SACW - 15 July 2015 | Burma’s grim reality / Pakistan: Urban Land / Sri Lanka: Democracy, labour rights / Bangladesh: Arabisation / India: Majoritarinism; Witch hunt against Teesta Setalvad; Praful Bidwai (1949-2015) / South Africa’s short memory / Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Tue Jul 14 18:07:04 EDT 2015
South Asia Citizens Wire - 15 July 2015 - No. 2863
[since 1996]
Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Democracy, labour rights and parliamentary elections | Ahilan Kadirgamar, Devaka Gunawardena
2. Arabisation of Bangladesh: An Asset, Liability or Threat? | Taj Hashmi
3. UK: The neo-colonial plot to halt Bengalis in Tower Hamlets | Ansar Ahmed Ullah
4. India: Majority Rule | Hartosh Singh Bal
5. Continued Intimidation and Assault on Teesta Setalvad and Sabrang is to break dissenting voices in India
6. Online Petition against rampant plagiarism by Hindutva publicist Rajiv Malhotra
7. From SACW Archives: 1980 Factsheet on Solidarnosc by Committee for Solidarity with Polish Working Class
8. Video: Prof. Gail Omvedt talks on Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's legacy | Gail Omvedt for IGNOU
9. Honouring and Remembering Praful Bidwai - Video, Photos and Tributes
10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
- Historian Richard Fox Young accuses writer Rajeev Malhotra of plagiarism
- India: Manipuri's xenophobic demand for ‘Inner Line Permit’ in the state to regulate migrants
- Should the word Adhinayak be changed from National Anthem?
- India: Hindu Mahasabha leaders booked for announcing Rs 5 lakhs reward for those who 'behead' Swami Agnivesh
- India - Rajasthan: Raje govt asks college libraries to keep biography on RSS founder
- India: BJP makes noise on curbs during religious fests
- India: RSS affiliate seeks redefinition of minority institutions
- Amartya Sen: Threat to secularism stronger than in the past
::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
11. A step backwards for women's rights in Afghanistan | Waslat Hasrat-Nazimi, Masood Saifullah
12. Burma’s grim reality - Editorial Board, The Washington Post
13. Pakistan - Karachi: Urban land reform | Arif Hasan
14. India - Property: Daughter has share but father has will | Manoj Mitta
15. India: Non-Veg Is the Norm | Mukul Dube
16. I became an architect because of toy trains: An essay by Charles Correa
17. Radioactive ablutions | Khaled Ahmed
18. From Greece to Goa: The anatomy of debt traps | Vivek Menezes
19. South Africa’s short memory | Jeremy Harding
20. H-Net Review: Sandison on Hall, 'Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era'
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1. SRI LANKA: DEMOCRACY, LABOUR RIGHTS AND PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
by Ahilan Kadirgamar, Devaka Gunawardena
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Contrary to perceptions created by employers and pro-business think-tanks that labour has a free run, the reality facing organised labour is that even the agreements and guarantees provided by the State are not implemented. And if that were case under the authoritarian Rajapaksa regime, there has been no movement on any of these issues facing labour, close to six months after the democratic change of regime.
http://sacw.net/article11364.html
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2. ARABISATION OF BANGLADESH: AN ASSET, LIABILITY OR THREAT? | Taj Hashmi
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Visitors to Bangladesh, who enter the country for the first time through the Hazrat Shah Jalal International Airport in Dhaka, might get the wrong impression about the major languages spoken in the country. Even before disembarking the aircraft, the first thing they notice is the name of the airport in bold Arabic letters on top of the airport building, along with Bengali and English on two sides. There was no Arabic sign on public buildings and thoroughfares until the late 1970s, when religion was inserted in the Constitution by General Ziaur Rahman.
http://sacw.net/article11368.html
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3. UK: THE NEO-COLONIAL PLOT TO HALT BENGALIS IN TOWER HAMLETS | Ansar Ahmed Ullah
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Following and prior to the recent 12 June Tower Hamlets mayoral election results, it seems some on the liberal and white left are asserting that racism and Islamophobia were at play. But such well-wishers are in fact colluding, appeasing, empowering and encouraging the most right wing, reactionary and corrupt fundamentalist elements of the Bengali/Muslim community in Tower Hamlets. It seems that there is a group of white leftists, trade unionists & Christian faith leaders who would prefer to keep the Bengali community insular, ghettoized and away from the mainstream. They ignore the history of the Bengalis who came to Tower Hamlets as economic migrants during 1950s and 1960s to better their lives and those of their children, and overlook the history of that community's stand against ghettoization by the GLC in the 1970s.
http://sacw.net/article11362.html
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4. INDIA: MAJORITY RULE | Hartosh Singh Bal
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The BJP’s view of democracy comes into conflict with the values of a constitutional republic
http://sacw.net/article11358.html
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5. CONTINUED INTIMIDATION AND ASSAULT ON TEESTA SETALVAD IS TO BREAK DISSENTING VOICES IN INDIA
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* INDIA: STATEMENT BY PEOPLE’S ALLIANCE FOR DEMOCRACY AND SECULARISM FOLLOWING CBI RAID AT SABRANG COMMUNICATIONS AND HOMES OF ITS EDITORS AND PUBLISHERS
Press Statement by PADS on 14 July 2015
http://sacw.net/article11371.html
* INDIA’S TOP INVESTIGATION AGENCY THE CBI IS MISREPORTING ITS SEARCH AT TEESTA SETALVAD’S HOUSE AND OFFICE PREMISES ON 14 JULY 2015
"As I write this, the search is still not concluded. It is shocking that while over a dozen members of the CBI are still in our premises conducting the search, Delhi spokesperson is misleading the public and our vast supporters by a series of misinformations and officials tweets." - Teesta Setalvad
http://sacw.net/article11370.html
* INDIA: STATEMENTS CONDEMNING CBI RAID OF 14 JULY AT ON TEESTA SETALVAD’S RESIDENCE AND OFFICE
Human Rights Defenders Alerts– India (HRDA), Hum Aazaadizon Ke Haq Mein (HAKHM) and People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism and have condemned at the raids by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) at the premises of social activist Teesta Setalvad, her husband Javed Anand, and office of Sabrang Communications and Publishing in Mumbai.
http://sacw.net/article11369.html
* INDIA: SUMMARY RESPONSE TO FALSE CHARGES AGAINST SABRANG COMMUNICATIONS AND CITIZENS FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE
http://sacw.net/article11354.html
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6. ONLINE PETITION AGAINST RAMPANT PLAGIARISM BY HINDUTVA PUBLICIST RAJIV MALHOTRA
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http://sacw.net/article11367.html
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7. FROM SACW ARCHIVES: 1980 FACTSHEET ON SOLIDARNOSC BY COMMITTEE FOR SOLIDARITY WITH POLISH WORKING CLASS
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[This 7 page broadsheet was produced in Delhi in 1980/81 by the Committee For Solidarity with the Polish Working Class (an informal and independent grouping of dissident leftists). It has been scanned as part of the sacw.net rare document archive ]
http://sacw.net/article11361.html
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8. VIDEO: PROF. GAIL OMVEDT TALKS ON DR. B. R. AMBEDKAR'S LEGACY
by Gail Omvedt for IGNOU
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http://sacw.net/article11360.html
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9. HONOURING AND REMEMBERING PRAFUL BIDWAI: VIDEO, PHOTOS AND TRIBUTES
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INDIA: A VIDEO RECORDING FROM THE TRIBUTE TO PRAFUL BIDWAI IN BOMBAY ON 2 JULY 2015
A video recording by Rafeeq Ellias from the memorial meeting on 2 July 2015 held in Bombay to pay tributes to the leading Indian Journalist of the left and a peace campaigner
http://sacw.net/article11356.html
INDIA: PHOTOS FROM THE 8TH JULY 2015 MEMORIAL MEETING FOR PRAFUL BIDWAI
These photos of the memorial meeting for Praful Bidwai were taken by Mukul Dube at the India International Centre in New Delhi
http://sacw.net/article11353.html
EDITORS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM EXPRESS SHOCK AT THE TRAGIC DEATH OF PRAFUL BIDWAI
Praful will be missed by everyone committed to socialism, workers rights and environmental justice.
