[sacw] SACW | 3 August 02

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | 3 August 2002

>From South Asia Citizens Web:
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

__________________________

#1. Sri Lanka : The Plight of Child Conscripts, Social Degradation
& Anti-Muslim Frenzy (University Teachers for Human Rights (Jafna ))
#2. Ajoka's Bangladesh visit. (Shahid Nadeem)
#3. India: Price Paid for a Sponsored Genocide: Economic and social 
dimensions of anti Muslim violence in Gujarat 2002 (John Dayal )
#4. India: The Right To Bigotry (Aakar Patel)
#5. India: Kites for azadi divas - kasai ki chali
#6. India: Modi's experiments with hate (Anosh Malekar)
__________________________

#1.

University Teachers for Human Rights (Jafna ) Sri Lanka
Special Report No: 14 
Date of release: 20th July 2002.

The Plight of Child Conscripts, Social Degradation
&
Anti-Muslim Frenzy
http://www.uthr.org/SpecialReports/spreport13.htm

_____

#2.

Daily Times (Lahore)
August 1, 2002

Culture Vulture: Ajoka's Bangladesh visit.

By Shahid Nadeem

It is remarkable how a major event in our history can be so easily wiped off
our consciousness. Our younger generations have very little idea of how and
why the majority of Pakistanis said good-bye to Pakistan

General Musharraf acted courageously in expressing regrets at the "excesses"
committed by Pakistan during the crackdown in then East Pakistan. It has
been over 30 years now since the Dhaka debacle. These years have seen
unprecedented collective amnesia. We have been pretending that 1971 never
happened; East Pakistan was never a part of Pakistan; and the East
Pakistanis were not the ones who spearheaded the movement for a Muslim
homeland. We have been telling our children that the un-Islamic,
Hindu-loving East Pakistanis fell for the Indian plot. It is remarkable how
a major event in our history can be so easily wiped off our consciousness.
Our younger generations have very little idea of how and why the majority of
Pakistanis said good-bye to Pakistan.

I visited Bangladesh in 1993 with Ajoka to participate in a South Asian
theatre Festival. It was the first time that a Pakistani theatre group was
performing in Bangladesh. There was tension in the air. Certain theatre
groups had boycotted our performance; others were quite dismissive about a
Pakistani theatre group having anything worthwhile to offer. We were
apprehensive too. As a student activist in the late '60s I had been inspired
by the radical students of East Pakistan during the movement against General
Ayub and was among the tiny minority in the Punjab who had opposed army
action in East Pakistan. It was a moving experience for me.

We went to the Martyrs Memorial on the first day and paid our respects. At
the opening of the performance, I spoke to the audience and expressed
"regrets" (read "apology") for the "excesses" (read "atrocities") committed
by the un-elected Pakistani rulers in the name of the people of Pakistan.
That set the tone for the performance. It was a double bill: a play about
the exploitation of women in the name of custom and religion, followed by a
play on religious intolerance. The response was overwhelming. The newspapers
prominently reported the breakthrough performance.

The next day, some prominent theatre persons came to meet us and said they
had boycotted our performance, but now regretted having missed something
worth watching. They wanted us to perform again. Since it was not possible
to find space for a repeat performance in the packed festival schedule, they
got one of their own performances dropped, to enable us to perform again.

During the festival, we were showered with affection by literally everyone.
Our hosts were not Jamaat-i-Islami activists or "the stranded Pakistanis".
Many of them were staunch nationalists and some had in fact, been the
leading members of the cultural front of the liberation struggle. I later
discovered that Sara Zakir, the theatre director/TV actress, who had invited
us for dinner at her home, had her brother killed during the 1971 crackdown.
The theatre director, who said he had changed his perception of the
Pakistani
theatre after seeing our performance, had run the rebel radio station during
the struggle. A leader of the Bangladeshi Theatre Groups Association said he
admired our courage. "We have similar problems here, of fundamentalism and
intolerance, but we do not address these sensitive issues as boldly as you
have done", he said.

We were invited by leading theatre groups for meetings and dinners. Old men
and women practiced their Urdu with us and recited Urdu poetry for us. The
veterans of the liberation struggle narrated personal stories of "excesses"
during 1971 and before. We were taken to the Museum of the Liberation
Struggle. We did not feel that we were being accused or held responsible for
what was done by our government and our leaders. They readily accepted that
the people of Pakistan were also oppressed by the same regimes and were not
fully aware of the scale of atrocities and injustices. But they wanted to
share their stories with us.

