SACW - 13 Oct 2014 | Bangladesh: The case of David Bergman / Pakistan: Malala and Populism's second coming / Sri Lanka: Island of a Thousand Mirrors / India: Doordarshan As RSS’s Publicity Agent; 'Mohanlal' and Mohan Bhagwat; Stop the Dilution of MGNREGA / The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery / Afghanistan: Human Rights Watch Letter on Senior National Security Officials

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 13 October 2014 - No. 2835 
[since 1996]
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Contents:
1. Bangladesh: A Man and History of Trial - The Case of David Bergman | Lawrence Lifschultz
2. Malala Yousufzai: the pride of Pakistan, but she can’t go home | Kamila Shamsie
3. Pakistan: Populism's second coming | I.A. Rehman
4. India - Pakistan: Blame game, retaliation will lead to a vicious cycle of violence threatening human lives on both sides
5. India: Doordarshan As RSS’s Publicity Agent - Dangerous Hindutva portents  | Praful Bidwai
6. Video: Teesta Setalvad in conversation with Justice Kolse Patil, former judge of Bombay high court
7. India: PUCL Fact-Finding Into The Violence In Vadodara, September 2014
8. India: Expressing Concern About the Situation in Jadavpur University - A letter to the Governor of West Bengal by academics and concerned citizens
9. India: Report on Kashmir Floods by a Fact finding team for Centre for Policy Analysis
10. India: Silencing Caste, Sanitising Oppression - Understanding 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan'
11. India and Pakistan must immediately stop ceasefire violations - Appeal from Pakistan India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy
12. India: Health Ministry Has No Records for the 475 Clinical trials in Ongoing Case of Illegal Drug Trials in the Supreme Court
13. India: An Open Letter to the Prime Minister - Stop the Dilution of MGNREGA
14. Recent posts on Communalism Watch:
-  [Political use of Garba dance in Gujarat] Not dancing to VHP tune (Jyoti Punwani)
-  Why Narendra Modi needs both 'Mohanlal' and Mohan Bhagwat (Bharat Bhushan )
-  Invitation to Book Release on Communalism and Terrorism by Kursheed Anwar (15 oct, New Delhi)
-  UK: Shiren Dewani who has been accused of murder in South Africa has a very activist Hindutva past
-  British operation for a Modi make over in the private Corporate sector
-  MODI's show at Madison Sq Garden: hindutva driven and inward looking, communaly inclined circuits in the diapora in the US were mobilised look at the list
-  India: on Hemchandra Vikramaditya in Panchjanya 12 Oct 2014
-  India: Names etc of Functionaries of Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojna (Who's Who of Hindutva's History Doctoring Project)
::: URLs and FULL TEXT :::
15. Afghanistan: A Return to the Dark | Christina Lamb
16. Afghanistan: Human Rights Watch Letter on Senior National Security Officials and Human Rights Concerns
17. India: It is tech, not terror, that’s shrinking boundaries in Adityanath’s home turf | Seema Chishti
18. The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery | William Dalrymple
19. What Is India? | Siddhartha Deb
20. The Throwaways | Feroz Rather
21. Book Review: Say You’re One of Them | Nadifa Mohamed 

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1. BANGLADESH: A MAN AND HISTORY OF TRIAL - THE CASE OF DAVID BERGMAN | LAWRENCE LIFSCHULTZ
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Justice Obaidul Hasan and his colleagues at Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal (# 2) are scheduled to rule on the question of an unusual historical dispute. How and why this question has become the subject of a contempt proceeding is a troubling story.Their decision is expected on October 13th and it may have ramifications that even the justices of ICT-2 may not fully appreciate. The case concerns the British journalist, David Bergman, who has been a long time resident of Bangladesh. Mr. Bergman has been accused of “contempt” of Court for exploring an issue pertaining to an historical reference that one of the Tribunals made in a particular case.
http://www.sacw.net/article9766.html

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2. MALALA YOUSUFZAI: THE PRIDE OF PAKISTAN, BUT SHE CAN’T GO HOME
by Kamila Shamsie
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Amid the celebrations over Malala’s Nobel prize, the threat from the Taliban is still too great for her to return
http://www.sacw.net/article9768.html

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3. PAKISTAN: POPULISM'S SECOND COMING | I.A. REHMAN
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Populist rhetoric has been used to sustain the Islamabad dharnas long enough to justify an inquiry into its impact on the country's politics.
http://www.sacw.net/article9752.html

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4. INDIA - PAKISTAN: BLAME GAME, RETALIATION WILL LEAD TO A VICIOUS CYCLE OF VIOLENCE THREATENING HUMAN LIVES ON BOTH SIDES
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Whatever be the genesis of the ongoing spate of violence at the borders, the fact remains that while handful of persons with vested interest are benefitting, it are the people on the two sides, especially those living on the borders who are suffering the most. ... leaderships on the two sides taking the initiative to broker a truce if the militaries on both sides are incapable of doing so
http://www.sacw.net/article9736.html

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5. INDIA: DOORDARSHAN AS RSS’S PUBLICITY AGENT - DANGEROUS HINDUTVA PORTENTS
by Praful Bidwai
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Hindutva crossed another red line in Indian politics on October 3 when the state-owned Doordarshan news channel made a live broadcast, for the first time ever, of the Vijayadashami (Dussehra) address of a Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh chief.
http://www.sacw.net/article9767.html

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6. VIDEO: TEESTA SETALVAD IN CONVERSATION WITH JUSTICE KOLSE PATIL, FORMER JUDGE OF BOMBAY HIGH COURT
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From farm labourer to erudite defence counsel to public prosecutor to High Court Judge BG Kolse Patil, today a mass leader speaks to Teesta Setalvad, of upper caste bias in the highest echelons of the institutions of Indian democracy, the need for a monitoring of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) that are tamperable and the divisive charecteristics of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS) and Hindutva organisations.
http://www.sacw.net/article9764.html

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7. INDIA: PUCL FACT-FINDING INTO THE VIOLENCE IN VADODARA, SEPTEMBER 2014
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Press Release - Date: 11 October 2014
    PUCL, Vadodara submitted the fact finding report to the National Human Right Commission, Home Department Gujarat and DIG Gujarat for immediate action.
http://www.sacw.net/article9762.html

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8. INDIA: EXPRESSING CONCERN ABOUT THE SITUATION IN JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY - A LETTER TO THE GOVERNOR OF WEST BENGAL BY ACADEMICS AND CONCERNED CITIZENS
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We, the undersigned academics and concerned citizens, are writing to you with grave concern, about the situation in Jadavpur University, as you are also the Chancellor of the University.
http://www.sacw.net/article9759.html

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9. INDIA: REPORT ON KASHMIR FLOODS BY A FACT FINDING TEAM FOR CENTRE FOR POLICY ANALYSIS
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The Centre for Policy Analysis organised a visit (September 27-29, 2014) to Jammu and Kashmir with the purpose of bringing out an interim report on the flood situation in the state. The team comprised Tushar Gandhi, Anand Sahay and Seema Mustafa.
http://www.sacw.net/article9735.html

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10. INDIA: SILENCING CASTE, SANITISING OPPRESSION - UNDERSTANDING 'SWACHH BHARAT ABHIYAN'
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The inauguration of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, (Clean India Campaign) with much fanfare, with ministers, bureaucrats and others holding Jhadoos evoked an interesting reaction from a ragpicker Sanjay who lives in Mehrauli with his parents. “These are the same people from whose houses we pick up garbage every day. This is part of our life. We don't really understand why they are making it such a big deal,”
http://www.sacw.net/article9734.html

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11. INDIA AND PAKISTAN MUST IMMEDIATELY STOP CEASEFIRE VIOLATIONS - APPEAL FROM PAKISTAN INDIA PEOPLE'S FORUM FOR PEACE AND DEMOCRACY
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We appeal to both India and Pakistan to urgently stop ceasefire violations and implement ceasefire agreement in letter and spirit.
http://www.sacw.net/article9731.html

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12. INDIA: HEALTH MINISTRY HAS NO RECORDS FOR THE 475 CLINICAL TRIALS IN ONGOING CASE OF ILLEGAL DRUG TRIALS IN THE SUPREME COURT
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October 8th, 2014 , New Delhi/ Indore : The writ petition filed by Swasthya Adhikar Manch in February 2012, came up for 10th hearing today before the three judge bench of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice H.L Dattu, Justice S.A Bobde and Justice Abhay Manohar Sapre heard the matter. In the last hearing, the Hon'ble Supreme Court had directed the Petitioners to file an reply affidavit based on a comprehensive affidavit filed by Secretary Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) in respect to the petitioners objection with regard to non-compliance of previous orders dated 21.10.2013 and 10.03.2013 on different aspects concerning Clinical trials of New Chemical Entities.
http://www.sacw.net/article9730.html

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13. INDIA: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER - STOP THE DILUTION OF MGNREGA
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We are very disturbed by impending moves of this government to undermine the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and the support it provides to crores of vulnerable rural families. We write this letter to seek your immediate assurance that these retrograde, anti-poor and anti-labour measures will be withdrawn
http://www.sacw.net/article9726.html

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14. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/

-  India: The writers forum (Janwadi Lekhak Sangh) condemned police suppression on Forward Press - Press Release
-  India: ‘Golwalkar Told Kurien That It Was Actually Just Politics’ - On the 1960s movement against cow slaughter led by then RSS chief (interview with Pushpa M. Bhargava)
-   Taking the fight to screen the film on the Muzaffarnagar riots to the courts
-  India: BJP's 'Hindu' Model Wont Work says Anand Teltumbde [Many progressives like him seem to be living some fantasy world of their own!]
-  Indian Semi-Fascism and the Left (Bernard D'Mello)
-  Video: Raj Thackeray on Aesthetic Vision - The Key to Progress
-  BJP’s Assertive Pitch: Panipat of Marathi Asmita?
-  India: The Xenophobia of Patriots (M A Kalam)
-  India: History, battleground for politics (Digvijaya Singh)
-  In praise of Hemu: Medieval king reveals true intent of Hindutva history (Pragya Tiwari)
-  India: Hindustani Versus Sanskritized Hindi – Saeed Naqvi
-  Mob and the city -- racist face of Delhi and contemporary India (Uday Bhaskar)
-  Looks more a propaganda item for the RSS - about its plans expand in the West
-  False Teachings for India's Students - Editorial in The New York Times (8 October 2014)
-  Can Caste Be Swept Away? - A statement by NSI
-  [Political use of Garba dance in Gujarat] Not dancing to VHP tune (Jyoti Punwani)
-  Why Narendra Modi needs both 'Mohanlal' and Mohan Bhagwat (Bharat Bhushan )
-  Invitation to Book Release on Communalism and Terrorism by Kursheed Anwar (15 oct, New Delhi)
-  UK: Shiren Dewani who has been accused of murder in South Africa has a very activist Hindutva past
-  British operation for a Modi make over in the private Corporate sector
-  MODI's show at Madison Sq Garden: hindutva driven and inward looking, communaly inclined circuits in the diapora in the US were mobilised look at the list
-  India: on Hemchandra Vikramaditya in Panchjanya 12 Oct 2014
-  India: Names etc of Functionaries of Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojna (Who's Who of Hindutva's History Doctoring Project)
-  Ah! The RSS remote works on Doordarshan too - Satish Acharya's Cartoon 
 
