[sacw] SACW Dispatch #1 | 29 July 00

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch #1
29 July 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

#1. India: Bombay extremist defies moderate India
#2. India: Hoax of An Arrest - A super-criminal walks free
#3. India: Memory & narcissism
#4. South Asia / the world: Important new book: Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Em=
pire
#5. Bangladesh: Chobi Mela / Festival of Photography
_____________________

#1.

The Christian Science Monitor
FRIDAY, JULY 28, 2000
WORLD

BOMBAY BOSS
A CHARMING EXTREMIST DEFIES MODERATE INDIA

by Robert Marquand
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BOMBAY

Imagine the racial overtones of David Duke. The machine-boss politics of
Chicago's late Richard J. Daley. The aura of Marlin Brando's "Godfather."

That's a composite of Bombay's Bal Thackeray - who has ruled India's
premier city for most of the 1990s by a system of fear and patronage, and a
militant Hindu party of lower-class youth known as Shiv Sena, or "Army of
the King."

Now imagine trying to arrest Mr. Thackeray.

That's what Maharashtra state authorities have been fumbling with for the
past 10 days - without success. With rumors of riots, schools and
businesses closing, and the stock market plunging, this city of 15 million
has nearly shut down twice.

At one level, the arrest attempt of Bombay's most provocative and colorful
figure seems purely a political vendetta by a former prot=E9g=E9, who is no=
w
the Maharashtra state deputy chief minister.

But at a deeper level the arrest of Thackeray, for allegedly inciting the
bloody Bombay riots of 1992 and '93, is a special moment in a battle over
the erosion of civil society in a city of great wealth and greater poverty
that has often been a bellwether of ethnic conflict and extremism for South
Asia.

At the center of the struggle is a single-spaced, 274-page document that
most people in Bombay have not even read. Known as the Srikrishna report,
it is named after a Bombay judge who spent five years investigating the
riots. In painstaking neighborhood-by-neighborhood detail, the report
describes riots that raged out of control for days, where police stood by
while 800 Muslims were killed (the official figure) - leaving wounds that
have not yet healed.

BAL THACKERAY: His release is a win for right-wing Hindus.
SHERWIN CRASTO/AP

Shiv Sena's rise

At the center of the riots, according to Judge Srikrishna's report, was Bal
Thackeray and his Shiv Sena organization.

"There is no doubt that the Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks took the lead in
organizing attacks on Muslims and their properties under the guidance of
several leaders....," the report states on page 28. "Bal Thackeray ... like
a veteran General, commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by
organized attacks against Muslims."

By 1995, riding a wave of Hindu revivalism throughout India and a promise
to make Bombay great again, the Shiv Sena itself was voted into power.

Its record was spotty. Rather than conducting reforms of housing and
education, critics say, the Sena used its official status to collect spoils=
.

As Praveen Swami, a leading Bombay journalist writes, for five years "the
Sena ran perhaps the most formidable roughneck apparatus ever seen in
Mumbai [Bombay], using state power to displace traditional criminal
organizations."

The Sena took over protection rackets, nightclub licenses, and film
finance. It engineered land schemes - all the while deploying the police to
guard its own city-wide network of 250 local bosses.

Last September the Shiv Sena was voted out.

Today, what the effort to arrest Bal Thackeray symbolizes, say many
analysts, is an attempt to reassure a confused and fearful middle class
that liberal and secular ideals are still informing politics, at a time
when the actual day-to-day government in Bombay is petty and corrupt.

"Are we going to allow the culprits of a crime this large to go free?" asks
leading Bombay attorney Majid Memon. "We are in the midst of an erosion of
democratic and secular values that will take decades to regain. The
Srikrishna report speaks to this erosion."

"There is a need for Indians to constantly rejuvenate their self-image of
having a civil society," argues Indian-American scholar Shekhar Krishnan, a
Bombay resident. "The middle class needs to feel that ethnic passions are
being held in check."

Srikrishna was issued in 1998. Not surprisingly, the then- ruling Sena
rejected any complicity in the riots. The report was shelved.

