SACW - 9-10 Apr 2014 | Bangladesh - India: Border killing / Pakistan the CII / India: BJP and the nuclear button; Tactical voting videos; Fehmida Riaz: 'Tum Bilkul Hum Jaisay Niklay / UK Report: Avaaz and Monitoring Group Expose Narendra Modi / UK: what was at stake in the miners' strike / Jane Goodall / Rwanda

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 9-10 April 2014 - No. 2816 
[year 16]
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Contents:
1. Bangladesh - India : Border killing continues (Editorial, New Age)
2. Pakistan: The state and the CII | Sabina Khan
3. India: What lies beneath, what lies ahead | Ananya Vajpeyi
4. India: BJP's MONEY-FESTO – MODI-FESTO's Understanding of Environment
5. The 2014 Vienna Declaration on Freedom of Information and Expression
6. India: School is not a battleground for religion! | Babu Gogineni
7. Robert Fisk: Sinister efforts to minimise Japanese war crimes
8. India: Varanasi ki Vyatha - a poem in Hindi by Nand Kishore Nandan
9. The other Taliban | Jawed Naqvi
10. Book Review of CM Naim's The Muslim League in Barabanki | K Babar
11. India 2014 Elections: Modi - Plumbing the low depths | Praful Bidwai
12. History of nuclear accidents illustrates absurdity & irresponsibility of nuclear weapons
13. India: The fine art of fact-fudging | Javed Anand
14. India: Press Statement by Academics, Artists and Concerned Citizens | 5 April 2014 
15. Audio Recording: Fehmida Riaz's Poem 'Tum Bilkul Hum Jaisay Niklay' [You have turned out just like us]
16. UK: Investigative Report by Avaaz Network and Monitoring Group Exposes Narendra Modi
17. Music Video: Modi a message to you
18. India - Tactical Voting Videos: Vote Wisely! 
19. Selections from Communalism Watch:
 - Video: Has Narendra Modi been given a clean chit?
 - Riot poison in sugar bowl: Report from Muzaffarnagar before 2014 elections
 - India 2014 elections: Media magnet and owner of Zee TV newtork openly calls for voting for BJP alliance
 - India: Video of Delhi University's ABVP members who are university's student union officials putting soot on the face a professor for expressing opposition to Modi
 - Gujarat 2002 Violence and the struggle for Justice: Video Recording of Manoj Mitta and Teesta Setalvad on 6 April 2014
 - India: Amit Shah’s speeches suggest that hate remains a key mobilising tool for the BJP
 - India: AAP's refusal to declare support for gay rights in its manifesto
 - Narendra Modi, a man with a massacre on his hands, is not the reasonable choice for India | Aditya Chakrabortty
 - The Past As Present - Romila Thapar's latest book challenges the Hindutva interpretation of history
 - Know Your NaMo: Like 'Father', like 'son' ? | Subhash Gatade
 - India Text of Election Commission Notice to Amit Shah re his hate speech - 7 April 2014
 - 2014 BJP's election Manifesto
 - Gujarat not riot-free since 2002: Here’s the proof

::: FULL TEXT :::
20. Saffron spread - The RSS has grand plans for Nepal if Modi becomes India’s prime minister | Yubaraj Ghimire
21. Indian election alarm as BJP raises prospect of nuclear weapons rethink | Jason Burke
22. Nuclear Weapons, No First Use and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party | Binoy Kampmark
23. Decolonisation of the Mind: A question for Lord Macaulay’s children | Priyamvada Gopal
24. In conversation with… Jane Goodall | Henry Nicholls
25. UK: Now we see what was really at stake in the miners' strike | Seumas Milne
26. Rwanda : le plus grand fiasco moral et géopolitique de la Françafrique | Raphael Glucksmann 

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1. BANGLADESH - INDIA : BORDER KILLING CONTINUES (Editorial, New Age)
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It is worth noting that the Indian government and the BSF top brass have time and again assured and reassured their Bangladesh counterparts of effective steps against border killing. However, such steps have been hardly forthcoming thus far.
http://www.sacw.net/article8262.html

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2. PAKISTAN: THE STATE AND THE CII | Sabina Khan
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Within a decade of the nation's inception, the 1956 Constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic. It also deemed Islam the official religion of the country. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the patron of the 1973 Constitution, took it a step further and declared Islam the state religion. An amendment was also added to the Constitution a year later which proclaimed Ahmadis non-Muslims. Bhutto's government went on to make Islamiat compulsory in (...) 
http://sacw.net/article8241.html

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3. INDIA: WHAT LIES BENEATH, WHAT LIES AHEAD | Ananya Vajpeyi
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As India enters its 2014 general election to constitute the 16th Lok Sabha, the spectacle of prominent commentators adjusting their views towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi unfolds before our eyes with escalating frequency and vivid clarity. These adjustments — to use a term that is more descriptive than judgmental, at least for starters — take a variety of forms, and come from a range of observers, analysts and experts.
http://www.sacw.net/article8275.html

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4. INDIA: BJP's MONEY-FESTO – MODI-FESTO's Understanding of Environment
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BJP's crucial understanding and concerned about environment is mentioned at page 29 “Decision-making on environment clearances will be made transparent as well as time-bound.” The word environment clearance is highlighted in bold which clearly reflects that Mr. Modi's Money-Festo's main concern is speedy clearance for the industries and not the environment. The other word ‘time-bound' is also clearly reflects that Mr. Modi's Money-Festo's main concerns is speedy clearance for the industries and not the environment. To make it very clear on the same page the Money-Festo further states “Frame the environment laws in a manner that provides no scope for confusion and will lead to speedy clearance of the proposals without delay.” This well spell-out assurance of Mr. Modi is to the industrialist that they should not worry about environment laws because Mr. Modi will remove all their hurdles so that just by filing some papers and giving some vague assurance they will get the clearance. This is the “Gujarat Model of Development” which led Gujarat State to become number one in pollution.
http://www.sacw.net/article8260.html

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5. THE 2014 VIENNA DECLARATION ON FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AND EXPRESSION
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We, the speakers of the Vienna 2014 International Conference “Freedom of Information Under Pressure. Control – Crisis – Culture” (comprised of international academics, media practitioners, librarians, experts of open culture and public space, activists, critical citizens, lawyers and policy makers), sign the following Declaration on Freedom of Information and Expression
http://www.sacw.net/article8259.html

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6. INDIA: SCHOOL IS NOT A BATTLEGROUND FOR RELIGION!
by Babu Gogineni
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Schools are for education, not indoctrination.
A school is not a place of prayer, it is an institution of learning.
Schools are not battle grounds for religions or politics.
Schools are not recruiting grounds for religions or politics.
No Saraswati Puja, No Namaaz, No Hosannas in School!
http://www.sacw.net/article8258.html

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7. ROBERT FISK: SINISTER EFFORTS TO MINIMISE JAPANESE WAR CRIMES
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(Via dilip simeon's blog)
I had to go to Californiato learn that Michiko Shiota Gingery, who lives in the Central Parkarea of Glendale City, suffers “feelings of exclusion, discomfort and anger” because her local authority unveiled a memorial to the innocent Asian women turned into sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army. These “comfort women”, the Japanese military's repulsive euphemism for the victims they turned upon with such sexual sadism, were gang-raped, used as prostitutes and often butchered by Japanese (...) 
http://www.sacw.net/article8253.html

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8. INDIA: VARANASI KI VYATHA - A POEM IN HINDI by Nand Kishore Nandan
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http://www.sacw.net/article8257.html

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9. THE OTHER TALIBAN | Jawed Naqvi
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The world at large is rightly fearful of Taliban-like fanatics getting hold of Pakistan's nuclear assets. The same analysts, however, have not paid heed to the possibility of a nuclear nightmare in Delhi should a right-wing Hindutva regime take charge next month. In my view, the adventurist quotient in the latter scenario is no less disturbing than the palpable terror of bigots taking over Pakistan.
http://www.sacw.net/article8256.html
    
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10. BOOK REVIEW OF CM NAIM'S THE MUSLIM LEAGUE IN BARABANKI
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K Babar reviews Indian-American scholar C M Naim's new collection of essays
http://sacw.net/article8255.html

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11. INDIA 2014 ELECTIONS: MODI - PLUMBING THE LOW DEPTHS
by Praful Bidwai
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The BJP has again shown its deep antipathy towards Muslims. It hasn't fielded a single Muslim candidate in Uttar Pradesh. Worse, it has given tickets to three men accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots. Modi's candidature from Varanasi is also meant to signify his claim to a “pan-Hindu” identity, from Somnath to Kashi.
http://sacw.net/article8254.html

