SACW | 24 June 2005

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | 24 June,  2005

[1] Nepal:
- The 'People's War' (Pankaj Mishra)
- Nepalese authorities harass journalists for reporting on the military (CPJ)
[2] The lost chances of history (Colin Gonsalves)
[3] Partition in Parivar? (Praful Bidwai)
[4] San Francisco professor fears Hindu 
retaliation (Mark Williams, Jehangir Pocha)
[5] Announcements:
(i) Interesting Times in India: A Short Decade at St. Stephen's College
by Daniel O'Connor

______


[1]

London Review of Books
Vol. 27 No. 12 dated 23 June 2005 | Pankaj Mishra

THE 'PEOPLE'S WAR'

Pankaj Mishra

In Kathmandu this March, I met a Nepalese 
businessman who said he knew what had provoked 
Crown Prince Dipendra, supposed incarnation of 
Vishnu and former pupil at Eton, to mass murder. 
On the night of 1 June 2001, Dipendra appeared in 
the drawing-room of the royal palace in 
Kathmandu, dressed in combat fatigues, apparently 
out of it on Famous Grouse and hashish, and armed 
with assault rifles and pistols. In a few 
frenzied minutes, he killed his parents, King 
Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, a brother, a sister 
and five other relatives before putting a pistol 
to his head. Anointed king as he lay unconscious 
in hospital, he died two days later, passing his 
title to his uncle Gyanendra.

Dipendra's obsession with guns at Eton, where he 
was admired by Lord Camoys as a 'damn good shot', 
his heavy drinking, which attracted the malice of 
the Sun, his addiction to hashish and his 
fondness for the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger - 
all this outlines a philistinism, and a potential 
for violence, commonplace among scions of Third 
World dynasties (Suharto, Nehru-Gandhi, Bhutto). 
And it is not so hard to believe the 
semi-official explanation for his actions: that 
his parents disapproved of his fiancée. However, 
the businessman, who claimed to know the royal 
family, had a more elaborate and intriguing 
theory.

We sat in a rooftop café in Thamel, Kathmandu's 
tourist centre, a few hundred feet from the royal 
palace. March, the businessman said, was a good 
season for tourists in Nepal. 'But look,' he 
continued, pointing to the alleys below us, where 
the bookshops, trekking agencies, cybercafés, 
bakeries, malls and restaurants were empty. In 
recent years, the tourist industry has been 
damaged by news in the international press about 
the Maoist guerrillas, who model themselves on 
the Shining Path in Peru, and whose 'people's 
war' has claimed more than 11,000 lives since 
1996. Even fewer tourists have ventured to Nepal 
since 1 February this year, when King Gyanendra, 
citing the threat presented by the Maoists, 
grounded all flights, cut off phone and internet 
lines, arrested opposition politicians and 
imposed censorship on the media.

A portly man wearing a cotton tunic, tight 
trousers and a cloth cap, the businessman had the 
prejudices of his class, the tiny minority of 
affluent Nepalese whose wealth comes largely from 
tourism and foreign aid; and that morning - the 
spring sun growing warm and burning off the smog 
over the Kathmandu Valley; the vendors of 
carpets, Gurkha knives, pirate DVDs and Tibetan 
prayer flags sullenly eyeing a stray tourist in 
tie-dye clothes - he aired them freely.

He said that Maoists had bombed the private 
school he sent his children to; he worried that 
his servants might join the guerrillas, who 
controlled 80 per cent of the countryside and 
were growing strong in the Kathmandu Valley. He 
said that he was all for democracy - he had been 
among the protesters demanding a new constitution 
in the spring of 1990 - but peace and stability 
were more important. What the country needed now, 
he declared, was a strong and principled ruler, 
someone who could crush the Maoists. He said that 
he missed Dipendra: he was the man Nepal needed 
at this hour of crisis.

According to him, Dipendra's three years as a 
schoolboy in Britain had radicalised him. Just as 
Pandit Nehru had discovered the poverty of India 
after his stints at Harrow and Cambridge, so 
Dipendra had developed a new political awareness 
in England. He had begun to look, with mounting 
horror and concern, at his homeland. Returning to 
Nepal, he had realised that it would take more 
than tourism to create a strong middle class, 
accelerate economic growth, build democratic 
institutions and lift the ninth poorest country 
in the world to the ranks of modern democratic 
nations. As it turned out, he had been thwarted 
at every step by conservative elements in the 
royal palace. He had watched multi-party 
democracy, introduced in 1991, grow corrupt and 
feeble while enriching an elite of politicians 
and bureaucrats; equally helplessly, he had 
watched the new rulers of Nepal fail to tackle 
the Maoists. Frustration in politics rather than 
love, the businessman claimed, had driven 
Dipendra to alcohol, drugs, guns and, finally, to 
regicide.

It's often hard to know what to believe in Nepal, 
the only Hindu kingdom in the world, where 
conspiracy and rumour have long fuelled a 
particularly secretive kind of court politics. 
Independent newspapers and magazines have been 
widely available only since 1990, and though 
intellectually lively, the press has little 
influence over a largely illiterate population 
easily swayed by rumour. In December 2000, news 
that a Bollywood actor had insulted Nepal incited 
riots and attacks on Indians and Indian-owned 
shops across the country. Little is known about 
Dipendra, apart from his time at Eton, where his 
fellow pupils nicknamed him 'Dippy'. There is 
even greater mystery surrounding Pushpa Kamal 
Dahal, or Prachanda, the middle-aged, articulate 
leader of the Maoists, who has been in hiding for 
the last two decades.

