Speaker:
00:00:01
We are live and I want to say, first of all, namaste and thank you for joining. We truly appreciate you being here with us today. We are going to talk about an important issue today, which is the election 2024. People have said that this may be one of the more consequential elections that we have, this is an election that is going to, decide America's future in many ways. We are doing a project called Hindu Vote. A voter education project we have been doing since 2020. But before I get to today's webinar, let me start with a quick introduction. My name is Ajay Shah. I am the president of World Hindu Council of America or VHPA, of America. I am also the co convener of HinduPact. Which is Hindu Policy Research and Advocacy Collective. It is an initiative of World Hindu Council of America or VHPA. I have been doing advocacy work for most of my adult life I'm really privileged to have Mohinder Gulati ji here today. Mohinder Gulati ji is, very accomplished, individual. He is a member of our core team for Hindu vote. He was in his younger days, an elections officer in India for two years. So he actually has on the ground experience in running the election. He recently retired from United Nations, where he was the chief operating officer of Sustainable Energy for All. He was also an advisor to Sustainable Development at the World Bank, where he worked At more than 50 countries. We are absolutely privileged that Mohenjo daro is part of our team and is working with us on this important initiative. So thank you, Mohenjo daro, and thanks for joining. We truly appreciate it. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, this is really one of the more consequential elections we are facing. We start looking around and we said, look the Hindu vote is really an important vote. And why do I say that? Let me show this graphic to you and see what you have to say about this particular graphic, let's take a look at this. And that screen will show you evidence as to why I'm making the statement I'm making. This, Mohinderji and everyone else who is watching, is the graph that we have put together at HinduPact. This is the graph that shows the importance of Hindu vote. Okay. So if you look at the blue bars here, this is from 2020 elections. The blue bars are the difference in the votes that president Biden got and former president Trump got. And this is for battleground states, which is on the X axis. So Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Michigan, and North Carolina, the battleground states. These are the bars that indicate the differences between the Biden vote and the Trump vote. The purple bar is the number of Hindus in that state. who are eligible to vote. The, Hindu vote in that particular battleground state. And you can see here that the Hindu vote can be a decisive vote in almost all the states except maybe a couple of them, like Florida and Virginia. The Hindu vote has grown since 2020. In every state, because of immigration and naturalization. If a candidate pays attention to this Hindu vote, they can actually win the elections. And mind you, this is not Indian vote. Hindu vote is much larger than the Indian vote. The Hindu vote includes people from other countries. who have come to America. For example, the Hindus from Bali, from Ghana, from Vietnam, from Suriname, from the Caribbeans, from Pakistan, from Bangladesh, you name it. And there are a lot of people who have adopted Hindu Dharma have been residents for many generations, or who have immigrated from some parts of Europe. And even countries like Latin America and Central America. So Hindu vote is not just of consequence. It is also growing vote and it's much more diverse vote. So you may say that, well, if the Hindu vote is this diverse, why would a candidate pay attention to Hindu vote? Why would they not just say, Hey, you know, I'll just address generic issues. Well, there are certain issues. If the candidates were to address, then they will get the deciding Hindu vote and will make an impact not just for the presidential elections, but also for the congressional elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate. So what are these issues? At HinduPact, we have come up with The American Hindu agenda for 2024. These are the issues that we think are of importance to all the Hindus. We have done a lot of research on it, consulted, other organizations, and we have come up with eight simple issues. The first one is. We would like to see a legislation to bar Hindu phobia. What do you mean by bar? I mean, of course, we all understand First Amendment. We're not saying stop free speech. But there are academic departments that promote, actively promote Hindu hatred. They write, they promote papers and they're funded by some government grant or the others. So defund these departments, defund these universities that actively promote Hindu hate. Okay, let's not use taxpayer dollars to promote Hindu hate. There might be other, situations where there are corporations and other places, which are funding these kinds of research and we want to make sure that is not funded. Now, as all of you have seen, there are at least a dozen cases over the last two years where Hindu temples have been vandalized and Mahatma Gandhi statues have been vandalized. This has happened without any attempt to even find the culprit, much less declare it as a hate crime. What we are asking that the people who get elected with our votes in Congress or in the White House, support the investigation to determine the systemic causes for this kind of vandalism across the U. S. It's a very simple demand have an investigation, find out what are the systemic causes. and punish the perpetrators of that because this is really a hate crime and it has to be investigated as a hate crime. The next one is immigration. Now, everyone who is probably listening to this webinar here live or people who are listening on Twitter or YouTube, they already know this, if you today come to America legally, I'm not talking about illegal immigration at all come here legally follow all the rules. Come using H1 visa, then go and apply for permanent residency for green card. Getting permanent residence right now is over a hundred years because there are country based caps. So there are only so many people from India who can qualify. What we are saying is that we are getting highly qualified, highly skilled workers from India. Most of them are Hindus. This artificial barrier is keeping them from getting, permanent residency. And it actually is hurting America. Because these are exactly the kind of legal immigrants you want in America. So expedite the green card for them. All you have to do is remove the country based, caps on the visa. Even worse are their children who come here legally when they're very young, two years, three years, four years old. When they turn 18, they don't have green card. Their parents don't have a green card yet. All of a sudden that kid who has grown up here, who has come to America legally, Is now out of status and the kid has either goes on student visa or some kind of work visa or has to go back to a country they've never known. And again, we are only making argument for kids who are here legally. The next one is supporting the merit based education and occupation. And this is the one where, there's a lot of studies now after the, fair admissions versus Harvard case, where a recent study of hundreds of thousands of students that said that, students from Indian subcontinent, mostly Hindus, would have had 50 percent better chance of getting admission at Ivy League schools if the admission process was fair and if there were no quotas. So the affirmative action policies were not in place and the numbers were not artificially capped at 17, 18%. Then these students would have had fair admission, chances and they would have actually 50 percent better odds of getting into one of these Ivy League schools. We want college educational and occupational opportunities to be based on merit and not on some artificial quotas. We want the candidates to actually support. this Supreme Court ruling and not try and override it. The other one is we want to hold religious theocracies like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh that abuse the minorities, the Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian minorities to be held accountable. What we mean by that is America has a lot of soft power, gives a lot of aid to these countries. We want to make sure that These countries are held accountable, so we don't see a 12 year, 13 year old, 14 year old girl being, kidnapped and converted to Islam, married off to men they don't even know, who are much older than them, these little girls now become, victims in a sex crime. You have seen recently what has happened in Bangladesh, where the Mandirs have been vandalized, Hindus have been beaten on the streets, Hindu businesses and homes have been burnt, Hindus have been forced to resign from their faculty jobs and police jobs and other places. We want. America to exercise its soft power and hold these, theocracies accountable. The next one is very simple. There are a lot of statues, murtis, as we call them. Murtis have been actually stolen or decapitated and the head stolen. If you go to Cambodia and you go to India, the murtis are stolen. People are worshipping them. These are especially older murtis. They've been worshipped for hundreds of years. And next, you know, some morning people wake up, go to the mandir, the murti is missing. We want to make sure that these artifacts that are taken, stolen, given to private collectors, gone to, museums, these are sacred murtis. They be returned so that people can place them back in mandirs. The next one is we want to make sure that US promotes a multifaceted partnership with. What I mean is America and India are natural allies. America is our karma bhoomi, India is our dharma bhoomi, but we both practice democracy. Bharat India has practiced democracy for thousands of years from the times of Mahajanapadas. That's about 3, 000, 3, 500 years ago. And we want to make sure that, and America being one of the more prominent democracies today, come and work together as equals, as allies and not government instruments like USCIRF are not used to malign India. And really use those tools by vested interests to break apart this natural partnership. So we want the candidates who get our support to actually promise us. They will use these tools, commissions and agencies that US government has for the good of promo. And by good, I mean promoting this multifaceted partnership with India. And finally, and I'm sure Maji will talk a lot more about it, is support legislation that promote environmentally responsible and sustainable development. In Hindu, derma, we consider Earth to be dirty. Maa. So we have a lot of respect for, Mother Earth and through sustainable development, we can promote, responsible development. So I'll stop there and turn it over to Mohinderji for the next part of this webinar. Mohinderji.
