Have you ever wondered why there is a renewed thrust to highlight atrocities against Dalits in India, and even abroad? Were there no crimes against Dalits in India until recently? Why did the western media start campaigning about it all of a sudden?
The answer is: the sea of media reports and social media buzz are not really bothered about discrimination against Dalits in India but are part of a well-thought-out conspiracy hatched by anti-India forces based in the US, Pakistan and other foreign countries – and of course, India.
The organisations and key people behind the conspiracy are linked to the anti-India ecosystem that includes the Pakistan Army and Islamic outfits based in the US and India, as per a recently-published case study by DisinfoLab, an organisation working to bust fake narratives and propaganda.
In a nutshell, the much-hyped Dalit activism is funded and masterminded by some radical Islamic outfits who aim to foment unrest and secessionist activities in India.
According to the aforementioned report, the people behind this new narrative-setting movement are linked to the Pakistan spy agency ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), the radical Islamist preacher Zakir Naik, who is wanted in India for hate speech and radicalization, and the Indian website TwoCircles.net (TCN).
However, the front organisation behind this India-smearing campaign is a so-called advocacy group named ‘Equality Lab’ (EL), founded by a US-born and brought-up woman named Thenmozhi Soundararajan.
Soundararajan was recently all over the Indian and US media after internet behemoth Google cancelled her talk show on caste.
In a resume posed by DisinfoLab, Soundarajan describes herself as a person with “an alleged expertise on the Dalit fault-line of India, groomed by anti-India operatives”.
In its report, the anti-propaganda website claimed that Equality Lab’s claim to Dalit discourse is based on a survey report published in 2018 “that somehow gained prominence without adhering to basic academic standards of such surveys”.
It further said that the co-authors of that report were Soundarajan, Natasha Dar, and Maari Zwick Maitreyi. While Dar is a Pakistan-origin professor at UC Berkeley, Maitreyi is a fake name of Valli Karunakaran, who also writes on TwoCircles.net.
“Huma Dar is the core of Pak’s operation in the US, and she has a legacy to maintain. She is the daughter of Lt. Col. Bashir Uddin Ahmad, a former Pakistan army officer, who was once posted in then-East Pakistan (Bangladesh) and died with the pain of the Pakistan partition in his heart. The revenge? Breaking India,” reads a tweet posted by DisinfoLab.
EL’s 2018 report, DisinfoLab said, was published in the US with the assistance of several organisations such as the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), the Organization for Minorities of India (OFMI), and the Alliance for Justice and Accountability (AJA).
“These organisations are fronts created by Pakistan Establishment/Jamaat-e-Islami in the US as part of its longest war against India. And as if to confirm our suspicion, the names of Bhajan Singh Bhinder and his entity, Organization for Minorities of India (OFMI), were removed from the EL report following the former’s expose in 2021,” the study report said.
The same EL report is now being widely used as the basis for the case against Indians in Cisco and to target Google CEO Sundar Pichai, an Indian. It was also used by several US universities on caste.
The case study elaborating on the role of TwoCircles.net said its founder, Kashif Ul-Huda, an Indian-origin US citizen, is a sympathiser of the banner radical outfit Students’ Movement of India (SIMI) and Zakir Naik, who is living in Malaysia.
Before founding TCN, Kashif ran a surfeit of websites during the 1990s and early 2000s. He started the ‘Urdustan’ website in 1997-98 along with his wife, Zainab Lakhani, which was managed from several places, including Pakistan, as per DisinfoLab.
It further said: “Under Urdustan, Kashif founded ‘IndianMuslims.Info’ in 2002, which in turn promoted several web portals, including a website called ‘Dalitstan’ that was designed to balkanize India.”
“Dalitstan was founded in 1999 by some white faces from the US who never entered India. On the surface, it advocates for Dalits but it covertly aims at balkanizing India by promoting secessionist links and groups,” it stated.
The study goes on to claim that Dalistan had four major plans –Mughalastan, Kashmir, Khalistan, and Islamestan which mirrors ISI’s strategy to break India.