SACW Jan 14-15, 2011 / Nepal citizenship / Afghan woman at peace table? / India: Minorities and Far Right / Pakistan: Salman Taseer

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire -  Dispatch No. 2697 - January 14-15, 2011
From: sacw.net

[1]  Nepal: Broaden Citizenship Provisions (HRW Press Release)
[2]  Pakistan: Salman Taseer Remembered (Tariq Ali)
[3]  In Afghanistan, a woman's place is at the peace table (Ann Jones)
[4]  India: Crusaders against India’s Christians  (J Sri Raman)
[5]  India: Safdar Hashmi - A Fitting Tribute to a Communist Artist (Sudhanva Deshpande)
[6]  India: Where people and their stories built a movement (Ruchir Joshi)
[7] Europe: Nazi Death Marches (Jan Friedmann)

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[1] Nepal:

Human Rights Watch

Press Release

NEPAL: BROADEN CITIZENSHIP PROVISIONS
DRAFT CONSTITUTIONAL REQUIREMENTS WILL CAUSE STATELESSNESS

January 14, 2011

(New York) - Draft articles on citizenship in Nepal's proposed new constitution risk making many Nepali children stateless, Human Rights Watch said today. Some of the proposed citizenship provisions are sharply at odds with Nepal's obligations under international law as well as the explicit commitment in the draft constitution itself to prevent statelessness, Human Rights Watch said.

The current draft, as modified by the High Level Task Force created to review the draft constitutional provisions in November 2010, specifies that a child would automatically be granted Nepali citizenship only if both parents prove they are Nepali citizens. Human Rights Watch urges the Constituent Assembly to amend the draft to allow a child born to either a Nepali mother or a Nepali father to be able to claim citizenship by descent.

"If these provisions on citizenship are passed into law, Nepal may have a crisis of statelessness on its hands," said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Instead of leveling up to ensure fair and equal access to citizenship for children born in Nepal, this proposal would level down to make acquiring citizenship difficult for many more children."

The anticipated new constitution is expected to provide greater protection of fundamental rights, in particular for minorities, women, and marginalized and vulnerable groups. Human Rights Watch expressed concern, however, that the 28 political parties endorsed the draft citizenship provisions of the High Level Task Force on January 3, 2011, in spite of the problems inherent in the provisions.

The current draft attempts to rectify existing discriminatory legislation that guarantees citizenship by descent only to children born to Nepali fathers. But it means that children with one Nepali and one foreign parent would be ineligible for citizenship if the foreign parent cannot or does not wish to take on Nepali citizenship.

In addition, provisions in the proposal would only allow a child of a Nepali parent married to a foreign spouse to apply for citizenship by naturalization after the parents have lived in Nepal as a married couple for 15 years, assuming that the parent is approved for naturalization, which is a matter of state discretion.

The requirement for both parents to prove citizenship for a child to be granted citizenship by descent is a source of concern, Human Rights Watch said, especially with regard to women. Human Rights Watch research suggests that for Nepali women in particular, the securing legal proof of citizenship can be very difficult, especially when male family members refuse to assist them or are unavailable to do so. Denying women proof of citizenship is an expedient way of ensuring that they cannot assert their rights to marital property, inheritance, or land.

"The government should take extra care to protect the vulnerable, in this case children, regardless of the whims of a parent or the discretion of local authorities," Pearson said. "The Nepali authorities need to ensure that every child born in the country is guaranteed their right to acquire a nationality and not be left stateless."

Research commissioned by the Government of Nepal in 1995 established that approximately 3.4 million qualifying Nepalis lacked citizenship certificates. Through a major government effort to rectify this problem, 2.6 million of those people were able to get citizenship documents. But at least 800,000 Nepalis currently do not have citizenship certificates.

In light of population growth, the actual number of persons lacking citizenship certificates is likely to be considerably higher, with estimates ranging from between two million to five million people out of a population of about 29 million who might be entitled to citizenship but lack documents, according to independent groups studying the issue. Children of these parents could be excluded from effective access to citizenship rights under the proposed provisions.

"Nepal is at a critical and exciting point in its history, as it drafts a new constitution designed to protect all its people equally," Pearson said. "No one should fall through the gaps in this process, least of all vulnerable groups such as children."

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[2] Pakistan
 
London Review of Books
Vol. 33 No. 2 · 20 January 2011
pages 11-12 | 2126 words

SALMAN TASEER REMEMBERED

by Tariq Ali

You are invited to read this free essay from the London Review of Books. Subscribe now to access every article from every fortnightly issue of the London Review of Books, including the entire archive of 12,574 essays.

Mumtaz Hussain Qadri smiled as he surrendered to his colleagues after shooting Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, dead. Many in Pakistan seemed to support his actions; others wondered how he’d managed to get a job as a state bodyguard in the carefully screened Elite Force. Geo TV, the country’s most popular channel, reported, and the report has since been confirmed, that ‘Qadri had been kicked out of Special Branch after being declared a security risk,’ that he ‘had requested that he not be fired on but arrested alive if he managed to kill Taseer’ and that ‘many in Elite Force knew of his plans to kill Salman Taseer.’

Qadri is on his way to becoming a national hero. On his first appearance in court, he was showered with flowers by admiring Islamabad lawyers who have offered to defend him free of charge. On his way back to prison, the police allowed him to address his supporters and wave to the TV cameras. The funeral of his victim was sparsely attended: a couple of thousand mourners at most. A frightened President Zardari and numerous other politicians didn’t show up. A group of mullahs had declared that anyone attending the funeral would be regarded as guilty of blasphemy. No mullah (that includes those on the state payroll) was prepared to lead the funeral prayers. The federal minister for the interior, Rehman Malik, a creature of Zardari’s, has declared that anyone trying to tamper with or amend the blasphemy laws will be dealt with severely. In the New York Times version he said he would shoot any blasphemer himself.

