SACW | Nov. 23, 2006

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | November 23, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2322

[1]  Gaining Power, Losing Values (Pankaj Mishra)
[2]  India's veneer of religious integration (Praful Bidwai)
[3]  India:  Victims of terror (Jyoti Punwani)
[4]  India:  Afzal's hanging - Politics of hate 
comes to the surface (J. Sri Raman)
       + Kathua Forum to begin signature campaign against Guru's hanging
[5]  India: Phantom of Indira Stalking (I K Shukla)
[6]  India: Gujarat ticked off on Godhra cases
[7]  UK: Casualties of culture (Hari Kunzru)
[8]  UK: Playing the oppression game (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown)

____


[1] 


New York Times
November 22, 2006

GAINING POWER, LOSING VALUES

by Pankaj Mishra

London

PRESIDENT Hu Jintao of China, who arrived in New 
Delhi on Monday to consolidate ties between the 
world's two fastest rising economic powers, can 
feel comfortable that at least one protester 
won't be troubling him.

When China's prime minister at the time, Zhu 
Rongji, visited Mumbai in January 2002, Tenzin 
Tsundue, a young Tibetan, scaled 14 floors of 
scaffolding to unfurl "Free Tibet" banners 
outside his five-star hotel. Last year in 
Bangalore, Mr. Tsundue appeared on the roof of a 
200-foot tower just above the building where Wen 
Jiabao, Mr. Zhu's successor as prime minister, 
was meeting Indian scientists. From there he 
threw pamphlets at bystanders, shouting, "Wen 
Jiabao, you cannot silence us."

This year, however, Mr. Tsundue has been 
silenced, although not by Chinese leaders. 
Invoking a penal code established by India's 
colonial rulers, the Indian police have imposed a 
travel ban on Mr. Tsundue. He is not allowed 
outside Dharamsala, the Himalayan town where the 
Dalai Lama and many of India's nearly 100,000 
Tibetan refugees live. This week he is under 
constant surveillance by armed police officers.

Pre-emptive arrests of and even police assaults 
on Tibetan protesters are not new in India. But 
the government's gagging of a well-known writer 
and activist like Mr. Tsundue raises questions 
about the moral values that India and China, the 
emerging superpowers of the new century, are 
likely to embody.

Both countries have mollycoddled Myanmar's 
extraordinarily repressive military rulers, which 
hints that neither is likely to let the human 
rights of the Burmese get in the way of trade. 
China's growing relationship with Sudan suggests 
that even genocide may not interfere with the 
supply of raw materials to China's perennially 
needy manufacturers.

Upholding business interests above all in its 
foreign policy, as in its domestic policy, China 
at least appears to be internally consistent. The 
gap between image and reality is greater in the 
case of India, which claims to be the world's 
largest democracy, with an educated middle class 
and a free news media.

And yet fundamental rights to clean water, food 
and work remain empty abstractions to hundreds of 
millions of Indians, whose plight rarely impinges 
on the news media's obsession with celebrity and 
consumption. The country's culture of greed 
partly explains why a woman is killed by her 
husband or in-laws every 77 minutes for failing 
to bring sufficient dowry.

Pundits in India deplore, often gleefully, 
American excesses in Guantánamo Bay and Abu 
Ghraib, and the inadequacies of the American news 
media in the run-up to the war in Iraq. But the 
Indian news media has yet to carry a single 
detailed report on the torture and extrajudicial 
killing of hundreds of civilians in Kashmir over 
the last decade.

Chinese nationalism is a tamed beast, 
occasionally unleashed by the Communist 
leadership to stir up mass protests against Japan 
and America. But in India, religious nationalists 
have run wild in the last 10 years, conducting 
nuclear tests, menacing minorities and 
threatening Pakistan with all-out war. In 2002, 
members of a Hindu nationalist government in the 
state of Gujarat, in western India, instigated 
and often organized the killing of as many as 
1,600 Muslims.

Free markets and regular elections alone do not 
make a civil society. There remains the task of 
creating and strengthening institutions - 
universities, news media, human rights groups - 
that can focus public attention on the fate of 
the powerless and oppressed and spread ideas of 
human dignity, compassion and generosity.

This task is never perfectly realized. But at 
least in the United States, many liberal 
institutions have vigorously pursued such goals, 
even as successive governments have made their 
pacts with various devils around the world.

For Western nations to criticize Chinese 
investments in Africa or Indian overtures to 
Myanmar may seem hypocritical in light of the 
West's history of ruthlessly exploiting Africa 
while appeasing its brutal dictators. But, as La 
Rochefoucauld pointed out, hypocrisy is the 
tribute vice pays to virtue.

