SACW | Aug 24-27, 2006

Sat Aug 26 20:11:21 CDT 2006

South Asia Citizens Wire | August 24-27, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2282

[1]  Sri Lanka: Peace Without Appeasement: Honoring Kethesh (Qadri Ismail)
[2]  Superstition rules the subcontinent (Praful Bidwai)
[3]  Bangladesh: Attack on free speech - Take action against them 
[Fascists] (Edit, Daily Star)
[4]  India - Pakistan - Bangladesh: Birth Pangs (Ashis Nandy)
[5]  Organised riots & structured violence in India (Paul R. Brass)
[6]  India: Supreme Court orders telecast of Anand Patwardhan's 
"Father Son and Holy War"
[7]  Letter to newspapers (Mukul Dube)
[8]  UK: Let us adopt Islamic family law to curb extremists (Colin Brown)
[9]  Upcoming Events: 
      Seminar: The International Brotherhood of Fascism
- The Sangh Parivar, the US State and the Attack on Minorities(New 
Delhi, 2 Sept 2006 )

___

[1] 

Lines Magazine
May - August 2006

PEACE WITHOUT APPEASEMENT: HONORING KETHESH
by Qadri Ismail

Kethesh Loganathan's decision to join the Rajapakse regime's "peace" 
secretariat was bewildering at the time. It still is after his 
assassination, presumably at the hands of the LTTE.

A strong argument can be made that Tamils of conscience-and I don't 
mean Lakshman Kadirgamar, a Tamil with U.N. Secretary-General 
ambitions-should have helped Chandrika Kumaratunga's peace efforts. 
Of all postcolonial Sri Lanka's heads of government, she-a leftist- 
alone viewed the national question as a matter of justice for the 
Tamils. Yes, she made early tactical mistakes about the protocols of 
the process. Worse, she was later willing to tolerate the military's 
molestation of Tamils; not to mention her party's role in the murder 
of Mawanella Muslims. But she always knew that justice was on the 
side of the Tamil people.
To Ranil Wickremasinghe, peace is simply a profitable proposition. 
The future might place him in the position of being the Sinhala 
leader who finally makes the deal that stops the war. But it would be 
just that: a deal. To the perspective that he articulates, to local 
and international capital that supports him, the LTTE must be 
appeased because it is bad for business. Wickremasinghe is quite 
willing to tolerate the LTTE as long as it targets only Tamils and 
Muslims, as long as it leaves the south alone.

Unlike his immediate predecessors, Mahinda Rajapakse reminds one of 
the truly terrible days of that war criminal, J.R. Jayewardene. To 
win the election, he actively cultivated the support of Buddhist 
priests who desire and demand violence. Among his first acts as 
president was to appoint Sinhala supremacists-notably, Sarath Fonseka 
and H.M.G.B.  Kotakadeniya-to leading positions in the defense 
establishment. That alone was signifier enough that the Tamil people 
could look forward, once again, to war. (Something the LTTE, for its 
own reasons, welcomed.) The refusal to investigate the January 
killings, presumably by the police, of the five Tamil youth in 
Trincomalee-details of this case have been made public by D.B.S. 
Jeyaraj, amongst others- was a blue-light to the troops that they 
could treat Tamil citizens like vermin; in Kurtz's infamously racist 
phrase, "Exterminate all the brutes!" Wherever possible, they have.

In that context, Kethesh's belief that he could somehow influence 
what is clearly a rabidly Sinhala nationalist government-work within 
the system-was, at best, a miserable mistake.

But we all misstep, don't we?

Only, Kethesh's-and make no mistake about it-was an error of judgment 
made in the interests of peace. For he wanted, as he had all his 
life, to make a difference. His decision to quit the Center for 
Policy Alternatives was spurred, in part, by his increasing isolation 
within the more influential sections of the peace lobby. They think 
hope is spelled R-a-n-i-l. They understand peace as the absence of 
war. To Kethesh-no mere nationalist, but a leftist, after all- things 
were not so simple.
He argued consistently (the articles are available at the CPA 
website) that peace wasn't synonymous with appeasing the LTTE at any 
cost; that the process should be inclusive-of other Tamil, Muslim and 
Sinhala opinion; that human and democratic rights should not be 
exchanged merely for an LTTE promise to stop killing Sinhalese.

This made him inconvenient to sections of the peace lobby, which has 
made a habit of excusing LTTE massacres of Sinhala and Muslim 
civilians, of not protesting its systematic stifling of oppositional 
Tamils. And, as the UTHR(J) noted, he got marked as an opponent by 
the Norwegians.

