SACW | Jan. 25-26, 2008 / Listening To Grasshoppers - Arundhati Roy / Pakistan: Steve Coll / Sarkozy Undermining Secularism - Regis Debray / World Social Forum Sri Lanka 2008

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | January 25-26, 2008 | 
Dispatch No. 2493 - Year 10 running

[1] Pakistan: Secular Space Shrinking
   (i) Armed and Dangerous: The growing violence in Pakistan (Steve Coll)
   (ii) The Sharia caveat (Editorial, Dawn)
  (iii) Disaster in the making (Editorial, The News)
[2] Bangladesh - military-controlled: Consensus 
needed, not confusion (Editorial, New Age)
[3] India: Statement on Bilkis Bano Judgment by Concerned Citizens
[4] India: Republic Day Parade - State Displays 
of Pomp Are Archaic (Times of India)
[5] Essay: Listening To Grasshoppers - Genocide, 
Denial And Celebration (Arundhati Roy)
[6] France: [Sarkozy Undermining Secularism] 
Malaise dans La Civilisation (Regis Debray)
[7] Announcements:
(i) World Social Forum Sri Lanka 2008 (Colombo, 26 January 2008)
(ii) Straight Talk - Elections 2008 (Karachi, 30 January 2008)
(iii) 1857 Special Lectures at Delhi University
- Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Delhi, January 25, 2008)
- Margit Pernau (Delhi, February 20, 2008)


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[1]   Pakistan:

(i) New Yorker - 25 January 2008

Audio
ARMED AND DANGEROUS: THE GROWING VIOLENCE IN PAKISTAN

with Steve Coll
   
http://downloads.newyorker.com/mp3/outloud/080128_outloud_coll.mp3


(ii) Dawn - January 25, 2008 

Editorial

THE SHARIA CAVEAT

THE caretaker Frontier government's draft 
regulation for replacing the existing law in the 
districts of Swat, Dir and Chitral with Sharia 
law comes infested with flaws, not least of which 
is the error of judgment. Setting aside the moral 
aspect of an interim, unelected and controversial 
government making such sweeping changes, it is 
the ramifications of the move that will haunt the 
governments to come in the years ahead. The 
proposed quick fix to appease the militants 
holding sway in the said districts must be 
resisted. Such moves based on political 
exigencies cannot offer a lasting solution of the 
problem at hand. Worse still, if the past is any 
guide, they compound the trouble even further. 
That's precisely what happened in Malakand Agency 
in 1999. The ill-advised Shar'i Nizam-i-Adl 
Regulation, ostensibly based on the Sharia, and 
promulgated back then with the intent of calming 
down Sufi Mohammed and his fanatic followers, 
just backfired with a bigger bang. It egged the 
extremists on to seek more and more political 
power, not through the ballot, but on the back of 
their misguided zeal - ironically, in the way of 
God. The ongoing extremist insurgency in Swat now 
being led by Sufi's cleric son-in-law Fazlullah 
is but the culmination of the wrong policy 
adopted in 1999 to try to appease the Islamic 
militants. The government's carrot and stick 
policy with regard to growing extremist militancy 
failed then; no, it boomeranged, and it is doomed 
to failure now if tried again.

Since the time of Gen Ziaul Haq, the state has 
been a party to spreading obscurantism alongside 
the largely semi-literate and myopic country 
mullahs. Even mainstream religious and 
non-religious parties have lent a helping hand in 
perpetuating the unfair and unjust state of 
affairs. Most so-called religious laws put on the 
statute for whatever reasons have been made part 
of the basic law without having been properly 
debated in an elected legislature. This ad hoc 
approach must be dispensed with, not only because 
it has created a parallel judicial system, but 
also because such laws have been widely abused to 
punish the victims rather than the criminals, as 
is more than evident in the case of the Hudood 
Ordinances.

The religious extremists at best represent the 
fringe of society, as elections that were ever 
held have shown. Their demands do not find 
resonance among the public at large, less so in 
the absence of an elected legislature. Nothing 
could be more dubious than promulgating Sharia 
laws to lessen election-time volatility in Swat, 
Dir and Chitral districts. It will open the 
floodgates of such pressure being exerted by 
those with a divine mission all around. The 
federal government must stop its Frontier 
counterpart in its tracks and scrap the draft law. Now.

(iii) The News - 25 January 2008

Editorial
DISASTER IN THE MAKING

The draft proposal by the NWFP government for a 
regulation under which 'Qazi' courts would be set 
up in Swat, Dir and Chitral appears to be the 
outcome of some particularly poor thinking. 
Rather than taking the people of these areas 
towards life in a modern age and providing them 
with access to justice and the basic rights that 
they deserve as citizens, the move seems to be 
designed to push them still deeper into an age of 
medieval darkness.

Much like the almost identical Nizam-e-Adl 
regulations introduced in Malakand in 1999, as 
part of a truce reached with TNSM chief Sufi 
Muhammad, the latest plan is ostensibly intended 
to appease militant sentiments in these areas. 
The fact that the militants in fact depend for 
their success on opposing the administration and 
will almost certainly find one means or another 
to attack the new courts seems not to have dawned 
on planners. Just as the accord with Sufi 
Muhammad failed, and other similar efforts have 
floundered elsewhere, this move too seems 
destined to meet an identical fate. Through it, 
the administration will in fact face the anger of 
both the religious right, who will never be 
satisfied by government-led measures taken in the 
name of religion, and liberal forces which see 
the courts as yet another retrogressive step.

The many flaws in the basic structure of the 
courts, including the question of the ability of 
those to be entrusted with the task to dispense 
justice according to laid-down norms, suggest 
they will do nothing to improve the plight of the 
people. The dubious concept of 'collective' 
responsibility, included in the regulation, which 
allows a DCO to act against a person, a group, a 
community or a locality to establish peace, 
carries with it ugly echoes of the draconian 
Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) law, struck down 
in PATA by superior courts nearly a decade ago. 
The fact that such laws are frequently misused 
raises the risks still higher. Setting up 
different systems of justice in various parts of 
the country carries with it many dangers. There 
is a need to introduce greater cohesion in 
national life, by granting people similar rights 
and ending the immense differences in this 
respect that exist between the provinces and the 
regions within them, rather than widening this 
gap through the establishment of parallel justice 
systems. The risk that the move will give rise 
for calls to expand the Qazi courts to other 
parts of NWFP, and thus increase the hold of 
obscurantism, is also very real.

What decision-makers must realize is that the key 
to tackling the tightening militant hold on 
northern parts of the country lies not in making 
dodgy deals with them, or attempting to placate 
them, but by pushing through policies that can 
bring development and change in these areas. This 
means focusing on the issues of education, 
healthcare, employment and welfare that could do 
a great deal to improve the lives of people. 
Indeed, the fact that such amenities have been 
denied to them for decades is one of the factors 
that has led to the growth of militancy in parts 
of NWFP. The problem as such can be resolved only 
by undoing past wrongs, rather than seeking 
'quick fixes' such as the Qazi courts, which will 
only aggravate existing problems rather than 
helping to solve them.