::: URL's and FULL TEXT :::
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15. AFGHANISTAN: A RETURN TO THE DARK
by Christina Lamb
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As Western troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, many women say that progress is already going backwards. These are their stories.
http://wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/spring-2014-afghanistan/a-return-to-the-dark/

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16. AFGHANISTAN: HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH LETTER ON SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY OFFICIALS AND HUMAN RIGHTS CONCERNS
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Human Rights Watch - October 9, 2014

Dr. Ashraf Ghani
President-elect, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
Via E-mail: ashrafghani1975 at gmail.com
c/o Dawood Sultanzoy
Via E-mail: sultanzoy at gmail.com
c/o Suleiman Khpalwak
Via E-Mail: s.khpalwak at ashrafghani.af; khpalwak.tcc at gmail.com
c/o Mustafa Omerkhil
Via E-mail: mustafa_omerkhil at hotmail.com

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah
Chief Executive-elect, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
c/o Ahmad Massih
Via Email: ahmadmassih at gmail.com
c/o Ahmad Zia
Via E-mail: ahmadzia98 at hotmail.com

Re: Senior National Security Officials and Human Rights Concerns

Dear President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah,

As you begin the selection process for key government posts in your new government, we would like to wish both of you success in carrying out your duties as President and Chief Executive of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Human Rights Watch would like to remind you of the opportunity – and the responsibility – you and your new national unity government now have to address the continuing human rights concerns in Afghanistan. One of the most crucial ways you can do so in these early days of your administration is by carefully vetting your appointments to key government posts to ensure that those appointees do not have a documented history of human rights abuses.

Over the last 13 years, Human Rights Watch has documented serious and widespread human rights violations by members of the Afghan National Police (ANP), the Afghan Local Police (ALP), and the National Directorate of Security (NDS), including systematic torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearance, and extrajudicial executions. Human Rights Watch has informed Afghan government officials about these abuses, as have the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. However, we remain deeply concerned that to date no member of the security forces has been prosecuted for such violations.

We urge you to carefully consider these concerns in the coming days as you make appointments to the Ministries of the Interior and Justice, the National Directorate of Security, the Attorney General, and other critical official positions.

We understand that the Afghan National Security Forces are under great pressure at this time due to a rise in insurgent attacks on frontline national police and ALP units over the past few months. We are aware that the national police, in particular, has suffered the heaviest losses in its history. However, it is precisely under such conditions that it is critical for security forces to adhere to Afghan and international law. In this regard, there are several measures that your government can undertake immediately to promote respect for human rights.

As you are aware, after the publication of UNAMA’s 2013 report on the treatment of detainees, President Hamid Karzai issued a decree in February 2013 ordering anti-torture measures, including prosecution of officials responsible for torture. However, there have been no prosecutions for such abuses against detainees. While UNAMA reported that torture had been reduced in some facilities, it has continued in others. Lawyers have told Human Rights Watch that some detainees are shifted among detention centers to conceal the prevalence of torture. Without prosecutions, there is no real deterrent to torture.

The police and NDS continue to carry out torture and summary executions with impunity. They have also been cited in reports of sexual violence and enforced disappearances, and reportedly maintain secret detention centers to which UNAMA and international humanitarian organizations have no access. The paramilitary ALP and other militia forces have been responsible for extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, assaults, and other abuses against local civilians.

In some cases, the role of commanding officers in these abuses is evident. In others, where a police or paramilitary unit has been implicated in numerous abuses, commanders will at least be responsible for crimes committed as a matter of command responsibility – that is, when a commander knows or should have known about abuses by forces under his control, but failed to take action to stop them or punish those responsible.

President Ghani, during your election campaign, you committed publicly to ensuring that members of the Afghan security forces who have been responsible for torture and other human rights violations would be prosecuted. Chief Executive Abdullah, you pledged to strengthen disciplinary frameworks and elevate the level of accountability in the security forces. Out of our concern that due process and emphasis on individual accountability contribute to the rule of law in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch makes the following recommendations:

    Appoint as heads of the Ministries of Interior and Justice, the National Directorate of Security, and the Afghan National Police, individuals who are committed to ensuring that Afghanistan abide by Afghan and international law in the treatment of detainees, prisoners, and the local civilian population. People in positions of authority in public institutions should not only bear no taint of involvement in human rights abuses, but should be proponents of respect for human rights.
    Establish an independent oversight and accountability mechanism empowered to conduct investigations into all allegations of torture and other mistreatment in custody.

    Create a national civilian complaints mechanism covering all Afghan security forces, including the armed forces, national police, the Afghan Local Police, and other government-backed militias that would recommend cases for criminal investigation, and assist in vetting security force personnel.
    Remove, discipline, and punish (including by referral to civilian and military prosecutors) all ANP, NDS and ALP officers and their superiors found responsible for committing or condoning torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions. Measures should include suspension, loss of pension and other benefits, and criminal prosecution where appropriate.
    Publicly denounce human rights violations by government officials and security forces and take action against counter-insurgency measures that rely on the unlawful use of force, extrajudicial killings, torture, and enforced disappearances.
    Disband irregular armed groups and hold their commanders accountable for abuses they have committed.

Human Rights Watch thanks you for your attention to these issues.

We would welcome your response and the opportunity to meet with members of the cabinet to discuss our recommendations.

Sincerely,

Brad Adams
Executive Director, Asia division

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17. INDIA: IT IS TECH, NOT TERROR, THAT’S SHRINKING BOUNDARIES IN ADITYANATH’S HOME TURF
by Seema Chishti
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(Indian Express - October 10, 2014)

Dipika Singh and husband Dilshad Afsar with their daughter and his parents in Basti. (Source: Express photo by Vishal Srivastav) Dipika Singh and husband Dilshad Afsar with their daughter and his parents in Basti. (Source: Express photo by Vishal Srivastav)

Written by Seema Chishti | Basti 

Subhan Alam, a vegetable seller, constantly mutters “bhaago, bhaago, bhaago”. For two months, that’s what the 56-year-old did, moving from place to place as he and his unwell wife went into hiding to escape the constant questioning by local police over the marriage of their son Nur (24) with his school sweetheart Pushpa Verma. The Alams are back at their two-room rented shanty in Bansi in Siddharthnagar district now. But Nur and Pushpa won’t be returning anytime soon.

In Basti town, nearly 100 km away, Diwali would be exceptional again in Afsar Ahmad’s home. “Even at Holi, you should taste the gujhiyas my daughter-in-law Dipika makes,” smiles Ahmad. If he speaks loudly enough, Dipika’s parents in the house separated from Ahmad’s by just a wall can hear him. However, in the six years since Dilshad Afsar (28) and Dipika Singh (25) got married, there has been no conciliatory sound from the other side. An ex-MLA, Ahmad stood by his son and daughter-in-law after their marriage, going so far as to organise a Hindu marriage in addition to the ceremony under the Special Marriage Act. All the effort seems worthwhile when he looks at his granddaughter. The three-year-old, Ahmad proudly says, “scores 100 out of 100 in school”, and recites ‘The Mulberry Bush’ effortlessly. They have named her ‘Angel’.

About 600 km away from western Uttar Pradesh that is still smouldering from the embers of last year’s riots, this is BJP MP Yogi Adityanath’s territory, and the heart of his Hindu Yuva Vahini network. If Adityanath spearheaded the recent BJP bypoll campaign that made fighting “love jihad” its covert theme, his Yuva Vahini has been at work in these parts of Uttar Pradesh for more than 10 years now.

That these areas have changed in this time, due to factors as varied as mobile phones and exposure to all kinds of media to literacy, has lent its campaign a new urgency. The Hindu Yuva Vahini has sensed the anxiety among parents about changes they don’t understand, and cashed in. What separates Subhan Alam from Afsar Ahmad is that the latter is richer, an ex-MLA, and hence lesser susceptible to the Vahini’s pressure.

Says chief police officer V S Sharma, “The matter is closed now as Pushpa and Nur are adults. There is no love jihad here and not one case has been reported so far.”

However, privately, his colleagues admit that in the constant tussle between girls stepping out and worlds closing in, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make voices of reason count.

Nur and Pushpa’s lawyer Noorul Huda, a successful attorney in the area, says, “I have four-files currently regarding elopements — a much higher rate than before.”

Huda calls them “mobile cases”. “In our times, it was glances, friends, love letters, a long and often unsure process. Now, just a missed call can kickstart a life-changing event. Razai mein let ke, ghanto vibration pe baat ho rahi hai (Under covers, they chat for hours with ringers off)… This has made trying to control or set up barriers impossible. Add to this the Hindu Yuva Vahini providing ‘protection’.”

Shafiq Ahmed, a fellow lawyer from Azamgarh, sees “a great sense of success in how communal riots occurred in western UP over this Hindu girl and Muslim boy theme supposedly”. He believes this will go on till the next Assembly elections. “So we will have not just love jihad, but also meat jihad and madrasa jihad — old and personal things twisted into political issues.”

The Hindu Yuva Vahini’s Nandeswar Ojha calls it a “terror campaign”. “Islamic terror impacts the world. Love jihad is a part of that terror. There are many cases here… thousands.”

But Ojha is unable to give specifics of even one. “It is more in western UP. We are less affected and are ensuring it does not grow — just prevention.”

The Hindu Yuva Vahini’s Basti spokesman Arun Bharti claims “seven-eight” FIRs where Muslim boys used hidden names “to fool or forcibly take away” Hindu girls. “In the past three years, there have been three cases like this, and two girls came back.”

BJP Basti district president Avdesh Singh even reads out a “rate card” deployed in ‘love jihad’ — “For raping and leaving a Hindu girl, Rs 50,000; for raping and marrying her, Rs 2 lakh; for raping, marrying her, settling down and then leaving her, Rs 5 lakh.”

Ask him who is funding this, and Singh fumbles for an answer, before saying: “This is what we have heard in discussions and seen on TV.”

Adityanath had himself spoken to the police to “retrieve” Dipika Singh, now married to Dilshad Afsar. “A mobile bill of Rs 1.30 lakh in a month, some years ago, was the price we have paid to be together,” laughs Dilshad now.

