SACW | 17 May 03

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire   | 17 May,  2003

Action Alert: In Defence of the Indian Historian Romila Thapar
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/Alerts/IDRT300403.html

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

#1. Destiny and devotion: the religious right has gained new ground 
in Pakistan (Rory McCarthy)
#2. On the moral policing efforts in to cleanse the country in Pakistan
#3. Pakistan: The NWFP creeps towards Talibanisation (Khaled Ahmed)
#4. A "South Asian Schindler's List": On Mahesh Bhat's film project
#5. India: Her poetry could have been mantra for Sangh Parivar (Ritu Sarin)
#6. India: Increase in SSP Dam Height - A Corrupt Politics : (Medha Patkar)


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

#1.

The Guardian (UK)
May 17, 2003

Destiny and devotion

In the wake of the war in Iraq, the religious right has gained new 
ground in Pakistan, both politically and culturally. Rory McCarthy 
reports on how Islamic militants are moving into the mainstream

Sabir Hussain Awan was 17 when he told his parents he was going to 
Afghanistan to join the Islamic jihad. Six years earlier, the Soviets 
had poured over the mountains of Afghanistan to prop up the communist 
government in Kabul and the Red Army had become an occupying force. 
Thousands of young men, mostly Afghans, Pakistanis and Arabs, were 
flocking to join the mujahideen resistance and Sabir wanted to be 
part of it. His parents were furious. They stopped his pocket money 
and threw him out of the house. But he was a petulant teenager and 
eventually got his war.

As a second-year chemical engineering student at college in Peshawar, 
an intrigue-ridden frontier town in north-western Pakistan, Sabir 
crossed with a handful of friends into Afghanistan and fought 
alongside the mujahideen. It changed his life. He became deeply 
religious, one of the fundamentalists with whom the west is so 
obsessed. His new devotion led him to another military jihad: the 
guerrilla war that had broken out in the Himalayan mountains of 
Kashmir against the Indian army. For the past decade, he has led a 
semi-underground existence, helping to finance and lead the Hizbul 
Mujahideen, the most powerful group of militants fighting in Kashmir.

When I meet Sabir, he is sitting in a shabby office in Peshawar's old 
city, overlooking the narrow streets of the gold market. The 
war-hardened teenager has grown into an immaculately dressed, 
carefully spoken 34-year-old. He wears suede shoes and an elegant 
cream shalwar kameez, and his fingers flick through a string of glass 
prayer beads. It is surprisingly hard to pin down the exact moment of 
change for people like Sabir, the point at which they stepped from an 
ordinary world into a radical militant movement. For Sabir, it 
started with student politics.

In his first year at the Government College of Technology in 
Peshawar, he joined the student wing of the local Pashtun nationalist 
party, a secular and hugely popular local organisation. His parents, 
who owned a farm in Nowshera, had been lifelong Pashtun nationalists.

But at the start of his second year, Sabir met some students from the 
Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, the student wing of Pakistan's most 
influential Islamist revival party, the Jamaat-e-Islami (the Party of 
Islam). He was increasingly disaffected with the nationalist students 
who he said had no respect for their teachers and were involved in 
"immoral activities". The IJT offered loftier values. Sabir was sent 
to Koranic classes run by the intellectuals of the Jamaat-e-Islami. 
"From the inside, I finally felt satisfied," he said. At the same 
time, he witnessed the suffering of Afghans who fled during the 1980s 
war into refugee camps around Peshawar. The lure of adventure 
involved in joining the mujahideen irregulars and leaving behind his 
parents' careful middle-class existence is left unsaid. "I didn't 
tell my family I was going and when I returned there was trouble," he 
says. "But then my parents saw my personality had changed and they 
began to understand me."

Men like Sabir have always lived on the margins of Pakistani society, 
an extreme and often violent Islamist minority but one with little 
real power. Today that is changing. Last October, in general 
elections, Sabir, the father of three young sons, matured against all 
expectations from a marginalised militant into an elected member of 
Pakistan's National Assembly. Even to his own surprise, he defeated a 
local feudal landlord to win a seat for the Jamaat-e-Islami from the 
Nowshera constituency.

In the months that followed September 11, a tide of Islamic 
revivalism swept through Pakistan. Anger at American foreign policy 
is deeply and universally felt. For many it began with the US-led 
campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the recognition in 
the months that followed that Washington and London have neglected 
their promises of reconstruction in the country they bombed. It is 
being fuelled again by increasingly overt FBI raids across Pakistan 
in the search for al-Qaida suspects and, inevitably and 
overwhelmingly, by the war in Iraq. In Pakistani eyes, American 
foreign policy is targeting the religion of Islam. Will Pakistan be 
next? It is the question on everybody's lips. Suddenly, the Islamic 
parties no longer seem to be on the margins of society but 
triumphantly riding a new wave of national bitterness and frustration.

Madrassahs, religious schools that are all too frequently the first 
training ground for militancy, have reported a surge in admissions. 
But perhaps the most significant public reaction came with the 
general elections last October when the Islamic parties became a 
serious political force for the first time in Pakistan's history. The 
Jamaat contested as part of a rare alliance of rival religious 
parties - the Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), or United Action Front. 
After the votes were counted, the alliance was left dominating two of 
the four provincial assemblies. In the national parliament in 
Islamabad, they emerged as the third largest party and a significant 
parliamentary force. This for a radical hardline organisation that 
advocates rule by the clerics, the imposition of sharia law, the 
wearing of hijab for women, segregated education for men and women, 
and a banking system without interest charges.

