SACW | Nov. 30 - Dec. 1, 2006
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at mnet.fr
Thu Nov 30 19:20:07 CST 2006
South Asia Citizens Wire | November 30 -
December 1, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2329 - Year 8
[1] Pakistan: Layered infamy (Razi Azmi)
[2] Bangladesh: At the crossroads of secular
tolerance and militant Islam (Jeremy Seabrook)
[3] India / Bangladesh / Diaspora: A tradition
which ridicules the clash of civilisations
(Madeleine Bunting)
[4] India - AFPSA: Repeal only in name (Colin Gonsalves)
[5] India and elsewhere: The Subaltern as Subaltern Citizen (Gyanendra Pandey)
[6] India: Team to study plight of riot victims in Gujarat
[8] Upcoming Events:
(i) Colloquium 'Sensor-Census-Censor :
Investigating Regimes of Information, Registering
Changes of State' (Delhi, 30 November - 2
December, 2006)
(ii) International Peace Festival (Bombay,1 -3 December 2006)
(iii) Public Forum - Faith, nation, culture: /
Lecture by Amartya Sen: What Bengal's history
tells us about living with multiple identities?
(London,1 December 2006
____
[1]
Daily Times
November 30, 2006
LAYERED INFAMY
by Razi Azmi
If the MMA has a role model or a 'best practice'
model, it has to be Mullah Umar's Taliban
government in Afghanistan, overthrown by the
US-led invasion. That government did not engage
in any development work in the country in the
five years it held sway over 95 percent of
Afghanistan
Nothing unites and mobilises our men (note the
masculine gender) of religion more swiftly and
firmly than a mere sympathetic mention of women.
According to a news report, about four hundred
ulema, including the Ruet-e-Hilal Committee
Chairman Mufti Muneebur Rehman, have signed a
fatwa against the Women's Protection Bill (WPB),
terming it "un-Islamic, immoral and
unconstitutional".
Earlier, opposing the passage of the bill,
Islamist lawmakers had boycotted the vote and
walked out of parliament, after their leader
Maulana Fazlur Rehman told the National Assembly
that the proposed change to the law would
encourage 'free sex'. "This is an attempt to
create a free sex zone in Pakistan," he said.
To suggest that the bill will promote promiscuity
is sheer nonsense. In respect of rape and
adultery, the WPB merely restores, only partly,
status quo ante, the situation that existed
before Zia-ul Haq set about using religion for
political goals. Our ulema can rest assured that
this bill, in and by itself, will do little or
nothing to improve the status of Pakistani women.
It will merely restrain the legal system from
dispatching the victims of rape to jail while
letting the rapists walk away with impunity.
My first introduction to the legal inequities of
Pakistan's so-called Sharia laws was about ten
years ago when I went to a court in Islamabad to
sign a power of attorney, for which I was asked
to bring two persons to sign as witnesses. I
quickly returned with my nephew and his wife, an
educated and dignified young woman and a mother
of one. The lawyer apologetically explained that,
under the law, the woman would only count as half
a person, so I needed to bring either another
woman (for two women would add up to one witness)
or a man.
Since Pakistan's Islamised law was very firm on
this matter, my nephew returned his embarrassed
wife to their house and came back with his
neighbour's son, a barely 18 year-old truant who
had never passed his matriculation exam and was
something of a joke in the neighbourhood. But
being of the masculine gender, he counted as a
full person and an acceptable whole witness, not
a half witness.
Under this law of evidence, which is still in
force, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto would have
been reckoned as half a witness in court, as
would all our female ministers, lawyers, doctors,
professors, scientists, diplomats (including our
present high commissioner to the UK) and civil
servants (including police officers). By
comparison, the biggest fool and idiot of a man
would count as a full witness before the law.
Obviously, the learned ulema like it that way.
Recently, a friend's uncle (his father's brother)
died in Karachi. Since he did not have any
children, as per the ('Islamic') law of the land,
duly buttressed by a fatwa from one of Karachi's
leading madrassas, the house was sold off, the
widow getting only a quarter of the proceeds, the
rest divided among the dead man's surviving
brother and sister, in the ratio of two-to-one in
favour of the former. Dispossessed of the home
her deceased husband had built, the widow has
been forced to live with her niece. No doubt, the
wise ulema like it that way.
Nor do the ulema raise their collective or
individual voices against the daily injustices
and violation of the most basic human rights in
the country. Who doesn't know that, in Pakistan,
police stations often double as torture chambers,
brick-kiln workers live and die in bondage and
slavery, organised gangs kidnap children to be
employed in forced labour (baigaar) camps, and
criminal gangs mutilate and deform kidnapped
infants to augment their begging power! A rape
reportedly occurs every two hours and gang-rape
of women is not uncommon either.
