SACW - 6 Jan 2016 | Sri Lanka: End Death Penalty / Afghan Beheadings / India-Pakistan: Go for Talks after Pathankot Attack / Bangladesh: Price of Secularism / India: Javed Anand Interview / End of BRICS? / Dilma’s fall / Chinese Crackdown / Sidney Mintz Obituary / British Nuclear Experience

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 6 January 2016 - No. 2879 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Letter to The President by The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka Recommends Abolition of Death Penalty
2. Joshua Hammer: The Price of Secularism in Bangladesh
3. Bangladeshi lawyer takes aim at sexual violence by religious edict
4. India - Pakistan Must Expedite Peace Talks and Jointly Take on Terror: Select Editorials & Commentary
5. Aatish Taseer: The Return of History
6. Combatting Communalism in India: Interview with Javed Anand by Jairus Banaji and Geeta Seshu
7. India: Democracy Undermined in Arunachal Pradesh | Garga Chatterjee
8. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - Bangladesh: Time for comprehensive plan against religious extremism (Edit, New Age)
 - India: Delhi University nod to seminar on Ram Janmabhoomi; students, faculty oppose
 - Bangladesh: Editorial in The Hindu on the Islamist challenge
 - India - Kerala: RYF march against communalism (5 Jan 2015)
 - India: Now, RSS plans to launch a Christian outfit
 - India: In Mangalore, the Bajrang Dal's success in creating a sense of insecurity fuels its strongman's security company

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

9. Beheadings send a chill through Afghanistan (Pamela Constable)
10. Pakistan: The judge who denied justice to the landless (Dr Pervez Tahir)
11. Pakistan: Interview with Kamil Khan Mumtaz
12. Multiculturalism in Bangladesh: where our political and intellectual debates end (Fardin Hasin)
13. "The BRICS - A Fable for Our Time" (Immanuel Wallerstein)
14.  Dilma’s fall: The wrecking of an inspiring left-wing experiment (Alfredo Saad Filho)
15. China: Justice at last (Neha Sahay)
16. China’s Latest Crackdown on Workers Is Unprecedented (Michelle Chen)
17. Sidney Mintz, Father of Food Anthropology, Dies at 93 (Sam Roberts)
18. Andrew Futter and Anthony Hopkins. Review of Baylis, John; Stoddart, Kristan, The British Nuclear Experience: The Roles of Beliefs, Culture and Identity. 

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1. LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT BY THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF SRI LANKA RECOMMENDS ABOLITION OF DEATH PENALTY
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The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) has urged President Maithripala Sirisena to abolish the death penalty in Sri Lanka. 
http://www.sacw.net/article12234.html

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2. JOSHUA HAMMER: THE PRICE OF SECULARISM IN BANGLADESH
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In support of gender equality, human rights and civil liberties, a group of bloggers is doing battle with Islamists online — and paying dearly for it.
http://www.sacw.net/article12219.html

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3. BANGLADESHI LAWYER TAKES AIM AT SEXUAL VIOLENCE BY RELIGIOUS EDICT | Lipika Pelham
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In Bangladesh, women whose actions fall foul of religious conventions have long been subject to punishment by fatwa. Sara Hossain hopes her trailblazing work can tip the balance back in favour of the secular legal system
http://www.sacw.net/article12226.html

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4. INDIA - PAKISTAN MUST EXPEDITE PEACE TALKS AND JOINTLY TAKE ON TERROR: SELECT EDITORIALS & COMMENTARY
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Jointly defeat by terror outfits derailing any dialogue process and initiative taken by both the countries.
http://sacw.net/article12231.html

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5. AATISH TASEER: THE RETURN OF HISTORY
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An Islamic philosopher in Karachi, an ideologue who provides violent ideas to some of Pakistan’s fiercest extremist groups, once told me that there are two kinds of history: dead and living. “Dead history is something on a shelf or in a museum,” he said. “Living history is part of your consciousness, something in your blood that inspires you.”
http://sacw.net/article12228.html

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6. COMBATTING COMMUNALISM IN INDIA: INTERVIEW WITH JAVED ANAND by Jairus Banaji and Geeta Seshu
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An interview in Jacobin Magazine with one of India’s staunchest opponents of religious nationalism and co-founder of Communalism Combat
http://sacw.net/article12227.html

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7. INDIA: DEMOCRACY UNDERMINED IN ARUNACHAL PRADESH | Garga Chatterjee
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The Indian government has a long history of manipulating state politics
http://sacw.net/article12232.html

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8. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - Bangladesh: Time for comprehensive plan against religious extremism (Edit, New Age)
 - India: Delhi University nod to seminar on Ram Janmabhoomi; students, faculty oppose
 - Bangladesh: Editorial in The Hindu on the Islamist challenge
 - India - Kerala: RYF march against communalism (5 Jan 2015)
 - India: Now, RSS plans to launch a Christian outfit
 - India: In Mangalore, the Bajrang Dal's success in creating a sense of insecurity fuels its strongman's security company
 - Video: Communist leader A B Bardhan's Speech, from Anand Patwardhan's 'Ram Ke Naam' (1992)
 - India: VHP To Unveil Ram Temple Blueprint for Ayodhya at a 2 day seminar "Shri Ram Janma Bhoomi Temple: Emerging Scenario" 9-10 Jan 2016, North Campus, Delhi University
 - Communal Riots in Gujarat: Examining State Power and Production of Marginality in the Attempt to Constitute the Past (Pooja Bakshi)
 - Hedgehogs and foxes: Why the BJP won't change (Mukul Kesavan)
 - Pakistan: Fracas at Council of Islamic Ideology
 - India: Haryana's BJP govt packs Gau Aayog with right wing men
 - India: The Sangh silences the Songs of Christmas (Ajaya Kumara Singh)
 - Jihadists Deepen Collaboration in North Africa (Carlotta Gall)
 - India: Spike in communal tension touches Karnataka’s cosmopolitan Bangalore
 - TV Report: Bajrang Dal member arrested for threatening to sexually assault activist
 - India - Kerala: Clash in Kozhikode Between Activists and Hanuman Sena Over Kiss Street Programme
 - India: 'Fundamentalism and Our Lives' a discussion organised by Nazariya and Anhad (6 Jan 2015, New Delhi)
 - Glimpses from the Safdar Memorial on 1st January 2016 in New Delhi
 - India: upcoming lecture -> What is Fascism in Today's Political Context by Prof   - Nirmalangshu Mukherjee (January 9, 2015, New Delhi)
 - Book Announcement: Science in Saffron - Skeptical Essays on History of Science (Meera Nanda)
 - Peacekeepers: A DM and SP prevent bloodshed in the wake of the Ramjanmabhoomi yatra, 1989 | Sabrang
 - Let’s revisit the ‘Idea of India’ (Purushottam Agrawal) 

-> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/

::: FULL TEXT :::

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9. BEHEADINGS SEND A CHILL THROUGH AFGHANISTAN
by Pamela Constable
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(The Washington Post - December 29, 2015)

Afghan militiamen in the Achin district of Nangahar province, east of Kabul, on Dec. 27, 2015. (Mohammad Anwar Danishyar/AP)

KABUL — At a ceremony inaugurating the new “Afghan Pentagon” here Monday, President Ashraf Ghani stressed the importance of building a modern military, subservient to the nation’s constitution and laws rather than to powerful individuals. He portrayed the gleaming new facility, built with U.S. funds, as the central command for that mission.

But 150 miles east, in the embattled district of Achin, news was spreading of an atrocity committed by a private pro-government militia over the weekend. After Islamic State forces captured and beheaded four of its members, Afghan officials reported, the militia retaliated by decapitating four Islamic State prisoners, later placing their heads on piles of stones along a main road.

The incident echoed the worst abuses of Afghanistan’s civil war two decades ago and raised fears that tribal strongmen, goaded by barbaric opponents, could undercut the Ghani government’s efforts to wage a professional fight against Taliban and Islamic State insurgents.

On Monday, Zahir Qadir, a tribal leader and deputy speaker of the Afghan senate, denied that the militiamen involved report to him. He has previously boasted that he has armed 200 men to fight “on the front lines” of the battle with Taliban and Islamic State forces in the province where the beheadings took place.

The retaliatory slayings and grisly display, first reported by Achin’s district governor and aired on Afghan media, aroused public horror and swift condemnation by human rights groups and others. There was shock that Afghan fighters had vengefully copied the tactics of their extremist adversaries and remonstration that the government had not done more to control private armed groups acting on its behalf.

“This behavior is unlawful and against humanity. We are not ISIS to do these things,” said Ahmed Ali, head of the provincial council in Nangahar province, which includes Achin. ISIS is another name for the Islamic State. “If militias are going to fight, they should be organized by the government and fight under its flag,” Ali said. “If they go out on their own, things like this can happen.”

