[sacw] SACW #2 | 10 Jan. 02

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire #2 | 10 January 2002

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#1. Borders closed (Beena Sarwar)
#2. Imagining history - The deafening clash of myth and fact (Mushirul Hasan)
#3. An agenda for cultural action - I & II (K. N. Panikkar)
#4. The Many Faces of An Indian (Bidyut Chakrabarty)
#5. Cross-border hatred: Blame history books (Arun S)
#6. India: Memorial lecture- to remember- to mourn - anil agarwal 
1947 - 2002 (New Delhi, 11 Jan)

________________________

#1.

The News on Sunday (Pakistan)
6 January 2002

Borders closed
By Beena Sarwar

The suspension serves the purpose of no one, except war mongers and 
religious zealots. The burning desire for contact between ordinary 
Indians and Pakistanis is expressed in their willingness to brave the 
hazards of making this contact; this was evident even during the 
Kargil crisis when the air, bus and rail services between the two 
generally ran packed.

It is unfortunate that road, rail and air links between India and 
Pakistan have been suspended. The decision will most hurt ordinary 
people who are in any case worst affected by tensions between our two 
countries, which divert attention and resources away from the real 
issues of poverty, hunger and illiteracy, and the rising tide of 
religious extremism that feeds on this tension.
The suspension particularly impacts the hundreds of thousands of 
divided families who were linked by the idealistically named Samjhota 
Express and the Dosti Bus. The heart-wrenching scenes at the train 
and bus depots on both sides recently are eloquent testimony to their 
pain. Now, even letters between those who cannot afford telephone and 
email will not be possible until the links are restored.

The suspension serves the purpose of no one, except war mongers and 
religious zealots. The burning desire for contact between ordinary 
Indians and Pakistanis is expressed in their willingness to brave the 
hazards of making this contact; this was evident even during the 
Kargil crisis when the air, bus and rail services between the two 
generally ran packed.

Besides the tensions and the risk of harassment by intelligence 
sleuths, difficulties include applying for visas in Islamabad or 
Delhi, where the only two consulates are located. Then there are the 
inconveniences of the journey itself, harassment by border guards, 
customs and immigration officials, and mandatory police reporting 
within twenty-four hours of arrival and departure.

Visas are not granted for the country, but for a maximum of three 
cities. Other restrictions include a prohibition on Indians and 
Pakistanis crossing the border by foot (other 'foreigners' are 
allowed), and on visas for armed forces personnel (serving and 
retired), or to those who are not visiting relatives.

And this was when we were in a state of 'no-war' -- there never has 
been any genuine peace, since each side has been engaged in a covert 
war for years, with varying levels of intensity.
But the 'no-war' situation was better than nothing. Restrictions were 
sometimes lifted, if at times grudgingly, to facilitate 
people-to-people contacts. 'Track two' diplomacy cannot replace the 
real thing, but both governments allowed it, because it provided them 
an escape route from their own implacable positions. The process thus 
fulfilled an important function. On another level, it contributed to 
the public discourse, thus creating a platform and a pressure for 
peace.

A significant part of such alternative meetings has been the 
discussion about the rise of religious extremism on either side of 
the border. The 'jehadis' and the 'sangh parivar' are more similar 
than they'd like to believe, and the people have more to gain from 
eliminating this mindset than suits either government.

Closing borders only strengthens extremist views. And it serves no 
purpose in terms of 'countering terrorism'. After all, 'terrorists' 
don't cross over with valid visas. The present crackdown on their 
activities in Pakistan is only pushing them underground -- and 
according to the Jaish's own statement, across the line of divide, 
into the Indian side of Kashmir.

Another important issue discussed in Track Two meetings has been 
Kashmir, and the need to acknowledge it not just as a territorial 
dispute but as a matter of the aspirations of the Kashmiri people. 
Indians had begun to realise that they cannot hold on to Kashmir by 
force, and Pakistanis had begun to realise that they cannot take 
Kashmir by force. Significantly, those involved in such dialogues 
include senior armed forces personnel -- retired, of course, since 
during active service army discipline forbids such dissent.

