SACW | 3 Aug 2004
sacw
aiindex at mnet.fr
Mon Aug 2 19:39:54 CDT 2004
South Asia Citizens Wire | 3 August, 2004
via: www.sacw.net
[1] Admn Ramdas and IA Rehman among 2004
Magsaysay Awardees for their work for
Indo-Pakistan peace
+ Text of award citation + News reports
[2] Pakistan: Between 'enlightened moderation'
and jihadi fantasy (Suroosh Irfani)
[3] Holy Shit: Vatican Fatwa on women is music
to Hindu, Muslim and Christian right
- Vatican Letter Denounces 'Lethal Effects' of Feminism
- Women slam Vatican's "time warp" policies (Philip Pullella)
- Statement of Frances Kissling, President, Catholics for a Free Choice
[4] India: Drowned and out [ in Harsud ](Medha Patkar)
[5] UK: Islamophobia in all its splendor: A call
for apology . . . (Iftikhar Malik)
[6] India: Call for assistance to document
communal threat to syncretic traditions
[7] India: Eye on Gen-Next, RSS may drop its khaki chaddis
--------------
[1]
2004 RAMON MAGSAYSAY AWARDEES
The Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay
Award Foundation today announced that this year
seven individuals from the Philippines, China,
Thailand, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan will
receive Asia's most prestigious prize, the Ramon
Magsaysay Award.
[Among the] The Awardees are:
[. . .]
Abdullah Abu Sayeed, from Bangladesh, founder and
head of Bishwo Shahitto Kendro or World
Literature Centre, for Journalism, Literature,
and Creative Communication Arts. Mr. Sayeed is
receiving the Award for "his cultivating in the
youth of Bangladesh a love for literature and its
humanizing values through exposure to the great
books of Bengal and the world."
Laxminarayan Ramdas of India and Ibn Abdur Rehman
of Pakistan, leading advocates in the
Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace and
Democracy (PIPFPD), for Peace and International
Understanding. Mr. Ramdas, former chief of his
country's navy, and Mr. Rehman, a journalist and
human rights advocate, are being recognized for
"their reaching across a hostile border to
nurture a citizen-based consensus for peace
between Pakistan and India."
[...]
Established in 1957, the Ramon Magsaysay Award is
Asia's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
[...]
The seven 2004 Magsaysay awardees join 236 other
laureates who have received Asia's highest honor
to date. This year's Magsaysay Award winners will
each receive a certificate, a medallion bearing
the likeness of the late President, and a cash
prize. They will be formally conferred the
Magsaysay Award during the Presentation
Ceremonies to be held on August 31, 2004 at the
Cultural Center of the Philippines, to which the
public is cordially invited.
This year's Magsaysay awardees will also speak in
a series of public lectures to be held at the
Ramon Magsaysay Center from August 26 to
September 1, 2004.
*****
For more information, please contact:
Mrs. Lourdes Mercado-Balbin
RMAF Communications Officer
Telephones: 524-2390; 521-3166 to 85, locals 161 or 180
Email: lmbalbin at rmaf.org.ph
Website: www.rmaf.org.ph
o o o
TEXT OF CITATION
The 1998 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding
CITATION for Laxminarayan Ramdas and Ibn Abdur Rehman
Ramon Magsaysay Award Presentation Ceremonies
31 August 2004, Manila, Philippines
The armed standoff between India and Pakistan has
endured for more than fifty years, bringing with
it four outright wars and continuing upheaval.
Its flashpoint is Kashmir, claimed by both sides.
But its roots lie in the shocking communal
violence of Partition in 1947. In the years since
then, memories of this disturbing event have
fueled religion-infused nationalism and
militarism in both countries and kept millions of
fearful people poised for war. Today both sides
boast nuclear weapons and the stakes are global.
The problem seems intractable. But Ibn Abdur
Rehman of Pakistan and Laxminarayan Ramdas of
India believe there is hope. As leaders of the
Pakistan India People's Forum for Peace and
Democracy, they are building popular support for
peace on both sides of the border.
Ibn Abdur Rehman, a Punjabi Muslim born in 1930,
was away at school in 1947 when Partition erupted
in his home town and his entire family was killed
by rampaging Sikhs and Hindus. Ramu Ramdas, a
Hindu from Mumbai, was fourteen at the time. He
remembers angry mobs threatening his parents for
protecting a Muslim family. Rehman went on to
study physics at Government College, Lahore but
found his vocation in journalism, rising from
post to post at leading Pakistani publications to
become chief editor of the Pakistan Times in
1989. Ramdas became a cadet at the Royal Naval
College in England and rose from command to
command until, in 1990, he was named chief of
India's navy. By 1993, Rehman had left the Times,
under pressure for criticizing the government,
and Ramdas had retired and acquired a Pakistani
son-in-law. As tensions again rose between India
and Pakistan, both men sought to influence their
countries to change course. In September 1994,
Rehman joined twenty-four likeminded Indians and
Pakistanis in Lahore to open a public dialogue
for reconciliation and peace. This led to the
formation of the Pakistan India People's Forum
for Peace and Democracy. Rehman became founding
chair of the Pakistan branch. Ramdas was named
vice-chair of the India branch and became chair
in 1996. Both men guided the organization until
2003.