However tainted in practice, the idea of virtue 
cannot be discarded in policymaking. By treating 
it with contempt, the ruling elites of India and 
China may soon make the world nostalgic for the 
days when America claimed, deeply hypocritically, 
its moral leadership.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of 
the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, 
Tibet and Beyond."

______


[2]

Inter Press Service
14 November 2006

INDIA'S VENEER OF RELIGIOUS INTEGRATION
by Praful Bidwai

           India, which has long prided itself as 
a shining example of democracy and 
religious-cultural pluralism, is being forced to 
contend with an unpleasant truth: the foundations 
of its claim to religious integration and harmony 
may be far shakier than earlier believed.
Media stories based on official data being 
gathered by a government-appointed committee have 
shockingly disclosed that Muslims, India's 
largest religious minority, face systematic 
exclusion and serious discrimination at multiple 
levels.
Over the past fortnight, various Indian 
newspapers and television channels have run 
reports quoting statistics being collated by the 
prime minister's High-Level Committee on the 
Social, Economic and Educational Status of 
Muslims, chaired by a former High Court judge, 
Rajinder Sachar.
The Sachar Committee's report has not yet been 
officially presented to the government. It is 
likely to be submitted any day, and is expected 
to cause a political storm.
"Going by what has appeared in the media, the 
committee has established a sad and shameful 
truth," said Mohammed Hamid Ansari, chairman of 
the official National Commission on Minorities 
and a distinguished diplomat who served as 
India's ambassador to the United Nations.
"The truth is that Muslims now constitute India's 
new underclass; they are worse off than the rest 
of the population in respect of access to public 
services, literacy, education, income, social 
mobility and jobs," said Ansari. "Researchers 
have long known this, but the truth has come out 
of the closet; it cannot be wished away."
Muslims form 13.4% of India's population of more 
than a billion, but are seriously 
under-represented in schools, universities, 
government jobs and parliament. They typically 
claim a share of only 4-6% in state employment.
In some respects, Muslims compare unfavorably 
even with Dalits (officially called Scheduled 
Castes), India's former untouchables, who have 
suffered systematic, cruel discrimination for 
centuries at the hands of upper-caste Hindus.
Muslims fare far worse than the lower and middle 
orders of the caste hierarchy, officially called 
Other Backward Classes (OBCs), in education, 
employment, poverty levels and landholding.
For instance, only 80% of urban Muslim boys are 
enrolled in school, compared with 90% of Dalits 
and 95% of others. (Earlier, in 1965, both 
Muslims and Dalits had 72% of their urban 
children enrolled in school.)
In the rural areas, just 68% of Muslim girls are 
at school, compared with 72% of Dalit girls and 
80% of others.
The gaps have widened. In 1965, Muslim girls (52% 
enrollment) were considerably better off than 
Dalits (40%). In villages, enrollment ratios for 
Muslims and Dalits were 32% and 19% respectively. 
But now, Muslim girls are worse off.
"If you are a Muslim, the chances are that you 
live in areas deprived of electricity, roads and 
municipal services," said Ansari. "There is 
growing ghettoization of Muslims."
Even worse is the discrimination Muslims face in 
respect of jobs. The Sachar Committee data from 
12 states, where the Muslims' share in total 
population is 15.4%, show that their 
representation in government jobs is a tiny 5.7%.
Sadly, such under-representation is more acute in 
states where Muslims constitute large minorities. 
For instance, in West Bengal, Muslims form 25.2% 
of the population, but account for a measly 4.2% 
in government jobs.
Muslims are particularly poorly represented in 
the judiciary, where their share can be as low of 
1.5% (Orissa). Barring Jammu & Kashmir (67% of 
whose people are Muslim), Muslim representation 
in judicial services is consistently low: only 5% 
in West Bengal, and 12.3% in Kerala (Muslim 
population, 24.7% of the total).
In the elite administrative, police and 
diplomatic cadres, Muslim representation varies 
from 1.6-3.4%. This is not surprising given that 
Muslims form a very low proportion of India's 
graduates, just 3.6%, or less than a fourth of 
their overall population share.
Muslims are poorly represented in the armed 
forces, where their proportion is believed to be 
just 2%. Recently there was a furor because the 
military refused to divulge this information to 
the Sachar Committee.
Muslims are altogether excluded from "sensitive" 
posts such as jobs in the intelligence agencies, 
especially the external-espionage Research & 
Analysis Wing, the National Security Guard and 
other elite protection forces. Their presence in 
the top national police and paramilitary agencies 
is nominal.
However, there is one place where Muslims are 
over-represented: prisons. Muslims claim a 
grossly disproportionate share of prisoners, 
including convicts and those undergoing trials.
Barring the northeastern state of Assam, their 
proportion in prison is considerably higher than 
their population share.
For instance, in Maharashtra, Muslims, who 
account for 10.6% of the population, form 40.6% 
of the prisoners. In the Delhi Capital Region, 
the respective percentage ratios are 11.7 and 
27.9, in Gujarat 9.1 and 25.1, and Tamil Nadu 5.6 
and 9.6.
"This tears to shreds the claim that India is 
successfully overcoming the inter-religious 
divide and equitably assimilating Muslims," said 
Rajiv Bhargava, a political theorist attached to 
the Center for the Study of Developing Societies 
in Delhi.
"That claim took a knock with the 
Hindu-chauvinist anti-Babri Mosque movement in 
the mid-1980s, and the ascent of the 
Hindu-exclusivist Bharatiya Janata Party to 
national power in 1998 for six years," Bhargava 
said. "It was further dented by the Gujarat 
carnage of 2002, in which 2,000 Muslims were 
killed with state collusion. Now, it stands 
exposed as a tissue of lies."
Anti-Muslim discrimination has visibly increased 
as a result of the government's 
"counter-terrorism" strategy, which critics say 
is largely Islamophobic and involves the harsh 
application of discriminatory measures. This 
explains the large number of jailed Muslim 
undergoing trials.
"The plain, bitter truth is that Muslims have 
long been the target of systematic exclusion and 
discrimination," said Bhargava. "They face 
institutionalized religious prejudice, just as 
ethnic minorities from the former colonies face 
institutionalized racism in Western Europe, or 
the blacks do in the United States."
This prejudice is acutely reflected in the 
political under-representation of Muslims.
In India, only half as many, or fewer, Muslims 
get elected as legislators as their population 
share would dictate. The proportion is abysmally 
low for Muslim women.
Many in India used to deny this. Now the time has 
come to face and remedy the situation. Prime 
Minister Manmohan Singh recently acknowledged 
this and said it is essential for "peace and 
harmony" that "the minorities get a fair share in 
central and state government and private-sector 
jobs".
He proposed more schools in areas with "a predominantly Muslim population".
The parties on the left have been pushing for, 
and the government is so inclined, allocation of 
15% of all development funds for the religious 
minorities (which together with Christians, 
Sikhs, Buddhists and others make up 18.4% of the 
population).
This may not be enough. There are two parts to 
plans to combat anti-Muslim discrimination: 
ending exclusion, and promoting empowerment.
The proposed "special component" plan could help 
address the empowerment issue, if it is 
implemented and monitored better than official 
plans for, say, Dalits.
"But that'll still leave the question of 
exclusion largely unaddressed," said Bhargava. 
"This will need bold affirmative action, 
including aggressive recruitment processes.
Above all, it will entail appointing Muslims to 
'sensitive' positions in police, military and 
intelligence agencies. Without bold action, the 
project of combating anti-Muslim discrimination 
won't get anywhere."


