SACW - 12 Jan 2015 | Sri Lanka: Sinhala Blood, Muslim Blood / India-Pakistan: Go with Talks not Hawks / Bangladesh 2015: year of bloggers, writers / Bangladesh - Pakistan: Heal the Wounds of War / India: Faith over rationalism / COP21: Paris deal too weak

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 12 January 2016 - No. 2880 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Stop the extremists who talk "Sinha Le", "Marraka Le" [Sinhala Blood, Muslim Blood] (Hilmy Ahamed)
2. Bangladesh 2015: A Year of Bloggers, Writer, Publishers murder in the hands of Islamism and its beneficiaries (Arif Rahman)
3. India - Pakistan: After the Pathankot attack act with prudence to save the agenda of entente
4. India: Jan 7, 2017 CNDP Statement on Nuclear test by North Korea
5. Video of Dhaka Book Launch: The Spectral Wound - Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Nayanika Mookherjee)

6. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - India: To fight communalism, Left has to think of electoral alliances (Ram Puniyani)
  - Faith over rationalism: The Indian elite are making the same mistake as their Pakistani counterparts (Shoaib Daniyal)
  - Bangladesh’s radical problem (Sudeep Chakravarti)
  - India Today TV Debate: on The Ram Mandir - Babri Masjid Dispute -- Rajdeep Sardesai talks to Subramanian Swamy and Asaduddin Owaisi (President, AIMIM) 
  - India:: Cinematographer Ranjan Palit: Fascism is lurking in our living rooms
  - Don’t play with fire: Calm heads should prevail in the wake of Bengal’s Malda riots - Editorial, The Times of India (January 8, 2016)
  - Is RSS planning to take leadership of the Ayodhya movement from VHP? The Sangh has devised a new strategy to bring its affiliates closer and push the agenda for a Ram temple. (Dhirendra K Jha)
  - India: 9th World Atheist Meet Gets Underway in Vijaywada, Andhra Pradesh (report in The New Indian Express) & details of the conference venue

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

7. Healing the Wounds of War between Bangladesh and Pakistan (Saleem Ali)
8. Pakistan was born in a state of confusion: Hoodbhoy
9. India - Assam’s minority report: As the state readies for polls, it would be dangerous to abuse the highly emotive ‘Bangladeshi’ card (Sanjoy Hazarika)
10. A short note on the short history of Hinduism (Mukul Dube)
11. India: The dress law for temples is just another tool to rein in 'provocative' women (TM Krishna)
12. Briton told horse penis remark 'could have led to war' between Kyrgyzstan and UK 
13. Book Review: Chandra on Balagopalan, 'Inhabiting 'Childhood': Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India'
14. COP21: Paris deal far too weak to prevent devastating climate change, academics warn (Tom Bawden)
15. Refugees to be given lessons in 'Western sexual norms' in Norway (Jake Alden-Falconer)  

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1. SRI LANKA: STOP THE EXTREMISTS WHO TALK "SINHA LE", "MARRAKA LE" [SINHALA BLOOD, MUSLIM BLOOD] | Hilmy Ahamed
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Its time that all Sri Lankans commit themselves to work towards the prosperity of our nation through true reconciliation. Towards this, the Government of President Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe should ensure that these racial extremists are brought before the law for inciting hate and communal threats.
http://www.sacw.net/article12252.html

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2. BANGLADESH 2015: A YEAR OF BLOGGERS, WRITER, PUBLISHERS MURDER IN THE HANDS OF ISLAMISM AND ITS BENEFICIARIES | Arif Rahman
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Year 2015 was the darkest of times in Bangladesh's history. Like 1975 murder of the founding president Sheikh Mujib, which wiped off all the secular achievements of the 1971 Independence war against Pakistan, 2015 will be remembered by the world as the year of Atheist bloggers, authors, publishers killing.
http://www.sacw.net/article12244.html

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3. India - Pakistan: After the Pathankot attack act with prudence to save the agenda of entente
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Three sane voices speak for the continuation of peace talks
http://www.sacw.net/article12245.html

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4. India: Jan 7, 2017 CNDP Statement on Nuclear test by North Korea
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The Coalition of Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) strongly condemns the nuclear weapons test by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). The North Korean regime, which is highly authoritarian and militarist, has tried to consolidate itself internally through such aggressive moves.
http://www.sacw.net/article12236.html

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5. Video of Dhaka Book Launch: The Spectral Wound - Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971 | Nayanika Mookherjee
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http://www.sacw.net/article12237.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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  - India:: Cinematographer Ranjan Palit: Fascism is lurking in our living rooms
  - Don’t play with fire: Calm heads should prevail in the wake of Bengal’s Malda riots - Editorial, The Times of India (January 8, 2016)
  - Hindutva fountainhead the RSS which has its own saffron flag wants madrasas to hoist India's national flag on Republic Day
  - Is RSS planning to take leadership of the Ayodhya movement from VHP? The Sangh has devised a new strategy to bring its affiliates closer and push the agenda for a Ram temple. (Dhirendra K Jha)
  - India: To fight communalism, Left has to think of electoral alliances (Ram Puniyani)
  - India Today TV Debate: on The Ram Mandir - Babri Masjid Dispute -- Rajdeep Sardesai talks to Subramanian Swamy and Asaduddin Owaisi (President, AIMIM)
  - India: Portents of a hate storm - beware defenders of Delhi University #RamMandirSeminar (Soumya Shankar)
  - India: How a 35-year-old meat ban order has added a fresh layer to Mangaluru’s communal problem
  - India: Excerpt from "Muslims and I" by Vijay Tendulkar
  - India: 'The RSS is conspiring to gain a hold of all academic institutions' - Ousted BHU professor
  - Faith over rationalism: The Indian elite are making the same mistake as their Pakistani counterparts (Shoaib Daniyal)
  - Lal Bahadur Shastri stood for social and religious pluralism
  - Bangladesh’s radical problem (Sudeep Chakravarti)
  - India: 9th World Atheist Meet Gets Underway in Vijaywada, Andhra Pradesh (report in The New Indian Express) & details of the conference venue
  - India: Amandeep Sandhu on the need for reform in the elected apex body of the Sikhs the SGPC
  - India: Upcoming National Convention 'Muslim Auraton ki Awaaz: Sadak se Sansad tak' [The Voice of Muslim Women: From the Road and the Parliament] (New Delhi, Feb 27 - Feb 28, 2016) 

-> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: FULL TEXT :::
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7. HEALING THE WOUNDS OF WAR BETWEEN BANGLADESH AND PAKISTAN
by Saleem Ali
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(National Geographic - January 1, 2016)

The flight from Karachi to Dhaka spans the heartland of South Asia and gives travelers an appreciation for the complexity of The Great Partition. So many linguistic and ethnic divides had to be traversed to formulate national identities for countries that now exist in the area. Nearly a fourth of the world’s population resides here. Identities in any geographic context are inherently synthetic and evolving, and the region that most acutely depicts such dynamism on the subcontinent is Bengal.

