SACW - 20 June 2011 / Sri Lanka: Militarised University / Pakistan: Media Freedoms & booze / Bangladesh: Faith & State ; Male violence / India: MGNREGA , corruption

Harsh K aiindex at gmail.com
Mon Jun 20 00:16:41 EDT 2011


     South Asia Citizens Wire - 20 June 2011 - No. 2717
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Contents:

I.
+ Bangladesh: The international crimes tribunal and the question of standards (David Bergman)
+ Casteism versus Communalism in India (Asghar Ali Engineer)
+ Sri Lankan Government Overtly Pushing Religious Doctrine 
+ The UN Report on Accountability in Sri Lanka: Substance and Reactions (Rohini Hensman) 
+ Compulsory training of university entrants by the military risks perpetuating the troubles of divided Sri Lanka (Rohini Hensman)
+ Dying to Tell the Story (Umar Cheema)
+ The Poison of Male Violence (Naeem Mohaiemen)
+ Undermining people’s power - A story of five years (Nikhil Dey)

II.
[Selected recent content on Communalism Watch:
China to fund Nepal to build 'Buddhist Mecca'
Ramdev’s non-profit outfits face probe in US
Muslim wife beater claims domestic violence Act not applicable to him since he married under sharia law
M.F. Husain: Victim of Intolerance
Husain's enduring legacy for India

III.
[Selected Full Text Content Follows]
Hate-crimes against the Ahmedis (Editorial, Daily Times)
For God’s sake! (Abbas Zaidi)
Triumph of faith over State (Sumit Mitra)
The name has a history (Editorial, The Telegraph°
Hobson’s choice (Jawed Naqvi)
A very special case: Wielding arbitrary power for the good (Partha Chatterjee)
“Deny! Deny!” (Uri Avnery)


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++    
+ Bangladesh: The international crimes tribunal and the question of standards 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++     

WHAT kind of rights should those accused of having committed international crimes during Bangladesh’s war of Independence be entitled to? Should the seven men now detained by the International Crimes Tribunal have fewer rights than those available to the men and woman accused of crimes (...)

-> http://www.sacw.net/article2152.html


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++    
+ Casteism versus Communalism in India 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++     

It is also wrong to assume that all upper caste Hindus are anti-Muslim. It is extremists among dalits who maintain that all Brahmins are against Muslims and they conspire to establish a Hindu Rashtra. Some may be of such views and indeed are. But a sweeping generalization in this respect would (...)

-> http://www.sacw.net/article2151.html


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++    
+ Sri Lankan Government Overtly Pushing Religious Doctrine 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++     

Governments are not elected to dictate religious doctrine to its people. We elect our legislators to run the state. We elect legislators to make the decisions we cannot. What they are not expected to do is to propagate and literally shove down everybody’s throats, religious doctrine. The (...)

-> http://www.sacw.net/article2149.html


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++    
+ The UN Report on Accountability in Sri Lanka: Substance and Reactions 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++     

The report by a UN panel of experts on accountability in Sri Lanka found credible allegations of war crimes as having been committed by both the Sri Lankan government’s armed forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at the end of the civil war between September 2008 and May 2009. (...)

-> http://www.sacw.net/article2148.html


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++    
+ Compulsory training of university entrants by the military risks perpetuating the troubles of divided Sri Lanka 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++     

Students in Britain have protested vociferously against government cuts in education funding, and rightly so. But students in Sri Lanka, where state-funded higher education is also under attack, face an additional ordeal: compulsory "leadership and positive attitude development" of university (...)

-> http://www.sacw.net/article2147.html


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++    
+Dying to Tell the Story
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WE have buried another journalist. Syed Saleem Shahzad, an investigative reporter for Asia Times Online, has paid the ultimate price for telling truths that the authorities didn’t want people to hear.

-> http://www.sacw.net/article2155.html

 	
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++    
+The Poison of Male Violence
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

By now, the macabre details of Syeed Sumon’s ferocious attack on Rumana Manjur is in many newspapers. The question is not, why did Rumana stay silent, the question is why did we? What is the monstrous society we created that a woman can be beaten for 10 years but does not find the social support to leave and file an assault case against the husband? Among many factors is this horrendous and murderous idea of izzat. Izzat of family, of marriage, of women; forcing hundreds of thousands of women to silently endure beatings at the hands of husbands. And when society sees those bruises at a wedding dawat, they avert their eyes politely.

-> http://www.sacw.net/article2154.html


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+Undermining people’s power - A story of five years
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

More than five years have passed since the world’s largest employment programme was launched in India. The scale of employment generated was not the only reason that this is a path breaking legislation.

