Public screening & discussion led by Mr. Imran Dawood

The current prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, first elected in 2014, has not only refused to denounce acts of caste terror and violence, pretending to be above the fray, but was himself the chief instigator of the Gujarat riots of 2002 when he was chief minister of that state. In those riots, Hindu mobs rampaged through Muslim neighborhoods of Ahmedabad (the largest city in Gujarat state) killing at least 1044 Muslims. A new two-part BBC documentary, India: The Modi Question systematically lays out the evidence connecting Narendra Modi to these horrific riots.

The screening will be followed by public discussion led by Mr. Imran Dawood, survivor of the 2002 Gujarat genocide. He is alive today only because the perpetrators thought they had killed him. Mr. Dawood is a UK citizen who, at the tender age of 18, went on a dream holiday to India with his two uncles, Saeed Dawood and Salik Dawood, and a family friend, Mohammed Aswat. Together with their driver, they became victims of a horrific and brutal lynching by a Hindu supremacist mob. The driver was doused with petrol and set on fire. The rest were chased, stabbed and burnt. They were brutalized enough to be assumed dead. The killers walk free to this day.

The tendrils of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) have taken root here in the U.S.A. and are growing more menacing by the day. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organization – RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization. The RSS operates outside India as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS). Together with VHP America, Sewa International, and the Hindu American Foundation, these organizations have successfully masqueraded as progressive, charitable, cultural, civil or democratic institutions in the U.S.A. But the government of India has banned the screening of the BBC documentary in India.