SACW | May 5-6, 2009 / Romesh Gunesekera / Shiv Visvanathan / Praful Bidwai / P. Sainath / Augusto Boal

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | May 5-6, 2009 | Dispatch No. 2622 - Year  
11 running
From: www.sacw.net

[1] Sri Lanka: A long, slow descent into hell (Romesh Gunesekera)
    (ii) The other war in Sri Lanka — in the silence of a newsroom  
(Muzamil Jaleel)
   (iii) Sri Lankans, Seeking Safety, Perish (Somini Sengupta)
   (iv) A new political road map for Tamils (Martin Regg Cohn)
[2] Nepal: The New Crisis
    - Interview with Sri Ram Poudyal, chief economic adviser to the  
Government of Nepal
    - Army chief case: Nepal SC issues notice to president's office
    - Climate of mistrust threatening Nepal’s peace process, says top  
UN envoy
[3]  Burma:   Opposition Balks at Giving Legitimacy to 2010 Polls  
(Marwaan Macan-Markar)
[4] India - 2002 Gujarat Pogrom and the Search for Justice:
    -  The ethics of duty and drama in times of riot (Shiv Visvanathan)
    -  Order To Re-Investigate Gujarat Carnage - BJP succumbs to  
Moditva (Praful Bidwai)
[5] The Indian Elections: Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics  
(P. Sainath)
[6] India: Quashing the voiceless with state ruthlessness (Patricia  
Mukhim)
[7] India: The Lost Banality Of Evil (Tridip Suhrud)
[8] Augusto Boal (16 April, 1931 - 2 May, 2009) one of Latin  
America's most celebrated dissident artists is no more
[9] Announcements:
- Seminar: "The Continued Incarceration of Dr. Binayak Sen: What does  
it mean for Indian Democracy?" (Bangalore, 9 May 2009)


_____


[1] Sri Lanka:

(i)

The Guardian
30 April 2009

A LONG, SLOW DESCENT INTO HELL

The decades of bitter fighting between the Sri Lankan army and Tamil  
rebels has left a beautiful country bereft and thousands caught in  
the crossfire. Novelist Romesh Gunesekera mourns his island's fate

Twenty six years ago, I was writing the earliest of the stories that  
would end up in my first book, in which a man called CK dreams about  
opening a guest house on the east coast of Sri Lanka. If one tries to  
pin his dream down on a map, I guess it would be just a few miles  
from the so-called "no-fire zone" today, a place where Tigers are  
said to be shooting Tamil hostages who do not want to be human  
shields, and the government of Sri Lanka is accused of bombing  
civilians; the strip of land where the BBC says the endgame of this  
long civil war is being played out, and from where 160,000 men, women  
and children have fled in the last couple of weeks. The heart- 
wrenching images of those refugees are superimposed for me on CK's  
dream and an idyllic sepia photograph, in a family album, of the  
small town of Mullaitivu, where an uncle and aunt lived 60 years ago.

Between my first draft of CK's story in the spring of 1983 and the  
second in the summer of that year, Sri Lanka went into freefall.  
Tension had been building up for some years in Sri Lankan politics.  
Many Tamils felt heavily discriminated against in the increasingly  
Sinhala-focused agenda of successive nationalist governments in Sri  
Lanka, whereas many in the majority Sinhala population saw the  
government's changes as redressing imbalances instituted under  
British rule. These tensions burst into sporadic militant attacks in  
the north through the 1970s and an increasing government military  
presence in the area.

Then, in 1981, in an act of incomprehensible malice, the revered  
Jaffna public library was set alight by a policeman.

Although there had been a precursor in the serious communal riots of  
1958 (in part flowing out of the controversy over the national  
language issue), 1983 was a horrific watershed. In July that year,  
the ambush of 13 soldiers in the north sparked anti-Tamil riots all  
around the country, especially in the capital, Colombo. Hundreds,  
some estimate 2,000, ordinary Tamils were killed, and many tens of  
thousands were made homeless.

The fledgling militant group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam  
(LTTE), formed in 1976 and commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, gained  
massive support at home and abroad and grew quickly to become a  
formidable guerrilla force. Very soon it was engaging in conventional  
warfare with the Sri Lankan army to establish an independent homeland.

Over the next few years, the fighting in the north of the island and  
the invective between partisans around the world intensified. My  
small story finally found its shape and a publisher. The editors of  
Stand magazine wrote to me and said: "We want to print it, but the  
office is divided on the coda. The final paragraph on the violence  
politicises the text. Half of us want it in, half of us want it out  
because maybe the story does not need it." I said it could not be  
left out; the war had invaded even that little page.

By the time the story became the core of a book, Monkfish Moon, in  
1992, the earlier lines had expanded: "... the east coast, like the  
north, would become a blazing battleground. Mined and strafed and  
bombed and pulverised, CK's beach, the dry-zone scrub land - disputed  
mother earth - would be dug up, exploded and exhumed. The carnage in  
Colombo, massacres in Vavuniya, the battle of Elephant Pass, were all  
to come. But that day ... in the middle of May, we knew none of that."

Today, we do know all of that, and more. We know that in the 26 years  
since 1983 at least 70,000 people have been killed in the conflict.  
Another 6,500 have died in the last three months, as reported by the  
UN. Large numbers of both government soldiers and Tigers who had not  
even been born at the time the story was written are dead. Their  
lives, as well as the foreshortened lives of thousands of ordinary  
people, had never known anything but the war. Tanks have rolled,  
fighter jets have roared, and suicide belts and trucks have exploded.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been  
bombed by one side or the other for decades. Many MPs and ministers,  
too - Sinhala and Tamil, hawks and moderates - have been murdered in  
this conflict.

For 26 years the main story in Sri Lanka has changed little: bombs,  
bullets, carnage and suffering. LTTE suicide bombs on buses, at train  
stations, suicide trucks at the Temple of the Tooth, the Central  
Bank, the assassination of one president, the wounding of another,  
and government military campaigns with increasing firepower and  
increasing casualties, terrifying air strikes and massive  
bombardment. Sadly, there have been other spikes of horror in the  
country with tens of thousands of dead - the 2004 tsunami, floods,  
the 80s insurrection in the south, disappearances, abductions - but  
the war has gone on relentlessly, in one area of the north or  
another, with only short periods of truce in which the Tigers and the  
government each gathered strength for the next round.

In those 26 years the great map of the 20th century was transformed:  
the Berlin wall came crashing down, Germany was reunified, the Soviet  
Union disappeared, China became the factory of the world and India  
boomed. But in Sri Lanka, the story remained the same.

A country that was once an admirable model of democracy, leading the  
way in agrarian reform, quality of life indices, and health and  
education services, got stuck as the prototype for suicide bombers on  
the one hand, and the new benchmark for "shock and awe" tactics with  
unbridled military muscle on the other. I find it difficult to  
believe that it was allowed to happen.

Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside  
themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to  
Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land  
itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry. Even those who plant landmines,  
blow up innocents, destroy villages or ravage the jungle, still love  
the place. They love the sight of it, the sound of it, the smell of  
it, the taste of it, the memory of it, the dream of it. Whether they  
carry coconuts or grenades, poems or bombs, cyanide or charms, there  
is a deep affection for the place which is an unbreakable common  
bond. Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka,  
carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the  
Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It  
binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide  
them. In recent years, despite the escalating violence, I found it  
bubbling up in so many places in Sri Lanka: in ethnically mixed  
children's peace camps, in young writers' imaginations, Sinhala and  
Tamil, in cricket crowds that brought everyone together. Only a few  
months ago, an armed soldier I spoke to on the street put it very  
simply: "There is no country like Sri Lanka anywhere in the world, is  
there? That is why everyone wants to come here, no?"

