SACW | April 30, 2008 / New Deal in Pakistan / China vs The Lama and Tibet / India: Criminalisation of the State
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Tue Apr 29 19:54:22 CDT 2008
South Asia Citizens Wire | April 30, 2008 | Dispatch No. 2509 - Year 10 running
[1] Pakistan: New Dealers (William Dalrymple)
[2] China vs the Lama and Tibet: He May Be a God,
but He's No Politician (Patrick French)
- Virulence of nationalism - of China and others
like India - does not bode well (Pranab Bardhan)
[3] India: No quick fixes, please (Dilip Simeon)
[4] India: Fair Trial Doubtful for Honored Rights Advocate (Human Rights Watch)
[5] India: On Taslima Nasreen - A Rejoinder to
Shahabuddin [the whole sale wheeler dealer in
"Muslim Affairs"]
[6] Announcements :
(i) A Citizens Walk for the Judiciary, (Karachi, 30 April 2008)
(ii) A Public Debate: If Kosovo, Why Not Kashmir? (Utrecht, 15 May 2008)
(iii) Publication Announcements:
a) Peace Now - Volume 6 : Issue 2, May 2008 (CNDP)
b) South Asia - An Environmental History by Christopher V. Hill
______
[1]
New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 5 · April 3, 2008
A NEW DEAL IN PAKISTAN
by William Dalrymple
The province of Sindh in southern Pakistan is a
rural region of dusty mudbrick villages, of
white-domed blue-tiled Sufi shrines, and of salty
desert scrublands broken, quite suddenly, by
floodplains of wonderful fecundity. These thin,
fertile belts of green-cotton fields, rice
paddies, cane breaks, and miles of checkerboard
mango orchards-snake along the banks of the Indus
River as it meanders its sluggish, silted,
café-au-lait way through the plains of Pakistan
down to the shores of the Arabian Sea.
In many ways the landscape here with its harsh
juxtaposition of dry horizons of sand and narrow
strips of intensely fertile cultivation more
closely resembles upper Egypt than the
well-irrigated Punjab to its north. But it is
poorer than either-in fact, it is one of the most
backward areas in all of Asia. Whatever index of
development you choose to dwell on-literacy,
health care provision, daily income, or numbers
living below the poverty line-rural Sindh comes
bumping along close to the bottom. Here landlords
still rule with guns and private armies over vast
tracts of country; bonded labor-a form of debt
slavery-leaves tens of thousands shackled to
their places of work. It is also, in parts,
lawless and dangerous to move around in,
especially at night.
I first learned about the dacoits-or
highwaymen-when I attempted to leave the
provincial market town of Sukkur after dark a
week before the recent elections.[1] It was a
tense time everywhere, and violence was widely
expected. But in Sindh the tension had resolved
itself into an outbreak of rural brigandage. We
left Sukkur asking for directions to Larkana, the
home village of the Bhutto family, only to be
warned by people huddled in tea stalls shrouded
under thick shawls that we should not try to
continue until first light the following morning.
They said there had been ten or fifteen robberies
on the road in the last fortnight alone.
NYR Subscriptions-Save $41!
If it is dangerous to travel here at night, it is
much more dangerous to declare openly for the
candidates you support in the elections. The big
landlords here-the zamindars-expect electoral
loyalty from their tenants. As the Pakistani
writer Ahmed Rashid put it, "In some
constituencies if the feudals put up their dog as
a candidate, that dog would get elected with
ninety-nine per cent of the vote." Such loyalty
can be enforced. In the more remote and lawless
areas the zamindars and their thugs often bribe
or threaten the polling agents, then simply stuff
the ballot boxes with thousands of votes for
themselves. This is sufficiently common for the
practice to have its own descriptive term: "booth
capturing."
Democracy has never thrived in Pakistan in part
because landowning has traditionally been the
social base from which most politicians emerge,
especially in rural areas. Here Pakistan is quite
different from India, where the urban middle
class quickly gained control in 1947. That class
has been largely excluded from Pakistan's
political process, as, even more so, has the
rural peasantry. There are no Pakistani
equivalents of Indian peasant leaders such as
Laloo Prasad Yadav, the village cowherd turned
(former) chief minister of Bihar, or Mayawati,
the dalit (untouchable) leader and current chief
minister of Uttar Pradesh.
You can see the results of a system dominated by
landowners in a town like Khairpur, a short
distance from Sukkur in the northern part of
Sindh. As you drive along, the turban-clad head
of the local feudal lord, Sadruddin Shah, with a
curling black mustache, sneers down from
billboards placed every fifty yards along the
road. Shah, who was standing, as usual, for no
less than three different seats, is often held up
in the liberal Pakistani press as the epitome of
all that is worst about Pakistani electoral
feudalism. After all, this is a man who goes
electioneering not with leaflets setting out his
program, but with five pickup trucks full of his
men armed with pump-action shotguns and
Kalashnikovs.
For generations the area has been dominated by
Sadruddin's family, the head of whom-currently
Sadruddin's father-is known as the Pir Pagara,
"the Holy Man with the Turban." The Pir Pagaras
are not only the largest and most powerful of the
local feudal landowners, but they are also the
descendants of the local Sufi saint. Normally
Sufism is a force for peace and brotherhood-Islam
at its most pluralistic and tolerant. At the
other end of Sindh I have attended the annual
'urs-or shrine festival-of the Sufi saint Shah
Abdul Latif, where there is ecstatic Sufi music,
the singing of love poetry, and men and women
dancing together-something that would horrify the
orthodox 'ulema.
But Khairpur has a very different and more
militant Sufi tradition. The Pir Pagaras have
always had their own Hur militia, which once
acted as a guerrilla force against the British
and now acts as Sadruddin's private electoral
army. The week I was in the district the local
papers were full of stories of Sadruddin's gunmen
shooting at crowds of little boys shouting
slogans supporting the recently assassinated
Benazir Bhutto, and burning down the houses of
those of his tenants who had flown opposition
flags.
The leaders of this feudal army were standing for
election under the banner of their own
pro-Musharraf faction of the Pakistan Muslim
League (known as PML-F, in the alphabet soup of
acronyms that characterizes Pakistani elections).
Against them were ranged the forces of Benazir
Bhutto's party, the Pakistan People's Party
(PPP). Contrary to its socialist-sounding name,
the PPP has traditionally also been very much a
feudal party that has consistently failed to
bring about any serious land reform that would
break the power of the landowners. Benazir Bhutto
herself was from a landowning feudal family in
Sindh; so is Asif Ali Zardari, her widower and
the current co-chairman of the PPP, which she
left to him and their son Bilawal in her will as
if it were a personal possession; so also is
Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the most likely candidate
for prime minister of the new PPP-dominated
coalition.
But things are at last beginning to change in
Pakistani politics, and here in Khairpur at
least, the PPP candidates were largely
middle-class-a new development in the region.
Nafisa Shah, who was one of the candidates
standing against Sadruddin, is the impeccably
middle-class daughter of a local lawyer, who is
currently at Oxford University writing a Ph.D.
dissertation on honor killings.
Nafisa's campaign was hugely assisted by a wave
of sympathy for Benazir: the day she was
assassinated, Khairpur was consumed by riots, and
for four days full-scale warfare broke out
between Benazir supporters and the local
administration, during which the election
headquarters of the pro-Musharraf parties and
several offices of the local government were
burned down.
Partly because of this simmering discontent,
outbreaks of violence were predicted on polling
day, and everyone was anticipating widespread
rigging by Musharraf and his intelligence agency
cronies, something to which the
Musharraf-appointed election commission was
expected to turn a blind eye. This, it was
predicted, would be followed by more riots
organized by the discontented opposition parties
who had been cheated of their votes.
