SACW | April 8-10, 2007

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  | April 8-10, 2007 | Dispatch No. 2386 - Year 9

[1]  Kashmir : You can't take silence for 
victory' An interview with Sanjay Kak (Shivam Vij)
[2]  Pakistan's disappeared:
   - Without a Trace - Declan Walsh
   -  A Leadership 'Beyond Repair' : An interview 
with Asma Jahangir (Ron Moreau)
[3]  India: BJP's Temple Index (Pamela Philipose)
[4]  India: The Utterances of the high and the mighty (Bina Srinivasan)
[5]  India: Modernising fast - but beware if you 
try to choose who to marry (Randeep Ramesh)
[6]  Book Review : Memory, lived and forgotten (Urvashi Butalia)
[7]  UK: Star values (Rahila Gupta)
[8] Events:
     Sahmat's new art project, Making History Our 
Own (New Delhi,  12 April, 2007)

____


[1]


Tehelka.com
Apr 07 , 2007

YOU CAN'T TAKE SILENCE FOR VICTORY'

Sanjay Kak spent three years making 
Jashn-e-Azadi, a documentary. He tells Shivam Vij 
India may not yet be ready for withdrawing troops 
from the Valley

Sanjay Kak
What was your motivation in making a film on Kashmir?

When I went to Srinagar in 2003 it was after a 
gap of 14 years. I was shocked by what had 
happened to Kashmir. To walk from our home to the 
nearby market in Lal Chowk one had to make it 
past half-a-dozen bunkers, with soldiers with 
fingers on the triggers of ak-47s, with 
transparent magazines with bullets shining 
through. This was not the Kashmir I knew at all! 
Then as I began to move about the city, and then 
to the countryside, the level of militarisation 
was so awesome, the fear and sullen anger amongst 
the people so palpable - I was convinced there 
was something very complex here that needed to be 
engaged with.

Would it be fair to say that your film 
Jashn-e-Azadi is about the secessionist movement?

It's a film that tries to understand the desire 
for azadi without trying to assign to it the 
rigid certainties that most Indians seem to 
demand of it. Whether that desire amounts to 
secession from India, as an independent State, or 
a merger with Pakistan, I don't know. I don't 
think there is a definitive answer to that in 
Kashmir either. But azadi is certainly about 
self-determination. And it is the ignorance of 
azadi that I find missing in the public discourse 
about Kashmir in India.

Neelakash Kshetrimayum
Were you shocked to see the disconnect between the people and the State?

Our ignorance of Kashmiri feelings about India is 
the outcome of 60 years of a hermetic, controlled 
knowledge system which forces us to think of 
Kashmir in only one way: that it's a part of 
India. But in Kashmir you will see that there is 
a long history to this distance. Many Kashmiris 
have not naturally seen themselves as Indian. My 
own grandfather was a Kashmiri Pandit, but I can 
remember up until the 70s, when he was going to 
Delhi he would say he was going to India. He had 
grown up in an independent Kashmir, and even 
after 1947 a certain distance had remained.

The film acknowledges the use of video from 
"anonymous Kashmiri cameramen". How credible are 
the archival videos?

That archival video is testimony of an incredible 
time. So is the video gathered for network 
television today. The filtering actually takes 
place in newsrooms in Delhi. It has been my 
experience that the often-deadly images that come 
from Kashmir can make it to the afternoon news, 
but are slowly reduced, until they become 
meaningless 30-second news-bites in primetime 
news. This works backwards to the crew on the 
ground who realise there is no point risking your 
life shooting something you know the network 
doesn't value. So self-censorship builds in. On 
the other hand these "anonymous Kashmiri 
cameramen" of the 1990s wanted to communicate a 
sense of what was happening there. You can use 
video to tell lies, but you can also search 
within it for truth. You can decide whether you 
want to be exhilarated by the sight of 7,000 
people protesting or be terrified by itŠ

The film has not really dealt with the issue of Kashmiri Pandits.

It has often bothered me that all discussion on 
Kashmir in Indian public discourse invariably 
turns into a discussion on Kashmiri Pandits. In 
the last 20 years, there was first a sentiment 
for azadi, then an insurrection, and then the 
Pandits had to leave. So why can't we, just once, 
go back and understand what's behind there, and 
then make our way forward?

Most Kashmiri Pandits obviously saw themselves as 
a part of India, but how do you resolve a 
situation where they are a tiny minority in a 
place which is fighting for self-determination? 
It was thus not altogether unexpected that they 
felt isolated, even targeted, and had to leave. 
In this film I wanted to first bridge the 
understanding of what the sentiment for azadi in 
Kashmir is.

What has happened to Kashmiri Pandits is 
terrible, particularly to the rural and poorer 
class among them. It is an enormous failure on 
the part of Kashmiri society that they have not 
been able to resolve. But why is nobody asking me 
why I haven't dealt with other important issues 
in Kashmir: custodial deaths, the politicisation 
of the Army or the continuing presence of 
Kashmiri Sikhs there? Does it have to do with the 
unacknowledged but tacit assumption that India is 
a Hindu country?

Surely all Kashmiri Muslims didn't want 
self-determination even in the early 90s.

I can only go by what I hear and read. I think it 
is fair to say that in the 90s, the overwhelming 
sentiment in Kashmir was pro-azadi. You may take 
as evidence what Jagmohan writes in his memoirs, 
that when he arrived as Governor in Srinagar in 
1990, the only people he could trust were the 
security guards at Raj Bhavan!

What were the reasons for such an overwhelming 
sentiment of azadi to appear 40 years into Indian 
independence?

In my own understanding of Kashmir, I think that 
the hundred years prior to 1947 are a very 
crucial piece of history. That century of Dogra 
rule was highly brutal and oppressive for the 
vast, vast majority of Kashmiris, especially it's 
predominantly Muslim peasantry. So in 1947 when 
the Maharaja left, there was a huge surge in 
expectations of what was expected to follow. 
There followed the highly successful land reforms 
in 1952 that unshackled the productive capacities 
of the peasant and led to a self-assertiveness in 
the face of perceived injustice. Of course, 
Pakistan played an important role in encouraging 
these tendencies, particularly after India played 
mid-wife to the birth of Bangladesh.

Do you think the Kashmiri Muslims have felt let 
down by not just India but also Indians?

Absolutely. The Indian liberal-left-progressive 
can and does take a position on the massacre of 
Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, or of Muslims in Gujarat 
in 2002. Even mainstream media like ndtv and 
Indian Express can. But to honestly deal with 
Kashmir asks for a lot more from us. If people 
are making a sustained argument for some form of 
disengagement with the Indian republic for 60 
years, should we not at least understand what 
they are saying? Or should we say - oh, there've 
been human rights violations and if we control 
them, all will be well. I think Kashmir forces us 
to ask very fundamental questions of how India is 
constituted and how much of it is held together 
by coercion.

