SACW - 11 July 2013 | Sri Lanka: Ravana Balaya / Pakistan: Blasphemy . ./ India: Kashmir, Ishrat Jahan & Rambo; Honour crimes; impunity / Egypt vs Muslim Brotherhood

Wed Jul 10 16:36:15 EDT 2013

South Asia Citizens Wire - 11 July 2013 - No. 2792
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Contents:

1. Read the Time Cover story on Buddhist Muslim Clashes in Myanmar, that is banned in Sri Lanka & Burma
2. Sri Lanka: Colombo Mosque to be relocated after intense campaign by Buddhist Far Right ’Ravana Balaya’ (D.B.S.Jeyaraj)
3. SAAPE - Peoples’ SAARC Campaign on ‘Demilitarisation, Democratisation and Social Justice launched
4. Submission on the Combined Initial and Second Periodic Report of Afghanistan to the United Nations CEDAW
5. Pakistan: Honour was maintained, to hell with justice | A real story by Aasim Zafar Khan
6. Pakistan: Our Rimshas (Asna Ali)
7. Vacuum in Kashmir (A.G. Noorani)	
8. How New Delhi manages Kashmir (Muzamil Jaleel)
9. ‘Progress’ is no balm for the Kashmiri’s daily humiliations (Bharat Bhushan)
10. India - Kashmir: Report on Kunan Poshpora by A Fact Finding CPA Delegation
11. India - Kashmir: Look Within (Jamal Kidwai)
12. India: Killing love with violence and politics (Subhashini Ali)
13. India: Ugly face of caste politics in Tamil Nadu (Vidya Bhushan Rawat)
14. India: Rambo to Mogambo (Javed Anand)
15. India: The Importance of Being Ishrat (Mukul Dube)
16. India: Photos from Justice for Ishrat Jahan Delhi 6 July meeting and candle light vigil
17. India: Six Posters of the Justice for Ishrat Jahan Campaign
18. India: Text of Declaration adopted at Left Parties Convention in Delhi, 1 July 2013
19. Breaking the Silence About Impunity on Sexual Violence in South Asia (Navsharan Singh and Urvashi Butalia)
20. Forget Nato v the Taliban. The real Afghan fight is India v Pakistan (William Dalrymple)
21. India: Uttrakhand floods - a man-made disaster (Praful Bidwai)
22. India: Ambedkar’s truths were little understood (B G Verghese)
23. India: 2009 report on Paid News by Press Council of India and Report of Parliamentary Standing committee on Information Technology (2011-12) related to Paid News
24. Banaz - A love Story [A documentary on Honour Crimes]
25. UK: Power structures and the politics of knowledge production: Hilary Wainwright interview (Rahila Gupta)
26. Egypt: Horrific Sexual Violence Against Women at Tahrir Square Protests - Statement by Human Rights Watch
27. UN report on implications of States’ surveillance of communications
28. Japan: Groundwater Radiation Levels Around Fukushima Increased 100 Times What They Were 12 Months Ago (BBC report)
29. India: Run For Cover - Editorial, The Telegraph, 10 July 2013
30. Not a Crisis or a Coup: The People’s Revolution in Egypt (Nawal El Saadawi)
31. Egypt: don’t miss the wood for the trees  (Dr Taimur Rahman)
32. Freedom of movement: dancing Egypt's revolution (Judith Mackrell)
33. Turkish women defend their lifestyle (Mehveş Evin)
34. Book Review: What Happened To India’s Economic Miracle? ’An Uncertain Glory - India and Its Contradictions’ by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen
35. Book Review: Just Around the Corner ‘On Sal Mal Lane,’ by Ru Freeman

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1. READ THE TIME COVER STORY ON BUDDHIST MUSLIM CLASHES IN MYANMAR, THAT IS BANNED IN SRI LANKA & BURMA
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Images of Time 1st July 2013, over page and the three pages of the story that has been banned
http://www.sacw.net/article4903.html

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2. SRI LANKA: COLOMBO MOSQUE TO BE RELOCATED AFTER INTENSE CAMPAIGN BY BUDDHIST FAR RIGHT ’RAVANA BALAYA’
by D.B.S.Jeyaraj
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The sequence of events relating to this “forced relocation” demonstrates a very high degree of extreme intolerance and hatred by the Ravana Balaya and the perceived collaboration of the Buddha Sasana ministry in the sordid exercise. Although the beleaguered Muslim community had tried very hard to be flexible and accommodating on this issue by suggesting reasonable alternatives the ethno religious fascists had demanded nothing less than a total relocation.

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3. SAAPE - PEOPLES’ SAARC CAMPAIGN ON ‘DEMILITARISATION, DEMOCRATISATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE LAUNCHED
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South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE), a regional network and Peoples’ SAARC on Tuesday (09 July 2013) launched a Campaign on ‘Demilitarisation, Democratisation and Social Justice’ and demanded all the states of South Asia to stop extremism within the region, cut the defence budgets to divert funds for social development and sign a No War pact.
http://www.sacw.net/article4960.html

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4. SUBMISSION ON THE COMBINED INITIAL AND SECOND PERIODIC REPORT OF AFGHANISTAN TO THE UNITED NATIONS CEDAW
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Afghanistan’s record of complying with CEDAW is very poor, and the country’s human rights situation, especially for women, is showing signs of deterioration as international engagement in the country wanes. Expanded Taliban control and violence related to the ongoing conflict are major factors in human rights abuses. However, the Afghan government is also failing in many areas to comply with its obligations under international human rights law, especially for women.
http://www.sacw.net/article4959.html

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5. PAKISTAN: HONOUR WAS MAINTAINED, TO HELL WITH JUSTICE
A real story by Aasim Zafar Khan
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Whatever the outcome of this case may be, the underlying principle is that the blood money law, along with crippling feudalism, is a major roadblock in the dispensation of justice in Pakistan – especially in cases that involve people from different socio-economic brackets. To put it simply, the rich can murder the poor and get away scot-free. The Qisas and Diyat Ordinance is also a haven for honour killings.
http://www.sacw.net/article4975.html

