SACW | 29 Nov. 2005

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | 29 Nov, 2005 | Dispatch No. 2181


[1] Pakistan: Stop vandalism in the name of sanctity of Quran! (Edit;,
Daily Times)
[2] Nepal: government shuts down Radio Sagarmatha
[3] Pakistan-India: Cooperation we can do without (Praful Bidwai)
[4] Pakistan: Fahmida Riaz in conversation with Rakshanda Jalil
[5] India: Text of Declaration at the CNDP Convention in Lucknow,
November 26-27, 2005
[6] The rightward lurch of India’s Congress party (Jawed Naqvi)

___


[1]

The Daily Times
November 28, 2005 	

EDITORIAL: STOP VANDALISM IN THE NAME OF SANCTITY OF QURAN!

The Punjab chief minister, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, has visited Sangla
Hill to see the evidence of the vandalism committed against churches
there and ordered a high-level judicial inquiry to get at the root of
what really transpired on November 12 after an alleged desecration of
the Quran. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who recently
visited Pakistan, expressed concern over the attacks in his meetings
with President General Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and
the minister for religious affairs, Ijaz ul Haq. The Christian community
in Sangla Hill has demanded that the government institute an inquiry at
the High Court level and has refused to remove the debris from the site
of the attack. Since the local administration seems to have been
involved in the incident, the chief minister had to remove some officers
who had shirked their responsibilities. He has done the right thing by
promising a high-level inquiry.

The destruction of the churches in Sangla Hill has hurt Pakistan’s image
at a time when it needs positive publicity abroad. Expectedly, the Urdu
press has given the outrage little coverage and has expressed no
concerned editorial opinion about it. Equally, the Christian community
in Sangla Hill has remained quiet, most probably out of fear of reaction
or on advice from the government. However, they have made sufficiently
credible reports on the incident to the church authorities in Europe.
They seem to agree about the origin of the trouble. Yousaf Masih was in
the habit of gambling with a Muslim, Kalu Sunyara. After winning from
Kalu, Yousaf Masih wanted to walk away but Kalu collared him in the
street and asked him to play on, but he refused. He was thereafter
accused of having torched a house set aside for the abandoned pages of
the Holy Quran to prevent them from being trampled.

Under the new procedure established by the government, a case of
desecration of the Quran is registered only after consulting the
district police officer (DPO); but in the case of Sangla Hill the SHO
registered the case and proceeded to torture Yousaf Masih’s brothers
after they failed to lead him to wherever he was. (He was eventually
apprehended.) The Holy Spirit Church was attacked a day later, on
November 12, 2005, after announcements from the mosques asking people to
gather “for discussion”. Soon, the city nazim was leading the crowd. A
mob of around 2,500 people holding sticks, stones, big hammers and
bottles of chemicals, attacked the church compound. They raised cries of
“Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and “Asai kuttay hai-hai” (Down with the
Christian dogs). By the end of the day, three churches, a mission-run
school, two hostels and several houses belonging to the Christian
community had been vandalised by the mob.

The tehsil of Sangla Hill is situated in the newly created district of
Nankana Sahib and lies 130 kilometres from Lahore. The area has a
population of 150,000 of which 12,000 are Christian. Among the
Christians, the Catholics are the overwhelming majority, while the rest
belong to various Protestant denominations. The parish of Sangla Hill
was set up in 1914, out of the Mariamabad parish territory. (Note the
English name of the tehsil.) Even in 1937 there were around 4,000
Catholics in the parish, who have now grown to around 1,800 families.
The parish comprises 183 villages, many of which have small chapels,
while the main parish church of the Holy Spirit was constructed and
blessed in April 1951. Muslim-Christian tension was rare in the area,
but conditions have begun to change after the escalation of radical
thinking among the local Muslim community. In one recent case in the
neighbourhood (May 9, 2005 in the village of Sathiali Kalan) when the
two communities clashed, resulting in the burning of a chapel, the
police rounded up five Christians (and no Muslims) who are still “in
custody” without trial.

