SACW - 28 June 2013 / Afghanistan: exodus? / Far Right in Burma, India, Sri Lanka / Burma: Ethnicity / Bangladesh: forced conversions / India: Posco, Maruti, Uttrakhand disaster; Phone Taps /Egypt Sectarian Brotherhood

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 28 June 2013 - No. 2790
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Contents:

1. The far right in Burma, India and Sri Lanka (Samir Jeraj)
2. What is behind the the sudden upsurge of violence towards polio vaccinators in Pakistan? (Samira Shackle)
3. India: Alternative to the politics of hatred (Harsh Mander)
4. Fascism’s natural ally (Jawed Naqvi)
5. India: ICLR releases report on violations of labor and human rights of Maruti Suzuki Workers
6. India: Rights Groups Call for Suspension of POSCO Steel Project and a halt to human rights abuses
7. Video: Left wing extremism in Chhattisgarh - A TV Discussion with Himanshu Kumar
8. India: NAPM Condemns attack on Prafulla Samantara and Lingraz Azad in Bolangir, Orissa
9. India: Even Uttarakhand tragedy will not stop reckless development (Jyoti Punwani)
10. M. V. Ramana: Whistle Blowers and the Public Interest
11. India: Tamil Nadu government has asked temples to conduct special prayers and rituals for rains
12. Open letter to President Dilma Rousseff from Brazil’s social movements
13. India’s counterterrorism laws being widely misused - says Human Rights Watch release
14. India: Phone tapping - 90,000 cases in Gujarat intrigue central intelligence agencies
15. India: Statement on Uttrakhand Catastrophe by India Climate Justice collective
FULL TEXT
16. Exodus: Afghan Diplomats Defect as Western Withdrawal Nears (Hasnain Kazim)
17. Bangladesh: Forced conversion of religion after abduction (Udisa Islam)
18. Man made disasters - Nepali Times, Editorial
19. Pakistan: Relocation of 10% military expenses to social security demanded (Staff Report, The Daily Times)
20. Pakistan: Never the twain shall meet (Harris Khalique) 
21. Burma’s Ominous Political Debate over Ethnicity (Sai Latt)
22. India: Public morality and the right to free sex (Flavia Agnes)
23. India: The Outsiders (Madhavankutty Pillai)
24. India: Modi’s Himalayan miracle (Abheek Barman)
25.India: Way to watch (Chinmayi Arun)
26. India: Verdict ’14 - Modi will gain even if BJP loses (Bharat Bhushan)
27. The War on Misguided Youth and Other Indian Euphemisms (Aditya Sinha)
28. Egypt: Ripping bodies apart - the Brotherhood’s sectarian policy in practice (Mariz Tadros) 
29. USA: How Wall Street Undermines Reform (Lawrence Lessig)
30. USA: Berkeley - What We Didn’t Know (Adam Hochschild)
31. A More Secular Europe, Divided by the Cross (Andrew Higgins)


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1. THE FAR RIGHT IN BURMA, INDIA AND SRI LANKA
by Samir Jeraj
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Far right religious nationalism is growing in South Asia.
http://www.sacw.net/article4853.html

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2. WHAT IS BEHIND THE THE SUDDEN UPSURGE OF VIOLENCE TOWARDS POLIO VACCINATORS IN PAKISTAN?
by Samira Shackle
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On Sunday 16 June, gunmen on motorbikes shot dead two polio workers carrying out a vaccination drive in Peshawar, a crowded city in Pakistan’s north-west. One of the men who died was a schoolteacher, the other a paramedic. Both left behind grieving families. Their deaths bring the total tally of polio workers assassinated in Pakistan up to nearly 20 since last December.
http://www.sacw.net/article4858.html

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3. INDIA: ALTERNATIVE TO THE POLITICS OF HATRED
by Harsh Mander
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I am resolutely opposed to the politics represented by Narendra Modi, which I find deeply inimical to the pluralist and humane idea of India, to secular democracy, and to caring and inclusive governance. There are many, on the other hand, who are evidently greatly attracted by his muscular style of leadership and his focus on market-led economic growth. The battle between these two ideas of India and of government is the stuff of democracy. But I wish this battle is fought without resort to untruth and disinformation.
http://www.sacw.net/article4857.html

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4. FASCISM’S NATURAL ALLY
by Jawed Naqvi
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Communalism, a twisted offshoot of religion, breeds in a fertile manmade atmosphere of strife. But it also thrives in natural calamities such as earthquakes, floods and cyclones. The current rain-induced havoc in Uttarakhand, host to several Hindu pilgrimages in India’s Himalayan foothills, spurred Narendra Modi to hog the limelight. The human tragedy was thus deftly converted into a political windfall with an eye on the bilious politician’s religio-fascist agenda. The aim is to win the 2014 Indian elections by whatever means.
http://www.sacw.net/article4856.html

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5. INDIA: ICLR RELEASES REPORT ON VIOLATIONS OF LABOR AND HUMAN RIGHTS OF MARUTI SUZUKI WORKERS
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Today, 27 June, 2013, the International Commission for Labor Rights (ICLR) released the report entitled, “Merchants of Menace: Repressing workers in India’s new industrial belt, Violations of workers’ and trade union rights at Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.”
http://www.sacw.net/article4855.html

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6. INDIA: RIGHTS GROUPS CALL FOR SUSPENSION OF POSCO STEEL PROJECT AND A HALT TO HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES
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The Government of India must end human rights abuses tied to its project with South Korean steel giant POSCO, and must immediately cease illegal seizures of land which threaten to forcibly displace as many as 22,000 people in India’s eastern state of Odisha, said rights groups in a new report released today.
http://www.sacw.net/article4854.html

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7. VIDEO: LEFT WING EXTREMISM IN CHHATTISGARH - A TV DISCUSSION WITH HIMANSHU KUMAR
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Recording from Indian television programme one on one.
http://www.sacw.net/article4804.html

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8. INDIA: NAPM CONDEMNS ATTACK ON PRAFULLA SAMANTARA AND LINGRAZ AZAD IN BOLANGIR, ORISSA
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On the night of 26th June, Prafulla Samantara, senior activist and National Convener, NAPM and Lingraj Azad, Samajwadi Jan Parishad was attacked at Bolangir station, while returning from a Padyatra organised by the people opposing Lower Suktel Project in the region.
http://www.sacw.net/article4848.html

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9. INDIA: EVEN UTTARAKHAND TRAGEDY WILL NOT STOP RECKLESS DEVELOPMENT
by Jyoti Punwani
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News reports about the recent visit of the minister of environment to Mumbai fill one with despair. Even as the devastation in Uttarakhand was making headlines, our chief minister was asking Jayanthi Natarajan to relax environmental rules for projects which are either unnecessary, or designed to wreak havoc on their surroundings. Did he forget that Uttarakhand’s destruction is a direct outcome of the relaxation of environmental rules in that ecologically sensitive state? Uttarakhand is far away. Our rulers refuse to learn the lessons of Mumbai.
http://www.sacw.net/article4842.html

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10. M. V. RAMANA: WHISTLE BLOWERS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST
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There is a common message emanating from the centers of power in Washington, D.C. and New Delhi: Whistle blowing, or truth telling as the act may be more accurately described, is not a welcome activity.
http://www.sacw.net/article4841.html

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11. India: Tamil Nadu government has asked temples to conduct special prayers and rituals for rains
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That a state govt in India goes out of its way to push for obscurantism is truly shocking.
http://www.sacw.net/article4840.html

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12. OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT DILMA ROUSSEFF FROM BRAZIL’S SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
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This week, Brazil has witnessed mobilisations across 15 capital cities and hundreds of other cities. We are in agreement with the statements coming out of these protests, which affirm the importance of these mobilisations for Brazilian democracy, because we are conscious of the fact that the changes we need in this country will come through popular mobilisation.
http://www.sacw.net/article4832.html

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13. INDIA’S COUNTERTERRORISM LAWS BEING WIDELY MISUSED - SAYS HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH RELEASE
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Members of Kabir Kala Manch, charged in 2011 under India’s draconian counterterrorism laws, remain subject to prosecution for their alleged support of Maoist militants. One of them, eight months pregnant, was denied bail and must wait until June 27 for an appeals decision on her bail application. Indian courts have repeatedly ruled that ideological sympathy should not be interpreted as active membership in a banned organization.
http://www.sacw.net/article4831.html

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14. INDIA: PHONE TAPPING - 90,000 CASES IN GUJARAT INTRIGUE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES
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Gujarat Police has obtained nearly 90,000 telephone call data records (CDRs) of people and entities in three months beginning January this year, raising eyebrows in central intelligence agencies about what is going on in Chief Minister Narendra Modi-ruled state to necessitate tapping.
http://www.sacw.net/article4830.html

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15. INDIA: STATEMENT ON UTTRAKHAND CATASTROPHE BY INDIA CLIMATE JUSTICE COLLECTIVE
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We see this tragedy as a result of cumulative and widespread injustice and wrongdoing: not only against the Himalayan environment, but also against mountain communities whose survival depends on that environment. This tragedy is also a crime, because our policy makers and administrators are also part of the larger climate injustice at a global scale that threatens, displaces and kills the marginal and the poor everywhere. On another plane, they simply let it happen. We believe that adaptation to disasters does not just mean desperate rescue work during and after the event, but also reducing vulnerability and risk before. Effective adaptation involves a series of measures that need to be adopted on a war footing. The sustainable development of a hill economy, and equity – not profit for a few – should be at its core.
http://www.sacw.net/article4828.html

::FULL TEXT::
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16. EXODUS: AFGHAN DIPLOMATS DEFECT AS WESTERN WITHDRAWAL NEARS
by Hasnain Kazim
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SPIEGEL International, June 24, 2013
The situation in Afghanistan is becoming so precarious that Afghan diplomats no longer want to return to their homeland. Up to 100 foreign service employees set for rotation back to Kabul from assignments abroad have now defected.

A total of 105 Afghan diplomats were meant to report for duty at the Foreign Ministry in Kabul on Saturday. They were being rotated out of their foreign postings as scheduled, and it was time to return to headquarters. Yet just five of them have resurfaced. The others have apparently remained in the countries where they had been posted, among them several employees of the Afghan Embassy in Berlin.

ANZEIGE
Sources at the Afghan Foreign Ministry have informed SPIEGEL ONLINE that embassy staff members have said they would apply for asylum in their respective host countries or at least apply for an extension of their service until the presidential election in spring 2014. "They are hoping that there is more clarity about the future of our country by that point," said an employee of the ministry. "I feel as though there has been an exodus. No one wants to return to Afghanistan," said the employee, who added that they couldn't be faulted for wanting to stay away from"the situation in the country."According to recent surveys, most Afghans believe the country will sink into chaos and violence and expect that civil war will break out once Western forces withdraw at the end of 2014. For months, the Taliban and various other ethnic groups have been arming themselves in preparation for a fight for power in the country.

The Fiction of a Bright Future

Many Afghan diplomats are the sons and daughters of high-ranking politicians who are also trying to go abroad as soon as possible and stay there until the situation in Afghanistan becomes clearer.

International foundations and organizations that organize educational trips and conferences for Afghans abroad have also become more cautious recently. They know that more and more trip participants will disappear. It is said in Kabul that several Afghan teachers never returned from a trip organized recently by the German government. And a high-ranking official from the Afghan Foreign Ministry called home during a trip to Canada to say that he wouldn't be coming back.

"I can confirm this trend," says Tinko Weibezahl, the head of the Kabul office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. "In recent months some of our most qualified contacts have left the country. The refugees are above all "the highly educated, who were much more optimistic about the future a year ago," Weibezahl says. Government ministers, lawmakers and senior military officials are also attempting to get their families out of the country.

The story of the hopeful future of an Afghanistan that stands on its own two feet, that is safe and peaceful and democratically governed, "is just a story that the West likes to tell us," says a senior official from the presidential palace in Kabul. "This story has just one catch: Most Afghans don't believe it."

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17. BANGLADESH: FORCED CONVERSION OF RELIGION AFTER ABDUCTION
by Udisa Islam
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Dhaka Tribune, June 27, 2013 

A new phenomenon where men kidnap 10-16-year-old girls from minority communities and force them to sign declarations that they are adults and wish to change their religion to Islam to get married

Human rights groups and NGOs are calling for more action to be taken to prevent a spate of abductions and rapes of women, who have reportedly also then been forced to convert to Islam as part of a “carefully-planned” strategy to reduce support for victims from their communities after the crime is perpetrated.

Prima (not her real name), a sixth grader from Gazipur’s Tongi area, was abducted on her way back from school on April 6 this year.