Today, watching video clips on the web of the grim situation on the  
east coast, the demonstrations around the world, the half-reports,  
the exhortations, the accusations, the propaganda, the excuses, I  
don't know what to make of the future. Is there anyone now who "can  
look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which  
will not"?

Under a pile of newspapers, I find a copy of the old tragedy from  
which I filched that quote. I open it and find Macbeth in the second  
act, speaking after he had killed the men he wished to pin Duncan's  
murder on. His cunning excuse sounds familiar: "Who can be wise,  
amazed, temp'rate and furious,/loyal and neutral, in a moment? No  
man./The expedition of my violent love/ outrun the pauser, reason."  
It doesn't tell us much about how to live, but we can certainly see  
how not to live. Disturbing, traumatic events do not reduce the  
relevance of poetry and fiction. For me, they make imaginative  
writing all the more urgent and necessary.

I have been back to Sri Lanka twice in the last six months, trying  
hard to find something of the optimism I felt writing my last book,  
The Match. I started writing it when peace had unexpectedly broken  
out in 2002. The novel was going to be like a bookend to the story I  
mentioned at the beginning of this piece, to celebrate a new  
beginning. But soon after it was published in 2006, the peace talks  
floundered. A few months later, the war entered a new and more  
fearful phase.

Wherever I went on these last two visits, no one - Sinhala or Tamil -  
wanted to talk about the war. They were fed up with the war. It had  
gone on too long, cost too many lives, hurt too many families. They  
all wanted it over one way or another. Taxi drivers, waiters,  
businessmen, writers, journalists, cobblers, farmers, and even  
soldiers. No one wanted to talk because no one believed it was  
nearing an end. No one believed anything about the war in the news.  
Too many journalists had been intimidated.

A famous editor had just been killed by yet unidentified gunmen. The  
concern I heard was about corruption and censorship.

Even when government forces finally took Kilinochchi, the LTTE  
administrative headquarters for years, my trishaw driver did not  
believe it. Now, it seems, there is a growing belief that the war, at  
least the one of tanks and planes and artillery bombing, will soon be  
over. The government is determined to completely destroy the military  
capability of the LTTE under its present leadership, and is unlikely  
to deviate from that mission. It has made single-mindedness one of  
its core characteristics and an electoral attraction. The paradigm  
has shifted.

What comes next? Some fear a dangerous mix of triumphalism and  
chauvinism; entrenchment of resentments; internment, radicalisation  
and insurgency. Others see an opportunity for reconciliation,  
reconstruction, and a slow, painstaking path towards real respect.  
The compassionate and exemplary treatment of the hundreds of  
thousands of displaced people would be the first step.

The other night, in London's Nehru Centre, I heard the Bengali poet  
Sunil Gangopadhyay recite a powerful poem against the warped beliefs  
we use to excuse our sometimes atrocious behaviour. It made me think:  
what should I believe in now? What can I believe in? What must I  
believe in?

So, here is a list to start with:

- I must believe that the fighting will be over tomorrow and there  
will be no more killing, indiscriminate or discriminate.
- I must believe that those who have the power will ensure that  
future generations will not be brought to this point of suffering again.
- I must believe that everyone believes murder is wrong.
- I must believe that aid will flow into the country and that it will  
go wholly and directly to those who have suffered most.
- I must believe that money for war will be converted into money for  
peace and reconstruction, wherever it may come from.
- I must believe that a military victory will not lead to triumphant  
jingoism.
- I must believe that all those who have been trained only to fight  
will be found gainful civilian employment.
- I must believe that the ambitions of the military will not grow  
ever larger.
- I must believe that a just and democratic society nurtures and  
protects all its people and treats them equally.
- I must believe that dissent will not be punished.
- I must believe that the press and media will be free and fair and  
brave.
- I must believe that journalists will not be intimidated.
- I must believe that good will is stronger than ill will.
- I must believe that good leaders are honourable people who will  
always place the interests of their people before the interests of  
themselves.
- I must believe that the young will learn from the mistakes of the  
elders.
- I must believe that we will not be fooled again, wherever we are  
and whoever we are.
- I must believe in the human capacity for compassion and  
reconciliation.
- I must believe all wrongs will be righted.
- I must believe that in words we will find what in fury we cannot.

But must I also believe - as leaders on all sides seem to - that the  
end justifies the means? Does it, really?


o o o

(ii)

Indian Express
May 04, 2009

THE OTHER WAR IN SRI LANKA — IN THE SILENCE OF A NEWSROOM

by Muzamil Jaleel

Colombo: The silence of the newsroom is broken only by the tapping of  
the computer keyboards. Large posters of a man with a gloomy face  
decorate the walls. Sunday Leader has more than journalists. It has a  
martyr. Its editor Lasantha Wickramatunge was assassinated on January  
8, the ultimate punishment for independent journalism, which he had  
predicted in an editorial published posthumously.

The story of this weekly newspaper and its editor demonstrates the  
dangers faced by journalists in Sri Lanka who want to remain faithful  
to unadulterated truth, exhibiting the larger political climate in  
the country following a victory on the battlefield. The Tamil Tigers  
never tolerated any criticism but now the government too has silenced  
the voice of the free press.

On World Press Freedom Day today, a leading newspaper of Sri Lanka  
The Sunday Times ran an editorial saying Sri Lanka has become one of  
the most dangerous places for a journalist. “Recent attacks on media  
practitioners have been done in the name of national security and  
morale of the security forces,” the editorial states. “The President  
invites political discourse. The reality is that either the press has  
been browbeaten by means of a ‘chilling effect’ syndrome or won over.”

“Sunday Leader is here. It is independent as it always was,” insists  
Lal Wickramatunge who looks after the newspaper after his brother- 
editor’s murder. “We have had tough times earlier as well. Our press  
was burnt down. We were attacked twice. But murder — it has been  
devastating.” He says the newspaper will never shut down. “We will  
never stop, no matter what happens. Everyday, I have to pass the  
place where he (Lasantha) was assassinated. He was eight years  
younger to me and we started this newspaper together. I have not come  
to terms with it (his murder) as yet. I have kept Lasantha’s last  
editorial on my desk in the office so that it gives me inspiration,  
so that I don’t lose heart.”

In fact, the newspaper republished its assassinated editor’s last  
editorial today. “We wanted to remind people again,” says Lal  
Wickramatunge. “We have not sealed our lips.” He says that despite  
the fear created by the assassination of the editor, no one from the  
staff has left. “That was encouraging in these difficult times.”

How have you covered the war? “We have done whatever we could. We  
haven’t budged.” The newly appointed editor Fredrica Jansz, however,  
says that the journey has been very difficult. “This is the biggest  
story and we don’t have access,” she says. “If you dare to dissent,  
if you are critical of not the war but even the conduct of this war,  
you are immediately labelled a traitor.” The assassinated editor’s  
journalist wife Sonali Samarasinghe, who was editing the paper’s  
sister concern The Morning Leader has already left the country  
because of a threat to her life.

Jansz says that this reaction from the government is not exclusive to  
their paper alone. “The defence writer of The Sunday Times Iqbal  
Athas had to stop his weekly column and leave the country after he  
was called a terrorist on the Defence website,” she says. “Keith  
Noyar of Nation newspaper was abducted from his home and severely  
assaulted. He was released only because of the intervention of the  
CEO of the media group, Krishan Coorey. Now the CEO too has left the  
country.”

