SACW - 14 May 2016 | Sri Lanka: independence of judges & lawyers / Bangladesh: What bloggers want the world to know / India: 18th anniversary of Nuclear Tests / Open letter to Writers attending Vedanta JLF London 2016 / UK: Communalisation of minority politics / On History of India’s Railways / New genetic engineering

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 14 May 2016 - No. 2895 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Open letter to the writers attending Vedanta JLF London 2016: from Niyamgiri mountain to the river Kafue calling Vedanta to justice
2. What we want the world to know: Three Bangladeshi bloggers
3. CNDP Press release on 18th anniversary of India’s Nuclear Tests
4. India: Goals of Secularism | V.K. Tripathi
5. The Idealist Who Loved Kashmir: History Revisited | Nyla Ali Khan
6. India: Sexual violence and the culture of impunity in Nagaland | Dolly Kikon
7. India’s National Commission For Minorities - Fix it or scrap it | Hasan Suroor
8. India: CNDP publishes a collection of selected articles by Praful Bidwai on Matters Nuclear
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - India: ‘Same laws for Hindus, Muslims, end triple talaq … Shah Bano denied justice, i got postal divorce … Muslim women exploited’ (Interview - TOI)
 - India: Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Aandolan – Fighting for Islamic Shariah, Not Women’s Liberty (Tufail Ahmad)
 - Pakistan -The Killers of Sabeen Mahmud: How a student of elite institutions turned to terrorism, JIT reveals
 - India - Malegaon blast case: NIA chargesheet to give clean chit to Hindutva connected Sadhvi Pragya, water down charges on Purohit?
 - India: Activists of right-wing Hindu Sena asks gods to help Donald Trump win US election
 - Modi Sarkar: Unfolding of Hindutva Agenda An E-book by Ram Puniyani
 - India: Gujarat Government’s mandatory list of 82 topics that PhD students in state universities have to research (Monobina Gupta's report in The Caravan))
 - India: We must resist attempts to communalise Shani Shingnapur, Haji Ali dargah issues (Javed Anand)
 - In Defense of Bipan Chandra: Resisting the Communal Hijackers of Our History (Sudha Tiwari)
 - India - Assam Assembly elections 2016: 'Important for intellectuals to take sides' - Academic Hiren Gohain on why the BJP is bad for Assam

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Bangladesh: Intolerance continues to kill - Where are we heading? (Editorial, The Daily Star)
11. Sri Lanka: Preliminary Observations and Recommendations of the Special Rapporteur Ms. Mónica Pinto
12. Pakistan: HRCP aghast at girl’s jirga-ordained murder
13. India: Ensure Credible Investigation of the Death of the Protestors in Arunachal Pradesh - Forum Asia
14. What’s wrong with being sexually free? South Asian sexual hypocrisy only causes violence: Zahra Haider
15. India: Shocking Indifference to the Plight of Project Affected Persons in Narmada Valley - The fight for justice shall continue, asserts NBA
16. A fraught victory: Sadiq Khan's win conceals the communalisation of minority politics in the UK | Gita Sahgal
17. Review Article: Chugging into Unfamiliar Stations - A New History of India’s Railways | Ian J Kerr
18. Bhagavan on Khan's India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War
19. New genetic engineering is slipping past old regulations | Jennifer Kuzma

========================================
1. OPEN LETTER TO THE WRITERS ATTENDING VEDANTA JLF LONDON 2016: FROM NIYAMGIRI MOUNTAIN TO THE RIVER KAFUE CALLING VEDANTA TO JUSTICE
========================================
We are deeply shocked and dismayed to hear that you have agreed to participate at the Jaipur Literature Festival claiming to be “The Greatest Literary Show on Earth” which has ’the world’s most hated company’ Vedanta as its key sponsor. Are you aware that Vedanta’s activities are destroying the lives of thousands of people in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Punjab and also in Zambia, South Africa and Australia?
http://sacw.net/article12749.html

========================================
2. WHAT WE WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW: THREE BANGLADESHI BLOGGERS
========================================
Bangladesh has become a dangerous place for anyone who dares to cross an invisible line set by Islamic extremists intent on silencing dissenting voices with knives and guns.
http://sacw.net/article12741.html

========================================
3. CNDP PRESS RELEASE ON 18TH ANNIVERSARY OF INDIA’S NUCLEAR TESTS
========================================
 May 11th and May 13th, 2016 mark the anniversaries of nuclear tests that India conducted in 1998.After 18 years of the nuclear tests, the security that the atomic weapons were supposed to bestow on us is conspicuously missing and South Asia is becoming more dangerous with each passing day.
http://sacw.net/article12744.html

========================================
4. INDIA: GOALS OF SECULARISM
by V.K. Tripathi
========================================
Secularism implies freedom from prejudice
http://sacw.net/article12742.html

========================================
5. THE IDEALIST WHO LOVED KASHMIR: HISTORY REVISITED
by Nyla Ali Khan
========================================
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, for better or worse, was a large presence on the political landscape of India for fifty years. In a fragmented sociopolitical and religious ethos, he represented the pluralism that would bind the people of Jammu and Kashmir together for a long time. Such personages leave indelible marks of their work and contributions on societies for which they have tirelessly worked, and their work, for the most part, traverses religious, class, and party fault lines.
http://sacw.net/article12739.html

========================================
6. INDIA: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND THE CULTURE OF IMPUNITY IN NAGALAND | Dolly Kikon
========================================
Perpetrators of sexual violence escape justice, while their victims are trapped between exhortations by women’s advocacy groups not to ‘suffer quietly’ and the social stigma attached to sexual violence.
http://sacw.net/article12734.html

========================================
7. INDIA’S NATIONAL COMMISSION FOR MINORITIES - FIX IT OR SCRAP IT | Hasan Suroor
========================================
Who’s listening? The problems of minority groups are not being addressed. LET’S start with a mild teaser: it is one of India’s oldest and most high-profile minority welfare bodies; costs the public exchequer — that is you and me — more than Rs 70 million a year to run it; is flaunted as a symbol of Indian state’s commitment to protecting minority interests ; and yet its public image is zilch
http://sacw.net/article12732.html

========================================
8. INDIA: CNDP PUBLISHES A COLLECTION OF SELECTED ARTICLES BY PRAFUL BIDWAI ON MATTERS NUCLEAR
========================================
A collection of some 48 articles written by Praful Bidwai between the early 1980s upto 2014 on military and civil nuclear matters have been assembled in a book form. The volume is published by Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) in India should be available soon.
http://sacw.net/article12745.html

========================================
9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
========================================
 - India: ‘Same laws for Hindus, Muslims, end triple talaq … Shah Bano denied justice, i got postal divorce … Muslim women exploited’ (Interview - TOI)
 - India: Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Aandolan – Fighting for Islamic Shariah, Not Women’s Liberty (Tufail Ahmad)
 - Pakistan -The Killers of Sabeen Mahmud: How a student of elite institutions turned to terrorism, JIT reveals
 - India - Malegaon blast case: NIA chargesheet to give clean chit to Hindutva connected Sadhvi Pragya, water down charges on Purohit?
 - India: Activists of right-wing Hindu Sena asks gods to help Donald Trump win US election
 - Modi Sarkar: Unfolding of Hindutva Agenda An E-book by Ram Puniyani
 - Invitation to Convention on Harmony and Freedom (13 May 2016, New Delhi)
 - India: A cash collection racket in the name of cow protection in Haryana (Dhirendra K Jha)
 - India: Gujarat Government’s mandatory list of 82 topics that PhD students in state universities have to research (Monobina Gupta's report in The Caravan))
 - India - Gujarat: Man sentenced to three year imprisonment for possessing beef
 - India: Bombay high court decriminalises beef, rightly reminds state to stay out of private domains (Editorial, The Times of India, 9 May 2016)
 - State Assembly Elections: Is the BJP gaining ground in Tamil Nadu? (M Rajshekhar)
 - Manas Chakravarty on access to education (livemint)
 - India: We must resist attempts to communalise Shani Shingnapur, Haji Ali dargah issues (Javed Anand)
 - In Defense of Bipan Chandra: Resisting the Communal Hijackers of Our History (Sudha Tiwari)
 - Bangladesh: Sufi preacher was hacked to death by machete-wielding assailants
 - India: an independent appeal from concerned Kashmiris about resettlement of Kashmiri pandits
 - India - Assam Assembly elections 2016: 'Important for intellectuals to take sides' - Academic Hiren Gohain on why the BJP is bad for Assam
 - If incorrect depictions of India’s borders are a crime, will RSS be prosecuted for ‘Akhand Bharat’? (Shoaib Daniyal) 

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
========================================
10. BANGLADESH: INTOLERANCE CONTINUES TO KILL - WHERE ARE WE HEADING? (EDITORIAL, THE DAILY STAR)
========================================
(The Daily Star - 9 May 2016)

Editorial

The motive behind the horrid murder of Shahidullah, a 'Pir' in Rajshahi, is unknown but the way unidentified assailants killed him bears the hallmark of extremists who have been behind the recent killings of several others, both Muslim and non-Muslim. 

That someone would be killed for practicing his faith, not considered mainstream by some, is barbaric and unacceptable in a country that was built on the cardinal principles of democracy and secularism. No true follower of Islam, the religion of peace, would have done such a thing at all.  

In no evaluation will the law enforcement agencies get pass mark in addressing the current spate of killings. The inability to catch these elements of the society—often driven by misguided religious and political motives—sends a chilling message that those who do not conform to the warped views of a miniscule  minority are in grave danger in today's Bangladesh. Will the state do nothing as extremist groups infiltrate the society and try to change the way citizens practice their faith, dress, and even think? 

Nobody expects the government to provide individual protection to people. But they have a duty to bust these hate mongering groups, cut their sources of funding, catch their masterminds and neutralise them before they strike gain. But unless and until the society as a whole stands united against these wayward groups, the threat will be far from removed. 


========================================
11. SRI LANKA: PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR  MS. MÓNICA PINTO
========================================
(Monic Pinto and Mr. Juan E. Méndez at Colombo press conference)

Preliminary observations and recommendations of the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers — Ms. Mónica Pinto*.

Colombo, 7 May 2016

* This statement should be read in conjunction with the preliminary observations and recommendations of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Introduction

At the invitation of the government, my colleague, Mr. Juan E. Méndez — the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment — and I visited Sri Lanka from 29 April to 7 May 2016 to assess the situation and remaining challenges concerning torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and the independence of judges and lawyers. We would like to express our appreciation to the government for extending an invitation to visit the country, for their full cooperation during our visit, and for the efforts displayed, in particular by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to facilitate and organize official meetings. In addition, we would like to thank the United Nations Resident Coordinator and the United Nations Office in Sri Lanka for supporting the preparations of the visit.

Sri Lanka is at a crucial moment in its history. While the armed conflict has ended after more than 30 years, much of the structures of a nation at war remain in place as the fabric of Sri Lankan society was left ravaged. It is now critical and urgent to replace the legal framework that allowed serious human rights violations to happen and set up sound democratic institutions and legal standards that will give effect to and protect the human rights embodied in the constitution or Sri Lanka as well as the international human rights treaties it has voluntarily ratified.

Officials we spoke to identified as the main threats and challenges of the country international terrorism and organized crime, as is the case with most countries in the world today. However, they can never justify the continuation of repressive practices or a normative framework that contributes to violations of fundamental rights and civil liberties.

