SACW - 15 March 2016 | Bangladesh: An Editor vs a Paranoid Government / Sri Lanka: hate speech / Pakistan: Killer's Funeral & his Shrine / India: Hysterical Patriotism & Assault on Activists / Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 15 March 2016 - No. 2887 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Social media hate speech during the 2015 elections - A study by CPA
2. Bangladesh: Editor, Mahfuz Anam of The Daily Star Faces the Wrath of a Paranoid Government | Tahmima Anam
3. Pakistan: My Father's Killer's Funeral | Aatish Taseer
4. Pakistan: Honour Killings or premeditated murder
5. India: BJP fuels patriotism hysteria and makes 'Nationals' and 'Anti-National'
6. India: Hindutva onslaught on Educational Spaces
7. India: Use of Private TV Network Directly Targeting Individuals 
8. Video: Megha Pansare speaks of the battle for justice following assassinations of the rationalists Dhabolkar, Pansare and Kalburgi in India
9. India: State Patronage towards godmen an assault on republican and secular values | Harish Khare
10. India: CNDP Press Release On The Leak In Kakrapar Nuclear Power Plant in Gujarat
11. India: PADS appeals to all democratic citizens, student org’s, women’s rights groups and organisations of labour in India to unite against the RSS/BJP government
12. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - Battle for the Soul of India (Prem Shankar Jha)
  - India: From shorts to pants - India’s 91-year old Hindu nationalist group is changing (Rama Lakshmi )
  - India: Lower house of Parliament Passes Bill to amend Enemy Property Act - new reports and resources
  - India: The ‘enemy’ within - RSS targets dissenters in universities (Editorial, The Tribune)
  - Announcement: Lawyers Convention in Defence of Democracy, Pluralism and Rule of Law (16 March 2016, New Delhi)
  - India: Gandhian Sarva Seva Sangh Call for 36 Hour Fast for Peace and Harmony 5-6 April 2016 in New Delhi
  - India - 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots: A strategic omission of inquiry (Mohammad Ali)
  - India: Free speech? These designers are Hindu Janajagruti Samiti's latest victims (Durga M Sengupta)
  - India Under Modi: 'Lawyers Collective' being targeted, responds to allegations of violating FCRA
  - India: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's proximity to BJP’s Modi Govt and danger of growing influence of religious cults on governments | Jyotirmaya Sharma
  - India - Maharashtra: Three wheeler auto rickshaws drivers at risk in Bombay after Raj Thackeray, the right wing chauvinist calls to target immigrant workers
  - India: Swadeshi Indology and the Destruction of Sanskrit (Sanjay Krishnan and Teena Purohit)
  - India: The Creation of Nationalist Hysteria - How Zee TV fuelled state action against JNU students (The Hoot)
  - India: A tale of two communalisms (Nissim Mannathukkaren)
  - India's Zee TV network openly targets and incites people against poet in vile Language
  - India: Taking back our universities - Resistance from below (Akeel Bilgrami) 


::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
13. Nepal's Bleeding Edge: Letter from the Terai Plains | Hanna Hindstrom
14. India: Witch hunt against activists & lawyers in Chattissgarh Continues [URLs]
15. Sedition law in Bangladesh [any different in India or Pakistan ?]
16. Recognising many months of ‘darkness’ in Sri Lanka | Kishali Pinto Jayawardene
17. An Afghan girl’s story of abduction and rape is testing an incoherent justice system | Tim Craig
18. Making of a shrine in Pakistan | Ayesha Siddiqa
19. Pakistan’s Prime Minister is Defying The Clerics — Very Carefully | Tim Craig 
20. It’s high time to change India’s sedition laws | Meenakshi Ganguly
21. Memory versus history | William Milam
22. Google as a Fortune Teller The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism | Shoshana Zuboff

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1. SRI LANKA: SOCIAL MEDIA HATE SPEECH DURING THE 2015 ELECTIONS - A STUDY BY CPA
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The 2015 Parliamentary Election witnessed social media as a key tool for political campaigning with expressions of hateful and defamatory material targeting candidates
http://sacw.net/article12467.html

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2. BANGLADESH: EDITOR, MAHFUZ ANAM OF THE DAILY STAR FACES THE WRATH OF A PARANOID GOVERNMENT | Tahmima Anam
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I scrolled through a series of videos and images. The first one was titled “Confession,” and featured a newspaper editor being harangued by a talk-show host. Further down, I saw a photograph of a crowd burning an effigy of this man. There was another, a Photoshopped image of the man with devil’s horns affixed to his head. Then there were the news stories, the tally of lawsuits against him rising to 30, 40, 70 cases. Finally, there was a statement from the prime minister of Bangladesh: The editor should resign and face trial. The editor is my father, Mahfuz Anam, and the newspaper is The Daily Star, the English-language paper he co-founded 25 years ago.
http://sacw.net/article12484.html

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3. PAKISTAN: MY FATHER'S KILLER'S FUNERAL | Aatish Taseer
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An estimated 100,000 people — a crowd larger than the population of Asheville, N.C. — poured into the streets of Rawalpindi to say farewell to Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. It was among the biggest funerals in Pakistan's history, alongside those of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of the nation, and Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, who was assassinated in 2007. But this was no state funeral; it was spontaneous and it took place despite a media blackout.
http://www.sacw.net/article12499.html

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4. PAKISTAN: HONOUR KILLINGS OR PREMEDITATED MURDER
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It is ironic how one has to describe a crime of the worst kind with a word like ‘honour'. Thus when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif says “there's no honour in honour killing”, it shows a way forward to the multitude of women who are subject to retrogressive traditions and customs that keep them slaves to a misogynistic society.
http://www.sacw.net/article12489.html

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5. India: BJP peddles a patriotism hysteria and makes 'Nationals' and 'Anti-National'
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THE JINGOISTIC FRENZY BEING WHIPPED UP BY THE BJP CAN DO THE NATION SERIOUS HARM
Finish off the deshdrohi (traitor)! This is the BJP's new war cry. And the Opposition is reportedly being put on the defensive in the small towns of Uttar Pradesh. This is dangerous, primarily because the logical conclusion of jingoism is war.
http://www.sacw.net/article12488.html

INDIA: BJP'S BRAND OF PATRIOTISM
It is amusing the party whose contribution to making of the Indian nation is zero, is accusing others of anti-nationalism!
http://sacw.net/article12486.html
  
INDIA: A NOTE ON "ANTI-NATIONAL"
by Mukul Dube
In accepted usage a “national” is a person who belongs to a nation, a citizen; but “anti-national” has nothing to do with this. [...] The Hindu Right and its flunkeys in the media have been using the expression. Any person who goes against the Hindu Right in any way is labelled “anti-national”. In its meaninglessness the expression is like “pseudo secular”, which until today has not been defined by those who fling it about with such abandon. It is no more than a term of abuse which has nothing to do with reality.
http://sacw.net/article12480.html

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6. INDIA: HINDUTVA ONSLAUGHT ON EDUCATIONAL SPACES
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INDIA: SANGH PARIVAR'S WISH - EDUCATION FOR HINDUISATION | C.P. Bhambri
Indian universities are at a crossroads because the Hindutva project of education, as defined and interpreted by the ideologues of the Sangh Parivar, cannot be pursued under the present system. For the Government, education is an instrument of Hinduisation of society & polity.
http://www.sacw.net/article12495.html

INDIA: THE ASSAULT ON JNU - THE BIGGER PICTURE | Romila Thapar
There is by now little doubt that we are currently being governed by those that seem to have an anti-intellectual mind-set. This spells trouble for universities that are concerned with high standards of teaching and research.
http://sacw.net/article12482.html

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7. INDIA: USE OF PRIVATE TV TO TARGET INDIVIDUALS
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A TV NETWORK DIRECTLY TARGETING INDIVIDUALS & INCITING PUBLIC SENTIMENT IS A DANGEROUS TREND - A STATEMENT BY CONCERNED CITIZENS
It is quite shocking that Zee news has targeted well known academics who are also widely respected public figures. Over the past week, Nivedita Menon — a feminist political scientist, writer, and translator — and most recently, Gauhar Raza — scientist, poet, film maker— have been labeled as "desh drohi" 'anti-national' by the channel.
http://sacw.net/article12491.html

[related: 

FEMINISTS IN SOLIDARITY WITH NIVEDITA MENON
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/feminists-in-solidarity-with-nivedita-menon/

GAUHAR RAZA SPEAKS REGARDING THE ATTACK ON HIS POEM ON FASCISM: VIDEO INTERVIEW BY PROF APOORVANAND [IN HINDUSTANI]
https://youtu.be/_QZrO8kGqWM ]