The blondes-daft, dismal and disgracefully unwilling to learn from 
their own mistakes-are desperate, having screwed up the Oslo talks, 
for some international diplomatic success. But they have almost 
certainly outlived their usefulness in Sri Lanka. Which, however, is 
not necessarily a good thing.

For the Rajapakse regime has made it clear, even to the most 
massively myopic that, unless its hand is twisted by some outside 
force, it will not make any "concessions" to the Tamils-despite the 
president's public posture as a peacenik. Indeed, it has made it 
superabundantly clear that it will condone rape in Mannar, massacres 
in Mutur and continue a policy that has already transformed thousands 
of northeastern Tamil and Muslim Sri Lankan citizens into homeless, 
displaced persons.

Mahinda Rajapakse once championed Palestinian rights. (Which may 
explain why Kethesh was optimistic about him.) He now sounds like an 
emulator of Ehud Olmert. He, too, is fighting a purely "defensive" 
war. (A ranch in Texas awaits the first person to guess who taught 
him to say that!) He, too, must bomb children in self-defense.

So, those who banned the LTTE, on the grounds that most of its 
attacks target civilians-Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese-should wonder 
whether consistency alone doesn't demand that equal sanctions be 
applied to the Sri Lankan government.

Except that, of course, just as much as the EU ban only strengthened 
the unilateralist element within the LTTE, international sanctions 
will invariably strengthen unilateralist elements within the Sinhala 
right, notably the JVP/JHU. (By the way, those who still insist on 
calling the JVP Marxist should realize that national socialist is the 
more accurate term. The best known representative of that politics, 
of course, is a short, ugly Aryan with a miniature moustache who 
tried to exterminate all the Jews.) On the other hand, I am prepared 
to bet that if the entire Sri Lankan cabinet, including its many 
Ministers for Inconsequential Affairs, is banned from traveling to-or 
just hitting the shopping malls in-the west, it will convert to 
federalism faster than you can say "Buddhu-Ammo!"

For that is the distressing dilemma facing those of us who do not 
understand peace in Sri Lanka as the vanishing of war. The LTTE is to 
democracy what Darrell Hair is to good umpiring. Any settlement that 
strengthens them cannot produce a comprehensive, transformative 
peace.  But who amongst us does not want the killing to end?

So, we cannot but beg that all the parties and "paramilitaries," even 
if they don't care about the suffering of civilians, stop the 
fighting. And then:
With Kethesh, we can also demand that peace requires not the 
appeasement of the LTTE, but the recognition that all the peoples of 
the northeast-and the rest of the country-are ensured a safe, secure 
and substantially democratic future. Rajapakse's "maximum devolution 
within a unitary constitution" and his majoritarian committee of 
experts don't even begin to address those concerns. For, as Kethesh 
argued, peace requires a transformation of the entire Sri Lankan 
state, not just the establishment of an autonomous area in the 
northeast, through a process that includes as wide a selection of Sri 
Lankan political opinion as possible.
Yes, this means that Muslim representatives participate as equals to 
the LTTE and government in any negotiations. Yes, it means other 
Tamil opinion is also involved, not just informed. And, yes, it 
means-as much as it troubles me to say this-that the JVP and JHU 
cannot be left out, either. Peace in Sri Lanka means abiding by even 
the unabidable.

But it also means that everything will be open to negotiation. 
Everything. Including that noxious flag, dominated by the armed 
Sinhala lion, which reminds me every time I encounter it that the 
minorities are insignificant in Sri Lanka.
That way, we could have peace without appeasement. And honor Kethesh's memory.

_____

[2] 

The News International
August 26, 2006

SUPERSTITION RULES THE SUBCONTINENT
by Praful Bidwai

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and 
human-rights activist based in Delhi

Apart from language, culture, food habits and political history, 
South Asians share one thing that's only rarely talked about: 
superstition, or blind faith in supernatural forces. Adherence to 
superstition cuts across national, geographic and class boundaries in 
our region. The affluent professionals of the southern plains of Sri 
Lanka -- South Asia's best performer in human development -- can be 
as deeply superstitious as the poorest of peasants in Nepal's high 
mountains.

 From time to time, superstitious belief explodes into near-mass 
hysteria. That's what happened last week in Mumbai, India's largest 
and most modern city, which witnessed a 'miracle': a 'divine force' 
had suddenly made seawater sweet at Mahim, at the junction of the 
island city and the Western suburbs.

Thousands flocked to Mahim Creek to drink the sweet water and fill as 
many bottles with it as they could. Mothers fed it to babies. Quacks 
offered it as a 'magical remedy'.

