SACW | 15 Apr 2006 | Faith Schools in UK; Call for Peace in Sri Lanka; India: Narmada, Congress Party
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at mnet.fr
Fri Apr 14 19:50:32 CDT 2006
South Asia Citizens Wire | 15 April, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2237
[1] UK: This is a clash of civilisations -
between reason and superstition (Polly Toynbee)
[2] Peace Campaign 2006: Call for Peace and Human Rights in Sri Lanka
[3] India: Press Release - Narmada Bachao Andolan
+ Don't damn Narmada (Angana Chatterji)
[4] India: The Great Transformation - The old
Congress has changed unrecognizably (Achin Vanaik)
[5] Book Review: 'Identity and Violence by
Amartya Sen' (Shuddhabrata Sengupta)
[6] Book Announcements:
(i) Indian Democracy, Pluralism and Minorities by Ram Puniyani
(ii) Dreams, Questions, Struggles - South
Asian Women in Britain by Amrit Wilson
7 Upcoming Events:
(i) India: National Day of Action To Support
Narmada and Bhopal Action (18 April)
(ii) UK: Public Discussion - Holy Warriors:
religious fundamentalism in India today (London,
9 May 2006)
___
[1]
The Guardian
April 14, 2006
THIS IS A CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS - BETWEEN REASON AND SUPERSTITION
Religious schools are indoctrinating and
divisive. The people don't want them. So why are
MPs backing them?
by Polly Toynbee
The DJ wasn't joking when he burbled: "Happy Good
Friday!" His audience probably didn't wince,
since a recent poll showed that 43% of the
population have no idea what Easter celebrates,
with the young most clueless. Eggs, bunnies,
lambs?
Even an old atheist like me sees no good in this
ignorance of basic Christian myths. How do you
make any sense of history, art or literature
without knowing the stories and iconography of
your own culture and all the world's main
religions? Total ignorance of religion and its
history could make people more susceptible to the
next passing charlatan offering Kwik Save
salvation from whatever it is people want to be
saved from.
But how odd that in this heathen nation of empty
pews, where churches' bare, ruined choirs are
converted into luxury loft living, a Labour
government - yes, a Labour government - is
deliberately creating a huge expansion of faith
schools. There is all the difference in the world
between teaching children about religion and
handing them over to be taught by the religious.
Just when faith turns hot and dangerous,
threatening life and limb again, the government
responds by encouraging more of it and more
religious segregation. If ever there was a time
to set out the unequivocal value of a secular
state, it must be now.
On Easter Day the National Union of Teachers
votes on the same motion debated by the
Association of Teachers and Lecturers to end the
growth of religious state schools and ban the
teaching of "intelligent design" as a valid
alternative to evolution. How craftily the
creationists have hijacked the word "intelligent"
for something so dumb. The teachers are right to
join the battle just as the Royal Society gathers
up the might of its scientific authority this
week to oppose the teaching of creationism: it
was the wonderful Steve Jones who said it is like
teaching genetics as a theory only as valid as
the theory that storks deliver babies.
This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not
between Islam and Christendom but between reason
and superstition. The wake-up call came with a
BBC/Mori poll showing that, even in this least
churchgoing nation, science is on the run: 48%
believe in evolution, against 39% who believe in
creationism/"intelligent design". If even
scientists aren't believed then here is fertile
territory for any mad and dangerous theories to
take hold.
But instead of standing up for reason, our
government is handing education over to the world
of faith. It's the same government that went to
war in Iraq to install the likes of Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani into positions of great
power. The man George Bush and Tony Blair see as
the best hope for promoting stability and
"freedom" in Iraq has just issued a fatwa calling
for the killing of all sodomites and lesbians.
See www.sistani.org: "Q. What is the judgment for
sodomy and lesbianism? A. Forbidden. Punished.
The people involved should be killed in the
worst, most severe way of killing." The exiled
Iraqi gay campaigner Ali Hili reports that these
orders are now being obeyed, with an upsurge in
beatings and slaughter of gays in Iraq by
religious cadres who have declared all unmarried
men over 35 "under surveillance".
The Pope may not call for murder, but the Vatican
is directly responsible for millions of Aids
deaths by refusing to sanction condoms even in
parts of Africa where half the population is
infected with HIV, putting out deliberate lies
that condoms are useless against the virus
anyway. Yet here is the Labour government
encouraging religions to take over as many
schools as they can, promoting the humbug that
values and morality only come with the "ethos" of
faith.
Remember this: over a third of all state schools
are now run by religions. Most are Christian,
with some Jewish, Sikh and of other faiths. Under
Labour the Church of England is rolling out 100
new secondary schools; half are open already. In
Labour's flagship academy programme, 42 of the
first 100 belong to Christian sponsors - at least
five of them to evangelical creationists. Since
Labour came to power six new Muslim state schools
have been created; there are another 150 in the
pipeline, according to the National Secular
Society.
The chief inspector of schools, David Bell, says
Islamic schools pose a challenge to social
cohesion. "Traditional Islamic education does not
entirely fit pupils for their lives as Muslims in
modern Britain." The Muslim Parliament itself has
just expressed anxiety about sexual abuse and
violence in the 700 unregulated madrasas where
100,000 Muslim children go after school. Catholic
revelations are a reminder that all religions are
at the same risk of abusing women and children
wherever there is a secretive spiritual and
cultural power over their lives.
Now the teachers' unions fear the faiths will
make a grab for many more schools when the
education bill puts them all up for potential
takeover. Trust status will give sponsors power
not just to run the governing body, but to devise
their own curriculum. (So forget sex education).
