SACW | June 19-21, 2009 / Afghanistan: US new ways / Pakistan: Submarine Kickbacks / Kashmir / Left's Ability to Rethink / Violence in Lagarh / Bajrang Dal camp

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire | June 19-21, 2009 | Dispatch No. 2636 -  
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] U.S. Pursues a New Way To Rebuild in Afghanistan (Rajiv  
Chandrasekaran)
[2] Pakistan:  Preventing a Taliban victory (Pervez Hoodbhoy)
[3] Pakistan - France:  Submarine Kickbacks and Killings
    - Submarine Money : ‘French nationals killed in Karachi over  
kickback’ (Dawn)
    - Dirty deals?  (Editorial, The News)
    - Soupçons (Laurent Joffrin)
    - La vengeance clandestine de la DGSE (Liberation)
[4] Kashmir:
   - Fire in the valley (Shujaat Bukhari)
   - What went wrong in Shopian? (Balraj Puri )
[5] India's Big Official Left Party:  Cult of Mediocrity (Rudrangshu  
Mukherjee)
[6] India: Questions about violence in Lagarh, West Bengal
   - Who will police the state? (Pratik Kanjilal)
   - Lalgarh is not a Communist Movement: Kanu Sanyal
   - Statement On the Political Violence Unleashed Against the Left  
in West Bengal
[7] India: The master and the maid (Shobha De)
[8] India's Romeo and Juliet tragedy (Sanjoy Majumder)
[9] Far Right and Obscurantism: A Bajrang Dal camp in Delhi (Tusha  
Mittal)
    - Puri Temple Should be Prosecuted for Seeking Musk (an  
endangered species); Poachers to probably replace Nepal's King as  
supplier
[10] Miscellanea:
    - Gay rights in China : Comrades-in-arms (The Economist)
    - Making the state protect women (Rahila Gupta)
    - When the East is a Career: The Question of Exoticism in Indian  
Anglophone Literature (Nivedita Majumdar)

_____


[1] Afghanistan:

OBAMA'S WAR : STARTING OVER ON DEVELOPMENT
U.S. Pursues a New Way To Rebuild in Afghanistan

by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 19, 2009

The idea to transform a vacant tract near the Afghan city of Mazar-e  
Sharif into a sprawling commercial farm, with miles of strawberry  
fields and thousands of cashmere goats, began with an entreaty from  
President George W. Bush to the billionaire chairman of Dole Foods at  
a 2006 Republican Party fundraiser.

Go to Afghanistan, Bush urged David H. Murdock, "to see what you can  
do to help."

After a tour of the country the following April, Murdock told U.S.  
officials he wanted to build a 25,000-acre plantation modeled after  
Dole's vast holdings in the Philippines. But a few months later, he  
concluded that transportation and security challenges made the  
project unsuitable for the company.

That did not dissuade the U.S. Agency for International Development.  
Mindful of the president's interest in the project -- and convinced  
that Murdock dropped out because he did not receive a thank-you call  
from Bush -- USAID decided to go it alone. It allocated $40 million  
in reconstruction money to the venture, and it directed a contractor  
to hire workers and purchase equipment.

It was not until a year later, after several million dollars had been  
spent, that agency officials realized why Afghans had not cultivated  
the land themselves: The water and soil were too salty to grow crops.

"It was a total waste of resources," said Frauke de Weijer, a  
development specialist who worked with USAID contractors building the  
farm. "It was a diversion of reconstruction money from other more  
effective and beneficial projects."

The barren farm embodies some of the challenges confronting President  
Obama as he tries to fulfill a campaign promise to turn around the  
deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

Members of his national security team have concluded that the country  
requires not just more money and personnel for reconstruction but  
also a fundamental overhaul of the U.S. approach to development. They  
want to implement broad-based initiatives aimed at improving the  
lives of as many Afghans as possible, shifting away from an approach  
employed during the Bush presidency that focused on generating  
discrete "success stories" and creating long-term economic  
sustainability through free-market reform.

Bush administration officials contend that their method was necessary  
to win financial support from Congress, and to build a degree of self- 
sufficiency that the country desperately needs, but Obama's advisers  
maintain it resulted in few tangible improvements for most Afghans,  
leading many of them to shift allegiance to the Taliban.

The consequences of the Bush approach have been most evident in U.S.  
efforts to help resuscitate Afghanistan's agricultural economy, which  
has been severely degraded by years of war, according to internal  
government documents and interviews with dozens of officials involved  
in the country's reconstruction. Instead of emphasizing programs to  
help meet domestic food needs by increasing farm yields, U.S. aid  
officials focused much of their resources on countering the growth of  
opium-producing poppies through projects that encouraged other ways  
to make a living in rural areas. The projects often had little to do  
with agriculture and did not address the root causes of why farmers  
became part of the drug trade.
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Those agriculture programs that did not involve counternarcotics were  
run for the past three years by a USAID official who believes the  
desires of private businesses should determine development strategy.  
He opted to steer U.S. aid toward agriculture fairs and marketing  
ventures instead of initiatives aimed at increasing crop production,  
an approach he says helped stimulate much-needed business development.

"The aid program has been driven at the operating level by people who  
are very ideologically private-sector, by people who have an  
antipathy toward government programs to assist farmers," said John W.  
Mellor, an agriculture economist who is an expert on farming in  
Afghanistan. "We are insisting that Afghanistan have a free-market  
economy of the sort we do not have for our own agricultural sector."

Officials at USAID, which has spent almost $7.8 billion on Afghan  
reconstruction since 2001, maintain that their programs have been  
effective. They note that they have funded the construction of 1,600  
miles of roads, the building or refurbishing of 680 schools and the  
training of thousands of civil servants. In the agricultural sector,  
the agency has pointed to a number of achievements: the transport of  
Afghan pomegranates to markets in Dubai, the opening of rural farm- 
supply stores and the restoration of pistachio orchards. "This  
program has had a remarkable success," said Bill Frej, the agency's  
director in Kabul.

But Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama's point man for Afghanistan policy,  
has a less sanguine view. The new administration, he said, needs "to  
fix what we have inherited."

Holbrooke intends to revamp the entire U.S. reconstruction effort,  
starting with agriculture aid and counternarcotics. He has decided to  
curtail campaigns to eradicate poppy crops -- which he believes have  
driven poor farmers to support the Taliban -- and restructure USAID's  
alternative employment programs, which together have cost the U.S.  
government almost $3 billion since 2004.

"In my experience of 40-plus years -- I started out working for AID  
in Vietnam -- this was the single most wasteful, most ineffective  
program that I had ever seen," he said in a recent interview. "It  
wasn't just a waste of money. . . . This was actually a benefit to  
the enemy. We were recruiting Taliban with our tax dollars."

Although farm projects lack the cachet of building schools and roads,  
Holbrooke and other administration officials believe that assisting  
Afghans in improving food production must be at the top of the U.S.  
reconstruction agenda. More than 80 percent of working-age males in  
the country are small-scale farmers. Helping them grow more food will  
improve the quality of their lives and -- administration officials  
hope -- reverse a sense of hopelessness that has contributed to  
Taliban recruitment.

Holbrooke's aides are still drawing up a detailed strategy for how to  
restructure the agriculture program. But it is already clear that  
there will be far more money: Congress agreed yesterday to add $100  
million for agricultural reconstruction, and the administration has  
asked lawmakers for an additional $235 million for fiscal 2010, a  
more than fourfold increase from 2008.

There will also be a fundamental realignment of power in Washington  
when it comes to shaping development policy. Holbrooke has wrested  
control of the program from USAID, making it clear that the agency  
will now be just one of several players involved in Afghanistan. He  
has reached out to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has agreed  
to send more experts from his department to Afghanistan, and is  
seeking to more closely coordinate with the Defense Department, which  
has 350 National Guard members with farm experience serving on  
agricultural development teams in six provinces.

The new plan, according to officials involved in the process, will  
involve smaller contracts, more involvement of Afghan development  
organizations and more money funneled through the Afghan government.  
USAID's private-sector development policies will be realigned, the  
officials said, to include a greater focus on helping farmers  
increase production.

"They need the kind of soup-to-nuts agricultural support that  
Roosevelt gave the farmers during the Great Depression -- roads,  
markets, irrigation, seeds, fertilizer, educational materials,"  
Holbrooke said. "Afghans are smart farmers. . . . They just need the  
right kind of help from us."