http://sacw.net/article11359.html
PRAFUL BIDWAI: A OBITUARY IN FRONTLINE
by N.D. Jayaprakash
As a humanist, Praful was passionate about the concerns of the people of his homeland; as a pacifist he was an internationalist to the core. In the sudden and untimely demise of Praful, the world’s democratic, secular and progressive movements—especially those in India and Pakistan—have lost one of their most ardent campaigners.
http://sacw.net/article11350.html
PRAFUL EMBODIED THE VISION OF AN ESSENTIALLY MODERN LEFT
by Jairus Banaji, Rohini Hensman
Praful was an extraordinary human being, always deeply committed politically, starting with his days as a student at Bombay I.I.T. and also the least dogmatic and sectarian left-winger that either of us ever knew. He embodied the vision of an essentially modern Left, the Left as a secular, rationalist force, a champion of democracy in the modern world, and as opposed to the authoritarianism and repressiveness of ostensibly “leftwing” regimes as to capitalism’s wide-ranging subjugation of humanity and of nature.
http://sacw.net/article11348.html
REMEMBERING PRAFUL
by Suhas Paranjape
I remember Praful from his pre-journalist days - the IIT days, the Magowa days - days when we were closest. This is a Praful who is not very well known and today I would like to speak about him.
http://sacw.net/article11349.html
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10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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- India: report on Vishwa Hindu Parishat (VHP ) and the Bajrang Dal (BD) joint rally at Mangalore on 13 July
- Historian Richard Fox Young accuses writer Rajeev Malhotra of plagiarism
- India: Manipuri's xenophobic demand for ‘Inner Line Permit’ in the state to regulate migrants
- Should the word Adhinayak be changed from National Anthem?
- India: Hindu Mahasabha leaders booked for announcing Rs 5 lakhs reward for those who 'behead' Swami Agnivesh
- India - Rajasthan: Raje govt asks college libraries to keep biography on RSS founder
- India: BJP makes noise on curbs during religious fests
- India: RSS affiliate seeks redefinition of minority institutions
- RSS ने सिखाया पाठ, RSS ने ही छोड़ दिया साथ, जानिए आनंद राय की कहानी - रवीश कुमार
- RSS cadres flood Nagpur with complaints about Modi government's performance
- Amartya Sen: Threat to secularism stronger than in the past
- India: 22 arrested for communal clashes in Teekri Brahman
- available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
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11. A STEP BACKWARDS FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS IN AFGHANISTAN
Waslat Hasrat-Nazimi, Masood Saifullah
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(Deutsche Welle - 10.07.2015)
The rejection of the first ever female nominee for the country's Supreme Court spotlights the challenges facing the government and international organizations in promoting women's rights in the war-torn nation.
Afghanistan Lynchmord an Frau Beerdigung
Afghan lawmakers delivered a blow to the country's President Ashraf Ghani on July 8 by rejecting 40-year-old Anisa Rasouli, the nation's first-ever female nominee, for the Supreme Court. Rasouli received 88 votes, nine short of the 97 needed to secure her appointment.
It came after several clerics criticized the nomination, claiming that only men were fit to sit on the nation's highest court. The move marks a setback for the Afghan government's efforts to empower women and promote them to high-profile positions.
"It is beyond doubt that I was not chosen due to my gender," said Rasouli. In an interview with DW, she noted that "women have the right to be represented at all levels of government and that it does not contradict Sharia, or Islamic law."
'A battle field'
"Afghanistan's parliament once more proved that democracy is only good and useful when it serves their egoistic, personal or party interest," Dr. Orzala Ashraf Nemat, Afghan scholar and founder of Youth & Women Leadership Centre told DW.
"But when it comes to inclusiveness and addressing important aspect of a civilized life, it proved to be representing a battle field of patronage politics where women have no place in it," she added.
Afghanistan Anisa Rasuli Nominierte Oberster Gerichtshof
Rasouli received 88 votes, nine short of the 97 needed for confirming her nomination
The disappointment of women's rights activists is compounded by the fact that 21 female MPs did not attend the voting session to confirm Rasouli's nomination.
"It's so disappointing. So many people fought so hard to have the quota in the constitution to make sure there would be two female MP's from each province. I feel like they must have had exactly that kind of day in mind," said Heather Barr, Senior Researcher for Women's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
President Ghani should introduce another female candidate for the position, and women MPs should vote for her to prevent another failure, Barr stressed. "The fact that the gap was only nine votes means that if he nominates another woman it should be possible next time," she told DW.
Equality is still in its infancy
President Ghani has been striving to increase women's participation at all levels of government since he took office last September. There are currently four women ministers in Ghani's cabinet. Two of the war-ravaged nation's provinces – Ghor and Daikundi – also have female governors.
Afghan officials and Taliban representatives have met in Islamabad for talks. But experts say such negotiations can only lead to peace if those involved are recognized by the Taliban leadership. (08.07.2015)
Why China is alarmed about IS presence in Afghanistan
Afghanistan's security on the brink of collapse
"I am grateful that the president has fulfilled his promise," said Sima Joyenda, the governor of Ghor province. "It is, however, extremely difficult for women to work in a province such as Ghor," she noted. The province has been plagued by insecurity and poverty for years.
"Although these political appointments are a good step, we are yet to see any action in terms of how the women appointed for these posts are going to be protected," said HRW's Barr, referring to past instances when women in high positions were targeted by terror groups.
Criticism
She also criticized President Ghani for not taking tough measures to eliminate violence against women and increasing their participation in the police force. According to a recent UN report, only five percent of cases of violence against women result in punishment for the criminals.
There is still a long way to go in terms of improving women's security in Afghanistan, said Barr, pointing to the death of Farkhunda Malikzada who was killed in March by a mob after being falsely accused of burning a Koran.
Critics fault the police, whom they say stood by and did nothing to stop the fatal attack. The incident triggered protests around the country and drew global attention.
For Barr and Nemat, such attacks are proof of the Ghani administration's failure to protect women's rights in the country.
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12. BURMA’S GRIM REALITY
Editorial Board, The Washington Post
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(The Washington Post, July 5, 2015)
The Post's View
President Obama and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi hold a news conference at her residence in Rangoon, Burma, last year. (Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency)
By Editorial Board July 5
JOURNALISTS IN Burma are “stifled” by a “climate of fear,” Amnesty International reported recently, finding “repression dressed up as progress.” The military government, after several years of pretend negotiations, recently vetoed constitutional changes that would have limited its power. Peace talks with ethnic groups have collapsed.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration, in its annual human rights report released just over a week ago, cheers a “trend of progress since 2011.”
Wai Wai Nu, a Burmese activist who recently visited Washington, is not surprised by the discrepancy. “The international perception is quite different from the reality,” she told us. “The human rights situation is deteriorating.”
Conditions in Burma, a Southeast Asian nation of about 56 million people also known as Myanmar, did improve in 2012. Wai Wai Nu herself, imprisoned in 2005 at age 18 because her father was a pro-democracy politician, was released along with hundreds of other political prisoners. Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy leader who had spent the better part of two decades under house arrest, also was freed and allowed to contest and win a by-election for parliament. The U.S. government, eager to pocket a foreign-policy success, eased its sanctions on the generals and former generals running the country.
