Lying religiously: The Hindu Students Council and the politics of deception

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SIX WEEKS LATER: NATIONAL HSC STILL UNABLE TO REFUTE EVIDENCE AMASSED IN
" LYING RELIGIOUSLY"

For More Information Contact: Ashwini Rao (akrao_nyc@yahoo.com, Samip Mallick (samipkmallick@gmail.com)

Saturday, May 26, 2007: Six weeks after the CSFH report -- "Lying Religiously" (LyR) -- was published with conclusive evidence that the National HSC was part of the RSS family of organizations (Sangh Parivar), the National HSC has failed to refute even a single piece of evidence in our report. Far from providing any substantive counter evidence or argument, officers of the National HSC have resorted to ad-hominems against the CSFH collective.

This strategy is not new. It is typical of the Sangh Parivar. The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate has done investigative work on the Sangh since 2002. In our first report, "The Foreign Exchange of Hate", which exposed the flow of dollars from the US to the RSS in India, we used a similar structure of evidence as the current report on the HSCs -- a majority of the evidentiary documents were drawn from the Sangh itself. In response, the Sangh Parivar attacked the collective and NOT the report, just like the National HSC leadership has done now. Our response from 2003, entitled "Deceit as a Core Value: The RSS Method", is archived at: http://stopfundinghate.org/actions/press/012803.htm. We urge all HSC members and the Indian-American community at large to take careful note of this pattern -- when completely unable to deal with the evidence against it, the Sangh resorts to ad-hominem attacks against its opponents.

In our two earlier press releases, we pulled out evidence from our report and framed it in a simple and easy to understand format and challenged the national HSC to refute the evidence. They have failed to do so in both their press releases. Do we take the national HSC's silence on the issue as its inability to deny its close links with the Sangh Parivar?

In our effort to keep the focus on the substantive evidence presented in the LyR report, CSFH will in the next 12 weeks send out one question every week to the national HSC leadership with a single issue or piece of evidence for them to respond to. Our reason for this is simple: we want to make absolutely clear to every reader –- and especially, every HSC member past and present -- that the National HSC has been deceptive about its connections with the RSS family and its only strategy is to distract from the evidence presented in the report.

Week #1: Why did the National HSC build the Sangh Parivar's Global Internet infrastructure and why does it continue to maintain it?

In our report, we have documented how the National HSC has built and continues to maintain the Sangh's Global Internet infrastructure. The evidentiary source for the IP Map is a neutral site, DomainTools. The IP Map (available at http://hsctruthout.stopfundinghate.org/ch3.html#1) is probably the most damning piece of evidence against the National HSC that establishes deep, systematic and undeniable links to the rest of the Sangh Parivar. It is not an incidental set of connections, but a deliberate and carefully built infrastructure. The National HSC has of course remained silent on this. However, some concerned HSC chapter members have written to us directly asking questions. The most often repeated question is whether the IP map shows anything more than some electronic links, and this needs further explanation.

Allow us to explain in some detail: Every machine on the Internet has a unique IP address that reads something like: 206.251.242.160, that is, four numbers separated by periods. Each set of numbers in an IP address that is separated by periods is called an octet (because it is represented in the binary form by a set of eight zeros and ones). Thus an IP address is made up of four octets. For brevity, we will represent an IP address as A.B.C.D where A,B,C and D represent numerical values and are each an octet. How the octet pattern is arranged says a lot about the organization that is using an IP address. For instance, a large network like AT& T will typically have an octet structure where every single machine that it owns on the internet will share the exact same value in the first octet. That is, all of AT&T's computers on the internet share the same first octet. Such addresses with a common first octet are called Class A addresses.

So also, a large to medium size business could ask for a Class B address where the first two octets (in our scheme, A and B of the A.B.C.D structure) are common for every machine it has on the internet anywhere in the world. Many MNCs have Class B addresses. Finally, smaller organizations could seek and be allotted a Class C address where the first three octets – A, B and C are fixed. Every machine they have on the internet will then have the first three octets repeated and the last octet will change. This is the case for most of the Sangh Parivar organizations hosted by the HSC -- they share the first three octets and have CONTIGUOUS fourth octet (as in, say 206.251.242.160 and 206.251.242.161). Furthermore, most of these websites, including those of the RSS (206.251.242.221), HSS (206.251.242.229), VHP (206.251.242.217), VHP-America (206.251.242.195), IDRF (206.251.242.226), Sewa International (206.251.242.203), Organiser (206.251.242.182) and Akhil Bharthiya Vidyarthi Parishad (206.251.242.198) list "Hindunet. Inc" as the "Admin Organization" and/or Ajay Shah (the first president of the HSC) as the "Admin Name". And the copyright notice on Hindunet says: Please note that entire collection of GHEN websites is copyrighted 1989-1999, Global Hindu Electronic Networks, Hindu Students Council.

In short, the HSC supports the electronic infrastructure of the Sangh Parivar. There is no way for all this to be an accident or a coincidence. In other words, there is no other explanation for this phenomenon but the fact that the national HSC, under the leadership of Ajay Shah, was given this task by the Sangh which they executed faithfully. (For a brief organizational overview of the Sangh Parivar, see
http://hsctruthout.stopfundinghate.org/images/Sangh_Parivar_OrgChart1.jpg).