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12. HISTORY OF NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS ILLUSTRATES ABSURDITY & IRRESPONSIBILITY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
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Reviewing in the London Review of Books Eric Schlosser's Command and Control, a book about Cold War nuclear weaponry accidents, noted Harvard sociologist of science Steven Shapin concluded that when it comes to nuclear weapons, "the rational attitude sometimes looks like irrational anxiety."[1]
http://sacw.net/article8252.html

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13. INDIA: THE FINE ART OF FACT-FUDGING | Javed Anand
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review of Manoj Mitta's recently released, hard-hitting book on SIT's 'fiction of fact-finding' in the Zakia Jafri petition
http://sacw.net/article8251.html

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14. INDIA: PRESS STATEMENT BY ACADEMICS, ARTISTS AND CONCERNED CITIZENS | 5 April 2014 
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http://sacw.net/article8204.html

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15. AUDIO RECORDING: FEHMIDA RIAZ'S HINDUSTANI POEM 'TUM BILKUL HUM JAISAY NIKLAY' [You have turned out just like us]
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The Pakistani feminist poet Fehmida Riaz through this wonderful poem in Hindustani suggests how India with its Hindutva religious right on the upswing is turning up to be on the same road as Pakistan. This recording was made on 5 April 2014 at a PIPFPD public event in New Delhi. This recording is part of the audio collection of South Asia Citizens Web Archive (sacw.net)

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16. UK: INVESTIGATIVE REPORT BY AVAAZ NETWORK AND MONITORING GROUP EXPOSES NARENDRA MODI
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Awaaz Network and 'The Monitoring Group have jointly published the report 'Narenda Modi Exposed: challenging the myths surrounding the BJP's prime ministerial candidate'. A meeting in London at the British Parliament in February 2014 re the communal violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 explained the issues raised in the above report. A press release 'Bring Modi to justice' is also published here along with the report
http://www.sacw.net/article8228.html

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17. MUSIC VIDEO: MODI A MESSAGE TO YOU
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The Ska Vengers 
http://www.sacw.net/article8227.html

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18. INDIA - TACTICAL VOTING VIDEOS: VOTE WISELY! 
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Two short videos (in English and Hindi) asking voters in India vote against communalism and to vote to save democracy
http://www.sacw.net/article8222.html

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19. SELECTIONS FROM COMMUNALISM WATCH
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Video: Has Narendra Modi been given a clean chit?
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/video-has-narendra-modi-been-given.html

Riot poison in sugar bowl: Report from Muzaffarnagar before 2014 elections
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/riot-poison-in-sugar-bowl-report-from.html

India 2014 elections: Media magnet and owner of Zee TV newtork openly calls for voting for BJP alliance
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-media-magnet-and-owner-of-zee-tv.html

India: Video of Delhi University's ABVP members who are university's student union officials putting soot on the face a professor for expressing opposition to Modi
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-video-of-delhi-universitys-abvp.html

Gujarat 2002 Violence and the struggle for Justice: Video Recording of Manoj Mitta and Teesta Setalvad on 6 April 2014
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/gujarat-2002-violence-and-struggle-for.html

India: Amit Shah’s speeches suggest that hate remains a key mobilising tool for the BJP
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-amit-shahs-speeches-suggest-that.html

India: AAP's refusal to declare support for gay rights in its manifesto
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-aaps-refusal-to-declare-support.html

Narendra Modi, a man with a massacre on his hands, is not the reasonable choice for India | Aditya Chakrabortty
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/narendra-modi-man-with-massacre-on-his.html

The Past As Present - Romila Thapar's latest book challenges the Hindutva interpretation of history
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-past-as-present-romila-thapars.html

Know Your NaMo: Like 'Father', like 'son' ? | Subhash Gatade
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/know-your-namo-like-father-like-son.html

India Text of Election Commission Notice to Amit Shah re his hate speech - 7 April 2014
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/india-text-of-election-commission.html

2014 BJP's election Manifesto
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/2014-bjps-election-manifesto.html

Gujarat not riot-free since 2002: Here’s the proof
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/04/gujarat-not-riot-free-since-2002-heres.html


::: FULL TEXT :::
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20. SAFFRON SPREAD - THE RSS HAS GRAND PLANS FOR NEPAL IF MODI BECOMES INDIA’S PRIME MINISTER
by Yubaraj Ghimire
=========================================
(Indian Express- April 7, 2014)
The RSS has grand plans for Nepal if Modi becomes India’s prime minister. 

In February 2005, VHP leader Ashok Singhal stood firmly by the then king, Gyanendra,when he took over all executive powers, promising to end “terrorism”, bring democracy on track and hand back powers to political parties eventually. Singhal, however, failed to bring the RSS and BJP around to his view on Nepal, and watched helplessly when Nepal transformed into a “secular republic”, with active support from the Indian government.

Singhal has apparently been down all these years, but resurfaced in Nepal with an aggressive agenda to restore its lost status as a “Hindu nation”. On his arrival last week in eastern Nepal’s Chatara Dham, which is hosting a “Kumbh Mela” for the first time, prominent parliamentarian Pawan Sharda gave him a hero’s welcome and touched his feet. The VHP leader announced that Modi’s assumption of the prime minister’s responsibility in India will lead to Nepal’s return to Hindu status.

Chatara Kumbh has already attracted a huge number of sadhus from India, a large number of them pro-BJP, and some known to be affiliated to the Congress. But both groups seem to believe that Nepal was declared a secular country in haste “under influence from European countries, and their churches operating in Nepal.”

“It was the United States and the European Union that were responsible for Nepal, the world’s only Hindu Kingdom, being turned into a secular state”, Singhal said. “Some leader like Modi has to appear on the scene here and counter all these external activities.” Singhal’s return to Nepal comes almost nine years after his previous political attempts apparently failed. But the leading player of the Ayodhya movement that saw the demolition of the Babri Masjid way back in December 1992 appeared as militant as before, asserting that he will mobilise people and prepare them for any kind of action, any sacrifice, to have Nepal officially declared the world’s only Hindu nation again.

Singhal was silent on the issue of monarchy. But Chatara Kumbh will be the venue where the deposed king, Gyanendra Shah, and Singhal will meet. Singhal seems to have a large agenda for Nepal, including the setting up of around 7,000 “Ekal Vidhyalayas”, schools run by the Hindu Swayam Sevak Sangh, the RSS outfit in Nepal. The RSS has deputed more than a dozen pracharaks (full timers) to Nepal to fulfil its agenda, and if Singhal is to be believed, if Modi becomes prime minister, it will have some “much desired results”.

Nepal’s political class, including the ruling coalition, understandably is silent on India’s electoral prospects, but they know that the outcome would not be without impact. The ruling coalition has enjoyed all cooperation from the Manmohan Singh-led government during the past eight years of radical changes, and four years of failed endeavour to write the much-promised constitution and institutionalise those changes. The pro-monarchy forces as well as those opposed to radical changes favour Modi, hoping that he will at least have India’s Nepal policy reviewed.

Since 1996, the year the Nepali Maoists waged war against the state, demanding the abolition of the monarchy, India’s Union home ministry often talked about a “Compact Revolutionary Zone” (CRZ), connecting Tirupati in India with Pashupati in Nepal, which was being built by the Maoists of the two countries. The BJP was the most vocal party opposed to the perceived CRZ, demanding that the government crush it with state force if necessary. However, even though the government of India successfully mediated to bring the Nepali Maoists and seven political parties together in November 2005 against the monarchy, ostensibly for peace and democracy in Nepal, the Manmohan Singh government began targeting the Indian Maoists as the source of the “red menace” inside the country . But in all likelihood, it will be difficult, in the event of Modi becoming prime minister, for India to continue to work with the Maoists in Nepal, a clear central point of the UPA government.

In contrast, Modi’s electoral campaign envisages connecting Somnath (Gujarat), Vishwanath (Varanasi) and Pashupatinath (Nepal) to consolidate Hindus and integrate them culturally . While Modi is focusing more on “development”, maintaining silence on the issue of Hindutva during his election campaign so far, Singhal has more or less spoken on behalf of Modi beyond the border. “Why are Nepalis silent? They need a Modi here as well”, he said at a public function in Nepal.

Singhal has not only cashed in on the anger and frustration of the Nepalese people directed at their errant politicians, but also found an ideal opportunity to take on the Nepalese and Indian actors who together had favoured radical changes and launched a tirade against the VHP leader nine years ago. Right or wrong, Singhal has proved in his nearly seven-decade-long association with the RSS that he has enough patience and total dedication to the cause he takes up.

