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This broad­cast was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: This pro­gram con­cludes our FTR series on Hin­dut­va fas­cism (Hin­du nation­al­ist fas­cism). In pre­vi­ous pro­grams, we high­light­ed key fea­tures of the gov­er­nance of Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi, whose BJP is a polit­i­cal front for the RSS. Formed along the lines of Mus­solin­i’s Black­shirts in 1925, the RSS was the orga­ni­za­tion that assas­si­nat­ed Mahat­ma Gand­hi. (We have dis­cussed Modi, the RSS and the BJP in numer­ous broad­casts, includ­ing FTR #‘s 795, 889, 441, 442, 445, 988 and 989, 990, 991.)

In past dis­cus­sions of the RSS and BJP, we have not­ed the fol­low­ing:

• Mod­i’s polit­i­cal for­tunes were boost­ed with sup­port and appar­ent financ­ing from Pierre Omid­yar, who also helped finance the rise of the OUN/B fas­cist suc­ces­sor orga­ni­za­tios in Ukraine.
• Modi and his BJP are viewed with great favor by Bre­it­bart king­pin, for­mer Trump cam­paign man­ag­er and advis­er Steve Ban­non. A num­ber of Trump’s busi­ness asso­ciates in India are asso­ci­at­ed with the BJP.
• Bernie Sanders’ prospec­tive Vice-Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Tul­si Gab­bard helped arrange the details for Mod­i’s Amer­i­can vis­it and is net­worked with the RSS.
• The above-men­tioned Tul­si Gab­bard is a mem­ber of the Hare Krish­na cult, as is her hus­band, her in-laws, her par­ents and her Con­gres­sion­al staff.
• Gab­bard is high­ly regard­ed by Modi admir­er Steve Ban­non as well.
• Gab­bard was seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered for a cab­i­net posi­tion by Team Trump.
• Under Modi, anti-Mus­lim vio­lence has dra­mat­i­cal­ly accel­er­at­ed, jour­nal­is­tic and civ­il free speech has been atten­u­at­ed, oppo­nents of the gov­ern­ment have faced var­i­ous forms of retal­i­a­tion and oppres­sion, jour­nal­ists and activists crit­i­cal of Modi/BJP/RSS have been mur­dered, a vir­u­lent­ly anti-Mus­lim cler­ic has been appoint­ed head of Uttar Pradesh (Indi­a’s largest province), vot­ing machines have appar­ent­ly been tam­pered with, and Indi­ans have expressed pos­i­tive feel­ings about mar­tial law. BJP mem­bers have cel­e­brat­ed Gand­hi’s mur­der.

In this pro­gram, we posi­tion the ideological/political tile of Hin­dut­va fas­cism in the mosa­ic of what free­lance Dan­ish jour­nal­ist Hen­rik Kruger (author of The Great Hero­in Coup: Drugs, Intel­li­gence and Inter­na­tion­al Fas­cism) and Kevin Coogan (author of Dream­er of the Day: Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al) call “The Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al.”

Begin­ning with review of ide­o­log­i­cal and oper­a­tional links between RSS Hin­dut­va fas­cists and the fol­low­ers of Hitler and Mus­soli­ni, we high­light key fea­tures of what may seem to many to be a clas­sic case of polit­i­cal “strange bed­fel­lows.” Key con­sid­er­a­tions in the Hitler/Mussolini/Hindutva fas­cist affin­i­ty include:

1. Oppo­si­tion to the British Empire (as con­sti­tut­ed), admi­ra­tion for the domes­tic agen­das of the Fuehrer and Il Duce, as well as the mil­i­tary prowess shown by the Euro­pean Axis nations: “. . . . In the decades pri­or to that momen­tous event, senior RSS mem­bers had direct links to both Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Ger­many. Part of the RSS’ fas­ci­na­tion with these total­i­tar­i­an regimes was their shared oppo­si­tion to the British Empire — how­ev­er, it went far beyond that. The RSS (as well as mul­ti­tudes of oth­er Hin­du nation­al­ists) admired the way Mus­soli­ni and Hitler reor­ga­nized their respec­tive nations so quick­ly from the wreck­age of war to build a pow­er­ful econ­o­my and mil­i­tary under the ban­ner of patri­o­tism and nation­al­ism. . . .”
2. The stud­ied nature of the Hindutva/Hitler/Mussolini affin­i­ty: ” . . . . Marzia Caso­lari, an Ital­ian schol­ar who stud­ied Indi­an pol­i­tics, once wrote of RSS’ con­nec­tions with Euro­pean fas­cism: The exis­tence of direct con­tacts between the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the [Ital­ian] Fas­cist regime, includ­ing Mus­soli­ni, and Hin­du nation­al­ists demon­strates that Hin­du nation­al­ism had much more than an abstract inter­est in the ide­ol­o­gy and prac­tice of fas­cism. The inter­est of Indi­an Hin­du nation­al­ists in fas­cism and Mus­soli­ni must not be con­sid­ered as dic­tat­ed by an occa­sion­al curios­i­ty, con­fined to a few indi­vid­u­als; rather, it should be con­sid­ered as the cul­mi­nat­ing result of the atten­tion that Hin­du nation­al­ists… focused on Ital­ian dic­ta­tor­ship and its leader. To them, fas­cism appeared to be an exam­ple of con­ser­v­a­tive rev­o­lu­tion. . . .”
3. Belief in the com­mon, mytho­log­i­cal “Aryan” ori­gins of India and Ger­many: ” . . . . Much of Nazi ide­ol­o­gy and imagery came from the sym­bols and his­to­ry of ancient India – indeed, the infa­mous Nazi swasti­ka was based on a Hin­du sym­bol of strength and good for­tune. More­over, the leg­endary his­to­ry (some would say, myth) of the inva­sion of pre­his­toric India by the mys­te­ri­ous ‘Aryan’ tribes would (cen­turies lat­er) pro­vide Hitler with his notion of a ‘super mas­ter race’ that was des­tined to dom­i­nate the world. . . .”
4. The enthu­si­as­tic embrace of Hitler and Mus­soli­ni by V.D. Savarkar, the ide­o­log­i­cal founder of Hin­dut­va fas­cism and the pri­ma­ry archi­tect of Gand­hi’s assas­si­na­tion: ” . . . . Per­haps there was no greater admir­er of Hitler and Mus­soli­ni in India than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, anoth­er lead­ing mem­ber of RSS.In a speech deliv­ered in 1940 (after the Sec­ond World War had com­menced), Savarkar said: There is no rea­son to sup­pose that Hitler must be a human mon­ster because he pass­es off as a Nazi or Churchill is a demigod because he calls him­self a Demo­c­rat. Nazism proved unde­ni­ably the sav­ior of Ger­many under the set of cir­cum­stances Ger­many was placed in. . . .”
5. The Hin­du Mahasab­ha’s sup­port for a Hitler/RSS con­junc­tion: ” . . . . Indeed, many Hin­du nation­al­ists also derid­ed Gand­hi for oppos­ing Nazism and fas­cism. In 1939, a spokesman for the Hin­du Mahasab­ha (Hin­du Par­ty) inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed Ger­many with Indi­an cul­ture and peo­ple. ‘Germany’s solemn idea of the revival of the Aryan cul­ture, the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the Swasti­ka, her patron­age of Vedic learn­ing and the ardent cham­pi­onship of the tra­di­tion of Indo-Ger­man­ic civ­i­liza­tion are wel­comed by the reli­gious and sen­si­ble Hin­dus of India with a jubi­lant hope,’ the spokesman blus­tered. ‘Only a few Social­ists head­ed by… Nehru have cre­at­ed a bub­ble of resent­ment against the present gov­ern­ment of Ger­many, but their activ­i­ties are far from hav­ing any sig­nif­i­cance in India.’ He added: ‘Germany’s cru­sade against the ene­mies of Aryan cul­ture will bring all the Aryan nations of the world to their sens­es and awak­en the Indi­an Hin­dus for the restora­tion of their lost glo­ry. . . .’ ”
6. Oth­er RSS lead­ers saw use­ful sim­i­lar­i­ties in the eth­nic chau­vin­ist phi­los­o­phy of both Hitler and Hin­dut­va fas­cism. ” . . . . Anoth­er senior RSS mem­ber, Mad­hav Sadashiv Gol­walkar, also praised Nazism and believed the ide­ol­o­gy should be applied to India. ‘Ger­man race pride has now become the top­ic of the day,’ he wrote. ‘To keep up the puri­ty of the race and its cul­ture, Ger­many shocked the world by her purg­ing the coun­try of the Semit­ic Races — the Jews. Race pride at its high­est has been man­i­fest­ed here. Ger­many has also shown how well-nigh impos­si­ble it is for races and cul­tures, hav­ing dif­fer­ences going to the root, to be assim­i­lat­ed into one unit­ed whole, a good les­son for us in Hin­dus­tan [India] to learn and prof­it by.’ Gol­walkar enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly advo­cat­ed for an India dom­i­nat­ed by Hin­dus. ‘There are only two cours­es open to the for­eign ele­ments, either to merge them­selves in the nation­al race and adopt its cul­ture, or to live at its mer­cy so long as the nation­al race may allow them to do so and to quit the coun­try at the sweet will of the nation­al race,’ he wrote. . . . ”
7. The eth­nic ide­o­log­i­cal par­a­digm of Hin­dut­va fas­cism and Nazism meld well: ” . . . . If one were to replace ‘Hin­du’ with ‘Ger­man,’ Golwalkar’s words would match Hitler’s rhetoric almost exact­ly. . . .”
8. Savarkar also saw Nazi and RSS eth­nic the­o­ry and pol­i­cy as con­verg­ing:  ” . . . . Savarkar also spelled out why Hin­dus should rule India and oth­ers should either be expelled or merged into the Hin­du major­i­ty. ‘The Aryans who set­tled in India at the dawn of his­to­ry already formed a nation, now embod­ied in the Hin­dus,’ he wrote. ‘Hin­dus are bound togeth­er not only by the love they bear to a com­mon father­land and by the com­mon blood that cours­es through their veins and keeps our hearts throb­bing and our affec­tion warm but also by the of the com­mon homage we pay to our great civ­i­liza­tion, our Hin­du cul­ture. . . .”