'Alternative Livelihoods'

Soon after the U.S. military overthrew the Taliban government in  
2001, a debate broke out among senior Bush administration officials  
over the best way to rebuild a country so impoverished from decades  
of strife that its rates of malnutrition, illiteracy and infant  
mortality were among the highest in the world.

Officials at the White House and the Pentagon favored projects with a  
quick impact, such as schools, roads and health clinics that could be  
completed in a year or two and build the goodwill among the Afghan  
people that they believed was necessary for the American public to  
support a continued military deployment.

Some development specialists at USAID preferred a longer-term  
approach. Focus on agriculture because it is the key to economic  
sustainability, they said, and on "capacity building" -- training the  
Afghans to do things themselves. But the White House and Pentagon  
prevailed.

The bulk of reconstruction funding in the first few years was devoted  
to building schools, roads and clinics. A particularly prized project  
was a highway from Kabul to Kandahar that Bush requested be completed  
in less than a year. USAID met the goal, but to do so, it allowed its  
contractors to place such a thin layer of asphalt in some places that  
it washed away when snows melted the following spring.

It was not until mid-2003, almost 18 months after the Taliban  
government fell, that USAID started its first national agriculture  
program. It received less than 5 percent of the annual reconstruction  
budget.

"Investments in agriculture take time. They don't produce results  
overnight -- and that's what the administration wanted," said Mark  
Ward, a former senior USAID official who participated in high-level  
discussions about Afghanistan with White House officials.

By 2004, administration officials had become alarmed by reports that  
poppy cultivation was reaching record levels, particularly in the  
country's east and south. When the White House agreed to spend $775  
million the following year on counternarcotics programs, USAID saw an  
opportunity. It pitched a program called "alternative livelihoods"  
that was based, in part, on the belief that poppy cultivation would  
drop if young men are offered short-term employment around planting  
and harvest time that pays better than working in the fields.

USAID got the money: $120 million for an alternative-livelihoods  
program in the south, and $108 million for one in the east. Then it  
looked for help. Because the agency no longer has people on its staff  
who implement development and reconstruction programs -- all of them  
left in the 1980s and 1990s because of budget cuts -- it turned to  
contractors.

Roadblocks

Chemonics, a for-profit development firm based in Washington,  
received the contract for southern Afghanistan in late 2005. It was  
one of many contracts won by the company, which has become a  
principal instrument of U.S. development policy in the country.

One of its first alternative-livelihoods projects was to build a  
road. And for that, it flew in 11 Bolivian engineers.

Andrew S. Natsios, the USAID administrator at the time, had recently  
viewed cobblestone roads in Bolivia's Chapare rainforest that were  
built under a U.S.-funded alternative-livelihoods program to  
discourage coca planting. He figured that such roads, which are  
inexpensive but require extensive manual labor to build, could be a  
new tool in the fight against poppies in southern Afghanistan because  
the construction effort would result in thousands of short-term jobs.  
Chemonics readily agreed.
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The Bolivians trained 46 Afghans in the art of placing fist-size  
river stones on the ground. Then they set about constructing a road  
from the capital of Helmand to an archaeological site on the  
outskirts of the city. Once a sixth of a mile was complete, Chemonics  
held a celebration that featured speeches from local officials and  
the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Chemonics had plans to build additional cobblestone roads across  
southern Afghanistan, but local Afghan leaders objected. They said  
that they were willing to humor the Americans with the path to the  
ruins, but that what they really wanted were gravel and asphalt  
roads. They complained that the cobblestones hurt their camels' hooves.

"It wound up being a huge waste of time and money," said one person  
who worked on the project. "Nobody did the due diligence."

Natsios maintains that the cobblestone roads were a good idea, but he  
said he could not comment on the implementation because it occurred  
after he left the agency. A Chemonics spokeswoman said the company  
"can't comment on the decision-making process that took place before  
the work began." A senior USAID official, speaking on the condition  
of anonymity, said Afghan officials initially supported the project  
but then changed their minds because they believed they could extract  
kickbacks from gravel and asphalt construction.

After the cobblestone venture, Chemonics shifted to other cash-for- 
work projects, including cleaning irrigation canals, that were more  
palatable to local officials. Although it allowed USAID to claim that  
it had generated hundreds of thousands of days of labor, the overall  
impact was the development equivalent of a sugar rush: It didn't  
last. Poppy farmers always managed to find enough help -- largely  
because unemployment is so acute -- and cultivation in southern  
Afghanistan reached all-time highs.

In 2007, the poppies grown in Helmand province alone could have more  
than met the world's demand for opium. And when U.S. funding for  
short-term labor dried up, many participants went to fight for the  
Taliban, according to some Chemonics specialists who worked on the  
cash-for-work projects.

Several Afghan development experts advising the Obama administration  
believe the fundamental mistake with the U.S. alternative-livelihoods  
approach is that it did not concentrate on agriculture. The Chemonics  
contract, which USAID increased to $166 million in 2007, included  
money for the construction of a business park, a women's center, an  
Internet cafe and a recreational facility designed to demonstrate,  
according to a USAID report, that Chemonics was "a good neighbor  
within the municipality."

What the U.S. strategy should have addressed, the experts maintain,  
were the basic reasons why poppy is so attractive to poor Afghan  
farmers.

Drug middlemen often provide farmers with a cash advance at the  
beginning of the planting season, and they routinely promise to buy  
the crop at a set price. Some merchants even offer technical  
assistance to help farmers increase their yields. For subsistence  
farmers, such aid is vital, and it leads them to plant poppy even  
when other crops -- including pomegranates, grapes and almonds -- can  
fetch higher prices.

"Our whole concept of alternative livelihoods is conceptually  
flawed," said Barnett R. Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York  
University and a consultant to Holbrooke. "Poppy is not a crop, it's  
an industry. You're not going to compete with it with day-labor  
projects."

But USAID declined to include agricultural credit and price supports  
in the alternative-livelihoods program for southern Afghanistan.  
Agency managers regarded price supports, which exist for some crops  
in the United States, as unsustainable for the Afghan government over  
the long term. The agency did decide to offer credit, but it did so  
through a separate program that would seek to establish private  
credit unions and small lending institutions. That program was not  
focused on agriculture, and security concerns have limited its  
operation in southern poppy-growing areas.

The few farm-related activities that USAID funded through the  
alternative-livelihoods program sometimes generated results counter  
to what the agency wanted. Several former Chemonics specialists  
involved with the project said that some of the farmers who accepted  
U.S.-sponsored wheat seed and fertilizer handouts simply sold the  
seeds in Pakistan, or ground them to make flour, and they used the  
fertilizer to nourish their poppy fields.

But the specialists contend that their superiors at Chemonics, which  
has received more than $430 million worth of Afghanistan  
reconstruction contracts from USAID since 2003, did not complain  
about it to USAID project managers because of concerns it might  
jeopardize future work with the agency.

Michelle Millard, a Chemonics spokeswoman, called the allegation  
"simply not accurate." She said the firm "has worked closely with  
USAID to refine the design and scope of programs to ensure their  
effectiveness." Agency officials say they rarely find out about  
problems in the field, unless the contractor informs them, because  
agency managers seldom leave their fortified compound in Kabul to  
independently assess projects.

"We're all sitting in this bubble," said one agency official  
stationed in the Kabul headquarters. "We have no idea what's really  
happening out in the rest of the country."

Cotton Proposition

Soon after the cobblestone-road project, Yosuf Mir, an Afghan  
American who lives in Fairfax County, approached Chemonics with what  
he thought was a no-lose solution to wean thousands of farmers off  
poppy cultivation: cotton, a crop widely grown in southern  
Afghanistan until the Soviet invasion in 1979.

When he asked farmers why they were growing poppies instead, he said,  
"They told me, 'What else can I do? We don't have the seeds. We don't  
have the fertilizer. We don't have anyone to sell to. There's nobody  
to give us credit except for the drug dealers.' "

The solution seemed obvious to Mir. The Afghan government was seeking  
to sell the state-run cotton ginning factory in Kandahar. He would  
buy it.

He consummated the transaction in 2005, pledging $1 million of his  
family's land in exchange for a 20-year lease. With that investment  
-- and with USAID's help in distributing cotton seeds -- he estimated  
that 35,000 farmers would resume growing cotton, and his factory  
could employ as many as 12,000 people. "We would," he said, "create a  
real alternative livelihood for the Afghan people."

