[sacw] sacw dispatch (0ct. 7, 1999)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens web Dispatch
7 October 1999
----------------------------------------------
#1. Pakistan petition dismissed against editor Najam Sethi
#2. RSS . . . seeks clarifications from the Pope
#3. The BJP's Dual Agenda:
#4. Book review of new Book on BJP
-----------------------------------------------
#1.
Date October 7, 1999
=46rom: Committee for the Protection of Journalists (New York)

Pakistan: Election Commissioner dismisses petition against editor Najam Seth=
i

Islamabad, October 6, 1999 =96 After a two-hour hearing, the Chief Election
Commissioner of Pakistan dismissed a petition that sought to exclude embattl=
ed
editor Najam Sethi from political life by having him declared non-Muslim.

The petition was filed on June 24 by legislator Syed Zafar Ali Shah, a
member of
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's ruling party. It sought to disqualify Sethi, w=
ho
is the founding editor of the Lahore-based English weekly The Friday Times,
from
voting or running for office by requesting that his name be struck from vote=
rs'
lists if he "does not fulfill the requirements of a Muslim," as defined in
Article 260-3 of Pakistan's constitution.

The petition also charged that a speech that Sethi delivered before a New De=
lhi
audience on April 30 violated Articles 62(h) and 63-1(g) of the constitution=
,
which prohibits people whose speech or actions are deemed prejudicial to the
"ideology of Pakistan" from holding any elected office.

The Chief Election Commissioner, Muhammed Qadeer, did not elaborate on his
decision.. Lawyers on both sides of the case presented documentary evidence
only.

Sethi was arrested at his home in Lahore on May 8, and was detained for
nearly a
month in the custody of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
agency, the
army's intelligence unit. Government statements indicated that Sethi was bei=
ng
investigated for "anti-state" activities, including his New Delhi speech, as
well as alleged collaboration with Indian intelligence operatives.

CPJ believes, however, that the Sharif government has been targeting Sethi f=
or
his consistently critical coverage of official corruption, as well as for
giving
an interview to a BBC documentary crew that was producing a program on
corruption within the Prime Minister's family.

Sethi and his family have also been fighting more than two dozen cases of ta=
x
evasion, all of which appear to be politically motivated.
-----------------------------------------------
#2.

=46rom: Khaleej Times, 7 Oct 1999
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/subcont.htm#story11

RSS questionnaire seeks clarifications from the Pope

=46rom our correspondent

NEW DELHI - The proposed visit of Pope John Paul II from November 5 may not
be a smooth affair. Although the union government accorded permission to
the Vatican chief for the visit, rejecting protests from the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the ongoing
Hindu-Christian rancour may vitiate the atmosphere.

The RSS and its affiliated organisations have been planning massive rallies
during the visit to protest against the role of Christian missions in
converting Hindus through allegedly coercive enticements.

The RSS has asked its units across the country to create a mass awakening
against the Pope and the policy of conversion. "We should avail of this
opportunity and awaken the Hindu masses," a circular issued by the RSS
second-in-command K.C. Sudarshan reads.

In the past few years, religious clashes in India has taken a new turn.
While the Hindu-Muslim riots have been on a low ebb following the
ascendancy of the BJP to power, clashes between Hindu organisations and
Christian missionaries have risen. Even criminal acts like the Jhabua nuns'
rape case were given a communal colour by the Congress. The party alleged
that VHP supporters raped the nuns only to have the Congress run state
government later admit that 13 of the 22 rapists were Christians.

In Gujarat, Hindu-Christian clashes disturbed this otherwise tranquil state
more than half a dozen times. It was followed by the burning of Graham
Staines and his two children, allegedly by Hindu zealots led by Dara Singh,
in Orissa. While the Hindu organisations claimed that Dara Singh has no
connection with them whatsoever, the Congress accused the Bajrang Dal of
being behind the gruesome act. Since then more than a dozen incidents of
Christians being beaten have taken place across the country.

The Justice Wadhwa commission appointed to look into the Staines killing
absolved the Hindu organisations of involvement and the RSS claimed it was
vindicated.

But the embers of this new communal tension continues to glow across the
country and various Christian bodies recently staged a dharna in the
capital to protest against the stripping of a nun who was forced to drink
urine by miscreants in Chhapra in Bihar.

The VHP continues to allege that Christian missionaries are offering cash,
jobs and other allurements to poor tribals to convert to Christianity. The
Christian missions, however, argue that the in-built exploitative social
statification in Hinduism forces the underdogs to get out of the fold and
Christianity offers them the only respite.

Sources in the RSS headquarters at Nagpur said RSS units across the country
have been asked to prepare a questionnaire to the Pope seeking
clarification on a dozen issues in regional languages which will be
distributed among the people.

The RSS has asked its affiliated organisations to urge the government to
clarify in what capacity the Pope is visiting India. "If he is coming as
head of state of the Vatican, than he should take no part in religious
activities. If he is coming as head of the Christian religion, the Indian
head of the state and head of government - the president and prime minister
- should not participate in programmes organised for the Pope since India
is a secular polity.

