SACW | 15 June 2006 | Aung San Suu Kyi; Hindu right and Nepal; Pak-India Parleys out of steam; Forced marriages in the UK; Ravi Dayal; Ban on Baa Baa Black Sheep

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | 15 June, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2258

[Mid June 2006, Marks Ten Years of South Asia Citizens Web initiative! ]

[1]  Remember Asia's Nelson Mandela: a political 
act of the first importance (Timothy Garton Ash)
[2]  India['s Hindu far right]  and Nepal (Badri Raina)
[3]  India - Pakistan Dialogue is Slow and Unsteady (A.G. Noorani)
[4]  [UK's position on forced marriages] This is 
a Betrayal of Asian women (Ross Clark)
[5]  India: Irreplaceable Pioneer - Obituary: 
Ravi Dayal 1937-2006. (Rukun Advani)
[6]  BJP ruled Indian state bans Baa Baa Black Sheep (Maseeh Rahman)
[7]  Two recent volumes by OUP Pakistan
[8]  Public Meeting on Increasing Assaults on 
'Right to Assembly and Protest' (New Delhi, June 
15)

____

[1]

The Guardian
June 15, 2006

REMEMBER ASIA'S NELSON MANDELA: A POLITICAL ACT OF THE FIRST IMPORTANCE

Western policy cannot change Burma by itself. 
Aung San Suu Kyi needs the clout of Asian 
democracies

Timothy Garton Ash

Next Monday is the 61st birthday of Aung San Suu 
Kyi. Unless she is back in hospital, where she 
was recently treated for a stomach ailment, she 
will presumably mark that birthday on her own, in 
the run-down villa on the shore of Inya lake 
where she has spent more than 10 of her past 17 
years under house arrest. We don't know what she 
will do, what she is writing or what she is 
thinking. Her isolation is almost total. 
According to recent reports, she sees only a 
housekeeper, the housekeeper's daughter, a 
gardener and occasionally her doctor. It seems 
unlikely that she will even be able to talk on 
the telephone with her sons, Alexander and Kim, 
who live in the west.

We are told she spends much time meditating, 
playing the piano and keeping fit, but that is 
hearsay. The last foreigner to meet her was a UN 
envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, who said she was well and 
expressed his hope that she could make a 
"contribution" to political progress in Burma, 
now officially known as Myanmar. There were 
rumours that her house arrest would be lifted. A 
few days later the military regime extended her 
detention order for another year. So much for 
dialogue. As the local joke goes, George Orwell 
wrote not just one but three books about Burma: 
Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen 
Eighty-Four.

I will never forget meeting Suu Kyi in Rangoon - 
now officially known as Yangon - some six years 
ago, when she was still able to leave her house. 
I went on to lecture about transitions to 
democracy, with her chairing and interpreting, to 
an intense, brave group of activists from the 
National League for Democracy (NLD). Unthinkable 
today, in a country that has gone backwards while 
all around are going forwards.

I'm sure she will be bearing her solitary 
confinement with fortitude, grace and the 
Buddhist life-philosophy that is so important to 
her. Yet I feel a terrible sense of frustration 
in writing about her and her country's 
predicament. What new is there to say? That she 
is a heroine of our time, an Asian Nelson 
Mandela. That the Burmese generals run one of the 
worst states in the world, spending some 40% of 
the country's budget on the military, while most 
of their people live in poverty and disease. (The 
Burmese health system is ranked 190th out of 190 
countries by the World Health Organisation.) That 
dialogue with the NLD, which overwhelmingly won a 
democratic election in 1990, is the key to 
political change. All true. All said a thousand 
times already. All to no apparent effect. 
Groundhog day in Yangon.

But if Suu Kyi doesn't give up, we have no right 
to. Instead of saying "happy birthday", which 
would seem grotesque in the circumstances, here 
are three modest thoughts about possible ways to 
thaw this frozen conflict. First of all, 
remembering Burma is itself a political act of 
the first importance. As the Czech writer Milan 
Kundera famously observed, "the struggle of man 
against power is the struggle of memory against 
forgetting". Forgetting Burma is just what its 
rulers want us to do. No news from Burma is good 
news for them, bad news for their people. 
(There's a challenge for the free media of the 
world here: how do you cover the story when there 
is no story?) We have to keep hammering away, 
even if it means repeating the same lines for 
years and years. After all, though the comparison 
is hardly encouraging, Nelson Mandela was in 
prison for 27 years; and yet South Africa moved 
in the end.

Second, while paying all respect to Suu Kyi's 
often repeated call for tight sanctions against 
the military regime, we should think again about 
the mix of our policies. For example, is there 
more we can do to alleviate directly the 
suffering of the population from the effects of 
Aids or drug addiction without giving an 
unacceptable payoff to the regime? The Free Burma 
Coalition activist and analyst Zarni has recently 
argued that both the western policy of sanctions 
and the eastern policy of constructive engagement 
have failed. He suggests that the starting point 
for moving towards a more effective combination 
of the two might be to try to see the world 
through the greedy but also anxious eyes of the 
Burmese military. What mixture of carrots and 
sticks would have a chance of persuading them to 
loosen up?