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8. VIDEO: MEGHA PANSARE SPEAKS OF THE BATTLE FOR JUSTICE FOLLOWING ASSASSINATIONS OF THE RATIONALISTS DHABOLKAR, PANSARE AND KALBURGI IN INDIA
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Megha Pansare speaking in hindi about the long delay in investigation of killings of rationalists, Dhabolkar, Pansare and Kalburgi at the sit-in organised by Maharashtra Andhshraddha Nirmulan Samiti at Jantar Mantar [New Delhi] on February 12th, 2016
http://sacw.net/article12485.html

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9. INDIA: STATE PATRONAGE TOWARDS GODMEN AN ASSAULT ON REPUBLICAN AND SECULAR VALUES | Harish Khare
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As a nation, we are overly blessed with a surfeit of deras, maths, ashrams and their cultic “masters” — and, each one seeks to bend the authority to his or her holy advantage. Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Shankar have become more visible — some would say have become an eyesore — only because of a in-your-face flaunting of their political connections.
http://www.sacw.net/article12503.html

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10. INDIA: CNDP PRESS RELEASE ON THE LEAK IN KAKRAPAR NUCLEAR POWER PLANT IN GUJARAT
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We are concerned about the leak in the Primary Heat Transfer System (PHTS) of Unit-1 of the Kakrapar Nuclear Power Station in Gujarat.
http://www.sacw.net/article12498.html

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11. INDIA: PADS APPEALS TO ALL DEMOCRATIC CITIZENS, STUDENT ORG’S, WOMEN’S RIGHTS GROUPS AND ORGANISATIONS OF LABOUR IN INDIA TO UNITE AGAINST THE RSS/BJP GOVERNMENT
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Appeal from People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism released on 4 March 2016
http://sacw.net/article12475.html

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12. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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  - India: Gauhar Raza speaks regarding the attack on his Poem on Fascism: Video interview by Prof Apoorvanand [in Hindustani] [in Hindustani]
  - Battle for the Soul of India (Prem Shankar Jha)
  - A non-authoritarian education, fulfilling sexuality and companionship, psychological and physical therapy (Andreas Peglau)
  - Reading Moravia's 'The Conformist' in India today Jairus Banaji (Sabrang India)
  - India: From shorts to pants - India’s 91-year old Hindu nationalist group is changing (Rama Lakshmi )
  - India: Lower house of Parliament Passes Bill to amend Enemy Property Act - new reports and resources
  - India: The ‘enemy’ within - RSS targets dissenters in universities (Editorial, The Tribune)
  - Announcement: Lawyers Convention in Defence of Democracy, Pluralism and Rule of Law (16 March 2016, New Delhi)
  - India: Gandhian Sarva Seva Sangh Call for 36 Hour Fast for Peace and Harmony 5-6 April 2016 in New Delhi
  - India: I’ve met Bharat Mata, but am scared of her new avtaar
  - India: Modi Government’s AYUSH Ministry has said that as per government policy, it does not recruit Muslims
  - 'Who is National, Who is Anti-national' JNU's Prof Amita Singh knows it all - A report in the Hindi paper has a report with her full audio interview
  - India - 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots: A strategic omission of inquiry (Mohammad Ali)
  - While the Baba Fart of of Living was doing his mega show screwing up yamuna in Delhi there was a another mega show in Uttrakhand with other gurus swearing by preservation
  - India: Free speech? These designers are Hindu Janajagruti Samiti's latest victims (Durga M Sengupta)
  - India: [aag kuredoge, chingari daaman tak to aayegi...]. Hindi text from a ghazal by poet Gauhar Raza that is under attack for being anti national
  - India Under Modi: 'Lawyers Collective' being targeted, responds to allegations of violating FCRA
  - India: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's proximity to BJP’s Modi Govt and danger of growing influence of religious cults on governments | Jyotirmaya Sharma
  - India - Maharashtra: Three wheeler auto rickshaws drivers at risk in Bombay after Raj Thackeray, the right wing chauvinist calls to target immigrant workers
  - India: Swadeshi Indology and the Destruction of Sanskrit (Sanjay Krishnan and Teena Purohit)
  - India: Vandana Shiva, the diva on international environmentalists circuit and Sri Sri the hot air guru to rub shoulders in mega World Culture event on banks of polluted yamuna river
  - India: The Creation of Nationalist Hysteria - How Zee TV fuelled state action against JNU students (The Hoot)
  - India: A tale of two communalisms (Nissim Mannathukkaren)
  - India's Zee TV network openly targets and incite people against poet in vile Language
  - India: Taking back our universities - Resistance from below (Akeel Bilgrami) 

-> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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13. NEPAL'S BLEEDING EDGE: LETTER FROM THE TERAI PLAINS
by Hanna Hindstrom
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(Foreign Affairs, March 10, 2016) 
Letter From Nepal

In early February, a group of local Nepalis stormed a blockade that had been clogging a crucial border pass with India for four months. The event marked a pause in a six-month spasm of unrest throughout southern Nepal that brought the country to its knees and crippled an economy that was already reeling after last year’s deadly earthquakes. The blockade had been erected in September 2015 by members of the Madhesi ethnic group, which is centered on the hotly-contested Terai plains between India and Nepal, and has long accused Kathmandu of treating its members as outsiders. When, in defiance of their Madhesi protest leaders, disgruntled locals and businessmen ripped apart the crudely built structure with their hands, it became clear that the blockade had been rejected by the very people it was intended to help.

A month after the blockade’s end, tensions are still high as the Madhesi community struggles to reconcile both with the central government and itself. The Madhesi, a marginalized minority with cultural and linguistic ties to neighboring India, has been fighting for greater rights and recognition in Nepal for decades. And when Nepal’s central government proposed a new constitution in June 2015 that marginalized the group by [. . .].
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/nepal/2016-03-10/nepals-bleeding-edge

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14. INDIA: WITCH HUNT AGAINST ACTIVISTS & LAWYERS IN CHATTISSGARH CONTINUES [URLS]
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A sordid record in Chhattisgarh - Editorial, The Hindu - February 25, 2016
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/adivasis-killlings-in-chhattisgarh-a-sordid-record/article8276829.ece

Soni Sori's sister, brother-in-law picked up by police, say lawyers
(Daily News & Analysis - 11 March 2016) 
https://tinyurl.com/zvd948q

“This Kind Of Terror, We Have Not Seen Before”: An Interview With The Lawyers Evicted From Bastar In Chhattisgarh
by Krishn Kaushik and Atul Dev (Caravan Magazine, 9 March 2016)
https://tinyurl.com/jsfhk28

Find us a house, we are also victims of war: Hounded Bastar lawyers
by Paramita Ghosh (Hindustan Times, New Delhi - 12 March 2016)
https://tinyurl.com/h6cut3c

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15. SEDITION LAW IN BANGLADESH [ANY DIFFERENT IN INDIA OR PAKISTAN ?]
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via The Daily Star (Bangladesh)
Compiled by Law Desk

The Penal Code, 1860 in its section 124A defines the offence of sedition. According to this section, anyone who by spoken or written words, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the lawful Government can be accused of committing sedition.

The punishment prescribed varies from imprisonment up to three years to life imprisonment, with fine or without it.

It is to mention that the expression "disaffection" under this section includes disloyalty and all feelings of enmity. 

However, any comment expressing disapprobation of the measures of the Government with a view to obtain their alteration by lawful means, without exciting or attempting to excite hatred, contempt or disaffection, does not constitute an offence under this section.

Even comments expressing disapprobation of the administrative or other action of the Government without exciting or attempting to excite hatred, contempt or disaffection, do not constitute an offence under this section.

Section 108 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898 provides an option to have

security for good behaviour from persons disseminating seditious matter. According to this section, the District Magistrate, or any other Executive Magistrate specially empowered by the Government, may require any person – accused of disseminating of any seditious matter the publication of which is punishable under section 123A or section 124A of the Penal Code – to show cause why he should not be ordered to execute a bond, with or without sureties, for his good behaviour for such period, not exceeding one year, as the Magistrate thinks fit to fix.
ADVERTISEMENT

However, no proceedings can be taken under this section against the editor, proprietor, printer of publisher of any publication registered under, and edited, printed and published in conformity with, the provisions of the Printing Presses and Publications (Declaration and Registration) Act, 1973, with reference to any matters contained in such publication except by the order or under the authority of the Government or some officer empowered by the Government in this behalf.

Source: bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd

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16. RECOGNISING MANY MONTHS OF ‘DARKNESS’ IN SRI LANKA
by Kishali Pinto Jayawardene
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(The Sunday Times, March 13, 2016)

A bold initiative took place this week when a collective of Sri Lankan women from the north, east, south and up-country areas publicly announced their decision to boycott International Women’s Day.

Putting specific demands forward
Declaring March 2016 as a ‘month of darkness,’ specific demands were outlined by the Womens’ Action Network to Sri Lanka’s political leaders. Calling upon State recognition of violence against women and children as amounting to a ‘national crisis,’ legal and policy reforms to ensure speedy trial were named as a priority.

