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As COVID plagues India, Indresh Kumar and Shyam Parande stepped forward — on more than one occasion in May 2021 — to release consignments of oxygen concentrators donated by non-profit organization Sewa International.
The
raging pandemic is not the first time that the two have publicly
partnered. Parande, the global coordinator of Sewa International, is not
just linked to Kumar through the non-profit but also through their
shared activism with another organization: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS). In past years, for instance, the two travelled to Cambodia
together to prepare a report about how India’s RSS can make a “cultural investment” there.
Parande, whose participation in the Cambodia project was reported as that of a “senior” RSS leader, has additionally been reported as head of the RSS’s “Vishwa Vibhag (foreign department)” and, with his wife, even described as one of “RSS’s power couples.” Kumar, for his part, is a senior member of the RSS’s national executive committee.
In
December 2010, Kumar was in Pune, Maharashtra to speak at the Vishwa
Sangh Shibir (VSS). “The VSS is a once-in-five-years conclave of the
RSS-supported Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh [HSS],” explained The Indian Express.
Noting that the event is often the first trip to India for some HSS
members, senior RSS executive Manmohan Vaidya said that the conclave
focuses on “how to spread the work and the message of RSS.”
Speakers
at the multi-day VSS included a “who’s who” of the Sangh Parivar — the
“family of organizations” springing from the RSS.
Aside
from Kumar, there was RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat, who argued that “a Hindu
alone can think of the welfare of the humanity” and declared,
“The world has to acquire Hindu values to survive.” There was Ashok
Singhal, then chief of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the religious
wing of the RSS. From the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political
wing of the RSS, came the party’s then second-in-command, Ram Lal. From
Sewa Bharati — the service wing of the RSS and parent organization of
Sewa International — came Sitaram Kedilaya. And from the US and the UK
came the presidents of the HSS branches of those countries.
Travelling all the way from Texas to attend was Ramesh Bhutada, the vice-president of HSS-USA. The event gave Bhutada — who has hosted Mohan Bhagwat in his Houston home — a chance to not only wear the RSS’s official uniform but meet and pose with the founder of the HSS. It also gave him a chance to travel with a Houston delegation that included Arun Kankani.
Aside
from their shared interest in the HSS/RSS summit in Pune, Kankani and
Bhutada are connected through their ties to Sewa International USA.
Kankani became the non-profit’s president in 2020. Bhutada is the organization’s chairperson.
Sewa International, according to one report about a VSS from the 1990s, is among “several affiliated organisations of RSS” operating abroad. Sewa USA is, reported The New Indian Express, “a part of the Sangha Parivar in the US.” It is also, as of 10 May 2021, the recipient of a $2.5 million donation from Twitter.
Twitter’s donation, announced by CEO Jack Dorsey, has outraged some. Nearly 2500 people have signed a petition demanding
that Dorsey rescind it due to the organization’s connection with the
RSS. The money, though it is officially earmarked to aid Sewa
International’s campaign to provide emergency relief medical equipment
in India’s struggle against COVID, also seems likely to assist the
RSS-linked non-profit’s public image.
The
RSS and Sewa International are both in need of image rehabilitation.
Bhutada, as both the RSS’s number two man in the US as well as chair of
Sewa USA, likely knows that more than most. And he — along with Kankani —
has a history of playing a crucial role in helping to rehabilitate the
image of the man some hold responsible for India’s current COVID crisis:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an RSS member.
In September 2019, Bhutada served as a leading patron of
“Howdy, Modi,” a mega-reception organized in Houston to promote the
Indian prime minister. While Bhutada’s son, Rishi, was the event’s head
spokesperson and his brother-in-law, Jugal Malani, chaired the event’s
organizing committee, Kankani served as head of operations. Meanwhile, Sewa International (Houston) President Gitesh Desai served, alongside Rishi Bhutada, as an event spokesperson.
“Howdy,
Modi” was the third such mega-reception organized in the US since
Modi’s election in May 2014. His visits were an opportunity to pay back
his thousands of Indian-American supporters who worked for his election
(including people like Bhutada as well as Desai, who actually travelled to India to campaign).