This process was underway right up until airspace was banned for 
Indian and Pakistani aircraft. A two day workshop on conflict 
resolution (Dec 22-23) organised by the Program on Peace Studies and 
Conflict Resolution (Department of International Relations, Karachi 
University) was conducted in collaboration with Brig. (rtd) A.R. 
Siddiqui's Regional Institute of Peace and Security Studies, Karachi. 
The Program itself is funded by the Colombo-based Regional Centre for 
Strategic Studies -- headed by a retired Indian general, Dipankar 
Banerjee. Participants came away inspired and hopeful of the chances 
for peace, even though the tension was building up.

But just a few days later, the situation prevented a high level 
three-member delegation of another people's initiative, the India 
Pakistan Soldiers Initiative for Peace, from keeping their 
appointment with Gen. Musharraf. They had visas, but the Indian 
authorities refused to allow them to cross the Atari-Wagah border on 
foot as they had planned, for safety reasons.

"By the time we changed our plans to fly, the only flight we could 
have taken to make our appointment with the President of Pakistan on 
time was leaving Delhi within the next three hours," writes Admiral 
(rtd) Ramu Ramdas. Unable to get seats, despite the personal efforts 
of Pakistan's Deputy High Commissioner, the delegation had to 
postpone their visit. "You can imagine how disappointed and helpless 
we felt. Both Lt. Gen. Dar and I had flown to Delhi from Mumbai and 
Pune respectively to keep this date but alas, the Ooper Walah willed 
otherwise!"

Besides the personal disappointments caused by this meeting, it could 
have played an important role in conveying the views of India's peace 
activists to the President of Pakistan, who possibly does not fully 
appreciate what this movement is up against. If we in Pakistan are up 
against the jehadis, our friends across the border face the hawks of 
the Sangh Parivar -- each feeds on and reflects the other.

Meanwhile, the suspension of links between the two countries has 
interrupted an exciting development -- cross-border visits by school 
and college students, privately initiated, with no official or NGO 
involvement or sanction. Students who made such visits, despite 
warnings from friends and relatives, returned to their respective 
countries amazed at the warmth and hospitality they received across 
the border -- stereotypes shattered. "They are people just like us," 
is a common response.

"We didn't find the Pakistan we were looking for," wrote a Ramjas 
College history student after visiting Pakistan. The Habib Public 
School students from Karachi who visited 15 educational institutes in 
India this past summer had similar experiences. A peace camp was 
planned for young Indians and Pakistanis in South India this coming 
summer. Whether this will be able take place is now doubtful.

Peace activists in India have been vocal against the prevailing war 
hysteria, as have those here in Pakistan. But these voices are barely 
reflected in the mainstream media. In any case, they alone cannot 
pull the two countries back from the brink. The governments have to 
be involved and willing.

New Delhi's knee-jerk response to the attack on its parliament, its 
plagiarism of Washington's rhetoric and attempts to take full 
political advantage of the prevailing climate against 'terrorism', 
should not stop Islamabad from taking the steps it urgently needs to 
take for Pakistan's own survival. In this, it will be supported by 
the majority of the people, who are increasingly aware of the cost to 
the country's own social fabric, of allowing militant religious 
groups to flourish and develop.

Islamabad's 'Afghan policy' lies ripped apart; that relating to 
Kashmir needs to be urgently reviewed. Steps in the right direction 
are being taken -- and so they should. We have paid a heavy price for 
our support, covert and overt, to religiously motivated ideologues, 
in the form of sectarian violence and killings in our own country. We 
need to curtail the jehadi groups not under Indian or even US 
pressure, but for our own sakes.

And our friends in India need to realise that for Pakistan to achieve 
this, we need support rather to be dragged into a confrontation that 
will only strengthen the extremists on both sides. Only if we can 
live in peace can the people of this region emerge from the problems 
that plague us, and play a positive role in an increasingly 
interconnected world.

_____

#2.

Indian Express (India)
Thursday, January 10, 2002

Imagining history

The deafening clash of myth and fact

by Mushirul Hasan

In the second half of the 19th century, textbook transmission formed 
but one facet of the wider significance of print culture. We know, 
for example, how contestations over history reveal the part played by 
school textbooks as ideological tools in the Raj's projection of 
itself through critical representations of pre-colonial past.

We also know how the British government carefully monitored, with the 
aid of an extensive bureaucratic network, what was to be included in, 
or left out from, the school or college curriculum. Thus, an 
elementary treatise on the art of writing the Persian characters was 
recommended by the Director of Public Instruction as ''original and 
scholarly, and will be of use in schools''. In another case, Munshi 
Zakaullah, headmaster of a school in Delhi, was rewarded ''for the 
industry displayed in the preparation of this excellent series of 
scientific works, and for his public spirit in publishing them''.

