[R-G] Obama's Indian: The Many Faces of Sonal Shah

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad11072008.html>
Weekend Edition
November 7 / 9, 2008
The Many Faces of Sonal Shah
Obama's Indian

By VIJAY PRASHAD

Barack Obama has appointed John Podesta to run his transition. During
the lean years of the Bush administration, Podesta, native of Chicago,
ran a shadow cabinet for the Democrats. Since 2003, the home of this
government-in-exile has been the Center for American Progress (CAP), a
liberal think tank set-up to rival the Heritage Foundation and the
American Enterprise Institute. The money, about $10 million per year,
came from George Soros, Peter Lewis, Marion Sandler and Herb Sandler –
the main liberal financiers. CAP has its set of fellows. Many of them
worked in some capacity within the Clinton administration (where
Podesta was Chief of Staff). There are hard-nosed people like Rudy
deLeon (who went through every Defense secretariat in the Clinton
years) and Jeanne Lambrew (who served as a health analyst in the
National Economic Council during the waning years of the Clinton
administration). But there are also the fresh faces, young people who
came to Washington with glowing references from the Ivy League. Others
marched over from the Hill, after serving various terms as staff
members for the Democratic warhorses. They have been groomed to be
part of the next Democratic administration. Their hibernation is over.
Obama has called.

The likely suspects have picked up the phone and moved to the
transition headquarters. Among them is a former CAP fellow and now
Google employee, Sonal Shah. Shah is well known in the South Asian
American community, and is a fixture in the Washington liberal
circuit. The latter know her for her Democratic credentials, most of
which seem to lie somewhere between neo-liberalism and welfare
liberalism. The bleeding heart pauses, but then ticks again to the
tune of pragmatism. This is perfect material for the CAP, which is
hardly enthusiastic about the Democratic Leadership Council's total
commitment to triangulation (which means capitulation to
conservatism), but it is not averse to a little political calculus
itself. Shah, a product of the University of Chicago, shined her
corporate shoes at Anderson Consulting (who was Enron's accountant),
which probably made it easier for her to go into Clinton's Treasury
Department, where she helped Robert Rubin put a U. S. stamp on the
post-1997 Asian economic recovery. The corporate side was balanced
with an interest in the ideology of "giving back." When Bush took
office, Shah went to the Center for Global Development, and while
there joined her brother Anand in forming Indicorps. Knowing full well
the desire among many South Asian Americans to give back to their
homeland, the Shahs created an organization to help them go and
volunteer in India, to do for them what the Peacecorps did for young
liberals in the 1960s. Shah left the CAP to work for Goldman Sachs,
and then went to Google. Shah's story is not unlike that of most of
the CAP fellows, many of whom honed their dexterity at trying to
reconcile the irreconcilable, capital and freedom, private
accumulation and human needs.

But there is a less typical side to the Shah story. Born in Gujarat,
India, Shah came to the United States as a two-year old. Her father, a
chemical engineer, first worked in New York before moving to Houston,
and then moving away from his education toward the stock market. The
Shahs remain active in Houston's Indian community, not only in the
ecumenical Gujarati Samaj (a society for people from Gujarat), but
also in the far more cruel organizations of the Hindu Right, such as
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Overseas Friends of the BJP (the
main political party of the Hindu Right) and the Ekal Vidyalaya.
Shah's parents, Ramesh and Kokila, not only work as volunteers for
these outfits, but they also held positions of authority in them.
Their daughter was not far behind. She was an active member of the
VHPA, the U. S. branch of the most virulently fascistic outfit within
India. The VHP's head, Ashok Singhal, believes that his organization
should "inculcate a fear psychosis among [India's] Muslim community."
This was Shah's boss. Till 2001, Shah was the National Coordinator of
the VHPA.

In 2004, I ran into Shah at the South Asian Awareness Network
conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At an earlier panel I questioned
her links to the Hindu Right, and so asked people to be wary about her
organization, Indicorps. She was furious, and we had a bitter exchange
in the Green Room. But at no point did she deny her active connections
to the Hindu Right. Her brother, Anand, wrote to me not long after,
concerned that Indicorps, which he runs full-time from India, would be
tainted by our tussle. "I was curious about Sonal's own personal
relationship with the VHPA," I wrote back, "That sparked some concern
for me. Of course we are free to have our multiple associations, and
there is no expectation that all our affiliations necessarily
influence each other. That necessity is granted, although it is my
understanding that the VHPA is a very disciplined organization that
demands a lot from its members – notably congruence in all the work
that they do. Which is why I raised the question."

And so I raise the question again.

Don't Cry for her, Gujarat.

