[sacw] SACW | 4 April 03

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  |  4 April,  2003

#1. Progressive South Asian Voices Against War On Iraq
#2. Historical pedagogy of the Sangh Parivar (Tanika Sarkar)
#3. Nadimarg and Kashmiriyat (Akhila Raman)
#4. Communal Harmony In India A Brainstorming Session in the US
#5.  India: Now that Togadia has confessed, what is the government 
waiting for? (Edit, Indian Express)

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

#1.

PROGRESSIVE SOUTH ASIAN VOICES AGAINST WAR ON IRAQ:
Selected articles & reports
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/iraq/
[Updated on 4 April 2003]

compiled by
The South Asia Citizens Web
* The full text digest of the below articles are (a single plain text 
file) available to all interested ; Should your require a copy write 
to <aiindex@mnet.fr>. The document will be sent as an attachment in 
Word (316k size)

[1.] Global Crisis Over Iraq : Resistance is never futile (Arundhati 
Roy | January 2003)
[2.] 'American Designs on Iraq : Its Consequences' on February 1, 
2003 New Delhi
[3.] Mahesh Bhatt's letter to Charles Mendies (5 Feb 2003 ))
[4.]  What sense can Iraq war make ( M.B. Naqvi | 10 Feb 2003 )
[5.] Political parties, civil society groups and TUs  protest against 
the US lead war propaganda against Iraq. 10th of Feb, 2003 in New 
Delhi
[6.] Anti-War Campaign Candlelight Vigil in New Delhi (15 February 2003)
[7.] Supporting the war may be suicidal  Dr Iftikhar H. Malik (15 
=46ebruary 2003)
[8.] Pakistan: Anti-war rallies - Citizens Committee Against War 
formed (18 February 2003)
[9.] News Report on Peace Vigil in Bombay , 15 February 2003
[10]. An Evening of Songs, Poetry, Dance and Drama To Protest The US 
Push For War Against Iraq (Hyderabad, February 19, 2003)
[11.] In Hyde Park, for peace (Praful Bidwai  | February 20, 2003)
[12.] The Citizens Committee Against War (CCAW)  rally against the 
war on Iraq in Karachi
on Feb. 28, 2003
[13.] Antiwar protests in southern India (Ganesh Dev and Arun Kumar | 
5 March 2003)
[14.] Liberal Contortions on Iraq (Achin Vanaik | March 13, 2003)
[15.] One Million, One Opinion (Kamal Mitra Chenoy  | 13 March 2003)
[16.] War For Hegemony, Not Justice - Stand up for peace! (Praful 
Bidwai |  March 17, 2003)
[17]. Dispatch from India (Praful Bidwai | March 20, 2003 )
[18.] Antiwar protests grow in India (WSWS correspondents | 20 March 2003)
[19.]  Attack on the human rights of Iraqi people (PUCL Press 
statement | March 20, 2003)
[20.]  [Delhi] University Community Against The War on Iraq (March 21, 2003)
[21.] Attack on the People of Iraq - A Crime against Humanity (NAPM | 
March 21, 2003)
[22.] Peoples Vigilance Committee on Human Rights [India] On US war & 
people of world (March 21, 2003)
[23.] Machinehead (Praful Bidwai | March 22, 2003)
[24.] Talk and Articles by Siddharth Varadarajan (March 24 - 27, 2003)
[25.]  "We do not want tears, we want solidarity" (Farida Akhter | 25 Mar 20=
03)
[26.] Pakistan's mullahs thrive on anti-war fever (M B Naqvi | March 25,=
 2003 )
[27.] Opposition in India & Pakistan to the US-led invasion of Iraq | 
Radio Interviews with Arundhati Roy /  Praful Bidwai / Abdul Hamid 
Nayyar | March 25, 2003 )
[28.] Joint Statement by leaders of India's Political Parties and 
Political Personalities Against War on Iraq (March 27, 2003)
[29.] Boycott The Dollar To Stop The War! (Rohini Hensman | 27 March 2003)
[30.] Into the Iraqi quagmire? (Praful Bidwai |  March 27, 2003)
[31.] 'People Against War' -- an umbrella of over 20 Mumbai-based 
organisations and citizens  (March 27, 2003)
[32.] Announcing Anti War Demos in Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai (March28, 2003)
[33.] Consensus of the coerced  (Praful Bidwai | March 28, 2003)
[34.] Report / Resolutions Adopted at the  Anti-War Rally in New 
Delhi on 28 March 2003
[35.] The war of occupation (Aijaz Ahmad |  March 29, 2003)
[36.] Revulsion, disgust in India at the war (Praful Bidwai | March 29, 2003=
)
[37.] Indian legal community criticises attack on Iraq (Rakesh 
Bhatnagar | March 30, 2003)
[38.] Anti-war rally in Kolkata (The Hindu | March 31, 2003)
[39.] Calcutta Peace rally skirts war twins (The Telegraph | March 31, 2003)
[40.] Editorial (Telegraph | March 31, 2003)
[41.] The Naked Emperor (Achin Vanaik |  Apr 01, 2003)
[42.] Battle for Baghdad Flounders in Sea of Deception (Praful Bidwai 
| April 2, 2003)
[43.] Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates (Arundhati Roy | 
April 2, 2003)
[44.] Sri Lankan and other South Asian Women Protest against the war 
on Iraq (Cats Eye | 2 April 2003)
[45.] The blame game begins (Praful Bidwai |  April 03, 2003)
[46.] A Strategy To Stop The War (Rohini Hensman |  April 3, 2003)
[47.] Brutal imperialism in the name of democracy (Aseem Srivastava | 
April 3, 2003)
[48.] March of Folly (Praful Bidwai | 4 April 2003)
[49.] Indefensible war  (Rajeev Dhavan  | 4 April 2003)
[50.] Human chain against war in Chennai | 3 April 2003

