SACW | 23-24 Jan 2005

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire   | 23-24 Jan.,  2005
via:  www.sacw.net

[1] Bangladesh:  The Next Islamist Revolution? (Eliza Griswold)
[2] In tsunami area, anger at evangelists  (David Rohde)
[3] India: Politics in its place  (Jyotirmaya Sharma)
[4] India: John Dayal nominated member of 
National Integration Council (AICC press release)
[5] Book Announcement: Dark Leaves of the Present 
(Edited by Angana P. Chatterji & Shabnam Hashmi)
[6] India: Religion census in Gujarat schools


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

[1]

New York Times Magazine
January 23, 2005

THE NEXT ISLAMIST REVOLUTION?
  By Eliza Griswold

Before dawn one morning this past November in 
Bagmara, a village in northwestern
Bangladesh, six puffy-eyed men gathered beneath a 
cracked-mud stairwell to describe a
man they consider their leader, a former 
schoolteacher called Bangla Bhai. The quiet was
broken now and then by donkey carts clattering 
past, as village women, seated on the
backs of the carts, were taken to the market. The 
women wore makeshift burkas -- black,
white, canary yellow -- and kept their heads 
down, and this, the men explained, was
Bangla Bhai's doing.

  Last spring, Bangla Bhai, whose followers 
probably number around 10,000, decided to try
an Islamist revolution in several provinces of 
Bangladesh that border on India. His name
means ''Bangladeshi brother.'' (At one point he 
said his real name was Azizur Rahman and
more recently claimed it was Siddiqul Islam.) He 
has said that he acquired this nom de
guerre while waging jihad in Afghanistan and that 
he was now going to bring about the
Talibanization of his part of Bangladesh. Men 
were to grow beards, women to wear burkas.
This was all rather new to the area, which was 
religiously diverse. But Jagrata Muslim
Janata Bangladesh, as Bangla Bhai's group is 
called (the name means Awakened Muslim
Masses of Bangladesh), was determined and violent 
and seemed to have enough lightly
armed adherents to make its rule stick.

  Because he swore his main enemy was a somewhat 
derelict but still dangerous group of
leftist marauders known as the Purbo Banglar 
Communist Party, Bangla Bhai gained the
support of the local police -- until the central 
government, worried that Bangla Bhai's
band might be getting out of control, ordered his arrest in late May.

  ''There used to be chaos and confusion here,'' 
Siddiq-ul-Rahman, one of Bangla Bhai's
senior lieutenants, said through an interpreter 
that morning in Bagmara. The sun was
coming up and a crowd was gathering. 
Siddiq-ul-Rahman boasted that police officers
attend Bangla Bhai's meetings armed and in 
uniform. The Bangladeshi government's arrest
warrant doesn't seem to have made much difference, although for now Bangla Bhai
refrains from public appearances. The government 
is far away in Dhaka, and is in any case
divided on precisely this question of how much 
Islam and politics should mix. Meanwhile,
Bangla Bhai and the type of religious violence he 
practices are filling the power vacuum.

  Bangladeshi politics have never strayed far from violence. During the war for
independence from Pakistan, in 1971, three 
million people died in nine months. Thuggery
has been a consistent feature of political life 
since then and is increasingly so today. This
has made it difficult to get an accurate picture 
of phenomena like Bangla Bhai. Under the
current government, which has been in power since 
2001 and includes two avowedly
Islamist parties, journalists are frequently 
imprisoned. Last year, three were killed while
reporting on corruption and the rise of militant Islam. Moreover, 80 percent of
Bangladeshis live in villages that can be hard to 
reach and are under the tight control of
local politicians. Foreign journalists in 
Bangladesh are followed by intelligence agents;
people that reporters interview are questioned afterward.

  Nonetheless, it is possible to travel through 
Bangladesh and observe the increased
political and religious repression in everyday 
life, and to verify the simple remark by one
journalist there: ''We are losing our freedom.'' 
The global war on terror is aimed at making
the rise of regimes like that of the Taliban 
impossible, but in Bangladesh, the trend could
be going the other way.

In Bangladesh, ''Islam is becoming the 
legitimizing political discourse,'' according to 
C.
Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the 
United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan,
federally financed policy group in Washington. 
''Once you don that religious mantle, who
can criticize you? We see this in Pakistan as 
well, where very few people are brave enough
to take the Islamists on. Now this is happening 
in Bangladesh.'' The region, Fair added, has
become a haven where jihadis can move easily and 
have access to a friendly infrastructure
that allows them to regroup and train.

  Another close observer of Bangladeshi politics, 
Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch,
told me recently: ''The practical effect of 
politics along religious lines is that you start 
to
accept a religious identity and reject every 
other. It's absolutely crucial to understand that
this is happening in Bangladesh right now.''

  This was not supposed to be the fate of Bangladesh, which fought its way to
independence 34 years ago. While its population 
of 141 million is 83 percent Muslim, the
nation was founded on the principle of 
secularism, which in Bangladesh essentially means
religious tolerance. After the guiding figure of 
independence, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was
assassinated in 1975, military leaders, seeking 
legitimacy, allowed a return of Islam to
politics. With the return of fair elections in 
1991, power became precariously divided
among four parties: the right-leaning Bangladesh 
National Party (B.N.P.), the mildly leftist
Awami League, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami and 
the conservative Jatiya. The two leading
parties are led by women: the B.N.P. by the 
current prime minister, Khaleda Zia, widow of
the party's murdered founder; the Awami League by 
Zia's predecessor as prime minister,
Sheikh Hasina Wazed, herself the daughter of the 
assassinated founding father, Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman.

