[Five weeks after the burning of the Sabarmati Express coaches on 28 February 2002, senior IAS officer Harsh Mander resigned from service, claiming heartbreak over the subsequent riots. Mander, then on deputation with a foreign NGO, ActionAid, was promptly embedded in the organisation, and recruited into the sickening international campaign against Gujarat and India, cashing in on his so-called moral stature. Krishen Kak, retd. IAS, took a dim view of Mander’s actions and made a lengthy exposé of the man, which became a chapter in “NGOs Activists and Foreign Funds: Anti-Nation Industry,” which he jointly edited with Radha Rajan. Now, with the Special Investigating Team reporting to the Supreme Court that the most sensational Gujarat riot cases were simply cooked up by the anti-Hindu brigade, Krishen Kak’s prescience is amply vindicated. We reproduce the entire chapter – Editor]
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“O what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive” Walter Scott (Marmion, 6.532-533)
“But my how we improve the score, as we practise more and more” John Henderson (http://www.billmon.org/)
1] On representative characterisation
On March 20, 2002, The Times of India published on its centrepage a piece titled ‘Hindustan Hamara’ that at once propelled its author Harsh Mander into the very front rank of our country’s conscience-keepers. Mr. Mander’s claims about the communal violence that earlier that year had rocked Gujarat (after a Muslim mob incinerated 58 Hindu children, women and men in a train leaving Godhra station) acquired unimpeachable authority because he made them as a senior member of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS), and ‘Hindustan Hamara’ was rapidly broadcast over the USA, the UK and the Darul Islam as an eye-witness account of the post-Godhra violence in Gujarat.
Mr. Mander then himself personally followed his account to the West (expenses paid mainly by Islamic and Christian organisations) and waxed in choking eloquence - he imitates the manner of the late MK Gandhi - his ‘anguish’ for the Muslims (and Muslims only) who’d died. Subsequently, and more than once, he declared he’d resigned from the IAS on moral grounds, because of his ‘anguish’ at the communal violence, and to separate himself from an administration that he declared had sponsored the violence against Muslims. The national English-language Nehruvian-secular media made a hero of him, he was lionised especially on Muslim websites, Muslim organisations hosted and sponsored him all over the USA, and he publicly declared - over the BBC - his Muslim selective bias.
Figures in the thousands of Muslims killed were bandied about (even from a United Nations office in Delhi), together with the unrestrained use of words such as ‘pogrom’, ‘genocide’ and ‘communal fascism’, and the mainstream English-language media in India promoted Mr. Mander as a man of conscience, principles, and secularism. This polemical essay establishes that Mr. Mander was and is none of the three. Mr. Mander is a cynical, coldly calculating, amoral, self-aggrandizing careerist, consciously using and allowing himself to be used by anti-India and anti-Hindu forces. His country - the ‘Hindustan Hamara’ that he publicly declared no longer for him is pride of place - is merely an expedience to badmouth as he strives to seek further recognition from those parts of the world for which his heart beats and his pocket stretches - the USA, the UK, and the Darul Islam.
For one, his anguished conscience at the post-Godhra Gujarat violence and his moral outrage that led him to proclaim his resignation from the IAS is a deliberate self-serving lie. For another, the politico-communal agenda of the British NGO he furthered in India was revealed. Weeks, months and years after the reality of Mr. Mander was made public, not one fact against him has been publicly repudiated by anyone. Instead, significant connections have been uncovered amongst Mander, the British NGO, the British government, Indian governments, Indian NGOs, and the Indian Administrative Service, so much so that ActionAid found it necessary to hire one of the world’s largest brand-building firms, the British PR giant Ogilvy and Mather, to whitewash itself with a huge advertising campaign.
2] Harsh Mander
Mr. Mander is a Sikh but finds it expedient to discard the identifying Sikh name of ‘Singh’ so as to be ‘secular.’ He has never spoken up for Indian Sikhs victimised in the1984 killings and still un-served by justice, but has no qualms serving the interests of American Sikhs determinedly dogmatising their faith.
As an IAS officer, he was no different from most others, except that he found favour with upper-class jholawalas and jholawalis, a constituency whose agenda he promoted and that in turn promoted him. Within the IAS, however, there were stories of the real reason for his frequent transfers, and the misuse of his official position and facilities, especially in the country’s LBS National Academy of Administration where he was posted for a few years. These included awkward questions about who paid his bills when he travelled to and in Rajasthan, and for what mode of travel (rail or road) the accounts had to show payment. Likewise, for when his wife accompanied him, and the source of payment for her bills.
These stories gained credence because my formal queries to the Government of India about some of them were met with total silence. Likewise, there was total silence to a similar formal letter to the Government of Chhattisgarh (to the IAS cadre of which Mander belonged).
Mr. Mander (while still in the IAS) arranged his deputation to ActionAid, the giant British multinational with a ‘subsidiary’ in India, that calls itself a charity but is actually in a global children exploitation industry. Mr. Mander secured for himself exceptionally favourable terms, even to getting ActionAid to shift - to suit him - its national headquarters from Bangalore to New Delhi, and to giving him a salary that was partly in pounds sterling and that was at least 50 times the salary of its lowest-paid employee in this country. In return, Mr.. Mander used his official connections to drop a government enquiry into ActionAid implementing a communal agenda in India.
A move to revert Mr. Mander from British employ to Indian government employ was strongly resisted by Mr. Mander, and again he used his IAS connections to have it dropped. Meanwhile, still in the IAS, he declared in writing his primary loyalty not to the Indian government but to his British employer. Two years before he actually put in his papers from the IAS, he’d announced he was prepared to leave his own country’s administrative service to serve as an agent in India the agenda of our former colonial masters.
However, the sword of reversion continued to hang over Mr. Mander’s head so, when he completed pensionable service in the IAS, he put in his papers for early and voluntary retirement, claiming from the Indian government upto a million rupees in retirement benefits. The Indian government agreed, with the stipulation (well within the rules) that Mr. Mander cease working for ActionAid. Secure in British employ, Mr. Mander mooned the Indian government. He stayed on with ActionAid - on a fat British salary - and continued to demand his Indian retirement benefits. His attachment to his country is clearly only to what he can mulct from it.
Around this time the violence erupted in Gujarat, and Mr. Mander promptly and publicly declared that in protest against the alleged government complicity in the violence, he was resigning from the IAS (implicitly thereby renouncing in the public eye his retirement benefits, while from the government he continued to demand them).
For months Mr. Mander was sanctified by the English-language media for his courage, his conscience, his convictions - and all the while he LIED. He knew he was lying, ActionAid knew, he, Chhattisgarh, and of India knew he was lying, but all played along till I exposed the lie.
Then, abruptly, Mr. Mander (and his supporters) stopped talking about his ‘resignation’ and began to use words like ‘quitting the IAS’ - as if there is only a technical difference between a resignation and a retirement (a million rupees is a technical difference?). Mr. Mander is now not as much in the limelight as he became accustomed to, but his need to lie appears so pathological that he declared ‘resignation’ again in The Hindu, May 14, 2005.
Along the way, Mr. Mander collected acclaim and awards - and what appears to be a fake PhD. Acquiring a larger-than-life halo, he became visiting fellow at the Nehruvian-secular Jawaharlal Nehru University, a visiting professor at the Nehruvian-secular Jamia Millia Islamia and an advisor to JMI’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution. As ‘Harsh Mander, Ph.D.’, he became adjunct faculty at the notoriously anti-Hindu California Institute of Integral Studies - but, when asked, neither the institute nor ‘Dr’ Mander were prepared to reveal the source and subject of his doctorate. And he had the National Terrorist Rights Commission (officially known as the NHRC) as well as the Supreme Court of India trusting him in their work.