Ban on private militias

Ghani has ordered an investigation into the abuses and dispatched a delegation of officials to confer with local leaders. After taking office last year, he formally banned private militias, but critics and supporters said he faces a variety of obstacles in trying to carry out that policy, including political opposition by powerful former militia leaders and a need for extra police and foot soldiers as the insurgent conflict spreads.

“We strongly disagree with these atrocities, and the policy is clear — no one may create, finance or activate militias on their own,” said Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the senior spokesman for the Defense Ministry. “But Afghanistan has seen 35 years of war, and it makes things a bit complicated. It is up to the central government. If they let us, we will not have much difficulty stopping them.”

Like other ethnic clans, Qadir’s raised militias to fight in successive wars against the Soviets, rival Afghan strongmen and finally Taliban rulers. Qadir, once a supporter of Ghani, is now waging an open vendetta against him and has accused the president’s senior aides of supporting the Islamic State. On Monday, he announced that he had ordered his men to fire on any unidentified helicopters that land in Achin, where Afghan army forces have previously mounted operations.

No abuses comparable to Saturday’s beheadings have been committed by government forces in the year since NATO combat troops withdrew, leaving Afghans to fend off the persistent Taliban insurgency and the newer, more menacing threat of the Islamic State, which regularly uses beheadings as a terror tactic. In several cases, the tactic has been copied by the Taliban. The bulk of government fighting has been done by the national army, trained and equipped by the United States and other Western allies.

But the specter of civil-war-era atrocities, in which Afghan militia factions and commanders from all ethnic groups were implicated, is still fresh in the nation’s memory. The abuses, documented in reports by Afghan and international human rights groups, included rape and sexual mutilation, nailing victims’ heads, driving tanks over live bodies and suffocation in cargo containers.

Despite public demand, no official efforts were made to bring the responsible warlords to justice — they wielded enormous power, helped U.S. forces fight the Taliban and were veterans of the Cold War-era struggle against Soviet forces. Today, many of these former militia bosses hold high positions in government or public life, especially in the national legislature, and many still command the loyalty of sizable numbers of armed men.

“For various reasons, including international pressure, no one was held accountable or brought to justice, even at a time when it was possible, with 130,000 foreign troops here,” said Nader Nadery, a former official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which conducted a detailed study of civil-war abuses. “Now the circumstances have changed, and it would be much harder to do.”

New security challenges

The Ghani administration took office last year with a reformist agenda that included forging a professional and cohesive security establishment. By the time NATO forces pulled out, Afghanistan had about 180,000 soldiers and 150,000 national police officers, as well as a small air force, but they have been stretched thin in the face of an aggressive and mobile enemy and have suffered from desertions, ethnic splits and poor coordination.

As a result, the government began to rely on, or at least tolerate, an assortment of revived or reconfigured local militias. Thousands of gunmen were mustered and briefly trained as special local police forces, but some acquired reputations for manhandling and extorting civilians. Others were paid by former commanders as personal guards but also became involved in fighting insurgents, including during the Taliban takeover of the northern city of Kunduz in October.

“Many of these commanders and militias have long-standing patterns of abuse, and reviving them now creates a real risk of more atrocities happening,” said Ahmad Shuja, associate researcher in Afghanistan for the New York-based group Human Rights Watch. “Ghani says he opposes them, but his actions have belied that. What happened in Achin is a potential war crime that must be investigated and prosecuted.”

But Ghani’s government faces a paralyzing quandary in trying to defang the country’s former militia bosses. Both he and his main opponent in the 2014 election, Abdullah Abdullah, courted various commanders. After the two men agreed to form a temporary “national unity” government, they brought in a few such strongmen, notably Abdurrashid Dostum as vice president. Others, left out of the spoils, have turned parliament into a bastion of opposition to virtually every policy Ghani proposes.

In recent months, some of the most powerful former warlords, rebuffed after proposing to join the anti-insurgent fight on their own terms, have formed a political alliance against Ghani’s government. The move has not involved violence, but experts say it could easily become an added source of danger for the country’s weak civilian rule.

“The beheadings in Achin could have dire consequences and create new hostility between the tribes, but what these militias did in the past is far worse. They killed, robbed and extorted. They buried people alive,” said Atiqullah Amarkhel, a retired army general and military analyst. “President Ghani says he is against them, but in practical terms he can’t do anything to stop them.”

Pamela Constable covers immigration issues and immigrant communities. A former foreign correspondent for the Post based in Kabul and New Delhi, she also reports periodically from Afghanistan and other trouble spots overseas.

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10. PAKISTAN: THE JUDGE WHO DENIED JUSTICE TO THE LANDLESS
by Dr Pervez Tahir
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(The Express Tribune, December 31, 2015)

The writer is a senior political economist based in Islamabad

On June 28, 2013, this scribe had written a column titled “A matter of land”. It opened thus: “Not too long ago, the peasants of this land of the pure were denied land rights by a judgment of the Shariat Court. This denial has prevented the agrarian economy, and the mass of rural citizenry, from rising to their potential. An appeal is due for hearing by the Supreme Court whose exercise of its independence has no parallel in our history.” The column ended with the plea: “The landless rest their case. They have full faith in the court of justice.”

In 1990, the Supreme Court’s Shariat Appellate Bench had declared land reforms ‘un-Islamic’. Since then, all governments and almost all political parties, including the initiator of land reform, not forgetting the practitioners of the dismal science called economics, had glossed over the critical issue of rapidly rising rural inequity. Two decades on, seven parties led by the president of the Awami Workers Party, Mr Abid Hassan Minto, filed a petition to review this verdict in the Supreme Court on December 13, 2011. It did not come up for hearing before February 2013.

During the hearings held on June 6-7, the head of the bench observed that “land beyond use should be considered land owned by the state”. This, according to him, would not be against the tenets of Islam. Hailing as he did from Balochistan, he wondered why thousands of acres in that province were with fake, absentee landlords not interested in cultivation, despite the availability of water. He stressed the need to convince the members of parliament to make laws to limit land ownership. He also sought clarification from the government about the implications of the devolution under the 18th Amendment on the subject of land reform.

It was a large, nine-member bench headed by the all-powerful, much-feared and popular Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, raising hopes that the injustice done to the poorest of the poor will finally come to an end. In October 2013, however, the then chief justice flatly declined to nullify the decision of the Shariat Appellate Bench. Instead, the petitioners were asked to make the non-functional Federal Land Commission and scores of others as party to the case, adding further confusion to the matter. The petitioners were asked to file a fresh plea. And there the case rests, giving legitimacy to private landowners created by the British to buy their loyalties. During the Mughal period, land belonged to the state and was entrusted to the notables to collect revenue. They were not given ownership. The indecision condemned the wretched of the earth to eternal bondage. In the absence of genuine land reform, there can be neither justice nor a truly representative democracy.

Now retired, the same chief justice has announced the formation of a new party, oddly named the Pakistan Justice Democratic Critic Party. The late Justice Sabihuddin Ahmed, a friend from Government College days, once showed me some judgments written by Justice Chaudhry. They were full of contradictory usage of words and terminology. Only he can be the Critic of ‘Justice Democratic’ without a comma or a hyphen. The elaborate 20-point programme of the new party includes, of all the things, a promise to implement land reform! Shall one say: Wo aye hain pasheman lash per ab/Tujhe ae zindagi laoon kahan se or Ki meray qatl ke baad us ne java se toba/hai is zoode pasheman ka pasheman hona.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 1st, 2016.

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11. PAKISTAN: INTERVIEW WITH KAMIL KHAN MUMTAZ
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(The News on Sunday - November 8, 2015)

“The common man is sold to the dream of material paradise”

Farah Zia 

Renowned architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz takes a critical look at the mass transit projects, the alternative solutions, the colossal scandal in the walled city and the fate of Lahore Bachao Tehreek
“The common man is sold to the dream of material paradise”

The News on Sunday: What do you make of the mega mass transit projects going on in the name of development in Lahore?

Kamil Khan Mumtaz: The idea of progress and development is a very heady idea which draws people irresistibly. In this larger paradigm of progress and development, the city has a very special place. People never tire of saying that cities are the engines of growth. So much so that urbanisation itself is seen as an indicator of progress and development. And it is proudly referred to in all the political and economic speeches. It doesn’t hurt anyone when you put a little honey in the pot. So there is a lot of mega bucks involved.

You have to see this as a part and parcel of the whole post-modernist world. This is the age of consumerism, global capital, where we have actually gone beyond the nation state. The nation state and democracy was a creation of bourgeoisie, European bourgeois revolution, and it was their need. We still hang on to this idea and complain why is the ‘state’ not addressing our problems?

The nation state is an obsolete idea. The state was first and foremost a reification of power: it replaced the clan, the tribal chief, the feudal lord and before that the family, the male head of the household. There was always a symbol of power and authority and the state then under the bourgeois arrangement became the representative of power, autonomy and sovereignty.