The 'miracle' water was poisonous, containing up to 400 times more 
impurities than Mumbai's poor-quality tap water -- which people have 
to purify by boiling, filtering or other means. Analysis showed it 
contains 770 to 1740 ppm of solids, much higher than the World Health 
Organisation norm of 0-500. The chloride content is 600 to 6,500 ppm 
(WHO norm, 0-250, tap water 1-12).

As for the heavy metals, cancer-causing chemicals and bacteria the 
'miracle' contains, the less said is better. Mahim creek receives a 
mind-boggling 1,000 million litres of untreated sewage a day. The 
water contains human faeces and 100,000 bacteria per 100 ml -- liable 
to cause severe gastro-intestinal problems and other disorders.

Even as the 'Mahim Miracle' hysteria continued, idols of Durga and 
Shiva started 'drinking milk' in Bareilly. Much like the 
'Ganesha-drinking-milk' phenomenon of 1995, the myth swept through 
city after Indian city. Hundreds of devotees lined up at temples 
carrying milk, believing that offering it to the gods would earn them 
'merit' and bring them benefits.

Many people attributed the Mahim 'miracle' to the karamat of Baba 
Maqdoom Saheb, a fourteenth century saint buried close by. Some 
others saw the hand of their own god in it -- Hindu, Christian or 
Parsi. The devotees convinced themselves this was the 'purest' of 
water, which can cause no harm. Even if they get cholera, "God will 
take care of us".

In reality, there was no miracle in Mahim. Changes in the salinity of 
seawater are not uncommon in the monsoon season and during low tide. 
Mumbai witnessed heavy rains, leading to overflowing of the Vihar 
Lake into the Mithi river which meets the sea at Mahim. This unusual 
flooding combined with a release of freshwater from rocks at the 
seabed, due to displacement or cracking. The lighter freshwater rose 
to the surface.

Similarly, the phenomenon of idols 'consuming' milk is caused by 
surface tension and suction due to capillary action. It isn't 
confined to 'divine idols'. Almost any rigid object with a pointed 
end can suck up a fluid from a shallow dish. In 1995, a cobbler 
demonstrated that he could make his humble shoe-mending tripod 
'drink' milk.

It's ludicrous to attribute such natural, scientifically explainable, 
phenomena to supernatural factors. Superstition is a sign of the 
disorientation that many South Asians experience because they don't 
understand the complexities, insecurities and turmoil produced by 
social, economic and political processes.

At work is helplessness in the face of unemployment, displacement and 
economic distress. At the upper end of the social spectrum is stress, 
produced by the corporate rat race.

Superstition offers a convenient escape from stress -- and from 
thinking. It makes the connections between cause and effect both 
invisible and unnecessary. You can attribute ill-health to invisible 
spirits or to the stars. Thus, it seems perfectly 'natural' to blame 
evil spirits for human or social acts.

You can blame your karma for everything and stop acting as your own 
agent and as a rational being that can critically evaluate day-to-day 
options. A superstitious person doesn't take responsibility for 
his/her actions.

To condemn superstition is not to condemn religious faith, but only 
its extreme blind form. Superstition is by no means unique to South 
Asia. But what makes it special here is two things: superstition is 
growing even among the affluent and educated; second, it has a 
collective, mass character. Just about every cult and sect in the 
world has a presence here, from delphic oracles to magneto-therapy. 
There is a flourishing divine enterprise in all our countries. It's 
not just the illiterate and poor who fall prey to superstition. 
Obscurantism has sunk deep roots among privileged professionals too.

Someone as seemingly modern and self-confident as Sachin Tendulkar 
performed a yagna to help him recover his cricketing form. Many South 
Asian ministers have personal astrologers whose advice they follow on 
cabinet appointments, swearing-in ceremonies, even the spelling of 
their names. For instance, South Indian leader Jayalalithaa added an 
"a" to her name because that's numerologically favourable.

At the lower end, desperate, impoverished and illiterate people marry 
their daughters to dogs to ward off the 'evil eye'.

The collective character of superstition in South Asia takes the form 
of periodic waves -- like the Ganesha-drinking-milk episode. 
Psychologists call this sociogenic illness, or socially produced mass 
hysteria. It's usually driven by a search for solace.

In recent years, India witnessed the 'monkey man' scare, the 'Chapati 
Jesus' (an image etched on a roti), and the 'onion witches' myth. The 
last was fuelled by a rumour according to which these women would 
visit homes and demand onions. As they cut the onions in half, blood 
would ooze out. Soon, someone in the family would die.

Many other societies too have witnessed outbursts of superstition, 
leading to panic, fear, and often, violence -- for instance, the 
Salem witch hunts in the United States in the 17th century. Keith 
Thomas in his masterpiece "Religion and the Decline of Magic" has 
analysed the power of superstition in sixteenth and seventeenth 
century England.

