[Indo-Eurasia] Hindutva Wolves in Dalit Clothing: Phony Dalit Websites (fwd)
Walter Slaje
slaje at T-ONLINE.DE
Sun Jan 22 09:04:00 UTC 2006
---Ursprüngliche Nachricht---
Absender: "Steve Farmer" <saf at safarmer.com>
Empfänger:
<Indo-Eurasian_research at yahoogroups.com>
Betreff: [Indo-Eurasia] Hindutva Wolves in Dalit
Clothing: Phony Dalit Websites
***Feel free to repost this message on the Dalit
Lists or elsewhere on
the Web, so long as the post is cited in full; for
print use, contact
saf at safarmer.com ***
HINDUTVA WOLVES IN DALIT CLOTHING
Would the Hindutva groups involved in the
California textbook
controversy set up phony Dalit websites?
They would and they just have, and it is one of
the biggest Hindutva
scams ever. The anti-Witzel and anti-Harvard hate
campaign is just the
tip of the iceberg: Now the Dalits are a prime
target.
-- First the California campaign run by the Vedic
Foundation (VF) and
Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), aided by the
Hindu American
Foundation (HAF), tried to strip references to
Dalits out of California
textbooks; indeed, the retired Hindutva academic
recommended by the
Department of Education to vet their own proposed
edits, claimed in
recent edit notes ascribed to him by the Hindutva
press that "Dalit is
a Marxist term"...;
See here edit #86 at <http://tinyurl.com/86bsm>
-- When the Dalits complained to the California
Board of Education, the
Dalits were accused by well-known Hindutvavadis
Kalavai Venkat and
Koenraad Elst and others on the main Hindutva List
(IndianCivilization)
as being pawns of Christian missionaries. (Point
of fact, not that it
should matter: not one of the Dalits who spoke
before the Board of
Education on January 12th was a Christian.)
-- And now, sinking to new depths, Hindutva
activists are pretending to
be Dalits.
The phony Dalit website set up in the middle of
the California campaign
is run by a Hindutva activist in Texas who runs a
long list of other
Hindutva sites, some quite notorious (discussed
with links below).
Those sites include Hindutva-run anti-Christian
and anti-missionary
sites; anti-Muslim sites; *fake* Christian sites
aimed at Muslims; and
at least three phony Human Rights sites.
The phony Human Rights websites are especially
interesting, since they
feature people or groups diirectly involved in the
California textbook
campaign, including Yvette Rosser, who works with
the Vedic Foundation,
and the Hindu American Foundation. (All this is in
Internet cache, so
if they change this stuff will just post the cache
versions.)
But let's start with the story of the phony Dalit
site -- of "Hindutva
Wolves in Dalit Clothing", or to use the alternate
title proposed by a
clever Indian friend, "Little Saffron Riding
Hood".
*********************
The story began late afternoon yesterday, when I
received the following
email. The email came after all the publicity
surrounding the global
distribution by Google of the Dalit video over the
last few days:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3966452794541360953
The email made it clear that it was sent in
response to events in
California.
> From: Dalit Human Rights <dalit.human.rights at gmail.com>
> Date: Fri Jan 20, 2006 4:33:13 PM US/Pacific
> To: saf at safarmer.com
> Subject: Dalit Human Rights
>
> Dear Dr. Farmer,
>
> We are very impressed by your efforts to accurately portray the plight
> of the Dalits in the California syllabus. We would very much
> appreciate if you could promote our website on your site and
> discussion lists. Please let us know if there are any additional ways
> in which we can work together.
>
> Regards,
>
> The team at Dalit Human Rights (DHR)
> www.dalithumanrights.com
At first I fell for it. I wrote back saying that
I'd be happy to help.
But then an Indian-American friend noticed
something odd about the
website. At first sight it looks like a
sophisticated news portal that
focuses on Dalit interests.
The oddity is that mixed in with the usual stories
found on such sites
("Dalit woman raped", etc.), you'll also find in
their carefully
manufactured "Archives" (started just three weeks
ago) stories of an
obvious Hindutva cast (no pun intended), taken
from Hindutva newspapers
that no Dalit would ever cite favorably.
The Archives contain stories from _The Pioneer_,
the same rightwing
paper that ran the hate article against Michael
Witzel on Christmas
day). Other stories are taken from the RSS-run
_Organizer_ or other
rightwing sources.
Moreover, the Archives only go back three weeks.
The site itself was
registered on December 19th, exactly one day after
we published a long
post that underlined the Hindutva orgins of the
Hindu American
Foundation (HAF) -- which likes to call itself a
"Human Rights
Organization".