And then there are the grotesque Daulay shah dey
chuhey, so called because their faces bear a
resemblance to rats. These are the unfortunate
young men who, in their infancy, were given over
by their parents as offerings to the shrine of
Daulay Shah in the Punjab. There, criminal gangs
operating with impunity put iron-clamps on their
skulls to prevent their growth. As a result,
their brains remain undeveloped and the face
acquires an elongated shape somewhat like a rat
(chuhaa). Accompanied by their tough-looking
minders, these boys beg on trains and other
public places. Believed to possess supernatural
powers, they attract hefty handouts.
None of the above is considered grave enough
issues for our ulema to demand action from the
government. No fatwas, demands, or ultimatums on
these burning social and human rights issues.
Indeed, the ulema have shown no inclination to
curb any of the rampant abusive and criminal
practices when in power. The MMA government in
the NWFP, comprising clerics, is a case in point.
Its only 'achievement' in a couple of years is
the Hasba bill, which will establish a parallel
justice system and a police force to enforce
their brand of Islamic morality in the province.
This will have little to do with socio-economic
reforms or suppression of criminal activity, but
a lot to do with burqa for women, beards for men
and prayers for all.
If the MMA has a role model or a 'best practice'
model, it has to be Mullah Umar's Taliban
government in Afghanistan, overthrown by the
US-led invasion. That government did not, even on
paper, leave alone practice, engage in any
development work in the country in the five years
it held sway over 95 percent of Afghanistan
(1996-2001).
The Taliban government is best remembered for
forcing women to put on the full veil and
forbidding them from leaving homes without a
close male relative, banning sports, prohibiting
men to shave, amputating the hands and feet of
alleged thieves and the stoning to death of those
guilty of adultery. The Taliban forces are now
engaged in burning down girls' schools and
killing women activists and social workers.
As if these inhuman practices are not enough to
make the world wonder, non-Muslims everywhere
look in astonishment at the cruelty unleashed by
the sectarian war in Iraq, pitting Muslims
against Muslims, which is such as to make
medieval barbarity look humane. In the name of
Islam, women, children, innocent shoppers,
labourers, bakers, commuters, religious
processions, shrines and mosques are deliberately
being blown up. Hundreds of Iraqi and other Arab
Muslims have detonated themselves to kill fellow
Muslims.
In occupied Palestine, the 57-year-old Fatma
Najar, a mother of nine children, with nearly 30
grandchildren, has just become the first known
grandmother to detonate herself, slightly
wounding three Israeli soldiers. The ruling
Palestinian party Hamas claimed responsibility
for the 'achievement'. "I offer myself as a
sacrifice to Allah and to the homeland," she said
on a video released by Hamas. "I am very proud of
what she did. Allahu Akbar," one of her sons,
Fuad, 31, told Reuters.
There is no fatwa from the ulema against these,
nor a word of condemnation from the MMA. Suicide
bombing by a 57-year-old mother of nine is not
un-Islamic but a Women's Protection Bill is. The
world is watching. Some are bemused, others
horrified at what they see, read and hear. In
today's world, words and images travel fast and
far.
______
[2]
The Guardian
November 7, 2006
AT THE CROSSROADS OF SECULAR TOLERANCE AND MILITANT ISLAM
Bangladesh's eclectic culture is threatened by
the conflict that has now erupted into violence
on the streets
by Jeremy Seabrook
A country torn by a low-intensity cultural civil
war has seen at least 25 people die in this
conflict in the last 10 days; its capital city is
strewn with overturned cycle rickshaws, rocks and
broken glass. A tense and watchful calm has since
returned to Dhaka, one of the fastest-growing
cities in the world, although sporadic violence
continues in some outlying districts.
This is Bangladesh, the country of origin of
about 300,000 British people, with the
fourth-largest Muslim population in the world.
The disturbances at the end of October followed
the end of the five-year mandate of the
Bangladesh National party and its religious-party
allies, Jamaat-e-Islami and Islami Oikya Jote.
These allies never believed in the existence of
Bangladesh; they fought on Pakistan's side in the
1971 liberation war, in which at least a million
Bengalis died.
The cause of the riots was the appointment of the
leader of a caretaker government for the three
months before elections next January. The
president, Iajuddin Ahmed, subsequently assumed
leadership of the interim administration. The
opposition Awami League has given him until
November 10 to "demonstrate his neutrality"; if
he fails it will intensify popular demonstrations
by the 14-party combine it leads.
