SACW - Jan 12, 2011 | Pakistan: Who will confront the Mullahs? / India go after Hindutva terrorists / The Left in denial on allegations against Assange

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire -  Dispatch No. 2693 - January 10, 2011
From: sacw.net

[1]  Pakistan: Who will confront the Mullahs?
  (i) My father's murder must not silence the voices of reason in Pakistan (Shehrbano Taseer)
  (ii)  A Pakistan in mourning will not be silenced (Fatima Bhutto)
  (iii) Pakistan Faces a Divide of Age on Muslim Law (Carlotta Gall)
   (iv) In dark vision, a ray in Pak vote share (Zulfiqar Ahmad)
[2]   India: Go After Hindutva Terror Network:
   (i) India’s own politics of denial (Pratap Bhanu Mehta)
   (ii) Keep Politics Out (Editorial, The Times of India)
   (iii) Make it work (The Times of India)
[3]  India: Sorry people, we're hanging up on you (Siddharth Varadarajan)
[4]  India: Powers That Be Protect The Rapists - Recent instances in Bihar, UP and Punjab : A call for Justice in Delhi
[5] The response to the allegations against the WikiLeaks founder prove that when it comes to rape, the left still doesn't get it

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[1]  Pakistan: Who will confront the Mullahs?

(i)  

The Guardian, 11 January 2011

MY FATHER'S MURDER MUST NOT SILENCE THE VOICES OF REASON IN PAKISTAN

There is a real danger that extremists could triumph if good people do not continue to speak out

by Shehrbano Taseer

I can't help but roll my eyes when I'm informed I must keep a guard with me at all times now. After my father, Salmaan Taseer, was assassinated by his own security guard on 4 January – my brother Shehryar's 25th birthday – does it even matter? If the governor of Pakistan's largest province can be shot dead by a policeman assigned to protect him in broad daylight in a market in the federal capital, Islamabad, is anyone really safe?

It was after lunch that I started receiving one message after another from friends inquiring about my father. I rang him. No answer. I called his chauffeur in Islamabad. He was wailing and incoherent. I told him to calm down and tell me everything. The governor had been about to step into the car after lunch at his favourite local cafe, he said. He had been shot in the back. There was a lot of blood, he said. I told him everything would be fine: my father was a fighter and he would make it.

According to the postmortem report I read, they recovered 27 bullets from his body, which means the gunman actually reloaded his weapon so nothing would be left to chance. Each one of my father's vital organs was punctured by the hail of bullets, except his heart and larynx – his mighty, compassionate heart and his husky, sensible voice.

The assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, had reportedly asked others in the governor's temporary security detail to take him alive. Almost a dozen, including security personnel, are now under arrest. Speaking to camera crews the same day from jail, 26-year-old Qadri said he had killed my father because he had criticised the country's draconian and often misused blasphemy laws. It seems that Qadri was also inspired by the rally against my father on 31 December, at which rabid protesters demanded his blood. Yet no arrests were made over this brazen incitement to murder.

The blasphemy laws were foisted on Pakistan by Islamist dictator General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s. As an intellectual firebrand of the Pakistan People's Party, my father endured jail and torture during that dictatorship. We had thought the nightmare and brutality of the Zia regime was over when the general's aircraft fell out of the skies in 1988. We were so wrong.

Some 200 lawyers – men of the law – garlanded Qadri and showered him with pink rose petals on both his days in court. The president of the lawyers' wing of the opposition party Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz was reportedly among them. The smiling assassin has become the poster boy for the unholy ambitions of the self-deluded. Lawyers who fought for an independent judiciary are standing in support of a self-confessed murderer. This is not the Pakistan for which my grandfather, MD Taseer, fought alongside founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

The inability of the state to prosecute terrorists successfully is proving fatal for Pakistan. The country's antiterrorism courts, where Qadri was presented, have a sorry record on convictions, and have been clogged by non-terrorism cases. The state is unable to gather evidence properly, make a cohesive case and ensure the safety of those who provide evidence against the militants. It is a different matter when it comes to trying poor, underprivileged Pakistanis – Muslims and non-Muslims alike – accused of blasphemy. Under pressure from the mobs outside, Pakistan's lower-level courts convict quickly, but these convictions are almost always overturned by the higher judiciary, although the accused (and in some cases the judges) are then killed by vigilantes.

My father was buried in Lahore on 5 January under high security. Cleric after cleric refused to lead his funeral prayers – as they had those of the sufi saint Bulleh Shah – and militants warned mourners to attend at their own peril. But thousands came to Governor House on that bitterly cold morning to pay their respects. Thousands more led candle-lit vigils across the country. But the battle is not going to be over any time soon.

In Pakistan, the voices calling for reason and tolerance are in danger of being wiped out. The fear is palpable. The militants have issued a warning against further vigils for my father. Yesterday, a rally in support of the blasphemy laws was held in Karachi, at which mullahs incited violence against former information minister Sherry Rehman – my mother's close friend, and the brave woman I was named after – who tabled a bill in the National Assembly in November proposing blasphemy-law amendments. The politician and former cricketer, Imran Khan, and former prime minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain – both conservatives – have also come out in support of my father's position: amending the blasphemy laws to prevent their misuse. The ruling party – my father's party – continues to equivocate.

My father's assassination was a hate crime fuelled by jihadist fervour, abetted by some irresponsible sections of the media and sanctified by some political actors. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing. The loss of one good man must not deter others. Pakistan's very future depends on it.

o o o

(ii)

Financial Times, January 10 2011

A PAKISTAN IN MOURNING WILL NOT BE SILENCED

by Fatima Bhutto

Muslims spend 40 days after a death in mourning. There is no joy, no space for life or the living – only for prayers for the dead and memories of the deceased. If every death requires 40 days of mourning, then Pakistan is a nation constantly caught in grief.

In Pakistan’s 64th year there has already been much bloodshed. On January 1, America launched four drone attacks, resulting in 19 deaths in northern Pakistan, intensifying a campaign that saw 110 such strikes inside Pakistan in 2010. The dead, as always, are faceless and nameless, but we are told they are militants.

During January 3 and 4, eight men were murdered in Karachi. A politician with MQM, Pakistan’s third largest political party (which though its own record is spotty when it comes to violence, has maintained liberal stances on many issues) was killed in a targeted assassination. The riots that followed claimed the lives of a further seven people.