The late Sav­it­ri Devi was an embod­i­ment of the Hindu/Nazi/Aryan ide­o­log­i­cal con­ver­gence. Devi has been among the ele­ments syn­the­siz­ing Hin­dut­va fas­cism with the con­tem­po­rary “Alt-Right.” Devi has been the focal point of renewed inter­est:

1. ” . . . . I filed her as a curios­i­ty at the back of my mind, until the ris­ing tide of extreme-right pol­i­tics in Europe and Amer­i­ca threw up the name ‘Sav­it­ri Devi’ once again. It isn’t hard these days to find dis­cus­sions of Sav­it­ri Devi’s books on neo-Nazi web forums, espe­cial­ly The Light­ning and the Sun, which expounds the the­o­ry that Hitler was an avatar — an incar­na­tion — of the Hin­du god Vish­nu, and Gold in the Fur­nace, which urges true believ­ers to trust that Nation­al Social­ism will rise again. The Amer­i­can extreme-right web­site Counter-Cur­rents hosts an exten­sive online archive of her life and work. . . .”
2. More about the resus­ci­ta­tion of Devi: ” . . . . Her views are reach­ing a wider pub­lic, too, thanks to Amer­i­can alt-right lead­ers such as Richard Spencer and Steve Ban­non, for­mer Trump chief strate­gist and chair of Bre­it­bart News, who have tak­en up the account of his­to­ry as a cycli­cal bat­tle between good and evil — a the­o­ry she shared with oth­er 20th Cen­tu­ry mys­ti­cal fas­cists. Dark met­al bands and Amer­i­can right-wing radio sta­tions also roar about the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hin­du mythol­o­gy, which Sav­it­ri Devi believed that Hitler was once des­tined to bring to an end. . . . ”
3. The psy­cho­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal foun­da­tion of the Aryan/Hindutva con­ver­gence is neat­ly summed up in the BBC Mag­a­zine arti­cle we excerpt: ” . . . . Sav­it­ri Devi her­self is almost for­got­ten in India now, but the Hin­du nation­al­ism she espoused and helped to pro­mote is in the ascen­dant, much to the con­cern of her nephew, the vet­er­an left-wing jour­nal­ist Suman­ta Baner­jee.  ‘In her book A Warn­ing to the Hin­dus, which came out in 1939, she advised the Hin­dus to cul­ti­vate a ‘spir­it of organ­ised resis­tance through­out Hin­du­dom,’ he says. ‘The tar­gets of this resis­tance were the Mus­lims, who were a threat, accord­ing to her, to the Hin­dus. And this is the same fear that is being echoed today.’ . . .” 
4. More about the dynam­ics behind the “Alt-Right”/Hindutva con­ver­gence: ” . . . . Hin­dut­va is the offi­cial ide­ol­o­gy of Prime Min­ster Naren­dra Mod­i’s rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty, which claims that Mus­lims and sec­u­lar­ists have under­mined the strength of the Hin­du nation. Though the par­ty’s offi­cial spokes­men con­demn vio­lence, the riots that led to the tear­ing down of the Babri Mosque at Ayo­d­hya in 1992 and the cur­rent waves of attacks — some­times fatal — by vig­i­lante groups on Mus­lims and dis­senters tell a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. . . . ”
5. High­light­ing the nature of the ide­o­log­i­cal sim­i­lar­i­ty between Nazi eth­nic pol­i­cy and Hin­dut­va fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy: “In the US, racism, anti-com­mu­nism and Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist notions about the impend­ing apoc­a­lypse have togeth­er pre­pared the ground for the far right’s flir­ta­tion with occult Nazism and Hin­du prophe­cies. And as in India, the tra­di­tion­al rul­ing major­i­ty’s fear of los­ing pow­er has been an effec­tive recruit­ing tool. . . .”

In addi­tion to the posi­tion of Hin­dut­va fas­cism in the Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al , we exam­ine Pierre Omid­yar, his espousal of neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic doc­trine, his sup­port for Mod­i’s Hin­dut­va fas­cists and his sup­port (along with U.S. intel­li­gence cut-outs like the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy and the Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment) for the Ukrain­ian OUN/B suc­ces­sor orga­ni­za­tions like Pravy Sek­tor, Svo­bo­da and the Azov Bat­tal­ion.

In FTR #889, among oth­er pro­grams, we high­light­ed Omi­da­yar’s devo­tion to the Aus­tri­an school of eco­nom­ic the­o­ry.

The political/economic con­text of Omid­yar’s efforts can be seen as a “neo-lib­er­al” flank­ing maneu­ver: putting “free-mar­ket” forces in pow­er and the West­ern and South­east­ern flanks of Rus­sia and Chi­na. Those two nations con­sti­tute much of what geo-politi­cians call “The Earth Island” or “World Island.”

