SACW - 21 Oct. 2011 / Sri Lanka Militarisation / Pakistan: Dress Terror / Bangladesh: war crimes; missing / India: anti nuclear movt; Anna's banal Hindutva; Ramanujan excluded at Delhi univ /‘Arab Spring’ and beyon

[Harsh K]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 21 October 2011 - No. 2728
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[Visit A lokpal for India: Dissenting views & news for anti corruption activists 
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Contents:

1. Militarisation of Sri Lanka and its infiltration into Higher Education (Shamala Kumar)
2. Pakistan: Dress modestly - Masked men enter girls’ school, thrash students (Azam Khan)
3. Shape of things to come? (Editorial, The Express Tribune)
4. Bangladesh War Crimes: First Charges Filed (David Bergman)
5. Bangladesh: Enforced disappearances. Missing, dead (Rahnuma Ahmed)
6. India - Gujarat: Three Questioning Gazes (Chitra Padmanabhan)
7. India: Text of Economists Letter challenging national poverty lines set up by the Planning commission

Content updates from sacw.net
8. India: People Power vs Nuclear Power (Praful Bidwai)
9. India: India: Anna is the icon of banal Hindutva (Jyotirmoy Sharma)
10. Violence has no borders (Urvashi Butalia)
11. India: Paid News - How corruption in the Indian media undermines democracy (Press council of India)
12. Text of Petition to India’s Supreme court challenging constitutional validity of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010
13. India: Can’t change history? Rewrite it (Jawed Naqvi)
14. India: The closing of our minds (Apoorvanand)
15. India - Kashmir: Time to face the ugly truth (Sameer Arshad)
16. India: National Integration Council Debate on Communal Violence Bill and Recent Riots (Asghar Ali Engineer)
17. India: Communal Violence (Prevention) Bill - urgent need for debate and passage in parliament (Ram Puniyani)

International:
18. A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software (Franco Berardi & Geert Lovink)
19. The ‘Arab Spring’ and beyond (Madanjeet Singh)
20. In Crowded Cairo Quarter, Islamists Try to Seize Mantle of a Revolution (Anthony Shadid)
21. Turmoil in arab world: Attack on secularism (Saeed Naqvi)
22. Event Announcements:
(i) India: Protest against curtailing of academic freedom under Right wing pressure !! 24 October 2011 at Delhi University
(ii) Pakistan: NSF Punjab is holding its Convention on 25-26 November 2011 in Faisalabad

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1. MILITARISATION OF SRI LANKA AND ITS INFILTRATION INTO HIGHER EDUCATION
by Shamala Kumar
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groundviews.org, 13 October 2011

Evidence of militarisation is everywhere – most recently in the sphere of higher education.  The armed forces are involved with development projects, in welfare, and in farming. They are even involved in city beautification, the maintenance of playgroups and shops, of course Sports, and now higher education.  Their increased presence is evident in subtle changes in our daily lives.  The large number of ‘yu ha’ vehicles dropping and picking up school-going children is one that confronts me each school day.

Militarisation is, however, not just confined to their conspicuous presence in public spaces but extends to public acceptance and reinforcement of an attitude that glorifies the forces which in turn enables the process of militarization. The military does not operate through a process of consensus building and does not, in general, function according to democratic principles. While those at the lower rungs of the military hierarchy bear the brunt of this oppressive system, civil society is not immune. [. . .]
http://tinyurl.com/44evy5k

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2. PAKISTAN: DRESS MODESTLY: MASKED MEN ENTER GIRLS’ SCHOOL, THRASH STUDENTS
by Azam Khan
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The Express Tribune, October 9, 2011

Fear grips Satellite Town schools as 60 men beat up students for dressing ‘inappropriately’.
RAWALPINDI: 
In a first for the garrison city, sixty masked men carrying iron rods barged into a girls’ school in Rawalpindi and thrashed students and female teachers on Friday.
The gang of miscreants also warned the inmates at the MC Model Girls High School in Satellite Town to “dress modestly and wear hijabs” or face the music, eyewitnesses said.
Fear gripped the area following the attack and only 25 of the 400 students studying in the college were present on Saturday. The school employs 30 female teachers.
Attendance in other educational institutions also remained low. After hearing about the attack, all schools in the city shut down, an official of the Rawalpindi District Administration (RDA) told The Express Tribune.
A student of the girls’ school managed to inform the administration of the nearby boys’ high school of the attack. “[However,] the armed gang was so powerful that we could not rescue our teachers and colleagues over there,” Noail Javed, a grade 10 student, said.
In-charge of MC High Schools in Rawalpindi issued a notification to the heads of all girls’ schools to take pre-emptive measures to avoid such incidents in future. According to the notification, a gang comprising 60 to 70 miscreants entered into the school from a gate that was “strangely open”.
All the MC school heads were assigned the responsibility of protecting the students by the notification. A school headmistress wishing not to be named said, “How is it possible for us to protect the students from such elements. The city administration should review its security plan.”
The notification also suggested that the heads should not inform the students about the situation, so that they are not alarmed into skipping school. “Police is investigating the matter,” the notification said. Following the notification, the heads of the schools also shared the numbers of relevant police stations with the teachers in case of any untoward situation in future.
Asjad Ali, a student of class 9 at the nearby boys’ high school, said that his younger brother Awais, a student of grade 5, was also among those who were brutally beaten by the miscreants with iron rods. “The police did not come,” he said.
A police official of the New Town Police Station, asking for anonymity, told The Express Tribune, “We were under strict instructions to do nothing.”
District Education Officer Qazi Zahoor and Rawalpindi Commissioner Zahid Saeed were not immediately available for comments.


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3. PAKISTAN: SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME? (Editorial, The Express tribune)
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The Express Tribune, October 11, 2011

The thugs who attacked the girls’ school in Rawalpindi have an agenda that includes other ‘corrections’.

A gang of thugs comprising of “60 to 70” men have ‘defended’ Islam in Rawalpindi on October 7, by attacking a girls’ school after warning it that it would ‘face the music’ if the girls didn’t ‘dress modestly and wear hijab’. They thrashed the girl students and their female teachers. The following day, most girls’ schools had zero or thin attendance. An official circular was sent around warning all girls’ schools to avoid such incidents by taking ‘preventive measures’. Will the administration pursue the gang who attacked the school? No, according to ‘inside information’ — which means that the state tacitly accepts the ‘ideological’ thrust of the attack.

This is happening against the backdrop of another tacitly accepted ideological punishment inflicted by a pious policeman called Qadri on late governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer. The lawyers’ community in Pakistan is on the side of the killer and the media has brainwashed the average citizen into thinking that it was the governor who was in the wrong and that the pious policeman should be let off through the legal device of diyat ‘facilitated’ no doubt by the kidnapping of Salmaan Taseer’s son. The challenge is: ask the clerics and the pious lawyers of Rawalpindi whether the gang who attacked the girls’ school were right in doing what they did, and the answer would be yes!

There is perhaps more to come. All girls’ schools may be ordered to make hijab compulsory for their pupils. The real edict behind the attack is what the Taliban have been doing in the tribal areas and what the Taliban did when they were ruling Afghanistan: the place for the girls is at home where after an appropriate period they are to get married and bear children, stereotyped on the model warrior who are now ‘correcting’ the state of Pakistan through suicide bombing. Some years ago when the thugs started attacking the co-educational institutions of Lahore, many pious people thought the ‘golden’ age had arrived and started writing their own threat letters to the institutions. The germ of extremism has grown faster and promises to kill more people than dengue fever ever will.