The incontrovertible fact is that Mr. Mander’s public persona is built on a monumental fraud. A former ActionAid senior executive in an email titled ‘Look Ma! The Emperor has no clothes!’ circulated in Jan. 2003 to Mander and to ActionAid offices and individual staff all over the world, began it ‘AAI Country Director Harsh Mander is a liar...’
Ah, and some of the supporting cast of this liar…...
3] The Indian Administrative Service
First, of course, is the government or, more appropriately in Mr. Mander’s case, the Indian Administrative Service. To lesser mortals, ‘government’ or ‘IAS’ is much the same. The IAS is notorious for sheltering its manipulators and shysters, as it did Mr. Mander and, even though it could have thrown the rulebook at him for repeated violation of the IAS conduct and discipline rules, it preferred not to do so. Indeed, my formal protest to the Government of India over its officers working for foreign governments (and answerable to that foreign government rather than to the Indian) was not even acknowledged. But that’s the IAS for you - why should it close to itself lucrative career options even though such options are inimical to the national interest?
Consider typical IAS support to Mander:
“He is an extraordinary person with a very high commitment to his principles,” says N.C. Saxena, former Director of the IAS Academy in Mussoorie and Secretary in the Planning Commission. “He would risk his job for his principles. The decision to resign is a personal one but it is a big loss to the service. He was the right role model for all future IAS officers as he led by example. I would have loved to have seen more Harsh Manders in the academy.”
“Harsh has been very straight and honest,” says Rajiv Talwar, a senior IAS officer in the Delhi Government and a batchmate of Harsh. “If people like him leave the service, there is need for introspection.”
‘Decision to resign’? ‘Right role model for all future IAS officers’? ‘More Harsh Manders’? ‘Honest’? Really?
There is a word for ‘people like him’ – quislings.
4] ActionAid
Then there is ActionAid, a global ‘child-sponsorship’ business that is supported by the British government as a charity but is really a tool of its foreign policy. That ActionAid CHEATS both its donors and its beneficiaries was revealed in 1999 by independent investigators and is now a matter of public record. In a well-documented piece, ‘The Ugly Side of Child Sponsorship’, Mr. Binu Thomas exposed the seamy underbelly of this prestigious ‘charity’ in India – as well as Mr. Mander’s initiative and complicity in expanding in India its foreign agenda of deceit.
That ActionAid has a communal agenda for our country – evidenced by its complete silence over the liquidation of Hindus in the Islamic States of Pakistan and Bangladesh (in Bangladesh, Hindus by law and in practice are ‘enemy’) – is also a matter of public record. That ActionAid’s resources supported Mr. Mander’s notoriously communal piece in the Times of India occasioned only a flat denial by ActionAid – and Mr. Mander himself, an open letter to him notwithstanding, never publicly denied the use of these resources.
(A complaint against ActionAid was made by me to the UK Charity Commission but, given the close inter-linkages between the British government and this so-called NGO, the Commission, after a closed enquiry, giving no opportunity to the complainant to rebut ActionAid’s rejoinder, unsurprisingly parroted the same denial.)
This British NGO through its leader Mander used its enormous financial resources with ‘will you walk into my parlour?’ temptations to connect over 300 voluntary agencies, at least one private limited company and, in the Punjlish phrase, their nears and dears. Among Mander’s nears and dears who benefited from ActionAid’s patronage are his fellow-adventurers Aruna Roy of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and the National Campaign of People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), and Shekhar Singh of the NCPRI, as well as Dimple and Suroor Mander, scheduled to travel to and from and for hospitality in Karachi in Sept. 2003 for attending as ‘family members’ an official ActionAid ‘cultural workshop’ there. They were the only ‘family members’ of any participant to be so privileged by ActionAid.
It is not just that ActionAid is communal, with one standard for Islam against Hindus in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India and another for Hindus fighting back in India. It also intervenes in our country’s national politics, and its country head Mander publicly asserted its right to do so. Note that ActionAid does this only in Hindu-majority India; it claims no such right in Islamic States. Thus, ActionAid in India initiated ‘a study to examine the social, economic and educational conditions of Muslims… as a means to mobilise and encourage the general public, civil society activists and organisations working on issues related to the Muslim community, to become more sensitised to the dismal economic, educational and social conditions of the Muslim masses.’ It felt no such urge to make a similar study of the few surviving Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Moreover, Mander declared himself under no obligation to obey the law to which ActionAid is subject regarding criticism of a government or its policies, and he publicly affirmed the politics of his Gujarat enterprise.
Then, ActionAid cosied up to the Congress Party, never criticizing communal violence in which the Congress Party is implicated - for example, the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, with its Newtonian defence by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; the massive Bangladeshi Muslim illegal immigration under Congress aegis into Assam and the consequent Nellie communal carnage; and, of course, Godhra, ignored by Mander because relieving Hindu victims is not within ActionAid’s anti-Hindu agenda for India.
Yes, ActionAid was forced to briefly acknowledge the ongoing ‘ethnic cleansing’ by Islam of Hindus in Kashmir. It did this not in Kashmir but in Delhi, in insulting tokenism, with its different politico-communal standards for Pakistan/Bangladesh and for India, and witness its Rs 10,00,00,000 donor budget advertised for the ‘5,000 families and over 2,000 children’ it announced are affected in Gujarat as against nothing for over 10 times that number that fled Kashmir.
ActionAid preferred not to respond to the charge that it was sanctioned about Rs 3 crores by the Congress government of Chhattisgarh while Mr. Mander was still of that cadre. Nor to the charge of Britain’s special interest in the Chhattisgarh area, an interest revealed as far back as 1956 in the Niyogi Committee Report about conversions there. Barbara Harriss, a British trustee of ActionAid, in a trip arranged by ActionAid, wrote ‘A Note on Destitution’, focusing on Chhattisgarh, as a Paper for the Dissemination Workshop of the NCAER/QEH/DFID Project on Poverty: Alternative Realities, 2002. Dissemination to whom and where? Queen Elizabeth House and the Department for International Development are British. Ms Harriss and ActionAid remained silent to the charge that the British government, through DFID, had given about Rs 1.5 crores to ActionAid. You can now understand why the British High Commission in New Delhi chose not to respond to a formal representation made to it about ActionAid’s function in India.
Mr. Mander, as country head of ActionAid, in an international forum in the USA, publicly supported Ms Sonia Gandhi’s eligibility to ‘rule India.’
For all this and more, ActionAid was rewarded with Indian taxpayer largesse from ‘secular’ Congress governments of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Delhi, and Mander was (with Teesta ‘Best Fakery’ Setalvad) rewarded with the ‘secular’ Rajiv Gandhi Sadbhavana Award by Ms. Sonia Gandhi’s Nehruvian-secular Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
So you have a foreign agency in India, promoting a communal agenda, managed by a serving Indian government officer, openly promoting the Congress party and its supremo Ms. Sonia Gandhi, and the return to it included an award and a financial nexus between the foreigner and at least three Congress governments in our country.
