SACW | 21 June 2004
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at mnet.fr
Sun Jun 20 18:26:30 CDT 2004
South Asia Citizens Wire | 21 June, 2004
via: www.sacw.net
[1] Kashmir Diary (David Devadas)
[2] Amnesty sought for detenus in Kashmir (B. Muralidhar Reddy)
[3] BBC Urdu to bridge divided families in Kashmir
[4] Pakistan: Hudood Ordinance (Farhatullah Babar)
[5] People's SAARC: Colombo Declaration
[6] The invention of the Hindu (Pankaj Mishra)
[7] Upcoming Event: Rohini Hensman will be
reading from 'Playing Lions and Tigers' (London,
29 June)
[8] Upcoming Event: `The New Mandate Civil
Liberties’ to commemorate the anti-emergency day
'(New Delhi, 25 June)
--------------
[1]
The Tribune [India]
June 20, 2004
KASHMIR DIARY
Peace efforts should not be allowed to lose momentum
by David Devadas
MUZAFFAR (name changed) is a handsome 22-year old
who lives in a middle class Srinagar locality.
Over the past couple of years, he has developed a
close friendship with a married woman of the
neighbourhood who is separated from her husband.
Her little children are very fond of Muzaffar and
enjoy outings with him, but it is of course the
sort of relationship that is frowned upon in a
conservative society.
Having known the young man's family for several
years, I can vouch for the fact that he is not
involved in any way with the secessionist
movement. Indeed, he holds the view - common
enough, incidentally, among the generation that
grew up amid the staccato rattle of gunfire -
that economic development is what Kashmiris need
rather than a changed political status.
Nonetheless, Muzaffar has been picked up by the
security forces several times and tortured.
Each time, it turns out, his lady friend's
husband has reported him as a terrorist. For
although the couple are separated, the man shares
the male mentality so common across the
subcontinent, that she is his property and that
it is his right and duty to beat up any other
male friends that she might have.
The difference is that, in the peculiar
circumstances of Kashmir, such a man finds it
easier to get the security forces to do his dirty
work for him. Any security force set to combat a
guerrilla war thrives on information about who is
covertly involved with one or other guerrilla
group and so they lap up such tips and act on
them expeditiously.
Torture being the favoured method of security
forces in not just Iraq, the typical reaction to
such a tip about a young man like Muzaffar is
that he is picked up and bundled into a closed
security force vehicle and driven straight to a
torture chamber. The forces' logic is that they
must extract information about the whereabouts of
other members of the group and of weapons dumps
before the group realises their fellow has been
caught and changes hideouts. The result is that
the torture victim's family is left searching
high and low for him for perhaps a couple of days
- or, at times, forever. Muzaffar has been
treated to electric shocks and the application of
chilly paste to wounds and other exposed areas of
a naked body, apart from thrashing and
humiliation.
When the Border Security Force has picked up
Muzaffar - twice so far over the past couple of
years - he has been released after the first
round of torture. It does not take long for them
to figure out that the fellow is innocent - at
least of the sort of crime they are trying to
stop. The local police, on the other hand, are a
different kettle of fish. The police picked up
Muzaffar on his little nephew's birthday a few
weeks ago and, although they too knew the fellow
was innocent, they wanted money and other favours
to let him go. Given the pattern of police forces
in many parts of the subcontinent, the man who
had reported him had also no doubt paid them.
Muzaffar's is not an isolated case.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing has been almost
a pattern through the traumatic 15 years that
Kashmir has spent in the grip of turmoil.
Property disputes and rivalry of one sort or
another have all too frequently led to such
malicious reports.
The forces cannot know which complaints are
genuine and which are motivated, unless they
investigate. But such action only creates fresh
bitterness and alienation among people who have
nothing to do with secessionist politics or
militancy.
One must remain constantly alert to the fact that
the extraordinary powers that have been given to
the security forces in Kashmir can and do lead to
abuse. The powers that be should never become
complacent about these extraordinary powers.
Although Dr Manmohan Singh's government intends
to repeal the draconian Prevention of Terrorism
Act (POTA), the answer finally is to repeal all
the special powers acts in Kashmir. The best road
towards that is the peace process. It must not be
allowed to lose momentum. The talks between the
Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan over
the next few days should push forward the process.
_____
[2]
The Hindu
June 21, 2004
AMNESTY SOUGHT FOR DETENUS IN KASHMIR
By B. Muralidhar Reddy
ISLAMABAD, JUNE 20. The Joint Committee on
Kashmir appointed by the Pakistan-India People's
Forum has recommended the release of all
prisoners held without charge and the declaration
of a general amnesty for all those held in
detention under special laws, civil or military
detention laws or without trial.
At its meeting in Lahore today, the Committee
also favoured free movement of people of Kashmir
on either side of the border without requirement
of passport or visa and rapid reduction in the
size and presence of troops throughout the
`former' state.
Tapan Bose, Pushpa Bhave, Sumit Chakravarty and
Amit Chakravarty attended the meeting from India.
Anees Haroon, Abdul Majeed Malik, Haji Mohammad
Adeel, Farooq Niazi, Munir Hussain, Shahid Fiaz
Kishwar Naheed and Mubashir Hasan represented
Pakistan.
The Committee has been asked to facilitate a
dialogue between the people from both sides of
the LoC and interact with all organisations
involved in the efforts to achieve peace and
democratic resolution of the Kashmir issue.
It deliberated in the light of the stand of the
Forum that Kashmir not merely being a territorial
dispute between India and Pakistan, a peaceful
democratic solution in accordance with the
aspirations of all the peoples of the former
princely state of Jammu and Kashmir has to be
achieved.