The administration’s hope, shared by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, was that the regime would negotiate its own demise, in the fashion of South Africa’s apartheid government. Alas, the generals seem to be reading from a different script. They have eagerly shed their pariah status, welcoming an influx of investment, but they seem determined that there will be no Nelson Mandelas in their country. Elections are scheduled for the fall, but Aung San Suu Kyi will not be permitted to run for president, and one-quarter of parliament seats will be reserved for the military without election.
Things are especially bad for the ethnic minority known as Rohingya, of which Wai Wai Nu is one, and for other Muslims. “People can demonstrate freely — against Muslims,” Wai Wai Nu noted. “But when people ask for their rights, or their education, or their land, they are arrested and charged.” And not only Muslims: Phyo Phyo Aung, another young former political prisoner, recently led a protest march — and was charged with violating the law in every township she walked through. There’s an “illusion of change,” Yan Htaik Seng, a project manager with BBC Media Action, told us, but censorship and fear-inspired self-censorship keep the media in a straitjacket.
U.S. officials hope that fall elections, even if held under an imperfect constitution, will empower pro-democracy parties enough to spur further change. That remains the sensible goal in a season of disappointment. But its fulfillment would be more likely if the administration acknowledged reality and adjusted policy accordingly, including, as Amnesty International argued, by pushing for an end to repression. As the organization’s Southeast Asia research director Rupert Abbott said, “Authorities are still relying on the same old tactics — arrests, surveillance, threats and jail time to muzzle those journalists who cover ‘inconvenient’ topics.”
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13. PAKISTAN - KARACHI: URBAN LAND REFORM
by Arif Hasan
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(Dawn - 15 July 2015)
OVER the last two years, there have been numerous seminars, workshops and happenings around Karachi issues. The dominant theme has been one of nostalgia. Senior citizens have spoken about a once liberal city of bars, night clubs, tea houses and cinemas. This was a colonial port city with a colonial port culture and governed by the residue of a colonial elite. It is doubtful if it could have survived (Zia or no Zia) the onslaught of populist politics in the absence of an effective alternative.
There were also tears shed for the destruction of the built heritage of the city that has been converted into badly needed space for warehousing, wholesale and manufacturing activities. This is because ‘we’ were unable to plan and develop alternative spaces for these activities. There was also concern for the loss of the Malir oasis and destruction of the mangroves and their flora and fauna. All this has been swallowed up by the insatiable greed of our elite for land and the absence of affordable homes for our poor.
These trends are alive and have multiplied over the last two decades. They have produced serious social injustices and ecological damage which can only be contained through urban land reform. But, before we discuss this issue, a few statistics are necessary.
Much has been lost because of the greed of Karachi’s elite.
Sixty-two per cent of Karachi’s citizens (estimated at 13 million) live in informally developed settlements on 23pc of the city’s residential land. Many of these have densities of more than 4,500 persons per hectare (1821 per acre) with more than six to 10 persons per room and up to 20 persons sharing a toilet. As such, they face serious overcrowding problems of which the main victims are family cohesion, women, children and old persons. These settlements, in the absence of housing options, continue to densify. Conversely, 36pc of Karachiites (estimated at 7.5m) live in formally planned settlements on 77pc of the city’s residential land. Here, densities can be as low as 84 persons per hectare. Such low-density settlements continue to increase.
There are over 200,000 vacant residential plots in Karachi and over 62,000 unoccupied apartments. And yet, we are developing high-middle income low-density settlements on over 24,200 hectares of land on the city’s periphery, which is destroying (apart from agricultural and pasture land) drainage channels, hillocks, archaeological sites belonging to the Stone Age and Buddhist periods and sites linked to Sindh’s intangible cultural heritage. Already Karachi floods, not because of climate change as some would have us believe, but because of encroachment on the major outfalls to the sea (once home to mangrove marshes) by elite housing societies. With some of these developments, Karachi will flood even more.
Another major ecological devastation has been the ruination of the city’s rural economy and the continued dislocation and induced poverty of its population. In 1985, 70pc of Karachi’s vegetable and fruit requirements came from its rural areas. In 2013, this was reduced to 10pc due to our failure to implement the provisions of the Karachi Master Plan 1975-85 which sought to preserve and develop these areas as agricultural belts.
The rural areas have also lost their shallow rainwater aquifers due to over-extraction of water and because about 60 billion cubic feet of sand and gravel has been illegally lifted for construction purposes from seasonal riverbeds. Due to this, water run-off can no longer be contained and aquifers cannot be naturally recharged.
An urban land reform to contain the social and physical devastation described above would ideally consist of the following.
One: a land ceiling act whereby no one individual can own more than 500 square metres of developed residential urban land. Two: a large enough non-utilisation fee on developed urban land to discourage speculative investment. Three: minimum density for any urban development project (including elite colonies) would be 450 persons per hectare to conserve land, protect the environment and promote equity. Four: no loans will be provided for housing to those who have received loans previously. Finally, all available government land would, as a priority, be made available for housing for low-income groups.
The market mantra, which we have adopted, and the rich who live off land speculation, will not agree to such reform, nor will the developer’s lobby although it has a lot to gain from it if a proper governance system is put in place. But then, governance systems are increasingly controlled by speculators.
The fear is that if there is no reform to conserve land and contain speculation, then senior citizens of the Karachi of 2030 will be explaining, with tears, to their younger generation as to how wonderful the city was in the first decade of the 21st century.
The writer is an architect.
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14. INDIA - PROPERTY: DAUGHTER HAS SHARE BUT FATHER HAS WILL
by Manoj Mitta
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(The Times of India - June 16, 2015)
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Property-Daughter-has-share-but-father-has-will/articleshow/47684675.cms
It is 10 years since the daughter has been brought on a par with the son under the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (HSA)
Despite a historic amendment in 2005, the Hindu inheritance law still suffers from gender bias.
It is 10 years since the daughter has been brought on a par with the son under the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (HSA). This historic amendment of 2005 never made much of a splash though, unlike other farreaching enactments of the same year such as RTI, NREGA and even the domestic violence law.
The lack of buzz about giving the daughter as much share as the son in the joint family property may seem ironic considering that this very proposal was one of the main reasons why the consolidated Hindu Code Bill championed by India's first law minister B R Ambedkar had been scuttled in the nascent republic to appease conservative forces.
Does this mean that the notoriously patriarchal Hindu society has since become more accommodating of gender equality? Not necessarily, for there is little data available on the extent to which the amended Section 6 of the HSA conferring the same rights and liabilities on the daughter and the son in the ancestral property has been implemented across the country.
Unlike in the case of RTI and NREGA, there has been no noticeable attempt on the part of the government to spread awareness about the change in property rights. Nor have civil society groups been anywhere as vigilant in monitoring the enforcement of HSA 2005 as they have been about the accrual of benefits from the more high-profile laws of that year.
Rights vs relations
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the import of the 2005 amendment is yet to sink in among the intended beneficiaries. Whether the women concerned are still ignorant about their new succession rights or have chosen to ignore them, Hindu ancestral properties have largely remained the preserve of their male counterparts.
As a study conducted by a feminist group, Partners for Law in Development, put it, "The de facto situation continues to be one where women forfeit these rights to avoid strained family ties." What is particularly difficult for the daughter is to invoke her entitlement, under the 2005 amendment, to claim par tition of an ancestral home even when male heirs from her family are residing there.
Apart from the lag in the implementation of the 2005 amendment, the Hindu inheritance law is in need of further changes for it to be rid of the remnants of gender discrimination.
Heirs of a woman
One such remnant flagged by the Law Commission in 2008 relates to the implications of a Hindu woman dying without leaving behind a will. If she dies as a childless widow, the husband's heirs alone inherit her estate. But then, since she is entitled post-2005 to inherit property from her parents' side as well as her husband's side, would it not be logical to give equal rights of succession to her heirs from both sides?