Special teams with the requisite competence and skills were requested to be established to expedite long pending cases in the Attorney General’s Department together with sufficient resources allocated for preventative measures. It was observed that the National Task Force on Violence against Women established last year as a ‘yahapalanaya’ (good governance) move should be strengthened and provided with necessary supervisory powers to oversee the process. This recommendation has particular import given the plethora of bodies in this country that have overlapping mandates and sweeping objectives but very little political or financial muscle to back those grandiose plans up.

A guiding standard of victim centeredness to be adhered to by judicial, law enforcement and service providing officers (including Judicial Medical Officers) to secure the safety, protection and dignity of women and ensure equal access to available services was also stressed.

Political will continues to be absent
At first glance, the boycott call is something out of the ordinary. Marking March 8th each year has deteriorated to a woefully mundane affair, attended by the fulsome speeches of politicians in the full glare of television cameras. This is accompanied by the wastage of public funds not only on the pomp and ceremony of useless events but on promotional advertisements announcing the commencement of yet another womens’ ‘national policy drive’ or some such equally deplorable asininity.

In the meantime, there is no political will to reform the investigative, prosecutorial and judicial branches of government. Indeed, given the extremity of the crisis of sexual violence that confronts us, it may well have been appropriate to extend the mourning of a ‘dark March’ to a longer time period.

As the Women’s Action Network correctly points out, thousands of women and their families have lost faith in the justice system. Even the limited compass of cases in which this group has been advocating on reads like a typical list of horrors. Among the cases detailed are the 18 year old school girl raped and murdered in 2015 in Punkudutheevu, the rape and murder of a woman in Batticaloa as well as in Gampaha respectively in 2009 and 2016 and the rape and murder of children in Kayts, Hatton and Vavuniya. Some of these cases occurred last year, indicating that there has not been a noticeable decrease in the wave of sexual violence. In each of these cases, initial protests by villagers in the relevant areas, though strong and agitated at first, peter out gradually.

In some instances, though the legal process was set in motion, results were conspicuously absent. Routinely, proper legal procedures were not followed, forensic procedures were bypassed and the chain of custody was compromised. Even if alleged perpetrators were arrested, they were almost immediately released on bail. Meanwhile, the trial is extended for years with the witnesses being threatened. Faced with this most daunting environment, the family members of the victim most often drop the case. Last year’s enactment of a Witness Protection law has not seen a noticeable change in this negative environment.
What should we celebrate?

So it is opportune on March 8th this year, to ask as to what precise individual and collective freedoms are being celebrated. Hence the aptness of the boycott call is undoubted. Post-’yahapalanaya’ Sri Lanka proves the point that not all the problems besetting the country can be attributed to a particular regime, however brutal and despotic that may have been.

Rather, systemic Rule of Law failures are the reason why there can be no individual security of women or indeed also men, until effective political will is demonstrated to address this problem. The criminalisation of law and order, breakdown of trust in the legal process and constitutional institutions as well as a general lack of basic security is manifest. This month saw an unprecedented increase in underworld killings even as a front ranking Cabinet Minister was allegedly implicated in a hit and run incident where the victim remains in dire risk of losing his life.

At what point would we begin to recover the confidence that disputes would be determined at the highest levels without political bias, the rule of law would be implemented to its fullest and the prosecution of the guilty would take place without fear or favour? When would citizens be treated equally by State institutions despite differing political views, notwithstanding whichever government happens to be in power? What would it take for an ordinary woman (or man) to be able to enter a police station without fear or for a litigant to enter a courtroom without trepidation?

The powerful and the powerless
And at what point would the profligate spending of those in political life cease? The Government’s announcement this month of varied tax increases bound to adversely impact on struggling families are in abrupt contrast to increasing perks that parliamentarians of all political parties are conspiring to grant themselves. Is this why a so-called ‘National Government’ was voted into power? The Ministry of Agriculture is reported to be expending an astounding sum of twenty one million as monthly rental even as farmers are out on the streets in fury over the cut in fertilizer subsidies. These are obscenities that cannot be tolerated.

Unfortunately, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe combine elected to office on an exuberant wave of peoples’ expectations has failed in several respects to justify the public trust placed in them. The dilemma that Sri Lankans are placed in when deciding their vote in future elections is harsh. Ineptitude and inefficiency coupled with degrees of political greed in the ‘yahapalanaya’ regime face off in one corner against rank racism and communalism with even worse greed of the Rajapaksa brand in the other corner.

These are unenviable choices indeed.

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17. AN AFGHAN GIRL’S STORY OF ABDUCTION AND RAPE IS TESTING AN INCOHERENT JUSTICE SYSTEM
by Tim Craig
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(The Washington Post, March 10 , 2016)

Gul Momina says she was held in a dark room with a muddy floor. Sayed Hussain says he did not kidnap her but instead responded to a text message from a girl he did not know who identified herself as Gul Momina. (Photo illustration/ iStock photos/Photo illustration/ iStock photos)

KABUL — Gul Momina says she was only 15 when a man and his wife lured her from her home here in Afghanistan’s capital. They gave her a soda, she recalls. Then she blacked out.
When she woke, the teenager says, she found herself locked in a dark room with a muddy dirt floor. For the next 3  1/2  months, by her account, the man beat and raped her while insisting that she was now his third wife.
Sayed Hussain, who is accused of attacking Gul Momina, tells a far different story. He never kidnapped her, he says. Rather, he received a text message in the fall of 2014 from a girl he had never met who identified herself as Gul Momina and said she loved him. She claimed to be an orphan and vowed to kill herself in front of his house if he did not marry her, he says.
Now, efforts to determine who is telling the truth have escalated into another test for a fragile Afghan justice system struggling to balance modern legal principles with laws shaped by local custom, endemic corruption and various interpretations of Islamic doctrine.

In a recent interview at the home of one of her relatives, Gul Momina, now 16, said that after weeks of captivity in which she was repeatedly whipped with a water pipe and cable wire, she escaped and returned to her family. Sayed Hussain, his wife and his father were arrested.
Sayed Hussain, however, said in an interview at his home that he had legally married Gul Momina. And in October, judges cited the purported marriage in freeing him, even though Afghan law states that girls under 16 cannot marry.
Like many Afghans, neither Gul Momina nor Sayed Hussain has a last name.
Ali Farhang, a lawyer for Gul Momina’s family who wants the Afghan Supreme Court to intervene, scoffed at the decision.
“In this case, even a person who doesn’t understand law could understand the truth,” he said.
Since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001, the United States and other international donors have invested more than $1 billion in training judges and prosecutors, establishing new courts and helping draft a modern legal code for Afghanistan.
But Afghan lawyers and advocates of legal reform say the justice system remains stacked against women and undermined by bribery and the erratic application of laws. The situation is so bad, they say, that many qualified judges and lawyers are leaving the profession.
“Everyone in the justice system has lost morale,” said Abdul Subhan Misbah, the vice president of Afghanistan’s lawyers union.
Gul Momina’s case provides an unusually revealing window onto the sorts of issues with which judges here must wrestle.
Before her alleged abduction, the teen said, she worked for Sayed Hussain’s wife as an embroiderer. In late 2014, she said, she got a call to pick up fabric.
“They were drinking a soda, and they offered me a beverage, which was uncapped,” she said.
The next thing she remembers is being locked in the muddy room. Sayed Hussain’s elderly father, who also lived at the house, was standing over her.
“When I started crying and shouting, ‘I want to go home,’ the father hit me with something on the back of my head,” she said.
Gul Momina said Sayed Hussain began referring to her as his “third wife.” Another woman in the house, who told her she also had been abducted, was the supposed second wife. Under Afghan law, men are allowed up to four wives.

Meanwhile, Gul Momina’s father was searching for his daughter.
“I went to the 17 police districts of Kabul city and gave her picture to them,” Mohammad Anwar said. “I went to every single hospital.”
After his daughter escaped, he said, she came home covered in bruises and unable to stand. But when they went to a police station, an officer “slapped my daughter in front of my eyes telling her, ‘Your condition is not that bad,’ ” he said.
Other police officials investigated her claims, and Sayed Hussain, his wife and his father, Sayed Ishaq, were arrested in January 2015 and charged with abduction and assault. Sayed Hussain also was charged with rape.

But Sayed Hussain, a truck driver, says he and his family are the victims. He said that after he received the text message “from an unknown number” asking him to call, he had several phone conversations and meetings with Gul Momina and that she eventually proposed to him.
He denied that she ever did embroidery work for the family, saying he thinks she got his phone number from an ad for his trucking business.
When she proposed, he said, he insisted that she get permission from her father and brothers, as is customary in Islamic culture, but he said that Gul Momina told him she had no living relatives. Sayed Hussain said she claimed to be 19.
“I told her I already have four wives,” he said, adding that at the time he had only one. “She said, I don’t care if you have 10. I will be the eleventh.”
Then, Sayed Hussain said, Gul Momina threatened that if he did not marry her, “she would grab a knife and kill herself in front of my gate.”
Twelve days after they first met, he said, they were married by a Shiite cleric. Both Sayed Hussain and his father denied they ever struck Gul Momina when she was in their home.
Asked why she had fled, Sayed Hussain said his family may have been too rigid for her. “We are a strict family,” he said, adding that about 20 people live in the same house. “We don’t let the women go out. . . . The women inside our house don’t use cellphones.”

