CIIS and the Hindu Right: Darker Detail

Further grim details are now leaking out concerning the persecution of Angana Chatterji and Richard Shapiro by the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). Initial facts behind their case were first discussed on the List the other day. 

I provide more disturbing data below. Those data include suggestive links between CIIS's  sudden actions against Shapiro and Chatterji  -- who have taught at the Institute since 1986 and 1997 respectively -- and new efforts by CIIS to solicit  money from wealthy Hindu donors , who for years have been demanding that CIIS fire Chatterji due to her widely publicized political and human-rights work in India.

It won't come as a surprise to those in the field that the targeted donors are the same Silicon Valley Hindu groups behind well-financed attempts to inject Hindutva pseudo-history into California history textbooks a half decade ago. Chatterji and her grad students played major roles in helping us defeat the Hindu right during the California textbook case, as many of the researchers on the List who testified in that case will recall. 

For  years the Hindu right has also been targeting Chatterji and Shapiro for their human-rights work with tribal peoples and other oppressed groups in Orissa, Kashmir, and other South Asian hotspots. It is hardly credible to believe that CIIS's sudden suspension of the two is unrelated to its suddenly renewed efforts to woo funds from the same groups that have demanded Chatterji's dismissal for over a decade.

If CIIS continues pursuing the course it is now taking, it is likely to find itself in the midst of an international cause célèbre in India as well as the US -- just as occurred (as we correctly warned the California Board of Education it would) when we took on the Hindu right in the textbook case in November 2005.

Before looking at CIIS's renewed pursuit of rich Hindu donors, I want to list a few of the many irregularities involved in the kangaroo hearings that CIIS plans to hold on Chatterji and Shapiro this week and next. CIIS bureaucrats have already made it clear that they intend for the hearings to result in the termination of the two, who are ironically two of the best-known among the Institute's few internationally known researchers. 

- The hearings will be closed, against the wishes of both Chatterji and Shapiro, and the administration has made only the vaguest public allusion to any accusations made against them; this for two internationally known academics and human-rights workers who between them have taught a total of 36 years at the school, and who have made it clear that they are open to addressing any legitimate grievances made against them;

- Chatterji  and Shapiro have essentially been gagged by CIIS and can't talk publicly about events involving their suspension without further jeopardizing their situation, since CIIS has no tenure system  -- not coincidentally a problem on which both of them have complained loudly and publicly in the past;  

- CIIS has denied requests that a neutral observer be allowed at the hearings from even as innocuous a group as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) -- a remarkable exclusion that signals where CIIS bureaucrats hope all this will end; 

- Chatterji and Shapiro are not being allowed to bring labor lawyers or indeed any legal counsel to the hearings, despite the fact that the administration has already signaled that it wants the hearings to end in their dismissal; 

- A noted in the press release put out by 38 CIIS students earlier today (downloadable from <http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/1025_PR_CIIS.pdf>, a CIIS worker in the administration has just put on record a ten-page statement that describes events behind the scenes that led to the actions against Chatterji and Shapiro. In brief, the statement notes that the Dean of Students sought permission in March 2011 to initiate an investigation targeting the two human-rights workers and  the Anthropology Department as a whole. Remarkably, Shapiro and Chatterji were not notified of the investigation, which began without their knowledge in April.  The ten-page statement details a long list of unethical tactics witnessed by the worker that month, including the solicitation of student complaints that included promises of compensation for those participating and intimidation for those who didn't. The worker's statement sharply contradicts public claims later made by CIIS bureaucrats that the investigation "was not proactively initiated by the CIIS Administration."

There are many other irregularities noted in the legal Press Release linked above and in a longer fact sheet earlier put together by CIIS graduate students, which you can download here: 

<http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/CIIS.persecution.Chaterji.Shapiro.pdf>

If this goes to court, CIIS is going to find that all these irregularities, which could result in crippling or destroying the careers of two internationally known researchers and human-rights activists, will cost the Institute dearly -- both financially and in terms of international respect.

Darker financial motives that  figure in this story are discussed for the first time below.

COORDINATED CIIS APPEALS  FOR MONEY FROM WEALTHY SILICON VALLEY HINDUS: THE CIIS-HINDUTVA CONNECTION

One of the most disturbing sides of the CIIS case involves the fact that CIIS's Board of Trustees was concocting far-reaching plans to attract new donations from wealthy Silicon Valley Hindus exactly as the school was preparing to fire Shapiro and Chatterji  -- among the Hindu right's most hated US enemies. 

The temporal overlaps are unambiguous. As noted above, in March-April 2011 CIIS bureaucrats began their secret "investigation" of Chatterji and Shapiro, undertaken with the clear aim of finding a pretext to fire them. The Chatterji-Shapiro problem apparently under control, within a month, in May 2011, the CIIS Board of Trustees was already making plans for a renewed "Silicon Valley Initiative" to raise new funds for the cash-poor Institute. The direct targets of the initiative were wealthy Hindu entrepreneurs -- the same high-caste and largely ultraconservative groups that had backed the Hindu right in the California textbook case five years ago, and who for years had been urging CIIS to fire Chatterji. 

