SACW - 13 April 2016 | Bangladesh: atheists under threat / Secularizing Sri Lanka / Pakistan: JuD Justice; Rats.. / Nepal: Prime Minister raps rights commission / India: Rampant Racism; Sinking Free speech / Charlie Hebdo & Blashphemy / Nuit debout

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 13 April 2016 - No. 2891 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Secularizing Sri Lanka - Paradox Of Sovereignty | Anushka Kahandagama
2. Nepal: Prime Minister signals to the independent National Human Rights Commission to seek prior approval before going public
3. Bangladesh: Authorities must act as another secular activist hacked to death - Statement by Amnesty International
4. India: In Solidarity with all Kashmiri students: An appeal by a group of Kashmiri Pandits
5. India Is The Most Racist Country ... Explains An African-American
6. India: Free speech in 2016 - First Three Months | a report from The Hoot
7. India: Glimpses from Pratirodh - 2, a gathering against attacks on reason, democracy and composite culture (8 April 2016, New Delhi)
8. India: Declaration from a National Convention of Workers, New Delhi, March 30 2016

9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - The killing only proves that I will never be able to return to my motherland: Exiled Bangla blogger (Report in The Times of India)
  - India: The fire tragedy at the Kollam temple in Kerala came from an opposite development currently stalking us: politically induced cultural aggression (Jawed Naqvi)
  - India: NDTV's wrong on history and facts - Prannoy Roy classifies all Muslims in Assam as migrants and Ahoms as Assamese ...(Aman Wadud)
  - India: Gujarat RSS activists queue up to greet DG Vanzara, accused in 3 staged killings by the police - Scanned photo from a Gujarati Newspaper
  - India: Mixing religion with politics - Who will separate and when? (PP Rao)
  - India - Kerala: Temple Authorities Played ‘Religious Sentiments’ Card to Hold Fireworks Display
  - India: How the RSS Helped Fill the BJP’s Grassroots Vacuum in Assam (Rajeev Bhattacharyya)
  - On sacralization of everyday life, religious identity, Citizenship, and Democracy in Contemporary India (Nandini Gooptu in Modern Asian Studies )
  - India - History: ‘It’s A Myth That Muslim Rulers Destroyed Thousands Of Temples’ - interview with Richard Eaton
  - India: How Communalism Divides the Nation? (Ram Puniyani)
  - The Fading Memory of Assam’s Syncretic History (Shaheen Ahmed)
  - How Hate Speech Divides the Nation: Baba Ramdev and Bharat Mata Ki Jia
  - India: Spirituality in a bottle - Indian guru builds empire on ‘holy’ bodywash for the faithful
  - India: Ravish Kumar's letter to Maharashtra Chief Minister on his threat to people who refuse to say 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' [audio in Hindi]
  - Is India a Secular Nation? by Madhav Godbole - Text of Undelivered B G Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2016

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Dalits and Maoists in Nepal's civil war: between synergy and co-optation | Richard A. Bownasa 
11. Jesuit Missionaries in Post-Colonial Conflict Zones: The Disappearance of ‘Father Basketball’ in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka | Bernardo E. Browna
12. Ten key questions (and answers) about the attacks on atheist bloggers in Bangladesh | David Bergman 
13. Muktijuddho: Polyphony of the Ocean | Naeem Mohaiemen
14. Bangladesh: Dear UNESCO, do you have a Plan B? | Maha Mirza
15. Pakistan: JuD justice - Editorial, The News
16. Oh, So Now I’m Bangladeshi? | Zia Haider Rahman
17. Panama Black money: No Holy Cows? | Faraz Ahmad
18. Even in ’83, Srinagar cheered West Indies, not India … campus brutality’s normal in Kashmir … tensions are up with ABVP: Basharat Peer
19. India: The builder flat - Modernity without content? | Santosh Desai
20. As giant rats menace Pakistan, conspiracy theories swirl | Tim Craig and Haq Nawaz Khan
21. Nuit debout protesters occupy French cities in revolutionary call for change | Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
22. The Assassin’s Veto: Blasphemy and Charlie Hebdo | Myra MacDonald
23. Book Review: Trent on Halliwell, 'Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945-1970'

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1. Secularizing Sri Lanka - Paradox Of Sovereignty | Anushka Kahandagama
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The article 9 of the Constitution provides an invisible power to Buddhist religious institutions which might harm the sovereignty of the country.
http://www.sacw.net/article12592.html

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2. Nepal: Prime Minister signals to the independent National Human Rights Commission to seek prior approval before going public
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Prime Minister KP Oli’s spat last week with senior functionaries of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has sent alarm bells ringing about the interference by the executive into an independent body responsible for upholding post-conflict transitional justice.
http://www.sacw.net/article12588.html

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3. Bangladesh: Authorities must act as another secular activist hacked to death - Statement by Amnesty International
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The vicious killing of another secular activist in Bangladesh is a grave reminder that the authorities are failing to protect people exercising their right to freedom of expression, Amnesty International said
http://www.sacw.net/article12594.html

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4. India: In Solidarity with all Kashmiri students: An appeal by a group of Kashmiri Pandits
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We, as Kashmiri Pandits, are distressed about this politics of hate and revenge. Our first reaction is: Have we lost our mind? Where are we heading with this kind of brazen brutality? Before this unfortunate incident is used to create communal hysteria and detrimental sentiments and further this cycle of violence, we want to tell the people and especially students across the country to refrain from attacking Kashmiri Muslim students. We urge them not to mentally or physically harass Kashmiri students under any circumstance.
http://www.sacw.net/article12587.html

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5. India Is The Most Racist Country ... Explains An African-American
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Of all the countries I have been to, India ranks way up there among the most ‘racist’, IMHO. Indians aren’t so much ‘racist’ as they are intolerant. Indians discriminate against fellow citizens to a degree that I have NEVER encountered in ANY other country.
http://www.sacw.net/article12590.html

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6. India: Free speech in 2016 - First Three Months | a report from The Hoot
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http://www.sacw.net/article12574.html

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7. India: Glimpses from Pratirodh - 2, a gathering against attacks on reason, democracy and composite culture (8 April 2016, New Delhi)
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8 April 2016: Pratirodh II was held "against attacks on reason, democracy and composite culture"; Mavalankar Hall, New Delhi; photos posted below are by Mukul Dube
http://www.sacw.net/article12581.html

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8. INDIA: DECLARATION FROM A NATIONAL CONVENTION OF WORKERS, NEW DELHI, MARCH 30 2016
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The Convention notes that attitude of the Govt is profoundly negative and hugely challenging to the working class. Despite readiness expressed by the CTUs through joint letter to the Govt after the 2ndSeptember 2015 strike for commencement of dialogue on the 12 point charter of demands (CoD), the Govt did not respond at all thus arrogantly ignoring the message of such a huge strike by crores of workers pressing for their demands unanimously formulated by all the CTUs.
http://www.sacw.net/article12589.html

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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
========================================
  - The killing only proves that I will never be able to return to my motherland: Exiled Bangla blogger (Report in The Times of India)
  - India: The fire tragedy at the Kollam temple in Kerala came from an opposite development currently stalking us: politically induced cultural aggression (Jawed Naqvi)
  - India: NDTV's wrong on history and facts - Prannoy Roy classifies all Muslims in Assam as migrants and Ahoms as Assamese ...(Aman Wadud)
  - India: Gujarat RSS activists queue up to greet DG Vanzara, accused in 3 staged killings by the police - Scanned photo from a Gujarati Newspaper
  - India: Mixing religion with politics - Who will separate and when? (PP Rao)
  - India - Kerala: Temple Authorities Played ‘Religious Sentiments’ Card to Hold Fireworks Display
  - India: How the RSS Helped Fill the BJP’s Grassroots Vacuum in Assam (Rajeev Bhattacharyya)
  - On sacralization of everyday life, religious identity, Citizenship, and Democracy in Contemporary India (Nandini Gooptu in Modern Asian Studies )
  - India - History: ‘It’s A Myth That Muslim Rulers Destroyed Thousands Of Temples’ - interview with Richard Eaton
  - India: How Communalism Divides the Nation? (Ram Puniyani)
  - The Fading Memory of Assam’s Syncretic History (Shaheen Ahmed)
  - How Hate Speech Divides the Nation: Baba Ramdev and Bharat Mata Ki Jia
  - India: Spirituality in a bottle - Indian guru builds empire on ‘holy’ bodywash for the faithful
  - India: Ravish Kumar's letter to Maharashtra Chief Minister on his threat to people who refuse to say 'Bharat Mata ki Jai' [audio in Hindi]
  - Is India a Secular Nation? by Madhav Godbole - Text of Undelivered B G Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2016
  - India: Fascism of everyday in Gujarat- Retired IPS officer D.G Vanzara, a key accused in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Ishrat Jahan fake encounter cases, dances with a sword in Gandhinagar 8 April 2016
  - Why Charlie Hebdo Was Right to Address the Brussels Attacks (Tehmina Kazi)

-> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. DALITS AND MAOISTS IN NEPAL'S CIVIL WAR: BETWEEN SYNERGY AND CO-OPTATION
by Richard A. Bownasa
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Contemporary South Asia
Volume 23, Issue 4, 2015, pages 409-425

Abstract
This paper examines the role of Dalits in Nepal's 1996–2006 civil war (or ‘Maoist People's War’) through field research conducted in 2014 in three villages in mid-western and mid-eastern Nepal. The aim of the paper is to illuminate Dalit struggles at the village level which have gone more or less unnoticed both in academic literature and in civil society debate in metropolitan Nepal. Dalit activists in certain locations had been mobilizing under the radar for many years before the People's War. These activists were able to co-opt the Maoist guerrilla movement at the local level to oppose caste discrimination, while arguably, being themselves afterwards co-opted into the Maoists’ national campaign for state power. Empirically, this paper uses detailed findings about changes in caste discrimination practices in three villages where Maoist–Dalit interactions varied greatly to assess the successes and failures of this local level Dalit activism. Theoretically, it parses this episode of activism through debates about the nature of struggles for modernity in rural Nepal, arguing that we might be missing forms of locally grounded ‘modernizing’ struggles that do not fit some typical conceptualizations in social theory.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09584935.2015.1090952

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11. JESUIT MISSIONARIES IN POST-COLONIAL CONFLICT ZONES: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ‘FATHER BASKETBALL’ IN BATTICALOA, SRI LANKA
Bernardo E. Browna
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
Volume 38, Issue 4, 2015 
pages 589-607

In August 1990, Father Eugene John Hebert SJ disappeared while trying to reach his home in the Sri Lankan city of Batticaloa. Caught in the midst of the turmoil that confronted Tamil and Muslim minorities after the peace-keeping operations led by the Indian armed forces collapsed, Father Hebert was one of thousands of victims who perished in the violence that engulfed the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka between June and September 1990. Since the early stages of the ethnic conflict (1983–2009), American Jesuits stationed in Tamil-speaking areas of the island had become de facto human rights activists, being virtually the only remaining trusted mediators between the different factions involved in the armed confrontation. Their efforts to foster peace and dialogue in the region were far from their original assignment as educators—which Father Hebert had been conducting since his arrival in 1948. This article not only traces Father Hebert's life trajectory from Louisiana to Sri Lanka, it also reflects on the cultural impact that the presence of American Jesuits had in the entire region, as well as on the changing responsibilities they assumed in the volatile political context of the island that took them from coaching basketball to becoming catalysts for peace.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2015.1096435

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12. TEN KEY QUESTIONS (AND ANSWERS) ABOUT THE ATTACKS ON ATHEIST BLOGGERS IN BANGLADESH
by David Bergman
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(Scroll.in - 12 April 2016)
The murder of 28-year-old law graduate on Wednesday was the sixth such killing since February 2015.
What can one conclude from Wednesday’s murder of 28-year-old law graduate Nazimuddin Samad who was hacked to death by assailants in Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka, bringing to six the total number of men killed in a similar manner since February 2013?

