SACW | May 13-18, 2009 / No Winners in Sri Lanka / Pakistan on the brink / Kashmir Interviews / Tribute to Sudarshan Punhani
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Sun May 17 19:51:14 CDT 2009
South Asia Citizens Wire | May 13-18, 2009 | Dispatch No. 2625 - Year
11 running
From: www.sacw.net
[ SACW Dispatches for 2009-2010 are dedicated to the memory of Dr.
Sudarshan Punhani (1933-2009), husband of Professor Tamara Zakon and
a comrade and friend of Daya Varma ]
____
[1] The crisis in Sri Lanka – a conflict without winners (Francis Deng)
- Sri Lanka: the bloody end of battle (Editorial - The Guardian)
- Eelam War IV: Finishing the work of the tsunami (Justin Podur)
- Sri Lanka: A tragedy foretold (Rohini Hensman)
- Statement by Sonali Samarasinghe Wickrematunge
- Taming of Tamil Tigers threatens to breed fiercer creatures
(Mark Tran)
[2] Pakistan on the Brink (Ahmed Rashid)
+ At last some sign of change in Pakistan (A. H. Nayyar)
[3] Bangladesh: HC guidelines on sexual harassment (Editorial, Daily
Star)
[4] India Administered Kashmir:
- Kashmir: MTV | IGGY presents Change: Kashmir
- Obama, "AfPak" and India (Jamal Kidwai)
[5] India: Left Debacle in Indian Elections - Draw the right lessons
from this defeat (Jayati Ghosh)
[6] India and Beyond: Protests World Wide As Dr Binayak Sen Completes
Two Years in Prison
- Who are these enemies of the state? (Sadanand Menon)
- Report on solidarity protest in Bombay for Dr. Binayak Sen, 14
May 2009
- Ahmedabad candle light protest demanding release of Dr. Binayak
Sen
- Human Rights Activists Seek Immediate Release of Dr. Binayak
Sen at Cambridge Protest Vigil
[7] In Memory of Sudarshan Punhani (1933-2009) (A tribute by Dr. Daya
Varma)
[8] Miscellanea: The Trouble With Explanation (Salman Rushdie)
_____
[1] Sri Lanka:
The Guardian, 17 May 2009
THE CRISIS IN SRI LANKA – A CONFLICT WITHOUT WINNERS
The standoff might be coming to an end, but a military victory will
not be sustainable unless legitimate grievances are addressed
by Francis Deng
The situation in Sri Lanka is deeply worrying. Most urgent is the
need to address the catastrophic conditions of civilians still
remaining in a shrinking pocket of land on the northern coastline,
designated a "safe zone" by the government, While some reports
indicate these trapped civilians are being used as human shields by
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels, both sides have
been repeatedly reminded by the United Nations s secretary general to
adhere to their obligations under international law. Even as the
current stand-off might be coming to a conclusion, with the LTTE
reportedly offering a ceasefire, there are also grave concerns about
the long-term implications of this decades-old conflict on the ethnic
Tamil community. The LTTE, who purports to represent the aspirations
of the minority ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka for the last 25 years, has
persistently waged a violent campaign against the majority Sinhalese
government and civilians and often, against members of its own ethnic
community.
This last week alone, more than a thousand civilians including dozens
of children reportedly died in the safe zone. Since the start of the
conflict in January 2009, seven thousand civilians are reported to
have been killed and thousands more maimed by heavy shellings by the
Sri Lankan military and shootings by LTTE fighters. Other atrocities
have also been committed by the parties involved in the conflict.
There are reports of Tamil men and women of military age being
separated at processing centres, removed from IDP camps and who might
be in the custody of the government but cannot be accounted for. The
government's practice of selective registration and arbitrary arrests
of Tamil men and women elsewhere in Sri Lanka for reasons of security
without legislative safeguards is a serious form of discrimination.
There have been reports of ethnic Tamil children being forcibly
transferred to the custody of pro-government para-military groups,
which would have grave consequences for the children's families and
community. There have been disturbing reports and images of Tamil men
and women suggesting torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
or punishment. The full extent of death, injury and destruction
cannot be ascertained because of the government's refusal to allow
independent media and monitoring in the conflict zone.
All parties must be urged to respect international human rights and
humanitarian law obligations, particularly to prevent unlawful
killings and accord protection to civilians and detainees. Women and
girls are particularly vulnerable to excesses of conflict and the
Government has a legal obligation to give them special protection.
The parties should be reminded that individuals can be held
personally responsible for war crimes and other international crimes
committed in the course of conflict and which attract universal
jurisdiction. The government should allow the United Nations and
other international humanitarian and aid organizations full and
unfettered access to all civilians and detainees in places of
detention and processing centres, including all sites for the
internally displaced.
It is not too late for the government to put an end to an
increasingly brutal and deadly conflict and pursue a reconciliatory
and peaceful path with the ethnic Tamil population to avoid a future
resurrection of ethnic-inspired hatred and violence. This polarizing
conflict is identity-related with ethnicity and religion as deeply
divisive factors. It will not end with winners and losers and it
cannot be ended solely through a military victory that may not be
sustainable in the long run unless legitimate grievances are
addressed. The government and the LTTE must immediately alleviate the
plight of civilians and the Government is urged to work with the
international community to initiate a political process to create a
national framework in which all Sri Lankans can co-exist as equal
citizens.
SEE ALSO:
SRI LANKA: THE BLOODY END OF BATTLE
Editorial - The Guardian, 17 May 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/17/tamil-tigers-
defeated-editorial
EELAM WAR IV: FINISHING THE WORK OF THE TSUNAMI
by Justin Podur
http://www.killingtrain.com/node/699
SRI LANKA: A TRAGEDY FORETOLD
by Rohini Hensman
http://www.sacw.net/article913.html
STATEMENT BY SONALI SAMARASINGHE WICKREMATUNGE, WIDOW OF EMINENT SRI
LANKAN JOURNALIST LASANTHA WICKREMATUNGE, 2009, UNESCO WORLD PRESS
FREEDOM LAUREATE
http://www.sacw.net/article903.html
TAMING OF TAMIL TIGERS THREATENS TO BREED FIERCER CREATURES
Sri Lanka's military victory comes at a high price, and its conduct
could be storing trouble for the future
by Mark Tran
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/17/sri-lanka-tamil-tigers-
analysis
_____
[2] Pakistan:
New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 10 · June 11, 2009
PAKISTAN ON THE BRINK
by Ahmed Rashid
To get to President Asif Ali Zardari's presidential palace in the
heart of Islamabad for dinner is like running an obstacle course.
Pakistan's once sleepy capital, full of restaurant-going bureaucrats
and diplomats, is now littered with concrete barriers, blast walls,
checkpoints, armed police, and soldiers; as a result of recent
suicide bombings the city now resembles Baghdad or Kabul. At the
first checkpoint, two miles from the palace, they have my name and my
car's license number. There are seven more checkpoints to negotiate
along the way.
Apart from traveling to the airport by helicopter to take trips
abroad, the President stays inside the palace; he fears threats to
his life by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, who in December 2007
killed his wife, the charismatic Benazir Bhutto, then perhaps the
country's only genuine national leader. Zardari's isolation has only
added to his growing unpopularity, his indecisiveness, and the public
feeling that he is out of touch. Even as most Pakistanis have
concluded that the Taliban now pose the greatest threat to the
Pakistani state since its cre- ation, the president, the prime
minister, and the army chief have, until recently, been in a state of
denial of reality.
"We are not a failed state yet but we may become one in ten years if
we don't receive international support to combat the Taliban threat,"
Zardari indignantly says, pointing out that in contrast to the more
than $11 billion former president Pervez Musharraf received from the
US in the years after the September 11 attacks, his own
administration has received only between "$10 and $15 million,"
despite all the new American promises of aid. He objects to the
charge that his government has no plan to counter the Taliban-led
insurgency that since the middle of April has spread to within sixty
miles of the capital. "We have many plans including dealing with the
18,000 madrasas"—i.e., the Muslim religious schools—"that are
brainwashing our youth, but we have no money to arm the police or
fund development, give jobs or revive the economy. What are we
supposed to do?" Zardari's complaints are true, but he does
acknowledge that additional foreign money would have to be linked to
a plan of action, which does not exist.
