SACW | 9 March 2006 | South Asia to Glow; Bombs in Banaras; Hindutva defeated on CA textbooks; Drug trials in India

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | 9 March, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2229

Contents:

[1] A new South Asian order in the making (Sherry Rehman)
[2] Indo US Nuclear Accord: Anatomy of an Agreement (Vijay Prashad)
[3] India: Varanasi Blasts: How Opportune? How Ominous? (I.K.Shukla)
[4] Defeat of Hindutva attempts to saffronize Californian textbooks
(Michael Witzel)
[5] India: A Nation of Guinea Pigs (Jennifer Kahn)
[6] India: Banaras Blasts - Statement by All India Secular Forum
[7] New Publication: 'Minorities & Police In India' Edited by Dr. Asghar
Ali Engineer & Amarjit S. Narang
[8] Event Announcement(s):
(i) 'Between Empire and Globalization:  Reading the Present through
Indian Feminisms' (Univ Pennsylvania, March 24)
(ii) Sixth South Asian Orientation Course In Human Rights And Peace
Studies, 2006


____________________________________


[1]


Dawn (Pakistan)
March 9, 2006

A NEW SOUTH ASIAN ORDER IN THE MAKING

by Sherry Rehman

DESPITE the concessions made by Pervez Musharraf for Washington,
President Bush’s approach to South Asia indicates very clearly a major
shift in US policy, refracted most sharply by his visit to the region.
Not only has US policy de-linked India and Pakistan as meriting some
semblance of parity, India seems to be getting the lion’s share of
Bush’s attention as well as his administration’s favour.

This is as much a reflection of India’s pull as the largest democracy in
the world as it is about attracting Indian markets or about countering
the growing weight of China in Asia as well as the global stage.

First of all, the Bush administration sees India not only as a
functioning democracy, it regards New Delhi as a stable manager of
conflict and transition. Delhi’s capacity to absorb internal dissent
without significant threats to central stability is quoted widely as a
key factor attracting US state and private investor confidence.

Secondly, the scope of the new partnership between the US and India is
being seen not only at a regional level, but as embracing a larger
global strategic vision. If there are any doubts about the limits of the
military partnership between the two, it has been eliminated by the
unusually explicit statement issued by the US defence department hailing
the deal as opening a path for more American-Indian military
cooperation. “Where only a few years ago, no one would have talked about
the prospects for a major US-India defence deal, today the prospects are
promising, whether in the realm of combat aircraft, helicopters,
maritime patrol aircraft or naval vessels,” the statement said.

Although resistance is expected from China, it is probable to expect
Britain, France, Germany and possibly Russia to fall into line with the
agreement, in part because it would clear the way for them to sell
nuclear fuel, reactors and equipment to India.

The negotiated accord announced Thursday by President Bush and Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi is aimed at removing the ban
effectively imposed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the
sale of fuel and civilian nuclear technology to India, in return for
India ‘s agreement to put its civilian reactors under international
inspections. According to this deal, India will be able not only to
retain its nuclear arms programme but also to keep a third of its
reactors under military control outside international inspection
including two so-called fast-breeder reactors that could produce fuel
for weapons.

In essence, the accord announced in New Delhi would place 14 of India ‘s
22 nuclear reactors under civilian inspection regimes by 2014. The
phase-in time along with very real possibility that breeder reactors may
never come under such a regime have unleashed a volley of objections
from critics.

While senior scholars at the independent Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace call this deal an example of “Santa Claus
negotiating” in terms of dropping all established nuclear regime
principles, critics of the deal in Congress and Pakistan focus on what
they maintain is a double standard embraced by the Bush administration:
in effect, allowing India to have nuclear weapons and still get
international assistance but insisting that Pakistan, Iran, North Korea
and other “rogue states” be given no such waiver.

Yet administration officials insist that there was no double standard at
play here. “The comparison between India and Iran is just ludicrous,” R.
Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said
on Thursday. “India is a highly democratic, peaceful, stable state that
has not proliferated nuclear weapons. Iran is an autocratic state
mistrusted by nearly all countries and that has violated its
international commitments.”

Yet Capitol Hill has not been as sanguine as the Bush administration
would like the world to believe. If support for India is
across-the-board, so is criticism of this deal by conservative
Republicans, who are concerned that the deal will encourage Iranian
intransigence, and liberal Democrats, who charge that the Bush
administration has effectively scrapped the NPT.

The issue of double-standards will naturally arise from Pakistan as well
for months after President Bush’s visit. While Bush hailed Musharraf as
a key ally in the US war against terror, it was noted in Pakistan that
he seemed to be doing business with one man, not Pakistan. Whereas he
only met with Musharraf in Islamabad, in India he chose to call on the
prime minister, the president, the leader of the opposition and the
leader of the Congress Party. In sharp contrast, the message to
Pakistan’s democratic opposition and rubber-stamp parliament was that if
you want to meet with President Bush it would be under General
Musharraf’s roof, not to mention his political turf.

Washington’s tendency to see Pakistan as an unstable, yet critical
frontline state in its war against Al Qaeda in the region has pitted it
unfortunately in an uneasy relationship with a country that is
increasingly at odds with its ruling elite. While extolling democracy as
an incentive for regime-change all over the world, Pakistanis are quick
to note that democracy is best considered controlled for their country
by Washington, ignoring the fact that since September 11, all President
Musharraf has done is take the state farther away from democracy.

By continuing to retain both posts of army chief and president,
Musharraf openly relies on US support to shore up a government that
marginalises and persecutes mainstream political parties. Instead of
cleaning up the tribal areas of Al Qaeda elements through a mixture of
political cooperation and security sweeps from local maliks he has
chosen to allow the area to become a hotbed of extremist dissent and
high-ranking Al Qaeda officials.

The killing of 18 innocent civilians caused by last month’s US bombings
in Bajaur Agency was a result of sloppy intelligence and ham-handedness
when dealing with a volatile and difficult terrain, but it raised a
cauldron of questions about the private nature of the deal that
Washington and Musharraf seem to have struck against the short-term and
long interests of both countries.

A country of Muslim moderates which once saw American values as
equivalent with respect for civil liberties now sees a cloak of double
standards fall on US responses to strategic challenges both in the
Middle East and the South Asian region.

