SACW - 6 May 2016 | Sri Lanka: Ben Bavinck’s Diaries / Bangladesh: Fascism from Below / Pakistan-India: Endless Peace Making Obstacle Race / India: Counterrevolution in full swing / Myanmar: Buddhist Right Call the shots

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Fri May 6 04:37:12 EDT 2016


South Asia Citizens Wire - 6 May 2016 - No. 2894 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Attacks On Atheists, Secularists, And Religious Minorities In Bangladesh
 - [Online Petition] Bangladesh Prime Minister of Sheikh Hasina : Protect the rights to freedom of religion, 
 - South Asia Editorials on the April 2016 killing spree by muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh
 - Bangladesh: Fascism from below | Habib Khondker
2. Pakistan - India: The Peace Making Obstacle Race
 - Pakistan - India: The problem of making peace | S. Akbar Zaidi
 - Pakistan & India Must Make Peace, Not War - Video by GurMehar Kaur
 - Pakistan - India: Gurmehar's silent battle for peace | Jawed Naqvi
3. Can Pakistan’s F-16s fight terror? | Pervez Hoodbhoy
4. India: “What Has Been Happening in Recent Times Could Well Develop Into Fascism”: An Interview with Romila Thapar (The Caravan)
5. India: A history of their own | Mridula Mukherjee
6. India: SAHMAT statement against the attack on Bipan Chandra’s book (30 April 2016)
7. From ‘Mother India' To 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai': 'Azadi' Eludes Indian Women | Shobha Aggarwal
8. India: Why NREGA workers are returning Rs 5 to PM Modi today (Labour Day)
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
- Identity politics in India’s north-east - The BJP promises to sniff out intruders in exotic Assam (The Economist)
- India: A little proof JNU vice chancellor's RSS connection -- his 1994 post of RSS leaders writings to a newsgroup
- Behind Bangladesh's Killing Spree: ISIS, Al Qaeda Or Indian-Trained Cleric? (NDTV report by Shreenivasan Jain)
- India: Unmasking Modi (Siddhartha Deb in New Republic)
- India: BJP and its supporters are working to sacralise the concept and language of nationalism (Mitali Saran)
- New hit-list threatens teachers, politicians in Bangladesh
- Bangladesh’s slow capitulation to Islamism (Ikhtisad Ahmed in scroll.in)
- India: MP Backward Classes and Minority Welfare Department member wants Christians tried for sedition
- India: For A New Rendezvous with Dr Ambedkar (Subhash Gatade)
- India: Freedom of Expression, Growing Intolerance and Concepts of Nationalism (Ram Puniyani)
- India: Hate Speech, Hurt Sentiment, and the (Im)Possibility of Free Speech (Siddharth Narrain)
- No community in India has gender-just personal laws so why do feminists continue to oppose a common law for all ?
- India: BJP's UP strategy [on 2017 assembly election] hinges on Hindutva and Most Backward Classes (Panini Anand in CatchNews, 2 May 2016) 

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Bangladesh: The radical religious rationale | Ziauddin Chowdhury
11. Pak-India diplomacy | A.G. Noorani
12. Kashmiri conundrum: A moment for Modi to turn a challenge into a seminal opportunity | Dileep Padgaonkar
13. Why Pak is convulsing over a woman’s account of her sex life | Moni Mohsin
14. Sri Lanka: Ben Bavinck’s Testimony Within The Crucible Of War, 1994-2004 | Michael Roberts 
15. Dangerous Fictions - The writer Mohammed Hanif probes for truth in Pakistan | Dexter Filkins
16. Open up or break up, dissident Yang Jianli tells China - Interview by Bharat Bhushan
17. The Counterrevolution Will Be Televised: On the Current Crisis of Indian Universities | Arvind Rajagopal
18. Myanmar: Suu Kyi punts on Rohingya issue | Simon Roughneen

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1. ATTACKS ON ATHEISTS, SECULARISTS, AND RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN BANGLADESH
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[ONLINE PETITION] BANGLADESH PRIME MINISTER OF SHEIKH HASINA : PROTECT THE RIGHTS TO FREEDOM OF RELIGION, 
Statement On Attacks On Atheists, Secularists, And Religious Minorities In Bangladesh
http://sacw.net/article12675.html

SOUTH ASIA EDITORIALS ON THE APRIL 2016 KILLING SPREE BY MUSLIM FUNDAMENTALISTS IN BANGLADESH
Editorial commentary from newspapers in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan on the continued target killings by fundamentalist groups in Bangladesh.
http://sacw.net/article12642.html

BANGLADESH: FASCISM FROM BELOW | Habib Khondker
Think about the depth of vulnerability that a great majority of Bangladeshis are in right now. For them, fear and compliance to the wishes of the fascists from the below is an understandable strategy. And this survival strategy may snowball into the dominant norms of a society.
http://sacw.net/article12655.html

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2. PAKISTAN - INDIA: THE PEACE MAKING OBSTACLE RACE
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PAKISTAN - INDIA: THE PROBLEM OF MAKING PEACE
by S. Akbar Zaidi
The peace process between India and Pakistan has ground to a halt, and perhaps the usual suspects are to be blamed. But it appears the exchange of allegations is more gesture than substance, and meant for domestic constituencies.
http://sacw.net/article12654.html

PAKISTAN & INDIA MUST MAKE PEACE, NOT WAR - VIDEO BY GURMEHAR KAUR
Message from an Indian girl whose father died in the Kargil war
http://sacw.net/article12648.html

PAKISTAN - INDIA: GURMEHAR'S SILENT BATTLE FOR PEACE | Jawed Naqvi
Gurmehar is the 19-year-old daughter of an Indian soldier who died fighting Pakistanis in the Kargil war. She was only two years old at the time. Growing up required grappling with terrible demons. And so the young girl arrived at her anti-war worldview through a tortuous maze of hatred and distrust, primarily of Muslims and Pakistanis who she blamed for her father's loss. It was her mother who pulled her back from the destructive journey.
http://sacw.net/article12661.html

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3. CAN PAKISTAN’S F-16S FIGHT TERROR?
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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To destroy terrorism will require a massive change of public attitudes.
http://sacw.net/article12691.html

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4. INDIA: “WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING IN RECENT TIMES COULD WELL DEVELOP INTO FASCISM”: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROMILA THAPAR (The Caravan)
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The thought that crossed my mind was that what they're trying to suggest about sedition vis-à-vis the nation in India, is becoming somewhat like blasphemy in the context of religion.
http://sacw.net/article12697.html

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5. INDIA: A HISTORY OF THEIR OWN | Mridula Mukherjee
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Behind the Bhagat Singh controversy lies an attempt to impose one notion of nationalism .... demands for destruction of and prohibition on sale of books written by JNU historians that have been on sale for decades, is it entirely unreasonable for us to wonder if there is a method to the madness, a rationality to the irrationality?
http://sacw.net/article12692.html

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6. INDIA: SAHMAT STATEMENT AGAINST THE ATTACK ON BIPAN CHANDRA’S BOOK (30 APRIL 2016)
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In recent days it seems to have become a habit of some latter-day “nationalists” to raise divisive or non-substantial issues to parade their patriotism. The most recent example of this is the attack on a major history of our National Movement authored by the distinguished historian Professor Bipan Chandra and his colleagues, titled India’s Struggle for Independence, published 28 years ago in 1988
http://sacw.net/article12653.html

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7. FROM ‘MOTHER INDIA' TO 'BHARAT MATA KI JAI': 'AZADI' ELUDES INDIAN WOMEN
by Shobha Aggarwal
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Women in India do not appear to be active participants in the debate around the chanting of the slogan ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai'. Even the debate in the media is dominated through discourse by men. The chanting of this slogan – necessary to prove ‘patriotism' – is an obsession only of the so called ‘patriotic' men.
http://sacw.net/article12658.html

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8. INDIA: WHY NREGA WORKERS ARE RETURNING RS 5 TO PM MODI TODAY (LABOUR DAY)
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English translation of letter by NREGA workers in Manika (Latehar, Jharkhand) to Prime Minister Modi on the 1st of May 2016 being sent along with a Rs Five note.
http://www.sacw.net/article12656.html

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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - India: Bombay High Court Strikes Down Two Sections of the Amended Beef Ban Act of Maharashtra (Maharashtra Animal Protection Act) Decriminalising Possession of Beef (Slaughtered outside the State)
- India: Small retailers traders who were the electoral stronghold of the BJP are upset with Modi as he seeks rural vote (A bloomberg feature in SMH)
- Identity politics in India’s north-east - The BJP promises to sniff out intruders in exotic Assam (The Economist)
- India: A little proof JNU vice chancellor's RSS connection -- his 1994 post of RSS leaders writings to a newsgroup
- Behind Bangladesh's Killing Spree: ISIS, Al Qaeda Or Indian-Trained Cleric? (NDTV report by Shreenivasan Jain)
- Ex BJP leader with record of hate speech isa candidate from Samajwadi party in Uttar Pradesh
- Ban on liquor unites left and right: In Pondicherry, BJP and CPI promise prohibition
- India - Ghaziabad: Arrests of Sameer, Sajid a mistake, Delhi Police were wrongly informed, say families
- India: Unmasking Modi (Siddhartha Deb in New Republic)
- India: BJP and its supporters are working to sacralise the concept and language of nationalism (Mitali Saran)
- India: Growing Intolerance in a Tolerant Society (Ram Puniyani)
- Balraj Madhok, RSS man and former president of Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) the predecessor of BJP is dead and gone (PTI report Times of India)
- New hit-list threatens teachers, politicians in Bangladesh
- Bangladesh’s slow capitulation to Islamism (Ikhtisad Ahmed in scroll.in)
- India: MP Backward Classes and Minority Welfare Department member wants Christians tried for sedition
- India: For A New Rendezvous with Dr Ambedkar (Subhash Gatade)
- India: Freedom of Expression, Growing Intolerance and Concepts of Nationalism (Ram Puniyani)
-  Review of Shamsul Islam's book 'Muslims Against Partition: Revisiting the Legacy of Allah Bakhsh and Other Patriotic Muslims' by Professor Anand Teltumbde
- India: Hate Speech, Hurt Sentiment, and the (Im)Possibility of Free Speech (Siddharth Narrain)
- No community in India has gender-just personal laws so why do feminists continue to oppose a common law for all ?
- India: “What Has Been Happening in Recent Times Could Well Develop Into Fascism”: An Interview with Romila Thapar
- India: BJP's UP strategy [on 2017 assembly election] hinges on Hindutva and Most Backward Classes (Panini Anand in CatchNews, 2 May 2016) 

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. BANGLADESH: THE RADICAL RELIGIOUS RATIONALE
by Ziauddin Chowdhury
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(Dhaka Tribune, May 5, 2016)

Bangladesh’s growing religious extremism needs to be acknowledged … before it’s too late

In 2007, Maulana Fazlullah, leader of a Frontier-based militant Islamic organisation known as Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (who later became the leader of Taliban-e-Pakistan) established a parallel government in about 59 villages of Swat Valley in Pakistan and introduced Sharia Law.

This came not in one fell swoop, but after a long run in with the Pakistan government and its feckless law enforcement agencies in that part of the country that began with US operations in Afghanistan in 2002.

Maulana Fazlullah, also known as Radio Mullah -- because of his broadcast over clandestine radio in the Malakand Agency (where Swat valley is) -- began propagating Islamic jihad against the Pakistan government and its allies for the establishment of Sharia Law in Pakistan.