The reporters at Sunday Leader say that they are angry but scared as  
well. “He (Lasantha) was like a father. Most of us have worked here  
for years. Whenever I am distracted while writing, I look up and see  
his poster. It’s a constant reminder of our tragedy,” a senior  
reporter says. “We don’t know how to deal with his assassination. We  
are angry, very angry. But we know nothing will happen. His murderers  
will go scot-free.”

Lal Wickramatunge says that the situation for journalists in Sri  
Lanka is very grim these days. “At the moment, journalists are under  
constant fire. Targeting journalists is done with absolute impunity,”  
he says. “Then the state has started to buy journalists and  
newspapers too.” He says that he does not see the curbs on press  
ending anytime soon. “The war is popular and the government is taking  
full advantage of it. Even if the war is over, I don’t see a change  
happening. Even if they catch or kill Prabhakaran and curb the LTTE,  
they will continue to use intimidation to curb dissent.”

He says that browbeating is not the only weapon that the state is  
using to silence the free press. “They are literally buying  
newspapers. They first assaulted a journalist of Nation and then  
bought it. Island (newspaper) is anyway following their line. Lake  
House group is owned by the government. The Sunday Times is middle of  
the road. That leaves us and one television channel,” he says. “But I  
have decided. No matter what happens, I will never let the sacrifice  
of Lasantha go waste. Sunday Leader will continue.”

The official reaction is as always the same — free press is an  
important pillar of a democracy. But a quotation displayed  
prominently in the military spokesman’s office explains it all: “It  
is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of press.  
It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.  
It is the soldier, not the politician, that ensures our rights to  
life and liberty...”

o o o

(iii)

SRI LANKANS, SEEKING SAFETY, PERISH
by Somini Sengupta
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/world/asia/06lanka.html?_r=1&ref=world

o o o

(iv)

Toronto Star
May 05, 2009

A NEW POLITICAL ROAD MAP FOR TAMILS

by Martin Regg Cohn

The stoic expressions of the two Tamil Tigers who turned themselves  
in to Sri Lankan government forces said it all: defeat and surrender  
– of themselves and their dream.

Held hostage by their fellow Tigers, the long-time cadres had sought  
sanctuary with the government they once denounced. Now, on  
television, they were repudiating their erstwhile comrades for  
recruiting child soldiers and using Tamils as human shields in Sri  
Lanka's brutal civil war.

Their faces were familiar to me: Velayuthan Thayanithi, alias Daya  
Master, the Tigers' media handler; and Velupillai Pancharatnam, alias  
George Master, a translator.

Daya Master had arranged my safe passage to his former headquarters  
in the Tigers' rump state of Tamil Eelam (homeland) in the jungles of  
northern Sri Lanka. As gatekeeper, he'd set up an interview with the  
movement's political chief, S.P. Thamilchelvan (later killed in a  
government bombing), with George Master translating.

Before I left him in 2002, Daya Master presented a "gift" of one of  
those Tamil Eelam flags bearing the Tiger emblem (with two crossed  
rifles). More recently, I've been seeing them on the streets of  
Toronto and Ottawa when local Tamil Canadians stage protests.

This is a difficult time for the Tamil diaspora. Emotions are raw.  
More than 70,000 Sri Lankans have died in the fighting of the last  
three decades, and hundreds of thousands of Tamils became refugees of  
the civil war. The largest number of them emigrated to Canada,  
leaving cities such as Jaffna desolate and depopulated.

Now many of them – but by no means all – are holding up placards  
calling for Tamil independence, or waving that Tiger flag with its  
powerful symbolism. It sends confusing signals.

Are the local protesters mourning the imminent defeat of the Tigers?  
Or the loss of so many Tamil lives in the fighting? If the latter,  
it's hard to square that with all the available evidence from  
independent agencies and human rights groups pointing to the Tigers  
blocking Tamil civilians at gunpoint, and deploying suicide bombers  
at displaced persons camps.

The Tigers' fight is lost. They are defeated militarily and  
discredited politically. Their terrorist tactics are notorious. They  
not only assassinated Sinhalese targets (and India's prime minister,  
Rajiv Gandhi), but systematically eliminated any rival Tamil  
political voices. They hijacked a movement and crashed it into the  
ground.

When Sinhalese politicians signed on to a Norwegian-brokered peace  
process a few years ago, the Tigers sabotaged it by rearming for war,  
then ordered a Tamil boycott of the elections that allowed Sinhalese  
hard-liners to triumph. After three decades of fighting, they are no  
further ahead.

The Tamil diaspora needs to stop fighting the last battle, and  
instead lay the groundwork for the political fight that lies ahead.  
That means raising the consciousness of Canadians, so that when more  
than 60 Tamils are killed in an attack on a hospital, it is front  
page news, not buried inside. That means engaging Canadian  
politicians, rather than scaring them off with Tiger flags. Instead  
of blocking roads, why not a road map?

Canadian federalism, while imperfect, can serve as a model for Sri  
Lanka of how to deal with regional and ethnic grievances. Sri Lanka's  
post-independence history has been an unhappy tale of mutual enmity,  
with the Sinhalese majority trampling on the language rights of the  
Tamil minority that makes up 18 per cent of the population, while  
keeping power centralized.

"That's where the new battleground will be," one of Sri Lanka's most  
articulate Tamil intellectuals, Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, told me  
from Colombo last week. "I think it would be a strategic mistake if  
they (émigrés) cling to the Tamil Tigers. There have been horrendous  
human rights abuses by the Tigers."

Now, with its treasury bare and the humanitarian situation dire –  
hundreds of thousands of Tamils are in displaced persons camps – Sri  
Lanka needs international help. Its consul-general in Toronto,  
Bandula Jayasekara, tells me that "Canada should try to reach out"  
with humanitarian help, as International Co-operation Minister Bev  
Oda did this week, promising $3 million in aid.

But reconstruction will not bring reconciliation. Any humanitarian  
operation must be a prelude to a political enterprise. That means  
moderation and compromise on both sides of the divide.

Sri Lanka's government remains in a triumphalist mood. But having won  
the war, it must also win the peace. And the only way to do that is  
by recognizing that the politics of the past, and the human rights  
abuses that took place, only exacerbated tensions.

A military solution will not, on its own, bring a resolution of the  
conflict.

Martin Regg Cohn, the Star's deputy editorial page editor, writes  
Tuesday.

_____


[2]  Nepal in Crisis:


Interview with Sri Ram Poudyal, chief economic adviser to the  
Government of Nepal and Professor of Economics at Tribhuvan  
University in Kathmandu, on the sidelines of ADB annual meeting in  
Bali on May 5th 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjdwSYUoWe4

Army chief case: Nepal SC issues notice to president's office
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/000200905052051.htm

Climate of mistrust threatening Nepal’s peace process, says top UN envoy
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30703&Cr=&Cr1=



_____


[3]  Burma:

Opposition Balks at Giving Legitimacy to 2010 Polls
by Marwaan Macan-Markar
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46725

_____


[4]  India:

Asian Age
May 2009

THE ETHICS OF DUTY AND DRAMA IN TIMES OF RIOT

by Shiv Visvanathan

May.04 : Two events have hung on the conscience of modern India  
because we, as a society, have not responded to it. It is not easy to  
respond to violence either as a mnemonic or as a continuing process.  
Witness and victim almost become irritants testifying to our passivity.

In fact, when one sees the prime agents of ’84, one realises that as  
tigers they are toothless. The late H.K.L. Bhagat, even Sajjan Kumar,  
had better claims to an old-age home than prison. It raises, then,  
the question of whether we should pursue these people into dotage.

Even more, it confronts us with the question — should society forget  
and go on?

