SACW #1 | 29 Dec 2004

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire  - Dispatch #1  | 29 Dec.,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

[1] Pakistan:  Chitral trouble is symptomatic of 
deeper malaise (Editorial, Daily Times)
[2] India:  Deaths by Water - and Environmental Degradation (J. Sri Raman)
[3] India: Dont fund the fundamentalists in the 
name of 'Relief' and 'Development' !
+ Beware of the crooks (IK Shukla)
[4] India:
[5] India: Fable of the bulls and the butcher (Jawed Naqvi)
[6] Book Review:' The Trauma and The Triumph: 
Gender and Partition in Eastern India edited by 
Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta' 
(reveiwed by Tanika Sarkar)


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

[1]

Daily Times
December 29, 2004 
Editorial

CHITRAL TROUBLE IS SYMPTOMATIC OF DEEPER MALAISE

Four masked men killed two workers of the Aga 
Khan Health Services Office in Chitral on Monday 
December 27 and burnt four vehicles belonging to 
the charity organisation. The police have 
registered a case against the unknown assailants 
and have also arrested four persons belonging to 
"a banned organisation". This kind of violence 
has happened in the area before but has gained 
momentum after the MMA campaign against the Aga 
Khan Foundation in the rest of the country. In 
the adjacent Northern Areas (Gilgit) the Aga Khan 
charity institutions have come under attack 
regularly in the past years after being targeted 
by the radical religious elements waging jihad in 
Kashmir.
Earlier this year, we had news about sectarian 
unrest in the North for almost six months. 
Schools were closed and there were instances of 
sporadic violence in areas where Shia and Ismaili 
populations are concentrated but where power and 
influence have passed to Sunni clerics. In 
Chitral, the Shia-Sunni tension dates back to 
1988 when the Northern Areas were attacked by 
Pushtun lashkars. A retired commissioner of 
Gilgit wrote: "In April 1988 armed rioters from 
outside entered the Gilgit environs. Eleven 
villages around town were torched, their wooden 
structures burnt to ashes and valuable goods 
looted. Around 40 persons were killed. It was 
clear to the Gilgit civil administration that the 
raiders, who were tribals and mujahideen 
elements, could not have reached this remote 
place from Peshawar without someone's blessing. 
The Frontier Constabulary, whose checkposts dot 
the Swat-Besham road and the Besham-Gilgit 
highway, did not act to intercept the raiders".
That year General Zia ul Haq fired Prime Minister 
Mohammad Khan Junejo for failing to control 
violence. Today, the MMA clerics are openly 
threatening 'action' against the Aga Khan 
Foundation because they don't want it to organise 
a better examination system in the country. There 
is no doubt that the fiery sermons delivered 
down-country are having their effect in the North 
and have intensified sectarian conflict in 
Chitral too. What are the grounds for the MMA's 
fury? If you wave the agitprop aside, there are 
no grounds at all.
It is quite obvious that religious prejudice was 
already simmering and simply wanted an outlet. 
The clergy has therefore decided to confront the 
Aga Khan Foundation on a very flimsy pretext. 
This is what happened.
The Aga Khan University Examination Board 
(AKU-EB) has been established through an 
ordinance to give the country an efficient system 
of exams that all students can afford. This was 
done in view of the growing popularity of the 
GCSE and "A" level exams conducted by the 
University of Cambridge in Pakistan. Each student 
taking these exams has to cough up around Rs 
20,000. After the Board's programme comes into 
force an examinee will pay only Rs 1,500 if he 
comes from a non-profit-making school and Rs 
3,000 if he belongs to a private school. The 
standard of examination will be as high as the 
Cambridge one, which is taken by our students 
because it is reliable and is recognised in the 
private sector. It should be noted that the 
AKU-EB ordinance applies so far only to the 
private sector and the federal institutions and 
is completely voluntary. (Education being a 
provincial subject, the system will apply to 
state-run schools only after the provinces 
agree.) If an institution is unwilling to submit 
to the new system it is free to stay away. How 
does that threaten the Pakistani society? The 
truth is that once the programme gets going 
everyone will enlist in it because of its 
efficiency.
Although the MMA, led by Jamaat-e-Islami, has no 
past record of criticising the Cambridge system 
in the country, the Jamaat now says the AKU-EB is 
set to "secularise" the country by the 
introduction of this system. How is that possible 
through mere conduct of such exams? The ordinance 
establishing the AKU-EB says quite clearly: "The 
Examination Board shall follow the national 
curriculum and syllabi." There is no hidden 
reference here to any presumed secular brainwash 
as feared by the clergy. So what is the truth of 
the matter? The truth is that a hidden desire to 
exclude one more community from the pale of Islam 
persists after what the religious fanatics have 
done to non-Sunni majority locations in the 
North. What was happening so far in the periphery 
is now threatening to come to the centre. That is 
why General Pervez Musharraf must take firm 
action against the elements which have attacked 
the Aga Khan Health Services Office in Chitral 
and are working under a scheme to destabilise the 
country by exacerbating its sectarian conflict. 
That is also why he should seriously think of 
displacing the reactionary MMA with a liberal 
party in his political affections. *

______


[2]


truthout.org
27 December 2004

DEATHS BY WATER - AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION
By J. Sri Raman

Chennai, India - Selvaraj, 38, sturdy and 
ebony-dark, set out on the catamaran, the ancient 
Tamil raft of tied logs, a little past six in the 
morning. He did not return. Some eight hours 
later, rescuers found his body washed ashore, 
like the bodies of scores of other fishermen.

