>From the South Asia Citizens Wire Dispatch #1 | 18 May 2002 http://www.mnet.fr
For Information & news on the Gujarat Carnage visit: http://www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/ __________________________ 1. European Parliament Concern over violence in the Indian state of Gujarat 2. India: Chhote Modi Lives up to Bade Modi's Reputation 3. India: Memorandum from women's groups May 1, 2002 4. India: Suggestions For Medical Teams. Doctors Needed for Gujarat 5. Gujarat Appeal 6. Politics, Religion and Our Ailing Public Institutions (J B D'Souza) 7. Yankee Hindutva's Intellectual. Who is Narain Kataria and why is he after Shabana Azmi? (Vijay Prashad) #7. Yankee Hindutva's Intellectual. Who is Narain Kataria and why is he after Shabana Azmi? Vijay Prashad Little India 17 May 2002. Narain Kataria's Indian Americans for Truth and Fairness in Media (IATFM) sends out a notice that it will conduct a protest of a book reading in New York on 21 May 2002. The note threatens the reading itself, but principally its most well known participant, the film star Shabana Azmi. Shabana Azmi, the note fulminates, "is a strange blend of a fundamentalist Moslem woman and a diehard Communist, out to defame Hindus and tarnish the image of India." Furthermore, "this crafty woman suffers from Hindu phobia and needs urgent counseling." That IATFM stands for "truth" is extraordinary on many counts. For one, there are numerous errors of fact in the note, about her movies, and then about the role that the Hindutva Right was most incensed about - in Earth. The error here is strange, mainly because Earth, in which Ms. Azmi did not act, is about the terror of partition, whereas Water, a movie unmade because of the churlishness of the Hindutva Right, has "a Hindu widow in Varanasi 100 years ago." If a group wedded to "truth" cannot establish the basic facts, it should be impossible for us to believe its grotesque value judgments. "Shabana is born with an animus against Hindu society," says the note, telling us that her parents, "Kaifi Azmi and Shaukat Azmi [are] both hard core communists." What the note does not say is that Kaifi Azmi recently died, and brought tears to most of the nation and its diaspora. That the IATFM decides to go after Ms. Azmi now is a mark of extremely poor taste. "When a person comes to weakness, whether it be through old age or disease, the person is free from these limbs just as a mango, a fig or a berry releases itself from its stalk" (Brihadharanyaka Upanishad, Yajurveda, 4. 3. 36) - the ethic of grief is given to all people and Mr. Kataria breaks with the ethos of the ancient Vedas with his lack of empathy. That Ms. Azmi is close to the communists is not something that Shabana Azmi has ever hidden. Yes, she works with the oppressed among Mumbai's slum-dwellers. And certainly, Ms. Azmi has taken the side of the freedom of expression, a sacrosanct right of artists - her moving speech at the National Film Awards just a few days after Safdar Hashmi was brutally killed by Congress Party militants in 1989 is only one sign of her commitment. There is nothing to hide in these relationships and I have never heard her discount them as she's visited the US. There is no question of duplicity (according to Kataria, "In India she hobnobs with followers of Lenin and Stalin. When in USA, she struts around as a progressive Moslem woman") - there is no contradiction between Indian communism and progressivism, between those who want to stop dams and those who want a modern future. That Kataria calls Ms. Azmi a fundamentalist must come as a shock to Imam Bukhari, who only recently, on a national television show, called her nachne ganewali tawaif (prostitute). That this so-called leader of the Indian Muslims can stoop to such levels of misogyny should give pause to any notion of a unified Muslim community of which Ms. Azmi is a part - the rifts in Islam are a wide as those that separate Mr. Kataria from me. When asked by Lalitha Panicker what her views are on political representation, Ms. Azmi brushed aside the sectarian idea that only the orthodoxy in a religious community must represent its people (one of the hallmarks of fundamentalism): "What are the issues that concern the average Muslim? Roti kapda, makaan, education, health, the same as any average Hindu, Christian, Sikh etc. The self-appointed fundamentalist leaders do not provide any solutions for this, they reinforce only the communal aspects of Muslim identity using rhetoric to whip up communal frenzy and rage. The moderate, on the other hand, speaks about education, employment, health. The fundamentalist is only reinforcing the stereotype and perpetuating [Samuel] Huntington's clash of civilizations theory." But let us take the spotlight off Shabana Azmi and ask whom Narain Kataria represents? He claims to