But another aspect that is necessary for any form of state, whether feudal, tribal, family or post-modernist, is legitimacy. In the modern world, power has gone beyond the state; it is now reified in money. Global capital rules even the most powerful state in the world. The most powerful president cannot move an inch without the permission of five families and the big money, banks, corporations lay down the rules.

So, big international financial and other corporate institutions arrive and have access straight to the highest levels of governments. They tell you what you need — a dam, city, infrastructure. We say that’s fine but we don’t have the money to do this. They say here is the money. So we fall in line, whether it’s New Murree, Patriata Forest, world class cities along the coast of Karachi or a mega project on River Ravi. A prime example is the Walled City Authority (WCA). The last one was dreamed up by Asian Development Bank. They said you have a great asset, an investment opportunity, turn your culture and history into an advantage, income generation. There will be poverty alleviation; call it sustainable conservation. That will be your equity, we’ll provide the cash, together we’ll make this mega project, we’ll make mega bucks, you get money, photo opportunity and everyone is very happy, consultants, contractors, suppliers.

Read also: This or that, buses or roads

TNS: But there are political dividends at the local level, too. Where would you place Lahore’s Metro Bus project, for instance, in this scheme because the funds were said to have been generated locally?

KKM: Of course, there are because there is a populist image of progress and development. Everyone loves it. It’s the dream, the material paradise, that’s where we all want to go. It’s a highly sellable product and it costs you nothing. The land is public commons, the money is from the financing agents, it will create money, jobs, progress, development.

The key component is to use the public commons as a free equity. The government says we are getting foreign exchange from outside and we are going to generate money. The taxpayer doesn’t have to pay anything. The income from the project will pay for itself. It’s presented as a win-win situation.

TNS: But the mass transit projects are no income-generating enterprises. There may be people getting or making money in as far as laying down the infrastructure is concerned but after that it is the liability of the government and the taxpayer?

KKM: All of these projects are liabilities. Generations will pay for them. It’s the famous debt trap. That’s what the financing companies make their money out of.

TNS: So, what should ideally have been done to solve the transport problem of Lahore?

KKM: There is a genuine problem of urban transportation and as a result we have a ridiculous situation of traffic. The solution is to reduce private vehicles and, at the same time, provide good public transport. This is what is immediately required. Now a great thing about a city like Lahore is that we are blessed with rights of way on our major arteries which very few cities enjoy. Mall Road, Jail Road, Ferozepur Road, Main Boulevard, the right of way is not a problem. All you need is to run buses on them. With a little more money, still more efficient would be trams. Use the same roads for track — yes our roads are wide enough — and run the trams.

When they were widening the canal, we screamed that we should have public transport; we are encouraging more motor cars. So, they finally got the message and built this structure for Metro bus in the air that could have paid for buses for not only Lahore but for the whole of Punjab.

Again, with the traffic issue getting from bad to worse, there is rail plan and instead of running that train on the grade, they are mostly running it in the air and may be at some places it goes underground. But just running buses on the same roads would have been so much cheaper.

TNS: What about the plan that you gave?
Now a great thing about a city like Lahore is that we are blessed with rights of way on our major arteries which very few cities enjoy. All you need is to run buses on them. With a little more money, still more efficient would be trams.

KKM: I was the leading consultant in the Lahore Urban Development and Traffic Study (LUDTS) in 1977. The study was published in 1981. One whole volume out of four was on transport and traffic. There was a whole series of projects that we had identified. A year or two afterwards, we went to meet the traffic engineer planner and asked him why was it not implemented? He said that nobody agreed to it; they said it does not require any money, it’s so cheap. Tell us some overhead or underground to be made, something visible which should be visible to the chief saab. These were his words. They don’t want pedestrian footpaths, crossing islands or bus ways or anything like that. When there is money spent, only that makes everybody happy.

So, this is what these mega projects are about and it is by design. There are government agencies like Nespak, Tepa and LDA. When you have finished local democracy, the source of revenue for the local government is not there anymore, how do these agencies work? They are left with charging fees for billboards, commercialisation, illegal construction, etc. Now the only way they can survive is to encourage people to put up billboards, to break building regulations, so that they can survive. To survive, Nespak needs these big projects. So it’s not out of malice necessarily. It’s just the way everything is structured that there is no other way that they can work.

TNS: In a democratic polity what should be the ideal mechanism or forum of decision-making. There is a sense among people of the city of Lahore that they are not consulted in any major decision about their city? They are fast losing that sense of belonging to the city?

KKM: A lot of these sentiments are the problem of the liberal intellectual. We are worried about transparency, democracy, consultative politics, history, culture and so on. When we were protesting against the widening of the canal, people with push carts objected and said that you ride in your cars, now it’s our turn to ride cars and you object to roads. People have aspirations. This is the success of years of propaganda which has sold the material paradise dream to the man in the street. That’s what he aspires for.

This is happening with the most advanced countries. The governments are identifying with the Wall Street and think that the people who are trying to occupy Wall Street are losers. It was a great expression of public sentiment but was diffused by the media that made them look so ridiculous. It was a great coup by the media.

TNS: So, is it a failure of the liberal intellectual as you say?

KKM: Yes, it is but can you compete with them? The power of global capital is what you are up against.

TNS: But shouldn’t there be a window of opportunity within democratic politics? Shouldn’t there have been engagement with the opposition?

KKM: There was a real rallying cry. People are fed up with corruption all over the world, in India too. But the dream of a shining future is too hard to resist.

TNS: Should we not be concerned about the heritage that we are losing in the name of development, monuments losing a sense of perspective with the monstrosities constructed all around them? Do we have enough laws?

KKM: We have plenty of laws. But you see the way they are trampled, they are made a mockery of, and they say it too that okay there is a law, let’s change it. The Walled City Authority is made by an act of parliament. The parliamentarians have chopped their own arms and legs.

TNS: How do you see the problems in the walled city and how can the WCA rectify those?

KKM: There is a horror story going on in the walled city of a magnitude and proportion that you can never imagine. When we did our LUDTS project in 1977, we did a socio-economic survey of the walled city. The population was 500,000, very dense, about 1200 persons per hectare. Now Aga Khan Trust, which is working in collaboration with the WCA, decided to have a fresh socio-economic survey. The population now has gone down to 250,000. Why? What has happened? You look at the map and realise that literally 50 per cent of the city is commercialised — it has spread like a cancer.

A couple of months back, a resident went to the Lahore High Court and filed a writ against the Punjab government and the Walled City Authority. He has a family house which is 150 years old and also has an imam bargah. He claims that all around his house, the entire property has been demolished. Somebody bought it systematically and they are building plazas, multistoreyed buildings, bringing cracks to his house and it might collapse. In the petition, he has questioned the role of WCA which was set up to conserve the culture of the city and to control commercialisation.

Related article: Not the Lahore I fell in love with by I.A. Rehman

The high court appointed us as amici curiae so we had to go in and investigate. We found that the property dealers and market traders are making unimaginable amounts of money. When we asked the WCA, they said they were helpless. When the Authority challans the dealers and traders in the magistrate’s court, they bribe them. When they go to seal the premises, they take out kalashnikovs. If their officer goes, he gets life threats. When we talked to the residents, they said their peace and privacy was shattered, their houses were vulnerable, and they were bothered by traffic.

What the land mafia does is deliberately make sure the property is degenerating and is of no value, then they buy it cheap, and systematically they buy a whole block, then pull it all down and build a concrete structure.

The property dealers and traders have contacts right up to the top; they get orders from the top and they are implemented. This is what is happening in the walled city; it is of colossal scale. There is transformation of a whole historic city. The population has left, the buildings have gone, so what is the Authority going to conserve and for whom? They say they will do it for tourists. As soon as this project was announced, foreign ambassadors and big hoteliers bought property near the Lahore Fort. The people have gone, the heritage is gone and now you are going to make a fake historic city — for big tour operators, airlines and hotels.

TNS: How do you look at Lahore Bachao retrospectively? What could it have done — to bring more people out on the streets, make alliances with political parties?

KKM: All this needed to be done and we tried all this. We did lobbying, talked to the media, went to the courts, up to the Supreme Court. The result is before you. The courts have de facto permitted them to go ahead with the projects. It shows what you can and cannot do.

From the experience of Lahore Bachao and our networks and organisations, we thought that let’s sit down and try to understand what’s going on. What is this development that we are constantly confronting? What is sustainable urbanisation? So emerged the Lahore Project. And now it’s more than three years that we have been working on that, collecting data, etc. It’s not flashy or in the news, we are doing it quietly. Lahore Project is a citizens’ initiative.

We have now a much better understanding of what is development and urbanisation, and what is going on.

TNS: But what about what needs to be done?

KKM: If you have correctly identified the problems, you have half the answers. So what needs to be done is very clear. But what is also clear is that it will not be done.

TNS: Isn’t that a defeatist position to have? Can we not empower people through activism?