While the Punjab government has shown initiative in preventing the
Sangla Hill incident from becoming a wave of province-wide intolerance,
Lahore’s clergy has become active too. Unfortunately, it has taken a
position that will shock the world. Maulana Dr Sarfraz Naeemi, secretary
general of Tanzimat Madaris Diniya, has said that the government had
paid scant attention to the desecration of the Quran but “rounded up 88
Muslim citizens of Sangla Hill on the false charges of destroying the
Christian churches”. He declared that the “Christian clergy had set the
churches on fire after the desecration incident and should be put behind
bars and not allowed to leave the country”. He warned that he was taking
a procession to Sangla Hill to get the Muslims released from jail. He
protested religion minister Ijaz ul Haq’s statement that the Muslims had
destroyed the churches. He said that the Quran “library” was burnt by
the Christian clergy with the help of a special incendiary powder they
first used in Shantinagar in 1997. (Shantinagar was destroyed by Muslim
fanatics on the pretext of desecration of the Quran.)

Other rather dubious “Khatm-e-Nabuwwat” organisations have been
mobilised by the vandals of Sangla Hill to issue dire threats. The
situation is simmering. Therefore there is need to hold a High
Court-level judicial inquiry into the details of the Sangla Hill
incident and get at the truth quickly. It should be interesting to find
out why the procedure set by the government under the desecration law
(295-B) was not followed by the police authorities and why the nazim had
decided to take “direct action” without proper judicial procedure?
During the past 12 months Muslims and non-Muslims have been equally the
victims of such laws in the country particularly in Punjab. A lot of
damage has been sustained by public property and bodily harm by innocent
citizens. In some incidents the police is known to have joined the mobs.
Since the buck stops with the chief minister, it is time he showed his
commitment to General Pervez Musharraf’s plea for enlightened moderation
in no uncertain terms. *


___


[2]


http://www.kantipuronline.com/kolnews.php?&nid=58346   KOL Report

NEPAL: GOVERNMENT SHUTS DOWN RADIO SAGARMATHA

KATHMANDU, Nov 27 - In what looks like yet another brazen assault on the
free press, the government closed down Radio Sagarmatha, the first
community radio in South Asia, Sunday night, arresting five employees
including journalists and technicians

A police team led by Inspector Bishwa Khadka stormed into the Master
Control Room of the radio station at around 8:55 p.m. today, forcefully
seizing transmission equipment and detaining Durga Karki, Rajendra Rijal,
Dipak Babu Aryal, Deepak Raj Pandey and Punya Bhandari.

They were taken to the District Police Office, Lalitpur.

Police, however, released Durga Karki at around 10:30 p.m.

It is learnt that the government raided Radio Sagarmatha for "attempting to
carry a BBC Nepali service relay broadcast that included the interview of
Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda."

The interview with Prachanda dealt with the recent understanding between
the political parties and the Maoist rebels to work towards the resolution
of the conflict in the country.

Radio Sagarmatha, however, did not carry the interview.

The police team left two separate letters from the Ministry of Information
and Communications at the radio station, one asking the radio station to
stop operation until further notice and the other asking to hand over
transmission equipment.

In one of the letters, the government has accused the radio station of
"airing programmes that encourage terrorists and terrorism against Section
15 (d) and (i) of the National Broadcasting Act- 2049 BS and the licence
provided to the radio station."

Chairman of the radio station, Laxman Upreti has termed the government
action as "a dagger to the heart of the radio revolution in Nepal."

"Nepal has been the South Asian country pioneering the role of FM radio in
informing the public and Radio Sagarmatha has been the vanguard of this
movement. The action by the government is a dagger to the heart of our
radio revolution," he said in a statement issued by the radio station.

"At this point, we are on the lookout for our staff taken in by the
authorities. At this hour of crisis, we seek the support of all who value
freedom of speech and expression in Nepal," the statement further quoted
Upreti as saying.

BBC relay transmission suspended on Radio Nepal

Meanwhile, the government has also stopped airing the relay transmission of
BBC World Service from Radio Nepal.

Authorities have furnished no reason for the action.

