SACW | 1 April 2005

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | 1 April,  2005
via:  www.sacw.net

[1]  Democracy, secularism and Pakistan (Razi Azmi)
[2]  For a United Front of Peace between India and Pakistan (Mubashir Hasan)
[3]  India / US: Modi Visa Denial: Celebrate but 
Organize Further (Vinod Mubayi and Daya Varma)
[4]  Stand up to the global gaze - For that, 
India only needs to be faithful to its own 
Constitution (Pamela Philipose)
[5]  India: Peace and Irresponsibility (Kalpana 
Kannabiran, Volga, Vasanth Kannabiran)
[6] Publication Announcement :
'December 13 : Terror over Democracy  by Nirmalangshu Mukherjee'


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

[1]

Daily Times
March 31, 2005

DEMOCRACY, SECULARISM AND PAKISTAN
Razi Azmi

A public meeting of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal 
(MMA) in Lahore on the occasion of Pakistan Day 
on March 23, attended largely by seminary 
students, was remarkable because of the 
participation of Imran Khan. He extended his 
support to the alliance and congratulated it for 
launching a movement for the restoration of 
democracy in the country.
Imran accused President Pervez Musharraf of 
seeking to implement a Western agenda in Pakistan 
in the garb of enlightened moderation. "We need 
dignity, respect and honour in the comity of 
nations but the General wants to make us slaves", 
he is quoted as saying.
Those who have been watching Imran Khan's 
headlong descent from a Westernised socialite and 
cricket idol to a West-bashing Islamised 
nationalist, will be saddened but not surprised 
at this denouement.
In response to a critical editorial in this 
newspaper ("Imran Khan, the MMA and Two-Nation 
Theory," March 25, 2005), his information 
secretary, Akbar S Babar, published a rejoinder 
("Imran and Two-Nation Theory", Daily Times, 
March 26, 2005), in which he accused "these 
'enlightened moderates' [of] conveniently 
ignor[ing] that Pakistan's descent to chaos was 
led by secular and liberal-minded Harvard and 
Sandhurst-educated ruling elite who denied 
justice, education, and basic healthcare to the 
majority."
Some members of the Pakistani ruling elite Mr 
Babar alluded to may have gone to Harvard or 
Sandhurst, but they most certainly cannot be 
accused of being liberal or secular. Education 
and appearances can be deceptive. Imran Khan 
himself is a case in point. For all his Western 
education and lifestyle, it is now impossible to 
distinguish him from typical Pakistani demagogues 
and bigots. Like them, he is denouncing the West, 
using nationalism and religion as political props 
and prescribing the hangman's noose to abolish 
corruption.
The ease with which Imran now mingles with the 
likes of MMA is self-evident. Not a trace of 
Oxford, Sussex or London in him! He's all Lahore 
- that too of the obscurantist variety - with 
Peshawar added for good measure.
To set the record straight, Pakistan's "descent 
to chaos" occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, during 
the period of the country's accelerated 
Islamisation, first under a mullah masquerading 
as a general and then under his civilian protégé 
who lived in another planet from Harvard or 
Sandhurst.
Looking beyond Pakistan, Turkey and Malaysia are 
the only two Islamic countries that stand out in 
terms of economic and socio-political progress, 
rather than being an embarrassment to the Ummah. 
The former is secular by conviction and the 
latter by compulsion. On the other hand, the 
Taliban's Afghanistan and the Ayatollahs' Iran, 
overtly anti-secular theocracies, are nothing to 
brag about.
In fact, the world remembers the Taliban regime 
as a blot on mankind. It had no constitution, no 
rules of governance and no policy that we know 
of. Mullah Umar viewed himself as Allah's 
representative in God-damned Afghanistan and, as 
such, he claimed to know what was good for his 
nation. In Iran, the elected government has less 
authority than the mayor of a large Western city, 
while real power is exercised by an unelected 
Council of Guardians consisting of Ayatollahs and 
their appointees.
Both the Taliban and the Ayatollahs are the 
unadulterated products of Islamic religious 
schools, graduates of Akora Khattak and Qom, to 
be precise. None can accuse their governments of 
being in the least infiltrated by Harvard and 
Sandhurst-educated liberals.
In the same speech, Imran Khan said that General 
Pervez Musharraf's policies went against the 
grain of the Two-Nation theory. Over 50 years 
after the creation of Pakistan, the debate about 
this theory and what the founder of the nation 
envisioned for Pakistan is only a matter of 
academic interest.
However, Mr Jinnah's oft-quoted speech of August 
11, 1947 makes an emphatic case for a secular 
state and cannot be juxtaposed against his other 
statements that have been quoted by Imran Khan's 
information secretary in support of an Islamic 
polity. Firstly, in this speech, Mr Jinnah 
unequivocally and unambiguously spelled out his 
secular vision for the future state. And, 
secondly, it was not a casual remark to the press 
or a public speech to mobilise the masses or win 
their votes, but a well-considered statement to 
the Constituent Assembly intended to impress upon 
lawmakers his thoughts for the new state.
But far more important is what the people of 
Pakistan want and need in the 21st century. It 
can be assumed that they would like to live 
according to the time-tested principles of free 
and fair elections, federalism, minority rights, 
women's rights and equality before law, all of 
which are successfully practised and safeguarded 
under what is broadly known as the democratic 
secular model first evolved in the West but now 
accepted - though not always followed - around 
the world. If, as we are repeatedly reminded, 
Islam invented and guarantees all the above, it's 
all the more reason to adopt them.
Some obvious facts are incontrovertible. The 
secular West is an example of success. Even 
next-door India, which began life with a secular 
constitution, is hailed for its achievements. We 
embarked on our journey at the same time with the 
Objectives Resolution, with its emphasis on 
religion, and immediately began to teeter on the 
brink of collapse. Years of sporadic Islamisation 
from the beginning, followed by high-potency 
doses of the same in the 1980s, led to a 
situation where Pakistan began to be seen as a 
"failed state".
A successful socio-political and economic system 
can only flourish where reason reigns and there 
are checks and balances, particularly a free 
press and an independent judiciary. These are 
incompatible with a religiously-oriented 
government with theocrats controlling the organs 
of the state.
It is an irony of Pakistani politics that the 
religious fundamentalists aligned in the MMA are 
now pretending to be champions of free and fair 
elections and insisting that President Musharraf 
cease to be army chief, although there is nothing 
particularly Islamic about either demand. 
Elections based on the principle of "one man, one 
vote" and civilian supremacy in politics are both 
Western inventions.
Elections put the MMA in power in two provinces 
and they reckon that, with the presidency 
weakened, they will be able to enter the portals 
of power in Islamabad, with or without elections. 
Once ensconced in power, their professed belief 
in "one man, one vote" will mutate into "one man, 
one vote, one time". The history of succession in 
Muslim countries and the recent experience of 
Afghanistan and Iran testify to this.
Besieged by the mullahs and infiltrated by their 
allies, sympathisers and opportunists, the 
Pakistani cabinet has just cast away "enlightened 
moderation" to reinsert the column for religion 
in Pakistani passports. Undoubtedly, it is a 
defeat for the liberal forces. So, too, is the 
Great Khan's joining forces with the MMA.
Before proceeding further down this path, the 
Oxford-educated Imran ought to spend some time in 
Peshawar or speak to people who fled the tyranny 
of the Taliban or the rule of the Ayatollahs and 
honestly ask himself whether that is the future 
he contemplates for Pakistan - for its youth, 
women and minorities, in particular.