KKM: It is a realistic position. What power to the people? It is an imagined fantasy that we all go around with. Power went from the tribal chief to the feudal to the bourgeoisie and now the power rests with the global capital.

What needs to be done is to discern between right and wrong. Right now there is no distinction. This is a philosophical position of the post-modern society that there is no absolute truth, no right and wrong, you can only have nuanced shades of grey. So, we deny the very possibility or the existence of right and wrong. In the Lahore Project, we say that once you know the right from the wrong, then at your level do what you think is right. Not because you expect to change the world, but because it’s the right thing to do.

TNS: Lastly, while we see this crass model of development in the cities of the developing world, the developed world seemed to have saved their London and their Paris very well. How did they have this sense of right and wrong in the presence of global capital?

KKM: Yes, indeed, they have saved their London and Paris. But remember these are the centres of global capital power and, thus, the leading factor in the destruction of this planet. They are the main beneficiaries of this global capitalism.

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12. MULTICULTURALISM IN BANGLADESH: WHERE OUR POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEBATES END
by Fardin Hasin
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(alalodulal.org/ - December 23, 2015)

The intellectual and political circles of Bangladesh have, for a long time, based their ideas and actions on or around a monolithic image of Bangladesh. Most discussions and debates have considered our ‘Bangalee’ identity as a constant, and the history of ‘Bangalees’ as linear; the other side of the story, as seen by much of the right-wing intelligentsia, seems to focus solely on our identity and history as ‘Muslims’. Both sides have a point, but we are all missing a greater part of the picture, that is, a country cannot progress in peace if it chooses to reduce all its citizens into a singular identity.

We Bangladeshis have been doing exactly that for a long time. Whether it’s Awami League with its Bangalee nationalism or BNP with its Bangladeshi nationalism with a strong emphasis on our Muslim identity there’s simply no space left for Bangladeshis who aren’t Bangalees and/or Muslims. This has caused a lot of conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts among the tribal people, who are neither Banglaees nor Muslims, leading to their struggle for self-assertion by both political and military means. It has also closed the door to a multicultural environment.

What’s multiculturalism really about? It is the view that the various cultures in a society merit equal respect and scholarly interest. We Bangalees like to think that our country has a singular culture (which we treat as never changing). It doesn’t; cultural norms and standards vary quite a lot between different fractions of our society. And we also like to think that our culture cannot be ‘foreignized’; if it does, it’s no longer our culture. That’s also a romanticized idea which historical facts don’t support.

The problem is that most of us didn’t know what our culture is to begin with. Yeah, we call it a ‘Bangalee’ culture, but the Bangalees who lived a thousand years ago had a distinctively different but aesthetically similar culture to what we have now. The change was done through the infusion of cultural traits imported from foreign rulers and their chosen elite. Yet the product of the transformation was still ‘Bangalee’ culture. It’s not like that now because, unlike our ancestors, we are not wise in our import of cultures from other societies and countries; we take the faulty parts and leave out the good ones.

One of the reasons we get away with never talking about multiculturalism is because our country doesn’t have much of an immigrant issue, and the foreigners who come here don’t generally settle. The notable exception were the Biharis who came here during the early days of Pakistan, and presently the Rohingyas seeking protection against persecution from ultra nationalist Rakhaines in Myanmar.

For us Bangladeshis, the Bihari issue is always uncomfortable; we don’t like seeing them as citizens in a state whose birth many Biharis opposed militarily and some acted as collaborators in the genocide committed by the Pakistani army. There was a time when we referred to them as atke pora Pakistanis (stranded Pakistanis) but Pakistan stripped them of their citizenship in 1978 after 500,000 were repatriated. Most of the Biharis who were left lived without citizenship in refugee camps. In 2008, Dhaka High Court granted rights of citizenship to Biharis who were minors in 1971. And the right to citizenship in Bangladesh is the right to become a part of the mainstream Bangladeshi culture and politics, though many of us don’t want to face the reality that way.

We are much less conflicted when it comes to Rohingyas because they only started coming after we were already liberated. As with any other refugees fleeing a war zone, Rohingyas often come in a single cloth and without any money or previous educational experience. Naturally enough, the worst professions of the country absorb them out of their desperation: from tourism prostitution to violent terrorism, the availability of food and shelter is enough to convince the refugees to join the trade; people on empty bellies sleeping under the sky think twice before making bad career choices. We the majority can silently live by as these things happen, or do something about the Rohingya situation before it worsens beyond control. No court has yet granted them citizenship rights, but some Rohingyas have registered for voter id-cards and more by assuming a Bangalee alias. Such aliases, in the wrong hands, are a major concern for security.

It’s worth noting that some Biharis also assumed Bangalee aliases to have better prospect of job and education, and are living among Bangalees in areas of better economic standards and lower crime rate. But they also absorbed the Banglaee identity; and from cultural and political viewpoints, it’s hard to distinguish them from Bangalees without prior knowledge of their roots.

But it’s not just Rohingyas and Biharis; there are a few other foreign locals in Bangladesh who have achieved, or are working towards, getting a citizenship. From my personal experience, I know a Nepali medical student who fell in love with a Bangalee batch mate and decided to marry him and settle here, a Korean businesswoman who owns two garments and lives in Banani, and a Cameroonian educationist currently serving as the Head of the Department of TVE at the Islamic University of Technology. We have seen a lot of African footballers in our national football league, and Bangladesh Football Federation has encouraged the better performers among them to apply for citizenship here.

Granted, the number of these immigrants is microscopically small in comparison to the rest of the population, and they certainly don’t possess a distinctive vote bank. Hence the political parties are not bothered by their presence and so they don’t have any effect on political ideologies whatsoever. Our intellectual circle rarely talks about issues lacking political relevance; and so, our discussions about our ‘Bengalee’ heritage or our ‘Muslim’ faith never take into consideration these people.

Thankfully enough, these immigrants, as far as I know, haven’t had much problem with racism. Bangladesh has always been open to people around the globe who wanted its shelter or wanted it be a part of their empire, which is the reason our language shares vocabulary with almost every major language of Asia. But that doesn’t mean that these foreigners don’t feel distant in this country; they are far away from feeling like just another average Bangladeshi citizen.

This begs another question: how do we define an average Bangladeshi citizen? If the only qualitative conditions required are being a ‘Bangalee’ and/or a ‘Muslim’, then why is there so much conflict between people of the same ethnicity and/or religion?

It’s because sharing the same ethnicity and/or religion doesn’t mean that everyone has the same political priorities. Our political parties have been so busy manufacturing an uber nationalistic dogma in order to stir up the patriotism in people (obviously to get votes), that they have completely forgot (or choose to forgot) the notion that being of the same ethnicity and/or religion can’t be the only reason a group of people want to live together and function as a state.

It’s the sharing of certain sociopolitical and economic goals, and an acceptance of the diversity that may exist among the ideas and philosophies directed towards achieving those goals. The day we stop talking about unity found from cultural and political conformism, and start addressing our lack of tolerance to the differences among us, is the day we’ll be able to define what being a ‘Bangladeshi’ is really about.

Fardin Hasin, is an engineering undergraduate student at IUT Dhaka, Bangladesh.

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13. "THE BRICS - A FABLE FOR OUR TIME"
by Immanuel Wallerstein
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http://iwallerstein.com, Commentary No. 416, January 1, 2016

The story of the BRICS is a strange one. It starts in 2001 when Jim O'Neill, at that time the chairman of the Assets Management division of Goldman Sachs, the giant investment house, wrote a widely-commented article about what we have come to call "emerging economies." O'Neill singled out four countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – all of whom were large enough in size and territory to have noticeable weight in the world market. He labeled them the BRICs.

O'Neill argued that their assets were growing at such a pace that they were going to overtake collectively the asset values held by the G-7 countries, which had long been the list of the wealthiest countries in the world-system. O'Neill did not say exactly when this would occur – by 2050 at the latest. But he saw the rise of the BRICs as more or less inevitable. Given his position at Goldman Sachs, he was essentially telling the clients of Goldman Sachs to shift significant parts of their investments to these four countries while their assets were still selling cheaply. 

The argument caught on, including in the four countries themselves. The four BRICs decided to assume the name and create structures of annual meetings as of 2009 in order to transform their emerging economic strength into geopolitical strength. The tone of their successive collective statements was to assert the place of the South against that of the North, and especially that of the United States in the world-system. They talked of replacing the dollar as the reserve currency with a new South-based currency. They talked of creating a South-based development bank to assume many of the functions that were the purview of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. They talked of redirecting world trade flows, so as to enhance South-South exchanges.

They talked of all these things, but somehow they never quite got around to implementing these proposals. Instead, they concentrated in the 2010's on enjoying the fruits of a high level of commodity prices, which allowed the governments of the four countries to augment significantly the income levels of their upper and middle strata, and even to increase some benefits to the lower strata. 

