SACW | 13-14 June 2006 | Hudood Debate in Pakistan; India: Chhattisgarh risks civil war; India Pakistan Arms race

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | 13-14 June, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2257

[The South Asia Citizens Web initiative is now 10 years old! ]

[1]  Pakistan: TV channels and the Hudood debate  (Edit, Daily Times)
[2]  India - Chhattisgarh : Militarising Civil Society
   - Citizens' panel warns of civil war in 
Chhattisgarh (Press Release, Independent 
Citizen's Initiative)
   - Waging War Against The People - Dangerous 
anti-Naxal strategy (Praful Bidwai)
   -  Salwa Judum: Nothing unofficial about it (Nandini Sundar)
   -  Physiognomy of Violence (K Balagopal)
   -  Chhattisgarh : Repression Garbed as Security (Editorial, EPW)
[4]  Religion, Violence and Political 
Mobilisation In South Asia edited by Ravinder
Kaur (Reviewed by Harsh Mander)
[5]  India Pakistan Arms Race and Militarisation Watch No 162
[6]  Call For Papers/Conference:  'The 
Independence of India and Pakistan: Sixtieth 
Anniversary Reflections.'

_____

[1]

The Daily Times
June 13, 2006

Editorial: TV CHANNELS AND THE HUDOOD DEBATE

The current debate about the abolition of Hudood 
laws is throwing up an interesting array of 
opinion. It is unprecedented because, on Islamic 
subjects, most private TV channels had only one 
point of view - that of the orthodox cleric - and 
there was usually no space for disagreement that 
could give the state an opportunity for reform. 
But after six years of freedom and 
"market-driven" Islamisation, the private TV 
channels are paying back good dividends. If the 
politicians want, they can do away with the 
horrible laws that punish the raped woman as if 
she had fornicated. The TV debates show the 
reactionary clerics sticking to their anti-reform 
stance - supported by the clerical alliance MMA 
in the parliament - although the people clearly 
think that the laws should be abolished. In this 
context, it is important to know whether the two 
non-clerical mainstream parties, the PPP and the 
PMLN, are inclined to side with the people or go 
with the mullahs.

Pakistan began its Islamisation in 1948 with the 
Objectives Resolution. It reached its climax in 
the 1979-1988 interregnum of General Zia ul Haq's 
military dictatorship when coercion was used in 
line with the provisions of enforcement contained 
in Islamic jurisprudence. After General Zia, the 
civilian governments were never strong enough in 
the face of the entrenched and Islamised organs 
of the state to roll back the process. In at 
least two instances, when the elected governments 
were dismissed by the president under Article 
58/2/B of the Constitution with the approval of 
the military establishment, one of the charges 
was that the government had stopped or neglected 
Islamisation. One unsuccessful military coup in 
1995 also made de-Islamisation one of its grounds 
for staging the coup. Indeed, after 1998, Prime 
Minister Nawaz Sharif attempted further 
'Islamisation' under the projected 15th 
Amendment. He failed only because he didn't have 
a sufficient majority in the Upper House.

Under General Pervez Musharraf the process of 
de-Islamisation began in earnest with a measure 
of "indirect" international coercion under UN 
Security Council resolution 1373 under Chapter 
Seven of the Charter. An order imposed under 
duress is easily rolled back by bringing the 
situation to normal: usually the laws remain 
unchanged but their enforcement by the state is 
allowed to default. But here an opposite thesis 
had in fact been proved: if a coercive order 
aimed at the transformation of society is allowed 
to reign for some years the target population 
internalises it and its effects become embedded 
in society. A "public demand" for Islamisation 
appeared to have become irreducible. Therefore 
even under General Musharraf Pakistan's discourse 
at least remained as intensely Islamic as it was 
under General Zia because after a decade of 
dictatorship the public mind had become 
unfamiliar with the secular-pluralist discourse. 
So when the private TV channels opened in 
Pakistan after 2000 the owners were struck by the 
high public demand for religious programmes.

