SACW - 24 May 2016 | Bangladesh: Islamist Terror / Pakistan: Honor killings / India - Pakistan: Busy polishing their atomic bombs / Nepal headed for showdown / India: Modi Govt. 2 years on; Left wins in Kerala but RSS culture has swept the place / Can Aung San Suu Kyi avoid the mistakes of Burma’s past? / China: official silence on the Cultural Revolution / Venezuela and the Silence of the Left

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 24 May 2016 - No. 2896 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh safer than Syria for jihadis - Interview with Taslima Nasreen
2. ’Honor killings’: Why Pakistan must act against this brutality | Sherry Rehman
3. India: Two Year of Narendra Modi Govt - select commentary | Bharat Bhushan / Shiv Visvanathan 
4. India - Pakistan: Fishermen in troubled waters | Jatin Desai
5. India: Hindutva linked terror accused in Malegaon blasts & other cases being let off and fine work by Hemant Karkare being taken down | Subhas Gatade and Julio Ribeiro
6. India: The Police, the counter-insurgency vigilantes and the maoists all responsible for displacement and division in Chhattissgarh villages
7. Breaking the silence on domestic abuse within progressive activist circles - A personal account | Swati Kamble
8. The Last Years of Victor Serge via his Mexican diaries
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
    India: RSS welfare projects in UP with 2017 assembly elections in view
    India: AAP releases NIA officer’s note against RSS leader Indresh Kumar
    India: At World Hindu Economic Forum in Bangalore VHP leader says The word ‘industry’ comes from Indus
    India: Right-wing Bajrang Dal men training its 'vigilante' men in Uttar Pradesh in use of rifles and other arms
    Richard David Williams: A review of Brahmans Beyond Nationalism, Muslims Beyond Dominance: A Hidden History of North Indian Classical Music’s Hinduization, by Justin Scarimbolo
    India: Muslim families shrinking fastest among Indian communities
    India: vote share figures concerning 2016 Assam assembly elections
    Secular India where Inter religious marriages are damned: How a Hindu-Muslim love story that started in Agra school ended in flames (Naveed Iqbal)
    India: Why saffron terror is not a myth - by shielding Hindu terror suspects, the Modi government is making a big mistake (Ashok Swain)
    India: Politics of indigeneity - A Letter to the National Media from Two ‘Migrants’ in Assam (Mayuri Bhattacharjee and Anwesha Dutta)
    India: Govt aggressively pushing its Hindutva agenda - wants Akbar Road Renamed
    India: BJP Won’t Capture Kerala Yet But RSS Culture Is Sweeping the State (Latha Jishnu)
    Secularism is a fig leaf. We’re more Pakistani than we think (Aakar Patel)
    Pakistan: ‘With no space for pluralism, religious intolerance thrived’ - report by Zoya Anwer on a teachers workshop held in Karachi
    India - Personal Law: Why it’s no conspiracy if courts intervene in Muslim personal law (Tahir Mahmood)
    India: Why exoneration of Sadhvi Pragya should worry everyone who stands for justice (Subhas Gatade)
    Pakistan: Right Wing Religious Alliance vows to Protect Blasphemy Law . . . .

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Can Aung San Suu Kyi avoid the mistakes of Burma’s past? - Editorial, The Washington Post
11. The Real Source of Terror in Bangladesh | Willam B. Milam
12. Nepal headed for another showdown: Madhes agitation moves to Kathmandu | Hari Bansh Jha
13. India: Re-Naming Akbar Road Is About Politics and Hindutva | Gopalkrishna Gandhi
14. Nuclear Battles In South Asia | Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian
15. India: CNDP Press release on 18th anniversary of India’s Nuclear Tests
16. Ex-president of the Maldives granted asylum in UK | Patrick Wintour
17. 'The official silence on the Cultural Revolution in China' - Editorial, The Telegraph
18. Culture and Power in the Chinese Communist Revolution | Jennifer Altehenger
19. Venezuela and the Silence of the Left | Pedro Lange-Churion

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1. BANGLADESH SAFER THAN SYRIA FOR JIHADIS - INTERVIEW WITH TASLIMA NASREEN
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Since 2013, more than 20 people – including secular writers, bloggers, professors, members of religious minorities and foreigners – have been killed in targeted attacks in Bangladesh. Why are secular individuals being targeted in Bangladesh? Who is killing them?
http://sacw.net/article12763.html

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2. ’HONOR KILLINGS’: WHY PAKISTAN MUST ACT AGAINST THIS BRUTALITY | Sherry Rehman
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In 2016, there is no reason that Pakistan’s people, mainly its women, should have to live in fear of the savagery and brutality of honor killings.
http://sacw.net/article12769.html

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3. INDIA: TWO YEAR OF NARENDRA MODI GOVT - SELECT COMMENTARY
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INDIA: NARENDRA MODI’S TWO YEARS HAVE INSTILLED FEAR IN THE MINDS OF MANY SECTIONS OF INDIAN SOCIETY
by Bharat Bhushan
On 16 May, 2014 Narendra Modi was elected with a resounding majority to Parliament. And on 26 May, he was sworn in as India’s Prime Minister. Two years later, has Modi managed to deliver on the promises that made people vote him to power? 
http://sacw.net/article12757.html

IN TWO YEARS THE NARENDRA MODI REGIME HAS EMASCULATED DEMOCRACY INTO A DEMAGOGIC AND THREATENING MAJORITARIANISM
by Shiv Visvanathan
Under the Modi regime What one is witnessing is more than cultural McCarthyism. To the witch-hunt, we are adding a cultural uprooting, inquisition-style. To the overt brutality of violence, one has to add the deeper violence of cultural disruption.
http://sacw.net/article12764.html

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4. INDIA - PAKISTAN: FISHERMEN IN TROUBLED WATERS | Jatin Desai
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To be in prison in one’s own country is itself a nerve-wracking ordeal. But imagine how much more agonising it must be to languish in another country’s prison, often endlessly, and for no fault or for minor transgressions, especially if the two countries in question happen to be India and Pakistan?
http://sacw.net/article12778.html

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5. INDIA: HINDUTVA LINKED TERROR ACCUSED IN MALEGAON BLASTS AND OTHER CASES BEING LET OFF AND FINE WORK BY HEMANT KARKARE BEING TAKEN DOWN
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The developments in the Malegaon blasts case have shown that the Hindutva forces are succeeding. Articles by Subhas Gatade and by Julio Ribeiro are posted below
http://sacw.net/article12771.html

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6. INDIA: THE POLICE, THE COUNTER-INSURGENCY VIGILANTES AND THE MAOISTS ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR DISPLACEMENT AND DIVISION IN CHHATTISSGARH VILLAGES
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A delegation comprising of Sanjay Parate, Chhattisgarh State Secretary CPI-M, Vineet Tiwari, Joshi-Adhikari Institute, CPI member, New Delhi, Archana Prasad, Professor Jawaharlal Nehru University and CC member AIDWA, and Nandini Sundar, Professor, Delhi University visited Bastar Division from 12 to 16 May 2016. We visited the following districts: Bijapur, Sukma, Bastar and Kanker. The focus of the visit was on the situation of ordinary villagers who are living through the conflict between the state and Maoists.
http://sacw.net/article12774.html

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7. BREAKING THE SILENCE ON DOMESTIC ABUSE WITHIN PROGRESSIVE ACTIVIST CIRCLES - A PERSONAL ACCOUNT | Swati Kamble
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My reason for writing this narrative is that I want to face the demons. I want to make sense of the things that happened to me. But not just for me. I want people to know, especially the young girls and women who are conditioned to endure violence and who are silently fighting abuse. I want them to know that they are not alone in this fight. To the society that pretends it is a private matter, I want to say loud and clear that domestic abuse is real.
http://sacw.net/article12765.html

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8. THE LAST YEARS OF VICTOR SERGE VIA HIS MEXICAN DIARIES
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Victor Serge (1890–1947) spent the last six years of his life in Mexico, joining the exodus from Marseille in 1941 and remaining behind after the War. Here he completed his two most celebrated works. Memoirs of a Revolutionary evokes his vagabond anarchist youth, passage to revolutionary Russia, years as assistant to Zinoviev in the Comintern and Left Oppositionist, prison, exile; a cast of thousands from the Old Bolshevik generation recalled in vivid detail. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was the most powerful of his ‘documentary novels’ on the turmoil of the inter-war years. Extracts from Serge’s 1944, 45 and 47 diaries had appeared in Les Temps modernes in 1949
http://sacw.net/article12755.html

