SACW | 18 Sept. 2003

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  |  18 September,  2003

[1] Pakistan: Miles to go and promises to keep (Edit., the daily Times)
[2] Book Announcement: Minorities and Human Rights in Bangladesh By 
D. Sengupta, S.K. Singh
[3] India: Judging genocide  (Praful Bidwai)
[4] India: Crime and punishment  (J Sri Raman)
[5] India: Homophobia Fatwa on our Queer Homo Sutra Country
[6] India: Digging in the dark: The ASI report on Ayodhya negates one 
of the constitutive principles of archaeology (Tapati Guha-Thakurta)
[7] India: Gujarat meeting in solidarity with people detained 
illegally for days on end (SPRAT)


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

[1.]

The Daily Times [ Pakistan]
September 18, 2003

EDITORIAL: Miles to go and promises to keep

Two events took place this week which must be carefully studied. The 
first was General Pervez Musharraf's appearance on a Q&A programme on 
the BBC (shown on PTV Tuesday) in which he made some interesting 
remarks. The second was a lecture in Islamabad by an ex-ambassador to 
Pakistan and current president of the US-based and influential Asia 
Society, Mr Nicholas Platt.
To take the second matter first, Ambassador Platt said that American 
interests in the region were threatened by four factors - "Taliban 
remnants trying to undermine Afghanistan's reconstruction, the 
possibility of Indo-Pak nuclear conflict, the danger of Pakistan 
succumbing on political and economic fronts and the rising tide of 
Islamic extremism". He also outlined the recommendations of a joint 
Asia Society-Council of Foreign Relations task force to the Bush 
government. Briefly, this task force has proposed an early 
Congressional authorisation of the proposed five-year US $3 billion 
assistance package to Pakistan; but it advises a linking of this 
package to Pakistan delivering on its campaign against terrorism, 
stopping the use of Pakistani territory for pro-Taliban activities 
across the Afghan border; social and economic reform; reduction of 
the Pakistan's army's role in civilian institutions; support to 
mainstream political parties; reform of state institutions, 
especially an end to the ISI's 'interference' in the electoral 
process; enlargement of education specially in the Pushtun areas; and 
an end to cross-LoC infiltration 'permanently'.
In addition to the aid package in exchange, Mr Platt wants the US 
government to ease restrictions on Pakistani textile exports to the 
United States. He seeks backdoor State Department diplomacy to get 
India and Pakistan to talk without saying what kind of solution the 
two should apply to the Kashmir problem. He also thinks that 
Washington, while pressuring Pakistan to end cross-LoC infiltration, 
should tell India to move forward on reaching an understanding with 
the elected government in Held Kashmir and address the aspirations of 
the Kashmiris.
Since India and Pakistan are equally in the ambit of the Asia 
Society, Mr Platt's statement is finely balanced among the three 
parties involved. First come the 'concerns' of the US government 
which he has presented as a 'given'. Second come the good things he 
wants the US to do. (It is, of course, anybody's guess whether 
Congress will heed the Asia Society's recommendation of speeding up 
the passage of the $3 billion assistance to Pakistan. The record 
elsewhere in the world, including Afghanistan, is not so good.) Third 
come the 'linkages', that is, things that General Musharraf will have 
to do to deserve it. Compared to this, what India has to do is 
negligible, which is understandable, because India is not seeking US 
assistance.
Interesting, though, the Asia Society comes across as tending to 
think along the same sort of lines as the many people who rang up 
General Musharraf on the BBC programme. While his claim that 
substantial progress has been made against terrorism is fairly 
credible, it is doubtful if anything he says on the permanent removal 
of extremism from the body politic of Pakistan can be wholly correct. 
He admits to presiding over a country that is full of extremism. But 
the battle against it will have to be long-term and will have to come 
from a government in Islamabad with better democratic and liberal 
credentials than the PML-QA. (Of course, one will have to be fair and 
say the problem belongs to the entire Islamic world and relates to 
the way most Muslims have begun to think in the past decade or so.) 
It is also true that the next step from extremist thinking - 
terrorism - has subsided in Pakistan, except that in Balochistan last 
month one saw a frightening re-run of the sectarian mayhem we saw at 
the peak of Talibanisation in 1998-99. Therefore General Musharraf 
can't say that he has succeeded in taming the seminaries where the 
sectarian brainwash flourishes. Then there are the jihadi militias. 
True, he has banned some of the jihadi militias under UN Security 
Council resolution 1373, but all of them are still around under 
changed names. The leader of one such dreaded organisation may be at 
large on a point of law but his provocative rhetoric can and should 
be stopped, which General Musharraf has not done. Also, the general 
should have got rid of, or diluted, the notorious Blasphemy Law but 
he hasn't done so. And so on.
Of course, General Musharraf will vehemently deny that there is 
infiltration across the LoC. And it is true that much of it has gone 
down from the peak of the mid-1990s. But, regrettably, the world 
finds India's point of view more credible that it hasn't stopped. 
Everybody understands that some infiltration will always take place, 
given the terrain around the LoC, but the fact that the demand is 
included in Mr Platt's statement can only mean that he has an 
'independent' source that is telling him that Pakistan is still 
sponsoring it. Thus, while it is generally accepted that whereas 
General Musharraf has delivered considerably on the Western front, he 
has not done so well on the Eastern front in relations with India. 
One might add here that there is much bloody-minded stonewalling on 
the part of India also to squeeze advantage from the lemon of the 
international campaign against terrorism. Also, General Musharraf's 
reference on the BBC to the 'Pushtun factor' in the old Afghan policy 
was misplaced because it smelled like India's Tamil factor in its 
failed Sri Lanka policy of yore. Surely, it is in Pakistan's interest 
to extricate itself from both eastern and western involvements to be 
better able to focus on the internal problems impinging on its 
security.
Ambassador Platt's message is that a strategic and mutually 
profitable US-Pakistan engagement can be built if Pakistan moves in 
the 'right' direction at home and abroad. General Musharraf has come 
some way down that road. But he still has miles to go and promises to 
keep. *