There is a therapy in forgetting, a hygiene that does not allow old  
wounds to fester. But there is a sense of history as convenience  
which a society cannot allow. Also, denial produces its own  
pathologies. For instance, the Israeli satora’s contempt for the  
Holocaust Jew was so blatant that camp documents were sold as  
pornographic literature. The denial of violence comes back as a new  
form of destiny. Sociologists also banalised the ’84 riots with  
writers like Emma Vidal pursuing a ruthless ethnography of how widows  
exploited the situation. While competent as sociology, this form of  
work blunted the sense of justice by treating the victims as  
entrepreneurs of their own misfortune. What Ms Vidal forgot is that  
not all memory can be commoditised. All trauma does not graduate to  
the circus as a "monster".

The 2002 riots were a bit different from the riots of 1984. The first  
major difference was that, in ’84, civil society and especially  
academics, university students, groups like the People’s Union for  
Civil Liberties (PUCL) and People’s Union for Democratic Rights  
(PUDR) rose to the occasion to provide succour to the victim. The  
state, in Gujarat, treated the victims as recalcitrant citizens of a  
development process. The riots were seen as part of a logic of  
development, of an old city sulking in its ethnicity. Worse, there  
was a blatant sense of exterminism. The local society, in general,  
wanted not just to terrorise the victim but also to eliminate him.  
This psychology, in fact, contributed to the carnivalesque mode in  
the aftermath of what was genocide.

What kept memory alive, apart from the efforts of the survivor, was  
not the media but the defiance of dissenters. One thinks, in  
particular, of Teesta Setalvad and the defiant testimony of Sri Kumar  
before the Nanavati Commission. It was partly because of their  
efforts that the court established the Special Investigation Team  
(SIT) to probe into the Gujarat riots.

The entry of the SIT was an extraordinary event. It came at a moment  
of cynicism about law and justice. It worked quietly, almost  
invisibly. Yet, its very adherence to protocols, its readiness to  
listen, its determined patience created a sense of the law as an  
occasional oasis of hope. Just like with Sri Kumar in the earlier  
phase, for R.K. Raghavan enactment of protocols has become iconic of  
the processes of a decent society.

In a performative way, faith in justice is going to depend not merely  
on what SIT unearths but on how Mr Raghavan, in his role as SIT head,  
behaves. He has to perform the drama of legal interrogation and  
investigation and he has to do it with immaculate correctness. In an  
odd sense, Raghavan has to play Raghavan to be convincing. He has  
created an everydayness about the interrogation, playing the  
unflappable Jeeves to a legal system that often tends to be empty- 
headed. As CBI director, Mr Raghavan embodied professionalism and  
honesty. His was a respected career.

But when, on April 27, the SIT opened the file on 41 new cases,  
something new was signalled. A pandora’s box of question marks  
exploded to emcompass police officers, IAS officers including chief  
secretaries, and even a few ministers. It was an electrifying moment.  
A new set of expectations has been created. The demands for justice  
as procedure, as ritual, as performance and as meaning has reached a  
new high.

Mr Raghavan is not merely a person. He is now a persona. His new role  
demands an immaculate performance as the circle of suspicion tightens  
around an elite bunch of officers. Tacitly and explicitly, he has to  
define what duty is. Is one loyal to a chief minister or the  
Constitution? Is duty clerical adherence to procedures or following  
one’s conscience? Is silence punishable? Is a request for transfer an  
adequate form of dissent? Is duty doing things right or doing the  
right things?

This drama does not belong to Gujarat alone. It is a truth commission  
of a different sort, asking why officers meekly follow unjust orders.  
In a psychological sense, we will have to face the idea that  
obedience is not enough. Following the psychologist Stanley Mulgram’s  
questions, one then asks why people obey indiscriminately and what  
differentiates the ethics of duty from the ethics of obedience.

Mr Raghavan has to enact this entire pedagogy and compress it into a  
report. If he succeeds, he will become an icon and if he trembles, it  
is the bureaucracy that will turn iconoclastic, dismissing the SIT as  
a partisan or incompetent body. It is ethical high drama enacted  
within the procedural domain. If the rituals are completed with  
fidelity, then a new generation of bureaucracy will face new  
standards of truth and propriety. They will realise that truth does  
not die when a file is closed. Mr Raghavan has enacted the first move  
by summoning one of the members of SIT itself for interrogation. But  
the SIT drama is also a challenge to society.

One of the fragments of violence one has lived with is how ordinary  
people kill and live with themselves. The question is what happens to  
a society that allows murder as a permissible occasional ritual.

The SIT drama should now be seen as more than a cat-and-mouse game, a  
record of which bureaucrat got caught and which did not. One  
sympathises with the families of officers under scrutiny. Communities  
get ungenerous at these moments. But justice, or rather the search  
for justice, can help cleanse our society. We owe the SIT a debt of  
gratitude for this moment of ethics.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist


o o o


Order To Re-Investigate Gujarat Carnage
BJP SUCCUMBS TO MODITVA

by Praful Bidwai

Has the Bharatiya Janata Party abandoned even the pretence of playing  
by the rules of democratic game and decided that it's not bound by  
any considerations of minimum political decorum and that it must  
stoop to the lowest possible level whenever it's questioned or  
challenged? Going by its reaction to the Supreme Court's order to the  
Special Investigation Team to inquire into the alleged role of  
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, his ministers and officials in  
instigating and abetting the terrible communal violence of 2002, that  
would indeed seem to be so.

The Court's stipulation that the SIT must complete the investigation  
within three months is a sign that seven years after the violence  
laid 2,000 people dead, the Gujarat pogrom continues to have  
distressing, haunting, gnawing significance for Indian democracy, and  
for the public debate on the rights and wrongs of politics.

The latest order is on a par with the Supreme Court's recent  
directions to transfer major legal cases pertaining to the carnage  
out of Gujarat. Put starkly, it's a frank expression of a lack of  
faith in the ability and inclination of the Gujarat administration  
under BJP rule to do a modicum of justice to the tens of thousands of  
victims of the orgy of killing, rape, arson and looting that Gujarat  
witnessed after the Godhra train tragedy of February 27.
However, instead of recognising its gravity, the BJP leadership has  
chosen to pour scorn on the Supreme Court order, maligning it as  
politically motivated and timed because it was pronounced three days  
before polling day in the general elections in Gujarat. Mr Modi has  
melodramatically pledged to go to jail if found guilty, but to be  
"reborn to serve Gujarat".

The BJP's abrasive self-styled legal luminary Arun Jaitly has  
declared that "there isn't a whisper of evidence so far" to indict Mr  
Modi and that Gujarat's Slobodan Milosevic will fight off the  
"secular brigade's" attack on him and "turn it to his advantage" in  
the elections, where the BJP hopes to improve on its 2004 score of 14  
out of 26 seats.

It's not clear whether Mr Jaitly includes Supreme Court judges and  
the SIT in the "secular brigade". But the SIT cannot be accused of  
secularist zeal. Since it was set up under former CBI director RK  
Raghavan by the Supreme Court in 2008, the outfit has only filed one  
new chargesheet in the 10 cases it has investigated. That indicted  
Maya Kodnani and Jaydeep Patel in the Naroda Patiya case. The SIT had  
no choice given the irrefutable evidence of their involvement in the  
massacre through records of mobile phone-calls.

The SIT has now been asked to investigate the complaint made by  
petitioner Zakia Nasim Ahsan, widow of former MP Ehsaan Jafri. This  
names Mr Modi and 62 other functionaries of the Gujarat government,  
including 11 Cabinet ministers, three sitting MLAs and 38 ranking  
bureaucrats and police officers. Among the latter are the then State  
Chief Secretary and Director General of Police.