Gujarat was once a tolerant society, made vibrant by its role in the
Indian Ocean trade. People of all faiths lived there with the kind of
pre-modern conviviality that did not always include respect for each
other, but which did not at least dissolve into the kind of virulence
on display in recent years. Certainly, oppressed castes bore the full
brunt of an unequal social order, but even for them there was escape
into Islam and there was a history of protest against the madness of
caste rigidity. Gujarat gave us Gandhi, who went off to South Africa
to learn his politics and returned to his state in 1915 to incubate
the massive nation-wide movement he was to lead. In November 1917,
Gandhi launched a major campaign among the Gujarati peasantry at the
town of Godhra. He began his meeting there by tearing up the oath of
loyalty to the King, making it clear that the new grammar of Indian
politics did not require such obescience. From Godhra, charged
Gandhian activists went into the villages of Gujarat to organize the
peasantry against the many abuses of colonialism. The uprising that
resulted, historian David Hardiman points out, made the area "the
strongest center of rural nationalism in India." From Godhra, in 1917,
went the quiet fury of freedom.

In 2002, other elements came out of Godhra, showing us how different
today's Gujarat is from its own history. This time Godhra was the
flashpoint not for rural protest against tyranny, but for the forces
of Hindu fascism. A disputed train fire that killed fifty-eight people
(most of whom were activists of the Hindu Right) led to a massive
pogrom against impoverished Muslim families and modestly well-off
Muslim merchants. Even the normally reticent Human Rights Watch could
not hold back, and its report's title revealed not only the anger of
the investigators but also their own principle finding, "We have no
orders to save you" State Participation and Complicity in Communal
Violence in Gujarat (April 2002). The Hindu Right let loose its
warriors who killed two thousand people and displaced several thousand
more. The state apparatus either stood by or actively participated in
the torment. Investigators who traced the line of violence routinely
met people who told them, "They killed my whole family." The carnage
was ghastly. Historian Tanika Sarkar wrote of a "breathless climate of
terror," as people fled their homes for poorly managed relief camps,
afraid not only of the organized mob but also of the police. People
couldn't sleep, afraid that their tormentors would come again. Chief
Minister Narendra Modi came to one area and told the terrified
residents, "You will be taken care of." The language chills: he might
have meant that the state will protect them, or that it would punish
them. His scowl and his brazen defense of his mobs was no comfort.

Gujarat remains a manufacturing center, but in the 1970s the social
basis of industry changed. From the 1910s to the 1970s, the textile
factories hired large numbers of workers, most of whom were members of
the Gandhian trade union, the Majoor Mahajan Sangh (MMS). They had
their various grouses with the system, but most had grown accustomed
to the rhythms of industrial society. When a major riot between Hindus
and Muslims broke out in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad in 1969, the
police moved their headquarters to the MSS office, and the union and
the state jointly helped to calm things down. But in the 1970s, the
large textile factories snuffed their fires, sending their workers
from the formal into the informal economy. The social infrastructure
of the towns and cities collapsed. Workers went into the piecework
economy, driving the economic fortunes of the big businessmen through
the roof but at the cost of the workers' health and social dignity.
Globalization arrived in Gujarat.

The disgruntled workers regrouped out of the MSS into the arms of the
newly aggressive Hindu Right, which welcomed their grievances and
reshaped their dignity around hatred of Muslims and oppressed castes.
The riot of 1993 was a dress rehearsal for the pogrom of 2002.
Lumpen-capitalism led to the social collapse of Gujarat. In mid-March
2002, a few weeks after the pogrom, sociologist Jan Breman went to
meet MSS's secretary general, who sorrowfully recounted his inability
to reach the police during the killings. It is a sign of the eclipse
of the Gandhian platform in favor of what has been called the Vedic
Taliban.

The Vedic Taliban includes not only the BJP, the party in power during
the Gujarat killings, but also a host of organizations known as the
Sangh Parivar. These include groups whose U. S. affiliate drew in
Sonal Shah's parents, and to which she also gave her time and energy.
This is not in the distant past. In 2004, while at the CAP, Sonal Shah
gave the keynote address in Miami for the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of
the USA. The Ekal Vidyalaya is an organization given over to
"education" in tribal areas of India. It is the policy of the Ekal
Vidyalaya to organize tribal peoples into the "Hindu community" and to
eschew the Christianity and animism that many practice. The climate
created by the Ekal Vidyalaya and the VHP in the tribal areas of India
led to the recent massacres of Indian Christians. Sonal Shah's father
Ramesh is in charge of the Ekal Vidyalaya in the U. S. She didn't take
the time in Miami to raise these concerns. Rather she talked about her
Indicorps project, which has sent volunteers to work with groups like
Ekal Vidyalaya. The language of social justice and cultural rights
work well to cover over the fascism that is otherwise being promoted.