In fact, however, serious violence did not
materialize, either in Khairpur or elsewhere, and
to general astonishment, Nafisa and her fellow
PPP candidates had a remarkably strong victory,
monitored and filmed by Pakistan's increasingly
fearless and independent press and television.
The PML-F was almost wiped out and Sadruddin Shah
won only his own home seat-and that with the
narrowest of margins.
What happened in Khairpur was a small
revolution-a middle-class victory over the forces
of reactionary feudal landlordism. More
astonishingly, it was a revolution that was
reproduced across the country. To widespread
surprise, the elections in Pakistan were free and
fair; and Pakistanis voted heavily in favor of
liberal centrist parties opposed to both the
mullahs and the army. Here, in a country normally
held up in the more Islamophobic right-wing press
of Western countries as the epitome of "what went
wrong" in the Islamic world, a popular election
resulted in an unequivocal vote for moderate,
secular democracy.
For Pakistani liberals, 2007 was one of the worst
years in their country's history. In early March,
Musharraf suspended Pakistan's chief justice,
Iftikhar Chaudhry, accusing him of using his
position for personal gain. This was clearly not
the case. Chaudhry had a reputation for both
integrity and independence, and most assumed that
Musharraf simply wanted to replace him with a
more pliant judge who would not block his
reelection as president.
Some were encouraged by the popular protests
mounted by Pakistan's lawyers in response to
Chaudhry's suspension-in city after city across
the country lawyers took to the streets in their
court robes, marching in orderly ranks, three
abreast, like emperor penguins in a nature film.
But any optimism was quickly dimmed by the
heavy-handed response of Musharraf's riot police
and the simultaneous growth of Islamist
radicalism in the heart of the capital, Islamabad.
This took the form of the heavily veiled,
black-clad "chicks with sticks" who, in April
2007, emerged in large numbers armed with bamboo
canes from a mosque and madrasa complex in the
city center, not far from the headquarters of
Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The young
women then proceeded to ransack suspected
brothels and smash video and music stores in the
capital while the police watched, apparently
helpless. The bloody storming by the army of
their base, the Red Mosque, in early July was
followed by an unprecedented wave of suicide
bombings and Islamist revenge attacks against the
army. In all there were sixty suicide bombings in
Pakistan last year, leaving 770 people dead and
nearly 1,600 injured.
By autumn the situation had become even worse,
with a series of crushing military defeats
inflicted on the Paki-stani army by the Taliban
in Waziristan, the "extraordinary rendition" by
Musharraf's officials of the former prime
minister and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif back
to Saudi Arabia after his return from exile, and
the subsequent declaration of an emergency by
President Musharraf, who put a number of
dissenting lawyers, political opponents, and
human rights activists under house arrest. The
disasters reached a horrific climax in December
with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. This
led many to predict that Pakistan was looking
like a failed state stumbling toward collapse and
civil war. The cruel contrast with India, then
widely being celebrated as a future democratic
superpower on its sixtieth birthday, was
unmistakable.
Yet the widespread publicity given to the crisis
obscured the important changes that had quietly
taken place in Pakistani society during
Musharraf's eight years in power. Pakistan's
economy is currently in difficulty, with
fast-rising inflation and shortages of
electricity and flour; but between 2002 and 2006
it had grown almost as strongly as India's. Until
the beginning of 2007, Pakistan had a
construction and consumer boom, with growth
approaching 8 percent; for several years its
stock market was the fastest-rising in Asia.
As you travel around Pakistan today you can see
the effects of the boom everywhere: in vast new
shopping malls and smart roadside filling
stations, in the cranes of the building sites and
the smokestacks of factories, in the expensive
new cars jamming the roads and in the ubiquitous
cell-phone stores. In 2003 the country had fewer
than three million cell phones; today apparently
there are 50 million, while car ownership has
been increasing at roughly 40 percent a year
since 2001. At the same time foreign direct
investment has risen from $322 million in 2002 to
$3.5 billion in 2006.
Pakistan's cities, in particular, are fast
changing beyond recognition. As in India, there
is a burgeoning Pakistani fashion scene full of
ambitious gay designers and amazingly beautiful
models. There are also remarkable developments in
publishing. In nonfiction, Ahmed Rashid's book
Taliban became the essential primer on
Afghanistan after 2001. Ayesha Siddiqa's Military
Inc. and Zahid Hussain's Frontline Pakistan are
two of the most penetrating recent studies of the
country and essential for understanding the
politics of Pakistan. Siddiqa is especially good
on the economic and political power of the army,
while Hussain's book is the best existing guide
to Pakistan's jihadis. There have also been
particularly impressive new works of fiction by
Pakistani writers, among them Kamila Shamsie's
Kartography and Broken Verses, Nadeem Aslam's
Maps for Lost Lovers, and Moni Mohsin's End of
Innocence. One of Daniyal Mueenuddin's short
stories, his wonderfully witty "Nawabdin
Electrician," was published in The New Yorker of
August 27, 2007.
Recently Mohsin Hamid, author of the best-seller
The Reluctant Fundamentalist,[2] wrote about this
change in culture. Having lived as a banker in
New York and London, he returned home to Lahore
to find the country unrecognizable. He was
particularly struck by
the incredible new world of media that had
sprung up..., a world of music videos, fashion
programmes, independent news networks,
cross-dressing talk-show hosts, religious
debates, stock-market analysis.... Not just
television, but also private radio stations and
newspapers have flourished.... The result is an
unprecedented openness.... Young people are
speaking and dressing differently.... The Vagina
Monologues was recently performed on stage in
Pakistan to standing ovations.[3]
Such reports are rare in the Western press, which
prefers its stereotypes simple: India, successful
and forward-looking; Pakistan, a typical Islamic
failure. The reality is of course much less
clear, and far more complex.
It was this newly enriched and empowered urban
middle class that showed its political muscle for
the first time with the organization of a
lawyers' movement, whose protests against the
dismissal of the chief justice soon swelled into
a full-scale pro-democracy campaign, despite
Musharraf's harassment and arrest of many
lawyers. The movement represented a huge shift in
Pakistani civil society's participation in
politics. The middle class were at last moving
from their living rooms onto the streets, from
dinner parties into political parties.
February's elections dramatically confirmed this
shift. The biggest electoral surprise of all was
the success of Nawaz Sharif's conservative
faction of the Muslim League, the PML-N. This is
a solidly urban party, popular among exactly the
sort of middle-class voters in the Punjab who
have benefited most from the economic success of
the last decade, and who have since found that
status threatened by the recent economic slowdown
and the sudden steep rises in the prices of food,
fuel, and electricity.
The same is true of the success of the MQM, the
Karachi-based party representing the Mohajirs,
the emigrants who left India to come to Pakistan
at the founding of the country in 1947. Like
Nawaz Sharif's PML-N, it is an urban-based
regional party attractive to middle-class voters.
Almost 50 percent of Pakistan's population now
lives in urban areas, and the center of gravity
is shifting from the countryside to the large
cities. The parties that appealed most
successfully to this new demographic trend won
the most convincing victories in the polls.
The rise of the middle class was most clear in
the number of winning candidates who, for the
first time, came from such a background. In Jhang
district of the rural Punjab, for example, as
many as ten out of eleven of those elected are
the sons of revenue officers, senior policemen,
functionaries in the civil bureaucracy, and so
on, rather than usual feudal zamindars. This
would have been unthinkable ten years ago.