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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
    India: Narendra Modi govt's new move on education: Coming soon a Vedic and Sanskrit education board
    India: RSS welfare projects in UP with 2017 assembly elections in view
    India: AAP releases NIA officer’s note against RSS leader Indresh Kumar
    India: At World Hindu Economic Forum in Bangalore VHP leader says The word ‘industry’ comes from Indus
    India: Right-wing Bajrang Dal men training its 'vigilante' men in Uttar Pradesh in use of rifles and other arms
    Richard David Williams: A review of Brahmans Beyond Nationalism, Muslims Beyond Dominance: A Hidden History of North Indian Classical Music’s Hinduization, by Justin Scarimbolo
    India: Muslim families shrinking fastest among Indian communities
    India: vote share figures concerning 2016 Assam assembly elections
    Secular India where Inter religious marriages are damned: How a Hindu-Muslim love story that started in Agra school ended in flames (Naveed Iqbal)
    India: Why saffron terror is not a myth - by shielding Hindu terror suspects, the Modi government is making a big mistake (Ashok Swain)
    India: Politics of indigeneity - A Letter to the National Media from Two ‘Migrants’ in Assam (Mayuri Bhattacharjee and Anwesha Dutta)
    India: Govt aggressively pushing its Hindutva agenda - wants Akbar Road Renamed
    India: BJP Won’t Capture Kerala Yet But RSS Culture Is Sweeping the State (Latha Jishnu)
    Revolutionary Bhagat Singh and Freedom Movement
    Secularism is a fig leaf. We’re more Pakistani than we think (Aakar Patel)
    Pakistan: ‘With no space for pluralism, religious intolerance thrived’ - report by Zoya Anwer on a teachers workshop held in Karachi
    India - Personal Law: Why it’s no conspiracy if courts intervene in Muslim personal law (Tahir Mahmood)
    India: Why exoneration of Sadhvi Pragya should worry everyone who stands for justice (Subhas Gatade)
    Pakistan: Right Wing Religious Alliance vows to Protect Blasphemy Law . . . .
    India: Caste-based UP school (Atul Chandra's report for Catch News)
    India - Bovine Matters in Modi Government : At first of kind cattlesheds conference, ministers were a bit cowed down by slogans & scuffles
    India: Rohit Vemula's Family gets a home but with help from the Muslim Right
    Making Goebbels proud of India (Jawed Naqvi)
    India - Assam Assembly elections 2016 - How Divided Speech United Voters Behind Two Poles (Rajeev Bhattacharyya)
    India: Malayalee scholar MN Karassery's fight against religious fundamentalism will continue beyond elections in Kerala
    India - Malegaon Blasts: NIA must Probe RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s Admission and Allegations about Art of Living (Shamsul Islam) 

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. CAN AUNG SAN SUU KYI AVOID THE MISTAKES OF BURMA’S PAST? - EDITORIAL, THE WASHINGTON POST
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(The Washington Post - May 20, 2016)

Can Aung San Suu Kyi avoid the mistakes of Burma’s past?

By Editorial Board 

THE TRANSITION from military rule and dictatorship to democracy is treacherous. In the past generation, not every nation that has embarked on that journey has arrived at its hoped-for destination, nor has every revolutionary leader delivered on the promise. Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, a champion of human rights and democracy in Burma who has taken most of the reins of power, no doubt has studied lessons from Lech Walesa, Boris Yeltsin and Nelson Mandela. In the weeks since her government assumed control, ending decades of military rule during which she was held under house arrest, she has moved gingerly and cautiously.

Beyond doubt, she realizes the enormity of the obstacles facing her and threatening Burma’s transition, but at the same time she sees that popular expectations are running high. She has freed political prisoners and set a new tone. Thin Yu Mon, a human rights activist in Rangoon who was recently in Washington, marveled at the atmosphere she encountered in a public festival. “Now we are really free,” she said.

But Burma’s democratic trajectory is not assured. The Obama administration properly recognized this Tuesday with a calibrated easing of sanctions on Burma, also called Myanmar, that left some in place, signaling a continuing concern over human rights abuses, ethnic conflict and the continuing influence of the military, which is trying to preserve undemocratic power through a constitution it wrote before allowing free elections.

One of Aung San Suu Kyi’s most daunting challenges, therefore, is to deal with these powerful and unelected generals, who control a quarter of the seats in parliament not subject to election and thus can block constitutional reform; who hold the key Defense, Home Affairs and Border Affairs ministries; and who have grown accustomed to profiting handsomely from the nation’s bounty. In the latest action, the United States has retained an arms ban, as well as sanctions on individuals and entities that are obstructing political reform, committing human rights abuses or engaging in illicit military trade with North Korea.

At the same time, Aung San Suu Kyi faces a cauldron of ethnic tension and conflict. Among the most severe is the plight of the 1 million Rohingya, a Muslim minority who have been subject to persecution and misery, denied citizenship and crowded into squalid camps. Some 100,000 Rohingya were driven from their homes in 2012 in a wave of violence. Subsequently, many fled and lost their lives on rickety ships at sea. Nationalist Buddhists have insisted the Rohingya are not Burmese and call them “Bengalis,” as did the former military government. Shockingly, after the U.S. Embassy expressed condolences recently for the loss of at least 20 people whose boat capsized on April 19, Aung San Suu Kyi suggested to the new U.S. ambassador that the United States should not use the word “Rohingya.” Ever careful, she may have been catering to Buddhist nationalists, but if so, it was an egregious error.

She must find a way to correct the mistakes of the past, not repeat them. 

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11. THE REAL SOURCE OF TERROR IN BANGLADESH
by Willam B. Milam
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(The New York Times - May 19, 2016)

On Friday, a doctor in western Bangladesh was hacked to death. Last weekend, it was a Buddhist monk, in the southeastern part of the country. The week before, it was a Sufi Muslim leader, up north. Less than two weeks earlier, it was an L.G.B.T. activist. Just days before that, an English professor.

Some of these attacks have not yet been claimed, but they follow a gruesome pattern: There have been at least 25 violent, sometimes public, killings of religious minorities, secularists and free-speech advocates in Bangladesh since February 2015. A dozen more people have been assaulted in similar ways and survived.

Of these attacks, more than 20 have been claimed by the Islamic State, about half a dozen by Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and one each by the indigenous Bangladeshi extremist groups Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and Ansar al-Islam.

The surge is worrying Western governments, which fear that local Islamist terrorists may now be competing for the attention of international jihadist networks or cooperating with them. Several Western countries have responded with antiterrorism measures: Japan is providing aviation security; the United States has called for strengthening cooperation with the Bangladeshi authorities to counter terrorism and violent extremism.

This is a predictable reaction, but it is misguided, and dangerous, because it proceeds from the wrong diagnosis.

The recent string of vicious killings in Bangladesh is less a terrorism issue than a governance issue: It is the ruling Awami League’s onslaught against its political opponents, which began in earnest after the last election in January 2014, that has unleashed extremists in Bangladesh.

A zero-sum mentality has been the rule of Bangladeshi politics since the end of the military dictatorship in 1991. Between then and 2007, the country’s two main parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (B.N.P.), traded power every term. Whichever one was leading the government focused on enriching itself and weakening the other. That left the private sector largely alone to invest in economic expansion and NGOs to provide education, health care and other social services the government wasn’t delivering.

In some respects, the government’s failure to do its job served the country well: The economy has grown by an average of 5-6 percent annually over the last two decades; Bangladesh has outdone India and Pakistan on various social development indicators, such as health care and education. But the country’s political culture steadily deteriorated.

Photo

A student with a portrait of the English professor A.F.M. Rezaul Karim Siddique, who was hacked to death on his way to work in April. Credit Associated Press

Major protests broke out in late 2006, after the then-ruling B.N.P. tried to rig elections scheduled for 2007. The army took over for a time. The Awami League was voted back into office in 2009 and in 2011 used its vast majority in Parliament to remove from the Constitution a clause providing that general elections be overseen by nonpartisan caretaker governments.

The B.N.P. boycotted the 2014 election, largely in response to that amendment, and since winning that one-party election the Awami League has been hellbent on turning Bangladesh into a one-party state. The B.N.P. has become the primary — really, the only — target of the government’s so-called law enforcement efforts. The Awami League routinely deploys the judiciary and the police against its political opponents and any dissenting voices in civil society.

High-ranking B.N.P. members have been framed on spurious corruption charges, among other things. According to the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, the government has silenced critics by resorting to enforced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings. Journalists who dare cover any of this are being charged with sedition and treason.

The Awami League’s relentless campaign against the political opposition and civil society has allowed violent radicals of all stripes to let loose. Concentrating the state’s limited judicial and police powers on the B.N.P. and its supporters reduces the resources that can be devoted to preventing terrorism and crime. Using illegal means to quiet perceived opponents undermines the rule of law, creating an atmosphere of impunity that emboldens extremists.

The first machete killing — of a secularist blogger — occurred in February 2013, before the last general election. The Awami League reacted as you would expect from an incumbent party: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina left her office to offer condolences to the family and vowed to catch the culprits. But since the party was re-elected, its response to similar attacks has become constructively evasive.

It is not clear whether Awami League leaders are even paying their respects to the victims’ families. At the same time that the leaders deny the presence in Bangladesh of Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent or the Islamic State, they accuse the B.N.P. — or what is left of it — of conspiring with the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami to destabilize the government. Ms. Hasina repeated this charge most recently a few weeks ago, after the killing of the L.G.B.T. activist and U.S. Embassy employee Xulhaz Mannan.

