VHP

VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) - World Hindu Council

The VHP was founded on August 29, 1964 in Bombay with the clear aim of being the activist wing, that would undertake aggressive actions in civil society as a whole. The first general secretary of the VHP made its goals clear as follows:

"It is therefore necessary in this age of competition and conflict to think of and organise, the Hindu world to save itself from the evil eyes of all three (all three being Christianity, Islam and Communism)." (quote from the Organiser, Diwali Special, 1964.)

The VHP has gone on to do just that - spread out as a extra-parliamentary force throughout not just India, but the world. Its primary functions in India are to mobilize forces for agitational and violent purposes. It took part in the Cow Protection Movement though out the 60's and the 70's. The entire Babri Masjid movement was orchestrated by the VHP - steadfastly refusing to enter into any negotiation, rejecting the right of the judicial system in adjudicating on the issue and mobilizing often violent events with the clear intent of polarizing society and creating a political movement within public discourse of Hindutva - the Rath Yatras of the 1980's and the final demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 were orchestrated by the VHP in association with its "youth wing" the Bajrang Dal. Again the strategy of the Hindutva combine as a whole is palpably apparent here. BJP leaders for instance would participate in VHP sponsored events, but when the results of such events came out - such as violence and killings - the BJP would conveniently distance itself temporarily from the VHP.

On the international front, the VHP's success lies in mobilizing migrant Hindus, especially the middle class and lower middle class. The VHP of America and its student wing the Hindu Student Council (which is present on many US and Canadian campuses) is the most obvious example of its international mobilization. The VHP of America and HSC's for instance conducted the the World Vision 2000 conference in Washington D.C in 1993, which became a rallying point for overseas Hindus and a ground for further recruitment in the wake of what many commentators called a "celebration" over the destruction of the mosque in India. The VHP of America and UK primary success can be seen if not in any other way in terms of financial clout - as it is the primary mode of channeling dollars and pounds into Hindutva politics back in India.

The council was established on August 29, 1964 in Bombay, Maharastra [ Biju ] with a political objective of establishing the supremacy of Hinduism all over the world. It obtains funds and recruits from Aryan Hindus all across the globe, especially from the US, UK and Canada and has grown to become the main fund-raising agency of Brahmanist Fundamentalism. The council was instrumental in the demolition of the holiest Islamic shrine in Oudh, the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya and has organised several massacres of Muslims and Christians. It is in the forefront in the call for a Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu State ethnically cleansed of its non-Aryan populations.

VHP calls for 'Hindu rashtra'

In the news

DH News Service AHMEDABAD, Feb 7

The eighth dharma sansad of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad asked the Bharatiya Janata Party to "mobilise the Hindu vote bank" and form a Hindu rashtra, even as ban on religious conversion was prioritised.

The three-day dharma sansad ended on Sunday on a note of uniting over "two hundred crore Buddhist and Hindus" of the world to form a "Vishal Hindu Front" - an anti-Christian and anti-Islamic front.

Moving the resolution for unity Buddhist Bhikshu Bhante Gyanjagat saw many similarities between the two religions and culture as well as the laws. President of the Kendriya Margadarshak Samity, the apex body, Acharya Dharmendra Maharaj said that Buddha belonged to the Hindu pantheon of gods. Budh Gaya belonged to the Buddhists. He further added that Jains and Sikhs also belonged to the same Hindu culture.

The VHP`s call for the unity of Buddhists and Hindus was a smart move to mobilise the Asian block of countries.

That the dharma sansad got the BJP government`s sanction was clear from Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel`s attendence on Saturday. Minister of State for Home Haren Pandya and Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Fakirbhai Vahela attended it on Sunday.

STATUTE AMENDMENT: Addressing mediapersons here after the completion of the eighth dharma sansad, VHP International vice-president Giriraj Kishore said the "VHP hoped that the BJP would amend the Constitution suitably to implement the Hindu rashtra and the Hindu agenda set by the sansad."