Here are 10 key points about the attacks on young atheists in Bangladesh.

1. Who’s at risk?: If you are currently living or staying in Bangladesh and write, or have in the past written, critically about religion on any website, blog, Facebook or Twitter account, you are at risk from being attacked and killed by Islamic militants.
That may sound dramatic, but that is the unfortunate reality. Social class will obviously play a role – and elite atheist bloggers (so-called, even though some of them seem to have been targeted for expressing themselves on any form of social-media) are less vulnerable than middle or lower middle class people like Samad, who do not have their own cars and who have to walk to work, or take public transport.
The only positive point that can be said is that the attacks are not frequent. It seems that the number of militants involved is small, and they do not have the logistical ability, at present, to organise more than the occasional attack.

2. Who’s responsible?: The organisation Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh, which used to be known as the Ansarullah Bangla Team, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the killing. The local militant group is a known affiliate of Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and has previously claimed responsibility for a number of the previous killings of “atheist bloggers”.
It is not likely that this Al Qaeda outfit has any actual presence in Bangladesh – Ansar al-Islam has perhaps simply decided to affiliate itself with this international militant organisation for prestige purposes. It is not known the extent to which the Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent actually provides them assistance – or indeed whether these string of murders would have taken place even if there were not this international linkage.
These "blogger murders" appear to be distinct from other killings, involving the murder of foreigners and attacks on Shia gatherings, that have taken place since the middle of 2015, and for which Islamic State have claimed responsibility.

3. Who else faces threat?: According to reports, the Ansar al-Islam statement stated that “We don’t attack people for being atheist in their personal lives …. We only target those who deride Islam and the Prophet.” It then went onto say that they killed Nizam Uddin for committing “blasphemy against our beloved Prophet,” and referred to three particular posts that he had written on his Facebook page.
However, the statement also reportedly went onto threaten to target judges, lawyers, engineers and doctors “who don’t allow others to follow the rulings of the Islamic Shariah.”
It is not clear what this means in reality – since this constitutes an enormous class of people. However, perhaps a greater concern is that other secular activists, who may not necessarily be atheists (or at least do not write publicly about their views ) could be at risk in the future.
This could include for example those who protest against Islamic fundamentalism and campaign in support of imposing the death penalty on those convicted of war crimes at the International Crimes Tribunal (see below). At present, while many "atheist bloggers" are also involved in or support these activities, it is their so-called atheistic writings that makes them the target. It is certainly possible, however that this could change.

4. Why are these attacks happening now?: There are a number of factors, but without the exponential increase in the use of social networks, these attacks would not be taking place. With social networks, anyone can write and publish whatever they want. And anyone in the world with an internet connection can then read it.
Ten years ago, perhaps the same number of people in Bangladesh had views critical of religion – but nobody then knew who they were or read anything they may have written. This has now changed – and intolerant Islamic militants can now read what they say, find out whether they live and target them.

5. Do these murders reflect wider conflicts within society?: Yes, these murders are also a reflection on the longstanding conflict within Bangladesh about the role of religion in the country.
The country fought to be independent from the Islamic state of Pakistan and Bangladesh’s original constitution emphasised secularism, and banned religious political parties. However, after the assassination of the country’s independence leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, things changed. The ban on religious parties was lifted, secularism as a fundamental principle was removed from the constitution, and in time, Islam was made the state religion.
The current government however has reintroduced secularism. Islam, nonetheless, remains the state religion, in apparent acknowledgement of the deep divide within the country about the role religion should play. These murders are a stark reminder that this divide remains very potent.

6. What role does the International Crimes Tribunals play here?: These attacks also have to be seen in the context of the International Crimes Tribunal which were established in 2010 to prosecute those accused of war crimes during the country’s independence war and which pits the State against the leaders of the islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami. These attacks also have to be seen in the context of the International Crimes Tribunal which was established in 2010 to hold to account those accused of war crimes during the country’s independence war. What that meant in effect was the State being pitted against the leaders of the islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami.
The trials, in which supposedly pious religious politicians faced the prospect of the death penalty, always created the risk of some kind of blow-back – a risk that was perhaps exacerbated by criticisms regarding the fairness of the trials. And whilst there is no evidence to suggest that Jammat themselves have been involved in these blogger killings, it is very possible that the perverted minds of the men involved in these murders consider their involvement in “avenging blasphemy” as similar in some way to the death penalties imposed by the state following these trials.

7. Is there a connection with the Shahbagh Movement as well?: The secular progressive anti-fundamentalist mass protests, which were triggered by a decision by the Tribunal in early February 2013 to impose a sentence of imprisonment rather than that of death on a convicted Jamaat leader, known as the Shahagh Movement, is also significant.
In order to delegitimise this movement, its opponents began claiming that the huge daily protests taking place in Shahbagh crossing were connected with "atheist bloggers" whose comments about Islam were published in some newspapers.
On February 15, 2013, Ahmed Rajib Haider, an atheist who wrote critically about religion, and was also involved in organising the Shahbagh protests, was hacked to death, the very first such murder.

8. Is lack of democracy also responsible? In the Wall Street Journal, Shafquat Munir, a respected security analyst at the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies is quoted as saying that “The shrinking democratic space and the absence of a credible opposition creates a political void which then allows radicals, extremists and fringe elements to take centre stage.” This general position also seems to be reflected in a new report published by the International Crisis Group
Whilst Bangladesh’s lack of democratic space – due to the absence of legitimate elections in 2014, the brutal crackdown on opposition leaders and activists including the filing of hundreds if not thousands of apparently false criminal cases, and the countless disappearances and extra judicial killings, along with the crackdown on the independent media – is certainly a very serious problem in Bangladesh, it seems too simplistic to suggest that this provides an explanation for recent killings.
Of course, if proper democratic politics does not return to Bangladesh, more people may will turn towards the extremes. But, even if Bangladesh's opposition was allowed to function, it is likely that for the reasons set out above, these killings would still have taken place.

9. Can the police protect these bloggers?: Apart from the authorities not having the capacity and resources to protect such a large number of potential victims, the police cannot be trusted to be on the side of the so-called bloggers. This is because Bangladesh has a panoply of laws that criminalise those who write critically about religion.
Under the 1860 Penal Code, it is an offence to deliberately “outrage the religious feelings” of any class of citizen as well also deliberately intend to “wound the religious feelings of any person”. It is also an offence under the Information, Communications and Technology Act 2006, to write something on the internet that “causes to hurt or may hurt religious belief” which has attached to it a minimum sentence of seven years imprisonment.
It should therefore be no surprise that “atheist bloggers” are wary of seeking the protection of the police, as they could be arrested for any of these offences. Many social network activists claim that they fear being arrested if they seek protection from the police. “I have not gone to the police because police actually tried to arrest me in 2013,” CNN reported one atheist blogger in Bangladesh as saying.

10. What is the government’s stand in all this? Whilst most Bangladeshis would expect that the government to unconditionally condemn these killings, the government seems unclear quite how to react. Whilst there are voices within the government that do condemn the killing, others also seem to have half an eye on its lack of diligence in enforcing the laws criminalising “hurting religious feeling”, and the other half on not wanting to be seen by religious constituencies in the country supporting people with views critical of religion.
This confusion, results in a failure of the government to take a clear principled position against the killings. Instead, for example, one has the home minister focusing on what exactly it was that Nizam Uddin wrote. “It is needed to see whether he has written anything objectionable in his blogs,” he told the BBC Bengali service.

o o o

[see also:

US REAFFIRMS SHELTER FOR BLOGGERS, SECULAR ACTIVISTS
http://www.thedailystar.net/country/us-reaffirms-shelter-bloggers-secular-activists-1208044 ]

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13. MUKTIJUDDHO: POLYPHONY OF THE OCEAN
by Naeem Mohaiemen
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(The Daily Star - April 09, 2016)

Shahabuddin Ahmed, Victory 1, oil on canvas

As a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University with a research focus on Bangladesh history, I paid close attention when media reports came out about a draft bill that would punish any distortion of the history of Muktijuddho.  The Law Commission posted the draft of the “Bangladesh Liberation War (Denial, Distortion, Opposition) Crime Law” in March, 2016 on their website: http://lc.gov.bd/Circular/Holocaust%20Law_Draft%20(Final).pdf

According to the press release (http://lc.gov.bd/Press%20repot/Press%20Release_PDF.pdf), the bill drafting committee was advised by an esteemed group of advisors. But I wonder if the long-term implications of such a bill have been fully understood? 

One inspiration for this bill was probably the intense debates that sprang up after Shahbag, where those opposed to trials began to argue against the evidence of war crimes. Another was probably Sarmila Bose's book 'Dead Reckoning' (which I debunked in detail), which argued the Pakistan army did not commit war crimes. Finally, another reason may have been the recent debate about the wartime death toll. It is likely that the advisory committee saw and framed the bill within that specific scope. But once passed, would such a bill really remain within that proscribed and imagined track? Instead, this bill would open a pandora's box to any aspect of the war, and the years leading up to the war, being considered “controversial.” Controversy is always in the eye of the beholder, and that can never be speculatively imagined to stay within its original space. We have a history of laws that often boomerang in unexpected ways.

While reading this draft law, I have been looking at the pile of history in my office, purchased during the Boi Mela. Bangladeshi history being the focus of my past research, and current Ph.D. work, these are books written by academics,  journalists, politicians, and international researchers. These books look at 1971 from all corners of the spectrum. Based on this draft bill, an enthusiastic litigant may pick up any of these books and decide to prosecute the author as being in violation of the law. 

As an illustration, let me turn to Muyeedul Hasan's Upodhara 71, the long awaited sequel to Muldhara 71. It was Muldhara 71 (1985) along with Jahanara Imam's Ekatturer Dinguli (1986) that inaugurated the resurgence of Muktijuddho Itihash, after a decade during which such histories were discouraged. In Muldhara 71, Hasan analyzed Tajuddin Ahmed's role in leading the Mujibnagar war command. Could a plaintiff one day decide that to emphasize Tajuddin's role in Mujibnagar is a distortion? One of the aspects Upodhara 71 looks at is the role of Manik Miah in pushing for a “go slow” approach toward the Six Points. Manik Miah's sudden death of a heart attack in Karachi created a vacuum, which was filled by younger radicals who pushed for full implementation of Six Points without compromise. The rest is ekattur history and today Bangladesh is probably an independent nation partially because of the “no compromise” stance that the young radicals took. This is a complex history and deserves a deeper investigation. Would we allow such analysis to happen?

One aspect of recent research is the leadership vacuum created by Bangabandhu's arrest by the Pakistani army. Even though he had said on March 7th “even if I cannot give the call,” the population was confused between building resistance inside Bangladesh (Bangabandhu had said “build a fortress in every home”), or joining the war command in India. Since Major Ziaur Rahman was then unknown, and not a member of the Awami League, his radio broadcast did not fully clarify the situation. According to Upodhara 71, confusion was finally broken with the first radio broadcast by Tajuddin Ahmed, 17 days after the crackdown began. 

Some of the best descriptions of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's negotiations with Yahya Khan are in Sisson & Rose's War and Secession (1991). One aspect of those marathon negotiations was to demonstrate to the Pakistan Army that if the National Assembly were not called, East Pakistan would go its own way. Yahya Khan's brutal crackdown did not factor in how open the Indian border would be to the fleeing leadership, and how quickly a provisional Mujibnagar government would be set up. Srinath Raghavan's recent 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (2013) and Gary Bass' The Blood Telegram (2013) shed even more light on the complex equations at play during the nine month war.
 

We can also consider left histories of 1971, such as Haider Anwar Khan Juno's 71er Ronangan Shibpur. The Indira government feared leftists inside the Mukti Bahini because they thought they may ally with Naxalites (who were in their peak moment of strength in West Bengal). Thus the leftists often found themselves having to fight the Pakistan army, and maneuver around a suspicious Indian army as well. For some of the NAP groups, Maulana Bhashani's sidelined position, and the confusion of Peking's pro-Pakistan position, put them into a quandary regarding the war. Most in the left overcame this situation and joined the war, a few did not or were pushed to the sideline. Understanding 1971 requires a frank discussion of this tumultuous left experience of the war.

What about the 1969 uprisings? Eminent Marxist historians such as Tariq Ali have documented, in Pakistan: Military Rule or People's Power (1970)  that the final round of anti-Ayub uprisings began in Rawalpindi. Yet Ali failed to look eastward, missing, in Shamsur Rahman's words, Asad's bloody shirt. But instead of nullifying Ali's book, it would be more productive to read his recollection alongside our own narratives, and ponder the cross-wing blind spots. 

1971 was a brutal, genocidal, and complex war, where many factors, institutions, and events came into play. We can simply look at the Biafra war that happened the year before us, or the Sri Lanka war that ended in defeat after two decades, to know that even people fighting a brave and righteous war do not always win. Our nation sacrificed immensely and won victory at a pyrrhic price. The worst thing we can do now is to pass a law saying that discussing the complexities of that war, at home or abroad, can be punished by law.

I am thinking today of Shahidullah Kaiser, a key figure in Upodhara 71. On the first days after the massacre, Hasan encountered Kaiser in Dhanmondi, and from then on the two stayed in clandestine contact. Kaiser had learned, through his contacts in the Communist Party, that the Nixon White House was trying to build a coalition of Bengali leaders who were willing to negotiate with the Pakistan government. This group would isolate Tajuddin Ahmed, and negotiate with the Pakistan Army against the wishes of Sheikh Mujib. We know from Lawrence Lifschultz that this secret group included Khondokar Mushtaque, and five years later these plans came to fruition in the catastrophic brutality of August 15th 1975. 

Muyeedul Hasan crossed into India to warn Tajuddin, Shahidullah Kaiser stayed back inside Bangladesh. On December 14th he paid the ultimate price when rajakar death squads picked him up. A month later, his brother Zahir Raihan disappeared while searching for his missing brother. I have been inspired by, and missed the presence of, these two brothers my entire life. In all sorts of ways, a culture of public intellectualism could never properly germinate in Bangladesh­ because so many of our best and brightest were killed in 1971. Yet, knowing the principles of both brothers, the last thing they would have wished is that independent Bangladesh would enact a law to punish discussions of the liberation war.

Let me turn finally to a book I intellectually dislike- Sarmila Bose's Dead Reckoning (2011). The book's revisionist argument, that the Pakistan army did not commit any mass killings, was known in advance through two essays in Economic & Political Weekly. I was on a mailing list of Bangladeshi academics who discussed the book, yet none seemed interested to actually read it and respond. Meanwhile, the book had been picked up by two academic presses (including my alma mater Columbia) and was circulating widely in my world- New York academic circles that follow South Asia. 

Finally, I went back to research material I had gathered in the 1990s while pursuing an oral history of 1971, and wrote a lengthy response to the book that was widely circulated. Yet, a few months after that, when I tabulated authors who had responded to the book in English, the list remained surprisingly small: Srinath Raghavan, Urvashi Butalia, Arnold Zeitlin, Gita Sahgal, Afiya Zia, Nayanika Mukherjee, Zafar Sobhan, Afsan Chowdhury, Dina Siddiqi, Akhteruzzaman Mandal, and myself. The fact that there are only five Bangladeshis on that list should tell us something about the paucity of English language research on 1971. Around the same time, a professor told me anecdotally that there had been no Ph.D.'s done on 1971 at Dhaka University in the first four decades.

While I disagree with the assertions in Sarmila Bose's book, I want to underscore that rigorous research is the only way to establish the histories of 1971. When we resort to punitive laws to stop books, instead of encouraging more books, we have suffered from a failure of imagination. 

If 1971 was about establishing a free state, a vibrant and liberated intellectual culture is the foundation of such a condition. Let people write or say what they want, and then respond through your own research and publications. Ahmed Sofa famously called 1971 “the polyphony of the ocean” (Bhorer Kagoj). Let 1971 be honored by a library of books that are as polyphonous, multilayered, and vast as the war itself.

Naeem Mohaiemen's “Flying Blind: waiting for a real reckoning on 1971”, a response to Sarmila Bose's' book, appeared in Forum (Daily Star), Economic & Political Weekly (India), and the anthology 'Lines of Control' (Cornell University: Johnson Museum). His other essays on 1971 include “Accelerated Media and 1971 Genocide” (Daily Star), “The Ginger Merchant of History” (International Journal of Asian Studies), “Time of the Writing, Hour of the Reading” (EPW), and “Simulation at War's End: Muktir Gaan in the field of evidence quest” (forthcoming cover of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies Journal). He is a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. 

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14. BANGLADESH: DEAR UNESCO, DO YOU HAVE A PLAN B?
by Maha Mirza
========================================
(Dhaka Tribune - April 10, 2016

We don’t have a Forest B

Dear UNESCO team (Dr Fanny Douvere, Mizuki Murai, Naomi Clare Doak),

Hello from Dhaka. So, how was your trip to Bangladesh?
Let us not get into the debate over whether a “super critical” “third-generation” coal plant pollutes or not. Let us also not discuss how planet Earth is headed for 3.7 degrees Celsius of warming.
Let us talk instead about the mission you just completed in Bangladesh. Especially the way the government carefully scripted your schedule: Where to go, whom to talk to, what to see, and what not to see.
As your schedule shows, it was obviously a well-formulated mission which was supposed to give you a true picture of the effect of Rampal plant.
Really! Rather, how did you not notice that it was well-organised to hide those who could actually give you the true picture?
You were carefully steered to meet a good number of people with a mindset that remains wedded to a superficial notion of “development.” The ones who look at development merely through the lenses of flyovers and power grids, who deeply believe that coal plants are the best things that can happen to a nation, and who think “the environment” is mere communist propaganda.
Yes, of course, you have got to meet an “independent expert” in your mission. By the way, wasn’t he also a paid member of the 11-member government team that accompanied you throughout the journey? Is that not clear conflict of interest? Wait now, let’s go deeper, wasn’t he the same “expert” who once told the UN assessment committee that the oil spill was no big deal?
While independent scientists spent months to study the deadly effect of the spill on the forest, didn’t the same “independent” guy tell us not to worry about the Sundarbans, as it was strong enough to survive a spill?
So, this time, what did you get to hear? Fly ashes are good for Phytoplanktons? The people of the Sundarbans are resistant to SO2? Mercury chips are the favourite meal of mangrove species?
So, have you got to meet the local people? I mean, not the ones you were scheduled to meet. Not the ones who told you how wonderful it would have been to have drowned in some 7.5 lakh tons of fly ash for a few hundred jobs. We are talking about the real people who lost their only piece of land. The ones who grow Aman paddy on the other side of the river.
Did you meet Mr Susanto Das? The co-ordinator of Krishi Jomi Rokkha Songram Committee, a local platform that has long battled to save local land and fisheries? No, looks like he was not on the state-sponsored itinerary.
Have you got to meet our scientists? Who know the wind, the landmass, the fish, and the vegetation of the Sundarbans?
The algebra of tidal waves and the life cycle of the sediments and the seeds? The ones who know the chemistry, the ecology, the morphology, and the communities of the forest?
Who have been studying the effect of SO2s and NO2s? We know that you have not. In that case, you probably got to hear more nonsense, and less natural science.
Yes, of course, you met the Upazila chairperson, an active ruling party member. Who surely told you how happy the “Rampalese” are to get a 1320MW humongous power plant right in their backyard?
Oh yes, you met the members of the Union Council, the apparently democratically elected “local representatives.” However, have you not done your homework? No meaningful UP elections have been held in Rampal upazila for years. The “locals” you got to meet happened to be the state mouthpieces, according to the real locals.
We wonder, could you possibly have reshaped the design of the mission? Could you possibly have skipped that highly orchestrated “journey by boat,” and instead make an effort to meet those local journalists/activists who were lining up on the bank of Passur River since early morning, March 26? Could you possibly meet the press? Meet the National Committee members? The members of NCSS? Any critical development experts? Any opposition to the plant?
The ones who were trying to reach you by email (which is publicly available on UNESCO and IUCN website) and phone?

Anyone who could have possibly told you about the range of environmental, social, and economic disorders that is about to be delivered by Rampal and Orion?
What are we supposed to make of it? Your lack of understanding of the ground politics? Your faith in “super critical” technology? The Memorandum of Understanding that you had to sign up for? A play-safe strategy? A disregard for reaching out to the dissident ones in advance of the mission?
If you’re allowed to talk to the people as long as they are selected by the government, then, honestly, what were you even doing here? Is that how you work?
Meet the ones who work for the government, don’t bother to meet those who fight for the people, and then go home and write your report? The assignment violated every conceivable moral ground for a UNESCO mission.
Your spectacular inability to meet the dissident voices bears testimony to the fact that the mission has become a farce. It highlights either your lack of concern, or your lack of competence.
If you are still convinced that you met the right people during your Bangladesh trip, then we must agree that the government is a marketing genius.
A good mission should not confuse people with circus, facts with fictions, and taking positions without meeting the right people. Would you keep this in mind while writing your report? 

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15. PAKISTAN: JUD JUSTICE - EDITORIAL, THE NEWS
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(The News - April 10, 2016)

Editorial

A parallel state has been operating inside Pakistan, not in the far-flung region of Fata, but in Lahore. The Jamaatud Dawa (JuD), an organisation placed on the terrorism watch-list by a number of international organisations and supposedly by our own authorities, has been running a Shariat court in Punjab’s capital. The court, named the Darul Qaza Shariat, which should be both illegal and unconstitutional, has been operating from the main JuD mosque in the Chowburji area. New reports indicate that these courts have been operational in seven cities across Punjab, including Islamabad – maybe even from as far back as 1990. The JuD court has been adjudicating on issues ranging from domestic issues to financial disputes and even murder cases, with as many as 5,500 cases ‘resolved’ by the court. Some of those issued illegal notices by these courts have reported receiving threats from those affiliated with the parallel court to appear before it. If these courts have indeed been operational since 1990, this is criminal negligence by various governments and agencies.

The Punjab government has taken the welcome decision to issue notices to those operating these courts, but what is worrying is that it is still unclear who exactly was issued notices and what kind of action was being contemplated. Only a day earlier, Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah trivialised the issue by almost comparing the Shariat court to a panchayat. With a case on the legality of panchayats ongoing in the Supreme Court, it should be important to highlight here that the two are not comparable. Panchayats are a system that existed locally prior to the colonial state coming in, whereas Shariat courts are an externally imposed system. Both have their own problems, but comparing them serves no function but to obscure matters. The state has continued to cede fundamental spaces to religious extremists in central Pakistan while continuing to focus on a war in the north. The JuD itself has admitted to the existence of the court but has publicly taken the position that it is only a space which ‘arbitrates disputes.’ It would be wrong to blame the failures of the state legal system for the JuD’s decision to form its own court. Instead, it shows both that the religious right wing in Pakistan is gaining more confidence despite the apparent implementation of NAP, and that the state is continuing to abdicate itself responsibilities. The notices may be a start, but they are certainly not enough. It is impossible that no one in the security or government apparatus knew of the operation of the Shariat court by the JuD (reportedly for over two decades now). There needs to be a longer and more fundamental investigation of what kind of social contract the Pakistani state is offering its citizens.

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16. OH, SO NOW I’M BANGLADESHI?
by Zia Haider Rahman
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Sunday Review / The New York Times - APRIL 8, 2016

TWENTY years ago, when New Yorkers asked me where I was from, all I’d say is that I grew up in Britain. Mentioning that I was born in Bangladesh drew only more questions, and New Yorkers simply wanted confirmation of what was to them the distinctive cultural marker: my British accent.

That accent was learned from imitating BBC News announcers on a cassette recorder. As a boy, I read about the destruction of millions of Jews and was gripped by fear: If white Europeans could do that to people who looked like them, imagine what they could do to me.

So I adapted, hoping to make myself less alien to these people so ill at ease with difference. I grew up not so long ago in a Britain that spat at nonwhites, beat us and daubed swastikas on walls.

Britain frightens its natives with the specter of a fifth column, and exhorts immigrants to integrate better and adopt British values. Do it and you’ll earn your stripes. But the promise is hollow, for Britain has no intention of keeping its side of the bargain.

Recently, I was invited onto the judging panel for the PEN Pinter Prize, English PEN’s award (honoring the playwright Harold Pinter) for a writer who “casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination’ ” to define “ ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies.’ ” Salman Rushdie and Tom Stoppard are past winners.

The announcement of the panel, which included Peter Stothard, the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, described me thus: “Born in rural Bangladesh, Zia Haider Rahman was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich and Yale Universities. He has worked as an investment banker on Wall Street and as an international human rights lawyer.”

The Man Booker Prize administration released a statement congratulating Mr. Stothard, a former judge of its award, and mentioning the two other appointees: “Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the Royal Court Theater, and Zia Haider Rahman, a Bangladeshi banker turned novelist.”

I have no idea what citizenships my fellow panelists hold; unhelpfully, Man Booker did not provide that information. I was, however, surprised to learn that I’m Bangladeshi. I don’t have a Bangladeshi passport, though I do hold a British one. In fact, I’ve lawfully held two valid British passports (to facilitate travel to so-called incompatible countries, like Israel and Jordan).

Clearly, holding two British passports doesn’t make me doubly British. But surely, for a bastion of the British establishment to call me Bangladeshi, it should have sufficient reason to believe that I am precisely that. Shall we put the error down to mere ignorance of the fact that millions of British citizens were born in, or are descendants of people born in, the post-colonies? Of course, keeping me Bangladeshi has the advantage of enabling some people to tell me to go back to my own country.

The issue is not what I choose to call myself but what the supposedly educated Briton chooses to call nonwhite British citizens. Britain has a problem with otherness.

This problem is not exclusively a British one. Although the “Brexit” campaign over a referendum to determine Britain’s exit from the European Union has revealed a nasty undercurrent of hostility toward other Europeans, the British do share something with the Continent.

I recently appeared on “Buitenhof,” a political program on Dutch television, to argue that Europe’s colonial history has left a stain on its psyche, an animus against foreigners. Afterward, aside from the usual racist mail, there were messages from nonwhite Dutch people, most taking issue with one thing. Apparently, I needn’t have qualified my remarks by saying things were worse in Britain. They were just as bad in the Netherlands. Life for immigrant Europeans is a daily confrontation with micro-aggressions and gestures of alienation.
I have been cosseted in Amsterdam for several months, where I am a writer in residence at the university and my novel is a national best seller. Last month, I attended the annual Boekenbal, a gala celebrating Dutch publishing, the main purpose of which, I learned, is to generate gossip about who is deemed worthy of tickets. In other words, its function is to establish an inside group.
My publisher invited me to a dinner before the gala at a restaurant. Midway through, I remembered my coat: On arrival, I’d left it somewhere and forgotten about it. When eventually a member of the staff and I found it, valuables still present, I thanked him.
“It is a pleasure to have you here,” he replied. Slightly odd formulation, I thought, putting it down to translation.
“No, sir,” he added, lowering his voice, “I mean it is an honor to have you here.” I looked at the man again.
“I saw you on ‘Buitenhof’ last week, and everything you said was right. But the Dutch won’t understand it because they can’t see it.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Emile,” he said, shaking my hand. “It’s the name I use at work. My parents are Egyptian, but I was born in the Netherlands. I’m the sommelier here and I know everything there is to know about wine.
“I speak Dutch fluently,” he went on, in English. “I know more about Dutch culture than most Dutch people. I am Dutch, but I’m never really accepted as Dutch.”
The encounter moved me, and I stepped out into the cold Amsterdam night to recover my composure.
These days, when New Yorkers ask me where I’m from, sometimes I might say, for the hell of it, “I was born in Bangladesh.” Unfailingly, it’s not enough. Often, bless ’em, they say, “Yeah, but you’re British, right?” I have to cross the Atlantic to hear this.
I’ve learned to cope. But when I think of the children in the projects where I grew up, and in the underprivileged school in London’s East End where I sat on the board, I know that taking refuge in the novelist’s seclusion would be an abrogation.

Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language. To the white Briton, the hyphenated identity — Bangladeshi-British, Pakistani-British — only highlights otherness. Each side regards the hyphenated identity as a concession to the other, rather than both rejoicing in a new stripe in a rainbow nation.

It does not come easily for white Britons to speak, face to face, of a nonwhite Briton’s nationality. The shuffling feet, the throat-clearing, the unmet eye give it away. Hyphenation sounds clunky, feels awkward; even calling someone just British is less pointed, less charged. The British have history; the Bangladeshi-British have punctuation.
It is Britain’s inherent cultural problem with otherness that makes it difficult for the native to call me British, difficult even for those who, one might naïvely hope, should know better.
If you’re not going to call me British when I grew up in Britain; when I hold a British passport and don’t hold a Bangladeshi one; when I don’t even speak Bengali; when, good citizen that I try to be, I help an elderly neighbor with his Ikea bed, or dig out the old lilac that another cannot uproot; when I was educated in Britain, worked in Britain, was “a body of England’s, breathing English air/Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home”; when I wash the dishes at the local church’s fund-raiser for the homeless (because regardless of faith, we surely all believe in the idea of community); and again — it bears repetition — when I hold a British passport “without let or hindrance,” then you can’t be surprised if, doubting your good faith, I grab my bags and get the hell out.
After all, how much more can I integrate? What more is it you want from us? To be white? To be you?

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17. PANAMA BLACK MONEY: NO HOLY COWS?
by Faraz Ahmad
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(Faraz Ahmad's Blog - April 10, 2016)

The media including the great crusader for truth and investigative journalism the Indian Express has already decided who the holy cows are in the Panama offshore scam. A day after the Express carried a front-paged story of one time well known sports journalist turned businessman Lokesh Sharma parking huge sums in tax haven British Virgin Island (BVI) in Panama, in the fourth part of its series about the Richie rich of India from Adanis to Oberois to Tyre dealers to Boutique owners to Art Divas like Amrita Jhaveri stacking their wealth in BVI, it has made amends by carrying an edit on April 8 commending Union Finance Minister by stating, “It is heartening too that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has underlined that there are no holy cows in this regard.”

Thereby the paper has already exonerated Jaitley without bothering to ask what kind of bond exists between Jaitley and Lokesh Sharma, nee Loki, as his intimate friends like Jaitely call him. It is left to Congress leader and former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh to recall that as the president of the Delhi District Cricket Association (DDCA) it was Jaitely who awarded contracts to Loki’s company, Twenty First Century Media (TCM) Private Limited.

Loki is very well-known in the world of Sports journalists and is in a way popular among sports and other journalists too because his TCM frequently provides them with an opportunity for moonlighting and pays them well. Lokesh Sharma, as the Express story too stated, started his TCM in 1993. Before that he was a sports journalist, like the present day IPL president and Congress MP Rajiv Shukla who both worked together once upon a time in the then popular weekly magazines Sunday/Ravivar under the  wings of M J Akbar, now a Rajya Sabha member and BJP spokesman. Loki later married into Akbar family and thus became a member of Akbar’s household. The existence of a symbiotic relationship between Loki and Jaitely for over two decades now is also known to almost anyone who is privy to the world of journalism or cricket in the national capital of India.

The same day the paper also carried the story of a BVI offshore company owned partly by Shiv Sena MP and Videocon owner Rajkumar Dhoot bidding for Indian Premier League (IPL), held in Pune in 2010. Now Rajumar Dhoot is another vocal crusader against corruption but as the report suggests has been at the very least parking funds in the Panama tax haven. Jaitley’s extraordinary and enthusiastic interest in the IPL even when Lalit Modi was heading is no secret and so is his affection for Rajiv Shukla who owes his elevation as IPL president to Jaitley.

Then there is another BJP MP Abhishek Singh the son of Chhatisgarh chief minister Raman Singh whose name appears as a shareholder in company Quest Height Private Limited which also figures in the Mossack Fonseca e-mails that exposed the international racket of parking funds, ostensibly illegal, in tax havens. Singh of course has denied any role in this scam.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, taking immediate cognizance of Express stories has asked of all the people Jaitely, if we go by what Jaitely told the world, to probe and catch the guilty. But then apparently as an afterthought he added, not all the money there need be illegal. There is no question there is need for Indians to invest abroad and that’s a welcome development any day. But to park money in tax havens, how could that be legal? And if the money parked in tax havens is legal where is the question of any action against those whose names figure here. Apparently influenced by this view of the NDA government expressed by the country’s Finance Minister, the Indian Express which was blowing its trumpet for last six days carrying the fifth but not the conclusive part of the list of Panama scamsters, suddenly seems to qualify its claims by stating in the same editorial that, “Indeed, some of the firms outed in the Panama Papers may very well be compliant with statutory norms.

“However that’s not telling the whole story,” Express editor writes realizing he is sawing off the branch he is perched upon and adds hurriedly, “The question is: Did many of those named in the list take recourse to floating firms in tax havens purely to avoid tax on their income?”

That’s the point. It’s not like the Tatas or Mittals investing in some industry abroad. Its parking your money in a tax haven. Why else would someone choose to park in tax haven if not to cheat on taxes? So looking from any angle this is Black Money, stashed abroad. This was the issue Anna Hazare raised and sat on a fast at Ramlila Grounds accusing the UPA of leading the most corrupt government. This frenzy provided opportunity to novices like Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi to hone their political skills. But where is Anna Hazare today, when it is all in the open who are the guys who were looting the country all along?

As if Anna’s movement did not do enough damage to the UPA government, the billionaire Yoga entrepreneur Ramdev jumped in too and perched himself on a high altar at the same Ramlila Grounds announcing yet another dharna under the banner of Bharat Swabhiman Andolan defying Police ban. Though later that night when the Police came, he fled borrowing the salwar Kameez and Dupatta of one his young female disciples. I wonder what that one wore after giving up her clothes in that melee, while the Police was chasing them all.

And what about our Danial right honourable judges of the Supreme Court, who decided to take upon themselves to hunt out with the CBI Indian treasure locked abroad? Where are they now? Where is that Subramanian Swamy who rushes directly to the apex court on any excuse as long as it puts Sonia Gandhi and her family members in a spot? For six days now the Indian Express has been carrying the series of stories which clearly identify those who have stashed away black money abroad but there is deafening silence all around. In fact the very next day the Times of India actually carried a story on its front page debunking the Express probe. Why is the Nation’s conscience keeper Arnab Goswami not moved yet? Why? Is it because most of the prominent names that have emerged so far have a direct or indirect connection with the BJP which rode to power, shouting hoarse about Black money and corruption pointing all along its finger at Sonia Gandhi. And since so far nothing has come implicating her, what’s the fun?

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18. EVEN IN ’83, SRINAGAR CHEERED WEST INDIES, NOT INDIA … CAMPUS BRUTALITY’S NORMAL IN KASHMIR … TENSIONS ARE UP WITH ABVP: BASHARAT PEER
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(The Times of India, April 11, 2016 TOI Q&A in The Interviews Blog | Edit Page, India,)

As tensions simmer over NIT Srinagar’s student clashes and police lathi-charge, acclaimed Kashmiri writer and journalist Basharat Peer spoke with Srijana Mitra Das about battles pitched over cricket pitches, the shikaras and students of Kashmir – and cultural freedom for all, including Kashmir’s disbanded girl band Pragaash:

How do you view the recent cricket-related student clashes – and the police’s brutal lathi-charge – at NIT Srinagar?

I don’t expect Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri students to agree over the politics of cricket – but no student should be harassed or assaulted.
Kashmiri students not cheering for the Indian cricket team conveys the nature of the relationship between Delhi and Srinagar. The first international cricket match was played in Srinagar on October 12, 1983, between Clive Lloyd’s West Indies and Kapil Dev’s India – even then, Kashmiri spectators in Srinagar cheered for the West Indies. Some youngsters tried to dig up the pitch to point out the disputed nature of Kashmir.
The police lathi-charge at NIT Srinagar is not surprising – using brute force for crowd control is routine for security forces and police in Kashmir. Police presence or raids on campuses is not new – Kashmir University used to look like a garrison for 20 years.
Half the buildings in my high school were a military camp.

But NIT Srinagar’s ‘pro-India’ student faction says it faces threats of violence and rape from ‘outsiders’ – is this usual?

These allegations must be reported and investigated carefully. We’ve witnessed the predominance of rumour and fear mongering on social media and mobile apps.
At a Jodhpur college, a group of Kashmiri students was assaulted by a mob seeking revenge for NIT Srinagar’s events – pictures of their bloodied backs are all online.
In such a charged atmosphere, there’s a greater onus on journalists to fact-check every single claim we make.
What i know of the larger picture in Kashmir is that there is a cottage industry of BEd colleges across Kashmir, in Anantnag, Srinagar, Baramulla. There are thousands of young men and women from various north Indian states who’ve been studying there for their degrees, which help them get government teacher jobs back home.
They have been alright.

Local voices now say chanting pro-Pakistan slogans is freedom of expression – but why was there such little support for Pragaash girl band’s freedom? Is freedom selective?

Freedom cannot be selectively applied. We live in a highly polarised world – and often fail the test of standing up for the rights of people we might disagree with.
Pragaash band was a lovely initiative by young girls – but the government-appointed ‘Grand Mufti’ gave a fatwa against them. The Pragaash kids came under serious pressure and quit playing – but the Grand Mufti got hell from everyone, from Hurriyat chief Syed Ali Shah Geelani to then chief minister Omar Abdullah.

You co-wrote the Bollywood hit, Haider – culturally, how do many imagine Kashmir, once land of shikaras and Shashi Kapoor, today?

The idea of Kashmir as a land of shikaras was an idea that depopulated Kashmir, looked away from its history, its turbulent politics.
Since the early 1990s, the Indian lens on Kashmir has been of the security establishment – a place that needed to be pacified, controlled.
Nowadays, it’s either the use of growing tourism figures to suggest all is well or return to the old mode of control after every flare-up.
There’s been no serious effort to engage with the political realities of Kashmir.

Why have student tensions across India risen?

After 2014’s Modi victory, the student wing of RSS, ABVP, became very aggressive – it clashes with politically aware Ambedkarite, Left-leaning and minority student groups.
The life and death of Rohith Vemula illustrated this for us. The crackdown on JNU illustrated this.
It is a larger ideological battle for the control of public spaces.

What challenges now confront Mehbooba Mufti?

Given the nature of her coalition with BJP, i don’t expect Mehbooba Mufti to be able to push anything significant politically with the larger Kashmir dispute.
After the floods, Srinagar’s been a ruin. Relief and rebuilding were major failures. Mehbooba must try to get the city back on its feet.
She faces the challenge of retaining PDP’s support base. Kashmiris watch the news carefully – and news from Modi’s India has been rather grim.
The question is, how well will she perform as chief minister – and will that be enough?


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19. INDIA: THE BUILDER FLAT - MODERNITY WITHOUT CONTENT?
by Santosh Desai
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(The Times of India - April 10, 2016

Across the country, a new kind of habitat is being created. As the city spills over from its original boundaries, and moves skywards, more and more Indians are coming to terms with the idea of living in flats. In a place like Mumbai, this has always been the case, but today, even in small town India, multi-storeyed buildings are mushrooming, and the flat is emerging as the modern way to live. For many, this shift is now so much a part of the accepted reality of our lives that it no longer carries any significance, but in reality the changes it sets in motion can be profound.

The dominant mental model of the home has been as a place of origin, as a seat of belonging. This is why the home in India has been a highly unselfconscious space, one that accommodated all the angularities of one’s preferred mode of living. The home was a sprawled space gathering objects that were assigned places depending on the purpose they served. It was an organism which grew seemingly on its own, gradually acquiring layers of use. In most traditional homes, space wasn’t measured; one rarely knew how large or small one’s living space was. Space seemed to expand or contract around one’s needs. The home was imagined inside out- it was a space built around the people who lived there.

The builder flat is constructed the other way around. It is conceived of as the new grid within which lives are being relocated. Created by the inexorable arithmetic of space as currency, the builder flat delivers a template that acts as a  solution to one’s housing needs. The space is determined first- the lives of the residents who occupy have to fit in into this preconfigured arena.

In order to help a prospective buyer imagine the final product, every new building development uses a ‘sample flat’ which is fully done up and populated with furniture. This has become the default imagination for the new home- this dressing up of space with the veneer of surface modernity. This brand of interior design has a great preference for neatness and slickness. Nothing juts out, surfaces are evened out and glossified. The eye slides over everything that it sees- the modern ‘designed’ flat comes without memory or reference- the primary aim to start anew by leaving the messiness of the past behind. The builder flat has marble floors and straight lines. Everything is exposed and all space is rendered useful. Memories do not stand in a straight line, even though the way we measure time is linear. Memories defy chronology, they leap about and arrive unannounced. The builder flat does not allow for this untidiness, not to begin with anyway. Here the personal is tucked away behind a screen. The modern is a denial of memory rather than an evocation of a new one. It marks the beginning of a new journey. Here one is meant to strive to become oneself, by jettisoning the accumulated luggage of the past.

Living in a flat and being responsible for one’s own home from scratch creates a new experience of the self. In the builder flat one arrives abruptly at the present having bailed on the past. The builder flat is in many ways a no-man’s-land where one catches one’s breath and idles in neutral. It opens up the possibility of making choices that were unavailable otherwise. It allows one to embark on a journey towards being an individual and gradually learning to make choices. The task of building one’s own life in one’s own home calls for making decisions that involve an awareness of one’s preferences, tastes and personality. The builder flat provides a start by putting together all those elements of modernity on which there is a general consensus, and even some on which there is not.

A good example is found in the number of flats that now have an open kitchen that abuts the living room. Borrowed from the West, this is an idea  that is far removed from the reality of Indian kitchens where tadkas and masalas impose themselves on one’s senses.  That so many people are open to this idea suggests that the desire to submit to a ‘modern’ life without asking too many questions of it is great.

The new habitat of the middle class also creates new anxieties and a desire for new affiliations. The community of the old needs to be replaced with a new kind of community. Here proximity is by itself not enough, being someone’s neighbor is an elective position; one chooses who to be neighbourly with. Apartment living makes all actions deliberate- there are few things that are given, that one must do. The experience of living in a crowd, while being relatively anonymous, of being in plain sight of so many without necessarily feeling observed is a completely new sensation. To have one’s action freed from the relentless scrutiny of those who appoint themselves as stakeholder in one’s life can be a liberating feeling but equally it creates a void in feeling significant that needs to be filled.

The beliefs of the past which were steeped in so much certitude now need to be renewed without help from an enabling environment. The self-conscious preservation of the past becomes a project just as does the desire to acquire new skills. The search for new anchors and for a new sense of belonging is only likely to intensify. New modes of living create new opportunities but also open up new gaps. The idea of being an individual is getting gradually constructed but it brings in it wake anxieties springing from an unfamiliar feeling of rootlessness. The builder flat promises freedom from the past, but offers little by way of filling this void. It offers modernity without content, replacing textured memory with neat surfaces. A new ecosystem is being created and as yet we can grasp only the bare outlines of what changes it might bring.

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20. AS GIANT RATS MENACE PAKISTAN, CONSPIRACY THEORIES SWIRL
by Tim Craig and Haq Nawaz Khan
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(The Washington Post - 5 April 2016)

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Here in a city that has defined Pakistan’s struggle against Islamist extremism, thousands of people have been killed or injured in terrorist attacks. But now, if asked their greatest fear, many residents cite one of the world’s other menaces: rats.
Over the past year, according to Peshawar’s mayor, eight children have been killed by rats. At night, rodents spill out of the city’s crude sewer system, chewing through doors and walls, feasting on food supplies and overrunning hospitals and schools.
And these aren’t ordinary rats, residents say. These creatures are big — so big that residents swear they can’t be native to the area. And that gives rise to yet more conspiracy theories in a country already prone to blaming its woes on outsiders.
“They can be so big, like cats, and with two big sharp teeth in the front,” said Muhammad Humayun, 38, who describes the size of the rats by stretching out his arm and pointing from his elbow to the tip of his fingers.
Throughout history, tales of cat-size rats have repeatedly surfaced only to be debunked by scientists.
Pakistani municipal workers bury rats in the main garbage dump in the city of Peshawar on April 02. (Mian Khursheed/For The Washington Post)
The average body of a Norway rat in the West, they say, is six to eight inches long. But some rat species in Asia have been known to grow larger, creating some uncertainty about what sort of rodent is now rampaging through Peshawar.
Still, the roots of Peshawar’s rat problem appear obvious.
More than 1 million people live packed together in poorly constructed houses in one of the oldest cities in South Asia. Uncovered sewage drains empty directly into streets or streams.
Garbage is casually tossed onto sidewalks or vacant lots. Butchers slaughter cows and goats in store-front windows. And chicken and dairy farms can be found in the middle of densely populated neighborhoods.
It seems like the makings of a rat paradise, yet residents are mystified as to why they are now being terrorized by one of human civilization’s most persistent foes.
Some say the problem began after a series of floods in 2010 and 2012 flushed rats from their nests in the mountains near the ­Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
A man walks near holes on the bank of a canal that a resident said are the living places of rats in the city of Peshawar. (Mian Khursheed/For The Washington Post)
Others believe the rats were bred on U.S. military bases in Afghanistan and brought to ­Peshawar in the trucks that are withdrawing coalition supplies on Pakistani highways.
One theory is that super-size rats came in the luggage of refugees fleeing a military operation in Pakistan’s tribal belt, where rumors of huge rodents have persisted for centuries.
There have been allegations that the rats were genetically modified by a foreign power and left here to terrorize Muslims.
Whatever the case, Peshawar is now locked in yet another war.
Last week, amid an outcry from lawmakers and residents, Mayor Muhammad Asim announced a three-pronged strategy to treat rats in the same manner the city combats “the hideouts of militants.”
To win the battle, Asim has created a new team of 30 municipal workers who will be spreading rat poison throughout the city each night. Free rat poison was made available to residents.
Peshawar has also set a bounty on rats, promising 25 rupees (about 25 cents) for each dead rodent.
“People are afraid,” Asim said. “They say these are not your normal rats. . . . They will eat your food. They eat your clothes, and they eat your papers.”
As residents of Washington and other U.S. cities can attest, this sounds like typical rat behavior. But reports that rats have killed eight children and injured numerous others in Peshawar have escalated the crisis.
Asim said one infant recently bled to death from rat bites to the face. Asker Pervaiz, a member of the local provincial assembly, said a 3-month-old baby died after a rat bit off part of an ear.
Some Peshawar officials are skeptical, noting that few of the deaths have been confirmed by a doctor or mortician.
“If a rat bites a baby, there is usually no medical evidence whether it’s a rat, a flea, a snake or mosquito,” said Taminur Ahmed Shah, a spokesman for the Peshawar Water and Sanitation Services, who blames Pakistan’s media for hyping the extent of the problem.

But Noor Qadir, 33, has no doubt Peshawar’s rats are turning into killers.
Qadir was sleeping in his house — located next to a brackish stream and a flour mill — on March 22 when his 8-month-old baby began crying.
“I woke up to his screams and saw the rat was in bed with him,” Qadir said. “The rat jumped out of the bed, and I killed the rat, and there was blood and teeth marks on his face.”
Qadir’s baby survived, but wounds from nine razorlike incisions remain visible under the child’s eye. Now, like many of his neighbors, Qadir stays awake at night dreading a return visit.
“I put my slipper in the space under the door, but half the slipper was eaten by the rat,” he said.
As with Pakistan’s sputtering war against human terrorists, there are already signs that Peshawar’s struggle against rats will be hampered by poor planning and a lack of commitment.
On Friday night, the new rat eradication team collected 500 rat carcasses after it left poisoned bread in three neighborhoods.
On Saturday evening, however, the team decided to take a night off because rain was forecast.
Peshawar officials temporarily suspended the reward program over the weekend because they were caught off-guard by how many people showed up with dead rats — and demanding payment.
Peshawar does have one crucial asset, however. The city’s eradication effort is led by Naseer Ahmad, a local celebrity nicknamed the Rat Killer.
After the wife of one of his friends was bitten by a rat seven years ago, Ahmad took it upon himself to start killing the animals for sport.
Using his own special mix of poison — the same toxic brew Peshawar is now using in its citywide campaign — Ahmad has killed 103,050 rats over the past seven years, he says.
He, too, believes the rats in Peshawar are getting bigger and meaner because of mysterious circumstances.

“Based on my experience, this is not a local rat. This is something different,” said Ahmad, adding that he recently started finding rats with coin-size testicles. “They are now not even afraid of kids, and kids can’t fight them.”

Peshawar’s strategy for killing rats, however, rests on children doing exactly that — motivated by the reward program, which is set to resume.
“If everything else fails, the 25 rupee incentive won’t fail,” Asim, the mayor, said. “A lot of children are already scavengers who pick up paper and plastic” for money, he added, in what is one of Pakistan’s poorest cities. “Now, they can be working to kill the rats.”
But Asim admitted that no one knows how many rats there are in Peshawar. And, he noted, the city’s new rat hunters are up against pests that can produce 20 offspring every 20 days.

Tim Craig is The Post’s bureau chief in Pakistan. He has also covered conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and within the District of Columbia government.

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21. NUIT DEBOUT PROTESTERS OCCUPY FRENCH CITIES IN REVOLUTIONARY CALL FOR CHANGE
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
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(The Guardian - 8 April 2016)

For more than a week, vast nocturnal gatherings have spread across France in a citizen-led movement that has rattled the government
Demonstrators gather in Place de la République for a peaceful sit-in as part of the Nuit debout movement
Vive la révolution: demonstrators gather in Place de la République for a nocturnal sit-in. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA
As night fell over Paris, thousands of people sat cross-legged in the vast square at Place de la République, taking turns to pass round a microphone and denounce everything from the dominance of Google to tax evasion or inequality on housing estates.
The debating continued into the early hours of the morning, with soup and sandwiches on hand in the canteen tent and a protest choir singing revolutionary songs. A handful of protesters in tents then bedded down to “occupy” the square for the night before being asked to move on by police just before dawn. But the next morning they returned to set up their protest camp again.
For more than a week, these vast nocturnal protest gatherings – from parents with babies to students, workers, artists and pensioners – have spread across France, rising in number, and are beginning to panic the government.
Called Nuit debout, which loosely means “rise up at night”, the protest movement is increasingly being likened to the Occupy initiative that mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in 2011 or Spain’s Indignados.

Cherifa, a French student at Paris’ Louis-le-Grand high school, who is taking part in the night-time protests. Photograph: Elliott Verdier/AFP/Getty Images
Despite France’s long history of youth protest movements – from May 1968 to vast rallies against pension changes – Nuit debout, which has spread to cities such as Toulouse, Lyon and Nantes and even over the border to Brussels, is seen as a new phenomenon.

It began on 31 March with a night-time sit-in in Paris after the latest street demonstrations by students and unions critical of President François Hollande’s proposed changes to labour laws. But the movement and its radical nocturnal action had been dreamed up months earlier at a Paris meeting of leftwing activists.
“There were about 300 or 400 of us at a public meeting in February and we were wondering how can we really scare the government?. We had an idea: at the next big street protest, we simply wouldn’t go home,” said Michel, 60, a former delivery driver.
Protesters debate issues such as national security, housing and proposed changes to French labour law. Photograph: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images

“On 31 March, at the time of the labour law protests, that’s what happened. There was torrential rain, but still everyone came back here to the square. Then at 9pm, the rain stopped and we stayed. We came back the next day and as we keep coming back every night, it has scared the government because it’s impossible to define.
“There’s something here that I’ve never seen before in France – all these people converge here each night of their own accord to talk and debate ideas – from housing to the universal wages, refugees, any topic they like. No one has told them to, no unions are pushing them on – they’re coming of their own accord.”
The idea emerged among activists linked to a leftwing revue and the team behind the hit documentary film Merci Patron!, which depicts a couple taking on France’s richest man, billionaire Bernard Arnault. But the movement gained its own momentum – not just because of the labour protests or in solidarity with the French Goodyear tyre plant workers who kidnapped their bosses in 2014. It has expanded to address a host of different grievances, including the state of emergency and security crackdown in response to last year’s terrorist attacks.
Students occupying an amphitheatre in Lille give a press conference to announce the start of the Nuit debout protests. Photograph: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

“The labour law was the final straw,” said Matthiew, 35, who was retraining to be a teacher after 10 years in the private sector, and had set up an impromptu revolutionary singing group at the square. “But it’s much bigger than that. This government, which is supposed to be socialist, has come up with a raft of things I don’t agree with, while failing to deal with the real problems like unemployment, climate change and a society heading for disaster.”