Law enforcers found her 55 days later at a hotel in Cox’s Bazaar. She had been raped repeatedly by some boys from her locality during the period and was forced to convert her religion from Hinduism to Islam and marry one of the perpetrators, Rabiul Hossein Manik.

Experts say Prima’s traumatic experience was not an isolated case, but part of a new phenomenon where men kidnap 10-16year old girls from minority communities and force them to sign declarations that they are adults and wish to change their religion to Islam to get married.

Experts have termed the forced changes of religion as a “carefully-planned” step designed to ensure that the victims do not receive the support of their communities and to leave scope for the criminals to get away without punishment.  

“It is only natural that the perpetrators of such crime would want to ensure that the victim cannot go back to her community or get its support. So they have devised this strategy and by forcing her to change her religion, they effectively ensure the victim cannot escape and go back and that no steps are taken by her community to free her and take her back,” Advocate Salma Ali, executive director of Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association (BNWLA), explained to the Dhaka Tribune on Wednesday.

However, there is no sign of concrete steps being taken by the government or social organisations for curbing these attacks or to rehabilitate the victims.

The distress of the victims is evident in a letter sent to her father by Kakoli Haider (not her real name). The 13-year-old was asleep in her bed when five Muslim men invaded and vandalised their home a year back. She screamed and fought back only to be easily overpowered by the criminals who took her away. 

Three months later, she communicated with her parents through a letter to her father where she said she felt like dying as the criminals had forced her to convert to Islam and one of them had married her in a ruse to 'legalise' their crime.

Ranu Saha (not her real name), a 16-year-old Hindu girl, was also victimised in a similar incident last year. She was abducted from where she was staying with her brother in Patuakhali’s Bauphal area and was similarly forced to convert by the criminals.

In recent years, the alarming rate of increase in violence against women has forced the government to enact stringent measures via the Women and Children Repression Prevention Act 2002 (amended 2003), Acid Control Act 2002 and Domestic Violence (Prevention & Protection) Act 2010.

However experts feel that the situation has barely improved and are calling for the government to put more effort in training law enforcers to deal with these types of crime.

“We can never overstate the relevance of legislation for control of crime and violence. However, on its own, legislation will have no bearing if it is not enforced,” Action Aid Bangladesh Country Director Farah Kabir said in her reaction to the inhuman attack on Prima.

She pointed out that law enforcers initially refuse to accept kidnapping charges in such incidents and try to tag such crimes as love affairs. They overlook the issue of forced conversion which is “very unfortunate.”

Bangladesh Mohila Parishad President Ayesha Khanam said enacting more laws would not address the problem. “We, therefore, need to identify the root causes first and then formulate a better strategy to overcome the problem.”

When questioned about why the parishad has not taken any step yet, Ayesha said, “We are trying to observe the situation. We will take effective step.”

State minister of women affairs, Meher Afroz Chumky, said gender sensitisation and issues of women rights and equality should be included in the present education system. She added the media could play an important role in creating awareness and in calling on law enforcers to properly attend to the victims. “We will communicate with the home ministry to solve these problems.”

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18. MAN MADE DISASTERS - NEPALI TIMES, EDITORIAL
Let’s not blame nature, the real disaster is the failure of governance that leads to lack of preparedness
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Nepali Times, 28 June-4 July 2013 #662

It is the same old story every monsoon season, only this year it started earlier than usual. Massive cloudbursts over western Nepal and the neighbouring Indian state of Uttarakhand in mid-June unleashed the total average monthly rainfall in a short span of 24 hours.

Every year, the downstream Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh blame Nepal for ‘releasing’ water. This time, it was Nepal that accused India of letting out water from the Dhauliganga Dam on a tributary of the Mahakali River that forms Nepal’s western border with India. Someone forgot that the Dhauliganga is a run-of-the-river scheme with daily pondage so it doesn’t store much.

It is the same blame game every rainy season: governments are blamed for lack of adequate and timely response, the Indians are blamed for building embankments, Biharis blame Nepal for letting water out from non-existent dams, climate change is blamed for our lack of preparedness, and everyone blames God for unleashing a ‘natural disaster’.

The rainfall this year was heavy, but it was hardly unprecedented. Northern India has historically suffered major floods, including the damming of the Alkananda in 1894 by a landslide and the bursting of the impounded lake which unleashed a wall of water that devastated the valleys below all the way down to Hardwar. The district capital of Darchula, Khalanga, itself is located on an elevated bank that is the relic of catastrophic floods on the Mahakali in historic times.

As with earthquakes, there is no point blaming God. Floods and earthquakes are a given in Nepal, the question is what have we done to mitigate loss of life and damage? These are not ‘natural’ disasters but man-made calamities because population pressure, greed, and corruption lead people to flout building codes and zoning laws.

The Himalaya is a fragile and geologically young range, prone to erosion and landslides in what is also the most densely-populated mountain region in the world. The combination of topography and climate make the Himalaya vulnerable to disasters.

Hazard mapping pinpoints where settlements can be relatively safe. Our forebears knew it was dangerous to live along floodplains and built homesteads on higher ground. Cloudbursts have always been a feature of the Asian summer monsoon, so settlements and infrastructure have to take these risks into account and heed nature’s repeated warnings.

The tragedy that struck Uttarakhand was made worse because it coincided with the pilgrimage season to the holy Hindu sites when thousands of Nepalis flock to northern Indian states either as pilgrims or porters. As it turned out, more Nepalis were killed in India than in Nepal itself.

There have been heroic rescues and miraculous tales of survival from India. Even the Indian state, with all the heavy-lift helicopters and a relatively better equipped disaster response setup at its disposal, found it difficult to cope with the sheer scale of the disaster. One shudders to think what would have happened had the Nepali side been hit harder.

Floods and landslides during the monsoon should not surprise anyone, what is surprising is our utter lack of preparedness, the ad hoc nature of the response, and the disaster tourism of our ‘cockpit netas’. As pressure on land forces people to settle on floodplains and climate change increases the intensity of extreme weather events, our response should be better early warning systems, and preparedness for rescue and relief.

Let’s not blame nature, the real disaster here is the failure of governance and the lack of political will not just to be prepared but to even provide the relief that is needed when disaster strikes.

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19. PAKISTAN: RELOCATION OF 10% MILITARY EXPENSES TO SOCIAL SECURITY DEMANDED
Staff Report | The Daily Times (Pakistan), June 27, 2013	   
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KARACHI: Political leaders, economists, educationists and human rights activists on Wednesday demanded that Article 38 of the Constitution pertaining to Social Security should be included in the fundamental rights section as currently it was part of Constitution's Principles of Policy section. 

These speakers were addressing a National Conference on Social Protection for Social Justice organised by Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) at a local hotel.

The speakers also demanded the President of Pakistan to present the report on implementation of Principles of Policy as according to Constitution, he had to present in the joint session of Parliament every year but it had never been presented.

They demanded to reduce military expenses by 10 percent every year and that amount should be transferred to the allocations for social security. "No War Pact should be signed by all countries of South Asia." They demanded to release all fishermen arrested by Pakistani and Indian navies and maritime security agencies.

The speakers called upon the South Asian countries to set a regional minimum wage limit for workers. They underlined the need for a political will and developing a mounting pressure by trade union movements on the governments. 

Speaking on the occasion, senior economist Dr Pervez Tahir, who was chief economist Planning Commission in his presentation ‘the cost factor’ said it was state's responsibility to provide job to unemployed and health to sick citizens. 

Portraying the status of the last fiscal budget 2011-2012, he said the government had spent Rs 432.1 billion on education, Rs 139.5 billion on health, Rs 36.6 billion on water supply and similar amount on various components, but still the status of health, education and social facilities is very serious.

Despite having initiatives like Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) and Food Support Programme there is no improvement in social sector, he said, adding the government’s People Works Programme-I with an allocation of Rs. 4.3 billion was meant to give fund to each parliamentarian to initiate development projects in their respective constituencies.

Similarly, People programme-II was provided Rs 33.6 billion which was on discretion of prime minister. He said social protection should be equitable for all the citizens, but it seemed in the context of Pakistan, resource constraint was a big issue. The government had opportunity to remove these hurdles, but it could not respond to suggestions and recommendations it received from different organisations.

Dr Tahir said 70 percent people were still associated with informal sector who are not beneficiaries of the projects successive governments initiated. He also portrayed the status of non-budgetary allocation of Rs 67 billion, being spent under Zakat, EOBI, Workers Welfare Fund etc.

Prof KP Kannan, Development Economist from India delivering his presentation via Skype shared Indian experience about the social security. He said India has a large unorganised sector and the government has initiated various programmes fo rthem. The government made minimum packages in health, education, house security, insurance, disability, old age benefits and other facilities. Health security is accepted as per the law. People in unorganised sector can register themselves. However, he said there were smaller village groups who come together and demand for their rights.

He said after the campaign by these groups the government had passed a food security bill. This bill is aimed to provide food security.

Jawed Rehmani, Manager micro insurance, National Rural Support Programme (NRSP) shared his organisation's experience regarding the micro insurance mechanism in Pakistan. NRSP, started in 1992 is currently working in 58 districts 
of the country. 

Health interventions are considered top priority to alleviate poverty. Health insurance is the first time initiative by NRSP. 

Dr Jaffer Ahmed of University of Karachi said laws were not being implemented in letter and spirit. The provinces have been given powers after the 18th Constitutional amendment, but still there was need to have social protection at the national level. “We must have universal social protection arrangements,” 
he concluded.

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20. PAKISTAN: NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET
by Harris Khalique 
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The News (Pakistan), June 26, 2013
Z A Bhutto wrote in If I am Assassinated – a book he penned while in prison – that perhaps the real mistake he committed in his politics was to try to harmonise the interests of the upper classes with those of the downtrodden. This would never happen. Unfortunately, it seems that Bhutto was the second last mainstream popular Pakistani politician (Benazir being the last), who at least thought about the social, political and economic interests of the struggling classes.

The issue has been placed on the back burner now and there is no real distinction between the economic policies propagated or pursued by the major political parties. The discourse is all about who is more ‘efficient’ and less corrupt in implementing the same pro-rich economic paradigm that is supposed to serve the poor through a small trickle-down of surplus wealth by creating safety nets. The discordant interests of the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the elites and the commoners, have to be brought back into the mainstream. The fragile left may not be able to deliver on this count if a mainstream party does not take it up.

However, in the wake of religious extremism and brutal militancy over the past two decades, there is one relevant discourse – weak but persistent – alive in the country today. This discourse is about creating a modern state and a progressive society vis-à-vis an exclusive theocratic state and an orthodox society. In this current discourse, we see Imran Khan and the eclectic leadership of the PTI attempting to do the same that Bhutto did with the interests of two classes historically at odds with each other. For the PTI, it is between their socially liberal urban followers and the right-wing bigots.

Khan Sahib believes that he can harmonise their view of the world which happens to be his own view – created by an odd mix of personal experience, neo-conversion to parts of our faith (not sum, and one wouldn’t want to further indulge in this), limited understanding of human history and listening to the lopsided guidance provided by some short-statured advisers who come from the traditional right-wing politics in this country.

Bhutto could practice, understand and articulate what went right and what went wrong with his ideas and his politics since he had the ability, knowledge and capacity to reflect. He wouldn’t listen to the sane bits of advice either on many occasions from his aides who were also wiser than those of Khan Sahib today.

Compared to Bhutto, Khan Sahib himself is neither as politically suave nor well-read enough in the realms of politics and history to be able to appreciate his own failings. For him, if things go right, it will be his charisma. If things go wrong, it will be other people’s fault.

People like us will remain in the bad books of the PTI leader and his ardent, blinkered followers for some time to come – or maybe forever. It will take them many years to learn that their bitter critics were their best friends. Therefore, it becomes all the more important for Khan Sahib’s experienced and sagacious well-wishers – who mostly happen to be liberal bureaucrats, retired ambassadors and foreign service officers, company executives, bankers, army officers, retired or serving – to remind him of certain hard facts about religious extremism, terrorism and the importance of creating a plural society that we have collectively learned from history.

The Jamaat-e-Islami’s partnership with the PTI in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government may not let this happen but the PTI is not just a ‘good looking Jamaat-e-Islami’ as our talented singer and blogger Ali Aftab Saeed shows in one of his video songs. Or is it?