King Gyanendra appeared on national television to 
blame the palace massacre on a 'sudden discharge 
by an automatic weapon'. A popular conspiracy 
theory, in turn, blamed it on the new king 
himself, who was allegedly involved in smuggling 
artefacts out of Nepal, and on his son, Paras, 
much disliked in Nepal for his habit of 
brandishing guns in public and dangerous driving 
- he has run over at least three people in recent 
years, killing one. More confusingly, the Maoists 
claimed that they had an 'undeclared working 
unity' with King Birendra, and accused Gyanendra, 
and Indian and American imperialists, of his 
murder.

This atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue seems to 
have grown murkier since February, when Gyanendra 
adopted the Bush administration's rhetoric about 
'terrorism' and assumed supreme power. Flights to 
Nepal were resumed after only a few days, and the 
king claimed to have lifted the emergency on 30 
April, but most civil rights are still suspended 
today. When I arrived in Kathmandu, fear hung 
heavy over the street crossings, where soldiers 
peeped out from behind machine-gun emplacements. 
Men in ill-fitting Western suits, with the 
furtive manner of inept spies, lurked in the 
lobby of my hotel. Journalists spoke of 
threatening phone calls from senior army officers 
who tended to finger as Maoists anyone who didn't 
support the king. Many of the people I wanted to 
meet turned out to be in prison or in exile. 
Appointments with underground activists, 
arduously made, were cancelled at the last 
minute, or people simply didn't turn up.

Sitting in her gloomy office, a human rights 
activist described the routine torture and 
extra-judicial killing of suspected Maoists, 
which had risen to a startling average of eight a 
day. Nothing was known about the more than 1200 
people the army had taken from their homes since 
the beginning of the 'people's war' - the highest 
number of unexplained disappearances in the 
world. She spoke of the 'massive impunity' 
enjoyed by the army, which was accountable only 
to the king. She claimed that the governments of 
India, the US and the UK had failed to understand 
the root causes of the Maoist phenomenon and had 
decided, out of fear and ignorance, to supply 
weapons to the Royal National Army: 20,000 M-16 
rifles from the US, 20,000 rifles from India, 
helicopters from the UK.

She said that the 'international community' had 
chosen the wrong side in a conflict that in any 
case was not likely to be resolved by violence. 
Though recently expanded, and mobilised against 
the Maoists in 2001, the army was no more than 
85,000 strong, and could not hold the 
countryside, where, among the high mountains, 
ravines and rivers - almost perfect terrain for 
guerrillas - it faced a formidable enemy.

She spoke with something close to despair. Much 
of her work - particularly risky at present - 
depended on international support. But few people 
outside Nepal cared or knew enough about its 
human rights record, and the proof lay in her 
office, which was austerely furnished, with none 
of the emblems of Western philanthropy - new 
computers, armed guards, shiny four-wheel drives 
in the parking lot - that I had seen in December 
in Afghanistan.

'People are passing their days here,' she said as 
I left her office, and the remark, puzzling at 
first, became clearer as I spent more time in 
Kathmandu. In the streets where all 
demonstrations were banned, and any protest was 
quickly quashed by the police, a bizarre feeling 
of normality prevailed, best symbolised by the 
vibrant billboards advertising mobile phones 
(banned since 1 February). Adverts in which 
companies affirmed faith in King Gyanendra 
appeared daily in the heavily censored 
newspapers, alongside news of Maoist bombings of 
police stations, unverified reports of rifts 
between Maoist leaders, promotional articles 
about Mercedes Benz cars and Tag Heuer watches, 
and reports of parties and fashion shows and 
concerts in Kathmandu.

Thamel opened for business every day, but its 
alleys remained empty of tourists. Months of 
Maoist-enforced blockades and strikes were also 
beginning to scare away the few foreign investors 
who had been deceived by the affluence of 
Kathmandu into thinking that Nepal was a big 
market for luxury consumer goods. Interviewed in 
a local newspaper, a Dutch investor described the 
Nepalese as an 'extremely corrupt, greedy, 
triple-faced, myopic, slow, inexperienced and 
uneducated people', and declared that he was 
taking his hair-replacement business to Latvia. 
Western diplomats and United Nations officials - 
darting in their SUVs from one walled compound to 
another - speculated about a possible assault on 
the capital by guerrillas.

But it is the middle-class Nepalese, denounced by 
the Maoists as 'comprador capitalists', who 
appear to live most precariously, their hopes and 
anxieties echoed in the newspapers by royalist 
journalists who affirm daily that Nepal needs a 
strong ruler and Gyanendra is best placed to 
defend the country, by means of a spell of 
autocratic rule, from both Maoist 'terrorists' 
and corrupt politicians.

Often while listening to them, I would remember 
the businessman I had met in Thamel and what he 
had told me about Dipendra; and I would wonder 
how the crown prince, if he had indeed been 
sensitised to social and economic distress during 
his three years in Thatcher's England, had seen 
his strange inheritance, a country where almost 
half of the 26 million people earned less than 
$100 a year and had no access to electricity, 
running water or sanitation; a country whose 
small economy, parasitic on foreign aid and 
tourism, had to be boosted by the remittances of 
Nepalese workers abroad, and where political 
forces seen as anachronisms elsewhere - monarchy 
and Communism - fought for supremacy.

