I/VII.
[Quote
"She is from the family of the RSS... There is nothing
wrong with it," he said.
Unquote
Pretty amusing, as it comes from a top functionary of
the RSS.
It is almost like asserting that there is nothing
wrong in belonging to a family of criminals as long as
one oneself is not so.
Even that part, otherwise profoundly legitimate,
sounds utterly funny in the mouth of a top functionary
of the RSS, an organistation deeply engaged in tarring
whole communities with the same (criminally
slanderous) brush based on, quite often only alleged,
wrongdoings of some of the community, what to speak of
family.
Quote
Our entire family believes in this. We follow a
compassionate Gandhian ideology that underlines
pluralism, diversity and the need to take all sections
of the society along in whatever we do," Anand Shah
told The Sunday Express.
Unquote
This also flatly contradicts the above-cited claims of
her brother Anand Shah regarding the commitment of the
"family" to lofty Gandhian values. Not to forget that
the assassin of Gandhi came from the ranks of the RSS
as the "Father of the Nation" had been looked upon as
a huge barrier between the Hindutva Brigade and their
objective of a Hindu Rashtra with his stellar and
undaunted role in dousing communal/sectarian passions
raging during that period even at a great risk to his
own person. Not only that even today, that despicable
murderer Nathuram Godse is idolized by the adherents
of the Hindutva Brigade.
Given the circumstances, it is unlikely that Shah
would positively respond to the RSS invite, at least
in the near future.
But that would, for very understandable reasons,
hardly prove anything.
However, more clinching evidences, like the reader for
the Indicorps fellows (referred to below) and Sonal
Shah being the national co-ordinator for the VHPA fund
raising operations related to the Gujarat earthquake,
preferably be unearthed.
Actually, the family should come clean on that,
particularly the reader for the Indicorps fellows.]
http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Nov112008/scroll20081111100142.asp?section=updatenews
RSS reception for Sonal Shah
DH News Service, New Delhi:
Gujarati expatriate Sonal Shah, an economist who has
now been appointed an advisory member by US
President-elect Barack Obama, would be invited by the
RSS and accorded a public reception at her village in
Gujarat.
Shah's father Ramesh Shah, who has strong RSS
affiliations, has been approached by the Sangh outfits
to make arrangements for her visit to her native
village Gabat in Sabarkantha.
Asked to comment on Sonal Shah's association with the
Sangh Parivar, the RSS national executive member Ram
Madhav told Deccan Herald that her father had been "a
staunch supporter of the RSS". He, however, denied
that she herself was associated with the RSS. "Where
are women in the RSS?" he quipped.
"She has been a Democrat for the last 20 years and has
worked very hard for the victory of Obama for the last
six months," said Madhav.
"She is from the family of the RSS... There is nothing
wrong with it," he said.
The Shah family migrated to the US in 1970 and has
been active in the overseas VHP activities.
Shah's father had headed the Ekal Vidyalaya
Foundation, which collects funds from the US residents
to support the tribal schools in India run by Vanvasi
Kalyan Parishad, one of the oldest RSS outfits working
in the tribal areas in India.
Appointment sparks protest in US
New York, pti: Three Indian-American groups have
protested the appointment of Sonal Shah in American
President-elect Barack Obama's transition team,
claiming that she is closely associated with the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad. They warned against Hindutva
"infiltration" into the power centres of the US
society.
II.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/nov/11sonal-shah-denies-rss-vhp-links.htm
Sonal Shah denies links to RSS, VHP
Aziz Haniffa in Washington, DC | November 11, 2008 |
10:07 IST
Sonal Shah, who was appointed to serve on
President-elect Barack Obama's official 15-member
transition board chaired by John Podesta, former
President Clinton's chief of staff, has said that her
"personal politics has nothing in common with the
views espoused by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or any such organization."
Shah, director for Global Development at google.org,
was responding to a controversy that erupted about her
VHP and RSS links on the Internet and then was picked
up by newspapers in India.