His ultimate success in driving out Pakistan government forces from Swat valley came after years of threats, both verbal and real, to the people in the area who dared to oppose him and his armed militants who continued to swell in number.

He would be the supreme leader of the region for close to two years until the Pakistan Army, mainly under pressure from the US, which was worried that the rise of another militant group and its sway over the area close to Afghanistan would stymie its efforts to eradicate the Taliban from Afghanistan.

During Fazlullah’s reign in Swat Valley, he not only drove out the Pakistan law enforcement but also civilian agencies, and established his own laws that he termed as “Sharia” inspired laws. Some of the draconian measures he took in the name of Sharia were closing cinema halls, DVD shops, banning music, and, incredibly enough, his supporters attacked barbershops for their  “un-Islamic” practices (because barbers shaved beards).

Sufi mystics and dancing girls were killed and dumped in the city square, and girls were not allowed to go to school. Fazlullah later issued fatwa against Malala Yousafzai, the girl who bravely stood up girls’ education, and had her shot by his supporters even after he had been ejected from Swat Valley.

Fazlullah’s rise was enabled by a government that ignored the early signs of his group’s growth, in part but largely because of indulgence of radicalism by succeeding Pakistan governments by way of coddling religious leaders and religious institutions in preference to progressive and liberal institutions, purely for short-term political goals.

The government of Ziaul Huq sowed the early seeds of radicalism through thousands of madrassas that he helped grow ostensibly to feed the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.

He and his successors used the products of these madrasas later to form the Taliban group who would, in future years, topple the Afghanistan government and rule there.

The break-up of the Taliban in 2002 by US intervention drove their leaders to the mountains, including the North West of Pakistan, and lead to the formation of a diverse group of religious militants in Pakistan, including that of Maulana Fazlullah.

While the US was busy eradicating Afghanistan of the Taliban, they and their ilk would find shelter in Pakistan, more precisely the Pakistan Army, which had helped the original Taliban grow in the first place.

Maulana Fazlullah and his armed militants thrived because the Pakistan government, at that time, was headed by a president (Asif Zardari of Pakistan People’s Party) who was busier defending his presidency against political foes than defending his country from religious militants.

His government was one of compromise, in particular with the powerful Pakistan Army, and he dared not take the army to task for their apparent unwillingness to tackle the rising religious menace in Swat Valley.

What this all means for Bangladesh

The discussion on Fazlullah and his group is relevant for Bangladesh, not because there is such a figure on the horizon of Bangladesh, although there was such a threat some years ago posed by a militant in northern Bangladesh.

It is relevant because leadership for religious militancy and terrorism does not have to originate locally. The attraction that IS or its affiliates have on youths inclined to similar views can come from anywhere.

Their proliferation can also happen in many countries, where youths are easily brainwashed or misled from parochial and illiberal education, biased interpretation of religion and its message, and paranoid ideas about the world where one is led to believe that their co-religionists are subject to a worldwide persecution.

These ideas are further cemented in a country that has weak law enforcement, lack of personal security, and absence of good governance. In such societies, a section of youth can be easily deluded to believe that a strong government can only be enforced through religion and a religion-based system. Anybody who opposes this is an enemy of religion and has to be eliminated.

There has been a string of murders in Dhaka and other places of Bangladesh in the last two years. The victims were people from a cross section -- some were writers, some publishers, some foreign nationals.

Quite a few were from the minority section. There has been no arrest, let alone any conviction in these murders.

What we have instead is speculation about the reasons for these murders from our political leaders and persons in authority. But more importantly, we have assertions of responsibility for these murders (at least the majority of them) from affiliates of radical Islamic groups that are rooted thousands of miles away from Bangladesh.

But strangely, these claims are refuted by our government leaders because admitting these assertions would be acknowledging the presence of militant groups with foreign loyalty in our midst.

The rise of Fazlullah and his group in Pakistan and the menace they caused and continue to cause was possible because of political exigencies. Bangladesh now does not have any known exigency of the kind Pakistan went through in the 80s and 90s that contributed to the rise of religious radicalism in that country.

What we have here are instances of some horrific murders that, till now, have remained unsolved but clandestine groups claiming loyalty to foreign-inspired militant organisations have reportedly claimed responsibility for these crimes.

There is no proof of these claims, but the apparent similarity of the victims (they were either bloggers of liberal thought, writers with secular reputation, or minority community members), should give hints to our law enforcment agencies that these murders are not random acts. These acts may be pre-planned and the perpetrators could be organised militants.

I do not know when or if at all the perpetrators of these murders will be arraigned. But I do know that a first step to close the gap could be the acknowledgment by our government that these murders are not necessarily the shenanigans of their political opposition to embarrass the government.

To embarrass the government, a political opposition has many other weapons in their arsenal other than killing bloggers, writers, and foreign nationals without any rhyme or reason.

Let us start from the assumption that the murders could be the handiwork of a group of fanatics who want to establish their laws in the country by terrorising people and anyone who opposes their belief. 

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11. PAK-INDIA DIPLOMACY
by A.G. Noorani
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(Dawn - April 30, 2016)

Despite their failure to break the impasse, the Pakistani and Indian foreign secretaries, Aizaz Chaudhry and S. Jaishankar, had what were called “frank and constructive” talks in New Delhi on April 26.

This only brings home the harm which the practice of stipulating conditions for talks inflicts on relations between Pakistan and India. These talks were in the time-honoured tradition of a “bilateral meeting” held on “the sidelines” of “a multilateral” conference”; this time the Heart of Asia conference.

The hideous jargon that has become the staple of discourse in South Asian diplomacy is of a piece with the immature sulk that characterises that diplomacy. The annual session of the UN General Assembly, the Saarc summit and similar “multilateral” jamborees provide convenient occasions for “bilateral” exchanges without loss of face.

The Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue is in deep freeze despite the announcement of its resumption by the foreign ministers in Islamabad last December. India’s grievances on the terrorist attack on the Pathankot air base are valid. Their gravity cannot be exaggerated. India was perfectly justified in raising the issue at the talks. What is ill-advised is making resolution of such issues a precondition to the talks.

It is time to give a thought to the utter wastefulness of diplomacy by sulk. Stand-offs do not last; they only invite American pressures for resumption of talks, which neither India nor Pakistan can resist for long.

Countries interact with each other at different levels. There are layers of interaction — diplomatic, trade, cultural — “people-to-people” — intellectual, intelligence and military; ranging all the way from the public to covert contacts.
A meeting between the two nations’ army chiefs would itself be a CBM.

No two countries have more in common with each other than India and Pakistan. No two countries communicate less. Our relationship is, for historical reasons, unique; sui generis. The choice is stark; we either drift along, as we have been doing since Partition, or break from that sorry past in a controlled calculated manner. That means that the disputes and disagreement are left to the governments to tackle and resolve by the diplomatic process with inputs from the media and academia.

But the diplomatic process is but one layer of the interaction. There is a host of others in democratic countries. These must be left free to interact with each other.

That a galaxy of former high commissioners of India and Pakistan met in New Delhi this past week is a welcome sign. Each side had its rich mix of doves, hawks and jays. Time there was when India refused to allow even Pugwash conferences to be held on its soil. Who gained by such petulance? Early in February, the director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, Lt Gen Rizwan Akhtar met the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, Masoud Andrabi, in Islamabad.

Around the same time the Afghan military operations chief held security and border management talks with his Pakistani counterpart at GHQ in Rawalpindi.

The national security advisers of India and Pakistan are known to have hit it off so well at their famous meeting in Bangkok and reportedly have since continued to remain in touch discreetly.

A former head of India’s external intelligence agency, RAW, Amar Singh Dulat, said recently: “I have been pleading for agency to agency interaction at the RAW and ISI level. It’s important for the intelligence chiefs to be in contact.”

He said: “It has happened from time to time, but it has not been institutionalised, which it should be. It is a confidence-building measure (CBM). If we are talking ... engagement then this is an important CBM. That the intelligence chiefs are talking gives confidence to both sides and to the outside world too.

“In the worst days of the Cold War, the KGB and the Central Intelligence Agency never stopped talking and that eased a lot of things. Whenever the temperature rose, it is these kind of things that bailed people out.”

These considerations apply with yet greater force to a dialogue between the army chiefs of India and Pakistan. They will have a lot to talk about.

Pakistan is concerned about the implications of India’s ‘Cold Start Doctrine’; India with the induction of tactical nuclear weapons in Pakistan’s armoury for battle. It would be wise to initiate it at two levels below the chiefs together with their respective official spokesmen, the DG ISPR (the Pakistani military’s media wing) and his Indian counterpart.

It can move to the level of deputy chiefs and eventually to a meeting of the army chiefs themselves. Pathankot will be easier to tackle.

It is impossible to exaggerate the advantages which interaction between the two armies will ensure. It will be a CBM in itself. More, it will provide a boost to the diplomatic process. That would be conducted no longer on “the sidelines” of multilateral conferences.

The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.

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12. KASHMIRI CONUNDRUM: A MOMENT FOR MODI TO TURN A CHALLENGE INTO A SEMINAL OPPORTUNITY
by Dileep Padgaonkar
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(The Times of India - April 30, 2016)

Small mercies, not large gestures, sustain the engagement between India and Pakistan. That the talks between foreign secretaries of the two countries in New Delhi last Tuesday led to not the slightest movement forward on any contentious issue is obvious enough. The Indian side raised the question of delays in bringing the culprits of the Mumbai and Pathankot attacks to book while the Pakistan side harped on alleged RAW activities in Balochistan and Karachi and the Modi goverment’s going slow on perpetrators of the Samjhauta Express blast. And it brought the ‘core’ issue of Kashmir back on the front-burner.

The reiteration of their respective positions means in substance that a formal resumption of the comprehensive dialogue between the two countries is not on the cards just yet. At the same time both have agreed to remain in contact at diplomatic and other levels. That is a small mercy for it sustains the hope that the bilateral relationship hasn’t reached a cul-de-sac.

Nowhere is this hope more buoyant than in the Kashmir Valley. The entire political spectrum welcomed the talks between the foreign secretaries even though they were held on the sidelines of the ‘Heart of Asia’ conference and thus lacked the cachet of a formal meeting. There is palpable glee that the Pakistanis raised Kashmir – something that to their great chagrin had found no mention in the joint Modi-Sharif statement in Ufa. And they draw comfort, however cold, from the fact that the two countries will continue to remain engaged.

This has helped in some measure to shore up Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s credibility in the Valley at a time when anti-India sentiment is fairly widespread after recent incidents in NIT Srinagar, Handwara and elsewhere. Adding fuel to these prairie fires are the anti-Muslim words and deeds of Modi’s ministerial colleagues and functionaries of the Sangh Parivar. The cumulative effect of both these developments has been four-fold: it has further alienated Kashmiris from the Indian state, discredited initiatives of the Centre and state government to speed up economic and social development, given a boost to the sagging fortunes of separatist groups and, most bothersome of all, provoked educated, middle-class youth to embark on the path of religious extremism.

Trust Pakistan to fish in these troubled waters. And trust separatist opinion to underline the religious and emotional affinities between Kashmir and Pakistan. Such adversity offers the Modi government a unique challenge. Its focus on development and governance is sound as far as it goes. But they cannot be a substitute for a robust political approach to the problems that plague the state.