"According to our information, seven other radio stations around the
country were also prevented from carrying the BBC Nepali Service feed by
the security forces," the statement further said.

___


[3]

“The News International”
November 26, 2005

COOPERATION WE CAN DO WITHOUT

by Praful Bidwai

Exactly one week ago, 24 people, including eight women, from the Indian
part of Kashmir walked the Kishanganga suspension bridge at Teetwal and
crossed over into Pakistani Kashmir to meet their relatives. This was
the first-ever movement of civilians across the Line of Control (LoC) on
foot. Seven months ago, passengers began crossing the LoC by the
Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus.

Teetwal is one of the five points at the LoC cleared by the Indian and
Pakistani governments for civilian movement after prolonged, at times
tough, negotiations following the Muzaffarabad earthquake. Despite the
six-week delay, this development is of no mean significance. It needed
real cooperation, including the construction of a bridge by the
Pakistani army in record time.

According to reports, over 2,000 applications are pending on either side
of the border for transit across the LoC. The civilian movement is meant
to continue indefinitely, although it will be subject to clearances by
both sides and remain vulnerable to their obstructive,
forever-suspicious bureaucracies.

This encouraging development comes amidst India’s participation (modest,
at just $25 million) in the international relief effort for Pakistan’s
earthquake-affected people and continuing people-to-people contacts,
increasing trade, and other forms of bilateral cooperation between the
two countries. Such cooperation is especially welcome now that the
dialogue process has slowed down. Some of the growing people-to-people
contacts pertain to medical tourism—Pakistani patients visiting India
for medical treatment, especially fairly sophisticated surgical
operations at relatively low costs.

However, there are reports of a growing reverse movement too—Indian
patients visiting Pakistan for kidney transplants. This is an
obnoxiously unethical form of “cooperation” that both societies can do
without. Here’s the background to the growing commerce in human organs.

The latest issue of “Outlook” magazine (Nov 28) carries an extremely
disturbing story on kidney tourism. More and more Indians with end-stage
renal disease (ESRS) are travelling to cities like Lahore and Rawalpindi
to get kidney transplants done. When they return, they become walking
advertisements for the Pakistani clinics which do such transplants. At
times, the hospitals and doctors concerned reduce the transplant charges
in return for the kidney recipients agreeing to spread the word and
encourage other patients to go to Pakistan.

The kidney donors are mostly poor and highly indebted people who earn a
maximum of Rs 100,000 for each transplant. “A big part” of the money,
says Outlook, goes to middlemen who fix the deal. The clinics stand to
get rich by anything between $7,500 and $10,000.

Both “push” and “pull” factors drive the India-Pakistan kidney bazaar.
The push factor lies in the increasingly tougher controls being imposed
in India on kidney donations by non-relatives. Beginning with the 1980s,
India, like Pakistan and the Philippines, became a major source of
kidneys in the global market for organs. Thousands of poor people were
robbed of their kidneys (at times surreptitiously) or lured into parting
with them for small sums of money. The business flourished thanks to
unscrupulous doctors, greedy private clinics, and cynical middlemen.

When the racket acquired the dimensions of a huge scandal, the Central
government passed the Transplantation of Human Organs Act in 1994, under
public pressure. The Act banned kidney donations by non-relatives. But
it left two huge loopholes. One, its enforcement was left to the states,
which were to set up Authorisation Committees (ACs) to approve
transplants. And two, Section 9(3) permits kidney transplants provided
the donor gives the organ not for money, but “out of love and affection”
for the recipient.

The states were tardy in the Act’s implementation. Many unethical
medical practitioners used the first loophole, though what might be
called “arbitraging”: they would move patients from states with strict
regulations to those without ACs. But the worst abuses involved
corruption or inefficiency in the ACs.

The kidney racket in India hasn’t quite ended. (In fact, at the upper
end, it has been internationalised. Donors are flown to service rich
patients in the West.) But it has become increasingly difficult to get
approval from the ACs. Sometimes, it takes months, even years. Scores of
unscrupulous doctors have been booked under the Act, some of them in the
Indian Punjab.

