SACW - 31 Oct. 2011 / Bangladesh: Jamaat on trial / Pakistan: Bol film review ; trading with the enemy / Sri Lanka: Wimal Fernando: Struggles for Democracy / India: Academic Freedom: Romila Thapar interview; Hindu Right Loves Anna / Manifesto for a Secular MENA / US: Attack on contraception

Harsh K aiindex at gmail.com
Sun Oct 30 15:31:05 EDT 2011


    South Asia Citizens Wire - 31 October 2011 - No. 2729
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[Visit A lokpal for India: Dissenting views & news for anti corruption activists 
http://lokpaldissent.wordpress.com/]

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Contents:

1. Bangladesh: Jamaat on trial - A view from Pakistan (Farooq Sulehria)
2. Bangladesh: Jamaat leader hires US firm to lobby (David Bergman)
3. Pakistan: Haunting, bold ‘Bol’ (Dr Mahjabeen Islam)
4. Pakistan: Human Rights Honor for Shehrbano Taseer
5. Pakistan: Culture of intolerance (FZ Khan)
6. Pakistan : Trading with the enemy (Najam Sethi)
 - Religious parties oppose MFN status for India (news report)
7. Pakistan, India urged to end fishermen`s woes (Mukhtar Alam)
8. India: The richness of the Ramayana, the poverty of a University: Interview with Romila Thapar
9. India: Three hundred Ramayanas - Delhi University and the purging of Ramanujan (Mukul Kesavan)
10.India: Why the Sangh Loves Anna (Hartosh Singh Bal)
- “Anna’s Movement Or Ramdev’s, We Never Go Anywhere Uninvited” - Outlook Interviews Nitin Gadkari
- Thanks to BJP led municipal corporation, some 100 in Delhi roads to be named after Hindutva leaders 
11. India: The chariot-rider (J Sri Raman)
Content updates from sacw.net
12. India's North east: Ethnic chauvinists whip up hysteria - 
- India-Bangladesh Border deal bugs the Hindu Right and regional chauvinists in North East India
- Blockades of Many Kinds (B.G. Verghese)
- Manipur blockaded on road to nowhere (Yengkhom Jilangamba)
13 India: Repeal Armed Forces Special Powers Act (Human Rights Watch)
14. Wimal Fernando: Struggles for Democracy in Sri Lanka (Ahilan Kadirgamar, B Skanthakumar)
15. Delhi University Stands up for Academic Freedom: Images of protest on 24 October 2011
16. Nuclear power: in whose interest? (Praful Bidwai)

International: 
17. Manifesto for a Secular Middle East and North Africa
18. What secularists and women stand to loose in the Tunisian elections? (Marieme Helie Lucas)
19. Holy smoke - Islamic televangelists (The Economist)
20. USA: "Letting Jesus Pick Your Birth Control?" (Katha Pollitt)

Good Books:
21. Book Reviews of Godse's Children - Hindutva Terror in India (A.G. Noorani and by Ram Puniyani)
22. The Saffron Condition: Politics of Repression and Exclusion in Neoliberal India by Subhash Gatade
23. Man's Dominion - The Rise of Religion and the Eclipse of Women's Rights (Sheila Jeffreys)

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1. BANGLADESH: JAMAAT ON TRIAL [A VIEW FROM PAKISTAN]
by Farooq Sulehria
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The News, October 29, 2011

Delawar Hossain Sayedee, leader of the Jamat-e-Islami in Bangladesh, has been indicted with 20 counts, including 3,000 killings, rape and arson, during Bangladesh’s nine-month-long war of liberation.

If proven guilty, Sayedee could face the death sentence. He has denied all charges against him. Sayedee will now be tried by the International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic tribunal with no United Nations role, which was set up last year to investigate war crimes in 1971. The trial begins on Oct 30.

While the role of the Pakistani military has drawn some media criticism, the Jamaat’s role in East Pakistan in 1971 has gone largely unnoticed.

The attitude of the Jamaat to the problems and issues raised by the East Pakistanis even prior to the military action was hostile at worst and ambiguous at best. Understandably, the Jamaat was never able to prosper in East Pakistan.

At the time of Partition, the Jamaat had only one member in East Pakistan. At the time of Bangladesh’s inception, it had 300-400 members (and roughly 2,100 in West Pakistan). However, it must be borne in mind that Jamaat’s membership was not open to everybody.

The Jamaat and the religious parties won a small percentage of the vote in West Pakistan in the December 1970 elections, in which they made an unexpectedly bad showing. In a bizarre twist of events, the Jamaat happened to come out a remote second, despite its tiny percentage, to the Awami League in East Pakistan. The League swept the elections in the province, winning all but two of the National Assembly seats there (neither of which went to the Jamaat).

Soon after the creation of Pakistan, the first expression of East Pakistan’s displeasure was the language riots. Jinnah wanted Urdu as the state language. East Pakistan wanted both Urdu and Bengali as state languages.

Since 56 percent of the population of united Pakistan spoke Bengali while 37 percent spoke Punjabi, Urdu was the language of the minority. However, Jinnah rejected East Pakistan’s plea, and from February 1948 the language issue began to dominate politics in East Pakistan.

In March 1948, there were student strikes and demonstrations throughout the province. Prime Minister Liaquat Khan reacted to the protests saying, “Pakistan is a Muslim state and it must have its lingua franca, the language of the Muslim nation...It is necessary for the nation to have one language and that language can only be Urdu, and no other language.”

The Centre finally capitulated to East Pakistan’s demand in 1952, but only after several Bengali-language activists had been killed in the movement.

The Jamaat’s reaction to the acceptance of Bengali as an official language was unwelcoming, if not outright hostile. The Jamaat’s organ Tarjuman-ul-Quran, for instance, declared that acceptance of Bengali on the same level as Urdu would discourage East Pakistanis from learning Urdu, and thus keep them ignorant of Islam since Urdu was richer in Islamic literature.

The Jamaat later on began to pay lip service to East Pakistanis’ concerns, like the language issue, or their under-representation in the military.

However, as the Jamaat saw it, the real problem was East Pakistan’s Hindus, who dominated the trade, and the communists. Maulana Maudoodi urged the ulema to rid the East Pakistani masses of what he called their ignorance of Islam, because “the influence of Hindu culture over their language, dress, habits and way of thinking is so big that they have lost all sense of its being an extraneous element in their life.”

The problem, so to say, was not exploitation at the hands of West Pakistan but what the Jamaat considered East Pakistan’s lack of Islamisation.

The Jamaat contended that Bengali literature was pervaded by Hindu ideas since Tagore was the major influence on it, while the similes and proverbs of Bengali reflected Hindu thought and social way of life. Besides, Bengali literature lacked what the Jamaat called Islamic politics, economics and way of life.

When Sheikh Mujib presented his Six Points, the Jamaat strongly rejected them on the pretext that they constituted a demand for secession. When the military operation was launched in East Pakistan in March 1971, the Jamaat intensified its campaign against the Awami League. The Jamaat dismissed the League and India as tools of a “world Christian-Jewish conspiracy” to dismember Pakistan.

In hindsight, the Jamaat propaganda may sound hysterical. However, at the time it helped rationalise the excesses committed against East Pakistanis. Not content with ideological justifications, the Jamaat raised militias and actively participated, alongside the army, in liquidating radical and progressive intellectuals and activists.

In May 1971, while East Pakistan was being brutalised, Maulana Rahmat Ilahi, the Jamaat’s general secretary, declared: “Our brave army has saved Pakistan.” Maulana Maudoodi appealed to East Pakistan’s “genuine Muslims to help the army in rounding up Awami Leaguers.”

According to him, the movement in East Pakistan was sponsored by Hindus, communists and atheistic Bengali nationalists, all of whom were agents of India, communism and Jews.

In April 1971, the Maulana sent a memorandum to 39 Muslim heads of states and the Rabita-e-Alam-e-Islami justifying the military action in East Pakistan. In his memorandum, he claimed that the Awami League movement had been launched under the influence of Hindu professors and Hindu Bengali literature.

In July, a Jamaat delegation headed by K J Murad was dispatched to Europe and the Middle East. The delegation visited the UK, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and some other countries to counteract pro-Bangladeshi propaganda.

Meanwhile, Jamaat delegations were dispatched to East Pakistan. In May 1971 the Jamaat general secretary himself accompanied Gen Umrao Khan on a visit to the province.

In June, the Jamaat’s deputy leader Mian Tufail Mohammad himself visited East Pakistan. On his return, Mian Tufail urged the army to reconquer every inch lost to the enemy. He said there should be no delay in killing all those responsible for the armed revolt.

He blamed the elected Awami League MPs for the chaos. Saying that the by-elections in a few constituencies announced by the Yahya regime would not suffice, he demanded the dissolution of the East Pakistan assembly and fresh elections in the province to both the national and provincial levels.

However, in the farcical by-elections that followed – which the main party, the Awami League was banned from contesting – the Jamaat fielded 19 candidates and won five National Assembly seats.

To the Jamaat’s credit, in the post-liberation period it was able to find itself a niche in Bangladeshi politics despite its role in the 1971 events. This was a repeat of its performance in Pakistan after independence, despite the fact that the Jamaat had opposed the creation of Pakistan.

The pattern in both countries has been similar. In Bangladesh the Jamaat allied itself with the military junta when Gen Ziaur Rehman came to power. Gen Zia, like his Pakistani namesake and counterpart, began to revise history and textbooks. His purpose was to minimise the role played by Sheikh Mujib in the movement and project his own imagined role in it. A revision of history equally suited the Jamaat.

The Awami League and the left forces, however, kept campaigning for a trial regarding atrocities in the 1971 war. In the last general elections, such a trial became an election issue. The Jamaat stood exposed and lost the elections.

A similar process is necessary everywhere including Pakistan to correct distortions of history. A ‘Truth Commission’ investigating not just the 1971 war but all the wars including the “Afghan jihad” and the “War on Terror”, perhaps?

The writer is a freelance contributor.