Based on the diaries maintained by a senior police official,  
eyewitness accounts and detailed media reports, the petition alleges  
that Mr Modi's Cabinet met after the Godhra incident, and ordered top  
civil servants and policemen to allow "Hindus" (read, Vishwa Hindu  
Parishad, RSS and Bajrang Dal thugs) "to vent their anger". It  
decided to back the bandh called the next day by militant Hindutva  
groups.
This is in line with the findings of more than 30 independent reports  
compiled painstakingly by national and international citizens'  
initiatives, former bureaucrats, scholars, feminists, civil society  
organisations, and human rights groups. In essence, they show that  
following Mr Modi's directives of February 27/28, Gujarat's  
government machinery refused to restrain armed mobs from killing  
Muslims, raping and sexually humiliating Muslim women, burning down  
their homes, destroying mosques, and pillaging property worth Rs  
4,000 crores.
Two ministers (Ashok Bhatt and IK Jadeja) positioned themselves in  
police control rooms or police chiefs' chambers and prevented  
personnel from being sent to rescue people targeted by mobs, or to  
douse fires. Acting in collusion with the ministers, state DGP K  
Chakravarthi and Ahmedabad Police Commissioner PC Pandey delayed  
imposing curfew and preventing the butchery of Muslims although they  
had prior intelligence on the impending attacks.

What followed was Independent India's worst-ever communal carnage  
conducted with state backing and sponsorship, which involved  
elaborate planning and preparation, and later, extensive cover-up and  
destruction of material evidence.

These facts are far too well-established to need more substantiation.  
The only way to hide and suppress them is to refuse to record them in  
Station House diaries or First Information Reports, distort them  
through "rolling FIRs", or name nobody for sinister acts of violence.  
This is precisely what the Modi government did. It also  
systematically rigged further inquiries through the Nanavati  
Commission and sabotaged the CBI's investigations by destroying  
records, abducting reliable witnesses, and leading false evidence.

This only further compounded the original offences, themselves grave.  
The groundwork had already been laid by April 2002 for the charades  
of inquiry and prosecution that followed, in which perpetrators of  
heinous crimes were shielded or exculpated.

This seven-year-long process of systematic sabotage and destruction  
of the very possibility of justice could have been pre-empted and  
prevented had the Central government dismissed Mr Modi in early March  
2002 and imposed President's Rule on Gujarat. That was the only right  
way of dealing with a clear and indisputable Constitutional breakdown.

But the BJP-led government in New Delhi wasn't going to do this.  
Beyond expressing tokenist concern and appealing for restraint-as if  
there were two sides to blame for the violence-it did nothing. It  
wouldn't have brought Gujarat under President's Rule unless it was  
pushed hard in an unrelenting campaign by the secular opposition.

Gujarat's second tragedy was that the secular parties failed to mount  
sustained pressure on the Vajpayee government. Had all the top  
leaders of the non-NDA parties resorted to extraordinary actions,  
they could have generated irresistible pressure-actions such as  
launching relay dharnas in all state capitals, and sitting on a  
collective fast-unto-death in Gandhinagar. Even Morarji Desai had  
succeeded in 1974 in securing the dismissal of the Chimanbhai Patel  
government by going on a hunger-strike for a far lesser offence:  
corruption.

Gujarat's third tragedy was that the state-level opposition didn't  
even try to mobilise powerful protests. It failed by default. Mr Modi  
continued to tyrannise Gujarat, making a mockery of the Constitution,  
gutting institution after institution, and effectively  
disenfranchising and politically disempowering not just Muslims, who  
form 12 percent of Gujarat's population, but a much larger chunk of  
secular non-Muslims too.

Then followed the fourth tragedy: Assembly elections, when lakhs of  
victims continued to live in fear in makeshift camps amidst. Such was  
the prolonged breakdown of law and order that even High Court judges  
and Inspectors-Generals of Police had to flee their homes because  
they happened to be Muslim. By late 2002, communal polarisation had  
grown into near-apartheid. To conduct elections amidst such abnormal  
conditions is to mock democracy.

The BJP, and in particular, the man who presided over the butchery of  
2002, deserves to be politically punished, even if some criminal  
cases against the culprits cannot be brought to completion soon.  
Assuming that the SIT conducts an honest job, it will still take  
years for the 63 people named for instigating the riots in Ms Ahsan's  
petition to be brought to justice.

However, some minimal justice will be done if the public delivers a  
stinging rebuff to Mr Modi and his ideology of Moditva (bloodsoaked  
Hindutva, coupled with a celebration of ruthlessness, machismo and  
pitiless disregard for the norms of democracy) by voting against the  
BJP and sending it packing from the political arena, thus rendering  
it insignificant.

By the time these lines appear in print, polling will have ended in  
Gujarat. But people in other states will still have a chance to  
register their disgust with the BJP's utterly divisive, exclusionist  
and hate-filled politics. This is not a call for vindictiveness. The  
Congress has at least apologised for the 1984 anti-Sikh violence and  
withdrawn Messrs Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar's candidature. The  
BJP continues to be in denial of the Gujarat pogrom. It must be  
punished more severely than in 2004 because it's consciously  
embracing Moditva today.

A campaign was launched even before the Supreme Court order to  
promote Mr Modi as the BJP's Prime Minister-in-waiting after Mr LK  
Advani. It was initiated by two senior BJP leaders, Arun Shourie and  
Arun Jaitly. In part, this campaign is explained by the BJP's own  
disenchantment with Mr Advani, whose leadership has failed to impress  
its members. In part, it's meant to promote a new concept of  
ubermensch (Superman)-style leadership, which delights in  
ruthlessness, undemocratic elitism and "getting things done" (for the  
privileged, as in the case of the big, ugly subsidies given to Tata  
Motors), and yes, cruelty. The BJP's caving-in to Moditva will be an  
even greater disgrace than its humiliation at the hustings.


_____


[5]

counterpunch.org
May 4, 2009

The Indian Elections
CELEB CRUSADES AND THE DEATH OF POLITICS

by P. Sainath

The barrage of celebrity propaganda to “get out there to vote” had an  
impact in Mumbai. Voting fell by 6 per cent. Well, okay, that’s being  
facetious. But had the voting risen, it would certainly have been  
credited in good measure to the celebrity campaigns, 26/11 and the  
media’s untiring appeals to an ungrateful electorate. Urged by a  
special song campaign from a well-meaning Bangalore-based rock band  
to “Shut up and vote,” too many Mum baikars paid heed to only the  
first part of that exhortation. (As did voters in Bangalore, too.) In  
Mumbai, voting was 41.41 per cent this time around as compared to  
47.15 per cent in 2004.

Corporate media’s cutest efforts failed to arrest a decline in voting  
percentage. Nor did corporate-sponsored events and NGO activism fare  
any better. The Facebook fraternity, and e-activism didn’t come out  
of it too well either (raising questions about real IT penetration  
even in this wealthy city). Such was the case  even in the  
constituency that received more space and time than any other — south  
Mumbai, which saw 40.33 per cent polling (2004: 44.22 per cent). Nor  
did the expected level of “anger over 26/11” materialize much beyond  
the television studios. Many rural constituencies in Maharashtra,  
despite a relative fall in turnout, saw higher voting than Mumbai.

Even after  polling day, the focus was on how Bollywood stepped up to  
the challenge of voting. The largest English daily (including its  
captive tabloid and city supplement) had as many as 11 items across 8  
pages on celebrity, mostly Bollywood, voting in Mumbai. These ran  
with heaps of pictures, featuring around 50 film world personae and  
assorted other celebs, kicking off with the main front-page photograph.
Just in case this was all too subtle for readers, the items ran  
helpful headlines. “Bollyvote.” “Filmdom flashes finger with pride.”  
“City hi-fliers step out to get inked.” “What a star cast.” And “Glam  
quotient: Mumbai’s celebrities step out in style.” One small item  
framed Shilpa Shetty’s edict that “elections have to be taken  
seriously.” She regretted being unable to follow this advice herself,  
being in Durban for Indian Premier League cricket.