______


[2] Bangladesh


New Age
25 January 2008

Editorial
CONSENSUS NEEDED, NOT CONFUSION

As is typical of any apolitical administrations 
anywhere in the world, the military-controlled 
interim government of Fakhruddin Ahmed went after 
the political institutions immediately after its 
assumption of office, making overt and covert 
attempts to create divisions within the major 
parties, especially the Bangladesh Nationalist 
Party and the Awami League. Although its campaign 
to redraw the political landscape has, of late, 
appeared to be in a state of lull, it has 
apparently had some success in inducing discord 
of varying degrees in the leadership of the BNP 
and the Awami League.
    The BNP, as it appears now, stands divided 
into two factions - one under the secretary 
general, Khandaker Delwar Hossain, and the other 
under Saifur Rahman and M Hafizuddin Ahmed, who 
were made acting chairman and secretary general 
respectively at a dubious standing committee 
meeting in late October 2007. Therefore, it 
springs little surprise when one of the factions 
unveils a six-point demand and urges its 
loyalists to get prepared for programmes to 
realise the demands, with the other remaining 
rather non-committal.
    What is rather curious, however, is an 
emerging difference of opinion between the top 
leadership of the Awami League and the leaders of 
its front organisations on the issue of a 
movement to free the detained AL president, 
Sheikh Hasina. As reported in New Age on January 
24, acting AL president Zillur Rahman and other 
top leaders rejected outright calls from within 
the party for a movement for Hasina's release. 
The top echelon of the party appears sympathetic 
to the interim government and expressly in favour 
of continuing the legal battle to have Hasina 
freed, instead of a movement that some leaders of 
its front organisations want to start building up 
now.
    At a time when the people's democratic rights 
remain suspended and the political process 
stalled under a state of emergency, the political 
parties that claim to be committed to democracy 
and believe in the sovereignty of the people in 
running the affairs of state need to reach a 
broader consensus and renew their resolve to have 
the fundamental rights of the people restored. 
Simultaneously, they should do some serious 
introspection and shrug off the attitude they 
displayed vis-à-vis running the affairs of the 
state and their respective parties in the years 
preceding the declaration of the state of 
emergency, which was largely undemocratic and 
intolerant of opposing views. Therefore, they 
should direct their activities at not only having 
the people's fundamental rights restored, which, 
needless to say, should begin with the withdrawal 
of the state of emergency, but also democratising 
their individual and collective conduct.


______


[3]

Media Release

Date January 25, 2008

STATEMENT ON BILKIS BANO JUDGMENT BY CONCERNED CITIZENS

The judgment in case of Bilkis Bano comes as a 
great relief in the times when justice is being 
denied to large section of society, more so to 
the victims of communal violence. A pregnant 
women who was gang raped, who witnessed the 
brutal killing of her family members, stood firm 
with grit and determination to seek justice with 
the help of civil right group of Gujarat. Bilkis 
herself deserves lot of praise for her courage. 
The civil rights group based in Gujarat, which 
took up the battle, needs to be appreciated for 
the yeomen service it has done in the cause of 
justice in Gujarat.

We welcome this judgment whole heartedly and hope 
that similar justice is also given to innumerable 
victims of the Gujarat carnage. While the Bilkis 
case shows justice is possible it also shows how 
difficult it is to get. While it shows that 
elements of democracy are still alive, it also 
shows how much compromised they are becoming with 
the ascendance of communal mind set of section of 
people and with the communalization of our state 
apparatus, police, bureaucracy, judiciary and 
polity. In a way the whole episode is a mirror to 
what is happening in Gujarat. The state sponsored 
pogrom in Gujarat has left the civic society 
fractured along religious lines. The person and 
party who led the carnage have got approval from 
a section of society, as the victory of Modi in 
2007 elections has shown. This erosion of 
democratic norms and justice delivery system is a 
matter of grave concern to all of us.

While Modi-BJP have already pushed their divisive 
politics deep down in the society, it is 
imperative that we restore back the values the 
values of democracy, pluralism, and diversity, 
the one's which are the base of our freedom 
movement. It is necessary that the norms of 
Indian Constitution, which seem to have been 
damaged severely in different parts of the 
country, more so in Gujarat, are restored back.

We urge upon all the concerned authorities to 
take up the cases of innumerable other victims of 
Gujarat carnage, reinvestigate if necessary, and 
set up special court to try the culprits, 
including Narendra Modi, whose role in the 
carnage was the most dangerous of all. The 
victims of Gujarat carnage are feeling helpless 
and are crying out for help for getting them 
justice, for getting them rehabilitated, for 
getting them the equal citizenship rights, which 
are due to all of us.

Prof. K.N.Pannikar, Ex Vice Chancelleor, Kaladi Uni, Kerala
Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, Chairman CSSS
Prof. Ghanshyam Shah, Social scientist
Dr. Ram Puniyani, Sec. All India Secular Forum
Digant Oza, Journalist
Rohit Prajapati and Trupti Shah, PUCL Vadodara
Irfan Engineer, Director Institute of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
Uttam Parmar, Social activist
Harsh Mander, writer, social activist
Ajit Muricken, Director, Vikas Adhyan Kendra, Mumbai
Shabnam Hashmi, Social activist, member, National Integration Council

[Released from: 23, Canning Lane, New Delhi-110001, Tel-23070722/ 40]


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[4]

Times of India
24 Jan 2008

VIEW: STATE DISPLAYS OF POMP ARE ARCHAIC

Does the state exist for the sake of its 
citizens, or is it the other way round? Normal 
lives of citizens are disrupted over several 
working days in the national capital in January.

That's when rehearsals are staged for the January 
26 Republic Day parade and the city's arterial 
roads are blocked. The chief feature of the 
parade is a display of India's military might, 
including ballistic missiles.

This is surely a travesty of Gandhi's legacy, 
which the state claims to uphold. Not to mention 
that a congregation of such weaponry as well as 
the nation's high dignitaries is a security 
nightmare. Security inevitably goes into 
overdrive on such occasions, which means acute 
harassment for citizens and loss of precious 
man-hours at work.

National day military parades have an archaic 
feel in a modern democratic republic. It's an 
announcement of the state's military readiness - 
both to its own people and to the outside world - 
that is more in line with the public style of 
authoritarian states such as China, North Korea, 
Iran and the Soviet Union.

In India's case, such displays may have been 
justified in the early years after independence, 
when there were doubts about whether it could 
survive as a nation-state. It perhaps needed to 
demonstrate that it was capable of defending 
itself.

Such demonstrations are no longer needed. As a 
confident and self-assured nation, India ought to 
turn its national days into days of public 
festivity instead of grim reminders of past 
sacrifice and present destructive capabilities.

To be sure there are floats and tableaux, 
representing the culture of India's states, 
accompanying the Republic Day procession. Why 
can't these form the entire parade? In other 
countries, such occasions are often spontaneous 
celebrations resulting from local initiative and 
involving direct participation by citizens.

In India, religious festivals are of this type. 
But why not have secular festivals on national 
holidays where everybody can participate? That 
would decrease the gulf between state and 
citizen, between arrogant pomp and participatory 
fun.



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[6] [ An abridged version of a lecture delivered 
by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, 
to commemorate the first anniversary of the 
assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the 
Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos.]