-> http://www.sacw.net/article2153.html

--------------

[Selected recent content on Communalism Watch:

China to fund Nepal to build 'Buddhist Mecca'
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/06/china-to-fund-nepal-to-build-buddhist.html
Ramdev’s non-profit outfits face probe in US
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/06/ramdevs-non-profit-outfits-face-probe.html
Muslim wife beater claims domestic violence Act not applicable to him since he married under sharia law
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/06/muslim-wife-beater-claims-domestic.html
M.F. Husain: Victim of Intolerance
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/06/mfhusain-victim-of-intolerance.html
Husain's enduring legacy for India
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/06/husains-enduring-legacy-for-india.html

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[Selected Full Text Content Follows]


Daily Times, 15 June 2011

EDITORIAL: Hate-crimes against the Ahmedis

Pamphlets giving a call to kill members of the Ahmediyya community in the name of Islam are openly being distributed in Punjab. Not only do these pamphlets glorify the killing of innocent people but the addresses of many prominent Ahmedi businessmen, senior teachers and doctors who reside in Faisalabad have been published. Despite the fact that there are laws in our statute books against incitement to violence and murder, no action has so far been taken against the publishers of these pamphlets, i.e. the department of publications and broadcasting, International Organisation of Protection of Prophethood Mediation of Muhammad (PBUH), All Pakistan Students Khatam-e-Nabuwat Federation. The PML-N’s Senator Pervaiz Rashid was not aware of these pamphlets but assured that the Punjab government will investigate and take action against the hatemongers. It is imperative that the authorities take strict measures against the bigots who are spreading hate literature and make sure that such acts do not go unchecked like they have in the past. It seems that laws against incitement are only there on paper. This has to change.

The Ahmediyya community in Pakistan has faced persecution at the hands of the state and bigots alike for decades. From being declared non-Muslims in 1974 during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s rule to General Ziaul Haq’s draconian Ordinance XX issued in 1984, the Ahmedis have been threatened, harassed and killed while those who are responsible for these gruesome acts of incitement and violence go unpunished. Last year on May 28, two Ahmedi worship places were attacked and more than 80 people lost their lives. Even though a year has passed, we still do not know what happened to the investigations. It speaks volumes about the justice system of our country when we have yet to see justice being served for late Governor Punjab Salmaan Taseer’s brutal murder. His case is subject to postponement after postponement because the government is unable to find a judge to hear the case.

Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah is alleged to have ties with the leaders of a banned organisation. This does not augur well for the province if its own law minister is giving patronage to militant outfits. The PML-N government in Punjab must stop bigotry from spreading its tentacles all over the province. The Ahmedis are as much Pakistanis as anyone else and they must not be treated as pariahs. The state must ensure their safety and punish all those who are fuelling hatred in our midst. *


o o o

Daily Times, 15 June 2011 	

VIEW: For God’s sake! 

by Abbas Zaidi

If possession of liquor, and not its consumption, is a crime, Odho should face justice. The question is: is possessing two bottles of liquor such a big crime that the Chief Justice of Pakistan feels forced to take a suo motu action?

In March 1977, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto spoke to the people of Lahore for the last time. National elections were only days away. He spoke to the people in the backdrop of a vicious one-point propaganda that his Islamist-opponents of the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) had been spreading against him day and night: “Bhutto drinks alcohol!” His God-fearing opponents, backed by the equally God-fearing US, had been saying that the people of Pakistan must not vote for the party led by a sharaabi (drinker).

On that particular day in Lahore, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of people who watched Bhutto. He said to the people: “They [the mullahs] say that I drink alcohol. Yes I drink alcohol, but I do not drink the people’s blood!” At that, the people of Lahore gave him a very long and thunderous ovation. They had accepted Bhutto, the alcohol drinker, because they did not want a bloodthirsty ruler to replace him. But they were proved wrong within weeks. Little did they realise, including Bhutto himself, that within months an army-judiciary axis will legitimise, sanctify, and Islamise bloodletting and slaughtering, and wage a jihad against minor crimes like possessing liquor, just possessing, not its consumption, and saying, just saying, that the generals should be held accountable for spending billions from the exchequer.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has used his judicial prerogative and got Attiqa Odho in deep trouble for carrying two bottles of liquor. If possession of liquor, and not its consumption, is a crime, Odho should face justice. The question is: is possessing two bottles of liquor such a big crime that the Chief Justice of Pakistan feels forced to take a suo motu action? Can any legal luminary come up with just one instance where such a minor crime (is it a crime or an offence, by the why?) compelled a suo motu action from the highest judicial authority of a country? What is the nature of suo motu? Why is the power of suo motu exercised in the first place? Had the government of Pakistan, the executive, failed to tackle a stupendous crime (possession of liquor by a woman) that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had to intervene?