The Law Commission suggested that Section 15 of the HSA 1956 be amended so that "in case a female Hindu dies intestate leaving her self-acquired property with no heirs, the property should devolve on her husband's heirs and also on the heirs of her parental side". This would surely be an apt sequel to the 2005 amendment, which too had been effected at the instance of the Law Commission.
Another retrograde provision waiting to be discarded is a gratuitous concession made to the Hindu right in 1954 while enacting a secular law for solemnising nondenominational "civil marriage". Section 19 of the Special Marriage Act says that any marriage performed under that law of a Hindu belonging to an undivided joint family shall be deemed to result in his "severance from such family".Thus, there is a statutory sanction to disinheriting from the ancestral wealth any Hindu who resorts to civil marriage, which is an option available to those who wish to avoid religious rituals or marry outside the community (without converting the spouse).
Such a disincentive to civil marriage is out of sync with the spirit of the 2005 amendment and the social trend towards inter-caste and inter-community marriages. It also serves as an obstacle to India moving towards its constitutional goal of uniform civil code.
Muslim daughters better off
The 2005 amendment is also a reminder of India's failure to reform the Muslim personal law, which allows polygamy and extra-judicial divorce. When it comes to property rights, the Muslim law gives the daughter no more than one half of the share of her male counterpart.All the same, since the Muslim daughter has such an entitlement even in the self-acquired property of her father, she is better off than her Hindu counterpart. After all, the proportion of nuclear families and self-ac quired properties is rapidly increasing across all communities.
Given that the 2005 reform is only about ancestral properties, the Hindu father continues to enjoy unfettered discretion to bequeath his self-acquired properties to whoever he wishes. "This is a loophole that still allows Hindu patriarchs to discriminate against daughters with impunity ," according to Delhi-based lawyer and feminist author Arvind Jain.Out of some 100 wills drafted by him for clients generally perceived to be "progressive", Jain estimates that barely two or three of them have made any provision for their daughters in the disposition of their self-acquired properties.
Biased wills
One way to mitigate this rampant gender bias is to take a leaf out of the Muslim law, which imposes a limit on the freedom of testamentary disposition. The Muslim father can will away a maximum of one-third of his property while the rest is divided among his legal heirs of both genders.
Significantly, when the Law Commission asked in 2000 whether such a restriction should be imposed on the freedom of the Hindu father as well, the majority of the respondents favoured this radical idea. Those reform seekers were, however, almost evenly divided on whether the right of testamentary disposition should be confined to one-third or one half of the Hindu's self-acquired properties. Even as it admitted that "there has been a strong demand for placing a restriction on the right of testamentary disposition", the Law Commission without giving any reasons said that after "due deliberation" it was "not inclined" to go so far in its recommendations.
The equality granted to the Hindu daughter in the context of ancestral property cannot make much difference on the ground unless this concept of curtailing the right to will away self-acquired properties is adopted. This may , however, amount to privileging equality over liberty to check a mischief.
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15. NON-VEG IS THE NORM
by Mukul Dube
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(Communalism Watch - 16 June 2015)
In India it is routine to hear “Nice party. They served non-veg” and “Are you veg or non-veg?” We see that the expression “non-veg” does duty both as noun and as adjective. In the former role it can stand for flesh, fish or fowl, the sole essential being that whatever it may be, it is not “veg”. In the U.K., incidentally, “veg” means not vegetarian but vegetable, as in the typical meal of “Steak, potatoes and two veg”. In the late 1970s it used to give my English girl friend much pleasure to hear people in India call themselves vegetables. “She did look like an aubergine, you know.”
In http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/the-food-habits-of-a- nation/article3089973.ece of 14 August 2006, Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar speak of the Hindu-CNN-IBN State of the Nation Survey. They say, “the findings [of the survey] show that only 31 per cent of Indians are vegetarians. The figure is 21 per cent for families (with all vegetarian members).” This is in the present. Historians have shown that the people of ancient India, starting with Brahmins, ate many kinds of meat including that of cattle. To call India a vegetarian country when over two thirds of Indians eat meat is imbecility. Yet vegetarianism is assumed to be the norm, encouraged or imposed by the ideologies of religion and caste.
The prefix “non-” is used to indicate negation or absence. Thus there are words like “non-combatant” and “nonsense”. It may also be used to mark a negative quality or a deviation from a norm, as in “non-attractive”. In a land of Hindus a “non-Hindu” is a deviant. In our country, because vegetarianism is wrongly assumed to be the norm, those who eat meat are called “non-vegetarians”. The expression often has a negative connotation: the eating of meat may be seen as a reprehensible act.
Vegetarianism is known all over the world: but it is considered a harmless eccentricity. Humans in nearly the entire world eat the flesh of mammals and birds and fishes. We are, as a species, omnivores, never mind all the ersatz Vedic humbug that flies around in Bharat.
It is only in our India that the expression “non-vegetarian” is found. Indians who go abroad get blank stares when they utter it. No one anywhere says “non-meat-eater” or “non-carnivore”, which would be a good deal more logical.
A meat eating family which lives in Ahmedabad in a housing society owned by Jains recently got forty letters threatening the rape of their daughter as punishment for their “criminal” food habits. It may happen that a sattvik pujari who lives in Birmingham will also face a threat. “You eat kaddu, Panditji -- you die.”
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16. I BECAME AN ARCHITECT BECAUSE OF TOY TRAINS: AN ESSAY by Charles Correa
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(scroll.in - 17 June 2015)
India's best-known architect died on Tuesday at the age of 84. In this article, he explains how he developed a passion for designing buildings and spaces.
I think I became an architect because of toy trains. As a child, I had a Hornby tinplate track and a couple of locomotives and wagons. Nothing very ambitious, really just enough to run the trains around your room, and the following day, perhaps change the layout so that they could run into the next room, under a table and back again. That was the marvelous thing about those old tinplate rails. They had flexibility. Every time one finished playing, back they went into their wooden box – to be reincarnated the next day in a totally new formation.
Ah, to have more rails – and more trains! But since World War II was on, there was no way my layout could possibly have been augmented. All I did have was catalogues (the legendary Hornby Book of Trains, Basset-Lowke’s Model Railways and so forth), which I would pore over. I drew out on graph paper the most elaborate layouts: straight rails, curved ones, sidings, crossovers, the works. Trains moved through tunnels, stations, over-bridges in one direction and then, through cunningly placed figure eights, came right back through the same stations and tunnels – but now in the other direction, setting up a brand new sequence!
That’s how I spent many of my classroom hours: drawing up these hypothetical layouts in exercise books. Years later, at the age of fifteen or so, coming across an architectural journal for the first time, I felt I could read the various plans and sections – and what they were trying to do. That much I owe to Hornby.
The architect's conundrum
Cut to many more years later. As a young architect, I’m perplexed by the contrary attitudes of two quite different thought processes. The first produces architecture which has very strong conceptual ideas – but on which you do not really linger beyond the first five minutes. An example might be Eero Saarinen’s three-pointed dome at MIT – a very elegant creation, but also perhaps something you might feel you have digested in one scanning. On the other hand, there is another kind of process, which does not involve any holistic schema at all. Many buildings (and most interiors) are designed this way. They present you with a series of spellbinding effects, one after another; perhaps without any real inter-relationship – except, of course, that one set-piece follows the previous one in a knockout sequence, rather like the way Gone With the Wind is structured around a series of unforgettable scenes. Or like the stories of Scheherazade. Once the sequence starts, you’re hooked – but can this ever provide a legitimate basis for serious architecture? Can such arbitrary and episodic narrativeever express the control, the rigor, and the discipline, so fundamental to holistic thought?
