SACW | 27 Oct. 2005

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | 27 October,  2005


[1] Three Earthquakes, A Genocide, Three 
Invasions and A World War (Aseem Srivastava)
[2]  Pakistan: Spend money on alleviating human 
distress and not on fuelling arms race (Daily 
Times)
[3] India: Voices from wounded Gujarat (Harsh Mander)
[4] Book Review: 'Remarkable Peregrinations': The 
Journey of the Jihad (Ananya Vajpeyi)
[5]  India: Bridging the Divides  - Set back to 
Amity Initiatives in Ayodhya (Ram Puniyani)
[6]  Announcements:
(i) Asma Jahangir speaking on 'Towards Democracy: 
Pakistan at the Crossroads (New York, 27 Oct, 
2005)
(ii) Seminar on India's Independent Foreign Policy (New Delhi, 28 Oct, 2005)
(iii) Ist India International Women's Film 
Festival 05 (Calcutta, 12 -18 Dec., 2005)

______

[1]

sacw.net | 25 October 2005


Civilization and compassion at the dawn of the twenty-first century

THREE EARTHQUAKES, A GENOCIDE, THREE INVASIONS AND A WORLD WAR

  by Aseem Srivastava

Civilization is on a mission from God to free the 
world from the evil of tyranny and bring 
democracy and human rights to all peoples of the 
planet. Presumably, there is human concern and 
compassion behind such a quest, more grand than 
any conceived in the long and glorious past of 
humanity. It is worth contemplating however, the 
shape in which this compassion appears. If the 
early signs in the twenty-first century are 
anything to go by, the coming decades look 
devastatingly ominous. Let us look at some 
examples.
Consider this. Four years ago, in October 2001, 
Western civilization thought nothing of starving 
over 7 million poor innocents (themselves victims 
of the Islamic fundamentalists) in Afghanistan in 
order to exact revenge for 9/11 (and for failed 
oil negotiations) on the Taliban. These people 
relied on food delivered by aid agencies who were 
ordered to suspend operations by Washington in 
order to put their delivery vehicles out of the 
line of fire and make the bombing possible. At 
the time, Noam Chomsky described what was 
beginning to happen as a "silent genocide", for 
which the West and its democratic citizens were 
morally responsible. Fortunately the bombing 
campaign ended soon enough, food deliveries could 
be restored quickly and Western societies and 
their governments were relieved of a potentially 
colossal "embarrasment" (though the faithful 
corporate media would have ensured that nothing 
was heard about any genocide this side of the 
Suez). Fortunately, compassion did not come into 
question (except of course in the case of about 
4000 civilian deaths, caused by US bombing).
In March 2003 the US, the UK and their string of 
credulous cronies launched the morally 
unconscionable and legally criminal invasion of 
Iraq on false pretexts, putting at the mercy of 
their dreadful "Shock and Awe" campaign the lives 
of millions of people who had already suffered 
for well over a decade the effect of the 
murderous UN sanctions which had led to the 
deaths of a million people, half of them children 
(according to UNICEF). This habit of 
civilization, whereby it employs starvation as a 
means of warfare has hardly ended in Iraq. BBC 
reports UN human rights investigator, Jean 
Ziegler, as having accused the US and British 
forces in Iraq of breaching international law by 
depriving civilians of food and water in besieged 
cities. "A drama is taking place in total silence 
in Iraq, where the coalition's occupying forces 
are using hunger and deprivation of water as a 
weapon of war against the civilian population," 
Ziegler told a news briefing in Geneva a few days 
ago.