It recommended that there was need to mobilise,
besides political parties, activists in the civil
society, especially among the groups such as Bar
Councils, Bar associations of districts,
teachers, human rights organisations, women,
chambers of commerce and industry, labour unions,
youth and others.
The panel demanded that the judicial process
provided in the laws should be activated for all
other Kashmiris who are in custody in Kashmir,
India or Pakistan and tribunals to investigate
missing persons set up.
_____
[3]
Pak Tribune
Friday June 18, 2004 (0320 PST)
BBC URDU TO BRIDGE DIVIDED FAMILIES IN KASHMIR
LONDON, June 19 (Online): The BBC's Urdu service
is launching a three-day event in the Indian and
Pakistani administered Kashmir, starting on
Monday 21 June.
Members of divided families will be able to talk
to each other via video and satellite phones. The
exchange co-hosted in Srinagar and Muzaffarabad
will be streamed live on the BBC Urdu online
site, bbcurdu.com Excerpts will appear on BBC
programmes including BBC Urdu's flagship news and
information programme, Sairbeen.
Head of BBC Urdu service Mohammed Hanif said that
the initiative breaks new ground: "We haven't
done anything like this before. The Kashmir event
allows people divided by a political conflict to
share their lives, times and experiences amongst
themselves and with the Urdu-speaking Internet
audience across the world."
Users of bbcurdu.com will be asked to comment and
send their opinions on this exchange, which will
then be published on the website and broadcast in
BBC programmes.
_____
[4]
The News International
June 21, 2004
HUDOOD ORDINANCE
Farhatullah Babar
Last week General Pervez Musharraf once again
called for a review of the Hudood laws saying,
'after all, these are man made laws and there is
no harm in reviewing them'. It is yet to be seen
whether the government will really do something
to change the law.
The Hudood Ordinance was promulgated in from
behind the back of the Parliament, without taking
into account the views of the cross section of
religious scholars and public opinion, and
prescribes punishment which are not ordained by
the Holy Qur'an and Islam.
The Ordinance has heaped shame and miseries on
hapless women. Those opposing changes in it will
be held accountable before both Allah and the bar
of public opinion.
Besides many other lacunae, rajam or stoning to
death for adultery as prescribed in the 1979
Hudood Ordinance, has nothing to do with Islam
and the Holy Qur'an. It has only stolen the
Islamic title of 'hadd' to make it appear as a
law ordained by the Holy Qur'an.
There is not a single verse in the Holy Qur'an
that prescribes the punishment of stoning to
death for adultery.
Some people argue that rajam is sanctioned by
what they claim to be the traditions and Sunnah
of the Holy Prophet (SAW) and therefore, it is
Islamic even if there was no mention of it in the
Holy Qur'an. This amounts to asserting that even
if an injunction has no basis in the Qur'an, it
can still be enforced as Islamic just because in
the view of some, it was in conformity with the
Sunnah or some saying of the Prophet (SAW). If
this argument is accepted, it would shake the
very foundations of Islamic jurisprudence.
True, that it is obligatory for a Muslim to
emulate and obey Sunnah of the Holy Prophet
(SAW). However, there are huge differences on
what constituted Sunnah. There are differences,
not only between the Sunni and Shia accounts of
Sunnah but also between the Qur'an, the Holy
Prophet (SAW) and all his noble companions, on
one side and the main body of the ulema of most
of the sectarian varieties, on the other.
It is correct that the Qur'an prescribed
punishment under the hadd for certain offences,
but it is wrong to say that the punishment for
adultery under the Hudood Ordinance 1979 was also
Qur'anic.
A true believer is ordained to accept the Holy
Qur'an by itself as a comprehensive and
self-contained source of Islam, free of any
ambiguity and inconsistency. This indeed is the
command in numerous verses of the Holy Qur'an,
such as "the Book explaining all things" (16:89),
"...it contains a detailed exposition of all
things," (12:111), it "makes things clear"
(27:1), "a book consistent with itself" (39:23),
"free of crookedness" (18:1) and "discrepancy"
(4:82).
Allah and Holy Prophet (SAW) are uncompromisingly
intolerant of the admissibility of any other
formulation, even in a subsidiary role as a
source of Islam. "In what exposition will they
believe after Allah and His signs (the word and
work of Allah)(45:6).
Any human formulation, which fails to measure up
to the letter and spirit of the Qur'an, is not
acceptable in Islam. On the other hand, any thing
that lies within the ambit of the Qur'an is truly
Islamic, no matter what its source or origin.
Says the Qur'an, "If any do fail to judge by what
Allah hath revealed, they are unbelievers"
(5:47). And if any fail to judge by what Allah
hath revealed, they are wrong-doers" (5:48).
The Qur'anic concept of Sunnah, the words and
deeds of the Holy Prophet (SAW), therefore has no
identity independent of the letter and spirit of
the Qur'an. If it were so, the Holy Prophet (SAW)
would not be commanded to say: "I hope that my
Lord will guide me ever closer (even) than this
to the right course" (18:24), or "ask forgiveness
for thy faults" (40:55).
The contemporary Arab society was primarily oral.
The Qur'an and the Holy Prophet (SAW), however,
both uphold the superiority of the written over
the oral word. That is why the Holy Prophet (SAW)
dictated every revelation to a scribe for
authentic record.
It is highly significant that the a man so
meticulous in ensuring that Divine guidance be
passed on correctly down to the last word, would
ignore his personal sayings so completely, if in
his view the same constituted, in any way, a
separate, independent or a complementary source
of Islam. He left behind not a single line in
writing that could then or later be called his
normative Sunnah.
The argument that rajam is part of Sunnah, and
even if not ordained by the Qur'an, is Islamic,
therefore, cannot be accepted.
