SACW | Nov 9-11, 2009 / Nepal: rights, animal killings, refugees / Pakistani Warheads / India: Insurgency and State Response / Kashmir Mobile Phone Ban / "Muslims wear perfume, Maoists use Dettol" / End of Berlin Wall 20 years on
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Tue Nov 10 16:00:55 CST 2009
South Asia Citizens Wire | November 9-11, 2009 | Dispatch No. 2664 -
Year 12 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] Nepal: Still Waiting for Justice: No End to Impunity in Nepal
(Human Rights Watch)
+ "India is protecting Nepal Army": Brad Adams
+ Somali Refugees in Nepal: Stuck in Waiting Room (Deepak
Adhikari)
+ Killing field: We must stop the Gadhimai sacrifices
immediately (Editorial, Respublica)
[2] Trouble at the top in Sri Lanka? (Charles Haviland)
+ Sri Lanka: Landmines, unexploded ordnance a barrier to return
[3] Pakistan: Another activist falls (Daily Times, Editorial)
+ In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?
(Seymour M. Hersh)
[4] Pakistan - India: The Indian overture (M.B. Naqvi)
[5] India: Will the mindset from the past change? (Amit Bhaduri &
Romila Thapar)
[6] India: Maoism’s other side (Dilip Simeon)
[7] India: Losing Connection With Kashmir (Harinder Baweja)
[8] India: Resources For Secular Activists
(i) Muslims wear perfume, Maoists use Dettol! (Jawed Naqvi)
(ii) RSS shock and awe in BJP (Editorial, Deccan Herald)
[9] Miscellanea:
- 20 Years of Collapse (Slavoj Zizek)
- Solidarity under strain (Adam Michnik)
[10] Announcements:
(i) Interactive dialogue with Eve Ensler (Bombay, 12 November 2009)
(ii) Public Discussion: Insurgency And Counter-Insurgency: Challenges
of Building A Shared Prosperity (Bombay, 12 November 2009)
(iii) Public Discussion: "The World’s Most Militarized
Dispute" (Harvard, 12 November 2009)
(iv) Public Meeting: Say ‘NO’ to Government’s War on People (New
Delhi, 13 November 2009)
(v) Celebrating Children’s Day (New Delhi, 14 November 2009)
(vi) NYC premiere of The Salt Stories, a documentary by Lalit Vachani
(New York, 14 November 2009)
(vii) Honoring Hari Sharma at 75 (Surrey, 14-15 Nov)
(viii) Panel Discussion: The Forum for Policy Dialogue on Water
Conflicts in India (New Delhi, 16 November 2009)
_____
[1] Nepal:
STILL WAITING FOR JUSTICE: NO END TO IMPUNITY IN NEPAL
October 15, 2009
This 47-page report calls for the government to investigate and
prosecute those responsible for crimes committed during Nepal's armed
conflict. A lack of political will and consensus, prevailing
political instability, and a lack of progress in the peace process
has meant the government has not delivered on its promises to
prosecute these crimes, as set out in the 2006 peace agreement, Human
Rights Watch and Advocacy Forum said.
Read the Report
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/10/15/still-waiting-justice
o o o
INDIA IS PROTECTING NEPAL ARMY: BRAD ADAMS
http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?
action=news_details&news_id=10954
o o o
Time Magazine
SOMALI REFUGEES IN NEPAL: STUCK IN WAITING ROOM
by Deepak Adhikari / Kathmandu Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009
Mahad Abdullahi Hassan had never heard of Nepal before the day he
landed in it. When the 28-year-old Somali boarded a flight from Dubai
to Kathmandu on May 23, 2007, he was hoping he would finally reach
his dream destination: Sweden. He had, after all, shelled out $4,000
to a human trafficker who promised to smuggle him to the Scandinavian
country.
Instead, when Hassan got off the plane, he found himself in the
airport in Kathmandu, where a taxi took him and the trafficker, who
was traveling with him, to a bustling tourist neighborhood in the
Nepalese capital. "It was a strange place," says Hassan. "All the
buildings looked the same. Everything was new to me." When they
booked a hotel there, the trafficker assured Hassan that he was
arranging the necessary documents to complete their journey to
Sweden. But the next morning, when Hassan woke up in an empty room he
realized he'd been duped. "I realized I was completely at a loss,"
Hassan recalls. (See pictures of the pirates of Somalia.)
At a loss, perhaps, but not alone. Gradually, Hassan integrated
himself into the close-knit community of 84 Somali refugees living in
Nepal, the largest nationality of some 300 United Nations-recognized
'urban refugees' now living in Kathmandu. The Somalis began to arrive
to Nepal in early 2006. Most of them are from Mogadishu, and nearly
all of them are victims of trafficking. Many say they, like Hassan,
were promised passage to Europe; some claim that they were supposed
to go to Naples, Italy, but ended up in Nepal because of the similar
sounding names.
The remote Himalayan nation of Nepal, freshly emerged from its own
decade-long Maoist insurgency, may seem an unlikely destination for
refugees. But the effects of war in faraway lands have now trickled
into this impoverished country. In fact, according to the U.N.,
developing nations like Nepal now host 80% of the world's 15.2
million refugees, nearly 20% of whom are designated as 'urban
refugees' living outside refugee camps. Unlike refugees living in
established camps, who are provided with food, homes, medical
services, training and education, urban refugees live in cities they
have fled to, at once more integrated with their new homelands, and
more vulnerable to it. Though the UNHCR supports urban refugees
through assistance and education, some are still vulnerable to
detention or deportation. In Nepal, the police have raided the
apartments of Pakistani urban refugees on several occasions while
searching for illegal immigrants.
Nepal is no stranger to people seeking shelter in its borders. Nearly
87,000 Bhutanese are now living in UNHCR-run refugee camps in
southeastern Nepal, having fled the tiny kingdom of Bhutan after the
government's policy stripped them of Bhutanese citizenship, and more
than 10,000 Tibetan refugees have been living in Pokhara, a western
tourist town and on the outskirts of Kathmandu, since 1959 after the
Chinese occupation of Tibet led to the eviction of several Tibetans,
including their spiritual leader Dalai Lama. But apart from these two
groups, the government of Nepal — which is not a signatory to the
1951 U.N. convention on refugees which ensures legal protection,
other assistance and economic rights of the refugees — does not
recognize the other nationalities living in its borders as refugees.
According to Basanta Raj Bhattarai, deputy coordinator of National
Unit for Coordination of Refugee Affairs at Ministry of Home Affairs,
the government has requested UNHCR not to recognize any more cases of
urban refugees living in its borders. There are fears, he says, that
the country might turn into a safe haven for illegal immigrants. "We
don't want Nepal to be a hub for human trafficking," says Bhattarai.
The government recently imposed a ban on issuing on-arrival visas for
the residents of a dozen countries, including Somalia, Burma, Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Sudan.
Fleeing war, drought and hunger at home, Somali refugees are
scattered all over the world. The vast majority of them have escaped
to neighboring African countries. After surviving death threats,
kidnappings and the murders of their loved ones back home, the
relatively few Somalis in Nepal are just whiling away their time,
waiting for what Hassan calls a "durable solution" — repatriation to
Somalia, resettlement in another country, or local integration here
in Nepal. As in Hassan's case, they help each other out and also
celebrate festivals like Eid together. But they also complain angrily
about what they see as the indifference of the Nepalese government
and UNHCR toward their predicament. (Read "Somalia's Crisis: Not
Piracy, but Its People's Plight.")
For Sayeed Hassan Olow, 41, the patriarch of his family of nine, each
day begins with the household chores. Olow wakes up early at four in
the morning, prepares food for his kids, and sends them to the
school. By 8 a.m. he's already at the Lazimpat cafe, meeting his
countrymen, and he returns home only in the evening. Without the
legal right to work and a monthly allowance of $55 handed out by
UNHCR, keeping food on the table can be a challenge, and the sense of
isolation is strong. As Muslims living in a Hindu majority nation,
they have to travel several miles to reach the nearest mosque for
prayers. Kathmandu's syncretic Hindu-Buddhist culture is hard for
them to fathom. Some, like Zakaria Ahmed, a 20-year-old who lives in
a sleepy neighborhood of Kathmandu with his wife and 8-month-old
daughter, says he spends most nights at home watching TV because he
has nowhere to go. "Most of us don't have Nepali friends," says
Hassan, "All we do is say 'hi' when we meet them at the cafe." The
group is still treated as something of a novelty in Nepalese society:
On May 5, the Kathmandu Post published a front-page photo of a group
of Somalis acting as bodyguards in a local movie. Dressed in jeans
and black tank tops, they were toting toy guns to protect the lead
actress of the soon-to-be-released film.
