[nukkad] Attack on IDRF: Little Method to Their Madness

[Gireesh Dixit - PCS <>]

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Without darkness there are no dreams. -Karla Kuban, novelist
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Attack on IDRF: Little Method to Their Madness

Beloo Mehra ~ Dec 11, 2002 

On November 20, 2002 a report accusing the India Development and Relief
Fund, a volunteer charitable organization which raises money in the United
States for projects in India, of funding hate was released in New Delhi with
much fanfare, and simultaneously carried by a variety of Left, Muslim, and
Christian web sites around the world. The attack against IDRF ("The Foreign
Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva") compiled in
the 91-page report is a rehash of much that the Forum of Indian Leftists
(FOIL) has published over the past five years. FOIL has been targeting IDRF
simply because IDRF has supported a variety of philanthropic and social work
including many undertaken by the RSS and its affiliates, and because IDRF
has volunteers and office-bearers who are affiliated with the VHPA, the
Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, and other overseas affiliates of the RSS (See my
essay on Sulekha: "A Left-Right Upper Cut to the RSS").  
The report is very explicit in its "single, simple conclusion": "IDRF funds
terrorism".  The report's authors include Girish Agrawal, Angana Chatterji,
Shalini Gera, Biju Mathew, Ali Mir, S. Ravi Rajan, and others, but the
person who presented it to the media was Biju Mathew, founding member of
FOIL. 
IDRF has been in operation since 1989, and is today considered to be one of
the most successful of Indian-American charitable organizations not
affiliated with a religious institution. Its low-overhead, all-volunteer,
shoestring operation makes it the successful and trusted organization that
it is. Its fundraising in 2001 of roughly two million dollars is a small
fraction of the total funds sent to India annually by the roughly two
million Indians and Indian-Americans in the U.S., and since 1989 its total
disbursement of funds to India is about $5.5 million.  Compare this to what
the variety of Church related organizations and Muslim philanthropic
organizations have spent in India the past 13 years, and the variety of
foreign NGOs have disbursed in India. 

IDRF's utility to most Indians/Indian Americans is that it offers an
alternative to the traditional religious/family channels of philanthropy, it
is public and audited, and donors can choose to contribute to humanitarian
projects of their choice (see IDRF.ORG). 
The release of the report, with the accompanying media hoopla, op-ed pieces
by the "secular, progressive" brigade, and petitions to the U.S. government,
sundry international organizations, etc., has brought much publicity to the
fabricators of the report presented by Sabrang Communications, the
publishers of "Communalism Combat" magazine. It has also brought a massive,
but largely unnoticed and unreported reaction from those in the community
who have some knowledge of what IDRF does, and how it does it. 

The essay below is the first attempt at informing the general public of the
nature and thrust of the anti-IDRF report.  It is my pleasure to present
Prof. Beloo Mehra's analysis of the methodology employed by the writers of
the Sabrang report. 

Ramesh Rao 

"The comprehension of meaning... lies not in the text itself, but in the
complex interaction between the author's intent and his/her performative
ability to encode that intent, and the receptor's intent and his/her
performative ability not only to decode the author's intent but to mesh
his/her own intent with the author's."[i] 

Late last month a report titled "The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and
American Funding of Hindutva"[ii] hit the cyber-world. Soon after that,
enough copies were sent out to corporations who contribute matching funds to
India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF), a Maryland based US charity,
asking them to stop "funding hate". This report jointly prepared by Sabrang
Communications of Mumbai, India and The South Asia Citizens Web of France
alleges that IDRF funds are being funneled to entities inciting communal
riots and persecution of minorities in India. 

Given the 'serious' nature of this report, one would expect that some
'serious' investigation must have been done for preparing this 91-page-long
report. One would also expect that such report would stand the rigor of a
critical academic deconstruction. This response to Sabrang report looks at
Chapter 1 that outlines the purpose, methodology, and organization of the
report. The emphasis is on understanding and critiquing the methods employed
by the researchers and writers of this report. The objective is to determine
if the methodology withstands a rigorous critical examination. This is
significant because without a sound methodological framework, the
conclusions of the report become highly suspect and even completely
unreliable. 

It is now well established in the fields of linguistics, mass communications
and media studies that texts are produced by socially situated speakers and
writers. Will this help explain some of the methods used and conclusions
reached by the writers of this report? 

In the first paragraph of the report, section 1.1. titled, "Purpose" the
last sentence reads, "The Foreign Exchange of Hate' establishes that the
IDRF is. ." Now anyone who has done any semi-academic writing knows that the
'purpose statement' is first and foremost about INVESTIGATION rather than
ESTABLISHMENT of facts. 

