SACW - 8 Aug 2015 | Bangladesh: Statement on Niloy Neel killing / Sri Lanka: women's union / Pakistan - India: shape of possible nuclear attack / Nepal: Secularism, federalism and rheumatism / India: state should stay away from religious festivals / Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima / Jan Breman Interview / China crashing, workers rising

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 8 August 2015 - No. 2866 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Mukta Mona Statement on the murder of writer and rationalist Niloy Neel in Bangladesh
2. Burma's path to democracy is being wrecked by lethal identity politics | Andrew Fagan
3. Silan Kadirgamar (1934-2015): Reflections on his life and politics | Rajan Philips
4. Sri Lanka’s first women’s trade union / Impact of flexibility on the labour regime
5. From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima | Arjun Makhijani
6. What a nuclear attack on Indian, or Pakistani, cities will look like | Nandagopal Rajan
7. Indian and Pakistani Citizens Condemn Terror Attack in Gurdaspur Demand Joint Mechanism to Deal with Terrorism
8. Strange case of an Indian National in Jail on Charges of Being a Pakistani Intruder
9. Statement in Support of Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand - from Civil Society Organizations and Human Rights defenders in Sri Lanka
10. India: State must not organize Religious festivals | Ram Puniyani
11. Equality, but with one exception | Aakar Patel
12. NLR Interview with Jan Breman (July-August 2015)
13. Denis Dalton on Gandhi in Calcutta during Partition of 1947
14. Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews Landscapes of Communism: A History through Buildings by Owen Hatherley
15. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: Darul Uloom Deoband fatwa declares shaving un-Islamic after previous edicts against photography and against dyeing hair black
  - India: JNU students snub ABVP, screen riot film
  - The need for a new agenda (Sitaram Yechury)
  - India should grant citizenship to persecuted refugees but make this religion-neutral (Editorial in The Hindu, 6 Aug 2015)
  - Orijit Sen on 'How to Survive the Stampede of the Patriots?'

::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
16. Writer / Blogger Niloy Neel Assassinated in Bangladesh
17. India: Special issue on on death penalty Frontline Magazine
18. Creeping authoritarianism: India is turning increasingly illiberal under the present government | TK Arun
19. Have the comrades lost it or are they just competing with the puritanical right wing - CPI demands total prohibition of liquor in India
20. Secularism, federalism and rheumatism  | Ass
21. What Could Mullah Mohammad Omar’s Death Mean for the Taliban Talks? | Barnett Rubin
22. What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Pornography | Lawrence Liang
23. Leading historian of Africa, Stephen Ellis, dies
24. China crashing, workers rising
25. The Jawaharlal Nehru today’s India does not know | Aakar Patel

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1. MUKTA MONA STATEMENT ON THE MURDER OF WRITER AND RATIONALIST NILOY NEEL IN BANGLADESH
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Following the murders of Rajeeb Haider, Avijit Roy, Washiqur Rahmna, and Ananta Bijoy Das, today, the Mukto-Mona writer, blogger, and activist Niloy Neel has been hacked to death. He wrote in Mutko-Mona as well as in Istishon, and Facebook under the name of “Niloy Neel” (twitter: #NiloyNeel). In addition to writing, Niloy Neel was involved in various social justice movements and was the founder of the Bangladesh Science and Rationalists Association.
http://sacw.net/article11447.html

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2. BURMA'S PATH TO DEMOCRACY IS BEING WRECKED BY LETHAL IDENTITY POLITICS | ANDREW FAGAN
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The very word “Burma” was once shorthand for a brutal military dictatorship, but things have now changed dramatically. Burma (or Myanmar) has come to be viewed as a country firmly committed to the establishment of a new reality, founded upon respect for human rights and the rule of law.
http://www.sacw.net/article11441.html

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3. SILAN KADIRGAMAR (1934-2015): REFLECTIONS ON HIS LIFE AND POLITICS | RAJAN PHILIPS
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A man of many facets, Silan Kadirgamar was a historian by training (specializing in international relations) and a university teacher; a Christian by conviction and socialist by persuasion; an affable mentor to younger generations - not only his students, but also others, especially those caught up in the uneasy translation between Sri Lankan swabasha and globalized communication; a political intervener always in furtherance of progressive principles but never in pursuit of positions; and in the context of living in a politically divided island for almost all his life, Silan was a tireless and perpetually optimistic bridge builder
http://www.sacw.net/article11428.html

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4. SRI LANKA’S FIRST WOMEN’S TRADE UNION / IMPACT OF FLEXIBILITY ON THE LABOUR REGIME
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    Two articles from The Sunday Times in Sri Lanka. The first one on the registration of Sri Lanka’s First Women’s Trade Union and the second one deals with recent mainstream economic policy making in Sri Lanka has been promoting the idea of labour “flexibility”
http://www.sacw.net/article11427.html

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5. FROM PEARL HARBOR TO HIROSHIMA | ARJUN MAKHIJANI
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Every anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two schools of thought square off. One says, the bombings were not necessary to end the war; the Japanese were close to surrender anyway. The other says remember Pearl Harbor, the Japanese militarists' determination to fight to the end. But many questions remain unasked in this framework. Why was the U.S. Pacific fleet moved to Pearl Harbor in 1940? Why did Japan bomb it? When were Japanese forces first targeted, rather than Germany?
http://www.sacw.net/article11444.html

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6. WHAT A NUCLEAR ATTACK ON INDIAN, OR PAKISTANI, CITIES WILL LOOK LIKE
by Nandagopal Rajan
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article on the 70th anniversary of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945
http://www.sacw.net/article11440.html

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7. INDIAN AND PAKISTANI CITIZENS CONDEMN TERROR ATTACK IN GURDASPUR DEMAND JOINT MECHANISM TO DEAL WITH TERRORISM
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 We the concerned citizens of India and Pakistan unequivocally condemn the dastardly attack by terrorists in Gurdaspur, Punjab on 27th July 2015 and express our heartfelt condolences and solidarity with the families of four police personal and three civilians killed.
http://www.sacw.net/article11415.html

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8. STRANGE CASE OF AN INDIAN NATIONAL IN JAIL ON CHARGES OF BEING A PAKISTANI INTRUDER
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KOLKATA: An Indian national has been languishing at Dum Dum Central Jail despite a release order issued in November 2013. A Bongaon court had convicted him on the ground that he, being a Pakistani national, intruded on India. Pakistan, on the other hand, refused to recognize him as its own citizen.
http://www.sacw.net/article11425.html

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9. STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF TEESTA SETALVAD AND JAVED ANAND - FROM CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS IN SRI LANKA
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We the undersigned express our profound dismay and disquiet at the continued official harassment by the central government of leading Indian human rights defenders Teesta Setalvad and Jawed Anand. Following the election of the BJP led government in Delhi in May 2014, the country has witnessed open strenuous official efforts to foist a large variety of charges of financial irregularity on them, to harass them, to tarnish their reputations, and to secure their arrests.
http://www.sacw.net/article11423.html

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10. INDIA: STATE MUST NOT ORGANIZE RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS
by Ram Puniyani
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After staging the Yoga on 21st June 2015 on Raj Path, Delhi, Modi Sarkar has planned to celebrate Rakhi, Raksha Bandhan at a grand scale in late August. This plan has full approval of its parent organization, the RSS. Now a Hindu religious festival will be given the status of a national festival so blatantly. It surely is indication of the type of deeper agenda of narrow nationalism this Government has in mind?
http://www.sacw.net/article11443.html

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11. EQUALITY, BUT WITH ONE EXCEPTION | AAKAR PATEL
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How will any change in the law that accommodates Bangladeshi Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews as being qualified to migrate under persecution exclude Bangladeshi Muslims?
http://www.sacw.net/article11448.html

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12. NLR INTERVIEW WITH JAN BREMAN (July-August 2015)
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I was born in Amsterdam in 1936. My father was a postman; my mother was a maid until she married. On both sides, their families had been bargees for generations, working the waterways of Holland. My father, born in 1895, was the youngest of fifteen children, though nine of them had died in infancy—infant-mortality levels were high for bargees; hygiene was poor and medical care hard to get.
http://www.sacw.net/article11442.html

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13. DENIS DALTON ON GANDHI IN CALCUTTA DURING PARTITION OF 1947
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From: C. H. Philips and Mary D. Wainwright. (ed.) The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives, 1935–1947. London: Allen and Unwin, 1970
http://www.sacw.net/article11413.html

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14. SHEILA FITZPATRICK REVIEWS LANDSCAPES OF COMMUNISM: A HISTORY THROUGH BUILDINGS BY OWEN HATHERLEY
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Back in the day, everyone knew that Stalinist architecture was hateful. The Poles notoriously loathed the Palace of Culture and Science that was the gift to war-ruined Warsaw from the Soviet elder brother or – as the Poles saw it – master. Foreigners and sophisticated Russians sneered at Moscow's wedding-cake buildings and lamented the old Tverskaya that had undergone a Stalinist remake as Gorky Street.
http://www.sacw.net/article11420.html

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15. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
=========================================
  - India: Darul Uloom Deoband fatwa declares shaving un-Islamic after previous edicts against photography and against dyeing hair black
  - India: JNU students snub ABVP, screen riot film
  - The need for a new agenda (Sitaram Yechury)
  - India should grant citizenship to persecuted refugees but make this religion-neutral (Editorial in The Hindu, 6 Aug 2015)
  - Orijit Sen on 'How to Survive the Stampede of the Patriots?'
  - IFTU team's report on situation in Khajoori Khas in New delhi
  - India: Rumours spark communal tension in Khajuri Khas in New Delhi
  - JNU stops screening of Muzaffarnagar riots documentary claiming no permission was sought
  - India: Thuggery on riot film backfires
  - I quit Gujarat judiciary because govt. wanted me to act against minority: Former judge
  - The idea of India is at stake. These are the most dangerous times since Independence (Nayantara Sahgal)
  - Announcement: Lecture by Romila Thapar on 'Indian Society and the Secular' 2nd Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture (New delhi @ Jamia on 19 August 2015) 
- available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: RESOURCES & FULL TEXT :::
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16. WRITER / BLOGGER NILOY NEEL ASSASSINATED IN BANGLADESH
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Another blogger murdered in Dhaka
Kamrul Hasan

Blogger Niloy Neel, also an activist of Gonojagoron Moncho, has been slaughtered by assailants in his residence at Goran in Dhaka.