The government's policy of designating Somalis like Olow, Ahmed and
Hassan as illegal immigrants places them in a precarious situation.
Every day they stay in the country, they accumulate a fee of $6 a
day. According to Bhattarai, only a handful of families in Nepal have
been accepted through the UNHCR for third-country resettlement, and
are slated they are ready to leave for Western countries. "The
resettlement countries should pay for their exit fines," says Bhattarai.
What's next for the rest of the Somalis trapped in this Himalayan
waiting room? Diane Goodman, acting representative of UNHCR in
Kathmandu, says despite its non-signatory status, Nepal is still has
obligations toward those who cross its borders seeking refuge on
humanitarian grounds. A year ago, the nation's Supreme Court ordered
the government to formulate new legislation to ensure, in keeping
with international laws, the rights for refugees, after a lawsuit was
filed by a local NGO on behalf of a Pakistani urban refugee. But the
government has yet to act on the ruling, citing lack of resources to
manage the refugees, and arguing that such legislation could provide
impetus for more refugees to come. Goodman and others watching the
situation are aware of the Somalis' desire to return home. But, she
says, "the situation in Somalia has regrettably deteriorated
significantly in 2009. We will not facilitate repatriation to a
country where the lives of a returning refugee and their family will
be in danger."
In the apartment Hassan shares with an Iraqi refugee and a fellow
Somali, he shows pictures of his wife, son and daughter in Mogadishu.
A calendar hangs on the wall as the sole decoration in an otherwise
spartan room with two beds and a lonely CD player. Had he made it to
Sweden, Hassan says he planned to bring his wife and children over to
meet him. Now, he thinks he made a mistake ever leaving. "Given a
choice," he says, "I would love to go back home."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/
0,8599,1936578,00.html#ixzz0WQJ0DRFY
o o o
Respublica
8 November 2009
Editorial
KILLING FIELD: WE MUST STOP THE GADHIMAI SACRIFICES IMMEDIATELY
Just a little over two weeks from now, Nepal will be in the
international spotlight but for a completely wrong reason: The
country will be hosting the Gadhimai festival in Bariyarpur, Bara
district, where approximately 500,000 animals – buffaloes, chicken,
goats, sheep, pigs, rats, rabbits – will be slaughtered as sacrifice
to the deity Gadhimai. Despite concerted protests from animal rights
activists, there are no signs that the festival, which takes place
every five years, will not be held this year. The festival falls on
Nov 24.
The Gadhimai festival primarily caters to Indians from across the
border. Mostly, people from the adjoining Indian state of Bihar come
to attend the festival and offer sacrifices. The barbaric fair
started being organized in Nepal following a ban on animal sacrifice
by most Indian states. It’s unfortunate and ironic that Nepal, which
is known across the world as a peaceful nation, is yet to come out
with strong legislations against animal sacrifice and cruelty.
Due to cross-border linkages, even animal rights campaigners from
India, including parliamentarian Maneka Gandhi, have joined hands to
apply pressure on the Nepal government to stop the sacrifices. They
have written to our prime minister and president, among others. Even
Ram Bahadur Bomzon, the “Buddha Boy” from Bara district, has urged to
stop the Gadhimai sacrifices. Despite all these calls, sadly, the
preparations to hold the festival are going on in full swing.
The festival is reminiscent of medieval brutality. During the fair,
about 250 men move around in drunken stupor hacking every animal in
sight to death soaking the land beneath in blood, turning the site
into a breeding ground of diseases. Following the 1995 Gadhimai
event, goats were detected of suffering from PPR disease (commonly
known as goat flu), which still haunts the country. On top of that,
perhaps what is being ignored are the psychological consequences of
such mass killings, especially on children, who take part in the fair.
If Nepal does not want to draw international flak and condemnation,
it must act fast. In the name of appeasing gods, we cannot continue
such inhumane and cruel practices. It does not befit a civilized
society.
_____
[2] TROUBLE AT THE TOP IN SRI LANKA? by Charles Haviland
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8352676.stm
SRI LANKA: LANDMINES, UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE A BARRIER TO RETURN
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86944
_____
[3] Pakistan:
Daily Times, November 10, 2009
EDITORIAL : ANOTHER ACTIVIST FALLS
Nisar Hussain Baloch, chairman of the Karachi NGOs’ Alliance and
president of the Gutter Baghicha Bachao Tehreek (GBBT), was shot dead
by unidentified persons near Old Golimar Bridge on Saturday. The
killers made good their escape. A case has been registered against
unidentified assassins at Soldier Bazaar police station.
After Baloch’s death, most of Old Golimar, Bada Board area and Pak
Colony, predominantly Sindhi and Baloch lower class neighbourhoods,
were shut down in protest. The police had to be called to control the
public outrage against the murder of a concerned citizen, known for
his long-standing campaign against the land grabbing mafia and the
indiscriminate conversion of parks, playgrounds, beach promenades,
sewage treatment plants, government building plots and even plots in
the sea into commercial projects by the authorities.
The City District Government Karachi is accused of having changed the
status of at least 26 parks and playgrounds in middle, lower-middle
and working-class neighbourhoods of the city. While a large tract of
land by the sea has been turned into a sprawling recreation point,
Bagh-i-Ibn-i-Qasim, in the heart of a posh locality, the right of the
lesser mortals in the metropolis to public spaces and amenity plots
is being flagrantly flouted. Several petitions are pending at various
levels of the courts against illegal conversion, grabbing and
disposal of land as well as amenity plots all over Karachi.
The latest victim of organized criminal gangs, Nisar Baloch embarked
upon his social service career in the mid-1970s when he opened a
street school in Old Lyari to provide free education to children.
While his passion for education remained unabated, his interests
diversified into the fields of environmental conservation and town
planning. For some time now, he was leading a campaign against
illegal encroachments on the 480-acre real estate of Trans-Lyari Park
(Gutter Baghicha) in Site Town. Reportedly, about 20 percent part of
this park has already fallen prey to the greed of those whose
penchant for profiteering, patronage, pillage and intimidation knows
no bounds. Nisar Baloch understandably became a thorn in the side of
the land grabbing mafia, reportedly backed by influential ethnic and
political parties of the city. Ironically, he had addressed a press
conference only a day before he was murdered where he highlighted the
issue in detail and pinpointed (perhaps fatally) the forces lending
administrative and political support to the illegal occupation of the
land of Gutter Baghicha. Importantly, Nisar Baloch had criticized
both the MQM and PPP in equal measure, the former for complicity in
coercion and the latter for its expedient tardiness. The Sindh Chief
Minister had slapped a ban on the disposal and leasing of plots by
the city government in July 2009. The ban was challenged by Nazim
Mustafa Kamal but this public interest matter was settled out of
court as if it was a compoundable dispute between two private
parties. Needless to say, this is neither the way to manage a 15
million strong metropolis nor does it dovetail with the stated claims
of the concerned political parties. *
o o o
New Yorker
Annals of National Security: Defending the Arsenal
IN AN UNSTABLE PAKISTAN, CAN NUCLEAR WARHEADS BE KEPT SAFE?
by Seymour M. Hersh November 16, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/11/16/091116fa_fact_hersh
_____
[4] India - Pakistan:
The Daily Star, November 10, 2009
THE INDIAN OVERTURE
by M.B. Naqvi
INDIAN Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave a brief speech on the
Indian-controlled Kashmir's soil. This builds on what Indian Home
Minister P. Chidambram had earlier disclosed regarding back-channel
diplomacy. Manmohan Singh's overture is more authoritative and
direct. It deals with Pakistan-India relations in general as well the
disputes in particular.