_____


#2.

Seminar (India)   February 2003

Historical pedagogy of the Sangh Parivar

TANIKA SARKAR

THE Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a cadre-based organisation with 
decided hegemonic aims. It seeks to politically educate its chosen 
cadres so that they can, in turn, disseminate select portions of the 
message among the various mass fronts that they might work with: 
electoral constituencies, students, women, tribals, slum dwellers, 
trade unions, religious bodies. The cadres develop different 
addresses for the different fronts, the accents and emphases varying 
considerably from the one to the other. Cadres thus are, in relation 
to the mass fronts, teachers, and, indeed, the affiliates of the 
Sangh call the Sangh itself their classroom. Teaching, therefore, is 
crucial to the agenda, evident in the fact that the human resources 
ministry is reserved for a RSS hardliner.

=46ully trained cadres, moreover, are the brahmans within the combine - 
in functions and, very often, in caste terms too. In any case, they 
are drawn from educated middle class, upper caste areas, and RSS 
shakhas too are mostly concentrated in similar spaces. The mass 
fronts, in contrast, are more diverse. They came up only after 
independence and with the appearance of universal adult franchise 
which necessitated a programme of going to the masses. The 
bifurcation in levels of education and training, related closely to 
caste and class divides, expresses a novel plan of hegemonic control, 
modifying, but not entirely replacing, older Hindu structures of 
inherited power and privilege. The older modes of leadership are now 
supplemented with educated, trained cadres who derive their 
ascendancy from acquired authority rather than from mere inherited 
status.

If pedagogy is crucial, within it history commands a very special 
distinction. Almost all of the Sangh's present politics uses images 
of the past as both referent and justification: that is, most 
recommendations for present-day activity are projected as responses, 
reactions to the past. Elements of the past need to be recovered and 
applied, other elements need to be replaced, while past events need 
to be revenged continuously. There seems to be, thus, an unbroken, 
living dialogue with the past.

The intensity of the engagement is, however, simulated as much as are 
the images of the past. The whole purpose of the lived relationship 
with the past is to overwrite an engagement with the present, 
especially with its problems of Indian poverty, social oppression, 
popular resistance and neo-imperialism.

The past that is constructed out of present interests and needs of 
the Sangh, the past which is an instrument in its present politics 
must, therefore, be an usable past rather than a real one, in so far 
as it is knowable through serious investigative methods. In order to 
be usable, it needs to reorient much of the knowledge of our past, as 
well as the epistemological and methodological bases for the 
construction of knowledge. No wonder that research organisations and 
teaching material are now controlled by Sangh-related teachers and 
historians, sometimes by Sangh pracharaks.

It is by now abundantly clear that the teaching of history is an 
arena of urgent concern and anxiety. I would like to argue that the 
anxiety arises not only because the educationists of Hindu rashtra 
must align their image of the past to the politics of the present, 
but also because all known and accepted disciplinary conventions 
create a tough impediment to that effort. What is more of a problem 
for the Sangh is that most variants of historical scholarship, the 
world over are, despite considerable internal differences, concerned 
with understandings of various configurations of diverse kinds of 
power: whether they are Marxists or post-structuralists, feminists or 
new-historicists, they engage in unpacking class, caste, patriarchal, 
colonial, post-colonial, discursive and cultural operations of power.

The Sangh is deeply uncomfortable with the entire exercise, since the 
only operation of power that it tries to identify is that of 
non-Hindus over Hindus - an identification that becomes untenable in 
the Indian situation where the Hindu majority is overwhelming and the 
religious minorities vulnerable in terms of material and political 
resources. The Sangh's relationship with history is therefore 
particularly fraught. It needs to possess the past, yet the accepted 
methods of representation are anathema toit.