The Sangh Parivar has also demanded a public apology from the Pope for
large scale conversions in India. It has asked whether he holds the view
that ultimate salvation can only be obtained through Jesus Christ. "If you
subscribe to the view that only Christianity can be way to ultimate
salvation, then have you considered what will be its consequences with
respect to the mutual harmonious relationship between your followers, who
form only two per cent of the population in India, and the remaining 98 per
cent of the people," the RSS asks. "Do you accept the Hindu view that all
religions are equal?" is another question.

This will be the first visit of the most powerful religious head of the
world to India during a Hinduist BJP-led coalition regime. This makes the
role of the government in facilitating the visit without any unsavory
incident all the more important.

The Pope is expected to visit various parts of the country, including
Kerala where there is a high percentage of Christians.

The Pope's visit may also aggravate another political row when Congress
president Sonia Gandhi, who is an Italian by birth and also a Christian,
meets him. The BJP has already raised the issue of Sonia's origin and may
go all out to consolidate Hindu opinion against the Congress chief.
--------------
----------------------------------------
#3.

October 4 1999 (Praful Bidwai Column)
--
The BJP's Dual Agenda: The non-'hidden' one is bad too
By Praful Bidwai

As these lines appear in print, India will have begun evaluating its
600 million electors' verdict in hard numbers. Regardless of which
combination of parties forms the next government, a few things can be
said with certainty despite the mutually contradictory, and
confusing, exit polls which in turn are also incompatible with
opinion polls. This election does not mark a break from the long-term
trend (barring 1984) of indecisive or fractured verdicts and
political instability. Indeed, it confirms India's most important
political sub-trend, that of the ruling party/ies going to the people
for approval, and the people rejecting them with varying degrees of
contempt.

Whatever its faults, the NDA cannot be accused of having run a
lacklustre campaign. The Alliance, especially the BJP, went into
electoral battle firing all cylinders, energetically rubbishing its
opponents. Its high-profile, do-or-die, campaign had three central
planks: Kargil, Ms Sonia Gandhi's foreign origins, and Mr Vajpayee's
"image", which is supposedly high among the upper class, upper caste
elite. All these are issues of identity, or symbols of loyalty. They
pertain to who you are-Indian, Hindu, government loyalist, etc.-not
what you do or stand for.

In all fairness, the BJP must admit it has failed at least on the
first two counts. The attempt to present the Kargil war as a high
point of national achievement came a cropper within the first half of
the campaign itself. By mid-September, murmurs of popular protest
against the politicisation of Kargil had grown into loud growls,
especially in areas such as Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand which
had seen a large number of casualties. The NDA's opponents could no
longer be maligned as churlish critics and spoilsports for
questioning the claim that a wholly avoidable, costly, military
confrontation which wasted 500 lives and Rs 10,000 crores was a
"grand victory". By the end of the campaign, the wind had been taken
out of much of the BJP's "national security is in peril" hype. The
party's claims to patriotism were widely questioned on the basis of
Mr Vajpayee's own record as regards the Quit India movement, the
RSS's history of collaboration with the British, the government's pro-
Western policies and its dubious sugar imports which continued even
while Kargil was raging.

Much of the shine in the NDA campaign, including Mr Vajpayee's own
prestige, quickly came off. Its rifts on caste and factional lines
came out in the open-most starkly in UP. The wholly negative campaign
on Ms Gandhi's foreign origins may have generated a lot of gossip,
abuse and vulgar jokes about Monica Lewinsky, but it probably didn't
bring many votes. The bulk of our voters were quick to see the
identity issue as hollow. They decided to favour the Constitutional-
pluralist notion of citizenship and give Hindutva nationalism the go-
by. It is only on Mr Vajpayee's image projection that the BJP
probably made some gains-if only because he seems rather unlike the
rest of itself. Even these gains may prove trivial and temporary.

And for good reason. The BJP came to power in 1998 on account of two
factors: a give-us-a-chance platform based on rejection of the
Congress and the United Front; and an appeal to the Famous Five Ss:
suraksha, swadeshi, samata, shuchita, and samrasta. Look at its
record on each of these. The party's militarism and nuclear jingoism
have degraded India's security. Today, millions of Indians have
become defenceless against a nuclear attack by Pakistan. Any number
of our cities can be targeted by missiles, which can't be intercepted.

Maximally, our generals can hope that Pakistan will be deterred from
attacking India. But such hopes involve mind games. At best, nuclear
deterrence is a flawed doctrine. The Cold War witnessed over 10,000
incidents where deterrence nearly broke down despite sophisticated
early warning, and command and control, systems. Neither India nor
Pakistan will have these for decades. That's why it was arrogant,
foolish and disingenuous for our government to publish the Draft
Nuclear Doctrine and ignite a nuclear arms race. This has alarmed not
just Pakistan, but China as well. The DND makes nonsense of
"minimum" deterrence.

