Shabnam Hashmi never imagined herself leading an international campaign until she came from New Delhi to New York in July to implore Indian-Americans not to send money to militant Hindu organizations in India that she says are leading the country away from secularism into Hindu nationalism and religious violence.
What put Ms. Hashmi on the road with her one-woman tour -- she spoke in a telephone interview from Atlanta after stops in the Midwest, Texas, California and Seattle -- were the Hindu attacks on Muslims in the state of Gujarat beginning in late February that left hundreds dead, according to Indian government figures. Independent Indian and international human rights groups have estimated that at least 1,000 people were killed, possibly 2,000 or more. The attacks on Muslims in Gujarat and the destruction of 360 mosques followed the killings by Muslims of 59 Hindu activists who were returning on a train from the ruins of a mosque in Uttar Pradesh that had been destroyed by Hindu mobs in 1992.
The anti-Muslim violence also raised concern among some American experts on India, who now echo Ms. Hashmi's fears, especially because India's national government is led by a Hindu nationalist party.
"The response has been very good," said Ms. Hashmi, a Muslim by birth but an agnostic now. Her message about the dangers of condoning or supporting mob violence, as the Indian news media report is done by Hindu nationalist politicians and their backers in the United States, draws on a painful personal history. In 1989, her brother, Safdar Hashmi, a street theater director and writer, was killed by a hired mob after he lent his support to striking industrial workers in India. She started a foundation in his memory to aid artists and intellectuals.
Ms. Hashmi and her husband, Gauhar Raza, a government scientist who also makes documentaries, went to Gujarat in April and came back with a 30-minute video, "Evil Stalks the Land," which intertwines footage from the history of Hindu fundamentalism and interviews with survivors of the Gujarat massacres.
Ms. Hashmi returned to Gujarat to spend three months talking to victims. She says that she believes hundreds of women were raped and that many of them were killed by Hindu militants in the kind of systematic assaults that characterized ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda.
"There are a lot of Indian-Americans who are very disturbed at what's happening in India," Ms. Hashmi said. "But at the same time, the amount of money that is being pumped from America into these right-wing organizations is terrible."
She echoed the conclusion of India's Human Rights Commission in citing the World Hindu Council, along with other national and local Hindu organizations, as among the groups responsible for the attacks in Gujarat. The council has denied any link. Ms. Hashmir said Indians in the United States had to guard against the possibility that groups here were funneling money to militants. She urged Americans in and out of government to start investigating organizations that might be supporting anti-Muslim terror.
In Washington, Robert M. Hathaway, director of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, said Indian journalists were producing enough evidence of the complicity of Hindu nationalist organizations and their branches abroad in the killings in Gujarat to demand some response in the United States.
"Indian journalists seem to have uncovered some very damaging and what look to me to be persuasive ties between fund-raising activities in the United States and some of these groups who had some shadowy role in the Gujarat violence," Mr. Hathaway said. But he added that for Americans the evidence was still secondhand, "which is why I thought it would be useful to have some sort of investigation by people who do have the ability to look at financial transactions and transfers."
In testimony in June to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a body created by Congress, Mr. Hathaway, formerly the South Asia specialist for the House International Relations Committee, was critical of the extremely low-key reaction in Washington to the Muslim deaths in Gujarat.
"Friends of India should have taken the lead in raising this on the floor of Congress, with a constructive initiative, not some bash-India initiative," he said. "Something that says, 'If things like this were to happen on a frequent basis, that does undermine the public and political support in this country for the creation and maintenance of this new relationship with India.' "
Mr. Hathaway also told the commission that the American ambassador in India, Robert Blackwill, should have gone to Gujarat in the wake of the violence. It would have sent a message, he said, "that we do care about Muslims as well as going after terrorists." -- Yoshie
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