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2. BANGLADESH: JAMAAT LEADER HIRES US FIRM TO LOBBY
by David Bergman
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New Age, 30 October 2011

A senior Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami leader, Mir Quasem Ali, along with his US-based brother Mir Masum Ali, in the past year spent $310,000 (Tk 24 million) hiring one of the top United States lobbying firms to try and influence the country’s politicians and government officials on the ‘Bangladeshi War Crimes Tribunal’ and issues relating to the ‘political opposition,’ according to documents lodged with the US congress.

In March 2010, the Awami League government set up the International Crimes Tribunal to prosecute people alleged to have committed war crimes during the 1971 war of independence.

Since its establishment, the tribunal has detained seven men, five of whom are leaders of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami.

Quasem Ali, a successful businessman, is a member of both Jamaat’s 15-member central executive committee and its working committee.

The head of the ICT’s investigation agency has previously confirmed to journalists that the agency is conducting inquiries into whether Quasem Ali committed crimes during the 1971 war of independence. It is understood that in 1971 he was president of the Jamaat’s Chittagong unit student wing.

His younger brother Masum Ali, who lives in New York and is understood to be a US citizen, is named as the project director of media and publications on the website of the Muslim Ummah of North America, an organisation which attracts US-based supporters of the Bangladesh Jamaat.

Cassidy and Associates,

which in 2010 was ranked as the sixth largest lobbying firm in the United States, is required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act 1995 to file with the US senate a registration form when any client starts using its services.

For as long as the arrangement continues, the firm must also file quarterly reports setting out the fees it receives from the client and the individual lobbyists within the company who undertook the work.

It is these publicly available documents which New Age has obtained in relation to the two brothers.

Abdur Razzaq, a Jamaat leader and head of the legal team defending his party colleagues accused of war crimes, declined to comment on whether the lobbying was undertaken on behalf of the political party. The forms do not mention Jamaat’s name.

Both Mir Quasem Ali and Cassidy and Associates failed to respond to a series of questions e-mailed to them.

It is not unlawful for a Bangladesh citizen or an organisation to hire a lobbying firm; documents filed with the US congress by lobbyists show that in 2001 and 2002, the Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority spent $430,000 (Tk 32.6 million) on hiring US lobbyists and between 2001 and 2009, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters’ Association spent over $530,000 (Tk 40.2 million) on lobbyists.

The United States has become an important battleground for those supporting and those opposing the International Crimes Tribunal.

Whilst the Bangladesh government is seeking to get the US government’s stamp of approval for the tribunal, the Jamaat-e-Islami wants the US congress and government to take a critical position in light of what they argue are violations of due process.

The effectiveness of Cassidy and Associate’s lobbying may in part be gauged if Stephen Rapp, the US ambassador for war crimes-at-large, comes for his third visit to Bangladesh, expected to take place in November. He has previously said that the US government might provide assistance to the tribunal depending on how he and the congress viewed the fairness of the trial process.

The documents, obtained by New Age directly from the US senate database, show that on November 24, 2010, Cassidy and Associates filed a lobbying registration form for a ‘client’ named as ‘Mir Quasem Ali’ and an address which matches the Jamaat’s leader current address at Mirpur in Dhaka.

The registration form describes the client’s business as ‘Television programme production and broadcast.’ Quasem Ali is a major shareholder of the Diganta Media Corporation which owns Diganta Television and the newspaper Naya Diganta.

The document describes the ‘specific lobbying issue’ for which the client has sought services from Cassidy and Associates as ‘Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal and political opposition matters.’

Nearly two months later, on January 13, 2011, the company filed a ‘lobbying report’ which stated that Quasem Ali would be required to pay ‘$80,000’ (Tk 6 million) for work done by the company in the final three months of 2010.

The figures are supposed to be a ‘good faith estimate’ by the company ‘rounded to the nearest $10,000.’

The forms disclose that the lobbying company put together a four-member lobbying team to lobby the ‘US house of representatives, the US senate and the state department.’

The team included the company’s founder and executive chairman, Gerald SJ Cassidy, one of its senior vice-presidents Mark Clack, who had previously worked as a staff member of the house of representative international relations committee, and also Elizabeth Tregaskis, the company’s ‘international specialist.’

Gerald Cassidy is one of the most prominent and respected lobbyists in Washington.

In a subsequent ‘lobbying report’ relating to work undertaken in the first three months of 2011, the lobbying company estimates that it would receive a further fee from Quasem Ali of $100,000 (Tk 7.9 million)

The form, this time stated that the company’s lobby was solely focused on the ‘Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal’ and not on opposition party matters.

This fee paid by Quasem Ali in the first quarter of 2011 was amongst the largest quarterly fees incurred by any of Cassidy’s clients in 2011 — with only about one dozen out of 140 clients paying more.

The filed documents, publicly available through an online US congress database, shows that Quasem Ali did not pay for any further lobbying work but that less than a month after he terminated his contract with the company, his brother, Masum Ali then became a client of Cassidy’s seeking lobbying around exactly the same subject areas.

In the next six months, the lobbying disclosure forms, seen by New Age, show that the fees paid by Masum Ali totalled $130,000 (Tk 9.9 million) — divided into $50,000 for the work undertaken between April and June 2011 and $80,000 for lobbying between July and September.

Masum Ali is described, like his brother, as involved in television production which may refer to his role in establishing Diganta Television in the United States. The forms show that a similar team of lobbyists worked for Masum Ali, though Gerald SJ Cassidy was replaced with the company’s number two executive, Gregg Hartly.

It appears that the arrangement between Masum Ali and the lobbying company is ongoing as it has not yet filed a ‘termination’ form.

According to the US congress database, the two men appear to be the only individual clients of Cassidy and Associates in 2011. All their other clients were companies or organisations.

Other Bangladesh newspapers have suggested that Quasem Ali has paid $25 million to lobbyists but this figure is not supported by the documents disclosed to the US senate by Cassidy and Associates.

Criticisms of the tribunal have not just been made by the Jamaat-e-Islami. Independent human rights organisations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have raised concerns about inadequacies in the International Crimes (Tribunal) Act 1973 and the tribunal’s rules of procedure, and they may themselves be involved in lobbying the US government on the tribunal.

The US Ambassador for War Crimes, in a letter to government ministers earlier this year, also set out a series of changes that should be made to the law but many of these have not yet been made.

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3. PAKISTAN: HAUNTING, BOLD ‘BOL’ 
by Dr Mahjabeen Islam
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http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011\10\21\story_21-10-2011_pg3_3

Daily Times, 21 October 2011

Ours is a society steeped in veneers; the veneer of a spotless drawing room but filthy kitchens and filthier bathrooms. Colonialism has not left us; we are more concerned about what is thought of us than righting our ills

A prerequisite before enjoying ‘Bol’ is an open mind. But even for the lead-lined mind of the zealot, just the sensory input of the film could break a steel-web or two. And staunch liberals might feel whiplashed at times as well.

Director Shoaib Mansoor insists that we talk. All that he brilliantly directs happens rampantly, but Pakistanis know not to talk about it. Our taboo issues are learned as if by rote and almost every issue raised in the film is where angels fear to tread.

The reviews were so wonderful and most films disappoint, for a movie, like life, is really all a matter of expectations. Not ‘Bol’. It is amazing that one film could mirror Pakistani society and tackle taboo issues so successfully. The art and savvy of the film is not its plot, for most of it is easy to predict; it is the depth, the dialogue and deep heartache that the lives of the characters create within you that makes you want to see it again so that you can savour what you surely missed the first time around.

While Pakistan is one of the few nations of the world that recognises transvestites as a third gender, their ridicule is a given. Theirs is a mould that was predominantly created by society and has unfortunately continued to be filled and characterised today the way it was centuries ago. Recognition as a third gender is present in the law but again, like all things in Pakistan, the law is useful only when cases of murder and gross usurpation of rights have to be fought in court. Societal bias and ridicule have not changed an iota and this is addressed very successfully in the film. When a child with gender confusion is born in a Pakistani family, hell does break loose. And this is the most heart-rending part of the film. In a single sentence of a single character the concepts of cross-dressing and homosexuality are challenged. Under the umbrella of religion, Pakistanis have stolidly ascribed the issues of cross-dressing and homosexuality to the environment; the film shatters this.

Patriarchy, intimidation and the preferential treatment scooped up by men is shown even in the small touches of the father getting mosquito net protection and the larger portion of food, but no one else, for the rest of the family is all women. Deprivation of education by the father and then ridicule for illiteracy is the typical double standard of numerous households. The practice of palming off endless daughters to any Tom, Dick or Harry and feeling the burden when the bad decision returns in the form of a divorce or under-educated or illiterate girls waiting a lifetime for Prince Charming is painful to see.

Hot-button issues of ethnicity and sectarianism take you on another roller-coaster ride. And ‘Bol’ is an equal opportunity employer. If you feel embarrassed at the crudeness of Punjabi behaviour, do not despair, for the arrogance and superficial sophistication of Delhi-wallas is pitiable. If Shias are seen to be cultural Muslims, one sees Sunnis as blinded and without perspective.

Human life has little or no value in Pakistan. And ‘Bol’ is graphic about this. We are more concerned with honour and societal respect than simply ‘the milk of human kindness’. And we are willing to sacrifice, in the literal sense of the word, a whole heck of a lot for good ratings from friends and family. ‘Loag kya kahein gay’ (what will people say?) might as well be ‘kishwar-e-haseen shaad baad’ (happy be the bounteous realm).

The father’s cronies are unmoved when he says that he will kill his daughter or she will kill him one day. He only grabs their attention when he says that she questions hadith.

Islam stands up to harsh inquiry and only those who understand a bit more than its basics do not get hot and bothered by seemingly pointed questions. The logical inquiry of a young mind, which is totally on point and is premised on the ‘dua and dawa’ (prayer and medicine/action) concept, bother the father endlessly, for his is not blind faith, but a dead one. Islam promotes inquiry and many a verse in the Quran asks you to wonder, challenges you to seek and learn.

