27. Indian Activist takes Bush to task - David Scafenberg, Sentinel Staff Writer

         Excerpt from India Abroad (September 5, 2003): Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande pulls no punches at meetings with administration officials - complains US reaction to Gujarat riots was not strong enough.

Deshpande, 74, pointed to the lack of a strong reaction from US Govt. to the sectarian carnage in Gujarat, which she said was state sponsored. She lamented the victims had not seen justice either through the police or judicial systems. At the State Dept., Deshpande—known for her campaigns covering thousands of miles with the likes of freedom fighter Vinoba Bhave—met with Diana Barnes, Foreign Affairs Officer, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. At the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, she met with Patricia Carley, a senior policy analyst. She met with staffers of the hierarchy of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian -Americans , addressed a community meeting at University of Maryland and interacted with the media. She said part of her trip would be to convince non-resident Indians and the Indian-American community not to contribute to the extremist groups. ´We would like to make our friends aware of the reality and those who subscribe to these views that if you really love India, you should not do anything that would harm India. What these people are doing in Gujarat and trying to do in other states will harm India in a very big way.´ Her trip is being sponsored by NRIs for Secular and Harmonious India. In Washington, she was accompanied to the meetings by John Prabhudoss, Executive Director, Policy Institute for Religion and State, and Kaleem Kawaja, coordinator, NRIs for a Secular and Harmonious India.

Indians who depose before the US State Department or before the USCIRF are anti-national, period. They squeal against their own countrymen, they express to a foreign Government their distrust of their country´s democratic institutions, they abuse their country´s police and armed forces, and they wail, ´Indian democracy is in peril, come and save us.´ And if you are Arundhati Roy, you will add, ´Me slave, you king´, for better effect. Some of these anti-national Indian informers actually think it is an honour to be summoned to appear before the US Government to squeal against their country. Professor Sumit Ganguly, University of Texas, who also passes himself off as ´expat journalist´ has appeared more than once before the USCIRF and his opening sentence at one such appearance in September 2000 was, ´I consider it an honour and a privilege to be asked to testify before this Commission today.´ Now, this kind of slavish deference must have been music to American ears and they summoned the good and willing professor again in 2002.

The USCIRF held a special hearing on ´Communal violence in Gujarat, India and the US response´ and those that were summoned to depose and those that appeared obediently before their masters on June 10, 2002 were Teesta Setalvad, Professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy, Professor Sumit Ganguly and Father Cedric Prakash. The URL of the proceedings of this hearing is presented to readers in Appendix 7 and is a must-read for the sheer anti- nation, anti-Hindu intent not only of the Indians who deposed before an alien Government but for the anti-India, anti-Hindu intent of the USCIRF itself . The comments made by the Commissioners about India are an unmitigated piece of impertinence. Didi Deshpande, let us not forget, deposed before the US Government in September 2003.¹¹ Neither the USCIRF nor the US State Department´s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor ever felt compelled to hold a hearing on the genocide of the Hindus of Kashmir or the ongoing violence and acts of terror by Christian terrorists in the North-East and Muslim terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir. Readers will note that these anti-national Indian worthies while auditing their country and its democratic institutions before the Americans also shed a few obligatory and insincere tears for the Hindus of Bangladesh! Not a tear for the Hindus at home - those that were killed and terrorised to flee from the state of Jammu and Kashmir, for the Hindu women and children killed in the Sabarmati Express in Godhra or for the Hindu victims of the Mumbai blasts and riots. I also present as an appendix a contrasting meeting with a US State Department official in Chennai on a similar mission in October 2004, not a word of which was reproduced in their international religious freedom report of 2005.¹² Let us get back to Didi Deshpande now.