  Zia and Sheikh Hasina, as she is known, have a 
legendary antipathy toward each other.
Each of their parties regularly accuses the other 
of illegal acts. When Sheikh Hasina very
narrowly escaped assassination last August, 
B.N.P. activists all but accused her of staging
the attack in order to acquire political 
advantage. Zia's government has been unable to
identify the assassins -- who lobbed grenades 
into a party rally, killing at least 20 and
wounding hundreds -- and Sheikh Hasina has 
refused even to discuss the investigation
with the prime minister, saying: ''With whom should I meet? With the killers?''

  The political breach between those two parties 
is being filled primarily by Jamaat-e-
Islami, which agitated against independence in 
1971 and remains close to Pakistan. The
group was banned after independence for its role 
in the war but has slowly worked its way
back to political legitimacy. The party itself 
has not changed much -- it was always
socially conservative and unafraid of violence. 
The political context, however, has changed
enough to give it greater power. Since 2001, 
Jamaat-e-Islami has been a crucial part of a
governing coalition dominated by the B.N.P. The 
two parties have ties dating to the late
1970's, but it is only since 2001 that a 
politically aggressive form of Islam has found, 
for
the first time since independence, a strong place 
at the top of Bangladeshi politics.

  It has found a corresponding position at the 
bottom of Bangladeshi politics as well, in the
social scrum that produces figures like Bangla 
Bhai. (Opposition politicians have linked
Bangla Bhai to Jamaat-e-Islami, a tie that Jamaat 
and Bangla Bhai have both denied.) The
border provinces have, since independence, 
harbored a proliferation of armed groups that
either Bangladesh, India, Myanmar or Pakistan, or 
some region or faction in one of those
countries, has been willing to support for its 
own political reasons. By the early 1990's
Islamist groups began appearing, mainly at the 
periphery of the jihad centered on
Afghanistan. The most important of these has been 
the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (Huji),
which has been associated with Fazlul Rahman, who 
signed Osama bin Laden's famous
declaration in 1998 endorsing international, 
coordinated jihad -- the document that
introduced Al Qaeda to the larger world. But 
Bangla Bhai's group and others have since
emerged and are making their bids for power.

  ''Bangladesh is becoming increasingly important 
to groups like Al Qaeda because it's been
off everyone's radar screen,'' says Zachary 
Abuza, the author of ''Militant Islam in
Southeast Asia'' and a professor of political 
science at Simmons College in Boston. ''Al
Qaeda is going to have to figure out where they 
can regroup, where they have the physical
capability to assemble and train, and Bangladesh is one of these key places.''

  Six years ago, Huji chose its first prominent 
target: Shamsur Rahman, who is Bangladesh's
leading poet. Recently, at his home in Dhaka, 
Rahman began telling me the story of the
attack as he pulled a sheaf of papers from a 
pigeonhole in his writing desk, on which sat a
bottle of black-currant soda and a copy of 
Dante's ''Inferno.'' Above the desk hung an ink
sketch of the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet, 
Rabindranath Tagore, as well as a
yellowing photograph of Rahman's father.

  Rahman, who is 75, is birdlike and wears his 
hair in a fluffy white pageboy. Most of his
poems are love poems, but some address the rise 
of militant Islam in his country. ''I am
not against religion,'' he said, smiling wryly. 
''I am against fanaticism.'' He reached for his
mug of hot water. It was the holy month of 
Ramadan, and Rahman's family had just broken
the day's fast.

  Downstairs, four policemen were eating a meal 
prepared by Rahman's daughter-in-law
Tia. Rahman has lived under police protection 
since Jan. 18, 1999, when three young men
appeared at his house and asked for a poem. Tia 
refused to let them in. The poet was
resting, she said. But the men begged for just a 
minute of his time, so Tia obliged.
Immediately one of the men ran upstairs and tried 
to chop Rahman's neck with an ax. ''He
tried to cut my head off, but my wife took me in 
her arms and my daughter-in-law too,''
Rahman recounted. The two women fended off the 
blows until the neighbors, hearing their
screams, rushed into the house and caught the attackers.

  Rahman gestured toward the women standing in the 
doorway. Tia looked exhausted. The
hair around her face was damp from cooking. 
Rahman's wife, Zahora, not more than four
feet tall, held her diminutive hands in front of 
her and smiled. (She understands English
but cannot speak it.) Rahman pointed out the 
shiny scar on her arm. Zahora patted her
husband and took his empty mug to the kitchen. 
''They wanted my head, not a poem,'' he
said.

  The attack led to the arrest of 44 members of 
Huji. Two men, a Pakistani and a South
African, claimed they had been sent to Bangladesh 
by Osama bin Laden with more than
$300,000, which they distributed among 421 
madrassas, or private religious schools.
According to Gowher Rizvi, director of the Ash 
Institute for Democratic Governance and
Innovation at Harvard and a lecturer in public 
policy, bin Laden's reputed donation is ''a
pittance'' compared with the millions that Saudi 
charities have contributed to many of
Bangladesh's estimated 64,000 madrassas, most of 
which serve only a single village or
two. Money of this kind is especially important 
because Bangladesh is one of the poorest
countries in the world. Out of 177 countries on 
the United Nations' Human Development
Index, Bangladesh is ranked 138, just above 
Sudan. The recent tsunami that devastated its
neighbors hardly touched it -- a rare bit of good luck for the country, as most
catastrophes seem somehow to claim their victims in Bangladesh.