Speaker 2:
00:12:29
Thank you very much for this wonderful introduction, Ajayji. I wish to all those viewing this webinar and those who might view it later on, happy Diwali. It's a little early, but it's around the corner. So wishing you all a very, very happy Diwali. I also want to congratulate those eligible to participate in the voting process on your good fortune. I want to congratulate you for that, that you are able to participate in a democratic process in a secure, safe, And dignified environment on not many countries in not many places. People are able to do that. I have not really been an election officer in India. That was long ago when we had paper ballots. That sounds like a very, very old times, but I have also seen these elections in many other countries where we know how difficult the democratic processes are and how rigged these are. So, you are very fortunate to be participating in a stable, safe, secure, dignified, democratic process here. And so please do go out, step out and vote your vote matters. As Ajayji said, and he showed you that graph. In a system of first past the post, this is not a system of proportional representation. It's a system of first past the post. In a system of first past the post, the swing vote matters. And your vote is actually much bigger than the victory margin in many of the states that Ajayji showed. Therefore, it is not only your moral obligation to go and participate in the democratic process. Be heard. Raise your voice, be heard, but also as a responsible citizen, go and vote and participate. On the HinduPact website, you will see several, very useful tools. And Ajay ji will talk about that later One is the temple guide. Another is a voter guide one as to for you as a voter What is it that you can do you should do what is that it is possible what you are eligible to? And what is legally permissible? What is not legally permissible? What are the tools that you can use? So there's a whole lot of information and very, very useful, background and the tools available on this website for you as well as for the Mondays that you can, if it is possible, convert these Mondays into, voter registration centers into polling centers so that it is not only that you are creating this facility for increasing the voter participation of the Hindu community, but also you are demonstrating to the community around you that you are a responsible, conscientious Citizen who participates and engages in these processes. So plenty of material are there Beautifully put together by Ajayji and his team. Please do go and visit and he will show you this later What is it that you can do as a voter? Register not only yourself, but also your friends your family your neighbors Encourage them to register for voting and use the tools available on the website. Get out to vote whether it is mail in ballots or whether it is early voting or whether it is going on the voting day. Unfortunately, we don't have a holiday on an election day, which is the case with India and Australia, but not here. So you don't get a day off, but nevertheless go out, and, get people to step out, to vote. So, Ajayji had talked about the democracy being 3, 500 year old in India and he has given, shown you some wonderful examples. Which are available on the website, but I'll share with you one personal experience. I had gone to a very remote village in Himachal Pradesh. It is called Malana. It is up at about 12, 000 Feet and in a small village at 12, 000 feet They have a small parliament and they have a village assembly in the middle of the village There are 11 seats Which are for the elders. So I asked them as to what are these. They said, Oh, these are very, very old. We, every two years, we elect twelve, eleven members from the village as the elders. And they are the ones who take all the decisions. Each member of each family then contributes one person as a local police. And local administration. I mean, you can't get more grassroots level democracy than that. So these traditions are actually very old as part of our civilization and as a part of our who to vote for? Ajayji has already talked about it. So I would not go into those. Okay. This agenda also you have, heard Ajayji, but when you talk to your candidates, and I don't mean only the presidential candidate, but there's the congressmen and the senators, or whether it is even for the, for your local council, when you talk to these candidates, do raise your issues. And these issues, Vajayji has talked about it, but also the local issues that affect you, whether that is growing Hindu hate or whether that is vandalization of your temples, whether that is the curriculum and academy in the school, curriculums, you will see, you'll be surprised as to how much of ignorance and, and discrimination and hatred is there in some of the curriculum or some of the local school that you see. So be aware of that, raise your voice, raise it with them, and then start participating at all levels. That is how your voices will get heard and how your voices will start mattering more and more. It's not only the numbers, it is also that, you are only 1 percent of the population, but you pay 6 percent of the taxes. That is financial muscle power that you have, which you are not using. So we are punching much below our weight in the U. S. democratic process. You are contributing so much to the economy. You are contributing so much to the society that you are. Society builders, you are wealth builders, and you are punching so much above your weight in terms of economic contribution that you should also convert that into political weight your voice should matter. Learn about your candidates what are their issues, what are their agendas, what do they stand for, who is funding them, who is endorsing them, who is supporting them so that you can see whether, those who are funding, are inimical to your interest? If they are, then how do you counter that? And, in the community mobilize your community. When you mobilize your community. You get these candidates to come and talk to your community, whether that's the Diwali Mela or whether it is Navratri or whether that is Celebration the temple or whether it is any other community function invite them and invite them not just for Participating in a festival, but also have a conversation with them about your issues Those are the times when not only you as you invite them to participate in the festivals and your celebrations But also on the sidelines have a meeting with them On what your local and national level issues are and what your agenda is. So do raise it with them and slowly start sensitizing, start making them more aware. I'll take a few more minutes just to talk about the eligibility. Most of you know that you are citizens, you can vote, but also there are people who may be on permanent residency. They may or may not be aware of what they are eligible for. For the purpose of voting. You have to be a U. S. citizen. You have to be above 18 years of age. You have to be a resident of the constituency where you are going to vote. There are some, ID requirements in some places, in some places they are not. So be aware of what are the requirements for you to be able to register as a voter and then go and, vote. People on the green card, cannot vote in federal elections in some areas for the local elections, depending on where you live. There are some local elections where they're eligible to vote, but mostly not. However, they can still participate in the election process. They can donate, and contribute. They can also, volunteer for election activities. So you can do all of those things, even as a green card, holder. One thing more which can be a little confusing for people is the is is the Can you do something on the internet? Because that's this is the age of internet. Even if you are Not a voter, even if you are a permanent resident, you can still do quite a lot on the internet. Make sure that you are, this is not a paid activity and make sure that that this is on the, on the internet. That you are not violating any of the conditions of use of internet, but you can certainly may do forwards. You can certainly, do some campaigning on the internet. You can even use your employer's computers and internet subject to whatever the conditions are. But. Some places that do that as long as it is not for advocating for a particular candidate or a particular party. And some of these are common sense election day checklist. I would not go into it, but all that I would say is that start getting more active, not just at the time of election, start getting much more active, politically engaging. Even before that so that then you start building as Hindus as a community, they start looking at you as a vote that they want to come and campaign to you. And therefore they start listening to, they start listening to your issues. Start listening to your voice and that starts mattering not only for you, but also for the broader Hindu community. So let me just stop there because now Ajayji will show you as to give you a demonstration of this website as to how to use it, how to navigate it. Do go out and participate in the election on 5th or before. And do take your friends and family and encourage them, have a conversation with them on what are the Hindu issues and why do they matter and how raising your voice with the candidates will make a difference, not only for you, but also for your future generations. Become more aware if you need more information on some of those issues, more details. So that you can have a more informed conversation with your representatives There is a lot of material available on the website Website use that material or otherwise you can get in touch with us to seek more clarification. We have people who are more Knowledgeable about it and can respond More accurately to your questions so that you are much better informed in engaging in conversation with your, local candidates. Thank you very much for listening to me and thank you very much, Ajayji. I hand it over back to you and I'll stop sharing the screen.
