SACW | Sept. 27-28, 2007 | Faith and history

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | September 27-28, 2007 
| Dispatch No. 2454 - Year 10 running

[1] Sri Lanka: Zero tolerance and the fate of victims (Nikhil Mustafa)
[2] Problems of Using Women as Weapons in 
Recounting the Bangladesh War (Sarmila Bose)
[3] Pakistan at Sixty (Tariq Ali)
[4] India:  
     (i) Where fusion cannot work -- faith and history (Romila Thapar)
     (ii) Myth, history and politics (K.N. Panikkar)
     (iii) Crossing the Sethu Rubicon (P Radhakrishnan)
[5] On the India - US Nuclear Deal:
     (i) Down the garden path (Aaron Tovish)
     (ii) Indo-US Nuclear Deal: In Whose 
Interests? (Aditya Sarkar, Anish Vanaik)
[6]  Announcements:
  (i) Publication: 'Chains To Lose - autobiography of Dada Amir Haider khan'
  (ii) Contemporary Miniature Painting in 
Pakistan: Talk by Salima Hashmi (Hong Kong, 16 
October 2007)
  (iii) Health and Human Rights - An intensive 
course (Bombay, 12 - 24 November , 2007)
  (iv) South Asian Feminisms: Gender, Culture and 
Politics (University of Pennsylvania, March 
28-29, 2008)

______


[1]


Daily Mirror
September 27, 2007

ZERO TOLERANCE AND THE FATE OF VICTIMS

by Nikhil Mustafa

Much has been said recently of zero tolerance of 
a number key areas of concern in this country. 
These include on corruption, waste, extra 
judicial killings, abductions, child recruitment, 
impunity etc. Much of these are in the terrain of 
regaling the readers of such assertions. It 
though is not so funny for those who meet such 
excesses. Much coffee has been poured, short eats 
consumed, workshops organized, submissions made 
on these issues. However, the pesty Sunday press 
continues to highlight as does on some Dailies 
that these excesses are part and parcel of our 
daily diet of horrors. It has come to the point 
at which discerning observers believe the reports 
are treated with disdain and dismissed with 
contempt by those who are responsible. Can this 
though go on without some volcanic eruption 
surfacing? See for example rumblings by monks in 
Myanmar. Who would have thought it likely. The 
final word on which has still not been cast but 
predictions are we are seeing an eruption likely 
to lead to change of the kind Aung San Su Kyi has 
stood for under house arrest.

The focus today is on the debates on Child 
recruitment and the statement of the Special 
Representative of the Secretary-General for 
Children and Armed Conflict Dr.Radhika 
Coomaraswamy. "It is also important to point out 
the I have engaged in dialogue for the explicit 
purpose of child protection with all parties, 
both state and non-state, whose actions have a 
significant impact on children. However, such 
dialogue, particularly with non-state actors, 
does not imply or confer political recognition or 
legitimacy of such parties.

"Although a wide range of issues and themes have 
been covered during the course of my visits, I 
have made an effort to focus more concentrated 
attention on four primary concerns: the 
recruitment and use of children as soldiers; 
grave sexual violence against children; the 
safety and access of humanitarian personnel; and 
rehabilitation and reintegration of children."
Sri Lanka

"The mission's findings revealed that the LTTE 
has not complied with its commitments: underage 
recruitments continue and several hundred 
children as verified by UNICEF have not yet been 
released. It was also ascertained that the 
break-away Karuna faction of the LTTE abducts 
children in government-controlled areas of the 
East, with credible evidence that certain 
elements of the Sri Lankan army may have aided in 
this practice.

In addition, humanitarian workers have been 
killed and NGOs threatened in an increasingly 
militarized environment. "Following the visit by 
my Special Advisor to Sri Lanka, the following 
commitments were made: The LTTE gave assurances 
that they would work with UNICEF to accelerate 
the release from their ranks of all children 
under the age of 17, with the objective of 
completing this process by the beginning of 2007. 
(Unfortunately, the LTTE did not commit to the 
full release of children under the age of 18 
years in contravention to applicable national and 
international law. They also committed to better 
training for their military commanders in 
relation to recruitment, and instituting a 
process to discipline those who do not comply; 
The Karuna faction undertook to publish formal 
policy statements forbidding under-age 
recruitment and to release children who may be in 
their ranks. The also agreed to work with UNICEF 
in an effort to trace the whereabouts and arrange 
the release of those abducted children whose 
families have notified UNICEF; The Government of 
Sri Lanka committed to undertake an independent 
and credible investigation into the allegations 
that elements of the Sri Lankan army have aided 
the abduction and recruitment of children by the 
Karuna faction and has recently announced the 
formation of a Committee to Inquire into 
Allegations of Abductions and Recruitment of 
Children for use in Armed Conflict.

"The Security Council Working Group on children 
and armed conflict has requested that a report on 
progress be submitted by October 2007. The 
continuing violence continues to exacerbate the 
problems of IDP children and the delivery of 
humanitarian assistance.

"I must also say there are some positive steps 
with regard to the Government. The Government has 
adopted and we welcome its adoption of a zero 
tolerance policy on child recruitment, it has 
also voluntarily submitted itself to the 1612 
process and it has set up a Committee to 
investigate allegations. And there are some 
positive steps with regard to the LTTE as well: 
for the first time the numbers taken in are less 
than those being released but of course there are 
many more to be released. But the Karuna faction 
continues to function with impunity, much of it 
in the Government-controlled areas so we welcome 
the notion of this Committee to investigate these 
abductions.

There are other areas as mentioned by one of the 
speakers, and as you know in October this year we 
will be presenting a report to the Security 
Council Working Group, the Secretary-General will 
presenting the report, monitoring the six grave 
violations and some of those violations relate to 
humanitarian access and to attacks on schools and 
hospitals."

The words in bold are important to the extent of 
the commendations, expectations and the SG's 
report on 'six grave violations' in Sri Lanka to 
the WG of the Security Council.

The substance of Radhika's comments are derived 
from a visit by her representative which caused 
quite a storm. This was before Sir John Holmes 
became a 'terrorist' and an assortment of actors 
found themselves being named in unflattering 
terms by the 'personal' as well the 'official' 
view points of significant personas from Sri 
Lanka. So what did Alan Rock her representative 
say when he dropped by last time around?

Recommendations

The LTTE must
(i) immediately stop all recruitment of children, 
defined as all persons below the age of 18.

(ii) fulfill its commitment to me to release all 
children in its ranks and work with UNICEF 
towards the return of those children to their 
families;

(iii) train and discipline its command ers so 
that they are well aware that the recruitment and 
deploy ment of children will not be toler ated; 
and

(iv) allow access to all LTTE camps by UNICEF and 
other international protection agencies to 
determine whether child recruits are present.

TMVP/Karuna must
(i) immediately stop all recruitment of children, 
defined as all persons below the age of 18;

(ii) fulfill its commitment to me to release all 
children in its ranks and work with UNICEF 
towards the return of those children to their 
families;

(iii) train and discipline its commanders so that 
they are well aware that the recruitment and 
deployment of children will not be tolerated; and

(iv) allow access to all Karuna camps by UNICEF 
and other international protection agencies to 
determine whether child recruits are present.

Government of Sri Lanka
I would respectfully recommend that the Government of Sri Lanka should
(i) immediately commence a thorough and impartial 
investigation into allegations of complicity by 
Government security forces in the abduction of 
children by the Karuna faction in such a way that

(a) complainants and witnesses will be protected from reprisal by any party;

(b) the results of the investigation will be made public; and

(c) the population of Sri Lanka and the 
international community will have confidence in 
the fairness and integrity of the investigation;

(ii) hold accountable any and all persons that 
might be found to have been complicit in such 
abductions;

(iii) secure the release and return to their 
families of all children abducted by the Karuna 
faction;

(iv) require that the police and Government 
security forces thoroughly investigate all 
complaints of child abductions, no matter by whom 
they were allegedly committed, and seek to find 
and return the abducted children;

(v) enforce the criminal prohibition against 
child recruitment under existing domestic law, 
and enact and enforce such additional measures as 
may be necessary to deter and punish the 
abduction of children in Sri Lanka;

(vi) make every effort to enable and facilitate 
humanitarian access to its population; and

(vii) assess and address the welfare and security 
of the Sri Lankan Muslim community, and 
especially its children and youth.