Bangladesh has a period of quarantine between
administrations. This reflects the conflict
between the Muslim and Bengali identities of
Bangladesh, a struggle all the more poignant
since it takes place within individual
Bangladeshis. The two principal parties are
governed not by the mild ideological
disagreements that characterise parties in most
democracies but by visceral personal hatred,
embodied in the two protagonists: Khaleda Zia,
widow of the murdered military leader Ziaur
Rahman, and Sheikh Hasina, daughter of the
assassinated first leader of Bangladesh, who led
the country during and immediately after the war
of liberation in 1971.
The source of the quarrel lies not in the slaying
of the dead heroes, whose memory the two rivals
cherish, but in a dispute over who was truly
responsible for the freedom of the then East
Pakistan from semicolonial dependency upon
Pakistan. For the Awami League it was a popular
uprising - supported by India - by the defenders
of a secular Bengali culture; the Bangladesh
National party, born of the cantonment, sees the
army as the true agent of Bangladesh's freedom.
Hatred originates in the contentious ownership of
a story of liberation.
Disputed proprietorship of the story of the birth
of Bangladesh has little to do with western ideas
of democracy. Bangladesh is a feudal democracy,
where the winner of elections takes absolute
control and denies the legitimacy of opposition.
Oppositions usually refuse to sit in parliament
and take their quarrel on to the streets in a
series of hartals (political strikes originating
in the days of the British raj) that bring the
cities to a standstill.
The outgoing administration won dramatically over
the Awami League in 2001 but presided over
continuing corruption, nepotism and political
violence; there have been more than 700
extrajudicial killings in "crossfire" by the
Rapid Action Battalion security forces, the
elimination of journalists and opposition
politicians. After the election of 2001,
widespread "religious cleansing" of Hindus and
attacks on Christians took place. The funds of
some secular non-government organisations were
blocked, and their leaders were arrested and
imprisoned.
An upsurge in political violence by Islamist
extremists was denied by the government. A
campaign of bombings against opposition
politicians, Sufi shrines, cinemas, theatres
performing traditional jatra plays and the Ahmadi
minority was blamed on opposition tactics to
"tarnish the image" of Bangladesh. Groups such as
the Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh and the
Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh operated with
impunity under the patronage of minority
religious parties in government.
With the government under pressure from western
powers, leaders of these terrorist groups were
arrested and tried after two judges were killed
in a suicide bomb attack in August 2005. Six,
found guilty in May 2006, are due to be executed.
Amnesty International has protested at the haste
with which this is being carried out, since it
suspects that the government wants to silence
those it indulged until the recent past. These
groups represent a minority in Bangladesh, but
they are resolved to regain for an austere,
fundamentalist Islam today what Pakistan lost in
1971.
The confidence of the Awami League on the streets
of Dhaka and Chittagong comes not only from the
growing gap between rich and poor, rise in prices
of basic commodities, frequent power cuts and
expanding city slums; the party also was boosted
by a split in the Bangladesh National party last
week, when 13 of its MPs left the party to form a
new dissident group, criticising the leadership's
corruption and indifference to the poor.
Bangladesh has occupied a particular place for
the US in its war on terror, as it has been
upheld as an example of "moderate Muslim
democracy", along with Turkey and Malaysia. In
the early years of Khaleda's government the US
did not acknowledge violence in a country that
supported it against Islamist extremism.
Extremists represent a small percentage of the
people. Islam in Bangladesh was always tolerant,
inflected by Sufism and coexistence with
Hinduism; Bengali culture, with its dance,
poetry, drama and music, inspires great popular
pride. The coming elections will determine
whether the country remains democratic and
tolerant, with its eclectic Bengali culture, or
whether a more militaristic, nationalist
administration will drive it further into the
arms of militant Islam.
· Jeremy Seabrook is the author of Freedom
Unfinished: Fundamentalism and Popular Resistance
in Bangladesh
______
[3]
A TRADITION WHICH RIDICULES THE CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS
Bengali culture has long disproved the 21st
century myth that fixed religious identities must
inevitably come into conflict
by Madeleine Bunting
One of the most striking exhibits in the current
British Museum exhibition Myths of Bengal is the
beautiful Gazi scroll - not just for its rich
colours and vivid figures, but because it
illustrates the enriching coexistence of two of
the world's great faiths. Images of Hindus making
puja offerings are juxtaposed with those of
Muslims making similar offerings at the tombs of
their saints (pirs). It shows how a remarkable,
syncretic culture emerged in which the tombs of
many pirs became places of pilgrimage for both
Hindus and Muslims.
The syncretism is also evident in the Bengali
tradition of bauls, itinerant singers who came
from both faiths and used the same songs, full of
the yearning of the humble man for God. These
songs were a great inspiration to the Bengali
Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore (whose paintings
are also on show at the British Museum) and
expressed the same sentiments found in both
religious traditions. The national anthems of the
predominantly Muslim country of Bangladesh and
the predominantly Hindu country of India were
both written by Tagore.