Ms Shetty is not alone, though. Union Agriculture Minister Sharad  
Pawar did vote in the earlier round, but whizzed off to Durban less  
than a week later. The national leader and potential Prime Minister  
had pressing business there. Yes, with the IPL. And so he left to  
attend to it before the Mumbai voting, leaving the slog overs to the  
tail-enders.
My favorite, though, was the charge of the Lightbulb Brigade on  
television. One celebrity urged everybody to vote. “I vote every  
year,” he said earnestly. Every year? Oh, the blessings of democracy.  
Another phrased it better, saying he voted “every time.” (Though,  
given his age, it couldn’t have been too many times.)

On the whole, slumdogs vote in larger numbers than the white-ribbon,  
candlelight crowd do. The final figure of a constituency is an  
average of how its different segments, sections and socio-economic  
groups voted. Even Malabar Hill has many poor voters. Generally, the  
poor vote in greater numbers. (The rich capture governments by other  
means.) The poor usually want to use the vote. It is the one  
instrument of democracy they get to exercise. But across the country,  
not just in Mumbai, millions are affected when elections are held in  
April-May. It is around this time that many regions see their largest  
exodus of migrant labor. Those workers do not get to vote. We take  
school and college examination schedules into account while fixing  
poll dates — and rightly so. But we take no note of the survival  
schedules of the poor.

In the diverse city of Mumbai, more than half the population lives in  
the slums and on the streets. Many who would vote are not registered.  
Several have had their status questioned. More so after slum  
demolitions, shifting and multiple relocations. Many, even if they  
are registered to vote in Mumbai, tend to go back to their villages  
(in Maharashtra or elsewhere) when given a break — as in this time’s  
four-day weekend. So even voting among the poorer sections is affected.

April-May is also the marriage season in many parts of the country.  
In Vidarbha, for instance, priests and astrologers had long ago  
declared April 16 (the voting day there) to be one of the most  
auspicious days for weddings. That too impacts on voting. The  
horoscope seers, alas, also fail each time to inform the Election  
Commission that temperatures of 46 degrees Celsius do not throw up  
the most auspicious days for voting. For the urban middle classes,  
this is vacation time. Nobody sees it as a great time to vote. But  
with Mumbai’s Beautiful People, having whipped up a lather over how  
“things have changed with 26/11,” a sense of letdown is inescapable.  
It is also, given the realities, quite overdone.

There is even, face it, the apathy of the comfortable. Those who  
might well explode in drawing-room or television studio outrage about  
high taxes and 26/11, but who see no real need to fiddle with the  
status quo. The comfort zone classes exist and are more urban than  
rural. See the difference between voting in rural Karnataka and  
Bangalore.

There is also, for the non-comfort zone classes, the small matter of  
issues. When last did the problems of food price rise, BPL cards, or  
ration quotas, dominate campaigns in either the Lok Sabha [national  
poarliament] or the State Assembly polls? Or those of sanitation,  
water, housing, demolitions and jobs? For millions in India’s  
megapolis, as elsewhere, these are very real issues. It’s a long time  
since anyone in Mumbai articulated a vision that integrates these  
basics into a national platform or perspective. The same failure also  
helped produce lower voting in other towns and even rural regions  
beyond Mumbai.

It has much to do with the death of politics. Even the BJP’s Hindutva  
crusade and the Shiv Sena’s shrillest campaigns in the 1980s and  
1990s did not result in Mumbai’s best voter turnouts. Has low voting  
always been the rule here? No. The Lok Sabha constituencies of Mumbai  
averaged over 60 per cent voting for 20 years between 1957 and 1977.  
All years of politics, workers rights, unions, historic policy  
decisions and rising consciousness. There were ideological debates  
around economic, social and foreign policy. In this city, Krishna  
Menon took on J.B. Kripalani and George Fernandes slugged it out with  
S.K. Patil. The ordinary Mumbaikar’s level of political participation  
was stunning.
Bollywood did not rule — although even the films of the time were  
more ideological. Sure, jobs, hunger, rations, food prices are  
‘local’ issues — even highly personal ones. They are also intensely  
national problems as well. (Last year, food prices were a global  
issue.) The price of bread has often proved the price of power.

In the present round, many well-meaning “awareness-raising” groups  
brought no politics to their voting drive. “Vote, you must vote!  
Don’t fail to vote.” For whom? For what? And why? One critic likened  
this to urging people to rush to get married without knowing who  
their partners might be. At points, the campaigns even raised this  
sense in young people — of voting to feel good about yourself. Not  
for any political reason. Some of the groups asked voters to focus on  
the individual candidates. Not his or her political platform. So it’s  
okay if your “clean” candidate has a genocidal political agenda. This  
cannot help much with a young generation already depoliticized and  
exposed daily to the media scorn of politics and all that goes with it.

In Mumbai, perhaps, the voting would have been higher had Vilasrao  
Deshmukh’s government still been around. One of that gentleman’s last  
acts as Chief Minister  of Maharashtra was to visit the Taj Hotel  
after the terror attacks with his film actor son and a prominent  
Bollywood film maker, offending just about everybody. Had he remained  
in power after that, there might have been higher polling in the  
city, against  Deshmukh’s Congress Party.

At the end of it, voting levels fell in Mumbai, and elsewhere, too.  
It was curious then, to see one discussion on Maharashtra on  
television. The panellists wondered if the prospect of Mr. Pawar as  
Prime Minister would evoke a burst of Maharashtrian pride, and if  
this would see the NCP-Congress alliance make huge gains. (As the  
channel’s opinion poll suggested it would.) Now, the alliance could  
indeed make gains in the State, but would that be the reason?  
Problem: the decline in voting in Mr. Pawar’s bastions in western  
Maharashtra has been, in relative terms, even greater than that in  
Mumbai. In Baramati, that decline (compared to 2004) was over six per  
cent. In Satara, over seven per cent. In Sangli over eight per cent  
and in Solapur over 10 per cent. If that is an outburst of pride, it  
is a very humble pride. Try issues, ideology, politics and decent  
election schedules. That could bring out far more voters any day, in  
Mumbai or elsewhere.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece  
appears, and is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought.


_____


[6]
The Statesman

QUASHING THE VOICELESS WITH STATE RUTHLESSNESS

by Patricia Mukhim

IT is an insane system that puts behind bars a medical doctor whose  
heart is with the most impoverished sections of Indian society. It is  
two years since Dr Binayak Sen, the internationally renowned medical  
doctor and human rights activist has been jailed. He will complete  
two years on 14 May 2009. Since his imprisonment different groups of  
human rights activists have been putting pressure on the UPA  
government to release Dr Sen, whose benign nature is known to all. He  
would be the last person to be involved in an act of sedition. But  
that is not what the mighty Indian state thinks. Recently activists  
of all shades once again petitioned Union home minister P Chidambaram  
requesting Dr Sen’s release yet again. It is believed that Dr  
Manmohan Singh had urged the Chattisgarh government to release him  
but his plea fell on deaf ears. Dr Sen, after all, is a prisoner of  
BJP-ruled Chattisgarh.