LISTENING TO GRASSHOPPERS - GENOCIDE, DENIAL AND CELEBRATION

by Arundhati Roy

I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be 
mine for time to come. From what I know of him, 
of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he 
lived his life, I know that had I been here in 
Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the 
one hundred thousand people who walked with his 
coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets 
of this city, with banners saying, "We are all 
Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps I'd 
have carried the one that said, "One and a half 
million plus one".*
[*One-and-a-half million is the number of 
Armenians who were systematically murdered by the 
Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the 
spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest 
Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic 
rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more 
than 2,500 years.]

***
In a way, my battle is like yours.
But while in Turkey there's silence,
in India, there is celebration.
***
I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my 
head as I walked beside his coffin. Maybe I would 
have heard a reprise of the voice of Araxie 
Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, 
telling the story of what happened to her and her 
family. She was ten years old in 1915. She 
remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that 
arrived in her village, Dubne, which was north of 
the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. 
The village elders were alarmed, she said, 
because they knew in their bones that the 
grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; 
the end came in a few months, when the wheat in 
the fields was ready for harvesting.

"When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," 
Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men 
folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your 
ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 
'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get 
it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When 
he came back there-this my mother tells me 
story-when he came back there, naked body, he 
went in the jail, they cut his arms...so he die 
in jail.

And they took all the mens in the field, they 
tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every 
one of them."

Araxie and the other women in her family were 
deported. All of them perished except Araxie. She 
was the lone survivor.

This is, of course, a single testimony that comes 
from a history that is denied by the Turkish 
government, and many Turks as well.

I am not here to play the global intellectual, to 
lecture you, or to fill the silence in this 
country that surrounds the memory (or the 
forgetting) of the events that took place in 
Anatolia in 1915. That is what Hrant Dink tried 
to do, and paid for with his life.

***
Most genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards
has been part of Europe's search for lebensraum.
***
The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the 
streets for many hours, and as I looked around, 
envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, 
mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out 
to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have 
suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He 
explained that they were expressing their 
solidarity with the child-assassin who was 
wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of 
Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my 
own battles to fight against other kinds of 
cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a 
way, the battles are not all that different. 
There is one crucial difference, though. While in 
Turkey there is silence, in India there's 
celebration, and I really don't know which is 
worse.

In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide 
against the Muslim community in 2002.


I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping 
with its definition contained in Article 2 of the 
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and 
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide 
began as collective punishment for an unsolved 
crime-the burning of a railway coach in which 53 
Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a 
carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 
2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight 
by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist 
militias, and backed by the Gujarat government 
and the administration of the day. Muslim women 
were gang-raped and burned alive.

	Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and 
Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically 
destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from 
their homes.

Even today, many of them live in ghettos-some 
built on garbage heaps-with no water supply, no 
drainage,
no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as 
second-class citizens, boycotted socially and 
economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as 
well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, 
promoted. This state of affairs is now considered 
'normal'. To seal the 'normality', in 2004, both 
Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India's leading 
industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a 
dream destination for finance capital.

The initial outcry in the national press has 
settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been 
brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati 
pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness.
This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row 
to win state elections, with campaigns that have 
cleverly used the language and apparatus of 
modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra 
Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the 
BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian 
states.

As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot 
compare with the people killed in the Congo, 
Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into 
millions, nor is it by any means the first that 
has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, 
3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of 
Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen 
by the Congress Party.) But the Gujarat genocide 
is part of a larger, more elaborate and 
systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is 
ripening and the grasshoppers have landed in 
mainland India.

It's an old human habit, genocide is. It has 
played a sterling part in the march of 
civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded 
genocides is thought to be the destruction of 
Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 
BC. The word itself-genocide-was coined by 
Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the 
United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. 
Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the 
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of 
Genocide defines it as:

     "Any of the following Acts committed with 
intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, 
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: 
killing members of the group; causing serious 
bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 
deliberately inflicting on the group conditions 
of life, calculated to bring about its physical 
destruction in whole or part; imposing measures 
intended to prevent births within the group; [or] 
forcibly transferring children of the group to 
another group."

Since this definition leaves out the persecution 
of political dissidents, real or imagined, it 
does not include some of the greatest mass 
murders in history. Personally I think the 
definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, 
authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, 
is more apt.

Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass 
killing in which a state or other authority 
intends to destroy a group, as that group and 
membership in it are defined by the perpetrator." 
Defined like this, genocide would include, for 
example, the monumental crimes committed by 
Suharto in Indonesia (1 million) Pol Pot in 
Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet 
Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).

All things considered, the word extermination, 
with its crude evocation of pests and vermin, of 
infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more 
apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces 
its victims, in order to go about its business of 
wanton killing, it must first sever any human 
connection with it. It must see its victims as 
sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would 
be a service to society. Here, for example, is an 
account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by 
English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut 
in 1636:

     Those that escaped the fire were slaine with 
the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune 
throw with their rapiers, so they were quickly 
dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was 
conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this 
time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus 
frying in the fyre, and the streams of blood 
quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke 
and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a 
sweete sacrifice....

And here, approximately four centuries later, is 
Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the 
Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting 
operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:

     We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set 
everything on fire...hacked, burned, set on 
fire...we believe in setting them on fire because 
these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're 
afraid of it.... I have just one last wish...let 
me be sentenced to death...I don't care if I'm 
hanged...just give me two days before my hanging 
and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura 
where seven or eight lakhs of these people 
stay...I will finish them off...let a few more of 
them die...at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die.

I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the 
blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the 
police, and the love of his people. He continues 
to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The 
one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide 
Denial.

Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the 
theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty 
triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an 
answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that 
arose in the 19th century, when Europe was 
developing limited but new forms of democracy and 
citizens' rights at home while simultaneously 
exterminating people in their millions in her 
colonies. Suddenly countries and governments 
began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides 
they had committed. "Denial is saying, in 
effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author 
of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, 
"that the murderers did not murder. The victims 
weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial 
is that it invites future genocide."

Of course today, when genocide politics meets the 
Free Market, official recognition-or denial-of 
holocausts and genocides is a multinational 
business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do 
to with historical fact or forensic evidence. 
Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It 
is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining, 
that belongs more to the World Trade Organisation 
than to the United Nations.

The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating 
market for natural resources, that curious thing 
called futures trading and plain old economic and 
military might.

In other words, genocides are often denied for 
the same set of reasons as genocides are 
prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in 
racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. 
Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of 
a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), 
permission granted for a military base, or the 
opening up of a country's economy could be the 
decisive factor when governments adjudicate on 
whether a genocide did or did not occur.

	Or indeed whether genocide will or will 
not occur. And if it does, whether it will or 
will not be reported, and if it is, then what 
slant that reportage will take. For example, the 
death of two million in the Congo goes virtually 
unreported. Why? And was the death of a million
Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the 
US invasion, genocide (which is what Denis 
Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for 
Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as 
Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, 
claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill 
Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her 
child?

Since the United States is the richest and most 
powerful country in the world, it has assumed the 
privilege of being the World's Number One 
Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate 
Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus 
arrived in the Americas, which marks the 
beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions 
of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the 
original population.
(Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to 
distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus 
to Indians, has a university town in 
Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts 
college named after him).