The Hudood laws, authenticating rajam as Islamic,
were rooted partly in General Zia's obsession
with the so-called Islamisation, and partly in
the devious scheme to co-opt the religious
extremists to punish and banish democratic
leaders.
Two separate commissions on the rights of women,
each headed by, and including eminent jurists and
religious scholars have held this view and
demanded repeal of the Ordinance. They have not
denied that Qur'an ordains hadd punishment for
certain offences. But they do assert that the
Ordinance made in the name of Islam and hudood by
Zia has nothing to do with Islam, and must
therefore be repealed.
The Hudood Ordinance punishes the victim even
before an attempt is made to catch the real
culprit. The women, even after proved to be
innocent, have to live forever with the shame of
infamy. This is murder of equity and justice that
cannot be the purpose of any Islamic law.
Those religious elements who claim that rajam is
Islamic, assert an exclusive right to interpret
Islamic teachings. But this is not correct. Islam
does not ordain that interpretation of its tenets
is the prerogative alone of those wearing green
turbans or black robes.
A resolution has been submitted in the Senate
that states: "This House expresses the opinion
that whereas Islam prescribes Hadd punishments
for certain offences, the punishments under The
Offence of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance
1979 are unIslamic"
How can the religious elements claim that those
demanding a change in the law are guilty of the
negating the Qur'anic injunctions? The
enlightened elements within the religious parties
must support this resolution. Also, the
parliamentarians not belonging to the religious
parties should prepare themselves for the debate
and not abandon the field to those who claim sole
monopoly of interpretation religious tenets.
The writer is a Senator
_____
[5]
19 June 2004
Subject: PEOPLE'S SAARC
Establishment of People's SAARC
With the formal declaration of the ìFree Tradeî in
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
(SAARC) through the twelth SAARC Summit. Having been
learnt the meaning of the Free Trade through the
documents of the summit, is that the trade would be at
the center and the Human Being would be at its
periphery. It has completely wiped out the importance
of humans. Thus the civil society of South Asia has
the responsibility to push up the human cause in the
trade scenario. It is a well-known fact the South
Asian region is most poverty stricken in comparison to
the entire world.
The summit has also reconstituted the Independent
South Asian Commission for Poverty Alleviation
(ISACPA), which is commendable step. But this
commission,that has the objective to play an advocacy
role and set SAARC Development Goals for the next five
years does not constitutes of a broader civil society
including the weaker section to represent their
specific cause, the reconstitution may not have a
fallback with the cause of suppressed class. The
areas of poverty alleviation, health, environment,
education giving due regard
to the suggestions of the ISACPA report definitely
require the people from the field the questions come
from without which, the answer can not be true in
their sense.
The summit has also appreciated by signing the SAARC
Social Charter that puts up the cause of poverty
alleviation, population stabilization, women
empowerment,health and nutrition, youth mobilization,
human resource development and also protection of
children. We too appreciate the above cause taken up
by through
the charter but would like to indicate that the
charter despite speaking on several issues misses out
a few vital ones. It does not talks about Human Right
for marginalised, development and democracy through
empowerment in regard to the women and even after
talking about child protection the abuse on children
has been left out that makes a key issue in South
Asia. Trafficking of children is a major issue to be
touched very specifically keeping the various laws of
SAARC nations by the Charter without which the
document purpose would not be complete.
The document does talks of the child and women
protection against trafficking of against
prostitution. It does not specifies the other hazards
which are or could be of trafficking for bonded labour
or for Camel Jockey that specially includes India and
Bangladesh as route for the trafficking. The document
also lacks the measures against the threats of organ
transplantation, forming a major business boom for
traffickers. Also the document ignored the cause of
men and their right
under the association.
As the summit declaration deal with the varied culture
of the SAARC nation it speaks of the cultural mosaic.
However the underline does not specify the formation
of a composite culture with the varied forms of
culture and does not even deals with the communal
facism rigging in these very SAARC nations. We demand
a clear vision on the issue to culture for it is the
identity of any nation and mixture of same shall there
be crystal clear and not opaque by any means.
It has been observed that conscience has at various
stages hindered relations and development of nations
and despite attempts an unclear military stand gives
an unwanted threat. The topic is same with the SAARC
nations who do talk of protection but the military
threat and the cold war going between the nations has
been ignored from the nations. Any expense on bomb is
a worry on many faces and the same investment on
creative thing if dwelling smile on millions. The
document as it talks of development and protection
shall be incomplete if it does not specifies the
associationÅfs stand on military operations between
the
nations as this would continuously bring upon a fear
psychosis on human under the big umbrella, pulling
down the efforts.
Taking examples of Cuba where the military expense if
five per cent against fifty five per cent expense on
health and education, of it GDP, can not the
association put pressure on the SAARC nations to adopt
a similar pattern and give boost to peopleís health
rather then bringing military threat.
The fourteenth summit of the association is going to
be held in January 2005. There is time for a Peopleís
SAARC to be formed that may take up the burning topics
before the next summit begins and pressurize to
include the peopleís cause in their existing agenda or
may modify the present one. It is the responsibility
of the people of South Asia to get united on this
bigger issue and form a unified force before the
January of 2005.
COLOMBO Declaration
Letís begin ìGlobalisation of Sensitivitiesî in South
Asia.
South Asia has the worldís most populous youthful
growing set of communities. These people are poor and
rural by global standards.
Globalisation has been ìhollowing outî the more
advanced areas in this region. Wages in the regionís
globalised workplaces are declining. (Sri Lankaís
export garments workersí monthly wages have fallen
from USD50 to USD30 between 1983 and 2003, a high
growth period for this industry.)
Isnít it time we organise for decent Social living for
our people. A SAARC for what? Global capital or
global people?