They also marked a personal victory as they were the first times that
Modi — as a beneficiary of diplomatic immunity in his new position as
prime minister — was allowed into the US after being banned from entry
in 2005. The US State Department, at the time, held him responsible for
“particularly severe violations of religious freedom” that occurred in
Gujarat in 2002. Extreme anti-Muslim violence erupted days after Modi
was appointed chief minister of the state; according to Human Rights Watch, the groups responsible primarily included the RSS and its affiliates.
While Modi and the RSS (which, in 2008, was again implicated in
an anti-minority pogrom) had — before the 2014 election — faced a great
need for international image rehabilitation, so too did Sewa
International.
Founded in 1989 by then RSS Chief Madhukar Deoras, Sewa Bharati — in India — “is an umbrella organisation which constitutes over nine hundred NGOs of the Sangh,” explains The Caravan. In the organization’s own words,
it was founded to provide a formal structure for “volunteers of RSS and
other allied organisations” to engage in charity. It is “affiliated to the RSS,” “RSS-led,” and operates as “the main agency for social work in the RSS.”
“We make no secret of the fact that we are members of the RSS,” one senior Sewa Bharati leader has said.
According to political
scientist Malini Bhattacharjee, the RSS’s focus on sewa — meaning
“selfless service” — “stemm[ed] from the need to rehabilitate the RSS’
image as a social and humanitarian organisation as opposed to a communal
and paramilitary body.” As she explains,
“Participation in relief and rehabilitation activities have not only
helped create a compassionate image for the RSS, but also provided it
with opportunities to undertake cadre building, consolidate its
organisational network, and even penetrate those regions where it had no
traditional support base.”
“The RSS also has an international wing, Sewa International, which organizes welfare work outside India and raises funds for parivar projects in India,” reports sociologist Chetan Bhatt. Founded in 1997, Sewa International has repeatedly described Sewa Bharati as its “local partner organization.“ It has various branches abroad, including, as noted, in the US.
Raising
funds abroad while rarely mentioning its connections to the RSS (an
organization about which many non-Indians are already ignorant,
anyways), Sewa International managed to make inroads. It — and its
sister groups — even secured patronage from politicians and agreements
for corporate matching of donations. In the early 2000s, however, a
series of events dented the non-profit’s image.
In
August 2002, the late Lord Adam Patel resigned as a patron of Sewa
International UK (SI-UK). “I very much regret ever having been part of
this racist organisation,” said Patel.
“Sewa International is a front for controversial militant Hindu
organisations, and so I have been forced to resign my position as one of
its patrons.” His resignation came “amid claims that it has links with
rightwing Hindu extremist groups blamed for provoking rioting in India.”
That was followed in December 2002 by a Channel 4 News special. British authorities, said the
channel, were investigating allegations that money raised through SI-UK
“might fund communal violence in India.” According to the channel, “We
wanted to find out whether money given by British donors to Sewa
International, apparently to help the poor in India, could actually end
up funding sectarian violence there.”
Meanwhile, in November 2002, a report in
the US claimed that Sewa International, in India, was affiliated with
the US-based India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF). “Sewa
International is [an] IDRF affiliate in India overseeing IDRF’s Indian
operation,” stated the report. “In terms of international funding, it
may be amongst the most significant of IDRF’s ‘sister’ organizations. It
is a Sangh Parivar organization set up primarily to coordinate foreign
contributions for different Sangh projects in India.” As Financial Times subsequently reported, “According
to IDRF’s tax filings, more than 80 per cent of the almost
$3.2m[illion] it directly sent to India between 1994 and 2000 went to
projects managed by groups that are explicitly part of the RSS family.”
In
response, matching corporate donors like Cisco Systems and Oracle
Corporation suspended their collaboration with IDRF while the US Justice
Department reportedly “launched
an investigation into charges that millions of dollars… were used to
fund Hindu fundamentalism in India.” IDRF’s spokesperson, Vijay Pallod —
a relative of and long-time co-activist with Bhutada
who also wore an RSS uniform at the 2010 VSS — shot back: “The
accusations are falsehoods packaged by propagandists masquerading as
concerned citizens.” Nevertheless, IDRF’s star briefly faded, and, over
the following year, Sewa USA was founded with Bhutada at its helm.