We developed lasting friendships during our memorable stay in Dhaka. We have
since collaborated with Bangladeshi theatre groups on theatre projects. In
2000, we toured South Asia with a joint production, a play about trafficking
of Bangladeshi women to Pakistan, a play written by me and directed by Sara
Zakir, the current president of Bangladeshi theatre groups association. Sara
and her actor-director husband, Aly Zakir, took us to the Dhaka University
where we saw the memorial of the intellectuals who were killed by Al-Badar
and Al-Shams just before the surrender. There was a long list of poets,
scientists, teachers and philosophers, the cream of Bangladeshi
intelligentsia, killed in cold blood and dumped in the campus ground. That
was the moment when I felt ashamed of being a Pakistani, I wished that the
campus ground would split and I could be buried.

I was quite pleased with our performance on and off stage. There were
tearful good-byes. The kind of goodwill we had created for Pakistan among an
influential section of opinion-makers was very satisfying. "You have done
more for the image of your country than your diplomats here," remarked one
of our hosts who had come to see us off. I couldn't agree more. No wonder
they call artists ambassadors of goodwill, I thought. For a moment I
imagined myself being decorated by the Government of Pakistan for doing such
a remarkable PR job in such a difficult situation.

Flying back, I was perchance seated next to a senior official from the
Pakistan High Commission. For the next two hours or more, I had to listen to
this gentleman's views about the Bengalis, the conspiratorial nature of this
inferior race and their untrustworthy nature. He went on without even
bothering to find out who I was and what were my views on the subject. This
man was a diplomat but given a chance, he could have easily committed the
excesses General Musharraf is now regretting.

On my return, I was called by MD-PTV, Mr. Farhad Zaidi. The agencies had
already reported my "unpatriotic" activities in Dhaka, and suggested that
action be taken against me. Mr. Zaidi, an enlightened and seasoned person,
managed to defuse the crisis. Even so, intelligence officials kept pestering
me for weeks, demanding copies of the scripts of plays we had performed in
Dhaka and generally asking stupid questions. The irony was that both plays
had been performed in Pakistan at various venues, including the PNCA and the
Lahore Arts Council. The script of one play was in fact published in a PNCA
collection. The agencies also proposed that Ajoka be banned from foreign
travel altogether. The PPP was in power at that time and Fakhar Zaman was
heading the Culture Ministry. It was at his personal intervention that
further action was prevented.

My regrets did not go down well with the agencies. But I am glad that
General Musharraf has felt the same way. I hope he does not have to sit next
to a Pakistan High Commission official on his way back. I also wonder if we
will learn any lessons? Those who do not tire of blaming the politicians for
all the ills, will they accept that the politicians in uniform are as
fallible, if not more.

(Shahid Nadeem is a playwright and TV producer of repute. This essay was
published in a recent issue of Daily Times of Pakistan.)

_____

#3.

Price Paid for a Sponsored Genocide:
Economic and social dimensions of anti Muslim violence in Gujarat 
2002 - and their implications for Western governments and 
International Financial organisations
By Dr John Dayal

[Paper presented on 18th July 2002 at the Seminar in Washington DC,
organised by the POLICY INSTITUTE FOR RELIGION AND STATE,
110 Maryland Ave., NE. Suite 510, Washington, DC 2002]

"I Only Gassed Them," Erich Gnewuch testifies about gassings in
Nazi-occupied USSR, 1942-3 [Quoted in "Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary
History of the Use of Poison Gas", edited by E. Kogon, H. Langbein, and A.
Rueckerl, Yale University Press, 1993, p. 57-9]. "I myself never shot a
single Jew; I only gassed them..."

------

"First they came for the Communists but I was not a Communist so I did not
speak out;
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists but I was not one
of them, so I did not speak out;
Then they came for the Jews but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."

-Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984

-------

Relativity has a new meaning in India. Do 2,000 dead in violence in the
western State of Gujarat matter in a national population of more than 1.1
billion people, and more so when compared to the incidence of fatalities in
ethnic strife or racist pogroms in the several continents. Does the rape of
five nuns, or the demolition of a few hundred mosques really make a
difference, much less the demolition of about fifty churches in two phases
in the same State of Gujarat? Does it matter that more than 120,000 human
beings, a half of them children, live cramped in four dozen refugee camps in
the modern city of Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat and once the textile
capital of the country, seeking a balance between the ever present threat of
an epidemic and the other threat of a bigoted police and an armed mob
waiting at the turn of the road.