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21. INDIAN ELECTION ALARM AS BJP RAISES PROSPECT OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS RETHINK
by Jason Burke
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(The Guardian - 7 April 2014)

Hindu nationalist opposition party, which is tipped to win lower house majority, causes concern with manifesto

Narendra Modi and Rajnath Singh
Bharatiya Janata party leader Narendra Modi, right, and party president Rajnath Singh at the launch of the manifesto for the Indian elections. Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The Hindu nationalist opposition party tipped to win India's election has sparked concern with a manifesto which, though largely devoted to economic development, setss out uncompromising hardline positions on contentious issues and raises the prospect of a revision of the country's policy on use of its nuclear weapons.

The election, a six-week process which is expected to see more than 600 million people vote, started on Monday with millions in the country's remote north-east going to the polls

Surveys predict a big win for the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) – whose prime ministerial candidate is the controversial Narendra Modi – though not an absolute majority in the 545-seat lower house of the national assembly.

The long-awaited BJP manifesto includes hundreds of policy initiatives including bullet trains, investment in job creation, water connections for every household, increased local defence production and funds to boost the practice of yoga.

But it was commitments to draft a "uniform civil code" – legislation that would withdraw the rights of India's 150 million Muslims to follow their religion-based law – and to "explore all possibilities" to build a Hindu temple at the bitterly contested site in the northern town of Ayodhya, which drew most attention internationally.

The BJP also says it would move to end the special autonomous status accorded to Jammu and Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan former princedom. The manifesto includes a controversial promise to work for the return of Hindus who left Kashmir when a separatist and then increasingly Islamist insurgency took hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

However, it is the prospect of a revision of India's nuclear doctrine, whose central principle is that New Delhi would not be first to use atomic weapons in a conflict, that has worried many in the region and beyond. Party sources involved in drafting the document told Reuters the "no first use" policy introduced would be reconsidered. The policy was introduced after India, then under a BJP government, conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998. Pakistan, India's neighbour responded within weeks with nuclear tests of its own.

"For a long time there has been an assumption that India would not use nuclear weapons first. Given the existing tensions with Pakistan and the fact that those tensions are likely to rise as US troops leave Afghanistan [at the end of this year], this could well cause stress in Pakistan's security establishment which is really not something anyone [in Washington] desires," said Michael Kugelman, of the Woodrow Wilson International Center.

In an interview last month, Rajnath Singh, the BJP president, told the Guardian the party wanted cordial relations with "all countries in the world".

Though Indian elections are unpredictable, most analysts and all polls indicate a significant BJP win. Economic growth faltered three years ago and the Congress party, in power since 2004, has been hit by a series of graft scandals.

Along with its many pledges to improve the living standards of all Indians, the manifesto unequivocally sets out a nationalist agenda. "In a democracy, everyone is not only free, but also encouraged to voice his or her concerns … However, all this should happen within the framework of our constitution and with the spirit of 'India First'. We have to keep the nation at the forefront of our thoughts and actions. Any activity, which disrupts the integrity of the nation, cannot be in the interest of any segment of the society or any region of the country," it says.

One passage refers to the "power" which lies in " the people of India, in the inner sanctum sanctorum of Mother India" and explains that "what is needed is to ignite the spark and Mother India would rise in her full glory."

However, the manifesto also says the "BJP recognises the importance of diversity in Indian society, and the strength and vibrancy it adds to the nation. India constitutes of all its' people, irrespective of caste, creed, religion or sex."

Singh, the party's president, said the manifesto's release was not simply a formality but a "pledge".

The document gives a glimpse into internal tensions within the BJP, which is an offshoot of a broader Hindu nationalist movement which has its roots in the struggle against British colonial rule, and the party's relationship with the vast RSS (National Volunteer Force), an organisation of activists working on a conservative and religious agenda with 40 million members.

Seema Chishti, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper, said that the inclusion of Ayodhya, Kashmir and then uniform civil code indicated that "the BJP is not in a position to jettison its Hindu identity or issues".

"These are the things they put on the back burner the last time they were in power … but in this manifesto, they have been reintroduced in a significant way," Chishti said.

Though the 50-plus page document acknowledges the "charismatic leadership of Narendra Modi", the promotion of the three-term chief minister of Gujarat on the national stage has been controversial within the BJP.

Modi came from the ranks of the RSS but has distanced himself from the organisation and has caused anger among traditionalist adherents of a vision of India as economically self-sufficient with its emphasis on attracting foreign investment from global firms. Analysts have said that the 63-year-old has sidelined older members of the BJP.

Prof Sumantra Bose of the London School of Economics downplayed any split and said that issues such as Ayodhya, the status of Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian civil code were at "the core of the beliefs of Hindu nationalist leaders of both the generations."

One question is the extent to which the nationalist views would define policy when in power.

"There's a religious right in the BJP so they want to acknowledge that without making it the centrepiece of the manifesto," said Ashok Malik, a political columnist. "I don't think the BJP is going to take it forward as a political movement."

One of the most polarising politicians in India for years, Modi is seen by critics as an extremist who, when chief minister in 2002, was accused of allowing or encouraging mobs to attack Muslims in towns across Gujarat after a lethal fire supposedly started by Muslims on a train full of Hindu pilgrims. Modi denied the allegations and investigators found no evidence of any direct involvement in violence.

He is also accused of an authoritarian style of government at odds with India's tradition of political compromise and consensus-building.

Supporters, including some of the most powerful industrialists in India, say Modi is an honest and decisive administrator who has introduced policies that have encouraged development in his state and could be reproduced elsewhere if he were prime minister. "There should be a strong government in Delhi so that the world doesn't threaten us. We need to hold our heads high and match the world," Modi said in Delhi."

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22. THE HYPOCRISY OF GOOD MANNERS: NUCLEAR WEAPONS, NO FIRST USE AND INDIA’S BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY
by Binoy Kampmark
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(counterpunch.org - April 09, 2014) 
“… no-first-use pledges constitute a declaratory policy without military significance.” - Therese Delpech, French Foreign Office, in The Nuclear Turning Point (1999), 335

So much stock can be placed on a word, or its emphasis. The Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund may well have claimed his Latin was above grammar, but when it comes to the wording of manifestoes, structure and emphasis can be kings. The election manifesto of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is particularly important on a few points. Some of them are unsurprisingly polemical, rubbing various groups, notably Muslims, the wrong way, while encouraging a Hindu-Nationalist line. The stance on Jammu and Kashmir is predictably dangerous and dissatisfying, revealing why bullies tend to be jaundiced, not progressive.

Its leader, Narendra Modi, was chief minister in Gujarat in 2002 when massacre and mayhem broke out between Hindus and Muslims. That blood, at least for some, has dried. Modi’s wily and canny politics has sparked a sense of optimism in a party that, in opposition, was regarded as a walking, talking disaster.1 Indian commentators such as Gucharan Das obsess about the “demographic dividend” and how Modi will use it. If he might be a touch extreme, then so be it. “There will always be a trade-off in values at the ballot box and those who place secularism above demographic dividend are wrong and elitist” (Times of India, Apr 6).

Then there is the issue about what to do with the nuclear stockpile. Such weapons have a perverse quality – they are desired, but are, in a sense, a desirable redundancy. They cannot be used, but they might be used in a fit of unreflective enthusiasm. It is the consummation that should never take place, even if the prospects are advertised in capital letters. It is a eunuch’s mandate.

“No first use” is the outgrowth of such insensible dynamics, a doctrine that gets the strategists more excited than members of the public. New Delhi did, after some pondering in 1998, embrace the position that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. The BJP, however, released a rather aggressive cat amongst the pigeons by suggesting in its manifesto that the stance was up for revision as “the strategic gains acquired by India during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime on the nuclear programme have been frittered away by the Congress”. Pakistan, by way of comparison, has no such policy.

Former US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, Richard Boucher2, is jittery about the potential revision. “What does it do for India? Nothing really, although it would introduce a small, probably destabilising, element in the calculations of nuclear adversaries.” Boucher’s theory here is that India’s main threats could hardly trigger a nuclear solution. “India’s nuclear strategy ain’t broke, so don’t fix it.” His reservations are far more a matter of form than substance.

Other diplomats and analysts are also in a flutter, noting India’s strides in the last 10 years in being rehabilitated as a good nuclear citizen. It has signed nuclear pacts with the US, Russia, and France and obtained reactors under deals it would not otherwise have received. Not embracing no first-use is tantamount to unacceptable lunacy. (There are always acceptable and unacceptable forms of nuclear lunacy.) An anonymous Western European diplomat is quoted in the Indian Telegraph3 as being concerned that “a BJP government will attempt any repeat of what it did in 1998”. South Asia expert Michael Kugelman4 fears that such a revision “could well cause stress in Pakistan’s security establishment”.

