Rest assured that whether it's online message boards, or Wikipedia or WoT or domestic irrational conundrum and politics, the singular blame on AIPAC is misleading. Or for that mater any thomas-friedman-neocon-claptrap about Buzz words such as democracy, secular, pluralist etc.Since the discussion started earlier on lobbies:
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=257926
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=257878
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=257898
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=257792
http://samaj.revues.org/index262.html
Working for India or against Islam? Islamophobia in Indian American Lobbies
Ingrid Therwath
In the past few years, the Indian American community has gained an unprecedented visibility in the international arena. It is indeed often projected as a model community and now constitutes growing and influential ethnic lobbies in Washington. But, in the face of its sheer division, Islamophobia did provide a unifying force sometimes bigger than the interest of Indian Americans or of their country of origin. Other factors can also be summoned. Among them, a leniency of many post-1965 migrants towards Hindu nationalist ideology and the wish to align with Jewish pressure groups in the context of the war against terrorism and to further the India-Israel-US strategic partnership play a major role in explaining Islamophobic overtones in the Indian American lobbies.
...................According to the 1990 US Census, 857,000 Indian Americans resided in the Unites States, more than twice the number a decade before (they were 350,000 in 1980). They were the fifth ethnic community in the US and were already established in the country. Besides, the end of the Cold War and that of a bipolar vision of international relations coincided with the rise of transnational groups and ethnic lobbies as political actors (Ambrosio 2002)1. The Indian lobby developed itself in this context, while India at the same time was witnessing the rise of Hindu nationalism. Now, with the post 9/11 American emphasis on the axis of evil and on the dangers of Islam, it seems the Indian lobby is using Islamophobia as a political strategy. Hence the question: is the Indian American lobby in Washington working for India or against Islam?
Of course, this question is deliberately provocative as it could be argued that both positions, pro-India activism and Islamophobia, can be reconciled. Further on the other end Indian American lobbyists claim to focus only on their community in the US and on domestic issues, far from any imported communal agenda. However, fieldwork conducted in New York and in Washington in July and August 2004 revealed virulent streaks of Islamophobia and hostility towards Pakistan amongst professional Indian American lobbyists. While not absolutely systematic, this anti-Muslim sentiment has been prominent in most of the interviews that I conducted. Constituting a population of slightly more than 1 million Hindus (approximately 52.6% of the total population of Indian Americans), the 2000 U.S. Census show that Hindus outnumber Muslims here, although their numerical superiority is not as overwhelming as it is in India. One would therefore expect this repartition to be mirrored in the membership of Indian American lobbies, but none of these pressure groups claiming to work for a multicultural homeland in a multicultural environment had Muslim representatives.
.........The hostility of the Indian American lobbies towards Islam and Pakistan can actually be construed as the result of two separate but complementary processes: the space occupied by ethno-religious minorities in American politics on the one hand, and long-distance nationalism on the other hand. In short, Islamophobia in Indian American lobbies stems from a combination of both contingent and structural factors as well as external and internal causes.
....In the last twenty years, South Asian communities in diaspora have been particularly prone to long-distance nationalism and one can easily recall the Sikh diaspora’s support to the Khalistani project and the Tamil diaspora’s support to the LTTE rebellion. In a way, the Ghadar Party partook of the same logic. Several factors contribute to the assumption that the first generation of Indian Americans, who became involved in politics in the 1980s and 1990s, do so as long-distance nationalists and tenets of foreign hindutva, either because of the psychological trauma caused by migration or by the necessity to define themselves in migration by opposition with an essentialized Other. Ashis Nandy favours the first explanation and links long-distance nationalism amonsgt NRIs and PIOs to the insecuriy resulting from uprootedness, cultural alienation and a minority position. Endorsing the cause of India and identifying with Hindu nationalism for instance and its demonization of Islam could then be interpreted as ‘a symbolic redress of cultural defeat’ (Nandy 2000: 127-150, 164-170) and ‘compensatory gratification’ (Rajagopal 2001: 47).
....Hindutva, with its distancing of the Muslim community as foreign invaders, provided a potent ideology for Indian Americans in search of a separate identity since the late 1970s. Indeed, they lobbied for the creation of a separate entry in the Census and were listed as ‘Asian Indians’ for the first time in 1980, before being officially labeled ‘Indian Americans’ in the 1990s (Sabbagh 2003). Moreover the constitution of the Indian American lobbies coincided with the rise of hindutva in India. The frequent visits of Indian dignitaries in the U.S. and the rapid rise of the instrumentalization of the Internet towards this end, with the creation of websites like www.hinduunity.org, a pro-hindutva and Muslim-bashing umbrella site based in Queens and Long Island, further fuelled ‘Yankee hindutva’.
