[Reader-list] NYT: Indian Starts A Campaign Against Cash For Militants

[geert lovink]

The New York Times
August 18, 2002, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 1; Page 15; Column 1; Foreign Desk
HEADLINE: Indian Starts A Campaign Against Cash For Militants
BYLINE:  By BARBARA CROSSETTE

Shabnam Hashmi never imagined herself leading an international 
campaign until she came from New Delhi to New York in July to implore 
Indian-Americans not to send money to militant Hindu organizations in 
India that she says are leading the country away from secularism into 
Hindu nationalism and religious violence.

What put Ms. Hashmi on the road with her one-woman tour -- she spoke 
in a telephone interview from Atlanta after stops in the Midwest, 
Texas, California and Seattle -- were the Hindu attacks on Muslims in 
the state of Gujarat beginning in late February that left hundreds 
dead, according to Indian government figures. Independent Indian and 
international human rights groups have estimated that at least 1,000 
people were killed, possibly 2,000 or more. The attacks on Muslims in 
Gujarat and the destruction of 360 mosques followed the killings by 
Muslims of 59 Hindu activists who were returning on a train from the 
ruins of a mosque in Uttar Pradesh that had been destroyed by Hindu 
mobs in 1992.

The anti-Muslim violence also raised concern among some American 
experts on India, who now echo Ms. Hashmi's fears, especially because 
India's national government is led by a Hindu nationalist party.

"The response has been very good," said Ms. Hashmi, a Muslim by birth 
but an agnostic now. Her message about the dangers of condoning or 
supporting mob violence, as the Indian news media report is done by 
Hindu nationalist politicians and their backers in the United States, 
draws on a painful personal history. In 1989, her brother, Safdar 
Hashmi, a street theater director and writer, was killed by a hired 
mob after he lent his support to striking industrial workers in 
India. She started a foundation in his memory to aid artists and 
intellectuals.

Ms. Hashmi and her husband, Gauhar Raza, a government scientist who 
also makes documentaries, went to Gujarat in April and came back with 
a 30-minute video, "Evil Stalks the Land," which intertwines footage 
from the history of Hindu fundamentalism and interviews with 
survivors of the Gujarat massacres.

Ms. Hashmi returned to Gujarat to spend three months talking to 
victims. She says that she believes hundreds of women were raped and 
that many of them were killed by Hindu militants in the kind of 
systematic assaults that characterized ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and 
Rwanda.

"There are a lot of Indian-Americans who are very disturbed at what's 
happening in India," Ms. Hashmi said. "But at the same time, the 
amount of money that is being pumped from America into these 
right-wing organizations is terrible."

She echoed the conclusion of India's Human Rights Commission in 
citing the World Hindu Council, along with other national and local 
Hindu organizations, as among the groups responsible for the attacks 
in Gujarat. The council has denied any link. Ms. Hashmir said Indians 
in the United States had to guard against the possibility that groups 
here were funneling money to militants. She urged Americans in and 
out of government to start investigating organizations that might be 
supporting anti-Muslim terror.

In Washington, Robert M. Hathaway, director of the Asia program at 
the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, said Indian journalists were 
producing enough evidence of the complicity of Hindu nationalist 
organizations and their branches abroad in the killings in Gujarat to 
demand some response in the United States.

"Indian journalists seem to have uncovered some very damaging and 
what look to me to be persuasive ties between fund-raising activities 
in the United States and some of these groups who had some shadowy 
role in the Gujarat violence," Mr. Hathaway said. But he added that 
for Americans the evidence was still secondhand, "which is why I 
thought it would be useful to have some sort of investigation by 
people who do have the ability to look at financial transactions and 
transfers."

In testimony in June to the United States Commission on International 
Religious Freedom, a body created by Congress, Mr. Hathaway, formerly 
the South Asia specialist for the House International Relations 
Committee, was critical of the extremely low-key reaction in 
Washington to the Muslim deaths in Gujarat.

"Friends of India should have taken the lead in raising this on the 
floor of Congress, with a constructive initiative, not some 
bash-India initiative," he said. "Something that says, 'If things 
like this were to happen on a frequent basis, that does undermine the 
public and political support in this country for the creation and 
maintenance of this new relationship with India.' "

Mr. Hathaway also told the commission that the American ambassador in 
India, Robert Blackwill, should have gone to Gujarat in the wake of 
the violence. It would have sent a message, he said, "that we do care 
about Muslims as well as going after terrorists."