Jump cut again, to China. Before I visited my first Chinese garden, I was confused. Photographs showed only some fragile scenographic effects: the quirky little bridge, the dragon wall, the pond of water and so forth. Yet, when you actually get there and start walking through the garden, it gradually builds and builds until it finally overwhelms you.Hornby all over again! First you go through the sequence of pond and bridge and dragon wall in one direction, and then you find yourself coming in from another direction, experiencing them all in another sequence, in another order, from another height and so forth. The same handful of props are used and reused, again and again. And each time, because of a slight change in angle, or in sequence, they carry a new significance.
Limiting elements
Restricting the number of elements, and using them over and over, is the key decision. It confers on the Chinese garden the rigour that the mandatory square piece of paper generates in Origami. By making the number of set pieces finite, but the variations in your perception of them seemingly infinite, the garden becomes, at one and the same time, both holistic and episodic. Perhaps the repeated tales told in Rashomon (the bandit, the husband, the onlooker, the wife) also stem from this same paradigm. With each narration of the identical events, truth is reborn again in a new form, trans-forming the lyrical open-ended tales of Scheherazade into the refracted and imploded metaphysics of Kurosawa’s masterpiece.
That is what toy trains are really about – those wonderful tinplate rails that made patterns across the bedroom floor (the way the real thing makes pat- terns across a landscape, or across a nation), abstract patterns that recall in the mind’s eye the true reality of railway journeys. Today, these toys are no longer available. What killed them off? The banal quest for super-realistic "scale model" railways and those stunningly prosaic attempts at so-called realism. Instead of the continuously changing patterns of demountable rails, we have today scale-track, nailed down permanently on to a baseboard – in the process fatally maiming that extraordinarily sophisticated level of abstraction and imagination that children brought to their tinplate layouts.
Excerpted with permission from A Place in the Shade: The New Landscape & Other Essays by Charles Correa, published by Penguin India.
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17. RADIOACTIVE ABLUTIONS
by Khaled Ahmed
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(The Indian Express - 19 JUne 2015)
A.Q. Khan has more to say about pre-prayer rituals of cleanliness than about science.
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Abdul Qadeer Khan
Pakistan’s “father of the bomb”, Abdul Qadeer Khan, writes a weekly column where you might expect him to teach Pakistanis the real lessons of science. He does nothing of the sort. He actually pontificates about religion. An April column of his was titled “Ablutions and prayers”, which was to be serialised, as he had more to say about these pre-namaz rituals of cleanliness than one thought.
First, he carefully scans the various ways of cleaning the body recommended by the various exegeses of Islam, Hanafi, Shafei, etc. These imams ordained washing after you’ve made yourself unclean, with special regard to male genitals. There is even the pain of “ghusl (bath)”, because mere washing may not suffice. A.Q. Khan is unrelenting in his pursuit of detail: “The followers of Imam Abu Hanifa consider the touching of a non-related woman and the touching of one’s own genitals as elements for ablution/ shower. They also consider uncontrolled laughter during prayers requiring renewed ablution. All Muslim scholars advise that, should there be the slightest doubt, ablution should be renewed.” (The News, April 27). There are concessions, of course. If you can’t find water, he writes, get a handful of sand.
And why not avoid touching women? Especially this evil habit of shaking hands with women you don’t know? Why I recommend this becomes obvious from the following ritual he sets down as compulsory: “One should start with Bismillah, sit facing the Kaaba, wash all organs three times, always right side first, then left, wet head and beard thoroughly and end with recitation of the Confessional Kalima.” This excellent tip makes it clear to me why, at my workplace, most bathrooms are such a mess. If the washbasin and the Kaaba fall on opposite sides, you have to do nearly impossible acrobatics to achieve the piety of cleanliness.
Like many of us living in the Islamic timewarp, he assumes that “nowadays, our young generation is hardly being taught to recite the Quran, learn namaz and the rituals of ablution and shower”. The fact is that in the 21st century, Muslims live under Islamisation as never before in history. In my office, all the young people say their namaz and, of course, do their ablutions. The bathrooms bear testimony to that. But keen on learning to wash myself properly before saying my prayers, I must listen to Khan and obey him. I would be following Articles 62 and 63 of the constitution even though I know I would flunk recitation of longer verses of the Quran required by these articles.
Khan concludes: “I intend to perform all the ‘ghusls (bath)’ which are compulsory for me to cleanse myself and to protect myself from ‘shaitan (Satan)’.”
All great men who contribute to the welfare of the Islamic state must be pious like Khan. Next to nuclear scientists, most of whom have flowing beards, one expects the judges to be pious as they dispense justice. It is praiseworthy that our judges give ample evidence of deep personal piety in times when the world is unfairly accusing us of letting bearded killers walk. If some judges are not bearded, it doesn’t matter too much because they make up with their wonderful obiter dicta of endless piety.
Nuclear weapons are for the defence of the Muslim nation in Pakistan. Therefore, the making of nuclear bombs must qualify as an act of piety for which the reward is paradise. At times we call this achievement of Khan an “Islamic bomb”, because there is no such thing as a Pakistani nation. All Muslims are one nation called “ummah”; therefore, the bomb Khan has fathered is Islamic rather than Pakistani. We are sure we are ordained to make the bomb because of the Quranic verse that says “keep your horses ready”.
But why have we made the bomb? Our nuclear doctrine says it is India-specific. India made the bomb first, leaping all roadblocks erected against proliferation. Pakistan had to follow to secure itself against an Indian invasion like the one in East Pakistan in 1971. A complication, however, has risen now that Balochistan is convulsed with an insurgency brewing since Pakistan’s early years. The bomb has not prevented the insurgency.
There is yet another complication that must bother our pious Khan. Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says the Quran actually forbids the manufacture of nuclear weapons, which is why Iran has no intention of making a bomb. It is the impiety of America and the West that gets in the way of believing Tehran’s sincere assertion. The Iranian nation believes the great leader, and Iranian nationalism is deeply attached to the creation of electricity through nuclear power stations, unlike Pakistan and India, where the nations are deeply attached to their phallic nukes. Their nuclear scientists are made presidents instead of being condemned. (Khan narrowly missed being made one.)
There is another complication Khan’s ablutions will not help resolve. Saudi Arabia too wants its bomb in obedience to the edict, “keep your horses ready”. But this bomb will not be Israel-specific, although any Islamic bomb should be. Just as Pakistan’s bomb failed to become Israel-specific and declined into being merely India-specific, the Saudi bomb will become Iran-specific. And that hurtles us into yet another polemic. The Saudi bomb will be a Sunni bomb, aimed against a Shia bomb of Iran that Khamenei denies. But who listens? Pakistan also swore for decades it was not making a bomb, and nobody listened. Looking at what Pakistan is doing to its Shias, one has a strong suspicion that its bomb will soon convert into a Sunni bomb.
Khan must focus on the sectarian nature of his achievement. He has given us a purely Sunni way of washing the body before praying. Had he been non-sectarian, he would have explained why the Shia kalima is different from the one recited by Sunnis. He was always in favour of letting Iran know nuclear secrets so that it could produce electricity. How could he forget Iran while cleaning himself for namaz?
The writer is consulting editor, ‘Newsweek Pakistan’
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/radioactive-ablutions/
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18. FROM GREECE TO GOA: THE ANATOMY OF DEBT TRAPS
by Vivek Menezes
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(The Times of India, July 4, 2015)
The entire world is watching Greece with bated breath this week, as its new socialist government attempts to navigate through a thorny economic crisis that poses unprecedented threats to the nascent Euro-zone, the imprimatur of the international banking system led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank, as well as the fragile recovery that has followed the global financial crisis of 2007-08. But Greece is not alone in drowning in huge public debt—many other countries are nearly as badly situated, and several states in India—including Goa—now carry similarly worrying burdens.
