We began our study of the Hindu Right in the United States several years ago, when word of large funds being transferred to India by sympathetic organisations started doing the rounds. Of course, the flow of such cash to the 'mother country' was not a novel occurrence among South Asians, as we had before us the highly publicised cases of the generosity of some Sri Lankan Tamils towards the LTTE, as well as of European, Canadian and American Sikhs towards Khalistani groups in Punjab.
The transfer of saffron dollars to India, of course, had the potential of being much larger. However, as is the case with the religious right of all persuasions, accessing information from these secretive organisations was not very easy. The secrecy has, in fact, increased after there were protests a few years ago about the dubious use of charity front organisations to channel funds to India. In 1994, there was even an effort to raise money through the US charity, United Way, but sustained protests from secular South Asian groups forced a withdrawal. Since that episode in particular, fund-raisers for the Hindu Right have been far less generous with information about their work.
Additionally, the fund-raisers are wary of openly talking about money because they tend to make extensive use of the illegal hawala network to transfer cash funds. Since the Hindu Right does not conduct 'terrorist' activity on North American soil, the US authorities do not pay as much attention to transfer of saffron dollars as they do to the Khalistani and LTTE money. The latter two organisations, after all, have conducted extortion and assassinations in North America, whereas the Hindu Right has been, if anything, more subtle.
Blocked thus in our search to learn of the way money flows into the Subcontinent, we turned our investigation to how the religious right raises money in the US and Canada. To do this, we had to understand the ways of the Right, notably the means by which it creates moorings for itself among the overseas South Asian population.