The Hindu rashtra presupposes great excisions in collective memory as 
well as the production of counterfeit historical memories: 
experiences of poverty and exploitation to be overwritten by 
narratives of foreign conquests, military defeats and the ills that 
rulers of a different faith had allegedly done to Hindu temples, 
women and cows. Beyond a point, actual historical evidence for all 
this is thin, patchy or absent. There is, on the other hand, 
embarrassingly strong historical evidence to confirm the absence of 
the Sangh from the ranks of anti-colonial movements, of transactions 
with Italian fascism and self-modelling on the politics of Nazi 
genocides which Golwalkar much admired. Professional expertise in 
historical investigations thus becomes an area of acute suspicion, 
even as the historical past becomes an essential commodity for 
possession.

Recent events in Gujarat well illustrate the Sangh methods of using 
and invoking the past. Narendra Modi's action-reaction thesis sought 
to legitimise anti-Muslim carnage on the grounds of Godhra events 
which, moreover, were ascribed to terrorists employed by Pakistan. 
However, Muslims who were massacred were obviously Indians, most of 
them so far removed from Godhra that they could not possibly have had 
a hand in those atrocities. A very large number of them were, 
moreover, children and babies, even unborn foetuses, not conceivably 
connected with Godhra, terrorism or Pakistan. Shrines of Muslim poets 
and musicians of the past were obliterated and desecrated, even 
though they too could not have contributed to Godhra. Muslims of the 
present, past and future, therefore, become exchangeable signs and 
anyone at any time can be seized upon in revenge for anything that 
Muslims have done, are doing, or can do. Both revenge and Muslim 
become mobile terms.

If the past, present and future can freely change places, the very 
location and meaning of the past has to change too from all its known 
uses and connotations. The Sangh not only aspires to fill popular 
commonsense with its own reading of history, it also desires to fill 
up academic historical productions with methods and meanings that it 
generates. For, popular understanding as hegemonised by the Sangh 
cannot afford to be interrogated by more professional constructions, 
since the boundaries between professional and popular are permeable 
and porous.

They break down especially at the school level where students, 
carrying with them popular legends and myths about the past from the 
media, family memories and cultural representations are confronted 
with serious acadamic modes of ascertaining past events and 
processes. This very age group, moreover, is the primary target group 
of the ideological training that the shakhas of the Sangh provide. 
Consequently, competing images of the past become a risky venture 
since students are also taught to value a certain professionalism and 
acadamic canon.

There is, moreover, an organisational imperative conjoined to the 
ideological one. The Sangh, as I remarked earlier, is itself 
structured as a teacher for a range of mass fronts, electoral party 
and religious organizations that make up the Sangh combine. It 
teaches all the leaders of the BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal. Its daily 
shakhas are meant for training in combat action and ideological 
lessons. The message that it teaches to its cadres, and to members of 
other fronts, is entirely a historical narration which features only 
its own preferred version of ancient Hindu glories, Muslim atrocities 
and Hindu suffering in later periods.

Equally significant are the silences about internal power lines that 
run within the Hindu community. Again, this narrative cannot afford 
to be entirely out of sync with standard academic histories. If the 
latter proved inhospitable to Sangh instructions, then state power 
now gives the Sangh the authority to supplant the older acadamic 
canon with those of its own making; censoring research publications 
and archival compilations, withdrawing textbooks and ordering new 
history writing. In all the states where it has held power, history 
teaching and textbooks have been altered dramatically.

How does the Sangh propose the simultaneous demolition of accepted 
historical knowledge and construct its own version as authentic 
scholarship? Above all, the Sangh has founded schools. The first 
school emerged in a significant context. It was during the partition 
riots and their aftermath that the Sangh made its real breakthrough 
in North India. However, its rapid expansion was briefly stalemated 
as it came under a cloud of suspicion after the assassination of 
Gandhi. Moreover, independent India began to function with universal 
adult suffrage, a development that the Sangh regarded with dismay.

Golwalkar had been brutally explicit in his condemnations of 
democracy and was especially critical of the power it would provide 
to labourers and low castes. Such frankness became muted as the Sangh 
too founded an electoral organ, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, to contest 
elections and woo mass constituencies that would inevitably be made 
up of precisely those people. In the 1952 elections, however, the 
left emerged as the major parliamentary opposition to the centrist 
politics of the Congress. At the national level of political 
decision-making, the Sangh vision found little purchase.

To vault over the impasse, the first thing that the Sangh did was to 
found a primary school at Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh in 1952 which 
rapidly spawned other Saraswati Shishu Mandirs in its wake. A Shishu 
Shiksha Parabandh Samiti was set up to coordinate the primary schools 
while bal mandirs began to develop for high school levels. The 
efforts were repeated in Delhi, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra 
Pradesh.