In one way, the Pakistani position is the more honest one. No first use policies reflect the acceptable hypocrisy of good manners, rather than the authentic appreciation for bad manners. Nuclear armed states may despise each other, but that is not necessarily a reason to use nuclear weapons. No first use, in a sense, is the rhetorical question since no state genuinely wants to be the first one to pull the trigger.

Therein lies the problem. State who embrace such a policy tend to be hedging, qualifying and dithering over an admission that they will use such weapons, even if they just might be the first ones to do so. Boucher himself stated in February 2002, while discussing the US policy on non-first use, that the US “reaffirms that it will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons States parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons except in the case of an invasion or any other attack on the United States, its territories, its armed forces or any other troops, its allies or States towards which it has a security commitment, carried out or sustained by such a non-nuclear weapon State, in association or alliance with a nuclear-weapon State.”5

Such an unforgivably long statement suggests how obtuse non-first use is – it need not necessarily require a nuclear strike to get a nuclear strike in retaliation. It keeps the door open for states to use their doomsday weapons, notwithstanding the faux restraint present in their doctrines.

Where Pakistan fits into this revision throws the no first use idea into sharp relief. Scrutinisers of the manifesto have tried to find clues about how long held resentment will translate into policy should Modi win office. “By avoiding inflammatory rhetoric on Pakistan in the manifesto, the BJP has sought to dampen the speculation around the world that Modi’s leadership of India will lead to an inevitable confrontation with Pakistan” (Indian Express, Apr 7).

It doesn’t pay to jump to standard conclusions on Indian politics. Assessing the next government’s foreign policy direction through bomb and Pakistan is not necessarily useful. The Hindu nationalist party may well rubbish and slander their neighbours and target Muslims, but that doesn’t mean no conversation takes place. The nuclear toting Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP made the journey to Pakistan twice during his six years as Prime Minister. The Congress Party’s Dr. Manmohan Singh, more the flavour of Western governments and advocate of civilian nuclear energy, has not done so once in 10 years in the same office.

The latter’s reticence and reluctance may well be attributed to the shackles placed by the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008. Acts of terrorism do wonders to narrow fields of engagement, even as they demand political figures to transcend them. The Congress Party stance on this is to “deliver on accountability for 26/11 as well as dismantling of the infrastructure of terrorism on Pakistani soil.” The BJP, rather cleverly, embraces “zero tolerance” even as it wishes for “friendly relations” with Pakistan. Perhaps that stance is for the best – Modi and the BJP may well have discovered that dealing with both Pakistan and notions of nuclear doctrine are matters of appearance and theatre more than substance and reality.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark at gmail.com

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23. DECOLONISATION OF THE MIND: A QUESTION FOR LORD MACAULAY’S CHILDREN
by Priyamvada Gopal 
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(Open Magazine - 12 April 2014)
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the least independent of us all? Or, to put it in more familiar terms, Macaulay ke asli aulad kaun hain (Who are Macaulay’s real children)? The question of whose minds are still colonised is a provocative one but one worth asking right now. If each election poses the question of what sort of polity we want to be living in nearly 70 years after India’s independence from Britain, it’s time to assess which of the political options before us proffers a genuinely freestanding, decolonised, expansive, unique and compelling vision of the future, one that is not parasitic on the legacies of 200 years of colonial rule. From the decriminalisation of homosexuality to sedition charges to the suppression of highly-regarded scholarship, questions have been raised about the extent to which the Indian Penal Code relies on anachronistic Victorian values and legislation. Charges of suffering from a ‘colonised consciousness’ were levelled against those who came to the defence of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. Whatever our position on this, perhaps we can agree that it’s worth taking seriously the question of the extent to which both our minds and our politics remain in thrall to colonialism. Who, then, might give us an India that is truly decolonised and ready to transform itself for the better?

The party which lays loudest claim to having a distinctive vision of India is the one slated to win the single largest number of Lok Sabha seats, whether or not it wins a majority or forms the next government. The BJP and its Sangh Parivar allies have made careers out of accusing various pet antagonists—from secularists and socialists to feminists, human rights campaigners and environmentalists— of being beholden to pernicious Western influences. They claim, by contrast, to stand for original Indic values that best suit an Indian ethos. But is this true? The heady cocktail the BJP offers is a combination of hyper- nationalism and hyper-capitalism (‘development’) which now merge in the form of Narendra Modi, who has been turned into an archetypal Indian hero, complete with Amar Chitra Katha-style comic book. The trouble, of course, is that both neoliberalism and nationalism premised on the dominance of the majority religion, however ‘tolerant’ of minorities it claims to be, are part of the legacy and afterlife of the British Empire.

The Raj, which prided itself on incorporating India into its booming capitalist growth story, began with the East India Company, described by economist Nick Robins as the world’s first multinational corporation, running riot across the land. While there was much indigenous resistance to British rule, the idea of the modern nation-state was certainly derived from nineteenth-century European ideas where the ‘nation’ was imagined as based on single homogeneous categories like religion and ethnicity. This was totally unsuited to the plural Indian context which, even Macaulay admitted, was one ‘which resembles no other’. It’s no accident that the idea that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate nations emerged out of the colonial experience, as did the glorification of India’s supposedly purely Hindu past.

The British Empire also bequeathed to India the apparatus of a strong centralised state that could crush challenges. The BJP’s vision of a militarised, nuclear- capable state run largely by autocratic Hindu caste elites would have made Macaulay proud. An English chauvinist to the core, he advocated strong government and a uniform repressive code of laws, the Indian Penal Code, which came to include, of course, Section 124A (sedition), Section 295A, which forbade outraging the religious sensibilities of His Majesty’s subjects, and Section 377, which outlaws homosexuality; the BJP is the only major party that has explicitly declared its commitment to upholding the latter. It’s also no surprise that the Sangh Parivar ideal of a Hindu Rashtra finds some of its most shrill adherents—not to mention substantial funding—from Britain and US-based Hindu NRIs and PIOs: the jingoistic BJP view of India is one which they can use to assuage their sense of being treated as second- class citizens who come from a less developed culture. Aggressive nationalism based on a uniform ethos combined with unbridled corporate growth is a language the West invented. In speaking it so fluently, the BJP would undoubtedly emerge as Macaulay’s favourite latter- day son.

What of the Congress, which nervously awaits a tryst with voters understandably fed up with long years of cronyism, dynastic politics, insiderism, incompetence and lack of vision? Its claim to an Indian vision draws on the weight of history. Its ancestor, the Indian National Congress, began as a genteel campaigning lobby for loyal ‘upper-caste’ Indians who wanted more say in governance. Under Gandhi, it became an all-India body, which was periodically able to mobilise the masses including the rural poor and oppressed castes against British rule. Against the wishes of many, including Gandhi, Nehru and his adherents turned it from a freedom-fighting organisation to an electoral party. After Independence, working in a diverse coalition, the Congress participated in creating a blueprint for India which was necessarily attentive to different social and economic pressures including the need for an inclusive polity that would not privilege one religion over another.

Under the supervision of Dr Ambedkar, the Indian Constitution emerged as a fairly enlightened document, underscoring the secularism that the Congress party continues to tout as its unique selling point. The trouble, of course, is that in addition to being perfectly capable of playing communal forces against each other when it suits it—recall its shocking role in the anti-Sikh pogroms on 1984—the Congress too has never broken from the British colonial model of a strongly centralised state in which a linguistic and religious majority, and caste elites, call most of the shots despite some managed pluralism. This, by the way, is a model that is being challenged in the United Kingdom itself as Scotland prepares to vote on whether to secede from the Union. Rather than addressing the root of problems, the Congress is also culpable of having used some of the worst inheritances from the colonial state, including brutal and excessive military force against Indian citizens, to crush insurgency whether secessionist movements or in the form, most recently, of Operation Green Hunt. The indefensible Armed Forces Special Powers Act, against which the remarkable Irom Sharmila has hunger-struck for years, is also directly derived from British rule.

Having failed to marry capitalism to socialism, despite some necessary measures which kept the poor in mind, the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi ‘liberalised’ India by opening the way to the full incorporation of India into US-led global capitalism, adopting the ‘growth’ mantra that its first generation of leaders had rightly been wary of. Liberalisation has made for a prosperous middle-class but despite populist rhetoric and commitment to a measure of social welfare, the Congress has ultimately failed to alleviate deep-rooted problems of distribution, exploitation of labour, poverty and hunger. Largely maintaining hierarchies of wealth, caste and power, the party repeatedly risks reducing important caste and communal questions to vote-bank politics. With questionable compromises followed by full capitulation to an economic model first propagated by the West, its story is of missed opportunities to craft something visionary and different in the wake of Independence.