Indian historians during the colonial period were sensitive to the 
importance of writing textbooks in order to contest the colonial 
version of the past. Thus the Allahabad-based historian, Iswari 
Prasad, produced a History of Medireview India ''to correct the 
common errors of history and to make the presentation of the subject 
as attractive as possible''. He made clear, in 1925, that a historian 
was not a party politician or a political propagandist, and that his 
function was to state and interpret the facts without allowing his 
own prejudices to influence the discussion of his theme or warp his 
judgement.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Doubtless, India and Pakistan are separate geographical entities. But 
is it fair to deny to their school and college students their shared 
past and collective memories?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The moral of the story is this: our historians possessed the skills 
and expertise to write textbooks and, after Independence, this task 
should have been left to individual writers and not undertaken by the 
government. Officially sponsored works run the risk of being 
withdrawn, as illustrated by the experience in 1977 and now, with a 
change in regime. Besides, writing textbooks at the behest of a 
government can turn messy in a society where the reading of the past 
is contested with unfailing regularity. Even where contestations are 
not so sharp, the norm is to encourage wide learning and not to 
prescribe a set of books produced by an official body.

Alas, we have paid little attention to the curriculum and the method 
of teaching in our schools. Krishna Kumar's recent book - Prejudice 
and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and 
Pakistan - points to the poor quality of history teaching in schools 
and its indifference to the child's intellectual development and 
interest in the past. History teaching, according to him, does not 
translate itself into a concern for the children who are at the 
receiving end.

In addition, history teaching serves as a means of ideological 
indoctrination. So that history's role in arousing an interest in the 
past and respect for it gets totally sidelined. Both in India and 
Pakistan, history is pressed into service to promote the project of 
nation building. Consequently, the rival ideologies of nationalism 
are underlined not to heighten the critical faculties of our students 
but to create a sense of pride in their Indian or Pakistani 
citizenship. This being the case, the selective marshaling of 
intellectual resources reinforces not only stereotypes and 
prejudices, but also widens the existing rift between the people of 
India and Pakistan.

Doubtless, India and Pakistan are separate geographical entities. 
But, then, is it fair to deny to their school and college students 
their shared past and collective memories? The painful reality is 
that the project of history writing in Pakistan, more than in India, 
has been tailored to suit the ideologies of the ruling elites. As a 
result, our shared past is bruised and fragmented. Indian histories 
are being written, often untidily, by Indian historians; Pakistani 
historians are, at the same time, busy writing the history of 
Pakistan with little or no sense of the unities in their past. In 
this melee the historian of the subcontinent, without being rooted in 
his fatherland or motherland, turns into a comic figure. Asked to 
analyse an artificially contrived and divided past, his attempts to 
discern elements of unity, continuity and coherence invite rebuke and 
repudiation.

The state in Pakistan has invested a great deal to rationalise the 
two-nation theory. In India the eclecticism of the first generation 
of liberal and left-wing historians has given way to chauvinistic 
versions of the past. Instead of harnessing the creative energies of 
our students, their staple diet consists of an odd mixture of myths, 
mythologies, legends and modern-day fantasies. The arduous journey of 
a historian is, thus, wasted.

Authors of The History of the Freedom Movement in Pakistan and 
Struggle for Freedom (Vol. 11 of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Series) 
had a common project - to undermine what was, in essence, the 
composite perspective on, and the pluralist interpretation of, Indian 
history. This convergence is not accidental, for Hindu and Muslim 
nationalists formulate their theories on the strength of separate 
religious communities plotting their destiny in a sharply defined 
Muslim or a Hindu universe. Their worldview on various other matters, 
nowadays projected in deciphering the past, has been largely shaped 
by much the same assumptions. Hence, the secular spokesman becomes 
their common enemy, and is designated as the intellectual terrorist.

Today, our students are exposed to another intellectual threat - 
attempts to design region, ethnicity or community-based curricula. If 
this trend continues in the form of pandering to Sikh or Jat 
sentiments for electoral reasons, we may soon find ourselves reading 
just the Jat, Sikh and Maratha histories. What will happen to Indian 
history is anybody's guess.