In 1977, Vidya Bharati was institutionalised to coordinate schools at 
the all-India level. By the early 1990s, it was running the second 
largest chain of schools in the country, controlling about 4,000 
schools, 40 colleges, a total of 36,000 teachers and about ten lakh 
students. It developed the Haflong Project for the North East where 
Christian educational consolidation had blocked their spread. It also 
reached out beyond the regular school and college circuit. There are 
shishu vatikas for pre-school infants, to orient their physical, 
mental, social and spiritual qualities in tune with Sangh sanskaras 
or dispositions.

The other project is that of sanskar kendras in geographically remote 
or socially marginalised areas; in tribal belts, rural pockets and 
urban slums. Here once-a-week lessons are provided by single teachers 
to generate training in 'religion, patriotism and Indian culture.' 
Whereas in its regular schools, middle class, upper caste children 
are given the full paraphernalia of modern education along with Sangh 
values, for the socially marginalised, Sangh values make up the 
entirety of educational efforts. While the poor are ideologically 
coopted, they are not socially empowered through a full-scale 
education.

Everywhere, teachers are recruited from RSS families, thus creating 
employment prospects for itself. To domesticate teachers who may come 
from other backgrounds, there are training camps that are organised 
several times in the year, widening the ideological net considerably. 
In general, the regular schools are located in areas which have an 
RSS centre and a VHP-controlled temple, usually attached to the 
school premises. There are evening and morning shakhas that the RSS 
runs for local children. The school is thus embedded within a tight 
and comprehensive range of institutions that would, in calibration, 
coordinate the child's leisure, education, ideological growth and 
religious understanding.

The cohesion is further consolidated by the fact that the regular 
schools are founded in neighbourhoods that share a fairly homogeneous 
caste-class and community profile. The bonds are strengthened by the 
teachers who make a point of regular home visits and dialogue with 
parents outside the school premises. The boundaries between the 
school and the family, between students and parents, are fluid, and 
Sangh teachers carry forward the school pedagogy beyond the school 
into the familial space. The school thus functions as a pivotal point 
within a larger envisioned community that aligns neighbourhood ties 
to Sangh influence.

Sangh schools follow the regular school board curricula and 
examination system, even using the older NCERT history textbooks 
since no better alternative could be found that would enable their 
children to compete with other schools. Little wonder, then, that it 
sought to change the curricula and textbooks for all schools as soon 
as it acquired state power: its own children could not be protected 
from ideological contamination otherwise.

However, their schools left their own distinctive inscription on 
education in a variety of subtle ways. Significantly, an entire 
apparatus of audio-visual and pedagogical operations was developed to 
intervene in remaking historical understanding in opposition to older 
textbooks. First, the walls displayed maps of undivided India as the 
true shape of the nation, imparting in students a refusal of the 
historical reality of the Partition and visualising the country as 
inclusive of the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. The refiguring of 
the map, moreover, requires explanations that inevitably provide an 
opening for accounts of the Muslim League plan for partition, of 
tales of Hindu sufferings in the holocaust, the mutilation of the 
land - all of which inculcate the desire for revenge.

The walls are also festooned with pictures of Hindu heroes like 
Shivaji and Rana Pratap, visually invoking legends of Muslim tyranny 
and Hindu royal-heroic resistance. A continuous narrative of Muslim 
wrongdoing is immediately and imaginatively disseminated while the 
idea of resistance is ineffably associated with royal figures rather 
than with common people. Distinctive notions of right and wrong, 
justice and injustice, enemies and defenders of faith and nation are 
produced and instantaneously conjoined. In this Manichaean world, 
Hindu princes appear noble saviours while Muslims defile country and 
religion and this provides the only possible history of the country.

In school assemblies, principals address students frequently on 
themes of Hindu patriotism, Babur and his mosque that allegedly 
destroyed Ram's temple, the saga of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and 
its martyrs. Many principals had participated as karsevaks in the two 
attacks on the Babri mosque, and those recollections are renewed 
routinely to link up with histories of Rajput and Maratha wars 
against Mughals. The aim is to build an undying thirst for revenge. A 
headmaster of a primary school related to me how proud he felt when, 
in response to his description of the Babri Mosque demolition, little 
children of five were inspired to clench their fists and swear 
revenge.

To shortcircuit the effects of the pre-BJP curriculum, schools 
provided a special course on Bharatiya sanskriti which was graded 
according to classes. All students of all classes have to study and 
pass examinations every year. The course has a series of graded 
textbooks which have provided the model for the revamped history 
syllabi in the BJP-ruled states, and are no doubt the paradigm for 
the new NCERT syllabus that the BJP plans.