Until 1993, Indian civil liberties groups had a 
substantial engagement with Kashmir. But by the 
mid-nineties, when the apparently secular jklf 
faded out, they were probably not comfortable 
when the avowedly Islamic Hizbul Mujahideen took 
over the driving seat. But Kashmiri sentiment 
didn't change, did it?

In 2007, what do you think the Kashmiri Muslim wants?

The overwhelming demand is that of troop 
withdrawal, of a disengagement of the military 
apparatus. From ordinary Kashmiri Muslims in the 
countryside to even those sitting in the Srinagar 
secretariat, they will all say they want 
withdrawal of troops.

Has the Indian State been a victor in Kashmir?

Are you talking about the reduction in the number 
of militants? A former militant veteran told me 
that at a certain point there was a tactical 
retreat by the militant leadership. He said "We 
didn't want an azadi that nobody was left to 
enjoy the fruits of. We could not afford to 
continue losing our best young men who were being 
killed like flies". But you can't take silence 
and domination for victory. The Indian security 
forces dominate every aspect of life in Kashmir. 
But can they take the lid off even briefly?

Can it?

An Army officer once told us the situation in 
Kashmir was totally under control today, unlike, 
say the mid-nineties. When was the Army 
withdrawing, we asked? He was shocked: Withdraw? 
There would be chaos, he said. I suppose he means 
that the Army is not only controlling the 
militants but also sitting on top of a civil 
population. As you lift that lid, there might be 
a few surprises in store for India. I'm not 
saying militants will run amuck in the Valley but 
you never know what form politics will take. You 
see how the security forces clear out of the way 
whenever there is the funeral of a militant 
commander, when thousands come out to protest and 
shout slogans of azadi. The film begins with one 
such in 1992 and ends with one in 2005. In those 
few hours when the lid is lifted, the expression 
of rage is in very much the same terms. Over 14 
years we hear the same slogans, the same anger 
and rage and passion. We can't assume that since 
the people are exhausted and if you remove the 
chains they will, like docile lambs, walk into 
the Indian Union.


_____


[2]


The Guardian
March 16, 2007

WITHOUT A TRACE

Seven-year-old Saud Bugti's father was picked up 
by secret police on a street corner in Karachi 
last November. No one has heard from him since. 
He has joined the ranks of Pakistan's 
'disappeared' - victims of the country's brutal 
attempts to wage war on both al-Qaida and those 
who fail to support the government. But how many 
innocent people are being caught up in this? And 
what is America's connection to the barbaric 
torture of suspects?

Declan Walsh reports

Saud Bugti, 7, whose father disappeared last November. Photograph: Declan Walsh

They vanish quietly and quickly. Some are dragged 
from their beds in front of their terrified 
families. Others are hustled off the streets into 
a waiting van, or yanked from a bus at a lonely 
desert junction. A windowless world of sweat and 
fear awaits. In dark cells, nameless men bark 
questions. The men brandish rubber whips, 
clenched fists, whirring electric drills, 
pictures of Osama bin Laden. The ordeal can last 
weeks, months or years.

These are Pakistan's disappeared - men and women 
who have been abducted, imprisoned and in some 
cases tortured by the country's all-powerful 
intelligence agencies. The Human Rights 
Commission of Pakistan has counted 400 cases 
since 2002; it estimates hundreds more people may 
have been snatched. The phenomenon started with 
the great sweeps for al-Qaida suspects after 
September 11, but has dramatically increased in 
recent years, and now those who disappear include 
homegrown "enemies of the state" - poets, 
doctors, housewives and nuclear scientists, 
accused of terrorism, treason and murder. Guilty 
or innocent, it's hard to know, because not one 
has appeared before a court.An angry Pakistani 
public wants to know why. The disappearances are 
increasingly perceived as Pakistan's Guantánamo 
Bay - a malignant outgrowth of the "war on 
terror". This week, the issue moved centre stage 
with the showdown between President Pervez 
Musharraf and Pakistan's chief justice, Iftikhar 
Muhammad Chaudhry. Many believe the judge is 
being victimised for championing the cases of the 
disappeared. "These are Gestapo tactics," says 
Iqbal Haider, a former minister. "The more we 
protest, the more innocent people are being hurt. 
And what frightening stories they tell."

For Abid Zaidi it started with a phone call one 
afternoon last April. The softly spoken 
26-year-old was at work at Karachi University's 
department of zoology in a cavernous room of 
stuffed animals, sagging skeletons and yellowing 
name tags. The voice on the phone instructed him 
to report to Sadder police station in the city 
centre. There, a handful of men were waiting for 
him: he believes they belonged to Inter-Services 
Intelligence (ISI), the army's powerful spy 
agency. They clapped cuffs on his wrists, wrapped 
a band around his eyes and drove him to a cell. 
Then, he says, the torture started.

The men beat him, he says, with a chain, until he 
collapsed. He was brought to a military hospital; 
there doctors brushed off his pleas for help. 
Then he was flown to another detention centre, 
where he was shown graphic images of torture. 
"People's skin was being removed with knives and 
blades and they were being drilled," he says. "It 
was really terrible." Then they hung him upside 
down from a butcher's hook, his face dipping into 
a pool of sewage water.

The interrogators wanted Zaidi to admit his 
supposed part in the Nishtar Park bombings. In 
early April, a suicide bomber had killed 50 
people at a Sunni religious gathering in central 
Karachi. The officials accused Zaidi, a prominent 
young Shia, of orchestrating the massacre. Zaidi 
tried to explain he was more interested in 
zoology than zealotry. They did not believe him.

In July, an official told him he had been 
sentenced to hang. Zaidi wrote a will. "I felt at 
peace because I knew God was with me," he says. 
But it was a ruse. At 4am on the morning of the 
"execution", having refused to admit his guilt, a 
dramatic reprieve was announced. Shortly 
afterwards, he underwent a lie detector test and 
on August 18 he was flown to Karachi. The 
blindfold was lifted. Zaidi was driven through 
the city. The car stopped, a man handed him 200 
rupees (£1.80) and pushed the car door open. "He 
said, 'Don't open your eyes,'" says Zaidi. When 
the engine noise had receded, he found himself 
standing at a bus stop near Karachi University. 
He got down on his knees and prayed. Then he 
phoned his brother to take him home.