______


[3] 

The Times of India
22 November 2006

VICTIMS OF TERROR
by Jyoti Punwani

With Malegaon also being attributed to Muslims, 
the alienation is complete. Initial fears of a 
communal backlash to the July 11 bomb blasts in 
Mumbai quickly disappeared as the media flashed 
images of Muslims helping out feverishly at blast 
sites and hospitals.

If indeed Muslim extremists had carried out the 
blasts, it was obvious they were completely out 
of touch with their community in Mumbai.

But within four months, the police have succeeded 
in effecting a turnaround among Mumbai's Muslims 
that any jehadi would envy. Perhaps this was what 
the bombers wanted. For a change, initially, even 
the Urdu press was out of sync with its readers.

It condemned the blasts, but blamed the CIA, 
Mossad, and the RSS for them, unwilling to 
acknowledge even the possibility that Muslims 
could have been responsible.

Outraged by this mentality, two Muslim groups, 
one religious, the other secular, decided to 
carry out anti-terrorism campaigns within their 
community to isolate those supporting it.

Today, these crusaders are not sure they can 
succeed. The Urdu press's stock has never been as 
high as it is now, and the English press's 
credibility as low for being a mouthpiece of the 
police. The police's handling of the blasts has 
sent someone else's stock soaring. His community 
had voted him out two years back.

  Today, even those who detest his methods 
acknowledge that state Samajwadi chief Abu Asim 
Azmi is the only politician to have taken up, at 
the highest level, the way Muslims are being 
exclusively targeted by the police. It's no 
secret that the PMO's intervention has had some 
impact on harassment faced by Muslim families.

Dismissing allegations of harassment, the ATS 
chief cites the Al-Qaida manual which directs its 
operatives to accuse the police of torture as 
soon as they are arres-ted. Does one need to 
visit Al-Qaida's website to make allegations 
against Mumbai police?