In America's second Holocaust, almost

30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into 
slavery. Well near half of them died during 
transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation 
could still walk out of the World Conference 
Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge 
that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. 
Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. 
The US has also refused to accept that the 
bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden 
and Hamburg-which killed hundreds of thousands of 
civilians-were crimes, let alone acts of 
genocide. (The argument here is that the 
government didn't intend to kill civilians. This 
was the first stage in the development of the 
concept of "collateral damage".) Since the end of 
World War II, the US government has intervened 
overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 
countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. 
This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the 
extermination, with excellent intentions of 
course, of three million Vietnamese 
(approximately 10 per cent of its population).

None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.

"The question is," says Robert MacNamara-whose 
career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo 
in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being the 
architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the 
World Bank-now sitting in his comfortable chair 
in his comfortable home in his comfortable 
country, "the question is, how much evil do you 
have to do in order to do good?"

Could there be a more perfect illustration of 
Robert Jay Lifton's point that the denial of 
genocide invites more genocide?

And what when victims become perpetrators? (In 
Rwanda, in the Congo?) What remains to be said 
about Israel, created out of the debris of one of 
the cruellest genocides in human history? What of 
its actions in the Occupied Territories? Its 
burgeoning settlements, its colonisation of 
water, its new 'Security Wall' that separates 
Palestinian people from their farms, from their 
work, from their relatives, from their children's 
schools, from hospitals and healthcare? It is 
genocide in a fishbowl, genocide in slow 
motion-meant especially to illustrate that 
section of Article 2 of the United Nations 
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of 
the Crime of Genocide, which says that genocide 
is any act that is designed to "deliberately 
inflict on the group conditions of life, 
calculated to bring about its physical 
destruction in whole or part".

The history of genocide tells us that it's not an 
aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human 
system.

Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th 
century onwards has been an integral part of 
Europe's search for what the Germans famously 
called
Lebensraum-living space. Lebensraum was a word 
coined by the German geographer and zoologist 
Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of 
as the dominant human species' natural impulse to 
expand its territory in its search for not just 
space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion 
would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant 
species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues 
believed should give way, or be made to give way, 
to the stronger one.

The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise 
terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her 
quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when 
Columbus landed in America.
The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to 
Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The 
Germans exterminated almost the entire population 
of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the 
Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial 
expansion" cost

10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th 
century, the British had exterminated the 
aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of 
Australia.

Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, 
argues that it was Hitler's quest for 
lebensraum-in a world that had already been 
carved up by other European countries-that led 
the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on 
toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and 
western Russia stood in the way of Hitler's 
colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native 
people of Africa and America and Asia, they had 
to be enslaved or liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, 
the Nazis' racist dehumanisation of Jews cannot 
be dismissed as a paroxysm of insane evil. Once 
again, it is a product of the familiar mix: 
economic determinism well marinated in age-old 
racism, very much in keeping with European 
tradition of the time.

It's not a coincidence that the political party 
that carried out the Armenian genocide in the 
Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for 
Union & Progress.


'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 
'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been 
the twin coordinates of genocide.

Armed with this reading of history, is it 
reasonable to worry about whether a country that 
is poised on the threshold of "progress" is also 
poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the 
India being celebrated all over the world as a 
miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be 
poised on the verge of committing genocide? The 
mere suggestion might sound outlandish and, at 
this point of time, the use of the word genocide 
surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the 
future, and if the Tsars of Development believe 
in their own publicity, if they believe that 
There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for 
Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, 
and kill in large numbers, in order to get their 
way.


Advani's chariot of fire: And so the Union project was launched

In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it 
seems clear that the killing and the dying has 
already begun.

It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the 
Soviet Union, that the Government of India turned 
in its membership of the Non-Aligned Movement and 
signed up for membership of the Completely 
Aligned, often referring to itself as the 
'natural ally' of Israel and the United States. 
(They have at least this one thing in common-all 
three are engaged in overt, neo-colonial military 
occupations: India in Kashmir, Israel in 
Palestine, the US in Iraq.)

Almost like clockwork, the two major national 
political parties, the BJP and the Congress, 
embarked on a joint programme to advance India's 
version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day 
euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. Every 
now and then, particularly during elections, they 
stage noisy familial squabbles, but have managed 
to gather into their fold even grumbling 
relatives, like the Communist Party of India 
(Marxist).

The Union project offers Hindu Nationalism (which 
seeks to unite the Hindu vote, vital you will 
admit, for a great democracy like India). The 
Progress project aims at a 10 per cent annual 
growth rate. Both these projects are encrypted 
with genocidal potential.

The Union project has been largely entrusted to 
the RSS, the ideological heart, the holding 
company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa 
Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was 
founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr 
Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to 
model it overtly along the lines of Italian 
fascism. Hitler too was, and is, an inspirational 
figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS 
Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. 
Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr Hedgewar as head of 
the RSS in 1940:

     Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first 
landed in Hindustan, right up to the present 
moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly 
fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race 
Spirit has been awakening.

Then:

     In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and 
should live the Hindu Nation.... All others are 
traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, 
to take a charitable view, idiots....

     The foreign races in Hindustan...may stay in 
the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu 
Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no 
privileges, far less any preferential 
treatment-not even citizen's rights.

And again:

     To keep up the purity of its race and 
culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging 
the country of the Semitic races-the Jews.


Race pride at its highest has been manifested 
here...a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn 
and profit by.

(How do you combat this kind of organised hatred? 
Certainly not with goofy preachings of secular 
love.)

By the year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 
shakhas and an army of seven million swayamsevaks 
preaching its doctrine across India. They include 
India's former prime minister, Atal Behari 
Vajpayee, the former home minister and current 
leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, and, of 
course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister, 
Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in 
the media, the police, the army, the intelligence 
agencies, judiciary and the administrative 
services who are informal devotees of 
Hindutva-the RSS ideology. These people, unlike 
politicians who come and go, are permanent 
members of government machinery.

But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it 
has put in decades of hard work and has created a 
network of organisations at every level of 
society, something that no other organisation can 
claim.

The BJP is its political front. It has a trade 
union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), a women's 
wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student wing 
(Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an 
economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch).

Its front organisation Vidya Bharati is the 
largest educational organisation in the 
non-governmental sector. It has 13,000 
educational institutes including the Saraswati 
Vidya Mandir schools with 70,000 teachers and 
over 1.7 million students. It has organisations 
working with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), 
literature (Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad), 
intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research 
Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas 
Sankalan Yojanalaya), language (Sanskrit Bharti), 
slum-dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva 
Pratishthan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical 
Mission, National Medicos Organisation), leprosy 
patients (Bharatiya Kushtha Nivaran Sangh), 
cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of 
newspapers and other propaganda material (Bharat 
Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit Prakashan, 
Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya 
Vichar Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak and Akashvani 
Sadhana), caste integration (Samajik Samrasta 
Manch), religion and proselytisation (Vivekananda 
Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagaran 
Manch, Bajrang Dal). The list goes on and on...

On June 11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv 
Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging 
enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri 
Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the 
birthplace of Lord Ram. At the National Executive 
of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to 
demolish the mosque and build a temple in 
Ayodhya. "I'm sure the resolution will translate 
into votes," said L.K. Advani. In 1990, he 
criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his 
Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the 
Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his 
wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in 
Parliament. (It had won two in 1984). The 
hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, 
when the mosque was brought down by a marauding 
mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. 
Its first act in office was to conduct a series 
of nuclear tests. Across the country, fascists 
and corporates, princes and paupers alike, 
celebrated India's Hindu Bomb. Hindutva had 
transcended petty party politics.