______


[2]


Mainstream
March 19, 2005

FOR A UNITED FRONT OF PEACE BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

Mubashir Hasan

Dr Mubashir Hasan is a former Minister for 
Planning and Finance in Pakistan; he held the 
post under Z. A Bhutto in the seventies. The 
following is the keynote speech he delivered on 
February 26, 2005 at the first session of the 
Seventh Joint Convention of the Pakistan-India 
Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy. (that 
took place in New Delhi from February 25 to 28, 
2005). -Editor

Last week I happened to visit the Human Rights 
Commission of Pakistan. In its basement is 
located the den of the famous Mr Nizam Din who is 
the oldest and the most meticulous keeper in 
Pakistan of subject-wise newspaper clippings. His 
files number in hundreds. Upon my request, he 
handed over to me two files of Pakistan-India 
clippings for the year 2004. One was about 
people-to-people contacts and the other was 
government-to-government contacts.
Throughout the year I had lived in Lahore keeping 
my eyes and ears open. I read four newspapers a 
day and assumed I knew what was happening between 
India and Pakistan. But I was in for the surprise 
of my life.
One of the files in my hand was really a register 
of newspaper size pages. Clippings filled up the 
entire space-pages after pages-nearly 250 in 
number. I was staggered. What the newspapers 
reported of the people going from one country to 
the other, of what they said and how they met in 
their scores of thousands, the sheer volume of 
it, was simply overwhelming. I was full of joy. 
Was not the people-to-people contact one of the 
aims for which our Forum was founded? The little 
hole in the bund (embankment), made by the forum, 
which started the trickle of traffic of peace 
lovers in 1995 was now as wide as a floodgate.
However, my joy was short-lived. What do these 
people going from one country like waves in a 
river want? What does their desire to cross the 
border and meet their likes on the other side 
mean? What do they want? What are their yearnings?
Then came the thunderbolt as I thought of similar 
episodes in the history of India and Pakistan. 
The periods of peace and harmony among the main 
communities had ended up in terrible conflicts 
and killings. What awaits us this time?-I 
wondered. It still causes great concern in my 
mind. I want to share my concern with you.
I realised that in the course of last one hundred 
years, this was not the firt time that the 
peoples of the subcontinent had shown 
extraordinary concurrence in wanting something.
In the past the masses had rallied behind leaders 
who they thought would deliver to them what the 
masses wanted and for which they showed 
historical unity.
In the second decade of the twentieth century, 
soon after the partition of Bengal was annulled, 
the people and their leaders exhibited a 
remarkable sense of harmony. The political 
parties representing the two main communities 
closed their differences and signed what came to 
be known as the Lucknow Pact. In those days the 
annual sessions of the Congress and the Muslim 
League were held concurrently in the same city. 
Many leaders would first speak in one meeting and 
then walk to the other meeting and speak there 
also. The great Khilafat movement was the high 
point of this unity in terms of political action.
Then the leaders lost control over thier followers.
The great harmony of the early twentieth century 
could not last even a score of years. 
Unprecedented large-scale communal riots 
followed. A little more than a hundred lives were 
lost during the period of over five years of 
riots.
Much alarmed, the political leaders modified 
their goal. Hitherto the main parties had the 
attainment of Dominion Status in the British 
Empire as their political objective. In 1930 the 
All India Congress changed its objective to 
complete independence. Ten years later, the 
so-called Pakistan Resolution was passed by the 
Muslim League. Serious negotiations with the 
British started soon after the release of the 
Congress leaders from their incarceration in jail.
w
There are three main features of the political 
landscape of India in the first half of the 
twentieth century. Firstly, India had political 
leaders of great stature. They believed in 
ironing out their differences through 
negotiations. They never ceased talking to each 
other.
Secondly, the masses of India believed that what 
they wanted and what the leaders demanded from 
the British was one and the same thing. The 
masses believed in their leaders, made tremendous 
sacrifices of lives and property on the 
assumption that once independence was achieved, 
their social, economic and other problems will be 
solved.
The political fight for independence from the 
British was epoch-making. It was a glorious 