5] The British government
The British government has been supporting ActionAid since the early 80s and is a substantial donor to it and, indeed, to many NGOs in other countries. ActionAid staff have been members of official British delegations, and have been on deputation to DFID. ActionAid and DFID work ‘particularly closely to influence policy changes’ in key sectors in other countries through ‘strategic level agreements…linked to strategic funding’, and in 1999 DFID donated GBP 3 million to ActionAid. In 2000, DFID entered into a ‘Partnership Programme Agreement’ with ActionAid, committing GBP 4.5 million to it during 2001-04 with an unspecified amount for a further two years, in addition to its other grants to it.
Policy changes? Strategic agreements? Strategic funding? And millions of pounds! Do you seriously believe all this is for charity? Does the leopard change its spots? What has been the pagan experience of British missionary-colonial rule? Tested by time, it was one of divide-and-rule. Where is the evidence that the British have had a change of heart?
So, Mr. Mander, for a munificent British salary in India, assisted by two other IAS officers in ActionAid, used his IAS connections to further that policy, till it was financially expedient for him to retire from IAS employ. Working for the British government in India, again on lucrative salaries far in excess of their IAS entitlement, are other IAS officers. Understand again that the annual professional assessments of these officers are being written by – and, therefore, their career prospects are dependent on – their British employers. Their competence is judged by how effectively they implement British policy for India.
Mander set the Britain-supported ActionAid on a massive expansion spree in India, not just directly but also through link/ sponsored/satellite agencies/companies, some of which are connected to Indian state governments. In 2001-02, its officially declared foreign money donated here was Rs 71.2 crores, and there is reason for inquiry that, by creating projects under the name of its own staff, it funneled money to favoured but non-FCRA recipients.
You scratch my back, said ActionAid’s Mander to his IAS colleagues in the British government, and I’ll see that yours are scratched too. So, the British government’s IAS officers only burped hospitably at Mander’s shenanigans – and were duly rewarded by their British employer. One went almost straight from her British DFID assignment here to the Commonwealth Office in the mother country, again on a lucrative foreign salary.
Consider that DFID in January 2004 ‘supported’ a Development Alternatives – PricewaterhouseCoopers ‘National Seminar on ‘Advocacy for Realising Rights and Removing Poverty,’ focusing on ‘what can be done by the civil society to improve policy formulation and design by Government’ as part of the British government’s ‘Poorest Areas Civil Society’, PACS, Programme for India that presently webs together 350 ‘civil society organisations’ through ‘a large resource base’ to cover 7,000 villages.
Actively involved in the seminar were the earlier quoted Mander-patron N.C. Saxena (ex-IAS), Parivartan and ActionAid (that noted too this programme’s ‘huge resource base’). The entire tenor of the seminar was critical of the Indian government, and ActionAid stated significantly that ‘Only you and I can change the country, bring about a silent revolution in the country. PACS can initiate that so that all of us can say, we did it.’ Now, ask yourself why the British government with its large/ huge resource base should support and encourage criticism of our government policy and action? Why should ActionAid want to change our country? Why should the British government agree to match whatever resources ActionAid raises from the corporate sector in India? For example, ICICI Bank gave ActionAid Rs 3.5 crores which became Rs 7 crores when the British government matched it. Why should ActionAid and PricewaterhouseCoopers want a British government-supported ‘silent revolution’ in our country? Why are they focusing on States most of which have a strong Christian missionary presence? Where is ‘charity’ in all this?
Why are you forgetting that the last time the British involved themselves in ‘changing’ our country, ‘India’s share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe’s share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952’?
6] The English-language mainstream ‘secular’ media
Then there is the English-language mainstream media, typified by The Times of India that published Mander’s bleeding-heart report, and Karan Thapar who defended Mander.
The independent and statutory Press Council of India determined that Mander’s ‘Hindustan Hamara’ report ‘at several points reiterated rumours that were being circulated at the relevant time. The truthfulness of the facts mentioned therein had not been established at any point of time till then but Shri Mander had chosen to base his views and sentiments on them, and put pen to the opinion thus formed by him.’ The Council ruled that ‘it was expected of the author as a responsible serving officer as well as of the respondent paper of repute like the Times of India, to be more restrained and circumspect in pronouncing a denouncement of the whole system in a communally surcharged atmosphere.’ The Council admonished the Times of India for its ‘indifferent and irresponsible attitude...in a matter of great public importance’ and felt ‘that a greater responsibility devolved on the editor of the paper in exercising his discretion to select articles for publication in such a situation’.
In other words, Mander LIED. He published worldwide anti-Hindu claims for which he had no basis when he made them. He willfully spread anti-Hindu rumours, made sweeping anti-Hindu statements that were fanciful and provocative and, notwithstanding his subsequent claims and that of ActionAid to be working in the interests of communal harmony, contributed only to further communalise and polarise views through this and later statements.
In fact, Mander and The Times of India violated almost every instruction of the Press Council’s guidelines on the reporting of communal violence. His anti-Hindu lies gained authority because he made them as an IAS officer, and their Goebbelsian repetition and promotion by the English-language mainstream so-called ‘secular’ media converted them to ‘secular’ truth.
Karan Thapar, who models himself on the BBC’s Tim Sebastian, in the Hindustan Times lauded Mander as a national hero, omitting to note that Mander himself, to Sebastian in HardTalk, admitted that, when he made the Hindustan Hamara claim of government complicity, he had no evidence of it at all. Mander himself declared his interest was only in the Muslim victims of communal violence.
Karan Thapar also chose to remain silent to an open letter addressed to him and circulated to the Hindustan Times and all over the web. That open letter clearly noted Mander’s prevarications and outright lies. But this is typical of the shrill-and-run tactics of the Manderians. They defend him with sweeping generalisations and vicious ad hominem attacks of the questioners, but when asked to rebut the facts brought out by these questioners, they beat a silent retreat.
Indeed, not a single major paper or TV channel reported the Press Council’s exposure of Mander. Not surprisingly, in addition to The Times of India, publications like the Hindustan Times, The Telegraph, Asian Age, Mainstream, Deccan Chronicle and Rashtriya Sahara were found by the Press Council to carry reports ‘tending to inflame communal passions’ and, let be it noted, these were pro-Muslim anti-Hindu passions.
7] Aruna Roy
Magsaysay awardee and ex-IAS officer Aruna Roy, self-proclaimed defender of democracy in Gujarat (but not in Bihar) and self-proclaimed defender of ‘secular’ rights for Muslims in Gujarat (but not Sikhs in Delhi, Reangs in the northeast, or Pandits in Kashmir), with Jean Dreze and others, publicly derided as communalists and worse those who dared question Mander’s ‘unquestioned integrity’. However, she is still silent about his unquestionable ‘resignation’ and other lies.
She herself had been caught in her lie that her Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan never took foreign help, being obliged to reveal that while it did not accept help in cash, it never hesitated accepting help in kind - so she could travel to and all over that mecca of our ‘secularists’, the United States, hitlerising Hindus but never Christians or Muslims (not even the one called the Butcher of Anantnag) since that would be biting the hands that feed her.
Aruna Roy is a great one for integrity and public accountability but herself cunningly evades it through a legal loophole. She admitted that foreign institutional support in kind has been her practice since the inception of her NGO. This includes support from ActionAid. Its website editorially lauded her, she in turn declared Mr. Mander’s ‘integrity cannot be questioned’, and Mander responded that her group is ‘distinguishable from other NGOs in that it had no funding whatsoever and who chose to follow the lifestyle and standards of living of the rural folk with whom they intended to stay’. Such mutual admiration!
