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Concerted Attack on the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF)


Exposing Biju Mathew, A.K.Sen, Sabrang.com, and the "Campaign to Stop Funding Hatred"


Narayanan Komerath

Contact: (remove the spaces) narayanan @ att. net

Attacks on IDRF

The discussion is presented verbatim and in chronological order, with posting times given in U.S. Central Standard Time. It does take some patience to read this, as with any debate where several points of view and several motivations are involved. However, the patient reader is invited to see how the discussion developed -

 

  • initial concern to
  • a bold airing of the issues,
  • a search for all information relevant to the issue, and then
  • the formation of opinions from the facts as they came out, and
  • debate on the implications and suggested courses of action.

Unlike the "91-page Report" compiled over many years of a labor of love (or is it really hate?) by the "Campaign to Stop Funding Hatred", we do not have a "single, simple conclusion" developed before looking at the evidence. We do see several interesting facts, for example:

  • The Report authors appear to assume that any grassroots charitable work done by organizations whose members believe in the Hindu religion must be done with evil intentions. They seem to think that this is so obvious to the reader that it needs no proof. And of course it does not appear to have occurred to them that 80% of Indians, and perhaps an even greater percentage of IDRF donors, are Hindu.

  • Further, the Report authors appear to be even more upset by the recipients of the aid being non-Hindu minorities! It appears that the authors' organizations were sorely lacking in breadth or diversity of thought or opinion, for this laughable inconsistency in their logic appears to have entirely escaped this galaxy of academics, throughout their marathon five-year effort to seek evidence of wrong-doing against IDRF.

  • The Report authors' previous work has mostly been in Marxist Communist media ("Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) ") displaying the Red Star and the Hammer and Sickle.

  • At least one from this group of attackers has his work published in the web pages of "Markazdawa.org", which represents the banned Islamic Terrorist Group, Lashkar-e-Toiba (L-e-T), based in Pakistan. L-e-T is widely reported to be responsible for the attacks on the Indian Parliament, the Jammu & Kashmir Legislature, and numerous other terrorist attacks. The L-e-T was also well represented on the Shomali Plain north of Kabul in October 2001, waiting to kill Americans until the USAF B-52s ended their wait.

  • The web pages of Sabrang.com, the organization listed as sponsor on their "Signature Campaign" makes no secret of its aim to see India broken into several pieces, with all of Jammu-Kashmir conquered by Pakistan, and all of North-East India captured by either Islamists in Bangladesh, or Communist China.

  • Upon investigation, we are beginning to find several instances where the report is simply dishonest, far more than just misleading. For instance, some of the Indian organizations classfied as "Hindu Extremist" are easily seen to be in fact organizations run or sponsored by a Christian Church in one case, or are organizations set up to provide guidance and technical assistance to farmers. The list of sponsors of several organizations include the Government of India, major Indian corporations, and various organizations from outside India other than IDRF. We are unable to understand why a team of dedicated academics, laboring over five years, was unable/unwilling to see what it took us minutes to find, on the published web pages of these organizations. The most "charitable" interpretation we can see at present is that these authors are grossly and pathetically incompetent, and so blinded by their own hatred that they assumed that anything with a Hindi / Sanskrit name must be a "hate-sponsoring" organization.

  • In several cases, organizations associated with the "RSS" and the very organizations to which IDRF sends money in India to disburse to the grassroots level, are also used by other charitable organizations such as "Asha for Education" and "AID" which have aligned themselves with Sabrang/FOIL to attempt to destroy IDRF. Site visit reports by ASHA (Seattle) members confirm in their own words that these organizations are non-discriminatory and non-"sectarian" - simply organizations of simple people immersed in service to others less fortunate than them. The Report Authors, being aligned with these other agencies must have been aware of these facts if they had done even the most elementary research. Yet they describe these organizations as "sectarian", "hate-spreading" and otherwise slander them in the report.

  • Several incidents of gruesome violence, for which the Report authors accuse the "RSS" or other "Hindu" organizations, have in fact been proven in the courts to have been the work of local criminals. The authors of the Report MUST have been aware of these when they made those accusations. Our investigations are continuing.

  • The Sabrang/FOIL Report (see pages 11 - ) twists facts to make it appear that it is sinister for an Indian-American charitable organization to have the unofficial Ambassador of India to NRIs in America, as one of its founders!!!

Biju Matthew

IDRF Rebuttal


Satyam Eva Jayate