Sayed Hussain spent nine months in prison. But in court, he produced a copy of a marriage certificate and a statement from the cleric who he said officiated the wedding.

Gul Momina denies that a wedding took place, but the judge dropped all charges against Sayed Hussain’s wife and father. Sayed Hussain was convicted of domestic abuse but was cleared of rape and kidnapping. After an appellate court upheld the verdict, he was released from prison in October.
Mohammad Anwar, outraged, is appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court. “I will fight with every last drop of blood until I get justice,” he said.
He and his attorney say they suspect that political pressure was brought to bear on the lower courts. According to Mohammad Anwar, a prominent member of Afghanistan’s National Assembly who belongs to the same Shiite sect as Sayed Hussain’s family called him recently, demanding that he return his daughter “to her husband.” The lawmaker says she knows nothing about the case.
Sayed Hussain and Sayed Ishaq said that while they were in prison, their relatives did try to negotiate with Gul Momina’s family about what it would take for them to return her to him. But they deny having political connections.
“Now I don’t even want her back,” Sayed Hussain said.
In a brief interview, one of the appellate court judges, Matiullah Amarkheli, defended the ruling, noting the marriage certificate and the testimony of the cleric. He referred further questions to the chief appellate judge, Shir Mohammad.

Mohammad also declined to comment but said that “there is a difference between sharia law and Afghan law” concerning the legal age for a girl to marry.
“There are thousands of cases,” he said. “Why are you focusing on this one?”
In Afghanistan, about 15 percent of girls are married before age 15, according to UNICEF. When underage girls in Afghanistan try to leave their husbands, some are prosecuted for “attempted adultery,” according to Jean Lieby, head of UNICEF Afghanistan’s child protection unit.
In this case, said Misbah, the lawyers union official, it appears that the lower courts decided to free Sayed Hussain on the basis of their interpretation of Islamic law — which generally sets puberty as the threshold age for marriage — instead of what the Afghan code specifies.
And, noted Misbah, whatever flaws exist in the justice system in Kabul, “it’s way, way worse” in rural areas.

Mohammad Sharif contributed to this report.

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18. MAKING OF A SHRINE IN PAKISTAN
by Ayesha Siddiqa
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(The Hindu, March 14, 2016)

A narrative is gathering force that, nudged by Pakistan’s civil-military leadership, the country's is recovering liberalism. An examination of a new shrine, to Salman Taseer’s assassin, tells another story

Could anyone imagine even six months ago that Shahbaz Taseer, son of Pakistan’s slain Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, would be freed from his Taliban or Uzbek captors after nearly five years in captivity? Despite friends’ prayers, his circle of admirers and onlookers had given up hope. Perhaps the Taseer family had better hope as it was secretly negotiating with the captors. But his return remains as much of a mystery as his disappearance. No one knows why he was kept for five years and why it took so long to negotiate his return.

However, the release is made to look like a turn of events from the sordid and the tragic to a new beginning for Pakistan. This despite the fact that there is an absolute lack of clarity regarding the role of security agencies in the release. So, for all one cares, the younger Taseer’s release was, by coincidence, a week after Mumtaz Qadri, his father’s killer, was hanged on the orders of the Pakistan Supreme Court. But it has been all made to look like things were following a natural sequence indicating Pakistan’s metamorphosis from a Taliban-ridden state to a haven for liberalism.

A mirage?

Glancing through Pakistan’s English-language press, it seems that we are back to discovering the good old Pakistan. Many in the national and international media have presented these events as a much-awaited shift towards peace and stability that was made possible only due to a perceived change in the military’s thinking. Operation Zarb-e-Azb, which begun in June 2014 and was aimed at terrorists ensconced in the tribal areas in the north of the country, is viewed as a precursor to some kind of a metamorphosis.

We hear of some sort of mutation in the attitude of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was earlier criticised by liberals as representing a soft form of the Jamaat-e-Islami. It’s his President Mamnoon Hussain who bravely ventured to reject Mumtaz Qadri’s appeal against his death sentence. Moreover, he was quick in announcing “prompt action” against the perpetrators of the Pathankot attack, and a police report was indeed initiated against un-named assailants.

But almost 400 km away from where the Taseer family is rejoicing its reunion with its son is the evolving shrine of Mumtaz Qadri in the Bara Kahu neighbourhood in the suburbs of the capital city, Islamabad. The grave, which was dug in the middle of an empty ground and is likely to turn into a blooming shrine, attracts hundreds of people every day who come to pray for his forgiveness and salute his bravery for and commitment to standing up for his religion and dying for it. There are flowers strewn on his grave every day and free food served to whoever visits, which is bound to attract more people. Over 2,50,000 people attended the funeral of a man who is a criminal in the eyes of Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

Raising passions

Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa of the Supreme Court of Pakistan did not find Salman Taseer guilty of committing blasphemy, the grounds on which Qadri shot dead the then Punjab Governor in January 2011. Justice Khosa also upheld Qadri’s death sentence by the sessions court. No one really expected that Qadri would be hanged given the passion and mass hysteria surrounding the blasphemy issue. There are many cases in which people have taken the law into their own hands and tortured people to death without hearing their side of the story. The issue is highly emotive and not even the ideological opponents of the Barelvi school of thought that Qadri represented, such as the Deobandi and Ahle-Hadith, could utter a word supporting his hanging. In fact, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) leadership also took part in the funeral.

The blasphemy law and Qadri’s sentence are both highly divisive issues. Ordinary people ask how a person whose funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands could be a sinner. Or how it is that the Asia Bibi case which started earlier has not been decided as yet. People see a foreign, particularly western and Israeli, conspiracy behind the quick decision and hanging.

A space with limits

What is certainly new is the strange caution among those visiting the Qadri shrine. The voices criticising the government’s perceived unfairness get muffled in the sound of the azaan. The manner in which the mob was stopped from joining Qadri’s family for the burial is a definite signal to his father and other family members that they ought not to cross certain limits. It is all right for the traders of Lahore to weigh Qadri’s father in gold or to contribute to the building of the shrine, but it must not be a space for political rebellion.

The Barelvis are in a majority in the country but are not equated with militancy. Barring a few small groups that fought in Kashmir, they are generally dedicated to preaching. In the last decade or so, they seem to be gathering support and using the issue of blasphemy in order to push back their ideological opponents — the Deobandis and the Ahl-Hadith — represented by the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and the Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaat-ud-Dawa (LeT/JuD) respectively. Although blasphemy is a dicey issue to tackle, Barelvi extremism has not won support from the government as in the case of the Deobandi and Ahle-Hadith militancy, which, over the years, tweaked their ideology to accommodate the Pakistan state’s military-strategic objectives.

Thus far, there is no evidence that the Deobandi and Ahl-Hadith militancy has lost state support. According to Sartaj Aziz, the Foreign Affairs Adviser to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the state will eventually deal with the JeM and the LeT as well. But the JeM based in Bahawalpur, in Punjab, and the LeT based in Muridke, outside Lahore, do not indicate any nervousness regarding possible doom. The JeM leadership exhibits neither nervousness nor indicates haste in removing the armed guards around its main centre. The LeT, on the other hand, has a more expansive organisational structure, and is thus quite sensitive to managing the popular narrative. For instance, around Pathankot, the organisation’s main spokesperson went around convincing journalists in Islamabad and Lahore of the LeT’s vulnerability — and that the government was targeting it needlessly when all that it did was welfare. But there is little reason for Rawalpindi to clean up the plains of Punjab and Sindh, particularly of the JeM and the LeT/JuD. The main worry was the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, parts of which were eliminated and the rest allowed to merge into other more “acceptable” groups, such as the JeM, it was ideologically affiliated with. A significant segment of the LeJ was encouraged to develop its political wing, a formula considered appropriate for the mainstreaming of Deobandi militants. However, this formula remains problematic as militancy is not necessarily driven by lack of occupation or mainstreaming.

The two sides

As Qadri’s hanging is symbolic of the state’s resolve to discourage people taking the law into their own hands, the new shrine denotes a sharp disagreement of the common people with the state and its decision. There is nothing much that can happen in the form of de-radicalisation, especially when the state has no plan to encourage it. Furthermore, it is a difficult venture in a hybrid-theocracy like Pakistan’s. For years, the common people were trained to think of themselves as protecting Islam and the Ummah. Jihad and blasphemy are a part of this formula, which is not about to change. One hears stories about Daeesh literature being discovered from the Quaid-i-Azam University involving both students and the faculty. How can a shift happen without tearing down such ideological shrines?