When Mir approached Chemonics, leaders of the alternative-livelihoods  
program expressed support for his proposal. Charles Grader, a former  
senior manager of a USAID agriculture project run by Chemonics, said  
a study commissioned by the firm deemed cotton "one of the better  
alternate crops." But for cotton to be economically viable, he said,  
USAID or the Afghan government would have to provide a subsidy to the  
farmers, in much the same way the U.S. government aids domestic  
cotton producers.

In April 2006, Chemonics asked USAID for authority to help  
rehabilitate Mir's cotton factory. USAID rejected the request within  
weeks -- the notion of agriculture subsidies was anathema to free- 
marketers at the agency.

Mir eventually received a fuller explanation for the decision: U.S.  
law prevents the government from aiding foreign cotton producers  
because doing so could help them compete against American growers.

Several U.S. officials familiar with the matter said that USAID could  
have asked the White House to issue an exemption, given the national  
security importance of stabilizing Afghanistan, but that senior  
officials at the agency opposed funding a program to promote a crop  
in which Afghanistan did not have a comparative advantage on world  
markets.

"Their thinking is all about free trade -- that Afghanistan is better  
suited to produce pomegranates and raisins than bales of cotton,"  
said one USAID official who disagrees with the agency's stance. "But  
what about the goal of keeping people from shooting at our troops?"

Late last year, Mir had to let go of the last 200 employees of the  
cotton factory, several of whom had worked there through the Soviet  
occupation and the Taliban years.

Most of them, Mir said, have since joined the Taliban.

"Even the Taliban knew the value of keeping the factory open," he added.

Sales and Marketing

In late 2006, Chemonics won another USAID contract, initially worth  
$102 million, for an initiative called the Accelerating Sustainable  
Agriculture Program. Agriculture experts recruited by the firm to  
work under the contract figured it would be a chance to implement the  
sorts of assistance projects that Afghanistan badly needed but that  
USAID did not want under the alternative-livelihoods program.

They proposed setting up a commercial poultry operation that would  
employ women in 50 villages and produce as many as 45 million eggs a  
year, reducing the country's reliance on imports from Pakistan and  
Iran. And they urged extending a project that had been set up under  
an earlier USAID contract to establish and restore vineyards.

"It would have produced real change in the lives of hundreds of  
thousands of Afghans," said Gary Kuhn, the executive director of  
Roots of Peace, a nonprofit organization that would have done the  
vineyard work for Chemonics.

But Loren Stoddard, director of USAID's Afghan agriculture and  
alternative-livelihoods programs, believed the contract should  
concentrate on promoting "buyer-led development." That meant sales  
and marketing activities, not field-level work to help farmers  
increase production.

The grapevine project was killed. So, too, was the egg venture.

Stoddard had worked as a produce salesman before joining USAID in  
2002. Before arriving in Kabul in 2006, he spent four years with the  
agency in Guatemala, where he earned plaudits from his superiors for  
helping to facilitate business deals between local farmers and Wal-Mart.

He wanted to do more of the same in Afghanistan. The key to  
resuscitating the economy, in his view, is for farmers to specialize  
not in wheat, which is a staple of the local diet, but in what the  
country grows best -- and what buyers in other nations want to  
import: pomegranates, almonds, pistachios, raisins and fruits such as  
apricots that can be dried or turned into juice. He is fond of noting  
that Afghanistan was one of the world's largest exporters of dried  
fruits and nuts before the Soviet invasion. But the first step in  
making that happen, he believes, is to line up purchasers, not focus  
on farmers.

"Rich farmers sell first and then grow," Stoddard said in an  
interview. "Poor farmers grow first and then hope somebody will buy it."

To implement his vision, Stoddard ordered Chemonics to use the  
contract money to hold a series of agriculture fairs that would give  
Afghan farmers a chance to display their wares to foreign buyers, to  
organize promotional shipments of pomegranates to supermarkets in the  
Persian Gulf region, and to establish "agribusiness brokerage  
centers" to facilitate business deals.

"In 2006, nobody had heard of an Afghan pomegranate," he said. "We've  
put the light on the fact that there's a lot of great stuff here to  
sell."

The 25,000-acre farm Murdock envisioned at then-President Bush's  
behest was going to be Stoddard's flagship project. He was convinced  
it would "help Afghans realize there was a bright future ahead of  
them" by demonstrating modern agricultural techniques and generating  
an appetite around the world for Afghan-grown products.

Stoddard said Murdock wanted the farm built on a vacant parcel  
because he feared tenant disputes. After Dole exited, USAID decided  
to stick with the empty-land strategy, despite concerns from some at  
Chemonics that the site might not be suitable for commercial  
agriculture.

USAID had planned to rely on underground aquifers to irrigate the  
farm. But every well that was drilled brought up water that was too  
salty.

The agency is using the remaining money allotted for the project to  
help develop private agricultural projects in the province.

Even if there had been enough water to run the farm, several  
agriculture specialists familiar with the venture contend it would  
have been out of place in a country where most people grow crops on  
small plots of land.

"It was one man's pipe dream," said another specialist who worked on  
the project for Chemonics. "It made no sense."

Until recently, Stoddard had relatively free rein to design and  
implement agriculture projects as he wished, according to several  
U.S. officials. That was because "nobody -- nobody at the White  
House, nobody at USAID headquarters, nobody at [the] State  
[Department] -- really understood agriculture in Afghanistan. And  
USDA was almost never at the table," said Ward, the former senior  
USAID official. "Loren had a vision for what would work. We may not  
agree with it, but at least he had a plan. Nobody else had one."

At USAID, which once had dozens of agronomists and agriculture  
economists on staff, only a handful of people with specialized  
training in agriculture development remain. Although the agency does  
not provide an exact count, most of its scientific and technical  
experts were sent packing in the 1980s and 1990s as budgets were cut  
and the workforce shrank.

"This is what happens when you eviscerate a federal agency," Ward  
said. "There's a consequence. You may not see it right away. In this  
case, we're seeing it a generation later, when we need AID to help us  
win a war -- and it can't."

Left Hanging

Late last year, when Mohammad Asif Rahimi, Afghanistan's newly  
appointed agriculture minister, visited his office for the first  
time, he was shocked by what he found -- or, rather, what he didn't.  
There was no phone. No Internet connection. No secretary.

"It looked like the Taliban left a week ago," he said.

To Rahimi, the reason was obvious: USAID had focused its money and  
attention on its own programs instead of helping Afghans assume  
responsibility for their own affairs. Agency officials said they did  
not provide more assistance to the ministry because they regarded  
Rahimi's predecessor as an ineffective leader.

As Rahimi learned more about the U.S. agriculture strategy, he said  
he became increasingly angry.

"This 'leave it to the hands of the private-sector' approach -- it's  
absolutely unrealistic," he said. "The agriculture sector needs a lot  
of support from the government."

_____


[2] Pakistan:

Dawn
20 June, 2009

PREVENTING A TALIBAN VICTORY
by Pervez Hoodbhoy

Guns may be able to destroy, but to rebuild and convince the  
populace, more is needed than the military. — AFP

Pakistan Military says Swat Valley 95 per cent secured
FIGHTING MILITANCY
Sceptics question Pakistan’s anti-Taliban resolve

Now that the army has turned serious, Baitullah Mehsud cannot expect  
to stroll down Constitution Avenue any time soon, nor hope to sit in  
the presidency.

A few thousand mountain barbarians, even if trained by Al Qaeda’s  
best, cannot possibly seize power from a modern, well-armed state  
with 600,000 soldiers. The spectre of Pakistan collapsing in six  
months — a fear expressed by a senior US military adviser in March —  
has evaporated.

But there is little cause for elation. Daily terror attacks across  
the country give abundant proof that religious extremism has streamed  
down the mountains into the plains. Through abductions, beheadings  
and suicide bombings, Taliban insurgents are destabilising Pakistan,  
damaging its economy and spreading despondency.

Look at Islamabad, a city of fear. Machine-gun bunkers are ubiquitous  
while traffic barely trickles past concrete blocks placed across its  
super-wide roads. Upscale restaurants, fearing suicide bombers, have  
removed their signs although they still hope clients will remember.  
Who will be the next target? Girls’ schools, Internet cafes,  
bookshops, or western clothing stores with mannequins? Or perhaps  
shops selling toilet paper, underwear, and other un-Islamic goods?