The elections of January and August 2015 brought an opening in the democratic space and the change in government has led to some promising reforms, such as the re-instatement of the Constitutional Council. Yet, more reforms are expected and necessary before the country can be considered to be on a path to sustainable democratization governed by the rule of law. There is a need to recover the momentum of reform and accelerate the process of positive change within a comprehensive and inclusive framework.

During my visit to Colombo, Anuradhapura, Jaffna and Kandy, I had the opportunity to exchange views with a number of high ranking officials, including representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Law and Order, the Ministry of Prison Reforms, Rehabilitation, Resettlement and Hindu Religious Affairs, the Chief Justice, the Attorney General, the National Police Commission, the National Human Rights Commission, Governors of the North Central, North and Central Provinces, the Judicial Service Commission, the Judges’ Training Institute, the Legal Aid Commission, as well as judges from different all tiers, the Sri Lanka Bar Association, lawyers, academics and civil society representatives. During his visit, the Special Rapporteur on torture also had the opportunity to visit a large number of detention facilities, including military camps, the details of which can be found in his statement.

I will now share some of my preliminary observations and recommendations. I will further develop my assessment in a written report, which I will present to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2017.
Preliminary observations and recommendations

Need for a justice system reflecting the diversity of society

Sri Lanka’s legal and judicial system has incorporated many laws, practices and proceedings inherited from the British, but also Roman Dutch law, which is mainly applied in civil cases. The society is predominantly Sinhalese, with important Tamil and Muslim minorities, which in the North and East of the country are in a majority position.

Yet, the diversity of the population is not reflected in the composition of the judiciary, the Attorney General’s office, or the police, or in the language in which proceedings are conducted. For instance, there are very few Tamil-speaking judges appointed at the highest levels of the judiciary — in fact, with the exception of the current Chief Justice, there are no Tamils in the superior courts (Supreme Court and Court of Appeal). Police forces, in charge of investigation and the first steps to initiate criminal proceedings, are also composed of a large majority of Sinhala-speaking people. There are also very few Tamil-speaking State counsels in the Attorney-General’s office.

Thus, diversity should not only be clearly set among the criteria for the appointment of judges and the recruitment of State counsels and police officers, but qualified interpreters should be assigned to tribunals as a measure to guarantee due process.

Women in Sri Lanka have reached the highest positions in the Justice System. However, their number decreases as the hierarchy of the court increases. Sri Lanka can envisage a plan for the parity in the justice system just favoring women to engage in the justice system.

Strengthening an independent administration of justice

The country needs to conduct a strict exercise of introspection, so as to improve the quality of its judiciary and of the Attorney-General’s office. This includes reviewing and publicizing the criteria for the appointment of judges and the causes for removal through disciplinary proceedings, providing quality legal and technological training, including mandatory training in international human rights law. “The judiciary is a national asset”, said one of my interlocutors. It is also a permanent institution, one of the three branches of the State, which has a fundamental role to play in a democratic society based on the rule of law; therefore it should be robust and efficient.

In general, the administration of justice deserves to be more transparent, decentralized and democratic. The instances participating in the appointment of judges, counsels of the Attorney-General’s office and judicial staff should publish the selection procedure, including the criteria and methods to be followed. The Constitution provides for the Chief Justice to head many instances dealing with administrative matters in the field of justice and this restricts very much his abilities to manage such an important branch of government.

A strict and rigorous recruitment process is essential for a justice system of high quality. Judicial officers should be appointed when meeting personal and technical requirements and after competitive examinations held at least partly anonymously. They should be trained in technical matters, including the administration of tribunals or the analysis of complex forensic evidence, as well as in human rights law, including gender and women’s rights.

Promotions of judges, entrusted to the Judicial Service Commission, should take into consideration not only the seniority of a person but also his or her merits. Yet, there is no proper evaluation of the performance of judges in place. Decisions on promotions lack transparency. There are no known and established criteria, which gives too much discretion to the Judicial Service Commission.

Further, the Judicial Service Commission is in charge of the transfer of lower court judges to the different jurisdictions in the country. While transferring judges after a certain number of years from one jurisdiction to another can certainly contribute to judicial independence, attention should be paid to the conditions in which such transfers are done. Judges are usually asked about their preferences, but there seems to be no clear criteria and procedures in place on the grounds of which decisions are taken. Transparency when it comes to the transfer of judges will improve if the Judicial Service Commission sets up clear guidelines for the transfer of judges and publicizes them.

Pending a constitutional amendment or revision, legislation should explicitly provide for specific criteria for the appointment of judges, their removal on the grounds of a disciplinary proceeding whose grounds are set out in the law and which should be substantiated with full respect for due process, including the right to a review.

Judges’ salary should not only be intangible but also adequate to conduct a decent life for the judge and his immediate family. Judges’ salaries should be considered on their own context and not been assimilated to other public servants whose functions are completely different and also their possibilities to engage in other jobs. Establishing a separate salary scale for the judiciary should also help to consider other allowances, which is especially important when judges move to different work places with spouse and children on a regular basis.

Contempt of the Court, a legitimate offense in the judicial arena, had in the past become the favorite tool of some Chief Justices to impose sanctions inaudita parte. Legislation should be enacted to define a clear and precise scope for the offence of contempt of court, identifying behaviors constituting contempt of the court, and setting up a procedure to deal with such cases.

Independent, impartial and transparent institutions

Democracy also requires that all bodies exercising jurisdictional functions comply with the basic standards of the right to a fair trial, namely, to be independent, impartial, and competent and to respect due process. Thus, independence, impartiality, competence, due process, as well as the right to appeal a decision to a higher body, are essential requirements to fulfill when it comes to all disciplinary proceedings. In the context of Sri Lanka, this includes disciplinary proceedings conducted by the National Police Commission with regard to active policemen, the Public Service Commission for State counsels, the Judicial Service Commission in the case of judges, as well as, evidently, removal or impeachment proceedings for judges from the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal.

Transparency is an essential requisite of the rule of law. Institutions in Sri Lanka, including those that are crucial for a rule of law regime, are generally opaque. More transparent institutions can play an important role in strengthening democracy in the country and protection from arbitrariness. In such a context, institutions whose operational methods are not set down in legislation should urgently make available to the public the regulations and rules of procedures they are following to carry out their activities. As an illustration, the Constitutional Council should publish the rules of procedures it established for itself and applies in discharging its appointment functions, as well as the criteria used to evaluate candidates’ suitability for a given position. Such publicity would contribute to dissipating possible accusations of deliberate opacity and arbitrariness.

The re-establishment via the 19th amendment of the Constitution of some of the democratic achievements first introduced by the 17th amendment of that same Constitution has been widely welcomed in Sri Lanka and by the international community. In that context, the

Constitutional Council was re-introduced as the organ in charge of recommending the appointment of members of a number of independent commissions, such as the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka or the Public Service Commission, and approving the appointment of judges of the superior courts and important executive positions, such as the Attorney-General. The Constitutional Council consists of 10 members, seven of which are politicians and the remaining three are civil society representatives. To avoid the politicization of the appointment processes under the purview of the Council and to increase its legitimacy, this current composition should be changed so as to include more civil society representatives, including possibly representation from the Bar Association and academia.

Highly credible and competent commissioners were appointed in 2015 at the head of the National Human Rights Commission. The Commission has wisely decided to invest more time, efforts and resources in policy advice and human rights awareness-raising, so as to become more proactive than reactive. The Commission needs to be supported, it should receive more human and financial resources in order to strengthened and expand its activities and train its staff to become more knowledgeable and effective, thereby regaining the credibility it had lost in the public’s eyes. Complain proceedings before the Human Rights Commission hold some promise for victims, but they alone cannot solve the problem of impunity for serious human rights violations.

Judicial accountability

The law in force in Sri Lanka does not include a proper code of conduct for judges. Having such a code would facilitate all disciplinary proceedings. Its drafting should be entrusted to a Commission composed of both retired and sitting judges, representatives of the Bar Association and of academia. It should take into consideration international standards as provided for in the United Nations Basic principles on the Independence of the Judiciary, the Bangalore Principles on Judicial Independence and other similar instruments, including regional ones.

Accountability is a must in a democratic society. As every citizen, judges should be held accountable for their misconduct. Judicial accountability goes hand in hand with judicial independence; it does not and should not constitute undue interference or a limitation to that independence. In this context, disciplinary proceedings should be conducted in accordance with a law passed by the Parliament, which would set up a special panel composed of independent and impartial individuals and would enumerate the specific causes triggering misconduct and the corresponding sanctions which must be proportionate and adequate. The proceedings should be conducted in a way which respects due process and the possibility to appeal the decision should be provided.

Accountability of the judges of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal is currently carried out through an impeachment procedure before Parliament. This procedure, which is foreseen in the Constitution, lacks regulation by an ordinary law. It is implemented by the Parliament through a Standing Order. The extreme politicization of the removal procedure in

force prevents its legitimacy. It is thus relevant to the independence of the justice system that any impeachment procedure be regulated by a law passed by Parliament. This law should provide for a judicial determination of the merits of the causes triggering the removal procedure, and the findings of alleged misconduct. Legislation should explicitly stipulate what constitutes misbehavior in the light of international standards as expressed in the Bangalore Principles on Judicial Independence. The final decision should lie in the hands of a panel or appellate tribunal, essentially composed of retired judges, which should decide on the existence of misbehavior in the given case. So as to avoid any selectivity in the composition of this panel, it may be decided that when retiring, judges are automatically enrolled in a list to serve as a member of the impeachment panel or appellate tribunal.

Constitutional review — an opportunity to strengthen independence

The Sri Lankan Parliament has recently constituted itself in a Constitutional Assembly and is taking steps with the view to drafting new constitutional provisions which may amount to one or more constitutional amendments or to a new Constitution. In either case, such undertaking present an opportunity to confer constitutional status to provisions safeguarding the independence and impartiality of the administration of justice, thereby contributing to reinforcing the independence and impartiality of the justice sector as a whole.

For instance, the Constitution should include the requirements, criteria and selection procedure for the appointment of judges and prosecutors, the causes that may lead to their removal, and the proceedings to respect in case of disciplinary action, including impeachment. The composition of other national institutions should also be amended, so as to prevent politicization of the administration of justice. The Fundamental Rights Chapter should also be thoroughly revised to include the full range of human rights contained in the international treaties voluntarily ratified by Sri Lanka, and in particular provisions relating to access to justice, access to a lawyer, the right to an effective remedy, and to a fair and public trial in full compliance with due process guarantees.

The Judicial Service Commission, which is in charge of the initial recruitment of magistrates who enter the judicial career, as well as the administration of transfers, promotions and disciplinary proceedings. This Commission is composed of the Chief Justice and two justices of the Supreme Court. Its independence and technical capabilities could be enhanced by enlarging this composition, so as to incorporate independent individuals — namely retired judges, high ranking administrative officers, sitting judges of the Court of Appeal, or representatives of the Bar Association. These individuals can also bring specific expertise and technical advice.

Implementation of international human rights law

In Sri Lanka, the Constitution is on top of the legal hierarchy. The country has ratified the great majority of international human rights treaties, including some instruments relating to the acceptance of United Nations treaty bodies’ competence to deal with individual

communications. However, these instruments and their related jurisprudence are deemed not enforceable at the domestic level. This extreme form of dualism is not a sustainable position because it is well known that a State may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to abide by a treaty it has voluntarily ratified.