In a statement released by the Obama campaign, Shah
said, "As an Indian-American who has lived in this
country since the age of four, serving on the
Obama-Biden transition team is a unique privilege for
me. A presidential transition is always a time of
excitement and, in some cases, of rumors and unfounded
gossip. I'd like to set to rest a few baseless and
silly reports that have been circulating on the
Internet. First, my personal politics have nothing in
common with the views espoused by the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or any such
organization. I've never been involved in Indian
politics, and never intend to do so. Second, I've
always condemned any politics of division, of ethnic
or religious hatred, of violence and intimidation as a
political tool. Some factually inaccurate internet
rumors have attempted to link me to Hindu nationalist
groups through a variety of tenuous connections: I'm
proud to have helped coordinate relief work following
the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, or cultural and
religious affiliations of some of my family members,
or apolitical humanitarian work I've been privileged
to do as a founder of the NGO Indicorps and as the
director of global development for Google.org.
Finally, I do not subscribe to the views of such Hindu
nationalist groups, and never have. Ridiculous tactics
of guilt by association have been decisively
repudiated by the American people. I am delighted with
what the victory on November 4 says about my country,
and about our place in the world. I look forward to
serving our President-elect in this time of
transition."
IV.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/no-vhp-links-our-family-condemns-gujarat-riots-says-sonal-shahs-brother/383333/
No VHP links, our family condemns Gujarat riots, says
Sonal Shah's brother
Suman K Jha Posted: Nov 09, 2008 at 0244 hrs IST
NEW DELHI, NOVEMBER 8 : Anand Shah, the brother of
economist Sonal Shah who has been named by US
President-elect Barack Obama as member of his advisory
board, said today that his family and their NGO had
nothing to do with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or the
Gujarat government.
As a "coordinator" of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
America (VHPA), Sonal Shah helped raise funds for
victims of the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat. Her
brother, who said that she couldn't comment given her
present responsibilities, criticised the 2002 riots.
"We strongly believe that no one in their right minds
would ever approve of violence. The riots in Gujarat
are not the way our society should deal with
conflicts. Our entire family believes in this. We
follow a compassionate Gandhian ideology that
underlines pluralism, diversity and the need to take
all sections of the society along in whatever we do,"
Anand Shah told The Sunday Express.
"We are in no way involved with the VHP in India or
the Gujarat Government here," said Anand Shah, who
runs Indicorps in Ahmedabad, an NGO Sonal Shah
co-founded that provides fellowships to overseas
Indian-origin young professionals to do internships in
India in social work.
VHPA media secretary Shyam Tiwari told The Sunday
Express: "Sonal was a member of VHP of America at the
time of the earthquake. Her membership has expired."
Sonal Shah, 40, a former Vice President at Goldman
Sachs and director of the US State Department of
Treasury, works for Google.org on its Global
Development team. Her father Ramesh Shah moved to New
York in 1970. Sonal joined her father, with her
mother, sister and brother, in 1972. Her father is a
former member of the Overseas Friends of BJP.
V.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/india-unity/message/28703
Here is an excerpt from a sort of promotional, or just
laudatory, article produced on the occasion of Sonal
Shah, who has just been nominated to the Transition
Team of Barack Obama, having been awarded the 'India
Abroad Person of the Year 2003' by the (international)
weekly newspaper India Abroad belonging to the stable
of the Rediff group:
Quote
"The politics aren't usually about religion. It's
usually about land or something like that. Religion is
used to create a greater disparity. In local
communities, a lot of the disputes are usually over
things that are more tangible, and it's important to
understand that."
She does, however, require that Indicorps Fellows be
as informed as possible. To that end, she has prepared
an Indicorps reader, which she is in the process of
revising.
As it currently stands, the Indicorps reader is a
solid bit of reading — three thick, photocopied
volumes and just under a thousand pages of articles,
novel excerpts, and chapters from historical texts.
The reader is ideologically diverse and includes the
works of Amartya Sen, V S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie,
Nehru, Mark Tully, and Shashi Tharoor, as well as
Sunil Khilnani, Konrad Elst, Robert Kaplan, and
Jeffrey Sachs. Asghar Ali Engineer is included, as is
the pro-Hindutva French journalist Francois Gautier's
Arise Again, O India and The Symbol of Ayodhya.
Rather than ignore any segment of the political
continuum, Sonal has embraced all of them, and
encourages her Fellows to make their own, informed
decisions.