History, stated R.C. Majumdar, co-author of a major textbook 
published in 1946, did not respect persons or communities; second, 
its aim is to find out the truth by following the canons commonly 
accepted as sound; finally, to express the findings irrespective of 
political considerations. If so, let us avoid playing politics with 
students, and let us also scrupulously refrain from invoking symbols 
of discord in order to legitimise our contemporary political 
concerns. Education has a vital role to play in helping India and 
Pakistan overcome the chronically unsettling effects of their 
interlocked frames of perception. Inculcating a respect for the past 
and the curiosity to make sense of it is a major educational 
challenge for societies where denial of the past and the urge to 
change it has enjoyed popular validity.

Hopefully, Kathmandu has shown the way. An India-Pakistan History 
Congress in Delhi or Lahore may well be the next step towards healing 
the wounds of the past. If not cricket, let the teaching of history 
be an instrument of peace in the subcontinent.

_____

#3.

The Hindu
Thursday, Jan 9, 2002

An agenda for cultural action - I
By K. N. Panikkar

Cultural action is an intervention in daily life, directed to the 
transformation of social consciousness... Its main agenda is to bring 
the individual, who is increasingly being alienated, into the social 
fold.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/2002010901301000.htm

The Hindu
Thursday, Jan 10, 2002

An agenda for cultural action - II
By K. N. Panikkar

What is required is the creation of a counter culture through 
constructive undertakings, which would alter the existing public 
discourse generated by globalisation and communalism.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/2002011001311000.htm

______

#4.

The Telegraph (India)
10 January 2002

THE MANY FACES OF AN INDIAN

BY BIDYUT CHAKRABARTY

Rewriting history textbooks for schools is part of a grand design. 
Based on the belief that the available National Council for 
Educational Research and Training books are distortions of the 
"Hindu" past, arguments are marshalled to defend the project. As 
schools play a significant role in the early socialization of future 
citizens, it is not difficult to understand why the school textbooks 
were meant to be revised in a particular way. What is central to the 
project is the creation of a specific type of individual endorsing 
values, ideas and beliefs fulfilling a specific political agenda. 
Thus the design, articulated in the revision of textbooks, is a 
powerful mode to objectify the individuals into certain identities 
and also define their environment.

It works on two levels. At one level, the schoolgoers constituting 
the target group are likely to be influenced by what is taught in 
schools. Stories narrated in classrooms generally remain significant 
reference points for most, even after their exposure to alternative 
perspectives and viewpoints. By creating an environment and 
simultaneously providing the foundational training in schools, those 
supporting the venture significantly influence, at a rather higher 
level, the social engineering and consequently the articulation of 
identities in a particular fashion. In this sense, the deletion of 
sections from the NCERT textbooks is an agenda with crucial 
historical consequences.

The "creation" of nation hinges on the dissemination of the 
"invented" national narrative among the populace. The role of schools 
in this process has been immensely significant - both when used by 
the state to forge the nation and by the nation's enthusiasts to 
spread the idea of nationhood, which, in turn, led to state building. 
Eric Hobsbawm described the importance of primary education in 
relation to nationhood by calling it "a secular equivalent of the 
church".

Embarking on the nation-building project, the state tends to spread 
the image and heritage of the "nation" to inculcate attachment to it 
and attach all "to country and flag". The creation of nationals in 
the United States of America, Hobsbawn has shown, was the outcome of 
a process in which school content and school rituals, such as worship 
of the American flag, played decisive roles.

What is being zealously pursued in India had a parallel in the Kosovo 
of the former Yugoslavia where the ruling authority sought to 
radically transform school education, and not merely the curriculum, 
to exclusively project and strengthen the Albanian identity at the 
cost of the Serbs. This has created a peculiar kind of tension in 
Kosovo where Albanians constituted a majority and the Serbs a 
significant minority. But in former communist Yugoslavia, the 
Albanian distinctive identity never became overwhelming probably 
because of hegemonic state power.

The primary aim of the NCERT project seems to be to articulate a 
specific Indian identity drawing upon a specific construction of the 
past. But Indian identity is hardly monolithic. Who is an Indian, is 
the fundamental question. The answer to this query is simple though 
its implications are likely to be far-reaching, especially in the 
context of the so-called pan-Indian "soul searching" agenda. For 
instance, I am an Indian, which does not clash with my being a 
Bengali and a Hindu. So is my friend Haroon-Or-Rashid from Kerala who 
speaks a different language and goes to mosque for prayer. So is 
Sabari Naomi Hembram of Ranchi who is a devout Christian and goes 
regularly to church for prayer.