Since the war on terrorism was launched by 
Washington, 49 months of the most hectic manhunt 
in history by the most powerful and wealthy state 
known to man have not yielded Osama Bin Laden 
(something that truly makes one wonder whether 
there was ever a clear intention to get him in 
the first place!). Meanwhile, taking both the 
Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns into account, 
somewhere between 110,000 and 130,000 people (we 
cannot know exactly how many since it appears, 
after Katrina, that Washington barely keeps track 
even of its own dead), who had nothing to do with 
terrorism have been killed, hundreds of thousands 
have been wounded or maimed for life and the 
everyday lives of 50 million people subjected to 
hardship and hoplessness. As has been said 
repeatedly by commentators across the political 
spectrum, this has led predictably to an 
exacerbation, rather than an alleviation, of 
terrorism.
Compassion?
Iraq had been named in Bush's "Axis of Evil" 
speech in January, 2002. So had been Iran. Since 
the time when the first phase of the war on Iraq 
had been completed, Iran has repeatedly been 
brought up as Washington's next target, once 
again on grounds as suspect as those on which the 
Iraq invasion was launched. After getting 
promising support from IAEA members, the US 
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has recently 
been jetting around the world trying to convince 
global powers why an invasion of Iran is 
necessary to make the rogue state behave itself 
in nuclear matters.
The Western media has made the world forget that 
Iran suffered a massive earthquake in December, 
2003. Over 25,000 people died and hundreds of 
thousands were rendered homeless. Six months 
later there was another major earthquake which 
led to the loss of almost a thousand human lives. 
None of this, however, has prevented the West 
from seriously contemplating "action" against 
Iran. Britain, France and Germany have all 
succumbed to Washington in applying pressure on a 
country that has suffered natural disasters so 
recently, other than having to bear the burden of 
economic sanctions led by the US.
In October 2005 it has been Pakistan's turn to 
endure nature's cruel fury. In the recent 
earthquake over 50,000 people have died and at 
least 2 million rendered homeless. There was an 
urgent request made to rich countries by 
President Musharraf for helicopters to deliver 
relief and supplies to Kashmir. The US could only 
spare eight from their obviously more important 
operations in Afghanistan. Britain could spare 
none. (Only some minibuses were sent!) Aid 
pledges made by both governments are 
embarrasingly insignificant and are exceeded by 
private collections which are already being sent.
Meanwhile, just yesterday (October 17), The 
Independent reported that Tony Blair has ordered 
a new generation of nuclear weapons to replace 
the existing Trident fleet at a cost of billions 
of pounds. Blair had also made a peace-making 
visit to India and Pakistan a few years back 
(just before the two countries had engaged in the 
Kargil conflict in Kashmir) and returned after 
selling over a billion pounds of weapons to both 
sides (an old empire tradition, welcomed by 
ruling elites in the poor countries, and good for 
the world economy).
Did compassion guide the deals?
Finally, take the case of Darfurs in Sudan, where 
the ruling Islamic fundamentalists have been busy 
overseeing a genocide in which upto half a 
million black African farmers and their families 
might have already been killed over the past two 
years in order to clear their farming land for 
drilling oil and setting up pipelines. British, 
Chinese, Indian and Japanese oil companies are 
already in the fray. US companies want their 
share of the booty, though a law passed under 
Clinton (remember he ordered the bombing of the 
pharmaceutical factory in 1998) prohibits trade 
with Sudan. This situation is changing since 
Condoleeza Rice took over the office of Secretary 
of State this year and US oil companies are 
beginning to do business in Sudan. So, even if 
Rice's predecessor, Colin Powell (under pressure 
from Christian and African-American groups in the 
US) had designated what has been happening in 
Darfurs as a "genocide", no military intevention 
has been forthcoming from the Western powers 
(just like in Rwanda) to stop it. Compassion 
somehow always gives way to oil pressure!
As their leaders scrape the depleted barrels of 
their humanity, citizens of democratic societies 
in the West urgently need to ask themselves why 
they tolerate such open hypocrisies from their 
elected representatives. At present it is mostly 
the inhabitants of poor countries who pay the 
price for these mass-deceits. But the time is 
hardly far when citizens of Western democracies 
will be footing increasing portions of the bill 
too. In fact, this is already happening, if one 
takes into reckoning the growing burden of war 
taxes, lives lost to war and terrorism, the 
pressure of immigrants from regions of the world 
impacted by war, poverty and tyranny, a rapid 
erosion of democratic rights (in the form, among 
other things, of anti-terror legislation and the 
muzzled media, not to speak of the various forms 
of thought control exercised on and within the 
academy) and, not the least important, the 
corrosion of the moral sense which, two world 
wars notwithstanding, has thus far sustained 
these societies in the past.
It is a matter of unspeakable astonishment that 
when so much stands to be lost in the West, most 
people are numbly going about their daily 
business, not paying much heed to the happenings 
of the world. The alternative to a serious 
internal reckoning by the West is the mounting 
nihilism and narcissism of consumer society 
which, in a world as interconnected as ours (in 
which, for instance, the availability of products 
ranging from lipsticks to Jaguars relies on an 
on-going supply of cheap oil and resources from 
other countries) is not merely solipsistic 
thoughtlessness about the sufferings that 
billions go through in order for the posh and 
privileged to go on with their indulgent ways. It 
is ultimately a recipe for catastrophe. This is 
no time for compassion fatigue. Even vaguely 
enlightened self-interest should suggest 
large-scale collective action to re-democratize 
the democracies.
Nobel-prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath 
Tagore had written in 1916, in the midst of World 
War I: "the West must not make herself a curse to 
the world by using her power for her own selfish 
needs." However, he also wrote that "in the 
so-called free countries the majority of the 
people are not free, they are driven by the 
minority to a goal which is not even known to 
them." By the time he was on his death-bed in 
1940, in the midst of World War II, more evidence 
had appeared of the declining human condition in 
the West. Tagore then wrote that "the failure of 
humanity in the West to preserve the worth of 
their civilization and the dignity of man which 
they had taken centuries to build up, weighs like 
a nightmare on my mind." The holocaust in Germany 
and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 
fours years after Tagore's death, made the 
nightmare visible to the world.
If the US instigates an invasion of Iran - either 
by using a staged attack on Israel as a trigger 
or by blaming Iran for its self-created mounting 
mess in Iraq or by simply aiming to stall its 
nuclear programme, and all, in the end, only to 
regain control over Iran's oilfields that the 
1979 revolution took away - then all bets are 
off. Whether the world stands or falls after that 
is anyone's guess.
Of one thing one can be sure. They who claim the 
guardianship of civilization today are its worst 
traitors and can know nothing about compassion. 
For that they have to achieve the impossible feat 
of humbling themselves to the level of those two 
school-teachers in Muzaffarabad, Kashmir who, 
when the earth below them was trembling with rage 
ten days ago, stood in the way of a falling wall 
and sacrificed their lives to save the many 
children who would otherwise all be dead today.