But on July 15, the now ruling Congress Party ordered Thackeray's
prosecution. He was charged with violating a law disallowing the "promotion
of enmity between different groups on the grounds of religion, race, place
of birth, residence, language." Specifically cited were three editorials
Thackeray penned for his party organ, Samna (Confrontation) during the '93
rioting. He called for a "holy war" in one, and in another titled "They
Became Like Sheep," he alluded to Muslims being shown their place in the
riots.

When the order to prosecute came, Thackeray said Bombay, if not all of
India, "would burn" if he were arrested. (Later, he called for calm.)

Thackeray's ace in the hole has been a statute of limitations forbidding
prosecution. This Tuesday, when he was brought to court and the city began
to shut down, the local judge went far past standard procedure to invoke
this statute. An appeal is under way and Thackeray could be arrested later
this summer.

SUPPORTERS' CELEBRATION: Bal Thackeray (in portrait), charged with
inciting 1992-'93 riots against minority Muslims, was arrested and released
Tuesday.
AP

At an interview at his residence, Thackeray wears the saffron robes of a
revered Hindu and comes across as personable and even charming, cracking
jokes and famously saying, "I'm just a cartoonist" - his profession before
he formed the Sena in 1966. His speech is punchy ("retaliation is my
birthright"), gossipy, and he speaks of orators he admires, including Adolf
Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr.

"What we need is a benevolent dictator; I prefer that kind of dictatorship.=
"

Thackeray defends himself and his party in an absolute manner, blames
Muslims for starting the riots, and argues that Judge Srikrishna is biased.
"No Hindus have ever started riots in India. I had no part in the riots of
1992," he says. When asked if nevertheless he regretted the violence he
says, "Why should I be sorry? If the Muslims had not started this, my boys
would not have come on the street."

In Bombay, Thackeray is loved and hated for a pro-Maharashtra "sons of the
soil movement" that started in 1966. At the time, south Indians dominated
the professional classes here, and Gujaratis and Parsis controlled the
business class. Local Maharashtrians - the lower and working classes - were
often treated as second-class citizens in their own city. Their language,
Marathi, was considered plebian.

Thackeray set out to change that. In many ways he did, becoming a cult
figure among young men who in the Sena found dignity, jobs, and family
social services the state was not providing. They literally worshiped the
rough and ready rhetoric of local justice that Thackeray provided.

Thackeray tried to toughen his charges. "He would say to passive Hindus,
'You are impotent, useless, weak-kneed, supine, jellyfish,' " remembers
Dipankar Gupta, a political scientist in New Delhi who knows Thackeray. "He
set out to create a real right wing. 'Don't strike back with talk, but with
force,' is his creed."

By the mid-1960s, his creed hit the streets. The Sena first campaigned
against south Indians in Bombay. By the 1970s they took on the powerful
communist and trade union movements. In the 1980s, Thackeray reworked
himself as a Hindu leader and found a more volatile target: the city's 15
percent Muslims, whom he still criticizes for being "anti-national."

How extreme is too extreme

Today, analysts question whether the Indian middle class - which has
already internalized much of the recent Hindu revival discourse - finds
Thackeray, one of its vocalizers, too extreme. Is his flamboyant, mafia-don
style and open advocacy of "hitting back" too rough?

In an India Times poll, conducted among the English speaking elite, 69
percent thought Thackeray should be arrested.

This may still happen. Legal sources say the case for overturning the lower
court is strong. A new case could even arise. But the inner workings of the
decision are murky and more political than legal. Whether Congress Party
leader Chhagan Bhujbal, a Thackeray prot=E9g=E9 turned rival, will pursue t=
he
case with zeal is unclear.
The monsoon season in Bombay may still get hotter.

Copyright 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society. All rights reserve=
d.

______

#2.