Zaidi's account cannot be verified because, 
officially speaking, he was never in government 
custody. However a senior police officer familiar 
with the case describes it as a major 
embarrassment. "That boy was picked up by a young 
officer," says the official, who asks not to be 
named. "[The police] knew it was the wrong guy. 
But they refused to listen."

The ISI is the most powerful arm of Pakistan's 
intelligence establishment, commonly referred to 
as "the agencies". Founded by a British army 
officer in 1948 and headquartered at an anonymous 
concrete block in Islamabad, the ISI is famed and 
feared in equal part. Its influence soared during 
the 1980s, when it smuggled vast amounts of 
American-funded weapons to mujahideen guerrillas 
fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. More 
recently, it has organised guerrilla groups 
fighting Indian troops in Indian-controlled 
Kashmir. The other major agencies in Pakistan are 
Military Intelligence and the civilian 
Intelligence Bureau, and all three of these major 
agencies have variously been accused of rigging 
elections, extra-judicial assassinations and 
other dirty tricks.

But until 9/11, disappearances were rare. Then, 
in late 2001, as al-Qaida fugitives fled from 
Afghanistan into Pakistan, Musharraf ordered that 
the agencies show full cooperation to the FBI, 
CIA and other US security agencies. In return, 
the Americans would give them equipment, 
expertise and money.

Suddenly, Pakistan's agencies had sophisticated 
devices to trace mobile phones, bug houses and 
telephone calls, and monitor large volumes of 
email traffic. "Whatever it took to improve the 
Pakistanis' technical ability to find al-Qaida 
fighters, we were there to help them," says 
Michael Scheuer, a former head of the CIA's Osama 
bin Laden unit. An official with an American 
organisation says he once received a startling 
demonstration of the ISI's new capabilities. 
Driving down a street inside a van with ISI 
operatives, he could monitor phone conversations 
taking place in every house they passed. "It was 
very impressive, and really quite spooky," he 
says.

The al-Qaida hunt became a matter of considerable 
pride for President Bush's close friend, the 
president of Pakistan. "We have captured 672 and 
handed over 369 to the United States. We have 
earned bounties totalling millions of dollars," 
wrote Musharraf in his autobiography last year. 
(The boast sparked outrage at home in Pakistan 
and was scrubbed from later Urdu-language 
versions of his book.) Prize captures included 
the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh 
Muhammed, who has apparently confessed to a 
string of terror plots after four years as a 
captive, and Abu Faraj al Libbi, another alleged 
bin Laden lieutenant. But certain innocents were 
also swept up in the dragnet.

Brothers Zain and Kashan Afzal, for example, were 
detained and beaten many times over eight months 
by Pakistani agents convinced they belonged to 
al-Qaida. Zain, now 25, remembers that, in 
between the thrashings, the "FBI wallahs" - a 
woman and two men - would come to visit. "They 
showed me a picture of Osama and asked if I knew 
him," he says at his home in Karachi. "I told 
them I had only seen him on television." As 
American citizens - the brothers were born in the 
US, where their father lives - they might have 
expected better treatment. Instead, they got 
threats. "The Americans said if we did not tell 
them everything, they would send us to Guantánamo 
Bay," says Zain.

Like many of the disappeared, the Afzals had a 
colourful past that drew the attention of the 
agencies. According to a well-informed source, 
their names appeared on a list of potential 
recruits found on a laptop belonging to Naeem 
Noor Khan, an al-Qaida computer expert arrested 
weeks earlier, in July 2004. They were also 
questioned about a visit they had made to the 
lawless tribal belt of Waziristan. But whatever 
they had done, it was clearly not enough to 
warrant prosecution by either Pakistan or the US. 
In April 2005, they were brought to Lahore 
airport, handed a pair of airplane tickets in 
other people's names, and set free.

The physical damage has healed - Zain suffered a 
burst eardrum - but the mental scars remain. "He 
hears voices in the night coming to take him away 
again," says his wife Sara. The couple agreed to 
meet the Guardian and give their first newspaper 
interview in an attempt to press their case for a 
new American passport. Despite numerous 
entreaties, the US consulate in Karachi has 
stonewalled requests to re-issue their passports, 
which were confiscated during their arrest. "I am 
scared because of what has happened," says Sara. 
"Pakistan is not a reliable country, you know." A 
US embassy spokeswoman in Islamabad declines to 
comment on their case.

The truth is that the American government still 
quietly supports the disappearances of al-Qaida 
suspects, says Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights 
Watch, which has documented many cases. "The 
abuse has become even more brazen because of US 
complicity," he says. He claims that American 
officials are regular visitors to ISI safehouses 
in Islamabad, Lahore and Rawalpindi where torture 
has occurred. They have supervised interrogations 
from behind one-way mirrors, he says. In FBI 
internal documents, he says, torture is referred 
to as "locally acceptable forms of interrogation".

For some detainees the safehouses are the back 
door to the mysterious world of CIA "black sites" 
- secret prisons in Afghanistan, eastern Europe 
and across the Arab world where torture is 
allegedly rife. Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian who 
was picked up in 2004, recently gave an 
extraordinarily detailed account of life in this 
system. After being tortured by ISI agents in 
Lahore - they strapped a rubber band around his 
penis - he said he was moved to a "villa" in 
Islamabad where he was questioned by US 
officials. "It seemed to me that this place was 
controlled by Americans. They were in charge," he 
told Human Rights Watch. "They would say: 'If you 
cooperate, we'll let you sleep.'" A female 
official told him in Arabic, "Fuck Allah in the 
ass." One of four fellow Pakistani detainees bore 
the marks of severe torture. "You can't imagine 
how much they were hurting him," said Jabour, who 
was released last summer.

In its annual human rights report published last 
Tuesday, the US State Department acknowledged the 
disappearances but skated around the US's own 
role. "The country experienced an increase in 
disappearances of provincial activists and 
political opponents," it noted.

In fact, most recent disappearances have nothing 
to do with al-Qaida. To quell an insurgency in 
Baluchistan - a vast western province with 
massive oil and gas reserves - the agencies, in 
particular Military Intelligence, have rounded up 
hundreds of suspected rebels in the past two 
years. Of the 99 abductions registered by the 
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan last year, 73 
were from Baluchistan. Officials believe many 
more have gone unreported. Shamsa Toon, a 
70-year-old woman, crouches on the pavement 
outside Karachi's Press Club clutching a giant 
photograph of her son, Gohram Saleh. He has been 
missing since August 8 2004, she says; this was 
the 166th day of her vigil. Her 13-year-old 
granddaughter is threatening to commit suicide if 
there was no news. "He's just a cab driver, not 
any rebel," she says, tears streaming down her 
face. "His only crime is that he is a Baluch."