In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and 
executed the Gujarat genocide. In the elections 
that took place a few months after the genocide, 
he was returned to power with an overwhelming 
majority. He ensured complete impunity for those 
who had participated in the killings. In the rare 
case where there has been a conviction, it is of 
course the lowly footsoldiers, and not the 
masterminds, who stand in the dock.

Impunity is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing.

India has a great tradition of granting impunity 
to mass killers. I could fill volumes with the 
details.

In a democracy, for impunity after genocide, you 
have to "apply through proper channels". 
Procedure is everything. In the case of several 
massacres, the lawyers that the Gujarat 
government appointed as public prosecutors had 
actually already appeared for the accused. 
Several of them belonged to the RSS or the VHP 
and were openly hostile to those they were 
supposedly representing. Survivor witnesses found 
that, when they went to the police to file 
reports, the police would record their statements 
inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of 
the perpetrators. In several cases, when 
survivors had seen members of their families 
being killed (and burned alive so their bodies 
could not be found), the police would refuse to 
register cases of murder.

Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician and poet 
who had made the mistake of campaigning against 
Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly 
butchered. (By a mob led by a fellow 
Congressman.) In the words of a man who took part 
in the savagery:

     Five people held him, then someone struck him 
with a sword...chopped off his hand, then his 
legs...then everything else...after cutting him 
to pieces, they put him on the wood they'd piled 
and set him on fire. Burned him alive.

The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, P.C. 
Pandey, was kind enough to visit the 
neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, 
murdered 70 people, and gang-raped 12 women 
before burning them alive. After Modi was 
re-elected, Pandey was promoted, and made 
Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire 
killing apparatus remains in place.

The Supreme Court in Delhi made a few threatening 
noises, but eventually put the matter into cold 
storage. The Congress and the Communist parties 
made a great deal of noise, but did nothing.

In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast 
recently on a news channel at prime time, apart 
from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted 
how the genocide had been planned and executed, 
how Modi and senior politicians and police 
officers had been personally involved. None of 
this information was new, but there they were, 
the butchers, on the news networks, not just 
admitting to, but boasting about their crimes. 
The overwhelming public reaction to the sting was 
not outrage, but suspicion about its timing. Most 
people believed that the expose would help Modi 
win the elections again. Some even believed, 
quite outlandishly, that he had engineered the 
sting. He did win the elections. And this time, 
on the ticket of Union and Progress. A committee 
all unto himself. At BJP rallies, thousands of 
adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, 
chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat 
has physically mutated into a million little 
fascists. These are the joys of democracy. Who in 
Nazi Germany would have dared to put on a Hitler 
mask?

Preparations to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' 
are currently in different stages in the 
BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, 
Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and 
Karnataka.

To commit genocide, says Peter Balkian, scholar 
of the Armenian genocide, you have to marginalise 
a sub-group for a long time. This criterion has 
been well met in India. The Muslims of India have 
been systematically marginalised and have now 
joined the Adivasis and Dalits, who have not just 
been marginalised, but dehumanised by caste Hindu 
society and its scriptures, for years, for 
centuries. (There was a time when they were 
dehumanised in order to be put to work doing 
things that caste Hindus would not do.

Now, with technology, even that labour is 
becoming redundant.) Part of the RSS's work 
involves setting Dalits against Muslims, Adivasis 
against Dalits.

While the 'people' were engaged with the Union 
project and its doctrine of hatred, India's 
Progress project was proceeding apace. The new 
regime of privatisation and liberalisation 
resulted in the sale of the country's natural 
resources and public infrastructure to private 
corporations. It has created an unimaginably 
wealthy upper class and growing middle classes 
who have naturally become militant evangelists 
for the new dispensation.

The Progress project has its own tradition of 
impunity and subterfuge, no less horrific than 
the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At 
the heart of it lies the most powerful 
institution in India, the Supreme Court, which is 
rapidly becoming a pillar of Corporate Power, 
issuing order after order allowing for the 
building of dams, the interlinking of rivers, 
indiscriminate mining, the destruction of forests 
and water systems. All of this could be described 
as ecocide-a prelude perhaps to genocide. (And to 
criticise the court is a criminal offence, 
punishable by imprisonment).

Ironically, the era of the free market has led to 
the most successful secessionist struggle ever 
waged in India-the secession of the middle and 
upper classes to a country of their own, 
somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge 
with the rest of the world's elite. This Kingdom 
in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, 
hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It 
has its own newspapers, films, television 
programmes, morality plays, transport systems, 
malls and intellectuals. And in case you are 
beginning to think it's all joy-joy, you're 
wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own 
environmental issues (parking problems, urban air 
pollution); its own class struggles. An 
organisation called Youth for Equality, for 
example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, 
because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated 
against by India's pulverised Lower Castes. It 
has its own People's Movements and candle-light 
vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was 
shot in a bar) and even its own People's Car (the 
Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group 
recently). It even has its own dreams that take 
the form of TV advertisements in which Indian 
CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream, 
Men's) buy over international corporations, 
including an imaginary East India Company. They 
are ushered into their plush new offices by 
fawning white women (who look as though they're 
longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) 
and applauding white men, ready to make way for 
the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the 
stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in 
its pockets) chanting 'India! India!'

But there is a problem, and the problem is 
lebensraum. A Kingdom needs its lebensraum. Where 
will the Kingdom in the Sky find lebensraum? The 
Sky Citizens look towards the Old Nation. They 
see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite mountains of 
Orissa, on the iron ore in Jharkhand and 
Chhattisgarh. They see the people of Nandigram 
(Muslims, Dalits) sitting on prime land, which 
really ought to be a chemical hub. They see 
thousands of acres of farm land, and think, these 
really ought to be Special Economic Zones for our 
industries; they see the rich fields of Singur 
and know this really ought to be a car factory 
for the People's Car. They think: that's our 
bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are 
those people doing on our land? What's our water 
doing in their rivers? What's our timber doing in 
their trees?

If you look at a map of India's forests, its 
mineral wealth and the homelands of the Adivasi 
people, you'll see that they're stacked up over 
each other.

So, in reality, those who we call poor are the 
truly wealthy. But when the Sky Citizens cast 
their eyes over the land, they see superfluous 
people sitting on precious resources. The Nazis 
had a phrase for them-überzahligen Essern, 
superfluous eaters.

The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel 
said after closely observing the struggle between 
Native Indians and their European colonisers in 
North America, is an annihilating struggle. 
Annihilation doesn't necessarily mean the 
physical extermination of people-by bludgeoning, 
beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or 
shooting them. (Except sometimes. Particularly 
when they try to put up a fight. Because then 
they become Terrorists.) Historically, the most 
efficient form of genocide has been to displace 
people from their homes, herd them together and 
block their access to food and water. Under these 
conditions, they die without obvious violence and 
often in far greater numbers. "The Nazis gave the 
Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into 
'reserves'," Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the 
Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the 
Amandabele, and all the other children of the 
stars had been crowded together. They died on 
their own when food supply to the reserves was 
cut off."