NYR Subscriptions
The sense of unrealism is widespread. As the Taliban stormed south
from their mountain bases near the Afghan border in northern Pakistan
in late April, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told the parliament
that they posed no threat and there was nothing to worry about.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik talked about how the Afghan government
of Hamid Karzai was supporting the Taliban and how India and Russia
were sowing more unrest in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the inscrutable,
chain-smoking army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, remained
silent. By the time Kiyani made his first statement on the advance of
the Taliban, on April 24, the army was being widely and loudly
criticized for failing to deploy troops in time.
Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the
government, but to a permanent state of anarchy, as the Islamist
revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more
territory, and state power shrinks. There will be no mass
revolutionary uprising like in Iran in 1979 or storming of the
citadels of power as in Vietnam and Cambodia; rather we can expect a
slow, insidious, long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis
that the Taliban have lit and that the state is unable, and partly
unwilling, to douse.
In northern Pakistan, where the Taliban and their allies are largely
in control, the situation is critical. State institutions are
paralyzed, and over one million people have fled their homes. The
provincial government of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) has gone
into hiding, and law and order have collapsed, with 180 kidnappings
for ransom in the NWFP capital of Peshawar in the first months of
this year alone. The overall economy is crashing, with drastic power
cuts across the country as industry shuts down. Joblessness and lack
of access to schools among the young are widespread, creating a new
source of recruits to the Taliban. Zar-dari and Gilani have spent the
past year battling their political rivals instead of facing up to the
Taliban threat and the economic crisis.
According to the Islamabad columnist Farrukh Saleem, 11 percent of
Pakistan's territory is either directly controlled or contested by
the Taliban. Ten percent of Balochistan province, in the southwest of
the country, is a no-go area because of another raging insurgency led
by Baloch separatists. Karachi, the port city of 17 million people,
is an ethnic and sectarian tinderbox waiting to explode. In the last
days of April thirty-six people were killed there in ethnic violence.
The Taliban are now penetrating into Punjab, Pakistan's political and
economic heartland where the major cities of Islamabad and Lahore are
located and where 60 percent of the country's 170 million people
live. Fear is gripping the population there.
The Taliban have taken advantage of the vacuum of governance by
carrying out spectacular suicide bombings in major cities across the
country. They are generating fear, rumor, and also support from
countless unemployed youth, some of whom are willing to kill
themselves to advance the Taliban cause. The mean age for a suicide
bomber is now just sixteen.
American officials are in a concealed state of panic, as I observed
during a recent visit to Washington at the time when 17,000
additional troops were being dispatched to Afghanistan. The Obama
administration unveiled its new Afghan strategy on March 27, only to
discover that Pakistan is the much larger security challenge, while
US options there are far more limited. The real US fear was bluntly
addressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Baghdad on April 25:
One of our concerns...is that if the worst, the unthinkable were
to happen, and this advancing Taliban...were to essentially topple
the government for failure to beat them back, then they would have
the keys to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.... We can't even
contemplate that.
Pakistan has between sixty and one hundred nuclear weapons, and they
are mostly housed in western Punjab where the Taliban have made some
inroads; but they are under the control of the army, which remains
united and disciplined if ineffective against terrorism. In his press
conference on April 29, President Obama made statements intended to
be reassuring after the specter of Pakistani weakness evoked by
Clinton, saying, "I feel confident that that nuclear arsenal will
remain out of militant hands."
A week earlier Clinton had accused the Pakistani government of
"basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists." Leading
US military figures such as General David Petraeus and Admiral
Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have
chimed in with even more dire predictions. Clinton's statements have
provoked increasing anti-Americanism in the Pakistani army and
public, and thus will complicate the effectiveness of any future aid
the US may give. On April 24 General Kiyani said that the army was
fully capable of defending the country and went on to strongly
condemn "the pronouncements" by outside powers that criticized the
army and raised doubts about the future of Pakistan.
The Obama administration has promised Pakistan $1.5 billion a year
for the next five years, but the bill is stuck in Congress with a
long list of conditions that the Pakistanis are unwilling to accept.
In early April other countries pledged a miserly $5.3 billion in aid,
even as Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the region, told
me that Pakistan needs $50 billion. None of this money is likely to
come immediately.
The Current Crisis
The present scare was set off in mid-February when the North-West
Frontier provincial government signed a deal with a neo-Taliban
movement in the scenic Swat valley, a major tourist resort area about
a hundred miles from Islamabad, allowing the Taliban to impose strict
sharia law in Swat's courts. (The creation of a new Islamic appeals
court was announced by the Pakistani government on May 2.) In return
for the Pakistani army withdrawing, the Taliban agreed to disarm,
then promptly refused to do so. The accord followed the defeat in
Swat last year of 12,000 government troops at the hands of some three
thousand Taliban after bloody fighting, the blowing up of over one
hundred girls' schools, heavy civilian casualties, and the mass
exodus of one third of Swat's 1.5 million people. The Taliban swiftly
imposed their brutal interpretation of sharia, which allowed for
executions, floggings, and destruction of people's homes and girls'
schools, as well as preventing women from leaving their homes and
wiping out the families that had earlier resisted them.
Despite dire warnings by experts and Pakistan's increasingly vocal
commentators in the press and elsewhere that the accord was a major
capitulation to the militants and a terrible precedent that
contradicted the rule of law as stipulated by the constitution,
Zardari and the national parliament approved the deal on April 14
without even a debate. Within days the Taliban in Swat moved further,
taking control of the local administration, police, and schools. On
April 19 Sufi Mohammed, a radical leader who the government had
released from prison in November 2008 and termed "a moderate" and
whose son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, is now the leader of the Swat
Taliban, said that democracy, the legal system of the country, and
civil society should be disbanded since they were all "systems of
infidels." Having won Swat, the Taliban made clear their intentions
to overthrow the national government.
The Taliban in Swat quickly grew to more than eight thousand
fighters, including hundreds of foreign and al-Qaeda militants,
seasoned Pashtun fighters from the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA), and extremist groups from Punjab and Karachi. They
invited Osama bin Laden to come live in Swat. In fact al-Qaeda and
the Taliban had targeted Swat three years earlier in their search for
a safe, secure sanctuary that would be at a good distance from the
Afghan border, with better facilities for an insurgency than FATA, as
well as far away from the US drone missiles that have been falling on
the tribal areas, killing Taliban leaders. Several top Taliban
commanders from FATA have already moved to Swat. The valley also has
income from lucrative emerald mines and timber businesses that the
Taliban seized from their owners.
It was also obvious that having taken possession of Swat, the Taliban
would expand beyond it; yet the army failed to deploy any troops in
neighboring areas to deter them. On April 21 the Taliban moved into
the adjoining districts of Buner, Shangla, and Dir, from which they
threatened several key sites—Mardan, the second-largest city in the
North-West Frontier Province; Nowshera, the army's major training
center; several large dams; and the Islamabad–Peshawar highway. In
Buner they were now just sixty miles from Islamabad.
Finally, on April 24, after much criticism from the Pakistani public,
politicians, and Washington, the army began to attack Taliban
positions in the three districts. Another 100,000 people fled the
army advance. The original deal with the Taliban is now virtually
dead since Swat has become the Taliban's main base and will also soon
be attacked by the army.
What has shocked the world is not just the spread of the Taliban
forces southward, but the lack of the government's will and
commitment to oppose them and the army's lack of a counterinsurgency
strategy. This disarray makes them all the more vulnerable in view of
the apparent cohesiveness of the Taliban's tactics and strategy.
Although the group has no single acknowledged leader, it has formed
alliances with around forty different extremist groups, some of them
with no previous direct connection to the Taliban. Moreover, the
Afghan Taliban have become a model for the entire region. The Afghan
Taliban of the 1990s have morphed into the Pakistani Taliban and the
Central Asian Taliban and it may be only a question of time before we
see the Indian Taliban.
Who are the Pakistani Taliban?
The US failure to destroy the al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leadership
in the 2001 war that liberated Afghanistan allowed both groups to
take up safe residence in the tribal badlands of the Federal
Administered Tribal Areas that form a buffer zone between Afghanistan
and Pakistan, where some 4.5 million Pashtun tribesmen live. Other
Afghan Taliban leaders sought sanctuary in Quetta, the capital of
Balochistan province. Their escape from Afghanistan and their move
into FATA were aided by local Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen who had
fought for the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s but had now become richer,
more radicalized, and more heavily armed in the process of playing
host to their guests.