Chapter 1 is titled "Purpose, Methodology and Organization," but only one
page is devoted to these three sections. Authors then go on to present a two
full page "Summary of Findings" - something that is not mentioned in the
title. Why this deceit? Is the purpose to merely 'capture' the reader's
attention (like good writers do), or to 'sell' the readers to conclusions of
the report, before they even had a chance to evaluate the evidence? The
latter is significant because the purpose of this report is nothing less
than stopping the funding for a major Indian-American charity. This sort of
tactic clearly reveals the agenda of the writers and makes this report
appear more as propaganda rather than a result of serious inquiry. 

For a 91-page report, the entire methodology employed by the researchers and
writers is presented in one small paragraph in section 1.2. The authors
state that the report is based on "a careful study and analysis of more than
150 pieces of documentary evidence, almost three-quarters of which are those
published by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (henceforth, RSS or Sangh) and
its affiliates." A critical reader must ask a basic question -- What kind of
analysis was performed? 

Since there is no mention at all of the analytical approach used, it may be
reasonable to assume that the researchers/writers at Sabrang used an
approach called "content analysis" - an approach most 
commonly used in media studies and mass communications research. To put it
simply, this is a research tool used to determine the presence of certain
words or concepts within texts or sets of texts. 
Researchers quantify and analyze the presence, meanings and relationships of
such words and concepts, then make inferences about the messages within the
texts, the writer(s), the audience, and even the culture and time of which
these are a part. A point to note here is that this inference-making part of
this approach could be where the researcher subjectivity, bias, and ideology
can play an important role. 

Content analysis, however, extends far beyond simple word counts. What makes
the technique particularly meaningful is its reliance on coding and
categorizing of the data. Researchers distinguish between emergent vs. a
priori coding. With emergent coding, categories are established following
some preliminary examination of the data. When dealing with a priori coding,
the categories are established prior to the analysis based upon some theory.


A major benefit of content analysis is that it is a systematic, replicable
technique for compressing many words of text into fewer content categories
based on explicit rules of coding. Any goodresearch report must have a
well-documented and detailed methodology section so that readers can judge
for themselves about the systematic and replicable nature of the research.
But for some unstated reason(s), such discussion is missing in this report.
The appendices do not contain any methodological information either. This
begs the question -- why didn't the authors make the methodology and actual
analytical tools public? How was the data obtained from the selected
documents coded - were the categories established a priori or did they
emerge during the analysis? 

According to Krippendorff[iii], six questions must be addressed in every
content analysis: 

1) Which data are analyzed? 
2) How are they defined? 
3) What is the population from which they are drawn? 
4) What is the context relative to which the data are analyzed? 
5) What are the boundaries of the analysis? 
6) What is the target of the inferences? 

In the Sabrang report, while the authors briefly address questions 1 through
3 in the one-paragraph long methodology, there is no explicit discussion
whatsoever of questions 4 through 6. So it is left to the reader to decipher
the context in which the data obtained from the selected documents were
analyzed, any boundaries that may have been applied to this analysis, and
the target or agenda behind the inferences. 

Some basic assumptions about the context can be made: 


1. Rise of BJP on the Indian national political scene. 
2. Increasing solidarity among Hindus in USA to promote Hindu causes in
India and abroad. 
3. Greater visibility of Hindus in the American social, economic, cultural,
academic, and political arenas. 
4. Growing awareness among Hindus in India and elsewhere about the
consistent lack of attention paid by the so-called secular and elite media
in India to 'Hindu' causes including violence committed against them. This
has resulted in emergence of several public forums (many on the Internet)
where such 'Hindu' concerns are regularly debated. 
5. Increasing connections between Hindu Diaspora and Hindus in India on
various levels including social, economic, and political. 

In this context, the authors of Sabrang report are perhaps trying to
"explain" the recent unfortunate riots in Gujarat in which both Hindus and
Muslims were killed. However, it should be noted that throughout the report
there is no mention of Hindus that were killed in these riots. These
assumptions can help us decipher the boundaries that were probably applied
to the analysis. Only those documents and only selected portions of those
documents are 'analyzed' that highlight the violence committed against
Muslims and other minorities. One is left wondering if during the entire
time that BJP has been in power (the time period of primary concern to the
authors of Sabrang report) any violence was committed at all against Hindus.
These boundaries of analysis have not been made specific by the authors of
the report. 