The times seemed good, and not only for the BRICs. In 2009, South Africa managed to convince the four BRICs to admit it as a fifth member of the group. The name was changed from BRICs to BRICS, the final capital S referring to South Africa. South Africa did not really meet the economic criteria O'Neill had specified, but in terms of geopolitics, it enabled the group to say it had an African member.

Meanwhile, other countries began to show economic characteristics similar to those of the BRICS. Journalists began to speak of the MINT – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey. Although this group also included ‘emerging’ economies, they never became a formal structure. One other country was an obvious member – South Korea. However, South Korea had already been admitted to the club of the wealthy – the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – and thus saw no need to enhance further its geopolitical status. 

Then all of a sudden, the economic strength of the BRICS took a turn for the worse in the 2010s. It isn't that the G-7 countries were growing faster again, but that the BRICS were showing lowered asset figures. The swift rise of the BRICS seemed to be vanishing.

What had happened? A look at the world-economy of the first decade of the twenty-first century shows that the world economic boom was largely driven by China's no-holds-barred construction and industrialization drive. It had created an enormous demand for inputs of all sorts, which China got from the BRICS countries as well as elsewhere. China's boom had been built on some shaky and reckless loan policies of the large number of regional banks that had come into existence, aided and abetted by considerable corruption. When the Chinese government sought to repair the damage, its growth rate plummeted, although it still remained relatively high. 

In addition, China's attempt to assert her geopolitical power over its neighbors in east and southeast Asia has led to accumulated tensions. Said to be part of China's rivalry with the United States, both China and the United States have been careful not to let the rivalry go so far that it threatens the longer-run possibilities of a partnership.

China's adjustments were immediately felt elsewhere, and especially in the other BRICS countries, which turned out to be economically shaky and therefore politically vulnerable. The dramatic fall of the world oil prices took their toll. One after the other, the BRICS found themselves in trouble, each in its own form. 

Brazil's economic policies had combined neoliberal macroeconomic policies with important transfers to the poorest third of the population – the so-called Fome Cero or Zero Hunger no longer worked. The fluid and ever-changing political alliances in the Brazilian legislature became a turbulent scene, threatening political stability. At the moment, the two main sides are trying to impeach each other's leaders. And the image of the person who had constructed Brazil's previously successful policies – Lula or former President Luis Inácio Cruz de Silva – is badly tarnished.

Russia's policies of heavy investment in the military combined with state-aided economic redistribution were strongly threatened by the fall in gas and oil price. Its geopolitical assertiveness in Ukraine and the Middle East led to various kinds of boycotts that hurt its economic national income sharply. 

India's attempt to catch up, not only with the West but with China, resulted in massive ecological damage as well as the diminution of investments by its diaspora in North America and western Europe. The current government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is finding it very difficult to fulfill the promises that led to his landslide victory so recently.

In South Africa, the overwhelming majority of the African National Congress (ANC) is finally receding, as an ever-larger proportion of the electorate is too young to remember the anti-apartheid struggle. Instead, politics have become increasingly based on ethnic politics. And the ANC is threatened by an anti-White upsurge among younger voters, so foreign to the ANC’s historic non-racial policies. In addition, South Africa's neighbors are increasingly uneasy with South Africa's strong hand in their internal politics. 

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! What remains of the geopolitical aspirations of the BRICS is anyone's guess.

[see also:
BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique Paperback – August 15, 2015
by Patrick Bond (Editor), Ana Garcia (Editor)]

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14.  DILMA’S FALL: THE WRECKING OF AN INSPIRING LEFT-WING EXPERIMENT
by Alfredo Saad Filho
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(THE BRICS POST, December 20, 2015)

Brazil’s Supreme Court has ruled that Congress must restart impeachment proceedings opened by the Chamber of Deputies against President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT). The deepest political crisis since the restoration of democracy, in 1985, is entwined with the most severe economic contraction in a generation, due to the turmoil in most middle-income countries, and to an ‘investment strike’ targeting the President’s downfall.

The country’s descent has been turbo-charged by a relentlessly negative media campaign, supplemented by a succession of corruption scandals orchestrated by overtly partisan judges and a runaway Federal Police. They are seeking to prosecute every instance of bribery and illegal finance touching the PT, however indirectly. In the meantime, scandals involving the opposition remain un-investigated.

The number of Brazilians who rated Rousseff's administration "bad" or "very bad" fell to 65 percent, from 71 percent in August, according to a Datafolha poll conducted from Dec. 16 to 17 [Image: Archives]

The number of Brazilians who rated Rousseff’s administration “bad” or “very bad” fell to 65 percent, from 71 percent in August, according to a Datafolha poll conducted from Dec. 16 to 17 [Image: Archives]
Corruption in Brazil is always nauseatingly entertaining, but it cannot be eliminated one scandal at a time. Corruption belongs to the machinery of the state; it links politics with business life and it buttresses the country’s inequality generating social structures. It is, then, unsurprising that, in the 1990s, when the PT chose to win elections instead of being honourably defeated, it had to find ways to fund its campaigns, behave ‘responsibly’ and distribute favours, just like the other parties.

Lula’s rise

This strategy worked. Lula was elected President in 2002, starting a succession of administrations that tended to follow the path of least resistance: there has been no serious attempt to reform the Constitution, the state or the political system, challenge the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, reform the media or transform the country’s economic structure. The PT also maintained the neoliberal macroeconomic policy framework imposed by the preceding administration. The PT’s unwieldy political alliances led to a form of ‘reformism lite’ that alienated the party’s base and provoked the opposition into escalating attacks since 2005.

In the meantime, however, the resources made available by the global commodity boom consolidated Lula’s position. In 2006, the government introduced an economic policy inflection including bolder industrial and fiscal policies, higher public sector investment and stronger distributive programmes. The ensuing dynamics supported Brazil’s rapid recovery after the global crisis. The country was anointed as one of the BRICS, and Lula became a global statesman. Yet, the political divide deepened. The opposition crystallised around a neoliberal alliance led by finance and the international capital, populated by the upper middle class, and cemented by a choleric media.

… And Dilma’s fall

Dilma Rousseff’s first administration (2011-14) tilted economic policy further away from neoliberalism, aiming to shift the engine of growth towards domestic investment and consumption. It introduced capital controls, reduced interest rates, and created new investment programmes. This strategy failed. The global crisis tightened Brazil’s fiscal and balance of payments constraints; quantitative easing in the advanced economies destabilised developing country currencies, and strident critiques of ‘interventionism’ limited investment. Brazil’s prospects deteriorated further as China’s economy cooled and commodity prices fell.

The opposition used these difficulties to justify an all-out attack against Dilma, demanding the restoration of neoliberal orthodoxy. Under siege, Dilma’s economic team leaned back towards neoliberalism, but this policy shift only increased the confidence of the opposition, that redoubled its effort to win the 2014 elections.

In the meantime, the judiciary tightened the screws around the PT. Successive corruption scandals emerged and, in June 2013, vast demonstrations erupted in the country. They encompassed a mélange of themes centred on ‘competent government’ and ‘corruption’, exposing tensions due to the economic slowdown, the government’s isolation and its failure to improve public services.

Dilma was narrowly re-elected through a mass mobilisation triggered by left perceptions that the opposition would reverse the social and economic achievements of the PT. However, Dilma immediately faced escalating political and economic crises. Her desperate response was to invite the banker Joaquim Levy to the Ministry of Finance, and charge him with implementing an orthodox adjustment programme that alienated the PT’s social base. Then another scandal captured the headlines.

The Federal Police’s Lava Jato operation unveiled a large corruption network centred on the state oil company Petrobras and including colossal robbery and illegal political funding. Blanket media coverage focusing on the PT destroyed the government’s credibility and catalysed the emergence of a right-wing opposition demanding Dilma’s impeachment.

A boy plays with campaign flyers during the general elections in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, on Oct. 5, 2014 [Xinhua]

A boy plays with campaign flyers during the general elections in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, on Oct. 5, 2014 [Xinhua]
Examination of their grievances fills a laundry basket of dissatisfactions articulated by expletives, but there is no plausible legal argument supporting the President’s impeachment. The process is entirely political and degrading for democracy, but it is likely to succeed in one way or another.

What now?

This dégringolade suggests five lessons.

First, under favourable circumstances, PT policies disarmed the right and disconnected the left from the working class. However, once the economic tide turned, the confluence of dissatisfactions overwhelmed the PT, and there was no one left to support its administration.

Second, while the PT governments reduced the income gap between the upper middle class and the poor they also increased the ideological distance between them, as the former drifted to the extreme right while the latter became inert.

Third, despite its volcanic energy, the new right is devoid of support outside the élite. There is not, then, a crisis of the state, but a crisis of government that cannot be addressed in the absence of economic growth. However, growth is unlikely to return while the PT remains in power.