Histories of South Asia rarely describe Nepal, 
except as a recipient of religions and ideologies 
- Buddhism, Hinduism, Communism - from India; 
even today, the country's 60 ethnic and caste 
communities are regarded as little more than a 
picturesque backdrop to some of the world's 
highest mountains. This is partly because Western 
imperialists overlooked Nepal when they radically 
remade Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries.*

While a British-educated middle class emerged in 
India and began to aspire to self-rule, Nepal 
remained a country of peasants, nomads and 
traders, controlled by a few clans and families. 
Previously dependent on China, its high-caste 
Hindu ruling class courted the British as they 
expanded across India in the 19th century. As in 
the so-called princely states of India, the 
British were keen to support despotic regimes in 
Nepal, and even reward them with territory; it 
was one way of staving off potentially 
destabilising change in a strategically important 
buffer state to Tibet and China. The country was 
also a source of cheap mercenaries. Tens of 
thousands of soldiers recruited by the British 
from the western hills of Nepal fought during the 
Indian Mutiny, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and 
in the two world wars. The Gurkhas also helped 
the British suppress political dissenters in 
India, and then, more violently, Communist 
anti-colonialists in Malaya in the 1950s.

As the movement for political independence grew 
in India, Nepal came to be even more strongly 
controlled by Hindu kings and the elites they 
created by giving land grants to members of the 
high castes, Bahun and Chhetri, which make up 
less than 30 per cent of the population. The end 
of the British Empire in Asia didn't lead to 
rapid change in Nepal, or end its status as a 
client state. Indian-made goods flooded Nepalese 
markets, stifling local industry and deepening 
the country's dependence on India. In the 1950s 
and 1960s, as the Cold War intensified, Nepal was 
the forward base of the CIA's operations against 
China.

American economists and advisers trying to make 
the world safe for capitalism came to Nepal with 
plans for 'modernisation' and 'development' - 
then seen as strong defences against the growth 
of Communism in poor countries. In the Rapti 
valley, west of Kathmandu, where, ironically, the 
Maoists found their first loyal supporters in the 
1990s, the US government spent about $50 million 
'improving household food production and 
consumption, improving income-generating 
opportunities for poor farmers, landless 
labourers, occupational castes and women'.

Modernisation and development, as defined by 
Western experts during the Cold War, were always 
compatible with, and often best expedited by, 
despotic rule. Few among the so-called 
international community protested when, after a 
brief experiment with parliamentary democracy in 
the 1950s, King Mahendra, Dipendra's grandfather, 
banned all political parties. A new constitution 
in 1962 instituted a partyless 'Panchayat' system 
of 'guided democracy' in which advisers chosen or 
controlled by the king rubber-stamped his 
decisions. The representatives of the Panchayat, 
largely from the upper castes, helped themselves 
to the foreign aid that made up most of the state 
budget, and did little to alleviate poverty in 
rural areas. The king also declared Nepal a Hindu 
state and sought to impose on its ethnic and 
linguistic communities a new national identity by 
promoting the Nepali language.

Such hectic nation-building could have lulled 
Nepal's many ethnic and linguistic communities 
into a patriotic daze had the project of 
modernisation and development not failed, or 
benefited so exclusively and egregiously an 
already privileged elite. During the years of 
autocratic rule (1962-90), a few roads were built 
in the countryside, infant mortality was halved, 
and the literacy rate went up from 5 per cent in 
1952 to 40 per cent in 1991. But Nepal's 
population also grew rapidly, further increasing 
pressure on the country's scarce arable land; and 
the gap between the city and the countryside 
widened fast.

What leads the sensitive prince to drugs and 
alcohol often forces the pauper to migrate. 
Millions of Nepalese have swelled the armies of 
cheap mobile labour that drive the global 
economy, serving in Indian brothels, Thai and 
Malaysian sweatshops, the mansions of oil sheikhs 
in the Gulf and, most recently, the war zones of 
Iraq. Many more have migrated internally, often 
from the hills to the subtropical Tarai region on 
the long border with India. The Tarai produces 
most of the country's food and cash crops, and 
accommodates half of its population. On its flat 
alluvial land, where malaria was only recently 
eradicated, the Buddha was born 2500 years ago; 
it is also where a generation of displaced 
Nepalese began to dream of revolution.

In Chitwan, one of the more densely populated 
districts in the Tarai, I met Mukti Raj Dahal, 
the father of the underground Maoist leader, 
Prachanda. Dahal was one of the millions of 
Nepalese to migrate to the Tarai in the 1950s. 
His son was then eight years old. He had 
travelled on to India, doing menial jobs in many 
cities, before returning to Chitwan, which 
American advisers and the Nepalese government 
were then developing as a 'model district' with 
education and health facilities. In Chitwan, 
Dalal bought some land and managed to give his 
eight children an education of sorts. Though he 
is tormented by stomach and spinal ailments, he 
exuded calm as he sat on the verandah of his 
two-roomed brick house, wearing a blue T-shirt 
and shorts under a black cap, a Brahminical caste 
mark on his forehead.

He had the serenity of a man at the end of his 
life. And, given the circumstances, he had not 
done too badly. I had spent much of that day on 
the road from Kathmandu to the Tarai, shuffling 
past long queues of Tata trucks from India, 
through a fog of dust and thick diesel smoke, 
ragged settlements occasionally appearing beside 
the road: shops made of wooden planks, selling 
food fried in peanut oil and tea in sticky 
clouded glasses, mud houses with thatched roofs - 
a pre-industrial bareness in which only the 
gleaming automatic guns of young soldiers and the 
tangle of barbed wire behind which they sat spoke 
of the world beyond Nepal.