  In Bangla Bhai's patch of northwestern 
Bangladesh, poverty is so pervasive that, for many
children in the region, privately subsidized 
madrassas are the only educational option. For
the past several years especially, money from 
Persian Gulf states has strengthened them
even more. Most follow a form of the Deobandi Islam taught in the 1950's by the
intellectual and activist Maulana Abul Ala 
Maududi, who was born in India in 1903 and
defined Muslim politics in opposition to Indian 
nationalism. While Maududi's original
agenda was reformist, the Deobandi model is now 
better known from the madrassas of
Pakistan, where it gave rise to the Taliban in 
Afghanistan. Whether Maududi intended it or
not, his teachings have become synonymous with radical Islam.

  In November, in a shop in the Bagmara bazaar not 
far from where Bangla Bhai used to
hold his meetings, two young men sat waiting to 
tell their stories about the cruelty and
repression of Bangla Bhai's movement. Everyone 
here wanted to talk about this, they said,
but were afraid of the consequences. Several days 
earlier, Bangla Bhai's cadres had beaten
a university student caught smoking cigarettes, another banned act.

  ''We weren't allowed to sell these,'' said one 
of the men, a 20-year-old shopkeeper,
holding up a pack of Player's Gold Leaf he kept on a low shelf.

  His friend, a thickset man in a white kurta -- a 
long-sleeved shirt extending below the
waist -- sat on a carton next to the counter, 
with a blue mobile phone in his hand. He
played with the phone distractedly as he 
described the announcements Bangla Bhai's men
had made, beginning last summer, over the 
loudspeaker, demanding that people come
watch public punishments. He told me that over 
the past months he himself had seen
more than 50 men hanged upside down by their feet 
from bamboo scaffolding and beaten
with hammers, iron rods and the field-hockey sticks that are commonly used in
Bangladesh as weapons. He winced for a second 
recalling these tortures, and then his
fleshy face lost all expression.

  ''In this place people live in fear,'' the 
shopkeeper said. ''They still punish people. If
anyone is not keeping Ramadan, even if it's a 
sick man and he's eating in a restaurant,
they treat them badly.''

  The thickset man scanned the street over his 
shoulder and added, shaking his head,
''They wanted the regime of the Taliban here.''

  Taskforce against Torture, a Bangladeshi human 
rights organization founded three years
ago, has recorded more than 500 cases of people 
being intimidated and tortured by
Bangla Bhai and his men. One of them is Abdul Quddus Rajon, a postmaster from
Shafiqpur, a village near Bagmara. He is 42 and 
comes from a wealthy family of moderate
Muslims. Rajon was abducted early last May when 
two men in green headbands showed up
at the post office on a motorbike. They forced 
him onto the bike and demanded his
brother's phone number. Abdul Kayyam Badshah, 
Rajon's brother and the leader of a
banned Communist Party, was wanted by the 
government and being pursued by Bangla
Bhai's men. Rajon refused to give them the 
number, so they took his mobile phone and
drove him to one of Bangla Bhai's camps.

  Rajon told me when I met him that he was held 
with 15 other men in two rooms. ''For four
days they tortured me,'' he recounted. Every 
morning, his captors, who Rajon said were
not more than teenagers, took him to a cell and beat him.

  Bangla Bhai's men demanded 100,000 taka for his 
release, about $1,600. Rajon eventually
agreed to pay. Before his release, he said, his 
captors tried to intimidate him into
becoming more observant. ''They took me in front 
of a mosque and told me to promise I
would keep my beard and pray five times a day, 
and to never tell anything about Bangla
Bhai's camp,'' he said. ''They wore beards and 
long kurtas like religious men, but that was
the only way in which they were religious.'' He 
pulled up the cuffs of his khakis to reveal
deep black gashes in his shins.

  ''Eleven days later,'' he said, ''they caught my 
brother.'' At noon on May 19, Rajon was
awakened by a loudspeaker. Bangla Bhai's men were 
announcing that his brother's trial
would start the next day and he would be 
sentenced to death. ''I tried to contact the state
minister and the superintendent of police by 
telephone,'' Rajon said. ''Because if Badshah
was accused, he should be tried according to the 
laws of the land. But they wouldn't talk
to me.'' (According to The Daily Star, 
Bangladesh's leading English-language newspaper,
the local government has been accused of colluding with Bangla Bhai.)

  The next morning, Badshah was found hanged by 
his feet from a tree near a police
station. He had been beaten to death. Rajon first 
heard about it through whispering in the
village. ''A policeman was wandering around 
asking people if they were glad my brother
was dead,'' he said. In the village and the 
surrounding districts, Bangla Bhai's spate of
killings and torture continued for another month. 
One man was dismembered. Another,
according to local journalists and villagers who 
told me they heard him, had a microphone
held to his mouth while he was tortured so that 
the entire village could listen to his
screams.

  ommunists are just one target of Islamic 
militants in Bangladesh. Most attacks have been
carried out against either members of religious 
minorities -- Hindus, Christians and
Buddhists -- or moderate Muslims considered out 
of step with the doctrines espoused at
the militant madrassas. International groups like 
Human Rights Watch cannot gather
information freely enough to be certain of the 
scope of the problem. Yet anecdotal
evidence is abundant. In Bangladesh, as part of 
the militant Islamists' agenda, religious
minorities are coming under a new wave of attacks. One of the most vulnerable
communities is that of the Ahmadiyya, a sect of 
some 100,000 Muslims who believe that
Muhammad was not the last prophet. (The Ahmadiyya 
are the subject of a Human Rights
Watch report to be published next month.) In 
Pakistan, the Ahmadiyya have been declared
infidels and many have been killed. In 
Bangladesh, religious hardliners have burned
mosques and books and pressured the government to 
declare the sect non-Muslim. Last
year, the government agreed to ban Ahmadiyya 
literature; earlier this month, however,
Bangladesh's high court stayed the ban pending 
further consideration by the court.