Speaker:
00:23:16
Thank you, Mohinderji. That was incredibly helpful, very useful, and the way you articulated it made all the difference. So thank you very much. Mohinderji mentioned about a website that we have. And this is a very unique website and I am really proud to say that not because we have created this As part of HinduPAC, but because really if you compare it with a website for any advocacy group, faith based advocacy group, from any faith, I think our website is head and shoulder above any other website you'll come across for a similar purpose. And once I show you, You will know why I'm saying that. And as a Hindu, you're going to be proud of the fact that you as a Hindu community have a resource that is unparalleled from anything you would have ever seen. So let me share my screen and go over the website. So the website is Hindu vote dot o r g. That's h i n d u v o t e dot o r g. And this Hindu vote website is as multiple aspects to it. I will show you a few of them without taking up too much time. And then you can explore the website on your own. So you can see that this website has multiple components. Mohinderji mentioned tools you can see the tools for voters. We are right here. I'll quickly show you the tools for voters that we have, and there's still time to use these tools. So for example, you can see that. Using this website, you can pledge to register, register to vote, verify your voter registration, you can request absentee ballots, you can sign up for election reminders, or you can look up the donors who's donating to a candidate. Really simple for example, if you want to check the voter registration, you click on this link here. And it gives you a simple link and it goes to you know, you put your first name, last name, address, your birth date, email address. We don't hold this information. This goes directly through a third party to the government to broker, which brokers between the different states. It goes to your state and the information that we get from the state. Again the privacy policy, terms of services, all of that is here. And you get information back from the state that shows you if you're registered to vote or not. Very important because we want to make sure that you have registered and your registration should show up. So this is, and there are other tools like that, right? So I'll not go over all the tools. Please explore on your own. Again, it's. Hindu vote dot org. We also track a number of bills. These bills are all here from the Hindu perspective. And we also have a legislative report card which says how many legislators like people in the House of Representatives or Senate support a bill that we support as Hindus or oppose it. The guide that Mohinderji showed is voter guide. It's right here. We also have the Hindu American agenda. And there's one more thing, and I'll show you that. So, Mohindraji talked about the agenda. He also briefly kind of flashed on the screen the candidate questionnaire. So we converted this agenda into questionnaire. And this questionnaire was, as a survey, was sent to all the candidates for House of Representatives and the Senate. So it basically went out to 1, 076 candidates who are running for various offices. Republicans, Democrats, Independents you know, Green Party candidates, and everyone you can think of. Okay, so all of them got the survey and as they fill out, I'll show you where the answers come. We also have a unique guide for temples and non profits, and this is the guide which tells the mandirs and the non profit what they can and cannot do legally during the election, like setting up the polling booth or setting up the candidate debates, they can issue statements, how they could do all that without jeopardizing their 501c3 status. So with that, let me first, before I go to the main website, these are the standing posters and we have been putting these informative standing posters on in various, on several Mandir premises. So you can see we have now about, I think we have reached about, 30, 35, 35 or so. And I think by election, we will have reached about 50 of these Mondays where we are putting up the posters about need to, you know, why do we need to register to vote? We also have podcasts available as part of our conversations over coffee. But now Without further ado, let me just show this main website that we have created that I've been talking about. So Hindu vote guide to elections 2024. So you come here and the first thing you see is you can have it in many languages by the way. And, but you can come to this website and you can enter any zip code or you can enter an address, any address in us. And you can search the candidates. So, for example, I'll put a zip code 92129. This is a zip code in San Diego, for example, right? I don't need to enter address because I already have a zip code. Otherwise, I enter the address and it maps to the same thing. And then I click on search. When I click on search here. I see all the candidates for House of Representatives, for the U. S. Senate, and some other information like tools and videos and articles and all of the other stuff. So now I say, well, you know, this is interesting. I have a Republican, I have a Republican and a Democrat. Republican in this case is Peter Bono, Democratic Scott Peters Democratic Senate candidate is Adam Schiff, and the Republican Senate candidate is Steve Garvey. Well, let me find out a little bit more about Adam Schiff. Right. Just want to know about him. So I click about on Adam Schiff. Now, remember the goal is of this website is to help a decision. We don't endorse a candidate. We want you to be informed. So you make a decision as to whether the candidate is worthy of your vote or not. Okay, so we look at, there's a brief bio, social media handles. And once you keep going down, you say, okay, well, who is giving money to this candidate? How much has the candidate raised? Remember, this is as of the reporting date that is available, that is available on federal elect site. And this might be a little older for Adam Schiff because he was in the house. We have to, you know, we'll make sure this connected to a Senate campaign. We get to hear more about this Senate candidacy. So you'll see for all the candidates. You'll see some contribution they have received, loans, everything else, again, it's directly from the Federal Election Commission website. We also have listed the political action committees for example, Americans for Hindus Hindu American political action committee, IPAC americans for Hindus, have they endorsed this candidate or not? Are they supporting, have they funded it? If Adam Schiff was funded by them, you would actually see an amount here. Since he has not received the money or endorsement, you don't see any amount of funding here. And you can see MGAGE is a Muslim Political Action Committee. MPAC is again, Muslim Public Affairs Committee. BAPS has its own public affairs, Sam. We want to give you a neutral view of who is supporting or not supporting the candidate. Okay, so that is where is the candidate getting money from? The second is a really, really unique way of representing a candidate. What we have here is all the relationships that Adam Schiff has. So, for example, Adam Schiff As you can see here is a Democrat if there was substantial amount, we would have listed major donors, we would have listed the name if that was in public domain and available as current information, then we can see the issues that are important to Adam Schiff. So for example, he has talked about racism and reflections on racism in America. And there's a source, you can click on it, you can explore it. That is a speech that he has given at the House of Representatives. He has talked about racial bias in healthcare, right? These are the issues that are important to him. He has also talked about Israel and anti Semitism. So you can see the source where he has talked about that. He has also talked about the Russian interference. And, the title of the news item was the quiet anger of Adam Schiff. And he talks about Russian interference and then his key writings. There's some key writings here telephone metadata from Reform Act that he talked about the domestic phone records and all that. He talked about the Freedom of Press Act that he has written about which is the Daniel Pearl Foundation Freedom of the Press Act that was passed. And then he has issued a statement of support for Israel as official house statement. That is his key writing. So you can now you can look at his record and you can say, is this candidates? Does this candidates values, writings, thoughts? caucus membership. Does it align with your thinking? Does it align with the Hindu interest or not? Right. And the questionnaire that we talked about a little earlier, this is the questionnaire. This questionnaire aligns with the Hindu agenda. So you can see that we'd ask about the candidates vision and why, what they want to do, why they want to run for election. There are three questions about that. Very simple. Then the Hindu hatred question and the Mandir vandalism question is combined into a single question and that is To counter the growing hate instances do you support this House Resolution 1131 that was proposed by Shri Thanedar in condemning Hindu phobia, anti Hindu bigotry and other purposes? So we want to know if a candidate Whether it's Adam Schiff or his opponent or any candidate running for Congress, House or Senate, what is their response? They've all been sent this custom link, and they click on the link and they respond to this simple question that should take no more than five minutes to respond to, if they have thought about these issues, then it automatically gets populated on this website. If they have not responded to, then it will just say, waiting for the