Source: WatanDost
Sectarian conflict looms over Pakistan, says study
By Khalid Hasan
Daily Times, May 14, 2007
WASHINGTON: Sectarian violence marked by the Shia-Sunni conflict threatens to engulf Pakistan as the current century gets underway, predicts a new study released here last week.
The study, the first of its kind, was completed by Khaled Ahmed, contributing editor at Daily Times, who conducted his research during the last nine months as a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre here. Entitled “Sectarian War: Pakistan’s Sunni-Shia Violence and its links to the Middle East”, Ahmed notes that tens of thousands of lives have been lost in Pakistan’s sectarian war in the last two decades of the 20th century. The mayhem continues into the 21st century. He recalls that a very tolerable level of Sunni-Shia tension was inherited by Pakistan from British Raj, and it was not until after 1980 that the two sects squared off violently. Like all internecine conflicts, the war of the sects has been characterised by extreme cruelty, he notes. It coincided with the onset of the Islamic Revolution of Imam Khomeini in Iran and the threat its “export” posed to Saudi Arabia and other Arab states across the Gulf.
Ahmed writes, “Pakistanis invariably blame Saudi Arabia and Iran for the violence since they funded and trained the partisans of this war. They are aware that Pakistan was subjected to someone else’s ‘relocated’ war. Much of the internal dynamic of this war remains hidden from public view. A kind of embarrassment over the phenomenon of Muslim-killing-Muslim has prevented Pakistanis from inquiring frankly into how the two hostile states were able to transplant their conflict in Pakistan. Sectarian violence has drawn its strength from the past too. The schismatic past was concealed behind two important layers of governance. First, the Raj was able to almost completely uproot the Sunni-Shia confrontation during its tenure from 1857 to 1947. A refusal to recognise the jurisprudence of takfir or apostatisation or and a competent encoding of the Muslim Family Law, separating the two sects, almost buried the conflict that had its seeds in the 7th century.”
According to Ahmed, the Pakistan Movement, which was spearheaded by the two sects together, carried the promise of a finally successful coexistence and possible Shia-Sunni integration. Early governance in Pakistan was in some ways an extension of the secular impartiality of the Raj. However, after independence, two developments took place that sowed the seeds of sectarianism which bear fruit later. Pakistan began to look for its identity in the stance its representative political party, the All-India Muslim League, had adopted during its competition with the secular and much larger All-India National Congress. Because of the early military conflict with India in 1947, Pakistan’s nationalism began to coalesce positively around Islam and negatively around India. Its textbooks sought their exemplary personalities in historical Muslim “utopias” and imagined “golden ages” that highlighted the particularism of Muslim identity instead of its “liminal” cross-fertilisation with Hinduism at the cultural level.
Pakistani textbooks went back to pre-Raj days and selected periods of Muslim rule where pluralism was at its lowest, and highlighted instead the separation of Hinduism from Islam.
Most of this selection turned out to be sectarian. While it set Muslims and Hindus apart, it also emphasised the conflict between Sunni and Shia communities. In the early period of Pakistan’s history, ignorance of the schism - or amnesia induced by the Raj interregnum - allowed this bias to go unnoticed.
Ahmed writes that during the Saudi-Iranian standoff in 1980, Pakistan was drawn to the Saudi side for a number of reasons. It had a large expatriate labour force stationed in the Arab Middle East, particularly in the Gulf where the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was formed in 1980 to ward off the Iranian threat. Before 9/11, almost 80 percent of Pakistan’s “foreign remittances” were earned from this region. Saudi Arabia was also the most important ally – after the United States - in “frontline” Pakistan’s war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The Kingdom funded the jihad, bought Pakistan its first instalment of the 40 F-16 warplanes from the United States, gave Pakistan the seed-money for its Zakat Fund which now stands at almost Rs 20 billion annually to be distributed among the poor. However, in the 1980s, this fund went predominantly to seminaries. Saudi Arabia also allowed Pakistan to buy Saudi oil on “deferred payment” which meant free oil. The Islamisation of Pakistan under Ziaul Haq proceeded under Saudi tutelage.