More pernicious still is the government’s wavering on free expression. On the eve of a Hindu holiday in September, Ms. Hasina told a group of Hindu leaders that people had the right to practice their own religion but not “to hurt others’ religious sentiment.” At a Bengali New Year celebration last month, she reportedly said the writings of bloggers criticizing Islam were “filthy words” and asked why the government should take responsibility if those writings “lead to any untoward incidents?” Islamists could be forgiven for interpreting these statements as a free pass to attack people they consider to be enemies of scriptural Islam.

Bangladesh has a history of fringe extremist groups. Some of those are a legacy of the war in Afghanistan, in which some Bangladeshis fought; others are byproducts of the Wahhabi influence that Bangladeshi workers in the Persian Gulf brought back when they returned home. But before the string of attacks that started last year, the last known terrorist attack in Bangladesh (by Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh) dated back to 2005.

It’s difficult to gauge the current terrorist threat in Bangladesh, especially any links between local and international groups. Whatever its exact nature, however, it is largely the result of the government’s repression against mainstream dissent. Responding to this wave of attacks as though it were principally a security issue, rather than a governance problem, would only make matters worse.

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

William B. Milam is a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and a former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh and Pakistan.

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12. NEPAL HEADED FOR ANOTHER SHOWDOWN: MADHES AGITATION MOVES TO KATHMANDU
by Hari Bansh Jha
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(Catch News - 23 May 2016)

The six-month long Madhes-centric agitation against the new Constitution in Nepal has now become Kathmandu-centric. Since 14 May, the Madhes-based political parties together with hill-based indigenous (Janajati) political forces - including the Sherpas, Magars, Gurungs and Rai-Limbus - have come together in a joint front called "Federal Alliance" in their bid to oppose the new Constitution promulgated on 20 September, 2015.

The Constitution curtailed much of their rights enshrined in the Interim Constitution 2007. The agitating groups have placed 26 demands before the government, which includes re-writing of the Constitution.
AFP

With a view to creating pressure on the government to address their grievances, thousands of political cadres belonging to Madhes-based political parties and hill-Janajati groups have been opposing the Constitution by organising different forms of protests.

Also read: Nepal: India's emasculated responses have emboldened KP Oli

Towards this end, they organised rallies, performed a two-day sit-in programme at Singha Durbar, the administrative unit of the government and a one-day sit-in programme at the official residence of the Nepalese Prime Minister. The government, however, turned a deaf ear towards their demands and termed the agitation as "pointless drama"
"Many fear Nepal may plunge into further political instability and the situation could turn violent"

Therefore, the agitating groups extended their protests for 10 days. Accordingly, they have been protesting against the Constitution in Kathmandu Valley and also in Pokhara and Birgunj. Over last few days, people's participation in the agitation is growing, despite the government's attempts to thwart it..

Of course, the government sent letters inviting the agitating groups to come forward and resolve differences over Constitution-related issues. But the agitating groups rejected the offer stating that the government wasn't serious about addressing their concerns in the three dozen times talks were held. They also add that the government hasn't created a congenial atmosphere for dialogue.

However, there is growing anxiety over the stand-off between the government and agitating groups. Many fear that Nepal would move further towards political instability and the situation could become violent if the stand-off continues for long.

Also read: Nepal constitution: Madheshi protests end but the anger remains

Last year, such a standoff led to an economic blockade of Nepal for 5 months, which created severe shortage of such essential items as oil and cooking gas in the country. According to estimates, each month of blockade caused a loss of $2 billion to Nepal's economy.

The entire economy was paralysed and Nepal's rate of economic growth has become negative.

On top of that, 58 agitators lost their lives and thousands were injured during that period. Human rights bodies have highlighted the excesses committed by the security forces against the agitating groups.

Also read: 100 days of Oli-garchy: Nepal PM's joke is on the people

Unfortunately, the government does not appear to be in a mood to address the demands of the Madhesis, Janajatis, Muslims, Dalits and women groups, constituting over 70% of Nepal's population. Both the India-Britain and India-European Union press communiqués released at the end of visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's to Britain and Brussels, Nepal was advised to make the Constitution inclusive and accommodate the concerns of different agitating groups to ensure peace and political stability in the country.

Even US Secretary of State John Kerry gave similar advice to Kamal Thapa, Deputy Prime Minister of Nepal. But the government of Nepal not only ignored such friendly advice but even opposed it.
"The entire economy was paralysed and Nepal's rate of economic growth has become negative"

To make matters worse, the government of Nepal in its recent policies and programmes has made an announcement to hold local level elections by November/December this year. In political circles, such a step is seen as as an effort to institutionalise the new Constitution. However, there is no sense in conducting this election as local elections fall under the jurisdication of states and the issue of demarcating states hasn't been resolved as yet.

In 2005, King Gyanendra also tried to conduct local level elections, pending in the country since 1997. But he failed due to strong opposition from political parties.

Lack of flexibility on the part of the government to address the problems of the agitating groups is likely to intensify the confrontation. But this time, the Kathmandu-centric agitation is likely to be more effective than the Madhes-centric agitation as it has the support of the hill-based indigenous groups and other political forces in Nepal.

Also read: False dawn in Kathmandu: how PM Oli lost the plot & what India can do

Besides, Western powers also appear to be sympathetic towards the cause of the Madhesis and Janajatis. In view of this development, the state needs to avoid a confrontation by addressing the core demands of the agitating groups such as the formation of one or two states in Terai, parliamentary elections on the basis of population, proportional representation and removal of discriminatory provisions in citizenship-related rules. Rewriting the Constitution is unavoidable for addressing these demands.

Edited by Aditya Menon

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13. INDIA: RE-NAMING AKBAR ROAD IS ABOUT POLITICS AND HINDUTVA
by Gopalkrishna Gandhi
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(The Wire - 19 May 2016)

This re-naming fever is about soft warfare, cultural politics.

General Vijay Kumar Singh is a soldier and a Rajput. He has in abundance a soldier’s perseverance and a Rajput’s pride. A soldier is expected by training to do his duty unflinchingly, a Rajput is expected by custom to speed to battle in a cloud of dust and determination, returning only if victorious.

A general must retire when the time comes for him to do so. V. K. Singh has retired from the Indian Army. But no Rajput retires from being a Rajput. Singh is a Rajput forever.

The former army chief’s wish to have New Delhi’s Akbar Road re-named as Maharana Pratap Singh Road has to be seen as a retired soldier’s fascination for military history and an un-retirable Rajput’s untiring Rajput chromosomes.

No one can fault a lion for roaring.

With no war declared, no one bugling him to battle, Singh’s instincts and training have made him turn from the solatiums of the present to the stimulations of the past. He has created a diorama of the battle fought four hundred and forty years ago at Haldighati between Maharana Pratap Singh and Akbar’s army commander Man Singh. There is true passion in the box-scenes, true nostalgia, true kinship. To the former general from the Rajput Regiment, I offer a salute for his miniaturisations of soldierly courage and a khamaghani for the magnifications of Rajput pride.

But the matter cannot be left there. His recommendation has been made as a minister. To another minister. And that, in an official letter. With that the idea goes beyond the cloisters of an individual’s imagining  to the chambers of public office. It makes the suggestion a communication of a minister’s idea, made by him as minister, to another minister who is thought by the ‘sending’ minister to be the right ‘receiving’ minister for that minister’s ministerial action. All this anoints the recommendation with the governmental equivalent of rose-water, which is, the official ink.

Unless withdrawn by him or officially disowned by the union government, his recommendation cannot be taken as an individual’s stray thoughts. It has to be seen as a reflection, howsoever individualised, of this government’s ideological gradient, its historical mount, its political axle.

And those are patent enough.

Hindutva

B.R. Ambedkar gave a now famous message to the All India Depressed Classes Conference at Nagpur in 1942 – Agitate, Educate, Organise. That can be re-worked in Hindutva’s vocabulary as ‘Regurgitate, Resuscitate, Polarise’. Regurgitate old prejudices, resuscitate dying biases, polarise communities. Of these, the first two are about methods, the third is about policy. And the policy is to polarise India first, on religious lines as between Hindus and Muslims and then, on thinking lines as between those who want India to be plural and those who want it to be Hindu-dominated, between those who want India to be liberal and those who want it to be tersely majoritarian. In other words, polarising India between India that is Bharat and India that is Bharatiya, between India that is Hind and an India that is Hindu.

The re-naming of Aurangzeb Road as A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Road had little to do with Aurangzeb. It had less to do with Kalam. It had everything to do with polarising, with wanting to turn the knife in India’s Hindu-Muslim duality. It had little to do with history and everything to do with politics. It had little to do with social memory and everything to do with communal manipulation. It was about regurgitating memories of Mughal bigotry, resuscitating ‘Aurangzeb the Bad’ and, above all, polarising Bharat and Hind.