That women perpetuate the exploitation of women is also well illustrated in the film. And the harsh and abusive circumstances that many families are living in day in and day out make you count your blessings.

For days ‘Bol’ haunts you. You talk about it ad infinitum only to realise that everyone is not a fan. “We should make films that give a better image of Pakistan,” said a friend. Is an image more important or the reality I asked? But ours is a society steeped in veneers; the veneer of a spotless drawing room but filthy kitchens and filthier bathrooms. Our is a ‘sub theek ho jayega’ (everything will be alright) society. Colonialism has not left us; we are more concerned about what is thought of us than righting our ills.

“The movie is very stressful,” said another. Really? And Pakistan is not? Terrorism and corruption ridden, bursting with an uncontrolled population, we should still put our collective head in the proverbial sand and make those movies in which they prance around in the grass singing love songs.

Free will and predetermination are also discussed. And the widespread attitude of receiving without lifting a finger and the raging confusion of submission to God’s will meaning to just be a puppet that perpetually procreates. Ironically, this puppet-like submission does not come with an acceptance of God’s will when He showers a household with daughters.

A painfully human and particularly Pakistani trait is sharply shown: to blame a person for the way they look, for their gender and for their sexual orientation.

Shoaib Mansoor’s films are reminiscent of the soul-searching films of Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal. And more, they are pointed and courageous and ‘Bol’ puts you through an emotional vacuum cleaning, if you let it that is. And we must collectively let it; we must talk about these issues rather than cloistering them into a stench.

The theme that the film wants to promote is not understood sufficiently because it comes way late in the movie. All else that it wants to convey it shouts, it screams and it harmonises in a beautiful but sad symphony.

The writer is an addictionist, family physician and columnist. She can be reached at mahjabeen.islam at gmail.com

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4. PAKISTAN: HUMAN RIGHTS HONOR FOR SHEHRBANO TASEER
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http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/

Human Rights First Honor for Shehrbano Taseer

Text of Citation for Shehrbano Taseer 2011 Human Rights First Award 

for Promoting Tolerance in Pakistan

Shehrbano Taseer, daughter of the late Pakistani Governor Salmaan Taseer—a reformer who was murdered by his own security guard for speaking out against the misuse of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws—is carrying out her father’s legacy of tolerance in a dangerous environment. Despite death threats, Taseer speaks out publicly against discriminatory laws that target religious minorities and has openly criticized those who glorify her father’s murderer. A recent graduate of Smith College, Taseer is a journalist with Newsweek Pakistan and devotes her energies to educating people about the dangers of intolerance. In the face of ongoing fears for her own safety and the security of her family, she fights to promote freedom, dignity, justice, and fairness. Taseer has been characterized as “one of the bravest women in today’s Pakistan.”

Upcoming awaited ceremony at:
2011 Human Rights Award Dinner
Wednesday, Oct. 26
Cocktail Reception at 6pm
Dinner and Program at 7:15pm
Pier Sixty, Chelsea Piers
New York City  


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5. PAKISTAN: CULTURE OF INTOLERANCE (FZ Khan)
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(The News)

Letters to the editor

Culture of intolerance
 
Wednesday, October 26, 2011

The district and sessions judge, Pervez Ali Shah, who had handed down the death sentence to Mumtaz Qadri for killing former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, has left for Saudi Arabia along with his family after receiving death threats from extremists. The verdict angered many religious extremist groups, which started threatening the judge and fixed a bounty on his head. Sensing the gravity of the situation, the government arranged sending Shah and members of his family abroad. This shows a lack of tolerance and reasoning in our society. How many judges will leave the country? How many people will remain quiet out of fear? The government has a lot to do.

The society, on its part, should show courage and confront such acts of extremism. The extremist elements need to be defeated in debates through argument and reasoning. This has happened in Swat. What the people of Swat demonstrated during and after the military operation there should be taken as an example, though not fully ideal.

F Z Khan
Islamabad

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6. PAKISTAN : TRADING WITH THE ENEMY
by Najam Sethi
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The Friday Times, October 14, 2011

Najam Sethi’s Editorial

The granting of Most Favoured Nation (MFN) to India has confounded certain long-established political and ideological vested interests. The story of why Pakistan denied this status to India for two decades and why it has relented today is worth telling because it sheds light on a critical dimension of Pakistan’s “national security doctrine”.

The Pakistani military has always spurned the notion that trade with India could be beneficial in any way to Pakistan. “Trading with the enemy” was taboo because India stood to benefit more from it than Pakistan by running huge trading surpluses. That could not be allowed until the Kashmir issue was resolved to Pakistan’s satisfaction. So after the 1965 war with India, all trade was banned, except a short list of necessary items.

The civilian leaders demurred, partly because they were often loyal creatures of the Pakistan military, and partly because they were corrupt and weak. Sections of trade and business went along with this national security doctrine because they stood to lose their Western trading franchises and monopolistic industrial practices in a protected market environment.

But China entered Pakistan’s national security equation in the 1990s as the most favoured nation in the world. It seized the Pakistani market for consumer goods and destroyed its small-scale domestic manufacturing industry. Questions now began to be asked why India should be kept out especially since transport costs were lower across the borders and also because certain Pakistani exporters stood to benefit from reciprocal trade facilities with India. India seized on this political environment change to grant MFN status to Pakistan but Pakistan didn’t return the compliment because the military was actually promoting jihad in Kashmir.

The Indians sought to use trade to build interdependencies between India and Pakistan so that the hatchet over Kashmir could be quietly buried in a mountain of profitable vested interests in Pakistan. By the same token, the Pakistani military was determined to thwart any such initiative. Under the circumstances, a clutch of feasibility reports commissioned by the Commerce Ministry under the Benazir Bhutto regime in the mid 1990s which proved that there were significant benefits to Pakistan from trading with India were quietly shelved. How could the “enemy” which was throttling Pakistan’s “jugular vein in Kashmir” be a most favoured nation?

In 1998, Nawaz Sharif made a tentative move to dent this equation. Pakistan had surplus sugar and electricity for which there was demand in India and profits to be made in Pakistan by both the private and public sector. The nuclear tests had led to a US squeeze on the Pakistani economy and Sharif sought to break out of his regional straightjacket. But there were no significant transport facilities to enable such exports. The Indians wanted security guarantees that if they built such facilities on their side of the border these would not be left stranded in the event of any future conflict with Pakistan. So Sharif opted for “bus diplomacy” in February 1999 with India’s PM to create the political space to expand trade and commerce. He also launched a back channel to resolve Kashmir. But the military sabotaged this initiative by launching an operation in Kargil and overthrowing Sharif.

General Musharraf’s pet project was the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline. Iran had a gas surplus, India was facing a huge energy deficit but Pakistan was self-sufficient. All Musharraf wanted was to collect transit rent from Iran and India without giving any security guarantees for the pipeline in the event of conflict with India. He also did not want to open up trade with India. So nothing came of it.

Peace with India was high on Asif Zardari’s agenda in 2008. But Pakistani terrorists with links to the military put paid to that in Mumbai.

Now MFN status has been granted to India because of two compelling reasons. The first is economic: the Pakistani economy is in a bind again because relations with America have soured and adversely impacted the aid pipeline; the IMF has pulled out because we are not ready to tighten expenditures and raise revenues, and inflation, unemployment and poverty are weighing on the public. Cheap imports from India will help in controlling inflation just as exports to India will help the balance of payments. The second is political: the military is embroiled in a serious conflict on its western borders and wants to stitch up the eastern border with India so that it is not distracted from the job at hand.

Is this a paradigm change? It isn’t if the Pakistani military is looking upon it as a tactical necessity. Should it be scorned? No, because opening up trade has its own powerful dialectic of enabling people on both sides of the border to establish and sustain mutually profitable and beneficial interests and contacts. It is the first step in the long journey to establish people-to-people contacts and help build stability, peace and prosperity in the region. 

o o o
[SEE ALSO]

The Daily Times, October 28, 2011 	

Religious parties oppose MFN status for India

Staff Report

ISLAMABAD: The leadership of leading national religious parties denouncing the government’s likely decision to award Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to India stated that it would damage the ongoing Kashmir liberation movement.

Talking to Daily Times Sahibzada Haji Fazle Karim, president Jamiat Ulama-e-Pakistan expressed his resentment over the issue stated that granting MFN status to India without solution of Kashmir dispute would be tantamount to betray with 90,000 martyred Kashmiris who shed their blood for liberation of the valley. “We are not against developing bilateral trade ties with India, however, it should not be started before resolving the core issue of Kashmir as well as other long standing issues between the two neighboring rivals,” he maintained.

Ameer Jamaat-e-Islami Syed Munawar Hassan said the government is conferring MFN status to India following the order of USA. Terming it as a historic blunder, he said it is not only against the strategic interests of Pakistan but would be betrayal with sacrifices of Kashmiris. “India has not only been involved in massacring the Kashmiris, struggling for the right of self-determination but also engaged in hatching conspiracies in Afghanistan and Balochistan to destabilize Pakistan”, he lamented. He further said the government should take the leadership of Kashmir on the board; otherwise, the unilateral decision would make Kashmiris believe that Pakistan has left them in the lurch.

Markazi Jamiat Ahle Hadith (MJAH) President Senator Sajid Mir in an anguish tone put a question to the government, “what favour New Delhi has given to the government that Islamabad was so keen for granting it the MFN status.” “India has been involved in subverting Pakistan and distorting its image at international level, while, the PPP government in a sheer contrast to this fact, looks impatient to declare India most favourite nation for trade”, he added.

He asked the foreign minister to explain the circumstance forcing Islamabad to go for the decision even without solving Kashmir issue, water dilemma and other long-standing disputes with India. The decision would have serious implications on Kashmir freedom movement, he added.

Yahya Mujahid, spokesman of Jamaatud dawa said possible decision would convey a negative message to the Kashmiris fighting for accomplishing the unfinished agenda of creation of Pakistan (seeking accession of the valley to Pakistan).