Aseem Shrivastava is a free-lance writer.


______



[2]


The Daily Times
October 27, 2005	 
Editorial: SPEND MONEY ON ALLEVIATING HUMAN 
DISTRESS AND NOT ON FUELLING ARMS RACE

Pakistan's resource base is under pressure from 
the October 8 earthquake. The government says 
that $5-10 billion will eventually be needed to 
rehabilitate and rebuild the lives and homes of 
the quake victims. The United Nations is asking 
the world to contribute half a billion dollars 
for relief work immediately but has had little 
success so far in meeting its target. Some money 
has come from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other 
Muslim countries. But international donors have 
not been as forthcoming as hoped. Indeed, it does 
seem that while the Western countries are 
agreeable to sending men and materials to 
Pakistan they are still leery of forking over 
cash to Islamabad. Is the fact at the back of 
their minds that Pakistan is about to spend $1.5 
billion on a first batch of F-16 fighter bombers 
when that money could be better spent on 
alleviating the hardships of the people of 
Pakistan? Countries in the EU, like France, which 
have yet to decide to give any kind of aid, could 
conceivably balk at the seeming contradiction 
between Pakistan's needs and its military's 
desires.
The good news from Washington is that Pakistan's 
military leadership might be "reconsidering" the 
F-16 deal. The Bush administration is expected to 
formally notify the US Congress next week of 
plans to sell the planes. The order is for 55 new 
Lockheed Martin planes, 25 used aircraft as well 
as so-called "mid-life" upgrades that would 
significantly improve the capability of another 
32 jets in the Pakistani Air Force's inventory. 
The price of all this will go into billions of 
dollars. This is a stupendous amount, given the 
fact that Pakistan's GDP is not even worth $100 
billion and at least $5 billion will be needed 
for quake relief in the short and medium term.
Given Pakistan's conflictual-mode defence 
strategy vis a vis India, its air force (PAF) has 
been under pressure for some time now in view of 
its depleting armour. Its current fleet of 32 
F-16s is not fully operational due to the lack of 
spares. Indeed, the PAF has had to cannibalise a 
few aircraft to keep the rest operational. But 
all said and done, the truth is that even after 
getting the 24 new F-16s (after shelling out $1.5 
million) the value of the new aircraft 
acquisitions by Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistan 
weapons calculus will remain only symbolic. It 
may serve to improve the PAF's morale but it will 
not bring commensurate strength. On the other 
hand, it might conceivably further hone the 
instinct in the Pakistani strategic elite to 
engage India in a conventional arms race. That 
raises the question: Isn't it inhumane at this 
tragic point in our national life to think of 
avoiding war with India by rearming ourselves? 
Unfortunately, there is another lethal aspect to 
this trend which must be kept in mind.
India can actually lead us to our perdition by 
playing on our imitative military instinct. The 
US offer to Pakistan is accompanied with a much 
bigger offer of technology transfer to India. New 
Delhi will be offered top-of-the-line fighter 
aircraft, such as the F-18, or the Joint Strike 
Fighter, with the additional advantage of 
licensed production in India. The US is also 
thinking of transferring to India some of its 
anti-ballistic missile systems and dual-use 
technology. Given the foremost reflex in Pakistan 
to match India weapon for weapon, this gives 
India an advantage over us, which is more lethal 
than its military superiority. Last year, India 
led the developing world in arms purchases, 
signing agreements totalling $15.7 billion 
between 1997 and 2004. The size of its economy 
gives it the leeway to spend more on arms than 
Pakistan at all times. Its edge over Pakistan in 
technology sharpens this advantage further. It 
can force us to spend ourselves into insolvency.
The world sees the folly of an Indo-Pakistan arms 
race. It wants the two to normalise relations and 
become economically interdependent neighbours. 
Since 2003, the two are actually involved in a 
process of normalisation that is popular in both 
India and Pakistan. Instead of focusing on the 
weapons calculus, more and more opinion-makers in 
South Asia are thinking of alleviating poverty in 
the region and exploring the synergies concealed 
in a cooperative Indo-Pakistan equation. Now that 
the mother of all cataclysms has happened - which 
the world insists on calling "the South Asian 
earthquake" - there is a need in Pakistan to 
shift from the conflictual paradigm and think of 
peace as a struggle against the "external threat" 
from an overly strained environment and economy. *