Punjab has since set up an AC in each district, headed by its deputy
commissioner, and including representatives of NGOs, doctors, the police
and an advocate. With stricter regulations in force, patients with ESRS
have increasingly started looking across the border—to Pakistan.

The pull factor is no less significant. Pakistan has not yet enacted a
law to ban kidney donations by non-relatives. There is, besides, a huge,
virtually unlimited supply of potential donors, like in India. These are
wretchedly poor people often reduced to destitution by collapsing public
healthcare services, periodic declines in agricultural incomes, or
natural calamities. Like in India, there is no shortage of doctors and
obscenely profitable private hospitals who see nothing wrong in acting
as “honest brokers”, who do a “two-way” job between needy patients with
kidney failure and potential donors. In fact, Dr Ahsan Masood of Masood
Hospital in Lahore said this to Outlook in so many words.

Absent here is any notion of informed consent—a central ethical tenet in
any activity that involves a risk on the part of the donor. Equally
absent is the recognition that kidney-sellers put themselves at high
risk and often suffer a range of ill-effects.

The long-term risk involved in losing a kidney is, potentially,
unacceptably high should the donor develop problems with the remaining
kidney. Generally, the health risk is enhanced because unethical
transplants are done in a hush-hush manner and without adequate quality
control. Mandatory follow-up, including blood pressure and urea checks,
is usually given the go-by. The donor becomes anonymous.

A study, Economic and Health Consequences of Selling a Kidney in India,
published in the “Journal of American Medical Association” in October
2002, surveyed 305 kidney donors in suburban Chennai. It found that
their income declined by 67 percent; 75 percent of them were still in
debt; and the health of 83 percent deteriorated.

The recipients don’t necessarily do far better. As is well-known, a
patient with a kidney donated by a total stranger is significantly
likelier to develop intolerance to it than one with a kidney donated by
a close relative. Besides, fewer than 3 percent of the Indians who need
transplants actually get them. More than 90 percent die because they
can’t even afford dialysis. The results are unlikely to be very
different in Pakistan.

It is imperative that Pakistan outlaw this disgusting trade in organs.
This could be best done with Indian cooperation. One necessary clause in
any future law that Pakistan enacts must be an insistence on a medical
treatment visa, not just a tourist or pilgrimage visa, for anyone who
travels for medical reasons. A second is a kidney transplant clearance
by the authorities in the country of origin, based on ethical
considerations and the requirement of informed consent.

There is a simple solution to the kidney bazaar problem: cadaveric
transplants after brain-stem death. We need to reform our organ registry
systems, and build up our capacities to harvest organs through effective
cadaver programmes. But in no case should we condone or permit the
selling of kidneys.—end—


___


[4]

Literary Review - The Hindu
Nov 06, 2005

IN CONVERSATION

'There is something sacred about art'

Rakshanda Jalil

Fahmida Riaz, Pakistani poet, on what it means to be a woman, a poet and
a socially conscious person.

"What feminism means for me is simply that women, like men, are complete
human beings with limitless possibilities."



Different frameworks: Fahmida Riaz does not think of herself as a rebel.

Everywhere your command is supreme
Except over this woman impure
No prayer crosses her lips
No humility touches her brow.

As though it isn't difficult enough being a Pakistani woman poet, if you
also happen to be a feminist, a progressive, an iconoclast and a
passionate crusader for human rights, life, obviously, is none too easy.
But Fahmida Riaz, who defies easy descriptions and repressive regimes
with the same nonchalant ease, is used to paying the price for her
defiance. A voice to reckon with in the world of Urdu literature, she
has a substantial body of work. Her poetry collections include Patthar
ki Zaban, Badan Dareeda, Dhoop, Kya Tum Poora Chand Na Dekh Paaoge,
Hamrakab and Aadmi ki Zindagai. She has published several collections of
short stories and novels such as Godavari, set in India and Zinda Bahar
Lane, based on Bangladesh, translations from Sindhi poetry as well as
some marvellously nuanced prose writings such as Zinda Bahar — a
travelogue-cum-autobiography-cum-history of the Indian subcontinent. She
was given the Himmett-Hellman award by Human Rights Watch, New York, in
1997. She was in Delhi recently to attend a seminar on Progressive
Writers' Movement at Jamia Millia Islamia. Excerpts from an interview...