Maulana Amjad of Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI-F) said it would push the Kashmir issue to the backburner. He urged the government to take all the stakeholders, especially the Kashmiris into confidence before taking such a major decision. He opined India had always cheated Pakistan and in this situation the rulers were taking decisions against the public opinion. He said the party would have no objection provided India accepts Kashmiri people right to self-determination and resolve the long-standing issue in accordance with the UN resolutions.

Nawaz Kharal, Information Secretary Sunni Ittehad Council terming the decision as most imprudent said even military dictators in the past could not go that far. The decision of an elected government, he said, was tantamount to sabotaging the freedom struggle of Kashmiris. MFN status to India should be a pre-condition for resolution of Kashmir issue, he urged.

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7. PAKISTAN, INDIA URGED TO END FISHERMEN'S WOES
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Dawn

by Mukhtar Alam 

October 28, 2011

KARACHI, Oct 27: Legal experts and labour rights activists said on Thursday that hundreds of fishermen from India and Pakistan had to languish in prisons for alleged violation of territorial waters even after completing their sentences thanks to the insensitivity of the two sets of bureaucracy to fishermen`s socioeconomic problems.

Speaking at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club, they said arresting fishermen with their boats and subsequent court trials and imprisonment never proved that any of the fishermen worked as a spy for his respective country.

They lamented that no humanitarian action had been taken during the last many years to end the misery of fishermen and their families.

Retired justice Nasir Aslam Zahid, who is also a member of the India-Pakistan Joint Judicial Committee on Prisoners (IPJJC), said that about 128 Indian fishermen were languishing in Pakistan jails for want of clearance from the interior wings of the two countries.

Those fishermen had been provided with consular access and identified as Indian nationals and now “we are just waiting for an official clearance for their transportation as free men to the Wagah checkpoint and their handing over to the Indian authorities,” the justice said, adding that the real problem in the repatriation of fishermen from the two countries was bureaucratic delay and the governments` reluctance to resolve the long-standing humanitarian issue.

A former senator and federal law minister, Iqbal Haider, president of the Pakistan Fishermen Forum Mohammad Ali Shah and joint director of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research Zulfiqar Shah also spoke.

A written statement issued on behalf of the speakers said that off and on hundreds of fishermen returned home but after several years of unjustified detention. Similarly, captured boats were returned only erratically, depriving many of their livelihood, the statement added.

It was further said that in recent months the Maritime Security Agency had accelerated seizure of boats and imprisonment of fishermen in not just its territorial waters but also of those fishing far away from the country`s exclusive economic zone. These actions were in contempt of an agreement between the Indian Coast Guard and the MSA envisaging that the crews be treated humanely and returned as soon as possible.

Justice Zahid, who visited fishermen and families of fishermen in India in September, said that the current seizure of boats and imprisonment of crew members was sad news after what seemed progress made in bilateral trade liberalisation and peace process in recent months.

He said as members of the IPJJC it was now the turn of four Pakistanis to visit Indian prisons and interview Pakistani fishermen there and hold meetings with their India counterparts.

“Our tour as IPJJC members is due since July last, but we are sitting fingers crossed as a green signal is awaited from the governments,” he added.

He said civil society members also wanted to have a meeting with the president and the prime minister on the issue of fishermen and devise a mechanism to stop their arrests on the ground of alleged trespassing and impounding of their boats and equipment.

Mr Haider, a senior supreme court lawyer, said the issues of fishermen of the two sides needed immediate attention for a practical solution, including signing of a treaty on the pattern of what India and Sri Lanka and India and Bangladesh had. Bureaucrats had been adding to the ordeal of the people of the two sides by keeping intact the old system of pre-departure visa, instead of introducing the issuance of visa on arrival at each other`s entry points, he said, adding that efforts should be made to ease the process of peace, and increase people to people relations between the two countries.

The fishing community leader, M.A. Shah, said that vessel seizure must be stopped by security agencies of both India and Pakistan forthwith and all fishermen be returned to their homes. “If Pakistan is to act rapidly, India must promptly accept detained fisher folk as its citizens,” he said, adding that verification must begin with fisher folk families and their organizations, replacing the current prolonged, bureaucratic top-down process that merely accentuates misery.

He said the number of fishermen detained in Pakistan had shrunk to 120 from 450, but in recent months the figure again rose to 250.

Zulfiqar Shah of Piler said that at a time when there was news of progress in trade relations between the two countries, efforts should also be made to remove restrictions on immigration across the borders by workers in search of better livelihoods.

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8. INDIA: THE RICHNESS OF THE RAMAYANA, THE POVERTY OF A UNIVERSITY: INTERVIEW WITH ROMILA THAPAR
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The controversial decision earlier this month by the Academic Council of Delhi University to drop A.K. Ramanujan's celebrated essay on the Ramayana, Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations from the B.A. History (Honours) course has evoked sharp protests from several historians and other scholars.

Coming three years after the Hindutva student body, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), vandalised DU's History department to protest against the teaching of this essay, the decision has been criticised as a surrender of academic freedom in the face of political pressure.

Romila Thapar, the foremost authority on early Indian history, spoke to Priscilla Jebaraj about the decision, its adverse consequences for scholarship and knowledge, and the efforts by vested interests to project one version of Hindu cultural heritage and religious tradition over all others. 
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/article2574398.ece

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9. INDIA: THREE HUNDRED RAMAYANAS - DELHI UNIVERSITY AND THE PURGING OF RAMANUJAN
by Mukul Kesavan
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(The Telegraph, 27 October 2011)

When I studied history as an undergraduate in Delhi University in the mid-1970s, A.K. Ramanujan’s essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas”, hadn’t been written and therefore couldn’t be read. The current vice-chancellor of Delhi University, on whose watch this essay has been purged from the university’s syllabus, was a student of mathematics in the same college at the time, a contemporary of men like the writer and member of parliament, Shashi Tharoor, the writer and publisher, Rukun Advani, and the broadcaster and civil servant, Ramu Damodaran.

I mention these seemingly irrelevant details because I’ve been trying to work out why the vice-chancellor and the academic council of Delhi University chose to delete Ramanujan’s essay from the BA history course. The essay is a marvellous account of the hundreds of ways in which the Ramayana has been told, complete with examples of this narrative diversity. I can’t imagine that the vice-chancellor, a member of that urbane cohort, the Class of ’75, wanted the essay removed because he agreed with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad goons who first agitated on the issue three years ago. They did this by trashing the department of history and physically assaulting the head of the department. This happened during the tenure of the previous vice-chancellor, but no holder of this office could possibly wish to further the work of thugs who seek to violently limit the intellectual freedom of a university. So that couldn’t be the reason.

Nor could it be expert opinion. The expert committee appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate the matter had four members, three of whom endorsed Ramanujan’s essay without reservation. The fourth, while praising the essay’s scholarship, came to the conclusion that it would be difficult for college lecturers to teach with sufficient context, especially those who weren’t Hindu.

Now, one of the assumptions behind the idea of a university education is that people learn about things they didn’t know before. Then, if they so choose, they become teachers themselves and pass that knowledge on to others. If our fitness to teach a subject was predicated on the cultural context into which we were born, we wouldn’t have universities as we know them today. I teach history at Jamia Millia Islamia. For years, I taught a course called ‘The History of Islam in India’. My department had many distinguished historians who happened to be Muslim, but not one of them was crass enough to suggest that my being non-Muslim rendered me unfit to teach that course.

This is, in essence, the objection of the solitary dissenting expert to Ramanujan’s essay being a part of the BA syllabus: it can’t be properly taught by college teachers who aren’t Hindu. I can’t bring myself to believe that university teachers (and the vice-chancellor and the members of the academic council are, first and last, academics) voted to banish “Three Hundred Ramayanas” on grounds that would effectively destroy the rationale and foundation of university education. There’s a reason why this is described as “higher” education: it is, quite literally, meant to elevate your mind, to free it of ascriptive prejudice and ignorance. So this can’t be the reason either.

Besides, why would they attend to the views of one expert and ignore three others? This leaves just the one reasonable possibility: the vice-chancellor and the academic council read Ramanujan’s essay and individually came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be taught to undergraduates. Why would they conclude that? We can rule out one possibility: the essay wasn’t struck off the syllabus because it was academically unsound. Ramanujan was the greatest scholar/translator India has produced in half-a-century, besides being one of our best poets. His translations of Tamil poetry from the Sangam period set new critical standards in the field of literary translation. So it wasn’t as if the academic council peer reviewed Ramanujan and found him wanting.

In case anyone has missed the point, the essay in question is not a pamphlet written by a provocateur: it is a scholarly essay published by a university press and aimed principally at an academic readership. Which makes it even harder to understand why the highest academic body of India’s most important liberal arts university, the University of Delhi, would choose to override expert opinion and remove it from an undergraduate syllabus. Especially when doing so would suggest, whether the academic council intended this or not, that the university had caved in to violent intimidation.

To return to our original question: if the vote to remove the essay was based upon the council members’ reading of the essay, and if their objections weren’t academic, what did they find in the essay that was unsuitable?

We know what the people who moved the court against Ramanujan’s article found objectionable. In April 2009, the court of the sub-divisional magistrate of Dera Bassi received a complaint which said, “The complainant was aggrieved and his conscience is hurt after going through the malicious, fictitious, mutilated comments added by altering the original contents of the religious book. It contains abusive and libelous language used for Divine Hindu deities. It contains false stories quoted under one pretext or oral and other (sic) without any authenticity. That it is a matter of concern that popular beliefs and prevailing traditions of Hindu Culture are projected in distorted manner. An attempt is made to create differences in communities.”

Almost every sentence of this complaint is objectively, as old-school lefties used to say, untrue. Ramanujan, far from being malicious about the texts he discusses, obviously loves them. His language is neither abusive nor libellous. He does not distort, by scholarly consensus, the texts that he translates and the charge that in writing this essay he is trying to create communal differences is, in fact, the only part of this story that is truly libellous.