Our stand is for our regional countries
1. To develop certain common standards and fronts in
dealings with Capital Movements and ownership of large
Companies
2. To develop common standards and fronts in dealings
with the agents of the global system as donors and
World Bank/ IMF
3. To develop common standards of decency of workplace
and treatment of workers
4. To develop common standards of minimum wages
5. To develop common standards of decent housing and
social infrastructure for all.
Our Campaign is to create and promote, within our
regional countries, a grass roots level activism of
direct action including:
1. Creating awareness of the World Bank/ Donors/ State
Ministries/ Elite Corporates & Professionals nexus
which is the Complex that is causing our problems and
economic distortions
2. Creating actions that challenge and overcome this
Capital Using Complex in simple activities as housing
or agricultural development in a way that is
developmental and creates the participation of the
people in the exact operations of Capital and Prices
in the economy.
3. Creating public demands for a People driven SAARC.
Dr Lenin Raghuvanshi Dr Darin C Gunesekera
PVCHR Wiros Lokh Institute
Varanasi, India Colombo, Sri Lanka.
30 May 2004
_____
[6]
Axess Magazine [Sweden]
June 11, 2004
THE INVENTION OF THE HINDU
By Pankaj Mishra
Hinduism is largely a fiction, formulated in the
18th and 19th centuries out of a multiplicity of
sub-continental religions, and enthusiastically
endorsed by Indian modernisers. Unlike Muslims,
Hindus have tended to borrow more than reject,
and it has now been reconfigured as a global
rival to the big three monotheisms. In the
process, it has abandoned the tradition of
toleration which lie in its true origins.
Earlier this year, I was in Rishikesh, the first
town that the river Ganges meets as it leaves its
Himalayan home and embarks upon its long journey
through the North Indian plains. The town's place
in Indian mythology is not as secure as that of
Hardwar, which lies a few miles downstream, and
which periodically hosts the Kumbh Mela; nor is
it as famous as places like Allahabad and
Benares, even holier cities further down on the
Ganges. People seeking greater solitude and
wisdom usually head deep into the Himalayas. With
its saffron-robed sadhus and ashrams, its yoga
and meditation centres, and its internet and dosa
cafes, Rishikesh caters to a very modern kind of
spiritual tourist: the Beatles came, most
famously, in the sixties to learn Transcendental
Meditationâ„¢ from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their
quick disillusionment seems not to have deterred
the stylishly disaffected members of the western
middle class that can be found wandering the
town's alleys in tie-dye outfits, trying to raise
their kundalini in between checking their Hotmail
accounts.
I was in Rishikesh to see my aunt, who has just
retired to one of the riverside ashrams. She has
known a hard life; widowed when she was in her
thirties, she worked in small, badly paid
teaching jobs to support her three children. In
my memory, I can still see her standing at
exposed country bus stops in the middle of
white-hot summer days. She had come to know
comfort, even luxury, of sorts in later life. Her
children travel all over the world as members of
India's new globalised corporate elite; there are
bright grandchildren to engage her at home. But
she was happiest in Rishikesh, she told me,
living as frugally as she had for much of her
life, and devoting her attention to the end of
things.
True detachment, however, seemed as difficult to
achieve for her as for the spiritual seekers with
email. I had only to mention the political
situationâ*”India was then threatening to attack
Pakistanâ*”for her to say, angrily: "These
Muslims need to be taught a lesson. We Hindus
have been too soft for too long."
In the last decade, such anti-Muslim sentiments
have become commonplace among the middle class
upper-caste Hindus in both India and abroad who
form the most loyal constituency of the Hindu
nationalist BJP. They were amplified most
recently in Gujarat during the BJP-assisted
massacre in early 2002 of over a thousand
Muslims. They go with a middle class pride in the
international prominence of Indian beauty queens,
software professionals and Bollywood films.
Perhaps I wouldn't have found anything odd about
my aunt's anti-Muslim passions had I not later
gone up to her monastic cell, one of the several
in a large quad around a flower garden, and
noticed the large garlanded poster of a
well-known Sufi saint of western India.
Did she know that she revered someone born a
Muslim? I don't think so. The folk religion to
which the Sufi saint belongs, and which millions
of Indians still practise, does not acknowledge
such modern political categories as "Hindu" and
"Muslim." I think the contradiction between her
beliefs and practice would only be clear to the
outsider: the discrepancy between the narrow
nationalist prejudices she had inherited from her
class and caste, and the affinities she
generously formed in her inner world of devotion
and prayer. It is not easily understood; but it
is part of the extraordinary makeover undergone
by Hinduism since the nineteenth century when
India first confronted the West, and its
universalist ideologies of nationalism and
progress.
THE REMARKABLE quality of this transformation is
partly shown by the fact that there was no such
thing as Hinduism before the British invented the
holdall category in the early nineteenth century,
and made India seem the home of a "world
religion" as organised and theologically coherent
as Christianity and Islam. The concepts of a
"world religion" and "religion" as we know them
now, emerged during the late 18th and early 19th
century, as objects of academic study, at a time
of widespread secularisation in western Europe.
The idea, as inspired by the Enlightenment, was
to study religion as a set of beliefs, and to
open it up to rational enquiry.
But academic study of any kind imposes its own
boundaries upon the subject. It actually creates
the subject while bringing it within the realm of
the intellect. The early European scholars of
religion labelled everything; they organised
disparate religious practices into one system,
and literally brought into being such world
religions as Hinduism and Buddhism.