Has the rebel inside you mellowed?

I never thought of myself as a rebel. A poet, a writer has a different
mental framework. One writes what one feels strongly about. I feel
strongly about so many things even now. But with the passage of time one
discovers certain aspects to even old notions. One is less stubbornly
sure. Take religion, for instance. Earlier, I thought it was a human
invention. Now I tend to think, may be it was a discovery.

Do you regard yourself as a feminist?

Very much so. But feminism has so many interpretations. What it means
for me is simply that women, like men, are complete human beings with
limitless possibilities. They have to achieve social equality, much like
the Dalits or the Black Americans. In the case of women, it is so much
more complex. I mean, there is the right to walk on the road without
being harassed. Or to be able to swim, or write a love poem, like a man
without being considered immoral. The discrimination is very obvious and
very subtle, very cruel and always inhuman.

A woman, a poet, a socially conscious person living in a society that
has more than its share of repressive regimes — how do you cope with
this triple whammy? Does one or the other of these cave in?

I think all these attributes that you give me so generously, thanks for
these compliments, emanate from one another. They exist as a whole. So
if one caves in, the others also go with it. I learnt this when I lived
in India. It is a wonderful Indian philosophical formulation that the
layers of existence are so rooted in one another that if we change one
the others also change.

Let's talk a little about your poems themselves... Some of your most
ideologically driven poems are also some of the most beautiful, most
poignant among your oeuvre. How do you manage this co-mingling, this
coming together of ideology and poetry?

Are they? Thanks. I suppose one should be totally sincere in one's art,
and uncompromising. There is something sacred about art that cannot take
violation. One should read extensively to polish expression. I read
Platts' Urdu-Hindi to English Dictionary like a book of poems. I love words.

I am struck by the use of Hindi in your nazms. Living in Pakistan, where
and how did you pick up Hindi? Was it also a deliberate decision to not
use the more stylised, literary, Persianised equivalents preferred by
earlier poets?

Well, since we live in Sindh, I thought we should try to bring Urdu
closer to Sindhi. It was also some kind of nostalgia. But then I got all
these words from early Urdu poetry and modern poets like Miraji. I could
not read Hindi before I lived here and that was in 1981. All the Hindi
diction poems were written before that. But I use Persian and Arabic
words liberally when I want to. I think that is the joy of Urdu.
Whichever way, it remains Urdu.

Your collection, Badan Dareeda, created a furore because of its
uninhibited exploration of female sexuality. Is there anything in that
collection that you would re-write now, or would you write in the same
unabashed way?

Do you mean in the same shameless way? (laughs). I think I may yet have
something to say in that direction. Writing is easy. No problem there.
Afterwards you face the music. Well, I seem to have survived through all
that. The furore dies down after a while. The poem lives on.

Can a poet, or a creative writer, truly make a difference to society, to
the way people think or the way governments work?

Everything makes a difference. It may not be immediately perceptible.
How else do you think society changes?

Rakhshanda Jalil is Media Coordinator, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.


____


[5]

TEXT OF DECLARATION AT THE CNDP (COALITION FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT AND
PEACE) CONVENTION IN LUCKNOW, NOVEMBER 26-27, 2005

1. The CNDP (UP Chapter) categorically opposes the US attempt to
victimize Iran for exercising it's sovereign right to have full
control over it's civilian nuclear fuel cycle. In this context the
CNDP condemns India's vote alongside the US at the September 2005
IAEA governing body meeting in support of a resolution threatening
Iran's future referral to the UN Security Council for the possible
imposition of sanction on Iran.