The simplest possible method for the state is to develop zero tolerance for violence and gradually ensure that justice is institutionalised. People should share the euphoria on decisions beyond the elite. If a sense of disproportionate justice continues, these very ideological shrines could emerge a bigger problem for the state and the region.

(Ayesha Siddiqa, author of Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, is an Islamabad-based columnist.)

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19. PAKISTAN’S PRIME MINISTER IS DEFYING THE CLERICS — VERY CAREFULLY
by Tim Craig 
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(The Washington Post - March 9, 2016)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — During a speech to international business leaders here in late November, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif shocked the country’s powerful religious community by calling for a new, more “liberal” Pakistan.

Amid an outcry, within hours, Sharif’s staff was playing down the speech, saying he didn’t really mean to imply Pakistan should become more like the West.
But so far this year, Sharif and his party have defied Islamic scholars by unblocking access to YouTube, pushing to end child marriage, enacting a landmark domestic violence bill, and overseeing the execution of a man who had become a symbol of the hatred that religion can spawn here.
The shift in tone can be traced to Sharif’s ambitious economic agenda, the influence his 42-year-old daughter has over him, and his awareness that Pakistan remains the butt of jokes, according to his friends, senior government officials and analysts.
“He knows the international community needs a progressive Pakistan,” said one senior Pakistani government official close to the prime minister, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could speak candidly about his boss. “So if he thinks a moderate, progressive or liberal agenda can help with his economic agenda, he goes for it.”
With strong support from rural voters and the religious community, Sharif returned as prime minister in 2013 after his party, Pakistan Muslim League-N, won a decisive majority in parliamentary elections.
Sharif, who had also served two terms as prime minister in the 1990s, has long been associated with Pakistan’s stodgy conservative establishment. And the election of a man rumored to go to bed shortly after dark was widely viewed as a sign that Pakistan was settling into a period of stale governance.
But Sharif, 66, and his PML-N lawmakers are now challenging Pakistan’s religious community, charting a new path for their party while unsettling a constituency that includes hundreds of thousands of Islamic clerics.
“This is turning into the worst-ever experience for our party,” said Aman Ullah Haqqani, a religious scholar and former provincial chief of Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam, an Islamist political party that had entered into a power-sharing agreement with PML-N. “He and his party are trying to impress the United States of America and the Western countries by becoming a liberal leader.”
In Pakistan, where Islam is embedded in the constitution, the term liberal is relative.
Few analysts expect Sharif — or any national Pakistani leader — to seriously consider legalizing alcohol consumption, much less same-sex marriage. And when past leaders such as the late Benazir Bhutto tried to soften the country’s image, they struggled to overcome opposition from hard-line Islamic clerics. Bhutto was assassinated in 2007.
For Sharif, the fraying of relations with religious conservatives began this winter when the government and military began quietly sending notice to mosques to tone down their sermons. In January, Sharif’s government ended a three-year ban on YouTube that had been supported by religious clerics to shield Pakistanis from videos defaming Islam.
Later that month, a senior PML-N lawmaker, Marvi Memon, introduced a bill to ban child marriage by raising the age limit from 16 to 18. The Council of Islamic Ideology, an influential committee that reviews legislation, objected by saying the change runs counter to Islamic law. Memon withdrew the bill but said the party is intent on showing a more “progressive side.”
“We are going to be talking about family planning, about immunizations, getting women out to work, domestic violence and literacy,” said Memon, who was named by Sharif to run a government program that gives cash subsidies to impoverished women. “He has never once told me I am stepping overboard.”
In Punjab province, where Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz, serves as chief minister, legislators recently approved new legal protections for abused women.
In one of the Sharif government’s boldest decisions, it did not intervene to stop last week’s execution of an assassin who was both celebrated and feared.
Mumtaz Qadri had become a hero among religious leaders after he shot and killed the former governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, in 2011. Qadri, then a police officer, targeted Taseer over his call to modify a law that makes insulting the prophet Muhammad — even by innuendo — punishable by death.
Muhammad Ibrahim, a senior leader of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, predicted Sharif could be “ousted from power” by so aggressively challenging the religious community.
But government leaders say Sharif is attempting to shift the focus away from Pakistan’s reputation for being a hotbed of Islamic extremism to better pursue his economic agenda.
With Pakistan’s economy still sputtering, Sharif is pinning his hopes on China’s promise to invest $46 billion here as part of a deal to ship more Chinese goods through Pakistani ports. U.S. business leaders are also increasing the frequency of their visits here.
“Nawaz Sharif may still be right-of-center, but he knows extremism is not good for business,” said Afrasiab Khattak, a former senator and Islamabad-based political analyst. He realizes that “Talibanization” and Chinese investment can’t go together.
From the other side, many of the prime minister’s critics argue that his government remains too timid in cracking down on radical religious seminaries and clerics.
“There are known terrorists, even in Islamabad, and they are scared of them,” said Saleem Mandwiwala, a Pakistani senator from the rival Pakistan People’s Party.
Miftah Ismail, Sharif’s special assistant for investment, said the prime minister “is a very religious guy, but he is perfectly okay with other people not being religious.” Ismail, who helped write Sharif’s November speech promoting a “liberal” Pakistan, added, “He sees we need to change the narrative about Pakistan.”
In the coming days, Sharif plans to announce a new plan for “empowering women” by expanding maternity leave and access to child care. He recently held a screening at his mansion of “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness,” an Oscar-winning movie that is drawing attention to honor killings in Pakistan.
“What’s going on here?” Fahd Hussain, a television news executive, asked in a newspaper column last week. “Is Nawaz Sharif in mortal danger of becoming a good man? Is he transforming into a Liberal?”
Hussain concluded that Sharif is making a political calculation to appeal to Pakistan’s growing population of urban voters. Other analysts say Sharif is increasingly influenced by his Twitter-savvy daughter, Maryam. She is viewed as Sharif’s potential successor as the leader of his party.
The senior government leader who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the “more progressive, more educated and better-read” Maryam Sharif has her father’s ear.
But the official stressed that Nawaz Sharif is driving the party’s overall national philosophy.
“He watches Western movies, he listens to music, he shakes hands with women,” the official said, “and he has respect for Christians, Ahmadis and Hindus.”
If Pakistan’s religious right thinks that makes someone a liberal, the official added, so be it.

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20. IT’S HIGH TIME TO CHANGE INDIA’S SEDITION LAWS
by Meenakshi Ganguly
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(The Asian Age, March 13, 2016)

JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar makes a speech to fellow students after being released on bail at the university campus, in New Delhi. (Photo: PTI)

While on a recent speaking engagement at the University of California, Berkeley, I visited the Free Speech Movement café, homage to the 1960s student protests that changed forever the boundaries of political speech on campuses in the US and elsewhere. It was oddly quiet, even though the US is in the midst of a high-decibel election campaign, with students engrossed with their cellphones and laptops. In contrast, the right to free speech was being debated in India fiercely in television studios, colleges, literary festivals, and Parliament. At the capital’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, students and teachers gathered in protest to talk about freedom of speech. Social media raged, with speakers on all sides of the debate vilified or praised.

At the heart of the debate are the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and a JNU student leader, Kanhaiya Kumar. Both Modi and Kumar are testimony to the possibilities for at least some of the most disadvantaged in India: one is the self-proclaimed tea seller while the other is the son of a farmer. Both proudly say they have broken through entrenched feudal structures that long denied their communities a voice.

Yet, one used the power of the state to persecute the other. On February 12, the police arrested Kumar after members of the BJP student-wing, ABVP, accused him of sedition for making what they call “anti-national” speeches at a public meeting. During the meeting, some participants protested the February 2013 execution of Mohammad Afzal Guru for a 2001 suicide attack on India’s Parliament in which nine people were killed. Without checking the facts, Modi’s home minister warned that those who shouted anti-India slogans or challenged India’s sovereignty and integrity during these meetings “will not be spared”.

Kumar’s arrest led to a public outcry over government attacks on free speech, attempts to shut down dissent, the role of media in public discourse, the rights of marginalised communities, human rights violations by security forces, vigilante politics, and even the death penalty — crucial issues that need to be debated and addressed.

It also brought into focus, yet again, the urgent need for India to repeal its outdated sedition law. Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code prohibits any words, spoken or written, or any signs or visible representation that can cause “hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection” toward the government. India’s Supreme Court has imposed limits on the use of the sedition law, making incitement to violence a necessary element, but the police continues to file sedition charges even in cases where this requirement is not met.

Indian officials often speak of the power of civil society to hold government accountable and force self-correction. However, there needs to be an admission of wrongdoing to correct.

Even after the police admitted they had no evidence against Kumar and the court released him, the Modi government has yet to concede that its arrest of students was wrong. The charges remain against Kumar and others who are still in jail. Nor has the government responded to the issues that have surfaced around these arrests.