The Pakistani military under former President Pervez Musharraf tried
to hunt down al-Qaeda, but never touched the Afghan Taliban, whose
regime the Pakistanis had supported in the 1990s and whose presence
was now considered a good insurance policy for Pakistan in case the
Americans were to leave Afghanistan. Both the Afghan and Pakistani
Taliban and their Punjabi extremist allies were seen as potentially
useful counters against India —both in any future struggle for the
contested region of Kashmir and also to tame the growing Indian
influence in Kabul. George W. Bush seems, at least, to have gone
along with this Pakistani strategy, urging action against al-Qaeda
but never pushing Pakistan to deal with the Taliban threat.
In Pakistan, the radicalized Pakistani Pashtun tribal leaders in FATA
began to organize their own militias in 2003 and to draw up their own
political agenda to "liberate" Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Afghan
Taliban had reconstituted their insurgency in Afghanistan, aided by
their Pakistani Pashtun allies and the Pakistani military's Inter-
Services Intelligence (ISI), which looked the other way as arms and
men flowed into Afghanistan from FATA and Balochistan. Only after
Taliban attacks on US forces in Afghanistan increased in the summer
of 2004 did Washington force Musharraf to send troops into FATA and
clear them out.
The Pakistani army, however, was promptly defeated and a vicious
cycle ensued. After every setback, the army signed peace agreements
with the Pakistani Taliban that allowed them to consolidate their
grip on FATA. In 2007 the separate tribal militias, led by a variety
of commanders, coalesced into the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or
Movement of the Pakistani Taliban, led by the charismatic thirty-four-
year-old Baitullah Mehsud from the tribal area of South Waziristan. A
close ally of both al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, he was later
linked to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and to hundreds of
suicide attacks in Pakistan.
At the same time, other separate but coordinated jihadi movements—
some supported in part by radical madrasas funded by Saudi Arabia and
other Gulf countries—sprang up. In the spring of 2007 radical mullahs
took over the Red Mosque in Islamabad and announced their intention
to impose sharia in the capital. The Musharraf government declined to
intervene when the movement numbered hardly a dozen activists. Six
months later, thousands of heavily armed militants including Pashtun
Taliban, Kashmiris, and al-Qaeda fighters fought a three-day battle
with the army in which a hundred people were killed. The extremist
survivors vowed revenge and became the core of a new group sponsoring
suicide bombings as they fled to FATA to join up with Baitullah Mehsud.
Three years earlier, in 2004, Maulana Fazlullah, the son-in-law of
Sufi Muhamed, who was at the time an unknown former ski-lift operator
and itinerant mullah, had set up an FM radio station in the Swat
valley with a handful of supporters and begun broadcasting
inflammatory threats both to local people and to the state of
Pakistan. The Musharraf government never shut his station down.
Fazlullah soon attracted the attention of al-Qaeda and the Taliban,
who poured in men and weapons to support him. By the time the
Pakistani army finally went into Swat in November 2007, Fazlullah
himself had an army and several radio stations.
In Punjab, extremist Punjabi groups who had been mobilized to fight
in Indian Kashmir in the 1990s by the ISI found themselves at loose
ends when Musharraf initiated talks with New Delhi and agreed to stop
militant infiltration into Indian Kashmir. With no resettlement or
rehabilitation programs in place, these Punjabi jihadi groups, who
until then had only focused on Kashmir and India, split apart. Some
went home, others rejoined madrasas, but thousands of them linked up
with the Pakistani Taliban and were able to mount suicide attacks in
Pakistani cities where the Taliban themselves had little access.
None of these groups could have survived if the military had carried
out a serious counterterror strategy; but the Pakistani army never
shut down any of them. Even though they were all openly opposing the
Pakistani state, the army still considered them part of the front
line against India and continued to stay in touch with them.
The Army and Politics
The army has always defined Pakistan's national security goals.
Currently it has two strategic interests: first, it seeks to ensure
that a balance of terror and power is maintained with respect to
India, and the jihadis are seen as part of this strategy. Second, the
army supports the Afghan Taliban as a hedge against US withdrawal
from Afghanistan and also against Indian influence in Kabul, which
has grown considerably. Containing the domestic jihadi threat has
been a tactical rather than a strategic matter for the army, so there
have been bouts of fighting with the militants and also peace deals
with them; and these have been interspersed with policies of jailing
them and freeing them—all part of a complex and duplicitous game.
The Bush administration pandered to the illusion that the Pakistani
army had a strategic interest in defeating home-grown extremism,
including both the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. Under Bush, the US
poured $11.9 billion into Pakistan, 80 percent of which went to the
army. Instead of revamping Pakistan's capacity for counterinsurgency,
the army bought $8 billion worth of weapons for use against India—
funds that are still unaccounted for, either by the US Congress or
the Pakistani government. Not a single major public development
project was initiated in Pakistan by Washington during the Bush era.
Despite US military aid, anti- Americanism has flourished in the
army, public opinion, and the press and television, fueled by the
idea that Pakistan was being made to fight America's war, while the
Americans were unwilling to help Pakistan regain influence in
Afghanistan. The US is accused both of helping India gain a strong
foothold in Kabul and of declining to put pressure on New Delhi to
resolve the Kashmir dispute. Bush's signing of the nuclear deal with
India last year was the last straw for the Pakistani army. In
military and public thinking, Pakistan was seen as sacrificing some
two thousand soldiers in the war on terror on behalf of the
Americans, while in return the Americans were recognizing the
legitimacy of India's nuclear weapons program. Pakistan's nuclear
weapons got no such acceptance.
Many in Pakistan had enormous hopes that the general elections in
February 2008 would bring in a civilian government that would be a
counterweight to the army and redefine Pakistan's national security
as requiring support for the economy and education and improvement in
relations with Pakistan's neighbors. Pakistanis, fed up with
Musharraf's eight years of military rule and stung by Bhutto's
assassination, voted for two moderate, pro-democracy, semi-secular
parties—Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), now led by her
husband Zardari, on the national level, and the Awami National Party
(ANP) as the provincial government in the North-West Frontier
Province. It was a resounding defeat for the Islamic parties that
Musharraf had placed in office in the NWFP and Balochistan in the
heavily rigged 2002 elections.
Here was the last opportunity for the politicians to concentrate on
two vital needs: reviving the moribund economy and working with the
army on a decisive strategy to combat Talibanization. The world
looked for leadership from the PPP, and foreign donors promised
financial aid if it could deliver. According to many polls, the
Pakistani public wanted the politicians to unite and work together.
Instead Zardari and the main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, who
heads the Pakistan Muslim League that holds sway in Punjab province,
have spent the last year battling each other, as the economy sank
further, Talibanization spread more widely, and the army and Western
donors became more and more fed up with the politicians. General
Kiyani has said that he is willing to take orders from the civilian
government but clear orders were never forthcoming.
In the NWFP, the Awami National Party failed to stand up to the
Taliban after they began an assassination campaign against ANP
ministers and members of parliament, forcing the ANP leaders to
disappear into bunkers while capitulating to the Taliban. The Swat
deal was initiated by the ANP, which naively believed that the
Taliban could be contained within Swat. The party is now divided,
weakened and unpopular among the Pashtuns who voted for it in
overwhelming numbers just a year ago. Its failure has wider
consequences, for the ANP is the only Pashtun party that could
counter the Taliban claim that the Pashtuns are pro-jihad and
extremist. The ANP version of Pashtunwali—the tribal code of behavior—
is nation-alistic but moderate and in favor of democracy. Right now
the extremist Taliban ideology is winning out as Pashtun cultural
leaders, aid workers, teachers, doctors, and lawyers are cowed by the
Taliban adherents.
Now that the army has moved into the districts around Swat and is
battling the Taliban, it is seen by the public as a two-edged sword.
Although people want the army to drive back the Taliban, the army
lacks both a counterinsurgency strategy and the kind of weapons that
would be needed to carry it out. In early May, extensive fighting was
reported in Swat after the Taliban reiterated their refusal to
surrender their weapons, fortified their positions, and ambushed a
military convoy, killing one soldier. In response, the army imposed a
curfew in the valley's main city of Mingora and ordered the civilian
population to move out. On the night of May 7, following an
announcement by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani that the
government was going to "eliminate" the Taliban militants, the army
launched a major air and ground offensive in Swat, dropping bombs and
firing artillery around Mingora, where an estimated four thousand
Taliban fighters had dug in and planted landmines.