The Working Group of the Security Council
I respectfully recommend that the Working Group 
propose to the Security Council that it should :

(i) consider targeted measures against LTTE to 
address its continuing failure or refusal to stop 
recruiting and deploying children; those measures 
might include travel bans, asset freezes and an 
arms embargo;

(ii) call upon Member States to assist in the 
application of those measures; and

(iii) consider the adoption of similar measurers 
in relation to TMVP/Karuna should those parties 
not, by the time this matter is next considered 
by the Working Group, implement the 
recommendations made in respect of them and set 
forth above.

The Alan Rock report if one were to read in full 
is candid, damning in terms of evidence of 
horrendous and terrible acts of omission on the 
part those whose task is to provide for the 
safety and well being of civilians particularly 
children.

A discerning reader who may persuse the 
recommendations could reasonably arrive at 
conclusions on whether Radhika was correct in her 
diplomatic utterances on the positives she has 
observed. Point being 'zero tolerance 'true or 
false? This column thinks it is a charade of 
cynical proportions of all engaged in this 
enterprise.

______


[2]

Economic and Political Weekly
Vol 42 No. 38 September 22 - September 28, 2007

LOSING THE VICTIMS: PROBLEMS OF USING WOMEN AS 
WEAPONS IN RECOUNTING THE BANGLADESH WAR

by Sarmila Bose

Every war is accompanied by sexual violence 
against women. That rape occurred in East 
Pakistan in 1971 has never been in any doubt. The 
question is what was the true extent of rape, who 
were the victims and who the perpetrators and was 
there any systematic policy of rape by any party, 
as opposed to opportunistic sexual crimes in 
times of war. This paper brings into focus the 
real victims of sexual violence by pointing out 
the paucity of reliable material, critically 
analysing widely cited testimonies of rape and 
suggesting the next steps to address the issue 
meaningfully.

Full Article at:
http://www.epw.org.in/uploads/articles/11060.pdf


______


[3]

London Review of Books
4 October 2007

PAKISTAN AT SIXTY

by Tariq Ali

Pakistan is best avoided in August, when the 
rains come and transform the plains into a huge 
steam bath. When I lived there we fled to the 
mountains, but this year I stayed put. The real 
killer is the humidity. Relief arrives in short 
bursts: a sudden stillness followed by the 
darkening of the sky, thunderclaps like distant 
bombs and then the hard rain. Rivers and 
tributaries quickly overflow; flash floods make 
cities impassable. Sewage runs through slums and 
posh neighbourhoods alike. Even if you go 
straight from air-conditioned room to 
air-conditioned car you can't completely escape 
the smell. In August sixty years ago, Pakistan 
was separated from the subcontinent. This summer, 
as power appeared to be draining away from Pervez 
Musharraf, the country's fourth military 
dictator, it was instructive to observe the 
process at first hand.
[. . .]

FULL TEXT AT: http://www.lrb.co.uk/

______


[4] India : Faith

(i)

The Hindu
September 28, 2007

WHERE FUSION CANNOT WORK -- FAITH AND HISTORY

by Romila Thapar

Faith and history have been brought into conflict 
once again by being forced to jointly occupy the 
same public space in contemporary India. In 
effect, there should be no conflict if it is 
recognised that the two are irreconcilable and 
that they cannot be fused together. They are 
independent of each other. Their premises, their 
methods of enquiry, and their formulations are 
dissimilar. So instead of trying to conflate 
them, it might be better to concede the 
difference and maintain the distance.

When historians speak of the historicity of 
person, place, or event, they require evidence - 
singular or plural - that proves the existence of 
any of these and this evidence is based on data 
relating to space and time. The two important 
spaces in the Valmiki Ramayana are Ayodhya and 
Lanka, on the location of which scholarly opinion 
differs.

The location of Lanka, for example, has been 
disputed by Indian scholars for the past century 
and remains unidentified with any certainty. Some 
have located it in the Vindhyas - in Amarkantak 
or in Chota Nagpur - and others in the Mahanadi 
delta. The identification with present day Sri 
Lanka is problematic. The earliest name for 
Ceylon judging by Indian and Greek and Latin 
references of the Mauryan and post-Mauryan period 
was Tamraparni (Taprobane in Greek). Ashoka in 
the third century BC, in one of his edicts, 
mentions Tamraparni as on the frontier. Later, 
the more commonly used name was Sinhala or 
Sinhala-dvipa, (Silam or Sieledib in Greek). It 
would seem that the name Lanka was a later 
adoption of the centuries AD.

This becomes puzzling for the historian. If 
Valmiki was referring to Ceylon, then the name 
should have been the one by which the island was 
known, either Tamraparni or else Sinhala, at the 
time of his composition. But since the name used 
is Lanka, which at this time appears not to have 
been the name for Ceylon, then perhaps Lanka was 
located elsewhere. The location of the Ram Setu 
would have to be reconsidered. This has been 
suggested by scholars who have argued that the 
setu was more likely located in a small expanse 
of water in central India and not in the Palk 
Straits. Nor is the setu referred to in every 
version of the story. Alternatively, if Lanka in 
the text is a reference to Ceylon, then the 
composition of the Valmiki poem would have to be 
dated to a later period when the island came to 
be called Lanka. All this uncertainty is quite 
apart from the question of the technical 
viability of building a bridge across a wide 
stretch of sea in the centuries BC.

It is said that the Ram Setu is cultural heritage 
and therefore cannot be destroyed even if it is a 
natural geological formation and not man-made. 
Has the idea become the heritage? To search for a 
non-existent man-made structure takes away from 
the imaginative leap of a fantasy and denies the 
fascinating layering of folk-lore. It would be 
more appropriate to recognise the undersea 
formations in the Palk Straits as a natural 
heritage and protect the relevant areas. We pay 
no attention to the fact that such marine parks 
are as important to our ecological future as 
those visible on the landscape.

That Rama is central to variant versions of the 
story is, in itself, not evidence of historicity. 
If the variants contradict each other as they do, 
this may create problems for those who believe 
that only one of the variants is true. But 
multiple variants enrich the interest of 
historical and comparative analyses in assessing 
the degree to which each approximates, if at all, 
to the historical past or what the divergence 
symbolises.

The two closest in time to the Valmiki are the 
Buddhist and Jaina variants. The Buddhist version 
in the Dasaratha Jataka differs entirely from the 
Valmiki. Rama is the son of the raja of Varanasi; 
exile is to the Himalayas; and there is no 
kidnapping of Sita by Ravana.

The earliest of many Jaina versions, the 
Padmacharita of Vimalasuri, dating to the 
centuries AD, contradicts all earlier versions 
and states that it is doing so in order to 
present the correct version of what happened. It 
differs substantially from the Valmiki narrative. 
Ravana is not a demonic villain but a human 
counter-hero. It presents the story in the 
conceptual framework of Jainism.

These other versions might be objected to or 
dismissed by the person who has faith in the 
Valmiki version since the other versions differ. 
What is of interest to the historian is not the 
number of variant versions, which is impressively 
large, but why major changes were introduced into 
these.

This does not happen with the biographies of 
those who were known to be historical figures and 
who founded belief systems: the Buddha, Jesus 
Christ, Mohammad. Their biographies adhere 
largely to a single story-line and this helps to 
endorse the 'official' narrative of their life. 
Their existence is recorded in other sources as 
well that are not just narratives of their lives 
but have diverse associations. The historicity of 
the Buddha, for example, is established, among 
other things, by the fact that a couple of 
centuries after he died, the emperor Ashoka on a 
visit to Lumbini had a pillar erected to 
commemorate the Buddha's place of birth. This is 
recorded in an inscription on the pillar.

If the current debate had grown from a genuine 
sense of enquiry, historians might have 
participated. Human activity has a historical 
context and this is open to historical comment. 
But it is only too evident that the issue of the 
Ram Setu has become a matter of political 
strategy on the part of those who are mobilising 
in the name of faith, and on the part of those 
who are reacting to the mobilisation. From the 
point of view of archaeology and history, the 
Archaeological Survey of India was correct in 
stating that there is to date no evidence to 
conclusively prove the historicity of Rama. The 
annulling of this statement was also a political 
act. Reliably proven evidence is of the utmost 
significance to history but not so to faith. 
Blasphemy does not lie in doubting historicity.

The historian is not required to pronounce on the 
legitimacy of faith. But the historian can try 
and explain the historical context to why, in a 
particular space and time, a particular faith 
acquires support. And we need to remind ourselves 
that our heritage has been constantly enriched 
not just by those of faith but also by those who 
contend with faith.