Omid­yar’s neo-lib­er­al, Aus­tri­an eco­nom­ic school can be seen in Mod­i’s enthu­si­as­tic recep­tion by Sil­i­con Val­ley movers and shak­ers, at the same time that he is mov­ing  to weak­en Indi­a’s child  labor laws.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: 

• The Omid­yar-owned Hon­ololu Civ­il Beat­’s curi­ous cov­er-up of Tul­si Gab­bard’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Hin­dut­va fas­cist Hare Krish­na cult.
• The par­tic­i­pa­tion of Indi­an sol­diers in the Wehrma­cht and Waf­fen SS dur­ing World War II.
• Tul­si Gab­bard’s co-spon­sor­ship of a bill that would label oppo­nents of Ukraine’s entrance into the EU as “ter­ror­ists.”
• Omid­yar jour­nal­is­tic pro­tege Glenn Green­wald had Andrew “Weev” Aueren­heimer at his par­ty cel­e­brat­ing Green­wald and Lau­ra Poitras’s receipt of the pres­ti­gious Polk Award. Wee­v’s name has been bandied about in con­nec­tion with the [alleged] hack­ing of DNC e‑mails. We note that Weev is appar­ent­ly res­i­dent in Ukraine. ” . . . . [GOP oper­a­tive Peter] Smith also reached out to ‘Guc­cifer 2.0’—an alias the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty has linked to Russ­ian state hackers—and was advised to seek the help of a white nation­al­ist hack­er who lives in Ukraine. . . . [Alt-Right media fig­ure Charles] John­son said he also sug­gest­ed that Smith get in touch with Andrew Aueren­heimer, a hack­er who goes by the alias ‘Weev’ and has col­lab­o­rat­ed with John­son in the past. . . .”

1a. Palash R. Ghosh presents a detailed analy­sis of the evo­lu­tion of the fascist/Hindu nation­al­ist link. Note the affin­i­ty of RSS thinkers for the eth­nic chau­vin­ism man­i­fest­ed by Hitler.

“Hin­du Nationalist’s His­tor­i­cal Links to Fas­cism and Nazism” by Palash R. Ghosh; Inter­na­tion­al Busi­ness Times; 3/6/2012.

. . . . The BJP has a very inter­est­ing his­to­ry — offi­cial­ly formed in 1980, its his­to­ry can be traced much fur­ther back to the pre-1947 era when Hin­du nation­al­ists not only demand­ed an inde­pen­dent India, but one com­plete­ly dom­i­nat­ed by Hin­dus.

The cur­rent BJP is the suc­ces­sor of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) par­ty, which itself was the polit­i­cal arm of the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh, a group that espoused open­ly mil­i­tant Hin­du activism and the sup­pres­sion of minori­ties in India. . . .  .

. . . . What may sur­prise many in the West is that some of the most promi­nent fig­ures of RSS deeply admired Fas­cism and Nazism, the two total­i­tar­i­an move­ments that swept through Europe at the time. . . .

. . . . In the decades pri­or to that momen­tous event, senior RSS mem­bers had direct links to both Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Ger­many. Part of the RSS’ fas­ci­na­tion with these total­i­tar­i­an regimes was their shared oppo­si­tion to the British Empire — how­ev­er, it went far beyond that. The RSS (as well as mul­ti­tudes of oth­er Hin­du nation­al­ists) admired the way Mus­soli­ni and Hitler reor­ga­nized their respec­tive nations so quick­ly from the wreck­age of war to build a pow­er­ful econ­o­my and mil­i­tary under the ban­ner of patri­o­tism and nation­al­ism.

With respect to Hitler and Nazism, the links to India and Hin­duism were deep­er and more pro­found.

Much of Nazi ide­ol­o­gy and imagery came from the sym­bols and his­to­ry of ancient India – indeed, the infa­mous Nazi swasti­ka was based on a Hin­du sym­bol of strength and good for­tune. More­over, the leg­endary his­to­ry (some would say, myth) of the inva­sion of pre­his­toric India by the mys­te­ri­ous “Aryan” tribes would (cen­turies lat­er) pro­vide Hitler with his notion of a “super mas­ter race” that was des­tined to dom­i­nate the world.

Dur­ing World War II, some Indi­an nation­al­ists received explic­it sup­port from Ger­man Nazis — in fact, some Indi­an sol­diers even served in Hitler’s armies and in the noto­ri­ous SS.

Marzia Caso­lari, an Ital­ian schol­ar who stud­ied Indi­an pol­i­tics, once wrote of RSS’ con­nec­tions with Euro­pean fas­cism: The exis­tence of direct con­tacts between the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the [Ital­ian] Fas­cist regime, includ­ing Mus­soli­ni, and Hin­du nation­al­ists demon­strates that Hin­du nation­al­ism had much more than an abstract inter­est in the ide­ol­o­gy and prac­tice of fas­cism. The inter­est of Indi­an Hin­du nation­al­ists in fas­cism and Mus­soli­ni must not be con­sid­ered as dic­tat­ed by an occa­sion­al curios­i­ty, con­fined to a few indi­vid­u­als; rather, it should be con­sid­ered as the cul­mi­nat­ing result of the atten­tion that Hin­du nation­al­ists… focused on Ital­ian dic­ta­tor­ship and its leader. To them, fas­cism appeared to be an exam­ple of con­ser­v­a­tive rev­o­lu­tion.

Per­haps there was no greater admir­er of Hitler and Mus­soli­ni in India than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, anoth­er lead­ing mem­ber of RSS.

In a speech deliv­ered in 1940 (after the Sec­ond World War had com­menced), Savarkar said: There is no rea­son to sup­pose that Hitler must be a human mon­ster because he pass­es off as a Nazi or Churchill is a demigod because he calls him­self a Demo­c­rat. Nazism proved unde­ni­ably the sav­ior of Ger­many under the set of cir­cum­stances Ger­many was placed in.

Savarkar crit­i­cized Nehru for his staunch oppo­si­tion to fas­cism.

Who are we to dic­tate to Ger­many… or Italy to choose a par­tic­u­lar form of pol­i­cy of gov­ern­ment sim­ply?” Savarkar rhetor­i­cal­ly asked.

“Sure­ly Hitler knows bet­ter than Pan­dit Nehru does what suits Ger­many best. The very fact that Ger­many or Italy has so won­der­ful­ly recov­ered and grown so pow­er­ful as nev­er before at the touch of Nazi or Fas­cist mag­i­cal wand is enough to prove that those polit­i­cal ‘isms’ were the most con­ge­nial ton­ics their health demand­ed.”

Indeed, many Hin­du nation­al­ists also derid­ed Gand­hi for oppos­ing Nazism and fas­cism. In 1939, a spokesman for the Hin­du Mahasab­ha (Hin­du Par­ty) inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed Ger­many with Indi­an cul­ture and peo­ple.

Germany’s solemn idea of the revival of the Aryan cul­ture, the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the Swasti­ka, her patron­age of Vedic learn­ing and the ardent cham­pi­onship of the tra­di­tion of Indo-Ger­man­ic civ­i­liza­tion are wel­comed by the reli­gious and sen­si­ble Hin­dus of India with a jubi­lant hope,” the spokesman blus­tered.

“Only a few Social­ists head­ed by… Nehru have cre­at­ed a bub­ble of resent­ment against the present gov­ern­ment of Ger­many, but their activ­i­ties are far from hav­ing any sig­nif­i­cance in India.”

He added: “Germany’s cru­sade against the ene­mies of Aryan cul­ture will bring all the Aryan nations of the world to their sens­es and awak­en the Indi­an Hin­dus for the restora­tion of their lost glo­ry.