Assistant Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police Md Nure Alam told the Dhaka Tribune that police recovered the body of Niloy Chowdhury on Friday afternoon.

"We heard that the victim was a blogger but the identity is not confirmed yet," said the police officer.

Niloy Chowdhury, 40, was known as Niloy Neel on Facebook. On his Facebook account, Niloy wrote several notes opposing irrational religious beliefs and superstitions.  

He was also a member of Bangladesh Bigyan O Juktibadi Sangathan (Science and Rationalists' Association).

The incident took place four months after the murder of Blogger Oyasiqur Rahman Babu, who was hacked to death only a month after secular blogger and former Buet teacher Avijit Roy was killed by extremists.

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17. INDIA: SPECIAL ISSUE ON ON DEATH PENALTY FRONTLINE MAGAZINE
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http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/trials-of-a-deathrow-convict/article7495070.ece
http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/mercy-plea-rejected-and-still-alive/article7499010.ece
http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/in-search-of-alternatives/article7495240.ece
http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/debating-death/article7499018.ece
http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/legal-crusaders/article7499045.ece

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18. CREEPING AUTHORITARIANISM: INDIA IS TURNING INCREASINGLY ILLIBERAL UNDER THE PRESENT GOVERNMENT 
by TK Arun
=========================================
(The Times of India - July 29, 2015)
The evil that men do lives on after them, the good is oft interred with their bones —so said Mark Antony. Of course, this was before the advent of the mass media and professional spin. Now, it is the other way around. The bad is banished from sight and memory. The good dances in front of you in 3D, backed up by surround sound.

Mass media can alter reality. Right now, authoritarianism is on the rise and liberal democracy on the retreat. But this is barely noticeable in the breathless coverage of news and barrage of opinion aimed at the citizen.

Censorship by Coercion

Consider the hounding of Teesta Setalvad. She is accused of financial impropriety and the CBI is chasing her with warrants for search and arrest. The harassment must be an ordeal for this crusader for justice. But by targeting her, the government also targets all those who dare to speak against the government and its leader, Narendra Modi. This is censorship by intimidation.

Teesta Setalvad and her non-government organisations are responsible for 254 people being convicted for the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002. The experience in India of communal riots is that culprits go scot-free. Witnesses are intimidated, the cases drag on and the resolve to persist with prosecution crumbles from sheer exhaustion, lack of resources and perceived futility.

Setalvad’s efforts broke the pattern, in the 2002 riots. Retrials took place outside Gujarat. CBI probes took place under the Supreme Court’s watchful eye. People got convicted.

By making the criminal justice system work the way it is supposed to, Setalvad has done more than most to fortify the integrity of the Indian state and prevent disaffection and resentment from taking routes outside the legal-democratic framework. She deserves laurels and our respect, not the gross intimidation she is being subjected to.

Consider the dilution of security provided to the judge, now retired, who convicted Maya Kodnani, a minister in Modi’s government in Gujarat, for the riots, even as the judge continues to receive threats.

Consider the ongoing move to shut down the Sun group’s television and radio operations, in the name of national security. What threat these pose to national security is so arbitrarily decided by the ministry of home that the ministry of information and broadcasting is baffled, as is the Attorney General. Yet, as the word spreads that the prime minister’s office is in favour of shutting Sun down, the rest of the government falls meekly in line. The courts are the only recourse for Sun.

Consider the crackdown on volunteer organisations and foreign funding agencies. The might of the state will be used to silence any dissent.

Consider the turn of events in the terror cases where the accused are Hindu extremists. In case after case, witnesses turn hostile, the prosecution loses interest and the cases begin to crumble. When the champion of Hindutva sits in the prime minister’s chair, can Hindus be allowed to be prosecuted for terror?

Hindutva Imperatives

Consider the 24% increase in the number of incidents of communal violence in the country in the first five months of the current year, as compared to the first five months of 2014.

The number of incidents rose from 232 to 287, according to home ministry figures. The provocative statements by members of the Sangh Parivar, some also members of the ruling party and the council of ministers, fit in with the project of creating a Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu state in which other religious identities are less than equal and democracy has to be curtailed, to allow such discrimination to prevail.

Consider Vyapam. There is little that is shocking about the corrupt practice of suborning a selection examination by illegal means. But what is truly shocking is the unnatural propensity for those who could testify in the scam investigation to fall dead. A conservative estimate puts 14 out of the 45 Vyapam-related deaths to be truly suspicious. What kind of a state system allows such systematic killing of witnesses, if not an authoritarian one.

Consider the Asaram Bapu witness killings. A godman is accused of raping several prepubescent girls, his equally charming son goes around intimidating witnesses and those who refuse to be chastened into submission get killed. Congress leader Salman Khurshid degraded himself and his party by accepting the godman’s brief. But the ruling dispensation’s subliminal support for the godman, simply because he is a holy man in the Hindu scheme of things, does far greater damage to the democratic framework in which all are equal before the law.

Consider the foisting of Hindutva ideologues on academic and other institutions. Consider the eagerness at several levels of the judiciary to curry favour with the powers that be. Consider the Indian trait remarked by L K Advani, the readiness to crawl when asked to bend.

Consider ending the pretence that we do not see authoritarianism creeping upon us.

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19. HAVE THE COMRADES LOST IT OR ARE THEY JUST COMPETING WITH THE PURITANICAL RIGHT WING - CPI DEMANDS TOTAL PROHIBITION OF LIQUOR IN INDIA
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CPI demands total prohibition of liquor in India
By PTI | 2 Aug, 2015, 04.19PM IST
COIMBATORE: A day after extending support to the August 4 bandh call in Tamil Nadu by some political parties on the issue of prohibition, CPI today demanded a nation-wide ban on liquor and said the Centre should immediately bring in an ordinance in this regard.

"Union Minister Pon Radhakrishnan, hailing from Tamil Nadu and other senior BJP leaders from the state should prevail upon Prime Minister Narendra Modi to impose a total ban on liquor in India," CPI leader D Pandian told reporters here.

By an ordinance the Centre can implement prohibition and the NDA government should take steps towards this, he said.

Yesterday, DMK and PMK had demanded a judicial probe into the death of a Gandhian activist Sasi Perumal during a protest against a state-run liquor outlet, while other parties, including Vaiko-led MDMK, had called for a bandh on August 4, demanding closure of liquor shops, as sought by him.

Perumal (59), who had been campaigning for total prohibition in Tamil Nadu for many years, had climbed a mobile phone tower in Kanyakumari district on Friday, demanding closure of a liquor outlet near an educational institute.

He had collapsed during the more than five-hour long stir and died while on the way to hospital.

MDMK, Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi and Manithaneya Makkal Katchi gave a call for a bandh on August 4, which received support from BJP, CPI-M and CPI.

On the land acquisition bill, Pandian said CPI would organise demonstrations as already announced in five zonal centres -- Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, Thanjavur and Tirunelveli on Aug 13, opposing it.

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/48317383.cms

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20. SECULARISM, FEDERALISM AND RHEUMATISM
by Ass
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(Nepali Times, 31 July - 6 Aug 2015 #769)

Despite the fact that Nepal was never under the colonial yolk and is frequently visited by natural calamities, it is heartening to note that our Great Leaders are constantly thinking about our welfare and trying to find ways to address our urgent day-to-day concerns about God Almighty.

Going by the number of column inches that have been devoted to the Omniscient Being in the past month, the number of tyres that have been burnt to terrorise people in 12 districts so they stop work and demand that Nepal be holier-than-thou, or the amount of saffron that has been imported from a certain large neighbouring country to the south which begins with the letter ‘I’, it is clear that we are the most god-fearing people on Earth. After all, Nepal’s human population is now approaching the total number of gods and goddesses in the Pantheon (33 million at last count) and given the rate at which we are procreating, is expected to overtake the population of Heaven in another 7.5 years.

Since God is now such an important player in Nepali politics, Nepali Times approached the Celestial Creator for an exclusive interview in order that He shed light on some of the relevant issues of the day like secularism, federalism and rheumatism. God was forthright and forthcoming, answering questions directly without beating around the burning bush.

Excerpts:

NT: Mr God, sir, how many of you are there actually? Some say you are one, while others believe you are member of a divine jumbo cabinet. 

God: Well, there is just me, my Dad and the Holy Ghost at the moment. Sometimes, when I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me.  But colleagues come and go in my office, so the number is not constant.

It must be very stressful administering paradise. Is this why you have let Nepal go down the tubes ever since it became secular? 