This tantalising glimpse of exchange and
commonality across faiths explodes the
21st-century idea of fixed religious identities
always coming into conflict with each other
throughout history. It exposes the falseness of
defining a civilisation by a single discrete
religious identity, as proposed by the US
political scientist Samuel Huntington in his
infamous "clash of civilisations" thesis.
In his most recent book, Identity and Violence,
Amartya Sen, a Bengali, describes how
civilisations are built on the exchange and
encounter of different cultural traditions. It is
both an impoverishment and a deeply dangerous
development to recast the identity of regions in
terms of just one faith. He cites Tagore, who
described his family background as a "confluence
of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British".
Bengal has been one of the world's great melting
pots, perhaps the place where east has met west
for the longest period of settled coexistence.
For more than 200 years it was at the heart of
Britain's power in India, and Calcutta was the
second city of the British empire. British rule
brought shocking misgovernment, such as the
Bengal famine of 1943 and economic exploitation,
but it also brought western ideas, producing a
vibrant cultural life in the 19th century.
Bengal's history in the 20th century, however,
raises painful questions: why hasn't more of this
syncretism survived, and indeed expanded across
other parts of the world? Bengali syncretism has
been the object of repeated attempts at
"purification" and reform movements within both
Islam and Hinduism. This process accelerated with
the arrival of literacy and publishing in the
19th century: the first Bengali grammar book
incorporated an explicitly Hindu agenda of
rooting out Persian words and replacing them with
Sanskrit. Distinct religious identities were
further stimulated by a clumsy British colonial
policy.
The 20th century saw Bengal partitioned along
lines of faith, a common culture and language
proving unable to hold the country together; a
fifth of the population fled from one side to the
other of the new international boundary between
India and East Pakistan, accompanied by horrific
violence. But neither was a shared faith a
sufficient basis for a nation, and Bangladesh
fought Pakistan for its independence in 1971.
Vestiges of the syncretism survive, despite the
fact that West Bengal is now largely Hindu, and
Bangladesh Muslim, but the process of erosion
grinds on. In both countries, wealthier diasporas
exacerbate the sharpening of antagonistic
religious identities. The faith of huge numbers
of Bangladeshi migrant workers now owes more to a
global Islam influenced by Saudi Arabia than to
Bengal's traditional Sufism. Upward social
mobility in the villages of Sylhet - the region
from which most British Bangladeshis come - is
associated with a rejection of the folkloric
piety in which even Bengal's pre-Islamic Buddhism
was discernible.
Meanwhile, among the diaspora in places such as
Tower Hamlets, "purification" creates conflict
between generations as youngsters search for "the
real Islam" and scorn that of their parents.
One of the most poignant symbols of this
abandonment of Bengal's history was in 2003. In
Sylhet's main mosque there was a tank full of
gajar fish. According to local tradition, the
Sufi saint Shah Jalal had brought the fish along
with Islam hundreds of years ago. But Islamist
extremists see him and his fish as evidence of
corrupt religious practice, and killed hundreds
of the fish in 2003.
Looking at the Gazi scroll, one cannot but
conclude that the past offers more enlightened
models of living with difference than we are
achieving. We need to be reminded - and inspired
- by the history of places such as Bengal so that
we can guard against the easy simplification that
human beings can be parcelled into discrete
civilisational categories based on faith. Some of
the world's richest cultural traditions are the
legacy of the interaction of several faiths.
______
[4]
The Times of India
1 Dec, 2006
REPEAL ONLY IN NAME
by Colin Gonsalves
The June 2005 report of the committee appointed
by the central government to review the Armed
Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, has recently
been made public, though not officially.
The core of the report is Part IV - the
recommendations - and Part V - the suggested
amendments to the Unlawful Activities
(Prevention) Act, 1967.
The first conclusion the committee makes is that
it is highly desirable and advisable to repeal
the Act altogether, without, of course, losing
sight of the overwhelming desire of the majority
of the region that the army should remain.
It advises that an appropriate legal mechanism
must be devised for the same. Thus the committee
begins with a highly dubious conclusion that the
majority of the people of Manipur want the army
to stay.
To justify the transfer of the provisions of
AFSPA to another statute, in this case the UAP
Act, it reasons: A major consequence of the
proposed course would be the erasure of feelings
of discrimination and alienation among the people
of the north-eastern states who feel they have
been victimised by the draconian enactment. The
UAP Act applies to all of India so the complaint
of discrimination would no longer be valid.
Over the years the constant complaint of many
people in the region has been that it is almost
impossible to get information about family
members and friends who have been picked up and
detained by security forces.
Many taken away without warrants have
disappeared, or ended up dead or badly injured.