Taseer’s spirited defence of Asiya Bibi, a 45-year-old Punjabi Christian peasant, falsely charged with blasphemy after an argument with two women who accused her of polluting their water by drinking out of the same receptacle, provoked an angry response from religious groups. Many in his own party felt that Taseer’s initiative was mistimed, but in Pakistan the time is never right for such campaigns. Bibi had already spent 18 months in jail. Her plight had been highlighted by the media, women had taken to the streets to defend her and Taseer and another senior politician from the Pakistan Peoples Party, Sherry Rehman, had demanded amendments to the blasphemy laws. Thirty-eight other women have been imprisoned under the same law in recent years and soon after a friendly meeting between Yousaf Gillani, the prime minister, and the leader of the supposedly moderate Jamaat-e-Islami, a member of the latter offered a reward of ten thousand dollars to whoever manages to kill Bibi.

Taseer’s decision to take up Bibi’s case was not made on a whim. He had cleared the campaign with Zardari, much to the annoyance of the law minister, Babar Awan, a televangelist and former militant of the Jamaat-e-Islami. He told journalists he didn’t want the socio-cultural agenda to be hijacked by ‘lunatic mullahs’, raged against governments that had refused to take on fanaticism, and brushed aside threats to his life with disdain. He visited the prison where Bibi was detained – the first time in the history of the Punjab that a governor has gone inside a district jail – and at a press conference declared his solidarity with her. ‘She is a woman who has been incarcerated for a year and a half on a charge trumped up against her five days after an incident where people who gave evidence against her were not even present,’ he told an interviewer. He wanted, he said, ‘to take a mercy petition to the president, and he agreed, saying he would pardon Asiya Bibi if there had indeed been a miscarriage of justice’.

Two weeks after this visit Taseer was dead. I never much cared for his business practices or his political affiliations and had not spoken to him for 20 years, but he was one of my closest friends at school and university and the two of us and the late Shahid Rehman – a gifted and witty lawyer who drank himself to death many moons ago – were inseparable. Some joyful memories came back when I saw his face on TV.

It’s 1960. The country is under a pro-US military dictatorship. All opposition is banned. My parents are away. The three of us – we are 17 years old – are at my place and we decide that something has to be done. We buy some red paint and at about 2 a.m. drive to the Cantonment bridge and carefully paint ‘Yankee Go Home’ on the beautiful whitewashed wall. The next morning we scrub the car clean of all traces of paint. For the next few weeks the city is agog. The story doesn’t appear in the press but everyone is talking about it. In Karachi and Dhaka, where they regard Lahore as politically dead, our city’s stock rises. At college our fellow students discuss nothing else. The police are busy searching for the culprits. We smile and enjoy the fun. Finally they track us down, but as Taseer notes with an edge of bitterness, Shahid’s father is a Supreme Court judge and one of my aunts is married to a general who’s also the minister of the interior, so naturally we all get off with a warning. At the time I almost felt that physical torture might be preferable to being greeted regularly by the general with ‘Hello, Mr Yankee Go Home.’
LRB Mug

Two years previously (before the dictatorship) the three of us had organised a demonstration at the US Consulate after reading that an African-American called Jimmy Wilson had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. On that occasion Salman, seeing that not many people had turned up, found some street urchins to swell our ranks. We had to stop and explain to them why their chant of ‘Death to Jimmy Wilson’ was wrong. Money changed hands before they were brought into line. Years later, on a London to Lahore flight, I met Taseer by chance and we discussed both these events. He reminded me that the stern US consul had told us he would have us expelled, but his ultra-Lutheranism offended the Catholic Brothers who ran our school and again we escaped punishment. On that flight, more than 20 years ago, I asked him why he had decided to go into politics. Wasn’t being a businessman bad enough? ‘You’ll never understand,’ he said. ‘If I’m a politician as well I can save money because I don’t have to pay myself bribes.’ He was cynical in the extreme, but he could laugh at himself. He died tragically, but for a good cause. His party and colleagues, instead of indulging in manufactured grief, would be better off taking the opportunity to amend the blasphemy laws while there is still some anger at what has taken place. But of course they are doing the exact opposite.

Even before this killing, Pakistan had been on the verge of yet another military takeover. It would make things so much easier if only they could give it another name: military democracy perhaps? General Kayani, whose term as chief of staff was extended last year with strong Pentagon approval, is said to be receiving petitions every day asking him to intervene and ‘save the country’. The petitioners are obviously aware that removing Zardari and replacing him with a nominee of the Sharif brothers’ Muslim League, the PPP’s long-term rivals, is unlikely to improve matters. Petitioning, combined with a complete breakdown of law and order in one or several spheres (suicide terrorism in Peshawar, violent ethnic clashes in Karachi, state violence in Quetta and now Taseer’s assassination), is usually followed by the news that a reluctant general has no longer been able to resist ‘popular’ pressure and with the reluctant agreement of the US Embassy a uniformed president has taken power. We’ve been here before, on four separate occasions. The military has never succeeded in taking the country forward. All that happens is that, instead of politicians, the officers take the cut. The government obviously thinks the threat is serious: some of Zardari’s cronies now speak openly at dinner parties of ‘evidence’ that proves military involvement in his wife Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. If the evidence exists, let’s have a look. Another straw in the wind: the political parties close to the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, have withdrawn from the central government, accusing it of callousness and financial malfeasance. True, but hardly novel.