  But those who oppose the Ahmadiyya are not 
giving up. At a recent rally in Dhaka, 10,000
protesters gathered outside an Ahmadiyya mosque 
as one Islamic leader intoned from a
parade float, ''Bangladesh's Muslims cast their 
vote to elect the current government, and
the current government is not paying any heed.'' 
Police officers in riot gear tightened their
formation protecting the mosque. ''Beware, we 
will throw you out of office if you do not
meet our demands,'' he said. ''No one will be 
able to stop the forward march of the
soldiers of Islam in Bangladesh.''

  The Ahmadiyya are hardly the only group at risk. 
''For the Hindus, the last couple of years
have been disastrous,'' says Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch. ''There are
substantial elements within the society and 
government itself that are advancing the idea
that Hindus need to be expelled.'' On the ground, 
attacks against Hindus include beatings
and rapes.

  ''Minority communities in the country are 
feeling less safe,'' said Govind Acharya, Amnesty
International's country specialist for 
Bangladesh. ''The Hindus, the Ahmadiyya and the
tribals in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are all 
leaving. This demographic shift is the most
problematic for the identity and the future of the country.''

  The permissiveness of at least some within the 
Bangladeshi government and the police in
allowing violent groups like Bangla Bhai's to 
pursue their agendas has only increased the
political legitimacy of such groups. Mohammad 
Selimullah, the leader of a militant Islamist
group based across Bangladesh's eastern border in 
Myanmar, was arrested in Chittagong
early in 2001, and he admitted in court that more 
than 500 jihadis had been training
under him in Bangladesh. On his computer, 
intelligence sources found photographs to be
sent to donors showing Islamic soldiers at rest 
and at attention, armed with AK-47's and
wearing shiny new boots. Selimullah said that his 
group received weapons from supporters
in Libya and Saudi Arabia, among others.

  Last spring in Chittagong, 10 truckloads of 
weapons -- the largest arms seizure in
Bangladesh's history -- were captured by the 
police as they were being unloaded from
trawlers. The tip-off most likely came from 
Indian intelligence, which monitors the arms
being sent to Islamist separatist groups in 
India's northeast. Haroon Habib, a leading
journalist in the region, has written that a 
leader of the government's local Islamist
coalition was helping to hide the weapons.

  Several months later, under increased pressure 
from the European Union and the United
States to crack down on terror, Bangladeshi 
security forces raided two camps in the Ukhia
area belonging to Huji. Local journalists say 
that both camps, which were not far from
Chittagong, have now been destroyed, but no one 
can get close enough to be sure. What
is certain is that the attack didn't drive the 
militants out of the region. Four months ago,
five more members of Huji were arrested in Chittagong.

  In this environment, Bangladesh's radical 
leaders have ratcheted up their ambitions.
Responding to the American invasion of 
Afghanistan, supporters of the Islamic Oikya Jote
(I.O.J.), the most radical party in the governing 
coalition and a junior partner to the
Jamaat-e-Islami, chanted in the streets of 
Chittagong and Dhaka, ''Amra sobai hobo
Taliban, Bangla hobe Afghanistan,'' which roughly 
translates to ''We will be the Taliban,
and Bangladesh will be Afghanistan.''

  The I.O.J. is considered a legitimate voice 
within Bangladeshi politics. The I.O.J.'s
chairman, Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini, who has 
served as a member of Parliament for the
past three years, says he believes that secular 
law has failed Bangladesh and that it's time
to implement Sharia, the legal code of Islam. 
During our two hourlong meetings, the mufti
-- a welcoming and relatively open man with a 
salt-and-pepper beard and teeth dyed red
from chewing betel -- asked if he could take 
photographs and pass them along to the
local press to show his constituents that he is 
so powerful the Western press now comes
to him.

  The mufti presides over his father-in-law's 
mosque and madrassa, Jamiat-Qurania-
Arabia, in Dhaka, where the traffic caused by 
600,000 bicycle rickshaws, more than in any
other city in the world, is so intense that it 
can take hours to travel fewer than 10 miles
from Louis Kahn's ethereal Parliament -- a relic 
of a more hopeful period in Bangladesh's
democracy -- to the warren of lanes in the old 
part of town where the mufti is based. At
the mosque, he almost overfills the armchair in 
which he stations himself. He admits that
as an Islamic state, Bangladesh still has far to go.

  ''As we are Muslim, naturally we want Bangladesh 
to be an Islamic state and under Islamic
law,'' the mufti said. Amini is the author of 
books in Arabic, Bangla and Urdu. (He learned
Urdu while completing graduate work in a madrassa 
in Karachi, Pakistan.) He recently
completed a multivolume set of laws and edicts, 
or fatwas. The mufti is renowned for his
fatwas, which, he said, he issues almost every day when people come to him with
questions about the application of religious law. 
The mufti has also issued fatwas against
the secular press when they investigate the rise 
of militant Islam in Bangladesh. When he
advocates punishment for those who offend Islam, 
he said, he does not intend to preach
violence. The young men of Huji who attacked the 
poet Shamsur Rahman were studying in
one of his madrassas in Chittagong.