As the authentic history of Indian civilization, such textbooks are 
faithful to Savarkar's definition: Hindutva, as a continuous, 
historically stable cultural essence, unifies India. All those who 
live outside its orbits - Indian Muslims and Christians, for instance 
- are non-Indians, enemies. The very land, in these books, is defined 
by a Hindu essence. There are no mountains or rivers as such, but all 
geographical features are depicted as objects of Hindu worship. Place 
names are fleshed out by pointing out their contiguity to Hindu 
pilgrimages, to sites where Hindu heroes fought against Muslims. 
Modern or medieval cities are identified by their ancient names. All 
past achievements - literary, artistic, architectural, musical, 
spiritual and scientific - are referred back to ancient, pre-Islamic 
eras.

The landscape is bereft of all Muslim or Christian cultural or 
religious presence. Nor do they figure as historical actors except as 
fifth-columnists for foreign powers or as invaders. There is a 
significant economy in the narration. History is shown to develop 
around a single axis which neatly bifurcates Indian people into true 
Indians and alien, as Hindus and others, as victims and tyrants, as 
invaders and vanquished.

The past, moreover, is used not as process, overdetermined and 
multifaceted with internal dialectical contradictions, nor does it 
have a synchronic unity or connectivity. It is a whirling pool of 
images and allegories, and events and figures can be pulled out of it 
at random, violating historical sequences at will to illustrate the 
same point across time and space. This methodological violence is 
imperative if a present politics has to convince people that Ram, an 
epic hero, was humiliated by Babur, a medieval emperor, and that 
present-day Muslims must be killed and humiliated to avenge that past.

Muslims and Christians are not simply invaders and conquerors of the 
past, they are fixed in eternal postures of aggression which, today, 
translates as insidious and covert gestures of hidden expansionism 
and conquest, carried on through conversion and terrorism. Histories 
of communities are not just unchanging and repetitive, they are, 
moreover, singular. History becomes emblematic, congealed into an 
array of postures, each summing up a whole community across the ages. 
The past is a museum of a few signs.

While ancient Indian glories are iconised, little is made available 
from the rich classical sources. The school hymns and mantras, 
invoking a militant and militarised nation worship, are modern ones, 
though composed in Sanskrit, and Sanskrit lessons teach spoken and 
modernised Sanskrit, not the literary or religious texts of classical 
Sanskrit. Even the devotional music that is taught is modern Hindi 
and Sanskrit hymns rather than the classical traditions. There is 
little actual knowledge of ancient Indian history or conditions, 
which are congealed into stylised icons.

Myths, epics and select fragments of historical episodes are joined 
together, again traversing chronological sequences freely and 
obliterating generic boundaries. Babur becomes the enemy of Ram, 
displacing Ravana, and the history of the demolition of the Babri 
Mosque is attached, with illustrations, to form a sequel to legends 
of Rajput and Maratha valour against Mughals. Demons and Mughals flow 
into each other and the Muslim becomes a free-floating signifier 
completely detached from concrete historical contexts. Patriotism, is 
entirely identified with hatred and revenge, the country with 
threatened borders. People, land, water and air, their survival and 
their welfare, do not form any part of patriotism. Nation figures as 
death - the courting of it, the infliction of it.

The silences are resounding. There is no analysis of caste, poverty, 
gender abuses, no mention of what Hindus have done to Hindus. Nor, 
for that matter, of what Muslim emperors have done to Muslim 
peasants. Power, historically, seems to generate from Muslims as a 
homogeneous bloc directed at a seamless mass of Hindus. So students 
are not insulated from violence; rather they are flooded with a 
surfeit of violent tales, demanding violent reflexes in response. But 
anger or even critical introspection into histories of internal, 
social violence is carefully excised.

=46inally, a word about the Sangh's pedagogical methods in conveying a 
sense of the past at shakhas and schools. It uses to a large extent 
oral tellings and the story format. This is a peculiarly effective 
mode, making as it does the past vivid, colourful, immediate, full of 
human interest and possibilities of emotional identification and 
imaginative participation. As a pedagogical tool, especially for very 
small children, its value is great and we all need to use it more, to 
integrate it with dry factual accounts or analysis.

At the same time, the mode cuts both ways. While it makes the past 
interesting, it also compels imaginative partisanship with figures 
and events which are part-invented, filled with vicious political 
values. Again, its dominance as a tool helps fore-close critical 
enquiry into the source, provenance, motivation, mode of construction 
of the narrated tales. Stories demand a suspension of critical 
faculties, demand a reception that is warm, partisan, accepting of 
the narrative thrust. Before they can be opened up to re-reading, 
re-evaluation, a search for elements that are suppressed or 
distorted, the communal message has settled and struck roots, 
creating imaginative reflexes in lieu of critical rethinking.

The historical tales, moreover, are subtly assembled. They are often 
made up of fragments from myths, genuine historical accounts, popular 
memories that are restricted and one-sided in their scope, for they 
ignore other memories. As part myths they command sacred meanings; as 
snatches of history they can be verified and authenticated; as memory 
they impel immediate recognition and acceptance. So, as a totality, 
they acquire multiple authorisation.