Dipika studied in a “convent”, a fact underlined several times in Basti, a place that has long been suspended between being a town and a city. She met Dilshad in college, where they studied together. Her parents did all they could to stall their marriage and involved the police, which brought in the Hindu Yuva Vahini. Their troubles continued till Dipika stood before the Allahabad High Court two years ago and said she wanted to stay with Dilshad.

She is finishing her B.Com now and plans to pursue her masters. Dilshad is a lawyer.

Pushpa too had to move court to stay with Nur. A Hindu goldsmith’s daughter, she fell in love with the poor vegetable seller’s son in school, where they studied together. Nur’s family was roughed up and its vegetable thela broken. They had to take a loan to pay a bribe to be left alone, they say.

In August this year, a local court declared Pushpa and Nur “major”, and hence free to make own decisions. Pushpa testified that she and Nur had got married in Lucknow, and that she had gone with him of her own volition.

Agreeing to speak only over the phone, the two say they are determined to “make it work”. They have only done schooling, and Nur has now set up a “small business” while Pushpa does small stitching jobs.

Advocate Vivek Srivastava sees both the opposition to such relationships and the pushback the result of a “new and unprecedented freedom enjoyed by the new generation”. Relationships are no more caste or community bound, he says.
If these seem tilted towards Muslim boys and Hindu girls, Srivastava adds, there is a reason. “Maybe there are fewer Muslim girls with as much liberty,” he says. “But that too is bound to change.”

In fact, an unsigned ‘reverse jihad’ message among Muslims lists 100 couples where the boy is a Hindu and the girl a Muslim. “These things will keep simmering,” warns Asaduddin Owaisi, MP, of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, blaming the BJP.

Niloufer Usmani (55), the principal of Begum Khair Girls Inter College in Basti, has seen the town change over the past two decades. But never as swiftly as in the past five years or so. Choosing her words carefully, she notes that development and progress differ. “Awareness is low here and vikas (progress) slow, but development has happened,” she observes.

Parents now want their girls to study, Usmani says, as much due to government incentives as the realisation that it is essential. But few take into consideration that many of them may then want to do other things besides join “safe” professions like teaching. “Girls see many possibilities. They want to pick partners of their choice and level, not worrying about caste or religion,” says Usmani.

Agrees Mohammad Yasir Abbasi (31), a lawyer from the region who comes from a family of freedom fighters, “A technological change like the Railways threatened social rigidity, with people of different religions and castes travelling together. Similarly, youngsters are mixing across barriers now. How can that trend be put back in the box?”

“Speaking honestly”, says Ahmad, he was distressed at son Dilshad picking Dipika over a Muslim girl. But now that the couple have settled down, it is his duty to ensure “a roof over their heads”, he says.

“Yeh dil ki baat hai (these are matters of the heart),” says paediatrician Dr Mohammad Iqbal. “It is the oldest story on Earth and will continue till the world ends. Boys and girls are doing M.A. together, how will you stop them from making off together — Hindu-Muslim, or inter-caste?”
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/it-is-tech-not-terror-thats-shrinking-boundaries-in-adityanaths-home-turf/99/

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18. THE GREATEST ANCIENT PICTURE GALLERY
by William Dalrymple
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(New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014 Issue)

A statue of the Buddha in one of the Ajanta caves, India

In the winter of 1844, Major Robert Gill, a young British military draftsman, set off from Madras into the independent princely state of Hyderabad to record a major new archaeological discovery.

Some years earlier, in 1819, a British hunting party in the jungles of the Western Ghats had followed a tiger into a remote river valley and stumbled onto what was soon recognized as one of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta. On the walls of a line of thirty-one caves dug into an amphitheater of solid rock lay the most beautiful and ancient paintings in Buddhist art, the oldest of which dated from the second century BC—an otherwise lost golden age of Indian painting. In time it became clear that Ajanta contained probably the greatest picture gallery to survive from the ancient world, and along with the frescoes of Pompeii, the fabulous murals of Livia’s Garden House outside Rome, and the encaustic wax portraits of the Egyptian Fayyum, Ajanta’s walls represented perhaps the most comprehensive depiction of civilized life to survive from antiquity.

The Ajanta murals told the Jataka stories of the lives of the Buddha in images of supreme elegance and grace. Unlike the flatter art of much later Indian miniature painting, here the artists used perspective and foreshortening to produce paintings of courtly life, ascetic renunciation, hunts, battles, and erotic dalliance that rank as some of the greatest masterpieces of art produced by mankind in any century. Most famous, perhaps, are the two astonishing images of the compassionate Bodhisattvas Avalokitesvara and Vajrapani, beings of otherworldly beauty, swaying on the threshold of enlightenment, caught in what the great historian of Indian art Stella Kramrisch described, wonderfully, as “a gale of stillness.” Even today, the colors of these murals glow with a brilliant intensity: topaz-dark, lizard-green, lotus-blue.

When they were first published in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1829, it was clear that these precious fragments of a lost classical world were themselves of great fragility and in danger of disintegrating into a cloud of dust. John Smith, the leader of the initial hunting party that had rediscovered the caves, had carved his name across the body of a Boddhisattva, and it did not take long for word to spread that here were unprotected treasures ripe for the attention of Victorian hunters, tourists, and assorted other graffiti artists. Nine years later, Dr. James Bird, in the course of preparing a report for the Asiatic Society, “notwithstanding protestations about defacing monuments…contrived to peel off four painted figures” from the zodiac or shield, one of the finest of the paintings at the site. Before long a self-appointed Indian caretaker had set up shop in the caves and, “for a small consideration,” presented tourists with “souvenir fragments” of fresco.

This was a relatively benign intervention by the standards of the time: in the same decade, forty newly discovered masterpieces of Gupta sculpture had been taken from the archaeological site marking the place of the Buddha’s First Sermon at the Deer Park in Sarnath in northern India and “thrown into the Barna river under the bridge to check the cutting away of the bed between the arches.” Many of the bricks of the great Sarnath stupa built by the Emperor Ashoka were also carted away to build a new suburb of Varanasi in the mid-nineteenth century.

Luckily, shortly after Bird’s visit, the painted caves of Ajanta came to the attention of James Fergusson, the pioneering archaeologist, art historian, and early scholar of Indian Buddhism. It was Fergusson who first realized the real importance of the Ajanta paintings and the danger they were in. After making a detailed study of the site and giving the caves the numbers they still possess today (“I numbered them like houses in a street”), he sent for the painter Major Robert Gill to make copies of the paintings before anyone else attempted to prise them off the walls or decorate them with records of their visit.

Twenty-two years later, in 1866, the great Indian Uprising of 1857 had come and gone, the vengeful British had murdered hundreds of thousands of suspected rebels, the East India Company had been removed from power, and instead Queen Victoria had been proclaimed empress of a now fully colonized India—but Major Gill was still in his beloved caves, hard at work. When he finally sent his painstakingly detailed oil paintings to London for exhibition in 1866 at the Crystal Palace, they were almost immediately destroyed in the fire that engulfed the exhibition center. Tragically, the paintings had not even been photographed. Gill knew what he had to do: with astonishing sangfroid, he packed his bags and returned to the site to begin work again. He died there, still absorbed by his copying, in 1875.

Gill’s place was taken by John Griffiths of the Bombay School of Art, who arrived in 1872 and worked away for a further thirteen years. Ajanta has always had this effect on people. Not only are the murals of unrivaled beauty, depth, and complexity, the site itelf is extraordinary: a steep horseshoe-shaped sickle of cliffs cut by the Wagora River, located in the wild mountain country of the western Deccan. But when Griffith’s pictures were sent to London, many of these too were destroyed when a wing of the Victoria & Albert Museum went up in flames.

Then, in 1916, the Japanese artist Kempo Arai arrived in India to teach Rabindranth Tagore calligraphy. Like Gill and Griffiths before him, he too spent many years tracing the murals through thin Japanese paper—the traditional Japanese method of making copies of artworks. On completion, Arai sent his work back to Japan, where they were stored at Tokyo Imperial University before they were destroyed by fire during the Taisho earthquake.”1

In our own time, the caves have lost none of this ability both to enrapture and entrap those artists and scholars who fall in love with them, and a whole sequence of modern academics have spent their entire careers studying the caves—Dieter Schlingloff,2 Monika Zin, Naomichi Yaguchi, and perhaps most notably and prolifically, Walter Spink of the University of Michigan.

I first saw the caves when I was eighteen, on a backpacking trip to India exactly thirty years ago, in the summer of 1984. Staying the night in the modest tourist department rest house at Fardapur, a short walk from the caves, I happened to bump into Walter Spink. He had already lived in the rest house for as long as anyone could remember, and even then was recognized as a wonderfully enthusiastic and eccentric Ajanta obsessive. It was thirty years since he had published his first essay on Ajanta, in 1954, and the evening I met him he sat up under the stars regaling my companion and me with stories about the caves and his theories of how they were built.

Three decades later, Spink, now in his mid-eighties, is still resident in Fardapur for part of the year. In addition to bending the ear of any receptive passing traveler, he has just finished the seventh and final volume of his lifework—Ajanta: History and Development—while the handsomely bound and beautifully illustrated Volume Six is just off the presses.3

Spink’s long, lonely decades of work on Ajanta are one of the most remarkable examples of art historical focus and dogged scholarly obsession in the field, and Spink is widely respected for both his charm and tenacity. But probably inevitably, not everyone accepts Spink’s unorthodox version of the construction of the caves, and his conclusions about his beloved Ajanta are widely debated and, especially in India, the subject of some controversy.

The valley of Ajanta was first settled by Buddhist monks in the second century BC, about two hundred years after the death of the Buddha. It is probable that the Buddha envisaged his monks as leading a peripatetic life—the life of the wandering thinker that he had himself led: “You cannot travel on the path,” he said, “before you have become the Path itself.” Yet by the second century BC, when the great rock-cut monasteries of western India began to be constructed, Buddhist monks had already started to turn away from the road to embrace instead the more sedentary life of the hermit in his cell.

When the rains made travel impossible, the Buddha had allowed his followers a “rain-retreat.” During this time the bhikkhus—literally beggars—were allowed to congregate on higher ground and to live in huts of wattle and daub, or better still in natural caves in the Himalayas and the mountains of the Western Ghats. It was from these sites, in time, that the great Buddhist monasteries arose.

Excavated shortly after the collapse of Ashoka’s great Mauryan Empire (322–185 BC), which had once stretched from Kandahar to the Vindyas, caves nine and ten at Ajanta are some of the oldest extant rooms in the world: from the paleographic evidence, scholars believe the years between 90 and 70 BC to be the most likely period of construction. These long chaitya, or prayer halls, lined with tapering octagonal columns, ending in a rounded apse that encloses the perfect dome of a tall stone stupa, were thus probably already old when Augustus started the rebuilding of Rome.