What these families have allegedly undergone is 
not half as savage as what was done to many 
Muslim families after the March 12, 1993 blasts. 
The targets then were random (anyone surnamed 
Memon, for instance). Now, they are uniform: SIMI 
and Ahle-Hadees followers.

After the Malegaon arrests, astute Muslims are 
wondering whether the Indian government is trying 
the US tactic of pitting Muslim sects against one 
another. The Ahle-Hadees obey the Qur'an 
strictly; their women wear the much-maligned 
naqab.

Tearing it off, throwing it on the faces of male 
relatives who are the accused, trampling it under 
foot, and threatening that this would happen to 
all the women in the family what could be the 
consequences of such action by the police on the 
victims and the community?

A substantial number of SIMI and Ahle-Hadees 
followers are educated. At least five of those 
arrested, and many of those "picked up" (for 
questioning, often for days, with no record of 
their detention), are professio-nals.

  First-timers at police stations, they initially 
felt incredulous and indignant, and finally 
helpless and bitter at the way they, their 
parents and their religion have been humiliated, 
for no 'crime' other than being related to a SIMI 
member, or being active members of a mainstream 
Muslim sect.

They have not been allowed to inform their 
families of their detention, and, in exchange for 
their release, have had to point out a friend's 
home to the police for 'questioning'.

All this has been done with 'suspects', or 
families of the accused. Treatment meted out to 
the accused has been vintage Mumbai police. One 
of them was reported by the press as having being 
"propped up" when brought to court. Yet the court 
dismissed his mother's application alleging 
torture, because he refused to say anything 
against the police.

Have such tactics been used to investigate 
another blast in April, where two Bajrang Dal 
boys died while making bombs inside an RSS 
activist's house in Nanded? How widespread were 
the links of that conspiracy, given that fake 
beards and moustaches were found at the site? The 
ATS has been uncharacteristically discreet here.

If having once been a member of SIMI makes you a 
terror suspect, what does that make members of 
the Bajrang Dal, which openly instigates violence 
against minority Indians? What is certainly 
suspect is the July 11 investigation.

The writer is a political commentator

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[4] 

The Tribune
November 23, 2006

AFZAL'S HANGING
POLITICS OF HATE COMES TO THE SURFACE
by J. Sri Raman

THE death sentence meted out to Mohammed Afzal 
under the Indian Constitution is not just in any 
way." This is not a line from any appeal for 
commutation of the punishment decreed by the 
Supreme Court for Afzal Guru. It is a quote from 
a section of the Hindutva camp that does not find 
the punishment harsh enough.

An outfit in Tamil Nadu called the Federation of 
Hindu Organisations has called upon President 
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, with whom a mercy petition 
for Afzal is pending, to set aside the death 
sentence. Sounding as pious as the Fallen Angel 
citing the scripture, the federation asks Mr 
Kalam to recommend punishment as prescribed 
(according to it) by the Shariat and the Quran.

A Tamil statement issued by the federation spells 
out the alternative punishment with sadistic 
glee. A free translation: "The sentence should be 
so amended that his (Afzal's) right hand and left 
leg are cut off and one of his eyes is gouged out 
and he is allowed, in this state of mutilation, 
to freely tour the whole of India and make an 
exhibit of himself in order that no extremist or 
terrorist ever emerges in this country again."

The widely circulated statement adds that the 
federation is "waiting with hope" for the 
President to make this recommendation, achieve 
"indelible fame in history" and prove himself "a 
great patriot".

The statement seeks to kill three birds with one 
stone. The federation's demand, of course, is 
designed to deter a sympathetic official 
consideration of the plea for commuting the 
sentence to life imprisonment. It is also a 
continuation, by other means, of the maliciously 
communal campaign against Indian Muslims and the 
Muslim personal law. And none but the most naive 
can miss the mischievous tenor of the plea 
addressed to the President with an unstated 
reference to his religious identity.

What the statement illustrates, more than 
anything else, is the hate - or the ideology as 
well as politics of hate - behind the campaign at 
the mass level for Afzal's hanging. The avowedly 
constitutional and anti-terrorist arguments we 
hear in decorous television debates in favour of 
the maximum punishment for the convict hardly 
conceal the character of this campaign, which 
matters far more in our free-for-all democracy.

The noose-for-the-anti-national demand is 
particularly dangerous in a country and a system 
where a political party can profit by a pogrom in 
a state and actually threaten to repeat it as an 
electoral tactic elsewhere. The demand is all the 
more dangerous because it is not being raised 
only in the state under Mr Narendra Modi. Lethal 
assaults have been made on satyaghrahis asking 
for clemency to Afzal even in Left-ruled Kerala.