How did Greece—a developed country integrated into the very wealthy European Union—manage to slide into such a grave predicament? The short answer is simple enough: The country kept spending more than it collected in tax revenues, mainly to keep investing in grandiose and unnecessary infrastructure (such as the lavish stadia for the 2004 Olympic Games), and to distribute as sops to government cronies. Greek political and economic elites were addicted to cheap borrowing from (mainly German and French) banks, taking out ever-increasing loans to settle ever-increasing interest payments. That party ended in 2009 when the possibility of default became clear. Since that point, Greece has struggled to borrow money to service existing debt, and has been forced to pay market-level interest rates that dug its economic hole so deep that IMF now says there is no possibility of repayment for at least 20 years.
While there are many similarities between the position Greece finds itself and the predicament of other countries and states—including Goa—the inadequate political integration of Europe over the past 15 years is a complicating factor.
It was Greek membership in the European Union that gave the country the credibility to borrow vast sums of money from EU institutions, but when the crisis exploded, the decision-makers in Brussels, Paris and Berlin chose to rescue their own banks and taxpayers with "bailout" packages, while imposing severe austerity measures on the Greeks. The result has been comprehensive economic collapse, 25% reduction in national GDP, and crippling unemployment rising above 50% for young people.
Tiny Goa is cushioned by the vast Indian Union, a much more effective support system than the Europeans have managed to create. Budget shortfalls engineered in Porvorim are highly unlikely to set off the kind of chain reaction feared if Greece is forced to leave the EU, 'Grexit', and returns to the drachma as its currency standard.
But the same economic principles playing out in Europe apply to India's smallest state's burgeoning debt trap, which features identically irresponsible borrowing, spending on scam infrastructure, and sops to government cronies.
Despite large hikes in Goa's share of cash from the Central fund (this year up a whopping 10%), Goa's public debt is heading upward of 10,000 crore and the state is reduced to the fatal strategy of borrowing at market rates to service interest payments. No less than Greece, this is the definition of unsustainable economic policy.
Ironically, it was the current chief minister of Goa who most aptly summarized the impending crisis when he was in opposition in 2010. He said then—"reckless expenditure by the government has led to liabilities exceeding 7,000 crore, an increase of 100% in the last five years... (it is) reckless expenditure on the creation of redundant assets, most of which are of a non-welfare nature and turn out to be liabilities which incur high capital costs and recurring maintenance and operational costs".
That highly reasonable analysis by (Laxmikant) Parsekar has been turned on its head by his own BJP government's outsized spending spree of a scale never seen before in Goa. A third Mandovi bridge for more than 600 crore, the controversial bridge to Tiracol (home to exactly 300 Goans) for more than 80 crore, extraordinarily dubious road-building and road-widening exercises for additional hundreds of millions of rupees.
While the outrageously expensive Lusofonia Games stadia lie empty and increasingly derelict, another series of giant white elephants are in the planning stages and being tendered. The spectre of Mopa airport comes ever closer, another unwanted money pit of thousands of crores.
Just as the hated 'troika' of lenders and finance ministers imposed on Greece, Goa's political elites are now also talking of selective "austerity" which does not allow increased spending on the inadequate healthcare system, or on the state's woefully mediocre education infrastructure.
Pay close attention to Greece by all means, because much the same is happening in Goa too.
The writer is a widely published author and photographer.
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19. SOUTH AFRICA’S SHORT MEMORY
by Jeremy Harding
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(Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2015)
Scenes from the long, wide fight against Apartheid
The migrants so recently attacked in South Africa almost all came from neighbouring countries that paid a high price in death and ruin for supporting anti-apartheid struggles.
by Jeremy Harding
A body lies by the wheel of a truck in Mozambique. Three figures stand with their faces away from the camera, gazing down at the dead man. Such scenes were common in Mozambique when this photograph was taken in 1983. The photographer is unknown: the negative was found in the archives of the Mozambican News Agency. A print is now on show at the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in Johannesburg, as part of an exhibition of photographs from southern African states during the last years of apartheid, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.
On the Frontline records what happened in newly independent states like Mozambique when they offered support to apartheid’s enemies — above all, the African National Congress — and leaves no doubt about the strength of South Africa’s reaction or the high price they paid. There is work from Mozambique, Lesotho, Zambia and Angola and others that played host to the ANC and the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), fighting for the independence of Namibia. There are also very striking pictures from Namibia, taken at the time of South Africa’s occupation. A handful of photos tell the story of peace and rehabilitation in the aftermath of a regional war that lasted 15 years.
Mozambique and Angola won independence from Portugal in 1975, after liberation struggles that began in the 1960s. But by the time the photo of the dead man by the truck was taken, the promises of independence had withered and the country lay in ruins. Mozambique’s problems with its neighbours began soon after the Portuguese left and the new government, FRELIMO, granted Robert Mugabe’s guerrilla movement rear bases close to its border with Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Rhodesian security forces responded by sponsoring a Mozambican anti-government insurgency, RENAMO. When majority rule ended in Zimbabwe in 1980, South Africa took the movement under its wing. RENAMO guerrillas, trained and equipped by their new masters, overran remote villages in rural areas, demolished railway tracks, blew up power lines and ambushed anything that moved on the roads. They terrorised civilians and forced them into their ranks: many recruits were under 18 and technically child soldiers. (FRELIMO also recruited with sweeps through towns and villages.) By 1984 the situation was so desperate that FRELIMO agreed to expel the ANC in return for a guarantee from South Africa that it would no longer aid and abet RENAMO, but the Nkomati Accord broke down, largely because South Africa failed to keep its side of the bargain. The war dragged on for eight more years, and by the time it was over, 4 million people had been displaced and 1 million were dead.
Those who died
Death is an unavoidable theme in the exhibition. A shocking photo from Lesotho, taken in 1982, shows the victims of a South African undercover assault on an ANC safe house in the capital, Maseru. In another, a deep trench is filled with bodies; it was taken in Angola in 1978 at the town of Cassinga, after one of the most devastating attacks by the South Africans in the entire regional conflict. The victims were Namibian exiles — about 600 — who died during a sustained aerial bombardment and a South African paratroop drop.
By then there were several protagonists in the Angolan war. Its independence government, the pro-Soviet MPLA, had survived an attempt to topple it in 1975, but only with the help of a contingent of Cuban soldiers, sent by Fidel Castro to hold the line against a South African column that had come within reach of the capital, Luanda. The South Africans withdrew, but still hoped to overthrow the new regime: they cultivated, trained and supplied UNITA, a rebel movement in south Angola run by the pliable warlord Jonas Savimbi, whom the US was also preparing to fund. The MPLA was harbouring the ANC and allowing SWAPO’s liberation fighters to roam more or less freely north of the border. Pretoria could not countenance the threat of an independent Namibia with a Marxist-Leninist liberation movement in charge.
The massacre at Cassinga signalled South Africa’s willingness to raise the stakes. Sixteen Cubans, deployed from their barracks nearby to defend the town, also lost their lives. Scores of SWAPO fighters died, but most of the dead were Namibian civilians. At the time, as South African photographer John Liebenberg’s pictures show, the struggle inside Namibia was intensifying. Namibians were leaving for Angola and by 1980, according to Norwegian overseas aid figures, there were at least 40,000 refugees over the border; there were 75,000 by 1985. PLAN, the SWAPO guerrilla army, was probably never more than 18,000 strong.
Angola looked complicated to outsiders but it was a textbook cold war hotspot with two rival alliances locked in a dramatic contest: the Angolan government, the Cubans, the USSR and regional anti-apartheid fighters on one side; the US, South Africa and their UNITA auxiliaries on the other. The consequences were brutally simple. At least half a million people died, mostly from illness and malnutrition, and millions were displaced. As in Mozambique, the casualties from landmines were high, with 87,000 Angolans maimed or killed.