One thing should be clear after 16 years: no 
western policy, however carefully designed, can 
work on its own. We simply don't have enough 
leverage in this largely self-sufficient Asian 
country, tucked in between the two Asian giants, 
India and China, and its south-east Asian 
neighbours, such as Thailand. If you doubt that 
we are already in a multipolar world, look at 
Burma. If the internal key to change is the 
reopening of dialogue between the military regime 
and the NLD, the external key is a change in 
approach by at least one, and preferably several, 
of its Asian neighbours.

Where to begin? Surely in India, a country where 
Suu Kyi went to school, and whose culture she 
studied and admires - and the world's largest 
democracy. One hardly expects communist China to 
press for liberalisation and democracy in its 
disgraceful little neighbour, but it is 
disappointing that democratic India has been so 
timid in policy towards its Burmese neighbour.

If we look to India for leadership in this 
respect, then we must start by listening to what 
Indians themselves have to say. The shape of the 
conversation should not be (Washington speaking): 
"Hey, Indians, you must take our self-evidently 
correct western template and help us impose it on 
Burma." It should be: "We're wondering whether 
you think, judging by your own lights and values, 
that this is acceptable behaviour in your own 
immediate neighbourhood? And if not, how do you 
suggest we work together to catalyse peaceful 
change there?" Better still, that debate should 
be initiated and carried forward inside India by 
intellectuals, commentators and politicians who 
argue that respect for human rights and respect 
for basic liberties are as much Indian values as 
they are western values.

This is the shape of the new world order, if 
there is to be one. We liberal internationalists 
in the west don't need to change that much of 
what we say; but if we are to achieve liberal 
ends in an increasingly multipolar world, then we 
do have to rethink how we say it, and to whom. 
And we have to listen more than we have for the 
last 500 years.

"To see a world in a grain of sand" exhorted the 
poet William Blake - a line that Suu Kyi must 
have studied when she read English literature at 
St Hugh's College, Oxford - just a couple of 
hundred metres from where I'm writing these 
words. And contemplating the lot of one brave 
woman in a lakeside house on a solitary birthday 
can lead us to a new understanding of the world 
we're in. So: have as good a birthday as 
possible, Suu, and many happier ones to come.


_____


[2]

ZNet
June 10, 2006

INDIA AND NEPAL
by Badri Raina

Replicating the wishful follies of the eighteenth 
century Bourbon monarch, Louis XVI,  King 
Gyanendra Shah of Nepal  has finally been denuded 
of all his powers.  It hardly matters now what 
royal robes  he wears; the emperor will 
henceforth be effectively without clothes.  This 
being 2006 rather than 1793, he might just save 
his head.

All that has been accomplished by a revolutionary 
upsurge spearheaded by Nepalese youth. 
Undeterred by either the 'royal Nepalese army', 
the subterfuges of 'mainstream' Nepalese 
polticians,  or the not so incipient royalist 
sympathies of the Indian and American 
establishments, the Nepalese people may have laid 
the groundwork for a Republic.

Having brought about a relatively peaceful 
overthrow of feudal despotism in their own 
country-in sharp contrast rather to the exertions 
of elite sections of Indian youth who are now 
engaged in counter-revolutionary activity to 
shore up privileges that accrue to them as a 
consequence of birth and economic status-their 
achievement may, infact, bear far-reaching 
beneficial consequence for India's State and 
Polity as well.

One of the declarations made by the new Nepalese 
government is that Nepal will no longer be a 
Hindu theocratic State  but a 'secular' one. 
This causes an enormous problem for the Hindu 
Right (led by the RSS) in India whose project 
ever since its establishment in 1925 has been to 
transform India into a  Hindu Rashtra, even as it 
has also been their oxymoronic boast that India's 
preponderant Hindu majority ipso facto renders it 
a secular nation. The declaration in Nepal, 
however, clearly implies that the Nepalese State 
has not been a 'secular' State thus far, 
regardless of its preponderant Hindu population. 
A statement made by the senior BJP (the 
political/electoral front of the RSS) leader, 
V.K.Malhotra   (The Hindu, May 20) regretting the 
Nepalese declaration is based  on the assumption 
that 'Hindu' and 'Secular' are interchangeable 
concepts.  Never mind that the anti-minority 
pogrom of 2002 in Gujarat under Narendra Modi 
busted this pretence sky-high.

Recorded ideological facts, however, belie this 
boast.  Long before Jinnah the founder of 
Pakistan, stipulated that Hindus and Muslims 
constituted separate 'nations,'and asked for a 
separate muslim State (1940), it was the Hindutva 
ideologue, Savarkar, who had expressed this 
theory first(1923). He laid the hypothesis that 
only those who were both born in India ( pitra 
bhumi) and bore allegiance to forms of religion 
'indigenous' to India ( punya bhumi) could be 
considered 'Indian.' Muslims and Christians were 
thus excluded from 'Indianness', since their 
chief places of worship lay outside the territory 
of India. Following upon that, Golwalkar, the 
then RSS  chief (or Sarsangchalak) in a 
pernicious book,  We, Our Nationhood(1939), 
which unabashedly lauded the Nazis for having 
elevated 'race pride' to unprecedented heights, 
warned India's religious minorities in no 
uncertain terms that unless they learnt to 
subjugate themselves wholly and without demur to 
dominant Hindu culture, and venerated Hindu gods, 
all their rights, including those of citizenship, 
would be denied them in the stipulated Hindu 
Rashtra (Hindu theocratic State).