Khan Sahib should be told that what one of his MPAs from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly said after a fatal bomb blast (that it was just a bomb blast and did not amount to doomsday) is something terribly serious. This statement coming from the ruling party’s MPA is an insult to the 40,000 Pakistani citizens and soldiers who were martyred over the past nine years at the hands of terrorists who are waging a war against Pakistan. Khan Sahib should also be asked to clarify his own and his party’s position on the assassin of Salmaan Taseer. When his MNA from NA-11, Mardan, Mujahid Ali Khan, demands an honourable release for Mumtaz Qadri, convicted by a court of law, it is the confusion in the party that is being reflected here.

Just to remind my readers, Khan Sahib himself condemned Taseer’s assassination while giving an interview in India. Very soon after, we were told that one of his party spokespersons participated in a rally held for Mumtaz Qadri in Lahore. This is no more a joke and the PTI just can’t evade answering these questions any more. Arif Alvi, the PTI MNA elected from NA-250, Karachi, clarified a little later that the statement from Mujahid Ali Khan that came out of the blue during the budget session of the national assembly was his (Mujahid’s) personal opinion. But what Arif Alvi himself said on a private television channel is no joke either. He sheepishly retracted, gave explanations and tried to clarify his position. The interview can be accessed online.

Arif Alvi is considered an old hand of Khan Sahib’s and a PTI stalwart from Karachi. After a major controversy, he was elected from a constituency that includes the two most affluent urban middle-class and elite neighbourhoods of Karachi – Clifton and the Defence Housing Authority. Alvi has categorically said that the Taliban’s demand for abolishing coeducation should be accepted. There are two immediate questions that are then raised. First, the schools that the Taliban were blowing up in Swat and other parts of Malakand were all girls’ schools and not coeducational facilities. I am not sure if in reality the Taliban are in favour of girls being sent to schools in the first place.

Second, Alvi apparently has no idea that almost all public schools in Pakistan, particularly in rural and peri-urban areas, are already segregated. Moreover, if there has to be no coeducation at any level in the educational institutions, why should it be limited to institutions in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone? Why should only Peshawar University be segregated? Why not start the process from Alvi’s own metropolitan city by segregating educational institutions in Karachi? Comparable to some neighbourhoods in Lahore, I can bet that most of the coeducational schools in Pakistan – if we map by NA constituencies – are in Alvi’s constituency and most of the higher educational institutions that are co-ed are in Karachi.

Alvi should also ask his party compatriots, the Kasuris, who run a large network of schools catering to high-income groups to abolish coeducation. But Alvi was with the JI before joining the PTI, wasn’t he? Old habits die hard. I am not commenting on the PTI’s coalition partners, JI, today. Otherwise, it is no less significant to mention that Sirajul Haq, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa finance minister, has recommended a separate assembly for women.

My sagacious and experienced PTI friends that I am speaking to through this column know very well that until reaching the ripe age of 40, Khan Sahib was a sportsman. Forget about pushing him to learn lessons from history, politics or philosophy. One thing may well be reminded to him from the trade he used to be good at – those who prevail in any game are not just talented, they are also clearheaded. Those who are confused, unsure and wobbly, seldom win. Even if they do, their glory is short-lived.

Harris Khalique...The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.

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21. BURMA’S OMINOUS POLITICAL DEBATE OVER ETHNICITY
by Sai Latt/ Asia Sentinel| Tuesday, June 25, 2013
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The Irrawady
Burma’s Minister of Immigration and Population Khin Yi poses for a picture at his office in Naypyidaw on June 10, 2013. The text on the background picture reads, ‘Humans cannot disappear when swallowed by earth, humans can disappear when swallowed by humans.’ (Photo: Reuters / Soe Zeya Tun)

Last year, I accompanied an ethnic Shan-Danu Muslim teenager to an immigration office in Burma’s Shan State to inquire about the citizenship application she had submitted through her high school. Although her friends had received their cards, the girl was told to come to the immigration office.

When she inquired about the reason for her visit, she was asked: “Are you of mixed blood?” The girl didn’t understand the question. The official asked again, “Are you Chinese?” The girl looks somewhat Chinese. Her father is ethnic Danu and her mother is an ethnic Shan. They both are citizens, as are their parents.

She replied: “I am Muslim.”

The officer responded in an impatient tone: “Yes, that’s mixed blood,” adding that was why she needed to come to the office.

“Mixed blood” doesn’t refer to her or her parents’ ethnicities, but to her religion. It appears to be the default category for Muslims, an automatic synonym for both South Asians and Chinese. All of her hyphenated “native” ethnic identities, however socially conceived and defined, matter less than her religion.

Designating her a “mixed blood” cost her money of course. A junior officer charged her 7,000 kyat (about US$8) to file her application. His sole act was to put her documents into a cheap, old paper folder.

The girl’s case is emblematic of the growing political debate over the status of Burma’s Muslim communities. It is enormously tangled, and is used to further increasingly ominous jingoism against anyone presumed to be non-Burmese—and there are legions of the disenfranchised.

Although Muslims, mostly Sunnis, make up only about 4 percent of the population according to the latest government census, and as much as 6-10 percent, according to the country’s Islamic scholars, they have in recent months been demonized by leaders of the 89 percent majority who describe themselves as Theravada Buddhists. The majority population, reportedly egged on by a military that wants to keep its hand in running the government from behind the scenes, repeats that Bengalis are terrorists and troublemakers who foment violence and that therefore they and their religion must be suppressed. The majority do not seem to accept that the violence must stop immediately, and that political dialogue is needed to clear misunderstandings and problems.

The racist discourse that has been fueling extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric every day on social media websites and printed in hate publications, is also found on signboards at immigration offices at all levels in the country. The signboards say, “A race does not disappear by being swallowed by landmass, but by being swallowed by another human race.”

The political effect of self-victimization is that it lends support to an anti-Muslim campaign that is already manifested in large-scale violence.

The country’s 1982 Citizenship Act is being used against those not recognized as official “national races” to prove that their forefathers lived in the Burmese territory prior to 1823—one year before the first Anglo-Burmese war 190 years ago.

That is odd as at that time there was no Burma as we know it today. Moreover, today’s “official” categorization of 135 ethnic groups is at odds with the history of categorization itself. For example, a 1960 publication by the Ministry of Culture estimated ethnic groups to be about 50, but the manual from the Department of Immigration and Manpower published in 1971 listed 144 so-called national races.

There, Muslims and South Asian groups were listed in an alphabet soup of designations such as Rakhine-Chittagong, Burmese Muslims, Rakhine-Kaman, and Other Burmese-Indians. The updated list of the 1990s, which the government never released officially, included only 135 groups. All Muslims and South Asian-related groups were removed. U Ko Ni, a Supreme Court lawyer, writes in Pyithu Khit (People’s Era) Journal that contradictions in the Citizenship Act and Burma’s three constitutions create a mélange of citizens of ethnic parents, naturalized citizens, guest citizens, people whose status is doubtful, those who have the right to be naturalized citizens, citizens with the right to run in elections and citizens without the right to run in elections.

Apart from legislative flaws, legal implications and political or electoral discrimination, the experience of Muslims in Burma sheds light on the way they are made citizens and foreigners simultaneously.

First, the name of the card that identifies one’s citizenship status is called a “Citizen Scrutiny Card.” The use of the term “scrutiny” is a reflection of the surveillance state. It is not only to scrutinize citizens as individuals but also to limit the rights of certain people in the name of protecting race and religion.

At immigration offices, as with the girl I accompanied, the phrase “mixed blood” is frequently used. It is not something to be ashamed of in this 21st century socio-political order. Immigration Minister Khin Yi recently said citizenship in Burma is determined by bloodline.

What is equally striking, however, is the way Muslims are identified on their cards—Race/Religion for a university student whose father is ethnic Danu and mother ethnic Innthar, is identified as “India Burman Danu Innthar Islam”—without punctuation. This happens because every Muslim is required to identify on his or her card either as being from India, Pakistan or Bengali.

There are only “India” or “Pakistan” as countries but not race, if there is anything called race at all. Although there is no clarification over whether the use of these words is to refer to either nationality or citizenship, or ethnicity, using them for the category of Race/Religion appears imprudent.

The case of the student’s mother is also intriguing. The mother, who is ethnic Innthar, was identified as “Bengali” although she is not even ethnically related to a Bengali. When immigration authorities began issuing the current Citizen Scrutiny Card in 1989, the mother’s father in a small village in the Inle Lake region was told he must register as a Bengali on his card. Not knowing the implications, the old man said: “It doesn’t matter. If you want to write, just write it.” The ethnic Innthar man thus became a Bengali.

As a result, his daughter was also issued the card on which she was classified as Bengali. Having realized that being identified as a “Bengali” on the card was troublesome, the woman took an oath at the township court that she was not Bengali but Innthar. Although the township immigration officer didn’t change her ethnic status after the oath, the woman’s argument won at last. Her Bengali status was successfully stripped off. She un-became Bengali.

In another family in Taunggyi, the multicultural capital of Shan State, a child is identified as “India + Burmese + Islam,” and another as “Pakistan + Shan + Burmese + Islam” despite the fact that they are in the same natural family unit. This doesn’t seem to matter to the government.

Such is the creation of “aliens” who have lived in Taunggyi for four generations. They are not migrants, and yet legal categorization has made them foreigners from South Asia—known as kalar. The striking matter in the first two cases is that the grandchildren of once relatively well-known figureheads of the town have been designated foreigners or outsiders by ethnic Burmans who only recently came to Shan State on government duty—to scrutinize who are and are not proper members of the town and the country—strangers coming to town only to tell the native families that they are outsiders.

In addition to turning in-country born Muslims into foreigners, official ethnocide is going on. A good example is that of ethnic Pathi, a Muslim majority people in central Burma whose recorded history and recognized status go back to the Burmese dynasty era. Although referred to in general terms as “Burmese Muslims” since the mid-1900s, Pathi as an ethnic category has faded away. Members of the community only continue to use Pathi as a prefix to their names.

In 2012, a political party was barred from registering a party with the name “Pathi.” Similarly, members of the community no longer register as Pathi on citizenship cards. In another case, a Mandalay woman of my acquaintance has been newly registered as “India Burmese + India Burmese/Islam.” Her old card, which was issued when she was 10, identified her by “national race” as Pathi and Islam for the religion category. But when she was required to update the card as she turned 18, the immigration department denied issuing her the card with Pathi as a national race. She did not renew her card for more than 12 years, at which point she found herself holding a card that identifies her as “India Burmese” although it was not her decision to accept her new legal identity.

She was cheated by the authority. That is, she refused to renew the card for more than 12 years until she was ensured by the authorities of a card with Pathi as her ethnicity. But when she signed documents and picked up the card, it was written “India Burmese + India Burmese/Islam.” Now an ethnic Pathi for 30 years is a new “India Burmese.”

Religion is a major determinant of this system of alienation. For instance, a man in Mandalay has India on his card, but his brother who chooses to follow his mother’s Buddhist religion does not.

Dislike of Muslims and discrimination is not new in Burma, however. It is decades-old. But the latest round of anti-Muslim hate campaigns, animated by the 969 movement, has had a serious impact on Buddhist-Muslim relations.

Striking discrimination in my recent research in Shan State is that of primary school teachers against children. This seems new. Some Muslim parents are saddened that teachers called their kids kalar (Indian/Muslim boys) or kalar ma (Indian/Muslim girls). At one school in Taunggyi, a third-grade Muslim girl was not allowed to participate in a staged activity due to her “kalar” look, discouraging her from going to school at all.

Teachers do not seem to be teaching respect and tolerance either. A grade one student, for example, was not befriended by other kids due to her kalar look, especially the “merging of the eyebrows.” The list goes on.

With the anti-Muslim 969 movement, Muslims are increasingly facing discrimination in the employment sector as well. In the past, Muslims were not recruited by the military or civil service. Now employers, in both family businesses and companies, are less willing to hire Muslims. A recent university graduate applied for job at a bank in Taunggyi but was told clearly that the bank did not hire her kind.

Not all Burmese or Buddhists hate Muslims, however. There are monks, educators, activists and ordinary citizens who are frustrated with the spread of hate campaigns across the country. But their benign attitude and voices are far less powerful and felt than that of a state that has designed alienation politically and structurally, and that of majority Burmese and/or Buddhists who have internalized and unleashed anti-Muslim sentiment and actions.

While the restrictive citizenship act makes the Muslims second class citizens, the discrimination they face results not only from the matter of law (i.e. the lack of citizenship), but also from alienation—particularly the practice of outright denial, which has much do with racism and ignorance. Discrimination against Muslims is based on their socio-cultural or ethno-religious membership as much as on legal status.