President Bush could have struck a better chord in Pakistan by
understanding three things:

One, the majority of Pakistanis don’t valorise suicide bombings, nor the
damage to property and innocent lives that a culture of militant protest
brings with it. If the anti-blasphemy protests are out of proportion in
Pakistan, it is because of widespread unhappiness with the Musharraf
model of unaccountable, non-representative governance. The
bulwark-against-extremism role that Musharraf has fashioned since 9/11
is neither real nor is it working.

Two: The rationale for dictatorship can never lie in civilian governance
failures. Whatever establishment elites say to US interlocutors, a
corrupt, incompetent civilian government is better any day than a
corrupt, incompetent military government.

Three: Pakistan needs higher investments in education and the social
services from US assistance, not just more F-16 aircraft. It needs a
fair trade agreement that allows its goods market access in the US
without the prohibitive architecture of US tariffs. If Jordan and
Morocco can prise better trade deals out of America, then why not
Pakistan, which needs its young people in the service of gainful
employment instead of on the streets roiling dissent. Bush’s investments
in democracy too fall way short of what is required in Pakistan to
strengthen democratic institutions and parties.

It is not enough to invest in Pakistan’s National Assembly secretariat,
which essentially ducks the detail that the Assembly runs against all
established norms of parliamentary practice. This happens not because of
an untrained secretariat, but because of the parliament’s eroded powers
and Musharraf’s manipulation of it as a front to appease criticism from
the international community. The government’s constant propaganda on
enlightened moderation and soft images too needs to be replaced by hard
decisions on repealing laws discriminating against women and minorities.
Although these are sovereign choices, Bush can certainly make Musharraf
commit to a better record on promises given the former’s leverage over
the few dictators left in the world.

Clearly, there is little to be gained by radicalising young converts to
a growing anti-US polestar in these parts of the world. It is high time
the Bush administration understands that it is not serving its own
interests by operating in Pakistan through a one-window dictatorship
model. The summary arrests of media and women organising in peaceful
protest in Rawalpindi on March 4 is not a move that Bush would want
associated with his visit. If the US is indeed sincere about exporting a
mass democratic culture that once kept its universities stuffed with
children from the Muslim world, it should realise that there is little
sense in expecting a free and fair election from a military dictator in
Pakistan in 2007.

If Bush wants to do business with Pakistan he needs to lean on Musharraf
to put in a caretaker government and an independent election commission
in place by the end of 2006. Without that, in what promises to be an
unfortunate turn of events for both countries, Pakistan could start
really shutting down to Washington, and that is not something either
nation would want.

The writer is a member of the National Assembly.


____


[2]

counterpunch.org
March 8, 2006

FOR THEM INDIAN MANGOES
ANATOMY OF AN AGREEMENT

by Vijay Prashad

Bela's Story.

In Jangpura, a small neighborhood in Delhi, my friends Bela Malik and
Tommy Mathew planned to welcome Laura Bush. As with all State visits,
between the negotiations and the meetings, the hosts arrange for the
dignitaries to tour safe "soft" sites that become front-page photo
opportunities. As if to send a signal to their Evangelical base, on
March 2 Laura Bush planned to visit a small NGO run by the Missionaries
of Charity. Bela, Tommy and other friends stitched a couple of bed
sheets together and made a banner that read: "Laura Bush, how about a
photo-op with the orphaned, maimed, dead children of Iraq?" It was a
loud question, written in a quiet way, and hung from a modest balcony. A
few hours before Laura Bush's cavalcade was to go down the road, US
secret service flooded the neighborhood. In their wake came the Area
Station House officer who entered Bela and Tommy's apartment,
confiscated the banner, refused to allow Tommy entry into his own flat,
and posted a police officer on the balcony. A thousand of Delhi's finest
overran Jangpura.

Laura Bush never got to the Missionaries of Charity. Something else came up.

In an email message, Bela wrote, "I came closest to feeling what being
under an imperialist system was and feeling first-hand the might of an
armed invasion. It wasn't that in a real sense, but for a few hours, it
was that. 'Security' is a funny term in the way it is used."

Annotations.

That same day, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President
George W Bush signed an agreement to cap Bush's trip to India. The
streets had not welcomed the President. Massive protests around the
country, most of them led by the Left parties and their allies, made it
impossible to ignore Iraq, Kyoto, Katrina, and all the other atrocities
of the Bush dispensation. Bush could not speak to the Parliament, and
his only public meeting turned out not be public at all. The revulsion
against him was quite general.

Here are my annotations of the Singh-Bush agreement, inked despite this
general distrust of the new global order:

(1) For economic prosperity and trade.

The best part of this is that US merchants can now import Indian
mangoes. I, for one, am thrilled. There is no comparison between Mexican
mangoes and those from India. On this I am quite chauvinistic. Although
as mangoes enter the international arena in a massive way, will the
market begin to narrow the many varieties of mangoes (from Alphonso to
Chausa and on)?

Liberalization of trade plays a major role in the agreement, although
this is "reform" that benefits US-based corporations, not Indian-based
manufacturers (nor the US or Indian working classes). While it calls for
the entry into India of hitherto blocked retail giants like Walmart
(through talk about increase of foreign direct investment), it does not
say anything about the cotton subsidies in the US that hinder Indian
textiles. The agreement asks for the completion of the Doha Round of the
WTO, but it does not publicly acknowledge that the round has been
stalled by the G-21 (led by India, Egypt and others) on the specific
question of cotton subsidies.

(2) For energy security and a clean environment.

Can they imagine that those who read this agreement won't laugh at them?
The Bush regime and the US Congress have contempt for international
treaties, and they are especially scornful of Kyoto. Whereas Kyoto puts
mandatory limits on the release of greenhouse gases, the Asia Pacific
Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (launched by the
Association of South East Asian Nations in 2006) will allow states to
set their own goals. It is a straightforward attempt to undermine Kyoto,
and it is led by the US, Australia and Japan (John McCain called the
Partnership "nothing more than a public relations ploy," but actually it
is more than that: it is designed to create illusions about climate
change and to break the gains that culminated in Kyoto). India has now
accepted the Partnership.

