SACW | 22 Sep 2004

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire  |  22 September,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

=======

[1] India Pakistan Peace March : From Delhi to 
Multan (23rd March 2005 on . . . )
[2] Religious bigotry, intolerance . . . 
affecting the entire subcontinent ... (Mollica 
Dastider)
[3] Pakistan: HRCP urges women to condemn Iraqi 
abductors seeking revocation of French law
[4] India: Large Dams in India: Temples or Burrial Grounds  (Robert Jensen)
[5] India: Shaheed Niyogi Memorial Award for 
Journalism 2004 for P. Sainath, Subhash Gatade
[6] Publication announcement: "The Law Reform 
Proposals Relating to the Rights of Sex Workers 
and Sexual Offences in India"
[7] India: Online petition in favour of Dr. D'Mello: a victim of Hindutva
[8] Book Review: 'The End of Faith: Religion, 
Terror, and the Future of Reason By Sam Harris" 
(reviewed by Natalie Angier)


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

[1]

INDIA PAKISTAN PEACE MARCH

A peace march is being planned by PIPFPD 
(Pakistan India People's Forum for Peace and 
Democracy) starting from Delhi, on 23rd March and 
will make its way to Multan, on 11th May, 2005.

Probably nowhere in the world do we have a 
situation where people are as emotionally 
entwined as between India and Pakistan and yet 
there is an enmity thrust upon them. The cruel 
turn of events in history resulted in political 
separation leading to a bloody migration of 
masses of people. Family links were severed and a 
deep scars were left. Even the post partition 
history has remained quite tumultuous, 
interspersed with four wars and loss of 
innumerable innocent lives. Kashmir remains a 
sore point between India and Pakistan threatening 
to take both countries to self-destruction. Even 
though common people never benefit from violence 
and hatred, fundamentalists groups within 
religion and politics in South Asia have ensured 
that the animosity will continue to take heavy 
toll on both sides.

Common people on both sides are now fed up of 
being targets of violence and of atmosphere of 
antagonism. They want friendship, peace and 
normal relations to be established between the 
two countries. We have seen that even though the 
ruling elites of the two countries are usually 
suspicious of each other, whenever the common 
people of the two countries get to meet, all 
walls of reservation against each other melt as 
warm emotions of affinity surge. It is like 
people of same family meeting each other after 
years of forced separation. Enmity, hatred and 
distance are only superficial and soon give way 
to warmth and friendship.
We feel that if real peace and friendship has to 
be established between the common people of India 
and Pakistan, the initiative will have to be 
taken by people themselves. So far, the 
governments have created trade and travel 
barriers between the two countries preventing 
easy access to the other country and free 
mingling among the people. However, now there is 
a subtle change in the atmosphere. The 
governments seem more willing than before to 
allow the people of two countries to interact 
freely and also seem to be supportive of the 
people-to-people level initiatives. Various 
initiatives are being undertaken. We plan to 
organize a peace march between Delhi and Multan 
beginning March 23, 2005. The long march will 
allow peace-loving people of both countries to 
participate in the grassroots initiative for 
peace and friendship and will help build an 
atmosphere among the common people of the two 
countries, which will ultimately persuade the two 
governments to follow suit.

For more details about the peace march or 
interest in participating in the peace march [...]

Subscribe to indpakpeacemarch at yahoogroups.com to 
receive regular information about the peace march 
or send mail to moderator at 
indopakpeacemarch at yahoo.co.uk
All persons wishing to march must register by 1st 
December, 2004 with their passport details.


______


[2]

The Telegraph
September 21, 2004

NO COUNTRY IS SAFE ANYMORE
Religious bigotry, intolerance and the discourse 
of exclusivity are affecting the entire 
subcontinent, and not merely Bangladesh, argues 
Mollica Dastider.

The author is fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi

"It is a question of ideology. We are against 
fanaticism while they are against secularism", 
claimed a shaken Sheikh Hasina Wajed, opposition 
leader of Bangladesh, after surviving an 
assassination attempt during a political rally in 
Dhaka. The rally was, among other things, to 
protest against the government's sponsoring of 
religious extremist forces. Politics in 
Bangladesh, in keeping with the trend in the 
subcontinent, has taken a decisive turn towards 
extreme polarization on this issue. While the 
Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its radical 
Islamist allies insist on a more explicitly 
Islamic identity of the Bangladeshi people, the 
opposition Awami League has been forced to spell 
out its anti-fundamentalist position.