Sri Lanka should adopt urgent measures, in accordance with its constitutional process, to give effect to the rights protected in international human rights treaties which have been ratified and which are in force. It is under the duty to ensure that every person under its jurisdiction can enjoy and exercise the right protected in these instruments and, if needs be, have access to an effective remedy to seize the courts and have judicial decisions enforced by the competent authorities. At the same time, the country should enforce decisions adopted by the United Nations treaty-bodies whose jurisdiction it has voluntarily accepted.

Attorney-General’s role

The Attorney-General’s acts both as a legal advisor to the State and as the Chief Prosecutor. In the first capacity, the Attorney-General is called to give advice on the constitutionality of draft legislation. This is an important power in a country where there is no judicial review of the constitutionality of laws after their adoption by Parliament.

The Attorney-General is also de Chief Prosecutor, and, as such replaced the position of the Independent Prosecutor which existed in the past. In such a capacity, the Attorney-General should issue clear and proper guidelines for the investigation and prosecution of crimes, specific guidelines could be developed for the investigation and prosecution of serious human rights violations, including torture, and violations of international humanitarian law. He should also monitor how cases are substantiated so as to avoid the delays incurred by his office. Even in ‘ordinary’ non-conflict-related and non-political cases, the Attorney-General’s office takes too much time to produce an indictment. This is but one of the reasons for the long judicial delays in the administration of justice in Sri Lanka and which court users of to endure.

The Attorney-General’s office acts as the representative of the State, which by no means should be equivalent to defending the government. His office should also be able to make a neat separation between the State and the public interest they act on behalf of and the persons behind the institutions so as to avoid any possible conflict of interest. Such conflict of interest have arisen for instance in cases where the Attorney-General’s office appears in the defence of police officers or military officers in cases of habeas corpus applications, as if the court decides that the respondent are responsible for the crimes they are accused of, the same office would be called to prosecute them.

Police’s important role in the criminal justice system

The police force also plays an important role in judicial criminal proceedings, for this reason they should be appropriately trained. The police force should incorporate members of the different groups living in the country and speak all the languages of the country. Not only policemen should be able to communicate in Sinhalese and in Tamil, but they should be able to do so when recording the statement of detainees, so as to produce reliable pieces of evidence before the judges and to observe due process. As the police assumes the prosecutorial role before magistrate courts, its officers should be adequately trained to discharge this delicate function.

Access to a lawyer and other due process guarantees

The government has to ensure that every person detained has access to a lawyer from the moment of the arrest and that every person is told about this right. This right should be enshrined in the Constitution but pending an amendment, it should be embodied in national legislation and law enforcement agents should be entrusted with the duty to tell detainees about their rights.

The frequent practice of confessions — especially in cases under the Prevention of Terrorism Act — and the plea bargain — which is not explicitly provided for in legislation in force -, if they are kept, should be coupled with some evidence supporting them, so that the judicial proceeding fulfills its function of shedding light to the facts. Truth is but one of the goals of the judicial process.

Judicial delays

Judicial proceedings are too long, and the time they involve affect especially people deprived of liberty. It amounts to a denial of justice. Cases are regularly postponed. Judges cannot afford the number of cases they have to deal with. The Criminal Investigations Department and the government Analyst Department are centralized in Colombo and conduct investigations for the whole justice system. Criminal prosecutors are overburdened. The backlog of Tribunals, in both civil and criminal matters, should be considered so as to be the object of some work plan to tackle the delays and to prevent their occurrence. Some elements to be taken care of are the increased capacities of the Mediation System Board, the increase in the number of judges and the establishment of some more courts in different parts of the country and some family courts, the clear cut difference in the prosecutorial services in the Attorney-General’s office so as to have a strong Prosecutor’s Office, and the implementation of an evaluation of performance plan.

Sri Lanka has a Mediation Board System composed substantially by retired public officers in charge of cases up to a certain amount of rupees. This system can be improved by appointing retired judges, through a public mechanism open to applications, and by raising the amount of money so as to cover more cases. In that way it may have the potential to settle many cases in just way, thus decreasing the number of judicial cases.

Access to justice

Access to justice is not only essential to give effect to the right to an effective remedy, but it is also explicitly included as one of the components of the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. To exercise this right, however, Sri Lankans need to be in a position to reach the courts and to have their cases timely adjudicated. 335 judges at all instances and in the whole country, a number given to us by the Judicial Service Commission, seem insufficient for a population of more than 20 million inhabitants. Further, the number of judges does not seem enough to deal with the variety and complexity of legal issues faced in Sri Lanka. Appointing more judges also needs to be accompanied by adequate facilities and resources, including building new court houses. While the government should approach this issue globally and progressively, it should soon take, and be seen to take, concrete measures in this direction. Increasing the number of judges and courts, should also help tackling the extremely serious issue of judicial delays. Setting up new courts and hiring more judges should further contribute to reduce the backlog and daily workload of judges, allowing them to improve the quality of their work.

In a country lacking public defense service, the Legal Aid Commission is doing important work. Its organization and its geographical display are important tools for the right of all Sri Lankans to access justice. This Commission should be supported through an adequate national budget.

Generally, judicial proceedings do not consider the victim, specially the criminal ones. All judicial actors should have the victim in mind when working. Criminal proceedings should be amended so as to be compatible with the rights of the child and thus avoiding children the cruel experience to be in court together with his/her aggressor. In this context, the establishment of family courts may be important provided that judges are trained in these matters and have the assistant of professionals in psychology, medical care, and others.

Today fundamental rights jurisdiction in Sri Lanka is vested only with the Supreme Court which acts as only instance. Many people are prevented from seizing this jurisdiction because they have to go to the capital city, Colombo, and engage a local lawyer. This jurisdiction should also be given to High Courts, which are all over the country, in every one of the nine provinces.

Education and training

Education by Law Schools should acknowledge that students are future law operators who will have to face a world whose legal order is undergoing significant change. They should be prepared to deal with different issues involving new problems and new tools. Judges, prosecutors and lawyers are all law graduates. Law curriculum should take notice and advantage of new issues and of practical matters, including international human rights law, gender perspective, international humanitarian law, international criminal law but also evidence, complex crimes’ evidence, among others.

Law has an evolving nature because it needs to adapt to social needs. All those participating in the justice system, whether judges, lawyers, State counsels or police officers, need to constantly update their knowledge. The Sri Lankan Judges’ Institute should incorporate specific training in international human rights law, gender and women’s rights, as well as new legal issues. The Institute’s governing authorities should be advised by a board composed of retired judges, academics and representatives from the Bar.

Transitional justice

On more than one occasion, Sri Lanka resorted to ad hoc commissions to enquire into serious and complex crimes, as well as to shed light on past atrocities and deal with lessons learned. However, for a variety of reasons these commissions have not been as successful as hoped and they have even, by their very existence, jeopardized the development or reinforcement of competent permanent institutions.

Sri Lanka is envisaging transitional justice mechanisms to deal with its near past. These sort of mechanisms are important for the future and have a substantial value as healing processes. Whatever the decision taken, the government should ensure that the bodies set up or existing which have to deal with these issues, be composed by independent and impartial people, completely beyond any questioning by the society, well learned in law. The different elements of a transitional justice strategy should be designed in a comprehensive, holistic manner that take into account the necessary links of these different components.

Sri Lanka is in a very good moment to envisage the strengthening of its justice system as a way to reinforce a main branch of government and as a means to ensure non-recurrence of the past. The international community should side Sri Lanka in these efforts and support it not only politically but also providing adequate training and co-operation in this field.

========================================
12. PAKISTAN: HRCP AGHAST AT GIRL’S JIRGA-ORDAINED MURDER
========================================

Lahore, May 6: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has strongly condemned the brutal killing of a 16-year old girl following a jirga’s decision to punish her for her supposed role in helping a couple find happiness together.

In a statement issued on Friday, the Commission said: “It is impossible to not be astounded by the brutality and ruthlessness of those who ordered and oversaw the callous mowing down of a young person in Donga Gali, in order to satisfy their notions of cultural proprietary. The criminal actions of the jirga must be condemned unreservedly by all those who stand for rule of law and the right to life itself.

“Such brutalities can occur only in a society that treats women as chattel, not just of the family but of the larger community.

“We have not come to this pass overnight and rulers past and present, including the current bickering lot, have a lot to answer for, not least because of their failure to confront or push back strongly enough against abhorrent crimes in the name of ‘honour’ and indeed addressing the perceptions or place of women in society.

“The arrest of the Jirga members in itself should be no ground for self-praise and HRCP certainly is not in the habit of praising anyone for doing what was their mandated duty.

“Nothing that the authorities do now can bring back the young victim, but they should at least now atone for their inaction by seeing to it that justice is done in this case and conditions that allow such incidents to take place are confronted.”

Zohra Yusuf

Chairperson
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP)
107-Tipu Block, New Garden Town, Lahore – 54600

========================================
13. INDIA: ENSURE CREDIBLE INVESTIGATION OF THE DEATH OF THE PROTESTORS IN ARUNACHAL PRADESH
========================================
(Forum Asia - 6 May 2016 )

(Bangkok/Kathmandu, 6 May 2016) – The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) strongly condemns the excessive use of force by police which has led to the death of two protestors in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh in the north-eastern state of India on 2 May 2016. Two people were shot dead by police at around 4 p.m. and many were injured when a group of people protested against the arrest of Mr. Lobsang Gyatso, a Buddhist monk who has been actively opposing mega dam projects in Tawang. FORUM-ASIA demands the Government of India to conduct a prompt, full, impartial, and independent investigation into the death of the two protestors and take actions against those responsible.

On 2 May 2016, a group of people gathered outside the Tawang police station to support Mr. Lobsang Gyatso and demand his release. Being denied of bail, he was brought back and secretly taken into the police station bypassing the protestors in the front of the police station. The police opened fire at the protestors without any warning when they tried to move towards the police station. Media report indicated that the two protestors—21-year old Nyima Wangdi, a monk from Tawang and 31-year old Tsering Tempa, a resident of Jangda village—were shot twice and shot in the forehead, respectively, with seven others injured. Mr. Lobsang Gyatso was given bail after a few hours.

Authorities in Arunachal Pradesh have approved the construction of about 168 mega dam projects in the state. Thirteen of these projects, which are to be located in Tawang, have been opposed by the indigenous people of the state.

Mr. Lobsang Gyatso is the Secretary of the Save Mon Region Federation (SMRF), an organisation of the Monpa community in the Mon-Tawang region of Arunachal Pradesh. Under his leadership, the SMRF has been protesting against ecologically destructive hydropower projects, demanding accountability in state development projects, and campaigning against corruption.

FORUM-ASIA was informed that, on 26 April 2016, Mr. Lobsang Gyatso was arrested for allegedly leading a group of people from Gongkhar village where the 6 MW Mukto Shakangchu project is coming up, and later released on bail. He was rearrested on 28 April 2016 for his critical comments regarding the protests recorded in an audio clip circulated on social media, and later denied bail.

“The right to freedom of assembly is a human right and not a privilege. This right should be exercised without arbitrary interference from the State. State also has the obligation towards ensuring protection of the right to freedom of assembly”, says Evelyn Balais-Serrano, Executive Director of FORUM-ASIA. “Credible investigation must be ensured in this case to fix the accountability of the law enforcement officers for a shooting without prior warning”, she adds.

