Other Hindu groups -- including members of the 'untouchables' caste -- entered the fray on Mr. Witzel's behalf. The Dalit Freedom Network, an advocacy group for untouchables, wrote to the education board that the proposed Vedic and Hindu Education Foundation changes reflected 'a view of Indian history that softens...the violent truth of caste-based discrimination in India...Do not allow politically-minded revisionists to change Indian history.[unquote] (36)
The textbook controversy was useful to establish DFN's credentials as a legitimate humanitarian advocacy group. This is quite typical of how lobbying groups establish credibility in the US.
[END OF EXCERPT]
Ref: From Page 225 of Breaking India:
Kancha Ilaiah: ‘We Want to Kill Sanskrit’
Another important ideologue being globally promoted by DFN as ‘the leading Dalit rights campaigner’, is Kancha Ilaiah. DFN awarded him a post doctoral fellowship.[49] One of his books, Why I am not a Hindu, is prescribed in introductory courses on Hinduism at many American universities. Koenraad Elst, a Belgian Indologist, reviewed the book and found parallels with the anti-Jewish caricatures in Nazi literature:
These anti-Hindu forces are exploiting the Aryan Invasion Theory to the hilt, infusing crank racism in vast doses into India’s body politic. Read, e.g. Kancha Ilaiah’s book Why I Am Not a Hindu (Calcutta, 1996), sponsored by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, with its anti-Brahmin cartoons: move the hairlocks of the Brahmin villains from the back of the head to just in front of their ears, and you get exact replicas of the anti-Semitic cartoons from the Nazi paper, Der Stumer.[50]
Equally vehement is Ilaiah’s hatred for Sanskrit. Indian Express reports that he made a strong presentation before India’s National Conference on Human Rights, saying, ‘We want to kill Sanskrit in this country.’[51] In an interview he also advocated, ‘We should close down the IITs and the IIMs as they pander to the upper-caste economy of the country.’[52] Ilaiah’s work illustrates how the Dalit movement has absorbed the rhetoric of the Dravidian separatists, such as demonizing Sanskrit and Hinduism as being the roots of oppression. Much of India’s shared heritage is made out to be the root of Dalit grievances.
The Christianity Today magazine lists among Ilaiah’s achievements that, ‘he recently testified at a widely-reported Congressional hearing in the USA,’ in which he blamed Hinduism for ‘the ongoing reality
of violence and discrimination against Dalits.’[53] In an interview with Christianity Today, he equated Hinduism with Nazism, and characterized it as ‘spiritual fascism’. His argument relies upon Hitler’s
misappropriation of Hindu symbols, for which he blames Hinduism.
‘Hinduism is a kind of spiritual fascism,’ he explains, ‘because the Hindu books say that Aryans wrote that, and Nazi Germany Hitler believed he belonged to an Aryan race’; and hence, ‘the symbols that Hindus and Aryan Germans used are the same, the swastika and the concept of a few people always being superior to the other . . . So Hinduism is a very spiritually fascist system and because of that our country has suffered in many ways.[54]
Ilaiah is routinely hosted by evangelical organizations to tour the United States, with the goal of building him up as a great leader of civil rights, and thereby upgrading his influence. For example, Texas based organization Gospel for Asia announced:
Gospel for Asia is pleased to host Dr Kancha Ilaiah, one of India’s most influential human rights leaders. . . . What Martin Luther King, Jr. meant to the civil rights movement in this country, Dr Ilaiah means to the civil rights movement in India today. . . . In his role as consultant to the All India Christian Council, he advises leaders on the socio-economic, religious, and political conditions among India’s
lower castes. [55]