If there is a strong faith - in the religious 
sense - among millions of people, then it does 
not require to be protected through massive 
demonstrations and the killing of innocent 
persons, through political mobilisation. Nor do 
archaeology and history have to be brought in to 
keep that faith intact. Faith finds its own place 
and function, as do archaeology and history. And 
the place and function of each is separate.

To say that the partial removal of an underwater 
formation in the Palk Straits is going to hurt 
the faith of millions is not giving faith its 
due. Is faith so fragile that it requires the 
support of an underwater geological formation 
believed to have been constructed by a deity? 
Making faith into a political issue in order to 
win elections is surely offensive to faith?

What is at issue is not whether Rama existed or 
not, or whether the underwater formation or a 
part of it was originally a bridge constructed at 
his behest. What is at issue is a different and 
crucial set of questions that require neither 
faith nor archaeology but require intelligent 
expertise: questions that are being wilfully 
diverted by bringing in faith. Will the removal 
of a part of the natural formation eventually 
cause immense ecological damage and leave the 
coasts of south India and Sri Lanka open to 
catastrophes, to potential tsunamis in the 
future? Or can it be so planned that such a 
potentiality is avoided?

What would be the economic benefits of such a 
scheme in enhancing communication and exchange? 
Would the benefits reach out to local communities 
and if so, how? Equally important, one would like 
to know precisely what role will be played by the 
multinational corporations and their associates 
in India. Who will finance and control the 
various segments of such an immense project? It 
is only when such details are made transparent 
that we will also get some clues to the 
subterranean activities that are doubtless 
already simmering. These are the questions that 
should be asked of this project and that at this 
point in time should be occupying public space.

(Romila Thapar is a distinguished historian of 
ancient India. She is the author of several 
books, including Asoka and the Decline of the 
Mauryas, 1961; A History of India: Volume I, 
1966; Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, 
2002; and Somanatha: The Many Voices of History, 
2005. An expanded version of this article will be 
published in Economic and Political Weekly, 29 
September 2007.)


o o o

(ii)

Frontline
Sep. 22-Oct. 05, 2007

MYTH, HISTORY AND POLITICS

by K.N. Panikkar

Now that Ayodhya is no more a potent force, Ram 
Sethu has emerged as a possible alternative.

THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
DECEMBER 6,1992. Kar sevaks atop the dome of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya.

EVER since Ayodhya became a disputed territory, 
Rama has been at the centre stage of the 
political mobilisation by Hindu communal forces. 
The incidents associated with the Rama Katha were 
invoked one after the other to appeal to the 
religious sentiments of Hindus. It began with a 
claim to the birthplace of Rama at Ayodhya, 
around which Hindu religious sentiments were so 
aroused as to lead to the destruction of the 
Babri Masjid. In the movement culminating in this 
vandalism, several symbols linked with Rama such 
as Rama Jyoti, Rama Paduka and Rama Shila were 
floated.

Yet, over the years, the political appeal of Rama 
has waned despite his strong presence in the 
religious life of believers. The temple issue was 
indeed kept alive through occasional religious 
assemblies and demonstrations. Nevertheless, Rama 
ceased to be of much emotional value that would 
provide political advantage to Hindu communal 
forces. In the elections of 2004, the Ram temple 
did not figure as an issue at all. This can be 
taken as an indication that believers were 
inclined to abandon the Sangh Parivar's 
aggressive Rama and return to worshipping his 
benign image, looking upon Rama Katha, as they 
had for centuries, as an "allegory of the life of 
the spirit as it journeyed through the world".

Rama was almost lost to the political Hindu and 
was being resurrected to his rightful place in 
the religious life of believers. It is in this 
context that the Ram Sethu project has come in 
handy for the Sangh Parivar, to revive the appeal 
of Rama in order to breathe some life into its 
sagging fortunes. Once again the Parivar is 
bracing up to claim Rama for the communal cause. 
In the process it is attempting to turn myth into 
history, blurring the distinction between the 
two, in order to gain legitimacy for its 
political project.

The question of whether the Archaeological Survey 
of India (ASI) should have filed an affidavit in 
the Supreme Court denying the historical 
existence of Rama has led to differences of 
opinion. The government has hastened to disclaim 
the affidavit and withdraw it, obviously fearing 
a Hindu backlash. Unlike the Ayodhya issue, even 
the secular voice has been rather muted. However, 
implicit in the affidavit is an important 
question regarding our approach to the past: Is 
there a distinction between myth and history?
Mythic Character

The ASI, it appeared, was conscious of this 
distinction in projecting the mythological 
character of Rama. The distinction does not imply 
a counterposition of myth and history as false 
and true. Myth is a way in which the human mind 
comes to grips with reality, and therefore, it 
can be said that it refers to reality. Yet, myth 
in itself is not reality. What the ASI has tried 
to state is that Rama was not a historical figure 
but a mythic character.

Similarly, the Ramayana being a literary piece, 
which was not originally a religious text but 
only sacralised later, contains many events and 
incidents that are products of imagination. It 
would therefore be futile to try to correlate 
them with historical fact and establish their 
authenticity. Such a view is not in any way a 
denigration of Rama or a critical reflection on 
the Ramayana. The Ramayana's literary quality, 
whether in the original Sanskrit or in regional 
languages, is well known. So are the ethical and 
moral values it foregrounds, which exercise 
considerable influence over the life of believers.

However, devotion to Rama and the influence of 
the epic have nothing to do with the historical 
veracity of Rama Katha. Devotees consider Rama an 
incarnation and do not test his deeds by the 
yardstick of historical truth. They are moved by 
their devotion and hardly approach the epic from 
a rational viewpoint or try to locate it 
historically. Whether the Ramayana is 
historically true or not is not a factor in their 
devotion. The Sangh Parivar has been trying for 
long to impute to incidents in the epic a 
historical quality to legitimise popular belief, 
under a false notion that belief would be 
reinforced by historical truth.

The panic reaction of the government in 
withdrawing the affidavit in effect endorses the 
Sangh Parivar's attempt to equate myth with 
history. Like the Sangh Parivar, the government 
seems to subscribe to the view that ascribing 
mythic character to Rama and the Ramayana is to 
undermine their importance and to injure the 
sentiments of believers. It overlooks the fact 
that believers consider Rama an incarnation. 
Traditional religious sources represent him so. 
The Matsya Purana, for instance, gives the 
following account: "There is also the account of 
the pastimes of Lord Rama, spoken by Valmiki - an 
account originally related by Brahma in one 
billion verses. That Ramayana was later 
summarised by Narada and related by Valmiki, who 
then presented it to mankind." What accounts for 
the devotion to Rama and the veneration of the 
Ramayana are not their historical veracity but 
their divinity.

Many Ramayanas

K. MURALI KUMAR

BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY workers at a rally in 
Bangalore on July 6, 2005, condemning the 
terrorist attack on the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi 
site at Ayodhya the previous day and the UPA 
government's security lapse.

In an attempt to attribute historical 
authenticity to the epic and its protagonist, the 
Sangh Parivar has been striving to privilege one 
single version of the Ramayana. But the Ramayana 
has several versions. It is difficult to 
ascertain the exact number as all of them are not 
written but are orally transmitted, both in India 
as well as in other Asian countries. A.K. 
Ramanujan has argued that these different 
"tellings" - a term he prefers to versions or 
variants as these imply an invariant or original 
text - differ from one another. They are not mere 
divergences from Valmiki's rendering but entirely 
different tellings.

Highlighting the multivocal existence of Rama 
Katha, Paula Richman has drawn attention to the 
many Ramayanas, of which Valmiki's composition is 
one, Tulsi's another, Kamban's another, the 
Buddhist Jataka yet another and the Jaina 
tradition yet another. Along with them, there are 
also innumerable folk narratives, extant not only 
in India but also in almost all the countries of 
Asia. They were not Valmiki's Ramayana adapted to 
local conditions but substantially different from 
one another, both in form and content. In the 
Buddhist version, Rama and Sita are originally 
brother and sister, a fact that once aroused the 
ire of the Sangh Parivar.

Women's folksongs from Andhra Pradesh challenge 
the accepted values of a male-dominated society 
by questioning the integrity of Rama and 
foregrounding the theme of the suffering that 
husbandly neglect causes a wife. Thus, the Rama 
Katha prevalent in different communities is 
vastly different and defies any attempt to 
identify a universally applicable text. All of 
them draw upon locally specific cultural traits, 
which impart to them a distinct character. Recent 
studies on different Rama Katha traditions 
demonstrate the different tellings of Rama's 
story that vary with regional literary tradition, 
social location, gender, religious affiliation, 
colonial context, intended audience, and so on.