The constitutional Left parties did have a vision of social justice, made important contributions to India’s freedom struggle and achieved much in some areas, not least land reforms and mass literacy. They have failed, however, to emerge as a national force with wide grassroots support. The CPM, while rhetorically condemning Western imperialism, did not distance itself from the toxic legacies of Stalinism, hardly less repellent than imperialism. While it has acted to check some of the privatisation excesses of its political partners and stood behind anti-communalism and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, it has also to answer for its own shameful exercise of brutal state power at Nandigram and Singur, where much like the BJP in Gujarat and Odisha and the Congress in Maharashtra, it has enabled Special Economic Zones to be established at the cost of agricultural land, kowtowing to corporate conglomerates like the Tata Group. SEZs are one example of how India is being recolonised by multinationals using standard colonial techniques including displacing populations, suspending constitutionally guaranteed labour protections and operating outside of state law. It should come as no surprise that the land grabs routinely undertaken by large corporations were facilitated by colonial-style legislation in the form of the Land Acquisition Act. Combine this with AFSPA and actual colonial- era statutes such as Section 295 and Section 377 and what we have is a nation that is in a state of arrested, though not yet failed, decolonisation.

We come finally to the Aam Aadmi Party, a new force with demonstrable appeal to an electorate thirsting for a meaningful alternative. Does the AAP offer a democratically decolonised vision for the future, one which takes India’s diverse religious and cultural traditions into account but also enacts much-needed transformations in our economic landscape, eliminating widespread malnutrition and yawning inequalities? That remains to be seen though the fact that the party has been joined by respected campaigners for economic and environmental justice like Medha Patkar, Rachna Dhingra and Soni Sori signals interesting possibilities. However, by emphasising the ‘crony’ element of capitalism rather than systemic inequalities that have everything to do with how corporations make ‘legitimate’ money, the AAP has so far echoed a line beloved in the West: that theirs is a ‘clean’ way of doing capitalism while Asia and Africa are ‘corrupt’. As many in the West now realise, it is perfectly possible for corporations and wealthy oligarchs to siphon off huge profits at the expense of ordinary people through technically lawful means including the removal of labour protections, weakened environmental regulations, displacement, cheap and inadequately scrutinised loans, government subsidies, tax shelters or loopholes as well as keeping wages low or extracting natural resources cheaply. Privatisation of public utilities and resources, including roads and ports, a defining feature of Modi’s Gujarat, is in itself corrupt, a form of theft. ‘By good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government,’ wrote Macaulay, but post-colonial governance doesn’t just have to be ‘cleaned up’: it needs to be radically overhauled and democratised to throw its weight behind the disenfranchised. To not become just one more variation on the neoliberal theme of deregulation and good governance, aam shouldn’t just apply to individuals but should ensure the public good by stripping unfettered capitalism of its khas status. And while we’re talking about decolonisation, let’s hope that the nasty anti-African racism of some AAP leaders in Delhi doesn’t resurface. Let’s also agree that ‘good governance’ should mean that any leader or official under whose watch any kind of carnage takes place is automatically disqualified from holding office.

How then, to use a term coined by Nigerian scholar Biodun Jeyifo, do we undo India’s ‘arrested decolonisation,’ yet to be fully envisioned by any of the major contenders for national power? It won’t come from cynical appeals to religious pride and fomenting hatred for minorities while lying prostrate before the gods of big business, allowing them to ride roughshod over the health and well-being of the vast majority of this country while ‘developing’ the bank balances of the super-rich and the middle-classes. Without necessarily emulating them, a more fully decolonised vision can draw inspiration from the manifold instances in Indian history where individuals and groups have challenged the concentration of power, wealth and privilege in a few hands, whether that power is derived from caste, kingship, landlordism or religion. Relatively recent history gives us, to name but a few, kisan sabhas, Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party, JP Narayan’s call for sampurna kranti, the Self-Respect Movement, the Dalit Panthers, a recharged longstanding women’s movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the National Trade Union Initiative and Adivasi resistance to dispossession. Now is a good time to reflect on the colonial racism which infects mainstream India’s view of Adivasis as primitive savages who can be deprived of land and livelihood with impunity. Dalit and Adivasi perspectives should not be footnotes to envisioning a decolonised India free of hunger, disease, environmental degradation and deprivation: they should be central to it. Only then will we have a truly independent country with no family resemblances to the late Lord Macaulay’s vision.

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24. IN CONVERSATION WITH… JANE GOODALL
by Henry Nicholls
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(http://mosaicscience.com/story/conversation-with-jane-goodall)

In conversation with… Jane Goodall

As Jane Goodall turns 80, Henry Nicholls talks to her about her remarkable career studying chimpanzee behaviour, her animal welfare activism, and accusations of plagiarism in her latest book.

1 April 2014

In February 1935, the year of King George V’s silver jubilee, a chimpanzee at London Zoo called Boo-Boo gave birth to a baby daughter. A couple of months later, a little blonde-haired girl was given a soft-toy replica of the zoo’s new arrival to mark her first birthday. This was Jane Goodall’s first recorded encounter with a chimp.

Goodall turns 80 this week. In the intervening years, her research on a community of chimpanzees in Tanzania revolutionised our understanding of these primates, our closest living relatives, and challenged deepset ideas of what it means to be human. She then packed in her fieldwork to become an activist, campaigning tirelessly for a more enlightened attitude towards animals and the environment. Along the way she has received nearly 50 honorary degrees, and became a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002 and Dame Jane in 2004.

Though I have only crossed London to meet her, I am struck by the sudden feeling that I have reached the end of some epic, Henry Stanley-like quest… “Dr Goodall?” As I reach out to shake a slender hand, the words “I presume” pop into my head. I suppress them.

I follow her into the front room and she politely offers me tea or coffee. There is a sofa beneath the bay window and next to it – as if only just put aside – a large book. I pick up The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of behavior, Goodall’s magnum opus published in 1986. I flip through its characterful portraits of the Gombe chimps, many of them – like David Greybeard – now household names.

Goodall sits down neatly on the sofa with her back to the bright sun. This is a brief pause in her whirlwind travel schedule of more than 300 days a year, but she displays few signs of weariness – worldly or otherwise. She has just been going through proofs of her updated book Seeds of Hope, the first edition of which was troubled by allegations of plagiarism. I don’t want to broach the subject so early in the interview, so I ask instead about her childhood, which I sense is of great importance to understanding Goodall.

§

Having seen a photograph of that doting little girl clutching Jubilee, her somewhat scruffy birthday chimp, I love the idea that this fluffy character influenced what Goodall would go on to achieve. On this, however, she sets me straight. When she first ventured to Africa in 1957, Goodall says, it had never occurred to her to work with chimpanzees. Rather, she had a far less specific and more romantic dream inspired by fictional characters from the books she had read as a child, notably Dr Dolittle and Tarzan. “I never wanted to be a scientist per se,” she says. “I wanted to be a naturalist.”

Goodall tells a story from her childhood that demonstrates how fixated she was by the Africa of her imagination. As a special treat, her mother, Vanne, had taken her to the cinema to see her first Tarzan film. When the curtains drew back to reveal Johnny Weissmuller in the starring role, however, the young Goodall burst into a fit of hysterical tears. In the quiet of the foyer, she composed herself and told her mother firmly: “That is not Tarzan.”

When she describes her earliest experiences of Africa, however, they don’t sound all that different from the jungles of her dreams. Not long after arriving in Kenya, Goodall captured the attention of Louis Leakey, the eminent palaeoanthropologist and curator of the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. Within hours of meeting, she had so impressed him with her knowledge of natural history that he had offered her a job. Within months, Leakey and his wife, Mary, set out on an expedition to Olduvai Gorge in what is now northern Tanzania, and Goodall went too. The place was teeming with wildlife.

“There were lions and rhinos and giraffes – I mean, everything was there,” she recalls with a flash of excitement. “I often think that’s one of the most magical times of my whole life.”

It was while scouring this ancient landscape for evidence of early humans and other hominids that Leakey first mentioned the idea of establishing a complementary study on wild chimpanzees to the west, at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve on the edge of Lake Tanganyika. Three years later, in 1960, Goodall entered the reserve to begin her research.

There had only ever been one concerted attempt to study chimps in the wild – and that scientist “had a trail of 22 porters”, Goodall says with a hint of pride in her voice. For the first few months in Gombe, it was just her, her mother and a single hired assistant. “I wanted to be alone,” she says, “but I wasn’t allowed.”