The most heavily reported part of the agreement is on nuclear issues. If
Congress approves the deal, the US will now supply India with nuclear
materials, and India will be able to develop its civilian nuclear power
sector. For a country with an energy shortfall, this could be seen as a
major gain. However, it is not, precisely because the logic for nuclear
power is not driven by India's energy situation but by the Bush
administration's geo-political ambitions. The current Indian government
had joined a process to create a "peace pipeline" to bring natural gas
from Iran, across Pakistan, into India, as well as to create energy
deals with western China. An Asian gas grid was in the offing. The
Indian Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar reflected in a speech last
year, "The energy-short countries of Asia are located cheek-by-jowl in
the immediate vicinity of their energy-abundant Asian cousins. Yet, if
you compare a pipeline map of Europe with a pipeline map of Asia, Asia
today looks almost naked." In mid-March 2005, Secretary of State Rice
went to New Delhi and offered a switch: if India joined in the policy to
isolate Iran (a central neo-con concern), the US would do what it could
to substitute the Asian grid with nuclear power plants. US Ambassador
David Mulford warned Aiyar that if India did not back off from the Iran
deal, it could face sanctions. Rice spoke more softly, and acknowledged,
"We believe broad energy dialogue should be launched with India because
the needs are there." What was in the best interests of India, and of
Asia, was gradually forgotten, whereas it because self-evident for the
elites to say that the US could solve India's energy needs. The
antipathy against Iran and China, and the desire for US primacy in the
world's relations, governed this "energy" deal. So much for that.
Manmohan Singh removed Aiyar from his post in the lead-up to Bush's
visit: it was a concession to Bush, and a sign that India was ready to
do anything to please the Superpower.

(3) For innovation and knowledge economy.

India is the new home to Business Process Outsourcing. That did not
enter the public discussions, although Bush made some caustic remarks
about out-sourcing. What did get mentioned is the US corporate demand
for "a vibrant intellectual property rights regime." Big Pharma finds
India very valuable as a research center (they've outsourced discovery
processes to Bangalore and elsewhere), but it is uneasy about the
production of drugs by Indian firms who pay no rent to the "owners" of
patents (even if these have expired, or if they have been independently
discovered). The fracas over AIDS drugs, and the US government's
reticence to buy Tamiflu from Indian manufacturers are good
illustrations of this: far more important to maintain the property
rights regime than to save lives (this is the one international
agreement that the US government loves to defend). India recently
conceded to Big Pharma: even as Roche (the Swiss firm that holds the
patent to Tamiflu) cannot produce enough does, the Indian government and
this "regime" will not allow Cipla (an Indian firm) to go ahead and
produce the vaccines.

(4) For Global Safety and Security.

"Terrorism is a global scourge," says the agreement. "Terrorism,"
however is not a subject, but a tactic used by political actors. One
can't go after "terrorism." A state has to identify those who use
terrorist tactics, analyze their grievances, and then make a strategic
decision on how to undercut them, destroy them or what not. This section
of the agreement is pure smoke and mirrors: it says nothing about the
genuine security needs of the populations, while simply stoking fears of
senseless violence. This statement is a lead-up to a long discussion on
Indo-US military coordination. Any discussion of this has to recognize
that the Indian government does not have a well-articulated strategy
document: why should India make an alliance with the US? What are the
main concepts for Indian foreign policy, apart from nostalgia for
non-alignment, and "realism" for proximity to the core of a unipolar
world? The US, meanwhile, has a well-articulated strategy. The dominant
class in the US (that miniscule population that benefits from the rent
economy, and that has grandfathered wealth turned into finance capital)
seeks to exercise power over the world, and to treat this power as
"security." The security of the masses is irrelevant (as demonstrated in
Jangpura on March 2). But the US knows that while it has the massive
military power to obliterate any country, it does not have the troop
strength to garrison the world. Therefore it requires pliant military
forces such as Singapore's navy and Poland's army to do its legwork.
Multilateralism is valuable rhetoric if it means other people's troops.
It is dangerous when it means other people's interests.

(5) Deepening Democracy and meeting international challenges.

Every agreement has a few "soft" points that are thrown in to mollify
liberals. Here we have something on AIDS, something on Avian Flu,
something on the Tsunami. Nothing is of consequence, but the basic
liberal points of fellowship and cooperation are made. One area of
interest, and concern, is broached, however. The agreement talks about
India's role in the International Centre for Democratic Transition. The
Center is based in Budapest, Hungary, and began as an offshoot of the
Communities of Democracy project of the US State Department (itself a
child of the Reagan era National Endowment for Democracy). The CoD
project helped mask Pax Americana as Pax Democratica: James Robert
Huntley, one of the visionaries of the project, argued that "mature
democracies" don't have imperial aims, since their own interest is
collective (democracy and open markets). The post-Cold War variant of
this was in the US driven Western Hemisphere Communities of Democracy
(led by Clinton in 1993). Far from being mature or about collective
interests, the platform was used to bash Cuba, and to promote the FTAA.
Latin America has rejected this spurious idea of "democracy." India,
under the Manmohan Singh government, has been roped into it.

The Foreign Policy of Jobless Growth.

The US has pioneered jobless growth, with the rent economy creating a
uber-class who earn fabulous rents from their patents on what is
manufactured in countries like China. Their barely taxed super-profits
provide growth to the US economy, although the jobs created within the
country are neither in the manufacturing sector nor do they pay well.
Increasingly income inequality is a function of the rent economy, and so
is the close to $1 trillion deficit of the US economy. India is walking
toward that road. A small class of people who earn large amounts of
money live in a sea of impoverished and frustrated people. In this
context, the "security" of the population is less significant than the
maintenance of the "power" of the minority. All concepts of foreign
policy, in this context, stem from this fundamental fact. The US has not
duped India: what has occurred is that the needs of the dominant class
have come to overshadow the broad coalition of classes that made Indian
foreign policy speak in its name. The new Indo-US agreement (and the
forthcoming Indo-Australian one) is a planetary version of the gated
communities.

Thank god for the mangoes.