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6. PAKISTAN: OUR RIMSHAS
by Asna Ali
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We as a nation have developed an unhealthy relationship with blasphemy and the laws used to prosecute it. There is no other crime that produces so much hatred or desire for vengeance. Our minorities live in fear of it being even whispered that they have committed blasphemy because they know that anyone accused of this crime walks with a bullseye on his forehead.
http://www.sacw.net/article4899.html

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7. VACUUM IN KASHMIR
by A.G. Noorani	
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It is tempting to say that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Srinagar on June 25 along with Congress president Sonia Gandhi reflected the same inadequacy of his current policies on Kashmir as does the limited rail link he inaugurated the next day between Banihal in Jammu and Qazigund, the gateway to the Valley.
They flagged off the first train on a mere 18-kilometre section of what is planned as a rail link to connect India's vast railway network. It would connect Jammu, via Srinagar to Baramula, near the Line of Control. However, the most critical sector between Katra and Banihal "has progressed only up to 12 to 14 per cent", the Comptroller and Auditor-General reported.
Nonetheless, there is some tangible achievement, though in the shape of a rail link "within Kashmir rather than to Kashmir". But the gains of the Prime Minister's policies on Kashmir are far more slender.
http://www.sacw.net/article4971.html

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8. HOW NEW DELHI MANAGES KASHMIR
by Muzamil Jaleel
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It doesn’t talk to it, or listen. Political initiatives are launched to tide over moments of crisis, to be abandoned as soon as they pass
http://www.sacw.net/article4972.html

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9. ‘PROGRESS’ IS NO BALM FOR THE KASHMIRI’S DAILY HUMILIATIONS
by Bharat Bhushan
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Had Rahul Gandhi talked to ordinary Kashmiris, he would have realised that while there may be a need for the army to man the frontier with Pakistan, the militarisation of Kashmir has led to citizens being viewed as enemies. He would have then judged the progress in Kashmir not by the growth in tourism or connectivity but by the rights enjoyed by the local citizens.
http://www.sacw.net/article4973.html

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10. INDIA: REPORT ON KUNAN POSHPORA BY A FACT FINDING CPA DELEGATION
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CPA-led Civil Society teams have also had a closer look at some of the events and incidents which continue to agitate the valley. One such incident is the alleged gang rape of women in the twin villages of Kunan-Poshpura in Kupwara district about 120 km outside Srinagar. CPA facilitated a team of senior civil society activists to visit Kunan-Poshpura between June 14-16, 2013 to assess the progress of the justice process and the grievances of the village more than 22 years after the incident.
http://www.sacw.net/article4829.html

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11. INDIA - KASHMIR: LOOK WITHIN 
by Jamal Kidwai
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The real challenge is not external. The Indian state and the J&K government would do well to first acknowledge the mistakes committed in the past and engaging with the people of Kashmir to find a way forward.
http://www.sacw.net/article4978.html

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12. INDIA: KILLING LOVE WITH VIOLENCE AND POLITICS
by Subhashini Ali
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    E. Ilavarasan has killed himself, brutally underscoring the continuing tragedy of young married couples being wrenched apart by caste and political pressures. Indeed, India’s veneer of modernity comes apart each time an inter-caste marriage breaks. And when one half of the couple is Dalit, as in this case, mob fury comes as an inheritance.
http://www.sacw.net/article4961.html

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13. INDIA: UGLY FACE OF CASTE POLITICS IN TAMIL NADU
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
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The death of E.Ilavarsan in Tamilnadu might be a single column report in our newspapers but it has reflected the mindset prevailing in India and deep rooted caste prejudices against the Dalits in our society. It has also proved that the Dravidian politics has not been able to overcome its own prejudices against Dalits and they large represent the politics of powerful politicized OBCs who at the social level have been at the loggerheads with Dalits.
http://www.sacw.net/article4957.html

:::::RELATED RESOURCE:::::

WHO KILLED ILAVARASAN?
by kuffir 
http://tinyurl.com/ncqtpr2

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14. INDIA: RAMBO TO MOGAMBO
by Javed Anand
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The Bharatiya Janata Party is desperate and under pressure its slip is showing. In response to the chargesheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the Ishrat Jahan case — which contains shocking quotes and details, including the fact that five cops of the Ahmedabad Crime Branch fired 70 rounds from automatic and semi-automatic weapons at 19-year-old Ishrat and three others — the BJP has chosen to show scant regard for judicial procedure.
http://www.sacw.net/article4950.html

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15. INDIA: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ISHRAT
by Mukul Dube
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Who was Ishrat Jahan? In 2009, S.P. Tamang, Metropolitan Magistrate, Ahmedabad, described her in the report of his judicial enquiry as a “loving daughter and caring sister” who worked hard to support her mother and younger siblings. However, now that the CBI’s examination of her death in an “encounter” is the centre of attention, many people are calling her anything but innocent and harmless. The noises coming from the Hindu Right may be ignored, for what they offer as evidence is not just pathetic but ludicrous. It is the media’s output that we must examine.
http://www.sacw.net/article4949.html

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16. INDIA: PHOTOS FROM JUSTICE FOR ISHRAT JAHAN DELHI 6 JULY MEETING AND CANDLE LIGHT VIGIL
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Photos by Mukul Dube of Public meeting and vigil organised by Justice for Ishrat Jahan Campaign on 6 July at the constitution club in New Delhi.
http://www.sacw.net/article4930.html

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17. INDIA: SIX POSTERS OF THE JUSTICE FOR ISHRAT JAHAN CAMPAIGN
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http://www.sacw.net/article4929.html

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18. INDIA: TEXT OF DECLARATION ADOPTED AT LEFT PARTIES CONVENTION IN DELHI, 1 JULY 2013
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India’s Parliamentary Left parties represented by the CPI, CPI-M, RSP and Forward Bloc held a National Convention in New Delhi on July 1, 2013. The following Declaration was adopted at the Convention.
http://www.sacw.net/article4939.html