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[2.]

Book Announcement:

SENGUPTA D., SINGH S.K.
Minorities and Human Rights in Bangladesh
Authors Press, New Delhi, 2003, 290 p.

This edited volume is an attempt to chart out and explain the retreat 
of secularism in Bangladesh and the consequent decline in the status 
of minorities. The contributors point to the historitical reasons for 
predominantly Muslim Bangladesh to adopt a secular constitution when 
it won independence from Pakistan as well as the 
socio-politico-economic reasons for its abandonment.

The volume shows how the quest for legitimacy by unelected leaders 
who had come to power under questionable circumstances led them to 
make compromises with fundamentalist political formations who had 
opposed the formation of Bangladesh itself. The result, the volume 
shows the de facto retreat of secularism followed by its de jure 
abandonment as exemplified by the adoption of Islam as the State 
religion. The status of the minority communities became worse and the 
reestablishment of democracy actually may have made things worse.

CONTENTS

Introduction
Dipankar Sengupta and Sudhir Kumar Singh

Secularism and Bangladeshi Politics

1. The Politics of Communalism and Secularism in Bangladesh
Krishan Gopal

2. Islamic Fundamentalism in Bangladesh
Nirmal Jindal

3. The Need to Uphold Secular Values in Bangladesh
Jagdish P. Sharma

4. Religious Politics in Bangladesh: A New Jingoism
Sanjay Bhardwaj

5. Islamic Fundamentalism and Minorities: A Comparative Study of 
Pakistan and Bangladesh
Saswati Chanda and Alok Kumar Gupta

6. Economic Success and the Legitimation of Islamism
Dipankar Sengupta

The Hindu Community in Bangladesh

7. Islamic Fundamentalism in Bangladesh and its Impact on Minorities
Ruchira Joshi

8. Human Rights of the Minority Communities in Bangladesh - A Far Cry
Bimal Pramanik

9. Fundamentalist Challenge to Democracy in Bangladesh
Pramod Mishra & Amit Kumar

10. Human Rights in Bangladesh: The Case of the Hindu Minority
Tapati Chakravarty

11. Minorities and Islamic Nationalism
S.N Singh

12. A Study on Perceived Fraternal Relative Deprivation of Hindus in Bangladesh
Asoke Kumar Saha

Ethnic Minorities and International Legal Position on the Rights of Minorities

13. Rights of the Minorities under International Law
R.S Saini

14. Chakmas and Human Rights in Bangladesh
Sudhir Kumar Singh & Davinder S. Kakkar

Migration and the Bangladeshi Diaspora

15. Migration and Conflict: Bangladeshi Migration and the 
Socio-Political Rights of the Indigenous Population in Assam
Biswajeet Saikia

16. Migration in Bangladesh: Strategy of Survival
Navin Mishra & Pradeep Tandon

17. Bangladeshi Diaspora: Existence of Multiple Identities of Bengalis Abroad
Pritam Banerjee

18. Education, Religion and Global Order
Ehsanul Haq


Source:
Centre de Sciences Humaines
2, Aurangzeb Road. New Delhi 110 011 - India
Ph. (91) 11 2 301 6259 | Fax. (91) 11 2 301 8480
E-mail : public at csh-delhi.com



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[3.]