Another necessary prerequisite for a coup is popular disgust with a corrupt, inept and failing civilian government. This has now reached fever pitch. As well as the natural catastrophes that have afflicted the country there are local wars, disappearances, torture, crime, huge price rises in essential goods, unemployment, a breakdown of basic services – all the major cities go without electricity for hours at a stretch and oil lamps are much in demand in smaller towns, which are often without gas and electricity for up to 12 hours. Thanks to the loan conditions recently imposed by the IMF – part of a gear change in the ‘war on terror’ – there have been riots against the rise in fuel prices in several cities. Add to this Zardari’s uncontrollable greed and the irrepressible desire of his minions to mimic their master. Pakistan today is a kleptocracy. There is much talk in Islamabad of the despised prime minister’s neglected wife going on a shopping spree in London last month and finding solace in diamonds, picking up, on her way back home, a VAT rebate in the region of £100,000.

Can it get worse? Yes. And on every front. Take the Af-Pak war. Few now would dispute that its escalation has further destabilised Pakistan, increasing the flow of recruits to suicide bomber command. The CIA’s New Year message to Pakistan consisted of three drone attacks in North Waziristan, killing 19 people. There were 116 drone strikes in 2010, double the number ordered in the first year of the Obama presidency. Serious Pakistani newspapers, Dawn and the News, claim that 98 per cent of those killed in the strikes over the last five years – the number of deaths is estimated to be between two and three thousand – were civilians, a percentage endorsed by David Kilcullen, a former senior adviser to General Petraeus. The Brookings Institution gives a grim ratio of one militant killed for every ten civilians. The drones are operated by the CIA, which isn’t subject to military rules of engagement, with the result that drones are often used for revenge attacks, notably after the sensational Khost bombing of a CIA post in December 2009.

What stops the military from taking power immediately is that it would then be responsible for stopping the drone attacks and containing the insurgency that has resulted from the extension of the war into Pakistan. This is simply beyond it, which is why the generals would rather just blame the civilian government for everything. But if the situation worsens and growing public anger and economic desperation lead to wider street protests and an urban insurgency the military will be forced to intervene. It will also be forced to act if the Obama administration does as it threatens and sends troops across the Pakistan border on protect-and-destroy missions. Were this to happen a military takeover of the country might be the only way for the army to counter dissent within its ranks by redirecting the flow of black money and bribes (currently a monopoly of politicians) into military coffers. Pakistani officers who complain to Western intelligence operatives and journalists that a new violation of sovereignty might split the army do so largely as a way to exert pressure. There has been no serious breach in the military high command since the dismal failure of the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy, the first and last radical nationalist attempt (backed by Communist intellectuals) to seize power within the army and take the country in an anti-imperialist direction. Since then, malcontents in the armed forces have always been rapidly identified and removed. Military perks and privileges – bonuses, land allocations, a presence in finance and industry – play an increasingly important part in keeping the army under control.

Meanwhile, on a visit to Kabul earlier this month, the US homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, announced that 52 ‘security agents’ were being dispatched to the Af-Pak border to give on the spot training to Afghan police and security units. The insurgents will be delighted, especially since some of them serve in these units, just as they do in Pakistan.

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[3] Afghanistan:

Los Angeles Times

IN AFGHANISTAN, A WOMAN'S PLACE IS AT THE PEACE TABLE
Let women play a bigger role in the country's affairs and see what happens to the peace process.

By Ann Jones

January 13, 2011

Looking for a way out of Afghanistan? Maybe it's time to try something totally different, like putting into action, for the first time in history, the most enlightened edict ever passed by the United Nations Security Council: Resolution 1325.

Passed on Oct. 31, 2000, the resolution was hailed worldwide as a great victory for both women and international peace. In a nutshell, it calls for women to participate equally in all processes of conflict resolution, peacemaking and reconstruction.

The resolution grew out of a recognition that while men at the negotiating table still jockey for power and wealth, women who are included commonly advocate for interests that coincide perfectly with those of civil society. They are concerned about their children and consequently about shelter, clean water, sanitation, jobs, healthcare, education — the things that make life livable for peaceable people.

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It's been nine years since I started doing aid work in Afghanistan, and I am frustrated by the lack of progress toward a peaceful and livable society.

Yet whenever I present my modest proposal for the implementation of 1325 to American big men who lay claim to expertise on Afghanistan, most of them strongly object. They know the theory, they say, but they are precluded from throwing their weight behind the resolution by delicate considerations of "cultural relativism." Afghanistan, they remind me, is a "traditional" culture when it comes to women. Westerners, they say, must respect that.

Yet the eagerness of Western men to defer to this "tradition" seems excessive, especially since few of the Afghan men who actually governed Afghanistan between 1919 and 1989 would have shared their sentiments.

Modern ideas, including the idea of equality between the sexes, have been at the heart of Afghan cultural struggles for at least a century. In the 1920s, King Amanullah founded the first high school for girls and the first family court to adjudicate women's complaints about their husbands; he proclaimed the equality of men and women, banned polygamy and the burka and banished ultraconservative mullahs who undermined the moderate Sufi ideals of Afghanistan. His modern ideas cost him his crown, but Amanullah and his modern, unveiled queen, Soraya, are remembered for their brave endeavor to drag the country into the modern world.

Thousands of Afghan citizens have shared Amanullah's modern views, expressed later by successive leaders, kings and communists alike. But in 2001 the U.S. — and by extension the entire international community — cast its lot with Hamid Karzai. We put him in power after a power-sharing conference in Bonn, to which only two Afghan women were invited. We paid millions to stage two presidential elections, in 2004 and 2009, and looked the other way while Karzai's men stuffed the ballot boxes. Now, it seems, we're stuck with him and his ultraconservative, misogynist "traditions," even though an ever-growing number of Afghanistan watchers now identify the Karzai government as the single greatest problem the U.S. faces in its never-ending war.

And what has Karzai done for the women of Afghanistan? Not a thing.

That's the conclusion of a recent report issued by the Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium, an association of prominent aid and independent research groups in Afghanistan. Afghan researchers conducted extensive interviews with prominent male religious scholars, male political leaders and female leaders at the local, provincial and national levels.