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19. BREAKING THE SILENCE ABOUT IMPUNITY ON SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN SOUTH ASIA (NAVSHARAN SINGH AND URVASHI BUTALIA)
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Despite many attempts by women’s groups to flag the issues of sexual violence, there still is a legal silence around the question of sexual violence and impunity. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and other extraordinary legislations such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act are seemingly “protective” legislations which were put forward by states as necessary for security. In fact, they have been violative of the basic human rights of people in the areas where they are in force. A small group of women activists have initiated a discussion on these extraordinary laws of south Asia which function to create some sort of consent to formal obstructions to justice, and thereby, create a much wider culture of impunity.
http://www.sacw.net/article4916.html

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20. FORGET NATO V THE TALIBAN. THE REAL AFGHAN FIGHT IS INDIA V PAKISTAN
by William Dalrymple
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Afghanistan’s old ethnic conflict has become a proxy war for the bitter feud between the region’s two nuclear powers
http://www.sacw.net/article4915.html

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21. INDIA: UTTRAKHAND FLOODS - A MAN-MADE DISASTER
by Praful Bidwai
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When the rains came in Uttarakhand, it was runaway building projects, dams and official failures that made them catastrophic
http://www.sacw.net/article4938.html

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22. INDIA: AMBEDKAR’S TRUTHS WERE LITTLE UNDERSTOOD
by B G Verghese
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Ambedkar was one of the outstanding leaders of the freedom movement who fought foreign rule as much as caste oppression within the Hindu fold. He was a democrat and constitutionalist and was no less a patriot than any for joining the Viceroy’s Council and fighting the system from within. Sadly he was never given his due outside his own dalit community in his lifetime or thereafter.
http://www.sacw.net/article4951.html

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23. INDIA: 2009 REPORT ON PAID NEWS BY PRESS COUNCIL OF INDIA AND REPORT OF PARLIAMENTARY STANDING COMMITTEE ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (2011-12) RELATED TO PAID NEWS
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Full Text PDF versions. 2009 Press Council of India - Sub committee report and on Paid News and May 2013 Report of Parliamentary Standing committee on Information Technology related to Paid News
http://www.sacw.net/article4617.html

::INTERNATIONAL:::
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24. BANAZ - A LOVE STORY
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This is a documentary film chronicling an act of overwhelming horror — the honour killing of Banaz Mahmod, a young British woman in suburban London in 2006, killed and "disappeared" by her own family, with the agreement and help of a large section of the Kurdish community, because she tried to choose a life for herself.
http://www.sacw.net/article4974.html

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25. UK: POWER STRUCTURES AND THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION: HILARY WAINWRIGHT INTERVIEW
by Rahila Gupta
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With the publication of the updated Beyond the Fragments, Hilary Wainwright spoke to Rahila Gupta about the politics of knowledge and using her experience of the women’s movement to address the question of how to realise the capacities of each for the benefit of all as the basis for alternative, horizontal models of political organisation.
http://www.sacw.net/article4958.html

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26. EGYPT: HORRIFIC SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AT TAHRIR SQUARE PROTESTS - STATEMENT BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
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Egyptian officials and political leaders across the spectrum should condemn and take immediate steps to address the horrific levels of sexual violence against women in Tahrir Square. Egyptian anti-sexual harassment groups confirmed that mobs sexually assaulted and in some cases raped at least 91 women in Tahrir Square, over four days of protests beginning on June 30, 2013, amid a climate of impunity.
http://www.sacw.net/article4940.html

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27. UN REPORT ON IMPLICATIONS OF STATES’ SURVEILLANCE OF COMMUNICATIONS
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At the 23rd session of the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, released his latest report – an analysis of the implications of States’ surveillance of communications on the exercise of the human rights to privacy and to freedom of opinion and expression.
http://www.sacw.net/article4902.html

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28. JAPAN: GROUNDWATER RADIATION LEVELS AROUND FUKUSHIMA INCREASED 100 TIMES WHAT THEY WERE 12 MONTHS AGO (BBC REPORT)
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A BBC video report
http://www.sacw.net/article4900.html

::: FULL TEXT :::
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29. India: RUN FOR COVER
Editorial, The Telegraph, 10 July 2013
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As in the case of Rizwanur Rahman in Bengal, much remains, and will remain, unknown in the case of E. Ilavarasan, the Dalit youth in Tamil Nadu who was recently found dead near the rail-tracks like Rahman. What is most certainly known is the tremendous weight of social opprobrium that their youthful shoulders had to carry for the choices they made — choices they were fully entitled to as progressive citizens of modern India. Both had challenged social prejudice by marrying outside their caste and community, and both were forced to pay with their lives. In Ilavarasan’s case, many others were forced to pay as well. Natham village in Dharmapuri, where he lived, was witness to one of the worst instances of caste violence after the Vanniyar community, to which his bride belonged, sought retribution for the young couple’s defiance of caste prescriptions. Social pressure and guilt, following the suicide of the bride’s father and the ensuing violence, were so severe that Ilavarasan’s wife, N. Divya, was forced to abandon him. Neither protection from the police nor the legality of marriage was enough to ensure the survival of the marriage — or indeed, simply survival.

The Rahman episode had brought to the fore the ugly face of the police, which, far from acting as the impartial keeper of the law, had acted under different kinds of sinister pressure. Ilavarasan’s case has exposed the hideous underbelly of Tamil politics. One wonders if the Ilavarasan-Divya marriage would have taken such a turn had the backdrop not been provided by the ambitions of the Pattali Makkal Katchi. Hell-bent on reviving its vote-bank among the Vanniyars in Tamil Nadu, the PMK has chosen to stage a comeback by targeting inter-caste marriage, particularly involving Dalits. The much-improved status of the Dalits, as a result of the policy of positive discrimination, is the cause of a lot of heartburn among other deprived castes like the Vanniyars, who use social isolation to hit back at the Dalits. Political alliances between Dalit and non-Dalit parties have not been good for the latter, encouraging them to fall back on reviving anti-Dalit sentiments for easy political gain. Power politics elsewhere in India, for political mileage or preservation of patriarchy, seen through the working of khap panchayats or shalishi courts continues to wreck marriages and lives, sometimes with the aid of the very forces of the State that are expected to protect them.