Yes, and no. It is true that on any given day, I have to use my directly-elected executive powers to straighten things out not just in your universe, but in parallel universes as well. I am aware that things are drifting a bit in Nepal, and I have sent instructions to my emissary there, Shri Pashupati Nath, to do whatever he deems fit in the new constitution to make Nepal holy again. Just because @brb_laldhwoj doesn’t believe I exist doesn’t mean I don’t. Oh, that’s a great line, let me tweet that. 

Is it true that those who support secularism will not go to Heaven when they die?  

Totally off the record, yes. But I can’t say that in public because, as God, I am supposed to love atheists as much as I love revanchists. But we have a full list of CA members who voted for secularism, and we will be barring them from the Pearly Gates when they breathe their last, or when they kick the bucket, whichever comes first. However, we will give them time to repent in a half-way house in purgatory until they see the divine light and admit that they have been misled by the damn commies, in which case we will give them a work permit to clean toilets at Heaven’s Door. If they continue to renounce Me, they will burn in Hellfire for eternity.  

Throughout the ages mankind has asked that if God is as compassionate as He makes himself out to be, how come He allows so much suffering in the temporal realm?

OMG, I was wondering when you’d ask me that because, even as Yahweh, I have no idea. ROFL.

And on a slightly personal note, are you a man or a woman, or both?

That is an insensitive sexist question. You’re a Badmass.


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21. WHAT COULD MULLAH MOHAMMAD OMAR’S DEATH MEAN FOR THE TALIBAN TALKS?
by Barnett Rubin
=========================================
(The New Yorker 29 July 2015)
The Afghan government and army may see Pakistan-brokered talks with the Taliban further confused by the death of Omar.	Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY JAWAD JALALI / EPA

Since he fled Kandahar on the back of a motorcycle, in December, 2001, Mullah Mohammad Omar, whom the Taliban he led called “Amir al-Mu’minin,” Commander of the Faithful, never appeared in public. If he was trying to elude pursuers, he succeeded: no one took up the U.S. on its offer of ten million dollars, under the Rewards for Justice Program, for information leading to his location or capture. He communicated publicly with his followers and the world only through statements issued twice a year, on the festivals of Eid al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, at the end of the Hajj. Whether or not Mullah Omar wrote or approved these statements himself, they constituted the most authoritative statements of Taliban policy. The most recent statement, a few days before this year’s Eid al-Fitr, which fell on July 17th, attracted even more than the usual attention, as it endorsed negotiations to end the conflict in Afghanistan. Such talks had seemed to start at a meeting in Murree, Pakistan, between delegations of the Afghan government and the Taliban, on July 7th. But then, on July 29th, news filtered out from multiple sources that Mullah Omar had died more than two years earlier. So who was negotiating with the Afghan government and under what authority?

The U.S. held intermittent meetings with the Taliban Political Commission from November, 2010, to January, 2012. Mullah Omar had reportedly authorized this political commission to carry out both international and domestic outreach when it was founded, in 2008. The Taliban suspended the talks in March, 2012, after U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales killed sixteen people in their beds, including nine children, in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province, home to many in the Taliban leadership. An attempt to open an office for the political commission in Doha, Qatar, on June 18, 2013, and restart negotiations failed. When the Taliban displayed symbols of their deposed government at the inauguration, the United States asked Qatar to close it. The commission remained in Doha, however, working unofficially.

Along with the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP), Jim Dobbins, I met with Mohammed Umer Daudzai, then the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, on June 25, 2013. (I had been senior adviser to the SRAP since the late Richard Holbrooke, the first to hold the office, brought me on board, in 2009.) With the Qatar office closed, Daudzai offered some ideas on how to continue the search for a political settlement. A man with a trim beard and a mischievous sense of humor, he recounted his efforts to persuade the Pakistani military to arrange a meeting between the Afghan government and Taliban leaders in Pakistan.  The Pakistanis, he said, claimed they did not control the Taliban. Daudzai prodded them, saying that was too simple—There are some Taliban you don’t control at all and who hate you. There are some you can influence, even if they don’t trust you. And there are some Taliban you do control. At least, Daudzai asked, organize a meeting between the Afghan government and some Taliban you control. That seems to be what Pakistan did on July 7, 2015.

Ashraf Ghani was inaugurated as the second president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on September 29, 2014, after a disputed election that was resolved only when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry brokered a power-sharing agreement between Ghani and his competitor, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Ghani, who had left Kabul to study at the American University of Beirut and then Columbia University, where he earned a doctorate in anthropology, was a co-author of the book “Fixing Failed States,” which drew on his experience working at the World Bank and as a special adviser to the United Nations.

Ghani approached the challenge of peacemaking in Afghanistan as, first, an issue between states. “The problem, fundamentally, is not about peace with Taliban,” Ghani told an audience in Washington, D.C., in March, 2015. “The problem is fundamentally about peace between Pakistan and Afghanistan.” He immediately set about shaping the environment for negotiations with Pakistan.

Ghani’s first two official visits were to the two countries with the most influence in Pakistan, having provided financial and technical assistance to the country’s nuclear-weapons program. Less than a month after his inauguration, he went to Saudi Arabia, which had been waging an internal war against Al Qaeda for ten years and sought to weaken it further by encouraging the Taliban to renounce its alliance. A few days later, he touched down in China, where the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region had been the site of terrorist attacks connected to a separatist movement, some of whose fighters received training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. China had subsequently come to regard the stability of Afghanistan as crucial to its internal security, as well as its economic future. The first wave of Chinese growth was based on labor-intensive exports from the Pacific coastal region, but as it slowed the leadership sought to invest in the central and western regions of the country, including Xinjiang. These landlocked areas could not develop without direct access to energy and raw materials, through routes that instability in Afghanistan or Pakistan could disrupt. At the end of the summit between Ghani and Xi Jinping, in October, 2014, China pledged to support an “Afghan-led, Afghan-owned” peace and reconciliation process.

Two weeks later, Ghani visited Pakistan, where he told Chief of Army Staff Raheel Sharif that it was time to end “thirteen years of undeclared hostilities.” He offered to address all the concerns the Pakistan military had about Afghanistan. Ghani would withdraw a request his predecessor had made for heavy weapons from India, and he proposed unprecedented transparency and cooperation between the two states’ military and intelligence agencies. He ordered the Afghan Army into battle against elements of the Pakistani Taliban that had taken refuge in Afghanistan, and he agreed to a long-standing Pakistani request for Afghanistan to send officer cadets to be trained at the Pakistan Military Academy, in Abbottabad. He also proposed establishing jointly operated border checkpoints, to promote the regulated movement of people and goods.

These concessions went far beyond what Afghanistan’s public, with its visceral distrust of and anger at the Pakistani military, was prepared for. As Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Karzai has said, “People in Afghanistan believe that whoever launches attacks on the security forces, kills tribal elders, and burns schools has roots in Pakistan and they view this as an undeclared war.” Ghani needed equal concessions from Pakistan, including military and intelligence operations to blunt the Taliban’s planned spring offensive and put pressure on the group to negotiate directly with the Afghan government.

But the Taliban leadership avoided and delayed answering Pakistan’s request to enter into direct talks with the Afghan government. Its consistent position had been that it would enter into talks with “other Afghans,” including the government, only after completing confidence-building measures with the United States, including the official opening of the political office and the removal of the Taliban from lists like Rewards for Justice. Instead of complying with Pakistan, on April 24th of this year the Taliban announced its largest spring offensive ever, with no apparent opposition from Pakistan. Former President Hamid Karzai called Ghani’s proposed memorandum of understanding on intelligence cooperation with Pakistan “an atrocious betrayal of the people of Afghanistan.” Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, and Army Chief General Raheel Sharif rushed to Kabul on May 12th in an attempt to halt the rapid deterioration of relations.

Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.) hastily did what Ambassador Umer Daudzai of Afghanistan had proposed back in 2013: it flew three former Taliban leaders under its control to Urumqi, China, the capital of Xinjiang. The three—Mullah Abdul Jalil, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Rahmani, and Mullah Abdul Razaq—had formerly served as deputy minister of foreign affairs, governor of Kandahar, and minister of the interior, respectively, but they had no connections to the Taliban Political Commission and no current influence in the Taliban hierarchy. On May 19th and 20th, with observers from the I.S.I. and China’s Ministry of State Security present, they met a delegation from Kabul. The Taliban were quick to disavow the meeting, posting an official statement on their Web site rejecting “rumors” that a “delegation of Islamic Emirate met with representatives of Kabul administration’s fake peace council in Urumqi city of China.”

Even as the I.S.I. put increasing pressure on the Taliban leadership in Pakistan to meet with the Afghan government, the Taliban’s official Pakistan-based spokesman reasserted, on June 24th, that the political office in Doha “is responsible for handling all the internal and external political activities related to the Islamic Emirate.” But the Taliban’s deputy leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, eventually felt the weight of Pakistan’s pressure and authorized senior Taliban leaders to meet with an official Afghan delegation, on July 7th, at the Golf Club, in the resort town of Murree, outside of Islamabad. The Afghan delegation was led by Haji Din Muhammad, a senior member of the High Peace Council. The Taliban present were Mullah Abbas Akhund, who headed the delegation, Abdul Latif Mansur, and Ibrahim Haqqani. Abbas and Latif Mansur were reputed to have belonged to the Taliban’s liaison committee with the I.S.I., while Haqqani represented a part of the Taliban that Admiral Michael Mullen, the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had called “a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency” in Congressional testimony on September 22, 2011. No member of the Taliban political office attended. The meeting was chaired by a Pakistani diplomat, with observers from the top ranks of the I.S.I. and mid-level observers from the U.S. and China.