______


[3]

The Times of India
EDITORIAL

VOICES FROM WOUNDED GUJARAT
by Harsh Mander

In a tribal village Tejgarh in rural Vadodara in 
Gujarat, economic boycott continues vigorously 
against the petty local Muslim traders even 
today. While destroying their small shops in 
2002, a spreading neem tree under which some of 
the shops had sheltered for generations was also 
burnt down.

Arjun, a young adivasi teacher of litera-ture, 
writes a poignant requiem to the fallen mighty 
neem, "You were like the adivasi: Steadfast of 
character and generous of spirit".

In an analogy to the violence by adivasis in 
2002, he goes on, "It was not you who destroyed 
the shops of the Muslims. You were set aflame 
yourself, and fell unknowingly of the shops that 
stood in your shade".

He adds, "I grieved as you burnt, but did nothing 
to douse your fires. Just like the intellectuals 
of my Gujarat". Meanwhile, ordinary survivors 
cope bravely with the unending cata-strophe of a 
hostile government and divided people.

An autorickshaw driver, Munnabhai, recounts his 
encounter with a beautiful young woman, who asks 
him to drive her anywhere, do what he likes with 
her, but give her some money.

On persistent probing, she confides that she was 
widowed by the massacre in 2002, and did not know 
how else to feed her three children. The driver, 
himself a victim of the carnage, gives her all 
the money he has, and weeps a little as he drives 
her home.

Sharief's eyes also well over briefly as he 
recalls the tribulations of his family while 
starting life afresh after they lost their home 
and loved ones in the massacre of 2002 in Naroda 
Patia in Ahmedabad.

"If there is one man who is most responsible for 
our recovery, it is the owner of the factory in 
which my father works. Right from the months that 
we were at the relief camp, the Hindu seth 
ensured that my father got his salary every month.

He kept his factory job vacant, and took him back 
as soon as we moved out from the camp, unlike 
thousands of other Muslims who were retrenched. 
He gave him loans to rebuild our home, and said: 
"Don't bother if you cannot repay". Such stories 
are untold but abound in Gujarat.

Yet simultaneously the dramatic victory in three 
quarters of the seats by the BJP in the recent 
municipal elections in Ahmedabad confirms the 
emergence of Narendra Modi as a modern folk hero 
for the adoring middle classes, testifying to a 
ever-widening engineered communal chasm.

But many bewildered Muslim residents say, "We 
ourselves worked against the Congress. What could 
we do when it put up candidates who had led the 
murdering mobs in 2002".

Just beyond the glitter of commerce and 
festivities in the city, one cons-tantly hits 
against astounding hate. Overheard at a petrol 
pump at Gandhinagar is a Gujarati yuppie on a 
mobile phone to his friend, commenting on the 
recent earthquake, "Good that the world is 
burdened by 30,000 less Muslims".

The mood is similarly drenched in hatred in many 
affected villages. In Mogha in Kheda, for 
instance, statues have been erected for two 
martyrs of Hindutva, killed in the 2002 carnage. 
You explore further, and find that they were 
killed several days after all the Muslims of the 
village were driven out.

The story is that they were probably looting 
within a Muslim home whose residents had fled, 
and unknowingly a mob, meanwhile, had set the 
house on fire. Today, every marriage procession 
and religious yatra in the village makes a detour 
to these two statues to pay homage.

A gentle, ageing science professor in Vadodara, 
whose house was burnt in 2002, is still 
struggling to come to terms with the loneliness 
of betrayal.

"My Hindu friends tell me that they like me a 
lot, because I am almost like a Hindu. They do 
not understand why their saying this causes me 
even more hurt. The Muslims also feel angry when 
I say that we must also search our hearts. I love 
my faith, but we should not believe that ours is 
the only path to paradise".