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30. NOT A CRISIS OR A COUP: THE PEOPLE’S REVOLUTION IN EGYPT
by Nawal El Saadawi
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counterpunch.org, July 09, 2013
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/09/the-peoples-revolution-in-egypt/

Cairo.

Every revolution in history has had its counter-revolution. Internal and external forces ally, as they did in Egypt  to abort the   January  2011   revolution. In this   revolution   on  30  June   2013   they failed and they will continue to fail because the Egyptian youth   both men and women who are rebelling against   the  Muslim  Brothers  , have learned the lessons of the past. Their consciousness has deepened with organization and unity.

Thirty  four  millions    men and women went out into the streets and squares. They were determined to topple the religious government under the control of the Muslim Brothers as well as all who support them at home and abroad. They wanted to expel all who use religion for economic and political gain and to oust Morsi. The will of the people is more powerful than military, police, religious or economic weapons. Here is the lesson of human history. There is no principle higher than truth and sincerity in the quest for freedom, justice and dignity.

The Muslim Brothers’ rule tried to divide the people into believers and heretics, but it failed. It tried to encourage its supporters to attack the demonstrators, but it failed. The power of the millions was like the sea that protects itself with its own strength and its tremendous waves that sweep away the jinn and the ghosts. The age of jinn, spirits and nonsense has ended. The light of knowledge, truth, love and creativity are increasing day by day.

Muslim Brothers militias killed young men and women, but the multitudes in the streets, in the neighborhoods and in the countryside kept growing. They were not afraid of the bullets, they did not retreat one step but kept advancing until they toppled the regime.

And yet, the imperialists and the Americans claim that this was not a revolution that demands a new legitimate regime but merely a crisis.

We need a new constitution that will realize the principles of the revolution: equality for all without distinction of sex, religion or class. We should not rush to presidential and parliamentary elections. We should not put the cart before the horse. We must not repeat mistakes.

Democracy is more than elections. Legitimacy means  the  power  of  the   peoples    more  than the ballot box.

We need a communal, revolutionary leadership and not a single leader. The Muslim Brothers armed militias fired on the people and the revolution turned to the national army and the army responded. The police served the people and not the regime. This is a historical revolution and not a coup d’etat or protest movement or outraged uprising. It is a revolution that will continue until all of its goals are realized.

On July 5, I watched a group of American men on CNN threatening to cut off aid to the revolutionary Egyptian people. And I laughed out loud. I hope that they cut off this aid! Since the time of Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, this aid has destroyed our political and economic life. This aid helps the U.S. more than anyone else. This aid that goes directly into the pockets of the ruling class and corrupts it. This aid has strengthened American-Israeli colonial rule in our lands. All that the Egyptian people have gained from this aid is more poverty and humiliation.

NAWAL EL SAADAWI  is the author of Women and Sex, Woman at Point Zero, The Fall of the Imam, Memoirs From the Women’s Prison and A Daughter of Isis.

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31. EGYPT: DON’T MISS THE WOOD FOR THE TREES 
by Dr Taimur Rahman
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http://tinyurl.com/pymu22u
The Daily Times, July 08, 2013 

If this rejection of political Islam catches on in the Muslim world, it can lead to a complete historical ideological shift

The entire debate on the dramatic events in Egypt this last week is now centred on the military intervention that has occurred on the side of the protestors. Those who support right-wing politics, though they have never earnestly supported democracy, have no hesitation in characterising recent events as a crime against democracy and a restoration of the military dictatorships of the past. Liberals, who condemn any form of military intervention in politics, feel that President Muhammad Morsi should have been allowed to complete his term, and join the right in denouncing the coup. In my opinion much of this debate misses the wood for the trees.

The Arab spring woke millions of people to political life. It swept aside military dictatorships that had existed for three, sometimes four decades. But it did not usher in progressive or liberal forces. On the contrary, nearly everywhere the Arab spring brought to power and prominence the religious right. In Tunisia the Islamist party Ennahda came to power; in Egypt, the Ikhwan ul Muslameen; in Libya and Syria, the rightwing National Transitional Council and Syrian National Council, respectively, were helped by the west to come to power or contend for it. Meanwhile, the monarchies were completely untouched by the Arab Spring. Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain continued much as before. In sum, the Arab Spring basically undermined all the secular governments in the Middle East and led to the whole scale victory of right-wing elements across the Middle East.

Turkish protests against Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP gave the first inkling that this was not where the pendulum of history was coming to a rest. Large-scale secular protests demonstrated that there were significant pockets of resistance to the right wing. But that is Turkey, a country with a longer and deeper history of secular development than any Muslim country. It could just have been Turkish exceptionalism. Except that it wasn’t.

Egypt followed soon in its wake. Morsi, who had won 13.23 million votes in 2012, became so unpopular in a year that 22 million people signed a petition for his resignation. During his year in office, food prices in Egypt doubled, at IMF’s insistence fuel subsidies for millions of the poorest Egyptians were removed. He supported NATO intervention in Syria. And he signed Free Trade Agreements with Europe that led to austerity and unemployment. Typical of all religious fundamentalists, Egypt saw rising tensions with people of other sects and religions. He accumulated vast dictatorial powers to his own office.

Finally, approximately 17 million came out on the streets against him. BBC called it the largest protest in the history of mankind. Egypt became ungovernable. Mohamed ElBaradei, leader of the secular opposition movement called Tamarod (Rebellion), argues that had the army not intervened there would have been a civil war. In the wake of Egypt, Tunisia has also begun a Tamarod movement against Ennahda.

