[sacw] sacw dispatch 5 Nov.99

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch
5 November 1999
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex
__________________
#1. Comment on an article by a Hindutwa type
#2. On Christians in India
#3. Ashrafuzzaman Khan's Infamous Diary
#4. Kargil Book Reviewed
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#1.
Comment from S. Sen (Mumbai, India)
3 Nov 1999

The Indian Express, 29 10 99 (Mumbai Edition), carried a piece captioned An
open letter to Pope John Paul II : Conversion is violence as the lead
article on its edit page by one Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the head of Arsha
Vidya Gurukulam..

Here, the writer dishes out some of the not-too-unfamiliar arguments that
the Sangh Brigade are proffering as a part of the hate campaign that they
have launched against the backdrop of the scheduled papal visit to India.
But by virtue of the very fact that it has been carried prominently by a
prestigious national daily, the arguments put forward acquire some degree
of legitimacy. Hence, an attempt has been made in the following to debunk
these spurious arguments.

The writer's diatribe against Pope John Paul II in the context of his
scheduled visit to India, prefaced with a hypocritical welcome(?) to
'Bharat', brings to mind the early days of Hindutva campaign leading to
step by step arousal of mass hysteria and the eventual demolition of the
Babri Masjid as the grand climax. His arguments are, as expected, based on
logical contortions and plain distortion of facts - which will become
self-evident as we go along..

To begin with, in order to vilify the Christian (and Islamic) practice of
conversion, Swami Saraswati has dubbed it as an act of religious and
cultural aggression and assault, and further claimed that, in contrast,
Hinduism, Buddhism et al are non-converting (Indian) religions, and thereby
non-aggressive (and, hence, superior). In order to do so, he has
disregarded, with shocking dishonesty, the well known fact that Dr. B. R.
Ambedkar got converted (from Hinduism) to Buddhism as recently as in
October 1956 along with lakhs of his followers in public demonstration of
his of deep contempt for the utterly oppressive character of his original
religion. In the process, Dr. Ambedkar became the symbol of hope and
emancipation for millions of Indians condemned for ages to sub-human
existence by the likes of Swami Saraswati. In fact, if we travel further
back in history, we would find that after flourishing for around thousand
and five hundred years in the land of its origin (evidently through
extensive conversions all across the Indian peninsula), Buddhism was
virtually wiped out through aggressive doctrinal campaigns, most notably
led by Adi Shankaracharya, and aided by coercive interventions of state
powers upholding Brahmanical Hinduism (and wholesale re-incorporation of
the Buddhists into the Hindu fold). Here, it requires to be further noted
that as human habitation in the Indian subcontinent predates emergence of
Hinduism, it evidently could have had not spread without continual and
massive conversions, declared or undeclared, with the attendant impact on
the life-styles and cultures of indigenous peoples. While Swami Saraswti
has taken great pains to build a case of cultural assault against
Christianity (and Islam) - a charge from which even Hinduism can not escape
unscathed, he has totally ignored the fact that conversion for a large
number of Indians provided (and, to an extent, continues to provide), at
least a limited opportunity, to escape the inhuman oppression of the Hindu
caste system. This is, however, not to deny that conversion can also come
as the outcome of spiritual quest on the part of the converted. The
contemporary cases of conversions to Buddhism (and Hinduism), in the
advanced West, apparently falls in this category.

Then again, in a rather telling fashion, Swami Saraswati has raised the
bogey of disappearance of Hinduism under the onslaught of the raiding
Christianity, as did the Greek, Roman and Mayan cultures in the hoary and
distant past. This blatant attempt to whip up a sense of insecurity and
paranoia leading to hatred and aggression , coolly disregards the fact that
from 1951 to 1991 the proportion of Christian population in Independent
India has actually come down, albeit marginally, from measly 2.35% to
2.32%.

=46inally, the writer claims that while he refuses to convert in response to
conversion, as it is not a part of his tradition, nevertheless by
converting the Pope (or Christians) is converting the non-violent to
violence. So, while one form of conversion is ruled out, as alien to
tradition, the other form, i.e. to violence, is justified. And, not only
that, the responsibility of consequent(?) violence e.g. the murder of
Graham Staines, and his two little sons, is thereby placed not with the
perpetrator of the crime but with the victim himself.