The Hindustan Times [ India]
September 18, 2003

Judging genocide

by Praful Bidwai

  As the public awaits the Supreme Court judgment in the Best Bakery 
case with bated breath, we are fast approaching the 65th anniversary 
of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), the Nazis' infamous pogrom 
of Jews after a German diplomat's assassination in Paris. The 
comparison is not hyperbolic. Last year's butchery in Gujarat was 200 
times greater in scale and much more bestial than Kristallnacht - the 
prelude to the gassing of 6 million Jews.

The Supreme Court's pronouncements last Friday - including its 
unsparing admonishment of Narendra Modi, its description of his 
government's appeal as an "eyewash", and its declaration that "we 
have no faith in [Gujarat's] prosecution or government" - have raised 
hopes that it will take extraordinary steps to do justice to the 
victims of Gujarat.

Those hopes were buoyed by the judgment convicting the Bajrang Dal 
activist/supporter Dara Singh for the gruesome burning alive of 
Graham Staines and his two children. That this followed two eyewash 
attempts, the first by a central ministers' group and the other by 
the Wadhwa inquiry, affirms the citizen's faith in the possibility of 
justice in India.

If Staines' murder belonged, as President Narayanan put it, to the 
"world's inventory of black deeds", the post-Godhra killing of 2,000 
Muslims opened a disgraceful new book of horrors - unprecedented 
globally for a half-century, except perhaps in Rwanda and Bosnia. 
Special international tribunals are now trying those genocidal crimes.

The post-February 27 Gujarat violence was unique in independent 
India. Never before did a state government collude so openly with 
communal thugs, rapists and murderers to target one religious group. 
(Indeed, it planned and organised some of the violence.) And never 
before did central functionaries, including the prime minister, so 
persistently shield the guilty by advancing the repugnant logic of 
"action-reaction" and citing non-existent "security threats".

There could be two opinions on whether the thoroughly condemnable 
Godhra episode was spontaneous or organised. (Evidence supports the 
first view.) But this is emphatically untrue of the planned, 
premeditated, systematic, violence that followed. In that danse 
macabre, thousands were torched or speared to death by frenzied 
anti-Muslim mobs. Horrific sexual violence was unleashed. Property 
worth hundreds of crores was destroyed/looted. Lakhs became refugees 
in ethnic cleansing in vast areas.

Crimes Against Humanity, the report of the Concerned Citizens' 
Tribunal, comprising eminent jurists and scholars, documents this 
after examining 2,094 statements and 1,500 witnesses. The pattern of 
violence shows the selective targeting of Muslims, inhuman forms of 
brutality, military precision and planning, the key role of the RSS, 
the BJP and the VHP-Bajrang office-bearers, use of Hindu religious 
symbols and complicity and participation of policemen and 
bureaucrats. This was planned, sustained and prolonged through 
hate-speech, intimidation and terror.

The defining characteristic of this violence was that Muslims were 
targeted simply because they were Muslims. The attackers' main 
slogans were: "Kill, burn, destroy their society, finish them off..." 
This highlights the genocidal nature of the violence.

Article II of the International Convention on Genocide, 1948, defines 
genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to 
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or 
religious group" like: "(a) killing [its] members; (b) causing [them] 
serious bodily or mental harm; (c) deliberately inflicting on the 
group conditions... calculated to bring about its physical 
destruction...; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births 
within the group; (e) forcibly transferring [its] children... to 
another group".

Gujarat unambiguously fits the definition. The violence involved the 
(partial) physical destruction of a community; economic destruction; 
sexual assault as an instrument of domination and terror inspired by 
"dark obsessions" with destroying women's sexual organs; sabotage of 
relief and rehabilitation; and the publicly declared intention to 
liquidate, mentally harm, humiliate and subjugate Muslims.

India is a signatory to the convention. This casts on it a duty to 
punish those responsible for genocide through a competent legal 
forum. This could be best done by creating a special independent 
national tribunal for hate-crimes and genocide. The Supreme Court 
must go beyond the specifics of the Best Bakery case to create this 
tribunal, composed of personnel selected by the Chief Justice of 
India, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. Put in 
perspective, Best Bakery involved the killing of 14 people. Gulberg 
was much bigger (70), as was Naroda-Patiya (200).