The DND is indeed a recipe for a spectacularly wasteful nuclear
arsenal, with an all-horizons global reach. Its prescriptions are
destabilising of security not just in the Indian sub-continent, but
the whole Asian continent. Potentially, they spell a shift in global
security equations. As India gets sucked into a nuclear arms race,
and spends unaffordable sums on super-expensive nukes, it will remain
vulnerable at the conventional level, as Kargil showed with a
vengeance. So much for suraksha!

Take swadeshi. This was unconvincing even as an attempt to
appropriate Gandhi's slogan while denuding it of its emancipatory
content and its pro-poor orientation. After Maharashtra's BJP-Sena
government cosied up with Enron, which it had earlier threatened to
dump into the Arabian Sea, the slogan's real meaning became clear.
Today, even swadeshi's pretence to self-reliance stands dropped.
There is wholesale embrace of MNC-driven globalisation.

With this has come an attack on samata: income and regional disputes
have widened in the past 17 months as never before. Even as the
government gave the rich huge tax breaks, and real prices of luxury
goods fell, the poor suffered greater deprivation, unemployment, and
loss of consumption. Consumer prices, the real test of inflation, are
likely to spurt further as soon as long-postponed price hikes (e.g.
diesel) are levied. Social disparities have greatly widened under the
NDA's top-down policies.

As for shuchita, the less said the better after the sugar and wheat
import scams, the telecom turnabout, and growing privatisation of
infrastructural services. We now have an I & B minister who
shamelessly hands over a prime Doordarshan contract to his own novice
son. We also have Banana Republic-style deal-fixing. In Mumbai, for
instance, the very person who headed a committee on flyovers was
given the contract to build them! The PMO is deeply implicated in
this Crony Capitalism. It has emerged as an independent (if shady)
economic power centre. (It is another matter that it has also been
used to settle the BJP's intra-party disputes).

Perhaps the worst area of the BJP's performance is in samrasta. Its
rule has segmented this society as never before. Today, all of
India's hierarchical and reactionary attitudes are coming out in
bilious forms. Our religious, ethnic and tribal minorities do not
only feel threatened with domination. They are being subjected to
atrocities-from Gujarat to Orissa, and from Haryana to Tamil Nadu.
The culture of the dominant sub-groups in the majority community is
being palmed off as "mainstream", while all other cultures are being
marginalised. Under the BJP's majoritarian rule, this society now
experiences its worst forms of cultural disunity and lack of
cohesion. The promise of a riot-free and fear-free India now sounds
not just hollow, but sinister.

This betrayal of the Famous Five Ss is inseparable from the BJP's
misgovernance and its communal agenda. Communalism is not just about
discriminating against people on the basis of religion. It provides a
cloak for, and means of rationalising, many injustices and
inequities, including class and caste exploitation, gender
discrimination, hierarchical domination of elite linguistic groups,
and so on. We have thus had 17 months not just of a corrupt and venal
government, but one that delights in further deepening India's chasms.

Last year, the people of India-to be more accurate, a quarter of them-
gave the BJP a chance in the hope that it would reform and
"normalise" itself and move away from sectarian politics of identity
to substantive issues. The BJP promised-and to some appeared-to be
the Party of the Future. It has proved itself to be the opposite-an
organisation which lacks a vision for the future, which has nothing
to offer to this society. The BJP has already exhausted its novelty
appeal. Worse, it has shown itself to be unworthy of trust, incapable
of taking India forward, and of enthusing any section of the
population barring its own coteries.

No wonder it has desperately tried to revive its so-called "hidden"
agenda-of temple, Article 370, uniform civil code, etc. This too has
earned it notoriety, disdain and ignominy. But we should not be
fooled. The BJP has two agendas: the long-term, "hidden", one; and a
short-term agenda. It is wrong to think that the "hidden" agenda is
the only dangerous one. Of course, it is dangerous. But its the short-
term agenda, of weakening democracy, undermining institutions,
spreading fear among the minorities, demoralising and harassing those
working to empower the poor, and for social and gender justice, is
equally pernicious as well as negative.

That is precisely why the BJP must not be condemned only for its long-
term goal of "Hinduising" this society, even as praise is showered
upon Mr Vajpayee for the un-hidden agenda. His un-hidden agenda can
only pave the way for a fascist transformation of this society. In
the short run too, it is pure poison for our democracy's health. One
can only hope that it is stoutly resisted and comprehensively
defeated.--end--
---------------------------------
#4.
[Valuable new Book on the BJP]

BJP and the Evolution of Hindu Nationalism:
=46rom Periphery to Centre
by Partha S. Ghosh;
Manohar Publishers; pages 460, Rs. 800.

A book review of the above by A.G. Noorani is available at
http://www.the-hindu.com/fline/fl1621/16210660.htm

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=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch is an informal, independent &
non-profit citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex