SACW | 28 March 2004

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire   |  28 March,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

[1] Pakistan: Criminals -- or victims of an unjust system? (Beena Sarwar)
[2] India:  My Religion is not my Nation (Anuradha M. Chenoy)
[3] India: Between jhatka and halal - Gujarat after two years of 
"normalcy" (Satish Deshpande)
[4] The Indian-ness of Pluralism can be found in Goa, Maria Aurora 
Couto tells Sagarika Ghose
[5] The controversy in India over US scholar (Manu Bhagavan)
[6] Response to material carried in SACW 26-27 March (Ammu Abraham)


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

[1]


The News on Sunday [Pakistan]
March 28, 2004

Criminals -- or victims of an unjust system?

If the President really wants to help women in prison, he would do 
well to repeal the Hudood Ordinances. This would have a far greater 
impact than limited remissions and pardons

By Beena Sarwar

On March 20, 2004, President Musharraf announced some relief for 
female prisoners, thus implicitly acknowledging that many of these 
prisoners are imprisoned unjustly and deserve special attention. But 
this relief will not solve the overall problem of an unjust system 
that allows innocent women to be locked up, often for years, in jails 
that house three times their capacity (male prisons are even more 
overcrowded, housing five times their capacity).

Most women (90 per cent, according to official sources) are 
eventually acquitted, which means they were unfairly accused in the 
first place. But most are also desperately poor and powerless, with 
limited access to lawyers and bail money. Some, like 22-year old 
Samina, receive bail that is then cancelled.

Samina is among the over 1,200 female under-trial prisoners (UTPs) in 
Pakistan, who will not benefit from the President's remissions. These 
apply only to female convicts -- just 463 across the country. The 
categories to be provided relief are: female convicts whose children 
are in jail with them (sentences to be reduced by a year), girls 
under 18, and women over 60, who have served at least one-third of 
their sentence (to be released).

There are few under-18 or over 60 year old female under-trial 
prisoners or convicts in Pakistani prisons (Karachi Women's Prison 
has no under-18s, a couple of over-60s, and only six convict mothers 
whose children are with them). The more urgent need is to re-examine 
and overhaul the legal system which is being used to punish women 
like Samina, not for any violent or heinous crime, but for going 
against social norms.

The concessions are conditional on the convicts not being implicated 
in terrorist cases or heinous crimes like murder -- or implicated in 
cases of theft, drugs, or 'zina'. The President intends to take this 
last matter up with the law ministry, because, as he rightly 
questioned, "What kind of zina would an under 18-year old girl be 
involved in?" A point worth considering in this context is that in 
many countries, sexual relations with a minor are statutory rape, 
even if the minor's consent was supposedly involved.

The weapon of choice for families wanting to punish daughters going 
against their wishes is the Zina Ordinance. Seventy-one out of the 
190 female UTPs in Karachi face zina charges; only one has been 
convicted.

Samina says she couldn't stand living at home. "My father was always 
beating my mother, who was the only earning member in the family 
besides me. Then I met Imran, and he asked me to marry him. I liked 
him, and I agreed. The day I went away with him, my father had really 
beaten my mother badly. He took me to the court and we got married. 
but now the same court is being used to punish us. Why?"

"We only got married, we didn't commit any crime," says her husband, 
gesturing with a shackled hand as they sit together on a dilapidated 
bench outside the court -- the only way they can now meet until the 
matter is settled.

Samina narrates that her father initially tried to file kidnapping 
charges against her husband. "The police came to arrest him, but I 
told them that I had gone of my own will and we were legally married. 
They told my father they couldn't do anything." She alleges that her 
father then offered the police Rs 50,000 to get her back. "I heard 
all this, sitting there in the police station while they argued. 
After some time, the police found a way out for my father."

This way out was to file charges under the Zina Ordinance, by 
accusing Samina of contracting a second marriage while already 
married. "I was engaged to my cousin," she says. "If there was a 
previous nikah, why did they take six months to produce a nikahnama? 
The judge never even asked us anything, just cancelled our bail."

Since then, both have been in prison, but say they have no regrets. 
Samina's labourer father-in-law standing nearby has already spent 
thousands on legal fees for the couple; Samina's father has offered 
to settle out of court for three lakh rupees -- which her in-laws are 
willing to try and raise, but Samina refuses. "That would be like my 
own father selling me," she says. She and her husband would rather 
stay in jail "as long as we are fated to."

"There are many girls like me in jail," she says. Others are 
co-accused with male relatives, or accused instead of male relatives. 
Some don't even know what crime they have been charged with. Saima, 
accused of dacoity, had her bail recently rejected by the High Court. 
Tahira, who has been in jail for almost six years, recently sent her 
7-year old son to live with her mother. She has been sentenced to 25 
years for kidnapping, along with her policeman husband who was 
framed, she says, by his enemies.

Shumaila, brash and articulate, also faces kidnapping charges; the 
co-accused, her husband, is absconding. "If we get a bail order, we 
don't have the bail money," she says, chewing gum defiantly. "If the 
lawyer comes to court, the judge doesn't show up." Her greatest worry 
is for her 6-year old son, who is with her -- one of the 46 children 
who live with their mothers in Karachi Women's Prison.