Thomas shows how the rise of organised religion, and more important, 
modernisation and industrialisation, marginalised and delegitimised 
black magic.

This is not to say that individuals in the West don't hold 
superstitious beliefs. Just two years ago, well-known British 
scientist Percy Seymour published "The Scientific Proof of 
Astrology". It now stands discredited. Similarly, pop singer Madonna 
recently joined the Jewish cult Kabbalah. She wants Kabbalah's 
'magic' fluid to be used to clean up radioactive wastes in Britain.

One reason why such weird fads acquire a mass character in our 
societies is the patronage superstitious ideas receive from the top. 
Under the Bharatiya Janata Party, for instance, India came close to 
teaching astrology at universities. Many of our information 
technology professionals remain as devoted to obscurantist cults as 
to computer software.

This is a sign of how far South Asia stands from developing a 
critical, rational approach to life. Scientific knowledge is 
objective, impersonal, and potentially accessible to all. Above all, 
it's falsifiable. Science is not a closed system. Astrology is. For 
instance, the recent addition of three planets to the solar system 
marks a major change in astronomy. But it won't affect astrological 
forecasts because they are impervious to facts.

Every society must generate its own renaissance or enlightenment 
based on reason. The subcontinent has a long, long way to go.

_____

[3]

The Daily Star
August 27, 2006

Editorial

ATTACK ON FREE SPEECH
TAKE ACTION AGAINST THEM
All those that are for free speech and freedom of opinion, and 
against bigotry and obscurantism should condemn the threats made 
against the life of professors Hasan Azizul Haque and Zafar Iqbal, by 
elements of Islami Chhatra Shibir. This tendency poses very grave 
risk for our democratic values and practice. We couldn't condemn the 
aggressive posture of the reactionaries enough.

We wonder what type of political environment we are living in, where 
the student wing of a political party, more so one that is part of an 
alliance that is in charge of running the country, issues death 
threats to teachers for having ventilated their individual views. And 
nobody in the ruling alliance, let alone the Jamaat-e-Islami, have so 
much as protested, not to speak of taking cognizance of the death 
threat, which itself constitutes an offence under the law of the land.

Are we to understand that the Jamaat-e-Islami, by their silence on 
the issue, condones the matter? Are they in accord with the line 
taken by their student wing, which perhaps they themselves would like 
to take, but have been prevented only by consideration of political 
propriety? Are we to believe that their underlings are doing all 
these at their biddings?

One may not agree with what has been said. But disagreements cannot 
manifest itself in the form of threats to the life of a person one 
disagrees with. Views should be countered with plausible arguments 
and let the people be the judge of which to accept. At least that is 
the civilised norm of human interaction. Nobody or group can take it 
upon himself or itself the right to determine what others can or 
cannot say.

We want the Jamaat to come out against the Chhatra Shibir for the 
utterances, punish the errant leaders and make clear to the country 
that they are against what has been said by disassociating themselves 
with the death threats. Otherwise, their silence will further 
reinforce the common perception of their role in this matter.

We also ask whether the government can do without taking cognisance 
of death threats made openly that is liable for action under the law 
of the land?

_____

[4]

The Times of India
August 13, 2006

BIRTH PANGS
by Ashis Nandy

Let the people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh remember this day as 
a day of remembrance, atonement and reconciliation. Sixty years ago 
on this day in Calcutta began a carnage that went on for about 18 
months, engulfing much of north and east India.

The killings more or less ended in January 1948 with the Karachi 
riots and the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, disowned and isolated 
by that time not only by vendors of hate but also by statists of all 
hues.

The carnage laid the basis of two nation-states, India and Pakistan. 
Another carnage was to mark the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 but many 
do not know that some of the most brutal and pointless killings in 
the second carnage were done by groups that were victims of the first.

August 14, 1946, was the beginning of our journey as independent 
countries and to disown its significance is to disclaim a part of our 
collective self.

In this part of the world there is a belief that we must forget some 
things to reaffirm a moral universe, to ensure that the ghosts of the 
past do not haunt us. We do not live by history but by narratives and 
memories that have built-in principles of forgetfulness.

But that is another kind of forgetting. It does not have as its 
underside an obsessive, private engagement with memories - stealthy, 
compulsive returns to the past to refresh paranoia and 
self-destructive fantasies of revenge.

As we have built new nation-states and millions have rebuilt their 
lives, we have not been able to lay our ghosts to rest. The political 
cultures of all the three countries have remained mired in a past 
that can neither be owned nor disowned.

Yet, as I look into the data we at the Centre for the Study of 
Developing Societies have collected on the violence of Partition, I 
am convinced that we can look back on those tempestuous days not only 
with shame but also some pride.