Angola was bullied and brutalised by South Africa, but the government and its allies put up a fight and acquitted themselves well. The sense that a long struggle was drawing to a close is clear in later photos (including some of my own). They were taken in 1988 as the tide of war turned in the government’s favour. The previous year Angola had launched a disastrous military offensive against UNITA’s rear base, deep in the south. The country’s crack brigades had been destroyed by the South African Defence Force (SADF). The situation looked hopeless, but as the SADF followed up — UNITA in the frontline — the remains of the retreating government forces dug in at the town of Cuito Cuanavale and held on. Cuba hurried reinforcements to forward positions and the SADF, encouraged by Cuban pilots flying MiG-23s, came to a judicious halt: it would have been too costly to press ahead. The siege had lasted months and Cuito Cuanavale was still in government hands. Now it was Castro’s turn to go on the offensive, deploying troops and armour close to the Namibian border, west of the recent fighting. The Russians agreed to the plan despite misgivings, and for a moment it looked as though South Africa’s border-war battalions might be stranded in Angola, unable to withdraw without heavy losses.
New confidence
These photos from Cuito Cuanavale in May 1988 recorded a newfound confidence among Angolan soldiers: they’d risen to a difficult occasion and the end was in sight. In one, Angolan infantry enjoy their inspection of a captured South African battle tank. The fight for Cuito Cuanavale was not over: moments after the picture was taken, long-range shells began falling and an Angolan soldier was seriously injured. But the SADF had lost the initiative, even if it could still make its presence felt from 40km away with state-of-the-art ordnance. Its new artillery, built at home by Armscor to a Canadian design, superseded an earlier gun, which the SADF had procured from Israel in breach of the arms embargo.
In military terms, the balance of power in Angola had reached parity. South African soldiers were also fighting a war at home, with the townships in open revolt. Beyond southern Africa, the US and the USSR were moving rapidly from détente to a choreographed understanding between victor and vanquished. The SADF pulled out of Angola in August 1988, leading the way to Namibian independence. Everything changed when Pretoria called its soldiers out of Angola: the point is made in a quiet, definitive photo by Liebenberg of young white soldiers in armoured personnel carriers crossing a pontoon at the Namibian/Angolan border. Apartheid’s days were numbered. The Cubans agreed to a phased withdrawal and, at the end of 1989, Namibian voters were allowed to go to the polls for the first time in their history. The result was a resounding victory for independence with SWAPO at the helm. Nelson Mandela was released in February 1990. The last Cuban soldiers left Angola in 1991. The MPLA was returned to power in Angola’s first western-style election in 1992.
In Mozambique, the peace process had been moving forward fast, with large foreign aid infusions to incentivise it. In 1989 Frelimo and the insurgents agreed on a new constitution, paving the way for a postwar settlement. The fighting dragged on, until elections in 1994 returned the ruling party to power. A striking photo taken after the apartheid wars shows guitarists and singers at a demining operation in northern Angola. The time had come for reconstruction, but the legacy of war was still in the ground. In Angola, unlike Mozambique, the peace was compromised when Savimbi rejected the election result. A destructive, unstable warlord, abandoned by his cold war backers, he held out against the regional settlement, keeping the conflict alive until 2002, when he was hunted down and killed.
New violence in South Africa
On the Frontline is a lesson in history with a bearing on the present. While the curators were hanging the prints, a wave of anti-immigrant violence engulfed South Africa. The Mandela Centre repositioned the show as an intervention against long-term memory loss. Many of the migrants attacked in Durban and Johannesburg were from neighbouring countries that had paid a high price for resisting apartheid, whether their citizens agreed or disagreed with the stance of their governments. As thousands of migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi made their way back over the borders or sought shelter in safety camps, the Centre used the exhibition — in the words of Verne Harris, research and archive director — “to remind South Africans of their indebtedness to the peoples of neighbouring countries and the many other African countries which supported our struggle for liberation.”
Opening the exhibition, Graça Machel, widow of Mozambique’s president Samora Machel and later of Mandela, criticised the South African government — and leaders of nearby countries — for abandoning the sense of purpose that had led the frontline states to defy South Africa and shaped their vision of a post-apartheid future. “Our leadership has betrayed the dream,” she said. “They don’t have the big dream to motivate all of us to look up to something bigger than any one of us.” The unstated message for the ruling ANC is that a country with 24% unemployment, high crime levels, sub-standard or non-existent housing and unaffordable utilities, should revisit the New Deal-style principles of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) that Mandela was persuaded to dilute in 1996. The recent xenophobic attacks, she said, were mostly carried out by people “who are struggling for survival themselves” and feel “pushed to the limit.”
Could a new RDP, without the flaws and anomalies of the original, broaden social justice in South Africa and bring an end to anti-immigrant feeling? Europeans are asking similar questions about economic austerity at the heart of the EU, and about the asylum seekers at its margins. There are no clear answers. In South Africa, the debate is still framed in terms of the country’s difficult past and the importance of memory. The call for social justice is really a call to keep alive the values that underpinned the anti-apartheid struggle. It is also a warning that South Africa’s elusive goal of equality can never be reached unless “the dream” — echoing Martin Luther King — is honoured and the ANC revives the tattered remains of its socialism. Like French exceptionalism, founded on a sense of Republican tradition and exemplary values believed to be permanently under attack or about to disappear, South African exceptionialism stresses the specificity of the struggle, and the need for distinctive policy solutions, including a dirigiste state that intervenes in all areas of public life, including the economy.
Immigration and right of asylum in South Africa are under pressure: the government has sought to tighten entry with harsh visa restrictions, penalties for offenders, and greater security along the borders. Last year the home affairs minister, Naledi Pandor, announced that “economic migrants” were “abusing” the asylum process (1). The problem lies deeper. Mandela was an assiduous nation-builder, but his wish to set an example to the world was so strong, and international praise for the transition so lavish, that a heroic, self-congratulatory chauvinism took root in the new national consciousness. Graça Machel is aware of this: her call for solidarity — and a unifying narrative — goes beyond South Africa’s borders to the region as a whole.
On the Frontline is an aide-mémoire for any southern African who shares her belief in “the dream”: memory, after all, is highly selective and, in this case, deeply politicised. For this reason, it is the terrain of choice for the Mandela Foundation and its Centre of Memory. The Centre’s commemorative focus is on “the life and times of Nelson Mandela”, which allows it to select and recall a salutary past of struggle, pain, heroism and sacrifice. It also organises regular “dialogue and advocacy” events at its large, gated premises in Johannesburg, where the principles of the anti-apartheid opposition can be reaffirmed, even when the “dialogue” involves people who are not comfortable in the new South Africa, or with each other.
Last year it screened 1994: the Bloody Miracle, a documentary about the township killings in the run-up to democratic elections; it brought together the daughter of Alwyn Wolfaardt, a member of the white ethnic fundamentalist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) and the black policeman who shot him when he was already badly injured. It has also brokered a tense conversation between Treatment for Aids (TAC), an activist NGO defending Aids-sufferers, and members of the ANC government, whose predecessors — above all, Thabo Mbeki — were locked in denial about HIV.
This is a delicate agenda, even if the Centre strives to put its guests at ease and mediate between hostile positions. “One of the key objectives,” Sello Hatang, CEO of the Mandela Foundation, explained, “is to create a safe space for people to come and say the unsayable.” The pay-off is obvious. In managing tense encounters between hostile parties who might otherwise never meet, the Centre champions Mandela’s skills as a negotiator, and everything he stood for, including the politics of the liberation movement — well to the left of the ANC in power — in the days of the struggle. This is not hypocrisy or dissimulation: Mandela was a figure on the left; he was on the Central Committee of the Communist Party at the time of his arrest in 1962; after his release he was forced to offer up social justice as a hostage to the future of the “rainbow nation”, in the name of reconciliation. He had no choice and he chose wisely. The argument now in South Africa is about whether the revolution should be revived or left in the ground.