The report notes that Karzai has supported increasingly repressive laws against women, most notoriously the " Taliban-style" Shia Personal Status Law, which not only legitimizes marital rape but prevents women from stepping out of their homes without their husbands' consent. The report points out that this law denies women even the basic freedoms guaranteed all citizens in Afghanistan's 2004 constitution.

In fact, Karzai's record on human rights, as the report documents, is chiefly remarkable for what he has not done. He holds extraordinary power to make political appointments, yet today, after nearly 10 years in office, only one Cabinet ministry is led by a woman: the Ministry for Women's Affairs, which has only advisory powers. Karzai has appointed only one female provincial governor among 33 men. (Is it by chance that her province, Bamian, is generally viewed as the most peaceful in the country?) Among Afghanistan's city governments, he has named only one female mayor. And to the Supreme Court High Council, he has appointed no women at all.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when Karzai named a High Peace Council to negotiate with the Taliban, its members initially consisted of 60 men and no women. They were the usual suspects: warlords, Wahhabis, mujahedin, all fighting for power to the bitter end. Under international pressure, Karzai belatedly added 10 women to the group. The U.S. has signed off on this lopsided "peace" council.

I suppose this means my modest proposal doesn't stand a chance, and that's a shame. We know from experience that power-sharing agreements among combatants tend to fray, often unraveling into open warfare within a few years. We also know that just because the big men in power stop shooting at each other doesn't mean they stop the war against civilians — especially women and girls. Rape, torture, mutilation and murder continue unabated or increase.

Thus, from the standpoint of civilians, a war is not always over when it's "over," and the "peace" is not necessarily a real peace at all. Think of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the notorious rape capital of the world, where thousands upon thousands of women have been gang-raped even though the country has been officially at peace since 2003.

I don't expect men in power to take seriously the Security Council's proposition that the involvement of women in negotiations makes for a better and more lasting peace. Progressive, peaceable men would prefer to live in a peace created by women and men together. But too many big men, in both Afghanistan and the U.S., are doing very nicely, thank you, with the traditional arrangements of their country and ours.

Ann Jones is the author of, among other books, "War Is Not Over When It's Over" and "Kabul in Winter." A longer version of this piece appears at tomdispatch.com.

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

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[4] India: Minorities and The Far Right
 
Daily Times
January 14, 2011

CRUSADERS AGAINST INDIA’S CHRISTIANS 

by J Sri Raman

Parivar operations have included a holy war against a minuscule Christian minority, totalling 2.4 percent of the country’s population. Gujarat under Narendra Modi holds the dubious record of having witnessed the goriest and most horrendous anti-Muslim violence in 2002

True, India has no blasphemy laws. But does it have no Aasia Bibis? No Indian court has sent a man or woman of Aasia’s religion to death for the crime she is alleged to have committed. Does the country, however, not have kangaroo courts of a kind that order and carry out punishments on people for the offence of being or having become Christians? The answers are affirmative in both cases. The parivar, India’s far-right ‘family’, of course, focuses its hate campaign against the country’s largest minority. Muslim-baiting has always remained its main occupation and preoccupation. It is not so well known to the wider world that Christian-bashing comes a close enough second in its list of devoutly performed duties.

This should be no surprise to anyone with even a sketchy idea of the ideology of the parivar, especially its patriarch, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). This ideology was spelt out in unmistakable terms by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, better known to his flock as Guru Golwalkar, who headed the RSS from 1940 to 1973 (thus constituting a bridge between the parivar generations before and after independence). A Bunch of Thoughts, a post-independence collection of the Guru’s sayings and speeches, was prescribed reading for the parivar for long years.

The book ends with a chapter titled ‘Internal threats’. The three threats listed and treated at some length are: Muslims, Christians and Communists. The present-day parivar leaders may pretend now and then to have given up some of the Guru’s extreme ideas. But the hit list has continued to guide the operations of the so-called Hindutva brigades.

The operations have included a holy war against a minuscule Christian minority, totalling 2.4 percent of the country’s population. Gujarat under Narendra Modi holds the dubious record of having witnessed the goriest and most horrendous anti-Muslim violence in 2002. It is not so well-known that an attack on tribal Christians in the Dangs area of Modi’s territory preceded and paved the way for the more infamous pogrom.

Violence erupted in the southern Gujarat district on Christmas Day, 1998. Churches and missionary institutions were attacked and many of them burnt down. Later, investigations left no doubt that the attacks by the parivar armies on several villages around the same time had been meticulously planned.

The Christmas campaign followed a year-long propaganda offensive through parivar leaflets portraying the missionaries, in true far-right style, as traitors. The leaflets urged the Christian tribesman to “purify yourself through yagna (ritual sacrifice) and become a Hindu”. They were warned of dire consequences if they did not heed the counsel of Hindutva.

All this was accompanied by a campaign against education imparted by Christian missionaries. One leaflet, baring a familiar stamp of the far-right, said, “Friends, we Hindus keep awake day and night and earn our living through hard work but do we ever think about the education of our children? With the intention of giving them the best education, you get them admitted in schools such as St Xavier’s and St Anne’s and consider it prestigious. In fact, this is the biggest mistake of your life.”

The leaflet added, “On account of... the Christian education influenced by the Christian tradition, when your child becomes a youth, he or she is already a half Christian.” This was a lie that millions of non-Christians educated in these institutions could nail easily. The campaign, however, continued.

A parivar propagandist, Nagendra Rao, sounded like former US President George Bush when he said, “If Muslims and Christians use perfidy and force in conversion, as they frequently do, we have to meet it with merciless ferocity and militant determination....Collateral damage in such cases is regrettable (but cannot be helped).”

The then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee reacted predictably to the black Christmas in Dangs. Initially, in New Delhi, he called the incidents “shameful”. On proceeding to Gujarat, however, his tone underwent a total transformation. He declared, “There is need for a national debate on conversions.” The parivar militants took this as a go-ahead for furthering this particular far-right campaign, and not only in Gujarat. Orissa on India’s eastern coast became their next target.