Justice for Gujarat entails going beyond even these discreet cases. 
Its genocidal hate-crimes must be seen in their totality, not just as 
this or that case of murder, arson, rape or psychological 
subjugation. This means that there must be fresh investigation, 
re-framing of (wrongly dropped) charges, and re-trial.

Equally relevant are some related issues. Gujarat witnessed a 
fundamental, total, prolonged breakdown of the rule of law and the 
Constitution, in which the Centre became complicit. It refused to 
defend fundamental rights, or investigate or criticise the barbaric 
violence. Vajpayee first vaguely, mildly, criticised Modi, but soon 
started blaming the victims. Fanciful conspiracies were concocted to 
link Godhra to al-Qaeda and demonise Muslims. This continues. All 240 
people charged under POTA in Gujarat are Muslims.

Because the Gujarat case is extraordinary, the court is called upon 
to do extraordinary things, the more because the government failed, 
and because the state administration has little integrity or autonomy 
to conduct a fair trial. This entails the creation of new, 
independent investigation and prosecution agencies which take their 
directions from the Supreme Court. The trials must take place 
primarily outside Gujarat.

It is equally imperative to extend the prosecution to the links 
between the pogrom and the hate-speech which became part of Modi's 
electioneering - a clear case for invoking Section 153 of the IPC. 
These organic links concern the political use of hate-speech.

That still leaves a huge problem: How to ensure that witnesses 
survive Gujarat's vitiated climate and are not terrorised into 
changing their testimony? (Even Ehsan Jaffrey's widow was intimidated 
by Sangh parivar goons this week). This can only happen if there is 
serious, humane, rehabilitation and adequate protection for the 
victims through a comprehensive supportive infrastructure. The 
Gujarat government cannot be trusted to provide this.

The infrastructure should have come into being 18 months ago, but the 
governments of the day failed. In particular, the Centre refused to 
apply Article 356 and impose President's Rule when a constitutional 
breakdown was manifest. Thus, even the processes of recording and 
registering crimes, listing witnesses, collecting evidence, etc., got 
corrupted.

To rectify this, the Supreme Court must step into an area which is 
not its classical, normal, domain - simply because the ends of 
justice cannot be met in any other way. The court is empowered to do 
"complete justice in any cause or matter" before it by Article 142.

This might seem onerous. But there is no alternative to a 
comprehensive sui generis process of creating a national tribunal, 
and independent agencies for investigation and prosecution. We have 
failed far too often to bring the perpetrators of hate-crimes to book 
- to the point that the government's lawyer last week cited that 
failure as an excuse for condoning the Gujarat genocide! India cannot 
afford a culture of impunity for grave human rights violations and 
hate-crimes. That will make a cruel mockery of our democracy. 
Democracy is an empty shell without fundamental rights, norms of 
public accountability, representative institutions and the rule of 
law.

Letting the Gujarat culprits get away and papering over the gravity 
of what happened would be the surest way of destroying the 
constitutional edifice of governance - indeed, this society. The 
Supreme Court must not disappoint the public.

______


[4.]

