SASI
South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) is a radical communist-backed, self-proclaimed human rights organization. Its co-founders are Prachi Patankar and Balamurali Natrajan both of whom are members of FOIL (Forum of Inquilabi Leftists). FOIL is an extremist organization that has links with Islamic extremists like the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR (Council on American- Islamic Relations), IAMC (Indian American Muslim Council), and ICNA (Islamic Council of North America). Members of FOIL have links with the convicted Ghulam Nabi Fai who was convicted by the FBI for charges of being an agent of Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and served two years in prison. SASI routinely teams up with Equality Labs and dodgy organization called Stand with Kashmir. SASI is funded by SINGH (Secular India’s National Growth and Harmony) Foundation. It is the fundraising arm of FOIL.
According to their Meduim.com page, SASI is “An NYC-based organizing group in solidarity with progressive social movements and self-determination in South Asia”. SASI supports and encourages Kashmir separatism and strongly believes in Defund Police. According to their website, “We believe that whatever the race or ethnicity of an individual cop, the police as a whole are a white supremacist organization and fundamentally about controlling and harming Black and brown bodies.” SASI is not only anti-Hindu, anti-India they are also anti-US. They concern themselves only with Islamophobia, on their website they write “We believe that religious intolerance is a toxic, systematized framework that occurs in all faith traditions and has caused mass violence globally. We also believe that Islamophobia is particularly reinforced and weaponized through the language of “war of terror” and deployed across South Asia.” In their call to uproot religious intolerance, SASI has only attacked Hinduism while the other two major religions which have a history of slavery, oppression, colonialism, barbarism, and forcible conversions have never been attacked. As per their website “We believe that climate change is intertwined with capitalism, caste, war, militarism, and occupation – all of which contribute to polluting our environment, deepening inequities and harming all of us.”
SASI refrain from calling themselves Indians or Hindus and often address themselves as “South Asians” including on their website. According to the blog by Prachi Patankar, Ghosts of Yogas Past and Present, yoga is Islamophobic and Hinduism is a constructed religion in the 18th and 19th centuries during the British era and that Brahmins and upper-caste Hindus, often by violent means, have appropriated the diverse sects, practices, beliefs, and rituals that existed for centuries.
Click on each image to read in detail.
While SASI has raised its voice for Pashtuns, Baloch, and Sindhis in Pakistan, SASI has never raised the issue of Hindus and Sikh girls in Pakistan who are routinely abducted, raped, and forcibly converted to their abductors and rapists or the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus in the 1990s at the hands of Pakistan-sponsored terrorists. They are also anti-Brahmins and often use Brahminism to attack Hinduism while giving wrong interpretations of Hindu scriptures or resort to complete and total misinterpretation of Hindu scriptures.
California Textbook controversy
SASI along with FOIL, CAG (Coalition Against Genocide), CSFH (Campaign to Stop Funding Hate), DFN (Dignity Freedom Network), and FOSA (Friends of South Asia) launched an attack on Hinduism and supported the skewed portrayal of Hinduism and India in school textbooks in the state of California. Prachi Patankar along with other FOIL members ran propaganda and a fake news campaign against the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi after the 2002 Godhra riots, lobbying and appealing to deny him a US visa. Even though PM Modi was found not guilty by the Supreme Court of India, the left-sponsored anti-Muslim conspiracy theories by SASI and similar anti-Hindu organizations still accuse PMModi of anti-Muslims ‘pogrom’ while giving clean-chit to Pakistan sponsored terrorism in India and globally. In 2018 SASI co-sponsored Equality Labs’ ‘Caste in the United States’ – a report produced with the least facts and most anti-Hindu propaganda. A.Kumar has called out Equality Labs hatred for Hindus and biasedness of the Caste report here.
Ram Mandir digital ad display in Times Square
Kashmir
Pulwama Attack
SASI blames India and Hindus for the terror attack on Indian armed forces in Pulwama that killed 40 soldiers. Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility for the attack. Jaish was declared a terrorist organization by the United States Treasury Department. In their statement dated 17th February 2019, SASI went to lie about Hindus attacking Muslims in Kashmir and the rest of India. They said “Shortly following the Pulwama attack, terrifying violence erupted against Kashmiri Muslims in the Jammu region of Jammu-Kashmir (JK) as well as several states in India. Even though a curfew was imposed on Jammu, Hindutva mobs were allowed to roam freely and attack Muslim colonies, targeting homes and burning vehicles. The violence is ongoing and its full extent is still unclear.” Furthermore, SASI blames India and Hindus for the Pulwama attack “But this did not come from nowhere, and much of the news coverage has been devoid of historical context. Efforts to understand the current crisis cannot ignore the structure of the military occupation, including the denial of Kashmiri sovereignty and self-determination, the routine experience of facing paramilitary forces, and the consequent growing record of human rights abuses, tortures, detainments, and collective punishments against Kashmiris by the Indian military.” In the whole statement, no terror group or Pakistan has been mentioned despite Jaish-e-Mohammed taking responsibility for the attack.