Anyone who has a modicum of humanity left in him or her will cry to see the brutality of the law enforcing and security forces of our ‘sacred institutions’. The chief justice took only hours to take suo motu against Odho. It has been more than two weeks since our ‘brave law enforcers’ kicked a young man to death in Karachi, just because he was one of a few dozens who were protesting against the electricity outage in his area. This violent murder of a ‘bloody civilian’ was reported only on one channel. What about the Kharotabad bloodbath carried out by the soldiers of the paramilitary Frontier Corps? It has been more than three weeks, but the Chief Justice has not done anything. No suo motu.

And what about Syed Saleem Shahzad? The way he was tortured and killed is horrible. But no suo motu notice was taken.

Is the blood of those who, within their legal rights, happen to annoy the security forces cheaper than alcohol? Sitting in Bankstown, a suburb of Sydney, I have watched the video of 19-year old Sarfaraz Shah brutally killed by the Rangers and his screams and pleas after having been shot (“Take me to the hospital!”) still echo in my ears. But, like many other Pakistanis, I believe nothing will happen. He will be forgotten just like thousands of people whom the state has killed because they refused to live like nodding donkeys. An ‘inquiry’ will be held. But nothing will happen. No one will be punished. Only a few months before, the Supreme Court announced that it would not hear any case, which might involve “our intelligence agencies”. Does an instance in the history of justice and the judiciary exist where the highest court of a state has explicitly said that it would not touch the intelligence agencies? Such a ruling emboldens those who violate the law and cut down civilians with complete impunity.

The writer is the author of Two and a Half Words and Other Stories. He can be reached at hellozaidi at gmail.com

o o o

The Hindustan Times, June 14, 2011

Triumph of faith over State

by Sumit Mitra

In 1988, when HM Ershad, a dodgy army general leading Bangladesh at that time, amended the constitution, he cleverly substituted the word “secular” in the State policy with “Islamic”. The civil society, which had supported Bangladesh’s secular constitution, was aghast at Islam being made the State religion. Fifteen of them filed a writ before the apex court, the core argument of which was that “a religion like Islam cannot be controlled by the State, and a sovereign nation-state cannot be dictated by the canons of Islam.”

After being in the freezer for 23 years, the matter is out again. The court has now asked the Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina why it has not yet been annulled. Hasina is the daughter of Mujibur Rahman, founder of the nation and architect of the secular constitution. However, a committee of lawmakers dominated by the Awami League has given its verdict. It does not want Islam to cease to be the country’s State religion. Interestingly, Ershad was not only the League’s ally in the last elections in 2008 but the architect of the ‘grand alliance’ (mahajot), instrumental in the previous incumbent Khaleda Zia’s electoral debacle. Mujibur Rahman’s idea of separation between Islam and the State has been scuppered by not only his political opponents but by his own kin.

The French-style ‘active neutrality’ of the State towards religion that Mujib had introduced got diluted after his assassination in 1975. Ziaur Rahman, the military ruler who took over soon after Mujib’s assassination, introduced the words Bismillah’ir Rahman’ir Rahim on top of the constitution’s preamble. And he wanted India to be put at a distance. The State radio, for example, stopped saying ‘Joy Bangla’ under him and chanted ‘Bangladesh Zindabad’ instead; the former was considered too close to ‘Jai Hind’ while the idea was to make it sound like ‘Pakistan Zindabad’.

It was clear that once the West Pakistani hegemony was obliterated, the Muslim identity of Bengalis was manifest again. Even then, all that it led Bangladesh to was a liberal form of Islam. But Ershad went several notches further. He sought realignment with Pakistan, a desire that also remained a strategic aim of the Bangladesh National Party under Khaleda Zia, Ziaur Rahman’s widow.

However, India need not read too much meaning into Hasina’s decision to let the Islamic state stay as it can well be a ploy to deflate Khaleda’s relentless campaign against her for being, among other things, an ‘Indian agent’. Besides, an overdose of secularism has not succeeded in the Islamic world — be it in Soviet-supported Afghanistan, in Iran under the Shah or Turkey under the pro-military secularists whose banning of headscarf became a moving metaphor of human liberty and its infringement in Nobel winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. In Turkey, liberal Muslim AK Party’s third consecutive electoral victory this week carries its own message to overzealous secularists.

However, not all Muslim-majority states are Islamic either. Indonesia is an example. Despite al-Qaeda attacks on its soil, it has limited its assertion of faith to “belief in one supreme God” and has given official status to as many as six religions, including Islam and Hinduism. However, the fact that Bangladesh has chosen a different kind of relation between the mosque and the State is a product of its own historical and cultural development.

The writ by Bangladesh’s citizens as early as 1988 shows a paradox that cannot be resolved by politicians. Justice Kamaluddin Ahmed, who took a leading part in drafting the petition, questioned how a sovereign State could have Islam as its “State religion”? Religion recognises no border. If it becomes the State, it cannot be subordinate to the sovereignty of a State. It is a dilemma that the Bangladesh secularists identified with uncanny prescience. Pakistan is paying a huge price for living with this contradiction. Bangladesh under Hasina has now welcomed it.