The Praful Bidwai Column
July 31, 2000

A HOAX OF AN ARREST
A SUPER-CRIMINAL WALKS FREE

By Praful Bidwai

So Mr Bal Thackeray, the self-confessed instigator of one of the worst
communal pogroms in our history, has gone scot-free again--thanks to a
objectionable judicial order and the Maharashtra government's ineptitude,
coupled with the Centre's collusion and venality. The worst scenario
forecast in this column last week has materialised. No one, barring the
Supreme Court, has emerged unsullied from the sordid drama. The state
government made a mess of the case. Instead of filing a fresh charge-sheet
and demanding Mr Thackeray's remand, it allowed the magistrate to invoke
the "time bar" based on a mere procedural technicality, while ignoring "the
interests of justice" specified in Section 470(3) of the CrPC itself. The
magistrate made a further mockery of the law by terminating the case
altogether. Of course, the most dishonourable place in the play is occupied
by Mr Thackeray who threatened bloody chaos should the law take its course.
Through sher blackmail, he successfully subverted the law.

Only a little less brazen was the arm-twisting on the part of the Sena's
MPs. The pride of place here goes to Mr Ram Jethmalani who rightly lost his
job and is now malignging everybody. Mr Jethmalani's conduct was not just
unbecoming of a minister; it was downright loutish. At its core was a
direct, open, unbridgeable conflict of interest: between his role as Mr
Thackeray's legal adviser for 30 years, and his role as Cabinet minister.
He had no business to comment on the merits of sanctioning Mr Thackeray's
prosecution. It was utterly fraudulent for him to plead that he was
speaking in his capacity as a citizen or an "experienced lawyer". Those
"capacities" were wholly subordinate to, and eclipsed by, his function as
law minister and by the principle of collective responsibility of the
Cabinet, which he wilfully violated.

Worse, over two long days, Mr Jethmalani drew up for Mr Thackeray a
"rescue plan" involving the misuse of Article 256 of the Constitution to
bring about unwarranted Central intervention in the case. This is before he
was sacked as minister. Equally obnoxiously, he talked down to the Supreme
Court, which as law minister, it was out of order for him to do: "The
learned Chief Justice should at least have realised that he was making
comments about a minister who knows his law as well as anyone else."
Regrettably, he was not the sole Union minister to comment on the Thackeray
case. Mr Arun Jaitley did the same, as did SS ministers Joshi, Prabhu and
Vikhe Patil, causing the Supreme Court to say: "It is distressing that
comments are made by cabinet ministers while a petition ... is pending
before the highest court of the land". This brought the ministers no glory.
But Mr Jaitley has since been elevated and appointed law minister!

Mr Vajpayee is seriously to blame for letting his ministers go berserk and
indulge in blackmail and subversion of the law. By refusing Maharashtra's
perfectly reasonable request for Central paramilitary forces to meet the
Sena's threat, and putting pressure on the CM and his deputy through Mr
Pramod Mahajan, he clearly showed he was partisan towards Mr Thackeray.
Without the intervention of his chosen emissaries in Mumbai, the July 25
false-arrest-and-release deal couldn't have been worked
out.=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20

Attorney General Soli Sorabjee too figures among the dramatis personae who
conducted themselves less than impeccably. He got into a fractious
relationship with Mr Jethmalani, who regards the AG as a subordinate
officer of the government, rather than a statutory authority under the
Constitution's Article 76. But that hardly justified his caustic remark
that Mr Jethmalani with his "inexhaustible store of pinpricks" was himself
to blame for his dismissal: "he did not require my help".

Testimony to tension between the two was the M.S. Shoes scandal, in which
Mr Jethmalani's decision to favour the company's promoters seemed to Mr
Sorabjee a fit case for inquiry under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
This, of course, speaks very poorly of the former law minister. Mr
Jethmalani indeed carries a burdensome reputation after half a lifetime of
defending notorious smugglers as their lawyer of choice. More recently too,
he has taken questionable decisions: e.g. calling for the havala scam files
during his 13-day tenure as law minister in 1998, then recommending
"regularisation" of posh Anant Ram Diary properties for a sum only
one-quarter of their market value (i.e. at a loss of Rs. 86 crores to the
exchequer), and calling for the destruction of Lutyens' Delhi to build
highrise structures. As law minister, he also got into scrapes with the
Supreme Court, as in the appointment of the Monopolies Commission head.
Indeed, it is dismaying that Mr Vajpayee made him law minister a second
time.