Today Sabir looks the politician but seems bemused by his newly won 
power. "I am not sure yet what we will contribute to people's lives, 
but this is a very big victory," he says: Islamist parties now 
control the provincial assembly for the North-West Frontier Province 
around Peshawar. Sabir says access to the new politicians will be far 
easier for ordinary people. That would indeed be a change: in the 
past, the elected feudal landlords have kept themselves removed from 
the population, comfortable in their vast houses and imported 
Japanese four-wheel drives. He promises better irrigation and this, 
too, touches an important subject. With a rapidly growing population 
and an increasingly threatened water supply, securing adequate water 
resources is fast becoming the priority. He also talks of "social 
justice". This is more difficult. Sabir wants to introduce sharia 
law, the strict Islamic code that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan 
took to a new extreme. "The benefit of sharia in society will be to 
eradicate corruption," he says.

It is true that Pakistan is riddled with depressing levels of 
corruption, from the lowest police sergeant to national leaders (the 
last two prime ministers were each accused of pocketing up to =A31bn 
from state coffers), but the sharia code has its own problems. Those 
parts of Pakistan's legal code already in accord with Islamic law are 
some of the most brutal and sexist: the Hudood Ordinances, introduced 
in 1979, rule that the evidence of a woman is worth half that of a 
man. Under these laws, a woman who is raped can end up being 
convicted of adultery if she is unable to provide four male Muslim 
witnesses to the crime against her. Most women in Pakistani jails are 
there for adultery. The sentence can be death by stoning. Under the 
same code, alcohol is banned and amputation recommended for convicted 
thieves. Sabir glosses over this side of sharia law. He stresses 
instead the fight against corruption. "Every government servant will 
be responsible to the common people for their every action. Until 
now, the top leaders were involved in corruption and the common man 
was paying the price for their deeds," he says. "A change will come 
and it will start at the top."

Pakistan is a nation that has never really got to grips with its 
identity. The country was created in 1947 when the subcontinent was 
partitioned as it won independence from British rule. Pakistan 
(literally "The Land of the Pure") was to be a homeland for Muslims 
and an attempt to bring to an end the communalist violence that had 
shaken India in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the country has always 
wrestled with its origins, unsure whether it should be a secular 
state whose citizens could practise their own religion in private or 
an Islamic state run under the law of the Koran.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the gaunt, intellectual founding father of the 
nation, seemed to make it perfectly clear. On August 11 1947, in 
Karachi, he told the new constituent assembly of Pakistan: "You are 
free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your 
mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. 
You may belong to any religion or cast or creed - that has nothing to 
do with the business of the state." Jinnah died the following year 
and Pakistan drifted from ineffectual secular governments to military 
dictatorships for the next two decades.

It was not until the 1970s that the Islamists began to emerge as 
political players. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a president who talked in 
socialist rhetoric, found his power base weakening and began throwing 
sops to the religious right. Alcohol was banned and the moderate 
minority Muslim Ahmadi sect was declared un-Islamic.

At the time, Islamist movements were flourishing across the Arab 
world in the aftermath of the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. Bhutto was 
eventually overthrown and hanged by the religiously minded dictator 
General Zia ul-Haq. In 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the 
US began to funnel billions of dollars through Zia and Pakistan's 
powerful ISI intelligence agency to support the Islamic mujahideen 
resistance. The money was used to fund a vast Islamisation programme. 
Thousands of madrassahs were built to provide a free education to the 
very poor, essentially teaching young boys to recite the Koran by 
heart in Arabic, a language they did not understand. Funds and 
literature came pouring into Pakistan from Saudi Arabia and hundreds 
of mosques were built to preach the Saudi's hardline Wahhabi Islamic 
doctrine, which promised the re-establishment of the first state of 
Islam set up hundreds of years earlier by the prophet Mohammed. The 
madrassahs proved to be a powerful recruiting ground for the Islamist 
parties and a generation later spawned the men who led the Taliban 
regime to power in Afghanistan.

Of all Pakistan's religious parties, the Jamaat-e-Islami perhaps 
prospered the most from this state-sanctioned Islamist revival. Yet 
the party has never converted its strength into political power. 
Before the last elections, it won barely a handful of seats in the 
national parliament. The rhetoric of the religious right didn't 
square with reality. Since it was founded in 1941, the Jamaat has 
been promising an imminent Islamic revolution, but it has never 
materialised.

Pakistan is still a largely secular state, dominated not by clerics 
but by feudal landlords, industrialists and the military. The Jamaat 
was founded by Maulana Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi, a journalist and 
cleric born in the Indian state of Hyderabad in 1903. Religion was 
not personal, he said, but integral to our social, economic and 
political lives: it was radical thinking that went on to shape 
Islamist movements from Egypt to Afghanistan. Maududi wanted to 
create a small, disciplined holy community that would live by his 
theory. At the same time, though, he accepted the role of a political 
struggle at the ballot box, despite the compromises that would 
entail. Over time, the idea of the holy community faded and the 
Jamaat focused more and more on pragmatic political goals.

The home of the party lies not in the conservative frontier regions 
where Sabir was elected but further south in the city of Lahore, the 
pulsing cultural heart of Pakistan. There, on the outskirts, is 
Mansoorah, a large, peaceful collection of offices, homes, schools, 
hospital and mosque that is Jamaat's headquarters. Of all the party's 
dozens of institutions, this seems to come closest to Maududi's idea 
of a community of the ultra-faithful.

