SACW - 23 April 2012 | Bangladesh’s writers / Afghan Women / Post-war Sri Lanka / Pakistani Progressives / One hundred years of Manto ; Bombay's old buildings ; Left's future; Be Educated Together; Beef eating; Communal Violence Bill / US Spy Center / Valentino Gerratana

[Harsh Kapoor]

    South Asia Citizens Wire - 23 April 2012 - No. 2743
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Contents:

1. Bangladesh’s writers --- battling terror, ethnic conflict and fundamentalism (Khondakar Ashraf Hossain)
2. Afghanistan: Statement on Justice for Women - Walk on April 14, 2012  (Young Women for Change)
3. The futility that is Omanthai: Post-war Sri Lanka’s reconciliation shortfalls (Marisa de Silva)
4. Pakistan: Joint Statement of Pakistani Progressives in Solidarity with Victims of Forced Conversion and Against Sunni Tehreek's attack on Sindh Progressive Committee's Rally
5. One hundred years of Manto (Rakhshanda Jalil)
6. India: Network of Women in Media Condemns Violent Abuse of Meena Kandasamy
7. India: A Cowed-Down Nation - Why kill over a people’s dietary preference for beef? (Meena Kandasamy)
8. India: Civil Society Groups Reject NAC Communal Violence Bill Draft, Lay Down Key Features For A New Bill
9. India: Way out for the Left (Praful Bidwai)
10. India: Waiting For A Disaster? - Old and unsafe buildings in Bombay's Coastal Regulation Zone areas (Rohini Hensman)
11. India: To Be Educated Together - The Obscure Republican Virtue, Fraternity (Mukul Kesavan)
12. India - Punjab: Myth busters of Mohali (Nishita Jha)
13. India: Selected Posts on Communalism Watch
 - S Anand: The right to eat
 - Christian forums file FIRS after IRA chief calls 'miracle water' a scam 
 - Is the Christian pastor’s arrest in Karnataka politically motivated? 
 - Report of the Fact Finding Team on Hyderabad Riots - 8th April 2012 
 - Telangana: A new Hindutva laboratory in the making
14. India: Photos from "Freedom in the Cage" Delhi protest against web censorship, 22 April 2012
International: 
15. USA: The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) (James Bamford)
16. Valentino Gerratana on Althusser and Stalinism


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1. BANGLADESH’S WRITERS --- BATTLING TERROR, ETHNIC CONFLICT AND FUNDAMENTALISM
by Khondakar Ashraf Hossain
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http://www.sacw.net/article2652.html

Nowhere has literature been so much entangled with the political history of a land as it has been in Bangladesh. The people of Bangladesh had to fight for self-determination; that political struggle against colonial exploitation by Pakistan was over in 1971. But soon another monster raised its head, a hydra-headed monster with multifarious tentacles, the worst of which were religious fanaticism and communal hatred. After the killing of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on August 15, 1975, fundamentalist forces came to power with the help of the anti-liberation forces both inside and outside Bangladesh. A new fight started, which was more bloody and devastating, because this time the enemies were more covert and guileful and more relentless and brutal. Bangladesh has experienced some terrible carnage since 1975, particularly in the nineties. Mass killings through bomb attacks on religious and cultural venues, on Bangali New Year celebrations, in cinema halls and mosques have been witnessed by us. Following the demolition of the Babri mosque, there were riots, forcing many Hindus to flee across the border. Bands of fundamentalist thugs appeared in the northern districts of the country and went on a killing spree. Members of minor religious sects like the Ahmadiyas were persecuted: bombs hurled into their mosque in Khulna killed dozens of people. Bangladesh turned into a virtual killing field and figured on the international media as a potentially dangerous tract of land.

But Bangladesh is far from being a ’fundamentalist’ country. Its people are on the whole peace-loving, and they have a long tradition of religious tolerance. Throughout the thousand years of the recorded history of the Bangali race, people of various religious and cultural denominations have lived together in harmony and peace. Bangla literature since the time of the Caryapadas has extolled the value of religious syncretism. The medieval Bangali poet Chandidas said: “Sabar opore manush satya, tahar opor nai (Man is true above everything, nothing is higher than man.) Our ’baul’ folk-singers sang: “Nanan boron gabhi re bhai, eki boron dudh; jagat bhoromiya dekhilam eki mayer put.” (Cows are of various hues, but their milk has the same colour; I travelled the world and saw the sons of the same mother.) Bangladesh is a land where sufi preachers spread the doctrine of peaceful Islam and the Vaishnava philosophy of Caitanya mixed with it to create a climate of mutual understanding. But the onslaught of fundamentalism is a recent phenomenon, a by-product of the global rise of political Islam after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban. Bangladesh, like many Asian countries, is grappling with this new monster. Writers in Bangladesh are working in this climate of fundamentalist terror and are responding to it in various ways. Being the most articulate section of society, they have responded through their writings as well as through organizing campaigns on the streets and holding seminars and symposia.

It was the poets and litterateurs who, through their works, sharpened the sensibilities of the public so that they could stand up in unison against the monster whenever the need arose. Bangladeshi literature covers two periods --- one stretches from 1947 to 1971, the cataclysmic year of the country’s birth, the other from 1971 till date. Both the periods are subsumed under the common appellation, Bangladeshi literature. In 1947, the Bangladeshi (i.e. East Pakistani) scenario was dominated by the bigots, who chanted the slogans of communal segregation and opted for a kind of literature that was removed from the immediate realities into a kind of jaded romanticism about the Middle East. But very soon, the secular voice was raised by poets and writers. They propounded humanistic values and the culture of tolerance. Poets Sufia Kamal and Shamsur Rahman, novelist Shawkat Osman , dramatist Munier Choudhury these were among the people who were the standard-bearers of communal harmony and religious tolerance in the pre-1971 period. In 1971, these values were seriously jeopardized by the onslaught of communalism and hatred. People were massacred because they had voted for secular harmony and civil rights. The worst sufferers were the Hindus, firstly because they were Bangalis, but also because they were non-Muslims. In free Bangladesh, the monster was reincarnated after 1975, when the killers of the founding fathers fanned the communal fire. Communal disharmony led to riots after the Babri mosque debacle. Many suffered as a result. Taslima Nasrin’s famous or infamous outbursts typify, albeit in an extreme form, the reaction of the writers and poets against the outrage. Poets and writers have, in their respective genres, addressed the question of religious bigotry and communal persecution in varying degrees and with different tonalities. But it can be safely asserted that Bangladeshi literature is probably the most vociferous in this particular respect in the whole of South Asia.

Major terrorist incidents since 1975

1. State terror against the tribal ethnicities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Started when President Ziaur Rahman encouraged Bangali settlers to settle in the districts of Rangamati, Bandarbaban and Khagrachhari in the late seventies. Many tribal families were uprootrd from their homestead and their ’jhoom’ land. Terror reigned supreme in the area until the government of Sheikh Hasina signed a peace accord with the tribal insurgents in 1996.

2. Communal riot after the demolition of Babri mosque in December 1992: 13 people killed; 2800 houses looted and destroyed, 2600 women raped. Taslima Nasrin wrote her novel Lajja basing on this incident. The book infuriated the fundamentalists and led to her banishment from the country in 1996.

3. Bomb attack on cultural evening of Udichi (1999) and Pahela Baishakh gathering at Ramna park in 2000. Twenty people were killed in these incidents.

4. Bombing of Ahmadiya mosque in Khulna in October 1999. Nine killed, 35 injured. The Ahmadiyas are a minor religious sect. They are Muslims, but the fundamentalists call them non-Muslims and want their sect to be banned and their mosques closed. Until last year it was a regular feature on Fridays for the fanatics to bring out processions against the Ahmadiyas.

5. Post-electoral violence on the minorities in 2001. Widespread looting and arson took place after the elections of October 2001. Several women of the minority community were gang-raped.

6. Grenade attack on Communist party rally in Dhaka in 2001. 7 killed, 50 injured.

7. Bomb attack at Mymensingh cinema halls on 7 December, 2002: 19 killed, over a hundred injured. The then government falsely accused writers Muntasir Mamun and Shahriar Kabir, arrested them and had them tortured in jail.