K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar's edited work highlights 
the Asian variations of the Ramayana, and the 
essays in the volume edited by Avadesh Kumar 
Singh focus on the way the epic has found 
expression in regional languages. The many 
Ramayanas connote that the events and incidents 
in the different versions of the epic are not 
historical facts but mythical representations or 
literary imaginations. The debate on whether the 
Ramayana is a true story or whether Rama is a 
historical figure is, therefore, off the mark.

The issue of Ram Sethu requires to be situated in 
the general context of the mythological character 
of the Ramayana. The Sethu Bandhan encapsulates 
within it several qualities of Rama and the 
character of the epic. Sethu Bandhan was a 
humanly impossible task that was made possible 
only by the divine powers of Rama. The 
description of Sethu Bandhan in one version of 
the Ramayana is as follows: "During the first day 
of construction, monkeys laid a hundred and 
twenty miles of rocks, which floated upon the 
ocean. They worked very swiftly, and were happy 
to see the bridge take shape. The second day, 
they set down a hundred and sixty miles of rocks; 
the third day, a hundred and sixty-eight miles; 
and the fourth day, their strength increasing, 
they completed a hundred and seventy-six miles. 
On the fifth and final day, the monkeys 
constructed a hundred and eighty-four miles of 
bridge, up to Mount Suvala on the northern shore 
of Lanka. Thus when the bridge was finished, it 
was eighty miles wide and eight hundred miles 
long."

Obviously, a vanar sena would not have achieved 
this feat. The question, however, is not its 
possibility or impossibility but how it enriches 
the mythical and divine quality of Rama. 
Obviously Sethu Bandhan is a myth.

But then, when myths become part of the belief 
system, they can be put to use for different 
purposes. Nobody in India has understood this 
better than the Sangh Parivar as is evident from 
the manner in which they have manipulated the 
myth and history of Ayodhya. Ram Sethu is an 
opportunity they are unlikely to let go of easily.

The distinction between history and myth is well 
recognised. Myths are in a way the opposite of 
historical facts, in the sense that, unlike 
historical facts, what constitutes a myth is not 
verifiable. Despite this, myths and history 
cannot be counterpoised as true and false.

THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY

L.K. ADVANI ON the Somnath-Ayodhya rath yatra of 
1991. Sixteen years later, the BJP apparently 
hopes Ram Sethu will yield the same political 
mileage as Ram temple.

In fact, myths also represent reality but 
represent it symbolically and metaphorically. 
Yet, myth masks reality. Therefore, myths are 
illusory representations of man and his world. 
Given their illusory nature, myths may not help 
to unravel the historicity of an event. Most 
myths are in a way timeless. Nevertheless, myths 
being a reflection of reality constitute a source 
of historical reconstruction and a means to 
understanding reality. Given this overlap, myths 
are used for a variety of purposes. They often 
serve as an agency of legitimisation, as in the 
case of Parasurama reclaiming land from the sea. 
They may also be employed for explaining a 
natural phenomenon, as in the case of Helios' 
chariot in Greek mythology.

The use of myths has been integral to the 
politics of the Sangh Parivar. Beginning with the 
movement for the construction of the temple at 
Ayodhya, the Sangh Parivar has been engaged in 
providing authenticity to various myths 
surrounding the life of Rama. The central issue 
of the Ayodhya movement was the identification of 
the exact birthplace of Rama, which was difficult 
to ascertain owing to the lack of evidence. Local 
tradition identifies Ayodhya through a popular 
myth, which runs as follows: "After Treta Yuga 
when Ram was supposed to have been born Ayodhya 
could not be located. While Vikramaditya was 
looking for Ayodhya, a saint told him to leave a 
calf loose and the place at which the calf 
secreted milk would be the place where Ayodhya 
was located. Vikramaditya did as he was told, and 
where the calf secreted milk he located Ayodhya." 
This mythical story became the basis for the 
identification of Ayodhya as well as the 
birthplace of Rama.

In the accounts given by leaders of the Vishwa 
Hindu Parishad (VHP), the place of birth becomes 
an indisputable fact of history. Following this 
identification, the VHP accorded historical 
status to a series of myths. These include the 
existence of the Ram temple at the site of the 
Babri Masjid and the attempts by Hindus to 
reclaim the temple through 77 battles against the 
Muslims in which 300,000 sacrificed their lives. 
These myths have now become authentic histories; 
not only are they paraded as historical facts, 
they have found place in textbooks as authentic 
history. Over a period of time, many of these 
facts could become part of popular history also.

The politics of the Sangh Parivar is essentially 
irrational. The attempt to turn myth into history 
and to use it for political advantage is rooted 
in irrationality. Now that Ayodhya is no more a 
potent force, Ram Sethu has emerged as a possible 
alternative. The Sangh Parivar is gearing up to 
exploit it. Would the ruling establishment take a 
rational and scientific stand and not succumb to 
the fear of the irrational?

K.N. Panikkar, a former professor of history at 
Jawaharlal Nehru University and a former 
vice-chancellor of Sree Sankaracharya University 
of Sanskrit, is currently the chairman of the 
Kerala Council for Historical Research.



o o o

(iii)

The New Indian Express
September 26 2007

CROSSING THE SETHU RUBICON

by P Radhakrishnan

The ongoing controversy and hullabaloo over the 
alignment cutting across the Adam's Bridge-Ramar 
Sethu — the undersea ridge between Rameswaram and 
the Sri Lankan coast — in the Sethusamudram 
Shipping Channel Project (SSCP) is the latest in 
a series which should raise a number of issues 
about the nexus between faith and politics, and 
its fallout for development. Of these at least 
seven are relevant not only in the context of the 
Ramar-Sethu row but also in other contexts where 
faith is often a bogey for diversionary politics 
and short-term political gains.

One, in a country where democracy and secularism 
are still nascent in the minds of its unwashed 
millions and pale before faith, what the pillars 
of democracy — legislature, executive, and 
judiciary — the intelligentsia as a class, and 
the media at large should do is to wean people 
away from peripheral and superficial aspects of 
faith, and faithbased politics through systematic 
inculcation of and pragmatic approach to 
diversity and development.

It is our failure to do this that caused 
demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 
1992. In retrospect many of us would admit that 
the demolition could have been averted if we had 
a parliament (central legislature) which was not 
made up at that time — as it is to a large extent 
even today — of politicians who carried their 
faith — inevitably a cultural baggage — only 
within themselves as a personal matter. That is 
precisely how the politicians could be edifying 
to the masses and tell them about faith "thus 
far, no further", that is faith is essentially a 
personal matter which should have no spill over 
and spin off effects in public spaces and should 
not be a matter of public insignia.

The same could be said about our judiciary which 
has on occasions digressed instead of trying to 
bring to bear upon itself pragmatic secularism, 
secularist pragmatism, and secular and rational 
humanism as hallmarks of a secular judiciary. The 
recent pronouncement by a high court judge in his 
judgment that Bhagavad Gita should be made the 
national Dharmashastra, which caused a furore in 
different parts of the country, is only part of a 
longer story.

The same is true of the executive: the demolition 
was the culmination of the drifting and dithering 
of the Narasimha Rao government. If the media was 
sensational then it is more so now on its 
incessant pursuit of instant hype. More so when 
the younger generation of the media persons (in 
particular of the TV channels) has hardly any 
sense of history and society.

Two, as globalisation comes to mean development 
of material and human resources at a fast pace 
and turning technology itself into spiritualism, 
those developing countries which do not chant the 
globalisation mantra, adapt to its needs, pace, 
and rhythm, and harness resources for their own 
development, are bound to be left behind and even 
caught up in the eddy of a complex process of 
planetary dimensions. This means that we cannot 
afford anymore to live in the past and the 
present simultaneously, and if there are 
roadblocks on our path to development which are 
not of vital concern to the nation, we ought to 
remove them and keep going.