The Daily Times [Pakistan]
September 18, 2003

HUM HINDUSTANI : Crime and punishment

J Sri Raman

The two cases show what public pressure can accomplish. In the 
Staines murder case, external, especially Western, pressure has 
certainly helped. And, in the Best Bakery case, popular opinion 
inside India made a significant difference
This is a tale of court pronouncements in the two vicious crimes of 
religious-communal violence that traumatised India. The 
pronouncements do not exactly present a study in contrast but 
illustrate the different kinds of pressures for justice in such cases.
On September 15, a special trial court delivered its judgment in the 
infamous Staines murder case. The court under a district-level judge 
in Bhubaneswar, capital of the eastern State of Orissa, convicted all 
but one of the 14 accused. The judgement came four and a half years 
after the crime that shook the country and elicited worldwide 
condemnation. Just three days earlier, the Supreme Court of India had 
criticised the Narendra Modi government of Gujarat in the equally 
infamous Best Bakery case. The highest court of the land questioned 
the right of the Modi regime to continue in office if it could not 
bring to book those involved in one of the most gruesome incidents of 
the Gujarat pogrom of 2002.
In the first case, Australian missionary Graham Stuart Staines (who 
had been running a leprosy home in Orissa for years) was burnt alive 
along with his two young sons - Phillip (11) and Timothy (7) - when 
they were asleep inside a jeep in a tribal village. The incident took 
place in January 1999. The prime accused was Dara Singh alias 
Rabindra Kumar Pal, associated with the Bajrang Dal, one of the 
rabidly communal outfits of the sangh 'parivar', the far-Right 
'family'.
The second instance was also an ordeal by fire for the victims. 
Fourteen people trapped in the Best Bakery unit in the heart of 
Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat, were burnt alive when the place 
was torched in the presence of police during the riots. The role 
played by members of the 'parivar' like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and 
the Bajrang Dal in the Gujarat riots was no secret. Nor, apparently, 
were the identities of the arsonists in this particular case, 
according to earlier reports. It is no secret that the state 
prosecution extended protection to the accused. And this has been 
taken up before the Supreme Court.
In both cases, progress towards justice has been a painful process, 
slowed down by hurdles put up by quarters at the highest levels. In 
the Staines murder case, L K Advani, then Union Home Minister and now 
Deputy Prime Minister, showed unseemly haste in giving a premature 
public certificate of innocence to the Dal and the rest of the 
'parivar'; the cue was picked up by concerned authorities and 
agencies at the centre and in the state. The murder was the 
culmination of an anti-Christian, especially an anti-missionary, 
campaign by the 'parivar', particularly in the Dangs area of Gujarat.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, true to style, initially 
deplored the 'excesses' of the campaign. However, a single visit to 
Dangs and he was pleading for 'a national debate on conversions', 
imparting legitimacy of sorts to the violent campaign.
Not surprisingly, it took over a year for the prime accused to be 
arrested, though he was accessible to the media and available for 
interviews during this period. Proximity to power centres even earned 
him the support of influential leaders of the Christian community at 
the national level. There were times when many lost hope that the 
court that was especially set up for a speedy disposal of the case 
could serve its purpose.
Hamstrung even more severely, has been the process of investigation 
and justice in the Best Bakery case. The high-level political support 
for Modi, even as he was presiding over the horrendous pogrom, was 
hardly concealed. Advani, who just once mumbled disapproval of the 
Gujarat chief minister's more outrageous public utterances, made 
ample amends by stridently defending Modi's decision to manipulate 
the communal polarisation in the mid-term election in his state. 
Vajpayee also blessed the election campaign by showering praise on 
Modi after having shown some disapproval earlier.
The state apparatus was quick on the uptake. The special court 
acquitted all the 21 accused after witnesses were intimidated. The 
prime witness, the young Zahira Sheikh, subsequently went to the 
National Human Rights Commission and complained about the official 
coercion she could have resisted only at grave risk to her entire 
family if she had testified at the trial. The NHRC, in turn, 
approached the Supreme Court with a plea to transfer the case to a 
court outside Gujarat, while the Modi government wants to appeal to 
the Gujarat High Court against the special court's decision.
It was a copy of this appeal that enraged the apex court. Calling the 
appeal 'an eyewash', a bench of the court asked the Modi government 
to quit, if it could not govern properly. This does not mean, of 
course, that justice has been done in the case. Transferring the case 
outside Gujarat will be a touch decision for the Supreme Court, as it 
will imply a censure of the State-level judiciary. The Staines case 
has not been closed either as Dara Singh has declared his resolve to 
contest his conviction by the special court.
The two cases, however, do show what public pressure can accomplish. 
In the Staines murder case, external, especially Western, pressure 
has certainly helped. And, in the Best Bakery case, popular opinion 
inside India does constitute a pressure that the Modis of the land 
may not be able to ignore easily.
The writer is a journalist and peace activist based in Chennai, India


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[5.]

http://india.indymedia.org/
17 September 2003

Homophobia Fatwa on our Queer Homo Sutra Country:
Our sexuality should not be the business of the 'secular' Indian state !

On the 9th of September, 2003, our beloved Indian government, finally 
responded to the petition filed in the Delhi High Court by Naz 
Foundation (India) Trust, in 2001. The response as usual was refusal 
to decriminalise homosexuality. The government told the court that it 
had no intention to ditch section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which 
says gay men can face up to 10 years in prison. Our sexist government 
claims that homosexuality is against the beliefs of the 'majority' of 
the country, and therefore shouldn't be legalised. Well, since the 
majority of Indians still believe in dowry, in caste and sexual 
discrimination etc., why on earth have the Indian legislators been 
going against the grain and making anti-people laws against sati, 
child marriage, dowry . . .?