  The mufti said that the only reason he is not a 
government minister is that the current
regime snubbed him out of fear as to how his 
appointment would look. The West would
see both him and Bangladesh as too extremist. The 
mufti has been named in Indian
intelligence documents as a member of the central 
committee of Huji (itself linked to Al
Qaeda), an association he would, of course, deny. 
He is also rumored to have close friends
among the Afghan Taliban, which he denies, while 
adding that it's better not to discuss
the Afghan Taliban, as they are so frequently 
misunderstood. Besides, he says as the
corner of his mouth twitches into a smile, the 
Taliban are running all over his madrassa, as
the word ''talib'' means only student.

  Outside his office, the sound of boys' voices 
reciting the Koran rises and falls. Fifteen
hundred students study at the madrassa, and the 
mufti's party, the I.O.J., sponsors
madrassas all over the nation; how many, he 
claimed not to know. Financing, the mufti
said, comes mostly from Bangladesh itself, but 
some money also arrives from friends
throughout the Arab world.

  Of all his political influence, the mufti is 
most proud of his fatwas, which, he said, give
him a means to speak out against those who 
violate Islam. ''Whoever speaks against Islam,
I issue a fatwa against them to the government,'' 
he said. ''But the government says
nothing.'' He shook his head, frustrated. That's 
next on his agenda: to pressure the
government to recognize his religious 
injunctions. ''It's possible,'' he said, ''now 
more than
ever.''


Eliza Griswold is a writer based in New York.


______



[2]

New York Times
January 24, 2005

IN TSUNAMI AREA, ANGER AT EVANGELISTS
By David Rohde

MORAKETIYA, Sri Lanka A dozen Americans walked 
into a relief camp here, showering bereft parents 
and traumatized children with gifts, attention 
and affection. They also quietly offered camp 
residents something else: Jesus.
.
The Americans, all of them from one church in 
Texas, have staged plays detailing the life of 
Jesus and had children draw pictures of him, camp 
residents said.
.
They have told parents who lost children that 
they should still believe in God and held group 
prayers where they tried to heal a partly 
paralyzed man and a deaf 12-year-old girl.
.
The attempts at proselytizing are angering local 
Christian leaders, who worry that they could 
provoke a violent backlash against Christians in 
Sri Lanka, a predominantly Buddhist country that 
is already a religious tinderbox.
.
Last year, Buddhist hard-liners attacked more 
than 100 churches and the offices of the World 
Vision Christian aid group, accusing them of 
using money and social programs to cajole and 
coerce conversions.
.
Most U.S.-based aid groups, including those 
affiliated with religious organizations, strictly 
avoid mixing aid with missionary work.
.
But scattered reports of proselytizing in Sri 
Lanka; Indonesia, which is predominantly Muslim; 
and India, with large Hindu and Muslim 
populations, are arousing concerns that the good 
will spread by the American relief efforts could 
be undermined by resentment over missionary work.
.
The Reverend Sarangika Fernando, a local 
Methodist minister, witnessed one of the prayer 
sessions in Sri Lanka and accused the Americans 
of exploiting traumatized people. "They said, 'In 
the name of Jesus, she must be cured!' As a 
priest, I was really upset."
.
The Americans in Sri Lanka belong to the Antioch 
Community Church, an evangelical congregation 
based in Waco, Texas.
.
Two members of the church were arrested and 
accused of proselytizing by the Taliban in 
Afghanistan in August 2001. When the United 
States invaded the country several months later, 
Northern Alliance forces freed the women.
.
The Antioch Community Church is one of a growing 
number of evangelical groups that believe in 
mixing humanitarian aid with discussions of 
religion, an approach that older, more 
established Christian aid groups like Catholic 
Relief Services call unethical.
.
In Sri Lanka, alarmed local Christian leaders say 
proselytizing could reverse the grass-roots 
interfaith cooperation that has emerged since the 
tsunami and endanger Christians, who make up 7 
percent of the population.
.
The country also has sizable Hindu and Muslim minorities.
.
The Reverend Duleep Fernando, a Methodist 
minister based in Colombo, the capital, brought 
the Americans to the camp here. Fernando said 
they described themselves as humanitarian aid 
workers. He and other Sri Lankan Christian 
leaders say raising religion with traumatized 
refugees is unethical.
.
"We have told them this is not right, but now we 
don't have any control over them," said Fernando, 
who called the group's Web site postings 
"unnecessarily explosive."
.
"This is a dangerous situation," he said.
.
In Indonesia last week, reports that a missionary 
group named WorldHelp planned to raise 300 Muslim 
tsunami orphans in a Christian children's home in 
Jakarta, the country's capital, sparked an outcry 
from Muslims. The group later said it never had 
custody of the children.
.
Sri Lankan refugees, camp administrators and 
church officials said the Americans have 
identified themselves only as a humanitarian aid 
group. In an interview here, Pat Murphy, a team 
leader, said the group is a nongovernmental 
organization, not a church group.
.
"It's an NGO," Murphy said. "Just your plain vanilla NGO that does aid work."
.
But the church's Web site says the Americans are 
one of four teams dispatched to Sri Lanka and 
Indonesia who have convinced dozens of people to 
"come to Christ."
.
When the group's postings were read to Murphy, he 
confirmed that the Americans were from the 
Antioch Community Church but said the group would 
never use relief goods and gifts to entice people 
into becoming Christians. He denied that the 
group, which sent about half of its members to 
work in the eastern town of Kalmunai, was trying 
to convert people."We simply provide people with 
information and they do with that what they 
like," he said.
.
A Jan. 18 posting from the team in Indonesia says 
Aceh Province is "ripe for Jesus!!"
.
"What an opportunity," the posting adds. "It has 
been closed for five years and the missionaries 
in Indonesia consider it the most militant and 
difficult place for ministry. The door is wide 
open and the people are hungry."
.
The Reverend Jimmy Siebert, the senior pastor of 
the Waco church, said in a telephone interview 
that the church would evaluate whether the group 
should identify themselves as simply aid workers. 
But he said the church believes missionary work 
and aid work "is one thing, not two separate 
things."
.
"My hope is that as a follower of Jesus they 
would bring who they are into the workplace," he 
said, "whether they are in a workplace in America 
or a workplace in Sri Lanka."
.
Older Christian aid groups like Catholic Relief 
Services, Lutheran World Relief and others with 
religious affiliations say that they do not 
proselytize and that they abide by Red Cross 
guidelines that humanitarian aid not be used to 
further political or religious purposes. Ken 
Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services, 
said that over the last 20 years there has been 
an increase in smaller Christian evangelical 
groups providing humanitarian aid in the wake of 
disaster.
.
W.L.P. Wilson, 38, a disabled fisherman, said he 
allowed the Americans to pray three times for the 
healing of his paralyzed lower leg because he is 
desperate to provide for his wife and three 
children again. Wilson, a Buddhist, said he 
believed that the Americans were trying to 
convert him to Christianity but he is in "a 
helpless situation now" and needs aid.