period of our history.
Thirdly, the masses of the subcontinent are prone 
to take matters in their own hands. At times, in 
defiance of leaders and government, they take to 
the streets and indulge in acts of brutality and 
violence. The kilings at Chauri-Chaura, the riots 
in the twenties and the series of violent acts 
before August 1947 are examples.
After independence, the new nation-state of 
Pakistan remained restive for a quarter of a 
century. Neither the rulers nor the political 
parties in Opposition had any linking of what was 
in store for them in 1971.
What are we in for now? This is the crucial 
question before the countries of South Asia, 
especilaly for India and Paksitan.
For forty years, the two governments and the two 
peoples remained united in confronting each 
other. Then came a breach in the lobby of the 
confrontationists. Joint statements of eminent 
persons from the two countries began to appear in 
newspapers urging friendship and good relations 
and avoidance of conflict. A large number of 
conferences were held and delegations were 
exchanged.
Then our Forum initiated people-to-people 
contacts. A trickle of peace activists started 
flowing through the hole bored by the forum in 
the great bund of confrontation. That little hole 
of 1995 has now become a floodgate. Thousands 
upon thousands are passing through it.
The crucial question is: what do the peoples of 
India and Pakistan, who are showing unprecedented 
bonhomie for the last decade want? Do the leaders 
on both sides know what the people want? If they 
are not aware there is a danger of repetition of 
the catastrophes of the past.
We say that the people want Peace and Democracy. 
But what does Peace mean? What does Democracy 
mean? Are the meaning of Peace and Democracy 
identical for the people and the leaderships?
For the people, Peace means security of life and 
property, food, housing, clothing, education, 
healthcare, justice, freedom from police and 
bureaucratic oppression, equality of opportunity, 
dignity, rule of law and being a citizen of a 
country that is respected in the comity of 
nations and Democracy means a system of 
governance that fulfils all their wishes and 
aspirations through the exercise of their power 
to elect their governments.
For the elites, Peace and Democracy have more or 
less the same meaning as they have for the people 
except that the elites already enjoy most of 
these benefits. The conduct of the elites in our 
countries has shown that they restrict the 
benefits of Peace and Democracy to their own tiny 
section of the population. By and large the 
benefits and Peace and Democracy do not reach the 
masses. Therefore, on the ground, Peace and 
Democracy have different meanings for the elites 
and for the people.
The billion plus peoples of Pakistan and India 
are faced with three major contradictions. One is 
between the elites and the people of each country 
as they have different interpretation of the 
terms Peace and Democracy; the second is between 
the confrontationist elites of Pakistan and their 
counterparts in India; and the third is between 
the peoples and the elites of both the countries 
on one side and the military and political might 
of the Western powers.
The elites and the peoples of India and Pakistan 
have major common goals when faced with the 
hegemonic political and economic designs of the 
imperial West. This is an issue on which the 
countries can forge a united front. Such a front 
when forged can be a formidable factor in 
promoting peace internally in each country and 
between the two countries.
The contradiction between the elites and the 
masses in both the countries is resolvable by 
empowering the people at all levels of 
governance. The basic components of those 
exercising power in India and Pakistan are the 
people, magistracy, jails, tax collector and 
secret services. Unless power is devolved in 
these five spheres of governance, the social 
contract between the people and state shall 
remain unconsummated and there shall not be the 
desirable level of harmony in the land.
As long as there is no internal harmony in 
Pakistan and in India, the two countries shall 
remain vulnerable to the possibilities of discord 
and conflict between them. Sections of the elites 
and foreign powers shall always like to take 
advantage from our internal disharmony.
We must redefine and reconstruct our goals. We 
have to restate our objectives by using terms 
that cause no confusion between the people and 
the leadership. We have to mobilise the people 
afresh. There should be no ambiguity between what 
the people want and what the leadership 
advocates. We must do all we can to avoid the 
fate that befell the periods of harmony in the 
past. There must not be another conflict, another 
conflagration.