____


[3]

VARANASI BLASTS: HOW OPPORTUNE? HOW OMINOUS?

by I.K.Shukla

The tragic and wanton loss of innocent lives from bomb blasts in the
anciently famous and popular Sankat Mochan temple, Varanasi, on Tuesday
7 March 06, shocked the entire nation by its senseless barbarity and
calculated impact. The tremors of shock and grief reverberated
throughout the length and breadth of the nation and beyond. The time,
the day, and the target were all diabolically well chosen by the
terrorists. Hundreds could have died from that explosion, in that there
was, additionally, a marriage party there for a votive ceremony.

Whereas various religious organizations, Christian and Muslim, instantly
expressed their outrage at the horror, denounced the criminals
unreservedly while demanding harshest punishment for them, urged the
state and central governments to rush relief and medical help to the
wounded, and extended condolences to the dead and sympathy and succor to
the victims, the reaction of the saffronazi outfits was, to put it
mildly, cynically savage.

One VHP man lost not a minute in blaming �jihadis�.  As to Advani and
Rajnath Singh, the carnage seemed to have opened their long awaited
doors of opportunity, for the former to retrieve his lost eminence among
the Hindutva hegemons, and the latter to win back UP for the BJP under
his presidency. Advani, therefore, announced his party�s three-week long
blood- and- fire march throughout India, deceptively calling it Ekta
Yatra (unity trek) , March 16 marking their sankalp (determination) day
in the Sankat Mochan temple. Both pledged BJP would not celebrate Holi
this year. Also Rajnath raucously and Advani lewdly cried for the ouster
of Mulayam Singh government and President�s Rule in UP. Their conduct in
terms of the Varanasi blast is not only squalid, but also sinister.

Advani has been routinely calling for the ouster of UPA government like
a keening crone for quite long. He forgot, as India's Home Minister,
clamoring for President�s Rule in Gujarat where his party managed to
slaughter, burn, rape, and rob over 2000 Muslims in 2002, and render
over a lakh homeless. He is afraid he might be tried for his role in the
Babri mosque demolition of 1992 along with other luminaries of his
fascist fraternity. For this reason BJP must bag UP with its 84 MPs,
who, forming a government in New Delhi, would grant the Hindutva
gangsters the bull of pardons, rewarding anti-national crime and
installing outlawry on the pedestal of Indian democracy.

Their priority is not the nabbing of the terrorists, not the relief -
adequate and swift � being rushed to the survivors, not a call to the
Varanasi citizenry to stay calm, but to pour more oil on the flames of
terror. Their anxiety is obscenely apparent: not to lose a moment to
cash this �opportunity� to their advantage and turn it into electoral
gains a la Gujarat 2002 in order to be at the helm in UP as soon as
possible.

Advani, who blazed the trail of communal bloodbath and fire fest all
over India culminating in the mega death of Muslims by his Yatras in the
past, is rearing to sprint into action and rehabilitate himself in the
top echelons of HinduTaliban. He would prove his worth, as in the past,
at the cost of minorities, hoping to terrorize UP to return the BJP back
into power, as Modi did in Gujarat.

Timing is all. One wonders why in a scary synchrony Hindu terrorism is
ravaging Christians in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat,
and elsewhere just at this time? Goa witnessed the saffronazi crimes �
planned destruction of Muslim shops and homes and the rain of terror - a
few days ago, the chief criminals responsible for it roaming freely are
two BJP MLAs. Close on its heels came Varanasi blasts. All so uncannily
close to Bush visit. With Clinton visitation not so distant in time,
about two dozen innocent Sikhs lost their lives at the hands of our own
army in Chittisinghpura, Kashmir. A tribute? To whom? For what? The
accursed mementos keep piling.

As if fortuitously aggravating the situation, came the Bush visit,
massively boycotted by Indians, Muslims in large numbers (not all
votaries of Nizam-e-Mustafa) in several cities all across India
protesting the rape of Afghanistan and Iraq by imperialist invaders.
This did not exactly please New Delhi parading and preening on its
vassalage to the imperium.

Not quietly to go into the sunset (political suicide), Uma Bharati,
throwing a schismatic challenge to BJP bosses, would announce the launch
of her own saffro-terrorist cult on 21 March. The Banaras blast would be
used by both to ballast their respective fortunes.

The ill omen for the minorities, Muslims in particular, could not have
come at a more menacing time, with a more bloodily exploitable coincidence.

With Congress immorally feigning coma and paralysis, if not death, and
the Left just issuing learned analyses of class contradictions in reams
of paper and seas of ink tirelessly, Hindutva is poised to win by
drenching India in blood and torching it to ashes, making it the paragon
of fascism as democracy - another gift to the world at large.
8March06.

____


[4]


HINDUTVA GROUPS DEFEATED IN THEIR ATTEMPT TO SAFFRONIZE TEXTBOOKS IN
CALIFORNIA

Sacramento, California, March 8, 2006, 5:30 p.m. PST

The intense struggle over the presentation of ancient Indian history in
school books in California has ended this afternoon at 5:30 p.m. PST,
with  total victory over the right wing and sub-sectarian  Hindutva
foundations, the so-called Vedic Foundation (VF) and the Hindu
Education Foundation (HEF).

The California State Board of Education (SBE) voted unanimously to
overturn the sectarian and politically motivated distortions pushed
through by the two obscurant Hindutva foundations during an earlier
phase of the review process for history textbooks. On February 27, a
sub-committee of the SBE had also voted unanimously to overturn a
majority of the disputed changes.

This decision is a victory for Californians, particularly for Indian
Americans, and by implication for all Americans and all others
worldwide who are interested in the historically correct depiction of
Indian
   history.

More than a hundred of South Asian scholars from across the United
States and more than fifty American and international Indologists had
written to the Board, protesting the changes proposed by the Hindutva
groups. The SBE had also received important scholarly input from South
Asian Studies faculty (Title VI) as well as other Indologists. In
addition, many Indian American community organizations and many private
individuals have been working diligently to ensure that ahistorical and
sectarian content proposed  by Hindutva groups  does not infect
California school textbooks.

We must wholeheartedly applaud the courage of various individuals and
community organizations, who in spite of being constantly harassed,
abused and threatened by various Hindutvavadins, stood their ground and
put in a tremendous effort to defend the educational futures of their
children.