The early rock-cut cave monasteries of western India also predate almost all the extant texts of Buddhism (written beginning in 100 BC but mostly surviving in much later copies), and all we know about them comes from the Sanskrit and Pali inscriptions left on the rock walls by the monks, their patrons, and devotees. By then the great monasteries of ancient India appear to have been as powerful as those in medieval Europe, and often had their own mints and owned landed estates, some of which were worked by slaves.

The second century BC was a period of great expansion of international trade, and these monasteries, remote as they may seem now, were originally built on the great trade routes of their time. The valleys they crown once saw the frequent passage of caravans bringing luxury goods—ebony, teak, and sandalwood, ivory and translucent Indian textiles, pepper and cinnamon—to the coast where they would then be shipped, usually by Jewish and Greek middlemen, to the Red Sea and thence to Rome.

The inscriptions show how surprisingly middle-class and mercantile early Buddhism was, and it is clear that the patrons of these early monks were often traders or their bankers. More surprising still, some of them designate themselves as Yavanas—“foreigners,” probably Greeks. As Walter Spink’s pupil Pia Brancaccio has pointed out, the Ajanta murals

    portray a prosperous and multicultural environment filled with people wearing golden jewels and…enjoying imported goods. Even the pigments used in the paintings indicate international trade connections—the blue, for example, was obtained from lapis lazuli imported from Iran or Afghanistan…. Recognizable among the crowds are many foreigners, easy to spot because of their different clothes, hairdos, and in some cases even skin colors…. Foreign figures appear so commonly in the murals that they must surely have been part of the social scene at the time.4 

dalrymple_2-102314.jpg Charles and Josette Lenars/Corbis
Detail from a mural in Cave One at Ajanta, showing King Mahajanaka, at right

The scholar who has done more to open up the daily reality of the Buddhist monks who built Ajanta is Gregory Schopen. Schopen has apparently never been to India, but his brilliant essays, collected in four pathbreaking volumes, based on close study of the published inscriptions at the early Buddhist sites, have arguably done more to alter our understanding of the early Buddhist world than any other scholar since James Fergusson in the nineteenth century.5

He is a witty as well as a polymathically erudite and learned writer, and he delights in showing how readily scholars of Buddhism have romanticized their subject, relying on Buddhist texts that often date in their current form from many centuries after the early monasteries: most of the texts we use to study Buddhism today “may not even have been known to the vast majority of practicing Buddhists—both monks and laity.”6

Schopen shows how the inscriptions left at Buddhist sites tend to record a far less idealized picture of life in early Buddhist India than the later documents that have been the foundational texts of modern Buddhist scholarship. He points out, for example, that Buddhist monks, far from being the otherworldly creatures often imagined by Western scholars, were frequently extremely worldly and “men of considerable wealth,” running businesses and mints; many were clearly sleeping around, lending money, and writing treatises on such unexpected subjects as inheritance law, medicine, and eroticism; some were even getting into sectarian fights, hoarding weapons, destroying the stupas of rival orders, and abusing and occasionally trying to murder nuns. They were, in other words, not saints but normal human beings.

Moreover, Schopen has shown that though it may have been the ideal that Buddhist monks give away all their property and abandon their families, in practice this was clearly not happening, as is shown by inscriptions where the majority of large donations to the monastery are recorded as coming from monks and their relations.7 Inscriptions in cave ten, for example, record a variety of small donations from several monks with names such as Dharmadeva, Buddhinaga, and Sikhabhadra, the latter “in honor of his mother and father.” One pillar was “the meritorious gift of the teacher Sachiva. Whatever merit is in this, let that be for the good of all sentient beings.”

As Schopen has also shown, the chaitya halls executed around 200 BC were some of the first spaces in Asia specifically made for congregational worship. They were created as part of a momentous change in religious practice, and provided a setting for a new form of communal Buddhist worship directed at the stupa, the domed, moundlike structure containing Buddhist relics, which had come to be seen as the living embodiment of the Buddha, rather as later generations of Catholics would look to the tabernacle, the place where the Eucharist is stored, as the location of the Real Presence. In these halls, the monks of Ajanta would gather together to have a “direct, intimate contact with a living presence.” The cult of stupa worship, writes Schopen, was “monastically controlled and monastically dominated…a primary concern for the monastic community and a necessary prerequisite for its continuance.”8

The monks may have long gone, but reverence is still something these early caves invoke, and visiting them today you see crowds of chattering tourists instantly hushed by the dark, solemn splendor of their painted interiors. With some of these early images, particularly with the newly rediscovered and restored early cycles from cave ten, probably dating from the first century BC, we are in a world so astonishingly lifelike that even today they can still make you gasp as you find yourself staring eyeball to eyeball with a silent soldier who could have fought the Bactrian Greeks in Afghanistan, or a monk who may have seen the Buddha’s relics interred at Sanchi.

So realistic are the faces of the people depicted, so direct are their expressions, that you feel that these have to be portraits of real individuals, glowing still with the flame of eternal life. There is something deeply hypnotic about the soundless stare of these silent, often uncertain, ancient Buddhist faces. Their fleeting expressions are frozen, startled, as if suddenly surprised by, say, the decision of the king of Varanasi to loose an arrow on a hunting trip or by the nobility of a great elephant breaking through the trees of the jungles. The viewer peers at these figures trying to catch some hint of the upheavals they witnessed and the strange sights they saw in ancient India. But the smooth, intense, humane faces stare us down.

It is the second phase of activity in the caves under the Hindu Vatakata Emperor Harisena (circa 475–500 AD), ruler of the Deccan, that most interests Walter Spink. It was during this fifth-century period of construction—a full six hundred years after the first caves were carved—that twenty-six of the thirty-one caves, and all the most elaborate ones, were dug. Rejecting the conventional line that these caves were the work of many generations of laborers burrowing away into the hillside, century after century, Spink believes that with the exception of the five early caves, the rest were constructed in a mere sixteen years between 462 and 477 by Harisena, whom he describes as one of India’s greatest rulers.

This phase took place after a long period of decline in Indian Buddhism, when the religion was fast heading into extinction in South Asia—like a last bright flicker of the guttering Buddhist lamp. In contrast to the earlier period of community patronage, it is clear that in the age of Emperor Harisena each cave had one single very rich patron—a man like the monk Buddhabhadra, the chief donor of the opulently appointed cave twenty-six, who was clearly a man of considerable wealth: in his inscription he describes himself as “the friend of kings.” As Walter Spink has noted, it is unlikely “that he spent very much time humbly wandering from village to village with his begging bowl as his predecessors in the early days of Buddhism did.”

Built to commemorate powerful individual patrons, these later caves were contructed, if not for eternity, then at least for the foreseeable future: as one inscription puts it, these chaitya halls were deliberately made to endure a kalpa—an entire cosmic age. The dedicatory inscriptions give a good indication of the motives of the patrons who paid for this work: “Realizing that life, youth, wealth and happiness are transitory,” reads one, Varahadeva, minister to Harisena, made “this magnificent dwelling to be occupied by the best of ascetics…. It resembles the palaces of the Lord of the Gods, clothed in the brilliance of Indra’s crown. As long as the sun [shines]…may this spotless cave…be enjoyed!” “Even a single flower offered here can yield freedom, the fruit known as paradise and final emancipation,” reads the inscription of Buddhabhadra, the donor. “The wise man will show reverence.” He adds: “A man continues to enjoy himself in paradise as long as his memory is green in this world. One should therefore set up such a memorial in the mountains that will endure for as long as the moon and sun continue.”

According to Spink, the work of construction was done at high speed by large numbers of workers: after carefully studying the excavations and conducting experiments with his own students, Spink has come to the conclusion that working continuously with no days off, one hundred workers could have excavated even a large cave in less than a month. Likewise, with a large number of painters—say fifty artists—collected from across India, Spink believes that the original 50,000 square feet of painting could have been done in around a decade. The fact that many of the caves are unfinished is, he believes, evidence that they were being excavated simultaneously and that work stopped suddenly owing to some political crisis—probably the death of Harisena in around 500 AD. A few piecemeal additions continued during the brief takeover of the site by the rule of the local Asmaka dynasty between 475 and 479 and the period of disruption that followed before the site was abandoned in the mid-sixth century.

During this time Spink assumes that the site may not have been a practicing monastery at all—merely a vast construction site: Ajanta, he concludes, “was never a proper and workable monastic establishment.” This would explain why several of the cave sanctuaries appear to have been almost unused, while the large number of different artistic styles in evidence would be owing not to changing tastes over many decades, but instead to the large number of different families of artists at work on a single site at the same time: close study, he believes, shows several hands with different styles at work simultaneously on a single wall.

Sixty years into his Ajanta project, it is clear that Spink has lost none of his detective-like eye for detail, and the latest volume, like its predecessors, bears witness to his astonishing inch-by-inch knowledge of every door jamb and window sill on the site. Even as he heads toward his nineties, Spink can spot details that anyone else would miss: for example, how a particular shrine may never have been used, since there was “no ritual soot,” and a “garland hook in its shrine antechamber” was never hung with flowers for worship, because “unlike its counterparts…the plaster around it remains unbroken”; or, conversely, he realizes by spotting the heavy “wear in the pivot holes in which the doors turned” that another cave was older and more frequented.

Many scholars, especially those in India, remain dubious that such an extensive body of work—excavation, painting, and sculpture—could all have been accomplished in so short a period of time; but even if you question Spink’s short chronology, there is no doubt that his work represents a huge contribution to the understanding of the site. His thesis remains unprovable, but his is certainly the most detailed study of the making of the caves ever conducted.

Walter Spink’s work is principally concerned with the construction of the site, but he has little to say about the theological world inhabited by the monks or the programs of painting they commissioned. In those fields, perhaps the most interesting new work has come from one of Schopen’s pupils, Robert DeCaroli, who has studied the persistence into early Indian Buddhism of earlier pre-Buddhist popular nature religions, and Vidya Dehejia, who recently has focused on the surprisingly sensuous nature of the Ajanta paintings.9

For the theological world of Ajanta is often very different from what we might expect, far from the pure and philosophically abstracted Buddhism sometimes projected onto the period by Western enthusiasts. Instead, it is clear that early Indian Buddhism was shot through with the cosmology of the animist cults that had existed in these hills before the arrival of the new teachings: all over the early Buddhist sites are inscriptions and carvings honoring the guardian gods and tutelary godlings who lived in the trees and stones and water around them and were capable of attacking, protecting, or possessing their human and monastic neighbors. Inscriptions reveal an imagined world full of hungry ghosts howling from the charnel grounds, voluptuous, nearly naked yakshi tree spirits, and their royally attired and well-fed male counterparts who could be persuaded to act as guardians if properly propitiated.