Perhaps it is too early to say but it would be something if the protests in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia were the beginnings of the second phase of the Arab Spring, a phase that is leading to the increasing disenchantment with political Islam and a new movement for secular democracy in the Arab world. If so, the birth and victory of such a movement will not proceed in a straight geometric progression within the framework of parliamentary democracy. It simply cannot because what is under contestation is not who will be in power but the rules of the game itself.

Turning back to Egypt, I share the views of Pakistani liberals and progressives who are opposed to military dictatorship in Egypt. Thankfully, in Egypt today the Supreme Court is passing a draft law on parliamentary elections and preparing for parliamentary and presidential polls. If this goes through, and the strongest guarantee that it will go through are the millions of people mobilised to fight for their rights in Egypt, the military intervention will prove only to be a temporary measure.

Where I part company with them is that they focus almost exclusively on the temporary intervention of the military and fail to see the much bigger story. The bigger story, in my view, is the large-scale rejection of political Islam. If this rejection of political Islam catches on in the Muslim world, it can lead to a complete historical ideological shift, destroying all remnants of semi-medieval thinking and opening the doors to progressive development.

The writer is an Assistant Professor at LUMS

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32. FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT: DANCING EGYPT'S REVOLUTION
by Judith Mackrell
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The Guardian, 10 July 2013

Morsi denounced dance and dancers alike. Conservative Islamic parties launched crackdowns. Will culture fare any better in the new Egypt?

In the days since Egypt's President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood party were abruptly ejected from power, the world's attention has been focused on the violent events in Tahrir Square and beyond, and the machinations of the country's military as it seeks to control power.

But one of the most fascinating aspects of the story – little reported in the face of wider events – is how it reflects Egypt's cultural politics. Although their list of grievances is long, it's perhaps surprising to hear that one of the many factors galvanising the opposition was the sacking of key figures in the Egyptian arts by the culture minister Alaa Abdel-Aziz.

One of them was Inas Abdel-Dayem, the much-respected director of Cairo Opera House: and as artists and management demonstrated their protest, many believed that it was the ballet, even more than the opera, that had been targeted by the creeping "brotherhoodisation" of Egyptian culture.

Morsi's own disapproval of dance is well-known. Eight years ago he made a statement on television denouncing dance as a violation not only of sharia law but of the Egyptian constitution. Under his regime, attacks on dance and dancers became commonplace. Some weeks ago, a ballet school was threatened with closure by a member of the ultra-conservative Nour party on the grounds that dancing could inflame public "indecency", and that ballet is "the art of nudity, spreading immorality and obscenity among people". On an informal level, too, members of the Muslin Brotherhood began taking it upon themselves to break up public dance performances – including, last month, this rather bland ballet-styled cabaret show in Cairo.

Of course ballet is a problem for any regime that wants to govern by strict sharia law. It is a western secular import, it puts women's bodies on blatant public view, it sanctions their intimate physical contact with men. Dance in general is anathema to this fundamentalist school of Islam, given its celebration of the beauty and unlicensed energy of the female body.

But it's precisely that energy that can also make dance a powerful force for change. In Iran, women have been banned from dancing in public ever since the 1979 revolution. Yet an active "underground" dance scene now flourishes, even if it has to categorise itself as "rhythmical movement" or "sport", to avoid prosecution. One popular manifestation is the number of young Iranian women developing skills in hip-hop and parkour (free running). This fast, free expressive form of movement is both a symbolic and practical act of defiance against a culture where young women are regularly and aggressively harassed on the street

Equally moving is the dance project that was organised two years ago by Anahita Razmi, a half-Iranian artist based in London. She was inspired in part by the violent political protests of 2009, when many young men and women in Tehran literally shouted their anger from the tops of houses and apartment blocks. But in paying homage to that protest, Razmi was using the cool minimalist filter of Trisha Brown's 1971 work Roof Piece, for which Brown had placed herself and 11 other dancers on the roofs of downtown Manhattan lofts, their bodies silhouetted against the skyline. Back then, Brown's interest had been liberating dance from conventional theatre: in Razmi's project, though, the Iranian dancers were making a far braver, more radical statement of emancipation – strong women dancing freely, high above the heads of a disapproving state.

Dance has always been a lightning conductor for religious and moral attitudes. Fundamentalists of many schools and cultures have condemned it as the expression of humanity's baser, more turbulent and sinful self. Back in the high puritan era of 17th-century England, when Oliver Cromwell tried to ban all forms of public dance, from court masques and ballets to maypole dancing, the effect of the prohibition was to create a generation for whom dance represented sin. When Charles II was restored to the throne, reopened the theatres and encouraged dance and music, Samuel Pepys felt he might be putting himself in moral jeopardy, the first time he tried a few dance steps at a party: "at last we fell to dancing, the first time that ever I did in my life" he wrote on April 10 1661, "[and] I did wonder to see myself to do".

Pepys' fear of the moral fallout from dancing was confirmed when he and his wife Elizabeth took professional lessons, and the sexual attraction they formed for their respective female and male tutors created a period of turbulent jealousy (albeit one of many) in their marriage. Pepys was relieved finally when all the capering stopped. He could forget about mastering the tricky manoeuvres of the "coranto" or courante, and at last fall "to quiet of mind and business again". In Egypt, tragically, quiet of mind and business have become very distant goals.