Every school that vanishes into the hands of the
religions is gone for ever, exceedingly hard for
a future government to get back. How can a Labour
government be doing this?
It's because religious schools are so popular,
the government says, and indeed they are. There
may be few bums on seats in pews, but there are
queues for the schools whose special "ethos" is
called closet selection. God doesn't move in such
very mysterious ways: research by the Institute
for Research in Integrated Strategies is only the
latest to find that C of E and Catholic schools
take a lower proportion of free-school-meal
children than the average for their catchment
area. It means nearby schools have to take more,
magnifying the imbalance as an unfair proportion
of troubled children congregate in bog-standard
schools without the magic "ethos".
Understandably, parents dash for schools where
the better-off congregate, but few value
religious schools for their own sake. In Northern
Ireland, where most schools are breeding grounds
for religious sectarianism, the few
nondenominational schools are hugely
oversubscribed - but sectarian politicians
prevent more opening for fear of losing their
tribes. The Young Foundation's study The New East
End warns that in Tower Hamlets white parents
fleeing Bangladeshis have taken over four church
secondary schools in which Bangladeshis make up
only 3% of the pupils, while they form 90% of
pupils in the next-door secular schools. Religion
usually means class, race or tribe segregation.
Ask most Labour MPs and they abhor the devious
abuse of religious schools and the segregation
they cause. It's not "choice", since most parents
would never choose faith schools if they were not
the flag for assembling the better pupils
locally. Baroness Morgan, until last year a close
Blair ally as No 10's director of government
relations, spoke out boldly against religious
schools in the Lords. (Note how everyone leaving
No 10 suddenly speaks their mind - and it is
rarely the mind of their leader.) ICM polling
shows that 64% of voters think "the government
should not be funding faith schools of any kind"
- a surprisingly strong position. So what on
earth is a Labour government up to - and why
don't Labour MPs refuse to let this happen?
____
[2]
PEACE CAMPAIGN 2006: CALL FOR PEACE AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN SRI LANKA
In response to a 'Call for Peace and Human Rights
in Sri Lanka' thousands of individuals and tens
of organizations expressed their support leading
up to the fourth year anniversary of the
ceasefire agreement on 22 February 2006. There
were protests and vigils in London, New York and
Geneva. Thousands of individuals signed the
petition in Germany during organized signature
campaigns and many other individuals signed via
e-mail. A number of organisations from Sri
Lanka, Canada, Australia and Europe wrote in
solidarity. We attach below the organizations
that endorsed the call, including a number of
prominent public and private sector unions in
Canada.
AN URGENT CALL FOR PEACE AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN SRI LANKA
As the world watches, Sri Lanka is rapidly
escalating towards outright war. Despite the
2002 ceasefire agreement, human rights violations
and attacks against democracy have continued.
During the past 4 years, political killings,
torture, abduction, violence against women,
arbitrary arrests, child recruitment and
extortion have risen dramatically. Now attacks
between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and
the Government of Sri Lanka are occurring daily.
Inevitably, civilians are the direct victims of
the intensifying violence. The ceasefire of 2002
is all but finished.
Therefore, we the signatories of this petition,
call on the Government of Sri Lanka and the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to immediately
implement the following:
An immediate end to political and extrajudicial
killings, abductions, rape, torture, arbitrary
arrests, and all acts of violence against
civilians;
An immediate end to all forms of child
recruitment and a commitment to release all child
soldiers;
An immediate end to violence against women and
the use and exploitation of women in wartime;
An immediate commitment to respect civil
society including the safeguarding of minority
rights, protection of displaced peoples, women's
rights, economic rights, and freedom of
expression and association;
An immediate end to all acts of violence
directed at one another and a commitment to a
peaceful political process to resolve the
conflict.
Wayne Hanley, President, UFCW Canada Local 175
The Coalition for Muslims and Tamils for Peace and Coexistence, Sri Lanka
The Elementary Teachers of Toronto
John Smith, Executive Officer, ETT
Paul O'Callaghan, Executive Director, Australian
Council for International Development (ACFID)
Robin Breon, Vice President, Steelworkers Local 1998, University of Toronto
Sri Lanka Islamic Forum-UK
Canadian Tamils For Democracy
Kristyn Wong-Tam, Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter, Toronto
ranjit de mel,sri lankan inter religious peace foundation,germany
Board of Directors,Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts
Sanjana Hattotuwa, Head, ICT and Peacebuilding Unit, InfoShare
The Radical Women's Writing Circle, Canada
Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 562, Canada
Joan Greer, Amnesty International, Hamilton, Canada
Stancea Vichie, Missionary Sisters of Service, Australia
Homes not Bombs, Toronto, Canada
Margaret Gibson, Asylum Seeker Welcome Centre, Brunswick, Australia
Memorial University of Newfoundland Student Union (MUNSU), Canada
Memorial University of Newfoundland chapter of Oxfam (MUN OXFAM), Canada
The Graduate Student Union of the Memorial
University of Newfoundland (GSU), Canada
The Teaching Assistants Union of Memorial
University of Newfoundland (TAUMUN), Canada
Gerald FitzGerald, The Justice, Peace and
Reconciliation Committee of 'The Spiritans'
St. John's Campaign Against War (STCAW), Canada
Henk Zandvliet, Director, NEAG Alternatives to
Violence, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The Society for Corporate Environmental and
Social Responsibility (CESR), Canada
The Newfoundland Public Interest Research Group (NLPIRG), Canada
Sri Lanka Democracy Forum
www.lankademocracy.org
____
[3]
Narmada Bachao Andolan
- 62 Gandhi Marg, Badwani, Madhya Pradesh 451551. Ph: 07290-222464
- C/o B-13 Shivam Flats, Ellora Park, Vadodara,
Gujarat 390023. Ph: 0265-2282232
- Maitri Niwas, Tembewadi, Dhadgaon, dist.