Well-known activist Girish Patel recalls the 
response of Socrates who said injustice will last 
as long as the person who does not suffer 
injustice, does not feel the same anguish and 
anger as the person who suffers injustice.

The writer is a former IAS officer.

______


[4]  [Book Review]

( an edited version of the below appeared in Indian Express of 20 October 2005)

sacw.net  |  27 October 2005

'REMARKABLE PEREGRINATIONS': THE JOURNEY OF THE JIHAD

by Ananya Vajpeyi

At last, an analysis of a phenomenon that crashed 
into our world on September 11, 2001, and brought 
down the edifices of political certainty. Faisal 
Devji's Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, 
Morality, Modernity (Foundation Books, 2005) is 
probably the first attempt in contemporary 
cultural studies to explain Al-Qaeda's jihad to 
the ordinary reader in terms that do not require 
a deep knowledge of Islamic theology or history, 
but rather, presume only that we live fully in 
the present moment. As if to counter the West's 
mystification of all things Islamic, Devji sets 
the jihad in what he argues is its proper 
context: that of American imperialism, 
globalisation, media, and world-wide 
anti-globalisation movements, not medieval ideas 
of righteous battle retrieved from archaic 
scriptural and legal texts which have little 
relevance in our times.

The current outbreak of the jihad across 
continents, from America to Asia via Europe and 
Africa, has aroused special fear in India, where 
the very term stirs up regionally specific 
historical memories that we are far from 
comfortable dealing with, especially given the 
large and variegated Muslim population of our 
country. It is easy for us conflate the many 
incursions of Islam into the subcontinent in the 
previous millennium, with developments that are 
entirely new, taking place from about the time of 
the fatwa against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic 
Verses (in 1989), an event Devji describes as 
"Islam's first global movement" (p52). But the 
fact is there isn't much of a déja vu here - 
something that would no doubt disappoint Hindu 
fundamentalists, who are hell-bent on seeing 
history repeat itself to render them timeless 
victims of Muslim blood lust. As Devji tries to 
show, the contemporary jihad is a genuine novelty 
in the history of Islam, reconfiguring the very 
meaning of Islam in a way that Western accounts, 
which remain Orientalist in their approach, have 
yet to capture.

The jihad as we know it - "Jihad reloaded", as it 
was aptly called by Omair Ahmad on 
www.openDemocracy.net - has, on Devji's analysis, 
several startling features: one, it is not an 
utopian emancipatory project, linked to the 
political destiny of a nation or set of nations; 
two, it is not geo-politically rooted, 
manifesting itself instead across countries, only 
some of which are fully or even partially Muslim; 
three, it is not derivative of a single, 
coherent, orthodox, authoritative, 
textually-grounded Islamic juridical doctrine of 
holy war; four, its presuppositions are close to 
Samuel Huntington's thesis about the "clash of 
civilizations", placing it inside a three-way 
conflict between the principal monotheistic 
book-based religions of the Middle East - 
Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and five, it is 
a personal ethical performance located in the 
individual, not a group politico-religious 
ideology vested in the entire community. The 
author's eventual claim is that the jihad today 
is a form of ethics rather than a form of 
politics, and that we must recognize it as such 
in order to begin to understand its seemingly 
bizarre and unmanageable effects in a global 
order we are wont to perceive as being primarily 
and overwhelmingly political.

The Landscapes of the Jihad merits a long and 
scholarly review, for which this is not the 
appropriate forum. Suffice it to say the most 
interesting and relevant chapters of the book are 
devoted to the array of symbols and practices of 
the new jihad that are radically mediatic, that 
is to say, impossible to comprehend except in the 
light of the media, including mainly the 
Internet, television and video. (Apparently Devji 
has not yet updated his study to include the 
blogosphere, which is becoming a key site for the 
continuing unfolding of the war in Iraq). In 
examining the undeniable relationship between the 
jihad and the media, Devji's most compelling 
reading, as a cultural critic, is of the jihad' s 
warrior as suicide bomber, or martyr.

Martyrdom, shahadat, he points out, has always 
been etymologically twinned with witnessing, the 
martyr and the witness both being called by the 
same name, shahid. But that so much of the 
jihad's martyrdom now takes place on the 
television screen: this makes witnesses of us 
all, members of a global public. "Martyrdom 
creates a global community because it is 
collectively witnessed in mass media." (p99). 
Besides scenes of war and on-screen acts of 
terror, more extreme imagery, such as videos 
showing the beheading of hostages, and martyrs 
having their own suicides taped: this is the 
jihad's chilling version of reality TV, says 
Devji. The convergence between seeing and dying, 
witnessing and martyrdom, already intensely 
meaningful within Islam, especially in Shi'ism, 
finds a natural affinity with the way the media 
works, increasingly welding news and terror, 
spectacle and death into the same image, and 
image after image, in a bloody series that has 
shown no signs of letting up since 9/11.