Orissa claimed world attention with the assassination of Australian missionary Graham Staines. Binayak Sen was not the first medical missionary to incur the parivar’s wrath. Baptist preacher Staines, ministering to leprosy patients since 1965, was killed along with his sons Philip (10) and Timothy (6), burnt alive in a jeep while sleeping in it in January 1999. The parivar had hounded him for “harvesting souls”, though his efforts led to no dramatic rise in the district’s Christian population.

It was yet another cruel Christmas, when minority-baiting mobs struck again. Mobs attacked churches and burnt down houses and other property. The affected villages had no protection from the police or any paramilitary force against the 4,000-strong far-right army.

There was yet another round of anti-Christian violence in August 2008. This followed the killing of a leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a vanguard of the violent campaigns in both Gujarat and Orissa. The minority community faced retaliatory attacks of brutal ferocity despite the fact that a Maoist group, active in the area, had owned responsibility for the killing. Over 3,000 Christian tribesmen fled for their lives and ended up as refugees in relief camps. Many stayed on in these camps without the minimum of facilities. The parivar mobs made sure that the refugees could not return to their homes unless they were ready to publicly renounce their faith and perform appropriate prayashchit (atonement).

The political front of the parivar, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), played its part as well. The party was then a junior partner in the government of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and used its crucial support for the government’s survival to fuel the violence.

This unremitting orgy of violence in the unfortunate Kandhamal region of Orissa has actually continued to be justified by the parivar. Right in 2008, the Orissa BJP took the stand that “the Kandhamal riot occurred because NGOs (a euphemism for Christian organisations) have instigated and conspired to bring about conversion with the foreign funds. It was necessary to implement hard the laws pertaining the ban on conversion.”

The party and the parivar have stuck to the stand, even while several human rights organisations have reported the state of terror in which the minority population continues to live here. Even in October 2009, then BJP President Rajnath Singh said that there “is a need to check large scale religious conversions carried out by foreign forces”, because “foreign missionaries are using religion to infiltrate India and corrupt its culture”. Ultimately, “illegal mass conversions” are a “threat to national security”.

The fanatics in Pakistan, in other words, share a common target and hate object with the far-right in India. No wonder, over 70 Indian Muslim organisations and a large number of Muslim intellectuals have condemned Salmaan Taseer’s killing. The intellectuals have also denounced the “reprehensible law” on blasphemy, sought to be enforced in so brutal a manner.

They were speaking as one minority for another. What the cause of democracy demands in India and South Asia is an assertion of the solidarity of the peace-loving majority with persecuted minorities of religions and all other kinds.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint

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[5]  

People's Democracy
January 09, 2011

JANAM REMEMBERS MARTYR SAFDAR HASHMI
A Fitting Tribute to a Communist Artist

by Sudhanva Deshpande

THE first of January is a very special day for the residents of Jhandapur. This is the day that they come out in large numbers, in a festive spirit, to remember and celebrate the legacy of Safdar Hashmi, the actor-playwright who was killed as a result of an attack on Jana Natya Manch on January 1, 1989. Also killed in that attack was Ram Bahadur, a Nepali migrant worker, who worked in a factory near-by.

Jhandapur itself is about 14 kilometres from the centre of Delhi. It is an urban village near Maharajpur, housing mainly industrial workers. There are a large number of industrial establishments here, in what is called the Site IV, Sahibabad Industrial Area. Many are relatively small units, but some are large, like bicycle manufacturers, iron smelters, pharmaceutical units, machine tools manufacturers, employing a thousand workers or more.

Given its proximity to Delhi, and especially because of its proximity to Anand Vihar which is becoming a major transport hub, the area itself is changing quite rapidly. Over the past five-seven years, many industrial establishments have shut down. On both sides of the Maharajpur border stand imposing shopping malls, and there is another big mall down the road near the Dabur factory. As you turn left to go towards Jhandapur past Maharajpur, you can see a huge ‘business park’ on the right and a Ford Endevour showroom on the left. Both stand at sites that housed factories earlier. Indeed, many factories in the area have shut down, because the owners find it more profitable to sell or rent out the premises. While the industrial area is still pretty large, the signs of de-industrialisation are also unmistakable.

As you go into Jhandapur (or anywhere in the Site IV Industrial Area, for that matter), you can sense a feeling of anxiety and anger among the workers. There is an overall sense of something smoldering below the surface. In the second week of November, a manager of a brake-shoe manufacturing unit in the area was killed following an altercation with workers. 27 workers have been accused of beating him to death, including two senior trade union leaders, neither of whom was present at the site of the incident. A further 350 unidentified workers are named in the FIR.

Upendra Jha, a CITU leader and one of the speakers at the rally of workers on January 1 following the performance of Jana Natya Manch’s play, did not refer to this particular incident in his speech – but he did not need to. When he spoke about the conditions under which workers today have to work, the audience of several thousand understood exactly what he was referring to, because the conditions at the brake-shoe factory are in no way unique. The two major issues facing workers today, he said, are (1) while the workday is supposed to be eight hours, everywhere 12 hours is becoming the norm, and (2) a large majority of workers are kept on contract and not regularised, even though they may have worked at a factory for as long as a decade.
 
Consider the case of the brake-shoe factory where the incident took place. Frontline magazine reports that this company ‘employed workers on contract basis and it is said that even workers who had put in over ten years of service had not been regularised. The company has 375 workers on its permanent rolls and 900 on contract; of the 900, around 700 are employed in direct production work, which is of a permanent nature.’ In other words, workers who are doing non-seasonal, steady, stable production work for years are not given the security of employment. Naturally, one of the major demands in this company (as elsewhere) is that workers on regular, production-related work be given regular employment.