And that's why all this rings so frighteningly familiar.
__________________
#2.
The Hindu
5 Nov. 1999
Op-Ed.

CHRISTIANS IN INDIA
By Rajeev Dhavan

INDIA IS not a nation but a complex secular civilisation. Its demography
tells part of its impressive story. The 687.6 million Hindus of
innumerable sects, 101.6 million Muslims (making India the third largest
Muslim-populated country), 19.6 million Christians, 6.3 million Buddhists,
3.3 million Jains and 3.1 million people of other persuasions (according
to the 1991 census) remind us of the many splendoured diversity of our
subcontinent.

We are ahead of the rest waiting for them to catch up with us. But as they
progress, we regress. No matter what its original inspiration, each faith
has indigenous roots. Indians take their faiths seriously- perceptively
making their choices without intimidation, fraud or coercion. The
religions are celebrated with expansiveness, believed with intensity and
tolerated with elegant grace. Each part of the country celebrates its
plural diversity. Take it away, and, there will be no India. That is why
the Supreme Court has made secularism a basic structure of the
Constitution.

A product of imperial expansion, the Christian faith is now as Indian as
any other faith. It is the faith of the majority in Meghalaya (64.08 per
cent), Mizoram (85.73 per cent) and Nagaland (87.47 per cent). In one
respect, we could call these `Christian States', but the Christian
population there rightly does not say so. In some States, the percentage
of Christians is high-Goa (29.86), Manipur (34.11), Andaman and Nicobar
(23.95) and Arunachal (10.29). In some other States, their population is
more than a million: for example, Andhra Pradesh (1.2 million) and Tamil
Nadu (3.2 million).

Taking into account the decennial increase since 1991, there are more than
a million Christians in Bihar, Karnataka and Maharashtra. The States
targeted for the recent fundamentalist attack-Gujarat (0.44 per cent) and
Orissa (2.1 per cent)-have fewer Christians. Oddly enough, the increase in
the Christian population between 1981 and 1991 was 16.89 per cent, less
than the normal demographic rise of 23.79 per cent for India. In other
words, its growth was 6.9 per cent less than that of the rest of the
population.

These figures are mentioned both as a reminder and as act of faith. A
reminder is necessary. No amount of political jingoism can escape the
stubborn reality that Christianity is the faith of a large number of
Indians-larger than the populations of Australia or New Zealand or the
many Christian countries. In many Indian States, the Christians are in an
overwhelming majority. What does India have to tell them? Can we say it is
not their country? Should we ask them to pack up and go? If so, where?
Should we tell them that if they stay back, they will be harrased? Or
should we tell the Christians that they must practise their faith
according to the political agenda of some fundamentalist Hindus?

Given the complexity and vivacity of India's multitudinous faiths, the
Constitution-makers were clear about what they wanted. Their first
decision was that religion was not just a matter of ``belief'' but
included the right to ``profess and practise'' religion. Had that not been
the case, religion would have become a matter of philosophy and much of
Hindu practice would not have been Constitutionally protected.

The second decision flowed from the discussions of the Minorities
Committee held on April 19, 1947 that the Constitution must contain the
additional right to ``propagate religion'' and this was accepted by an
Advisory Committee on April 23, 1947. Amidst some concern expressed in the
comments on the Draft Constitution of 1948 and the debate during December
3-7, 1948, there was broad support for including the ``propagation''
clause so that proselytising faiths could tell others about themselves.
Whether a faith is proselytising is a matter of practice, not theology.
Hindu Maharishis and Bhagwans have literally sold the ``Karma cola'' of
Hinduism through inducements and promises of various kinds. Little would
be left of India's many religions if protection was not afforded to the
practices, celebration and propagation of the faiths. The real concern of
the Constituent Assembly was that the protection of group rights should
not result in unfairness within groups to Dalits, tribals and women and
thereby denial of social justice to some. Unfortunately, Hindu
fundamentalists have never addressed this real concern except when baiting
Muslims. They have ignored the persistently prevalent social inequities in
Hinduism.