Even the most benign feudal lords suffered
astonishing electoral reverses. Mian Najibuddin
Owaisi was not just the popular feudal lord of
the village of Khanqah Sharif in the southern
Punjab, he was also the sajjada nasheen, the
descendant of the local Sufi saint, and so, like
Sadruddin Shah, regarded as something of a holy
man as well as the local landowner. But recently
Najibuddin made the ill-timed switch from
supporting Nawaz Sharif's PML-N to the
pro-Musharraf Q-League. When I talked to people
in the village bazaar, they all said that they
did not like Musharraf, but they would still vote
for their landlord.
"Prices are rising," said Hajji Sadiq, a cloth
merchant, sitting amid bolts of textiles. "There
is less and less electricity and gas."
"And what was done to Benazir was quite wrong," his friend Salman agreed.
"But Najib sahib is our protector," said Hajji.
"Whatever party he chooses, we will vote for him.
Even the Q-League."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because with him in power we have someone we can
call if we are in trouble with the police, or
need someone to speak to the administration."
"When we really need him he looks after us."
"We vote according to local issues only. Who cares about parties?"
Because of Najibuddin's personal popularity, his
vote stood up better than many other
pro-Musharraf feudal lords-and he polled 46,000
votes. But he still lost, to an independent
candidate from a nonfeudal middle-class
background named Amir Varan, who received 57,000
votes and ousted the Owaisi family from control
of the constituency for the first time since they
entered politics in the elections of 1975.
As well as a middle-class victory over a feudal
past, in the west of the country the election was
also an important vote for secularism over the
Islamist religious parties.
In the last election of October 2002, thanks
partly to their closeness to the ruling military
government, and partly to their sympathy with
al-Qaeda, the Islamist Muttehida Majlis Amal
(MMA) alliance nearly tripled its representation
in the national assembly from 4 to 11.6 percent,
and swept the polls in the two key provinces
bordering Afghanistan-Baluchistan and the
North-West Frontier Province-where they went on
to form Islamist provincial governments.
This time, however, religious parties sunk from
fifty-six out of 272 seats in the national
assembly to just five. In the North-West Frontier
Province, the MMA has been comprehensively
defeated by the overtly secular Awami National
Party (ANP). This is a remnant of what was once a
mighty force: the nonviolent and secular Red
Shirts movement, which, before the creation of
Pakistan, was originally led by Khan Abdul
Ghaffar Khan, an important ally of Mahatma Gandhi
from the North-West Frontier Province. Ghaffar
Khan was locked up by one Pakistani general after
another for much of the time between Partition
and his death in 1988, but his political movement
has survived both the generals and a succession
of bomb blasts aimed at its party, and has
now-after nearly fifty years in opposition-made a
dramatic comeback under the leadership of Ghaffar
Khan's grandson, Asfandyar Wali Khan.
"Before the Taliban," the North-West Frontier
Province "used to be a very liberal area," he
told me in Islamabad.
No one can force us to give up that
culture-even the suicide bombers. There is a very
clear polarization taking place...on one side
those striving for peace, nonviolence, and a
future of cooperation with the international
community, and on the other those who stand for
confrontation and hatred. They are men of
violence, but we refuse to be cowed. We may lose,
but we will make a stand.
In the election, Asfandyar's ANP routed the
Islamists, demonstrating that contrary to their
image as bearded bastions of Islamist orthodoxy,
Pashtun tribesmen are as wary as anyone else of
violence, extremism, and instability. Now the ANP
is talking of extending the Pakistani political
parties into the troubled northern tribal areas
that are federally administered and act as the
buffer zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan: "If
I am prepared to take on the Maulvis in the
tribal areas, why should the government stop me?"
asked Asfandyar. "At the moment the tribal areas
are just left to fester. We have to end that
isolation and bring them forward."
The issues that mattered to voters in the
frontier were those of incompetent governance by
the MMA, increased insecurity, and especially the
fear of constant suicide bombings. Like
democratically elected parties anywhere else in
the world, the electorate judged the MMA on its
record, and threw it out for failing to deliver.
There is a clear lesson for US policymakers here.
The parties of political Islam are like any other
democratic parties: they will succeed or fail on
what they deliver. The best way of dealing with
democratic Islamists, if Pakistan's experience is
anything to go by, is to let them be voted into
power and then reveal their own
incompetence-mullah-fatigue will no doubt quickly
set in. Besieging Islamist parties that have come
to power through a democratic vote, as the US has
done with Hamas, or allowing local proxies to rig
the vote so as to deprive them of power, as
happened in Egypt, only strengthens their hand
and increases their popularity.
There is an additional reason for modest optimism
about Pakistan's future at the moment. In recent
years, the biggest threat to the country's
stability has come from the jihadi groups created
and nourished by the army and the ISI for
selective deployment in Afghanistan and Kashmir,
but which soon followed their own violent agendas
within Pakistan itself. For the last decade, that
threat has been exacerbated by the ambiguous
attitude toward the jihadis maintained by the
Pakistani army and its intelligence services.
Some elements have been alarmed by the militants'
violence and the effects that supporting these
groups would have on the alliance with the US.
Others saw them as useful irregulars that could
still be drawn on to fight low-cost proxy wars
for the army. That era of division and ambiguity
now seems to be coming to a close.
On November 24, 2007, a suicide bomber detonated
himself beside a bus at the entrance of Camp
Hamza, the ISI's Islamabad headquarters. Around
twenty people died in what is the first known
attack by an Islamist cell against the Pakistani
intelligence services. Many of the dead were ISI
staffers. This event, coming as it did after
three assassination attempts on General
Musharraf, several other bomb attacks on army
barracks, and the murder of many captured army
personnel in Waziristan, is credited with
persuading even the most stubbornly pro-Islamist
elements in the Pakistani army that the monster
they have created now has to be dispatched, and
as quickly as possible.
Shuja Nawaz is a Washington-based specialist on
the Pakistani army who comes from a prominent and
well-connected military family and who is about
to publish Crossed Swords, an important new book
on the army.[4] According to Nawaz,
The direct attacks on the army have shaken up
the military at all levels. One of Musharraf's
senior colleagues said he was changing his cars
daily to avoid being identified when he hits the
roads of Rawalpindi. The army brass has been told
not to go out in uniforms. Soon, they may stop
using their staff cars with flags and star plates.
This is obviously a radically new situation, and
one that changes all previous calculations on the
part of the military. The Pakistan expert Stephen
P. Cohen of the Brookings Institution agrees with
this assessment. He recently told me:
The senior leadership of the army under
Musharraf now regards the threat from Islamic
radicals as being far greater than the threat
posed by India. That conviction has been hugely
increased since the suicide bomb attacks on army
staff and the intelligence agencies this past
December.[5]
This week the news came that the army had rounded
up in Lahore an important cell of
Lashkar-i-Jhangvi Islamist militants; many more
such arrests are expected soon.
Over the last few years there has been something
of an existential crisis in Pakistan, at the
heart of which lay the question: What sort of
country did Pakistanis want? Did they want a
Western-style liberal democracy, as envisaged by
the poet Iqbal, who first dreamed up the idea of
Pakistan, and by the country's eventual founder,
Muhammad Ali Jinnah? An Islamic republic like
Mullah Omar's Afghanistan? Or a military-ruled
junta of the sort created by Generals Ayyub Khan,
Zia, and Musharraf, who, among them, have ruled
Pakistan for thirty-four of its sixty years of
existence?
Though turnout in the election was fairly low,
partly owing to fear of suicide bombings, it is
clear that Pakistanis have overwhelmingly
rejected the military and Islamist options and
chosen instead to back secular democracy. And if
many stayed at home, no fewer than 36 million
Pakistanis braved the threatened bombs to vote in
an election which by South Asian standards was
remarkably free of violence, corruption,
ballot-stuffing, or "booth capturing."