In fact, just recently, another deeply 
embarrassing chapter has been added to the 
Goeblesian history of the RSS/BJP: In a volume 
(RSS Aur Bharti Jana Sangh Ki Sthapna Ka 
Itihaas-RSS and the History of the Establishment 
of the Jana Sangh), one of several commissioned 
by the Hindu Right to commemorate the silver 
jubilee of the existence of the BJP, the authors 
(both RSS insiders), Makhan Lal and J.K.Mathur, 
have forthrightly inscribed the truth that the 
RSS and the Jana Sangh-the predecessor of the 
BJP-were created to 'counter the muslims.'Having 
in recent years charged India's secular 
historians of 'distorting' Indian history, the 
RSS now claims its own history has been distorted 
by its own historians! Never mind that they spoke 
the plain truth.

Ever since India's Independence in 1947, thus, 
the Hindu Right in India, led by the RSS, has 
refused allegiance to either the secular Indian 
Constitution or the national flag, the Tricolour. 
This despite the fact that such allegiance was 
enjoined upon them by the post-Independence 
government led by Nehru as quid pro quo to the 
release of their leaders from incarceration which 
had resulted from suspicion of their involvement 
in the conspiracy to murder Gandhi in 1948.

When the eastern wing of Pakistan seceded in 1971 
to establish an independent Bangladesh, despite a 
shared religious affiliation, the world had 
resonant proof that a  common religion alone 
could not be a viable basis for State-formation. 
Much as the RSS then applauded Pakistan's 
break-up, the larger lesson was lost on it.  It 
thus continued to view Nepal, a Hindu theocratic 
State, as an object of its own dreams, and the 
King as a veritable avatar of the Hindu god, 
Vishnu.  The new development in Nepal has thus 
driven a stake not just through the Nepalese 
theocratic monarchy but of the RSS as well, just 
at it has lent force to all those in India who 
have maintained that only a secular and pluralist 
India can be a modern and viable India.
Furthermore, one of the chief accusations of the 
RSS against India's Congress Party (which had led 
the struggle for independence from colonial 
rule), has been that it has always engaged in 
pampering India's religious minorities, chiefly 
the muslims.  The RSS calls this the Congress's 
'minorityism.' With news coming now from the new 
Nepal that provisions will be enshrined there as 
well for protective and enabling laws in the 
interests of Nepalese ethnic and religious 
minorities, the RSS has lost another one of its 
major propaganda mechanisms against India's 
secular parties.

All in all, the Nepalese events bear a resonance 
that stretches way beyond life in Nepal.  Indeed, 
these lessons need not be restricted only to the 
RSS in India; they seem of equal relevance to 
large parts of the world where Islamic ideologues 
seek to deny secular, democratic forms of 
Statehood, and perhaps also to the new crop of 
born-again Evangelists in America whose vision of 
Statehood in recent years has not, after all, 
been too different from that of those whom they 
seek to defeat.

_____


[3] 

Hindustan Times
June 12, 2006

SLOW AND UNSTEADY

A.G. Noorani

By now, the near decade-old composite dialogue 
between India and Pakistan has run out of steam. 
There is little progress on any of the eight 
topics listed in the joint statement issued in 
Islamabad on June 23, 1997. Least of all on the 
item placed least significantly, namely 
'promotion of friendly exchanges in various 
fields'. There has been some improvement in the 
last two years since the Saarc summit in 
Islamabad in January 2004, but not much. While 
there are obstacles on both sides in this matter, 
the honours are not evenly divided. Pakistan has 
been by far the more blatant offender though 
India has not lagged too far behind in this silly 
game.

Since the governments of both countries control 
the academia and wield influence over what pass 
for 'think-tanks', private initiative cannot go 
far without official support. Professions of 
commitment to freer intellectual exchange have 
not prompted any government of India, regardless 
of its political complexion, to rescind the 
long-standing obscene circular that requires 
Indian citizens to seek permission from the MEA 
and the Union Home Ministry to hold any seminar 
within the country in which South Asians 
participate.

Yet, it would be unfair to dismiss professions of 
commitment to freer exchange of persons and ideas 
as altogether insincere. One suspects that one 
drawback is that not much thought has been given 
as to how the process can be put on rails so that 
it moves smoothly. Another is ignorance and 
suspicion on both sides.

As to the first, a good roadmap was drawn up 45 
years ago at the Indo-Pak Cultural Conference in 
New Delhi in April 1961. Its moving spirit was Dr 
Tara Chand, while Humayun Kabir, as then chairman 
of the ICCR, gave his strong backing. Behind the 
scenes, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru lent his 
powerful support and inaugurated the conference. 
Nothing like that has been witnessed in the years 
since.

Erudite papers were read by scholars on 
archaeology, history, education, fine arts, 
journalism, films and languages. Among those who 
participated enthusiastically were I.H. Qureshi, 
R.S. Sharma, G.C. Chatterjee, K.G. Saiyadain, 
Mulk Raj Anand, Balraj Sahni, Gopinath Aman and 
Gopichand Narang.

Four papers stand out: A.R. Rashidi's on Indo-Pak 
historiography since 1947; Mulk Raj Anand's on a 
common basis for contemporary art in India and 
Pakistan; Yadu Vanshi's on growth of scientific 
and technical literature in Hindi and Urdu; and 
Gopinath Aman's on Urdu literature in 
post-Independence India. It was not dominated by 
Urdu-speaking scholars nor by any single 
intellectual discipline. There were only three 
papers in Urdu: by Ehtesham Husain, Gopichand 
Narang, and Balraj Sahni. Born in Rawalpindi, 
Balraj Sahni's thought-provoking paper on the 
language issue makes poignant reading. Indeed, to 
read the papers today is to realise what both 
countries missed because of their obdurate and 
short-sighted policies.