Even if they are guilty, points out activist and researcher Nazish 
Brohi, author of 'Trapped: women in custody' (ActionAid, 2003), most 
of these women don't pose a threat to society. Instead of locking 
them up, they should be rehabilitated and absorbed in society. "If 
you look at their cases, you'll find that few women have actually 
murdered someone, or picked up a gun and committed a robbery," says 
Brohi. "It's not that men have an easy time of it, but women are more 
vulnerable in our society. Also, because they are the primary 
care-givers, their families and children really suffer along with 
them when they are locked up." They are in prison not for crimes, she 
believes, but because for challenging the status quo in a patriarchal 
society.

The disproportionately large number of women charged under the zina 
laws calls for an examination of these laws. Consider that until 1979 
when the Hudood Ordinance was promulgated as part of Gen. Zia's 
'Islamisation drive', the words 'hudood' or 'zina' were not even part 
of the public discourse in Pakistan. Directly affected persons -- a 
wife or husband -- could register cases of adultery, but only against 
men -- a limitation that protected women in a male-dominated, feudal 
society where women are rarely in control of their lives. Adultery 
was punishable with a relatively minor fine and/or imprisonment, and 
the state could not be a party.

The Hudood Ordinances (Offence of Zina) led to thousands of women 
being incarcerated: there were 70 women prisoners country-wide in 
1979, a number that had increased to 6,000 by 1988. Since Gen Zia's 
passing and the 'restoration of democracy', the figures have declined 
-- 2,200 in by the end of the year 2002, and about 1,700 currently, 
according to Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

However, lawyer and activist Asma Jahangir notes that this drop may 
be due to the fact that more women are able to obtain bail than 
before, thanks to a relatively more sympathetic and sensitised 
judiciary and a greater overall awareness (more sympathetic 
organisations and individuals now provide these women with financial 
and legal assistance). So the decline in women's prison population 
does not necessarily reflect a decline in the number of cases.

Hudood Ordinance supporters argue that thousands of women have 'only' 
been imprisoned for 'zina', that no 'hadd' punishment has been 
carried out even if awarded, that most women are acquitted. But then, 
why should they suffer prison in the first place? Most women 
prisoners are desperately poor. Their basic needs are taken care of 
in jail -- health care, education, food, clothing and shelter -- but 
they would rather be free and starving, than sheltered, educated and 
fed in prison. As Samina says, "Yes, jail has all the facilities, the 
conditions are good. But imprisonment is imprisonment. there's no 
place home, even if it's just a hut."

So far, remissions to prisoners have been linked with some national 
or religious holiday, like Independence Day or Eid, or the limited 
concessions announced recently by the President just before Pakistan 
Day, March 23. A new kind of remission was announced on March 19 by 
the NWFP government -- for prisoners who pass Holy Quran translation 
exams and Dars-e-Nizami courses. This was previously not included on 
the list of valid reasons to grant the lessening of jail terms -- 
never mind that this condition discriminates against prisoners from 
other faiths.

Of more use than limited remissions would be an overhaul of the 
justice system that allows so many, mostly poor, women -- besides 
juveniles and men -- to be incarcerated in the first place. Various 
efforts are being made to provide some kind of relief, but these 
efforts address the symptoms of the problem, rather than the problem 
itself.

For instance, the Sindh Government notified the Legal Assistance 
Committee in January as a pilot project, partly funded by the 
government and partly by philanthropists at home and abroad. Headed 
by the former Supreme Court judge Nasir Aslam Zahid, who also chaired 
the 1997 Women's Commission, the project will enable a team of 
full-time lawyers to be based within jail premises for the first 
time. Their office is being built in a disused Anti-Terrorist Court, 
designed gratis by architect Faiz Kidwai, with material costs being 
covered by contributions from the Rotary Club and others.

These efforts follow ongoing aid to female prisoners by such 
philanthropic organisations and individuals, who have in the past 
raised funds for air tickets enabling the repatriation of foreign 
prisoners who have served their sentences. The All Pakistan 
Physicians of North America (APPNA) has a special committee on 
violence against women, spearheaded by Dr Zafar Iqbal in New York and 
Dr Amna Buttar in Chicago. They have collected over $25,000 towards 
lawyers' fees and bail money in Karachi (through Justice Zahid) and 
Lahore (through Dr Yasmin Rashid).

But if the President really wants to help women in prison, he would 
do well to act upon the recommendation of the government's National 
Commission on the Status of Women (NCSW) and repeal the Hudood 
Ordinances. This would have a far greater impact than limited 
remissions and pardons that will benefit only a few victims of an 
unjust system.

The writer recently
produced a special report on women in prison for Geo TV.


Prisons in Pakistan

Number of prisons: 89

Prison Staff:13,000

Prison capacity:35,500

Prison Population:80,653

Overcrowding:45,153

Convicted:17,073

Under trial:53,891

Condemned Under trial Ordinary convict Juvenile

(Male ) (Female) (Female) (Female) (under trial)(convict)

Balochistan 142 0 16 13 80 128

Punjab 6066 27 784 265 1330 312

Sindh 44 30 243 34 507 0

NWFP 134 5 217 89 286 65

TOTAL: 6586 62 260 401 2203 505

(source HRCP)

_____



[2]


Times of India [India]
27th March, 2004

My Religion is not my Nation

by Anuradha M. Chenoy

Prime Minister Vajpayee has projected friendship with Pakistan as a 
sop for Indian Muslims. Deputy Prime Minister Advani has stated that 
Hindu-Muslim relations in India will improve if relations with 
Pakistan improve and that Pakistan-India cricket matches could play a 
role in improving relations with Indian Muslims. These are dangerous 
and divisive formulations. In such a discourse citizens are divided 
purely on the basis of their religious identity represented as two 
distinct communities in constant opposition to each other. Further, 
one group is being shown as tied to another hostile state that 
influences its collective opinion. All three implications of such 
statements are typically sectarian and disruptive.