There are often strong anti-communal temptations to counter the 
plundering of genuine historical accounts by the Sangh in ways that 
certainly oppose the ultimate communal message, but which nonetheless 
replicate Sangh methods and attitudes towards history. One very 
obvious response is to fill up the crucial gaps left in historical 
memory by Sangh narrations, but then refuse to go beyond providing 
counters. For instance, manufactured tales of Muslim tyranny or 
exaggerated and partial narratives of Muslim separatism and violence 
may be countered by accounts of tolerant Muslim emperors, of Hindu 
Mahasabha espousal of the two-nation theory, or of Hindu violence in 
Partition riots. This is an absolutely necessary endeavour, urgent 
today as never before, since these facts will now face official 
suppression.

At the same time, while they may balance the perspective, trim off 
exaggerations, correct distortions, it is dangerous to reduce secular 
history to rebuttals and rejoinders to Sangh historical claims: to 
get trapped eternally into a closed circle of charges and counter 
charges, for that forces history into the crude and empty polemical 
slot where the Sangh has placed it. There is a similar Manichaean 
divide into good and bad, authentic and inauthentic, black and white, 
the same disregard for an understanding of internal contradictions, 
and impatience for ambivalences, ambiguities, complications.

Again, the urgency of building up counters to the Sangh entails the 
construction of alternative histories that the Sangh cannot 
accommodate, that provide the vital lie to the Sangh's monochromatic 
narrative of Hindu community and its others. We can - and we ought to 
- build up narratives of other struggles that will empower subaltern 
agency so that it will not be coopted by the Sangh's communalism and 
will recognise the crucial importance of histories of power in the 
realms of class, caste and gender. Yet, the very desire to have 
empowering narratives that celebrate subaltern agency can leave gaps 
and steamroller complexities in the interests of easy and simple 
celebrations.

The very burden of historical narration - and its real interest and 
excitement - lies in that it must acknowledge a past that does not 
always yield up edifying tales, a past that is difficult and painful 
for us because we find in it not merely Hitlers but also Stalin, not 
simply peasant resistance but also peasant patriarchy, or working 
class racism. This perpetual shock treatment may stimulate a kind of 
despair that dismantles the very desire for historical truth claims 
as old-fashioned positivism, scientism. The disavowal of the 
historical truth claim or truth aspiration simplifies the rich 
difficulties of serious investigation and narration.

We engage in such debunking of serious history, however, only when we 
are ignorant of the practice of history, of the spectrum of 
theoretical debates that emerge from an experience of that practice 
and which place historians within a creative and complex ambiguity 
that grapples with the inherent limitations and provisionality of the 
truth claim and the necessary discipline that still compels us 
towards accuracy and precision in investigation. It is out of this 
continuous, painful and necessary tension that rich historical 
understanding and thick descriptions emerge.

More than a commitment to the subject itself, it is also politically 
urgent to refuse to replace communal fables with anti-communal ones, 
or with tales that empower the right kinds of agencies. It is 
precisely in these times that we need to desperately assert the 
importance of being true to ascertained, verified, cross-checked 
evidence, academic and professional training, accountability and 
openness, that distinguish serious history from nice stories. It is 
precisely in these times when the VHP thunders that faith is higher 
than serious accounts of what actually happened, that we need to 
proclaim that we search for the latter, knowing its ultimate 
elusiveness in any closed, final sense, and knowing the constructed 
nature of our own accounts.

We need to court the label of being dated, unusable brands in the 
marketplace of saleable ideas to make that claim, knowing all its 
methodological risks and limits. It is a fidelity to what actually 
happened in Gujarat that makes our accounts of Gujarat's recent past 
different from Sangh histories.

* The research on RSS schools, reported more extensively elsewhere, 
was done together with Tapan Basu.

_____


#3.

Daily Times April 3, 2003
Op-Ed

Nadimarg and Kashmiriyat : by Akhila Raman

Massive solidarity demonstrations by the Kashmiri Muslims
following the brutal killings of Pandits at Nadimarg
reveal that Kashmiriyat continues to flourish. They also
highlight the alienation and plight of the Kashmiris who
continue to be brutalized by the militants and the Indian
forces.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=3Dstory_3-4-2003_pg3_3

[Above Op-Ed with online references for those curious:
http://www.mindspring.com/~akhila_raman/kashmir/nadimarg_links.htm ]

In a dastardly act, =ECunidentified gunmen=EE massacred
24 Kashmiri Pandits including 11 women and two children
in Nadimarg village in Indian-administered Kashmir, on
March 24. Kashmiris rallied in solidarity with the
Kashmiri Pandits, voicing their outrage against the
carnage. No militant group claimed responsibility;
India promptly accused Pakistan-backed militants,
while Pakistan also condemned the killings. Some local
villagers besides militant groups have in fact accused
Indian authorities of masterminding the carnage to
undermine their freedom struggle [Kashmir Times, March 25].
What is really going on?