The Forum's chief weapon was dialogue. In a
series of joint conventions beginning in 1995, it
drew hundreds of Indians and Pakistanis together
to promote demilitarization, denuclearization,
and peace, and to publish resolutions insisting
upon mutual arms reductions and troop pullbacks;
an end to cross-border provocations; and a
"peaceful democratic solution" in Kashmir.
Meeting alternately in Pakistan and India, the
conventions have sustained this dialogue for ten
years as the Forum's base has grown to embrace a
web of environmental, human rights, trade union,
and women's rights activists as well as concerned
citizens from the academe, industry, and the
professions. During the same years, the Forum
organized people-to-people delegations of
lawmakers, diplomats, soldiers, artists, women,
and students to open friendly talk channels
between Indians and Pakistanis and to counteract
propaganda in each country stigmatizing the
other. It also campaigned for the liberalization
of travel between the two countries and for the
revision of hate-filled school textbooks. At
another level, Forum leaders such as Rehman and
Ramdas worked behind the scenes with national
leaders and opinion makers to promote the peace
agenda. The Forum's mission is not grandiose. "It
is enough," Rehman says, "to contribute in easing
the tension between the two countries by
providing opportunities for people to meet."
For Rehman, the Forum's peace initiative grew
naturally from his work as one of Pakistan's
leading human rights advocates and as long time
director of the internationally esteemed Pakistan
Human Rights Commission. In this role and also as
a journalist, Rehman has devoted decades to
exposing systemic violations of the rights of
women, children, workers, and minorities in
Pakistan and to fighting corruption and the abuse
of power. He has been a champion of democracy as
a secular ideal in a country where, he says,
"authoritarianism has been the rule and
short-lived democratic facades an exception." All
this at considerable personal risk and sacrifice.
As for India and Pakistan, he calls upon both
countries to reject their "pathological obsession
with the politics of hostility."
Ramdas says, "I entered the armed services as a
hawk and exited as a dove." His military career
made him intimately familiar with the limitations
of military solutions to political problems. This
led to his role in the Forum. Still, India's
explosion of a test atomic bomb in May 1998,
Ramdas says, "was one of the greatest turning
points in my life." In July he signed a public
declaration by retired military men declaring
that "nuclear weapons should be banished from the
South Asian region, and indeed from the entire
globe." With his wife, Lalita, he threw himself
into the anti-nuclear cause, warning Indians and
Pakistanis alike about their country's unreliable
"control and command systems" and about the
naiveté of "nuclear deterrence." Touring and
speaking extensively, he exhorted everyone to
guard against the seductiveness of solutions
"through super-violence."
Ramdas and Rehman both connect the problem of
peace in the subcontinent to dangerous ideologies
that associate religion with nationalism and
patriotism, and to militarism and other
antidemocratic forces. Rehman rues his own
country's "absence of genuinely democratic
institutions." And Ramdas has linked recent
political trends in India to "the path to
fascism." Both have been smeared as traitors. But
they are not moved. It is time to stop the
belligerent shouting and listen to other voices,
they say. When it comes to war and peace, Rehman
likes to say, "I believe the people are a little
ahead of the governments."
In electing Laxminarayan Ramdas and Ibn Abdur
Rehman to receive the 2004 Ramon Magsaysay Award
for Peace and International Understanding, the
board of trustees recognizes their reaching
across a hostile border to nurture a
citizen-based consensus for peace between India
and Pakistan.
o o o
News Reports
The Hindu - August 03, 2004
MAGSAYSAY AWARD
URL: www.thehindu.com/2004/08/03/stories/2004080306350109.htm
The Daily Star - August 03, 2004
ABDULLAH ABU SAYEED RECEIVES MAGSAYSAY AWARD
URL: www.thedailystar.net/2004/08/03/d40803012222.htm
The News International - August 03, 2004
IA REHMAN GETS MAGSAYSAY AWARD
by Rahimullah Yusufzai
URL: www.jang.com.pk/thenews/aug2004-daily/03-08-2004/main/main10.htm
______
[2]
The Daily Times - August 03, 2004; Op-Ed.
BETWEEN 'ENLIGHTENED MODERATION' AND JIHADI FANTASY
by Suroosh Irfani
The "theological threads" of force and violence
have gotten so entwined with our everyday life
that such violence has become virtually
'naturalised' in our religious imagination. It is
encouraging to note that an open and critical
engagement enabled the vast majority to see
through the distortions of meaning and
misrepresentation of images attributed to Islam.