...From Kashmir to Palestine: the Indo-Jewish nexus
It was only natural for the Indian American lobby to look at the Jewish lobby for guidance as a model of political action. Indian Americans wished to emulate the strength of the American Jewish lobby and Kumar P. Barve, the first Indian American holding office since Dalip Singh Saund’s election to the Congress 1956, sums this interest up by stating that ‘Indian Americans see the American Jewish community as a yardstick against which to compare themselves. It’s seen as a gold standard in terms of political activism.’16 However, in spite of the Jewish lobby’s position as the most prominent ethnic lobby in the U.S., this rapprochement is a recent phenomenon very much linked to long-distance nationalism in the two communities and to the rise of hindutva in India.
The Sangh Parivar itself encouraged such an alliance and hoped it would become an anti-Muslim front. According to Vijay Prashad, a leftist academic settled in the U.S., the Indo-Jewish friendship in America is very much linked to the rise of right-wing nationalists, personified by Sharon and Advani, in Israel and in India. He attributes it to the ‘Global Right’ and to ‘the entente between India and Israel, between Hindutva and Sharonism in the shadow of US imperialism’ (Prashad 2003: 4-5, 7).
Of course, K.B. Hedgewar, the founding father of the RSS, and Veer Savarkar, the author of the 1923 pamphlet Hindutva. Who is a Hindu?, professed their admiration for Nazism and Fascism and wished to import the idea of a Final Solution to the Muslim Indian community.
...Besides, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Palestinian terrorism provided a tempting parallel for the Hindu-Muslim communal tension and Kashmiri militancy in the eyes of Sangh activists. Many BJP and Bajrang Dal leaders have thus spoken highly of Jews and Israel. The Indo-Israel friendship was subsequently supported by the BJP government. This new friendship was of course encouraged by the Indian government seeking to ally itself with Israel, for strategic and military purposes.
The 9/11 attacks provided another pretext for the reactivation of long-distance nationalism in Indian American lobbies and for anti-Muslim ravings. Not surprisingly, the Kashmir-Palestinian parallel is being invoked again, in a way reminiscent of the hindutva websites, while the Internet is acknowledged as a political media.
A report prepared by AAPI in March 2002 and entitled India-U.S. Relations in the Aftermath of September 11, 2001, also put Kashmir and Palestine at the same level as instances of communal conflict with remarks such as ‘the thinking goes that if U.S. can bomb Afghanistan, Israel can bomb Palestinian hideouts, why can’t India bomb the terrorist camps in Pakistan occupied Kashmir or in Pakistan!’21. The Kashmir-Palestinian equivalence is certainly not derived from an official Indian position. On the contrary, the similarity between the two regions is being used by the Muslim Hurriyat Conference to pressurize the Indian government to evacuate Kashmir in the way Israel evacuated Gaza22. The parallel between Palestine and Kashmir is therefore not essentially anti-Muslim and can on the contrary be instrumentalized to further the Muslim Kashmiri cause. The Islamophobia among Indian Americans, their focus on terrorism and their conflation of Palestine and Kashmir has to be understood as a by-product of the American dominant political rhetoric and of Jewish and Hindu long-distance nationalisms.
Conclusion:
However, the Indo-Jewish nexus in Washington, the Congressional Caucus on India and the Indian Americans do target Pakistan as a primary concern of U.S. foreign policy. This anti-Muslim streak has also permeated the political position of many Congressmen, who tend to lump together Israel and India’s concerns. The space devoted to the Indian American lobby in the press tends to give it undue importance in the process of political decision-making.
Islamophobia amongst Indian American lobbyists indicates that they try to gain influence by aligning themselves with what they perceive as the mainstream American discourse. On the other hand, one can wonder if this strategy will prove fruitful in a country that is increasingly critical of overly sectarian positions. Indeed, the recent sales of F-16 planes to Pakistan and the Pakistan-U.S. friendship since 2001 clearly indicate the limited influence of the Indian American Islamophobia and the Indian American lobbies.
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Originally Posted by BlackTerrel
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