The very next day, the HAF put out a press-release
shedding tears for
four Dalit women who were denied entry to a temple
in Orissa -- the
first such tears they had ever shed of this sort
-- and the same day
the dalithumanrights.com domain name was
registered.
No data are found on the Website that identifies
the "team at Dalit
Human Rights (DHR)". (But see below!)
But do check out the stories in their "Archives",
e.g., the story on
how Dalits and upper caste Hindus joined together
to kill Muslims in
Gujarat.
Or the provocative story entitled "Hours of
Anti-India, Anti-Hindutva
Rhetoric at 'Indian' Muslim Meet":
http://www.dalithumanrights.com/archives.php?time=1135926508
Also check out the story attacking the "Aryan
Invasion" theory and
extolling the beauties of the ancient caste
system, which "was based on
the unfoldment of the consciousness within each
individual through the
chakras":
http://www.dalithumanrights.com/archives.php?time=1135926555
**************
Not believing that this was a "Dalits for
Hindutva" site -- that would
be an historical first -- we became curious about
who owned the domain
name "dalithumanrights.com".
That's easy enough to check: Go to the Whois data
base at Network
solutions at
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml
and type in "dalithumanrights.com" in the search
field. You'll be taken
to a page where you'll find that the owner
carefully registered the
name by "proxy" in order to hide his identity. But
you *will* find the
IP address of the site listed -- 66.226.242.126 --
at the bottom of the
page.
When you investigate IP 66.226.242.126 further,
using the Whois data
base, you'll discover that the same IP address
hosts at least 22
extremist Hindutva webpages owned by Hinduworld,
Inc., in Houston,
Texas -- run by a well-known Hindutva activist
named Rajiv Varma.
I say "at least", since many more websites
registered by "proxy" may
also use that address.
Here's a List of these 22 other Hindutva sites,
some of which are quite
well-known:
http://whois.webhosting.info/66.226.242.126
To see the owner's name and address, click on the
links. You'll find
that the owner of all of them (and hence of the
fake Dalit webpage) is:
Rajiv Varma
Hinduworld, Inc.
10592-A Fuqua St. #174
Houston, Texas 77089
530-239-7548
(If you call the Hinduworld, Inc., telephone
number listed here, all
you'll get is a robot voice asking you to leave a
message.)
Hinduworld, Inc., also runs other Hindutva sites,
but let's just focus
on the ones I've mentioned above, put in some kind
of order:
1. Our fake Dalit Human Rights site, which as
noted above was
registered right after we began publicly
complaining about the removal
of references to Dalits in California textbooks.
You have to study this
website a bit before you notice its Hindutva
origins, which is revealed
in the mix of Hindutva stories mixed in with
legitimate Dalit stories;
we have to assume that the mix would get more
obvious as time went on
-- if we did indeed publicize the site:
http://www.dalithumanrights.com/
Besides the other stories in their carefully
pruned "Archive", noted
earlier, check out this one on why Anti-Conversion
Laws are needed; it
is taken from the far-right RSS newspaper, _The
Organizer_!
http://www.dalithumanrights.com/archives.php?time=1135926484
2. The Hindutva.org site, which is among the
craziest Hindutva sites on
the Web. This one takes the extreme Hindutva line
currently favored by
Koenraad Elst: that the BJP isn't Hindutva
enough:
http://www.hindutva.org/
The craziest of the crazy material is in the
"frame" story on the left,
which is worth reading in full. It is signed at
the end:
> - Hindutva Team
> on behalf of hindutva.com
which is interesting to compare with the similar
final line of the
phony Dalit email I got yesterday:
> The team at Dalit Human Rights (DHR)
> www.dalithumanrights.com
Same author? Who at hindutva.com may be the main
Hindutva Wolf in Dalit
Clothing?
We're not sure, but one of the main Webmasters of
hindutva.com is
Sudheer Birodkar, who you can easily look up on
the Web. Besides his
work here, Birodkar also runs forums on the
Hindunet.com Website with
fellow Hindutvavadis deeply involved in the
California campaign and the
closely related anti-Witzel issue -- including
Vishal Agarwal, NS
Rajaram, and David Frawley.
I particularly love Sudheer Birodkar's nutty
"Hindutva pledge" posted
at Hindutva.com -- tolerant and anti-casteist and
atheistic at points
and viciously anti-Muslim and anti-Christian at
others: your average
Hindutva intellectual at work:
http://www.hindutva.org/pledge.html
3. Two identical anti-Christian sites, which pay
special attention to
anti-conversion issues in India, well worth
exploring:
http://www.christianaggression.com/
http://www.christianaggression.org/
3. Further anti-Christian and anti-conversion
sites, all three
identical but with different URLs; a lot of work
and money went into
creating these:
http://www.conversionwatch.org/
http://www.crusadewatch.com/
http://www.crusadewatch.org/
4. Phony human rights sites; note Yvette Rosser's
name prominently
displayed on the home page of these sites. (Rosser
is deeply involved
with the Vedic Foundation, one of the two groups
to offer Hindutva
edits in California.)