Not only Hinduism, but the word Hindu itself is
of non-Hindu origin. It was first used by the
ancient Persians to refer to the people living
near the river Indus (Sindhu in Sanskrit). It
then became a convenient shorthand for the Muslim
and Christian rulers of India; it defined those
who weren't Muslims or Christians. Modern
scholarship has made available much more
information about the castes, religious sects,
folk and elite cultures, philosophical traditions
and languages that exist, or have existed, on the
Indian subcontinent. But despite containing the
world's third largest population of Muslims,
India is still for most people outside it, a
country of Hindus; even a "Hindu civilisation" as
it featured in Samuel Huntington's millenarian
world-view.
The persistence of such labels in the West is not
just due to ignorance, or to some lingering
Christian fear of unconvertible heathens.
Perhaps, the urge to fix a single identity for
such diverse communities as found in India comes
naturally to people in the highly organised and
uniform societies of the West, where cultural
diversity now usually means the politically
expedient and hardened identities of
multiculturalism. Perhaps, people who themselves
are defined almost exclusively by their
citizenship in the nation-state and the consumer
society cannot but find wholly alien the
pre-modern world of multiple identities and
faiths in which most Indians still live.
Certainly, most Hindus themselves felt little
need for precise self-descriptions, except when
faced with blunt questions about religion on
official forms. Long after their encounter with
the monotheistic religions of Islam and
Christianity, they continued to define themselves
through their overlapping allegiances to family,
caste, linguistic group, region, and devotional
sect. Religion to them was more unselfconscious
practice than rigid belief; it is partly why
Indian theology accommodates atheism and
agnosticism. Their rituals and deities varied
greatly, defined often by caste and geography;
and they were also flexible: new goddesses
continue to enrich the pantheon even today. There
is an AIDS goddess which apparently both causes
and eradicates the disease. At any given time,
both snakes and the ultimate reality of the
universe were worshipped in the same region,
sometimes by the same person. Religion very
rarely demanded, as it did with many Muslims or
Christians, adherence to a set of theological
ideas prescribed by a single prophet, book, or
ecclesiastical authority.
This is why a history of Hinduism, no matter how
narrowly conceived, has to describe several very
parochial-seeming Indian religions, almost none
of which contained an evangelical zeal to save
the world. The first of theseâ*”the Vedic
religionâ*”began with the nomads and pastoralists
from central Asia who settled north India in the
second millennium BC. It was primarily created by
the priestly class of Brahmans who conducted fire
sacrifices with the help of the Vedas, the
earliest known Indian scriptures, in order to
stave off drought and hunger. But the Brahmans
who also formulated the sacred and social codes
of the time wished to enhance their own glory and
power rather than propose a new all-inclusive
faith; they presented themselves as the most
superior among the four caste groups that emerged
during Vedic times and were based upon racial
distinctions between the settlers and the
indigenous population of north India and then on
a division of labour.
A NEW RELIGION WAS also far from the minds of the
Buddhists, the Jains and many other philosophical
and cultural movements that emerged in the sixth
and fifth centuries BC while seeking to challenge
the power of the Brahmans and of the caste
hierarchy. People dissatisfied with the
sacrificial rituals of the Vedic religion later
grew attracted to the egalitarian cults of Shiva
and Vishnu that became popular in India around
the beginning of the first century AD. However,
the Brahmans managed to preserve their status at
the top of an ossifying caste system. They
zealously guarded their knowledge of Sanskrit,
esoteric texts, and their expertise in such
matters as the correct pronunciation of mantras.
Their specialised knowledge, and pan-Indian
presence, gave them a hold over ruling elites
even as the majority of the population followed
its own heterodox cults and sects. Their
influence can be detected in such Indian texts as
the Bhagavad-Gita which was interpolated into the
much older Mahabharata, and which, though
acknowledging the irrelevance of ritual
sacrifices, made a life of virtue, or dharma,
inseparable from following the rules of caste.
At the same time, India remained too big and
diverse to be monopolised by any one book or
idea. Today, the Hindu nationalists present
Muslim rulers of India as the flagbearers of an
intolerant monotheism; but there was even more
religious plurality during the eight centuries of
Muslim presence in India. Sufism mingled with
local faiths; the currently popular devotional
cults of Rama and Krishna, and the network of
ashrams and sects expanded fast under the Mughal
empire. Medieval India furnishes more evidence of
sectarian violence between the worshippers of
Shiva and Vishnu than between Hindus and Muslims.
In the 18th century, the British were both
appalled and fascinated by the excess of gods,
sects, and cults they encountered in India. It
was a religious situation similar to the pagan
chaos a Christian from the eastern provinces of
the Roman empire might have encountered in the
West just before Constantine's conversion to
Christianity. As it turned out, like the powerful
Christians in Rome, the British in India sought
and imposed uniformity. There were intellectually
curious men among them: a judge called William
Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal,
whose amateur scholars began in the late 18th
century to figure out the strange bewildering
country the British found themselves in. Jones, a
linguist, confirmed the similarity between
Sanskrit and Greek. Another official, James
Prinsep, deciphered the ancient Indian script of
Brahmi, the ancestor of most Indian scripts, that
the British found on pillars and rock faces
across south Asia, and threw the first clear
light on the first great patron of Buddhism,
Ashoka. A military officer called Alexander
Cunningham excavated the site near Benares where
the Buddha had preached his first sermon.
These days, there is a common enough presumption,
which was popularised by Edward Said's
Orientalism, that much of western scholarship on
the Orient helped, directly or not, western
imperialists. Some people take it further and
assert that any, or all, western interest in
India is tainted with bad faith.
IT WOULD BE TOO simple to say that this great
intellectual effort, to which we owe much of our
present knowledge of India, was part of a
colonialist or imperialist enterprise of
controlling newly conquered peoples and
territories. What's more interesting than the by
now familiar accusations of Orientalism is how
the assumptions of the earliest British scholars
mingled with the prejudices of native Indian
elites to create an entirely new kind of
knowledge about India.