______



[3]

International South Asia Forum Bulletin
April, 2005

MODI VISA DENIAL: CELEBRATE BUT ORGANIZE FURTHER
by Vinod Mubayi and Daya Varma

Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, a 
hard-line RSS pracharak, the master mind of the 
Gujarat pogrom that killed over 2000 minority 
Muslims in February-March 2002, and the leader of 
a state government that has perpetrated and 
continues to perpetrate many atrocities against 
Christians and Muslims, was invited to visit the 
U.S. and U.K. in late March 2005. The invitation 
to Modi was extended by the Asian American Hotel 
Owners Association (AAHOA), an organization that 
includes many small motel owners of Gujarati 
origin; its board has several fervent supporters 
of Hindutva on it. The public events that Modi 
was going to address included: a speech at 
Madison Square Garden in New York City sponsored 
by the Association of Indian Americans for North 
America (an NRI Hindutva-front organization), a 
keynote address to the AAHOA annual convention in 
Orlando, FL, and another speech at California 
State University in Long Beach, CA. The Florida 
event, it is important to note, was co-sponsored 
by many premier American multinational 
corporations such as American Express, the 
Cendant Corporation, US Franchising Service, etc. 
that are part of the lucrative hotel service 
industry; AAHOA members themselves own real 
estate estimated at $40 billion. Chris Matthews, 
host of the NBC TV show "Hardball", was to share 
the stage with Modi in Florida for which he was 
supposed to have received a fee of $50,000. These 
huge amounts are illustrative of the financial 
clout being disposed of by the NRI sympathizers 
of Hindutva.

News of Modi's visit galvanized a response by a 
number of different forces in the U.S. and U.K. 
opposed to the communal and violent politics 
practiced by Modi and his ilk. About 40 different 
organizations, ranging from organizations of 
secular Indians, various organizations belonging 
to Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Hindus of 
Indian origin, and progressive individuals 
resident in North America, came together in an 
umbrella Coalition Against Genocide (CAG) that 
launched a whole series of actions aimed at 
denying legitimacy to the Modi visit. These 
actions ranged from requests to AAHOA to rescind 
their invitation to Modi, demands to the U.S. 
State Department that Modi be denied a visa on 
the grounds of his having committed acts of 
religious persecution that amounted to crimes 
against Humanity, pressure on the corporate 
business sponsors to cancel their sponsorship of 
the Florida event, request to Matthews not to 
share a stage with a criminal like Modi and 
forego his lucrative fee, and press releases to 
the U.S. media about Modi's record. This pressure 
began to show some results: Matthews declined to 
participate in the AAHOA convention and the 
corporate sponsors did likewise by canceling 
their participation. Two members of the U.S. 
Congress introduced a resolution on the floor of 
the U.S. House of Representatives that denounced 
Modi in no uncertain terms. South Asian academics 
in various U.S. universities wrote a letter to 
the U.S. government protesting the planned visit 
and the Institute for Religion and Public Policy 
also wrote to the State Department to deny Modi 
entry into the U.S. The U.S. Commission on 
International Religious Freedom, a body chartered 
by the U.S. Congress, expressed a significant 
concern about the visit through a statement by 
its Chairperson, Preeta Bansal , who is herself 
of Indian origin.

The final blow to the visit was delivered by the 
U.S. government when Modi was not only denied a 
diplomatic visa but his business/visitor visa 
that was still valid for a few more years was 
canceled. It is interesting that the U.S. State 
Department, while quoting the relevant portion of 
the regulation under which Modi was denied entry, 
justified its action by referring to reports of 
official Indian bodies like the National Human 
Rights Commission and the rulings of India's 
Supreme Court that had severely criticized the 
Modi regime for its acts of omission and 
commission in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. This 
response effectively defused the Indian 
government's somewhat hypocritical and pro forma 
protest of the Modi visa denial, an issue on 
which the BJP has been trying hard to arouse 
"patriotic" indignation and fervor within India.

Although the Modi visit was canceled, his 
followers went ahead with the programs in New 
York and Florida bringing his speech in by a 
video-link. A spirited protest of about 250-300 
CAG members that went on for almost four hours 
was held outside the Madison Square Garden venue 
in New York despite a freezing rain. A similar 
protest also took place in Florida. It was good 
news that Modi was denied a visa for the US. His 
criminality has been proven many times and in 
many different ways. But we have to recognize 
that it is unlikely that CAG's opposition to Modi 
and Hindutva played any significant role in the 
U.S. government's decision. Other factors like 
the Congressional resolution and, more important, 
the pressure from U.S. Christian groups that are 
upset with Hindutva's actions against Christians 
in India probably had more  impact.