( Sumit Mitra is a Kolkata-based political commentator )

The views expressed by the author are personal

o o o


The Telegraph, 12 June 2011

Editorial

THE NAME HAS A HISTORY

A name can be easily changed. But history cannot be altered. The past in that sense is definite and inert. The name, West Bengal, has a very important and tragic piece of history attached to it. The adjective West before Bengal immediately denotes a separation, since it suggests that it has or had a complement to it called east Bengal. The name, West Bengal, gestures towards incompleteness. The first political attempt to divide east and west Bengal was made by Lord Curzon in 1905, when he tried to divide the province of Bengal through an administrative fiat. The move backfired because it gave rise to the first mass movement against British rule and its policies of divide and rule. The move to erect a barrier between a Muslim majority east Bengal and a Hindu dominated west Bengal was resisted and Curzon’s order had to be rescinded by Lord Hardinge. If the partition of Bengal was resisted, the partition of India was not. Thus in 1947, what had previously been referred to as east Bengal became East Pakistan, and in 1971, Bangladesh. The name, West Bengal, contains within it this piece of history. West Bengal was born because east Bengal was given away to another country. A line drawn on a map became an international border. Any attempt to change the name of West Bengal, under whatever pretext, is an attempt to overlook and tinker with this bit of history.

This is the political side of the story. What is undeniable is that in times past, there existed a cultural distinction between west and east Bengal. This should not suggest that there was no cultural exchange and interaction between the two regions of the same province. In the 19th century, people from east Bengal — east of the river Padma — were often the butt of ridicule in Calcutta. But the jokes lost their humour once people from east Bengal, from Dhaka, Bikrampur and elsewhere, began to dominate the professional world of Calcutta. The sense of cultural superiority that the people of west Bengal had cultivated vis-à-vis their peers from the east became a caricature of itself. The cultural distinction, in fact, did not provide grounds for the political division of the province. The creation of East Pakistan and therefore of West Bengal was an arbitrary act.

Apart from the fact that neither history nor culture provides reasons for changing the name of West Bengal, there are other reasons for maintaining the same name. The frequent renaming of cities, streets and states is a futile and time-wasting exercise. Dropping the word West from the name of the province will entail elaborate legal steps and will have to be followed by alterations in various places, from government lists to stationery. All this to what purpose? The previous government of the state spent enough energy and money in the useless exercise of changing names. Mamata Banerjee has better things to do. The people of the province will remain what they are with or without the West.

o o o

Dawn, June 9, 2011

Hobson’s choice

by Jawed Naqvi

FOR over two decades, roughly since the end of the bipolar world, many people in different countries have faced a Hobson`s choice. In India, they have endured bone-crushing poverty with rampant corruption that came clothed as free-market reforms. The choice they faced was worse — life- sapping religious fascism.

It may not have been a coincidence, therefore, that an ancient mosque was demolished in Ayodhya within months of Dr Manmohan Singh`s arrival as finance minister, triggering religious violence that has become a festering wound. The ensuing political arithmetic suited both the casually secular Congress and the revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Votes were garnered over cynical slogans of communalism and minority rights but the outcome — the electoral mandate — was uniformly handed over to free-market mandarins.

The story is nearly the same in today`s Pakistan where an overtly secular government is widely perceived as corrupt amid accusations of doing secret deals with the IMF behind the people`s back. The lure is that it offers a sliver of hope for a quasi-resolute stand against an ever-growing storm of religious and ethnic fanaticism.

In Afghanistan, the Hobson`s choice is mutating into a trade-off between a corrupt regime sponsored by the West and a return of the Taliban, also supervised by the West`s benign gaze. A government-backed survey in Kandahar last year found more than 70 per cent citizens as not having faith in the state`s capacity to curb corruption. On the other hand, 53 per cent claimed the Taliban were incorruptible.

A UN committee backed by the United States and Britain is preparing to lift international sanctions on a number of former Taliban figures in Afghanistan. It is all claimed to be part of reconciliation for peace talks. The BBC`s Paul Wood informed us from Kabul this week that 47 such men had been selected by the committee for the lifting of travel sanctions, releasing their frozen accounts and, intriguingly, permission to buy arms. Richard Barrett, the coordinator of the Taliban Sanctions Committee, said flatly: “The Taliban will come back.” He added that there was no military solution.

In the meantime, Fareed Zakaria was interviewing the spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt for the CNN, getting assurances from the hitherto banned group of a syncretic multi-cultural future for the strategically vital Arab country. In India too a vital discourse on governance and probity has been handed over to religious figures and narrow nationalists. Rightly or wrongly, the burgeoning middle class perceives religious leaders as honest brokers against a habitually vile establishment. Mercifully, there is still room to delight in the farce of what is evolving as a situational tragedy.

