[sacw] SACW Dispatch #2 | 16 Aug. 00

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch #2
16 August 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

#1. India: Secularism is indispensable
#2. India/Pakistan: 'on14th of August, the 53rd anniversary of Partition'
#3. India: French journalist Gautier is great friend of the Hindu Right
#4. India: Cops injured in clash with Hindutwa Hot Heads
#5. India: "Jang" Parivar wants war with Pakistan
#6. Canada: Upcoming Seminar on Politics of Rewriting History in India
#7. USA: Allaince for Secular & Democratic S. Asia & INSAF event at MIT

_____________________

#1.

Indian Express
15 August 2000

SECULARISM IS INDISPENSABLE

by Kuldip Nayar

Partition has, in fact, debunked the two-nation theory. Fiftythree years
ago, when the subcontinent was divided on August 15, India had more
Muslims than those in the Islamic state of Pakistan. Even the founder of
Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had stated that Hindus and Muslims
were two nations, came round to say after creation of the new state: You
cease to be Muslims or Hindus; you are either Pakistanis or Indians. "We
are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction
between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste,
creed and another."

Mahatma Gandhi never accepted the thesis that religion formed the basis
of nationhood. He announced his decision to spend the rest of his life
in Pakistan looking after the minorities. He trekked to Noakhali in
Bengal to calm down communal passions on the eve of Partition. And he
went on a fast unto death to stop Hindu-Muslim rioting in Calcutta.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, then Congress president, told the Muslims
leaving India, still called Muhajir in Pakistan, that they would be in a
minority wherever they went. He was proved right. Pakistan paid no
special attention to protect their identity and interests. The entire
struggle was for a separate homeland for the Muslim minorities in India.
Once a new country was created on that basis, the Muslims migrating to
Pakistan were mere Muslims in a predominantly Muslim-majority country.

The question "who is a Muslim?" was vociferously debated in Pakistan
before the Ahmedias were declared non-Muslims. There is a voluminous
report by Justice Munir pronouncing that Pakistan, embracing various
schools of Islam, has no option but to follow the path of secularism.
The religious parties in Pakistan have not allowed a discussion on the
subject. But they have never been able to get more than a fraction of
the votes in any election and never secured more than a couple of seats
in the National Assembly.

The questions increasingly asked in Pakistan are: Is democracy
incompatible with Islam? What should be the role of religion in the
state? Does religion bind together the Pakistanis belonging to different
states -- Punjab, Sindh, the North West Frontier Province and
Baluchistan? The military rule, the fourth in a span of 50 years, has
made people introspect why democracy does not seem to work in Pakistan.
The fact that 95 per cent of them are Muslims -- and the state's
religion is Islam -- has not helped the country either.

The point which Pakistan misses is that pluralism is the ground on which
the structure of democracy rests. That still remains buried beneath the
debris of bigotism. When even history books have been rewritten to skip
the ancient Hindu period, how can the students be expected to imbibe the
temper of tolerance and accommodation? Such sectarian outlook is sought
to be fostered even in India. Human Resources Development Minister Murli
Manohar Joshi's actions are a case in point. Since secularism is still
so pervasive in the country, he has not been able to go beyond the
appointment of pro-RSS men to some history and research institutions.
Unlike in Pakistan, the intelligentsia and newspapers are not taking his
moves lying down.

Still the danger of India slipping into a state of Hindutva is real. In
fact, a couple of states have already got saffronised. Liberal Hindus
are being taken in by jingo nationalism. The affluent in the middle
class and the non-resident Indians (NRIs) are confusing the issue by
giving the impression that Hinduism and Indianness are co-terminous. It
is a soft,stealthy approach. But it is having its effect. Even
youngsters are getting contaminated. The tragedy is that there is no
political party or group to affirm secularism relentlessly.

Ideologically, too, the country is becoming weak. The imprint of
theindependence struggle, which projected a secular India, has got
dimmed over the years. Examples of the joint Hindu-Muslim struggle
against the Britishare rarely cited. This suits the BJP because the
party has never been part of any national movement. Nor has it owned the
ethos of independence struggle: the spirit of a secular India.

If the celebrations of Independence Day have been reduced to a mere
ritual -- the Prime Minister addressing the nation from the Red Fort --
the faultlies with those who have tried to dilute the message. When
Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Sardar Patel and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
marched together underthe leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, they conveyed
that independent India would know no difference on grounds of religion.
None in the NDA wants to recall the days of Hindu-Muslim unity, although
some of its constituents were secular before the power obsession took
them over.