While the RSS was not explic­it­ly anti-Semit­ic (large­ly because India nev­er had a large Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion), Savarkar even praised Hitler’s treat­ment of the Jews (at least before the death camps and ovens became known to the pub­lic at large).

In 1938, dur­ing the time of accel­er­at­ing anti-Jew­ish leg­is­la­tion in Ger­many, Savarkar sug­gest­ed a sim­i­lar fate for India’s Mus­lims.

A nation is formed by a major­i­ty liv­ing there­in,” he declared. “What did the Jews do in Ger­many? They being in minor­i­ty were dri­ven out from Ger­many.”

Anoth­er senior RSS mem­ber, Mad­hav Sadashiv Gol­walkar, also praised Nazism and believed the ide­ol­o­gy should be applied to India.

Ger­man race pride has now become the top­ic of the day,” he wrote.

“To keep up the puri­ty of the race and its cul­ture, Ger­many shocked the world by her purg­ing the coun­try of the Semit­ic Races — the Jews. Race pride at its high­est has been man­i­fest­ed here. Ger­many has also shown how well-nigh impos­si­ble it is for races and cul­tures, hav­ing dif­fer­ences going to the root, to be assim­i­lat­ed into one unit­ed whole, a good les­son for us in Hin­dus­tan [India] to learn and prof­it by.

Gol­walkar enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly advo­cat­ed for an India dom­i­nat­ed by Hin­dus.

“There are only two cours­es open to the for­eign ele­ments, either to merge them­selves in the nation­al race and adopt its cul­ture, or to live at its mer­cy so long as the nation­al race may allow them to do so and to quit the coun­try at the sweet will of the nation­al race,” he wrote.

“That is the only sound view on the minori­ties prob­lem. That is the only log­i­cal and cor­rect solu­tion. That alone keeps the nation­al life healthy and undis­turbed… The for­eign races in Hin­dus­tan must either adopt the Hin­du cul­ture and lan­guage, must learn to respect and hold in rev­er­ence Hin­du reli­gion, must enter­tain no idea but those of the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the Hin­du race and cul­ture, i.e., of the Hin­du nation and must lose their sep­a­rate exis­tence to merge in the Hin­du race, or may stay in the coun­try, whol­ly sub­or­di­nat­ed to the Hin­du Nation, claim­ing noth­ing, deserv­ing no priv­i­leges, far less any pref­er­en­tial treat­ment not even citizen’s rights.”

If one were to replace “Hin­du” with “Ger­man,” Golwalkar’s words would match Hitler’s rhetoric almost exact­ly.

Savarkar also spelled out why Hin­dus should rule India and oth­ers should either be expelled or merged into the Hin­du major­i­ty.

“The Aryans who set­tled in India at the dawn of his­to­ry already formed a nation, now embod­ied in the Hin­dus,” he wrote.“Hindus are bound togeth­er not only by the love they bear to a com­mon father­land and by the com­mon blood that cours­es through their veins and keeps our hearts throb­bing and our affec­tion warm but also by the of the com­mon homage we pay to our great civ­i­liza­tion, our Hin­du cul­ture.

Dur­ing a speech giv­en to Indi­an mil­i­tary offi­cers and Indi­an nation­al­ist Sub­hash Chan­dra Bose in Dres­den, Ger­many, in 1943, Hitler him­self report­ed­ly said: You are for­tu­nate hav­ing been born in a coun­try of glo­ri­ous cul­tur­al tra­di­tions and a colos­sal man­pow­er. I am impressed by the burn­ing pas­sion with which you and your Neta­ji [Bose] seek to lib­er­ate your coun­try from for­eign dom­i­na­tion. Your Neta­ji’s sta­tus is even greater than mine. While I am the leader of 80 mil­lion Ger­mans, he is the leader of 400 mil­lion Indi­ans. In all respects he is a greater leader and a greater gen­er­al than myself. I salute him, and Ger­many salutes him. It is the duty of all Indi­ans to accept him as their führer and obey him implic­it­ly. I have no doubt that if you do this, his guid­ance will lead India very soon to free­dom.”

After the defeat of Fas­cist Italy and Nazi Ger­many in World War II, Hin­du nation­al­ists dis­tanced them­selves from the total­i­tar­i­an regimes of Europe.

How­ev­er, their calls for a “Hin­du India” have only strength­ened over the years. In the present cli­mate, the RSS and BJP are both gen­er­al­ly opposed to the Mus­lim pres­ence and express extreme hos­til­i­ty toward Indi­a’s prin­ci­pal Mus­lim rival, Pak­istan.

More­over, Nazism, and the mys­ti­cism of Adolf Hitler’s warped philoso­phies, remain an obses­sion with many Indi­ans, almost 80 years after Der Führer came to pow­er in Ger­many.

1b. Next, we under­score the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Indi­an nation­als as sol­diers in the Free Indi­an Legion, ini­tial­ly allied with the Wehrma­cht, and then with the Waf­fen SS, as well as the armies of Impe­r­i­al Japan.

“Indi­an Legion;” wikipedia.com

. . . . The Indi­an Legion (Ger­man: Indis­che Legion), offi­cial­ly the Free India Legion (Ger­man: Legion Freies Indi­en) or Infantry Reg­i­ment 950 (Indi­an) (Ger­man: Infan­terie-Reg­i­ment 950 (indis­ches), I.R. 950) and lat­er the Indi­an Vol­un­teer Legion of the Waf­fen-SS (Ger­man: Indis­che Frei­willi­gen Legion der Waf­fen-SS), was a mil­i­tary unit raised dur­ing the Sec­ond World War in Nazi Ger­many. Intend­ed to serve as a lib­er­a­tion force for British-ruled India, it was made up of Indi­an pris­on­ers of war and expa­tri­ates in Europe. Because of its ori­gins in the Indi­an inde­pen­dence move­ment, it was known also as the “Tiger Legion”, and the “Azad Hind Fauj”. Ini­tial­ly raised as part of the Ger­man Army, it was part of the Waf­fen-SS from August 1944. Indi­an inde­pen­dence leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose ini­ti­at­ed the legion’s for­ma­tion, as part of his efforts to win Indi­a’s inde­pen­dence by wag­ing war against Britain, when he came to Berlin in 1941 seek­ing Ger­man aid. The ini­tial recruits in 1941 were vol­un­teers from the Indi­an stu­dents res­i­dent in Ger­many at the time, and a hand­ful of the Indi­an pris­on­ers of war who had been cap­tured dur­ing the North Africa Cam­paign. It would lat­er draw a larg­er num­ber of Indi­an pris­on­ers of war as vol­un­teers.

Though it was ini­tial­ly raised as an assault group that would form a pathfind­er to a Ger­man-Indi­an joint inva­sion of the west­ern fron­tiers of British India, only a small con­tin­gent was ever put to its orig­i­nal intend­ed pur­pose. A hun­dred legion­naires were para­chut­ed into east­ern Iran under Oper­a­tion Bajadere and infil­trat­ed into Baluchis­tan Province to under­take sab­o­tage oper­a­tions, which they report­ed­ly did suc­cess­ful­ly, but with insignif­i­cant effect. A small con­tin­gent, includ­ing much of the Indi­an offi­cer corps and enlist­ed lead­er­ship, was trans­ferred to the Indi­an Nation­al Army in South-East Asia. The major­i­ty of the troops of the Indi­an Legion were only ever sta­tioned in Europe in non-com­bat duties, in the Nether­lands and in France until the Allied inva­sion. They saw action in the retreat from the Allied advance across France, fight­ing most­ly against the French Resis­tance. One com­pa­ny was sent to Italy in 1944, where it saw action against British and Pol­ish troops and under­took anti-par­ti­san oper­a­tions.