The thrusts of this approach have been iterated time again: allow peaceful protests; deal with mob violence with minimum loss of life and limb; review draconian security acts in force viz AFSPA and Disturbed Areas Act; release prisoners who have been jailed for minor crimes and haul up others in court in line with the imperatives of due process; display speed and transparency in dealing with human rights abuses by whosoever is alleged to have committed them. Such measures are bound to create an atmosphere that is conducive to addressing political issues.

The complexity of these issues, each one shaped by a deep-seated history of mistrust, cannot be underestimated. There are several cross-currents of opinion within the Valley – ranging from outright secession to forms of autonomy and self-governance within the Indian Union. Jammu and Ladakh have their own set of grievances and aspirations. And so do minorities in these two regions, and, far more tragically, the Kashmiri Pandits, victims of communal fury.

The Modi government needs to reach out to all these sections of opinion. Each one knows what red lines cannot be crossed. To name them is to ensure that the political dialogue is a non-starter. Ambivalence has served the Indian mind well.

Pakistan is certain to muddy the waters. But that is a risk worth taking. The alternative to a political dialogue – upsurge of violence every now and then – would mire all stakeholders in J&K in a bottomless quagmire. The biggest sufferers would be the people of the state.

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13. WHY PAK IS CONVULSING OVER A WOMAN’S ACCOUNT OF HER SEX LIFE
by Moni Mohsin
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(The Times of India - May 1, 2016)

Earlier this week, a young Pakistani woman wrote a candid piece online about her premarital sex life in Islamabad. Alleging that Pakistanis watch more porn privately than any other nation in the world (she didn’t quote her sources) while publicly maintaining a façade of piety, she took them to task for being a bunch of sexually repressed hypocrites. She didn’t just dole it out, she was pretty forthright about herself. She listed the number of partners she’d had (a dozen by the age of 19) and described the location of her trysts (cars, expensive hotel rooms, and once her boyfriend’s father’s office which had an attached bedroom – your surprise is not unmerited).

But she didn’t have a great time because of all the secrecy, lies and subterfuge involved. And the fact that her partners were an unadventurous, boring lot.

She had the gumption to write all this under her own name: Zahra Haider. Miss Haider currently lives in Canada where she is dating non-judgmental, non-Pakistani men and having, by her own account, a fulfilling experience.

Meanwhile in her home country, the proverbial s*** has hit the fan. Her compatriots — most of them men, I must add — have spewed their fury, outrage and disgust in a stream of abusive tweets. Admittedly a few have also maintained that her private life is her own business. I won’t go into what some have threatened to do to her but suffice it to say she has been denounced for all manner of sins. She’s a liar. She’s a slut. She’s brought shame to her family.

Shame to her name. Shame to the nation. (Funny how any number of factual reports of child abuse, gang rapes and honour killings don’t bring the nation into disrepute but one woman’s personal views on sex between consenting adults disgrace us all.) No doubt it’s only a matter of time before Miss Haider is also accused of being a traitor. Obviously she’s been put up to it for some vast but undisclosed sum by the enemies of our nation to ‘show us in bad light’. Obviously she should promptly pack her bags and shove off to the decadent, immoral West where she so clearly belongs. Were she not already there.

By far the weirdest accusation being hurled at her comes from a fervent supporter of Imran Khan’s opposition party, PTI. In a truly bizarre stretch of the imagination, this particular rant holds PML-N,
Stealth of nation: Zahra Haider’s real crime is that she’s been candid about her love life and worse, found her Pakistani lovers wanting

Stealth of nation: Zahra Haider’s real crime is that she’s been candid about her love life and worse, found her Pakistani lovers wanting

the ruling party, responsible for the shame heaped upon the nation by Miss Haider’s shocking disclosures. Why? Because she was once the class fellow of Maryam Nawaz, the Prime Minister’s daughter. Yes, go figure.

Quite clearly, Miss Haider has become a lightning rod for all sorts of ugly prejudices, insecurities and anxieties. It is worth stressing that what she says in her article is hardly revelatory. We all know that there’s plenty of pre- and extra-marital sex around, and has been forever. That we like to deny its existence for reasons of honour or propriety is no secret either. In providing her own evidence, Ms Haider has made clear the disconnect there. All she’s asked for, really, is more openness and honesty.

I can see why her demand has discomfited many. She’s asking for a fundamental change in societal attitude, one that goes against millennia of custom and tradition. When that change involves women, men go ballistic. If any evidence were needed simply consider the bitter opposition to the Punjab’s protection bill for women. But I suspect Miss Haider’s real crime is that she’s made so bold as to talk of her love life openly and worse, found her Pakistani lovers wanting.

The depressing fact is that men the world over resent outspoken, confident women. The Guardian newspaper recently ran a survey in Britain investigating online abuse experienced by its writers and discovered that female columnists, particularly non-white female columnists, were subjected to much greater, much nastier trolling than their male counterparts. Had Miss Haider’s article been penned by a man, I’m convinced it would not have generated half as much controversy as it has. But because she’s a woman, and a desi woman at that, she must be put in her place. Misogyny is rampant everywhere but online it is out of control.

Though it pains me to admit it, I’m not surprised by the viciousness. For that matter, Ms Haider couldn’t have lived in Pakistan for 19 years and not known that. But she wrote it any way. So kudos to her.

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14. SRI LANKA: BEN BAVINCK’S TESTIMONY WITHIN THE CRUCIBLE OF WAR, 1994-2004
by Michael Roberts 
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(Colombo Telegraph - 6 May 2016)

As a young teenager in the Netherlands Benjamin Bavinck (1924-2011) lived through the occupation of his country by the Nazi Germans. As he traversed the various war zones in Sri Lanka between 1988 and 2004, therefore, and recorded his experiences (in Dutch) in his diaries, he brought an experiential background that few other foreigners would have possessed. This pillar of experience was girded by two other sturdy characteristics: (1) what one can present as “Dutch phlegm” and (2) a commitment to the service of mankind that is a trait of those devoted to the helping professions.

Bavinck had committed himself to teaching at Jaffna College in 1954 and learnt Tamil during the course of his eighteen-year stint career in the island.[1] He returned in 1988 to serve the Protestant Churches in different parts of Sri Lanka. He was working in various capacities in the helping profession within the Jaffna Peninsula in the period encompassed by Volume Two of his diaries, initially in the space of Thamililam under the LTTE and then, after the SL Army captured the greater part of the Peninsula in mid/late-1995, under the Government of Sri Lanka and its military arm.

E. Valentine Daniel, a Malaiyaha Tamil and one of my friends from the hills who has risen to high academic status as an anthropologist in USA, was a student at Jaffna College from 1962 and knew Bavinck as teacher, while subsequently sustaining an adult friendship with the good man. The introduction which he has provided to all readers of this documentary source within Volume One is invaluable and becomes mandatory reading for all serious investigators.mahinda_sarath (2) colombotelegraph

Take note of one of his evaluations of Bavinck: “[n]ot only has Ben been a self-reliant man, he taught every student that came his way the art of being self-reliant, and along with this, his students took in lessons of self-control, industriousness, thrift, privacy, modesty and plainness which resonated with their own beliefs and practices in the making. Apart from not being a teacher in the conventional sense, he always was and still is a student; but not a student who studies us, but one who studies with us and among us — a participant-observer-student-teacher.”

Val’s assessment of Bavinck as “a fiercely independent person” is reinforced at every turn as one digests his diary entries. As he states,, Bavinck’s commentary provides one with “a balanced account” – one that is “reflective…fair …. deliberative” (Daniel). In brief one cannot ask for a better historical source –a resource that is. So one can anoint Daniel’s emphasis: “[Bavinck’s] diary is a gift, not only to the historian and research scholar, but to every Tamil and Sinhalese citizen, whatever be the state with which he or she chooses to identify himself/herself with.”

In early 1989 Bavinck’s diary records a discussion with Dr. Rajani Thiranagama nee Rajasingam (also spelt Rajasingham) and in subsequent months his interactions with Rajani’s father (a Christian Tamil and retired mathematics teacher) and Rajan Hoole, K. Sritharan and Daya Somasunderam deepened.[2] This was the core group behind voices of protest within the domains commanded by the LTTE. These were quintessentially Tamil and humanist voices, directed against LTTE excesses in the Peninsula and elsewhere (while also pinpointing governmental atrocities). In consequence Rajani was murdered by the Tigers on the 21st September 1989.

This did not deter the sturdy personnel of the UTHR circle. Hoole and Sritharan were constantly in hiding and on the move thereafter. From that point on The Broken Palmyrah and the series of web publications under the rubric “University Teachers for Human Rights” have presented their sombre findings on killings and misdemeanours from all sides engaged in the conflict in Sri Lanka.[3]

It is in the same spirit that Bavinck pens his diary entries, pursuing a middle path and advocating a modus vivendi between the Sinhalese government dispensation and a Tamil dispensation that was now dominated by the LTTE. Indeed, those reading his diaries will find several entries detailing conversations and sojourns with old Mr. Rajasingam as well as the younger activists of the UTHR circle.

In his public ruminations once[4] Val Daniel made a passing suggestion that he considered Ben Bavinck to be a Tamil. Maybe. But Bavinck’s diaries demonstrate that he was also sturdy Dutch in his resoluteness, courage and engaged commentary as a moderate voice crunched in-between extreme forces. A nuanced study will probably discern moments when his “foreign-ness” enabled him to opt for hard choices between the devil (LTTE) and the deep blue see (GSL) in ways which went beyond his UTHR comrades. That is a puzzle I leave for serious students of his material.

Bavinck did not pen an entry every day. Sometimes an entry covered the short period which intervened between entries. Nor was he resident in Sri Lanka throughout the period embraced by Volume Two. There were occasions when he was on leave-either on furlough in Holland or on business in USA as a member of the Congregational Council overseeing Jaffna College and the American Mission’s activities in Sri Lanka. Thus in utilizing Volume two of his published diaries, one must note his absence from Sri Lanka in the following periods:

I will be presenting extracts from his diary entries arranged on thematic lines. In doing so readers and researchers should attend to two cautionary notes that I attached in my presentation of Volume One. (A) “His information … is a voice of his times and conveys invaluable information. It should not be dismissed as ‘gossip,’ though of course some of the reportage has to be treated cautiously as second-hand or third-hand reportage of events that Bavinck did not witness himself. These tales, clearly, must be sifted and evaluated in the light of other contemporaneous information.” (B) “This is down-to-earth testimony…the data brings out the immediacy of the moment as well as the complexities of the ground situation amidst daily life. This is truly riveting material. Absorb it carefully.”

With Volume Two I am planning to extract the following “Motifs” or “Tracks,” but it is possible that adjustments will be made to these intentions.