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SEE ALSO:
BROTHERS AND OFFICERS: A HISTORY OF PACTS
(Jan 25 2013) by Wael Eskandar 
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/9765/brothers-and-officers_a-history-of-pacts

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33. TURKISH WOMEN DEFEND THEIR LIFESTYLE (Mehveş Evin)
Milliyet - Turkey
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Women have played a central role in the protests against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
According to the opinion research institute Konda, over half of those who came out to protect the trees in Istanbul's Gezi Park were women. For the conservative daily Milliyet, if so many women are taking part, "it's also because they are at the heart of criticism regarding the current lifestyle: all the talk of families with at least three children, the amendments to the abortion law, the 'sermons' of the religious youth, the perception of women as child-bearing machines and the fact that
you can only get the morning-after pill with a prescription. To say nothing of the never-ending violence, rapes and harassment. All of this directly affects - and alarms - women. Mr Prime Minister, not only has much been said about women, all this talk has also made them take to the streets!" (02/07/2013) +++
http://cadde.milliyet.com.tr/2013/07/02/YazarDetay/1730698/kadinlarin-devrimi

Kadınların devrimi
02.07.2013 - Milliyet - Turkey
by Mehveş Evin (mehves.evin at milliyet.com.tr) 

::Book Review::
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34. WHAT HAPPENED TO INDIA’S ECONOMIC MIRACLE? THE ELEPHANT UNTETHERED.
by William Dalrymple
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(The New Statesman, 5 July 2013)

An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions
Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen
Penguin, 448pp, £20

Patience, wrote Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary, is a “minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue”. The economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze quote Bierce in their new book on the Indian economy, An Uncertain Glory:

India has seen a lot of this alleged virtue. There has been an extraordinary tolerance of inequalities, stratification and caste divisions . . . There has been the silent resignation of Indian women. There has been patient endurance of the lack of accountability and the proliferation of corruption. And – of course – there has been adaptive submission by the underdogs of society to continuing misery, exploitation and indignity.

An Uncertain Glory is a major work by two of the world’s most perceptive and intelligent India-watchers writing today. In it, they examine the uncertain future of the country’s economy at a moment when initial optimism about the spectacular rise of “New India” is giving way to more a nuanced understanding of the difficulties that still lie ahead.

Sen is among the greatest minds of our time. A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, a former master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and now the Thomas W Lamont University Professor at Harvard, he is regarded with such reverence in academia that he has probably been awarded more honorary degrees than any other person alive: there were about 100 on his CV at the last count.

His co-writer, Drèze, though lesser known in this country, is also a celebrated development economist. Of Belgian origin, he became an Indian after decades of living in the country and has taught at both the London and Delhi Schools of Economics. He is regarded as one of the most knowledgeable writers on famine, child health and poverty, on which subjects he advised the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, before resigning in despair when he saw that all his suggestions were being ignored. This is the third book Sen and Drèze have co-written and is by far the most important and chilling.

Their thesis is simple: India’s failure to equal the success of China’s hyper-development is due in large part to the failure of the state to provide “essential public services – a failing that depresses living standards and is a persistent drag on growth”:

Inequality is high in both countries, but China has done far more than India to raise life expectancy, expand general education and secure health care for its people. India has elite schools of varying degrees of excellence for the privileged, but among all Indians seven or older, nearly one in every five males and one in every three females are illiterate . . . India’s health-care system is an unregulated mess. The poor have to rely on low-quality – and sometimes exploitative – private medical care, because there isn’t enough decent public care. While China devotes 2.7 per cent of its gross domestic product to government spending on health care, India allots 1.2 per cent.

An Uncertain Glory comes at a time when observers worldwide have begun to recalibrate their expectations of India’s future. The economic boom, which began in 1991 and took off in the late 1990s, provoked a miniboom of New India books, some far better than others. First off the blocks was Gurcharan Das, a former CEO of Procter & Gamble, whose India Unbound in 2001 became an international bestseller and made a convincing case that the future was India’s: all that was needed was further deregulation and a stripping away of the economic coils – the “licence Raj” – that were tethering the Indian elephant to the ground and the country’s future as an economic superpower was assured.

The statistics were impressive: India was reportedly training a million engineering graduates a year, against 100,000 each in the US and Europe, and the country was said to stand third in technical and scientific capacity – behind the US and Japan but well ahead of China. Between 1991 and 2001, as the Indian economy trebled in size, the country’s IT sector alone earned almost $50bn a year, mostly in export revenues. Part of those profits were spent buying prestigious foreign businesses – for example, the muchtrumpeted acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata Motors.

Some of this continues today. Average incomes were projected to continue doubling every ten years. The number of mobile phone users has jumped from three million in 2000 to 100 million in 2005 and 929 million in 2012. The number of television channels rose from one in 1991 to 150 in 2007 and more than 500 today. In 2006, 23 Indians appeared on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires; this year, the figure had more than doubled to 55.

In the wake of this amazing growth, there followed two more books on the subject from Das and a series of notable New India memoirs and studies from authors such as Patrick French, Anand Giridharadas and Akash Kapur. One of the best was a remarkable look at India’s economic prospects entitled In Spite of the Gods by Edward Luce, the articulate and wonderfully literate former New Delhi correspondent of the Financial Times. “Economic futurologists at the CIA, in the investment banks, at western universities and in the business press all agree that China and India will at some stage in the 21st century come to dominate the global economy,” he wrote, almost a decade ago. “In Washington’s various intelligence estimates, China will overtake the United States between 2030 and 2040 and India will overtake the US by roughly 2050, as measured in dollar terms.” According to Luce, opinion was only really divided “on the speed with which the future will materialise”: “Add or subtract a couple of points from India’s annual growth rates and it could overtake the United States as soon as 2040 or as late as 2090.”

As the economic climate has become chillier in the past five years, however, there has been a major revision of expectations and the books emerging more recently have begun to reflect that. In 2009, Dipankar Gupta published The Caged Phoenix: Can India Fly? The book was the first to look closely at the structural limits to the Indian growth story. Gupta wrote that despite the promises of independence and liberalisation, India continued to remain caged in backwardness. Why was the growth story not translating into development? Why was the much-vaunted human resource capital not taking India rapidly towards excellence? How could deprivation and prosperity live so easily side by side?

As the economy has continued to slow since 2010, the mood has grown steadily more pessimistic. India’s growth rate has now sunk from 9.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2010 to about 5 per cent a year, slipping from the world’s second-fastest-growing economy to tenth place in this index. Other economic indicators are equally alarming: public borrowing has quadrupled in the past five years, the national deficit is growing, inflation is high and the value of the rupee has plummeted by 20 per cent in the course of the summer. In a few years, India has gone from what seemed to be imminent world economic domination – the maharaja of the Brics – to what the emerging market analyst Ruchir Sharma, the author of last year’s bestseller Breakout Nations, has called merely a “50-50 bet”.