As the police swooped to pick him up past midnight from his sprawling makeshift Delhi camp, Baba Ramdev instinctively hid behind his agitated yoga students. In the melee, as the police lobbed a few teargas canisters to tame the crowd, the Baba quickly discarded his trademark saffron dhoti for a woman`s shalwar suit. If he was caught before he could flee, it was because of his unkempt beard, which did not match the outfit he had changed into.

Cut to Maulana Abdul Aziz of Islamabad`s Lal Masjid in July 2007. Didn`t he try to dress up as a woman — albeit more cleverly — in a burqa, mindful of his giveaway grey beard? Pakistan`s federal troopers homed in on his stronghold anyway and proceeded to unveil the cleric before a gaggle of bemused cameramen. At least 20 people were killed in that police-extremist standoff and dozens seriously injured. One woman was critically injured in the Delhi operation, but the Baba`s supporters described the police highhandedness as violence in Jalianwala Bagh.

Bereft of his saffron dhoti, and if you can visualise him with a Taliban-style headgear, Ramdev can easily pass for a battle-scarred field commander from the ravines of Gardez. A healed gash on his forehead could pass for shrapnel wound and a twitching smaller eye would not be unlike some of the icons unearthed from the extremist fringe. Ramdev strikes a more purposeful similarity with the Taliban, not the least in his intense desire to rid his country of pervasive corruption. Both advocate barbaric punishments, including death. Both prescribe severe retribution for sexual preferences.

There is of course no known nexus between official corruption and the kind of political system a country follows. For example, Transparency International`s report for 2010 places Denmark and New Zealand at par with Singapore as least corrupt with 9.3 points out of 10. And though both are robust democracies, Australia at 8.7 looks that much more honest than Britain, assigned 7.6.In South Asia, India`s runaway corruption appears saintly at 3.3 among a pack of incorrigibly tainted neighbours. Pakistan at 2.3 is struggling jealously behind Bangladesh, placed a notch higher at 2.4. Sri Lanka at 3.2 looks agreeable by the lowly regional yardstick.

By that token, even an ungovernable Afghanistan can revel at 1.4 for being placed second from the bottom, still ahead of Somalia`s 1.1. Potentially misleading statistics? In which case, how do we explain the Baba Ramdev phenomenon across India, even if many have dismissed him as a creation of the media?

After his eviction from Delhi, the Baba has continued with his hunger fast, a method Gandhi had used to fight colonial power. Backing him to the hilt is the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of the BJP. The next elections are not due for another three years, but there is a key poll scheduled in Uttar Pradesh next year.

Capturing the state is considered a useful first step to rule India. Corruption is a low-yield political issue vis a vis parochial emotions. Doing a deal with sadhus of different religions seems to be the seasonal flavour across the world. That shouldn`t worry any establishment in India — whether headed by the Congress or the BJP — provided the resultant mandate is transferred to its powerful claimants. The conditions look pretty similar for any country faced with such a Hobson`s choice.

The writer is `s correspondent in Delhi.

___


The Telegraph
19 June 2011

A VERY SPECIAL CASE
- Wielding arbitrary power for the good

by Partha Chatterjee

I must begin with two disclaimers. The Singur land development and rehabilitation bill, 2011 was moved in the West Bengal legislative assembly last Tuesday by the industries minister with whom I happen to share a name. However, I believe he does not share any of the opinions or sentiments expressed below. Second, I was a persistent critic of the Left Front government when it was in power and what I say here are not the views being expressed by the Opposition in or out of the assembly. I am looking at the new piece of legislation principally as a historian of Bengal’s land system.

The Singur bill is a special legislation of a very exceptional kind. It deals not with the land acquisition laws as such but only with a particular case of acquisition of 997 acres of land in a specific place. It deals not with all landowners whose lands were acquired in that particular case but only with a small set of “unwilling owners”. It annuls the lease agreement with Tata Motors and transfers the land back into the possession of the government because the public purpose for which the land was acquired, namely, the setting up of a factory, had “totally failed”, but it is not meant to apply to numerous other such cases where land acquired by the government has been lying unutilized for decades. Most crucially, the bill claims that there are agitations “endangering safety and security in the area which unless properly handled urgently, serious law and order problems are likely to develop”. In short, the Singur bill is an emergency legislation for an exceptional case.

It is not unprecedented for a legislature to enact an exception to the law. The special provisions of reservation for Scheduled Castes and Tribes in government employment and educational institutions, for instance, are exceptions to the fundamental right of equality of citizens, but the exceptions are part of the Constitution (even though their validity has to be renewed from time to time, marking once more their exceptional character). The legislation protecting the rights of bargadars enacted in West Bengal soon after the Left Front government first came to power laid down exceptions to the legal rights of landowners. Examples of declaring the exception through administrative directives, without tampering with the body of the law, are legion. Government authorities will allow squatters to remain in their illegal settlements on public and private lands or vendors to set up stalls on city pavements — often for entirely justified reasons — by identifying exceptional circumstances that require the suspension of the law in that particular case, without enacting a new law that would affect the rights of legal owners and licensed shops and establishments. Looming behind all of these cases of constitutional, legal or administrative exceptionalism, we may notice the presence of a groundswell of political opinion, expressed through agitations and mobilizations, clamouring for what is believed to be a justified exception. Is the Singur bill an exceptional law of this kind?