He is the national vice-president of the People’s Union for Civil  
Liberties, one of the oldest civil liberties organisations in India.  
His area of work centred around issues of basic livelihoods, health  
services and social justice. While in prison, Dr Sen was honoured  
with the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. Yet  
he became a victim of the very issues he supported. In what can only  
be termed the most vulgar infringement of human rights, Binayak Sen’s  
trial came up only one year after his arrest. To add insult to  
injury, he has been repeatedly denied bail, a plight that even people  
accused of heinous crimes do not have to suffer. Is this, then, a  
case of personal vendetta?
Ironically, the prosecutors are hard put to find any tangible  
evidence to press charges on the list of accusations that evidently  
are all “trumped up”. But is this not familiar territory? When the  
state wants to pillory any individual, it can find umpteen ways of  
doing so, including that of planting ammunition and incriminating  
documents on the person. In fact, the more depressed the economic  
condition of the person, the easier it is to concoct charges and make  
them stick. Is this the kind of justice system we live with? In the  
case of Binayak Sen, 22 Nobel laureates signed an open letter to the  
government of India requesting his immediate release and expressing  
“grave concern” at the contravention of his fundamental human rights.  
Dr Sen has been suffering from chest pain and has not received  
adequate treatment. Activists now demand that he should be treated at  
CMC Vellore, from where the good doctor qualified as a physician.

Dr Sen came into conflict with the authorities for his open criticism  
of the Salwa Judum movement, a state-sponsored vigilante group that  
has run amok and taken the law into its hands. The Salwa Judum is the  
state’s answer to the Maoist movement. Those areas of Chattisgarh now  
overrun by Maoists are known to be the most backward and deprived  
areas. This uprising by the peasantry has everything to do with their  
angst for a better, more equitable delivery system. It has nothing at  
all to do with secessionism or high treason. That the Maoist movement  
has been equated to a movement against the state shows how incapable  
India is of comprehending the plight of its less privileged and  
marginalised people.
Class struggles are by no means unjust. These struggles are pushed to  
the limits mainly because the state remains unresponsive until a  
spate of violence awakens it from slumber. And then you witness a  
repressive regime trying to contain these uprisings. This is a story  
that is so familiar for people living in the North-east. In a country  
that is getting more and more economically fragmented, where the  
electoral system does not seem to deliver either economic or social  
justice, what do ordinary citizens take recourse to?

Many of the struggles for greater autonomy in the North-eastern  
states have turned violent because the state does not understand any  
other language of discourse. Sadly when the state gets uptight about  
any issue it tends to go into overdrive. Take the case of Assam, for  
instance. While it is true that the Ulfa and National Democrat Front  
of Boroland movement, and many others besides, have transgressed into  
bloody spasms of outrage, the government of India, which is the sole  
arbiter of our collective fates, has never tried to understand or has  
intentionally disregarded the need to analyse the causes for such  
outbursts. Much less to address them in the right spirit.

The state unleashes its own brand of violence, as if fighting  
violence with violence is the only creed of justice. Take the case of  
Prabhat Boro, the owner of a small medicine shop in Dhekiajuli,  
Assam. He was recently killed in one of the many “encounters” between  
the state forces, in this case the Assam Rifles, and alleged  
militants. His only fault was that he was innocuously named by Hiren  
Nath, an Ulfa intermediary who was arrested some time ago. Boro was  
picked up only on the strength of Nath’s confession. But since there  
was nothing at all to link him to any subversive activities, Boro was  
released on bail. While he was in prison his family comprising his  
wife and two kids were impoverished. Boro owned a Pulsar motorcycle  
which he desperately tried to get a buyer for. Rafiqul Islam, a  
regular law- breaker in the same prison, offered to buy the  
motorcycle. Islam paid him a token amount and promised to pay the  
rest in instalments but defaulted.

Boro, in dire straits, naturally pursued the payment matter and went  
to Islam’s home to get the money. While there, eyewitnesses claim  
that the Assam Rifles suddenly descended on the scene and killed  
Boro, his two friends and some other Muslim labourers who happened to  
be present there. Rafiqul Islam is obviously an Assam Rifles informer  
who thought the best way to get off paying for the motorcycle was to  
kill Boro. The latter and his two friends were conveniently labelled  
NDFB accomplices while the Muslim labourers were tagged as belonging  
to a Muslim outfit, Multa.

Boro’s widow is seeking justice, but who will listen to this  
completely disempowered waif of a woman? Such cases are far too many  
to recount in the conflict areas of the North-east. People like  
Binayak Sen are at least high profile enough to get the attention of  
a world audience. But what happens to ordinary, helpless humans whose  
only fault is that they were born poor, so poor in fact that justice  
is beyond their reach? Is there any human rights organisation in the  
North-east that is keeping a tab on all such gross violations of  
people’s rights? Will anyone take up the cause of the slain men who,  
without any evidence, were considered sympathisers and accomplices of  
militant outfits? Will the PUCL step in and do its own investigation  
into this case which incidentally has received little media coverage  
because those killed were without any political clout? Let them look  
at Boro’s antecedents and those of his friends and the three other  
Muslim labourers and challenge the Assam Rifles.

Incidents of human rights violation escalate each time the security  
forces are given a free hand to contain militant activities. In the  
absence of any credible human rights institution and since the Assam  
State Human Rights Commission hardly ever takes suo moto action, the  
security forces are emboldened to trample on all human rights. In  
this act of gross misdemeanour they are covered for all their crimes  
under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. How long will the people  
of the North-east put up with this inhuman Act? And how many more  
people will get eliminated like flies before we wake up to claim our  
rights to live as free and equal human beings in a just system? Or  
will this be just a pipedream for all of us living in a blighted region?


_____


[7]  Book Review:

 From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 15, Dated Apr 18, 2009

THE LOST BANALITY OF EVIL

A new biography fails to achieve the finesse required to market  
Narendra Modi, says Tridip Suhrud

Masked vigilantes BJP members wear Narendra Modi masks at an election  
rally in Ahmedabad
IT’S NEITHER A face nor a mask. It’s an eerie, disfigured,  
dismembered, disembodied image. It is not a person, nor a head that a  
headhunter would collect. It shows a fragment of a cityscape, half- 
ethnic kite festival where the kites appear as brand ambassadors.  
But, oddly, there is no sense of play or festivity. The image is not  
locatable, it can’t be grounded or given a body. It’s a kind of head  
that would address a populace, precisely because it’s not located in  
people, in locality or in himself. In that sense it’s eerie. Modi’s  
dismembered head (Narendra to his biographers) appears as the head of  
some ritualistic sect or cult. His eyes might appear to some  
advertiser as steely, but bereft of body they appear frozen.  
Semiotics of the cover of the book provides better psychoanalysis of  
the man than the contents of the book.

The fable reverses itself. It’s not the myth of the headless warrior  
horseman. It’s the myth of the head without the body. In the myth of  
Modi, the body has disappeared; his own and the body political. It’s  
a body-less leader, chaste, celibate, hyper-masculine only in context  
of the State. An archetypical symbol of a demagogue, who is located  
nowhere but wishes to sway all. It’s a deeply Manichaean book. There  
is one source of good, one idea of good, the rest are evil;  
symbolised by opposition, his own party-men, the dissenters and the  
recalcitrant pseudo-secular English press. One wonders how a  
democratic leader can polarise the populace into such a binary of  
opposition, where he is the Self and the rest are the totality of  
others. No amount of formal propaganda can break the political  
unconscious of a story where the General (as his biographers call  
him) thinks that he exists, therefore we are. The logic is  
inevitable; if we differ we cease to exist.

The Modi myth is the mother-goddess myth gone awry. Here is a man  
incapable of care and nurturance reincarnating himself in, and as, an  
act of violence. His biographers don’t realise that authoritarian  
personalities are both bad myth and bad politics.