Also fascinating is Devji's exposition of Shia 
and Sufi imagery in the way Al-Qaeda leaders 
construct their personae and their activities. 
The centrality of the figure of the martyr, the 
mobilization of the fedayeen (devotees), the 
reference to Osama bin Laden as "Shaykh", the 
non-urban landscapes and backdrops full of caves, 
mountains, ruins and wilderness, the discussions 
of dreams and portents in the writings of 
speeches of the principals, disconnected places 
like Baghdad and Sarajevo, Srinagar and 
Manhattan, Kabul and Grozny that are a 
hodge-podge of peoples and cultures - Devji 
traces all of these elements to diverse 
(mystical, heretical, charismatic and 
alternative) traditions within Islam, that are 
very far from the urban, legalistic, 
architectonic, state-centric and authoritarian 
Sunni faith. Even the ancient cities of Islam's 
original holy lands, he points out - Jerusalem, 
Mecca, Medina, Najaf and Karbala - are no longer 
strongly attached to any territorially-based 
entity, but are rendered cosmopolitan, 
international and universal in character, both by 
the diversity of beliefs and by globalised 
economics. These are now, for good or for ill, 
among the many theatres of the jihad.

What is so refreshing in Devji's work is his 
translation of the jihad into a lexicon that 
makes far better cultural sense to us in South 
Asia than the paranoid and obfuscating, not to 
mention racist, discourses of the West that only 
experiences itself as being under attack, but it 
knows not exactly from whom, or what, or why. 
Better still, his prognosis is not apocalyptic, 
far from it:

Jihad has not always played a prominent role in 
the Muslim past and will not do so in its future. 
However egregious Al-Qaeda's militancy, it is 
like that of any other movement - bound for 
containment, compromise, or defeat. Such violence 
is not even the most important thing about its 
jihad: Al-Qaeda's importance in the long run lies 
not in its pioneering a new form of networked 
militancyŠ but instead in its fragmentation of 
traditional structures of Muslim authority within 
new global landscapes. (xvi).



______


[5]

24 October 2005

BRIDGING THE DIVIDES

SET BACK TO AMITY INITIATIVES IN AYODHYA

by Ram Puniyani

In the otherwise dismal scenario of communal amity one
good initiative by Sant Gyandas of Hanuman Gardhi, the
biggest temple of Ayodhya, had come as a whip of fresh
air. Three years ago he invited the local Muslims for
Roza iftar in the temple premises. He repeated it the
next year as well. Meanwhile to match these sentiments
one Babu bhai from Muslim community took the
initiative of Hanuman chalisa recital on Id Milan. One
Madhuban Das, not to be left behind, went on to
distribute Ram Rahim chadars to people. The Muslim
community which earlier in the wake of the proposed
Kar Seva was planning to abandon Ayodhya out of fear
felt reassured and stayed on. This year, under the
influence of VHP a section of Hanuman Garhi mahants
filed a case in the court that such Roza Iftar is
against the by laws of the temple, and court ruled in
their favor. Also, many a VHP activists sat on a
Dharna in front of Hanuman Garhi to oppose the Muslims
entry into the temple premises for the Roza Iftar
party.

What is the worth of efforts of the likes of Mahant
Gyan Das or various other groups who are trying to
bring different religious communities together through
such festive occasions, through mutual respect for
each other’s sentiments?

A thriving democracy, needs the principles of Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity (community) as the base of its
existence. In India we have seen mauling of these
values under the impact of a politics, which derives
its legitimacy from the religious identity of the
people. With rising pitch of communal violence the
physical and emotional polarization of communities
along religious lines has been taking place. In places
like Mumbai, post 92-93 the Muslim dominated areas
have come to be called a ‘Mini Pakistan’, in Ahmadabad
the Muslim majority area is called, ‘border’ and one
hears that Muslim localities are also being called as
Gaza strip. Post 92-93 Mumbai violence, a huge chunk
of Muslim population living in mixed localities
shifted to places like Mumbra and Jogeshwari, which
are becoming exclusive Muslim areas. Similarly the
builders in previously mixed areas are refusing to
sell the housing units to minorities. In places like
Gujarat the economic boycott of Muslim community
persists in substantial chunk of places.