Although our perceptions of what makes us Indian are different none 
of us would deny our Indianness. We will probably fight tooth and 
nail over the nature of democracy or secularism but will never deny 
our being an integral part of a rich and old civilization, which 
prospered by way of inter-cultural communication. Hence, it is 
difficult, if not impossible, to define our "identity" as Indians in 
strictly categorical terms.

In a changed socio-economic and political environment, national 
identity is a subject of agonized debate. The debate revolves around 
concerns in two directions: first, as Indians, we "lack", or have 
lost, the sense of identity or that it has become diluted, eroded, 
corrupted, or confused; as a corollary to the first, the obvious 
concern is, therefore, how to retain, preserve or strengthen the 
sense of identity. What is thus emphasized are the beliefs that 
national identity consists of being different from others and is 
invariably diluted by inter-cultural borrowing, that it is 
historically fixed, that it is the sole source of political 
legitimacy, that the state's primary task is to maintain it and that 
national identity defines the limits of permissible diversity.

This argument does not hold water since national identity is not a 
substance but a cluster of tendencies and values that is neither 
fixed nor alterable at will, and that it needs to be periodically 
redefined in the light of historically inherited characteristics, 
present needs and future aspirations. Identity is not something that 
we have, rather it is what we are; it is not a property, but a mode 
of being. So, to talk of preserving or losing one's identity is to 
use misleading metaphors.

The dominant political imagination of the Indian national movement 
was primarily in favour of a constructed modern Indian nation, in 
which both the principle and its symbolic markers were modern. But 
historically speaking, Indian nationalism consisted of a number of 
competing, jostling constructs of political imagination: one of these 
was secular-modern, but it was surrounded by others which had much 
more ambiguous attitudes towards democracy, secularism, social 
justice and the entire programme of modernity.

The trajectory of European nationalism could not be replicated under 
Indian conditions. If the nation-state had to be culturally 
homogeneous by definition, this did not fit the cultural reality of 
the Indian subcontinent. The Indian state after 1947 created 
institutions with several parallel and mutually reinforcing 
principles of pluralism: secularism provided for a pluralism of 
religious practices; federalism encompassed the pluralism of regional 
cultures and democracy allowed the expression of plural political 
ideals.

The constitutional form of this nationalism is civic, based on a 
secular-republican citizenship rather than belongingness to any 
mystical, cultural or ethnic essence. Being a Bengali or Tamil or 
Punjabi or Hindu or Muslim or agnostic is not therefore contradictory 
to being an Indian. Translating the humanistic complex imagination of 
a political community into legal rules was a difficult task 
especially when the nation was asked to articulate its plural 
character.

The Constitution therefore tried to mediate between different 
partially conflicting pictures of justice. Underlying this lies a 
strong justification for not having argued for a uniform civil code 
in India. The analogy of Britain is probably most apt here. Though 
nurtured in the tradition of enlightenment, Britain is not a nation 
state strictly in terms of the established criteria of nationhood. 
For instance, Scotland has its legal and educational system in which 
the British parliament does not interfere. Wales and Northern Ireland 
too enjoy many privileges and three island dependencies - the Isle of 
Man, Jersy and Guernsey.

Why didn't the Indian political leaders approve of nationalism as 
constructed in Europe? Most Indian leaders instinctively knew that 
the language of nationalism not only did not make sense in India but 
also was bound to have disastrous consequences. They were acutely 
aware of the fact that the Hindus' flirtation with nationalism during 
the first two decades of this century frightened away not only the 
Muslims and other minorities but also some of their own lower castes. 
Similarly, the national anthem of independent India excludes several 
regions, but no one is the least exercised about it.

Indian political culture is based on the consensual style of the 
Gandhian nationalist movement, which tried to base the concept of 
Indian unity on a non-federal or agglomerative approach to cultures. 
The Gandhian concept of nation incorporates diversities of various 
kinds, which are integrally associated with India over ages. Very 
briefly and crudely, it consists in developing a definitionally 
plural style of living, which avoids the extremes of the melting pot 
model.