Musharraf's officials swat the issue away with 
blunt denials. "I can say with authority that 
these people are not with any agency or 
government department," says Brigadier Iqbal 
Cheema, head of the "crisis management cell", 
which spearheads anti-terror operations, at the 
Interior Ministry. "Most of these people creating 
a hue and cry belong to the militant 
organisations and have jihadi backgrounds. They 
are involved in these activities themselves." But 
the current confrontation with the chief justice 
has brought a renewed focus. Western diplomats 
are queasy about such obvious abuses from an ally 
they claim is "moving towards democracy". And the 
death of Hayatullah Khan, a tribal journalist who 
was found dead last June after seven months 
apparently in the custody of the agencies, has 
further fuelled the outrage.

Last November, Chaudhry, the chief justice, 
ordered the agencies to "find" 41 people who had 
gone missing. Subsequently, half were quietly 
released. But the court actions have mostly just 
underlined the impotence of the civilian 
institutions in the face of a powerful military 
machine. When ISI lawyers plead that they "cannot 
locate" certain detainees, the judges can only 
fume and bang their benches.

Meanwhile, tearful relatives are left grasping 
for even a shred of news. Qazim Bugti, the mayor 
of Dera Bugti, a small town in Baluchistan, was 
picked up last November. His wife Asmat, left 
behind to look after their five children, weeps 
when she talks of her husband's disappearance. 
"Does President Musharraf not have children of 
his own? Would he like to see them treated like 
this?" she says in the family's Karachi 
apartment. She agrees to speak despite whispered 
phone warnings to keep quiet: the agencies do not 
appreciate publicity.

Several relatives say they have been instructed 
not to contact the media or human rights groups. 
Khalid Khawaja, who led a pressure group on 
behalf of some detainees, himself went missing 
last month. He was reportedly taken to Attock 
Fort, a notorious military prison. But the most 
audacious disappearance, perhaps, is that of 
Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost.

During his three years of captivity in Guantánamo 
Bay, Dost, 37, became known as the "poet of 
Guantánamo" for his sharp verse. After his 
release, he wrote The Broken Shackles of 
Guantánamo, and it was published in the Pashto 
language last September; it became an instant hit 
in Peshawar's bookstalls, selling more than 
10,000 copies. It also contained stinging 
criticism of the ISI. Weeks later, policemen in a 
van abducted Dost as he walked from his local 
mosque after Friday prayers. His brother, 
Badruzzaman Badr - also a former Guantánamo 
detainee - says, "The book is the reason behind 
this. They are angry about what we have written. 
They claim to have democracy and freedom of 
expression in this country, but it is not real."

When Dost's case came before a local court for 
the third time in January, the judges again asked 
the ISI to produce the missing man. Again there 
was no answer. Now Badruzzaman, who has abandoned 
his gemstone business and no longer sleeps at 
home, fears he will be next. "I do not feel safe, 
they could arrest me any time. But where can I 
go?" he says.

Abid Zaidi, the zoology student from Karachi, has 
also learned the price of going public. In late 
October, he travelled to Islamabad to describe 
his ordeal before a press conference organised by 
Amnesty International. Shortly afterwards he was 
picked up again, this time by men in uniform. 
Zaidi says they were flushed with anger. "They 
told me: 'Next time, we will not pick you up. We 
will kill you'".

o o o

Newsweek International
April 2, 2007 issue

THE LAST WORD: ASMA JAHANGIR
A LEADERSHIP 'BEYOND REPAIR'

by Asma Jahangir

These are tough times for Pervez Musharraf. Under 
increasing criticism for his inability to control 
Islamic militants in the country's tribal areas, 
the Pakistani president now faces a revolt within 
his own judicial establishment. For the past two 
weeks, hundreds of lawyers have staged protests 
and gone on strike over the president's decision 
to suspend Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry for alleged misuse of 
his powers. (The charges include nepotism and an 
excessive fondness for luxury cars and aircraft.) 
In addition to the demonstrations, eight judges 
and the deputy attorney general have resigned, 
raising questions over the future of Pakistan's 
judiciary-and its leader's grip. NEWSWEEK's Ron 
Moreau spoke to Asma Jahangir, one of Pakistan's 
foremost Supreme Court lawyers and chairwoman of 
the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Excerpts:

MOREAU: What is Musharraf's motive for suspending Chaudhry?
Jahangir: Insecure dictators see ghosts 
everywhere. This is not the first time it has 
happened. He forced the Supreme Court justices to 
swear a loyalty oath to him when he came in [via 
a bloodless coup in 1999.] He's insecure. Not 
only does he want a pliant judiciary, he wants a 
totally subservient one. But it's very difficult 
in 2007 to have that with today's free media and 
the independent bar.

Musharraf claims that he is only following 
procedure-that Chaudhry's suspension is standard 
reaction to the charges against the chief justice.
The president has tried once again to lie and to 
mislead everybody. His move is not as casual and 
simple as he puts it. It was obviously 
preplanned. He claims that placing Chaudhry under 
house arrest was a tactical error. Yet for two 
days this "tactical error" continued.

Chaudhry ordered the government to begin looking 
into the hundreds of so-called Islamic extremists 
who had been detained and disappeared. Is this a 
factor in Musharraf's decision?
Musharraf is a very skillful liar, but now he is 
losing his touch. He says: "I've been very 
worried about the missing people, too, but what 
can I do? They are jihadis." He wants the world 
to feel that these disappeared people are Islamic 
militants, which is not true. I would say 60 
percent to 70 percent on the list of the 141 
disappeared people that we have given to the 
Supreme Court are Sindhi and Baluch nationalists 
who are secular. And some of these nationalists 
are well known in the country. They are poets and 
writers, and their work is secular. They have no 
connection to jihad, or Al Qaeda or Taliban. 
Either he's living in denial or is misled. But I 
think he is just lying.

But Chaudhry ruled that the government should 
produce the missing people, didn't he?
As far as the missing people are concerned, 
Chaudhry has not given a single judgment on it. 
He kept the Human Rights Commission's petition 
pending for one and a half months. But since we 
are lawyers of renown, it is very difficult for 
any judge to kick us around-he had to hear it. 
But he went at it very slowly. He did give a 
notice to the government [to act], but he really 
didn't give a judgment. There was not a single 
time when he said that those who kept these 
people should be brought to justice. All he was 
doing was saying to the government, "Let's find 
some people." How can any court close its eye to 
hundreds of people who have disappeared?

Was Musharraf worried that Chaudhry would rule 
against his retaining a dual role as president 
and chief of Army staff later this year?
Whether the president can continue to wear his 
uniform or not was not an issue. We do not think 
that any judge has that kind of courage, 
including Chaudhry. We don't think that these 
judges have gumption or courage.

