Hindu Students Council - Status of Affiliation With Sangh Parivar

Status of Affiliation With Sangh Parivar

Because the Council was set up with the help of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, Diana Eck calls it a "loose affiliate" of the VHP. She also notes that HSC emphasises a "strong sense of Hindu identity" and that "While many American Hindus would explicitly reject the religious nationalism of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in India, they have developed no alternative organizations to address the issues of Hindu identity in the United States." A report by the London School of Economics also identifies the HSC as a "Hindu nationalist" organization. It has recently been described by scholars as "associated with Hindutva"; the "VHP of America's student wing" and as one of "the major right-wing Hindu groups operating in the United States".

After studying a chapter of the HSC, Prema Kurian came to the conclusion that "there was a diversity of opinions, and it was only a minority who were militantly Hindu-centric", while going on to say that the "Hindu-centric group in the second generation will come to represent the voice of American Hinduism in the future and will similarly comprise mainly male, upper-caste, upper-class, highly educated professionals. As an Indian American newspaper reported, it is no secret that the second-generation leadership for American Hindu nationalist organizations 'is being groomed in the HSC'".

Biju Mathew and Vijay Prashad, members of the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL), an activist organization associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) and are involved in what they term as the "Campaign to Stop Funding Hate", which on April 13, 2007 released a report entitled Lying Religiously: The Hindu Students Council and the Politics of Deception, which accused the HSC of deceiving students about its links with the VHP, asserting that in the VHPA stated in 2003 that the HSC was "the youth wing of VHP". The Hindu Students Council has responded to this claim, rejecting the charges made by the leftist organization as "a mix of outdated information (some of which is 15 years old and presented as currently accurate) and inaccurate claims published by anonymous authors concealing their true motivations for initiating this misleading attack", and that the report’s claims against the council "should be seen for the farce of true investigative reporting that it is"

Others, like Prof. Stephen Warner, however, see HSC simply as an organization promoting Hinduism on college campuses and helping Hindu students reconnect with their roots and develop their Hindu identity. Hinduism Today describes it as an independent Hindu organization serving students throughout the United States.