Ahmed argues that it is not possible to examine the Saudi-Iranian conflict exclusively in a non-sectarian perspective. The schism was reflected in the Afghan jihad, but after the jihad ended, it was reflected in the ouster, from the first government-in-exile, of mujahideen belonging to the Shia militias. The Afghan mujahideen government was set up in Peshawar in 1989, but, under Saudi pressure, the Shia militias were not given representation in it. The rise of the Taliban in 1996, quickly recognised by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, was in a way a reversal of Iran at Saudi hands in the final count. The Taliban were recruited from the Deobandi and Wahhabi outfits, which were historically anti-Shia. In 1986, the Deobandi seminaries of Pakistan and India had issued fatwas of apostatisation against the Shia population and thus upheld the manifesto of Sipah Sahaba, a party formed in 1985 in Pakistan on the basis of its demand that the Shia be declared non-Muslim by the state through an amendment to the constitution. The state had already set the precedence of apostatising Muslim communities and declaring them non-Muslims under the Second Amendment of 1974.
According to the author, “The anti-Shia fatwas were ‘managed’ through a Deobandi scholar from India, Manzur Numani, who had earlier written a book against Imam Khomeini and Iran. Funded by the Saudi charity Rabita Alam Islami, he wrote to the Deobandi seminaries of India and Pakistan, asking them to give their juristic opinion on the Shia faith. In 1986, all of them sent to him fatwas declaring the Shia to be kafir. No attention was paid to the character of the Shia faith in Pakistan, a grave mistake made at the political level. The Shia of Pakistan had developed as a community tied to the teachings of Najaf. Their religious leaders followed the school of Najaf, which meant non-acceptance of the Iranian brand of faith founded on the concept of Velayat Faqih by Imam Khomeini, giving the Shia clergy the right to rule under the divine charisma of the ruling jurist. There was a strong implication in this of the sharing by the ruling jurist of the divinity of the innocent Twelve Imams. The Shia community of Pakistan was not politically aligned to its clergy; it was even less connected with the clerical hierarchy of Iran. The Shia of certain regions of Pakistan began going to Qum instead of Najaf only after the state under General Zia decided to collaborate with Saudi Arabia.
Ahmed points out that the laws promulgated in Pakistan against the apostatisation of the Shia do not contain any provision banning the issuance of fatwas as “private” edicts that violate the sovereignty of the state. The state is reluctant to bring the controversy of the apostatising fatwas into the courts of law because the courts themselves function under the sharia and will find it hard to disagree with the fatwas as edicts. The state rightly refuses to recognise the Shia as a separate community and has not given them a separate status in the census, meaning that the state does not “officially” discriminate on the basis of sect. It is generally agreed that Shia are 15 to 20 percent of the total population, with significant concentrations in Quetta in Balochistan, Kurram Agency in the Tribal Areas, and Gilgit in the Northern Areas. If the Northern Areas is given the status of a separate province, it will be a Shia-majority province. Pakistan is second only to Iran in respect of the number Shias living in it.
Ahmed notes that out of all the big cities, Karachi has witnessed some Shia response at the street level to the sectarian activities of the Deobandi seminaries, but by and large even in Karachi the Shia community has stayed away from violence, relying on the MQM and other non-religious parties for their political expression. In Lahore and Rawalpindi, where the biggest Shia seminaries are located - and have been targeted - the Shia have stayed away from their clergy and have not indulged in street violence. Shia “retaliation” has come from secret Shia militias run by organisations that remain officially banned. One can speculate that once the “external” causes of sectarian strife are removed or minimised sectarian violence will subside in Pakistan. Since 2004 the violence has become one-sided and Shia retaliation to Deobandi acts of terrorism has only been in extremis.