The committee acknowledges that the UAP Act does
not provide for an internal mechanism ensuring
accountability of the forces and calls for one
that is transparent, quick and involves
authorities as well as civil society groups to
provide information about missing persons within
24 hours.
It has reduced the grievances of the people of
Manipur to the limited issue of non-provision of
information. In a situation where the main
grievances are torture, executions and
disappearances, to say that information is the
key is farcical.
As redress, the committee suggests the
constitution of grievance cells composed of three
members - a senior member of the local
administration as chair, a captain of the
security forces and a senior member of the local
police.
The role of these cells would be to receive
complaints, make prompt enquiries and furnish
information to the complainant. The cells are
designed to be dominated by the forces and police
and have no power to punish.
After stating that the use of armed forces ought
to always be for a limited period, the committee
suggests an open-ended time schedule: While
deploying the forces, the central government
shall, by a notification published in the
gazette, specify the state or the part of the
state in which the forces would operate, and the
period shall not exceed six months.
At the end of the specified period, it shall
review the situation in consultation with the
state government and check whether the
dep-loyment of forces should continue and till
when.
There is another provision that is more
pernicious than the provisions of AFSPA read
together with the Supreme Court judgment in the
Naga Peoples Movement for Human Rights case.
The Supreme Court interpreted the provisions of
AFSPA to mean that the security forces cannot
substitute the civil administration and police
and are always to act in aid of civil power.
The suggested amendments are clearly at the
behest of the security forces that see for
themselves a larger role.
Then comes the clincher.
The suggested provision for opening fire is
sweeping. Mere reasonable suspicion that a person
is in possession of arms is sufficient to open
fire.
There is no indication that the principle of the
minimum use of force is applicable at all. A
non-commissioned officer can give orders to open
fire.
There are no guidelines for opening fire or for
any enquiry to be conducted after the forces open
fire and injure people in the process.
In sum, what is being repealed is only the name
of the AFSPA statute and not the provisions of
the statute itself.
The writer is a senior Supreme Court advocate.
_____
[5]
THE SUBALTERN AS SUBALTERN CITIZEN
by Gyanendra Pandey
The "re-presentation" of the subaltern (a
relational position in the way power is
conceptualised) as subaltern citizen is not about
the technical question of citizenship; rather the
claim is about historical agency, and about
belonging - in a society and in its
self-construction. For 200 years and more, the
struggles waged by the oppressed and
subordinated, i e, the subalterns, were seen as
struggles for recognition as equals. The history
of these efforts appeared as a history of
sameness. However, in the later decades of the
20th century, this struggle was extended to
encompass another demand - the demand for a
recognition of difference - the existence of a
variety of differences that explained the
diversity, density and richness of human
experience. It is this paradox that needs to be
answered, while debating the construction of a
subaltern citizen: how is the long-standing
struggle for equality supposed to be folded into
this newly asserted right to the recognition of
difference?
http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2006&leaf=11&filename=10759&filetype=pdf
_____
[6]
The Hindu
Nov 29, 2006
TEAM TO STUDY PLIGHT OF RIOT VICTIMS IN GUJARAT
Special Correspondent
NEW DELHI: The Communist Party of India (Marxist)
on Monday said it was working out to send a
delegation of different parties to Gujarat
following the National Commission of Minorities
report that 2002 communal riots victims there
were yet to be rehabilitated.
CPI (M) Parliamentary Party leader Basudeb
Acharia said that more than 45,000 people were in
relief camps and no proper rehabilitation was
done by the Gujarat Government even after four
years. "We have decided to send a delegation
comprising Left parties, Samajwadi Party,
Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Congress and
Nationalist Congress Party to visit and find out
about it," Mr. Acharia said at a press conference.
The party also said that Railway Minister Lalu
Prasad had not kept the convention of making a
statement in the House and announce compensation
for the victims of bomb blasts on trains
recently. "This is the first time the Railway
Minister has not made any statement in regard to
the incident in which 8 people were killed and 35
injured," he said.
_____
[7]
_____
[8]
_____
[9]
_____
Upcoming Events:
(i)
This is to announce a three day International Colloquium on
Information, Society, History and Politics, titled - 'Sensor-Census-
Censor : Investigating Regimes of Information, Registering Changes of
State' at Sarai-CSDS (29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054) on 30th November,
1 & 2 December.