There is no doubt Modi deserves to be prosecuted 
in India as is fit for any country which abides 
by minimum standards of the rule of law and 
humanity. But while bringing Modi to justice is a 
necessary step, it is hardly sufficient to solve 
the problem of mass support for fundamentalist 
politics in India. Prosecuting criminals, hanging 
them, electrocuting them, chopping off their 
heads or denying them freedom to travel to the 
Western world has not stopped crime and the 
prosecution of Narendra Modi will not, by itself, 
bring dignity to India's minorities. The venom 
spread by the Sangh Parivar is deep-rooted and 
has created an anti-Muslim, anti-Christian 
culture, which has seeped into the minds of 
millions of Hindus. Is there any other 
explanation why nearly 4,000 gathered inside 
Madison Square Garden to listen to the 
satellite-transmitted speech of Narendra Modi 
while less than a tenth of that number protested 
outside? Maybe if Modi had appeared in person, 
the crowds, both inside and outside, would have 
been much larger. But the disparity would 
probably still remain and it brings up the issue 
again of mobilizing people against fundamentalist 
politics.

Is there something we are not doing here and 
something that people like us are not doing back 
home? One feature of our efforts seems to be that 
attempts at mass mobilization and painstaking 
work at building organs  within the community 
have been replaced by electronic communication - 
transmission of some useful, some peripheral 
information, depending upon the whim of the 
sender. There is a place for electronic media in 
communication but, given the nature of the Indian 
community, it cannot replace the painstaking 
effort of mass mobilization, work in the 
community and talking to people in the language 
they are familiar with (that might be different 
from the one we know). It is difficult to find 
material against Modi on websites such as Foil, 
that can be printed and given to 
computer-deprived, barely-English-knowing South 
Asians.

CAG is an advance on what existed (or did not 
exist) before, an embryonic front of 
organizations and persons of different 
backgrounds uniting to oppose fundamentalism. It 
is a necessary first step but it cannot stop 
there and must move into the wider community if 
it is to prove an effective counterweight to the 
centrally organized fundamentalists in the US and 
UK. Ad-hoc coalitions that mainly lobby and 
protest are, by their very nature, only a 
starting point for political action; they need to 
be transformed into something more permanent and 
more organized. If lobbying and protest could 
suffice, there would have been no Iraq and 
Afghanistan war. Millions marched in hundreds of 
cities across the world against the Bush-Blair 
agenda. Nearly 5% of the Montreal population was 
on the street for more than two hours at -23 
Celsius to oppose the impending war.  Even some 
influential governments expressed their 
reservation. Yet Afghanistan and Iraq were 
attacked and thousands massacred.

Why did lobbying succeed in denying a visa to 
Modi? While the answer is speculative, it is 
probable that Bush used one provision out of many 
in the U.S. government's arsenal to rectify to 
some degree his administration's anti-Muslim 
policies and relatively dismal credentials on 
human rights issues. Our jubilation, however, may 
turn out to be a bit premature and a bit 
unfounded if we fail to carry out painstaking 
mass work rather than depend upon liberal 
American institutions to take care of our 
problems.




______


[4]

The Indian Express
March 31, 2005

STAND UP TO THE GLOBAL GAZE
FOR THAT, INDIA ONLY NEEDS TO BE FAITHFUL TO ITS OWN CONSTITUTION
Pamela Philipose 	 	 		 

The response of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra 
Modi to the US decision not to grant him a visa 
is a study in cynicism. He argued that it is the 
duty of the Government of India to protect all 
the legitimate and democratic rights of its 
citizens and that the US decision went against 
all principles of "democracy", "human rights" and 
"natural justice". The UPA government did of 
course oblige him - more fulsomely than the call 
of duty warranted - but let that not distract us 
from expressing wonder at the words that tripped 
from Modi's tongue. He cited "democracy", "human 
rights" and "natural justice" as values that 
needed defending.

Can the man responsible for the Gujarat carnage 
of 2002 actually speak of "democracy", "human 
rights" and "natural justice"? When he urged the 
Indian government to protect the "rights" of its 
citizens, which included his own of course, he 
did not obviously perceive the irony of such a 
demand coming from a man who had once presided 
over a machinery that had spectacularly failed to 
protect the basic rights of Gujarat's citizens. 
He also attempted to pass off the murders/rapes 
of that horrendous interregnum as ordinary urban 
crimes. "New York alone witnesses more than 1,500 
rapes a year" so why is the US criticising him, 
he wanted to know. That's Modi for you, a master 
purveyor of slanted reconstructions.

But this familiar fact should not detain us here. 
The denial of the US visa to Modi is a 
significant development deserving closer 
examination. The first question that presents 
itself is why did the US government single Modi 
out for such treatment? After all, there have 
been numerous massacres and riots in India 
involving politicians. The massacre of Sikhs in 
'84 is a case in point. One hasn't heard of an 
H.K.L. Bhagat or a Sajjan Kumar being denied an 
US visa on grounds of "infringement of religious 
freedom", or the leaders of the BJP/ VHP/ Bajrang 
Dal/ Shiv Sena being denied entry for fomenting 
the pre- and post-Babri Masjid demolition riots. 
As for those faceless Islamic merchants of terror 
who had triggered the murderous frenzy resulting 
in the migration of Kashmiri Pandits from the 
Valley, they don't even figure on the radar. So 
why Modi?