The official United States response to the tragedy in the Indian State of
Gujarat has been disappointingly muted, and Indians are wondering why it is
so. Certain historians - some from the US, others from Israel, chide those
who lightly use the word Holocaust for ethnic massacres elsewhere in the
world. There have been, as they say, "horrible cases of genocide directed
against innocent people: 10 to 20 million black Africans died during the 200
years of the international slave trade, nearly 12 million Native American
Indians in North America were decimated between 1600 and 1850, and the more
recent events in Bosnia and Rwanda. However, there has been only one
holocaust. The motivations for it were entirely racial. There was little, if
any, economic net gain; The victims presented no threat to the German
nation, nor to the Nazi regime. The rational nature of its methodology --
its efficiency, calculability, predictability and control - are unparalleled
in human history. Its ferocious intensity. The slaughter of the Jews did not
begin until late 1938 and ended in 1945."

No one has called the continuing violence against Muslims in India since
1947 a holocaust. The word Genocide has been more frequently used, mostly by
the Muslims themselves, and by those in Civil society, including those
espousing a Left of the Centre ideology, and others moved entirely by
Gandhian and humanitarian emotions.

In sheer numbers, the Partition of India left more than a million men, women
and children dead, killed in acts of individual and mass murders of singular
barbarity during the world's biggest voluntary or forced exchange of
populations - between the newly created Dominions of India and Pakistan
which were granted Independence by the ruling colonial British government at
midnight of 14th and 15th August 1947. Ironically British officers were
still commanding the armies, and controlling the police forces of the two
countries as Muslim and Hindus killed whoever they could encircle in a
minority enclave, or find trapped in the overcrowded trains and buses that
crawled towards the border from the two sides. No one has the exact data, no
one really wants to come to grips with the enormity of the crime, but there
is general agreement that the violence was from both sides equal intensity
and the numbers of dead of the two communities also about equal - roughly
500,00 each. India and Pakistan have never come to terms with the events of
the Partition, and the abiding enmity between them arising out of a messy
division of territory, assets and cultural ethos.

The military confrontation alone consumes almost a quarter of their national
budgets in direct and indirect spending on the military, and then some more
in paramilitary forces and armed police who perform internal security duties
of which keeping the peace between the two communities is an important and
significant part. In Pakistan, it has indirectly led to a continuing
suppression of democracy in the imposition of a military dictatorship but
rarely interrupted by civilian rule. In India, it has led to the advent of
the nuclear bomb - soon copied by Pakistan - and the emergence of a
militarist doctrine of nationalism that has sponsored neo fascist political
entities. And above all, it has fed a not so latent divide between the
religious communities in India where the hostility at the border, and the
violent racial memories, keep alive a simmering confrontation that needs but
an excuse to burst out in the open. And when it does, there is an immediate
harking back to the torching of trainings, the burning alive of men , women
and children, the evacuation of entire populations. Perhaps an honest Truth
and Reconciliation Commission set up in the two countries at some time in
the past half a century may have exorcised the demons of the past, and
weakened the force of mnemonic hatred which borders on racism, and flirts
with paranoia.

Muslims are a full 12% of the Indian population, Christians constitute about
2.4 %, and Sikhs just under 2 %. And India has had to face an embarrassing
question from its own civil society: How secular is India? The data is
depressing:

- Number of Communal (Hindu - Muslim) riots that have occurred in India
since 1950: 13,000 (Thirteen Thousand)

- Percentage of Muslim victims in every communal riot: 87%

- Percentage of Muslims among those arrested in communal riots: 90%

- Percentage of Indian police officials who say they have noticed communal
(anti-Muslim) bias in behaviour of Indian policemen during a communal riot :
48%

(Data: Courtesy Outlook, August 14, 2001 Volume XLI, Number 32 Compiled by
Anoop Babani from data of Institute of Objective Studies, New Delhi and
Former Inspector General of Police Vibhuti Narain Rai, Indian Police
Service.)

There is need for a detailed domestic discussion on the Police and the
political and administrative structures of the State that lead to the sort
of violence that was seen in Gujarat in 2002, the second time in thirty two
years after the massacres of 1969. There is perhaps greater need for an
international spotlight on India's sectarian and inter religious record, as
much as its human rights record, howsoever diplomatically inconvenient it
may seem now in the light of the West's own geo-political diplomatic,
security and strategic interests and current popular concerns, including the
international war on terrorism and the spotlight on Islamic fundamentalism.
I think it is in the interests of the West, and both its political and
economic community, to take a clear hard and focused look at the Indian
situation in the post Gujarat era. It will be injurious to international
interests if undivided attention given to the containing of Islamic
fundamentalism somehow and somewhere ignores Hindutva fundamentalism, seen
at its blood-tinged worst in Gujarat.