Mander certifies that the MKSS has ‘no funding’! He certifies Roy’s lifestyle and standard of living as Gandhian. Yet he - and Roy - draw a most un-Gandhian distinction between accepting foreign institutional support in kind but not in cash. For example, they won’t accept the money for their international air tickets, but they’ll accept the tickets, thank you. This is the grossest hypocrisy. Not only does she accept unlimited foreign funds in kind but, contrary to the public image she generates for herself in our country, she has been doing so for a long time and from a wide range of foreign donors. And, of course, she and Mander know quite well that foreign help in kind escapes government monitoring, whereas foreign help in cash requires reporting and accounting to the Government.
But funneling of FCRA donations is possible, and she closes her eyes to its illegality. Consider her MKSS-approved Lok Shikshan Sansthan. It openly suggests that FCRA ‘money can be sent to’ its founder-NGO Prayas or to the Roy-connected SWRC Tilonia ‘and it would be transferred to our organisation’s account’.
Roy is signatory to the ‘Decisions and Action Plan’ of the ‘People’s Conference against Globalisation, 21st-23rd March 2001, New Delhi’. The convener of this conference was one S.P. Shukla (also ex-IAS) and its full report appeared as a ‘special feature’ in the April 2001 issue of ‘Liberation, the central organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)’.
Now, both SP Shukla and Shekhar Singh of the NCPRI are members of the unregistered ‘unstructured’ Right to Information: Citizens’ Forum Against Corruption, CFAC, which itself is a creation of something called Parivartan. So this Forum, the NCPRI and Parivartan were all asked for information of the people who sponsored that ‘people’s conference’ and whether the CPI (M-L) was one of the sponsors. Are you surprised that not one of them would give the information? And yet on the CFAC are a retired naval chief, eight retired very senior civil servants, a retired high court chief justice, and a serving civil servant who is also in Parivartan. And they’re all concerned about ‘public accountability’.
The CPI (M-L) is an avowed advocate of selective violence and has an established record of anti-nationalism and anti- Hinduism. Associated in the work of Parivartan are Harsh Mander, Aruna Roy and Shekhar Singh. The inference is obvious.
Such hypocrisy is characteristic of Nehruvian secularists. Mander, himself a Gandhi poseur, played at being Gandhi-poor from the security of a lavish monthly income of Rs 2 lakhs and a comfortable upscale apartment. Aruna Roy is like him and her namesake, the more notorious Arundhati Roy who, even as she publicly sympathised with tribal people, privately grabbed their land for her personal use. Aruna Roy protests that a certain State government initiative was a ‘move [that] amounts to attempts at giving away public land to private entrepreneurs at throwaway prices’ - but she never found it necessary to protest her namesake’s land-grab. Aruna Roy enjoys the security of an affluent family, affluent and influential connections, a large government-gifted property in Rajasthan available to her for her use and that of her family and friends, and a valuable apartment available to her in the national capital. She then plays – in the manner of a Versailles shepherdess – at being poor.
Let’s have it from Ms Roy herself: ‘it is the educated and literate class that are deeply involved in corruption. Literacy cannot remove corruption, it can be removed through ethics, and poor and illiterate people are more ethical in their behaviour compared to an educated person. We have lost morality and it is our doublespeak that is harming the nation.’
Now that’s a perspicacious self-description. Right on target, Ms Roy, right on target.
Let us look at one instance of Roy double-speaking for her foreign supper. The America-based Association for India’s Development, AID, hosted her and her colleague Shankar Singh as the keynote speakers at a conference in that part of the world, and reported that they ‘came to Ann Arbor to talk about their Freedom to Information campaign as well as the communal violence that has devastated Gujarat....Arunaji and Shankarji also gave heartfelt testimonials about the communal violence in Gujarat....Ann Arbor was only one stop on their tour of America. They stopped in countless cities.....’
Ask yourself why these two committed activists, who as a principle will not accept American cash for their campaign in India, need to go to ‘countless cities’ all over America at American cost seeking American approbation for their domestic political cause of freedom of information. Roy publicly claimed her NGO ‘has survived on contributions from its constituents and supporters.’ Are rich anti-India Americans and their organisations the constituency of this so-called people’s movement in India? Unless, of course, we note that, during this extensive and expensive American tour, these Nehruvian secular stalwarts sang heart-feelingly about post-Godhra Gujarat but are not reported to have said a word about the Hindu victims at Godhra, or of the victims of the far worse and ongoing communal violence in Kashmir, and that this foreign Association for India Development listed four relief projects (with their total donor budget of USD 84,416) directly related to the rehabilitation of Muslim victims of communal violence in Gujarat—but not a single project for Hindu victims of communalism in Kashmir.
Roy’s duplicity was exposed by a fellow-participant at the World Social Forum in Mumbai. There Roy said, ‘When we say another world is possible, we are saying that we want development and globalisation that is people centric, that puts people first rather than corporations and profits.’
Surely she does! Just as in her NGO she’s put ‘people’ first, and so she tells the world. But her air tickets to the USA and all her travel costs and hospitality abroad are eventually paid for by her American sponsors’ earnings from ‘corporations and profits’. This she doesn’t tell the world; fellow-participant Beena Adhik does: ‘The NGOs, who are flocking to WSF, have no ideology and are themselves totally dependent on foreign funding which in turn comes from multi-nationals.’
But then, as the Volcker report, the Mitrokhin and Benediktov papers, and the Quattrocchi saga reveal, Roy and her kind are aligned to a political lineage that flatters itself on its ‘crystalline honesty’ even as it grovels for and fattens itself on anti-national foreign largesse.
Roy asserts that ‘we cannot stand by and watch the failure of government and civil society, the breakdown of law and order, of democratic human values. It is a question of whether Indian democracy will survive at all.’
No, she’s not talking about Bihar: ? a State that has been riven with casteism and communalism by Nehruvian secularism; ? a State that more than once had its high court noting a collapse of law and order; ? a State where the most flourishing industry was kidnapping and extortion; ? a State over which a corrupt Union Minister foisted his wife as Chief Minister and later gloried in an un-Constitutional ‘rabripati shasan’ foisted by a Government that Roy herself advised; ? a State that in India Today’s ‘State of the States’ 2004 and 2005 ranking came at the very bottom and was described as ‘very effective in distributing poverty than in generating prosperity’ and India’s ‘worst State’ to live in; ? a State from the hopelessness of which 2,00,00,000 have migrated; ? a State that Transparency International India announced in 2005 is our country’s most corrupt State; ? a State that, according to a senior minister of the same government she advised, had seen 70,000 killings, yes, seventy thousand, of which 69,000 are Hindus killed, in the last 15 years; ? and a State that, according to Rahul Gandhi, hadn’t ‘a trace of governance…no functioning government…no governance….a total collapse of the administrative system’ and that which, according to his mother Sonia Gandhi, constitutes ‘a great tradition of healthy politics’.
All these were ‘giant strides’ according to the political party, the government of which Aruna Roy is a staunch supporter. To Aruna Roy, it is enough that Bihar practised Nehruvian secularism to be a well-administered and democratic State – even if parts of it became a ‘Pakistani mohalla’. With Roy’s membership of the National Advisory Council, she cannot escape credit for its state of affairs – a state of affairs so emphatically and democratically rejected by the Biharis themselves once they were enabled in Nov. 2005 to vote freely by an Election Commission that did its duty.