Kannan, 14, went out a little later that Sunday 
morning to the Marina Beach, the pride of this 
South Indian city, its little piece of paradise. 
He carried his cricket bat, with a sticker of 
Sachin Tendulkar, the star of the game, on it. 
He, too, did not return home. His frail, little 
body was also found hours later on the once 
inviting sands. Search was still on, though, for 
the bodies of the other members of his team and 
their opponents who were to play a weekend match 
on a field with a backdrop of waves.

Krishnamurthy, 67, had driven there for a brisk 
morning walk along the long beach line, as had 
been his wont for a couple of years. They found 
his car, smashed and upturned.

Survivors in the fishermen's hamlets close to the 
Marina count Selvaraj and others like him lucky 
indeed. Even the bodies of many, many other 
fishermen, who had gone into the sea for their 
morning catch, have not been found. Officials put 
the number of missing fishermen at no less than 
5,000.

The best-known public hospital in this capital of 
the south Indian State of Tamilnadu, one of the 
worst-hit areas in the widespread Asian tragedy 
of December 26, has lined up scores of 
salt-smeared bodies for possible identification 
by their bereaved kin. Quite a few are still 
lying unclaimed - an indication that killer waves 
may have devoured whole families on the fringe of 
the city and survival.

People, especially the poor, are prepared for the 
worst - but the worst they can imagine. Down 
here, they were not prepared for this particular 
disaster, wrought by quake-generated waves 
(tsunamis, their Japanese name a household word 
here already) rising to a tidal height of 15 to 
40 feet before crashing to kill. They were not 
prepared, and not only because they had fished 
only in a gentle sea and played or walked only on 
soft sands.

True, the balmy Bay of Bengal had held no terrors 
for them before. There is a more basic reason, 
however, why the tremors and the resultant sea 
turbulence (claiming a toll of over 2,500 human 
lives) have taken Chennai and Tamilnadu totally 
unawares. The public here has been kept in the 
dark about a dire environmental threat that has 
been growing at a great pace over the past decade 
or so.

What holds good for Tamilnadu does so as well for 
the rest of coastal India to reel from the impact 
of the calamity - the States of Kerala, Andhra 
Pradesh, Orissa, and West Bengal.

In the wake of the tragedy, Tamilnadu is 
witnessing a series of helicopter surveys of the 
misery in cities, towns and marooned villages by 
ministers. The opposition and the ruling party 
are raking up disaster-related issues to fight 
over. Funds for relief operations can also become 
an issue between the State and federal 
governments in the coming days. Official 
statements and steps reveal no recognition of the 
role of environmental degradation in the making 
of the disaster.

The calamity highlights, more than anything else, 
the callous neglect of environment protection 
along the entire coastal belt of India, including 
Tamilnadu. A handful of environmental activists 
have been crying themselves hoarse over the 
issue, but the powers-that-be have preferred to 
dismiss them as cranks. At the core of the issue 
lies a corporate-political mesh of corruption 
that seeks to thrive on human misery and lives.

India, by law, has a coastal regulation zone 
(CRZ), where building activities are supposed to 
be strictly regulated. In Tamilnadu and 
elsewhere, as old lawyers would put it, the rules 
and regulations have been observed more in breach 
than in observance. The rapacious rich, callous 
corporates, and a state flush with the 'free 
market' spirit have indulged in impermissible 
real-estate activities in the allegedly protected 
zone.

A concrete chain of residential colonies, star 
hotels and entertainment spots has robbed the 
land of all coastal protection from the once 
friendly sea. It is mainly the poor who have paid 
- with their lives - for this crime against the 
coastline.

When the dead have been cremated or buried, it 
will be time to tell the people that 
environmentalism is not elitism, as self-serving 
seekers of political power have taught them. At 
stake in the protection of India's coastal 
environment are the lives of not merely Olive 
Ridly turtles but the millions to whom it is not 
a money-spinning means.


______



[3]  DONT FUND HATE IN THE NAME OF RELIEF AND DEVELOPMENT !

Watch out, the India Development & Relief Fund 
(IDRF), USA is back again with a donation appeal 
this time around, tsunami relief.
http://www.idrf.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Hnnews&file=article&sid=157

IDRF continues to mislead the public by claiming 
to be a secular, broad based organization funding 
"development" and "relief" programs in India. It 
is nothing other than a US fundraising front for 
Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) connected 
groups in India. For more information on IDRF 
visit: www.stopfundinghate.org/

o o o

BEWARE OF THE CROOKS
by IK Shukla
"To reap moola, dominate relief efforts, and 
steal and sell relief materials - this is an art 
in which HinduTaliban have always excelled and 
they remain unrivalled.