It has always been understood that all faiths would practise and propagate
religion in a non-coercive atmosphere in which people genuinely felt free.
If any has been coercive towards other faiths, it is politicised Hindu
fundamentalism. This is evident from the razing of the Babri Masjid, the
killing of missionaries, the harassment of Christians in Gujarat, the rath
yatra of Mr. L. K. Advani, the aggressive posture of the Sena-BJP combine
in Maharashtra and the unmitigated campaign by the real allies of the BJP
Government against minorities.

Can religious freedom ever exist under this kind of pressure? The answer
is as simple as the question is rhetorical. The only real coercion against
religious freedom has come from Hindu fundamentalists who have been
violent, cruel and sacrilegious to intimidate and terrorise Muslims and
now Christians for political advantage. Wild allegations of coercive and
fraudulent conversions made against the Christians deflect attention away
from the real coercions being practised in India.

In a somewhat elusive judgment in the 1977 Bihar case, the Supreme Court
made distinctions to lay down that the Constitutional right of one to
propagate a faith did not include a right to convert another. Legislation
which prohibits conversion by force, fraud or allurement has been upheld
as Constitutional. Although this decision is skewed and the legislation
was really directed against the Christians, they have happily accepted the
dispensation. They practise and preach their faith -leading by example.
They work with leprosy patients and the poor, providing medicine and
support with characteristic humility. Christian donor-organisations fund
not just Christian organisations in India, some 80 per cent of the donor
funds from Christian sources go to non-Christi an organisations. The work
done by the Christian organisations is so good that various Indian
Governments involve them in governance and support their exemplary work.
There are few-practically none- examples of coercion or fraud. Certainly
none that cannot be dealt with or that justifies the campaign against the
Christians or Christianity.

In a calculated campaign, the BJP and its real allies have enlarged their
electoral dividends in Orissa and Gujarat. They feel they have found a
winner. The Muslims have been let off, at least for the moment. The
Christians are targeted. The Pope is seen as a living Christian
monument-quite like the Babri Masjid was potrayed as a Muslim symbol. The
object is not to protest against his visit but to gain rank and file
support by doing something sacreligeously insulting, as they did to the
Babri Masjid. The tactic is the same. The victims become villains. The
transgressors claim the moral high ground. Such hypocrisy is perverse and
dangerous. The Pope has nothing to do with all this.
__________________
#3.
News from Bangladesh November 4, 1999
Commentary

THE TRAVAIL OF ASHRAFUZZAMAN KHAN'S INFAMOUS DIARY
by Jamal Hasan

Who's Ashrafuzzaman Khan? Why is it so important that we now know the
content of his diary? Please be patient and read this write-up. I will let
you draw your own conclusion regarding the culpability of this man.

It was the first week of December of 1971-it was also the final chapter in
our nine month long days of fire and blood. Forces under the joint command
of our valiant Mukti Bahini and the Indian army had almost encircled Dacca
from all directions. But even as all seemed lost for the beleaguered
Pakistani armed forces, sinister forces were at work at the Governor's
House determined more than ever to deliver the coup de gr=92ce to the
"upstarts" who had refused to accept the fate of a subject race. General
Niazi was huddling with his comrade the infamous Major General Rao Farman
Ali, and their chief troubleshooter, Major Siddique Salek. They had just
received the list they had been expecting from Al-Badr and Al-Shams.
Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a commander of the brutal Al-Badr, had just compiled a
list of Bengali intellectuals for the "benefit" of the high command in the
Governor's House. It was the list of intellectuals who have been targeted
for elimination. The plan was to kill them immediately so that if
Bangladesh becomes an independent nation, it will have to make do without
those that can contribute significantly to rebuild the infrastructure of
the devastated nation. It would be Pakistan's parting kick to Bangladesh,
so to speak.

Many of the Bengali intellectuals listed by Ashrafuzzaman Khan were taken
out of their homes in the dead of night in that eventful week of December
in 1971. Needless to say, none of them lived to see the light of day. Even
in the moment of their defeat, Generals Niazi and Ali must have relished
the thought that they have forced Bangladesh to pay an extremely heavy
price for its independence. It must have given them no little pleasure to
imagine that Bangladesh will fall apart in no time without the services of
so many of its leading intellectuals.