A week after meeting Sabir in Peshawar, I make my way to Mansoorah 
where, sitting on a lawn beside a mosque, a young party worker, 
Mazhar Siddiqui, explains the allure of the Jamaat life. Mazhar's 
family crossed from India during partition and settled in the town of 
Mianwali, in northern Punjab. Mazhar enjoyed a good education and 
seven years ago moved to Lahore where he finished a degree in 
business administration. Rather than take a job in a private company, 
he came to Mansoorah. He began working in the Jamaat's finance 
department and was given a rent-free flat in the singles quarters, 
overlooking the tree-lined lawn and the mosque.

The party paid him 8,000 rupees (=A390) a month, less than half what he 
could have earned in an ordinary business, but offered him a tightly 
ordered life steeped in Islamic learning. His day begins at 5.30am 
when the muezzin sings the call to prayer and the Jamaat workers 
gather in the mosque to hear an hour-long lecture on the Koran. They 
go to their offices to work and return to pray at lunchtime, at 
mid-afternoon, just before and just after sunset. "When I work here, 
I feel the money I earn is clean. People working outside have so many 
hurdles in their life, but I have a kind of mental satisfaction," 
says Mazhar, now 30.

He first met the Jamaat at college in Mianwali where, like Sabir, he 
joined the party's student wing, the IJT. "I joined them because of 
their Islamic characteristics and their moral character," he says. 
"There were other student organisations but they just had slogans. 
IJT was a hard-working, practical organisation."

In 1991, Mazhar went for three weeks to a training camp in Mansehra, 
in northern Pakistan, run by Hizbul Mujahideen, the guerrilla group 
fighting in Kashmir. In the end, he never went to Kashmir, but he 
went on to play an equally important role in the party. He was made 
provincial chief of the Bazme Paigham, a remarkable and little-known 
section of the Jamaat whose job it is to recruit supporters among 
schoolboys as young as five. "I told them about Islam, about loyalty 
to Pakistan and about our ideology," he says. He also warned them off 
the sins of the west: alcohol, adultery and lewd satellite television 
channels. "We want to teach them from an early age. By 18 it is too 
late." In an unguarded moment, he admits his work was "brainwashing".

"Whoever once joins the IJT, as far as his mind is concerned, he 
remains with the IJT for ever. The ideological orientation given to 
them is very strong," Syed Munawwar Hasan, one of Jamaat's senior 
leaders, told me later.

Jamaat-e-Islami has 20,000 full-time members who have taken an oath 
to the party, but more than five million associate members, mostly 
ex-IJT, who contribute donations and their time. Another religious 
community, Qurtuba (named after Cordoba, the ancient city of learning 
in Muslim Spain), is being built 30 minutes outside Islamabad, with 
space for 10,000 homes. This emphasis on organisation has ensured 
that thousands of ex-IJT members are now working in Pakistan's civil 
service, the army, the press, academia and private industry, and 
retain an instinctive loyalty to the Islamist movement. It is not 
just a movement of the disaffected poor, but of the establishment, 
too.

A Jamaat official drives me across Lahore to meet Naseem Zafar Iqbal 
and his wife Saima to prove the point. It is the weekend and the city 
is caught between two celebrations. Hundreds of brightly coloured 
paper kites fill the sky for Basant, the kite-flying festival that 
heralds the arrival of spring. For Lahore's fashion-conscious and 
liberal-minded middle classes, it is an excuse to shop and party. For 
the clerics and followers of Jamaat, it is something sinful. The 
saffron yellow that adorns the Basant decorations smacks to them of 
Hinduism, and the growing commercialisation of the festival, now 
dominated by Coca-Cola and Pepsi hoardings, is an unwelcome incursion 
of western capitalism. The decadence of Basant, they say, overshadows 
the more important celebration later in the week of Eid-ul-Adha, the 
Muslim festival of sacrifice. Thousands of goats, sheep and cows are 
tied up on street corners around the city, waiting to be sold for 
family sacrifices.

Naseem and Saima live with their three young sons in a large house in 
an affluent neighbourhood close to the canal which slices a broad, 
straight path through the centre of Lahore. Naseem runs a management 
training company, Saima helps the local women's wing of the Jamaat 
and runs Koranic lectures in their neighbourhood. Her grandfather, 
Nazir Ahmed Chaudhry, was one of the 75 founding members of Jamaat 
who gathered with Maududi in Lahore in 1941 to establish the party.

The couple are well-educated and culturally conservative. Saima is 
reluctant to meet me without her husband present and keeps her head 
veiled with a white silk shawl throughout our conversation. Both are 
unhappy about the Basant celebrations outside. "It is not part of our 
culture," says Saima, 34. "We have our two Eid festivals every year 
and we are taught to be happy with them. We don't need new 
festivals." She talks about having adopted from the Jamaat a 
particular "value system" that marks her out from her more secular 
friends. The young couple complain that Basant encourages men and 
women to dance together and drink alcohol. "This is not Islam. This 
is not Pakistan. This is not part of our civilisation," says Naseem. 
They believe that young men and women should live separate lives, 
women should always be veiled and they should not come together 
except in arranged marriages, a cultural tradition still prevalent 
across Pakistan. Anything less somehow detracts from the integrity of 
women.

As Jamaat supporters, the couple want to see religious thinkers and 
clerics running Pakistan. But they want a system more sophisticated 
than that of the Taliban in Afghanistan and they hesitate at the idea 
of a state as radical as a theocracy. Instead, they want a 
democratically elected religious government, and they echo the 
frustrations of Sabir in Peshawar with their talk of a need for 
social justice and an end to the corruption of the past. "People are 
realising that in secularism they will not find honest people," says 
Naseem. "Here people who believe in secularism are largely corrupt 
people."