"[It] is high time for all to offer a united 
resistance [to religious fanatics]," Hasina 
urged, "otherwise none [in] this country will 
ever be safe." However, Begum Khaleda Zia's 
political secretary told the BBC that Bangladesh 
remains "established and identified as a moderate 
Islamic country". But the recent assertions of 
Islamist terrorist groups in this fourth-largest 
Muslim majority country of the world clearly 
shows that battle lines are drawn between the 
fanatics, democrats and secularists"here.

The growing erosion of secular values is well 
demonstrated by the visible apathy of the BNP 
regime in bringing to book the zealots who 
indulge in terror. The alarming rise in Islamist 
militancy is particularly evident in 
north-eastern Sylhet and the Chittagong 
provinces, where subversive activities reached a 
peak in May this year. While a grenade attack 
injured the visiting British high commissioner at 
a Sufi shrine in Sylhet, the militants killed a 
senior Awami League leader in Satkhira, murdered 
a newspaper editor and, more recently, killed 
another Awami League activist in Sylhet. Besides 
threatening to stop the circulation of the 
country's leading daily, Pratham Alo, for 
reporting extremist activities in Chittagong, 
they have managed to back up their persecution of 
the Ahmadiya community with a government ban on 
the latter's worship and literature. These 
developments, together with the apparent 
unconcern of the regime in expediting 
investigations into violence, only underscore the 
belief that the BNP's coalition partners 
Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Oikya Jote simply do 
not want the government to pursue the terrorists. 
The public reiteration of the jihadis to kill 
Hasina Wajed further exposes the immunity enjoyed 
by them in the country's civil and political 
space.

Even though the Awami League has been at the 
receiving end of extremist ire, its secular 
credentials are also open to question. When it 
enjoyed power in the past, the party showed a 
clear lack of political will to check the 
activities of pro-taliban Islamic radicals, 
apparently so as not to lose support of the 
Islamic constituencies in the country.

Hasina Wajed's public appearance as a devout 
Muslim during the 2001 general elections 
illustrated this aptly. Furthermore, on the eve 
of the elections, when systematic violence was 
unleashed against religious minorities in the 
countryside to deter them from exercising their 
voting rights, the Awami League did little to 
resist the persecution. Despite its 
well-entrenched support base in rural Bangladesh, 
the party sought to silently tide over the 
episode, lest it be branded anti-Islamist before 
the general elections. Nonetheless, its current 
desperation to save Bangladeshi civil and 
political society from fanatics calls for the 
urgent attention of democratic forces of all hues.

From the partition of Bengal on the basis of the 
"two nation" theory, to the assertion of Bengali 
nationalism against Pakistan to the latest 
refashioning of an Islamic identity the history 
of Bangladesh has proceeded in a strange spiral. 
If the native peasantry's Islamic identity was 
the original ground to secede from a Hindu 
zamindar-dominated Bengal, for East Pakistan, 
this identity mattered little during its struggle 
against the Urdu-speaking Pakistani rulers. Yet 
the centrality of Bengali language and cultural 
nationalism that so animated the liberation of 
Bangladesh seems powerless today to resist a 
return to an orthodox Islamic fold. In effect, 
this Islamic Bangladeshi identity aims to 
dissolve, once and for all, the shared space of 
Bangladeshi people with the Indian and Hindu 
Bengalis, and to deny the cultural traditions 
that upset all exclusive nationalist frameworks 
and religious borders.

The BNP is now intent on appropriating Islamic 
symbols for its legitimacy. But the supervening 
role of Islam was reiterated in the Eighties when 
General H.M. Ershad declared Islam as state 
religion. This process has met with sporadic but 
powerful public resistance, but has been 
unleashed once more in recent years. The aim is 
to drive a permanent wedge between the Islamic 
and the syncretic Bengal, erasing residues of the 
secular Bengali nationalism once upheld by the 
constitution of Bangladesh.

Of course, the rise of "Islamophobia" in the 
Anglo-American bloc makes it easy for 
fundamentalists across the world (Christian 
right, the Zionists and Hindutvavadis) to equate 
Islam with terrorism. But the appeal of Islamist 
militancy among the poor and marginalized in 
Muslim majority countries is also taken as a 
licence by political elites to flirt with the 
forces of Islamic obscurantism. The primary 
identity of the Bangladeshi people is an 
emotional and ideological battleground today, 
making it extremely vulnerable to intolerant 
discourses of exclusivity.