Today, all involved in fighting for this goal have expressed their
admiration of the State Board for rejecting the most egregious edits
proposed by the Hindutva groups that attempted to sanitize caste and
gender oppression. The victory over the machinations of the VF & HEF is
especially poignant as it has been achieved on International Women's
day, March 8th.

We must applaud the State Board for voting on the side of historical
accuracy, and for not caving to the intimidation and blackmail tactics
of HEF and VF who, failing to obtain any academic or other scholarly
support, have now turned to a politically connected law firm and are
issuing threats of legal action in a desperate attempt to intimidate
the Board of Education, and to force the Board to divert precious
resources that could have gone towards the education of California
school children.

We also must commend the SBE staff for having patiently considered a
wide variety of views from community groups, as well as from scholars.
With the changes recommended by
the SBE, the textbooks are a vast improvement over earlier textbooks
and are now largely free of errors. We must note with appreciation the
stance taken by Ms. Ruth Green, President of the History-Social Science
Sub-committee, that the textbooks should represent the plurality of
scholarly opinion.

We must also thank the community organizations such as Friends of South
Asia (FOSA), Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America (FeTNA),
various Dalit organizations (Ambedkar.org, New Republic India,  Dalit
Freedom Network, Dalit Sikh temples), Coalition Against Communalism
(CAC), Indian American Public Education Advisory Council (IPAC). We
must  especially commend the representatives of Dalit organizations,
who urged the SBE to restore references to Dalits and the Caste System,
which had been deleted from the textbooks on HEF's and VF's
recommendations. Individual Dalits and their organizations have
suffered the crassest abuse and vituperation from the self-styled
representatives of the Hindu Indo-American community. Their eloquent
and moving testimonies which outlined the daily depredations that
Dalits face was crucial as it laid bare the hollowness and dishonesty
of the HEF and VF agenda.

The  combined efforts against the attempts by Hindutva groups to
distort California's textbooks have resulted in a crushing defeat of
these obscurantist views. After a long struggle, historical accuracy
and a balanced depiction of life in ancient India has prevailed, not
the sugar-coated version of a hoary, mythical Golden Age that never
was.

In gratitude to all involved,

Michael Witzel


____


[5]

WIRED magazine
March 2006
	
A NATION OF GUINEA PIGS
There's a new outsourcing boom in South Asia - and a billion people are
jockeying for the jobs. How India became the global hot spot for drug
trials.

by Jennifer Kahn

The town of Sevagram in central India has long been known for three
things: its heat, which is oppressive even by Indian standards; its
snakes, which are abundant; and its ashram, a derelict and increasingly
malarial retreat preserved as a tribute to Mohandas Gandhi, who lived
here and was known for tenderly relocating the poisonous vipers that
slithered into his shack.

Despite this intemperate setting, Sevagram's hospital has a good
reputation. Though the power fails often, forcing medics to use the
backlit screens of their cell phones for illumination, the standard of
care is higher than at many of the country's public hospitals, and the
facilities are comparatively plush. At the nearby government medical
center in Nagpur, for instance, patients sometimes have to sleep on
mattresses on the floor.

Last year, Sevagram began garnering even more cachet. A German
pharmaceutical company called Boehringer Ingelheim, whose latest
stroke-prevention drug was making its way through the clinical pipeline,
approved the town's hospital as a trial site - one of 28 in India
recruiting stroke victims to round out the company's 18,500-person study.

The drug regimen, known as Aggrenox, was being tested for its ability to
forestall a second stroke. S. P. Kalantri, the doctor tapped to lead the
trial in Sevagram, quickly grasped the offer's appeal. Patients in
Sevagram are poor enough that the benefits of taking part in the study
would amount to a health care windfall; among other things, Boehringer
Ingelheim guaranteed participants two physicals during each of the three
years that the trial would run. For each person enrolled, moreover, the
hospital would receive 30,000 rupees (about $665) - no small amount,
given the puny budget of the center's stroke ward, a single room of
eight pallet beds. Kalantri talked the matter over with the chair of the
hospital's ethics committee, and the two concluded that the trial drug
itself, with its possible side effects and limited efficacy, would
provide little benefit to their patients. Then they went ahead and
signed up.

When I arrive in Sevagram on a typically sweltering October afternoon,
Kalantri is midway through a busy day. That morning, he attended to a
farmer who had been bitten on the heel by a viper while sleeping, and
then to a woman who had drunk a quart of insecticide in a suicide
attempt. He also checked on his regular patients: a man with cerebral
malaria, two women with unexplained fevers, and a stroke patient who had
hemorrhaged. When I ask what treatment he gave to the stroke victim, he
seems surprised. "Nothing," he says. "There's nothing we can do."

Though hemorrhagic strokes are untreatable - drugs can't undo the damage
- Kalantri's response echoed a more persistent frustration: that
patients are too poor to pay for medicine. Because of this, one of the
alluring features of a clinical trial is that subjects are supplied with
the test drug for free. And while the medication on offer isn't always a
very useful one, there's still the chance that it will do some good.

This casual optimism contrasts sharply with the attitude in the West,
where the number of patients willing to sign up for clinical trials is
abysmally low. Just 3 percent of cancer patients opt to join trials, and
the number of US patients who sign up for cardiac trials has plunged by
half over the past five years.

Such reticence has created a problem for the pharmaceutical industry.
Modern drug design may be a sophisticated enterprise, harnessing
technology that didn't even exist a decade ago, but one part of the
process remains the same: The only way to tell how well a medication
really works is to feed it to a sick person. This process, the human
clinical trial, is the largest and creakiest part of the drug­making
machine - a mammoth lab experiment that succeeds by brute statistical
force. To make it run, companies have to round up a large number of
ailing people and then convince them to swallow an unproven remedy with
uncertain side effects.

The experiment unfolds in three stages: Phase I, when a compound is
safety-tested on a few dozen healthy people; Phase II, conducted on a
slightly larger group of mildly ill subjects; and Phase III, which is
the most extensive. Involving thousands of subjects and taking up to
seven years to complete, Phase III trials are the make-or-break point
for new medicines and, because of their size, the hardest to fill with
patients. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that discoveries of rare
side effects (including lethal ones, like strokes and heart attacks
caused by the arthritis drug Vioxx) have pushed companies to conduct
ever larger studies. In the 1980s, a new drug typically was tested on
1,300 volunteers in a total of 30 trials. By the mid-1990s, those
numbers had swelled to 4,200 patients and 68 trials.