According to the Afghan and Pakistani governments, the two sides agreed on the need for confidence-building measures, and scheduled another meeting for after Ramadan. China, the U.S., and the U.N. described the meeting as a breakthrough, the first direct meeting between “authorized” delegations of the Afghan government and the Taliban. The Taliban spokesman based in Pakistan did not comment. Instead, the day after the meeting, the Taliban announced that the Political Commission had been granted “full capacity and agency powers” over negotiations. The commission then issued a tweet stating that it alone was authorized for talks, and had not met with representatives of the “Kabul administration.” In an interview with the pro-Taliban Pashto-language Web site Nun.Asia (Asia Today), the commission’s spokesperson, Naim Wardak, said that the Taliban delegates had participated in the talks as “hostages” of Pakistan. On July 9th, an article was published on the Taliban Web site, only to disappear four hours later. “When the dust settles,” it said, “the much hailed talks between Taliban officials and Ghani-administration officials in Islamabad will be revealed as nothing more than Pakistan delivering a few individuals from the Islamic Emirate to speak in their personal capacity.” The Political Office, too, wanted negotiations, but on the Taliban’s terms, and without the involvement of Pakistan.

For the first time the Taliban, founded to end factionalism, were speaking with multiple voices, some manipulated by Pakistan more obviously than ever. Since only the hidden Mullah Omar could settle which was the true voice of the Taliban, the question of his authority became pressing. Some Taliban leaders, notably Akhtar Muhammad Mansur’s rival Zakir, whom he dismissed as military chief in April, 2014, had for years contested Mansur’s claim to lead in the name of Mullah Omar. On July 1st, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which had long recognized Mullah Omar as its amir, issued a public statement asserting that Mullah Omar was dead and shifting its allegiance to the Islamic State. On July 23rd a Taliban splinter group, Fidai Mahaz, posted on Facebook that Mullah Omar had been killed by Akhtar Muhammad Mansur and Taliban finance chief Gul Agha Ishaqzai in 2013. Several Afghan researchers and journalists reported that “a majority of Quetta Shura members have demanded that Mansour should take their representatives to meet Mullah Omar,” to quell doubts about whether he is alive and in command; on July 29th, multiple reports from Afghanistan and Pakistan claimed that he died in a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2013. The Quetta Shura reportedly was meeting to choose a successor, but it is questionable whether any successor, especially one chosen in Pakistan while the leadership is under such pressure from the I.S.I, would be accepted as legitimate.

Amid these controversies, Afghanistan and Pakistan appear to have tussled about the venue of the next meeting. A spokesperson for the Afghan High Peace Council announced that the next round of talks will take place on July 30th or 31st, probably in China, but ultimately Pakistan announced that it will be in Pakistan, on Friday, July 31st. Holding the talks outside Pakistan would make it much more likely that members of the Political Commission would attend, making the Taliban delegation more credible. That might be needed to deliver Ghani’s main objective, some kind of reduction in violence, such as a ceasefire. A ceasefire, even of limited duration, would enable Ghani to show Afghanistan’s war-weary but skeptical population that they will benefit from his concessions. The credibility of the delegation would make less difference if, as many Afghans think, the I.S.I., and not the Taliban leadership, controls Taliban military operations. In that case, Pakistan could deliver a cease-fire itself with the face-saving appearance of an agreement.

The death of Mullah Omar may allow Pakistan to put leaders it controls more fully in charge of the Taliban. It may also cause the Taliban to splinter. Some may stop fighting and enter the system, while others may join even more extremist groups, such as the Islamic State, and fight the governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. If the two governments cannot gain the willing participation of most of the Taliban in the peace process, Kabul may demand that Islamabad use force to shut down whatever part of the Taliban’s military machine it does not control directly. But the Pakistani Army, which is already overstretched by its posture toward India, and by battles against the Pakistani Taliban, Baloch nationalists, and armed gangs in Karachi, will be reluctant to take on a battle-hardened Afghan group, some of whose members it hopes to use as future agents of influence.

These issues may at least temporarily draw the attention of high-level U.S. decision-makers back to Afghanistan, where they will find that they now need to coöperate closely with China. Till now, Washington has seemed stuck in 2009, entirely obsessed with troop numbers and timetables. U.S. mid-level officials have assisted and supported these talks, but at the highest levels the Administration still seems to view a settlement in Afghanistan as an exit strategy from an area where our interest is declining in step with our troop numbers. If the death of Mullah Omar draws high-level attention back to Afghanistan, Washington might realize that it is impossible to execute a “pivot to Asia” without continuing engagement in Afghanistan.

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22. WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT PORNOGRAPHY
By Lawrence Liang
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(The Wire, 4 August 2015)

Of all the literary forms that exists, the most neglected one remains the ‘list’. Even as we all suffer compulsively from listmania (manifested in practical to-do lists or deserted island discographies), we often remain indifferent to its creative and fantastical possibilities. But where citizens neglect, the state overcompensates and one of the defining characteristics of modern bureaucracy is its obsession with what Umberto Eco names the ‘infinity of lists’. And if there were a list of great lists then surely the circular issued by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) would be the latest entry.

Even the most die hard free speech advocate would find it difficult not to be impressed and perhaps even a little charmed by the list of 857 websites compiled by DeitY. A commentator on Twitter observed that his bookmarks paled in comparison with the DeitY list (an appropriate time perhaps to elevate the Deity into the God of porn things), and their naiveté would indeed have been charming were it not so misplaced.

The order issued under Section 79 (3)(b) of the Information Technology Act on the grounds of ‘morality’ and ‘decency’ directs all Internet Service Proviers (ISPs) to disable access to the websites. It is pertinent to note that it is not a blocking order per se. The power to issue orders blocking websites vests in Sec. 69A of the IT Act which reads as follows:

    69A Power to issue directions for blocking for public access of any information through any computer resource. –

    (1) Where the Central Government or any of its officer [sic] specially authorised by it in this behalf is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient so to do, in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above, it may subject to the provisions of sub-section (2) for reasons to be recorded in writing, by order, direct any agency of the Government or intermediary to block for access by the public or cause to be blocked for access by the public any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in any computer resource.

It is clear that the grounds for blocking a website do not include decency or morality. Section 79 on the other hand is a safe harbour provision which exempts intermediaries from liability under certain condition. Sec. 79(3) removes this exemption from liability if the ISP fails to expeditiously remove or disable access to any information that has been notified by the government as illegal. But given that ISPs have generally been known to over comply with government directives the order could be treated as a blocking order for all practical purposes.

The order comes in the light of a PIL filed by Kamlesh Vaswani currently being heard by the Supreme Court. The petition seeks amongst other things a declaration that watching pornography is itself illegal. In July, the Chief Justice refused to pass any interim order on the grounds that it would be a violation of the right to privacy of citizens. There have also been previous decisions that have held that the mere consumption of pornography is not illegal though its circulation is, under the Indian Penal Code and other laws.

Explicit vs Offensive

The order has understandably been received with outrage, especially amongst people concerned about freedom of speech and expression and over regulation of the Internet by arbitrary executive orders, and it is likely that this order will be the subject of much legal and political scrutiny. But for the moment I am interested in asking the question of how we understand the purported object of regulation – Pornography.

The specialists at the Ministry – after trawling through thousands of sites and arriving at their final list – are presumably the best people to help us understand what exactly we talk about when we talk about pornography. But therein lies the problem because I suspect that the definition of pornography that they are working with would identify sexually explicit content as the criteria for defining pornography. Shohini Ghosh distinguishes between sexually explicit material and sexually offensive material, arguing that not all sexually explicit material is offensive even as you may have sexually offensive material (such as the K series on TV) which does not involve any sexually explicit depiction. This dilemma of identifying pornography is an old one and has even lent itself to a test known as the “I know it when I see it” ( a reference to a statement made by Justice Potter Stewart in the Jacobellis case claiming that he can’t define pornography but he knows it when he sees it).

But as we have established, there is no legal problem with merely seeing, it is only producing and circulating such content that is a problem. The world of pornography has historically been a large one encompassing all kinds of content and appealing to all kinds of people and tastes, and the Internet has only heightened this definitional dilemma of what constitutes pornography. The debate over pornography is by now a well established one with various nuanced positions developed over the years ranging from  anti porn feminists like Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (who argue that there is no difference between pornography and rape – pornography is the theory and rape the action) to ‘sex positive’ feminists like Ellen Willams who have defended pornography. The question of censorship of pornography has also been a divisive one and a number of feminists who critique pornography nonetheless reject censorship as the means, claiming that the problem of patriarchy, sexism and misogyny require a more complex answer than censorship.

Conceptual clarity

It is undeniable that the prevalence of cheap technologies of video recording, the availability of spy cameras and the Internet have significantly contributed to the redefinition of pornography. If pornography largely referred to sexually explicit content that was produced commercially, the rise of amateur pornography is one of the defining features of online pornography. Even within the world of amateur pornography there is a considerable diversity ranging from revenge porn, non consensual recordings and in rare cases recordings of private sexual activities uploaded consensually. The Vaswani petition alludes to the rise of revenge and amateur pornography in India as a specific problem and much as free speech advocates disagree with what the petition asks for, it would be irresponsible not to acknowledge the seriousness of some forms of pornography.

But this is also why we need conceptual clarity about the problem that we are trying to address. For the anti porn brigade, the issue of pornography in India has always been a problem of obscenity, decency or morality, while for free speech advocates, pornography is a question of freedom of speech and expression.