This is the land where the mightiest rivers of the subcontinent, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, converge to form the world’s largest delta. The fertile planes of the delta lured scores of peasants to the region over the centuries, now making it the most densely populated place on earth. In the medieval period, there were moments of Bengali imperialism, with dynasties such as the Pala and Sena gaining ascendance, but these were were largely non-expansionist in cadence. The Bengalis contributed their talents to whoever ruled them, whether Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim, with great generosity of spirit. While tenaciously guarding their language, Bengalis were, to their great credit, willing to embrace other communities and “outsiders”.

It was in Bengal that the British first established their foothold through the East India Company which later became what has been termed “the world’s first corporate raider.” Yet the resistance to British rule in its various forms also had its epicentre in Bengal. The Muslim League, which now prides itself as the vanguard of Punjabi politics in Pakistan, was also founded in Dhaka in 1906. At the same time avowedly anti-religion Marxists also find a home in Western Bengal. Such is the diversity of Bengali society. This land has also produced numerous notable scholars and artists that have made Bangladesh proud, and at one time Pakistan could also lay some claim to their fame. Nobel laureates such as Rabindranath Tagore, Amartya Sen and Muhammad Yunus, or singers like Runa Laila or film icon Shabnam.

A Tragic Sense of Loss and Gloating

Pakistanis often encounter a peculiar mix of nostalgia and relief when they visit Bangladesh. There is a bittersweet affection that visitors feel as if being reunited with an estranged sibling. On the one hand, the clogged traffic of Dhaka, the cyclone-ridden hinterlands and the levels of poverty that by some measures exceed those in Pakistan make Pakistanis feel a bit relieved that they do not have to “deal” with this complexity anymore. In recent years, however, some of my Bengali friends tend to mildly gloat on Pakistan’s misfortunes of extremism and the relative peace in Bangladesh. However the differentiation in that regard seems more illusory with extremist incidents sadly rising in Dhaka as well in 2015.

Pakistanis must reflect further on what a devoted and talented citizenry  they have lost to the arrogance of electoral politics in 1971.  Bengali nationalism is still very strong and memorials to the Liberation War are found all around the country. There are some indelible impressions of the country’s Pakistani lineage as well, such as the parliament building in Dhaka whose construction started during the Ayub Khan era. Designed by the famed Jewish-American architect, Louis Kahn, the building is emblematic of the kind of grand urban planning that Ayub Khan endorsed in the construction of Islamabad as well.

During my visit to Dhaka in 2009, I frequently heard the Bangladeshi account of the brutality of the 1971 war. There is an entire museum devoted to this period with some very graphic details of how civilians were affected by this tragic period in our history. At the campus of Dhaka University is a monument to the struggle for Bengali language, commemorating a 1952 shootout with the police who were trying to enforce Urdu. Several students were killed in this clash. The United Nations recognises February 21, the day of that tragedy, as the international day of language.

No doubt the linguistic imperialism of West Pakistan deserves censure but international norms should also not be misused to claim excessive victimhood by Bangladesh.  For example, the oft quoted demographics of the casualties in the 1971 war and labeling it  “a  genocide” by some Bengalis is highly  divisive and unhelpful as the international legal definition of genocide does not apply to this conflict. There are also counter-claims of atrocities by the Bengali Mukti Bahini guerrilla forces. Unquestionably tragic as they were, over-playing the 1971 events and trying to establish some moral equivalence with the Holocaust or other genocides will serve no purpose and will only entrench hatreds further. The erudite British-Indian writer and human rights activist Salil Tripathi has grappled eloquently with historiographic precision on this matter in his landmark book The Colonel who Would not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy.

Anger and Arrogance

A definitive historical question that is frequently asked in both Bangladesh and Pakistan on the events of 1971 is : “Why did Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (the West Pakistani leader) not let Mujibur Rahman (the Bengali leader) become the prime minister when he had a majority of the seats in the 1970 election?” It was this power struggle that spurred the 9-month civil war within Pakistan (Liberation War for Bangladesh), leading to the independence of Bangladesh. In my personal view, Mr. Bhutto, indeed demonstrated despicable hubris in his conduct at the time which was emblematic of his supreme arrogance in international relations. There was also an undertone of racism in the behaviour of many West Pakistanis towards Bengalis which enabled such conduct. Historians can argue ad infinitum about the causes of the break-up of the country. Perhaps it was inevitable given the geographic and cultural divide; perhaps it was galvanized by Indian intervention. Whatever the confluence of circumstances, it was a horribly tragic event in the way the separation occurred.

Time should heal wounds of war but sadly South Asian politics in the contemporary context are stoking the demons of the past through vengeance narratives. Rather than learning from countries like South Africa and Japan in turning the page on past oppression through a politics of healing and reconciliation, there is a craven impulse to dismiss any gestures of concord. In 2002, erstwhile Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf visited the Liberation War memorial in Dhaka and officially expressed remorse for the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army during the 1971 war. Yet for many Bengali politicians this is still not enough and the revenge impulse continues to dominate. The obstinacy to accept healing narratives is an ominous sign. As the famous 5th century Theravadic Buddhist commentator Buddhaghosa in his famed text  Visuddhimagga noted: ““Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of harming another; you end up getting burned.” The politics of hatred is burning both Bangladeshis and Pakistanis alike, not to mention the regional hegemonic power India that smolders in its own embers of ethno-religious nationalism but whose security hawks continue to spell doom for neighboring countries. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan need to reject such fear, hate and hegemony, and to learn from Partition rather than be poisoned by its bitter past.

Parted but Peaceful

As exemplified by the break-up of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, there is a civilized and peaceful way to undertake such deliberate nationalism. Perhaps the same could have happened in South Asia too, if there had been greater regional leadership and a willingness for mediation from past colonial powers such as Britain.  Yet during those troubled days of the Cold War, and the peaking pique of Indo-Pak rivalry, such a path was not followed.  However, we have to stop languishing in past follies and there are proponents of peace in Bangladesh and Pakistan that deserve to be heard. Despite strong resentment towards Pakistan, there is also a palpable political maturity in some parts of the Bangladesh intelligentsia that do not use the ill-fated actions of a few politicians to build hatred towards Pakistan. However, many of these forces of moderation are being marginalized by contemporary Bangladeshi politics. Some of my Bengali friends living abroad are now afraid of voicing support for peace with Pakistan because of the bullying tactics of the current regime in branding them traitors for questioning the ultra-nationalist narrative. They have personally voiced fears that their families back home would be targeted by ultra-nationalist forces if they showed any peace-building solidarity with Pakistan. Indeed, the opposition party itself is being intimidated for showing ostensible loyalty to Pakistan in public statements. Sadly, academics have become embroiled in this muzzling of any conversation with Dhaka University issuing an end to even academic collaborations with Pakistani universities. This is a very troubling sign of what some analysts have referred to as the “narcissism of victimhood.”