The reason Hindutva militants attacked this essay is not difficult to understand. Hindutva seeks to re-make the diversity of Hindu narratives and practices into a uniform faith based on standardized texts. When Ramanujan tells, in scrupulous translation, Valmiki’s version of Ahalya’s unfaithfulness, where Indra is emasculated by the sage Gautama for cuckolding him, the Hindutva right is embarrassed and appalled because it likes its epics sanitized.

If the members of the academic council and the vice-chancellor are appalled by the Ahalya story, they should know that their objection is to Valmiki’s Ramayana, not Ramanujan’s essay. They should also reflect on the implications of a decision that suggests that the academic guardians of the University of Delhi believe that their Honours students shouldn’t be introduced to an unexpurgated version of Valmiki’s Ramayana, that even references to the original of this epic text, should be bowdlerized or purged on the surreal ground that they distort the “…traditions of Hindu Culture…”

But they can’t, of course, be objecting to Valmiki or Kamban or any of the Ramayana narratives that Ramanujan refers to in his remarkable essay. They are academics, after all, aware of the significance of primary texts. Nor can the vice-chancellor be trying to turn the clock back to his time in college when the essay was blissfully unwritten: nostalgia has its uses but no one, surely, would want to airbrush Ramanujan and his oeuvre out of the world of scholarship.

A part of Ramanujan’s oeuvre is a sharp poem called “Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day”. The poem tells the story of an Indian professor of Sanskrit making his way around Berlin in 1935, unable to make sense of the city or its German signs till familiar symbols, a “gothic lotus on an iron gate” and “the swastika on the neighbour’s arm” give him a fleeting, spurious sense of home. A university’s academic guardians must know that there have been attempts in other times and places to fabricate an authorized past, to speak for an authentically Indo-European people, to concoct an ‘Aryan’ canon. Ramanujan’s essay is an intellectual antidote to projects such as these, it is a text that revels in the incredible diversity of our epic narratives.

I can only imagine that the vice-chancellor and the academic council made an honest mistake, that, prompted by a misplaced sense of prudence or superabundant caution, they offered “Three Hundred Ramayanas” at the altar of a lumpen god, hoping to appease it. It won’t, of course: this god is insatiable. Instead of pandering to unreason, the university should be true to itself, stand its ground and reinstate Ramanujan.

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10. INDIA: WHY THE SANGH LOVES ANNA 
by Hartosh Singh Bal
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Open Magazine, 22 October 2011

Hartosh Singh Bal turned from the difficulty of doing mathematics to the ease of writing on politics. Unlike mathematics all this requires is being less wrong than most others who dwell on the subject. He is the Political Editor of Open.

Why the Sangh Loves Anna
He endorses the RSS worldview while appealing to people who lie outside its fold

It is no coincidence that the Jan Lokpal Bill imagines an ombudsman who would be to the republic what Anna is to Ralegan Siddhi, someone who will whip us all into shape

It is ironic that a movement which has made so much noise about holding a referendum on the Jan Lokpal Bill, a referendum that has no sanction or validity under the Constitution, has so much trouble with a referendum in Kashmir. Surely, whatever an individual’s stand on the issue, it is reasonable to expect that we live in a republic where such issues can be voiced and debated openly. In this context, the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena (the very name is an insult to Bhagat Singh) is contemptible but unimportant. What is far more shocking is the amplification of the same view by Anna and his sidekick Arvind Kejriwal, who more and more reflect the same fascist bent of mind that drives the RSS.

Prashant Bhushan’s statement on Kashmir was made weeks before he was assaulted. In fact, his stand on Kashmir was clear well before the Anna movement was conceived. Why did it take an attack on Bhushan, by people who were certainly once directly allied with the Sangh and are today part of it in spirit, for Anna to suddenly attack such views in public? How has this man given to so much vagueness while replying to every pointed question suddenly found such clarity? It is only because the viewpoint that Anna and by extension Kejriwal represent is the same simplistic and ill-thought-out rightwing nationalism of the Sangh which has no space for the Constitution or the liberal values it embodies. In that sense, when Anna’s team stands and shouts “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”, it is not hailing the Indian Republic but a mythic nation that exists only in the mind. It was no coincidence that the very stage on which Anna first fasted at Jantar Mantar had a map of India shaped in the image of Bharat Mata as the backdrop. It is no coincidence that Anna is a teetotaler given to flogging young men who do not obey him. It is no coincidence that Kejriwal has often shared the stage with an anti-reservation organisation called Youth for Equality. It is no coincidence that the electioneering they are doing is not directed against corruption but the Congress (even if the distinction is sometimes hard to make, it exists). It is no coincidence that Constitutional issues are so readily dismissed by Anna and Kejriwal, who has even anointed Anna above Parliament. It is no coincidence that through the Jan Lokpal Bill, they imagine an ombudsman who would be to the republic what Anna is to Ralegan Siddhi, someone who will whip us all into shape.

Through the twentieth century, this combination—a claim to efficient governance, a mythic father or motherland, a contempt for a certain section of people—has been the mark of fascism. Surprisingly, many of the Left, such as Bhushan himself, have been slow to recognise this. The news that two members of the core committee of Anna’s team, Rajendra Singh and PV Rajagopal, have resigned is no surprise; what is a surprise is that they were part of the committee to begin with, perhaps they were taken in by the rhetoric that is always so seductive to the Left, ‘we must be with the people’. The support extended by the RSS, the overt expressions of sympathy, the covert mobilisation of numbers, the desire to make common cause with Anna, is not some public play at deception and politics, it is the manifestation of a genuine desire to make common cause with a man who has managed to fulfill their aims. Mobilise the people, corner the Congress, and fight to the death for Kashmir (only rhetorically, of course, for in reality the soldiers who die in the fighting are motivated by a far more prosaic professionalism). This only leaves the question of how long people like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan will survive as part of Anna’s team. Patkar is calling for a repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Everyone knows where Anna will stand on that one, but perhaps his views will become public only once some other organisation sympathetic to the Sangh attacks Patkar. But this is now only a matter of detail. The personal compromises that a Bhushan or a Patkar have had to make with their own views is up to them , what counts is that the attack on Bhushan has opened up the faultlines within the movement and exposed the delusions of those who joined it in the name of ‘liberal’ values.

This does not mean the movement is petering out. The Winter Session of Parliament will see a Lokpal Bill being adopted, but it is unlikely that in its details it will contain all that Anna and Kejriwal have demanded. There will be another fast, there will be more tamasha and television, but what should have been a means of channelling an anger directed against a corrupt government is now turning into a force that the RSS is only bound to welcome.

o o o

SEE ALSO:
“Anna’s Movement Or Ramdev’s, We Never Go Anywhere Uninvited” - Outlook Interviews Nitin Gadkari
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?278789

Thanks to BJP led municipal corporation, some 100 in Delhi roads to be named after Hindutva leaders 
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/10/thanks-to-bjp-led-municipal-corporation.html

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11. INDIA: THE CHARIOT-RIDER
by J Sri Raman
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Daily Times, October 21, 2011 

Advani’s repeated attempts to reinvent himself in the image of an Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a more widely ‘acceptable’ candidate for the prime minister’s post than any other leader in the party or the parivar (the far-right family), are no secret

When the chips are down, the tireless warrior summons his trusty chariot again. Lal Krishna Advani finds himself back on a vehicle of mythological wars driven by a more modern fuel.

This is the sixth Rath Yatra (chariot ride) to be undertaken by the veteran of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a former deputy prime minister. It all started over 21 years ago, when he proposed in a party forum a Pada Yatra (a pilgrimage on foot) to rouse public awareness of the promising Babri Masjid issue. Pramod Mahajan, a bright young spark of the BJP then who made an impact by being one of the first politicians to flaunt a mobile phone, thought that the times demanded a more technology-aided travel mode. Thus was born Advani’s first rath, an imported Toyota mini-bus.

The yatra proved a big success. Launched on September 25, 1990, in Gujarat’s symbolically chosen Somnath, it did not last even a month as Advani was arrested in the then Lalu Prasad-ruled Bihar on October 23. But it had left by then a long enough trail of bloody communal strife, and was to lead to the barbaric demolition of the Babri Masjid two years later, bringing unprecedented political benefits to the BJP. Advani has not looked back since then.

Popular television serial ‘Mahabharat’, which ran from October 1988 to June 1990, had made the rath a reminder of India’s past glory, especially to ‘cultural nationalists’ of the BJP kind. Advani took it all forward. In 1993, he went on a Janadesh (popular mandate) Yatra, to protest in particular against the proposed constitutional 80th Amendment Bill, seeking to delink religion from politics. Followed by a Swarna Jayanti (golden anniversary) Yatra to mark 50 years of India’s independence.

Then came the Bharat Uday (India shining) Yatra from Kanyakumari to Amritsar and from Rajkot to Jagannath Puri in March 2004, on the eve of a general election. This was the least rewarding of Advani’s rath yatras, with the ‘Shining India’ slogan actually losing the election for his party. The Bharat Suraksha Yatra (for defence of India) against the Congress-led government’s policies on terrorism did not yield a political bonanza either.

Advani seemed to entertain higher hopes, however, from the current Jan Chetana (popular awareness) Yatra directed against the series of corruption scams rocking the country over the recent period. The 38-day chariot ride, launched on October 11, to cover over 10,000 km, is proving far more challenging than he might have foreseen.

Technologically, the rath represents a remarkable improvement. A luxurious Volvo bus has replaced the Toyota, and it boasts fittings and facilities including a lift and internet connectivity, besides a kitchen and space for at least six co-passengers. Unlike in the past instances, the yatra will take in a few flights as well as it covers 23 states, including the North-East and the Andaman-Nicobar islands. But there have been enough problems and bickering within the party and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to make the ride more than a little bumpy.

Speculation about Advani’s real intentions has been louder thus far than about the possible political impact of the yatra. His repeated attempts to reinvent himself in the image of an Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a more widely ‘acceptable’ candidate for the prime minister’s post than any other leader in the party or the parivar (the far-right family), are no secret, really. The attempts have failed so far. Advani is trying harder this time by avoiding stopovers altogether on this yatra at either Ayodhya or Somnath.