Modi’s biographers write history in a funny way. The fragment of life  
where Modi was a RSS pracharak to the time that Vajpayee sent a  
reluctant Modi to be the Chief Minister of Gujarat belongs to history  
and biography. History is history only pre-Godhra. Godhra is a  
conspiracy, the riots a rumour and the bad press merely gossip. In  
this, the quest for truth and justice, search for compassion, the  
need of reconciliation, have no place. They are utopian in the  
original sense of the term, because they don’t belong to this story.  
They have no location, and hence, legitimacy. As sociologist Shiv  
Visvanthan reminded us, Modi, after Sanjay Gandhi, is the most  
sinister myth of Indian politics. Both depoliticised politics in the  
name of the political. If evil ever pretended to be good in the guise  
of development, Sanjay and Modi are the siblings of modernity that we  
can do without.

The trouble with a man like Modi is that he does not belong to  
history but only to the world of news, where he continually reinvents  
himself. Modi as news has to happen again and again. In fact, it’s  
because he is news that biography sounds dated. Modi makes better  
sense when he distributes his masks that we wear or on the hoardings  
of the Information Department of Government of Gujarat, hyphenated  
with information about CNG or a new gas find. As you consume the city  
you also consume Modi as a fragment of it. One must confess that  
Modi’s PRO and the information department do a better job than Kamath  
and his collaborator. One does not doubt that Modi is a presence but  
it’s a presence that needs a biographer of the scale of Eric  
Erickson, Alexander Misterlisch or Ashis Nandy. Because they would  
have been able to weave the relationship between the ordinariness of  
the man and the gigantism of evil. They alone could have explained  
the seductiveness of evil. Kamath and Randeri are too banal to  
understand the banality of evil.

_____


[8] Augusto Boal (April 16, 1931 - May 2, 2009) one of Latin  
America's most celebrated dissident artists is no more

Dear All,

Augusto Boal, the Brazilian theater director and playwright known for  
the interactive genre called the "Theater of the Oppressed," died  
Saturday. He was 78. Boal died of respiratory failure following a  
long battle with leukemia in Rio. We salute him for what he has done  
for the oppressed community and of course for theatre. We pay our  
tribute to the man of courage. The message of Boal delivered on the  
World Theatre Day 2009 is attached.

Brief biography at :
http://www.ptoweb.org/boal.html

Hiren Gandhi
Saroop Dhruv
Members of Samvedan Cultural Programme, Ahmedabad.
--

World Theatre Day 2009 - Message by Augusto Boal:

All human societies are “spectacular*” in their daily life and  
produce “spectacles” at special moments. They are “spectacular” as a  
form of social organization and produce “spectacles” like the one you  
have come to see.

Even if one is unaware of it, human relationships are structured in a  
theatrical way. The use of space, body language, choice of words and  
voice modulation, the confrontation of ideas and passions, everything  
that we demonstrate on the stage, we live in our lives. We are theatre!

Weddings and funerals are “spectacles”, but so, also, are daily  
rituals so familiar that we are not conscious of this. Occasions of  
pomp and circumstance, but also the morning coffee, the exchanged  
good-mornings, timid love and storms of passion, a senate session or  
a diplomatic meeting - all is theatre.

One of the main functions of our art is to make people sensitive to  
the “spectacles” of daily life in which the actors are their own  
spectators, performances in which the stage and the stalls coincide.  
We are all artists. By doing theatre, we learn to see what is obvious  
but what we usually can’t see because we are only used to looking at  
it. What is familiar to us becomes unseen: doing theatre throws light  
on the stage of daily life.

Last September, we were surprised by a theatrical revelation: we, who  
thought that we were living in a safe world, despite wars, genocide,  
slaughter and torture which certainly exist, but far from us in  
remote and wild places. We, who were living in security with our  
money invested in some respectable bank or in some honest trader’s  
hands in the stock exchange were told that this money did not exist,  
that it was virtual, a fictitious invention by some economists who  
were not fictitious at all and neither reliable nor respectable.  
Everything was just bad theatre, a dark plot in which a few people  
won a lot and many people lost all. Some politicians from rich  
countries held secret meetings in which they found some magic  
solutions. And we, the victims of their decisions, have remained  
spectators in the last row of the balcony.

Twenty years ago, I staged Racine’s Phèdre in Rio de Janeiro. The  
stage setting was poor: cow skins on the ground, bamboos around.  
Before each presentation, I used to say to my actors: “The fiction we  
created day by day is over. When you cross those bamboos, none of you  
will have the right to lie. Theatre is the Hidden Truth”.

When we look beyond appearances, we see oppressors and oppressed  
people, in all societies, ethnic groups, genders, social classes and  
casts; we see an unfair and cruel world. We have to create another  
world because we know it is possible. But it is up to us to build  
this other world with our hands and by acting on the stage and in our  
own life.

Participate in the “spectacle” which is about to begin and once you  
are back home, with your friends act your own plays and look at what  
you were never able to see: that which is obvious. Theatre is not  
just an event; it is a way of life!

We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is  
changing it.

Augusto Boal

(Original Portuguese)* means also having the nature of a spectacle or  
show (note of the translator)


_____


[9] Announcements:


The Campaign for the Release of Binayak Sen invites you to a public  
seminar

"The Continued  Incarceration of  Dr. Binayak Sen: What does it mean  
for Indian Democracy?"

It is almost two years since Dr. Binayak Sen was arrested by the  
Chhattisgarh government for alleged 'crimes against the state'. Civil  
society has in the intervening period been deeply disturbed about  
this most unjust incarceration. All major cities across the globe and  
within India have seen protests, signature campaigns, discussions,  
and media awareness events all of which have attempted to raise  
awareness and make the state respond to the concerns of ordinary  
citizens. It is a telling comment on the nature of Indian democracy,  
that two years down the line we are still engaged in this struggle to  
free a man who should never have been imprisoned.

We see the struggle to free Dr. Binayak Sen as not just the struggle  
to secure the liberty of one man but rather a struggle, which in its  
many dimensions encompasses the very idea of India. It is a struggle  
which strives to protect and defend those who work to secure the  
Preambular promise of social and economic justice, it is a struggle  
against unjust and arbitrary state terror directed at those with the  
deepest Constitutional commitments and it is in every sense a  
struggle about the ethical content and meaning we wish to give to the  
Indian Constitution.

To understand and to reflect upon the many meanings of the struggle  
to free Dr. Binayak Sen and to renew our commitment to this highly  
significant struggle, we invite you to this public seminar.

Date: May 9th, 2009 (Saturday)

Time:  2 pm to 5 pm

Venue: SCM House, 29, 2nd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore.

Speakers: Dr K. Balagopal,(Human Rights Forum, Hyderabad) B.V.  
Seetharam (Karavali Ale, Mangalore), and B.N. Jagadeesha (Alternative  
Law Forum, Bangalore)

Schedule:

Session 1: (2 p.m.) “Binayak Sen and the Constitutional Imagination  
of India” - Lecture by* Dr. K. Balagopa, Advocate and Member, Human  
Rights Forum, Hyderabad.

Session 2: (2:30 p.m.) “Targeting Human Rights Activists in  
Karnataka” – Presentation by Jagadeesh B.N., Advocate, Alternative  
Law Forum.

Session 3: (3 p.m.) B.V. Seetharam, editor of Karavali Ale, on his  
experiences in Dakshina Kannada

Session 4: (3.30 p.m- 5 p.m.): Discussion

For further queries please call 9845001168.

For those interested, Anand Teltumble is releasing a Kannada  
translation of the book, Khairlanji at the same venue (SCM House)  
from 10:30 am to 1 pm


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