On a personal level, this is very distressing for me and my family who have always viewed the pluralistic culture of Bangladesh with admiration. Some of my Punjabi mother’s best friends during adolescence days in Lahore in the 1940s and 1950s were Bengali. I grew up with fond stories of these friends and she has continued to maintain affectionate correspondence with them even after the parting of our two nations. I am sure there are multitudes of such stories of human connection and camaraderie that must be cherished and passed on to the next generation. Showing a spirit of forgiveness and magnanimity will only make Bangladesh stronger —  not weaker. It should also be noted that Bangladesh and India both agreed to the terms of clemency and forgiveness in the 1974 tripartite agreement whereby no further trials would be conducted.

Tenuous democracy has returned to both Pakistan and Bangladesh in the last few years. Yet old political families still control electoral politics in both countries. The families of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Mujibur Rahman — two political rivals in the erstwhile West and East Pakistans still have major political sway in both countries. Both politicians were tragically killed in their own divided lands by internal political forces, and possibly with external interference. The assassination of Sheikh Mujib and much of his family by assailants of his own ethnicity and many from his own army in 1975 was particularly bloody and left a bitter legacy for the nascent nation. Let us hope that the next generations will learn from the unfortunate fate that befell their forefathers. Pakistan and Bangladesh are now in a state of cold peace that needs a healing process to further a more functional and mutually productive relationship. A joint reconciliation commission (an important follow-up to the unilateral West Pakistani led Hamoodur Rahman Commission which also squarely criticized the Pakistani army) should perhaps be established by both countries which allows for a recognition of past injustices, but with a positive goal for moving towards a fruitful future together as two friendly nations. Tough issues such as reparations of funds lost in the Partition can be addressed through such a joint commission. With abject poverty and myriad other social and ecological problems confronting both countries, we must move beyond the momentary gratification of settling scores and work towards constructive reconciliation.

Some parts of this article are derived from material published earlier by the author

[Saleem Ali - University of Queensland (Australia)]

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8. PAKISTAN WAS BORN IN A STATE OF CONFUSION: HOODBHOY
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(The Times of India - Jan 10, 2016)

HYDERABAD: Pakistan is a nation that was born in confusion, is still in confusion but will move out of it in the future - hoped eminent nuclear physicist and author Pervez Hoodbhoy who has, for long, been a champion of the "secular state" notion. "Though I know that it is not welcome in my country and people who deviate from the notion that it is an Islamic state, are looked upon disapprovingly, I strongly feel that's what we need to head towards," Hoodbhoy reiterated.

He was speaking at a session on 'Reimagining Pakistan', organised as part of the ongoing Hyderabad Literary Festival. The Pakistani scholar was joined by Venkat Dhulipala, a US-based professor, historian and writer, on the dais.

The conversation about a secular Pakistan, took both the authors back in history - to the time of partition and Jinnah's fight for a separate "Muslim" nation. While Hoodbhoy spoke of Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a "confused" man whose idea of separating a Hindu nation from a Muslim one fell flat when "east Pakistan broke away in 1971" to form Bangladesh, Dhulipala, quoting from popular theories, painted the founder of Pakistan as a "secular person". "It has been a broadly accepted axiomatic truth that Jinnah wanted it (Pakistan) to be a European style nation state based on secular democracy. And if only he had stuck around longer, he would have been able to nurture that dream. Pakistan would have then emerged as a mirror image of India," the author of 'Creating a New Medina' stated.

Hoodbhoy politely disagreed. Elaborating on his views of Jinnah, the author said how "he didn't have a clue" about what he said or wanted. "On the one hand he spoke of all citizens - irrespective of religion - being equals and on the other he wanted Pakistan to be an Islamic State. Sadly, neither he nor anybody till date knows what an Islamic State is," the 66-year-old scholar said, pointing out to his co-panelist how his country, at one point, was indeed a mirror image of India.

"When I grew up in Karachi (he was born three years after partition) our neighbourhood comprised Parsis, Christians and Hindus. We all shared perfect goodwill - as was true of many other neighbourhoods. There were wine stores all over the city. It was actually just like Bombay (Mumbai)," Hoodbhoy reminisced, ruing how his country then "was very different from the country that it has become today".

Harping on the 1947 incident being an "unspeakable tragedy" that "separated people who at one time could live together in peace", the Pakistani writer sincerely prayed that Pakistan, one day, grows into a country where "every citizen has exactly the same right and privileges as of any other, irrespective of their religion, language, class or race".


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9. INDIA - ASSAM’S MINORITY REPORT: AS THE STATE READIES FOR POLLS, IT WOULD BE DANGEROUS TO ABUSE THE HIGHLY EMOTIVE ‘BANGLADESHI’ CARD (Sanjoy Hazarika)
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(The Times of India - January 12, 2016 | TOI Edit Page)

Assam’s minority report: As the state readies for polls, it would be dangerous to abuse the highly emotive ‘Bangladeshi’ card
by Sanjoy Hazarika

For five hours, the body of the 15-year-old girl hung on the barbed wire fence, blood streaking her clothes in the January chill, her hair hanging down in a macabre flow. She was shot while climbing over from the Indian side in West Bengal to Bangladesh and was going for her own wedding. Her father had managed to get over unscathed but the child, whose name was Felanee did not make it. That was in 2011. That Felanee was Bangladeshi was uncontested but the killing of an unarmed child sparked a furious outcry against shootings of civilians by BSF on the international boundary.

As a result of this incident, Indian border patrols were instructed not to fire live ammunition on suspected intruders (mind you, BSF failed to tackle the real infiltrators, those of armed groups who had skipped across for years, creating mayhem, until the Bangladesh government cracked down and handed over Ulfa, NDFB and Manipuri insurgent leaders to India). Nearly 1,000 persons had been killed in a 10 year period or one death every four days.

Those who died included Bangladeshis and Indians, cattle rustlers, petty criminals as well as people who were shot while going about their daily business. Cattle smuggling is a major business along the border; so is human trafficking. Criminal gangs which flourish on either side of the border are unlikely to do so without official connivance.

Illegal/informal migration from Bangladesh into India is substantial but there are other interlocking issues. I will focus on two here. One is the scale of the migration – most of the figures I have seen are simply assertions and ‘analysis’ based on assumptions. The other is the impact that such perceptions are having not just in eastern India, especially in Assam and West Bengal, but also across the country, with antipathy growing against Muslims of Bangla origin.

The latter is important especially as Assam is going to the polls in a few months. There appear to be few issues, barring the anti-incumbency factor against the Tarun Gogoi government. That is why one must be extremely careful that the highly emotive ‘Bangladeshi’ card is not used as a weapon of rhetoric.

As far as numbers are concerned, the truth is that decades after the ‘Bangladeshi’ campaign began in the late 1970s, few have been detected and deported despite many promises. Not even the Centre has a clear idea of how many illegal migrants are in India, not just Assam. For years there has been a sense of fatigue on the issue in Assam.