    Ben Bavinck’s Personal Stance
    The Tamil Intelligentsia for the LTTE
    Tamils In-between and Shifting Currents
    GSL Shelling, Excesses & Atrocities
    Tiger Atrocities and Controls
    Prabhākaran as Fascist
    The Cult of the Māvīrar among Tigers & Tamils
    Incidents: The Enforced “Exodus” mid-1995
    Incidents: The Puttur East Incident
    Insights on Tamil Lifeways and Culture

SELECT BIBILIOGRAPHY re PREVIOUS PRESENTATIONS OF THE BAVINCK DIARIES

 “Val Daniel’s Introduction of Ben Bavinck and Ben’s Diary over the Years of Conflict in Lanka,” 11 September 2011, http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/val-daniels-introduction-of-ben-bavinck-and-bens-dairy-over-the-years-of-conflict-in-lanka/

“Ben Bavinck’s Jaffna Diaries: Extracts in Himal,” 9 April 2011, http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/2019/

Ahilan Kadirgamar: “A Life of Solidarity: Ben Bavinck, a Jaffna Man — 25 February 1924 to 11 August 2011,” http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/a-life-of-solidarity-ben-bavinck-a-jaffna-man-25-february-1924-to-11-august-2011/ and Sunday Island, 21 August 2011

Michael Roberts: “Shelling Suffering of the Tamil People, 1990-91 – Ben Bavinck,” 15 September 2011. http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/shelling-suffering-of-the-tamil-people-1990-91-%e2%80%93-ben-bavinck/

Michael Roberts: “Sandwiched in between: Tamil Dissidents and Others in the Furnace of War & its Killings, January 1989-late 1990 via Ben Bavinck’s Diary,” 29 September 2011, http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/sandwiched-in-between-tamil-dissidents-and-others-in-the-furnace-of-war-its-killings-january-1989-late-1990-via-ben-bavinck%e2%80%99s-diary/

Michael Roberts: “Pirapāharan as uncompromising killer prone to vengeance: testimonies from the Jaffna heartland, 1989-91,” 1 November 2011, http://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/pirapaharan-as-uncompromising-killer-prone-to-vengeance-testimonies-from-the-jaffna-heartland-1989-91/

 [1] His diary entries in the mid-1990s reveal that Bavinck continued to study Tamil and seek mastery in expression.

[2] His diary entry runs thus: “Afterwards I also met Rajan Hoole, who explained that the leading thought behind the founding of the UTHR (J) was the feeling that there was nobody to oppose the principle “Might is right!”, not even the churches. The churches thought that the only possible approach was through silent diplomacy. Rajan thought that if the LTTE had had respect for the churches they would have listened.”

[3] Also see Rajan Hoole, The Arrogance of Power, 2000.

[4] Daniel indicates that this was at a Keynote Address on “Who is a Tamil?” before the International Centre for Ethnic Studies.

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15.  DANGEROUS FICTIONS - THE WRITER MOHAMMED HANIF PROBES FOR TRUTH IN PAKISTAN
by Dexter Filkins
========================================
(New Yorker - May 9, 2016 Issue)

Letter from Karachi 
	
Hanif “writes in a spirit of delinquency,” his publisher says.	Credit Photograph by Chiara Goia for The New Yorker

One recent afternoon, the writer Mohammed Hanif climbed out of his car at the Benazir Bhutto Martyr Park, in Karachi. Hanif, who is fifty, has a square jaw that juts from a square head, and he walks with the easy stride of a fighter pilot, which he once was. He was wearing a pair of knockoff Ray-Bans, which cost about fifty cents at a local stand, and smoking a Dunhill cigarette.

The park—built to honor the former Prime Minister, who was killed by a suicide bomber in 2007—is a kind of urban oasis. Karachi is a sprawling, chaotic city of some twenty-two million people, riven by ethnic strife and gang wars; its main crime-fighting force, the Pakistan Rangers, patrols the streets in pickups mounted with heavy machine guns. Hanif has made his home there since 2008, when he returned from London, where he worked for twelve years as a reporter for the BBC. As a novelist and a journalist, he has become perhaps the foremost observer of Pakistan’s contradictions and absurdities.

At the entrance to the park, a statue of Bhutto faces the street, waving toward the boisterous Karachi traffic. Hanif is writing these days about Bhutto, who is a divisive figure in Pakistan’s modern history and therefore exactly the sort of character that he is drawn to. “For a lot of people, Bhutto symbolized some kind of future that was going to be semi-normal, semi-peaceful, where people could get on with their lives without things always going bang, bang, bang,” Hanif said. But she stole one and a half billion dollars in public money; her husband, Asif Zardari, became known as “Mr. Ten Per Cent” for allegedly keeping a share of every government contract. Her military helped foster the creation of the Taliban, empowering terrorist groups that still plague Pakistan. When the park was finished, in 2010, the Bhutto statue was surrounded by a steel fence, to keep it from being defaced.

Inside the gates, the traffic noise receded; kids played cricket on a broad green lawn. Hanif lit another cigarette. He has a laconic, understated way of speaking, as though he were trying to downplay the outrage and the hilarity that animate his prose. “I used to come here quite a lot, when it was just a lake and some grass. There’d be couples making out, that sort of thing,” he said. “It’s nice that the government was actually able to build this—that the land wasn’t handed over to the usual people.”

In Pakistani cities, valuable land is often seized by powerful gangs or businessmen and cleared for construction. In the distance stood a line of high-rises, at least one of which was rumored to be owned by Zardari, who was President from 2008 until 2013. Within the park, Hanif spotted another illegal building, beside a lake. “Navy guys have built a ‘sailing club’ there,” he said. “You never see a single yacht, but they’ve just grabbed some land to make a private club.”

Hanif says that his novels only happen to be set in Pakistan, and that he has no great desire to explain the place to outsiders. But he acknowledges that the peculiar difficulties and injustices of the society help to give his fiction its manic edge. “I tried once to write a story about another galaxy, and it began to sound like Karachi,” he said. As a journalist, he has written boldly about the military’s repression of domestic dissent and its support of terrorist groups. In a pair of novels, he’s been more slyly devastating, portraying a country run almost entirely by backstabbing mediocrities, and a society where a woman who shows any gumption or intelligence usually ends up dead or disfigured. This kind of critique can be dangerous in Pakistan. While the constitution allows for a broad measure of free expression, people know better than to speak or write publicly about the powerful intelligence services or about crimes committed in the name of Islam. Since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, thirty-one Pakistani journalists have been murdered.

Hanif discourages the image of himself as a risk-taking dissident. When a fan at a reading a few years ago asked if he was a target of the security forces, he joked, “Stop giving people ideas.” In private, he is mindful of the connections that allow him latitude: he has a following in the West, and, as a former employee of the BBC, he holds a British passport. Ultimately, though, he hopes that what will protect him is his connection to the country itself. “I was born here,” he said. “I went to a government school in a village. My brother and sister still live here—all my childhood friends are still here. I served in the armed forces,” he went on. “Some writers become foreigners, even when they are living here. I don’t think I am a foreigner. Even the people who don’t like me, I’m one of them. I speak their language. I don’t travel with guards. I didn’t just fly in from England.”

When Hanif was born, Pakistan had been an independent nation for just eighteen years and an Islamic republic for nine. Notionally united by religion, it was divided by almost everything else: class, sect, language, ethnicity. Hanif grew up in a village in Punjab province, the home of the country’s historically dominant ethnic group, the Punjabis. His father was a farmer, like nearly everyone else there, and neither of his parents could read or write; the only book in the house was a copy of the Koran. Hanif borrowed books and read widely, starting in his first language, Punjabi. Then, as a teen-ager, he learned Urdu, the national language, and also English, which gave him access to British and American novels and to Russian and Latin-American works in translation. “English is the language that I associate with fiction,” he said.

Hanif felt stifled by small-town life. When, at sixteen, he found an Air Force recruitment ad in the local newspaper, he saw it as a way out; he signed a contract to serve for eighteen years.“My father couldn’t believe I had actually signed up,” he told me. In most of the world, the Pakistani military is not an esteemed organization; it has lost every war it has ever fought, including one with India, in 1971, in which a third of the Army was taken prisoner. Inside Pakistan, though, it has established itself as the preëminent arbiter of money and power. Until 2013, no elected civilian leader had ever handed power to another; generals always intervened.

In the Air Force, Hanif trained as a fighter pilot, flying an American-made T-37 twin-engine jet. But, he said, “I hated every minute I was there.” Whenever he could, he shirked duty to immerse himself in novels by Graham Greene and Joseph Heller; sometimes he read to his fellow-officers from “Catch-22,” which seemed especially relevant. “This was the life we’d been living, minus the war,” he said.

One afternoon in August, 1988, Hanif was sitting with friends in the officers’ mess, planning the evening. “The only TV channel in Pakistan suspended its normal transmission and started playing recitations of the Koran,” he said. “It was a big sign that something was up.” The recitations were followed by an announcement: a plane carrying Pakistan’s military dictator, General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, had exploded in midair. (The explosion also killed many of Zia’s senior advisers and the American Ambassador Arnold Raphel.) Zia had taken power a decade earlier, when he overthrew Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—Benazir’s father—and ordered him hanged. “With the help of the Almighty Allah, the armed forces will do everything we can to insure stability,” Zia vowed. Instead, he presided over a vast, American-funded campaign to drive the forces of the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. The war, along with the huge quantities of weapons and money that streamed into the country, helped to radicalize Pakistan. On the day his plane blew up, Zia was headed to an Army base after inspecting American tanks that he wanted to buy.

When Hanif and his fellow-officers discovered that Zia had been killed, they celebrated, pooling their money to buy a bottle of illegal whiskey. “I mean, we were really happy,” he said. “Toward the end of Zia’s reign, he was completely losing it. He’d been around forever, and when leaders are around forever they start doing stupid things. Every couple of years, he’d come forth with a new version of the ‘True Islam.’ ” Zia had instituted a sweeping Islamization of Pakistani society, making such offenses as adultery and theft punishable by stoning and amputation. He took thousands of political prisoners, and ordered Bhutto loyalists flogged. “When he got blown up, it was kind of his due,” Hanif said. “It was clear that somebody had bumped him off.”

Three months later, Hanif left the Air Force, a decade ahead of schedule; his father had died, enabling him to leave on compassionate grounds. He became a journalist, writing about fashion, show business, and boxing; he also began to report for Newsline, the country’s most aggressive news magazine. It was an unglamorous life—he lived in run-down Karachi neighborhoods, where his roommates included gangsters and heroin addicts—but he loved the work. One of his early scoops was about student activists in Karachi, who were operating branches of violent gangs at their universities. Hasan Zaidi, a journalist who worked at a rival publication, recalls marvelling at Hanif’s sources: “We would read his stuff and say, ‘Why don’t we have this guy?’ He always had his fingers on the pulse of the street.”

In 1996, Hanif got an offer from the BBC to come to London and work for the Urdu-language service. He was newly married, to Nimra Bucha, an actress, and the job seemed to promise a break from the difficulties of life in Karachi. In an essay written later, he recalled, “People were being kidnapped for a few thousand rupees. Everybody’s cousin had been robbed at gunpoint. Carjacking was rampant. Even an obscure journalist like me had a gangster or two stalking him.” He told Pakistani friends that he’d return after three years. Instead, he stayed for twelve.

He became the head of the Urdu service, supervising a staff of sixty, and the job kept him enmeshed in Pakistani politics. In his sixth year, he got word that one of his reporters had been kidnapped by the I.S.I., the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Hanif feared that the reporter would be killed, but, on the advice of a contact in the I.S.I., he assigned a series of stories about the abduction. “The guy inside the I.S.I. said that if we wanted him released we should make a lot of noise,” Hanif said. “So we made a lot of noise.”

Before moving to England, Hanif had dabbled in writing plays that criticized the military. One of them was “What Now, Now That We Are Dead?,” written during a period of extrajudicial killings in Karachi. In the play, victims of the killings come back to life to survey the world they departed, then decide that it’s better to return to their tombs.

In London, he became consumed with figuring out who had killed Zia. He made phone calls and researched the lives of those around Zia, trying to assess potential culprits: the C.I.A., the Israelis, the Indians, the Soviets, rivals inside the Army, and even, according to one theory, a case of mangoes that had been carried aboard the plane for a celebration and then had exploded spontaneously. He was met with silence. “No one would talk—not Zia’s wife, not the Ambassador’s wife, no one in the Army,” he said. “I realized, there’s no way in hell I’ll ever find out.”