The process of religious communication on TV in 
Pakistan was market-driven. It catered to the 
aggressive fundamentalist as well as to the 
"accretive" magic-oriented istakhara type of 
discourse. Since under General Zia, Pakistan had 
only one state-owned TV channel, the religious 
discourse under General Musharraf - through half 
a dozen new private TV channels - seemed actually 
to be several times more extensive in volume and 
quality than what General Zia was able to achieve 
officially. This "stampede" for Islam was aided 
in no small measure by the earlier proliferation 
of jihadi clergy, which had formed its own 
centres of power in parallel to the state. The 
organisations banned by a UN committee under 
resolution 1373 for terrorism remained present on 
the ground and continued to assert their power in 
favour of a privatised Islamisation. In fact in 
2002, jihadi and sectarian clerics were 
emboldened enough by General Musharraf's "secular 
ambivalence" to announce that they would take 
over cities and start Islamising them by force.

After September 11, 2001, the Islamic discourse 
on TV became more intense and aggressive. It was 
spearheaded by a clergy now scared of General 
Musharraf's "subservience" to the United States, 
which might result in his taking steps to 
restrict clerical activity in Pakistan. (This was 
actually seen to happen later when General 
Musharraf tried to "normalise" the seminaries and 
sanitise the ideologically loaded textbooks.) 
This was compounded by a pan-Islamic wave of 
grievance, which was further strengthened by the 
2003 American invasion of Iraq. Since this 
invasion was opposed by all levels of Pakistani 
society, the TV discourse reflected it through 
the new supremacy of the clerical speaker. It now 
began to express an unrelated cosmic grief that 
looked less like a protest against global 
injustice and more a like a regret over Islam's 
inability to dominate. As astounding proof of how 
the mass media affected the mind of society, Imam 
Mehdis began to emerge from various cities of 
Pakistan and had to be arrested!

Because of the private TV channels, the era of 
General Musharraf has been in effect more of an 
"Islamic" era than the one presided over by 
General Zia. The tone of the Islamic discourse 
has been aggressive, if not paranoid, and freedom 
accorded to secular and moderate voices to come 
and compete with the orthodox clergy has simply 
led to more acrimony as youthful audiences tend 
to defend the hard-line positions taken by the 
clerical discussants. The moderate discussants 
are tentative and apologetic because of their 
inability to quote from the Quran and Hadith in 
Arabic, and can clearly see the dice loaded 
against their point of view. The audiences are 
motivated by a number of external influences, 
which have been induced by the TV channels 
themselves. The rise of collective namaz in 
mosques was witnessed under General Zia and the 
period following his death, but the real 
dominance of the mosque was seen under General 
Musharraf and his liberal media policy.

In an interesting departure, however, the same TV 
channels are now projecting a public consensus 
that a woman who is raped - an act of violence, 
not sex, because a woman often dies during rape - 
cannot be punished with qazf (wrongful 
accusation) simply because she can't prove it 
with four pious male witnesses. This is largely 
because of the obvious and blatant injustice. It 
is also because the human rights dialogue in the 
country has sharpened because of crusaders like 
Mukhtar Mai. Meanwhile, the MMA is watching and 
will definitely defy it if the non-clerical 
parties support its defiance. But why should the 
PPP and PMLN stand in the way of a much-needed 
reform?

Let us keep our fingers crossed because both 
mainstream parties have shelved earlier 
commission reports recommending abolition of 
Hudood laws when they were in power. *

_____


[2]  MILITARISING CIVIL SOCIETY


Press Release by Independent Citizens Initiative,
New Delhi 29th  May 2006

CITIZENS' PANEL WARNS OF CIVIL WAR IN CHHATTISGARH
CALLS FOR END TO 'SALWA JUDUM' CAMPAIGN AND JUDICIAL INQUIRY


An Independent Citizen's Initiative of writers, 
senior journalists and former civil servants 
visited Dantewara district of Chhattisgarh State 
between 17 and 21 May 2006. It traveled through 
the entire district talking to a wide 
cross-section of people - displaced villagers in 
camps, political leaders, government and police 
officials, social workers, journalists, and other 
citizens. It found that the situation in 
Dantewara district is extremely serious. There is 
an atmosphere of fear and a great deal of 
violence in which ordinary villagers, and tribals 
in particular, are the main sufferers. The 
violence by Maoists guerillas continues. On the 
other side, in several areas the Chhattisgarh 
administration appears to have 'outsourced' law 
and order to an unaccountable, undisciplined and 
amorphous group which calls itself Salwa Judum. 
The leadership of this group has passed into the 
hands of criminal elements who are not in the 
control of the administration. Violence is no 
answer to violence.