While peace and confidence building with Pakistan is in national 
interest, the leadership of this country has again equated the 
Muslims as 'outsiders'. If they are concerned about relations between 
the two communities in India, why must they depend on the goodwill of 
Pakistan? Why do they not address this internally? The reason is that 
such divisions apart from being a useful tool for raising a 
particular kind of religious nationalism masquerading as 'cultural 
nationalism', are useful just before a general election as the 1990 
rath yatra proved. The minorities are constantly called upon to prove 
their patriotism, proofs of which are never seen as sufficient, and 
their loyalty questioned as they are persistently made to pay a price 
for this imagined disloyalty.

Such arguments of sectarian nationalism translated as Hindutva are 
based on the premise that religion and ancestry are the primary 
criteria for citizenship. The presumption is that citizenship is 
frozen in some imagined ancient time and that all internal 
differences collapse in the face of the 'majority' identity. History 
and reality are disavowed and deeper class, caste, regional, ethnic 
and sectarian differences within communities are glossed over to 
highlight imagined religious differences. It is for instance self 
evident that the Malyalee Hindus, Christians and Muslims who share 
language, territorial affinity, ethnicity and culture have more in 
common with each other than with the equally diverse Punjabis. Thus 
to present the Hindus and Muslims as homogenous and undifferentiated 
wholes in perpetual contradiction with each other, with relations 
between them hostage to friendship with another nation is not only 
mischievous falsification, but betrays a lack of elementary knowledge 
of the very nation they claim to represent.

In fact, the simplest definitions show that nations are made up of a 
combination of attributes, and a sectarian ideology that a nation can 
be based on just one characteristic like religion is a recipe for 
disaster, as the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have shown. 
Authoritarianism, sectarian witch hunts, ethnic cleansing, and the 
break up of communities and nations inevitably follow. Further if our 
linkages to our state are based solely on religion why should 
politicians or select unrepresentative priests decide the shape and 
content of what is, say, Hindu or Hindutva? Should this be decided, 
if at all, by the elected sansad or an unelected 'dharm sansad?'  

History shows that a nation can lose or change any of its 
characteristics and yet remain a nation. The Irish, for example, lost 
their language but continued to consider themselves a nation and 
Pakistan was divided despite the base of common religion. Five 
Central Asian separate states were formed after the Soviet 
disintegration despite commonality of religion and history, because 
for them ethnic identity was more important than the other factors.

That is why Hindutva could never be the basis of collective Indian 
nationalism, because if it was, there could never have been the India 
we know today.  In fact, religious nationalism is always antagonistic 
to collective secular nationalism. This is because religious 
nationalism destroys the pluralities essential to a viable 
nationalism. It was plural nationalism that has kept India together 
and enabled an institutionalized and robust democracy. This essence 
of Indian pluralism giving all citizens equal status and yet 
safeguarding their cultural and religious rights have been guaranteed 
by the Indian Constitution. Further democratic theory is premised on 
the realization that majorities are temporary. A non-BJP coalition 
may be in power one day, a BJP-led coalition another. Thus the 
protection of the rights of political, religious and other minorities 
is critical to democracy. Thus statements to the contrary violate the 
Constitution and the democratic process itself. They give a signal, 
that it is posed as normal and legitimate, to make insiders into 
outsiders and collaborators of hostile countries solely because of 
religious affiliation.

Statements like those made by the Prime Minister are translated by 
the ranks of parties and organizations committed to Hindutva into 
actions that punish the minority community as representatives of 
Pakistan. This happened in Gujarat where colonies where Muslims live 
have been dubbed 'mini Pakistan,' enemies to be legitimately attacked 
in an orgy of religious nationalism. Minority communities are thus 
forced to live in a state of constant tension and turmoil deprived of 
their fundamental rights, living on majority sufferance.

Such statements show a blinkered view of peace itself. Peace is 
viewed in terms of a peace constituency likely to deliver a positive 
electoral dividend.  The 'majority' community is seen as one that can 
be manipulated to deliver votes either for peace or war whenever 
necessary. Peace in reality, is a process that involves compromises 
to create the essential confidence for all to arrive at a just and 
equitable solution. Not the best or ideal, but one both can live with 
and accept. For this the Prime Minister and his deputy must see 
themselves as representatives of a multi-cultural and plural society 
committed to a durable peace for all. This would be the true 'raj 
dharma' that the Prime Minister spoke of earlier in Gujarat. 


_____

[3]


Himal [Nepal]
March-April 2004
OPINION

Between jhatka and halal
Gujarat after two years of "normalcy"

For the Muslim victims of communal violence in Gujarat the violence 
has not ended - it is the difference between immediate hacking 
(jhatka) and slow death (halal).

by Satish Deshpande

In their famous conversation about words, Humpty Dumpty confides to 
Alice that while verbs are short- tempered and proud, 'you can do 
anything with adjectives'. He also insists that whenever he makes a 
word do a lot of work, he always pays it extra.