I am afraid not. There is general agreement now that the manner in which the land was acquired in Singur was heavy-handed, unilateral and non-consensual. Even the Communist Party of India (Marxist) leaders have conceded as much, even though they are still reluctant to admit that there was intimidation, physical assault and even the killing of those opposed to the acquisition. Leaving aside the demerits of the Land Acquisition Act itself, about which a lot can be said, there is little doubt that in the case of Singur the law was applied in a way that was tyrannical. What does the new bill do to redress this? Unlike the legislation on bargadar rights in 1979, for instance, this bill does not specify a class of citizens which is being given the special protection or benefit of the law. Rather, it allows the government to “return equivalent quantum of land to unwilling farmers who have not accepted the compensation” for the land taken from them. These “unwilling farmers” are actually named individually, along with the size of the plot acquired, in a schedule attached to the bill. In other words, the entire piece of legislation is designed to reward around 2,800 listed individuals who are members of a few hundred families, mostly from the neighbourhood of Singur.

What is wrong with this? Several things. If the Singur acquisition was unfair and unacceptable, then surely every landowner whose land was taken away was a victim, because the compensation package that was offered applied equally to all. The land acquisition law does not require that a landowner must be willing to part with her land. Whether willing or not, everyone’s land was physically acquired in exchange for the offer of compensation, as prescribed by the law. The Singur bill will now enable the government to return an equivalent amount of land only to those who did not pick up their compensation cheques. Clearly, this discriminates between two classes of victims. Already we hear farmers in Singur complaining that they had been coerced by CPI(M) activists to accept their cheques and not join the agitation. In view of numerous reports of the degree of terrorization in the area at the time, there is ample reason to believe that some of these complaints are true. In any case, how can the law presume to judge, without the benefit of a judicial procedure, the willingness or otherwise of the victims of an oppressive action of a previous government? It is the present government which is arbitrarily making that judgment on behalf of the law.

In fact, the new government may be said to be rewarding those who resisted the law at Singur and, by comparison, penalizing those who gave in because they did not have the fortitude or resources to fight. The Land Acquisition Act itself stands intact, ready to be used by this and future governments. Not only that, the government cannot avoid the charge of enacting a special law to reward a tiny, albeit rather special, group of its own partisan supporters. Given the incredibly narrow focus of this exceptional piece of legislation, this conclusion is a compelling one.

There are other elements of exceptionalism in the Singur bill that concern the lease agreement with Tata Motors and its rights and culpability. I am sure there are many managerial and legal luminaries who will sort out this friendly tussle between industry and government. I have nothing to say on that matter. There is also the question of sharecroppers and labourers who have lost their livelihood. Since they are people without any title to the land, their interests are notoriously difficult to protect through land laws. It is not surprising that they are not mentioned in the Singur bill.

To be fair, there are good political grounds for the new government’s concern to do something in Singur. That was the agitation that propelled Mamata Banerjee on a trajectory that finally led to what was once almost unthinkable — the ouster of the CPI(M) from power in West Bengal. She is now riding the crest of a wave of resentment against the former regime. She embodies charismatic power of a kind never seen before in West Bengal’s politics. She feels compelled to respond to the deep frustration of a people fed up with a government that is so bound by rules and procedures that instead of delivering services all it does is encourage the bully and shelter the corrupt. Certain of her charismatic power, she does not mind being arbitrary in order to do good. There is something utterly disarming about a chief minister who can tell a legislative assembly that she does not understand the law.

It has been said that the law can be used to perpetuate tyranny, just as arbitrary power can be used for the good. The difficulty is that the desire to produce immediate results by legislating in an arbitrary manner can subvert the very foundations of a legal system by making it unpredictable and incoherent. Regardless of protestations to the contrary, the Singur law will now become the source of a spate of litigation seeking exemptions from or redress for the application of the Land Acquisition Act, whether in the past or the future. More importantly, just as the Left Front, guided by the belief that it was acting for the future welfare of the state, has now paid the price for its arbitrary use of power, so might the present government come to regret its current penchant for arbitrary action to achieve the good. And those radicals who are now applauding the Singur bill as an act of historic justice would do well to remember that the next time the good doctor Binayak Sen has to run to the Supreme Court, he will be seeking the protection of the law against the arbitrary powers of a vindictive state government. The good of the people is a laudable thing, but it is doubtful that there are easy shortcuts to that goal.