______

#5.

The Economic Times (India)
Cross-border hatred: Blame history books
ARUN S, NEW DELHI
PTI [ WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 09, 2002 1:11:20 AM ]
SELECTIVE silence and narration about events in history text books 
for school children in India and Pakistan have "produced a generation 
which has learnt to hate and suspect each other".
Eminent historians, who have closely studied the history texts in 
both countries, say a distinct bias creeps in while describing even 
key episodes of the Freedom Struggle and earlier events which form 
the countries' common past.
According to Prof Krishna Kumar of Delhi University, who has 
extensively researched on the "cross-border history" of the two 
countries, both countries selectively narrate incidents, or refrain 
from doing so, for ideological or cultural reasons.
"The twisting of jointly-made history has already affected the 
post-independence generation," says Prof Mushir-ul-Hasan of Jamia 
Milia Islamia University, here ruing that "we have produced a 
generation which has learnt to hate and suspect one another".
As a result of this "politics of silence" or "politics of mention," 
Kumar says he found the events between 1937 and 1947 as described in 
the two countries "entirely contradicting each other".
"There is absolutely nothing that can be said to be similar though 
actually there should not have been much of a difference in 
interpretation," Kumar observes. "Our heroes and villians are 
different from theirs. The events they consider as important and 
landmark don't even find a mention here and vice versa."
While Indian books point out that partition was a result of the 
'Muslim-British conspiracy', "there (in Pakistan), they teach the 
students that Britishers with the help of Hindu leaders tried to 
delay the birth of Pakistan," says Prof Kumar, who in his book 
Prejudice and Pride has made a comparison of the history text books 
of the two nations.
Also, the Pakistani books discuss in detail the 1937 elections to the 
UP Council, in which the Muslim League fared badly, as a landmark 
event in which the seeds of Partition were sown, in contrast the 
Indian school books "just gloss over the subject," says Kumar.
"For the Indians the 1942 Quit India Movement, in which not many 
Muslims participated, was the most important event after 1930," says 
the academic expressing anguish that Partition itself, which is 
regarded as the greatest event of century that resulted in the 
migration of more than a million people, has not been given the kind 
of treatment it desrves in either of the two countries.
"More than one million were killed, many women were raped, many were 
left homeless, lots of children were orphaned, families broken and 
all these just get five to six lines in the texts of both countries," 
says Kumar, who describes himself as a "refugee child".
Criticising the textbooks for being centered only on the "so-called 
great personalities" and not on ordinary people who sacrificed their 
lives for freedom, Kumar says "without their supreme sacrifice 
winning independence would have been even more difficult."
Echoing his sentiments, Prof Hasan says, "We invent heroes and 
celebrate them without analysing their role objectively to assess 
their contribution. All this is symptomatic of the political divide 
between the two countries." Thus, the "fathers" of both countries are 
portrayed differently in the respective country: "The Pakistani text 
books depict Gandhi as a Hindu leader, whereas Indian books elevate 
him to a mythic status. Simiarly, while the Pakistani books project 
Jinnah as a semi-divine visionary, the Indian ones refer to him with 
resentment," notes Kumar.
When the Motilal Nehru Report of 1927 - the first Indian attempt to 
draft a constitutional framework - which Jinnah disagreed with 
greatly, gets an elaborate analysis in Pakistani books, Indian books 
hardly mention it, observes Kumar.
These distortions were implanted due to the difference in the 
'nation-building agenda'of both countries, says Kumar. "While 
Pakistan has erased the 'Hindu part' of the common history, attempts 
are being made here to delete the 'Muslim part'," says Prof Hasan 
warning that "unless the political divide between the two countries 
is bridged it would be difficult to write objective history for 
textbooks."

_____

#6.

Memorial lecture

to remember
to mourn

our friend, boss, guru

anil agarwal 1947 - 2002

to gather strength
to keep the fight going

Date: january 11, 2002
Time: 4.30 pm
Venue: jacaranda hall,
india habitat centre,
lodhi road, new delhi 3

the CSE family

Anil Agarwal, visionary founder and leader of the Centre for Science 
and Environment (CSE), passed away on January 2, 2002, after a 
seven-year battle against cancer. The world has not only lost a rare 
thinker and advocate dedicated to improving the environment, but also 
a staunch supporter of the rights of the poor, and of social justice.

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