It is true that the earlier formal Indian condition that Pakistan
should give up supporting non-state actors against India stays. This
can be a formulation that will make the idea acceptable to the Indian
Right. There are Pakistan's persistent demands and entreaties that
the dialogue between the two countries should restart and that
Pakistan is itself the victim of terrorism. It can scarcely favour
terrorism. Hardly a day goes by without any terrorist attack in some
place or other in Pakistan.
The Indian prime minister was specific about the developments he
desired in Kashmir and wanted the known benefits of more trade. He
used the word "trade" in a very comprehensive sense. He obviously
included in it economic cooperation and perhaps more.
As for the Kashmir issue, he wanted the CBMs that are already in
place to be expanded and made more effective. For instance, he says
there is trade across the LoC but it is pitifully small. People do
cross the LoC but only few are able to obtain the necessary papers
from the two governments. And so on.
This was a specific reference to what needs to be expanded. There
were other references to Kashmir's CBMs already in place. The idea he
was floating was to expand them all. This takes what Chidambram had
said a few days ago much further.
As for the general question of trade, he said it should increase east
and west of Pakistan, meaning that India-Pakistan trade should expand
and also that Pakistan should permit the transit of Indian goods
through Pakistan territory. India has long wanted transit facilities
through Pakistan. Given the Indo-Pakistan relationship hitherto, it
was far too much to expect. The relationship has to be much better
than what it has been before Pakistan will agree to that.
This is a sensitive question in Pakistan. The central bureaucracy is
not for it, though originally it was thought that most of the
opposition to increased links with India came from the old Muslim
League school of thought in Punjab. It is to be found more in Punjab
than elsewhere in Pakistan. As a result of recent changes, especially
recent developments in Punjab itself, opinion has veered toward
letting Indian goods transit through Pakistan territory. Its benefits
were to be realised. But there is some considerable way to go before
the Pakistan government will permit that.
There is no doubt that Indians are keen on it. And unless Pakistan
permits this trade, India will not be forthcoming in other matters
between the two countries. There is no doubt about the fact that the
Indian economy is expanding at a fairly rapid rate. Whether or not
India becomes a superpower, it will certainly become one of the great
powers. But it cannot attain that potential, which is inherent in the
Indian economy, without cooperation from Pakistan, particularly in
the matter of transit.
Actually, India-Pakistan friendship is what is required and
friendship is a two-way street. Both sides have to give something to
take something from each other.
In terms of potential, there are international schemes of connecting
Europe with the Far East, both in the southern and the northern
regions, by rail and road. The southern link-up is to pass through
India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Railways have to be laid.
Pakistan's rulers are said to be afraid of international spies
getting into the country. But there are few countries that can
prevent foreign spies from plying their trade. Every country has to
be strong enough to take all that in its stride. It happens
everywhere. Pakistan is not, or should not be, so weak as to be
destabilised by a few foreign spies working inside it. Against this
disadvantage, there are bewitching advantages of growing trade.
Pakistan's own development will get a fillip, and international trade
through Pakistan will earn some rent for it.
Once such international trade by rail and road gets going, Nepal,
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka too will be benefited. Bangladesh and Nepal
both have differences with India over trade; India wants transit
route to its North-East through Bangladesh, which remains closed.
Nepal also wants new transit rights through India for its foreign
trade. A region-wide modus operandi is indicated, and would be
beneficial to all the states of Saarc. Maybe Saarc is waiting for
this particular stimulus for its growth and success.
But, for some such thing, India-Pakistan relations cannot remain what
they are if these international schemes are to fructify. Commonsense
and dogged enmity are mutually exclusive. India and Pakistan have to
reconcile, at least enough to permit economic cooperation and direct
trade between them, and letting all international trade through
Pakistan territory would go a long way in providing economic
incentives for rapid development in the country. The question is how
can relations between India and Pakistan be improved?
So far it has been a circular argument: since relations are bad,
economic cooperation cannot grow, and since there is not much of
trade and economic cooperation, relations between them are bad. Both
parts of the argument need to be changed.
Manmohan Singh talked about banking facilities and other matters. His
view seems to include far greater Indo-Pakistan cooperation than has
so far been discussed. The issue boils down to what makes Indo-
Pakistan relations so rigid and bad. What has happened recently to
ride out on that situation? The enormity of the trust deficits the
two must overcome is staggering because of having been inhibited by
the difficulties for so long. While it is true that where there is
will there is a way, here the question is of creating the will.
One way of looking at things is to concentrate on how the benefits
that will accrue will outweigh the disadvantages. In the Indo-
Pakistan disputes one thing that is lacking is the political will to
become friends. Both sides lack it or lack enough of it. But the
benefits of rapprochement between the two are so great that it is a
pity that things should remain as they have been, especially when
they are not in a position to take their "enmity" too far due to the
implications of nuclear deterrents, difficulties in Kashmir and
emerging water dispute.
While smaller territorial disputes can be resolved easily, the main
ones now are the opposing nuclear weapons sitting cheek by jowl and
the big and growing questions about the absolute water shortage that
is going to hit both countries due to climate change. They have to be
ready to sort these out. Both have to go a fairly long way before
this can happen.
M.B. Naqvi is a leading Pakistani columnist.
_____
[5] India:
The Hindu, 9 November 2009
WILL THE MINDSET FROM THE PAST CHANGE?
by Amit Bhaduri & Romila Thapar
Those that have governed in tribal areas must share the
responsibility for the negligence of the adivasis. The proposals for
a multi-lateral dialogue should be set in that context.
There has been a flurry of concern as also vituperation over the
activities of the Maoists in the forests that are mostly home to
tribal society. There is a confrontation between the state and this
society through the intervention of the Maoists. One pauses while
reading the speeches of those in authority and thinks back to the
past. The texts of the past represent the people of the forest, the
forest-dwellers, largely as “the Other” – the rakshasas, and those
who moved like an ink-black cloud through the forest with their
bloodshot eyes, who ate and drank all the wrong things, had the wrong
rules of sexuality and, as strange creatures, were far removed from
‘us.’
Kautilya in the Arthashastra condemns them as troublemakers and
Ashoka threatens the atavikas, the forest-dwellers, without telling
us why. The interest of various kingdoms in extending control over
forests has an obvious explanation. The forests supplied elephants
for the army, mineral wealth including iron, timber for building, and
by clearing forests the acreage of cultivable land increased and the
consequent agriculture brought in revenue. In later times, even when
there were situations of dependence on forest people, the
conventional attitude towards them was that they were outside the
social pale and had to be kept at a distance.
So is this pattern essentially different from the present?
Naxal activity started in the 1960s and gained some support in the
rural and later urban areas of West Bengal and subsequently Bihar and
Andhra. It raised the ire of the state but did it make the state more
sensitive to problems of the adivasis? It was treated as a law and
order problem and put down although sporadic incidents kept occurring
to remind ‘us’ that ‘their’ problems have remained. So this activity
is not new but there is an increase in anger and with attacks from
both sides. This makes it far more palpable even in our big cities,
as yet far away from the ‘jungle areas.’
The government’s anxiety over Maoist activity has at this point
increased and needs explanation. Violence on both sides has been
stepped up. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) was banned. Now the
Maoists are being threatened with Operation Green Hunt but at the
same time are also being invited to cease their violence and
negotiate. The Maoists have slowly cut a swathe through the sub-
continent and the fear is that this may expand. Would this be
sufficient reason for a “hunt” or could there be other factors
changing the equations from 40 years ago?
The current violence on both sides is fierce enough but what happens
if the state launches a semi-military offensive trying to snuff out
the Maoists and the Maoists retaliate, as they are likely to? It
would displace and kill many hundreds of our people, villagers and
tribals living in areas of Maoist activity, including those who are
not sympathetic to the Maoist ideology or objective. Any “hunt” would
have to be on an enormous scale since groups claiming to be Maoists
are now widespread in over 200 districts in the country in contiguous
areas. Has this kind of hunt helped solve our problems elsewhere?
Manipur, Assam, and Kashmir continue to remain areas of on-going
civil strife.
