[sacw] SACW | 19 Dec. 00

[Harsh Kapoor]

SOUTH ASIA CITIZENS WIRE
19 December 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex)

#1. Pakistan: Peace Revival Association of Youth website
#2. India: Justice Liberhan, the man with steel nerves
#3. India: Somnath and Ayodhya
#4. India: The Theo-Fascist Terror and the Moral inferno
#5. Announcement: The new issue of 'the-south-asian' is out

--------

#1.

Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 16:57:09 +0500
From: Adeela Khalid <adeela@i...>
Subject: PRAY's site

Dear All,
Peace Greetings !
We've built a web site for PRAY. I invite all of you to visit and am
looking forward to hear your comments.
Click on any one of the links below:
http://praypeace.net/
or
http://geocities.com/peacepray/index.htm
We'll get a domain name and will 'officially' launch the site after
having your comments (criticism and appreciation).

Waiting to hear from you!

Regards,
Adeela Khalid

P.R.A.Y
P.O. Box 20089, PECHS,
Karachi-75400, Pakistan.
Fax. 0092-21-4520799
Email pray@i...

_____

#2.

Outlook
25 December 2000

The man with nerves of steel

He was chosen for his honesty to head the commission probing the Babri
demolition. That
same honesty has hampered Liberhan's career.

By A.S. Panneerselvan

December 8, 1992. Two days after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a
high-level team met at the the then prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao's
residence to formalise a damage-control exercise. S.B. Chavan, who then
held the home portfolio, came up with the idea of setting up a one-man
enquiry commission to deflect charges against the government that it was
not acting against those responsible for the demolition.

That commission was to be neutral and efficient. The team also advised the
PM to select someone who would fulfil five crucial criteria. First, he
must neither be a Hindu nor a Muslim. Second, he must not be from any of
the contesting castes-Brahmin, Jat or Yadav. Third, he must know Hindi and
must not be from the south. Fourth, he must have a clean image. And five,
he must be a sitting judge of a high court to lend the commission some
kind of moral authority. The team found its man in Justice Manmohan Singh
Liberhan, a Sikh and a sitting judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

Back then, Justice Liberhan could not have imagined that his 'right man
for the job' credentials would hamper his career prospects. Born in a
village near Chandigarh in 1938, Liberhan was enrolled as an advocate in
the Ambala Court in 1962. After practicing for 25 years in Ambala and
Chandigarh, he was elevated as a judge to the Punjab and Haryana High
Court in 1987. He was a low-profile man who was never in focus till 1992.
"Judges must not aspire to hog the limelight. They cannot play to the
gallery or pander to the political leadership. They must function strictly
according to the written law. And to do this effectively, it is important
that judges remain anonymous." This was a work philosophy the honourable
judge had often espoused to his friends.

Liberhan became judge at a time when judicial activism was just taking
root in the country. He too delivered many progressive judgements but they
were different from those of other activist judges in that Liberhan was
careful never to undermine the authority of the executive or of the
legislature. "Liberhan has passed many critical strictures against erring
individuals but always refrained from treating other institutions as
inferior to the judiciary," says a senior advocate of the Chennai High
Court.

But soon after he began work with the commission, Liberhan discovered that
honest judges are never encouraged. The Narasimha Rao government had set
up offices for the commission in Lucknow. Only there was no office and no
staff. The government seemed in no hurry to get to the truth.

As a sitting judge in Chandigarh, Liberhan found it difficult to be in
Lucknow on a regular basis. It took one year for the Rao government to
realise that and the commission was shifted to Delhi. By then, Liberhan
had fallen behind the three-month deadline fixed by the government.
Throughout the Congress rule, the judge received little help from the Union
government.

"The only thing Justice Liberhan was assured of was the periodic extension
of the commission's tenure," says a close source. "The Union government
and the UP state government did precious little to get the stay-granted by
the Allahabad High Court which permitted the bjp leaders from abstaining
from the commission's proceedings-vacated. It was also during this period
that for the first time his career was affected because he was handling a
politically sensitive case."