Thus, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi correctly chose statesmanship over local politics by settling the IndoBangladesh land boundary issue, a problem that had been unresolved for decades, he piquantly created a challenge for the Assam unit of his own party which had opposed the deal, claiming it would increase illegal migration.

Such complexity is deepened by sweeping media reports which posit a future where ‘Bangladeshi Muslims’ will be a majority in the state and ignore the fact that it has three major groups of Muslims: Assamese speaking Muslims whose ancestors go back to the 13th century, Muslims of Bangla origin, many of whose ancestors came over 100 years ago, and the post-1971 Bangladeshi Muslims. Indeed, this last point is also conveniently forgotten: those who moved from East Pakistan before 1971are not Bangladeshis.

Also ignored is that there is a high fertility and birth rate among Muslims groups in western Assam where large families are the norm. This is a key factor in demographics – especially if one considers the fact that Assam has smaller border with Bangladesh than Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram or West Bengal!

There is hostility to in-migration in Assam and the northeast. Most migrants – as the recent movement from Syria shows – seek safe havens. In addition to that, there is greater economic security as Bangladesh’s economy has grown to a near middle economy, making risky out-migration less attractive.

The combination of selective facts, selective memory and rhetoric can be a deadly combination as seen in 2012 after incidents in western Assam where both Bodos and Muslims were victims. Hate mongering triggered an exodus of lakhs of workers from the region, from places such as Bengaluru. Few locally there would make the distinction between a Bodo, a Naga, a Sikkimese or a Mizo. The ‘northeast’ is lumped together.

What happened in February 1983 should suffice as adequate warning about the vulnerability of this complex area: Over 36 years ago, Aasu launched a powerful anti-immigrant movement that brought successive state governments to their knees, stalled the economy, shut down educational institutions and markets and even blocked oil transportation; in February 1983, the central government forced an election in the state, in the teeth of opposition from Aasu and other anti-immigrant groups. In the ensuing violence, thousands were killed – no one still knows the final toll, but it is said to be well above 3,000 – including Muslims of Bengali origin, members of tribal groups, Assamese and other ethnics.

The worst massacre was at Nellie, which i covered as a young reporter, in which nearly 2,000 Muslim men, women and children were killed. The sight of hundreds of corpses, of infants, women, old men, huddled on dry rice fields are images which i can never forget. Those who died were certainly not Bangladeshis and had lived there for generations. Their survivors struggle futilely to get justice for the murdered and maimed.

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10. A SHORT NOTE ON THE SHORT HISTORY OF HINDUISM 
by Mukul Dube
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(scroll.in - 10 January 2016)

While it may be that the religious streams now grouped together under the rubric of Hinduism are ancient, the word 'Hindu' was not applied to them until relatively recently.

The word “Hindu” is now taken to mean a person who follows what is called the Hindu religion, or Hinduism. It was not always so.

In Sanskrit (as in the earlier Indo-Aryan), “sindhu” means a large body of water and its usage is applied to rivers and oceans. The word was turned into the proper name of the largest river in the region, now called the Indus. The terms “Hind” and “al Hind” came to be applied to the Indian sub-continent – the region across the river – by Persians and Arabs starting around the 6th century BCE. The geographic name was applied to ethnicity and culture also. It had nothing to do with religion until much later.

Proponents of the “Hindu” religion, in particular those who follow the ideology of Hindutva, claim that it is the world’s oldest. While it may be that the religious streams now grouped together under the rubric of Hinduism are ancient, the word “Hindu” was not applied to them until relatively recently by those who followed these religious streams or religions. In DN Jha’s essay “Looking for a Hindu identity”, he writes: “No Indians described themselves as Hindus before the fourteenth century” and “Hinduism was a creation of the colonial period and cannot lay claim to any great antiquity”.

In the 18th century, the European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus.

Jha continues: “The British borrowed the word ‘Hindu’ from India, gave it a new meaning and significance, [and] reimported it into India as a reified phenomenon called Hinduism.”

Well before this, Abd al-Malik Isami’s Persian work, Futuhu’s-salatin, composed in the Deccan in 1350, uses the word  ”hindi” to mean Indian in the ethno-geographical sense and the word “hindu” to mean “Hindu” in the sense of a follower of the Hindu religion”. But this usage remained uncommon.

The idea of tolerance

Every religion has always been hostile to other religions. I suggest that the well known hostility between Shaivism and Vaishnavism makes them religions and not “sects”, and that the distinction between these categories is without meaning.

These two dominant streams also showed hostility towards the many other religious streams that are now lumped together in “Hinduism”: and of course the blood-letting between Brahmanical religions on the one hand, and Buddhism and Jainism on the other, is too well known to require a mention.

It is absurd to describe Hinduism – or any other religion – as tolerant. The statement heard throughout the world of “I shall defend my religion to the death” clearly means that if the defender does not die in the fight, the attacker will. What did the various akharas of India do if not fight to the death, and what were they if not religious?

The confounding of the geographical name “Hindostan” or “Hindustan”, which is Persian in origin, with the synthetic compound “Hindu” + “sthana” is an example of how low people can stoop, whether out of ignorance or out of bloody-mindedness. The fact is that “Hindostan” was in use centuries before anyone thought to describe a religion as “Hindu”.

It is a delicious irony that those who seek to defend their “Hindu dharma”, primarily against Muslims, do not have the ghost of an idea that the very name of their religion came originally from a region which is now associated with Islam.

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11. INDIA: THE DRESS LAW FOR TEMPLES IS JUST ANOTHER TOOL TO REIN IN 'PROVOCATIVE' WOMEN
by TM Krishna
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(sroll.in - 9 January 2016)

The guardians of society are so obsessed with sexual propriety that they forget the gender and class discrimination involved in enforcing an apparel code.

As the new year dawned, Justice S Vaidyanathan’s prescribed dress code for Hindus visiting temples came into force in Tamil Nadu. These were new rules, amounting to an "apparel law". The “ruled” attire for men visiting temples, hereafter, is a shirt with pants or upper cloth with pyjamas or a dhoti, while women are to be in a sari, half sari or a churidhar with upper cloth. For children, the law is “any fully covered dress”. The order and the concept of an order on such a matter have been difficult enough to accept. But for me, what has been an uncomfortable reality is the fact that Hindus have more or less accepted this diktat, and find it most appropriate.

Dress codes as such are not new. “Customs and traditions,” according to the 1947 Tamil Nadu Temple Entry Authorisation Act, determine entry permissions. Temples in Kerala, for instance, enforce the rule that men need to be bare-chested and women are expected to wear a mundu.

Though the rules are directed towards all devotees, it is clear from the details that the target is the modern woman. It is more than obvious that all of these conditions are intrinsically misogynistic, further establishing the sexist notion of “distracting” women. This court order is no doubt another enforcement of puritanical notions set in place by one gentleman.