No, Roy is not even talking about West Bengal where the communists systematically rig the elections so much so that ‘democracy and Bengal are two mutually exclusive concepts’.
She is talking about Gujarat that, very soon after the violence, underwent a general election that not even she could say was undemocratic; the same India Today ranked seventh amongst the States; the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation listed at the top of its economic freedom index; according to her own UPA Government attracts the highest industrial investment of all States; Transparency International India ranks among the least corrupt States; and India Today not only ranked highest in its 2005 ‘Freedom = Prosperity’ list, but declared ‘safety of life is highest in Gujarat’. *
For Roy, ‘what is also at stake are the principles which [she] believe[s] are the basis of Hinduism itself—a wisdom born out of compassion, understanding and tolerance’.
Sure, so the Pandit community in Kashmir did not live by these principles? It was not tolerant, peace-loving, law-abiding? So, where was Roy when mullahs from masjids called for the elimination of the Hindu men and the abduction of Hindu women? Why didn’t she go preach compassion, understanding and tolerance to these mullahs? Why hasn’t she still done so? Did not her IAS batchmate Wajahat Habibullah boldly and publicly admit “I had been appointed Special Commissioner, Anantnag... A large crowd...came to inform me that the Kashmiri Pandits were leaving Anantnag. My reply was that if they had decided to move, there was little the State Government could do to stop them. The Pandits had reason to be afraid. They were a small minority. Every day tapes were being played from the mosques saying, “Either you support us (militants) or else we kill you”... I fully acknowledge our failure...” (‘Kashmir Conundrum’, The Times of India, Mumbai, May 20, 2002).
She can go all the way to America to cry to Americans of Hindus who are not compassionate, etc., etc., but she hasn’t the guts to go to the Jammu refugee camps that are described as hell-on-earth and tell the Hindu refugees there of Muslims who are not compassionate, etc., etc. She hasn’t the guts to go to Kashmir and take on that government that is as, if not more, culpable as the Government of Gujarat, a government that is culpable of genocide of a Hindu community by Islam. Ask yourself why not.
Meanwhile, the ‘secular’ government that Roy officially advised and oversaw announced in Parliament that 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed in Gujarat in the post-Godhra violence. These figures remain unquestioned (and note that ‘post-Godhra’ reduces the count of Hindus killed). The enormous discrepancy between the figures in the thousands propagandised by the Nehruvian secularists and the figures officially declared now by their own government can be understood when we realise that the late M.K. Gandhi, the founding deity of Nehruvian secularism, equated one Muslim to three non-Muslims, so 790 × 3 = thousands. Got it? And if this is perverse mathematics, so is Nehruvian secularism perverse.
Aruna Roy goes all the way to America to complain about 790 Muslim deaths, but doesn’t condole a single Hindu one. She is ‘secular’, but she had no difficulty standing by quietly when a Congress prime minister justified deaths of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi, and she still stands quietly by in the Congress and State-enabled ongoing ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Pandits from Kashmir – 350,000 Hindu refugees of a jihad in our own country, and presumably Roy, like Gayatri Sinha, considers this Hindu holocaust an Islamic art form.
Roy says she is ‘democratic’, yet she lauds that dictator and mass murderer Mao Tse-tung. She had no qualms at all being part of that extra-Constitutional coterie called a National Advisory Council that oh-so-democratically rules our country, dictates to a selected prime minister and exercises power without any accountability. She had no qualms at all that the former head of this coterie has committed foreign exchange and other economic offences. She had no qualms at all that there was with her in this Council a person who, for well over a decade, is on a foreign payroll – a huge and steady monthly income disguised as an advisorship. To whom is he accountable?
As both a ‘secularist’ and a ‘democrat’, Roy advised and oversaw, with an easy conscience:
? A government led by a party accused of international corruption in a United Nations report, a party that Roy supports in power; ? A government that retained, without work but on the public payroll, a minister having greasy palms named in the same report and named as well by the concerned Indian ambassador who is from the minister’s own political party, the party that Roy supports in power; ? A government that appoints and conspires and a prime minister who lies with ‘political hatchet men’ to totally disregard ‘fairness and adherence to constitutional values’; ? A government with a minister who is accused (by a chief minister from the prime minister’s own political and Roy supported party) of links with terrorists; ? A government whose ministers are accused of and accuse each other of corruption, mayhem and murder; ? Who call arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden a mahatma; ? A minister who in Parliament once called both Rajiv Gandhi and Roy’s ex-boss Sonia Gandhi ‘communal’.
Most despicable of all is Roy’s contempt for the implications of the Supreme Court judgment striking down the IMDT Act. The Supreme Court noted the failure since 1950 of the protection of Assam and our northeast from a steadily increasing ‘trespass of foreign nationals’ so that today there are ‘millions’ of them in our country in what the Court declares is ‘external aggression’ with consequent ‘internal disturbances’, and a change in the demography of the region reducing the pagans to a minority in our own homeland. Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Governor of West Bengal (and an IAS batchmate of Roy), declares Bengal “is sitting on an infiltration ‘time bomb’”. Bengal has well over a million Bangladeshi invaders.
But does all this matter to Roy, self-proclaimed ‘secularist’ and ‘democrat’? No. What matters to her is that the government she monitored soft-pedals the issue, continues to encourage this aggression, and continues to put these invaders on our electoral rolls so that they continue to swell the vote bank of the ‘secular’ political parties she supports. This is the ‘democracy’, this is the ‘secularism’ that Roy projects and protects. Her primary loyalty is clearly to the communal fascists that are her anti-pagan extraterritorial sponsors.
And then this is the Roy who expresses much concern ‘at the imbalance of power between the elite and the marginalised citizen…..For the people of India, the time to hold a Government accountable to its promises is now’ (India Today, April 11, 2005). Yes, Roy – both as elite and as government – should know.
Aruna Roy is emphatically against ‘the acceptance of a paradigm of solutions by policy-makers without obtaining the sanction of the people. In a democratic framework, this is simply not acceptable’. True enough. Yet Roy herself, who has never fought a legislature election, saw no duplicity in making the Constitutional hierarchy of a Government responsible to her and people like her rather than to the people-at-large who elected them.
To whom is she accountable? 8] Some others of the Manderweb
(a) Shabnam Hashmi:
Like Aruna Roy, Shabnam Hashmi of the Nehruvian-secular SAHMAT lied about foreign help in cash but not in kind, nor about the Islamic interests that, for the same purpose as Roy’s, paid for her travel to and in America. She was obliged to leave SAHMAT and, with Mander, K.N. Panikkar and Shubha Mudgal, then set up ANHAD. ANHAD described itself as an unstructured organisation and solicited money from the public – but refused to reveal whether it was legally registered (and, if not, in whose account the money was banked).
(b) Aman Ekta Manch:
Likewise again, the ActionAid-supported Aman Ekta Manch was not a registered body and had no stated office-bearers, but it had ‘volunteers’ collecting in its name funds from the public; it apparently has a bank account but, when asked, would not say where; and it did not see itself accountable to the public for the money it collected.
In fact, Mander/ActionAid initiated a slew of such ‘people’s movements’ – Aman Samudaya, Aman Jathas, Aman Pathiks – that solicited or received funds from the public. But to whom were they accountable? Mander’s Aman Biradari is claimed to be a Trust and it solicits funds from the public, but nowhere in its website does it reveal anything of its accounts, though the site flaunts names such as Swami Agnivesh, Shabnam Hashmi, Asghar Ali Engineer, Jean Dreze, K.N. Panikkar, Mallika Sarabhai, Nafisa Ali, Nandita Das, Nirmala Deshpande and Paul Diwakar.