In February 2016, two United Nations Special Rapporteurs, Maina Kiai and Christof Heyns, recommended in a joint report that “force shall not be used unless it is strictly unavoidable, and if applied it must be done in accordance with international human rights law”. The report further clarifies that “States and their law enforcement agencies and officials are obligated under international law to respect and protect, without discrimination, the rights of all those who participate in assemblies, as well as monitors and bystanders. The normative framework governing the use of force includes the principles of legality, precaution, necessity, proportionality and accountability.”

“Any use of force must be kept to a bare minimum and be proportionate”, says Anjuman Ara Begum, South Asia Programme Officer of FORUM-ASIA.

FORUM-ASIA believes that an independent investigation on the whole incident is essential, focusing on the role of political leaders and police officials, in order to ascertain the proportionality of the force used and to fix accountability for the loss of human life.

FORUM-ASIA condemns the killing of the protestors and calls on the Government of India to ensure freedom of assembly and to protect the life and liberty of the protestors.


========================================
14. WHAT’S WRONG WITH BEING SEXUALLY FREE? SOUTH ASIAN SEXUAL HYPOCRISY ONLY CAUSES VIOLENCE: ZAHRA HAIDER
========================================
(The Times of India - 11 May 2016 | Interview)

Pakistani writer Zahra Haider’s recent article on pre-marital sex in her country has caused a furore. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das, Haider discussed why South Asians don’t talk about sex but choose hypocrisy, the dynamics of misogyny, sexual violence – and marriage:

What inspired you to write about sex, gender and hypocrisy – and did you feel qualms about being so candid?

I grew up surrounded by men who made it very clear i’d be given a lot more freedom if i were a boy – i wouldn’t have had a curfew, i could’ve dressed however i wanted and hanging out with the opposite sex wouldn’t have been such an issue.

To me, these hypocritical beliefs are pure injustice – i wanted to burst the bubble of denial.

I wanted to be as honest as possible – i had grown far too tired of the hypocrisy and judgment that circulates within our society, feeding off things like a woman’s sexuality or her independence.

I felt minor qualms regarding the potential backlash i could face. I was advised that returning to Pakistan from abroad would be unsafe after the article had been published – which i was somewhat upset about.

How are you dealing with criticisms of being from Pakistan’s ‘elite’ and misrepresenting the nation?

As i mentioned in my article, i grew up within the elite, so i would possess more knowledge on that society. These were my personal opinions.

Accusing me of falsely representing an entire country is rather illogical. I am not an entire country – nor can i possibly represent every single Pakistani in Pakistan.

What responses are you receiving?

Mixed responses – however, more men have responded.

There’s been a lot of focus around the number of sex partners i’ve had. I’ve been called out for being promiscuous by a prominent Pakistani columnist Mehr Tarar, which goes against any basic feminist belief – what is so inexplicably wrong about being “promiscuous”?

On the other hand, many people applaud my bravery, relating on a much higher level.

What drives ‘shame’ around sex in Pakistan and India?

Misogynistic values, some people going to extremes for sex-selective abortions.

If a man wrote this article, i’m certain he wouldn’t have received the backlash i have, especially from the opposite sex. But because i’m a woman, i’m bound to receive hateful, hypocritical comments.

The conditioning that sex should never be a topic of discussion starts from day one – within our society, family, school, media.

You analyse sex and marriage. Does arranged marriage throw shadows around sex – creating what you rather vividly describe as the world’s ‘horniest people’?

Yes, absolutely.

We face this pressure of having to marry someone dependent on our parents’ choices – a stranger we may not have any connection with.

By socially endorsing arranged marriage, our society indirectly ostracises love marriages – and creates confusion regarding emotions like passion or attraction.

Honour killings due to refusing arranged marriages say a lot about how shadows evolve – into something much more dangerous.

What strains does sex – and its prohibition – cause in Pakistani society?

When you label something inherently natural as inherently ‘wrong’, it’s bound to mutate.

In a restrictive society, some people rebel through pornography, deviant sexual behaviour – even abuse.

This must be seriously addressed.

Sex is a fundamental practice and repressed people go to extremes – when these extremes include the abuse of children or women, there is no excuse for remaining silent.

What sex is acceptable – and what does this reflect?

Reproductive sex is perhaps the only sex that’s acceptable culturally.

Sex is never accepted simply as sex.

By focussing on the mere reproductive function, we subtract the aesthetics of what sex truly is – emotional, fulfilling, powerful and passionate.

Due to the belief that women are simply beneficial for reproductive purposes, sex revolves around men. And due to gender inequality, women’s opinions are automatically deemed lesser – if a woman has an opinion on sex, she most certainly faces backlash.

Many women face punishments like honour killings, acid attacks, even public lashings.

But are South Asian norms about sex evolving?

From my knowledge, India has a compact middle class, it’s a lot more capitalistic and i believe it has evolved more with the influences of the internet, media and travel.

However, change is quite cosmetic in Pakistan – it’s still more feudal.


========================================
15. INDIA: SHOCKING INDIFFERENCE TO THE PLIGHT OF PROJECT AFFECTED PERSONS IN NARMADA VALLEY
THE FIGHT FOR JUSTICE SHALL CONTINUE, ASSERTS NBA
========================================

Badwani / New Delhi, May 8 : The recent High Level meeting in Delhi chaired by the Prime Minister’s Pirncipal Secretary Nripendra Mishra and attended by the Chief Secretaries of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra on the 6th of this month regarding the Sardar Sarovar Project, reveals the deep sense of apathy and indifference of the current Central and respective State governments to the plight of the thousands of Project Affected Persons in the Narmada valley.

It is understood that the respective State governments of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh have been directed to expedite Resettlement and Rehabilitation (R&R) process while the Gujarat government undoubtedly seeks a much needed boost in terms of favourable public opinion before the Assembly Elections in 2017. The Gujarat government is particularly under severe pressure owing to the negative publicity due to the Patidar agitation in the state. The state’s oft repeated claim that the completion of the dam would immensely increase the irrigation potential of the State remains a palpable lie to this day; a fact vindicated by the still dry regions of Kutch and Saurashtra.

Narmada Bachao Andolan has consistently reiterated that this alleged “irrigation benefit” has been directed only towards industries in the state. It appears that this trend is set to continue under the current neo-liberal regime characteristic of the infallible belief in ‘growth without limits’.

The respective state governments have repeatedly and falsely claimed complete rehabilitation of the Projected Affected Persons despite multiple evidences put forward by the Andolan, which has often been validated by the ongoing proceedings infront of GRA or numbers unearthed by Jha Commsssion. The struggle has been fought tooth and nail on the legal fronts as well; only to see the judiciary blinded by its own scaffold; often ignoring or underestimating violence perpetrated by the State and Central Governments.

When there are not less than 40,000 families in Madhya Pradesh who are to face the watery grave this Monsoon, then what can one counter the Chief Secretary of the state with who reports compliance and merely demands 350 crore rupeers for rehabilitation? They choose to ignore their own commissions, tribunals and other authorities reports or ground realities, as they exist today.

In the recent meeting, The Gujarat Chief Secretary is reported to have claimed that “Maharashtra has only around 300 families to be resettled while MP needs to settle more – around 1200 families”; numbers which we insist are nowhere even close to the actual figures. For instance, in Maharashtra alone, there are about 791 declared families; a figure which was arrived at following jointly prepared report after a thorough check up of all documents in the Collectors office by both, activists from the NBA and the Collectors’ men over few months in 2015. This figure does not include the 300-400 yet to be declared PAF’s who are currently at the mercy of seeking their declaration by the Grievance Redressal Authority (GRA) chaired by a retired High Court judge, in the state.

The State’s brute force and its unyielding arrogance asserts itself blatantly, particularly so under the current Central Governement’s disposition. This ego driven project is nothing but a facade to cover decades of ‘destruction’ in the name of ‘development’ placing a veil over the inhuman treatment meted out to the people affected by this project!

Such a falsehood, unprecedented in history, needs to be countered not before the Courts of justice but in people’s court in which about 40,000 families, communities within the submergence area need support of all those who are courageous to challenge the present paradigm of development.

Devram Kanera, Kamla Yadav, Gokhru Bhilala, Kailash Awasya, Bhagirath Dhangar, Mohan Patidar, Kailash Yadav, Mudubhai Machhwara, Devisingh Tomar, Yogini Khanolkar, Noorji Vasave, Chetan Salve, Jiku Tadvi, Pemal Behan, Ramesh Prajapati, Sanovar B Mansoori, Lokesh Patidar, Shyama Behan, Rahul Yadav, Mukesh Bhagoriya, Khema Bhilala, Medha Patkar

Contact Nos. 09179617513, 9826811982
Email ids :medha.narmada at gmail.com, nba.rahulyadav at gmail.com

=======================================
16. A FRAUGHT VICTORY: SADIQ KHAN'S WIN CONCEALS THE COMMUNALISATION OF MINORITY POLITICS IN THE UK
by Gita Sahgal
=======================================
(India Today - 12 May 2016)

Sadiq Khan won such a convincing election victory to become the first Muslim mayor of London that his success now seems a foregone conclusion. But it was far more of a slog than it should have been.

His main opponent, the Conservative Zac Goldsmith, was known as an environmentalist, but his campaign failed to play to his strengths. Instead, they followed the template developed by the Australian Lynton Crosby who utilised negative tactics to win the Conservatives the general election against the wisdom of the opinion polls. This time, horrified Conservatives watching the campaign implode called them 'dog whistle' methods.

Steve Hilton, a former Conservative spin doctor, commented on the unlikelihood of Goldsmith bringing back 'the nasty party ' label to the Tories. Hilton understands, for he is immortalised in the political satire, The Thick of It, as a barefoot spin doctor teaching old school Tories to be cuddly and love 'the Big Society'. Hilton failed and went off to his spiritual home-California.

Were all the questions raised about Khan simply smears? Maajid Nawaz, a former member of the Hizb-ut- Tahrir, generously acquits Khan of being a fundamentalist sympathiser. Nawaz is grateful to Khan who defended him while he was a fundamentalist imprisoned in Egypt; even though he later smeared Nawaz as an 'Uncle Tom'.

Britain's open secret is that all parties have a rigidly communalist view of minority politics. Khan spent many years as a human rights lawyer defending terrorist suspects. Nawaz rightly distinguishes between his work and his political associations-which ranged over those associated with terrorism in Britain to defending Muslim Brotherhood preachers and the Jamaat-e- Islami umbrella organisation, the Muslim Council of Britain. I had investigated senior figures in the MCB during my work on the campaign against The Satanic Verses and the Bangladesh liberation war. In The War Crimes File, which I produced for Channel 4, we investigated Al Badr death squads. A leader, Chowdhury Mueenuddin, was later convicted of mass crimes in the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh. In spite of the allegations against him, he rose to prominence in Britain, embraced by Prince Charles as well as Tony Blair. It's perhaps not so surprising that a young lawyer looking to make his way in politics would gravitate to terror suspects and Islamist parties. They had become the heroes of the Left and necessary advisors to government. An earlier generation's power brokers were men associated with the Congress, the Pakistani PPP, the Bangladeshi Awami League or the Communist parties with their strength in various workers' associations. Now, these were passé; and the mosque and temple de rigueur, instead.