He writes, “But sectarian peace may not return so quickly to certain regions where the Shia-Sunni populations are in a state of equipoise and the Shia have the capacity to assert themselves. The Hazara community in Quetta in Balochistan is ghettoised to an extent that it will continue to attract Sunni violence, but sectarian trouble can be contained if the government is able to offer the Hazara Shias protection against the Taliban predominance in the city. The question of Parachinar in the Kurram Tribal Agency is however more complicated for two reasons: one, the historical nature of the friction between the tribes and, two, the linkages the Turi Shia tribe of Parachinar have developed downwards into the settled areas of the NWFP. The neighbouring tribal agency of Aurakzai and the cities of Bannu and Kohat in the NWFP have been “Talibanised” by Sunni extremists, and the Shias living there are being forced to fight back. At the time of writing in 2007 Parachinar had seen 50 deaths in the sectarian battles between tribes still ongoing in the month of March.”
According to Ahmed, the federally administered Northern Areas of Pakistan may take time to control the sectarian violence that has gripped the region since 1988. The demographic balance in Gilgit is such that Shia and Sunni vote banks have polarised there like Iraq, but that is more owing to the government’s refusal to allow the region to become devolved as a political entity. The army retains control of the administration of the Northern Areas because of the region’s strategic location next to Kashmir. During the Kargil operation in 1999, which was carried out from base camps in the Northern Areas, ground was provided once again for the sectarian violence that followed into the new millennium. The militias Pakistan used at Kargil were all Shia-killers. The status of the region - a change which is bound to lead to the diffusion of sectarian tension - will be difficult to “normalise” as long as the conflict with India over Kashmir is not resolved.
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Showing posts with label KHalid Hasan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KHalid Hasan. Show all posts
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Sunday, 21 December 2008
Welcome to Pakistan, the self-declared Fortress of Islam where the mosques may be full on Fridays but where everyone cheats everyone. by Khalid Hasan
A nation in denial —Khalid Hasan
Foreign Minister Qureshi says the “charitable” activities of Jama’at-ud Dawa will not be banned. In other words, Pakistan will disregard Security Council sanctions. And Qureshi was supposed to be among the enlightened ones of this regime
Some well-heeled woman in Lahore took to the streets this week, daintily holding candles, while bright-eyed young men made up the rear — all in honour of the Iraqi journalist Muntazir al-Zaidi, who lobbed his shoes at President Bush. The NWFP assembly passed a resolution and a nation, already in denial as to direct or indirect responsibility for Mumbai, found one more reason to rejoice. There is no doubt that the pulpit-thumping clerics that day were proclaiming yet another victory for Islam and predicting that it was only a matter of time before Muslims ruled the world.
Welcome to Pakistan, the self-declared Fortress of Islam where the mosques may be full on Fridays but where everyone cheats everyone and for justice one is advised to return to the times of Haroon-ur-Rashid or Jahangir.
Praising the Iraqi journalist for hurling shoes at President Bush, a spokesman for the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which the government says is banned, promised that the Taliban would take all possible steps for the release of al-Zaidi: “The TTP will do all it can to secure the release of Muntazir al-Zaidi and to get hold of the historic shoes.” Maulvi Omar told reporters by telephone from an undisclosed location that al-Zaidi has become the hero of the entire Muslim world.
As a journalist, I have reservations about the Iraqi journalist’s action. A working journalist is permitted close physical proximity to presidents and prime ministers in order for him to perform his professional duties. He must not misuse that privilege or employ it to push his personal or political agenda. Therefore, regardless of what al-Zaidi or the rest of us think of President Bush and his policies, what the man did was wrong.
He abused and betrayed the trust that had been placed in him. Journalists should use their pens and their cameras, not their shoes, to express themselves. Thanks to al-Zaidi, in future, all journalists on assignment will be subjected to far greater scrutiny and background checks than they face today. In other words, al-Zaidi performed a great disservice to the profession, violating its ethics. I have read thousands of words written on the incident by Pakistani journalists, but none has questioned the ethics of al-Zaidi’s action.
Need I add that I have opposed the Iraq War openly from the start, and in a meeting with the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, I clearly expressed my views about the war that was then in the offing without mincing my words. Anyone who wants confirmation only needs to ask Richard Boucher next time he is in Pakistan, which, given his record, should be any day after Christmas. Boucher was present at the meeting, being the Department spokesman.