The historian Mike Davis says that between 12 
million and 29 million people starved to death in 
India in the great famine between 1876 and 1892, 
while Britain continued to export food and raw 
material from India. In a democracy, Amartya Sen 
says, we are unlikely to have Famine. So in place 
of China's Great Famine, we have India's Great 
Malnutrition. (India hosts 57 million-more than a 
third-of the world's undernourished children.)

With the possible exception of China, India today 
has the largest population of internally 
displaced people in the world. Dams alone have 
displaced more than 30 million people. The 
displacement is being enforced with court decrees 
or at gunpoint by policemen, by 
government-controlled militias or corporate 
thugs. (In Nandigram, even the CPI(M) had its own 
armed militia.) The displaced are being herded 
into tenements, camps and resettlement colonies 
where, cut off from a means of earning a living, 
they spiral into poverty.

In the state of Chhattisgarh, being targeted by 
corporates for its wealth of iron ore, there's a 
different technique. In the name of fighting 
Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been 
forcibly evacuated and almost 40,000 people moved 
into police camps. The government is arming some 
of them, and has created Salwa Judum, a 'people's 
militia'. While the poorest fight the poorest, in 
conditions that approach civil war, the Tata and 
Essar groups have been quietly negotiating for 
the rights to mine iron ore in Chhattisgarh. Can 
we establish a connection? We wouldn't dream of 
it. Even though the Salwa Judum was announced a 
day after the Memorandum of Understanding between 
the Tata Group and the government was signed.

It's not surprising that very little of this 
account of events makes it into the version of 
the New India currently on the market. That's 
because what is on sale is another form of 
denial-the creation of what Robert Jay Lifton 
calls a "counterfeit universe". In this universe, 
systemic horrors are converted into temporary 
lapses, attributable to flawed individuals, and a 
more 'balanced' happier world is presented in 
place of the real one. The balance is spurious: 
often Union and Progress are set off against each 
other, a liberal-secular critique of the Union 
project being used to legitimise the depredations 
of the Progress project. Those at the top of the 
food chain, those who have no reason to want to 
alter the status quo, are most likely to be the 
manufacturers of the "counterfeit universe".

Their job is to patrol the border, diffuse rage, 
delegitimise anger, and broker a ceasefire.

Consider the response of Shahrukh Khan to a 
question about Narendra Modi. "I don't know him 
personally...I have no opinion...," he says. 
"Personally they have never been unkind to me." 
Ramachandra Guha, liberal historian and founding 
member of the New India Foundation, a 
corporate-funded trust, advises us in his book-as 
well as in a series of highly publicised 
interviews-that the Gujarat government is not 
really fascist, and the genocide was just an 
aberration that has corrected itself after 
elections.

Editors and commentators in the 'secular' 
national press, having got over their outrage at 
the Gujarat genocide, now assess Modi's 
administrative skills, which most of them are 
uniformly impressed by. The editor of The 
Hindustan Times said, "Modi may be a mass 
murderer, but he's our mass murderer", and went 
on to air his dilemmas about how to deal with a 
mass murderer who is also a "good" chief minister.

In this 'counterfeit' version of India, in the 
realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in 
the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, 
for the most part, are simply absent. They have 
been erased in advance. (They only put in an 
appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of 
Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and 
charity meted out by ngos.)

Last summer, I happened to wander into a cool 
room in which four beautiful young girls with 
straightened hair and porcelain skin were 
lounging, introducing their puppies to one 
another. One of them turned to me and said, "I 
was on holiday with my family and I found an old 
essay of yours about dams and stuff? I was asking 
my brother if he knew about what a bad time these 
Dalits and Adivasis were having, being displaced 
and all.... I mean just being kicked out of their 
homes 'n stuff like that? And you know, my 
brother's such a jerk, he said they're the ones 
who are holding India back. They should be 
exterminated. Can you imagine?"

The trouble is, I could. I can.

The puppies were sweet. I wondered whether dogs 
could ever imagine exterminating each other. 
They're probably not progressive enough.

That evening, I watched Amitabh Bachchan on TV, 
appearing in a commercial for The Times of 
India's 'India Poised' campaign. The TV anchor 
introducing the campaign said it was meant to 
inspire people to leave behind the "constraining 
ghosts of the past". To choose optimism over 
pessimism.

"There are two Indias in this country," Amitabh 
Bachchan said, in his famous baritone.

     One India is straining at the leash, eager to 
spring forth and live up to all the adjectives 
that the world has been recently showering upon 
us. The Other India is the leash.

     One India says, "Give me a chance and I'll prove myself."

     The Other India says, "Prove yourself first, 
and maybe then, you'll have a chance."

     One India lives in the optimism of our 
hearts; the Other India lurks in the scepticism 
of our minds.

     One India wants, the Other India hopes... One 
India leads, the Other India follows.

     These conversions are on the rise.

     With each passing day, more and more people 
from the Other India are coming over to this 
side. ...

     And quietly, while the world is not looking, 
a pulsating, dynamic, new India is emerging.


And finally:

     Now in our 60th year as a free nation, the 
ride has brought us to the edge of time's great 
precipice....

     And one India, a tiny little voice in the 
back of the head is looking down at the ravine 
and hesitating. The Other India is looking up at 
the sky and saying it's time to fly.

Here is the counterfeit universe laid bare.

It tells us that the rich don't have a choice 
(There Is No Alternative), but the poor do. They 
can choose to become rich. If they don't, it's 
because they are choosing pessimism over 
optimism, hesitation over confidence, want over 
hope. In other words, they're choosing to be 
poor. It's their fault. They are weak. (And we 
know what the seekers of lebensraum think of the 
weak.) They are the 'Constraining Ghost of the 
Past'. They're already ghosts.

"Within an ongoing counterfeit universe," Robert 
Jay Lifton says, "genocide becomes easy, almost 
natural."

The poor, the so-called poor, have only one 
choice: to resist or to succumb. Bachchan is 
right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the 
world's not looking. Not to where he thinks, but 
across another ravine, to another side. The side 
of armed struggle. From there they look back at 
the Tsars of Development and mimic their 
regretful slogan: 'There Is No Alternative.'

They have watched the great Gandhian people's 
movements being reduced and humiliated, 
floundering in the quagmire of court cases, 
hunger strikes and counter-hunger strikes. 
Perhaps these many million Constraining Ghosts of 
the Past wonder what advice Gandhi would have 
given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves of 
Africa, the Tasmanians, the Herero, the 
Hottentots, the Armenians, the Jews of Germany, 
the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps they wonder how 
they can go on hunger strike when they're already 
starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when 
they have no money to buy any goods. How they can 
refuse to pay taxes when they have no earnings.


Stamp out the Naxals: They have no place in Shining India

People who have taken to arms have done so with 
full knowledge of what the consequences of that 
decision will be. They have done so knowing that 
they are on their own. They know that the new 
laws of the land criminalise the poor and 
conflate resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful 
activists are ogws-overground workers.) They know 
that appeals to conscience, liberal morality and 
sympathetic press coverage will not help them 
now. They know no international marches, no 
globalised dissent, no famous writers will be 
around when the bullets fly.