The government was reluctant to elevate him as chief justice of any high
court since such a move would confer more credibility and status to the
commission. "Though the commission and the regular judiciary are not
directly linked, the fact that a sitting chief justice is heading it lends
it more power and authority. Do you think the Allahabad High Court would
have given a stay in favour of (L.K.) Advani and Kalyan Singh if Liberhan
was chief justice?" asks a senior counsel. Between 1992 and 1997,
Liberhan's career stagnated even as the commission's work dragged on.

It was only during the United Front regime that things began to look
slightly better. With Mulayam Singh Yadav as the Union defence minister,
the basic infrastructural needs of the commission were fully met. In July
1997, Liberhan was finally promoted as chief justice and posted to the
Madras High Court.

The respite proved as short-lived as the UF government. The coming to
power of the bjp-led front signalled the next phase of trouble for
Liberhan. The Vajpayee-led government's strategy was similar to that of
the Rao regime-retard the progress of the commission. This was also the
time when the spotlight turned very firmly on the bjp's biggest and most
troublesome ally, Jayalalitha.

At that point, the government was making every effort to save Jayalalitha,
who had many graft cases against her pending at the Madras High Court.
Several of these cases were as being heard by the First Bench of the
Madras High Court, of which Liberhan was a part. Many matters, including
writ petitions filed by Jayalalitha challenging the setting up of special
courts to try cases of corruption against her and some members of her
erstwhile ministry, were being heard in Chennai. The law minister at the
Centre was an aiadmk nominee and there were apprehensions that some of
these petitions would be turned down.

It was now that the Vajpayee government decided to transfer Liberhan to
the Guwahati High Court. Thankfully, the entire bar in Chennai took up his
cause and protested..G.R. Prasad, president of the Tamil Nadu State
Committee of the All India Lawyers' Union, who led the protests, had then
stated: "The proposed transfer undermines the authority of law and is
against public interest." Prasad pointed out that several cases relating to
the Minimum Wages Act, central sales tax, employees' state insurance and
the Private Schools Act had also been heard by the First Bench over a
period of time and judgements had been reserved. The First Bench, which is
also the Green Bench that handles environment-related issues, had also
heard several important cases. According to Prasad, if Justice Liberhan had
been transferred, these cases would have to be heard again, an exercise
that would take several months to be completed.

Though the bjp government permitted him to stay on till he delivered the
judgement in the Jayalalitha case, he was soon shunted out of Chennai.
"The important fact is that two of his juniors in the Chennai High Court,
Justice D. Raju and Justice Shivraj Patil, were elevated to the Supreme
Court while Liberhan was denied a place in the bench of the apex court,"
says a senior advocate of the Supreme Court.

Justice Liberhan retired from the Andhra Pradesh High Court about a month
ago and has since been concentrating on his work with the commission.
Close sources say he's keen to complete the task he began eight years ago.
This has triggered a fresh bout of unease in bjp quarters. For those in
the legal profession would vouch that it's not easy to bulldoze Liberhan.
Nor can he be influenced. Says a former brother judge: "He has nerves of
steel. He'll do his duty and do it without fear or favour. In some cases
people may not have agreed with some of his observations but no one has
ever questioned his integrity." The present government has done all it can
to tire him out but Liberhan has not given up. And that can hardly be good
news for the BJP.

______

#3.

The Telegraph
19 December 2000

SOMNATH AND AYODHYA=20
=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20=20
BY MANI SHANKAR AIYAR
=
=20
Intervening in the Lok Sabha
debate on Ayodhya, the prime minister sought to buttress his case by
citing what Rajendra Prasad had said at the kumababhishekam of the Somnath
temple in April 1951. What he conveniently forgot to mention were the
circumstances in which Rajendra Prasad, who was then the president of
India, was obliged by the council of ministers, specifically the prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to abandon his plans of going to Somnath as
the president of India and to make his visit there in a purely personal
capacity. As the story behind this reflects the fundamental difference
between Nehru's pristine version of secularism in governance and the
acrobatics being indulged in by a life-long swayamsevak-turned-mukhauta,
the tale is well worth retrieving from the archives.