In FATA and Swat, villages have been flattened by the army's
artillery and aerial bombing; many civilians have been killed, and
local tribal leaders who have tried to resist the Taliban have not
been supported by the army. Meanwhile, on May 12, the United Nations
Refugee Agency reported that it had registered more than 500,000
displaced people from the conflict in Buner, Dir, and Swat since May
2 alone, joining another 500,000 that have been uprooted in the NWFP
since last summer, and others who have not yet registered with the
agency. According to a spokesman for the Pakistani military, the
total number of refugees has risen to 1.3 million. But by mid-May,
the Pakistani government had no adequate plans to look after this
influx—only a fraction of which had been given temporary shelter in
camps—or to provide aid.
Since 2004, practically everything that could go wrong in this war
has gone wrong. Most important of all, the army and the government
never protected the Pashtun tribal chiefs and leaders who were pro-
government—some three hundred have had their throats slit by the
Taliban in FATA, and the rest have fled. Even though there was
significant local resistance to the Taliban in Swat and Buner, tribal
councils begged the army to cease its operations because they have
been so destructive for civilians.
The insurgency in Pakistan is perhaps even more deadly than the one
in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan there is only one ethnic group
strongly opposing the government—the Pashtuns who make up the Taliban—
and so fighting is largely limited to the south and east of the
country, while the other major ethnic groups in the west and the
north are vehemently anti-Taliban. Moreover, more than a few Pashtuns
and their tribal leaders support the Karzai government. In Pakistan,
the Pashtun Taliban are now being aided and abetted by extremists
from all the major ethnic groups in Pakistan. They may not be popular
but they generate fear and terror from Karachi on the south coast to
Peshawar on the Afghan border.
In Afghanistan the state is weak and unpopular but it is heavily
backed by the US and NATO military presence. In addition, the Afghans
have several things going for them. They are tired of nearly thirty
years of war; they have already suffered under a Taliban regime and
don't want a return of Taliban rule; they crave development and
education; and they are fiercely patriotic, which has kept the
country together despite the bloodshed. The Afghans have always
refused to see their country divided.
In Pakistan there is no such broad national identity or unity. Many
young Balochs today are fiercely determined to create an independent
Balochistan. The ethnic identities of people in the other provinces
have become a driving force for disunity. The gap between the rich
and poor has never been greater, and members of the Pakistani elite
have rarely acted responsibly toward the less fortunate masses. The
Taliban have gained some adherents by imposing rough forms of land
redistribution in some of the areas it controls, expropriating the
property of rich landlords. Education and job creation have been the
least-funded policies of Pakistan's governments, whether military or
civilian, and literacy levels are abysmal; there are now some 20
million youth under age seventeen who are not in school. The justice
system has virtually collapsed in many areas, which is why the
Taliban demand for speedy justice has some popular appeal. Moreover,
the Pakistani public has to deal with the differing versions of
Pakistani policy put out by the army, the political parties, the
Islamic fundamentalists, and the press and other components of civil
society. There is confusion about what actually constitutes a threat
to the state and what is needed for nation-building.
The last two years have bought some hope in the growth of the middle
class, an articulate and increasingly influential civil society made
up partly of urban professionals and publicly involved women. Most
Pakistanis are not Islamic extremists and believe in moderate and
spiritual forms of Islam, including Sufism. However, Pakistan is now
reaching a tipping point. There is a chronic failure of leadership,
whether by civilian politicians or the army. President Zardari's
decision to invade Swat in early May came only after pressure was
applied by the Obama administration and the army and the government
had been left with no other palatable options. But with the Taliban
opening new fronts, it will soon become impossible for the army to
respond to the multiple threats it faces on so many geographically
distant battlefields. The Taliban's campaigns to assassinate
politicians and administrators have demoralized the government.
The Obama administration can provide money and weapons but it cannot
recreate the state's will to resist the Taliban and pursue more
effective policies. Pakistan desperately needs international aid, but
its leaders must first define a strategy that demonstrates to its own
people and other nations that it is willing to stand up to the
Taliban and show the country a way forward.
—May 14, 2009
o o o
Mail Today
16 May 2009
AT LAST SOME SIGN OF CHANGE IN PAKISTAN
by A. H. Nayyar
The different power centres are working together to take on the
Taliban, but much more must be done to defeat its fundamental threat
ALL THE components of the state seem to have finally come out of the
state of confusion and ambiguity.
They seem to have all determined that the Tehreek- e- Taliban
Pakistan ( TTP) is the gravest danger to the Pakistani society.
The government has called on the military to take action against the
rapidly advancing Taliban, in spite of the much touted deal between
the provincial and federal governments and Sufi Mohammad’s Tehreek
Nifaz- e- Shariah Muhammadi in Malakand Division.
The deal stipulated that in return for enforcing the Sharai Nizam- e-
Adl ( Islamic system of justice), the dreaded Taliban would not only
cease their activities in the division, but would lay down their
arms. Instead, of disarming themselves, the Taliban pushed into the
nearby districts of Buner and Shangla. There they did exactly what
they had done in other places. They extorted money from the locals,
closed down schools, barber shops, CD and video shops, and eliminated
anyone who tried to resist them.
It is true that the Central government was initially quite reluctant
to approve the Malakand deal, but then it finally gave assent to it
after coming under immense pressure from the coalition partner Awami
National Party, and staging a hurried passage through the parliament.
Reality
The approval seemed to have brought a pall of utter gloom over the
nation. That was until Sufi Mohammad spoke. Speaking at a huge
gathering of triumphant followers, he let out his views candidly. He
termed the democratic system of government, elections, the courts,
including the Supreme Court as contrary to Islamic injunction, and
worthy of contempt. That brought everyone in the country to their
senses. In the face of the violation of the deal by the Taliban
incursions in Buner and Shangla, and the obvious lack of Sufi’s
control over the Taliban, the deal collapsed.
The Awami National Party also came out of its state of confusion, and
quickly joined the decision to launch a strike against the Taliban.
Nearly all now support the military action.
Afzal Khan Lala is a brave soul. He is among the few leaders of the
Awami National Party, the flag bearer of Bacha (Khan Abdul Gaffar)
Khan’s legacy, who opposed the Nizam-e-Adl, and who doggedly faced
the Taliban onslaught in his village when most of the top ANP leaders
had either left the country or at least hid themselves in Islamabad.
He has now come out in the open.
He rightly pointed out that the Taliban could not possibly lay down
their arms because then their victims would take revenge against
those who perpetrated so much carnage in the area during the last year.
There is a very wide support for the military action in the country
now. People are very happy that the ambiguity around the role of the
military, and especially about the relationship between the
insurgents and the military appears to be over.
People had a deep suspicion that the military would continue to
regard the Taliban as an asset against an unfriendly government in
Kabul and an increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan. Many also
thought that the Taliban were proving to be the proverbial goose with
golden eggs for Pakistan when it came to assistance from the west,
especially the USA. All such suspicions have, for the moment, been
laid to rest. A majority of Pakistanis are enthusiastically looking
to a successful and rapid elimination of the scourge of Taliban from
the Frontier province.
Many Pakistanis are also happy that the focus of security concerns
has shifted from India to the brutal Islamist militancy. The military
has therefore moved a number of troops from the eastern border to the
North.
Sleepers
This could never be an easy transformation given the long history of
animosity between India and Pakistan.
Even President Zardari found courage to say most clearly that
Pakistan does not face any threat from India. Pakistanis are
therefore looking to a reciprocal gesture from India, at least in the
form of some reassuring statement supporting Pakistan’s campaign
against the Taliban. After all, a Taliban ruled Pakistan could never
be a comfortable situation for India.
However, the hope of Pakistanis to see a rapid elimination of Taliban
may not be a realistic wish.
The Taliban movement has been like other insurgencies in the region. Sri
Lanka has not yet come out of the decades long bloody LTTE
insurgency. India has failed to completely suppress insurgencies in
Assam and Kashmir, or for that matter the one of the Maoists in
central India.
Insurgencies tend to have a long life in most parts of the world, and
there is no reason why the Taliban insurgency should be any shorter.
Besides, the Pakistani society has undergone an enormous change in
recent years. The 2007 Red Mosque episode in Islamabad— when the
keepers of the mosque amassed weapons and fighters within the mosque
and challenged the writ of the state right in the middle of the
capital— may not be an isolated phenomenon.
Who knows how many more mosques are stuffed with weapons and
fighters, waiting for the right signal to launch a Taliban style take
over bid? If the military is serious in eliminating this
civilisational threat to Pakistan, it must launch a clean up action
against all the mosques and madrassas in the country.
Collateral
It should also end its relations with the groups like Lashkar- e-
Tayyaba, Jaishe- Muhammad and the intensely sectarian Lashkar- e-
Jhangvi. There is no sign yet that the military has any intention of
doing that. The Imam of the Red Mosque was recently released on bail
after two years because the prosecution failed to put up a case
against him.