The slowing of India’s economy, argued Sharma, was partly due to a wider global malaise that was outside its control: almost all of the main emerging markets were growing at around 7 per cent between 2003 and 2008; only three contracted. India did well to have an average growth rate of 8.9 per cent during these boom years but it was hardly a surprise. Thanks to the global recession, growth rates are down across the board. This year, China is expected to grow 7.7 per cent and Brazil less than 2.8 per cent. India still has a good chance of success, wrote Sharma, but no better a chance than that of many other emerging economies.

Into this contested field, Sen and Drèze walk with the steady tread of umpires emerging on to a pitch after a shout of “LBW!” Their book is not journalistic like Giridharadas’s India Calling, nor anecdotal like French’s India, nor a literary memoir like Kapur’s sophisticated look at a changing South India in India Becoming. It does not offer a bold, new way of looking at poverty like Abhijit V Banerjee’s and Esther Duflo’s remarkable Poor Economics. What it does, with a rare clarity, is provide a fabulously comprehensible deployment of complex data and lay out the factual basis of where India stands now and what it needs to do if it is to reach its full potential. It shows how far India has moved on from the time of the Raj, when average life expectancy in India, in 1931, was only 27. Today, it’s 66. The female literacy rate in India has likewise gone up from 9 per cent in 1951 to 65 per cent today.

On the other hand, Sen and Drèze show that “a quarter of the Indian population . . . remain effectively illiterate”. Physical infrastructure is badly neglected: “The general state of public services in India remains absolutely dismal, and the country’s health and education systems in particular have been severely messed up.” Even today, a third of Indians do not have electricity, compared to 1 per cent in China. “Half of Indian homes remain without toilets, forcing half of all Indians to practise open defecation.” Wages in manufacturing in China have grown by 12 per cent since 2000, compared with 2.5 per cent in India, and 90 per cent of Indians still work in what is referred to as “the informal sector”. While India has climbed rapidly up the ladder of economic growth rates, it has fallen behind Nepal and Bangladesh in the scale of social indicators. Brazil, with much slower economic growth, has a far better record of poverty reduction. India remains an oddity among the Bric countries: “India’s per capita GDP is less than half of China’s, one third of Brazil’s and one fourth of Russia’s.”

This is the most shocking part of the book. Every year, more children die in India than anywhere else in the world: 1.7 million children under the age of five, largely from easily preventable illnesses such as diarrhoea. Of those who do survive until the age of five, 48 per cent are stunted as a result of a lack of nutrients: child malnutrition in India is higher than in Eritrea.

In this respect, write Sen and Drèze, “South Asia fares distinctly worse than sub-Saharan Africa. More than 40 per cent of South Asian children (and a slightly higher proportion of Indian children) are underweight in terms of WHO norms, compared with 25 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Likewise, the most basic health measure that any government can provide for its people is to immunise very young children but, in India, only 43.5 per cent of children are completely immunised, compared to 73.1 per cent in Bangladesh: “India is falling behind every other South Asian country, with the exception of Pakistan, in terms of social indicators.” For instance, life expectancy was the same in India and in Bangladesh in 1990 but today it is “four years higher in Bangladesh than India, 69 and 65 respectively. Similarly, child mortality, a tragic indicator, was estimated to be about 20 per cent higher in Bangladesh than India in 1990, but has fallen rapidly in Bangladesh to now being 25 per cent lower than in India by 2011.”

In sub-Saharan Africa, only eight out of 25 countries have immunisation figures as bad as India’s. India’s adult literacy is not quite the lowest in the world but, at 65 per cent, it is the same as in Malawi and Sudan. Adult literacy in China, by comparison, is 91 per cent. So bad is the situation that Sen and Drèze go as far as stating that Indian democracy is “seriously compromised by the extent and form of social inequality”.

Improving education lies at the heart of solving the problem. India’s underperformance, they write, can be traced to a failure to learn from the examples of so-called Asian economic development, in which rapid expansion of human capability is both a goal in itself and an integral element in achieving rapid growth. Japan pioneered that approach, starting after the Meiji restoration in 1868, when it resolved to achieve a fully literate society within a few decades. As Kido Takayoshi, one of the leaders of that reform, explained: “Our people are no different from the Americans or Europeans of today; it is all a matter of education or lack of education.”

Indians hugely value this, too, but effective public education remains out of the reach of millions. The private sector is often excellent but state schools – all that is available for most ordinary Indians – remain abysmal.

In a recent article, Aravind Adiga wrote that “the greatest danger to India’s future” was not Pakistan “but overconfidence”. He is right. As Sen and Drèze point out at the end of their magnificent study, democratic politics does offer opportunities for the most deprived Indians to demand “a rapid and definitive removal of their extraordinary deprivation”. However, as well as political organisation, what is also vital is “a clear-headed understanding of the extensive reach and peculiar nature of deprivation and inequality in India. This is surely one of the principal challenges facing India today.”

By providing the raw data on that poverty and by presenting it in such a palatable format, Sen and Drèze have made a major contribution to finding a way towards solving the desperate situation faced by India’s many millions of underdogs.

William Dalrymple’s “Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan” is published by Bloomsbury (£25)

[The above is also available at: http://www.sacw.net/article4977.html]

:: Book Review ::
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35. Just Around the Corner
‘On Sal Mal Lane,’ by Ru Freeman
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Published: Sunday Book Review / The New York Times, June 21, 2013

Brenda Carpenter
Ru Freeman
By CRISTINA GARCÍA

Before reading this rich, sensory novel, my literary familiarity with Sri Lanka came mostly from Michael Ondaatje’s rollicking memoir, “Running in the Family.” But it was enough of an introduction, with all its extravagant, hilarious dysfunctions, to pique my interest in the island nation. Ru Freeman’s assured second novel is a much quieter yet rewarding portrait of a community of families on a dead-end road in Colombo, the country’s capital. They are a mixed lot on Sal Mal Lane: Sinhalese, Tamils and Burghers, descendants of European colonizers. Down this road live the comfortably middle class and the dirt poor; the sick, the heartbroken and viciously prejudiced; youngsters vivacious with talent, or misshapen by abuse; and a few residents in their middle and later years who are roused by the arrival of the Heraths, a family with four lively children.

