The South Asian: Fundamentalists Misrepresenting Dalits on the Web?

January 30, 2006

Fundamentalists Misrepresenting Dalits on the Web?

In an interesting twist in the California text books saga, it seems that interesting parties posing as Dalits have started imposter Dalit sites.

When Dalits complained to the California Board of Education about being misrepresented in the edits presented vis-à-vis Indian and Hindu history, these Dalits were accused by various Hindu fundamentalist groups as being pawns of Christian missionaries. (Point of fact, not that it should matter: not one of the Dalits who spoke before the Board of Education on January 12th was a Christian.)

Dr. Farmer, who is also part of the Indo Eurasian Research group says that he got involved when he received the following email.

From: Dalit Human Rights
Date: Fri Jan 20, 2006 4:33:13 PM US/Pacific
To: saf@safarmer.com
Subject: Dalit Human Rights

Dear Dr. Farmer,

We are very impressed by your efforts to accurately portray the plight of the Dalits in the California syllabus. We would very much appreciate if you could promote our website on your site and discussion lists. Please let us know if there are any additional ways in which we can work together.

Regards,
The team at Dalit Human Rights (DHR)
www.dalithumanrights.com

But there seemed to be inconsistencies. He writes:
At first I fell for it. I wrote back saying that I'd be happy to help. But then an Indian-American friend noticed something odd about the website. At first sight it looks like a sophisticated news portal that focuses on Dalit interests.

The oddity is that mixed in with the usual stories found on such sites ("Dalit woman raped", etc.), you'll also find in their carefully manufactured “Archives" (started just three weeks ago) stories of an obvious Hindutva cast (no pun intended), taken from Hindutva newspapers that no Dalit would ever cite favorably.

The Archives contain stories from _The Pioneer_, the same rightwing paper that ran the hate article against Michael Witzel on Christmas day). Other stories are taken from the
RSS-run _Organizer_ or other rightwing sources.

Moreover, the Archives only go back three weeks. The site itself was registered on December 19th, exactly one day after we published a long post that underlined the Hindutva orgins of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) -- which likes to call
itself a "Human Rights Organization".

The very next day, the HAF put out a press-release shedding tears for four Dalit women who were denied entry to a temple in Orissa -- the first such tears they had ever shed of this sort -- and the same day the dalithumanrights.com domain name was registered.

No data are found on the Website that identifies the "team at Dalit Human Rights (DHR)".

But do check out the stories in their "Archives", e.g., the story on how Dalits and upper caste Hindus joined together to kill Muslims in Gujarat.

Or the provocative story entitled Hours of Anti-India, Anti-Hindutva Rhetoric at 'Indian' Muslim Meet

Not believing that this was a "Dalits for Hindutva" site -- that would be an historical first -- we became curious about who owned the domain name "dalithumanrights.com".

That's easy enough to check: Go to the Whois data base at Network solutions at
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml and type in "dalithumanrights.com" in the search field. You'll be taken to a page where you'll find that the owner carefully
registered the name by "proxy" in order to hide his identity.

But you *will* find the IP address of the site listed -- 66.226.242.126 -- at the bottom of the page.

When you investigate IP 66.226.242.126 further, using the Whois data base, you'll discover that the same IP address hosts at least 22 extremist Hindutva webpages owned by Hinduworld, Inc., in Houston, Texas -- run by a well-known Hindutva activist named Rajiv Varma.

In a civic society process to understand and include various perspectives on Indian history, guerilla tactics threaten to undermine the process through strategies of misrepresentation.

It is possible that a group believes completely in its own truth and the veracity of the truth – however, an attempt to misrepresent another group and the truth of that group is clearly unseemly to say the least.

How low will we stoop?

Posted by collective at January 30, 2006 11:26 AM

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