The yatra, however, is proving accident-prone indeed — even in a literal sense. Soon after the yatra’s start, the rath developed a snag that caused nausea for Advani’s colleagues and obliged him to get a standby chariot from Karnataka. The rath also got stuck under a railway bridge near Patna. But these were trivial problems, compared to other troubles.

One of these was reflected in a joke doing the rounds. Advani, it is said, would have done better to choose a Tata Nano car, known also as the ‘people’s car’ for its puny size and capacity, and thus give his party a pro-aam aadmi (common man) image. The crack does not conceal a reference to the fact of a special rapport between the House of Tatas and Narendra Modi who gave the small car project a place of pride and privilege in his Gujarat after West Bengal had shunted it out.

The reference was really to competitive politics between Advani and Modi, to which the country has been an amused witness over recent months. Advani’s fervent anti-corruption yatra began after Modi’s fast, believe it or not, for “communal harmony”. And the yatra, scheduled to start originally from Gujarat, was shifted to Bihar where chief minister Nitish Kumar has been chary of sharing even an election dais with Modi. The strongman of Gujarat, meanwhile, is continuing with a series of fasts for his strikingly ironic cause.

Advani has been denied the reassurance of support from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), patriarch of the parivar, as one of its oldest activists. The RSS, in fact, is said to have insisted on several other BJP leaders accompanying him on his yatra, to ensure that every one of them gets a fair share of fake anti-graft credit.

Nothing, however, has proved a bigger speed-breaker for the yatra than the corruption scams in Karnataka, the only BJP-ruled state in the south. Former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa, overthrown after an ombudsman’s report, was arrested in a case of land grab just days after pilgrim Advani’s progress towards “probity in public life”. Advani has disavowed any soft corner for Yeddyurappa, but we will wait to see if rhetoric against corruption stays the same after his yatra enters Karnataka.

It is a different kind of nausea that seizes the country, as it watches the spectacle of a spurious far-right war on corruption.

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

SEE ALSO:

Orissa town painted saffron ahead of Advani Yatra

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/town-painted-saffron-ahead-of--advani-yatra/195679-60-117.html

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12. INDIA'S NORTH EAST: ETHNIC CHAUVINISTS WHIP UP HYSTERIA
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INDIA-BANGLADESH BORDER DEAL BUGS THE HINDU RIGHT AND REGIONAL CHAUVINISTS IN NORTH EAST INDIA
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/10/india-bangladesh-border-deal-bugs-hindu.html

BLOCKADES OF MANY KINDS
by B.G. Verghese
The Manipur blockade has gone far beyond a demonstrative measure and must be ended. The ordinary people have suffered enough. The Kuki-Naga quarrel at the root of the agitation is esoteric for most and politically whipped up by ethnic chauvinists on both sides. The State government is caught in a bind while Centre appears to have been passive for far too long, hoping that the problem will go away by itself. A prolonged stalemate could erupt in anger.
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2011/10/kuki-naga-ethnic-chauvinists-and.html

MANIPUR BLOCKADED ON ROAD TO NOWHERE
by Yengkhom Jilangamba

These protests are the weapon of choice in the expression of rival ethnic claims, are testing the people's tolerance beyond endurance, turning the State into a socio-political volcano that could explode anytime.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article2571330.ece

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13. INDIA: REPEAL ARMED FORCES SPECIAL POWERS ACT (Human Rights Watch)
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Human Rights Watch

Repeal Armed Forces Special Powers Act [1]
Prime Minister Should Overrule Army’s Objections
October 19, 2011

(New York) – Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India should override the objections of the army and keep his 2004 promise to repeal the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), Human Rights Watch said today. The Indian defense establishment has opposed even minor amendments to the law, despite the findings of independent bodies in India [2] and abroad that the law has resulted in numerous serious human rights violations over many years, Human Rights Watch said.

India’s Home Ministry has proposed amendments, but the army insists that it needs the law to operate in what it calls “disturbed areas.” News reports suggest that the army is blocking an effort to present the amendments for a vote during the upcoming winter session of parliament. Home Minister P. Chidambaram has reportedly tried but failed to persuade the army to support the amendments.

“There is broad recognition in India that the Armed Forces Special Powers Act should be repealed because it has led to so many abuses,” said Brad Adams [3], Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Prime Minister Singh should overrule the army and keep his promise to abolish this abusive law.”

The AFSPA grants the armed forces the power to shoot to kill in law enforcement situations, to arrest without warrant, and to detain people without time limits. As a result, the armed forces routinely engage in torture and other ill-treatment during interrogation in army barracks. The law forbids prosecution of soldiers without approval from the central government, which is rarely granted.

The law violates India’s obligations under international human rights law, including the rights to life, to be protected from arbitrary arrest, and to be free from torture and other ill-treatment, Human Rights Watch said. The provisions protecting soldiers from prosecution deny victims of abuses the right to a remedy because it forbids prosecution of soldiers without approval from the central government, which is rarely granted.

The AFSPA was enacted on August 18, 1958, as an emergency measure to allow the deployment of the army to counter a separatist movement in the northeastern Naga Hills. However, it has remained in force in several northeast states for five decades and in Jammu and Kashmir since 1990. Repeal of the AFSPA has become a core demand of residents and activists in the areas in which it is in operation.

Following the 2004 death in military custody of Manorama Devi, a Manipuri woman suspected of being a militant, violent protests broke out in Manipur. Singh set up a judicial inquiry to examine the law and promised to abide by its conclusions. The committee, led by Justice Jeevan Reddy, found that while the security situation required continued deployment of the army, the AFSPA should be repealed and replaced by a more “humane” law.

In April 2007, a working group on Jammu and Kashmir appointed by the prime minister also recommended revoking the act. The Supreme Court, while upholding the constitutional right to enact such laws, has issued guidelines to prevent human rights violations, but these are routinely ignored.

International bodies have repeatedly recommended the repeal of the AFSPA. These include the United Nations Human Rights Committee and UN member states during India’s Universal Periodic Review at the Human Rights Council in 2008.

“India is a democracy in which the armed forces are supposed to be subject to civilian control,” Adams said. “While the government should take into account the army’s viewpoint, it should not let the military have a de facto veto over a law that has led to the killing and torture of so many people.”

The government has a responsibility to ensure the protection of citizens from abuses by separatist militants and armed groups, Human Rights Watch said. However, the AFSPA has proven to be ineffective and has instead encouraged abuses by all sides.

The provision for immunity for soldiers who commit abuses is of particular concern, Human Rights Watch said. While the army insists that it has internal mechanisms to punish those who commit crimes, there is no public information about whether and how soldiers or officers are disciplined or prosecuted. Victims’ families are seldom informed about court martial proceedings or other disciplinary measures and thus believe that perpetrators are left unpunished.

“The army supports the Armed Forces Special Powers Act because of the immunity it provides soldiers who commit serious abuses,” Adams said. “It should realize that such abuses fuel public anger, permitting militant groups to flourish and putting soldiers at greater risk.”

 
Source URL: http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/10/19/india-repeal-armed-forces-special-powers-act

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14. WIMAL FERNANDO: STRUGGLES FOR DEMOCRACY IN SRI LANKA
by Ahilan Kadirgamar, B Skanthakumar
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sacw.net - 23 October 2011

In mid-January 2011, WIMAL FERNANDO, the veteran Sri Lankan left and democratic rights activist and former trade unionist, was interviewed by Ahilan Kadirgamar and Balasingham Skanthakumar, to record his recollections of almost five decades of struggle for social change. 
http://www.sacw.net/article2345.html

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15. DELHI UNIVERSITY STANDS UP FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM: IMAGES OF PROTEST ON 24 OCTOBER 2011
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http://www.sacw.net/article2347.html

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16. NUCLEAR POWER: IN WHOSE INTEREST?
by Praful Bidwai
======================================
Last Friday, 13 individuals who would be considered pillars of the establishment, including a former cabinet secretary, several retired secretary-level and state chief secretary-level officials, and many top-level scientists, did something stunningly unconventional. They joined ha nds with two of India’s best-known non-government organisatio ns, Common Cause and Centre for Public Interest Litigation, to file a writ petition in the Su preme Court asking for “a safety reassessment of all nuclear facilities in India”, and “comprehensive long-term co s t-benefit analysis” of nucl ear power, pending which there must be a stay “on all proposed nuclear plants”. They also ch allenged the constitutional validity of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010.
http://www.sacw.net/article2352.html


INTERNATIONAL
======================================
17. MANIFESTO FOR A SECULAR MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA
======================================
http://www.siawi.org/article2643.html

Statement

For Immediate Release

27 October 2011

FOR A FREE AND SECULAR MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

76 secularists and human rights campaigners, including Mina Ahadi, Nawal El Sadaawi, Marieme Helie Lucas, Hameeda Hussein, Ayesha Imam, Maryam Jamil, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasrin, Farida Shaheed, Fatou Sow, and Stasa Zajovic have signed on to a Manifesto for a Free and Secular Middle East and North Africa.

In light of the recent pronouncements of the unelected Libyan Transitional Council for ‘Sharia laws’, the signatories of the manifesto vehemently oppose the hijacking of the protests by Islamism or US-led militarism and unequivocally support the call for freedom and secularism made by citizens and particularly women in the region.

Secularism is a minimum precondition for a free and secular Middle East and for the recognition of women’s rights and equality.

We call on world citizens to support this important campaign by signing on to our petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/world-citizens-defend-a-free-and-secular-middle-east-and-north-africa

We also ask that supporters click ‘like’ on our Facebook page to support this important campaign: http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Free-and-Secular-Middle-East-and-North-Africa/271164176261820#!/pages/A-Free-and-Secular-Middle-East-and-North-Africa/271164176261820 and Tweet: #freesecularMENA in support of a free and secular Middle East and North Africa.