There are things that can be said about the current campaign also.
The military in the past fought against the Taliban insurgents by
long- distance artillery fire.
The obvious consequence was high collateral damage, with little
damage to the actual targets. That has been hugely counterproductive.
If the military wants to take out the Taliban, it will have to take
them on through close encounter.
The result of long distance artillery use has been a massive exodus
of population from their homes.
What has baffled citizens for quite some time is the failure of the
military in striking at the communication system and supply links of
the insurgents. The Islamic militants have very successfully used FM
radios in their campaigns of threats, coercion and recruitment. Why
the radio transmitters were not taken out, or at least jammed, has
been a specially troubling question. That is when everyone suspected
that the military did not want to hurt Taliban.
People now hope that under the changed situation, the military would
move wisely and not let the mullahs use technology to their benefit.
The writer is senior research fellow at the Sustainable Development
Policy Institute, Islamabad
_____
[3]
The Daily Star
May 17, 2009
Editorial
HC GUIDELINES ON SEXUAL HARASSMENT
THESE SHOULD BE IMPLEMENTED IN LETTER AND SPIRIT
THE move by the High Court last week to lay down a number of
guidelines for the authorities to prevent sexual harassment of women
is surely a milestone in Bangladesh's legal history. It has long been
known, and publicly pointed out, that women in a very large number of
instances and in very many professional and other areas have been
subjected to such harassment over the years without any measures
being put in place to help them deal with the problem. Now that the
HC has acted, thanks to a public litigation writ petition filed by
the Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association (BNWLA), we can be
reasonably sure that concrete steps will be taken to ensure the
security of women in their work and movement, that indeed women will
be empowered to take such action as will bring the perpetrators of
the crime to book.
A significant feature of the HC action is that its guidelines will be
treated as law until a law relating to prevention of sexual
harassment is in place. This is important, for it allows no time gap
to be there between the directives coming into effect and the actual
framing and promulgation of a law. Even more encouraging, the HC's
directive to the authorities regarding the formation of five-member
harassment complaint committees, to be headed by a woman, at every
workplace and organisation means that sexual harassment of the kind
that has been going on for years could now finally be reined in. In
these long years, we have repeatedly come across reports of various
forms of sexual harassment in such important places as higher
academic institutions, government offices and private enterprises.
Such nefarious activities have been carried on both openly and
subtly. Moreover, with the arrival of e-mails, mobile phones and SMS,
harassment of women has appeared to go up. At crowded public places,
women have had to go through such humiliation as groping and pinching
without being able to take action against the elements indulging in
such outrage.
We feel that the High Court directives have opened the window to
change of a substantive kind. It not only helps Bangladesh's women to
assert themselves but also reassures the nation that we indeed
inhabit a country which means to ensure equality of all kinds and
especially between the sexes. It should now be for the government and
the private sector to act swiftly on the HC guidelines. When it does,
it will be going a major step further in promoting its promised
culture of change.
_____
[4] India Administered Kashmir:
Kashmir: MTV | IGGY presents CHANGE: KASHMIR
A bold exploration of one of the most important & ignored political
tragedies of the last 50 years.
MTV Iggy, as part of its Change initiative, has produced & aggregated
one of the most comprehensive multimedia surveys of the unfolding
tragedy that is Kashmir, the controversial region bordering northern
India, Pakistan and China, that was once considered a Paradise on Earth.
Featuring the stories of Kashmiri youth and conversations with a
range of contributors including Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy,
Writer William Dalrymple, and journalist Tarun Tejpal. Dr. Angana
Chatterji of The International People's Tribunal in Kashmir discusses
the ravaged psyches of Kashmiri children, and the tortured bodies of
the adults. Political commentator Fareed Zakaria, economist Jeffrey
Sachs, and author Mira Kamdar on why Kashmir has global implications.
http://www.mtviggy.com/
http://www.mtviggy.com/kashmir
- IGGY
o o o
http://www.opendemocracy.net/
11 May 2009
OBAMA, "AFPAK" AND INDIA
by Jamal Kidwai
As the US reshapes its policy to the "AfPak" region, India must
strengthen its support for democratisation in Afghanistan and also be
less touchy about Kashmir
Barack Obama has moved quickly to fulfill his pre-election promises
regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Obama administration has
already re-focused significant attention on the region, demonstrating
a serious desire to undo the mess in "AfPak" created by George W. Bush.
Such serious intent was demonstrated by the international conference
held in The Hague on 31 March under the aegis of the United Nations,
was attended by foreign ministers and senior diplomats from more than
75 countries.
The US secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, who played a key role in
organising the Hague conference, said that the Obama administration
has also stopped using the infamous and counter-productive
appellation, "the war on terror", opting for the far more technical
"overseas contingency operations".
The softening of the rhetorical hard-edges of US policy have been
accompanied by real policies as well. The US has committed $40
million out of an estimated $100 million for elections in Afghanistan
in August 2009. This money is designated to cover the cost of ballot
boxes and the counting of votes. More money will be allocated to
cover the other costs of the election. Jamal Kidwai is Director of
the AMAN Trust in India
Policy-makers have also turned to Pakistan, which will receive $3
billion and $7.5 billion of military and economic aid respectively
over the next five years, with the condition that this money is not
diverted to terrorists indulging in anti-India activities. This
condition has been formalised by Congress' approval of the Pakistan
Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement (PEACE) Act. Central
to these moves is the recognition that the establishment of democracy
in Afghanistan and Pakistan is necessary to defeat terrorism and
Islamic fundamentalism in the region.
Broadening the lens
For the first time, too, Iran has been accepted as a partner for
establishing peace and security in the region. Iran is now
recognised, along with Afghanistan, as a victim of the narcotics
economy. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has been a great source of
funding for the Taliban, facilitating the acquisition of weapons,
while Iran struggles with high levels of heroin addiction amongst its
young people. The Shia regime in Iran and the Taliban have
traditionally been at loggerheads, and for the last decade Iran has
had to spend a great deal in manning its border with Afghanistan in
order to keep a check on the drug trade.
The authoritative Asia Society Task Force report ("Back from the
Brink? A Strategy for Stabilizing Afghanistan-Pakistan", April 2009)
quite correctly emphasises a multi-regional approach to restore
democracy and establish peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The report
urges the establishment of "regular dialogue and exchanges over
Afghanistan and Pakistan with Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey, the
Central Asian states, and Saudi Arabia, seeking a means of
cooperation with all in conjunction with our NATO allies and other
international partners to... seek agreement with regional and global
powers over the stabilization of Afghanistan".
Washington will nevertheless have to navigate tricky waters in
winning broader cooperation. Can the Obama administration, for
instance, collaborate with Iran in tackling the narcotics trade while
leaving other
outstanding disputes on the back-burner? The US role in supporting
the military dictatorships of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan and in
propping up other leaders in central Asia for its own narrow
interests also needs to be reconsidered. Supporting a dictatorship in
one region to establish "democracy" in another can only yield short-
term results at best.
India's role
India remains an important but problematic component of the puzzle.
It has historically played a significant role in promoting democracy
in Afghanistan. But again, like the US, its approach has been largely
instrumentalist. It has allied with those "democratic" elements of
Afghanistan which New Delhi saw as its strategic, regional partners
in countering Pakistan. This was the logic behind India's support for
the Northern Alliance led by the (at times brutal) warlord, the late
Ahmed Shah Massoud.A similar logic applies to India's support of
Hamid Karzai's government.
Nevertheless, India is playing a serious role in the reconstruction
of Afghanistan. Since Karzai took over, India has committed $750
million for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, which makes it the
fifth largest b-ilateral donor after the United States, Britain,
Japan and Germany.
According to reports there are over 3,000 Indians working on
different projects in Afghanistan, many of whom have been targeted by
the Taliban and its supporters in Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency,
who see India's presence in Afghanistan as opposite to Pakistani
interests. Investigations have now proved the ISI's role in the
infamous bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul on 7 July 2008.
The mention of "supporting the lowering of tensions with India,
especially through composite dialogue" in the Asia Society Task Force
Report is being seen by many in India as a suggestion for third party
intervention in its long standing dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir.
The view is further reinforced by the Indian diplomatic and political
establishment's general scepticism of the Democracts when it comes to
the question of Kashmir; the impression in New Delhi is that US
Democratic governments historically tend be "Pakistan-friendly".