[ Full Text at: www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_3-8-2004_pg3_2 ]
______
[3] [Holy Shit: Vaticans latest fatwa is music
to the ears of Qaids of Hindutva, to Islamists
and to the Christian Right; they are all in the
business of keeping women at bay ! ]
Washington Post - August 1, 2004; Page A16
VATICAN LETTER DENOUNCES 'LETHAL EFFECTS' OF FEMINISM
Document Outlines Formula for Man-Woman Relationships
By Daniel Williams and Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Foreign Service
ROME, July 31 -- The Vatican issued a letter
Saturday attacking the "distortions" and "lethal
effects" of feminism, which it defined as an
effort to erase differences between men and women
-- a goal, the statement said, that undermines
the "natural two-parent structure" of the family
and makes "homosexuality and heterosexuality
virtually equivalent."
The sharp critique was contained in a document
issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a chief
adviser to Pope John Paul II and head of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the
department in charge of defining Roman Catholic
orthodoxy. The 37-page document also outlined the
Vatican's formula for relationships between men
and women, calling for "active collaboration
between the sexes" and rejecting subjugation of
women.
The statement was the latest Vatican salvo
against trends it regards as undermining its
teachings on sexuality and the family. Vatican
officials have assailed abortion and
contraception; politicians who support abortion
through legislation; and legalized same-sex
unions. The pope approved the document, titled
"Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on
the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church
and the World."
Catholic feminists in the United States said the
letter presented a caricature of feminism as
antagonistic toward men and trying to deny any
difference between the sexes. They said feminism
seeks equal rights and respect for both genders.
"The demonization of feminism is most
disturbing," said Frances Kissling, president of
Catholics for a Free Choice, an advocacy group
for abortion rights, who said her blood pressure
"shot up 20 points" when she read the letter.
"It takes extreme positions that may have been
historically held by five people and casts them
as if they were held by every woman," Kissling
said. "The feminism I know is all for
partnerships and is all for empowering both men
and women. The feminism I know does not ignore
the fact that there are sexual differences."
Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, a feminist
theologian at Harvard Divinity School, said the
document restated positions the Vatican has taken
many times and that the only surprise was its
timing. She said church leaders may be feeling
some urgency to combat same-sex marriage, as well
as renewed pressure to consider ordaining women
in response to the worldwide scandal over sexual
abuse by priests.
"It has some positive things in it, but the
political function of the document is the same as
the ones before," Fiorenza said. "It's trying to
make a theological case, which they're really not
able to make, against the full equality of women
in the church."
Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said
on Vatican Radio that the aim of the letter was
to critique two current strands in feminism: one
that emphasizes "a radical rivalry between the
sexes" and the other that seeks to "cancel the
differences between the sexes."
The letter argued that "the obscuring of the
difference . . . of the sexes has enormous
consequences," including inspiring ideologies
that "call into question the family, in its
natural two-parent structure of mother and
father, and make homosexuality and
heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new
model of polymorphous sexuality."
While assaulting what it said were the bases of
feminist ideology, the letter tried to tackle the
practical difficulties and inequities that
feminists also decry. It appeared to attempt to
strike a balance between a Catholic ideal of
women raising children at home and the reality
that many work outside the home.
Women ought not be stigmatized for desiring the
life of a homemaker, the letter argued. "Indeed,
a just valuing of the work of women within the
family is required," it said. Women who choose to
work in the labor force should be awarded a
proper schedule and "not have to choose between
relinquishing their family life or enduring
continual stress," it said.
The Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the national
Catholic weekly America, said in an e-mail
message that "although most American feminists
would express their ideology differently than the
Vatican, on the practical level they are on the
same page (in terms of equality in education,
politics, workplace) except on abortion and women
priests." If there are differences, he added, "it
is probably on the relationship between men and
women in the family, not in society. . . . For
the Vatican, the ideal is that a father be paid
well enough so that a mother can stay home and
raise the kids."
The letter called for the Catholic Church to take
advantage of "feminine values" that include
listening, understanding, caring and
faithfulness. Although women are banned from the
priesthood, their role in the church is not "a
passivity inspired by an outdated conception of
femininity," the letter maintained.
Almost a third of the letter was devoted to
biblical declarations about the sexes. "From the
first moment of their creation, man and woman are
different, and will remain so for eternity," it
said. Tracing the story of Adam and Eve, it said
original sin opened the way to relations between
man and woman "in which love will frequently be
debased into pure self-seeking, in a relationship
which ignores and kills love and replaces it with
the yoke of domination of one sex over the other."
In the afterlife, the letter stated, men and
women will continue to be different, but sex will
come to an end. "The temporal and earthly
expression of sexuality is transient," it
declared.