Then, on January 5, Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab province, was killed in broad daylight in Islamabad. Also on that day, the bullet-riddled bodies of three missing Baloch men were discovered. One of them, Qambar Chakar, had a masters degree in economics and was a highly regarded and respected student activist. He was 24.

Not all of these stories made headlines. Yet, in part because of the death of Taseer, foreign correspondents and television pundits have still sounded the death-knell for liberal Pakistan. They have been too hasty. Some 10,000 people have disappeared in the gas-rich Balochistan province since the war on terror began 10 years ago, according to local human rights groups. The disappearances of secular, leftist activists like Chakar have been going on for many years, without producing fears for the end of moderate sensibilities in Pakistan.

My country has an unfortunate history of death by assassination; a tendency to resort to violence ahead of debate and the rule of law. Yes, too much blood is spilt in Pakistan. But this is not new. Mubashir Hasan, a political activist and former finance minister, compares the country’s elite to Kali Ma, the Hindu goddess of creation and annihilation, who gives life but also devours her children, simultaneously creating and destroying. It has been this way since 1951, four years after independence, when Pakistan’s first appointed prime minister was shot and killed at a party rally in Rawalpindi.

Yet even during our most violent and intolerant regimes, Pakistan’s inherent liberalism has proved itself a strong opponent. General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988, was responsible for our blasphemy laws – which are alleged to be the reason behind Taseer’s assassination – alongside a series of “hudood” laws, which threaten death for an adulterer, or a woman who engages in pre-marital sex.

Under Gen Zia’s martial law, the punishment for theft was amputation. But unlike in Saudi Arabia and Taliban Afghanistan, where thieves once were (and still are in the case of Saudi Arabia) publicly mutilated, not one doctor in all of Pakistan could be found to carry out the sentence. And so the law was resisted. Gen Zia presided over many executions and assassinations, my grandfather’s and uncle’s included. But he did not kill what was, and still is, the liberal, moderate and tolerant part of Pakistan. He could not. Nobody can.

More recently, when another dictator, General Pervez Musharaff clamped down on traditional media, journalists refused to self-censor and took to the internet: using blogs, Facebook (which was banned over the summer), YouTube and text messaging. After Gen Musharaff declared emergency rule, graffiti reading only “one coup per dictator” was painted around Karachi.

Other examples of a residual liberalism remain. Last month, Sharmilla Farooqui, an adviser to the government of Pakistan’s Sindh province and member of the ruling party, made a clumsy intervention in a case where two girls had been abducted in Karachi, and one was gang-raped. In response, women congregated to protest. No matter that our laws, thanks to Gen Zia, would punish the rape victim rather than the rapist – the women stood on the street in dangerous Karachi and demonstrated for a principle. They proved a saying from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, that: “There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is great competition between the two. But there is a third power stronger than both, that of women.”

Pakistanis must now concentrate their efforts on defending liberalism’s most natural allies – women and the press being among the strongest – but the battle is ours, and ours alone. American drones and foreign interference in Pakistan’s affairs only divide the country.

Our liberal heritage is strong, despite obscenely corrupt and incompetent leadership and burgeoning fundamentalism. True, this most recent spate of gruesome bloodshed has plunged Pakistan further into mourning, and there seems to be no respite from the grief that accompanies every killing and act of violence. But what has always been temperate and tolerant, and bravely so, about Pakistan remains with us.

The writer, a poet and writer, whose last book is ‘Songs of Blood and Sword’, is the niece of Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto 


o o o

(iii)

The New York Times, January 10, 2011

PAKISTAN FACES A DIVIDE OF AGE ON MUSLIM LAW

Lawyers rallied for Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on Thursday.
By Carlotta Gall

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Cheering crowds have gathered in recent days to support the assassin who riddled the governor of Punjab with 26 bullets and to praise his attack — carried out in the name of the Prophet Muhammad — as an act of heroism. To the surprise of many, chief among them have been Pakistan’s young lawyers, once seen as a force for democracy.

Their energetic campaign on behalf of the killer has caught the government flat-footed and dismayed friends and supporters of the slain politician, Salman Taseer, an outspoken proponent of liberalism who had challenged the nation’s strict blasphemy laws. It has also confused many in the broader public and observers abroad, who expected to see a firm state prosecution of the assassin.

Instead, before his court appearances, the lawyers showered rose petals over the confessed killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, a member of an elite police group who had been assigned to guard the governor, but who instead turned his gun on him. They have now enthusiastically taken up his defense.

It may seem a stark turnabout for a group that just a few years ago looked like the vanguard of a democracy movement. They waged months of protests in 2007 and 2008 to challenge Pakistan’s military dictator after he unlawfully removed the chief justice.

But the lawyers’ stance is perhaps just the most glaring expression of what has become a deep generational divide tearing at the fabric of Pakistani society, and of the broad influence of religious conservatism — and even militancy — that now exists among the educated middle class.

They are often described as the Zia generation: Pakistanis who have come of age since the 1980s, when the military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, began to promote Islam in public education and to use it as a political tool to unify this young and insecure nation.

Today, the forces he set loose have gained such strength that they threaten to overwhelm voices for tolerance in Pakistan’s feeble civilian government. They certainly present a nagging challenge for the United States.

Washington has poured billions of dollars into the Pakistani military to combat terrorism, but has long neglected a civilian effort to counter the inexorable pull of conservative Islam. By now the conservatives have entered nearly every part of Pakistani society, even the rank-and-file security forces, as the assassination showed. The military, in fact, has been conspicuously silent about the killing.

“Over time, Pakistani society has drifted toward religious extremism,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and defense analyst from Lahore. “This religious sentiment has seeped deep into government circles and into the army and police at lower levels.”

“The lower level are listening to the religious people,” he said.

Indeed, the Pakistan of today, and the brand of Islam much of the nation has embraced, is barely recognizable even to many educated Pakistanis older than the Zia generation. Among them is Athar Minallah, 49, a former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the lawyers’ protest campaign against Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007 and 2008.

Mr. Minallah studied law at Islamic University in Islamabad from 1983 to 1986, and the first lesson any student learned in his day was that the preservation of life was a pillar of Islamic law, he said.

But under General Zia in the 1980s, the government began supporting Islamic warriors to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Indian control of Kashmir, and the syllabus was changed to encourage jihad. The mind-set of students and graduates changed along with it, Mr. Minallah said.

That change is now no more apparent than among the 1,000 lawyers from the capital, Islamabad, and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi, who have given their signed support for the defense of Mr. Qadri, who has been charged with murder and terrorism.