That the Obama administration's special envoy to the region, Richard
Holbrooke, is ostensibly tasked only with Afghanistan and Pakistan
(and not India) is a measure of how gingerly Washington is stepping
around the issue of Kashmir. India resists any suggestion that the
situation in Kashmir and the violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan are
linked. India also insists that Kashmir can only be resolved
bilaterally, opposing any third party intervention.
It helps New Delhi that it can argue from a position of strength
about Kashmir. The country's rise on the geo-political stage, its
increasing economic strength, its nuclear power, and its desire to
present itself as as a responsible stakeholder in the international
system all weigh in its favour.
Events in Kashmir also abet New Delhi's line. The high turn out in
recent state elections in Kashmir, the decision by Sajjad Lone, a
major separatist leader, to contest in this year's parliamentary
elections and the public wrangling over calling for an election
boycott by the Hurriyat, an umbrella organisation of separatists,
point to improving conditions in the restive region.
At the same time, these positive signs should encourage India to be
less touchy over Kashmir. Whatever the causes of violence in Kashmir,
the ongoing crisis there has symbolic redolence across the border in
Pakistan, strengthening the hand of Pakistani hard-liners,
militarists and Islamists. As a mature democracy, India should be
open to dialogue with any country that shuns violence and is willing
to resolve differences through dialogue. This will open more space
for the democratic and liberal elements of Pakistan (and of
Afghanistan) to counter Islamic fundamentalism and militancy in their
region. It will also isolate the right wing Hindu chauvinist parties
in India that have been trying to whip up communal rhetoric after the
Mumbai attacks of last November.
_____
[5] India: Left Debacle in National Elections
Asian Age
May 17, 2009
Farmers, Muslims had no faith left
By Jayati Ghosh
It is beyond doubt the general elections of 2009 have delivered a
severe blow to the Left parties. Of course, it was always likely that
the Left would come down from its historically high tally of 61 seats
in the previous Lok Sabha elections, especially as these came
overwhelmingly from only two states. But the extent of the decline in
Left seats, to less than half the previous figure, nevertheless comes
as a shock.
What is particularly disturbing is the performance in the two
previous Left strongholds of West Bengal and Kerala. What explains
this sharp deterioration?
This is a crucial question, since if the Left is to recover and grow
again, as well as spread its message to other parts of the country,
it is important to draw the right lessons from this defeat and to
change strategy accordingly.
The lessons are likely to be different in the two states. Most people
would agree that the Kerala state government is reasonably popular,
and chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan certainly continues to command
very high approval ratings. But the margins of victory and defeat
have always been relatively small and the state has a history of
consecutively shifting both Lok Sabha and Assembly victories across
the two major fronts.
So even a small shift in vote percentage can cause very large shifts
in the seats won or lost, and this is likely to have been the case in
this election. Having said that, it is also likely that the
widespread perceptions of factionalism within the main party in the
Left Front, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), made people
uneasy and harmed the front electorally.
The rather rigid attitude towards alliances with some smaller parties
in Kerala before this particular election also did not help.
In West Bengal the picture is more disturbing. There is clear
evidence of vote shifts against the ruling Left Front, and this
message from the electorate cannot be ignored but must be addressed.
The Left Front has ruled the state for more than three decades,
providing not only stability but also many extremely positive
measures for the improvement of conditions of life of ordinary
people: not just the crucial land reforms that were the most
extensive of any state government in the last 30 years, but the
pioneering moves towards decentralisation and providing more powers
to locally elected bodies.
However, in the past few years the state government of West Bengal,
through its own actions or its inability to get its message across,
has contributed to some loss of goodwill among the people. Three
factors that have contributed to this and which must be recognised
and addressed are:
The sense of alienation among the peasantry in the face of the events
at Singur and Nandigram and the inability of the government to
adequately justify its actions to the people or even to publicise its
continuing land distribution programme;
The perceptions of discrimination among the Muslim community, even
among those who have earlier been consistent Left supporters;
The feeling that the government has been more heavily influenced by
the bureaucracy rather than responding to — and engaging with — the
actual cadre of the parties, bright and highly committed people who
have given their lives towards working for socialism and for the
ideals of the Left.
To these negatives must be added some errors of omission, in terms of
positive policy interventions that have not been sufficiently
utilised or developed. The most important of these is the National
Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which was brought about by
the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government largely because of
insistent pressure from the Left at the national level.
It is worth noting that the states in which the parties of ruling
state governments have been successful in this election are those in
which the NREGA has been implemented extensively and with some
enthusiasm: Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Orissa.
In West Bengal there has been much less success in NREGA
implementation and this is clearly a necessary and high priority task
for the Left Front government. Another critical area of public
intervention that requires urgent attention is the Public
Distribution System (PDS) for food, which needs to be revamped,
extended and strengthened in the state.
While this election result is a major setback, it can also be turned
into an opportunity for Left revival and expansion, not only in these
two states but across the country.
The clear result in Tripura has been little noticed, but it speaks
extremely well of the solid support and popularity of the Left Front
government in that state.
In other states where the Left has won seats or got many votes, it
reflects the long and committed struggles of the local cadre on
issues that are fundamental to the core support of these parties:
land, livelihood, conditions of living and social equality. If these
features are strengthened, this adversity can be turned into a
stimulus for positive transformation and future growth of the Left
movement in India.
o o o
Buddha offers to step down
by Ashis Chakrabarti
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090518/jsp/frontpage/story_10984021.jsp
_____
[6] India: Dr Binayak Sen completes 2 years in Prison - Concerned
Citizens Protest
Who are these enemies of the state?
by Sadanand Menon
http://www.freebinayaksen.org/?p=280
Report on solidarity protest in Bombay for Dr. Binayak Sen, 14 May 2009
http://www.freebinayaksen.org/?p=282
Ahmedabad candle light protest demanding release of Dr. Binayak Sen
http://www.freebinayaksen.org/?p=281
Human Rights Activists Seek Immediate Release of Dr. Binayak Sen at
Cambridge Protest Vigil
http://www.freebinayaksen.org/?p=283
_____
[7] TRIBUTE:
http://www.sacw.net/article920.html
IN MEMORY OF SUDARSHAN PUNHANI (1933-2009)
by Dr. Daya Ram Varma
I have known Sudarshan for nearly 58 years. Even if I take one minute
for each year I have known him, I will be speaking for an hour. I
have lots to say. Even one hour is not enough. However, as my respect
to the occasion I have compressed one year into 15 seconds. I will
end my tributes to my comrade and friend Sudarshan Punhani in about
15 minutes.
I am older than Sudarshan. I had designated Sudarshan to speak at my
funeral. I am utterly saddened at this reversal of the role.
When I saw Sudarshan the last time on March 12 at the Jewish General
Hospital, it was not the Sudarshan I had known all these year. I did
not think he would come out of the hospital. Yet he wanted to know if
the dates for the Indian parliamentary elections have been
announced. Indeed I did not know how he has survived so long with so
much insult to his body. I phoned Shree to tell her that even Tamara
cannot keep him alive much longer. So when I saw an email from our
friend Jonathan titled Sudarshan I knew its contents before I opened it.
I came to know Sudarshan in 1951. He was in the main campus of
Lucknow University, then called Canning College and I was in what was
then known as King George’s Medical College; the two campuses
separated by the river Gomati. There was another friend of ours,
Anand Bhatnagar. Sudarshan and Anand Bhatnagar were already members
of the Communist Party of India or CPI; I had just joined. Anand
Bhatnagar was a whole time worker of the party. The three of us used
to meet almost every day. Our favourite meting place was the Coffee
house in Hazrat Ganj.
This Coffee house was an institution, in which coffee was the least
important. It was a meeting place of nihilists, communists,
socialists, journalists, middle-of-the-roaders, intellectuals as well
as of non-intellectuals whose ambition was to be mistaken as
intellectuals. These coffee house people knew only each other and no
one else; and yet, they used to sit there for hours every day and
decide the fate of Lucknow University, India and the world.
Whenever Sudarshan returned to Lucknow he visited this coffee house.
On his return he would tell what any one of significance, especially
one Kakkar, the most talkative of them all, and Dilip Biswas, the
ever-confident communist, said.
Sudarshan adored mathematics but he had tremendous respect for
academic excellence in general. There are many examples of this. One
relates to the Lucknow University Economics Professor Saran. Gomati
River frequently inundates the adjoining areas during rainy seasons.
Sudarshan narrates how during one of these floods, Professor Saran
loaded his books on a boat to safety leaving everything else in the
house to its fate.