It is from this perspective that the Ramar-Sethu 
row should be understood. The issue is not one of 
faith but of development. Those who genuinely 
believe Rama as real, as divine, as an avatar, 
and who should continue to be revered and 
worshipped, already have a surfeit of sites and 
structures in different parts of the country. 
Even if Ram-Sethu was a creation or legacy of 
Rama, it is as archaic as Rama and is only 
peripheral in the scheme of divine things in 
modern social settings; no devotee has any access 
to it. In an age of lebensraum religious 
communities have begun to give up some of their 
traditional belief systems and related practices 
and reconcile to the needs of modernity. One 
example is Christianity, which has in principle 
accepted cremation as against burial for want of 
space, and in some places where cremation has not 
yet been adopted the practice of burial itself is 
undergoing different forms of change for making 
space to the new-comers. Another example is 
Islam. Some of the middle-east countries have not 
let mosques stand in the way of their development 
projects. A third example is Hinduism. For want 
of space sections of them who practised burial in 
the past have switched to cremation. However, as 
a country India is probably an exception where 
sites of faith hinder development. We have any 
number of such sites even in the highways and 
bye-ways, and even if these sites are unused and 
totally neglected for ages they are not removed 
for fear of communal orgy. Far from vouching for 
our democratic, diversity, pluralistic and 
secular credentials this clearly shows our lack 
of political and administrative will.

Three, if comprehensive feasibility studies have 
convinced the government that the SSCP will 
indeed contribute to national development and 
futuristic impact-assessment studies have 
convincingly shown that the project will have no 
adverse ecological, environmental, and social 
effects, the government should not feel hamstrung 
by cries of faith. If for some reason the 
feasibility and impact assessment studies have 
shown that the dredging is not worth the money 
being spent on it the government should not have 
undertaken it at all. But as of now we do not 
have adequate information on this.

Four, as the idea of dredging away the 
Ramar-Sethu dates back to the 1860s if not 
earlier, which got formally crystallised after 
India's independence, citizens have a right to 
know why the attempts since the 1950s at dredging 
did not materialise, why they were abandoned, and 
if they were abandoned what was the determining 
role of faith vs. feasibility.

Fifth, as the decision for dredging was taken 
during the NDA government at the Centre the BJP's 
sudden love of Rama in the sea-bed of Ravana is 
political chicanery at its worst.

Six, what was the role of the Archaeological 
Survey of India in a matter which is essentially 
in the realm of the Geological Survey of India? 
By involving the ASI the government itself has 
unwittingly given the Ramar-Sethu a heritage 
status and invited trouble.

Seven, in a development project such as the SSCP 
what should be the role of the judiciary? Should 
it stay the project merely because it has been 
petitioned, or should it have dismissed the 
petitions outright on grounds that in development 
projects conceived by the executive it will 
interfere only if there is flagrant interference 
with and violation of faith that too as an 
interpretation of the constitutional provisions 
concerning the right to belief and religion and 
not in the context of heritage?

The writer is senior professor of sociology at 
the Madras Institute of Development Studies, 
Chennai

______


[5] ON THE US INDIA NUCLEAR DEAL:

(i)

The Hindu
September 26, 2007

DOWN THE GARDEN PATH

by Aaron Tovish

Good leadership looks as far down the road as 
possible to anticipate obstacles and detours. On 
the nuclear deal, a combination of U. S. and 
Indian hubris has led India down the garden path 
without any clear strategy for reaching the 
ultimate destination other than economic 
enticements and intimidation.

I write as a partner of India in several 
important nuclear disarmament initiatives in the 
1980s and 1890s. Good friends warn you when you 
are making a mistake. It is in that spirit that I 
say the following difficult words.

Indian government leaders have made a major 
mistake thinking the United States could be their 
battering ram to break out of their nuclear 
isolation. Although many illusions have been 
carefully cultivated, the final result will be an 
embarrassing failure. It is time for the leaders 
to look for face-saving ways out of this debacle.

Until recently, India was as articulate as any 
country in the international arena in pointing 
out and condemning the pronounced unilateralist 
tendencies in U.S. foreign policy since the 
advent of the Bush administration. So how has it 
failed to see that, for the rest of the world, 
the U.S.-India deal falls squarely into this 
unilateralist pattern - and thus will be rejected 
by many countries just as surely as the other 
unilateralist policies of the U.S.? If the 
U.S.-India deal could be pursued unilaterally, 
then whether or not a good idea, it could at 
least be implemented. But the deal depends, at 
the very least, on a universal absence of 
opposition in the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers 
Group (NSG) and, as I will show below, the 
192-member Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 
(NPT). As anyone who has followed the lame 
64-member Conference on Disarmament for the last 
decade can testify, consensus is a non-starter in 
the diplomatic world.

No one should be fooled by the fact that the deal 
appears to be progressing steadily to date - 
although even that might be a too-kind 
description. It is true that no NSG country has 
as yet openly declared an intention to stop the 
deal cold. It is clear that to do so would be to 
incur the united wrath of the U.S. and India, as 
well as a dozen other countries eager for nuclear 
reactor contracts. So for now the countries that 
oppose the deal are hoping that it will implode 
of its own accord. This way they would be spared 
the onerous task of stepping into the breach. But 
as soon as it becomes clear (if indeed it ever 
does) that the deal has reached the stage for 
action by the NSG, they will gird themselves and 
step forward.

Do not, however, expect direct resistance. The 
following logic could well lead to a more 
effective opposition than frontal opposition. 
Such is the nature of the trap India and the U.S. 
have set for themselves.

The fundamental issue that guarantees a veto is 
violation of Article I of the NPT. Countries that 
take their obligations under treaties seriously 
(unfortunately the U.S. is not one of them) will 
want strong assurances that peaceful nuclear 
commerce is not directly or indirectly benefiting 
a nuclear weapons programme. To many it is 
obvious that supplying foreign uranium for the 
peaceful programme frees up domestic supplies for 
the military programme. This goes against the 
spirit of Article I, which bans assistance that 
"in any way" assists in the acquisition of 
nuclear weapons by non-nuclear-weapon states. For 
some countries that will be reason enough to 
oppose the deal.

But many others will be taking a narrow 
interpretation of Article I - that is, direct 
assistance must be avoided. For them the key 
thing will be confidence that a true firewall has 
been erected between the peaceful and military 
programmes. As was learned in Iraq in the early 
1990s, site-specific safeguard agreements are 
inadequate to that task. Thus, it will be 
essential to have several of the key elements of 
the so-called 'Additional Protocol' complementing 
the safeguard agreement. These countries will 
insist that there can be no action in the NSG 
until India and the IAEA have concluded all 
safeguard and Additional Protocol negotiations.
Contradiction

Already this sets up a contradiction with the 
U.S.-India deal. It would allow commerce to begin 
only after the site-specific safeguards are 
operational, but would leave the Additional 
Protocol out of the picture until it "enters into 
force." This is one example of why the U.S. is 
precisely the wrong partner to help India 
overcome its isolation. The U.S. negotiators 
could not press India on this issue because the 
U.S. itself has yet to bring its Additional 
Protocol into force. This tempted the Indian 
government to score a point for sovereignty (and 
supposed equality with the U.S.) but the 
long-term effect is a collision course with the 
NSG.

The Additional Protocol comes in three flavours: 
one for nuclear-weapon states parties to the NPT; 
another for non-nuclear-weapon states parties to 
the NPT; and a third for neither of the above. 
NSG members will insist on seeing the Additional 
Protocol with India so that they can be sure that 
specialised equipment, specially trained 
personnel, and even specific designs and 
operating manuals are not transferred from the 
peaceful programme to the military programme. In 
short, a thorough Additional Protocol is a sine 
qua non for their confidence that the deal will 
not lead to violations of Article I.

This Additional Protocol cannot, therefore, look 
anything like the nuclear-weapon states' 
Additional Protocols, which deal almost 
exclusively with export matters. India cannot 
expect to negotiate with the IAEA on an equal 
footing with the nuclear-weapon states where 
there is no pretence even of establishing a 
firewall between the peaceful and military 
programmes. If India forces this issue, it might 
succeed in getting its way with the IAEA, where a 
majority of the Board of Governors can help force 
the issue, but it will set itself up for a fall 
in the NSG, where any single member can veto it.

But it will not be necessary for any NSG member 
to use the veto, since it will have a much easier 
basis for opposition. If India wishes to be 
treated as a nuclear-weapon state, despite the 
fact that it does not qualify as such according 
to the definition given in the NPT (having tested 
a nuclear weapon before 1969), then the effect of 
the deal going through would be to create a de 
facto sixth nuclear weapon state. As such, this 
becomes a matter of direct concern to the 
non-nuclear-weapon states parties to the NPT, who 
have adhered to the treaty on the basis of there 
being only five recognised nuclear-weapon states. 
Thus, the NSG should not take any action until 
the NPT states parties have had a chance to 
consider these far-reaching implications of the 
U.S.-India deal.