One was aghast to know about the conversation of two
Hindu women, in Anand; Gujarat, when one said that she
lives in a good and clean locality the other one went
on to say that she lives probably in a better area as
there are no Muslims at all in her area. It is common
place to hear such things like ‘Oh one is good despite
being a Muslim’, in Gujarat.

This Navaratri festival one was pained to hear that in
Indore, the local VHP has put a ban on the entry of
Muslim youth in the Garba dance festival, on the
grounds that Muslim youth will lure away Hindu girls,
‘our girls’. Those using religion on the chessboard of
politics are working overtime at a deep societal level
to create a wedge between the communities. At the same
time the propaganda is promoted to the effect that we
the Hindus go even to the Sufi Dargahs but the Muslims
do not come to our temples. This has been a frequent
question fielded in the National integration workshops
conducted by many of us. The polarization along
religious lines strengthens the communal forces; the
ghettoisation of minorities strengthens the fanatics
of that community and gives a free run to the Mullahs
to dish out their fatwa’s on the community. And the
vicious circle begins.

The democratic nation state can only be based on the
values of Liberty Equality and Fraternity (community).
The national community is the basic pillar of the
democracy. The country fragmented on the lines of
religion or caste can not stay together, cannot
progress. As such also most of the times the pluralism
and diversity are a matter of celebration till the
vested political designs step in. India’s rich
syncretic traditions have seen the boundaries between
religions as the point of meeting of the people and
not as the point of separation. The interaction seeps
into all aspects of social life, religion being one
major component of that. It is keeping this in mind
that Dara Shikoh, who was a scholar of Persian and
Sanskrit, went on to write in his book Majma ul
Baharain that India is a great ocean, the meeting
point of two seas, Hinduism and Islam. The same is
manifested in our religious traditions (Bhakti and
Sufi), in our food, dress, architecture, music, dance,
literature and what have you. This is what was
envisaged by founding fathers of our nation as the
ground on which India was to stand. This was the base
of our national movement. This was in contrast to the
ideas of communal stream, Muslim League (Urdu, Muslim,
Pakistan) and Hindu Mahasabha-RSS (Hindi, Hindu
Hindustan). The latter tendencies were rejected by the
freedom movement, by the people of India.

With ascendance of Hindu right, the exclusivist
politics based on dominant culture is being asserted
and brought to the fore. The present trend of
polarization, ghettoization is seriously undermining
the National integration. It will breed in to divisive
trends in sections of society. We need to choose as to
in which direction we have to go, direction of the
efforts like that of Mahant Gyandas which can bring
the communities together or in the direction of VHP
associates who under one or the other pretext want to
exercise the exclusionist politics. The Mahant, rather
than getting discouraged by the court ruling has
decided to take out Ram-Rahim yatra, which surely is
the best way to continue his earlier initiative at
Hanuman Garhi. One can just compliment the efforts of
Mahant Gyandas, Babu bhai and their likes and hope
that their tribe increases.


______

[6] ANNOUNCEMENTS


(i)

Asia Society and Citigroup invite you to a lecture with:

Asma Jahangir
UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief,
and Chairperson, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan

Towards Democracy: Pakistan at the Crossroads

Thursday, October 27, 2005
  6:30 pm - 8:00 pm (Reception Follows)
  Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street, New York City

Leading human rights advocate in Pakistan, Asma Jahangir, will address
issues related to the law and judiciary in Pakistan.  Jahangir will
focus her talk on the role of tribal councils in Pakistan and their
relationship to the state.  She will discuss the critical case of
Mukhtaran Bibi whose gang rape on orders of a tribal council in 2002
inspired international outrage, putting the legal institutions in
Pakistan under intense scrutiny.  She will explore the status of human
rights, in particular women's rights, in Pakistan and the prospects for
a transition away from the conditions that lead to failed governance.
These and other pertinent issues related to state, civil society and
human rights in Pakistan will be the focus of the evening's discussion.
Mahnaz Ispahani, Adjunct Senior Fellow for South Asia at the Council on
Foreign Relations will moderate.  Part of the Citigroup Series on Asian
Women Leaders, which features women at the forefront of effecting social
change in Asia.

$5 Students w/ ID   $7 Members/NGO   $12 Nonmembers
Advance registration is strongly recommended.
For tickets, contact the Asia Society Box Office at 212-517-ASIA, or
send complete information by fax at 212-517- 8315, or email
BoxOffice at AsiaSociety.org.  Credit card required for advance
registration or reservation.  Cancellation required at least 24 hours in
advance to avoid charges.  Reservations that are not cancelled/claimed
will be charged.

______


(ii)

Seminar on India's Independent Foreign Policy

Constitution Club on 28th October, 2005 from 10.00 AM
to 4.00 PM

The Committee on India's Independent Foreign Policy is
happy to invite for a seminar on 28th October The
Seminar will be held in the Constitution Club on 28th
October, 2005 from 10.00 AM to 4.00 PM. It is open to
all.