Click on the button that carries her name on any
of the pages and
you'll be taken directly to Rosser's biography,
given quite extensively:
http://www.hinduvigil.com/
http://www.hinduvigil.net/
http://www.hinduvigil.org/
If you click on the "links" page, you'll find
Hindutva misinformation
at its finest.
Here you'll find links to legitimate Human Rights
groups, like Amnesty
International, mixed in with phony Human Rights
groups like
hinduhumanrights.org, which glorifies the
destruction of Ayodhya -- the
great mythical moment in recent Hindutva history
during which Hindu
mobs destroyed Babri Mosque in December, 1992:
http://www.hinduhumanrights.org/ (watch out for
popup ads when you
play with the links!)
We also find on the page direct links to the Hindu
American Foundation
(HAF), which as we found out in the California
case claims to speak for
2 million Hindu-Americans -- which according to
the US State Department
is over 500,000 more Hindu Americans than exist.
(And certainly all
those who exist aren't Hindutvavadis!)
The President of HAF, as noted previously on the
List, is Mihir
Meghani, who is also deeply involved in the
California campaign.
Meghani is the author of the famous manifesto at
the BJP website in
India:
http://bjp.org/history/htvintro-mm.html
5. Straight anti-Muslim hate sites:
http://www.historyofjihad.org
6. Anti-Muslim site with a heavy focus on Kashmir,
etc. To see all
this, you have to explore the links. You'll also
find links here to
Koenraad Elst's site, to Hindu Unity (another
famous Hindutva website:
go to http://hinduunity.org/aboutus.html ), and
more:
http://www.islamreview.org/
7. Still another anti-Islam site. This one is of
special interest since
it pretends to be written by Christian activists:
the Hindutvavadis not
only are fake Dalits, when the need arises, but
like to pretend to be
Christian's as well. The site at times is quite
funny:
http://www.islamreview.com/
To see the faux Christianity, click on "About Us",
which talks about
their supposed "Ministry", which doesn't exist:
http://www.islamreview.com/aboutus.htm
There is a lot more of interest here to explore on
this site: take some
time with the links.
8. Another anti-Islam site apparently aimed this
time at Americans.
Click on the flag icons and you'll find links to
rightwing sites around
the world. Do click on the flags, which take you
to odd and scary
places -- but also watch out again for the popup
ads!
http://www.newsonterror.com/
9. News site (minimally working) meant to follow
anti-Hindu news
stories; this one is apparently a project
underway, or one that never
fully made it:
http://www.hindumediawatch.com/
http://www.hindumediawatch.org/
10. Under construction or not working, but
presumably stay tuned:
http://www.dharmaeducation.com/
http://www.dharmaeducation.org/
http://www.jesusreview.com
http://www.jesusreview.org
http://www.vhs-net.com/
http://www.vhs-net.org/
http://www.hindurenaissance.com/
http://www.hindurenaissance.org/
11. I should mention that Hinduworld, Inc., runs
other Hindutva sites
as well, some with overlapping content. I didn't
search for their IP
addresses. Some of these other sites include:
http://www.waronjihad.org
http://www.historyofjihad.com
But the worst of the worst is the phony Dalit
website.
Presumably, our Dalit friends will have something
to say publicly --
and loudly -- all over the Web about this newest
Hindutva deception.
Will the Indian press pick it up?
And how long before this site, and much that I
talk about above, goes
down the ever deepening Hindutva 'memory hole'?
(Well, we have it all
downloaded, so no problem!)
Best,
Steve Farmer
saf at safarmer.com
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
Visit your group "Indo-Eurasian_research" on the
web.
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
Indo-Eurasian_research-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the
Yahoo! Terms of Service.
---------------------------------
Prof Dr Walter Slaje
Hermann-Loens-Str. 1
D-99425 Weimar (Germany)
Tel/Fax: +49-(0)3643 501391
www.indologie.uni-halle.de
Ego ex animi mei sententia spondeo ac polliceor
me studia humanitatis impigro labore culturum et
provecturum
non sordidi lucri causa nec ad vanam captandam
gloriam,
sed quo magis veritas propagetur et lux eius, qua
salus
humani generis continetur, clarius effulgeat.
Vindobonae, die XXI. mensis Novembris MCMLXXXIII.
More information about the INDOLOGY
mailing list