Perhaps we should look at it less as an ‘us’ and ‘them’ situation and
more as an ‘us’ and ‘us’ situation. At the end of the day, we are all
involved as people who live in this country and what is more, as
people who have to go on living in this country. Even those whose
lives have not been remotely touched by what goes on in ‘tribal
societies’ will find themselves ill at ease with expanding civil strife.
If we see it as an ‘us’ and ‘us’ situation, then the need for a
dialogue with all the groups involved becomes the most immediate
concern. The question is who should be talking to whom and about
what. If the state has to start the dialogue — as the strongest party
in the conversation — it should be conversing with several groups:
1. Those living in the rural areas and the forested areas affected by
the current civil strife, frequently referred to as ‘the people.’
This should be the primary and most important dialogue. It is not
about who is right and who is wrong but about what is it that is
leading to people becoming embroiled in revolts. People do not
support insurgent groups or get imposed upon by such groups unless
there is a reason. The adivasis live in areas where the benefits of
development hardly ever reach them. Education, health care,
communication, access to justice are mentioned sotto voce, since in
most places they don’t exist. Our Prime Minister and Home Minister
have had long tenures in earlier governments as finance ministers and
have been well aware of patterns of development. Did they and their
colleagues not recognise the injustice of unequal “development” and
the anger it could produce? The same applies to the State governments
of these areas who have not exactly distinguished themselves in
addressing the problems of the adivasis. The situation now demands
attention because it has turned violent.
2. Then there is the state. What has the state done in these areas to
annul the terror of poverty over the last 60 years? Perhaps terrorism
and its victims should be redefined to include many more varieties of
terror than the ones we constantly speak of. The spectacular increase
of wealth despite the recession has still done little to make poverty
less immanent in much of the country. As the arbiter of Indian
citizens, it might explain what it would propose to change in order
to remove the injustices that encourage poverty. For example, what
should be the terms and conditions that should prevail in a transfer
of land between adivasis and others?
3. Many areas under Maoist control are those that the corporate world
would like to “develop.” These have rich mineral resources — once
again, almost as in earlier times, the attraction is timber, and
water, and also mineral wealth such as coal, iron, bauxite. There is
of course a history to such “development” since colonial times:
except that it has now been intensified given the increase in the
number of corporates and more importantly, their hold on the state.
Are the corporates the new factor, as some would argue? The state
acquiring land to hand over to private corporations is not identical
with the appropriating of the land and resources of the forest-
dwellers in earlier times, but there are some echoes. Both the
appropriators and the appropriated have to have their say in any
dialogue with due respect to PESA (Panchayat Extension to Scheduled
Areas Act, 1996), which recognises the right of the adivasis to
decide on the use of their land. For any successful dialogue, the
state has to be neutral without biases in favour of corporations in
its notion of “development” in these areas.
4. The Naxals/Maoists. Are they a unified party with a common
programme? And is their programme tied to development for the people
only through a revolution accompanied by bloodied violence? Do they
reflect immediate demands related to the daily life of the people
that sustains them or an ambiguous promised utopia that may never
come? Discussions between the state, the Maoists, and the people on
the implementation of development are far too compelling to be ignored.
If there is such a dialogue, what should the corporates be concerned
with? Clearly land is the key issue and most of it is in forested
areas. Is all and any land up for grabs? Surely there should be some
categories of land that should be left alone if we are to survive on
this planet. Is the demand for large tracts of land in these areas
not a subversion of the much-vaunted Forest and Tribal Act of 2006,
which promised 2.5 hectares to every tribal family that had rights to
the land? And what does the forest dweller get in return for selling
his land? He cannot use the money to secure his future income since
there are no such facilities available to him. He is left with money
with which to buy hooch — the pattern that was followed all over the
colonial world in North America, Australia, and Africa. Are we now
internalising a colonial history to repeat it on our own citizens?
And where lands have already been sold to corporations, one does not
hear of the corporate organisations first setting in motion the
essentials of development in education, health care, communication,
and access to justice among the displaced or resettled communities,
before they actually start working for profit on the land they
acquire. Should this not be considered as part of the sale deeds,
particularly as the state is the broker? Corporates are good at
drawing up contracts so there should be contracts with the people,
vetted by lawyers representing the people where agreements can be
examined and negotiated, and those that have been pushed around can
still make demands with the possibility that they might be heard.
Such actions may be more effective, certainly in the long run but
even in the short run, than an Operation Green Hunt. Violence is a
dead end even for the Maoists. When practised by the state on its own
citizens, its collateral damage is unacceptable in a democracy;
lasting civil strife escalating into a civil war in these areas will
create its own demons of the arbitrary repression of ordinary
citizens. An alternative form of intervention ushered in through a
multi-lateral dialogue involving all the concerned parties is not
merely an option, it is imperative.
(Amit Bhaduri is an economist and Professor Emeritus at the
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila Thapar is a historian
and Professor Emeritus at JNU.)
_____
[6] India:
Hindustan Times, November 09, 2009
MAOISM’S OTHER SIDE
by Dilip Simeon
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic.
— Albert Camus
Spokesmen of Maoist extremism have recently expressed regret for
beheading a police officer and explained their actions as a defence
of the oppressed. Their comrades’ brutality, they say, is an
aberration. They cite instances of state violence to justify actions
they claim are undertaken in self-defence. There is more to this than
meets the eye. Maoist theory holds that India is a semi-colonial
polity with a bogus constitution that must be overthrown by armed
force. The comrades view all their actions as part of a revolutionary
war. Their foundational documents declare armed struggle to be “the
highest and main form of struggle” and the “people’s army” its main
organisation. In war, morality is suspended and limits cast aside.
War also results in something the Pentagon calls “collateral damage”.
Is it true that Naxalite brutality is only an aberration?
On August 15, 2004, the Maoists killed nine persons in Andhra
Pradesh, including a legislator, a driver and a municipal worker. On
August 14, 2005, Saleema, 52, a cook in a mid-day kitchen in
Karimnagar was beaten to death by Maoists for being a “police
informer.” This was the second woman killed by them in a fortnight. A
former Naxalite, Bhukya Padma, 18, was hacked to death in Marimadla
village on July 30. On September 12, 2005, they slit the throats of
17 villagers in Belwadari village in Giridih. Landmine blasts in
February 2006 killed 26 tribals and injured 50 in Dantewada,
Chhattisgarh. The victims were returning from religious festivals,
and some from anti-Naxalite rallies. Another blast on March 25 killed
13 persons.
Some of these killings may be incorrectly reported, some carried out
by local cadre on their own. But the comrades clearly believe in
political assassination. Moreover, the decisions to kill are taken in
a shadowy realm wherein the fault of the victim is decided by whim.
Truth and falsehood are dispensed with because the Party Is Always
Right. Their targets have no chance of appealing for mercy, and no
one will be punished for collateral damage. And all this is justified
because the Maoists are at war — a circular argument, because whether
or not we are at war is another whim.
But there is an elephant in India’s drawing room. Maoists openly defy
the Constitution, which they say is a mask for a brutal order. Are
not our mainstream parties equally contemptuous of the law? Why did
the NDA regime try and do away with Schedule 5 of the Constitution
that protects tribal lands from encroachment? Why is it still being
violated? Is there not prima-facie evidence of politicians’
involvement in massacres in Delhi and Gujarat in 1984 and 2002? Why
haven’t they been brought to justice? In 1987, 40 Muslims of Meerut
were killed in custody. Why did the case take 18 years to come to
court? The BJP and the Congress both supported the private army named
Salwa Judum with disastrous consequences for Chhattisgarh’s
population. Even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court criticised
the States’ recklessness. In 2007 the West Bengal government
despatched an illegal armed force to crush its opponents in
Nandigram. India’s rulers regularly protect criminals, and part of
the public is complicit in this. Policemen in dereliction of duty get
promoted. Mass murderers are hailed as heroes. Why are we addicted to
double-standard?
Those who believe in virtuous murder are today calling upon the
democratic conscience. Does democracy include the right to kill? Our
left-extremists have changed the world for the worse. Along with
right-wing radicals, they ground their arguments on passionate
rhetoric and a claim to superior knowledge. Fighters for justice have
become judge and executioner rolled into one — in a word, pure
tyrants. Every killing launches yet another cycle of trauma and
revenge. Will Francis Induvar’s son ever dream of becoming a
socialist? Should not socialists hold themselves to a higher standard
than the system they oppose?