Aurangzeb Road was renamed A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Road, ‘Bad’ Muslim to ‘Good’ Muslim, with a hidden snigger. The call for turning Akbar Road into Maharana Pratap Singh Road, great Muslim to great Hindu, is being made with an open sneer. The first re-naming idea was clever, this one is morbid. The first caused a gasp of astonishment, this stifles the breath of belief.

Akbar

Akbar is ‘Akbar the Great’ not because he was a great Mughal but because he was, simply, exceptional. In his use of power for creating a nation unified by a moral direction, Akbar ranks with Ashoka and with Ashoka alone. Not just the Hindustan he ruled but the India of subsequent  centuries has recognised him as one who “died as he had lived for many years, a man whose religion nobody could name” –  an ideal condition for the ruler of a country with many religious traditions. Akbar stands at a rare intersection of scholarly esteem and popular endorsement as a figure of national convergence.

His urbane treatment of India’s Hindu majority including his marrying Hindu princesses, doing away with the outrageous pilgrim tax and the appointment of Hindus to the highest possible military and civilian commands can be interpreted as acts of political canniness as indeed they were. But his extension of the same civility to Jains, Parsis and Christians has to have had inner roots in eclecticism. If the Din-i-Ilahi stabilised his throne and burnished his personal image, it also becalmed the country.

Akbar sought to build trust. He tried to win and retain the confidence of his people in his impartiality, his justice. Ashoka erected pillars and carved edicts across his empire to proclaim the Dhamma; Akbar built the Ibadat Khana (House of Worship) in his gardens at Sikri to be used as a discussion hall to debate, in a free and enquiring spirit, questions of religion and theology.

Does Singh not know this? Of course he does. But then he is captive, captive to the ideology of his political party.

Why, four and a half centuries on, should Akbar’s name on a road make him want to erase it? Is pluralism threatening? Is debate unwelcome? Is civility shown by a Muslim a challenge?

Or has it become necessary, urgently necessary now, to further Hindutva consolidation, and here through the great veins of Rajput self-pride?

The answer is patent.

Hindu consolidation

The minister could have asked for a brand new building, flyover or a road to be named after the lion-hearted Maharana Pratap Singh of Mewar. I do not know if Mansingh Road is named after Akbar’s commander or another of the same name. If the former, that name could in some logic though in bad form, have been sought to be renamed but that would not have satisfied their Hindutva. Replacing Akbar’s name on the New Delhi road by that of Akbar’s brave adversary, does. It does so by staging a proxy Haldighati, a diorama battle in which the great Mughal becomes ‘the oppressor’ and the great Rana the liberator, the great Mughal becomes the Muslim and the great Rana becomes the Hindu. It continues Hindutva’s plan to un-ravel, strand by strand, the great weave of India’s pluralism. It continues the self-deluding and India-defeating agenda of Hindu consolidation.

It is not about the person any more. It is about the religion.

Babur Road, Humayun Road, Akbar Road, Jehangir Road, Shahjahan Road have all been placed by road re-namers on a death row. They will all have Maharana Pratap equivalents. Ashoka Road will be a harder case. Unless of course someone suggests that it be re-named Kalinga Marg.

Supporting Singh’s recommendation, a BJP spokesperson has said that road names such as Akbar Road’s should go because they represent India’s oppressors. Imagine, she said, Israel having a road named after Hitler. One can be sure that from ‘the other side’, there will be equally intemperate and ill-tempered howls of protest comparing Hindus to the Nazis, Indian Muslims to the Jewish victims of the second world war.

The re-namings do not have to be done, as they say, ‘actually’. It is enough for purposes of consolidation that they be recommended. Twist the lime-drop into the milk and wait for it to curdle. The khoya can take its own time.  And so, suggest, suggest, recommend, recommend. And do nothing more. Sit back and let ‘them’ fight. The next re-naming tranche could be recommended for places – Allahabad, Aurangabad, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad,  Secunderabad, Nizamabad, Shahjahanabad, Faizabad, Ahmednagar, Fatehpur… And then for cultural signets. Soft power is a phrase of dubious distinction used for another gambit of suspicious intent, cultural diplomacy. This re-naming fever is about soft warfare, cultural politics. If, in Pakistan and elsewhere the beautiful Khuda Hafiz has been sought to be replaced by Allah Hafiz, Hindutva will want to and try to replace Jai Hind! By Bharat Mata ki Jai!. And the simple Namaste with Jai Sri Krishna! to be responded, do not forget, by Radhe! Radhe ! But that will be tough, in Tamil Nadu certainly where, thanks to Periyar and the Dravidar movement, speakers of that classical language, despite all their piety, will not countenance replacing Vanakkam with Jai this or that deity.

Rend, rend, that which time has stitched;  tear , tear what time has darned. And cut, cut what has stayed whole. This is what Muslim bigotry and Hindu consolidation are about.

Sare Jahan Se Achcha

Sadly, however, for the zealots, and fortunately for India, its people, for Hum Bharat Ke Log or Hum Hind Ki Awam, are just that many, that many too many, and too many too sensible, to be bamboozled by the cultural demagoguery, political roguery and emotional thuggery. We do not want to be good or bad Muslims, good or bad Hindus. We just want to be fortunate citizens, fortunate in the intentions of our rulers, fortunate in their wisdom not their cleverness, in the honesty of their hands not the smartness of their fingers. Our rulers cannot be Ashoka or Akbar. But they can try to be their heirs. Nehru did, Ambedkar did. What did they re-name ? Nothing, certainly not India. They kept that name, adding to it a grand synonym, Bharat. And that is what Rakesh Sharma celebrated, I am sure, when gazing down at the Time-carved peninsula of India from his sky-seat, he answered Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s question of how India looked from ‘up there’, with ‘Sare Jahan Se Achcha’.

Today’s rulers, in their mundane seat of brief office can never, howsoever hard they may try, ever hope to erase the shape of Hindustan from the name and style India that is Bharat.

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14. NUCLEAR BATTLES IN SOUTH ASIA
by Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian
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(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 4 May 2016)

The armies of Pakistan and India are practicing for nuclear war on the battlefield: Pakistan is rehearsing the use of nuclear weapons, while India trains to fight on despite such use and subsequently escalate. What were once mere ideas and scenarios dreamed up by hawkish military planners and nuclear strategists have become starkly visible capabilities and commitments. When the time comes, policy makers and people on both sides will expect—and perhaps demand—that the Bomb be used.

Pakistan has long been explicit about its plans to use nuclear weapons to counter Indian conventional forces. Pakistan has developed “a variety of short range, low yield nuclear weapons,” claimed retired General Khalid Kidwai in March 2015. Kidwai is the founder—and from 2000 until 2014 ran—Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which is responsible for managing the country’s nuclear weapons production complex and arsenal. These weapons, Kidwai said, have closed the “space for conventional war.” Echoing this message, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry declared in October 2015 that his country might use these tactical nuclear weapons in a conflict with India. There already have been four wars between the two countries—in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999—as well as many war scares.

The United States, which at one time deployed over 7,000 tactical nuclear weapons in Europe aimed at Soviet conventional forces, has expressed alarm about Pakistan’s plans. Amplifying comments made by President Barack Obama, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained in April 2016 that “we’re concerned by the increased security challenges that accompany growing stockpiles, particularly tactical nuclear weapons that are designed for use on the battlefield. And these systems are a source of concern because they’re susceptible to theft due to their size and mode of employment. Essentially, by having these smaller weapons, the threshold for their use is lowered, and the[re is] risk that a conventional conflict between India and Pakistan could escalate to include the use of nuclear weapons.”

Responding to US concerns, Kidwai has said that “Pakistan would not cap or curb its nuclear weapons programme or accept any restrictions.” The New York Times reported last year that so far, “an unknown number of the tactical weapons were built, but not deployed” by Pakistan.

India is making its own preparations for nuclear war. The Indian Army conducted a massive military exercise in April 2016 in the Rajasthan desert bordering Pakistan, involving tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and 30,000 soldiers, to practice what to do if it is attacked with nuclear weapons on the battlefield. An Indian Army spokesman told the media, “our policy has been always that we will never use nuclear weapons first. But if we are attacked, we need to gather ourselves and fight through it. The simulation is about doing exactly that.” This is not the first such Indian exercise. As long ago as May 2001, the Indian military conducted an exercise based on the possibility that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons on Indian armed forces. Indian generals and planners have anticipated such battlefield nuclear use by Pakistan since at least the 1990s.

Driving the current set of Indian strategies and capabilities is the army’s search for a way to use military force to retaliate against Pakistan for harboring terrorists who, from time to time, have launched devastating attacks inside India. In 2001, Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed credit for an attack on India’s parliament. India massed troops on the border, but had to withdraw them after several months. International pressure, a public commitment by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to restrain militants from future strikes, and Pakistan’s threat to use nuclear weapons if it was attacked caused the crisis to wind down. Following the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants, General Deepak Kapoor, then India’s army chief, argued that India must find a way to wage “limited war under a nuclear overhang.”

