'Hinduness' with vengeance: Schools offer Indians way out of poverty, lessons
in religious bias
Jehangir Pocha,
Chronicle Foreign Service
Friday, April 16, 2004
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/16/MNGFV6530M1.DTL
Gonasika, India -- The students singing a timeless Hindu hymn in this remote
tribal village have no idea that they are pawns in a politicall experiment
driven by ancient Indian hatreds and funded by donated U.S. dollars.
To pupils and parents, most of whom are "tribals," or aboriginal peoples, the
school is a ray of hope in a life of desperate poverty. "My family sent me here
because they couldn't afford me," said Dyneswar Juang, a seventh-grader. "Here
I get everything for free. I have a future."
But human rights organizations in the eastern state of Orissa say the school
and others like it are political tools in the hands of India's foremost Hindu
nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
In the past several years, the RSS and its allies, collectively called the
Sangh Parivar, have built a network of more than 30,000 Hindu religious
schools, called shishu mandirs or "temples of learning." Most are located in
remote tribal regions where government schools are few. Using the promise of
free education and housing, the shishu mandirs have enrolled more than 5
million impoverished youths, including many orphans.
In class, students are "subtly indoctrinated into the RSS Hindutva ideology,"
said Sudarshan Das, president of Agami Orissa, an umbrella organization of
nongovernmental organizations working with tribal peoples.
Hindutva, or "Hinduness" is a nationalist ideology that asserts history,
science, politics, economics and other subjects should be viewed from a Hindu
perspective. Hindutva proponents say Islam and Christianity have divided India
and caused its decline from its glorious past. With India facing Islamic
separatists in Kashmir and aggressive proselytizing by evangelical Christians,
the RSS believes their sovereignty and identity are under a renewed threat and
Hindus should turn secular India into a Hindu state.
Subash Chauhan, the Orissa state secretary of a group that runs hundreds of
shishu mandirs, concedes the schools' goal is to "make sure the Hindutva mood
is created in Orissa."
In a recent report, Teesta Setalvad, a civil rights activist, chronicled how
the shishu mandirs promote anti-Islamic and anti-Christian sentiment while
lionizing the RSS. Students spend hours studying Hindu religion and culture and
their history textbooks recount how "Muslim invaders killed our (Hindu)
forefathers like flies."
Willy D'Costa, national secretary of the Indian Social Action Forum, an
organization associated with Christian groups, says the Sangh Parivar also is
leveraging the devotional fervor of the students and using them as shock troops
in violent anti-Muslim and anti-Christian pogroms.
They point to the Hindu-Muslim riots that rocked the western state of Gujarat
in March 2002. Witnesses and human rights groups reported that tribal areas
where the RSS was most active experienced the worst violence.
Paramdara Pillay, a teacher at Juang's school, says his colleagues in Gujarat
were "forced to send their students to fight or else they would have lost their
jobs and funding for their schools."
Significantly, a sizable chunk of funding comes from Indians living in the
United States, says Vijay Prashad, director of International Studies at Trinity
College in Hartford, Conn., and a founder of FOIL, an umbrella organization of
Indian leftists.
"At least $6 million has been officially raised in the U.S and sent to these
schools (by) U.S. branches of Sangh Parivar organizations," said Prashad, who
along with several scholars and activists co-authored a report on such funding
for South Asia Citizen's Watch, a human rights group based in France. "Often
the funds are raised through charitable fronts, (and) donors have no idea where
their money is going."
In India, fundamentalist religious organizations have long used foreign- funded
schools to groom adherents. Saudi-funded Muslim madrassas are fertile
recruiting grounds for extremists in Kashmir and elsewhere. And the Sangh
Parivar accuses Western-funded Christian evangelists of using schools to lure
vulnerable groups into Christianity.
But what makes the Sangh Parivar's schools different is the fact that nearly
all of the enrolled students are not Hindus, according to Maj. A. Somnath, of
the Dalit Solidarity People's Party.
"Because they need our votes, they are trying to make us Hindus," Somnath said,
referring to tribals and Dalits (untouchables) at the bottom of India's caste
system. "It's a kind of social engineering that has very dangerous effects."
The debate reflects an age-old social schism that has long haunted Indian
politics.
About 2,000 years ago, Indian society organized people into a hierarchy of
castes based on "ritual purity.'' Brahmins (priests) were followed by
Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaisyas (traders), and Sudras (peasants). Tribals and
some non-tribal groups, who now call themselves Dalits, were considered too
impure to belong to any caste and became untouchables.
Excluded from mainstream Hindu life, the untouchables developed their own
system of worship. Tribals typically follow animist beliefs, praying to trees
and stones while Dalits pray to supernatural forces and Earth goddesses.
Since tribal religions have no religious texts or grand places of worship, they
are often ignored by other faiths. The Sangh Parivar insists that tribals and
Dalits - as well as Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains -- are simply waylaid Hindus.
"This is not conversion but assimilation," said Ajay Sahni, executive director
of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi." And despite the
theological arguments, he says the goal is completely political.
Tribals and Dalits make up about 35 percent of India's 1 billion inhabitants.
Traditionally, they have joined India's Muslims, who represent just 12 percent
of the population, in voting against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu
nationalist party. With new elections on Tuesday, pollsters say the BJP needs
tribal and Dalit votes. Das says the shishu mandirs convert tribal students to
Hinduism by teaching them to worship Hindu deities, and break tribal affinities
with Muslims and Christians by demonizing both communities.
Chauhan says the assimilation of tribals into Hinduism is less socially
disruptive than their conversion into a foreign religion like Christianity. He
says Christian groups have made India a prime target for their proselytizing
and that about 2,000 tribals have been converted in recent months.
"If Hindus do not unite, we will soon become a minority in our own country,"
said Chauhan. Though census figures do not support his argument -- India's
Hindu population has held steady for decades at about 82 percent -- the Sangh
Parivar has been effective at uusing it to rally tribals.
"Yes, we are Hindus," said Lahuri Juang, Gonasika's tribal priest, who minutes
later performed an animist sacrifice that involved beheading a chicken and
anointing his forehead with its blood.
All around Juang, the cracked mud huts and bloated bellies indicated that his
village is not on anyone's development map. There is almost no sign of modern
life anywhere -- except for an official notice advising residents how to update
their voting records on a wall in the community warehouse filled with grain.
With elections looming, Das worries that the kind of violence that rocked
Gujarat could break out here. In the past year, according to local police,
several churches have been torched in the state and at least 30 Hindu-
Christian clashes have occurred. Local police, human rights groups and
opposition parties have accused Sangh Parivar of complicity in the violence.
"The Hindu right does not want any rival religion in India," said Maj. Somnath,
the Dalit activist. "They tried to destroy Buddhism all those years ago, now
they are doing it to us."
Yahoo! Groups Links
- To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/india-unity/
- To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25�
