SACW - 22 March 2016 | Sri Lanka: Lesson in Free Speech / Afghanistan: virginity tests / Pakistan: Mullahs on the warpath / India: Patriotism mob / Hungary: general strike / The Daoud Affair

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 22 March 2016 - No. 2888 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Afghanistan: Sexual Assault in the Name of Science | Heather Barr
2. Pakistan: Mullahs on the warpath against a domestic violence law - Will society standup against to the clerics ?
3. A Sri Lankan Lesson in Free Speech | Kenan Malik
4. India seems to be in the middle of a counter-reformation | Mukul Kesavan
5. India: A stranger in one's own Land | Ali Khan Mahmudabad
6. Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism | Dilip Simeon
7. India: Damning Urdu | Mukul Dube
8. India: Arrest of Dr Saibal Jana of Shaheed Hospital (at Dalli Rajhara) Human Rights Defenders Alert - India / E-Petition to Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh
9. India: Photos from People's March to Save Democracy - New Delhi, 15 March 2016
10. India: Public Statement in Support of Gauhar Raza by Scientists & Science Communicators from across the World
11. India: Ram Advani (1920 - 2016) - reports and tributes
12. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: Meet the people who torture and lynch in the name of protecting the cow
  - USA: Online Petition Re South Asian History Textbooks in California under assault from Hindu fundamentalists
  - India: ‘Insult to RSS chief’ - Police in a fix after booking youth under scrapped 66(A) of IT Act
  - India: Five arrested for lynching 2 Jharkhand cattle traders in Jharkhand - Gau Raksha Samiti seems involved
  - India: Meghnad Desai on the fallacies in the idea of Hindu nationalism
  - India's Fraud Nationalists (Aakar Patel)
  - India: Modernisation of the RSS - Ultra-nationalism holds many dangers
  - India: ‘Good Sufi’, ‘Bad Muslim’ (Javed Anand)
  - India: Urdu writers asked to declare "My book not against the govt, nation"
  - India: 'Changing textbooks so no one like [JNU student leader] Kanhaiya is born' in Rajasthan: Education Minister
  - India: 2 jailed in MP for morphed image of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat based on a complaint stating that the duo had hurt sentiments of Hindus
  - India: Minorities panel wants inquiry against JNU professor
  - India: Why the MIM shouldn't expect much sympathy from the Muslim community (Jyoti Punwani)
  - India: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Alok Rai)
  - Kaun Hai Bharat Mata ? Bharat Ek Khoj Episode 1 - (from a tv serial in Hindi)
  - India: Cartoon by Manjul following the attack on a mounted police horse by the BJP MLA during a demonstration
  - India: Communal polarisation and hyper-nationalism are two sides of the same coin (Pawan K Varma)
  - India: Producing patriotism - How 'Bharat Mata' became the code word for a theocratic Hindu state (Shoaib Daniyal) 

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
13. Sundarbans in grave danger | Kallol Mustafa
14. Bangladesh: Vested property return act must be enforced | Editorial, The New Age
15. Patriotism & Skewed Histories | Rajan Hoole
16. Delhi's air pollution is a classic case of environmental injustice | James K Boyce and Aseem Shrivastava
17. India: ... And Then They Came for Me! | Editorial, EPW
18. India: The lynch mob of Latehar - Press Release by PUDR
20. The Geopolitics of Infrastructure on the Indus Rivers since the 1940s | Daniel Haines
21. Why I speak out against Islamism | Maryam Namazie
22. Hungary heads towards general strike and civil disobedience against Orbán regime | Christopher Adam
23. The Daoud Affair: How Western intellectuals turn themselves into the enemies of an entire class of liberal writers from Muslim backgrounds | Paul Berman and Michael Walzer

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1. AFGHANISTAN: SEXUAL ASSAULT IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE | Heather Barr
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Each year, dozens or even hundreds of women and girls in Afghanistan are subjected to invasive, humiliating, and sometimes painful vaginal and rectal exams in the name of “science.” These so-called virginity exams are not just demeaning – they constitute sexual assault and are often used as evidence against women in court for the “crime” of zina, or sex outside of marriage.
http://sacw.net/article12527.html

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2. PAKISTAN: MULLAHS ON THE WARPATH AGAINST A DOMESTIC VIOLENCE LAW - WILL SOCIETY STANDUP AGAINST TO THE CLERICS ?
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There is no denying that Pakistani society is very vulnerable to religions passions. Even when the Islamists are unable to win an electoral majority, their capacity to mobilise the streets on an emotional issue is considerable. Perhaps nothing unites our clerics more than women's issues.
http://sacw.net/article12525.html

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3. A SRI LANKAN LESSON IN FREE SPEECH | Kenan Malik
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. . .the current fashion for denouncing “cultural appropriation,” which denotes the use by people of one culture (especially privileged ones) of the symbols or ideas of another.
 http://sacw.net/article12528.html

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4. INDIA SEEMS TO BE IN THE MIDDLE OF A COUNTER-REFORMATION | Mukul Kesavan
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Citizenship, in the jargon of medical insurance companies, is a pre-existing condition. Our rights as citizens cannot, should not, be taken away from us unless we break our republic's laws. It follows from this that citizenship and its attendant promise of life and liberty, cannot be subject to litmus tests of patriotism devised by political parties, celebrity nationalists, bureaucrats and gau rakshaks. But increasingly they are.
http://sacw.net/article12524.html

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5. INDIA: A STRANGER IN ONE'S OWN LAND | Ali Khan Mahmudabad
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The new enemy property ordinance is more draconian than the one in 2010. It retrospectively rewrites the 1968 act and forecloses judicial recourse for countless Indians
http://sacw.net/article12522.html

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6. SATYAGRAHA - AN ANSWER TO MODERN NIHILISM | Dilip Simeon
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Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016. This lecture engages with the approaches of Socrates and Gandhi to the question of a 'national religion'; and on nation-worship as an instance of right-wing atheism.
http://sacw.net/article12519.html

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7. INDIA: DAMNING URDU | Mukul Dube
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Urdu is one of the twenty-two “scheduled languages” of the country. It is the language of vastly more Indians than, for instance, Bodo or Santali or Sindhi. Historically, there is no doubt that it is an Indian language.
http://sacw.net/article12521.html

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8. INDIA: ARREST OF DR SAIBAL JANA OF SHAHEED HOSPITAL (AT DALLI RAJHARA) HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS ALERT - INDIA / E-PETITION TO CHIEF MINISTER OF CHHATTISGARH
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A human rights alert from Human Rights Defenders Alert - India and an electronic petition seeks the release of Dr. Saibal Jana of Shaheed Hospital at Dalli Rajhara, Chhattisgarh
http://sacw.net/article12515.html

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9. INDIA: PHOTOS FROM PEOPLE'S MARCH TO SAVE DEMOCRACY - NEW DELHI, 15 MARCH 2016
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Students, Teachers from JNU and citizens of Delhi March from Mandi House to Parliament Street in New Delhi against the clampdown by authorities and for the release of students arrested on charges of sedition. People's March to Save Democracy was called by the JNU students' union on 15 March 2016. At its termination point there was a public meeting which was addressed by student leaders, members of the JNU teachers union and by intellectuals and political leaders. The photos posted here were taken by Mukul Dube and are part of the SACW.NET Archive - Photo Project
http://sacw.net/article12512.html

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10. INDIA: PUBLIC STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF GAUHAR RAZA BY SCIENTISTS & SCIENCE COMMUNICATORS FROM ACROSS THE WORLD
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We, the undersigned, are shocked to learn about the sinister propaganda unleashed by a section of the Indian Media against Gauhar Raza, a well known scientist, poet and film-maker.
http://sacw.net/article12511.html

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11. INDIA: RAM ADVANI (1920 - 2016) - REPORTS AND TRIBUTES
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reports & tributes after the passing of Ram Advani the celebrated book seller in Lucknow
http://sacw.net/article12513.html