Unquote
[Source:
http://www.indicorps.org/docs/INDIA_ABROAD_12-19-2003.pdf.]
It is significant that of the authors listed above
quite a few are known staunch adherents of the
Hindutva ideology: V S Naipaul, Mark Tully, Konrad
Elst. Kaplan is an unapologetic apologist of US Empire
over the globe. [Mark Tully is a softer version.]
Francois Gautier's Arise Again, O India and The Symbol
of Ayodhya are - as the titles suggest - rabble
rousing, fire spewing, pure hate stuff of the worst
variety.
On the other side of the divide all are arguably
moderates. But what would be most pertinent and
revealing is the actual selection of the
articles/pieces. That would show up the intent/bias in
much clearer light.
It'd be nice if someone could get hold of copies of
both the original and updated, if any, version(s) of
the Indicorps reader.
[From: Sukla Sen]
VI.
http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad11072008.html
[Excerpted from: The Many Faces of Sonal Shah: Obama's
Indian by Vijay Prashad]
Born in Gujarat, India, (Sonal) Shah came to the
United States as a two-year old. Her father, a
chemical engineer, first worked in New York before
moving to Houston, and then moving away from his
education toward the stock market. The Shahs remain
active in Houston's Indian community, not only in the
ecumenical Gujarati Samaj (a society for people from
Gujarat), but also in the far more cruel organizations
of the Hindu Right, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP), the Overseas Friends of the BJP (the main
political party of the Hindu Right) and the Ekal
Vidyalaya. Shah's parents, Ramesh and Kokila, not only
work as volunteers for these outfits, but they also
held positions of authority in them. Their daughter
was not far behind. She was an active member of the
VHPA, the U. S. branch of the most virulently
fascistic outfit within India. The VHP's head, Ashok
Singhal, believes that his organization should
"inculcate a fear psychosis among [India's] Muslim
community." This was Shah's boss. Till 2001, Shah was
the National Coordinator of the VHPA.
In 2004, I ran into Shah at the South Asian Awareness
Network conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At an
earlier panel I questioned her links to the Hindu
Right, and so asked people to be wary about her
organization, Indicorps. She was furious, and we had a
bitter exchange in the Green Room. But at no point did
she deny her active connections to the Hindu Right.
Her brother, Anand, wrote to me not long after,
concerned that Indicorps, which he runs full-time from
India, would be tainted by our tussle. "I was curious
about Sonal's own personal relationship with the
VHPA," I wrote back, "That sparked some concern for
me. Of course we are free to have our multiple
associations, and there is no expectation that all our
affiliations necessarily influence each other. That
necessity is granted, although it is my understanding
that the VHPA is a very disciplined organization that
demands a lot from its members – notably congruence in
all the work that they do. Which is why I raised the
question."
VII.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/USA/Indian-American_groups_protest_Sonal_Shahs_appointment/articleshow/3696417.cms
Indian-American groups protest Sonal Shah's
appointment
10 Nov 2008, 2000 hrs IST, PTI
NEW YORK: Three Indian-American groups have protested
the appointment of Sonal Shah in US President-elect
Barack Obama's transition team, claiming that she is
closely associated with the VHP and warned against
Hindutva "infiltration" into the power centres of the
US society.
In a joint statement, Indian Coalition Against
Genocide and Indian American Coalition for Pluralism
and Non Resident Indians for a Secular and Harmonious
India said they are holding consultations among
themselves and like-minded Indian-American leaders on
the issue.
The organisations have asked Shah to clarify her
position about her association with the VHP and its
"mother organisation" RSS.
The statement said they have avowed to increase their
efforts to "educate the American politicians and
business leaders about the attempts by the Hindu
ultra-nationalist Hindutva movement to infiltrate the
power centres of the US society by giving big
donations and through volunteer work."
The Coalition Against Genocide was instrumental in
getting the visa of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra
Modi revoked in 2005, it recalled and voiced concerns
that an attempt might be made to get his visa
reinstated.
After India media reports linked Shah to the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, her brother Anand Shah had said the
40-year economist's family had nothing to do with the
VHP or the Gujarat government.
Shah was on November 6 named in a 15-member team which
will oversee smooth transition of power from the Bush
Administration to the incoming Obama dispensation.
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