They regard the Jamaat as part of the glue that holds a fragile 
Pakistan together. Ethnic parties have long had considerable support 
across the country but in the long run they threaten to tear Pakistan 
apart. Islamist parties, on the other hand, offer national unity and 
identity through religious belief. Fewer than 8% of Pakistanis speak 
Urdu, the national language, as their mother tongue. Instead, they 
speak ethnically-identifying languages, such as Pashtu, Punjabi, 
Sindhi, Saraiki or Baluchi (the list goes on: there are 69 living 
languages spoken in Pakistan). Many families in Lahore speak Punjabi 
at home but Naseem and Saima, like all Jamaat loyalists, make a point 
of speaking Urdu.

"The religion of Islam preserves the ethnic diversity and at the same 
time brings people together," Naseem says. They dispute Jinnah's 
legacy, insisting that he has been misinterpreted. He in fact 
intended to leave behind an Islamic, not secular, state, they say.

Do Pakistanis like Naseem and Saima honestly believe a religious 
government is around the next corner? They say so, but for now that 
seems unlikely. The advances made by the Islamic parties in the 
latest election owed a lot to their peculiar relationship with the 
all-powerful military. In most other Muslim countries, Islamist 
movements have been crushed by the state. In Pakistan, they are more 
allies than enemies. The army needs religious militants to keep up 
the guerrilla war in Kashmir and the mainstream religious parties to 
act as a unifying force in an otherwise diverse nation.

And so, while political parties were banned from holding rallies, the 
religious groups were not. The army helped bring the religious 
parties together into the MMA alliance and at the same time helped to 
divide the political parties. "The MMA is the military-mullah 
alliance - a culmination of the investments made in the religious 
right in this country over many years," said Afrasiab Khattak, a 
leading secular intellectual and chairman of the Human Rights 
Commission of Pakistan. The army shows no signs of loosening its grip 
on Pakistan and the Islamist movement has little chance of seizing 
power alone. There is unlikely to be an Iranian-style Islamic 
revolution or a Taliban-style armed uprising.

Yet the implications of this rediscovery of Islamism are tremendous, 
not least in relations with Pakistan's traditional enemy, India. The 
Pakistan army relies on the religious parties to present an 
ideological counterbalance to what it regards as the Indian threat, 
and most recently the disturbing emergence of Hindu nationalism that 
has gained strength in India under the leadership of the ruling 
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Jamaat's literature warns of 
"hegemonic Indian designs".

"The whole nation should be prepared to meet the Indian war jingoism, 
the apologetic approach and the routine of meeting its demands 
[should] be put to an end," the party's central council said in 
January last year. A rising tide of Hindu nationalism in India and 
Islamic revivalism in Pakistan bodes poorly for relations between the 
two countries, the world's newest declared nuclear powers. In the 
past few weeks, Indian and Pakistani leaders have started efforts to 
improve relations and raised hopes of a summit on Kashmir, but many 
fear fighting in the Himalayan mountains will return this summer when 
the returning heat clears snow-blocked passes.

=46ew in Pakistan doubt that their nation is also heading inexorably 
towards a more overt confrontation with the US. For years, Pakistani 
governments have sought to cast themselves as Washington's ally, but 
that is becoming harder and harder. Although the country's president, 
General Pervez Musharraf, made unprecedented commitments to 
eradicating militancy in the months after September 11, it is clear 
his words have not been matched by actions.

The success of religious parties at the polls will only add to these 
concerns. Among those now elected are men like Sabir who openly admit 
their role in the Kashmir war and other, more chilling characters, 
such as Azam Tariq, now a politician in the national assembly and 
formerly the head of the banned sectarian outfit Sipah-e-Sahaba which 
is blamed for dozens of brutal murders. In the North-West Frontier, 
the new provincial government has already threatened to stop FBI 
raids on al-Qaida suspects and to hamper support for the US military 
operations across the border in Afghanistan. It is clear, too, that 
Islamabad's nuclear capability - the world's first Islamic nuclear 
bomb that is so prized in Pakistan - has become a cause of concern 
for the US. The growing leaks from Washington alleging links with 
North Korea's nuclear programme almost certainly herald a more 
combative approach to dismantling Pakistan's nuclear armoury. This 
will be strongly resisted by the army and their allies in the 
Islamist parties.

In the end, the greatest test for the religious parties should be 
their performance in government, particularly in the North-West 
=46rontier where they control the province. Many Pakistanis voted for 
them as an expression of frustration at previous governments. How 
will the religious leaders respond? Already musicians have been 
locked up (their music deemed un-Islamic), western-style school 
uniforms have been banned (for being a "symbol of slavery") and plans 
are under way for the introduction of sharia law and a religious 
police force, along the lines of those used by the Saudi government 
and the Taliban regime. It is unclear, however, what the Islamist 
government has in mind to meet the more practical needs for better 
education, improved healthcare and access to clean water and 
sanitation.

Sitting in the Jamaat office in Peshawar, Sabir Hussain Awan is 
boldly dreaming of how the next elections will bring the religious 
right into the forefront of government in Islamabad. "At the next 
election, the majority of Pakistanis will support us, you will see. 
Pakistan should be an Islamic state and if we introduce sharia law in 
a practical way, there will be great prosperity," he says. For now, 
that seems a distant dream, but as the US struggles to meet its 
promises of security and democracy in Iraq, support for the religious 
right in Pakistan, and elsewhere across the Islamic world, will only 
grow. The Jamaat-e-Islami has waited more than 60 years for this 
chance. It has nothing to lose.


______

#2.

The Hindustan Times (India), May 16, 2003

Cocky wives of cocksure generals run Pakistan's moral crusade
Indo-Asian News Service
Lahore, May 16

If Lahore's red light district has braved the "most tyrannical and 
hypocritical" regimes to retain its original character, efforts by 
Pakistan's moral police to cleanse the country don't stand much of a 
chance, a respected newspaper editor contends.