Symbolism counts for a lot in Indian politics. If the Maoist party is
interested in negotiations, I suggest a demand that will expose the
hypocritical nature of our polity: ask the government to remove the
portrait of
VD Savarkar from the Central Hall of Parliament, placed there in
2003. If it cannot do that, ask it to place Charu Mazumdar’s portrait
alongside. Why not? Both were extreme patriots. Both believed in
political assassination, both hated Gandhi and both insisted that the
end justifies the means.
My suggestion will meet with indignation. But the deep link between
these two currents of extremism is the unutterable truth of Indian
history. Hindutva is the Maoism of the elite. In 1969, an ultra-
leftist Hindi writer penned a diatribe titled Gandhi Benakaab that
praised Godse as a true son of India. In 42 years of activity,
Naxalites hardly ever confronted the communalists; although to be
fair, one ultra-left group in Punjab did combat the Khalistanis. The
assassination of a VHP Swami in Kandhamal in August 2008 is the only
example. The Maoists owned the crime, but the Sangh parivar vented
its wrath upon Christian villagers. Thousands were displaced and over
30 were killed. The comrades were unwilling or unable to prevent the
carnage.
Savarkar’s acolyte Nathuram Godse murdered Mahatma Gandhi. In 1969,
the Justice Kapur Commission concluded that the conspiracy was
hatched by Savarkar and his group. Sardar Patel said as much to Nehru
in February 1948. If Savarkar deserves to be honoured by the Nation,
so does Charu. Since the government is unlikely to accept either
option, we may finally come to a debate about why one kind of
political murder is anti-national, while the other is patriotic virtue.
Dilip Simeon is a Delhi-based historian
_____
[7] India Administered Kashmir:
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 45, Dated November 14, 2009
LOSING CONNECTION WITH KASHMIR
Would a blanket ban on prepaid mobile phones in any other state of
India be acceptable?
by Harinder Baweja
FIRST THINGS first – the powerful government of India and its
agencies do not sewem to consider Kashmiris as their own citizens.
Too strong a statement, some would say, but here are some choice
examples of insensitivity: a Kashmiri model incarcerated for months
before being let off for lack of evidence, the Services team refusing
to go to Srinagar to play a match and now, 39 lakh innocent Kashmiris
— Indians, we keep repeating — without mobile connectivity, only
because Home Minister P Chidambaram has decided that pre-paid SIM
cards are a security risk.
This is not the first time communications in the Valley have been
curtailed. For some years now, phone lines between Kashmir and
Pakistan have been jammed and families divided by the Line of Control
for no fault of theirs have no means of talking with each other.
Every now and then, when troops are being moved in and out of the
Valley, Internet connectivity is frozen. But this summary ban of pre-
paid connections has literally left Kashmiris speechless. Consider
the timing too — the ban was imposed immediately after Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi returned from the
state where the Prime Minister offered a dialogue for peace. That
they also inaugurated a railway line between Qazigund and Anantnag
for better connectivity is irony that has not escaped the Kashmiris
and Kashmiri youth, the constituency that the Prime Minister tried to
reach out to.
Sensitivity and compassion apart, the Home Ministry’s order lacks
common logic – supposedly, the standards of proof of identity
required for pre-paid connections are not stringent enough. How come
all the babus in North Block could come up with no plan to strengthen
these standards short of a blanket ban? And if post-paid numbers can
be monitored, why does the same principle not apply across the board?
The problem is that we are either a wimp state or a plain paranoid
one Either way, it shows us up as an unthinking lot. Some years ago,
when the bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad was still on
the table, the Home and External Affairs ministries were concerned
that terrorists would be its main passengers. Perhaps Ajmal Kasab and
his nine accomplices could have saved themselves the trouble of going
through marine training – if they had bothered merely to purchase a
bus timetable.
The SIM cards used in the 26/11 attacks were procured not from
Srinagar, but from Delhi and Kolkata
If Manmohan Singh’s recent trip to the Valley was aimed at addressing
the deep-seated alienation that every Kashmiri feels, his advisors
should be letting him know that the Home Ministry’s move has touched
a raw nerve. If mobile connectivity is important to each one of us —
no matter which part of the country we live in — it is of that much
more importance in Kashmir. In all the years of the insurgency, when
cellular phone towers had not scaled the Valley, men would not leave
home without tucking a scrap of paper with their address on it into
their pockets. Unsure of returning home safely, they carried those
pieces of paper with them so that if they were killed, at least their
bodies could reach home. In today’s smothering atmosphere of
insecurity that still surrounds Kashmiri families, the mobile phone
has replaced that piece of paper. But this is not something that will
strike the bureaucrats occupying the corridors or power. For them –
Kashmir remains a piece of prime real estate; the crown on India’s
head; an unalienable part that has to be kept at any cost.
Surely Chidambaram knows that the 10 terrorists of 26/11 carried
Indian SIM cards that they activated as soon as they reached Mumbai.
Those cards had not been procured from Srinagar but from Delhi and
Kolkata. Does the solution lie in banning mobile connectivity for 39
lakh people or in improving intelligence? The answer is a no brainer.
_____
[8] India: Resources For Secular Activists
(i) Dawn, 9 November 2009
MUSLIMS WEAR PERFUME, MAOISTS USE DETTOL!
by Jawed Naqvi
Mr P. Chidambaram’s state is programmed to see organic signs of
conformism and dissent. –Photo by Reuters
Let me share with you Prashant Rangnekar’s report in the Sunday
Express (8th Nov) headlined: Goa bombers tried to leave Muslim
imprint [ http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Goa-bombers-tried-to-
leave-Muslim-imprint/538736 ]. Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram
too should read Rangnekar’s dispatch from Mumbai. After all, as a
senior leader of the majority community, the home minister last week
reiterated a solemn pledge to Wahhabi clerics of the Deoband seminary
that Hindus will and should always protect the minorities.
He obviously doesn’t subscribe to the more tenable view that the only
real minority in India is the ruling elite and they need nobody’s
protection, much less sympathy. The rest of us are commoners –
Dalits, tribals, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, Jews,
Jains, Buddhists, non-believers, pagans, everyone. If these people
need anyone’s protection it is that of the state, not any community.
That the clerics showed scant interest in Chidambaram’s promise of
security is of a piece with their experience of vacuous resolves made
to them since decades with an eye on their votes. The dismissiveness
shown to the senior minister also subsumes Deoband’s own obscurantist
agenda. The ageing clerics went into paroxysms, on their part, about
how the singing of Vande Matram was not acceptable to Muslims.
Of course Vande Matram is not an ideal song for a secular republic.
It would be, had the Indian constitution made provisions for God in
the preamble. But it didn’t. But scores of Muslim, Sikh, Christian
and agnostic singers have sung praises of Hindu deities in classical
and popular music. I even know of Pakistani men who carry ‘sindur’
and ‘mangalsutra’ from Delhi, insignia of married Hindu women, to
adorn their Muslim spouses with. These are cultural gives and takes.
If we make them a test of patriotism the patrons of a fine culture
would turn away.
So while Chidambaram and his sparring partners from Deoband were
locked in a fruitless and diversionary discourse about physical
security and an obscurantist song, the real-life Muslim citizens,
like the Dalits, like the tribals, like the majority of impoverished
and abused Indians were engaged in assiduously disabusing the state
of its blinkered view about them. A part of this struggle involves
explaining to the state that they are not all terrorists.
Mr Chidambaram should also read a powerful message, if he reads
Hindi, which we can see on the back of Delhi’s three-wheeler taxis
these days. The simple lines throw a mighty challenge to the state,
by asking: When a truthful citizen is stricken with fear of the
police, the law courts and the government, is it freedom or is it
slavery? But Mr Chidambaram’s state is programmed to see, much like
the fire-spitting robot in the Hollywood movie – Terminator – organic
signs of conformism and dissent.