However, Mr Sorabjee is no paragon of rectitude either. He went along with
the Vajpayee government's abjectly partisan decision to review the
Constitution, and that too while bypassing Parliament altogether. He also
breached a healthy Parliamentary convention by not resigning when the
United Front, which appointed him AG, demitted office. He pleaded with the
BJP to let him continue. The AG's position is special in the Westminster
system. Mr Sorabjee does it no credit. His record on Constitutional matters
is ambivalent. In a letter to The Times of India, he defended the Emergency
as conforming to the rule of law. He has neither recanted nor apologised
for this.

The unflattering conduct of all the players in this continuing shabby
spectacle bears witness to the growing rot in our system and failures of
the Indian state. Surely, it speaks poorly of our political and justice
delivery system that it took seven years, three governments, and a
suspended-now-revived-later judicial inquiry, for a case against Mr
Thackeray to be lodged--only to be dismissed. As the Supreme Court rebuked
the Maharashtra government: "You appoint a high court judge to head a
commission and is this the way you treat his report?" It is no less
unfortunate that the Supreme Court itself rejected a petition in late 1994
for Mr Thackeray's prosecution on identical grounds. It must now redeem its
own integrity by quickly ordering his prosecution.

Many recent actions speak equally poorly of the state's integrity. It
showed scant respect for the law when it "regularised" patently illegal
encroachments by the super-rich on government land under its own nose, in
1,071 colonies in Delhi--including Sainik Farms and Anant Ram Dairy. This
amounts to trading in sovereign rights. This is worse than plea bargaining
prevalent in the U.S., which our legal system rightly frowns upon. The
message it sends out is that the affluent and the powerful, including
ministers (and Mr P.R. Kumaramangalam has been explicitly named), can get
away with gross illegality and acts of enormous greed just by paying a
certain sum of money. The Sainik Farms issue is wholly different from, say,
regularising unauthorised slums. The poor squat on land because they cannot
afford to buy property. Cities need them for services. Without their
labour, the rich couldn't even live. Squatting by the poor is
survival-related. Sainik Farms are greed-related. Those who build vast
illegal mansions, and steal electricity to aircondition them, do so in full
knowledge of their culpability.

Even more deplorable is the Vajpayee government's decision to free the
five Russians sentenced in the Purulia arms-drop case. These men were
fairly tried and found guilty on serious charges. They had not even begun
the appeals process when President Putin's visit was announced. Their
sudden release was not a "humane gesture", as claimed, but an act of
cowardice on the part of a government which sacrificed its own law in
pursuit of huge arms deals with Russia. That's not the mark of a
self-respecting government which takes the notion of national sovereignty
seriously.

India's state is turning increasingly parasitical and predatory. It has
less and less to offer its people by way of services necessary for human
existence. It is withdrawing even from areas like power and telecom, where
it once played an irreplaceably useful role. Its sources of authority are
now to be found largely in its armed apparatus alone. They are bereft of
moral and political legitimacy.

This spells a unique danger. In the Age of Democracy, states get their
legitimacy not from above, but from below--from the people, in whom real
sovereignty rests. States do not live for themselves, but to fulfil the
needs of the citizenry. If they fail to play these functions, their
legitimacy gets eroded, undermined. That is precisely what is happening in
today's India. Mr Vajpayee has certainly succeeded in keeping his
government afloat through yet another crisis. He has also weakened the
Congress-NCP alliance in Maharashtra and generously helped that fascist
force called the Shiv Sena. But he has caused the citizen's faith in the
Indian state to be shaken by its failure to bring a communal super-criminal
to book. That faith won't be restored unless the Supreme Court intervenes
and orders Mr Thackeray's long ovedue trial.-end-

______

#3.

The Hindu
27 July 2000
Op-Ed.

