Interesting article about Tulsi
Gabbard and her ties to Hindu nationalist organizations in India. It was posted on the Organization for
Minorities of India website.
The analyst, Pieter Friedrich, traces
her congressional career from 2011 connecting the funding and backing, and much
of her success, to these right wing Hindu organizations and people.
She’s obviously quite ambitious for a
37 year old human. She’s also a slick politician very similar to Obama who has
shown she’ll SAY whatever it takes to get where she wants to go.
“Gabbard’s links to Hindutva
organizations have nagged her for years, but they became a major issue last
year during her campaign for reelection to a fourth term in the U.S. Congress.”
“In June 2018, U.S.-based human
rights outfit Organization for Minorities of India (OFMI) began protesting
Gabbard’s announcement that she would chair the World Hindu Congress (WHC).
Held in Chicago in September 2018, the event was organized by the VHP-America
and featured as its keynote speaker RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. “They are linked
to every major pogrom in India in the past 30 years — all of which occurred
during Bhagat’s active years in the organization,” explained OFMI spokesperson
Arvin Valmuci at the time. “There is no place in the USA for a terrorist group
like the RSS.” Subsequently, the group issued an open letter to Gabbard
suggesting that she was “standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the fascist element
of Hindu nationalists of India.”
“In August, OFMI produced a video
questioning: “Why does she turn a blind eye to the atrocities of India’s
fascists? Is Tulsi bought and paid for by Hindu supremacists?” Thereafter,
Friedrich conducted an interview with Hawaiian radio show host Irminsul in
which he stated, “Gabbard is spending her time working as hard as possible to
bring the Hindu nationalist agenda to American soil. Her stance is not only
empowering extremists in India to continue engaging in violence against ethnic
minorities there, but she’s also using her political platform to deliberately
conceal the reality of the situation for Indian minorities.” Later, a coalition
of 11 South Asian diaspora groups signed an open letter calling on Gabbard to
publicly sever ties with Hindu nationalist organizations and detailing her
“association with extreme right wing hate groups.”
“Finally, after months of protest, Gabbard
issued a September 4 statement — on the eve of the WHC — in which she said,
“Due to ethical concerns and problems that surround my participating in any
partisan Indian political event in America, effective immediately, I
respectfully withdraw myself from serving as Honorary Chair of the World Hindu
Congress.”
According to Freidrich, it’s not that
simple.
“Representative Gabbard’s deep ties
to agents of a violent religious nationalist political party and the
paramilitary groups which control it suggests that India’s supremacists have
infiltrated America and are using her for their own ends,” remarks Valmuci.
“She only backed out of WHC because of political pressure from people and
groups around the country, but she continues to associate with and receive
funds from the same Hindutva outfits that hosted the WHC. We hope that her
presidential campaign provides a platform for exposing this infiltration and
also the vast number of past and ongoing Hindutva crimes committed with
impunity against India’s Buddhists, Christians, Dalits, Muslims, Sikhs, and
non-fundamentalist Hindus.”
Freidrich rounds it out with this
warning to early left wing progressive Gabbard supporters.
“Her congressional career exists
because of financing from and free promotion from Hindu nationalist
organizations in the U.S. which are directly linked to Hindu nationalist
organizations in India which currently control India’s government and which,
there, are directly implicated in repeated pogroms and other atrocities against
minorities.”
“She shouldn’t be president, but she
shouldn’t even be in Congress,” said Friedrich. “She should be, if not
investigated on a criminal level, at least deeply investigated on a
journalistic level…. If we’re going to talk about Russia hacking our election
and we’re going to talk about foreign political interference in the American
political scene, how about we look at Tulsi Gabbard. While we’re all distracted
with the Russian political interference, maybe we should turn our focus and pay
a little bit of attention to the Indian political interference.”
Here's a short one.