David Cameron has frequently denounced multiculturalism but his campaign video, Neela Hai Aasman , followed the Labour footprint. A garlanded Cameron is seen with his wife dressed in a sari, bowing before various godmen. Not a single Muslim is in sight, but Modi features strongly to add lustre to the Conservatives. Goldsmith had a similar video.

During Goldsmith's campaign, voters of Indian origin received leaflets targeted at religion and region. The British PM's visit to the Golden Temple was celebrated for Sikhs, Gujaratis were told Corbyn and Khan were anti-Modi. Scare stories spread of Labour taxing family jewellery.

But finally, Cameron over-reached himself when he used parliamentary privilege to accuse Sadiq Khan of supporting Suliman Gani, an imam he claimed was a supporter of the Islamic State. Gani denied the accusation and announced he was a Conservative supporter.

If Khan faced a rough time, his campaign tactics for his parliamentary seat summoned up a vicious communalism. Maajid Nawaz claims that Khan allied with Sunni Muslims against an Ahmadi Muslim candidate.

These horrors recall an earlier election in the 1980s where the gay Labour candidate Peter Tatchell faced vilification and violence for his sexuality. The Liberals fought and won a dirty campaign for their man, Simon Hughes, who had not declared that he too, was gay. Hughes went on to serve for decades as an honourable Liberal Democrat.

In spite of the allegations, many anti-fundamentalist campaigners voted for Sadiq Khan. They want to challenge a poisonous anti-migrant narrative, and to address the housing crisis which has priced even middle-class Londoners out of the city.

Meanwhile, many secular Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Dalits and athiests-- all from minorities-- are subjected to death threats and discrimination by fundamentalists in the UK. Khan has distanced himself from allegations of anti-semitism but he needs to hear the voices of minorities within minorities.

Sadiq Khan has won a landmark election which he fought as the son of a bus driver and seamstress. Perhaps his greatest achievement is to restore the idea that the welfare state is the guarantor of stability and opportunity.

Gita Sahgal is Director, Centre for Secular Space, UK


========================================
17. REVIEW ARTICLE:  CHUGGING INTO UNFAMILIAR STATIONS - A NEW HISTORY OF INDIA’S RAILWAYS
by Ian J Kerr
========================================
(The Economic and Political Weekly - Vol. 51, Issue No. 19, 07 May, 2016)

Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India by Ritika Prasad; New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015; pp ix+315, Rs 795, hardback.

The publication of Ritika Prasad’s (2015b) Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India marks the maturation of a trend present in the historiography of South Asian railways since the turn of the current millennium. This trend has seen some historians give much more attention to the multidimensional ways in which the railways were central to the making of modern India. Some of the new studies mentioned below are in the form of recently completed PhD theses which, I expect—because they all represent impressive examples of interesting scholarship—to emerge as good books during the next couple of years or so. As an impressive corpus of new research and writing the books, articles and theses that populate this trend deserve to be labelled a new history of India’s railways.

‘New’ in New History?

The trend in question has three characteristics. First, there is focus on the ways in which railway construction and operation were consequential for India as a whole, for specific regions or localities, and for social collectivities and/or individuals. What the railways did, what they effectuated, is the central concern rather than a focus on the more internal question of what the railways were. Second, a concern for what the railways did has led some researchers to focus more on sociocultural and representational dimensions while others have focused on economic issues examined via sophisticated, quantitative methodologies and the explicit use of economic theory. The third characteristic, the use of some primary sources written/spoken in the languages of India, is present in the works of the more sociocultural and representational bent. The serial statistical data used by the economists and economic historians exists in the universal language of numbers. The Indian language sources used so far are skewed towards Bengali and Hindi in an emerging literature focused heavily on Northern India. The railway history of Western and South India has been neglected, hence Gujarati and Marathi and the languages of the Dravidian South are largely absent from the engagement with Indian language sources.

Tracks of Change is not the first contribution to the new history, and it certainly will not be the last. One good, early contribution, is Appleby’s (1990) thesis (never published although many have read it).1 More recent contributions include those that appeared in the 2007 collection, 27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies (Kerr 2013). Bury (2013) in that book used later19th century Hindi travel accounts to examine North Indian responses to railways, and to the altered conditions of travel the railways inaugurated. Aguiar (2013) and Parmar (2013) in the same collection provide overlapping studies of railway imagery in films and literature whose subject are the partition and its aftermath. Aguiar (2011) subsequently published an interesting book titled Tracking Modernity: India’s Railways and the Culture of Mobility. Arguably, my own short but deliberately semi-popular Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India, a short, contextualised general history, also can claim membership in the new history (Kerr 2012). Laura Bear’s (2007) methodologically pioneering ethnohistory describes the enclaved psychosocial world of the Anglo–Indian railway employees and their families living in the railway colonies of Eastern India, notably Kharagpur where Bear did much of her fieldwork. Bear’s focus on the Anglo–Indians generates some novel arguments—Anglo–Indians as a “railway caste” for example—and also restricts the generalisability of her study within the broader attempts to better understand India’s railway past.

A more extensive description of recent writing about India’s railway past can be found as a section of an extensive survey of the secondary literature published c 1830–2011 that forms chapter two of John Hurd and Ian J Kerr (2012). The book also discusses primary sources and their locations, representational sources, railway statistics and their uses. The book is meant to facilitate research into India’s multidimensional railway history and thus to the publication of more studies like (in quality and orientation, not specific content) those discussed in this review article.

Prasad’s Theoretical Track

Within the new history Prasad’s interesting, readable and well-researched study represents an important milestone in the journey to an improved understanding of the multifaceted ways railways contributed to the making of modern India. The book has seven substantive chapters, a conceptual and historiographical introduction, and a concluding chapter. The latter cleverly uses the construction and operation of the Delhi Metro system (construction started in 1998; the first line opened in 2002) to show how, differences of time, context, use, technology and scale notwithstanding, “substantive assessments of the metro bear striking resemblance to how the impact of railways was being assessed more than a century ago”2 (p 266).The introduction establishes Prasad’s central concern with describing how the railways of colonial India became increasingly enmeshed in everyday life, and “people negotiated this increasing presence of railways in their lives, and how the ensuing processes of adaptation, contestation, and accommodation have materially shaped India’s history” ( p 3). All of this, of course, took place within the contexts affected by the attitudes and practices of the colonial authorities well described in the book. Indeed, much of what Prasad describes has a limited connection to railways as a material presence and much more to do with social construction. Railways as a material technology, for example, are not inherently divided into higher and lower classes where passenger travel is concerned; railway officials and the colonial authorities condoned the transport of pilgrims in goods’ wagons. No technical imperative required either practice.

“Everyday” for Prasad is an expansive concept that includes considerable room for human agency as people, collectively and individually, negotiated on a continuous basis the technologies and their social consequences that came to permeate daily life. However, Prasad’s book encompasses content that goes beyond the “everyday” to include what might be called commonplace and frequent but not continuously present. The distinction is well caught in a few short lines written by the Bengali poet Naresh Guha as translated by Kabirul Islam—“she shuts the window/In the distance a train passes/It is rumoured Tapati Sen/Is soon to be married” (Islam 1972). In many Indian contexts the noises made by trains foreground and background daily life on an almost continuous basis and thus provide one marker of the ubiquitous presence of the railways although, both now and earlier, there were always substantial areas of the Indian subcontinent where there were no or low density rail lines. Marriage, however, is a commonplace occurrence but hardly an everyday occurrence; indeed, quite to the contrary, marriage may be a central human institution but it occurs infrequently and with ceremony in the life cycles of individual and families. Thus, when Prasad writes about flooding attributed to railway embankments she describes something that was all too commonplace and frequent but hardly everyday or even annual.

Prasad’s substantive chapters are as follows: (1) “The Nature of the Beast? An Elementary Logic for Third-Class Travel,” a discussion of the great preponderance of third class travel among the railway passengers who, contrary to much early thinking, rapidly increased in number despite the deplorable conditions in their carriages and few amenities at the stations—conditions that generated extensive criticism almost from the start, and whose amelioration in the face of railway company intransigence later became an important demand of Gandhiji and the nationalist movement; (2) “Demand and Supply? Railway Space and Social Taxonomy” provides an illuminating discussion of the varieties of socio-spatial separation and segregation within the carriages and at the stations. This was a complex issue involving racial divisions and demands from within South Asian communities for, inter alia, separate carriages for women or separation based on caste, religion or respectability; (3) “Crime and Punishment: In the Shadow of Railway Embankments” is primarily a discussion of the ways in which the railway embankments in Bihar impeded water flows and led to flooding (especially in 1904–06 and 1917) leading some desperate local villagers to cut embankments or to open culverts deliberately blocked by the railway companies. More often than not the railway companies denied responsibility, and the colonial authorities sometimes punished the villagers for their actions; (4) “Railway Time: Speed, Synchronization, and ‘Time-Sense’” provides a fascinating account of the ways in which the needs of the operating railways for precise timing drove the decades-long and much debated move to the imposition of a standard railway time across the subcontinent that finally in 1905 was fixed at five hours 30 minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time at a meridian roughly two degrees east of Madras; (5) “Contagion and Control: Managing Disease, Epidemics, and Mobility” describes the ways in which the railways came to be seen as significant vectors in the transmission of diseases like cholera and bubonic plague resulting in railway passengers being subjected to draconian controls as the colonial authorities sought to contain contagious outbreaks. Pilgrim traffic became a particular object of these measures; (6) “Designing Rule: Power, Efficiency, and Anxiety” notes that from the beginning railways in India were, first and foremost, seen by colonial authorities as a mechanism to secure and to strengthen British rule. The railways became “central to sustaining and embodying the militaristic undergirding of state and empire, they also became central to people’s ability to protest both” (p 232), so this chapter both describes railway facilitated troop movement and nationalist attempts to bomb trains or destroy track; (7) “Marking Citizen from Denizen: Dissent, ‘Rogues,’ and Rupture” examines the sometimes discordant and contradictory ways in which the railways as a method of transportation and as technological presence were represented both as modern and progressive, and critiqued as “the evil” that buttressed British rule and unleashed forces that harmed Indians. The critique, of course, was advanced by Gandhi who embodied the contradictions because he rode the rails often in the nationalist cause but he also denounced railways for their disruptive consequences including moral decay. And if elite nationalists generally favoured railways (if not the way the colonial railways operated), the “rogues” of popular nationalism, denounced by their leaders, happily engaged in protest actions ranging from ticketless travel to chain pulling to sabotage, the latter in direct defiance of the tenets of satyagraha—a descent into violence that leads Prasad to conclude this chapter with the events of 1947.

Blending Material and Social

Tracks of Change, therefore, with its focus on what the railways did, on some of the consequences for India of railway construction (for example, railway embankments and flooding) and railway operation (conditions of travel, disease transmission, colonial control and anti-colonial nationalisms, etc) fits well within the trend identified above as descriptive of the new railway history of India. It is a book that blends analyses of the material side of railway history, including satisfying chunks of statistical and cartographic data with a concern for the contested sociocultural consequences played out within the fraught context of colonial rule.