2. The CNDP opposes the development and possession of nuclear weapons
everywhere and by any country. The UP Chapter of the CNDP declares
the following:

   a. India having carried out nuclear tests in May 1998 provoking
Pakistan to do the same has no moral right to call for global or
regional disarmament elsewhere while retaining it's own nuclear
arsenal. The UP chapter of the CNDP therefore calls for the
establishment of a South Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone inclusive of
India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka.
   b. The UP Chapter of the CNDP also calls for the unconditional
establishment of a Middle Eastern Weapons of Mass Destruction Free
Zone (MEWMDFZ). This obviously includes nuclear weapons and
incorporates among the countries in the region, both Iran and Israel.
We demand that India declare its unequivocal support to this proposal
irrespective of any objections by the US, Israel or any other country
in or outside the region.
   c. The CNDP calls on all the nuclear weapon powers to set up along
with the non-nuclear weapon states an international conference to
immediately initiate the process of global nuclear disarmament
through verifiable steps of steady and cumulative nuclear disarmament
carried out by all nuclear weapon states.

3. Since a military potential and dual-use capacity is inherent in
all civilian nuclear energy programmes, there is a vital need to
establish complete transparency in the functioning of all such
programmes everywhere. The UP Chapter of CNDP therefore opposes al
selective and hypocritical approaches (eg as in the case of Iran) in
this respect and calls for the establishment of a universally
applicable, multilateral treaty aimed at ensuring such complete and
global transparency in the civilian nuclear energy programmes of all
countries, including those of the nuclear weapon states, de jure (the
P-5) or de facto (India, Pakistan, Israel). An international and
impartial agency not beholden to or manipulable by any country or
group of countries must be set up as part of the terms of such an
international treaty to carry out the vital and necessary functions
of global monitoring , verification, recording and publicity.

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

Sandeep Pandey/Arundhati Dhuru, CNDP, 9415022772, ashaashram at yahoo.com
Utkarsh Sinha, CNDP UP Chapter, 94150 27476, skutkarsh at gmail.com

II.

ONSITE REPORT: Day I of CNDP Convention
DailySouthAsian
***************

The first UP State Convention of Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament
and Peace was inaugurated today in Lucknow. The Inaugural session
discussed the dangers of emergence of a hegemonic military power.
Achin Vanaik, Professor of Political Science, Delhi University ,
informed the gathering that there were more military bases of the US
in the post cold war era. Other speakers included Anil Choudhary,
Chittranjan Singh and Sandeep Pandey. Arundhati Dhuru moderated the
session.

The second session discussed the India's Iranian dilemma in the
context of the Indo-US Nuclear deal. Qamar Agha, the middle East
expert said that during his recent visit to Iran he discovered that
Iranians felt let down by India, after India voted against Iran at
the IAEA meeting. India is adopting the same double standards that it
used to accuse US of before it tested it's nuclear weapons. India,
having forced it's way into the elite nuclear club, is now telling
Iran not to go ahead with it's nuclear power programmes.
Tomorrow the delegates of CNDP convention will protest against the
recent Indo-US Nuclear deal by staging a demonstration at the Sardar
patel St atue, near GPO at Hazratganj. The CNDP stands by Iran in the
politics of US dominance over Iran but demands creation of Nuclear
Weapon free zone in middle East. The CNDP also demands creation of a
multi lateral non-partisan monitoring agency for nuclear energy
programmes world over.


____

[6]

Dawn
28 November 2005

THE RIGHTWARD LURCH OF INDIA’S CONGRESS PARTY

by Jawed Naqvi

IN GEORGE ORWELL’S fable about the dissipation of the Bolshevik
revolution, pigs play the role of ideological rabble-rousers. By the
time the book ends the pigs, however, acquire the deportment of the very
human beings they had once exhorted the other animals living on The
Animal Farm to overthrow.

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The
creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from
pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

The drift in India’s mainstream politics today smacks of similar
betrayals. When everyone’s thoughts were riveted to the defeat of Lalu
Prasad Yadav in Bihar last week, a momentous change took place in the
western state of Maharashtra. A turncoat leader of the Hindu fascist
Shiv Sena was leading the Congress party, which he had joined, to a
surprise triumph in a state by-election.