The answer to this question can tell us a great 
deal about the myriad ways in which the world has 
changed in the 21st century. Let us confine 
ourselves to three significant developments here. 
The first is the emergence of the US as the 
world's only superpower and the unilateralism it 
has increasingly demonstrated in the wake of the 
September 11 attacks. This has had profoundly 
unsettling consequences for the rest of the world 
as, for instance, the pulverising of Iraq on the 
specious grounds that Saddam Hussein's government 
harboured weapons of mass destruction. Its 
advocacy of international "democracy" and 
"democratic freedoms", we know, is highly 
suspect. Not only are these values deployed 
selectively, they are invariably employed to 
serve America's pursuit of global domination.

Coterminous with this has been the quickening 
pace of globalisation, which has meant not just 
the merger of financial and commodity markets, or 
the growing heterogeneity of national 
populations, but a connectivity between people on 
a scale that had hitherto never been imagined. 
This has resulted in a significant softening of 
national borders and could, in the future, 
undermine the capacity of governments to steer 
the social, intellectual and economic lives of 
their people.

Today, given the compression of space and time 
globalisation has wrought, NRI communities in the 
US and UK can respond to events in mother country 
in real time. Here, too, we have the ideological 
divisions that characterise the discourse at 
home. If the Association of Indian Americans of 
North America can deem it fit to invite a man 
like Modi to grace their public platforms, there 
can just as well be campaign clusters like the 
Coalition Against Genocide lobbying furiously to 
get the visit aborted. If some NRIs in the UK 
find Modi the perfect "special guest" at the 
Gujarat Day Concern at the Royal Albert Hall, 
there can just as well be the London-based 
Monitoring Group and Awaaz spearheading a 'Stop 
Modi' campaign and initiating moves to arrest him 
for the killings of two British nationals, Saeed 
and Sakil Daud, during the Gujarat carnage.

Finally, the new millennium has seen a greater 
articulation and application of humanitarian 
international law than in previous decades. It 
has witnessed the spectacle of Slobodan 
Milosevic, the man who bore the epithet 'Butcher 
of the Balkans', stand trial in an international 
tribunal that was telecast world wide. He was the 
first in a long list of public figures who have 
had to confront the uncomfortable truth that the 
impunity afforded by the state is an uncertain 
and finite thing. Augusto Pinochet, Ariel Sharon, 
Jiang Zemin, Jean Kambanda, Robert Mugabe, Henry 
Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, are just names.

India does not recognise the jurisdiction of the 
International Criminal Court, nor has it ratified 
the Convention against Torture, but it has 
nevertheless had to face the embarrassment of 
global scrutiny. When the EU issued a demarche 
after Gujarat, the MEA rejected it as 
"interference in our internal affairs", even as 
it objected to every expression of "concern" by 
visiting dignitaries from countries like Canada, 
Denmark and Finland. Jaswant Singh, as foreign 
minister,famously observed that "India will not 
be spoken to from any position of assumed 
superiority or morality".

We, who pride ourselves in our Constitution and 
institutions of justice, quite rightly find such 
scrutiny of our domestic affairs an anathema. 
There are also, decidedly, disturbing aspects 
about western powers emerging as guardians of 
universal rights within an universal order. But 
this only underlines the imperative of addressing 
the weaknesses of our own governance, our 
failures to ensure justice and to abide by our 
Constitution. The issue goes beyond Modi's 
foreign excursions. India's swabhiman needs to 
rest on far surer foundations than visas for its 
travelling politicians. The country's self-esteem 
ultimately rests on its ability to abide by the 
highest standards of "democracy", "human rights" 
and "natural justice".


______


[5]


The Economic and Political Weekly
March 26, 2005
Commentary

PEACE AND IRRESPONSIBILITY

Recent actions by the Naxalite movement in Andhra 
Pradesh raise questions about the ethics and lack 
of accountability on the part of these groups. It 
is not merely in the bearing and use of arms that 
the Naxalite movement mirrors the state. 
Unfortunately there is a stark resemblance even 
in the indiscriminate and extremely moralistic 
identification of the enemy who must then be 
eliminated. The power of naming in this entire 
scenario vests with the police on the one side 
and the Naxalites on the other. Actions such as 
the recent killings by the Naxalites destroy 
public confidence and increase the faith of 
people in repressive measures and fascist 
solutions. The fear of terrorism is not easy to 
contain and when radical politics begins to use 
the weapon of terror that, in our view, signals 
the end of politics.

by Kalpana Kannabiran, Volga, Vasanth Kannabiran


The possibility of peace in Andhra Pradesh has 
rolled back completely in the state. The peace 
processes and dialogue that were a source of 
immense hope in the past eight months among all 
sections of the people have ground to a halt. 
From a growing concern about the lack of 
transparency and the practices of impunity on the 
part of the state, there is now a serious concern 
about the ethics and lack of accountability on 
the part of the Naxalite groups. We had, in an 
earlier essay, raised these concerns when we 
argued that carrying of arms gives the licence to 
kill and cause grave injury - whether to state or 
political groups, and vests arbitrary powers in 
the individuals or groups that bear them. Little 
did we realise when we made that observation, 
that our words would prove so troublingly 
prophetic. To mince words at this juncture would 
be unethical. The actions by the Naxalite groups 
in Vempenta1 and Chilakaluripeta2 villages in the 
state grossly violate every principle of 
revolutionary politics. However, we would like to 
examine the reasons why these violations have far 
more serious implications than appear at first 
sight.