By this token the adjective 'normal' must have been paid an 
astronomical bonus for the truly stupendous amount of work that it 
has done in Gujarat over the past two years. Although his claims were 
met with disbelief at the time, Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been 
retrospectively vindicated in his insistence that, except for the 
first 72 hours of the 'action-reaction' sequence, post-Godhra Gujarat 
has been, well, normal. Indeed, we ought to be grateful to him for 
drawing attention to Gujarat's most significant contribution to the 
national ethos since Mahatma Gandhi - the establishment of a new 
notion of normalcy.

An important term in social theory, the word 'normal' has three main 
meanings in everyday language - a common or usual state of affairs 
that carries the additional connotation of being ordinary or 
unremarkable; a healthy condition, the opposite of diseased or 
pathological; and finally, the sense derived from its root-word 
'norm' indicating an ideal state that is worthy of emulation. These 
meanings suggest that 'normal' is a boundary-marking word whose job 
is to separate the mundane from the extraordinary, the healthy from 
the sick, and the legitimate from the delinquent. Although every 
society and every age needs such boundaries, their actual location 
keeps changing according to the balance of social power in each 
context. The political potency of the word derives from its ability 
to link a populist-majoritarian fact (that which is most common) with 
a moral-ethical ideal (that which is most right). What we have 
witnessed in Gujarat is an unprecedented attempt to normalise 
communal oppression by representing it as popular practice and proper 
precept.

We must not flinch from acknowledging the success of this attempt. 
The spread of Hindu communal violence in Gujarat has broken many 
barriers: a hitherto urban phenomenon has spilled over into rural 
areas; adivasis and dalits have participated actively; and the upper 
middle-classes have been directly involved, both as victims and 
especially as perpetrators. Disturbing reports, since confirmed 
repeatedly, about the presence of women and even children among the 
mobs make these India's first 'family-outing' riots. The depth, 
intensity and sheer scale of public participation - as many as 40 
cities and towns in the state were under curfew simultaneously - had 
shocked even people like Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Pravin 
Togadia.

If the making-common aspect of normalisation was spectacular, the 
making-ordinary and making-legitimate aspects have been even more 
stunning. Gujarat's recent history contains many acts of symbolic 
erasure like the destruction of the poet Wali Gujarati's mazaar in 
Ahmedabad. But it is only here that the municipality - an institution 
steeped in the dull details of everyday life - managed to pave the 
spot overnight to make it look 'normal' by morning. Every riot 
involves destruction of property and sources of livelihood; but in 
Gujarat, this was followed up with a systematic economic boycott 
designed to continue this destruction silently and 'peacefully', thus 
annihilating hope for the future. All riots uproot people from their 
homes and communities; but in Gujarat, this was backed by sustained 
public pressure to ensure that the refugees would never return, or 
would do so only under stringent 'conditions' enforcing second-class 
citizenship. In short, all riots - even state-sponsored pogroms like 
the anti-Sikh riots of Delhi - are supposed to end, to yield to an 
'after' that is fundamentally and not just formally different. 
Gujarat is our first riot that has refused to end: for its victims, 
the difference between the 'abnormal' madness of 2002 and the 
'normal' malevolence of 2004 is only the difference between jhatka 
and halaal.

Retail repression
Except during the Partition, mainstream political discourse in India 
has always, albeit after the fact, described communal riots as 
isolated incidents of momentary madness sharply separated from normal 
everyday life. Of course this is untrue, because riots cannot be 
conceived immaculately, but this fiction has suited most parties - 
the dominant sections, the 'silent majority', and sometimes even the 
victims. More importantly, the moral illegitimacy of riots has never 
been in doubt, even though the guilty have rarely been punished. 
Attempts to justify riots have never flatly denied wrongdoing, but 
have concentrated on constructing a history of prior provocations in 
order to present the riots as defensive action.

In its 'laboratory state' that is Gujarat, Hindutva has developed a 
prototype of everyday communalism that breaks decisively with this 
pattern by seeking to integrate riots with normal life, shrinking and 
eventually erasing the zones of delinquency in which they used to be 
segregated. Above all, it seeks to legitimise the oppression of 
Muslims to the point where it seems so natural that justifications 
will be superfluous. The model here is that of a nation at war, when 
all patriots are expected to be unthinking warriors and all questions 
are anti-national. But war is an abnormal condition, so this example 
does not capture the full significance of the Gujarat model. A closer 
approximation might be caste, where the oppressive hierarchy is so 
deeply embedded in tradition that it becomes part of ordinary common 
sense, requiring no explicit justification precisely because it is 
what we 'already know'. In fact, activists working in Gujarat have 
pointed to the birth of a new form of untouchability with respect to 
Muslims. The ultimate goal of the Gujarat model is to make riots 
redundant - to replace the spectacular, wholesale violence waged by 
trishul-wielding mobs with the unobtrusive, retail repression 
enforced by the mundane compulsions of daily custom. In the new 
normalcy, Muslims are to be ghettoised as a caste of right-less 
non-persons forever dependent on 'the goodwill of the majority'.

If this chilling vision were thought to be exaggerated or still a 
distant dream, one needs only to look at the calm and confident 
manner in which long-established precedents have been flouted in 
Gujarat. Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) has been used exclusively 
against Muslims (and one lone Sikh) but not against Hindu rioters; 
differential amounts of compensation have been paid to Hindu and 
Muslim victims in similar circumstances; and the legal machinery of 
the state is itself obstructing due process and abetting the accused 
in evading justice. It takes courage to grasp the enormity of what 
Hindutva proposes, and especially to acknowledge its asymmetry with 
Muslim fanaticism. Given the demographic and socio-cultural profile 
of India, Muslim hate organisations can never hope to normalise 
themselves; they will forever remain in the delinquent fringe. 
Barbaric acts attributed to Muslim fanatics - like the burning of the 
train in Godhra - will always remain just that, extraordinarily 
vicious crimes. Hate campaigns launched by Muslims can never be 
converted into electoral chariots bearing their sponsors to the most 
powerful positions in public life.