If he couldn’t solve the mystery, he could address it in a novel, he decided: “What if, fictionally, I raise my hand and say, ‘Look, I did it’?” The idea grew into “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” a satirical thriller built along the lines of a Pakistani “Catch-22.” Hanif’s narrator and proxy is Ali Shigri, an Air Force trainee who escapes the absurdities of military life by marching obsessively and by smoking high-grade hash, bought from the squadron’s laundryman, Uncle Starchy. Shigri has a good motive to attempt an assassination: his father was murdered on Zia’s orders. But, in Hanif’s telling, nearly everyone in Pakistan wants to kill Zia. His intelligence chief conspires to pump VX gas into the cabin of his plane; a mango farmer plants a bomb, hoping to inspire a Marxist-Maoist revolt. Zia is even pursued by a crow, carrying a curse bestowed by a blind woman whom he condemned to a dungeon.

The historical Zia was humorless and self-regarding, a violent autocrat who liked to be spoken of as a “man of faith” and a “man of truth.” In “Mangoes,” he is a buffoon—paranoid that his underlings are plotting against him, distracted by a long-running fight with his wife, who has kicked him out of their bedroom, and tormented by an itchy infestation of rectal worms. At one point, trying to determine what his subjects think of him, he disguises himself with a shawl and rides into the city on a borrowed bicycle. The disguise works so well that he is detained by a policeman, who mistakes him for a vagrant and gives him a humiliating mandate: “Say ‘General Zia is a one-eyed faggot’ thrice and I’ll let you go.”

If the book’s satire seems cartoonish at times, it is also fearless. The military men are hapless schemers, in thrall to American advisers; the narrator is involved in a gay relationship with another pilot. (“I thought I needed to put some sex in the novel, but it was set in an Air Force barracks,” Hanif said.) Hanif has spoken of fiction as “the opposite of journalism.” But he acknowledges that the book was informed by his years of reporting, and by interviews with survivors of Pakistan’s dungeons. The most sinister figure is an I.S.I. officer, Major Kiyani, whose name evokes that of Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army’s notorious chief of staff. To Americans, Kayani is known for presiding over an elaborate double game, in which Pakistan took billions in U.S. aid to help with the war in Afghanistan while covertly sponsoring the Taliban. The fictional Kiyani is both a dandy and a demented torturer, “the kind of man who picks up a phone, makes a long-distance call, and a bomb goes off in a crowded bazaar.” He, too, is involved in a plot to kill Zia.

As Hanif refined the manuscript, he told no one in Pakistan what he was working on. He and Bucha sat up nights in their apartment in London and wondered what the reaction would be. “At one point, I decided I should change the names of the characters,” he said. “But I wrote a few pages like that, and it just wasn’t any fun, so I switched back.” He drew inspiration from Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and politician, whose novel “The Feast of the Goat” tells the story of Rafael Trujillo, the longtime dictator of the Dominican Republic. In the book, Trujillo is depicted as a brute, but also as an impotent bed wetter. “I realized it was O.K. to do this,” Hanif said. “It gave me a kind of permission.”

When he finished the novel, in 2007, he pitched it to a Pakistani publisher he knew. “She wouldn’t even look at it,” he said. His old employer, Newsline, agreed to publish the book, but the printing company that it hired refused to be involved. Finally, Random House in India—Pakistan’s neighbor and archenemy—bought the manuscript and agreed to ship several thousand copies to Pakistan. According to Chiki Sarkar, who was then the head of Random House in India, the potential for controversy was appealing. “I insisted that Zia’s face be on the cover,” she said. “We pitched it as the book that no one in Pakistan would publish.” One early shipment was held up when a customs agent opened a box and saw Zia’s image. Soon afterward, Hanif, along with his wife and son, returned to Karachi to live.

When “Mangoes” was released, Hanif’s Pakistani friends were shocked: after a decade of repressive martial law, he was brazenly mocking the military. “He will just say anything,” Kamila Shamsie, a fellow-novelist, remembers thinking. For many people, though, the satire was welcome. “Hanif is essentially saying, Let’s not see Zia as a big man, as a monster—let’s see him as a pathetic man,” Shamsie told me. “This book feels like revenge.” It got stellar reviews in Pakistan, not least because the country was enduring another military dictatorship: General Pervez Musharraf had seized power in 1999. The critic Husain Nasir described the book as “engaging in rhythm, innovative in style, sardonic in voice, facts oozing out with beguiling charm.” It was long-listed for a Man Booker Prize.

A few times, Hanif had indications that “Mangoes” had reached powerful people. A general approached him at a party and asked who his sources were; others asked how he had managed to unravel the assassination plot. Zia’s son sent a message to complain—but, Hanif said, it was clear that he hadn’t read the book. Remarkably, there was no official backlash. “I think I was helped by the fact that no one in the military reads novels,” he said.

The book’s other great advantage was that it was written in English. The English language occupies a paradoxical place in Pakistani society: it is a holdover from colonial times, which are not favorably remembered, yet it remains the language of government, of the military, and of the upper classes and those who aspire to join them. Nearly half of Pakistanis are illiterate, and many of the rest speak Urdu, or one of the local languages; the audience for journalism and fiction in English is an impassioned but relatively tiny élite. This situation presents both limits and opportunities. Writers in English have far more latitude to criticize authorities, both secular and religious, without retribution. Clerics tend not to read English, or to care much about the opinions of upper-class intellectuals; politicians are largely concerned with the vastly greater numbers of people who read primarily Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, or Balochi. When Hanif’s English-language reporting has exposed corrupt or mendacious leaders, the official reaction has often been benign. “Sometimes you get this feeling that you are basically writing for like-minded people,” he said.

The success of Hanif’s début elevated him to the first tier of Pakistani writers in English, joining Mohsin Hamid (“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia”) and Daniyal Mueenuddin (“In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”). But, while much Pakistani fiction centers, like Hamid’s, on the lives of the upper class, or, like Mueenuddin’s, on fading feudal traditions, Hanif focusses on the sordid elements of society, and on the failures of the country’s self-styled guardians. Chiki Sarkar, the publisher, said that Hanif was distinguished by his relatively humble origins. He grew up in a middle-class family, went to a government school, and stayed in Pakistan for college; his work as a journalist has brought him closer to the struggles and disappointments of ordinary Pakistanis. “Hanif writes in English, but his world and his imagination and his humor come from a non-English language,” she said. “He writes in a spirit of delinquency.”

Hanif lives in Defence, a neighborhood of stately homes on the Arabian Sea. It’s one of the nicest parts of Karachi, filled with the kind of people who might buy Hanif’s books, but its affluence is deceptive. Many of the homes are barricaded by sandbags and cement walls and protected by armed guards; the residence of the current Home Minister of Sindh province, a few houses down from Hanif’s, resembles a fortress. Generators counter the city’s chronic electricity shortage. Defence may be a neighborhood of oligarchs, but, as one Pakistani writer told me, in Karachi you can live like an oligarch on a hundred thousand dollars a year.

Hanif lives in a comfortable two-story house, which, like most of the others, is surrounded by walls. But he does not employ an army of servants, and, inside, the place is homey and unostentatious. When you walk through the gate, you are greeted by Hanif’s two pet dogs, a conspicuously Western touch; in a Muslim country, dogs are generally seen as supersized vermin.

Hanif does what he can to stay in touch with the “pulse of the street.” He regularly returns to his home village to see old friends. He often writes in Urdu—plays and song lyrics as well as journalism—and he appears on Urdu-language television. The effect of his work in Urdu is more pronounced, he says; more people call him to comment on his pieces, and his criticisms of the government or the military carry more punch. But his most transgressive writing doesn’t always reach the largest audience. Eight years after its publication, “Mangoes” has yet to be published in Urdu. When he and Bucha, who acts in Urdu-language films and soap operas, appear together in public, she is recognized more often than he is.

For years, as Hanif read the Pakistani newspapers, it seemed that every day there was at least one story about an attack on a woman: shot by her brother, or stoned to death by a mob, or sentenced to death after her husband’s family accused her of insulting the Prophet. When I arrived in Karachi, the story was about a woman who had been set on fire by relatives.

In 2008, Hanif began to imagine a story about a female avenger fighting back against Pakistan’s patriarchal society. “I just had this idea of a female superhero flying around and kicking ass,” he said. He was also inspired by his boss at Newsline, an editor named Razia Bhatti, who pushed him to go after powerful public officials. “The stories back then were printed on these long rolls of paper, and she used to sit with me and go through my stories line by line. She was a real crusader—absolutely fearless.”

After a few tries, Hanif found himself uncomfortable with the superhero conceit—“I was afraid I was writing a bad Hong Kong type of movie”—and he gave it up. Then another scenario occurred to him. Years before, his mother had fallen ill and was taken to the hospital. He sat with her for days, in a ward staffed around the clock by female nurses, most of them Christians, a tiny minority in Pakistan. “So many institutions in Pakistan don’t work at all, and I was struck by how dedicated the nurses were,” he said. “Their salaries are very low. No one was supervising them—it was the middle of the night—and yet they carried on in the most dedicated way.”

Hanif got the idea of writing about a nurse in a decrepit hospital. Alice Bhatti (named for his old editor) is a ferociously strong young woman: smart, independent, and rebellious to the point of recklessness. She works as a nurse in the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, a shambling Catholic institution in Karachi that is corrupt, underfunded, and horrifyingly filthy: rats make nests of human hair; gunnysacks filled with body parts sit in a corner. Alice is Christian, the daughter of a faith healer, from a Christian slum called the French Colony, where Jesus is known as “Lord Yassoo.” She comes from a family of “sweepers,” or janitors, a job performed overwhelmingly by Christians. At the hospital, Alice sees the most vicious tendencies of Karachi—murders and molestations that go unreported, bodies that go unclaimed. She freely mocks the Islamic faith, in concert with her father, who warns her, “These Muslas will make you clean their shit and then complain that you stink.” More than anything, Alice is determined to defend herself from an endless wave of insults and assaults:

    There was not a single day—not a single day—when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, brother protecting his honour, father protecting his honour, son protecting his honour, jilted lover avenging his honour, feuding farmers settling their water disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body.

When a wealthy patient’s relative tries to force Alice to perform oral sex, she slashes his genitals with a razor and dispatches him to the emergency room. “Go to Accidents. And no need to be shy, they get lots of this sort of thing during their night shift,” she says. “And stop screaming.”

In another city, Alice might have called the police. Instead, her primary contact with law enforcement is Teddy Butt, a bodybuilder who works nights on a police death squad. Butt—a simpleton with a steroid abuser’s high-pitched voice—becomes infatuated with Alice, and professes his love while holding her at gunpoint. When she rebuffs him, he leaves the hospital and, in despair, fires his pistol into the air. The bullet wings a truck driver, who slams on his brakes, which causes a rickshaw to swerve, which kills five schoolchildren crossing a street, which sets off a riot that spreads across Karachi, as thousands of aggrieved citizens sack restaurants, burn tires, and overturn cars. The mayhem lasts for three days; eleven people die and entire neighborhoods are destroyed before things settle down. “Newspapers start predicting ‘Normalcy limping back to the city,’ ” Hanif writes, “as if normalcy had gone for a picnic and sprained an ankle.”

“Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” is a funny book, more light-footed than its subject matter suggests, but its power lies in its portrayal of how Alice is relentlessly crushed. Finally, Alice agrees to marry Teddy—largely to move into a roomier apartment—but he is bewildered by her high-spiritedness and sets about trying to make her behave like a proper wife. When she tries to leave him, he feels “dishonored” and seeks a time-honored remedy: he throws acid in her face. Alice may have been a superhero, Hanif suggests, but in Pakistan not even female superheroes can prevail.

The Karachi Press club is situated in a mansion built during colonial rule, with high wooden shutters to keep out the heat and palm trees on either side. Reporters sit at tables on the grounds, smoking and chatting. Every afternoon, people with grievances against the government gather to demonstrate, sometimes by the thousands. It’s a curious ritual—the demonstrators coming to the reporters, rather than the other way around. “It works this way because the reporters are too lazy to go out,” Hanif, who visits the club occasionally, told me.

The Pakistani press corps works with a strange mixture of privilege and constraint. Pick up one of the better English-language newspapers—the News or the Dawn—and you will find penetrating coverage of national security, poverty, and governmental corruption. But, beyond shifting and mysterious boundaries, no journalist may stray without risk. In 2010, Umar Cheema, who had written about dissent within the military, was picked up by men in police uniforms who were widely presumed to be I.S.I. agents. They shaved his head, sexually humiliated him, and dropped him miles from his home, with a warning to stop. The following year, Saleem Shahzad published stories asserting that the armed forces had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda. He was beaten to death and his body dumped in a canal.

The infiltration of the armed forces by Islamist militants has long been a dangerous topic; the country’s blasphemy laws are another. In the past few years, there has been a third: the bloody insurgency in the state of Balochistan, where the military and the intelligence agencies have been accused of a campaign of kidnappings, torture, and executions. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, thirteen reporters covering Balochistan have been murdered since 1992. In 2014, Hamid Mir, the country’s best-known television journalist, who has criticized the Army and the I.S.I. in his pieces, was shot six times by unknown gunmen as he drove to work. Since then, Mir says, his television station has stopped reporting aggressively on Balochistan.

In 2012, Hanif was asked by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to write a series about dissidents who had disappeared in Balochistan. Hanif’s reporting was compiled in a small book, “The Baloch Who Is Not Missing & Others Who Are,” and also published in English-language newspapers. After the stories came out, Hanif received a call from an old Air Force friend who had become a general. “I heard some people talking badly about you,” the friend said. “Why do you put yourself at risk?” Hanif interpreted the call as a calculated warning: “He was passing me a message.”

There were other signs that even the English-speaking élites were no longer safe. In January, 2011, the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was shot dead by his bodyguard after he denounced the death sentence of an impoverished Christian woman, who was charged with insulting the Prophet after a group of Muslim women refused to drink from a bowl that she had touched. “That was a seismic shift,” Kamila Shamsie, the novelist, said.

Last April, Sabeen Mahmud, a close friend of Hanif’s who ran a local event space called the Second Floor, was planning a panel discussion involving Baloch leaders. Worried that the I.S.I. would react badly, she turned to Hanif for advice. He told her that it would be very risky, but Mahmud decided to go ahead anyway.

Hanif was out of town the night of the discussion, but he followed it on Twitter, and was relieved when it came to an end without incident. A few minutes later, he got a call from a friend: gunmen had pulled alongside Mahmud’s car and opened fire, killing her and wounding her mother. “It really shook me,” he said. “I used to think, like Sabeen, that we were really small fry. Who the hell cares about a hundred and twenty people sitting in a room talking, a bunch of like-minded losers?” Mahmud’s death was a measure of how much things had changed in Pakistan. The stories Hanif had published about Balochistan were “impossible now,” he said.

The police announced that they had arrested a suspect in the killing, but nothing about him fit the profile of an assassin: he was a student at one of the most prestigious universities in Pakistan. Many of Mahmud’s friends suspected that she was killed by the I.S.I. In September, her driver, who witnessed the killing, was also shot dead. After Mahmud was killed, a large group of supporters gathered at the Karachi Press Club, planning a series of protests to demand the truth about what had happened to her. Hanif joined them. “I am not a protester by nature, but it seemed like the decent thing to do,” he said. There was a good crowd, he said, nearly two hundred people. But it rapidly petered out. On the twentieth day, Hanif told me, only three people came.

Hanif’s audience seems not to have lost its appetite for outrage, or at least for comic relief. During a discussion at the Karachi Literature Festival, a woman in the audience stood and asked him to write another coruscating novel, like his first one. “ ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ was so close to the truth,” she said. “My copy is in tatters now, because ten of my friends borrowed it.”

Hanif’s most rambunctious new work is “The Dictator’s Wife,” a musical that he wrote with the composer Mohammed Fairouz, which will have its première at the Kennedy Center in January. The main characters are unnamed—known only as the First Lady and her husband, Himself—but they bear an unmistakable resemblance to Pervez Musharraf and his wife, Sebha. The dictator in question never appears onstage. As his wife scrabbles with angry protesters and gripes about her compromised marriage, he is sequestered in the bathroom, represented only by a mordant song that his aide-de-camp sings on his behalf:

    When you’re forced to bugger
    200 million people
    You need time to recover.
    After you have rigged the elections
    After all your positive actions
    You need a few moments of self–reflection
    Me time.

This kind of antic effect has grown scarcer in Hanif’s writing, which has become increasingly tragic. Last year, Fairouz asked him to collaborate on an opera about Benazir Bhutto. Hanif had considered writing a book about her, but decided that her life—filled with death, corruption, and betrayal—was too dramatic. “It’s too over the top,” Hanif told me. But opera seemed like a fitting medium. “In opera, everyone gets killed, and everything is over the top anyway,” he said.

Hanif knew Bhutto glancingly; while he was living in England, she was also there, having fled arrest warrants in Pakistan after the collapse of her scandal-ridden government. On occasion, she came into the BBC office to talk about the news from home.

In 2007, Bhutto was granted amnesty, and that October she returned to Pakistan to run for a third term. Less than an hour after she arrived, a suicide bomber attacked her motorcade, killing more than a hundred and forty people. “No one thought something like that could happen again,” Hanif said. “Once she survived it, she’d be safe.” Two months later, she was attacked again, by a suicide bomber and men firing weapons. This time, she was killed.

The Pittsburgh Opera plans to stage “Bhutto” in 2018. As Hanif revises the libretto, he and Fairouz sift through ideas in long telephone calls. The libretto has moments of Hanif’s anarchic humor: one of the main characters is a cabinet minister named Maulana Whiskey (essentially, Whiskey Priest), and Benazir is called by her childhood nickname, Pinkie. But most of the story seems haunted by thirty years of political and social tumult. It consists of three acts, each centering on a momentous death: Zia’s hanging of Benazir’s father, the explosion of Zia’s plane, and Benazir’s assassination.

“Bhutto” will no doubt cause a stir in Pakistan, whether or not it is staged there. A large part of the population holds the memory of Benazir’s family sacred, and the question of who killed her is unresolved. Musharraf, who was President at the time, is now on trial for the murder in Islamabad. He has maintained that, when an intelligence report suggested Bhutto might be attacked, he did everything he could to protect her. But Bhutto’s lobbyist in the United States, Mark Siegel, testified that Musharraf denied a request from Bhutto for more security, telling her, “Your security is dependent on the relationship between us.”

Bhutto’s legacy also lingers in more urgent ways. The Taliban, which flourished during her Administration, is surging in Afghanistan, and its affiliates are at war with the Pakistani state. In a recent Op-Ed piece in the Times, Hanif recounted a series of attacks in Pakistan, including a raid on a school that killed a hundred and forty children. Afterward, the Army claimed the attacks were evidence that “hard targets,” such as airports and military bases, had become too difficult to strike. “The language used to report and commemorate these massacres is sickeningly celebratory and familiar,” Hanif wrote. “The students are called martyrs. Their courage is applauded.” He went on, “How much courage does it require to take a bullet in the head? . . . This is imposed martyrdom, and it isn’t a sign of strength. It’s a sign of utter helplessness.”

For the first time in years, Hanif has begun to wonder about his future in Pakistan. Bucha, his wife, has asked him to stop appearing on television, out of concern for his safety. “It’s something I think about all the time,” she told me. “In Pakistan, you don’t have to be outspoken to be killed. The people we might be afraid of are people we don’t even know.” She and Hanif talk about whether the family should leave the country again. In the meantime, he sometimes encourages rumors that he’s living abroad.

When Hanif worked at the BBC, he used to go to the office each day hoping that Pakistan would not make the news. It seldom happened that way. For a writer engaged with politics, there has been a benefit. Politically turbulent societies often produce extraordinary literature: Russia in the twilight of the tsars, India after independence, postwar Latin America. Pakistan, reliably chaotic since 1947, has served Hanif as a wellspring of characters and ideas. Still, he insists that he would be happier if the country somehow became calm. “I never want to leave,” he said. “If Pakistan were normal and boring, I would love that. I’d shut my mouth for a while, if that was the price.” 

Dexter Filkins joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2011.

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16. OPEN UP OR BREAK UP, DISSIDENT YANG JIANLI TELLS CHINA
Interview by Bharat Bhushan
========================================
(catchnews.com - 4 May 2016)

Chinese dissident leader Yang Jianli, the moving force behind the Interfaith Conference of China's ethnic and religious minorities in Dharamsala recently, is not unduly disturbed by the cancellation of visas of some dissident leaders by India.

He pointed out that despite the cancellation of four visas due to China's protest, 69 participants, including at least eight Chinese activists and Uyghur American Association's president Ilshat Hsan, had attended the conference.

"The cancellation of the visas of Dolkun Isa, Lu Jinghua and Ray Wong is a matter of regret. But the Indian media has overlooked one vital fact: that the conference itself was held, and that India allowed it to be held for the first time on its soil says a lot about the government's position," he said. He cautioned against coming to quick conclusions about India being "weak" in reacting to China's protest.

Yang is president of Initiatives for China, a US-based organisation dedicated to working for a peaceful transition to democracy in China. He has a doctorate from Harvard University, and is co-author of a democratic Constitution for China. He went back to China after completing his Ph.D to organise the labour movement for non-violent change. He was arrested and jailed for five years on charges of "spying" . He was released after UN intervention, and has since launched Initiatives for China.

Catch caught up with him while he was en route from Dharamsla to the US. Excerpts from the hour-long chat with Yang Jianli:

What was the aim of the Interfaith Conference you organised in Dharamsala?

This conference was first held in 2000, and is intended to expand a dialogue we have had with the Tibetans for a decade, to include others - the Uyghurs, the Mongolians, Christians, the followers of Falun Gong and the people of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

They share a common desire for complete freedom from the yoke of China's communist regime. We have held this conference mostly in the US and twice in Taiwan. Now, we want to take it around the globe - especially to countries that are strategically important for China. We think that our conference can influence policy making towards China, and the views of civil society in these countries about China.

India is strategically very important for China, and we wanted to honour the Dali Lama in his place of work. Also, we are a non-violent movement and India is the home of Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, in 2000, our first Interfaith Conference was held on Gandhi's birthday, 2 October.

What is common among the various persecuted ethnic and religious minorities of China? The Uyghur movement is ethnic and religious but violent; the Tibetan movement is ethnic and religious but non-violent; the Mongolians are an ethnic minority, while the Christians and Falun Gong practitioners are religious minorities; and the demands of the people of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau are not religious. How can faith/religion bring them together?

