SAAVI’s Response to Equality Labs: A South Asian American Grassroots Non-Profit Advocacy Group Calls For Genuine Equality & Integrity

This letter is an aggregate of emails sent by the President of South Asian American Voices for Impact (SAAVI), Mr. Chandru Acharya, in response to a call by Equality Lab for a Twitterstorm campaign for today, Wednesday, April 8 “to call attention to the rise of Islamophobia during a global pandemic in India.” Equality Labs reached out to various organizations, including SAAVI, through an email that was sent to a distribution list called South Asian Coalition.

[Note: I am publishing this letter in my capacity as a friend of SAAVI with the permission of its author and President, Mr. Chandru Acharya. As a Hindu scholar-activist, I am committed to supporting grassroots organizations and to amplifying their voices. If you would like to communicate with and/or support SAAVI and the work that they do, you can contact them here.]

Dear Equality Labs,

Please remove SAAVI from your distribution list permanently. We do not feel that your organization represents the interests of all South Asians with integrity or honesty.

SAAVI has board members who are Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Atheist and Christian and is a secular organization which has a body of work in Michigan with Interfaith organizations serving people of all faiths and even people of no faith with the same amount of passion and honesty. We do not subscribe to…