Determining what's appropriate

“Common” people have spoken up in justification of the words. The words in their statements supporting this order include “sanctity” and “modesty”, both only reiterating my understanding of the situation. All this brings to mind moving pictures from mythological Tamil films, of the pure and saintly Vishwamitra being lured by the seductress Menaka, dressed in a shimmering tightly-fitted dress highlighting her physical attributes. We often hear Pravachanakars turn these stories into metaphors, but even there the woman is the corrupter.

The fear is that unless there are rules in place, women would enter temples wearing “all kinds of odd clothes” such as shorts, mini-skirts and other Western clothes. These, it is presumed, will arouse the baser instincts in “poor, vulnerable men” and violate the sanctity of the place. Borne out of twisted traditional ideas of sexual control and violence, this is indeed an extension of the commonly held belief that women who “expose themselves” invite rape and molestation.

The 1947 Act referring to customs and traditions is against equality, which is the basic spirit of our Constitution. Almost every tradition and custom is a combination of patriarchy, caste and class. There is no doubt that the practice of men entering the sanctum without an upper cloth is at least in part linked to caste discrimination. In interior villages, even today we see lower caste men remove their loosely knotted headgear while speaking to a person of higher caste or class. If we do not question these cultural hangovers, how do we ensure equality? Therefore, to allow every temple to prepare its own set of guidelines according to its own traditions is no different from uppity clubs demanding that individuals are allowed only in shoes.

But what is “appropriate”, and how does one determine this? This is the difficult question that does not have a “right” answer. But let us step back further. What is our relationship with our bodies and sexuality? Enforced morality is borne out of our inability to embrace ourselves as sexual beings with intense desires that transcend the boundaries of socially created relationships. To avoid this emotional turbulence, we have “attired order” among other things. But the matter is not so simple, entangled in this are more complex barbed wires.

The man is seen as the uncontrollable sexual machine and by the laws of nature is corruptible. The woman exists to satisfy “his” needs and aware of his inherent weakness, a conniving enticer. When people speak of distraction in the context of the temple, they are referring to this entrapment that women are said to practice, whether by design or not being beside the point. And, therefore, clothing control is a tool to rein in the provocative woman and support the weak man.

Role of religion

Where does religion fit into all this? God is the perfect mechanism to establish this very idea and religious organisations across cultures play that role perfectly. Therefore, it is no surprise that we want to remove any idea of sexuality from the precincts of the temple, even though sculpted voluptuous women stare at us at every turn. Women being titillated by the carved broad shouldered, muscled dvarapalakas are of course of no consequence.

Ritual practices within the temple celebrate sex, but we should remember that sexual desire among the gods is pure while that which happens between homosapiens is neech. The tragedy is that this canvas is a creation of the powerful male (not gender-specific) who has altered the images at different times to suit his own convenience.

The larger issue is therefore far removed from the temple itself. What we have failed to create is a society where we respect our bodies and build relationships on trust, an environment where sexual desire is not suppressed and placed on the lowest step of nature, but absorbed into the understanding of each other irrespective of gender. Instead, we have made the woman the physically weak sexual object who provides pleasure to the insatiable man. And religion is one mechanism through which we manipulate her. I do not see any sanctity in this construction.

It is the same faith that we need in human interactions that should guide our relationship with god, and this bond will naturally determine how we present ourselves to him or her – not what men believe is appropriate or comfortable in their eyes. We stand before Rama, Kamakshi or Siva in a rapture that is as much about our own physical self, as it is about our belief. We admire Nataraja for the exquisite sexual imagery that human creativity bestowed upon him and surrender to the cosmic strength he gives us. This all-encompassing experience is the temple.

Varying degrees

Such controls are not confined to Hinduism. Islam and Christianity have their own customs and practices with regard to personal attire. I was once given a harsh shelling by a woman from the Islamic faith about the hijab. She convincingly argued that in every society, it is the man who determines the amount of skin that a woman can reveal, and therefore the hijab gives her the ability to take control of her body and deprive man of his control and consequently pleasure.

But what seems like a strong feminist statement ignores the fact the enforcement of the hijab is borne out of misogyny. There are enough cases of women being forced to wear the hijab by their families. Free will itself is not at all that liberated, and it high time we understand this nuance. And here I must say this: we the “majority Hindus” in this country constantly speak about the hijab as an oppressive tool, forgetting that Hinduism forces similar conditionalities on women in the form of the ghunghat, metti, and mangal sutra. There is also the unquestioningly accepted practice that menstruating women should not enter the temple. These are all abusive in nature, it is only the degrees that vary.

While the Acharyas, Mullahs, and other priests and judges are busy demanding sexual propriety, they ignore the class discriminations that choice of attire brings forth. No one seems to care that people flaunt the most expensive and branded clothes at the temple and create unfair comparison, jealousy, sadness and discrimination. The sight of legs affects us much more.

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12. BRITON TOLD HORSE PENIS REMARK 'COULD HAVE LED TO WAR' BETWEEN KYRGYZSTAN AND UK 
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Michael McFeat, now deported from Kyrgyzstan, says police told him sausage comparison could have sparked conflict

Press Association Scotland

Sunday 10 January 2016

A British mine worker thrown out of Kyrgyzstan for a remark about a local delicacy has claimed that police warned him he could have sent the country to war with the UK.

Scotsman Michael McFeat, who is now at home in Perthshire, told the Sunday Post newspaper he had been banned from entering the former Soviet country for five years.

McFeat was held by police after posting a picture on Facebook of Kyrgyz colleagues queuing for a chuchuk horsemeat sausage, with a caption comparing it to a horse’s penis.

He said he believed that the traditional dish was actually a horse’s penis, but the remark offended and angered his co-workers. He told the newspaper that he was smuggled out of the Kumtor gold mine after being informed that an “angry lynch mob” was coming to get him.

After a nine-hour journey, during which he claims the vehicle in which he was travelling was “rammed” by two cars, McFeat was arrested by police at Manas airport near Bishkek and held under racial hatred laws.

“The police told me my act could send Kyrgyzstan to war with the UK,” he said. After a court appearance and an apology, McFeat was driven to the airport to board a flight to Edinburgh.

“I was told there was a 17-page petition demanding I be jailed, and the mine went on strike after I left, so they were making an example of me,” McFeat told the Sunday Post. “I’ve always been up for a joke, but this was one time I wasn’t joking and it’s been blown out of proportion.”
 
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13. BOOK REVIEW: CHANDRA ON BALAGOPALAN, 'INHABITING 'CHILDHOOD': CHILDREN, LABOUR AND SCHOOLING IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA'
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 Sarada Balagopalan. Inhabiting 'Childhood': Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xi + 237 pp. $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-29642-8.

Reviewed by Nandini Chandra
Published on H-Childhood (January, 2016)
Commissioned by Meredith Bak

While popular media and literature have focused on the plight of the street child in the non-West, there are very few scholarly works devoted to the subject, at least in India. Indian childhood studies is a relatively new field, and the few volumes available are mostly about the history of a pedagogic childhood discourse, and thus devoted to a school-going population. Sarada Balagopalan’s Inhabiting Childhood is a very welcome contribution, since it reconstitutes the debate on childhood from the standpoint of subaltern children. It brings both a theoretical sophistication as well as ethnographic finesse to a topic that has mostly been relegated to dry policy works.