"Twenty years ago, drugs were dropping the cardiac mortality rate from
20 percent to 15 percent," says Dhiraj Narula, medical director of
Quintiles ECG, a contract-research firm that organizes trials for major
multinationals. "Today we're looking at drugs that will take you from 6
percent mortality to 5 percent. To prove an effect that subtle, in a way
that's statistically robust, you need a lot of patients in your sample."
One cardiac drug study was conducted on a whopping 41,000 subjects.

The result is a bottleneck that Narula argues is impeding the arrival of
important cures. Herceptin - an exceptionally effective breast cancer
drug - languished in trials for years because its maker, Genentech,
reportedly couldn't recruit enough patients to test it.

Like many in the pharmaceutical industry, Narula believes that the
solution to the slow pace of drug trials lies in outsourcing. As many as
half of all clinical trials are already conducted in locations far from
the pharmaceutical companies' home base, in countries like India, China,
and Brazil. And many industry analysts expect the market to skyrocket,
particularly as expanding libraries of genetic information increase the
number of drugs coming out of the lab. The consulting firm McKinsey
calculates that the market in India for outsourced trials will hit $1.5
billion by 2010.

Enticed by numbers like these, developing countries have been scrambling
to catch Big Pharma's eye - India most aggressively of all. Like high
tech call centers and software farms, which were meant to transform
India's computer industry by creating skilled workers and a stockpile of
modern equipment, drug trial outsourcing is seen as the fast route to
economic and scientific growth - a money train that the country can't
afford to miss. With this in mind, the government is working to
advertise India's most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably
its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number
of ailing patients - 32 million diabetics alone. Many of these patients
are also, in the delicate parlance of the drug world, "treatment naive,"
meaning they've never taken any medication for their illnesses. This is
a perk for trial managers, because it lowers the risk of unforeseen drug
inter­actions and avoids the troublesome process of weaning patients off
one medication and onto another.

Last year, the government took a more controversial step, amending a
long-standing law that limited the kind of trials that foreign
pharmaceutical companies could conduct. That law allowed companies to
test drugs on Indian patients only after the drugs had been proven safe
in trials conducted in the country of origin. In January, the government
threw out that constraint. India, the brilliant hub of outsourced labor,
was positioning itself in a newly lucrative role: guinea pig to the world.

The headquarters of Sevagram's Aggrenox trial, located around the corner
from the hospital's intensive care unit, is low on frills. A drooling
corner sink and two elderly computers list against the water-stained
walls, under the benevolent gaze of a small plastic bust of Gandhi. A
handful of scientific papers have been tacked to the wall, where they
hang unstirred by a sluggish fan. Since recruitment for the trial began
in January 2005, Kalantri has signed up 44 stroke victims, a quarter of
the number that have come through the hospital.

Nonetheless, Kalantri is uneasy about his clinical success. "Patients
here are very passive," he reflects. "They will almost never question
their doctor." Indeed, one woman who joined the trial six months ago
sits patiently for more than an hour while Kalantri translates my
questions, before revealing that she is suffering from aches and fever
that are likely malaria. Such deference is hard to imagine in US
patients - a querulous lot - and it makes Kalantri's position tricky.
"Nine out of 10 times," he says, "the patient will just ask me to make
the decision about the trial for him. So what role do I play? Am I a
physician, concentrating on what's best for the patient? Or am I a
researcher interested in recruiting patients? I try to balance the two
sides, but ..." He shrugs. "It's a dichotomy."

Kalantri began worrying about such matters not long after he started
recruiting patients for Boehringer Ingelheim. The previous year, he had
overseen a trial for Reviparin, an anticlotting drug that improves the
health of one out of 65 cardiac patients within 30 days of a heart
attack. The trial was enormous: Nearly 16,000 patients participated,
half of them from India. When the trial ended, however, Kalantri
wondered whether he had served his patients well by enrolling them. At
800 rupees a day, the drug they had taken was too expensive for any of
them to afford. Plus, even when it worked, it showed results for just a
month. Such a minute and costly improvement might make sense in the US,
Kalantri felt, but was it really the kind of medication that poor
Indians should be testing? "The biggest problems around here are
snakebite and insecticide poisoning," he points out. "We could really
use a trial for one of those."

Kalantri is in a good position to observe such discrepancies. He grew up
in the neighboring town of Wardha, 15 minutes away by auto-rickshaw, and
got his training at the local medical college in Nagpur - a city whose
main claim to fame is a survey plaque declaring it to be India's
geographical center. He is a slight man, with a philosophical and
conscientious manner. His wife is a database administrator for the
hospital in Sevagram, and last year the older of their two children
started attending medical school there. Although Kalantri could probably
work elsewhere - in 2004, he did a stint at UC Berkeley, working on his
master's in public health and collaborating on a tuberculosis study that
was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association - he
remains attached to the rural hospital he joined 20 years ago. "I found
my peace of mind here," he says.

Initially, Kalantri says, he was excited by the idea of bringing
clinical trials to Sevagram and liked the prospect of turning his
hospital into a research center. "Drug trials can teach residents proper
record-keeping and help them understand how to associate clinical care
with research," he notes. When I first called him, shortly after a
record rainy season, he mentioned that the emergency ward contained a
number of patients with a mysterious fever - one that epidemiological
tests had been unable to identify. "It would be good to study it,"
Kalantri murmured, sounding a bit regretful. "Maybe we will, one day."

Bringing trials to India, moreover, struck him as medically important. A
Nature Genetics article had recently surveyed 29 drugs whose efficacy
and side effects varied in different racial or ethnic populations.
Perversely, testing drugs exclusively on Americans and western Europeans
could almost seem colonial.

Little by little, however, Kalantri began to see the problematic side of
outsourced trials. "When I try to explain that a drug is experimental,
that it might not work, the understanding is not there," he observes.
"One woman said to me, 'What do you mean, the drug might not work? All
drugs work!'"