Paths to destruction. It could come to pass that Pakistan’s army uses nuclear weapons on its own territory to repel invading Indian tanks and troops. Pakistan’s planners may intend this first use of nuclear weapons as a warning shot, hoping to cause the Indians to stop and withdraw rather than risk worse. But while withdrawal would be one possible outcome, there would also be others. It is more likely, for instance, that the use of one—or even a few—Pakistani battlefield nuclear weapons would fail to dent Indian forces. While even a small nuclear weapon would be devastating in an urban environment, many such weapons may be required to have a decisive military impact on columns of well-dispersed battle tanks and soldiers who have practiced warfighting under nuclear attack.

India’s nuclear doctrine, meanwhile, is built on massive retaliation. In 2003, India’s cabinet declared nuclear weapons “will only be used in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere … nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” According to Admiral Vijay Shankar, a former head of Indian strategic nuclear forces, such retaliation would involve nuclear attacks on Pakistan’s cities. Kidwai describes such Indian threats as “bluster and blunder,” since they “are not taking into account the balance of nuclear weapons of Pakistan, which hopefully not, but has the potential to go back and give the same kind of dose to the other side.” For nuclear planners in both countries, threatening the slaughter of millions and mutual destruction seems to be the order of the day.

There are also risks short of war, of course. Nuclear weapon units integrated with conventional forces and ready to be dispersed on a battlefield pose critical command-and-control issues.  Kidwai believes that focusing on “lesser issues of command and control, and the possibility of their falling into wrong hands is unfortunate.” He claims “Our nuclear weapons are safe, secure and under complete institutional and professional control.” The implication is that communications between the nuclear headquarters and deployed units in the field will be perfectly reliable and secure even in wartime, and that commanders of individual units will not seek—or have the capability to launch—a nuclear strike unless authorized.

It is difficult to believe these claims. Peering through the fog of war, dizzied by developments on a rapidly evolving battlefield, confronting possible defeat, and fuelled by generations of animosity towards India as well as a thirst for revenge from previous wars, it cannot be guaranteed that a Pakistani nuclear commander will follow the rules.

Add to this the risks in what now passes for peacetime in Pakistan. The Strategic Plans Division may dismiss fears that its nuclear weapons will be hijacked. However, the military has rarely succeeded in anticipating and preventing major attacks by militant Islamist groups in Pakistan. Look no further than the May 2011 attack on Karachi’s Mehran naval base. The attackers, who may have numbered up to 20 and had insider help, “scaled the perimeter fence and continued to the main base by exploiting a blind spot in surveillance camera coverage, suggesting detailed knowledge of the base layout,” The Guardian reported. It took elite troops 18 hours to regain control of the base.

It is also unclear how the officers who are in charge of Pakistan’s military bases and those who make security-clearance decisions are chosen, and whether their own commitment to fighting Islamic radicalism is genuine. In 2009, the former commander of Pakistan’s Shamsi Air Force Base was arrested for leaking “sensitive” information to a radical Islamist organization. In 2011, a one-star general serving in Pakistan’s General Headquarters was arrested for his contacts with a militant group. In a religion that stresses its own completeness, and in which righteousness is given higher value than obedience to temporal authority, there is room for serious conflict between piety and military discipline.

Grasping at straws? A first step to reducing all these nuclear dangers is to prevent an escalation of tensions. This must start with Pakistan tackling the threat of Islamist militancy at home and preventing militant attacks across the India-Pakistan border. The outlook is mixed on both fronts. Pakistan’s army accelerated its war against radical Islamist groups after a 2014 attack on an army school in Peshawar that killed more than 140 students and staff. Despite military claims of success, though, responding with massive force and inflicting countless deaths will not resolve what is at its core a political and social problem. Ending the threat of radical Islam in Pakistan will require sweeping changes in public attitudes and major policy reversals in many areas. These are nowhere in sight.

To its credit, Pakistan has recently been more forward-leaning in dealing with militants who attack India. Following the assault on India’s Pathankot airbase in January 2016, Sartaj Aziz,  foreign affairs adviser to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, made the surprising revelation that a mobile phone number used by the attackers was linked to the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed based in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. To collect evidence for possible legal action against Jaish-e-Mohammed leaders, Pakistan sent a fact-finding mission to Pathankot with the approval of the Indian government. This kind of cooperation by the two governments is unprecedented.

Rather than limit cooperation to crisis management after an attack, Pakistan and India could agree on a South Asian version of the Open Skies Treaty to provide each with limited access to the other’s air space for surveillance purposes. India has an interest in monitoring possible militant camps within Pakistan and border areas where militants may cross. Pakistan seeks early warning in case India is preparing to mount a surprise attack. The 1992 Open Skies Treaty, covering the United States and fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and Russia and its former Soviet and Eastern European partners, allows for controlled surveillance flights with agreed instruments such as photographic and video cameras, radar, and infrared scanners. The goal is to promote “greater openness and transparency in their military activities” and “to facilitate the monitoring of compliance with existing or future arms control agreements and to strengthen the capacity for conflict prevention and crisis management.” The United States and other parties to the Open Skies Treaty could share their technical tools and flight management experience with Pakistan and India, as well as what they’ve learned about the value of the agreement.

The two countries should also prepare in case things go wrong. The 1999 Lahore Agreement committed Pakistan and India to “notify each other immediately in the event of any accidental, unauthorised or unexplained incident that could create the risk of a fallout with adverse consequences for both sides, or an outbreak of a nuclear war between the two countries, as well as to adopt measures aimed at diminishing the possibility of such actions, or such incidents being misinterpreted by the other.” The question is, who will each side call and how? One possibility is a direct line of communication—a hotline—from Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division chief to the head of India’s Strategic Forces Command. There are other hotlines, and they are not always used or used wisely, but in a crisis this may be better than relying on television, Facebook, Twitter, or Washington.

Progress towards even such limited measures will confront the fact that in both India and Pakistan, nationalist passions forged over seven decades are being reinforced by the institutional self-interests of emerging nuclear military-industrial complexes and their political patrons and ideological allies. The United States and Soviet Union saw such deepening militarization during the Cold War. The institutional forces and ideas—what the great English anti-nuclear activist, thinker, and historian E.P. Thompson called “the thrust of exterminism”—proved so strong that even when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union fell, the Bomb remained. With expansive and costly nuclear arsenal modernizations underway in the United States, Russia, and the other established nuclear weapon states, the Bomb now seems ready for a second life. Increasingly subject to the same exterminist forces, South Asia may be locked in its nuclear nightmare for a very long time.

Pervez Hoodbhoy has taught in the physics department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad for 40 years and now also teaches at Forman Christian College in Lahore. He has won many awards, including the Abdus Salam Award for Mathematics, the Book of the Year Award from the National Book Council of Pakistan, and UNESCO's Kalinga Award for science popularization. In addition to producing many documentaries for Pakistani television, he has written the books Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, Education and the State: Fifty Years of Pakistan, and Confronting the Bomb: Pakistani and Indian Scientists Speak Out. He is a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors.

Zia Mian is at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He is co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM).

[also available at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SAAN_/message/1691]

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15. INDIA: CNDP PRESS RELEASE ON 18TH ANNIVERSARY OF INDIA’S NUCLEAR TESTS
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http://sacw.net/article12744.html

sacw.net - 11 May 2016

Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP)

PRESS RELEASE | May 11, 2016

May 11th and May 13th, 2016 will 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. India has become the world’s largest arms importer, with a share of 14 per cent in the entire world’s weapons’ trade. Between 2006–10 and 2011–15, India’s weapons imports have grown by 90 per cent. Similarly, Pakistan’s defence budget has also seen a steep rise. Evidently, the claims of nuclear weapons supporters that these lethal weapons would bring security and stability to the region have proven to be untrue.

It’s time we realise that nuclear weapons do not provide us security. They just push the world into a spiral of insecurity and arms racing. As the documents from the Cold War era unclassified in recent years have shown, nuclear deterrence is a dangerous myth and the non-use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima has been more a matter of of sheer luck given various close calls caused by both accidents and near-fatal miscalculations.

Totally unprovoked, and in fact carried out at a time when India’s relationship with both Pakistan and China were getting better in the 90s, India’s nuclear tests in Pokharan had more to do with the militant Hindu-majoritarian jingoism of the BJP and RSS. The rise of religious fundamentalism in both India and Pakistan has made the region more dangerous and there is a real possibility of a limited conventional war that can then escalate to a nuclear exchange. In today’s world, only South Asia is a region which has two nuclear-armed neighbours with an unabated history of of hot and cold wars from 1947 onwards.