There was grass-roots resistance to the violence. Genocide is not 
easy to organise in a society built on communities, not nations; 26 
per cent of the respondents in our survey say that they survived 
because of help given by someone from the enemy community.

No other genocide in the world yields comparable figures. And even 
that figure is an underestimation. Many victims are loath to admit 
that they have survived because someone from the enemy community 
helped.

  For in their bitterness they have since then embraced sectarian 
ideologies. Salim Ahmed of Islamabad's Sustainable Development Policy 
Institute, an important participant in our study, tells how an 
elderly Sikh was disturbed when his son brought home an abducted 
Muslim woman; he begged his son to release the woman.

But the son was young and women were being abducted all over Punjab. 
He did not listen. The father took out his family gun and shot his 
son. This story, told by a member of the woman's family, was the 
beginning of Salim's interest in Partition violence.

And he has already found more than a hundred such episodes. We have 
many reasons to be ashamed of, but we have some reasons to be proud, 
too. For 60 years, we have been unable to mourn the more than one 
million dead.

Pakistan considers the Muslims who died martyrs to the cause of 
Pakistan. Yet, no Pakistani regime has sought to commemorate their 
sacrifice. The Hindu nationalists consider Hindu victims to be 
martyrs who died for the idea of an undivided India but in their 
writings, too, propaganda has priority over anguish.

Both sides sense that almost all of those who died had no inkling of 
the larger cause for which they died. Perhaps the time has come for 
us to mourn for the victims in a different way.

By acknowledging that they were not the foot soldiers of a freer, 
post-colonial world but the canon fodders for an ideology of state 
that saw conventional nation-states as the last word in human 
emancipation.

Pakistan was a product of Muslim nationalism but this nationalism was 
no different from the nationalism that created the modern 
nation-states in Europe; nor was it in any way different from the 
kind of nation-state the Hindu nationalists wanted to build in 
undivided India.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, ever eager to force India to live by 
Europe's history, recognised this when he said, "I have no quarrel 
with Mr Jinnah's two-nation theory. We Hindus are a nation by 
ourselves and it is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two 
nations".

Both accepted Europe's blood-stained history as the guide to 
state-building. They were not wrong. Today's ultra-secular France 
began to move towards its present culture of state only after 
cleansing itself of its Protestant citizens.

The birth of the United States was accompanied by the most efficient 
genocide of all times, which wiped out more than 95 per cent of the 
native population of the Americas.

That is the past of every major nation-state now singing paeans to 
secular, multicultural, multi-ethnic states. Understandably, Gandhi's 
battle against the violence of Partition tried to bypass the state 
altogether.

We refuse to recognise that the birth certificates of India, Pakistan 
and Bangladesh are written in blood and the memories of that first 
genocide constitute the dark underside of the cultures of state in 
South Asia.

As a result, the dead are uninvited guests at every international 
negotiation among the states and every debate on collective security.

The writer is a cultural and political psychologist.

_____

[5] 

The Hindu
August 23, 2006

ORGANISED RIOTS & STRUCTURED VIOLENCE IN INDIA

by Paul R. Brass

What are called Hindu-Muslim riots in India are, in fact, more like 
pogroms, and have recently, in Gujarat and elsewhere, taken the form 
of genocidal massacres and local ethnic cleansing as well.

MY FIRST involvement with the subject of collective violence was with 
the Aligarh riots of 1961 that occurred on the birthday of Mahatma 
Gandhi, an irony that I was not the only person to notice at the 
time. At that time, I was engaged in my Ph.D. research on the 
Congress party in five districts in Uttar Pradesh. I had chosen 
Aligarh as one of the five sites in order to determine how the 
Congress functioned in a context where Hindu-Muslim relations had 
been embittered as a consequence of the presence of the Aligarh 
Muslim University in the city. I arrived in Aligarh a couple of 
months after the termination of those riots and wrote about their 
disastrous consequences for the Congress organisation in the district 
in my first book, Factional Politics in an Indian State.

In subsequent research visits to India over the next two decades, the 
subject of violence also featured, but again only peripherally in my 
work on other issues, especially concerning language and politics. 
Nevertheless, I was struck by the ways in which violence had come to 
be used in Indian politics. It had become not something aberrant, but 
rather routine, which I noted in my brief discussion (in my second 
book, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India) of the Ranchi 
riots of August 1967 that took off from the decision of the 
non-Congress coalition government in Bihar to declare Urdu as the 
second official language of the State.

