[LINK] "Ron Banerjee’s army of none"

[rfmcdonald]

Writing for The Grid, David Topping presents his thorough research into Ron Banerjee and his organization Canadian Hindu Advocacy, known for its very loudly anti-Muslim presentations. It turns out that, contrary to Banerjee's claims, CHA isn't; in fact, as Topping documents, it looks like Banerjee is his own group's only active member.

To say that Canadian Hindu Advocacy lends Ron Banerjee credibility is an understatement—its reach, or rather the reach he claims it has, is the sole basis for it. Mere months after its founding, Banerjee called CHA “the largest and most prominent Hindu advocacy [group] here in Canada” at a rally, and he hasn’t stopped saying as much since. ”We are a national organization of professionals,” reads the homepage of CHA’s website, “most of whom have left other groups to join together and form an entity that really stands up for traditional Canadian and mainstream Hindu values.” In a letter to Maclean’s on behalf of CHA, Banerjee wrote, again, that “we are a large national group.”

Never mind, for now, that Canada’s Hindu population numbered 297,200 people as of 2001 [PDF], and that even in Toronto Life’s feature about the Valley Park Middle School protests against school prayer that Banerjee helped orchestrate, he claimed a paying membership of only 930, which is 0.31% of that. Never mind, for now, that Banerjee, who is alternately referred to in the press as a director of CHA and its spokesperson, is apparently the only member of the organization who’s ever referred to in the press at all. (Combined, the Toronto Sun and National Post have published dozens of news articles quoting Banerjee, and he’s also a recurring talking head on Sun News Network’s The Arena with Michael Coren, and has been a guest on AM640′s John Oakley Show and Jim Richards’ Newstalk1010 Showgram.)

[. . .]

I tell Banerjee that I’m trying to find any evidence of the hundreds of paying members he claims the group has, and I ask if I can talk to any of them. He says, “I wouldn’t know how to do that without disclosing the names of the people and stuff like that.” He sends me this video, which he says shows other members (“senior directors” and a few of their “more active members”). It doesn’t look like a large national group; I count only about ten people standing with Banerjee in it. He promises to send me the names of other members and supporters, some of whom I say I’m willing to keep anonymous. I tell him that, either way, the more he can send me, the better, and that it’s my job to not take him on his word. I give him a day. He sends me five.

I was asking Banerjee for members of Canadian Hindu Advocacy because I’d spent a week looking myself, and hadn’t been able to find any.

When I spoke to Pandit Roopnauth Sharma, the president of the Canadian Hindu Federation, which represents temples across the country, he wasn’t surprised. “Other than knowing Mr. Banerjee by name, I know of no one who’s in the group,” Sharma said. “I don’t know of anyone that I’ve come into contact with who’s said to me, ‘By the way, I’m the president,’ or ‘I’m the secretary,’ or ‘I’m the treasurer.’” Half-serious, he asked for a favour: “When you find somebody, please, I would be interested to know who they are. And if you find members of his executive and things like that, it would be nice to know who they are.”

Dr. Budhendra Doobay, the chairman of Richmond Hill’s Vishnu Mandir and the founder of the Canadian Hindu Federation, says he doesn’t “know of any Hindu [Banerjee] represents,” either. “As far as I’m concerned, his views do not represent the views of Hindus in the GTA.”

CHA’s Facebook group is little help. As of September 28, it has a mere 111 members, only 18 of whom, including Banerjee, were active in any way between June 1 and September 18, 2012 (whether posting anything to the group’s wall themselves, posting a comment alongside something anyone else posted, or Liking anything). Of those 18 members, 7 don’t appear to live in Canada—their home cities are listed as places like Delhi, India. Or Kyoto, Japan. Or Chicago. Of the group’s five administrators other than Banerjee, two appear to be living in India. Still, I sent private messages to all of the administrators and all of the active members whose privacy settings allowed it, asking each one i) whether they were Hindu, ii) whether they were Canadian, iii) whether they were a member of CHA, and iv) what they thought of the decision to screen Innocence of Muslims. After a week, none had replied to me except for one woman, Cutler Hill. She says she’s Canadian, but not Hindu; she described herself as an “evangelical Zionist.” She continued: “I am not part of the decision commity [sic], but if I was I would vote in favour of it.” It was beginning to look an awful lot like Canadian Hindu Advocacy had an abundance of neither Canadians nor Hindus.