When the Islamic University of Islamabad was attacked by a suicide-bomber its conservative faculty came out saying there was nothing wrong with the attackers; it was just that the university had been forced to become ‘moderate’ in its stance through the appointment of wrong type of vice-chancellors. The university was founded with Arab dollars and had teachers like Abdullah Azzam and Mullah Krekar, both counted among the founders of al Qaeda in Peshawar. Nextdoor to Rawalpindi, in Islamabad, Lal Masjid became a symbol of piety when in 2007 it started attacking places it thought were responsible for fahashi (indecency) that violated the edicts of Islam. In 2004, it had denounced the Pakistan Army when it confronted the Taliban terrorists in South Waziristan. Today, the Lal Masjid seminary is consensually the best example of Islamic education.

What began in Afghanistan with the destruction of girls’ schools is now happening in Pakistan. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and areas surrounding it most girls’ schools have been blown up by the Taliban. Those who advocate this ‘Islamic reform’ are spread far afield including the capital of the country. Dozens of ‘study circles’ have sprung up where learned ladies, on the model of al Huda’s founder, Ms Farhat Hashmi are inculcating a tough brand of Islam, advocating hijab as the first condition. In the wake of an attack on a mosque in Rawalpindi cantonment — which killed many innocent children — it was found that the killers were the sons of teachers who organised such study circles in Islamabad.

The thugs who attacked the girls’ school in Rawalpindi have an agenda that includes other ‘corrections’. The administration would be wrong not to take action and make them answerable to law. If it is legal in Pakistan to have girls’ schools and if there is no legal provision compelling the girls to wear hijab, then these thugs are criminals trying to impose their own will on the citizens. This incident has exposed the state to the challenge of either taking action to reaffirm the writ of the state or shrink from action and allow the writ of the state to be further squeezed.


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4. BANGLADESH WAR CRIMES: FIRST CHARGES FILED 
by David Bergman
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http://www.asiacalling.org/en/news/bangladesh/2265-bangladesh-war-crimes-first-charges-filed

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5. BANGLADESH: ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES. MISSING, DEAD
by Rahnuma Ahmed
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(New Age, 17 October 2011)

A fruit trader.
A businessman cum political activist.
Two brothers.
A timber trader.
The timber trader's elder brother.
The elder brother's business partner.

Mohammad Salim Mian. Sujon. Jalal ud din. Lal Babu. Akbor Ali Shordar. Ayub Ali Shordar. Abdur Rahman (Increased incidence of enforced disappearance, Asian Legal Resource Centre, August 24, 2010).

Members of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB)-4 picked up Salim from his relative's house in Kapasia, Gazipur, on February 19, 2010. They handcuffed him. Blindfolded him. Disappeared to date.

In Sujon's case, no, it wasn't RAB-4, but allegedly, RAB-2. Its members kidnapped  him from a Dhaka city street on March 24, 2010. At first, the police refused to record the complaint of family members. Nothing doing, RAB enjoys impunity. It was accepted only after RAB's name had been supplanted by `unidentified persons.' Missing to date.
Jalal ud din and Lal Babu were arrested on March 18, 2010 from the Bihari colony in Mirpur, Dhaka where stranded Pakistanis -- state-less citizens, belonging neither to Pakistan, nor to Bangladesh – live. RAB-4 again. Heavily armed, they cordoned the entire neighbourhood. No explanation. No arrest warrants either. That's the norm.
The brothers worked in a hairdressing salon, meagre earnings which provided for their mother and three sisters as well. As a matter of fact, Jalal had remained single, because of familial obligations. Men in black uniform entered, says their nephew who'd been sleeping in the same room. Others wore plain-clothes, one a black panjabi. They told us not to be afraid. Similar false assurances given to their sisters as well. RAB told us, they'd come to no harm. They said, we were safe too.
Pallabi thana reportedly did not record the allegations of the family members properly. The General Diary says, `On March 16, Jalal and Lal Babu went out of the house and since then they are missing' (Abu Sufian, Darkness prevails, August 1, 2011). Went out of the house for sure, but not voluntarily? Disappeared to date.

Akbor Ali Shordar was picked up by members of RAB-5, alongwith his timber-trade partner, Bipin Chandra Sarkar, from a sawmill in Thakurgaon on March 19, 2010. When Akbor's wife Parvin went to the police station to file a complaint, they detained her instead. They said Bipin had abducted Akbor. Then, to top it all, they pressured Bipin's younger bother to file a complaint against Akbor for having abducted Bipin. Rigmaroles which would have been laughable if what really occurred was not so tragic.

Bipin returned home the next morning to tell the tale. Thirteen plain-clothed men had arrested the two of them. They'd been blindfolded, taken away in a microbus with hands tied behind their backs. Conversation en route indicated that the abductors belonged to RAB-5. They demanded 30 lakh taka.

Akbor's elder brother, Ayub Ali, lodged a petition case with the Chief Judicial Magistrate Court, Thakurgaon. He wrote letters of complaint to high-ranking government officials. To the Inspector General of Police. No replies. No action. Not until he held two press conferences accusing RAB of having abducted his brother.
Ayub Ali, and his business partner Abdur Rahman were arrested from Banosree  on May 19, 2010. The abductors wore black uniforms, similar to those worn by RAB. And now, all three -- Akbor Ali Shordar, Ayub Ali and Abdur Rahman -- are missing. Its been nearly a year and a half.

RAB-2. RAB-4. RAB-5.
The Rapid Action Battalion, which, as its website proudly proclaims is the `only elite force' in the country.

How long do family members wait for the return of those `disappeared'? Razia Sultana, teacher, geography department, Jahangirnagar university, whose father was picked up by Pakistani army officials in 1971, whose body has never been found, told me, although we presume he's dead, that he was killed, how can one be absolutely certain. What if...?
It's been forty years now. Razia apa's mother waited for her husband all her life. As does Shahidul's cousin, Tuni bu, whose husband, an engineer, was picked up by the army in 1971. Whose body was never found.

No hope of his return. None except an ember that burns. That refuses to be gutted out despite long years. What if....?

But no `what if's' for the family members of Mizan Hossain, Jewel Shordar and Rajib Shordar. They were picked up allegedly by plain-clothed members of the detective branch on July 31 this year, from old Dhaka. The human rights organisation Odhikar, in its investigation noted inconsistencies in the statements given by witnesses and members of the law enforcement agencies. These were voiced by Jewel's father who suspects Gandaria police were involved in the abduction and murder of his son and Rajib. They claimed to belong to the law-enforcement agencies. Gandaria police refused to register a GD (surely, a telltale sign?); but after doing so, no one turned up from the police station to inquire. No effort on behalf of the thana to find out what happened, when, how and why.

No `what if's' for their family members. Mizan and Jewel's bodies were discovered on a Pubail road slope, in Gazipur. Rajib's on the Dhaka-Mawa highway near Nimtoli. Trussed up with gamchas, mouths too stuffed with gamchas. Young, oh so young bodies. Mizan was only 23, Jewel and Rajib only 18.

No `what if's' for the family members of Mizan of Karwan bazar either, and his trading partner Ali Akbar. They went missing on June 29. Dumped bodies found 3 days later in the Tejgaon truck stand. Family members allege, business rivals got them killed. They allege, members of the law-enforcement agencies must have helped.