A 2013 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) PhD thesis by Aparajita Mukhopadhyay (2013) should be read in connection with Prasad’s book. Mukhopadhyay covers some of the same ground albeit from a different conceptual perspective. Both works, for example, examine some of the consequences of the railways for the nature and uses of time and time keeping in India; both works discuss the conditions of railway travel, separation and discomfort, and the Indian responses thereto. However, if Prasad finds her conceptual inspiration in the literature of the “everyday,” Mukhopadhyay situates herself within the spatial turn in Indian history through explicit use of concepts advanced in Ravi Ahuja’s (2009) influential Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (c 1780–1914). Ahuja (and Mukhopadhyay), in turn, was influenced by spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre.3

Both authors are indebted to the massive runs of archival records generated by the colonial state and the railway companies for the bulk of their primary sources. However, in Mukhopadhyay’s case there is also a particular emphasis on the use of later19th and early 20th century travelogues written in Bengali and Hindi.4 The Bengali sources provide a basis for many of the nuances that differentiate Mukhopadhyay’s work from that of Prasad’s.

Economic Trails

Recent writing that focuses on the economic dimensions of India’s railway past—a topic almost coeval with the start of railways on the subcontinent —is so different from that discussed above that if the central characteristic of the new railway history was something other than understanding better what the railways did, what they effectuated, then discussing the sociocultural and the economic literature in this survey would be a case of conjoining aardvarks and zebras.5 However, both the advocates for railway lines in India and subsequent analysts expected that the most profound effects of railway development in India would be found in the economic realm. Marx famously, and in the event mistakenly, wrote that one “cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways” (Marx 2001). Marx was not entirely mistaken—he rarely was—but writing in 1853 he underestimated the power of colonialism to retard industrial development in India, witness the fact that through 1947 91% of all the broad gauge locomotives and 77% of the metre gauge machines placed into India-service were manufactured in Britain (Kerr 2001).

Limited industrial development notwithstanding, India during the colonial period was in any case pre-eminently an agricultural country with an overwhelming majority of the population living in many thousands of peasant villages. Thus, economically inclined historians have long sought to identify the consequences of railway operation primarily within this agrarian context. As early as 1975 John Hurd used quantitative techniques to demonstrate the emergence of a railway-stimulated, pan-Indian market in grain in the period 1861–1921 (1975). Michelle McAlpine’s (1983) revisionist studies wedded qualitative and quantitative sources to statistical analyses to understand better the causes and amelioration of famine. The heavy use of statistical data has long characterised the attempts to assess the economic consequences of the railways—for examples see Sanyal (1930) and Antia (1932).

Important previous publications notwithstanding the most recent explorations into the economic dimensions of India’s railway history have broken new ground in the size of the data sets upon which they are based and the theoretical and methodological sophistication of the analysis. One reason for this is the increase in readily available and more easily used computing power (high end desktops or laptops these days are more powerful than the mainframe super computers of the 1980s, for example, the Cray Y–MP). Another reason is the use by some researchers of the methodology known generically as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) that is particularly helpful when very large data sets covering extended units of space and time are involved.

Donaldson and His Data

The effort of Dave Donaldson to identify some of the broader consequences of India’s colonial railways illustrates well the advances sketched above (2010).6 Donaldson, an economist, constructed a vast data set from the rich body of serial statistics, specifically railway-related and otherwise, that populate the colonial archive thanks to the record-keeping proclivities (a tool of empire) of the British Indian authorities. Donaldson’s data set was disaggregated to the level of 235 districts in British India, virtually the entire number except for a few urban areas, for the period 1870–1930 during which most of the colonial railway system was constructed. Data on prices, agricultural, output, daily rainfall, and interregional and international trade flows and a digital map “in which each 20 km segment is coded with its year of opening” were included. Together, this rich body of information enabled Donaldson to track the development of each district’s economy “before, during, and after” the spatial progression of the railways. With this data set coupled to GIS techniques, advanced forms of econometric analysis and a complex Ricardian trade model Donaldson set out to assess the extent to which the railways “reduced trade costs and thereby allowed regions to gain from trade.”

Donaldson concluded that the railways “decreased trade costs and interregional price gaps,” “increased interregional and international trade,” and brought about a 16% growth in real agricultural income in the districts during the period studied.7 Along the way, he also makes a social savings estimate of 9.7% of aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) or 14.8% of real agricultural income.8 Regardless of the reservations one might have about Donaldson’s work these are impressive findings that demonstrate the power of theory, advanced statistical techniques and GIS methodologies when applied to large data sets. However, findings at this level of abstraction do not tell us anything about the important question of how income gains, gains that Donaldson notes were small in absolute terms, were distributed among the inhabitants of his 235 districts. In short, his work does not explore the uneven aspect of railway-driven combined and uneven development under colonial capitalism although one expects his data could reveal inter-district differences.

Labour and Its Movements

Other economists and economic historians have contributed recently to the identification of additional consequences of India’s colonial railways. Dan Bogart and Latika Chaudhary have published interesting work including a study that examined “regulation, ownership and costs” on Indian railways in the period 1874 to 1912 in which they found that “the move to state ownership significantly decreased working expenses” (Bogart and Chaudhary 2013, 2012; Bogart forthcoming). The Government of India (GOI) accomplished this surprising (mainstream economists usually consider state ownership inefficient) result by reducing labour costs which they could do, argue the authors, “because of the undemocratic colonial nature of the GOI, a fiscal system heavily reliant on railways for revenues, and a regulatory environment under private ownership that weakened incentives (notably the guaranteed returns on capital investment) to lower costs.” This finding may tell us more about the consequences of colonial rule for the railways than about the consequences of the railways for India. However, anything that impacted labour was consequential for Indians given the substantial numbers employed by the railways. Other recent articles in the economic realm revisit the question of railways and price convergence in British India, and another author looks at the efficiency of grain markets in 18th and 19th century India (Tahir and Kuehlwein 2010; Studer 2008).

Studies of railway labour provide content and conceptual orientations that overlap the sociocultural/representational and economic varieties of the new railway history. The workforces that built and operated the colonial railways were so large that they were important social collectivities in their own right—the 8–10 million or so Indians that cumulatively built the railways of India c 1850–c 1900 cannot be considered insignificant in any way—while the large and increasing numbers employed by the operating railways (3,54,902 in 1901; one million plus in 1946) added to those engaged in construction were one of the ways in which the railways were hugely consequential for India and Indians (1570).9 Over 40 years ago Myers and Kannappan (1970) wrote, “from 1850 to 1940, the construction, maintenance, and operation of the railways employed at least one man for every two employed in all branches of modern industry.” This statement, which could benefit from a revisit and extended serial reconstruction, suggests well the highly consequential significance of railway employment.

A focus on railway labour has led one historian in the direction of class formation, class consciousness, collective action, formal unionism, and popular politics via a pioneering study of worker militancy among the 12,000 to 20,000 South Asians employed daily at the vast Moghalpura workshops of the North Western Railway in the period extending roughly from 1919 to 1947. This thesis by Ahmad Azhar (2014) is a richly detailed work that includes among its primary sources workshop records, and memoirs, oral history and Communist Party records in Urdu and Punjabi. The size of the Moghalpura workforce and the various forms and phases of militancy among those workers put them initially at the centre of plebeian politics in Lahore from which they moved to a more inward-looking stance of working class solidarity focused on the attempt to achieve more control of the labour processes in which they were enmeshed. Subsequently, post-World War II, the Moghalpura workers came under the sway of the Communist Party. Details of the thesis aside, what is central in terms of this review article is the fact that the railway workers, themselves a major consequence of South Asia’s colonial railways, were a leading, central presence in the labour history of South Asia in ways that often extended well beyond disputes with their employers. Therefore, the study of railway labour can open up new questions for all historians of South Asian labour.

The same opening of new questions via railway labour can be found in the work of Nitin Sinha. His examination of strikes by the railway workers of Bihar and Bengal, 1918–22 leads him to argue “that rigid categories like racialism or nationalism are of little help in unravelling the complexities of workers’ choices and their politics” (2007). More recently Sinha has begun to provide us with the insights he derives from his research into the history of the East Indian Railway Company’s workshop town of Jamalpur in Eastern Bihar.

Making Railway Towns

Jamalpur is a much smaller city than Lahore even if one includes its nearby and longer-standing twin city of Munger (erstwhile Monghyr). Unlike Lahore, it owes its urban existence to the massive railway workshop complex opened in 1862, a fact that enables Sinha to study its history as an example of neglected smaller urban areas—“a railway-generated urbanity based on the site of industrial production, labour division and an industrial work culture...” (Sinha 2012b). Thus, like colonial Lahore but even more so, Jamalpur was an urban area within which the workshop employees had a central role and the railway as a socioeconomic institution and physical presence a dominant force. The article is a fascinating and pioneering account that, like the work of Azhar but from a different perspective, addresses a major lacuna in the railway history of South Asia—the railway workshops, their workforces, and “railway-generated urbanity” where the consequences of the colonial railways had a heightened visibility across space and time, society, and political economy.

The new history of India’s railways has begun to give us a much better-rounded, deeper and multidimensional understanding of what the railways did in colonial India, of what the railways contributed to the making of modern India during British rule. The literature surveyed above only mentions some of the best of recent work. Moreover, the postcolonial railway history of South Asia is now well over 50 years long. Railways did not cease to be consequential in 1947!10

Nonetheless, much remains to be done. Geographically, Western and Southern India has been little investigated as far as railway history is concerned.11 Much more needs to be done to identify the many ways, physical and socio-economic, the railways shaped or even created (for example, Jamalpur or Golden Rock as a section of Tiruchirappalli) India’s urban places, be they a giant megalopolis like Mumbai or the small towns to whose history Sinha directs our attention. The railway acts and the regulations for which the acts provided statutory justification plus case law is an almost completely neglected field.12 The railways and the environment remain very much untouched as a research field although Pallavi V Das (2015) has just published a book. Focused on the Punjab Das explores an important consequence of railway construction and operation, deforestation and the subsequent attempts to ameliorate what the railways effectuated.

How Rails Lead to Roads

The railway history of colonial and postcolonial India also needs to be placed in wider temporal and spatio-techno frameworks. Temporally, this means beginning the story of transportation before the railway age and continuing through the railway age in order to describe changes and continuities within coeval modes of transport (road and river for example) that coexisted and competed within complex, dynamic and locally/regionally specific configurations.13 Spatially and technologically it means recognising that the railways for all their undoubted importance in the making of modern India always—depending on the region —existed within contexts populated by other modes of transport, and that the dominance of the railways was not necessarily achieved quickly and completely, nor did the dominance remain unchallenged thanks to the emergence of motorised road transport from the 1920s forward, air travel in the 1960s, and the relatively recent ability of the telecommunications industry (including the internet) to take over certain kinds of communication across space.

Fortunately we have Ravi Ahuja’s splendid Pathways of Empire to provide conceptual and substantive guidance where the spatial and temporal overlap of transportation systems in the colonial period is concerned. And, as noted above, Ahuja’s conceptual template specifically influenced the recent work of Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, and more diffusively the work of other historians. Additionally, a most interesting study by Nitin Sinha (2012a) covers transportation by roads, rivers and rails within a framework that stresses the broader concept of communication rather than solely the mechanisms of physical transportation across space. This leads Sinha to engage Ahuja, especially on the terrain of the “cultural production and representation of knowledge” where, in Sinha’s view, Ahuja’s historical materialism lacks that which Sinha provides, namely, the study of “the discourses that shaped the colonial rule’s attitude towards introduction and improvement of the communication network” (Sinha 2012a: xxiv and xxvii–xxviii).