A new coalition government now looks likely to
come to power peacefully, bringing together
Zadari's People's Party and Sharif's Muslim
League, and will do so unopposed by the army.
These developments should now lead commentators
to reassess the country that many have long
written off and caricatured as a terror-breeding
swamp of Islamist iniquity.
The country I saw in February on a long road trip
from Lahore in the Punjab down through rural
Sindh to Karachi was not a failed state, or
anything even approaching "the most dangerous
country in the world...almost beyond repair" as
the London Spectator recently suggested, joined
in its view by The New York Times and The
Washington Post among many others. On the
contrary, the countryside I passed through was no
less peaceful and prosperous than that on the
other side of the Indian border; indeed its road
networks are far more developed. It was certainly
a far cry from the violent instability of
post-occupation Iraq or Afghanistan.
On my travels I found a surprisingly widespread
consensus that the mullahs should keep to their
mosques, and the increasingly unpopular military
should return to its barracks. The new army
chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, who took over when
Musharraf stepped down from his military role
last year, seems to recognize this. He has
repeatedly talked of pulling the army back from
civilian life, and ordering his soldiers to stay
out of politics. He has also ordered that no army
officer may meet with President Musharraf without
his personal approval. He also seems committed to
maintaining tight security to protect Pakistan's
nuclear arsenal.
Pakistan will not change overnight. Much violence
and unrest no doubt lie ahead, as shown by the
recent assassination by a suicide bomber in
Rawal-pindi of General Mushtaq Baig, the head of
the Pakistan Army Medical Corps, and continuing
bomb blasts in the troubled Swat Valley, once the
country's most popular tourist destination. The
country still has a vast problem with rural and
urban poverty, and a collapsing education system.
It also has serious unresolved questions about
its political future. As Ahmed Rashid said in a
recent interview:
The new coalition government will have to
face continuing behind the scenes efforts by
President Pervez Musharraf and the intelligence
agencies to undermine them even before they are
allowed to govern. Musharraf's agents backed by a
section of the Washington establishment had been
secretly trying to persuade Zardari to go into
alliance with the former ruling party-the
Pakistan Muslim League-Q group. The Q group has
been decimated in the elections-23 ministers lost
their seats and today it is leaderless,
visionless and without an agenda-except it
remains a pawn in the hands of Musharraf.[6]
For many Pakistanis, there continues to be
confusion and disillusion. Most of the country's
impoverished citizens still live precarious and
uncertain lives. A growing insurgency is spilling
out of the tribal areas on the Afghan border. But
Pakistan is not about to fall apart, or implode,
or break out into civil war, or become a Taliban
state with truckfuls of mullahs pouring down on
Islamabad from the Khyber Pass. It is not at all
clear whether the members of Pakistan's flawed
and corrupt political elite have the ability to
govern the country and seize the democratic
opportunity offered by this election, rather than
simply use it as an opportunity for personal
enrichment. But they are unlikely ever again to
have such a good opportunity to redefine this
crucial strategic country as a stable and
moderate Islamic democracy that can work out its
own version of India's remarkable economic and
political success.
-Lahore, March 3, 2008
Notes
[1] I briefly draw here and elsewhere on my
dispatch to The New Statesman, February 21, 2008.
[2] Harcourt, 2007; reviewed in these pages by Sarah Kerr, October 11, 2007.
[3] Mohsin Hamid, "General Pervez Musharraf:
Pakistan's Big Beast Unleashed," The Independent
(London), February 11, 2007.
[4] Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the
Wars Within, to be published by Oxford University
Press in June.
[5] Stephen P. Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan
(Oxford University Press, 2005) is one of the
most sophisticated and penetrating analyses of
the country in print.
[6] Scott Horton, "Six Questions for Ahmed Rashid
on the Elections in Pakistan and US Foreign
Policy," February 28, 2008, available at
www.harpers.org.
______
[2] China vs The Lama and Tibet
New York Times
March 22, 2008
HE MAY BE A GOD, BUT HE'S NO POLITICIAN
by Patrick French
NEARLY a decade ago, while staying with a nomad
family in the remote grasslands of northeastern
Tibet, I asked Namdrub, a man who fought in the
anti-Communist resistance in the 1950s, what he
thought about the exiled Tibetans who campaigned
for his freedom. "It may make them feel good, but
for us, it makes life worse," he replied. "It
makes the Chinese create more controls over us.
Tibet is too important to the Communists for them
even to discuss independence."
Protests have spread across the Tibetan plateau
over the last two weeks, and at least 100 people
have died. Anyone who finds it odd that Speaker
Nancy Pelosi has rushed to Dharamsala, India, to
stand by the Dalai Lama's side fails to realize
that American politics provided an important
spark for the demonstrations. Last October, when
the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to the
Dalai Lama, monks in Tibet watched over the
Internet and celebrated by setting off fireworks
and throwing barley flour. They were quickly
arrested.
It was for the release of these monks that
demonstrators initially turned out this month.
Their brave stand quickly metamorphosed into a
protest by Lhasa residents who were angry that
many economic advantages of the last 10 or 15
years had gone to Han Chinese and Hui Muslims. A
young refugee whose family is still in Tibet told
me this week of the medal, "People believed that
the American government was genuinely considering
the Tibet issue as a priority." In fact, the
award was a symbolic gesture, arranged mostly to
make American lawmakers feel good.
A similar misunderstanding occurred in 1987 when
the Dalai Lama was denounced by the Chinese state
media for putting forward a peace proposal on
Capitol Hill. To Tibetans brought up in the
Communist system - where a politician's physical
proximity to the leadership on the evening news
indicates to the public that he is in favor - it
appeared that the world's most powerful
government was offering substantive political
backing to the Dalai Lama. Protests began in
Lhasa, and martial law was declared. The brutal
suppression that followed was orchestrated by the
party secretary in Tibet, Hu Jintao, who is now
the Chinese president. His response to the
current unrest is likely to be equally
uncompromising.
The Dalai Lama is a great and charismatic
spiritual figure, but a poor and poorly advised
political strategist. When he escaped into exile
in India in 1959, he declared himself an admirer
of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent resistance. But
Gandhi took huge gambles, starting the Salt March
and starving himself nearly to death - a very
different approach from the Dalai Lama's "middle
way," which concentrates on nonviolence rather
than resistance. The Dalai Lama has never really
tried to use direct action to leverage his
authority.
At the end of the 1980s, he joined forces with
Hollywood and generated huge popular support for
the Tibetan cause in America and Western Europe.
This approach made some sense at the time. The
Soviet Union was falling apart, and many people
thought China might do the same. In practice,
however, the campaign outraged the nationalist
and xenophobic Chinese leadership.
It has been clear since the mid-1990s that the
popular internationalization of the Tibet issue
has had no positive effect on the Beijing
government. The leadership is not amenable to
"moral pressure," over the Olympics or anything
else, particularly by the nations that invaded
Iraq.
The Dalai Lama should have closed down the
Hollywood strategy a decade ago and focused on
back-channel diplomacy with Beijing. He should
have publicly renounced the claim to a so-called
Greater Tibet, which demands territory that was
never under the control of the Lhasa government.
Sending his envoys to talk about talks with the
Chinese while simultaneously encouraging the
global pro-Tibet lobby has achieved nothing.
When Beijing attacks the "Dalai clique," it is
referring to the various groups that make Chinese
leaders lose face each time they visit a Western
country. The International Campaign for Tibet,
based in Washington, is now a more powerful and
effective force on global opinion than the Dalai
Lama's outfit in northern India. The European and
American pro-Tibet organizations are the tail
that wags the dog of the Tibetan
government-in-exile.