I think we are united by the principles of tolerance and understanding as well as our common desire to achieve freedom from China's communist regime. You said that the Uyghurs are violent. But those Uyghurs we work with are non-violent. Dolkun Isa, to whom India denied a visa, is a non-violent human rights activist. I have worked with him for two decades; he is not a terrorist as China describes him.

The Dalai Lama has claimed that the two autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet have been subjected to a "cultural genocide" by Beijing. Is the process that the Dalai Lama described so graphically continuing?

The cultural genocide is continuing. The languages of the minorities, for example, are greatly endangered. The pressures on language are not only cultural but also economic. Some Tibetans, for example, are giving up their language so they can get better jobs. A situation has been created in which languages and religions have been pushed to the verge of destruction.

The land, environment, natural resources and culture of the Tibetans, for example, is being destroyed in the name of development. What is Tibetan identity without them?
Linda Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images
"China is destroying land, resources, culture of the Tibetans in the name of development: Yang Jianli"

What is your perspective on the future of Tibet?

I think, first of all, we need to preserve Tibetan identity - primarily their culture and language. Only then can their geographical identity be preserved and the right to self-determination exercised.

I don't believe in the use of force to achieve any political goal. The Tibetans can decide on any arrangement they like democratically - the Dalai Lama's Middle Path or whatever else.

How do you see Tibet in the post-Dalai Lama scenario?

While I think that a post-Dalai Lama era is still far away, there must not be any spiritual or cultural vacuum after the Dalai Lama. Otherwise, China will plan their own reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and a great division will be created among the Tibetan people.

Anticipating this, the Dalai Lama has already devolved his temporal powers to democratically elected leaders. So, he has already created a political authority which the Tibetan people will trust. Please understand that the 14th Dalai Lama is an extremely rare commodity. There will not be another like him. I, therefore, have more confidence in the democratic system that he is creating than in whoever will be the next Dalai Lama.

How credible and viable is the Uyghur leadership which is demanding an independent East Turkestan?

Their cause is more difficult than the Tibetans' because they do not have a unifying leader like the Dalai Lama. For other ethnic groups, this kind of leadership is unimaginable. However, they must pursue their goals through non-violent means. Violence will get them nowhere, not only because of the military might of the Chinese state but also because of the way the world views terrorism today.

Would the Central Asian neighbours of China want a Uyghur-led Xinjiang to break away as an independent state? After all, the ethnicities in these countries cut across national boundaries.

That is a very complex geographical and political issue. We do not pretend that we have a solution (to the Uyghur issue). But we must arrive at some general principles. So, no matter what, nobody should have the authority to impose a solution on the Uyghurs. Everything should be decided through democratic means by a Uyghur majority.

How successful will Beijing's efforts to hold China's fractious borderlands be? Do you think China will remain a highly centralised, unitary state, or might it develop into a more multicultural, or even a pluralistic society?

I think pluralism is inevitable. China, I believe, will one way or the other, become a loosely connected state structure. Democracy will dissolve this very centralised unitary structure of power that exists. I am not saying that these groups will separate from China, but that they will only be loosely connected to the Centre.

If China does not become multicultural and pluralistic, do you think the ethnic and religious movements, which are either non-violent or at a low threshold of terrorism, might actually morph into something more dangerous?

Yes, there is a potential of that. Impatient young people may opt for that when they see themselves running out of effective non-violent options. I, however, advocate the non-violent path, aware as I am of the military might of the Chinese state. The Chinese government would want these movements to become extremist because it is easier to deal with extremism. You can justify the government's high handedness. Moderate movements based on non-violence are much more complex and, therefore, difficult to deal with. They require a dialogue. So violence only benefits the Chinese government.

Could China break up like the Soviet Union, splintering in a way that its leaders obsessively warn against?

Eventually, perhaps. Loosening up of the state is inevitable but break-up is possible.

Wouldn't the international community want a stable China since an unstable China cannot be the engine of economic growth for the rest of the world?

I think when it comes to their foreign policy, many countries look at China only in terms of their own short-term interests. A break-up of China will reverberate across the entire region. Fearing instability and chaos, many countries will not want that to happen. But such inconveniences are actually in their long-term interests, and of the world.

People in China may have many grievances but there seems to be little evidence of a popular democratic movement on the ground.

We have a lot of protests within China, as well as intellectuals and dissidents who argue against the government's line. But in terms of a viable democratic Opposition, we are not there yet though we are working on it.

There are people in China who are scared that agitating for democracy in an organised way might lead to bloodshed, so much so that they have thrown up their hands. What would you say to them?

I understand their fear. We do have a 100-year-old bitter history of such violence. The Chinese government also tends to frighten people into thinking like this. But China will transition peacefully. The Chinese people are very good at self-organisation when they are given the space - see what they have done on the world wide web whenever they have got the opportunity in the economic or cultural sphere and when there is no centralised power directing them.

I think the Chinese will transition peacefully to democracy.

You started out as a member of the Communist Party, a rising star you were. What led to your disappointment with the party?
Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images
"The party made me spy on colleagues. I didn't like that. Tiananmen massacre was the final straw: Yang Jianli"

When I was small, I witnessed the Cultural Revolution and saw the brutality of the Communist Party. When I was a little older, I joined the party on Hu Yaobang's call to young people. However, I found that the party changed us instead of us changing the party. My everyday party job was to keep a watch on my colleagues. I did not like that. Later, I witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacre and that was the final straw.

Edited by Mehraj D. Lone

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17. THE COUNTERREVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED: ON THE CURRENT CRISIS OF INDIAN UNIVERSITIES
by Arvind Rajagopal
========================================
(Los Angeles Review of Books - May 5, 2016)

Media Populism at Work

IN INDIA, one of the most populous nations in the world, the media often frames stories around national identity through the lens of growth, freedom, and democracy. When covering stories that involve political dissent however, the frame is dramatically different: journalism quickly gives way to witch hunts. Few examples of this are as compelling as current coverage of a growing student protest movement against government efforts to turn universities into extensions of the ruling party. Student activists have declared solidarity with working classes and lower castes, and openly called for freedom in army-occupied Kashmir. They are the face of popular democracy in India today, and as such, the subject of a fierce, orchestrated campaign of police beatings, harassment, career jeopardy, and in particular, character assassination in the press — with intimidation by news anchors being the most prominent feature of the attack on universities.

The Indian media has long served as an ally of the state, often signaling to political supporters and dissidents alike who was on the right and the wrong side of the government. But many neoliberal champions predicted this would change after the government deregulated broadcasting in 1995. They claimed that a privatized media sector, free to grow and compete in an open marketplace, would deliver choice and freedom of opinion to a populous nation.

Instead, the opposite has happened. The exponential growth of media outlets in India has narrowed the channels for political dissent. In India today, a powerful propagandist — commercial media — has replaced a state broadcasting apparatus whose historic achievement was to create a national market for televisual entertainment. Through a series of “for or against” media campaigns, viewers must choose nationalism, security, nuclear technology, anti-corruption, good governance, and “good times” (the election slogan of the BJP in 2014, which the media endorsed and echoed), over a series of alternatives that are no alternative at all. This is neoliberal politics, Indian style.

After decades of government media serving as the voice of the state, privately owned television channels now claim that they speak for the nation. Uncorroborated accusations by political leaders in the ruling party are often treated as judgments that may lead to arrests based on fabricated evidence, accompanied by public humiliation. Instead of discussing the issues, news anchors attack the alleged culprits, declaring them to be antinational and thus fit for any kind of abuse. This peculiar form of media populism is now the default formula on Indian TV.

The most sensational chapter in this story is the government’s charge of sedition against students at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of the foremost liberal arts universities in the country, and well known for its political liberalism. Through a complex calculus that provides for both affirmative action and diversity, JNU’s admissions system makes the campus a microcosm of the Indian nation like no other university in the country. For example, students from the northeast are better represented in JNU than in any other university outside the northeast itself. The father of JNU Student Union President, Kanhaiya Kumar, one of the six students accused of sedition, is a farmer, and his mother a childcare worker; both live on a combined income of Rs. 3000, or about $45 a month in Begusarai, Bihar.

JNU is not only a national university; there is no university in India that tries harder to represent the nation in all its variety, and to bring its different parts into a meaningful relationship with each other.

If we adopt the language of the present government, it should follow that to accuse JNU students of being antinational is on the face of it, implausible. We might say that the charge is, fundamentally, antinational itself. The results of the first ever government survey of Indian universities, just announced, have indicated that JNU and Hyderabad Central University, a campus also prominent in the news for its student protests, were at the very top in their “diversity and inclusiveness.”

This is the government’s latest volley in an ongoing battle to redefine public universities on its own terms. But as Vinod Pavarala, professor and head of the Department of Communication at the Hyderabad University pointed out to me, students are winning this war of perception, not least because of their greater presence in social media.

Good Times Are Still to Come

The leader of the present government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, kissed the steps of Parliament on his first day in office to show respect for democracy. It would be the first such show, and the last.

The 3rd century BCE philosopher Kautilya outlined four dimensions involved in the exercise of power, which are now part of the vocabulary of Indian politics: saam, daam, dand, bhed. These terms roughly translate as “consensus,” “tribute,” “punishment,” and “division.” The BJP relies on the last two, although it likes to presume or declare that it goes by the first.

The BJP’s predecessor, the Congress Party, was not so different. Under Indira Gandhi it won a landslide victory in 1971 with 43.7 percent of the popular vote (as opposed to the BJP’s 31.3 percent in 2014), and a larger majority of Parliamentary seats than the BJP’s. Four years later, Mrs. Gandhi declared a National Emergency, threw her opponents in jail, and launched a mass sterilization campaign. Voters ultimately threw the Congress out of office all over North India in 1977, a historic defeat that opened the BJP’s pathway to power.

The BJP, which ran for reelection in 2014 on the winning campaign slogan achche din aane wale hain, “good times are coming,” seems unaffected by the lesson, despite losing at the polls several times after the 2014 general elections (in Delhi and Bihar at the state level, and within the states of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat at the local level). At a time when rising inequality in India tracks closely with the growing social aspirations of its people, the government has been compelled to present some kind of justification for its policies. Its latest budget offers subsidies to the middle classes, including a 23.5 percent pay hike to Central Government employees. For the majority who are poor, however, token welfare measures are not the answer to growing inequality.[1]

Neoliberal Governance and the University: The Case of JNU

Why are universities being targeted?

Education — or more accurately, reeducation through Hindu nationalism — is one of the BJP’s long-standing projects. Schools and regional universities have been the BJP’s focus thus far, but since 2014, the party’s (and its affiliate organizations’) attention has moved upward to the elite universities. Its influence at these institutions provoked student protests, which the BJP has tried to suppress.

Students went on strike for seven months to protest the appointment of a director at the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) whom they and many others saw as unqualified. At Hyderabad Central University, a Dalit PhD student, Rohith Vemula, committed suicide earlier this year after being suspended for political actions similar to those students were later accused of at JNU. Critics accused the central government, which controls all central universities, of caste discrimination, and of violating rights historically taken for granted at universities.

Meanwhile, the central government is on a war footing. It has declared its intent to abolish the long-standing minority status of the country’s two leading Muslim universities. Richa Singh, the first woman student leader to be elected in the historic Allahabad University, received death threats after she opposed a powerful local BJP leader who, among other things, urged Hindu men to rape dead Muslim women.[2] After these and other campuses challenged the ruling party’s student wing, BJP political leaders became outraged at the impertinence of their young opponents.