The police roughed up Chaudhry as he went to his hearing last week.
You even see the chief justice on television 
being dragged by the hair. It was all over the 
newspapers and television. It's a violation of 
human rights. What frightens people the most is 
that if they can treat a chief justice so 
shabbily and humiliate him so shamelessly, then 
nobody is safe. We all feel that we are next in 
line.

What will happen if the Supreme Judicial Council 
exonerates and reinstalls the chief justice?
If the SJC restores [Chaudhry] to the bench I 
don't know if he can perform independently 
because lawyers are championing his cause. Would 
a chief justice who comes back riding on the 
shoulders of lawyers be able to sit on the bench 
and not be able to think about the fact that he 
owes his reinstatement to lawyers?

How do you see this ending?
They [the government] probably feel the longer 
they prolong the proceedings the greater the 
chance that the movement will eventually fizzle 
out. My own assessment is that the situation will 
become defused because lawyers can't stay on 
strike and keep protesting for months on end. But 
this government will make another mistake. This 
government is beyond repair.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

______


[3] 

Indian Express
April 05, 2007

BJP'S TEMPLE INDEX
Why underplay Ayodhya in UP? Party's reacting to popular aspirations

by Pamela Philipose

  Point to be noted. It was not the BJP that 
attempted to raise temperatures on Babri 
Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi in this Uttar Pradesh 
election campaign. It was a Rahul Gandhi 
desperate to get his party on the map that has 
all but rejected it since 1989.

This time, from all evidence, the BJP is agnostic 
about the virtues of flogging the Temple issue, 
and the party's manifesto released earlier this 
week testifies to this. It is widely realised now 
that whipping up communal frenzy against a symbol 
that can be invested with hatred is far easier 
than whipping up communal frenzy for something - 
an observation that Christophe Jaffrelot has made 
in The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian 
Politics. Election results bear this out. From 
its all-time high of 221 seats in the 1991 
elections after the Ayodhya campaign, the BJP 
could manage only 177 seats in the first 
elections after the demolition in 1993.

L.K. Advani may have been the political 
sheet-anchor of the Ayodhya movement, but he was 
among the first to realise that the BJP needed to 
dilute its Temple tinge if it was to grow. 
Indeed, it was only after this was done and after 
Atal Bihari Vajpayee - the leader least 
associated with the Temple campaign - was 
projected as the party's prime-ministerial 
candidate that the BJP could discard the 
'untouchable' status it had acquired because of 
the demolition, strike coalitional deals and come 
to rule India. The Temple is still, of course, an 
intrinsic part of the BJP's ideological and 
programmatic identity, as indeed are the demands 
for a uniform civil code and the scrapping of 
Article 370. It will be faithfully trotted out in 
election manifestos for a long time to come. But 
the party seems to have long ceded the campaign 
to more extremist outfits within the Sangh like 
the VHP and Bajrang Dal.

Yet while electioneering in UP, in contrast to 
campaigns elsewhere, the party had always 
maintained a stridency on the Temple issue. Its 
relatively muted treatment this time is therefore 
intriguing. There could be three reasons for 
this. The first, of course, is the abject failure 
of the card to bring in votes. The 2002 UP 
elections saw a lot of local political activity 
around the Temple. The BJP government at the 
Centre revived the Ayodhya cell mandated to clear 
all impediments in constructing it. The demand 
was also raised that the "undisputed land" around 
the Masjid be handed over to the Ramjanmabhoomi 
Nyas so that work could commence, even as 
artisans were put to work on carving the pillars 
of a "grand temple". Meanwhile, the Bajrang Dal 
announced its plan to train 10 lakh people in the 
martial arts and arm 3 lakh volunteers to 
overcome possible resistance to the project. But 
the 2002 UP elections saw the BJP lose almost 
half the seats it had won in 1996 - from 174, its 
tally came down to 88 - with its vote percentage 
declining from 33.31 per cent to 25.31 per cent. 
It was the BJP's worst performance in 10 years.

The second factor is the transformation of UP. A 
great deal has happened in the 17 years since 
L.K. Advani's first rath yatra, and perhaps 
nothing represented this change more eloquently 
than the response to the gravely provocative bomb 
attack on the Sankat Mochan mandir at Varanasi 
last year. In an earlier era, such an attack 
would have led to a blood bath. This time there 
was a unified voice of condemnation, and the BJP 
and VHP/Bajrang Dal were not allowed to make 
political capital out of the tragedy.

There has also been, meanwhile, the rise and rise 
of caste-based parties like the BSP and the SP. 
Their formidable presence indicates more than the 
mere resurgence of identity politics; it reflects 
the aspirations of the previously dispossessed to 
control power in order to transform their lives. 
Political mobilisation along caste lines is also 
about bijli, sadak, paani plus education, health 
and jobs - but at one remove. UP remains as 
always at the bottom of human development chart, 
but the difference is that today social 
expectations and general awareness are far higher 
in the state than ever before whetted by some 
social and economic progress. According to the 
World Bank and the Directorate of Economics & 
Statistics, Planning Department, UP, the number 
of the poor in the state has declined from 59 
million in 1993 to 48 million in 2002, with 
poverty rates in rural areas falling from 42.3 to 
28.5 per cent. It is the pressure from below that 
is forcing every political party in the current 
fray to go beyond its committed voter base; 
beyond talking to the converted; beyond pressing 
familiar campaign buttons. The SP wants the 
Rajput vote along with its Muslim-Yadav base. The 
BSP is wooing the Brahmins. The BJP is forced to 
do a deal with Apna Dal for its Kurmi-Koeri base, 
and project Kalyan Singh not as a Temple savant 
but as an OBC messiah.

Which brings us to the third aspect: there is by 
no means a consensus within the Sangh Parivar on 
how the Temple issue is to be handled, with the 
hardliners, convinced that a 'Hindu Vote' can 
indeed be consolidated on this issue, pitted 
against those who believe gaining power demands a 
broader appeal. The recent resistance within the 
BJP to allowing Yogi Adityanath to dictate terms 
when it came to seat sharing - even after he had 
threatened to field his own candidates under the 
Hindu Mahasabha banner - underlined this divide. 
It took the considerable weight of the RSS and 
saffron stalwarts like Ashok Singhal to bring 
about a compromise on the issue. Today, the hope 
of consolidating the 'Hindu Vote' is leading the 
party to woo Uma Bharati, whose party has plans 
to contest from a hundred seats in the state.