On India attaining independence, there were a few princely states left
dithering, one of which was Junagadh, whose prime minister was Shahnawaz
Bhutto, father of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. On the advice of Shahnawaz, the
nawab of Junagadh acceded to Pakistan. Vallabhbhai Patel attempted to make
the nawab see reason and when that proved impossible, Indian forces
marched into Junagadh, held a plebiscite and proceeded to integrate
Junagadh into the Indian Union.

As Somnath lay within the territory of Junagadh, it was announced that a
magnificent temple would be raised at the site where it had earlier been
razed by Mahmud of Ghazni during repeated assaults through the first two
decades of the 11th century.

A month later, in December 1947, a cabinet meeting was held at which the
Union minister for works and housing, K.M. Munshi, the founder of the
Bharatiya Vidya Bhawans, apparently raised the question of government
funding of the reconstruction of the temple. When later this initial
mention was fleshed out with a detailed proposal from Munshi's ministry,
Nehru hotly denied that there had been any substantial discussion and
asserted that, in any case, no decision had been taken to fund the
project.

A secular government, Nehru held, could not involve itself in building
places of worship and if any such temple was to be built, even at so
renowned a site as Somnath, it must be with private funds. Although
several ministers of his cabinet, in particular Shyama Prasad Mookerjee
and N.V. Gadgil in addition to Munshi demurred, Nehru carried the day and
the government distanced itself from the project.

Instead, a trust was set up which collected a substantial fund through
private donations. The temple was ready to be inaugurated by April 1951.
By then, Rajendra Prasad had become the first president of the Indian
republic. He was invited to the inauguration and readily accepted. But
when the government heard of this, the council of ministers was convened
by Nehru to discuss the propriety of the president attending this
religious function.

Cabinet meetings are held in secret and only the decisions are recorded,
that too in the baldest language. Therefore, we of a later generation have
to construe what might have happened against the background of significant
developments of the time. In September 1949, the pound sterling was
devalued vis-=E0-vis the American dollar; India, as a member of the sterlin=
g
area, followed suit but Pakistan did not do so; therefore, India broke off
trade relations with Pakistan.

Hours later, Nehru was met by a delegation of Muslim traders from the
walled city area of Delhi who said their shops had been closed by
government order. Nehru sent for his minister of rehabilitation and was
horrified to learn from the worthy that he thought it followed as day the
night that if trade was banned with Pakistan, it meant that Indian Muslims
could not indulge in commerce.

That rectified, Nehru found himself confronted with a proposal from B.C.
Roy, the legendary chief minister of West Bengal, endorsed moreover by the
Union home minister, that in retaliation for the expulsion of lakhs of
Hindus from East Pakistan, the government of India might follow a policy
of throwing out one Indian Muslim for every five Pakistani Hindus forcibly
expelled from East Bengal. Nehru put his foot down and instead embarked on
negotiations with the Pakistan prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, which
resulted a few months later in the Liaquat-Nehru pact, a document unique
in the annals of international diplomacy.

Through the pact, the two countries bilaterally undertook to unilaterally
treat their respective minorities as equal citizens, not as hostages for
good behaviour by the other side. However, when Nehru addressed the
Congress parliamentary party to explain the terms of the pact, he was
heard in such sullen and resentful silence that he returned to his office
and wrote out his resignation. Patel eventually persuaded him to withdraw
the resignation.