The attacks on JNU stand out among these cases: from falsely accusing its 28-year-old student union president Kanhaiya Kumar of sedition, to the admission of doctored videos shown on a national channel that these allegations rested on, to the criminalization of students for exercising rights they had previously enjoyed.[3] But picking on JNU was surely a mistake — it is an internationally recognized university with many respected academics, and with a history of debate and dissent.

Student activists held a meeting at JNU on February 9, 2016, to protest the “judicial killing” of a Kashmiri, Afzal Guru, who had been convicted of terrorism. They were later caught by surprise when TV news stations aired footage of the event that showed students chanting antinational and seditious slogans. It turned out that the ruling BJP party’s student organization, the ABVP, had tipped off the stations in advance of the protest and invited them to campus; the footage in question was later shown to be doctored. The ABVP proceeded to file a police complaint alleging that antinational and seditious slogans had been shouted on campus. Two days later the Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, declared in a tweet that such activity “would not be tolerated or spared.” The JNU student union president, Kanhaiya Kumar, was charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy and arrested on February 12. Five other students named in the arrest warrant went into hiding. An orchestrated campaign denouncing the students began on the news media. Alongside, student protests quickly mushroomed.

In student rallies that drew crowds of five and 10 thousand, JNU professors and students denounced the government’s crusade as a diversion from its failures and an attack on the spirit of university education. Critics were not limited to the JNU campus either. For example, one prominent Bollywood personality, Gulzar, remarked that student dissent on campus made him feel safer, and did not merit arrest warrants for sedition. Amid growing international protests against the government’s actions, Kumar was granted bail on March 2, but not before the High Court judge observed that his offense was like an infection in a limb that might yet require amputation.

The next day Kumar delivered a speech that soon went viral; the student leader whom they sought to frame as a criminal mastermind, instead became a political rock star. Far from crushing JNU as a bastion of antinational elements, the nearly unthinkable happened: the left became politically relevant again, thanks to the BJP.[4]

Relevant, but hardly triumphant. After Kumar’s speech, one BJP leader offered a reward of five hundred thousand (or five lakh) rupees to anyone who cut out Kumar’s tongue. Another political entrepreneur offered a prize of 11 lakh rupees for his murder. A high-level committee set up by the vice-chancellor to inquire into the charges against Kumar and the four other students recommended they be expelled.

The larger public has become accustomed to internecine political debate of this kind, where brute strength rather than argument alone decides the outcome. In a public sphere of combat, politics is akin to a blood sport where reason and rhetoric can combine with raw force whether of numbers, or arms, or both. News media, rather than being transparent conduits to events, have become mock battlegrounds in India today, where the public enemies of the moment are ritually denounced. The struggle of the students has been to highlight the managed character of these media platforms, and to stage their own media performances, which circulate via social media.

A Clash of Institutions: Media Growth Encounters University Expansion

India’s universities are not simply extensions of what we are familiar with in the West. They were established as institutions of colonial governance. Even after independence, change came slowly to the universities, given their limited demographic basis. However, over the last 20 years, enrollment in higher education has increased nearly seven times, and the number of universities has almost quadrupled. Women constitute nearly half of all college students today, and the presence of lower castes has increased also.[5] It is in the top tier of public universities that students have mobilized, initially demanding the reinstatement of graduate student fellowships the government abolished; subsequently staging political rallies protesting the mistreatment of Dalit students; and demanding freedom in Kashmir. The ruling party swiftly associated the latter with Islamic terror and sedition, leading to police cases against students.

All of the foregoing is in contrast to the private universities, which well-connected businessmen or political leaders fund and own themselves. Unlike their public counterparts, private universities have expanded greatly in the last four decades. They are more socially homogeneous, and have a higher proportion of upper castes, but are on the whole politically docile.

Students from subaltern castes are becoming politically active in public universities at a time when other spaces of progressive politics are shrinking, and jobs are scarce too. However, the major television channels have amplified the harsh state response to student activism, seeking to intimidate protesters rather than facilitate dialogue. Considering that private media emerged in response to state monopoly over the airwaves, the irony is rich.

In the era of state control, the role of mass media was largely defensive, excluding critical opinion and serving as a symbol of ruling party control; its persuasive power was limited. But private media today has gone on the offensive, and become powerful political weapons, symbolizing the neoliberal convergence of state and business elites. The counterrevolution is on, and it is televised.

Because the major national television channels are financially vulnerable, they are institutionally pliable and susceptible to external influence. Corporate globalization has found its unifying credo in an aggressive cultural nationalism.

This is recent, and its implications are only now beginning to be understood. For most of the history of independence, the majority of the country was in a media dark space. Within a few years media bright has become the watchword; varieties of media now traverse nearly every part of the country.

Previously, communication was fragmented across language and literacy, and between rural and urban areas. The masses were assumed to be passive and uneducated; the aim of mass communication was to activate them. The masses now appear to be activated, and in ways that older media theories never foresaw.

The popular Hindu news anchor, Ravish Kumar, diagnosed a “sickness of television” (TV ki beemari) that affected the medium and its viewers too. To prove his point, he broadcast his 30-minute report over a pitch-black screen — a moral and political statement. He wanted to make viewers isolate, and question the abuse now freely flowing from the television channels.[6]

“India Shining” is the slogan that has accompanied the onset of neoliberalism since the early 2000s. As more people struggle to achieve a semblance of this promised human flourishing, they encounter a deeply embedded hierarchy that ruling elites go to extraordinary lengths to defend. Can neoliberal development crush the popular energies that it has helped to release, without fatally harming itself in the process? Instead of media witch hunts against college students, India needs a more expansive view of age-old subalterns seeking modern justice.


[1] http://ntui.org.in/media/item/recalibration-of-economic-policy-to-mask-a-political-crisis/.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLXYzvI_FWs
[3] http://scroll.in/latest/805250/jnu-students-refuse-to-accept-findings-of-panel-that-inquired-into-february-9-protests-pti
[4] Kumar’s speech can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS9AX8rvYhg
[5] Satish Deshpande, “The Public University After Rohith-Kanhaiya,” Economic and Political Weekly, v. 51, no. 11, 12 March 2016, pp. 32-34.
[6] The February 19, 2016 Hindi broadcast on NDTV can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shZf-NrSbu0

Arvind Rajagopal is professor of Media Studies at New York University. His most recent book is Media and Utopia (Routledge, 2016).

========================================
18. MYANMAR: SUU KYI PUNTS ON ROHINGYA ISSUE
by Simon Roughneen
=======================================
(Nikkei Asian Review, May 5, 2016)

A monk protests outside the U.S. embassy in Yangon on April 28 against the official U.S. use of the term "Rohingya" to refer to Myanmar's minority Muslim​s. (Photo by Simon Roughneen) 

YANGON -- Before Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy routed all comers in Myanmar's elections last November, many speculated that even if her party was always going to win a free and fair vote, the extent of the victory could be curtailed by attempts by Buddhist hardliners to undermine the NLD by stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment among the majority Buddhist electorate.

Rabble rousers such as Wirathu -- a Mandalay-based monk known for his derogatory and xenophobic rhetoric about Myanmar's estimated 5 million Muslims -- opposed the prospect of a NLD-led government, saying that such an administration would not only favor Muslims but would bring "chaos" to Myanmar.

A woman chants anti-Rohingya slogans outside the U.S. embassy in Yangon on April 28. (Photo by Simon Roughneen)

The previous government of President Thein Sein did little to rein in Wirathu and other nationalist groups such as Ma Ba Tha, prompting suspicions that anti-Muslim, anti-Rohingya tensions were being stoked to dent the NLD's credentials as a defender of Buddhist-majority Myanmar and undercut its electoral prospects.

In the end, the NLD did not include any Muslims among the more than 1,000 candidates it fielded in the elections. Suu Kyi, long recognized around the world as a staunch defender of democracy and human rights, refused to comment on the plight of Myanmar's roughly one million Rohingya, a Muslim group living mostly in the country's western Rakhine state, who have been denied civil rights under a 1982 citizenship law. Rohingya lawmakers from the military-backed ruling party in the last parliament were barred from seeking re-election and the Rohingya were prevented from voting.

The Union Solidarity and Development Party, led by Thein Sein, was thrashed in the election, winning only 5% of the seats in Myanmar's upper house and 7% in the lower house in November, although it won nearly 30% of the popular vote. The NLD won 80% of the contested seats, although it holds only around 60% of all parliament seats since a quarter of total seats are reserved for the military.

No change?

The Myanmar government does not recognize the existence of a Rohingya ethnic group, dismissing them as "Bengali" and therefore immigrants from Bangladesh, which borders Rakhine state. Around 140,000 Rohingya were driven from their homes in mob violence in late 2012, while tens of thousands more have braved storms and human traffickers to find refuge in neighboring Malaysia.

Before the election, Rohingya harbored hopes that a NLD election win would see an easing of their plight, with several interviewed by Nikkei Asian Review ahead of the election saying that they hoped the NLD's apparent reluctance to speak up for them was merely tactical to avoid forcing Wirathu and others to urge the public to vote against the NLD.

But prospects for an improvement in the Rohingya's situation appear bleak after the Myanmar foreign ministry, which is headed by Suu Kyi, recently asked the U.S. to refrain from using the term "Rohingya." The request was made by Suu Kyi according to a ministry official.

A protester outside the U.S. embassy in Yangon reads a statement condemning the U.S. for using the term "Rohingya" in a recent press release. 

Less than a week before the request was made, around 300 protestors calling themselves the "Myanmar National Network" demonstrated outside the U.S embassy in Yangon because they objected to the use of the word "Rohingya" in an official statement offering condolences on the drowning of what was thought to be around 40 Rohingya in the sinking of a refugee boat off the Rakhine coast.

The dead have since been reported as being Kaman, a mostly Muslim minority that the government recognizes, but which also faced violence during the 2012 pogroms.

The protestors said that the term "Rohingya" is an "offence not only to local native ethnic Rakhines but to all ethnic groups in Myanmar," and asked that the U.S. to "seriously respect diplomacy ethics" by not using the term.

U.S. ambassador to Myanmar Scott Marciel responded that it is common practice for "communities anywhere [to] have the ability to decide what they should be called. And normally when that happens, we would call them what they want to be called. It's not a political decision; it's just a normal practice."

The protesters also warned that they would oppose any effort by the NLD to change "race and religion protection" laws approved just before the election by the previous administration, which included restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith marriage.

The Arakan National Party, which represents Rakhine Buddhists who live near Rohingya enclaves, also said it would also protest against repeal of the laws. The ANP was already angered by the NLD's decision to allocate to itself the chief minister positions in Myanmar's 14 regions and states, some of which are home to powerful ethnic minorities. 

Aung Win, a Rohingya community leader in the Rakhine capital of Sittwe, said that he was not surprised at the foreign ministry's petition to the U.S. "The foreign minister and Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi understands very well about the Rohingya and what is happening in Rakhine state, but she is silent and not saying anything."

Rather than dealing with the Rohingya issue, some observers believe that Suu Kyi is now focused on changing the country's constitution to allow her to become president. The new government has also said it wants to prioritize peacemaking with Myanmar's many ethnic militias as well as promote economic growth.

"I think the new government is more concerned right now about maintaining domestic political stability. The NLD probably doesn't want to have to deal with the voices of the Myanmar's extreme nationalists as it feels that it already has a lot on its plate," said Miguel Chanco, Southeast Asia analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit.


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