The jittery soldiers who approached the car with 
fingers on their triggers were very young, hard 
to associate with stories I had heard in 
Kathmandu - stories no newspaper would touch - of 
the army marching men out of overcrowded prisons 
and executing them. My companion, a Nepalese 
journalist, was nervous. He knew that the 
soldiers in the countryside attacked anyone they 
suspected of being a Maoist, and journalists were 
no exception. Many of the soldiers barely knew 
what a journalist was.

There are few places in Nepal untouched by 
violence - murder, torture, arbitrary arrest - 
and most people live perpetually in fear of both 
the army and the Maoists, without expectation of 
justice or recompense. Dahal, however, appeared 
to have made a private peace with his 
surroundings. He told me that he spent much of 
his day at the local temple, listening to 
recitals of the Ramayana. He said that he still 
believed the king had good intentions. He 
appeared both bemused by, and admiring of, his 
famous son, whom he had last seen at the funeral 
of his wife in 1996. The ideas of equality and 
justice, he thought, had always appealed to 
Prachanda, who was a sensitive man, someone who 
shared his food with poor people in the village. 
He couldn't tell me how his son had got 
interested in Mao or Marx in such a place as 
Chitwan, which had no bookshop or library. But he 
did know that Prachanda had got involved with 
Communists when he couldn't find a good job with 
the government and had to teach at a primary 
school in his native hills of Pokhara.

In his speeches, which claim inspiration from Mao 
and seek to mobilise the peasants in the 
countryside against the urban elite, Prachanda 
comes across as an ideologue of another era: he's 
an embarrassment to the Chinese regime, which is 
engaged in the un-Maoist task of enriching 
Chinese coastal cities at the expense of the 
hinterland, and feels compelled to accuse 
Nepalese Maoists of besmirching the Chairman's 
good name.

In the few interviews he has given, Prachanda 
avoids answering questions about his background 
and motivation, which have to be divined from 
details given by Dahal: the haphazard schooling, 
the useless degree, the ill-paid teaching job in 
a village school, all of which seem to lead 
inexorably to a conflict with, and resentment of, 
unjust authority.

The 'modernisation' and 'development' of Nepal 
during the 1950s and 1960s created millions of 
men like Prachanda, lured away from their 
subsistence economies and abandoned on the 
threshold of a world in which they found they 
had, and could have, no place. Nepal's 
agricultural economy offered few of them the jobs 
or the dignity they felt was their due, and they 
were too aware of the possibilities thwarted by 
an unequal, stratified society to reconcile 
themselves to a life of menial labour in unknown 
lands, and an old age spent in religious stupor. 
Educated, but with no prospects, many young men 
like Prachanda must have been more than ready to 
embrace radical ideas about the ways that an 
entrenched urban elite could be challenged and 
even overthrown if peasants in the countryside 
were organised.

Growing up in Nepal in the 1960s, Prachanda 
watched these ideas grow in the Naxalbari 
movement in India. Communist activists lived and 
worked secretly in parts of Nepal during the 
Panchayat era - in the 1950s, a famous Communist 
leader called M.B. Singh travelled in the 
midwestern hills and acquired followers among the 
Magars, one of Nepal's more prominent ethnic 
groups now supporting the Maoists. But Prachanda 
says that the 'historic Naxalbari movement' of 
India was the 'greatest influence' on the 
Communists of Nepal.

In the late 1960s, thousands of students, many of 
them middle-class and upper-caste, joined an 
armed peasant uprising led by an extremist 
faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) 
in West Bengal and Bihar. Known as Naxalites, 
after the Naxalbari district where the revolt 
first erupted in 1967, they attacked 'class 
enemies' - big landlords, policemen, bureaucrats 
- and 'liberated' territories which they hoped 
would form bases for an eventual assault on the 
cities, as had happened in China. The Indian 
government responded brutally, killing and 
torturing thousands. Driven underground, the 
Naxalite movement splintered, and remained 
dormant for many years.

In the 1990s, when India began to move towards a 
free market, the Naxalite movement revived in 
some of the poorest and most populous Indian 
states. Part of the reason for this is that 
successive Indian governments have steadily 
reduced subsidies for agriculture, public health, 
education and poverty-eradication, exposing large 
sections of the population to disease, debt, 
hunger and starvation. Almost three thousand 
farmers committed suicide in the southern state 
of Andhra Pradesh after the government, advised 
by McKinsey, cut agricultural subsidies in an 
attempt to initiate farmers into the world of 
unregulated markets. In recent years, Naxalite 
movements, which have long organised landless, 
low-caste peasants in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, 
have grown quickly in parts of Uttar Pradesh and 
Madhya Pradesh - where an enfeebled Indian state 
is increasingly absent - to the extent that 
police and intelligence officials in India now 
speak anxiously of an unbroken belt of 
Communist-dominated territory from Nepal to South 
India.

The Naxalite uprising in the late 1960s 
invigorated the few Communists in Nepal, who, 
like the members of the Nepali Congress, the main 
underground political organisation, sought 
guidance and encouragement from India. In 1971, 
some Nepalese Communists living across the border 
from Naxalbari declared a 'people's war' against 
the monarchy. They killed seven 'class enemies' 
before being suppressed by the king. As fractious 
as their Indian counterparts, the Nepalese 
Communist parties split and split again over 
petty doctrinal or personality issues. In 1991, 
after the restoration of multi-party democracy, 
several of them contested elections, and even did 
well: a Communist coalition became the biggest 
opposition party, and briefly held power in 1994. 
In the early 1990s, however, few people in Nepal 
could have predicted the swift rise of Prachanda 
and the obscure faction he led.