From  calamity, manmade or "natural", they habitually reap rewards, and
their hordes of illicit gains bulges and bloats.

Gujarat earthquake 2001 showed them nakedly, 
brutally, as thugs and predators. Those most 
affected did not get relief, because they 
belonged to minorities whom the Saffronazis 
regard disposable and redundant, neither Indian 
citizens nor human.

Let no money reach them through their well 
entrenched fraudulent conduits. because it will 
only swell their sordid coffers and spur their 
savage violence.

They have been planning to open electoral account 
in the South. This is their opportunity. They are 
desperate for a plank. This tragedy gives them 
one.

Beware of the crooks. With or without saffron 
they are a threat to humanity, they are a threat 
to India."


______


[4]


The Praful Bidwai Column
December 27, 2004

UPA Betrays Its Biggest Promise
Mocking at job guarantee

By Praful Bidwai

The single biggest promise made by the United 
Progressive Alliance on taking power was to 
"provide a legal guarantee for at least 100 days 
of employment, to begin with, Š every year Š at 
minimum wages for at least one able-bodied person 
in every household". This was not a casual 
pledge, but reflected a solemn commitment made by 
the Congress right since 2002, and reaffirmed by 
Ms Sonia Gandhi at least five times.

The Employment Guarantee Act (EGA) was meant to 
distinguish the UPA from its predecessors' 
economic policy and create a great social bridge. 
A guaranteed right to work would heal the rift 
between the poorest people and the not-so-poor. 
It would try to reconcile the elementary human 
aspirations of the wretched of the Indian earth 
with the lofty ambition of the privileged to make 
India a Great Power.

Regrettably, the UPA started diluting the EGA's 
scope early on. It whittled down its coverage to 
rural areas only-as if there were no grinding 
poverty in our towns and cities! It also 
redefined "households" to cover only those who 
share a dwelling or have a common ration card. 
Thus, just one person in a family would get work 
regardless of whether it is nuclear (with 4 to 5 
members) or joint (with, say, 8 to 15 members). 
Then, the UPA further confined the EGA's scope to 
just a quarter of India's districts with no 
promise of extending it nationally.

All this ran roughshod over the draft 
thoughtfully prepared after wide consultations by 
the UPA's own National Advisory Council, 
comprising highly accomplished social scientists 
and activists with roots among the rural poor.

Now, the UPA has tabled a Bill which mocks at the 
very concept of an employment guarantee. The Bill 
allows the government to switch the scheme on or 
off at will-without assigning any reasons. This 
parodies the notion of a right! Clause 3.1 of the 
Bill says state governments shall provide 
employment "in such rural areas Š and for such 
period" as may be "notified by the Centre". The 
employment "guarantee" does not have universal 
eligibility. It only covers households below the 
poverty line (BPL). And it does not even assure 
them the rate specified by the Minimum Wages Act, 
1948. There's no hint of the scheme's extension 
to the whole of India!

To appreciate the comprehensive character of the 
betrayal of the UPA's promise, it's vital to 
understand the EGA's rationale as a social 
security measure and examine the arguments for 
and against it. The case for an EGA arises from 
three considerations. First, there exists 
structurally caused and socially determined mass 
poverty and deprivation in India. So a person who 
is willing to perform even the most unskilled of 
manual labour, much like a draught animal, cannot 
find work. Millions are forced into chronic 
poverty for no fault of theirs other than their 
birth in underprivileged conditions. Society has 
failed to redress this for decades. This is an 
unacceptably unjust waste of valuable human 
potential. It is society's duty to empower the 
most unfortunate among the poor by providing 
employment to them.

Second, "normal" economic processes cannot 
resolve the problems of chronic poverty, 
unemployment, all-round poor social indicators, 
and depleted human capacities. Such processes 
will perpetuate or reinforce, they won't redress, 
the underlying structural causes-irrespective of 
GDP growth! One great theorem of Development 
Economics is that public action through special 
programmes is indispensable for this.

This is especially, cruelly, true of depressed 
areas. But it is also true of many areas of 
relative rural prosperity, like Punjab, Haryana 
or coastal Andhra. Surveys show that men and 
women even in Haryana find agricultural work for 
less than 50 days a year and non-agricultural 
work for respectively 70 days and just 3 days! At 
the same time, rural landlessness has steadily 
grown. It stands at 40 percent-plus nationally.

Third, recent economic growth in India has been 
perversely jobless. Earlier, 4 to 5 percent GDP 
growth would generate roughly 2 percent 
employment growth. Today, a 5 to 6 percent GDP 
increase produces just one percent more 
employment-or only about half the yearly increase 
in the number of job-seekers. Most recent 
schemes, including the Jawahar Rozgar Yojna and 
food-for-work programmes haven't remedied this 
perversity. 