These groups hate criticism almost as much as the
Chinese government does. Some use questionable
information. For example, the Free Tibet Campaign
in London (of which I am a former director) and
other groups have long claimed that 1.2 million
Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese since
they invaded in 1950. However, after scouring the
archives in Dharamsala while researching my book
on Tibet, I found that there was no evidence to
support that figure. The question that Nancy
Pelosi and celebrity advocates like Richard Gere
ought to answer is this: Have the actions of the
Western pro-Tibet lobby over the last 20 years
brought a single benefit to the Tibetans who live
inside Tibet, and if not, why continue with a
failed strategy?
I first visited Tibet in 1986. The economic
plight of ordinary people is slightly better now,
but they have as little political freedom as they
did two decades ago. Tibet lacks genuine
autonomy, and ethnic Tibetans are excluded from
positions of real power within the bureaucracy or
the army. Tibet was effectively a sovereign
nation at the time of the Communist invasion and
was in full control of its own affairs. But the
battle for Tibetan independence was lost 49 years
ago when the Dalai Lama escaped into exile. His
goal, and that of those who want to help the
Tibetan people, should be to negotiate
realistically with the Chinese state. The present
protests, supported from overseas, will bring
only more suffering. China is not a democracy,
and it will not budge.
Patrick French is the author of "Tibet, Tibet: A
Personal History of a Lost Land."
o o o
YaleGlobal
28 April 2008
VIRULENCE OF NATIONALISM - OF CHINA AND OTHERS LIKE INDIA - DOES NOT BODE WELL
by Pranab Bardhan
Respect on demand: Chinese protesters in
Australia reflect nationalist anger, but
unwillingness to accept criticism may not bring
respect
BERKELEY: As the troubled Olympic torch relay
winds its way to Beijing, the recent fury in
China about the evil doings of the "Dalai clique"
in Tibet and of the western media goes beyond the
ever-active orchestration by the Chinese
leadership. As nationalism has replaced socialism
as the social glue in this vast country, old
memories of humiliation at foreign hands and
current pride in phenomenal economic success
generate popular resentment at what looks like
external attempts to rain on the parade of
China's glorious Olympic moment.
Of course, the Chinese protestation that the West
is politicizing a sports event is disingenuous,
as all parties concerned, including the Chinese
government, treat it as much more than a sports
event. The government now tries to tame the
anti-West passions of the people and has made
some gestures, at best half-hearted and likely
futile, toward negotiation with the Tibetans.
Modulating the mass passions and keeping them
under appropriate bounds so that they don't
boomerang back is a tough job, as Chinese
administrators know very well.
But serious Chinese social thinkers cannot be
comfortable about the preening nationalism all
around them, often stoked by the frenzy of the
internet mob - witness the harassment and
persecution of a Chinese student at Duke
University and her family in China on grounds
that she committed the grievous offense of trying
to mediate between two opposed groups of
demonstrators on the occasion of the campus
protests around Tibet. Nor can the Chinese
thinkers be unaware, that despite tight state
control over sources of information, the
economic, political, cultural domination - and
migration -of the Han Chinese will keep on
fueling unrest in Tibet even when the current
opportunist protests die down.
Nationalism in all countries whirls around the
great tradition and rides roughshod over the
"little people" and their distinctiveness. China
in particular has a long history of
homogenization of culture and language, and
suppression of voices of dissent, reflexively
taken as signs of rebellion. The historian W.J.F.
Jenner in his book "The Tyranny of History,"
describes one of the basic tenets of Chinese
civilization as "that uniformity is inherently
desirable, that there should be only one empire,
one culture, one script, one tradition." Even
feeble movements for autonomy among the Tibetans
and Uighurs are thus treated as sedition or
"splittist." This way the moderates in these
movements are discredited, often radicalizing the
leadership in the long run and providing the
ingredients of self-fulfilling prophecy of the
ruling authority in their efforts at suppression.
In contrast, Indian political culture has been
somewhat more tolerant of pluralism, dissent and
diversity, and electoral arithmetic often makes
compromise and cooptation of dissenting groups
necessary. Yet much of the rest of the country
looks away - or regards it as the necessary price
for keeping the nation state intact - as gross
abuse of human rights and violence by the Indian
Army regularly take place in Kashmir and the
north-eastern part of the country, often
reciprocated by the rebels. In different parts of
India, the Hindu nationalist forces raise their
ugly head, politically and socially, and win
elections from time to time. They regularly
question the national loyalty of other religious
groups and justify atrocities on them. Even
sporting events become political when, during an
India-Pakistan cricket match, the Hindu fanatics
look for traitorous signs of jubilation among
Indian Muslim spectators if the Pakistan team
scores.
Majoritarian violence against ethnic minorities
is also familiar in the recent history of
Malaysia and Indonesia. Xenophobia has been
almost a state-propagated religion in North Korea
and Burma. In all these countries, the minorities
are routinely branded as anti-national. And
earlier in the first few decades of the 20th
century, militant nationalism that grew in
strength in Japan wreaked havoc in much of Asia.
Of course, in many of these countries the
ideology of the nation state with its
homogenizing and aggrandizing propensities was an
import from the West. Western history is littered
with the devastation at home and abroad caused by
the overbearing nation state. The memory of
colonial oppression and defeat by the West and
the longstanding reality of its international
economic and military domination add fuel to the
ultra-nationalism in Asia, both on the chauvinist
right and the anti-imperialist left. The misdeeds
and the ambiguity of a country's own history do
not deter the nationalist zeal and myth-making.
As the 19th-century French philosopher, Ernst
Renan, famously said, part of being a nation is
to get its history wrong.
Surely, nationalism is not without its benefits,
especially in countries where divisive conflicts
among different parochial communities tear
society apart. Particularly in socially extremely
heterogeneous countries like India or Indonesia,
nationalism can play a role in taming and
transcending the internecine-group conflicts and
chaos. But while there may be occasions when one
wants to give some primacy to the national
identity over other cultural or regional
identities, this should not be an argument for
suppressing the latter or letting the national
identity supersede the larger values of
humanitarianism.
India is somewhat fortunate in having Gandhi,
Nehru and Tagore as intellectual mentors in the
independence movement against the colonizer, as
all three warned against the excesses of
nationalism. Gandhi called imperialism another
name of armed nationalism, which he regarded as a
curse.
In particular, Tagore, one of India's greatest
writers and thinkers, was most trenchant in his
criticism of nationalism - even though two of his
songs became, posthumously, the national anthems
of India and of Bangladesh. About a hundred years
back, even at a time when a fervent nationalist
movement in India was surging all around, he
wrote novels and essays that pointedly showed how
harmful nationalism can be - "with all its
paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags
and pious hymns" - how in the name of national
unity the majority often tramples on minority
concerns and aspirations for self-expression, and
how national conceit makes society lose its moral
balance.
Exactly hundred years back, in 1908, he wrote in
a letter to a friend:"Patriotism cannot be our
final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I
will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and
I will never allow patriotism to triumph over
humanity as long as I live." During an invited
lecture on Nationalism in Japan in 1916, Tagore
praised Japan for its impressive national
achievements and for inspiring self-confidence
among other Asian people, but he was open in his
sharp criticism on the rise of militant
nationalism there. The Japanese public, earlier
effusive about him, considerably cooled its
reception in subsequent days. In 1938, shortly
after the Japanese invasion of China, when a
Japanese poet and friend wrote to Tagore, seeking
moral support of Japan's action since China was
being "saved" from the clutches of the West,
Tagore was severely critical and described the
Japanese poet's sentiments as translating
"military swagger into spiritual bravado."