For long years civil rights groups and lesbian and gay activists have 
been campaigning for recognition of diverse sexualities and 
questioning an archaic and prejudiced law, which violates rights of 
Indian citizens. In the recent years groups working with the HIV 
positive and on AIDS prevention in India have pointed that police 
brutality and the illegality of gay sex, are restricting many from 
coming forward to receive information on how to protect themselves 
from the disease. The government should be loudly told to mind its 
own sex and to respect peoples rights and choices, even if they arent 
'majority' choices. The government wont ever listen, if we dont 
actively campaign and push it. Activists in progressive social 
movement circuits should also be lobbied not to remain silent. They 
should be told their silence is complicity. It is imperative for all 
to join in to expand heterosexual secular India into a safe space for 
lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender [LGBT] people and other 
sexuality-minorities. A letter has been drafted by some groups in 
Delhi for public campaigning. Feel free to use text from this to 
remodel your own letters and send this to newspapers and to our moral 
policemen in and out of government.

Draft of Open Letter Challenging Government of India's assertion not 
to decriminalise homosexuality and to create public opinion
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/new/openletter15092003.html


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[6.]
<http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2019/stories/20030926004002300.htm>
The Telegraph [India] September 17, 2003

Digging in the dark
- The ASI report on Ayodhya negates one of the constitutive 
principles of archaeology

by Tapati Guha-Thakurta

The author is professor of history, Centre for Studies in Social 
Sciences, Calcutta
The protests had rung out more than a decade ago. Ever since the 
miraculous archaeological "discoveries" of S.P. Gupta and B.B. Lal of 
1990 armed the Vishwa Hindu Parishad with its most powerful body of 
"evidence" about the remains of a Hindu temple beneath the Babri 
Masjid, professional historians and archaeologists have cried 
themselves hoarse over the flagrant abuse of their disciplines at 
Ayodhya. The very form of the presentation of the Ramjanmabhumi 
demand, as a historically testifiable thesis, made "proof" a central 
issue in the controversy - the key endangered element, to be saved 
and retrieved. D. Mandal's tract, Ayodhya: Archaeology After 
Demolition (1993), stands to date as the most convincing challenge to 
the temple "evidence". Mandal, a field archaeologist, exposed the 
complete violation of the science of stratigraphy in the digging of 
trenches and in the analysis of the excavated artifacts at Ayodhya. 
He showed how the random mixing of post-depositional debris with 
properly stratified finds and a confusion of artifactual sequences 
automatically denuded this entire corpus of material of any status as 
"data".

If there was one fundamental point that emerged from this 
archaeological debate of the early Nineties, it was the impossibility 
of anything like "incontrovertible evidence" in archaeology; also, 
the impossibility of unearthing clues about any single or distinct 
pre-mosque structure beneath the layers of debris of the demolished 
masjid at the site. That this point has been of no import at all is 
today up for all to see.

But what comes as a real eye-opener is the way the science and the 
profession of archaeology have once again allowed themselves to be 
dragged into the renewed farce of providing "hard proof" that a 10th 
or 11th Hindu temple existed immediately beneath the floor levels of 
the demolished mosque. That such "scientific" and "indisputable" 
evidence should now come after five months of excavation by the 
Archaeological Survey of India and in the form of a 574 page report 
submitted to the Allahabad High Court on August 22, 2003, comes as 
the greatest irony. It finally drives home the utter futility of all 
the scholarly criticisms and exhortations of the past two decades, 
and its invocation of objective knowledge.

Truth and facts died an ignoble death at Ayodhya long ago. Yet, the 
search for newer and newer "evidence" continues to drive the politics 
of the site. Thus new scientific "facts" about a sprawling 
multi-pillared temple structure beneath the Babri site can still be 
nonchalantly offered by a professional body like the ASI, to a 
gullible public and a jubilant Hindu right-wing, to be used as the 
best moral tool to disinherit the Sunni Waqf board of its rightful 
proprietorship of the land. And a clearly political agenda of a hunt 
for an imaginary temple can take on the scientific trappings of an 
excavation and a voluminous site report, this time with a token 
adherence to the tenets of stratigraphy.

This hot document, the ASI report, apparently in the public domain, 
remains tantalizingly out of reach. So, we are up to our ears with 
the latest reports on the "proof" of a massive 50x30 metre walled 
structure just beneath the surface mosque floor, of some 50 pillar 
bases that stand in full alignment with this structure, of terracotta 
figurines, lotus motif carvings and fragments of an amalaka, and most 
tellingly, of a circular sanctum-like depression at the centre of the 
disputed site, just beneath the make-shift shrine of Ram Lalla.