Pornography, however, has never exclusively been either about morality or free speech. Abigail Levin for instance argues that the basis for regulation of pornography ought not to rest upon problematic conceptions of public morals or individual corruption, but upon constitutional fundamentals such as equality and dignity. Following Ronald Dworkin’s refinement of the core principles of liberalism, Levin suggests that the interests of freedom of speech and expression have to be weighed against the interests of equality. Thus any content that can either demonstrate a harm (non consensual, exploitative conditions even if consensual) can rightfully be regulated. This is a position that is reflected in the universally accepted stance against child pornography.

Target the degrading, dehumanizing

In India the IT Act addresses child pornography (explicit or obscene) via a specific provision and includes not just the circulation of, but also the watching of child pornography. This is not a provision that has ever been objected to by any free speech advocate because it is founded on perfectly reasonable grounds. Thus if legislature or executive were to pass an order that regulates pornography that is non consensual or because it violates equality or dignity, it would be understandable. The order of DeitY however randomly lists 857 websites (some of which may indeed be problematic while many may just be sexually explicit material) and outlaws them on the grounds of decency and morality. The moral paternalism implicit in its order is what makes it a naïve and simplistic response to a genuine problem.

It may serve Indian law makers well to move away from their US-UK obsession and turn to Canadian jurisprudence to guide them on how to talk about pornography when they talk about porn.

In its 1992 judgment in R v. Butler, the Canadian Supreme Court grounded their understanding of pornography in principles of equality and dignity, arguing that “degrading or dehumanizing materials place women (and sometimes men) in positions of subordination, servile submission or humiliation.  They run against the principles of equality and dignity of all human beings.”  The test was not based on whether members of a community were morally shocked or their sense of decency offended by sexually explicit content but whether the content or its production itself violated equality.

Once we move from moral paternalism, we will find that there is indeed a lot to talk about when we talk about pornography, its just that the conversation is not what the DeitY thinks it is.

Lawrence Liang is an advocate and the co-founder of the Bangalore Alternative Law Forum

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23. LEADING HISTORIAN OF AFRICA, STEPHEN ELLIS, DIES
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Mail & Guardian Online
30 July 2015 14:52 Staff Reporter

Historian Stephen Ellis has died of leukaemia at his home in Amsterdam, aged 62.

Obituary: Stephen Ellis (1953-2015)

Stephen Ellis, the British historian who wrote extensively about Africa and particularly about South Africa, died of leukaemia at his home in Amsterdam on July 29, aged 62. He was the Desmond Tutu Professor of Social Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam when he died.

Ellis’s most recent book, External Mission: The ANC in Exile 1960-1990, was published by by Jonathan Ball in South Africa in November 2012, reigniting the debate about Nelson Mandela’s membership of the South African Communist Party (SACP).

Ellis grew up in Nottingham in the United Kingdom and studied at Oxford University. He worked as a lecturer at the University of Madagascar in the late 1970s and early 1980s, publishing his account of an uprising there as Rising of the Red Shawls (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

He headed the African sub-region of the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London and was the Africa specialist of the International Crisis Group. As editor of the subscription journal Africa Confidential in the late 1980s, he reported the first account of the Umhonto weSizwe (MK) mutiny in Angola in 1984, based on inside information. He was subsequently editor of the British journal, African Affairs.

Ellis’s 1992 work, Comrades Against Apartheid: The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile, was the first book to report on the MK mutiny in Angola in 1984, its Quatro prison camp and the dreaded ANC security department, Mbokodo. The accuracy of Ellis’s work was confirmed by the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998.

Africa Now, developed out of Ellis’s involvement with the Global Coalition for Africa, and was published in 1996. He first worked at Leiden University’s African Studies Centre (ASC) in the early 1990s and continued to hold a position there until his death.

“Stephen Ellis is the ASC’s most prominent scholar, and one of the key researchers in African studies in the world,” wrote the ASC’s Tom Dietz. “The library of the ASC has 82 of his publications … He wrote most extensively about South Africa, Madagascar, Liberia and Nigeria, but also about Togo, Zambia, and Sierra Leone. Stephen Ellis’ personal page at Google Scholar shows that 4 700 colleagues cited his many publications so far. His most popular book is The Criminalization of the State in Africa, which he wrote together with Jean-François Bayart and Béatrice Hibou and which was published in 1999.”

Ellis conducted research in the Stasi archives in Berlin in the former German Democratic Republic together with his wife, the Dutch scholar, Gerrie ter Haar and two South African scholars, Loammi Wolf and Paul Trewhela, which brought to light new facts about the ANC’s years in exile. With Ter Harr, Ellis wrote Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa (in 2004). He had nearly completed a book about Nigerian organised crime at the time of his death.  

Fellow historian Paul Trewhela writes: Stephen Ellis was the first scholar to publish unshakeable evidence that Nelson Mandela had been a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the period between the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960 and Mandela’s arrest near Howick in KwaZulu-Natal in August 1962.

After half a century of denial by the ANC, the SACP and their supporters in South Africa and internationally, Ellis proved that Nelson Mandela had been as a member of the Central Committee of the SACP as well as of the national executive Committee of the ANC at the time he took part in the secret formation of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) in 1960-61.

Ellis and Russian historian Irina Filatova were the only scholars to do the necessary work in archives in South Africa and around the world, as well as in interviews with surviving witnesses, to established this as fact.

Ellis first published the evidence he uncovered in July 2011 in an academic paper, The Genesis of the ANC’s Armed Struggle in South Africa, 1948-1961, in the Journal of Southern African Studies (37:4). The day after Mandela died on December 5 2013, the SACP issued a statement acknowledging that he had been a member of the central committee of the party.

Hugh Macmillan, a research associate at the African Studies Institute at Oxford University, challenged Ellis on the matter. The debate between the two historians was published in January this year in the journal Africa, a quarterly journal issued by Cambridge University Press. Ellis’s final word will be a forthcoming paper in Cold War History, in which he reports further evidence acquired by Filatova from her research in Moscow earlier this year.

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24. CHINA CRASHING, WORKERS RISING
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(Jacobin Magazine)
ANATOMY OF A COLLAPSE

The Chinese state’s intervention after the stock market crash was immensely political — as was the collapse itself.
by Kevin Lin

7.30.15

Kevin Lin is a PhD student in Australia researching labor politics in China.

The sheer enormity of the destruction was staggering. In less than a month, from mid-June to early July, the Shanghai Composite Index plunged by 30%, wiping out more than $3 trillion in share value from its June 12 peak. The wealth liquidated in the crash was equivalent to approximately 30% of China’s GDP ($10 trillion in 2014), 20% of the United States’s GDP ($17 trillion), and about ten times the size of Greece’s current total debt ($350 billion).

The collapse sent shockwaves around the world, not surprising given that China accounts for more than one-third of global growth. China’s spectacular stock market crash is a testimony to the increasing volatility and the underlying contradictions of the Chinese economy. More importantly, rather than simply being a financial crash, it is also immensely political.

No one can claim they didn’t see it coming — the only uncertainty was the exact timing of the crash. Since last year, there’s been a 150% rally fueled by margin trading (the practice of using borrowed money to buy stocks). The overvaluation of shares was widely recognized, with some analysts estimating by more than 20 percent. The mainstream financial press had been describing it as a bubble for months. Even the Chinese government, which had encouraged people to invest, issued warnings back in April, and tried to tighten trading rules to dampen the exuberance.

The crash finally came this month, producing widespread panic and pushing the Chinese government to implement a range of stopgaps.

It halted all new stock listings, restricted short-selling (the practice of betting against price falls), and ordered some of the largest state-owned enterprises — and even the state pension funds – not to sell shares. Instead, the Chinese state quickly made plans to buy more shares, while the country’s top twenty-one securities brokerages collectively pledged to purchase shares worth at least $19 billion. The Chinese government also directed the central bank to lend money to brokerages and investors to buy shares totaling $365 billion.

It was this highly political intervention into the stock market — popularly dubbed jiushi, or “rescuing the market” — that came as a surprise to many, both within China and abroad. And what made it even more political was the thought of what the spectacle of tens of millions of individual investors — ordinary people investing their incomes, loans, and savings — suddenly losing their money might do to the legitimacy of the Communist Party.
The Chinese Economy and Its Discontents

Stock market crashes are a relatively new phenomena in China — during Mao’s reign (1949–1976), stock exchanges were regarded as a capitalist institution and thus abolished. They weren’t reintroduced until 1991, well into the post-Mao reform period.

In these early years, however, buying shares was considered too risky; instead, investors and ordinary people preferred to purchase government-issued bonds or put their money in state-owned banks for safe returns. Incomes for the majority of the population were also quite low, so few people could afford to invest in the stock market. While volatility and risk certainly existed, stock market crashes were not a part of the economy.

This started to change in the 2000s as China’s economic growth, facilitated by financial liberalization and the commercialization of the banking system, channeled money into the stock market and fueled a huge bubble. Between October 2005 and October 2007, the Shanghai Composite Index grew from a little over 1,000 points to almost 6,000 points — only to plummet to less than 2,000 points with the onset of the global economic recession.

The effects on Chinese industry were even worse. In the first six months of 2008, with the export sector shrinking due to declining demand in the North American and European markets, 67,000 factories closed across China. In the final quarter of 2008, an additional 50,000 factories were shut down. An estimated 20–30 million rural migrant workers temporarily lost their jobs in the process, and labor protests spiked. Many returned to their rural hometowns.