Jha made the observation that increasingly, the type of people that the management was employing as ‘managers’ was changing – in the past managers had no compunctions in turning to goons to intimidate workers, but now increasingly, goons themselves were being employed as managers. When Jha said that today ‘personnel manager’ means a person with a pistol, a murmur of recognition ran through the workers, who knew this to be all too true. Again, though Jha did not take names, the case of the brake-shoe factory should be noted. A few weeks before the incident in mid-November, the management had sacked eight workers without notice. A number of other provocative steps were also taken by the management. The workers had remained peaceful, and wanted to sort out the issue through negotiation. On the day of the incident, the management arbitrarily moved two union leaders to different departments without even informing them. When the workers protested, the manager opened fire. This led to the altercation that resulted in his death. Jha said that the workers were not going to take the strong arm tactics of the management lying down, and warned of impending struggles if the employers did not mend their ways. The meeting to celebrate the legacy of the communist artist Safdar Hashmi became, quite fittingly, an occasion to assert workers’ rights and solidarity.

The other speakers at the meeting included Vasudev, Rajasthan state secretary of the CPI (M), and Amra Ram, leader of the legislative group of the CPI (M) in the Rajasthan assembly. Vasudev paid glowing tributes to Safdar Hashmi. He recalled that barely a week before the fatal attack in Jhandapur, Safdar had come to Sadarshahar in Rajasthan with Jana Natya Manch. Janam had performed Halla Bol (the play which was to be attacked in a week’s time) and Aurat. Watching Halla Bol, Vasudev, said, was a moving and inspiring experience, because the play was connected to the struggles of the Delhi working class. Vasudev recalled that after the play, he said to Safdar that Janam must prepare a similar play on the peasant situation. He said that his connection with Safdar was very personal, since his wife also acted in plays, and in fact the very first meeting he attended, just a day after his wedding, was to protest Safdar’s killing.

The programme on January 1 this year began with Janam singing songs in memory of Safdar and performing its new play, Jab Chale Khap Ka Latth, on the infamous khap panchayats. After the play, there was a performance of a play by Jana Natya Manch, Kurukshetra, based on Munshi Premchand’s classic story, Sadgati. The group also sang a number of melodious songs.

The attack took place on  January 1, 1989, and Safdar died in hospital on the 2nd. Accordingly, every year on that day, Janam organises a small intimate meeting where friends and comrades remember Safdar and share his memories. This is also a wonderful way of acquainting younger comrades with the many facets of his personality. This year, the main speaker at the meeting was Murli Manohar Prasad Singh, who used to be a leader of the teachers’ movement in Delhi University and is now connected with the Janwadi Lekhak Sangh. He recalled that he first met Safdar in the early 1970s, when Safdar was still a teenager and Singh himself was a Naxal. Safdar posed some sharp questions to him. Later, during the Emergency, when Singh was arrested, he recalled that the police also questioned him about how he knew Safdar. After his release, and his disenchantment with Naxal adventurism and their refusal to take part in mass politics, Singh came over to the CPI (M) and had occasion to work closely with Safdar over several years.

The other speakers at the meeting were Sania Hashmi and Brijesh. Sania, a Janam actor who is also Safdar’s niece, was four when he was killed, and came into Janam later because she wanted to connect with Safdar’s work. Brijesh, Janam actor and writer, came in contact with Safdar because he was part of a group of young doctors who were in the 1980s quite interested in cultural activities. He recalled how Safdar gradually started bringing him closer to the movement without his even realising it. He was appreciative of the fact that Safdar had a way of communicating his politics without thrusting it upon people.

Janam also organises a poetry reading session in memory of Safdar, since he himself was very fond of poetry. Last year, poems by Faiz and Majaz were read, and this year, the focus was on three more centenarian poets: Nagarjun, Shamsher, and Kedar Nath Agarwal.

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[6] 

The Telegraph
14 January 2011

 AT THE TURN OF THE ROAD - Where people and their stories built a movement

THE THIN EDGE: RUCHIR JOSHI

Talking about the kinds of surprises thrown up by the campaign for the right to information, Shankar Singh of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan tells an interesting story. “The sarpanch of a local village had listed three check dams among the projects completed with the funds his panchayat had received for public works. Three check dams over a period, each with a name and a completion date, which all looked very good and proper on paper. The people verifying the work looked at the signature of the government’s junior engineer who had checked and cleared the work on the first dam and summoned him to take them to the dam. The J.En took them to the dam, they checked it and it was fine: the materials used were as per specifications, the construction was good, it all seemed above board. Then they called the J.En who’d signed off on the second dam and this man took them to see the one he’d inspected. When they arrived, the people realized they had been brought to the same check dam but from a different route. When they asked the second engineer, he said ‘But this is the route by which the sarpanch brought me!’ Okay. So they asked for the engineer who’d cleared the third check dam, yet another junior engineer, a third one, and you know what? He took them to the same dam again but by a third route!”

Shankarbhai and his comrades in the MKSS have many funny stories to tell but if you listen to them, a very unfunny picture emerges of rural India and of this particular corner of central Rajasthan. There is the goonda who spent 25 lakh to win the election for sarpanch in a poor village, a small investment on the huge dividends he would later rake in from the budget he would control. There is the man who filed a right to information petition on a project and had his legs chopped off for his trouble. There is the breakdown of weekly expenditure in the village of the farmer and activist, Lalsinghji, where each person ‘spends’ Rs 5 on education, Rs 20 on food and Rs 30 on alcohol pouches and biris — the women and children don’t drink or smoke, but the men make sure their consumption keeps the per capita averages high. And then there is the MKSS man who filed an FIR with the local police thana to report that someone had stolen his village’s check dams. This part of the country is mostly made up of people struggling to find work that will help them put together two meals a day. This area also has quite a few people who thrive by regularly and with impunity siphoning off money, grain and resources supposedly allocated for the poor. It is a picture we’ve seen laid out for us many times, in news reports, in articles by journalists, by the occasional documentary or TV snippet, and it is a picture we can swipe aside easily to allow other, more comfortable, images to occupy our minds.