The results of these elections will decide how 
the BJP will play its Temple card in the future. 
But it is clear that the fallen domes of the 
Masjid and the imagined spires of the Mandir have 
come to acquire a whole new sub-text in the 
heartland today. Listen to what poet Jamuna 
Prasad Upadhyaya from Ayodhya has to say: "Namazi 
bhi nahin hain, pujari bhi nahi hain/ jo woh 
Masjid aur Mandir ke liye ghamgin rehte hain/ 
Ayodhya hai hamari aur hum sab hain Ayodhya ke/ 
phir kyon surkhi mein Singhal aur Shahabuddin 
rehte hain?" (There is nobody to read the namaaz, 
nobody to conduct the puja/ They remain bereft of 
the Masjid and Mandir/ Ayodhya is ours and we are 
Ayodha's/ So why in the headlines do Singhal and 
Shahabuddin remain?)

______


[4]

http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollection/ArticlesArchive/bina7april2007.html
www.sacw.net   >  Communalism Repository - April 7, 2007

THE UTTERANCES OF THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY

by Bina Srinivasan

How blithely he said: Forget about the post 
Godhra violence, citizens of Gujarat, there is so 
much investment coming into the State.   This, in 
his capacity as chairperson, IIM Ahmedabad.

So, now all of us can live happily ever after.

After all, there are shopping malls galore that 
have replaced the simple vegetable markets and 
the like.  And there is Pizza Hut, and MacDonalds 
and so on.  Each name more bizarre than the rest.

I think about Gujarat.  All the time.  And, something starts crumbling. 

What is it that begins to fall apart in Gujarat? 
Is it the notion of democracy, citizenship?   I 
wonder.  Maybe.  Or maybe it is more than that. 
Like sheer humanity.   When my neighbour tells me 
that in 2002, she told her domestic help that she 
should also go and loot the near by fruit 
vendor's place, since everybody was doing it, a 
chill runs through my spine. 

What happened to her, my neighbour?  Who is so 
good to me, so good with plants, with mongrel 
dogs, who gather each day at her gate for their 
meals.   I admire her.  Yet, I don't.

Lately, I heard that there have been more than 30 
'encounter' deaths in 2006 in a span of seven 
months in Gujarat.   Three guesses for the 
religious community of these people, who were 
picked up and done to death.  Just like that.

Come easy.  Go easy.  As they say.   Yet going is 
never easy.  Especially not when you are being 
raped by policemen and then being burnt alive.

You must remember that Gujarat is a fascist 
paradise.  And the erosion of democratic rights 
is complete.   Specially if you are poor, Muslim 
and a woman.  No jokes intended.  I have always 
said so and will reiterate: we saw the 
transformation of the state.   It's a Hindu 
Rashtra.

All of you who are skeptical about these words. 
Just also mark these words.   Gujarat was no 
laboratory, as a friend of mine pointed out today 
to me.  It was and is just ripe.  Like, an 
Alphonso mango.

And now we are told we must forget about Godhra 
and its aftermath.  That means we blank ourselves 
to the 81 relief colonies that exist.   Or the 
number of women who have been forced to take to 
sex work.  Or the families who live in abysmal 
poverty, denied now of sanitation, water supply 
and what have you.   Don't even talk about 
luxuries of education.  Did I hear somebody say, 
education for Muslim girls??  Now, that is a joke.

A Hindu Rashtra out to eliminate a quarter of its citizens.

Let's all forget Hitler too.

I have middle class Muslim friends whose eyes go 
weird with tears when they talk about living in 
ghettos.

Helpless.  Hopeless.

Unless we take to the streets.

The other end of the spectrum, of course, is 
Nandigram.  Screaming and screeching with the 
truth about a world riven with globalisation, and 
a different kind of fundamentalism.

Want to flip a coin and make a choice? Choose. 
And then tell me if you can live happily ever 
after.   I will migrate to your island.

______


[5]

The Guardian
April 9, 2007

MODERNISING FAST - BUT BEWARE IF YOU TRY TO CHOOSE WHO TO MARRY

LOVE STORIES HIGHLIGHT DURABILITY OF CLASS AND RELIGIOUS DIVIDES

Randeep Ramesh in Kosamba

Amir Mirza first noticed his future wife, Swati, 
when she arrived at the home of a physics tutor 
they both went to. Four years on, he still 
recalls it was her "really green" eyes that made 
a lasting impression. In between classes the 
teenagers would chat about grades, exams and the 
difficulties of getting into good colleges. 
Friendship blossomed in the dusty streets of the 
Indian town of Kosamba, in Gujarat.

Soon Amir and Swati were falling in love. Their 
conversations turned to marriage and kids. Few in 
modern-day Britain would consider that unusual. 
But in small town India, Amir and Swati had dared 
to break two social taboos, with disastrous 
results. Not only had they chosen each other 
without parental consent but Amir, a Muslim, 
wanted to marry a Hindu.

What followed was a cautionary tale about love 
and marriage in a country where economic progress 
has brought only superficial changes to a 
conservative society. Marriages are arranged in 
the interests of the family or community - 
choosing a partner is too important a step to be 
left to chance.

Towns in Gujarat are distinguished by a religious 
segregation. In Kosamba Hindus and Muslims live 
on opposite sides of the main road and rarely mix 
more deeply than meeting in markets and schools.

"My parents were against [the marriage]. Her 
parents had problems. Our friends thought it was 
a bad idea. At that time we only had ourselves," 
says Amir. To be together they eloped to the 
southern city of Bangalore.

"We had to get away. I took out all my savings, 
about 8 lakhs (£9,500), and we got married on 21 
June 2006. The happiest day for us."

In an attempt to win over their parents, the 
newlyweds returned to Gujarat a few months later, 
only for a now-pregnant Swati to be kidnapped by 
her family. "They invited us over for lunch and 
then grabbed me from the car with the help of 
some of their friends," she says, blinking away 
the tears.

Drugged and locked up in her brother's house, the 
19-year-old says she was forced to sign papers 
claiming her husband had assaulted her. Later she 
was taken to a hospital where she was 
anaesthetised and an abortion of her 63-day-old 
foetus induced.

"I lay down with terrible stomach pains. There 
was blood and I blacked out. I do not remember 
anything but know I lost our child," says Swati, 
who escaped after two weeks' imprisonment. She 
says her family disowned her after she refused to 
renounce Amir. Swati says her family's actions 
mean she will take a new name, Mariam, and adopt 
"as much Islam" as she can.

The couple are now in hiding but they agreed to 
be interviewed at the Mirza family home. Amir 
says his parents have reluctantly agreed to their 
marriage. "No one is happy," he says.