So, my research on violence in my first two decades of field work was 
incidental to my main interests. In 1982-83, however, when I 
undertook a restudy of the same five districts two decades after my 
initial research in India, it had become apparent that any study of 
politics in Uttar Pradesh had to include the issue of violence 
centrally. It was also apparent to me then that violence was not only 
an issue in Hindu-Muslim relations, but was increasingly widespread 
in Indian politics. Consequently, wherever I went in U.P. in those 
years, I asked persons in authority and in politics whether or not 
there had been any serious incidents of violence recently. Everywhere 
I went, I was indeed informed of such incidents and proceeded to the 
sites where they had occurred in each district to investigate their 
origins, the reasons for their occurrence, the consequences for the 
participants, and the ways in which they were reported in the press 
and used by politicians for their own ends.

My research at that time did not focus explicitly on what are called 
"Hindu-Muslim riots," but on various forms of violence, including 
intercaste, intervillage fracases, and police-public confrontations. 
In the meantime, however, as the militant Hindu movement began to 
gather force, so did the intensity and scale of collective violence 
involving Hindus, Muslims, and the police. So also did the media 
attention to these forms of violence.

It was during my field work in Aligarh and Meerut districts in 
1982-83 that I first came to the conclusion that there was a great 
deal wrong with the kind of attention given to what are called 
Hindu-Muslim riots and to the interpretations given to violence 
designated as such. I came away from those field trips with the 
thought that the rioting that I was learning about was neither 
spontaneous, nor was it primarily conflict between Hindu and Muslim 
crowds, though there was still some of that.

On the contrary, I said to myself, and to a former district 
magistrate in Aligarh, that there existed in these towns what I 
called "institutionalised riot systems." The ex-DM, who knew very 
well how riots were organised, nevertheless reacted with an 
uncomprehending look. I was somewhat discouraged by his reaction, but 
ultimately found in my data from interviews, official and 
non-official reports - but not from the media - that the existence of 
such systems was to my mind incontrovertible. Moreover, it was much 
more highly developed and elaborately organised within the network of 
militant Hindu organisations radiating out from the RSS than from any 
comparable network of Muslim organisations, at least in northern 
India.

Moreover, it was also now clear enough to me that what have been 
called Hindu-Muslim riots in India of the past several decades are 
misnamed, that they could not have been carried out with such force 
in so many places, in many cases for extended periods of time, and 
repeatedly, without the complicity of the police and the failure of 
the political parties in control of government and the administrative 
and police officers in the districts to prevent riots or at least to 
contain them once they had begun. In short, what are called 
Hindu-Muslim riots in India are, in fact, more like pogroms, and have 
recently, in Gujarat and elsewhere, taken the form of genocidal 
massacres and local ethnic cleansing as well.

These discoveries led me in turn to adopt a critical stance 
concerning the social science literature on this subject which, it 
seemed to me, had got caught up in misguided efforts to categorise 
and classify the various forms of collective violence and to probe 
the mentalities of rioters and crowds without displaying much 
knowledge of how riots actually happen. Pseudo-science substituted 
for ethnographic research. The search for universal laws of behaviour 
ignored the dynamic processes by which riotous behaviour was 
produced. The urge to find "causes" for riots turned into a 
chimerical search for the sources of violence in crowd psychology, 
spontaneous popular anger over grievances against other groups spread 
by rumours, ancient hatreds, decline of civic engagement, and on and 
on, all without benefit of actual knowledge of anything but the 
barest sequencing of events, without penetrating into the circles 
where specific persons and groups actually work out plans of action, 
strategies and tactics, recruit rioters, and select targets to 
attack. Nor was virtually any attention paid to the crucial roles 
played by the media and politicians in framing the discourse 
concerning riots in such a way as to displace blame away from the 
actual perpetrators, the authorities, the police, and themselves on 
to others.

In 1999, I was invited to present a paper on the 1947 partition 
violence in India for a conference on forced migrations and 
collective violence in the twentieth century. The organisers of the 
conference, like most people, including regrettably most scholars who 
have not actually done research on the subject, assumed that the 
partition violence was yet another example of "Hindu-Muslim 
violence," an expression of the mass anger and fears of millions of 
people who fled their homes and villages for safety across the new 
border between India and Pakistan.

Serious scholarship

At this time, the new wave of serious scholarship on the Partition 
had just begun. I was able to draw upon this literature as well as 
the massive published documents on the subject, and a few of my own 
earlier meetings in the 1960s with politicians who had been deeply 
implicated in the violence. I realised now, as did several others in 
the 1990s, that even such a stupendous disaster as the partition of 
India had been massively distorted in historical writing on the 
subject and in public consciousness, that it had not been at all 
recognised, except by a tiny minority of scholars, for what it 
actually was, namely, a twentieth century form of genocide and ethnic 
cleansing, planned and organised, but made to appear wholly or mostly 
spontaneous or blamed upon various easy targets such as Lord 
Mountbatten or the British policy of "divide and rule." So, the 
genocide of partition is yet another example, the most extreme form, 
of course, of institutionalised violence, lying at the far end of a 
continuum of forms of violence that include riots, pogroms, and 
massacres.