The clamour against clemency has only become 
shriller and cruder after the expiry of the 
original date for the hanging (October 20). 
Mahatma Gandhi may have measured the distance to 
Swaraj by the length of the khadi yarn spun in 
the country. The present-day "patriots" do not 
measure the distance to a victory in the "war of 
terror" by the length of the hangman's rope 
(already announced along with its weight). They 
do so by counting the days that remain for the 
death sentence to be carried out.

The strongest argument for commutation of the 
sentence, as some have pointed out, is the utter 
anachronism of capital punishment. Most countries 
have abolished this form of punishment, and it 
does not do India proud that the latest to join 
the list are five, far less developed Asian 
nations - Cambodia, Nepal, Timor-Leste, Bhutan 
and the Philippines. Intimately linked is the 
argument about the unwisdom of empowering the 
state as an executioner. An almost equally valid 
objection to death sentences, however, is the 
vicious social atmosphere they almost always 
promote.

Hanging of persons convicted even of petty thefts 
was a public spectacle in Britain of the early 
Industrial Revolution, when the punishment was 
intended to teach the young working class respect 
for private property. Lynch mobs laughed and 
cheered as the noose tightened around a Negro's 
neck in the United States not too long ago. No 
one may say it on the camera, but Afzal's hanging 
is also being billed as mass communal 
entertainment.

Custodians of public morality in these past cases 
of both the US and Britain (which have now 
declared a crusade against "Islamic terror") held 
up the hangings as attempts at civilising the 
economically or racially handicapped. A vitally 
essential part of the exercise is the portrayal 
of the victims - and, by implication, their class 
and community - as criminal. Strikingly similar 
is the way the holy warriors of the hang-Afzal 
camp are now waxing self-righteous.

This finds crude evidence in the kind of 
responses the campaigners against Afzal's hanging 
have to cope with. One of the many examples is 
the electronic epistle received by Sukla Sen of 
the Ekta (Committee for Communal Amity), Mumbai, 
after launching an online petition for the 
Presidential pardon for Afzal. The petition said: 
"One is only asking for the commutation of the 
death sentence - not quashing of the punishment 
altogether, whereas a demand for retrial would 
have perhaps been more justified given the fact 
that all the relevant facts were not allowed to 
be presented before the trial court and that the 
facts presented were doctored." The plea could 
not have been less provocative.

The angry response asked Sen: "Šhow would have 
reacted if Afzal had brutally raped your wife or 
sister and killed your child? Why don't you ask 
your wife what she would have wanted?" The 
questions are not connected in any way to the 
attack on Parliament, which involved no such 
crimes. They only seek to reinforce a demonic 
image of Kashmir rebels in defence of the death 
sentence.

Pundits like Mr Soli Sorabjee may really mean it, 
and do sound plausible, when they say the 
sentence cannot be set aside on the ground that 
its implementation will create an explosive 
situation in Kashmir. The learned man of law, 
personally opposed to capital punishment, argues 
that, so long as the statute book provides for 
it, an exception in its enforcement cannot be 
made just because a political or pressure group 
opposes it. What he fails to note is the force of 
support from a much larger and more fiercely 
determined family of political and pressure 
groups for expeditious implementation of the 
death sentence in this case.

The orchestrated opposition to the pursuit of the 
constitutional process of the mercy petition and 
a Presidential pardon is not seen as a pressure 
campaign. The character of the campaign is not 
readily recognised because the campaign is more 
invisible than visible. Mr Sorabjee's stance 
represents the campaign at its best, followed by 
fervent pleas from retired luminaries of the 
Foreign Service and the like for "responsible" 
self-restraint by rights activists in such 
sensitive natters of state. It is statements like 
the one we started with that illustrate the 
invisible but the more important part of the 
campaign.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has threatened 
to launch a "public awareness campaign" across 
the country on the importance of hanging Afzal. 
To be sure, the party has officially put its 
stress on issues of "internal security" and 
drafted its select Muslim showpieces in the 
struggle for an early execution of the convict. 
But then L.K. Advani, too, only kept repeating 
his mantra of "cultural nationalism" during his 
Ayodhya "rath yatra", which left a trail of 
communal riots and culminated in the Babri 
Masjid's demolition.

o o o

Kashmir Times,
20th Nov.2006

Kathua Forum to begin signature campaign against Guru's hanging
http://www.kasmirtimes.com/archive/0611/061120/news6.htm

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[5]

PHANTOM OF INDIRA STALKING
by I K Shukla

Nov.20,2006

Megalomania can wreak havoc and leave in its wake 
unimaginable wreckage. This one-liner may 
emcapsulate Indira Gandhi's fall from grace when 
she declared Emergency in June 1975 and 
compromised grievously all the state institutions.