Nandurbar, Maharashtra. Ph: 02595-220620
PRESS RELEASE
April 13, 2006
§ Health of all three fasters deteriorates
§ Medha Patkar writes letter to the SHO for her release
§ RCNCA meeting announced for Saturday morning;
NBA states dam construction must be stalled since
rehabilitation not done and Report of the
Ministers visit should be released
§ Anna Hazare visits dharna site, also meets Maharashtra Chief Minister
§ Solidarity actions around the country and the world continue and intensify
The health of the three fasters is beginning to
deteriorate on their 16th day of indefinite
hunger fast. Jamsingh Nargave's is in a lot of
pain, especially in his legs. Bhagwati behen is
beginning to experience a lot of weakness. Medha
Patkar's BP and potassium level continue to
fluctuate abnormally and the ketone level is
positive. She is experiencing weakness and severe
headaches. However, the struggle for justice and
the hunger fast continues and will continue
unless the people of the Narmada Valley get
justice.
Medha Patkar has written a letter to the
Parliament Street SHO demanding to know what
sections she has been charged under, since she
was officially not been served any papers at all.
Nor has she been produced before a magistrate
until now. Yet, she is being held under detention.
Meanwhile, noted social activist and
anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare visited the
dharna site today to support the ongoing
struggle. He also met Vilasrao Deshmukh, Chief
Minister of Maharashtra, to urge him to intervene
in this matter as far as the rehabilitation of
Maharashtra families is concerned.
The meeting of the Review Committee of the NCA
has been announced for Saturday morning. NBA
welcomes the decision to call the meeting,
however, we reiterate that this meeting should
have been held one month ago when the
construction clearance was given. By now, the dam
construction has proceeded upto about 3 metres,
illegally! NBA demands an immediate stalling of
construction until all affected families are
rehabilitated as per Supreme Court directives;
with land and shifted six months before possible
submergence.
Solidarity actions, demonstrations, dharnas and
solidarity fasts continue throughout Indian and
the world over. 34 individuals and 42
organisations from all over the world including
Bangladesh, Australia, USA, Belgium, Thailand,
Philippines, Venezuela, Japan, etc, have written
a letter of protest to the Prime Minister. The
letter states, "...this is a blot on your
government...the Narmada struggle is a
reaffirmation of the Indian constitution's
commitment to democracy and justice". The
organizations include Friends of the Earth,
Australia, Assembly of the Poor, Thailand, Focus
on the Global South, Thailand & Philippines,
Center for Economic Justice, USA, Nodo Bolivar
Del Observatoria Desc Amazonia, Venezuela and
many others.
All over the country too there are solidarity
actions in Itarsi, Hoshangabad, Bhopal, Indore,
Trivandrum, Mysore, Mumbai. Bhopal saw a huge
dharna yesterday, including scientists, writers
and eminent citizens. The dharna in Indore is
continuous with regular relay fasts and they even
held a Kavi Sammelan yesterday, showcasing the
Narmada poems. Especially in Kerala, hundreds of
villages are observing fasts and conducting
dharnas in solidarity. Badwani, which being 4 kms
from the Narmada river, is close to several
submergence villages in Madhya Pradesh and is
also the center of the office of the NBA,
observed a 100% bandh on 11th April in solidarity
with the struggle in Delhi. The bandh was total,
and brought together varying groups including
Jain community, NSUI, ABVP, several college
students, and all the merchants association of
this town. Although the M.P. govt claims that
Badwani is not in submergence even at 138 m, the
life and existence of Badwani depends on the
villages
around it, which are on the verge of being drowned without rehabilitation.
Several of these submergence villages, such as
Chikhalda, Kadmal, Ekalra, Ekkalbara, Bhavariya,
Kavti that are affected by submergence are
observing 'chulhabandi' where the entire village
observes solidarity fast. This was also observed
in Vadchil, the Maharashtra resettlement site,
where families of Nimgavhan, Domkhedi and Surung
have been resettled 2 years ago, after immense
struggle. In the submergence village Kakrana, all
the children of the jeevanshala (school) there
observed a fast on 9th April. The villages of
Nimad are also daily carrying out 'deep daan',
where they release diyas (lamps) into the Narmada
river. The largest 'deep daan' as yet has been
done by the people of Nissarpur, in special
support of Bhagwati Patidar from their village,
who is also on her 16th day of fast.