The media has also picked up the barrage of criticisms against these 
findings, brought up by the team of independent archaeological 
observers like Suraj Bhan, R.C. Thakran, Supriya Verma, Mohammed Abid 
and Irfan Habib. We are told of their counter-readings of the 
excavated mound as a rich habitation rather than a religious site 
till possibly the early medieval period, and of the existence 
thereafter of a distinctly Islamic structure of the early Sultanate 
period, as indicated most clearly by the presence of the lime-surkhi 
floor (a technique brought in by Muslim builders) and vast deposits 
of glazed tile ware.

If this ancient city site has yielded important evidence of 
settlements from the Northern Black Polished Ware and later Kushana 
and Gupta era, its richest archeological data pertain nonetheless to 
this early medieval Sultanate period. And these archaeologists have 
stuck out their necks to argue that if anything was razed, expanded 
and appropriated in the building of the Babri Masjid, it was a prior 
mosque structure. These finds, they allege, have been deliberately 
suppressed or distorted in the ASI report in its determination to 
discover only a destroyed temple at the site.

The quest for infallible underground evidence has only ended in a 
mammoth spectre of public misinformation. The independent or Left 
professionals, who were mobilized as representatives of the Sunni 
Waqf board and the all-India Muslim personal law board to adjudicate 
on the correctness and scientificity of the excavations at Ayodhya 
are now left in the greatest bind. They have on them the terrible 
onus of having to fight the "proof" of temple remains with an armoury 
of counter-proof or lack of proof.

The kind of faith that the Muslim parties have vested in the truth 
and objectivity of archaeological evidence is quite pathetic. They 
have thus allowed themselves to dance to the tune of the VHP; they 
were persuaded by leaders like Zafrayab Jeelani to agree to the 
digging of the Muslim graveyard site in the precincts even as 
excavation was disallowed beneath the crucial spot of the makeshift 
Ram shrine; and they have depended on the intervening powers of this 
team of selected archaeologists to set the "facts" right in their 
favour.

Throughout the months of the excavation, these visiting 
archaeologists had been continually handing in to the Allahabad court 
their observations and objections (including their objections to what 
they were not allowed to see or handle). Now they are faced with the 
unenviable responsibility of having to supplant the volume and 
intricacies of the ASI report at court with an equally formidable 
counter-document that can prove the falsities and fabrications of 
this excavation data.

More than at any other time, the public today is in dire need of 
being informed about the basics of standard excavation procedure, 
about the norms of digging, classifying and reporting, and about the 
regularity with which artifacts like terracotta statues, pottery, 
tiles or architectural carvings crop up in all such multi-cultural 
structural mounds, without begetting any conclusions about the 
existence of either temples or mosques. Only then would the 
aberrations in what occurred at Ayodhya from the middle of March this 
year be clear.

Why, we must ask, were trenches laid out only in accordance with the 
highly questionable Indo-Japanese ground penetrating radar survey? 
Why was the crucial epicentre of the site occupied by the Ram shrine 
left undisturbed, with worship continuing in the midst of an 
excavated site? Why were trenches dug with little consideration for 
natural lighting, with pink and saffron shamianas further blocking 
out that light? One could well say that a temple had been "found" 
here, even as the excavation began, well before any report was 
submitted. A temple was the only demand at the site - from everyone, 
whether they be sadhus, security personnel or court officials.

A renowned archaeologist has applauded the fact that, for the first 
time in Indian history, a full excavation has been conducted under 
the control of the judiciary, pushing the ASI into submitting this 
more-and-more rare product of a site report. But what credibility 
rests today with a body that has allowed its professional practice to 
be dictated by the archaeological illiteracy of political parties and 
the court, that could be jolted out of its notorious inertia about 
completing and publishing reports only under the political 
stranglehold of staging a made-to-order dig and a trussed-up report?

But there is of course a much larger accusation to be made here about 
the politics of archaeology at Ayodhya. To have permitted itself to 
be embroiled in this pointless exercise of authentication and 
refutation of underground evidence has been, in my opinion, the 
greatest undoing of the discipline. After all, what difference does 
it make even if temple remains do exist at the site, even if one 
assumes that portions of a temple were razed and assimilated within 
the medieval mosque?