There was an authoritarian streak in her that had 
virulently surfaced first in the 50s when she, as 
Congress President, sought the overthrow of the 
most popular, democratically elected, 
Namboodiripad government of Kerala, and on her 
"advice", the then Prime Minister, Pt Nehru, had 
obliged. I am using the word "overthrow" 
deliberately. No legalese, no casuistry in the 
name of the Constitution, could suffice to 
cleanse this move of its patent malafides. 
Honestly speaking, it was ultra vires of the 
spirit of the Constitution. But the overthrow was 
fobbed off as "preserving law and order".

UP may not be he best administered state. 
Economically, educationally, and industrially it 
remains among the most backward states of India, 
part of the inglorious combine deservedly called 
BIMARU. But Mulayam Singh Yadav may not be the 
worst of the Chief Ministers. That he is the bete 
noire of the Congress is quite another matter. 
But that gives Sonia Gandhi, another Congress 
President, no carte blanche to do as she pleases 
and conspire to overthrow his government. Yes, it 
would be nothing less than overthrow.

The euphemisms like 'removal', 'President's 
Rule', 'legislature in suspended animation', 
'mid-term elections', etc., will fail to provide 
even the skimpiest fig leaf needed on such 
ignoble occasions bearing witness to the 
egregious violation of the Constitutional order 
and a brutal assault on the democratic protocol.

That there is law and order problem in UP which 
has stirred Sonia Gandhi is a big lie. Before 
anyone else she knows it only too well. That 
Mulayam has proved too slippery an eel, not 
amenable to her designs and dispensations, is too 
obvious a fact to need elaboration. But she must 
be warned against any precipitous and peremptory 
resort to constitutional mayhem. She must be 
reminded that Congress is only a major component 
of the UPA governmemt in New Delhi. Congress 
presuming a mandate solely in its own rights, is 
insufferably obscene hubris and willful 
detachment from the reality calculus of a 
government composed of many parties.

Sonia must be dreaming that she can revive the 
Congress fortunes in UP by this maneuver. Whoever 
has fed her this advice is living in the fool's 
paradise, where she need not rush in. Indira 
Gandhi too was given advice that she liked, but 
nothing unpleasant or disagreeable. That proved 
her undoing.

Had Sonia really been concerned over law and 
order, there were many candidates for dismissal 
and dissolution. I will mention just one: Modi's 
Gujarat. She would be alone in the world, except 
for the Atals and Advanis, to believe that things 
are normal in Gujarat in terms of law and order. 
Did it ever prick her conscience that total 
failure of the "Modi estate" called for New 
Delhi's intervention long ago?

And, why have she, Congress, and UPA opted for 
total blindness and paralysis vis-a-vis the 
Gujarat carnage that took a toll of over 2000 
lives and rendered over  100,000 innocent 
citizens into homeless refugees overnight, for 
ever? Eloquent inaction in the case of Gujarat 
bared her pretensions, and Congress posturings to 
universal condemnation, finding them , to their 
surprise, as collaborators and bed-fellows of 
theo-terrorists.

No reprise of Indira will be tolerated even by UP.


_____


[6] 

The Telegraph
November 23, 2006

GUJARAT TICKED OFF ON GODHRA CASES
Our Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, Nov. 22: Gujarat today sought 
dismissal of an NHRC petition seeking transfer of 
17 post-Godhra riot cases outside the state.

In an application before the apex court, Gujarat 
contended no third party should be allowed to 
interfere in criminal cases via a PIL.

Appearing for the state, counsel K.T.S Tulsi said 
the apex court had ruled in a PIL against Lalu 
Prasad that once a charge-sheet was filed "the 
process of monitoring by this court'' had to end.

But the court refused to compare the two cases. 
"Don't compare other cases with the Gujarat riot 
cases. These are peculiar cases."

The court explained that it would have to 
consider that procedures under CrPC had been 
overlooked in the cases, post-mortem had not been 
done and doctors had given false evidence.

Tulsi said the trial court could handle these 
matters if an application was filed. But the 
court said it would have to ensure the criminal 
justice system was not derailed.

The court then fixed February 20 for the next hearing.

Of the 17 cases sought to be transferred, 13 were 
filed by the NHRC and four by an NGO.

The NHRC cases pertain to massacres in Godhra, 
Sardarpura, Gulbarg Housing Society of 
Meghaninagar, Naroda Patiya, Naroda Goan and Ode.

Citizens for Justice and Peace filed nearly 65 
affidavits by victims and witnesses to back its 
allegations.