In fact, rather than isolate the case of 
Bangladesh, one needs to recognize that religious 
bigotry, intolerance and the discourse of 
exclusivity are factors affecting the 
subcontinent-- partitioned once on these grounds 
already. Such factors have not only led to a 
renewed and bitter polarization between the 
religious right and the tolerant liberals around 
us, but there is also a distinct parallel in the 
modus operandi of the forces involved. In its new 
avatar, religious majoritarianism has shrewdly 
resurfaced as a majority community-based 
nationalism, trying to eliminate inherent 
differences in our plural contexts, targeting 
minorities and fomenting waves of assault and 
subjugation in a ploy to gain political power. 
The overwhelming presence of the Hindutva forces 
in India, the first-ever electoral success of 
Jamaat-e-Islam in Bangladesh and the pro-taliban 
Muttahida Majlis-e Amal in Pakistan, are all 
symptomatic of this particular development. The 
polarization in Bangladesh between Muslims and 
non-Muslims is no different from that in India.

Should this be taken to mean that religious 
extremism in one country is in reaction to the 
extremism spawned in the neighbouring land? This 
theory has many takers even among seasoned 
observers who explain the developments in 
Bangladesh as a response to prior developments in 
India and in the West. Not surprisingly, 
Bangladeshi fundamentalists warm up to such 
explanations quite easily, and their 
representatives spare no effort in underscoring 
the point. No one can deny that the demolition of 
the Babri mosque in 1992 and the subsequent rise 
of the Hindu right in India did play an extremely 
significant role in the process. But the adoption 
of this reaction theory in effect leads one to 
unduly ignore the internal factors behind 
Bangladeshâ*™s Islamization, factors that reveal 
the relative lack of its development under 
successive regimes. More important, such a view 
wrongly pits the Hindu right and Islamist right 
as antagonist forces, missing their underlying 
proximity in action and rhetoric.

The factor that binds these forces together is 
their identical hate campaigns against the 
respective religious other-- Muslims in India and 
Hindus in Bangladesh. The so-called cultural 
nationalist agendas are premised upon excluding 
the other in each context, which becomes the self 
in another location. This is how they draw a 
positive sustenance from the mutual conflict, 
targeting in common the democratic ethos of the 
region. Thus, we are told that nationalism is 
another word for Hindutva by the Bharatiya Janata 
Party after its chintan baithak in Goa, or that 
Uma Bharti is a staunch nationalist fighting the 
"pro-Muslim, anti-national" Congress in India.

On a similar vein, the Bangladeshi Islamists 
adopt a nationalist pose and dismiss the minority 
persecution in their country as mere 
"anti-Bangladesh campaign" by the "pro-India" 
opposition of Sheikh Hasina. Together, they 
constitute a south Asian political fraternity, 
and this is what political analysts need to 
recognize.

______


[3]


The Daily Times - September 2, 2004

HRCP URGES WOMEN TO CONDEMN IRAQI ABDUCTORS

ISLAMABAD: The Human Rights Commission of 
Pakistan condemned the kidnapping of two French 
journalists by terrorists in Iraq and urged 
Muslim women to raise their voice against such 
attacks.
"It is important that Muslim women around the 
world make it clear that the militants guilty of 
barbarianism in Iraq do not represent them," said 
a statement issued by the commission. "They 
should make it absolutely clear that these 
insurgents do not speak for their political and 
religious concerns. Their actions have already 
tarnished the image of Islam and threaten to 
inflict still more damage in the future.

The journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges 
Malbrunot, were kidnapped last month by a Sunni 
Muslim group called the Islamic Army of Iraq. The 
group has demanded that France repeal the 
controversial law that disallows Muslim women 
from wearing head scarves. The law also bans 
other outward signs of religious affiliation in 
French public schools and is scheduled to take 
effect this week. Despite the terrorists' 
threats, French officials have asserted that the 
law will stand.
"It is time that Muslims around the world 
dissociate themselves from the acts of such 
militants," said the HRCP statement.  [...].


______


[4]

Counterpunch.org | September 21, 2004

LARGE DAMS IN INDIA: TEMPLES OR BURRIAL GROUNDS
by Robert Jensen

FULL TEXT AT URL:  www.counterpunch.org/jensen09212004.html

______


[5]

The Hindu- Sep 22, 2004

AWARD FOR P. SAINATH

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, SEPT. 21. The Rural Affairs Editor of 
The Hindu , P. Sainath, has won the Shaheed 
Niyogi Memorial Award for Journalism 2004 for 
writings on labour issues and the workers 
movement.

The second prize was shared by Subhash Gatade, a 
freelance journalist in New Delhi, and Susheel 
Sharma of Bastar Bandhu, Kanker, Chhattisgarh. 
Special inspirational prizes would be given to 
Kumar Pankaj of Rashtriya Sahara, New Delhi; Anuj 
Sinha of Prabhat Khabar, Jamshedpur; Shyam 
Kishore Sharma of Hari Bhoomi, Rajim, 
Chhattisgarh; and Kamal Kamokar of Nav Bharat 
Times, Raipur.