The Centre plays a discreet but proactive part in this debate, and moves further by the day from the policies of the ruling party. Many of its memorial interventions are focused on urgent, short-term issues: it responded very quickly to xenophobia in April, and On the Frontline has served it well in this respect. In fact, the Centre has had a keen eye on anti-migrant violence for at least seven years. Its greatest challenge — a problem pointed out by Machel — is that recent generations of South Africans know little about the past and less about the countries from which millions of undocumented African migrants are arriving as cheap labour or corner-shop entrepreneurs. Older South Africans are still ready to thank neighbouring states for their sacrifice, and they are ashamed of the recent events. But there is no such thing as collective memory in a country where nearly 70% of the population are under 35 (2).
“No African is a foreigner in Africa,” the philosopher Achille Mbembe wrote about the recent outbursts. He argues that South Africa is defaulting on its obligation to neighbouring states. On the Frontline makes much the same argument, but its impact can only be modest. Mbembe, a member of staff at the University of the Witwatersrand, is so angry that he’s suggested costing the damage done in Angola, Mozambique and other countries — “the number of people maimed” and “the long chain of misery and destitution suffered in the name of our solidarity with South Africa” — and producing a total. “If black South Africans do not want to hear about any moral debt, maybe it is time to agree with them, give them the bill and ask for economic reparations” (3). The dream is not what it was.
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20. H-NET REVIEW: SANDISON ON HALL, 'ARTHUR ASHE: TENNIS AND JUSTICE IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA'
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Eric Allen Hall. Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 344 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4214-1394-5.
Reviewed by Simon Sandison (University of Leeds)
Published on H-1960s (July, 2015)
Commissioned by Zachary Lechner
Racial Consciousness On and Off the Tennis Court
With Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era, Eric Allen Hall offers a welcome and timely scholarly biography of one of US tennis’s most important revolutionaries. One gets the impression that both Hall and Ashe in particular may shy away from such a strong description. Even so Arthur Ashe makes clear that, while Ashe was not necessarily a trailblazer for African American involvement in US sport or even just tennis—he followed Bob Ryland and Anthea Gibson onto the courts and athletes like Jackie Robinson, Jessie Owens, and Joe Louis are all cited by Hall as predecessors—he, along perhaps with Muhammad Ali, was among the first African American athletes to realize his potential to promote social change through political activism.[1] Athletic success gave him a voice which he could use to do this.
Hall’s book, surprisingly, is the first of its kind published about Ashe. While Ashe wrote four memoirs alongside ghostwriters, as well as the groundbreaking, if flawed, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete (1993), published across three volumes, there have been only a handful of nonacademic biographies written since his death in 1993. Hall is able to interweave and contextualize Ashe’s athletic achievements, his intellectual nature, and his various politically driven actions: autobiographies and sporting histories have been unable to reconcile honestly these facets of his personality. Hall’s meticulous research of extensive archival materials allows him to uncover the complexities of Ashe’s relationship with his own athleticism and race. Indeed, the archival sources he uses are remarkable. In addition to a thorough survey of contemporary journalism in three countries, Hall has made use of forty-two boxes of Ashe’s personal papers located in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This kind of collection is almost unique in sports history and Hall’s capable use of it lends Arthur Ashe a depth of private detail unprecedented among athletic biographies, scholarly or otherwise.
Hall successfully parses this extensive archive to provide a unified narrative of a life that, Janus-faced, was consistently interesting to journalists writing in the front and back of daily newspapers around the world. Hall, like Ashe, shows that sporting success and political efficacy are two sides of the same coin and, equally, draws on a good knowledge of a wide and varied set of cultural contexts to demonstrate this collaboration. These contexts include, but are not limited to, the social history of tennis, the civil rights movement and black power, the apartheid movement in South Africa and in the United States, and African Americans in sport. Arthur Ashe, though, is best viewed as a historical document in its own right. Meticulous, honest, and straightforward, the book itself might act as a tool by which other cultural critics, building on Hall’s research, can bring refreshed and renewed attention to this intersection between sport and political activism, racial or otherwise. The familiar refrain that sport and politics should not mix—persistent to the present day—punctuates Ashe’s experiences and Hall’s book. Plainly, despite the gains made by Ashe, this absurd assertion is one still leveled at athletes in the twenty-first century. For example, in 2014, Detroit Lions running back Reggie Bush was accused by ESPN and the Washington Post of being “outspoken” after a series of incidents in which he offered his support to campaigns in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, protesting police violence against Michael Brown.[2]
Perhaps the episode that best illuminates Ashe’s moderate, resourceful, and committed approach to the struggle for race equality comes right at the beginning of his career. While in his freshman year at UCLA, the tennis team was, as usual, invited to an annual tournament at the Balboa Bay Club with Ashe’s name “conspicuously absent” from the list of players. Ashe’s coach, J. D. Morgan assured him that the team was willing to boycott the tournament on his behalf if Ashe instructed them to do so. Morgan’s advice, quoted in Ashe’s third memoir Off The Court (1981) and reproduced by Hall, became a succinct mantra for Ashe’s approach to protest more widely: “You can’t make it a little issue. If you want to fight something like [the Balboa exclusion], you have to fight it to win it. And you have to prepare for it, get your ducks in order so to speak” (p. 48).
Hall is critical of Morgan’s insistence that Ashe received the authority to decide whether the whole team should boycott the tournament. Hall suggests that at such an early position in his career, Ashe could not possibly have been so outspoken—nor could he have imposed his struggle onto his teammates without their explicit agreement—and that, moreover, Morgan absolved himself of the responsibilities of leadership. However, in transferring this responsibility to Ashe, Morgan in fact established a template for reserved and considered protest that informed all of Ashe’s later activism. The fingerprints of this advice are clear, for example, when Ashe was finally granted a visa to compete in the South African Open during apartheid’s peak years. He was keenly aware that the public debates with black journalists, meetings with leaders of the white and black communities, and the journeys to Soweto would have no effect if he did not also compete admirably in the tournament. He finished second, knocking out two white South Africans in the process.
At a historical moment in which athletic activism appears to be at a low ebb, Arthur Ashe, above all, offers a timely opportunity to revisit a man who, in his words, “could be the reactionary’s nigger and the revolutionary’s Uncle Tom” (p. 50). A moderate through and through, Ashe was consistently able to create and inspire change—by degrees—in attitudes and in legislation. While it is apparent that US sport generally and tennis specifically is increasingly comfortable with black athletes (while an African American has not won a Grand Slam tournament since Ashe, the Williams sisters have been prolific), the same is certainly not true for gay athletes. The recent experiences of Jason Collins, Michael Sam, and Darren Young demonstrate that the struggle for equality in sport still has some way to go. Ashe’s middle way might offer athletes of color and other minority sportsmen and sportswomen a blueprint to reclaim their public lives from an accusatory sporting media still betrothed to the idea that any bleed between sports and politics is outspoken as opposed to ordinary.
Notes
[1]. Unlike Ashe, works on Ali and his personal brand of activism are numerous. Gerald Early, I’m a Little Bit Special: A Muhammad Ali Reader (London: Yellow Jersey, 1999) is perhaps the best start.
[2]. Cindy Boren, “Reggie Bush Protests Eric Garner Decision with ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Shirt,” Washington Post, December 7, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/early-lead/wp/2014/12/07/reggie-bush-protests-eric-garner-decision-with-i-cant-breathe-shirt/; and Michael Rothstein, “Reggie Bush Wears Protest Shirt,” ESPN.com, December 8, 2014, http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11993093/reggie-bush-detroit-lions-wears-breathe-shirt-game.
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