The impact on Pakistan’s women is enormous. Throwing acid, or  
threatening to do so, has been spectacularly successful in making  
women embrace modesty. Today there is scarcely a female face visible  
anywhere in the Frontier province. Men are also changing dress —  
anxious private employers, government departments and NGOs have  
advised their male employees in Peshawar and other cities to wear  
shalwar-kameez rather than trousers. Video shops are being bombed out  
of business, and many barbers have put ‘no-shave’ notices outside  
their shops.

If public support were absent, extremist violence could be relatively  
easy to deal with. But extremism does not lie merely at the fringes.  
As an example, let us recall that 5,000 people crammed the streets  
outside Lal Masjid to pray behind the battle-hardened pro-Taliban  
militant leader, Maulana Abdul Aziz, the day after he was released  
from prison on the orders of interior minister Rehman Malik.

In the political arena, the extremists have high-profile cheerleaders  
like Imran Khan, Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Hamid Gul who rush to justify  
every attack on Pakistan’s people and culture. To them it makes no  
difference that Baitullah Mehsud proudly admits to the murder of  
Allama Dr Sarfaraz Ahmad Naeemi, the recent Peshawar mosque bombing,  
the earlier Wah slaughter and scores of other hideous suicide  
attacks. Like broken gramophone records, they chant “Amrika, Amrika,  
Amrika” after every new Taliban atrocity.

Nevertheless, bad as things are, there is a respite. To the relief of  
those who wish to see Pakistan survive, the army finally moved  
against the Taliban menace. But, while the state has committed men to  
battle, it cannot provide them a convincing reason why they must fight.

For now some soldiers have bought into the amazing invention that the  
Baitullahs and Fazlullahs are India’s secret agents. Others have been  
told that they are actually fighting a nefarious American-Jewish plot  
to destabilise Pakistan. To inspire revenge, still others are being  
shown the revolting Taliban-produced videos of Pakistani soldiers  
being tortured and beheaded.

That the enemy lacks an accurate name typifies the confusion and  
contradiction within. In official parlance they are called  
‘militants’ or ‘extremists’ but never religious extremists. It is  
astonishing that the semi-literate Fazlullah, on whose head the  
government has now placed a price, is reverentially referred to as  
‘maulana’. On the other hand there is no hesitation in describing  
Baloch fighters — who fight for a nationalist cause rather than a  
religious one — as rebels or terrorists.

A muddled nation can still fight, but not very well and not for too  
long. Self-deception enormously increases vulnerability. Yet,  
Pakistan’s current army and political leaders cannot alone be blamed  
for the confusion; history’s baggage is difficult to dispense with.

To say what really lies at the heart of Pakistan’s problems will  
require summoning more courage than presently exists. The  
unmentionable truth — one etched in stone — is that when a state  
proclaims to have a religious mission, it inevitably privileges those  
who organise religious life and interpret religious text. It then  
becomes difficult — perhaps impossible — to challenge those who claim  
to fight for religious causes. After all, what’s wrong with the  
Taliban mission to bring the Sharia to Pakistan?

If there was one solid unchallengeable version of the faith, then at  
least there would be a clear answer to this question. But conflict  
becomes inevitable once different models and interpretations start  
competing. Whose version of the Sharia should prevail? Whose jihad is  
the correct one? Who shall decide? Lacking a central authority — such  
as a pope or caliph — every individual or group can claim to be in  
possession of the divine truth. The murder of Dr Naeemi by the  
Taliban comes from this elementary fact.

For now the Baitullahs, Fazlullahs, Mangal Baghs, and their ilk are  
on the run. Yet, they could still win some day. Even if killed,  
others would replace them. So, while currently necessary, military  
action alone can never be sufficient. Nor will peace come from merely  
building more roads, schools and hospitals or inventing a new justice  
system.

Ultimately it is the power of ideas that shall decide between victory  
and defeat. It is here that Pakistan is weakest and most vulnerable.  
A gaping philosophical and ideological void has left the door open to  
demagogues who exploit resource scarcity and bad governance. They use  
every failing of the state to create an insurrectionary mood and  
churn out suicide bombers. Only a few Islamic scholars, like Dr  
Naeemi, have ventured to challenge them.

The long-term defence of Pakistan therefore demands a determined  
ideological offensive and a decisive break with the past. Nations win  
wars only if there is a clear rallying slogan and a shared goal. For  
this, Pakistan must reinvent itself as a state that is seen to care  
for its people. Instead of seeking to fix the world’s problems —  
Kashmir, Afghanistan and Palestine included — it must work to first  
fix its own.

A nation’s best defence is a loyal citizenry. This can be created  
only by offering equal rights and opportunities to all regardless of  
province, language and, most importantly, religion and religious  
sect. Navigating the way to heaven must be solely an individual’s  
concern, not that of the state.

The author teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.


_____


[3] Pakistan - France:

SUBMARINE MONEY : ‘FRENCH NATIONALS KILLED IN KARACHI OVER KICKBACK’

Dawn, 19 June 2009

A Pakistani woman walks with her son Mohammad Rizwan, who had been  
acquitted by a court last month in a case of 2002 bombing in Karachi  
that killed 11 French engineers and was re-arrested by the  
authorities under a local law for maintaining public order. — AFP
PARIS: French magistrates investigating an attack in Karachi blamed  
on militants that killed 11 French nationals in 2002 are looking into  
allegations it was linked to corrupt deals, lawyers for the victims’  
families said.

A coach carrying French naval engineers and technicians was bombed as  
it left a hotel in Karachi in May 2002. The attack killed 14 people  
in all.

Pakistani authorities at first blamed militants and two men were  
sentenced to death for taking part in the attacks, but their  
convictions were overturned on appeal in 2003.

French magistrates Marc Trevidic and Yves Jannier told the victims’  
families they were now investigating allegations the attack was  
orchestrated by unnamed Pakistani officials angry with France over  
non-payment of bribes tied to a defence deal.

‘The investigating magistrates told us that they believed this  
scenario was extremely credible,’ one of the relatives’ lawyers,  
Olivier Morice, told reporters.

According to these allegations, some kickbacks ended up in the  
campaign funds of then French prime minister Edouard Balladur, a  
rival of Jacques Chirac in the 1995 presidential election, a judicial  
source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Sarkozy rejects suspicion
President Nicolas Sarkozy was Mr Balladur’s campaign manager in the  
ballot and was also budget minister when the lucrative sales contract  
for the French Agosta submarines was signed. He rejected on Friday  
the magistrates’ suspicions. ‘Listen, this is ridiculous,’ Mr Sarkozy  
told reporters at a news conference after an EU summit in Brussels.

‘This is grotesque ... We have to respect the grief of the families.  
Who would ever believe such a tale?’ he added.

Mr Balladur also denied any knowledge of wrongdoing. Asked about the  
allegation by French state television, Mr Balladur said: ‘As far as I  
am aware, everything was completely above board. I have nothing more  
to say. If anyone has any proof, let them speak up.’

Lawyer Morice said the investigating magistrates had obtained a top  
secret internal memo in October 2008 from the state-owned shipbuilder  
which contained the allegations.

The memo, copies of which were shown on French media on Friday, says  
French and Pakistani officials connived to take bribes as part of the  
sale of the submarines to Pakistan.

It says France stopped paying the bribes after the 1995 election, won  
by Mr Chirac, and that Pakistani officials kept asking for them for  
several years.

The allegation is that they eventually lost patience and organised in  
retaliation the attack on the bus full of French engineers, who were  
working on the Agosta submarine project.

Al Qaeda link?
Investigators had been looking into an Al Qaeda link to the attack.  
But lawyer Morice told AFP: ‘The Al Qaeda track has been totally  
abandoned. The motive for the attack appears linked to the non- 
payment of commissions.’

Magali Drouet, a daughter of one of the men killed, quoted magistrate  
Trevidic, as telling the families that this theory was ‘cruelly  
logical’.

She added that according to this scenario, the attack was carried out  
because the special payments were not made by France to a minister.

High-ranking politicians would likely be called in to testify, said  
Morice. Details of the payments emerged in 2008 as part of an  
investigation into French arms sales.

Police seized documents from the French firm, now known as DCNS,  
which discussed the companies used to pay fees in connection with  
arms sales.

One unsigned document spoke of Pakistan intelligence services using  
hardline militants. The document, which has been added to the case  
file, said those who employed the hardline group had financial aims.