The pattern is all too familiar and is reminiscent of
the massacre of 35 Sikhs at Chattisinghpora by
=ECunidentified gunmen=EE in March 2000 when India had
promptly accused Pakistan sponsored =ECforeign militants=EE.
=46ollowing the massacre, Indian forces killed five persons
in the nearby Panchalthan village and portrayed them as
=ECforeign militants=EE responsible for the massacre; However,
DNA test results released on July 16 have established that
the slain persons were indeed innocent civilians, thus
exposing the deception. Despite repeated demands by the
Kashmiris for an impartial inquiry into the seed incident
at Chattisinghpora, no inquiry has been conducted as of date.
Similarly, the 1998 massacre of 23 Pandits at Wandhama went
uninvestigated despite repeated demands by the Kashmiris.
The All Party Hurriyet Conference, the leading separatist
umbrella group, observed a protest strike demanding an
inquiry; Amnesty International=EDs request to investigate
Wandhama carnage was refused. This raises doubts about
the credibility of the assertions of the Indian State.

Let us take a snapshot of the chilling human rights record
in Kashmir; 2477 civilians had been killed by the Indian
forces during 1990-1998 according to conservative official
estimates (which mostly exclude thousands of custodial
killings); 6673 civilians had been killed by the militants
in the same period which include 982 Hindus and Sikhs.
Besides, thousands of renegade militants in the employ of
the Indian forces have perpetrated excesses. In 1999,
Gurbachan Jagat, the Director General of Police admitted
that there were 1200 renegades in the payroll of the
government. Renegades are believed by the locals to be
behind many unexplained killings by =ECunidentified gunmen=EE
such as the killings of human right activists Jalil Andrabi,
H N Wanchoo and Dr Farooq Ashai and continue to be the
most dreaded group.

While it is not yet clear who perpetrated the carnage, it
is clear that the killers were interested in derailing the
peace process initiated by the State Chief Minister Mufti
Mohammed Sayeed. The killings have been a devastating blow
to his efforts to bring back the minority Pandits who fled
the Valley in a massive exodus in 1990. The killings also
come closely on the heels of the disbanding of the dreaded
SOG (Special Operations Group) which has committed massive
human right violations in the past. As part of the =EChealing
touch=EE policy, he is also considering releasing hundreds of
those Kashmiris under detention who are not involved in
militant activities; There are concerns that the Centre
may be planning to wrest security matters from the State
government following the massacre, which will reverse the
=EChealing touch=EE policy. The motive of the gunmen is clear:
To prolong the Kashmir tragedy, terrorise the minorities
and taint the Kashmiri freedom struggle with a communal colour.

It is heartening to note that thousands of Kashmiris
rallied in support of the Kashmiri Pandits and held protest
demonstrations. The entire Valley shut down on March 25 in
response to a call for a strike by the Hurriyet, thus sending
a clear signal to the killers that Kashmiri Muslims do not
approve of killings of their Hindu brethren and that
Kashmiriyat =F3 the composite culture with the glorious
traditions of communal amity, tolerance and compassion =F3
is still flourishing.

It is also clear that the Hurriyet enjoys immense support
across the Valley; the strikes called by the Hurriyet are
observed in near-total. The 42 per cent voter turn-out in
last October elections in Indian-administered Kashmir has
been misinterpreted by some, as a sign that Kashmiris are
happy with India. It should be noted that, in response to
Hurriyet=EDs poll boycott call, the turn-out was only 11 per
cent in Srinagar district and only 29 per cent in all of
the Valley, where insurgency is concentrated. Those who
voted were in fact voting for local issues such as electricity,
hospitals and employment and voted in favour of a better
administration. The larger issue of the resolution of the
Kashmir issue remains unresolved. For instance, last
October 27 =F3 the 55th anniversary of the arrival of Indian
army =F3 the Valley observed a complete shut-down in response
to a call by the Hurriyet. Every year, this day is being
continually observed as the =ECBlack Day=EE on the call of the
separatists since 1989 when the militancy erupted in Kashmir.
The writing is on the wall for India to see.

=ECUnidentified gunmen=EE are often interpreted in Indian
circles as a monolithic group of =ECKashmir militants=EE while
in fact, there is a significant presence of renegades and
self-appointed/Pakistan-backed foreign militants fighting
for their Muslim brethren, who end up undermining the cause
of the latter. There is an urgent need to order an impartial
investigation by an independent agency to identify the
killers in such incidents of communal killings and bring
them to book. Kashmiris have long demanded impartial inquiry
into such communal killings and India must address this grave
matter.