Most such schemes, like the earlier Integrated 
Rural Development Programme-which, for instance, 
gave cheap loans to buy goats where there was no 
grazing possible!-are badly designed, top-down in 
nature, and implemented with remarkable 
callousness and no transparency. They must be 
reformed, supplemented or replaced. The EGA is 
probably the best complement/replacement for 
them. Its main attraction is that it alters the 
balance between the government and poor people by 
giving them entitlements-unlike other schemes 
which depend on the government's whims or, more 
rarely, concern for people.

That's precisely why Professor Amartya Sen calls 
the EGA an "enormously important instrument" of 
empowerment. Yet, many critics have attacked both 
the concept and the scope of the employment 
guarantee idea on many grounds. Some argue that 
it's outrageously expensive and will cost 4 to 5 
percent of GDP. Others hold that its scope must 
be narrowed to the very poorest by lowering the 
wage rate. Yet others say it's a wasteful 
populist measure that will create a "nanny 
state". One commentator goes as far as to say 
it'd be better to drop a few thousand crores in 
Rs 5 or 10 coins by helicopter than to run an EGA.

These arguments are largely specious. Many of 
them have been empirically discredited by 
Maharashtra, the first state to introduce the 
EGA. The Maharashtra scheme saved tens of 
thousands of lives during the terrible droughts 
of 1973-74 and 1977-78. For many, it represented 
the difference between starvation or one meal a 
day, and two meals. It was subsequently diluted, 
but it still covers the whole state, and offers 
universal eligibility and an alienable right to 
work (albeit at a low wage of Rs 45) or, 
alternatively, an allowance-a quarter of the 
wage-rate for the first 30 days, and after that, 
one-half the rate. There is an urgent need to 
upgrade the Maharashtra EGS, not to scrap it.
As for the national EGA, it will at maximum cost 
Rs 40,000 crores a year, not Rs 200,000 crores as 
wildly speculated. This is just 1.2 percent of 
GDP-a small price to pay for empowering hundreds 
of millions. There is both an ethical and an 
economic need to peg the lowest wage to Rs 66, 
the present minimum rate under the Sampoorna 
Grameen Rozgar Yojna. The function of a minimum 
wage is to set the floor under which rural 
incomes must not fall. There must be such a floor 
if India's villages are not to remain an abyss of 
poverty and wretchedness. There must be a special 
preference in the EGA for women. Or else, they 
will probably be excluded because there is only 
one job available per household.

Above all, however, the scheme's coverage must be 
extended to cover all rural households, not just 
BPL families. So-called targeting tends to work 
against the poorest. India's recent experience 
with the Public Distribution System for food 
shows that BPL households are hard to identity. 
Local power structures are such that the 
privileged can bully the rural bureaucracy into 
including them, not the poor, under the BPL 
category. It's better that some non-poor are 
wrongly included that the poor are excluded from 
a universal access scheme.

If the UPA is serious about redeeming its 
promise, it must revise the unacceptable clauses 
in the latest Bill. It must in particular amend 
the clause pertaining to transparency, which 
requires that information about the scheme can 
only be accessed on paying a fee. Equally 
deserving to be deleted is Clause 34 which 
empowers the government to amend both the basic 
features of the scheme and the conditions of 
guarantee and workers' entitlements.

The UPA won't find it easy to retain the spirit 
of the EGA by making all these amendments. Many 
forces and individuals in it are opposed to any 
deviation from "free-market" neoliberal policies 
which might help the poor. Some have openly 
expressed their scepticism, including Planning 
Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh 
Ahluwalia, Finance Ministry bureaucrats and a 
whole gaggle of Right-wing market analysts like 
Surjit S. Bhalla parading themselves as "expert 
economists".

The real issue is whether neoliberal voodoo 
economics prevails, or poor people's interests 
do. For neoliberals, it's never pertinent to ask 
how and why the affluent benefit from the 14 
percent of the GDP that currently goes into 
subsidies. The larger question is whether mass 
poverty is compatible with a half-way decent, 
democratic society. To get the UPA to correct 
course, its topmost leaders must intervene. Ms 
Gandhi has already made her stand clear by 
endorsing the NAC's worthy draft. It's now Dr 
Manmohan Singh's turn. The UPA's survival, 
credibility and legitimacy demand that the Bill 
be amended radically by reference to a Select 
Committee. History won't forgive a lapse or 
failure here.-end-

______


[5]