Is the BJP, without making it public, implementing the one-people
thesis? The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, belonging to the RSS
parivar like the BJP, have been employed to project that the country
belongs to Hindus and the rest are there because they have been allowed
to stay. The manner in which the BJP-ruled Gujarat lets fundamentalist
Hindus pick on the Muslims and Christians shows that the state is sure
of the Centre's support.

"But Gujarat is the land of Gandhi." This is what Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan remarked when I met him in Afghanistan after the communal riots in
Ahmedabad in 1969. "Why should it happen after the departure of the
British who divided us Hindus and Muslims?" I really felt embarrassed at
that time and I feel the same way now because I have have yet to find an
answer to his question.

One can see the inner struggle raging in the BJP, between liberal
elements represented by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the
hardliners led byHome Minister L. K. Advani. The RSS is behind the
latter and guides him through to take a rigid stand on matters like
Kashmir. The outright rejectionof Farooq Abdullah's demand for autonomy
by the Centre was at its behest. Still Vajpayee and Advani are not at
variance with each other. Both are conscious of their limits.

No doubt, Pakistan will one day become a tolerant, pluralistic society.
Thenalone will it be able to establish democracy. The anti-India or, for
that matter, anti-Hindu stance will make it increasingly fundamentalist.
This is a status sought by authoritarian regimes, not those elected by
the people. Secularism is also a must for democracy. Pakistan will
realise the futility of insisting on making religion the basis of
nationality. It would be equally tragic if the BJP were to play the
Hindu card to spread its influence. The party besmeared the nation's
secular face when it paved the way for the destruction of the Babri
Masjid. It would cause irreparable damage to the country's integration
if it continued pursuing the policy of `one people and one culture'.
Such a move cannot be condoned, much less accepted, at a time when the
nation celebrates its 53rd Independence Day.

Still the danger of India slipping into a state of Hindutva is real. In
fact, a couple of states have already got saffronised

Copyright =A9 2000 Indian Express Newspapers
______

#2.

Telegraph
15 August 2000

UNFORGETABLE DIVIDE
=09=20
BY MUKUL KESAVAN

Monday, the 14th of August, was the 53rd anniversary of Partition, a
good time to think about the relationship between the public history of
an event and the way in which it is individually experienced, remembered
and written down. Amit Chaudhuri ("Partition as exile", July 9) has a
view on this: where official histories of Partition are narrative and
totalizing, the individual experience of Partition is poetic and
fragmentary. This probably means that the public record and schoolbook
history try to impose one cause-and-effect story on all Indians, while
individuals experience Partition variously, obliquely, and in bits and
pieces that don't always add up to a story with a partisan beginning and
a sarkari end.
In this opposition between history as the genealogy of the nation and
the past as experienced by individuals, history as a discipline has
disappeared from view. Chaudhuri refers to official history frequently;
all history in his essay is curricular or official; for him, therefore,
the reports, films and novels that speak of Partition, rehearse a
nationalist script that the authors first learnt in their schoolrooms.
Generations of historians who modified, contested and complicated this
Standard Received Past, creating orthodoxies of their own, which in turn
were challenged by others, find no acknowledgement.

The Partition of India was an event. The event consisted of the colonial
state and contending nationalists agreeing to divide colonial India into
two sovereign nations, India and Pakistan. Formally this division ruled
out an exchange of minorities but the moment the borders were drawn up
and then ratified by the creation of Pakistan on the 14th of August,
1947, the killings began in earnest and minority populations were
displaced on an unprecedented scale.

For Chaudhuri, recognizing Partition as a historical event amounts to
being hegemonized by official history. Partition for him is not an event
because its effects were spread over decades and the ways in which
people reacted to this supposedly definitive event was infinitely
complex, a complexity which official history cannot accommodate.

I don't know about official history but history, the discipline I teach
for a living, has no difficulty in coping with the idea that events have
consequences, that these consequences are not uniform and that they can
affect the lives of people decades after the date of the event. To allow
that an earthquake has an epicentre is not to deny that its devastation
is differently and unevenly experienced.