Three events have raised the hackles of Friday Times editor Najam 
Sethi: efforts to prevent the creation of a food court adjacent to 
Lahore's red light area, the defacing of billboards, and attempts by 
Punjab University to sanitise English literature classics of 
"obscene" words and expressions.

His collective anger translated into an editorial titled "May God 
have mercy on us all" that even spewed venom against President Pervez 
Musharraf's wife Sehba.

"The whisper goes that the wife of a former army general raised the 
(English literature) matter with the president's good wife, who 
referred it to the president himself," Sethi wrote.

"In due course, a call from the presidency woke up the registrar and 
the vice-chancellor of the (Punjab) university, both retired army 
officers, who entrusted the job of cleaning up the English language 
to a certain Dr Shahbaz Arif."

Among the targeted texts, according to Sethi, were celebrated 
classics like Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, The Rape of the 
Lock by Alexander Pope, The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott and The 
Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

"Arif claims that the word 'rape' in The Rape of the Lock evokes a 
'negative image'. He says he will try to change this image or 
recommend some other book," Sethi wrote.

He quoted Arif as saying: "There are so many vulgar words, concepts 
and thoughts in the current English curriculum that they can induce 
our youngsters to erroneous thoughts and ways, and there are ideas 
and concepts that don't jibe with the ideology of Pakistan".

=46umed Sethi: "Among the many objectionable words listed by the great 
scholar of Islam and defender of Pakistan are vodka, wine, whiskey. 
But for some strange reason, words and phrases like 'cock a gun' or 
'cock an ear' or 'crowing cocks' and even 'cockpits' are also under 
scrutiny."

"We are appalled," Sethi wrote. "It is bad enough to be ruled by 
cocksure generals. Now we are to be taught English language and 
literature by the cocky wives of cocksure generals. May God have 
mercy on us all."

The fanatical behaviour or the moralists on Lahore's proposed food 
court "is equally disturbing", Sethi wrote.

"Its opponents argue that 'innocent youth' of the country would be 
attracted to the food street' and fall into the erring ways of the 
area.

"This is a load of crap. The red-light area already boasts some of 
the finest eateries in the city, including one in the heart of the 
area run by an acclaimed artist. Nor would the red-light area have 
become a greater 'den of sin' by the arrival of an upmarket food 
street in its vicinity. If anything, perhaps, it might have been 
nudged to clean up its act in keeping with the spirit of the times.

"It bears reminding, of course, that the red light area has braved 
the most tyrannical and hypocritical of regimes to retain its 
original character in an undying tribute to the great historic city 
of Lahore," Sethi maintained.

As for the defacing of billboards, Sethi was alarmed that the malaise 
that had begun in Lahore a few months had spread to the North West 
=46rontier Province.

What have been specifically targeted are billboards of women 
advertising toothpaste, shampoo and cooking oil, because the 
Jamaat-i-Islami, a member of the six-party religious alliance that 
rules the province, considers such advertising un-Islamic, Sethi 
wrote.

"Can we then presume that the same logic will now be surreptitiously 
applied to all product advertising in the print and electronic media 
so that in the bitter end the fundamentalists will force the hijab 
(veil) on every female in the country?" Sethi wondered.

______


#3.