These scholars organised their impressions of
Indian religion according to what they were
familiar with at home: the monotheistic and
exclusive nature of Christianity. When confronted
by diverse Indian religions, they tended to see
similarities. These similarities were usually as
superficial as those found between Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. But the British assumed
that different religious practices could only
exist within a single overarching tradition. They
also started off with a literary bias, which was
partly the result of the mass distribution of
texts and the consequent high degree of literacy
in Europe in the eighteenth century. They thought
that since Christianity had canonical texts,
Indian tradition must have the same. Their local
intermediaries tended to be Brahmans, who alone
knew the languagesâ*”primarily Sanskritâ*”needed
to study such ancient Indian texts as the Vedas
and the Bhagavad-Gita. Together, the British
scholars and their Brahman interpreters came up
with a canon of sorts, mostly Brahmanical
literature and ideology, which they began to
identify with a single Hindu religion.
The Brahmanical literature, so systematised,
later created much of the appeal of Indian
culture for its foreign connoisseurs, such as the
German romantics, Schopenhauer, Emerson and
Thoreau. The strange fact here is that most
Indians then knew nothing or very little of the
hymns, invocations and liturgical formulae of the
four Vedas or the philosophical idealism of the
Upanishads that the British and other European
scholars in Europe took to be the very essence of
Indian civilisation. These Sanskrit texts had
long been monopolised by an elite minority of
Brahmans who zealously guarded their knowledge of
Sanskrit. It was these Brahmans who educated the
British amateur scholars. So they studied
earnestly the canon of what they supposed to be
ancient Indian tradition and managed to remain
mostly unaware of the more numerous non-textual,
syncretic religious and philosophical traditions
of Indiaâ*”for example, the popular devotional
cults, Sufi shrines, festivals, rites, and
legends that varied across India and formed the
worldview of a majority of Indians.
But the texts provided the British the standards
with which to judge the state of contemporary
religion in India. Since few Indians at the time
seemed capable of the sublime sentiments found in
the Bhagavad-Gita and the Rig-Veda, Hinduism
began to seem a degenerate religion, full of such
social evils as widow-burning and untouchability,
and in desperate need of social engineering: an
idea that appealed both to British colonialists
and their Brahman collaborators who had long felt
threatened by the non-Brahmanical forms of
religion that most Indians followed. It was
equally convenient to blame the intrusion of
Islam into India for Hinduism's fallen state,
even the caste system, and to describe Hindus as
apathetic slaves of Muslim tyrants: a terrible
fate from which the British had apparently
rescued them in order to prepare their path to a
high stage of civilisation.
These ideas about the Muslim tyrants, Hindu
slaves and British philanthropists were
originally set out in such influential books as
History of British India, written by James Mill,
a Scottish utilitarian, and the father of John
Stuart Mill. Such books now tell you more about
the proselytising vigour of some enlightened
Scots and utilitarians than about Indian history.
BUT THEY HAVE HAD very serious political
consequences. Many westernised upper-caste
Indians, including middle class Hindu
nationalists, now believe that Muslim invaders
destroyed a pure and glorious Hindu civilisation,
which a minority of Brahmans then managed to
preserve. The rather crude British generalisation
that Hindus and Muslims constituted mutually
exclusive and monolithic religious
communitiesâ*”a view which was formed largely by
historians who never visited India, such as James
Mill, and which was then institutionalised in
colonial policies of divide-and-ruleâ*”was
eventually self-fulfilled, first, by the
partition of British India, and then by the
hostility between India and Pakistan.
Even at the time, these ideas had a profound
impact on a new generation of upper-caste
Indians, who had been educated in western-style
institutions, and so were well placed to
appreciate the immense power and prestige that
Britain then had as the supreme economic and
military nation in the world. These Indians
wished to imitate the success of the British; do
for India what a few enterprising men had done
for a tiny island; and they found a source of
nationalist pride in the newly-minted "Hinduism."
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
educated people everywhere in the colonised
countries of Asia and Africa were forced into
considering how their inheritance of ancient
tradition has failed to save them from subjection
to the modern West. This was what preoccupied
such Muslim intellectuals as Mohammed Iqbal, the
poet-advocate of Pakistan, the Egyptians Mohammed
Abduh, the intellectual founder of modern radical
Islamist, and Sayyid Qutb, the fundamentalist
activist who inspired Osama Bin Laden.
These were mostly people from the middle class
who were educated formally in western-style
institutions and who became the leading modernist
thinkers within their respective traditions.
Their most crucial encounter was with the West
whose power they felt daily in their lives, and
whose history they learned before they learnt
anything else.
Travelling to the West in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, they came up against
the paradox that the western nations, which were
mortal enemies of each other, and brutal
exploiters in their colonies, had created
admirably liberal civilisations at home. They
remained opposed to the colonial presence in
their countries and aspired for independence. But
they were also dazzled by the power and prestige
of the West, and they couldn't but grapple with
the complex question of how much space to give to
western values of science, reason, secularism and
nationalism in the traditional societies they
belonged to.
THIS QUESTION BEGAN to haunt Vivekananda when in
1893 he travelled to the West for the first time
in his life. Born in a middle class family in
Calcutta, he was educated in western-style
institutions, and was studying law, in
preparation for a conventional professional
career, when he met the mystic Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa and renounced the world to become a
sannyasi. He travelled all across India and first
exposed himself to the misery and degradation
most Indians then lived in. When he travelled to
the Parliament of Religions as a representative
of the Hindu religion in 1893, he hoped partly to
raise funds for a monastic mission in India and,
more vaguely, to find the right technology for
alleviating poverty in India.