Poorly paid doctors can also find the financial rewards of a trial hard
to resist - particularly since pharma companies reward high enrollments
with prizes like vacations to Hawaii and Europe. "A lot of private
hospital doctors have suddenly become 'researchers,'" Kalantri notes.
"They will enroll almost anybody and recruit for almost any trial,
whether or not it helps the patient." And while the money earned from a
trial in Sevagram goes to the hospital, elsewhere it may be paid to the
doctor. "A lot goes into personal bank accounts," he says.

Naïveté and corruption are hardly unique to India, of course. They're
the early story of almost any developing industry, when regulation is
still too flimsy to check the horses of rapid progress. Compared to a
country like China, for instance, India is alert to the potential for
exploitation and has made at least some effort to safeguard its
citizens. Programs to train clinicians in World Health
Organization-standard Good Clinical Practice - a set of international
rules covering patient rights and data management - have sprung up
around the country. In addition, all trials must ostensibly be cleared
by a local review board that includes one doctor, one lawyer, and one
pharmacist, as well as a housewife and a social worker.

In practice, however, policing trials is not easy. The enforcement staff
of the Drugs Controller General of India - the equivalent of the US
Federal Drug Administration - consists of just three pharmacists. And
the country has little history of keeping medical care independent of
the pharmaceutical business. The largest cardiac hospital in India,
Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre, is a division of the
massive Indian pharmco Ranbaxy.

"Are patients here more vulnerable?" asks Brijesh Regal, CEO of the New
Delhi-based firm Apothecaries, which runs clinical trials for
pharmaceutical companies. "Obviously. They're poor. They're illiterate."
Nonetheless, he argues, most of the problems can be attributed to the
growing pains of a new industry. He points to the thalidomide fiasco in
the 1950s - women who were given the drug for morning sickness delivered
children with severe birth defects - as evidence that every developing
industry has problems. "Why are we so concerned about India?" he asks.
"If problems happened everywhere else, they will happen here. We are a
massive country without a lot of regulatory infrastructure."

Regal's willingness to accept collateral damage may seem chilling, but
it has some historical precedent. The path of medical progress is strewn
with cases of questionable ethics, desperate practices, and misguided
experimentalism, if not outright exploitation. And since patients with
the fewest options are invariably the ones most likely to try (or be
forcibly volunteered for) risky new treatments, be it an artificial
heart, an unproven pill, or a radical lobotomy, they're also the ones
who bear the brunt of medicine's experimental nature. In this light,
outsourcing trials to a country where decent medical care is scarce, and
medication scarcer, is just the globalization of an old equation.

Kalantri, meanwhile, finds himself stuck in the uncomfortable role of
gatekeeper. "Every week, I get a call: 'Do you want to participate in
this trial?'" he says. So far, he has turned down one anti-osteoporosis
trial and another for a drug that might improve patient survival after a
heart attack. He declined, he explains, because the studies "don't make
sense for India." Finding better treatments for osteoporosis and high
cholesterol is important, he adds. "But these are diseases that will
cause problems at 40 or 50. Infectious diseases like malaria and
filariasis kill at 20, and they're much more common here."

Kalantri is also troubled by what he sees as skewed trial demographics.
"Ninety percent of patients being recruited in India are poor," he says.
"That's the reality. Trials enroll very few patients who are rich,
literate, and capable of asking awkward questions."

But even as Kalantri has grown more selective, other Indian doctors are
moving in the opposite direction. And at his own hospital, Kalantri's
pickiness has been a subject of debate. "Some of my colleagues are not
exactly happy with these decisions," he sighs. "The extra money could be
used to build the department."

Finding a dollar amount that compensates medical centers properly -
covering costs like blood tests and the extra time a doctor must spend
with study patients, without amounting to a bribe - is tricky, Kalantri
says. He confesses that he has turned down trials because they paid too
little. Nonetheless, when a representative from Boehringer Ingelheim
visited to check up on the paperwork, Kalantri felt compelled to mention
that the amount the company was offering per patient seemed high. The
rep looked at him in surprise. "You're the first person to say that,"
she said, giving Kalantri a puzzled smile. "Everyone else has asked for
more."
Jennifer Kahn (jenn_kahn at wiredmag.com) is a contributing editor. Her
profile of hacker Adrian Lamo (issue 12.04) was selected for Best
American Science & Nature Writing 2005

____



[6]

All India Secular Forum
9b Himalaya Apartment, Santacruz (E)
(25704061, 26149668)

The terrible bomb blast on the Sankatmochan temple in
Varanasi is utterly disgusting and most condemnable.
The loss of over twenty innocent lives is a matter of
serious grief for all of us. One hopes the state will
do all possible to support the families who have lost
their near and dear ones.

The cowardly terror attacks and tactics are a matter
of anguish for all of us irrespective of our religious
identity. The attempt by some to paint these terror
attacks as Islamic or coming from Muslims is motivated
and aiming to split the communal bonds of our Indian
nation. One has to see that terrorism has nothing to
do with religion, it is a political phenomenon. Be it
the terrorism of LTTE, ULFA, Khalistanis or Irish
Republican army, all these have roots in the social
and political problems. The terrorism being witnessed
currently is the aftermath and product of US which had
propped up Al Qaeda which was the beneficiary of huge
sums of money and ammunition for throwing away the
communist troops from Afghanistan. It was during this
manipulation of global political events that the word
Jihad was brought in as the war cry of Al Qaeda. Again
all this was supported and aimed at by US in order to
occupy Afghanistan and control the oil zone of the
region. The politics of oil is being presented as the
clash of civilizations and religions. The cult of
terror has roots in the formation of Israel,
displacement of 14 lakh Palestinians, and extension of
the same in Kashmir via the conduit of Pakistan which
was acting hand in glove with the US imperialist
designs.

It is time we realize this and ensure that terrorism
is not associated with this or that religion. The
response of BJP like formations to begin Yatras is
fraught with dangers as the nation has witnessed
earlier. One urges that sanity prevails and we try to
deal with the cancer of terrorism in a political way
rather than giving way to the communal forces which
are itching for searching one or the other pretext to
bring back their divisive politics to the fore.
Citizens of India cutting across all the religions
have condemned these insane acts. We do need to bring
back our social agenda to the issues of social and
economic development, and deal with terror mongers
firmly without making a religious issue out of it.