At a time when Asian countries are becoming more
important economically and geo-politically, they
should be wary of the dangers of
ultra-nationalism and the damages it can cause to
their own society and to others, as the history
of nation states in the West illustrates so
tragically.
Pranab Bardhan is professor of economics at the
University of California, Berkeley, and co-chair
of the Network on the Effects of Inequality on
Economic Performance, funded by the MacArthur
Foundation. He was the editor of the "Journal of
Development Economics" for many years.
Rights:
© 2008 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
______
[3] INDIA: CRIMINALISATION OF THE STATE
Hindustan Times
April 28, 2008
NO QUICK FIXES, PLEASE
by Dilip Simeon
The Supreme Court's March 31 observations
regarding the armed group - Salwa Judum - affect
not only Chhattisgarh, where this group operates,
but pose questions to major actors across the
political spectrum. Admitting two public interest
petitions on the matter, Chief Justice K.G.
Balakrishnan asked the respondent, "How can the
State give arms to some persons? The State will
be abetting in a crime if these private persons
kill others." This observation contains a
profound and much-evaded truth about our polity.
It also has ramifications for a long-due process
of reform in India's fast-eroding criminal
justice system. If Chhattisgarh persists with a
strategy that the court has prima facie perceived
to be illegal, it will only be following several
nasty precedents that point towards the
criminalisation of the State.
The Union of India, represented here by the state
of Chhattisgarh, has illegally sub-contracted its
sovereign control over legitimate force to a
private vigilante group which functions with
impunity. The Salwa Judum has the backing of the
BJP and the Congress and has been accused of
committing punitive rapes and killings. The
policy of rewarding its cadres for killing
Naxalites has encouraged false encounters. This
brutal campaign has undermined the legitimacy and
reputation, not only of the government of the
day, but also of the Indian Union. Chhattisgarh
has claimed that the Salwa Judum is a 'Gandhian
campaign'. This is a strange description of men
armed with guns, axes, bows and arrows. The
National Commission for Women and citizen's
inquiries have concluded that the lawless conduct
of the Salwa Judum has led to a spiral of violent
retribution, resulting in a civil war among the
tribal population. In joint raids carried out by
the Salwa Judum and the security forces,
suspected 'Naxalite sympathisers' (mostly old
persons and small children who cannot run away)
have been murdered, their houses torched and
livestock looted. In several instances, the raids
have continued until all the villagers moved into
camps. Its atrocities are rarely registered,
marking an extension of impunity to an
extra-legal force.
Up to January 2007, 4,048 Special Police Officers
(SPOs) were appointed under the Chhattisgarh
Police Regulations. These Salwa Judum activists
are given weapons training by security forces
under an official plan to create a paramilitary
structure parallel to that of the Naxalites. The
SPOs are mostly unemployed tribal youth and
minors. The appointment of minors as security
personnel is a violation of constitutional
clauses (Article 39) that protect the lives and
dignity of children; and of the Child Labour Act
(1986) that forbids the employment of children in
hazardous activities. The government has also
violated UN conventions on the rights of
children, and thus rendered India vulnerable to
international reprimand.
In January 2007, over 47,000 persons were living
in so-called relief camps and 644 out of 1,354
villages in Dantewada district were prey to their
activities. Thousands have fled to neighbouring
states. Clearly, the government sees enforced
resettlement as the best means of separating the
revolutionaries from their environment. These
methods were employed by the British in Malaya
and by US forces in Vietnam. But India is a
60-year-old democracy and the people being forced
out of their homes are Indian citizens with equal
rights under the law. They may work and live
where they like and their liberties may not be
curtailed or taken away unless by due process of
law. They are not criminals and cannot be held
responsible for the rise of Naxalism, of which
they are the victims, and for which the
administration is answerable.
Chhattisgarh has also enacted the Special Public
Security Act (2005) that throttles legitimate
dissent and other fundamental rights enshrined in
Articles 14, 19 and 21. Civil rights activist
Binayak Sen has been incarcerated under this Act.
Along with its other actions related to the Salwa
Judum, this measure violates Article 13, which
forbids the State from making any law, ordinance
or regulation that 'takes away or abridges' the
fundamental rights of Indian citizens. The
Schedule V, which protects tribal areas, has also
been violated. Is the Constitution being
undermined by governments tied to industrialists
and MNCs?
It is questionable whether draconian laws can be
effectively regulated - the semi-permanent status
of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in the
North-east is a glaring case of how emergencies
can develop vested interests. We may expect the
national security establishment to raise an
outcry against the disbanding of the Salwa Judum.
From their own standpoint, however, this policy
will lead to the perpetuation of violence,
stabilise rebellious attitudes and reduce public
security. This might be a lucrative proposition
for some but its consequence will be to render
destitute the poorest sections of the citizenry
and drive them to desperation. It will also
result in the erosion of the writ of law and the
constitution. We should consider whether the
emergence of insurgencies with a support base
among India's most-deprived people has something
to do with sheer misgovernance. Violent movements
gain stature when directed at undemocratic
governments.
The Union Home Minister wants special legislation
to deal with extremism. Is it not true that our
major political parties have indulged in
terror-inducing activities in the past? That the
process of justice in these cases has been tardy,
to say the least? Dare we say that in certain
cases, private armed groups and captive mobs have
been hired by the state? The protection enjoyed
by the Ranvir Sena and the Salwa Judum are
examples. So was the vigilante action in
Nandigram undertaken by political cadre
associated with the West Bengal government. If
our rulers believe that such activities will
curtail insurgency, they are mistaken. The only
way to protect the rule of law is to respect it.
Disrespect for law by its guardians has already
had disastrous results.
President Pratibha Patil has referred to mob
violence as a result of the failure of Indian
judicial system. Her Republic Day address spoke
of "internal threats from Naxalism and
terrorism", the former feeding upon "sentiments
of discontentment in the undeveloped parts of the
country". In Chhattisgarh, this discontent
derives from the devastation of livelihoods for
the benefit of corporate houses with an eye on
mineral-rich tribal lands. The President noted
that violent methods "had no place in a
democracy". Surely this applies to all sides? A
month later, she advised a seminar on judicial
reforms that the rise of mob violence was due to
the "failure of the justice delivery system"; and
stated that it was time to "collectively
introspect on the causes of the ills of judicial
administration without being unduly touchy and
sensitive to criticism... we need to have in
place a judicial machinery which is easily
accessible and dispenses affordable and
incorruptible justice to the people". Should not
the administration pay attention to these
observations by the Head of State? Contrary to
the Prime Minister's assessment, it could be the
criminal justice system that is the biggest
security threat facing the country.
Dilip Simeon is Senior Research Fellow at the
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
_____
[4]
Human Rights Watch
INDIA: FAIR TRIAL DOUBTFUL FOR HONORED RIGHTS ADVOCATE
CHHATTISGARH GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT USE NAXALITE ISSUE TO SILENCE CRITICS
(New York, April 29, 2008) - Criminal charges
against award-winning human rights defender Dr.
Binayak Sen raise serous concerns that he will
not get a fair trial in Raipur district court in
Chhattisgarh state when hearings begin on April
30, Human Rights Watch said today.
Chhattisgarh state officials charged Sen in
February 2008 with being a member of a "terrorist
organization." Sen has been in custody since May
14, 2007. If convicted, he could be sentenced to
life imprisonment.
For over two decades, Sen has provided medical
care in remote tribal villages in Chhattisgarh.
He has received numerous awards in recognition of
his work. On April 22, the Global Health Council
announced that he won the 2008 Jonathan Mann
Award for Global Health and Human Rights.