A detailed programme of the three days is given below. Participation
by registration at the venue. Limited seats available.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROGRAMME
Day 1: 30 November 2006
9:30 - 9:45 Introduction
Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai-CSDS, Paul Keller,Waag Society
Kerstin Lindberg, Delegation of the European Commission to India,
Bhutan and Nepal [Introduces the EU-India ECCP project]
9:45 - 11:15 Panel 1: Information, Mobility and Exclusion:
Borders, Passports and Identification Documents
Moderator: Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Sarai-CSDS
Passport, Ticket and Rubber Stamp: The "problem of the
pauper Hajji", c. 1882-1926
Radhika Singha
Associate Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social
Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
Passports, Literacy, Phantasm: The States of Writing Nation
Vazira Fazila Yacoobali Zamindar
Assistant Professor of History, Brown University, Providence
11:15 - 11:30 Tea
11:30 - 2:00Panel 2: Monitoring Surveillance
Moderator: Tapio Mäkelä
Media Artist/Researcher, Helsinki
Exposure: Surveillance and the Political Economy of Interiority
Kirstie Ball
Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Open University Business
School, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes
Machetes, Electrodes and Databases
Sam De Silva
Independent Media Maker and Facilitator, Colombo/Melbourne
Security Culture and the Economy of Fear
Konrad Becker
Cultural Organiser/Artist/Activist, t0 Institute of Culture
Technologies, Vienna
2:00 - 3:00 Lunch
3:00 - 4:45 Panel 3: The Artist As Information Practitioner
Moderator: Rana Dasgupta Writer, Delhi
Archival Malpractice and Counter-Strategies
Charles Merewether
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research,
Australian National University, Canberra
Information versus Dissemination: Artistic and Activist Strategies
of Information Practice
Ewen Chardronnet
Artist/Critic/Information Activist, Tours
Across Borders and beyond Definitions: Creating Concepts and
Syndicating Content
Florian Schneider
Artist/Activist, kein.org, Munich
4:45 - 5:00 Tea
5:00 - 6:00 Film Screening
Temporary Loss of Consciousness, 2005
Directed by Monica Bhasin
Independent Filmmaker, Delhi
Colour, 35 min.
6:00 - 6:15 Tea
6.30 - 7.45: Keynote: Histories of Identification
Introduction: Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Sarai-CSDS
Why Did Fingerprinting Emerge in Colonial India?
Governmentality, Surveillance and the Fear of the "Native"
Chandak Sengoopta
Professor, Department of History, Birkbeck College, University of
London
Day 2: 1 December 2006
10:00 - 11:15Keynote: The Record of Power
Introduction: Prabhu Mahapatra
Department of History, Delhi University
Seeing Like a State: State Controls in Europe Since 1500
Leo Lucassen
Professor, Leiden University/University of Amsterdam
11:15 - 11:30 Tea
11:30 - 1:30Panel 2: The Daily Life of Information
Moderator: Jeebesh Bagchi
Sarai-CSDS
From the Chowkeydari Act to Biometric Identification:
Passages from the History of the Information State in India
Taha Mehmood
Sarai-CSDS
Garib Aadmi ko Kaun Dekhta Hai (Who Looks at the Poor
Person)?TheKhullam-Khulla (Transparency) Principle and
Beyond on the Streets of Delhi
Aman Sethi
Journalist, Frontline Magazine
Documents as Date-Lines: The Making and Unmaking of
Urban Settlements
Shveta Sarda, Priya Sen and Jaanu Nagar (presented by Shveta Sarda)
Cybermohalla Project, Ankur/Sarai-CSDS
1:30 - 2:30 Lunch
2:30 - 3:30 Panel 3: Neo-Liberal Governmentality and Risk:
Information and Surveillance in India
Uma Maheshwari Kalpagam
Professor, G.B. Pant Social Studies Institute, Allahabad
Respondent: Awadhendra Sharan
Sarai-CSDS
3:30 - 3:45 Tea
3:45 - 5:45 Panel 4: Truth, Transmission and Technology
Moderator: Ravi Sundaram
Sarai-CSDS
The Technology of Telegraphy and the Telegraphy of
Technology: Magic and Speculation in the First Half of the
Last Century
Deep Kanta Lahiri Chaudhuri
Historian, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi
... And Nothing But the Truth: So Help Me Science
Lawrence Liang
Legal Theorist/Researcher, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Unofficial Secrets Act: The Administration of Certainty and Ambiguity
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Sarai-CSDS
5:45 - 6:00 Artist Presentation
KhirkeeYaan, 2006
Shaina Anand
Independent Filmmaker, Chitra Karkhana, Mumbai
6:00 - 6.30 Tea
6.30 - 7.45 Keynote: Histories of Information
Introduction: Radhika Singha
Illegibility: Reading and Insecurity in 19th-Century Law and Government
Jane Caplan
Professor of Modern European History, St Antony's College,
University of Oxford
8:00 pm onwards: Conference Dinner, CSDS Lawns
Day 3: 2 December 2006
10:00 - 12:15 Panel 1: Censorship and Memory
Moderator: Nivedita Menon