Goodall pauses, revisiting that period in her mind. “I’ll never forget going along the shoreline of Lake Tanganyika, then looking up…”

Up there, in the densely forested valleys that funnel streams off steep hills to the water’s edge, were the chimpanzees she had come to study. With the assistance of a game warden who acted as escort, Goodall and her mother put up their ex-army tent. “If you wanted air to come in, you just rolled up the sides and tied them with tape,” she says. “Well, the air came in, but the spiders, scorpions and snakes came in as well.”

Although her mother was terrified – “You know I’m afraid of spiders!” – Goodall was apparently fearless, setting off up the slopes to explore her new home. “I sat up there and just couldn’t imagine I was there. It seemed absolutely unreal.”

The picture Goodall paints – a folding camp bed beside a palm tree in a forest clearing beneath a bright moon, the sound of baboons barking in the distance – could have come straight from an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. I wonder if the realisation of so fantastical a childhood dream has helped her stay connected to her youth – but again she sets me straight. Rather it is The Birches, the home near Bournemouth in which she grew up: when not travelling, this is where Goodall still returns, to “all my childhood books, the trees I climbed as a child, the cliffs where I walked… I am blessed in this way.”

During her first stint in the field, Goodall struggled to get close to the chimps. However, the individual she named David Greybeard proved a particular inspiration, showing her a side to chimpanzees nobody had ever documented before. In late October 1960, she watched David from a distance as he gnawed away at the freshly killed corpse of what was probably a baby bush pig – an observation that ran counter to the then-widespread assumption that chimps were strict vegetarians.

A few days later, Goodall witnessed David making and using a tool to feed on ants. I ask her to describe this moment in detail: “There was vegetation in the way and David had his back to me… so what I saw was the hand picking up the tool. I saw the movements. And I saw it was obvious he was eating…”

Once David had moved off, Goodall went to investigate and discovered long stalks of grass lying around. Picking a stalk up, she pushed it into one of the narrow entrance holes to the ant colony. The disturbance caused ants to emerge. The chimps, presumably, would then lick them off the grass. After subsequent, clearer sightings of this behaviour, Goodall went to Leakey with the discovery.

“I knew it was very important because I’d been around Leakey long enough,” she says. At that point, most people believed humans were the only species capable of making and using tools. In response to Goodall’s observations of David and others, Leakey famously declared: “Now we must redefine ‘tool’, redefine ‘man’, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

I am suddenly aware that Goodall is watching me, back perfectly upright, hands in her lap. She keeps very still, her soft green eyes studying my face as she waits patiently for my next question. I feel a peculiar, strangely comforting empathy with David Greybeard and the other Gombe chimps.

§

Despite Leakey’s excitement over Goodall’s early findings, not everyone was ready to embrace them. In late 1961, she arrived in Cambridge, where Leakey had used his connections to enrol her for a doctorate – not something Goodall wanted to do. “I was only doing this thesis for Leakey’s sake. I’d never had an ambition to be a scientist and be part of academia.”

The patronising treatment Goodall received at the hands of her mainly male colleagues can hardly have endeared her to the academic lifestyle. She was criticised for giving her study-animals names and personalities. “I didn’t give them personalities, I merely described their personalities,” she counters. As for Goodall’s reported discovery that chimps used tools: “Some scientists actually said I must have taught them.” She laughs. “That would have been fabulous if I could have done that.”

I try to imagine receiving this kind of dismissive treatment, and suspect I would have been infuriated, then crushed. Not Goodall. She says she simply knew that she was right and her critics were wrong. I ask where this conviction came from and, as an explanation, she returns to her youth.

“My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.”

So when her Cambridge colleagues told her she couldn’t talk about chimps having personality, mind and emotion, she begged to differ – because of Rusty the black mongrel. “Rusty had taught me otherwise. If you spend time with animals, you’re not going to betray them by taking away something which is theirs.”

Rusty, I discover, was one of two dogs with whom Goodall became friendly in her early teens at The Birches. The other, Budleigh, was a beautiful long-haired collie belonging to the owner of the local sweetshop. “Collies are meant to be bright but he wasn’t,” Goodall says, recalling how Budleigh proved incapable of learning to shake hands.

One day, though, as Goodall continued her efforts to train “Buds”, Rusty the mongrel (watching at a distance) raised his paw. “From that moment I realised Rusty was brilliantly intelligent because, even though I wasn’t teaching him, he’d learned by observing my teaching of Buds.”

I am struck by what Goodall did next. The young teenager imagined herself inside Rusty’s mind, she says, in an effort to see the world from his perspective and relive the intellectual feat he’d just performed. There are not many children I know who’d do this, I suggest. She considers for a moment: “Probably not.”

If her Cambridge colleagues had been patronising, it was nothing compared to the treatment she received at a symposium on primates held at the Zoological Society of London in April 1962. “I gave my first scientific presentation and was terrified, says Goodall. “I practised for hours,” she says. “I was determined not to read and not to say ‘er’ or ‘um’. I have remained true to that ever since.”

After three days of talks, the meeting came to a close with a speech by Sir Solly Zuckerman, an anatomist who had studied monkeys in Africa, and gone on to become secretary of the Society and chief science adviser to the Ministry of Defence. Although Goodall had been well received, Zuckerman took the opportunity to fire a volley of pointed comments at the twentysomething newcomer.

“There are those who are here and who prefer anecdote – and what I must confess I regard as sometimes unbounded speculation,” he told his audience, as recounted in Dale Peterson’s biography of Goodall, The Woman Who Redefined Man. “In scientific work it is far safer to base one’s major conclusions and generalisations on a concordant and large body of data than on a few contradictory and isolated observations, the explanation of which sometimes leaves a little to be desired.”

At the mention of Zuckerman, Goodall’s features sharpen slightly, and the pace of her speech quickens. She dismisses his monkey work as “rubbish”. It is the only bad word she has to say about anyone, and even then she controls the emotion almost before it has appeared.

This was not Goodall’s first run-in with Zuckerman. At the end of 1961, there had been a press conference at London Zoo to announce her preliminary findings – and she had hatched a plan to use this public platform to call for an improvement in the conditions of the captive chimps at the zoo. “There was a bare cage with a cement floor,” she explains. During the summer months, the chimps had no shade: “It got boiling hot and there was only one platform, the other had broken, so the male got that and the female had to sit on the floor. It was horrible.”

Before the meeting, over dinner with the diplomat Malcolm MacDonald (who had visited her briefly in Gombe and would become Governor-General of Kenya in 1963), Goodall shared her intention to champion the welfare of the captive chimps: “I was really excited.”

But MacDonald, with his experience as a politician, could see a flaw. Speaking out on behalf of the chimps to a packed auditorium would be a direct criticism of Zuckerman’s leadership of the zoo. “Do you think he’s going to allow a little whipper-snapper who doesn’t even have a degree to tell him he’s in the wrong?” Goodall recalls MacDonald telling her. “You’ll make an enemy for life, and you don’t want an enemy like that.”

Instead, Goodall suggested several simple changes to the chimps’ enclosure that would improve their welfare, and MacDonald worked behind the scenes to see them implemented. “What I learned then is: don’t let people lose face, don’t try to do something publicly until you’ve tried every which way to do it quietly. I’ve found that so helpful to me,” she says, particularly in places like Africa and China.

Naturally, Zuckerman took the credit for the improvements to the chimps’ enclosure. “I don’t mind two hoots as long as it gets done,” Goodall says.

Jane Goodall studies a baboon

© Fotos International/Getty Images

Jane Goodall studies an African baboon, 1974.

A capacity for seeing the bigger picture may go some way to explaining her success as an activist. She pinpoints her transformation to 1986, and a chimpanzee conference organised by the Chicago Academy of Sciences to coincide with the publication of The Chimpanzees of Gombe. By then, she’d spent more than 25 years in the field, completed her PhD, established the Gombe Stream Research Center, got married, raised a son and made further groundbreaking observations on chimpanzee society – including insights into chimp communication, sex, mother–infant bonding, inter-community warfare and cannibalism. But at the age of 52, she walked away from the field and turned to a life on the road. “How ridiculous, really, when you think about it,” she says. “What did I think I could do, trotting around Africa with an exhibit of old pictures blown up, and bits of rock and stick?”

Her initial focus – facilitated by the Jane Goodall Institute she’d established almost a decade earlier to support her chimp research at Gombe – was to draw attention to the plight of chimpanzees more generally. In the wild, habitat destruction, the bushmeat trade and animal trafficking all posed significant threats to the species’ future – and they still do. “It is horrendous.”