The authorities should immediately release all those arrested for engaging in free expression and drop all charges. The government should instead initiate steps to repeal the sedition law, once used to lock up Indian leaders campaigning for an end to British colonial rule but now used against fishermen protesting a nuclear energy facility, against folk singers who address dalit and tribal rights, against cartoonists, agai-nst human rights activists — and against students.

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement served as a crucial milestone in the US struggle for civil liberties. Although the din around the Kumar arrest is dying down, this could well be the start of India’s own movement. Will those who label critics “anti-national” prevail, or will free speech advocates who contend it is patriotic to try to make the country better through peaceful criticism of state policies, win the day?

India’s Constitution provides significant protections on paper. Now there is an opportunity for the government, legislature and judiciary to make sure these rights are fully protected in practice. Kanahaiya Kumar, after he was released from jail, spoke eloquently about the freedoms he sought for his generation: for an end to discrimination based on caste, religion, gender or sexual choice. Everyone has the right to denounce these state failures. To do so is not “anti-national”. And it is certainly not seditious. It is the essence of democracy.

Meenakshi Ganguly is South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. Follow her on Twitter at mg2411.

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21. MEMORY VERSUS HISTORY
by William Milam
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(Dhaka Tribune, 13 March 2016)

The people of Sarajevo showed unimaginable heroism during the siege that killed almost 14,000

As I mentioned in my previous article “Where it all began,” Sarajevo’s Historical Museum is divided into two very different parts. The first part is a paean to Tito’s communist, multi-ethnic federation in which the fractious history of the Balkan states seemed to have finally worn itself out in WWII.

One would have inferred from that history, as displayed in the museum, that true harmony prevailed throughout the federation.

Yugoslavians had reason to hold their heads high in post-war Europe, as it was the only occupied part of Europe that basically freed itself from Nazi Germany. By the time the Soviet Army reached the Balkans, Tito’s communist partisans were in control of most of the region, and the Wehrmacht was retreating westward.

That led to Tito’s ability to insist on a Balkan face to his communist regime -- a luxury that none of the other occupied countries of Eastern Europe could manage (all of which soon fell under the Soviet thumb). In fact, none of the occupied countries of Western Europe could claim to have liberated themselves either. Tito’s communist partisans were the only real successful resistance against the Axis powers.

In the light of this history, the paean to those “halcyon” post-war days is quite understandable. But the enthusiasm for the federation begins to ebb after Tito’s death in 1980. Amid the proud descriptions of Sarajevo’s entry onto the international stage with its successful hosting the Winter Olympics of 1984, there begins to be subtle mutterings about Sarajevo, and Bosnia, not getting its share of national resources.

And as the grumbling becomes louder, the viewer slips into the 1990s when the museum records the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation. After 1989, its various parts, influenced of course by the break-up of the Soviet Union, begin to break away from the federation to declare their independence as sovereign states. The first half of the museum’s historical exhibition ends with the Bosnian declaration of Independence in early March 1992.

The second half is about the war, and especially about the siege of Sarajevo. And the heroism and the grit of the Bosnians during this horrendous siege is a very compelling story. Sarajevo has rebuilt much of the damage and new modern buildings sprouted throughout the city. I found one building which had not been touched after being shelled into rubble. Evidently, many resembled it 20 years ago.

From what I can make out, the war was fought over territory -- which side was going to control what territory. This tone perhaps started when presidents Milosevic of Yugoslavia and Tudman of Croatia agreed in March 1991, a year before Bosnia declared independence, that Bosnia-Herzegovina would be partitioned between Serbia and Croatia.

If this seems reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin pact to partition Poland in 1939, it must have seemed even worse to the Bosnian Muslims, and such an agreement was certainly against post-WWII international standards, which forbid changing borders by force.

Later that year, to keep Bosnia form being drawn into the war, the EU proposed a plan that essentially divided Bosnia between the Muslims, Serbs, and Croats in a proportional way. The Bosnian president, Izetbegovic, signed the agreement but then withdrew it, saying he would not agree to the ethnic division of Bosnia, although this plan would have given Muslims their share of Bosnia which the earlier Milosevic/Tudman agreement would not have. But it was not a good deal.

It was a vicious and brutal war, characterised by targeting civilians in an attempt to get the Bosnians to give up, by ethnic-cleansing bordering on, and sometimes becoming, genocide, and mass rape, mainly of Muslim women by Serbian fighters. Its heroic episodes include the sieges of several cities, and the tremendous spirit and will of the Bosnians not just to survive but to give better than they got despite their inferior equipment and armaments.

The siege of Sarajevo began on April 5, 1992, and lasted for 1,425 days, until February 29, 1996 -- three times longer than the siege of Stalingrad. It was the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.

A Bosnian Serb force of 13,000 surrounded Sarajevo, remaining in the hills which overlook the city from which they could bombard the city with artillery and tanks without being directly contested even though there were 70,000 Bosnian troops in the city. This was mainly true not only because of their position on the commanding heights above the city, but because the Bosnians were poorly armed.

Almost 14,000 people were killed in Sarajevo during the siege, including about 5,500 civilians. The population dropped from over 500,000 in 1991 to somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000 today. To the visitor, the heroism of the entire population is unimaginable.

The Serbs had snipers in the city (at one point the Serbs were in control of one part of the city) who raked the broad streets and avenues with bullets, firing at pedestrians. One didn’t walk or stroll down the streets, one ran for one’s life. The siege cut off food supplies and people had to line up for bread and water. The Serb artillery found these lines easy targets, and hundreds were killed while standing in line.

The only way in and out of the city was through a tunnel that the citizens had dug, that ran under the airport runway. I talked to a man who said he had been through it five times during the siege.

Why, I asked. He said: “Because I was young, I could do it.” It meant going through water, sometimes waist high, and bending over because of the low ceiling, but holding one’s weapon up out of the water. After emerging from the tunnel, he had to walk 17 miles up a very steep mountain to avoid the Serbs. I didn’t ask what he was going to do after he got past the siege. I really didn’t want to know.

The citizens of Sarajevo have memorialised some of the heroism. And they remember it too. There is a difference between memorials and memory. Memorials are to remind us of an event or a person. Memory is how we see the past, and whether we see it honestly. Nations build memorials to their heroes, or to commemorate their successes, but some also build memorials to their moral or political failures. 

Statues of famous presidents and generals dot the Washington landscape. But the Vietnam memorial is to a terrible and costly mistake that most Americans now remember as such. Germany builds memorials to the Holocaust, certainly a monstrous moral failure, but many Germans have yet to admit their parents’ or grandparents’ responsibility for it by just looking the other way. Japan builds memorials for its war victims, but refuses to acknowledge its responsibility for the war or for the atrocity of, inter alia, Nanking.

After the Sarajevo siege ended in 1996, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted two Serbians for crimes against humanity during the siege, sentencing one to life imprisonment and the other to 29 years’ imprisonment. The court indicted Radovan Karadzic, of 11 counts, one of which is for the siege. Sarajevo has had some redress.

One of my favorite authors, Ian Baruma, wrote that “failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.” After a visit to Sarajevo, I have to, for the first time, disagree with him. 

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22. GOOGLE AS A FORTUNE TELLER THE SECRETS OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
by Shoshana Zuboff
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(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 March 2016)

Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to. The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. Is there nothing we can do?surveillance capitalism

The assault we face is driven by the exceptional appetites of a wholly new genus of capitalism: surveillance capitalism.

Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010.  (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion. Now each is valued at well over 500 billion.)  While Google’s new lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior.  This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors.  While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency.  What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?

“Most Americans realize that there are two groups of people who are monitored regularly as they move about the country.  The first group is monitored involuntarily by a court order requiring that a tracking device be attached to their ankle. The second group includes everyone else…”

Some will think that this statement is certainly true. Others will worry that it could become true. Perhaps some think it’s ridiculous.  It’s not a quote from a dystopian novel, a Silicon Valley executive, or even an NSA official. These are the words of an auto insurance industry consultant intended as a defense of  “automotive telematics” and the astonishingly intrusive surveillance capabilities of the allegedly benign systems that are already in use or under development. It’s an industry that has been notoriously exploitative toward customers and has had obvious cause to be anxious about the implications of self-driving cars for its business model. Now, data about where we are, where we’re going, how we’re feeling, what we’re saying, the details of our driving, and the conditions of our vehicle are turning into beacons of revenue that illuminate a new commercial prospect. According to the industry literature, these data can be used for dynamic real-time driver behavior modification triggering punishments  (real-time rate hikes, financial penalties, curfews, engine lock-downs) or rewards (rate discounts, coupons, gold stars to redeem for future benefits).

Bloomberg Business Week notes that these automotive systems will give insurers a chance to boost revenue by selling customer driving data in the same way that Google profits by collecting information on those who use its search engine. The CEO of Allstate Insurance wants to be like Google. He says, “There are lots of people who are monetizing data today. You get on Google, and it seems like it’s free. It’s not free. You’re giving them information; they sell your information.  Could we, should we, sell this information we get from people driving around to various people and capture some additional profit source…? It’s a long-term game.”