Many in the crowd said that after four years of Hollande’s Socialist party in power, they left felt betrayed and their anger was beginning to bubble over.
Jocelyn, 26, a former medical student acting as a press spokesman for the movement, said: “There are parallels with Occupy and Indignados. The idea is to let everyone speak out. People are really sick and tired and that feeling has been building for years. Everything Hollande once promised for the left but gave up on really gets me down. Personally, it’s the state of emergency, the new surveillance laws, the changes to the justice system and the security crackdown.”

A protester holds a sign which reads ‘#Panama leaks, people, racketeering, that’s enough’ in Paris. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA
The government and the Paris authorities are being cautious about the policing of the movement. An investigation is under way into the alleged assault by a police officer accused of hitting a student at a Paris high school last month during a demonstration against the labour overhaul.
The government is preparing possible concessions to students and youths to calm those expected to attend another such rally on Saturday.
Each night at Paris’s Place de la République, the “general assembly” begins at 6pm and the crowd discuss ideas. Hundreds of demonstrators communicate using coded hand gestures: wiggling their fingers above their heads to express agreement or crossing their wrists to disagree.
Michel, an artist who hopes to be a candidate in the 2017 French presidential elections, joins the protesters in Paris.
Various committees have sprung up to debate a new constitution, society, work, and how to occupy the square with more permanent wooden structures on a nightly basis. Whiteboards list the evening’s discussions and activities – from debates on economics to media training for the demonstrators. “No hatred, no arms, no violence,” was the credo described by the “action committee”.
“This must be a perfect mini-society,” a member of the gardening committee told the crowd. A poetry committee has been set up to document and create the movement’s slogans. “Every movement needs its artistic and literary element,” said the poet who proposed it.
Demonstrators regularly help other protest movements, such as a bank picket over revelations in the Panama Papers or a demonstration against migrant evictions in the north of Paris.
“Generation revolution”, was scrawled on the pavement. The concept behind the movement is a “convergence of struggles” with no one leader. There are no union banners or flags of specific groups decorating the protest in the square – a rarity in France.
Cécile, 22, a Paris law student at Thursday night’s general assembly, said: “I don’t agree with the state society is in today. To me, politics feels broken. This movement appeals in terms of citizen action. I come here after class and I intend to keep coming back. I hope it lasts.”

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22. THE ASSASSIN’S VETO: BLASPHEMY AND CHARLIE HEBDO
by Myra MacDonald
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(War on the Rocks - 11 April 2016)

When an editorial dismisses as “xenophobes” those who blame terrorism on immigration, and is then taken as conclusive proof of racism, you know something has gone terribly wrong. Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine whose offices were attacked last year by gunmen offended by its cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, has once again been denounced for “Islamophobia” and racism. The alleged offense came in an editorial that challenged the role of religion in society, and that is assumed by its critics to say that all Muslims are complicit in terrorism. Nowhere in the French original by the cartoonist Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, nor in its rather more awkward English translation, does it say that. Rather, it is an anguished defense of French secularism, tinged by bitterness in a man who was shot in the shoulder while watching his colleagues die. Far from attacking all Muslims — an assertion that assumes all Muslims are the same — it takes aim at the growing power of religious conservativism. It calls out society’s failure to question this for fear of being branded an “Islamophobe.” It blames our silence for creating an atmosphere of fear without which terrorism cannot succeed. That silence has left the field open to the far right and produced a fractured, anxious society more inclined to react emotionally than rationally to acts of terrorism. Unwittingly proving the point made in the editorial, Charlie Hebdo’s critics have loudly condemned it for “Islamophobia” and racism, silencing the issues it raised with a willful or ignorant distortion of what it said. It is a grotesque parody that could be ignored if the stakes were not so high.

Go back to the January 2015 attacks in Paris by Islamist gunmen in which 12 people died at the Charlie Hebdo offices and another five were killed in related shootings. The Charlie Hebdo staff were not killed for racism. They were murdered for the assumed crime of blasphemy. Before the attacks, Charlie Hebdo was a niche magazine catering to a certain section of the French left, lampooning the government and the far right, mocking all sources of power including religion, and championing the cause of anti-racism. Of course, those with deeply held religious views would have found some of their cartoons offensive. But they had the choice not to see them. To read Charlie Hebdo, you had to go out of your way to buy the magazine. The cartoons were not plastered on billboards across Paris. Nor, as sometimes erroneously assumed, was the publication popular with the anti-immigrant right. On the contrary, the right is one of its main targets. That critics, especially in the English-speaking world, have so conclusively convicted Charlie Hebdo for racism (in doing so, heaping ire on journalists who are already facing death threats) tells you little about the magazine itself. It does, however, tell you much about the insidious of power of the very notion of blasphemy. Rather than confront the fact that the Charlie Hebdo staff were massacred for blasphemy, the magazine has been tried and convicted for a different crime — that of racism. Such is the transformation of their role as victims of a crime to victimizers, that the latest denunciation in Vice Magazine said they had become “smug satirists” who, among others, are “terrorizing” Muslims across Europe. (Muslims are rightly worried about an increase in anti-Muslim bigotry; but the arrow directed at Charlie Hebdo is shot from a different bow.)

I will return to the editorial lower down, but first get one thing straight: Europe is not being overrun by marauding cartoonists. People are being murdered for blasphemy. Nor is this about privileged white Westerners versus oppressed minorities. The most recent high-profile murder of a Muslim in Britain was not carried out by a smug satirist. Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah, from the minority Ahmadi community and originally from Pakistan, was beaten to death last month by a Muslim offended by posts he put online proclaiming his faith. Ahmadis have been excommunicated in Pakistan and banned from describing themselves as Muslims. Shah’s killer, Tanveer Ahmed, gave the same reason for murdering Shah as the gunmen who massacred the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. He said he had shown disrespect to the Prophet Mohammed. In Pakistan, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was gunned down by his own bodyguard in 2011 for speaking up for a Christian woman sentenced to hang for blasphemy. After his killer, Mumtaz Qadri, was hanged this year his supporters besieged Islamabad to protest. For them Qadri was a hero who had defended the honor of the prophet. Perhaps they should have been shooed away by a posse of cartoonists. In Bangladesh, law student Mohammad Nazim this month became the latest secular activist and blogger to be murdered for writing against militant Islam.

It really should not be so difficult to recognize the difference between victim and attacker in any of these examples. The real power still resides with the men with guns, not those doing the dying. But since Charlie Hebdo’s critics seem to have difficulty grasping this, it is necessary to go through some of the shovelfuls of mud flung at it. For a start, it is held responsible for every sin of French racism right back to the Algerian war of independence from France, and indeed even as long ago as 1948. That is as absurd as accusing President Barack Obama of supporting the murder of black activists during in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

Charlie Hebdo occupies a particular space in French secularism, a system that many outside France regard with outright distaste or incomprehension. But every country is a product of its history and culture and unless we all want to be ground down into a standardized global model in which no one can say anything that anyone would find offensive, we should assume they will be influenced by national peculiarities not easily visible to outsiders. Americans attached to the U.S. arrangement that upholds religious freedom are particularly prone to condemning the French model. But seen from the other side of the Atlantic, the United States can seem just as alien. Without the European welfare state, with its support for gun-ownership and unrestricted capitalism, it gives the impression, rightly or wrongly, of being not so much a society in the European sense, but a collection of individuals driven by identity politics and consumerism. Indian secularism is more accommodating than the French version, but limited by the country’s economic divisions. You would not, for example, see the Muslim son of the dhobi sitting next to the daughter of the laundryman’s Hindu boss in a state school, something that is at least theoretically encouraged by the French state school system. In France, anti-clericalism goes back to the French Revolution. Its secularism, or laïcité, actively aims to keep religion out of public life, including in its state schools. Compared to the United States or India, France has done rather better in providing decent and free state schools to everyone, albeit with increasing difficulty, including in poorer urban areas.

Then there is the recent past. The 20th-century Cold War history of the continental European secular left, of which Charlie Hebdo is a remnant, is alien to many Americans. Back then, opposing religion and American capitalism were often one and the same. The United States supported the Catholic Church as a bulwark against Communism, endorsing the same religious conservatism that it backed elsewhere, notably in Islamist militants fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. American critics outraged over Charlie Hebdo have much in common with their 20th-century right-wing counterparts who tried to stop left-wing Italian playwright Dario Fo from performing in the United States. His work mercilessly mocking the Catholic Church with vulgar and irreverent humor was also denounced as blasphemous. The continuity in the attitudes of an American audience to the “blasphemous” cartoons in Charlie Hebdo is not surprising. What has been saddening is that it has been so relentless. It champions a moral, religious and cultural conservatism that nowadays is more associated with Islam, but was once more closely linked with the anti-gay, anti-women, repressive views handed down by the Christian church. To suggest that anyone opposing this conservatism is racist or Islamophobic not only flies in the face of history, but maligns the many Muslims who support progressive causes.

Charlie Hebdo’s content does not travel well and much gets lost in translation. Many inside France don’t like it either, but you don’t expect people to appreciate every magazine and newspaper of every style across the political spectrum. If you’re in Washington, as many War on the Rocks readers are, just ask for people’s opinions of The Nation and The Weekly Standard at your next happy hour. But since Charlie Hebdo cartoonists drew attention to themselves by being murdered, it is now subject to international scrutiny. As a result, its meaning is not just lost but inverted. A drawing of drowned Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi lampooning European consumerism and its rejection of refugees was assumed to be mocking the child. Its current cover declares that “Je Suis Panama” in a send-up of the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag. If its critics stick to their usual literal interpretations, one assumes it is only a matter of time before they accuse it of defending tax havens.

The recent editorial that caused so much anger is certainly provocative. But it makes far more sense if you read it in the context of a debate between two men, both French speakers, both with very different concepts of the role of religion in society. It starts with Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan saying that society needs to compromise with religion. The editorial responds to Ramadan by saying, no, don’t compromise. French secularism is in retreat and must be defended. In the debate on the role of Islam in society, it says, Ramadan sets himself up as judge and jury. According to Ramadan, laïcité must “adapt to the new role of religion in western democracies, and must also accept all traditions brought in by people born of immigration.” Ramadan is not a neutral player here in the sense of being an innocent bystander. He represents a strand of thinking that is at the other end of the spectrum from Charlie Hebdo. To his detractors, among them many secular Muslims, he is seen as guilty of double-speak, saying one thing to a Western audience and another in the Islamic world while promoting an Islamist agenda. The grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, and son of a man who introduced the ideas of Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami Islamist political party, to the Arab world, Ramadan is a controversial figure. (This long 2007 profile of Ramadan in The New Republic is a useful start.) Whether or not you agree with the stance taken by the Charlie Hebdo editorial, it is troublesome that Ramadan should have been given a free pass while the counter-argument is slammed. Ramadan might or might not be right. But neither the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Jamaat-e-Islami would have been given such a free pass in Egypt or Pakistan, where criticism is harder to silence with accusations of racism or Islamophobia.