Bangladesh was liberated on December 16, 1971. Unfortunately, it took
longer than it should have taken for the new administration to attend to
its tasks. By the time the investigators arrived at the residence of
Ashrafuzzaman Khan, he had fled. However, in haste, he had left behind a
crucial piece of evidence. The investigators rummaging through his leftover
items managed to recover that piece of the puzzle from his house. They
found Ashrafuzzaman Khan's diary. In it was that infamous list of
intellectuals in his own handwriting. It was indeed a gruesome find that
shocked the people. Ashrafuzzaman Khan was a wanted man. Photos of the
suspect were posted in all Bangladeshi newspapers. People were urged to
apprehend the criminal. But all this was too late. Ashrafuzzaman had
managed to flee not just his residence, but his country as well by the time
the search was on for his arrest.

Today, Ashrafuzzaman Khan leads an active life of all places in New York.
He has assumed a role of leadership in the Islamic movement in the city.
Ashrafuzzaman Khan is now the President of the Islamic Circle of North
America. I was reminded anew of his terrible past as I read a recent issue
of the Washington Post (November 1, 1999). It carried a statement by
Ashrafuzzaman Khan on the tragic EgyptAir accident. Ashrafuzzaman Khan was
quoted as saying, "Sometimes, we face that we are helpless=8A. another man
lost his parents. Nobody knows anything. Everybody is sad. But we have to
put our faith in God." This is coming from the man whose infamous list had
left so many children without their fathers in that fateful week in
December of 1971. What an irony it is that this conspirator par excellence
of Bangalee intellectual killings in 1971, is now a dyed-in-the-wool
humanist, after all these years! But, is he a humanist? No. He is just a
wolf in sheep's skin. That is what he is!

We, Bangladeshis, seem to be singularly devoid of self-esteem. Bangladesh
had failed miserably to bring the war criminals to justice after the
surrender of Generals Niazi and Ali on 16th December 1971. And today,
Sheikh Hasina seems to be more interested in pursuing only those that had
killed her kith and kin on 15th August 1975. No one seems interested to
bring the killers of 1971 to justice. To me, this is the greatest travesty
of justice in Bangladesh.

Of course, Ashrafuzzman Khan hasn't quite been allowed to forget his
criminal past. A few years ago, Shahriar Kabir, a leader of Ghatok Dalal
Nirmul (Efface the killers and conspirators) Committee exposed the
whereabouts of Ashrafuzzaman Khan who, needless to say, stoutly denies any
wrongdoing. But editions of the directory of collaborators, "Ekatturer
Ghatok Dalal Kay Kothai" (Where are the killers and conspirators of 1971?")
continues to carry Ashrafuzzaman Khan's photo together with a print of the
pages of his infamous diary.

The Nirmul (Efface) Committee has branches in almost all States of USA.
Most of the members were very active under the leadership of Shaheed
Janani Jahanara Imam. They had even sent a lawyer to assist the
prosecution during the epoch making People's Trial of Prof. Golam Azam and
his cohorts. When will they go after Ashrafuzzaman Khan? In America, it
shouldn't be too difficult to force a war criminal to answer in a court of
law. The million-dollar question is-who will bell the cat?
__________________
#3.
Hindustan Times
Nov., 1999
Sunday Magazine
=20
Kargil Book * Slips on Tenuous Theories
by Achin Vanaik

Praveen Swami does a fine job in detailing the changing phases of the
Kargil war and explaining how it finally ended through US diplomatic
intervention than by total victory on the ground. His exposure of the
intelligence failure (of analyses, not data-gathering) is very persuasive,
while his scathing indictment of the attempted cover-up of numerous
failures by the political and military hierarchy through the Subrahmanyam
Committee is entirely justified. The latter has no legal status, no real
scope or powers to carry out a proper investigation.

Even its composition violates all norms of impartiality since the members
are being asked to interrogate the supervisory behaviour of the very
bodies - the National Security Council advisory board and secretariat - of
which they were members! Swami also provides a survey of the process of
recent communalisation in Jammu and Kashmir (especially by the BJP-Sangh
in Jammu), which is highly informative and thoughtful in its various
judgments. All this makes the book a welcome and valuable contribution.