For a roadmap, the Resolution which the 
Conference unanimously adopted can serve as a 
good model. Its very first recommendation was 
that 'for exchange of information on literary and 
cultural matters centres may be established in 
the two countries'. Others were 'exchange of 
professors and students', 'facilities for 
research', 'exchange or transmission of books and 
journals'; agreement on protection of copyright; 
periodic conferences on 'scientific and academic 
subjects' and 'the institution of a new type of 
visa, to grant facilities to students and 
scholars who visit the country for the purpose of 
study and research'.

Politics killed these ideas. How can any such 
centre exist in a hostile environment and without 
official support? The odd seminar, the jamboree, 
and visits of public figures are no substitute 
for organised, institutional exchanges, say, 
between the leading universities of both 
countries.

The generation with memories of the pre-Partition 
subcontinent is fading away. Most of the 
stalwarts of the Progressive Writers' Movement 
are gone. The new generation combines healthy 
curiosity with inherited suspicion. There is 
little appreciation of the intellectual ferment 
on both sides of the divide in which there is 
sharp questioning of conventional wisdom, not 
excluding the policies of the national heroes 
that led to the Partition.

Chaudhary Khaliquzzaman, a leading figure in the 
Pakistan movement, lamented, "Look at the 
condition of the three isolated Muslim 
communities [in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh]. 
They dare not communicate with one another. 
Pakistan today is not one-third as important as 
the pre-Independence Muslim India was. Are the 
Indian Muslims a third of their forebears in 
political weight? And the Muslims of Bangladesh - 
well, you know, they do not count as much as even 
Pakistan". This was said in an interview with 
M.B. Naqvi ages ago (Pakistan Economist, April 
15, 1979). The distinguished poet, Munir Niazi, 
told The Herald (Jan. 2006) that "Partition was 
the worst thing that could have happened to us."

Air Marshal (retd.) Zafar Chaudhri had no 
hesitation in asserting that the so-called 
"Pakistan ideology", a euphemism for religious 
bigotry, was no part of Jinnah's credo and cited 
his famous speech in 1947 which brought our poor 
L.K. Advani to grief. He said, "The Pakistan 
ideology was invented after the birth of 
Pakistan" (Jang, July 10, 1987).

While religious bigots hijacked Jinnah's 
Pakistan, the bureaucracy and armed services also 
put on it the stamp of their own outlook. 
Ironically, Pakistan's civil and military 
bureaucracies could boast of a large number of 
writers and intellectuals from among their own 
ranks. There began an increasing domination of 
religious bigots and civil and military 
bureaucracies over the intellectual life of the 
society.

As Mohammed Waseem pointed out, their credo was 
"anti-communism, anti-secularism and 
anti-Indianism". But there was another school, 
intellectually no less powerful, with bases in 
Lahore and Karachi. I.A. Rehman and Khaled Ahmed 
represent it in their analyses. They are as 
nationalistic as any other Pakistani but are 
secular and liberal to the core. We laud their 
criticisms of Islamabad, ignore those of New 
Delhi. The school they represent received no 
understanding from us at any time.

The reality of Pakistan's cultural scene was 
portrayed accurately by Zeno in MAG on Aug. 5, 
1982. On the surface, Islamisation held sway. 
Yet, there was an 'Indian-Muslim dimension of our 
culture', as Indian as it was Muslim. Efforts to 
denude, if not eliminate, the former could not go 
far. The 'new view of Pakistan's culture being 
presented by our diehard Islamists...  does not 
exclude the Indian element from the Indo-Muslim 
culture'. In fact, 'it affirms the Indianness of 
the Pakistan tradition'. A statesmanlike policy 
by India will strengthen this school of thought.


_____


[4]

The Telegraph
June 11, 2006

THIS IS A BETRAYAL OF ASIAN WOMEN
by Ross Clark

After a consultation involving 157 individuals 
and organisations, the Home Office decided last 
week that there should be no specific offence of 
rape. Many respondents, according to the Home 
Office minister Baroness Scotland, fear that a 
specific offence of rape merely helps to "isolate 
victims, prevent reconciliation and drive rape 
further underground". Instead, she proposed that 
rapists should be pursued through the civil 
courts, adding: "We will continue to provide 
information and assistance both to potential 
victims and to concerned professionals who are 
confronted by this abuse."

Actually, the above is not quite true. I have 
substituted "rape" for "forced marriage". In some 
ways, though, the distinction is academic: a 
woman forced into marriage is almost certainly, 
sooner or later, going to be forced into sex as 
well - not to mention imprisonment and slavery to 
boot.

Baroness Scotland was certainly in no mood to 
tolerate forced marriage when, last September, 
she launched a consultation on her proposals to 
criminalise the practice: "Forced marriage cannot 
be justified on religious or cultural grounds 
because no major world religion supports itŠBy 
making forced marriage a specific offence we give 
it a voice in a form which it doesn't have at the 
moment."