One reason perhaps why it has not been done so is because the focus of this
report is to show the link between IDRF and violence against religious
minorities in India. Does this suggest an innate bias or a pre-determined
conclusion of the researchers even before doing the content analysis of the
selected documents? Readers must therefore question the social or political
agenda behind such a report that starts off with a well-articulated bias on
part of the writers, as stated in the opening paragraph 1.1: 

"Hindutva, the Hindu supremacist ideology that has under girded much of the
communal violence in India over the last several decades, has seen
tremendous growth outside India over the last two decades." 

Even before the reader is made aware of the origins of Hindutva as a
political ideology, he or she is asked to believe that it is "Hindu
supremacist ideology" and has been responsible for much of the "communal
violence" in India. Is this a case of reaching at a conclusion even before
any evidence is presented? 

Assuming that a bias or agenda is generally there in any research endeavor,
are there ways in which a researcher doing a content analysis can control or
limit the effect of personal subjectivity?  Two concepts are worth
mentioning here - Reliability and Validity. 

Reliability -- This may be understood in the following terms: 


· Stability, or intra-rater reliability. Can the same coder get the same
results try after try? 
· Reproducibility, or inter-rater reliability. Do coding schemes lead to the
same text being coded in the same category by different people? 

As mentioned earlier, in the one-paragraph methodology section of the
report, there is no mention of any coding schemes that were used for the
content analysis of the documents selected for this report. In the absence
of any relevant information about analytical methods used for this report,
the above criteria for reliability of the report and its findings can't be
addressed at all. This alone makes the conclusions of this report highly
unreliable. 
Validity -- It is important to recognize that a methodology is always
employed in the service of a research question. As such, validation of the
inferences made on the basis of data from one analytic 
approach demands the use of multiple sources of information. In qualitative
content analysis, like the one presumably used by Sabrang researchers,
validation could take the form of triangulation. Triangulation lends
credibility to the findings by incorporating multiple sources of data,
methods, investigators, or theories. Given the absence of any detailed
methodology in Sabrang report, readers are strongly advised to question the
validity of its conclusions. In fact, in such a case, readers should find
easy to believe that the conclusions have more to do with the researcher
agenda or bias, rather than the trends emerging from the data. It would be
reasonable to argue that the highly purposive and agenda-specific
cut-and-paste routine employed by the authors of Sabrang report has helped
it become more of a malicious propaganda than a factual research report. 

Common sense suggests that for someone interested in finding out how the
funds of a certain charity are being spent, in addition to looking at the
internal documents of the charity, the researcher must also collect some
primary data from the charity's beneficiaries - individuals and/or
organizations. This helps not only to determine the other side of the story,
but also to validate the findings emerging from the internal documents of
the charity. In this report, while one is asked to believe that diverse
documents "including forms of incorporation and tax documents filed by IDRF
with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the US, articles in Sangh
Sandesh, the newsletter of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, and occasional
reports published by different Sangh organizations in India and the US" were
analyzed, there is no mention if any attempt was made to contact these
organizations or individuals who have received funds from IDRF. It is not
clear if any of these people -- the direct beneficiaries - were interviewed,
or if any internal documents of these beneficiary organizations were
reviewed or analyzed for specific purpose of how the money disbursed to them
was actually spent. 

The questions to be asked of the beneficiaries would be -- what kinds of
activities these organizations engage in? Who are the people they serve?
Interestingly, the few places where one does see the selected quotes from
any of the internal literature of a beneficiary organization like Sewa
International, words like "propaganda material," "Hinduization," "sectarian
ideological training," and "effort to mislead people" are used to discount
the real development and relief work done by this organization. 

At the end of the one-paragraph methodology, the authors write: "The
methodological emphasis on primary sources internal to the Sangh Parivar, is
to ensure that the evidentiary basis of the conclusions drawn is of the
highest standards." While the sentence structure makes it sound that the
findings of this report are credible and even reproducible, there are
several questions that a methodology critic must ask when going a layer
beneath the surface. For example, what is meant by "primary sources"?
Typically, "primary" in research lingo means data that is original, data
that was not 'collected' prior to the present study. By definition, content
analysis is an approach that uses secondary data, e.g., the
reports/texts/documents that are already published or are available in the
public domain. A quick look at the references included in the report makes
it clear that most of the information is retrieved from online documents,
press releases, media reports, and mass communiqués. Thus, the language used
by Sabrang writers with respect to primary and secondary sources of data can
be seen as a way to confuse the reader and lend more credibility to the
report's 'findings'. 

Additionally, for the reasons stated earlier with respect to lack of
available information about the coding of data, and measures employed to
ensure reliability and validity of the study's findings, it is not clear how
the conclusions were drawn in the first place. Therefore, it is not possible
to accurately evaluate the "highest standards" by which these conclusions
can be judged by independent critics. This could be seen as an attempt by
Sabrang writers to present the findings as the objective truth without
telling the readers how the truth was arrived at. 