‘It involved obtaining the payment of unpaid commissions’ linked to  
the sale of French submarines to Pakistan in 1994, it said.—Agencies

o o o

The News
21 June 2009

EDITORIAL : DIRTY DEALS?

The possibility that the 2002 killing of 11 French engineers, who  
died alongside three Pakistanis when a car packed with explosives was  
rammed into their minibus in Karachi, may have been carried out to  
avenge a failure by Paris to pay commissions to Pakistan on a deal  
involving submarine sales is shocking. The act of terrorism, close to  
a five-star hotel, had till now been blamed on extremist militants.  
An ATC court in 2003 had indeed found two men linked to a 'jihadi'  
group responsible, although they have since been acquitted by the  
Sindh High Court due to a lack of proof.

French investigators and the relatives of the victims seem confident  
about the dirty deals theory. They claim to have compiled some  
evidence that suggests that the attack was carried out to punish the  
French for stopping commission payments. These ended in 1995, after  
French President Jacques Chirac assumed office. The recipient of the  
payments on the Pakistan end of the line is stated to have been a  
certain Asif Ali Zardari, at the time a minister in his wife's second  
government. Rogue elements in the intelligence agencies are thought  
to have been involved in the attack, deliberately disguising it to  
look like the doing of militants.

The entire story in many ways seems ludicrous, especially as the  
killing took place seven years after the money stopped flowing in.  
That it happened at a time when Zardari had no place in power and the  
ruling setup was led by General Pervez Musharraf also raises  
questions as to its authenticity. But the fact is that most of us  
will, somewhere in our minds, harbour the suspicion that the French  
may have stumbled across the terrible truth. Corruption in defence  
deals is well-established. It takes place in many parts of the world.  
The Bofors scandal of the 1980s, allegedly involving massive  
kickbacks to Indian politicians who included former prime minister  
the late Rajiv Gandhi, shook that nation. Though Gandhi was cleared  
by a court, echoes from the case can still be heard. Accusations of  
massive corruption have been heard still more frequently in Pakistan,  
and the submarine affair acts as a reminder that the president of  
Pakistan, in a previous incarnation, was known as 'Mr Ten Percent'.

The French probe is of course still to be proven before courts. At  
the moment it consists of little more than allegations. But the  
spectres it raises are terrifying. If indeed agency elements have  
been engaged in mimicking extremists, new dilemmas open up about  
other murders and other attacks. These are an indication of the  
dangers we live with and the fact that through our country, many  
currents flow. A number of them are still unchartered. We must hope  
the latest case with its startling disclosures can shed light on some  
of these. At the same time, Pakistan must do all it can to  
demonstrate the French case is based only in the imagination of  
lawyers. The damage from it has already been done. It needs to be  
seen if some of it can be deflected and the name of those named in it  
cleared.

--
ALSO SEE :
(In the French Media)

SOUPÇONS PAR LAURENT JOFFRIN
http://www.liberation.fr/politiques/0101575134-soupcons

LA VENGEANCE CLANDESTINE DE LA DGSE
http://www.liberation.fr/societe/0101575137-la-vengeance-clandestine- 
de-la-dgse

_____


[4] Kashmir

Fire in the valley
by Shujaat Bukhari
http://www.flonnet.com/stories/20090703261301700.htm

What went wrong in Shopian?
by Balraj Puri
http://www.unnindia.com/english/story.php?Id=4764

_____


[5] India:

The Telegraph, June 21, 2009

  CULT OF MEDIOCRITY
- The CPI(M) has lost its moral and intellectual high ground
by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

And all these things were
wonderful and great;
But now I have grown nothing,
knowing all.

— W.B.Yeats

“For PCJ who lit up the lives of some of us’’ — so reads the  
dedication of a book published in the 1980s. The uninitiated will  
ask, “Who is PCJ?” Today, only a handful of people will know that the  
dedicatee is none other than P.C. Joshi, the legendary leader and one- 
time general secretary of the undivided Communist Party of India. The  
word, legendary, is used advisedly, even though the story of Indian  
communism does not quite lend itself to legends.

Joshi is today a forgotten figure even in communist circles. His  
birth centenary, two years ago, passed virtually unnoticed. The  
Communist Party of India (Marxist) in its party organ, People’s  
Democracy, published an article by Prakash Karat that recalled  
Joshi’s contribution to the making of the CPI. Joshi was the  
undisputed leader of the CPI during the only glorious period of the  
party’s history. Given his current forgotten status, it is necessary  
to provide here a few facts about Joshi’s life.

He came to communism in the early 1930s from the Meerut Conspiracy  
Case in which he was one of the accused. He became the party’s  
general secretary in 1936 and was disgraced and expelled from the  
party in 1949 when, under the leadership of B.T. Ranadive, the CPI  
declared that Independence was fake (yeh azadi jhoothi hai, was the  
slogan) and that India was ripe for an armed insurrection. In the  
1950s, after Ranadive’s removal, Joshi was reinstated in the party  
but he never regained his position and influence. The split in the  
communist party in 1964 broke his heart and he spent the later part  
of his life as a lonely figure within the CPI trying to document and  
write the history of communism in India.

What was so remarkable about the man and about the years in the CPI  
that have come to be associated with his name and his line?  
Photographs of Joshi or descriptions of him by those who knew him do  
not suggest that he was a man with a commanding personality. He was a  
shortish man who always wore baggy shorts; he had smiling and  
mischievous eyes. He had the rare gift of reaching out to people.  
Recalling his first meeting with Joshi, a comrade wrote , “I found  
[in Joshi] a person in whose hands I could place myself without  
reserve — a strange mixture of affection and dedication.’’ What was  
unique about Joshi was that he could be as comfortable sitting in an  
upper middle-class ambience — a communist professor’s flat in Elgin  
Road in Calcutta, for example — as he would be sitting on a charpoy  
chatting to a working-class comrade. Both the professor and the  
worker would also be at ease with Joshi. This outstanding quality  
enabled Joshi to spread his and the party’s influence among a large  
section of the people.

Joshi zealously pursued excellence. He wanted communists to be the  
best and the brightest in every sphere of life. Only then, he  
believed, would communists become the exemplars for the rest of  
society. Communists would be looked up to by others because of their  
excellence, their integrity and their behaviour. He told students who  
were drawn towards communism to be the best in their various  
subjects. He inspired some of the best teachers, artists, poets and  
writers to either join the party or to work closely with it. In  
Bengal, Sushobhan Sarkar, the famous teacher of history, Bishnu Dey,  
the poet, Sambhu Mitra, the actor-director, the maestro Ravi Shankar,  
the artist Chittaprosad, the photographer Sunil Janah, were some of  
the figures who were close to Joshi and worked with the CPI. Many  
brilliant students of Presidency College were inspired by him and  
were known inside the party as ‘Joshi’s boys’. He transformed the CPI  
from a marginalized organization to a mass-based and well-organized  
political party with enormous intellectual and cultural influence.  
One reason why Joshi was able to do this was because he was unwilling  
to compromise on sincerity and quality.

There was another reason for Joshi’s success: he was not sectarian  
and he was untouched by pettiness and rancour. He realized that for  
communism to strike roots in India it would have to appeal to all  
sections of society. Only then would communists become part of the  
national mainstream. Such a project had no scope for narrow- 
mindedness and sectarianism. His ability to rise above pettiness was  
exemplified by his attitude when he was expelled from the party. In  
1948-49, the period he was under attack from the party, many of his  
close friends — Sushobhan Sarkar for one — and young comrades whom  
Joshi had nurtured — like Arun Bose and Mohan Kumaramangalam —  
abandoned him to show their loyalty to the party. But Joshi never  
held this against them. In fact, Sarkar remained one of his closest  
friends. What is even more remarkable is that when Ranadive became  
the target of an inner-party struggle in the early 1950s, Joshi  
ensured that Ranadive wasn’t victimized in the manner Joshi had been.

To be sure, the breadth and generosity of Joshi’s vision and his  
ability to attract the best had been possible within a particular  
historical context. The late 1930s and the early 1940s, Joshi’s  
halcyon years, saw the Soviet Union and communists at the forefront  
in the battle against fascism. The Depression of 1929 and the rise of  
fascism had persuaded many in Europe that the future of the world and  
civilization lay in communism. It was said then that “communism  
represents our singing tomorrows”. Some of the best minds of Europe  
were drawn to communism, and this had its impact in India and the  
movement that Joshi pioneered.