Dawn
28 December 2004

FABLE OF THE BULLS AND THE BUTCHER
By Jawed Naqvi

The Russian Marxist theoretician Leon Trotsky 
narrated his version of an Aesop fable with 
telling effect. A cattle dealer once drove some 
bulls to the slaughterhouse. And the butcher came 
in the night with his sharp knife.
"Let us close ranks and jack up this executioner 
on our horns," suggested one of the bulls. "If 
you please, in what way is the butcher any worse 
than the dealer who drove us hither with his 
cudgel?" replied the bulls, who had received 
their political education at the Comintern.
"But we shall be able to attend to the dealer as 
well afterwards." "Nothing doing," replied the 
bulls firm, in their principles, to the 
counsellor. "You are trying, from the left, to 
shield our enemies - you are a social butcher 
yourself." And they refused to close ranks.
The story is instructive or tragic depending on 
your proximity to the fight against fascism. 
Gujarat is as good an example as any, where 
Trotsky's warning runs the risk of not being 
heeded.
Take the case of Zaheera Sheikh. She was once 
regarded as a crucial witness to the Gujarat 
pogrom of 2002. Today she is being accused of 
taking all of one point eight million rupees to 
recant on her evidence.
If she indeed has taken the money from the 
Bharatiya Janata Party's lawmakers in Gujarat, 
effectively a bribe to keep quiet in the trial, a 
suggestion strongly made by last week's Tehelka 
expose, the courts will deal with the matter 
accordingly.
If she did not demand the money to change her 
testimony in what is known as the Best Bakery 
massacre, one of the many that were carried out 
in the Gujarat pogrom of February-March 2002, 
then the question becomes harder to answer: why 
did she recant?
Before the courts could even address the issue 
some mullahs of an obscure group called 
Majlis-i-Shura quickly issued a fatwa seeking to 
throw Zaheera out from her community, if such an 
act is legally or religiously possible.
Simultaneously, well-meaning secular activists 
fighting to provide legal aid and social 
protection to the victims of Gujarat have tended 
to approve of or at best look the other way when 
some of their own have burnt Zaheera's effigies 
in protest in different parts of Gujarat and 
elsewhere.
This is not the only ridiculous thing. Hindus and 
Muslims alike are turning Zaheera into a pariah 
and our secular activists do not look too worried 
about it. Yes, her recanting has harmed the legal 
case against the BJP's killing squads in Gujarat.
But suppose Zaheera Sheikh had kept to her 
testimony. Would it have been fair to her? 
Suppose Teesta Setalvad goes on to win the Best 
Bakery case, would it stall the fascist movement 
for a moment, and change Zaheera's fortunes for 
the better?
The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous 
movement of large masses. Trotsky saw it as 
plebian movement in origin, "directed and 
financed by capitalist powers".
It issued forth from "the petty bourgeoisie, the 
slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent 
from the proletarian masses". Is Zaheera a mere 
Muslim victim or does she also have a class 
character? And could she at some point identify 
with any of the classes that were lured by 
Mussolini's charismatic personality, as so many 
seem to be by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, for example.
The sense of urgency, the paucity of time as 
marked out by Trotsky in the fight against 
fascism has dissipated in Gujarat into a bunch of 
legal battles with their familiar baggage of 
clever arguments and counter arguments. Take two 
examples from the BJP's recent successes, and the 
situation in Gujarat would look even more 
worrying.
The Ayodhya movement that led to the demolition 
of the Babri mosque in 1992 has not waned. It did 
successfully install a temple at the site of the 
razed mosque and thousands of simple folk daily 
throng there under police protection.
The mosque was not protected by the state but the 
makeshift temple is. The Supreme Court cannot 
decide any issue that goes into the realm of 
mythology. The only question is therefore to 
build the temple properly "by mutual consent".
In the 1993 January-February anti-Muslim violence 
in Mumbai by the Shiv Sena, a partner of the BJP, 
hundreds were killed. The findings of the 
independent inquiry commission led by Justice 
Shri Krishna indicted the Shiv Sena.
The Congress has been ruling Maharashtra for much 
of the period since then. Little has been done to 
punish anyone. So why should we expect anything 
better from Gujarat, which is ruled by the BJP?
It is clear that fascism cannot be fought 
legally. The last time it was vanquished it took 
the combined might of Winston Churchill and 
Joseph Stalin and two American presidents to 
snuff it out. The Nuremberg Trials became 
possible only after the political battle was won.
Zaheera Sheikh belongs to the category of Indians 
- or even liberal Indian Muslims, if you like - 
such as Arif Mohammed Khan and Najma Heptullah, 
who recently joined the BJP, after the Gujarat 
massacres, claiming that the usually centrist 
Congress was more anti-Muslim than the Hindutva 
party.
To an extent they are right. The Congress party's 
leader in Gujarat is Shankar Singh Vaghela, a 
former leader of the Muslim-baiting Rashtriya 
Swayamsewak Sangh. But the butcher, as Trotsky 
warned, is already sharpening his knives for any 
Congress versus BJP debate to have any relevance 
for the moment.
Zaheera Sheikhs will happen if there is no 
political movement that supports the work of 
people like Teesta Setalvad or provides cover to 
the efforts of the Tehelka newspaper.
Hitler was not driven to suicide by a bunch of 
well-meaning NGOs. The military forces of 
rightward leaning Churchill and the leftist 
dictator Stalin, who lived on to fight a bit of 
the Cold War, overwhelmed him.