Our investigations show that the civil 
administration is on the point of collapse. 
Despite carrying letters from the Additional 
Chief Secretary and informing all officials of 
our visit, our movement was strictly curbed. We 
were prevented from visiting villages where 
serious human rights violations were reported. We 
were physically attacked three times by Salwa 
Judum members, manhandled, and our possessions 
stolen, with the police standing by.

We found that society has been deeply divided. 
Villages and families have been set against each 
other. Minors are being used as Special Police 
Officers (SPOs), and armed with lathis and guns. 
An entire section of society is being 
criminalized by being made complicit in salwa 
judum's violence, and also made vulnerable to 
retaliatory attacks by Maoists and their village 
level supporters. Instead of bringing in peace 
and security, Salwa Judum has increased 
insecurity all around.

The Independent Citizen's Initiative found 
evidence of killings, the burning of homes, and 
attacks on women, including gang-rape. Only the 
killings by Maoists are recorded, while the 
killings and other incidents of violence by Salwa 
Judum have been ignored. Arrests appear 
arbitrary, and several people seem to be missing. 
All these incidents need to be thoroughly 
investigated. The press is tightly controlled and 
intimidated, and feels unable to report the 
truth. 

Thousands of villagers have been forced to come 
and live in camps. Camp conditions are seriously 
inadequate. Beyond building some roadside houses, 
the government appears to have no long-term plans 
for the rehabilitation or safe return of 
villagers.
  We believe that for the violence to end, and for 
the citizens of Dantewara to live peaceful and 
normal lives, the Government of Chhattisgarh 
needs to immediately take these corrective 
measures:

1. The Salwa Judum must be stopped immediately, 
its members disarmed, and control reasserted by 
the state administration.
2. To restore governance, the government must 
revamp all top level administration in the area 
and position those known to have empathy for 
adivasis.  The law-and-order machinery must be 
repaired and restored so that it is fully 
accountable and protects the lives, security and 
dignity of the citizens of Dantewara.
3. The government must facilitate and enable the 
return to their villages of those in camps. For 
this, both Maoists and the government must come 
to a ceasefire.
4. The Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Act 
2005 must be repealed since its provisions are 
vague and vulnerable to misuse.

We appeal to the Government of India, jointly 
with the Government of Chhattisgarh, to:

5. Institute a full, impartial, credible and 
time-bound enquiry into the incidents of violence 
by Maoists as well as Salwa Judum in Dantewara in 
the last one year.
6. Since the Maoists are not confined to 
Chhattisgarh, the Government of India must start 
a national dialogue with the Maoists.

We appeal to the Maoists to stop violence, to 
facilitate conditions of peace and normalcy, and 
enable the return of displaced people to their 
own homes and villages.

The members of the Independent Citizen's Initiative were:

Dr Ramachandra Guha (historian and columnist, Bangalore)
Mr Harivansh (editor, Prabhat Khabar, Ranchi),
Ms Farah Naqvi (writer and social activist, New Delhi),
Mr EAS Sarma (former Secretary, Government of India, Visakhapatnam),
Dr Nandini Sundar (Professor of Sociology, Delhi University),
Mr. B. G. Verghese (former editor, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, New Delhi).


o o o


The Praful Bidwai Column                              
June 5, 2006


WAGING WAR AGAINST THE PEOPLE
DANGEROUS ANTI-NAXAL STRATEGY

By Praful Bidwai

The Chhattisgarh Government is about to launch a 
massive military operation against the Naxalites 
with more than a dozen Central Reserve Police 
Force battalions under the command of the 
so-called "Supercop" and former Punjab 
Director-General of Police KPS Gill. The 
operation has been called the "ultimate" blow or 
"knockout" punch against "the Red Menace" and 
will reportedly involve the use of helicopters. 
The CRPF will be assisted by special commandos 
from Mizoram, who have been trained in 
"counter-insurgency" operations by United States 
troops at Vairangte for more than a decade.

Mr Gill's strategy, whose blueprint is with the 
Union home ministry, involves gathering reliable 
intelligence on the Maoists' hideouts and 
movements, and hitting them hard "in a sudden and 
well-coordinated attack".  According to a leak to 
the media, "the thrust of the Gill [strategy] is 
to launch a swift offensive, giving little time 
to [the] Maoist guerrillas to regroup and 
retaliate". The plan also involves evacuation of 
large numbers of people from the forests of 
southern Bastar and clearing them of mature trees.