However, so charged was the atmosphere that the Congress president of the
United Provinces (as Uttar Pradesh was then called), Purushottamdas Tandon,
who Nehru had complained was talking the language of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, threw his hat into the ring for the presidentship of the
Congress in the country as a whole-and won, not against some unknown but
none less than J.B. Kriplani. It was while the party was thus drifting away
from its secular anchor that the Somnath temple reached completion.

The council of ministers at its meeting in April 1951 took the decision to
advise the president, Rajendra Prasad, not to proceed to Somnath in his
capacity as president of the republic. Bound by this advice, the president
announced that, in that case, he would wish to be present at Somnath in
his personal capacity.

It was as such that he went there and it was as such that he spoke there.
Unless this background was known, the average listener to Atal Behari
Vajpayee's quotation might have been forgiven for thinking that the speech
came from none less than the first citizen of India.

Vajpayee, of course, needs no instruction on this. Because three months
later, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee resigned from the Nehru cabinet and
established a new party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. His private secretary
at the time was a young 26 year old youth called Atal Behari Vajpayee. In
the first general elections that followed in early 1952, the Jana Sangh
was routed but not until they had elected their first member of
parliament, N.C. Chatterjee, father of Somnath Chatterjee. When Nehru
reconstituted his cabinet after the elections, two of the ministers most
closely associated with Somnath were dropped, K.M. Munshi and N.V. Gadgil.

The sequel to the Somnath episode is instructive. Nehru went on, in
September 1951, to persuade his colleagues to resign from the Congress
working committee. Tandon too resigned; Nehru took over; and proceeded to
the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi on Gandhi Jayanti, October 2, 1951, where he
delivered himself of a single line which, in my view, sums up everything we
need to know about secularism in governance. Jawaharlal said: "If any man
raises his hand against another in the name of religion, I shall fight him
to the last breath of my life-whether I am in government or outside."

______

#4.

HINDUTWA : THE THEO-FASCIST TERROR , THE MORAL INFERNO

by I.K.Shukla

"Sir, where there is no liberty of judgment, there is no honor. 'Nothing is
dishonorable.'
If there is in a man's mind any overriding idea, any faith, that can make
all things honorable, however cruel, however treacherous, however untrue, i=
n
that man's soul there can be no honor. Your word as a Teutonic Knight is no
good to me."

- SWASTIKA NIGHT, a novel by Katharine Burdekin. Victor Gollancz, London,
1937.

Katharine wrote this novel pseudonymously as 'Murray Constantine' in an
England whose ruling class was desirous of Hitler demolishing the Soviet
Union. The imperialist invasion of Soviet Union at its birth had left the
"unfinished task" for Hitler to accomplish. This diabolic design was then
the "national sentiment", mute or manifest, in Britain and other centers of
imperialism. As an anti-Nazi, and as a woman, she would be deemed doubly
unpatriotic and subversive of the statutory orthodoxy of a sick
nationalism, were she to be found out. Hence the pseudonym. Only in the
1980s was her identity revealed by the publisher.

Among the three "inspirations" of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four ,1949, (two
others being Jack London's Iron Heel, 1907, and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We ,
1920-21 ) this dystopia of a feudal Europe, seven centuries into
post-Hitlerian police state, probes the nexus between gender and political
power in a womanless world. Beyond the specifics of Nazism in the novel in
which men are valued for brutality and women are degraded as breeders, it
unfolds a nightmare which so strikingly resembled conventional Europe's
contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity. The cult of masculinit=
y
burgeoning into fascism, Katharine presciently saw, was the logical
culmination of patriarchy gone wild. Rape was institutionalized, a routine
practice, erasing women's importance and autonomy. Their right of rejection
was an affront, their reproductive ability a scare. Real men, that the Nazi
society was breeding, would deny them both. The Hitlerian creed was. " I
believe in pride, in courage, in violence, in brutality, in bloodshed, in
ruthlessness, and all other soldierly and heroic virtues."