Ram Puniyani/Irfan Engineer

(All India Secular Forum)



____


[7]

MINORITIES & POLICE IN INDIA
A new book Edited by Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer & Amarjit S. Narang

This timely volume analyses the attitude and orientation of police
towards minorities in India's plural, democratic, secular society and
its behaviour while dealing with them as groups particularly in communal
not situations. The essays written from diverse socio-cultural
perspectives take into account the expected role of law enforcement
agencies in plural democratic societies and India's constitutional
framework, also how far these agencies have stood up to that role and
deviated from the same.

The essays take into account the colonial heritage, structure, training
and working conditions of the police agencies to determine their
attitude and behaviour. Role of police has not been evaluated in
isolation but in the framework of socio-political structures and
processes. The reports of various commission and studies have also been
analysed and suggestions have been thoroughly examined. The purpose is
not just to condemn the police but to evaluate the system in a manner
which can be used for improving the situation.

Contributors include Kirpal Singh Dhillion, Prakash Louis, Abdulrahim
Vijapur, R.K. Raghavan, Prem Dhar, Malaviya among many others.

Contents

Preface
Introduction

1.      Making and Unmaking of Muslim Stereotypes
Asghar Ali Engineer

2.      Minorities and Police in India
Amarjit S. Narang

3.      Democracy, Pluralism and Police in India
Kripal Singh Dhillion

4.      Maintaining Social Order
R.K. Raghavan

5.      Place and Role of Police in a Plural Society
Prakash Louis

6.      Police and the Minorities in India
Preme Dhar Malaviya

7.      Endangered Minorities in India: Understanding the Role of Police
Abdulrahim Vijapur and Md. Mohibul Haque

8.      Police and the Minorities: A Study of the Role of the Police in
during Communal Violence in India
K.S. Subramanian

9.      Police Prejudice against the Muslims
Arshi Khan

10.  Police Partisanship during Communal Riots: Need for its
Secularization and pluralization
Iqbal A. Ansari

11.  Need for People Friendly Police
Chaman Lal

12.  The Infamous carnage of November 1984
H.S. Phoolka

13.  Role of Police in 1984 anti-Sikh Massacre, Delhi
Vrinda Grover

14.  National Policy for Police
Ajay K. Mehra


Total Pages: 227
Price: Rs.625/-


For Copies Contact
Mr. Ajay Kumar Jain
Manohar Publishers & Distributors
4753/23 Ansari Road, Daryaganj,
New Delhi: - 110 002.
E-mail: sales at manoharbooks.com

____


[8]  ANNOUNCEMENTS: Upcoming events

(i)

BETWEEN EMPIRE AND GLOBALIZATION: READING THE PRESENT THROUGH INDIAN
FEMINISMS'
A one day conference at the University of Pennsylvania

Sponsored by The South Asia Center, The Alice Paul Center for Research
on Women and Gender, The Graduate School of Education, The Department of
English, Project for Global Communications Studies, Annenberg School of
Communications

Friday, March 24, 2006

Room 500, Annenberg School of Communications, 3620 Walnut Street

(Detailed Schedule is forthcoming)

Thematic How does feminism, intellectually and politically, understand
its present? In recent years, one name given to the current historical
conjuncture is "globalization", understood as a set of economic,
cultural, and political processes that have provided a new context for
and object of feminist theorizing and activism. On the other hand, in a
post-9/11 world, we are said to be in an age of "empire". How does one
understand the status of and relationship between "empire" and
"globalization" as political and intellectual horizons for feminist
theory and practice?

This conference/workshop will interrogate these questions from the
location of Indian feminisms, as they are located within South Asia and
the Anglo-American academy. We suggest that universalizing frameworks
such as "empire" and "globalization" can only be interrogated as
adequate and compelling ways of grasping "the present" if they speak to
the multiple and various historical conjunctures (understood as
national, postcolonial and/or transnational) that define feminist
fields. How do such frameworks "travel" in and through the questions,
problems, and issues that define differently located feminist fields in
Anglo-America and India? The workshop will further interrogate these
frameworks for understanding the present from an interdisciplinary
perspective, bringing together scholars in history, literary studies,
and the contemporary social sciences (political science, anthropology,
sociology). "Globalization" and "empire" seek to name "our present".
However, very little exploration has been done on the shift from
"globalization" to "empire". Further, little has been done to explore
what this shift might mean (perhaps nothing?) for feminisms and further
still for feminisms in multiple locations. This conference/workshop
seeks to explore the changing dynamics of the "present" for Indian
feminisms in light of these encompassing frameworks.

Participants
This is  a one-day conference with 5 key participants: Nivedita Menon
(Political Science, University of Delhi), Mrinalini Sinha (History, Penn
State University), Raka Ray (Sociology, University of California,
Berkeley), Priya Gopal (English, University of Cambridge), and Mary John
(Women's Studies, JNU).
There will be two discussants, Anupama Rao (History, Barnard) and Ann
Farnsworth-Alvear (History, University of Pennsylvania). A final
roundtable will include Saadia Toor (Sociology, CUNY), Bakirathi Mani
(English, Swarthmore College), and Madhavi Kale (History, Bryn Mawr
College).

We envision this as an open and dynamic dialogue and hope you will join us!

--
Haimanti Banerjee
Outreach Coordinator
South Asia Center
University of Pennsylvania
820 Williams Hall, 36th & Spruce Streets
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Ph: 215-898-4490

_____


(ii)


SIXTH SOUTH ASIAN ORIENTATION COURSE IN HUMAN RIGHTS AND PEACE STUDIES, 2006


SOUTH ASIA FORUM FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Applications are invited for the Sixth South Asian Orientation Course in
Human Rights and Peace Studies. The last date for receiving applications
is 25 March 2006. Application form can be downloaded from -
http://www.safhr-hrps.org/ApplicationForm.doc and
http://www.safhr.org/ApplicationForm.doc


The course will have three components:

A three months long distance learning beginning 1 May 2006;

field work in August; and, a three-week long Direct Orientation in
September 2006.



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

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.