The next opportunity for the NPT parties to take 
up this issue will be the 2010 NPT Review 
Conference. (Preparations are already under way 
for that conference, but those preparatory 
meetings have no power to take decisions on 
substantive matters.) The operative positions of 
the states parties are those adopted by consensus 
in 1995 and 2000, i.e., with the concurrence of 
the U.S. All of them flatly contradict the very 
premise of the U.S.-India deal. (So we see the 
ugly head of U.S. unilateralism rising again.) A 
nuclear-weapon-state-like Additional Protocol 
would require the NPT parties to agree that India 
should no longer be considered a 
non-nuclear-weapon state. And that would have to 
be done by consensus. Not very likely, to say the 
least.

The only alternative for action on the deal 
before 2010 would be to force the issue in the 
NSG. But that would certainly elicit several 
vetoes. This would wreck not only the NSG but 
also the NPT. It is unlikely that the U.S. would 
be willing to go down that road - even if the 
administration were willing, Congress would not 
let it. In short, India would be left standing 
alone at the altar.

If India wants to avoid this long-drawn-out, 
losing battle, it will need to agree to an 
Additional Protocol that is closer to a 
non-nuclear-weapon state's Additional Protocol 
than a nuclear-weapon state's. This would be a 
first indication of distancing itself from the 
U.S. unilateralist approach. It is a necessary 
condition for going forward multilaterally with 
the deal, but not a sufficient condition. To 
satisfy all NSG states, India would have to 
further distance itself from its erstwhile 
sponsor by signing the Comprehensive Test Ban 
Treaty (CTBT).

The U.S. signed the CTBT in 1996 but has since 
declared that it has no intention of ratifying 
it, thereby creating an obstacle to the treaty's 
entry into force. The vast majority of NSG 
members have not merely signed but have also 
ratified the treaty. They will not accept a deal 
in which resumed testing is not only condoned but 
there are special contingency plans to assist the 
testing nation. Again, in the absence of strong 
assurances to the contrary, they will defer the 
matter to the NPT Review Conference, which has a 
longstanding stake in the CTBT.

It is not for me to decide for India whether 
concessions on the Additional Protocol and 
nuclear testing would be wise - although I have 
no doubts they are. I am only describing what 
lies ahead. Good leadership looks as far down the 
road as possible to anticipate obstacles and 
detours. A combination of U.S. and Indian hubris 
has led India down the garden path without any 
clear strategy for reaching the ultimate 
destination other than economic enticements and 
intimidation.

There will be a natural urge to find a scapegoat 
for this. The obvious candidate will be the 
countries that ultimately stand up and say, 'No.' 
Before you vent your frustrations on these 
countries, reflect for a minute. India's 
longstanding criticism of the NPT was that it 
accorded mainly privileges to the designated 
nuclear-weapon states and mainly obligations to 
the non-nuclear-weapon states. These courageous 
countries are just resisting a yet more 
discriminatory nonproliferation regime. You 
cannot in good conscience blame them.

India has a profound heritage of progressive 
leadership. That leadership used multilateral 
fora to advance global security concerns. Let us 
hope that this recent flirtation with 'great 
power' unilateralism is soon looked back upon as 
a brief aberration.

(Aaron Tovish, a disarmament expert, is former 
Director of Peace and Security Programs with 
Parliamentarians for Global Action in the 1980s 
and 1990s. He worked closely with Indian 
government officials on two major arms control 
initiatives: the Six Nation Peace Initiative and 
the Partial Test Ban Treaty Amendment. He now 
works for the Mayor of Hiroshima, President of 
Mayors for Peace, and is responsible for the main 
activity of the organisation: the 2020 Vision 
Campaign, which is akin to the Rajiv Gandhi Peace 
Plan. The opinions expressed in this article are 
his own.)


o o o o

(ii)

Economic and Political Weekly
September 22, 2007

INDO-US NUCLEAR DEAL: IN WHOSE INTERESTS?

A report of a recent international conference in 
New Delhi that critically discussed the foreign 
policy, nuclear weapons and nuclear power aspects 
of the Indo-US deal.

by Aditya Sarkar, Anish Vanaik

The public debate about the Indo-US nuclear deal 
in the English language media has been 
characterised by a frighteningly narrow set of 
reference points. The space for a genuine and 
informed debate has been crushed between 
professions of its technical complexity, the 
assumption that a national interest will be 
served by the deal, and the charge that 
opposition to it is based upon a blind 
"anti-Americanism".1

Consequently, the range of views offered has been 
extremely narrow, typically consisting of 
imputations and assertions rather than 
information. The importance of the International 
Conference on the Indo-US Nuclear deal, held at 
Delhi on August 31 and September 1, must be 
understood against this perniciously anti- 
democratic spirit within which the debate had 
hitherto been conducted.

The conference, organised jointly by the Heinrich 
Boll Foundation (HBF), the Coalition for Nuclear 
Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) and Popular 
Education and Action Centre (PEACE) was conceived 
of as tackling individually the three main planks 
upon which the deal was being championed - the 
strategic dimension, nuclear weapons and nuclear 
energy.  It began, however, with a keynote ad- 
dress by Jean Dreze of the Delhi University and G 
B Pant Institute. His presentation, made more 
powerful by the calm and assured manner of his 
delivery, pointed towards all the dangerous kinds 
of irrationality that inevitably accompany 
nuclear questions.

To a packed auditorium, with some sitting in the 
aisles for lack of space, he pointed out that 
rational responses to developing situations were 
the first casualties in the kind of escalatory 
dynamic that nuclear deterrence demands. The 
mirage of deterrence - that it would end all 
kinds of conflict through preparing for 
annihilation - had repeatedly proved illusory 
over the last century. His exhortation to 
remember the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 
and the dangers of a nuclear conflagration in 
south Asia was important because these are 
precisely the kinds of real contexts and 
consequences that are so easily and disastrously 
lost sight of in the rush towards taking a 
"tougher" or more "realistic" stand on questions 
of foreign policy. Since they all operated upon 
this plane of nuclear deterrence, he suggested, 
there could be no such thing as a "responsible 
nuclear power". Dreze's address had the salutary 
effect of reminding those present that the bigger 
picture must not be lost sight of amid the 
minutiae of the nuclear deal.

The first panel took up the strategic dimension 
of the deal. The first speaker, Achin Vanaik of 
Delhi University and member of the CNDP, pointed 
out that viewing the outcomes of the deal through 
the lens of Indian aspirations for great power 
status was the opposite of where an analysis of 
the deal's consequences should begin. Rather, the 
stakes for which the US was playing, given that 
it is clearly the more powerful party here, must 
be understood before making sanguine claims about 
India's independent foreign policy. The recent 
stance of the Indian government on a variety of 
issues (such as the Asian energy grid or the vote 
against Iran in the IAEA) demonstrated that the 
US was achieving its greatest victories in 
capturing the hearts and minds of the Indian 
elite, thus sapping any long-term determination 
to emerge as a strong proponent for a more just 
international order.  The second speaker,  T 
Jayaraman of the Tata Institute of Social 
Sciences, Mumbai, suggested that India, so long a 
critic of an unjust international nuclear order, 
was now looking to benefit from that order.  The 
US, he maintained, far from disman- tling the 
non-proliferation order, was bent upon creating a 
new, even more unequal and dangerous one of which 
this deal formed a cornerstone.

The third speaker, Andrew Lichterman, a nuclear 
disarmament activist and lawyer associated with 
The Western States Legal Foundation, California, 
United States, suggested that the nuclear deal 
must be located within a broader integration of 
global elites. The package of economic and 
military contracts that the "strategic alliance" 
would entail, were the currency through which a 
network of empire could be maintained. The 123 
might well be followed by a 126, referring to the 
number of fighter planes that India might well 
end up purchasing from the US. A struggle against 
the nuclear consequences of such an alliance 
cannot, therefore, remain divorced from this much 
broader front of struggle against an increasingly 
unequal domestic regime. Ejaz Haider, the last 
speaker at the session, news editor of the Friday 
Times, Lahore, claiming to be a realist, 
suggested that India could, in fact, serve its 
national interest by joining the US bandwagon 
strategically. Inasmuch as this would have 
implications for Pakistan, it would pursue a 
policy accordingly.

Both of these conclusions were disputed during a 
very lively question and answer session. 
Jayaraman pointed out that one of the most 
distasteful aspects of the atmosphere in which 
the deal had been carried through was the 
complete lack of dialogue with Pakistan on the 
question, if only to reassure them that this deal 
was not a provocation. A Pakistani gentleman from 
the floor pointed out that we need to think as 
south Asians and governments had repeatedly used 
the bogey of "internal matters" to keep us 
separated, when the reality was that these deals 
had immediate effects upon all the people of 
south Asia.