The pounding continued. In 2004, a new report emerged
in the UK which revealed that SI-UK “is the fundraising arm of the HSS
UK,” alleged that it is “directly linked with the RSS and its
affiliates, including Sewa International India and Sewa Bharati,” and
claimed that “Sewa Bharati has been openly involved in Hindutva [Hindu
nationalist] extremist political work in India.” The report argued that
SI-UK’s “main purpose” was to “raise funds in the UK for RSS projects in
India in order to directly help the expansion of the extremist RSS’s
networks across Indian society in line with the long term political and
sectarian aims of the RSS.”
“Sewa
Bharati is the main recipient of funds from SIUK,” stated the report.
“The fundamental aim of these projects is to penetrate communities
through service activities in order to promote RSS ideology and
organization.” Arguing that the RSS was “distributing relief selectively
to higher caste victims and neglecting Dalits and Muslims” as well as
“organizing training cells (shakhas) in relief camps,” the report
explained:
“An
alarming chain links unsuspecting donors in the UK to the active
political promotion and glorification of the extremist RSS in Gujarat.
UK donors gave funds in good faith to SIUK for humanitarian
reconstruction and rehabilitation following the 2001 Gujarat earthquake;
these funds went from SIUK to the RSS’s Sewa Bharati which managed the
work, with additional funds from government agencies; work was started
through RSS ceremonies, or completed villages were inaugurated by very
senior RSS officers…. The extremist RSS and its dangerous ideology were
actively promoted in Gujarat through these processes. The Hindutva
political agenda of the RSS was explicit in the reconstruction and
opening ceremonies of several villages funded by SIUK. The agenda to
glorify and expand the RSS was well known by SIUK but not revealed to
donors.”
It
was an inauspicious launch into the 21st century for Sewa International
but, 20 years on, the RSS-linked non-profit seems to be successfully
rehabilitating its image as it opens its coffers to receive the
outpouring of financial support offered by Twitter. A rising tide floats
all boats, however. Thus, Indresh Kumar of the RSS seems to also be
benefitting from the self-promotional PR opportunities that arise as
international aid pours into India.
Kumar
certainly needs the image boost. After a series of blasts targeting
Indian Muslim locations in the mid-2000s, Kumar’s name figured in the diary of a key accused, another key accused claimed he
had prior knowledge of a blast, and yet another accused — Swami
Aseemanand, a full-time RSS worker affiliated with Vanvasi Kalyan
Ashram, an RSS-affiliate named as both a participant in anti-minority
violence as well as a top recipient of funding from the IDRF and SI-UK
— confessed that
Kumar (along with Mohan Bhagwat) gave their blessings to his plans for
staging the blasts. “This is great,” Aseemanand claimed Kumar and
Bhagwat said about his plans. “It’s very important that it be done. But
don’t link it to the Sangh.”
Although
Kumar certainly never hoped for that (alleged) conversation to be made
public, the things he has unapologetically said in public in recent
years do little to improve his image anywhere other than in Hindu
nationalist circles. He has denounced conversion as an act of Satan, demanded national
legislation against “Love Jihad” (the conspiracy theory that Muslim men
are systematically duping Hindu women into marrying them), and described protestors against the Citizenship Amendment Act (which sets “a legal criterion for citizenship based on religion”) as “traitors.”
From
Kumar to Modi and the RSS to Sewa International, image rehabilitation
is certainly a need of the past two decades. As COVID continues ravaging
India and the nation still faces a catastrophic shortage of oxygen, it
appears that the crisis comes as a fresh of breath air to a supremacist
movement that has been increasingly hounded by bad publicity. While the
Modi regime’s pandemic policy includes suffocating dissent,
the regime’s apologists — thanks, in part, to millions donated by a
social media giant — are, for now, breathing a little easier.
Chances are, however, that the Sangh, although it thinks the donation is very important, doesn’t want it linked to them.
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