But there are many others who are missing. Whose family members teeter between hope, and loss of all hope. Saiful Islam, a garment businessman, from Gulshan, on October 2. Three young men, picked up from Khilgaon, Chowdhurypara, on October 4, by men in plain-clothes claiming to belong to the detective branch, whisked away in a microbus. Dhaka university student Sakhawat Hussain Tuhin, missing since September 20. Kazi Ataur Rahman Litu, ward 87 BNP unit president, picked up by plain-clothes persons on September 22, from Dayaganj. Litu's home had been raided ten days earlier, live bombs recovered according to police. Dhaka City Corporation ward councillor Chowdhury Alam, BNP leader, missing since June 25, 2010.

Many more. Many dead, bodies found. Others, missing.

Like KM Shamim Akhter, former Bangladesh Chatra Union leader, who was picked up from his home in Purana Paltan by men in plain-clothes on September 29. His wife was kept waiting for three hours when she went to file a complaint at Paltan thana, and was refused. A GD was registered later, `without naming anyone as a suspect' (Amnesty International, October 7, 2011).
A few, like Bipin, have returned to tell the tale. Human rights activist William Gomes, who worked for the Asian Human Rights Commission alleges being abducted while returning to his house near Sayedabad bus terminal on May 21, 2011. Of being pushed into a car, blindfolded, hooded and driven to the `headquarter.' On reaching there, he was taken up in the lift to the ninth floor. His clothes were removed, he was made to stand naked and blindfolded, presumably among men who were fully clothed, possibly, in uniform? Filthy words, `son-of-a-bitch,' `son-of-a-whore,' `bastard' interlaced with `sir,' `yes sir,' `no sir,' directed at superiors, by subservients, carrying out orders. Threats of shoving hot eggs up his anus. Of feeding him to magur macch (scavenging catfish). Of being asked how much Khaleda Zia, the opposition leader, had paid him. Of how much the AHRC had given him as `source money', this, by a native speaker of English.

Thirsty, Gomes had asked for a glass of water. It was mildly hot, he says, it did not taste normal. He was dropped off later, but since then, his health has gotten worse. He suspects something must have been added to the water he drank while in `their' custody. His legs hurt. At times, he feels paralysed. His hands feel weak, his body trembles. `I feel that I will collapse at any time. I cannot sleep properly.' According to his account, the torture that he was meted out was carried out in the name of the prime minister. An interview that he had given to Radio Television Hong Kong was played for his ears, accompanied by a volley of questions from his abductors, among them, `You and your AHRC is only good and (prime minister) Hasina is bad?' (Countercurrents, June 17, 2011).

From crossfire, to encounter, to cold-blooded murder. By members of the law-enforcement agencies. Accountable to none. Apparently carrying out government instructions to quell political opposition. Apparently hiring out their services, like mercenaries, to interested quarters who want their rivals finished off. Licence to abduct, to `disappear'  people, who are citizens of the state, are tax-payers.

Our leaders, both in position and opposition, express a profound inability to recognise the pain and suffering of others as they continue to capitalise on slain family members for political gain. A dead father. A dead husband.
One can only hope and pray that both previous and incumbent rulers -- those who  created and run this frankenstein force, those who maintain and perpetuate it -- all state functionaries who abduct and kill, and all teachers, writers, artists and intellectuals who are complicit by remaining silent (and I mean each and every one of them) will spend sleepless nights haunted by visions of Mizan Hossain, Jewel Shordar, Rajib Shordar..... Trussed. Mouths stuffed.  

Published in New Age, Monday, October 17, 2011. http://newagebd.com/newspaper1/editorial/37020.html

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6. INDIA - GUJARAT: THREE QUESTIONING GAZES 
by Chitra Padmanabhan
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The Telegraph, October 20 , 2011

Narendra Modi’s invocation of peace and development cannot silence the questions his rule has raised, writes Chitra Padmanabhan

Facing the chief minister are three women with their individual quests — Shweta Bhatt, Jagruti Pandya and Zakia Jafri. Their troubled gaze is making it hard for the chief minister to camouflage his iron-fisted power play and his unrepentant, hardline political persona with the veneer of a ‘statesman’. He is the reason their lives have intersected to come to a public boil in recent times, unfurling aspects of the narrative of governance — or the lack of it — in Gujarat that one way or the other is linked to the post-Godhra carnage of 2002 and its aftermath.

Shweta Bhatt came into the public glare on October 3 with a letter to the Union home minister, P. Chidambaram, stating that she feared for the safety of her husband, Sanjiv Bhatt, the suspended Indian police service officer who was arrested in Ahmedabad on September 30 for allegedly forcing a Gujarat police constable, K.D. Pant, to sign a false affidavit.

On October 5, in a second letter to the Union home minister, Shweta spoke of the harassment caused by state police searches in her house. Even as her move kept the issue alive in public perception, a judicial verdict granted Sanjiv Bhatt bail after an 18-day custody.

Around the same time as Shweta, Jagruti Pandya, the widow of the former Gujarat home minister, Haren Pandya, sent a legal notice to the Gujarat government and police for invading her privacy through constant surveillance by plainclothes policemen from the special branch, Ahmedabad police, who even entered her house to ask her father about her comings and goings. Jagruti was quoted as saying that the policemen admitted in writing they had orders to do so.

In September, Jagruti had moved the Gujarat High Court seeking reinvestigation of her husband’s murder, citing the Central Bureau of Investigation and the state government as respondents. The catalyst was a consummate Gujarat High Court judgment of August 29, 2011, acquitting all 12 men whom the trial court had convicted in 2007 for Pandya’s murder on charges of a terror conspiracy.

With the focus away from terror and back on Haren Pandya’s immediate circumstances at the time of his murder (a rallying point for state party dissidents — he had also deposed before a citizen’s tribunal regarding the 2002 violence), Jagruti attempted to meet Modi on the first day of his much-publicized fast to seek justice. According to some print media reports, she was “persuaded” otherwise by the father-figure, L.K. Advani; however, several television channels reported that she had been turned back by the police. What Jagruti knows is that there is no turning back from probing the reality of her husband’s murder.

In a far more encompassing context and dimension of trauma, Zakia Jafri, too, knows there is no turning away from the reality of the agonizing end of her husband, the former member of parliament, Ehsan Jafri, and others in the 2002 massacre in Gulbarg society.

Zakia had approached the Supreme Court following the state police and high court’s refusal to lodge her complaint alleging the involvement of the chief minister and several others in the Gulbarg killings and other incidents from February 28, 2002 to March 10, 2002. Taking serious note, the Supreme Court ordered investigation into the allegations by an independent special investigation team.

On September 12, 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that the SIT investigation report be forwarded to the sessions court in Ahmedabad for it to proceed as per law. By not merely ordering the lodging of a complaint but by directing and overseeing the investigation, the Supreme Court extended itself and went beyond the relief sought by Zakia.

The mesh of events created around the three women, each following her own instinct, has nevertheless had the combined effect of shining a pointed light on precisely those facets of Modi’s rule that he now desires to mask under a more reasonable exterior: an opaque law and order machinery, the reality of virtually a one-man, strongman, state party and government, and the Hindutva politics of extreme polarization.

These three women from different backgrounds are not conventional rivals speaking the language of realpolitik which Modi can handle easily. Their tenor of communication and the context their presence alludes to have the potential to flare up, and attract larger configurations. Also, it will not be easy to isolate a Shweta or a Jagruti by raising the familiar bogeys of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The point is, when their tangles unravel, so will the questions posed by Zakia Jafri.