Hundreds of thousands have broken faith with the 
institutions of India's democracy. Large swathes 
of the country have fallen out of the 
government's control. (At last count, it was 
supposed to be 25 per cent). The battle stinks of 
death, it's by no means pretty. How can it be 
when the helmsman of the army of Constraining 
Ghosts is the ghost of Chairman Mao himself? (The 
ray of hope is that many of the footsoldiers 
don't know who he is. Or what he did. More 
Genocide Denial? Maybe). Are they Idealists 
fighting for a Better World? Well... anything is 
better than annihilation.

The Prime Minister has declared that the Maoist 
resistance is the "single largest internal 
security threat". There have even been appeals to 
call out the army. The media is agog with 
breathless condemnation.

Here's a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of 
the ordinary. Stamp out the Naxals, it is called.

     This government is at last showing some sense 
in tackling Naxalism. Less than a month ago, 
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked state 
governments to "choke" Naxal infrastructure and 
"cripple" their activities through a dedicated 
force to eliminate the "virus". It signalled a 
realisation that Naxalism must be stamped out 
through enforcement of law, rather than wasteful 
expense on development.

"Choke". "Cripple". "Virus". "Infested". "Eliminate". "Stamp Out".

Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air. And 
people believe that faced with extermination, 
they have the right to fight back.By any means 
necessary.

Perhaps they've been listening to the grasshoppers.


______


[7]  [The chief guest at its Republic Day in 
Delhi is a uranium lit tadpole from France called 
Sarkozy; Little is known or written about in 
South Asia on this new style bully president of 
France. The latest among his fantasies is to undo 
and undermine the rules that governed the space 
for religion in public life in Secular France. 
Regis Debray, one of few from the disappearing 
species public intellectuals has chosen to speak 
up. For the small minority of French speaking on 
the SACW list, posted below is the full french 
text Debray's article. ]

o o o

www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2008/01/24/malaise-dans-la-civilisation-par-regis-debray_1003178_3232.html

Le Monde
24 Janvier 2008

MALAISE DANS LA CIVILISATION,

par Regis Debray

"L'instituteur ne pourra jamais remplacer le 
pasteur ou le curé parce qu'il lui manquera 
toujours la radicalité du sacrifice de sa vie et 
le charisme d'un engagement porté par 
l'espérance." Qu'en auraient pensé, devant le 
peloton d'exécution, Jean Cavaillès, Marc Bloch, 
Jean Prévost, Léo Lagrange ? Ils avaient assez de 
foi en eux pour hausser les épaules. Mais du 
temps où il y avait une gauche en France, cette 
injure - dans la bouche d'un président de la 
République - eût mis un million de citoyens sur 
le pavé. Une "politique de civilisation" ? 
Certes, mais laquelle ? Chacune se définit par sa 
façon de souder ou de distinguer le temporel et 
le spirituel. Des Eglises libres de l'Etat, dans 
une nation élue, comme aux Etats-Unis, ce n'est 
pas un islam inféodé à l'Etat, comme en Turquie, 
ni un Etat libre des Eglises, comme en France, 
fille de sainte Geneviève et de Diderot. Après 
d'heureux aperçus sur le considérable apport du 
christianisme, le discours du Latran a dérivé 
vers une falsification de notre état civil. Et la 
prière psalmodiée dans la capitale du fanatisme, 
Riyad, louant Dieu comme "le rempart contre 
l'orgueil démesuré et la folie des hommes", 
oublie que le Dieu unique a été autant cela que 
son contraire.

C'est entendu : si aucune civilisation ne peut 
vivre sans valeur suprême, le temps est passé des 
messianismes de substitution qui demandaient à un 
accomplissement politique de pallier mort et 
finitude. Une république laïque n'a pas à 
promouvoir une quelconque Vérité, révélée ou 
"scientifique". Mais que notre chose publique, 
par une chanceuse exception, se soit affranchie, 
en 1905, des religions établies ne la réduit pas 
à une courte gestion de l'économie, notre 
intouchable état de nature. Enraciné dans 
l'instruction publique, le projet républicain 
d'émancipation a sa noblesse. Il y a un code des 
libertés publiques, mais la Fraternité n'est pas 
réglementaire. C'est une fin en soi, qu'on peut 
dire transcendante, sur laquelle peuvent se 
régler pensées et actions.

Tout citoyen à la recherche de ce qui le dépasse 
se verrait enjoint de regarder l'au-delà ? Cela 
revient à délester la République de toute valeur 
ordonnatrice. Il y a loin de l'enseignement 
laïque du fait religieux, que j'avais recommandé, 
que l'Assemblée nationale a approuvé, à ce 
détournement dévot du fait laïque. Notre propos 
n'était pas d'humilier l'instit pour vanter 
l'iman ou le pasteur. Mais d'étendre les Lumières 
jusqu'au "continent noir" des religions, non de 
les abaisser. Encore moins de les éteindre. "La 
mystique républicaine, disait Péguy, c'était 
quand on mourait pour la République. La politique 
républicaine, c'est quand on en vit." Cette 
dernière ne sera pas quitte envers la première 
avec une gerbe de fleurs le 14-Juillet ou une 
belle envolée quinquennale. Faut-il, parce que 
les lendemains ne chantent plus, remettre aux 
détenteurs d'une Vérité unique le monopole du 
sens et de la dignité ? Entre la high-life et la 
vie consacrée, il y a le civisme. Entre le top 
model et Soeur Emmanuelle, il y a l'infirmière, 
l'institutrice, la chercheuse. Entre l'utopie 
fracassée et le Jugement dernier, il y a ce que 
l'on se doit à soi-même, à sa patrie, à autrui, à 
l'éthique de connaissance, au démon artistique. 
Ces transcendances-là, qui se conjuguent au 
présent, sans dogme ni magistère, ne sont pas les 
seules, mais elles ont inspiré Marie Curie, 
Clemenceau, Jean Moulin, Braque, Jacques Monod et 
de Gaulle (dont la lumière intérieure n'était pas 
la religion, mais l'histoire). Etaient-ce des 
professeurs de nihilisme ? Dans le rôle du mentor 
et du liant entre factions, la franc-maçonnerie 
des rich and famous semble avoir remplacé celle 
des loges radicales d'antan, moins flashy mais 
plus éclairante. Faut-il, parce que le Grand 
Occident succède au Grand Orient, réduire le 
gouvernement à une administration, la scène 
nationale à un music-hall et la foi religieuse au 
statut de pourvoyeuse d'espérance aux désespérés 
? Après l'opium des misérables, l'alibi des 
richards ? Les vrais croyants méritent mieux.

Au forum, la frime, à l'autel, l'authentique ? 
Dieu pour les âmes, l'argent pour les corps, ceci 
compensant cela. C'est l'idéal du possédant. Ce 
cynique équilibre entre indécence matérialiste au 
temporel et déférence cléricale au spirituel 
soulagerait nos élus de leurs obligations 
d'instruire et d'élever l'esprit public en payant 
d'exemple. Ce grand écart est possible dans un 
pays-église, formé au moule biblique, où neuf 
citoyens sur dix croient en l'Etre suprême et où 
l'Evangile peut faire contrepoids au big money. 
La France, où un citoyen sur dix reconnaît 
l'Inconnaissable, n'est pas la "One Nation under 
God". Les civilisations ne se délocalisent pas 
comme des stock-options ou des serials télévisés 
- anglicismes désormais de rigueur. Fin des 
Chênes qu'on abat, à La Boisserie, face à la 
forêt mérovingienne. "S'il faut regarder mourir 
l'Europe, regardons : ça n'arrive pas tous les 
matins. - Alors, la civilisation atlantique 
arrivera..." Encore une prophétie gaullienne 
confirmée ? Le divin atlantisme désormais à 
l'honneur donne congé à une tradition 
républicaine biséculaire au nom d'une tradition 
théodémocratique inexportable.