Cooperman reported from Washington.
o o o
Source: www.reuters.co.uk/
WOMEN SLAM VATICAN'S "TIME WARP" POLICIES
Sun 1 August, 2004 13:48
By Philip Pullella
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Women have reacted with
anger and amusement to a Vatican document on
feminism, with some saying the Catholic Church is
run by men who live in a time warp and want to
keep women in their place.
The document, issued on Saturday, said modern
feminism's fight for power and gender equality
was undermining the traditional concept of family
and creating a climate where gay marriages are
seen as acceptable.
Frances Kissling, president of the U.S.-based
Catholics for a Free Choice, said she thought she
had "passed through a time warp" when she read
the document.
"I thought for sure I was the 1960s and Archie
Bunker had been appointed theologian to the
Pope," she said, referring to the character in an
old American TV series whose bigoted views
included opposition to any form of women's rights.
In a 37-page document "On the Collaboration of
Men and Women in the Church and in the World",
the Vatican said women should be respected and
have equal rights in the workplace, but
differences between the sexes must be recognised
and exalted.
The document, which re-stated Catholic Church
positions, including the ban on female priests,
said that many women felt they had to be
"adversaries of men" in order to be themselves.
It criticised feminism's attempt to erase gender
differences, saying it had inspired ideologies
questioning the traditional family structure of a
mother and a father and making homosexuality and
heterosexuality virtually equivalent.
"Such observations could only be made by men who
have no significant relationships with women and
no knowledge of the enormous positive changes the
women's rights movement has meant for both men
and women," Kissling said.
YESTERDAY'S WORLD?
Emma Bonino, a former European commissioner and
current member of the European parliament, said
the Vatican was writing about a world that she
said no longer exists.
"This letter could easily have been written by an
imam of al-Azhar," she said referring to Sunni
Islam's most respected institution of religious
learning in Cairo.
"To be fair to the Catholic Church, no religion
is a great friend of women," she told the
Corriere della Sera newspaper. "They pay you a
lot of compliments but when push comes to shove
they ask you to stay in your place: wife, nurse,
mother and grandmother."
The document said that although motherhood is a
"key element of women's identity," women should
not be considered from the sole perspective of
procreation.
It said women who choose to be full-time mothers
should not be stigmatised and it appealed to
governments to make it easier for mothers to hold
outside jobs without "relinquishing their family
life".
Some women suggested that the Vatican was taking
a patronising attitude that it would not take
towards men.
"Everyone knows that men and women are different
and the feminist movement has always held this
view," said Chiara Saraceno, a professor of
sociology at the University of Turin.
"What continues to shock me is this teaching
attitude that is always directed at women and
never at men," she told the leftist newspaper
L'Unita. t of the world is increasingly moving
towards acceptance, reported The Washington Post.
o o o
Vatican not a Credible Source on Women
As Vatican prepares to release statement on feminism,
CFFC questions its exclusion of women from leadership in church
Statement of Frances Kissling, President, Catholics for a Free Choice.
For Immediate Release
July 30, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC-A new Vatican document on women to
be released on Saturday, July 31, is unlikely to
position the Vatican as a credible or objective
source of information, analysis, or support for
women's rights. "Letter to the Bishops of the
Catholic Church on Collaboration between Men and
Women in the Church and in the World" surfaces as
the world's women begin their preparations for a
ten-year analysis of the UN women's conference
held in Beijing in 1995. At this conference, the
Vatican was seen as a source of disinformation
and as an obstacle to international policy that
improves women's lives. Early reports indicate
that the document rehashes the same false charges
and stereotypes about feminism, including the
charge that feminism is hostile to men. The
reality is that it is the Vatican that is hostile
to women's full inclusion in the church itself.
Until the Vatican addresses its own exclusion of
women from leadership, it is hard to believe
anyone will take seriously its views on women.
--statement ends--
______
[4]
The Hindustan Times - August 2, 2004: Pg 10: Edit » Story
DROWNED AND OUT
by Medha Patkar
Harsud is no more. This 700-year-old town, now
besieged by the Narmada Sagar Project (NSP), was
where in September 1989, 35,000 people raised the
slogan, "We want development, not destruction!"
They had warned the nation of the massive human
and environmental devastation that projects such
as the large dams on the Narmada held in store.
Now at the very site of that popular uprising for
human and sane development, one can witness the
most tragic scenes of broken homes, fleeing
families and an ancient town turned prematurely
to ruins.
If you move through the streets of Harsud today,
heaps of rubble greet you with dust yet to
settle. One can't believe that all this could
happen within a fortnight, in violation of the
law, human rights and a society's conscience.
It's an illegal move, but more than that, a
cruelly conceived conspiracy by the State to push
the giant dam project ahead without concern for
the people living there or what they would do
after being displaced. People were made to
dismantle their own houses, overseen by the rapid
action forces marching inside the crowded
township.