At the time of the sur­ren­der of Nazi Ger­many in 1945, the remain­ing men of the Indi­an Legion made efforts to march to neu­tral Switzer­land over the Alps, but these efforts proved futile as they were cap­tured by Amer­i­can and French troops and even­tu­al­ly shipped back to India to face charges of trea­son. Because of the uproar the tri­als of Indi­ans who served with the Axis caused among civil­ians and the mil­i­tary of British India, the legion mem­bers’ tri­als were not com­plet­ed. . . .

1c. The essence and gen­er­a­tion of the Nazi/Hindu/“Aryan” mytho­log­i­cal dynam­ic is beyond the scope of the present pro­gram. We have cov­ered it in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #172, deal­ing with Sav­it­ri Devi, the focal point of a recent BBC pod­cast.

From BBC Mag­a­zine, attached to the above-named pod­cast:

“Sav­it­ri Devi: the Mys­ti­cal Fas­cist Being Res­ur­rect­ed by the Alt-Right” by Maria Mar­ga­ro­nis; BBC Mag­a­zine; 10/29/2017.

Sav­it­ri Devi, a mys­ti­cal admir­er of Hitler and a cat-lov­ing devo­tee of the Aryan myth, seemed des­tined to fade into obscu­ri­ty after her death 25 years ago. But thanks to the rise of the extreme right, her name and her image now crop up online more and more, writes Maria Mar­ga­ro­nis.

In 2012, brows­ing the web­site of Greece’s Gold­en Dawn par­ty for an arti­cle I was writ­ing, I stum­bled on a pic­ture of a woman in a blue silk sari gaz­ing at a bust of Hitler against a blaz­ing sun­set sky.

What was this appar­ent­ly Hin­du woman doing on the site of an open­ly racist par­ty devot­ed to expelling all for­eign­ers from Greece? I filed her as a curios­i­ty at the back of my mind, until the ris­ing tide of extreme-right pol­i­tics in Europe and Amer­i­ca threw up the name “Sav­it­ri Devi” once again.

It isn’t hard these days to find dis­cus­sions of Sav­it­ri Devi’s books on neo-Nazi web forums, espe­cial­ly The Light­ning and the Sun, which expounds the the­o­ry that Hitler was an avatar — an incar­na­tion — of the Hin­du god Vish­nu, and Gold in the Fur­nace, which urges true believ­ers to trust that Nation­al Social­ism will rise again. The Amer­i­can extreme-right web­site Counter-Cur­rents hosts an exten­sive online archive of her life and work.

Her views are reach­ing a wider pub­lic, too, thanks to Amer­i­can alt-right lead­ers such as Richard Spencer and Steve Ban­non, for­mer Trump chief strate­gist and chair of Bre­it­bart News, who have tak­en up the account of his­to­ry as a cycli­cal bat­tle between good and evil — a the­o­ry she shared with oth­er 20th Cen­tu­ry mys­ti­cal fas­cists.

Dark met­al bands and Amer­i­can right-wing radio sta­tions also roar about the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hin­du mythol­o­gy, which Sav­it­ri Devi believed that Hitler was once des­tined to bring to an end.

Who was Sav­it­ri Devi, and why are her ideas being res­ur­rect­ed now? Despite the sari and the name she was a Euro­pean, born Max­imi­ani Por­tas to an Eng­lish moth­er and Greek-Ital­ian father in Lyon in 1905.

From an ear­ly age, she despised all forms of egal­i­tar­i­an­ism. “A beau­ti­ful girl is not equal to an ugly girl,” she told an inter­view­er sent by the Holo­caust denier Ernst Zun­del in 1978.

Swept up by Greek nation­al­ism, she arrived in Athens in 1923 at the same time as thou­sands of refugees dis­placed after Greece’s dis­as­trous mil­i­tary cam­paign in Asia Minor at the end of World War One.

She blamed the West­ern allies for Greece’s humil­i­a­tion, and for what she saw as the unjust­ly puni­tive terms imposed on Ger­many by the Treaty of Ver­sailles. In Sav­it­ri’s mind, Greece and Ger­many were both vic­tims, denied the legit­i­mate aspi­ra­tion of unit­ing all their peo­ple in one ter­ri­to­ry. That view, com­bined with a pas­sion­ate anti-Semi­tism which she claimed she learned from the Bible, led her to iden­ti­fy her­self ear­ly on as a Nation­al Social­ist.

Hitler was Ger­many’s cham­pi­on but, she said, his desire to erad­i­cate Europe’s Jews and restore the “Aryan race” to its right­ful posi­tion of pow­er made him her “Fuhrer” too.

In com­mon with anti-Semit­ic thinkers since the 18th cen­tu­ry, Sav­it­ri blamed Judeo-Chris­tian­i­ty for destroy­ing the glo­ry that was Greece and the Aryans’ myth­i­cal ancient utopia. In the ear­ly 1930s she sailed for India in search of a liv­ing ver­sion of Europe’s pagan past, con­vinced that the caste sys­tem, by for­bid­ding inter­mar­riage, had pre­served pure Aryans there. (For­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who vis­it­ed India in the 1970s, shared her mis­con­cep­tion.)

So unusu­al was the sight of a Euro­pean woman trav­el­ling fourth class by train that she was placed under sur­veil­lance by the British colo­nial author­i­ties. But Sav­it­ri had lit­tle to do with the British in India until World War Two, when she passed infor­ma­tion she gleaned from them to the Japan­ese. She learned Indi­an lan­guages, mar­ried a Brah­min (whom she believed to be an Aryan like her­self), and forged an elab­o­rate syn­the­sis of Nazism and Hin­du myth, in which Hitler was a “man against time” des­tined to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga and ush­er in a new gold­en age of Aryan suprema­cy.

In Kolkata in the 1930s, Sav­it­ri worked for the Hin­du Mis­sion, now a qui­et neigh­bour­hood shrine but in those days a cen­tre for Hin­du nation­al­ist cam­paign­ing and mis­sion­ary activ­i­ty. The politi­ci­sa­tion of Indi­a’s reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties under the British had helped to fos­ter the growth of the Hin­dut­va move­ment, which argued that the Hin­dus were the true heirs of the Aryans and that India was an essen­tial­ly Hin­du nation.

Sav­it­ri offered her ser­vices to the Mis­sion’s direc­tor, Swa­mi Satyanan­da, who (like many Indi­ans before inde­pen­dence) shared her admi­ra­tion for Hitler and allowed her to mix Nazi pro­pa­gan­da with her talks on Hin­du iden­ti­ty. She trav­elled the coun­try lec­tur­ing in Hin­di and Ben­gali, salt­ing her talks about Aryan val­ues with quo­ta­tions from Mein Kampf.

In 1945, dev­as­tat­ed by the fall of the Third Reich, she returned to Europe to work for its restora­tion. Her arrival in Eng­land is described in her book Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged God­dess, a chil­dren’s fable whose hero­ine is a cat-lov­ing Nazi like her­self.

The hero­ine, Heliodo­ra, “had no ‘human feel­ings’ in the ordi­nary sense of the word,” she wrote. “She had been, from her very child­hood, much too pro­found­ly shocked at the behav­iour of man towards ani­mals... to have any sym­pa­thy for peo­ple suf­fer­ing on account of their being Jews.”

Sav­it­ri was always clear that she pre­ferred ani­mals to humans. Like Hitler, she was a veg­e­tar­i­an. She viewed the world as if from a great dis­tance, car­ing more for what she saw as the deep pat­terns of nature than for human lives. Vis­it­ing Ice­land, she spent two nights on the slopes of Mount Hekla as it erupt­ed. “The orig­i­nal sound of cre­ation is ‘Aum’,” she wrote. “The vol­cano says every two or three sec­onds, ‘AUM! AUM! AUM!’ And the Earth is trem­bling under your feet all the time.”