Critical of the BJP goverment for its inability to implement the Hindu agenda, he said: "It was on crutches." The VHP leader said the government should work closely with the religious forces.``

Contradicting his stand, the VHP leader said that the BJP was the closest to the Hindu ideology, they would compel the government to implement the 40-point Hindu agenda.

Mr Giriraj Kishore said the VHP would in addition to unting the Buddhists, Hindus, Jains and Sikhs also include Gypsies and ethnic faiths of other pre- Christians era to create an "anti- imperialist" front. Their programme of swadeshi meshed very well with the BJP`s agenda.

The VHP also saw an international conspiracy of multinational corporations and the Christian missionaries in promoting consumer culture. Sant Avichaldasji of Gujarat saw an international conspiracy by Christian missionaries in the tribal district of the Dangs.

ADOPTION OF DISTRICTS: Mr Giriaj Kishore said sadhus would adopt a district each and fan out to educate people and counter the activities of Christian missionaries. He saw a major threat by Christian missionaries in the North-East. The adoption of a district was a bid to thwart the activities of the missionaries. Every sadhu who attended the sansad was assigned one district. Seven districts were assigned in Karnataka.

Since banning religious conversion was focal to VHP`s agenda, they planned to mobilise opinion against Christian missionaries and their inflow of foreign funds, which according to the VHP leader ran into crores.

Renaisance in the Hindu religion, the VHP realised, was the best way of stopping conversion.``

Is VHP really Hindu?

The Hindustan Times - Opinion - Jan 19, 1999 (By M. N. Buch)

Addressing the VHP meet at Jaipur recently Ashok Singhal, its president, is alleged to have stated that the award of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Prof Amartya Sen is an anti-Hindu conspiracy.

His argument was that Dr Sen pronounced in favour of universal literacy, which is an agent of conversion of Hindus to Christianity. By implication this means that if a person is illiterate and ignorant he belongs to that primitive faith called Hinduism, but if he becomes literate and capable of absorbing knowledge, he would naturally gravitate towards Christianity.

What stronger condemnation of the Hindu faith can be found than this alleged statement of Mr Singhal? Hinduism is the one religion which places great emphasis on knowledge, refuses to tie its followers to the narrow confines of bigotry and not only permits but encourages the search for truth by questioning, by discourse and by seeking one's own path to salvation.

In other words, the Hindu faith demands that the human mind should develop to a stage where it can, on its own, determine what is truth, without depending upon the directions of the clergy or the tenets given in an immutable book. How can the mind develop in the environment of illiteracy and ignorance advocated by Mr Singhal?

Hinduism as a religion differs from those of Semitic origin in that it is not a religion of exclusivity. It is not merely coincidental that neither Sanskrit nor Hindi have any word for religion. In Arabic, religion is translated as "mazhab, but "dharma is not a translation of the word religion.

Dharma transcends religion because its opposite is adharma and no one, including an atheist, can ever opt for adharma as a way of life. When religion itself is not defined Hinduism becomes an exercise in faith rather than adherence to a tenet.

The VHP, in trying to give a definition to Hinduism which binds the religion into narrow confines of bigotry, imitates that most communal of organisations, the Jamaat-e-Islami. In the pronouncements of fundamentalist maulvis and an equally fundamentalist Ashok Singhal one finds very little difference.

The VHP is running a campaign against conversion by the Christians. India had over 200 years of Christian-British rule, including a highly evangelistic period during the Victorian era. Despite this the number of Christians in India never exceeded two per cent of the population.

A cross-section of conversions would indicate that the maximum number has occurred in remote regions and among those sections of Hindu society which had always been exploited and ostracised by caste Hindus.

The only parts of the country in which there has been some conversion of upper castes are Goa and Kerala. In Goa it was fear of the inquisition which induced conversion and in Kerala Christianity came as early as 52 AD.

Many of the conversions which took place amongst tribals and Harijans were the result of the Christian missionaries creating an infrastructure of education and health care amongst these people and offering them a degree of social equality and acceptability which Hindu society had denied them.