Deep into the temporal continuum that was the railway age in colonial India a new mechanism of land transport appeared that became in some contexts during the 1930s a noticeable competitor to the railways. This was motorised road transport that has steadily increased its importance as a major (and in some contexts, the major) form of land transport in India. Facilitated by more and improved roads, the internal combustion engine fuelled by petrochemicals made mass transport by bus, lorry and the automobile possible. In short, the palimpsest that was transportation in India had a new layer that must be brought fully within the purview of railway history. Transport by road or rudimentary trail was always present before and during the railway age; the introduction of motorised land transport inaugurated a qualitative and quantitative change that historians of South Asian transport/railways must incorporate into their accounts of the making of modern India.

Something of the way forward in regards to motorised land transport and its implications for the railways is found in Stefan Tetzlaff’s (2015) PhD thesis.14 This wide-ranging study covers everything from improved road making and changing government transportation policies to the emergence of owner-driver enterprises and petrol marketing networks, and onwards to Gandhi inspired anti-automobile protests. Throughout the thesis due attention is paid to road-rail competition and/or coordination as shaped by the changing policies of those in authority.

Tetzlaff gives us a thorough and thoroughly interesting study that breaks new ground. With its focus on the social consequences of motorised land transport it exhibits the central characteristic of what should now be called a new transport history of India, namely, a focus on the ways in which various precolonial, colonial and postcolonial forms of transport and their labour forces were consequential for India as a whole, for specific regions or localities, and for social collectivities and/or individuals. The railways will only be a part of that bigger picture although for a substantial period of time they will still prove to have been the most important part.

Notes

1 The author, I understand, chose not to pursue an academic career and thus was saved from the world of publish or perish.

2 My discussion of Prasad’s book should not be read as an assessment by a neutral reviewer. I had significant contact with the pre-publication manuscript and I was among those who recommended its publication. Because of my prior appreciation my discussion here focuses primarily on the book’s content rather than critical appraisal. I thought it an excellent work before publication so I have the same opinion of the published version. Readers who want an additional and somewhat different take on recent writing about India’s railway history are encouraged to read a survey published by Prasad (2015a).

3 An important work within the spatial turn within Indian history is Goswami (2004) with whom both Prasad and Mukhopadhyay engage.

4 Kumkum Chatterjee (1999) also used some of these Bengali travelogues.

5 Hurd and Kerr, Chapter 2 provides coverage of the secondary sources, published 1850–2011 on the railways and the economy/political economy. Chapters 5 and 6 describe some of the statistical sources, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and present some hitherto unpublished runs of statistical data.

6 Donaldson’s work has been accepted for publication in the American Economic Review but because of a backlog one currently has to read a version of the paper available on the web—Donaldson (2010).

7 Donaldson also concludes “a sufficient statistic for the effect of railroads on welfare in the model (an effect that is purely due to newly exploited gains from trade) accounts for virtually all the observed reduced-form impact of railroads on real income in the data.” This is a crucial technical point in Donaldson’s econometric analysis, and a potential weakness, as is the reliability of the agricultural statistics he uses. For a more extensive account of the strengths and weaknesses of Donaldson’s work read Kerr (2014).

8 Cf the social saving estimate of 9% for 1900 calculated by John Hurd (1983).

9 The presence of many casual workers involved in the maintenance and operation of the railways means that the formal enumerations of the permanent railway employees consistently underestimate the numbers employed. See Basu (1979, 1981, 1985).

10 1947 divided the railways of South Asia along with everything else and subsequently in Pakistan and then Pakistan and Bangladesh the railways failed to flourish in the way they did in India. A detailed narrative of South Asia’s railways from 1946 to roughly 1952 could be most instructive.

11 In collaboration with a Portuguese scholar I have nibbled at a South Indian topic via an examination of the early years of the West of India Portuguese Guaranteed Railway, Mormugao, Goa to Castle Rock in British India, where a line continued on to Dharwar. See Kerr and Hugo S Pereira (2013). Pereira is extending the study into the 20th century decades.

12 Prasad, Tracks of Change, under her indexed entries of “legislation” and “litigation” provides a small hint of what might be undertaken. More generally, the social history of law is underdeveloped in the Indian case.

13 Coexistence/competition between older and newer forms of transportation also existed on the rivers. Dewey (2014) masterfully describes the failure of the steamships and the continued success of the country boats.

14 Significantly, Tetzlaff’s thesis, like that of Ahmad Azhar discussed above, was supervised by Ravi Ahuja.

References

Aguiar, Marian (2011): Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

— (2013): “Railway Space in Partition Literature,” 27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies, Ian J Kerr (ed), Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Ahuja, Ravi (2009): Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (c 1780–1914), Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Antia, F P (1932): Inland Transport Costs: Influences on Economic Development, Bombay: D Taraporevala & Sons.

Appleby, Leighton (1990): Social Change and Railways in North India, c 1845–1914, Diss, University of Sydney.

Azhar, Ahmad (2014): Crossing the Tracks: Railway Workers and the Terrain of Popular Politics in Late Colonial Lahore, c 1919–47, Diss, University of Gottingen.

Basu, Timir (1979): “Plight of Casual Workers in Railways,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 14, No 27, pp 1115–16.

— (1981): “Plight of Railway Construction Labour,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 16, No 7, pp 229–30, http://www.epw.in/journal/1981/ 7/our-correspondent-columns/labour-plight-railway-construction-casual-labour.html.

— (1985): “The Railways’ Subalterns,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 20, No 8, pp 312–13, http://www.epw.in/journal/1985/8/our-correspondent-columns/labour-railways-subalterns.html.

Bear, Laura (2007): Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self, New York: Columbia University Press.

Bogart, Dan (forthcoming): “Off the Rails: Is State Ownership Bad for Productivity?,” Journal of Comparative Economics.

Bogart, Dan and Latika Chaudhary (2012): “Regulation, Ownership and Costs: A Historical Perspective from Indian Railways,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol 4, No 1, http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~dbogart/Draft-State-Feb2015_public.pdf.

— (2013): “Engines of Growth: The Productivity Advance of Indian Railways, 1874–1912,” Journal of Economic History, Vol 73, No 2, pp 340–71, http://eh.net/eha/wp-content/uploads/2013/ 11/Bogartetal.pdf.

Bury, Harriet (2013): “Novel Spaces, Transitional Moments: Negotiating Text and Territory in Nineteenth-Century Hindi Travel Accounts,”27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies, Ian J Kerr (ed), Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, pp 1–38.

Chatterjee, Kumkum (1999): “Discovering India: Travel, History and Identity in Late 19th Century and Early 20th Century India,” Invoking the Past: the Uses of History in South Asia, Daud Ali (ed), Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp 192–227.

Das, Pallavi V (2015): Colonialism, Development and the Environment: Railways and Deforestation in British India, 1860–84, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dewey, Clive (2014): Steamboats on the Indus, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Donaldson, Dave (2010): “Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure,” Working Paper 16487, October, National Bureau of Economic Research, http://www.nber.org/papers/w16487.pdf.

Goswami, Manu (2004): Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hurd, John (1975): “Railways and the Expansion of Markets in India, 1861–1921,” Explorations in Economic History, Vol 12, No 3, pp 263–88.

— (1983): “Railways,” Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol 2: c 1750–c 1970, Dharma Kumar (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p 741.

Hurd, John and Ian J Kerr (eds) (2012): India’s Railway History: A Research Handbook, Leiden: BRILL.

Islam, Kabirul (1972): “A Note on Modern Bengali Poetry,” Indian Literature: Proceedings of a Seminar, Arabinda Poddar (ed), Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, pp 177–93.

Kerr, Ian J (ed) (2001): Railways in Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p 6.

— (2012): Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

— (ed) (2013): 27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

— (2014): “Colonial India, Its Railways, and the Cliometricians,” Journal of Transport History, Vol 35, No 1, pp 114–19.

Kerr, Ian and Hugo S Pereira (2013): “India and Portugal: The Mormugão and the Tua Railway Compared,” Railroads in Historical Context: Construction, Costs and Consequences, A McCants, E Beira, J M L Cordeiro and P B Lourenço (eds), Vol 2, Porto: MIT Portugal, EDP.

Lefebvre, Henri (1991): The Production of Space, D Nicholson-Smith (trans), Oxford: Cambridge University Press.

Marx, Karl (2001): “The Future Results of the British Rule in India,” reprinted in Railways in Modern India, Ian J Kerr (ed), Delhi: Oxford University Press, p 65.

McAlpine, Michelle (1983): Subject to Famine: Food Crises and Economic Change in Western India, 1860–1920, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mukhopadhyay, Aparajita (2013): Wheels of Change? Impact of Railways on Colonial North Indian Society, 1855–1920, Diss, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Myers, Charles A and Subbiah Kannappan (1970): Industrial Relations in India, 2nd ed, London: Asia Publishing House, p 41.

Parmar, Prabhjot (2013): “Trains of Death: Representations of the Railways in Films on the Partition of India,” 27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies, Ian J Kerr (ed), Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Prasad, Ritika (2015a): “Railways in Colonial South Asia,” Mobility in History, Vol 6, No 1, pp 120–26.

— (2015b): Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.

Sanyal, N K (1930): The Development of Indian Railways, Calcutta: University of Calcutta.

Sinha, Nitin (2007): “The World of Workers’ Politics: Some Issues of Railway Workers in Colonial India, 1918–22,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol 42, No 5, p 1.

— (2012a): Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s, London: Anthem Press.

— (2012b): “Entering the Black Hole: Between ‘Mini-England’ and ‘Smell-like Rotten Potato’, The Railway Workshop Town of Jamalpur, 1860s–1940s,” South Asian History and Culture, Vol 3, No 3, p 317.

Studer, Roman (2008): “India and the Great Divergence: Assessing the Efficiency of Grain Markets in 18th- and 19th-Century India,” Journal of Economic History, Vol 68, No 2, pp 393–437.

Tahir, Andrabi and Kuehlwein Michael (2010): “Railways and Price Convergence in British India,” Journal of Economic History, Vol 70, No 2, pp 351–77.

Tetzlaff, Stefan (2015): The Motorisation of the ‘Mofussil’: Automobile Traffic and Social Change in Rural and Small-Town India, c 1915–1940, Diss, University of Gottingen.
- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/19/review-article/chugging-unfamiliar-stations.html#sthash.2PibszR2.dpuf

(Ian J Kerr teaches history at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.)

========================================
18. BHAGAVAN ON KHAN'S INDIA AT WAR: THE SUBCONTINENT AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR
========================================
H-Net - May, 2016

 Yasmin Khan. India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 432 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-975349-9.

Reviewed by Manu Bhagavan (Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY)
Published on H-Diplo (May, 2016)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

The Second World War, with its larger-than-life personalities, cataclysmic campaigns, race-against-the-clock gamesmanship, and vivid characterizations of good and evil, has long captured the imagination of generations of both professional and armchair historians. Most work on the conflict, whether analytical or narrative, has explored the major actors involved, seeking for instance to explain Hitler’s rise; to catalogue the horror of Nazi atrocity; to depict the outer limits of human endurance, bravery, and cruelty; to herald the heroism of soldiers; or to laud Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as saviors. 

Breaking from such conventions, Yasmin Khan’s new book is resolutely focused on the war’s impact, its lived reality, on the Indian subcontinent, an area marginal to the primary military confrontations, and seemingly peripheral to the entire war itself. Yet precisely by looking at things from such an angle, India at War allows us to see the war from fresh perspectives. This book is a sweeping history, ambitious in scope, which sees the arc of the global struggle predominantly through the eyes of South Asian peoples, from the famous to the everyday. 