______



[6]   [Book Review]

Seminar
December 2004

THE TRAUMA AND THE TRIUMPH: Gender and Partition 
in Eastern India edited by Jasodhara Bagchi and 
Subhoranjan Dasgupta. Stree, Calcutta, 2003.

WHEN Indians repossessed their homeland on 15 
August 1947, close to 12 million people on all 
sides of the borders were left without a home. 
The black irony of the situation was deliberately 
repressed in official and popular celebration of 
the amazing fact of freedom, so hard-won, and so 
ardently awaited. Within another quarter of a 
century, the subcontinent was split a second 
time, unravelling the logic of the first 
partition: the two nation theory, espoused by the 
Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League, came 
unstuck as the nation state of Pakistan 
splintered in the name of other solidarities and 
contradictions that could not be contained within 
the framework of religious identity.

The celebration of the 50th year of India's 
freedom saw a dramatic redefinition of the 
meaning of August 1947. The event that appeared 
on the forefront of scholarly and popular 
memorialisation was more the horrors of the 
holocaust and the breakup of the country than the 
pleasure of repossessing the country. It is 
interesting to speculate on why that semantic 
shift occurred at this point. The promise of the 
Nehruvian welfare state and the new-founded 
economic sovereignty had largely been dissipated 
in the last decade, substantially eroding the 
expectant optimism with which the newly-made 
citizens had greeted the infant nation state in 
1947. More significant, the horrors of anti-Sikh 
and anti-Muslim pogroms brought back memories of 
the holocaust. The foundation of the nation state 
had not been a monolithic one. A mass movement, 
rare in the history of the world in the scale of 
popular activism and non-violence, had been one 
of its sources. But there had also been the 
parallel narrative of religious separatism, both 
Hindu and Muslim, a long lineage of mass communal 
violence and hatred that had shaped the course of 
events that led on to freedom-with-partition. The 
50th year of our freedom saw a preoccupation with 
the recovery of the second strand of nation 
making, reflecting the new and darker context for 
historical writings.

The new histories of the Partition were written 
largely by feminist scholars and gender became a 
key prism through which the events were reviewed. 
There was a shift away from the earlier 
preoccupation with the realm of high politics, 
negotiations and bargains over the fate of 
nations. There was also, by and large, a 
breakaway from the earlier historical 
explanations that traced lineages of partition in 
the long histories of communalism and violence, 
especially in Bengal and Punjab. The accent was 
on the experiential, the emotive aspects of 
events and the holocaust was seen as an 
apocalyptic occurrence that could be studied on 
its own without being necessarily located in an 
ideological and political context. The histories 
expanded the methods of using oral narratives; 
they revealed the conjoined patriarchies of 
states and families, the involuted violence that 
separated even the victims.

In all this, Bengal had remained, by and large, a 
relatively minor footnote. Punjab provided the 
dominant frame of reference to which Bengal 
provided examples of departures from the norm. Of 
course, there was a major exception to this 
general trend. Joya Chatterjee had, in fact, 
pioneered the revival in partition studies with a 
focus on Bengal. She was able to weave together 
the experiential with the institutional, the 
immediate events of holocaust with histories of 
communal ideology and political organization. In 
her more recent work, she had emphasized a 
vitally important point: partition did not end, 
but began in June 1947 as the scheme for 
territorial separation came to be finalized. In 
other words, the proper life of partition begins 
with the displaced people and the separated 
lands, the new economies and state structures, as 
they came to take shape from 1947.

In very recent years, the probe of Bengal 
partition has widened. The editors of the volume 
under review have rightly pointed out that the 
nature of the Bengal partition was different from 
Punjab in some very crucial ways. One of the 
striking differences is that there was no massive 
concentration of violence in one or two years 
followed by a virtual exchange of entire 
populations as happened in Punjab. The partition 
in Bengal was a very long drawn out affair, the 
borders remained open much longer and the 
migration was both more continuous and thinner at 
any given point of time. There were, moreover, 
repeated spurts of violence leading on to 
recurring bouts of migration, some of it caused 
by threat perception rather than by actual 
violence, and some of it also caused by economic 
dislocations that made older patterns of 
livelihood untenable. The Indian government, 
determined to accord proper refugee status only 
to people who could prove that their flight was 
directly caused by communal violence, took little 
responsibility for the streams of Hindus from 
East Pakistan. There was, moreover, more than one 
displacement in the lives of Bengali migrants as 
they were torn out of the settled Bengali 
landscape and flung into the wilds of the 
Sunderbans or into the forests of Dandakaranya 
outside Bengal. One hardly knows where to put a 
closure to the history of the Bengal partition.

The recent studies of Bengal partition have, 
therefore, focused closely on the history of 
displaced people, their many dislocations and 
their struggles for survival, land and homes. The 
focus on violent events or memories of 
spectacular violence which characterize the 
Punjab studies, are, in comparison, less 
dominant. The present volume continues that trend.