Spilt milk
But - and this is where hope has often been sought - it is not as 
though Gujarat has been easy to replicate in the rest of India. 
Despite the initial euphoria of the 2003 state elections which gave 
'Milosevic' Modi an overwhelming victory including as much as 55 
percent of the popular vote, the Sangh Parivar met with rebuffs in 
subsequent elections in Himachal Pradesh and elsewhere. Even in the 
recent round of state elections where it has been unexpectedly 
successful, the BJP was forced to foreground issues other than 
Hindutva. And by comparison with past versions, its current campaign 
for the general election of April-May 2004 seems remarkably subdued. 
There has been no routine recourse to the tried and trusted Ayodhya 
issue; in fact, 'development' appears to be the uncharacteristic 
centrepiece of the campaign, at least so far. Does this mean then, as 
many are urging, that it is time to 'get over Gujarat' and move on?

It is true, of course, that in political terms Gujarat 2002 
represents 'spilt milk' that is pointless to go on crying over, 
especially given the comprehensiveness of the Hindu right-wing 
victory in that particular battle. It may even be true that Gujarat 
is the exception proving the rule that, in the final analysis, rabid 
Hindu communalism does not make electoral sense on the subcontinental 
canvas of Indian democracy. But to think thus is to underestimate the 
importance of the decisive break that the events of 2002 have made 
with the history of our present. Moreover, by seeking solace on these 
terms, we become hostages of ephemeral caste equations, erratic 
electoral 'waves' and other political contingencies that determine 
the outcome of elections in India.

For the particular events which constituted the riots of 2002 were 
unprecedented only in scale, not so much in content. We had, alas, 
seen it all before - the burning, looting and killing, the rapes, the 
slaughter of children and even the unborn. But despite the repeated 
occurrence of such horrors, the political universe which produced 
them remained inhabitable because it had always - always - disowned 
these events retroactively. Howsoever hypocritical it may have been, 
the dominant ethos did eventually place such events in moral 
quarantine, thereby preventing them from infecting the body politic. 
Modi and his minions have achieved something significant - they have 
overturned this history by masterminding India's first riot with both 
mass participation and zero remorse. In Gujarat today, two long years 
later, neither the proverbial common man nor the politician, 
bureaucrat or policeman - in short, none of those responsible - feels 
the need, even strategically or cynically, to admit that something 
wrong has happened. This immediately places enormous strain on the 
social fabric because it demonstrates that, contrary to the 
conventional wisdom fostered thus far in post-Partition India, 
planned ethnic cleansing is in fact achievable.

 From the perspective of the Hindu right, the crucial fact about the 
2002 riots is that they have facilitated the BJP's electoral victory 
in Gujarat without causing losses elsewhere. None of the BJP's recent 
defeats - in Himachal Pradesh, the Delhi municipal and assembly 
elections, etc. were directly attributable to Gujarat; the 
indications are that this issue was largely irrelevant to the 
outcome. It is equally plausible that the BJP's victories (Rajasthan, 
Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh) too are unrelated to Gujarat, but 
this cannot be a source of much hope for the secular-progressive 
camp. For it only proves that while Modi-style pogroms may not always 
win elections, they will not lose them either. The uncertainty of 
benefits may dissuade the pragmatic or passive communalist, but their 
costlessness can only encourage the committed kind. To men like Modi, 
Togadia, Singhal or Advani - true believers prepared to pay a high 
price to achieve their aims - this is clearly a worthwhile bargain. 
Such people will only be dissuaded by the prospect of heavy losses.

Are there any factors in the contemporary political scene that can 
raise the cost of communal violence? Can such forces be built by 
collective action? These are the key questions of the moment.

Globalised Gujarat
There is a widely held view that 'globalisation' will somehow tame 
Hindutva through world opinion and/or the world market. The 
geopolitical history of the unipolar world in the last two decades 
provides sufficient evidence of the fragility of this argument. 
Moreover, there is the experience of Gujarat itself, as the BJP 
leadership conclusively demonstrated, that it is possible to manage 
appearances by saying one thing abroad and its opposite at home. In 
any case, Sangh Parivar doublespeak is now a well rehearsed routine. 
As for the world market, it is doubtful whether it has had any impact 
on Gujarat. (The discomfiture of local industrialists may have had 
more effect, though its long term implications are difficult to 
gauge.) In reality, most global markets are thoroughly cartelised 
with only a few powerful players, and their alleged tendency towards 
political moderation has been extremely unreliable to say the least. 
So, where containing communalism is concerned, globalisation may at 
best provide some contingent inputs; it cannot form the basis of a 
deliberate strategy. Whatever their specific content, such strategies 
will perforce have to rely on domestic factors.