A distinguished set of speakers will discuss various
implications of India'’s Foreign Policy in the light of
the recent developments - the IAEA Iran vote and the
Indo-US Agreement in July. They consist of former
diplomats /civil servants such as Muchkund Dubey,
Hamid Ansari, Satish Chandra, S.P.Shukla, senior
journalists and academics such as N.Ram, Kuldip
Nayyar, Aijaz Ahmad, Siddharth Varadarajan, Achin
Vanaik, and experts such as A.Gopalkrishnan (former
Chairman, Atomic Energy Regulatory Board), etc.
The Iran vote in which India broke ranks with the
non-aligned countries is symptomatic of the UPA
Government's strategic perception that an independent
foreign policy has no place in this uni-polar world.
The country has been committed to this course without
any semblance of a public discussion. It all started
with the bland assurances of the Government that
India's foreign policy will not be affected by the
Indo-US agreement. But it soon ended with the current
position that amounts to making procurement of nuclear
technology and fuel supplies from US, the overriding
objective of the Indian foreign policy. The process
has been characterised by a total lack of
transparency.  Nor has Government considered it
necessary  to  spell out its concept "national
interest".
The impact of Indo-US joint agreement in now clearly
visible. It is no longer a matter of conjecture: the
discussions in the US Congress have made it clear that
if India wanted the lifting of sanctions in high
technology and nuclear areas, it would have to pay the
price and tow the US line on Iran. India's foreign
policy is now hostage to the US. Various arguments are
being advanced to justify this course, such as India's
need for nuclear energy being far more important than
oil and gas imports from West Asia. This is at a time
when the US itself does not regard nuclear energy as a
major source for the near future and is focussed far
more on West Asia for its own energy needs.
The seminar will address the various facets of the
global scenario within which India's foreign and
energy policies are being constructed and provide the
basis of a vigorous national debate on India's foreign
policy directions.
Justice VR Krishna Iyer 	Shri SP Shukla 	MK
Bhadrakumar 	Seema Mustafa


Session I: 10:00 -11:30 am
India's Iran IAEA Vote: Implications for Foreign
Policy

SP Shukla	Chairperson
MK Bhadrakumar	   Seminar Architecture and Background

Hamid Ansari	   Balancing India's National Interest
Satish Chandra 	   Implications of the Iran Vote
N.Ram	   Compromising India's Foreign Policy

Tea Break

Session I Contd.: 11:45- 1.15 pm
Siddharth Varadarajan  Is Iran in Violation of NPT?
	   India's Energy Options
A.Gopalkrishnan	   NPT and the Nuclear Fuel Cycle
Seema Mustafa	   US Congress and India-Iran Relations


Lunch Break

Session II: 2:00- 4:00 pm
Indo-US Strategic Relations and Non-Alignment
Kuldip Nayyar	Chairperson
Muchkund Dubey	   Non-alignment in a Unipolar World
Aijaz Ahmed	   Divergence of India and US Strategic
Interests in West Asia
Achin Vanaik	   US and Its Strategic Vision
Akbar Khalili 		  Iran US Relations
Saeed Mirza	   Succumbing to the Empire

_______


(iiii)


Ist India International Women Film Festival 05 in 
cooperation with the Film Federation of India & 
Federation of Film Society & Indian Motion 
Pictures' Association at Kolkata from 12th Dec to 
18th Dec' 05. Our main venue for the festival is 
Swabhumi Heritage Plaza, Priya cinema, Max 
mueller Bhawan & Cinema 89.

Our objective is to give boost to promising women 
film directors working independently all over the 
world. Because film is no longer a mode of 
entertainment only rather an internally acclaimed 
visual text capable of exposing all that lies 
behind a transparent rendering of the real film 
festivals have become an indispensable event for 
those involved in this media.Ist India Women Film 
Festival, first ever in India & second in Asia 
after Japan, is expected to highlight the budding 
talents that remains otherwise unnoticed & their 
experimental works.

[. . . ]

Because the time is too short for us we are not 
going for any selection procedure this year. All 
the films have to reach us within 15th November 
05. If you agreed to participate please send us 
immediately the title & other details of the 
films.

Contact:

Shyamali Deb Banerjee
Artistic Director
IIWFF
55B, Mirza Ghalib Street, Saberwal House
Kolkata - 16.
Tel :09830197447, +91 33 5535 7166, 3022 3289.2227 1144, 22271288
Fax:3022 3288, e-mail:iiwff at yahoo.com


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