In 1948, Sav­it­ri man­aged to enter occu­pied Ger­many, where she dis­trib­uted thou­sands of pro-Nazi leaflets, bear­ing the words: “One day we shall rise and tri­umph again! Hope and wait! Heil Hitler!”

She said years lat­er that she was glad to be arrest­ed by the British occu­pa­tion author­i­ties because it brought her clos­er to her jailed Nazi “com­rades”. Dur­ing her impris­on­ment, which was cut short by her hus­band’s inter­ven­tion through the Indi­an gov­ern­ment, she grew close to a for­mer Belsen wardress con­demned as a war crim­i­nal, “a beau­ti­ful-look­ing woman, a blonde of about my age.” Sav­it­ri’s sex­u­al­i­ty has been the sub­ject of some spec­u­la­tion. Her mar­riage to Asit Mukher­jee was alleged­ly celi­bate because they were not of the same caste; the Nazi financier Fran­coise Dior, niece of the fash­ion design­er, claimed to have been her lover.

In her lat­er years, Sav­it­ri Devi returned to India, where she seemed to feel most at home. Liv­ing in a flat above a garage on a qui­et Del­hi street she devot­ed her­self to the neigh­bour­hood cats, going out every morn­ing to feed them bread and milk bedecked in the gold jew­ellery tra­di­tion­al­ly worn by mar­ried Hin­du women.

She died at a friend’s house in Eng­land in 1982. Her ash­es were laid to rest with full fas­cist hon­ours, pur­port­ed­ly next to those of Amer­i­can Nazi leader George Lin­coln Rock­well.

Sav­it­ri Devi her­self is almost for­got­ten in India now, but the Hin­du nation­al­ism she espoused and helped to pro­mote is in the ascen­dant, much to the con­cern of her nephew, the vet­er­an left-wing jour­nal­ist Suman­ta Baner­jee.

“In her book A Warn­ing to the Hin­dus, which came out in 1939, she advised the Hin­dus to cul­ti­vate a ‘spir­it of organ­ised resis­tance through­out Hin­du­dom,’ ” he says. “The tar­gets of this resis­tance were the Mus­lims, who were a threat, accord­ing to her, to the Hin­dus. And this is the same fear that is being echoed today.”

Hin­dut­va is the offi­cial ide­ol­o­gy of Prime Min­ster Naren­dra Mod­i’s rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty, which claims that Mus­lims and sec­u­lar­ists have under­mined the strength of the Hin­du nation. Though the par­ty’s offi­cial spokes­men con­demn vio­lence, the riots that led to the tear­ing down of the Babri Mosque at Ayo­d­hya in 1992 and the cur­rent waves of attacks — some­times fatal — by vig­i­lante groups on Mus­lims and dis­senters tell a dif­fer­ent sto­ry.

In the US, racism, anti-com­mu­nism and Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist notions about the impend­ing apoc­a­lypse have togeth­er pre­pared the ground for the far right’s flir­ta­tion with occult Nazism and Hin­du prophe­cies.

And as in India, the tra­di­tion­al rul­ing major­i­ty’s fear of los­ing pow­er has been an effec­tive recruit­ing tool.

“Since the mid­dle of the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion the sin­gle most impor­tant fac­tor in the minds of peo­ple who joined the Tea Par­ty was the idea that white peo­ple were being shoved aside,” says researcher and writer Chip Berlet. “The far right and organ­ised white suprema­cist groups have both been buoyed up by fear among many white cit­i­zens in the Unit­ed States that they’re being dis­placed and humil­i­at­ed.”

Sav­it­ri Devi’s work forms part of the his­to­ry of both Indi­a’s Hin­du nation­al­ists and the Euro­pean and Amer­i­can extreme right. Her flam­boy­ant, eccen­tric writ­ings con­tain — unvar­nished and uncen­sored — all their key ideas: that human beings can be divid­ed into “races” which should be kept sep­a­rate; that cer­tain groups are supe­ri­or to and more enti­tled than oth­ers; that these groups are under threat; and that the dark times in which we live will only end when they again take pow­er, return­ing us to a myth­i­cal gold­en age.

2. In FTR #889, we set forth Pierre Omid­yar’s efforts in bring­ing both the OUN/B suc­ces­sor groups to pow­er in Ukraine, as well as his sup­port for the BJP and Naren­dra Mod­i’s suc­cess­ful elec­toral efforts.

 The CIA as Orga­nized Crime by Dou­glas Valen­tine; Clar­i­ty Press [SC]; Copy­right 2017 by Dou­glas Valen­tine; ISBN 978–0‑9972870–2‑8; pp. 130–131.

[This is excerpt­ed from an inter­view author Dou­glas Valen­tine gave with Ryan Daw­son.] VALENTINE: The Cen­tre UA is the orga­ni­za­tion that Pierre Omid­yar co-fund­ed two years ago. Cen­ter UA is an umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion that is linked to var­i­ous activist projects and NGOs, one of which is the New Cit­i­zen cam­paign which, accord­ing to the Finan­cial Times, “played a big role in get­ting the protest up and run­ning.” . . . .  Why did Omid­yar prove will­ing to come on board with such known regime-change spon­sors as USAID and NED –to say noth­ing of Soros? Where else is he [co]operating? It should nev­er be for­got­ten that this is the kind of com­pa­ny he keeps. Why?

While Omid­yar was born in Paris and his par­ents moved to Mary­land from France when he was young, he appears to be of Iran­ian descent. His moth­er was a Far­si lin­guist and as of 2016, is pres­i­dent of the Roshan Cul­tur­al Her­itage Insti­tute. As bizarre as it may seem, lit­tle infor­ma­tion is pub­licly avail­able about his father, includ­ing his name. He appar­ent­ly was a urol­o­gist or sur­geon at Johns Hop­kins, and if that was the case, his name should be avail­able. The secre­cy sug­gests some sort of intel­li­gence con­nec­tion, per­haps to the type of upper class emi­gre cir­cles the CIA cul­ti­vates in Amer­i­ca. It is fact that the CIA sta­tion in Iran served as one of the Agen­cy’s main bases for agent oper­a­tions against the Sovi­ets. . . .

. . . . Maybe Pierre Omid­yar is acces­si­ble to US for­eign pol­i­cy agen­cies due to some pri­or fam­i­ly con­nec­tions. Maybe that accounts for why he spent a few hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars (a pal­try sum for a bil­lion­aire) to hep put the Cen­tre UA in place in Ukraine: so the CIA could run oper­a­tions against the Rus­sians, like it did out out of Iran. I’ve nev­er heard any expla­na­tion from inquis­i­tive Glenn Green­wald. When it comes to his sug­ar dad­dy’s mon­key busi­ness, Green­wald’s pol­i­cy is pure “seeno, hear no, speak no evil.” Why? Is that the quid pro quo for the hand­out?

What I do know is that bil­lion­aires like Omid­yar and George Soros and the Rockefellers–to say noth­ing of USAID and NED–aren’t fund­ing polit­i­cal action out of the good­ness of their hearts. They’re doing it to advance their inter­ests. That’s why an orga­ni­za­tion like Cen­tre UA is cre­at­ed: to advance the inter­est of its finan­cial back­ers. to me it looks like a CIA-facil­i­tat­ed mech­a­nism to cre­ate a cri­sis in Ukraine and exploit it. The 40 NGOs it coor­di­nates are per­fect­ly placed to pro­vide cov­er for covert CIA polit­i­cal action. . . .