Yogini Khanolkar, Kamla Yadav, Siyaram Padvi,
Chetan Salve, Dipti Bhatnagar, Ranvirsingh,
Noorji Padvi
o o o
Asian Age,
14 April 2006
DON'T DAMN NARMADA
by Angana Chatterji
Dams are not the temples of India, they have become its burial grounds. In
dissent to the brutal refusal of state and Central governments to honour the
legally-bound commitment to resettlement and
rehabilitation of adivasi and other
disenfranchised peoples who are made refugees by the Sardar Sarovar dam,
Jamsingh Nargave, Bhagwatibai Patidar and Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao
Andolan (NBA) began an indefinite fast on March 29, 2006. On April 4, police
forcibly took Patkar and Nargave into hospital custody charging that they were
attempting suicide, and assaulted and arrested
300 Andolan activists in New Delhi.
The dam stands at 110.64 metres. On March 8, 2006, the Narmada Control
Authority approved raising the height of the
Sardar Sarovar to 121.92 metres. This,
as per the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Limited, will require 1.75 lakh cubic
metres of concrete and cost an additional Rs 125 crores. Following a petition
by the NBA in1995, the Supreme Court of India limited construction of the dam
to 80.3 metres. Since 1999, the court has allowed successive jumps, even as it
upheld the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award (NWDTA), mandating
land-for-land rehabilitation of impacted families
six months prior to any increase in
dam height. This has never been enforced. As the dam rises and the reservoir
grows in size, more villages are submerged, lives
imperilled, displacing memory,
difference, history.
The Narmada Valley Development Plan, imagined since 1946 and formulated in
the late Eighties, designated the Narmada River - 1,312 kilometres through the
states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat - and her tributaries as the
site of 30 large, 135 medium and 3,000 small dams. These dams are turning the
river into a series of lakes, devastating 20 million peasants and adivasis who
call the Narmada watershed home.
Across the Narmada Valley, 35,000 additional families will be impacted at 121
metres, and have not been rehabilitated. The Madhya Pradesh government has
offered cash compensation to families, violating the land-for-land mandate of
the NWDTA. In Maharashtra, over 1,000 families are yet to receive
rehabilitation. In Gujarat, numerous affected
families are yet to receive land or have been
allocated poor quality land. A ministerial team visited the Narmada Valley,
yet the government has failed to act.
South Asia is home to the largest grouping of tribal peoples outside Africa,
and 84.3 million indigenous peoples live in India. A diversity of cultures
named "indigenous" share the ongoing reality of cultural and physical genocide.
Indigenous peoples today live in states and statelessness, subject to forces of
assimilation and annihilation. As peoples and cultures, the "indigenous"
cannot be made uniform or essentialised. Their resistance includes assertion of
native identities and traditional culture, as well as efforts to modernise and
incorporate. In September 1958, India ratified the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) Convention 107 relating to
Indigenous and Tribal Populations.
Integrationist in character, Convention 107 attests to tribal rights based on a
framework of indigenous "populations" rather than
"peoples." In 1989, ILO issued
Convention 169, concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent
Countries, accepting indigenous cultures as distinct organised societies with
specific identities, recognising them as "peoples." Such acknowledgement allows
tribes the right to negotiate for "sovereignty" with states in which they are
situated. The Indian state remains reluctant to
sign Convention 169, prioritising
an assimilative approach to nation building.
Adivasi and peasant movements in India reject the assumption that development
justifies cultural annihilation and the state capture of the lands and
livelihoods of disempowered communities. Between
1970-1990, 45 million people were
displaced by India's experiment with large-scale hydroelectric projects.
Adivasis are 8.2 per cent of the nation's inhabitants, 40 per cent of the
displaced population. The Tenth Five Year Plan
states that 8.54 million adivasis
were displaced between 1951-1990, from Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh,
Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. The count, activists say, is
considerably higher. Only 2.12 million have been resettled.
The nation displaces ethics with/for dominance, interning the dispossessed in
the process. Patkar and Nargave must be released from hospital custody
immediately. The Congress government must accede to the NBA's demand and halt
construction of the Sardar Sarovar until the
affected are ethically rehabilitated as
per the provisions of the NWDTA and Supreme Court orders of 2000 and 2005.
For 21 years, people in the Narmada Valley have struggled for justice with
inordinate courage. They are the subjects of
state violence, immense and egregious
casualties of maldevelopment. The indefinite dharna continues, emanating a
haunting call that resounds across the world: "Narmada Bachao."
Angana Chatterji is associate professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology
at California Institute of Integral Studies
____
[4]
The Telegraph
April 12, 2006
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
- The old Congress has changed unrecognizably
by Achin Vanaik
The author is professor of international
relations and global politics, Delhi University
Face of modern India
However reluctant longtime supporters might be to
accept this, let us proclaim the truth loud and
clear. The Congress that led the national
movement, that did so much to shape the
post-independence experience and that, till the
early Eighties, despite all ups and downs, was
the principal reference point of the polity - the
embodiment of Indian centrism, programmatically
most expressive of the widest cross-section of
Indian society - is no more. It is now a
fundamentally right wing party differing in no
serious way from the Bharatiya Janata Party in
either its economic or foreign policy
perspectives. As for the Congress commitment to
secularism, this is more pragmatic than
principled. There is usually a time lag between
the emergence of a new socio-political phenomenon
and the kind of theorization of it that can
provide a more full-bodied awareness of what has
happened. When, how and why has this
transformation of the Congress taken place?
In seeking to understand what makes and shapes a
party, one needs to look at four crucial
dimensions and their interconnections and how
these change over time: the programme, the
leadership, the organizational structure, the
social-electoral base. In the case of
ideologically driven cadre parties, it is always
the programme that makes the party, never the
other way around. To investigate changes in the
character of such parties, the tell-tale signs
are provided by the dilution of their programmes,
usually in response to the need to expand their
social bases, even as all efforts must be made to
prevent the demoralization of their ideologically
trained and disciplined cadre-activist force.
Hence the left and the BJP can be expected to
exhibit a much greater degree of historical
continuity than parties like the Congress.