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12. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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  - India: Delhi researcher wanting to access the library branded 'traitor' by a university guard
  - India: Meet the people who torture and lynch in the name of protecting the cow
  - USA: Online Petition Re South Asian History Textbooks in California under assault from Hindu fundamentalists
  - India: ‘Insult to RSS chief’ - Police in a fix after booking youth under scrapped 66(A) of IT Act
  - India: Five arrested for lynching 2 Jharkhand cattle traders in Jharkhand - Gau Raksha Samiti seems involved
  - India: Meghnad Desai on the fallacies in the idea of Hindu nationalism
  - India's Fraud Nationalists (Aakar Patel)
  - India: Modernisation of the RSS - Ultra-nationalism holds many dangers
  - India: ‘Good Sufi’, ‘Bad Muslim’ (Javed Anand)
  - India: Urdu writers asked to declare "My book not against the govt, nation"
  - India: 'Changing textbooks so no one like [JNU student leader] Kanhaiya is born' in Rajasthan: Education Minister
  - India: 2 jailed in MP for morphed image of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat based on a complaint stating that the duo had hurt sentiments of Hindus
  - India: Minorities panel wants inquiry against JNU professor
  - India: Why the MIM shouldn't expect much sympathy from the Muslim community (Jyoti Punwani)
  - India: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Alok Rai)
  - Kaun Hai Bharat Mata ? Bharat Ek Khoj Episode 1 - (from a tv serial in Hindi)
  - India: Cartoon by Manjul following the attack on a mounted police horse by the BJP MLA during a demonstration
  - India: Communal polarisation and hyper-nationalism are two sides of the same coin (Pawan K Varma)
  - India: Producing patriotism - How 'Bharat Mata' became the code word for a theocratic Hindu state (Shoaib Daniyal)
  - India: Patriot Games that Belittle the Nation (Manoj Joshi)
  - India: Witnesses killings carried out on ‘behalf of self-styled godman Asaram Bapu’, reveals shooter 

-> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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13. SUNDARBANS IN GRAVE DANGER
by Kallol Mustafa
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(Dhaka Tribune - March 21, 2016)

How did the 2014 oil spill affect the Sundarbans? This is the first of a two-part long form, and the fifth article in a series about the Rampal power plant
Since the oil spill disaster in the Sundarbans on the night of December 9, 2014, many ebbs and flows of the tide have come and gone. The thick and poisonous spilled oil reaches wherever the water reaches during the high tide, via the Sela river (where the disaster originated), Passur and Baleshwari rivers, and the innumerable canals.
The sunken oil tanker Southern Star-7, moored at the Chadpai Range river port since its recovery from the depth of the Sela river, has been surrounded by oil containment rubber booms. Had this been done as soon as the accident occurred, the spread of the oil spill over such a vast area of the Sundarbans could perhaps have been avoided. Furthermore, the clean-up of the oil would have been much easier.

But instead, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon-rich heavy fuel oil (HFO), also known as furnace oil, has spread all over the Sundarbans via the waterways, reaching far into the forest through hundreds of canals.
It had been estimated that about 80 to 100 square kilometres of waterways and coastal vegetation has been affected by the oil pollution, but there are no estimates available at this moment of how much of the interior of the forest has also been affected by the pollution.
The layer of oil slick currently floating on the river is relatively thin, although sunlight and oxygen cannot penetrate even this thin layer and reach the water beneath. This is pushing all aquatic life-forms, including aquatic vegetation and fish, to their demise.
When the oil enters the still waters of the canals, it is forming thick and impenetrable tar-like deposits, rising and lowering with the high and low-tides. Even when the water goes down along the banks during the low-tide, the oil deposit is sticking to the slope of the mud-banks, and oily junk is gathering at the roots of the trees covering their breathing roots, trunks, and leaves.
It looks as if someone had taken a paint-brush dipped in black paint and coloured all the trees. In the words of the forest expert Razzak: “As if a venomous black snake had tightened its coil around the trees of the Sundarbans.” According to another forest expert, Baowali, some of the watering holes used by the tigers, deer, and other animals have also been polluted by oil reaching them during the high tide.

The carcinogenic polyaromatic hydro-carbon in the furnace oil is highly damaging to the liver and skin. Apart from this, the layer of oil prevents sunlight and oxygen from entering the water. It will not be possible for life to exist in places where the oil is stagnating.
The breather roots covered by oil will be of little use to the trees for the purposes of breathing.Crabs, mudskippers, and other invertebrates which make the oil-covered mud their home, are now in danger. Except for one or two dead crabs, no other life forms have been observed in the oil-soaked mud during low tide.
This is the season when many varieties of fish lay their eggs in the Sundarbans -- the high and low tide-flooded sloping banks of the canals is where many fish as well as shrimps lay their eggs and spawn. Also, it won’t be possible for keora and bain trees to bud during the time, as these tiny plants cannot survive in the poisonous oil-filled muddy earth.
Those young plants, whose roots are embedded in oil, will perish within a couple of weeks to a month. However, it’ll take longer for the effect of the oil on fully-grown trees to become manifest. The big trees’ leaves may turn yellow or may even start falling off, and eventually they may even start dying in a few years.
The oil pollution lowers the immune power of the mangrove trees, and as a result, the incidence of the saline water causing top-dying decease that has been inflicting the sundari trees may increase.
The site of the oil spill was the centre of the world’s reservation of the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin species. Now that place has become a place of fear -- not only for the dolphins but also for all other land and aquatic creatures.
Since the oil spill, dolphin, crocodile, fish, fishing birds, or any other animal have not been spotted in the area. They have either perished or have moved elsewhere.
They had taken shelter in this area because it was the most suitable place to support them, but now that they’ve been forced to relocate, it’s not certain how long they will survive.
And the state of the human population that live off the forest is like that of the mangrove trees; they can’t just uproot themselves and relocate elsewhere. Especially those whose livelihoods depend on fishing and crab-hunting, have been hit the most. Since the whole thing started, it has not been possible to use fishing nets or ropes.
The oil destroys fishing nets, as well as the crab enclosures and traps. When, in 2011, ships started plying through the Sundarbans, the pollution caused the number of fishes in the river to drop. Now, with the oil spill, not a single fish can be caught any more. 

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14. BANGLADESH: VESTED PROPERTY RETURN ACT MUST BE ENFORCED | Editorial, The New Age
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(Editorial, The New Age, March 19, 2016)

IT IS unacceptable that even after winning the legal battles with the government in district tribunals, most of the claimants laying ownership claims to vested landed property have not got back the possession of their land because of non-cooperation of district administrations and local land officials, according to rights campaigners. Regrettably, in most of the cases, the deputy commissioners sought opinions from the land ministry on their next course of action even after the appeals tribunals gave their verdicts in favour of the claimants. The observation of land rights campaigners and some Hindu community leaders that there has been very little enforcement of the Vested Property Return Act despite the fact that several amendments were made to it in 2011 to benefit the sufferers needs to be taken into serious consideration.
Another unpalatable truth is that out of 1,18,173 cases filed with the tribunals by claimants to 1,92,668 acres of land in vested property, only 8,089 cases relating to 26,224 acres of land were disposed of until January. As New Age reported on Friday, the government retained the ownership of 22,323 acres of vested property as it won 3,416 cases in its legal battles with the claimants and decisions on 1,12,057 more cases are still pending with the tribunals. The confounding fact is that despite repeated reminders, 16 deputy commissioners have not yet provided the latest information on the vested property in their jurisdiction to the land ministry, as the deputy secretary for vested and abandoned property cell said. The documents on the latest status of the vested property were prepared by the land ministry based on the information provided by district administrations. However, the non-compliance by some deputy commissioners in implementing the act to return the property to those who are the rightful claimants and whose authenticity has been proved beyond any doubt by the tribunals is impeding the process for a noble cause, that is, assuaging the sufferings of these hapless people. As such, district administration’s non-compliance with the act in question should be identified as a major impediment to the management of vested property in line with the act.
Allegations are rife that the district level land administration is riddled with corruption. Pervasive dereliction of duty and breach of normal procedure are, therefore, not difficult to discern in the land administration there. Needless to say, it is going on because corruption has been institutionalised at every stage of service delivery by land administration and management. It is also deeply worrying that very little has so far been visible to suggest that implementation of the verdicts of the tribunals in this regard has begun. The incumbents need to take necessary steps to expedite the process to dispose of all the cases and hand over vested land to rightful claimants in no time.

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15. PATRIOTISM & SKEWED HISTORIES
by Rajan Hoole
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(Colombo Telegraph - March 19, 2016)
 
Authoritarianism and the Crisis of Identity -I

“…the secret of Gandhi’s greatness lay not in the absence of human failings and foibles, but in his inner restlessness, ceaseless striving and intense involvement in the problems of mankind. He was not a slave to ideas and concepts, [which] were for him also aids in grappling with human problems, and were to be reconsidered if they did not work” – P.C. Joshi, in Gandhi and Nehru

“You are fanning the worst of sentimental flames. We can fight on political ideologies, on economic principles, but when it comes to rousing people to a state of mass hysteria on issues like language, religion and race, there is no knowing where it will end. If Honourable Members had seen the spectacle I witnessed on Sunday at the Town Hall grounds, they would have been ashamed of themselves. They would have felt sorry for the future of this country… it is not enough for us merely to mouth phrases and say that the minority communities have nothing to fear from the majority community; that in the past we have got on well, and that we will get on in the same old way. That is not enough today… Today we have to do something positive to allay those fears that are increasing.. . if we do not take a positive stand, we will continue to give room for Sinhalese chauvinists to do what damage they can”. – Dr. N. M. Perera, LSSP leader, in the Ceylon House of Representatives on 19th October 1955. The reference is to a meeting of the Tri Sinhala Peramuna.

Mapitigama Buddharakkitha

*Photo – The whisky-drinking Kelaniya High Priest Buddharakkhita who was close to Wimala Wijewardene, the widow of the author of ‘The Revolt in the Temple’, had helped S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to power in 1956 on the ‘Sinhala Only’ cry.

With the coming of independence from Britain in 1948, power was ceded to the colonial elite, and it could not have been otherwise. For it is they who had the education, and the skills in administration and government. Being in a privileged class cannot do much harm if one has the humility to recognise that it is not divinely ordained, and that if one went far enough back in one’s lineage, one is likely to discover that such privilege often came into the family through dubious means. Nevertheless, the future good of the country depended on whether this class could produce leaders of vision to steer a course that would ensure justice and stability.

During the Indian struggle for example, Jawaharlal Nehru, a member of the colonial elite spent his breaks in prison contemplating and writing, formulating a vision for India. In his classic Glimpses of World History, written in prison in the early 1930s, he tries to make the reader understand India’s place in the wider heritage of mankind. In the chapter on the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he places it as a lost cause, ‘the last flicker of feudal India’, despite the heroic resistance to the British in many parts of the sub-continent; a lost cause, against the industrial might, organisational skill and unscrupulousness of British power.

Thus to those of Nehru’s way of thinking, the future good of India, a political entity of British creation, lay in being forward-looking, drawing the best from mankind’s heritage, while being true to her own spiritual legacy. There was no going back to feudalism. Great men and women, and visionaries from all parts of India – Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Subramaniya Bharathi among them – helped to lay secure foundations for independent India. An India having the ideals to continue the struggle against bigotry in its various forms.

This country did not go through that process of nation building, thereby acquiring the values to sustain its independence. A ruling class that was rather deferential to British power, and comfortable in its own dominance, did not have the values to negotiate the challenges of independence. In the absence of a vision and controlling values, faced with the challenge of obtaining votes, it became easy for politicians from this class to look back to a reconstituted past. They went on to don the mantles of feudal heroes which ill-fitted them.

In a far-reaching manner, the past colonial rulers, especially the British, had determined the constituents of the post-independence ruling class. Governor Brownrigg’s declaration of 21st November 1818, a year after the British had suppressed the Kandyan rebellion, listed 15 Kandyan nobles who were to be rewarded by the British for their support and services to the British crown. Those who took part in or aided the rebellion were to be punished with the loss of their lands and titles.

Among those rewarded were the chiefs Ratwatte and Mahawalatenna, listed along with Eknelligodde Dissave. The latter’s services to the British had been recorded with some embarrassment by John Davy (An Account of the Interior of Ceylon). To Eknelligodde was attributed the devastation of Lower Uva, whose men ‘supported by a small party of our [British] troops’ showed ‘their zeal [for the British] by their depredations’. Not all the chiefs rewarded would have gone to such an extreme, but many would rather have decided on pragmatic grounds, after judging the resistance of the rebels to be a lost cause.

J.P. Lewis in his Manual of the Vanni Districts (1895) refers to the violent and extortionate conduct of one Bulankulame Dissave (Chieftain) whose appointment to that post in 1815 was a reward for having supported the British. Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and President J.R. Jayewardene were both descendants of persons rewarded for services to the Dutch or British rulers or both. Not surprisingly, it is such families who came to form the ruling class in post-independence Ceylon, and one does not quarrel with that.

What has been dangerous in politics is the manner in which they have used the past.

Instead of speaking about the need to relieve oppression and poverty in all communities, they spoke about the oppression of the Sinhalese by all kinds of invaders and their resulting fall from ancient glory, and reclaimed for themselves the feudal status of being their champions. Even the heroism of the Kandyan rebellion accrues to them by glossing over its embarrassing aspects. For this backward looking brand of politics, history, the more ancient and more vague, the better. In its search for enemies of the Sinhalese Nation, Tamil invasions from India, Tamils in the plantations, Tamils in government service and Tamils in the commercial sector were all pointed to as a conspiracy against the Sinhalese.

Amidst this vote-catching propaganda, the fate of the Kandyans who had a genuine claim to patriotism, and had to lose everything to escape British wrath, went unnoticed. A case of disappearance recorded by us concerned Jayasekere, a carpenter in Pottuvil, who was then 74. His ancestor who was Nindagama Rala in Miyangoda, Southern Uva, had fled after the rebellion of 1817 and settled in Panama, south of Pottuvil, an area that remains very backward to this day. His daughter Kumarimenika had married Tharmaratnam, a Tamil. Tharmaratnam was taken in the notorious mass abductions by the STF and Police on 2nd August 1990, and disappeared. Jayasekere had to labour for the upkeep of his daughter and three grand children. The State which was in the hands of modern ‘patriots’ had for many years failed to respond to their appeals regarding the missing person. Jayasekere’s reality is very different to that of Deputy Defence Minister Ratwatte. One of the latter’s birthday observances was televised with a speech by a very nationalist monk, the proceedings giving him the heroic aura of a Dutugemunu or Prince Sapumal Kumariah from ancient and medieval history.

Of considerable significance in the fortunes of this country are the Wijewardenes of Kelaniya. Their antecedents go back to the colonial elite. The family, now Buddhists, had been in turn Roman Catholics, Calvinists and Anglicans with the transfer of power from the Portuguese to the Dutch to the British, and had acquired wealth through ‘less than pious business activities’. Mrs. Helena Wijewardene renovated the Buddhist temple at Kelaniya and her family became its patrons. J.R. Jayewardene who was brought up an Anglican was her eldest grandson through daughter Agnes, and Ranil Wickremesinghe, her great grand son through her son Don Richard. The latter was the founder of Lake House Newspapers – a powerful vehicle for family ambitions.

The Revolt in the Temple (1953) was an important piece of ideological writing by Helena W.’s son Don Charles, which appropriated for the Kelaniya Temple and the ‘Sinhalese Race’ a 2500 year history, and likewise by allusion for the Wijewardene family, the temple’s recent patrons. The destiny of the country and of the patrons of the temple was linked together by the writer in his eloquent slogan, “When Kelaniya fell, Lanka fell, when Kelaniya rose, Lanka rose.” Jayewardene discovered and published for the family an ancient and royal genealogy based on a dubious manuscript. (See The History of Kelaniya, Jonathan S. Walters, SSA.) The zeal of proselytes, with pretensions to an ancient legacy and a modern mission, rendered their politics highly combustible. The Revolt in the Temple, according to Walters, ‘constitutes a blunt statement that the Tamils are a threat to that historic mission and lays out Wijewardene’s blue-print for a post- independence Sinhala Buddhist state which has gradually become a reality.’

The whisky-drinking Kelaniya High Priest Buddharakkhita who was close to Wimala Wijewardene, the widow of the author of ‘The Revolt in the Temple’, had helped S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to power in 1956 on the ‘Sinhala Only’ cry. Chauvinist politics and commercial interests have always been close partners. It is said by contemporary observers that differences between Bandaranaike and Buddharakkhita had developed over the formers refusal to accommodate the business ambitions of a close relative of the latter. Later when Bandaranaike tried to accommodate the Tamils in a quasi- federal arrangement, Buddharakkhita orchestrated his assassination in 1959. Ironically, Wimala Wijewardene, at the close of her tempestuous political career as minister of health in the Bandaranaike government, turned to working for Back to the Bible. The monk-assassin Soma Rama, took Christian baptism before he was hanged.

The ideology of this family reverberates through the political career of Jayewardene from the 1940s and the actions of his son in the 80s as personal security advisor to the president. The other side of this politics was the nurturing of the Tamil Tigers. The very excesses of the supremacist ideology to which this family lent its weight, could not but lead to its discomfiture, resulting in previously unthinkable compromises to stay in power. Such was the social character of Ceylon’s ruling class.

A more imaginative ruling class would have found other means of getting votes from all the communities, rather than having to play the champions of one community and equally having to make enemies of the others. This avoidance of modern problems and taking liberties with the truth over presumptions about heroic pedigrees and historical grievances set the country on the course of tragedy. The ideology through which this politics was articulated contained in it a crisis of identity for the ruling class having its roots in the recent colonial past.

*From Rajan Hoole‘s “Sri Lanka: Arrogance of Power – Myth, Decadence and Murder”.