CSFH continues to urge all concerned individuals and groups to engage in a substantive public discussion on the issues we have raised in our LyR report. Such open discussions are important within the South Asian community, especially among Indian-American youth, who have been deceived by the National HSC leadership. It is incumbent upon all HSC chapters to begin sorting out the truth from the lies by asking the National HSC leadership to respond to the concrete challenge we have raised above and not produce random distractions.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Deception Continues: HSC Fails to Deny CSFH Charges

Report is "Spot on" say report writers

New York, Monday, April 23, 2007: On Sunday, April 15, 2007, the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH) released a 65-page new report titled "Lying Religiously: The Hindu Students Council and the Politics of Deception," (LyR) that comprehensively documented the links between the North American campus based organization, the Hindu Student Council (HSC) and the ultra-right, violent, Hindu chauvinist network of organizations in India-the Sangh Parivar. The report was released at the "2007 Organizing Youth (OY!) Conference" held in NYC from April 13-15 and was enthusiastically received by South Asian American youth at the OY conference.

In its response to the report, the HSC press release of April 20, 2007 characterizes the CSFH report as a "smear campaign" that is "based on inaccuracies" and "outdated information." Beyond these assertions the press release only repeats banal platitudes about itself and its vision without denying even one item of evidence presented in the LyR report.

The first charge is curious since almost all information presented in the CSFH report are drawn directly from official HSC or Sangh Parivar sources. This leaves no room for claiming that the sources are invalid or the representation is "inaccurate" since these are all the HSC's own statements about itself, and various Sangh organizations' official statements about the HSC (See our first press release and a summary power point presentation at hsctruthout.stopfundinghate.org for details of the report). The methodological emphasis on sources internal to the Sangh family is to ensure that the evidentiary basis of the conclusions drawn is of the highest standards. Given this, we can only conclude that the HSC leadership is in denial.

Nevertheless, CSFH would like to highlight a few pieces of the evidence that the National HSC leadership has chosen to avoid and invite the HSC to publicly comment on the same.

There are many more such examples in our report. The fact is that M/s Bhutada and Trivedi of the HSC National (who issued the HSC's press release) are still trying to hide the connections between the HSC and Sangh. "The National HSC's inability to contest even a single piece of evidence outlined in the report is nothing but an attempt to cover up with a hope that the chapters will not ask too many questions" said Ashwini Rao, a CSFH coordinator. "The report" he continued, "is spot on!" The HSC National leadership does not owe the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate any explanation. It owes its members in all the universities across North America an explanation as to why these affiliations were not revealed to them and why their futures were being endangered by associating them with an extremist group of organizations. We would urge members of every HSC chapter across the US and Canada who was not aware of these links to demand an explanation of the National HSC. The members of HSC who were not told about these connections were certainly duped.

One other matter raised in the HSC press release deserves comment. The HSC National leadership accuses CSFH of insensitivity in launching such a campaign at a moment when they are busy offering solidarity to the Virginia Tech HSC chapter after the tragic events of April 16. We find this diversionary tactic most hypocritical, for the HSC has stood by in stony silence after each riot carried out by its sister organizations in India. In 1993, the HSC rationalized and celebrated the destruction of the Babri mosque (and the anti-Muslim violence that followed) as "the beginning of the new age of Hindu Renaissance, a new Hindu Revolution". Again, after the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the National HSC promptly (and rightly) called for apprehending the perpetrators of the Godhra carnage, but was understandably silent about justice for the families of the more than 2000 Muslims massacred in what was probably the worst carnage since 1947. In fact, in the post-genocide days, the National HSC was busy oiling the machinery of the Sangh's global propaganda network (by maintaining the electronic infrastructure of the Sangh). Is the National HSC not complicit in the cover up that has ensued since 2002?

CSFH urges a public debate and discussion on this within the South Asian community, especially among Hindu-American youth, whose trust has been betrayed by the National HSC leadership. There could be no better starting point for a collective sorting out of the truth from the lies than with the HSC national leadership answering the challenges to the three very concrete and specific points we have raised above. The LyR report is replete with such evidence and if needed CSFH will break this down release-by-release for the benefit of the Indian-American community.

Campus Hindu Organization Conclusively Linked to the Sangh Parivar
in North America and India

"Desi-American Students Deceived by the Hindu Student Council" says New Report

New York , Friday, April 13, 2007: The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH) will release a new report, Lying Religiously: The Hindu Students Council and the Politics of Deception, on Sunday,
April 15, 2007. The report brings together evidence from multiple sources to demonstrate a web of connections between the Hindu Students Council (HSC) and the violent, hindu ultra-right Sangh Parivar, and exposes the deliberate efforts of the HSC leadership to conceal its links with the Sangh Parivar in order to deceive Hindu-
American college students. The report provides the first comprehensive documentation of the origins, methods and practices of the HSC.

Similar to "The Foreign Exchange of Hate," the 2003 report documenting the flow of money from the United States into the coffers of the Sangh Parivar in India, almost all of the documentation used to construct the current report comes from the archives of the HSC itself and from the publications of the Sangh Parivar in North America and elsewhere. Starting with the origin of the HSC in 1991, when Ajay Shah, the first president of the HSC, proudly declared that the HSC was part of the VHP of America, the report documents the rise of early HSC leaders into the ranks of Sangh Parivar leadership in North America, the detailed family connections between a significant section of the HSC leadership and the Sangh Parivar, and the central role played by the HSC in the creation and maintenance of the Sangh Parivar's internet infrastructure, including the web infrastructure of the Sangh Parivar's parent organization, the RSS.

"Most of the young desi Americans who join the HSC have no clue as to the connections between the HSC and the militant and violent Hindu right wing in India" says Samip Mallick, one of the campaign coordinators for CSFH. "We fully support the creation and existence of Hindu student organizations on college campuses,
but we are unable to condone the Hindu Student Council's continued misleading of college students regarding its ties to the Sangh Parivar," he continued. With the launch of the report, CSFH announces its six-month "Truth Out on HSCs" information campaign aimed at informing every desi American student of the two-faced methods of the HSC and the Sangh Parivar.

The report will be released on Sunday, April 15 at 3:30 PM at a press conference hosted by the Youth Solidarity Summer at 451 West Street (@ Bank), New York, NY 10014.