Fourth, the extinction of Kirchnerismo in Argentina, the disintegration of Chavismo in Venezuela, and the trials of the PT suggest that transformative projects in Latin America are bound to face escalating right-wing resistance. It follows that the pursuit of ever-broader alliances is not necessarily stabilising, because they are prone to internal collapse. Instead, the sources of social, political and institutional power must be targeted through ambitious shifts in the economic base, international integration, employment patterns, public service provision, structures of representation and the media.

Fifth, Brazil is entering a long period of instability; the emergence of a new political hegemony may take years, and it is unlikely to favour the left. In the meantime, we can expect constant entertainment reading about surreal scandals. Unfortunately, the stakes are too high for comedy, and the ongoing impeachment process is not about corruption. It is about a right-wing coalition wrecking an inspiring left-wing experiment in one of the most important countries in the Global South.

This article, abridged by the writer for The BRICS Post, draws upon a longer piece posted on the website of SOAS, University of London.

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15. CHINA: JUSTICE AT LAST
by Neha Sahay
=========================================
(The Telegraph, December 31, 2015)

CHINA DIARY

With about 40 per cent of Chinese women reporting physical abuse by husbands/boyfriends, the first law clearly defining and criminalizing domestic violence was passed on Sunday, after years of agitation by women. Three particular cases - and the social media - were instrumental in forcing the male-dominated communist party to enact the law.

The first was the death in 2009 of a 26-year-old Beijinger within 10 months of her wedding. Dong Shanshan's abuse started right from her honeymoon. She complained eight times to the police, but to no avail, as wife-beating was considered a 'private matter'. She went back to her parents, but was kidnapped by her husband. She finally died in hospital. Her husband was sentenced to six-and-a-half years for "maltreatment". The couple were educated; they owned a BMW. The outcry after Dong's death prompted the communist party to heed the pleas of the official women's body to consider its draft of an anti-domestic violence law.

The second case was that of the 42-year-old Li Yan who, after suffering her husband's beatings and worse for two years (he cut off her finger) and trying all avenues for help (the police, the local women's federation and the community committee) in vain, turned on him with the very gun with which he was threatening to shoot her. She then dismembered his body and disposed of it.

Li was sentenced to death by a trial court for intentional homicide. Her sentence was upheld by the next court, which rejected police and hospital records, complaints to the women's federation as well as witness testimony, on the grounds that the witnesses were her family and friends, and there were no official investigation reports from the authorities she had complained to.

Brave women

Last year, when the Supreme Court was to pronounce judgment on Li, more than 400 lawyers and women activists signed a petition urging it to overturn her death sentence. The court sent it back for re-trial, and this year, Li's death sentence was suspended for two years and could change to life imprisonment after that.

The third case that brought the issue to the country's attention in a way that none of the others had was that of an American married to a Chinese man. Frustrated at being told to calm down and go home by the police, Kim Lee decided to post photos of the injuries inflicted on her by her husband in late 2011 on Weibo. She had only 23 followers, but the images went viral. Emboldened, she went back to the cops. This time, they noted her complaint. The court granted her a divorce on grounds of domestic violence, gave her full custody of her children, and made her husband pay child support to the tune of 12 million yuan, and 50,000 yuan as compensation. The case was sensational - the wife was American, the husband a celebrity English teacher. Instead of running to the American embassy, Kim decided to use her adopted country's legal system, and won. She did not want her daughters to think she had got justice because she was an American, but because she was a woman. She has settled down in China.

Her husband's defence was typical - she was a disobedient wife. Although he apologized publicly, he insisted that Kim, on account of being American, did not understand Chinese culture and had gone public with family affairs. The new law makes wife-battering a very public matter indeed, by authorizing hospitals to report cases that seem to fall within this category to the police.

How did wife-beating become a 'private matter' when, under the rule of Mao, both cooking and childcare were deemed community affairs in order to enable women to work? Feminists admit that women then may not have held up half the sky as Mao said, but were definitely valued more than they are in today's market economy.

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16. CHINA’S LATEST CRACKDOWN ON WORKERS IS UNPRECEDENTED
by Michelle Chen
=========================================
(The Nation - December 18, 2015)

Seven worker-activists involved in the independent labor organizations known as “worker centers” have been arrested. 

In an unprecedented crackdown on some of China’s most effective independent labor organizations, known as worker centers, seven worker-activists have been detained and held virtually incommunicado in detention facilities in Foshan and Guangzhou.

The detainees include Panyu Dagongzu Service Center staffers Zeng Feiyang and Zhu Xiaomei; former Dagongzu staffers Tang Jian (a k a Beiguo) and Meng Han; Peng Jiayong of the Panyu-based Laborer Mutual Aid Group; He Xiaobo, director of Foshan Nanfeiyan Social Work Services Organization; and Deng Xiaoming of the Haige Workers Center. Beiguo reportedly remains detained, but his whereabouts are unconfirmed as of December 16.

The activists are reportedly being detained on grounds of “endangering national security,” according to Amnesty International. It is unclear whether charges have been formally brought; earlier reports indicated Zeng and Zhu had been apprehended on lesser charges of “disrupting social order,” and He charged with “embezzlement.” Attorneys, restricted from communicating with them, have demanded clarification on the charges. The national-security charges, Amnesty reports, “could lead to a sentence of up to 15 years imprisonment.”

Advocates report that He and Zhu’s lawyers, along with detainees’ family members, have been arbitrarily barred from visiting. And Zhu, a former migrant worker from Henan turned organizer, has been denied bail and is unable to reunite with the baby she is nursing. Authorities have also reportedly questioned and harassed dozens of relatives and affiliates of the detainees and their groups.

While the government remains mum on the detentions, the police sweep seems an unusually harsh crackdown on community-based groups that have long struggled to balance mutual aid and advocacy without courting controversy. Working outside the international spotlight and concentrated in China’s gritty southern manufacturing belt, organizers toil thanklessly each day on behalf of local workers: filing complaints, winning back wages, fostering collective bargaining, and occasionally mediating strikes and other workplace conflicts.

But this is not the first security clampdown these activists have experienced. The website China Change has detailed the activists’ often tumultuous career as rank-and-file organizers. Zeng, a former corporate lawyer turned grassroots labor organizer, was detained and threatened by police, and later attacked by unidentified assailants, after helping to coordinate a major strike at a Guangdong shoe factory in late 2014.

Peng Jiayong, a veteran labor activist who became a full-time grassroots rabble-rouser after he was fired for trying to organize coworkers at a foreign-owned company, was assaulted by “eight unidentified men and severely injured” last April, according to China Change.

But what makes these activists so dangerous? Unlike the Ai Weiwei school of celebrity dissenters known worldwide for their subversive spectacles, Nee says, worker centers are comparatively low-key and pragmatic. They typically prefer to use arbitration and negotiation with management, rather than direct action like strikes, which they would generally treat “as a tactic of last resort.”

Coinciding with wider crackdowns on journalists and activist lawyers, the detentions might signal an effort to tighten the government’s stranglehold on civil society. One veteran labor activist, commenting anonymously on a Hong Kong commentary site, explained that “the raids were well planned from a higher level of government,” and that facing an economic slump, by targeting activists who were “promoting a positive attitude to the workers’ collective bargaining,” the government was actively suppressing “the legitimate aspirations of workers.”	

Meanwhile, a wave of labor unrest is roaring across southern China. According to the watchdog group China Labour Bulletin, labor protest incidents in Guangdong have recently spiked, from 23 in July to 56 in November, mostly in manufacturing workplaces where workers protested over unpaid wages, “factory closures, mergers and relocations.”

Elsewhere in Guangdong, Walmart store workers are escalating their long-running struggle to defy the government-run union apparatus, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), by campaigning for independent candidates. While their actions are not directly connected to the NGO crackdown, their struggle for independent unionization underscores the challenges of building autonomous rank-and-file power in China’s increasingly globalized and precarious workforce.

Both the silencing of worker centers and Walmart’s insurgent union drive point to growing tensions between independent labor activism and the management-aligned official union system. In many workplace disputes, according to CLB’s research brief on China’s labor movement, labor unrest has outgrown the ACFTU bureaucracy, which typically serves to neutralize disputes on management’s behalf. In recent years, workers “have been perfectly able and willing to bypass the trade union entirely and organize strikes and protests themselves in their pursuit of better pay and conditions.”

“The union doesn’t do anything” to promote workers’ interests, according to Hong Kong–based labor scholar Anita Chan. A lack of strong unions, she adds, is one reason groups like Dagongzu have approached labor relations through “legalistic” rather than militant means.

Over the past decade of reform-era union activity, Chan says, grassroots organizing has been impeded by an oppressive political climate. Even in larger worker uprisings, such as last year’s massive Yue Yuen shoe-factory strikes, protests have been co-opted by union officialdom or quashed by authorities, and haven’t engendered sustainable autonomous organizing campaigns.

“All these strikes, they’re directed against management, not against the state,” she observes.

Still, though the targeted groups face challenges from the state and business, a global groundswell of solidarity has emerged to defend the detainees as symbols of a labor movement that is as vital as it is endangered.