Therefore, while addressing the 1982 citizenship act is a must, it is important not to lose sight of the social and political dynamics of alienation, ethnocide and discrimination. Promoting mutual respect, recognition and tolerance, and most importantly the undoing of anti-Muslim state propaganda and the majority’s internalized racist thoughts and actions are must-address issues.

Sai Latt is a Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

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22. INDIA: PUBLIC MORALITY AND THE RIGHT TO FREE SEX
by Flavia Agnes
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The Asian Age, June 25, 2013
    Beneath the conventional mindset of equating sex with marriage lies a deeper concern: to pin responsibility on men who think it’s their birthright to use and discard women. 

Since the day of the Madras high court ruling a week ago, which upheld the right of an abandoned woman and her two minor children to demand alimony from the man with whom she had lived without a valid ceremony of marriage, I have been swamped with queries on the implications of this ruling on women and the society.

Our overzealous media and social networking sites are abuzz with varied interpretations of the judge’s statement, especially that marriage means “consummation of sexual interaction” between a man and woman of marriageable age, with or without the rituals. Some view it as a death knell to the hallowed institution of marriage. The anguished cry, “How can casual sex be equated with ‘marriage’ where the pledge to ‘cherish, honour and respect’ is taken in the presence of the holy fire, a sacred deity or the Holy Book?”
The absurdity of the moral indignity expressed by opinion makers baffles me. Is it a deliberate misrepresentation merely to sensationalise and titillate? The core of the ruling is its attempt to interpret a clause in the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA), and to bring within its ambit entitlements of women who are in technically defective marriages or in “marriage-like relationships” to prevent men from escaping from their legal responsibilities towards them and safeguard the right of children born of this union. It is a statute passed by our Parliament, not merely a judge-made law. Its aim is salutary.
The worrisome aspect of this positive ruling meant to address the issue of destitution of women and children, are the unwarranted and flippant comments, such as “sexual cravings” in this sentence: “…any couple who choose to consummate their sexual cravings then that act becomes a total commitment with adherence to all consequences that may follow...”
It appears from such comments in the judgment that a man indulging in casual sex with a willing partner must be punished for it by the bondage of marriage for life. These comments and their interpretations are being viewed by some as a curb on the right to “free sex without encumbrances” and a violation of the right to free choice. But these comments are not law and there cannot be a valid marriage contract without “free consent”. But beneath the conventional mindset of equating sex with marriage lies a deeper concern — to pin responsibility on men who think it’s their birthright to use and discard women. Sadly, it lacked the articulation to formulate this concern in words beyond the patriarchal paradigm of the institution of marriage. That is its limitation, but I consider it a minor lapse.
During litigation for maintenance, shelter and protection from violence, the usual ploy adopted by scheming men and their unscrupulous lawyers is to project women in informal relationships as “women of loose moral character” in order to deprive them of their economic rights. Hence, despite its inarticulation, I would place this ruling on a far higher plank than the Supreme Court’s ruling in the D. Velusamy versus D. Patchaiammal case which was pronounced by no less a legal luminary than Justice Katju, which used derogatory terms such as “concubines”, “mistresses” and “keeps” in order to justify the setting aside of an order for pittance of maintenance awarded to a woman by the family court in Madurai and upheld by the Madras high court.
If Madras high court’s Justice C.S. Karnan had stuck to the framework of the statute and to Supreme Court’s rulings — such as in the Chanmuniya versus Virendra Kumar Singh Kushwaha case — which have upheld the right of women in technically defective marriages by holding that the term “wife” must be given a broad and expansive interpretation, he would have better served the cause of women’s rights.
He, in fact, had an extremely forward-looking precedent of his own high court to support him. In 2008, Justice K. Venkataraman, in the M. Palani versus Meenakshi case, had upheld the right of a woman to maintenance even though the couple had not lived together in a domestic relationship. The appellant had contended that the woman is not entitled to maintenance under the PWDVA since the parties had not lived together as “husband and wife” at any point of time. His contention was that the woman had voluntary submitted herself, despite being fully aware that “he does not believe in the institution of marriage”. And, had there been even a slight reference to marriage as a pre-condition to sex, he would never have had even casual sex with her. “Mere proximity for the sake of mutual pleasure” can never be called a domestic relationship, under the Act, he had argued. But the high court rejected the plea and upheld the ruling of the lower court.
It is of grave concern to me that even women journalists quiz me about the Madras high court ruling leading to the erosion of the moral fiber of the society. Whose morality are we talking about? It is not judgments such as this one that cause the erosion, but the prevailing social values where men, conservative and progressive alike, consider it their birthright or “fundamental right” to sexually exploit women by indulging in pre-marital and extra marital-sex and many women, including professionals, are gullible and fall prey, wittingly or unwittingly.
UN statistics continue to haunt us — every third woman in India experiences violence in intimate partner relationships. Only after years of exploitation, does the truth that they have been used like doormats dawns on even the most educated and “liberated” ones. Most nurse their wounds in private and move on. But it is essential that a legal provision exist to aid those women who wish to pin responsibility and claim entitlements. It is time we understand public morality from the woman’s perspective. From the viewpoint of her rights, irrespective of the morality of rituals.

The writer is a women’s rights lawyer
 
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23. INDIA: THE OUTSIDERS
by Madhavankutty Pillai
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Open Magazine, 25 Jun - 01 Jul, 2013
It was somewhere between interesting and amusing to watch Himachal Pradesh’s Director General of Police, B Kamal Kumar, on Headlines Today. The issue in question was his statement that migrant labourers were responsible for most crimes in the state. He wanted I-cards for them and their antecedents verified before they were allowed to work in the state. In the clip where he made these suggestions, Kumar can also be heard saying that migrants from Nepal and Bihar were the main culprits. As the channel’s anchors got ready to pummel him, he had a sudden insight into geographical conditioning and made quick amends by saying that migrant-criminals were independent of region. And then, as both a contradiction of what he had just said and an illustration of it, he added Punjabis and Haryanvis to the list.

Kumar is in the long line of politicians and policemen who are convinced about migrants making crime uncontrollable in big cities. The corollary to this is that if you address migration, you will address crime. In January 2012, after the rape of a Manipuri girl, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit said just as much. Raj Thackeray has made a career out of holding Bihari migrants responsible for everything under the sun, including probably the dispute between North Korea and the United States. In one TV interview, he was asked for evidence showing their link to crime. He retorted that the interviewer just had to ask any policeman informally. Thackeray was probably not lying. The Mumbai Police would think like that.

Decent intelligent people would be a little confused about how to react to such statements. At one level, anecdotal evidence seems to show that it is self-evident and true. It also seems inherently distasteful to make that connection. There is, however, a way to approach the issue so that both hold true—allowing that migration increases crime but also its being venal to highlight it.

Let’s begin by moving away from regular crimes to something bigger like unimaginable corruption. In the past few years, you would therefore have the case of A Raja who is alleged to have made a few thousand crore out of illegally selling airwaves that didn’t belong to him. There would also be Suresh Kalmadi who, as president of the Indian Olympic Association, is alleged to have used India’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games to enrich himself. Raja is a man from Tamil Nadu who was based in Delhi when he saw the opportunity. Kalmadi is from Pune and was also in Delhi as a Member of Parliament while organising the Games. Both are, therefore, migrants. After these scams broke out, you did not hear Manmohan Singh or the CBI chief saying that corruption has increased because of migrants from Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra. Or take government departments where transfers are frequent, like Excise or Income Tax. Corruption is institutionalised in them. But on the rare arrest of any IT officer whose native home is somewhere else, the Finance Minister does not say it is a migrant problem.

When it is said that migrants increase crime, they therefore always mean those at the lower end of the social scale, a threat to the nice happy lives of the middle and upper middle-class. When a policeman or a minister wants migration regulated, he or she essentially wants one particular class sanitised. In the process, they will make rules for the 95 per cent in that class who are honourable hardworking men.

Anyone who is silly enough to control crime in cities by controlling migrants needs to come up with another definition for a city. Any city that exists today is a creation of migrants. If you stop them, you stop its growth. The standard of living will go down because labour will become expensive or non-existent. The large numbers that come into a city are like veins carrying blood and oxygen into its heart. If they want to change the complexion of Indian society for something that normal competent policing can do, then good luck and God bless.

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24. INDIA: MODI’S HIMALAYAN MIRACLE
by Abheek Barman | Jun 26, 2013
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The Times of India
On the evening of Friday, June 21, as India reeled from the shock of the calamity in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi landed up in Dehradun with a handful of officers. By Sunday, it was claimed that he had rescued 15,000 stranded Gujaratis from the wreckage of Uttarakhand and sent these grateful folks back home.

This miracle was played up in media. But how was this feat achieved in a day or so, when India's entire military establishment has struggled to rescue around 40,000 people over 10 days?

Reports say that Modi pulled off this coup with a fleet of 80 Innovas. How did these cars manage to reach places like Kedarnath, across roads that have been washed away, over landslides that have wrecked most access routes?

But let us assume Modi's Innovas had wings as well as helicopter rotors. Including the driver, an Innova is designed to carry seven people. In a tough situation, assume you could pack nine passengers into each car. In that case, a convoy of 80 Innovas could ferry 720 people down the mountains to Dehradun at one go. To get 15,000 people down, the convoy would need to make 21 round trips.

The distance between Dehradun and Kedarnath is 221 km. So 21 trips up and down would mean that each Innova would have to travel nearly 9,300 km.

It takes longer to travel in the hills than in the plains. So, assuming an average speed of 40 km per hour, it would take 233 hours of driving to pull off the feat.

This assumes non-stop driving, without a second's rest to identify the Gujaratis to be rescued and keeping the rest of the distressed folk at bay, or any time to load and unload the vehicles. And forget about any downtime for the gallant rescuers.

That is nearly 10 days of miraculous work. And Modi pulled it off in a day.

Actually, in less than a day: a breathless media reported that by Saturday, 25 luxury buses had brought a group of Gujaratis back to Delhi. For some reason, four Boeing aircraft also idled in some undisclosed place nearby.

Modi, ever modest, himself did not make the claim of rescuing 15,000 Gujaratis from Himalayan disaster in a day. It was likely dumped on a gullible media by his public relations agency, an American outfit called Apco Worldwide. In 2007, Apco was hired, ostensibly to boost the Vibrant Gujarat summits, but to actually burnish Modi's image, for $25,000 a month.

He is in good company. Apco has worked for the dictator of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, the governments of Malaysia and Israel and the American tobacco lobby.

For the latter, it set up front organisations to rubbish evidence which proved that tobacco causes cancer. Apco has also worked for pariah regimes like Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha.

Its powerful advisory council includes former Israeli diplomats Itamar Rabinovich and Shimon Stein, as well as Doron Bergerbest-Eilon, who was the highest ranked officer in the Israel security agency.

Apco is credited with Modi's makeover and his holographic campaigns. Before Apco, Vibrant Gujarat was a tame affair: the first three summits generated investment promi-ses between $14 billion and $150 billion. After Apco, in 2009 and 2011, these jumped to $253 billion and $450 billion.

Apco worked tirelessly to rope in investor interest from America. It also lobbied with politicians in Washington to remove the ban on Modi travelling to the US. The ban was imposed after the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat as Modi presided over the state in 2002. So far, Apco hasn't succeeded in getting Modi a US visa.

And the Vibrant Gujarat numbers are all hot air. An analysis by my colleague Kingshuk Nag in his biography of Modi shows that only 3.2% of the 2009 number has materialised on the ground. Of the 2011 figure, a mere 0.5% is for real.

But Modi does not need Apco to lie. In 2005 he announced that state-owned company GSPC had made India's biggest gas discovery: 20 trillion cubic feet (tcf) valued at more than $50 billion, off Andhra Pradesh. This was 40% more than what Reliance had found in the same area. Modi then egged on GSPC to grab projects in Egypt, Yemen and Australia.

Many suspected that Modi's gas claim was hot air, but in the absence of evidence few could say so. But by 2012, the Centre's directorate general of hydrocarbons (DGH), which analyses and certifies all energy finds, said that it could vouch for only a tenth of Modi's claim: there was only 2 tcf of gas. And that too in areas tough to exploit.

Meanwhile, under Modi's rousing leadership, GSPC had poured in nearly $2 billion into exploration, much of it raised as debt based on its supposed 20 tcf gas find. When the gas vanished, GSPC went bust.

To rescue it, Modi asked the company to venture out into more areas, like city gas distribution. There have been problems with these businesses as well, including a very dubious transaction with a company in Barbados.

In every area the Modi narrative is a tale of bluster and bluff. But his Himalayan miracle is a barefaced, cynical lie. 