Their leader is Rao Abdur Raheem, 30, who formed a “lawyers’ forum,” called the Movement to Protect the Dignity of the Prophet, in December. The aim of the group, he said, was to counter Mr. Taseer’s campaign to amend the nation’s strict blasphemy laws, which promise death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

In interviews, Mr. Raheem and six of his colleagues insisted they were not members of any political or religious party, and were acting independently and interested only in ensuring the rule of law.

All graduates of different Pakistani universities, they insisted they were liberal, not religious conservatives. Only one had religious training. They said they had all taken part in the lawyers’ protest campaign in 2007 and 2008, and that they were proud that the movement helped reinstate the chief justice.

Yet they forcefully defended Mr. Qadri, saying he had acted on his own, out of strong religious feeling, and they denied that he had told his fellow guards of his plans in advance. He was innocent until proved guilty, they said. They have already succeeded in preventing the government from changing the court venue.

In their deep religious conviction, and in their energy and commitment to the cause of the blasphemy laws, they are miles apart from the older generation of lawyers and law enforcement officials above them.

“I felt this is a different society,” said one former law enforcement official when he saw the lawyers celebrating Mr. Qadri. “There is a disconnect in society.”

The former security official, who has worked in fighting militancy and who requested anonymity because of his work, said that within just four hours of the killing, 2,500 people had posted messages supporting Mr. Qadri on Facebook pages.

Mass rallies championing him and the blasphemy laws have continued since then.

This conservatism is fueled by an element of class divide, between the more secular and wealthy upper classes and the more religious middle and lower classes, said Najam Sethi, a former editor of The Daily Times, a liberal daily newspaper published by Mr. Taseer. As Pakistan’s middle class has grown, so has the conservative population.

Besides his campaign against the blasphemy laws, it was Mr. Taseer’s wealth and secular lifestyle that made him a target for the religious parties, Mr. Sethi said.

“Salman had an easygoing, witty, irreverent, high-life style,” he said, “so the anger of class inequality mixed with religious passion gives a heady, dangerous brew.”

Government officials, analysts and members of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the secular-leaning party to which Mr. Taseer belonged, blame the religious parties and clerics who delivered speeches and fatwas against Mr. Taseer for inciting the attack. On Monday, Mr. Qadri, who confessed to the killing, provided a court with testimony saying he was inspired by two clerics, Qari Hanif and Ishtiaq Shah.

The police say they are now seeking the clerics for questioning, but with the growing strength of the conservative movement on the streets, religious leaders — even those who incite violence and terrorism — are nearly untouchable to the authorities and are almost never prosecuted.

The blasphemy law has been condemned by human rights groups here, who say it has been used to persecute religious minorities, like Christians, and on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI called on Pakistan to undo the law. But the law has become an opportunity for religious parties looking to whip up public sentiment, Mr. Sethi said.

A dark presence in the background is the military establishment, which has sponsored the religious parties for decades, using them as tools to influence politics and as militant proxies abroad. The military also has a heavy influence on much of Pakistan’s brash media, which fanned the flames of the blasphemy issue with sensationalist coverage.

“Democracy has brought us a media that is extremely right-wing, conservative,” Mr. Sethi, 62, said. “Most are in their 30s and are a product of the Zia years, of the textbooks and schools set by the Zia years, which are not the sort of things that we were taught.”

“The silence of the armed forces is ominous,” Mr. Sethi added.

Indeed, whether on the military or civilian side, the government has failed to act forcefully on the case at every stage, the former security official said. Whether through fear or lack of policy, it has done little to challenge the ideology behind the attack or the spreading radicalism in Pakistani society.

“The entire state effort has been on the capture and kill approach: how many terrorists can you arrest and how many can you kill,” the former security official said. “Nothing has been done about the breeding ground of extremism.

“Unless the government does something serious and sustained,” the official warned, “we are on a very dangerous trajectory.”

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 11, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

o o o

(iv)

The Telegraph, 12 January 2011

IN DARK VISION, A RAY IN PAK VOTE SHARE
Why polls are the best bet

by Zulfiqar Ahmad

The murder of Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, is the latest salvo in an openly declared war by Islamist terrorists in their bid to mould Pakistan in their vision of an Islamic state.

It is a dark vision of a world without modern education, without music, without humour. It’s a world where women are imprisoned within the walls of their homes, non-believers have no rights, children are not allowed to play and sing, and anything that brings joy is banished.

Many in Pakistan do not even acknowledge this war, others cower in fear, and only few actively resist it. Even small attempts at resistance are dealt with brutally by these Islamists who should be labelled accurately as terrorists: “a person who employs terror or terrorism, especially as a political weapon”.

Salmaan Taseer’s “crime” was that he supported a proposed — but yet to be tabled — parliamentary bill by Sherry Rehman, former information minister for President Zardari and now a parliamentarian, to modify — not repeal — the anti-blasphemy law introduced in 1986 during General Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship.

Rehman’s bill seeks to eliminate the death penalty, criminalise incitement and penalise false accusations.

To underline his support of the bill, Taseer also visited Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who was sentenced to death in November 2010 under the anti-blasphemy law by a Sharia court for supposedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad. For his stand against a law so vaguely worded that it hardly qualifies as law and deeply insults basic human decency, he paid with his life.

At the heart of Taseer’s murder, its weak-worded condemnation by many politicians of traditional political parties, and the celebration of this heinous act by sections of the society, is the shifting sense in Pakistan about what it means to be “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan”.

Until the mid-1970s, Islam played a marginal role in Pakistani politics, while a relatively moderate form of the religion defined its society.

During this period, efforts by religious parties to push for a deeper Islamisation of the Pakistani state and society were generally unsuccessful. Things changed after General Zia-ul-Haq’s 1977 coup and his attempts to more actively push for the Islamisation of Pakistan’s polity.

With the coming of the Afghan jihad, jointly sponsored by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, a militant, radical Islam, deeply shaped by a purist Wahabi outlook, took centre stage as the vanguard of a revitalised religion; moderate Islamic voices became increasingly marginal. The dramatic rise of the Taliban, the attacks of 9/11, the United States’ war on terror and attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan all helped these radical Islamic groups proliferate and gave them a degree of legitimacy.

Pakistan’s militant Islamist groups are organised, well funded, highly weaponised and ideologically motivated. They do not hesitate to kill. These groups have patrons with deep pockets, the protection of certain elements within Pakistani intelligence agencies, extensive networks and many sanctuaries, in both cities and mountains.