The most important feature of the volume is that 
it is a mosaic made up of fragments from many 
different archives. A diverse range of histories, 
history writings and historical sources are 
pulled together, suggesting multiple directions 
for future research. The collage format also 
enabled the editors to bring together many of the 
strengths of different modes of historical 
reconstruction. There are recollections as well 
as historical analyses of policies and 
experiences; there are accounts of state and 
institutional grapplings with the 'refugee 
problem' along with literary and filmic 
representations of refugee self-fashioning. And, 
true to the peculiarities of the Bengal 
partition, the scope is not confined to the 
moment when partition began to happen. The second 
partition of the subcontinent brings it into 
recent post-colonial histories as it concerned 
Bengal yet again. Given the diversity of genres 
and themes that the volume represents, it is 
impossible to write adequately about each single 
contribution. I shall merely point out some of 
the strengths.

As the title of the volume signifies, the editors 
work with a complex dialectic of losses and new 
beginnings. As Asoke Mitra had observed long 
back, the burden of partition was borne mainly by 
refugee women who stepped into unprecedented 
roles: homemaker, breadwinner, political 
activist. Such struggles in a hostile environment 
which compounded the traumatic escape from homes 
and homeland nonetheless promised new, though 
difficult, beginnings. The book provides an 
excerpt from Ritwik Ghatak's memorable film, 
Meghe Dhaka Tara, but, in a different vein, the 
excitement of inhabiting public roles and spaces, 
perhaps, comes out more in Satyajit Ray's 
Mahanagar. The woman, forced to earn a living, 
was not entirely a tragic figure, even if her 
difficulties were massive.

The editors also point out the role of the Left 
in mobilizing broken, traumatized people in 
struggles where, again, women played a major 
role. The Left came into its own, marking out 
future bases and forms of struggle by going into 
the heart of rehabilitation work and with 
militant claims to unsettled land. It is somewhat 
ironic to think that in the present state of West 
Bengal, the Left Front government engages in 
breaking up some of these very resettlement 
colonies in the interests of urban development.

A very perceptive comment by Jasodhara Bagchi 
points out the structural similarity between the 
traumatic events of a generalized loss of home 
and the routinised abandonment of ancestral homes 
for all women living under patrivirilocal systems.

Subhoranjan Dasgupta reads Akhtaruddin Elias' 
Khwabnama as a fictional completion of history. 
The text evokes very powerfully - and Dasgupta's 
reading communicates that power most vividly and 
sensitively - an unusual perspective on 
partition: that of a Muslim. In this connection, 
a comparison with Gourkishore Ghose's novel, Prem 
Nei, might have been further illuminating. 
Dasgupta interestingly counterposes the united 
peasants' struggle in the Tebhaga movement to its 
contemporary event of partition as a split 
possibility. It, however, leaves the question 
open as to why the mass movement for partition 
triumphed, even among Bengali peasants.

Selina Hossain's short story, 'Kantatare 
Projapati' evokes the excruciating torture of a 
woman in prison. The context, most possibly, is 
the Bangladesh War of 1971, but one misses a 
further explanation, or an introduction to the 
author. Similarly, the memorable pamphlet of 
1951, based on Ila Mitra's statement to the East 
Pakistan police is reproduced without any 
contextualisation or explanation. The 
extraordinary document from the legendary leader 
of the Tebhaga movement has been largely unknown 
and one is grateful to the editors for bringing 
it back into the public domain. However, Ila 
Mitra has become a shadowy name to the present 
generations, and to readers outside Bengal. This 
would have been a major opportunity to revive 
that history.

Rachel Weber does a close study of one of the 
refugee settlements in South Calcutta. She 
locates this against the changing urban 
topography of the metropolis that the partition 
brought in its wake. The changing fate of the 
Bijoygarh Colony in Jadavpur is filled out 
through the words and recollections of the 
refugee inhabitants who then go back to an older 
past to talk about an older home and its 
violation and loss. She introduces her own 
subject position as a child of Jewish refugees 
who escaped from Nazi Germany to create a 
correspondence between the two moments of exodus. 
The comparison may be somewhat misleading, 
masking the specificities of each history.

Renuka Roy was a leading figure in rehabilitation 
work, going on to become the Minister of 
Rehabilitation. Rehabilitation was an area in the 
new governmental enterprise where the expertise 
of women had acknowledged value, since even in 
conventional gender understanding, they are seen 
to possess 'natural' abilities for rebuilding 
broken homes. The article is a very important 
contribution tracing, as it does, the trajectory 
of refugee existence from the Sealdah station to 
the camps and then the colonies. It provides a 
detailed and critical account of the inadequacies 
and obstinate blindness of the Indian government 
towards the true dimensions of the problem in 
Bengal. It also traces the complicated 
centre-state negotiations on this. It blames the 
Nehru-Liaqat Pact of 1950 which mistakenly 
assumed that the eastern influx was temporary and 
that the status quo ante could be restored. When 
that did not happen, there was no revision of the 
structures of the rehabilitation plan.

