American Hindu Extremists Fail in Media Intimidation Campaign
September 21, 2002
Hindu extremist groups in the U.S failed in their attempts to intimidate PBS. PBS refused to scrap or make changes in its documentary, “Soul of a Nation” that aired on September 19th. The documentary dealt with the Gujarat pogrom in which more than 2000 Muslim civilians were butchered or burnt alive and more than 600 girls and women gang-raped before being burnt and hacked to death. The documentary raised disturbing questions about the spread of Hindutva hate schools all over India.
Militant Hindu websites have been urging their supporters to contact PBS masquerading as Christians and threaten to harm PBS financially.
Indian Muslim Council, a nationwide advocacy group for a pluralistic India, launched a successful campaign in support of the Freedom of Speech and PBS. Moderate Hindus and other Indian minority groups helped IMC -USA in its campaign.
IMC-USA commended PBS for not getting intimidated and urged them to do follow up documentaries on the infiltration of the American society by the Hindutva-fascists. These fascists are trying to duplicate in the U.S. their successful campaign of brainwashing young minds as shown in the documentary and infiltrating the U.S. power centers.
Hindutva ideology is a truly fascist ideology and its founder formed the Hindutva-fascist party, RSS, on the model of the Italian fascist party in the 1920s. After the rise of Hitler to power, the Hindutva-fascists made him their ideal on the grounds that the higher-caste Hindus are Aryans and Hitler stood for Aryan supremacy.
The Hindutva-fascists openly glorify Hitler’s final solution and want to try them as their model in their quest for ” cleansing India” off its 180 million Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and other minorities. They are proud that they “took back” India from its Buddhist majority 2000 years ago.
The Hindutva-fascists were shunned after they killed Gandhi in 1949. As the Gandhian leaders pointED out in the documentary, the fascists then adopted a policy of brainwashing young minds and infiltrating the Indian power centers and have now emerged as a force in the Indian society.
This year their juggernaut ground to a halt as they lost all the state elections. In desperation they executed a gruesome pogrom in the Indian state of Gujarat to polarize the Indian society on religious grounds. All the western media and Human rights agencies have called the Gujarat genocide well planned. The deplorable burning of train in Godhra was just used as an excuse. Recent reports have raised suspicion that the train arson was staged by the fascists themselves, or at least, provoked, as part of their strategy.
The Gujarat genocide raised concerns in some quarters of the U.S society and the U.S media has begun to take interest in the infiltration of the U.S power centers by the Hindutva-fascists and their massive fund raising activities and youth camps in the U.S. Senator Mitchell in his post documentary comments rightly pointed out the dangers of rise of religious extremism and violence in a nuclear power like India.
This media interest has begun to unnerve the fascist groups and they tried their well-known and well-practiced tactic of media intimidation. But they found out that this tactic would not work in the U.S.
IMC is urging other US media institutions to focus on the alarming rise of fascism in India. India is too important a country to be lost to fascism.
Contact Person: Dr. Shaik Ubaid (516) 567-0783