A student at CIIS has forwarded to me a three-page draft document related to the Initiative, which was drawn up by or for the CIIS Board of Trustees at the same time as the secret "investigation" of Shapiro and Chatterji was taking place. 

The CIIS paper proposes the formation of what it grandly labels (in fund-raising-speak) "The Integral Life Professional/Entrepreneurial Forum" -- aimed at linking (big-moneyed) Silicon Valley businessmen and CIIS. With exquisite political correctness, the proposal doesn't mention that its obvious target audience consists of wealthy Hindus. But the target is made clear by the only graphic in the text, a Saffron-Colored Wheel or Dharmachakra -- a favorite Hindutva symbol -- and  by the kinds of sappy feel-good language that fills the pages of the Websites of Hindutva organizations pretending to be human rights groups, many of which cropped up during the well-financed California textbook case.  

Thus we find that each spoke of the CIIS Saffron Wheel represents eight principles, one of which ("Responsibility") requires us "to fulfill one's duties and responsibilities (dharma) in all roles -- to oneself, family, fellow-man, community, country and planet."  The obvious if unstated subtext is that one might fulfill his or her dharma by donating to Hindu-friendly CIIS. 

You can read the whole of the badly written and in some ways comical Board of Trustees document (and see the CIIS Saffron-Colored Wheel) here:

http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/CIIS.Silicon.Valley.Appeal.pdf

It is not likely that any such appeal would work with  Shapiro and Chatterji -- two of the Hindu right's most hated enemies -- still in place as CIIS's best-known academics. Apparently in planning out their campaign CIIS had a special gift bonus in mind for the donors: Their long-expressed wish that Chatterji be fired (with Shapiro now tossed in) was about to be fulfilled. 

This is not the first time that the issue of right-wing donations at CIIS has been linked to career of Chatterji, who due to her human-rights work in India has been a thorn in the side of the Hindu right since she began teaching at CIIS in 1997. 

A decade ago, when Rajiv Malhotra first launched his rightwing Infinity Foundation, a big financial backer of Hindutva causes, he offered CIIS $100,000 in research support with a single string attached -- that CIIS  get rid of Chatterji. To its credit, CIIS at that time rejected that offer. But ten years later economic times are tough, and the cash-strapped school apparently feels that raising money from wealthy Silicon Valley NRIs is  worth the cost of losing two of the few faculty members at CIIS who have an international reputation in the academic world.

Firing them will come with extra benefits, since Chatterji and Shapiro have both been sharp critics of the authoritarian ways in which CIIS has been governed for years. With them gone, criticism of the administration from the faculty can be expected to cease.

It is important to note that not unexpectedly Malhotra and his followers have been watching events at CIIS carefully. Imagining the smell of victory after a decade of trying, they are hard at work collecting Internet signatures supporting CIIS's suspension of Chatterji  and Shapiro, as witnessed by this post made yesterday in the (predictably narcissistically named) "Rajiv Malhotra Discussion List", found at <rajivmalhotradiscussion@yahoogroups.com>:

> Here is a petition to CIIS commending them on their suspention (sic) of Chatterjii and Shapiro, and asking them to follow through with a full termination. Please sign it and spread it far and wide for as many signatures as possible.

The Hindu right tried the same approach when it attempted to get Michael Witzel fired from Harvard using the same tactics during the height of the California textbook case, 2006. It should also be added Malhotra was a major financial contributor to the legal war chest of the rightwing groups whom we defeated at great personal cost in that case.

It is worth mentioning finally that yesterday morning I  received an email on the CIIS suspension of Chatterji and Shapiro from the most prolific (if often ridiculous) of India's Hindutva  propagandists -- Dr. S. Kalyanaraman, who despite his location in far-off Chennai acted as a formal advisor to one of the rightwing Silicon Valley groups (the so-called Hindu Education Foundation) that started the California textbook fiasco. 

They too solicited and received huge sums of money from ultraconservative Hindus in Silicon Valley and had money from rightwing political groups in India as well. Those who thought at the time that this was a California matter without involvement of the Hindu right in India were hopelessly naive, as California officials realized far too late.

CIIS administrators are navigating in extraordinarily dangerous waters that will result -- if they don't quickly change course -- in permanent damage to their Institute's academic reputation. Neither the national nor international press has yet gotten wind of the fact that CIIS is looking for pretexts to fire two leading human-rights workers who are among the few researchers at the Institute that have international reputations.

Reading the muddled public explanations that CIIS bureaurats have put out about the Shapiro-Chatterji affair -- which they certainly could not have first cleared with competent attorneys --  suggests to me that they don't have a clue about the disastrous directions in which they are steering their ship. 

Please spread the news, in India as well as the US.  The actions of CIIS are intolerable -- and violate everything that academia is supposed to stand for. 

Steve Farmer
http://www.safarmer.com