Joshi’s efforts to attract the best sounds very distant today. The  
record of violence and oppression of all communist regimes across the  
globe has brought disgrace to the ideology of communism, which no  
longer attracts the best minds. But this is not the complete story so  
far as India, especially West Bengal, is concerned.

In 1964, when the CPI split and the CPI(M) was born, the latter, at  
least in West Bengal, got the giant share of the party’s resources  
save the intellectual ones. The intellectual cream remained with the  
CPI. The CPI(M) was born under the sign of mediocrity. Its leadership  
promoted anti-intellectualism and the cult of mediocrity. This, it  
was assumed, would bring the CPI(M) closer to the people. Promode  
Dasgupta, the redoubtable head of the party apparatus in West Bengal,  
was the driving force behind this kind of thinking. Under his  
successor, Anil Biswas, this tendency was aggravated. Biswas  
personally controlled educational institutions and intellectual  
organizations. This brand of nepotism alienated real talent. Many  
came under the flag of the CPI(M) lured by the loaves and fishes of  
office, but numbers did not make for quality. The moral and  
intellectual high ground that communists had once enjoyed in West  
Bengal gradually came to be eroded. Today, the CPI(M) stares at a  
moral and intellectual vacuum.

There is no need to uphold everything that Joshi did; like most  
communists of his time, he committed many errors. But in the context  
of its plight in West Bengal, the CPI(M) leadership could think of  
rediscovering Joshi and trying to understand what communists need to  
do to establish moral and intellectual hegemony over society. The  
transformation of society will never occur through the brutal use of  
State power and the deployment of terror through cadre. It demands a  
more sensitive handling by a leadership that is confident enough to  
be broadminded and open. Joshi failed because his comrades were  
unwilling to listen to him, save for a brief period. That period  
still has lessons to offer to those who are willing to learn. Will  
the CPI(M) learn?

_____


[6]  India: Questions about violence in Lagarh, West Bengal

Hindustan Times
	
WHO WILL POLICE THE STATE?

by Pratik Kanjilal

June 19, 2009
	
Many years ago, to illustrate the volume of counterfeit liquor in the  
Indian market, the chairman of the distillers J&B had told me that  
more Scotch is drunk in India than is bottled in all of Scotland.  
Today, watching the TV coverage of Lalgarh, I wonder if there are  
more Maoists in West Bengal than in all of India. The belief that  
this is a purely Maoist movement is a classic case of post hoc ergo  
propter hoc (‘after this, therefore because of this’), the logical  
fallacy behind most superstitious beliefs.

The Lalgarh saga was preceded by a Maoist landmine attack in November  
2008 on the convoy of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, but the  
unrest was actually triggered by the police excesses that followed.  
Incensed by their inability to protect their political masters, they  
arbitrarily attacked and arrested villagers. Tired of being ignored  
by the state, except for the brutal attentions of the police, and  
encouraged by Maoists who had been waiting for such an event, the  
local adivasis rose in revolt and paralysed the administration. What  
started as a people’s movement fitted in beautifully with the grand  
Maoist plan to create autonomous regions founded on tribal identity  
stretching across central India.

When you have a power vacuum, opportunistic political interests like  
Mamata-didi or Mao-dada will rush in and violence will follow. But we  
aren’t seeing classic Maoist violence. The Maoist’s natural prey is  
the police, but no one’s tried to murder policemen in the months  
since November. Is the target the state, which sponsored  
underdevelopment and police brutality? The party, which had a  
stranglehold here? The casualties were CPI(M) cadres, but the picture  
is unclear. After three decades of Marxist rule in West Bengal, the  
party, the state and its executive appendages, including the police,  
have fused into an ugly boil in urgent need of lancing.

Insurgencies, like the Maoist one, feed off governance failure,  
especially in tribal areas. Take a map of India, mark off  
underdeveloped areas and insurgency flashpoints and you will find an  
amazing degree of congruence. It gets worse when state or party  
attempts to retain control by using the police as its armed  
enforcers, instead of investing in development. Even peaceable people  
become receptive to the idea of armed resistance, allowing a handful  
of Maoists to seize control of vast territories.

Underdevelopment will persist for reasons of political chicanery and  
administrative inefficiency. But surely we can prevent the police  
from being used as the private army of the political establishment. A  
non-partisan police could have reduced the degree of violence seen in  
Ayodhya, Gujarat, Nandigram and Delhi in 1984 — tragedies scripted by  
three distinct political groups. Ever since the Emergency, a need has  
been felt to reform the police from a colonial occupation army into a  
modern public protection force. But reform was repeatedly stonewalled  
by political interests. In 2006, an exasperated Supreme Court ordered  
measures to free the police from political interference and make it  
accountable. Even this order was resisted by many states, including  
West Bengal.

After the Batla House ‘terrorist encounter’ in Delhi, Manmohan Singh  
had advised the police to ask themselves why they were mistrusted.  
Today, it would be useful for our chief ministers and home ministers  
to ask themselves the very same question.

Pratik Kanjilal is publisher of The Little Magazine.

o o o

The Statesman, 20 June 2009

LALGARH IS NOT A COMMUNIST MOVEMENT: KANU SANYAL

With heavily armed state forces marching fast to end Maoist dominance  
at Lalgarh, a major bloodshed could be in the offing in the tribal  
hinterland. In an exclusive interview with Bappaditya Paul, founder  
of the Naxalbari uprising, Kanu Sanyal, expresses his views on the  
Lalgarh turmoil

Excerpts:

Q Do you support the Lalgarh agitation spearheaded by the People's  
Committee?

A No, we don't. Because the Lalgarh agitation is strictly an ethnic  
insurrection by the Adivasi community and it is not inclusive of  
other communities living in there. It is easy to name an organisation  
as "People's Committee" but that does not necessary mean it  
represents all people cutting across the various communities.

Q Given that the Maoists are actively participating in the Lalgarh  
agitation, do you consider this a Communist struggle?

A I just told you that Lalgarh agitation is confined within the  
Adivasi community alone. How can an ethic uprising be termed a  
Communist struggle?

Lalgarh is certainly not a Communist uprising. The Maoists are only  
exploiting the situation by using the Adivasis as stooges to carry  
forward their agenda of individual terrorism.

Q Activists of the People's Committee are now taking to arms to  
resist the police and paramilitary foray into Lalgarh. Do you think  
they are doing the right thing?

A See, the Adivasis hardly have access to sophisticated arms.  
Whatever arms they might be equipped with now, have been supplied  
selectively by the Maoists. But the handful of arms and ammunitions  
can barely resist the march of the state forces. The resistance will  
be crushed in no time.

Q How do you weigh the Centre and the state's role on the Lalgarh  
turmoil?

A No one is wiling to take charge of the situation. Rather both the  
state and the Centre are trying to pass the buck on each other.
The CPI-M-led state government allowed the Lalgarh crisis to escalate  
by not addressing the genuine grievances of the Adivasis on time.
And now the Congress and Trinamul are on the look out to exploit the  
situation to dislodge the Left Front from power either immediately or  
in the 2011 Assembly election in the state.

Q What would be your suggestion to end the siege at Lalgarh?

A Both the People's Committee and the state government must instantly  
launch an unconditional dialogue. The People's Committee should place  
their demands in clear words and the state will have to address them  
earnestly.

Q Should they keep the Maoists out of the process?

A It's for the local people to decide.

Q Would you support a ban on the CPI (Maoist) in West Bengal?

A State suppression can never be the answer for tackling any sort of  
terrorism. You ban one outfit today and another would crop up  
tomorrow. Thus, the need is to alienate them by going close to the  
poor people and address their grievances fast.

o o o

STATEMENT ON THE POLITICAL VIOLENCE UNLEASHED AGAINST THE LEFT IN  
WEST BENGAL

Since the results of the Lok Sabha elections have been announced,  
West Bengal has been witnessing a spate of organized attacks against  
activists and supporters of the Left, particularly the CPI (M). In  
Khejuri (East Midnapore) and Lalgarh (West Midnapore), Left activists  
have been physically attacked and assassinated, Party offices burnt  
down and Left supporters forcibly driven out of the villages, by  
organized and armed gangs. Targeted assassinations of Left leaders  
have also taken place in the districts of Bardhaman, Birbhum, Purulia  
and Howrah. These forces appear to have interpreted the election  
results as a license to unleash terror against the Left activists  
working at the grassroots level. The open or tacit support accorded  
to Maoist sponsored violence by some political parties suggests a  
concerted attempt to create anarchy and dismiss the democratically  
elected State Government. It is disturbing to note that this attempt  
to destabilize the State Government is occurring at a time when lakhs  
of people devastated by Cyclone Aila are in desperate need of relief  
and rehabilitation, and exposes the insensitivity of these anti Left  
forces to the plight of poor people.

