[sacw] South Asia Citizens Web Mailer (June 5, 1999)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Mailer - June 5, 1999

Contents:
[1.] Babri Demolition Case: Advani, 48 others summoned [ report by Pankaj
Vohra in the New Delhi Paper, Hindustan Times]
[2.] Murder of a Language [Op-Ed Piece by the Indian Feminist Madhu Kishwar
in the New Delhi Paper, Hindustan Times]
[3.] CPJ Protest Fax to Indian P M following Ban on Pak TV transmission in
India
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=46rom: Hindustan Times, Saturday, June 5, 1999, New Delhi

BABRI DEMOLITION CASE: Advani, 48 others summoned
New Delhi, June 4

(By Pankaj Vohra)

In a significant development that could have far-reaching political
implications for the caretaker Vajpayee Government, a special judge in
Lucknow has summoned several top BJP, Shiv Sena and VHP leaders on June 15
for framing charges against them in the December 6, 1992 Babri masjid
demolition case.

The court of CBI special judge J. P. Srivastava, in its order dated May
20, 1999, has directed that all the 49 accused, including Union Home
Minister L K Advani, Union HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, Union Minister
of State Uma Bharti, UP Chief Minister Kalyan Singh and Shiv Sena Chief Bal
Thackeray, appear in person before the court.

Earlier, in an order in September, 1997, the court had concluded that a
prima facie case under Sections 147, 143-A, 153, 295-A, 505, 395, 397,332,
337 and 338 read with Section 120-B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was made
out against the accused persons, including Mr Ashok Singhal, Mr Vishnu Hari
Dalmia and Mr Vinay Katiar. Mr Srivastava has issued his latest order after
hearing the arguments of Mr O P Sharma, senior advocate of the Supreme
Court, and Mr Choubey, senior CBI counsel who appeared on behalf of the
prosecution. The matter had been pending on account of revision petitions
filed by some of the accused persons before the HC

Mr Srivastava had passed his initial order after examining the charge
sheet placed before him by the CBI, the investigating agency, on Oct 4,
1993. The CBI's plea was supplemented with all the documentary and oral
evidence based on the statements of hundreds of witnesses under Section 161
of the CrPC. The two Session cases number 344/94 and 749/96 were filed
before the special judge.
After hearing the arguments for several days, Mr Srivastava had passed a
very comprehensive order with cogent reasons. The court has observed that
the criminal conspiracy of "felling down" the disputed structure in Ayodhya
was commenced by the accused persons from 1990 and it was completed on Dec
6,1992. Mr Advani and others at different times and at different places
schemed the demolition of the disputed structure, the court has observed.
The judge observed, "I find prima facie case based on the strength of
evidence to charge the accused persons.under different Sections of the
IPC."

Consequently, 33 accused persons filed four revision petitions against the
order of the special judge, mainly on the question of jurisdiction while
their petition under Section 482 for quashing the order had been dismissed
by the High Court. The High Court had not passed any interim order granting
stay of proceedings pending in the court of the special judge.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/050699/detFRO05.htm
--------------------------------------------------------
:::2:::

=46rom: Hindustan Times, Saturday, June 5, 1999, New Delhi, Section: Opinion

MURDER OF A LANGUAGE

(By Madhu Kishwar)

Very few Hindus realise that the largest surviving group of victims of the
Partition are those Muslims who chose to stay in India.

They came to be mistrusted and despised in the land of their birth.
Nothing symbolises their more poignantly than the treatment meted out to
Urdu in post-Independent India.
This can well be described as linguistic genocide. Most people are just as
unaware that in the region that gave birth to Urdu and was the traditional
centre for Urdu learning for centuries, namely Uttar Pradesh, there is not
a single Urdu medium primary or junior high school.

The only two Urdu medium high schools are those run by and affiliated to
Aligarh Muslim University. Consequently, very few among the
post-Independence generation can read or write Urdu.
All those families who are keen to have their children pick up some Urdu
have to send their kids to religious madrasas.