Nagas, or snake deities, are particularly prominent, and their cults were well integrated into the life and worship of the monasteries. This is made especially clear by the inscription left by Minister Varahadeva, which states that the mountain around the caves was home to a Naga king, and whose portrait sculpture, crowned with a wonderful plume of cobra heads, guards the stairs leading to cave sixteen.

The decoration of Ajanta may have been designed for monastic buildings constructed to house ascetics, but while the paintings do depict Buddhist themes, the stories chosen tend to depict the princely world of the courtly patrons rather than that of the monks. Here, beside handsome, bare-chested kings, narrow-waisted princesses decked with tiaras of jasmine languish lovelorn on swings, while dancing girls of extraordinary sensuousness, dressed only in jewels, perform beside lotus ponds.

While the choice of subjects may surprise us today, the Ajanta artists clearly saw nothing odd in this juxtaposition of monk and dancing girl: in the Indian tradition, whether Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist, the sensuous is seen as an integral part of the sacred. As Vidya Dehejia puts it, “the idea that [such sensual images] might generate irreverent thoughts did not arise; rather, the established association appears to have been with accentuated growth, prosperity, and auspiciousness.” The celibate Buddhist monasteries of Ajanta were filled with images of sensuous, half-naked women—because in the eyes of the monks and their patrons this was not just permissible, but completely appropriate decoration.


1 Manager Singh and Balasaheb Arbad, “Chemistry of Preservation of the Ajanta Murals,” International Journal of Conservation Science, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April–June 2013). 

2 Dieter Schlingloff is widely regarded as the greatest art historian of the Ajanta murals, and his work, assisted in many cases by Monika Zin, has revolved around minutely identifying the stories told in the murals. Many of his most important essays are translated into English in Studies in the Ajanta Paintings: Identifications and Interpretations (Ajanta, 1987). His recent Ajanta Handbook to the Paintings (New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 2013) is the best existing guide to them. 

3 Walter M. Spink, Ajanta: History and Development: Volume 1: The End of the Golden Age (Brill, 2005 ), Volume 2: Arguments About Ajanta (Brill, 2006), Volume 3: The Arrival of the Uninvited (Brill, 2005), Volume 4: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture Year by Year (Brill, 2009), Volume 5: Cave by Cave (Brill, 2007), Volume 6: Defining Features (Brill, 2014). 

4    Pia Brancaccio , The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad: Transformations in Art and Religion (Brill, 2011), p. 80.

5 Gregory Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), Figments and Fragments of Mahayana Buddhism in India: More Collected Papers (University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), and the recent Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters: Recent Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014). 

6 Schopen, Bones, Stones and Buddhist Monks, p. 2. 

7 These themes and the question of how monks interacted with their families have been studied in a fascinating new book by one of Schopen’s pupils, Shayne Neil Clarke, Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014). 

8 Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks, pp. 116, 34, 93, 126. 

9 Robert DeCaroli, Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2004), Vidya Dehejia, Early Buddhist Rock Temples: A Chronology (Cornell University Press, 1972), and The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries Between the Sacred and Profane in India’s Art (Columbia University Press, 2009). 

=========================================
19. WHAT IS INDIA?
by Siddhartha Deb
=========================================
(The Nation, September 16, 2014)

Children in Varanasi, India, wearing masks of Narendra Modi, April 24, 2014

In May, in a national election widely perceived as marking a dramatic new phase for India, the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won an absolute majority in Parliament. The Indian National Congress Party (INC), the country's oldest political party and the winner of more elections than any of its rivals, saw itself jeered to defeat, its prime-ministerial candidate, the Harvard-educated Rahul Gandhi, portrayed as an ineffectual representative of a political lineage out of touch with the impatient, assertive mood of contemporary India. That mood, it was said, was far better captured by the 64-year-old Narendra Modi, who led the BJP campaign and is now the fifteenth prime minister of India. Of far more humble origins than Rahul Gandhi (the scion of a family that has produced three generations of prime ministers), Modi is thought to have presided, as chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, over a remarkable economic and social renaissance in his home state, even as India, under the tutelage of the Congress Party, went from boom to bust.

But in this contest of a self-made son of the soil against a member of the ancien régime, why were Modi's most vigorous supporters the elites themselves, from the corporate and media oligarchs and their camp followers among the professional classes to the prosperous Indian diaspora in the United States? As Modi promised, on the campaign trail, to build a hundred new "smart" cities and bring in high-speed bullet trains of the kind already common in China and Japan, suited Indian men affiliated with universities and think tanks appeared on television shows and in the op-ed pages offering paeans to Modi's pro-business record. There was no talk, at these levels of discourse, of Modi and the BJP as representing anything other than business and efficiency. It was only in India, after the electoral victory, that the point was made more explicitly. In Open magazine, whose political editor had been removed prior to the elections, perhaps for being too critical of the BJP, the cover story celebrated Modi's victory under the headline Triumph of the Will.

And so the tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Modi, who, in his long run-up to the prime minister's seat, had begun the practice of distributing bearded, bespectacled masks of himself among his supporters, has, underneath that pro-business, pro-efficiency veneer, also been the man who started his political career as a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the volunteer paramilitary organization that provides muscle for the BJP's well-larded front. In 2002, soon after Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, one of the worst modern pogroms in India occurred there, with at least 1,000 Muslims killed by Hindu mobs while the police ignored the violence or, in some cases, helped it along. And while it is true, as Modi's advocates proclaim (the shrillest of them men with Hindu names and postal addresses in California, Massachusetts and Michigan), that nothing has ever been proven in court linking Modi directly to the riots, it is also true that the pogrom was followed by a pattern of extrajudicial executions or "encounter killings," the most notable of these being the deaths of three men and a young woman, all Muslim, said to have been on their way to assassinate Modi, and who were probably abducted and murdered in cold blood by the police. (It is likewise true that those few policemen who tried to stop the Gujarat rioters have seen their careers suffer.)

But again, nothing has been proven in court, and not a word of all this has been mentioned by Modi's supporters or allies on the various websites, social media forums, op-ed columns or television shows about the new leader, which have been used largely to present the business-friendly face of Modi and his party. The brief congratulatory message released by the White House similarly focused on "economic opportunity, freedom, and security for our people and around the world," choosing to ignore the fact that in 2005, a previous US administration had denied Modi a diplomatic visa (and revoked his tourist visa for good measure) for "severe violations of religious freedom" under his watch in Gujarat.

But Modi is, of course, a persona as much as a person—someone who would have to be invented if he did not exist. If the face behind the mask is associated with hatred, especially of Muslims, and the mask itself is associated with market-driven prosperity, both impulses originate with the elites who see in Modi a triumph of their majoritarian will. These are people energized by talk of the free market and by denunciations of minorities, people who speak the language of TED when selling a product or service and who leave behind chilling genocidal comments when trolling news and opinion sites. It is they who coined the popular campaign phrase "Modi-fied" to capture the idea that a massive transformation was needed in India. And now that India is indeed being Modi-fied, the question concerns what form this transformation will take, and whether it will remain possible to maintain what has always been an artificial separation—more in the eye of the liberal beholder than in reality—between the business of violence and the violence of business in India.

* * *

But why did India, a success story not so long ago, need to be Modi-fied at all? Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, sliced open by neoliberal knives into a realm of information technology, real estate and conspicuous consumption, the country was widely celebrated, both by its own elites and its Western boosters, as having entered the realm of true democracy. The four previous decades of postcolonial India were consigned to a conceptual darkness that was sometimes called "socialism" and sometimes, in a slightly more accurate reference to the heavy bureaucratic role of the centralized state, the "license-permit Raj." In contrast to this was the celebration of the present: the new, market-friendly nation, tiger rising and "India Shining" (the latter a slogan coined by the BJP in its failed re-election bid in 2004), and particularly its growth as measured by GDP, averaging 8 to 9 percent throughout the first decade of the new millennium and peaking at 10.3 percent in 2010. Fed largely by flows of foreign capital and inherently weak, the tiger has since shrunk to the size of a goat, with growth having fallen to 4.7 percent in 2014—which goes some way toward explaining why both the Indian oligarchs and sections of the population turned against the Congress Party toward the end of its ten-year rule and began to clamor for Modi to take over.

Still, twenty-plus years of growth does not, on the face of it, seem like a bad thing. And while growth is an abstraction, the feedback loop of reality experienced by the Indian elites seems to provide plenty of evidence for how much wealthier the country has actually become, with its new airports, a real-estate boom of condos, villas and shopping malls, a heady swarm of international consumer brands, its fifty to seventy billionaires (depending on whom you ask) and the creation of the Indian Premier League, a corruption-laced cricket competition with a generous display of white cheerleaders for the local voyeurs. Given all this, and considering the apparently innate genius of Indians in harnessing the power of capitalism (celebrated not that long ago by Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat, a bestseller in India as much as in the United States), why should the recent downturn have led to such angst? Didn't we already have those bullet trains and "smart" cities?

* * *

The left-liberal economist duo Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, the former an Indian citizen of Belgian origin and the latter a Harvard-based Nobel laureate, have a different account of the boom years in their book An Uncertain Glory. To begin with, they offer a historical context for India, with the caveat that the Indian economy, if measured only by growth, was not quite the sluggard it was made out to be in contemporary accounts. It rose from 3.7 percent in the 1950s to 5.2 in the early '90s, before the changes that ushered in a high-growth India took place. And this early phase of postcolonial growth happened, the authors point out, in a country where the majority had been devastated by colonial rule, a fact conveniently consigned to oblivion both by Western boosters of neoliberal India and their Indian counterparts. Yes, the British brought the railways, as Sen's Harvard colleague, the historian Niall Ferguson, likes to remind us (although the Indians also labored to build those railways, even as the taxes extracted from their use guaranteed profit to the British citizens who had invested in them), but growth during the Raj was at times negative: for example, the average life expectancy for Indians in 1931 was twenty-seven years. It is possible, as Drèze and Sen argue, quoting the economist Angus Deaton, "that the deprivation in childhood of Indians born around mid-century was as severe as any large group in history, all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution and the hunter-gatherers that preceded them."

But if the severe immiseration of the colonial period, including famines that killed millions, was no longer a regular feature of modestly growing, independent India, little progress was made in fundamental areas such as health and primary education. This stasis gives the lie, Sen and Drèze write, to the rhetoric that independent India was socialist in any meaningful way, but it also marks India out as different from a range of Asian countries across the political spectrum, including China, South Korea and Japan.