Before independence, the Congress was a party, a
movement, and a government-in-waiting. After
1947, it rapidly shed the character of a movement
but its extraordinary organizational and
networked character, forged in the process of
leading the national movement, made it a
government-within-a-government. This fact went by
many names - the 'Congress system', 'one-party
dominance', 'the world's greatest network of
bargaining and patronage dispensation'. To this
Congress must go the greatest credit for the
initial institutionalization of a stable liberal
democratic polity. From the late Sixties onwards,
the 'Congress system' collapsed organizationally
and declined electorally and politically. Its
network structure could not survive the twin
blows of the passing away of a generation of
leaders both dispersed and connected at all
levels from the Centre to the state to the
district to the block to the village, and the
substantial abandonment by the rising landed
elite, which became the key force behind the
emergence of various non-Congress regional party
alternatives.
Electorally, there was the decline in support
from the upper and upper-middle classes and the
increasing volatility of support from the core
minorities of Dalits, adivasis and Muslims. The
former process was steadier, continuous and more
serious. The consequences of this erosion of the
Congress as the 'natural party of governance'
were to unfold over the Seventies, Eighties and
Nineties. Three centrist alternatives emerged -
the Janata Party, the Janata Dal, the United
Democratic Front - none of which lasted a full
term of office at the Centre. The Congress was
reduced to a dysfunctional body dominated by a
small centralized leadership, itself dependent on
the contrived charisma of the members of the
Nehru-Gandhi dynasty - the one link between the
current Congress and its past 'glory'.
Now only governmental power could keep its
patronage system going and it was the promise of
victory at the polls that would crank to life at
election times an otherwise non-functioning party
machine. In the space of seven years the Congress
would receive its highest vote - 1984 - testimony
to the new volatility of electoral behaviour, and
then come back to power for the first time as a
minority government in 1991, needing to engineer
defections to stabilize its term in office. Since
then, with the regionalization of the Indian
polity and the dramatic rise of the BJP, its
leadership of coalition governments (1998,
1999-2004), its electoral plateauing and its
subsequent relative decline, we have been firmly
in the era of coalition governments.
Programmatically speaking, the 1984 Rajiv Gandhi
government first shifted economic policy
significantly to the right. But the real turn in
1991 had to await the collapse of the Soviet
Union and was then much more strongly
ideologically determined. On the foreign policy
front, the P.V. Narasimha Rao government
effectively abandoned non-alignment and turned to
the West, especially to the United States of
America. But it would be the BJP-led National
Democratic Alliance that would explode the bomb
and seek strategic accommodation with the US,
which really laid down the contours of Indian
foreign policy - a direction faithfully followed,
indeed accelerated, by the current Manmohan Singh
Congress. For at least the next decade or more,
the overall profile is clear - the normalization
of rightwing politics at the Centre at all
levels, social, economic, cultural, the external
- as two coalition groupings, led by the Congress
and BJP, with some degree of interchangeability
of junior regional partners, compete with each
other.
Yet there remains one crucial difference between
the Congress and the BJP. In the course of the
Nineties, the all-India electoral haemorrhage of
the Congress from the top was so much greater
than from below. Its upper caste Hindu vote as a
proportion of all upper caste votes fell from 36
per cent in 1991 to 21 per cent in 2004, while
its proportion of Dalit (39 per cent and 37 per
cent) and adivasi votes (45 per cent and 42 per
cent) remained relatively stable between the two
election periods. The proportion of Muslims
voting Congress actually rose from 38 per cent to
50 per cent. In short, more than ever before in
its history, the Congress is the party of the
poor and lower castes but is also now decisively
and determinedly rightwing in its policy
orientation and behaviour. Three interconnected
factors explain this extraordinary disjunction.
First, the emergence of a 'middle class' of mass
proportions comprising the top 20 per cent or
more of Indian society that provided the
professional recruiting ground and the social
base for explicitly rightwing, self-serving
elite-driven policies. Second, the emergence of a
totally new kind of leadership highly compatible
with the values, preoccupations and interests of
this burgeoning layer of elites and middle class
and very different in its political culture,
reflexes and commitment from that of the Congress
past. It is this Congress leadership (starting
from Rajiv Gandhi as the 'face of modern India'),
which, in a context of internal organizational
decay, is most responsible for the
systematic-cumulative programmatic shift of the
party to the right that eventually passed beyond
the point of no return. Finally, there is the
enormous pressure exerted by the remarkable rise
of the BJP-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in large
part, also explained by its expanding support
amidst this middle class.
In a more comparative survey, the most important
contribution of the rise of the new right in the
three democracies of the US, the United Kingdom
and India, from the beginning of the Eighties
onwards, was its contribution to the decisive
transformation of the main alternative party
contender. This ensured the longer-term rightwing
transformation of governmental policy. Reaganism
and Thatcherism could only debouch into the
eventual emergence of the Clinton 'New Democrats'
and Blair's 'New Labour' after provoking the rise
and resistance of a 'new left' in both parties
(Jesse Jackson and Tony Benn) that then had to be
crushed within the parties through a fierce
internal struggle. But the Congress witnessed no
such process. This Congress long ago shed the
rooted organizational structure, which could have
been the source and terrain of such a struggle to
retain the party's historical character.