L'actuel chef de l'Etat s'est donné dix ans pour 
rattraper le retard de la France sur la 
"modernité", nom de code des Etats-Unis, passés 
maîtres des arts, des armes et des lois. Et voilà 
que, sur un enjeu crucial où nous avions de 
l'avance sur la Terre promise des people, un 
born-again à la française nous mettrait soudain 
en marche arrière ? Bientôt la main sur le coeur 
en écoutant La Marseillaise ? Les lapins, faute 
de mieux, feront de la résistance.

Régis Debray est écrivain, directeur de la revue MédiuM.


______



[7] Announcements:

(i)


World Social Forum Sri Lanka 2008

Act Together for Another World: A Better Sri Lanka is Possible!

Sat 26 January, Vihara Mahadevi Park Open Air Theatre



Programme

Opening 9.00 am to 10.30 am



Speakers

Dr Ajantha Perera
Environmentalist and Chairperson, Association for Consumer Action

Sarath Fernando
Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR)

Dr Sarba Raj Khadka
South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE), Nepal

Music by Jayathilake Bandara

10.30 am to 12 noon

Space

Organisation

Theme

Space 1

MONLAR
Alternative Agriculture and Land Rights

Space 2

Mothers & Daughters of Lanka and Vikalpani
Women and Peace

Space 3

Plantation Sector Social Forum
The Housing Crisis and The Ten Year Policy for 
Plantations: Our Alternative Vision

Space 4

Free Trade Union Development Centre
How can Working People face Rising Cost of Living and the Sufferings of War?

Space 5

National Fisheries Solidarity Organisation
Protect Fishers, Farmers and Workers Right to Livelihood

12.00 pm to 1.00 pm

Lunch and Exhibitions

1.00 pm to 2.30 pm

Space

Organisation

Theme

Space 1

Rural Women's Fund/Action Aid Women's Rights Network
Charter on Violence against Women in Post-Disaster Context

Space 2

Prayathna
Necessity and Challenge for a Democratic Peoples Movement

Space 3

Leo Marga Ashram
Corporate Globalisation and Plantation 
agriculture: Civil Society Alternatives, followed 
by book launch: The Journey from Leaf to Cup

Space 4

Sri Lanka Nature Forum
Environmental Costs of Mega-Development Projects 
(Weerawila, Hambantota, Moragahakanda etc.)

Space 5

Inter-Religious Group

Inter-Faith Dialogue on Peace

2.30 pm to 4.00 pm

Space

Organisation

Theme

Space 1

Savisthri
Peoples Health Movement
There are Development Alternatives: Now is the Time to Build Them!
Health is the Right of People

Space 2

Law & Society Trust and Rights Now Collective for Democracy
Abrogation of the Ceasefire and Return to War: 
Impact on Civilians and Human Rights Defenders

Space 3

Association of Family Members of the Disappeared and Right to Life

End Impunity! UN Convention on Disappearances Now!

Space 4

Green Movement of Sri Lanka
Disaster aspects of conflict, economic crisis and globalisation

Space 5

Community Trust Fund
Northern Muslim IDP Issues


Closing 4.00 pm onwards

Speakers

Susil Sirivardhana
Peoples Space (Jana Avakasha / Jana Avakasam)

Karamat Ali
Pakistan Institute for Labour Education and Research (PILER) Pakistan

Nimalka Fernando
International Movement Against Discrimination and Racism (IMADR)


Cultural Performances

Heritage Initiative                              Music
Jana Ranga Sabhava                       Forum Theatre
Jayathilake Bandara                         Concert


______


(ii)

Join us at t2f for STRAIGHT TALK - ELECTIONS 
2008, organized by APNA Channel and Helpline 
Trust.

Up until the late 60s, Pakistan was a strong 
contender for the position of Asian Tiger but 
unfortunately, over the years, we have 
floundered. Various elected representatives have 
come and gone, emergencies have been declared, 
and various flavors of martial law have been 
imposed. Pakistan stumbles from one day to the 
next, desperately in search of leadership.

Benazir Bhutto has been brutally assassinated, 
followed by three days of killing, looting, 
burning and wanton destruction of public and 
private property. The entire election process has 
been derailed. Political leaders are making wild 
accusations and leveling allegations. There is 
anger, fear, apprehension, confusion, and 
uncertainty across the entire country.

Do the upcoming elections hold any meaning for 
the citizens of Pakistan? Do you wonder what our 
awami leaders plan to do once they are elected? 
How will the next government tackle the enormous 
issues of corruption and inequity? How will they 
rebuild our destroyed institutions, especially 
the judiciary? How will they curb terrorism and 
the spread of talibization? How will they 
introduce the urgent reforms required to improve 
the quality of life of Pakistani citizens?

What is your message for President Musharraf, the 
Election Commission, political leaders, and 
voters? Let's Talk!

IMPORTANT: These special editions of Straight 
Talk Pakistan - Elections 2008 will be recorded 
and televised on APNA Channel. We have space for 
50 participants and doors will close after the 
session begins.

Dates: Wednesday, 30th January and Thursday, 31st January 2008

Time: 8:00 pm

Venue: The Second Floor (t2f)
6-C, Prime Point Building, Phase 7, Khayaban-e-Ittehad, DHA, Karachi
Phone: 538-9273 | 0300-823-0276 | info at t2f.biz
Map: http://www.t2f.biz/location

______


(iii)

1857 SPECIAL LECTURES AT DELHI UNIVERSITY

Rudrangshu Mukherjee

Nationalism and History Writing: S.N. Sen and 
S.B. Chaudhuri as historians of 1857

January 25, 2008


Margit Pernau

Contested Memories and Memoirs: Remembering 1857 in Delhi

February 20, 2008


University Conference Centre
(Opp. Botany Dept.)


______


(iii)

OUTSIDE IN! A TALE OF 3 CITIES. The 70's & 80's
Exhibition of Photographs by Pablo Bartholomew. 
At the National Museum, New Delhi.

27 Jan. - 29 Feb. 2008
______


(iv)

Dear friends,

TRANSCEND Peace University (TPU), the online 
center for Peace and Development Studies, invites 
you to join online classes with participants all 
over the world.

You will find a variety of peace and development 
subjects, comprised in 23 online courses, taking 
place from March 3rd to May 23rd, 2008. TPU 
courses are conducted by peace practitioners, 
internationally recognized professionals. TPU 
March Semester 2008 also include courses on 
Peaceful Conflict Transformation conducted by 
Johan Galtung, the rector of TRANSCEND Peace 
University.
Applications are received until February 22nd, 2008.

Please see attached file for the complete list of courses.

To see more details and to apply visit our 
website 
<http://tpu.transcend.org>http://tpu.transcend.org

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

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: http://insaf.net/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.