Neela Banerjee contributed reporting from Washington.


______


[3]

The Hindu
Jan 24, 2005

POLITICS IN ITS PLACE

By Jyotirmaya Sharma

There is a growing tendency among all sections in 
public life to evade larger political issues. If 
it prevails, the casualty will be the idea of 
India.

CHIEF ELECTION Commissioner T.S. Krishnamurthy's 
remarks last week on the use of the Justice U.C. 
Banerjee report on Godhra by Lalu Prasad in Bihar 
has raised a number of issues about the terms of 
political discourse in the country. While the CEC 
has now nuanced his stand on the issue, the 
questions raised by his original remarks deserve 
a wider debate. This incident turns the spotlight 
on not merely the constitutional powers and 
limits of the Election Commission, or indeed the 
salience and legitimacy of commissions of 
inquiry, but the very nature of political 
discourse in the country. While there is 
understandable cynicism about politics and 
political actors in the country, large sections 
of the population still look to political 
processes as the only way of achieving their 
desired goals and meeting their aspirations.

More importantly, the entire episode exhibits a 
growing tendency among all sections in public 
life to evade larger political issues. 
Frequently, a call for a larger political debate 
is fudged under the guise of legalism. Even in 
the instance of the Banerjee report, questions 
about its constitution, its statutory powers and 
its terms of reference were discussed at length 
rather than the use of an unfortunate incident to 
generate a state-induced pogrom against Muslims 
in Gujarat. Godhra was primarily a law and order 
problem, which the Narendra Modi Government in 
Gujarat allowed to snowball into a religious and 
communal issue. All subsequent attempts to 
unravel the truth about Godhra and its aftermath 
seem to be coloured in the rhetoric of its 
perpetrators and their communal agenda.

What generates this indifference to politics is 
not only the inability of ordinary citizens to 
participate in politics but also the fashionable 
trend to reduce all public discourse to issues 
relating to `development'. Political innocence 
assumes that the economic man has no politics. 
This was best demonstrated in the last elections 
in Madhya Pradesh, where Uma Bharti made bijli, 
sadak, aur pani (electricity, roads, and water) 
the main election plank, hiding effectively her 
Hindutva agenda. Large sections of the 
intelligentsia and the media have actually begun 
to think that politics is indeed about moral 
issues, civic solidarity and virtuous citizens, 
and that public life ought to be nothing more 
than a college debating society where issues are 
discussed in an animated, but genteel way.

Politics is about power and its legitimacy. It is 
not about the extremely regressive and 
reactionary idea of civil society that unthinking 
commentators seem to be offering, day in and day 
out. Constant harping on civil society leads to 
sentimentality, nostalgia and illiberalism of the 
worst kind, along with malignant notions of 
nationalism and communitarianism. Ronald Reagan 
and Margaret Thatcher were the pioneers of this 
idea, and George W. Bush won his second term 
riding on the back of such an idea of a 
self-contained, morally superior and 
self-sustaining neo-conservatism. In India, this 
manifests in the form of a sentiment where it is 
assumed that holding hands, singing songs, 
holding candle light vigils, and ensuring civic 
amenities will actually ensure our fundamental 
freedoms and our individual choices.

Take for instance the Savarkar issue. It came to 
the forefront at the time of the Maharashtra 
Assembly elections. There were those who argued 
that Savarkar was a freedom fighter and must be 
honoured as one. Another set of people spoke 
about his alleged role in the Gandhi 
assassination, which was countered by those who 
claimed that Savarkar had been acquitted by the 
trial court and subsequent inquiry commissions 
for lack of direct evidence implicating him in 
the Mahatma's murder. Individuals with little 
sympathy for Savarkar's politics suggested that 
despite his dangerously reactionary philosophy, 
he was a great stylist in Marathi literature and 
that his natya sangeet continues to be sung to 
this day.