They were offered a meagre compensation for their
houses: Rs 25,000 cash (ultimately found to be
part of the compensation that was due anyway) and
assurances that everything would be provided at
the resettlement site, New Harsud. But the
intimidation tactics worked, and the people
didn't just vacate their houses, but also
demolished them - many even paying labourers Rs
100 a day to do so.
Harsud is still bustling, full of labourers and
their supervisors, some shopkeepers, and a
handful of houses such as that of Surendra
Khandelwal, one of the few who have refused to
leave. Others such as Nanibai and other landless
labourers' families in Ward No. 9 are left out of
the project-affected list altogether. Meanwhile,
at least 32 shopkeepers find no place in the
rehabilitation policy. And they can't simply run
away as there is nowhere to go.
There are hundreds of visitors, common people
from all over coming to witness this destruction
of a town. There are contractors and
transporters, police and some remaining owners
recovering their possessions and planning for the
demolition. Yet, all this bustle can't hide the
cries of women and children, old and young, many
of whom are now on the streets. They catch people
like myself or any politician who happens to pass
by, showing their notices and asking for help.
Many who have already shifted out come back
everyday and stay for hours, despite knowing that
they are already homeless, sleeping in the
verandahs of their relatives' houses or in sheds.
The Narmada Sagar, one of the 30 major dams on
the Narmada and one of the two gigantic dams, is
supposed to submerge 254 villages. Of these, 176
have already been affected, and 29 more will be
affected before the monsoon ends. It is a project
that was approved by the ministry of environment
and forests (MOEF) and the Planning Commission,
subject to the conditions of the Narmada Water
Disputes Tribunal Award (NWDTA). The NWDTA,
compliance with which is supposed to be monitored
by the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), requires
that rehabilitation of affected families be done
at least six months prior to submergence. All
landowners losing 25 per cent or more of their
landholding are promised replacement land.
And yet, the approximately 22,000 population of
Harsud was 'asked' to leave without completing
the land acquisition process. Many are yet to
even get cash compensation. Complaints abound of
names missing from the official lists, while
major sons of property owners (to be considered
as separate families) are not yet included. To
top it all, the resettlement site is not even
ready with the minimum of amenities. Meanwhile,
the monitoring authorities are not in the
picture, as the NCA has been purposely kept out
of rehabilitation monitoring so as to give a free
hand to the dam builders.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Narmada
Sagar project is the role played by the statutory
company, Narmada Hydroelectric Development
Corporation Ltd. (NHDC). With its unlimited power
over construction, impact assessment and
compensation, it has proved to be criminal and
corrupt in all of these roles. The decision to
raise the height of NSP to 245 metres a year
ahead of schedule without resettling the affected
people indicates the ruthlessness that
accompanies such corporatisation of the State.
While the NVDA has also always been callous, the
NHDC is even more arrogant and abrasive.
So village after village goes under water, with
families becoming bankrupt. With their rights to
life and livelihood being thrown into the
dustbin, they - many of them being Dalits and
adivasis - stand as a testament to the bankruptcy
of the law itself. Unfortunately, the judiciary
has failed to stand up to protect these citizens.
Thousands of families face the same fate of being
declared Non-existent Resident Indians. They are
being displaced by water and erased on paper.
All of this is justified in the name of power:
huge targets for electricity supply based on
consumption indicators dictated by western
standards. Under this vision of energy-intensive
technological development, equity and
sustainability are hardly conceived of as a
priority even by those who are sensitive to the
social and environmental losses. In addition to
the human toll, 40,000 hectares of forest with
rare flora and fauna have been clear-felled for
Narmada Sagar while about 20,000 hectares were
cut for Sardar Sarovar. Compensatory
afforestation is nothing but a joke here. Crores
are spent on it and only corruption has thrived.
The Sardar Sarovar Dam is as disastrous as the
Narmada Sagar. It is more known due to the 19
years of struggle. The people of Harsud and its
hinterland have not been a part of the resistance
undertaken by the people from Manibeli in
Maharashtra to Nimad in MP. Yet, while this
struggle has achieved many gains, the fight
continues in the face of inadequate
rehabilitation.
The Madhya Pradesh government, in particular, has
most flagrantly dodged its legal responsibility
to give land as an alternative source of
livelihood to people displaced by the SSP.
(Rehabilitation is also far from complete and
adequate in Maharashtra and Gujarat.) Not one
family has been allotted land in MP. If the
government was serious about rehabilitation, it
would have prepared a master plan with details of
land to resettle as stipulated by NWDTA, project
clearances, the Planning Commission and Supreme
Court judgments. But, it has failed to do this.