3a. Epit­o­miz­ing the amoral per­spec­tive lurk­ing behind the very suc­cess­ful pub­lic rela­tions man­i­fest­ed by Big Tech is their court­ing of Naren­dra Modi.

“Naren­dra Modi, Indi­an Pre­mier, Courts Sil­i­con Val­ley to Try and Ease Nation’s Pover­ty” by Vin­du Goel; The New York Times; 9/27/2015.

Naren­dra Modi and Mark Zucker­berg have much in com­mon.

Mr. Modi, the prime min­is­ter of India, over­sees a nation of 1.25 bil­lion peo­ple. Mr. Zucker­berg, the chief exec­u­tive of Face­book, runs a social net­work with 1.5 bil­lion active users. Both see them­selves as glob­al lead­ers push­ing for broad social change, and both rou­tine­ly use social media to com­mu­ni­cate with their many mil­lions of fans.

On Sun­day, the two men engaged in a mutu­al admi­ra­tion ses­sion at Face­book’s Sil­i­con Val­ley head­quar­ters, with Mr. Modi field­ing pre­s­e­lect­ed ques­tions from a crowd of Face­book employ­ees and guests invit­ed by the Indi­an Embassy.

Mr. Modi praised social net­works like Face­book, Twit­ter and even China’s Wei­bo as use­ful tools for gov­ern­ing and diplo­ma­cy. . . .

. . . . Sil­i­con Val­ley has been eager to assist. . . . .

3b. We not­ed that Naren­dra Modi was polit­i­cal­ly evolved from the Hin­du nationalist/fascist milieu of the RSS, one of whose mem­bers mur­dered Gand­hi.)

In addi­tion, we have seen that Mod­i’s elec­tion was heav­i­ly but­tressed by Ebay’s Pierre Omid­yar, who has under­writ­ten Glenn Green­wald’s recent jour­nal­is­tic ven­tures and par­tial­ly bankrolled the 2014 Ukraine coup that brought the heirs of the OUN/B to pow­er.

Modi is imple­ment­ing the lais­sez-faire agen­da favored by Omid­yar, a cyn­i­cal “cor­po­ratist” agen­da that is poised to restore child labor in India.

The lais­sez-faire/­cor­po­ratist agen­da cham­pi­oned by Omid­yar and Modi is at one with the “aus­ter­i­ty” doc­trine pro­mul­gat­ed by the GOP, Ger­many, the IMF and the Under­ground Reich.

“Get to work, kids! And be sure to bring your wages home to your [unem­ployed] mom and dad.”

“The Modi Gov­ern­ment Is Send­ing Mil­lions of Kids Back into Exploita­tive Labour” by Rashme Seh­gal; Quartz; 5/4/2015.

An amend­ment to the Child Labour Pro­hi­bi­tion Act pro­posed by the Naren­dra Modi-led gov­ern­ment is about to undo years of hard-won progress in the area of child labour—and con­demn mil­lions of kids to exploita­tive employ­ment.

The amend­ment will allow chil­dren below the age of 14 to work in “fam­ily enter­prises”—a euphemism for indus­tries such as car­pet-weav­ing, bee­di–rolling, gem-pol­ish­ing, lock-mak­ing and match­box-mak­ing. The new norms will also apply to the enter­tain­ment indus­try and sports.

The amend­ment flies in the face of the Right to Edu­ca­tion Act (RTE), 2009, which guar­an­tees edu­ca­tion to every child. After the RTE came in, child labour dropped from 12.6 mil­lion in 2001 to 4.3 mil­lion in 2014. The amend­ment will undo much of that progress. It will also be a seri­ous set­back to all the work done by activists, such as Swa­mi Agnivesh and Nobel lau­re­ate Kailash Sat­yarthi, to res­cue chil­dren from bond­ed labour and exploita­tion.

Mirza­pur-based Shamshad Khan, pres­i­dent of the Cen­tre for Rur­al Edu­ca­tion and Devel­op­ment Action, calls the move “ret­ro­gres­sive.”

“All our cam­paigns to end bond­ed child labour, start­ing from the eight­ies, will go up in smoke,” Khan said. “Schools will be emp­tied out, and poor chil­dren in states like Bihar, Jhark­hand and Uttar Pradesh will be back to work­ing in sheds and makeshift fac­to­ries that will all go by the nomen­cla­ture of ‘fam­ily enter­prises.’ The worst-hit will be the chil­dren of Dal­its, Mus­lims, trib­al fam­i­lies and those belong­ing to mar­gin­alised com­mu­ni­ties.”

The amend­ment can also be used to deny edu­ca­tion to the girl child, who will be sucked into all forms of house­work. Accord­ing to gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tics, male lit­er­acy lev­els in 2014 stood at about 82%, while female lit­er­acy lev­els were as low as 64%. The school drop-out rate for girls is almost dou­ble the rate for boys.

An uncon­sti­tu­tional change

Ban­daru Dat­ta­treya, India’s min­is­ter of labour and employ­ment, announced in ear­ly April that the gov­ern­ment planned to intro­duce amend­ments to the Child Labour Pro­hi­bi­tion Act in the cur­rent ses­sion of Par­lia­ment.

His min­istry, while seek­ing the amend­ments, said the Act will not apply to chil­dren help­ing fam­i­lies in home-based work, and espe­cially fam­i­lies work­ing in agri­cul­ture and ani­mal-rear­ing. The objec­tive of these amend­ments, accord­ing to min­istry offi­cials, is to help chil­dren nur­ture a spir­it of entre­pre­neur­ship. They will par­tic­u­larly help chil­dren of fam­i­lies cur­rently liv­ing at sub­sis­tence lev­els, the min­istry claims.

Child rights activists say the move will ben­e­fit fac­tory own­ers in India’s cow belt. Their prof­its will esca­late four­fold as chil­dren could be made to work longer hours and paid less than adults.

...

Enakshi Gan­guly Thukral of HAQ Cen­tre for Child Rights believes this is an attempt by the Modi gov­ern­ment to ensure a size­able chunk of the pop­u­la­tion remains in the infor­mal sec­tor, deprived of min­i­mum wages and social secu­ri­ty.

“The gov­ern­ment is not in a posi­tion to pro­vide jobs for mil­lions of young peo­ple,” said Thukral. “Such a ret­ro­grade step will help ensure mil­lions of kids remain illit­er­ate and, there­fore, unem­ploy­able.”

Bad old days again

Major cut­backs in the 2015 bud­get in the areas of health, women and chil­dren, and edu­ca­tion will fur­ther com­pound this prob­lem. Thukral said labour offi­cials are already guilty of under-report­ing child labour. “But once child labour is per­mit­ted under one guise or the oth­er, then even a min­i­mum [lev­el] of account­abil­ity will cease to exist,” she said.

Labour offi­cials at the dis­trict lev­el are empow­ered to file cas­es against employ­ers hir­ing chil­dren but few employ­ers are ever con­victed. Sta­tis­tics from the labour min­istry for 2004–2014 show that there have been 1,168 con­vic­tions for chil­dren employed in haz­ardous indus­tries with about Rs83 lakh col­lected in fines. This mon­ey has been des­ig­nated for the reha­bil­i­ta­tion and wel­fare of child labour. How­ever, in this peri­od, only Rs5 lakh was dis­bursed from this fund.

Khan recalls the peri­od before the RTE Act, when dalals (touts) open­ly knocked on the doors of rich seths (mer­chants or busi­ness­men) to sell traf­ficked chil­dren.