India was a colony of Great Britain in the early 1940s, and was increasingly chafing at the imperial yoke. What did it mean to go and fight for “the Raj”? Just whose side were the British on? If colonies were fighting on behalf of the imperium, how come only the metropole was credited? Could a victorious Japan lead to pan-Asian liberty and unity? 

Khan distills these questions, unsurprisingly, into the story of Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, a charismatic former president of the Indian National Congress, was an ardent Indian nationalist who prioritized ending British domination of India above all else. He reached out to the Axis and forged an alliance of convenience, taking over leadership in 1943 of a corps of Indian Army POWs who had switched sides and dubbed themselves the Indian National Army (INA). Bose declared a Provisional Government of Free India and the INA its fighting force, and he set out to liberate the subcontinent embedded in Japanese forces.

The Bose story loosely bookends India at War, and further makes brief appearances throughout the rest of the narrative, but does not receive any sustained treatment. This is for the most part a good thing, since quite a bit has already been written on this subject.[1] Instead, Bose is deployed tactically here, to highlight the ambiguity of World War II in the subcontinent and for its people. The complexity of the emotions—fears and hopes—and needs—hunger and poverty and family—driving people’s decisions are all brought into relief, and the war is in the process humanized in meaningful ways. Indians in Southeast Asia, for instance, soon “became vulnerable to forced labour, to the predations of hungry armies on the march and to aerial bombardment” and “soured” on Japanese victory as a result (p. 117). To survive, they would jump between service in the (British) Indian army, the INA, and civilian life, defying ideological or easy political explanations for their actions.

The sheer scale of the Second World War is overwhelming, with its multiple theaters, numerous battles, and terrible toll. Khan manages to capture this breadth, yet cleverly weaves small, individual stories throughout the grander narrative, in the process drawing sharp portraits of lives forever changed. She selects a handful of figures for special attention, ranging from well-known leaders like Aruna Asaf Ali to villagers like Richpal Ram. Through the latter’s tale, Khan vividly portrays the heroic actions of a battalion of Indian soldiers in Italian-occupied East Africa.   

While a commendable effort, the treatments are uneven. Aruna Asaf Ali, for example, goes underground for much of the war, and leads a life of derring-do as an anticolonial activist. In this, she grows increasingly physically and emotionally distant from her husband, the nationalist Asaf Ali. He is conflicted, happy and proud of his wife, scared for her safety, and unhappy about his own marginality, caused by his imprisonment due to the Quit India movement (the third, and final of Gandhi’s major anticolonial campaigns). Aruna’s is an interesting, even exciting episode. But Khan never really gets the reader into Aruna Asaf Ali’s head, to understand what was driving her and to give us clear sense of her purpose, her ambition, and her own fears. Moreover, Aruna Asaf Ali was one of several politically active women during this time, including Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, and Hansa Mehta, yet we never hear about any of them. 

The absence of such figures speaks to one of the book’s lacuna. Khan mentions “internationalism” once (p. 249) but does not discuss the ways in which the concept informed some important aspects of India’s response to the war, and many of Mahatma Gandhi’s and Jawaharlal Nehru’s ideas. The Quit India declaration that was adopted, for example, was written by Nehru and was distinctly antifascist. It promised India would side with the Allies upon independence, and then it talked about a need for a world federation. Chattopadhyay and Pandit both went on tours of the United States in the 1940s to speak for Indian independence, and Pandit played a big role in early 1945 in challenging Great Power plans for the postwar peace. India did not just fight in the Second World War, it actively imagined and helped construct the order that came after, led often by women. 

This, however, is ultimately not Khan’s primary concern. She is, rather, interested in giving us the most detailed account to date of the small and large ways that India as a territory was affected by the war. And so she spends time talking about the relatively carefree attitude of Raj high society in India early on, far removed from the tragedies and hardships being endured in Europe. She gently and tenderly conveys the worry of family for each other when ripped apart by fighting. She captures the sense of doom in parts of eastern India as the Japanese continued to make advances. And she vividly depicts the anxiety, fear, and hope provoked by the American presence in India, most notably by troops of color, in challenging both Raj and caste assumptions.

Perhaps Khan’s most jarring depiction is that of the Bengal famine, which had been raging in northeastern India throughout 1943. Khan asserts that the famine was the product of hoarding by “black marketeers and more affluent traders,” poor administrative decisions, and willful neglect by the British (p. 210).[2] So it is provocative and “shocking,” as she correctly states, when she notes much later, quoting “a British lady from Calcutta,” that “the German atrocities apparently do not compare with the Bengal famine” (p. 299). Britain’s heroic wartime image certainly suffers from such an assertion, a damning indictment. Khan moves on quickly from this point, but it nevertheless lingers.

Overall, India at War is a careful and nuanced work of history. Yasmin Khan has striven to produce a study of World War II that is attentive to racism, colonialism, and gender discrimination; to everyday and extraordinary acts of heroism matched by inexplicable barbarism; to selflessness and selfishness; to the local and the global, and that reflects through the prism of the Indian subcontinent the contradictions of the Second World War. It is a big task at which she largely succeeds and India at War consequently is a book well worth reading.   

Notes

[1]. See for instance Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Nehru & Bose: Parallel Lives (New Delhi: Penguin, 2014); and Leonard Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj (New Delhi: Rupa, 2014), among many others. Khan is knowledgeable about this literature. 

[2]. Following the work of Janam Mukherjee and Amartya Sen. 

========================================
19.  NEW GENETIC ENGINEERING IS SLIPPING PAST OLD REGULATIONS
by Jennifer Kuzma
=======================================
(Aeon - 06 May, 2016)

Is genetic engineering really that different than traditional use of breeding and hybrids?

There is a longstanding tension between innovation and regulation in genetic engineering, as policymakers have struggled to balance the benefits of innovation with the need to address safety concerns. But with recent advances – most notably the discovery of the gene-targeting and gene-cutting molecular machinery known as CRISPR-Cas9 – the tension has begun to snap. While consumers are focused on a debate over the labelling of the first generation of genetically engineered food ingredients, the latest techniques allow types of genetic modification that fall outside of existing regulatory frameworks, and in some cases are deliberately designed to circumvent them.

Since the late 1970s, genetic engineers had to blindly launch a novel gene into a host cell, hoping it landed in a good spot and worked well there. Not anymore. Now they can precisely cut and delete particular spots of DNA; replace portions of genes; or add entirely new genes in specific places. These techniques, collectively called ‘gene editing’, are akin to our abilities to take pen to paper to delete phrases, rearrange sentences or add new ones. CRISPR-Cas9 in particular makes it easy for genetic engineers to mutate, swap or add multiple genes at one time. Researchers recently used this approach to edit a whole set of 60 pig genes, with the goal of producing porcine organs that harbour fewer viruses and so are safer for human transplantation.

Animal and crop genetic engineering is heading quickly towards gene editing, not just because of its speed and creative power but also because its developers recognise loopholes in oversight in the United States. Some of the new gene-editing techniques fall outside of current regulatory definitions, which are based on old-school genetic engineering. For example, the US Department of Agriculture has primary authority for overseeing genetically engineered plants under the Plant Pest Act. That approach made sense when engineers employed plant-pest DNA sequences to deliver new genes into host plants. With gene editing, though, biotech engineers no longer have to use such sequences to insert genes. As a result, several edited crops, such as an anti-browning white button mushroom using CRISPR-Cas9, have evaded US regulation. Regulatory avoidance has become the name of the game, as biotech crop developers flock towards under-the-radar gene editing.

A second advancement in genetic engineering relies on gene editing, but takes it a step further in order to spread altered genes through whole wild populations. Here the regulatory issues are even more daunting. Usually, an introduced gene is carried on one of a pair of chromosomes and is thus inherited by about half of the offspring in the first generation. Eventually the gene will get diluted in the natural population if there is no selective advantage to it. In contrast, experimental new ‘gene drive’ systems allow for an edited gene on one chromosome to copy itself into its partner chromosome. The result is that nearly all offspring will inherit the engineered gene. If just a few organisms with gene drives are released into the wild, the whole population could end up with the edited gene. In organisms with short generation times and random mating, an engineered gene could spread through a large population within just a season.

Gene drives have not yet been released into the wild, but they have been demonstrated in laboratory-cage experiments with fruit flies and mosquitoes. Scientists have proposed several reasons to use gene drives to engineer populations in the wild. For example, the drives could spread killer genes to destroy unwanted pest populations, invasive species or disease-carrying organisms. The release of just a few individuals with killer-drive systems could theoretically cause a whole population to collapse. This type of assault could come in handy for eradicating mosquitos carrying dengue, malaria or the Zika virus. Gene drives could also be used to add beneficial genes to populations. Editing systems such as CRISPR-Cas9 could carry cargo genes with them to immunise an endangered species against disease or to protect it from the effects of climate change. In some cases, gene drives might be the only option to save an endangered species or to protect humans from great harm.

Ecosystems are complex and sensitive, however. Unintended effects could accompany engineering species in the wild: a more dangerous pest might fill a niche left vacant by a killer-gene drive, or beneficial predators might be harmed from eating prey with killer-gene drives. Although researchers are working on systems to recall gene drives, certain effects could be irreversible and others unpredictable.

Gene editing and gene drives represent an inflection point in our technological capabilities: they are outpacing government abilities to develop appropriate risk assessments and oversight systems for them. To address these issues, several expert workshops have been held across the US at academic and non-profit institutions such as MIT and the J Craig Venter Institute over the past two years. The US National Academy of Sciences is soon expected to release a report on gene drives and responsible research, including suggestions about new approaches to oversight. Recently, our Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University contributed to the effort, convening a gene-drive workshop that brought together more than 70 experts in the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences from academe, business, government and non-profit organisations.

Although our workshop was not designed to achieve consensus, the group generally agreed on three key points:

    1) People living in areas of gene-drive deployment should be consulted prior to release;
    2) Conflict exists between current regulations that focus on containment, and field-testing gene drives that are designed to spread; and
    3) Gene drives do not respect human-made borders, so collaborative and international governance is even more important than usual.

Mainly, the workshop yielded more questions than answers – an important one being that scientists do not yet understand gene drives well enough to develop responsible rules for deploying them. Research funding for biosafety and risk analysis, as well as efforts to devise oversight systems suited for gene drives, are sorely needed.

Past societal conflict about genetically engineered organisms can provide guidance for oversight of the future. Instead of today’s contested, top-down systems of making decisions, we need adaptive, bottom-up, inclusive systems that can account for a variety of concerns while keeping pace with the changes in technology. Scholars in social sciences, including myself, have published policy-process models for such ‘new governance paradigms’. Social awareness and increased public dialogue about the new capabilities of genetic engineering are an important first step as we tease out the institutional arrangements. Let’s begin that effort now, as we stand at the precipice of engineering nature itself.

Jennifer Kuzma is the Goodnight-NC GSK Foundation Distinguished Professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University.

Edited by Corey S Powell

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

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

     #####
    #### _\_  ________
    ##=-[.].]| \      \
    #(    _\ |  |------|
     #   __| |  ||||||||
      \  _/  |  ||||||||
   .--'--'-. |  | ____ |
  / __      `|__|[o__o]|
_(____nm_______ /____\____ 

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