In the West, it is called profiling and is generally frowned upon by
decent people. We are different. In the malaria-infested forests of
Chhatisgarh, anyone carrying quinine tablets or even a bottle of
Dettol is identified as a Maoist. What about Muslim terrorists, how
can we tell them from a distance, particularly if they have been shot
or have blown themselves up? Rangnekar’s eerily funny report reveals
how at least some of the Hindu extremists visualise what a Muslim
terrorist should look like.
According to the Express story, investigators in Goa now believe that
the Sanatan Sanstha men who were killed while apparently planting
bombs in the coastal state during Diwali celebrations last month were
hoping to fan communal tensions.
How? Well they were planning to mislead the police through items they
wanted to leave behind at the site: a shopping bag from Delhi’s ‘Khan
Market’, a bottle of traditional perfume ‘popular among Muslims’ and
an empty bag of branded Basmati rice on which all the words were in
Urdu.
The items were recovered by policemen from the site of the crude bomb
blast in Margao on October 16 in which two Sanatan members, Malgounda
Patil and Yogesh Naik, were killed. According to Rangnekar, it was
found after investigations and the subsequent arrest of two men
suspected to be linked to Patil and Naik that they were carrying
these items to leave them behind at the blast site in order to signal
a Muslim hand.
‘The material was enough to spark communal trouble in Margao and
extremist elements from outside would have found it easy to aggravate
it,’ an officer was quoted as saying. Margao, Goa’s main commercial
city, is represented by Chief Minister Digambar Kamat in the state
assembly and has a large Muslim population. Kamat, incidentally, was
near the site of the blast, taking part in the Diwali celebrations
but was not hurt.
The alleged plan to blame the bomb blast on Muslim groups had echoes
of the Malegaon bomb blast last year, the officer said. Members of
Hindu extremist group Abhinav Bharat, accused for that blast, had
parked the motorbike packed with the bomb below the defunct first-
floor office of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
Patil and Naik are accused of planting three bombs at the crowded
Diwali celebrations in Margao and another at a celebration in
Sancaole town 20 km away. Of these, only one of the bombs in Margao
exploded, prematurely, police say. While Patil died within hours,
Naik succumbed to his injuries in hospital days later.
Patil worked as an administrator at the Ramnathi headquarters of
Sanatan while Naik, a teacher at a school for mentally challenged
students, supplied milk to the organisation and circulated its
mouthpiece Sanatan Prabhat.
Subsequently, the Special Investigating Team constituted by the Goa
police to probe the blast arrested Vinay Talekar and Vinayak Patil,
alleging that they were linked to the conspiracy. Sanatan has denied
it had anything to do with the blast.
It would be far more purposeful for Mr Chidambaram and his sparring
partners from Deoband to focus on more crucial issues, such as the
trail of evidence with which the state could pin down groups that use
false flag attacks to implicate members of a different community with
an intent to cause social ruptures. He must reopen the probe into
what has come to be known as the dubious Batla House encounter
killings in Delhi.
In fact the accidental deaths of suspected Hindu extremists in the
Goa blasts may have a link with the firebombing of the Samjhauta
Express in February 2007. Press Trust of India reported on October 19
that India’s federal police (CBI) and Rajasthan Police had questioned
four persons in Indore, including a local leader of Bharatiya Janata
Yuva Morcha (BJYM), in connection with the Samjhauta Express blast.
According to the news agency, during the initial investigation, the
CBI had stumbled on some clues ‘which hinted that material used in
the (Samjhauta) explosion might have been bought from Indore
following which some people came under the scanner of the CBI’.
BJYM is the youth wing of India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata
Party.
Sixty-eight persons, including many Pakistanis, were killed and other
passengers sustained injuries when explosions ripped through
Samjhauta Express during its transit through Panipat on its way to
Lahore from Delhi.
In a separate dispatch from Panaji, state capital of Goa, PTI said
the local government was examining the possibility of banning Sanatan
Sanstha, the right wing group being seen behind the blast in Margao.
The outfit is allegedly linked with Sadhvi Pragya Singh who has been
probed in a spate of attacks in the Muslim localities of Malegaon. Ms
Singh is believed to be ideologically linked with an army colonel
being probed in the Samjhauta blasts.
Last year, the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) had revealed
that Purohit supplied the RDX used in the Samjhauta Express. The
police officer investigating the case was, however, killed during the
terror attack on Mumbai in November last year. If the state wishes to
appear credible with the common people, which is what Muslims really
are, it needs to look into this and countless other shady happenings.
But that may be a difficult mission for a programmed robot seeking
out traces of Dettol and Basmati rice to combat terrorism.
(ii)
Deccan Chronicle, 8 November 2009
EDITORIAL : RSS SHOCK AND AWE IN BJP
Rarely, if ever, has the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) expressed
itself as unambiguously on the selection and composition of the top
leadership of the BJP, a party it has spawned but has kept a formal
distance from for the sake of appearances, as Mr Mohan Bhagwat, the
organisation’s chief, did on Friday, leaving BJP leaders apoplectic.
The so-called “cultural” outfit has, thus, come out into the open as
the machine that gives dictation to the BJP which is meekly accepted.
Political movements and parties develop their own cultures. This is
in part shaped by the ideology they follow, and is in part the
outcome of the wider milieu in which they operate. As a party of the
Hindu right, the BJP had broken its confines of being no more than
the sum total of RSS workers and their families and friends, and
gained a wider acceptance in the post-socialism phase of Nehru and
Indira Gandhi as Congress went into a decline. A wide variety of
individuals, who wouldn’t see themselves as communal in outlook,
veered toward the party in several evolutionary steps. They believed
they were making the shift to a clean, transparent, democratic
political vehicle that was better suited than any other formation to
take India forward in the changed era. It will be interesting to see
how this constituency views the flagrant interference of the RSS in
BJP affairs. Mr Bhagwat may direct the choice of the next BJP chief,
but will his command help keep the party together? A leader like
former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh has already found his
trust had been misplaced. It is not unlikely that the BJP has a
considerable following of similarly inclined individuals. The new
type of politically inclined but non-RSS constituency that had also
been drawn to the party on account of the presence of leaders such as
Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr Lal Krishna Advani is today apt to be
disillusioned. This segment had something to do with helping the BJP
gain a wider appeal and establish a partial hegemony within Indian
polity. Mr Bhagwat’s shockingly frank announcement makes it plain
that none of the vaunted younger generation BJP leaders operating in
the country’s capital can match the young guns of the Congress — the
BJP’s main rival — led by Mr Rahul Gandhi, whose energy, operating
style, thinking, and charisma have been a revelation after he had
been written off by most. When the rabbit is sprung out of Mr
Bhagwat’s hat, we shall know who Mr Rajnath Singh’s successor is
going to be. But no one in the BJP today looks forward to the
announcement of the new chief with any sense of anticipation, such is
the party’s degraded morale. Worse, the new chief, operating under
the RSS leader’s direct mentorship, is likely to begin with a
handicap if he is seen by the party’s current big wigs, who have
nursed deep ambitions of their own, as an interloper. These are not
easy times for the main Opposition party. The mountains and forests
are moving in a Macbethian sense.
o o o
SEE ALSO:
REGIONAL CHAUVINISM MUST BE FOUGHT (Editorial, Mail Today, November
9, 2009)
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2009/11/regional-chauvinism-must-be-
fought.html
STOP THE HOOLIGANS (Editorial, The Times of India,10 November 2009)
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2009/11/stop-hooligans.html
_____
[10] Miscellanea:
New York Times, November 9, 2009
20 YEARS OF COLLAPSE
by Slavoj Zizek
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During
this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous
nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come
true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the
world suddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few
months earlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections
with Lech Walesa as president?
However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was
dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted
with an unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in turn,
as nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as rightist,
nationalist populism; and as renewed, belated anti-Communist paranoia.
The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists
who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often
heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the
Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from
expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it
is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for
the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European
specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex
of globalization.
Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism from
Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large protests
against the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for weeks.
Protesters linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule by
successors of the Communist party. They denied the very legitimacy of
the government, although it came to power through democratic
elections. When the police went in to restore civil order,
comparisons were drawn with the Soviet Army crushing the 1956 anti-
Communist rebellion.