It's a safe bet that this operation will further 
brutalise the civilian population without being 
particularly effective against the Naxalites. The 
whole plan is thoroughly ill-conceived, and will 
involve violations of the law of the land and the 
human rights of vulnerable Adivasi tribals. The 
Union and state governments should call off the 
operation at once.

The operation is a sequel to a "people's 
campaign" called Salwa Judum (peace hunt or 
movement) launched a year ago by the state 
government, which has all but triggered a civil 
war in parts of Chhattisgarh. Salwa Judum (SJ) 
targets the Naxalites for violent attacks.  Its 
members generally comprise the local elite, 
including wealthy Adivasis, traders and 
contractors. Formally, SJ is the creation of 
Congress legislature party chief Mahendra Karma, 
politically known as "the 60th member of BJP CM 
Raman Singh's cabinet". In truth, the SJ idea was 
conceived by former BJP home minister Brij Mohan 
Aggarwal.

A group called Independent Citizens' Initiative 
(ICI), comprising former Union government 
secretary EAS Sarma, Delhi sociology professor 
Nandini Sundar, veteran journalist BG Verghese, 
historian Ram Guha, Prabhat Khabar (Ranchi) 
editor Harivansh, and social activist Farah 
Naqvi, recently inquired into Salwa Judum's 
activities. Its just-released fact-finding report 
makes extremely disturbing reading. It shows that 
SJ is not the "people's spontaneous resistance or 
uprising" against the Naxalites that it's claimed 
to be. It's a government-sponsored and -funded 
organisation which has an armed wing consisting 
of 3,200 Special Police Officers, widely seen as 
the tribal face of the police.

In essence, says ICI, the Chhattisgarh government 
has "outsourced" its law-and-order functions to 
an "unaccountable, undisciplined and amorphous 
group" not trained to use firearms properly.  The 
SJ and the SPOs have no legitimate authority, but 
have become a law unto themselves. SJ has been 
forcing tribals to take up arms against the 
Naxalites-on pain of being beaten up, illegally 
fined, or have their homes burnt down. SPOs are 
meant to work under the authority of the state 
police. But in Chhattisgarh's Naxalite-affected 
districts, the regular police has ceded all power 
to SJ's lumpen elements.

SJ's violent operations have turned the tribal 
belt of Bastar into a virtual war-zone, in which 
Adivasis are pitted against Adivasis and forced 
to fight the Maoists to whose retaliation they 
become vulnerable. Scores of villages have been 
evacuated. The Adivasis' social life has been 
destroyed. Officially, as many as 46,000 people 
have been compelled to move into so-called relief 
camps near highways. According to interviews 
conducted by ICI with local people, officials, 
journalists and foresters, the number of 
displaced people is as high as 70,000.
ICI found "evidence of killings, the burning of 
homes, and attacks on women, including 
gang-rape." There are arbitrary arrests and 
"several people seem to be missing.  The press is 
tightly controlled and intimidatedŠ" Local 
villagers complain of harassment, extortion, 
frequent beatings (to extract information about 
Naxalites) and other human rights violations.

SJ is guilty of recruiting even minors as SPOs-a 
breach of the Geneva Conventions and of several 
covenants on child rights to which the government 
is a signatory. Equally disturbingly, an attempt 
is under way to break up tribal communities into 
the equivalent of "Strategic Hamlets" which the 
U.S. created in the 1960s in Vietnam in its 
brutal. The "Strategic Hamlet" model is not as 
far-fetched as might appear. Just last fortnight, 
two officials of the U.S. Embassy met the 
Chhattisgarh chief secretary (home) BKS Ray to 
offer the state assistance in fighting the 
"Naxalite threat". Although the government has 
not accepted the offer, it's clearly following 
the same militaristic approach that the U.S. 
favours to deal with insurgents and guerrillas, 
for instance, in Latin America.

Ostensibly, the UPA government advocates a 
"two-pronged" strategy: deal sternly with 
Naxalite violence; but simultaneously address the 
socio-economic sources of discontent underlying 
it through development programmes. In March, 
Union home minister Shivraj Patil tabled a status 
paper on the issue in which he spelt out a 
14-point policy based on such a dual approach. In 
reality, the government has concentrated much of 
its effort on "modernisation" of state police 
forces, long-term deployment of paramilitary 
troops, and use of modern lethal weaponry.