That is why it is imperative to breach the cloak of impunity which 
Narendra Modi has almost succeeded in throwing over the post-Godhra 
events of 2002. The contrast with the Godhra incident is striking: 
the wheels of justice do seem to be moving in that context, despite 
the considerable doubt that forensic reports have cast on the 
original thesis of a Muslim mob having set fire to Coach No. S6 from 
the outside. On the other hand, with the large-scale destruction of 
incriminating evidence - including gruesome instances of state police 
burying the bodies of victims with large quantities of salt in order 
to accelerate decomposition - the subversion of justice in the 
post-Godhra riots is nearly complete. Last hopes are pinned on the 
small proportion of cases taken up by the Supreme Court, and on the 
staying power of embattled NGOs, local activists, and above all, the 
survivors themselves.

What else can be done to interrupt the march of Hindutva, or at the 
very least, to force it to pay a higher price for its successes? Can 
we afford to rely solely on the vagaries of electoral arithmetic? Two 
years later, it is difficult to be optimistic. The voices of 
Gujarat's victims and its dissenters proved no match for the menacing 
growl of Modi's amplified election speeches as he laid claim to 
'Gujarati asmita' (Gujarati pride) and threatened to bring down the 
wrath of 'five crore Gujaratis' (50 million) on his opponents. If the 
familiar forms of our progressive politics are all ultimately founded 
on faith in 'the people', then Gujarat 2002 forces us to confront the 
darkest of all questions: What is to be done when 'the people' turn 
regressive? How does one confront a normalised pathology, a banalised 
evil?

A question first asked of Western Europe in the second quarter of the 
20th century now faces Southasia in the first quarter of the 21st 
century. Whatever the shape of the answers that will be forged 
collectively, it is certain that they will need not only hardworking 
adjectives but also angry verbs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The violent minority and silent majority of Gujarat do not constitute 
separate and distinct social fragments. The silence of a sizeable 
part of the silent majority is not the speechless shock of numbed 
bystanders. It is the conspiratorial silence of willing spectators, 
remote witnesses to a Roman holiday, whose public silence is a 
private roar of approval that is clearly audible to the architects of 
the violence. There are those who cannot speak and those who will not 
speak.

How else are we to explain the seeming paradoxes of the riots in 
Ahmedabad? We have seen educated girls and boys from middle and upper 
middle class families who do not actually participate in the killings 
but follow in the wake to loot Muslim establishments. We have seen 
couples on two wheelers bring home consumer durables scavenged from 
the debris of retail outlets. The cell-phone wielding rioters are not 
isolated elements who have taken control in a social vacuum.

_____


[4]

Sunday Express | The Indian Express [India]
March 21, 2004

The Indian-ness of Pluralism

It can be found in Goa, Maria Aurora Couto tells Sagarika Ghose

The contemporary dilemma turns on how to create the new Indian liberal.
On the debris of official 'secular socialism', with the looming spectre
of hate-filled cultural nationalism, from where shall we draw the
mainsprings of an Indian cosmopolitanism based on plurality, yet
strongly embodying India's piety? From where shall we create that
alchemy that combines the bhakti inheritance, the intellectual agony and
muscle of the East-West encounter, the grace of European manners and
conversation, the rational education and rigour of the British
administrators, the music of the Portuguese? How shall we become
representatives of the thousands of little traditions of religious
coexistence that is manifest in mohalla, qasbah and communidade across
the land? The answers lie, in many ways,in Goa.

Maria Aurora Couto, author of 'Goa, A Daughter's Story' (Viking) to be
published next month, undertook a journey. After many years in Dharwar,
Patna, Delhi, Chennai and London she set up home in her native Goa, in
one of its most transcendental and cerebral villages, Aldona. And she
set off in search of the evolution of Goan society and of the Goan mind.
In the process, she discovered many truths that have the potential to
resonate across not just Goa but across India. Her foremost discovery
was a hidden fountain, a fountain that erupted quietly from the red
earth and towered upward to the palms and jackfruit trees of her beloved
land: the fountain of humanism.

Humanism not as theory, but as the life blood of society, of emotion and
of religion. Although caste has been tenacious, hierarchical rigidities
have been softened to create what has been called vegdench munxaponn: a
unique humanism, an original form of being.

"Goa has been so brutally imprisoned in the tourist brochure," she says,
"Goans have been so caricatured, that the depth and complexity of Goan
society has not been seen for the ideal it can present for modern
India." There are deep roots to liberalism in Goa, where the human
condition is
deeply spiritual precisely because it is deeply liberal.

Her massive, luminously written book has been described as the "Zuari
river in full flow", an epic telling of Goa's story, both polemical as
well as personal, enlivened by a range of voices from the Lisbon-based
advocate Priti Camotim to Malbarao Sardessai, patriarch of the Saraswat
Brahmins of Goa.

The book is a rediscovery of her father, "Chico", whose tragic life and
self-destructive creativity are almost a mirror image of an older Goa
which died after the Liberation of 1961. Chico, with his breadth of
vision equally at home in European and traditional cultures, above all,
a musician, for whom music "was the breath of life -- was the epitome of
the rich homegrown culture of East and West, which could not flower
because of the lack of opportunity and constraints inherent in the
experience," she writes.

"For me, the story of the decline of old Goa, is like Satyajit Ray's
Jalsaghar," she says. "The refinement and aristocratic patronage of
music and arts were undeniably a part of a landed elite interacting with
Portuguese rule and that class was destined to fade away."

Yet Goa's enduring contribution to Indian liberalism, Couto believes,
can never fade.