Ramadan’s role, according to the editorial, is to dissuade people from questioning Islam for fear of being branded “Islamophobes.” It warns against acquiescence to his views since “terrorism is not possible without a generalised silence being established in advance.” The arguments that follow are sad and resigned rather than venomous. How do European societies deal with the rise of religious views that had largely disappeared in the 20th century? The editorial describes an imaginary Muslim who takes over the local boulangerie and no longer sells ham sandwiches. He is perfectly genial. He has absolutely no link to terrorism. Where is the line drawn between accommodation and complaining? When does it reach a point that it matters to people to be denied a ham sandwich when it is so obviously absurd to balk at a single bakery? The reference is one that carries greater resonance inside France than outside. The boulangerie is an institution in France, the baguette and “sandwich jambon-fromage” an essential part of it. The baker is particularly pious. He has a long beard and the mark on the forehead of a man who prays five times a day. He is certainly not typical of “all Muslims” — many Muslims would note the prayer marks and consider him as different from them for his overt display of piety. People will adapt, the editorial says. What of the veiled woman? She is a devoted mother who does no harm to anyone. The question of the veil is a vexed one, particularly in France which has resisted the presence of religious symbols in the public sphere and where French feminists worry about pressure on women to cover up. Many Muslim women also refuse to wear the veil. People will get used to it, the editorial says. The editorial does not explicitly say the disappearance of ham from the boulangerie or the veiled woman is a problem. The point is about the reluctance to articulate any discomfort. “Let’s keep quiet,” it says; “let’s not grumble.” “We will make do.”

Is the writer of the editorial really trying to blame these imaginary individuals for terrorism as the critics so stridently assert? This is not Donald Trump speaking. It is a section of the French left. In the French original, the tone comes across as more poignant than aggressive. That is perhaps because of the despairing headline “Qu’est ce que je fous la?” (WTF I am doing here), which seems less strident than the English “How Did We End Up Here?” It is not just a language issue. The cultural references, the assumptions about conversations already had, about points already made, make no sense from far away. If you had read Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission,” you might interpret the editorial differently. As in all cultures, France is self-referential. It is fair to point out this can be a problem when outsiders are trying to interpret. What is not fair is to forget that Charlie Hebdo is scrutinized internationally because its staff was murdered for blasphemy.

And because we all have different histories, we will read the editorial in different ways. Personally, I am reminded of Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” in the way the actors in the editorial are described. These are imaginary characters playing out their role in a tragic farce, driven by invisible compulsions. Even the gunman in a taxi on his way to attack the Brussels airport is portrayed as passive rather than active. These players are a reflection of a society where everyone is complicit in maintaining a silence in which the compulsions driving them cannot be articulated:

    From the baker who prevents you from eating what you like to the woman who prevents you from saying you would prefer her without a veil, you feel guilty for having such thoughts. From that moment, the undermining work of terrorism begins.

I don’t expect everyone to read it the same way and certainly not to have the same cultural reference points. I only ask you to pause for thought.

Some years ago, one of the popular laments by Pakistanis on Twitter was “Wake Up Pakistan.” They fretted the state was ceding too much ground to religious conservatives and Islamist militants. Their warnings went unheeded. Similarly, in the editorial you come away with the sense all the characters are sleepwalking into tragedy. The outraged critics who filter it through the prism of racism do exactly what the editorial said they would do. They silence the debate by crying “Islamophobe.” They endorse or ignore Ramadan’s views and attack only the other side.

You don’t need to like Charlie Hebdo. But you should asking why anyone should compromise with the most regressive forces in Islam represented by the men who killed cartoonists for blasphemy. It does a terrible disservice to Muslims to suggest they are all the same, with “all Muslims” on one side and Charlie Hebdo on the other. Only a few decades ago, Muslim countries were far less culturally conservative and far less influenced by the politicization of religion. There is nothing permanent about today’s situation and nor is it intrinsic to Islam. Historically, Islam spread worldwide in part because of its openness to other cultures. Islamic scholarship contributed to the European Enlightenment. It is that openness to debate that should be encouraged; not those who want to shout down Charlie Hebdo.

To return to the Glasgow shopkeeper, the forces that killed him were set in motion long before he died. In 1974, Pakistan decided Ahmadis were heretical and declared them non-Muslims. The theological debate on Ahmadi beliefs had been running for years, but the impetus for the 1974 decision was political and driven by the Jamaat-e-Islami. Ahmadis have since become among the most persecuted minorities in Pakistan. Many fled for safety to the United Kingdom, only to continue to face harassment by those Muslims who claimed to find their views offensive. Leaflets were distributed in Britain declaring them “wajb-ul-qatl,” or worthy of death. Two years ago the Ahmadiyya community took out an advertisement in a regional newspaper. When a group of Muslims complained about it, the Luton newspaper apologized for causing offense and dissociated itself from the content of the advertisement. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which claims to fight sectarianism and discrimination, refuses to acknowledge Ahmadis’ own insistence that they are Muslims. They do, however, include among their affiliates the Khatme Nubuwwat, an organization at the forefront of Ahmadi persecution.

Britain ignored this problem until Tanveer Ahmed drove from the northern town of Bradford to Glasgow to beat Asad Shah to death. “If I had not done this,” Ahmed said in a statement this month, “others would have. …” Shah’s last message, posted on Facebook hours before he died, ought to put paid to the notion that killing for blasphemy is linked to racism: “Good Friday and a very happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation.”


Myra MacDonald is a former Reuters journalist who has reported on Pakistan and India since 2000. She is the author of “Heights of Madness”, a book on the Siachen war. Her second book, “Defeat is an Orphan, How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War”, will be published in July. She can be found on Twitter @myraemacdonald.

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23. BOOK REVIEW: TRENT ON HALLIWELL, 'THERAPEUTIC REVOLUTIONS: MEDICINE, PSYCHIATRY, AND AMERICAN CULTURE, 1945-1970'
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 Martin Halliwell. Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945-1970. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Illustrations. 448 pp. $62.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8135-6064-9; $36.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8135-6065-6.

Reviewed by James W. Trent (Gordon College)
Published on H-Disability (January, 2016)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

The people of the United States are a peculiar sort. For baby boomers like me, the twenty-five years between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Richard Nixon regime were too much a time of maturing to be a time of reflection. We remembered our parents’ stories of postwar housing shortages, of the GI Bill swelling the halls of universities, of economic improvements, of the war in Korea, and of the fears of Communists sharing national secrets and infiltrating social and political institutions. We came of age during the long civil rights movement, and during the open and secret wars in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Some of us protested, some of us killed and were killed, and many of us experienced lower rates of poverty, moderate college tuition costs along with generous public educational funding, and a reduced gap between the wealthiest among us and ordinary workers. It all seemed inevitable then, but upon reflection Americans were a peculiar people at a curious time.

In Therapeutic Revolutions, Martin Halliwell argues that people in the United States experienced these social, political, and economic events among changes in American culture. This culture—curious, eclectic, diverse, creative, and filled with many myths and not-a-few banalities—included the effects of far-reaching changes coming from medicine in general and psychiatry and the social sciences in particular. When it comes to changes and culture, Halliwell knows his subject area. Throughout the book, he reveals his deep and thorough understanding of these diverse events as they evolved in the developing “therapeutic revolutions.” He does so through a careful analysis of the writings of the period’s therapeutic authorities, integrated with abundant examples from American popular culture. Throughout the book, Halliwell convincingly shows that the variables—events, popular culture, and postwar therapies—emerged as interdependent constructions.  

Halliwell divides his text into three sections, which he calls “Fragmentation: 1945-1953,” “Organization: 1953-1961,” and “Reorganization: 1961-1970.” The divisions follow the presidencies of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy-Lyndon B. Johnson. The immediate postwar years followed a decade of severe economic hard times and then a half-decade of war’s social disruptions. After the Second World War, Americans seemed primed for the expansion of medical facilities, rehabilitation services, medical innovations, and medical interventions. Political and therapeutic authorities framed this expansion as the linkage of a healthy citizen and a healthy society. The returning serviceman came home to return to ordinary citizenship by integrating himself into a society ready to understand his war injuries, both physical and mental. Hollywood provided numerous films to structure the emerging therapeutic constructions for the general public. By the last years of the 1940s, however, Americans were adjusting to the growing fears of the Soviet Union, to a new war in Korea, and to the Red Scare. Thus, added to changes in therapeutic healing came fear, along with claims for “mind control.”

The fragmentation of the postwar years gave way, as Halliwell sees it, to the apparently more consensus-building Eisenhower years. Industry expanded; American jobs were plentiful (at least for urban whites); and many people were settling into a routine of business as usual, in the suburbs, with young children, and with a manageable mortgage. With this “organized” society also came the critical findings of William H. Whyte, C. Wright Mills, Abraham Maslow, and others. Science might be providing organizational theory, know-how, and workplace efficiencies, but its creations had also become routinized as the “organization man.” Health measurements and psychiatric nomenclature began to account for the neurosis of modern workplaces and workplace cultures. Consensus might be socially valued, but conformity seemed unmasculine and hardly self-reliant.

But even for ordinary citizens all was not well. There were class differences, women were becoming less willing to be compliant homemakers, and there was the growing worry of adolescent delinquency and sexuality. For Halliwell, the presidency of Kennedy in 1961 did not begin a disintegration of the 1950s organizing consensus, only a reorganizing of that consensus. This reorganization developed from criticisms coming from inside and outside the developing therapeutic communities.

In mental health and psychiatry, residential institutions, which had grown in number and size during the previous fifteen years, nevertheless began to come under criticism. The criticisms came from libertarian critics of psychiatric control and authority, and from critics of the wretched conditions in the nation’s public residential facilities. Also, the dominance of Freudian psychiatry began to give way to alternative therapeutic assumptions and techniques. Halliwell is especially interested in noting the effects of humanistic and existentialist psychological thinking in the 1960s. At the end of the decade, confidence in medical authority had hardly ended, but it had been seriously shaken. Civil rights unrest, the reactions to aggression in Viet Nam, and the student movements had all added to this “reorganization.” As Halliwell notes at the end of his book, the history of healthcare in the United States between 1945 and 1970 was fraught with a cultural optimism that remained at tension with a growing pessimism, making the therapeutic revolution a complicated revolution, one that Halliwell analyzes with great depth and understanding.


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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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