Mumbai: At Mumbai’s Jio World Convention Centre Friday, a video clip played in English depicting “Hindu heroes” from the time of Chanakya and Chandragupta Maurya to Rani Durgavati and Chhatrapati Shivaji. It was played to a room full of businessmen who erupted in applause and chants of “Jai Shree Ram”. Subsequently, another clip was played, this time in Hindi, explaining how the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb plundered India.
The two clips framed the World Hindu Economic Forum (WHEF) as it kicked off its three-day conference in Mumbai. Aiming to “make society prosperous”, the initiative was started by Swami Vigyananand, joint general secretary of Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP).
Previously, the three-day conference was held in Bangkok, New Delhi, London, Los Angeles and Chicago, among other cities.
Speaking to ThePrint, Vigyananand said the purpose of the forum was “to unite Hindu businessmen on one platform and provide economic opportunities”.
“Someone had once asked me what is the difference between other economic forums and the Hindu economic forum,” he said. “I replied, other forums are about creation of wealth but here we believe in wealth creation as well as distribution of wealth.”
The Mumbai conference, WHEF’s ninth, will have 24 sessions and about 1,000 attendees from across the globe.
The event will be attended by the chief ministers of various states, including Yogi Adityanath and Bhupendra Patel, and eminent business personalities such as Ashishkumar Chauhan, MD & CEO of the National Stock Exchange and Nilesh Shah, MD of Kotak Mahindra Asset Management Company.
Speaking at the event Friday, Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis lauded organisers for following the Hindu ethos and said that “(PM Narendra) Modi’s Hindu growth rate model” will show a new direction to the world while India becomes the fastest-growing economy.
“Maharashtra will become a $1 trillion economy by 2028,” he asserted. He further said that while the western world believes in the “survival of the fittest,” according to Hindu ethos, everyone who is born will live, and society will ensure this happens.
Many delegates and entrepreneurs ThePrint spoke to at the event said it was a platform for them to showcase their work and promote their companies. “Since we get to meet people from across the globe and especially those who follow our thinking and ethos, it becomes easier to market our brand and company,” one delegate at the event said.
According to Vigyananand, who also heads VHP’s international wing, many Hindus across the world need to come together for economic development, and WHEF provides a platform for them. When asked whether non-Hindus can participate in it, he said that anyone who aligns with the thought of “dharma” was welcome.
Although Vigyananand is associated with VHP, he denied that the event had political links.
He asserted that it was, in fact, the WHEF that approached the government to help them and not the other way round.
On Friday, mostly small start-ups like Lotus Real Estate and Seva Vivek were present at the conference along with multiple companies from around the globe. Speakers from several companies including Hiranandani Group, Tata Cliq, Angel One, Jio Financial Services, Welspun and Aditya Birla Health Insurance would be present through the three days.
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A look at WHEF
The forum is a brainchild of Vigyananand, who has been associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for many years. He was also actively involved in the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation. Explaining how the forum started, he said that, around 2007, when he was in South Asia, he became friends with a professor named Tan at Universiti Malaya and they discussed how the Chinese are controlling the world trade market.
“What the professor said is that since you Hindus act individually smart and not collectively, we are not excelling and controlling the market, because the Chinese attacked our supply chain. And that is where the idea of having a Hindu forum came about, because we need to organise and work collectively,” Vigyananand told ThePrint.
He further said that when he started thinking on these lines, he realised that Catholics have an all-India Catholic forum, there is a World Islamic Economic Forum in Malaysia, and other places also have their own community-specific economic forums, but Hindus do not.
So in 2009, Vigyananand began connecting Hindus and providing them with a platform to network. “The founding philosophy of the WHEF is Chanakya’s sutra: dharmasya moolam arthah, i.e. economy is the strength,” he said.
The first WHEF conference was held in Hong Kong in 2012. Mumbai has been chosen for the event for the second time.
According to Rajendra Pandey, one of the members of WHEF for Adelaide, Australia, who is also a VHP member, the conference is for interaction and networking more than providing a platform for investment. “We facilitate meetings of entrepreneurs, especially those in start-ups. On our platform, people come to showcase their talents and later, we even provide guarantees of these entrepreneurs to the investors,” he told ThePrint.
“We create an ecosystem for Hindu business people to come together and prosper. Many have benefitted in the past because of our platform. Our job is to let people have their first meeting and provide a trusted network. We then see to it that start-ups are launched and help people in marketing their business further,” Pandey, who has been attending the forum since 2018, said.
WHEF organisers told ThePrint that the platform was like a big umbrella, under which there were several local Hindu economic forums. For example, in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi or Adelaide for that matter, smaller groups exist that consist of people with similar ideology and ethos. While many of them have links with RSS or VHP or their affiliates, some are purely business-oriented and have joined these forums at the local level.
“They step up to organise WHEF every year (except for the Covid years), where newer and newer entrepreneurs and startups come to network,” one of the organisers said.
Another WHEF official told ThePrint that “it is more like a networking platform rather than investment seeking”.
“We have no control on who invests where and with whom. People can network here.”
The forum received 200 entries from entrepreneurs but 10 were shortlisted and will introduce their business concept to the public at the conference. Anyone who wants to invest in the business can do so. In all, there will be 24 sessions over three days, including those on AI, pharma, etc., according to Vigyananand.
‘Hindus need to unite’
Fadnavis said India’s progress and development were not borne out of suppression and colonialism. “We didn’t invade and loot (anyone) but grew on our own strength. Our Hindu growth rate was initially ridiculed but today, we are showing the path to the world.”
Another speaker, entrepreneur T.V. Mohandas Pai, showed a chart depicting “how GDP fell during Mughal/Islamic rule”.
“Bharat was the richest civilisation in the world. But we were impoverished because of the Islamic invasion from central Asia and colonial exploitation. White imperialists (British) left India in 1947 and they were replaced by brown imperialists who carried on the same policy. Pandit Nehru carried on the same bad socialist policies. From 1950 to 1980, we grew at 3.5 percent because private capital was suppressed,” Pai told the gathering.
Pandey said that since the Indian diaspora is spreading across the globe, India needs to capitalise on its market size. “Since Covid, and the world seeing how the supply chain crumbled under China, leaders are looking at India as a market and here Hindus need to unite to become one force,” he added.
Vigyananand said letters about the conference being held in Mumbai were sent to 24 chief ministers, except for M.K. Stalin of Tamil Nadu, whose son and Deputy CM Udhayanidhi Stalin was involved in the Sanatana Dharma row, Hemant Soren of Jharkhand and Arvind Kejriwal (former CM of Delhi) because of allegations of corruption against them.
“Those who align with us in principles have accepted our invitation and are gracing the event. But we have sent letters to all,” he said.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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