Its main argument is framed by an opposition between khatni (hard manual labor) and manush (becoming truly human/read bourgeois) as articulated by the NGO workers and the street children, the main protagonists of the book. Balagopalan argues that this imbrication of children in labor is the enduring gift of the colonial state, which not only preserved the greater logic of caste segregation through a rigid distinction between manual (object lessons) and mental (subject lessons) education, but also created further segmentations within the different populations of children for purposes of administration and accumulation.

While the colonial discourse set up a disciplinary logic, the postcolonial state was more invested in a developmental one. The book documents children’s lives through what it calls the interplay of “the imaginary waiting room of history”[1] and the present moment of arrival. This means that for the developmental state, universal formal schooling was a telos, which it hoped would be eventually reached via non-formal and more scattered provisions for laboring children. For Balagopalan, the RTI or the Right to Education Act of 2009 actualizes that telos of full immersion in schooling with disastrous consequences, through its imperative of a complete separation of children from labor.

The book critiques this imperative of full immersion both because the act fails to take cognizance of the concrete realities in which children actually perform labor, and because the immersion is in any case a class-based immersion, intended to rule out any exit from manual labor. Balagopalan contends counterintuitively that the apprenticeship on the street and the karkhana may be healthier options to the poor schooling on offer. Thus, far from facilitating the possibilities of becoming manush, the bogey of full immersion creates a false anxiety around a subaltern childhood marked by passivity, abjection, and loss. Furthermore, the project of full immersion takes no account of subaltern childhood’s real origins in the violence of colonial modernity.

In 2015 (after the book was published), a new amendment to the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act (1986) was proposed, allowing children to work in home-based enterprises such as beedi rolling, carpet weaving, lock and matchbox making, etc., after school hours. The amendment, even though motivated by a neoliberal logic, would seem to restore what the book deems right—that the prospects for subaltern children are better in this dual system than one in which the bogey of full immersion in schooling completely ruins any economic chances the children may have, along with the resourcefulness and confidence they learn from being members of the informal proletariat. This gives the lie to the moral panic in the popular media about reversing the spectacular school enrollments achieved via the RTI. However, the amendment (whether passed or not) makes us rethink the neoliberal moment as a kind of common sense different from the one posited in the book—one whose telos is not just separation of children from labor, but the full immersion of childhood in the abstract structures of labor that schooling in any case signifies. So the difference between khatni and manush is not an opposition of labor and schooling, but the contradictory unity of concrete and abstract forms of labor. The book then provokes the question of whether the neoliberal moment simply abolishes the contradiction leading to a one-dimensional society ruled by either manush or khatni, or whether it merely reveals the contradictory forms of labor as constitutive of a single unity.

By looking at childhood as a historically embedded practice, Balagopalan intends to force childhood out of its cultural framing—“its non-modern and autonomous vectors” (p. 50). Her approach is based on an understanding of postcolonial modernity that “‘differs’ from rather than reproduces with a historical lag the same coordinates of a western modernity” (p. 50). The space of postcoloniality is a heterogeneous one, marked by different thresholds of biological age across class, caste, and gender. In deference to the upper-caste native elites, the British allowed personal law to function outside the uniform civil code. The realm of childhood was mediated by voluntary and religious charity organizations, guided by ideas of service to the poor rather than any normative discourse of childhood. These indigenous actors were unable to conceive of the child in separation from the thick networks of sociality and kinship. According to Balagopalan, the present conjuncture of global arrival stands to threaten this flexible relation between formal structures and the informal networks. In other words, there is real danger of domination becoming hegemonic.

“Domination without hegemony” of course refers to a key concept in subaltern studies, specifically the title of its founder Ranajit Guha’s 1997 book in which the colonial state is characterized by relations of domination, in contrast to the hegemonic or persuasive techniques of the liberal Western state. Domination in this view frees the masses to have their independent standpoint less ideologically incorporated than hegemony might require. Inhabiting Childhood then expresses the encroachment of the liberal logic in the periphery as a danger that could erode this independence, and possibly the postcolonial theory according to which subalterns are still preserved from the structures of abstract domination. For instance, as we move into the last chapter of the book, the hegemonic idea of manush begins to undermine the pride the children felt in their khatni, making their labor the very source of their tyranny.

In the bulk of Balagopalan’s study however, the children retain their freewheeling subaltern standpoint. They negotiate with state networks which promise the goal of manush, and yet they identify with the counterpublic immersed in khatni as a means of augmenting the subsistence income of their families. Subaltern subjecthood is thus neither grounded in critique nor fully accepting of global structures such as the stipulations of the UNCRC. This uneasy inhabitation is read as a disruption of the hegemonic structures of rights-based childhood. Additionally, the kids’ attunement to the streets makes them open to dynamic opportunities in an economy characterized by informalization and precarity. In a way, their training on the streets is ideal for a future oriented to risk and speculation.

One crucial way in which “difference” (or the informal structure of postcolonial modernity) is preserved in the book is through the logic of governmentality. The rural dispossessed or surplus population—victims of globalization—are captured by the projects of the postcolonial state. This is akin to pulling them back into the folds of direct domination even as capitalist development sweeps across the countryside. In this move, the surplus population is identified as members of a need economy, rather than being determined by the abstract logic of capital. The book tries to nuance this position by showing the children as equally part of the double rationales of economy and politics. While this evokes the socially dense and complicated narrative of subaltern lives, it fails to show the mutual constitution of planning in accumulation and vice versa. This is not simply about demonstrating how the state is in cahoots with capital, but grasping the grounding of the political in economic categories of value and commodity.

Balagopalan is eager to correct the view of a postcolonial reading simplistically identified with cultural incommensurability or precapitalist remnants, by showing how the standpoint of child labor in the non-West has valuable lessons for the advanced centers of capital, also mired in conditions of precarity and poverty. The problem, however, is the irreconcilability of the privileged analytic of “difference,” grounded in the language of an uneasy inhabitation, with one that rigorously thinks through the concrete mediations of children’s lives. In the former analytic, the children’s sense of responsibility (“the call of the other”) towards their biological and fictive families is dubbed a sensibility, prior to intent or reason, and located outside the realm of sovereign subjectivity. However within a social critique adequate to the totality of capitalism, the subject is far from sovereign. Instead, it is a function of its fractious sociality, and hence able to grasp itself within its limiting social context. This opens up the possibility of solidarity as a critical relation with fellow human beings rather than affirming their collective brotherhood. The sobering aspect of a postcolonial critique lies in its rejection of any unmediated standpoint. But the fact of the relations being mediated is held up as an object of desire, rather than a possibility for overcoming. The uneasiness is to be preserved, almost to the point of fetishization. This paradoxically echoes the managerial logic epitomized in the neoliberal moment where the actual immersion in the ideal of manush or mass schooling never comes to pass. It is always aborted.