Intent on instantly propping up the country’s falling growth rate, the Chinese government rolled out a $586 billion stimulus package that focused on infrastructure instead of social services and welfare. It largely worked. The stimulus, and government intervention more broadly, was credited with successfully staving off a deeper recession. With mass unemployment and social unrest still a threat, it has committed to keeping its foot on the pedal and boosting the annual rate of economic growth above 8%.

Despite the government’s concerted intervention, China’s GDP growth rate has continued to decline: a mind-boggling 14% in 2007, it dipped to less than 10% for a few years, and then dropped to 7.4% last year — quite good by international standards, but low for China. This year, GDP growth is likely to be 7% or less, causing concerns about a further slide.

The government has made a virtue out of the slowdown, describing the Chinese economy as entering a period of “New Normal” in which growth is purportedly more balanced and sustainable. But there are lingering economic contradictions that are related to the recent stock market crash.

The housing market, built on the back of rapid urbanization, invited speculation that inflated housing prices. The rapid uptick prompted the government to depress housing prices in an attempt to prevent the bubble from bursting and triggering a wider crisis. This deflationary tactic rendered investment in housing and manufacturing industries less profitable, sending investors looking for high returns (often on borrowed money) to the stock market.

At the same time, the post-crisis stimulus package was being financed mainly through bank lending rather than direct state grants, and was made possible by loose monetary policy. The stimulus ended up exacerbating the existing local government debt problem, which the Chinese government was still working to address via a debt-for-bond swap program shortly before the stock market crash.

Finally, while fixed investment has contributed significantly to China’s growth, consumption levels remain low as a percentage of GDP. A sharper increase in domestic spending is necessary for the transition from an investment and export-led economy to a consumption-driven one, but this is a political issue more than an economic one. Low levels of consumption reflect the increasing share of incomes going to capital instead of labor in the post-Mao era, where workers have lost employment security and labor rights, and face enormous difficulty organizing independently and engaging in collective bargaining.

The expansionary monetary and fiscal policies the government has implemented since the financial crisis have largely failed to resolve these problems, and the recent crash has only made the situation worse.
The Shape of the Stock Market

Financial liberalization and government encouragement have made it extremely easy and appealing for individuals to trade in the stock market. Since mid-2014, more than 40 million new accounts have been set up, and a significant majority are individual investors.

Share trading, unsurprisingly, is concentrated in China’s major cities and the wealthy east coast. But many also trade in second- and third-tier cities and towns, and the spectrum of who trades has broadened considerably.

One group that has entered the market in large numbers over the past year is younger people, primarily those in their twenties and thirties. These are mostly professionals workers making middle-level incomes, and migrant workers making lower- to middle-level incomes. This demographic’s slow wage growth has encouraged it to put money in the stock market in the face of China’s high urban living costs, exacerbated by the recent housing bubble.

Then there are slightly older people, the mom-and-pop investors in their fifties and sixties who have invested part of their retirement savings in the hopes of then contributing to their children’s housing down payment.

Faced with low interest rates that dissuade them from putting their money in the banks, increasing social inequality, and few other ways to earn higher incomes, more and more people are willing to gamble their savings on the stock market, believing the government will not let the market crash. So while much of the Chinese media has focused on the fact that a plurality of the individual investors has only a high-school diploma — cynically implying that investors’ lack of education caused the bubble — it’s China’s new middle class that is heavily involved in the stock market, acting rationally in an irrational system.

On its own, the stock market crash doesn’t pose a real threat to the survival of the Chinese Communist Party, but popular discontent is growing, with large protests that include an increasingly assertive working class.

Politically, many people in China hold contradictory opinions about the role of the government. They believe, for instance, that the state meddles in and manipulates the stock market to the detriment of the investors. But when the stock market collapses, they hope the government comes to the rescue. Thus, both the failure of the state to control the stock market and what some deem excessive intervention damage its credibility and undermine its legitimacy.

This is a politically sensitive period in China; since its accession in 2013, the new leadership has sought to consolidate its power and regain legitimacy. It has launched an expansive anti-corruption campaign, disciplining more than 100,000 cadres across bureaucracies and levels of government, and simultaneously tightened censorship and cracked down on civil society activism. During the stock market crash, the authorities detained and questioned more than 100 lawyers and NGO workers.

Since the 1990s, China’s middle class has reluctantly offered support to the regime in exchange for a rising standard of living at the expense of liberty and democracy. How the government responds to the crash in the coming months may test this loyalty.

While the threat to the Chinese economy is real, there is a risk of overstating the impact of the crash. Even at its lowest point the shares level in the Shanghai Composite Index merely returned to that of March, still 80% higher than a year ago.

Moreover, the stock market plays a fairly minor role in the Chinese economy relative to other developed economies. The amount available for trading is only about a third of Chinese GDP compared to more than 100% for developed economies.

The number of participants is also comparatively low. The recent China Household Finance Survey found that only 9% of households actively traded shares and another 4% of households owned mutual funds. And less than 15% of household financial assets are invested in the stock market. This is still a large number given the size of the Chinese population, but it remains a small percentage for now.

In response to government intervention to restore confidence, two days after the market hit a low of 3,500 points, the Shanghai Composite Index surged by 10.6%, the biggest two-day gain since 2008. Fears were eased as the Shanghai Composite Index returned to 4,000 points.

However, despite the rebound, the ability of the state to continually inject money and confidence into the stock market is uncertain, and its decision to reflate the economic bubble may very well increase the size of the problem.

On Monday, the Shanghai Composite Index suffered an 8% plunge, raising fears of a repeat of the downward spiral of early this month. And if another, bigger crash occurs, it may have a significantly greater ripple effect on China’s real economy.
A Left Response

The crash rekindled the age-old debate about the role of the state in markets, and the government response is being seen as a setback for free-market advocates both inside and outside of China. We will likely hear strong calls for greater financial liberalization and a larger role for the market in the Chinese economy. Indeed, there are already criticisms of government intervention and reports of global capital’s displeasure.

The Communist Party is not opposed to more marketization. It has made clear its receptivity to more market-oriented reforms, including financial liberalization, and its willingness to encourage more market competition, private businesses, and individual consumption. However, it has not been able to implement significant reforms due to opposition within the government and state-owned industry. The current anti-corruption campaign is seen as clearing the way for the reforms.

The Left has to resist such deepening marketization, which will only lead to more economic instability and widening inequality. However, our knee-jerk response should also not be to defend Chinese state intervention in the economy as such. The Chinese government is responsible for creating a financial environment where individual investors are lured into gambling their incomes and savings, and its recent actions will likely inflate the bubble further.

Instead, we need to demand more regulation of the financial sector, as well as more equitable distribution of incomes so people won’t depend on risky investment strategies to compensate for low wages and high living costs.

Because of the highly restricted political space in which they operate, China’s social movements — including the restive labor movement, the environmental movement, and the feminist and anti-discrimination movements — often fly under the radar. But they remain China’s only hope for a more socially just and environmentally sustainable society. When the next crash comes, the ability to chart alternative responses rests on their organizational capacity.

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CHINA’S NEW LABOR INSURGENCY

Worker militancy has shown cracks in both China’s economic plan and the Communist Party’s official trade unions.
by Eli Friedman

    The following is an excerpt from Eli Friedman’s Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China, available now.

For years, a strong alliance between capital and the lowest levels of the Chinese state meant that strikes were dealt with either through police repression or through an ad hoc system of mediation by union and government officials that was focused almost exclusively on resuming production, regardless of the outcome for workers.

But by 2010, the Chinese central government and Guangdong provincial authorities not only were ready to seek a new model of accumulation in the Pearl River Delta but were willing to (indirectly) ally with insurgent workers to realize this goal.

Just such an alliance, conditional and ephemeral as it may have been, emerged in the course of the Nanhai Honda strike, which in turn allowed the strikers to win economic concessions and begin to develop political goals. In large part because of this small political opening, the character of protest in the 2010 strike wave displayed some unusual (if not unprecedented) tendencies — most significantly that demands were offensive rather than defensive in nature.

However, even though Honda employees won important economic gains, all levels of the state and union remain vigilant about the development of autonomous bases of worker power. Although economic gains were made in the 2010 strike wave, worker disillusionment with state-affiliated enterprise unions persists.
The Honda Conflagration

Honda’s production chain in China consists of a somewhat convoluted system of ownership. The most significant company is Guangzhou Honda, a 50–50 joint venture with the state-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group Corporation, where a majority of units are produced. Additional assembly plants include Honda Automobile (China), which produces for foreign markets, and the joint venture Dongfeng Honda located in Wuhan.

These plants are served by a variety of parts manufacturers, including the wholly Japanese-owned Nanhai Honda. Starting production in March of 2007 with an initial investment of USD $98 million, the company was Honda’s fourth integrated automatic transmission production plant in the world. Aside from producing transmissions, the plant also makes drive shafts and connecting rods for engines.

In part because Honda believed that work stoppages were highly unlikely in authoritarian China, the Nanhai plant was established as the sole supplier of several key parts for the entire China operation. By sourcing from within China rather than from Japan or Southeast Asia, Honda could reduce costs by saving on transportation and labor.

In part because of the key position that auto manufacturing plays in the economy, the government put a high premium on maintaining good labor relations in this sector. As a result, all the Honda assembly and parts manufacturing plants in Guangdong established unions. The union at Guangzhou Honda had been awarded several official accolades for its good work and frequently hosted visiting delegations of foreign trade unionists.