With the Vempenta incident, what stands out is 
the sheer mindless brutality of the attack. To 
justify the attack on the grounds that it was 
retaliation for a massacre of dalits six years 
ago is ridiculous to put it mildly. But even so, 
old questions resurface again and again. Can you 
use the master's tools to dismantle the master's 
house? There is a deeply moral question that must 
be addressed. If the same degree of brutality - 
not just towards the representatives of the state 
but towards the civilian population is going to 
characterise radical politics, it is better to 
deal with a repressive state that can be brought 
to account through democratic processes at least 
theoretically than deal with a politics where 
there is no theoretical possibility to enforce 
accountability. But on a more immediate level, 
what was the consequence of the Vempenta 
incident? The dalits in the village had to flee 
in fear of retaliation.

Disproportionate Costs

If one were to argue that there are costs that 
must be paid in the struggle for the betterment 
of the human condition, the costs that dalits and 
adivasis bear is disproportionate to any 
improvement in their condition. In the agency 
(tribal) areas of Andhra Pradesh, it is adivasis 
who bear the cost of state violence and 
repression, irrespective of whether or not they 
believe in the goals of the Naxalite movement. 
Now, apart from forcing dalits into homelessness 
by callous action that passes as politics, there 
is a steady number of dalit and tribal people 
(identified with the 'ruling classes') who are 
being killed by Naxalites. The response of a 
leadership that sees them only from the 
standpoint of their class location and does not 
consider them as dalit/adivasis is demonstrative 
of the unreason that accompanies arbitrariness in 
politics.

What are the indices of betterment in the human 
condition? At the level of popular understanding 
getting a formal education, securing steady 
employment (and government employment is the most 
secure in terms of ensuring family survival, as 
many dalits and adivasis in government employment 
will tell us), and working towards building up 
resources and capacity in subsequent generations 
is a hard struggle that a small proportion of 
people in these groups have managed to achieve 
against all odds. To suddenly declare that these 
people are class enemies and will not be spared 
in the war against the state - not just that they 
might be killed accidentally in confrontations, 
but that they will also be specially targeted and 
killed, that their families will not be spared, 
either brings us to the point of zero hope.

When we wrote our earlier piece on women's rights 
and Naxalite groups in November 2004, we did 
raise several questions with respect to the ways 
in which gender was articulated in radical left 
politics. Of the several things we said there, 
one of our concerns was on the glorification of 
motherhood. Our point is driven home painfully in 
this violence and counter violence that we are 
now mute witness to. The short film on mothers of 
Naxalites killed in encounters, released around 
the time of the peace talks last year, 'Smarana', 
opens with noted poet Varavara Rao reciting a 
poem on mothers of the revolution in which he says

Not having understood her birthing pains, today 
how can we grasp that mother's rage?

In an informal account of a constable's 
conversation with a mother of a Naxalite that was 
reported to us, the constable apparently chided 
the mother for the kind of son she had borne, to 
which the mother retorted that she only gave 
birth. What did she know when he was born what he 
would become?3  Not all the mothers in the film 
'Smarana' understood or agreed with the paths 
their children had chosen, nor were they all 
alike in social location. The only uniting factor 
was that their children had died similar deaths - 
a fact some were proud of but others merely 
resigned to.

Poverty of Revolutionary Paradigms

To construct the mother of the revolutionary in 
the image of the mother goddess speaks to the 
poverty of existing revolutionary paradigms with 
respect to women, but especially to mothers. Our 
observation here is borne out by what happened in 
the recent incident at Chilakaluripeta. The 
60-year old woman who was killed had in fact 
locked her son (a sub-inspector) and some others 
into a room and was blocking the entrance, when 
she was shot. The son managed to escape. When 
questioned about the ethics of this kind of 
indiscriminate massacre of innocent people, a 
spokesperson justified the act by saying that she 
deserved to be killed for giving birth to a 
'rakshasa'. The birthing pains, the glorious 
mother who sacrifices her life, the simple humane 
woman who did all she could to shield those dear 
to her are subsumed within the revolutionary 
quest for a Ramarajyam where the only true/good 
mothers are those that reproduce the creed. Will 
Varavara Rao now repeat

I have not seen that mother But her pointing finger accuses me?


Witness what is happening on the other side. The 
police establishment is now talking of setting up 
an exclusively tribal force to be positioned in 
agency areas to deal with the 'Naxalite menace'. 
Who is thinking about the human rights of dalits 
and adivasis in all this? Where earlier they paid 
indirect costs by living in areas where these 
confrontations were most bitter, now, ironically 
after the peace process, they are beginning to 
pay direct costs - being sought out and killed on 
the one side; being used as cannon fodder on the 
other.