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25. INDIA: WAY TO WATCH
by Chinmayi Arun
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Indian Express, June 26 2013
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/way-to-watch/1133737/0

The domestic surveillance regime in India lacks adequate safeguards

A petition has just been filed in the Indian Supreme Court, seeking safeguards for our right to privacy against US surveillance, in view of the PRISM controversy. However, we should also look closer home, at the Indian government's Central Monitoring System (CMS) and other related programmes. The CMS facilitates direct government interception of phone calls and data, doing away with the need to justify interception requests to a third party private operator. The Indian government, like the US government, has offered the national security argument to defend its increasing intrusion into citizens' privacy. While this argument serves the limited purpose of explaining why surveillance cannot be eliminated altogether, it does not explain the absence of any reasonably effective safeguards.

Instead of protecting our privacy rights from the domestic and international intrusions made possible by technological development, our government is working on leveraging technology to violate privacy with greater efficiency. The CMS infrastructure facilitates large-scale state surveillance of private communication, with very little accountability. The dangers of this have been illustrated throughout history. Although we do have a constitutional right to privacy in India, the procedural safeguards created by our lawmakers thus far offer us very little effective protection of this right.

We owe the few safeguards that we have to the intervention of the Supreme Court of India, in PUCL vs Union of India and Another. In the context of phone tapping under the Telegraph Act, the court made it clear that the right to privacy is protected under the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, and that telephone tapping would also intrude on the right to freedom of speech and expression under Article 19. The court therefore ruled that there must be appropriate procedural safeguards to ensure that the interception of messages and conversation is fair, just and reasonable. Since lawmakers had failed to create appropriate safeguards, the Supreme Court suggested detailed safeguards in the interim. We must bear in mind that these were suggested in the absence of any existing safeguards, and that they were framed in 1996, after which both communication technology and good governance principles have evolved considerably.

The safeguards suggested by the Supreme Court focus on internal executive oversight and proper record-keeping as the means to achieving some accountability. For example, interception orders are to be issued by the home secretary, and to later be reviewed by a committee consisting of the cabinet secretary, the law secretary and the secretary of telecommunications (at the Central or state level, as the case may be). Records are to be kept of details such as the communications intercepted and all the persons to whom the material has been disclosed. Both the Telegraph Act and the more recent Information Technology Act have largely adopted this framework to safeguard privacy. It is, however, far from adequate in contemporary times. It disempowers citizens by relying heavily on the executive to safeguard individuals' constitutional rights. Additionally, it burdens senior civil servants with the responsibility of evaluating thousands of interception requests without considering whether they will be left with sufficient time to properly consider each interception order.

The extreme inadequacy of this framework becomes apparent when it is measured against the safeguards recommended in the recent report on the surveillance of communication by Frank La Rue, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of speech and expression. These safeguards include the following: individuals should have the legal right to be notified that they have been subjected to surveillance or that their data has been accessed by the state; states should be transparent about the use and scope of communication surveillance powers, and should release figures about the aggregate surveillance requests, including a break-up by service provider, investigation and purpose; the collection of communications data by the state, must be monitored by an independent authority.

The safeguards recommended by the special rapporteur would not undermine any legitimate surveillance by the state in the interests of national security. They would, however, offer far better means to ensure that the right to privacy is not unreasonably violated. The emphasis placed by the special rapporteur on transparency, accountability and independent oversight is important, because our state has failed to recognise that in a democracy, citizens must be empowered as far as possible to demand and enforce their rights. Their rights cannot rest completely in the hands of civil servants, however senior. There is no excuse for refusing to put these safeguards in place, and making our domestic surveillance regime transparent and accountable, in compliance with our constitutional and international obligations.

The writer is research director, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi 

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26. INDIA: VERDICT ’14 - MODI WILL GAIN EVEN IF BJP LOSES
by Bharat Bhushan
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The Asian Age, June 27, 2013
Mr Modi will arrive as a leader of stature… (but) the BJP will not be able to use public anger against misgovernance and corruption electorally

It is not only the plummeting rupee and the declining rate of growth which have a déjà vu feel of the 1990s about them. The Bharatiya Janata Party also seems to be boldly marching backwards with Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s call for implementing a uniform civil code and party veteran L.K. Advani pitching for revoking Article 370. In the period between1991-1996, it was because of supporting such issues that the BJP became, politically speaking, untouchable.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, as the leader of the BJP, kept his distance from the more divisive activities of the party such as the mobilisation for the temple in Ayodhya and tacit support for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Nevertheless, despite winning 161 seats in the 1996 general election, no regional party wanted to be seen in Mr Vajpayee’s company.
Only two years later, in 1998, did 12 parties came forward to form an alliance with the BJP. By 1999, the National Democratic Alliance included 23 parties. This came about because all controversial and divisive issues were shelved. The BJP convinced its allies that the proposed Ram Temple in Ayodhya would be built either through a dialogue or through a court judgment, that it would not take up the revocation of Article 370 nor would it push for a uniform civil code.
The NDA also paid rich dividends to the BJP in subsequent elections. The overall percentage of votes polled by the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections increased by an average of four to five per cent. The number of parliamentary seats the BJP could contest effectively increased because of votes transferred by alliance partners. Before the formation of the NDA, the BJP polled only about 20 per cent of votes (20.1 per cent in the 1991 general election and 20.29 per cent in 1996).
The NDA helped take this vote share to 25.59 per cent in the 1998 and 23.75 per cent in the 1999 general elections. When anti-incumbency hit the NDA, the BJP’s vote share fell to 22.16 per cent in 2004 and then to 18.80 per cent in 2009 because voters were happy with the Untied Progressive Alliance government.
According to one NDA leader, deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani’s living room, at its expansive best, was not large enough to accommodate all the NDA representatives. Today, the NDA — comprising just the BJP, the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Shiv Sena — can sit comfortably on a three-seater sofa. To argue that today’s moth-eaten NDA can do better than the NDA of 1999-2004 is to test public credulity. A shrunken NDA will mean fewer effective contests and a reduced percentage of votes for the BJP.
Further, there are large parts of the country where the BJP has no prospect of winning, or “Zero MP Zones”. Without a pre-poll alliance with the Dravidian parties, the BJP cannot expect to win any parliamentary constituency in Tamil Nadu (39 Lok Sabha seats) and Puducherry (one seat). It had won nine seats in alliance with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in 1999. In Kerala (20), the BJP is as non-existent as it is in Lakshadweep (one). The party drew a blank in the last two elections in Andhra Pradesh (42 Lok Sabha seats), whereas it had won seven seats in alliance with the Telugu Desam Party in 1999. The BJP won only one seat in West Bengal (42 seats) in 2009 and with no alliance in sight it might not be able to better that performance.
In Orissa (21), despite Hindutva forces trying to polarise voters by initiating violence against Christians, the party drew a blank in the 2009 Lok Sabha election.
In about 11 Lok Sabha seats in the Northeast (minus Assam), the BJP is absent. Add to these the seats in Kashmir Valley (three) and becomes clear that the BJP will not be in effective contest in about 180 Lok Sabha seats. That leaves it only 363 seats to contest in the rest of India.
It is, therefore, difficult to understand the claims of people like Baba Ramdev and Ashok Singhal, of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, that the BJP can get more than 300 seats. In the largest state, Uttar Pradesh (80 seats), the BJP cannot hope for an alliance with either the Samajwadi Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party. A triple murder accused out on bail and forbidden by the courts to enter his own home state of Gujarat, Amit Shah, has been sent to Uttar Pradesh to ginger up the voters. Unless Mr Shah foments communal tensions — a gruesome strategy already mastered by the BJP in its Hindutva lab of Gujarat — it is difficult to see how the BJP can stem its falling vote share in the state from 30 per cent in 1999 and 22 per cent in 2004 to 17.5 per cent in 2009.
In Bihar, after the split with the Janata Dal (United), the BJP’s tally can only go down. In Chhattisgarh, fortune may not continue smiling on the party after the massacre of Congress leaders by Maoists. A split Shiv Sena in Maharashtra means there is no consolidation of Hindutva votes that would have suited the BJP. In Karnataka, the BJP will go down after B.S. Yeddyurappa’s exit. Without allies the BJP’s electoral performance will improve marginally only in a small number of states such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.
While it is difficult to see why the BJP has given up on the politics of reasonable accommodation, it is perhaps easier to understand Mr Modi’s motivations. He gains even if the party loses. He would arrive on the national scene as a leader of stature. As a contender in national politics, it would also be harder for individuals to sue him for past misdemeanours. The BJP will be the net loser because it will not be able to use the groundswell of public anger against misgovernance and corruption electorally.

The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi

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27. THE WAR ON MISGUIDED YOUTH AND OTHER INDIAN EUPHEMISMS
by Aditya Sinha
=========================================
India Ink / The New York Times, June 27, 2013
If the “War on Terror” had been undertaken by the government of India, it probably would have been called the “War on Misguided Youth.” That’s because in the 1980s and ’90s, when New Delhi was trying to suppress separatist movements in Punjab, Kashmir and Assam, each official speech and classified document used the euphemism “misguided youth” to refer to young men who had rejected the idea of India and had taken to arms.

Such a tame euphemism conjures images of sulky teenagers falling into bad company at the school playground, rather than the reality of politically active young people challenging the existing order. Undoubtedly, by understating the movement’s potency, the euphemism also served to undermine it.

As India’s government did not send in a battery of guidance counselors to settle grievances but instead sent in the Indian Army to subdue the “boys,” India’s war on terror might even have been called “Befitting Reply to Misguided Youth.” The army likes to talk in terms of giving fitting and befitting replies; it not only gives a sense of the other guy having started it, but it also sounds gentlemanly, as if war were cricket and it was now the home side’s turn at bat.

The Indian Army isn’t much different from the Pentagon in using euphemisms that seek to give a clinical gloss to the essential job of militaries, which is killing. The only difference is that where the Pentagon is Orwellian in its language, the Indian Army is Wodehousian. Thus the government never tires of declaring to its citizenry: “Our armed forces are prepared for any misadventure,” as it did in its response to the fourth war with Pakistan in 1999 in Kargil in Jammu and Kashmir. A lethal battle on the disputed border is routinely described as a skirmish. Perhaps, then, the war on terror would correctly be called, in Indian officialese, “Befitting Reply to Misguided Youth’s Misadventures”.

After the reply comes the reconciliation. Especially if the government believes that the problem is solved, as New Delhi apparently does nowadays with regard to Kashmir. Reconciliation includes forgiving. Or, as the government of India puts it, it’s time for an “amnesty scheme.”

In India a scheme is not an underhanded plot, or a piece of seamy intrigue; it is on par with a countrywide macroeconomic plan or a national developmental mission. In this usage, Indians follow their former colonial masters, the English, though the latter are sparing in their schemes.

So, in India, the largest Keynesian intervention to generate work for the rural poor is titled Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, a title so wordy that it sounds like a misadventure. There is also the Indira Gandhi National Widow Pension Scheme and the Rajiv Gandhi National Rural Electrification Scheme, but the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission leads me to believe that some secret subversive in government is determined that anything that is named after a Gandhi is necessarily a scheme.

In a proper English classroom, “amnesty scheme” is an oxymoron, and bound to fail.

What does stick in the public mind is the possibility of an amnesty scheme for those with black money. Such a scheme is in fact a desperate plea by government to dishonest businessmen, corrupt politicians and cunning bureaucrats: a plea to bring their stash home and pay a token tax on it. Ever since the 1997 Voluntary Disclosure of Income and Wealth Scheme unearthed about $10 billion (at prevailing exchange rates), various finance ministers have been under pressure to announce another “black money amnesty scheme.” It has not happened, probably because this form of amnesty has been cacophonously denounced by lawyers, tax experts, politicians and the media, as an officially sanctioned money-laundering scheme.

You could thus say that the government was in a difficult position, or that the black-money amnesty had left it compromised. But in India, you could not say that the government was in a “compromising position” because a police party would then land up at the next Cabinet meeting brandishing handcuffs. In India, anyone caught in the act of intimacy, be it cuddling on the lawn of a public park or behind the bushes at a national monument is said in official parlance to be a “compromising position.” The euphemism, when published in newspapers, leaves a lot to the imagination of the reader, which probably helps the beat constable who, more often than not, in every nook and corner of the country, aims to extort middle-class youngsters or middle-aged adulterers.

If you asked someone in government to change its police’s position on “compromising positions,” he would probably decline, citing “the national interest,” a euphemism that has to come to mean anything but what is in India’s interest. Its provenance is the era when the government thought it had a monopoly on deciding what was best for everyone and so shoved its policies down the country’s proverbial throat with the paternalistic justification that these policies were in the interest of the newly independent yet vulnerable nation.