Even now, China is asking African governments for chimpanzees and gorillas for entertainment, Goodall tells me. “We feel our sanctuaries, which cost us so much money, aren’t safe any more.”

I find myself being sucked into a vortex of gloom, but Goodall is always ready to offer a reason for hope – a word that crops up time and again in the titles of her many books. One reason is what she calls “the resilience of nature”; by way of illustration, she tells me about land reforms in Tanzania in the 1970s that resulted in widespread deforestation around the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve.

“When I looked down,” she recalls of one visit, “it was so totally shocking to see our little oasis of Gombe… It looked like a dust bowl: completely bare hills, overfarmed, more people living there than the land could support.”

Today, however, as a result of the Lake Tanganyika Catchment, Reforestation and Education Project, which her Institute began in 1994, the Gombe chimps now have “three to four times more forest than they had ten years ago. It’s regenerated so quickly. So we have 30-foot-high trees.” I feel better already.

More than half a century since she first engineered improvements to the conditions of the chimpanzees at London Zoo, Goodall is still fighting hard on behalf of captive chimps too. In the 1980s, she raised ethical concerns about their use in xenotransplanation, which led the medical community to steer away from this practice. More recently, she has worked with Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health in the US, to phase out their use of captive chimpanzees in medical research; she is delighted the US Senate voted to increase the budget available for retirement of these chimps. “We are beginning to win,” she says.

I ask Goodall if she is in favour of a blanket ban on the use of chimpanzees in medical research. “I can’t quite say that. But what I can say is that, ethically and morally, I feel it’s wrong to use them, and it’s absolutely wrong to put them in five-foot by five-foot cages.”

Goodall puts chimps at the forefront of the wider debate about the use of experimental animals. “At one time, the scientists said we’ll always need animals for this – and now we don’t,” she says. “If science really puts its mind to getting alternatives… once they do, they’re cheaper and usually safer.”

§

With our time almost up, I realise I haven’t asked after Mr H, the toy monkey who famously travels with her from one venue to the next. Somehow Goodall the activist doesn’t seem complete without him, and I wonder if he might join us.

Mr H stands for Mr Gary Haun, a US marine who lost his eyesight in a helicopter crash at the age of 21, then went on to became a professional magician, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, scuba, sky-dive, and much else besides. “He thought he was giving me a stuffed chimp for my birthday,” Goodall recalls – but the soft toy has a tail, so is clearly a monkey. “Gary,” she told him, as she guided his hand towards the evidence of his mistake, “I know you can’t see it… but you have no excuse.”

For the last 20 years, Goodall has kept Mr H close as a reminder of another of her reasons for hope: “The indomitable human spirit… He’s been to at least 60 countries with me, he’s been touched by at least four million people. I say that when you touch him, the inspiration rubs off.”

Goodall invites me to touch Mr H – but instead of inspiration, I have a sudden, parental panic that he might one day go missing. “I’ve nearly lost him several times but that’s the original,” she says, stroking him gently. Once, she left him on the top of a telephone kiosk in an airport and had boarded her plane before she realised. “I’ll have to get off the plane,” she explained to the attendant, adding: “You’ll have to bolt me in to keep me because I’ve left my most precious object outside.”

Still clutching Mr H, Goodall reaches into her bag and another soft toy peeps out. “This is Cow” – a gift handed to her during a recent visit to the dairyland state of Wisconsin. “I was going to give Cow to the next deserving child,” she explains, but instead she has turned her into “a spokesperson” for abused farm animals. She looks at the toy and then talks about it as if she’s giving it praise. “Cow has worked really hard – she has created I don’t know how many vegetarians, even in places like Argentina where they live on meat.”

I am reminded of something I’ve read: how Goodall, as a child, loved to arrange tea parties for her soft toys. I wonder if there are others who would like to join us – but it turns out that Jubilee, her childhood chimpanzee, is in Germany, being fitted for a jumpsuit to hold his failing stitching in place.

Goodall herself is flying to Germany in a few hours. “I’m going to Düsseldorf, then Vienna, then back to Munich… It still amazes me. Children write to me and say, ‘You taught me, you did it, I can do it too.’ So this is why I have to go on going around. Because it’s making a difference.”

When not on the move, she concentrates on her writing. In her latest book, Seeds of Hope, she and journalist Gail Hudson champion plants. But the first edition, published last year, was troubled by allegations of plagiarism, with the Washington Post identifying “at least a dozen passages borrowed without attribution, or footnotes, from a variety of websites”.

Goodall accounts for these lapses by citing her hectic work schedule and her chaotic method of note-taking: “I am not methodical enough, I guess,” she says. “In some cases, you look at my notebooks, there’s no way you can tell whether this is from talking to somebody or whether it was something I read on the internet.”

I ask if there was any naivety on her part. “Yes, there must be… I have learned. In the future, I shall be more organised even if I don’t have time,” she says. “I shall certainly make sure I know who said something or what I read or where I read it.” Goodall, though, is adamant that she did not intentionally try to pass off anyone else’s words as her own. “I don’t think anybody who knows me would accuse me of deliberate plagiarism.”

In a revised edition of Seeds of Hope, to be published this month, Goodall and Hudson have made minor changes to the text to address their critics and added a lengthy notes section. “I don’t think a book has ever been more researched than this one. The notes at the end are about as long as the book.”

I ask if she’s concerned that attention will focus on what she’s changed, rather than on the subject matter. “Looking back, it has been a godsend,” she says. “I am really happy for the sake of the plants that we’ve got it right now. I feel this is a book we can really be proud of now.”

And then she adds, “Honestly, Henry, who is going to deliberately go out to give me a bad time?” We both know it will probably happen.

Before I go, Goodall wants to show me some drawings she made as a child. They are reproduced in Me… Jane, a children’s book by Patrick McDonnell. She finds a copy amid piles of books by or about her, and flips to the relevant page. There, across a double spread, are several meticulous sketches of animals. The wing of a pterodactyl above the wing of an eagle; profiles of a cat, horse, crocodile, dog, chimpanzee and human – all to scale with their brains neatly coloured in pink pencil. “They are not very good,” she says.

I have spent the last two hours in the polite, inspiring company of a woman precisely twice my age. But as she shows me her drawings, I get the feeling I am talking to the 12-year-old Goodall. Finally, when I hold out my hand for her to shake, she spurns it and offers me something far more rewarding: a chimpanzee embrace. Her delicate arms envelop me, slowly, widely, deliberately. There is something categorically different about this hug; something that will stay with me for ever.

“Chimpanzees don’t say goodbye,” she says. I walk to the door, trying to fathom what to make of this. I turn and call out another farewell, but Goodall doesn’t reply. She has turned away from me and doesn’t look back.

    Author: Henry Nicholls
    Editor: Mike Herd
    Photographer: Ben Gilbert
    Copyeditor: Tom Freeman

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25. UK: NOW WE SEE WHAT WAS REALLY AT STAKE IN THE MINERS' STRIKE
by Seumas Milne
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(The Guardian, 12 March 2014)
Thirty years on, the costs of the gutting of trade unions are obvious. That's why demonising Bob Crow was a failure

Bob Crow struck a chord with a public living the reality of the race to the bottom in pay and conditions. Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA
As a rule, the most effective trade unionists have to die before the mainstream media and politicians will say anything decent about them. That's certainly what has happened to the rail and seafarers' leader Bob Crow.

Instead of the industrial dinosaur, political throwback and strike-happy hypocrite demonised for more than a decade, it now turns out that Crow was in fact a modern and effective workplace champion. The scourge of the London commuter didn't just drive up rail workers' living standards, we are told, but fought successfully for low-paid contract cleaners into the bargain.

Part of that is about not speaking ill of someone cut off in their prime, of course. But it also reflects establishment awareness of the chord that an authentic workers' leader strikes with a public living the reality of the race to the bottom in pay and conditions – and a public life purged of working-class figures and populated by plastic political and corporate professionals.

As it happened, Crow died on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the start of the miners' strike. It is doubtful that even death will win Arthur Scargill the national treasure treatment currently being given to Crow, given the scale of his vilification and the extent of the challenge he represented to political and economic power from the 1970s to the 1990s.

But the 1984-5 strike, the decisive social and economic confrontation of Britain's postwar era, is how we got where we are today. A generation on, it is now even clearer than it was at the time why the year-long struggle over the country's energy supply took place, and what interests were really at stake.

The Thatcher government's war on the miners – her chancellor Nigel Lawson described preparations for the strike as "like re-arming to face the threat of Hitler" – wasn't just about class revenge for the Tories' humiliating defeats at the hands of the miners in the early 1970s. It was about using the battering ram of state power to break the single greatest obstacle to the transformation of the economy in the interests of corporate privilege and wealth that Margaret Thatcher was determined to carry out. The offensive ushered in the full-blown neoliberal model that has failed to deliver for the majority, generated inequality and insecurity on a huge scale, and imploded with such disastrous consequences five-and-a-half years ago.