In 2004, the hard Right government in Gujarat honored Shah with the
Pride of Gujarat (Gujarat Garima) award. Sonal Shah could not attend,
but her brother was there, to get the award from Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee, in the presence of the venomous Narendra Modi.

Hold It In Your Heart.

Obama's campaign was monumental. The energy unleashed within the
country was something to behold. The small dissident wings of the
anti-war and anti-free trade movements had not been able to cultivate
such a massive wave, and even as many of us had our doubts about this
or that element of the Democratic agenda, it was hard to be unmoved by
the urgent enthusiasm of the people. Obama himself was super, a
disciplined candidate who not only carried the weight of history
lightly, but also made sure to remain unruffled by the riotous attacks
of the Republicans. Coming to power with an incredibly efficient
campaign, it is therefore all the more surprising that he had to turn
to the likes of Podesta to form his governing team.

But this is also no surprise. Podesta played a role in the mysterious
Democracy Alliance, the group of high rollers around the Democratic
Party who were frustrated with the Clinton theory of triangulation and
wanted a more robust liberalism to command their party (it was for a
time presided over by Rob McKay, the Taco Bell heir who gave some of
his millions to finance the San Francisco living wage battle). The
Democracy Alliance came together to bridge the gap between the two
arguments that tore at the Democratic Party in the Bush years. The
principled argument ran between those who pushed a more liberal
strategy and those who wanted to take Clintonian pragmatism to its
limit. The organizational argument took place between those who felt
that the Democratic Party should compete in all fifty states (Howard
Dean) and those who wanted to maintain the focus on the fourteen
competitive states (Rahm Emanuel). This was a bitter battle. Podesta's
calmness usefully held these two sections together. His CAP, in fact,
not only became a neutral ground for these two sections of the
Democratic Party, but it also had ambitions to link the Party to the
various progressive movements that lay on its outer rim and beyond.

Many of the Centers' ideas, however, strayed far from progressivism,
keener to be bold against its base (such as teacher's unions) than
against the world of finance. A recent study complained about teacher
absence in the public schools (ten days a year), something that
disproportionately impacted students in low-income neighborhoods. But
not a word about the ruin of social welfare by the Clinton White House
that resulted in the lack of institutions to shore up parents,
teachers and students in these neighborhoods. For our intrepid
liberals it is far easier to utilize their calculus of triangulation
to blame the teachers.

On foreign policy, the champions of humanitarian interventionism based
at the CAP remain confident, regardless of the failures in Afghanistan
and Iraq. These are blamed on Bush's incompetence rather than on the
exhaustion of U. S. imperialism. To revive their interventionist
fantasies, the CAP liberals use Darfur. It stiffens the spine. John
Prendergast holds the reins here, running the ENOUGH project of the
CAP. He is committed to the merits of doing something in Darfur, but
has little sense of the role that "Darfur" plays within the U. S. in
keeping the terminally ill concept of humanitarian interventionism
alive (for more on this, look for Mahmood Mamdani's Survivors and
Saviors, coming out in 2009). Right after Obama's election, Predergast
co-wrote a letter to the president-elect asking Obama to "lead a
concerted international peace surge for Sudan." This letter went out
just as violence increased in the Great Lakes region of Africa
(ground-zero for the Cell-Phone Wars of our day; the region is the
source of coltan, an essential element for cell-phones) and as
Israel's armies once more struck the civilian populations of Gaza. Not
a word from CAP on this. Nor on the Gujarat violence, or the killing
of the Christians by the Hindu Right. No humanitarian interventionism
when this affects U. S. imperial interests. Which is why Shah's own
far Right commitments in India are not contradictory to those of the
CAP liberals; many of them have similar commitments to the far Right
in Israel or in other parts of the world.

When asked to name his favorite books, Obama mentioned that one of
them is Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I encourage
him to go to his edition (mine is the Beacon Press one from 1957) and
turn to page 155. There he will find a simple sentence, "It has always
been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the
humiliation of their fellow-beings." The Hindu Right thrives on the
humiliation of Indian Muslims, Christians, and oppressed castes, and
it derives its social power from those who are survivors of the failed
experiment in globalization. Those millions, like myself, who feel a
joy in snubbing the Bush dynamic and the entire history of social
exclusion in the United States should demand that our hopes be held to
a higher standard. Not to the howling dogs, but to the doves.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian
History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College,
Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of
the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at:
vijay.prashad at trincoll.edu