______


[7] 

The Guardian
November 21, 2006

CASUALTIES OF CULTURE

Multiculturalism should not be seen as a fixed 
and fragile entity, but something that's being 
made and remade every day on British streets.

by Hari Kunzru

There's a cult animation in New Zealand called 
Bro'town, which centres on the adventures of a 
bunch of Pacific Islander kids growing up in 
Auckland. A kind of Kiwi South Park, it 
occasionally heads off into fantastical 
territory. In one episode, we see rebellious 19th 
century Maori hero Hone Heke, famous for serially 
chopping down flagpoles flying the Union Jack, 
and thus initiating the so-called Flagstaff war 
against the British. Hone Heke is up in heaven, 
chopping away at everything in sight, as a 
neurotic Jesus ineffectually remonstrates with 
him for damaging the fixtures and fittings. "Fuck 
off," says the Maori chief. "It's my culture."

Somehow the idea of culture has got very confused 
in the UK. Multicultural politics once provided a 
light in the post-imperial gloom for a nation 
coming to terms with mass immigration. 
Multiculturalism was creative and 
forward-looking, a frame in which to think about 
new ways of being British. However, as biological 
racism has faded away, a form of cultural racism 
is taking its place, often propagated by 
left-liberals who consider themelves, um, whiter 
than white on issues of diversity. Underlying 
much of the current hot air about "respect" and 
"offence" we find implicit the idea that as BME's 
(or whatever the current jargon is for those of 
us who don't trace our descent back to Nick 
Griffin), we're somehow more determined by our 
culture than our flexible white co-Britons. 
Certain things have to be excused us. Our views 
on the usefulness of the clitoris, evolution, 
ladies fashions or the relative merits of other 
ethnic minorities are off limits, particularly to 
white politicians, because such questioning might 
constitute a form of racist pressure. It's our 
culture. Fuck off.

Of course there exists a constituency on the 
headbanging right who'd love the opportunity to 
"question" us as hard as their boots could kick. 
During the Danish cartoons controversy, a lot of 
the hacks solemnly draping themselves in the toga 
of European Enlightenment values were more 
accustomed to cooking up stories about 
swan-eating asylum seekers. Such people will 
never be happy until the darkies are back where 
we belong, holding trays of drinks in the 
background of Merchant Ivory movies.

Our more serious conversation has to be with the 
communitarian politicians who feel happiest when 
dealing with us in groups. Instead of asking us 
as individual British citizens what we think or 
feel about contentious issues, our views are too 
often inferred from a dialogue conducted with 
so-called "community leaders", who are frequently 
self-appointed, and almost always cultural 
conservatives, with every incentive to take 
offence on our behalf in order to preserve their 
own access to funding and influence. This odd 
coupling of white liberals and brown 
conservatives has produced a form of 
multiculturalism in which culture appears as 
fixed and fragile as a dried flower, something to 
be preserved, in danger of being shaken apart by 
the slightest breath of criticism, rather than 
something being made and remade every day on 
British streets, by people who often have little 
in common with the old chaps we watch on the TV, 
shaking hands and clutching their MBEs.

This ossified form of multiculturalism creates 
casualties within the ethnic minority communities 
its proponents believe they are protecting. 
Women, homosexuals, religious, social or 
political dissidents and artists must all contend 
with a political environment in which their 
freedoms are considered less important than the 
"representative" power of community leaders, who 
will zealously wield the weapon of offence when 
their authority is challenged. The government's 
record on civil liberties is shameful, and 
nowhere worse than in situations where taking a 
stand would threaten their fragile grip on the 
allegiance of their minority-community 
interlocutors.

In the wake of the forced closure of Gurpreet 
Kaur Bhatti's play Behzti, Home Office minister 
Fiona Mactaggart famously opined that the death 
threats made against the playwright would 
increase ticket sales. "That people feel this 
passionately about theatres is a good sign for 
our cultural life," she said, a breathtakingly 
patronising comment which in its disregard for 
both the safety of the playwright and the anger 
of the protestors perfectly encapsulates the 
cowardice and opportunism of a government which 
dangles the carrot of "protection" from offences 
against cultural norms, while waving the big 
stick of "shared values" at those who fail to 
conform to whatever fuzzy definition of 
Britishness is currently doing the rounds in 
Westminster.

Pity the poor muddled Muslim Council of Britain 
(a creation of this political culture), 
enthusiastically begging for a religious offence 
law, then howling in protest at the glorification 
provisions in the anti-terrorism act. Their 
confusion illustrates the limits of the current 
dialogue, and exemplifies a tendency within 
minority communities to see freedom of expression 
solely as a weapon white people use to attack or 
insult us, rather than a tool which can be used 
to challenge the strong and powerful.