In another valuable article, Meghna Guha Thakurta 
contrasts patterns of Hindu migration after 1950 
from East Pakistan with Muslim migration away 
from West Bengal after the riots of 1964. It 
explains migration decisions by families in the 
post 1947 and 1971 contexts and contrasts the 
aspirations of Hindu and Muslim migrants: Hindus 
leaving their precious ancestral home or 
'bhitabari' and Muslims imagining that they were 
moving towards their 'promised land'. This is 
done through micro-studies of two families: a 
Hindu one coming away from Barisal in East 
Pakistan, and a Muslim one going away from 
Barasat in West Bengal. She notes the tendency to 
settle down in large urban centres, even for 
rural families. She also traces the pattern of 
pre-partition migration from East to West Bengal 
and shows how the networks were overstretched and 
eventually broke down under the strain of the 
pressures of population movements after the 
partition.

Urvashi Butalia captures the curious story of the 
strange anomalies of territorial partition which 
created 'chitmahals' or enclaves in each other's 
territories as a province was arbitrarily pulled 
apart. The belated merger of two princely states 
- Cooch Bihar in the West and Rangpur in the East 
- with two different states left theborders 
notoriously ill-defined and the inhabitants 
trapped within tightly enclosed land ringed round 
with borders from which any movement became most 
difficult. It also made them vulnerable to police 
harassment on both sides. The ingrained 
perversity of the refugee experience receives a 
further twist within this history of Berubari.

Meenakshi Sen looks into the history of another 
ex-princely state, Tripura, whose demographic 
profile changed entirely after partition. There 
was an earlier history of pre-partition Bengali 
Hindu migration into the state but the trickle 
became a torrent after 1947. The exodus of 
Tripura Muslims towards Pakistan firmly 
established the numerical predominance of Bengali 
Hindus within the state. The situation, however, 
became complicated after the 1960s, as some of 
the Muslims attempted to return on highly 
unfavourable terms. The Congress government 
actively discouraged the migration and the 
discrimination that the Muslims faced is 
recounted in the words of two Muslim women 
migrants. Hindu dominance touched the lives of 
the indigenous tribal women as the institution of 
dowry was introduced to their villages.

The volume offers important oral archival 
material that future historians of Bengal 
partition will find useful. There are interviews 
with refugee women who then became involved with 
different kinds of political activities in West 
Bengal. Nalini Mitra, an active member of the 
Purba Pakistan Mahila Samiti that was set up in 
East Bengal under Leela Ray, recalls her 
experiences of communal violence - the only piece 
that deals with the theme in this volume - and 
Sukumari Chaudhuri describes her political work 
in the 1955 strike at the Bengal Lamp Factory in 
Calcutta. Gargi Chakravartty interviews Bithi 
Chakravarti to follow the trajectory of her life 
as she leaves home, comes to Calcutta with her 
practically destitute family and ultimately 
emerges as the family breadwinner. Dasgupta 
interviews a CPI activist of undivided Bengal - 
Nibedita Nag - who, along with a section of party 
workers, went against the stream, to move to the 
East and carry on with party work under dangerous 
constraints. There are very interesting fragments 
from the Partition Diary of Suhasini Das of 
Sylhet as she despairingly watches the exodus of 
Hindus and the changed social landscape.

There is a fascinating recollection of travels 
through riot-torn Noakhali in the fateful year of 
1946 by the veteran social activist Ashoka Gupta 
who accompanied Gandhiji through a district where 
Hindu girls had been molested on a large scale 
and where Gandhiji took a group of young Hindu 
women on his mission of peace and as a token of 
his faith in peace. In 1955, Ashoka Gupta, Bina 
Das, Amar Kumari Vatma, Sudha Sen and Sheila 
Davar went on a tour of refugee centres in East 
Punjab and Delhi to compare rehabilitation 
policies vis a vis Punjabi refugees with the 
conditions in West Bengal refugee camps. The 
detailed comparison established the 
discrimination and marginalisation that Bengali 
refugees encountered as compared with the much 
greater investment of resources and sensitivity 
that Punjabi refugees received. The report is 
reproduced in the volume.

Subhoranjan Dasgupta moves forward in time to 
locate the tentacles of the partition among the 
women in the Brindaban pilgrimage of today. There 
is also a moving excerpt from Dakshinaranjan 
Basu's recollections of a vanished way of life in 
his village Sonarang, marked by a history of 
Buddhist practices and relics. It would have been 
useful if the short introduction mentioned the 
location of the village, since the text does not 
indicate it. There are beautiful translations by 
Dasgupta of poems of two refugee poets, 
Jibanananda Das and Taslima Nasreen: poems of 
nostalgia for landscapes that have vanished from 
their lives. They underline something that has 
been crushed and overwritten by the current 
foregrounding of the nation state as the sole 
measure of a spatial affiliation with a 
particular territory - that is, the meaning of 
homeland in lives of people, the sensuous and 
concrete bonding with an inherited landscape.

It is a large and crowded canvas that we have 
here. That makes for a rich understanding of the 
complexity of the problem but it also reduces the 
scope for an extended engagement with any 
particular aspect.

Tanika Sarkar


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