8. Bomb attacks on variour mazaars of pirs in 2003killing many. In one incident, British High Commissioner Anwar Chowdhury was wounded when he was visiting the mazaar of Shah Jalal in Sylhet. 6 people died.

9. Police fired upon a rally of the aborigines at Madhupur Tangail on January 3, 2004 killing a Garo youth named Piren Snull. The tribals were protesting the establishment of a so-called eco-park by destroying their habitat.

10. Grenade attack on Sheikh Hasina’s anti-terrorist rally on 21 August 2004 : 13 grenades were hurled at Sheikh Hasina. 24 persons killed; many were maimed forever. It was subsequently proved that Harkatul Jihad, an Islamic outfit, masterminded the attack.

11. Assassination attempt on poet-scholar Dr. Humayun Azad in February 2004. Dr. Azad was brutally hacked at by religious terrorists.

The writers’ response to terror

Taslima Nasrin is the first name to be mentioned, because her case is an example of the extent to which a writer’s insecurity can go. She has become an epitome of protest and free speech. Although many people have reservations regarding the quality of the literature she has penned, nobody doubts her force and relevance. Taslima published Lajja in 1993, in which she graphically described the torture and communal violence unleashed on the Hindu community following the demolition of Babri mosque. The book was banned by the Bangladesh government. The fundamentalists issued a fatwa declaring her a ’murtad’ (infidel) and demanded her execution by hanging. They also set a price on her head. The government of Bangladesh filed a case against her on the charge of hurting the religious sentiments of the people. She went into hiding with the help of some secular intellectuals of the country. She recounted her days of hiding in her book Shei Shob Andhakar (All those darknesses) in which she exposed the hypocrisy of her countrymen. There was a worldwide protest against the persecution of Taslima; so after two months she was granted bail but was forced to leave the country. She has been trying to come back to her land of birth ever since but without success. Her stay in India has been eventful: she has been attacked; her residence permit has been cancelled several times; she has been bundled out of Kolkata and Jaipur, put into unknown hiding places, etc. etc. Every Indian knows her sad story. Nothing can show the condition of a writer living under the cloud of terrorism more graphically than the case of Taslima Nasrin.

More tragic is the case of Dr. Humayun Azad, a famous poet, novelist, essayist and linguist of great repute. Although Taslima Nasrin could avert physical assault in Bangladesh by going into hiding, Humayun Azad could not. He infuriated the bigots by writing scathing satires on the fundamentalist mullahs and by propagating atheistic ideas. The author of seventy books, Azad started his career as a poet. Then he moved into linguistic research and finally got immense popularity by writing columns in newspapers. Religious fanatics (later identified as members of the terrorist outfit Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh) tried to assassinate him on February 27, 2004, on his way home from a book fair. The terrorists mercilessly hacked at his neck and face with machetes. Although he survived the attack, he died later that year in Munich, Germany. Some say the trauma of the killing attempt contributed to his sudden death in August 2004. Humayun Azad created a lot of dissatisfaction among the fundamentalists by writing Naari, a Bengali version of Simone du Beauvoir’s Second Sex. In response to their protests, the then government of Bangladesh banned the book. But the more immediate cause of the assassination attempt was the publication of a devastating novel named, Pak Saar Zamin Saad Baad, in which he satirized with extreme vehemence the activities of the collaborators of the Pakistani army during the liberation war in 1971.

If Taslima Nasrin protested in her way against the communal crimes after the Babri mosque affair, Mustafa Panna, a young short story writer, did his bit regarding the communal atrocities during the post-election period of 2001. Unlike Taslima, Mustafa has not yet come under any serious threat from the perpetrators of the crime. One reason may be that the issue this time is more political than religious. The post-election violence assumed huge proportions when the winners of the general election, the BNP-Jamaate-Islami-led coalition, let loose a reign of terror on the Hindu minorities. These minorities are traditionally thought of as being supporters of the Awami League. Hundreds of communal attacks have been recorded; the newspapers were awash with reports of rape, loot and arson. Purnima Rani Shil, Mahima and other young girls narrated their harrowing tales of suffering to journalists. Mustafa Panna, in his recently published collection of short stories, Magha Aslesha, depicted the stories of communal atrocities in a moving manner.

Violence on the ethnic minorities has also drawn sharp reaction from writers. Writers and activists like Mesbah Kamal, Sanjeev Drong and Audity Falguni depicted the plight of the ethnic minorities in their writings. They also organized seminars and sit-ins, formed human chains in public places to protest ethnic persecutions in the Hill Tracts and elsewhere. In general, it is writers and artistes who have always taken to the streets to protest against all kinds of religious, ethnic and political terrorism. They have been jailed and tortured by the BNP-Jamaat regime. Shahriar Kabir, a novelist, juvenile writer and human rights activist, has been a relentless campaigner against the fundamentalist terrorists. He, along with Dr. Muntassir Mamun, a historian and writer, was imprisoned after the Mymensingh cinema hall tragedy. Shahriar Kabir has been nearly maimed by torture and has had to appear at the court for interminable hearings over the years. Poet Shamsur Rahman, Poet Syed Shamsul Haq and National Professor and writer-translator Kabir Choudhury have been in the forefront of the fight against fanaticism and terrorism. Shamsur Rahman, venerated as the number one poet of Bangladesh, came under attack by Harkatul Jihad in his own house in January 1999. He narrowly escaped death, but his assailants were never brought to justice.

The writers of Bangladesh have to work under such constraints that there is always a kind of edginess in their literary expressions. Bangladeshi poetry has been overtly political, as the poets had to grapple with such monsters as political autocracy, religious fanaticism and communal hatred. They have been tireless and vociferous in their protest against these ills. Judged from pure aesthetic viewpoints, Bangladeshi literature might appear to be too loudly political, but it could hardly be otherwise. Nowhere has politics been more oppressively real as it has been in Bangladesh. The writers of Bangladesh have never found an ivory tower of aesthetic disengagement to contemplate their navels in total oblivion of the harsh realities around them.

Professor Khondakar Ashraf Hossain, a leading poet and influential voice in literary criticism in Bangladesh, teaches English literature at Dhaka University.

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2. AFGHANISTAN: STATEMENT ON JUSTICE FOR WOMEN - WALK ON APRIL 14, 2012 
by Young Women for Change
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Saturday, 14 April 2012 12:03 

http://youngwomenforchange.org/whats-new/3720-Statment-on-Justice-for-Women-Walk-on-April-14,-2012

In the Name of the Almighty who Created all Humans Equal

Since Nawroz, New Year, at least five women have been killed in Afghanistan. Three women were killed in Herat, one of whom was beheaded by her
husband. Another woman was killed by her husband in Khost and another was hanged after the unjust decision of the tribal court in Paktya. Halima,
17, was nearly beaten to death by her husband.

In addition to this in 2012, the most brutal cases of violence against women were reviled in Afghanistan.

- Sahar Gul, 15, was tortured by her husband and his family. Her fingernails were pulled out. Her face and body were burned and her hair was pulled
out because she refused to become a prostitute. Her husband is still free.
- Storai was beaten and hanged with a rope by her husband because she gave birth to a third girl. Her husband is still free.
- Mumtaz and her sisters were attacked with acid because she refused a marriage proposal. Only one of the attackers is in jail.
- Qamar Gul was raped by two men but is now in prison for adultery.
- Nazanin, 9, was raped by two of her uncles and is still waiting for justice. The criminals are still free.
- Aziza, 14, was kidnapped and raped by a warlord in her area for 20 days. Aziza has now returned to her home in Jawzjan and because she filed a
complaint, she is afraid for herself and her family. The criminals for her kidnapping and rape are still free.
- Sima, a teacher, was killed in Baghlan province with a knife by her brother because she worked outside the house.
- Sadaat, 15, was married by force to a man who is older than 30 and was beaten and tortured daily. Sadaat tried to burn herself, but was saved
and is now under treatment. No one has been arrested for violence against her.