That said, Chaudhuri's insistence on the singularity of individual
reactions to Partition is odd. North India and Bengal are full of
refugee settlements whose residents will give you strikingly uniform
accounts of their experience of terror, displacement and exile. Even if
we allow that every life is as unique as a fingerprint, the life
experiences that people have in common - collective experiences of
defeat or death or displacement - must count for something in shaping
their lives, in defining the nations that they inhabit.

Chaudhuri writes that Partition's effect was disruptive rather than
definitive. Disruption isn't the word I'd use for the displacement of
millions of people and the killing of a million and more, but that
aside, it shouldn't be hard for anyone to grasp that this "disruption"
was definitive. Apart from the individual misery it spawned, it created
two permanently hostile states, revanchist parties, resentful refugee
populations that were politically significant, and a durable
justification for majoritarian politics. It was certainly definitive for
those who died; it was definitive for their families.

It was definitive in a remote and referred way for the largely south
Indian audience that shouted its hate at the Pakistani team during a
World Cup match in Bangalore some years ago. Anyone who wants to
understand how profoundly the drawing of lines on a map in 1947
reconstituted our world should read Amitav Ghosh's fine novel, The
Shadow Lines.

If someone were interested in understanding the ways in which the
experience of Partition shaped politics in Bengal, there is a first-rate
article by the historian, Joya Chatterji, that he could read which
describes how the agitation for rights in the refugee camps of the
Fifties affected the political fortunes of the communist party in
Bengal. But Chaudhuri's essay isn't really about the events of 1947. It
tells us more about his narrative strategies for writing fiction than it
does about narratives of Partition, public or private.

Chaudhuri tries to domesticate Partition in two ways. One we've looked
at, the poetic and fragmentary route. Since everyone has a different
take on Partition, it is doubtful that Partition was an event at all -
extreme subjectivity as the solvent of history. His second strategy is
both more radical and more interesting. For this he uses the films of
Ritwik Ghatak.

Chaudhuri declares that "Partition in Bengal is central to the filmmaker
Ritwik Ghatak's work - not the moment of Partition itself, or its place
and representation in the nationalist historical narrative, but its
human, almost elemental, story of displacement and resettlement. In
Ghatak (who was of East Bengali origin, and was married to an East
Bengali), Partition becomes a metaphor for migration, resettlement, and
exile, among the most profound preoccupations of 20th century creative
artistes everywhere; for the 20th century is an age of great and
continuing displacement."

Citing Ghatak's use of natural images to represent displacement and
renewal, he writes that "It is through these images suggesting the
original creation of the universe that Ghatak makes material the inner
world of Partition, of apocalypse and rebirth. This serene background,
where the historical and the natural seem to be as good as identified
with each other, frames, almost indifferently, the small drama of the
story's human characters. Partition, according to this vision, which
conflates the natural, the geographic, and the political, is seen as
almost predetermined...Movement, exile, and displacement...have been a
part of life in India from the beginning of the 20th century, and
probably before; during Partition, movement and exile simply took place
on a mass scale, and with sudden and violent intensity and coercion."
(italics mine)

Here we have Partition made little by the near infinity of geological
time or (take your pick) the very long duree. It is either a puny
disturbance dwarfed by large metaphors or just more of what was
happening already only this time with the pedal pressed down to the
floor. I suppose you could say that the 1943 famine was just an upward
spike in the long graph of malnourishment in the Bengal countryside. You
could, but you would have to admit that a lot had been left unsaid. Was
the Bengal famine an event? Hard to tell...people experienced hunger in
such different and complex ways.

Either way Partition is denied its historical particularity: it becomes
a generic disturbance, not an event that changed our lives. So it
doesn't have to be addressed by the novelist, except as noises-off, or
invoked whenever it's useful to tincture some fictional matron's life
with remembered sadness.

This fictional world is sustained by a thin ether produced by stirring
everydaylife into the taken-for-granted-present. The promenading
novelist dawdles past a pageant of scenes from bhadralok life, recording
at leisure its tics and foibles, serving up self-absorbed, frictionless
inner lives, immune to history because upheavals like Partition are
either processes that occur off camera, or matters of subjective recall.
Event, above all, is taboo: were history to happen to this bubble world,
its sedate streets would fill with people, damaged, excited and inspired
by their pasts. Unpredictable and volatile, they might goose our
loitering flaneur into a gallop.=20=20=20

______

#3.