They are also helped by the deepening of an Islamic ethos within Pakistan society, more broadly that has emerged in response to the United States’ war on terror. There is a sense in among many Pakistanis that Islam needs protection leading to a reflexive sympathy for groups that may appear to stand against the United States.

Faced with such formidable foes, the traditional political parties of Pakistan have shown a remarkable lack of seriousness and urgency. The major non-Islamist political parties — the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Muslim League (PML-Nawaz), Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), and Awami National Party (ANP) — are defined more by their lack of courage, excess of greed and a pathological lust for power than by any principle.

Currently, they offer little hope that the hijacking of Pakistan by Islamist terrorists can be thwarted. The leaders of these political parties prefer to sit behind road blocks, fortified houses and armed guards and wage petty wars against other political parties rather than to confront an enemy that has declared war on them.

Even immediately after the murder of Taseer, federal law minister Babar Awan blamed the Punjab government for not providing adequate security to the assassinated governor and termed the killing “political”.

In return, the senior adviser to the chief minister of Punjab, one Sardar Zulfiqar Khosa, accused the federal government of wanting to control the governorship of Punjab. It is singularly depressing to read, on the same newspaper page announcing the murder, that 30 lawmakers have been charged with holding false degrees, or that the MQM and ANP activists are killing each other again in Karachi.

If, however, the traditional non-Islamist political parties are pushed by Taseer’s murder to take the battle to their enemy — unlikely as it maybe — then they will have to plan for a long war.

To begin with, they will need to define and agree to a basic minimum ideological agenda that reaffirms their shared commitment to a moderate, humane version of Islam; a willingness to pass tough laws to protect basic human rights, while curbing hate speech and open incitements to murder, and the courage to forcefully implement these laws.

In immediate terms, it will be critical that the current administration serves out its tenure and the next round of elections are held.

The continuation of the democratic process may also push political parties to pursue longer-term policies to address the economic needs of the people with an eye on the next round of elections.

General elections are the best ally of traditional political parties in their fight against radical Islam. Indeed, the increasing salience of religion in society has not translated into electoral gains for Islamic parties. In every election in Pakistan, including the last one in 2008, all Islamic parties of every hue combined have always polled less than 20 per cent of popular votes.

According to various credible polls and analysis, radical Islamist parties received less than 5 per cent of the total votes in the 2008 elections, a number unlikely to change in the near future. And herein lies some hope for the country despite the venality of its current political leaders.

• Zulfiqar Ahmad is the president of the Eqbal Ahmad Foundation, a US-based organisation for promoting peace between India and Pakistan, and an independent writer. He left Pakistan for his home in the US the day Taseer was killed


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[2] India: Hindutva Terror 
 
Indian Express, January 11 2011

INDIA’S OWN POLITICS OF DENIAL

by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Swami Aseemanand’s “confession”, detailing the activities of Hindu terror groups, has produced a deep moral vertigo. There is, to be sure, much more that needs to be investigated and explained. This evidence needs to be squared with other sources, particularly on the Samjhauta Express blast. The timing of the “leak” of the confession will certainly raise political eyebrows. The confession, without corroborating evidence, may not prove to be decisive.

But, as strategic expert B. Raman has rightly said, the circumstances make it difficult to dismiss this confession out of hand. This much is crystal clear. First, that terror groups inspired by Hindutva exist. It is not much of a comfort to say that these are fringe elements. The significance of these elements is often revealed only in long hindsight; they can trigger fears and anxieties far in excess of their numbers. Who knows what sort of subterranean counter-politics these revelations will generate? Even if they are only a few drops, they are a poison that can vitiate the whole. Pious homilies about their marginality cannot disguise this possibility.

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Second, these are groups that, even within their own paradigm, have created a new moral abyss. They have cloaked themselves in the garb of victims seeking retaliation. They are not only tempted by violence, they have no compunctions about striking the holiest places of worship like the Dargah at Ajmer, the deepest manifestations of our civilisation’s connection to the sacred. What kind of sickness has allowed the appellations “swami” and “sadhvi” to be colonised by a tissue of violent resentments?

Third, our response to this challenge has been, at best, an embarrassed denial. In the process we have put on display our double standards. We could not even get ourselves to admit that anyone claiming the appellation Hindu could be terrorists. This is more a symptom of our prejudice than a fact. This also seemed to blindside investigative agencies enough that they kept on pursuing the wrong leads and targeting the wrong groups.

But there is also a national security challenge posed by this episode. The BJP, perhaps instinctively, but true to form, is not handling these revelations well. The leaks may well be politically motivated. But in the larger scheme of things the motivation behind the leaks is a small sideshow. Whichever way you look at it, India’s credibility is seriously dented. We all understand that the CBI can be used politically, and no one puts it past this government to use law enforcement agencies selectively. Yet, if the BJP attacks the credibility of the state lock stock and barrel, think of the consequences. The one thing about credibility is that you either have it or you don’t: you cannot cherry-pick. If we legitimise the argument that there is nothing to law enforcement agencies but politics, where does it leave any action of the state? After all, it is the very same state that prosecutes Afzal Guru and Ajmal Kasab.

God knows, there are serious miscarriages of justice and abuses of power in our system. But to simply dismiss the state on partisan grounds would be to say exactly the same thing states like Pakistan say about India: that this state cannot be trusted with any investigation and any evidence. Instead of attacking the state, the BJP needs to help examine the case on the merits. The only way to deal with possible miscarriages is to examine the veracity of a charge, not change the subject by impugning the source.

Besides, the BJP needs to learn a political lesson. Nothing diminished L.K. Advani before the last election more than his artless, passionate and entirely a priori defence of Sadhvi Pragya. Their attack on Hemant Karkare haunts them to this day; it suggested a level of pre-commitment, small-mindedness and a lack of institutional judgment not befitting a leader. Nitin Gadkari’s equivocations and Ravi Shankar Prasad’s defensiveness are in the same vein.

The BJP has to recognise that a strong and credible state is incompatible with any form of community partisanship. It could have turned this crisis on the head by at least being consistent on the issue of possible miscarriages of justice. It could have shown equal concern for Muslim youths falsely arrested.

The RSS will, on the surface, make all the right noises distancing itself from terrorism. But the revelations are so damaging that if it has any semblance of genuine nationalism left, it will have to do more than verbal distancing. It will have to actively cooperate to root out this menace, and find a way of atoning as an organisation that is unprecedented. This is highly unlikely. But it is the only way of answering the question as to why the organisation should be tolerated at all.