Consider too that ‘citizen’s initiative’ called Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan, AAA, funded by ActionAid, the citizen taking this initiative again being ActionAid’s own Harsh Mander. AAA, says its website, ‘seeks to increase the accountability of public institutions to ALL citizens’ (the emphasis is theirs). It is ‘run by a core team of 11 professionals’ who, characteristically, are not named, nor does AAA tell us citizens about its accounts other than that it is accountable to ActionAid (and not to “ALL citizens”). Such is its idea of accountability.
(c) St. Stephen’s College:
Principal Anil Wilson who declares on the college website that St. Stephen’s College ‘is a religious foundation’ held up ActionAid’s Mander as a role model for Indian youth. When challenged by another Stephanian, Wilson responded with an ad hominem attack. He was then confronted with a direct question of a specific financial nexus between this Christian religious foundation and ActionAid. Trapped in his lie, he retreated behind a smokescreen of evasive bluster.
This religious foundation’s chaplain is the Reverend Valson Thampu who is also a member of the Delhi State Minorities Commission. Thampu takes up cudgels on behalf of Muslims in Gujarat, but never on behalf of the Hindu minority in Kashmir or, even though asked, of the pagan Reangs (persecuted by Christian Mizos) with well over 30,000 of them refugees in Tripura. Principal Wilson publicly blackens Thampu as being among those ‘people [who] hide behind the façade of religious status to sugar-coat the offensiveness of their conduct and to escape the arm of law.’ (d) Shubha Mudgal:
Noted vocalist, she wails over two allegedly-desecrated Muslim graves in Ahmedabad, but has not one note for the over one hundred Hindu temples documented as desecrated by Muslims in independent and ‘secular’ India’s Kashmir.
(e) NCPRI:
The vocal movement in India called the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, whose founders include Harsh Mander, Aruna Roy and Shekhar Singh. These three are also on its working committee, with Singh donning the mantle of convener. Shekhar Singh (who taught at St. Stephen’s), when asked, would not say whether he or his own NGOs had received money from ActionAid. The NCPRI is an ‘unstructured’ organisation that receives funds from the public. It seeks to ensure that the institutions and agencies in India, whether within or outside the Government, function transparently. It demands the government make its information public, but does not apply the same standard to itself, declining to reveal the origin of its resources.
(f) Amita Joseph:
There are interconnecting webs. Consider the World Bank-supported and American-sponsored Global Alliance for Workers and Communities which justifies American-style capitalism and whitewashed two American MNCs that earned notoriety for their sweatshop procurement from the ‘Third World’. In the centre of its India web sat Amita Joseph, who’d earlier helped implement British and American Government policy in India. She categorically denied any connection with ActionAid, till confronted with the record of one. Then, characteristically Manderian, she retreated into silence.
9] The Manderweb
The whole Mander edifice is a fraud, protected by government patronage, funded by foreign money and sponsored by anti-Hindus with - ? The documented duplicity of Shekhar Singh and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information; ? The double standards on record of such well-known activists as Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze who certify the lying Mr. Mander’s ‘unquestionable integrity’; ? The Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the Vigil India Movement that present Mander awards for promoting communal harmony and human rights, though they’re informed that his integrity is suspect; ? Protégées like Shabnam Hashmi and Shubha Mudgal who, along with him and ActionAid, operate unregistered organisations that solicit money from the public; ? Associates like Amita Joseph who pretend no association; and ? The head of a Christian religious foundation, who pronounces this pseudologue a role model for Indian youth.
Which are some of the foreign-based agencies eager to involve themselves with the Manderweb and the perpetuation of anti-majority and anti-pagan Indian democracy?
Consider, for example, the foreign sponsors of Mander’s talks in May 2003 in California, Michigan and Chicago: ? American Federation of Muslims of Indian Origin ? Indian Muslim Relief Committee ? Coalition against Communalism ? Coalition for Secular Democratic India ? Indian Muslim Council ? International Christian Coalition for Human Rights ? American Federation of Muslims from India ? New Republic India ? Sikh American Heritage Organisation ? Federation of Indo-American Christians of North America ? Voice of Asian Minorities ? South Asian Group for Action and Reflection ? Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America ? Sikh Foundation
‘Harsh Mander is on a short-speaking tour of the US as the country-director of UK-based NGO ActionAid – India’, they said, and the announced subject of all these talks - only Gujarat!
Consider, for example, that Aruna Roy goes all the way to Chicago to sup with the Indian Muslim Council-USA in October 2004. There she (identified as Founder MKSS, and Member of National Advisory Council for the Central Government of India), at - please note – its iftar party, ‘inspires’ members of this umbrella Muslim organisation in America with her thoughts on the importance of social justice. No, these are not her thoughts about the need for social justice in America or in any Islamic State but about social justice in her own country with which Americans are so concerned.
The same Council then co-sponsors a talk by her the same month in Stanford in California. Again, the talk is not about whatever it is in America, but about issues relevant domestically in her own country (and about which she is not reported to have ever travelled to and talked about in Bihar, Bengal or Kashmir). Now, who paid for all this expensive travel and hospitality, and why? Her NGO? Try asking her. Her Magsaysay citation claims that ‘Roy and her colleagues practise the transparency they preach, accounting scrupulously for their own expenditures to rural neighbours.’ Do they indeed? To rural neighbours in America? Or to the terrorism-linked organisations that pay for her?
Do you still wonder why the announced subject is never our northeast, never what our Supreme Court itself has declared ‘an aggression’ on Assam (and, therefore, of India) by Bangladeshi aliens, why the Manderweb does not want on its agenda the rehabilitation of Hindu refugees in Jammu from Islamic violence in Kashmir?
Have not, to borrow the NCPRI’s words for Gujarat, Islamic outfits ‘aggressively usurped the use of all public spaces, suppressed constitutional rights of free expression, and hounded’ Hindus out of Kashmir? Are Kashmiri Pandits not victims of Islamic communal violence, and on a scale unheard of in the rest of the country?
Do you still wonder why ActionAid in Pakistan and Bangladesh does nothing about victims of communal violence in those countries? When ActionAid’s country director for India himself publicly confirms his and ActionAid’s pro-Muslim/anti-Hindu approach, including this British ‘charity’ involving itself in defending the Muslim criminal accused in the Godhra train-burning, for what kind of ‘communal harmony’ do the Manderians spin?
According to some of Mander’s American sponsors, ‘Mander is prominent among those who are fighting to save the soul of India in a changing world’. The America-based Indian Muslim Relief Committee, while falsely denouncing ‘the Gujarat Genocide [as] the Worst Violence Since the Partition’, equally falsely announced Mander as an ‘eyewitness’ and ‘one of the top 40 IAS officer’s of India, he resigned in protest to Indian Govt.’s involvement in the Gujarat Riots’. Falsely because, for example, the Sikhs of Delhi, the pagan Reangs in the northeast, and the KPs in Kashmir have suffered far more and that too with the involvement of the Nehruvian-secular political party that the Manderweb supports; Mander was not an eye-witness; there is no official IAS evaluation that listed Mander as anywhere among its top officers; he never resigned at all; and even he does not claim the Government of India’s involvement in the riots.