Here society is marked by bhakti Hinduism and bhakti Christianity, tiny
wayside shrines contain an ancient aesthetic faith, avenging fierce
Durga from Bengal, in Goa becomes Shanta Durga, historian D.D. Kosambi's
Marxism is different from others simply because he is a Goan. "The
stereotype is Christian Portuguese rule being replaced by Hindu
predominance. Yet Buddhism and Jainism have been important shapers of
Goa and contributed to its textured religiosity."

'Goa: A Daughter's Story' is open to controversial readings in the
polarised climate of today and Couto is anxious that some of her
chapters are not misinterpreted.

She admits that conversions were violent but argues that violent birth
certainly does not preclude 400 years of nurturing. And as for
misinterpretation, any grist is suitable for mills that seem to grind
against communal harmony and the sustenance of the Indian-ness of
pluralism.

Her doubts were dispelled by Girish Karnad: "You should go by what you
know or feel in your bones to be right -- that even if conversions were
forced or violent, the faith that people gained from them could prove to
be culturally and spiritually enriching."

Today, she feels that India is at the "crossroads", and so is Goa.

Subtle changes are beginning to cloud the unfussy if segregated harmony
of Goa. She says the battle today is not "majority community" versus
"minority community" but between liberal and non-liberal Indians. And
the quest is now how to find that rooted plurality which is as native to
India as its soil, rather than the borrowed prescriptions of Western
think-tanks.

Goa today may have fallen into sloth and decline, a money-order economy
may have created torpor and stagnation, but its civilisational basis
holds the clue towards a new way forward.

_____


[5]

[March 27, 2004]

>** India seeks to arrest US scholar **
>India seeks the arrest of an American scholar who wrote a controversial
biography of Shivaji.
URL: < news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/3561499.stm >

Dear Friends:

I write in regards to the recent controversy over a US scholar's history
book in India.  As some of you may know, James Laine, a professor of
religious studies at Macalester College in MN, has published a book through
Oxford University Press entitled SHIVAJI: HINDU KING IN ISLAMIC INDIA.  As a
result of its publication, Indian scholars and scholarly institutes in
Western India (Maharashtra) have been harassed and ransacked. The
controversy has grown to such ridiculous proportions that the Indian Prime
Minister has commented on the book, "warning" Laine, and the Maharashtra
government has called for his ARREST through Interpol.  See the above BBC
story.

If you don't have the book, get it! It is quite good.  As with The Satanic
Verses and The Myth of the Holy Cow (or Harry Potter for that matter), those
who seek its ban have usually not read the book in question and certainly
have no desire for nuance or precision.

SHIVAJI: HINDU KING IN ISLAMIC INDIA is about the role of myth and legend in
the construction of historical memory.  One claim in the book in particular
has raised people's ire---that Shivaji's mother may have had an affair with
someone other than his "real" father.  For this, Indian politicians have
claimed that Indian pride has been insulted and that this is an insult to
the nation. 

It's a shame that the nation has such thin skin, but it is also easy to see
why nationalists would be so threatened by this book.  I've looked at the
passages in question.  They are in Chapter 5 of the book, especially in the
first, full paragraph on p. 93.  Without a doubt in my mind, this
controversy is a bunch of nonsense---politically motivated through and
through.    Laine begins this chapter with a quote from W.E.B. DuBois.  Let
me requote it for you: "[O]ne is astonished in the study of history at the
recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed
over.... We must forget that George Washington was a slaveowner...and simply
remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring.  The difficulty
with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and
example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but does not tell the
truth." (p. 89)

Shivaji is one of these perfect heroes in mythic history.  Laine's goal is
to illustrate the tensions between myth and history, not by historically
proving one thing or another, but by raising a panoply of "questions that
haven't or can't be asked." By revealing the gap between what is known or
thought to be known, and the unasked (let alone unanswered) questions, Laine
hopes to provide foundation for further serious, historical inquiry.

To this end, he begins with a discussion of Texas and myths related to Davy
Crockett and the Alamo (timely, given the new movie coming out on this
topic).  He then states: "My primary claim is not that I have a truer, more
objective history than the standard accounts.  What I would prefer to do is
look once again at the emerging narrative that we have considered to see
those places where the authors themselves have carefully avoided saying
something, or where they say something rather abruptly in order to answer
some unexpressed concern.  Such a pursuit will allow us NOT TO SEE THE
"REAL" SHIVAJI BUT TO BETTER APPRECIATE THE IDEOLOGICAL CONCERNS OF THE MANY
AUTHORS WHO HAVE SHAPED THE NARRATIVE TRADITION OF SHIVAJI'S LEGENDARY LIFE.
[Caps added for emphasis]  The real issue is what the authors are saying
about themselves, about the dreams they hold, the dreams they see expressed
in the tales of their hero." (p. 90)

Laine then broaches the "unthinkable thoughts" and dares to ask questions
that haven't been asked.  Among 5 questions, can we imagine, he asks, if
Shivaji had an unhappy family life.  In an elaborate multi-page answer to
this question, Laine provides some speculation, not quite idle, but not
"proof of the fact" either.  But his goal is not to prove a point of view,
but precisely only to illustrate people's popular ideas versus some
"thoughts that cannot be thought."  To this end, Laine states on p. 93: "The
repressed awareness that Shivaji has an absentee father is also revealed by
the fact that Maharashtrians tell jokes naughtily suggesting that his
guardian Dadaji Konddev was his biological father.  In a sense, because
Shivaji's father had little influence on his son, for many narrators it was
most important to supply him with father replacements, Dadaji and later
Ramdas.  But perhaps we read the story of his life as goverened by
motivations buried deep in his psyche by a mother rejected by her husband.
[This point is discussed on the previous page.]  One could then see that
Shivaji's drive to heroism was spurred by his attempt to please his doting
mother, and that she, aware of her Yadava heritage and thinking of her
husband as a collaborator of low birth, instilled in her son the dream of a
revived Hindu kingdom...."