Those who are familiar with my previous work know that I do not take 
a detached stance in my writing on the subject of collective 
violence. I strive for social science objectivity, but I do not hide 
my passion or anger. In the long, previously unpublished essay on 
"The Politics of Curfew" in my recent book Forms of Collective 
Violence: Riots, Pogroms and Genocide in Modern India, I have 
provided extensive, detailed accounts from my own interviews over 
many years, as well as from other sources, concerning the misuse of 
curfew in India as a device for the victimisation of the Muslim 
population during riots.

In preparing that essay, I searched for comparative literature on the 
subject and found none, but I did find evidence that misuse of curfew 
restrictions to victimise particular ethnic or subject groups is 
hardly confined to India. I have, therefore, argued that this is an 
issue that needs to be taken up by the human rights community and 
international organisations. I have also proposed a set of policies 
that might be considered by such groups and by governments in India.

One must take up the issue of what secularism means in India in 
relation to collective and state violence involving Hindu-Muslim 
relations. I argue in my book, as I have elsewhere, that secular 
values are absolutely essential for the maintenance of a just and 
peaceful social order in India. I believe, moreover, that the whole 
movement against secular values in India and the West is a grave 
mistake in which, regrettably, many valued colleagues and serious 
academic writers in India and the West are involved.

(Excerpted from Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms and 
Genocide in Modern India by Paul R. Brass - to be published in 
September by Three Essays Collective.)
_____

[6]

Supreme Court passes strictures against Prasar Bharati and orders DD 
to telecast Anand Patwardhan's "Father Son and Holy War"

Three of Anand Patwardhan's hard-hitting National Award winning 
documentaries reached Indian TV audiences only after the judiciary 
ruled that these films had to be telecast. Bombay our City (1985) on 
the plight of Bombay's poor, In Memory of Friends (1990) on the fight 
for communal harmony in strife-torn Punjab and Ram Ke Naam (1992) on 
the Ayodhya crisis, were all telecast following court orders, years 
after they were first made. It is now the turn of Father, Son and 
Holy War (1995).

A Chronology of Events

1.  "Father, Son and Holy War" (FSHW) a 2 hour, two part documentary 
critique of the male psyche and its relationship to communal 
violence, was completed in 1995. Passed without cuts by the Central 
Board of Film Certification, the film went on to win two National 
Awards in 1996 - Best Social film and Best Investigative film. It 
also won several international awards and in 2004 was included by DOX 
magazine (Europe) as one of the 50 memorable international 
documentaries of all time.

2. After Doordarshan (DD) refused to telecast the film, Patwardhan 
filed a writ in the Bombay High Court in 1998 on the grounds that DD 
was being arbitrary and had violated his right to Freedom of 
Expression and the public's right to Information. In February 2001, 
the Bombay High Court after viewing the film, directed DD to telecast 
it within 6 weeks.

3. Prasar Bharati appealed against this judgment in the Supreme 
Court. In December 2001 the Supreme Court directed DD to 
re-constitute a new committee to review the film within three months. 
A year passed without DD taking action. Finally in the face of 
contempt of court proceedings, DD constituted a screening committee 
that included prominent Hindu and Muslim religious leaders with the 
necessary qualifications. This committee unanimously recommended the 
telecast stating: "It is a very good film and must be shown."

4. Prasar Bharati nevertheless rejected the film. Patwardhan then 
filed a new writ in the Bombay High Court and in 2003 won a second 
judgment by which DD was again ordered to telecast FSHW within two 
weeks. Prasar Bharati again appealed the matter in the Supreme Court 
claiming they could not show the film because one part of it had an 
"A" censor certificate. 

5. On July 20, 2006 Justice Lakshmanan and Justice Panta of the 
Supreme Court saw the film and heard submissions from both sides. 
Prasar Bharati asked for certain deletions but on 25 August 2006, the 
judges upheld the High Court order to telecast the film without cuts. 
Apart from this the Honourable Justices went so far as to pass 
strictures against DD and Prasar Bharati. Noting the long history of 
rejection of Patwardhan's National award winning films they stated 
that: "This behaviour of DD would justify us in stating that DD is 
being dictated by rules of malafides and arbitrariness in taking 
decisions with regard to the telecast of the Respondent's films." 
They further added that: "We are shocked by the observation of the 
Prasar Bharati that the film is not suitable due to unsatisfactory 
production quality and the film has nothing specific to convey".