MEMORY & NARCISSISM

By Neera Chandhoke

IN RECENT decades, Indian society has been host to an astonishing
phenomenon: the increasing representation of the majority
community as the victim of history. Recollect the narratives
constructed around Babri Masjid/ Ayodhya in the 1980s. ``Yes, for too long
I have suffered affronts in silence'' ran the complaint in one pamphlet
distributed by the VHP. ``My numbers have dwindled... my adored
motherland has been torn asunder. I have been deprived of my age-old
rights over my own hearth and home.'' We all know the outcome of this
particular narrative - the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

Today the majority is being represented as the victim of a
conspiracy by the Christian churches to convert Hindus. Defending the VHP
against the charge of spreading hate literature against the minorities,
Prajna Pravah, intellectual forum of the RSS, writes in a letter to the
Prime Minister thus: ``VHP booklets and pamphlets increasingly prove how
the activities of Christian fundamentalists are aimed at destabilising
the Hindu society and the state''. Considering that the Church has
managed to convert a little over two per cent of the people in all these
centuries of its presence in the country, the allegation of
destabilisation is startling. The mind boggles. But such are the
ironies of political self- representations.

The affiliate organisations of the Sangh Parivar are, however, not
alone in this. In a different way, the Jats, a once proud community
that treated the upper castes with disdain, have managed to edge
their way into the reservation network by representing themselves as
the victims of caste discrimination. We in India have also been affected
by the global phenomenon of the `culture of complaint' and the `cult of
the victim'. Scholars tear their hair; they clutch their brows with
stupefaction - what explains, they ask, this eager competition for the
label of the victim by groups who would have once scorned the badge?

The causes for the onrush of narratives of victimisation that have
replaced the politics of ideas are complex. Defying neat analysis or
categorisation, they spill over into the inadequately explored realms of
collective psyches and remembrance of the past. But we can begin to
trace the causes of this phenomenon to some tangible factors: speedy and
disconcerting social change, and the decline of religious, familial, and
caste bonds for one. People in this (post) modern world, where changes
occur faster than any flight of fancy, have simply lost their
hold on referents that tell them who they are and where they have come
from. Memory and narratives of memory on the other hand allot an identity
- howsoever incoherent or fragile it may prove. But memory is after
all multilayered, multiple, and heterogeneous. Why recollect
victimhood? Why not memories of how people have managed to carve out
spaces of inter-group belonging?

It is not as if memory of victimisation is always a bad thing. After
all the Dalits have made a place for themselves in the sun through such
means. Collective memory of how communities have been victimised by
and in history can prove to be enormously empowering when it comes
to righting historical wrongs. The problem is that such
strategies have proved supremely appropriable by every group, be it
a majority, or a group that has exercised power over land ownership. And
like all strategies, this one also pursues a power project -
compensation for the Jats, retribution for the Sangh Parivar - by
defining one group against the other.

Expectedly all this has not proved very desirable for democratic
politics. For if we look closely at narratives of victimisation, we find
that their main property is their complete narcissism. They prop up
memory as a mirror and see only their own damaged and distorted face,
distortions that can only be corrected either through violence and
vendetta, or exclusive compensation. These are the exact politics of a
`new tribalism'. Apart from the fact that the politics of `new
tribalism' injects frenzied and unhealthy emotionalism into public
life, it bears other serious consequences. For one, these narratives of
memory, narcissistic as they are, are completely insensitive, even
hostile, to the otherwise legitimate claims of other groups. Other
groups come to be viewed either as competitors for the loaves and fishes
dished out by the state, or as `outsiders', who have to be excluded from
any collective project.

Most of the time, ordinary people are just too busy eking out a living,
just too involved in negotiating life's major and minor tragedies to
hate or hurt each other. People may hold personal memories, mediated
through rumour and anecdote, of how they were victimised, and these
memories may not allow them to socially interact with members of the
group identified as the victimiser. But this does not mean that they
ritually define themselves against these members. And they can
certainly build bridges of solidarity with other groups in other
fields, at the work place for example.