responses. And then there are affirmative action, what do you think about affirmative action, about the immigration policy, about international human rights, about the foreign policy again, it mirrors exactly the Hindu American, American Hindu agenda is reflected in this questionnaire. And then there are some more, And that is what the candidate we think that these are important questions for our community to know about for example what the candidate thinks about the gun control issue and about the abortion. Again, we are passing no judgment on it. We just want to know what the candidate position is. And then here are the, remember I told you that the, we track the voting records or who is who is sponsoring a particular legislation or a bill or resolution. And we are, we follow that and we say, okay, does this, candidate's position in alignment with the position that we as Hindu PAC on behalf of the Hindu community hold. And if there's no position taken, then you'd see an A. But in case of Adam Schiff, if you go down with the Hate Crime Commission Act of 2023, we think it should be supported. Adam Schiff has supported it. So we give them a thumbs up. If there are cases where we don't support it, we'll give them a thumbs down. And there's one more part of this website. Now, this is important part of the survey. This is we want to know here what you think about a candidate as a voter in his constituency. Has he been involved with the Hindu Hindu American community in his constituency? Do you think he appreciates the Hindu American community? If you don't know, you can just say neutral. I'm just randomly picking, right? Because he's not my senate candidate. So I don't know really whether what he is doing. I'm just demonstrating a website at this stage. Do you believe that he would be a strong advocate for US India relationship? I don't know. I would just say, yeah, sure. Why not? Do you believe that this candidate is aware and appreciates of the growing level of hate being directed at the American Hindu community? We saw that he supported one legislation. We'll just say strongly agree. And does he promote merit based educational opportunities? If you don't think he agrees, then you can say no. Again, I'm just demonstrating a website. I don't know what his position is on any of these things. So this is how we vote. And then, you know, You can then if there are enough number of survey responses to make it statistically significant, then you would see the survey responses here. The idea is that you want to know what your fellow Hindus are thinking about this particular candidate. And that is yet another way of judging the candidate. So we have five different ways of judging a candidate. You judge the candidate based on the, what voters in his or her district saying or state saying about the candidate from the Hindu perspective. What are the bills or resolutions that the candidates supporting, whether they're in agreement with the position that we as Hindu Pact have taken. We have here a response to the questionnaire that we sent, all the relationships. and the speeches that the candidate has given and all the political action committees and funding that candidate gets. So these are the ways that we evaluate a candidate using this website. Again, very unique, haven't seen this and any other faith based website at all so far. Now, let me go back and show you one final thing. I'll remember I had mentioned earlier that we actually track the candidates and we We have a legislative report card. So let me show you what that looks like. These are the bills that we track. A quick demo on what we are tracking. So all the bills at what stage the bills are in. Hindu vote website is absolutely critical for all the Hindus because they can see what is going on without going through, all the news items and fumbling through all the sources to find out what is important of Hindus in Congress. You can just go to this one page and you can see all the bills in House and Senate that are being tracked by HinduPAC. To make things even simpler, we also have a legislative report card. So every two years we update this and we say, okay, you know, how are the, in the past and this current Congress, what are the bills that are important? Same bills that we showed earlier in the bill tracker. Now we have all the candidates. who have opined on these bills one way or the other. And we can show you who are supporting Hindu causes with a thumbs up and who are supporting, not supporting the Hindu causes with thumbs down. Now these are politicians, so you can see some of them have a thumbs up and thumbs down. So now we leave it to you whether, you know, to weigh the pros and cons if they're one thumbs up and one thumbs down, right? But this is how we, we have 160 candidates all scored over here. Okay. So with that done, I go back to this website and I want to show you a couple of other things. These are some really two of our leaders Deepak Karthik is leading the Hindu vote initiative. And she's the executive director for Hindu vote. Deepthi Mahajan is the co convener of HinduPact, a Hindu policy research and advocacy collective. Deepa and Deepti have done a lot of show appearances. They were in the Shree Iyer show, which is a very popular show on Vibhuti Jha's show called Jaipur Dialogues and various others. So please, check them out. The links are on our website. We do a podcast. We just released them yesterday, three of them. So check out the podcast. You'll see the link to the podcast on our website as well. Okay. With that Mohinderji, that is pretty much what I had to cover. I'll turn it over to you to see if other comments.
Speaker 2:
00:39:31
Now, thank you very much Ajayji. Even I learned quite a bit in your presentation. Navigating through the website all the all the wonderful work that has been done. I can tell you that this level of information, this level of awareness, this level of that created, it is not common to see this level of, the information and the tools being made available to the voters anywhere. I have seen it in many other countries where I've worked from the World Bank and the United Nations, this level of voter education, voter awareness, the level of information that you are putting at the tips of their fingers to be able to make an informed choice and a conscious decision. That is very rare. So, heartiest congratulations to you and your team for having done this great work. You're part of our team. I'm a newbie. So you have inducted me recently. So I'm still learning my way through more and more impressed. As I see, I'm getting more and more impressed. One appeal that I would like to make to the Hindu community here in the US is do make better use of your mans to create awareness in the Hindu community about the public policy choices. We are not talking about the partisan politics. We are not talking about party politics. We are not talking about electoral politics. We are talking about public policies. And the Mondays should be at the vanguard of creating awareness. In the Hindu community or the temple communities on what are the public policies, how they affect you, what are the pros and cons of those, and what is it that you can do about it, what you need to do about it and what you can do about it. So become much better, much more informed citizen about the policies that affect you. And the Mandirs should play that role because that is one place where everybody gets together. And also for the Mandir executives, They also should inform themselves that being a 501c3 or religious based does not mean that you will not speak up for the concerns of your community. You should be the anchor You should be the leader of raising the concerns of your community for the welfare of your community so that is the only appeal that I would make and not a self promotion, but I would just like to say that I'm a president of the Global Hindu Temple Network America and Managing trustee of Global Hindu Temple Network in India And that is what we are trying to do through Global Hindu Temple Network that is The temples should become the, not only the places of religious worship, but also places of social consciousness and re energization of the Hindu communities everywhere should become center of social activities, cultural activities, religious activities economic activities, but bring more social cohesion and public policy awareness, not only for yourself, but also for your community. younger generation for your children and younger generation and bring them to the temple, become aware of the public policies that will affect their future and become much more proactive. So, again, happy Diwali and wish you all a wonderful election day and a wonderful election results.
Speaker:
00:42:46
Thank you. Thank you, Mohinderji. And I'll close with one final appeal. All this take a resources and a lot of funds. So my appeal to the community would be that please go to hindupac. org slash donation. And just go to our website, click on donation button on hinduvote. org, click on donation button anywhere, any of the websites, so hindupac. org or hinduvote. org, click on the donation button and help us as much as you can, because none of this is done on cheap. It does take a lot of resources, to develop a sophisticated website like this, we would appreciate the community support in enhancing support and maintaining this website and really create a professional grade, resource for our community. We are a 501c3. All the donations are absolutely tax deductible. And again, we are not endorsing any candidates. We are just providing tools for voter to evaluate the candidates who will vote in, alignment with the Hindu community. So with I will everyone happy Diwali and happy election thank you for Namaste.
Speaker 2:
00:43:44
Namaste to everyone.