Narayan Rane, who till early 2005 was the leader of the opposition in
Maharashtra and a prominent Shiv Sena leader, took a dig at Sena chief
Bal Thackeray, saying “his presence in Malvan for campaigning increased
my vote share by 10 to 15 per cent and their candidate had to forfeit
his deposit”.

Once a blue-eyed boy of Thackeray, Rane claimed Shiv Sena chief was
doing a ‘fine job’ of winding up the organization which is fast on the
wane. He said Congress president Sonia Gandhi was happy with the victory
and had promised to visit his constituency in Konkan in February next year.

Earlier, the Congress party had inducted a powerful rightarm of
Tahckeray, Chhagan Bhujbal. More recently Sanjay Nirupam, another Shiv
Sena rebel, joined the Congress amid fanfare despite opposition from
secular aides of Sonia Gandhi, including the late movie star and sports
minister Sunil Dutt.

A couple of years ago, the Congress split the Bharartiya Janata Party in
Gujarat. Former Gujarat chief minister Shankar Singh Vaghela, schooled
all his life with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, was made in charge of
the Congress party in the state. He has remained president of the
Gujarat Congress ever since.

Only a few years ago, the right-wing Hindu BJP had split a weak and
vulnerable Congress in Uttar Pradesh, using the breakaway legislators to
shore up a wafer-thin majority in the state assembly. Of course, many
Indians do not see much difference between the Congress party and the
BJP. Actually, a senior member of BJP’s think tank confessed to me
recently that on foreign policy and economic issue the two parties held
almost identical views.

In fact, if the Congress and BJP join hands in parliament today they
would have a thin majority with 280 seats, seven more than needed.

This majority may not of course hold in the next elections as regional
parties assert their role even more forcefully. A recent village-level
panchayat election in Uttar Pradesh saw the Dalit party of former chief
minister Maywati making a clean sweep, leaving both the BJP and the
Congress quite pulverized.

For the moment at the federal level, the Congress is leaning on the
support of the communist-led Left Front to run a ragtag alliance of
convenience. But it is simultaneously playing footsy with its
traditional right-wing flank, which now includes former rabble-rousers
of the Hindu communalist groups.

However, communalism does not seem to be the immediate objective for the
Congress. A right-wing consolidation has industrial applications too.
Shiv Sena was founded and used by the Congress in the 1960s to break up
communist trade unions in Mumbai.

The spadework for the formation of the Shiv Sena had started with the
launching of the Marathi weekly Marmik by Bal Thackeray on August 13,
1960, just three months after the formation of the state of Maharashtra
on May 1, 1960. The publication of the first issue of Marmik,
significantly, took place at the hands of the first chief minister of
Maharashtra and a top Congress leader, Y. B. Chavan.

Since then the Shiv Sena has systematically targeted different sections
of minorities in a cynical attempt to build its mass support. Such
minority targets have included non-Maharashtrians, Muslims and Dalits.

However, anti-Communism has been the most consistent plank of the Shiv
Sena ever since its inception. It is this aspect that has ensured it the
firm support of big business. One of the defining moments of the Sena’s
ideological thrust came in 1975 when it wholeheartedly supported Indira
Gandhi’s emergency rule.

The induction of Shiv Sena and BJP politicians, not necessarily bereft
of their ideological baggage, into the Congress appears to be of a piece
with the rightward drift of India’s oldest secular party. Is it
preparing to eject the leftist baggage, perhaps to recast itself into a
new ideology in the manner of the Labour Party of Britain? The likeness
in domestic and foreign policies of both compels a comparison.

The Shiv Sena has always been under the authoritarian grip of its
demagogic chief who has never disguised his contempt for democracy and
adulation of dictatorship. Thackeray has publicly glorified Adolf Hitler
and Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse. There must be something
seriously compelling for Sonia Gandhi to welcome its most rabid
rightwing leaders into the Congress fold. We’ll reserve judgment and
watch the happenings in parliament and outside, hoping that the
denouement of our fable doesn’t turn into a catastrophe.


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Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
SACW archive is available at: bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.