What has happened in the meantime to change her 
mind? The Government's commitment to human rights 
has been overridden by its weak-headed devotion 
to multiculturalism, that's what. In Labour Party 
politics there is, of course, an enormous 
difference between rape and forced marriage: 
while the former is an offence committed all over 
the country, the latter is almost exclusively 
confined to the Asian population. And that, in 
the Government's mind, makes a law against forced 
marriage indefensible - on the grounds that it 
would discriminate "unfairly" against a 
particular race.

Indeed, the Home Office appears to have been 
thinking along these lines when it published its 
consultation paper on forced marriage, gently 
suggesting to potential respondents that a 
criminal offence of forced marriage would 
"disproportionately impact on black and ethnic 
communities and might be misinterpreted as an 
attack on those communities". In other words: "We 
would like to catch these brutes who kidnap young 
members of their families, hustle them off to 
Pakistan and, under threat of death, marry them 
off to some thuggish cousin who repulses them. 
But we are frightened that if we do so we will 
provoke a few more mad imams to burn the Union 
flag and demand that unbelievers be put to the 
sword."

In reality, it isn't a law against forced 
marriage that discriminates against ethnic 
minorities; it is the failure to introduce such a 
law.

The Government has created a situation in which 
young Asian women are deemed to have lesser human 
rights than have the rest of us; what chance the 
Home Office declining to act if it were a nutty 
Christian sect forcing women into marriage? Like 
Basil Fawlty, so obsessed with not mentioning the 
war to his German guests that he can't stop 
himself doing just that, the Government has 
become so preoccupied with avoiding racial 
discrimination that it has ended up committing 
this very act.

The Home Office estimates that 300 British women 
annually are forced into marriage against their 
will. It will come as little consolation to them, 
as "concerned professionals" attempt to effect a 
"reconciliation" between them and their 
kidnappers - that their plight has been 
overlooked supposedly in the name of racial 
harmony.

_____


[5]

The Telegraph
June 11, 2006

IRREPLACEABLE PIONEER
- Obituary: Ravi Dayal (1937-2006)
Rukun Advani

Outside the arcane area of legal philosophy, the 
name of the Oxford scholar, H.L.A. Hart 
(1907-92), does not ring much of a bell now. 
Straying from philosophy into law, he happened to 
write the foundational text of his discipline, 
The Concept of Law (1961), and is sometimes 
dutifully remembered for that reason.

Unknown to most, there is a far more interesting 
reason for remembering H.L.A. Hart. In 1961, he 
inadvertently laid the foundations of Indian 
academic publishing. He managed to do this when 
he dissuaded one of Oxford University's Indian 
history graduates from taking up research, 
persuading him instead to consider the 
attractions of a career in publishing. Sensing 
that the vacillating graduate needed a few 
sensible words in his ear, Hart said Indian 
publishing was uncharted terrain and the Oxford 
University Press needed good men in India. And 
so, quite by chance, in that far off era - long 
before OUP India itself began looking like a good 
man fallen among thieves, accountants, jumped-up 
salesmen, and semi-literate editors - this 
history graduate heeded Hart's advice and went on 
to pioneer the field of Indian academic 
publishing virtually single-handed. He was born 
Ravindra Dayal; for most of his life and until 
his death on June 3, 2006, he was known as Ravi 
Dayal, the publisher.

'History of the book' is now a rapidly developing 
academic field, and someday soon some Larkinian 
Jake Balokowsky, sensing s/he can milk the Mellon 
Foundation, will put up a Spivakian research 
proposal arguing the indispensability of a 
biography of Ravi Dayal for any 'hermeneutically 
nuanced' and 'epistemologically problematized' 
understanding of Indian academic publishing. In 
the interim, a few lines of antique clarity about 
this foot soldier, who did all the groundwork on 
which an industry flourishes today, may serve as 
a memorial in his honour.

Ravi Dayal lived much of his life in Delhi but 
was at heart a pahadi. Kayasthas, like Kashmiri 
Pandits, often became munshis in legal and 
bureaucratic enclaves such as Allahabad, Lucknow 
and Srinagar, but Dayal's family had a house in 
Nainital and packed him off to attend Sherwood 
College. He grew up loving the clatter of rain on 
a cold tin roof and the sight of deodars blurred 
by mountain mist. In his later years, he 
inherited a family mansion in Ranikhet and 
perversely loved being marooned there by the 
monsoon, in the company of childhood friends, 
reliving the joys of his growing-up years.

One early experience of his Nainital days in the 
Forties was serendipitous: while walking to 
school he accidentally bumped into a man whom he 
had frequently seen on that road. On this 
occasion the man asked the boy his name. When the 
boy replied "Ravi Dayal", the man introduced 
himself as Jim Corbett. "You're the man-eater!", 
howled the confused boy, bolting in terror in the 
direction of his school, leaving Corbett - as 
Dayal put it in his impeccably articulate style 
when recounting the story- "somewhat bemused". 
Later, as head of OUP India, Dayal sold hundreds 
of thousands of copies of the Corbett corpus, 
published the best biography of Corbett, and gave 
Corbett's biographer, D.C. Kala, the Ranikhet 
rooms in which Kala still lives.

Corbett and Elwin were perhaps the only two major 
OUP India bestseller-authors that Dayal did not 
personally bring into the OUP: they had been 
brought in by Roy Hawkins, OUP India's 
Bombay-based head at the time, under whom Dayal 
trained. Hawkins was apparently a great editor, 
but Dayal found him intellectually stifling. He 
soon accepted a posting in OUP's Madras branch, 
where he worked alongside Girish Karnad, with 
whom he became great friends and whose plays he 
later published. In 1971, Dayal moved to Delhi to 
set up OUP's new headquarters there.