The cases above are just some examples of violence against women in Afghanistan.

 The Human Rights Commission in March 2001 reported 1026 cases of violence against women. That number has grown to 2700 cases in 2012. Most
cases of violence are not in the record and are never heard of. While the Elimination of Violence against Women law passed in 2009 has banned
beating, killing, torture, rape and other kinds of violence and has set specific punishment for those who commit these crimes, the criminals are rarely
punished. In reality, in some cases, women are the ones who goes to jail for the crime they did not commit.

 Islam and the constitution of Afghanistan is puts emphasis on social justice and equal rights. Islam is a religion that banned and stopped people from
burying their daughters alive, and injustice and brutality against women. But five women were killed in the span of 2 weeks in an Islamic republic
and there is no sign of justice. Islam emphasizes on love between couples but in an Islamic country, when a husband kills his wife, her Islamic and
human rights are forgotten and nobody is ready to maintain justice. According to the Constitution of Afghanistan, women and men are equal, but in
practice a women who has been raped is imprisoned while the rapist enjoys security and freedom. In the same country, a 9 year old girl is raped by
her uncles and justice is silent.

  We, the women and men of Afghanistan who want equality and justice, demand from the people’s representatives, who represent the men and
women of Afghanistan, the Ministry of Justice, that is responsible for creating a just environment for men and women in Afghanistan, and the Ministry
of Women’s Affairs, which must protect the rights of the same women who are brutally tortured, that they should no more forget women and when
crimes like these happen in front of their eyes, they should remember justice and humanity and raise their voice.

As the voice of millions of women across the country, the following are Young Women for Change’s demands:

- We demand advocacy from Afghan men. Men, fathers, husbands, and brothers: until when are you going to sit silent when these crimes happen?
Until the day a woman from your own family is hanged, cut into pieces, burned, swarmed with bullets, imprisoned or killed? Injustice to one woman
is injustice to all women, including your female family members. Raise your voices!
- Maximum punishment for those who have committed murder in the last two weeks.
- The freedom of the women who are in jail because they were raped.
- Follow-up on all cases of violence against women mentioned and not mentioned above.
- Laws on paper do not have any value if they are not implemented! The government of Afghanistan needs to step up and take necessary measures
for raising the awareness of law implementer, and judicial system that fight these crimes about the EVAW law. We demand that Ministry of Women’s
Affairs, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Culture and Information and governmental media start campaigns on violence against women in province and
district levels and raise awareness and accountability using the EVAW law!
- Ministry of Justice needs to take serious measures to implement the law of Elimination of Violence against Women in all of Afghanistan.
- Advocacy programs for women who burn in the fire of violence by media and relevant government agencies.
- Breaking the suffocating silence of violence against women by women and government agencies.
- Condemning violence against women by Ulema Council. Dear Ulema! Are you not aware of these crimes and injustice? As religious leaders, isn’t it
your obligation and job to raise your voice? Why are you silent?
- The Ministry of Health needs to oversee and report all possible cases of violence to the relevant authorities and these authorities, with the
cooperation of human rights and women’s organizations, need to take tangible steps towards security and protection of women.
- The office of the President of Afghanistan, in addition to condemning such acts needs to work closely and directly with authorities, so that all
criminals who are guilty for violence against women be arrested and punished strictly and no one is given a freebee, regardless of their social status.
Mr. President! Women also belong to the country you are the president of and you are responsible to pay attention to their rights and security. As
the leader of this country, protecting women’s rights is your duty and obligation. Every Afghan woman has the right of access to justice and protection
by law just like your dear daughter, Malalai Karzai has.

The Afghan women and men of conscience will never forget these crimes. We will never stop fighting for implementation of justice and equality in this
country.

With Hopes of Justice and Equality!
Young Women for Change

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3. THE FUTILITY THAT IS OMANTHAI: POST-WAR SRI LANKA’S RECONCILIATION SHORTFALLS
by Marisa de Silva 
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Omanthai Checkpoint, 12.30am: As the conductor switches on the bright florescent lights inside the bus, the bus comes to an abrupt halt, jolting awake blurry-eyed passengers travelling from Jaffna to Colombo, who, in response to the instruction “okkomala bag arung eliyata bahinna…” (“Everyone, take all your bags and get off the bus…”), scramble around in search of their respective bags, still half asleep. Once having located their individual items of luggage, young and old alike, stumble out of the bus one after another and walk towards the takarung (metal sheet) shed, where males and females follow separate queues to have their bags checked by male and female army personnel, respectively. The checking too has now become so superficial and lackadaisical that it’s obvious it’s being conducted purely out of protocol, rather than as an actual security measure.
 
http://tinyurl.com/7l6vjw6

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4. PAKISTAN: JOINT STATEMENT OF PAKISTANI PROGRESSIVES IN SOLIDARITY WITH VICTIMS OF FORCED CONVERSION AND AGAINST SUNNI TEHREEK'S ATTACK ON SINDH PROGRESSIVE COMMITTEE'S RALLY
=======================================
http://www.sacw.net/article2646.html
 
We, progressive organisations from all over Pakistan and Kashmir, jointly
resolve to:
- Condemn the barbaric acts of kidnapping, forced conversion and "marriage" to strangers of Sindhi Hindu young women by powerful vested interests in connivance with so-called "religious" elements, whose heinous crimes bring shame to all Sindhis as well as to all Pakistani citizens
- Stand in solidarity with Rinkle Kumari, Asha Kumari and other kidnapped young women, who have been forced to suffer the ultimate humiliation for the venality of the corrupt elite that rules Pakistan
- Condemn the connivance of the state and the ruling oligarchy of coalition partners in these
shameful, predatory attacks on a small and vulnerable minority
- Demand that all kidnapped young women be recovered and allowed of their free will to re-join their families
- Demand the arrest of all the criminals involved in this vicious, disruptive campaign of hate and expropriation
- Demand that an FIR for armed attack be registered against the goons of the Sunni Tehreek who charged the rally of the Sindh Progressive Committee (SPC) in Hyderabad with batons and pelted the female participants with stones
- Demand the immediate suspension of the SHO of the Madadgar 15 Thandi Sarak police station in Hyderabad for unlawfully detaining 22 members of the Sindh Progressive Committee, even though it was they who were attacked by the Sunni Tehreek goons
- Demand an immediate withdrawal of the fabricated FIR registered against the activists of Sindh Progressive Committee
- Thank all those citizens who sent messages of support to the jailed SPC activists and who helped negotiate their release
- Continue our struggle against religious extremism and state terrorism and for a more inclusive and diverse society
 
Signatures:
 
Abid Hasan Minto,                 president Workers Party Pakistan
Jamil Umer,                       general secretary Awami Party Pakistan
Younas Rahu,                    General Secretary Labour Party Pakistan
Imdad Qazi,                       General secretary Communist Party Pakistan

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5.  ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MANTO
by Rakhshanda Jalil
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(The Indian Express,  20 April 2012)

The progressives who marginalised him can now redress an old wrong

Centenaries are useful occasions for reflection and understanding. In the case of someone as contentious as Saadat Hasan Manto, his hundredth birth anniversary, on May 11, offers an occasion to make amends. Of course, those who regard Manto as a writer of a “certain” sort of stories would do well to study his oeuvre to understand its range and complexity. But, more importantly, those forces and those writers’ blocs — now diminished and depleted — which marginalised and mocked Manto during his lifetime can redress an old wrong. I am referring to the influential group of writers called the “progressives”, who had established the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936 and in the years leading up to Partition set themselves up as a controlling authoritarian body.