The writer is Honorary Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta 

___

Gush Shalom, 18 June 2011

Uri Avnery, “Deny! Deny!” 18/06/11

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1308345669/

I am fed up with all this nonsense about recognizing Israel as the “Jewish State”.[1]

It is based on a collection of hollow phrases and vague definitions, devoid of any real content. It serves many different purposes, almost all of them malign.

Binyamin Netanyahu uses it as a trick to obstruct the establishment of the Palestinian state. This week he declared that the conflict just has no solution. Why? Because the Palestinians do not agree to recognize etc. etc.

Four rightist Members of the Knesset have just submitted a bill empowering the government to refuse to register new NGOs and to dissolve existing ones if they “deny the Jewish character of the state”.

This new bill is only one of a series designed to curtail the civil rights of Arab citizens, as well as those of leftists.

If the late Dr. Samuel Johnson were living in present-day Israel, he would phrase his famous dictum about patriotism differently: “Recognition of the Jewish Character of the state is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

IN ISRAELI parlance, denying the “Jewish Character” of the state is tantamount to the worst of all political felonies: to claim that Israel is a “State of all its Citizens”.

To a foreigner, this may sound a bit weird. In a democracy, the state clearly belongs to all its citizens. Mention this in the United States, and you are stating the obvious. Mention this in Israel, and you are treading dangerously close to treason. (So much for our much-vaunted “common” values”.)

As a matter of fact, Israel is indeed a state of all its citizens. All adult Israeli citizens – and only they – have the right to vote for the Knesset. The Knesset appoints the government and determines the laws. It has enacted many laws declaring that Israel is a “Jewish and democratic state”. In ten or in a hundred years, the Knesset could hoist the flag of Catholicism, Buddhism or Islam. In a democracy, it is the citizens who are sovereign, not a verbal formula.

WHAT FORMULA? - one may well ask.

The courts favor the words “Jewish and democratic state”. But that is far from being the only definition around.

The most widely used is just “Jewish State”. But that is not enough for Netanyahu and Co., who speak about “the nation-state of the Jewish people”, which has a nice 19th century ring. The “state of the Jewish people” is also quite popular.

The one thing that all these brand-names have in common is that they are perfectly imprecise. What does “Jewish” mean? A nationality, a religion, a tribe? Who are the “Jewish people”? Or, even more vague, the “Jewish nation”? Does this include the Congressmen who enact the laws of the United States? Or the cohorts of Jews who are in charge of US Middle East policy? Which country does the Jewish ambassador of the UK in Tel Aviv represent?

The courts have been wrestling with the question: where is the border between “Jewish” and “democratic”? What does “democratic” mean in this context? Can a “Jewish” state really be “democratic”, or, for that matter, can a “democratic” state really be “Jewish”? All the answers given by learned judges and renowned professors are contrived, or, as we say in Hebrew, they “stand on chickens’ legs”.

LETS GO back to the beginning: the book written in German by Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, and published in 1896. He called it “Der Judenstaat”.

Unfortunately, this is a typical German word that is untranslatable. It is generally rendered in English as “The Jewish State” or “The State of the Jews”. Both are quite false. The nearest approximation would be “The Jewstate”.

If this sounds slightly anti-Semitic, this is not by accident. It may come as a shock to many, but the word was not invented by Herzl. It was first used by a Prussian nobleman with an impressive name - Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz, - who died 23 years before Herzl was even born. He was a dedicated anti-Semite long before another German invented the term “anti-Semitism” as an expression of the healthy German spirit.

Marwitz, an ultra-conservative general, objected to the liberal reforms proposed at the time. In 1811 he warned that these reforms would turn Prussia into a “Judenstaat”, a Jewstate. He did not mean that Jews were about to become a majority in Prussia, God forbid, but that moneylenders and other shady Jewish dealers would corrupt the character of the country and wipe out the good old Prussian virtues.

Herzl himself did not dream of a state that belongs to all the Jews in the world. Quite the contrary - his vision was that all real Jews would go to the Judenstaat (whether in Argentina or Palestine, he had not yet decided). They – and only they - would thenceforth remain “Jews”. All the others would become assimilated in their host nations and cease altogether to be Jews.

Far, far indeed from the notion of a “nation-state of the Jewish people” as envisioned by many of today’s Zionists, including those millions who do not dream of immigrating to Israel.

WHEN I was a boy, I took part in dozens of demonstrations against the British government of Palestine. In all of them, we chanted in unison “Free immigration! Hebrew State!” I don’t remember a single demonstration with the slogan “Jewish State”.

That was quite natural. Without anyone decreeing it, we made a clear distinction between us Hebrew-speaking people in Palestine and the Jews in the Diaspora. Some of us turned this into an ideology, but for most people it was just a natural expression of reality: Hebrew agriculture and Jewish tradition, Hebrew underground and Jewish Religion, Hebrew kibbutz and Jewish Shtetl. Hebrew Yishuv (the new community in the country) and Jewish Diaspora. To be called a “Diaspora Jew” was the ultimate insult.

