IT giants plug funds to Sangh

BANGALORE: Silicon Valley companies have been caught unawares after being accused of donating considerable sums of money to the India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF).
This US-based charity, according to The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, a voluntary group, is funnelling “millions of dollars’’ to Sangh Parivar-affiliated organisations, which propagate “sectarian hatred in India’’.
Among the large US corporations mentioned by the 91-page report are Cisco, Sun, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard.
“The report, which has taken years, presents a mass of incontrovertible evidence. They are an expose of the false pretexts under which the Sangh Parivar front organisations often collect huge amounts of money from unsuspecting NRIs and US corporations,’’ Biju Mathew, a representative of The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, told The Times of India on Thursday.
He maintained that unsuspecting corporations end up giving large chunks of cash as matching funds of their employees to the IDRF.
“There are a number of Sangh Parivar sympathisers within these companies who will have to be identified. The campaign will intensify over the next one month and ensure that the funding to these communal organisations is completely stopped,’’ says Mathew.
He alleges the IDRF obtained considerable sums of money from these companies by claiming that its activities were “secular’’, although company rules explicitly prohibit donations to religious organisations.
In a formal communication, Sun Microsystems stated that all current donations to the IDRF have been placed on hold pending a directive from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). “Any non-profit and non-proprietary organisation that has been granted 501(c)(3) tax exempt and public charity status is eligible to receive matching gifts from Sun Microsystems,� it added. The IDRF, it observed, does not appear on the IRS list of agencies known to support terrorist activities.
Similarly, a Cisco spokesperson said the company had terminated all matching donations to the IDRF. Mathew says other mega-corporations like Intel have promised to study the report thoroughly and see that they do not commit the same mistake.
It’s significant that this report has been released at a time when the annual charity season begins in the US, which normally stretches from Thanksgiving Day to Christmas. It has also come at a time when companies like Cisco were planning to triple their matching employee grants this year.
In 1999, the report says, the Cisco Foundation gave almost $70,000 to the IDRF, placing it among the top five of Cisco grantees.
IDRF representatives were unavailable for comment.