[. . . ]

{ continues in the upcoming edition of SACW}


o o o o

Committee to Protect Journalists

330 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001 USA
Phone: (212) 465-1004     Fax: (212) 465-9568
Web: www.cpj.org     E-Mail: media at cpj.org

Nepalese authorities harass journalists for reporting on the military

New York, June 23, 2005-Nepalese authorities 
continue to harass and intimidate journalists who 
independently cover military activities. Local 
newspapers report that two editors were 
interrogated this week and urged to disclose 
their sources for stories involving the Royal 
Nepalese Army.

Police today questioned Kishor Karki, editor of 
Blast Time, a daily newspaper based in the town 
of Dharan, about his reporting on a clash between 
the government and Maoist rebels, according to 
the Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ).

Citing orders from the chief district officer, a 
police inspector questioned Karki for two hours 
in an effort to compel him to reveal the source 
for his reporting on violence in eastern Bhojpur 
district on June 22, the FNJ said in a written 
statement. The editor did not disclose his source.

In a separate incident yesterday, two 
plainclothes military officers entered the 
offices of the Kathmandu-based weekly Jana Aastha 
three times to question staff members about a 
June 22 article on the activities of a general in 
the Nepalese army, editor Kishor Shrestha told 
the Committee to Protect Journalists. Shrestha 
said that he also received a phone call at his 
home.

Military officers demanded that Shrestha and 
other journalists at the newspaper reveal the 
source for the June 22 article, the editor said. 
The reporter who wrote the story was not in 
Kathmandu, and other Jana Aastha journalists 
refused to disclose the source. Officers left 
only after threatening to return on Monday.

"The staff were very much afraid," Shrestha told 
CPJ. "The officers said, 'We're not going to 
forgive you. There's no excuse for this.'"

Armed military censors occupied all major media 
houses during the week of February 1, when King 
Gyanendra took power in a royal coup. Shortly 
afterward, the Ministry of Information and 
Communication (MOIC) issued wide bans on 
reporting, including a directive banning the 
press from reporting independently on the ongoing 
conflict between the government and Maoist 
rebels. While journalists have pushed the lines 
of government control during recent months, the 
MOIC orders have never been lifted.

In recent weeks, journalists have stepped up 
protests against media restrictions initiated on 
February 1, including a total ban on private FM 
radio news broadcasting. Dozens of journalists 
have been arrested and detained briefly since 
protests intensified this month, including 10 
journalists who were held for five hours after 
holding a protest in a restricted area in the 
central district of Kavre yesterday.

"Independent reporting on the conflict in Nepal 
is crucial to the safety of its citizens and the 
defense of human rights," CPJ Executive Director 
Ann Cooper said. "We call on Nepalese authorities 
to stop harassing journalists who report on 
military affairs."

CPJ is a New York-based, independent, nonprofit 
organization that works to safeguard press 
freedom worldwide. For more information, visit 
<file://www.cpj.org>www.cpj.org.

______


[2]

The Indian Express
June 22, 2005

THE LOST CHANCES OF HISTORY
by Colin Gonsalves		 		 

Author of Constitutional law of India and former 
attorney general, the late H.M. Seervai, has 
provided an interesting account of Jinnah's role 
in Partition. According to him, the picture 
painted of Jinnah as being the one who brought 
about Partition on account of ambition, vanity 
and intransigence is contrary to historical 
evidence. He describes Nehru as appearing 
imperious and shows Gandhi as being indifferent 
to Muslim demands. He suggests it was Gandhi who 
introduced religion into politics with disastrous 
consequences.

M.A. Jinnah joined the Congress in 1906. He was 
hailed as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity 
after the 1916 Lucknow Pact, when the Muslim 
League (ML) and the Congress agreed to jointly 
fight the British. When, in 1914, Annie Besant 
started the Home Rule League, the president of 
its Bombay branch was Jinnah. In 1920, Gandhi 
became League president but Besant resigned over 
politics becoming 'intertwined with religion'. 
Gandhi had begun to subtly introduce religion 
into politics as his ascetic image had begun to 
appeal to Hindu religious sentiment. This 
approach to arouse political consciousness was 
understandable, but it came at a price. His 
support for the Khilafat movement saw Jinnah 
cautioning him against it.

In 1925, the All Party Conference appointed a 
committee headed by Nehru to frame the 
Constitution. The Nehru Report rejected separate 
electorates. The ML had wanted this and had also 
demanded residuary powers be given to the 
provinces. Jinnah pleaded these amendments be 
accepted to avoid "civil war". They were 
rejected. "This is a parting of ways," Jinnah 
told a friend.

Then, when the British announced the Communal 
Award providing for separate electorates and 
reservation for both Muslims and depressed 
classes, Gandhi announced a fast unto death. It 
was withdrawn after B.R. Ambedkar intervened and 
the Poona Pact was arrived at under which there 
were reservations for depressed classes but with 
joint electorates. In the polls to provincial 
legislatures under the Government of India Act, 
1935, out of 485 Muslim seats the ML won only 
108. Congress ministries were formed in eight 
provinces. Then Congress made the disastrous move 
of not forming a coalition with Muslims. In the 
United Province, it contested 9 out of 66 Muslim 
seats and lost all. The backlash had begun.

In his autobiography, India Wins Freedom, Maulana 
Abdul Kalam Azad wrote "if the League's offer of 
cooperation was accepted the Muslim League would 
have merged with the Congress." But Azad's 
recommendation was rejected by Nehru who said 
that no Muslim should be admitted into the 
Cabinet unless he joins the Congress. He wanted 
the Cabinet to be homogeneous. In March 1937, 
Nehru remarked "there are only two forces in 
India today, British imperialism and Indian 
nationalism." Jinnah was quick to retort, "No, 
there is a third party, the Mussalman." History 
was to bear him out. Yet, even as late as 1937, 
according to Shiva Rao, Jinnah was not 
considering a separate state.