We arrive at Devdungri in the evening. The cluster of houses is a few metres off one of the best stretches of highway in the country, a picture that we ‘Indians’ proudly love: this bit of NH-8 is a beautiful new road, with little blinking reflectors on the tarmac catching the headlights, direction markers in fluorescent yellow clearly escorting the road as it winds and slopes through hilly Rajasthan brush. You could be anywhere in the developed and prosperous world, except if you remember you’re in India then it’s clear that no embezzlement has been allowed to interfere with the ‘face’ we show to the outsiders, not excluding tourists who might motor down this road to Udaipur.

A couple of teenage boys are waiting at the side of the road with a solar lamp and, when I pull over, they get into the car. “Zindabad, bhai.” “Zindabad.” They greet us and guide me over a bumpy track to park next to a mud wall enclosing a small cluster of huts. Inside, on the chawk between the kitchen and the sleeping hut, we are met by a couple of other members of the Sangathan. I return the ‘Zindabad’ mixed judiciously with ‘hello’ and ‘namaste’ because I’m far from sure I have any right to partake in the revolutionary greeting. No one seems to mind. They are not looking for our bona fides or any kind of password; they know we are only here for a day and two nights to get a tiny sense of the work they’ve been doing and we are shown around the small hut area with warmth and light formality. The MKSS was begun in the late 1980s by Aruna Roy, Shankar Singh and Nikhil Dey. Two of them, Nikhil and Shankarbhai, are here tonight, but there is nothing particular to mark them out from the others — swaddled in shawls and anoraks they go about their business while talking to us and explaining things. Inside the small kitchen hut we are give a meal of roti and dal, basic but delicious, after which we hit the sack. The next morning, Shankarbhai takes over the tea-making and the cooking, something which is done by everyone in turns. There is a faint hierarchy of the more experienced over the newer or younger members of the collective but it is deceptive: the next day I see a younger colleague tear strips off an older one for failing to carry out some important tasks to do with the hut and living arrangements.

As the winter sun rises on a clear blue day, it is hard to connect this motley bunch of people to the huge movement they sparked off. Starting work in the area, the MKSS kept coming across one obstacle — it was impossible to get hold of accounts of how public money had been spent by officials and local elected politicians. When they got hold of a few leaked accounts they found huge discrepancies between what was supposed to have been spent and what was actually spent. Daylight robbery had been committed over decades, looting everything from emergency funds for drought relief to regular annual budgets for school buildings and sanitation projects. The MKSS began to hold jan sunvais, public courts where the leaked accounts were read out and tallied with what people could point out. Fraud of all sorts from false names on payrolls to the aforementioned ghost-dams came to light and pointed to one thing: the public had a right to know how their money was being spent and by whom. From this began the right to information campaign that ripened into the Right to Information Act passed by the Congress-led government that came to power in 2004.

As people have pointed out, Right to Information is not a magic bullet that will right all the country’s wrongs (there is no RTI vis-à-vis the private sector, there are many problems that cannot be countered simply by information and records) but it is a hugely effective weapon in the arsenal of development activists and social movements. The beauty of the argument is that it’s very hard for anyone to publicly denounce it: everybody but everybody officially hates corruption and everybody but everybody loves to point their fingers at others for being corrupt. This means that the MKSS and others can get into a non-adversarial relationship with the state bureaucracy even as many within officialdom try their best to sabotage the Act and the movement.

The second night I’m there, a busload of IAS interns arrive on this stop of their Bharat Darshan. These are the future girders of the steel frame who will rule us in the years to come and, for some reason, I’ve been picturing dour, cynical older people, mostly men, who will come and listen impassively as Nikhil and Shankar and others expand on the ideas and history behind the movement. What the Chetak unloads is a bunch of fresh-faced kids between twenty-four and thirty, jeans, backpacks, mp3 players and branded sneakers. As many young women as young men, and from all over India. As they stand around like high-school kids, polite hands behind their polite backs, listening to the plans for the next couple of days, I see the huge, wide-eyed respect they have for this organisation and the people from whom it’s constituted.

“We have no projects, no handicrafts, no buildings or farms to show you,” says Nikhil Dey. “All we have is our people, us, and you should just speak to us individually and in groups to get our stories.”

I try and connect these youngsters to the typical image of the corrupt or arrogant IAS babu basking in his or her burgeoning bank balance and bribes and I find it impossible. It’s in large part thanks to groups like the MKSS that this connection may become increasingly difficult to make in the coming years.


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[7] History of German Fascism

SPIEGEL ONLINE, 14 January2011

NAZI DEATH MARCHES
BOOK DETAILS GERMAN CITIZENS' ROLE IN END OF WAR KILLINGS 

by Jan Friedmann

More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in death marches shortly before the end of World War II. Many of them were murdered by German civilians. A new book tries to answer the question why.

The end was in sight, with Allied troops already on the outskirts of the city. Nevertheless, a number of citizens of Celle in north-central Germany became murderers on April 8, 1945.

They participated in the hunt for hundreds of concentration camp prisoners who, during an American bombing attack on the city and its train station, had fled from the freight cars, some of them in flames, in which they were being transported. Local police officers, guards and members of the Volkssturm national militia and the Hitler Youth executed their victims in a nearby forest.

The prisoners were "killed like animals," many of them execution style, according to a British military report. Up to 300 people died in the massacre, with the leader of a Hitler Youth group in Celle killing more than 20 alone. The Allies captured the city four days later.