That the political and personal, the public and private spheres mesh and
cannot be separated, oddly enough, is a construct that the fascist state
itself promotes and violently imposes. Nothing will be allowed to escape it=
s
distortion and mangling. It is both Prussian and Procrustean. Total contro=
l
of regimented "proper behavior" and unremitting watch over assertive
"deviation", i.e., defiance of conformity, keep it busy, and secure in
power. It is for this purpose that it seeks to destroy "all books, records=
,
and even monuments from the past" to make " the official Nazi =EBreality' t=
he
only possible one." Hence its feverish and continuous campaign to destroy
memory and persecute those fighting against state-sponsored amnesia and
political apathy. Thought control is a congenital imperative of fascism,
and still more of theo-fascism. Theocratic fascism seeks extinction of
diversity, exile of creative imagination, and extermination of inquiry. It
turns the nation into a ghetto both literally and mentally. The politics of
terror inhibits dissent and state violence intimidates opposition.

The Hindutwa edition of that beastly anarchy is turning India into a mora=
l
inferno, far beyond the confines of that novel, far more gruesome, far more
"barbaric and uncivilized", to put it mildly.
It is noteworthy that the saffronites have shamelessly imported their
frenzied ideology of totalitarianism in its entirety from fascist Italy and
Nazi Germany. Its gods are alien. This warrants serious reflection upon an=
d
rigorous scrutiny of our society and political parties which have, as in
Nazi Germany, proved to be the breeding ground of and avid accessories to
the national sickness of communal fascism running riot.

Questions worth asking: why are dowry deaths going up exponentially, why ar=
e
bride burnings becoming normal, why mostly only in the "higher" castes, why
are female infanticides now routine, why is the incidence of rape rocketing=
,
why are women now being trained by a communal outfit to be good cooks and
mothers, why are known criminals and assassins in federal and state
legislatures, why are churches burnt by saffro gangs described as just
"huts" (thus immunizing and condoning the crime?), why are rapists-
arsonists-murderers now being designated as "saviors of Hindutwa, and
enlisted by pols as their vote enforcers, why are women pramukhs of
Panchayats stripped naked or harassed and humiliated by the traditional
honchos, and, not the least, why are "secular" and "democrat" parties aidin=
g
and abetting the theocratic conspiracy of violent regimentation and
invidious exclusion, why are they legitimating outlawry and obscurantism
which are dumping the nation into a constitutional and moral abyss. There
are umpteen questions that can be added to this list.

Mussolini's " A chi l'Italia? A noi! (To whom does Italy belong? To us!) "=
.
Hitler's " Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuherer! (One nation, one people, one
leader!)" The 18th century French counter-revolutionists had a similar
slogan: "Une foi, une loi, un roi! (One faith, one law, one king!)" And,
their cousins, Afrikaaner Broederbond in South Africa, were not to be left
behind. They too had grunted: "Een volk, een land, een taal(One people, one
land, one language.)" It is this sinister trinity of noxious miasma , fit
only for the brainwashed robots and zombies, that Hindutwa is steeped in an=
d
that it seeks to blanket the nation with. If injustice entailed prolonged
bloodbath in those countries and adjacent ones, why would it be different
here? Isn't it designed to that end: 'Set the whole subcontinent aflame in
the vaulting fires of hell'?