Department of Political Science, Delhi University
Conversing the Cut: A Chronicle of Censorship in Egyptian
Cinema
5 Channel Video (2005)
Babak Afrassiabi
Artist/Media Practitioner, Teheran/Rotterdam
The Silence of the Arabs
Mansour Jacoubi
Activist/ Information Practitioner, Beirut
Listening in the Archive, Listening for the Archive: History,
Memory and the Archive
Sadan Jha
Sarai-CSDS
12:15 - 12:30 Tea
12:30 - 2:00 Panel 2: Network Effects
Moderator: Monica Narula
Sarai-CSDS
Imagined Networks: Rhetoric, Poetics and Politics in
Electronic Communities and Online Networks
Wendy Chun
Associate Professor, Brown University
Resisting System Subjectification: Paranoia as a Culturally
Specific Affect of Network Use
Tapio Mäkelä
Media Artist/Independent Researcher, Helsinki
2:00 - 3:00 Lunch
3:00 - 4:30 Panel 3: The Accession Register: Information Abundance,
Scarcity and Libraries
Moderator: Geert Lovink
Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam
The Class Library of Babel: Digital Librarianship and
Copyright Circumvention
Sebastian Lütgert
Writer/Programmer/Artist, Berlin
Memoirs of Information Work
Avinash Jha
Librarian, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
"Because It's There! Because I Can!" Desire and Information
Economies of Abundance
Felix Stalder
Media Scholar, Zurich; Researcher/Organiser, Vienna and New York
4:30 - 4:45 Tea
4:45 - 6:00 Holes, Erasures, Silences: Archives and Absences
Shahid Amin, Professor, Department of History, Delhi University
In conversation with Mahmood Farooqui, Sarai-CSDS
Introduction: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai-CSDS
6:00 - 6:15 Tea
6:15 - 7:00 Conference Conclusion: Open Session
Moderator: Ravi Vasudevan, Sarai-CSDS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The colloquium is a part of 'Towards a Culture of Open Networks'
<http://www.opencultures.net> a collaborative initiative of Sarai-
CSDS, (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam) and t0 (Vienna). 'Towards a
Culture of Open Networks' is supported by the EU-India Economic and
Cultural Programme. The contents of the colloquium can under no
circumstances however be regarded as reflecting the position of the
European Union.
----
(ii)
International Peace Festival
1 -3 December 2006
Bhartiya Vidya Bhawan
Munshi Nagar
Bhavan's Campus
Dadabhai Road, Andheri (W) Mumbai- 400 053
Interactive Symposia
(Venue: EMBA Class I, S P Jain Institute of Management)
A Peaceful World Is Possible
The quest for Peace is an eternal pursuit of the
humanity. Peace that is just. Peace that is based
on mutual respect and dignity. Peace that denotes
love. Peace that means compassion and solidarity.
The quest for Peace in its very essence is a cry
for Justice. It's unquenched thirst for Freedom.
Freedom from discriminations and oppressions -
overt and covert. Freedom to self-expression.
Freedom to bloom unhindered.
The extant world is, unfortunately, too cruel,
too oppressive, too unfree, too unjust.
The Global War on Terror, brutalisation of Iraq,
bloodbath in Afghanistan, carnage in Gujarat are
just a few too obvious examples. The catalogue is
endless. That's why the ode to Peace is also the
struggle for Justice. Reinvigorated explorations
of means and ways to achieve Justice, Equity and
Peace.
In a world riven with violence and war,
oppression and inequity, it becomes all the more
urgent and necessary to intensify the struggles
for peace, network the diffused efforts and
explore the myriad dimensions.
'International Peace Festival' proposes to do all
these mainly through the languages of creative
'cultural' expressions - to explore, to express,
to build bridges and break barriers, in a
confluence of collective participation and
intermingling. To strengthen our faiths, deepen
our understandings, reinforce our convictions and
realise our dreams: A Peaceful World Is Possible.
The Interactive Symposia, 'A Peaceful World Is
Possible', running side by side with other
'cultural' events, will in its own way - in terms
of more conventional language, deliberate the
live issues and explore the means and goals
through interactive sessions There will be six
sessions in all - two each on all the three days.
The first one from 11 00 - 13 00 hrs, and the
second one from 14 30 - 16 30 hrs. Each session
will have three initiators and a chair. The
chair will introduce the topic. Each initiator
will speak for about 15 minutes. Then
participation from the floor will be sought in
terms of questions and brief observations. There
will be interventions and clarifications by the
initiators. The chair will sum up the discussions
at the end. The chair may, however, make
necessary modifications of this broad format as
per the specific demands of the given occasion.
Detailed Programme:
Day 1 (Dec. 1)
Session I (11 00 - 13 00 Hrs.)