Girish Karnad's view is that Ravi Dayal, though 
something of a live wire in Madras, really came 
into his own when he became head of OUP India 
about thirty years ago. This is true. Dayal's 
most singular and enduring achievement is that he 
put India on the world's intellectual map. He did 
this by transforming OUP India from being a 
run-of-the mill textbook publisher dabbling in 
higher learning into the world's most reputed 
centre for South Asian academic publishing in the 
social sciences and humanities.

In his time, and largely because of his eminence 
and repute, OUP India became unquestionably the 
first press of choice for anyone wanting to 
publish in South Asian history, sociology, 
politics, and economics. In the history of 
post-independence Indian publishing, he is more 
important than M.N. Srinivas is in the history of 
Indian sociology or Irfan Habib in the history of 
Medieval Studies. Srinivas and Habib had rivals 
and followers who were roughly their equals. Ravi 
Dayal was in a publisher's league of his own. He 
created what was in his era an unrivalled 
institution. He ran the institution. In his day, 
he was the institution.

This opinion will be seconded by most people who 
worked with Dayal between the early Seventies 
until 1987, when he took early retirement to 
start his own publishing company. Puffing 
continuously at a bidi, he exhaled integrity and 
commitment to publishing as a discipline. People 
lucky enough to get in the way of his smoke 
soaked in the craft of book-making tinged with 
the aroma of tobacco. He sustained his 
organization by creating and nurturing a creative 
publishing ethos, advising and supervising 
judiciously, delegating and encouraging all the 
time. Working with him, people learned not a 
business but a craft: editing, typesetting, 
cost-estimating, printing, binding, everything.

His associates felt they were his friends: never, 
ever, did he make colleagues feel that they were 
subordinates or employees. He refused an 
airconditioner in his room: like everyone else, 
he sweated over scripts blown about by a fan, 
holding them together by paperweights and 
something weightier - his uncommon editorial 
acumen. He never had a chauffeur, he drove his 
own jalopy. No flunkeys carried his briefcase to 
his office. This may have been because he never 
had a briefcase: he despised corporate symbols 
almost as much as neckties and kept clear of 
them. Most importantly, he kept his British 
bosses in Oxford at a clear distance, managing to 
wrest for OUP India a degree of autonomy that has 
been tamely surrendered by the house-slaves put 
in place there more recently. Dayal's OUP was a 
community of craftspeople first, a corporation 
just by the way.

Lunchtime at the OUP canteen in the Eighties 
should have been caught on film: it would show a 
world completely at odds with the one run by 
homo-hierarchicized head honchos who run 
publishing corporations via power lunches in posh 
hotels. If Amartya Sen or M.N. Srinivas or 
Sukhomoy Chakravarty happened to drop in at 
lunchtime, they would be stood in the OUP India 
lunch queue and made to patiently shuffle towards 
daal-chaval on a standard railway thaali behind 
dispatch clerks and packers. This was Subaltern 
Studies embodied. Those socialist lunches, the 
product of a peculiarly Dayalian brand of brutal 
egalitarianism, actually served as a shrewd 
acquisitioning tool: they were, paradoxically, 
among the many small reasons for the most 
distinguished authors later lining up to have 
Ravi Dayal publish their books.

On the skills of editing a manuscript he said, 
reflectively: "Oddly enough, my experience is 
that if you cut a manuscript down to half its 
size it frequently becomes twice as readable." 
The bulk of academics are prototypical 
narcissists: when they are not in love with 
themselves, they fall in love with their own 
words. Dayal cut them down to size. He alone had 
the authority to be as ruthless as he liked. If 
Salman Rushdie had had the good fortune of being 
edited by Ravi Dayal, his novels would have been 
less prolix and twice as readable. The Almighty 
had endowed Ravi Dayal with the 'Order of Carte 
Blanche with the Blue Pencil, First Class', at 
birth. What could mere academics do except 
acquiesce and applaud when Dayal's pencil 
shreddingly improved their writing beyond all 
recognition? Besides, his spidery handwriting was 
part calligraphic, part indecipherable. So, even 
if you disagreed with some of his editing, you 
gave in partly because it was so beautifully done 
and partly because you couldn't make out what 
he'd done. In any case, disagreeing with Ravi 
Dayal was not something you wanted to do in a 
hurry. Even if you won the day over some small 
syntactical point, something about him made you 
feel you'd actually lost. On his own turf, he 
wasn't beatable.

On the skills required for acquisitioning 
manuscripts, he said: "An editor should possess 
the authority to seem to an author like an equal, 
not a supplicant. A distinguished academic will 
only give you his book to publish if he feels he 
can trust you intellectually." The irony is that, 
in fact, even the most eminent authors felt like 
supplicants when facing Dayal: the aura of 
distinction he carried made them sense he was 
more equal than them all. They virtually lined up 
to have their scripts considered for publication 
by him: Sálim Ali, A.K. Ramanujan, Romila Thapar, 
Burton Stein, Irfan Habib, Ranajit Guha, M.N. 
Srinivas, Ashis Nandy. Every major academic was 
in the queue unless he'd been turned down. (Dayal 
hated visiting the India International Centre, 
describing it as "that den of rejected authors".) 
Even the elusive Bernard Cohn of Chicago, who had 
resisted publishing a book, handed over to Ravi 
Dayal, at their first meeting, the manuscript of 
his hugely influential classic, An Anthropologist 
Among the Historians and Other Essays (1987). It 
was a coup: roughly, the academic publisher's 
equivalent of Liz Calder bagging David Guterson's 
incomparable Snow Falling on Cedars.