Rejected by mainstream Hinduism these communities, to a very limited extent, had embraced Christianity. The VHP refers to this as forced or rice conversion. I would suggest that these conversions are the direct result of the neglect of the backward people by the very people who are now posing as the champions of Hinduism.

Even today there is a strong Christian missionary presence in the field of social service in the backward regions. Has Ashok Singhal ever tried to create a Hindu parallel?

Why should a Dalit or a tribal respond favourably to the VHP when all it can offer is empty slogans?

The VHP was not founded to promote militant Hinduism which is a contradiction in terms. Hinduism needs no militancy because it is already all embracing.

The origin of VHP lay in a desire to create an environment in which a whole series of dharma sansads could help Hindus understand the religion better and to promote its universality.

The minute the religion tries to become exclusive, it has to create a tenet or a book which defines the religion and ordains that anyone not accepting it is beyond the pale. Who will reveal such a book to Hindus?

Certainly not Ashok Singhal.

It is precisely because of the catholicity of Hinduism that the Guru Granth Saheb is as much a holy book of the Hindus as it is the core of the Sikh faith. It is precisely because of this that the message of peace of Islam and goodwill of Christianity are part of the Hindu faith.

It is when Hinduism rejects other faiths that it, too, will die. The leaders of VHP, who advocate such rejection, are no Hindus and the Parishad has lost itself in the quicksand of bigotry.

Growing Up Extreme:

On the Peculiarly Vicious Fanatacism of Expatriates By Shashi Tharoor (From Washington Post)

ON AUG. 6, 1994 some 15,000 mostly Indian expatriates will assemble at the Washington Hilton and the Omni Shoreham Hotel for a "global conference" grandly titled "World Vision 2000." A glossy brochure promoting the conference describes it as "a grand effort to bring (together) youths from across the USA and around the world" to "deliberate on the Vision of Wholeness for the future of life on our planet."

Under the blazing headline "Look Who Is Comming (sic) to the Global Conference!" one finds, in bold, the names of President Clinton and the Dalai Lama and, in more modest type, Bill Moyers and Carl Sagan. Careful scrutiny, however, reveals that these luminaries have not yet accepted their invitations. And that those "dignitaries and spiritual leaders" who have agreed to "guide the Global Conference" represent most of the pantheon of India's Hindu extremist fringe.

The "Global Conference" is timed for the centenary of the appearance at Chicago's World Parliament of Religions of the brilliant Hindu humanist Swami Vivekananda, and its breathless blurbs seek to appropriate his luster. But its organizers have no claim to the all- embracing tolerance and wisdom of the late sage. They are the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, whose "Vision" extends most famously so far to the destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in northern India last December, an act that unleashed violence and rioting on a scale not seen in India since independence.

The VHP, which enjoys the rare distinction of being considered more extremist than the RSS, the party of Mahatma Gandhi's assassin, has made something of a specialty of incitements to hatred. Under its auspices during the recent Bombay programs, Muslims have been abused, attacked, turned out of their homes, deprived of their livelihoods, butchered in the streets. Its more articulate sympathizers have expressed admiration for Hitler's way with inconvenient minorities. This is the happy crew of moral and spiritual guides to whom 15,000 Indian emigre youngsters, some no doubt inveigled by the prospect of hearing the Dalai Lama and the president,will entrust their Washington weekend. When the brochure declares that "this celebration will include a variety of high-quality programs to raise the awareness of human beings about their future direction," one's natural tendency to yawn is replaced by a shudder down a slowly chilling spine. Washington seems an unlikely setting for a celebration of Hindu fanaticism. And yet it is not such an improbable venue after all. For there seems to be something about expatriation that breeds extremism.