The Hindustan Times
16 August 2000

SAFFRON BRIGADE HAS SUPPORT IN FRENCH JOURNALIST GAUTIER

by Sridhar Kumaraswami

(New Delhi, August 15)
DOES THE Indian media always reflect a Westernised point of view
regarding the repeated attacks on Christians in India? Does India's
intellectual elite, "a majority of whom are Hindus", come down hard on
"their own culture, their religion, their brothers and sisters"?

Well, that's certainly what French journalist Francois Gautier would
have us believe. Gautier, the political correspondent in India and South
Asia, for Le Figaro, one of France's leading newspapers, makes no secret
of his sympathies for the Saffron brigade in his recently-published book
Arise, O India. The book, published by Har-Anand Publications, is on
display at the Delhi Book Fair.

Gautier, makes several observations in the book most of which seem to
veer towards the extreme Hindu Right. For instance, in a reference to
the heinous murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines in Orissa, he
asks whether "the life of a Christian is more sacred than the lives of
many Hindus". While conceding that the murder should be universally
condemned and that the murderers should be brought to book, Gautier
seems to see a hidden agenda behind the massive outcry in the Indian
media. He contends that no voices are raised when "Hindus" are
slaughtered in Kashmir.

Regarding Kashmir, Gautier holds a firm view that the ordinary Kashmiri
loathes India. But he adds that to preserve Dharma India has to remain
one and "even conquer again, whether by force or by peaceful means, what
was once part of her South Asian body". He also gives some rather
unsolicited advice to Indian Muslims asking when they will understand
"that they have to be Indians first and then Muslims".

"What the Muslim invaders did during the centuries of their domination
was that they planted a seed of division ... and today, the seed has
matured, whether in Kashmir, Pakistan or even in India," Gautier reasons
in an argument that would make a Hindu right-winger nod in delight.
While espousing that it is Hinduism which makes India unique, the
Frenchman has also listed Ayodhya "as the perfect example of the
unwillingness of the Indian Muslims to come to terms with the Indian
reality". In a shocking description of the Babri Masjid, Gautier states
that "there was this lone mosque with its two ugly domes" that anyone
with a right sense should see "was not worth making an issue of". He has
also suggested that the BJP should take some hard decisions to
'Indianise' the nation.

Some of the measures suggested are rewriting of Indian History and
reintroduction of Sanskrit as the national language. In his work, the
Frenchman has commented on the stages in Indian history including the
'Muslim invasions', colonialism, and post-1947 India. In his avatar as
an historian, he has also stated that the massacres perpetuated by
Muslims in India are unparalleled in history and is even bigger than the
holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis.

______

#4.
The Times of India
15 August 2000

30 COPS INJURED IN CLASH WITH BAJRANG DAL ACTIVISTS

JAIPUR: More than 30 policemen and several others were injured when
Bajrang Dal clashed with police following a dispute over the route of a
procession in a village in Kota district, police said on Monday.

Police resorted to lathicharge and burst teargas shells to disperse the
mob which pelted stones at them in Kanwas village on Sunday. Up to 36
people were arrested and prohibitory orders promulgated in the village
where the activists clashed with police following refusal by the
authorities to allow them to take out a procession, to mark 'Akhand
Bharat Diwas', through a minority community locality.

When they were asked to take another route, the activists started
pelting stones. Police resorted to lathicharge and burst tear gas
shells. In the ensuing clash, more than 30 policemen and several people
were injured.

The situation was peaceful and under control, deputy inspector general
of police Kota range Vasudev Sharma said. (PTI)

______

#5.

The Times of India
15 August 2000

RSS FAVOURS WAR

By Rajesh Ramachandran

The Times of India News Service

NEW DELHI: The RSS, bitten by the hot pursuit bug, wants the government
to be prepared for war. Fully endorsing BJP general secretary Venkaiah
Naidu's call for a hot pursuit across the Line of Control in Jammu and
Kashmir, the RSS went a step ahead and asked the government to be
prepared for any eventuality, be it war. It asked the government to
attack terrorist camps in the Pakistan-occupied territory, if need be.

In an interview to The Times of India News Service, RSS leader MG Vaidya
said, ``Hot pursuit'' would not draw flak from international community
because it was aware of Pakistan's involvement in spreading terrorism in
India. Besides, he said, ``Taking a battle to the enemy territory is
always advantageous. In 1965, when we couldn't contain the Pakistani
forces in Akhnoor, our forces marched towards Lahore, thus relieving the
tension in Akhnoor.''