This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June 2008,
Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of Communist
images like the hammer and sickle, as well as the playing of the
Soviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government proposed
expanding a ban on totalitarian propaganda to include Communist
books, clothing and other items: one could even be arrested for
wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist right
to the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the old
Communist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new problems and
challenges are reduced to the repetition of old struggles, up to the
absurd claim (which sometimes arises in Poland and in Slovenia) that
the advocacy of gay rights and legal abortion is part of a dark
Communist plot to demoralize the nation.
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength
from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many
young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-
Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is
really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still
miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do
not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same
dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former
Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really
changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated ...
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image
they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most
abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which
formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In
other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they
are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.
One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the
disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run
the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the
heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their
dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the
former Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to
the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market
efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and
corruption.
A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists
allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power:
they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists
themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over
Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are
now beating capitalism in its own terrain.
This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always
seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion
of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume
that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.
But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to
be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What
if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of
economic development, but its impediment?
If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in
the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign
of the “immature” expectations of the people who didn’t possess a
realistic image of capitalism.
When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large
majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom
to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk
as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity,
liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the
prevailing cynical hypocrisy.
As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters
were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology
itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately be
designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude
deserves a second chance.
This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, the
Soviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission to
Washington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, “I Chose Freedom.”
His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism included a
detailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s Ukraine, where
Kravchenko — then still a true believer in the system — helped
enforce collectivization.
What most people know about Kravchenko ends in 1949. That year, he
sued Les Lettres Françaises for libel after the French Communist
weekly claimed that he was a drunk and a wife-beater and his memoir
was the propaganda work of American spies. In the Paris courtroom,
Soviet generals and Russian peasants took the witness stand to debate
the truth of Kravchenko’s writings, and the trial grew from a
personal suit to a spectacular indictment of the whole Stalinist system.
But immediately after his victory in the case, when Kravchenko was
still being hailed all around the world as a cold war hero, he had
the courage to speak out passionately against Joseph McCarthy’s witch
hunts. “I believe profoundly,” he wrote, “that in the struggle
against Communists and their organizations ... we cannot and should
not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.” His
warning to Americans: to fight Stalinism in such a way was to court
the danger of starting to resemble their opponent.
Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the inequalities
of the Western world, and wrote a sequel to “I Chose Freedom” that
was titled, significantly, “I Chose Justice.” He devoted himself to
finding less exploitative forms of collectivization and wound up in
Bolivia, where he squandered all his money trying to organize poor
farmers. Crushed by this failure, he withdrew into private life and
shot himself in 1966 at his home in New York.
How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and
disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new
Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for
justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to
invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous
utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream
that holds the rest of us under its sway.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities in London, is the author, most recently, of “First
as Tragedy, Then as Farce.”
o o o
The Guardian, 9 November 2009
SOLIDARITY UNDER STRAIN
We in Poland began the Berlin Wall's collapse. But for all the gains,
people remain deeply dissatisfied
by Adam Michnik
I belong to a generation that liked to repeat the words of the 19th-
century Russian writer Pyotr Chaadaev. "I didn't learn to love my
nation blindfolded, gagged and with my head lowered. I believe that a
man can only be useful to his country when he can look at it clearly."
This was something we often said to ourselves when our rebellion
against the dictatorship in Poland seemed hopeless. We thought we
would not live to see it gone, but still we refused the blindfold and
the gag. We carried on protesting, as writers and intellectuals; in
student actions, workers' strikes and demonstrations during religious
festivals; and by founding the first opposition organisations. They
called us troublemakers and bandits. But it turned out we were doing
the right thing.
The Workers' Defence Committee started in 1976 – after a wave of
workers' protests – with just a few hundred people, scattered across
Poland. By August 1980, after the great strikes of the Baltic and
Silesia, it had become Solidarity, a movement that numbered several
million people from every social class, a national confederation
pushing for a free, independent and just Poland. It was driven
underground – but not destroyed. Solidarity survived further years of
dictatorship until, in 1989, it became an open partner in the new
administration.
It was in Poland that the Berlin Wall began to crumble. As 1989
dawned, the Polish people, and the Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians,
Hungarians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Ukrainians – and Russians
themselves – were all praying for the same thing: the collapse of the
Soviet Union. This event would help not just us, but our Russian
friends as well.
Early in the year negotiations between Poland's communist regime and
the Solidarity opposition began. Talks culminated in elections – only
semi-democratic – on 4 June 1989. But something genuinely historic
took place. For the first time, elections in a communist state led to
the crushing defeat of the Communists. The opposition's victory -
supported by the Catholic Church and the authority of John Paul II -
was complete.
But it was not this victory that made the world's headlines the
following day. Instead it was the massacre of students demanding
democracy in Tiananmen Square, in Beijing.
Thus on the same day the world saw the two faces of communism, its
two possible reactions when threatened. One regime, in Beijing, used
the language of tanks and executions; the other, in Poland, chose
instead the language of the ballot box, opening up a road to
democracy and change that would soon reach the other nations of
eastern and central Europe.It was in Poland that the first stones of
the Berlin Wall started to crumble. ItPoland had overcome the curse
of its own history, a history marked by partitions, which wiped our
country off the political map of Europe; of tragic insurrections
doomed to failure, and hundreds of thousands of victims of hopeless
battles for freedom.
We know that nothing in history ever has just one cause. Poland's
change was also a result of the changes in Russia; of sensible US
politics; of Pope John Paul II and the Catholic church; of the Afghan
people, who opposed the Soviet invasion. And there was also the deep
economic crisis in the Soviet Union itself.
But I will never forget that it was the Poles who created the model
for compromise between ruler and ruled, for a peaceful dismantling of
dictatorship, and for an equally peaceful transition of power into
the hands of those who had won in parliamentary elections.
How Poland has changed in two decades. It has become a democratically
lawful country with a healthy economy. For Poland, the last two
decades have been the best in the last 300 years. And yet so many
Poles today are deeply dissatisfied. Why?
The great Russian writer Anton Chekhov wrote of his homeland: "Under
the banners of education, art and free expression, a type of toad and
crocodile will come to power more frightful than anything that ever
came out of Spain's Inquisition – a narrow-minded, self-righteous,
overbearingly ambitious type, totally lacking in conscience.
Charlatans and wolves in sheeps' clothing will be able to lie and
dissemble to their heart's content." The Russian genius foresaw what
happens to a nation when it acquires freedom after years of slavery.
This is what has happened in the new post-communist democracies.
In Poland, it was the workers in the great factories who won change,
their strikes forcing the authorities to give way. But those same
factories were also the first victims of the ensuing transformation.
Modernised to compete in the marketplace, they cut their workforces.
Instead of a miracle of freedom, people found themselves staring
redundancy in the face.
The revolutions of 1989 had not mentioned mass privatisation or
social inequalities; or sudden growth in crime, corruption and mafia
activity; or, worst of all, permanent unemployment. This was the
reality of the post-communist period offered up to the Poles and
their neighbours. Political freedom, a free-market economy, the end
of censorship and the opening of borders, had not been enough to
effect a balance. The destruction of a despotic regime had led not
just to liberal democratic values – it had also marked the start of a
wild rush for wealth. A people enslaved for decades, unable to
measure the worth of their own work, instead began to seek instant
miracles and gratification by applying the exigencies of brute force,
cynicism and bribes.
Of course, there has been change. A new generation of politicians has
been created. Those who had previously been excluded from legitimate
political and economic activity are its leaders today. But at the
same time we have had to deal with the growth of corruption on a
massive scale, and with unfulfilled promises about social progress.
The chasm dividing rich and poor has deepened – the only difference
is that many of the richest people today were prominent activists.
In some post-communist countries an aggressive ethnic nationalism is
on the rise. In others, religion is being used by those in power as
an anti-democratic ideology, an instrument of intolerance and
exclusion. Post-communist transformation creates not just winners,
but many losers: those who are unemployed, rejected, pushed into
poverty. The often brutally greedy new elites are slow to learn
democratic habits, respect for the law of the land, pluralism or
tolerance.