All over the world, the neoliberal state’s austerity measures, its refusal to pay the costs of reproduction have effectively pushed workers to fall back on their own resources, and on the labor of women and children. This might have the default happy consequence of creating bonds of solidarity and reciprocity, but can we really make a virtue out of this default sociality? Unless the forces of sociality are mobilized for a transformative goal, we have to be very careful about celebrating what is really an enforced state of self-subsistence. While the so-called platform children’s relations of responsibility “reduce the precarity” (p. 145), they are able to do so by agreeing to remain permanently within the structures of precarity. The book is, at times, too appreciative of the children’s canny acceptance of police beatings and exploitation within a benevolent familial idiom.

While there is camaraderie and cooperation between the different inhabitants of the street, this “responsibility” or “call of the other” (contra duty) is translated into a familial idiom. Surely, this has an ideological underpinning since the nation marks the familial as a way of controlling and privatizing common resources, thwarting the development of a proletarian consciousness. Despite Balagopalan’s admirably nonsentimental tone, her theory pushes her paradoxically in the direction of romanticizing the street child’s pragmatic mastery of the street. Although this grasp of the street child’s combination of “the mimetic with the market value” (p. 95) is perhaps the strongest part of the book, it does not go beyond an affirmation of this logic. For instance, noting the children’s admiration for those among them confident enough to spend money, she says “small signs of consumption provided a crucial foothold to continue believing” (p. 97). This is very perceptive, and yet it keeps us at an intellectual standstill.

The concluding chapter on the RTI Act finishes with a plea to keep alive the liberal promise of a common education instead of settling on training to produce second-tier citizens. This is highly welcome, but slightly at odds with the postcolonial provenance of the rest of the book in which “common” (with its invariably false promise of universal equality) is suspect, and needs to be negotiated via a more communitarian understanding. Despite Balagopalan’s disavowal, the reciprocal relations produced within a matrix of accommodation and critique is akin to the moral economy of the peasant who would rather live below subsistence than push contradictions to their logical conclusion. What matters is surviving creatively and with dignity, which it appears, they manage to do anyway.

Since in postcolonial theory, the children are already practicing an everyday communism by “crafting alternate networks of economic and emotional sustenance” (p. 21), there is no need of a transformative agenda. While Balagopalan’s assessment of the children’s complex navigation between consent and coercion is astute, her chosen theoretical model betrays the radical, emancipatory possibilities of where her observations might have gone.

Despite its failure to recognize the unity of the abstract and concrete aspects of the children’s labor, Balagopalan’s ethnography is tremendously rich for allowing the normative understanding of childhood to be questioned in terms of these broad categories. The material circumstances of the street kids, their conditions of labor, and their expectations from education and life are evoked through textured networks of reciprocity and friendship, at odds with the formal orthodoxies within which their lives are framed, namely the ethical imperative to be at school. The book is a testimony to the resourcefulness and resilience of street children in the postcolony, the tactile pleasures of scavenging and communing—the “thrill of finding an unexpected object” (p. 94) or “being alive to any lucky break” (p. 96)—and at the same time, the location of these micro-worlds within abstract and oppressive dynamics. Readers will find it a very satisfying and evocative contribution to South Asian childhood studies.

Note

[1]. A concept introduced by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 

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14. COP21: PARIS DEAL FAR TOO WEAK TO PREVENT DEVASTATING CLIMATE CHANGE, ACADEMICS WARN
by Tom Bawden
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(The Independent [UK] 9 January 2016)

Exclusive: Some of the world’s top climate scientists have launched a blistering attack on the deal

'The hollow cheering of success at the end of the Paris Agreement proved yet again that people will hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest' Getty

The Paris Agreement to tackle global warming has actually dealt a major setback to the fight against climate change, leading academics will warn.

The deal may have been trumpeted by world leaders but is far too weak to do help prevent devastating harm to the Earth, it is claimed.

In a joint letter to The Independent, some of the world’s top climate scientists launch a blistering attack on the deal, warning that it offers “false hope” that could ultimately prove to be counterproductive in the battle to curb global warming.

The letter, which carries eleven signatures including professors Peter Wadhams and Stephen Salter, of the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, warns that the Paris Agreement is dangerously inadequate.

Because of the Paris failure, the academics say the world’s only chance of saving itself from rampant global warming is a giant push into controversial and largely untested geo-engineering technologies that seek to cool the planet by manipulating the Earth’s climate system.

The scientists, who also include University of California professor James Kennett, argues that “deadly flaws” in the deal struck in the French capital last month mean it gives the impression that global warming is now being properly addressed when in fact the measures fall woefully short of what is needed to avoid runaway climate change.

This means that the kind of extreme action that needs to be taken immediately to have any chance of avoiding devastating global warming, such as massive and swift cuts to worldwide carbon emissions – which only fell by about 1 per cent last year – will not now be taken, they say.

“The hollow cheering of success at the end of the Paris Agreement proved yet again that people will hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. What they disregarded were the deadly flaws lying just beneath its veneer of success,” the academics write in the the letter, also signed by Dr Alan Gadian of the University of Leeds and Professor Paul Beckwith of the University of Ottowa in Canada.

“What people wanted to hear was that an agreement had been reached on climate change that would save the world while leaving lifestyles and aspirations unchanged. The solution it proposes is not to agree on an urgent mechanism to ensure immediate cuts in emissions, but to kick the can down the road.”

The authors don’t dispute the huge diplomatic achievement of the Paris Agreement – getting 195 world leaders to sign up to a global warming target of between 1.5C to 2C and pledging action to cut carbon emissions.

But they say the actions agreed are far too weak to get anywhere close to that target. Furthermore, the pledges countries have made to cut their carbon emissions are not sufficiently binding to ensure they are met, while the Paris Agreement will not force them to “rachet” them up as often as they need to.

Of even greater concern, they say, is the lack of dramatic immediate action that was agreed to tackle global warming. The Paris Agreement only comes into force in 2020 – by which point huge amounts of additional CO2 will have been pumped into the atmosphere. The signatories claim this makes it all but impossible to limit global warming to 2C, let alone 1.5C.

“The Paris Agreement’s heart was in the right place but the content is worse than inept. It was a real triumph for international diplomacy and sends a strong message that the sceptics have lost their case and that the science is correct on climate change. The rest is little more than fluff and risks locking in failure,” said Professor Kevin Anderson of Manchester University, who has not signed the letter but agrees with its argument.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge and a signatory of the letter, said the prospects for curbing global warming following the Paris Agreement are now so dire that he advocates a charge into geo-engineering – not something he recommends lightly. “Other things being equal I’m not a great fan of geo-engineering but I think it absolutely necessary given the situation we’re in. It’s a sticking plaster solution. But you need it because looking at the world, nobody’s instantly changing their pattern of life,” Prof Wadhams said.

Pumping huge amounts of water spray into clouds to make them bigger and brighter so that they reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere – known as Marine Cloud Brightening – offers the best geo-engineering prospect, he said.