Let us, for a moment, even suppose that the Congress is playing cheap politics with the timing of these revelations. But even cheaper politics, in return, will do more damage. In some ways, for us as citizens, the charge that the investigation is politicised is also a psychologically easy let-off. It prevents us from fully confronting the significance of all that is being revealed.

A few self-selected crazies on the net notwithstanding, there is little reason to believe that the activities of the terror groups being identified has wide political support. If anything, there is likely to be revulsion. But there is a danger that this revulsion will be overshadowed by embarrassment, producing a silence that smacks of complicity. This silence can only add to the political damage we have already inflicted on ourselves.

We also need to understand that India has been diminished by these revelations. We can go on all we want about the difference between India and Pakistan. We can say that the Pakistani state has supported terrorism, but the Indian state has not. But to most of the world this will appear to be more a matter of degree than of kind. It will once again relate the issue of terrorism, not to a particular state, pursuing its objectives through violence, but to the general history of Hindu-Muslim violence and counter-violence.

The only way this damage can be repaired is if the Indian state credibly and relentlessly pursues its investigations, without us impugning its credibility from the start. Perhaps this serious crisis can be turned on its head. By admitting our mistakes, blind spots and omissions, we can at least send a signal that we have the resilience and courage to correct our mistakes. Otherwise, we will be exactly in the same boat that we place Pakistan: a society that practises the politics of denial.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi 

o o o

The Times of India, 12 January 2011

Editorial

KEEP POLITICS OUT

Malegaon in Maharashtra, the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan - belatedly but with gathering momentum, evidence is emerging of a network of fundamentalist Hindutva organisations behind them. Swami Aseemanand's December confession providing many of those details may now be disputed by his lawyer as having been made under duress, but it is not the only source of information. The National Investigation Agency has ferreted out a number of operational details related to the Samjhauta Express blast as well. Taken together - and added to information gleaned from the arrests of Lt Col Srikant Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur - we have an emerging picture of a threat serious enough that there can be no political gamesmanship over the issue as we are witnessing now.

The hopeful sign, however, is that if the emerging picture is correct, Malegaon, Mecca Masjid et al have been traced to a small group of extremists, and rolling them up at this point should stop the contagion from spreading. That is what we need to focus on. The BJP should no longer be in denial about saffron terror, but instead purge its ranks of those inclined to follow violent methods in pursuit of religious goals. To some extent the RSS has gone further than the BJP has. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's admission that some members of the Sangh had shown extremist tendencies and were consequently asked to leave is a step away from the Sangh Parivar's policy of absolute denial.

But the continuing political battle over semantics and vote banks misses the point entirely. Terrorism is terrorism; there is nothing to choose between the Islamist variety, greater in scope, and the Hindutva variety, more insidious in its effect on the country's socio-cultural fabric. As there has been a public outcry over laxity in dealing with cross-border terrorism - and subsequent attempts by the government to address the lacunae - so there must be an effort to close down the network of operatives from groups like Abhinav Bharat, Jai Vande Matram and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti.

While the BJP continues to be in denial on saffron terror the initial wrong turn taken by investigative agencies, which had started out by blaming Muslim extremist groups for the blasts, is an embarrassment for them as well. A good deal of time has elapsed since the blasts happened, and shoddy investigations risk losing vital evidence while pursuing innocent people. Investigative agencies should speed up their gathering of evidence and prosecution of the guilty, while innocents who were harassed deserve to be compensated. 

o o o

The Times of India, January 11, 2011

MAKE IT WORK

The communal violence (prevention, control and rehabilitation of victims) Bill has been debated since 2005, and seen formulations and reformulations. It's time to push it through now. The Bill's current version seems to have addressed some of the previous lacunae in addressing sins of omission or commission by a state's political, bureaucratic and security machinery by clearly detailing what constitutes dereliction of duty by government officials and increasing the prison term for anyone found guilty. A national council will be appointed that will act as an ombudsman in case of communal disturbances. There will also be state councils to be notified by the states. They are meant to monitor investigations and prosecution of cases, make sure FIRs are filed, and oversee rehabilitation of victims.

There has been opposition to the Bill, on the ground that it allows the Centre to encroach on the state subject of law and order. But given today's security environment and the necessity for states to coordinate on law and order issues, some of this is inevitable. Besides, such oversight should have a salutary effect in compelling state action to contain communal violence. Having an ombudsman in place, after all, is better than declaring President's rule in a state that allows communal violence to go unchecked. It goes without saying that such a law shouldn't be politically misused by the Centre to harass states where the opposition is in power, as that would defeat its very purpose. But given administrative laxity that's often the cause of communal disturbances getting magnified, and the grave risk to national integration that this poses, it's time for the pendulum to swing in the other direction. 

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[3]  India: 

The Hindu, January 12, 2011

SORRY PEOPLE, WE'RE HANGING UP ON YOU

by Siddharth Varadarajan

The Manmohan Singh government is digging an even bigger hole for itself by claiming there was no loss of revenue from the sweetheart sale of 2G spectrum to favoured corporate houses.

“Milord,” cunning lawyers have argued in countless Hindi movies, “how can there have been a murder when there is no dead body?” I was reminded of this line when I heard Kapil Sibal — who has been performing as an understudy at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology ever since A. Raja was ousted on corruption charges — bravely defending the legacy of his predecessor at a press conference. By attacking the Comptroller and Auditor General's 2G spectrum scam report and claiming the government lost no revenue despite the fact that “procedural irregularities in the implementation of the first-come first-served policy” may have occurred, Mr. Sibal has done the political equivalent of removing the “dead body” from the crime scene and then declaring his clients innocent. For if the government lost no money through the sale of spectrum in 2008, it stands to reason that the politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who are today being investigated could not have made any money either. Illegitimate profits cannot be conjured out of thin air — which is what spectrum essentially is. There is no dead body milord.

Sadly for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who no doubt prepped Mr. Sibal to make his ill-advised arguments, the CAG report is full of incriminating corpses. And their ghosts are likely to stick around long enough to haunt the ruling party at the time of the next general election.

The central thrust of Mr. Sibal's argument is that the PAC used flawed logic to arrive at the conclusion that the sale of Universal Access Service licenses by the Department of Telecom in 2008 led to a revenue loss of Rs.1,76,000 crore. But here's what he chose not to say. The CAG itself acknowledged in its concluding chapter that the amount of loss could be debated but “the fact that there has been loss to the national exchequer in the allocation of 2G spectrum cannot be denied.”