Thus Urdu learning gets divorced from secular education and religious
leaders alone get associated with the defence and spread of Urdu. This
strengthens the hold of those Muslim leaders who want their community to
limit their concerns to religious issues and ignore the secular interests
of Urdu speakers.

This further widens the gulf between Muslims and other communities. Why
this attempt at decimation of Urdu? Many Hindus have been misled into
believing that Urdu is an alien language, that it was once the language of
foreign invaders and that for this reason their supposed descendants made
it the language that helped bring about the partition of India.

The actual facts tell a very different story. The foreign invaders who
brought Islam to India were Turks who knew no Urdu simply because Urdu did
not exist at that time.
Though their own language was Turkish, their successors, the Mughals, used
Persian as the court language after they established their empire in India.
It is only in Bombay films that emperors like Akbar and Shahjehan speak in
Urdu.

In actual fact, the great Mughals considered Urdu too plebian for use as a
royal language. It is only later that lesser Mughals whose empires had
shrunk in both size and glory began using Urdu at court, as the gap between
royalty and commoners narrowed dramatically.

Urdu was not the language of Muslim rulers but grew on Indian soil as a
language of the bazaars and Chhavnis (Military garrisons) of north India
out of the interaction between Persian and Khariboli. Just as Hindi is
Sanskritised Khariboli, Urdu is Persianised Khariboli and, therefore, Hindi
and Urdu are close kin.

Urdu was the language of the educated elite among both Hindus and Muslims
for a few hundred years until English replaced it. Thus, contrary to
popular belief, Urdu is not the language of Muslims alone.

Both Hindus and Muslims joined together in creating this beautiful
language. It is no less incorrect to stigmatise Urdu as the language that
created the partition of India.

The very idea of Pakistan was conceptualised in England's Cambridge
University by a handful of Western educated Muslim intellectuals like
Jinnah and Iqbal.

They cooked up this fantasy influenced by European nationalism - an
ideology that has been responsible for some of the bloodiest massacres and
wars known to human history, including two world wars.

It was an anglicised intellectual, Jinnah, who hardly knew any Urdu and
was not even a practising Muslim, who was able to convince large numbers of
educated Muslims that they were not just a community, but a separate,
distinct nationality and, therefore, needed a separate homeland and nation
state.

Almost till the very end, the indigenous educated ulemas and maulanas
sided with the Congress and opposed the partition. Thus, the ideology that
led to the disastrous partition of India was the product of Western
education rather than that of Urdu or Islamic tradition.

The traditional teachings of Islam actually go contrary to the tenets of
the nationalist ideologies of states such as Pakistan. Nevertheless, the
Hindu elite has been taught to mistrust Urdu because it was adopted as the
national language of Pakistan.

Ironically enough, despite fifty years of brainwashing of Pakistani
Muslims into accepting Urdu as their national language, it has very weak
roots in Pakistan. Urdu is an alien language for most Pakistanis, barring
the minority who migrated from Uttar Pradesh at the time of partition.
Most Pakistanis speak very clumsy Urdu with a distinct accent
characteristic of the region they are from in Punjab, Sindh, Multan or the
=46rontier provinces. The real Urdu speaking people are still called
Mohajirs, that is, foreigners.

The party of the Mohajirs, the MQM, is locked in a deadly battle with the
Pakistani political establishment. Many people in Pakistan's provinces feel
Urdu is an unwelcome imposition on them and they are extremely hostile to
Urdu speaking Mohajirs.

Just as the political establishment in India has tried to wipe out
Hindustani from official use, which is indistinguishable from Urdu, and
substituted a Sanskritised Hindi, so also the Pakistani establishment is at
pains to ruin Urdu by stuffing their official language with as many Arabic
words as possible while also distancing it from Hindustani.