For charisma, style, elegance, and articulation, 
there was no one like Ravi Dayal in publishing - 
or outside. It was a class act: he could have 
charged good money just to have people watch him 
being himself. Listening to him, you got the 
feeling he was an upper-class Bloomsbury Brit 
togging himself down in Gandhian garb so that he 
could feel at home conversing with Lalu Prasad, 
when in fact his natural conversational companion 
would have been Lytton Strachey. In profile, he 
looked an amalgam of Bertrand Russell and Jiddu 
Krishnamurti: forehead up Russell, eyebrows down 
Krishnamurti. Shortness of stature never came in 
his way: an atmosphere of authority extended his 
height a couple of feet. His austere patrician 
air gave you the feeling he was the publishing 
world's Nehru. If Nehru was the last Englishman 
to run India, Ravi Dayal was the last Englishman 
to rule the Indian academic universe. His left 
liberalism, his interest in ideas and history, 
and his nationalism were all, like Nehru's, the 
beliefs of a morally incorruptible nobleman 
devoted to enriching the intellectual life of his 
country in his own eccentric way.

Ravi Dayal was the second-last of the 
intellectually respected heads of OUP India. (His 
anointed successor, the saintly bhadra 
intellectual, Santosh Mookerjee, who retired in 
1992, was the last.) Over the nineteen years 
after he left the OUP, Dayal published Amitav 
Ghosh's novels, played the mouth organ with 
incredible proficiency, gardened with zest, ran a 
charitable trust which took medicine and literacy 
to his homeland, Kumaon, and charmed those who 
flocked to his house to breathe the same air as 
he did.

All men are irreplaceable. Ravi Dayal is more irreplaceable than others.


____


[6]


The Guardian
  June 14, 2006

INDIAN STATE BANS BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP

Maseeh Rahman in Delhi


A book of nursery rhymes. Photograph: Adam Butler/AP

Tens of thousands of children at Indian schools 
have been told they can no longer sing popular 
English nursery rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle 
Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep.

In an attempt to rid schools of what is perceived 
as malign western influence, the school education 
minister in the state of Madhya Pradesh, Narottam 
Mishra, has commissioned a new set of rhymes 
written by Indians to "infuse a sense of 
patriotism" among five-year-olds.

Article continues
For the first time since English-language 
education was introduced in India by Lord 
Macaulay in the 19th century, children in Madhya 
Pradesh state schools will not learn the 
time-honoured rhymes imported from England.

But there has been no public discussion on the 
change and some parents disagree. "The poems 
[which are being axed] are only about nature, 
they have nothing to do with patriotism," Anjali 
Singh, a parent in the state capital Bhopal, told 
a local television news channel on Wednesday.

"In these days of globalisation, a child should 
be exposed to everything, not just what's local. 
These poems are a door through which the children 
can view the wider world."

A retired English teacher, Professor Zamiruddin, 
said the rhymes were popular with children. "The 
old rhymes have survived because we don't have 
good ones written in English that are rhythmic 
and easy-to-learn," he said. "The government's 
decision is so churlish and thoughtless."

This is not the first time that the Hindu 
nationalist BJP has stirred a controversy by 
tinkering with the school curriculum. In 
neighbouring Gujarat state, school textbooks were 
rewritten to categorise religious minorities 
including Muslims, Christians and Parsis as 
"foreigners" and to extol aspects of Nazism and 
fascism. A social studies textbook in Gujarat 
said: "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the 
German government within a short time, 
establishing a strong administrative set-up."

But unlike in Gujarat, the BJP's latest move to 
"nationalise" nursery rhymes may get the approval 
of its usually vociferous opponents from the left.

"I don't mind if the rhymes are replaced by 
equally good Indian poems," scientist Yash Pal 
told the Hindustan Times.

Educationalist Anil Sadgopal, speaking on the 
CNN-IBN news channel, said culturally specific 
poems such as Baa Baa Black Sheep could go, but 
asked: "What's wrong with Twinkle Twinkle Little 
Star?"

_____


[7]  Two recent volumes by OUP Pakistan

The News International

Books Received
Contested Representation

Punjabi Women in Feminist
Debate in Pakistan
By Tahmina Rashid
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Price: Rs.595  Pgs: 419

This book examines the legal rights, political 
representation and socio-economic status of women 
in Pakistan. It also looks at contested views on 
the class structure of society and the manner in 
which women are positioned. The aim of this book 
is to cover the gap between the activists and the 
women they represent. It is an addition to the 
available literature on women in Pakistan as the 
focus is more on lower and lower-middle class 
rural as well as urban women rather than women 
activists and organizations and their efforts. 
The study brings to light the questions raised by 
women participants regarding class differences 
and its effects on approaches in dealing with 
women by State structures and organizations. The 
book highlights the need to include women from 
various classes in mainstream feminist agendas of 
organizations as well as donor agencies. It 
asserts the need to make a distinction between 
speaking 'on' women and 'for' women.