A bright young Pakistani who came here to attend university and who recently returned to Pakistan to live and work has sent me a message that deserves to be shared. BQ, which is how I will identify him, writes:
“I had no idea the country had regressed so much. Everywhere you look, people are depressed, angry, cynical, and they all complain non-stop about the government, even when it is not justified. I am just so disappointed that I don’t have words to explain it. It seems that even divine intervention is not going to save us now! It is not impossible elsewhere in the world to find fair, middle of the road news being presented objectively when it comes to major sources of information. Regretfully, this is not true of Pakistan. If one leaves the English press aside, it is too painful to even read anything in the Urdu press. It seems there is a race on to see who can win at not being objective. Is the Urdu press only staffed by people who are unable to separate their own nationalist or religious feelings from their obligation to be neutral? This is not journalism.”
BQ goes on, “It is both tragic and comical that the Urdu press, political pundits, social, military, and other so-called analysts constantly appearing on every private TV channel are stuck in the past. It seems everyone is one-dimensional. Nobody seems to get above the most superficial and weirdest possible analysis, namely that India, Israel and America are conspiring to harm Pakistan. Apparently, these countries have nothing else to do.
“Every society has its conspiracy theorists. Every society has people who write and say things that are not only wrong, but that make the average citizen nervous, but they don’t get to appear on major TV channels and they definitely don’t get to write daily columns in major newspapers, except in Pakistan, where it seems that almost everyone associated with the Urdu press lacks the ability to be objective, fair or balanced.
“For example, these so-called super-patriotic experts have discovered that Pakistan is the ‘Fortress of Islam’ and that everyone, including Pakistan’s neighbours, are scared of Pakistan’s nuclear technology and are conspiring against us, and by extension, against Islam. In other words, everyone is against Pakistan, because Pakistan has the atomic bomb. But worry not, they proclaim, these forces of evil will never be able to do harm us because of our ‘bum’. The layers of conspiracy get thicker and thicker and the irony is that most people buy into it, conveniently forgetting that the Soviet Union had the most sophisticated nuclear arsenal and yet, despite being a superpower, it broke up.”
BQ, writing amid power breakdowns, is not done yet. “There is no question that there are forces working to destabilise Pakistan, but these forces are not external. These are people inside Pakistan: they are the Taliban and the Islamists that Pakistan itself created and funded and now, the monsters have gone rogue. Ironically, after every suicide bombing in Pakistan, the media start suggesting that terrorist it was the work of the CIA, Mossad and, of course, RAW. Instead of tackling the country’s dire internal problems of water, sewerage, electricity, gas, petrol, pollution, unemployment, fundamentalism and the ethnic divide, we huff and puff about India, Israel and America. Instead of fixing our own country, we criticise others. Instead of taking responsibility for our failures, we look for scapegoats.”
I hope BQ is feeling better having got all this off his chest.
As for Mumbai, not only the nation but the government is now in almost total denial.
President Zardari said on Wednesday that there is still no firm proof that the gunmen came from Pakistan. There is still no conclusive evidence to substantiate the claim that the attacks were orchestrated from Pakistani soil, he added. Foreign Minister Qureshi says the “charitable” activities of Jama’at-ud Dawa will not be banned. In other words, Pakistan will disregard Security Council sanctions. And Qureshi was supposed to be among the enlightened ones of this regime.
Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net
(Daily Times, 20 Dec 2008)
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Foreign Minister Qureshi says the “charitable” activities of Jama’at-ud Dawa will not be banned. In other words, Pakistan will disregard Security Council sanctions. And Qureshi was supposed to be among the enlightened ones of this regime
Some well-heeled woman in Lahore took to the streets this week, daintily holding candles, while bright-eyed young men made up the rear — all in honour of the Iraqi journalist Muntazir al-Zaidi, who lobbed his shoes at President Bush. The NWFP assembly passed a resolution and a nation, already in denial as to direct or indirect responsibility for Mumbai, found one more reason to rejoice. There is no doubt that the pulpit-thumping clerics that day were proclaiming yet another victory for Islam and predicting that it was only a matter of time before Muslims ruled the world.
Welcome to Pakistan, the self-declared Fortress of Islam where the mosques may be full on Fridays but where everyone cheats everyone and for justice one is advised to return to the times of Haroon-ur-Rashid or Jahangir.