While SSP rehabilitation may be a step up from
what's happening in Harsud, this is little
consolation. While some have been lured by
(insufficient) cash payments, thousands of others
have not. They assert their rights, not just to
rehabilitation, but also to the very question of
the project. If they had not done this over the
course of the past two decades, they would have
had the same fate as the families ousted from the
Bargi and Tawa dams in the Narmada valley or
Jaikwadi in Godavari. Because of their struggles,
11,000 SSP-affected families have been given
sites with land and amenities. Yet, this can't be
celebrated when there are over 40,000 others left
to fend for themselves. They are still on the
banks of the Narmada and they haven't yet
demolished their houses.
Amidst this season of destruction, with the
Sardar Sarovar and Narmada Sagar dams
immiserating thousands of families, it is
necessary that Indians stand up and respond to
these injustices.
_____
[5] [Islamophobia in the UK Press ]
Hello There,
A chap called "Will" Cummins--originally Harry
Cummins--has published four serialised pieces on
Islam and Muslims in the July issues of the
Sunday Telegraph. Many people are deeply and
rightly upset over his immensely Islamophobic
observations such as: Muslims, like dogs, share
common characteristics, or let us get them before
they get us, and so on. Thanks to Marina Hyde of
the Guardian Diary, now we know that the chap is
in fact the Press Officer at the British Council
in London. Institutional racism is nothing new
but the BC are certainly nervous given their
altruistic profile all over the world. They were
hiding behind all sorts of flimsy terms but he is
twice confirmed by the Guardian. In fact, Marina
Hyde, as a protest, sat outside their offices in
Great Portland Street on Friday having her
breakfast. I have sent letters to the Sunday
Telegraph's editor (Dominic Lawson--Nigel
Lawson's son and don't forget Lady Black's daily
diatribe against Arabs. She is an open advocate
of the expansionist Zionism), to the British
Council's David Green and certainly to Ms Hyde. I
understand both the MAB and MCB have also sent
similar letters to them. I am appending my emails
herewith for your information, which you may like
to bring into the notice of your members.
Thanks and all the best.
Iftikhar.
1-
From: Iftikhar Malik
Sent: Fri 30/07/2004 09:56
To: dominic.lawson at telegraph.co.uk
Cc: Iftikhar Malik (ihm50 at yahoo.com)
Subject: Will (Harry) Cummins: Telegraph must disown racist elements
Dear Mr. Lawson,
It is certainly shocking and deeply annoying to
see a respectable paper like yours allowing
itself to be used for such a poisonous and
hateful propaganda against Muslims/Islam on a
regular basis, contributed by otherwise timid and
sick people like Will (Harry) Cummins. The
tirades from Lady Black and several of her ilk
were already enough without warranting the need
for more Islamophobes like Cummins. By giving him
regular space for his malignant and racist ideas,
you have not only allowed yourself to be used as
an instrument of injustice and hate but have
equally become a partner as well. For a paper of
your stature it is too unbecoming and certainly
strengthens the view that specific powerful
lobbies are out there to malign Islam simply to
whitewash what is being done in West Asia. The
honourable thing for the paper and the editor
would be to publish a front-page apology and to
come out with an open policy statement of intent
on the serious issues of Islamophobia. I guess
professionally and morally you owe these two
obligations to the nation. The rest I leave to
your conscience.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Regards,
Sincerely,
Professor Iftikhar H. Malik
FRHisS
22 Worcester Place
Oxford OX1 2JW.
2-
marina.hyde at guardian.co.uk
Dear Ms Hyde,
Congratulations on your persistence and
investigative journalism in exposing the source
of these hateful columns in the Telegraph spewing
poison about Islam. People like Will (Harry)
Cummins abound but are basically timid as they
have to hide behind smokescreens. The Telegraph
and the British Council must apologise to the
nation at large and must eradicate all the
malignant, infectious and highly diseased racist
elements from within. Otherwise, we will be
well-placed to believe that these self-professing
citadels of honesty, integrity and harmony are
the willing instruments for Islamophobia.
Best regards.
Sincerely,
Professor Iftikhar H. Malik
FRHisS
22 Worcester Place
Oxford OX1 2JW.
ihm50 at yahoo.com
3-
30 July 2004.
Mr. David Green
The British Council
LONDON c/o Email.
Dear Mr. David Green,
As reported by Guardian today and yesterday, Mr.
"Will" Cummins is the press officer at the
British Council, an organisation purported to
further academic and artistic sharing. As an
organ of public diplomacy it is meant to spread a
good image of Britain everywhere. Of course, it
is funded by our money--the tax payers. But given
the malignant, poisonous and immensely
Islamophobic views of Mr. Cummins, I am afraid,
million of people like me have been disappointed
in the British Council. I guess the Council must
ensure that it, in fact, implements fairness,
transparency and justice in its own structures
before reaching out the wider world. In one of my
books, I have done half of a chapter on you work
but must say that after reading these columns I
am deeply worried. I hope it is just a solitary
case but only the time will tell. We must face
the fact that the institutional racism is a sad
reality across a wider spectrum and there must be
holistic efforts to eradicate it. The places of
higher education and public diplomacy, as many
reports continue to suggest, are infected by this
serious malaise and people like you holding
important positions should ensure that they are
fair and above board. It seriously compromises
your image as an organ of the British public
diplomacy and I am afraid just hiding behind an
unclear denial or a non-committal apology would
not help a reputable organisation like the
Council. Sacking a person and then coming out
with a routine pious statement is no solution
either. It is a serious matter and must be
confronted bravely and all the skeletons hidden
in the closets, if there are any, must be brought
out in the public arena.