Speaker:
00:43:51
is you know
00:00:01
We are live and I want to say, first of all, namaste and thank you for joining. We truly appreciate you being here with us today. We are going to talk about an important issue today, which is the election 2024. People have said that this may be one of the more consequential elections that we have, this is an election that is going to, decide America's future in many ways. We are doing a project called Hindu Vote. A voter education project we have been doing since 2020. But before I get to today's webinar, let me start with a quick introduction. My name is Ajay Shah. I am the president of World Hindu Council of America or VHPA, of America. I am also the co convener of HinduPact. Which is Hindu Policy Research and Advocacy Collective. It is an initiative of World Hindu Council of America or VHPA. I have been doing advocacy work for most of my adult life I'm really privileged to have Mohinder Gulati ji here today. Mohinder Gulati ji is, very accomplished, individual. He is a member of our core team for Hindu vote. He was in his younger days, an elections officer in India for two years. So he actually has on the ground experience in running the election. He recently retired from United Nations, where he was the chief operating officer of Sustainable Energy for All. He was also an advisor to Sustainable Development at the World Bank, where he worked At more than 50 countries. We are absolutely privileged that Mohenjo daro is part of our team and is working with us on this important initiative. So thank you, Mohenjo daro, and thanks for joining. We truly appreciate it. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, this is really one of the more consequential elections we are facing. We start looking around and we said, look the Hindu vote is really an important vote. And why do I say that? Let me show this graphic to you and see what you have to say about this particular graphic, let's take a look at this. And that screen will show you evidence as to why I'm making the statement I'm making. This, Mohinderji and everyone else who is watching, is the graph that we have put together at HinduPact. This is the graph that shows the importance of Hindu vote. Okay. So if you look at the blue bars here, this is from 2020 elections. The blue bars are the difference in the votes that president Biden got and former president Trump got. And this is for battleground states, which is on the X axis. So Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Michigan, and North Carolina, the battleground states. These are the bars that indicate the differences between the Biden vote and the Trump vote. The purple bar is the number of Hindus in that state. who are eligible to vote. The, Hindu vote in that particular battleground state. And you can see here that the Hindu vote can be a decisive vote in almost all the states except maybe a couple of them, like Florida and Virginia. The Hindu vote has grown since 2020. In every state, because of immigration and naturalization. If a candidate pays attention to this Hindu vote, they can actually win the elections. And mind you, this is not Indian vote. Hindu vote is much larger than the Indian vote. The Hindu vote includes people from other countries. who have come to America. For example, the Hindus from Bali, from Ghana, from Vietnam, from Suriname, from the Caribbeans, from Pakistan, from Bangladesh, you name it. And there are a lot of people who have adopted Hindu Dharma have been residents for many generations, or who have immigrated from some parts of Europe. And even countries like Latin America and Central America. So Hindu vote is not just of consequence. It is also growing vote and it's much more diverse vote. So you may say that, well, if the Hindu vote is this diverse, why would a candidate pay attention to Hindu vote? Why would they not just say, Hey, you know, I'll just address generic issues. Well, there are certain issues. If the candidates were to address, then they will get the deciding Hindu vote and will make an impact not just for the presidential elections, but also for the congressional elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate. So what are these issues? At HinduPact, we have come up with The American Hindu agenda for 2024. These are the issues that we think are of importance to all the Hindus. We have done a lot of research on it, consulted, other organizations, and we have come up with eight simple issues. The first one is. We would like to see a legislation to bar Hindu phobia. What do you mean by bar? I mean, of course, we all understand First Amendment. We're not saying stop free speech. But there are academic departments that promote, actively promote Hindu hatred. They write, they promote papers and they're funded by some government grant or the others. So defund these departments, defund these universities that actively promote Hindu hate. Okay, let's not use taxpayer dollars to promote Hindu hate. There might be other, situations where there are corporations and other places, which are funding these kinds of research and we want to make sure that is not funded. Now, as all of you have seen, there are at least a dozen cases over the last two years where Hindu temples have been vandalized and Mahatma Gandhi statues have been vandalized. This has happened without any attempt to even find the culprit, much less declare it as a hate crime. What we are asking that the people who get elected with our votes in Congress or in the White House, support the investigation to determine the systemic causes for this kind of vandalism across the U. S. It's a very simple demand have an investigation, find out what are the systemic causes. and punish the perpetrators of that because this is really a hate crime and it has to be investigated as a hate crime. The next one is immigration. Now, everyone who is probably listening to this webinar here live or people who are listening on Twitter or YouTube, they already know this, if you today come to America legally, I'm not talking about illegal immigration at all come here legally follow all the rules. Come using H1 visa, then go and apply for permanent residency for green card. Getting permanent residence right now is over a hundred years because there are country based caps. So there are only so many people from India who can qualify. What we are saying is that we are getting highly qualified, highly skilled workers from India. Most of them are Hindus. This artificial barrier is keeping them from getting, permanent residency. And it actually is hurting America. Because these are exactly the kind of legal immigrants you want in America. So expedite the green card for them. All you have to do is remove the country based, caps on the visa. Even worse are their children who come here legally when they're very young, two years, three years, four years old. When they turn 18, they don't have green card. Their parents don't have a green card yet. All of a sudden that kid who has grown up here, who has come to America legally, Is now out of status and the kid has either goes on student visa or some kind of work visa or has to go back to a country they've never known. And again, we are only making argument for kids who are here legally. The next one is supporting the merit based education and occupation. And this is the one where, there's a lot of studies now after the, fair admissions versus Harvard case, where a recent study of hundreds of thousands of students that said that, students from Indian subcontinent, mostly Hindus, would have had 50 percent better chance of getting admission at Ivy League schools if the admission process was fair and if there were no quotas. So the affirmative action policies were not in place and the numbers were not artificially capped at 17, 18%. Then these students would have had fair admission, chances and they would have actually 50 percent better odds of getting into one of these Ivy League schools. We want college educational and occupational opportunities to be based on merit and not on some artificial quotas. We want the candidates to actually support. this Supreme Court ruling and not try and override it. The other one is we want to hold religious theocracies like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh that abuse the minorities, the Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian minorities to be held accountable. What we mean by that is America has a lot of soft power, gives a lot of aid to these countries. We want to make sure that These countries are held accountable, so we don't see a 12 year, 13 year old, 14 year old girl being, kidnapped and converted to Islam, married off to men they don't even know, who are much older than them, these little girls now become, victims in a sex crime. You have seen recently what has happened in Bangladesh, where the Mandirs have been vandalized, Hindus have been beaten on the streets, Hindu businesses and homes have been burnt, Hindus have been forced to resign from their faculty jobs and police jobs and other places. We want. America to exercise its soft power and hold these, theocracies accountable. The next one is very simple. There are a lot of statues, murtis, as we call them. Murtis have been actually stolen or decapitated and the head stolen. If you go to Cambodia and you go to India, the murtis are stolen. People are worshipping them. These are especially older murtis. They've been worshipped for hundreds of years. And next, you know, some morning people wake up, go to the mandir, the murti is missing. We want to make sure that these artifacts that are taken, stolen, given to private collectors, gone to, museums, these are sacred murtis. They be returned so that people can place them back in mandirs. The next one is we want to make sure that US promotes a multifaceted partnership with. What I mean is America and India are natural allies. America is our karma bhoomi, India is our dharma bhoomi, but we both practice democracy. Bharat India has practiced democracy for thousands of years from the times of Mahajanapadas. That's about 3, 000, 3, 500 years ago. And we want to make sure that, and America being one of the more prominent democracies today, come and work together as equals, as allies and not government instruments like USCIRF are not used to malign India. And really use those tools by vested interests to break apart this natural partnership. So we want the candidates who get our support to actually promise us. They will use these tools, commissions and agencies that US government has for the good of promo. And by good, I mean promoting this multifaceted partnership with India. And finally, and I'm sure Maji will talk a lot more about it, is support legislation that promote environmentally responsible and sustainable development. In Hindu, derma, we consider Earth to be dirty. Maa. So we have a lot of respect for, Mother Earth and through sustainable development, we can promote, responsible development. So I'll stop there and turn it over to Mohinderji for the next part of this webinar. Mohinderji.