Instead of mitigating mob violence, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leaders are using a tragedy to manipulate a contentious general election. With little evidence, the BJP has been full-throated in its call for and promise of “retaliation” against Pakistan — which has always translated into continuing the illegal occupation in Kashmir. On Feb 14th, a sitting member of the Delhi legislative assembly – Kapil Mishra – tweeted a call for genocide. Pro-military demonstrations have been organized in many Indian states, some of which have turned into anti-Muslim mob violence. In the United States, Indian-American Hindu right students groups have been holding pro-Indian army vigils.SASI Statement on the Pulwama Attack: End the Indian Occupation and Free Kashmir, 17th February 2019
2008 Mumbai blasts
In a piece titled Let Us Not Forget – ‘After Mumbai, Which Way Forward? A Public Dialogue’ originally published in Kafila , SASI while expressing solidarity with the victims, says “The two countries emerged together in an instance of troubled freedom; their futures are just as entangled as their present and their pasts. So let us make sure that Mumbai is not used as a pretext to escalate tensions between the two countries;….” SASI in the entire piece does not blame Pakistan-sponsored Laskar-r-Taiba or Pakistani Ajmal Kasab or Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi but instead paints Pakistan as a victim of terrorism alongside India. SASI then goes on to say “Let us not forget pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat took place only six years ago. Today, Indian Muslims are compelled to condemn events in Mumbai in the loudest voice lest they be deemed its perpetrators. And they have done so in no uncertain terms. But why must they be asked to continually demonstrate that they too belong to the nation?” In the statement, SASI equates India’s Bajrang Dal with Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-taiba, “Let us boldly call for the rights and pain of victims of all violence to be acknowledged and addressed be it state violence or that perpetrated by groups like Bajrang Dal, Lakshar-e-Taiba, or their ilk.”
Fallout with Sadhana
SASI had a fallout with Sadhana and Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR). SASI accused them to be soft on Hindutva and giving a platform to Indians who chanted ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai (Hail Mother India). In a statement on 8th January 2020, SASI said:
We are fighting against Hindu fascism that has successfully normalized its poisonous tenets into a larger Indian cultural fabric. Groups like the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) and Vishva Hindu Parishad-America (VHP-A) are some of the oldest Indian diasporic organizations in the country. They have been working as cultural institutions for decades, and have gained a lot of ground in organizing Hindu American communities. There have been many violent consequences to this community work — — normalization of caste practices and RSS logics, invisibilization of Dalit and Dalit-American contributions and labor, and mythologizing of Kashmir’s history and politics…….For a Hindu organization to undermine Dalitbahujan and Muslim leadership at a time when these communities are facing genocide is wrong.SASI’s statement on fallout with anti-Hindu group Sadhana and HfHR, 8th January 2020
SASI also accused Sadhana of ” — decentering Muslim, Dalitbahujan and Adivasi voices in favor of a sanitized and inaccurate understanding of Hindutva that privileges Brahminism.” While attacking Sadhana SASI goes on to peddle lies about Hindu scriptures without any evidence to back up their argument and make anti-Brahmin statements without including thousand years of social and political effects of Islamic and Christian British influences on Indian society.
Hindutva as a political force is a relatively new ethnonationalist phenomenon, but please know that Hindu fascism itself predates Hindutva in the form of Brahminism. The Manusmriti, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Ramayana — all provide countless examples of caste hegemony, Brahminical patriarchy, and contempt for Bahujans all in the name of teaching dharma, or duty to society.orical violence without making that the burden of those impacted by it. Being committed to annihilating caste must include listening and respecting thousands of years of Dalitbhaujan and Adivasi resistance, with well-established assertions that Hindu scriptures cannot be the liberatory framework for challenging caste.SASI’s statment on fallout with anti-Hindu group Sadhana and HfHR, 8th January 2020
The statement ends with a sentence “It is worth remembering that two regions under Indian control — Assam and Kashmir — have been declared to be on high alert for genocide by international human rights groups.” SASI includes Assam as a region under Indian control. This is the same viewpoint Delhi riots accused Sharjeel Imam had and also made to the students of AMU on cutting the chicken neck (Siliguri Corridor) that will alienate North-East from the rest of India.
Inputs Source : STOP HINDU HATE