Who are these “various people” and what is this “long-term game”?  The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit. This is the gateway to a new universe of monetization opportunities: restaurants who want to be your destination. Service vendors who want to fix your brake pads. Shops who will lure you like the fabled Sirens. The “various people” are anyone, and everyone who wants a piece of your behavior for profit. Small wonder, then, that Google recently announced that its maps will not only provide the route you search but will also suggest a destination.

The goal: to change people’s actual behavior at scale

This is just one peephole, in one corner, of one industry, and the peepholes are multiplying like cockroaches. Among the many interviews I’ve conducted over the past three years, the Chief Data Scientist of a much-admired Silicon Valley company that develops applications to improve students’ learning told me, “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us”.

The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying. The sports apparel company Under Armour is reinventing its products as wearable technologies.  The CEO wants to be like Google. He says, "If it all sounds eerily like those ads that, because of your browsing history, follow you around the Internet, that's exactly the point--except Under Armour is tracking real behavior and the data is more specific… making people better athletes makes them need more of our gear.”  The examples of this new logic are endless, from smart vodka bottles to Internet-enabled rectal thermometers and quite literally everything in between. A Goldman Sachs report calls it a “gold rush,” a race to “vast amounts of data.”

The assault on behavioral data

We’ve entered virgin territory here. The assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests.  This is a different kind of challenge now, one that threatens the existential and political canon of the modern liberal order defined by principles of self-determination that have been centuries, even millennia, in the making. I am thinking of matters that include, but are not limited to, the sanctity of the individual and the ideals of social equality; the development of identity, autonomy, and moral reasoning; the integrity of contract, the freedom that accrues to the making and fulfilling of promises; norms and rules of collective agreement; the functions of market democracy; the political integrity of societies; and the future of democratic sovereignty.  In the fullness of time, we will look back on the establishment in Europe of the “Right to be Forgotten” and the EU’s more recent invalidation of the Safe Harbor doctrine as early milestones in a gradual reckoning with the true dimensions of this challenge.

There was a time when we laid responsibility for the assault on behavioral data at the door of the state and its security agencies.  Later, we also blamed the cunning practices of a handful of banks, data brokers, and Internet companies. Some attribute the assault to an inevitable  “age of big data,” as if it were possible to conceive of data born pure and blameless, data suspended in some celestial place where facts sublimate into truth.
Capitalism has been hijacked by surveillance

I’ve come to a different conclusion:  The assault we face is driven in large measure by the exceptional appetites of a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the fruitful expansion of market democracy.

Surveillance capitalism is a novel economic mutation bred from the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies. It is an unprecedented market form that roots and flourishes in lawless space.  It was first discovered and consolidated at Google, then adopted by Facebook, and quickly diffused across the Internet. Cyberspace was its birthplace because, as Google/Alphabet Chairperson Eric Schmidt and his coauthor, Jared Cohen, celebrate on the very first page of their book about the digital age, “the online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws…it’s the world’s largest ungoverned space.”

While surveillance capitalism taps the invasive powers of the Internet as the source of capital formation and wealth creation, it is now, as I have suggested, poised to transform commercial practice across the real world too.  An analogy is the rapid spread of mass production and administration throughout the industrialized world in the early twentieth century, but with one major caveat. Mass production was interdependent with its populations who were its consumers and employees. In contrast, surveillance capitalism preys on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and are largely ignorant of its procedures.

Internet access as a fundamental human right

We once fled to the Internet as solace and solution, our needs for effective life thwarted by the distant and increasingly ruthless operations of late twentieth century capitalism.  In less than two decades after the Mosaic web browser was released to the public enabling easy access to the World Wide Web, a 2010 BBC poll found that 79% of people in 26 countries considered Internet access to be a fundamental human right. This is the Scylla and Charybdis of our plight. It is nearly impossible to imagine effective social participation ––from employment, to education, to healthcare–– without Internet access and know-how, even as these once flourishing networked spaces fall to a new and even more exploitative capitalist regime. It’s happened quickly and without our understanding or agreement. This is because the regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation.

Taming this new force depends upon careful naming.  This symbiosis of naming and taming is vividly illustrated in the recent history of HIV research, and I offer it as analogy.  For three decades scientists aimed to create a vaccine that followed the logic of earlier cures, training the immune system to produce neutralizing antibodies, but mounting data revealed unanticipated behaviors of the HIV virus that defy the patterns of other infectious diseases.
HIV research as analogy

The tide began to turn at the International AIDS Conference in 2012, when new strategies were presented that rely on a close understanding of the biology of rare HIV carriers whose blood produces natural antibodies. Research began to shift toward methods that reproduce this self-vaccinating response.  A leading researcher announced, “We know the face of the enemy now, and so we have some real clues about how to approach the problem.”

The point for us is that every successful vaccine begins with a close understanding of the enemy disease.  We tend to rely on mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes. I am thinking of the twentieth century’s totalitarian nightmares or the monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism. But the vaccines we’ve developed to fight those earlier threats are not sufficient or even appropriate for the novel challenges we face. It’s like we’re hurling snowballs at a smooth marble wall only to watch them slide down its façade, leaving nothing but a wet smear: a fine paid here, an operational detour there.

An evolutionary dead-end

I want to say plainly that surveillance capitalism is not the only current modality of information capitalism, nor is it the only possible model for the future. Its fast track to capital accumulation and rapid institutionalization, however, has made it the default model of information capitalism. The questions I pose are these: Will surveillance capitalism become the dominant logic of accumulation in our time or, will it be an evolutionary dead-end –– a toothed bird in capitalism’s longer journey? What will an effective vaccine entail?

A cure depends upon many individual, social, and legal adaptations, but I am convinced that fighting the “enemy disease” cannot begin without a fresh grasp of the novel mechanisms that account for surveillance capitalism’s successful transformation of investment into capital. This has been one focus of my work in a new book, Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization, which will be published early next year.  In the short space of this essay, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this problem.

Fortune telling and selling

New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. Ford discovered and systematized mass production. General Motors institutionalized mass production as a new phase of capitalist development with the discovery and perfection of large-scale administration and professional management. In our time, Google is to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago: discoverer, inventor, pioneer, role model, lead practitioner, and diffusion hub.

Specifically, Google is the mothership and ideal type of a new economic logic based on fortune telling and selling, an ancient and eternally lucrative craft that has exploited the human confrontation with uncertainty from the beginning of the human story. Paradoxically, the certainty of uncertainty is both an enduring source of anxiety and one of our most fruitful facts. It produced the universal need for social trust and cohesion, systems of social organization, familial bonding, and legitimate authority, the contract as formal recognition of reciprocal rights and obligations, and the theory and practice of what we call “free will.” When we eliminate uncertainty, we forfeit the human replenishment that attaches to the challenge of asserting predictability in the face of an always-unknown future in favor of the blankness of perpetual compliance with someone else’s plan.

Only incidentally related to advertising

Most people credit Google’s success to its advertising model. But the discoveries that led to Google’s rapid rise in revenue and market capitalization are only incidentally related to advertising.  Google’s success derives from its ability to predict the future – specifically the future of behavior. Here is what I mean:

From the start, Google had collected data on users’ search-related behavior as a byproduct of query activity.  Back then, these data logs were treated as waste, not even safely or methodically stored.  Eventually, the young company came to understand that these logs could be used to teach and continuously improve its search engine.

The problem was this:  Serving users with amazing search results “used up” all the value that users created when they inadvertently provided behavioral data. It’s a complete and self-contained process in which users are ends-in-themselves. All the value that users create is reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved search.  In this cycle, there was nothing left over for Google to turn into capital. As long as the effectiveness of the search engine needed users’ behavioral data about as much as users needed search, charging a fee for service was too risky. Google was cool, but it wasn’t yet capitalism –– just one of many Internet startups that boasted “eyeballs” but no revenue.
Shift in the use of behavioral data

The year 2001 brought the dot.com bust and mounting investor pressures at Google. Back then advertisers selected the search term pages for their displays.  Google decided to try and boost ad revenue by applying its already substantial analytical capabilities to the challenge of increasing an ad’s relevance to users –– and thus its value to advertisers. Operationally this meant that Google would finally repurpose its growing cache of behavioral data. Now the data would also be used to match ads with keywords, exploiting subtleties that only its access to behavioral data, combined with its analytical capabilities, could reveal.

It’s now clear that this shift in the use of behavioral data was an historic turning point. Behavioral data that were  once discarded or ignored were rediscovered as what I call behavioral surplus. Google’s dramatic success in “matching” ads to pages revealed the transformational value of this behavioral surplus as a means of generating revenue and ultimately turning investment into capital. Behavioral surplus was the game-changing zero-cost asset that could be diverted from service improvement toward a genuine market exchange. Key to this formula, however, is the fact that this new market exchange was not an exchange with users but rather with other companies who understood how to make money from bets on users’ future behavior. In this new context, users were no longer an end-in-themselves.  Instead they became a means to profits in  a new kind of marketplace in which users are neither buyers nor sellers nor products.  Users are the source of free raw material that feeds a new kind of manufacturing process.