I hope that the British Council will rise to its
challenge and if Mr. Cummins is not your
employee, then you must openly disown it and if
he is and, like a lousy rat, hides behind flimsy
curtains or within the institutional labyrinths,
he and his ilk, be fully exposed and held
accountable through proper legal procedures. The
Council must ensure that such sickening events do
not recur and instead it reflects a transparent,
exemplary--not patronising--and forward-looking
attitude through its various trajectories and
outreach.
Best regards,
Sincerely,
Iftikhar
-Professor Iftikhar H. Malik
FRHisS
22 Worcester Place
Oxford OX1 2JW.
ihm50 at yahoo.com
o o o
[The hateful articles appeared in the Sunday
Telegraph (London) on 4, 11, 18 & 25 July 2004.
The last in the series is posted below.]
The Sunday Telegraph - 25th July 2004
URL: www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/07/25/do2504.xml
Muslims are a threat to our way of life
By Will Cummins
(Filed: 25/07/2004)
In 1748, the novelist Horace Walpole had cause to
draw attention, in a letter, to the outrageous
behaviour in France of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the
exiled leader of 1745's failed Jacobite revolt.
Prince Charles Edward Stuart was terrorising
Louis XV - the rebellion's mentor, on whom
Charles relied for everything - with endless
threats and the most insolent demands. Walpole
could not help remarking on the narrowness of
Britain's escape.
"What a mercy," he wrote to the Duke of
Newcastle, the then Prime Minister, "that we had
not him here!" If, said Walpole, the Pretender
was prepared to bully the government of France,
even though he was entirely in its power, what
would he have done with a British government
under his control?
And what, I have been asking in recent articles,
would Islam's equally insouciant "exiles" in
Britain do with a UK government in their power?
Indications from the Leicester South and
Birmingham Hodge Hill by-elections were not
encouraging.
Konrad Henlein, the Nazi leader of the Sudeten
Germans - whose cynical attitude to liberal,
democratic, minority-friendly inter-war
Czechoslovakia offers a metaphor for what we face
- once observed: "We must always demand so much
that we are never satisfied." He wouldn't have
got very far in Leicester South, where the idea
of refusing Muslim voters any part of their
global Jihadi agenda was so distant from the
candidates' minds that they couldn't even wait to
be asked.
However, my fellow Telegraph writer Jenny
McCartney is plagued by a very different anxiety.
She is deeply concerned for, not because of,
Britain's burgeoning Muslim population. It is the
persecuted Jews of the Third Reich, not its
Nazis, to whom we should compare this notoriously
gifted, useful and self-effacing group, she has
written in her column of July 18.
Jenny sees in the revulsion for Islam displayed
by the British National Party an echo of the
anti-Semitism to which hideous German
publications like Der Sturmer gave vent. Though
why she has to ransack back numbers of hoary
Fascist tradesheets when almost every mainstream
Muslim paper in the world today is full of
loathsome anti-Jewish rants and images isn't
clear.
"In the miserable event" of "an al-Qaeda attack
in Britain", she wrote last week - which repeated
warnings from our Government have termed
inevitable - "there is little doubt in my mind
that assaults on peaceful, law-abiding British
Muslims would increase".
Well, it's good to know that, as the rest of us
hug our bottles of Evian in the irradiated ruins,
mourning thousands of dead, Jenny will be lying
awake at night worrying that someone might drop a
dog poo through the letterbox of her local balti
house. Such outrages, she warns, will be "fanned
by an increasingly hysterical rhetoric - already
in place - that encourages non-Muslim Britons to
see each and every Muslim citizen as a threat".
Whose rhetoric is that exactly?
The Guardian newspaper is the Bible - perhaps one
should say the Koran? - of Islamo-fascist
Britain. However, it has recently been lending
its opinion pages to one Fuad Nahdi, a leading
Islamic "moderate" who publishes Q-News, a
magazine for young UK Muslims. When two British
Muslims launched a suicide attack in Israel, this
is what he wrote in The Guardian of May 2, 2003:
"I am not surprised by news of Britain's first
suicide bombers. What, however, I find
astonishing is that it took place in Tel Aviv,
not Manchester." He goes on to say, "We should
brace ourselves for the forthcoming intifada on
the streets of Birmingham and Detroit."