For us this was not anti-Zionist by any means. Quite the contrary: Zionism wanted to create an old-new nation in Eretz Israel (as Palestine is called in Hebrew), and this nation was of course quite distinct from the Jews elsewhere. It was only the Holocaust, with its huge emotional impact, which changed the verbal rules.

So how did the formula “Jewish State” creep in? In 1917, in the middle of World War I, the British government issued the so-called Balfour Declaration, which proclaimed that “His Majesty’s Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…”

Every word was carefully chosen, after months of negotiations with Zionist leaders. One of the main British objects was to win American and Russian Jews for the Allied cause. Revolutionary Russia was about to get out of the war, and the entry of isolationist America was essential.

(By the way, the British rejected the words “the turning of Palestine into a national home for the Jewish people”, insisting on “in Palestine” – thus foreshadowing the partition of the country.)

IN 1947 the UN did decide to partition Palestine between its Arab and Jewish populations. This said nothing about the character of the two future states – it just used the current definitions of the two warring parties. About 40% of the population in the territory allocated to the “Jewish” state was Arab.

The advocates of the “Jewish state” make much of the sentence in the “Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” (generally called the “Declaration of Independence”) which indeed includes the words “Jewish State”. After quoting the UN resolution which called for a Jewish and an Arab state, the declaration continues: “Accordingly we … on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”

This sentence says nothing at all about the character of the new state, and the context is purely formal.

One of the paragraphs of the declaration (in its original Hebrew version) speaks about the “Hebrew people”: “We extend our hands to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the independent Hebrew people in its land.” This sentence is blatantly falsified in the official English translation, which changed the last words into “the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.”

As a matter of fact, it would have been quite impossible to reach agreement on any ideological formula, since the declaration was signed by the leaders of all factions, from the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox to the Moscow-oriented Communist Party.

ANY TALK about the Jewish State leads inevitably to the question: What are the Jews – a nation or a religion?

Official Israeli doctrine says that “Jewish” is both a national and a religious definition. The Jewish collective, unlike any other, is both national and religious. With us, nation and religion are one and the same.

The only door of entry to this collective is religious. There is no national door.

Hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Russian immigrants have come to Israel under the Law of Return with their Jewish relatives. 

This law is very broad. In order to attract the Jews, it allows even distant non-Jewish relatives to come with them, including the spouse of the grandchild of a Jew. Many of these non-Jews want to be Jews in order to be considered full Israelis, but have tried in vain to be accepted. Under Israeli law, a Jew is a person “born to a Jewish mother or converted, who has not adopted another religion”. This is a purely religious definition. Jewish religious law says that for this purpose, only the mother, not the father, counts.

It is extremely difficult to be converted in Israel. The rabbis demand that the convert fulfill all 613 commandments of the Jewish religion – which only very few recognized Israelis do. But one cannot become an official member of the stipulated Jewish “nation” by any other door. One becomes a part of the American nation by accepting US citizenship. Nothing like that exists here.

We have an ongoing battle about this in Israel. Some of us want Israel to be an Israeli state, belonging to the Israeli people, indeed a “State of all its Citizens”. Some want to impose on us the religious law supposedly fixed by God for all times on Mount Sinai some 3200 years ago, and abolish all contrary laws of the democratically elected Knesset. Many don’t want any change at all.

But how, in God’s name (sorry), does this concern the Palestinians? Or the Icelanders, for that matter?

THE DEMAND that the Palestinians recognize Israel as “the Jewish State” or as “the Nation-State of the Jewish people” is preposterous.

As the British would put it, it’s none of their bloody business. It would be tantamount to an intervention in the internal affairs of another country.

But a friend of mine has suggested a simple way out: the Knesset can simply resolve to change the name of the state into something like “The Jewish Republic of Israel”, so that any peace agreement between Israel and the Arab State of Palestine will automatically include the demanded recognition.

This would also bring Israel into line with the state it most resembles: “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan”, which came into being almost at the same time, after the partition of India, after a gruesome mutual massacre, after the creation of a huge refugee problem and with a perpetual border war in Kashmir. And the nuclear bomb, of course.

Many Israelis would be shocked by the comparison. What, us? Similar to a theocratic state? Are we getting closer to the Pakistani model and further from the American one?

What the hell, let’s simply deny it!

[1] This is  reference to debate erupting after the publication of Edgar Keret, “Netanyahu Says There’s No Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Haaretz, June 18, 2011: “This is an insoluble conflict because it is not about territory,” he says. “It is not that you can give up a kilometer more and solve it. The root of the conflict is in an entirely different place. Until Abu Mazen recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, there will be no way to reach an agreement.” http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/netanyahu-says-there-s-no-solution-to-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-1.367759  (MT note)


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