Narendra Modi’s magic chant of peace and development does not have the power to deflect forever the questioning gaze of the three women. They are his political dividend.

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7. INDIA: TEXT OF ECONOMISTS LETTER CHALLENGING NATIONAL POVERTY LINES SET UP BY THE PLANNING COMMISSION
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Economic and Political WEEKLY, october 1, 2011

We the undersigned economists do not consider the official national poverty lines set by the Planning Commission, at Rs 32 and Rs 26 per capita per day for urban and rural areas, respectively, to be acceptable benchmarks to measure the extent of poverty in India. In any case, irrespective of the methodology we adopt to measure poverty, the number of poor and hungry people in the country remains unacceptably large.

While academic debates can continue on the appropriate measure of poverty in India, its extent and whether it is decreasing over time, we strongly believe that it is unacceptable and counterproductive to link the official poverty estimates to basic entitlements of the people, especially access to food. Official surveys of nutritional intakes and outcomes indicate that under- nutrition is much more widespread than income poverty, however defined. It is also widely recognised that the targeted public distribution system (PDS) introduced since 1997 has done more harm than good by creating divisions even among the poor and has led to massive errors of exclusion. Recent evidence clearly establishes that states which have moved towards near universalisation of the PDS have performed much better in increasing offtake and reducing leakages.

Restoring the universal PDS appears to us as the best way forward in combating hunger and poverty. This is not only feasible within the available fiscal space of the union government but must be a policy priority in the backdrop of high and persistent food price inflation. 

Ashok Mitra, Thomas Isaac, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, S K Thorat, Prabhat Patnaik, Atul Sarma, G S Bhalla, Yoginder K Alagh, S Subramanian, Pulin Nayak, Ravi Srivastava, Mahendra Dev, R S Deshpande, C P Chandrasekhar, Ritu Dewan, Surjit Singh, Alakh Sharma, Nirmal Kumar Chandra, Sanjay Reddy, Jeemol Unni, J B G Tilak, Jayati Ghosh, and others.


Updates on sacw.net
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8. INDIA: PEOPLE POWER VS NUCLEAR POWER 
by Praful Bidwai
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If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wanted to insult the people agitating against the Koodankulam nuclear reactors at India’s southern tip, he could have found no better way than agreeing to meet their delegation on October 7— only to have Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) Secretary Srikumar Banerjee lecture them on the virtues of nuclear power.
http://www.sacw.net/article2336.html

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9. INDIA: INDIA: ANNA IS THE ICON OF BANAL HINDUTVA
by Jyotirmoy Sharma
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Does Anna Hazare have an ideology? Despite the surfeit of emotion that Hazare generates, this is a legitimate question that ought to be asked, understood and answered. That he is no democrat in the sense the word ‘ democracy’ is normally understood is a foregone conclusion, something that even his most vocal admirers would admit. He brings to debate and discussion the rigour and predictability of a military drill. His model of rule, governance and statecraft is that of undiluted paternalism, something even his secret admirers would admit.
http://www.sacw.net/article2339.html

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10. VIOLENCE HAS NO BORDERS
by Urvashi Butalia
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Violence is more internalised now — targeted towards its own people, against women and children. There are no traces of the memories of violence from the past — of the partition of 1947 and the subsequent wars. Pakistan never stops surprising a visitor.
http://www.sacw.net/article2337.html

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11. INDIA: PAID NEWS - HOW CORRUPTION IN THE INDIAN MEDIA UNDERMINES DEMOCRACY (Press council of India)
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PRESS COUNCIL Sub-Committee Report

Preface
The fifteenth general elections to the Lok Sabha took place in April-May 2009 and in order to ensure free and fair coverage by the media, the Press Council of India issued guidelines applicable to both government authorities and the press. After the elections, a disturbing trend was highlighted by sections of the media, that is, payment of money by candidates to representatives of media companies for favourable coverage or the phenomenon popularly known as ―paid news‖.
http://presscouncil.nic.in/Sub-CommitteeReport.pdf

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12. FULL TEXT OF PETITION TO INDIA’S SUPREME COURT CHALLENGING CONSTITUTIONAL VALIDITY OF THE CIVIL LIABILITY FOR NUCLEAR DAMAGE ACT, 2010
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http://www.sacw.net/article2329.html

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13. INDIA: CAN’T CHANGE HISTORY? REWRITE IT
by Jawed Naqvi
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Some people change history others censor it. A much-acclaimed 1987 essay by Prof A.K. Ramanujan about the many written and oral legends of Lord Ram was deleted last week from the history syllabus of Delhi University. The tinkering with high academia had an insidious purpose. Previous assaults on scientific history writing in India occurred when the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party was in power. The latest outrage came under the Congress’s watch.
http://www.sacw.net/article2338.html

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14. INDIA: THE CLOSING OF OUR MINDS
by Apoorvanand
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The Delhi University academic council’s decision to drop A.K. Ramanujan’s essay, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’, from the prescribed readings for BA (honours) history and BA (programme) students, brings back memories of Bombay University’s move to remove Rohinton Mistry’s novel Such a Long Journey from the syllabus. The victimisation of art-historian Shivaji Pannikkar by Baroda’s Maharaja Sayajirao University is another long and painful story. The many, many cases of books and plays being proscribed by various governments form the general climate in which our universities operate.
http://www.sacw.net/article2332.html

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15. INDIA - KASHMIR: TIME TO FACE THE UGLY TRUTH
by Sameer Arshad
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Perhaps the scale of wrongs in the Valley has reached a level where even the discovery of 2,500 unmarked graves in north Kashmir doesn't truly provoke outrage as it should. This discovery is the first official confirmation of what the rights activists have been saying for years - but beyond that, it is the same old story of denial.
http://www.sacw.net/article2341.html

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16. INDIA: NATIONAL INTEGRATION COUNCIL (NIC) DEBATE ON COMMUNAL VIOLENCE BILL AND RECENT RIOTS
by Asghar Ali Engineer
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I think though after Gujarat no communal riot has taken place on that scale but to write off communalism will be a serious mistake. It continues and shall continue to be a major political challenge to Indian secularism and effective legal and political action must be taken to face this challenge and it is also need to be said country of Indian diversity cannot survive without secularism.
http://www.sacw.net/article2333.html

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17. INDIA: COMMUNAL VIOLENCE (PREVENTION) BILL - URGENT NEED FOR DEBATE AND PASSAGE IN PARLIAMENT
by Ram Puniyani
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In a recently held meeting of the National Integration Council, in September 2011, the discussion on The Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparation) Bill 2011 was on the top of the agenda. While the leaders of opposition of both the houses of parliament, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, came down heavily on the draft Bill, there were not too many members of the council speaking in support of it.
http://www.sacw.net/article2334.html


INTERNATIONAL
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18. A CALL TO THE ARMY OF LOVE AND TO THE ARMY OF SOFTWARE (Franco Berardi & Geert Lovink)
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Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:15:54 +0200
From: Geert Lovink 
To: nettime-list

A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

By Franco Berardi and Geert Lovink

October 2011. The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting.