Wouldn't crossing the LoC lead to a war? ``We'll face it. If we have to
cross the LoC to crush terrorism, we have to be prepared for any
eventuality. Unless Pakistan stops cross-border terrorism there is no
alternative,'' Vaidya said.

Though the Prime Minister said India would talk to any Pakistan
government, military or elected, the RSS, he said, felt that a military
dictator would talk only from a militarily strong position. Vaidya said
that the present escalation of violence and readiness to talk with India
were two facets of Pakistani military's policy.

He said the Parivar was anxious that the government was undermining the
gravity of the Kashmir issue by calling it a proxy and limited war.
``Thus there was no total war even when Pakistan violated the LoC in
Kargil,'' a source said.
[...] .

______

#6.

SEMINAR ON 'OUTSIDER AS ENEMY: POLITICS OF REWRITING HISTORY IN INDIA '

Prof. K.N. Panikkar
Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Chairman, Archives on Contemporary History, India
=20
Monday, August 28
6 PM

CDAS, McGill University
3715 Peel Street, Montreal
Canada

"How these persons can have the presumption to censor the work of
historians of the stature of K.N.Panikkar, defies imagination. Only the
Nazis in Germany over sixty years ago could have been capable of such
presumption." - Irfan Habib (a renowned Indian Historian)
=20

"What is happening to 'Towards Freedom' is not an isolated instance. It is
a part of a larger design of the Sangh parivar to transform India into a
Hindu nation unmistakable foreboding of fast emerging fascist conditions in
our country". - K.N. Panikkar

Earlier this year two volumes of modern Indian history books entitled
'Towards Freedom' submitted to the Oxford Press were arbitrarily withdrawn
by the Indian Centre for Historical Research, the ICHR. One of the editors
of these volumes is Prof. K.N.Panikkar, Chairman of the Archives on
Contemporary History, India.

It is a well known fact that after coming to power last year the present
Indian government led by the Hindu fundamentalist party the BJP has started
an assault on all democratic and secular educational institutions. It had
placed its members and sympathizers on the Board of the ICHR.

Prof. Panikkar will talk about the politics of rewriting history in the
background of the emerging fascist tendencies in India.

Organized by

CERAS, Centre d=92etudes et de ressources sur l=92Asie du Sud
Alternatives
CDAS, Centre for Developing Area Studies, McGill University

Info: Feroz Mehdi at (514) 982-6606; ext. 2248

______

#7.

Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia

and

The International South Asia Forum (INSAF)

invite you to a celebration of Independent South Asia

Food, Music, Talks, and Poetry

Keynote Address

by

Dr. Paresh Chattopadhyay
The University of Quebec at Montreal

Globalization of capital and its contradictions
=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20

Tang Hall green at MIT.
Cambridge
August 19th Saturday 4:00 PM
In Solidarity with the People of South Asia we celebrate the 53nd
anniversary of the formal independence of South Asiancountries from
colonialism with a renewed commitment to the struggle for true democracy
and social justice.

In deep sympathy with the victims of the recent violence in Kashmir
and in alarm over the general escalation of violence there, we reiterate
in the strongest possible terms the need for all concerned parties to=20
continue dialogue towards bringing peace in the region.=20

All the South Asian countries have deep bonds of
shared culture and civilization. Recent actions of the governments of
India and Pakistan such as the development of nuclear weapons and the
continuing conflict in Kashmir threaten the peaceful co-existence of not
only the two countries but of the entire region. We believe that the
current hostile climatethere is inimicable to development and that the only
way to ensure peace and prosperity in the region is to garner greater
economic and cultural
ties across borders.=20

Join us for food, music, and talks when we get together to call upon t=
he
our governments in South Asia to:

1. Work toward joint solutions of shared problems of economic and huma=
n
development.
2. Seek greater cooperation in trade and promote cultural and
intellectual exchange between the two countries.
3. Seek a peaceful resolution to the dispute over Kashmir with genuine
representation and active participation from the diverse peoples of Kashmi=
r.
4. Not allow recent tragic events to further undemocratize the
polity in Kashmir.

**************************************************************************=
**
Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia
**************************************************************************=
**
___________________________________
South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch (SACW) is an
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