We, the undersigned, call upon the democratic minded people in West  
Bengal and across the country to condemn and expose these forces  
which, are threatening the very edifice of democratic politics in  
West Bengal. We also appeal to the State Government to take stern  
steps, both political and administrative, to protect the lives of  
citizens. We urge the Central Government to provide full and  
effective support to the State Government in tackling the situation.

Irfan Habib, AMU, Aligarh
Prabhat Patnaik, Kerala Planning Board, Trivandrum
Aijaz Ahmad, Literary Theorist, New Delhi
Utsa Patnaik, JNU, New Delhi
C P Chandrasekhar, JNU, New Delhi
Jayati Ghosh, JNU, New Delhi
D K Bose, ISI, Kolkata
Ratan Khasnabis, Calcutta University, Kolkata
Nripen Bandhopadhyay, WB Planning Board, Kolkata
Shamshad Hussain, Painter, New Delhi
Badri Raina, DU, New Delhi
Mohan Rao, JNU, New Delhi
Prabir Purkayastha, Delhi Science Forum, New Delhi
Rajendra Prasad, SAHMAT, New Delhi
V K Ramachandran, ISI, Kolkata
Githa Hariharan, Novelist, New Delhi
Madhura Swaminathan, ISI, Kolkata
Venkatesh Athreya, MSSRF, Chennai
Seema Mustafa, Centre for Policy Analysis, New Delhi
M K Raina, Theatre Artist, New Delhi
N K Sharma, Act One, New Delhi
Indira Chandrasekhar, Tulika Books, New Delhi
T Jayaraman, TISS, Mumbai
D Raghunandan, Delhi Science Forum, New Delhi
Vijay Prashad, Trinity College, Hartford, USA
Ayesha Kidwai, JNU, New Delhi
Vikas Rawal, JNU, New Delhi
Ananya Mukherjee Reed, York University, Canada
Sudhanva Deshpande, Jan Natya Manch, Delhi
Surajit Mazumdar, ISID, New Delhi
Mritiunjoy Mohanty, IIM, Kolkata
Atulan Guha, ISID, New Delhi
Parthapratim Pal, IIM, Kolkata
Satyaki Roy, ISID, New Delhi
Chirashree Das Gupta, ADRI, Patna
R Ramakumar, TISS, Mumbai
Shamik Chakraborty, IOAP, Berlin, Germany
Ginu Z. Oomen, ICWA, New Delhi
Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya, IIM, Kozhikode
Arindam Banerjee, CDS, Trivandrum
Srinivasan Ramani, EPW, Mumbai

Released by
Rohit, ex-President, JNUSU

_____


[7] India:

Asian Age
20 June 2009

THE MASTER AND THE MAID

Shobhaa’s Take

June.20 : The guy’s had it! That’s what we are saying today, when the  
scandal is red hot and journos are going nuts. The story so far is  
pretty simple: Good-looking actor attacks helpless maid when the wife  
is out. Maid cries "rape". Cops pick up the actor. Actor weeps and  
says it was consensual sex. Wife decides to "stand by her man",  
Hillary Clinton-style. Maid adds a death threat to the original  
charge. Shiney cools his heels in the lock-up. Hides his face. Weeps  
some more. Industrywallas distance themselves. Several skeletons  
start rattling in Bollywood cupboards. What happens next depends on  
two factors: 1) Shiney’s standing within his fraternity. 2) Maid’s  
ability to activate the activists. About the first, Shiney has  
everything going against him. He is not a star son. He has not  
aligned himself to any camp. He is not the hero of big-budget  
blockbusters and, therefore, does not have crores riding on him. And  
mainly, he is not liked by Bollywood. After this incident, he will be  
instantly and gleefully banished by those who hated his guts in the  
first place. About the maid, well… she is in a far better position  
vis-à-vis society at large. If Shiney has indeed raped her, she  
deserves all that can be done to make sure she gets justice. But she  
will have to be very cautious while dealing with all the overnight  
"do-gooders" who’ll rush to her side sensing an opportunity to make  
money. It boils down to just that — money and influence. Since Shiney  
does not possess too much of either, he can kiss the tatters of his  
career goodbye. Shiney is dead meat. A Bollywood pariah. The pity is  
that Shiney happens to be one of our better actors. It is being said  
he was being tapped for an important role in a Hollywood film. What  
terrible timing!

The perverse part of this morality tale is how Bollywood has chosen  
to keep mum. The reason is simple — by protecting Shiney, nobody  
makes money. By shunning him, nobody loses money. Matlab ki baat hai.  
If proved guilty, Shiney won’t be the first "rapist" in this dirty  
business, and he certainly won’t be the last. Bollywood is full of  
rogues and these ruthless men think nothing of exploiting needy  
women. There are stories galore of powerful, prominent heroes forcing  
themselves on alarmingly young back-up dancers (those nubile girls in  
skimpy costumes who are hired by the shift by producers) and  
threatening them later. It is part and parcel of "herogiri", and no  
eyebrows are raised. Some actors often see this as a perk of the job  
— something to kill time between shots. The whole unit is in the  
know, and I suspect so are the wives and girlfriends who prefer to  
look the other way.

If the charges are proved true, then Shiney would not be the only man  
in Bollywood to have forced himself on a hapless woman. Whether it is  
big-time producers, directors, cameramen, music composers… even sidey  
actors, women are fair game. This is hardly a secret. It is only when  
the woman goes public with the sorry episode that Bollywood makes a  
few token noises before silencing her. The men are let off after a  
fake show of concern for the girl. Most times she is the one who  
stands to lose everything. For starters, Bollywood men genuinely  
believe every woman is "game". The arrogance is astonishing. And  
sadly enough, many of these starlets play ball in the vain hope that  
they will get noticed… get roles. Of course, it doesn’t work like  
that… but who’s to tell them?

When forced sex across the class barrier becomes a full-blown  
scandal, that’s when the Big Boys of Bollywood close ranks and slink  
away. Had Shiney belonged to an influential lobby, aligned himself to  
a politician, or been the star of a string of commercially-successful  
films, one or two phone calls to the right people would have sorted  
out the current mess. But Shiney has always been a fringe player. His  
choice of films was unconventional, and he didn’t conform to  
Bollywood’s strange code of sycophancy requiring newbie actors to  
suck up to all those mighty producers and seniors. He was a loner,  
often described as "arrogant" and "difficult" because he "interfered"  
on the sets and didn’t socialise with the rest — nor flirt with the  
leading lady. What an oddball, said the others, suspicious of this  
great-looking outsider who refused to blend in. These  
"eccentricities" will be held against him as the case builds up. If  
it builds up.

Remember how rapidly the public lost interest in Madhur Bhandarkar  
when Preeti Jain accused the director of "repeatedly" raping her?  
Most people don’t know and don’t care what happened to Mamata  
Kulkarni’s sister (or even to Mamata, for that matter) after she  
accused Anupam Kher of trying to molest her. What about Jackie  
Shroff? Aditya Pancholi and Pooja Bedi’s underage maid? Rajesh  
Khanna? Several others in the same league who could have been sailing  
in the same boat as Shiney, but got bachaoed because they leveraged  
their positions? Shiney will be thrown to the wolves once the press  
loses interest in his case. In India, our attitude towards rape is  
shockingly callous. Many men do not consider rape a crime "as such".  
Meaning, they believe it is not all that serious in the first place.  
Had it not been a maid, but a Bollywood actress or a prominent  
socialite in her place, interest levels in the case would have  
outlived the summer. Shiney is not Salman Bhai, or Sanju Baba. Who  
gives a damn?