The increasing privatisation of defence sector in India under the Modi government is also creating entrenched lobbies that have an inherent interest in deepening insecurities. Mr. Modi’s manifesto in the last general elections vowed to reconsider India’s declared policy of ‘nuclear restraint’ – namely reassessing no-first-use doctrine, while pursuit of triadic deployment of nuclear weapons makes a mockery of the notion of being committed to a policy of minimum and stable deterrence. The Modi government’s evident lack of professionalism in foreign policy and the ideological penchant for jingoism to divert public criticism on domestic issues has only worsened the situation and there are apprehensions that the BJP might promote war hysteria as we reach closer to the next elections.

At this important juncture, we demand that confidence building measures pertaining to nuclear weapons in South Asia be urgently pursued, that a moratorium on nuclear use in the region must be signed at the earliest. That India and Pakistan along with neighbours pursue a South Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone as well as actively supporting the global efforts to outlaw and abolish nuclear weapons.

For CNDP,

Achin Vanaik
Lalita Ramdas
Abey George
Anil Chaudhary
Kumar Sundaram

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16.  EX-PRESIDENT OF THE MALDIVES GRANTED ASYLUM IN UK
by Patrick Wintour
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(The Guardian - 23 May 2016)

Malé government calls diplomatic situation ‘charade’, after jailed former leader Mohammed Nasheed was only allowed to go to Britain on medical grounds

Mohammed Nasheed with his lawyer Amal Clooney. Nasheed said his country was slipping into authoritarianism. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Britain has granted political refugee status to the former president of the Maldives, who was jailed in 2015 after a trial that drew widespread international criticism for being part of a slide to authoritarianism in the country .

His lawyer disclosed that Mohammed Nasheed had sought political asylum, and this was confirmed by UK diplomatic sources. Nasheed, the Maldives’ first democratically elected president, was allowed to go to Britain in January for treatment on his back, after President Abdulla Yameen came under international pressure to let him leave.

Shortly after arriving in the UK in December, Nasheed met David Cameron in Downing Street to raise concerns about the deteriorating situation in the Maldives. Cameron was strongly supportive after the meeting where Nasheed was accompanied by Amal Clooney, wife of the Hollywood actor George Clooney. She has been representing Nasheed legally in the UK.

The Madives government said on Monday they were disappointed that the UK government had agreed to “be part of this charade”, adding British ministers were helping with efforts to circumvent the law. Nasheed was jailed for 13 years on terrorism charges after illegally ordering the arrest of a judge in a trial that put a spotlight on instability in the Indian Ocean archipelago, a destination for the super-rich holidaymakers.

Former Maldives president warns of return to dictatorship on UK trip

Since his release from jail, on the grounds of ill-health, Nasheed has called for sanctions against Yameen and his allies for detaining political prisoners, mainly opposition leaders, and for alleged human rights abuses in the Maldives. On Monday, Nasheed issued a statement accusing Yameen of jailing all opposition leaders and cracking down “on anyone who dares to oppose or criticise him”.

Responding to news that he had been granted asylum, the Maldives government said “Nasheed was granted medical leave exceptionally by the appropriate authorities in the Maldives after which he is expected to return to serve the remainder of his sentence. Nasheed’s legal team had claimed he only wanted to go to the UK because the medical treatment he needed was only available in the UK.

“This latest development clearly demonstrates that the intention was to seek to avoid serving his prison sentence, and thus again, the former president has once again exhibited a distinct lack of commitment to the legal process and continues to manipulate the process for political gain, believing that he remains above the law”.
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In a statement confirming his exile, Nasheed said: “In the past year, freedom of the press, expression and assembly have all been lost. Given the slide towards authoritarianism in the Maldives myself and other opposition politicians feel we have no choice but to work from exile - for now.”

After Nasheed was forced from power, the United Nations, the US and human rights groups have said Yameen’s government failed to follow due process and that the case was politically motivated. Yameen, increasingly close diplomatically to China, has proposed all-party talks to resolve the political crisis but opposition parties insist their jailed leaders must first be released.

Yameen has faced international criticism over the detention of 18 journalists after they said a proposed defamation bill was aimed at suppressing freedom of expression. It has also used the threat of jihadi terrorism to arrest many of its critics.

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17. 'THE OFFICIAL SILENCE ON THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN CHINA' - EDITORIAL, THE TELEGRAPH
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(The Telegraph - 22 May 2016

Reckoning with the past
- The official silence on the Cultural Revolution in China is a refusal to acknowledge the violence that accompanied the event

History evokes nostalgia; it also produces fear and revulsion. The remembrance of history can bring forth silence, especially if the past that is being recollected is unpleasant and smells of violence. The Cultural Revolution in China, which began 50 years ago with a party document denouncing the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", is a pivotal episode in Chinese history which the present political leadership in China wants to forget. There are good reasons for this. The Cultural Revolution inaugurated a period of chaos and bloodshed that lasted for nearly a decade. It was the brainchild of none other than the "Great Helmsman", Mao Zedong, still an iconic figure in the official narrative concerning China's history. Unwilling to tarnish the icon in any way, the present leadership prefers to be silent on the Cultural Revolution. It is aware that any criticism of that chapter in Chinese history will inevitably lead to an unfavourable assessment of Mao, who, according to some historians, "gloried in the chaos [and] loved the idea of civil war". The anniversary of the Cultural Revolution thus went unremembered in China, and no one is held retrospectively accountable for the violence and the killings.

Communists have been rather good at invoking this kind of party-induced amnesia. For many years, communists refused to accept the horrors of Josef Stalin's rule, the lies perpetrated by the Moscow trials of the 1930s, and the role of Leon Trotsky in the making of the Russian Revolution. Facts were not only suppressed but also falsified. Only after the collapse of communism in Russia was the truth allowed to be openly discussed. Since China officially remains under the red flag, it continues to silence and distort. Other countries that have broken with communism, or were never under communist rule, have not shied away from holding individuals responsible for killings and violence in the past. In Cambodia, for example, the Khmer Rouge tribunal has investigated crimes committed under Pol Pot's regime. In Bangladesh, individuals who had carried out atrocities against those fighting to liberate East Pakistan from the dominance of West Pakistan have been tried, condemned and executed. In India, immediately after the Emergency, the Shah Commission investigated the excesses of Indira Gandhi's totalitarianism.

History can be suppressed only in the very short run. However much the Chinese political leadership wants to maintain a silence on the Cultural Revolution, across the world there is a general awareness of the violence that accompanied that episode. The world has also recognized the lies spread by the acolytes - scholars and intellectuals - of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. History does not forget, human beings are made to forget. But the past is also remembered and reckoned with.

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18. CULTURE AND POWER IN THE CHINESE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
by Jennifer Altehenger
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(dissertation reviews - May 17, 2016)	

A review of Reordering China: Culture and Power in the Chinese Communist Revolution, by Xiaohong Xu.

Bu Dahua, one of the students who led the Red Guards in Qinghua University’s High School, recalled in an interview an outing with some of his friends in spring 1966. He was distressed because they felt they had failed to move the revolution forward, at least for the time being: “I felt my body seemed to be possessed by many revolutionary souls: there were Zou Rong who euologized revolution; Chen Tianhua who didn’t hesitate to lay down his life for the revolution; Lu Xun who grasped ‘his pen as his sword’; Lenin when he studied in Kazan University; Mao Zedong who zealously expressed himself in Aiwan Paviolion; and even Russian Decemberists…Ideal, illusion, fantasy, and reverie were all swirling in my mind.” (p. 217) In that moment, the thought of this pantheon of revolutionary heroes motivated Bu, yet also caused despair. Mao was important, but so were many more heroes and heroines who collectively formed one impossible yet desirable model to be emulated. To understand Bu and his generation of Red Guard revolutionaries, this dissertation argues, one must re-examine the longue durée of the Chinese Communist Revolution. We need, in short, better theoretical frameworks. These should enable us to grasp “revolution” through the people and their organizational structures. For people, Xu contends, both “made revolution” and became part of a larger development called “revolution.”

“The specter of the revolution,” Xu writes, “is returning to haunt China.” (p. 238) When this dissertation was completed in 2013, global media were feverishly analyzing the transition to a new Politburo Standing Committee under Xi Jinping. Selected revivals of revolutionary practices such as the mass line have now, three years later, become a firm part of the way we see Xi; the man, the leader, and increasingly the contested icon. For this, and for many other reasons, Xu’s dissertation is a timely contribution to what we know and how we think about the Chinese Communist revolution. As a historical sociologist, Xu wears two hats. With his sociologist’s hat on, he offers a complex engagement with existing theoretical and methodological frameworks that all attempt to answer short but excruciatingly difficult questions: Why, how, and when do revolutions develop, succeed and/or fail? From Theda Skocpol’s 1979 classic work on France, Russia, and China to the extensive scholarship on social movement and charismatic authority, he confidently and critically draws on a wide range of theoretical literature to rethink China’s revolution and the role of the Communist idea therein. With his historian’s hat on, he delves into a substantial set of published and unpublished primary sources – from archival documents to memoirs, telegrams, newspapers, and interviews – to show how and why a diverse cast of historical agents created revolutionary change in certain moments, bit-by-bit. Stitching together both hats, this thesis makes for a compelling read.