“In the eight­ies, kids were being paid a dai­ly wage of as lit­tle as Rs4 per day,” he said. “We kept up pres­sure on the gov­ern­ment, insist­ing that all out-of-school kids be cat­e­gorised as child labour. This open traf­fick­ing of kids declined sharply with the RTE Act. If the BJP (Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty) suc­ceeds in intro­duc­ing such a dan­ger­ous amend­ment, we will be back to those old days.” . . . .

4. In FTR #991, among oth­er pro­grams, we chron­i­cled Gab­bard’s pro­found, long-stand­ing involve­ment with a branch of the Hare Krish­na cult head­ed by Chris But­ler.

In a Huff­in­g­ton Post sto­ry about Gab­bard and the But­ler branch of the Hare Krish­nas, the author men­tioned that he could find no record of Gab­bard hav­ing made a pub­lic pro­nounce­ment of being an acolyte of But­ler. We thought this strange, since an archive about the But­ler cult con­tained an embed­ded video in which Gab­bard describes But­ler, aka Jagad Guru Sid­dhaswaru­panan­da Parama­ham­sa, as her guru.

At the time of record­ing, we though that “Civ­il Beat” was a fea­ture of the Huff­in­g­ton Post. It turns out that there is much more to the sto­ry.

Civ­il Beat was car­ried by the Huff­in­g­ton Post, how­ev­er it was an ear­ly jour­nal­is­tic ven­ture of Pierre Omid­yar, whose bet­ter known jour­nal­is­tic effort, First Look Media, enfolds The Inter­cept, the media voice for Nazi fel­low-trav­el­er Glenn Green­wald.

Omid­yar, as we have chron­i­cled in FTR #889, among oth­er pro­grams, helped finance the rise of Naren­dra Modi, as well as the Maid­an coup in Ukraine. Omid­yar is heav­i­ly net­worked with the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy and the Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment. Omid­yar’s bru­tal “phil­an­thropic” efforts are head­ed by Roy Proster­man, a vet­er­an of the Phoenix pro­gram in Viet­nam.

The odd inabil­i­ty of the Civ­il Beat writer to find Gab­bard’s eas­i­ly accessed pub­lic announce­ment of her feal­ty to But­ler is more com­pre­hen­si­ble in light of Omid­yar’s joint spon­sor­ship of the pub­li­ca­tion and Mod­i’s regime in India.

“Pierre Omid­yar;” Wikipedia.

....In 2010, Omid­yar launched online an inves­tiga­tive report­ing news ser­vice, Hon­olu­lu Civ­il Beat, cov­er­ing civic affairs in Hawaii. The site has been named Best News Web­site in Hawaii for three con­sec­u­tive years.[18] On Sep­tem­ber 4, 2013, Hon­olu­lu Civ­il Beat start­ed a part­ner­ship with The Huff­in­g­ton Post, launch­ing the weblog’s lat­est region­al addi­tion, Huff­Post Hawaii.... 

5a. Gab­bard, her fam­i­ly, her fiance and in-laws-to-be and their respec­tive milieux are inex­tri­ca­bly linked with a branch of the Hare Krish­na cult head­ed by Chris But­ler, aka Jagad Guru Sid­dhaswaru­panan­da Parama­ham­sa.

“Tul­si Gab­bard Still Dogged by Krish­na Cult Rumors” by Rul Kaneya; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 3/16/2015.

. . . . “Civ­il Beat found” no evi­dence that Tul­si Gab­bard is — or ever was — a But­ler devo­tee. And we could find no record of her ever speak­ing pub­licly about it. [This is patent­ly untrue, as we shall see below–D.E.]. . .

5b. The Huff­in­g­ton Post arti­cle above dis­counts any pub­lic pro­nounce­ments by Gab­bard about But­ler being her guru. These are con­tra­dict­ed in the third embed­ded video con­tained in the post below. At around 3:45, she cred­its Chris But­ler, aka Jagad Guru Sid­dhaswaru­panan­da Parama­ham­sa with being her guru.

Tul­si Gab­bard, Cult Born And Raised.

5c. After Bhak­tivedan­ta Swami’s death, ISKCON (Hare Krish­na Cult) frag­ment­ed into many dif­fer­ent fac­tions. They receive mon­ey from opaque sources. We won­der if the Bor­mann net­work may be behind that mon­ey?

“Mur­der, Sex and Free Food” by Frank Bures; The Port­land Mer­cury; 6/21/2001.

. . . . Nori Muster worked for 10 years as ISKCON’s pub­li­cist, before quit­ting in dis­gust. She thinks the group is beyond hope.

“They don’t like to let peo­ple know there’s real­ly as much chaos as there is,” she says of ISKCON’s lead­er­ship. In 1997, Muster pub­lished her book, Betray­al of Spir­it, about her 10 years in ISKCON’s pub­lic­i­ty depart­ment.

“What you have now is just a dying thing that’s kind of lin­ger­ing,” she says. “It would take a lot for them to turn it around at this point. And that would involve being more hon­est about their his­to­ry, open­ing up more about their finances, and where they get their mon­ey from, which we still can’t fig­ure out They (the lead­ers) have access to lots of mon­ey and they chan­nel it where they want it.”

6. Omid­yar jour­nal­is­tic pro­tege Glenn Green­wald had Andrew “Weev” Aueren­heimer at his par­ty cel­e­brat­ing Green­wald and Lau­ra Poitras’s receipt of the pres­ti­gious Polk Award. Wee­v’s name has been bandied about in con­nec­tion with the [alleged] hack­ing of DNC e‑mails. We note that Weev is appar­ent­ly res­i­dent in Ukraine.

Andrew Aueren­heimer: Guest at Glenn Green­wald’s par­ty; appar­ent res­i­dent of Ukraine.

“GOP Researcher Who Sought Clin­ton Emails Had Alt-Right Help” by Ben Schreckinger; Politi­co; 07/11/2017.

The saga of Peter Smith’s quest to obtain 33,000 emails delet­ed by Hillary Clinton—an effort now at the cen­ter of intrigue swirling around the Don­ald Trump campaign’s ties to Russia—keeps get­ting weird­er.

In his Hail Mary bid to tip the elec­tion to Trump, the Repub­li­can pri­vate equi­ty exec­u­tive enlist­ed two con­tro­ver­sial alt-right activists to help him under­stand the work­ings of the inter­net and make con­tacts in Trump’s orbit, accord­ing to inter­views with those involved and emails obtained by Politi­co.

The activists, the jour­nal­ist-turned-entre­pre­neur Charles John­son and his for­mer busi­ness part­ner Pax Dick­in­son, agreed to help Smith’s quixot­ic mis­sion, which failed to track down copies of Clinton’s emails. John­son is a polar­iz­ing fig­ure who was banned from Twit­ter in 2015 after pro­mot­ing an effort to “take out” a Black Lives Mat­ter activist but main­tains ties to White House offi­cials. Smith also reached out to “Guc­cifer 2.0”—an alias the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty has linked to Russ­ian state hackers—and was advised to seek the help of a white nation­al­ist hack­er who lives in Ukraine. . . .

. . . . John­son said he also sug­gest­ed that Smith get in touch with Andrew Auern­heimer, a hack­er who goes by the alias “Weev” and has col­lab­o­rat­ed with John­son in the past. . . .

6. A House Res­o­lu­tion with Gab­bard as one of its cospon­sors: House Res 447:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-resolution/447/text

This one’s passed the House, and is ful­ly sup­port­ive of Ukraine mov­ing into alliance with the EU, con­demn­ing those that dis­agree as ter­ror­ists, etc.