Some stories, Sudarshan used to repeat; I don’t know if he had
forgotten the previous time he had told it or liked to repeat them
for the sake of the elegance of the subject. One such story is about
a Ph.D. student of philosophy in Lucknow University. He was
undoubtedly brilliant but he shunned water and almost never bathed.
As a mark of his admiration for this bath-detesting philosopher,
Sudarshan told me how the great discipline of philosophy has been
vulgarized so much so that reporters ask the American football coach:
what is your philosophy for the game?
By 1951, the Communist Party had emerged from underground and was
legal. The armed struggle, which was an adventurist continuation in
an independent India of an earlier armed resistance against the
autocratic Nizam of Hyderabad, was officially withdrawn. That is when
some of the most brilliant intellectuals of India came out of hiding
to become the top academics in both humanities and sciences. That
also helped Sudarshan complete his PhD. It was a new atmosphere.
Sudarshan was a product of this period.
Anand Bhatnagar used to live in a joint family. He had a room to
himself. In that room hung a picture of Stalin and next to it a
picture of the popular film actress Nargis, whom all the three of us
admired. A party functionary who came to the house felt that this was
an insult to Stalin. Anand was served a disciplinary notice.
Sudarshan came to Anand’s rescue; he suggested - just remove the
picture of Stalin.
The Communist Party of India split in 1964. Sudarshan felt closer to
CPI and detested the newly formed CPI-Marxist. On his visits to India
he would meet old guards of CPI. He was especially fond of one
Guruprasad, who later became a member of the UP legislature;
Sudarshan told me that the only change in his life style was the
presence of a telephone on the desk. One of the old guards Shrimali
decided to do PhD in economics in Lucknow University. His supervisor
was another communist Professor VB Singh. Sudarshan kept track of
Srimali as well. One of Sudarshan’s friends was Salman, who later
took a position in one of Delhi University colleges.
India has only one billion people so every one knows every one else.
You cannot go to India without being spotted by some one you know. So
whenever Sudarshan and Tamara went to India, Salman would know and
would not allow them to stay anywhere else but at his home. Salman
died about a year ago and his family remained in touch with Sudarshan
and Tamara.
Sudarshan would have preferred to do PhD in mathematics but
circumstances led him to choose theoretical physics, which is almost
but not exactly mathematics. Sudarshan felt that like mathematics,
theoretical physics too could not be put to human use. However, all
scientists can be outdone by technologists. Sudarshan told me that
Thompson who proved the existence of electron hoped that his
discovery would not serve any human use. What happened must have been
a great shock to Professor Thompson. Sudarshan distinguished between
science and technology. For example, he told me that the discovery of
electromagnetic waves was science but the transmission of signals by
Marconi or Jagdish Chandra Bose was technology.
The PhD supervisor of Sudarshan in Lucknow was one professor
Vachaspati. He had just returned from the US and according to
Sudarshan was brilliant. Sudarshan used to tell how Vachaspati would
sit motionless in the seminars except when a student said something
of significance.
While in Lucknow University, Sudarshan had picked up a few of the
brightest students as a part of his retinue with whom he would have
long discussions. Indeed, animated discussions were the highest
entertainment for Sudarshan through which he made both friends and
created distance. Sudarshan had definite views on practically
everything of social, political and economic relevance. He had the
uncanny ability to note aspects of an event which would normally
escape the attention of many. For instance, when the Soviet Union
collapsed, many questions came up. Why did it happen? Sudarshan had
a view on this as well. However, Sudarshan pointed out something
which, to my knowledge, no one else except the communist leader late
Mohit Sen, did. This is what they asked: How is it that a communist
party with millions of members collapsed in one stroke and there is
not even a rumbling of protest? This, he said, cannot happen in India.
Sudarshan was a treasure house of critical knowledge on a wide
variety of subjects – history, politics, economics, religion and so
on. For some reason, I wanted to buy a bible instead of taking it
from a hotel room. He said buy the Old Testament. He was my
dictionary and a source of ready-made knowledge. Every conversation
I had with Sudarshan gave me new ideas and insight on different
matters including medicine, which he did not think was really a
science. He told me the story of how when a certain doctor was trying
to provide evidence that the source of cholera in a working class
locality in South London was contaminated water, he was shunned by
colleagues and authorities alike, who argued that the contagion was
imported from India. Butchery of Africans by the Europeans was
monetarily rewarded. Sudarshan told me how to facilitate the reward
process, the murderer had to only bring the severed ears of his
victim as an evidence of his accomplishment because carting the whole
body was too cumbersome.
Although I knew Sudarshan for 58 years, I knew little about his
personal life. He almost never talked about himself. I did not know
his family name until we met in Montreal. Like nationality and
parentage, every one in India has a caste, neither of which is of
your choosing. I do not know what caste Sudarshan belonged to. I did
not know he has a sister until Shree enquired about the secret of his
superb Indian cuisine. He said he learned it all from his sister. I
do not know which place of India he was born. May be he was a true
son of the soil of India. His knowledge of and admiration for India,
to my knowledge, have been matched by no other person I know. He was
a great admirer of Nehru and a devotee of Gandhi, not so much as a
nationalist but more because to him these men had a vision of no
match in the world.
Although Sudarshan did not talk about himself, he did talk about his
friends. Almost any one in Marianopolis who knew Sudarshan knew me.
However I don’t think any one really knew him – they only knew his
views and his intolerance for contrary views. And Sudarshan had
definite views on everything.
Sudarshan believed in communicating face to face and not by letters,
telephone or e-mail. If I ever wanted to send something for
Sudarshan, I would email it to Tamara to be transmitted in
appropriate form to Sudarshan. So when I left Lucknow in 1959 and
Sudarshan was still struggling with his PhD, our contact was broken.
I got letters twice; once when our friend Anand Bhatnagar died and
another to let me know he is about to finish his PhD. After that I
met him years later in Purdue where he was a professor and then later
in Montreal.
Many people associate Sudarshan with brash temperament. He himself
told me that he knows that he is not polite in conversations. I
suppose Sudarshan never wished to undermine the significance of
important issues by adulterating it with politeness. Yet, Sudarshan
was a very tender person and very forgiving. He inspired many
students at Marianopolis and was immensely proud of the success of
his students. One of his Marianpolis students of Indian parents got
admission in Caltech. Parents sought Sudarshan’s advice for they
thought they could not afford it. Sudarshan told them that if it had
been his son, he would mortgage the house to get him through the school.
I once took Anjali Abraham, who had done her bachelor’s in
mathematics and is now completing her PhD in Education at McGill, to
Sudarshan for advise. Anjali told Sudarshan she wanted to be a school
teacher. Sudarshan did not think even for a moment to tell her that
she should still do her PhD in mathematics following which she could
do whatever she wished.
Sudarshan always wanted Tamara’s eldest son Paul to pursue an
academic career; however when Paul decided to channel his talents in
pursuit of other areas, Sudarshan used to narrate Paul’s
accomplishments with a sense of pride.
Sudarshan was an atheist. And yet he broke down when Anand Bhatnagar
died. Anand’s sister-in-law Hem Bhatnagar was very attached to Anand.
Following his death by suicide, Hem told Sudarshan that if his dear
ones sit and meditate in a certain way, he would come back to life.
So here was Sudarshan, the rational, the atheist, the uncompromising
sitting with Hem meditating in a certain way to get his friend
comeback to life.
Sudarshan could relate to little Alice like he was just a bit older.
One day when I visited Sudarshan Alice was there. Of course Sudarshan
and I started talking to each other to the great disappointment of
Alice. At some point Alice could not take it any longer and said
something, which I did not understand. Sudarshan did. Sudarshan had
told Alice that he would play with her when his friend is gone. What
Alice wanted to know from him - when is his friend leaving?
Tamara’s father was an accomplished mathematician. Tamara is a
mathematician too. Sudarshan told me that Tamara was prevented from
blossoming as a mathematician just because she was a woman and had to
look after the family. When I met Sudarshan in Montreal, they had a
dog. The dog actually belonged to his son Siddhu, short for
Siddhartha, a name given by his grandfather, the distinguished Hindi
writer Yaspal, as a mark of his admiration for Buddha. Sudarshan
looked after this dog as any animal lover would.