It is the Heraths, and especially their children — Suren, Rashmi, Nihil and little Devi — who are at the heart of this generous story. Freeman seems to suggest throughout that no one on this lane is wholly bad, only scarred by hurt and misunderstanding. And though we are privy to the inner lives of the adults and their litany of sorrows — Old Mrs. Joseph’s husband committed suicide over an adulterous affair; her son, Raju, is a deformed, would-be bodybuilder; the Bollings, barely scraping by, are plagued by a past calamity — and we receive periodic news of growing political turmoil in the country, Freeman never strays far from the neighborhood’s youngest inhabitants. They are wondrous to behold, with their intelligence, imagination and innocence. I don’t know that I’ve seen children more opulently depicted in fiction since Dickens. “They stood together even when they were apart,” Freeman writes. “There was never a single Herath child in a conversation, there were four; every word uttered, every challenge made, every secret kept, together.”

The youngest of the Herath siblings, Devi, is a whirlwind of energy and defiance — “the picture of impenitence.” Impulsive, and with an unlucky birth date, she is the street’s beloved mascot, and the source of her brother Nihil’s paralyzing fear for her safety. “I want Devi to grow up to be 50 soon so I can stop worrying about her,” he says. A kindly neighbor coaxes him to stop watching over Devi and return to his dreams of cricket stardom. Suren, the oldest sibling, is intent on thwarting his mother’s plans for an engineering career for him in favor of a musician’s life. Under his influence, even the dutiful Rashmi evolves from a mini-version of Mrs. Herath — with her “certain aura of reprobation” — to a much less compliant daughter. Their stories are brilliantly woven into the fabric of the neighborhood, changing its inhabitants forever.

As she did in her graceful first novel, “A Disobedient Girl,” Freeman delineates the divergent worlds of young and old with great sensitivity. Though the two groups often clash and at times awkwardly overlap, the divide is never fully breached. “Ah, the conversations between parents and children, the way they unfold, always with good intentions, rarely with complete honesty,” she writes. The lane itself serves as a lushly riotous backdrop, with fragrant, shady sal mal trees and blooming roses, tumbledown walls and buses that roar down a nearby thoroughfare, including “the near-mythical 109, whose route nobody knew.” It is in and around this lane that the novel leisurely unfolds, with its intermittent, small-scale urgencies, with the children’s kite-flying and cricket playing, their tentative romances and grudges, their variety shows and bike riding, all heightened by their ignorance of the encroaching violence.

“On Sal Mal Lane” takes place over the five years (1979-83) auguring Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, and Freeman brings the particularities of that strife to vivid life, even if only Mr. Herath, a government official buried in his newspapers, is clued in about the turbulent times, imagining the C.I.A.’s hand in everything. Alas, the violence cannot be kept at bay forever, or so the narrator keeps reminding us, taunting us with the preordained tragedy to come.

If I were to have one quarrel with the novel, it would be with this omniscient, chummy narrative voice and its distinct, often opinionated perspective (“And who, you might ask, am I? I am nothing more than the air that passed through these homes, lingering in the verandas. . . . I am the road itself, upon whose bosom the children played”). Freeman’s narrator muscles her way (one suspects the narrator is female) into the tale, coloring it with too much foreshadowing, not trusting the details of the story to speak for themselves. It’s as if the narrator feels insecure about her ability to hold the reader’s attention without a steady stream of nudges, promises and intrusive asides. “Yes, we could blame Lucas,” Freeman writes, instructing us on one character’s role in the undoing of the Heraths, “but we would be wrong.” Or, referring to the scant news coverage of the country’s turmoil: “Their predictions of the future were nothing like the one that was coming. Not even close.” Elsewhere, the narrator comments on Nihil’s self-sacrificing decision to give up cricket practice in order to take care of his younger sister: “Sacrifice, no matter how pure the intention, can never guarantee outcomes, it merely lulls us into believing it can.”

Instead the novel soars when it permits the reader to surrender to its sensory beauty, language and humor. Who can resist the description of the bodybuilding Raju, who “usually walked with his head tilted sideways and hanging down as if he was helpfully exposing his neck to a tired executioner”? Or the unhappy achievements of his nephew-cum-nemesis, a street tough who enjoyed “cutting the clotheslines in his neighbors’ backyards and rejoicing in the way everything clean turned instantly muddy.” Or the “scruffy,” good-natured twin sisters, Dolly and Rose, the latter whose “big dream was to break the Guinness World Record for standing on one foot . . . a task that she felt was well within her sights.”

Freeman is also wonderfully deft at evoking the dawning globalism of a late-20th-century childhood — the popularity in Sri Lanka of the Hardy Boys and “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” of Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali, and pop songs by Culture Club and ABBA, U2 and the Beatles. Led by the increasingly rebellious Suren Herath, the children on Sal Mal Lane decide to stage a variety show that bedazzles the entire neighborhood — except, of course, Mrs. Herath, who views it as both a personal betrayal and a degradation of everything she holds dear. The performances range from a traditional Kandyan dance to a rousing rendition of “Yellow Submarine.”

When the much-promised violence finally arrives, the fallout from the political and ethnic turmoil on the people of Sal Mal Lane is skillfully, forcefully rendered. And it is a crushing heartbreak; many crushing heartbreaks. But these tragedies might have unleashed even more poignancy and power had we been spared the novel’s overbearing sense of menace, or been allowed the opportunity to question — or dare hope against — the inevitable harm.

Cristina García’s new novel is “King of Cuba.” She teaches creative writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.
A version of this review appeared in print on June 23, 2013, on page BR14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Just Around the Corner.

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South Asia Citizens Wire
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