The outbreak of violence in this part of the state of Lower Saxony is described in detail in a book by Daniel Blatman, "The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide," which comes out in German translation this week. The book addresses the broader issue of the death marches of concentration camp prisoners in 1944 and 1945, during the waning months of the war.

Lives Filled with Suffering

Blatman, a historian at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, comes to an unsettling conclusion about the last phase of the Nazi mass murders: "The more the war approached its end, and the more obvious the prisoners' presence in the midst of the German population became, the more regularly German civilians participated."

Those civilians included government and local officials, members of the Nazi Party and the Hitler Youth, as well as local residents. They abused or killed large numbers of those who, in the last stage of their lives filled with suffering, were forced on marches or had spent days being transported across Germany in overfilled freight cars.

At least 250,000 former prisoners lost their lives on death marches between January and May 1945. Their graves line roads in parts of Lower Saxony, Bavaria and Mecklenburg, and in almost all of the places where the Nazis had built their camps.

The death marches began in occupied Poland, where the SS emptied out the larger camps in places like Majdanek, Gross-Rosen and Auschwitz as the front approached. Many prisoners were not even given enough time to pack their few belongings. Often clothed in nothing but rags and wearing wooden shoes, they staggered across the overcrowded roads in the bitter cold.

Attacking the Weakest

The prisoners were forced to share the roads with retreating German soldiers and civilians fleeing from the Red Army. All too often, the fears of the panicked masses erupted into violence against the weakest of those with whom they shared the route.

The tone was set by the SS, whose guards murdered without restraint. In Palmnicken, for example, 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the former East Prussian city of Königsberg (today's Kaliningrad), the henchmen drove more than 3,000 prisoners from the Stutthof camp, who had been marching for days, onto the beach of the frozen Baltic Sea and mowed them down with their machine guns.

A few weeks later, the death marches led directly through the territory of the German Reich. In one case, prisoners from the Hessental camp near Schwäbisch Hall in southwestern Germany were forced to march eastward toward Bavaria. After the war, investigators with the French occupation force unearthed mass graves in several locations along the route. They found 17 bodies in Sulzdorf, 36 in Ellwangen and 42 in a village called Zöbingen. Death marches that began at the Dachau concentration camp passed through Poing near Munich and continued through Wolfratshausen and Bad Tölz. Groups of prisoners from the Flossenbürg camp crisscrossed Bavaria.

The number of perpetrators continued to grow. Historian Blatman estimates that thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of ordinary citizens became accomplices of the murderous regime near the end of the war. In the northern city of Lüneburg, for example, a scenario similar to what had happened in Celle unfolded on April 11, 1945, when civilians and police officers captured prisoners who had escaped from a train that had been bombed. Members of the German navy later shot the prisoners at the Lüneburg train station.

Merciless Sadists

There is no historical evidence that anyone at the very top, such as Hitler or SS chief Heinrich Himmler, gave the orders to liquidate the camps. The last weeks of the war were characterized by a gradual breakdown of administrative order. The jurisdiction over the groups of prisoners being forced to march around the country changed in rapid succession, and many local officials acted on their own authority when deciding what to do with the prisoners.

But why did so many officials behave with such brutality, and why did ordinary civilians become involved, when it was already clear that the Nazis' "final victory" was a fantasy?

To answer this question, Blatman cites the example of the guards, a group of people who had become merciless sadists over the years. The concentration camp guards saw themselves as frontline soldiers against the enemy within, and as defenders of the Aryan race and the superior nation. Now that they were no longer working in the camps, they continued their mission, except that they were relieved of their prescribed routines. Worried about being caught by the Allied soldiers in the company of bands of walking skeletons, they chose to kill the potential witnesses instead.

Similar motives also turned many people on the home front into prepetrators when the trains filled with prisoners suddenly arrived in their towns. Mayors, local party officials and men with the Volkssturm militia were determined to prevent the oppressed concentration camp inmates from gaining their freedom in their own backyards and exacting revenge for the injustices they had suffered. This logic led them to believe that they were protecting the welfare and safety of their fellow citizens by killing the strangers in their striped prison uniforms.

Zebra Hunting

A decade of indoctrination, or what Blatman calls a "genocidal mentality" that had systematically dehumanized the Jews and the Slavs, led to the collective hunt. Adolescent members of the Hitler Youth often reached for their guns as a matter of course.

Of course, there were also farmers who handed bread or potatoes to the starving prisoners or concealed them. There are also accounts of cases in which prominent local residents, including a lower-level Nazi official and a respected attorney in Burgstall in the Altmark region of eastern Germany, rescued larger groups.

But many of the marches ended in disaster, as was the case in Gardelegen, a town in east-central Germany, where US soldiers found hundreds of charred and mangled bodies in a barn in mid-April 1945. They were the bodies of prisoners from various camps who had been forced inside.

It was later discovered that people had volunteered to guard the prisoners, "including ordinary civilians, some of them armed with hunting rifles, who mutated into prison guards of their own volition," Blatman writes. The massacres began when the prisoners were being marched to an empty cavalry school in Gardelegen, where they were housed temporarily, and where adolescents boasted: "We're going hunting, to shoot down the zebras."

'Responsibility of the Entire German People'

Men from the Volkssturm militia, police officers, soldiers from a paratrooper division barracked nearby, guards and civilians helped drive the doomed prisoners into the barn. Then they locked the doors, lit gasoline-soaked straw on the ground and tossed hand grenades into the building. Anyone who attempted to escape the inferno ran into a hail of bullets. Some 25 prisoners survived, while about 1,000 died.

A few days later, the victims were given a burial with military honors. The Americans ordered the residents of Gardelegen to attend the ceremony.

"Some will say that the Nazis were responsible for this crime," Colonel George P. Lynch, chief of staff of the 102nd US Infantry Division, told the Germans. "Others will point to the Gestapo. The responsibility rests with neither. It is the responsibility of the entire German people."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan


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