be the secretary of the Indian American Intellectuals' Forum in this note, but he is much more than that. Mr. Kataria is a long-time member of the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a senior member of the group that runs the VHPA-allied Indian Development Relief Fund, a senior figure in the Bajrang Dal/Meir Kahane-linked Hindu Unity Group (whose website posts a "hit list"), the Organizing Secretary of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (the overseas wing of the RSS) and a contributor to the RSS's paper, Organiser. The Indian American Intellectuals' Forum is a Hindutva organization whose members include: Jagat Motwani, Sardar Inderjit Singh, Raksh Pal Sood, Arvind Gupta, Arish Sahani, Ravi Kulkarni, Romesh Diwan, Narindar Kukar, Dinesh Agarwal, Rakesh Shreedhar and many others. Messrs. Singh and Sood are from the Sikh Sangat of America (an organization from Edison, NJ, that is part of the Sikh-Hindu alliance organized by the Hindutva groups, and which held a Hindu-Sikh Unity Celebration in Edison on 8 November 1997). Messrs. Agarwal and Sahani are from the Overseas Friends of the BJP. At their gathering on conversions and missionaries, the chief guest was the VHP's External Working President (and Chairman of Mody Industrial Group), Dr. Bhupendra Kumar Mody. The surprise in the list is Jagat Motwani, head of GOPIO. To get a sense of Mr. Kataria's importance in the world of Hindutva, we might eavesdrop on the HSS's Hindu Sangathan Divas of 1999 in New York City. As organizing chief of the HSS, Mr. Kataria took a leadership role in the meeting, where the head of the HSS told the six hundred people in attendance that the Hindu Empire extended from Afghanistan to Indonesia, and that there is a chance for a revival if Hindus remain united. If you think this is the world of the crackpots, bear in mind that not a moment later, the Consul General of India in New York, Mrs. Shashi Tripathi took the stage, extolled the armed forces and called the Kargil war "a little bit of a pinprick." "Our armed forces are very strong," she continued. "They have been taken unaware. But it does not matter. They will soon throw the enemy out of our country." The Intellectuals' Forum made an entry into the world of US electoral politics on 16 April 2000, when it held a forum in New York City entitled "Democracy vs. Terrorism," and hosted, for a fund-raiser, conservative Republican Congressman Benjamin Gilman (New York) - who is militantly against China, for missile defense and along the grain of every single foreign policy position of Hindutva. At the forum, Dr. Romesh Diwan, an economist from Rensselaer, noted, "latest studies suggest that 50 million Indians were killed during the Islamic domination of India and 200 million Indian were done to death during British rule." Based on these fantastic facts, the forum concluded, "Nexus among terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and drug trafficking is posing a serious threat to civilized and egalitarian societies and must be destroyed." The waters must first be muddied with a suggestion of "Islamic" atrocities in the past (that these Muslim rulers made alliances with Hindus and killed both the Muslim and Hindu working people is beyond the sufferance of Hindutva), and then the intellectuals of Yankee Hindutva toss in words like "terrorism" and "drug trafficking" to make the case finally that Islam is bad news. A few years ago, Biju Mathew and I wrote an article entitled "The Protean Forms of Yankee Hindutva," in which we argued that Yankee Hindutva creates a multitude of forms that seek to address various parts of our lives in the US, at the same times as these many avatars seek to hide the mainspring of its agenda - to create a "Hindu American" community that is a long-distance supporter of the Hindutva Right in India. Mr. Kataria's role in several of these organizations is one more indicator of the protean forms. But like his comrades in the Yankee Hindutva movement, Mr. Kataria betrays a host of the yamas that enjoin an ethics to people who subscribe of Hinduism: where is his arjava, his honesty, his satya, his truth, his kshama, his tolerance and patience, and finally, his ahimsa, his lack of violence? The attack on Ms. Azmi is a travesty and it comes from the bowels of the Hindutva movement. If Gujarat must not become the future face of India, let Mr. Kataria's antics not become the future face of the desi diaspora! __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-W-E-B---S-I-T-E-=-=-= To Subscribe/Unsubscribe from GoaNet | http://www.goacom.com/goanet =================================================================== For (un)subscribing or for help, Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dont want so many e=mails? 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