Where Swami falters is in his attempt to situate the Kargil episode in a
wider framework of political evaluation. There are two notable weaknesses.
=46irst, his subscription to a US conspiracy or 'grand design for Kashmir'
theory and second, his impressions regarding the longer-term impact of the
nuclearisation on India-Pakistan relations. This cannot be the place for a
systematic critique of the widespread tendency among many Indian leftists
and nationalists to entertain US conspiracy theories almost at the drop of
a hat. This generally indicates an unwillingness or inability to come to
grips with the real complexities of both US foreign policy formulation and
behaviour outside of a few obvious areas where it has clear grand designs.
At the time of Pokharan II, many believed that not only was the US not
caught unawares, but that the tests reflected a covert US-BJP collusion
politically aimed at China!

Suffice it to say here that if Swami thinks he has made a serious or
convincing case for treating the Kargil episode's "internationalisation"
as evidence of a deep-seated US plot to carry out a "second partition" of
Kashmir to establish a "US protectorate," he is mistaken. He will have to
do much more than superficially ruminate about the "geo-political
importance" of Kashmir "overlooking Afghanistan, China, India and
Pakistan". Nor will it suffice to point to a Kashmir study by a private
NRI-headed think-tank in the US as providing plausible, let alone
decisive, evidence of the White House's "grand design" simply because it
envisages a resolution of the Kashmir issue along lines similar to a 1950
UN Owen-Dixon proposal. The latter called for uniting POK, the Valley and
the Muslim parts of Jammu in a separate, near-fully sovereign entity. Nor
is it enough for Swami to claim that because the National Conference
government's Regional Autonomy Committee's plan for provincialisation of
Jammu and Kashmir, albeit motivated by very different considerations,
will, in his view, objectively play into the hands of those who want a
"second partition," therefore something not just sinister but very
powerful and influential is going on "in the background," as it were.

On the issue of nuclearisation, Swami is wrong in thinking Pakistan was
desperately waiting for Pokharan II to happen so as to jump at going
nuclear to correct its conventional military-strategic imbalance. This was
the view, certainly, of a section (now stronger after Chagai) of the
Pakistani establishment. The stronger reality was that Pakistan was a
reluctant nucleariser, fully aware of the disproportionately heavier
burden of a nuclear arms race on it, and possessing a much greater
awareness than its Indian counterpart of the danger of a nuclear exchange
if both countries crossed the threshold. Its best option has been
non-nuclear parity between the two countries for which Islamabad made
repeated offers.

Certainly, after Chagai, the temptation to internationalise Kashmir via a
Kargil behind a "nuclear shield" became stronger. But there's no axiomatic
relationship of the kind Swami seems to believe - namely, that
nuclearisation tends to institutionalise low-intensity local wars even as
it prevents full-scale ones, or that, ipso facto, the stronger the
movement towards nuclearisation, the more Kargils. In its own way this
buys into the "validity of deterrence" arguments. Low-intensity warfare
continues not because they are stimulated or "institutionalised" by
nuclear weapons, but because the latter are irrelevant to the dynamics of
such warfare.

Similarly, the claim that nuclear weapons will deter full-scale
conventional war is a highly dubious counter-factual. Swami concedes that
Kargil (which he calls neither low-intensity, nor fully conventional war,
but "full-scale conventional engagement") could have escalated into much
more had India crossed the LoC. But the logic of the situation, he says,
demanded, and got, US intervention "in time". But will it always be so?
This is a "guarantee" he cannot, and should not, make.

The best way to understand the implications of South Asian nuclearisation
is not through resorting to arguments about the supposedly generic
deterrence properties of nuclear weapons, but by grasping properly the
insertion of this nuclearisation process in the specific political
dynamics of the given context. For example, India, as the status quo power
in Kashmir, will not necessarily be tempted to promote low-intensity
localised wars with Pakistan, let alone "full-scale conventional
engagements".

=46rom Pakistan's side, it is one thing to claim that the temptation to
repeat Kargil will persist, and might be succumbed to once or more,
depending on a particular concatenation of external and internal factors.
But to claim that repeated Kargils are inevitable because of some
distinctive logic of nuclearisation itself, is something else, and quite
untenable.

[ * The Kargil War by Praveen Swami, ISBN: 8187496045, published by
LeftWord Books (leftword@v...), Paperback, 111 pp, List price: Rs 60.00]

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(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since1996.