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16. DELHI'S AIR POLLUTION IS A CLASSIC CASE OF ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE
by James K Boyce and Aseem Shrivastava
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(The Guardian - 9 March 2016

India’s new tax on car sales is a step in the right direction, but can the country address the wealth and power imbalance driving the health disaster?
The news that India is introducing a new tax on car sales to help combat severe air pollution and congestion problems has unsurprisingly been decried by the country’s car industry.
The chair of India’s largest car manufacturer, Maruti Suzuki, says the tax “is going to hurt the industry, and will impact growth and affect job creation”. Following the announcement, shares in Maruti Suzuki traded more than 5% lower.
But others have celebrated the move, recognising that business as usual cannot continue in a country home to the four most polluted cities in the world. “Once Indians owning cars was seen as a sign of economic success. Now this sort of tax is seen as Indians being responsible,” a senior research fellow at Delhi-based thinktank told the Guardian.
The tax comes on the heels of the Delhi government’s unprecedented step this winter of imposing an emergency “odd-even” license plate number rule to restrict private car use to alternate days.
Reports of extreme air pollution in Delhi and other Indian cities are nothing new. The World Health Organisation estimates that more than 600,000 people die each year as a result of outdoor air pollution in India. Much less discussed is the fact that not all residents are equally affected, nor equally responsible.
As the rich get richer everyone else gets less happy
Delhi’s low-income residents – who don’t travel by car – bear the brunt of the city’s toxic air. This is partly because of where they live. A 2011 study found levels of suspended particulates to be generally higher in the city’s poorer neighbourhoods.
The poor also spend more time outdoors, where pollution is most intense. A study in the scientific journal Atmospheric Environment reports that men from low-income households spend on average about seven hours outdoors daily, compared to virtually zero for those at the top of the income scale.
What’s more, affluent households can afford air conditioning, better nutrition and better healthcare, all of which insulate them, to some extent, from dirty air.
Some of the highest pollution exposures are inflicted on those who make their living on the streets, including traffic police and drivers of three-wheeled auto-rickshaws. These rickshaws have been converted to compressed natural gas, a cleaner fuel source, as a result of a 1998 supreme court ruling in a case brought by environmental advocates.
Many of Delhi’s cars, by contrast, continue to burn particulate-heavy diesel. Researchers have measured concentrations of hazardous ultra-fine particles on the city’s arterial roads that are eight times higher than those recorded on rooftop monitors just a kilometre away
The health impacts on residents are becoming more and more evident. Children’s developing bodies are especially susceptible to long-term harm. A 2008 study for India’s Central Pollution Control board reported that more than two-fifths of Delhi’s schoolchildren have reduced lung function, damage that is likely to be irreversible.
The good news is that there is rising demand from India’s citizens for cleaner air, coupled with greater willingness of Delhi’s populist Aam Aadmi (roughly translated as common man) government, elected a year ago, to respond. Delhi needs ambitious, longer-term policies to tackle root causes of the problem. These must include not only steps to halt the exponential growth in car traffic and diesel trucks but also huge new investments in public transportation, tougher pollution controls on the smoke-belching power plants and brick kilns that ring the capital’s perimeter, and measures to reduce the clouds of dust from construction debris and road traffic.

Beneath the headlines, Delhi’s air pollution is not only a public health disaster; it is a classic case of environmental injustice. The city’s affluent classes reap the lion’s share of the benefits from the activities that poison the air, while less privileged residents bear most of the human health costs. This fateful disjuncture – and the inequalities of wealth and power that lie behind it – has posed the single biggest impediment to addressing the problem.

It remains to be seen whether the authorities in Delhi can muster the political will to go beyond stopgap emergency measures and launch the policies that are desperately needed to safeguard the public interest in a clean environment against the private interests of the polluting classes. Will India, often hailed as the world’s largest democracy, be able to overcome the oligarchy that rules its air? The poor who bear the heaviest air pollution burdens wish they could hold their breath long enough to find out.

    James K Boyce teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Aseem Shrivastava is a Delhi-based writer and co-author of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India.

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17. INDIA: ... AND THEN THEY CAME FOR ME! | EDITORIAL, EPW
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(Economic and Political Weekly, 19 March 2016

It is not just institutions which are in the cross hairs, the citizen and her republic are also the targets.

For some time now, it has been evident even to those who had reposed faith in the moderating power of prime ministership on the politics that Narendra Modi represented that there has been no such effect. The main focus of the government (much to the dismay of the cheerleading “captains of industry” as well as the aspiring middle classes) has been on what the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) calls “cultural nationalism” and what the people of India know as a violent implementation of Hindu majoritarianism.

There has been a sustained strategy to fill the governing positions of institutions with not just those aligned ideologically and politically with the government in power, which is normal practice in most democracies, but with incompetent people who will hollow out the substance of these institutions. The list of institutions targeted thus is now well known. Even institutions whose functional autonomy is crucial to the checks and balances of a parliamentary democracy have been targeted for “capture,” like with the infamous attempt to undercut the Reserve Bank of India’s autonomy through the budget proposals last March.

There has been a parallel track to this attack on institutions. It is the attack on individuals. An Aamir Khan here, an Amartya Sen there, some time on Gulzar, someplace on U R Ananthamurthy; this list has been longer than ever. This has been the favourite strategy of the Hindutva forces even from the time of the previous National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government: of attacking individuals to the point where their life and liberty is threatened and they are coerced into silence. One never really knows when an M F Husain could become a Graham Staines. Thus the chilling effect of such targeting of individuals.

In its second reincarnation, the NDA government led by Narendra Modi has sat majestically inactive over a similar targeting of individuals by sundry forces whose only common thread is a shrill Hindu majoritarian nationalism inspired by the RSS. However, there is a far more insidious aspect to this targeting of individuals under the benign gaze of Prime Minister Modi: apart from celebrities it is now anonymous citizens who are targeted for going about the business of daily life.

A Mohammad Akhlaq is lynched for the food he eats. A university teacher, Vivek Kumar, invited to give a lecture at Gawalior, is attacked for the views he espouses. A poet and scientist Gauhar Raza is branded anti-national for reciting a poem. A dean of student welfare in a university, R Mahalakshmi, is attacked for doing the routine work of allowing student gatherings. A teacher, Nivedita Menon, is attacked for speaking about Kashmir and the North East at a teach-in. Dalit teachers are branded anti-national, just like Dalit students were earlier. Journalists reporting news are heckled, or worse arrested and questioned by the police, as happened recently with a journalist who reported that Muslims were not appointed for the Government of India-organised “World Yoga Day” as part of government policy. It was, after all, a minister of Modi’s cabinet who termed journalists as “Presstitutes” and continues to use that term.

These are just the better-known names who have come to prominence because they happen to get media, and social media, attention. The list itself is endless.

This targeting of citizens living their daily life has preceded the election of the present NDA government and has become the hallmark of how Hindutva forces and other socially reactionary right wing groups have forced their agendas on society. The murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M M Kalburgi, or the self-announced “death of the writer” by Perumal Murugan or the suicide of Rohith Vemula just go to show that the branding of a people as anti-national (or against a community) can lead to tragic, horrific consequences. What is new in the present dispensation is that the pillars of the state—the executive (union ministers), the judiciary (lawyers and judges), the media (national television)—are not standing up to defend the citizen and her fundamental rights; rather they are leading the lynch mobs.

The citizen has only the protection of her fundamental rights, ensured by the legitimacy and might of the state. The fundamental rights are not being denied in words, but by the state’s continued refusal to uphold them and by foisting false cases, by lawyers beating up defendants and by judges equating political opinions to viruses, by television news anchors broadcasting doctored videos and false news, these rights are denied very effectively. If teachers and students at one of India’s premier universities cannot speak their mind without fear of litigation and violence, both by the state as well as sundry political groups of the Hindutva stable, the message being sent out to the citizens is that their only protection is acquiescence with the Hindu majoritarian agenda, not the Constitution of India.

The defence of the people thus attacked—whether it is Rohith Vemula, Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Anirban Bhattacharya, S A R Geelani, Gauhar Raza, R Mahalakshmi, Nivedita Menon, or the many, many others who always get left out in such lists—is not just the defence of these individuals. It is a defence of the very idea of citizenship guaranteed by the fundamental rights of the Constitution of India. The defence of the citizen is the defence of our republic.

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18. INDIA: THE LYNCH MOB OF LATEHAR - PRESS RELEASE BY PUDR
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PEOPLES UNION FOR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS

PRESS STATEMENT

In the early hours of 18th March 2016, Mohammad Majloom Ansari (35) and Inayahtullah Khan (12) were found hanging from a tree in the Balumath forest area in Latehar, Jharkhand. Residents of Balugoan and Nawada villages, Ansari and young Khan were on their way to the weekly cattle fair with their eight buffaloes when they were stopped, thrashed, strangled and hanged by a lynch mob. So far the police has arrested 5 men and is on the lookout for three others. It has also clamped S.144 IPC in Balumath in a bid to quell communal tensions.