10] The rise of the unstructured organisation
Note the rise of the unregistered unstructured organisation. Promoted as ‘a citizens’ initiative’ or ‘a people’s movement’ by Manderians (and led and controlled by them in an ‘association of persons’), it avoids the accountability required of a legally registered NGO, it claims as a USP that it takes no foreign donations (and so it avoids official clearance for foreign support in cash), but it has no difficulty at all accepting generous foreign support in kind, none of which need be reflected in the personal accounts of its leaders or in any public account it presents. Former IAS and other ex-sarkari types (including judges) are closely involved to provide it with ‘respectability’ and their connections still in the sarkar provide protection, in return from it of post-retirement sinecures for themselves.
Consider the ActionAid/MKSS-associated Right to Food Campaign, an unstructured organisation that ‘survives mainly from individual donations…..in rupees with no strings attached’. Please note the cleverly suggestive use of ‘individuals’ and ‘rupees’ – yet individuals can be foreign, foreign support can be in Indian rupees, and an earlier listing in the site of support received in kind was removed.
Between 12/2002 and 12/2004, this Campaign reported donations received ‘worth’ Rs 7,67,595/-. This included a personal donation of Rs 3,00,000/- from Arundhati Roy, apart from Rs 1.5 lakhs from her Zindabad Trust, but there is nothing to show that all donations are receipted. The expenses during this period totalled Rs 9,71,939 and appear to be overwhelmingly on salaries (Rs 3,21,000), campaign materials (Rs 4,51,137, recovered through their sale) and at least Rs 1,33,417 on what appears to be expenses on participation in programmes of others.
Now, the Campaign has a small ‘support group…all members of the support group participate in the Right to Food campaign in their personal capacity, without remuneration’. Excellent. But why are the members of this support group not named; does ‘without remuneration’ mean they take care of their expenses too, or does the Campaign meet those – and then how much are these expenses? There is a clue. The Campaign has two Supreme Court-appointed ‘commissioners’ (one of whom is N.C. Saxena) that it appears to have co-opted and their address is c/o the Centre for Equity Studies. Guess whom these commissioners have as their ‘special advisor’? Harsh Mander. Guess who heads this Equity Centre? Why, Mander’s old friend Shekhar Singh, who won’t reveal whether Mander’s ActionAid funded it!
Consider another entity called Parivartan that explicitly states it is NOT an NGO. It is not registered under any Act as a society or a trust or a company. It is a people’s movement. For income tax purposes, it is an Association of Persons. Note that, for income tax purposes, an AoP is a coming together of persons with a profit motive, and the members of an AoP (co-adventurers, in legal jargon) can have a share in the income of the AoP – unlike the members of a registered society who can have no such share. So who are the Parivartan AoP? Surely not its five full-time workers – they get salaries, and they include a serving government officer of the Indian Revenue Service.
No, the names in the AoP are given nowhere in its website, not even on its ‘About Us’ page, except one Manish Sisodia, shown as ‘part-time volunteer’ and described as ‘a founder-member’ and ‘treasurer’. And what are the terms of the agreement of association? Surely ‘the people’ are entitled to know the arrangement their self-appointed leaders have made amongst themselves for any facilities, whether in cash or kind, from the income of the AoP? And yet Parivartan demands transparency and accountability from others.
Now, look at the Parivartan Receipt and Expenditure Statement FY 2002-03 (1/10 to 31/3) as displayed on its website. The receipts total Rs 2,02,489 of which Rs 2,01,889 are donations; the expenditure totals Rs 1,88,164. Of the latter, salaries total Rs 1,14,000. The only ‘programme cost’ is Rs 35,945 on a jan sunwai. The rest is all standard office/administrative expense. In other words, about 93 per cent of donations to Parivartan go not to ‘the people’ but to maintaining the AoP and its support infrastructure.
At the same time, Parivartan claims ‘the fixed costs are around Rs 6 lakhs per annum. This includes salaries of workers, rent, phone and other office expenses’, and it solicits generous contributions. Programme costs are ‘partly funded through collections from the community itself including poor people and the shortfall is made good by raising funds from outside,’ but the website is significantly silent whether these are included in the receipts statement and, especially, whether receipts are issued for ‘the small amounts donated by a host of very poor people.’
This is transparency? This is accountability? Something wrong with their maths? Or with their morals?
A last example: Mr. Mander published on March 23, 2004 ‘A Manifesto For Democratic India’ (that demanded, among other things, ‘public accountability’ from ‘funded NGOs’) and named for ‘Contact Info’ something called ‘Resistance’. This Resistance ‘brought together persons, organisations and other forums committed to democracy and pluralism from all across the country for a daylong conference on April 4th 2004. The conference emphasised the need and importance that every citizen needs to take sides in a unified civil-society action to prevent the fascist forces from gaining an upper hand in the country’.
When Mander’s Resistance was asked whether it is registered, who are its members, the source of its funds, the participants of the conference, and who funded the conference, its Apoorva Anand responded with the characteristic ad hominem attack of the questioner and then he retreated into silence. Such is the Manderweb’s ‘public accountability’.
Such is Harsh Mander who yet can publicly state ‘While all public authorities should definitely come within the purview of access legislation, some private bodies or persons whose activities affect the public directly should also come within the purview of the law. NGOs should also necessarily be included in the law,’ while privately he does his best to evade accountability. When organisations engaged in community service can legitimately enjoy a tax break provided they are registered (and, of course, the members have no share in the income), ask yourself why self-proclaimed samaj sewaks should prefer an organisational form that is unregistered and the income of which is taxable – but in which income they can claim shares.
Unstructured organisations are accountable to no one, and within India the incestuous web of Manderians who promote them are accountable only to themselves. They are co-adventurers in the business of selling out our pagan homeland.
And which is the most ‘unaccountable’ of all unstructured organisations? Here it is from TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan: ‘The Mother of all NGOs in India, of course, is the National Advisory Council. Its writ begins and ends in charity—but with a crucial difference. Whereas the cost of real charity is private and the beneficiary is the public, the cost of NAC charity is public and the beneficiaries are private.’ He calls it a SONGO. Guess why.
Do you wonder that Russia, learning its lesson from a string of revolutions in the former Soviet republics ‘all inspired and orchestrated by Western-funded NGOs’, has legislated the shutting down of NGOs that “threaten the country’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, national unity and originality, cultural heritage and national interests.”
But our Nehruvian secularists, instead of shutting down such NGOs, set one up to rule our country!
11] The Repudiation of Patriotism
The arrogance is unbelievable of people like Mander, Roy and Hashmi that it is, in Hashmi’s words, persons like them ‘who have been struggling to keep the country together’, and implicitly our country will fall apart without these ulema to guard the faith. What is common to all these Nehruvian secularists and represented by Mander himself?
The essential common characteristics are anti-paganism, and the acquisition of name, fame and pecuniary gain through the exercise of double standards, with no deshbhakti, no loyalty to the country.
Recall Arundhati Roy’s notorious ‘I’m no patriot’. To acquire the passport of our country, she lied in writing that she ‘owe[s] allegiance to the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India’. Then, having got the passport, she declared without a qualm that she is not a patriot, in other words, that she has no loyalty to her country. This is the grossest hypocrisy and selfishness. If she does not have patriotism for India, she has no business being its citizen.
Patriotism may be an old-fashioned sentiment but, ironically, the freedom Roy uses to repudiate patriotism is possible only because she is a citizen of a country in which deshbhakt jawans with their own lives are prepared to defend her freedom to attack their values. The fact is undeniable that the Roys of this world - Nehruvian secularists - dare speak up, in her words, only in ‘democratically elected regimes in the “free world:”’ they don’t dare speak up in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or China against the ‘authoritarian regimes’ there.