The opening session will be on 'Militaristic
Globalisation and Struggles for Peace' This
session will focus on defining and exploring
Globalisation and its different dimensions, the
criticality of use of brute force by the US
Empire, the current state of struggles and the
strategies to combat.
Chair-cum-Speaker: Prof. Ninan Koshy
(Thiruvananthapuram)
Other Speakers: Praful Bidwai (Delhi), Carmencita
(Philippines), John Jones (Sweden)
Session II (14 30 - 16 30 Hrs.)
This session will deal with 'Religion and Culture:
Source for Peace or Oppression?'
Here the speakers with religious and secular
backgrounds will explore the role of religions
and indigenous cultures as resources for building
peace, struggles against oppressions or source of
violence, oppression and gender injustice. This
is expected to be a live-wire session.
Chair-cum-Speaker: Dr. (Fr.) Keith D'Souza
(Mumbai) Other Speakers: Dr. Zeenat Shaukat Ali
(Mumbai), Ammu Abraham (Mumbai)
Day 2 (Dec. 2)
Session I (11 00 - 13 00 Hrs.)
This session will focus on 'Cultural Homogenisation in a Multicultural World'.
The speakers will dwell upon the cultural
dimensions of Globalisation and also the
majoritarian drives, spearheaded by the Hindutva
and other 'centralist'/'nationalist' forces, to
obliterate the Little Traditions - cultural
identities of marginalized groups and
communities. And the struggles to combat such
trends.
Chair-cum-Speaker: Dr. Sandeep Pendse (Mumbai)
Other Speakers: Prof. K. N. Panikkar
(Thiruvananthapuram), Dr. Uma Rele (Mumbai), Dr. Abdul Haq Ansari (Aligarh)
Session II (14 30 - 16 30 Hrs.)
This session is: 'Wars against Women, Women against Wars'.
This will deal with women as targets of War - big
and small, seen and unseen. Women's body as the
site of violence and battlefield for domination.
But not only that, it will also explore 'women'
as active 'subjects' of History, agents to
reshape it, just not as passive 'objects'.
Chair-cum-Speaker: Dr. Veena Poonacha (Mumbai)
Other Speakers: Nandita Shah (Mumbai), Dr.
Vibhuti Patel (Mumbai), Dr. Oishik Sarkar
(Kolkata)
Day 3 (Dec. 3)
Session I (11 00 - 13 00 Hrs.)
This session is: 'Struggles for Peace and
Democracy in South and Southeast Asia'.
Speakers from a number of countries will report.
And, as usual, discussions will follow.
Chair-cum-Speaker: Fr. Cedric Prakash (Ahmedabad)
Other Speakers: Rafiqe Ullah Khan (Bangladesh), Anil
Chaudhary (Delhi), Dr. Rukaya (Nepal) and others
Session II (14 30 - 16 30 Hrs.)
The last and final session will be: 'Visions of Peace'.
The different dimensions and visualisations of
Peace from multiple perspectives like in various
religions, cultures, traditions and ideologies
will be presented and deliberated. An attempt
will be made to connect these multiple visions as
a meaningful collage and also to work out a set
of coherent strategies for realisation.
Chair-cum-Speaker: Prof. Gopal Guru (Delhi)
Other Speakers: Dr Asghar Ali Engineer (Mumbai), Prof.
Achin Vanaik (Delhi), Urvashi Butalia (Delhi)
[As part of the 'cultural events', Shubha Mudgal
will perform on Dec. 1 evening and Seema Kirmani
(Pakistan) on Dec. 3 at the closing function.
Just to give an idea.
It's all FREE!
There will be many other cultural events - from
morning to late evening, performed by troupes -
including adivasis and dalits, from different
corners of India and also abroad There will be
dramas, films, paintings, photo-exhibitions,
ethnic food-stalls, artefacts and what not.
Just be there and take part.]
-----
(ii)
Faith, nation, culture:
The Guardian/British Museum Public Forum:
What Bengal's history tells us about living with multiple identities?
Amartya Sen
Friday 1 December, 18.30
BP Lecture Theatre
£10, concessions £8
Bengal has arguably the longest history of
engagement between East and West, stretching back
over several centuries of settlement, with
Calcutta once the capital city of the British in
India. For Bengalis, the British were just one
chapter in a long history of cultural exchange
and accommodation. That history has seen a
cultural heritage shared across faiths (in
particular, Hinduism and Islam) and then split,
in the twentieth century, across two nations:
India and Bangladesh. How does this story of
multiple identities - of faith, nation, culture -
shed light on the challenges of globalisation in
the twenty-first century as many Bengalis migrate
across the sub-continent and across the globe?
How do those diaspora identities, whether in
Tower Hamlets or Delhi, refashion their past and
what insights can history can offer for the
increasing primacy of religious identity?
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
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/
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