Surprisingly, till now, the police has been reluctant to question the Latehar Gau Raksha Samiti even though one of the accused, Mithilesh Prasad Sahu, is a known member of the organization. Instead, the version given to the media states “cattle loot”, “cash” and “personal enmity” as probable motives for the lynching. A local leader of the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (P) has questioned the official claim as he pointed out that the two victims were not rich traders and did not have much money on them as they were on their way to the fair on foot. Besides, if cattle loot was the motive, then, the police needs to explain why four of the eight buffaloes were found in the forest and only two were recovered from the accused. The SP Latehar, Anoop Birtharay, has conveniently stated that neither the family nor the complainant have blamed any organization. Needless to say, the FIR does not specify any reason for the lynching.

Why is the police soft-pedalling the issue of the involvement of the Gau Raksha Samitis in the barbaric killings? Protesting villagers, mostly cattle traders, who blocked the Latehar-Chatra highway and also pelted the police, are not new to such acts of lynching. On 8th September 2015, a cattle trader of nearby Gomia village, narrowly escaped being killed after he was thrashed by right wing goons, the Latehar MLA, Prakash Ram told PUDR. Mr Ram also said that the police refused to lodge a complaint and, instead, detained the victim. In February 2016, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, VHP, had announced in Jamshedpur that it would launch an agitation against the state government for ‘failing to protect’ the interests of the Hindu community and for failing to prevent ‘cow-slaughter’ incidents (www.jharkhandstatenews.com, 14.2.2016). Hence, the roots of the present hanging are not difficult to find. The lynch mob is around and known to the police.

The recent attacks and killings of Muslim cattle traders or those who are involved in the leather trade have been accompanied with certain organized actions which point to collusion between the mobs and the administration. One, such mobs use extreme cruelty while attacking victims. Whether it was Zahid Ahmed Bhat who was burnt alive in his truck in Udhampur in October 2015 or the manner in which the two deceased in Latehar were strangled and hanged, the mob actions are extremely violent and barbaric. Two, the time lag between a rumour and the crime is alarmingly short as the gatherings of mobs and lynchings happen almost simultaneously. Such mobs are forever ready to attack and no effort is made to prevent such gatherings. For instance, in Mainpuri, Agra, in October 2015, two men, Rafeeq and Habib were severely thrashed by a lynch mob merely on the suspicion that they were slaughtering a cow even when it was known that the animal had died of natural causes. Three, the nature of police investigations following the discovery of the crime remain suspiciously loaded in favour of the accused as the police is unwilling to probe how organized mobs are being created out of local Gau Raksha committees which enjoy political patronage.

Each of the above suggests that the Hindutva lynch mobs act with the knowledge of the local administration. The question is how will the rule of law function if its custodians subvert it willingly and act in complicity with the lynch mob? It is necessary to ask why such acts of vindictive killings are being repeated and why the state is so ‘tolerant’ about the violent actions of right wing mobs. While it is obvious that these self-styled cow protection groups must be prevented from converting the rule of law into self-serving instruments of communal power, why is the administration looking the other way?

Deepika Tandon and Moushumi Basu
Secretaries, PUDR
20th March 2016
www.pudr.org

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19. Education is always political
by Anurag Behar
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livemint.com, March 17 2016

Processes and practices of education are as political as the content. More political than processes are the aims of education

Galileo was pronounced “vehemently suspect of heresy” by the Church in 1632 and lived the last nine years of his life under house arrest, for his espousal of heliocentrism. Curiously, Copernican heliocentrism had been used by Pope Gregory himself in 1582 to alter his eponymous calendar. This schizophrenic behaviour of the Church can be substantially explained by its assessment that Galileo’s espousal questioned the authority of the Church to decide what was true. This blow at the basis of the then political order had to be crushed—while Copernican calculations as a tool to change the calendar were perfectly acceptable.

Most certainly such heretical ideas had no place in schools and universities; the Church controlled that well. In fact, over the next two centuries, the Protestant and the Catholic churches and their institutions often vied for the claim of being more geocentric than the other. It’s only by the 19th century that geocentrism withered away from the curriculum in schools.

Let’s not fool ourselves that such things are memories of an “unscientific” past. As one example, all world maps that schools use (and Google uses) are wrong, and they feed Eurocentrism. The subtle nudge is in the choice of placing Europe at the centre of the world, but what is egregiously wrong is the relative proportions of the countries and continents. The geographies of “the North”—Europe and North America—are represented ludicrously bigger than they are; the 48 million sq km of “the North” is shown to be bigger than the 94 million square kilometer of “the South”. Open a map and look at these remarkable distortions: in reality, South America is about twice the size of Europe but shown to be equal, Greenland looks bigger than China but is actually one-fourth, and the Nordic countries look bigger than India but are actually one-third.

Even matters of the physical world are learnt and taught in schools often on the basis of political values and choices. These may be very deliberate choices, like the Church on heliocentrism or unthinking espousal as in the case of the Eurocentrism in the maps.

Let’s take another example from economics. Textbooks in economics from the 1960s and ’70s in India would be full of the virtues of central planning and arcane details of the Mahalanobis model, which seems very strange today. Equally strange are today’s economics text books, which are influenced by market fundamentalism and dominated by the idealized rationality-individualism-equilibrium nexus, which exists only in these books; this stuff is as disconnected from reality as was the planning model. What must we know in economics to say that we know economics is a substantially political and not a purely epistemic issue?

The content of education in any society is politically influenced. This political influence operates at both levels: to accept what is “true knowledge” (for instance, the planning model versus market theory) and to choose “worthwhile knowledge” that finds place in the curriculum from the universal set of “knowledge”. I have deliberately taken examples from areas which are not usually referred to when discussing how politics determines the content of education, while in certain subjects and areas, this issue is well-known—say, in the content of history and sociology, in the treatment of matters of gender and caste.

The processes and practices of education are as political as the content. What is the language of the medium of instruction? Who all do we include in education? If we want universal equitable education, how do we make it happen? Do we think “merit” takes precedence over affirmative action? Do the pedagogical approaches adequately factor for the diversity in the class? Every one of these questions, and many more which determine education, are political in nature.

Even more political than the content and processes of education are the aims of education. Education that aims to develop autonomous, critical thinking individuals and to help develop a just and democratic society is sharply political. And as sharply political would be education that aims to develop individuals who are not questioning but conforming to some existing order. In fact, the aims of education shape the processes and content of education, including significantly determining their political tilt.

Views from the extremes, both the left and the right, regarding the recent happenings in some university campuses, have been unsurprising. Ugly, unethical politics anywhere must be condemned. But what has been surprising is a view stated by some which amounts to “there must be no politics in educational institutions”. This view reflects either a very naïve understanding of education or an insidiously political (even if unconscious) choice. And that choice is for education to aim to develop people who do not engage with the most important issues around them, do not question and do not think for themselves. This amounts to deep politics in education of a kind that must be rejected.

We need education that energizes our democracy and builds an India as envisioned in the Constitution by developing the abilities of students to think and contribute as autonomous individuals; this education is certainly political. One way or the other, all education is political.

Anurag Behar is chief executive officer of Azim Premji Foundation and leads sustainability initiatives for Wipro Ltd. He writes every fortnight on issues of ecology and education. 

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20. THE GEOPOLITICS OF INFRASTRUCTURE ON THE INDUS RIVERS SINCE THE 1940S
by Daniel Haines
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(Dissertation Reviews - March 14, 2016

A review of The Geopolitics of Infrastructure: Development, Expertise and the Nation on the Indus Rivers, by Majed Akhter. [University of Arizona. 2013. 282 pp. Primary advisor: Paul Robbins]

The politics of water-sharing and development is a globally important topic. Burgeoning populations, increasing per capita demands on water resources though modernization, and the potential impact of climate change mean that water is a precious commodity. South Asia, much of which is arid or semi-arid, has not only a pressing need for water but also some of the world’s most extensive irrigation and hydropower networks. Majed Akhter’s The Geopolitics of Infrastructure: Development, Expertise and the Nation on the Indus Rivers is a welcome addition to the fields of water policy studies, South Asian international relations, and state-building in Pakistan. Taking a seventy-year view of technocracy on the Indus rivers—including the Indus Waters Dispute between India and Pakistan during the 1940s-1950s, the relationship between nationalism and regionalism in Pakistan during the 1960s-1970s, and the legal geopolitics of international arbitration during the 2000s—Akhter argues that political elites in regions downstream from powerful neighbors emphasize hydrographic vulnerability in their relations with upstream elites.

The dissertation is divided into nine chapters, plus a short introduction and conclusion. After an introductory first chapter, which introduces the rivers and critiques the Security Studies-centric mode in which they are usually discussed, Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 are historical in focus. The rest of the chapters discuss contemporary developments.