Mr Nahdi, who arrived in Britain from Kenya in
1983, is comparing himself and his fellow Muslims
here to the Palestinians conducting the second
intifada against Israel. In Muslim folklore, the
Palestinians are a native people disposessed by
Zionist invaders. Mr Nahdi seems not to have
grasped that, in Britain, he and the rest of the
faithful are the "Jewish settlers", we, the
usurped Palestinians. If anybody is going to
mount an intifada against the invader, it will be
us.
Jenny writes that those who are afraid of Islam
ignore the diversity of the religion, which
replicates that of Christianity itself.
Christianity too, she writes, has its extremists.
To which one might, like St Paul, say, "and what
has Christ to do with Baal?" All Muslims, like
all dogs, share certain characteristics. A dog is
not the same animal as a cat just because both
species are comprised of different breeds. An
extreme Christian believes that the Garden of
Eden really existed; an extreme Muslim flies
planes into buildings - there's a big difference.
If, for instance, Muslims meet with defeats in
the Balkans (a fact which Jenny finds deeply
disturbing), it will certainly not have been for
want of trying. It is more a tribute to their
incompetence than their humanity. As the Tunisian
intellectual Abdelwahab Meddeb points out in his
recent book La maladie de l'Islam, Muslims'
defeats are a symptom, not a cause, of Muslim
decline.
When his children became "a thwart, disnatured
torment to us all", the scales fell even from
King Lear's eyes. But "Jenny Wren" McCartney
wishes Britain to feed the cuckoo in its nest
because that's what wrens have always done.
Doesn't she think that cuckoo looks, and behaves,
a little like the "detested kite" to which Lear
compared Goneril?
______
[6]
Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 01:34:12 +0530
From: "Shiv Kumar" <journoshiv at yahoo.co.in>
Dear Mr. K[ . . .],
I am Shiv Kumar, Special Correspondent, The Tribune based in Mumbai.
I am interested in applying for the National Media Fellowships 2004-05 to
study the threat posed by communal polarization to syncretic traditions in
India. Of specific focus are shrines that have become zones of conflict
between multiple communities. I would like to go
beyond the shrines of Bhojshala and Babu Budan
and look at smaller shrines that are slowly
falling prey to contestations.
Would it be possible for you to circulate my
request via your mailing lists so that people who
have information on this can get in touch with me
quickly?
My contact: journoshiv at yahoo.co.in
Shiv Kumar
______
[7]
The Times of India - August 02, 2004 | Editorial
SHORT-CIRCUITED
EYE ON GEN-NEXT, RSS MAY DROP ITS KHAKI CHADDIS
Clothing matters. The RSS brass seems convinced.
The Sangh plans to shed its trademark khaki
shorts for more trendy outfits. If things move as
reports suggest, the knickerwalla may soon attend
the shakha in white trousers, or even jeans. The
starched white shirt could make way for T-shirts.
News is awaited on the black topi and the danda .
Also, on the discussion table is permission for
senior swayamsevaks to get married. The shorts
have a history that dates back to the
pre-Independence days when K B Hedgewar set up
the Sangh to instil in the 'timid' Hindu society
the cohesion and discipline of the 'invaders' who
had established their political and cultural
hegemony over India. The paramilitary style it
adopted parodied the law enforcers of the day -
the oversized shorts were borrowed from the
colonial police. Now, the chalaks want to check
out a new uniform; they suspect that their
sartorial backwardness is one of the reasons for
Gen-Next's lack of interest in the RSS. Stagnant
numbers in shakhas have been ascribed by many,
including insiders, to the Sangh's refusal to
change with times. RSS bosses in Nagpur now
realise that austerity and celibacy have few
takers in today's world of designer politics.
But is politics all about clothing? The Sangh
seems to have stagnated because few are willing
to risk their time and thought for agendas that
refuse to recognise the plurality of the Indian
experience. RSS politics revolves around the fear
of the Other. In the immediate political context
of Partition, divisive ideologies found
supporters. With the passage of time and the
emergence of lumpen Hindutva outfits like the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal - which
service hate without placing a premium on
austerity - the RSS has lost its USP. Dropping
its shorts will hardly enable the organisation
widen its support base. The RSS's problem is not
the chaddi but its chintan . Its political face,
the BJP, managed to occupy office only after it
agreed to shelve exclusivist agendas. Even
Narendra Modi was reminded by the electorate that
politics cannot be the prerogative of a communal
ideology. The idea of India seeks a politics of
pluralism and an ideology of accommodation. The
Sangh needs to rethink its relevance and ideology
rather than its dress code. Or else, as in the
fable, Gen-Next will see through the emperor's
new clothes.
o o o
[More on the above at the URL: communalism.blogspot.com ]
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
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
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
SACW archive is available at: bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/
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