In the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions’ online petition, signed by numerous human-rights groups and European and Asian labor organizations, the union’s globalization monitor, “The Chinese government purports to advance the ‘rule of law’ within its borders and promotes the idea of a civilized and peaceful rise internationally. However, local governments abuse their power, using violence and arrests to repress and intimidate labour organizations, preventing Chinese workers from pursuing fundamental labour rights.”

In Nee’s view, the support for the detained activists stems from solidarity as well as from gratitude for the role of the worker centers in movement building and training rank-and-file organizers. “A lot of the reason why the strikes [and protests] have succeeded,” he says, “is because of worker solidarity and a new rights consciousness.… Once people are aware of their rights, it’s kind of hard to go back unless you permanently try to silence them.”

The persecution of Guangdong’s worker-activists exposes the hypocrisy of China’s “rule of law.” Nonetheless, it also reveals an emergent political landscape for labor: While the state can suppress individual activists, the consciousness of workers is rising too fast for anyone to contain it.


Michelle Chen Twitter Michelle Chen is a contributing writer for The Nation.

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17. SIDNEY MINTZ, FATHER OF FOOD ANTHROPOLOGY, DIES AT 93
by Sam Roberts
=========================================
(The New York Times, Jan. 1 2016)

Sidney W. Mintz, a renowned cultural anthropologist who provocatively linked Britain’s insatiable sweet tooth with slavery, capitalism and imperialism, died on Sunday in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 93.

The cause was a severe head injury from a fall, his wife, Jacqueline Mintz, said.

Professor Mintz was often described as the father of food anthropology, a mantle bestowed on him after the critical and popular success of his 1985 book, “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.”

Even before that, though, he had stretched the academic boundaries of anthropology beyond the study of aboriginal peoples. (He joked about those who believed that “if they don’t have blowguns and you can’t catch malaria, it’s not anthropology.”)

His groundbreaking fieldwork in the Caribbean was the basis of his book “Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History” in 1960, in which he profiled the rural proletariat — the “millions of people in the world, nearly all of them people of color, working at ghastly jobs producing basic commodities, mostly for consumers in the West,” as he described them to the journal American Anthropologist last year.

Professor Mintz also explored the legacy of language and religion that slaves took with them from Africa. He was instrumental in creating a black studies curriculum at Yale University in the early 1970s before joining Johns Hopkins University, where he helped found its anthropology department in 1975 and became professor emeritus in 1997.

The son of a restaurateur and an amateur chef himself, Professor Mintz was best known beyond the academy and his own kitchen for his Marxian perspective on the growing demand for sugar in Britain, beginning in the 17th century.

In his view, that hunger shaped empires, spawned industrial-like plantations in the Caribbean and South America that presaged capitalism and globalization, enslaved and decimated indigenous populations, and engendered navies to protect trade while providing a sweetener to the wealthy and a cheap source of energy to industrial workers.

“There was no conspiracy at work to wreck the nutrition of the British working class, to turn them into addicts or ruin their teeth,” Professor Mintz wrote in “Sweetness and Power.” “But the ever-rising consumption of sugar was an artifact of interclass struggles for profit — struggles that eventuated in a world market solution for drug food, as industrial capitalism cut its protectionist losses and expanded a mass market to satisfy proletarian consumers once regarded as sinful or indolent.”

He added, “No wonder the rich and powerful liked it so much, and no wonder the poor learned to love it.”

Professor Mintz was as much at home in the 21st century as he was in the 17th. In “Sweetness and Power” he observed that Americans were consuming more by multitasking, writing, “Watching the Cowboys play the Steelers while eating Fritos and drinking Coca-Cola, while smoking a joint, while one’s girl sits on one’s lap, can be packing a great deal of experience into a short time and thereby maximizing enjoyment.”

Sidney Wilfred Mintz was born on Nov. 16, 1922, in Dover, N.J., the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Solomon, was a dye maker who became a clothing salesman. His mother, the former Fanny Tulchin, was a seamstress and an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. (By the time the group was banned by the government as radical, he said, “she was married and organizing only her kids.”)

His father was a dishwasher in a diner before buying it and converting it into “the only restaurant in the world where the customer was always wrong,” Professor Mintz said. (Its previous owner had been enticed to purchase a Ferris wheel and left town with a carnival.) The diner went bust during the Depression.

“Very early I became interested in how people acquired, prepared, cooked and served food, and that all came from my father,” Professor Mintz told American Anthropologist. “I came by my interest in food honestly; feeding people had become what my father did for a living. As I grew, I was able to help.”

But when he was home from college during summers, Professor Mintz gorged on breakfast after his overnight shift at the local military arsenal — so much so, he said, that his father complained that “our financial security as a family would remain at risk until I moved out or lost my appetite.”

He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brooklyn College in 1943, taught celestial navigation in the Army Air Forces during World War II and received a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University.

Like his father, he did most of the cooking at home. In addition to his wife, the former Jacqueline Wei, with whom he lived in Cockeysville, Md., he is survived by two children from an earlier marriage, Eric Mintz and Elizabeth Nickens; and two grandchildren.

In 1996, Professor Mintz wrote “Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions Into Eating, Culture and the Past,” in which he maintained that Americans did not have a national cuisine. What they share, he said, is a “lively appreciation of sin,” which manifests itself in an obsession with dieting

He also complained about the eating habits of too many people today.

“We appear to be capable of eating (and liking) just about anything that is not immediately toxic,” he wrote in “Sweetness and Power.” “What constitutes ‘good food,’ like what constitutes good weather, a good spouse or a fulfilling life, is a social, not a biological matter.”

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18. ANDREW FUTTER AND ANTHONY HOPKINS. REVIEW OF BAYLIS, JOHN; STODDART, KRISTAN, THE BRITISH NUCLEAR EXPERIENCE: THE ROLES OF BELIEFS, CULTURE AND IDENTITY. 
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John Baylis, Kristan Stoddart. The British Nuclear Experience: The Roles of Beliefs, Culture and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 312 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-870202-3.

Reviewed by Andrew Futter (University of Leicester) and Anthony Hopkins (University of Birmingham)
Published on H-Diplo (January, 2016)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Anyone wishing to understand the United Kingdom’s seven-decades-old relationship with nuclear weapons--a must if one is to fully appreciate, understand, and engage with the heated nuclear debates of today--should start with this excellent new book by leading British scholars John Baylis and Kristan Stoddart. The British Nuclear Experience provides a fascinating and highly accessible narrative of the somewhat peculiar story of both the day-to-day dynamics and the broader evolution of nuclear thinking and policy in the United Kingdom. The authors unearth and explain many fundamental dynamics about British nuclear policy that are rarely included in other analyses and tend to feature little in the public discourse or debate about the future of nuclear weaponry. There is no obvious political or normative agenda being advanced in this work (it is neither a “cheerleader” for Trident replacement nor a treatise for unilateral disarmament), but rather the authors seek to provide a holistic and inclusive assessment of how and why certain decisions were made, who the key players behind these decisions were, and above all, how we got to where we are today. If there is any key take-away message, it is that we must look beyond simple “security-driven” explanations for UK nuclear policy (although these are certainly not discarded in the book), and focus on the importance of ideas, identity, beliefs, and the intervening role played by domestic politics and British political culture. By drawing upon an extensive and diverse range of primary evidence and sources in order to tell their story, which gives the work great depth, authority, and credibility, the book is able to provide a fascinating insight into what is so often (sometimes arguably for good reasons) an impenetrable subject, full of secrets and intrigue.

The book manages to pack a considerable amount of detail, fact, and anecdote into a relatively small space, and without compromising readability, assessment, or chronological flow. The narrative begins with analysis of the early days of atomic research, starting with the time when Britain led the world in the science of nuclear weapons, through the Manhattan Project, and into the race to build the bomb. It then explains how Britain, and especially the 1952 UK Global Strategy Paper, set the stage for general thinking about nuclear deterrence, how atomic weapons became central to both US and NATO strategy by forming formed a key part of “nuclear orthodoxy” that remains this day.  The book considers the questions and complications for British non-strategic (or tactical) nuclear weapons and their role within NATO, especially in Europe, and as a component of broader UK strategy. Baylis and Stoddart also look closely at the decision, politics, and technological developments that surrounded the move from the V-bomber force to Polaris in the 1960s, and then at the even more complicated story of how the United Kingdom came to procure the Trident D5 missile system two decades later. Finally, the book demonstrates how the procurement of Trident D5 missiles drives and shapes the way that the debate has materialized in recent years, first under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and more recently under David Cameron. While the text is primarily sequential, it uses key periods in UK nuclear history as vehicles through which to highlight and explain the broader set of dynamics at play. The interaction of these dynamics is a central part of the story and can explain much about how the United Kingdom got to where it is, and why the current debate has shaped up in the manner that it has.