For more information, contact:
 Marieme Helie Lucas
 Maryam Namazie
 Telephone: +44 (0) 7719166731
 For a Free and Secular Middle East and North Africa
 Email: secularMENA at gmail.com
 BM Box 2387, London WC1N 3XX, UK

(FOR FRENCH, ARABIC AND PERSIAN VERSIONS SEE PDF FILE URL BELOW)

MANIFESTO FOR A SECULAR MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

The 2009 protests in Iran followed by the Arab Spring have the potential to herald a new dawn for the people of the region and the world. The protests have clearly shown that people in the region, like people everywhere, want to live 21st century lives.

We, the undersigned, emphasise their modern and human dimension and wholeheartedly welcome this immense and historical development. We are vehemently opposed to their hijacking by Islamism or US-led militarism and support the call for a free and secular Middle East and North Africa made by citizens and particularly women in the region.

Secularism is a minimum precondition for the freedom and equality of all citizens and includes:
 1. Complete separation of religion from the state.
 2. Abolition of religious laws in the family, civil and criminal codes.
 3. Separation of religion from the educational system.
 4. Freedom of religion and atheism as private beliefs.
 5. Prohibition of sex apartheid and compulsory veiling.

SIGNATORIES

 1. Mina Ahadi, Spokesperson, International Committees against Stoning and Execution, Iran/Germany
 2. Marieme Helie Lucas, Sociologist, Founder and former international coordinator of Women Living Under Muslim Laws and founder of Secularism Is A Women’s Issue, Algeria/France
 3. Maryam Namazie, Spokesperson, Equal Rights Now – Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran, Iran/UK
 4. Shahla Abghari, University Professor, Iran/USA
 5. Siavash Abghari, Esmail Khoi Foundation, Iran/USA
 6. Ahlam Akram, Palestinian Peace and Human Rights Writer and Campaigner, Palestine/UK
 7. Sargul Ahmad, Women’s Liberation in Iraq, Iraq/Canada
 8. Mahin Alipour, Coordinator, Equal Rights Now – Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran, Iran/Sweden
 9. Reza Alkrami, Human Rights Activist, Iran/USA
 10. Farideh Arman, Coordinator, Committee to Defend Women’s Rights, Iran/Sweden
 11. Sultana Begum, Regional Gender Adviser, Diakonia Asia, Bangladesh
 12. Djemila Benhabib, Writer, Algeria/Canada
 13. Codou Bop, Journalist and Director of GREFELS, Dakar, Senegal
 14. Ariane Brunet, co-founder Urgent Action Fund, Québec, Canada
 15. Micheline Carrier, Sisyphe, Québec, Canada
 16. Patty Debonitas, Iran Solidarity, UK
 17. Denise Deliège Femmes En Noir, Belgium
 18. Equal Rights Now – Organisation against Women’s Discrimination in Iran, Sweden
 19. Fanny Filosof, Femmes en Noir, Belgium
 20. Mersedeh Ghaedi, New Channel TV Programme host, Iran/Norway
 21. Groupe de recherche sur les femmes et les lois, Dakar, Senegal
 22. Laura Guidetti, Marea Feminist Magazine, Italy
 23. Zeinabou Hadari, Centre Reines Daura, Niger
 24. Anissa Hélie, Historian, Algeria/France/USA
 25. Rohini Henssman, Human Rights Activist, India
 26. Hameeda Hossein, Chairperson Ain o Salish Kendra, Dhaka, Bangladesh
 27. Khayal Ibrahim, Women’s Liberation in Iraq, Iraq/Canada
 28. Leo Igwe, Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement, Nigeria
 29. Ayesha Imam, Women’s Human Rights and Democracy Activist, Nigeria/Senegal
 30. International Campaign in Defence of Women’s Rights in Iran, Sweden
 31. International Committee against Execution, Germany
 32. International Committee against Stoning, Germany
 33. Iran Solidarity, Iran/UK
 34. Maryam Jamil, Women’s Liberation in Iraq, Iraq
 35. Sultana Kamal, Executive Director, Ain o Salish Kendra and Chairperson Transparency International, Bangladesh
 36. Abbas Kamil, Unity Against Unemployment in Iraq, Baghdad, Iraq
 37. Harsh Kapoor, South Asia Citizens Web, India
 38. Akbar Karimian, Human Rights Activist, Iran/UK
 39. Cherifa Kheddar, President of Djazairouna, Algeria
 40. Monica Lanfranco, Marea Feminist Magazine, Italy
 41. Houzan Mahmoud, Representative of Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, Iraq/UK
 42. Nahla Elgaali Mahmoud, Biologist, Sudan/UK
 43. Anwar Mir Sattari, Human rights Activist, Iran/Belgium
 44. Amena Mohsin, Professor, Dept. International Relations Dhaka University, Bangladesh
 45. Khawar Mumtaz, Director Shirkat Gah, Lahore, Pakistan
 46. Taslima Nasrin, Writer and Activist, Bangladesh
 47. U. M. Habibun Nessa, President, Naripokkho, Bangladesh
 48. Partow Nooriala, Poet, Writer and Human Rights Activist, Iran/USA
 49. Asghar Nosrati, Human Rights Activist, Iran/Sweden
 50. One Law for All, UK
 51. Pragna Patel, Southall Black Sisters, UK
 52. Fariborz Pooya, Iranian Secular Society, Iran/UK
 53. Protagora, Zagreb, Croatia
 54. Hassan Radwan, Activist, Egypt/UK
 55. Mary Jane Real, Women’s Human Rights Coalition, Manila, The Philippines
 56. Edith Rubinstein, Femmes en Noir, Belgium
 57. Nawal El Sadaawi, Writer, Egypt
 58. Fahimeh Sadeghi, Coordinator, International Federation of Iranian Refugees, Iran/Canada
 59. Gita Sahgal, Director, Centre for Secular Space, UK
 60. Nina Sankari, Secularist and Feminist, Poland
 61. Secularism Is A Women’s Issue (International Network)
 62. Aisha Lee Shaheed, London, UK
 63. Farida Shaheed, Shirkat Gah, Lahore, Pakistan
 64. Siba Shakib, Filmmaker, Writer and Activist, Iran/USA
 65. Sohaila Sharifi, Women’s Rights Campaigner, Iran/UK
 66. Issam Shukri, Head, Secularism and Civil Rights in Iraq, Iraq/Canada
 67. Southall Black Sisters, UK
 68. Fatou Sow, Sociologist CNRS, Dakar, Senegal
 69. Afsaneh Vahdat, Coordinator, International Campaign for Women’s Rights in Iran, Iran/Sweden
 70. Lino Veljak, Professor of Philosophy, Zagreb University, Croatia
 71. Fauzia Viqar, Director Advocacy and Communications, Shirkat Gah Women’s Resource Centre, Lahore, Pakistan
 72. Anne Marie Waters, One Law for All, UK
 73. Vivienne Wee, anthropologist, feminist and human rights activist, Singapore and Hong Kong, China
 74. Women In Black, Belgrade, Serbia
 75. Sara Zaker, Theatre Director, Bangladesh
 76. Stasa Zajovic, spokesperson Women in Black, Belgrade, Serbia

We call on world citizens to support this important campaign by signing on to our petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/world-citizens-defend-a-free-and-secular-middle-east-and-north-africa

We also ask that supporters click ‘like’ on our Facebook page to support this important campaign: http://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Free-and-Secular-Middle-East-and-North-Africa/271164176261820#!/pages/A-Free-and-Secular-Middle-East-and-North-Africa/271164176261820 and Tweet: #freesecularMENA in support of a free and secular Middle East and North Africa.

For more information, contact:
 Marieme Helie Lucas
 Maryam Namazie
 Telephone: +44 (0) 7719166731
 For a Free and Secular Middle East and North Africa
 Email: secularMENA gmail.com
 BM Box 2387, London WC1N 3XX, UK

FULL TEXT PDF AT: http://tinyurl.com/6d78v68

======================================
18. WHAT SECULARISTS AND WOMEN STAND TO LOOSE IN THE TUNISIAN ELECTIONS?
by Marieme Helie Lucas
======================================
siawi.org, October 22, 2011

by marieme helie lucas

On the eve of the elections in Tunisia that will shape the future of the country and even that of the Arab world as well, Western do-gooders and Islamic fundamentalists hand in hand rejoice in ‘Tunisia’s first free elections’ and its access to ‘ democracy’. The recent history of Iran and Algeria have taught us better… And women in Tunisia watch in horror the rise of Muslim fundamentalists
http://www.siawi.org/article2624.html

=====================================
19. HOLY SMOKE - ISLAMIC TELEVANGELISTS (The Economist)
=====================================
From The Economist, Oct 29th 2011 | from the print edition

Islamic televangelists
Holy smoke
Islamic preachers are drawing on a Christian tradition

SCREAMING hordes of teenage girls are a common sight at pop concerts and film premières. They are less usual when waiting to hear a religious preacher. But such girls—one gasping “I can see him, I can see him” through the folds of her niqab—awaited Moez Masoud, an Egyptian televangelist, recently in Cairo. He is part of a growing band of Islamic preachers who are true celebrities, says Yasmin Moll, a researcher at New York University, who attended Mr Masoud’s talk.

They draw on a Christian tradition pioneered in the 1950s by such preachers as Billy Graham. For the past ten years Amr Khaled, an Egyptian one-time accountant turned televangelist star, has led the way. Previously television preachers fitted the stereotype of white-haired, bearded sheikhs in white robes, monotonously exhorting the faithful, in classical Arabic, to follow the strictures of Islam more exactly.

In 2001 Mr Khaled burst onto screens with his show “Words from the Heart” and his brand of modern, moderate piety. Sharp-suited, mustachioed and speaking colloquial Egyptian, Mr Khaled and his audience (of men and women) discussed the concerns of young Muslims, such as whether Islam forbids cinema-going.

Others have followed in his footsteps. Egyptians dominate, including Mr Masoud and Mustafa Hosny. In Indonesia Abdullah Gymnastiar, known as “Elder Brother Gym”, attracted millions of viewers to his television shows and seminars—until his decision to take a second wife in 2006 outraged his many female fans.