Geo-engineering technologies – which also envisage putting giant mirrors in space or whitening the surface of the ocean to deflect incoming solar radiation back into space – are controversial because of fears that they are technically demanding, would be extremely expensive while interfering with the climate system could have damaging unintended consequences for the planet.

A spokesman for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change  said: “The Paris Agreement is a resounding declaration of political intent by all the world’s nations. We are fully confident that countries are not sitting on their haunches waiting until 2020 before doing anything,” he said. 

The letter

The hollow cheering of success at the end of COP21 agreement proved yet again that people will hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. What people wanted to hear was that an agreement had been reached on climate change that would save the world while leaving lifestyles and aspirations unchanged. 

What they disregarded were the deadly flaws lying just beneath its veneer of success.  As early as the third page of the draft agreement is the acknowledgment that its CO2 target won’t keep the global temperate rise below 2 deg C, the level that was once set as the critical safe limit. The solution it proposes is not to agree on an urgent mechanism to ensure immediate cuts in emissions, but to kick the can down the road by committing to calculate a new carbon budget for a 1.5 deg C temperature increase that can be talked about in 2020.

Given that we can’t agree on the climate models or the CO2 budget to keep temperatures rises to 2 deg C, then we are naïve to think we will agree on a much tougher target in five years when, in all likelihood, the exponentially increasing atmospheric CO2 levels mean it will be too late.

More ominously, these inadequate targets require mankind to do something much more than cut emissions with a glorious renewable technology programme that will exceed any other past human endeavour. They also require carbon to be sucked out the air. The favoured method is to out-compete the fossil fuel industry by providing biomass for power stations. This involves rapidly growing trees and grasses faster than nature has ever done on land we don’t have, then burning it in power stations that will capture and compress the CO2 using an infrastructure we don’t have and with technology that won’t work on the scale we need and to finally store it in places we can’t find.  To maintain the good news agenda, all of this was omitted from the agreement.

The roar of devastating global storms has now drowned the false cheer from Paris and brutally brought into focus the extent of our failure to address climate change. The unfortunate truth is that things are going to get much worse. The planet’s excess heat is now melting the Arctic Ice cap like a hot knife through butter and is doing so in the middle of winter. Unless stopped, this Arctic heating will lead to a rapid release of the methane clathrates from the sea floor of the Arctic and herald the next phase of catastrophically intense climate change that our civilisation will not survive.

The time for the wishful thinking and blind optimism that has characterised the debate on climate change is over. The time for hard facts and decisions is now.  Our backs are against the wall and we must now start the process of preparing for geo-engineering. We must do this in the knowledge that its chances of success are small and the risks of implementation are great.  

We must look at the full spectrum of geoengineering. This will cover initiatives that increase carbon sequestration by restoration of rain forests to the seeding of oceans. It will extend to solar radiation management techniques such as artificially whitening clouds and, in extremis, replicating the aerosols from volcanic activity. It will have to look at what areas that we selectively target, such as the methane emitting regions of the Arctic and which areas we avoid.

The high political and environmental risks associated with this must be made clear so that it is never used as an alternative to making the carbon cuts that are urgently needed. Instead cognisance of these must be used to challenge the narrative of wishful thinking that has infested the climate change talks for the past twenty one years and which reached its zenith with the CO21 agreement. In today’s international vacuum on this, it is imperative that our government takes a lead. 

Signed by

Professor Paul Beckwith, University of Ottowa 
Professor Stephen Salter – Edinburgh University
Professor Peter Wadhams – Cambridge University
Professor James Kennett of University of California.
Dr Hugh Hunt – Cambridge University
Dr. Alan Gadian -Senior Scientist, Nation Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, University of Leeds
Dr. Mayer Hillman - Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Institute of the Policy Studies Institute
Dr. John Latham – University of Manchester
Aubrey Meyer  – Director, Global Commons Institute.
John Nissen -  Chair Arctic Methane Emergency Group
Kevin Lister - Author of "The Vortex of Violence and why we are losing the war on climate change"

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15. REFUGEES TO BE GIVEN LESSONS IN 'WESTERN SEXUAL NORMS' IN NORWAY
by Jake Alden-Falconer
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(The Independent, 9 January 2016)

The classes aim to use role-playing scenarios to address cultural differences regarding women

Norway is offering non-European asylum seekers classes in Western sexual norms, in a bid to prevent violence against women.

The question of integration has become more urgent throughout northern Europe after New Year’s Eve, where more than 100 women were reportedly sexually assaulted or robbed in Cologne, Germany. Federal authorities have identified 18 asylum seekers within the 31 suspects linked to the attacks.

With more than a million asylum seekers arriving in Europe this year, a growing number of European politicians have leaned towards offering coaching in social mores. Many were previously reluctant to suggest that men from more conservative societies would misinterpret women’s behaviour, for fear of stigmatising migrants as potential rapists and playing into the hands of anti-immigrant politicians.

Norway, who first introduced the controversial classes, has now seen its model followed in countries across Europe.

In October, Denmark’s parliament debated efforts to teach national attitudes to sex and consent as part of compulsory language courses after three asylum seekers from Eritrea were arrested for allegedly raping a 25-year-old Eritrean woman in Hjørring  in October.

On Friday, Belgium announced that courses on ‘respect for women’ for non-European migrants and refugees would become obligatory in the coming weeks.

Linda Hagen of Hero, the company that runs 40 per cent of Norway's reception centres for refugees, said the emphasis of the classes had been placed on group discussion and the exchange of ideas, rather than on a teacher instructing students. “Our aim is to help asylum seekers avoid mistakes as they discover Norwegian culture," she explained to AFP.

"There's no single cultural code to say what is good or bad behaviour because we want a free society," she said. "There has to be tolerance for attitudes that may be seen as immoral by some traditional or religious norms."

Hero first launched a course on cultural differences regarding women after what Hagen described as a “wave of rapes”, committed mostly by foreigners in the south-western town of Stavanger between 2009 and 2011.

The courses take place at reception centres as part of a wider introductory programme to Norway – aiming to address the problem of sexual assault through discussion of concrete examples.

"It could be an 18-year-old guy who says he's surprised by the interest some Norwegian girls are showing in him. He assumes they want to sleep with him," Hagen explained.

"So the group leader will ask him: Who are these girls? Where do you meet them? How do you know it is sex they want? Not all women in Norway are the same," she said. Norwegians are likely to be assigned the role of sexual predator in these scenarios: “We turn the roles around a bit because there are rapists in all ethnic groups," Hagen said.

But while many have condemned the policy for stigmatising refugees, far-right groups said the courses didn't go far enough.

"This programme can only have a short-term effect, given the attitudes abroad where women are oppressed," said Hege Storhaug of Human Rights Service, an anti-immigration group. "To put an end to these attitudes, immigration has to first be restricted, then you have to concentrate on the newly-arrived immigrants and the second generation to assimilate them to our basic values, such as gender equality," she said.
  
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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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