Speaker 2:
00:12:29
Thank you very much for this wonderful introduction, Ajayji. I wish to all those viewing this webinar and those who might view it later on, happy Diwali. It's a little early, but it's around the corner. So wishing you all a very, very happy Diwali. I also want to congratulate those eligible to participate in the voting process on your good fortune. I want to congratulate you for that, that you are able to participate in a democratic process in a secure, safe, And dignified environment on not many countries in not many places. People are able to do that. I have not really been an election officer in India. That was long ago when we had paper ballots. That sounds like a very, very old times, but I have also seen these elections in many other countries where we know how difficult the democratic processes are and how rigged these are. So, you are very fortunate to be participating in a stable, safe, secure, dignified, democratic process here. And so please do go out, step out and vote your vote matters. As Ajayji said, and he showed you that graph. In a system of first past the post, this is not a system of proportional representation. It's a system of first past the post. In a system of first past the post, the swing vote matters. And your vote is actually much bigger than the victory margin in many of the states that Ajayji showed. Therefore, it is not only your moral obligation to go and participate in the democratic process. Be heard. Raise your voice, be heard, but also as a responsible citizen, go and vote and participate. On the HinduPact website, you will see several, very useful tools. And Ajay ji will talk about that later One is the temple guide. Another is a voter guide one as to for you as a voter What is it that you can do you should do what is that it is possible what you are eligible to? And what is legally permissible? What is not legally permissible? What are the tools that you can use? So there's a whole lot of information and very, very useful, background and the tools available on this website for you as well as for the Mondays that you can, if it is possible, convert these Mondays into, voter registration centers into polling centers so that it is not only that you are creating this facility for increasing the voter participation of the Hindu community, but also you are demonstrating to the community around you that you are a responsible, conscientious Citizen who participates and engages in these processes. So plenty of material are there Beautifully put together by Ajayji and his team. Please do go and visit and he will show you this later What is it that you can do as a voter? Register not only yourself, but also your friends your family your neighbors Encourage them to register for voting and use the tools available on the website. Get out to vote whether it is mail in ballots or whether it is early voting or whether it is going on the voting day. Unfortunately, we don't have a holiday on an election day, which is the case with India and Australia, but not here. So you don't get a day off, but nevertheless go out, and, get people to step out, to vote. So, Ajayji had talked about the democracy being 3, 500 year old in India and he has given, shown you some wonderful examples. Which are available on the website, but I'll share with you one personal experience. I had gone to a very remote village in Himachal Pradesh. It is called Malana. It is up at about 12, 000 Feet and in a small village at 12, 000 feet They have a small parliament and they have a village assembly in the middle of the village There are 11 seats Which are for the elders. So I asked them as to what are these. They said, Oh, these are very, very old. We, every two years, we elect twelve, eleven members from the village as the elders. And they are the ones who take all the decisions. Each member of each family then contributes one person as a local police. And local administration. I mean, you can't get more grassroots level democracy than that. So these traditions are actually very old as part of our civilization and as a part of our who to vote for? Ajayji has already talked about it. So I would not go into those. Okay. This agenda also you have, heard Ajayji, but when you talk to your candidates, and I don't mean only the presidential candidate, but there's the congressmen and the senators, or whether it is even for the, for your local council, when you talk to these candidates, do raise your issues. And these issues, Vajayji has talked about it, but also the local issues that affect you, whether that is growing Hindu hate or whether that is vandalization of your temples, whether that is the curriculum and academy in the school, curriculums, you will see, you'll be surprised as to how much of ignorance and, and discrimination and hatred is there in some of the curriculum or some of the local school that you see. So be aware of that, raise your voice, raise it with them, and then start participating at all levels. That is how your voices will get heard and how your voices will start mattering more and more. It's not only the numbers, it is also that, you are only 1 percent of the population, but you pay 6 percent of the taxes. That is financial muscle power that you have, which you are not using. So we are punching much below our weight in the U. S. democratic process. You are contributing so much to the economy. You are contributing so much to the society that you are. Society builders, you are wealth builders, and you are punching so much above your weight in terms of economic contribution that you should also convert that into political weight your voice should matter. Learn about your candidates what are their issues, what are their agendas, what do they stand for, who is funding them, who is endorsing them, who is supporting them so that you can see whether, those who are funding, are inimical to your interest? If they are, then how do you counter that? And, in the community mobilize your community. When you mobilize your community. You get these candidates to come and talk to your community, whether that's the Diwali Mela or whether it is Navratri or whether that is Celebration the temple or whether it is any other community function invite them and invite them not just for Participating in a festival, but also have a conversation with them about your issues Those are the times when not only you as you invite them to participate in the festivals and your celebrations But also on the sidelines have a meeting with them On what your local and national level issues are and what your agenda is. So do raise it with them and slowly start sensitizing, start making them more aware. I'll take a few more minutes just to talk about the eligibility. Most of you know that you are citizens, you can vote, but also there are people who may be on permanent residency. They may or may not be aware of what they are eligible for. For the purpose of voting. You have to be a U. S. citizen. You have to be above 18 years of age. You have to be a resident of the constituency where you are going to vote. There are some, ID requirements in some places, in some places they are not. So be aware of what are the requirements for you to be able to register as a voter and then go and, vote. People on the green card, cannot vote in federal elections in some areas for the local elections, depending on where you live. There are some local elections where they're eligible to vote, but mostly not. However, they can still participate in the election process. They can donate, and contribute. They can also, volunteer for election activities. So you can do all of those things, even as a green card, holder. One thing more which can be a little confusing for people is the is is the Can you do something on the internet? Because that's this is the age of internet. Even if you are Not a voter, even if you are a permanent resident, you can still do quite a lot on the internet. Make sure that you are, this is not a paid activity and make sure that that this is on the, on the internet. That you are not violating any of the conditions of use of internet, but you can certainly may do forwards. You can certainly, do some campaigning on the internet. You can even use your employer's computers and internet subject to whatever the conditions are. But. Some places that do that as long as it is not for advocating for a particular candidate or a particular party. And some of these are common sense election day checklist. I would not go into it, but all that I would say is that start getting more active, not just at the time of election, start getting much more active, politically engaging. Even before that so that then you start building as Hindus as a community, they start looking at you as a vote that they want to come and campaign to you. And therefore they start listening to, they start listening to your issues. Start listening to your voice and that starts mattering not only for you, but also for the broader Hindu community. So let me just stop there because now Ajayji will show you as to give you a demonstration of this website as to how to use it, how to navigate it. Do go out and participate in the election on 5th or before. And do take your friends and family and encourage them, have a conversation with them on what are the Hindu issues and why do they matter and how raising your voice with the candidates will make a difference, not only for you, but also for your future generations. Become more aware if you need more information on some of those issues, more details. So that you can have a more informed conversation with your representatives There is a lot of material available on the website Website use that material or otherwise you can get in touch with us to seek more clarification. We have people who are more Knowledgeable about it and can respond More accurately to your questions so that you are much better informed in engaging in conversation with your, local candidates. Thank you very much for listening to me and thank you very much, Ajayji. I hand it over back to you and I'll stop sharing the screen.