Across the road in Kosamba's Hindu suburbs is the 
home of one of the men accused by the young 
lovers of kidnapping Swati. Mohan Chowksi, a 
local jeweller, admits comforting Swati's family, 
but denies any crime. "Under our customs Hindus 
should not marry Muslims. But I did not take the 
girl," he says. "The Muslims have brainwashed 
her. She is not madly in love - just mad."

Despite modern India's new malls and shiny office 
blocks, traditional values are deeply entrenched 
in a society where family, caste and religious 
obligations persist. Nowhere is this more obvious 
than in affairs of the heart. An opinion poll of 
15,000 people, carried out in January by Delhi's 
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 
found that 70% of Indians thought parents should 
have the final say in marriage. Less than a third 
of young people said it was OK to "date".

Some couples have defied their parents and 
settled down despite the disapproval - but almost 
all come from the upper and middle classes.

Josephine Joseph, a Christian, had to wait six 
years to marry her Hindu husband, B P Thanmaya. 
Both come from highly educated, liberal families. 
Josephine, 30, says she had had two close 
relationships before; but her family expected her 
to marry a Christian from her home state of 
Kerala.

"My mum kept saying my dad was unwell, and could 
not break the news to him. Really she did not 
know how he would react. There was a lot of worry 
about what [Christians] would say."

"My father-in-law wanted me to convert [to 
Hinduism]. I refused. We wanted to get married to 
each other. It took years but in the end everyone 
had to accept it. It was a church wedding one day 
and a Hindu one the next."

The most vehement opposition in India is to 
inter-caste marriages. In the survey, 
three-quarters of Indians said it was wrong to 
marry a person from a different caste. India 
remains a stratified society and the caste system 
relies on marriages being arranged to preserve 
bloodlines and lineage. A romance across the 
caste divide is often fatal. In the back streets 
of a poor housing colony in east Delhi, a father 
weeps for his dead son. Chander Bhan Kumar, who 
comes from a dalit, or untouchable, community, 
says his eldest boy, Kishan, was killed because 
he dared to marry an upper-caste girl, Laxmi, in 
2005.

Her family abducted her 10 days after the 
ceremony, and the two were kept apart. Mr Kumar 
says Kishan, 26, refused to give up hope. But 
last November he was shot dead while sitting on 
his motorbike in traffic.

Five men, including Laxmi's two brothers and 
father, have been arrested. The police said the 
brothers killed Kishan to "avenge humiliation".

"Kishan loved that girl, but the family could not 
bear marrying into our family," said Mr Kumar. 
"It was shame for them. But my son had his heart 
broken and then was killed. All because of love. 
Even today, being low caste can lead to death."

In many aspects, Indian marriages appear more of 
a commercial transaction than a romantic 
expression. Matrimonial adverts carried on the 
internet and in newspapers generally list the 
caste, age and education of prospective brides. 
Women are marketed as "fair" or with a "wheatish 
complexion". Dowries are widely negotiated, 
despite being illegal.

Dipankar Gupta, professor of sociology at Delhi's 
Jawaharlal Nehru University, says there is "very 
little real freedom to choose one's own way in 
life.

"India is not a liberal society in that sense. 
Marriage is a very obvious example where even 
today most young people cannot easily choose 
their own partner."

Backstory

The triumph of romantic love may be celebrated in 
Bollywood but it is estimated that 95% of Indians 
have arranged marriages. Marriage in India is a 
union between two families rather than two 
individuals. The procedure tends to follow a 
strict pattern. A girl's parents put the word 
about that they are looking for an "alliance". 
India's scores of marriage websites are well 
subscribed to and pages buzz with pictures and 
CVs. Once a suitable boy has been found, families 
exchange summaries that list a person's 
attributes. Horoscopes are also consulted. There 
follows tea so that prospective groom and bride 
can check each other out. If they like each 
other, more discreet meetings can be arranged. 
Once a proposal is accepted, it is not unusual 
for families to check that the groom was honest 
about his job and income. Dowries, under the law, 
can be given but not asked for. In reality there 
is a negotiation. Divorce rates are rising, but 
the law is biased against women - who unlike 
their counterparts in the west are only entitled 
to maintenance and alimony, not a chunk of wealth.

______


[6] 

www.sacw.net > Partition of 1947
http://www.sacw.net/partition/Urvashi9April2007.html

Book Review

MEMORY, LIVED AND FORGOTTEN
Ravinder Kaur's work breaks new ground in the study of Partition to understand
how it still affects its inheritors
by Urvashi Butalia
( The Financial Express, April 1, 2007)

[Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi
by Ravinder Kaur, Oxford University Press, 2007]

Among the recent spate of books on the Partition 
of India, Ravinder Kaur's stands out for its 
meticulous attention to detail and its wealth of 
information. Her focus on the city of Delhi, and 
within that three resettlement colonies, and a 
specific time period stretching from 1947 (not 
August but March when the actual movement of 
people began as a result of the early 
disturbances) to 1965, the year the 
rehabilitation programme was officially closed, 
both marks this book as different and enables a 
close, detailed examination of one aspect of this 
multi-layered history.

Kaur turns her attention to the lived experience 
of Partition among refugees who arrived in and 
made the city of Delhi their home. She examines 
how the shape of the city changed and how the 
process of such change, impacted the lives of the 
migrants. Taking the widely accepted image of the 
Punjabi refugee as enterprising, dynamic, proud, 
and hardworking, she asks why it was that Delhi, 
for example, did not see the kind of violence 
that Karachi fell into very shortly after the 
influx of refugees there. Why was it that the 
Punjabi refugee in Delhi was more acceptable than 
his/her counterpart in Karachi?

But more, Kaur's work breaks new ground in the 
now increasingly important study of Partition and 
memory. Looking at the link between private and 
collective memory, Kaur shows how the two 
influence and shape each other. Partition 
refugees often personalize stories of general 
violence and trauma, telling, and feeling them to 
be their own, and marking the shifts in political 
climate, location, as felt, personal things. Her 
introductory chapter explores this in detail, 
pointing out that many Partition studies have 
looked at the then and after of Partition 
refugees, but have not necessarily addressed the 
process that went into the making of a refugee, 
and into the making of his or her life thereafter.

She further complicates the discussion of memory 
by showing how the fragemented ways in which 
memory is stored in an individual's mind can 
often turn, in the narrating of such accounts, 
into a linear narrative where the connections can 
be borrowed from the received collective 
recounting of the meta narrative of that event. 
In this way, according to her, the meta and micro 
narratives overlap and inform each other.