The Daily Times (Pakistan), May 17, 2003

The NWFP creeps towards Talibanisation

Khaled Ahmed's Urdu Press Review
Not many anticipate it but the NWFP is set on a collision course with 
the centre. The centre is weak as it engages with two deadlocks, one 
outside, with India, and the other inside, in parliament. In 
Pakistan, no crisis has had a solution for a long time
Chief Minister NWFP Akram Durrani is being pushed by his party JUI-F 
to enforce the Sharia, but the other parties are either keen to a 
lesser degree or are opposed to what the MMA government is trying to 
do. So far the Frontier society, which includes areas with Punjabi 
majority, are tolerating the new order because of incredulity, but it 
will finally arouse a lot of trouble - of defiance as well as 
division. The federal government is smug because it knows that a 
province just can't fly off the handle like this and yet survive 
non-cooperation from the centre of power. But the "transformational" 
governance of the MMA will not only damage civil society in the 
=46rontier it will cause a "sympathetic" outbreak of vigilante action 
in the other provinces and more dangerously in Punjab where some 
cities have already succumbed.
According to "Nawa-e-Waqt" (4 May 2003) the NWFP had quietly brought 
into force the Hisba tribunal recommended sometime ago by the Council 
for Islamic Ideology (CII) but ignored by the federal government. 
Hisba would be a committee led by a religious scholar who would go 
around seeing if the province was observing Islam under the principle 
of "amr bil maroof wa nahi an-al munkir" (to support that which is 
good and oppose that which is wrong). The Hisba would be above all 
courts and it will be empowered to send anyone to six months in jail 
in case of non-compliance with its rulings. The new law which the 
NWFP government has kept secret will create a Hisba force that would 
be unchallengeable, The Hisba will ban all bank transactions made on 
the basis of interest. It will see to it that there is complete 
closure during namaz and fasting and "juma" prayers. It will ban 
beggary and the business of "taviz-ganda" (magic).
The beginning of religious reform confirms the accusation of 
President Karzai that Talibanisation was not indigenous to 
Afghanistan but was brought in by the madrasa influence from 
Pakistan. It is a fact that some of the big leaders of the Taliban 
had absorbed their world view from the extremist seminaries in 
Pakistan. The JUI members of the NWFP parliament are aware that the 
opposition PML-N and PPP will not favour Talibanisation of the 
province, but they also know that they have the numbers on their 
side. Justice under Hisba is dramatic but that is the justice we have 
been taught by our textbooks to idealise. There is a lot of 
miscarriage of reason and good sense in the verdicts handed down by 
the Taliban judges dispensing justice on their feet. The Peshawar 
government will Islamise what they can within the provincial list of 
the Constitution. PML-QA chief Chaudhry Shujaat has already gone to 
Peshawar and told Chief Minister Durrani that he would help him in 
the process of Islamisation of the province. (This was a part of the 
plan to get the JUI to okay the LFO.) Before Chaudhry Shujaat said 
this, Akram Durrani had been to Punjab University without informing 
the chief minister of Punjab. The result was panic at the University 
and a feverish drive to purge the textbooks of "obscenities". The 
Punjab has already partially succumbed. Gujranwala administration has 
started attacking all entertainment programmes. It took its cue from 
an earlier vigilante campaign which was led by armed clerics.
Columnist Mehmood Mirza wrote in "Khabrain" (5 May 2003) that there 
was confusion and chaos in Pakistan owing to four distinct ways of 
thinking about Islam and life. One section was conservative and held 
on to inflexible views about the national way of life; the second was 
the large ineffective mass that wanted reinterpretation of Islam; the 
third thought Islam could be applied only to private life and this 
group was playing an important role in the running of the state; and 
the fourth was composed of those who were fed up with Islam and were 
a part of the intellectual life in Pakistan. This pointed to 
confusion and chaos in the country.
It is the first "inflexible" category that dominates Pakistan. There 
was a time when these people could only use argument to express their 
rage at people they thought were crossing the line (ilhad) in 
religion. Physical attacks in the past happened but they were rare. 
Today these elements have been "weaponised" by the state in return 
for participation in the state's deniable low-intensity conflict and 
they can kill with impunity. The second category that presumably 
wants Islam reinterpreted may be hiding somewhere but they can't 
express this view in public. Even Allama Iqbal could not escape the 
wrath of the clergy many decades ago by asking for reinterpretation. 
The category that believes that Islam should be kept in the personal 
domain are another concealed community. They never say it and since 
most of them are in the administration they have perfected the art of 
changing over to shalwar and growing beards and saying namaz in the 
corridors of the secretariat simply to convince the authoritarian 
Islamists that they are in compliance. Those who are sick and tired 
of the despotism of the clergy may be intellectuals but they never 
open their mouths, which is why, as opposed to Iran, there is no 
debate going on in Pakistan. The truth is that only one opinion is 
dominant in Pakistan. That's why Pakistan is in danger.[...].

{ Full Text at: 
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=3Dstory_17-5-2003_pg3_7 }

______


#4.

BBC (UK), 16 May, 2003

Indian director plans Pakistan shoot

Indian director Mahesh Bhatt is hoping to make the first ever Indian 
film shot entirely in Pakistan - a project he described as a "South 
Asian Schindler's List".

Bhatt's film will be about the true story of a Muslim who saved the 
lives of 200 Sikhs during the riots that took place during partition 
in 1947.
In Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg filmed the story of a German 
businessman who saved about 1,000 Jews by employing them in a 
munitions factory.
"I was wanting to make a South Asian Schindler," Bhatt told BBC World 
Service's World Today programme.
"After being exposed to hundreds of movies which looked at Germans as 
demons, finally came a film which saw a German with a golden heart.
"That made the world weep."

Plot
Bhatt said he hoped to achieve something similar when his film was 
shown in India, which would highlight Pakistani bravery towards 
Indians even at the height of tensions during partition in 1947.
"When I was going through the history of the partition of India and 
Pakistan, I came across an incident of a brave Muslim policeman who 
just with a stick prevented a mob from killing over 200 Sikhs that 
were locked in a home," Bhatt said.

  We are glued together by our genes, we eat the same food, wear the 
same clothes, and I think, despite trying our best, we are unable to 
separate ourselves

Mahesh Bhatt

"So I sourced my inspiration from that brave, anonymous policeman, 
and I felt that in a country where we have demonised the Pakistanis 
in our movies, it's time to look at them affectionately."
Bhatt added that his hopes to shoot the film entirely in Pakistan 
were based on a symbolic need as well as being important for 
authenticity.
"It's the need of the plot because it turns the clock back to '47 and 
it needs the terrain of the north-west frontier," Bhatt said.
"It will also, in these times, make the political point that we can 
finally go and shoot there - who says the Asian miracle is over?"

'Expecting miracles'
Bhatt conceded that he had often been accused of a holding a 
politically-naive viewpoint, but said that his message was one of 
unity.
"We need to be audacious.
"People do accuse me of being naive, and they say that I am expecting 
miracles to happen.
Bhatt's film is based on the events of partition
"I say look, I am committed to this idea, I am happy to be making 
this film in Pakistan.
"The worst case scenario is that I will write the plot, and then have 
to shoot on my own terrain.
"But this film will certainly be made, because there is a need to 
look at those people across the boarder and also here - Hindus who 
helped the Muslims to cross the boarder, and Muslims who helped 
Hindus to cross the boarder.
"It's time we paid a tribute to them - and learned something from them."

'Same stock'

Bhatt is of mixed Hindu-Muslim parentage, something he admits has 
shaped political views he attempts to put across in his films.
"The pluralism that India boasts about is in operation here," he stated.
"My father belongs to the lineage of the great saint of Gujarat, and 
my mother is Shi'a Muslim, so I am the embodiment of what is called 
the composite culture.
"When the world is being swept by global homogenisation, there is a 
tribal backlash - but I think India and Pakistan essentially belong 
to the same racial stock.
"We are glued together by our genes, we eat the same food, wear the 
same clothes, and I think, despite trying our best, we are unable to 
separate ourselves.
"It's time to accept the inevitable - that together we can fly - or 
we will sink."