Under this line of reasoning, anyone opposed was unpatriotic. Indeed, anyone disagreeing with the government was routinely accused of stoking “fissiparous tendencies”, which was presumably invoked to scare people about the potential balkanization of young India. However, when you consider that “fissiparous” is itself a tendency to break apart, “fissiparous tendencies” would actually mean “tendencies to have a tendency to break apart” which is somewhat less sinister. And lest you think that “national interest” and “fissiparous tendencies” are euphemisms of a bygone era, then think again: both figured in discussions last month of the states’ chief ministers over the federal government’s proposal for a National Counter-Terrorism Center.

I could keep giving example after example of clunky Indian officialese, but then this piece would start sounding like the prime minister’s Independence Day speech at Red Fort. You have to wonder why it is that Indians love a good euphemism, because it doesn’t just appear in official-speak, but also in corporate memos as well as in the posts and tweets of online India. So what lies behind this euphemism euphoria? Perhaps a sensitive government tries not to offend the ethnic, linguistic, religious, class or caste groups that populate the Indian mosaic.

Or it may simply reflect the government’s continuing conceptual confusion. It could even be part of a larger scheme: India’s zombification of the English language — killing words and phrases, and then bringing them back to life in a brain-dead disfigured form that seeks out healthy humans as prey. Whichever way you look at it, you have to admit: giving a befitting reply to misguided youth whose fissiparous tendencies threaten the national interest sounds a lot jollier than “war on terror”.

Aditya Sinha is the former Editor-in-Chief of Daily News and Analysis and The New Indian Express.


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28. EGYPT: RIPPING BODIES APART - THE BROTHERHOOD’S SECTARIAN POLICY IN PRACTICE
by Mariz Tadros 
=========================================
Open Democracy, 26 June 2013
The lynching of four Egyptian Shi’a citizens by mobs is raising alarm bells with regard to the potentially tragic consequences of Islamist endorsement of sectarian policies, which threaten not only to rip the country apart but the region as well.

Mobs in the Egyptian village of Abou el Nomros lynched four Shi’a citizens on June 23 and injured many others in an assault that extended over several hours. The accounts of human rights organizations’ fact finding missions and eyewitness accounts tell the same story: Sheikh Hassan Shehata, a leading Shi’a figure was on a visit to one of the 200 or so Shi’a followers who live in the village of Abou el Nomros in the governorate of Giza. The village chief (al omda) warned Sheikh Hassan Shehata to leave as the inhabitants were enraged by his presence: he refused. Shortly thereafter, 5,000 residents, led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis attacked and destroyed the house in which he resided, pulled him and others out, dragged them through the streets, hitting them with sharp and hard objects and fatally wounding them. The Arab Network for Human Rights’ (ANHR) fact finding mission discovered that the police previously knew of the planned attacks on the Shi’as but did nothing to prevent them, and that the very attacks which lasted for over three hours happened in their presence.

However, citizens did not just rise out of the blue against the Shi’a citizens in this village, the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis have been inciting hatred against them for some weeks now. According to the same fact finding mission, the local imams have recently been using hate speech against the Shi’as regularly in their sermons, calling them infidels, and enemies of the Prophet. Following one of those inflammatory sermons three weeks ago, citizens went out in a protest against the Shi’as. Shi’as in the village of Abou el Nomros recount that up to two years ago, they never experienced any sectarian hatred towards them from the 17,000 strong village and there was generally social harmony. The Shi’a of Egypt have issued a statement blaming the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis for the violence. Media accounts note that the residents of Abou el Nomros were proud of having rid their village of the Shi’as and having lynched the infidels. The story bears striking resonances to the narratives of leading Muslim Brotherhood historians and political figures of their pride at having successfully mobilized mobs to attack Bahais and other sects in the 1930s (see Gom’a Amin (2006)The Muslim Brothers in Egyptian Society 1939-1945 (in Arabic) .

Yet the official discourse of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis, as is usual, is one of a denial of any responsibility. Ironically, the highest level of authority, President Mohamed Morsi has warned against the Shi’a threat on several occasions. According to Salafi leader Hussein Yacoub, the President told him in a private conversation that the Shi’a represent a greater threat to Islam than the Jews.

More recently at the Cairo stadium last week, President Morsi expressed no objection when Sheikh Hassan appealed to him not to open Egypt’s pure doors to the Rafedah, the Shias - whom Sheikh Abd el Maqsoud in his speech called “the impure” (alanjas). Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination, a civil society group combating religious prejudice pointed to Morsi’s speech at that stadium as the epitome of incitement of religious hatred when he described the war in Syria as one in terms of Sunnis vs. Shias.

The truth of the matter is that with the rise of political power of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis over the past two years, and the generally lax security situation, sectarian aggression has placed under fire all those who do not belong to their own belief system, whether it is devout Muslims who are critical of these movements or Baha’is, or Shi’as, or the country’s largest minority, the indigenous Christian Coptic population. While the Mubarak regime’s policy gravitated between a divide and rule strategy and appearing to be the only ally for the Copts against the Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood-led government has, so far shown a political and ideological reluctance to move away from a religiously-mediated notion of citizenship. Yet it too seeks to show that it is a “moderate” force compared to other Islamist forces. To the outside world, it seeks to convey the impression that it could be worse for religious minorities, if they end up with a Salafi-led government.

The author’s own research indicates that incidents of sectarian assaults against the Christians has increased from 45 cases in 2010 to 70 in 2011 to 112 in 2013 and they have continued to rise and become more intense and systematic since President Morsi came to power.

The witch hunt by those who see themselves as the true guardians of Islam against individuals and collectivities has become systematic, which is not surprising in view of the non-inclusive political order that the present government has espoused. There are many rumours being spread in Egypt today that the Islamists intend to strike against Christian citizens and groups on June 30, 2013 - the day of mass protests planned against the regime. Such rumours are intended to intimidate Christian citizens not to take part in the protests, but they also suggest that when it comes to staying in power, there can be no limits to instrumentalizing religion to make political gains.

The tragic consequences of a divisive political policy are not just borne on a domestic level, they are bound to have regional effects. Already, Iran’s foreign ministry has condemned the massacre of the four Shi’as in Egypt and dubbed it as part of a foreign conspiracy against Shi’as.

What next? Will Morsi’s government wage war to avert attention from the country’s growing economic woes and social and political dissent?

Mariz Tadros is a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, and author of The Muslim Brotherhood in Contemporary Egypt: Democracy redefined or confined? 

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29. USA: HOW WALL STREET UNDERMINES REFORM
As Wall Street money flows to Republicans, Democrats are scrambling to get back in big money's good graces.
by Lawrence Lessig
=========================================
The Daily Beast (June 23 2013)
51%, 47%, and then 32%: If you want to understand just why we're going to see another financial crisis - and likely worse than the last - these three numbers are a pretty good start. But to see just why, we have to put them in some context.

In May, Knopf released Robert Kaiser's Act of Congress: How America's Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn't, a blow-by-blow account of the passage of the biggest financial reform bill since the New Deal. Kaiser is an associate editor and senior correspondent at the Washington Post, and this book is actually pretty optimistic, where his previous one - 2010's So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government -  was quite pessimistic. That book remains the very best account of how money has ruined Congress, and should remain required reading for every citizen.

Yet in Kaiser's new book, money is almost nowhere to be found. Instead, he shows Dodd-Frank as a rare and wonderful story of Congress buckling down and doing what everyone understood had to be done: re-regulate Wall Street. And indeed, shortly after the bill was passed, I witnessed Barney Frank, a hero in Kaiser's account, brag to a group of Democrats that "people don't realize it, but the banks got nothing in our bill".

But as I read the book, there was a pretty big elephant standing right in the middle of the room that Kaiser doesn't tell us much about. The most important architectural feature of Dodd-Frank is that the most important regulations of Dodd-Frank were not actually in the bill. Instead, Dodd-Frank punted the guts of its potential reform to a multi-year regulatory process. Almost 400 rules were to be written by regulators (with the generous aid of lobbyists): a process, which five years after the crisis, has not yet come to an end.

It doesn't take a PhD in game theory to understand what that design was about. By shifting the core of the regulations to a procedure stretched over years and dominated by bank lobbyists, the bankers could minimize the chance that this "change" would actually change anything real - and ensure that public and press attention would drift elsewhere as the new rules were worked out.

And that's precisely what has happened. According to the latest wonderful monthly report prepared by the law firm of Davis Polk, Dodd-Frank demanded regulators settle almost 400 rules. The deadline for 279 of those rules has passed, but only 104 rules have been finalized. Of the 175, or 63% that have missed their deadlines, forty percent don't even have a proposed rule released for comment. Dodd-Frank was a work in progress when born, and, as these statistics suggest, it has yet to grow up.

    Wall Street is punishing the Democrats for their meager efforts to rein in Wall Street.

Yet delaying reform through endless negotiation was only one of the games that Wall Street lobbyists have played. To maintain businesses as usual, Wall Street also needs weak regulators, ideally ones who dream of landing a job on Wall Street. That didn't seem to be in the cards, as the one great appointment that President Obama made was a Wall Street turncoat, former Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler to head the new body charged with regulating derivatives.

Having seen the corruption up close, and having already made his killing, Gensler was now in the business of killing that corruption. At every turn, he insisted on truly crazy ideas - like transparency about the derivatives traded, or trading on public exchanges. These of course were just the sort of crazy ideas that mainstream economists (even those on the right) had long said competition and efficient markets require. But apparently executives on Wall Street are a bit rusty on their Adam Smith, or Milton Friedman. So they fought Gensler as hard as they could.

In the last few weeks, however, there has been good news for Wall Street here, too. Gensler is heading out as the Chairman of the CFTC, and slated to replace him is a thirty-something year old former staffer from Capitol Hill, Amanda Renteria - someone who, as the Huffington Post described it, "has little experience in financial regulation ...  Most of her career has been focused on public service except for a few years [after college] when Renteria worked at", you guessed it, "Goldman Sachs".

Who knows? Renteria may be another tiger in waiting. But when amateurs charged with regulating complex economic transactions sit across the table from experts, good public policy rarely results.

All that is a prelude to explain the significance of the numbers at the top - 51%, 47%, and then 32%. These are the percentages of Wall Street money that has gone to Democrats in the past three election cycles. (Or actually, the money contributed from the FIRE, or Finance/Insurance/Real Estate sector. For strictly Wall Street, the change is even more dramatic. For example, among hedge fund managers: 67%, 48%, 24%.)

Translated into prose, the meaning of these numbers is pretty simple: Wall Street is punishing the Democrats for their meager efforts to rein in Wall Street.

And that matters for one obvious reason: Given the way we fund elections, no political party in America can survive with Wall Street as its enemy. FIRE is the largest sector contributing to campaigns by far, easily doubling the next highest single issue-sector, health. So as Democrats scramble to build a strategy to keep the Senate, and possibly win the House, number one on their "to-do" list is winning back Wall Street's love. And what - beyond weak or non-existent Dodd-Frank regulations, or a regulator-in-chief who has never dealt with a multi-tranche credit default swap - would be the most effective way to buy that love?

How about regulating derivatives?

If you're like most who know anything about what brought about the financial crisis of 2008, that idea would strike you as simply insane. The opaque and complex market of derivatives was the single most important de-stabilizer leading up to 2008. They would be, as Warren Buffet, had predicted they would be, "financial weapons of mass destruction", which wiped-out an enormous amount of wealth. If anything had to change after 2008, it was the unregulated character of these fWMDs. So the idea that we should now undo the tiny regulations that Dodd-Frank tried to impose is just nuts.

Yet that is precisely what Congress is now doing. In a trio of bills now racing through the United States House, a bi-partisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats, led by Connecticut Congressman and former Goldman Sachs partner Jim Himes, is pushing hard to deregulate Wall Street. Because of course, as Wisconsin Democrat Gwen Moore explains, Wall Street regulation is "crippling the economy". (There's no indication in the original source about whether the congresswoman kept a straight face when she uttered that nonsense.) And the only way to get the good times back, these de-regulators insist, is to license the men with "more money than god" to rape and pillage once again.

Serious souls recognize that deregulation is just insane. But not enough yet see what that insanity tells us. In a single line, its message is this: We have lost the capacity to govern, because none in our government has the freedom to even question the most powerful funders of political campaigns without facing catastrophic campaign losses. Our government is held hostage by the funders of campaigns. And those funders don't spend their money to get good public policy. They spend their money to get public policy that pays - them.

In January, a survey (PDF) of 10,000 Harvard Business School alumni identified the "effectiveness of [our] political system" as the number one issue accounting for our "falling behind" our competitors internationally.