Indeed, the CAG made separate calculations based on four different methodologies in order to demonstrate the flawed nature of the licensing system the DoT ran. The figure cited by Mr. Sibal came from using the 3G spectrum auction proceeds as a guide to the revenue the government gave up by not auctioning 2G spectrum. Other methods used were looking at the sale of equity by shell-company licensees Swan Telecom and Unitech. Both of these companies sold a chunk of their otherwise worthless equity to established operators, thereby providing a helpful indication of what the licenses they had bought for a song were truly worth. Extrapolating from those sales figures, the CAG estimated that the government short-changed itself by anywhere from Rs.57,666 crore to Rs.69,626 crore.

The CAG report methodically establishes how the great spectrum robbery of 2008 was essentially a scam within a scam. The original scam was designed to benefit the universe of existing and potential telecom operators by selling them a scarce resource — spectrum — on a first come, first served (FCFS) basis at a seven-year-old price that had no bearing on current market conditions. Given the exponential increase in teledensity between 2001 and 2008 — by some estimates, the number of mobile subscribers had already risen from four million to 300 million and was expected to continue to grow at a rapid clip — the failure to use an efficient price discovery mechanism meant the government was prepared to forsake an enormous amount of revenue in order to benefit operators fortunate enough to get hold of new spectrum.

But having scripted super profits for the lucky telecom companies in the spectrum allocation process, it was inevitable that the politicians and bureaucrats running the show would take the next step. The only way to accumulate rent from companies benefiting from a giveaway that is available to all as a matter of policy is to use one's allocative power to favour some over others. This was the genesis of the second scam in which a handful of applicants — many of whom were completely unqualified to be applying for telecom licenses at all — were cherry-picked by the DoT in an arbitrary subversion of the first come, first served process. The CAG report demonstrates how Swan, in which the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group had a key stake, and Unitech were among the beneficiaries of this. Bank drafts and guarantees were prepared in advance by some companies who were unofficially tipped off so that their completed applications for spectrum could be submitted literally within minutes and hours of the official call going out.

Mr. Sibal, who tore into the CAG, was sporting enough to admit there may have been some wrongdoing in the manner in which the FCFS policy was implemented. At the same time, he insisted the policy of charging 2001 prices was correct and that a 2G spectrum auction would have led to an increase in the price of telecom services. What he ignores is the fact that the cost of telecom services emerging from the 2G allocation will be a function not of the absurdly low price at which the government sold spectrum but of the prevailing tariff rate in the market and also the higher resale price at which this precious commodity finally enters the system. To paraphrase an argument first made by Sunil Jain in the Financial Express last year, there was indeed an auction for 2G spectrum whether Mr. Sibal approves of auctioning or not. But this auction was conducted not by the government, as it should have been, but by the companies who benefited from the arbitrary manner in which spectrum ended up getting allocated. They simply turned around and resold what they had received to the highest bidder.

Mr. Sibal also sought to argue that the government policy on spectrum allocation — of underpricing it or even giving it away free — was justified in the name of keeping the cost of basic telephony down. He compared the Rs.17 a minute cost of a mobile phone call a decade back with the 30 paise per minute rate today to prove his point but this is a flawed argument. Most technology-driven consumer goods and services experience a declining price curve over time. I paid $1,000 as a graduate student in New York for my first laptop computer in 1990. It was a no-brand, 386 chip, 40MB hard drive heavyweight monster whose battery lasted about an hour if I was lucky. Today, $1,000 will buy you a powerful notebook and decent variants can be bought for as little as $300. It also cost me $2 a minute to call my parents back home (which is why I rarely did so). The last time I was in the U.S., I could call India for eight cents a minute. The drop in call rates has nothing to do with subsidised spectrum as Mr. Sibal would have us believe, but with competition, increases in productivity and the global ebb and flow of technological change and obsolescence which allowed Indian companies to buy 2G network equipment at a relatively inexpensive cost. In any case, even at the supposedly low call rates in India, telecom operators are making serious money. The last thing they need is a free handout in the form of an FCFS spectrum allocation policy, that too one which is rigged.

The government's argument about keeping mobile call rates low may have had some credibility if the logic was applied consistently. But everything in India is contingent on whose asset is being sold to whom. When a public asset like spectrum is to be sold to a private company like Anil Ambani's Swan Telecom, or to Tata or others, we are told the price must be kept low even if there is a revenue loss. When a public asset like food grain is to be sold to the poor under the proposed Right to Food Act, the same people say prices cannot be kept low because this would lead to a revenue loss. When a public resource like Krishna-Godavari (KG) gas comes into the hands of an industrialist like Mukesh Ambani, the price must be kept high even if this means consumers end up paying a higher price for electricity and fertilizers. From 2G to KG to CWG the system's logic and rules will always be designed to allow maximum profits for those with real connections.

The CAG in its report has demonstrated how “the entire process of allocation of UAS licenses lacked transparency and was undertaken in an arbitrary, unfair and inequitable manner … which gave unfair advantage to certain companies over others.” It was this “unfair advantage” which allowed “certain companies” to earn revenue that rightly belonged to the government. So compelling is the charge of corruption on a massive scale in the spectrum licensing matter that the Supreme Court has said it will monitor the progress of investigations by the CBI.

Public disenchantment with the corrupt ways of our political and business establishment is running so high that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was forced to promise in his New Year greetings a “course correction” that would “cleanse governance” in India. If Mr. Sibal's arguments are any indication, however, Dr. Singh's New Year resolutions have not lasted very long at all. If the UPA government continues to remain in denial, it will pay a heavy political price. At the time of the next general election, when Congress managers scratch their heads and wonder where on earth the seats to form the next government are going to come from, Mr. Sibal's arithmetic will be remembered as the point where the game which was not going the party's way anyway finally slipped out of its hands.