This basic point needed to be made, and made most forcefully, by 
historians and archaeologists. As lawyers are pointing out, proof of 
a prior temple cannot alter the terms of the property dispute: it 
cannot take away the hard fact testified by revenue records that for 
centuries now, this mosque site was a waqf property. More important, 
the past "crime" of the destruction of a 10th-century temple by 
Babur's general, Mir Baqi, cannot by any means justify the 
far-greater modern-day crime of the razing of a 16th-century mosque.

For that negates one of archaeology's fundamental constitutive 
principles - the protection and conservation of historical monuments, 
established through a series of statutes in colonial and independent 
India. It goes against the grain of all its intricate knowledges of 
several other such temple-remains beneath mosques or vestiges of 
Buddhist and Jain establishments beneath Hindu religious edifices 
throughout India. It renders illegitimate, by the same logic (say the 
logic of appropriating a Buddhist site), several of the country's 
most revered temples in the custody of the ASI.

Historical retribution and repossession becomes the most dangerous of 
arguments for the country's vast architectural inheritance. If there 
was a single secular principle that the government and the 
archaeological profession should have established at Ayodhya, it was 
that the Babri Masjid had to be protected as a historical structure. 
The progressive infiltration of the mosque since its first forcible 
occupation by the Bairagis sadhus of the Hanumangarhi temple in the 
1850s - from the construction of the Ram Chabutra within the compound 
to entry of idols, pujaris and worshippers - have underlined the 
urgency of this need for over a century now.

There were many critical moments when such a law could and should 
have intervened - when, for instance, during the communal riots at 
Ayodhya in 1934, one of the domes of the masjid was destroyed and had 
to be renovated by the government; or when on the night of December 
22-23, 1949, the Ram idols were planted inside and the property had 
to be locked and attached by court order; or even as late as the 
Eighties when, following the "opening of the locks", the unrestricted 
access of Hindu worshippers and the sangh parivar's mounting 
Ramjanmabhoomi campaign made the destruction of the mosque an 
imminent danger. The "disputed property" needed to be more 
categorically claimed as an archaeological protected monument.

To have failed in this cardinal task, and then to have entered the 
battle for proof and counter-proof about the historicity of the site 
as Ramjanmabhoomi and the presence of the conjectured temple, were to 
have given the game over fully to the masters of Hindutva. There is 
little left to be salvaged now. Having first lost portions of the 
courtyard, then the rights of worship and eventually the entire 
masjid, the Muslim litigants are fast on the path of forfeiting their 
last rights on the property. To hope that the rule of law can still 
prevail to retain for the disinherited this symbolic land, or to ask 
that this emptied excavated mound be now preserved as a prime ancient 
and medieval archaeological site is like crying in the dark.


______


[7.] [The following might still interest people even though the date 
of the event  is past ]

Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 12:00:08 +0530

You are aware of the widespread reports that dozens of members of the 
minority community have been illegally detained for several days.

SPRAT has arranged a meeting at Jyoti Sangh, Relief Road, Ahmedabad, 
at 9:30 PM on Wednesday 17th Sept, 03 specially for the residents of 
Dariapur, Kalupur and Shahpur  on Law and Citizens. Friends of the 
Fraternity like Justice Rawani [retd], Mr Girish Patel, Dr Mukul 
Sinha etc will be joining as a mark of solidarity with people 
detained illegally for days on end.  Centre for Social Justice has 
graciously supplied book and pamphlet on citizen's rights at law. The 
pamphlet will be duplicated and circulated.

Earlier the police had denied permission for a public meeting at 
Dariapur, in writing. Hence this meeting in an auditorium.

If need be a Citizens' Tribunal will be set up to hear the 
testimonies of the relatives of illegally detained persons in camera 
and to issue its findings publicly. Also, working with other 
organizations, other public pressure programmes including a mass 
dharna will be organized, as discussed at a joint NGO meeting 
recently.

We must exercise all our democratic privileges to uphold the 
citizen's rights. Your support is solicited.

With fraternal regards

Sameer Pradhan
Asst Vice President

SPRAT
[Society for the Promotion of Rational Thinking]

SF-8, Rajnagar Complex, Narayan Nagar Road,
Paldi, AHMEDABAD 380 007

Tel: +79-663 46 55 /66 /77
Fax: +79-661 20 49
Web: <http://www.mysprat.org/>www.mysprat.org



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Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on matters of peace 
and democratisation in South Asia. SACW is an independent & 
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Citizens Web (www.mnet.fr/aiindex).
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