The award will be given on September 28 during 
the public meeting organised by the Chhattisgarh 
Mukti Morcha to observe Shaheed Niyogi's 
"shahadaat diwas."

The jury, consisting of Kuldip Nayar, Anand 
Swaroop Verma and Jameela Nishat, took into 
consideration writings during the last three 
years.

The award was instituted in 1998 to recognise the 
contribution of journalists in upholding the 
legacy of Shanker Guja Niyogi, the firebrand 
trade union leader and social activist from 
Chhattisgarh who was murdered on September 28, 
1991 by the industrial mafia.


______


[6]

New Publication by Centre for Feminist Legal Research (CFLR)

"The Law Reform Proposals Relating to the Rights 
of Sex Workers and Sexual Offences in India"

In the memorandum, the Centre for Feminist Legal 
Research (CFLR) examines the existing legal 
provisions that regulate sex work and unpack some 
of the underlying assumptions on which these laws 
are based. Our intention is to assist sex workers 
groups represented by the National Network of Sex 
Workers (NNSW) and especially those advocating 
for law reform on their behalf, to fully 
understand the implications of the existing legal 
provisions on the rights of sex workers, sexual 
minorities, quite specifically, and on women more 
generally. This memorandum is further designed to 
assist in developing an informed approach towards 
law reform in this area.  Finally, this document 
is intended to assist policy makers and lawmakers 
who will ultimately engage in the practical work 
of reform laws the deal with the rights of sex 
workers and other similarly disadvantaged groups.

 We review the existing law relating to sex work, 
and explore the limitations with regard to its 
implementation. On the basis of these insights, 
CFLR has developed some law reform proposals that 
are designed to eliminate the provisions, which 
adversely impact on the rights of sex workers, 
sexual minorities and other women, and propose 
amendments that will facilitate their rights. The 
memorandum does not take a stand for or against 
sex work, but does take the view that human 
rights are non-negotiable. Rights are an 
essential tool for fighting abuse, exploitation, 
and harm, and should not be made contingent on 
the nature of the work in which an individual 
engages nor curtailed in the name of conservative 
sexual morality.

Suggested Contribution: INR - Rs.125/-     US$ 10

Centre for Feminist Legal Research
Flat No. 5, 45 Friends Colony (East)
New Delhi-110 065, India
www.cflr.org/


______


[7]  [ONLINE PETITION]

[September 17, 2004]

Dear Friends:

Dr. Bernard D'Mello, a professor of management and economics at MDI-Gurgaon
(Haryana, India) has been targeted  by the institute's administration for
removal because of his opposition to the administration's promotion of a
communal agenda and its underhanded ways. In an EPW article of  November
1999 he had critiqued Hindutva influences in management education and also
challenged MDI's attempt to invite RSS ideologues to the MDI campus.

It is very important that we put pressure on India's Union Minister for HRD
Arjun Singh, and the Union Minister for Finance P. Chidambaram to intervene
in this case and deliver justice to Dr.  D'Mello. Purges like this are
artifacts of the anti-intellectual HRD policies of the erstwhile BJP-led NDA
government, and need to be addressed in the spirit of fairness and
protection of academic
freedom.

Please take a moment to sign an electronic petition in favour of Dr.
D'Mello. The petition is available at
http://www.petitiononline.com/dmello1/petition.html

Thank you,
Rakhi Sehgal

Doctoral Candidate/American University, Washington, DC (USA)
Currently in New Delhi for research


______


[8]  [BOOK REVIEW]


New York Times, September 5, 2004 | Book Review Desk

'The End of Faith': Against Toleration
By NATALIE ANGIER

THE END OF FAITH
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
By Sam Harris.
336 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

When I was 8 years old, my family was in a 
terrible car accident, and my older brother 
almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and 
sleepless on my paternal grandmother's 
living-room couch, she softly explained to me who 
was to blame. Not my father's Aunt Estelle, a 
dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, 
as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the 
reason Estelle's station wagon flipped over and 
Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my 
father had stopped going to church the previous 
year, and God was very, very angry.

Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of 
evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have 
steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the 
heathen in my heart.

