Gandhi's grandson, Khudai Khidmatgar chief among advisers to US Hindu rights group

Rajmohan Gandhi

The Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR), a US-wide advocacy organization claiming to be committed to the "ideals of multi-religious pluralism in the United States, India and beyond", advocate peace, justice and human rights of all communities from a Hindu perspective, has declared it has appointed a group of advisors, including Mahatma Gandhi's grandson Rajmohan Gandhi.
Announcing this, Sunita Viswanath, director of HfHR, said, Faisal Khan, national convener of the recently-revived Khudai Khidmatgar, originally founded by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as Frontier Gandhi, is also an adviser along with carnatic musician TM Krishna, researcher Dr Linda Heiss, and Malayalam litterateur KP Ramanunni.

Faisal Khan

Also biographer of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Rajmohan Gandhi is a research professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois. He continues the work of his grandfather, trying to bring the world together through understanding and cooperation. Since September 11, 2001, he has addressed the issues between the West and the world of Islam.
Dr Linda Hess is a scholar of mystical/devotional poetry of North India, especially the 15th-century poet Kabir. She translates and writes about the poetry in its literary, religious, social, and performative contexts. Her publications include "The Bijak of Kabir", "Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Poetry of Kabir", "Bodies of Song: Kabir Oral Traditions and Performative Worlds in North India", and "Permanent Black in India".

TM Krishna

Hess has also written about the 16th-century poet Tulsidas and the Ramlila of Ramnagar, an annual 30-day outdoor traveling performance in Varanasi that dramatizes the Rāmcharitmānas. Linda taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University for 21 years, retiring in 2017.
Faisal Khan is a Gandhian activist and has been associated with the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) for the past 15 years, working for communal harmony and people’s empowerment. He has helped establish Sabka Ghar (The People’s House) in Delhi and Kanyakumari, dedicated to all those killed in the name of religion, caste, gender, race and region.

Linda Hess

Apart from being a Carnatic music vocalist, TM Krishna is a writer, activist and author, who has championed a number of causes connected to environment, caste system, communalism, religious reforms, and reform of social practices, and has written three books, "Voices Within: Carnatic Music — Passing on an Inheritance", "A Southern Music — The Karnatik Story", and "Reshaping Art".
Krishna's forthcoming book traces the history of mridangam-maker and mridangam over the past 100 years, and has won the Magsaysay Award in 2016 for ‘his forceful commitment as artist and advocate to art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions’.

KP Ramanunni

As for KP Ramanunni, he is a Malayalam language novelist and short-story writer. His first novel "Sufi Paranja Katha" (What the Sufi Said) won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1995 and the novel "Daivathinte Pusthakam" (God's Own Book) won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award in 2017. He believes that practicing Hindus must oppose Hindu nationalism.
Making the announcement, HfHR said, "Our advisors are esteemed leaders who believe that HfHR’s work is important and valuable, and have placed their trust in us by joining this team. They do not necessarily endorse all our statements and positions, and similarly, we do not necessarily endorse all their statements and positions."

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