Since Chapter 1 of the report presents not only the methodology, but also
the key findings of the report, another level on which this section must be
critically examined is the language or discourse. Borrowing some ideas from
Critical Discourse Analysis (another analytical tool used in fields such as
linguistics, mass communications, media studies) will help here. Discourse
analysis is a tool for studying communication within socio-cultural
contexts. The writer expresses ideological content in texts and so does the
linguistic form of the text. 

The language used in Chapter 1 of Sabrang report appears biased,
sensational, and full of generalizations, thus making the report appear as
an ideological-discursive structure, which first and 
foremost expresses the values of an ideological system and of a specific
discourse authority (in this case of the organizations responsible for
collating and funding this report). While Chapter 1 presents just a summary
of the report's findings, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that most
people after reading this 'sensationalizing' summary would make their minds
without having any need to read further. 

Section 1.4 titled, "Summary of Findings" starts with the sentence: "The
purpose of this report is to DOCUMENT the links between IDRF and certain
violent and sectarian.." Is this an admission on the part of the writers
that their purpose is to DOCUMENT rather than to FIND if any such links
exist? Is the starting assumption of these writers that such links exist? If
that is the case and if the link has already been pre-established (at least
in the minds and ideologies of the writers of this report), why use the
misleading word "Findings" in the title of this section? It appears that the
'researchers' at Sabrang Communications and The South Asia Citizens Web
already had their conclusions before they even started their 'research.' And
their purpose was merely to DOCUMENT their pre-established conclusion.
Perhaps a case of accusing IDRF even before "findings" have said so. 

Kaplan[iv] contends, "Rhetoric intent,...coherence and the world view that
author and receptor bring to the text are essential" in critically examining
a text. Van Dijk[v] argues that the exercise of power in modern, democratic
societies is no longer primarily coercive, but persuasive, that is,
ideological. The obvious negative tone of Sabrang writers, as evident in
their references to organizations that are engaged in consolidating Hindu
identity, in teaching Hindu mythology in non-public schools, and in working
in tribal areas suggests the ideological bent of the writers. Another
example of writers' rhetoric intent is obvious in section 1.4, where the
writers depict the Hindutva movement as a "violent sectarian
movement.similar to the Nazi idea of a pure Aryan Germany." 

A quick look at the rest of this report suggests that the authors continue
to use phrases, statements, and expressions that are at best mere rhetoric
or assumptions, rather than 'scientific' arguments. After all none of us
have THE COMPLETE TRUTH about things, including the ones who wrote this
"funding of hate" report. But after reading just the first few pages of this
report, the one-sided, partial, and biased nature of the 'truth' becomes so
obvious, that even a statement such as 'the authors had any hidden agenda'
becomes meaningless. The agenda is not hidden at all -- in my view, anyone
or any text that seems to suggest that they have THE COMPLETE TRUTH on their
side must be challenged. 

If the groundwork for a report that 'looks' as comprehensive as the one
prepared by Sabrang and FOIL (Forum of Indian Leftists) is so quick and
dirty, can any reasonable reader find the conclusions reliable? We let the
readers decide. 

~*~ 

Prof. Beloo Mehra teaches qualitative research at a non-traditional liberal
arts university.  Her other academic interests include cultural models of
schooling in ethnic minorities, especially Asian Indians in the US,
practitioner/action/research, women's ways of knowing, role of self in
knowledge construction, and bridging academic and creative writing. She
likes to conduct biographical and life history research that tells stories
of people from their perspectives, and tries to capture the humanity of
those who are studied. She believes that research should be disseminated to
a larger audience, and researchers should learn to report research in ways
and formats that reach all interested readers, not just the academic
community. She is generally open to several different views and
perspectives, except the ones she completely disagrees with! 

~*~ 

[i]Dellinger, B. (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis. Available online at
<http://users.utu.fi/bredelli/cda.html> 

[ii]The Foreign Exchange of Hate: "IDRF and the American Funding of
Hindutva". Sabrang Communications Private Limited, Mumbai, India, and The
South Asia Citizens Web, France. 
<http://www.sabrang.com/hnfund/sacw> 

[iii]Krippendorff, K. (1980). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its
Methodology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 

[iv]Kaplan, R. (1990). Concluding Essay: On Applied Linguistics and
Discourse Analysis, in R. Kaplan (Ed.), Annual Review of Applied
Linguistics, Vol. II. 

[v]Van Dijk, T., (1991). Racism and the Press, in Robert Miles (Ed.),
Critical Studies in Racism and Migration, New York: Routledge. 


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