Maybe now you have a better sense of just why.

_____
Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Harvard Law School.
Links: The original version of this article, at the URL below, contains several links to further information not included here.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/23/the-roots-of-the-next-financial-crisis-how-wall-street-undermines-reform.html


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30. USA: BERKELEY - WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW
by Adam Hochschild
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New York Review of Books, May 23, 2013

Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power
by Seth Rosenfeld
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 734 pp., $40.00                                                  

A curious thing about the United States is that anticommunism has always been far louder and more potent than communism. Unlike sister parties in France, Italy, India, and elsewhere, the Communist Party here has never controlled a major city or region, or even elected a single member to the national legislature. Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in 1948 received no more than 2.4 percent of the popular vote with Communist support; and Wallace himself soon repudiated the Communists here and abroad.

American anticommunism, by contrast, built and destroyed thousands of careers; witch-hunted dissidents in Hollywood, universities, and government departments; and was a force that politicians like Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon rode to great prominence. Of course this was not the first time that heresy hunters have overshadowed the actual heretics: consider the Inquisition, which began before Martin Luther, the greatest heretic, was even born, or how, on accusations of Trotskyism, Stalin imprisoned or shot Soviets by the millions—numbers many times those of Trotsky’s beleaguered, faction-ridden actual followers. But heresy hunting is seldom really about ideas; it’s about maintaining power.

Power begins with surveillance, and the pioneer in American anti-Communist surveillance was Ralph Van Deman, whose elongated hawklike face made him someone a movie director would have cast for the job. A career US Army officer, Van Deman first made his mark keeping a close eye on Filipinos who might have the temerity to resist the long occupation of their country that began with the Spanish-American War. As the military intelligence chief in Manila starting in 1901, he used a web of undercover agents and the newest record-keeping technology—file cards—to track thousands of potential dissidents.

Later in his career, back in the United States, Van Deman filled his cards with the names of American socialists, labor activists, and supporters of the Russian Revolution, the sort of people rounded up in the notorious Palmer Raids of 1919–1920 that jailed some ten thousand leftists. He continued collecting information about Communists and other left-wingers long after he retired as a major general in 1929. With funding from the Army and J. Edgar Hoover’s new Federal Bureau of Investigation, he maintained a private network of informants until his death in 1952, keeping his 250,000 file cards in his house in San Diego, where they were frequently consulted by police Red squads and the FBI.1

It was Hoover, of course, who would take Van Deman’s search for real or imagined Communists to far greater heights. More than forty years after his death, we know a great deal about this unpleasant and power-hungry man, but the California investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld adds significantly more in Subversives, which is based on some 300,000 pages of FBI documents, pried out of the resistant agency over more than two decades in a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

The papers largely concern FBI surveillance, disinformation, and other monkey business during the student revolts that roiled the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s. These upheavals made Berkeley surely the only college campus in the world with four full-time daily newspaper correspondents stationed on it, and for a while, as a greenhorn reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, I was one of them. I watched firsthand the mass arrest of 773 Free Speech Movement sit-in demonstrators in December 1964 for demanding an end to restrictions on political speaking and organizing on campus, the massive marches and teach-ins against the Vietnam War over the following several years,2 and the astonishing sight of a California National Guard helicopter swooping across the campus in 1969 indiscriminately spraying a dense white cloud of tear gas.

I thought I knew all that was going on, but it turns out there was much that none of us knew, from the fact that the FBI secretly jammed the walkie-talkies of monitors directing a huge 1965 anti-war march I covered to the agency’s decade-long vendetta against Clark Kerr, the man who was first chancellor at Berkeley and then president of the University of California system.

Everyone knew that the FBI had no love for student leftists, but Hoover’s intense hatred for Kerr is the major revelation of Rosenfeld’s careful and thorough book—and it was a revelation for Kerr as well when Rosenfeld shared some of this material with him shortly before Kerr died in 2003. “I know Kerr is no good,” Hoover scrawled in the margin of one bureau document.

Although Kerr was largely reviled by the activists of the Free Speech Movement, who were—quite rightly—protesting his university’s ban against political advocacy on campus, he was far more than the colorless bureaucrat he appeared. For one thing, he had a wry sense of humor, at one point quipping that the real purpose of a university was to provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty. More importantly, he was a man of principle. From 1949 to 1951, for example, the university was riven by a fierce controversy over a loyalty oath required of all employees. More than sixty professors refused to sign, and thirty-one of them, as well as many other staff, were fired. Though a staunch anti-Communist, Kerr spoke out strongly against the firings and the witch-hunt atmosphere surrounding them. His stands on such matters won him the enmity of right-wingers, and he was soon on Hoover’s radar.

The heresy that Hoover feared most was not communism; it was threats to the power of the FBI. And so what pushed him over the line from hostility to absolute rage at Kerr was an exam question. University of California applicants had to take an English aptitude test, which included a choice of one of twelve topics for a five-hundred-word essay. In 1959, one topic was: “What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to criticism?”

In response, a furious Hoover issued a blizzard of orders: one FBI official drafted a letter of protest for the national commander of the American Legion to sign; other agents mobilized statements of outrage from the Hearst newspapers, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. An FBI man went to see California Governor Edmund G. Brown and stood by while Brown dictated a letter ordering an inquiry into who wrote the essay question.

Hoover himself wrote to members of the university’s board of regents, who swiftly apologized. But his ire did not subside; he ordered an FBI investigation of the university as a whole, assigning an astounding thirty employees to the task. The result was a sixty-page report, covering professorial transgressions that ranged from giving birth to an illegitimate child to writing a play that “defamed Chiang Kai-shek.” The report also noted that seventy-two university faculty, students, and employees were on the bureau’s “Security Index.” This was the list Hoover kept of people who, in case of emergency, were to be arrested and placed in preventive detention, as in the good old days of the Palmer Raids. Like Hoover’s forebear Van Deman, the FBI maintained the index on file cards, but now these were machine-sorted IBM cards.

One of Rosenfeld’s finds is that when the FBI didn’t have another weapon handy, it sent poison-pen letters. The man initially suspected of writing the offending essay question, for instance, was a quiet UCLA English professor and Antioch College graduate, Everett L. Jones. When intensive sleuthing couldn’t find anything to tie Jones to the Communist Party—the usual FBI means of tarring an enemy—someone in the bureau wrote an anonymous letter on plain stationery to UCLA’s chancellor, signed merely “Antioch—Class of ’38,” saying that the writer had known Jones and his wife in college, where “they expressed views which shocked many of their friends,” and later became “fanatical adherents to communism.”

Hoover’s anger at Clark Kerr was reignited in 1960, when thirty-one Berkeley students were among those arrested in a large demonstration against a hearing by the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco’s City Hall—an early landmark in what would be a tumultuous era of American student protest. Hoover was outraged when Kerr refused to discipline the students taking part. Kerr said, reasonably enough, that any student demonstrators were acting as private individuals and “were not in any way representing the university.”

The upheavals of the Free Speech Movement, which had Berkeley in turmoil during the 1964–1965 school year, and of the protests against the Vietnam War that began shaking the campus soon after, brought renewed scrutiny by the FBI. As always, Hoover’s anticommunism had little to do with the Soviets: although the FBI’s responsibilities include counterespionage, only twenty-five of the three hundred agents in Northern California were assigned to this, while forty-three were at work monitoring “subversives,” which meant people like student activists at Berkeley—and, it turns out, even some of those they thought were their enemies, like the university’s regents.

Hoover gathered information about several liberal pro-Kerr regents and funneled it and other ammunition to a major enemy of Kerr, regent Edwin Pauley, a wealthy Los Angeles oilman. An FBI official then reported back to Hoover that an appreciative Pauley could be a useful informant and could “use his influence to curtail, harass and…eliminate communists and ultra-liberal members on the faculty.”

The balance on the board of regents changed following Ronald Reagan’s election as California governor in 1966 (the governor and several other state officials are ex officio regents), and at Reagan’s first meeting, Kerr was fired. Even though Hoover can’t be blamed for Kerr losing his job, he had already made sure that there was another one the educator didn’t get. Some months earlier, President Johnson had decided he wanted Kerr to be the next secretary of health, education, and welfare. “I’ve looked from the Pacific to the Atlantic and from Mexico to Canada,” LBJ told Kerr in his famous arm-twisting mode, “and you’re the man I want.” Kerr said he would think it over. Meanwhile, Johnson ordered the usual FBI background check. Among the documents Rosenfeld wrested from the agency in his legal battle is the twelve-page report Hoover sent the president. Included in it were allegations from a California state legislative Red-hunter who claimed that someone named Louis Hicks had worked with Kerr in the 1940s and declared that Kerr was “pro-Communist.”

“Hoover’s report failed to note, however,” Rosenfeld writes, “that when FBI agents interviewed Hicks he denied making the charge.” The report made a string of similar misrepresentations, among them another such charge—with no mention of the FBI investigation that found it untrue. Before Kerr could tell LBJ that he had decided to turn down the post, the president withdrew the offer.

Hoover’s FBI did its best not only to wreck the careers of enemies like Kerr, but to promote those of its friends, like Ronald Reagan. Although Rosenfeld far overstates the bureau’s influence on Reagan’s rise, it is nonetheless jarring to see how much help he got from an agency that was supposed to stay above partisan politics. Reagan had been trading information with the FBI about alleged Communists and radicals ever since his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s, and he continued to feed the bureau Hollywood political gossip for long afterward. The FBI did various work for him in return, for example investigating whether a live-in boyfriend of his estranged daughter Maureen was already married (he was).

Another FBI favor for Reagan also concerned a wayward child: his son Michael. In 1965, after Hoover had at last, reluctantly and under much pressure, finally begun investigating organized crime, an agent reported that “the son of Ronald Reagan was associating with” the son of Mafia clan chief Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno. Both sons enjoyed pursuing girls and driving fast cars, and the young Bonanno already had a police record at eighteen. The routine procedure would have been for FBI agents to interview Reagan for any information about the Bonannos he might have learned, but Hoover ordered instead that the agents should simply suggest to Reagan that he tell Michael to find another companion. Reagan, just then gearing up for his first run for governor, was most grateful.

The FBI provided him many other courtesies over the years: a personal briefing from Hoover, data for his speeches, quiet investigations of people the University of California was thinking about hiring—even though screening applicants for jobs that didn’t have to do with the federal government was outside the bureau’s jurisdiction. But Hoover’s biggest favor of all for Reagan was something he didn’t do. In 1960, an informer the agency thought was “reliable” reported that Reagan secretly belonged to the John Birch Society—an organization even the FBI thought so extreme (it considered President Eisenhower a Communist) that it was kept under surveillance. Rosenfeld says that he could not tell from the available records whether this claim was true. But, he notes, “it was precisely the kind of uncorroborated information” that the bureau had quietly slipped to dozens of politicians or journalists over the years when it wanted to damage the reputation of someone like Clark Kerr. This report—which could easily have wrecked Reagan’s future political career—Hoover kept quiet.

One appeal of hunting alleged heretics is that it is relatively easy. By contrast, good police work—chasing down corporate crime or the Mafia, for instance—is extremely hard. Small wonder that in building the power of the FBI, Hoover preferred the first to the second. But what happens to a professional anti-Communist when, on the home front anyway, there are almost no more Communists? Rosenfeld’s book is in part a portrait of an FBI clumsily looking for new targets. In a curious echo of the hostility the Soviets and their satellite regimes had toward the anti-authoritarian overtones of rock music, Hoover grew alarmed about the counterculture. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters came into his sights, as did organizations like Berkeley’s Sexual Freedom League.

But the world was shifting under the FBI’s feet. In the old days, of course, if you couldn’t wreck someone’s career by tying him to a known Communist, you could still do so by exposing a sexual misdeed. Or you could simply hint that you had such information—a method Hoover for decades used to blackmail potential congressional critics into silence. But even though the bureau dispatched a poison-pen letter in 1965 to reveal that a prominent Berkeley antiwar activist had fathered a child out of wedlock, the FBI’s Northern California chief wrote Hoover sadly that such leaks were no longer so effective. These student radicals, he explained, “do not have the same moral standards as a Bureau employee.” In such treacherously changing times, what was a poor blackmailer to do?