Speaker:
00:23:16
Thank you, Mohinderji. That was incredibly helpful, very useful, and the way you articulated it made all the difference. So thank you very much. Mohinderji mentioned about a website that we have. And this is a very unique website and I am really proud to say that not because we have created this As part of HinduPAC, but because really if you compare it with a website for any advocacy group, faith based advocacy group, from any faith, I think our website is head and shoulder above any other website you'll come across for a similar purpose. And once I show you, You will know why I'm saying that. And as a Hindu, you're going to be proud of the fact that you as a Hindu community have a resource that is unparalleled from anything you would have ever seen. So let me share my screen and go over the website. So the website is Hindu vote dot o r g. That's h i n d u v o t e dot o r g. And this Hindu vote website is as multiple aspects to it. I will show you a few of them without taking up too much time. And then you can explore the website on your own. So you can see that this website has multiple components. Mohinderji mentioned tools you can see the tools for voters. We are right here. I'll quickly show you the tools for voters that we have, and there's still time to use these tools. So for example, you can see that. Using this website, you can pledge to register, register to vote, verify your voter registration, you can request absentee ballots, you can sign up for election reminders, or you can look up the donors who's donating to a candidate. Really simple for example, if you want to check the voter registration, you click on this link here. And it gives you a simple link and it goes to you know, you put your first name, last name, address, your birth date, email address. We don't hold this information. This goes directly through a third party to the government to broker, which brokers between the different states. It goes to your state and the information that we get from the state. Again the privacy policy, terms of services, all of that is here. And you get information back from the state that shows you if you're registered to vote or not. Very important because we want to make sure that you have registered and your registration should show up. So this is, and there are other tools like that, right? So I'll not go over all the tools. Please explore on your own. Again, it's. Hindu vote dot org. We also track a number of bills. These bills are all here from the Hindu perspective. And we also have a legislative report card which says how many legislators like people in the House of Representatives or Senate support a bill that we support as Hindus or oppose it. The guide that Mohinderji showed is voter guide. It's right here. We also have the Hindu American agenda. And there's one more thing, and I'll show you that. So, Mohindraji talked about the agenda. He also briefly kind of flashed on the screen the candidate questionnaire. So we converted this agenda into questionnaire. And this questionnaire was, as a survey, was sent to all the candidates for House of Representatives and the Senate. So it basically went out to 1, 076 candidates who are running for various offices. Republicans, Democrats, Independents you know, Green Party candidates, and everyone you can think of. Okay, so all of them got the survey and as they fill out, I'll show you where the answers come. We also have a unique guide for temples and non profits, and this is the guide which tells the mandirs and the non profit what they can and cannot do legally during the election, like setting up the polling booth or setting up the candidate debates, they can issue statements, how they could do all that without jeopardizing their 501c3 status. So with that, let me first, before I go to the main website, these are the standing posters and we have been putting these informative standing posters on in various, on several Mandir premises. So you can see we have now about, I think we have reached about, 30, 35, 35 or so. And I think by election, we will have reached about 50 of these Mondays where we are putting up the posters about need to, you know, why do we need to register to vote? We also have podcasts available as part of our conversations over coffee. But now Without further ado, let me just show this main website that we have created that I've been talking about. So Hindu vote guide to elections 2024. So you come here and the first thing you see is you can have it in many languages by the way. And, but you can come to this website and you can enter any zip code or you can enter an address, any address in us. And you can search the candidates. So, for example, I'll put a zip code 92129. This is a zip code in San Diego, for example, right? I don't need to enter address because I already have a zip code. Otherwise, I enter the address and it maps to the same thing. And then I click on search. When I click on search here. I see all the candidates for House of Representatives, for the U. S. Senate, and some other information like tools and videos and articles and all of the other stuff. So now I say, well, you know, this is interesting. I have a Republican, I have a Republican and a Democrat. Republican in this case is Peter Bono, Democratic Scott Peters Democratic Senate candidate is Adam Schiff, and the Republican Senate candidate is Steve Garvey. Well, let me find out a little bit more about Adam Schiff. Right. Just want to know about him. So I click about on Adam Schiff. Now, remember the goal is of this website is to help a decision. We don't endorse a candidate. We want you to be informed. So you make a decision as to whether the candidate is worthy of your vote or not. Okay, so we look at, there's a brief bio, social media handles. And once you keep going down, you say, okay, well, who is giving money to this candidate? How much has the candidate raised? Remember, this is as of the reporting date that is available, that is available on federal elect site. And this might be a little older for Adam Schiff because he was in the house. We have to, you know, we'll make sure this connected to a Senate campaign. We get to hear more about this Senate candidacy. So you'll see for all the candidates. You'll see some contribution they have received, loans, everything else, again, it's directly from the Federal Election Commission website. We also have listed the political action committees for example, Americans for Hindus Hindu American political action committee, IPAC americans for Hindus, have they endorsed this candidate or not? Are they supporting, have they funded it? If Adam Schiff was funded by them, you would actually see an amount here. Since he has not received the money or endorsement, you don't see any amount of funding here. And you can see MGAGE is a Muslim Political Action Committee. MPAC is again, Muslim Public Affairs Committee. BAPS has its own public affairs, Sam. We want to give you a neutral view of who is supporting or not supporting the candidate. Okay, so that is where is the candidate getting money from? The second is a really, really unique way of representing a candidate. What we have here is all the relationships that Adam Schiff has. So, for example, Adam Schiff As you can see here is a Democrat if there was substantial amount, we would have listed major donors, we would have listed the name if that was in public domain and available as current information, then we can see the issues that are important to Adam Schiff. So for example, he has talked about racism and reflections on racism in America. And there's a source, you can click on it, you can explore it. That is a speech that he has given at the House of Representatives. He has talked about racial bias in healthcare, right? These are the issues that are important to him. He has also talked about Israel and anti Semitism. So you can see the source where he has talked about that. He has also talked about the Russian interference. And, the title of the news item was the quiet anger of Adam Schiff. And he talks about Russian interference and then his key writings. There's some key writings here telephone metadata from Reform Act that he talked about the domestic phone records and all that. He talked about the Freedom of Press Act that he has written about which is the Daniel Pearl Foundation Freedom of the Press Act that was passed. And then he has issued a statement of support for Israel as official house statement. That is his key writing. So you can now you can look at his record and you can say, is this candidates? Does this candidates values, writings, thoughts? caucus membership. Does it align with your thinking? Does it align with the Hindu interest or not? Right. And the questionnaire that we talked about a little earlier, this is the questionnaire. This questionnaire aligns with the Hindu agenda. So you can see that we'd ask about the candidates vision and why, what they want to do, why they want to run for election. There are three questions about that. Very simple. Then the Hindu hatred question and the Mandir vandalism question is combined into a single question and that is To counter the growing hate instances do you support this House Resolution 1131 that was proposed by Shri Thanedar in condemning Hindu phobia, anti Hindu bigotry and other purposes? So we want to know if a candidate Whether it's Adam Schiff or his opponent or any candidate running for Congress, House or Senate, what is their response? They've all been sent this custom link, and they click on the link and they respond to this simple question that should take no more than five minutes to respond to, if they have thought about these issues, then it automatically gets populated on this website. If they have not responded to, then it will just say, waiting for the responses. And