______


#4.

The Indian Express (India), May 17, 2003

Her poetry could have been mantra for Sangh Parivar
Ritu Sarin
Lakhimpur Kheri, May 16: Madhumita Shukla, whose murder has shaken 
the political establishment in UP, could have been a Sangh Parivar 
icon, another Sadhvi Ritambhara. She lived dangerously and ended up 
with Amar Mani Tripathi, who was a minister in the Rajnath Singh 
government before being sacked for his alleged criminal links.

Spouting venom against the minorities and Pakistan, she was a 
rabble-rouser even while in school. A cassette of her poem reveals 
that she could have given Pravin Togadia and Narendra Modi a run for 
their money had the saffron fringe adopted her. How they - and the 
media - overlooked her in the politically charged environment of UP 
will remain a mystery.

Madhumita's looks were quite deceptive when it came to her poetry. 
With Benazir Bhutto as Pakistan Prime Minister, she exhorted the 
youth to spill blood in that country: ''Ghus ke veeron seema me ye 
kaam kijiye, Pakistan me jaake katle aam kijiye, aur Karachi tak 
goonje bam, bam, likh de Benazir par Vande Mataram.'' (Please cross 
the border and kill them, we should hear the blasts till Karachi and 
inscribe Vande Mataram on Benazir). Her advice to Prime Minister Atal 
Behari Vajpayee was to marry Benazir (forget Begum Khaleda Zia and 
Chandrika Kumaratunga) and bring Pakistan in dowry.

She was so vitriolic in her attack on Syed Shahabuddin and M F Husain 
at one kavi sammelan in Neemuch that the organiser had to gently 
remind her to go slow on josh (enthusiasm) and show more hosh 
(reason).

But she was not one to be deterred. 'Jaag chuke Seeta ke bete, kafan 
odh kar aayenge, Benazir tere seene par hum bhagwa dhwaj pharayenge, 
Khula ailan karti hoon, Babar ki auladon sunlo, Jaise Ayodhya mukt 
karayi, Mathura bhi mukt karayenge.' (Seeta's sons have woken up and 
they are seized with a death-wish; Benazir we are going to unfurl the 
saffron flag on your chest; Babar's progeny, beware, we will liberate 
Mathura the way we liberated Ayodhya).

She knew all the right lines. On the slaughter of cows, she made this 
impassioned plea: 'Is Hindustan ka ye kaisa samwidhan, ho raha ha 
desh me gau mata ka kataan, Roshni tumhe apni dikhana padega, sansad 
ko Jai Sri Ram gana padega.' (India's Constitution has failed to stop 
the slaughter of cows but Parliament will eventually have to sing Jai 
Shri Ram).

[...].


______


#6.

NARMADA BACHAO ANDOLAN
B-13, Shivam Flats, Ellora Park, Baroda-390007 (Ph. 0265-2282232
baroda@narmada.org)
62, Gandhi Marg, Badwani, M.P.( Ph. 07290-222464 badwani@narmada.org)

Press Note / May 14, 2003

Increase in SSP Height - A Corrupt Politics : Digvijay, Shinde Submit to
Modi's Wiles

GOVT.'S WATER-WAR AGAINST ITS OWN 12,000 FAMILIES FACING SUBMERGENCE
WITHOUT RESETLEMENT: FRAUDULENT CLAIMS OF REHABILITATION & BENEFITS

Once again, the Indian State has betrayed the Adivasis and farmers in the
Narmada valley by its cruel and presumptuous decision to impose the
submergence and destitution on its own people. It is nothing but the
intra-border terrorism by the Indian state on its own people It will be not
merely a doob (submergence), but a doom unleashed on the innocent civilians.

In yet another atrocious and illegal step, the Indian government has decided
to raise the height of the Sardar Sarovar Project from 95 meters to 100
meters, threatening the lives of over 12,000 tribal and farmer families in
the Narmada valley with no hope of resettlement. Along with the nefarious
designs of the infamous Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the
anti-people role played by the two Congress Chief Ministers- Sushilkumar
Shinde of Maharashtra and Digvijay Singh of Madhya Pradesh- has also been
equally hideous.

Not less than 12,000 (twelve thousand) tribal and peasant families on the
banks of the Narmada will be compelled to face submergence due to this
decision. The fact was well established through repeated surveys and
government appointed fact-finding missions. Knowing this fully well, the
bureaucrats and political bosses in the governments of Gujarat, Madhya
Pradesh and Maharashtra have connived to bring in flood and devastation
beyond last years' calamitous submergence to make the people destitute. With
hardly any progress on rehabilitation with land, as provided in the
policies, this rising of the height and consequent submergence is illegal,
unjust and a clear contempt of Supreme Court's Judgment 2000.

It will be literally a kind of water war in the Narmada Valley, before it is
witnessed by the world, as more than one hundred villages thickly populated
villages in Nimad (Madhya Pradesh) and twenty-six in Maharashtra, that will
be affected at 100 meters cannot be vacated and people cannot be resettled
by any means before the flooding occurs in the coming monsoon. The people
will face it and the Governments too will have to face nationwide and
worldwide infamy for yet another genocide - perpetuated in the name of
Gujarat this time by its infamous Chief Minister and , fully supported by
the so-called secular Governments! The decision is an absolute deception on
behalf of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh Governments, as they have submitted
outright before the all-powerful Modi, who could impose his will even on the
Prime Minister's office.