Put simply, if the progressives had an ideology, Manto had a world view; both had their roots in the Russian revolution, both gave unequivocal emphasis to social change. In the early years, the progressives were willing to ignore Manto’s lack of ideology since he kept churning out story after story about the working class, especially the outcast and the marginalised. A story like “Naya Qanoon” (New Law) was, in fact, widely acknowledged by the progressives and found a place in the many anthologies edited by progressive critics and editors. The story’s central character, Mangu the Coachman, who believes a new law has been passed that has given independence to India, takes on an English Tommy and in the process becomes an emblem of the subaltern’s desire for freedom. In his unlettered, untutored, instinctive defiance of British rule and in his impetuous headlong rush to throw off the imperial yoke, Mangu became the progressives’ version of Everyman. Till the 1940s, the progressives were content to let Manto be; while they were happy enough to appropriate the more political stories in his first two collections — Aatish Parey (1936) and Manto ke Afsane (1940) — trouble began to brew with the third collection Dhuan (1942). One story, “Boo”, in particular, irked the progressives, causing Sajjad Zaheer, founder-member of the increasingly powerful PWA, to publicly condemn it at a conference in Hyderabad in October 1945. A resolution against obscenity was drafted (a resolution that included references to Manto, Ismat Chughtai and Miraji); fortunately, the move to pass it was scuttled by the maverick Maulana Hasrat Mohani who called the assembly of writers to make a judicious distinction between obscenity and latif havasnaki (“refined sexual desire”)!

Thwarted in passing a unanimous resolution, a core group within the PWA began to marginalise Manto. For his part, Manto initially defended himself by saying that his intention was neither pornography nor titillation but simply to show certain important and stark realities of life: “If it is obscene to even mention a prostitute then her existence is also obscene. If one is forbidden to mention her, then her profession too should be forbidden. Remove the prostitute; her mention too will end.” But later, like a wilful naughty child who, upon being taken to task, becomes more wilful, more intent upon doing that which brings censure, Manto kept cocking a snook at the progressives’ growing wrath. In the collection of sketches called Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins), we see him bent upon rebellion, willing to cross the limits of brutality, jeering the gods of social realism to do their worst. Fortunately, Manto was able to check himself and once he found his own voice over the din of Partition, he wrote some of his finest stories, leaving us with some memorable characters just before his end: Babu Gopinath, Mozelle, Toba Tek Singh, Mammad Bhai, Janki, Neelam, Mummy, Hafiz Manzoor, Qadir the butcher, among others.

While he wrote with particular empathy about women, simulating a certain naturalness in speech and behaviour that can only come from close interaction and minute observation, he wrote with astonishing perspicacity about fellow men as well. And all sorts of men: writers, filmmakers, photographers, social workers, office workers, tinsmiths, tongawallahs, washermen, water-carriers, pimps, shopkeepers. In short he could claim a nodding acquaintance with people in all rungs of life. To match these characters and their real, living contexts, he gave us an equally living, equally real language, the sort of Urdu that had never been written before but one that sounded perfectly believable in the mouth of these characters. Over 60 years later, Toba Tek Singh’s famously unintelligible diatribe has become a telling commentary on the madness of Partition: “Oper di, gur gur di, anx di, bay dhiana di, mung di dal di...”

Manto’s relentless individuality always posed a problem for literary critics, both progressive and otherwise. In celebrating his centenary, it is time his legacy is celebrated not in parts but in its entirety, with its strengths and weaknesses, beauty and ugliness, absurdity and realism, detachment and empathy getting their fair share of attention. It is time this idiosyncratic combination of contraries, always a delight for Manto’s readers, stopped being a problem for the critics.

Jalil is the editor-translator of “Naked Voices: Stories and Sketches by Manto”

[The above article is also available at: http://www.sacw.net/article2647.html]

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6. INDIA: NETWORK OF WOMEN IN MEDIA CONDEMNS VIOLENT ABUSE OF MEENA KANDASAMY
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http://www.sacw.net/article2645.html
The Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI), strongly condemns the violent and sexist abuse unleashed on poet, writer, activist and translator Meena Kandasamy, presumably in response to her posts on Twitter about the beef-eating festival at Osmania University, Hyderabad, on 15 April 2012 and the ensuing clashes between groups of students.

After her comments on Twitter, she was threatened with various forms of violence, including gang rape and acid attacks. Some placed a price on her head. Others threatened her freedom of speech, saying that she would not be allowed to speak anywhere, and called for her prosecution for allegedly outraging religious feelings under Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code. In over a hundred tweets, she was called a whore, characterless, a terrorist and a bitch. One of the most objectionable comments was that she should be raped on live television, this barbaric idea was put out by one Siddharth Shankar who followed it up with more vicious filth.

Meena Kandasamy has become the target of a vicious abuse campaign on twitter and other sites for her support to the festival during which she and other students had to be escorted to a safe place under police escort. Protestors even stoned the van they were travelling in. It is highly condemnable that her support of a food festival should lead to demands for her prosecution and a bounty on her head.

As a professional network of women journalists, the NWMI is firmly committed to freedom of expression and, indeed, supports ongoing efforts to ensure that the Internet remains a free space and is not subjected to censorship. However, freedom comes with responsibility and all those who value free speech must, at the very least, censure hate speech.

Everyone in a democracy has a right to hold and express their opinions on current events and issues. Similarly, everyone has a right to disagree with and argue against the opinions of others. Debate - not abuse and threats - is the democratic means to deal with conflicting views on contentious topics: in this case, the right to choose what to eat and not eat.

It appears that Meena Kandasamy has been singled out for abuse at least partly because she is a bold and outspoken woman who expresses her opinions freely in the public sphere. The fact that she is a Dalit, especially one whose work focuses on caste annihilation, linguistic identity and feminism, clearly makes her even more of a target.

We call upon all those who value freedom of expression to join us in condemning the online attack on Meena Kandasamy and to explore ways to ensure that everyone has a right to express their opinion - on the Internet as well as elsewhere - without being subjected to hateful abuse.

The Network of Women in Media, India

http://www.nwmindia.org

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7. INDIA: A COWED-DOWN NATION - WHY KILL OVER A PEOPLE’S DIETARY PREFERENCE FOR BEEF?
by Meena Kandasamy
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(Outlook Magazine, 30 April 2012)
   					
    “The university and all teaching systems that appear simply to disseminate knowledge are made to maintain a certain social class in power, and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.... The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”

—Michel Foucault, debate with Noam Chomsky, 1971

It looks like Foucault’s “real political task” is what the organisers of the recent beef-eating festival at Osmania University set out to do: they fought the “food fascism” that kept beef out of the menu, reminded the secular state that a university hostel mess was not Sankara math, and criticised the imposition of caste-Hindu dietary diktats on Dalits from within the confines of a seemingly neutral educational institution. When they rapped “Beef is the secret of my energy” with all the soul of an outlaw anthem, it sounded like the secret heartbeat of an anti-caste cultural revolution.

But the stone-pelting, vehicle-torching ABVP hooliganism and the OU vice-chancellor S. Satyanarayana’s statement that beef would not be served in hostels unmasked a pattern of political violence. Tucking into beef biriyani behind the smokescreen of the teargas firing at OU, one could imagine the rage of a caste-Hindu mob that lynched five Dalits in Jhajjar, Haryana, in 2002 for skinning a dead cow. A week earlier, Hindu extremists had triggered communal disturbances in Hyderabad’s Old City area by hurling beef in the Hanuman temple at Kurmaguda. Both these incidents highlight the ideological framework of Hindutva mobilisation using a certain female quadruped political player who is capable of igniting riots, whose dead flesh could cause a city to disintegrate into communal violence.

Instead of acknowledging the beef-fest as an act of Dalit assertion, right-wing commentators said it was a ploy to dent the Telangana struggle. They propped up pork to silence other minorities and cast this as a Hindu-Muslim stand-off when it was actually about untouchability. Dr Ambedkar had theorised that broken men (and women) rebelling against caste became untouchables because they were Buddhists and beef-eaters. Beef, being a Dalit food, was kept away from caste-Hindus and stigmatised. To enforce the strict regimentation of caste codes, beef-eating was prohibited for Hindus. And not just in the Manusmriti.