"None of these unseemly facts accord well with the family values of
contemporary middle-class Indians, and are largely ignored in popular modern
accounts...."

"The great man was great because of his public deeds, and as a great man, he
is presumed to be a man whose private virtues informed his domestic life.
But, in fact, we know virtually nothing of his family affairs."

These last lines are critical, because they acknowledge the weakness in our
historical knowledge.  More questions need to be asked and more research
done.  Laine does not claim that he is providing the definitive answers.

Laine's book and the crisis surrounding it are therefore battlegrounds on
freedom of speech and freedom of expression issues.  How can we pursue
ideal, objective scholarship if certain questions cannot even be asked, let
alone certain answers ever be provided?

One does not have to agree with Laine's conclusions or with his assessments.
But that is what scholarly debate is for.  Material that "breaks ground"
gets us thinking about new issues, and in new ways.  It does not imply that
it is definitive, that it is the "last word."  It might or might not be, but
we'll only know after healthy, vigorous debate.

But we can't have that if this debate is clotured before it is even begun.
Banning books only reveals the fear of debate that the banners have.  Which
leads to the question: what are they so afraid of?  What gives the banners
the right to determine what we can or cannot discuss, what we can and cannot
think or say?  Think about DuBois' prescient analysis.  Therein lies the
rub.


Sincerely,


Manu Bhagavan
Assistant Professor
Department of History and Political Science
Manchester College
N. Manchester, IN 46962 [USA]


______


[6]

[Posted below is a response to material posted in SACW 26-27 March 2004]

o o o

About the article "UN bodies support March 25 as Int'l Day of resistance
against war, cruelty", published   in 26-27th March in SACW, from
Bangladesh Observer:

"The day commemorates the incident of barbaric crack down on the
Bangla-speaking unarmed
civilians of the Pakistan's eastern province. An estimated three million
people in Bangladesh were killed, in the worst ever genocide after killing
of the Jews in Germany".
Yes, the Pakistani army was cruel and killed a lot of people in East
Pakistan, when Muslim majority East Bengal tried to liberate itself from
rule by a country which in the first place lies right across India on the
other side of the subcontinent. But is that genocide?

The Jews in Germany were not sent to the gas chambers by other Jews; they
were killed by non-Jewish Germans, elected to power by the 'people'. Not
disputing the number of Bangladeshis (then East Pakistanis) killed by the
Pakistani military at that time, but were those killed exclusively
non-Muslims? Or were they mainly Muslims? If the latter, then how can it be
called genocide? If there is an attempt, for example, to eradicate say all
the Chakmas in Bangladesh, that can be called genocide. To eradicate all
Hindus left behind in Bangladesh, that can be called genocide. To eradicate
even all Ahmediyas in Pakistan, that can be called genocide. But surely, all
wars and mass murders are not genocide by definition. Even attacks on
unarmed civilians by the military of a foreign country cannot be called
genocide, though it amounts to a war crime. In genocide, invariably, there
would be collusion of some section of civil society; and that section would
be majoritarian.

"The anti-war WCFFC has appealed to Bangladesh authority and NGOs affiliated
with UN to move a resolution 53/199-12/98 in the forthcoming general
assembly, which will enable to declare March 25 as an international anti-war
and cruelty day".
In the actual resolution, or in any of the proceedings, there seems to be no
mention of 'genocide' as such; its all about war and cruelty.

It is not surprising that this move, of declaring March 25th as anti-war and
cruelty day is supported by the UNESCO  and Kofi Annan and that it has
gathered momentum just now.

I cannot help feeling that the immediate inspiration for all this is the
worldwide, massive demonstrations against the occupation of Iraq on March
20th by anti-war groups. (There was one in Mumbai too, by the Forum Against
War & Terrorism, at 4pm at Hutatma chowk/Flora fountain in South Mumbai. I
landed there expecting a peace demonstration; but as it happened, the police
refused permission for it, though on a Saturday evening noone was really
getting very inconvenienced. Around 500 of us were carted off in vans and
kept at the police station for some hrs and later released. We were not
charged.).
On 20th were the protests, massive in the US especially. On 22nd, Sheikh
Ahmed Yassin, who they say is the 'spiritual' leader of Hamas, was
assassinated by the Israeli army/security forces, with missiles. A paralysed
old man, in a wheel chair, murdered by 3 missiles! How can we all not be
overcome by admiration for the bravery and chivalry of the legendary Israeli
army and security forces?! Above all, we are floored by the heroism of Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon! He is reported to have personally ordered and
monitored this great feat.
I do not know much about the Hamas, and do not approve of blasting off
unsuspecting people in buses and trains, by anyone, in Israel or Jammu &
Kashmir or anywhere else. But this, is the pits. And this seems to have been
a response to the March 20th demos. So, now we have some NGOs in UNESCO,
rushing to get March 25th declared as anti-war and cruelty day. And also a
confuscation about what is meant by genocide.
Ammu Abraham
[Bombay, India]


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

Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on matters of peace 
and democratisation in South Asia. SACW is an independent & 
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