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[4] India: Powers That Be Protect The Rapists - Recent instances in Bihar, UP and Punjab : A call for Justice in Delhi

http://www.sacw.net/article1834.html

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[5] The response to the allegations against the WikiLeaks founder prove that when it comes to rape, the left still doesn't get it

The Nation

The Case of Julian Assange

by Katha Pollitt

December 22, 2010  

Here's what I've learned so far from the furor over the rape allegations against Julian Assange: when it comes to rape, the left still doesn't get it. The problem is not that many WikiLeaks supporters question the zeal with which Swedish authorities are pursuing Assange. Maybe it's true that an ordinary guy, faced with similar accusations, would have been allowed to slip away quietly once he left Sweden rather than become the subject of an Interpol red notice. (Maybe not, though. The eleven Swedes on Interpol's public red list include people wanted for fraud and other non-spectacular crimes. Much has been made of the fact that only one of these, an alleged child molester, is charged with a sex crime. But the vast majority of wanted people are privately listed, so actually there's no way of knowing if Assange's case is exceptional.) Given that US politicians, from Joe Biden to Sarah Palin, have called for Assange's head, it isn't paranoid to suspect that he is being singled out in order to extradite him to the United States. But it could also be that Sweden is following up because prosecutors get mad when world-class celebrities flee the country and then thumb their noses at them—cf. Roman Polanski.

What's disturbing is the way some WikiLeaks admirers have misrepresented the allegations, attacked the women and made light of date rape. It's been known for some time that Assange was accused of using his body weight to force sex on one woman, ignoring her demand that he use a condom, and penetrating the other woman while she slept, also without a condom despite her wishes; but writer after writer has treated the whole thing as a big joke. It was "sex by surprise"—some arcane Swedish thing—wrote Dave Lindorff on Truthout. Plus, Assange didn't tell the second woman about the first and didn't return her phone call. Hell hath no fury like a groupie scorned. Appearing on Keith Olbermann's show after he put up $20,000 to help bail Assange out of a British jail, Swedish rape law expert Michael Moore called the case "a bunch of hooey": "the condom broke during consensual sex." Olbermann made matters worse when he retweeted Bianca Jagger's tweet linking to a post on Mark Crispin Miller's blog claiming that Assange accuser "Miss A" had "interacted" in Cuba with an anti-Castro women's group supported by terrorist and former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles, and had published anti-Castro "diatribes" in a Swedish magazine. You would think the left would be more sensitive to charges of guilt by association—since when did marching in a demonstration mean you sign on to everything its supporters support? By those lights, everyone who went to an ANSWER-sponsored march against the Iraq War thinks North Korea is a Marxist paradise.

And everyone who believes and promotes the "information" that "Miss A" is a CIA "honeytrap" is an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier. Because the original source for that story is one Israel Shamir, writing in Counterpunch and vigorously defended by Counterpunch editor and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, who also belittles the accusations as "unsafe sex and failure to phone his date the following day." I spent a few hours on www.israelshamir.net and learned that: "the Jews" foisted capitalism, advertising and consumerism on harmonious and modest Christian Europe; were behind Stalin's famine in Ukraine; control the banks, the media and many governments; and that "Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; the world is." There are numerous guest articles by Holocaust deniers, aka "historical revisionists." We have now produced on the left an echo chamber like that on the far right, where the scurrilous charges of marginal fanatics are disseminated through electronic media and end up, cleansed of their original associations, as respectable opinion.

The heroic Sady Doyle, a blogger at Tiger Beatdown, gets lots of credit for starting a Twitter campaign that forced Moore and Olbermann to—sort of—back off their sexist chortling. But it's too late: the "revelations" that Sweden has laws against condomless sex and that "Miss A" is a CIA "honeytrap" are all over the left blogosphere. And it isn't just men who are spreading it. On The Huffington Post, Naomi Wolf posted a satirical letter to Interpol, aka the "World's Dating Police," repeating the broken-condom falsehood and adding that Assange's crimes include "texting and tweeting in the taxi...while on a date and, disgustingly enough, 'reading stories about himself online' in the cab." Is this the same Naomi Wolf who wrote a 2004 New York magazine cover story accusing Harold Bloom of putting his hand on her thigh twenty years previously? Wolf argues that the accusations against Assange demean the seriousness of rape. In fact, Swedish law does distinguish among degrees of rape, with Assange being accused on one count of the least grave kind. In a much-cited letter to the Guardian, Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape argued that Sweden's low rape conviction rate proved that Assange was being set up—in 2006, she claimed, only six people were convicted out of 4,000 reported. Not so. "I don't know where they got those figures," Amnesty International's Katarina Bergehed told me by phone from Sweden. "In 2006 there were 3,074 rapes and 227 convictions." (Sweden tracks rape by individual acts, not by number of victims, so its rape rate is lower than it looks.) Bergehed should know: she wrote the Swedish section of the Amnesty report on sex crimes in the Nordic countries that Assange supporters cite as proving that Sweden is the worst place in Europe for rape victims. One reason the Swedish rape conviction rate is low is that, thanks to thirty years of feminist progress, the law defines sexual violence and coercion broadly, but as in other countries, police and juries often do not. The same seems to be true of large swaths of the American left.

WikiLeaks is revealing information citizens need to know—it's a good thing. Assange may or may not have committed sex crimes according to Swedish law. Why is it so hard to hold those two ideas at once?

Editor's note: An earlier version of this column included one of the accuser's names, which we decided to publish because it has been reported in other outlets. On deeper consideration we regret that decision, and we apologize for any harm it may have caused.

December 22, 2010   |    This article appeared in the January 10/17, 2011 edition of The Nation. 

o o o

Naomi Wolf: Wrong Again on Rape

by Katha Pollitt

January 10, 2011  

Should the press reveal the names of complainants in rape cases? In the Guardian, Naomi Wolf says yes—beginning (but you knew this was coming) with the two women who've accused Julian Assange of forcing his attentions—his condomless attentions—on them. The same women she previously mocked on HuffPo as jealous whiners, and on Democracy Now!, accused of giving mixed messages to an ardent bedmate. No "let's wait until the trial," for her.

Anonymity, Wolf argues, is a relic of the Victorian era, when raped women were seen as damaged goods; permits stereotypes about rape victims to flourish, since people don't see that "ordinary women" get raped; harms women by treating them as children rather than moral agents; and impedes law enforcement. This last point is a little bizarre: doesn't Wolf realize that anonymity applies only to the media? Everyone in the justice system knows who the complainants are. Wolf also, as she often does, gets her facts wrong: Anita Hill, whom she cites as bravely volunteering her name and thereby spurring a great wave of "equal opportunity law," was not a complainant in a legal case. She was subpoenaed as a witness in the Senate hearings. Anonymity was never an option for her. Furthermore, Hill's allegations against Clarence Thomas had nothing to do with rape, so why is Wolf even talking about her? Hill is in fact, the only real-life modern woman Wolf mentions in a piece that name checks Virginia Woolf, Coventry Patmore and Oscar Wilde.