Advocate P.A. Sebastian represented Patwardhan in the High Court and 
Advocate Prashant Bhushan in the Supreme Court.

Signed:  Anand Patwardhan

_____

[7] 

Subject: Letter to newspapers

D-504 Purvasha
Mayur Vihar 1
Delhi 110091

14 August 2006

Presumably to set itself apart from the Continent, Britain and 
Ireland, from where its founders had come, the USA chose to partly 
reverse the date-month-year format and create its own month-date-year 
one. It does not ever seem to have been troubled by the illogic of 
putting the smallest unit in the middle rather than at the start- or 
at the end, as in the ISO standard, YYYY-MM-DD, which is logical and 
which makes computations simple. Now, of course, it has given itself 
the divine right to take the world where it pleases.

11 September, the day of the attack on the World Trade Center, 
automatically became "9/11". As that was the shorthand which the USA 
used, the rest of the world used it too, never mind that in most 
countries the number of a month in a year follows that of a day in a 
month.

How do we explain the fact that the shorthand used for the Mumbai 
train blasts is "7/11"? We were a British colony, so we mostly use 
the DD-MM-YY format to express Gregorian and other dates. Is "9/11" a 
part of the canon which all countries in a world now ruled by the USA 
will always follow, a mark of global colonialism?  Certainly on the 
day after the Mumbai blasts, newspapers-the Times of India is an 
example -- carried a report of Uncle Samuel "George" Bush consoling 
India. Naturally, he also held out informed advice or some such thing 
on a gun-metal platter on which was inscribed "The War Against 
Terror".

Mukul Dube

_____

[9] 

The Independent
15 August 2006

LET US ADOPT ISLAMIC FAMILY LAW TO CURB EXTREMISTS, MUSLIMS TELL KELLY

By Colin Brown

Published: 15 August 2006

Muslim leaders have urged Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for
Communities, to support Islamic family law in Britain to stop youths joining
Islamic extremists.

Following three hours of meeting with Muslim groups in Whitehall, Ms Kelly
said: "There is a battle of hearts and minds to be won within the Muslim
community, working with the Muslim community to take on the terrorist and
extremist elements that are sometimes found within it, not just in the
Muslim community, but elsewhere as well."

John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, who was also at the meeting, is
today expected to meet Muslim Labour MPs who have demanded a change in
Government foreign policy on the Middle East.

Mr Prescott and Ms Kelly made it clear that the threat of terrorism could
not be used to force a change of policy abroad. Ms Kelly said she did not
accept that British foreign policy should be dictated by a small group of
people.

"What I do accept is that there is a lot of anger and frustration out there
in the community that needs to be properly expressed and vented through the
democratic process," she said.

Dr Syed Aziz Pasha, secretary general of the Union of Muslim Organisations
of the UK and Ireland, said he had asked for holidays to mark Muslim
festivals and Islamic laws to cover family affairs which would apply only to
Muslims.

Dr Pasha said he was not seeking sharia law for criminal offences but he
said Muslim communities in Britain should be able to operate Islamic codes
for marriage and family life. "In Scotland, they have a separate law. It
doesn't mean they are not part of the UK. We are asking for Islamic law
which covers marriage and family life. We are willing to co-operate but
there should be a partnership. They should understand our problems then we
will understand their problems."

He said that Ms Kelly had said she would "look sympathetically at all the
suggestions" that had been made. He added: "She agreed with my suggestion
[that] it should be a partnership approach."

The meeting was the latest in a series aimed at showing the Government is
listening to the Muslim community. The role of co-ordinating the meetings
was switched from the Home Office to the Communities department to move the
focus from law and order to a wider agenda.

Yousif al-Khoei, of the Al-Khoei Foundation, said they had discussed with
the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board "how we could channel some of
the frustrations of the youth into peaceful channels". He said: "It's a
question of working at local level as well as national solutions.

"The main message for me is that nobody is taking the problems lightly and
the time for talking is over. We need to have a co-ordinated attempt to
tackle the problems. If we don't, we may regret this for generations to
come."

Labour MPs with large Muslim communities in their constituencies have
expressed concern about the pressure for sharia in Britain.

Muslim leaders have urged Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for
Communities, to support Islamic family law in Britain to stop youths joining
Islamic extremists.

Following three hours of meeting with Muslim groups in Whitehall, Ms Kelly
said: "There is a battle of hearts and minds to be won within the Muslim
community, working with the Muslim community to take on the terrorist and
extremist elements that are sometimes found within it, not just in the
Muslim community, but elsewhere as well."