Praising the Iraqi journalist for hurling shoes at President Bush, a spokesman for the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which the government says is banned, promised that the Taliban would take all possible steps for the release of al-Zaidi: “The TTP will do all it can to secure the release of Muntazir al-Zaidi and to get hold of the historic shoes.” Maulvi Omar told reporters by telephone from an undisclosed location that al-Zaidi has become the hero of the entire Muslim world.
As a journalist, I have reservations about the Iraqi journalist’s action. A working journalist is permitted close physical proximity to presidents and prime ministers in order for him to perform his professional duties. He must not misuse that privilege or employ it to push his personal or political agenda. Therefore, regardless of what al-Zaidi or the rest of us think of President Bush and his policies, what the man did was wrong.
He abused and betrayed the trust that had been placed in him. Journalists should use their pens and their cameras, not their shoes, to express themselves. Thanks to al-Zaidi, in future, all journalists on assignment will be subjected to far greater scrutiny and background checks than they face today. In other words, al-Zaidi performed a great disservice to the profession, violating its ethics. I have read thousands of words written on the incident by Pakistani journalists, but none has questioned the ethics of al-Zaidi’s action.
Need I add that I have opposed the Iraq War openly from the start, and in a meeting with the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, I clearly expressed my views about the war that was then in the offing without mincing my words. Anyone who wants confirmation only needs to ask Richard Boucher next time he is in Pakistan, which, given his record, should be any day after Christmas. Boucher was present at the meeting, being the Department spokesman.
A bright young Pakistani who came here to attend university and who recently returned to Pakistan to live and work has sent me a message that deserves to be shared. BQ, which is how I will identify him, writes:
“I had no idea the country had regressed so much. Everywhere you look, people are depressed, angry, cynical, and they all complain non-stop about the government, even when it is not justified. I am just so disappointed that I don’t have words to explain it. It seems that even divine intervention is not going to save us now! It is not impossible elsewhere in the world to find fair, middle of the road news being presented objectively when it comes to major sources of information. Regretfully, this is not true of Pakistan. If one leaves the English press aside, it is too painful to even read anything in the Urdu press. It seems there is a race on to see who can win at not being objective. Is the Urdu press only staffed by people who are unable to separate their own nationalist or religious feelings from their obligation to be neutral? This is not journalism.”
BQ goes on, “It is both tragic and comical that the Urdu press, political pundits, social, military, and other so-called analysts constantly appearing on every private TV channel are stuck in the past. It seems everyone is one-dimensional. Nobody seems to get above the most superficial and weirdest possible analysis, namely that India, Israel and America are conspiring to harm Pakistan. Apparently, these countries have nothing else to do.
“Every society has its conspiracy theorists. Every society has people who write and say things that are not only wrong, but that make the average citizen nervous, but they don’t get to appear on major TV channels and they definitely don’t get to write daily columns in major newspapers, except in Pakistan, where it seems that almost everyone associated with the Urdu press lacks the ability to be objective, fair or balanced.
“For example, these so-called super-patriotic experts have discovered that Pakistan is the ‘Fortress of Islam’ and that everyone, including Pakistan’s neighbours, are scared of Pakistan’s nuclear technology and are conspiring against us, and by extension, against Islam. In other words, everyone is against Pakistan, because Pakistan has the atomic bomb. But worry not, they proclaim, these forces of evil will never be able to do harm us because of our ‘bum’. The layers of conspiracy get thicker and thicker and the irony is that most people buy into it, conveniently forgetting that the Soviet Union had the most sophisticated nuclear arsenal and yet, despite being a superpower, it broke up.”
BQ, writing amid power breakdowns, is not done yet. “There is no question that there are forces working to destabilise Pakistan, but these forces are not external. These are people inside Pakistan: they are the Taliban and the Islamists that Pakistan itself created and funded and now, the monsters have gone rogue. Ironically, after every suicide bombing in Pakistan, the media start suggesting that terrorist it was the work of the CIA, Mossad and, of course, RAW. Instead of tackling the country’s dire internal problems of water, sewerage, electricity, gas, petrol, pollution, unemployment, fundamentalism and the ethnic divide, we huff and puff about India, Israel and America. Instead of fixing our own country, we criticise others. Instead of taking responsibility for our failures, we look for scapegoats.”