The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of the postwar compromise between the working class and progressive bourgeoisie has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting back education and the public health system and is cancelling the right to a salary and a pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of large parts of the population, a growing precarity of labor conditions (freelance, short-term contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily humiliation of workers. The yet to be seen effect of the financial crisis will be violence, as people conjure up scapegoats in order to vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, obliteration of democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism: FINAZISM.
Right now people are fighting back in many places, and in many ways.  Occupy Wall Street inspired a mass mobilization in New York that is extending across the USA every day. In Greece workers and students are squatting Syntagma square and protesting against the blackmail by the European Central Bank, which is devastating the country. Cairo, Madrid, Tel Aviv, the list of the ‘movements of the squares’ is proliferating. On October 15 cities across the globe will amass with people protesting against the systemic robbery.
Will our demonstrations and occupations stop the Finazist machine’  They will not. Resistance will not resist, and our fight will not stop the legal crimes. Let’s be frank, we will not persuade our enemies to end their predatory attacks (‘let’s make even more profit from the next downfall’) for the simple reason that our enemies are not human beings. They are machines. Yes, human beings ‘ corporate managers, stock owners, traders ‘ are cashing the money that we are losing, and prey upon resources that workers produce. Politicians sign laws that deliver the lives of millions of people to the Almighty God of the Market.
Bankers and investors are not the real decision makers, they are participants in an economy of gestural confusion. The real process of predatory power has become automated. The transfer of resources and wealth from those who produce to those who do nothing except oversee the abstract patterns of financial transactions is embedded in the machine, in the software that governs the machine. Forget about governments and party politics. Those puppets who pretend to be leaders are talking nonsense. The paternalistic options they offer around ‘austerity measures’ underscore a rampant cynicism internal to party politics: they all know they lost the power to model finance capitalism years ago. Needless to say, the political class are anxious to perform the act of control and sacrifice social resources of the future in the form of budget cuts in order to ‘satisfy the markets’.  Stop listening to them, stop voting for them, stop hoping and cursing them. They are just pimps, and politics is dead.
What should we do? Living with the Finazist violence, bending to the arrogance of algorithms, accepting growing exploitation and declining salaries’ Nope. Let’s fight against Finazism because it is never too late. At the moment Finazism is winning for two reasons. First, because we have lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of precariousness and competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media virtualization has destroyed the empathy among bodies, the pleasure of touching each other, and the pleasure of living in urban spaces. We have lost the pleasure of love, because too much time is devoted to work and virtual exchange. The large army of lovers have to wake up.  Second, because our intelligence has been submitted to algorithmic power in exchange for a handful of shitty money and a virtual life.  For a salary that is miserable when compared to the profits of the corporate bosses, a small army of ‘softwarists’ are accepting the task of destroying human dignity and justice. The small army of software programmers have to wake up.
There is only a way to awake the lover that is hidden in our paralyzed, frightened and frail virtualized bodies. There is only a way to awake the human being that is hidden in the miserable daily life of the softwarist: take to the streets and fight. Burning banks is useless, as real power is not in the physical buildings, but in the abstract connection between numbers, algorithms and information. But occupying banks is good as a starting point for the long-lasting process of dismantling and rewriting the techno-linguistic automatons enslaving all of us. This is the only politics that counts. Some say that the Occupy Wall Street movement lacks clear demands and an agenda. This remark is ridiculous. As in the case of all social movements the political backgrounds and motives are diverse, even diffuse and quite frequently contradictory. The occupation movement would not be better off with more realistic demands.
What is thrilling right now is the multiplicity of new connections and commitment. But what is even more exciting is finding ways that can set in motion the collective ‘exodus’ from the capitalist agony. Let’s not talk about the ‘sustainability’ of the movement. That’s boring.  Everything is transient. These fast-burning events do not help us to overcome the daily depression. Occupying the squares and other public spaces is a way to respond to the short duration of the demonstrations and marches. We are here to stay.
We are not demanding a reform of the global financial system or the ECB. The return to national currencies of the past, as requested by the rightwing populists, will not make ordinary citizens less vulnerable to currency speculation. A return to state sovereignty is not the solution either, and many people already sense this. The demand for more ‘intervention’, control and oversight of markets is a hopeless gesture. The real issue is that humans are no longer in charge. We need to dismantle the machines themselves. This can be done in a very peaceful manner. Hack into their system, publish their crimes through Wikileaks-type initiatives and then delete their real-time trading killing networks for good.
Financial markets are all about the politics of speed and deterritorialization. But we know their architectures and vulnerabilities. The financial world has lost its legitimacy. There is no global consensus anymore that the ‘market’ is always right. And this is our chance to act. The movement has to respond at this level.  Decommissioning and re-programming financial software is not the dream of a Luddite sabotaging the machine. ‘Market regulation’ will not do the job, only autonomy and the self-organization of software workers can dismantle the predatory algorithms and create self-empowering software for society.
The general intellect and the erotic social body have to meet on the streets and squares, and united they will break the Finazist chains.


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19. THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ AND BEYOND 
by Madanjeet Singh
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The Hindu, October 20, 2011

The aborting of the 2011 revolutionary waves of protests has given the Anglo-Americans another opportunity to install Islamists in the Arab world.

The Arab Spring is a misnomer used by the media to describe the uprising that the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi unleashed in Tunisia on December 18, 2010 in protest against police corruption and ill-treatment — a spark that ignited into wildfire and spread to Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen and to other countries. In January, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, the fountainhead of Islamic fundamentalism.

But it was in Egypt that the computer-literate working class youth and their supporters among middle-class college students, created a veritable revolution, fanned by the whirlwind of many human rights activists, labour, trade unionists, students, professors, lawyers, and especially unemployed youth. A Facebook page set up to promote the demonstrations, attracted tens of thousands of followers. The government mobilised the riot police and resorted to infiltration to break the uprising, but the demonstrations by students and labour activists continued in Tahrir Square, until President Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign on February 11, 2011, after 18 days of massive protests, ending his 30-year presidency.

The euphoria that chants such as “the people and the Army are united” that had reverberated around Egypt’s squares created, was rudely snuffed out within a week by the Egyptian military Generals, who grabbed power from President Hosni Mubarak. They did not identify themselves as partners in the revolution, but claimed to be the sole bearer of its legitimacy. The haste with which they discarded the façade of secularism that Mubarak’s authoritarian regime was using against the Muslim Brotherhood, resulted in the largest demonstration on Friday, July 29, by thousands of Islamists since the uprising, calling for the imposition of strict Shariah law. Many demonstrators carried Saudi Arabian flags and placards that said: ‘Bin Laden is in Tahrir.’ As recently as 2009, the Brotherhood had called for a ban on women or Christians serving as Egypt’s President.

Tahrir Square, once the scene of wild celebrations, turned into a battlefield as the Army moved in to disperse the activists, beating them with clubs and electric rods, and even firing live ammunition. Hundreds have since been thrown in jail and 12,000 civilians have been tried in military tribunals — a number that is far more than was treated thus during Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship. Widespread torture by beatings, electrocution, and even sexual assault by military personnel, has been reported. The police, in connivance with the authorities, have shot and killed Coptic Christians who protested against Islamists that had set fire to their churches. The Egyptian Coptic Patriarch, Chenouda III, was awarded the 2000 UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence for encouraging interfaith dialogue.

The Islamic retrogression is a far cry from the colourful secular flowers that had blossomed during the Arab Spring with the establishment of the Baath Party in 1946. “Baath,” which means "resurrection" or "renaissance," was a movement that was founded in Damascus by two Syrian intellectuals: Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian (1910-1989), and Salah al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim (1912-1980). In the early 1930s, Alfaq and Bitar had gone to study at the Sorbonne University in Paris and worked together to formulate a doctrine that combined aspects of Arab nationalism and socialism committed to Arab unity and the freedom of the Arab world from the clutches of Western colonialism.