Chapter 1 critiques the dominant, security-centric discourses that underpin mainstream studies of the Indus rivers. Following Stephen Graham (Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails. New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 1-26), Akhter argues that the Security Studies approach tends to privilege apparent “peace” between states as the goal of international relations, often marking the social and economic impacts of unequal relations between and within sovereign states, which the structure of international relations often frames. This line of argument flows through the thesis as a whole, and after establishing his initial position, Akhter moves on to tackle another major strand of thinking on the Indus rivers: namely that Pakistan (the downstream country in the basin) is running out of water. He delves into publicly available water-flow statistics and natural sciences literature in order to demonstrate that the basin’s hydrology is more complex than a simple picture of water stress: waste water, for instance, is widely used for irrigation, meaning that apparent inefficiencies in water management do not necessarily translate to water stress (pp. 45-46). Akhter concludes that relative water scarcity based on power and wealth inequalities—i.e., the fact that “water flows towards money,” in the saying of the American West—is Pakistan’s real problem.

Chapter 2 turns to the early years of the historical Indus waters disputes, which broke out between East Punjab (India) and West Punjab (Pakistan) in 1948. The British colonial government had constructed a large network of irrigation canals in undivided Punjab, which the Partition of 1947 severed. East Punjab inherited not only a geographically upstream position, meaning that the rivers of the basin flowed through it before crossing into Pakistan, but also the mechanisms for controlling the flow of water into some Pakistani canals. In April 1948 the East Punjab government used this position to cut off water supplies into two of West Punjab’s waterways, citing the latter’s failure to renew a canal-related interprovincial agreement. Rather than discuss the technical and legal ins and outs of the lengthy negotiations that India and Pakistan held between 1952-1960 under World Bank auspices, Akhter examines the ways that technocratic assumptions about river-development structured politicians and bureaucrats’ frame of reference. Akhter demonstrates that the India-Pakistan negotiations, while ostensibly “technical” and “a-political,” were in fact thoroughly politicized. Drawing on James Scott’s influential thesis on high modernism in state formation (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Akhter argues that discussions of water-flow data, for instance, masked what Indian and Pakistan negotiators held in common, namely a propensity for simplifying a complex natural system such as the Indus Basin into an easily “legible” object of state development.  This framework left precious little room for the acknowledgement of “hydraulic regionalism”—Pakistani elites’ articulation of the specific vulnerabilities of Pakistan’s downstream territory—which nevertheless continually undermined the technocratic nature of the talks.

In 1960, when India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), another agreement was signed, providing $893.5 million of funding to Pakistan to construct a huge system of irrigation and hydropower works. Several western powers contributed to the fund, which consisted of a mixture of loans and direct grants: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, West Germany, the U.K., and especially the U.S. Chapter 3 explores the financing of the Indus Basin Development Fund as a window onto Cold War geopolitics and capitalist development. Drawing on the analysis of David Harvey, Akhter suggests a juxtaposition between “capital logic”—the global imperative towards capitalist accumulation—and “territorial logic”—the grounding of state power in bounded territorial spaces. Akhter argues that, in the context of the World Bank’s role in putting the financial package together, “the territorial logic of Cold War statecraft exercised itself through finance capital” (p. 113). Technocratic development, in other words, served the ends of both capitalists and states.

Chapter 4 shifts focus from the international arena to a political history of Pakistan during the 1950s. In this chapter Akhter engages with the Gramscian idea of a “passive revolution”: a top-down process of state formation that forms at the intersection of global and domestic political economy, on the capitalist periphery (Antonio Gramsci, Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gransci. New York: International Publishers, 1971; Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question. West Lafayette: Bordighera, 1995). Akhter argues that the passive revolution in Pakistan served the ends of Pakistan’s military-bureaucratic elite, which was (and is) dominated by Punjabis. This elite, he argues, used apolitical, technocratic hydro-development as part of its attempt to extend hegemony and create a sense of nationhood that lay beyond the overtly political sphere.  The spatially uneven process of development, which neglected other regions, nevertheless contributed to the tensions and fissures within the Pakistani nation-state. Akhter has since refined and developed these arguments in a journal article (Majed Akhter, “The Hydropolitical Cold War: The Indus Waters Treaty and State Formation in Pakistan.” Political Geography 46, 2015, pp.65-75).

Chapter 5, which also forms the basis of a recent article (Majed Akhter, “Infrastructure Nation: State Space, Hegemony, and Hydraulic Regionalism in Pakistan.” Antipode 47, 2015, pp. 849-870), builds on the previous chapter. It analyzes the process of hydraulic regionalism that has characterized relations between downstream Sindh and upstream Punjab, first as provinces of colonial India, and later of Pakistan. Akhter focuses on three infrastructure-related geopolitical issues: a dispute between the two colonial provincial governments over water allocation during the 1920s; the welding of the provinces of West Pakistan into one unit during the 1950s, and its fragmentation back into individual provinces in the late 1960s; and contemporary Sindhi protests against a planned dam at Kalabagh in Punjab. Again responding to Gramsci, the chapter argues that Punjab’s representatives have sought to present their claims to hydro-development as technical and apolitical, casting the river basin as a unit that does not contain political boundaries. In fact, as Akhter shows, this discourse masked an intense regional politics.

Over the rest of the thesis, Akhter brings his narrative up to the very recent past, and shifts source base. In Chapter 6 he turns to legal sources to analyze a 2005-2007 dispute between Indian and Pakistani delegations over the construction of the Baglihar project on the River Chenab in (Indian) Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan contested India’s right, under the IWT, to construct the hydropower dam on a river that the treaty had assigned to Pakistan’s use. The World Bank appointed Raymond Lafitte, a Swiss professor of civil engineering, as a “neutral expert” to decide the case. Akhter usefully links back Lafitte’s deliberations and decision, which ignored the possible geopolitical effects of the project and relied heavily on the wording of the treaty, to the crucial moments in 1960 when the World Bank insisted on the given treaty wording. Doing so, Akhter argues with considerable justification, demonstrates that Lafitte’s approach misread the history of the Indus negotiations by assuming that the treaty wording represented consensual agreement rather than grudging compromise. In this chapter Akhter also discusses another recent dispute, over India’s Kishenganga hydro-electric project on a tributary of the River Jhelum. This time, a World Bank-convened court of arbitration did consider geopolitics, to an extent, and imposed limits on Indian plans.

Chapter 7 follows hot on its heels and sustains the investigation of the Kishenganga arbitration, using similar sources. Here Akhter thinks more broadly about what international treaties are and how parties interpret them, leading to an informative discussion of the IWT in international legal context. Again, he shows how present-day disputes actively invoke and use the history of the Indus negotiations. This is particularly useful: water policy literature frequently mentions (in passing) the legal oddity of the IWT, but Akhter is the first scholar to convincingly illuminate the treaty’s unstable meaning.

The final two chapters maintain focus on the present day, but shift in theme to the politics of technocracy, nationalism, and regionalism in Pakistan. Using ethnographic sources, mainly interviews with engineers and his field notes on attending specialist water policy discussions in Lahore, Akhter returns to the theme of the “politics of artefacts,” and this time builds on Winner’s theories to highlight the relationship between the Pakistan’s national water-supply system as a material phenomenon and a focus for the politics of regionalism (Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, 1980, pp.121-136; and The Whale and the Reactor: The Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Even an apparently simple task like measuring water flows in different provinces suffers from the deep lack of trust between engineers loyal to those provinces, shows Chapter 8. Technological “fixes” to political and social problems, such as determining and ensuring the equitable distribution of water amongst rival claimants, rarely work.

Using a similar sources base and pursuing similar themes, Chapter 9 explains why a technocratic vision of unified, integrated water-supply across Pakistan’s four provinces cannot overcome regional differences. The most powerful engineering lobby in the country is attached to Punjab, the province which is both advantageously upstream on Pakistan’s rivers, and politically, economically, and demographically dominant compared with the other provinces. Punjabi engineers who promote “neutral” and “efficient” schemes from water distribution fail to recognize, and overcome, the objections of activists in downstream Sindh. By insisting on absolute technocracy, and attempting to annex discourses of the “national interest,” the Punjab lobby leaves no room for compromise.

The Geopolitics of Infrastructure has significant potential to impact on the fields of water policy studies, South Asian studies, and historical geography. Akhter wades into the thick mire of writing on the politics of water-sharing in the Indus Basin, and finds genuinely original angles on it. More broadly, the thesis will be of interest for its impressive demonstration of source-work. Akhter handles official archives, legal materials, interviewing, and ethnographic reporting with equal skill. He not only demonstrates that big topics require multiple approaches, but offers a clear methodological example for others who wish to follow suit.