Democratization in Pakistan
A Study of the 2002 Elections
By: Mohammad Waseem
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Price: Rs.495   Pgs: 258

This book deals with the 2002 elections as part 
of the process of democratization in terms of 
transition from military to civilian rule. It 
starts with an analysis of the way elections in 
Pakistan have been studied over time by scholars 
from inside and outside the country, and with the 
theory and practice of elections in the global 
and domestic contexts. It discusses the 
accountability drive of the Musharraf government, 
followed by the devolution plan, the presidential 
referendum, the electoral reforms and 
constitutional amendments as important milestones 
on the way to the 2002 elections. It seeks to 
analyze the way the ruling set-up shaped the 
electoral dynamics. It also brings to the surface 
the political undercurrents of partisan 
de-alignment represented by a low level of voter 
identification with political parties and a low 
turnout. The study provides a comprehensive 
analysis of the input of civil society in the 
election process, including the role of media, 
NGOs, the lawyers' community and intelligentsia 
in general.


_____


[8]

Invitation to participate in the
Public Meeting   on
Increasing Assaults on 'Right to Assembly and Protest'

(With special reference to BJP-led Jharkhand 
Government's conspiracy to frame CPI(ML) General 
Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya under patently 
false charges, including 307 of IPC and Section 
17 of the draconian Criminal Law Amendment Act)
    
Venue: Gandhi Peace Foundation,
Deendayal Upadhyay Marg,
near ITO, New Delhi

Time:   2 P.M.

Date:    June 15, 2006

Amongst those who have confirmed their participation include:

Justice Sachar, Arundhati Roy, Gautam Navalakha, 
Uma Chakravarty, Sumit Chakravarty, Sukumar 
Muralidharan, Tripta Wahi, ND Pancholi, Lata 
Jishnu, Jawed Naqvi.



Dear friend,

As you may be aware the Jharkhand government is 
desperately trying to frame Comrade Dipankar 
Bhattacharya, General Secretary of CPI(ML), and 
other party activists under patently false 
charges including 307 of IPC and Section 17 of 
CLA. And that too for leading a peaceful march to 
the Assembly(on 1st march 2001) to protest a 
spate of incidents involving police brutality, 
including the infamous and unprovoked firing on 
Muslim youth at Doranda and the firing on tribals 
at Tapkara for protesting displacement by the 
Koel Karo Dam.

The charges against the CPI(ML) leaders and 
activists- Comrade Dipankar Bhattacharya (General 
Secretary, CPIML), Om Prakash, Harsh Narayan 
Singh and Sita Ram Singh as well as Motu Oraon, a 
labouring tribal youth who was a bystander, under 
Section 147, 114, 148, 149, 353, 323, 324, 307, 
188, 431 of the IPC and Section 17 of the CLA 
(Criminal Law Amendment Act)- is before a 
fast-track court in Ranchi. The CLA, you may be 
aware is incidentally a draconian act (which came 
into force between TADA and POTA), which, despite 
being repealed, nevertheless continues to be 
frequently invoked in Jharkhand.

The CPI-ML leaders are being witch-hunted and 
greeted with repression in Jharkhand for a mass 
act of public political protest. The Assembly 
March was brutally lathicharged; newspapers 
carried photographs of dozens of CPI(ML) 
activists lying bloody and battered, and of the 
police dragging CPI(ML) General Secretary 
Dipankar Bhattacharya and late Comrade Mahendra 
Singh (CPIML's lone MLA in the Jharkhand 
Assembly) by their clothes and hair. Comrade 
Dipankar was detained in judicial custody in jail 
for a week, and false charges were slapped 
against the arrested activists. Now, charges have 
been framed and the Jharkhand Government is 
pursuing these false cases assiduously and in a 
great hurry to clamp political  dissent. Notably, 
the Jharkhand Government has dropped the cases 
against several activists of the Jharkhand 
movement, and even against leaders of the Ram 
Janmabhoomi agitation.

The slogans  of 'Punish the police officials 
guilty for Tapkara firing', 'Gherao the Assembly, 
Punish the Killers' and 'Scrap the Koel Karo 
Project' on the banners and placards are being 
cited by the police, while claiming that Comrade 
Dipankar and other activists were 'inciting' 
protestors for a murderous attack on police and 
Assembly!

If the Jharkhand Government allows the police to 
punish and persecute leaders engaged in mass 
democratic protests, there will be no democratic 
means left to protest incidents like the police 
firing at Tapkara and Doranda. The path for a 
police State will be set in Jharkhand. For the 
General Secretary of a recognised political 
party, leading a political protest to voice 
certain issues before an elected Assembly, to be 
charged with abetting attempted murder, is 
probably unprecedented in the annals of Indian 
politics. The only comparable precedent can be 
found in the arrests of political leaders during 
emergency.

There is an urgent need to come together and 
safeguard the democratic rights enshrined in the 
Constitution if we have to ensure that people 
protesting against the violation of their 
fundamental rights are not shot down and those 
who lead the voice of concern are not 
witch-hunted and jailed in Jharkhand.

Yours in solidarity,

Prabhat Kumar
Central Committee,
COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MARXIST-LENINIST) (LIBERATION)
Central Office: U-90, Shakarpur,Delhi-110092, 
Phone: 011 -22521067 Fax: 011 - 22518248;
E-mail: mail at cpiml.org : cpiml.lib at bol.net.in : Website: www.cpiml.org

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

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.