The five chapters follow a thematic and roughly chronological order that begins with the early Communist Movement in the late 1910s and ends with the formation of the Red Guard movement in 1966. Chapter 1 opens with an introduction and a detailed analysis of the existing scholarly literature on revolutions and social movements globally. Xu argues that “revolutionaries like Mao did not ‘make’ the revolution… they ran into it, got involved in it and brought an order in and out of a social revolution.” (p. 8) Social movements, as a concept and historical phenomenon, are one of the crucial prisms through which Xu seeks to understand twentieth-century China. His attention to social movements explains his overall focus on protagonists, organizational structures, and agency, and his attempt to alleviate some of the “confusion over the notion of agency.” (p. 20) The dissertation therefore, “charts out how this dialectic of organizing and rupture came about, what social and cultural circumstances conditioned the rise of the revolutionary vanguard, how the vanguard theorized social contradictions and its own role in bringing about historical change, and what affected its success, routinization and further rupture.” (p. 9)

To do so, Xu’s more empirical chapters examine cultural repertoires, new ideas, practices, social networks, interactions, and ideological power. Chapter 2 investigates how students and intellectuals organized into the Chinese Communist Movement in the wake of May Fourth and specifically between 1920 and 1921. The first part is a cross-sectional analysis of 28 May Fourth organizations, some of which merged into the Chinese Communist Movement and some of which did not. The second part then compares the New Citizens Study Society and the Young China Association. Members of the New Citizens Study Society elected to join the Communist movement, while members of the Young China Association could not come to an agreement over the matter and eventually broke apart. Xu is looking to explain why some were more attracted to Bolshevism than others and it was those societies with a distinct component of self-cultivation that found important parallels and points of convergence between their own practices and the Bolshevik call for discipline and self-sacrifice.

Chapter 3 fast-forwards to the early 1940s and the period of the frail second United Front. Here, Xu is interested in the role of “ideology and strategy in the formation of Maoism” as a coherent program. More specifically, the chapter proposes a “more interactional model, where actors – revolutionaries, in this case – also respond to structural circumstances by retooling their strategies of action, drawing both from their ideological resources and other cultural idioms.” (p. 95) Mao and his comrades, Xu argues, devised a strategy of “achieving unity through opposition” in the months before and after the Wannan Incident of 1941. This allowed them at the same time to strengthen the vanguard role of the Communist Party and to expand organizationally in ways that required flexibility and adaptability.

The idea of “New Democracy” clearly shifts to the analytical foreground and it is taken up in Chapter 4, though now Xu moves our attention away from Party leadership strategies in the midst of war and towards the YMCA. As the “biggest social service organization during this period,” the YMCA provided an organizational structure, a space of civil society and social networks, and a source of individual identification. More simply, the chapter asks how civic organizations experienced “this radical change from revolutionary crisis to the establishment of cultural hegemony by the revolutionary vanguard?” (p. 147) Without effective democratic institutions, this chapter argues, even a vibrant civil society will no longer function as social capital. Rather, it will become a source of “social representation” for a regime that “claims democratic legitimacy based on civil society organizations and their reconfigured relations with each other in lieu of democratic institutions.” (pp. 149-150) In the specific case of the YMCA, then, this transition happened with formation of the All-China Youth Federation under the umbrella of New Democracy.

Finally, Chapter 5 gives a twist to one of the classic questions of sociology: charisma and charismatic authority. Perhaps it is not surprising that the chapter’s main focus is on the Red Guards and the Red Guard Movement. More surprisingly and refreshingly, however, the chapter shows little interest for the Mao Cult. Mao and his cult of personality feature, of course. But the Mao Cult is but part of the much larger pantheon of revolutionary heroes and heroines with which this review opened and which shaped the experiences of a generation of Chinese citizens, the Mao Era’s baby boomers, born just as the People’s Republic had been founded and educated during the prime of early socialist construction. Xu here analyzes not the causes of revolution, but the causes that de-stabilize revolutions, and asks why this generation in particular was so receptive to Mao’s attempt to mobilize them. Moving away from the “elite conflict theory” (p. 183), Xu identifies mnemonic education and exemplary education as crucial factors. It was supposed to help create “docile tools” of socialist construction. Yet learning of so many individuals who created revolutions spurred many among this baby boomer generation to imitate and seek a revolutionary identity of their own. Charisma could not be routinized.

How we make sense of revolutions in general, and China’s revolution in particular, has been among the hotly debated questions across and among disciplines. In his theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich study, Xu has found new angles that will fascinate those who wish to learn more about China’s revolution in a domestic and comparative perspective. And it has much to offer to those, if they exist, who thought there was little life left in the study of the grand socialist revolutions. If the study of revolutions is an evergreen, then Xu has proven how much can be gained from a judiciously administered trim.

Jennifer Altehenger
Department of History
King’s College London
jennifer.altehenger[at]kcl.ac.uk

Dissertation Information
Yale University. 2013. 234 pp. Primary Advisor: Julia P. Adams and Philip S. Gorski.

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19. VENEZUELA AND THE SILENCE OF THE LEFT
by Pedro Lange-Churion
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(CounterPunch - May 20, 2016)

Venezuela is nearing collapse It can turn violent soon. Last week Nicolás Maduro decreed a state of emergency and suspended constitutional rights. He fears “the Empire” is set to strike soon. This measure comes abruptly as the opposition demands Venezuelan Electoral Panel to ratify the 1.8 million signatures collected in just a few hours as a first step to constitutionally call for a referendum to remove him from power. And he is looking for ways to delay this process.

An article in Counterpunch written by Eric Draitser characterized the referendum as a coup orchestrated by the opposition to oust Maduro and destroy the legacy of Chávez’ revolution. It further argues that Venezuela’s economic predicament—already a humanitarian crisis—is the product of a plot of the Venezuelan right-wing elites that control the National Assembly and the U.S. imperial interests, comparing the current crisis in Venezuela with the overthrow of Allende in the seventies by Nixon, Kissinger, the CIA and the Chilean elites.

What Draitser and others do not mention is that the referendum is a constitutional right pursued by an opposition whose control of the National Assembly (Venezuela’s congress)  is legitimated by a landslide electoral victory in December 2015.  The article identifies the opposition with the right-wing elites when in reality the opposition is a coalition of parties and individuals that also include left and left-to-center ideological orientations. The President of the Assembly, for instance, Henry Ramos Allup has been the Vice-President of the Socialist International. Most importantly, the article also conveniently omits Maduro’s coup to the National Assembly. On December 30, 2015 he abruptly appointed twelve Supreme Court Justices as a way of invalidating any law passed by Venezuela’s elected legislative body, thus undermining the will of the Venezuelans who elected the members of the National Assembly.

The left acts as if all leftist governments must be unconditionally defended, no matter how authoritarian and corrupted they become. In acting this way they hark back to the Stalinist days of unconditional allegiance to the party, or to the Cold War years when even timid critiques to the left—even within the left–produced knee-jerk attacks and excommunications. The left has failed to critique a “leftist” government whose policies have led to the current crisis in Venezuela. It took Noam Chomsky ten years to realize that Chávez has become a dangerous authoritarian ruler who betrayed the grassroots movement born out of his initial emergence into the Venezuelan political scene. Slavoj Zizek is careful to remind us that Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez are authoritarian caudillos not be compared to Pablo Iglesias from Podemos or Alexis Tsipras from Syiriza. But Zizek is reluctant to use his acumen to shed light on Venezuela’s darkest hour. Venezuela was news while it was good news and while Chávez could be used as a banner for the left and his antics provided comic relief. But as soon as the country began to spiral towards ruination and Chavismo began to resemble another Latin American authoritarian regime, better to turn a blind eye.

The position of the left has been either to suspend a critical stance or not to address Venezuela’s situation at all. The left media is quick to condemn the coup to Dilma Rousseff orchestrated by the Brazilian opposition–as it should, or Macri’s neoliberal initiatives in Argentina poised to undo the Peronista policies that produced an undeniable upward mobility in Argentina. But when Venezuela comes up the left intelligentsia draws a blank and changes the topic. As if critiquing an authoritarian regime disguised under a leftist rhetoric means condemning all the left. At this point, a good measure of self-criticism would be constructive to a left in peril in Latin America. What leftist leaders and thinkers should have said and didn’t say (with the exception of José Mujica in Uruguay, who wrote a letter to Nicolás Maduro pleading to cease the brutal repression of peaceful protests) was that Venezuela cannot be an example of a successful leftist government. After all, Maduro can do more harm in Venezuela than Mauricio Macri in Argentina. Macri attempted to name by decree two Supreme Court Judges in mid December (2015) and days later Judge Alejo Ramos Padilla issued an injunction blocking Marcri’s appointments. A few days later Maduro appointed twelve Chavista judges to Venezuela’s Supreme Court. His decision, of course, was challenged by the National Assembly, but to no avail.