Very few voices questioned his politics of hate 
and the implications it has for sustaining India 
as a secular, plural and multicultural society. 
The Bharatiya Janata Party deflected any wider 
debate on the Savarkar issue in Maharashtra by 
resorting to the bijli, sadak, pani argument and 
maintaining that Savarkar was not an election 
issue.

Is this state of affairs due to our inability to 
confront larger political issues or is it because 
discussing these will implicate all of us in ways 
we hardly suspect? Is it because we have lost the 
ability to judge between good and evil, beautiful 
and ugly, hiding perpetually behind moral and 
ethical relativism? Has our moral and ethical 
vocabulary become so overused that it does not 
carry conviction? Writing to Gandhiji in 1919, 
Tagore prophetically hoped that "martyrdom for 
the cause of truth may never degenerate into 
fanaticism for mere verbal forms, descending into 
self-deception that hides itself behind sacred 
names." If the BJP chooses to call Lalu's Bihar 
`jungle rajya' (rule of the jungle), it can only 
generate a counter-expletive about Modi's rule in 
Gujarat.

This brings us to the question of Bihar. The 
State has become the middle class symbol of all 
that is awry with politics and democratic 
institutions. "This is possible everywhere else 
except Bihar," is the common middle-class refrain 
in India. Jokes abound about India offering Bihar 
to Pakistan, and Pakistan, in turn, forfeiting 
all claims to Kashmir. The impression is as if 
Bihar is not even a part of India. This is not to 
suggest that all is well with the beleaguered 
State. Rather, the point is about isolating the 
politics of Bihar from the politics of the rest 
of the country. Idle moralism and empty 
condescension replaces any effort to exercise an 
influence over Bihar.

There is no denying that Lalu Prasad's main 
contribution in a real sense is to empower the 
long-suppressed Dalit and Muslim sections of the 
State. He might not have enhanced human 
development indicators in the State, but has 
certainly empowered sections of people who had 
remained on the margins of society for centuries. 
He has also been a consistent part of all secular 
coalitions.

Despite this, corruption, violence, non-payment 
of salaries to teachers, abductions, extortion 
and lack of infrastructure are endemic to Bihar. 
And it is the duty of Lalu Prasad's political 
allies to exercise enough influence on him to 
affect a course correction in the State. In this 
respect, the Congress and the Left parties have 
been found wanting. The compulsions of 
parliamentary and Assembly arithmetic has 
prevented them from engaging in a constructive 
fashion with the destiny of Bihar. Just as Godhra 
ought to be discussed nationally, so should Bihar 
be extensively debated. Isolating a State or a 
political formation only breeds indifference and 
neglect, and leads to the worst kind of 
parochialism.

Is there a way out? The first step would be to 
debate and put in place a series of political 
reforms where the fate of democracy is not held 
hostage to the vagaries of numbers in government 
formation. A consequence of this will be to 
reduce to a considerable degree the influence of 
vote bank politics and lessen appeal to 
primordial markers of identity. Another important 
task is to free the increasing clamour for 
governance from excessive managerialism and 
technocracy. Governance, however good, without 
democracy is totalitarianism. The logical step, 
therefore, is to strengthen democratic 
institutions as well as give them a liberal 
orientation.

Above all, the primacy of politics and ideology 
ought to be celebrated. Instead of working 
towards a monochromatic, seamless and antiseptic 
polity and society, attempts have to be made to 
own up the cacophony that Indian voices generate. 
In other words, it is not sufficient for Telugu 
Desam MLAs to argue that the post-Godhra riots 
have no implications for Andhra Pradesh. Nor is 
it good enough for the Prime Minister to deflect 
the Savarkar issue by suggesting that we ought 
not to speak ill of the dead.

We should be able to discuss Godhra, Bihar, the 
anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the 2002 Gujarat riots, 
Manmohan Singh's vision of economic 
liberalisation, the economic policies of the 
communist parties, naxalism, suicides of farmers 
in Andhra Pradesh, and a host of other issues not 
only openly and boldly, but as instances that 
concern us all. In the absence of this 
engagement, our sense of the nation will be 
reduced to showing admirable solidarity during 
times of war or national calamities. The ultimate 
casualty would be the idea of India.

______


[4]

ALL INDIA CHRISTIAN COUNCIL
Regd. Office: 8-2-601/B/17 Bhanu Society Banjara 
Hills, Hyderabad 500034 Andhra Pradesh, India
President: Dr Joseph D’ Souza      Secretary General: Dr. John Dayal

Please correspond with Secretary General at:
505 Link Society, 18 I.P. Extension, Delhi 110092 India
Phone (91 11) 22722262 Mobile 09811021072
Email: <mailto:johndayal at vsnl.com>johndayal at vsnl.com

PRESS STATEMENT

24TH January 2005

John Dayal nominated member of National Integration Council

The central Government has nominated senior 
journalist and Civil Society activist Dr. John 
Dayal as a member of the newly reconstituted 
National Integration Council.

John Dayal is President of the All India Catholic 
Union and the Secretary General of the All India 
Christian Council. Another Christian member of 
the Council is Rev Valson Thampu. Past members 
have included the late Archbishop Alan De Lastic 
of Delhi.

The Prime Minister chairs the NIC whose 
membership includes Chief Ministers, central 
ministers and prominent leader of various 
political parties and religious communities.

Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil in his letter 
said “The National Integration Council was 
institutionalised as a forum for deliberating on 
key policy issues and to discuss effective 
strategies to combat the evils of communalism, 
casteism, regionalism and separatism in pursuance 
of a decision taken by the National Integration 
Conference convened in 1961 at the instance of 
India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. 
The conference observed that the deliberations 
and recommendations of such a body would help in 
preserving the integrity and solidarity of the 
nation and in promoting national integration.

In his letter of acceptance to Home Minister 
Patil, John Dayal said: “The need of reviving the 
National Integration Council had been keenly felt 
for much of the last decade, which saw so much 
misunderstanding between different religious and 
social groups, often leading to tragic, and 
avoidable, bloodshed.

“I congratulate the Government at the Centre for 
reviving and reconstituting the NIC. Founded by 
India's first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru as 
part of his grand vision of a continuing dialogue 
in civil society, the NIC was, and can again be, 
an important part of Indian Civil Society, and a 
forum of airing and redressing critical issues of 
identity, co-existence and nurture in our Secular 
and Democratic nation as guaranteed in the 
Constitution.  I accept the nomination with a 
deep sense of humility and commitment to the 
ideals of secularism that Nehru held so dear to 
his heart and which are so important and crucial 
for the peace and prosperity of contemporary 
India.”


______


[5]

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT:


Dark Leaves of the Present
Edited by Angana P. Chatterji & Shabnam Hashmi


This volume is a lament, a partial biography of 
the challenges facing the nation. Published by 
ANHAD (Act Now for Harmony and Democracy) in New 
Delhi, January 2005, for the public at large.


Contents
PREFACE By Shabnam Hashmi
NARRATING THE NATION: DARK LEAVES OF THE PRESENT. 
An Introduction By Angana P. Chatterji
HINDU SOCIAL ORDER AND THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF DALITS  By Sukhadeo Thorat
COMMUNALISM AND THE VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS  By K. N. Panikkar
IROM SHARMILA: Profile in Courage. An Interview
QUEER RIGHTS: Issues in Sexual Orientation and 
Gender Identity By Arvind Narrain
THE TRIBAL WORLD  By Ajay Dandekar
VULNERABLE CHILDREN, INSTITUTIONALISATION, AND 
THE LAW By Harsh Mander and Vidya Rao
GENDERED VIOLENCE IN HINDU NATIONALISM By Angana P. Chatterji
SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY AND THE CLIMATE OF IMPUNITY IN INDIA By Ravi Nair
POTA: A REMEDY WORSE THAN THE DISEASE  By Colin Gonsalves
POTA: Production of Terrorist Act, Gujarat By Mukul Sinha
REFLECTIONS: PAINTINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS AND POEMS -- 
Paintings by Sudhir Patwardhan, Vasudevan 
Akittam, Kalla, Jyoti     Bhatt, Yunus Khimani, 
Molina Khimani, Roy Thomas; Photographs: Sahir 
Raza; Poems: Anshu Malviya, Baburao Bagul, Ashok 
Chakravarty


Price: Rs 750/-
All proceeds will go to ANHAD to support its 
human rights work with the marginalised in India

Copies can be purchased through ANHAD or at bookshops. To order:
<mailto:anhadinfo at yahoo.co.in>anhadinfo at yahoo.co.in
<http://in.f85.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=anhad_delhi@yahoo.co.in>anhad_delhi at yahoo.co.in

________


[6]

The Telegraph
January 22, 2005

Religion census in Gujarat schools

Our Correspondent

Modi: Hidden agenda?
Ahmedabad, Jan. 21: A controversial decision to 
make primary students fill in a village-wise 
religion-based questionnaire has raised 
suspicions about the Gujarat government's "hidden 
agenda".

The Opposition Congress has dubbed the census in 
rural areas as the BJP's "attempt to disturb 
communal harmony".

Education minister Anandiben Patel denied any 
religion-based survey in village schools. She, 
however, admitted students are being asked to 
fill in a questionnaire, but argued the exercise 
is aimed at making them aware of their social and 
cultural surroundings.

The four-page questionnaire seeks to find out how 
many people belong to which religion in a 
village, the festivals that are celebrated, the 
number of religious places and their historical 
importance.

The survey is being conducted as part of the 
government's district primary education project's 
documentation exercise in each of the state's 
18,000 villages. District education officials 
have been directed to send the details in the 
form of a "village diary".

Meena Bhatt, the project director, said the 
questionnaire is meant to "sharpen the writing 
skills of primary students" and aimed at getting 
information for preparing pictorial messages for 
children.

Why then are only two of the 27 columns in the 
questionnaire related to education, asked 
Opposition leader Arjun Modhvadia.

Modhvadia alleged that the education department 
is implementing the agenda of the Vishwa Hindu 
Parishad. They intend to create a religion-based 
databank on the rural areas, like they did in 
cities before the 2002 riots to identify Muslim 
properties which were later targeted with 
precision, he accused.

The Congress leader said a similar exercise was 
secretly undertaken by Gujarat police in Dangs 
district just before the anti-Christian attacks 
in 1998.

The Congress dominates 20 of the 25 district 
panchayats in the state and is exploring ways to 
stop the survey.

But Patel said the questionnaire would not be 
withdrawn. Children, she said, have a right to 
know the religion of the people they live with in 
the villages and about their festivals.

She dismissed the Congress' fears of another BJP 
gameplan to disrupt communal harmony in the 
"socially integrated" villages as unfounded and 
demonstrative of its "mental perversion" about a 
harmless exercise.



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

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