"Dr. Sen appears to be a victim of the
Chhattisgarh government's attempt to silence
those who criticize its policies and failure to
protect human rights in its fight against
Naxalites," said Brad Adams, Asia director at
Human Rights Watch. "The court should ensure that
this trial is not used by the state government to
cover up its failures by punishing the
messenger."
Human Rights Watch said that likely political
motivations for the charges and other fair trial
concerns in Chhattisgarh merit the trial's change
of venue to another Indian state. The case
against Sen was brought after he called on the
Chhattisgarh government to respect human rights
in its campaign against Maoist armed combatants
called Naxalites.
The presiding judge has allowed only one of Sen's
supporters to attend the hearings at a time,
despite a provision in international law that
trials be public. A judge may cite public order
reasons to restrict the attendance of the press
and public. However, the district court's limit
of one supporter of the defendant at the trial is
unnecessarily restrictive and raises broader
concerns about the fairness of the trial.
"The actions of the local authorities and the
presiding judge call into serious question
whether Dr. Sen will receive a fair trial," said
Adams. "To ensure fairness, the venue should be
moved to another state with no political axe to
grind."
In 2005, the Salwa Judum movement was started
with state support in Chhattisgarh to oppose the
Naxalites. With state backing, the Salwa Judum
began committing serious human rights abuses,
including killings, beatings of critics, burning
of villages, and forced relocation of villagers
into government camps. As a prominent leader of
the human rights group People's Union for Civil
Liberties (PUCL), Sen called for an end to Salwa
Judum abuses. He also opposed the Chhattisgarh
Special Public Security Act, criticized human
rights violations such as torture, extrajudicial
killings and campaigned for improvements in
prison conditions.
Sen was first detained under the Chhattisgarh
Special Public Security Act, 2006. Human Rights
Watch has criticized this law because it could
lead to serious abuses. The law allows detention
for "unlawful activities," a term so loosely
defined that it can severely restrict the
peaceful activities of individuals and civil
society organizations in violation of the Indian
constitution and international human rights law.
The state's primary evidence produced in court
thus far includes letters from an alleged Maoist
leader, Narayan Sanyal, who Sen allegedly
smuggled out of prison. The police say that Sen
visited Sanyal in prison a number of times, and
that documents and other materials, including his
computer, confiscated after his arrest, allegedly
contain unspecified subversive materials. Sen has
denied all these charges and said that his
meetings with Sanyal were facilitated by jail
authorities to provide medical care.
"The laws in Chhattisgarh make it easy for the
government to prosecute human rights defenders
like Dr. Sen," said Adams. "The court must fairly
decide whether a real crime has been committed."
______
[5]
Mainstream
April 26, 2008
ON TASLIMA NASREEN: A REJOINDER TO SHAHABUDDIN'S LETTER
Communication
A statement on Taslima Nasreen's departure from
India, signed by several persons, was published
in Mainstream (April 5, 2008). Reacting to it
Syed Shahabuddin wrote a letter which was
published in Mainstream (April 19, 2008). The
following is a rejoinder to the letter by some
signatories of the statement.
We have not mentioned anywhere in the statement
that Taslima Nasreen is a "stateless person" or a
"political refugee" or a "guest of the
government". Shri Shahabuddin's reference to her
status in India in these terms is, therefore, a
non-issue so far as we are concerned. We do not
know what is the purpose behind his raising these
extraneous issues. It is true that Taslima
Nasreen did not come to India as a "stateless
person" or as a "political refugee", but it is
also true that she did not come to India for
touristic purpose. She came to live here and
pursue her vocation in peace and in a conducive
environment, just as J.B.S. Haldane, Ruskin Bond
and several other eminent foreigners came and
lived in India. Many of them ended up by becoming
Indian citizens. We have advocated the same for
Taslima Nasreen.
Shri Shahabuddin has stated that in our statement
we have defined democracy in a manner which
violates the cultural ethos of India. There is no
such implication in our statement. In our view,
the cultural ethos of India lies in tolerance,
co-existence of different beliefs and points of
view and spirit of freedom. Shri Shahabuddin
apparently has a different notion of "cultural
ethos".
He has also stated that Taslima Nasreen is not a
crusader for freedom. We beg to differ from him
on this point. That she has been a crusader for
freedom, particularly women's liberation, is
evident from her writings not from the time of
the publication of Dwikhandito, but from the
early 1990s. The least that we would have
expected from Shri Shahabuddin to do before
coming to the conclusion that she is not a
crusader for freedom or that she is a "writer of
sorts", is to read her work, particularly her
poems, many of which are available in English
translation.
Shri Shahabuddin has made the gratuitous
suggestion that Taslima Nasreen should have
stayed in her native land and faced her situation
valiantly. How Taslima Nasreen should carry out
her campaign for freedom is entirely her
judgement and not something which can be decided
by others. There is no reason why her commitment
to freedom must be tested by her willingness to
rot in jail in Bangladesh, or be lynched by a mob
or executed by the court's order. Pursuing
freedom and secular values by staying in one's
native land and facing the situation valiantly is
generally possible in a liberal and secular state
like India and not in a theocratic state or a
state based on religious fundamentalism.
So long as Taslima Nasreen has a valid visa, she
has every right to return to India. Besides, we
have advocated that her visa should be extended
and she should be allowed to stay in India as
long as she wants. We agree with the Minister of
External Affairs, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, that
during her stay in India she should in her
conduct, particularly in her exercise of freedom
of expression, follow the conditions prescribed
in the Indian Constitution. We believe that
during her stay in India from 2004 to 2008, she
did not say or do anything which amounted to an
abuse or violation of the conditions under which
she was given the permission to stay. She did
not, as alleged by Shri Shahabuddin, "engage in
public activities and make statements which hurt
the sentiments of the Muslim community and
provoked their protest and thus created
disorder". There is not a shred of evidence to
substantiate these allegations. If Shri
Shahabuddin has such evidence, we challenge him
to produce it. The attack on her in Hyderabad and
the violence and the disturbance of public order
in Kolkata were totally unprovoked. Taslima
Nasreen did not say or write anything on or just
before these events to justify unlawful
activities. In fact, they were the religious
extremists who, without any provocation, attacked
her in Hyderabad and who brought out a
well-planned and orchestrated protest rally
against her and in the process indulged in loot,
destruction, arson and violence. They did this to
serve the extraneous purpose of particular
political leaders and particular political
parties. In our view, the law of the land should
have been enforced in these cases and these
religious extremists should not have been allowed
to indulge in these activities with impunity.
We agree with Shri Shahabuddin that foreign
nationals staying in India cannot claim some of
the rights in the Indian Constitution, which are
available to Indian citizens. At the same time,
according to international law, there are certain
inalienable rights which inhere in a person by
virtue of his or her being a human being. These
include the right to life in its various forms,
protection against torture and incarceration etc.
According to several judgments given by our
courts, foreigners visiting or staying in India
are as much entitled to these rights as Indian
citizens.
Shri Shahabuddin has stated that "none of her
friends came forward to take her under their
wings or persuade her to stay on or guarantee her
security, even if the government did not". This
statement is factually wrong. Many of her
friends, including signatories to the statement
published in Mainstream, persuaded her to stay on
in India when she was under tremendous pressure
both by the Government of West Bengal and the
Central Government to leave the country. Besides,
she did not need any friends to keep her in
India. She had her own home in Kolkata where she
stayed for several years and she had enough means
to maintain herself. The main issue was providing
security during her stay. And this arose only
after she was physically attacked and threatened
by religious extremists in the second half of
2007. Shri Shahabuddin should know that security,
in the ultimate analysis, can be guaranteed only
by the State and not by individuals. That this
responsibility devolves on the State is clear
from the fact that the West Bengal Government
refused to allow her to return to Kolkata until
the Central Government assumed the responsibility
for her security, and the Central Government
itself accepted this responsibility by keeping
her in the so-called "safe house" in New Delhi.