Daniel Haines
Department of History
University of Bristol

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21. WHY I SPEAK OUT AGAINST ISLAMISM
by Maryam Namazie
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(The Guardian - 13 October 2015)

Criticism of Islamism is much needed. It’s time for the left to support the many who, like me, refuse and resist

Warwick University Student Union’s reversal of its initial decision to bar me from speaking about Islam and Islamism on campus, at the invitation of Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists Society, has been widely celebrated as a small win for free speech. But it has also ruffled the feathers of Islamists and their apologists.

Historically, criticism of religion has been a crucial aspect of free expression and intrinsically linked with anti-clericalism and the dismantling of that which is deemed taboo and sacred by the gatekeepers of power. Such criticism has been key for social progress. It is also a matter of life and death for many living under Islamist rule, such as in those areas where Isis has seized power, Saudi Arabia, or in Iran where criticism of religion and the state are analogous. There, anything from demanding women’s equality or trade union rights to condemning sexual jihad and the “Islamic cultural revolution” (which banned books and “purified” higher education) can be met with arrest, imprisonment and even the death penalty.

Where Islamists are not in power but have influence – I include Britain here – critics face accusations of racism and Islamophobia to deflect legitimate outrage against Islamism, which I regard as a killing machine and a network with global reach. Atheist bloggers have been hacked to death by Islamists in Bangladesh while UK-based Bangladeshi bloggers have been placed on death lists.

The labelling of much-needed criticism of Islamism as antisocial, even dangerous by left apologists sees dissent through the eyes of Islamists and not the many who refuse and resist. How else are we to show real solidarity with those who struggle against the theocracies we have fled from – if not through criticism? The fight against Islamism and the need for international solidarity apparently does not enter into their calculation.

Even their paternalistic “concern” for British Muslims is incoherent. After all, aren’t many critics of Islamism Muslims too? In fact, Muslims or those labelled as such are often the first victims of Islamism and are at the forefront of resistance. Also, not everyone in what’s referred to as the Muslim “community” is a Muslim, and even if they are, religion is not the only characteristic that defines them. Moreover, the rise of Islamism has brought with it a corresponding rise in the demand for atheism, secularism and women’s liberation.

At its core, this is a global fight between theocrats and the religious right on the one hand, and secularists and those fighting for social justice on the other. It’s a fight taking place within and across communities and borders. Notwithstanding, the “concern” of this “left” only encompasses the “authentic Muslim”, which to them is the Islamist. It has become their go-to catchphrase to deflect all criticism by dishonestly conflating condemnation of Islamists with the demonisation of ordinary Muslims, so as to justify siding with the religious right at the expense of dissenters. In fact, conflating ordinary Muslims with Islamists does nothing to challenge anti-Muslim bigotry but in fact reinforces it.

In their “anti-colonialist” worldview, which unsurprisingly coincides with that of the ruling classes in the “Islamic world” or “Muslim community”, dissenters are either “native informants” or contributing to the “demonisation of Muslims”.

For those who have bought into the Islamist narrative, there are no social and political movements, class politics, dissenters, women’s rights campaigners, socialists – just homogenised “Muslims” (read Islamists) who face “intimidation” and “discrimination” if an ex-Muslim woman speaks on a university campus.

This politics of betrayal ends up denying universalism, seeing rights, equality and secularism as “western”, justifying the suppression of women, apostates and blasphemers under the guise of respect for other “cultures” – imputing on innumerable people the most reactionary elements of culture and religion, which is that of the religious right. According to this view, the oppressor is victim, the oppressed “incite hatred”, and any criticism is bigotry.

Ironically, these postmodernist “leftists” have one set of progressive politics for themselves (they rightly want gay marriage, women’s equality and the right to criticise the pope and Christian right) and another for us. We are merely allowed to make demands within the confines of Islam and identity politics and only after taking note of the “power imbalance”. (By the way, an ex-Muslim migrant woman like me is a minority within a minority but that “power imbalance” does not concern them.)
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Islamism must be challenged by an enlightenment, not a reformation. (Some would argue that Isis is Islam’s reformation.) For this, the right to criticise religions and the religious right (including the Christian right, Buddhist right, Hindu right and Jewish right) is crucial, as is international solidarity and an unequivocal defence of migrant rights, secularism, equality and citizenship.

Those in the business of defending Islamism make a mockery of traditional left values and are incapable of fighting for social justice on multiple fronts – these include fighting against the religious right, racism and xenophobia, fascism of all stripes, the UK government’s restrictions on civil liberties, as well as for free expression.

Now is the time to reclaim the left and the values it represents for us all – irrespective of “community”, beliefs and borders. In the age of Isis, this is an historical task and necessity.

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22. HUNGARY HEADS TOWARDS GENERAL STRIKE AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AGAINST ORBÁN REGIME
by Christopher Adam
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(Hungarian Free Press, March 16, 2016)

More than 45,000 took to the streets on March 15th, 2016, as part of a massive demonstration led by teachers, parents and students, but drawing on all demographics of Hungarians who are livid with an intellectually and morally bankrupt, and rhetorically exhausted autocratic regime that has built its power on dividing society against itself and capitalizing on the increased vulnerability of desperate, marginalized people. István Pukli, the 36-year old director of the Teleki Blanka High School in Budapest, has risen to become the de facto leader of a movement that has now organized its second mass demonstration in under one month.

Mr. Pukli handed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and President János Áder an ultimatum: both men must apologize to all Hungarians who the government has “frightened and humiliated over the past six years” no later than March 30th. If Mr. Orbán and Mr. Áder fail to offer a blanket apology which, in this form, would be political suicide for them, then Mr. Pukli and the movement of teachers  would engage in a one hour national, illegal walk-out. And this would be followed by ever longer walk-outs and, ultimately, a general strike. It’s critical to note that legal strikes among teachers in Hungary are all but impossible to get approved, so illegal strikes are the only option.

Mr. Pukli’s ultimatum is a shrewd move. First, he has managed to turn the teachers’ protest into a wider movement that engages all those, from all walks of life, dissatisfied with the Orbán government. Hungary has apparently arrived at the moment when the various disparate sectors and demographics of the opposition are uniting, despite the varied nature of their grievances. The uniting factor, however, is precisely as Mr. Pukli summarized it: Mr. Orbán’s regime is building absolute loyalty through fear and by rendering already vulnerable people even more beholden to the whims of those in power.

I consider the initial responses to the ultimatum on the part of Fidesz to be politically unhelpful for the government. First, Fidesz MEP Tamás Deutsch went onto Twitter and made light of Mr. Pukli and the protesters. “I wouldn’t want to be in the government’s shoes now,” remarked Mr. Deutsch sarcastically.

Then to show just how tone deaf Mr. Orbán has become, he too turned Mr. Pukli’s ultimatum into a joke. “I simply took this as a joke–the whole thing sounded so funny, ” remarked the prime minister. When asked to comment on the impending strike, Mr. Orbán simply said: “I am still going to show up to work.”

Mr. Pukli declared that the regime “does not have power over us,” and he added: “What kind of law is that which protects those in power from the people? It’s now or never. We are living in historical  times. We cannot tell our children that we could have done something for them, but wasted the opportunity. We are no longer asking. We are demanding.”

The high school director then told the protesters that one of his demands is that the government find someone credible who would sit down and negotiate with the teachers and their unions, and that the regime immediately remove both Minister Zoltán Balog and State Secretary László Palkovics from this file.

Mr. Pukli’s message is one of social justice and respect for unions. It is a message that is to the left of the mainstream Hungarian opposition, particularly parties like the Democratic Coalition (DK). In 2012, Mr. Pukli–born in 1979 and originally from the town of Szekszárd–had the following to say about education and society in Hungary:

“The basis and raison d’etre of the consumer society has been called into question in the last few years. The deepening world crisis has made this burst, like a balloon…The worldview, which considers the happiness of the individual above all else, has made those growing up and even their parents greedy, and less sensitive to societal problems. But we have to recognize that we are not independent of each other–society is not built on just separate elements that are insensitive to each other.”

This viewpoint is closest to the views of some of the newer parties and younger members of the Hungarian opposition, notably Dialogue for Hungary (Párbeszéd Magyarországért) and Politics Can Be Different (Lehet Más a Politika). Parties like DK have taken a more classical liberal approach, placing the focus on individual freedoms and liberties, rather than on solidarity and on a more communal approach to society.

Mr. Pukli’s views are much more in tune with those who may have voted for Fidesz or Jobbik in the past, or perhaps did not vote at all, but are now looking for change. Neoliberalism, which has characterized much of the left-centre Hungarian opposition’s rhetoric, is not a winning ticket in Hungary.

The second half of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s second, consecutive term in office may be significantly more difficult for him than the first.