So our world is now one of open questions. We ask: what is the future
for our democratic systems? And we are comforted to know that this
same question is being asked throughout democratic Europe. Despite
all the mistakes, blunders and scandals, Poland today – 20 years on –
is a normal, democratic European country. It's the kind of country I
wanted my generation to bequeath to our children. Although, to tell
the truth, I wish that it was a rather better one.
_____
[11] Announcements:
(i) INTERACTIVE DIALOGUE WITH EVE ENSLER
Dear Friends,
Press Club, Mumbai and Akshara are pleased to invite you to an
interaction with Eve Ensler with members of women’s organizations,
social activists and the Press on 11th November 2009, Wedensday at
4:00 pm to 5.30 pm at Press Club, Mumbai, opposite Azad Maidan Police
Station, CST.
Eve Ensler is a well known playwright, performer and activist. She is
the award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, which has been
published in 45 languages and performed in over 120 countries. She
now returns to India for the World Premier of her new play, ‘I am an
Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World’ on
12th November 2009 at the NCPA theatre.
She is also the founder and artistic director of V-Day, the global
movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised
nearly 60 million dollars and recently celebrated its tenth anniversary.
This is an opportunity to have an inter-active dialogue with Eve
about our movements, strategies and social contexts.
Please do come,
Regards,
Nandita Gandhi Swati Deshpande
Co-director Secretary
Akshara Press Club, Mumbai
o o o
(ii)
Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry
Citizens for Peace
Gateway House
and
Tata Institute of Social Sciences invite you to a discussion on
INSURGENCY AND COUNTER-INSURGENCY: CHALLENGES OF BUILDING A SHARED
PROSPERITY
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
National Gallery of Modern Art(NGMA), Sir Cowasji Jehangir Hall, Fort,
Mumbai
6.15 pm Tea
6:30 to 8:00pm Discussion
Chair:
Dr. Parasuraman, Director, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Panel will include:
Dr. Ajit Ranade, Chief Economist, Aditya Birla Group
Himanshu Kumar,Vanvasi Chetna Ashram, Bastar, Chhattisgarh
M.D. Nalapat, Professor of Geopolitics and UNESCO chair, Manipal
University
Dr. Nandini Sundar,Professor of Sociology, Delhi
University Author: Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological
History of Bastar
The escalation of hostilities between Naxal/Maoist insurgents and
government para-military forces has put millions of lives in deep
peril. While the conflict seems to be in the hinterland it has grave
implications for both rural and urban India, its democracy, society,
security, economy and foreign policy. How has business come to be
embroiled in this? What role can it play as stakeholder? What is the
environmental impact of this insurgency? What is the foreign policy
implication of the spread of the ‘red corridor?’ Finally, can
citizens develop a constructive and creative response to this crisis?
Can business evolve ideas for resolution of the conflict that ensure
peace and justice for the affected and economic growth for all?
o o o
(iii) The Kashmir Initiative Speaker Series
Human Rights Policy for
"THE WORLD’S MOST MILITARIZED DISPUTE"
November 12, 2009 4:30-6:30 PM
L-230 Gundle Family Classroom, Littauer Building 2nd floor
62 Years of Unrest: Regional & International Ramifications
with
Angana Chatterji, Ayesha Jalal, Alexander Evans
Moderated by: Sugata Bose
6:00-6:30 PM
Film screening and discussion (of work in progress)
KASHMIR with John Halpern
6:30 Reception at the Carr Center
Co-sponsored by
South Asia Initiative at Harvard
Harvard Pakistan Student Group (HPSG)
For More Information See: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/sbhrap/
projects/kashmir/index.php
o o o
(iv) Public Meeting : SAY ‘NO’ TO GOVERNMENT’S WAR ON PEOPLE
Date: 13th November 2009, 12.00 pm onward
Vivekananda Statue, Delhi University
Speakers:
Madan Kashyap, Journalist
Prashant Bhushan, Civil liberties lawyer
Saroj Giri, Dept. of Political Science, DU Gautam
Navlakha, Civil liberties activist
Harish Dhawan, PUDR Dr.
N. Bhattacharya, Jan Hastakshep
Poonam, Pragatisheel Mahila Sangathan Sanjay
Kumar, NSI
Sandeep Singh, AISA
Banjyotsna, DSU
Abhinav,
Disha Mayur
Chetia, PSU
Representative of Peoples organisations form North Eastern states
Representative of JNU Forum Against War on People
o o o
(v) Music Basti would like to invite you to a program we are hosting
at Khushi Home (run by Aman Biradari)
Celebrating Children’s Day, November 14th, 2009
(1.00 pm, Khushi Home, Okhla Industrial Area Phase II, New Delhi)
o o o
(vi) NYC premiere of The Salt Stories, a documentary by Lalit
Vachani, at the MIAAC film festival.
Date :Saturday, the 14th of November 2009 at 12 PM
Venue: The Quad Cinema (34 West 13th Street, between 5th and 6th
Avenues).
http://miaacfilmfest.org/Films#SALTSTORIES
o o o
(vii) LIFE IN STRUGGLE CELEBRATION
November 14-15, 2009
Honoring Hari Sharma at 75
Dear Friends,
ONLY ONE WEEK LEFT for the "Life in Struggle Celebration" to honor
Hari Sharma at his 75th birthday. It will take place on November 15
at the Grand Taj Banquet Hall, 8388-128 St, Surrey, BC and will start
at 5.30 pm. The ticket for the event, including dinner and
entertainment, is $30.00, and there will be a cash bar. A book,
"Celebrating Life in Struggle: A Tribute to Hari Sharma, "scheduled
to be published in November, will be presented to Hari at the party.
It will be available to all the guests and is included in the cost of
the ticket.
If you have not obtained your ticket already, we urge you to do so
now. The caterer has to be given a precise figure of those attending
the event.
Tickets can be obtained from Café Kathmandu (2779 Commercial Drive,
Vancouver). Or, phone Harinder Mahil (604 761 9235) or Bhanu Poudyal
(604 376 7329).
We also remind you that there is a conference on November 14 (10 AM
to 4 PM) at which some of the articles included in the book mentioned
above in the section, 'Perspectives on Imperialism, Socialism and
People's Struggles Today' will be presented and discussed. Venue:
Newton Community Recreation Centre, 7120 - 136B Street, Surrey, BC.
Lunch provided.
Hari Sharma @75 Organizing Committee:
Abi Ghimire, Amarjit Chahal, Bhanu Poudyal, Charan Gill, Chinmoy
Banerjee, Harinder Mahil, Raj Chouhan, Sarabjit Hundal, Satinder
Sidhu, Shinder Brar
o o o
(viii) The Forum for Policy Dialogue on Water Conflicts in India is
happy to invite you to the panel discussion on "Can water conflicts
in India be resolved by putting water in Concurrent list,
particularly in the context of impact of climate change on
hydrological cycle?" to be held on 16 November from 5 to 8 pm at
Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi. A provisional programme
is given below.
Provisional Programme
Venue of the meeting: Indian National Science Academy, Bahadur Shah
Zafar Marg, New Delhi - 110 002
5 pm to 8 pm; 16 November 2009
Welcome and introduction
Lead Presentation
Prof. Ramaswamy Iyer, Ex-Secretary, Ministry of Water Resources,
Government of India and presently with the Centre for Policy
Research, New Delhi
Panel Discussion (Some of the panelists are yet to be confirmed)
Biksham Gujja, Policy Advisor of the Living Water Programme at WWF
International, Gland, Switzerland and also Team Leader of WWF-ICRISAT
Project on Water Productivity in Agriculture
M. K. Prasad, Executive Chairman and Director, Information Kerala
Mission & former president of KSSP, Trivandrum
M. K. Ramesh, National Law School, Bangalore
Medha Patkar, Narmada Bacho Andolan and National Alliance of Peoples’
Movements (NAPM), Mumbai
Mihir Shah, Member, Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi
N K Premachandran, Minister for Water Resources, Government of Kerala
Navroz Dubhash, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
Pawan Kumar Bansal, Minister of Water Resources, Government of India,
New Delhi
Prashant Bhushan, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India, New Delhi
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
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/
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