The American ethnic mosaic is full of imported bigotry, from the Muslim fundamentalists who have been trying with commendable ineptitude to blow up New York to Miami's many Cuban votaries of vicious virtue. Indian Americans have done their best to compete with these Fidelios of the foreign fringe. A coven of well-heeled Hindu professionals from Southern California recently swamped newspapers in India with a post-Ayodhya advertising campaign designed to counteract the bleeding-heart "pseudosecularism" of appalled liberals like myself who published denunciations of the destruction of the mosque and its aftermath. The ads - a farrago of ahistorical half-truths calling upon Indians in India to "awake," for otherwise "India and Hindus are doomed" - were merely the latest evidence that exile nurtures extremism. The "Global Conference" continues in this tradition.

The strident chauvinism of these American Hindus is, after all, only one more installment in a long saga of zeal abroad for radicalism at home. We have already had expatriate Sikhs pouring money, weapons and organizational skills into the cause of a "pure" (tobacco-free and barberless) "Khalistan"; Irish Americans supporting, willfully or otherwise, IRA terrorism in Northern Ireland; Jaffna Tamils in England financing the murderous drive for Eelam in Sri Lanka; and lobbying groups of American Jewry propounding positions on Palestinian issues that are far less accommodating than those of the Israeli government itself.

The irony of political extremism being advocated from distant aeries of bourgeois moderation is only the most obvious of the contradictions of this phenomenon. The more visible Khalistanis of North America may have carefully regroomed their beards and thrown away their cigarettes as enjoined upon them by the Sikh scriptures, but they derive sustenance almost entirely from clean-shaven expatriate co-religionists largely unfamiliar with the prohibitions and injunctions of their faith. And the Hindu chauvinists of Southern California flourish in a pluralist melting-pot whose every quotidian experience is a direct contradiction of the sectarianism they trumpet in the advertisement pages of newspapers in India.

The explanation for this evident paradox may lie in the very nature of expatriation. Most of the contemporary world's emigrants are people in quest of material improvement, looking for financial security and professional opportunities that, for one reason or another, they could not attain in their own countries. Many of them left intending to return: A few years abroad, a few more dollars in the bank, they told themselves, and they would come back to their own hearths, triumphant over the adversity that had led them to leave.

But the years kept stretching on, and the dollars were never quite enough, or their needs mounted with their acquisitions, or they developed new ties (career, wife, children, schooling) to their new land, and then gradually the realization seeped in that they would never go back. And with this realization, often only half-acknowledg ed, came a welter of emotions: guilt, at the abandonment of the motherland, mixed with rage that the motherland had somehow - through its own failings, political, economic, social - forced them into this abandonment. The attitude of the expatriate to his homeland is that of the faithless lover who blames the woman he has spurned for not having sufficiently merited his fidelity. That is why the support of extremism is doubly gratifying: It appeases the expatriate's sense of guilt at not being involved in his homeland, and it vindicates his decision to abandon it. (If the homeland he has left did not have the faults he detests, he tells himself,he would not have had to leave it)

But that is not all. The expatriate also desperately needs to define himself in his new society. He is reminded by his mirror, if not by the nationals of his new land, that he is not entirely like them. In the midst of racism and alienation, second-class citizenship and self- hatred, he needs an identity to assert - a label of which he can be proud, yet which does not undermine his choice of exile. He has rejected the reality of his country but not, he declares fervently, the essential values he has derived from his roots. As his children grow up "American" or "British," as they slough off the assumptions, prejudices and fears of his own childhood, he becomes even more assertive about them.

But his nostalgia is based on the selectiveness of memory; it is a simplified, idealized recollection of his roots, often reduced to their most elemental - family, caste, region, religion. In exile amongst foreigners, he clings to a vision of what he really is that admits no foreignness.

But the tragedy is that the culture he remembers, with both nostalgia and rejection, has itself evolved - in interaction with others - on its national soil. His perspective distorted by exile, the expatriate knows nothing of this. His view of what used to be home is divorced from the experience of home. Expatriates are no longer an organic part of the culture, but severed digits that, in their yearning for the hand, can only twist themselves into a clenched fist.