then there are affirmative action, what do you think about affirmative action, about the immigration policy, about international human rights, about the foreign policy again, it mirrors exactly the Hindu American, American Hindu agenda is reflected in this questionnaire. And then there are some more, And that is what the candidate we think that these are important questions for our community to know about for example what the candidate thinks about the gun control issue and about the abortion. Again, we are passing no judgment on it. We just want to know what the candidate position is. And then here are the, remember I told you that the, we track the voting records or who is who is sponsoring a particular legislation or a bill or resolution. And we are, we follow that and we say, okay, does this, candidate's position in alignment with the position that we as Hindu PAC on behalf of the Hindu community hold. And if there's no position taken, then you'd see an A. But in case of Adam Schiff, if you go down with the Hate Crime Commission Act of 2023, we think it should be supported. Adam Schiff has supported it. So we give them a thumbs up. If there are cases where we don't support it, we'll give them a thumbs down. And there's one more part of this website. Now, this is important part of the survey. This is we want to know here what you think about a candidate as a voter in his constituency. Has he been involved with the Hindu Hindu American community in his constituency? Do you think he appreciates the Hindu American community? If you don't know, you can just say neutral. I'm just randomly picking, right? Because he's not my senate candidate. So I don't know really whether what he is doing. I'm just demonstrating a website at this stage. Do you believe that he would be a strong advocate for US India relationship? I don't know. I would just say, yeah, sure. Why not? Do you believe that this candidate is aware and appreciates of the growing level of hate being directed at the American Hindu community? We saw that he supported one legislation. We'll just say strongly agree. And does he promote merit based educational opportunities? If you don't think he agrees, then you can say no. Again, I'm just demonstrating a website. I don't know what his position is on any of these things. So this is how we vote. And then, you know, You can then if there are enough number of survey responses to make it statistically significant, then you would see the survey responses here. The idea is that you want to know what your fellow Hindus are thinking about this particular candidate. And that is yet another way of judging the candidate. So we have five different ways of judging a candidate. You judge the candidate based on the, what voters in his or her district saying or state saying about the candidate from the Hindu perspective. What are the bills or resolutions that the candidates supporting, whether they're in agreement with the position that we as Hindu Pact have taken. We have here a response to the questionnaire that we sent, all the relationships. and the speeches that the candidate has given and all the political action committees and funding that candidate gets. So these are the ways that we evaluate a candidate using this website. Again, very unique, haven't seen this and any other faith based website at all so far. Now, let me go back and show you one final thing. I'll remember I had mentioned earlier that we actually track the candidates and we We have a legislative report card. So let me show you what that looks like. These are the bills that we track. A quick demo on what we are tracking. So all the bills at what stage the bills are in. Hindu vote website is absolutely critical for all the Hindus because they can see what is going on without going through, all the news items and fumbling through all the sources to find out what is important of Hindus in Congress. You can just go to this one page and you can see all the bills in House and Senate that are being tracked by HinduPAC. To make things even simpler, we also have a legislative report card. So every two years we update this and we say, okay, you know, how are the, in the past and this current Congress, what are the bills that are important? Same bills that we showed earlier in the bill tracker. Now we have all the candidates. who have opined on these bills one way or the other. And we can show you who are supporting Hindu causes with a thumbs up and who are supporting, not supporting the Hindu causes with thumbs down. Now these are politicians, so you can see some of them have a thumbs up and thumbs down. So now we leave it to you whether, you know, to weigh the pros and cons if they're one thumbs up and one thumbs down, right? But this is how we, we have 160 candidates all scored over here. Okay. So with that done, I go back to this website and I want to show you a couple of other things. These are some really two of our leaders Deepak Karthik is leading the Hindu vote initiative. And she's the executive director for Hindu vote. Deepthi Mahajan is the co convener of HinduPact, a Hindu policy research and advocacy collective. Deepa and Deepti have done a lot of show appearances. They were in the Shree Iyer show, which is a very popular show on Vibhuti Jha's show called Jaipur Dialogues and various others. So please, check them out. The links are on our website. We do a podcast. We just released them yesterday, three of them. So check out the podcast. You'll see the link to the podcast on our website as well. Okay. With that Mohinderji, that is pretty much what I had to cover. I'll turn it over to you to see if other comments.
Speaker 2:
00:39:31
Now, thank you very much Ajayji. Even I learned quite a bit in your presentation. Navigating through the website all the all the wonderful work that has been done. I can tell you that this level of information, this level of awareness, this level of that created, it is not common to see this level of, the information and the tools being made available to the voters anywhere. I have seen it in many other countries where I've worked from the World Bank and the United Nations, this level of voter education, voter awareness, the level of information that you are putting at the tips of their fingers to be able to make an informed choice and a conscious decision. That is very rare. So, heartiest congratulations to you and your team for having done this great work. You're part of our team. I'm a newbie. So you have inducted me recently. So I'm still learning my way through more and more impressed. As I see, I'm getting more and more impressed. One appeal that I would like to make to the Hindu community here in the US is do make better use of your mans to create awareness in the Hindu community about the public policy choices. We are not talking about the partisan politics. We are not talking about party politics. We are not talking about electoral politics. We are talking about public policies. And the Mondays should be at the vanguard of creating awareness. In the Hindu community or the temple communities on what are the public policies, how they affect you, what are the pros and cons of those, and what is it that you can do about it, what you need to do about it and what you can do about it. So become much better, much more informed citizen about the policies that affect you. And the Mandirs should play that role because that is one place where everybody gets together. And also for the Mandir executives, They also should inform themselves that being a 501c3 or religious based does not mean that you will not speak up for the concerns of your community. You should be the anchor You should be the leader of raising the concerns of your community for the welfare of your community so that is the only appeal that I would make and not a self promotion, but I would just like to say that I'm a president of the Global Hindu Temple Network America and Managing trustee of Global Hindu Temple Network in India And that is what we are trying to do through Global Hindu Temple Network that is The temples should become the, not only the places of religious worship, but also places of social consciousness and re energization of the Hindu communities everywhere should become center of social activities, cultural activities, religious activities economic activities, but bring more social cohesion and public policy awareness, not only for yourself, but also for your community. younger generation for your children and younger generation and bring them to the temple, become aware of the public policies that will affect their future and become much more proactive. So, again, happy Diwali and wish you all a wonderful election day and a wonderful election results.
Speaker:
00:42:46
Thank you. Thank you, Mohinderji. And I'll close with one final appeal. All this take a resources and a lot of funds. So my appeal to the community would be that please go to hindupac. org slash donation. And just go to our website, click on donation button on hinduvote. org, click on donation button anywhere, any of the websites, so hindupac. org or hinduvote. org, click on the donation button and help us as much as you can, because none of this is done on cheap. It does take a lot of resources, to develop a sophisticated website like this, we would appreciate the community support in enhancing support and maintaining this website and really create a professional grade, resource for our community. We are a 501c3. All the donations are absolutely tax deductible. And again, we are not endorsing any candidates. We are just providing tools for voter to evaluate the candidates who will vote in, alignment with the Hindu community. So with I will everyone happy Diwali and happy election thank you for Namaste.
Speaker 2:
00:43:44
Namaste to everyone.
Speaker:
00:43:51
is you know