It's not often that I see my florid strain of 
atheism expressed in any document this side of 
the Seine, but ''The End of Faith'' articulates 
the dangers and absurdities of organized religion 
so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt 
relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost 
personally understood. Sam Harris presents major 
religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and 
Islam as forms of socially sanctioned lunacy, 
their fundamental tenets and rituals irrational, 
archaic and, important when it comes to matters 
of humanity's long-term survival, mutually 
incompatible. A doctoral candidate in 
neuroscience at the University of California, Los 
Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of 
us think, but few are willing to say in 
contemporary America: ''We have names for people 
who have many beliefs for which there is no 
rational justification. When their beliefs are 
extremely common, we call them 'religious'; 
otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad,' 
'psychotic' or 'delusional.' '' To cite but one 
example: ''Jesus Christ -- who, as it turns out, 
was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose 
bodily into the heavens -- can now be eaten in 
the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken 
over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink 
his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone 
subscriber to these beliefs would be considered 
mad?'' The danger of religious faith, he 
continues, ''is that it allows otherwise normal 
human beings to reap the fruits of madness and 
consider them holy.''

Right now, if you are even vaguely observant, or 
have friends or grandmothers who are, you may be 
feeling not merely irritated, as you would while 
reading a political columnist with whom you 
disagree, but deeply offended. You may also think 
it inappropriate that a mainstream newspaper be 
seen as obliquely condoning an attack on 
religious belief. That reaction, in Harris's 
view, is part of the problem. ''Criticizing a 
person's faith is currently taboo in every corner 
of our culture. On this subject, liberals and 
conservatives have reached a rare consensus: 
religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of 
rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas 
about God and the afterlife is thought to be 
impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas 
about physics or history is not.''

A zippered-lip policy would be fine, a pleasant 
display of the neighborly tolerance that we 
consider part of an advanced democracy, Harris 
says, if not for the mortal perils inherent in 
strong religious faith. The terrorists who flew 
jet planes into the World Trade Center believed 
in the holiness of their cause. The Christian 
apocalypticists who are willing to risk a nuclear 
conflagration in the Middle East for the sake of 
expediting the second coming of Christ believe in 
the holiness of their cause. In Harris's view, 
such fundamentalists are not misinterpreting 
their religious texts or ideals. They are not 
defaming or distorting their faith. To the 
contrary, they are taking their religion 
seriously, attending to the holy texts on which 
their faith is built. Unhappily for international 
comity, the Good Books that undergird the world's 
major religions are extraordinary anthologies of 
violence and vengeance, celestial decrees that 
infidels must die.

In the 21st century, Harris says, when swords 
have been beaten into megaton bombs, the 
persistence of ancient, blood-washed theisms that 
emphasize their singular righteousness and their 
superiority over competing faiths poses a genuine 
threat to the future of humanity, if not the 
biosphere: ''We can no longer ignore the fact 
that billions of our neighbors believe in the 
metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth 
of the book of Revelation,'' he writes, ''because 
our neighbors are now armed with chemical, 
biological and nuclear weapons.''

Harris reserves particular ire for religious 
moderates, those who ''have taken the apparent 
high road of pluralism, asserting the equal 
validity of all faiths'' and who ''imagine that 
the path to peace will be paved once each of us 
has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of 
others.'' Religious moderates, he argues, are the 
ones who thwart all efforts to criticize 
religious literalism. By preaching tolerance, 
they become intolerant of any rational discussion 
of religion and ''betray faith and reason 
equally.''

Harris, no pure materialist, acknowledges the 
human need for a mystical dimension to life, and 
he conveys something of a Buddhist slant on the 
nature of consciousness and reality. But he 
believes that mysticism, like other forms of 
knowledge, can be approached rationally and 
explored with the tools of modern neuroscience, 
without recourse to superstition and credulity.

''The End of Faith'' is far from perfect. Harris 
seems to find ''moral relativism'' as great a sin 
as religious moderation, and in the end he 
singles out Islam as the reigning threat to 
humankind. He likens it to the gruesome, 
Inquisition-style Christianity of the 13th 
century, yet he never explains how Christianity 
became comparatively domesticated. And on reading 
his insistence that it is ''time for us to admit 
that not all cultures are at the same stage of 
moral development,'' I couldn't help but think of 
Ann Coulter's morally developed suggestion that 
we invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders 
and convert their citizens to Christianity.

Harris also drifts into arenas of marginal 
relevance to his main thesis, attacking the war 
against drugs here, pacificism there, and 
offering a strained defense for the use of 
torture in wartime that seems all the less 
persuasive after Abu Ghraib. Still, this is an 
important book, on a topic that, for all its 
inherent difficulty and divisiveness, should not 
be shielded from the crucible of human reason.

Natalie Angier has written about atheism and 
science for The Times, The American Scholar and 
elsewhere.



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

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