In a move that smells disingenuous Sonal Shah, a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, has renounced her formal association with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a fundamentalist Hindu group that is often at the center of revanchist battles.
"Had I been able to foresee the role of the VHP in India in these heinous events, or anticipate that the VHP of America could possibly stand by silently in the face of its Indian counterpart's complicity in the events of Gujarat in 2002 - thereby undermining the American group's cultural and humanitarian efforts with which I was involved - I would not have associated with the VHP of America," Shah said.
The contrition has apparently been prompted by the possibility that the Obama team may ask her to pack her bags. She says so herself in as many words "I need your help," wrote Shah an email to her supporters. "This is gaining legs as the National Journal also picked it up and likely Fox (News channel). I need to mobilize people against the leftists and the right wing. There is a likely chance that they will ask me to resign as the team does not need my publicity." She is right. The Obama team does not need that kind of publicity, particularly in light of the Rod Blagojevich scandal in Illinois, the president-elect’s home state.
I am skeptical about Shah’s assertion that she was not able to foresee of the VHP in India, particularly when one considers how extensively reported and debated the VHP’s role in the violence was. No reasonably informed person, the least of all one who once worked as a senior executive with the Internet search giant Google. I would like to believe that as an executive of the company she had at the very least as much access to Google’s brilliant search functionalities as you and I have.
It is entirely possible that Shah, who may not have been particularly enamored of the VHP’s unabashedly fundamentalist Hindu platform, believed that its network could be used to achieve a larger good. In the process she might have chosen to disregard all that the VHP stood for. Whatever is the case she is obviously worried about that the controversy surrounding her association with the VHP could undo her appointment by the Obama team on a three-member team to develop technology policy.