On their return to Syria in the early 1940s, they became school teachers, and together with a significant number of Christian Arabs as founding members, they promoted Baathist ideology within a nationalist and secular political framework that rejected the faith-based orientation. These ideas of protecting the minority status of non-Muslims, found favour with the progressive leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement such as Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, Tito in Yugoslavia and Sukarno in Indonesia, since the secular ideology helped them to stabilise the ethnic and communal conflicts in their newly independent countries. They also supported the Baathist concept of socialism that differed from classical Marxism.

These were among the reasons for Baathism having grown rapidly, establishing a number of branches in different Arab countries. Baathism went on to form governments in Syria and Iraq, as well as in Egypt briefly when Syria merged with Egypt in 1958, to become the United Arab Republic. There could not have been better interlocutors than Aflaq, representing the Greek civilisation, and Bitar, personifying the Phoenician culture. They conceived their respective religions as a mere appendix attached to the Greek and Phoenician classical antiquity that spread across the Mediterranean region from 1550 BC to 300 BC.

This region, known as the ‘Fertile Crescent,’ comprising ancient Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Mesopotamia, was home to the earliest urban communities in the world, spanning some 5000 years of history. It was in ancient Iraq that the first literate societies developed in the late 4th millennium BC. They developed the first cities and complex state bureaucracies, using a highly sophisticated writing system. Their scholars compiled historical, juridical, economical, mathematical, astronomical, lexical, grammatical and epistolary treatises. They invented the first two-wheeled wooden carts and built roads, earlier than 3000 BC. It was this cradle of civilisation that the illegal Anglo-American invasion destroyed. The invaders installed bin Laden’s jihadists to promote their Islamic agenda.

Taha Hussein (1889-1973) was the senior mentor of Aflaq and Bitar. He was one of the most influential 20th century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, known as the pioneer of the Arab Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Arab world. An admirer of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, he was a nationalist, and his vision of Egyptian secular culture was embedded in what he called “Pharaonism.” He believed that “Egypt could only progress without reclaiming its ancient pre-Islamic roots.” He opposed Saudi Arabia’s Stone-Age Islamic culture of the desert that was alien to the rich Arab cultures of the Fertile Crescent.

Taha Hussein was prosecuted for his views and lived in exile for several years. It was not until the 1950s that he was rehabilitated, on the eve of Egypt becoming a republic, and appointed Minister of Knowledge (now the Ministry of Education). This gave him the opportunity to initiate a number of educational reforms, such as free education for children. Like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the first Education Minister of independent India, Taha Hussein left no stone unturned to make education secular. He transformed many of the Koranic schools into secular primary schools and secularised not only the Al-Azhar but also a number of scientific universities that he established. He upgraded several high schools to colleges, such as the Graduate School of Medicine, Agriculture and others.

Since the United States’ alliance with bin Laden’s Mujahideen destroyed the secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1989, and dismantled the secular Baath administrations in Iraq for the benefit of al-Qaeda jihadists, the abortion of the 2011 Arab Spring has given the Anglo-Americans another wonderful opportunity to install Islamists in the Arab world. These ferocious vultures are now hovering over Syria, the last bastion of Baathism, under the pretext of democracy, to tear apart the amity between its Muslim and Christian communities. But so far they have found no ruse to directly attack Syria, as President Bashar al-Assad could not be accused of “possessing weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying Western civilisations within 45 minutes.” So the Arab Spring has become the Trojan horse to supply arms and ammunition to the dissidents and escalate the conflict into an emergency to isolate Syria by imposing United Nations sanctions.

The computer-literate students and working class youths and their supporters among the middle class who had initiated the protests, are naturally baffled, as I was when India was partitioned by the British colonialists. The impact of the divide-and-rule policy was even more devastating on the subcontinent’s Sufi Islam as Pakistan’s military dictators uprooted it to cut the Gordian knot with Mother India’s secular and pluralist culture. The political scenario in the Arab countries seems to be heading towards one similar to the struggle now being waged in Pakistan between Muslim fanatics and the more moderate sections of society,

As with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Ennahda Party of the Islamist Rachid Ghannouchi is expected to win the elections in Tunisia next month and choose an Assembly to draft a new Constitution. His biographer Azzam Tamimi wrote: “The real struggle of the future will be about who is capable of fulfilling the desires of a devout Muslim. It’s going to be about who is Islamist and who is more Islamist, rather than about the secularists and the Islamists.” During a re¬cent debate with a secular critic, Ghannouchi asked: “If the Islamic spectrum goes from bin Laden to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which of them is Islam?” And he argued: “Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models — models that combine Islam and mo¬dernity?”

Ghannouchi seems unaware of Prime Minister Erdogan’s antecedents. As Mayor of Istanbul in 1995, he declared that “the New Year’s Day is a Christian holiday and not a legitimate cause for celebration by Muslims,” and that “shaking hands with the opposite sex is prohibited by Islam.” In 1997, he identified Turkish society as having “two fundamentally different camps — the secularists who follow Kemal Atatürk’s reforms, and the Muslims who unite Islam with Shariah laws.” The secular lullaby he is singing to put his people to sleep and join the European Union, is symbolised by the Islamic hijab with which President Gul’s wife wraps her head.

Regarding Indonesia and Malaysia, Ghannouchi would have known better had he married an Indonesian Muslim — as I did in 1963 — and witnessed how the indigenous syncretistic cultures derived from the secular Buddhism and multicultural Hinduism are being systematically destroyed by the innumerable Wahabi mosques and fundamentalist madrasas that the Saudi petrodollars have built in these countries.

The omens are ominous as thousands of Islamists in Tunis have protested against the screening of a film they condemn as “un-Islamic and blasphemous.” And in Cairo, a student attending a Salafist protest meeting asked: “If democracy means majority, then why do they want to impose on us the views of the minorities — the liber¬als and the secularists — when we Islamists are the major¬ity? Salafis are the extremists that espouse violent jihad against civilians as a legitimate expression of Islam.”

The Arab Springers seem well on their way towards subscribing to the Sunni majoritarian culture and becoming another “epicentre of terrorism” like Pakistan, where even the moderate civilians are throwing rose petals on the assassin of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who was assassinated for defending a Christian woman condemned to die for insulting Islam. The judge of the Anti-Terrorism Court who sentenced Mumtaz Qadri to death has gone into hiding after lawyers attacked his courtroom, and a spate of protests and death threats. Banner-carrying mobs in Lahore, Rawalpindi and other cities are “saluting Qadiri’s glory,” and some fundamentalist organisations have announced huge rewards for anyone who would kill the judge.

“Pakistan once had a violent, rabidly religious lunatic fringe. This fringe has morphed into a majority. The liberals are now the fringe. We are now a nation of butchers and primitive savages. Europe’s Dark Ages have descended upon us,” said Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

(Madanjeet Singh, founder of the South Asia Foundation, is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. This article has been adapted from a chapter in his forthcoming book, Cultures and Vultures. A shortened version was published in The Hindu on October 19, 2011) 

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20. IN CROWDED CAIRO QUARTER, ISLAMISTS TRY TO SEIZE MANTLE OF A REVOLUTION
by Anthony Shadid
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http://tinyurl.com/5vo5cx2
The New York Times, October 17, 2011

Egypt's parliamentary contest has already begun in Cairo's Imbaba neighborhood, where residents waited for a nearby Muslim Brotherhood meeting.