____
[5]
Outlook Magazine - April 17, 2006
Review
THE PASSION OF AMARTYA SEN
We can be more than one kind of person, given
different contexts, avers our argumentative Indian
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE: THE ILLUSIONS OF DESTINY
by Amartya Sen
Penguin
144 pages; Rs 295
An argumentative Indian can sometimes be a
surprisingly passionate man. Here, the words
'surprisingly' and 'passionate' are used with
some deliberation because the Indian in question,
caught mid-argument, is none other than Amartya
Sen. After all, 'passion' is not necessarily the
first thing that springs to mind when you think
of the good professor. You think of a measured,
reasonable, persuasive voice, that marshals
evidence, lays out a case, and constructs an
edifice of ideas
entirely through logical steps, causal
connections, elegant equations and a mass of
statistical and empirical data. That is what
people who win Nobel prizes for economics are
usually expected to do.
And yet, in reading Identity and Violence : The
Illusion of Destiny what you do ultimately come
to grips with is what might be best described in
quasi-Biblical terms as 'The Passion of Amartya
Sen'. In a set of nine closely interwoven essays,
Sen takes on the violence and the threats to
peace and intellectual liberty that spring from
unexamined assumptions about culture and identity
in the contemporary world. In doing all this,
what Sen renders transparent is the degree to
which he feels angry, sad, joyous, irritated,
pleased and hopeful, sometimes all at once. We
hear him chuckle and laugh, complain and get
exasperated, and occasionally, we hear him sigh.
Sen revisits several of the debates of his
earlier collection of essays The Argumentative
Indian. He returns to them elliptically,
sometimes repetitively, but always with a
passionate, almost obdurate intensity. As if the
tasks he had set himself are unraveling before
his eyes, and are in need of constant, repetitive
acts of nurture and care.
Can the measured path of reason (which Sen
invokes in the words of the Emperor Akbar, as
'rah-e-aql') be touched and ruddied by the warmth
of sentiment? A close reading of Amartya Sen's
unfolding career as a moral philosopher, and as a
peripatetic public intellectual, would in fact
suggest that it can.
Amartya Sen, the moral philosopher, is a
companionable interlocutor to Amartya Sen, the
economist, and Sen the skeptical enlightenment
intellectual is an interesting counterpoint to
Sen the sentimental Bengali. Here, I mean
'sentiment' not pejoratively or condescendingly,
but appreciatively, as a recognition of a certain
depth and intensity of feeling. This reasoned
depth and intensity of feeling is the basis of
the principal intervention that he makes in
Identity and Violence. We can read this in the
way he glosses key ethical and cognitive problems
facing the contemporary world through an optic
that owes a considerable debt to the role of
'sentiment' in classical Economic thought,
particularly to a close (and somewhat covert)
reading of Adam Smith. Smith, sometimes reviled
as the theorist of self interest, had emphasized
the significance of 'sympathy' in making us feel
the passions of others in a neglected text called
A Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is not often
remembered that 'sympathy' for Adam Smith was as
important a factor in the making of decisions in
the real world as the calculus of self interest.
Amartya Sen's arguments in Identity and Violence
can be read as an exercise in the contemplation
of sympathy as a social force. For him, it is
sympathy that produces the feelings of identity
with those we consider to be like ourselves, and
sympathy again that generates resonances with the
feeling of people we might designate as 'others'
for a given purpose. Sen goes on to argue that
our affiliations are in fact plural, and that we
can be more than one kind of person, given a
plurality of contexts.
Thus a person may be at the same time -"an Asian,
an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi
ancestry, an American or British resident, an
Economist, a dabbler in Philosophy, an author, a
Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and
democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a
believer in the rights of gay and lesbian people,
with a non religious lifestyle, from a Hindu
background, a non-Brahmin and a non believer in
the afterlife"
The person whose portrait this is (and can it be
anyone other than our argumentative Indian?) is
not a being without identity, or a man without
qualities, but a person who engages different
aspects of his self when encountering different
kinds of people, situations and choices. His
'sympathies' are neither monochromatic nor
monotonous, in fact they articulate a broad
spectrum of possibilities that need not add up to
a consistent or even harmonious monad. As Sen
says, with some poetry and much conviction, the
horizons of the self are multiplied, not halved
by history and circumstance.
Following Sen, we could argue that it is
precisely this matrix of complex 'sympathetic'
resonances between different aspects of different
selves that makes for the web that we are
accustomed to think of as society. To think of
any one of them as cardinal is to enter the trap
of the illusion that we are destined to be one
thing over all others. The refusal to entertain
the 'illusion of destiny' entails a recognition
that we choose to be who we are more than that we
are condemned to be who we are said to be. It
means understanding of the fact that some
Bengalis may enter into relationships of
significance with some Uzbeks based on an
acknowledgment of their common agnosticism, even
as some Bengalis might enter into meaningful
dialogues with some Tamilians on the basis of a
shared perception of non-Brahmin identities, just
as some devout Jain vegetarians who are
heterosexual but believe in the rights of gay and
lesbian people might find common cause with some
homosexual Muslim, or Sikh, or Hindu, or Jewish,
or Christian or Atheist carnivores. These
relationships and alliances are contingent on the
situational dynamics that different people find
themselves in at different points of time, in
different places and contexts, and at different
times in their lives. They spring from local
circumstances and they span the earth. They are
the products of reasoned choices made by
reflective individuals and discursive
communities. Some of these may be more enduring
than others, and might determine a greater part
of a person's life, others may be momentary but
highly significant in terms of the intensity of
interaction. Some may lead to lasting friendships
and alliances, others may lead to accidental and
momentary but significant solidarities. But in
either case, the placing of people in boxes that
designate one identity to the exclusion of others
leads necessarily to impoverished,
'miniaturized' selves and stunted social
possibilities. This impoverished self is what Sen
designates as being under the sign of a
'solitarist' conception of identity.