Fascism is a "nationalistic" fever. This noisome pathogen manifests itself
in inventing a glorious past, continual excitement (noe Quwwatul Islam
mosque near Qutb Minar), frenzied gangsterism, perpetual tension, spasms of
violence, a regimen of tyranny, and terror as a tool to control the
citizenry. Before I proceed, let the readers relish something fresh and
cognate to these cogitations. The quartet of quotes from Eduardo Galeano's
latest book Upside Down, Henry Holt, N.Y., jaggedly sum up our national
condition:
"...our culture is the daughter of several mothers. Our multiple
identity
gains its creative vitality from the fertile contradiction of its parts. Bu=
t
we have been trained not to see ourselves, not to see the full splendor of
the human condition in all its glory.' p.56.
"Sixty years ago the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt had some advice for
anyone wanting to pursue a career in politics: "Proclaim: 'I have robbed,
and I aspire to robbing on a larger scale.' Promise to sell off every last
inch of Argentine soil , to sell the Congress building and turn the Palace
of Justice into a tenement. In your speeches, say: 'Stealing isn't easy,
gentlemen. You have to be a cynic, and that's what I am. You have to be a
traitor, and that's what I am.' ". p.142.
"Politicians who swear, hand over heart, that national sovereignty
has no
price tend to
be the ones who give it away for nothing. And those who proclaim they'll
round up all the crooks tend to be the ones who steal even the shoes off
horses galloping by.' p.144.
"In 1937, to open the road to progress in the Dominican Republic,
Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo ordered twenty-five thousand black
Haitians cut to pieces with machetes. The generalissimo, a mulatto whose
grandmother was Haitian, used to whiten his face with rice powder and he
wanted to whiten the country too." p.58.

These lines must resonate with us for two reasons. They show India's presen=
t
plight to be a link in a continual chain of human depravity and imperialist
(TNC-IMF-WB-WTO) onslaught. This would justify my reference to Burdekin's
book. Her book in 1937, when the Western powers were aiding Hitler in every
way, was a dystopian fantasy, though prescient and predictive, of the
holocaust ahead. And, at the time, Germany's democrats and small parties ha=
d
lined up behind Hitler. What this concatenation culminated in for Europe an=
d
Germany is a history of horrors that sends chills down the spine even at
this distance of time. But, it was not unique to Germany, nor its
ingredients and accomplices were history's fossils. India has rushed to
embrace this nihilistic abomination discarding its own history and trashing
its own traditions of rainbow diversity.

The monster of division and exclusion in India is daily growing into a scar=
y
magnitude. In the words of von Hess in Swastika Night: "Exclusion is an
excellent way of making men feel inferior." Our own Swastika Night of the
Iron Heel is no more a mere threat. It is upon us , and the following
will attest it.

Bal Thackeray is raving much more dementedly than ever before. He would hav=
e
Muslims disfranchised because they don't vote for state being the church. I=
n
this construct, not only must the Muslims disappear, but also the state, if
it doesn't assume the duties of the church as well. Even his delirium is
well designed. He asserts this is the way to make all political parties
pro-Hindutwa. But if all parties would embrace Hindutwa, why would they be
separate? So, in essence, he is pitching for One Party, and that of the
saffros. He won't have Muslims except as vote banks, disposable, if they
don't vote for communal fascism and majoritarian tyranny. Bal's formula is
neat and nippy. Despite his numerous crimes and this latest insult hurled
at the Constitution and national ethos of eons, that this danger to nationa=
l
security and social harmony is still not in an asylum or a jail is a tragic
proof of the lawlessness pervading and plaguing the land.

But he is not singular in his mental degradation and moral destitution. Thi=
s
is an opera being played out in concert. To test the waters, to stretch the
limits. Shrikant Joshi, the secretary of Deoras, the ex- director of RSS,
said Dec. 16 that the demolition of the Babri mosque was "the dastardly
deed" of the RAW. If it was so, what did the saffron gang do to rectify
matters? Had it delegated the work to RAW? Shortly we should expect ISS to
be credited with the destruction of the mosque. MM Joshi and Bharati being
in "excited joy" at the demolition, were in a catharsis. This from another
luminary of the RSS. This construction upon catharsis, however original, ca=
n
do credit only to saffros who have everything from memory to morals, from
history to heritage, all skewed.