For the miners, the strike was a defensive battle for jobs and communities. But it also raised the alternative of a different kind of Britain, rooted in solidarity and collective action. The crippling of the country's most powerful union opened the way for the systematic deregulation of the labour market – and the zero-hours contracts, falling real wages, payday loans and food banks we are living with today.

Every couple of years, evidence emerges to underline the unparalleled nature of the state onslaught and ruthless rule-breaking to overcome resistance in the mining communities, bought at a cost of £37bn in today's prices.

In January, newly released cabinet papers confirmed that, just as Scargill had warned at the time, there was indeed a secret hit list to close 75 collieries with the loss of 75,000 jobs when the strike began. Thatcher lied about it and planned to send thousands of troops into the coalfields, as her government faced imminent defeat.

In media and establishment mythology, of course, it was the insurrectionary incompetence of the miners' leadership that led to the breakneck destruction of the mining communities, rather than the government that ordered it. That is abject nonsense.

There was simply no option of a gentle rundown of the industry in 1984, with or without a national ballot, as the treatment of pits that worked during the strike demonstrated. The only choice was between the  certainty of mass closures and the chance of halting the assault.

To achieve its goal, the government unleashed the full force of the state: a militarised police occupation of the coalfields, a commandeered and manipulated criminal justice system, mass sackings and jailings – and the use of MI5, GCHQ, the NSA and special branch to bug, infiltrate, smear, manipulate the media, and stage dirty tricks against the union and its leaders.

Since the Guardian first reported leaks about security service operations against the miners in the 1990s, much more has emerged and been confirmed by former officials. MI5's "counter-subversion" role has been largely transferred to a string of notorious undercover police units, now the subject of an official inquiry; global blanket surveillance by GCHQ and the NSA is on another scale entirely from their then unprecedented operations against the miners' strike; while state collusion with mass corporate blacklisting of trade unionists has continued, despite the enfeebled state of the labour movement.

Thirty years on, the argument about coal is now focused on the threat of global warming and carbon emissions, rather than the tiny workforce that still mines it or the social wreckage in the coalfields left behind by Thatcher's social vandalism.

But the battle over coal in the 1980s was in any case really about power and class, not fuel – just as the argument about its legacy is more about the future than the past. Success for the miners could not, of course, have turned the neoliberal tide, which was a global phenomenon. But it would certainly have at least weakened Thatcher, reined in her worst excesses, and put a brake on Labour's rush for the "third way", which eventually turned into New Labour's embrace of the Thatcherite settlement.

As the strike fades into history, the miners' stand has been vindicated by the experience of that failed model. Profound economic change means such an industrial conflict will never be repeated in that form; but its experience can speak to our times.

Among its lessons are that you can't always fight on terrain and at times of your choosing; division can be fatal; and the higher the stakes, the dirtier that employers and governments will play. And as Crow demonstrated, militancy may not guarantee success – but passivity will asphyxiate unions when the workforce needs them to be stronger than ever.

• An updated edition of Seumas Milne's book, The Enemy Within – The Secret War Against the Miners, is published this week and is available from Guardian Books

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26. RWANDA : LE PLUS GRAND FIASCO MORAL ET GÉOPOLITIQUE DE LA FRANÇAFRIQUE
Raphael Glucksmann 
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(Liberation, 7 Avril 2014)
Le monde rend hommage au million de Tutsis exterminés entre avril et juillet 1994 et partage la honte de n’avoir rien fait pour les sauver d’une mort certaine, diffusée en direct sur CNN. La France ne participe finalement pas aux cérémonies. Pourquoi ? Pour une phrase vindicative de Paul Kagamé dans Jeune Afrique ?

Evidemment l’attaque du président rwandais relève d’un calcul politicien. Evidemment, les auteurs et les acteurs principaux du génocide de 1994 ne sont pas français. Mais s’il est un pays qui devrait passer outre les critiques de Kigali et placer l’hommage aux victimes au-dessus de tout, c’est bien le nôtre.

L’intervention de nos soldats en 1990 a sauvé le régime Habyarimana, dont l’idéologie raciste et la machine répressive préparaient le génocide (opération Noroît). Les armes, la formation, les conseils fournis gracieusement par notre République au «Hutu Power» lui permit de mener à bien son projet exterminateur. Et l’opération Turquoise de juin - juillet 1994, mise en cause par Kagamé, exfiltra les cerveaux et les petites mains du génocide vers le Zaïre. Ce qui déclencha ensuite la pire guerre civile de l’Afrique contemporaine, au cours de laquelle la France officielle a naturellement soutenu Mobutu et ses amis miliciens hutus.

Vingt ans plus tard, notre élite politico-diplomatique n’est toujours pas prête à entendre cela. Pourtant, les choses semblaient avoir bougé. Bernard Kouchner avait rendu un vibrant hommage aux Tutsis exterminés et reconnu les «erreurs» françaises. Nicolas Sarkozy avait rencontré l’ancien ennemi public Kagamé. Le juge Bruguière et les parasites de la politique franco rwandaise laissent la place aux enquêtes sérieuses du juge Trévidic, aux historiens, à un embryon de réflexion collective.

Mais le gouvernement socialiste fait marche arrière. L’année des commémorations a commencé par la légion d’honneur décernée par Aurélie Filippetti au plus actif des révisionnistes, Pierre Péan. Elle se poursuit donc par la politique de la chaise vide à Kigali. Quel est le problème spécifique des socialistes avec le Rwanda ? Si le soutien au régime hutu fut assumé aussi bien par la gauche que la droite (de 1993 à 1995, la cohabitation règne), il avait été décidé, planifié, enclenché par François Mitterrand en personne et ses plus proches conseillers, dont son propre fils et le toujours influent Hubert Védrine. Le peuple (hutu) contre les seigneurs (tutsis), la menace anglo-saxonne sur notre pré carré, la référence à 1793 pour expliquer les massacres inhérents à la «révolution sociale hutu»… : la grille de lecture surréaliste de la crise rwandaise venait de l’Elysée. Comme toutes les décisions d’engager nos soldats. Et il suffit d’écouter Paul Quilès et d’autres gardiens du temple s’époumoner à la radio pour comprendre que le PS n’a pas fait l’inventaire du mitterrandisme, malgré les appels répétés de Lionel Jospin.

Aujourd’hui, alors que François Hollande et Laurent Fabius peinent à convaincre nos alliés européens d’envoyer le moindre soldat en Centrafrique, il est temps de lever les soupçons d’aventurisme néocolonialiste qui surgissent dès que Paris s’occupe d’Afrique. De Stockholm à Kigali, en passant par Bruxelles, la plupart des capitales européennes et africaines se méfient à juste titre ou non de l’interventionnisme français dans son pré carré. Une analyse publique sans concession de nos errements passés permettrait de convaincre nos partenaires que nous n’allons pas reproduire les mêmes erreurs. Cela commence par le Rwanda, le plus grand fiasco moral et géopolitique de la Françafrique.

Alors que nos représentants combattent sans relâche les histrions qui font de la négation de la Shoah leur fonds de commerce, ils seraient inspirés d’arrêter de décorer les révisionnistes du génocide des Tutsis et de mettre fin à la litanie des communiqués officiels sur le génocide «rwandais» (évitant de définir les victimes et les bourreaux). Ils devraient aussi prêter moins d’importance à la défense de l’honneur national, bafoué par les politiques passées et les dénis actuels plus que par les attaques de Kagamé, qu’au respect du million de victimes que nous avons, au mieux, laissées se faire massacrer par nos alliés ou, au pire, activement contribuer à éliminer de la surface de cette terre.

Qu’aurait-on dit d’un gouvernement français refusant de se rendre avec le reste du monde à Auschwitz pour commémorer les victimes juives de la barbarie nazie sous prétexte que le président polonais a proféré des accusations dérangeantes contre l’Etat français ? François Hollande a eu peut-être raison de ne pas envoyer Christiane Taubira au Rwanda : il devrait se rendre en personne à Kigali, Murambi et Bisesero.

Il aura fallu cinquante ans pour que l’Etat français reconnaisse son rôle dans la déportation des Juifs et quarante pour appeler la guerre d’Algérie par son nom. Combien de temps avant que nos dirigeants cessent de sauter au plafond lorsqu’on évoque l’aveuglement criminel de la France au Rwanda ?

Raphael GLUCKSMANN Réalisateur

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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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