The supremacy of the market over the state in the 1990s did nothing to change the ongoing deprivation of the majority. While the booming wealth in India and China (to which India was compared favorably) meant increasing inequality in both countries, it was only in India, Drèze and Sen point out, that wages for the working classes remained "relatively stagnant." In terms of physical and social infrastructure—including electricity, sanitation, safe water and schooling—India lags not just behind China but also many of its poorer South Asian neighbors like Bangladesh. "To point to just one contrast," the authors write, "even though India has significantly caught up with China in terms of GDP growth, its progress has been very much slower than China's in indicators such as longevity, literacy, child undernourishment and maternal mortality…. Whereas twenty years ago India generally had the second-best social indicators among the six South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan), it now looks second-worst…. India has been climbing up the ladder of per capita income while slipping down the slope of social indicators."

Although the abstract language of percentages and ratios cannot capture the sheer desperation of the people living through those sliding social indicators, the data are nevertheless unambiguous. Even accepting the government's official poverty line, with an absurd ideal budget for the poor that "includes princely sums of…forty rupees per month for health care" (an amount that "might buy something like the equivalent of an aspirin a day"), "a full 30 per cent of the population in 2009-10, or more than 350 million people," live below it. A more realistic poverty level, on the other hand, would include nearly 80 percent of the population. In most other social indicators, too, the India portrayed by Sen and Drèze is an unfamiliar one, invisible in the deluge of commentary, films, and books produced by the Indian elites and their overseas patrons. "Nutrient intakes (calorie, protein, micronutrients—almost anything except fat) have decreased" in "the last twenty years," while children and adult women "are more undernourished in India (and South Asia) than almost anywhere else in the world." India is rated "as the most polluted among 132 countries for which comparable data are available," while "one fifth of all Indian men in the age group of 15-24 years, and one fourth of all women in the same age group, were unable to read and write in 2006."

The dystopic details don't end there. The use of new technology to abort fetuses selectively has led to a rapidly declining female-to-male birth ratio, with a nationwide average of 914 girls per 1,000 boys in 2011, as opposed to 940 to 950 girls in European countries—and with Gujarat, its development such a shining exemplar in the Modi campaign, boasting an average of 891 girls in 2011, among the lowest such numbers in India. At the same time, India—and especially in states like Gujarat—is a growing provider of rent-a-womb services for wealthy European and North American couples. Minorities, those designated as lower castes and Adivasis (the indigenous groups outside the caste system) all fare badly not just in the traditional structures of power in India, including the police, judiciary, media and civil services, but also in the shiny new market sectors: "in a recent study of corporate boards in India," Drèze and Sen write, "more than 90 per cent of their members were upper-caste, and almost half…were Brahmins," although Brahmins themselves were "slightly outnumbered by Vaishyas," the traditional business and trading castes. Indeed, on 70 percent of the corporate boards, "there was no ‘diversity' at all, in the sense that all members belonged to the same caste group."

Nevertheless, Modi and his elites continue to adopt a Tea Party–style rhetoric drawn largely from the same Randian-Reaganite influences—one that depicts them as resolutely opposed to big government, except when it comes to expanding the national-security state and protecting and advancing the interests of those elites. These ideas are, of course, peddled by the prosperous Indian diaspora in the United States and its upper-caste, upper-class relatives back in the motherland, all of them capable of spouting the latest jargon about "networking" and "equity" while also offering a curiously dated reverence for those icons of privatization, Reagan and Thatcher.

As a result, while the rhetoric is about the poor—especially the minority poor—leeching off the state, the reality is somewhat different. Power and fuel remain subsidized by the state, benefiting the "privileged urban residents who enjoy the luxury of modern gadgets and affluent lifestyles at public expense," as well as "telecom companies and air-conditioned shopping malls." The same elites that scream themselves hoarse at the thought of a living wage, supplementary nutrition, and support for education or healthcare for the masses remain resolutely committed to subsidies to sate their craving for gold and diamonds—which, Sen and Drèze point out, cost double the amount in foregone annual revenue that it would take to institute a modest national program providing subsidized food to the poor.

* * *

A country functioning in this manner—such that India's biggest import after fuel is gold and silver (13.3 percent of total imports in 2011–12)—is absurd from any point of view other than one devoted to aggressive short-term gains for a select few. But what made India like this? When An Uncertain Glory was published in India prior to the elections, the resulting debate was brief, devoted largely to the book's supposedly controversial arguments and the promotion of Sen to various right-wing hate lists. This dominant culture in India—one that allowed it not just to ignore the arguments in the book, but also to bring into formation a government devoted to greater inequality—is not something Sen and Drèze attempt to address. Nor can they, given their rational, data-driven arguments and their great faith in the Indian nation and state, as if all that prevents India from harvesting rainwater instead of hoarding gold and silver in great quantities is the lack—or ignorance—of the right information.

This is not surprising, because Sen at least has always had a somewhat roseate view of India, his liberalism shot through with an elitism whereby the masses provide the data and select dons, usually Oxbridge and Ivy League, the ideas. Perry Anderson, who shares (and, indeed, vastly supersedes) Sen's haute manner, has no such illusions when it comes to Indian rationality or the emancipatory possibilities of the Indian state. His The Indian Ideology, originally published as three essays in the London Review of Books in 2012, emphasizes that the central ideas dominating India, even when they emanate from its liberal elites, are as flawed as the reality of India today.

Anderson's opening salvo, stocked with judiciously chosen quotes about the greatness and uniqueness of India proffered by "distinguished" Indian intellectuals (Sen among them), argues that, critical and erudite though their works might be, they share fundamental tropes "with the rhetoric of the state itself." These are characterized by Anderson, quite delightfully, as Hobson-Jobson pairings of "antiquity-continuity; diversity-unity; massivity-democracy; multi-confessionality-secularity." Identifying Gandhi and Nehru as the original purveyors of the above formula, Anderson sees in the former a "Jain-inflected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy," while finding in the latter a person with "shallow…intellectual equipment" and a marked tendency to drift "from realities resistant to his hopes or fancies." Both were responsible, Anderson opines, for the Hinduism-inflected mass mobilization of the anticolonial movement, alienating the Muslims and leading to the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, a process that resulted in at least 1 million people killed and millions more displaced. Only B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who drafted the Indian Constitution and was of an egalitarian, even radical bent, comes off well in Anderson's survey of India's leaders—but Ambedkar, as Anderson correctly points out, was frustrated more often than not by the Gandhi-Nehru combine.

As in inception, so in consolidation, Anderson shows, with a sharp eye for the ways in which a fledgling Indian democracy replaced ballots with bullets whenever democracy proved inconvenient. In Kashmir and the northeastern territories, which were policed by forces operating under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), "murder, torture [and] rape…multiplied," a process accompanied by the growth of an "immense apparatus of repression" that eventually numbered close to 2 million personnel. This apparatus now operates everywhere in India, keeping the nation's dissenters and marginalized in check, stamping out the rebellions inevitable in what Anderson sees as a Hindu state masquerading as a diverse democracy.

But if the state, as well as the myth that is its justifying principle and animating power, is patently false and self-serving, could this be only because of Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress Party? It is in this obsession with two personalities and one party that Anderson's analysis begins to look shallow. There is, to begin with, the dismissal of colonialism as not much more than a benign force, with Anderson arguing that it was the British alone who knitted together an Indian nation. It was the British, too, Anderson argues, who kept the Hindus and Muslims from cutting each other's throats, as they had apparently been doing for a millennium or more. There is little acknowledgment in Anderson's book of the brutality of colonial rule, or that the "antiquity-continuity" he mocks took much from the British Raj, including its central ideological tool of parliamentary democracy and its effective intermeshing of courts, bureaucracy, media and security forces to maintain the dominance of the elite. Of the AFSPA, Anderson writes:

    In 1958, Nehru's regime enacted perhaps the most sanguinary single piece of repressive legislation in the annals of liberal democracy, the Armed Forces Special Powers Regulation, which authorized the killing out of hand of anyone observed in a group of five persons or more, if such were forbidden, and forbade any legal action whatsoever against ‘any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers of this regulation', unless the central government so consented.

Naturally, Anderson omits the detail that the AFSPA was a modification of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance issued by the British in 1942.

That Indian nationalism and the Indian state derived many of their central characteristics from the brutalities of British rule does not absolve postcolonial Indians of their responsibility in refining their version of internal colonialism for over sixty years. But for Anderson to dismiss the depredations of famines, the British responsibility in the Partition, or the sheer scale of misery for the majority of people on the subcontinent is like working backward from criticism of the contemporary Israeli state to conclude that the Nazis were not so bad, after all.

* * *

Perhaps Anderson's intention is nothing other than to be polemical and to attack the defining pieties about India. But how popular and deeply held—as opposed to dominant—are those ideas, anyway? Apart from a passing reference to Arundhati Roy and "dalit writers" (the latter unnamed) as among the few iconoclastic thinkers in contemporary India, Anderson's references remain the same eminent Indians that he critiques in the beginning for aligning their ideas too closely with the rhetoric of the state. For him, as with Sen, one needs a good Oxbridge or Ivy League degree to enter the debating arena—which is why, in his book, there are none of the contending ideas of India that have emerged from the country's northeast, the Naxalites, or the people's movements and trade unions that take on those claustrophobic conventions every day. The forces of colonialism, capitalism or imperialism simply do not exist in his account.

It is possible, of course, to argue that in writing The Indian Ideology, Anderson is critiquing a dominant ideology, one that is nurtured and furthered by the country's elites. Yet it is never entirely clear whether this ideology is a clever con game played on the people by a long line of leaders from Gandhi on (in the more orthodox Marxist sense of the word "ideology"), or if it is, as Anderson argues at many points, something with genuine mass appeal, expressing qualities innate and inherent to the Indian personality and to India. And here, for Anderson, as with the elites, the quintessential Indian personality is that of an upper-caste Hindu male. After critiquing Gandhi and Nehru, therefore, for their soft Hindu confessionalism, Anderson writes that in contemporary India, it is the BJP that "is a real party, with cadres, programme, and a social base." And while the BJP may be dangerous, when it comes to the Congress Party, Anderson has this to say: "Its exit from the scene would be the best single gift Indian democracy could give itself."

It isn't entirely clear if this is just a throwaway line delivered from Los Angeles, where Anderson teaches, but since the publication of his book, that gift has been delivered—and so perfectly wrapped that news of it led to stock-market gains of $1.5 billion in a single day for two of the biggest industrialists supporting Modi and the BJP. But even if one takes Anderson's point to be that a BJP victory will demand a confrontation with the false idea of India promulgated by the Congress Party and its affiliated elites, it is not apparent how this will lead to "any radical reconstruction of the state." Given the credulity of the masses in Anderson's account, why would they be interested in a self-reckoning of any kind? As for the Nehruvian elites that Anderson both admires and excoriates for their propagation of the idea of India, many of them have already begun making peace with the new dispensation, their idea of India requiring not radical reconstruction under the BJP but only minor adjustments.