Author: Christopher Adam Christopher Adam received a B.A. in history from Concordia University, an M.A. in East/Central European and Russian-Area Studies from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on the history of the Hungarian diaspora during the postwar period. Christopher is the founding editor of the Hungarian Free Press, as well as the founder and editor-in-chief of the Kanadai Magyar Hírlap Hungarian-language paper, which won Hungary's 2015 Free Press (Szabad Sajtó) Award. Christopher resides in Ottawa, Canada.

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23. The Daoud Affair: How Western intellectuals turn themselves into the enemies of an entire class of liberal writers from Muslim backgrounds
by Paul Berman and Michael Walzer
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(Tablet - March 21, 2016)

Last month the Algerian novelist and journalist Kamel Daoud astonished the readers of Le Monde in Paris by threatening to renounce journalism, not because he is afraid of Islamists at home in Algeria, though a fatwa has been issued against him, but for another reason, which is still more dismaying. He has been severely condemned by people from the Western intellectual class, and silence seems to him an appropriate response.

The denunciations of Daoud are a distressing development. And they are doubly distressing because they conform to a pattern that has become familiar. It goes like this: A writer with liberal ideas emerges from a background in the Muslim countries, or perhaps lives there now. The writer proposes criticisms of Islam as it is practiced, or of sexual repression under Islamic domination (a major theme), or of the Islamist movement. The criticisms seem blasphemous to the Islamists and the reactionary imams, who respond in their characteristic fashion. In the Western countries, intellectuals who mostly think of themselves as progressive make their own inquiry into the writer and his or her ideas. They hope to find oblique and reticent criticisms of a sort that they themselves produce. But they find something else—criticisms that are angrier and more vehement, or more sweeping, or more direct.

The Western intellectuals, some of them, recoil in consternation. And, as if liberated from their reticence, they issue their own condemnation of the offending writer, not on grounds of blasphemy but on grounds that purport to be left-wing. The Western intellectuals accuse the liberal from the Muslim world of being a racist against Muslims, or an Islamophobe, or a “native informant” and a tool of imperialism. Sometimes they accuse the liberal from the Muslim world of stupidity, too, or lack of talent. This was Salman Rushdie’s experience in the years after he came out with The Satanic Verses, back in 1988, which he has described in his memoir Joseph Anton. The experience of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, originally from Somalia, offers probably the most widely discussed example after Rushdie’s. But the pattern of Western condemnation can be observed in many other cases as well, directed at liberal writers of different kinds and views—the authors of political essays, memoirs, literary criticism, journalism, and novels, from backgrounds in countries as diverse as Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Kamel Daoud’s Algerian colleague, the novelist Boualem Sansal, last year’s winner of a prize from the French Academy, has come under this kind of condemnation. And now the pattern has reemerged in regard to Daoud himself.

Daoud stands high on the world scene because of his novel, The Meursault Investigation, which adds a philosophical dimension to the affair. The book is an homage to Albert Camus, and a rebuke. In 1942 Camus published a novel titled The Stranger, which tells the story of a French Algerian named Meursault, who gratuitously murders a nameless and silent Arab on the beach. Daoud in The Meursault Investigation tells the story of the murdered man’s younger brother, who contemplates what it means to be rendered nameless and silent by one’s oppressor. In France, Daoud’s reply to Camus won the Goncourt Prize for a First Novel in 2015, among other prizes. In the United States, it received two of the greatest blessings that American journalism can bestow on a writer not from the United States. The New Yorker published an excerpt. And the New York Times Magazine published a full-length admiring profile.

These triumphs created a demand for Daoud’s journalism, as well. For 20 years he has written for the Algerian newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran, but, in the wake of his novel’s success, his journalism began to appear prominently in Le Monde and other European newspapers. He was invited to write for the New York Times. And he responded to these opportunities in the way that any alert and appreciative reader of his novel might have expected.

He offered insights into the Islamic State. He attacked Saudi Arabia, with a side jab aimed at the extreme right in France. But he also looked at the mass assault on women that took place in Cologne on New Year’s Eve by a mob that is thought to have included men from the Arab world. He dismissed a right-wing impulse in Europe to regard immigrants as barbarians. And he dismissed a left-wing, high-minded naïveté about the event. He pointed to a cultural problem. In the New York Times he wrote: “One of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women.” More: “The pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.” In Le Monde he wrote that Europe, in accepting new immigrants and refugees, was going to have to help them accept new values, too—“to share, to impose, to defend, to make understood.” And now his troubles began.

A group of 19 professors in France drew up a statement accusing Daoud of a series of ideological crimes, consisting of “orientialist cliches,” “essentialism,” “psychologization,” “colonialist paternalism,” an “anti-humanist” viewpoint, and other such errors, amounting to racism and Islamophobia. Le Monde published their accusations. A second denunciation came his way, this time in private. It was a letter from the author of the New York Times Magazine profile, the American literary journalist Adam Shatz. In his letter Shatz professed affection for Daoud. He claimed not to be making any accusations at all. He wrote, “I’m not saying you’re doing it on purpose, or even that you’re playing the game of the ‘imperialists.’ I’m not accusing you of anything. Except perhaps of not thinking, and of falling into strange and potentially dangerous traps”—which amounted to saying what the 19 professors had said, with the additional accusation of stupidity.

Daoud published the American journalist’s letter in Le Monde, just to make clear what he was up against—though he did it with an elegant show of friendliness. He explained that he, and not his detractors, lives in Algeria and understands its reality. He noted the Stalinist tone of the attacks on him. He insisted on the validity of his own emotions. He refused to accept the political logic that would require him to lapse into silence about what he believes. And then, in what appeared to be a plain and spiteful fury at his detractors, he declared that he is anyway going to do what the detractors have, in effect, demanded. He is going to silence his journalism: a gesture whose emotional punch comes from The Meursault Investigation, with its theme of silence. Or, at minimum, Daoud threatened to be silent—though naturally the calls for him to continue speaking up have already begun, and doubtless he will have to respond.

The two of us who are writing this commentary call attention to a second pattern in these condemnations, which dates to the days of Soviet Communism. Everyone who remembers the history of the 20th century will recall that, during the entire period from the 1920s to the 1980s, one brave and articulate dissident after another in the Soviet bloc succeeded in communicating a message to the Western public about the nature of Communist oppression—valuable messages because the dissidents could describe with first-hand accuracy the Soviet regime and its satellite states.

And, time after time, a significant slice of Western intellectuals responded by crying: “Oh, you mustn’t say such things! You will encourage the reactionaries!” Or they said: “You must be a reactionary yourself. A tool of imperialism.” The intellectuals who responded in these ways were sometimes Communists, pledged to loyalty to the Soviet Union, and sometimes they were fellow-travelers, who defended the Soviet Union without having made any pledges. But sometimes they were merely people who worried about their own societies—who worried that criticism of the Soviet Union was bound to benefit right-wing fanatics in the West. These people considered that, in denouncing the Soviet dissidents, they were protecting the possibility for lucid and progressive conversation in their own countries.

But that was a mistake. By denouncing the dissidents, Western intellectuals succeeded in obfuscating the Soviet reality. And they lent the weight of their own prestige to the Soviet regime, which meant that, instead of being the enemies of oppression, they ended up as the allies of oppression. The progressive intellectuals were not foolish to worry about right-wing fanaticism in their own countries, but they needed to recognize that sometimes political arguments have to be complicated. They needed to learn how to defend the Soviet dissidents even while attacking right-wing fanatics in the West. They needed to make two arguments at the same time.

Too many progressive intellectuals today are falling into the pattern of those fallacies of long ago. They are right to worry about anti-Muslim bigotries in the Western countries. But in turning themselves into the enemies of an entire class of liberal writers from Muslim backgrounds, they are achieving the opposite of what they intend. They mean to oppose racism. But they end up drawing invidious distinctions between people like themselves, who ought to be free to issue angry criticisms of their own cultures and societies, and the intellectuals of the Muslim countries, who ought to bite their tongues. They mean to defend lucidity, but they obfuscate realities by drowning out the news that is brought to us by the liberal writers. They mean to inhibit the growth of irrational hatreds in the West. But they end up adding to the hatreds that are directed at the liberal writers. They mean to display sympathy for the Arab and Muslim world, and they end up castigating its most talented writers. They mean to promote progress, and they end up adding their weight to the Islamist condemnations. Daoud, with his eloquent protest, has revealed the ironies. We applaud him, and we applaud the newspapers that have published him—and we hope that, having made his point, he will quickly return to the business of making people think.

***
Paul Berman is the critic-at-large of Tablet magazine. Michael Walzer is professor (emeritus) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of Just and Unjust Wars and The Paradox of Liberation, among other books, and the former co-editor of Dissent magazine.

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

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