But there were strict limits on how much even this model union would do for its workers. During a lunch meeting in December 2008 between the chair of Guangzhou Honda and visiting union leaders from the United States, talk turned to international cooperation between auto unions. The union chair said that he had visited Japan previously to hold exchanges with other auto union representatives and that he felt they had much in common.

Alluding to the difficulties American auto manufactures were facing at the time, he joked that he had told his Japanese counterpart, “We have a strong union, like you. But we don’t want to be too strong; just look at all the problems
they have in the United States!”

In fact, it turned out that the very weakness of the union at the Nanhai supplier plant would make it impossible for workers to have their demands heard without going on strike; not just the Nanhai plant but Honda’s entire China operations would be shut down as a result.

Although workers at Nanhai had long been unhappy with the wages and had discussed going on strike, hardly any of the workers knew that Tan Guocheng was going to initiate the strike when he did. One week before the strike, Tan met with fifteen people from the assembly department were he worked; previously they had only “had random talks on the shuttle bus to work.”

One worker from this department said that the idea had been discussed but that nobody wanted to lead it. In separate interviews, workers from other departments confirmed that they had heard nothing of the strike until it had begun. But according to Tan, more than twenty people, most of them from Hunan, had been in on the plan by the time it was put into action.

On the morning of May 17, just as production began at the usual time of 7:50, Tan hit the emergency stop button, and both production lines in the assembly department were shut down. Tan and co-organizer Xiao shouted out at each assembly line, “Our wages are so low, let’s stop working!”

For most of the plant’s nearly 2,000 workers, this was to be the first they heard of the strike. Even one worker who was from the assembly department and had heard discussion about the possibility of the strike was caught unaware: “I didn’t know the strike was going to happen.. . .I wasn’t there at the time [because I went to the bathroom]. When I was finished in the bathroom I came out and there weren’t any people. I stood there looking, ‘huh, how come they aren’t at work?’ ”

As workers from the assembly department fanned out throughout the facility, they shouted to their coworkers to stop work and join them in fighting for higher wages. They initially received a somewhat cool reception in the other departments and eventually began a sit-in in front of the factory with only about fifty workers.

But given the critical position of the assembly department in the production process, the other departments were forced to shut down in a matter of hours. By that afternoon, management had set up suggestion boxes and pleaded with the workers to resume production, promising them that they would consider their demand for higher wages and provide a full response in four days. Perhaps because of their relatively small numbers, the strikers took management at their word, and production resumed that very day.

On May 20, management, government officials, union officials, and worker representatives engaged in negotiations. The workers’ demand at this point was simply to raise all wages by RMB 800. In the meantime, the strikers returned to work, though production was greatly reduced during these few days.

The next day, negotiations broke down, and the strike continued. Over the weekend, organizers continued their outreach, and the number of strikers in front of the factory grew to over 300. Then, on May 22, management announced that Tan and Xiao, the two original strike leaders, were having their contracts terminated.

But this attempt at repression completely backfired, as the following day the strike only grew in strength. Now concerned for their livelihoods, workers covered their faces with surgical masks but continued to hold the line.

Throughout this process, the enterprise union alternated between passivity and hostility. Workers complained that during the bargaining session, the union representative did not say anything at all but merely observed the proceedings. When the strike initially began, a team of investigators from the district labor department and trade union were dispatched to the factory.

Leaving no doubt which side of the struggle they were on, the officials announced, “According to relevant regulations, we did not find that the factory is in violation of any laws.”

One worker who was selected as a representative was quite disappointed with the behavior of the enterprise union chair, Wu Youhe, in the first round of negotiations:

    [The enterprise union chair] invited a lawyer [to the first round of negotiations]. The lawyer said that our strike was illegal. He [the union chair] didn’t have any views of his own and couldn’t make any decisions. He always asked the general manager what to do. At bottom he is a chairman and isn’t controlled by the company; he has this power. But for him, everything had to go through the general manager, and he would help the general manager refute the things we said.

On May 24, worker representatives were convinced to come back to the table in a negotiation session chaired by the enterprise union head. Still trying to serve as an intermediary, the union chair attempted to persuade the workers to accept management’s offer of a RMB 55 increase in food subsidies — a far cry from the RMB 800 they were demanding.

This ineffectiveness was not lost on the workers, with one striker commenting, “The union said it stood for our interests. They said we employees could give them any demands and they would pass them on to management, and they would resolve things for us. But they didn’t do this in the slightest.”

The strikers refused management’s offer on May 24, and the situation escalated. On May 25, things became much more tense when all of Honda’s assembly plants in China were completely shut down because of lack of parts.

Originally counting on a well-disciplined workforce, Honda had only one supplier for transmissions in the country, and all four assembly plants in China were therefore highly dependent on Nanhai. The combined daily losses of the five plants were estimated to be RMB 240 million.

Management further yielded by producing a second offer for wage increases on May 26. This proposal called for increasing regular workers’ salaries by RMB 200 a month, along with 155 in living expense subsidies, and a wage increase of 477 for interns who had been at the plant for more than three months. But workers rejected this offer as well, and the strike continued.

At this point, workers formalized their demands. In addition to the primary demand of increasing wages for all employees by RMB 800, they also demanded that the fired workers be rehired, that there be no retribution against strikers, and that the enterprise union be “reorganized” (chongzheng). According to some strikers, the demand for union reorganization emerged after they saw that the union had failed to actively represent them in the previous negotiation sessions.

With the losses mounting, management became desperate and did its best to try to break the resolve and unity of the strikers. The most direct attack was on May 28, when managers attempted to force workers to sign a pledge saying that they would “not lead, organize, or participate in slowdowns, work stoppages, or strikes anymore.”

But this tactic completely backfired as almost nobody agreed to sign it, with one worker saying, “as soon as I saw it [the agreement] I threw it away. We won’t sign.” One group of female workers said that “nobody moved a hand.” When asked if they were afraid of refusing management’s demand, one worker insisted, “Nobody was afraid! Who would be afraid? If they want to fire us, then they’ll have to fire all of us!”

The strike was entering a decisive stage. Likely already the longest strike ever waged by migrant workers in the reform era, the situation had become a political crisis for the local state. Despite the mounting economic and political costs, the events of May 31 took everyone by surprise.
The Union as Strikebreaker

When workers arrived at the factory on that morning, they were informed that each department would be holding meetings to further discuss strike resolution. As the workers were waiting in various rooms of the main administration building, a large contingent of vans and buses pulled up in front.

The vehicles were filled with dozens of men, all of whom were wearing yellow hats and badges reading, “Shishan Township Federation of Trade Unions,” which is the union organization immediately superordinate to the enterprise union branch.

Shortly thereafter, the assembly department, crucial to reviving production, met with the general manager of the plant and made a new offer for a wage increase. Although still dissatisfied with management’s new offer, the workers were persuaded to return to their assembly lines. Indications began to emerge that the strikers’ unity was crumbling as some departments began to start up their assembly lines. People from the union dispersed to each of the departments and encouraged workers to immediately resume production.

When some workers from the assembly department moved to return to the area in front of the factory where they had been demonstrating over the previous nearly two weeks, a confrontation with the union group emerged. As confirmed from multiple independent sources, the union people began filming the workers and demanded that they return to the factory and end the strike.

A tense situation quickly escalated and soon devolved into a physical confrontation during which several workers were struck by people from the union. This infuriated the workers, and a strike that had appeared to be losing steam was quickly reinvigorated.

Workers from other departments who had resumed production rushed to the scene as soon as they received news of the violence, and a large crowd quickly gathered. Another physical confrontation occurred, and this time the union side was even more violent than before, with several workers suffering light wounds. The aggressors quickly retreated to their vehicles and refused to come out.

At this point, the government decided things had gone too far, and it took steps to settle the conflict. Riot police were deployed, though they never engaged the workers. The authorities additionally cordoned off the road into the factory, and nobody was allowed entrance. Whichever government agencies had supported the peaceful strike were not interested in more violent confrontations or the possibility that the strikers might leave the production grounds.

It is certain that most of the strikebreakers were not actually union officers. The first thing mentioned by many workers was that it seemed preposterous that the township-level federation, with only a few paid members on staff, could recruit so many officers from other union branches. One worker involved in the scuffle said that some of the strikebreakers (all of whom were male) had earrings and tattoos, items that union officials would be very unlikely to sport.

But if most of the thugs were not actually union officers, it is nevertheless undeniable that the district union federation had a hand in organizing the strikebreakers, a point made obvious in a letter it wrote to workers. A foreman from the assembly department was blunt in his assessment: “Of course it was the union’s idea. Who else would have such a stupid idea? Only Chinese unions would think of this.” It is, however, unclear to what extent the union federation was acting at the behest of management or whether it was taking independent action.

When workers received an open letter from the Shishan Township and Nanhai District Federations of Trade Unions the following day, the local union leaders provided a tepid apology and did not denounce the violence that had occurred the previous day, nor did they attempt to deny that they had organized the strikebreakers:

    Yesterday the trade union participated in mediation talks between the workers and management of Honda. Because a portion of Honda employees have refused to return to work, factory production has been severely curtailed. In the process of discussions with forty or so employees, at one point there occurred some misunderstandings and verbal imprudence from both sides.

    Due to the impulsive emotional state of some of the employees, a physical conflict ensued between some employees and representatives from the union. This incident has left a negative impression on employees. A portion of these employees, after receiving word of the incident, seem to have misinterpreted the actions of the union as siding with management. Yesterday’s incident came entirely as a shock to us. If people feel that some of the methods used in yesterday’s incident were a bit difficult to accept, we apologize.

