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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who on 10 May 2021 announced a $2.5 million donation to Sewa International, must have missed journalist Neha Dixit’s viral tweet,
published a week earlier, urging Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) not to
support the controversial nonprofit organization because “they work as
the welfare wing of RSS.”
As COVID-19 ravages India, Sewa International recently announced its
plan to raise $10 million for medical equipment to support the
country’s struggle against the virus. Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi — a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the
paramilitary which gave birth to the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party — faces scathing international criticism for his regime’s apparent indifference to and outrageous mishandling of the COVID crisis.
Yet, just weeks after Modi’s regime ordered Twitter to censor tweets critical
of his pandemic policy, the social media giant now, ironically, plans
to pour millions into the coffers of an RSS-BJP affiliate which has been
accused of funneling international funding to “racist and anti-Muslim”
groups in India.
“I am satisfied that Sewa International is a front for controversial militant Hindu organisations,” said British
Lord Adam Patel in August 2002. As a patron of the nonprofit, Patel had
helped it raise relief funds for victims of a 2001 earthquake in
Gujarat. Yet he resigned in disgust — “I very much regret ever having
been part of this racist organisation,” he declared — after an
earthquake of a different nature shook Gujarat immediately after Modi
became chief minister of the state in February 2002.
The 2002 Gujarat Pogrom left thousands of Muslims dead. The RSS-BJP, reported Human Rights Watch, were “the groups most directly responsible” for the violence. The RSS, explained UK human rights outfit Awaaz South Asia Watch,
follows a “supremacist ideology called Hindutva” which was “formed in
the 1920s and 1930s,” was “influenced by Fascism and Nazism,” and
teaches that India should be an “exclusive Hindu nation-state.” In a
2004 exposé, Awaaz claimed that Sewa International’s “main purpose is to
raise funds for and support a distinct family of organizations
associated with the extremist RSS.”
Madhukar
Deoras, third chief of the RSS, founded Sewa Bharati in 1989 as a
service — or welfare — wing of the paramilitary. Sewa International was
subsequently launched, states the
nonprofit’s website, “to engage the Indian Diaspora (NRI) worldwide.”
The US branch — the recipient of Twitter’s largesse — was registered in
2003 to, it says,
to serve as part of the “larger movement that started in India in 1989”
under Deoras. “Rashtriya Sewa Bhar[a]ti and Sewa International both are
part of the same non-profit organisation affiliated to RSS,” explained right-wing
Indian media outlet OpIndia in May 2021. “While Rashtriya Sewa
Bhar[a]ti operates nationally, Sewa International has volunteers working
both in the US and India, coordinating the work of raising funds.”
According
to Awaaz, both organizations “are dedicated to building a Hindu nation
based on Hindu extremist ideas, glorifying the RSS, recruiting for the
RSS and expanding RSS physical and ideological training cells (shakhas)
in India.”
Sewa International, reported historians
Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle, is “managed mainly” by “activists”
of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the international wing of the RSS.
Outside of India, the nonprofit is chaired by Ramesh Bhutada. An
industrialist based in Houston, Texas, Bhutada also serves as vice-president of HSS-USA and has worked closely with Overseas Friends of the BJP USA (OFBJP-USA) — the American wing of the BJP, which is now registered as a foreign agent — to help get Modi elected in 2014.
Sewa International’s board also includes HSS Global Coordinator Saumitra Gokhale. In 1995, while in India, Gokhale reportedly served as a pracharak (full-time officer) of the RSS. In 2012, he and Bhutada helped host RSS’s
Suresh Joshi — who recently retired as the paramilitary’s
second-in-command — on a six-week tour of HSS shakhas in the US. “For
our activities outside of Bharat [India], the source of inspiration
remains the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,” he later saidat a presentation in California.
In July 2020, Gokhale gave the concluding remarks at a Sewa International conference where Arun Kankani was announced as
the nonprofit’s new president. Kankani — an employee of Bhutada’s Star
Pipe Products — has a long track record of involvement with the
RSS-affiliated family of organizations known as the Sangh Parivar. In
2010, for instance, he joined a Houston delegation to attend an HSS-RSS summit in India; in 2019, he keynoted an HSS conference in Houston.
When
Kankani became president of Sewa International, the nonprofit suggested
it was because he had proved his worth serving as head of operations
for the team that organized the September 2019 “Howdy Modi”
mega-reception in Houston. Bhutada and several members of his close
family also took a leading role in organizing the controversial event, as did Sewa International (Houston) President Gitesh Desai.