It is not merely in the bearing and use of arms 
that the Naxalite movement mirrors the state. 
Unfortunately there is a stark resemblance even 
in the indiscriminate and extremely moralistic 
identification of the enemy who must then be 
eliminated. The power of naming in this entire 
scenario vests with the police on the one side 
and the Naxalites on the other. Concerned 
citizens and institutions of justice are rendered 
voiceless. The defence and public recognition of 
human rights of political activists has been a 
slow and gradual struggle. Actions such as this 
destroy public confidence and increase the faith 
of people in repressive measures and fascist 
solutions. The fear of terrorism is not easy to 
contain and when radical politics begins to use 
the weapon of terror that in our view signals the 
end of politics.

This brings us to our final point. The movement 
for human rights in this state started with the 
defence of the civil and political rights of 
Naxalites. As people with an active interest in 
entrenching human rights standards in the 
societies in which we live, we defend the right 
to practice politics and condemn every action by 
the state that seeks to abridge that political 
space. However, in the last 25 years, we have 
experienced the limitations of viewing human 
rights as restricted to civil and political 
rights alone. There are larger violations that 
are routinely practised by civilian populations 
in dominant positions against entire classes that 
are vulnerable. Any defence of human rights must 
defend not just the civil and political rights of 
extremely literate, articulate, educated, but 
politically vulnerable groups; it must more 
importantly, defend the fundamental rights to 
life, livelihood and survival, the right against 
assault and violence, of the largely 
non-literate, impoverished, politically, socially 
and economically vulnerable groups. It becomes a 
matter of grave concern when the groups whose 
right to practice politics has been defended at 
enormous cost begin to act irresponsibly towards 
those who have not yet enjoyed basic freedoms, 
destroying their very right to survival.

We urge a public debate on these issues.


Notes

1 On February 28, 2005, Maoists axed eight people 
to death in Vempenta village, Pamulapadu mandal, 
Kurnool district. This was justified by them as 
being a retaliation to the similar massacre of 
dalits in the same village on June 16, 1998.
2 On March 10, 2005, Maoists killed seven people 
in Chilakaluripeta in an attack on the police 
station and police quarters. One of these killed 
was a dalit circle inspector. A 60-year old woman 
who blocked their entry into the house was also 
killed.
3 K G Kannabiran, personal communication.

______


[6]

[ANNOUNCEMENT]


Recently released in Delhi by
Bibliophile South Asia
and
Committee for Inquiry on December 13 *


December 13 : Terror over Democracy
by
Nirmalangshu Mukherjee


We cannot underestimate ... the cynicism of 
centers of power in pursuit of their own often 
despicable ends. It is within this context that 
we should ...consider the detailed investigation 
carried out in this important and careful study.
Noam Chomsky


About the Book

The terrorist attack on Indian Parliament on 13 
December 2001 posed a test-case for Indian 
democracy. This book tells the story of how civil 
institutions in India - the media, the police, 
the political executive and the judiciary- failed 
the test. as a result, the question 'who attacked 
Parliament' remained unanswered, and the human 
rights of the accused were seriously violated.

The following issues, among others, are examined in detail:
complicity between the media and the police
actions of the NDA government in promoting fear and prejudice
large-scale fabrication and concoction by the investigating agency
biased trial and judgement in the POTA court and 
'balancing act' of the High Court

The discussion is supported with extensive 
documentation from newspaper reports, judicial 
statements, public statements, and some important 
but little-known literature on the subject 
published earlier. Most of these are included in 
the Annexures.

The book ends with a strong appeal for a comprehensive parliamentary inquiry.


About the Author

NIRMALANGSHU MUKHERJEE teaches philosophy at 
Delhi University. He has lectured extensively on 
the philosophies of language and mind, and has 
been a visiting professor in several institutions 
in India and abroad. Apart from numerous 
articles, he is the author  of The Cartesian Mind 
: Reflections on Language and Music, and a 
co-editor of Noam Chomsky's The Architecture of 
Language. His forthcoming books include The 
Primacy of Grammar, and compilation and editing 
of Language and Naturalistic Inquiry by Noam 
Chomsky. He has published many political articles 
in the Economic and Political Weekly,  Indian 
Social Science Review, ZNet South Asia and 
elsewhere; this his first political book.

[Contents]

Foreword Essay : Manipulation of Fear by Noam Chomsky
An Attack on Democracy
Terrorism and Preventive Measures
Windows of Opportunity
Role of Media
Court Documents
Who Attacked Parliament?
Prosecution Story
Story Disputed
Incredible Features
Acquittal of Geelani
Arrest Memos
'Procured'  Witnesses
A Surrendered Militant
Unfair Trial
An Appeal for Parliamentary Inquiry
Annexures
Index

--
(* Committee for Inquiry on December 13

Mahasweta Devi			Nirmala Deshpande
Rajni Kothari			Prabhat Patnaik
Ashish Nandy			Mihir Desai
Prashant Bhusan			Indira Munshi
Rita Panicker			Gautam Naulakha
Sumanta Banerjee			Hiranmoy Dhar
Vasanthi Raman			Ashim Roy
Ali Javed				Tripta Wahi
Nandita Narayan			Neeraj Mallik
Vijay Singh			Nirmalangshu Mukherjee)

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

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