The bulk of the financial assistance of Rs 2,475 
crores committed to India's 55 worst 
Naxalite-affected districts has been earmarked 
for police-paramilitary operations. Very little 
has translated into development funding. 
According to ICI, relief camp conditions are 
seriously inadequate. The government appears to 
have no long-term plans for rehabilitation or 
safe return of villagers.

The government has concentrated only one thing: 
force. This approach springs from a "thanedar 
mentality": coercion is the most effective way of 
dealing with social dicontent. This approach is 
fundamentally misbegotten. It fails to understand 
that Naxalite activity has spread to some 160 of 
India's 600 districts because of rising agrarian 
distress, destruction of forests by the timber 
mafia, uprooting of Adivasis due to predatory 
mining, irrigation and metallurgical projects, 
and rapidly growing income and regional 
disparities. It's not a coincidence that more 
than two-thirds of the 55 most severely 
Naxalite-affected districts lie in the tribal 
belt. In state after tribal state, the Adivasi 
economy has been squeezed and marginalised to a 
point where millions of Adivasis have ceased 
being an agricultural people and lost the organic 
historical links with land, forests and water. 
Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand were created on the 
explicit rationale of a tribal identity. But in 
both, the influx of outsiders has reduced 
Adivasis to a minority.

More generally, Naxalite activity has grown-year 
after every single year-because of India's 
jobless and destructive growth which benefits 
only a tenth or so of the population. The growth 
is extremely rapid in areas in which the state 
has withdrawn from public services or colluded 
with entrenched interests, and become predatory 
on the people.

It's hard to defend the violent justice that many 
Naxalite groups readily hand out to their 
enemies. Some have even developed a stake in 
extortion. However, the problem this poses cannot 
be resolved, even mitigated, by coercion, 
especially the lawless use of force without 
accountability. That's precisely what Salwa Judum 
has practised. This cannot but further alienate 
Chhattisgarh's Adivasis and throw even the more 
neutral of them into the Naxalites arms. Each 
time an innocent tribal is brutalised, and 
separated from his/her means of livelihood, a 
Naxalite sympathiser is created. Social 
discontent typically takes a violent turn when 
all peaceful avenues are closed.


Mr Gill is a dogmatic votary of the coercive 
approach. One of the greatest myths created about 
him is that he effectively, yet lawfully, crushed 
the Punjab insurgency. His methods were 
egregiously lawless: torturing suspected 
militants, harassing their families, deploying 
unnumbered jeeps, and killing hundreds of those 
merely suspected to have harboured Khalistani 
guerrillas. The National Human Rights Commission 
has just authenticated the judicial finding that 
almost 2,000 people were cremated without 
identification in a single year in Punjab. It has 
ordered compensation for the victims' relatives. 
Clearly, Mr Gill has a lot to answer for. In a 
more just society, he would be tried for crimes 
against humanity. The Khalistani movement died 
not because of Mr Gill's brutal methods, but 
because its militants antagonised the people and 
lost support.

By relying on contingents trained in 
"counter-insurgency", and more generally, on 
brute force, Mr Gill will visit even more 
violence than SJ on Chhattisgarh people. He must 
be stopped in his tracks. Salwa Judum must be 
disbanded. The Centre must radically revise its 
Naxalite strategy and open a dialogue with Maoist 
groups. If the Manmohan Singh government can hold 
round after round of talks with separatists from 
Jammu and Kashmir  and with the National 
Socialist Council of Nagaland, there is no reason 
why it cannot talk to non-secessionist groups 
which voice the grievances of the people. The 
Naxalites have a history of 39 years. If they 
have flourished, it is because they represent 
something in this society. It just won't do to 
ignore them, or worse, to try to crush them.-end-



sacw.net
June 4, 2006

SALWA JUDUM: NOTHING UNOFFICIAL ABOUT IT

by Nandini Sundar

On June 4, the Chhattisgarh government celebrated 
the first anniversary of Salwa Judum, the 
officially-sponsored anti-insurgency campaign 
against Naxalites in Dantewada district. 
Officially, the campaign is a spontaneous, 
self-initiated people's movement for peace. But 
as the Independent Citizens Initiative of which I 
was part found out during an intensive 
fact-finding visit to the region last month, the 
truth is far more alarming.