Call me cynical, but I don't think Wolf would be taking this line, either about anonymity or date rape, if the accused were, say, George W. Bush, or, for that matter, Joe Sixpack. This is all about protecting Assange from what she believes are politically motivated charges. In other contexts, Wolf seems aware enough of the risks of exposure for women who accuse men of even minor acts of sexual aggression. After all, in 2004 she confessed in New York magazine that for twenty years she had not "been brave enough" to mention to any living soul that Harold Bloom had "sexually encroached upon" her by groping her thigh when he was her professor at Yale. Does she think she would have been more courageous if going to the dean would have meant seeing her name on the front page of the Yale Daily News, the New Haven Register and maybe even, given Bloom's celebrity, the New York Times? In fact, Wolf waited decades to make a peep and is furious at Yale, all these years later, for not acting on her non-complaint.

In defending her attacks on the women in the Assange case, Wolf often mentions her experience as a counselor and reporter on rape (she's reported on rape "more than any journalist I know," as she modestly put it on Democracy Now!). Does she really think rape victims (including of course male rape victims) would side with her on this? Yes, Naomi, I would like my extremely conservative extended family to know all about how I came not to be the virgin they think I am! Oh, Naomi, please, it's so important that everyone I meet knows I was raped at a frat party, because otherwise how will they know how to set up a group on Facebook calling for me to be sodomized unto death? The trouble with declaring anonymity an outworn custom is that the Victorian code that shamed rape victims is with us today, it's just that to the stereotypes of the sullied virgin and chaste wife have been added the crazy lying slut, the cocktease and the repressed frump who secretly "wants it." If Wolf has really spent as much time with rape victims as she claims, I can't believe she doesn't know how ready people are to attack the credibility of just about anyone who brings a charge of rape, including, often, the accuser's own friends and family. Disproving her own thesis, Wolf is quite willing to assume the worst about the Assange accusers, based on Internet rumors, early misreportings and spin from Assange and his lawyer.

I'm the first to admit that anonymity in this particular case is a close call at this point, since, although I've always supported anonymity for sex-crimes complainants, at the last minute I decided to name "Miss A" in my column two weeks ago. My thinking was that she had no real privacy left: her name is all over the Internet (some 113,000 Google hits); "Miss A" just looked so silly on the page. (I was also under the mistaken impression that, post-outing, the women had accepted a public role; in fact, they've been attacked so viciously, that Miss W has gone into hiding and Miss A has moved to the West Bank.) A number of people objected when the piece came online, and that night my editor and I changed it back to "Miss A." Better look a little prim than help the pack baying for their hides. (The original version still exists in the print magazine.)

Rape victims already face formidable obstacles in getting justice, which is a big reason why so many don't go to the police. (In the US, only about 13 percent of reported rapes result in a conviction; in the UK, it's about 6 percent.) Wolf argues that victims of other crimes don't get anonymity, but in no other crime do complainants face anything like the skepticism and hostility widely meted out to those who report sex crimes, especially when the accused is famous, respectable, admired, important or even just good-looking. Never mind what publicizing names would do for "women," the theoretical construct. What about the actual human beings who have been the victims of sex crimes? Why does Wolf want to increase their suffering? Isn't it bad enough that the police may well not take them seriously, their rape kits may not be processed, their credibility will be attacked in court in a way that would never happen if the crime were burglary or mugging and, if the defendant looks like one of their own—their son, their brother—at least some members of the jury will be looking for reasons to acquit?

Watch out for people who want to make life harder for real-life women on the grounds that it'll help "women." There is no end of ways in which increasing the odds against already victimized people can be portrayed as good for them—look at the debates around welfare and affirmative action. The best way to help real life rape victims is to make it easier for them to report attacks against them, so that the perpetrators can be brought to justice and prevented from harming others. If what women see all around them is that those who come forward have their lives shredded and their reputations, thanks to the Internet, forever linked to their most traumatic experience, they will decide, in even greater numbers than now, that coming forward just isn't worth it.

Right now, nothing prevents rape complainants from outing themselves, and some have done so. More power to them. But extraordinary heroism should not be forced on people, especially if the result is more silence for victims, more impunity for perpetrators. Naomi Wolf, who kept her own secret until the time was right for her, regardless of the effect on other women, should be the first to understand that.


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[5] Announcements:

(i) ARTISTS IN SOLIDARITY WITH DR BINAYAK SEN

An afternoon of cultural protest by artists, musicians, poets, film directors and writers against the persecution of Dr Binayak Sen will be held on 15th January at Jantar Mantar from 2-7 PM under the banner of ‘Artists for Human Rights’. 

Among those participating are well-known film directors Aparna Sen, Gautam Ghose and Sudhir Mishra together with musicians Rabbi Shergill and Susmit Bose. Among the poets and writers attending the cultural protest will be Ashok Vajpeyi, K.Satchidanandan, Kumarnarain, Mangalesh Dabral, Gagan Gill, Sanjay Kundan, Teji Grover, Khursheed Alam, Mukul Priyadarshini and Gauhar Raza.

There will also be music performances by other artists and student bands from different colleges in Delhi in solidarity with Dr Binayak Sen.

All are invited to come and attend the protest.


For further information contact:
Satya Sivaraman: Ph: 9818514952
Apoorvanand: 27662146
Manisha Sethi: 9811625577

o o o

(ii)  INVITATION

 PRESS CONFERENCE & PREVIEW

Lalit Kala Akademi, National Academy of Art, Ministry of Culture, Government of India, is organizing a major exhibition entitled ‘Against All Odds: A Contemporary Response to the Historiography of Archiving Collecting and Museums In India’ from 13 to 27 January 2011 at Lalit Kala Akademi Galleries, 35 Ferozeshah Road New Delhi. This exhibition on Indian Contemporary Art is curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala, Curator and Gallerist. This show will showcase works of art by 20 well-known Indian artists.

Details of the exhibition is as follows: 

Exhibition title: ‘Against All Odds: A Contemporary Response to the Historiography of Archiving Collecting and Museums In India’

Cuarted by: Arshiya Lokhandwala 

Date:  12 January 2011

Time: 3:00 pm
Venue: Lalit Kala Akademi Board Room, 2nd Floor, Rabindra Bhavan, 35, Ferozeshah Road, New Delhi 110001
Ph: 011 23009200 or 23387621


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