Lastly, Shri Shahabuddin has again gratuitously
given his opinion that by being a Muslim by
birth, bearing a Muslim name and having talents
of sorts, Taslima Nasreen has marketable assets
for the West and, therefore, she is likely to be
more comfortable and feel at home there. This
would apply to thousands of liberal Muslims in
India. Would he suggest that they should also
leave the country?
Mahasweta Devi, Tarun Sanyal, Bibhas Chakravarty,
D. Bandyopadhyay, Muchkund Dubey, Sailendra Nath
Ghosh, Sunanda Sanyal, Sujato Bhadra, Giasuddin,
Golam Yajdani, Meher Engineer, Dilip Chakraborty,
Sumit Chakravartty.
______
[6] Announcements:
(i) WALK IN KARACHI FOR JUDICIARY, WEDNESDAY 30TH APRIL
Dear All,
Peoples Resistance shall hold a demonstration for
restoration of judiciary on Wednesday April 30,
2008, at 6 pm at Dalton Market DHA, (in front of
Rahat milk shop). Participants will walk down to
the Legal Chief Justice of SHC, Mr. Sabihuddin
Ahmed's house for a 30 minute protest.
PR expresses its disappointment that this
important issue has not been addressed as
promised and would like to reiterate the demand
for urgent and unconditional restoration of
judiciary. April 30th is the last day of 30-day
period committed by two major political parties
in Bhurban Declaration for the resolution of this
issue.
All concerned citizens /groups are requested to
join and show solidarity for the cause of
restoration of original judges.
People's Resistance is a coalition of students,
teachers, NGOs, journalists and citizens
concerned with restoration of judiciary, freedom
of media and restoration of constitution.
Bring banners, placards, flags, T-shirts and your friends!
In a rare quirk of fate if the judicairy is
restored on that day, we will mark it as a
celebration!
All those in Karachi are requested to join.
Please inform all your friends in Karachi.
Samad
Meeting participants: Lala, Raza Naeem, Asad
Butt, Naeem Sadiq, Sufiya Umar, Ali Asad,
Salahuddin & Sophia
o o o
(ii)
IF KOSOVO, WHY NOT KASHMIR?
PUBLIC DEBATE in The Netherlands with high
profile guests from Kosovo, Kashmir, Nagorno
Karabach, Russia and Europe.
May 16th 2008, The Netherlands
IKV Pax Christi organises on May 16th a public
debate about the consequences of the recognition
of Kosovo as an independent state for other
regions where its people expose a desire for
independence. What does recognition of
independence of Kosovo mean for people in other
regions of which the geo-political status quo is
disputed?
Regions as Kashmir, Tibet, Southern Ossetia,
Nagorno Karabach: do they, now that Kosovo
declared independence, also have right to declare
independence, or not? If Kosovo, why not Kashmir?
The USA and Europe have played a crucial role in
coming to Kosovo's independence. However,
according to European and American diplomats
recognition of Kosovo is a unique case. In other
regions that strive for international recognition
as well, as e.g. Kashmir, Tibet, Nagorno
Karabach, Southern Ossetia, its people stress
the similarities between the Kosovar and their
own position. What then makes Kosovo unique? If
Kosovo, why not Kashmir?
Academicians from India, Pakistan and Kashmir
will be attending the debat, give their input and
enter in dialogue with representatives of
European Thinktanks, from European Parliament and
various sections of European society.
Speakers are (amongst others):
* Joost Lagendijk, Member of European Parliament for Greens/Green Left
* Karen Ohanjanyan, Nagorno Karabach Committee of 'Helsinki Initiative 92'
* Majid Tramboo, Patron of Jammu Kashmir
Liberation Front (JKLF) and Director of Kashmir
Centre EU in Brussels
* Ilir Deda, Kosovo Institute for Policy Research and Development (KIPRED)
* Harutyun Mansuryan, filmproducer of 'Internews Armenia'
Date: May 16th 2008, starting 7 PM
Venue: TUMULT Centre for Debate.
Address: Domplein 5, Utrecht The Netherlands
English spoken, free entrance.
Website: www.ikvpaxchristi.nl
o o o
(iii) Publication announcements
a)
PEACE NOW - The Bulletin of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament & Peace
Volume 6 : Issue 2, May 2008
Contents
A. Editorial \ 1
B. Towards Global Nuclear Disarmament \ 3
I. Nuclear Disarmament: State of the World by J. Sri Raman
II. Nuclear Non-ProliferationTreaty: The
Roadblock to Nuclear Disarmament by
N.D.Jayaprakash
III. Towards Global Nuclear Disarmament: From the
Perspective of Indian Peace Movement by Achin
Vanaik
IV. Towards Global Nuclear Disarmament:
Significance of Forthcoming NPT Review Conference
by Hiroshi Taka
V. Nuclear Disarmament and the NPT: The
Responsibility of the Nuclear-Weapon States by
Sergio Duarte
C. Indo-US Nuclear Deal \ 23
I. US-India Nuclear Agreement: Bad for Nuclear Non-
Proliferation, Bad for Nuclear Disarmament by Philip
White
II. Interview by Shyam Saran
D. Nuclear Power \ 28
I. How Safe and Desirable Is Nuclear Power? By Santanu Chacraverti
E. CNDP Third National Convention: Report,
Declaration and Resolutions \ 37
F. Documents \ 44
I. Keynote address to the 2008 Oslo Conference on
Nuclear Disarmament
II. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear
War: 18th World Congress
III. The Promises of the 2000 NPT Review Conference
available from:
CNDP
A-124/6, Katwaria Sarai,
New Delhi 110 016
cndpindia at gmail.com
b)
SOUTH ASIA: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
by Christopher V. Hill
(Santa Barbara, Denver, and Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008). xxii,
pp.327. 8 maps, 40 photographs.
ISBN 1-85109-925-5; 978-1-85109-925-2 (hardbound book);
1-85109-926-3;
978-1-85109-926-9 (e-book)
This volume is part of a fifteen-volume series
entitled "Nature and Human Societies," which
attempts to present the first complete set of
global environmental histories. The South Asia
volume differs from some of the earlier ones in
that it is based on a chronological model. Issues
examined include environment and history in the
Indus Valley; Ashoka and his environmental
legacy; irrigation and cultivation in South
India; and the impact of Mughal warfare upon the
land. The section on colonial rule focuses on
irrigation, deforestation, public works, famine,
the impact of the railway, and education, among
other issues. The book then turns to Sri Lanka
and Nepal., looking at the impact of the
plantation system in Sri Lanka, and tourism in
Nepal. This is followed by an analysis of the
socio-environmental impact of Partition.
Postcolonial environmental history is tied
together through such issues as industrialization
and massive multi-purpose dam projects; the
Bhopal catastrophe, and recent natural disasters.
The book concludes with three case studies: "The
Agrarian System of Mughal India;" "The Permanent
Settlement Act and the Kosi River; and "The
Narmada Bachao Andolan."
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. The Environmental Setting
2. The Indus Civilization and the Aryan Impact 3. The Mauryan
Empire and the Classical Age 4. Imperial Interlude 4. The Rise
and Fall of the Mughal Empire 6. Company Rule 7. Imperium,
1858-1947 8. Sri Lanka and Nepal in the Modern Era 9.
Independence and Partition 10. South Asia Since 1947 11.
Conclusion 12. Case Studies Important People, Events, and
Concepts Chronology Bibliographic Essay Bibliography Glossary
Index
---
(iii)
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit
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