Simply put, the district is in the vortex of an 
officially-sponsored civil war that has displaced 
nearly 50,000 people and led to the deaths of 
over 250. A police video talks of 'Operation 
Salwa Judum' starting from January 2005 onwards 
when the police launched overt and covert 
operations to mobilise villagers against the 
Maoists, and the government appoints and pays 
special police officers (SPOs) Rs. 1,500 a month. 
A work proposal for the 'People's Movement 
against Naxalites' drawn up by the Collector of 
Dantewada in 2005 describes its modalities, 
noting, inter alia, that informers will not trust 
government unless their information is 
immediately acted upon and Naxalites are killed. 
Para 10 notes that if innocents die in large 
operations, higher-up authorities must keep 
quiet. The Collector also advocates controls on 
the media.

Far from being a "peace campaign", the Salwa 
Judum has led to increased violence all round. 
The "peace" activists go in mobs from village to 
village, asking people to join. If they don't, 
they are warned their houses will be burnt. As 
the Chhattisgarh government itself has 
acknowledged, Maoist violence has increased as a 
result. The Dantewada Collector's list names 81 
people killed by Naxalites in Dantewada from June 
to December 2005. An additional 60 or so have 
been killed in 4 major incidents in 2006. The 
Maoists have also released a list of civilians 
killed from June 2005 to March 2006.  None of 
these 116 people are registered in any FIRs and 
no compensation has been paid to their families. 
Two separate investigative teams have 
independently confirmed 16 of these deaths. The 
Maoists have also published a list of 91 villages 
and 1,857 houses burnt by the Salwa Judum, and at 
least 31 women gangraped. Independent groups like 
PUCL-PUDR, Human Rights Forum and the Independent 
Citizens Initiative have all been forcibly 
prevented by the Salwa Judum from visiting 
villages where the maximum arson has been 
reported.

Instead of responding seriously to these and 
similar findings, it is unfortunate that the 
Union Home Ministry, as the Economic Times 
reported on 31 May, has simply chosen to dismiss 
our report as "selective".

The state government claims that people have fled 
to camps because the Naxalites have threatened 
retaliation for joining the Salwa Judum, and that 
they are simply responding to a crisis situation. 
In fact, at least five different probes (the 
three above as well as the Asian  Centre for 
Human Rights and an enquiry by the state wing of 
the Communist Party of India) have confirmed that 
the majority of people have not come into camps 
voluntarily. They have been forcibly brought 
there by the Salwa Judum and security forces. 
Some have come to avoid their houses being burnt 
while others have been attracted by the payments 
to SPOs.

The answer to why the authorities are wilfully 
displacing people lies perhaps in historical 
parallels with Mizoram, Malaysia, and elsewhere 
where governments have been unable to fight 
guerrillas militarily. By emptying the villages 
and strategically relocating them, the government 
deprives guerrillas of their support base. 
According to the Collector's work proposal, those 
in camps need to be resettled into permanent 
roadside settlements attached to a police station 
so that Naxalites cannot influence them and they 
can help the police in search operations. 

The government claims it is within its rights to 
appoint SPOs and to create village defence 
committees. But when people are forced to serve 
as informers against co-villagers, it leads to a 
dangerous spiral of intra-village violence. Many 
of the SPOs look like minors, have no 
identification and harass ordinary commuters. 
When our team was attacked (for the third time) 
at Bhairamgarh thana, we were carrying a letter 
from the Home Secretary but no one was willing to 
read it or take the SP's call. The Salwa Judum 
mob controlled the thana.

Another common refrain in Salwa Judum circles is 
that the Naxalites have not allowed any 
development in the area. They do not allow 
schools, roads or any other development project. 
This problem needs to be looked at carefully. For 
example, school teachers -- some of whom like 
Salwa Judum leader, Madhukar, told us he attends 
school only sporadically  -- often use the 
Naxalite excuse to shirk work. The government 
cannot abdicate its own responsibility for the 
lack of development and blame it on Naxalites. 
However, there are genuine grievances against the 
Naxalites. People have every right to want to 
vote in and contest elections. The Naxalites have 
boycotted elections and threatened those voting. 
They have killed suspected informers and 
subordinated the interests of local people to 
their wider armed struggle.

It is true that the Naxalites have blown up 
schools, planted mines and killed people. These 
crimes have been registered and there are laws to 
deal with them. However, a democratic government 
cannot kill suspected Maoists or their 
sympathisers out of hand, and deny that such 
deaths have taken place. The Maoists have blown 
up schools because the CRPF used them as bases. 
Both are wrong. The Supreme Court and 
international conventions assert that civilian 
institutions must be kept out of armed conflict.