The default position in the left is to blame Venezuela’s dismal situation on American interventionism. To be sure, the U.S. did play a role in all this. There was the attempted coup in 2002 led by a misguided opposition, with the support of Bush’s government in the U.S. and Aznar’s government in Spain; it didn’t last more than two days in power. But as abhorrent as this intervention was, the U.S. did not have nearly as active a role as the hawkish U.S. interventions in the seventies, the one in Chile being, perhaps, the most infamous. American interventions have shifted focus to the Middle East. After the failed coup, the U.S. left Venezuela pretty much to its own devices, with a relative thawing of relations when Barack Obama came to power. In March 2015 Barack Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat, providing his government with the tools to block assets in the U.S. belonging to Venezuelan officials involved in corruption, implicated in drug trafficking and accused of violation of human rights. But this declaration has had negligible impact in Venezuela’s internal affairs. The truth is that the U.S has been relatively indifferent to Venezuela’s problems since 2002. This indifference is not motivated by a genuine respect for Venezuela’s sovereignty. It has simply been more convenient and less costly to leave things as they are, as long as Venezuela continues to provide the U.S. with 17 % of its oil consumption. Ironically, despite Chavista anti-imperialist rhetoric, the U.S. has been and continues to be Venezuela’s most important commercial partner. How different a situation from that of Cuba, besieged for decades by an aggressive economic embargo. The debacle of Venezuela, its social decomposition, the demise of its middle class, the collapse of its economy, its scarcity of goods, its corruption and drug trade, its health care crisis and its alarming public safety record cannot be simply “dismissed” as a consequence of American interventionism.

Many historians argue that Venezuela’s plight is the eternal recurrence of countries cursed and blessed by oil riches. To prove their point they cite past civil unrest like “El Caracazo” in February 1989, a week long wave of protests and clashes that resulted in hundreds of casualties. True. But never has Venezuela experienced a crisis of such proportions, never has the country been in such a generalized humanitarian calamity, never has its public safety record and its corruption been so dismal and unfettered. And as sound as these structural arguments are, it is important to realize that to a large extent this is a crisis mostly made in Venezuela.

Chavismo had a chance to do things differently, in ways which could have averted this meltdown. Save the hiccup of 2002, Chavismo has been in power uninterruptedly for seventeen years, holding the reins of all branches of civic and military power. Chavismo has also enjoyed oil revenues unprecedented in the history of the country. Much of this wealth was grotesquely mismanaged, fueling extravagant subsidies that peaked in the countless and expensive elections organized to barely disguise the government’s authoritarian inclinations behind a veil of legitimacy. The acts of corruption perpetrated by private officials and the military equals macro-economic cyphers: $300 billions disappeared in the last decade as the coffers of banks in Andorra, Switzerland and other fiscal paradises spill over with wealth stolen from Venezuelans. This cypher, by the way, was not provided by the Venezuelan opposition, but by renowned Chavistas who have been with the “revolution” from its beginnings. Jorge Giordani, an old communist who served as Minister of Economic Planning, was the first to blow the whistle and then other ministers joined, like Héctor Navarro and Ana Elisa Osorio, all in Chávez’ cabinet from 1999 through 2013. But nowhere does the left acknowledge these facts as contributing to the current crisis in Venezuela.

In his unbounded paranoia, Chávez made sure to arm his militias (Círculos Bolivarianos) with sophisticated weapons. Caracas boasts the highest murder rate in the world. Twenty-five thousand Venezuelans are killed every year (an undeclared war) and these militias are ready to disrupt peaceful protests with violence, or work for the interests of emerging drug lords inside and outside of government. Wary of perceived traitors to the revolution, Chávez reshuffled his increasingly smaller inner circle of aides to key posts in the government. Maduro followed his mentor. Anyone critical of Chávez’ policies could be expelled from his inner circle; some were even imprisoned. Venezuelans remember General Raúl Isaías Baduel, Chávez’ Minister of Defense, a die-hard Chavista instrumental in restituting Chávez to power after the coup in 2002. As Chávez attempted to centralize more power, Baduel criticized his authoritarian tendencies. Baduel was arrested at gunpoint from his home and thrown in jail. The case of judge María Lourdes Alfuni is better known internationally. In 2009, Chávez disagreed with one of her rulings and sentenced her to thirty years in prison, a glaring violation of judiciary independence. Alfuni was placed in a prison with convicts she had previously sentenced. Fearing for her safety—inmates tried to burn her alive– human rights organizations lobbied for her release and Noam Chomsky finally wrote an open letter demanding her release and distancing himself from Chávez. She became ill with cancer and after emergency surgery was granted house arrest. Evidence later emerged that during her detention she was brutally raped by guards and officials from the Ministry of Justice. For years Venezuelans witnessed the same names play different roles in government, most of them deeply unqualified and many belonging to the military. No wonder all areas of Venezuela’s government and society in general have collapsed.

To assert that these ills are caused by American interventionism and by oil wars in the international market robs Venezuelans of agency and absolves them from the responsibility to reckon with the ways they shaped their current history. There are many oil rich countries currently enduring the dip in oil prices orchestrated by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, but not one of these countries resembles Venezuela’s devastation. Such assertions ignore that Chávez expropriated closed to seven thousand productive industries now in ruins, forcing the country to import with less money many of the goods it previously produced. Such assertions ignore that Chavismo ruined PDVSA–Venezuela’s oil company–by appointing inept and corrupt managers who turned the company into a platform to launder cash. Such assertions ignore that Chávez disregarded warnings from economists urging him to curb spending, urging not to impose price caps on products at the expense of producers reluctant to produce at a loss; to these warnings Chávez arrogantly replied that oil would reach the $200/barrel mark by 2015; it is merely $50 now and production costs almost exceed revenues. Such assertions ignore that people are dying in hospitals because medicines as basic as antibiotics cannot be found in Venezuela’s pharmacies and hospitals and doctors have to rush through surgeries because water and electricity might run out at any moment, as it does daily throughout the country. There is a humanitarian crisis in the country’s health systems (public and private), but Maduro refuses humanitarian aid stating it is hard to find a country with a better healthcare system than Venezuela. Such assertions ignore that Venezuela is the most catastrophic economy in the world with a 700% inflation projected to reach 1200% as the country enters default in the third quarter of 2016, with a byzantine currency exchange policy stubbornly kept in place to facilitate embezzlement in the billions of dollars. Such assertions ignore that both, Chávez and Maduro feigned not to see how the drug business has permeated the highest spheres of power in the country, a reality now undeniable: the First Lady’s nephews await trial in a New York City prison, after been arrested in Honduras for trying to push 80o kg of cocaine into the U.S., a cargo of cocaine that took off from the presidential ramp in Caracas’s airport.  The litany is long and can’t be blamed on U.S. intervention alone.

The left in Latin America has failed to criticize Chavismo, but the right has cunningly jumped to the opportunity. Right-wing politicians, in their electoral campaigns and in their attempts to impeach leftist leaders, love to use Venezuela as a convenient example of a political model to be avoided at all cost. Why hasn’t the left exercised a sensible measure of self-criticism and offer a candid reflection on the Venezuelan case as a way of countering right-wing opportunism?

In 2014, I attended the march celebrating Martin Luther King’s Day in Oakland., I met an old white American donning a cowboy hat and a t-shirt that flaunted a portrait of a radiant Chavez with the PSUV logo (United Socialist Party of Venezuela). I asked him if he had been to Venezuela, he said no. He told me he was eighty-four years old. I told him I was Venezuelan and he mumbled with a thick American accent: “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.” I asked him what he thought of Chávez. He said: “He tells it like it is” and referred with admiration to Chavez’ performance in 2006 at the United Nations, when he compared Bush to the devil. To me that was one more display of demagoguery from a populist leader with a penchant for histrionics. It troubled me then that such performance would draw international support from people on the left. It was almost too easy. People seemed to relish in a South American leader who “tells is it like it is” (this is, by the way, what Trump supporters say of their candidate: “Trump tells it like it is”). What troubles me even more, in the face of Venezuela’s hopeless present, is that such uncritical sympathy for Chávez cast a veil over the fact that Venezuela’s current ruination is in large measure the consequence of his policies and his political solipsism. Sympathizers still exonerate Chávez from responsibility: “Maduro is not Chávez,” I tire of hearing. And it is true, Maduro lacks Chávez’ charisma and political capital. But Maduro in a more substantial way is Chávez. In power for just three years, Maduro reaps now what Chávez sowed for fourteen years. Chávez was lucky and died just at the right moment. We shouldn’t forget that Chávez appointed Maduro as his successor as he left for Cuba to die. And there you have it: Maduro is Chávez’s most tangible legacy as everything dissolves into violence and misery.

In the famous opening of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx quotes Hegel’s affirmation, according to which historical events are first tragedy and then farce. I believe that the chapter written by Chavismo in Venezuela is simultaneously tragedy and farce.
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Pedro Lange-Chorion is a professor in the Latin American Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.


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