In
January 2014, Desai introduced Bhutada at an OFBJP-USA event organized
to support Modi’s election. “To make a strong India, Narendra Modi and
the BJP are the right vehicles,” said Bhutada.
Detailing plans to organize up to 10,000 volunteers in the US to
campaign for Modi, he described how he was coordinating closely with BJP
in India. One of those volunteers was Desai himself, who joined a team
of so-called “volunteers
turned political warriors” to travel from Texas to India to serve as
boots on the ground for Modi. In parting remarks to the political
warriors, Bhutada told them it was “the moment to pay our debt to our
motherland.”
After Modi won in May 2014, Bhutada argued that
his “upbringing in the culture of RSS is an asset” and praised his “RSS
training” as the reason for his success. When Modi won re-election in
May 2019, Bhutada and Desai both spoke in his honor at a victory party
in Houston. “There is no leader better than Prime Minister Narendra Modi
ji with vision and mission to lead India in the 21st century,” declared Desai.
Sewa’s
leadership — aside from Desai, Kankani, Gokhale, and Bhutada — also
includes at least a half-dozen directors and advisors who are apparently
either HSS executives in the US or long-time activists with the RSS in
India or both.
Advisor Yashwant Pathak is a former RSS pracharak who has been described as a joint coordinator for HSS. Honorary board member Radheshyam Dwivedi, who reportedly joined
the RSS in 1947, is a former president of HSS-USA. Both Pathak and
Dwivedi have regularly spoken at RSS summits alongside senior Sangh
Parivar leadership. Manohar Shinde, a director, has been described as “an RSS-trained man who was one of the founders of the HSS” and reportedly maintains close ties to the BJP regime in India.
Sewa International’s sentiments towards the Hindu supremacist paramilitary are no secret.
Its sympathies were further exposed when, in 2017, the nonprofit opened its annual report with a glowing commemoration of the late RSS pracharak K
Suryanarayan Rao. Praising the 70-year veteran of the RSS (who died in
November 2016) as “a visionary,” the report explained that Rao was both
inspired by the vision of first RSS chief, KB Hedgewar, as well as
“deeply influenced by the ideological, philosophical and spiritual
stance” of second RSS chief, MS Golwalkar.
The RSS’s “cardinal principle,” Rao once said,
is the belief that India is a Hindu Rashtra (nation). “It is our life
breath,” he proclaimed. “RSS is convinced that only when every person in
this country realises that he is after all part and parcel of this
Hindu Rashtra, this nation can progress, standing up as one man.”
Rao’s vision mirrored Golwalkar’s. The vision Golwalkar spoke of,
however, explicitly included an India where minorities were stripped of
citizenship if they refused to glorify it as a Hindu nation. Golwalkar,
the longest-serving and most notorious of the six chiefs the RSS has
had to date, was inspired and influenced by Hitler’s Germany and
Mussolini’s Italy. Describing non-Hindus in India as “threats,”
“foreign,” and even traitorous, he suggested they should be stripped of
citizenship. Praising Hitler’s “purging” of the Jews as “race pride
manifested at its highest,” he concluded that the Nazi dictator’s racial
policy was a “good lesson” from which to profit.
Nearly
100 years after the RSS’s founding in 1925, its political wing, the
BJP, is now attempting to weather a public relations crisis
alongside the raging healthcare crisis; yet the RSS-BJP, no stranger to
controversy, refuses to miss the chance to turn the situation to its
advantage even as COVID tears across India.
In
March 2020, India’s first lockdown extinguished the pressure of
mounting protests against the regime’s Citizenship Amendment Act; now,
as the regime loses control of the virus, it has diverted growing
international pressure away from the ongoing farmers protest. Meanwhile,
as local administrations empower the RSS by partnering with it for COVID relief efforts, the paramilitary’s members have gotten special passes and sometimes even police powers.
Furthermore, when Sewa International gets showcased as a role model
relief organization, the Sangh Parivar as a whole reaps huge public
relations dividends — especially as the organization is granted global
legitimacy in the form of, for example, a multi-million dollar donation
from Twitter.
As
Twitter offers millions to Sewa International despite its links to a
violent, Hindu nationalist, and literally Nazi-inspired paramilitary,
humanitarians everywhere can only hope that Jack Dorsey might be
persuaded to listen to reason and reconsider financing the welfare wing
of the RSS.
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