This 'solitatist' notion of identity creates
guided missiles of the self that keep hitting the
same target. Thus, the contemporary Muslim or
Hindu or Christian is shorn (by others and in
many cases by himself) of any possibilities other
than those underwritten by what Sen calls
'Civilisational Incarceration'. She is condemned
to become a shade of what she could be simply on
the basis of a received idea of what it means to
be Muslim, or Hindu, or Christian, or whatever.
Sen demonstrates this process of the
'impoverishment' of a series of identities, be
they configured as 'Muslim' or 'colonized' or
'Western' subjects, with an array of arresting
examples and contrapuntal histories that span
from India, to China, to Ireland, to Africa, to
the Arab and Islamic world.
He patiently argues a case for a considered
appreciation of the Islamic world's contribution
to science, technology, doubt, the freedom of
thought and reason as a necessary countermeasure
to the univocal registers of the theses of the
'Clash' and 'Dialogue' of Civilisations. He shows
how uncritical 'multiculturalism' may very easily
devolve into a set of plural 'monocultures'. He
argues for an acknowledgment of the debts that
the West owes the East, and vice versa. He
searches for room in the difficult but vitally
necessary intellectual space that is neither an
elegy nor a dirge for the long history of
globalisation. He is able to see the validity of
the critique of immiserisation that many
'anti-globalisation' activists articulate, and he
is also able to state (though not as
convincingly) that the operation of global market
forces can have a variety of different
consequences when they are qualified and
attenuated by wider social choices and decisions
about democracy, gender relations, health, and
education.
While reading Identity and Violence, I also read
a remarkable testament to the violence of
identification - a set of twin blogs in Hindi and
English that documented and witnessed the
destruction of one of Delhi's most alive and
hospitable neighbourhoods - Nangla Machi - on the
banks of the Yamuna, flanking the ring road as it
arcs past Pragati Maidan. Thousands of hard
working, peaceable people were made homeless last
week by bulldozers and riot police acting under
the orders of the judicial apparatus, to the
accompaniment of a deafening near silence in the
media. Accounts of wardrobe malfunctions at
fashion shows took precedence over news of
demolitions and the relentless violence of an
un-accountable judiciary. The blog entries,
written by young media practitioners who lived in
Nangla Machi and some of their interlocutors,
speak of a world of everyday sympathies and
solidarities, of the complex map of identities
that is embodied and lived in a working class
neighbourhood in a city like Delhi.
Ironically, it was the residents' inability to
furnish proof of their 'identities' and
documents, a grave failing in the face of the
ruthlessness of a state mandated demand for
'solitarist' inscription as 'legal' inhabitants,
that led to a perceptional precedence of their
status as trespassers over their claims to
humanity and habitation in a city. This is what
eventually contributed to the continuing violence
of their eviction. It is those who refuse to be
identified, or those who sometimes cannot be
adequately identified, who also bear the brunt of
the harshest blows when the violence of
identification comes calling astride a bulldozer
armed with a court order. Underlying it is a
total negation of any 'sympathy' on the part of
the judge who writes the eviction notice towards
those who are to be evicted. For him, there
cannot be any point of intersection or resonance
between their humanity and his eminence. After
all, he reasons, they defecate by the road, and
he purges in his chamber. A clear demarcation of
identities, even of corporeality, between the
judge and the judged, between the elite and the
urban subaltern, is the necessary prelude to the
role played by the foundational violence of the
state in the process of the re-configuration of
the city.
Reading Amartya Sen on violence and identity is
an occasion that might help us find ways in which
to think about this fact with precision and with
sympathy, and consider ways of ensuring that it
happens less often.
The reviewer is co-founder of Sarai. A slightly
shorter, edited version of this appeared in print.
____
[6] BOOK ANNOUNCEMENTS:
(i)
Indian Democracy, Pluralism and Minorities
By Ram Puniyani
Pages 171, Hard Bound, Price Rs 400/-
The question of co-existence between Hindus and
non-Hindu communities poses the greatest
challenge to Indian democracy and secularism.
With far right Hindutva organizations gaining
ground and the spreading of anti-minority
violence across the country the question needs to
be debated more carefully.
"Indian Democracy, Pluralism and Minorities"
discusses some important aspects of the
anti-minority violence and propaganda being
spread by the RSS and its sister organizations.
The author argues that one of main reasons for
the ascendancy of communal politics is the
misconceptions and distortions spread by those
bent upon constructing an identity based on
suspicion and hatred.
This book dispels many myths that have caused
hundreds of riots across the country and have
brought communities in India at loggerheads with
each other. The book would be useful for
scholars, academics, students of Indian history
and society as well as social activists.
For orders please contact
Global Media Publications
J-51-A, 1st Floor, AFE, Jamia Nagar, Okhla,
New Delhi-110025
Tel: 91-11-55666830, 9818327757
E-mail: info at gmpublications.com
Please shop online at www.gmpublications.com
(The book would be available by 20th April 2006)
----
(ii)
Dreams, Questions, Struggles - South Asian Women in Britain by Amrit
Wilson (Pluto Press, London and Ann Arbor, MI)
Dreams, Questions, Struggles testifies to a multiplicity of struggles,
individual and collective, through which South Asian women, across divisions of
class, community, age and religion, are seeking to take control of their lives.