What are its implications for the International community, for the economic
departments of Western governments, and not just their ministries of
External affairs and Defence concerned at the Nuclearisation of the Indian
sub-continent and the ever-present danger of yet another India-Pakistan War.
How do they respond to revelations that many of the political groups,
including the ultra right wing Hindu nationalist entity called the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh and its daughter organisations which are indicted in much
of the anti Muslim violence across the country, are being funded by persons
of Indian origin living in the United States and in Europe, through both
legal as well as the gray channels for transfer of funds, using lacunae in
the law. What meaning does economic stagnation born of ethnic and religious
strife in India have for welfare agencies of the United Nations, for the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the Brettonwoods
institutions involved in credit and finance. And above all, what signals
does it send out to the vast investing public in the United States and
Europe, which hopefully will assess India as a worthwhile potential
investment area. It is axiomatic that nations with ethnic, religious or
similar strife lag behind in development, even if like Ireland they are in
the middle of the prosperous West.

I think the West has a vested interest, a vested economic and political
interest, to ensure that there is no sectarian bloodshed in India, that the
Muslim community is not targetted continuously and viciously, and
particularly in its economic entrails. This is a call for it to act.

In an economy which India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has
committed himself to accelerate to an annual growth rate of more than eight
percent from its present hesitant 5 to 6 percent, the occurrence of a
communal riot, or an episode as ghastly as that witnessed in Gujarat from
February 28th 2002 onwards for more than four months, comes as more than a
mere hiccup. It is a major break in the economic continuum with far reaching
repercussions, which include not just a flight of capital in the short turn,
but a flight of labour, a polarization of society, an astronomical cost of
rebuilding of infrastructure. Most of all it involves rehabilitation and
re-integration of an entire community that has been economically emasculated
in a systematic State sponsored pogrom. Not to do so, or to cavil at the
cost of such rehabilitation and re-incorporation of the Muslim community
into Gujarat's economic fabric will open up a new Pandora's box of future
strife and bloodshed, accessing other sensitive States throughout the
federal space of India. [...]

{Full text of the above paper by John Dayal (43k) is available to all 
on request. Should you require a copy drop a note to 
<aiindex@m...> }

_____

#4.

chowk.com
31 July 2002

The Right To Bigotry
by Aakar Patel

Article 19 clause 1 sub-clause (a) of the Constitution of India (a 
fine document which can never be read enough) tells us that all 
citizens have the right to Freedom of Expression, the cornerstone of 
democracy.
If, having read that, you choose not to move on but look at the 
footnotes, the following paragraph might interest you:

"Nothing in sub-clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation 
of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so 
far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of 
the right conferred by the said sub-clause in the interests of the 
sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, 
friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or 
morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or 
incitement to an offence."

Right then, you have the right to say and publish and film and 
broadcast what you want as long as government and courts and police 
and diplomats and moralists approve of it (incidentally, the bit 
about "sovereignty and integrity" was added in 1963, after Nehru's 
disastrous war against China).

The Editors Guild of India appointed a three-man fact finding mission 
to go to Gujarat and probe allegations that there had been bias in 
the media.
Its mandate very broadly was, then, to find out whether this right to 
freedom of expression had been abused by its champions.

The team comprised of Dileep Padgaonkar, executive managing editor of 
the Times of India and B G Verghese, former editor of the Hindustan 
Times and adviser to Indira Gandhi, apart from myself.

I went to Gujarat as a strong believer in absolute freedom of 
expression including -- these things are discussed at the Guild often 
-- the freedom to name communities involved in rioting as 
perpetrators or victims.

Journalists are responsible, right? People have a conscience -- when 
they're told what thugs are doing in their name, they will protest, 
governments will act.

Armed with this belief and my notepad, I sat at the Guild team's 
meeting with Mr Falgun Patel, owner-editor of Sandesh, the state's 
second-largest selling paper (ABC circulation 705,000).

"A vicious cycle began," Mr Patel said, after the Times of India 
reported an incident naming the victims, making it clear which 
community was involved. Following which, he explained, previously 
restrained newspapers (amongst which he presumably included his own) 
abandoned their no-naming policy.

"Nobody showed any norms or ethics after this," Mr Patel said.

"The English papers sided with the minorities" (a word I particularly 
dislike: the only majority in a republic is a democratic one) while 
"Gujarati papers backed Hinduism."

The use of this word I found quite strange, because it assumed that 
English papers were anti-Hinduism, and that to side against fanatics 
was the same as being against their faith.
He said that the paper editorialised its news pages and had a policy 
of not carrying clarifications.
Hindus never start anything on their own, Mr Patel said, it was 
always the Muslims who caused trouble. After this he took off.