National Interest?

In response to one of the questions, Vanaik also 
clarified his contention that the whole paradigm 
of "national interest" is a fiction.  Different 
classes have different interests domestically, 
and it is folly to think that, somehow, these 
coincide on international questions. In fact, as 
things stand, the constant claim of policy being 
in the "national interest" is little more than a 
mask for the pursuit of the interests of the 
elite.   The second session explored the impact 
of nuclear weapons, in the light of the Indo-US 
deal, on the possibilities of global and south 
Asian disarmament. From different perspectives, 
the four speakers at this session all concluded 
that the present regime of nuclear power in south 
Asia has produced a major, crippling threat to 
the possibility of global nuclear disarmament, in 
the form of a hawkish and belligerent process of 
nuclear weaponisation, with an inherently 
escalatory logic.

The first speaker at this session was Kanak Mani 
Dixit, the editor of the Nepal- based magazine 
Himal Southasia. Dixit's talk foregrounded the 
real dangers of nuclear conflict in south Asia, 
in the light of the flight time of missiles 
between India and Pakistan (six or seven 
minutes), the high risk of nuclear accidents, the 
fallout of which cannot be contained within 
national boundaries, and the per- vasiveness of a 
chest-thumping military nationalism in both 
countries. It emphasised the importance of an 
anti-nuclear movement based on mass mobilisation 
in the vernaculars of different regions. Dixit 
pointed out that the encasement within US 
security architecture has meant refusal of 
another energy choice that had been open to India 
- the proposed Iran-India-Pakistan gas pipeline, 
which, besides producing energy, would have also 
created genuine and healthy south Asian economic 
link- ages. He suggested that pushing for an 
anti-nuclear commitment in the soon-to-be drafted 
Nepali constitution might help create a climate 
of anti-proliferation.  Dixit was followed by 
Praful Bidwai, independent journalist and 
founding mem- ber of the CNDP. Bidwai offered a 
critique of the creeping consensus shared by pro- 
ponents of the deal and, at least tacitly, by its 
opponents on the official Indian left.  Both 
sides, he argued, have been trapped within a 
discourse of national sover- eignty that neglects 
the deeply irrespon- sible nature of India's 
nuclear programme.  A "responsible" nuclear 
weapons state, he stressed, is a contradiction in 
terms, and India's claims to such 
"responsibility" are plainly fraudulent. As early 
as 1974, India, after signing an agreement on the 
purely peaceful use of nuclear technology, went 
on to illegally use imported fuel for a nuclear 
test. The present deal, by offer- ing imported 
nuclear fuel and reactors, liberates India's 
domestic uranium reserves for weaponisation. In 
the light of escalat- ing military expenditure 
(which has doubled in the last 10 years), and 
massive arms procurement, it is clear that the 
Indian government and security experts have no 
compunctions about triggering a subcontinental 
arms race. Bidwai also pointed out that India has 
consistently rejected all measures and talks 
aimed at the achievement of disarmament, 
replacing an earlier commitment to multi lateral 
agreements against nuclear weapons with a 
regressive emphasis on purely bilateral treaties 
that seek to legitimise Indian nuclear strategy.

If further confirmation of India's role in 
triggering off a south Asian arms race was 
needed, it was provided by Abdul Hameed Nayyar, 
president of the Pakistan Peace Coalition and 
member of the Inter- national Panel on Fissile 
Materials, who offered an account of the 
Pakistani security establishment's response to 
the Indian nuclear programme. The Indo-US deal 
enables India to produce 60-100 weapons- grade 
plutonium a year, and raises its production of 
nuclear weapons from six to 26 annually. Within 
the mad logic of escalatory nuclear deterrence, 
this was bound to trigger off similar ambitions 
in Pakistan. Nayyar demonstrated that this is 
precisely what has been happening, with the 
construction of new plutonium production and 
reprocessing plants to increase fissile material 
production. The logic of "credible minimum 
deterrence" that undergirds the weaponisation 
programmes of both countries, is clearly 
escalatory and dangerous, as Nayyar's talk 
chillingly reminded us.

Oliver Meier, a representative of the Arms 
Control Association in Europe, and a fellow at 
the Institute of Peace Research and Security 
Policy, Hamburg, provided insights into the wider 
global context of the deal, in particular the 
hesitancy on the part of Germany, as a member of 
the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to give  the 
deal a green signal. India, he pointed out, has 
not accepted all the safeguards prescribed by the 
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Full 
acceptance of these safeguards is usually a 
prerequisite for NSG clearance, which the deal 
requires  for its operationalisation. India's 
refusal to accept the full set of safeguards, 
however, as Bidwai's talk had already emphasised, 
is in line with its consistent opposition to any 
form of global regulation for the most globally 
destructive form of energy.  Both the first two 
sessions - on the strategic embrace of the US by 
India and the dangers of nuclear weapons 
proliferation - provided a counterweight to the 
enormous hawkishness of the Indian state and 
security apparatus. But the third session, 
focusing on the dangers of civilian nuclear 
energy regime, addressed the even wider audience 
of those who are uncomfortable with nuclear 
weaponisation but believe in the necessity and 
manage- ability of civilian nuclear energy. The 
speakers at this session were Felix Matthes from 
the Institute of Applied Ecology, Berlin, Sudha 
Mahalingam, member of the Petroleum and Natural 
Gas Regulatory Board, Delhi, Sanghamitra Gadekar, 
social activist and editor of the anti-nuclear 
magazine Anumukti, and M V Ramana, member of the 
International Panel of Fissile Materials and 
fellow of the Centre for Interdisciplinary 
Studies in Environment and Development, 
Bangalore.  Matthes, like Meier the day before, 
provided a German perspective on India's nuclear 
programme, in the light of the history of the 
German civilian nuclear energy programme, which 
is now being phased out. He emphasised the huge 
extent of the damages - computed in financial 
terms amounting to over 2,000 billion euros - in 
the event of a nuclear accident.  A single major 
nuclear accident, in other words, may terminate a 
country's energy policy and wreck any gains made 
from nuclear energy. He argued that recent German 
experience showed that renewable sources of 
energy may provide a more fruitful bedrock of 
energy policy. Sudha Mahalingam's talk amplified 
the theme of the costs of nuclear energy, and 
exploded the myth that it is "Too Cheap to 
Meter".  A single nuclear reactor, she pointed 
out, was unlikely to have a purchasing cost of 
below $ 1,500/kwh. Adding the interest 
accumulating during construction, the total costs 
of a nuclear reactor would amount to Rs 8-10 
crore/MW. Fuel costs, too, have risen to $ 
105/pound. The risk of a nuclear accident would 
also have to be borne financially by the 
government, which would bear virtually unlimited 
li- ability. Nuclear energy, in other words, is a 
much more expensive business than its 
propagandists claim. Mahalingam argued that gas 
provided a far cheaper energy option for India, 
an assertion that further underlined Kanak 
Dixit's argument that the Iran pipeline would 
have been both practically and politically more 
desirable than nuclear energy.

Health Costs

Sanghamitra Gadekar shifted the discus- sion from 
the financial to the "real" costs of nuclear 
energy. Nuclear power in India, she argued, is 
necessarily embedded within forms of immense 
social injustice and ecological irresponsibility, 
which operate from the very beginning of the 
nuclear fuel cycle. She demonstrated that the 
culture of the nuclear establishment was 
predicated on the exploitation and deception of 
low-wage workers and residents in areas taken 
over for mining, or for the establishment of 
reactors. The land recently acquired for a 
nuclear reactor at Madban in Ratnagiri, for in- 
stance, was taken under draconian emergency 
provisions, without an Environmental Impact 
Assessment, or a public hearing. The site of the 
proposed plant, furthermore, lies in a zone that 
has experienced 88 quakes of an intensity 
exceeding three on the Richter scale between 1986 
and 2005. At Jadugoda in Jharkhand, where uranium 
is mined, workers carry out their work with 
virtually no protection from radiation, and 
radioactive waste is taken away in open trucks. 
Local inhabitants have been crippled by tumours, 
congenital deformities, and chronic diseases. 
Quite independent of all the other problems with 
nuclear energy, the culture of nuclear power in 
India is shot through with patent disregard for 
the human lives expended in the production of 
such energy.