I hope BQ is feeling better having got all this off his chest.
As for Mumbai, not only the nation but the government is now in almost total denial.
President Zardari said on Wednesday that there is still no firm proof that the gunmen came from Pakistan. There is still no conclusive evidence to substantiate the claim that the attacks were orchestrated from Pakistani soil, he added. Foreign Minister Qureshi says the “charitable” activities of Jama’at-ud Dawa will not be banned. In other words, Pakistan will disregard Security Council sanctions. And Qureshi was supposed to be among the enlightened ones of this regime.
Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net
(Daily Times, 20 Dec 2008)
Read more...
Sunday, 9 November 2008
Yet another controversial Obama appointment. Sonal Shah, the adviser picked up by Obama for his transition team, is known for her links to VHP
Yet another controversial Obama appointment
* Sonal Shah has been part of group believed to have been involved in massacre of Muslims in Gujarat and carrying out sustained campaign against Indian Christians in Orissa
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: Another of President-elect Barack Obama’s appointments has been greeted with disbelief by Pakistani-Americans and liberal members of the Indian community because Sonal Shah, the adviser picked up by Obama for his transition team, is known for her links to communal Hindu organisations.
Vishwa Hari Parishad (VHP) and its student wing Bajrang Dal are believed to have been involved in the massacre of over 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat and for the last three months have been carrying out a sustained campaign against Indian Christians in Orissa.
Sonal Shah has been the national coordinator for VHP-America and her father has been associated with the Overseas Friends of the BJP. Further, her organisation IndiCorps works with a VHP-sponsored initiative called the Ekal Vidyalayas – or single-teacher schools with a curriculum steeped in instilling hatred against non-Hindu religious minorities. Ekal Vidyalayas have played a key role in anti-minority violence in the states of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. IndiCorps founders also have a close relationship with controversial Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
According to Vijay Prashad, Chairman of South Asian history and director of international studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, Sonal Shah’s Houston-based parents were “not only in the ecumenical Gujarati Samaj, but also in the far more cruel organisations of the Hindu Right, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Overseas Friends of the BJP 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 US branch of the most virulently fascistic outfit within India. The VHP’s head, Ashok Singhal, believes that his organisation 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, the hard Right government in Gujarat honoured Shah with the Pride of Gujarat (Gujarat Garima) award.”
Read more...
* Sonal Shah has been part of group believed to have been involved in massacre of Muslims in Gujarat and carrying out sustained campaign against Indian Christians in Orissa
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: Another of President-elect Barack Obama’s appointments has been greeted with disbelief by Pakistani-Americans and liberal members of the Indian community because Sonal Shah, the adviser picked up by Obama for his transition team, is known for her links to communal Hindu organisations.
Vishwa Hari Parishad (VHP) and its student wing Bajrang Dal are believed to have been involved in the massacre of over 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat and for the last three months have been carrying out a sustained campaign against Indian Christians in Orissa.
Sonal Shah has been the national coordinator for VHP-America and her father has been associated with the Overseas Friends of the BJP. Further, her organisation IndiCorps works with a VHP-sponsored initiative called the Ekal Vidyalayas – or single-teacher schools with a curriculum steeped in instilling hatred against non-Hindu religious minorities. Ekal Vidyalayas have played a key role in anti-minority violence in the states of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. IndiCorps founders also have a close relationship with controversial Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
According to Vijay Prashad, Chairman of South Asian history and director of international studies at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, Sonal Shah’s Houston-based parents were “not only in the ecumenical Gujarati Samaj, but also in the far more cruel organisations of the Hindu Right, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Overseas Friends of the BJP 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 US branch of the most virulently fascistic outfit within India. The VHP’s head, Ashok Singhal, believes that his organisation 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, the hard Right government in Gujarat honoured Shah with the Pride of Gujarat (Gujarat Garima) award.”
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