One is often told that the Naxalites are 
outsiders from Andhra who are misleading local 
tribals.  The Maoist leadership, is indeed, 
overwhelmingly from outside. However, so is the 
Salwa Judum leadership, and government officials 
themselves, many of whom are insensitive to 
adivasis and use pejorative terms to describe 
them such as 'primitive and promiscuous', 'lazy'. 
The official Bastar tourism website describes 
them as savages.

The best way to deal with the Naxalite problem is 
not through military action. Both sides must 
declare a ceasefire. The government must build 
confidence among the people by stopping the Salwa 
Judum, holding an independent enquiry, engaging 
in a national dialogue with the Maoists and 
repealing the Chhattisgarh Public Safety Act. The 
Maoists, too, must enter a democratic negotiation 
process.

Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology, Delhi University

o o o

The Economic and Political Weekly,
June 3, 2006

PHYSIOGNOMY OF VIOLENCE
A cycle of violence and counter-violence is devastating the lives
of adivasis in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, a Maoist
"liberated area". There is no official record of the number of
persons killed as a result of the brutal violence of the Salwa Judum.
While the Maoists had put an end to the severe harassment of the
adivasis by forest and police officials, successfully resisted
domination and oppression of the adivasis by the patel-patwari,
and raised the rate for picking the tendu leaf, there are certain
conflicts of interest in the present context of a counter-insurgency
that have created a divide within the tribal community, which
makes the present atmosphere tense.

by K Balagopal

http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2006&leaf=06&filename=10152&filetype=pdf

o o o

The Economic and Political Weekly
May 27, 2006

Editorial

CHHATTISGARH : REPRESSION GARBED AS SECURITY

http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2006&leaf=05&filename=10119&filetype=pdf

____


5


Book Review
Seminar 561
by Harsh Mander

RELIGION, VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL MOBILISATION IN SOUTH ASIA edited by Ravinder
Kaur. Sage, Delhi, 2005.

Ravinder Kaur's edited volume, Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in
South Asia, is a useful collection of essays that seeks to map and analyse the
phenomenon of socio-political mobilisation and mass violence around constructed
religious and ethnic identities. Loosely termed 'communal violence' in South
Asia, this has been and remains a source of enormous suffering and insecurity
among the people of this part of the globe for more then a century.

Ravinder Kaur herself persuasively rejects 
simplistic and facile explanations of
such violence as 'spontaneous outburst of emotions', the handywork of a few
'anti-social elements' or as proof of regrettable mutual hatred that
periodically recurs in South Asia. She also argues against the assumption that
frequent incidents of violence occur like a disease in the society and leave
everything unaltered, only to return to 'normal' once the disease has lapsed.
Instead, she sees these episodes of collective violence against a community as
part of a process of ongoing social control exercised by the dominant groups.

Most popular and scholarly analyses of communal riots neglect the aftermath of
the violence when survivors frequently seek 'safety in numbers', that is,
migrate to areas considered safe because of the numerical strength of their
group. Another neglected trend is of 'economic boycott' by the majority group
that ensures further loss of economic and social power of the minority group.
Kaur importantly sees significance in the lasting psychological, social,
economic and political impact of the physical violence in terms of the violent
rupture in people's personal lives, loss of faith in government agencies, and a
deep sense of subjugation and alienation from the 'mainstream'. She aptly sees
these trends as part of a project to reduce the victim community to 'second
class citizens' - deprived of protection, fundamental rights, and basic human
dignity.

This framework is particularly useful in understanding the Gujarat pogrom of
2002. Most analyses dwell on the grisly events of slaughter and rape and not on
the lasting impact of ghettoisation, social and economic boycott and cultural
suppression. She points out that conventional studies of communal violence view
'hatred' from the 'other' community in an almost ahistorical and
de-contextualized mode, mainly in terms of actions and reactions, usually a
response to provocation by minorities. She rightly observes that this obscures
the central role of religious mobilization on the one hand, and of various arms
of the state on the other.

Bjorn Hettne makes a useful classification of forms of political violence that
occur in South Asia. These range from assassination of political leaders
(usually inspired by ethno-racial conflict); riots between communities usually
sparked off by a provocative religious ritual or neighbourhood conflict but
deriving from struggles for power and resources; sectarian violence within the
same religion; inter-ethnic violence between 'sons of the soil' and poor
immigrants; upper caste violence against Dalits; ethno-racial political
violence aimed at political independence or autonomy; pogroms; and ethnically
organised gang wars.