Congress then began a search for a solution. The 
Desai-Liaquat Ali Pact and the Sapru Committee 
suggested the formation of coalition ministries 
at the Centre. This was turned down. In 1945, 
Azad suggested to Gandhi that the Constitution be 
federal, units be given the right to secede, that 
there be joint electorates with reservation of 
seats and parity between Muslims and Hindus in 
the legislature and Central Executive "until 
communal suspicion disappears". Gandhi differed. 
Bhulabhai Desai and Tej Bahadur Sapru, prominent 
lawyers, also pleaded in vain. As a result, in 
the 1945 Central Legislature Assembly elections, 
the ML won every Muslim seat and Congress Muslims 
lost every seat. It overlooked the fact that 
though 200 million Hindus were not equal to 90 
million Muslims in terms of numbers, while 
framing a constitution some sort of meaningful 
parity has to be worked out. Gandhi made no 
practical attempt to find a solution. Even after 
the ML call for direct action the Calcutta 
killings and the boycott of the Constituent 
Assembly in 1946, Gandhi did not budge.

The rest is history. Lord Wavell who, according 
to Seervai, tried repeatedly to get the Congress 
to accommodate the ML for a unified India, was 
sacked. The Congress began planning for 
Partition. Gandhi, who had previously said that 
Partition would come to India over his dead body, 
advised that circumstances had arisen which made 
Partition unavoidable. Jinnah left India with an 
appeal to both Hindus and Muslims to bury the 
past. The next day Patel said at Delhi "The 
poison has been removed from the body of India. 
We are now one and indivisible."


The writer is a Supreme Court advocate


_______


[3]

Khaleej Times
12 June 2005

PARTITION IN PARIVAR?
By Praful Bidwai

THE seismic shocks delivered to the Sangh Parivar 
by L K Advani's pronouncements, which very nearly 
glorified Pakistan's founding father Mohammed Ali 
Jinnah, are unlikely to subside soon. Whatever 
happens to the Bharatiya Janata Party's fraught 
relationship with the RSS, and even if Advani 
returns as party president, it's certain that the 
Parivar cannot endorse his adulation for Jinnah 
without questioning and severely revising the 
RSS's core-ideology, and the 'bauddhik' or 
compulsory "educational" diet on which 
generations of Hindu nationalist activists have 
been brought up, including most of the BJP's top 
leaders.

At the centre of that ideology are hatred of 
Islam and demonisation of Indian Muslims as 
Pakistan's "Fifth Column" who partitioned the 
country and continue to undermine its unity. 
Hindutva is inseparable from Islamophobia. No 
wonder the BJP leadership is badly convulsed by 
Advani's remarks.

Its crisis management isn't made any the easier 
by the lack of general popular sympathy in India 
for Jinnah and the original idea of Pakistan. A 
recent opinion poll says 76 per cent of 
respondents don't think Jinnah was secular; 72 
per cent believe he was the main cause of 
Partition. More important, 56 per cent think 
Advani betrayed his followers by praising Jinnah 
and only 22 per cent think he has become 
"moderate" as a result!

What impelled Advani to call Jinnah a "great 
man", a "rare individual" who creates "history", 
and quote his famous speech of August 11, 1947 in 
which he promised equal rights to all citizens 
irrespective of faith? Advani's remarks were not 
isolated observations, but part of a series of 
statements made during his Pakistan visit, all in 
the same spirit.

According to sources close to Advani, quoted in 
the media, they represent his frustration at the 
BJP's defeat in the 2004 elections. He appears to 
have concluded that even by repeating the Ayodhya 
agitation in the Hindi heartland, the BJP won't 
be able to return to power - so sharp are caste 
divisions in the Gangetic belt. To broaden its 
appeal, religious minorities must be 
"neutralised" and "secularists" and "liberals" 
won over.

Advani chose his Jinnah comments as "shock 
therapy" for the party. He wanted to confront the 
RSS and VHP who have of late repeatedly targeted 
him for attack. The choice of such a blunt 
instrument appears maladroit, even tactless, 
given the negative public perception of the 
events that led to Partition. Even within the 
BJP, Advani has succeeded in dividing, not 
uniting, senior leaders.

Three issues arise. Was Jinnah really secular? If 
so, what were his essential differences with 
Gandhi and Nehru? And is the two-nation theory at 
all compatible with secularism?

Jinnah was a man of many parts-a suave, modern, 
highly Westernised person (who proudly owned some 
200 Saville Row suits), a brilliant lawyer and 
Constitutionalist, but someone who was never 
pious or interested in religious instruction. 
Yet, his politics was shaped by issues of 
minority representation, and eventually, the 
demand for a separate state for India's Muslims.

Jinnah's life went through many phases. In the 
early stages, he was secretary to Gokhale, the 
great independence leader and liberal, and 
admired Dadabhoy Nowroji and Pherozeshah Mehta. 
In the 1920s, when the young Raja of Mahmudabad 
described himself as a "Muslim first," Jinnah 
corrected him: "My boy, no, you are an Indian 
first and then a Muslim." But by the late 1930s, 
he had despaired of working jointly with the 
Congress. A frustrated Jinnah then emerged as the 
"sole spokesman" of the Muslims.