But such a self-reckoning has long been under way, sometimes beneath the surface and sometimes visibly, taking on a range of forms and accents that Anderson does not seem to see or hear from his Olympian perch. This self-reckoning has little to do with the social base of the BJP; it involves both local struggles, such as agitations against mining companies, dams and nuclear plants, and more fundamental questions: Why reconstruct the state at all, even radically? Who says that India is a preordained nation of some kind, as opposed to a prison house? Because for all its claims of uniqueness—whether of Nehruvian antiquity-continuity or Modi-fied massivity-majoritarianity—India has never been an exception to the contemporary world at all, except in the particular inflections it brings to its self-delusion and the flattering attention it is able to attract from Western business and political leaders.

In a recent essay about Italy in the London Review of Books—one which has the same obsession with personalities, but not the same distaste for the culture from which the personalities spring—Anderson writes that Italy should not be taken as an anomaly within Europe, as some are wont to do, but rather as something "closer to a concentrate of it." The same could be said of India and the illusions that have brought it to its present state of disaster. India has never been an exception, whether in its visions of past success or in its prognosis for future glories. Rather, it has simply had the misfortune to go from the Harrovian Nehru to the Reaganite Modi in its relatively brief span as a modern nation. In all these things, India is the clearest, most toxic concentrate of the Anglo-American world that exists today.

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20. THE THROWAWAYS
by Feroz Rather
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(The Rumpus, October 8th, 2014)

The street is narrow and cramped, and from the edge of my balcony on the sixth floor, I see a cybercafé at the far end. I moved here, to Munirka, a labyrinthine conglomeration of concrete, haphazard houses in the south of Delhi, on the 10th of August. There is no Internet at my new house. Every morning, I go down and before stepping into the street, I fold up the bottoms of my trousers. The rain comes frequently these days, making puddles all over the dirt track, and if I don’t take care, the mud will stain my feet and splash my shins.

In the season of monsoon rains, it smells of dampness everywhere. In the cybercafé—a room of gray, gritty walls, with two rows of small box-like doorless cubicles that sit parallel to each other—the air is heavy with the varied smells of human sweat. My fellow users, one on either side of me, can squint at the screen of my computer, and this makes me uncomfortable, makes me want a cubicle with a closed door, all to myself. But I can’t indulge this feeling of self-violation for long; there is a more pressing concern at hand. From the low ceiling, the fan above me creaks, its dusty blades gyrating perilously close to my head. Standing upright could cost me my life.

The attendant is in his early forties, a clean-shaven, gentle-looking man with calm eyes. But he frowns and demands my passport when he hears where I’m from. I have come to expect this in the days leading up to India’s Independence Day, but I ignore his gaze, suddenly sharp and questioning. In my mind, I rush north, tearing through the length of Indian plains; I leap over the Himalayas until I’m in Kashmir. This valley, this verdant valley, the blue-and-white porcelain bowl of flowers, its variegations and striations of green, the caravan of glassy, tumbling rivers, ah my country, torn to its veins by the war that started in 1989, a war that despite terrible death and destruction continues today.

In 1999, I was fifteen and the chill of war had gradually begun to thaw. It was in the winter of that year, at the age of sixty-eight, that my grandfather, Baba, died of cancer. In his last months, I grew very close to him. He had grown deaf. Perhaps the gunshots that rang through the air, which killed more than sixty thousand civilians in the first decade of the war, had caused him permanent damage.

*

Baba was a practicing mystic. He was tall; he had a handsome, oblong face and high cheekbones that he kept clean of beard. He wrote poetry in recondite Kashmiri. He retained some remnants of respect for Sheikh Abdullah.1Baba visited shrines and was critical of the clergy: “During day, rishis loot poor peasants. During night, they fantasize Allah will reward them with houris and wine in the paradise,” he would say and give a mocking laugh. He was even more critical of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist religious organization with Communist-style cadres: “They display long beards and preach with a fanatical certainty, but without knowing the real Syed, Prophet Muhammad, without burning their souls in the fire of his ishq, love. They don’t seek transcendence; they look for Truth in the extraneous, when Truth is manifest and within, in the I.”

PrayerRugBaba was austere and frugal in his manners. He exercised a Spartan discipline; he would never fail to wake up before dawn and offer prayers. He would be seated quietly on a woolen rug in his room, surrounded by an army of cats he fed with pieces of lawas bread. At night, after he had finished listening to the BBC’s Urdu news bulletin, he went out and fed most of his supper to a shy she-dog, his eternal friend on the porch.

In 1947, Baba was in eighth grade in a school in Anantnag, our hometown. As the British prepared to depart, they proposed that the subcontinent be divided. 2 Baba’s diploma, which was due in the fall from the University of Lahore (now in Pakistan) never came, and he was not able to join high school; the Partition marked the end of Baba’s formal education. He dabbled in making and selling herbal medicine. But it was not enough to support his wife and son. He sold groceries and iron implements, spades and shovels, to the farmers of the village in the same shop he had sold medicine. His first son, Ismaiel, my father, grew up quickly to pick up the tricks of the trade. Baba was assured that Ismaiel, delightful, soft-spoken, and more significantly, with a gift for computing, could do it. It was with this reassurance, in the late 1970s, as his deafhood dawned, that he withdrew into mysticism.

In his last months, I helped my cousin, Neelofar, to make Baba’s bed at night. I loudly recited metaphysical poems of Iqbal and Ghalib and Rumi since it was getting difficult for him to hold a book in his hands. I helped wash up when he threw up each morsel of food he had eaten for lunch. His mystic’s calm was being shattered. After a sleepless night of terrible pain, he told me at dawn: “I’m going to die and I hope they allow me to die peacefully at home and not take me to the hospital. Why bother when I’m going to die anyway!”

But as the day broke, my parents took him away to a hospital in Srinagar. My older brother, Showket, went to visit him in the evening from our village, Bumthan, forty miles south of the capital city. When he returned, Showket reported that a doctor pricked Baba’s back and gathered a sack of plural effusion. The outcome was clear; the lung cancer had reached its most lethal stage.

I’ve lived the last ten years of my life away from Kashmir, the first seven years in Delhi, the rest in the countryside of California. I’ve even lost myself, however briefly, in the happier cities of San Francisco and Istanbul. I’ve strolled on a misty winter morning by Lake Michigan in Chicago. I’ve soaked myself in the ocher warmth of a summer afternoon in Santa Barbara. But as always, when the news of death reaches me, I long to return. In the distance when a somber sun is setting, I imagine, I’m walking back to my home, by the riverbank lined with chestnut trees, and as I pass by the village graveyard blooming with lilies, I stop and recite the poems for Baba at his gravestone, oval and conspicuous. And I shut my eyes to Nazir’s grave that is somewhere nearby.

*

When I return to my apartment, there is a pigeon perched on a pile of books on my table. I realize I’ve kept the door to the balcony ajar and once the pigeon enters, the door closes with a gust of faint wind. The pigeon gives me a distrusting look. It flies directly into the window. It bumps its head and bounces back. It flies to the other side of room into another window and bounces back and falls to the floor. It twists its neck and flaps its wings futilely. It flies and bounces back to the floor again. The transparency of escape is a deception. The pigeon is trapped and terrified. It looks at me and shuts its eyes. With one single squeeze of my hand, I can throttle the bird, I think, end it with one hammering blow of my heel. I walk across the room and open the door. The pigeon opens its eyes and flies out. It has started raining. In the blurry slice of the sky, I watch the ascending pigeon, opening its grey wings in the rain.

In the evening, I sit on my mattress, the only furnishing in the bare room. It is nearly a hundred degrees, dank and sultry, and my soaking shirt, sticks to my back. The ceiling fan is noise and doesn’t cool. An unannounced water-cut means I can’t take shower either. I’m reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. I try to concentrate.

After a while, rain lures me to the balcony. Suddenly, it becomes torrential. I stand mutely by the window and watch, over a smudge of the pigeon’s head, as thick raindrops accelerate, drumming on the roof, bathing the balcony, lashing furiously against the glass.

DaggersHemingway presents war as a territory of human experience where all possibilities of love dwindle and vanish. The war’s promise of glory, the pursuit of valor, the coming of courage, the anticipation of victory, and the sense of doom and inevitability of human defeat that overwhelms the story at its end, sends me into the depths of my childhood. In the early 1990s, boys like Nazir, in their late teens, would leave home, all heroism and bravado, to go across the Line of Control, to the other part of Kashmir. They would train as militants there and then return to fight, for the principle of aazadi, freedom, against the Indian soldiers.

Nazir is a difficult memory. He is chubby, bovine, sincere, and even secretly romantic. I remember a few days before he left to cross over, he whispered to me: “Neelofar is very beautiful. When I come back and I’m grown up and responsible, I’ll ask her to marry me.”  About four months later, when he returns, he is leaner, healthier. His hands move nimbly, his eyes darting back and forth. He has a thicker beard. He hides his Kalashnikov, slung across his shoulder, under his pheran. He is a member of the outfit they call Ikwanul Muslimoon.

Nazir lies buried in the mind’s forbidden faraways, on the margin of the village graveyard, obscured by nettle. I have been told that he died on July 22, 1995. Ikhwan by then had been co-opted by the Indian army to crush the armed rebellion by fighting other active militant outfits and breaking the morale of the common people who supported them. The day he died, I was away from home, at school in another village. I remember it rained on that day.

The rain was sudden and came down in brittle sheets, clattering against the corrugated tin roof of the two-storied brick building. Most other children had left since school was over. I waited; I sat on the upper steps of the wooden staircase leading to my classroom. I watched the rain flow in runnels to the thirsty school ground, sun-hardened and brown and without a blade of grass.

When I reached my village, a queer hush had fallen on the streets. At home everyone was quiet. I asked my mother what had happened. “They brought Nazir back today,” she said. The villagers had buried him hurriedly an hour before, and only the sky had wept. People left immediately and women did not beat their breasts or pull out their hair or strike their foreheads with their open palms; no elegies were sung. My mother cried quietly.

When I saw Neelofar, she clasped my arm and looked me in my eyes: “His chest was pierced with their bullets. He did not deserve that,” she said. She did not cry but her face flushed with rage. She wanted to say more; she had never talked to me about Nazir before. I said nothing and waited for her to speak. Even to this day, I regret my silence; I never mustered enough heart to ask her again what exactly she meant.

Later at night, when Showket came home, he narrated an account of the story hovering over the village. It was the soldiers who had killed Nazir, he told me. There are many kinds of Indian soldiers, more than half a million in number, stationed in Kashmir, but the Rashtriya Rifles (RR) are the most dreaded. They had destroyed him.