In the post 9/11 context, Hettne finds that the highly contested term
'terrorism', usually prefixed with 'international', has penetrated the
discourse mainly to justify greater tolerance for repression. It usually
induces elements of fear, surprise, civilian victims and political objectives,
but mainly old internal conflicts increasingly described as 'terrorist'. In
India after 9/11, Indian Muslims are increasingly seen as participating or at
least sympathetic to terrorism. The paradox is observed that while India is
evolving in a fundamentalist direction, explosive and chronically violent
Pakistan under Musharraf is trying to break with fundamentalist forms of Islam.
In Sri Lanka, the conflict between Tamils and 
Sinhalese which resulted in 65,000
deaths has come closer to a solution, in that the international war against
terrorism has been reduced to the freedom of movement for the Tamil Tigers,
branded as a terrorist organization by several countries, including India. In
Nepal, Maoists are no longer simply dubbed 'terrorists' and are seen as more
akin to the Indian Naxalite uprising.

Among the other significant papers in the volume is Jan Breman's analysis of
Gujarat 2002. An outstanding scholarly observer of the state over decades, he
notes that the state apparatus - both the leading political party and
government agencies - condoned or even facilitated the pogrom, rather than stop
it. Moreover, the trade union movement which used to be the main platform for
collective action has withered away. What he describes as the 'paralysis' of
social movements, could not have been better illustrated than by the decision
of the board of the Sabarmati Asharam to close its gates when the violence
spread through the city. He observes that the front organizations of Sangh
Parivar were able to mobilize mercenaries of subaltern castes to assist in
operation of killing, burning and looting.

Paul Brass is another perceptive foreign scholar 
who focuses on the discourse of
Hindu-Muslim communalism that has corrupted history, penetrated memory, and
contributes in the present to the production and perpetuation of communal
violence. He notes that the 'memory' of Indian history has been kept vivid also
by the militant Hindutva demand to recapture and restore temples allegedly
destroyed by the Muslim conquerors and replace these by mosques. He evocatively
maps how Hindu and Muslim bodies are both the location and the metaphor in the
production of communal violence.

This slim volume of essays is both brilliant and disturbing in its flashes of
distilled insights and provocative analyses. The major limitation is that the
essays were collected for a seminar, and inevitably are both uneven and fail to
build a coherent discourse. Yet the flashes of insight into phenomena that
constitute some of the gravest contemporary challenges to our survival as a
secular democracy are enough to make the manuscript worth careful study.

Harsh Mander

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[5]

India Pakistan Arms Race and Militarisation Watch
Compilation (June 14, 2006)
Year Seven, No 162
is available at URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IPARMW/message/173


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[6]

  CALL FOR PAPERS/CONFERENCE: The Hartley Library, 
which houses the Mountbatten papers, in 
conjunction with the Centre for the Study of 
Britain and its Empire at the University of 
Southampton seeks paper proposals for a 
conference entitled, 'The Independence of India 
and Pakistan: Sixtieth Anniversary Reflections.' 
The conference will be held at the Avenue Campus, 
University of Southampton on 17-20 July 2007.

The event will be divided into panel discussion 
and keynote plenary lectures. Papers will be of 
30 minutes duration followed by question. The 
following people have already agreed to 
participate:  Gyanendra Pandey, Urvashi Butalia, 
Gurharpal Singh, Akbar S. Ahmed, Joya Chatterji, 
Victoria Schofield, Sten Widmalm and Sikandar 
Hayat.

Proposals for panel papers will be especially welcome in the following areas:

     *

       The 'high politics' of the British departure from India
     *

       The 'history from beneath' of the British departure from India
     *

       Historiography, historical discourses and memory
     *

       Independence and partition in film and literature
     *

       Region, locality and partition
     *

       The legacies of 1947 for nation building 
and state construction in India and Pakistan
     *

       Diasporic narratives on 1947

Proposals including a working title and 250 word 
abstract should be sent by 1 September 2006 to 
Professor Ian Talbot, Department of History, 
University of Southampton at  iat at soton.ac.uk

The full line-up of papers will be confirmed by 1 
October 2006. Full length papers will be required 
by 1 May 2007. It is anticipated that only 
limited funds will be available to cover the 
costs of paper givers from the subcontinent.

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Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
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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.