But it is precisely these solidarities that have been undermined,
whenever narratives of victimisation have succeeded in
translating dormant prejudices into resentment. On the one hand,
resentment articulates, sharpens, and ultimately translates what may be
subterranean prejudice into hostility/insensitivity towards other
groups. In the process, other communities come to be depicted as a
proximate and perceptible threat to the identity, to the dignity, and
to the interests of the members of community which is host to this
construction. Obviously, the greatest casualty in all this is
inter-group solidarity inasmuch as such narratives impede understanding
among groups.

On the other, resentment has become the self-justifying ideology of the
victim who argues that he or she is privileged, simply because he or
she has been victimised. No wonder that groups are luxuriating in
remembering long-forgotten abuses, no wonder they are feeding upon
notions that they and only they have suffered in history, no wonder that
they feel the need to stay angry, to take umbrage at the least
provocation. The victim as in an Amitabh Bachchan film has finally
become the hero. In the process, suffering has been trivialised by
being transformed into an index of compensation even as groups struggle to
prove which group has been the most brutalised, or the most humiliated in
history.

The problem is that when a group bases its identities on the
sentimental solidarity of remembered victimisation and
resentment, we can expect nothing but historical myopia and in extreme
circumstances, vendetta. That is why narratives of victimisation
pose tremendous problems when it comes to projects of democratic
interaction or solidarity in civil society. As each group tries to
monopolise the symbols and the vocabularies of suffering; as each
group avidly rushes to claim the status of victim, and as narratives
of victimisation dominate civil society, groups become completely
self-centred, unwilling to listen to others or to show empathy to
their claims. They may even seek to exclude other groups from the
arena of civil society.

So whereas the Sangh Parivar seeks to push out the religious
minorities, caste-based groups seek to push out other caste-based groups,
and in the process the genuinely marginal and deprived communities,
whose narratives do not find ready resonance in civil society, are
further pushed out of history.

Expectedly, as exclusive group memories assert irreconcilable as well
as irreducible demands, the construction of a rich civic culture where
people can empathise with others becomes a remote dream. It is worrying,
because as we have seen in India, feelings of historical victimisation can
easily slide into the phenomenon of collective narcissism, where one sees
only oneself and no one else in the mirror of history and of the future.
It is worrying because if people are constituted by memories of
victimisation, they can hardly begin to talk to each other civilly or
rationally in civil society. Where do we then find the resources
of belonging, or shared memories of common struggles to construct a
culture of democracy? Narratives of victimisation may arguably prove
the single most substantial impediment to any kind of politics in the
democratic mode.

______

#4.

IMPORTANT NEW BOOK !

Eqbal Ahmad:
Confronting Empire

Interviwes with David Barsamian

Foreword by Edward W. Said

For the First Time ever, Eqbal Ahmad's most provocative ideas are now
available in book form. In these intimate and wide ranging discussions with
David Barsamian, Ahmad tells us about nationalism, identity, and
resistance, with reflection on his role in liberation struggles around the
world.

ISBN: 0-89608-615

South End Press
E-mail southend@i...
Website: http:/:www.lbbs.org/sep/sep.htm

______

#5.

CHOBI MELA (FESTIVAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY)

Despite the Western construct of the history of photography, which only
recognises, with notable exceptions, work by North Americans and Europeans
and their 'discoveries' of 'other cultures' there is clear evidence that
photography was flourishing in Bengal since the early 1840s. Little is know=
n
of this history. Ironically, in the year 2000, we still know little of the
photographic practice in our region. Except for collections of individuals
such as Ebrahim Alkazee and Ismat Raheem, most of the early photographs
remain in colonial archives such as the India Office Library in London.
There are no anthologies of the photography of the sub-continent. And there
is little global awareness of the changes that are taking place in the
medium in this region. Often working in isolation, practitioners themselves
are unaware of the significance of their contribution.