Because India is a Hindu state at heart despite all apparitions to the contrary, Article 48 of the Constitution requires the State to take steps to prohibit the slaughter of cows. Anti-cow slaughter laws in most states promise prison terms. In implementing Hindutva, nobody outdoes Narendra Modi. He sparked off the state-aided slaughter of Muslims a decade ago, but now tries to balance his karma by conducting dental and cataract surgeries for cows. Note: Hinduism only asks of a ruler to protect cows from slaughter. While Muslim victims of the Gujarat riots still languish in relief camps, Modi gloats that no cow has to travel more than three kilometres to reach a health camp. In this animal farm, Her Holiness Mother Cow is a first-class citizen with health insurance and a pension plan. Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and Christians, being beef-eating minorities, cannot press for similar privileges.

She hasn’t always been treated with motherly respect, though: D.N. Jha’s book The Myth of the Holy Cow documented the problematic (and under-appreciated) history of Brahmin/Hindu beef-eating in ancient India, before the taboos evolved, while Manish Jha’s film Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women depicted the sexual abuse of a cow by sex-starved men. Perhaps that’s why when the BJP was in power, the National Cow Commission (2002) suggested forming a Central Cattle Protection Rapid Task Police Force and wanted amendments to pota to enable detention of those smuggling cows.

There is no point getting offended if someone enjoys beef in all its juicy glory. Since nobody is being force-fed, tolerance means digesting the idea that just as cows are meant to be milked, cows are also meant to be meat. There cannot be a shred of doubt that in a racist nation which advertises vaginal skin-lightening creams, the large, naive eyes and flawless complexion make the cow an attractive mother. Men take pride in being mummy’s boys, but it is high time Hindutva organisations and secular, state-run universities stop being swayed by bovine sex appeal, step out of their Oedipus complex and remind themselves that cows, at least the fertile ones, are only mothers of calves. Why kill for a cow, when you aren’t born of one?

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8. INDIA: CIVIL SOCIETY GROUPS REJECT NAC COMMUNAL VIOLENCE BILL DRAFT, LAY DOWN KEY FEATURES FOR A NEW BILL
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Recognizing the urgent and dire need for a law against communal and targeted violence, once again civil society activists called for a National Consultation on April 21, 2012. We, the undersigned, secular and civil liberty activists, women’s rights activists, legal experts, academicians, organizations, while rejecting the NAC draft bill, demand from the Government to draft a new legislation, the primary focus of which should be to secure accountability of public servants and to hold them responsible for communal and targeted violence, as well as make provision for providing reparative justice to the victims and survivors of such violence.
http://www.sacw.net/article2648.html

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9. INDIA: WAY OUT FOR THE LEFT
by Praful Bidwai
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(The News International, 21 April 2012)
 
One of the positives of Indian politics, like a relatively stable democracy, is the existence of two national Left parties, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) and Communist Party of India (CPI). Alas, they are in decline and have lost major elections recently. The message from their just-concluded congresses is that they are down, not out. They admit they are in crisis, and must revise their ideology and strategy. But they are hesitant to do so radically enough. Unless they go radical, their crisis is likely to deepen.

These were the first congresses to be held since the last Lok Sabha election (2009), which saw the Left’s tally plunge from 60 to 24 seats, followed by its comprehensive rout in West Bengal and poor showing in the Kerala Assembly.

The Left, especially the CPM – the world’s biggest Communist party outside China – stands at a fork in history. If it regains relevance by relating to the masses’ struggles for a life with dignity and justice, it could have a bright future. Today, the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party are both losing ground, and no national-level alternative has emerged. This favours the Left. But if the Left remains stuck in jaded ways of thinking, it will lose appeal until its decline becomes irreversible. That’s the road to extinction taken by a majority of the world’s CPs after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The CPI, smaller and more self-critical of the two parties, frankly admitted that it got alienated from the working people because it followed elitist policies. It resolved to join and lead grassroots struggles. It also accomplished a much-needed leadership transition with its highly regarded general secretary AB Bardhan handing over charge to Sudhakar Reddy.

However, the CPM didn’t leave its “comfort zone” to confront the truth. It papered over contradictions in its line, which impelled it to withdraw support to the United Progressive Alliance in 2008 and thus squander a unique opportunity to influence state policy by negotiating a common programme with the ruling coalition.

The CPM also caved in to unhealthy factional pressures. Veteran Kerala leader and former chief minister VS Achuthandan was dropped from the politburo at the behest of the conservative and elitist state party secretary Pinarayee Vijayan. But former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattachajee was retained although he has defiantly boycotted all politburo and central committee meetings held outside Kolkata.

Bhattacharjee’s retention was meant to placate the CPM’s Bengal unit, which was greatly upset with the central leadership for withdrawing support to UPA-I. This cemented an alliance between the Congress and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, which trounced the Left Front.

The Left withdrew support on the issue of the US-India nuclear deal, which failed to strike a chord with its core constituency, leave alone ordinary people. This was in some ways as great a mistake as denying the late Jyoti Basu a chance to lead the United Front government in 1996, for which he was the pre-eminent consensus candidate. Basu called this a “historic blunder”.

The Left tactlessly withdrew support in July 2008, well after the UPA had taken the deal to the International Atomic Energy Agency for endorsement. In response, the UPA brought a vote of confidence in parliament, which it won with an impressive margin. Manmohan Singh, obsessed with the nuclear deal, played dirty by going back on his promise to secure the Left’s consent before completing the agreement. But the Left was politically isolated. Its critique of the deal overemphasised its link to a strategic partnership with the US. But this lacked coherence. It didn’t even mention the deal’s implications for legitimising India’s – and the US’s – nuclear weapons, and uncritical promotion of nuclear power.

The Left cut an even sorrier figure by forming a despicably opportunist parody of a “third front” for the 2009 Lok Sabha election with former BJP allies like Mayawati and Chandrababu Naidu. The front lost the elections – and the Left its credibility. The whole episode should have been discussed threadbare.

However, the CPM congress reached an awkward compromise. It said the support withdrawal was justified, not the timing. Support should have been withdrawn in late 2007, before the UPA government approached the IAEA. This pleased the party’s West Bengal unit to an extent, while letting the central leadership off the hook. However, the CPM couldn’t have confronted the UPA in late 2007. Singur and Nandigram had become household names exemplifying the Left’s betrayal of its core support-base. And the CPM was vulnerable because its cadres violently “recaptured” Nandigram.

At the root of the crisis was the CPM’s embrace in West Bengal of the same neoliberal policies, with corporate-led industrialisation, for which it rightly pilloried the UPA. The compromise over the nuclear deal was thus a classic case of refusing to learn from past mistakes, and instead adopting a false please-all policy. That’s not what genuine self-criticism is about, and that’s not how a healthy, wholesome new approach can evolve.

At the latest congress, the CPM adopted an ideological resolution which falls well short of understanding the contemporary world as well as the flaws of the Stalinist tradition to which it belongs. Nor did it attempt to understand the importance of the new social movements and political mobilisations that are sweeping the world, including Latin America, where novel forms of government based on civil society and popular movements have emerged.

The party continues to call China a socialist country (with some minor deviations) despite the fact that it is a quintessentially capitalist economy, which follows the logic of capital accumulation and exploitation of labour, and provides the greatest thrust among all the countries of the world to capitalist globalisation and replication of the neoliberal model. The official line on China faced stiff opposition from many delegates. It nevertheless prevailed.

The CPM also adopted an approach which opposes both the Congress for its neoliberal policies, and the BJP for its neoliberalism and communalism. General Secretary Prakash Karat says the CPM won’t support the Congress even to defeat the BJP. The party has for the moment abandoned the “third front:” idea for a “Left and Democratic” alternative.

Yet, all this seems focused mainly on electoral alliances within the parliamentary framework. The point, however, is non-parliamentary mobilisation. The Left cannot grow and rejuvenate itself unless it takes up people’s livelihood issues and struggles for the right to food, to safe drinking water, and to healthcare, education and employment. This alone can expose the bankruptcy of prevalent mainstream approaches while offering practical radical alternatives.

Logically, the Left should mobilise poor neighbourhoods and picket private schools to admit underprivileged children under the Right to Education Act, just upheld by the Supreme Court. It must agitate for the implementation of the conditions, including subsidised treatment for poor patients, under which prime property was transferred to posh private hospitals like Apollo.

