Though I was an early and vocal participant in the Great Sonal Shah Internet Debate of 2008, I am done arguing about it. This post is not about that directly.
Instead, I’d like to focus on some of the bigger issues behind the controversy, specifically: 1) how South Asian religious youth camps work and what they do, and 2) whether Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu organizations in the U.S. send large amounts of money to South Asia to support communalist organizations over there.
As always, I would love to hear personal testimony from people who went to religious youth camps, or who have been involved in any of the organizations I’m going to be mentioning. An ounce of personal testimony is better than a pound of theorizing, generalizing, and blah blah blah argument.
1. What’s at issue
These two issues are the central themes of a chapter in Vijay Prashad’s book, The Karma of Brown Folk, called “Of Yankee Hindutva.” They also feature in Prashad’s essay in Sulekha, “Letter to a Young American Hindu.”
The reason Prashad is so focused on Sonal Shah is pretty clear: to him, she seems to represent exactly the “Yankee Hindutva” he has been talking about for years. As I see it, the major things Sonal Shah is accused of are 1) being a part of the leadership of an organization called the VHP-A, which has a clear communal bias (no one seriously disputes this), and 2) speaking at HSS-US youth camps like this one (from the website, HSS-US appears to be considerably less extreme than VHP-A, though they do prominently advertise a new book they’ve published on M.S. Golwalkar). Ennis has also suggested that what is really worse than this might be 3) the fact that she waited so long to clarify her former affiliation: the cover-up is worse than the crime. I do not agree with him on that, but I do agree with people like Mira Kamdar that (1) and (2) might be concerning.
But what exactly does an association with the American branch of a Hindu nationalist organization tell us about a person? How much do we really know about the American branches of these organizations? How bad are they really?
Below the fold, I’ll raise some questions about the accounts Vijay Prashad has given of VHPA and the Hindu Students Council in his book, The Karma of Brown Folk.
Before doing that, let’s start with a personal testimony, from a person who actually disagrees with me overall on this issue. As I was browsing people’s various blog posts relating to Sonal Shah, I came across a great post and discussion thread by a blogger named Anasuya. In the comments to Anasuya’s post is another person named Anasuya (Anasuya Sanyal), who attended VHP camps years ago, and had this to say about her experience of them:
I too remember attending VHP conferences as a teenager growing up in the US and I had no idea of the political affiliations until I lived for a bit in India around age 17. Naturally, I was not in any kind of agreement with the VHP platforms, philosophy or actions and I even wrote a small piece about the American “face†of the VHP for The Telegraph!
And as a second generation Indian American, Indian politics were not a topic in the home and VHP conferences were a parentally-approved weekend outing since we were with other Indian friends. The fun part was our more responsible friends would drive us all to the place and we’d take over a cheap motel and party. Otherwise at that age, a weekend away would have been strictly forbidden.
I don’t remember too much about the conferences themselves–there were a few interesting group discussions/breakout sessions. I didn’t see any political content. If anything, the parents saw it as a way to participate in a big somewhat religious gathering, seeing as how more established religions in the US had youth events, whereas Hindus did not. (link)
As I say, Anasuya Sanyal disagrees with me overall, so this account shouldn’t be taken as a tailor-made version of what happened to support the “pro Sonal Shah” side of things.
Anasuya (the blogger) also has a great string of questions that follow from this: Continue reading →