Verghese, Padgaonkar and I asked questions and were taking down notes 
as he spoke.
"Hinduism ke naam per hum kuch bhi karenge," after "the way these 
Muslims have behaved." Even Hindu women felt that this time, "theek 
hai, saalon ko maro."
"The hell with everything -- principles of newspapers and all," he 
said, when asked what of restraint.

What about the innocents who would die because of such aggression?, 
we asked. His reply was so atrocious that I looked up from my notes 
to see if he was aware that we were writing his statements. He was.
"When you target innocents, the message goes to the others to behave."
Mr Patel's paper reflected his bigotry.

One day's lead story screamed that women at Godhra were raped and 
their breasts had been cut off. This was not true, chief minister 
Narendra Modi told us and a note had been issued in clarification.
Carrying this, of course, was against Sandesh's policy.

In its Bhavnagar edition, Sandesh said in a headline "Hindus were 
burnt alive in Godhra and Bhavnagar's cowardly leaders did not even 
throw a stone".
Sandesh was not the only paper to hold and publish such views. Far 
from it. The number one paper, Gujarat Samachar (ABC 810,000), ran 
front page articles on the phenomenon of the Hulladio Hanuman 
(riotous Hanuman), whose idols had been installed on razed mosques 
and dargahs.

A paper in Anand, Madhyantar, ran an eight-column front page 
commentary headlined: "Muslims will have to prove they are full 
Indians".
What was the effect of this poison on the state?

Narendra Modi, who told us that they felt the papers had gone 
overboard, sent a letter to Falgun Patel thanking him on the balanced 
and responsible coverage in Sandesh. He sent this letter to most 
papers in Gujarat, except one edited by a Muslim. The guilty papers 
were congratulated for the viciousness of their propaganda.

All the collectors and senior police officers we met told us that 
this recklessness to sweep up readers was severely damaging. Indeed, 
some of them said that violence that had been quelled with great 
difficulty, burst again into fire immediately after such articles.

Communities should NOT be named in articles, they said time and 
again, begging us to tell our fellow editors this.

If it is true, and I believe it to be true, that news reports inflame 
us to violence, the makers and menders of the constitution may well 
be justified in surreptitiously denying us the freedom of expression 
that is the right of all those who participate in democracy.

We are, simply put, unfit to have this freedom because we will misuse 
it. For murder.

Anybody have an opposing view

_____

#5.

Kites for azadi divas - kasai ki chali se desh ko sandesh

Dear Friends,
We have been working in Ahmedabad, in a basti called Kasai ki chali ( 
a locality of 100 odd families, including the neighbouring gasi ram 
ki chali which has 46 families unable to return home yet) ; for the 
past few months. This is an individual effort of the two of us only 
and we are supported and encouraged in our endeavour by friends in 
Delhi, Mumbai and other cities. We are working on the relief/ 
rehabilitation/ regeneration of employment opportunities front for 
the Gujarat riot victims with specific reference to Kasai ki chali 
and the neighbouring Gasiram ki chali.
Most of the families in Kasai ki chali work in the patang making 
un-organised sector. Therefore, as part of the regeneration of 
employment we are planning to get about 10,000 kites made by the 
people of this Chali in Ahmedabad.
We are spending on the raw cost of material and labour costs from a 
portion of our money collection.
Do you think you and your friends can persuade certain organisations 
or certain people in your city to buy these kites in bulk of 100 / 
500 / 1000 to fly on AZADI DIVAS with certain messages for communal 
harmony?
Please send us your orders by e mail. Each kite will cost Rs 5/- only.
The profit we make from the kites will be recycled into the 
rehabilitation work for the Chali.
In case you wish to send us an order, you can send us the dd/ cheque 
drawn in favour of
GUJARAT EDUCATION SOCIETY / PRASHANT to our postal address at;
Ajay Raina,
c/o Rais Sheikh,
B -4, Elite Flats,
Off Narayan Nagar Road,
near Jethabai Park Bus Stop,
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007,
In case you place an order, please send us the postal address to 
which we should send the kites.
You can contact us at the following tel; nos: (c/o Kanti bai) 5329018 
and (c/o waheeda ben) 5384701.
Best regards
Ajay Raina/ Leya Mathew

______

#6.

The Week
COVER STORY

Modi's experiments with hate
The Gujarat chief minister is all set to reap the benefits of the 
communal tension he himself helped create

By Anosh Malekar
http://www.the-week.com/22aug04/cover.htm

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