Nazir and three other members of Ikhwan had gone to Zabelpor, a village a few miles north of my own, near the Jammu-Srinagar highway. They had gone there in a white ambulance from their base camp in Anantnag to capture a militant who worked with Hizbul Mujahideen (The Party of Holy Warriors). 3 It was a coincidence that some troopers of the Border Security Force (BSF) paramilitary happened to be present in the village.

With a dictator’s fleeting sense of impunity and untrammelled power, Ikhwan had been turned into a pack of wolves; they brutalized their own people without qualms or restraint. But that day, when the residents of Zabelpor saw the white truck entering the village and heard Nazir and his companions asking for the militant’s whereabouts, they gathered and shouted at them in unison and drove them back to the truck. Nazir and his companions did not fire at the villagers for fear they wouldn’t return alive. The crowd was large and agitated.

As the driver pulled away, someone shouted: “These men of Hizbul Mujahideen will kill us, these men of Hizb…,” and pointed toward the truck as it sped away from the village, leaving a dust cloud behind. The troopers of Border Security Force did exactly what the astute villager wanted. They messaged a group of Rashtriya Rifles patrolling the highway.

The troopers of Rashtriya Rifles stopped the truck midway, between Bijbyor and Khanbel, near Shuhul Floor Mills. They demanded the men exit the truck. Nazir was shocked to see the troopers pointing their guns, their hands ready on triggers. He shouted that he was their own, an ikhwaen, but they wouldn’t listen to him. In a panic, he wrapped his pheran around his head as they shot him repeatedly in the chest. Then they shot two of his companions. The driver, also a member of Ikhwan, screamed in fury and frustration. He was so enraged that he kicked open the window and jumped down to the road. He shouted that he was an ikhwaen but to no avail. The driver seized the officer by the collar and head-butted him, as if to demonstrate his loyalty.

All this happened in broad daylight, while cars and buses passed. The passengers watched while the troopers circled the driver with daggers drawn. They barked at him. They stabbed him. Then they stabbed him, until his shredded clothes fell from his lacerated body. And then, in the thickening veil of his own blood, he dropped to the ground.

*

In the last chapter of A Farewell to Arms, Henry realizes that Catherine is going to die and remembers his war friend, Aymo. I’m struck by the intensity of Henry’s confusion, and it stirs and mingles with my own confusion. Amid the thousands of images whirling in my mind, it is Baba lying on the road along with the driver, his shirt torn open, his chest pierced, his body bare and festooned with a thousand gurgling gashes. It is Baba lying there, while the soldiers, drunk with blood, stand and brandish their daggers, cutting wounds in the red dome of the sky. And it is Nazir, about to be strangled in his bed, a dove-gray pigeon with its eyes shut to the world, hoping to elude the ineluctable angel of death. And it is Neelofar, holding his one hand, as she rests her elbow on the windowsill, a cold, controlled smile on her ashen face, looking with clear, gleaming eyes into the future. She beckons a gathering rainstorm to come and wash over his mud-stained, disgraced face.

*

No one talks about Nazir in the village. Like all other betrayers, like Sheikh Abdullah who after years of heroic resistance and champion leadership succumbed and sold his soul to India, Nazir is unforgivably unremarkable. SnakeClubBut such is the cruel logic of war, that at the very last moment of his life, he was pushed to be who he was, a Kashmiri, and killed across that unmistakable fault-line, on his very own side. A fact that he was forced to acknowledge, for a split second, as he feigned a pigeon’s blindness by wrapping his pheran around his eyes.

And again, and yet again—and why should I not, it is my home—I return. One interminable graveyard, the place of my eternal rest. I dream the day: my funeral orchestrated under a drizzling shower of autumn rain, and from the branches of the chestnut trees, russet leaves fall on my face and my outstretched hands, and from the windows of Bumthan’s elegant houses, elegies being sung; I’d be buried in the same graveyard near Baba, and away from Nazir.

*

On the morning of the 14th of August, as Delhi awakes to prepare for the Independence Day celebrations, I walk past the cybercafé which I don’t bother to enter. After bearing the suspicions of the attendant, his demands of passport every time I—a potential malefactor— enter, I set an Internet connection at my apartment. I cross the road. I stand under a bougainvillea hanging down from the ruin of an ancient stone wall. It begins to rain. I’m not in California anymore, I realize, where stealing a rose by the roadside could mean a $250 fine. I slowly extend my hand and tear a branch.

I resume walking on the broken sidewalk, away from the cybercafé. A car whizzes past, honking indifferently. In this city, I have nowhere to go. The raindrops keep falling on the flowers as I hold them in my cupped hands, the flowers which by their very nature have no scent. I close my eyes. I listen to the desolate noise of the raindrops falling on the cobblestones and the road. I open my eyes. I look upward into the darkening heavens, and in that odd, sodden moment, I wonder whether it would ever rain a rain over Delhi that would make the bougainvilleas fragrance soak the city, sweet and aromatic.

***

1. Sheikh Abdullah was the most prominent politician during 1930s and 1940s, who envisioned a secular, democratic, free Kashmir. He led the 1953 land reforms in which land was transferred form the feudal lords to the tillers like Baba. Sheikh Abdullah was later jailed and exiled by the Indian government.↩

2. The British proposed that the Muslim majority states would go to Pakistan, in the upper eastern and western flanks, while the Hindu and Sikh majority states would go to India. The rest, the independent princely states, would choose a dominion of their choice. The state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had a Muslim majority of 77% but a Hindu king, Hari Singh, did not fit into this simplistic formula of Partition. Despite being an unpopular autocrat, Hari Singh did not want to either accede with India or with Pakistan and held his decision until it became unavoidable. In the end what happened was, Indian troops landed in Kashmir and occupied the airport in Srinagar. This happened just before the Pukhtoons began marching towards Srinagar from the northern district of Baramulla. The fighting did not stop, however. India and Pakistan fought their first war on Kashmir until, after a series of bloody skirmishes in the mountainous regions like Uri, a mutual ceasefire was reached by the end of December in 1948. In fact, the de facto border called Line of Control was reached, dividing the political people, Kashmir, and the territories were held by two warring newly born, bloodthirsty nations. The Indian statist narratives of history emphasize the invasion of Pukhtoon tribesmen from the side of Pakistan on October 22, 1947, and Hari Singh willingly and legitimately acceding with India on October 26, though in the end the decision was his alone. Many other circumstances, as discussed by Australian analyst Christopher Snedden in his book, Kashmir: The Unwritten History—for instance, the uprising of the Muslims in Poonch against Hari Singh, the inter-religious violence in the Jammu province prior to the invasion, or for that matter, the ‘friendship’ which Sheikh Abdullah enjoyed with the would-be Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at that time, and the effect of that dynamic on Hari Singh’s cataclysmic, undemocratic decision—remain largely unspoken.↩

3. An indigenous militant outfit, initially heavily backed by Pakistan and favored and ideologically endorsed by Jamat-e-Islami.↩

Feroz Rather is a Kashmiri writer who received his MFA from Fresno State. His work has appeared in The Caravan, Berfrois, and Warscapes, among others. He is a contributing editor at The Normal School.

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21. BOOK REVIEW: SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THEM
by Nadifa Mohamed 
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(Sunday Book Review - The New York Times - SEPT. 26, 2014)
In one of the many startling scenes in “Island of a Thousand Mirrors,” Nayomi Munaweera’s first novel, a Sri Lankan girl riding the train to school is suddenly surrounded by a machete-wielding mob, who demand proof she isn’t Tamil. In her panic, she recites the Buddhist sutras “preaching unattachment, impermanence, the inevitability of death,” an unholy trinity that could apply to all civil wars. This chilling exchange reminded me of a conversation I once had on a London bus with a Somali refugee, who swerved from banal chitchat into dark reminiscence. He recalled a moment in Mogadishu when he was forced to recite his genealogy, the string of grandfathers’ names that place all Somalis within their clans, and he borrowed a school friend’s lineage, as his own would have marked him for death.

The weight of these humiliations, momentary yet everlasting, is the ballast of a narrative that ebbs and flows in time and space. From the maternal expanse of the Indian Ocean to the sterile swimming pools of Los Angeles, the lives of Munaweera’s characters are defined by bodies of water that reflect the state of their souls, including the corpse-clogged wells and lagoons of the Tamil north and the playful shores of the Sinhala south, alive with flying fish and ancient turtles.

Yasodhara Rajasinghe; her sister, Lanka; and their comrade-in-mischief, Shiva, grow up in the same house in Colombo — the Sinhala girls downstairs and the Tamil boy upstairs, in a partition that matches their island’s. A mango tree and its fruit are the focus of strife between the Tamil patriarch and Sinhala matriarch, but the children float through the house and its garden, impervious to any divisions.

Before we are introduced to these three, however, we are marched through the machinations and changing fortunes that bring them to life, in a manner that seems breathless and unnecessarily hurried: Grandparents die, marriages are arranged and lovers betrayed. When the violence that has stayed latent finally explodes, the residents of the house are thrown to the wind, navigating difficult, self-consciously new lives in the United States. Munaweera describes how Yasodhara, growing into her Americanness, casts a disdainful glance at the newly arrived refugees gathered at her wealthy uncle’s house for Christmas. She keeps her distance, “lest the aura of foreignness so laboriously shed” rubs off on her.

While the Rajasinghes buy a car, tend a lawn and make a home in Los Angeles, the story returns to Sri Lanka and to an anonymous village in the north, where Saraswathi, a Tamil teenager who finds beauty in mathematical equations, lives with her dancer mother, lame father and giddy little sister. The predations of the national army combine with those of the Tamil Tigers to slowly steal whatever happiness or comfort this family enjoyed. The uneasy relationship between “liberation movements” and those they seek to liberate is convincingly captured, as are the constant negotiations civilians have to make to survive in a war zone — take that child but leave me this one. Still, Saraswathi’s voice never rings true; her experiences are heart-rending, but they seem to smother any glimpse of what distinguishes her from other girls weaponized by the Tamil Tigers.

The beating heart of “Island of a Thousand Mirrors” is not so much its human characters but Sri Lanka itself and the vivid, occasionally incandescent, language used to describe this teardrop in the Indian Ocean. Despite the bloody acts taking place on its soil, Sri Lanka remains a place where flower boys chase cars down mountain passes, “the buffalo stirs in the jade paddy fields” and life abounds restlessly, both on land and under the sea.

ISLAND OF A THOUSAND MIRRORS
By Nayomi Munaweera
242 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $24.99.
Nadifa Mohamed’s most recent novel, “The Orchard of Lost Souls,” was published in March.

A version of this review appears in print on September 28, 2014, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Say You’re One of Them.


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

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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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