The Parliament of Religions was part of a larger
celebration of Christopher Columbus's so-called
discovery of America. The organisers planned to
"display the achievements of western civilisation
and to benefit American trade." Vivekananda
addressed himself directly to such
self-absorption. He spoke eloquently and
enthrallingly on Hinduism in Chicago, drawing on
his great knowledge of western philosophy. He
claimed that it was an Indian achievement to see
all religions as equally true, and to set
spiritual liberation as the aim of life.
Americans received his speech rapturously. He
lectured on Hinduism to similarly enthusiastic
audiences in other American cities.
The news of Vivekananda's success flattered
insecure middle class Indians in India who wished
to make Hinduism intellectually respectable to
both themselves and to westerners. But
Vivekananda himself, during the next few years he
spent travelling in America and Europe, was to
move away from an uncritical celebration of
Indian religion and his hostility towards the
West. He came to have a new regard for the West,
for the explosion of creative energy, the
scientific spirit of curiosity and the ambition
that in the nineteenth century had made a small
minority the masters of the world. He could
barely restrain his admirations in letters home:
"What strength, what practicality, what manhood!"
Vivekananda also claimed to sense a spiritual
hunger in the West, which he said India was
well-placed to allay. He thought that India could
be Greece to the West's Rome, by offering its
spiritual heritage to the West in exchange for
the secret of material advancement. Together, he
hoped, India and the West would lead a new
renaissance of humanity.
Vivekananda returned to India after three years,
his admiration for the West undiminished. He set
up a monastic order devoted to social service and
to reforming Hinduism which he saw as a decadent
religion. In the midst of his endeavours, he died
young, at thirty-nine. Nothing much could come
out of what was mostly well-intentioned rhetoric:
India was too far away from the West, which was
then only in the middle of its extraordinary
rise. It was not up to India, then a subject
country, to impose terms on anyone.
Vivekananda appeared to have struggled in his
short life with many new ideas. He didn't always
have clear solutions. His value lies in that he
was among the first Indians to realise clearly
the fact of western dominance over the world; he
attested above all to the inevitability of the
West's presence, if not superiority, in all
aspects of human life. There were other people
who had reached the same conclusion:
Europe is progressive. Her religion is....used
for one day in the week and for six days her
people are following the dictates of modern
science. Sanitation, aesthetic arts, electricity
etc are what made the Europeans and American
people great. Asia is full of opium eaters, ganja
smokers, degenerating sensualists, superstitious
and religious fanatics.
This could be either Vivekananda or Iqbal. It is
actually Angarika Dharampala, the greatest figure
of modern Buddhism. Born in Sri Lanka (then
Ceylon) in 1864, Dharampala was just a year
younger than Vivekananda. He even went to the
Parliament of Religions in Chicago as a
representative of Buddhism but was more prominent
than his Indian colleague. Like Vivekananda,
Dharampala was influenced by the West,
particularly by the Protestant missionaries that
came with British rule over Sri Lanka, and came
to denounce traditional religion in Sri Lanka as
corrupt and unmanly. He wished to modernise
Buddhism and also give it a political role.
Following these contradictory desires, he became
an anti-colonial nationalist, and the major icon
of the Sinhalese nationalism that later brought
Sri Lanka to civil war in the 1980s.
COMPARED TO SUCH Hindu and Buddhist modernists as
Vivekananda and Dharampala, the Muslim
intellectuals were more divided in their
attitudes towards the West. Some of them, such as
the young Turkish intellectuals of early
twentieth century, wished totally to remake their
countries along western lines so as to reach the
summit of power and affluence that the West had
arrived at. There were many others who chose the
way of suspicion or antipathy. Iqbal stressed the
need of Indian Muslims to form their own state
where they could follow Islam in its most
spiritual form and be able to resist the material
ways of the West. Qutb advocated a return to the
Koran and preached revolutionary violence against
the West and its values that he saw incarnated in
Arab nation-states.
But whether choosing nationalism or revolution,
almost all of these intellectuals from colonised
countries seemed to concede that the West had
become the best source of ideas about effecting
large-scale change and organising human society.
They admitted the need for modernisation even in
the sphere of religion and for cultivating a
rational and scientific outlook.
ONLY A TINY MINORITY of upper-caste Indians had
known much about the Bhagavad-Gita or the Vedas
until the eighteenth century when they were
translated by British scholars and then presented
as sacred texts from the paradisiacal age of
something called "Hinduism." But in the
nineteenth century, movements dedicated to
reforming Hinduism and recovering its lost glory
grew very rapidly. The inspiration or rhetoric of
these neo-Hindu movements might have seemed
archaic. In fact, they were largely inspired by
the ideas of progress and development that
British utilitarians and Christian missionaries
aggressively promoted in India. Modernist
intellectuals in Muslim countries then exposed to
European imperialism similarly absorbed western
influences, but their distrust of the Christian
and secular West was deeper.
Unlike Muslims, the Hindus tended to borrow more
than reject. Ram Mohun Roy (1772-1932), who is
often called the "father of modern India," was a
Unitarian. He founded the Brahmo Samaj, a
reformist society that influenced the poet
Rabindranath Tagore and filmmaker Satyajit Ray,
among other leading Indian intellectuals and
artists, as part of an attempt to turn Hinduism
into a rational, monotheistic religion. The
social reformer Dayananda exhorted Indians to
return to the Vedas, which contained, according
to him, all of modern science, and echoed British
missionary denunciations of such Hindu
superstitions as idol-worship and the caste
system. Even the more secular and catholic
visions of Gandhi and Nehruâ*”the former a devout
Hindu, the latter an agnosticâ*”accepted the
premise of a "Hinduism: that had decayed and had
to be reformed.