The main academic thrust of the book is to highlight that in order to understand the particular, often punctuated, evolution of UK nuclear weapons policy, we must look beyond external threats as the key explanation of events. Indeed, the book makes the case for the application of a “thin constructivist” international relations (IR) lens in order to look outside the narrow set of strategic (realist) drivers that so often dominate analysis, not just of UK nuclear weapons but also of global nuclear order more broadly. While there is little dispute that the presence of the Soviet Union, and the threat of nuclear attack on the United Kingdom, was a major factor in British thinking throughout the Cold War, the book also shows that these were not the only dynamics driving the policy forward and saving the UK nuclear weapons program from being cancelled. Indeed, a nuclear weapons policy based purely on strategic analysis may have played out very differently, both during the Cold War, and now especially, in the two-and-a-half decades and a half since it has ended. In fact, as the book shows, had the political situation been different in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United Kingdom might well have purchased the less expensive and less capable Trident C4 missile (which was viewed as being sufficient for deterrence at the time), rather than the more advanced and more expensive D5 system it operates today. As it is, the UK is currently debating the replacement of a system that was beyond what officials believed was necessary for “minimum nuclear deterrence” even at the height of the Cold War. This also highlights the importance of contingent events elsewhere in shaping the nuclear debate in the United Kingdom (a key theme of the book), as well as explaining the current attachment to a highly capable nuclear system.

The authors suggest that we must therefore consider the particular impact that British culture, beliefs, and identity had on the nuclear story: perhaps most importantly how notions of “great power status” and the UK as having a “fundamental role in the world” have been juxtaposed against domestic financial and political realities and constraints, as well as a belief that if nuclear weapons could keep Britain safe and deter war, then they were morally justifiable. The perceived need to have a “Union Jack flying on top of it” has remained an integral part of the story throughout British nuclear history--even if policymakers and supporters have not always publicly acknowledged this motivation. This is not to mention the signal importance that both “keeping up with Uncle Sam” and retaining the special relationship has had on policy. Indeed, the United States plays a key role throughout the story, both directly through its provision of nuclear technology (after the McMahon Act of 1946 was amended), and indirectly through the importance of the transatlantic cultural link and NATO. Despite recent overtures by US president Barack Obama, it is believed that the United States continues to favor a nuclear-armed Britain, and the UK sees this link as a fundamental diplomatic component of the Atlantic alliance, and a source of British influence around the world. The book does an excellent job of explaining the ebb and flow of these dynamics and how they have provided the intellectual context through which both the British nuclear program, as well as the often capricious political debate, has been seen, understood, and constituted. 

There are a number of fascinating sub-themes that also perforate the analysis throughout the book. The first is the uncanny way that British nuclear debates and political dynamics have repeated themselves (often in a surprisingly similar manner) over time. There is perhaps no better example of this than the recurring deliberations about what the United Kingdom requires for nuclear deterrence. For example, the political debates of the 1950s and the “Duff-Mason report” in 1978 bear striking resemblance to the 2013 Trident Alternatives Review (TAR) mandated by the Liberal Democrat Party as part of its coalition deal with the Conservatives: discussions about the possibility of “other nuclear options” such as nuclear delivery by cruise missiles (either by submarine or aircraft) are certainly not new. Indeed, many of the “alternatives” discussed in the 2013 TAR--aspects that remain part of the debate today--were addressed in much better detail in 1978 (albeit not publicly). The possibility of some type of nuclear cooperation with France, an idea seriously entertained by Edward Heath in the 1970s as part of an entente cordial, has never really gone away either and would be revisited again throughout the decades, notably in the late 2000s. 

So, too, would the discussions about the “Moscow Criterion” and what UK nuclear weapons must be able to achieve in order to deter; this was a fundamental driver of the decision to procure Polaris in the 1960s (making the newly produced V-bombers obsolete almost immediately) and the “Chevaline” program to increase warhead penetrability undertaken in the 1970s, and a key reason why the 2006 Government White Paper argued for renewing Trident with a like-for-like replacement system and not something “less capable.” This remains a centerpiece of the debate today (although far less explicit), despite the move towards what has become popularly termed a second nuclear age, which has seen a greater diversity of national and nuclear security threats than ever before. In some ways this dynamic can also be evinced by Margaret Thatcher’s deep concerns about Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (or Star Wars, as it became popularly known), and how this might impact the viability of the UK nuclear deterrent, and exacerbate conventional (NATO) inferiorities in Europe. As Michael Hesletine mused at the time, “What if the Soviet Union succeeded in developing such a system in turn, which might neutralize the British and French independent deterrents?” (p. 183). The same dynamics are slowly entering the debate again today, with the possibility that Russia, or another potential UK adversary might develop a ballistic missile defense system sometime in the future that could undermine the Trident-based nuclear force and therefore its ostensive deterrent value. 

The same is largely true for domestic party politics and internal party dynamics, particularly for the Labour Party (the Tories have remained strong supporters of a UK nuclear capability for most of this period, and more recently of renewing the Trident system). Indeed, the book chronicles how various Labour leaders have sought to manage the nuclear issue amongst the party membership and within the Parliamentary party, and particularly how they have sought to neuter or at least circumvent antinuclear sentiment (notably under Clement Atlee, and then later, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, and Blair). It also shows how leaders (when in opposition) have utilized the disarmament message as a key policy option: a highly visible factor in the 1980s under Neil Kinnock and something we appear to have returned to again with the election of antinuclear weapons advocate Jeremy Corbyn today. While the Main Gate decision to begin construction on replacement nuclear weapons will likely be taken in 2016, how a future Labour government would act should it win power in the 2020 general election remains to be seen, especially if this victory relies heavily on the support of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Ultimately, and despite considerable differences in context, the same themes therefore appear to underpin the discussion; the same options, politics, and debates seem to crop up, and the same conclusion(s) tends to be reached. At least, that is, so far.

A penchant for secrecy has been another constant theme of what the authors describe as the “British nuclear experience.” Until recently, UK nuclear policy was decided and implemented by just a handful of very influential people and kept well away from the media and the general public. In fact, as the authors show, for a large part of the story, British nuclear decision-making has been made by a very small number of people and groups, often operating, in the early stages at least, in complete secrecy--even from large parts of the government. This was “due to a deep-seated conviction by the political and defence establishment that nuclear matters are of such overwhelming importance to the security of the state that extraordinary measures are necessary to protect national secrets” (p. 130). Both the Wilson and Callaghan governments kept the hugely expensive Chevaline program secret--primarily because Chevaline was as much about politics as any particular requirements, and decisions on nuclear weapons were regularly not even discussed by the full Cabinet--let alone subject to scrutiny from Parliament or the general public. Instead, a small number of key figures, political, official, and scientific have been fundamental to the story: Clement Atlee, Ernest Bevin, and Henry Tizard in the early years; Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s; Margaret Thatcher and Michael Quinlan through the 1980s and 90s; and perhaps Tony Blair and David Cameron more recently--to name but a few. In this way, the book makes the case for the intrinsic importance of a powerful nuclear advocacy coalition within government: while views within this coalition have often differed, this was kept quiet from the general public and therefore from wider scrutiny.  

Given all of these dynamics, the authors suggest that while any move toward UK nuclear disarmament is certainly possible, this would require a fundamental change in the kind of beliefs, culture, and identity issues which have embedded nuclear weapons at the center of British thinking, and not necessarily therefore a fundamental shift in the strategic environment and types of threats facing the United Kingdom. As the book makes clear, a strong belief about Britain and what it stood/stands for as much as any threat has underpinned the seven-decades-long British relationship with nuclear weapons. Ultimately, as the authors point out, “until a substantial degree of trust between nations has been achieved, British governments continue to believe that nuclear weapons have a critical role to play in national security” (p. 202). However, it could be argued that the reverse is happening, with the ever-important references to an uncertain global future being given fresh impetus following Russian military action in Ukraine and Syria, and heightened instability across the Middle East.

The overwhelming feeling is therefore that business as usual remains the British nuclear status quo, and that barring some significant political or strategic transformation, Britain will remain a member of the exclusive nuclear weapons club well into the second half of this century. That said, it could be that Britain’s nuclear weapons future could be decided on the basis of a number of domestic pressures. While the government has committed to spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, there are many competing demands on that budget and government spending more generally. Furthermore, this comes at a time when the government secured only a tiny parliamentary majority in the 2015 general election, and is now facing an opposition that is going to review its policy on Trident replacement, led by someone personally opposed to nuclear weapons. There is also the sizable SNP parliamentary representation, for whom opposition to Trident replacement has become a totemic policy, and which continues to raise the possibility that developments in Scottish domestic politics could yet prove important in determining the UK’s nuclear future. Despite this, David Cameron has recently repeated his pledge to replace Trident on a like-for-like basis and maintain Continuous at Sea Deterrence with four submarines, which is likely to ensure that many of the fascinating and defining themes of Britain’s nuclear debate that Baylis and Stoddart identify in this book will remain prominent well into the future.


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

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

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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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