Obama Indian aide's VHP links spark debate

Rohit Bhan, Nidhi Razdan

Thursday, November 13, 2008, (Ahmedabad, New Delhi)

Indian-American Sonal Shah may have denied having any links to the VHP and the RSS, but US President- elect Obama's new aide is still the subject of furious debate on the internet. Shah, an eminent economist who heads Google's philanthropic arm, was appointed as a member of the advisory board of Barack Obama recently.(Watch)

The accusations against Shah first came up in a post by Vijay Prashad, the chair of South Asia history at Trinity College in Connecticut. Those defending Sonal Shah on blogs are now ripping into Prashad's piece.

"The Gujarat Garima award Sonal received for her work with her NGO, IndiCorps, in 2004, upsets Prashad because Narendra Modi was present there. The Gujarat Garima awards were organized by the US-based weekly Gujarat Times. They were presented by the then Prime Minister of India. Those who received the same award, in the same year, and in person were Ratan Tata, Mukesh Ambani, and economist Dr Jagdish Bhagwati.

So now Tata, Ambani, Bhagwati and others are responsible for, or at least complicit in, anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat? Nice try, " said a blog.

But other bloggers are demanding that Obama should drop Shah from his team.

"The spin doctors for Ms. Sonal Shah are now saying that she was a member of the VHP and her membership has expired. This is like saying that she was a Nazi and now her membership has expired," says a blogger.

Shah herself has dismissed the accusations against her as silly, and says her work during the Gujarat quake of 2001 was humanitarian.