On 11 June 1995, at a Satyanarayan temple in New York city, the New York shakha of the Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh held a Hindu Sangathan Diwas (Hindu Unity Day). Dr. Yash Pal Lakra, president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA) was the keynote speaker... What does the VHPA do in America and what is the nature of the Hinduism imparted by its workers? these are not questions which this brief note can answer. In stead (this) analyses the Hindu migrants who take comfort in the withered arms of the VHPA.

America turns to migrants from South Asia for their labour, not for their lives... Each day ... migrants are assailed by a society unable to deal with people who speak with a different accent, who have different shades of skin, colour, who enjoy different music and food and who have their own ways of social interaction.

... America enjoys the technical and manual labour of these subcontinental migrants, but America is unable to take the lives of these migrants into its heart.

For this reason, the migrants search for ways to recover their own dignity as well as to protect their children from what they sometimes see as an overly hostile society.

The new syndicated Hindu movement which began in the 1960s in India soon turned its eyes to North America and Britain. In North America, the VHPA was founded in 1970 to gradually spread to about 75 cities with a membership in the thousands. The VHPA is able to grow because it responded (perversely) to the contradictions of the Hindu migrant.

First, it offered a way for the migrants to reconstruct their dignity as a people with a great culture which is superior to American culture. The VHPA fought a bigoted culture with its own bigoted...

Rather than negotiate the weaknesses in our cultural experiments, the VHPA reinforced the idea of the separation of "Hindu" and "America" and thereby further segregated the consciousness of the Hindu migrant from American society. For example, the VHPA encourages Hindu women to avoid professionalism, warns Hindu teenagers to eschew ... social relations with non-Hindu youth... The youth are alienated from the resources which might help them to live in a multicultural nation and a complex world. Gandhi, in 1925, offered the best riposte to the VHPA's static idea of "culture": "It is good to swim in the waters of tradition, but to sink in them is suicide". Tradition must build upon our contemporary contradictions not be a thing which we must wield dogmatically against our own collective interests.

The second manner in which the VHP was able to draw support was by its offer to socialize the youth. American society is under attack from the rapaciousness of transnational capital which knows that it can sell whatever the market will bear regardless of ethics. Parents are fighting a defensive battle against the weight of these corporations.

Hindu parents do not join in what should be a collective battle to reconstruct society along the lines of compassion: rather, many withdraw into Hindu enclaves where they send their children to VHPA summer camps to be trained in the way of the ... Hindu Dharma.

... The VHPA sells these camps as cultural and, in fact, itself as a cultural organization. Of course, those who know of the activities of the VHP in the subcontinent (destroying the historical mosque at Ayodhya and participating in sectarian violence) know ... work better.

At the Tenth Hindu Conference in New York City in 1984, a resolution urged "all the Hindus of the world - back home and abroad - to act in a broad and nationalistic manner rising above their personal beliefs and creeds, parochial languages and provincial and sectarian considerations such a Gujarati. Punjabi, Tamilian, Telugu, Bengali, Jains, Sikhs, etc". The VHPA offers the Hindu (and Sikh and Jain!) migrant an easy task: give money for work in India, to help those Hindus who are in "distress". The money rolls in (the VHPA does not reveal the amounts)...

The money travels to do "good work", which to those of us! who have some idea of the VHP in India, means towards such activities as purchasing conversions, engineering sectarian conflicts and funding political candidates. The VHPA asks American Hindus to be nationalistic: that nationalism, however, allows the migrant to be innocent as their devotion "saffron dollars" and puts to work in the imaginary homeland (India) ... people ... are slaughtered in its name.

The tragedy of the Hindu migrants is their inability to reconstruct their traditions to suit a difficult context...

Indian Americans must draw from their various cultural resources in order to produce philosophies adequate to their concrete problems. That is the purpose of culture: as a resource of hope, not a weapon for self-flagellation. (Source: The Secular Democracy, April, 1997)

Hindu Suraksha Samiti: Declare Cow As The National Animal

Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Suraksha Samiti, Punjab has demanded an immediate ban on cow-slaughter ... in Patiala on May 5 (and) warned the Government that if it did not stop transportation of cattle from Punjab to other States, workers of the Samiti would protest and stop trains and trucks carrying cattle for slaughter.

The Samiti also decided to launch a countrywide agitation to get the cow declared as the national animal. (Source: The Organiser, 8 June, 1977)