Sudarshan had tremendous affection and admiration for Tamara and
Tamara more than reciprocated it. The last few months of Sudrashan
were very trying for him and for Tamara. He was on peritoneal
dialysis. As long as he could he would tell elaborate stories of how
loads of dialysis bags were delivered to the house and how he can no
more visit India because these facilities may not be easily available
while traveling. The kidney is an important organ. A distinguished
physiologist Smith titled his book on the kidney “From fish to
philosopher” merely to emphasize that the kidney is solely
responsible for the transition from aquatic to terrestrial life.
Once Sudarshan developed kidney trouble, he was sentenced to death.
He fought it bravely but eventually even he was not strong enough.
His helplessness at Jewish General was heartrending to his family and
friends. He wanted to come home but he belonged to a hospital. His
suffering could only be freed by death. And death did come.
In the passing away of Sudarshan, Tamara and her children and
grandchildren have lost an unusual personality. I trust that they
can, no matter how hard, adjust to it. Tamara is a strong woman but
the challenge was not in keeping Sudarshan alive. It is now when
Sudarshan is no more at 65 Palmerston, TMR. Would she meet this
challenge? I wish and hope as all of you do that she would.
St. John’s, NL
May 3, 2009
_____
[8] MISCELLANEA:
outlookindia.com, May 25 2009
THE TROUBLE WITH EXPLANATION
It forces the author to impose his own reading of his work on the
reader, depriving him of the aura of mystery around its origins ......
by Salman Rushdie
We live in the age of explanation and yet we understand each other
less well every day. Open a newspaper, turn on the broadcast news,
and an avalanche of explainers buries you under verbiage, telling you
how to think about what you know. Science explains seven things a
minute while religion claims to have explained everything already,
anyway. The day passes to the sound of the powerful explaining away
their mistakes, distortions and lies. "Reality instructors", to use
Saul Bellow's term, are all around; reality instruction may be the
biggest growth industry of our time.
The bookstores are filled with non-fiction because we are losing
faith in our dreams and believe that only the facts can tell the
truth, but the most popular books of all are still fictions filled
with the purest drivel. In our private lives we pay fortunes to sit
in rooms with wiser men and women, seeking explanations for our
weaknesses, our inner turbulence, our grief. We pay nobody, however,
to help us understand our joys. These
we can readily explain; or, rather, happiness needs no explanation.
It is misery that demands a confessor.
In the midst of this dull riot of answers, is there still room for
the bright questions of scholarly inquiry? And if we speak
specifically about the arts, should we—or should we not—follow the
advice of V.S. Naipaul, who once told an audience at the Hay-on-Wye
literary festival that literature was not for the young, and
recommended that all English departments in all universities should
therefore be shut down immediately?
The relationship between the arts and their explainers has always
been edgily ambiguous. It has been said that great writers need great
critics, and there are instances—William Faulkner and Malcolm Cowley
come to mind—when a critic's contribution to the understanding of a
body of work has been essential. And where would surrealism be
without Andre Breton? At the opposite end of this argument is Tom
Wolfe, satirising an art-culture in which theory precedes practice,
and the New York Times' chief art critic can write "to lack a
persuasive theory is to lack something crucial"; so that, as Wolfe
says, "the paintings...exist only to illustrate the text." Several
years ago, I was at a British Council literary seminar in Walberberg,
Germany, where a group of well-known British authors (Ian McEwan,
James Fenton, Caryl Phillips among them) shocked an audience of
eminent European scholars and critics by claiming that all the work
done studying and explicating their books was not of much interest to
them, and could not be described as useful or helpful.
I wondered, at the time, if we writers were telling the truth, or
simply taking up an essentially defensive (though apparently
aggressive) position. In the aftermath of the Death of the Author,
after all, it is the Critic who is king, and yet there we were,
obstinately alive, and determined to retain sovereignty over our own
texts. As time passes, however, I admit to having more and more
difficulty with this whole business of being Explained, rather than
merely—happily—read.
The trouble begins with having to explain oneself. When I publish a
book, my strong instinct is to absent myself completely, because at
the moment of publication, the writer's time with the book is at an
end, and the reader's time begins. You offer up your tale and then
you want to hear from other people; the least interesting voice, at
that moment, is your own. However—for such is the nature of the
publishing industry—at the very moment when the author wishes to be
invisible, he is required to be most visible. Every writer comes to
dread the sound of his own voice repeating answers over and over again.
The effect, if the process goes on long enough (and it does, it
does), is to alienate one from one's own work.Publication comes to
seem like the process by which the author is persuaded to detest his
book, so that he has to begin writing another story to obliterate the
one he can no longer bear to discuss.
In my own case, these anti-explanatory feelings were intensified by
the strange hubbub that followed the publication of The Satanic
Verses. Rarely, if ever, can any author have been called upon to
explicate his own book so frequently, in such detail, and often in
the face of entrenched, often hostile attitudes toward the text that
were based upon not reading it, or reading a few bits of it
(sentences carefully selected and decontextualised to create a
"meaning" that bore no relationship to the "meaning" of the book as a
whole), or vindictively misreading it, or reading it through the
transforming lenses of assumptions about religion and its privileges,
about "culture" (that much-abused word) and its "sensitivities", and,
of course, about me—assumptions and prejudices that, for many
readers, turned the book and its author into entities unworthy of
serious consideration. You didn't need to read The Satanic Verses to
hold an opinion about it, because the clamour of angry explanations
told you it wasn't worth the trouble. "I don't need to walk in the
gutter," said one such non-reader critic, "to know that it contains
filth." You didn't need to concern yourself about the book's author,
either, because the same clamour told you how unpleasant a person he
was.
To fight back against this assault, it was necessary to say, over and
over again, what I thought my book was about, and to explain why I
had written it in the way I had written it and not in some other,
less problematic, way; to explain, indeed, why I had written it at
all, when not writing it would plainly have been so much less
troublesome to everyone. It often felt that I was also required to
offer up a similar exegesis of "Salman Rushdie". Instead of
discussing themes, ideas, characters, feelings, language, form, tone,
I had to justify my right to write at all. "He knew what he was
doing," people said, but nobody actually cared what that was. So I
had to spell it out, again and again. None of this was pleasant. All
of it felt necessary.
I have been obliged by extraordinary circumstances to do what I
believe that a writer should never do: to try and impose my own
reading of my work upon the world, to prescribe its meanings, to say
clearly what was intended by each contested paragraph, to try and
establish the work as proper, justifiable, moral, perhaps even good,
in the face of an onslaught that insisted it was improper,
unjustifiable, immoral and bad. In general, it is my view that the
reader completes the book; that one of the joys of literature is that
each reading will be different, because of what each reader brings to
the experience. It is my view that it is not for the author to tell
the reader how to read his work. And yet there I have been, in
interview after interview, and in many written pieces, trying to
rescue my work from its detractors, and saying, in effect, "This is
what this passage means" or "Read this part like this".
Even today, 22 years after I began to write The Satanic Verses, I am
still asked for detailed accounts of the day-to-day motivations of
writing its many sentences. The truthful answer ("I don't remember")
is, of course, unsatisfactory. So I have come up with my little bunch
of answers, answers that satisfy some questioners—not, evidently, the
ones who will never be satisfied—but which increasingly trouble me.I,
too, am a reality instructor now. ...How readily I fall into the trap
of explaining my motives, my characters, my sentences; how willingly
I talk about ideas and controversies, attacks and defenses! What
book, what body of work could retain the slightest aura of mystery
when the author himself shines such a bright light on its origins and
meanings? Why won't that garrulous author be quiet and let his books
speak for themselves?
I once saw Joseph Heller being interviewed about, if memory serves,
his novel Good as Gold, and refusing, in spite of much coaxing by the
interviewer, to talk about his book in any terms except those of his
characters: what they felt, what they wanted, what they were like,
why they acted as they did. He simply refused to step back from his
art and pontificate about it "from the outside". How wise he was! Why
can't I do that?
To my mind, the best argument in favour of the principle of the
universality of free speech is not an appeal to its rationality, but
to its place at the heart of human nature. We are, as I've often
said, storytelling animals, the only creatures on our planet, as far
as we know, that use story—narrative, history, gossip, philosophy—as
a way of understanding ourselves. Any external limitations on our
ability to speak, or on the content of our speech, therefore
interferes with something essential to us all, whether we are writers
or not. When people are told that they cannot freely re-examine the
stories of themselves, and the stories within which they live, then
tyranny is not very far away.
(Excerpted from an essay in Midnight's Diaspora: Encounters with
Salman Rushdie, edited by Daniel Herwitz and Ashutosh Varshney,
Penguin/Viking, Rs 399.)
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. An offshoot of South Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
More information about the SACW
mailing list