During an extended visit to Pakistan, Mander repeatedly mewled to Pak audiences that his ‘core of the idea of India is that people of diverse faiths, castes, gender and classes live together with peace, mutual respect, security and equal citizenship rights.’
Certainly. But what about roaring to Pak audiences about a similar core for Pakistan? Why didn’t he, as an Indian, dare ask them why they haven’t let Hindus in Pakistan live in peace, security and equal citizenship? Why didn’t he dare ask them why they have all but liquidated the Hindus in Pakistan? Why didn’t he dare ask them why they send jihadis who strike at the very centres of Hindustan – Parliament, Raghunathji, Akshardham, Ramjanmabhoomi, Varanasi.
‘Let a lamp be lit’, choruses Mander to an Indian audience after he returns. ‘Let’s write a poem for friendship’, says he.
Well, why doesn’t he dare go to Kargil when the Pak jihadis attack and light lamps for and write poems to them?
He daren’t. He eats jihadi salt. Manderians are not democrats; they are dulocrats, and the Manderweb symbolises our dulocracy.
So, are you surprised that the dulocracy that rules our country does not commemorate Kargil Day? It says jihadis and illegal immigrants are ‘our brothers and sisters’. And our deshpremi jawans who die keeping these invaders out are both expendable and forgettable.
12] The hijacking of hamara Hindustan
A tree will not flourish unless it is firmly rooted in fertile soil.
There can be no paganism without a land in which pagan culture and polity can freely flourish.
There can be no Hindus without a Hindustan.
The paganism that extended from Gandhara across Kashmir and Tibet right upto the East Asian coast, and down through Sri Lanka and Myanmar, has steadily shrunk till, in 1947, it lost major chunks in the subcontinent itself. Post-1947, under the Nehruvian secularism and democracy of which the Manderweb is part and that it propagates, we pagans have been eliminated from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, and much of the northeast. We are seeing our elimination in Assam, Kerala, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar under a ‘secular’ and ‘democratic’ dispensation that is quite openly anti-pagan, that extends to ravening world-conquering religions in India advantages over the Hindu majority that neither Christians nor Muslims in the democracies where they are a majority, or where they rule (as in the Vatican State, or in any of the Islamic States), extend to Hindus within their domains.
Why do we accept this double standard?
Nehruvian secularists preach ‘compassion, understanding and tolerance’ to Hindus. But they dare not preach to Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs a compassion, understanding and tolerance for the pagans. That would be to negate the very essence and history of these rapacious religious imperialisms.
Hindustan is the last major bastion of paganism. In their 2000 years, everywhere that the rapacious Abrahamic monotheisms have conquered, they have erased pre-existing faiths.
Nowhere, but nowhere, in the world where the exclusivisms have conquered have they allowed significant pagan populations to survive. Nowhere in the territories of these monotheisms is there a meaningful survival of any pre-monotheism, any paganism. There is not one significant exception to this worldwide historical fact.
We Hindus are the world’s last pagans and our time has come now, as missionaries and mullahs daily remind us.
Nehruvian secularists forget a fundamental principle of human conduct called the golden rule of reciprocity. This rule goes back at least 5,000 years to our Mahabharat, it goes back to Confucianism, and it is divinely sanctioned for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all of which acknowledge the Old Testament. Four times does the Old Testament sanctify as the lex talionis an application of this principle: Exodus 21.23-25; Leviticus 24.17-21; Deuteronomy 19.19; indeed, practised by their god himself – Judges 1.7, and by his followers in, for example, the Koranic kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Most Manderians are educated in elite English-medium institutions. They read Shakespeare. They should remember Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice, III.1. If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge? The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
For 1,000 or so years in our land our paganism has been at the receiving end of preying monotheisms. What have they taught us pagans except their villainy? And, after Independence, even with us pagans a numerical majority, Nehruvian secularism twists us under minorityism, our democracy being used as an instrument to appease these monotheisms, the numerical pagan majority being held hostage to a numerical minority.
B.R. Ambedkar himself ‘did not believe our Constitution was secular because it allowed different treatment to various communities and the legislatures could frame separate laws for different communities.’ A half-century later we see the result: a growing class of ‘minority’ super citizens, and one of them a super prime minister. What are these monotheisms still teaching us if not their villainy? They have taken every advantage of the pagan ‘compassion, understanding and tolerance’ to undermine it. They are as Duryodhana to the Pandavas – not as much land as will cover the tip of a needle do they want to leave us. So why should we not better their instruction? Remember that the Pandavas regained their kingdom, their homeland, their honour, only after they remembered the golden rule of reciprocity.
When these monotheisms, our so-called ‘minorities’, identify themselves as part of world-dominating movements, prevalent and spreading in lands across the globe, then it is the paganism in India that needs to be protected as a ‘minority’, because now paganism survives nowhere else in the world, being destroyed everywhere else by our so-called ‘minority’ religions. When eradicated from India, where will we pagans find a homeland? It is the paganism that is the real ‘religious’ minority in India.
Why have we pagans forgotten the lesson Krishna taught our ancestors?
It is clear that shrewd anti-Hindu foreign sponsors recognize in Mander a heartless and highly-skilled manipulator ready to use a web of contacts for his own self-promotion and monetary gain. He is their willing stooge to deny the numerical majority our pagan rights in India, to dismember our pagan polity, and to enable our conquest – and consequent extinction – by the aggrandising Abrahamic monotheisms. Manderians are Judases. For today’s equivalent of 30 pieces of silver, they sell us to those whose avowed aim is to destroy us.
‘I am the LORD thy God …Thou shalt have no other gods before me…for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God….’ (Exodus 20.2,3,5)
‘La ilaha il Allah, Muhammad-ur-Rasool-Allah’ (‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah’—Al-Shahada)
These beliefs are the very foundations of their respective faiths. They are commandments. True believers must subscribe, are required to accept the one that is the very basis of their religion. There can be no compromise, and historically the religion ultimately has shown none.
Three quotations are relevant to the exclusivisms. Marx had said, ‘We are ruthless and ask for no quarter from you. When our turn comes, we shall not disguise our terrorism’. Churchill said, ‘An appeaser is one who keeps feeding a crocodile in the hope it will eat him last’. And George Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.
Nehruvian secularists are appeasers. The exclusivisms are terrorists, are crocodiles. They practise neither compassion for nor understanding nor tolerance of pagans. They have never done so. They terrorize, they gobble up pagans. This is the lesson of the past.
The homeland of my progenitors has already been cannibalised by Islam.
The homeland of my dharma is under terror from a missionary-mullah-marxist nexus.
‘Hindustan hamara,’ claims the anti-pagan Harsh Mander for these his webmasters.
Let those, like Mander, who are ashamed of being Hindustani, emigrate to the lands of the monotheisms. To those lands of ‘compassion, understanding and tolerance’ let them freely go. Like Pakistan. Bangladesh. Or even America. Hindustan hamara hai.
We pagans want our homeland back.
[For notes, please refer to http://www.vigilonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=970&Itemid=1 From:- NGOs Activists and Foreign Funds: Anti-Nation Industry Ed., Radha Rajan and Krishen Kak Published by Vigil Public Opinion Forum, 2006. The online version of the book can be accessed at http://www.vigilonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=843&Itemid=109]
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