The Left needs to launch mass movements on issues, including inequalities, which agitate the underprivileged and are the centre of their aspirations for a better, more humane life. Precisely such agitations, like the Food and Land Movements, built up the Left in the 1960s. They, not the politics of manoeuvre between bourgeois party-led alliances, hold the key to the Left’s growth.

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi.

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10. INDIA: WAITING FOR A DISASTER? - OLD AND UNSAFE BUILDINGS IN BOMBAY'S COASTAL REGULATION ZONE AREAS
by Rohini Hensman
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(outlookindia.com, April 18, 2012)
			
Hope for redevelopment of the aging and degrading housing stock in coastal areas, provided by the new Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, has been belied in the 15 months after it was published.					

The purpose of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification when it was issued in 1991 was to protect the environment along the coast by restricting what could be done in these areas. CRZ was divided into various categories according to the degree of vulnerability of the environment, and in some areas, no construction was to be allowed. In CRZ II—already built-up areas along the coast—the Floor Space Index (the ratio between the total area of a plot and the built-up floor-space on it) was frozen at what it was at the time the Notification was passed. In Bombay (as it was then), this was 1.33 for the Island City and 1 for the suburbs.

To the extent that the regulation has been implemented, it has indeed protected the environment. However in Mumbai, where a large part of the city falls into the coastal zone, a problem has arisen in the case of old, dilapidated and unsafe buildings. In other parts of the city, residents who cannot afford the costs of redeveloping their old buildings can attract builders to undertake the task by offering them extra FSI, which the builders can sell and make a profit. In CRZ areas, this is not possible. As buildings age, the possibility of mishaps and even collapse increases, and residents are put at risk.

The new CRZ Notification of 6 January 2011 that was issued by the ministry of environment and forests when Jairam Ramesh was minister seeks to provide a remedy to this problem. It states clearly that in Greater Mumbai there are ‘a large number of old and dilapidated, cessed and unsafe buildings in the CRZ areas, and due to their age these structures are extremely vulnerable and disaster prone. There is therefore an urgent need for the redevelopment or reconstruction of these identified buildings…The Floor Space Index (FSI) or Floor Area Ratio for such redevelopment schemes shall be in accordance with the Town and Country Planning Regulations prevailing as on the date on which the project is granted approval by the competent authority.’ (pp. 23–24) In other words, the new CRZ guidelines assume that the Maharashtra state government and the BMC will soon be allotting a higher FSI to buildings in these categories in order to encourage their redevelopment, with the express aim of minimizing danger to the lives and homes of residents.

Mr Ramesh’s notification was published 15 months ago, yet to date there has been not a single announcement by either the state government or the Commissioner of any revised Planning Regulations that would allow older and less safe buildings in CRZ areas to be redeveloped with a sense of urgency. When an old (1968) building near Haji Ali by the name of Vellard View recently suffered extensive structural damage and partial collapse due to a landslide, Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan and the BMC reportedly refused to grant any extra FSI to the residents for redevelopment of their building. The residents were forced into accepting a substantial cut in their carpet areas to be able to finance reconstruction through a builder.

Meanwhile, the Commissioner Subodh Kumar has been lobbying for a 36-km coastal road that will run from Nariman Point to Kandivli, that is slated to cost Rs 8000 crores and has even been described as the Chief Minister’s ‘dream project’. The Maharashtra government’s priorities are truly shocking! Redevelopment in already built-up areas has no negative impact on the environment, whereas a coastal road would tear up the last of Mumbai’s beaches, massively interfere with tidal movements, destroy mangroves and fishing communities, and generate vastly more pollution than the city already suffers from. But apparently cars matter more than people!

Since the new CRZ regulations were issued at the start of last year, there have two significant policy changes involving the allocation and definition of FSI. The first was the state government’s decision to allow the suburbs to enjoy an additional floor space index of 0.33 to iron out a long-standing disparity between them and the Island City. The second has been a new and tighter definition of what counts as FSI, that now includes a whole series of structural elements that were previously treated as exempt. Because the new definition has a substantial impact on their margins, builders are now allowed a “compensatory” FSI of 35% (or 0.35), for which they have to pay a premium except where redevelopment projects are involved.

Since both policy moves are about what counts as “basic” FSI, logically they should be applicable to those categories of CRZ buildings for which Jairam Ramesh’s regulation has made special provision, since the FSI norms have now been upgraded. Yet the plain fact is that there is so little transparency or public understanding of what the state authorities’ policy is for these buildings that builders are currently taking the stand that neither of these changes applies to any set of buildings in CRZ II. In short, all buildings in the suburban CRZ areas remain stuck at an FSI of 1, regardless of the precarious state of many of these structures.

As the housing stock in the coastal areas ages and degrades, repairs are no longer feasible beyond a certain point, which is why Mr Ramesh’s CRZ notification of 2011 sought to encourage redevelopment in those areas as a key priority. Obviously no one seems to be listening at this end. Or are they waiting for a disaster to happen before they move?

Rohini Hensman is a novelist and writer. She lives in one of the old buildings that the current regulations are dooming to stagnation

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11. INDIA: TO BE EDUCATED TOGETHER - THE OBSCURE REPUBLICAN VIRTUE, FRATERNITY
by Mukul Kesavan
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(The Telegraph, 22 April 2012)

In the French Revolution’s great triad of republican values — liberté, égalité, fraternité — the third term has always seemed the runt of the litter. Liberty and equality have (or seem to have) clear, absolute meanings, so clear and so absolute that thinkers nearly always caveat their use of these terms by invoking the real world. Thus, we are often told in passing that there’s no such thing as absolute liberty and no actual state of perfect equality. But fraternity? Fraternity never seemed to add anything to republican virtue that the other two values didn’t already supply; it existed to complete the rhetorical rule of three, it was there for the sake of rhythm rather than meaning. If you google the great fraternal cliché ‘brotherhood of man’, you get pages of links to a 1970s British pop group that once, appropriately, scored a hit with a song direly called “United We Stand”.

Oddly enough, this French flourish was given desi heft and meaning by the recent debate about the Right to Education Act. On the English language news channels, the debate centred on one provision of this bill, the mandatory reservation of a quarter of all nursery admissions in private schools for poor children.

In one television discussion a conservative critic of this rule argued that while he had no objection to privileged and poor children studying together, the emphasis on opening up private schools to the poor seemed to him a diversionary manoeuvre by the government because it didn’t address the appalling condition of state schools which were responsible for the education of the vast majority of India’s students. If every private school implemented the provisions of the RTE Act, some 80 per cent of India’s school children would still receive a wretched education.

This seemed a reasonable argument and it had become something of a refrain when private school principals explained their opposition to the law. At the end of this particular enunciation of the private school position, a lawyer who had argued the government’s case in court when this rule was legally challenged, chose not to make the customary counter-argument. She didn’t say that private schools were themselves making a diversionary argument, that by gesturing at ill-served state school students, their spokespersons were trivializing the very real good the law did by providing access to good schools to a significant minority of poor students. She said instead that we should welcome the court’s endorsement of the RTE law because it spoke to a central republican value: fraternity.

Put like that, the debate about reserving seats for the poor in private schools became more interesting. By invoking fraternity in this context, she reminded us that the opening up private schools didn’t just help poor children out of poverty, it rescued rich children from their isolation. The meaning of fraternity became clearer, not as it would via a dictionary, but as it might if you raced through a thesaurus. It meant adjacency, camaraderie, friendship, brotherhood (and sisterhood). It was the opposite of isolation, separateness and apartness and it expressed something that neither liberty nor equality contained: the difficult ideal of sociability across difference, the acknowledgment that despite visible inequality we were connected by an imagined republican kinship.

There is no country in the world that needs fraternity more than India does and there is no society that has less of it. Most cultures, for example, have traditional gathering places —cafes, coffee houses, bars and pubs —where men hang out and fraternize. India doesn’t. The ones we do have now came to us via a colonial modernity. In a culture where the casual sociability of eating and drinking together is made difficult by the idea of ‘jootha’ and rules about pollution, fraternity is a difficult idea.