Although Subversives is perhaps one hundred pages too long (we don’t need to know a Free Speech Movement leader’s grades in each college course, for example), Rosenfeld’s many years of digging have produced other notable revelations. The most controversial concerns Richard Aoki, a military veteran and particularly confrontational student leader in the later stages of Berkeley 1960s activism—at one point he urged his comrades to steal weapons from National Guard armories. Aoki also provided guns to Black Panther Party members and gave them some of their first weapons training. When his book was first published, Rosenfeld startled just about everyone, it seems, by showing that Aoki was an FBI informant. This accusation has generated a furious fusillade in Aoki’s defense in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education and other publications. But in my reading of both sides, the charge seems well documented and convincing; moreover, when Rosenfeld asked him directly if he was an informer, Aoki gave a vague and ambiguous answer.

Aoki’s defenders do not believe that so charismatic a leader could have been anything other than the passionate fighter for justice he appeared. Yet in the murky world of surveillance and double agents, some people can serve two masters. Perhaps the most famous such figure was Yevno Azev (1869–1918), for a decade and a half the key informer for the tsarist secret police, on whose behalf he infiltrated the Russian revolutionary movement and betrayed hundreds of his comrades. But while leaking the details of some assassination plots to the authorities, he nonetheless zestfully helped plan others, including the murder of a provincial governor, of the Grand Duke Sergei (the tsar’s uncle), and of the minister of the interior. It appears that neither Azev nor his alarmed police handlers ever figured out which side he was really on. Was that true for Richard Aoki?3 We will never know: ill with kidney disease, he committed suicide four years ago.

Aoki’s record raises the question: Was the Black Panther Party’s descent into criminal violence mainly the work of FBI agents provocateurs? Were more undercover agents whom we don’t yet know about responsible for the move toward violent confrontation, also beginning around 1969, by other groups, such as the Weather Underground?

I think not. Even though new information about FBI manipulation may eventually surface, there was already plenty of madness in the air by end of the 1960s. The trail of Black Panther extortion, beatings, murders, and other crimes—especially in Northern California—is so long as to be far beyond the FBI’s ability to create it. And by 1970, there were also too many white leftists who romanticized third-world revolutionaries, talked tough, wore military fatigues, and spoke a different language than the nonviolent one of the Free Speech Movement leaders of 1964–1965.

The principal activists of that movement knew their fight was a universal one. They cared about civil liberties from Mississippi (where FSM leader Mario Savio had been a civil rights worker) to Moscow (a year after their own mass arrest, FSM veterans held a Berkeley campus rally for imprisoned Soviet dissidents Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel). But political generations were short-lived in the 1960s, and by a few years later, some of the fatigue-clad solidarity activists who passed through Eastern Europe en route to North Vietnam showed little concern over the Soviet-bloc invasion that had crushed the Prague Spring of 1968.

Rosenfeld rightly appreciates the best of the Free Speech Movement leaders, especially the late Mario Savio, whom I came to know toward the end of his life: a gentle, eloquent, deeply intelligent man whose passion for civil liberties and social justice had the strength of a religion. Even though Savio’s lifelong battle with depression and keen belief that the movement could not thrive if it were centered on him personally led him to stay in the background after 1965, it did not prevent the FBI from following his every move, monitoring his bank account, and aggressively questioning his neighbors, employers, friends, and landlords.

Even at its worst, the FBI was far less draconian than dozens of secret police forces active around the world then and today. Poison-pen letters are one thing; disappearances, torture, and murder another. But changes in technology have vastly increased the ease of surveillance. In the 1950s, Rosenfeld reports, in order to eavesdrop on a meeting in Jessica Mitford’s house, two bumbling FBI agents hid in a crawl space beneath it; the mission almost came to grief when one fell asleep and started snoring. But today those agents would have access to vastly more: not just Mitford’s phone calls—which they were already tapping—but her credit card statements, her Google searches, her air travel itineraries, her bookstore purchases, her e-mails, her text messages, her minute-by-minute locations as signaled by the GPS in her mobile phone. To hold longtime records of this sort on whomever it chooses to monitor, the National Security Agency is building in Bluffdale, Utah, for $2 billion, the largest intelligence data storage facility on earth—five times the size of the Capitol building in Washington. It is scheduled to open later this year.4

Naturally, it’s all in the name of stopping terrorism, but the misuse of intelligence-gathering for political purposes, from Ralph Van Deman and the Palmer Raids to J. Edgar Hoover and his meddling with a university board of regents, should make us aware that such things can happen again. The combination of electronic data collection, a vague and nebulous foreign threat, and tens of billions of dollars pouring into “homeland security” each year is a toxic mix, ripe for new demagogues. Subversives is a timely warning. That essay question on the 1959 University of California entrance exam is one we must never stop asking.

1 For Van Deman’s story, see Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 

2 This was enough to gain a notation in my own FBI files, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act years ago, that “acting as a representative of the press,” I had been in contact with the march organizers. Although I was a very small fish indeed, my FBI and CIA files from the 1960s run to more than one hundred pages. 

3 He and Azev apparently both had personal motives for some of their actions: J. Edgar Hoover, surprisingly, had opposed the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans that had placed Aoki in a prison camp as a child, and Vyacheslav von Plehve, the minister of the interior whose assassination was plotted by Azev, a Jew, had orchestrated a series of pogroms. 

4 See James Bamford, “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say),” Wired, March 15, 2012. ↩


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31. A MORE SECULAR EUROPE, DIVIDED BY THE CROSS
by Andrew Higgins
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The New York Times, June 17, 2013 
Daniel Mihailescu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A huge European Union flag in front of the Parliament building in Bucharest, Romania, in May. The flag, with its circle of 12 yellow stars, has a coded Christian message, inspired by iconography of the Virgin Mary wearing a crown with 12 stars.
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Stanislav Zvolensky, the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Slovak capital here, was thrilled when he was invited to Brussels three years ago to discuss the fight against poverty with the insistently secular bureaucracy of the European Union.

The European Commission at first ordered Slovakia to revise its monks-in-halos design for a commemorative euro coin.
“They let me in wearing my cross,” the archbishop recalled.

It therefore came as a rude surprise when, late last year, the National Bank of Slovakia announced that the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, had ordered it to remove halos and crosses from special commemorative euro coins due to be minted this summer.

The coins, designed by a local artist, were intended to celebrate the 1,150th anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in Slovak lands but have instead become tokens of the faith’s retreat from contemporary Europe. They featured two evangelizing Byzantine monks, Cyril and Methodius, their heads crowned by halos and one’s robe decorated with crosses, which fell foul of European diversity rules that ban any tilt toward a single faith.

“There is a movement in the European Union that wants total religious neutrality and can’t accept our Christian traditions,” said Archbishop Zvolensky, bemoaning what he sees as rising a tide of militant secularism at a time when Europe is struggling to forge a common identity.

In a continent divided by many languages, vast differences of culture and economic gaps, the archbishop said that centuries of Christianity provide a rare element shared by all of the soon-to-be 28 members of the fractious union. Croatia, a mostly Catholic nation like Slovakia, joins next month.

Yet at a time when Europe needs solidarity and a unified sense of purpose to grapple with its seemingly endless economic crisis, religion has instead become yet another a source of discord. It divides mostly secular Western Europe from profoundly religious nations in the east like Poland and those in between both in geography and in faith like Slovakia.

In nearly all of Europe, assertive secularists and beleaguered believers battle to make their voices heard. All of which leaves the European Commission, in charge of shaping Europe’s common aspirations, under attack from all sides, denounced by atheists for even its timid engagement with religion and by nationalist Christian fundamentalists as an agent of Satan.

Asked about such criticism, Katharina von Schnurbein, the commission official responsible for outreach to both religious and secular groups, smiled and said, “I can assure you that the European Commission is not the Antichrist.”

Europe is suffused with Christianity, or at least memories of its past influence. The landscape is dotted with churches, now mostly empty, and monasteries, its ancient universities are rooted in medieval religious scholarship, and many of its national crests and anthems pay homage to God.

Even the European Union’s flag — a circle of 12 yellow stars on a blue background — has a coded Christian message. Arsène Heitz, a French Catholic who designed the flag in 1955, drew inspiration from Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary wearing a crown with 12 stars. The same 12 stars appear on all euro coins.

The very idea that Europe should unite began with efforts to rally Christendom in the ninth century by Charlemagne, the first ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.

Throughout its modern history, however, the “European project,” as the Continent’s current faltering push for unity is known, has sought to keep religion and the unruly passions it can stir at arm’s length. The 1957 Treaty of Rome and other founding texts of what is today the European Union make no mention of God or Christianity. The Brussels bureaucracy, in its official account of Mr. Heitz’s religion-tinged flag, ignores the Virgin Mary, stating instead that the 12 stars “symbolize the ideal of unity, solidarity and harmony among the people of Europe.”

“There is a general suspicion of anything religious, a view that faith should be kept out of the public sphere,” said Gudrun Kugler, director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, a Vienna-based research and lobbying group. “There is a very strong current of radical secularism,” she said, adding that this affects all religions but is particularly strong against Christianity because of a view that “Christianity dominated unfairly for centuries” and needs to be put in its place.

Ms. von Schnurbein dismissed accusations of an anti-Christian agenda. The European Union, she said, “is often seen as trying to eliminate religion, but that is really not the case.” She added, “We deal with people of faith and also people of no faith.”

Obliged by treaty to consult with religious and secular groups, the European Commission, said Ms. von Schnurbein, attaches “great importance” to this dialogue, which she described as “unique” for an international body.

The commission’s monetary and economic affairs department that ordered Slovakia to redesign its commemorative euro coins says it had no real problem itself with halos and crosses and demanded that they be deleted in the interest of “religious diversity” because of complaints from countries that also use the euro.

Leading the charge was France, which enforces a rigid division of church and state at home, and objected to Christian symbols appearing on Slovak money that would also be legal tender in France. Greece, where church and state are closely intertwined, also protested, apparently because it considers the Greek-born monks Cyril and Methodius as part of its own heritage.

For the European Union’s most strident critics, the dispute has been a godsend, buttressing their argument that Brussels is an alien, meddling and sinister force. “I need to voice a serious and disturbing suspicion: that the E.U. is under the control of Satan or Satanism,” said Rafael Rafaj of the Slovak National Party, a far-right nationalist party.

The view that the European Union serves Satan has become a popular theme for some extreme Christian fundamentalists, who cite the Bible’s Book of Revelation as proof that dissolving national boundaries signals an approaching apocalypse.

Yet, several of the union’s most senior figures are themselves Catholics, as were most of its founding fathers, including Germany’s first postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Germany’s current leader, Angela Merkel, the daughter of a pastor, has been outspoken in defending Christianity, telling supporters worried about the increasing number of Muslims that “we don’t have too much Islam, we have too little Christianity.”

The Brussels bureaucratic apparatus, however, is “uncomfortable with religion,” said Lucian Leustean, a scholar at Aston University in Britain and the editor of a 2012 book, “Representing Religion in the European Union: Does God Matter?”

This is partly due to the rise of well-organized secular groups that pounce on any hint that Christians are being favored over other religions or nonbelievers. But a bigger reason, said Mr. Leustean, is a shift in demography and public attitudes.

Church attendance is falling across Europe as belief in God wanes and even cultural attachments wither. The Continent’s fastest-growing faith is now Islam. In Britain, according to a poll last year, more people believe in extraterrestrials than in God. In the European Union as a whole, according to a 2010 survey, around half the population believes in God, compared with over 90 percent in the United States.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe slowed the secular tide somewhat as the European Union began to admit new and sometimes deeply religious countries like Poland and Romania. Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission in the 1990s, kicked off a debate on the “soul of Europe” and held informal meetings with church and other religious leaders.

But when Europe set about drafting a constitution in the early years of the last decade, demands that Europe’s Christian heritage be mentioned ran into bitter resistance and were eventually dropped. The religious question resurfaced again with the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, which skipped any reference to Christianity and instead paid tribute to the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe.”

It mandated dialogue with religious groups. But it also ordered equal treatment for “philosophical and non-confessional organizations,” which include groups whose principal philosophy is hostility to organized religion.

Archbishop Zvolensky of Bratislava predicted that efforts at European unity are doomed unless the union gives a bigger place to God. “Religion should be the inner strength of the union,” he said.

He does see one encouraging sign: Slovakia’s national bank has decided to stick with its original coin design and abandon plans for a halo-free minting in honor of Cyril and Methodius.

The European Commission has gone along with this, and the commemorative coins will finally be minted next month — two months later than originally planned — but with halos and crosses.


Miroslava Germanova contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 19, 2013

An article on Tuesday about religion as a source of discord among the mostly secular Western European nations of the European Union and those profoundly religious nations in the east misstated the year of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, one of the union’s founding texts, which makes no mention of God or Christianity. It was 1957, not 1951.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 18, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A More Secular Europe, Divided by the Cross.

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