The whole question of the definition of who is or 
who is not a refugee is also discussed. People 
who had already left their homes for one reason 
or another, before the events of August 1947 and 
who were subsequently unable to return, became, 
willy nilly, refugees. But the official 
definition of refugee did not have the space to 
accommodate them, for in order for it to do so, 
they would have had to have fled across an 
international border. The arbitrariness of dates 
and state definitions touched people's lives in 
profound ways.
Supplementing this question is another key area 
of enquiry: what does it mean to speak of 
refugees being well settled. Who defines what 
being settled is, and Kaur suggests that any 
attempt at definition must engage with the local 
groups that have emerged out of this 'critical 
event' (to borrow Veena Das's formulation), and 
the new modes of action and behaviour that came 
in with them, for, according to her, the 
pre-history of critical events is as important as 
the event itself.

Kaur's conclusions support much of what has been 
learned and offered by recent enquiries into 
Partition and its multiple histories. As more and 
more fields of enquiry open up, it becomes 
increasingly clear that there is no longer one, 
single, undifferentiated narrative of Partition. 
Rather, such a major historical event contains 
within it multiple, layered and nuanced 
narratives - which are in turn encoded within 
various layers of silence dictated by class, 
location, gender, majority or minority status and 
so on and which enable us to seek out its 
multiple histories. In that sense this book is a 
welcome addition to the increasing body of 
literature that is engaged in this important 
exercise.


______


[7]


The Guardian
April 7, 2007

STAR VALUES
This week's premiere of Provoked exemplifies how 
the allure of celebrity can be put to good 
purpose.

by Rahila Gupta

On Tuesday night I attended the Leicester Square 
premiere of Provoked, a British Asian film based 
on the story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, an Asian 
woman who set her brutal husband alight after 10 
miserable years. I was at that vibrant indoor 
mela for three good reasons: as a member of 
Southall Black Sisters, who had secured her early 
release from prison; as a co-writer of her 
auto/biography, Circle of Light (now re-issued as 
Provoked) on which the film was based, and as 
someone who had co-scripted the screenplay of the 
film itself.

From the moment that Aishwarya Rai, Bollywood 
superstar and face of L'Oreal, agreed to play 
Kiran, the production has rarely been out of the 
media spotlight. When she signed on the dotted 
line, the money began to roll in and we were 
assured of audiences who wouldn't normally bother 
with a film about domestic violence. She - along 
with Nandita Das and Steve Mcfadden, of a star 
cast which includes Miranda Richardson, Robbie 
Coltrane and Naveen Andrews - were in attendance 
at the premiere.

Imagine an almost completely full 1,300-seater 
cinema: as a writer and activist, that is truly 
gratifying. For me, writing is politics by other 
means. To bring about change it is necessary to 
raise awareness as widely as possible. Large 
waves of raucous humanity rose and subsided on 
the rumour that Aishwarya Rai was in the 
building. When she finally made her appearance, 
the crowd went berserk. I saw young British-born 
Asians falling at her feet (literally), normally 
a gesture of respect reserved for older people on 
the sub-continent.

There we were, SBS, a small band of activists, 
thrilled at the possibility of reaching those 
sections of our community that are hard to 
mobilise in such large numbers for a "cause". Rai 
had made this possible. Internet chatrooms 
populated by young Asians have been buzzing with 
debate about the rights and wrongs of Kiran's 
actions. Domestic violence has permeated public 
consciousness as never before.

The allegation that Rai herself has faced 
domestic violence also helps to make the point, 
both explicitly and implicitly, that this affects 
women of all classes when it can disempower 
someone as powerful as Rai.

The choice of Rai was a controversial one. It was 
the question I got asked most frequently by 
journalists. Some even made the ridiculous 
argument that she was too beautiful to be beaten. 
It is true that Rai is not renowned for her 
acting abilities. However, this has been her best 
performance to date. There may have been other 
actors who would have done a better job but they 
do not have her pulling power. What we gain in 
reach, we lose perhaps on subtlety and intensity.

But what the goddess giveth, she also taketh 
away. For all her lofty comments in support of 
Kiranjit's plight, Rai refused permission for the 
film's poster to be used on the cover of Kiran's 
reissued auto/biography which made it a less 
attractive proposition to publishers. Our brush 
with celebrity left us bruised rather than 
shining in its glow.

Whilst we should acknowledge that her celebrity 
will deliver audiences, the benefits are mutual. 
Why did Rai agree to take on a role like this or 
indeed why did the director, Jag Mundhra think it 
was an important film to make? Surely SBS has to 
take the credit for that. The historic change in 
the law on provocation was brought about by a 
group of black women doing good, solid, 
old-fashioned, groundbreaking work. Immortalising 
that moment of history on celluloid has its own 
attractions for celebrities like Rai whose 
fluffiness gains weight through participation. 
Maybe this film will help put her career back on 
the road from Bollywood to Hollywood.

Rahila Gupta is on the management committee of 
Southall Black Sisters. She co-wrote the book 
Provoked, with Kiranjit Ahluwalia and the 
screenplay for the film. The book can be ordered 
for £8.99 by emailing 
<southallblacksisters at btconnect.com>

______


[8]  EVENTS:

Sahmat's new art project, MAKING HISTORY OUR OWN, 
at The Indian Women's Press Club, on National 
Street Theatre Day, April 12th, 2007 at 5.30pm

SAHMAT
8 Vithalbhai Patel House
Rafi Marg, New Delhi 110001
Tel: 2371 1276, 2335 1424
E Mail: sahmat at vsnl.com


April 6, 2007.

Sahmat invites you to view their unique new art 
project, Making History Our Own, at The Indian 
Women's Press Club, on National Street Theatre 
Day, April 12th, 2007 at 5.30pm. This year-long 
travelling project was launched here in Delhi, 
and will return next January after crossing the 
country. Artists have been invited to make work 
which interprets their own histories and 
inspirations or their own vision of the National 
histories which will be commemorated this year - 
1857 and 1947. The collective personal visions 
will add up to a visual history of the arts in 
our country. Many senior artists and Sahmat 
regulars are contributing work as well as many 
younger and emerging artists.

They include Gulammohammed Sheikh, Neelima 
Sheikh, Zarina, Arpita Singh, Paramjit Singh, 
Shobha Broota, Vivan Sundaram, Shamshad Husain, 
Pooja Iranna, Jehangir Jani, Ram Rahman, Sunil 
Gupta, Manisha Parekh, Indersalim, Gigi Scaria, 
Meera Devidayal and Lalitha Lajmi amongst many 
others.

The exhibition is on the web at:
www.sahmat.org/makinghistoryourown.html

Indian Women's Press Corp, 5 Windsor Place, New 
Delhi 1. Opposite Meridien Hotel. Till April 
19th, 11 am - 10 pm.


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

Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), 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.