It looks at the role of the British state, of the relentless pressures of the
market, and of the politics of South Asia in
reshaping gender relations over the
last thirty years; and discusses how South Asian masculinities in different
communities have been reconfigured by multicultural policies and by politicised
religion.
The book challenges the received wisdom that the British state is confronting
South Asian women's oppression in the context of government interventions such
as the current 'Forced Marriage Initiative' and new policies on mental health.
It analyses the experiences of low-paid Asian women workers, including farm
workers, and their varying strategies for trade union organising; deconstructs
contemporary British South Asian weddings; and looks at how dominant
representations of South Asian women have and have not changed.
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE NEW 'GOOD WOMAN': RECONSTRUCTING PATRIARCHAL CONTROL
3. CHANGING MASCULINITIES
4. MAKING A SPECTACLE OF ONESELF -SOUTH ASIAN WEDDINGS IN BRITAIN
5. 'MERCY AND WISDOM OF A GOVERNMENT'? RACE CULTURE AND IMMIGRATION
6. PSYCHIATRY, VIOLENCE AND MENTAL DISTRESS
7. CONTESTING (MIS) REPRESENTATION
8. STILL FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE - LOW-PAID WORKERS IN A GLOBAL MARKET
9. DREAMS, QUESTIONS AND STRUGGLES - REFLECTIONS ON A MOVEMENT
Amrit Wilson is a writer and activist on issues of gender and race in Britain
and South Asian politics. Her books include /Finding A Voice/ - /Asian women in
Britain/ (Virago, 1978) which won the Martin Luther King award*. *She is
currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield
'Dreams, Questions, Struggles', is available now priced at £16.99. To order a
copy go to www.plutobooks.com. Alternatively contact the distributor on 01264
342932 (tel) 01264 342761 (fax) or email your order to tps.pluto at thomson.com.
____
[7] UPCOMING EVENTS:
(i)
18 APRIL - NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION TO SUPPORT NARMADA AND BHOPAL ACTION.
Jantar Mantar- New Delhi, April 12: Over 50
citizens and activists representing various
local, national and international organisations
met at Jantar Mantar on Monday (11 April) evening
to declare 18 April 2006 as a 'National day of
action' to support the demands of Narmada Bachao
Andolan and Justice for Bhopal groups presently
on indefinite hunger-strike in New Delhi.
Students, writers, film-makers, musicians,
artists, impacted community representatives and
activists expressed their outrage about UPA
government's abject failure in ensuring social
and environmental justice in the country. Its
inability to meet over 20 year old demands of the
Sardar Sarovar dam-impacted and Bhopal gas
disaster impacted communities while expanding on
their mindless development paradigm, destroying
lives and damaging the environment, impacting the
poor and the poorest, the indigenous and the
migrant, in our villages and our cities. Citing
spate of recent state acts of terror in
Kalinganagar, Gangavaram, Delhi and Mumbai slums
the participants pointed out that in its pursuit
of profit and business, the UPA government had
flouted all Supreme Court directives on
rehabilitation, resettlement, compensation and
reparation by ruthlessly repressing the voice
of the impacted. Its proactive collaboration and
corroboration with corporate and vested interests
at the cost of its citizens interests, the
collapse of judiciary, executive and politics,
were the chief concerns expressed by the
participants.
It was decided that April 18 will be marked by
Relay fasts, Candle-light vigils, dharnas,
chakka-jams, pamphleteering, gheraos and other
non-violent activities by students, workers,
women, children, coordinated by support groups,
allies, students groups and citizen's initiatives
in support of the joint statement and demands of
NBA and Bhopal groups.
Other proposal included activities to expose the
business collaboration of Congress/UPA members
with corporations, whether it was the Dow
lawyer-cum-Congress spokesperson Abhishek
Singhvi, former Enron counsel P. Chidambaram or
Monsanto middleman, or Supreme Court judges such
as Justice Ahmadi with his openly unethical
behaviour in the matter of Union Carbide and the
Bhopal Memorial Hospital Trust. Citizens charter
for a complete rehaul of the present policies on
industrial development, land acquisition, urban
development, rehabilitation and resettlement with
a creative forms of citizens action were
discussed. People expressed a lot of
dissatisfaction with the Courts, and the Supreme
Court with its insulting statements on
slum-dwellers and activists came in for
particular criticism.
By Shailendra Yashwant
o o o
(ii)
Holy Warriors: religious fundamentalism in India today
Date: 09 May 2006
Location: Old Theatre, Old Building, London School of Economics
Time: 18.30
Price: This event is free and open to all with
no ticket required. Entry is on a first come,
first served basis.
Description: Speaker: Edna Fernandes
Panellists: John Harriss, Athar Hussain, Jill
McGivering, Purna Sen
The post 9/11 world remains fixated by the threat
posed by Islamic fundamentalism. But Islam is not
the only religion to be hijacked by the politics
of the fanatic. In India, the world's largest
secular democracy, the forces of fundamentalism
are evident in every major religion. What lies at
the heart of this fanaticism and what threat does
it pose to India today? Edna Fernandes is author
of Holy Warriors: a journey into the heart of
Indian fundamentalism and a former foreign
correspondent of the Financial Times. Professor
John Harriss and Dr Athar Hussain are based at
LSE. Jill McGivering is a former South Asia
correspondent with the BBC and is currently a BBC
world affairs correspondent. Purna Sen is
director of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Amnesty
International.
Contact Information: For more information
contact Charles Phua: email c.r.phua at lse.ac.uk
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
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/
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