Azad Essa / Middle East Eye
A Hindu-American community leader appointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) faith-based religious council is a senior member of an organisation associated with a Hindu supremacist group in India, Middle East Eye can reveal.
Chandru Acharya, who was appointed by the DHS in late September to advise the US government on domestic issues, is a director of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS-USA), a group that has repeatedly defended the policies of India’s right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The HSS says it is apolitical and says it acts as a vessel for celebrating Hindu cultural and religious values.
Acharya confirmed his association with HSS-USA to Middle East Eye but denied any affiliation between his organisation and the RSS.
The organisation is made up of hundreds of branches in close to 40 countries.
The 25-member faith-based security council on the DHS, which includes leaders from several faiths, was set up to provide advice to the secretary on matters “related to protecting houses of worship, preparedness and enhanced coordination with the faith community”.
MEE contacted the DHS for comment but did not receive a response by time of publication.
Ria Chakrabarty, policy director for Hindus for Human Rights (HFHR), told MEE: “The RSS is the ultra-right wing Hindu extremist organisation and the founding of the Hindutva ideology, which is a Hindu supremacist and Islamophobic ideology.”
“The HSS is the overseas arm of the RSS. We firmly oppose the inclusion of organisations like HSS in any religious freedom council.”
Scholars and activists describe the RSS, formed in 1925 in Nagpur, India, as the backbone of Hindutva or the Hindu nationalist movement in India. Its aim is to make India a Hindu Rashtra or Hindu state.
It is under the RSS that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well as several other organisations like the HSS and the right-wing religious organisation Vishva Hindu Parishad, emerged in hundreds of branches across dozens of countries over the past four to five decades.
The organisations operate separately on an administrative level but ultimately fall under the umbrella of the RSS. Modi is a lifelong RSS member.
Several sources, however, including the official HSS website, either state they have been inspired by the RSS or credit the RSS as its parent organisation.
The HSS and its connected organisations in the diaspora, scholars say, are primarily tasked with amplifying and defending the project of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva outside India.
Several Indian Americans, including activists and scholars of South Asia, told MEE that it was “very troubling” that a member of a known group linked with and inspired by a supremacist organisation that sees India’s minorities as second-class citizens would now make their way into a body purportedly looking to shape the domestic policies of the US government.
Rasheed Ahmed, executive director of the Indian American Muslim Council, told MEE: “How can a member of a group whose parent organisation in India is implicated in violence against religious minorities and attacks their places of worship be a good fit for this position?”
“Regrettably, DHS has chosen an individual representing a supremacist hate group,” Ahmad added.
Defending Modi
MEE has also found that Acharya, a Michigan-based IT consultant, has used his position as a Hindu community leader to discredit efforts to raise awareness of rising religious intolerance in India.
In April, Acharya was among a group of Hindu-Americans who questioned the veracity of a United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) report that designated India as a “country of particular concern” over what they found to be diminishing rights for Muslims and Christians in the country.
“The [Indian] government continued to systemise its ideological vision of a Hindu state at both the national and state levels through the use of both existing and new laws and structural changes hostile to the country’s religious minorities,” the USCIRF said.
The USCIRF recommended that the US impose targeted sanctions on individuals or groups responsible for violating religious freedoms.
Acharya was quoted in The Print describing the findings as “one-sided” and “biased”.
“The report provides a one-sided and biased narrative about religious freedom in India with exaggerated claims that are designed to fuel an ecosystem of fear and hate. The report lacks authenticity and attempts to brand the vast majority of peace-loving and pluralistic Hindus as extremists,” Acharya said.
Acharya told MEE this month that he stood by his criticism of the report, citing a 2021 Pew Research survey. But India’s Article 14 – a website that is a joint effort by lawyers, academics and journalists to provide “intensive research and reportage, data and varied perspectives” – described the Pew Research study as “the latest to lay bare the schisms in Indian society”.
A year earlier, in April 2020, as the first wave of the Covid-19 virus swept the world, several BJP leaders directly blamed Muslims for the spread of the virus, even going so far as to claim that Muslims were deliberately spreading the virus.
Human Rights Watch wrote that the BJP used terms like “Talibani crime” and “CoronaTerrorism” to insinuate that Muslims were deliberately spreading the virus, adding that some mainstream media resorted to “CoronaJihad”, resulting in the hashtag going viral on social media.
Academics Shakuntala Banaji and Ram Bhat wrote that the coronavirus had simply “added a new dimension to the hate speech and disinformation circulated about Muslim communities in India”.
This story was originally published in middleeasteye.net . Read the full story here