The Central government, the Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra governments along
with the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), which ahs given the 'conditional'
consent, have violated every single provision, norm, law and even the
Supreme Court order of October 2000 regarding the resettlement of displaced
people. The land-based resettlement is a cardinal provision of Narmada Water
Dispute Tribunal (NWDT), to which the state governments had sworn
allegiance. The land-based resettlement was endorsed by the Supreme Court
verdict in October 2000. None of the states have resettled the affected
people.

Betrayal by Singh

These two Chief Minister - Shinde and Singh - know fully well that they have
no land for the resettlement of over 3, 000 tribal families in Maharashtra
and atleast over 5, 000 more families in Madhya Pradesh, which will face
submergence due to the 100 meters dam (+ 3 meters of humps). This 103 m.
height will engulf all the 33 tribal villages in Maharashtra, and large and
well settled villages in the plains of Nimad, like Nisarpur, Bhavanriya,
Chikhalda, Chhota Badada.

Everyone concerned knows that, it is practically impossible even otherwise
the resettle the Nimad villagers, with fertile land and large, well-settled
villages bustling with agrarian, commercial and social activities. There is
simply no cultivable land available to resettle them. The so called 5000
hectares land, identified by the state government, had already been rejected
by the people three years back, after a joint inspection along with the
officials, as it was totally uncultivable. The M.P. government was in fact
resorting to the illegal means of forcibly disbursing cash compensation to
the oustees - which is a clear violation of the NWDT and Supreme Court
order.

Even very recently, Digvijay Singh had committed in his written reply to our
letters that his state would ensure strict compliance with the Tribunal
Awards and the Supreme Court Judgment. But his acquiescence for further
construction without resettling his own people exposes the rhetoric and
absolutely inhuman attitude by the media savvy and so called Green Chief
Minister. This is the height of dishonesty and betrayal by the Digvijay
Singh Government with his own people. It is the same government, which had
filed a separate suite in the Supreme Court in 1998, for decreasing the
height of the dam. It had then claimed that it wanted to save its fertile
Nimad land, had no land to resettle all these people, the state has no money
and no benefit from the dam.

Maharashtra's Duplicity

The previous Vilasrao Deshmukh government in Maharashtra had at least
maintained that it had no land for the resettlement of the tribal oustees of
the state. It had also appointed a joint Task Force, in September 2001, with
the participation of Narmada Bachao Andolan and other organizations, to
assess the extent and magnitude of the displacement, the status of the
resettlement of tribals in Maharashtra. The Task Force had finished its job
in 2002 itself and had come out with shocking revelations.

Accordingly, there has been no complete resettlement of the oustees even
below 90 m. Over 800 oustees shifted to the 'resettlement sites' are yet to
be fully rehabilitated. This alone will require 4000 hectares of land for
their land-based resettlement. Thousands of tribals are still to be
resettled and there is no land available for their resettlement. Nor there
is any plan ready for their resettlement. Also, there is an urgent need to
revise the estimates and lists of the project-affected persons (PAPs),
declaring the left-out families (undeclared) as the PAPs, to identify over
4000 hectares of land for their resettlement, and to expedite the process of
Planning Committee of NBA and the government.

The NBA and other organizations had a meeting with the Chief Minister Mr.
Shinde, on April 29 and again on May 8, where he announced that Maharashtra
will not allow increase in the height, until the people below that height
are resettled according to the NWDT. He agreed that the people would be
shown land and will be fully rehabilitated before any increase in the dam
height. But he seemed to rely more on h9is officials and was audacious to
set aside the Task Force recommendations for updating and revising records
of oustees, on the basis of the official resurvey done by a Task Force
involving the NBA. Without doing all this, the state has allowed flooding of
the lands and houses, bringing in destruction, much beyond last years'
submergence.

The Maharashtra bureaucracy has been hostile to the tribals in Narmada
valley and it wants to 'teach a lesson' to the valiant tribal villagers who
have made their life miserable by insisting on the law, their rights and
entitlements. Mr. Shinde made a choice against the tribals, in favour of
bureaucracy- and Modi. It is shameful for Maharashtra and for the nation
that a Chief Minister, who flaunts his being a Dalit (depressed caste) on
his sleeve, to agree to the destruction of life and livelihood of tribal
brethren..

It is obvious for both the Congress Chief Ministers (as also Gehlot, Chief
Minister of Rajasthan), that they will gain very little benefit, uncertain
electricity benefits -especially when Gujarat has taken away water beyond
original plans through lower level bypass tunnel- and not a drop of water
from Sardar Sarovar Project. Yet, they have decided to sacrifice their
people for the political and financial benefit of Modi Government and his
mainstream Gujarat, not the people from the drought affected region of Kutch
and Saurashtra.

The people of Saurashtra and Kutch in Gujarat, will have to wage a battle
against the giant urban-industrial elites and the capitalist powers, like
the people in the valley have been struggling for last 18 years. Beyond all
of this, the nation will have to reconsider about the investment of
thousands of crores of rupees in such an unviable and disastrous project
(total cost 44.000 crores), with rampant corruption. Sardar Sarovar Project
will prove to be a great social and economic disaster for Gujarat and India.
Drowning people will not drown the truth, nor can it wipe out the people's
struggle.

The Narmada struggle is a test case for all of us to see that the people's
rights are upheld. For the governments and the petty bureaucracy also, it is
a test case - nay matter of prestige - to see that people do not assert
their rights. What we are going to choose?

As far as NBA, we will keep fighting against the injustice, oppression and
fraud - symbolized by the Sardar Sarovar.


Medha Patkar

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

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