Walking my children to their school in Brooklyn some years ago, I met panhandlers asking for money at the corner of every block. My technique was to either ignore them or to hurriedly give them change and move on. The natives did things differently; they stopped, exchanged greetings, and only then did money change hands. A fraternal acknowledgement of a poor man’s humanity doesn’t come naturally to desis. This has everything to do with the exclusions of caste. The caste system is distinguished from other forms of social differentiation not merely or even principally by its endorsement of inequality; what makes it unique is its ideological hostility to fraternity.

In India, the poor and the privileged, even those who are modestly middle class, aren’t divided by class; they’re divided by a line of control. The poor, to adapt L.P. Hartley’s famous first line, are another country. It’s a country that we write about or help make policy for — if we’re feeling curious, generous or charitable. Our concern is frictionless because their country and ours might be adjacent but they’re sealed off from each other. It’s only when this line of control is legislatively breached, when people not-like-us have to be admitted into our country, that we find reasons with which to repair the breach. Thus every episode of affirmative action in our history has been met with arguments from merit, arguments against a pernicious ‘creamy layer’ and now an invocation of the ‘real’ problem in Indian education, the reform of the state schools.

These arguments are often both cogent and made in good faith; their main defect is that, without always knowing it, they deride fraternity in the name of some larger republican virtue. There is, in fact, no larger republican virtue than fraternity. The argument for emancipating all of India’s poor should not be an argument against admitting Dalits into the charmed circle of India’s administrative and academic elite. The entry of some Dalits, tribals and other backward classes (Muslims included) via affirmative action and reservations into the institutions run by India’s ruling class won’t end inequality or abolish poverty, but it isn’t meant to. It’s meant to encourage and, if necessary, enforce fraternity where previously there was none. A republic that systematically excludes most of its people from its governing structures and educational institutions becomes unfraternal to the point of illegitimacy.

Historically, the call for fraternity seeped into Indian republicanism from the peninsula; it percolated upwards from the south to the deeply non-fraternal north. Jyotirao Phule and his Satyashodhak Samaj, the early educational reservations instituted by the Maharaja of Mysore, the Vaikom Satyagraha, Periyar, the Dravida parties that instituted backward class reservation in the Tamil country, B.R. Ambedkar, whose presence ensured that scheduled caste reservations were written into the republic’s founding document, the Constitution, preceded the Mandalization of heartland politics. This was not a coincidence: nowhere outside the north were the savarna so numerous or the varna hierarchy more entrenched.

The private school reservations that the RTE Act mandates is the latest of these incremental attempts to institutionalize fraternity in Indian society and politics. It is particularly hard to argue against because it implements the criterion of economic backwardness that opponents of caste reservations used to invoke when confronted by Mandal. To oppose this in principle is to oppose the intermingling of rich and poor, to oppose, in a word, fraternity.

The debate about the RTE Act helps desis understand how deeply liberal political instincts are rooted in an inarticulate belief in fraternity. Why was apartheid so repugnant? Not because it is unequal (there was, arguably, greater inequality elsewhere in the world); it was repugnant because it was a State-sponsored negation of fraternity which is grotesque in a republic. ‘Separate but Equal’ would be unacceptable even if the second term of that motto was true. Why do self-aware Israelis worry about the occupation? Why does the wall between Israel and the West Bank seem symbolically so ominous? Because it reflects the formal separation of Arab and Jew. Why does the idea of a Hindu, a Muslim or a Buddhist republic sit so oddly with the notion of republican democracy? Because to make Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists sole proprietors of a republic is to exclude people not of those faiths from a republic’s fraternal union.

The implementation of private school reservation might well be inefficient, corrupt, even counter-productive. In the civil rights era, ‘busing’ as a policy for desegregating schools didn’t always work and eventually a series of supreme court judgments led to its abandonment. But, as with busing, the debate about private school reservation might help transform the political culture of the republic by locating affirmative action in that resonant yet enigmatic republican value, fraternity.


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12. INDIA - PUNJAB: MYTH BUSTERS OF MOHALI
by Nishita Jha
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(Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 17, Dated 28 April 2012)

In the grip of stultifying superstition, Punjab needs these fearless five to conjure forth an age of reason, says Nishita Jha

Firefighter Jarnail Singh Kranti

Photos: Garima Jain

THE MAN in the driver’s seat was born in front of PC Sorcar’s house. Turning his taxi to the Rationalist Society headquarters in Mohali, he says, “We had heard that Sorcar gained his powers from one book. Whoever read it would go insane for six months, then transform into the world’s greatest magician. I kept hoping to find it. It was the only reason I learnt to read.” One day, he found a thin journal left in the back of his taxi. “Ghosts that possessed women, talking idols, telekinesis — all the magic in the world explained. I felt as though I had found Sorcar’s book,” he says.
Neeraj Daun

Neeraj Daun smother superstitions

What Biswas had found, apart from the fulfillment of a childhood dream, was the monthly publication brought out by Tarksheel, the Punjab Rationalist Society.

That Biswas found magic in a rationalist pamphlet isn’t the paradox it seems. In their aim to cultivate scientific thought and obliterate superstitions accrued over centuries, the foot soldiers of Tarksheel are meeting and beating the charlatans and tricksters on their own field. Crowded among the posters of Bhagat Singh, the Tarksheel office is a stockpile of magic tricks — powders that burst into flames, innocuous-looking containers that swallow change, notes and cheques, ointments that cause the appearance of superficial burns and a spool of holy string.

It is one prong of a strategy formulated by the Indian Rationalist Association (IRA), the umbrella organisation of which Tarksheel is a chapter. In addition to more conventional methods like conducting seminars to spread awareness, other arms such as the Satya Shodhak Sabha (Gujarat), Soshit Samaj (Jharkhand) and Jana Vignana Vedika (Andhra Pradesh) also play detective or guinea pig as required. Although it would be convenient to suppose superstitions thrive only in the rural fringes of these states, the metros see their own share of supposed supernatural activity. The head of the Indian Rationalist Association, Sanal Edamaruku, spent close to 23 hours in a studio in New Delhi last year, while a sadhu invited by the news channel pranced around, muttering a curse that would supposedly end Edamaruku’s life on air. This April, he faced the ire of the Organisation of Concerned Catholics when he unravelled a ‘miracle’ at a church in Mumbai. Edamaruku discovered that the droplets of water trickling from a statue of Jesus Christ in Vile Parle were, in fact, from a nearby drainage system, and is currently facing arrest for ‘blasphemy’.

The largest presence in the Tarksheel office is that of Jarnail Singh Kranti, a retired primary schoolteacher and trade union activist who was initiated into the Society in 1984, while translating AT Kovoor’s books into Punjabi. Kovoor, an Indian professor of Botany in Sri Lanka, had spent his post-retirement years hunting out and exposing godmen — the most famous of these showdowns was Kovoor’s meeting with Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi. The apocryphal story goes that Kovoor matched Sai Baba miracle for miracle, finally asking him to produce something he couldn’t hide up his sleeve, a pumpkin — the baba walked away. Impressed with Kovoor’s work, Kranti founded the Chandigarh chapter of the IRA and began distributing translated titles (Begone Godmen, Gods, Demons and Spirits, The Miracle of Ganga Water) at schools and local functions. Soon, he had a small army of rationalists and 11 districts around Chandigarh under his watch. The Tarksheel Society has now published over 200 titles in Punjabi, Hindi and English on similar themes.

Due to the kinds of complaints Tarksheel receives — which Kranti broadly classifies as sexual, financial, social and traditional — discretion and cultural sensitivity are of prime importance. While the society has its panel of legal and medical advisers, the core investigating team consists of Kranti (“People trust me because I am old,” he offers), Satnam Singh Daun (an untrained hypnotist, magician and detective-at-large), Daun’s wife Neeraj (who represents another useful demographic — 90 percent of Tarksheel’s cases involve troubled women), journalist Harpreet Rora and his wife Harvinder. Except for Kranti, who works at the Tarksheel library full time, everyone else has a day-job, through which they fund the society’s activities. Kranti says with some pride that all the core team members have had ‘court-registered, inter-caste love-marriages’ — convinced that this is an indicator of their commitment to a rationalist cause.