But as of now, my guess is that Shiney’s lawyer will only have to  
work on shooting down the maid’s story and branding her a liar. Rape  
is extremely hard to prove. The big mistake a rape victim generally  
makes is to first wash herself and change her clothes. It is a  
spontaneous reaction to the deep revulsion, sense of violation and  
defilement that the victim feels. She automatically rushes to  
"cleanse" herself, effectively washing away all evidence. This  
weakens the case still further. However, Shiney’s maid did not commit  
this mistake and the police claim to have sufficient material to nail  
the guy. In similar situations, Bollywood actors arrogantly rely on  
star-power to save their butts. With star-power comes political clout  
— Bollywood feeds off its Delhi connections and Delhi uses the same  
people to jolly the crowds during elections. It is a cosy  
relationship that works for both. But Shiney is not in that league.  
He is a relative nobody with zero connections. His wife may claim  
it’s a frame-up. But for what? Money? How much can Shiney cough up in  
the first place?

Experts are saying (incongruously enough) that men are at a  
disadvantage in our system, since courts show more sympathy towards  
the victim who may falsely implicate a known person. Shiney is a  
known person. He seems disturbed and in need of psychiatric help.  
Internationally, too, it is not uncommon to come across famous men  
with looks, money and power forcing themselves on young, vulnerable  
girls. It is a recognised disease… also known as the Boris Becker  
Syndrome. Shiney needs help. Psychiatric help. So does the maid.

— Readers can send feedback to www.shobhaade.blogspot.com


_____


[8]

BBC News, 19 June 2009

INDIA'S ROMEO AND JULIET TRAGEDY

by Sanjoy Majumder
BBC News, Phaphunda, India

It was a story buried in the middle of the Indian newspapers.
Two star-crossed lovers committed suicide after the local village  
council, or panchayat, ordered them to annul their marriage or face  
death.
Amreen was Muslim and her husband, Lokesh, a Hindu. Their match was  
simply unacceptable to their communities. The couple poisoned  
themselves.
Now police have charged the entire panchayat with abetting suicide.
[. . .]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8109805.stm

_____


[9] India: Religious Right and Obscurantism

Generation Next is born at a Bajrang Dal camp in Delhi
Tusha Mittal looks in at how the young are being inspired into violence.
Photographs by Shailendra Pandey
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main42.asp? 
filename=Ne270609national_defence.asp

Puri Temple Should be Prosecuted for Seeking Musk (an endangered  
species); Poachers to probably replace Nepal's King as supplier
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2009/06/puri-temple-should-be- 
prosecuted-for.html

_____


[10] MISCELLANEA:

Gay rights in China
Comrades-in-arms

June 18, 2009 | SHANGHAI
 From The Economist print edition

THE LONG MARCH OUT OF THE CLOSET

AS A boy of 15 in north-eastern China, Dylan Chen knew he was gay. “I  
grew up thinking I was the only gay person in all of China,” says Mr  
Chen, now 25 and living in Shanghai. Small wonder. Homosexuality had  
been decriminalised in China only two years before. It would be  
officially classified for several years more as a mental illness.  
Information and acceptance were both in very short supply.

Life for China’s tens of millions of homosexuals has improved  
markedly since then, especially in big cities. Gay and lesbian bars,  
clubs, support groups and websites abound. Chinese gays, who  
playfully call themselves “comrades”, have plenty of scope for  
networking. One surprising website caters specifically for gays in  
China’s army and police force.

But even in cosmopolitan Shanghai tolerance has its limits, as Mr  
Chen and others learned this month when they planned a series of  
plays, film screenings, panel discussions and parties called Shanghai  
Pride Week. The organisers, a group of local and expatriate gays, ran  
into last-minute trouble as city officials forced the cancellation or  
relocation of some events. Hannah Miller, an American who has lived  
in Shanghai for five years and was one of the main organisers, knew  
better than even to think of staging something as brazen as a parade.  
She hoped that limiting events to private venues and promotional  
materials to English would be enough to deter unwanted official  
attention.

In the end eight events went ahead, attended by some 4,000 people,  
and Ms Miller judged it all a big success. The Chinese press has  
begun cautiously to report the events, which Mr Chen sees as a big  
step forward, and a welcome departure from the usual stories about  
AIDS or the alienation of Chinese homosexuals.

But attitudes will not change easily, especially away from large  
cities. Traditional values emphasise conventional family life and the  
continuation of blood lines. The government, meanwhile, has shown a  
willingness quietly to tolerate homosexuality, but has failed to do  
much in the way of providing explicit protection. Tentative  
legislative proposals to expand gay rights have died swift unnoticed  
deaths. Always wary of rocking the boat, the government routinely  
quashes attempts at social-activism and rights promotion. Lawyers and  
activists advocating gay rights have been harassed, and, though many  
gay websites are accessible, some are blocked.

Very accessible are places like Eddy’s Bar on Shanghai’s west side. A  
rarity when it opened in 1995, it is now one of the city’s many gay  
hotspots. This week, apparently undented by the gay-pride kerfuffle,  
business was brisk.

o o o

The Guardian, 19 June 2009

Making the state protect women

The state's duty to protect the right to life has been applied in a  
domestic violence context for the first time in Turkey

by Rahila Gupta

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights made an important  
ruling against the government of Turkey (which is a signatory to the  
European convention on human rights) for failure to protect Nahide  
Opuz and her mother against Opuz's violent ex-husband. Although the  
legal principle of the state's duty to protect the "right to life" of  
its citizens has been with us for some time, it has never before been  
applied in a domestic violence context. Opuz's mother was killed by  
Huseyin Opuz who, on previous occasions, had stabbed Nahide and tried  
to run both the women over in a car.

The court judgment ruled that the Turkish state had failed the women  
under the ECHR and ordered it to pay €36,000 to Nahide. The judgment  
was also significant because it found the Turkish government to be in  
breach of article 14 of the ECHR – the prohibition of discrimination  
– because the violence suffered by the women was "gender-based", it  
amounted to a form of discrimination against women. A first.

While this case will provide an impetus to those in the UK and other  
parts of Europe poised to bring similar challenges, for Opuz herself  
it is a pyrrhic victory. Her own position is even more vulnerable  
than before. Her ex-husband was released by a Turkish court after six  
years of serving a life sentence, pending an appeal on the grounds  
that he had killed his mother-in-law because she had destroyed his  
family honour by encouraging her daughter to stray. Opuz is in  
hiding, terrified that her husband will find her and kill her. She  
was forced to leave her children with her father-in-law where her ex- 
husband also lives and believes that she has lost them for good.  
Press reports suggest that, despite the latest judgment, the  
government has not taken steps to protect her.

Those like Jane Nichol Bell who have argued, on Comment is free, in  
response to the Sabina Akhtar case, that it is "a ridiculous notion"  
to expect the state to protect the "right to life" of its citizens  
should take heed. Who else could someone like Opuz turn to for  
protection if not the police? Akhtar had told the police that she had  
been battered by her husband 25 times and that he had made threats to  
kill her before he eventually stabbed her to death. Refuge and Helena  
Kennedy are hoping to support the Akhtar family in actions against  
the police and the CPS. Bell argues that the police acted within the  
law. Whether the Akhtar case is strong enough to be a test case is a  
matter for legal opinion but surely the principle of getting the  
police to take domestic violence seriously is hugely important.

In the UK, we have seen case after case of police failing to protect  
women from violent family members despite repeated pleas for help.  
Women's groups have tried various ways of holding the police  
accountable. Southall Black Sisters have over the last 30 years made  
it a policy to document every police failing, to complain in writing  
and to ensure that the really serious cases get investigated. So far,  
the best result has been the rare apology, and even more rare, words  
of warning to the officers involved, as in the Banaz Mahmod case.  
Mahmod's body was found in a suitcase; she had been strangled by a  
bootlace, murdered on the orders of her father and uncle for falling  
in love with a man who belonged to a different Kurdish clan. Her  
sister, Bekhal, who is pursuing further action against the police  
with the support of Southall Black Sisters, is torn between the  
desire to improve the protection regime for others and fear for her  
life and retaliation from her family and community, like Opuz.

Lawyers Bhatt and Murphy, acting in the Mahmod case, are pressing for  
an inquest as this will provide an opportunity for public scrutiny of  
the exact circumstances of her death. Raju Bhatt believes that Opuz's  
case will be an "encouragement for those seeking to hold the state  
accountable". Let us hope that cases like these, pursued at  
considerable personal cost, bring about wider changes in police  
practice and reduce the number of preventable murders.

o o o

Postcolonial Text, Vol 4, No 3 (2008)

WHEN THE EAST IS A CAREER: THE QUESTION OF EXOTICISM IN INDIAN  
ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE
by Nivedita Majumdar
http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/858/636


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