Jinnah probably genuinely believed in some ways 
in the ideal of a state that's secular insofar as 
it doesn't discriminate against citizens on 
grounds of faith. But his practice, his basic 
project, his life's greatest mission, was based 
on the rejection of secularism and promoting 
Muslim-separatist politics, which culminated in 
Pakistan. Jinnah worked under enormous 
compulsions of historical forces, including a 
relatively conservative Muslim League, British 
policy on separate electorates and 
representation, and the intervention of World 
War-II. He ended up with a moth-eaten, 
denominational Islamic state - perhaps against 
his own grain.

Advani reduces a complex political personality 
and movement to a few statements and thus 
trivialises secularism itself. This also 
minimises the importance of the fundamentally 
inclusive, humane and liberal secularism of 
Gandhi and Nehru, who strove right till the end 
to give the freedom movement a secular-pluralist 
content, which repelled Jinnah.

Once you say Jinnah and Gandhi were more or less 
equally secular, you abolish critical 
distinctions between secularism and communalism. 
You can then shrink a giant like Nehru into a 
political pygmy like Deen Dayal Upadhyay. That 
can only serve to legitimise the sangh's venomous 
ideology.

Advani says he wants "a debate" on the issue of 
Jinnah's "secular" strivings and the two-nation 
theory. This is welcome. But if he's honest, 
Advani will discover that the originators of the 
theory were not Jinnah or Iqbal. Rather, they 
were Bhai Permanand, Lala Lajpat Rai and Vinayak 
Damodar Savarkar. Parmanand advocated a division 
of India, with the "territory beyond Sindh" 
united with Afghanistan and North-West Frontier 
Province into "a great Musulman Kingdom. The 
Hindus of the region should come away ...''

Rai also posited a "Hindu nation" separate from 
the Muslim-dominated areas of Punjab and the 
NWFP. Savarkar elevated this to a proper theory 
in 1923 by distinguishing between two nations, 
one based on "indigenous" religions, and the 
other on "foreign" ones.

Yet, these figures, and their acolytes like 
Golwalkar, are the greatest icons of Hindutva or 
"cultural nationalism". Their views on nationhood 
cannot be separated from the RSS-BJP's 
core-politics. Is the BJP, leave alone the VHP or 
RSS, prepared to jettison such views? Is Advani, 
even Vajpayee, prepared to make such a conceptual 
break? Are they prepared for a virtual revolt 
against their own progenitor, the Sangh? The 
answer is, "unlikely".
Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian journalist and commentator


_______


[4]

San Francisco Chronicle
June 23, 2005
Page A - 10

S.F. PROFESSOR FEARS HINDU RETALIATION
Militants threaten rape over investigations of caste tension, she says
Mark Williams, Jehangir Pocha, Chronicle Foreign Service

New Delhi -- A San Francisco professor has become 
embroiled in a dispute with militant Hindu 
activists who, she says, threatened to parade her 
naked in the streets and rape her because she was 
working with a local organization investigating 
religious and caste tensions in eastern India.

Angana Chatterji, an associate professor of 
social and cultural anthropology at the 
California Institute of Integral Studies, says 
the threats against her and other female members 
of the Indian People's Tribunal on the 
Environment and Human Rights were made last week 
as they took testimony from residents in 
impoverished Orissa state.

Over the past few years, Orissa has become a 
focal point in a campaign by Hindu 
fundamentalists to turn secular India into a 
Hindu nation ruled by Hindutva, a set of strict 
Brahmin principles. The campaign has heated up 
into a simmering "war for souls" as Hindu 
nationalists struggle to halt conversions to 
Islam and Christianity among the state's 
impoverished lower castes and classes.

Chatterji, an Indian citizen born in Calcutta, 
has stirred the ire of Hindu nationalists before 
by writing about religious violence in other 
Indian states and campaigning in the United 
States to block funding for extremist Indian 
groups.

The controversy last week came as Chatterji and 
other members of the tribunal were taking 
depositions from activists belonging to three 
Hindu groups -- the Bajrang Dal (army of the 
monkey god, Hanuman), Vishwa Hindu Parishad 
(World Hindu Council) and the women's wing of the 
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers 
Group).

The meeting was peaceful, Chatterji said by 
telephone, until her group received a fax from 
the state office of the Hindu council labeling 
the tribunal a collection of "leftists, fellow 
travelers (and) Hindu baiters." In a pointed 
reference to Chatterji, it said: "The inclusion 
of an NRI (nonresident Indian) well known for 
anti-Hindu activities in the U.S. suggests 
foreign funds from sources bent on destabilizing 
the country."

"At that point,'' Chatterji said, "things started to get violent."

Activists from the Bajrang Dal and the World 
Hindu Council surrounded the tribunal members -- 
academics, human rights workers and retired 
judges among them -- and demanded that the audio 
recordings of their testimony be handed over. 
Chatterji refused, but to placate them, she said, 
she destroyed the tapes in front of them, and 
hearings were canceled for the day.

Outside, the crowd grew agitated, Chatterji said, 
with some shouting, "We will rape those women" as 
others allegedly called out: "We will parade them 
naked."

India's official National Human Rights Commission 
has reported that the stripping and public 
parading of women is a tactic used by upper-caste 
and Hindu nationalists to intimidate and punish 
those who oppose them.

Two former chief justices in the tribunal, K.K. 
Usha and R.A. Mehta, called the incident 
"shocking, outrageous and highly deplorable."

Subash Chouhan, a senior state leader of the 
Bajrang Dal, denied that members of his 
organization had threatened the tribunal members 
with rape. But at a press conference several days 
later, he warned that if Chatterji continued her 
work in Orissa, the Bajrang Dal and the Hindu 
council would continue to "challenge and repress" 
her.