Gandhi drew his political imagery from popular
folklore; it made him more effective as a leader
of the Indian masses than the upper caste Hindu
politicians who relied upon a textual, or elite
Hinduism. But it was Swami Vivekananda who in his
lifetime was witness to, and also mostly
responsible for, the modernisation of Hinduism.
Vivekananda was the middle-class disciple of the
illiterate mystic Ramakrishna Paramhans; but he
moved very far away from his Guru's
inward-looking spirituality in his attempt to
make Hinduism, or the invention of British and
Brahman scholars, intellectually respectable to
both Westerners and westernised Indians. In his
lectures in England and America, where he
acquired a mass following, he presented India as
the most ancient and privileged fount of
spiritualityâ*”a line that many Indian Gurus were
profitably to take with their western disciples.
At the same time, he exhorted Hindus to embrace
western science and materialism in order to shed
their burden of backwardness and constitute
themselves into a manly nation.
Vivekananda borrowed from both
British-constructed Hinduism and European
realpolitik. In doing so he articulated the
confused aggressive desires of a westernised
Indian bourgeoisie that was then trying to find
its identity. But his ambition of regenerating
India with the help of western techniques did not
sunder him entirely from the folk religious
traditions he had grown up in. He remained a
mystic; and his contradictory rhetoric now seems
to prefigure the oddly split personality of the
modern Hindu, where devotion to a Muslim saint
can co-exist with an anti-Muslim nationalism.
HIS IMPORTANCE DOESN'T END THERE. The marriage of
Indian religiosity and western materialism
Vivekananda tried to arrange makes him the
perfect patron saint of the BJP, a political
party of mostly upper caste middle class Hindus
that strives to boost India's capabilities in the
fields of nuclear bombs and information
technology and also reveres the cow as holy. A
hundred years after his death, the BJP has come
closest to realising his project of westernising
Hinduism into a nationalist ideology: one which
has pretensions to being all-inclusive, but which
demonises Muslims and seeks to pre-empt with its
rhetoric of egalitarianism the long overdue
political assertion of India's lower caste groups.
Vivekananda's modern-day disciples are helped
considerably by the fact that the Indian
bourgeoisie is no longer small and insignificant.
It is growingâ*”the current numbers are between
150-200 million. There are millions of rich
Indians living outside India. In America, they
constitute the richest minority. It is these
affluent, upper caste Indians in India and abroad
who largely bankrolled the rise to power of Hindu
nationalists, and who now long for closer
military and economic ties between India and
western nations. The new conditions of
globalisationâ*”free trade, faster
communicationsâ*”help them work faster towards
the alliance Vivekananda proposed between an
Indian elite and the modern West. As a global
class, they are no less ambitious than the one
which in the Roman empire embraced Christianity
and made it an effective tool of worldly power.
Hinduism in their hands has never looked more
like the Christianity and Islam of Popes and
Mullahs, and less like the multiplicity of
unselfconsciously tolerant faiths it still is for
most Indians. Their growing prominence suggests
that Vivekananda may yet emerge as more
influential in the long run than Gandhi, Nehru or
Tagoreâ*”the three great Indian leaders, whose
legacy of liberal humanism middle class India
already seems to have frittered away as it heads
for intellectually and spiritually oppressive
times.
PANKAJ MISHRA
Author. Regular contributor to the New York
Review of Books, The New Statesman and the Times
Literary Supplement as well as several Indian
publications.
______
[7]
CENTRE OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, SOAS
ALL WELCOME
Rohini Hensman
(Mumbai-based researcher and activist in the
trade union, women's liberation, and human rights
movement and author of To Do Something Beautiful)
will be reading from
Playing Lions and Tigers
(Gratiaen Book Prize shortlist 2003)
on
Tuesday 29 June at 6.15pm,
in G57, College Buildings,
School of Oriental and African Studies
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
"An indispensable book, a must-read Š It is
really a book all readers who care about Sri
Lanka should take up" - lines, May 2004
"In order to keep alive the flame of hope for the
future, it is necessary to confront the memory of
mistakes in the past, and Rohini's novel does
that beautifully" - Silan Kadirgamar
Centre of South Asian Studies, SOAS
020 7898 4892
csas at soas.ac.uk
______
[7]
PEOPLE'S UNION FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES: DELHI
M-35 Greater Kailash I, New Delhi 110048.
[...].
Dear friend
All of us would agree that during the reign of
the last government the civil liberties
environment had become extremely difficult for
the vulnerable sections of the society. This
happened directly as well as indirectly. The
horror of Gujarat, draconian nature of POTA, its
discriminate application and subversion of the
judicial system to deny the justice to the
victims of Gujrat riots were no less than a
catastrophe for our civil society. Besides, the
blind servility to WTO dictated market centric
policies pushed the organised and unorganised
labour and peasants to the abyss of poverty.
However following the parliamentary election 2004
the Indian electorate has chosen a new
government led by the UPA. What do we expect from
and impress upon the new government for ensuring
a dignified life for the common citizen as well
as restoring and strengthening nation’s civil
liberties’ atmosphere?
To discuss this and all the related issues,
PUCL-Delhi has organised an inter-active session,
`The New Mandate Civil Liberties’ to commemorate
the anti-emergency day on 25 June 2004 at 4:30
p.m., at Rajendra Bhawan, Conference Hall (in
front of Gandhi Peace Foundation) Deen Dayal
Upadhaya Marg, I.T.O., New Delhi. Several eminent
people from the related fields are expected to
take part in the discussion.
Your gracious presence is kindly solicited.
With thanks
Pushkar Raj
General Secretary, PUCL-Delhi
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South
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