The new breed of televangelist has proved hugely popular with young viewers uninterested in traditional religious programming. But the Muslim religious and political establishment is uncomfortable with these new celebrities: none boasts traditional training as a cleric. In an odd alliance, secularists are also chary, worried that the brand of moderate Islam they peddle could prove to be the gateway to a more extreme version. But stuffy religious authorities are now being forced to acknowledge these stars’ pulling power. In January Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of al-Azhar, the Cairo-based font of Islamic orthodoxy, met Mr Khaled to discuss how to renew religious discourse in Islam.

The appeal of such preachers lies in large part in their very lack of official religious credentials. They present themselves as ordinary Muslims who have overcome personal struggles to discover their faith. Many say they were not religious when they were younger. Ahmad al-Shugairi, a Saudi preacher, describes a misspent youth in California, going to clubs with women and even drinking alcohol, before he returned to Saudi Arabia and Allah. Mr Masoud lost friends to a car accident, a drug overdose and cancer and he endured surgery and his own car crash before deciding to commit his life to God. The disappointment among Mr Gymnastiar’s followers at his second marriage—legal but widely frowned on in Indonesia—lay in the fact that it was at odds with his image as a devoted husband and family man, to many of his female followers at least. Sincerity and personal integrity are crucial to their appeal.

Messrs Khaled, Masoud and Hosny all got their start on Iqraa TV, a Saudi-based religious satellite channel. At one point, about 80% of Iqraa TV’s advertising was reportedly generated by Mr Khaled’s programmes. Mr Khaled has since broken away from Iqraa TV and his programmes are broadcast on a variety of networks, including secular ones such as MBC, a satellite channel based in Dubai.

Until now most of these preachers have resolutely avoided getting involved in politics. But this may be changing. Since Egypt’s revolution, Mr Khaled, for instance, has become more political. In the run up to the constitutional referendum in March he and Mr Masoud joined the “no” campaign along with secular liberals. He has yet to declare any political intentions but if he does, the power of Islamic televangelists could reach a new level.

=====================================
20 USA: "LETTING JESUS PICK YOUR BIRTH CONTROL?" 
Conservatives All Over the Country Fighting to Deprive Women of Contraception
by Katha Pollitt
=====================================
From: The Nation 

Right-Wing politicians at the federal and state levels have launched an attack on contraception.

by Katha Pollitt | October 7, 2011  

First they came for abortion, but I didn’t care because abortion was for sluts. Then they came for sex ed, but I didn’t care because the kids can learn all they need to know at home. Then they came for birth control, but… Wait a minute! Birth control? They’re coming for birth control? I need that! For nearly a decade prochoicers have been warning that abortion foes were gearing up to go after contraception, but the possibility of losing birth control was too far-out for most people to take seriously. And you know prochoicers—they’re always crying wolf. Well, wake up, sleepyheads, it’s happening.

After the Senate rejected a House attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, Republican Representative Cliff Stearns, chair of the energy and commerce subcommittee, demanded that PP turn over reams of documents going back twenty years. The official purpose was to see if PP’s abortion services, which cannot receive federal funds, are sufficiently segregated from its contraceptive and other health services, which do receive federal dollars. Since Republicans believe this separation is impossible—money is fungible, and all that, except when it goes to a church for supposedly nonsectarian social services—who knows what Stearns and Co. will decide counts as evidence?

Meanwhile, House Republicans continue their attempts to ban federal support for PP, this time through a draft bill on agency funding that would also completely defund Title X, the government’s main family-planning program. Title X, which provides family planning services to more than 5 million mostly low-income people each year, has nothing to do with abortion, which kind of proves that the “fungibility” issue is just a fig leaf. (Bill supporter and Tea Party Caucus member Denny Rehberg, a Montana Republican who opposes raising taxes on the wealthy—did I mention that he’s the twenty-fourth-richest member of Congress?—claims that zeroing out birth control funds for poor women is necessary to lower the deficit. Because what could be cheaper than babies?)

As is so often the case in the war on abortion, the most damaging action is in the states. GOP-led governments have voted to cut or eliminate PP funding in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Indiana, Kansas, Wisconsin, Texas and New Jersey. Yes, New Jersey, where Governor Chris Christie, hero of Republicans who also happen to be sane, eliminated the state’s $7.5 million budget for family planning. And yes, Texas, where Governor Rick “N-wordhead” Perry slashed family planning funds from $111.5 million to $37.9 million. Meanwhile, since you can always find money for the things you really want, he boosted aid to antichoice crisis pregnancy centers to $8.3 million.

Federal judges have forced North Carolina, Kansas and Indiana to drop their plans, and the federal government is picking up the tab in New Hampshire. Poor women in New Jersey, Wisconsin and Texas are out of luck. You can see which way the tides are running. Note the geographic diversity: defunding contraception isn’t just a Bible Belt specialty anymore.

Speaking of the Bible Belt, Mississippians will be voting next month on Ballot Initiative #26, which would amend the state Constitution by redefining “person” to “include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof.” If passed, the amendment would ban all abortion, possibly even to save the woman’s life. It could also ban ¨in vitro fertilization and the most popular and effective methods of birth control: some forms of the Pill and the IUD, as well as the morning-after pill. Never mind that as many as half of all fertilized eggs never implant in the womb (implantation is the actual medical definition of pregnancy, although you’d never know it these days). Hold on, blastocysts! In a few short weeks, you may be Mississippians, bona fide citizens of the state with the highest rate of unplanned pregnancy in the country. Whether from conviction or fear or a little bit of both, plenty of state Democratic politicians support #26 .

Would #26 really ban the Pill? Personhood USA president Keith Mason is cagey: “Certainly women, my wife included, would want to know if the pills they’re taking would kill a unique human individual,” he told NPR. Of course, there’s nothing to prevent women, his wife included, from switching to diaphragms or prayer if they suspect their contraception makes their wombs inhospitable to four-celled Mississippians. You don’t need a law to let Jesus pick your birth control. But letting women decide? That would be so… prochoice.

Coloradans rejected personhood amendments in 2008 and 2010, but Mississippi could be the charm. Either way, Personhood USA says it plans to have similar amendments on the ballot in half the states by 2012. So add that to the Catholic Bishops’ ongoing fight against the decision to have the Affordable Care Act provide contraception with no co-pays—it’s not enough that religious organizations can deny this lifesaving boon to their employees; the bishops want all women to be deprived. And don’t forget threats to require parental consent for teens to get birth control or treatment for STDs. Such a measure was proposed in Arizona in 2010 and in Maine in the spring—both failed. But that legislators are even entertaining the thought is cause for alarm.

Back on Earth, unplanned pregnancies have risen from 47 to 49 percent of all pregnancies. Apparently the anticontraception crowd won’t be happy until it’s 100 percent.


GOOD BOOKS:
=====================================
21. BOOK REVIEWS OF GODSE'S CHILDREN - HINDUTVA TERROR IN INDIA
by A.G. Noorani and by Ram Puniyani
=====================================

(Godse's Children: Hindutva Terror in India
by Subhash Gatade Phros Media, New Delhi. 400 Pages / Rs. 360)

Book Review: Sangh Parivar's bluff
The book ably documents evidence of saffron terror. 
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20111104282207800.htm

Book Review: Unraveling the Truth
The book takes a broad overview of Hindutva politics also and the role of media and the international connections of Hindutva politics are also presented in detail
by Ram Puniyani

=====================================
22. THE SAFFRON CONDITION:
Politics of Repression and Exclusion in Neoliberal India
by Subhash Gatade
=====================================
From the publishers desk

Subhash Gatade focuses on the right wing thrust in Indian polity during the first decade of the 21 st century. His writings show that the ultra-right and Hindu nationalist political formations may have temporarily lost out in the race to retain governmental power at the Centre and may appear in disarray, but the agenda of the RSS sponsored Hindutva project for the Hindu rashtra is very much in the reckoning and enjoys widespread State complicity. The impact of neo-liberalism and majoritarianism and their consequences for democracy and human rights are meticulously documented. Above all, he shows what happens when dreams are deferred. No concerned citizen or student of contemporary India can afford to miss reading the book

www.threeesays.com
ISBN 978-81-88789-75-7
No of Pages 475
First edition : September 2011
Rs. 500

=====================================
23. MAN'S DOMINION - THE RISE OF RELIGION AND THE ECLIPSE OF WOMEN'S RIGHTS
By Sheila Jeffreys
=====================================
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415596749/

Published October 10th 2011 by Routledge – 222 pages
Paperback: 978-0-415-59674-9: $45.95
Hardback: 978-0-415-59673-2: $135.00

In this feminist critique of the politics of religion, Sheila Jeffreys argues that the renewed rise of religion is harmful to women’s human rights. The book seeks to rekindle the criticism of religion as the founding ideology of patriarchy.

Focusing on the three monotheistic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this book examines common anti-women attitudes such as ‘male-headship’, impurity of women, the need to control women’s bodies, and their modern manifestations in multicultural Western states. It points to the incorporation of religious law into legal systems, faith schools, and campaigns led by Christian and Islamic organisations against women’s rights at the U.N., and explains how religious rights threaten to subvert women’s rights. Including highly-topical chapters on the burka and the covering of women, and polygamy, this text questions the ideology of multiculturalism which shields religion from criticism by demanding respect for culture and faith, whilst ignoring the harm that women suffer from religion.

Man’s Dominion is an incisive and polemic text that will be of interest to students of gender studies, religion, and politics.

Contents:
1. Introduction
2. The Devil’s Gateway: religion and the subordination of women
3. Fundamentalism: the divine right of patriarchs
4. The right to religion trumps women’s human rights
5. Multiculturalism and ‘respect’ for religion
6. Desecularisation and women’s equality
7. Covering up women
8. A harem for every man?: the rise of polygamy
9. The Master’s Tools: Islamic feminism and its critics
10. Conclusion: Liberating women from religious oppression

Author Bio:
Sheila Jeffreys is a Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Industrial Vagina (2009) and Beauty and Misogyny (2005).


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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.


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