M V Ramana's paper, the last of the seminar, 
focused on the absence of effective and 
accountable safety mechanisms to guard against 
nuclear accidents - a dimension completely absent 
from the official "debate" on the nuclear energy 
issue. He pointed out nuclear power is unique 
among electricity technologies in having the 
capacity to inflict instantaneous catastrophic 
damage. This is a direct out- come of the speed 
and high pressure and temperature at which highly 
radio active material must operate. He described 
the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and its 
consequences in some detail. Closer home he 
listed several narrowly averted nuclear accidents 
in India over the last decade and a half, in 
particular the fire at the Narora atomic plant in 
1993, and the valve failure and radiation 
emission at Kalpakkam in 2003, which resulted in 
large doses of radiation exposure to three 
workers. The likelihood of such accidents can be 
minimised through efficient safety mechanisms, 
but, argued Ramana, there is no foolproof method 
of ensuring complete nuclear safety. Besides, as 
his talk demonstrated effectively, the Indian 
nuclear establishment is geared towards minimal 
and very in- effective investments in safety and 
security. It was an important and sobering note 
upon which to conclude a conference that would 
have alerted many  to the real and urgent dangers 
to national and global peace and security posed 
by India's current enthusiasm for this nuclear 
deal.

Note

1 Barkha Dutt, for instance, says: "Frankly, for 
most of us, much of the technical jargon is 
gobbledygook.... [Nevertheless] no matter how 
cynical we are about our politicians, we largely 
trust this government when it says there will be 
no deliberate sell-out of India's independence." 
In taking this stand of claiming not to 
understand the deal, and yet sup- porting it out 
of a sense of "national interest", she is 
representative of an important strand of 
positions taken on the question within the 
television and print media. Hindustan Times, 
August 18, 2007.

By far the lowest level to which the debate fell, 
however, was the insinuation that the left, by 
opposing the deal, was serving the interests of 
China or Pakistan rather than India. This was the 
stand taken by the strategic experts quoted in a 
front-page article of the Hindustan Times. 'Whose 
National Interest Is the Left  Protecting?', 
Hindustan Times, August 20, 2007.


______


[6]  ANNOUNCEMENTS:

(i)

Publication Announcement

The autobiography of Dada Amir Haider khan, 
CHAINS TO LOSE , is finally published in two 
volumes and ready for sale and circulation.

For those who do not know Dada, whose life and 
political work  spans the entire of 20th century, 
 was a revolutionary, an international  sea 
farer, a railroad worker in the Unites States, a 
student at the Lenin University of the People of 
the East, an union organizer in Bombay and 
Madras, a prisoner of the British in colonial 
India and a prisoner of Pakistan's rulers for 
being a communist.

An excerpt from the dust cover blurb says: "Much 
has been written since the classic treatises of 
Karl Marx  about proletarians and their role in 
the dialectics of change. Some academics have 
even disputed the very existence of the 
proletariat as a class conscious social entity, 
specially outside the parameters of industrial 
Europe and North America. But seldom have we come 
across a work in which a proletarian of 
unmistaken identity speaks for himself. CHAINS TO 
LOSE is that rare an exception. ..."

Originally written in his self taught English, 
Dada's autobiography is compiled and edited, with 
an introduction,  by Hassan N. Gardezi, a well 
known  South Asian social scientist.

To obtain your copies please contact:  Mr. 
Muhammad Kamran, Office Assistant, Pakistan 
Studies Centre, University of Karachi, Karachi, 
75270   E-mail 
<mailto:pscuok at yahoo.com>pscuok at yahoo.com

For further information the editor can be reached 
at: 
<mailto:gardezihassan at hotmail.com>gardezihassan at hotmail.com


---

(ii)

TALK: CONTEMPORARY MINIATURE PAINTING IN PAKISTAN: TRANSFORMING TRADITION
by Professor Salima HASHMI (Dean of School of 
Visual Arts at the Beaconhouse National 
University at Lahore)
Date and Time: Tuesday, 16 October 2007, 6.30-8.00pm
Venue: Bloomberg Auditorium, 27/F Cheung Kong 
Center, 2 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong
Registration required (SEATS LIMITED): 
chantal at aaa.org.hk or call Chantal Wong on 2815 
1112 before 9th October 2007.
Presented by: Asia Art Archive
Sponsored by: Christie's and Bloomberg
Free admission. Conducted in English

---

(iii)

HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS

An intensive course exploring linkages between 
health and human rights and building skills in 
rights based monitoring and use of international 
and national instruments, designed for health and 
human rights activists.

November 12th - 24th , 2007

Organized by

Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes
and
Tata Institute of Social Sciences

About the Course

This intensive 2 weeks residential course focuses 
on the relationship between health and human 
rights. The course identifies and discusses the 
complex interactions between health and human 
rights. The key areas covered by the course are:

1.	The implications of human rights for public health theory and practice.
2.	The effect of health policies and programs on human rights
3.	Health consequences of human rights violations
4.	The linkage and synergies between 
promoting and protecting health and human rights
5.	Monitoring health and human rights

This course is designed to provide an overview of 
the nature and role of national and international 
norms, processes and institutions with respect to 
health and human rights issues. The course will 
include responses of the national and 
international political and legal order to some 
of the pressing issues of health and human 
rights. It will explore the dialectical relation 
between the pursuit of national interest by the 
governments and the rhetoric of global objectives 
by the agencies that include health or human 
rights within their mandates.

Eligibility: Graduation and above

Registration Fees: Rs.5000/-
The cost of food and accommodation will be borne 
by us. (Traveling expenses have to be borne by 
the participants.)
On basis of need registration fees for few participants may be waived.

Last date of form submission: October 1 , 2007

Venue: Conference Hall
Tata Institute Of Social Sciences ( TISS) Campus, Deonar, Mumbai

Accommodation: TISS Hostel


For more information write:
Course Coordinator
Adv Kamayani Bali Mahabal
CEHAT
Sai Ashray , Aram Society Road
Vakola, Santacruz (East)
Mumbai - 55.
Tel: 26673571 / 26673154
Fax: 26673156
Email: 
<http://in.f85.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=cehat@vsnl.com>cehat at vsnl.com 
/
Web site: <http://www.cehat.org/>www.cehat.org  


----

(iv)

SOUTH ASIAN FEMINISMS: GENDER, CULTURE AND POLITICS
University of Pennsylvania, March 28-29, 2008

This interdisciplinary international conference 
on South Asian Feminisms will bring together 
distinguished scholars/activists both within and 
outside the academy, from the subcontinent 
(Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) 
as well as the US, UK, and Canada.  Our focus 
will be the contemporary dynamics of feminist 
activism and theorizing in the region, with 
particular emphasis on violence, human rights, 
and minorities. These are issues of vital concern 
across the region and within the South Asian 
diaspora. We envision stimulating discussions 
about the promises and difficulties of feminist 
legal activism and of human rights discourse for 
feminist concerns, especially as they engage 
issues of caste, religion, ethnicity, sexuality 
and class; the relationship between feminism and 
movements for democracy; forms of gendered 
violence; and the impact of transnationalism and 
globalization on feminist movements within and 
outside
the region.
The conference will pay sustained attention to 
the specificities of these issues within 
different contexts that constitute "South Asia", 
but also encourages conversations across these 
contexts, reaching out to the shared, unequal, 
and overlapping histories of the region. 
Distinguished participants will include: Ratna 
Kapur, Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal 
Research in New Delhi, India and Senior Gender 
Advisor to Nepal, United Nations; Malathi De 
Alwis, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 
Colombo, Sri Lanka; Flavia Agnes, leading 
feminist scholar, women's rights lawyer, 
co-founder of Majlis, Mumbai, India; Firdaus 
Azim, Professor, BRAC University and activist, 
Nari Pokko, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Angana Chatterjee, 
Associate Professor, California Institute of 
Integral Studies;  Amina Jamal, Assistant 
Professor, Ryerson University, Toronto, CA; 
Anjali Arondekar, Associate Professor, University 
of California, Santa Cruz; Dina Siddiqi, 
Independent Scholar, New York/Dhaka, Bangladesh; 
Priyamvada Gopal, cultural analyst and literary 
critic, Cambridge University, UK; Annanya 
Bhattacharjee, co- founder, Sakhi (New York) and 
International Organizer for Jobs with Justice 
(New Delhi, India/Washington, DC, US).

The Conference Committee gratefully acknowledges 
support and sponsorship from the following: the 
Provost's Global Initiatives Fund, the South Asia 
Center, the Alice Paul Center/Women's Studies 
Program, the University Research Fund, the School 
of Arts and Sciences Dean's Office, the Graduate 
School of Education, the Department of English, 
the Center for the Advanced Study of India, and 
the Department of Anthropology.

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

Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
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