India's Foreign Ministry, acting on complaints 
received by U.S. citizens, has said it will ask 
the chief minister of Orissa to investigate the 
matter. Chatterji said she and the tribunal had 
also asked the Human Rights Commission to 
investigate the threats and conditions in Orissa.

At the California Institute of Integral Studies, 
on Mission Street near Civic Center, Joseph 
Subbiondo, the school's president, called 
Chatterji "an amazing teacher whose students 
deeply respect her.''

He said he was concerned about her security.

"She could be here in cool San Francisco, but 
she's over there in hot India really pushing for 
the people," he said.

The battle over India's future as a secular 
nation or Hindu state has stirred passions in the 
country and beyond.

The Hindu nationalists are led by the Sangh 
Parivar (the Family of the Sangh), a loose 
coalition of groups that used Hindutva as a 
rallying cry to fuel the rise of the Bharatiya 
Janata Party. The party, known as the BJP, came 
to power in 1998 and ruled India for almost six 
years until May 2004, when it lost in general 
elections to the center-left Congress Party.

In recent years, the Sangh Parivar has carried 
out a major drive in Orissa state to win over 
Indians who it said had drifted away from 
Hinduism.

Many of Orissa's 37 million people are tribal 
people and others considered "untouchable" under 
the officially banned but still entrenched Hindu 
caste system. Neglected by those in power, the 
tribals and "untouchables'' (who call themselves 
Dalits, or broken people) became the target of 
aggressive evangelizing by Muslim, Christian and 
Buddhist groups.

Once Dalits and tribals switch faiths, they often 
join Orissa's millions of Christians and Muslims 
in voting against the upper caste-dominated BJP. 
That upsets Hindu nationalists like Chouhan, the 
Bajrang Dal state official.

"Christians pay people to convert, (and) Muslims 
created the caste system to weaken Hinduism," 
Chouhan said.

Stirring voters with this argument, the Sangh 
Parivar and BJP called for a ban on Muslim and 
Christian evangelizing and began to woo tribals 
and Dalits into mainstream Hinduism. Their 
efforts have paid off; while the BJP lost the 
2004 elections, it carried Orissa state.

But the "war for souls'' ignited in Orissa 
continues to blaze in the state and beyond. Both 
supporters and opponents of Hindu nationalism 
have started political parties in many countries, 
including the United States.

Pro-Hindutva groups have organized and have sent 
millions of dollars to Sangh Parivar 
organizations in India, according to New 
York-based Human Rights Watch.

In response, Chatterji and several other Indian 
academics in the United States have formed 
organizations such as the Coalition Against 
Genocide, whose name was inspired by deadly 
anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat that killed up to 2, 
000 people in 2002.

Since that year, Chatterji has visited more than 
60 villages in India to collect testimony from 
victims and perpetrators of religious and caste 
violence, including the burning of Christian 
churches. In one notorious incident, Australian 
missionary Graham Staines and his two sons, 
Philip and Timothy, were burned to death in their 
car in 1999. Staines had worked for more than 30 
years in a leper colony in the state and was 
accused of making mass conversions to 
Christianity.

Most recently, Chatterji and the Coalition 
Against Genocide riled the Sangh Parivar by 
lobbying the United States to deny an entry visa 
to Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat. 
Modi's administration was criticized for its 
response to the riots in 2002.

Chatterji said that after last week's incident, 
she had received an anonymous phone call warning 
"if I did not behave like a woman should, I would 
be raped, murdered, then cut into pieces, and no 
one would know how it happened."

Despite the threats, Chatterji said her tribunal 
would continue its work in Orissa.

"The Sangh Parivar has been very clear in its 
intent to make Orissa a Hindutva state," she 
said. "To stop them from delivering on this, we 
need to act, and now."



______


[5]   [ Announcement ]

INTERESTING TIMES IN INDIA: A SHORT DECADE AT ST. STEPHEN'S COLLEGE
by Daniel O'Connor

Published by Penguin Books India
June 2005, 256pp
ISBN: 014303345X
Edition: Paperback

A personal record of one of the most significant, 
yet least written about, decades in Indian history
Daniel O'Connor and his wife arrived in India in 
1963, virtually the last days of the Nehruvian 
era, to live and work at St. Stephen's College, 
Delhi. This was the beginning of a relationship 
that was to last almost a decade. Being part of a 
creative college community that mirrored all the 
effects of a newly realized post-colonial 
consciousness and the anxieties and hopes of a 
nation coming to grips with post-Nehruvian 
existence, the young couple witnessed and 
participated in many tumultuous events.
As teacher Dr O'Connor taught midnight's children 
in the almost idyllic environs of the college. As 
chaplain he attempted to negotiate a formal 
post-colonial religious role in a richly 
pluralistic context. As a young expatriate there 
was family life to cope with: setting up house 
and bringing up children in a city trying to get 
rid of its imperial past, in a society contending 
with food shortages and rationing, unemployment 
and communal conflict. Accompanying all this were 
two wars and political tumult, both outside and 
inside the college, as students got caught up in 
the excitement of revolutionary activities under 
the influence of Maoism and the Naxalite 
movement. Yet, for all the difficulties and 
anxieties, it was a happy and fulfilling 
experience, always interesting, enriched by 
enduring friendships across barriers of race and 
creed.
Covering political events and social concerns, 
dotted with delightful vignettes of college 
life-from staff politics to the Shakespeare 
Society's theatre productions-Interesting Times 
in India, engagingly written and fondly told, 
seamlessly combines both popular history and 
personal memoir.

http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/Books/BookDetail.asp?ID=5871


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