Chobi Mela is an attempt not only create an understanding of the present
state of photography in the region, but also to deconstruct current
photographic practices on the basis of wider influences, particularly that
of globalisation. The festival hopes to bring together a wide range of
photographic work and photographic practitioners from various parts of the
world, but especially from the sub-continent and the rest of Asia. Through
exhibitions, discussions and dialogues, we hope to explore the semiotics of
present day photographic practice, showcase the work of established and
emerging photographers, initiate debates on issues central to present day
photographic practice (cultural representation, takeovers by Getty and
Gates, implications of digital technology), and bring about an understandin=
g
of the medium, its history, its present, both within the industry and
amongst the public at large. Besides showing a wide range of work being
produced in Bangladesh, Chobi Mela will collect bodies of work from SAARC
countries India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Asean countries Singapore,
Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as recent work from China and Taiwan. It
will also prominently feature European countries UK, Germany and the
Netherlands, as well as work from South American and African countries. Wor=
k
is expected from the USA, Australia and France and other countries as well,
but we are still awaiting confirmation. The nature of the work will range
from fine art photography, to conceptual practices, through to
photojournalism, industrial photography and digital imaging.

A unique exhibition "The War We Forgot", which will pool the images of
photography legends like Don McCullin, Raymond Depardon, Marc Riboud, Mary
Ellen Mark, David Burnett, Raghu Rai, Marylin Sylverstone, and Abbas, on th=
e
war of liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, is being especially curated for th=
e
festival by Robert Pledge, the president of Contact Press Images.(details o=
f
the exhibition is given below)

Chobi Mela will be the single biggest photographic event to have taken plac=
e
in Asia. The festival is expected to open on the 15th December 2000, at the
National Museum and will continue for a month. It is also expected that it
will be opened by the President of Bangladesh.

The War We Forgot

It was twenty eight years ago. One of the bloodiest wars of this century. A
genocide of unparalleled proportions, with more innocent people killed than
in the Nazi concentration camps. In less time than it takes for a baby to b=
e
born, a population of mostly farmers, men women and children who had never
before held a gun, fought a trained army of 93,000 soldiers, and gave birth
to a new nation. While in the West, the "Concert for Bangladesh" raised
millions of dollars, and the US and the Soviet union flexed muscles at each
other for one last time, the news of what was happening except from what
passed through the guerrilla grapevine was not available to Bangladeshis.
With the media totally in the hands of their oppressors, and entire village=
s
being burned at the slightest excuse, even listening to the banned Shadhin
Bangla Radio would spell death. It was only after the 16th of December, whe=
n
they slowly discovered the corpses of the intellectuals, the mass graves,
the torture cells, that Bangladeshis began to reconstruct what had been
happening to their people for the last nine months. But the world knew.
Though many stayed silent, and others took sides based on political
convenience, the images of the holocaust were produced by some of the fines=
t
photojournalists of the world. Many met for the first time in Bangladesh.
Some made their mark because of the way they documented this war.

Some have since died. Others are now household names. Some have chosen
oblivion. But many of the images remain. In the archives in Time Life
Building. With agencies that distributed the work. In personal collections,
with children who have retrieved the work of dead parents. Though the war,
while it lasted, was widely covered in the media, this, one of the most
significant events of this century, was never put together as a serious
visual collective. The analysts differ in their opinion. The sceptics say
the war was won (16th December 1971) too close to Christmas, and post
Christmas, the media had moved on to other stories. Others feel it was a wa=
r
amongst two poor nations, where little was at stake for the economic powers=
.
Bangladesh itself, ravaged by the war, and subsequent political turmoil,
never found itself in a stable enough situation to reconstruct its own
history, and not everyone wanted the story to be told.

Over a quarter of a century later, on the eve of the millennium, We would
like to give to the rest of the world a fragment of Bangladesh's history. A
history that must be told. For the many who have given their lives for thei=
r
freedom, for those who have been left behind, who live with the pain, for
the perpetrators of the crime who must be confronted with their deeds, and
for the youth to know the birth pangs of their nation.

Shahidul Alam
Drik Picture Library Ltd.
House 58, Road 15A (New)
Dhanmondi Residential Area
Dhaka 1209, Bangladesh
Tel: (880-2) 9120125, 8123412, 8112954
Fax: (880-2) 9115044
URL: www.drik.net, www.meghbarta.net, www.drik.net/pathshala

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