CAIRO — In one of Cairo’s most crowded quarters, where streets are so filled with trash that bulldozers scoop it up, the Muslim Brotherhood has opened not one but two offices. Its most conservative counterpart has followed suit. An Islamist do-gooder with forearms as broad as the Nile has vowed to win a seat in Parliament.

By some estimates, Imbaba is three times as dense as Manhattan. Islamic activists have built on their formidable charity in the neighborhood.

Egypt’s parliamentary election may be more than a month away, but the contest has already begun in the neighborhood of Imbaba, where the arc of the Egyptian revolution is on display. The clarity of the revolt has given way to the ambiguity of its aftermath, and Islamic activists here who failed to drive the popular uprising — some, in fact, opposed it — are mobilizing to claim its mantle amid the din of protests, confusion and, last week, violence.

Imbaba may not be Cairo — it is more like a distilled version of the city — but it says a lot about where an anxious country may be headed as it approaches an election that will help decide the future character of an unfinished revolution.

From the caldron of frustration the revolt represented, Islamic activists here have built on their formidable charity across a landscape where liberal and secular forces have made almost no impression. Residents debate programs but often have only the agendas of religious parties to go on. Even the most secular voices — the few there are — wonder if it is not time to give the Islamists a chance.

“They’re the only ones organized, and they’re the only one who deliver to people in need,” Amal Salih, a 24-year-old resident of Imbaba, said with a measure of regret.

Ms. Salih came of age when Imbaba was in the throes of militant Islamists, who earned her neighborhood along the Nile the nickname of the Islamic Republic of Imbaba. Embarrassed, the government eventually deployed 12,000 troops, arrested a man called Sheik Gaber who had imposed his notion of order here and occupied the neighborhood for six weeks. The government offered promises that typically proved illusory; just a year before the revolution, a leading official promised that Imbaba would soon look like Cairo’s most upscale neighborhoods.

It never did, and by the time the revolution began, Ms. Salih joined the protests against her parents’ wishes.

She wears a veil, but she calls herself secular. She laments the resurgence of religious forces, but she clings to the hope that her time in Tahrir Square symbolized.

“We can’t be impatient,” she said. “Every revolution in the world takes time.”

In Imbaba, as elsewhere in Cairo, those memories of Tahrir Square represent an ideal that seems to grow more pristine the longer the ruling military council delays the transition to civilian elected government. During the revolution in Imbaba, youths made the point that religion rarely drove their demands, even in a pious locale like this one. As security collapsed, neighborhoods banded together, almost spontaneously, to face any provocation, imagined or otherwise.

Residents said a rich businessman who operated boats on the Nile helped organize popular defense committees. In a neighborhood named for blacksmiths, family elders abstained from their usual evenings over coffee in cafes and set up checkpoints. A spice seller named Sheik Salama and butchers from the Qut family helped organize guards for a stretch of street that hosted a branch of Bank Misr and the Munira Police Station.

“It was spontaneous,” said Magdy Obeid, a young academic in Imbaba. “We participated as Egyptians. We did not know someone was puritanical, Muslim Brotherhood, or whatever. We were just Egyptian, and there was no distinction between us.”

Mr. Obeid sat in a dingy apartment that was dark but for the glow of the late afternoon. He sipped a soft drink as he remembered those days, then turned to the present. “Now it’s only the Islamic currents,” he said, nodding. “Without a doubt, until now, they’re the only ones who have emerged. No one else is on the scene.”

Imbaba is as proud as it is crowded — by some estimates, it is three times as dense as Manhattan. One resident estimated its population at 15 million, a vast overstatement given that Cairo itself is only 18 million or so. But the exaggeration underscored the sheer challenge of bringing relief to a neighborhood where no one walks a quiet street. Three-wheeled motorized buggies known as tuk-tuks ply the streets. Since the revolution, builders have ignored codes, piling floor atop floor on red-brick buildings never high enough to escape the din.

In February, some of the most puritanical Islamists here handed out fliers urging people to support President Hosni Mubarak; with his fall, they seek to replace him with one of their own. Posters on mosques outline a program no different from any liberal agenda, save for item No. 1 — Islamic law — and a number listed at the bottom reserved for female callers.

“The people here are poor, and they have no idea about democracy or politics,” said Ayman Abdel-Wahab, a Brotherhood member sitting in the group’s office, which opened here in July. “They’ll side with whomever they think can offer them help.”

On the walls of mosques like Furqan and Tawba, posters beckon residents to come and get to know the Brotherhood, still the most potent of Egypt’s Islamist currents. Mr. Abdel-Wahab said the group tried to serve as an intermediary between residents and overwhelmed local officials, and that it regularly distributed sugar, oil and rice to hundreds of the most needy. A banner hangs over one of Imbaba’s main thoroughfares trumpeting a Brotherhood celebration of the neighborhood’s best students. (Each received a watch and certificate.) Youths are offered summer trips to beaches. Other Islamist charities provide monthly payments — $15, sometimes a little more — to widows.

Of course, there is nothing new in Islamist activists’ taking the lead in offering charity in Cairo, but only now is it so intertwined with the fortunes of coming elections.

“Some people say that the services I provide are equivalent to that of 50 members of Parliament,” declared Yasser Suleiman, known by everyone here as Sheik Yasser.

In an office adorned with a plaque that reads “The Koran and nothing else,” Sheik Yasser oversees a staff of 20 employees providing help to 1,500 orphans with a budget, he says, of $330,000. His short-sleeve shirt reveals arms that seem too stout to belong to the accountant that he is. A failed candidate in the last election for Parliament, he is determined to win this time around, campaigning on his 25 years of charity work here.

“That’s the fruit of freedom and democracy,” he said.

Under Mr. Mubarak’s long rule, the divergent currents of Islamists were often grouped under the rubric of “the religious.” That is no longer the case. The Brotherhood now openly competes with groups that have lately become more assertive: the Salafists, the most puritanical current, along with the once-militant Islamic Group, which renounced violence in the late 1990s. Not even the Brotherhood claims to know the relative weight of each, though some residents blame the Salafists for a new current of intolerance in Imbaba as well as sectarian clashes that erupted this summer with Christians. Rumors are traded furiously of Salafists’ administering vigilante justice. In one version, a youth stealing tuk-tuks had either his hand amputated or his ear sliced off.

Ayman Abdel-Aziz, a pharmacist whose office abuts the new headquarters of the Salafist Nour Party, nodded with approval at the story. Though calling himself secular, he had grown weary of the crime wave in Cairo; even his business had been broken into.

“These days, you have to deal with those people and instill fear,” Mr. Abdel-Aziz said. “Yes, it’s savage, but it’s the perfect way to deal with all those thugs among us.”

He vowed not to vote for the religious currents, but he understood the logic these days. After decades of repressive rule sometimes conflated in the street with the notion of secular liberalism, he said, people were willing to consider alternatives, however austere.

“The argument goes like this,” he said. “Give them a chance. Let’s try them out.”

On a night in which an autumn breeze offered respite from Cairo’s pollution, Sayyid Abdel-Khaleq joined his friend Khaled Said on a trip to the Brotherhood’s office. In the past week they had paid visits to two liberal parties and the Nour Party, as they tried to figure out whom to vote for. The liberals seemed dated, they said, and the Salafists felt as though they were still “in the kindergarten of politics.” That left the Brotherhood, although Mr. Abdel-Khaleq said “a lot can happen between now and then.”