There is a greater need to address the larger problem which
sustains militancy and alienation, namely the non-resolution
of the Kashmir issue. As Moti Lal, one of the Nadimarg
survivors pointed out, =ECsuch killings cannot be stopped
unless Kashmir issue is resolved. How can our Muslim
brethren ensure our security when they are themselves dying?=EE
Kashmiris, without doubt, are crying for peace, but
certainly not for a peace on the terms dictated to them.
India needs to recognise their legitimate grievances =F3
long-denied self-determination and erosion of autonomy =F3
and engage them and their representatives, namely the Hurriyet,
in unconditional dialogues. The present =ECcarrot and stick=EE
policy has devastated the people in the past decade and must
be abandoned. Any attempt to integrate Kashmir into India
needs to be an emotional integration; Winning the hearts and
minds alone can lead to lasting peace.

_____


#4.

Positive Steps For
Communal Harmony In India
A Brainstorming Session With
Two Out of Town Resource Persons

Ms. Smita Narula, Human Rights Watch, New York
Dr. Sachit Balasari, MD,Harvard University Cambridge,

& A Galaxy of Following Local Participants

Dr. K. S. Sripada Raju, Vaishnava Center,
Shrikumar Poddar, International Service Society
Prof. Jim Bebermeyer, Communication, East Lansing
Dr. Hiralal Koul, Statistics, Michigan State University
Ms. Elise Harvey, Co-Chair, Peace Education Center
Dr. Pragnya Pandya, Physician, Activist, Ionia, Mich
Prof. Surendrar Matani, Development, Toledo, Ohio
Ramesh & Maya Dedhia, Enterpreneurs, Okemos
Ajay Shah& Father , Physician, Okemos, Michigan
Amin Tejani, Executive, Lansing Chamber of Commerce
Vipul Desai, Gandhian Activist, Haslett, Michigan
Innaiah Pothacamury, Natural Resources, East Lansing
Devesh Poddar, Student, Michigan State University
Ms. Prerna Sonthalia, Graduate Student, Michigan State
Leonard Stuttman, Social Activists, Lansing, Michigan
Dr. Hasso Bhatia, Consultant, Okemos, Michigan
Dr. Devendra Pateriya, Business Executive, Haslett

11 am Sunday, April 6, 2003
Corniche Room, Kellogg Center, MSU, East Lansing

Rajasthan, UP, Andhra, Maharashtra, Karnatak, Goa and other states
will have assembly elections this year and next year. General Elections are
due in the year 2004.  Friends of India and NRIs can play an important role
in generating ideas for maintaining Communal Harmony and  thus help
prevent  repeatition of Gujarat type violence in India.


Luncheon Seminar Sponsored By
INTERNATIONAL SERVICE SOCIETY
A Humanitarian Service of Vaishnava Center for Enlightenment
Non Resident Indians For Secular & Harmonious India


_____


#5.

Indian Express, April 04, 2003
Editorial

Been there, done that
Now that Togadia has confessed, what is the government waiting for?

VHP general secretary Praveen Togadia was threat-making as usual when 
he let it slip. There are only two courses left, he announced at a 
press meet, now that the Supreme Court has refused to allow the 
government to allow the VHP to have its way in Ayodhya.

The government must either pilot a legislation in the monsoon session 
of Parliament to hand the undisputed land over to the VHP. Or else. 
Among the dire consequences of not passing the requisite law that 
Togadia outlined: splits within both Congress and BJP, fall of the 
Vajpayee government, fresh Lok Sabha polls - a repeat, in general, of 
'anarchical conditions' like those that prevailed on December 6, 
1992. And then, lest there be any doubt about whether the VHP was up 
to the job, Togadia recalled its illustrious record: it was 'we', he 
pointed out, who demolished the Babri Masjid and then came out on the 
roads in Gujarat.

Now that he has had his say, we have a question: What's the 
government waiting for? The two crimes are well chronicled and 
Togadia's is as fulsome an admission of guilt as a prosecution can 
realistically hope for. Now that VHP's general secretary has 
confessed all, now that it has come from the horse's mouth, will we 
finally see the government act? Togadia's admission must surely come 
as a windfall for a government that is having such a hard time in 
nailing the guilty in both cases. Last heard, the Babri Masjid 
demolition case was still floundering in the Uttar Pradesh courts; a 
year after, investigations into the bloody riots in Gujarat are 
inexplicably hobbled even as the Godhra 'fact'-finding apparently 
progresses by leaps and bounds, all under the cover of Pota. The 
Vajpayee government must immediately take Togadia for his word and 
book him for violating the law of the land.

And it must act before it is too late. Togadia and his cohorts have 
been systematically upping the ante once more on Ayodhya and this is 
the opportunity to nip their designs in the bud. The law must come 
down on Togadia soon for both reasons: So that justice can be done in 
two festering cases, and so that spectres from an unpleasant past may 
not be resurrected again.


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SACW is an informal, independent & non-profit citizens wire service run by
South Asia Citizens Web (www.mnet.fr/aiindex).

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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