Google Glasses of the Future © dapd
Vergrößern
Seeing the World the way, Google does: with „Google Glass“

While these facts are known, their significance has not been fully appreciated or adequately theorized. What just happened was the discovery of a surprisingly profitable commercial equation –– a series of lawful relationships that were gradually institutionalized in the sui generis economic logic of surveillance capitalism. It’s like a newly sighted planet with its own physics of time and space, its sixty-seven hour days, emerald sky, inverted mountain ranges, and dry water.
A parasitic form of profit

The equation: First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioral surplus.  Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material.  Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive twenty-first century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioral surplus into prediction products designed to predict behavior now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behavior.  The better (more predictive) the product, the lower the risks for buyers, and the greater the volume of sales. Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behavior.

While advertisers have been the dominant buyers in the early history of this new kind of marketplace, there is no substantive reason why such markets should be limited to this group. The already visible trend is that any actor with an interest in monetizing probabilistic information about our behavior and/or influencing future behavior can pay to play in a marketplace where the behavioral fortunes of individuals, groups, bodies, and things are told and sold.  This is how in our own lifetimes we observe capitalism shifting under our gaze: once profits from products and services, then profits from speculation, and now profits from surveillance. This latest mutation may help explain why the explosion of the digital has failed, so far, to decisively impact economic growth, as so many of its capabilities are diverted into a fundamentally parasitic form of profit.
Unoriginal Sin

The significance of behavioral surplus was quickly camouflaged, both at Google and eventually throughout the Internet industry, with labels like “digital exhaust,” “digital breadcrumbs,” and so on. These euphemisms for behavioral surplus operate as ideological filters, in exactly the same way that the earliest maps of the North American continent labeled whole regions with terms like “heathens,” “infidels,” “idolaters,”  “primitives,” “vassals,” or “rebels.”  On the strength of those labels, native peoples, their places and claims, were erased from the invaders’ moral and legal equations, legitimating their acts of taking and breaking in the name of Church and Monarchy.

We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own behavior. They are erased in an astonishing and audacious act of dispossession by surveillance that claims its right to ignore every boundary in its thirst for knowledge of and influence over the most detailed nuances of our behavior.  For those who wondered about the logical completion of the global processes of commodification, the answer is that they complete themselves in the dispossession of our intimate quotidian reality, now reborn as behavior to be monitored and modified, bought and sold.

The process that began in cyberspace mirrors the nineteenth century capitalist expansions that preceded the age of imperialism. Back then, as Hannah Arendt described it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “the so-called laws of capitalism were actually allowed to create realities” as they traveled to less developed regions where law did not follow. “The secret of the new happy fulfillment,” she wrote, “was precisely that economic laws no longer stood in the way of the greed of the owning classes.” There, “money could finally beget money,” without having to go “the long way of investment in production…”
“The original sin of simple robbery”

For Arendt, these foreign adventures of capital clarified an essential mechanism of capitalism. Marx had developed the idea of “primitive accumulation” as a big-bang theory –– Arendt called it “the original sin of simple robbery” –– in which the taking of lands and natural resources was the foundational event that enabled capital accumulation and the rise of the market system. The capitalist expansions of the 1860s and 1870s demonstrated, Arendt wrote, that this sort of original sin had to be repeated over and over, “lest the motor of capital accumulation suddenly die down.”

In his book The New Imperialism, geographer and social theorist David Harvey built on this insight with his notion of “accumulation by dispossession.”  “What accumulation by dispossession does,” he writes,  “is to release a set of assets…at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Overaccumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use…It can also reflect attempts by determined entrepreneurs…to ‘join the system’ and seek the benefits of capital accumulation.”

Breakthrough into “the system”

The process by which behavioral surplus led to the discovery of surveillance capitalism exemplifies this pattern. It is the foundational act of dispossession for a new logic of capitalism built on profits from surveillance that paved the way for Google to become a capitalist enterprise. Indeed, in 2002, Google’s first profitable year, founder Sergey Brin relished his breakthrough into “the system”, as he told Levy,

Honestly, when we were still in the dot-com boom days, I felt like a schmuck. I had an Internet start-      up — so did everybody else. It was unprofitable, like everybody else’s, and how hard is that? But when we became profitable, I felt like we had built a real business.”

Brin was a capitalist all right, but it was a mutation of capitalism unlike anything the world had seen.

Once we understand this equation, it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck or a cow to give up chewing.  Such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival. How can we expect companies whose economic existence depends upon behavioral surplus to cease capturing behavioral data voluntarily?   It’s like asking for suicide.

More behavioral surplus for Google

The imperatives of  surveillance capitalism mean that there must always be more behavioral surplus for Google and others to turn into surveillance assets, master as prediction, sell into exclusive markets for future behavior, and transform into capital. At Google and its new holding company called Alphabet, for example, every operation and investment aims to increasing the harvest of behavioral surplus from people, bodies, things, processes, and places in both the virtual and the real world.   This is how a sixty-seven hour day dawns and darkens in an emerald sky. Nothing short of a social revolt that revokes collective agreement to the practices associated with the dispossession of behavior will alter surveillance capitalism’s claim to manifest data destiny.

What is the new vaccine? We need to reimagine how to intervene in the specific mechanisms that produce surveillance profits and in so doing reassert the primacy of the liberal order in the twenty-first century capitalist project. In undertaking this challenge we must be mindful that contesting Google, or any other surveillance capitalist, on the grounds of monopoly is a 20th century solution to a 20th century problem that, while still vitally important, does not necessarily disrupt surveillance capitalism’s commercial equation.  We need new interventions that interrupt, outlaw, or regulate 1) the initial capture of behavioral surplus, 2) the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material, 3) excessive and exclusive concentrations of the new means of production, 4) the manufacture of prediction products, 5) the sale of prediction products, 6) the use of prediction products for third-order operations of modification, influence, and control, and 5) the monetization of the results of these operations. This is necessary for society, for people, for the future, and it is also necessary to restore the healthy evolution of capitalism itself.

A coup from above

In the conventional narrative of the privacy threat, institutional secrecy has grown, and individual privacy rights have been eroded. But that framing is misleading, because privacy and secrecy are not opposites but rather moments in a sequence. Secrecy is an effect; privacy is the cause. Exercising one’s right to privacy produces choice, and one can choose to keep something secret or to share it. Privacy rights thus confer decision rights, but these decision rights are merely the lid on the Pandora’s Box of the liberal order. Inside the box, political and economic sovereignty meet and mingle with even deeper and subtler causes: the idea of the individual, the emergence of the self, the felt experience of free will.

Surveillance capitalism does not erode these decision rights –– along with their causes and their effects –– but rather it redistributes them. Instead of many people having some rights, these rights have been concentrated within the surveillance regime, opening up an entirely new dimension of social inequality. The full implications of this development have preoccupied me for many years now, and with each day my sense of danger intensifies. The space of this essay does not allow me to follow these facts to their conclusions, but I offer this thought in summary.

Surveillance capitalism reaches beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm. It accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital, but also rights. This unilateral redistribution of rights sustains a privately administered compliance regime of rewards and punishments that is largely free from detection or sanction. It operates without meaningful mechanisms of consent either in the traditional form of “exit, voice, or loyalty” associated with markets or in the form of democratic oversight expressed in law and regulation.
Profoundly anti-democratic power

In result, surveillance capitalism conjures a profoundly anti-democratic power that qualifies as a coup from above: not a coup d’état, but rather a coup des gens, an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.  It challenges principles and practices of self-determination ––in psychic life and social relations, politics and governance –– for which humanity has suffered long and sacrificed much. For this reason alone, such principles should not be forfeit to the unilateral pursuit of a disfigured capitalism. Worse still would be their forfeit to our own ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift.  This, I believe, is the ground on which our contests for the future will be fought.

Hannah Arendt once observed that indignation is the natural human response to that which degrades human dignity. Referring to her work on the origins of totalitarianism she wrote,  “If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, then I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities.”

So it is for me and perhaps for you:  The bare facts of surveillance capitalism necessarily arouse my indignation because they demean human dignity. The future of this narrative will depend upon the indignant scholars and journalists drawn to this frontier project, indignant elected officials and policy makers who understand that their authority originates in the foundational values of democratic communities, and indignant citizens who act in the knowledge that effectiveness without autonomy is not effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom.
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Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor, Emerita, Harvard Business School. This essay was written for a 2016 address at Green Templeton College, Oxford. Her forthcoming book is Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization, to be published by Eichborn in Germany and Public Affairs in the U.S.


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