    The behavior of the above mentioned group of forty or so workers has already damaged the interests of the majority of employees. In addition, such behavior harms factory production. The fact that the union has stood up and admonished these workers is entirely in the interests of the majority of employees. This is the responsibility of the union!

    It would be unwise for workers to behave in ways that go against the interests of themselves and others because of impulsive emotions. Some employees are worried that representatives who are willing to stand up and enter into talks with management would later receive the reprisals of management. This is a misunderstanding.

The letter went on to admonish workers for refusing to accept the offer that management had made. In a final attempt at damage control, it closed by saying, “Please trust the union. Trust each level of Party officials and government. We will definitely uphold justice.”

Unsurprisingly, the letter from the Shishan and Nanhai union federations was unsatisfactory to the strikers. As one worker activist put it, “Their apology letter wasn’t an apology letter at all, so we were pretty enraged.”

An open letter from worker representatives that appeared two days after the union’s apology letter was defiant: “The union should protect the collective rights and interests of workers and lead the workers in the strike. But up until now, they have been looking for excuses for the union people’s violence against striking workers, and we seriously condemn this.”

Additionally, the letter went on to express “extreme rage” at the union’s claim that it was the union’s hard work that had caused management to increase its offer of wage increases, arguing rather that these were “won by the blood and sweat of striking workers facing extreme pressure.” Relations between the strikers and the township-level union could not have been worse, and they certainly heightened the tension of the unfolding drama.
Resolution

Whereas the tactics of the township-level union failed to break the deadlock, higher levels of the union and Party were much more sympathetic to the strikers. I heard from GZFTU leadership that Guangdong Party secretary Wang Yang supported the strike and the workers’ wage demands and even that there was support in the central government.

The Central Propaganda Department did not issue a reporting ban until May 29, nearly two weeks into the confrontation, at which point the strike wave had spread to other factories. But this was an indication that the central government was willing to allow more pressure to build on management, as it is rare for coverage of strikes to go on for so long. The GDFTU deputy chair, Kong Xianghong, took an active role in the negotiations and supported the wage demands. Particularly after the confrontation between the Shishan union and the workers, the provincial-level authorities were eager to resolve the conflict quickly.

In order to find an orderly resolution, the various government agencies that had become involved in the strike demanded that the workers select representatives. Although a hastily arranged set of negotiators had been selected for the first round of talks, strikers had become reluctant to produce representatives, particularly after the two people who initiated the strike were fired.

This unwillingness to negotiate was unacceptable to the state, and it brought in the Guangzhou Automotive CEO and National People’s Congress delegate Zeng Qinghong to speak with the workers. Through gentle and paternalistic persuasion, late on June 1, Zeng convinced the strikers to select representatives and to begin a conditional resumption of production.

In their open letter, the worker representatives had said that if management did not meet their demands within three days, the strike would be resumed. Furthermore, the letter had stated that “bargaining representatives will not accept anything less than the above-listed demands without the authorization of a general meeting of employees.” Finally, negotiations began on the third.

On June 4, the worker representatives were joined by Chang Kai, a well-known labor scholar from Beijing, who served as their legal counsel. Negotiations went late into the night, and eventually an agreement was struck.

Regular workers were to receive wage increases of approximately RMB 500, bringing their monthly wages above RMB 2,000. The underpaid interns who worked alongside regular workers saw their wages increase by more than 70 percent, to more than RMB 600. Such large wage increases in response to strikes were unprecedented in China and may leave an important mark on the struggles yet to come.


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25. THE JAWAHARLAL NEHRU TODAY’S INDIA DOES NOT KNOW
by Aakar Patel
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(Quartz india,July 24, 2015)

Going through his selected works one afternoon (an exercise that is inevitably rewarding and one that I recommend strongly to readers), I came across this note that Nehru wrote to the then union minister for information and broadcasting, B.V. Keskar, along with an enclosed letter: “I have been rather worried at the progressive disappearance of Western music from India. Bombay is practically the only centre left, where this is encouraged. I think Indian music will profit by contacts with Western music. I know nothing about the person who has written this letter. But, as there appear to be few Indians who have studied Western music, I feel a little interested in him.”

The content of that letter is unknown, but its writer was Adi J. Desai, a Parsi. Nehru’s worry was justified, though he was optimistic in assuming that Western classical music would survive the exit of the British. Fifty years later, it is dead everywhere in India except South Bombay. And here it is dying as one community depopulates. But the interesting thing is the level at which Nehru engages with the subject. It is obvious that he hasn’t merely “forwarded” it to “the concerned person” as happens in our time, but actually thought about it.

The other interesting thing is that the letter is from May 1957, a decade after Nehru had been leading India and at a time when a lot must have been occupying both his mind and his schedule. But to him this was important.

Unlike most urban Indians, Nehru was a naturalist.

He took great joy in putting together a garden in his official residence. He could identify trees and flowers, according to those who knew him, and he kept a whole zoo of animals inside the house including pandas. It is these various interests of his that produced the man who could gift us institutions whose quality required more than just funding. They required real vision and Nehru more than any other leader we have had, possessed this in abundance.

This came to him not through his academic studies, as I have already referred to earlier. Crocker says he was instinctively brilliant. He once took a biologist, who had won the Nobel Prize, to Nehru. At their meeting, Crocker says, the scientist “made a careless remark about some work. Nehru pounced on it, politely, and demolished it. This was typical. Few errors in reasoning escaped him.’”  He kept a whole zoo of animals inside the house including pandas. 

Being a man of such intelligence and sensitivity, Nehru did not necessarily love the behaviour of the Indians whom he met. Where he could not influence or change such behaviour he would shame people into following him. For instance, once at a parade in Delhi, some Congressmen were objecting loudly to being seated on the grass instead of on chairs. Nehru did not respond to them but got off his chair and himself sat on the grass, silencing them all immediately. Similarly, at a reception where MPs began littering the ground with banana peels and wrappers, Nehru himself began cleaning the ground, getting them to behave likewise.

One of the most revealing paragraphs about Nehru is this one which opens Crocker’s book: “I first saw Nehru in 1945. At the time I was serving in the British army, and the end of the war happened to find me in India for a while before demobilization. Nehru had not been long out of prison and was making a triumphal tour in Bengal. Crowds gathered to see him at the railway station in my area; huge and enthusiastic crowds. I noticed at the station where I was waiting for him that his evident satisfaction at the crowd’s welcome did not prevent him from impatiently pushing—some of my brother officers said slapping—people who got too near him.”

It is perfectly true that Nehru was irritable, but he was also bombastic and verbose, making too many speeches (often three a day) and spending too much time lecturing the West.

He was careless with his time, once giving three hours to a high school delegation from Australia, while his ministers waited outside.

These were of course teenagers but it would surprise many people that the Chacha Nehru who loved little children was apparently a myth and Nehru did not really have time for or enjoyed the company of children. To quote Crocker, “Nehru certainly did some acting on public occasions and before TV cameras… The acting was never worse than the pose of Chacha Nehru with the children. This was at its worst on his birthday for a few years when sycophants organized groups of children, with flowers and copious photographing, to parade with him. It was out of character; his interest in children was slender.” In my opinion this clichéd typecasting of him has taken away from many people real knowledge of his angularities and interesting facets. Nehru did not really have time for or enjoyed the company of children. 

Crocker thought Nehru “had no sympathy for Gandhi’s religion, or for religiousness at all.” But there is a photograph in Mushirul Hasan’s The Nehrus that shows Jawaharlal entering the Ganga wearing a janoi, the Brahmin’s sacred thread. The thread looks new, however, and it’s not visible in two other photographs of him bare-chested, one in swimming trunks and the other doing shirshasan, the headstand practised by followers of yoga.

I think Nehru engaged with the culture but did not succumb to it. He was an Indian and proud of being one, as his magnificent work The Discovery of India (another text that is not but should be made compulsory reading in our schools) shows. But he did not feel the need, as do many leaders including our current one, to find security in the symbolism (tikas, turbans and so on) of religion.

Some other aspects of Nehru are revealed through anecdotes. He did not dismiss those who came to him with petitions and while they waited for their turn to meet him they were not chased away. He had great tolerance and patience for the poor and he allowed a slum to slowly come up right in front of the prime minister’s house, sympathizing with its occupants rather than turning the police on them. Such things reveal the man, and we can safely rule out any of our leaders doing this. The sanitized localities they live in and sanitized corridors they travel in are far removed from Nehru’s acceptance of the facts and his decision not to turn his eye away from the reality of India.

Nehru had great physical courage.

We know this from the famous story of an incident during the riots of Partition in Delhi. Nehru was already prime minister when he was passing by a mob that was attacking a Muslim tailor at Chandni Chowk. He ordered the car to stop and jumped in to save the man, swinging a lathi that he took from the police. He had no care for his personal safety and of course this was in the time when prime ministers did not have the sort of security that they do today. But he thought of nothing other than the victim and the mob, terrified at the enraged leader in their midst, fled.

Nehru was dyed secular through and through. It was not something that he put on. It is said that he rejected advice to remove the Muslim cooks in his kitchen because he refused to see all individuals through the lens of their faith. Every generation is fortunate to have such a man leading them and Gandhi knew what he was doing when he trained and gifted Nehru to us.

Excerpted with permission from Nehru’s India: Essays on the Maker of a Nation, edited by Nayantara Sahgal, Speaking Tiger Books. This passage is excerpted from The Many Faces of Jawaharlal, by Aakar Patel. 


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