And so everyone stands in their cultural corner 
and snarls, generating a lot of heat and very 
little light. The consequences of Jack Straw's 
comments about the niqab (condemnation from both 
brown and white wings of the 
multicultural-igarchy and a field day for the 
send-em-back-to-wogland brigade) were so 
numbingly predictable that unless he was having a 
dizzy moment, it's hard not to imagine some kind 
of ulterior motive, a bid to reconnect with the 
neglected Alf Garnett vote. Wittingly or not, 
Straw has inaugurated a new low in our 
debilitating offence culture. Around Britain, 
politicians are making the same mental note. 
Don't get too involved. Let their leaders deal 
with it behind closed doors. It's just their 
culture.

_______


[8] 


guardian.co.uk/
November 22, 2006

PLAYING THE OPPRESSION GAME

Religionists do not want parity - they want 
special treatment and an unacceptable influence 
over policy.

by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

We have lift off, emailed Sunny Hundal 
delightedly after he launched our New Generation 
Network manifesto. Flying in a balloon on an 
optimistic breeze I contemplate the possibilities 
we have freed up. Too many wretched years have 
been wasted under communal political management 
which skilfully divided and relabelled black and 
Asian Britons to disable progressive politics. 
This operational model was used effectively 
during colonialism and worked splendidly for New 
Labour and "ethnic" henchmen until recently, of 
course, when both have been panicked by home 
grown terrorism and self -segregation.

I can't remember when unelected religious and 
community leaders, politicians and institutions 
decided the religious identity was primary and 
that the broad black political movement was dead 
as was any claim to multiple identities and 
complicated allegiances. But they did and it was 
without our consent. Once human rights and 
equality activists mobilised to stand up for all 
victims of racism and the internal oppressions 
within groups, particularly violence against 
women and children. Our compassion and action 
were not rationed, colour-coded or preserved for 
our own kind. When Joy Gardener, a young black 
mother, was killed by immigration officers in 
front of her young boy, we didn't see her as an 
Afro-Caribbean cause; when a Hindu wife was burnt 
to death because she didn't bring a big enough 
dowry we didn't consider that to be a little 
local difficulty to be sorted by the community.

We believed in universal standards and rights 
which are enshrined in the UN Human Rights 
charter. Citizens were autonomous individuals 
with not creatures owned and controlled by rigid 
traditions. My dearest friend Gary Younge is 
worried that we are against group entitlements. 
We are. Fighting racism doesn't require 
designated and preserved rights for communities. 
In South Africa individuals are protected not 
self defined, demarcated groups. We were not 
reverential towards faith or cultural practices 
that violated the human spirit and yet 
passionately campaigned to topple white, 
middle-class, male domination over the country 
and its institutions. Organisations like the 
Southall Monitoring Group and Southall Black 
Sisters worked to promote a collective agenda to 
combat injustice and inequality. Yes, I do think 
those were halcyon days even though the struggles 
were hard and the state more resistant to change.

Today the enemy of equality, freedom and justice 
is as likely to be within. Broken up into simple 
tribes which compete for attention and resources 
(who is the most oppressed of us all?), 
commonalities are negated, differences 
fetishised. Religionists - Muslim, Catholic, 
Hindu, Protestant- want not parity but special 
and exceptional treatment and unacceptable 
influence over policies. The responses of Salma 
Yaqoob and the Muslim Council of Britain to our 
manifesto make those demands without a blush. The 
country is held to ransom if objections are 
raised to practices that violate deeply held 
principles. Community leaders use diversity to 
silence democracy. We are not permitted to 
question the maltreatment of some women and young 
people within enclaves.

The MCB and several others put out a joint 
statement on their website over the veil 
controversy: "The veil, irrespective of its 
specific juristic rulings is an Islamic practice 
and not a cultural or customary one as is agreed 
by the consensus of Muslim scholars. It is not 
open to debate (my emphasis). We advise all 
Muslims to exercise extreme caution in this issue 
since denying any part of Islam may lead to 
disbelief...we recognise the fact that Muslims 
hold different views regarding the veil but we 
urge all members of the Muslim community to keep 
the debate within the realms of scholarship 
amongst people of knowledge and authority in the 
Muslim community." These authoritarians also 
decide who is a real Muslim and who is not. They 
have excommunicated my Shia community and many 
others who reject their conservative and 
anti-modernist Islam.

This is what Mr Bunglawala thinks is freedom in a 
democracy? Sikh, Hindu and Christian "leaders" 
using faith as a weapon, instead of respecting 
faith as a guide to life and spiritual solace? 
Finally, international issues of grave importance 
are being grabbed by these separatist 
anti-democrats. It is a shame and scandal that 
the antiwar movement which brought together all 
Britons is today throwing in its lot with MCB and 
others defending the divisive status quo. The 
injustices heaped on Palestine and Iraq are not 
examples of "Muslim" suffering but political and 
military annihilation. Many who have given their 
lives to these causes are not Muslim.

We have lift off. Now watch as these obscurantists try to shoot us down.


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

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.