Kovoor matched Sai Baba miracle for miracle, finally asking him to produce something he couldn’t hide—a pumpkin

THE LION’S share of cases on Tarksheel’s investigative roster involves ‘possessed’ women. Rora says the easiest way to discourage women from moving around freely or mingling with the opposite sex is to instill fear in the form of supernatural repercussions from an early age. The myths that proliferate in villages are centred on feminine virtue and its containment. Oft-repeated ones include djinns love women with open hair, or those who wear perfume, or new brides. Walking under a peepul tree at midnight or when everyone is asleep in the afternoon is a sure way to get possessed.

Upon investigation, the root causes of possession are more humdrum: related to guilt, an unsatisfactory sex-life, lack of sex-education and an unconsciously-repressed rebellion against patriarchal rules. For instance, two of the possessed women Daun and his wife met recently, one a village girl, the other a lecturer at Chandigarh University, were pregnant and under tremendous psychological pressure to bear sons. The village girl’s clothes would ‘spontaneously’ catch fire, and the college lecturer would speak in a voice distinct from her own, threatening to kill her unborn child.

Daun usually begins his interaction with the ‘patient’ by establishing himself as a holy man, appealing to the same subconscious mechanisms that created the ‘ghost’. His favourite trick involves swallowing fire. By this stage, the Tarksheel investigators have familiarised themselves with the family’s history to arrive at a logical working hypothesis for the patient’s behaviour. Having assuaged the supposed spirit, Daun then confronted each of the women with facts from the investigation. The village girl was dissatisfied with her marriage. The college lecturer was overworked and unappreciated. Overwhelmed by this direct handling of their actual problem, they both confessed and thus expunged their demons.

In most cases, the possessed women are relieved to be freed of their psychological burden. In the event that the ‘ghosts’ prove to be stubborn, Daun uses hypnotism to coax the facts before a final confrontation. Once in a while, the myth-busters of Mohali will let the suggestion of a greater power linger, though it goes against the grain of their tenets. As a precautionary measure in case of pregnant women, Daun and Neeraj led the mothers-in-law to believe that a terrible curse would befall them if the girls were tormented for bearing daughters.
Satnam Singh Daun 	Harpreet Rora 	Harvinder Kaur

The real thing (From left) Satnam Singh Daun, Harpreet Rora and Harvinder Kaur

Not all of Tarksheel’s cases are tied up quite as neatly. Kranti recalls a village near Manimajra where cattle would turn up dead every morning, causing intense panic among the villagers. For nearly three weeks, the sarpanch had forbidden anyone from entering or leaving the village, hoping to nab the culprit — to no avail. “The villagers were almost ready to kill each other by the time we were called in,” says Kranti, “We knew that if we could not solve this case, we would lose a lot more than our reputations.” It took a three day stake-out. The team discovered that the cleaning woman had made a deal with the leather-worker (chamaar) of the village where she would poison one animal a day while cleaning the stable, and he would pay her a percentage of the money he made off its hide. “The upper castes were worried about which god they had offended, not realising it was the lower castes that wanted revenge,” Daun finishes the story amid laughter.

Cattle deaths are a common cause and symptom of hauntings in villages. Miles away in Dharmapuri, Chennai, a group of villagers locked themselves up in their homes after dark for over four weeks, convinced a “blood-sucking vampire” was killing their animals. Another team of Rationalists, led by Thagadur Tamilselvi, camped out near the stables for three weeks and discovered that contaminated water was the culprit.

The Tarksheel gang doesn’t always wait to be called when there’s something strange in the neighbourhood. Taking their cue again from AT Kovoor, who offered a prize of $901 for anyone who could provide any evidence of the paranormal, the society ups the ante; Rs 5 lakh for proof of possession of psychic or supernatural abilities. “We don’t have that kind of money at the moment,” grins Rora, “but we’re quite certain we won’t have to pay up.” Kranti adds seriously, “If we do, we can always arrange it,” but more as testament to the legitimacy of the offer than a concession that such powers exist.

‘It’s shameful that they need to see an uneducated charlatan to make a business decision,’ says Neeraj

THERE IS a serious need for the Rationalists. In Punjab, highly educated, wealthy families (often those settled in foreign countries) visiting ‘gurus’ and ‘dera babas’ in their ‘pinds’, and making huge donations every visit is a well-documented phenomenon. “We don’t care what they do with their crores, but it is shameful that they need to see an uneducated charlatan before making a business decision, or to ensure that their wives give birth to sons — how is this progress?” says Neeraj, visibly irritated. Punjab is also home to a booming ojha business — men who claim they can get rid of any kind of evil spirit or curse. They also extort money, property deeds and gifts from people, while subjecting them to humiliation as part of their cure. One of Kranti’s first cases, Jitender Singh, a bank employee who lost his job and became depressed, was beaten, stripped and mocked by a group of such ojhas because his wife’s family insisted that this was the only way in which he could be ‘cured’. Singh, now a recovering psychiatric patient, says he had begun to seriously contemplate suicide around the time that Kranti found him, and insisted that he seek medical intervention. “There are very few trained psychiatrists in Punjab and there is still a lot of stigma attached to seeking counselling. I think it’s one of the main reasons that young working professionals turn to drugs and alcohol for respite,” he says.

The nexus between political parties and religious figures adds another dimension — the latter guarantees votebanks while the former ensures protection from the law. “No government till date has tightened the 1954 Drugs and Magic Remedies Act, under which the maximum punishment is two months in prison and a Rs 2,000 fine,” says Daun. Instead, the Rationalists are seen as godless and amoral people. Edamaruku has been vilified in the past for echoing Kovoor’s claims that Sathya Sai Baba was a con-artist. Under Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal’s government, Tarksheel’s publications were banned for a few months as seditious, when a rationalist society member managed to annoy a BJP MLA by challenging his party’s resident soothsayer.

Daun believes that people hate Rationalists because they ask too many pesky questions. “No one wants a poor man to ask why he is poor. Everyone just wants him to accept his fate because that is the only way the rich can survive without fear,” he says. It is easy to see why an apolitical, irreligious and socialist group should cause tremors in the corridors of earthly power. Meanwhile, for newly converted rationalists like Biswas the taxi-driver, the world of logic is simply magical.

With inputs from Jeemon Jacob

Nishita Jha is a Correspondent with Tehelka.

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13. India: Selected Posts on Communalism Watch
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S Anand: The right to eat
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2012/04/s-anand-right-to-eat.html

Christian forums file FIRS after IRA chief calls 'miracle water' a scam 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2012/04/christian-forums-file-firs-after-ira.html

Is the Christian pastor’s arrest in Karnataka politically motivated? 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2012/04/is-christian-pastors-arrest-in.html

Report of the Fact Finding Team on Hyderabad Riots - 8th April 2012 
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2012/04/report-of-fact-finding-team-on.html

Telangana: A new Hindutva laboratory in the making
http://communalism.blogspot.in/2012/04/telangana-new-hindutva-laboratory-in.html

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14. India: Photos from "Freedom in the Cage" Delhi protest against web censorship, 22 April 2012
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On 22nd April 2012, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi (11AM to 5PM) Artists, musician and internet users participate and talk against web censorship
http://www.sacw.net/article2651.html

INTERNATIONAL ETC:
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15. USA: THE NSA IS BUILDING THE COUNTRY'S BIGGEST SPY CENTER (WATCH WHAT YOU SAY)
by James Bamford
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Wired, March 15, 2012
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

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16. VALENTINO GERRATANA ON ALTHUSSER AND STALINISM
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. . . the relationship between Stalinism and Leninism. We are here faced not with two clearly definable categories, between which a systematic opposition may be established, but with a complex of inter-related and mutually conditioning problems, which resist simplistic attempts to draw precise lines of demarcation. The fact that Leninism was transmitted and consolidated through the mediation of Stalinism is not something that can be erased by a simple sponge-stroke of intellectual reasoning.

http://www.sacw.net/article2650.html


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