Dec.16 Bangaru Laxman declaimed that "the Ram temple at the =EBdisputed sit=
e'
can't be removed even if the court delivers a decision in favor of the
mosque." Shouldn't he be in jail for contempt of court by preempting it an=
d
threatening it? He went further: "Parliament has endorsed the view that the
temple can't be removed." When did the parliament do so? He went on: "It
would be difficult to remove the temple despite adverse court verdict."
Vajpayee said "an alternative site has to found for the mosque", says
Laxman, and that settles the issue. Why can't an alternative site be found
for the temple, or why was the demolition of the mosque easy, and removal o=
f
the temple would be difficult, he did not elucidate. But he let the cat out
of the bag: " the disputed structure is not there...it is likely to make
things easier this time." So, every demolition would be legit for making
things easier later. This is a blueprint and a confession.

That Dec. 6, 1992, the day of nation's ignominy and shame, was celebrated b=
y
cowardly perpetrators of the crime as Shaurya Diwas (Bravery Day), is
tantamount to declaring war on the minorities, and farthest from any concer=
n
for the nation's unity and well-being. It is affirmation of faith in
atavistic savagery and in abiding commitment to wrecking of the nation bric=
k
by bloody brick Saffronites (Advani?) had said of the temple being built in
Ayodhya by brick and blood. True to their word they collected bricks from
all over, as they spilled the blood of 3,000 Muslims in the wake of the
demolition. Only in their books it was brave. Elsewhere it would be called
criminal, cowardly, and anti-national. Not one of the killers was jailed or
hanged. And the saffros promise more of the same by their obduracy in the
matter. Not many would have any use for this Hindutwa, a throwback to
barbarism and dark ages.

The political parties can't be relied upon in countering this national
threat. Since they are as greedy for power, they have invented rationales
for their cynicism in joining the bandits' gang. And, all in the name of
democracy, and as watchdogs of secularism. Their masks are now ripped off.
VajPayee's was torn asunder long ago. The facts is, he never had any. It wa=
s
all a servile media's creation - investing him with values and virtues he
hadn't even heard of, values and virtues he couldn't believe in as a loyal
volunteer of RSS. He could never be a votary of an ideology which was
anathema to the RSS: secular humanism, political democracy, cultural
pluralism, and social egalitarianism. The commercial media thrust these on
him, in its own interests, for its own benefit. And, it reaped the reward.
Projecting this image of VajPayee ensured "stability", that is, status quo.

This stagnating stasis in which age-old iniquities and yawning disparities
are getting bloodily perpetuated warrants demolition and burial. The soone=
r
the better. Those who set temples to be the priority of the nation, are
seeking to prolong feudal tyranny, and maintain the terror that this nation
has been subjected to after 1947 by the stranglehold of the
politico-bureaucrat-tycoon combine. It will "remove" and "disfranchise" any
group of Indian citizenry it finds inconvenient and redundant. It is not in
the realm of conjecture any more. Those who don't behave (surrender their
vote banks to Hindutwa) - Dalits, Tribals, Christians, Women - will forfei=
t
their citizenship like Muslims.
Thackeray decrees there will be only religious parties in Bharat, only
Hindutwa, and no political ideology disturbing his reactionary and fascist
dispensation. He wants to be appeased by all political parties. His gall is
logical. The 23 parties in Atal cabinet have been appeasing communal
fascism, and BJP has been appeasing him. It has been too long an
appeasement. Let's end it. Or, our default will write finis to India both
as a nation and as the first habitat of all mankind.
Dec. 18, 2000

(not to be reproduced without author's permission)

_______

#5.

The new issue of 'the-south-asian' is on the net and carries interviews of
the South Asian Ambassadors in Washington DC, and also articles on
Technology Trends in Optical Networks, B2B software applications and their
implications on South Asia, Sunil Dutt's account of his early years in
Bombay as a film journalist and he also talks of his visit to his native
village Khurd [now in Pakistan] after 50 years. The URL for the site
is www.the-south-asian.com
______________________________________________
SACW is an informal, independent & non-profit
citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since 1996.
Dispatch archive from 1998 can be accessed
at http://www.egroups.com/messages/act/
////////////////////////////////////
Disclaimer: opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily correspond to views of SACW compilers.