“During the revolution, we adhered to no membership,” he said. “We were motivated by ourselves, for ourselves, and we were driven by what was inside us.”

“Now,” he added matter-of-factly, “it’s the time for parties.”


A version of this article appeared in print on October 18, 2011, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: In Crowded Cairo Quarter, Islamists Try to Seize Mantle of a Revolution.

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21. TURMOIL IN ARAB WORLD: ATTACK ON SECULARISM
by Saeed Naqvi
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Deccan Herald, 20 October 2011
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/199199/attack-secularism.html

The secular enclaves may have been few, but emphatic secular presence was a check on mindless religiosity.

The luxury bus leaves downtown Cam hotel to Qassion mountains for a panoramic view of the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city, Damascus. The picture has to be sketched because outside Syria everyone is counting on the level of chaos we did not see.

There are diplomats, journalists, scholars, some NGOs too, invited by a Syrian think tank to study the current situation. Edward Lionel Peck, former US ambassador to several Arab countries was in the group. From the Ahlatala Cafe at the Qassian heights, the vast expanse looks the very picture of tranquility.

The city’s calm is all the more noticeable because, thanks to the media, we have been conditioned to expect tension, conflict, street protests. “No fireworks here” the manager of the Café intervenes. Derra, Alleppo, Homs, Hama – “those are the cities where you might see some action”.

An Indian businessman invites me to spend the evening with a Syrian Sunni family he has known for long years. The husband is a retired civil servant; the wife dons a white chiffon scarf. She has a sad, beatific smile on her face. Her two daughters in frocks are constantly replenishing the centre table with fruits, baklavas, scones, soft drinks, Turkish coffee – endless hospitality.

The negative media focus on Syria in recent months has erased from minds the continuing reality: the country is among the few remaining parts of the Arab world where elegant, gracious living is still possible. “But it may end soon” the wife says, wiping her tears. “Can you imagine – I have to wear this scarf now”. She is Sunni who are supposed to be with the Islamist rebels opposing the Alawi ruling elite. Then why is she unhappy wearing a scarf? Syrian social order is in turmoil.

The population of Syria consists overwhelmingly of Sunnis – say 80 per cent. The biggest minority are Alawis, in their origins a Shia Sect but as a result of decades of Baath party training, have shed their religion. They are secular in a non religious sort of way, rather in the image of Mustafa Kemal Pasha or the more Socialist, left leaning Jawaharlal Nehru, a blend of an abiding local culture and western education.

Until the Ayatullahs came to power in 1979, Teheran, Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Baghdad, Algiers, Tunis and any city in Morocco, and even Tripoli had among their populations the most secular elites. The secular enclaves may have been few but emphatic secular presence was a check on mindless religiosity. How was the secular stamp rubbed out in most of these societies in the space of three decades? Each city has a different narrative. The narrative of Damascus is currently in the making.

With the world’s media arrayed on the other side, it is difficult to persuade those who would care to listen, that it is secularism which is fighting with its back to the wall in Syria. But the narrative the media beams about Syria is: Assad brutalizes his people.

Liberal democracy
It can be nobody’s case that Arab monarchies and dictatorships, Kemalist Turkey and Shah’s Iran were paragons of liberal democracy, if that be such a non negotiable value. But a certain elegant urbanity was available in these enclaves. In Cairo and Beirut, this urbanity came along with a sparkling intellectual life. Mubarak’s Cairo stilled the fizz.
An anti intellectual aridity crept in which gradually overwhelmed most of the cities listed above. Damascus, believe it or not, is the last bastion where one can sit with friends and discuss ideas.

What, then, is our hostess that evening so distraught about? The growing religiosity travelling from across a post Kemalist Turkey and post Saddam Hussain Iraq have generated peer pressure for the scarf. And now, the impulses which brought in the scarf are providing hospitality for Islamism to topple the Baathist structure. Islamism is being preferred to secular Baathism by the US, Europe, Israel (Saudi Arabia) because the move removes Syria from the Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas chain. The regional chessboard changes.

Historically, in Syria Sunnis owned most of the lands and the rather poorer Alawis gravitated towards the army and other services. Just as the great Red Army, in the ultimate analysis, turned out to be a Russian army, the Yugoslav army, a Serbian army, the Syrian army is mostly an Alawi army. This army is the backbone of the Baath structure. Much the largest membership of Baath party comes from the Sunni majority for obvious reason. But they do not have as much of a “control” on power as the Alawis do particularly since the ascent of Hafez Assad in 1971.

There has always been a little bit of Muslim Brotherhood of varying strengths throughout the Arab sub stratum. The Iranian revolution in 1979 and breakdown of the Lebanon power sharing system after the Israeli occupation caused something of a stir in the central city of Hama, inviting a brutal crackdown by Assad in 1982.

The “Arab spring” broke up into three theatres – North Africa up to Egypt. Britain and France are to this day trying to manage the mess they have created in Libya. The Saudis are at the wheel in Bahrain and Yemen. Syria appeared to have been spared. Then Turkey began to look like a good model for Arabs in search of the electoral route. Moreover, if Syria can be fitted into that scheme, Iran will lose an ally and Turkey will gain influence.

The media has taken up the project with its concoctions and exaggerations. Double check this last fact with Ambassador Peck who is quite as puzzled. Meanwhile the lady with the scarf will swear by the holy book that she and her family in Alleppo have seen arms being funnelled in for the protestors from Turkey. Others talk of Protesters being armed from Iraq and Jordan, a story the media will not investigate.


22. ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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(i) India: Protest against curtailing of academic freedom under Right wing pressure !!
Monday, October 24 at 12:00pm
Location: Vivekananda Statue, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi, Delhi
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(ii) Pakistan: NSF Punjab is holding its Convention on 25-26 November 2011 in Faisalabad
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Dear Friends and Comrades,
NSF Punjab is holding its Convention on 25-26 November 2011 in Faisalabad, the first NSF Convention to be held in Punjab since 1991. We are organizing this Convention with the view of not only strengthening the nascent organizational structure of the NSF but also as a meeting point for the various strands of the Pakistani Left and progressive groups who we believe must come together if we are to resurrect ourselves as an effective, coherent force at this turbulent juncture in Pakistan's history.

We are a voluntary, self-financed student organization and we are raising funds in order to meet our expenses for the upcoming Convention. We are attaching a fundraising appeal to this message which introduces the aims & objectives, history, organizational structure and activities of the NSF since its reorganization, along with a pictoral view of some of NSF Punjab's recent activities.

We would appreciate it if you could take the time out to take a look at our fundraising appeal and support our efforts with a personal donation, however small. We are also looking for individuals who are willing to be regular donors towards the quarterly NSF magazine (published jointly by NSF Punjab and Sindh) called "The Student".

We will duly acknowledge any donations we receive and present you with a monthly report of our activities, along with a financial report which will be sent to donors documenting the organization's expenditures during that period. Copies of our magazine and manifesto can be obtained by writing to us at nsfpunjab at gmail.com or calling Mr. Nazish Zahoor (Information Secretary) at 0331-5078723. You can also take a look at our website: nsfonline.wordpress.com

Most of all, we look forward to seeing you at our Convention in November!

In solidarity,

Alia Amirali
General Secretary
National Students Federation (Punjab)
Ph: 0332-5240283
nsfpunjab at gmail.com, amiralienator at gmail.com (personal)
http://nsfonline.wordpress.com/
	nsfonline
nsfonline.wordpress.com

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