The result might be considered comic were it not for its tragic
consequences. For example, most Pakistanis delight in seeing Bombay films
and listening to Bollywood music. Many of them, including the video parlour
owners who stock them, refer to them as Urdu films and Urdu songs.
They do not seem to have any difficulty understanding the language and
ethos of our Hindi films. But almost everyone I met during my three visits
to Pakistan poked fun at the sarkari Hindi peddled by Doordarshan which
they find incomprehensible.
However, the Sanskritisation of Hindi, courtesy the Bharat Sarkar, is part
of a political exercise meant to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims
in north India.

Similarly, while most who know Hindustani in India can enjoy Pakistani
popular entertainment and ghazals, we find it hard to follow the language
used in the news bulletins of sarkari PTV.
The imposition of Urdu on Pakistan's non-Urdu speaking people has produced
many negative consequences, including the secession of Bangladesh.
Similarly, in India it does harm when Urdu is assumed to be the language of
non-Urdu speaking Muslims.

A section of the Muslim leadership has been working hard to force all
Muslims - no matter if they live in Kerala, Karnataka, Assam or Gujarat -
to adopt Urdu as their mother tongue. This amounts to driving a wedge
between them and the local culture and community in which they are now
rooted.
The language of every community in India is region- specific, not religion
specific. Just as Hindi is not the language of all Hindus in India, Urdu
cannot and is not the language of all Muslims in the subcontinent. Muslims
will have the incentive to stay rooted in their regional and linguistic
identities only if they feel secure and confident that their religious,
cultural, economic, political and citizenship rights are secure.

If they are victims of hatred and violence, if they don't feel physically
secure, politically confident and culturally fulfilled, they are likely to
seek security in huddling together defensively as an inward looking
religious community that uses formal adherence to Urdu for symbolic
purposes alone.

---------------------------------------
::::3::::

Committee to Protect Journalists
330 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001 USA Phone: (212) 465-1004 Fax=
:
(212) 465-9568 Web: www.cpj.org E-Mail: info@c...

June 4, 1999

SENT BY FAX =97 to 011-91-11-301-6857

His Excellency Atal Behari Vajpayee
Prime Minister of India
Office of the Prime Minister
South Block
New Delhi 110 011, India

Your Excellency:

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is concerned over your
administration's recent decision to ban the transmission of Pakistan Televis=
ion
(PTV) within India's borders.

On June 2, after the launch of India's air campaign in Kashmir's Kargil regi=
on,
Information Minister Pramod Mahajan announced that cable operators across th=
e
country are prohibited from broadcasting PTV, "which has launched a
vilification
campaign against India, especially in connection with the Kargil
situation." The
minister added that the ban would remain in effect pending further instructi=
ons
>from the central government.

As an organization dedicated to the defense of press freedom around the worl=
d,
CPJ urges your administration to rescind the ban on PTV. Such action is in
direct contravention of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights,
which states that "Everyone has the right to . . . seek, receive, and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

CPJ is particularly troubled by Mahajan's instructions to the state governme=
nts
that they must order police to take action against those cable operators who
violate the ban. We also note that in many parts of Jammu and Kashmir, citiz=
ens
receive PTV without cable access, and hope authorities will not punish
those who
exercise their right to choose their source of news.

We thank you for your attention to this matter, and await your response.

Sincerely,
Ann K. Cooper
Executive Director

cc: President R.K. Narayanan
Home Minister L.K. Advani
Information Minister Pramod Mahajan
American Society of Newspaper Editors
Amnesty International
Article 19
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression
Congressional Committee to Support Writers and Journalists
Freedom Forum
Freedom House
Human Rights Watch
Index on Censorship
International Association of Broadcasting
International Federation of Journalists
International Federation of Newspaper Publishers
International Journalism Institute
International PEN
International Press Institute
National Association of Black Journalists
National Press Club
Newspaper Association of America
The Newspaper Guild
North American National Broadcasters Association
Overseas Press Club
Reporters Sans Fronti=E8res
Society of Professional Journalists
South Asian Journalists Association
World Press Freedom Committee

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