SACW - 12 June 2016 | Afghanistan: Meet Sultana / Sri Lanka: Women beedi rollers / Pakistan: In defence of Marvi Sirmed / Bangladesh: Armenians in Dhaka / India: Praful Bidwai Memorial Award / Brazil: Coup or Fiasco ? / Iran: Petition for the release of Prof Homa Hoodfar / Atheism on Trial in Russia
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Sat Jun 11 14:46:09 EDT 2016
South Asia Citizens Wire - 12 June 2016 - No. 2899
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]
Contents:
1. Pakistan: Remembering the 1972 workers' movement in Karachi
2. India: Praful Bidwai Memorial Committee Announces Annual Award
3. Video: The Use and Abuse of History - a recording from Idea of India conclave (23-24 May 2016)
4. India: Statement Condemning the Persecution of Lawyers Collective and Indira Jaising and Anand Grover by Home Ministry
5. India: Stop Persecuting Lawyers Collective! - Statement by PUCL
6. India: My Visit to Bisahra (Dadri) | V.K. Tripathi
7. India: Why the BJP rewrites history | Christophe Jaffrelot
8. CNDP Statement: Nuclear deal with the US would mean destruction for people and environment in India (9 June 2016)
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
India: Different political forces in the country have either collaborated with or tacitly approved the Hindutva forces in their early days (Sumanta Banerjee)
India - Narendra Dabholkar Murder Case: CBI Arrests Hindu Janajagruti Member Virendra Singh Tawde
India: Life in the Mathura cult camp
Bangladesh Detains Several Thousand in Drive Against Islamist Radicals (Two reports from The Associated Press)
India: BJP’s Assam win is proof Hindutva has reached areas where it was marginal
Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa Regime Gave Millions Worth Free Rides To Militant Buddhist Monks And Journalists
India: Land allotments to RSS bodies during during NDA-I
India: RSS to lecture to IAS successful aspirants (that passed out of RSS-backed coaching institute Samkalp); RSS claims 60 per cent of this year's UPSC picks studied at Samkalp
Bangladesh: Anti Terror clampdown in response to recent targeted killings
India: Thanks to Ram Bahadur Rai (an RSS man), the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts has become a venue for events by Hindutva front organisations
India: The ghost of Malegaon - Harsh Mander
India: Re-reading Mathura [Violence & the politics of ashrams, sects their shadowy side and echo in lower-middle class etc..] (Shiv Vishvanathan)
India: The Republic of Ram Briksh Yadav (Apoorvanand)
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Afghanistan: Meet Sultana, the Taliban’s Worst Fear | Nicholas Kristof
11. Women beedi rollers and necrocapitalism in Sri Lanka | Prashanthi Jayasekara
12. Pakistan - India: The elephant at the peace table | Ayesha Siddiqa
13. Pakistanis Please Sign this petition Petition in defence of Marvi Sirmed
14. Pakistan: CII reform a priority | I.A. Rehman
15. Two Genocides, Two Peoples, and One Grievance - Armenians in Dhaka | Adnan Morshed
16. Should Suu Kyi lead Burma? | David Hutt
17. India: Udta Punjab - CBFC’s mandate is only to certify films, not to censor them or chop them up | Nandini Sardesai
18. Publication Announcement:: Words Matter: Writings against Silence, edited by K. Satchidanandan
19. Trautmann reviews Nayanjot Lahiri. Ashoka in Ancient India
20. Brazil: coup or fiasco? | Immanuel Wallerstein
21. Atheism on Trial in Russia's Stavropol | Victor Davidoff
22. Petition for the release of renowned anthropologist Prof Homa Hoodfar from Evin prison in Tehran
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1. PAKISTAN: REMEMBERING THE 1972 WORKERS' MOVEMENT IN KARACHI
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Pakistan: Remembering the 1972 workers' movement in Karachi
Rich tributes were paid to the martyred workers of the labour movement of the early 1970s as the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) observed its anniversary by organising a seminar at PMA House
http://www.sacw.net/article12812.html
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2. PRESS RELEASE BY PRAFUL BIDWAI MEMORIAL COMMITTEE ANNOUNCES ANNUAL AWARD
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New Delhi, June 8: The Praful Bidwai Memorial Award has been set up to commemorate the life and work of one of India's most outstanding journalists as well as accomplished author, committed activist and public intellectual, so that his legacy would inspire others.
http://www.sacw.net/article12810.html
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3. VIDEO: THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY - A RECORDING FROM IDEA OF INDIA CONCLAVE (23-24 MAY 2016)
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excerpts from the panel discussion on ' The Use and Abuse of History ' under the Modi regime [in India]. The discussion was led by KM Shrimali, and Mridula Mukherjee and Amar Farooqui as panelists. This is a Newsclick video
http://www.sacw.net/article12811.html
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4. INDIA: STATEMENT CONDEMNING THE PERSECUTION OF LAWYERS COLLECTIVE AND INDIRA JAISING AND ANAND GROVER BY HOME MINISTRY
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We, the undersigned, unequivocally condemn the efforts of the Ministry of Home Affairs to persecute the Lawyers Collective (LC), Indira Jaising and Anand Grover in order to obstruct the legal and human rights work being carried out by them.
http://www.sacw.net/article12809.html
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5. INDIA: STOP PERSECUTING LAWYERS COLLECTIVE! - STATEMENT BY PUCL
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PUCL strongly condemns the continued persecution of Senior Advocates Indira Jaising and Anand Grover and the `Lawyers Collective' organisation run by them, by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) using the coercive provisions of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, 2010 in an arbitrary, biased and politically motivated manner.
http://www.sacw.net/article12805.html
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6. INDIA: MY VISIT TO BISAHRA (DADRI) | V.K. TRipathi
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I never expected villagers to remain insensitive to the agony of lynching of a simple man even after 8 months. Fanatic organizations have got an immense weapon in the issue of cow to humiliate, discriminate and, kill people. It is not a failure of Congress or liberal political parties alone. It is a failure of civil society.
http://www.sacw.net/article12815.html
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7. India: Why the BJP rewrites history | Christophe Jaffrelot
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The rewriting of history textbooks is an old priority of the Hindu nationalist movement.
http://www.sacw.net/article12808.html
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8. CNDP STATEMENT: NUCLEAR DEAL WITH THE US WOULD MEAN DESTRUCTION FOR PEOPLE AND ENVIRONMENT IN INDIA (9 JUNE 2016)
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The joint declaration issued by India and the United States during the Prime Minister's visit is shocking as it effectively celebrates the undermining of India's sovereign Nuclear Liability Act, passed by the parliament in 2010 to ensure justice to the victims in case of an accident.
http://www.sacw.net/article12814.html
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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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India: Different political forces in the country have either collaborated with or tacitly approved the Hindutva forces in their early days (Sumanta Banerjee)
India - Narendra Dabholkar Murder Case: CBI Arrests Hindu Janajagruti Member Virendra Singh Tawde
India: Life in the Mathura cult camp
Bangladesh Detains Several Thousand in Drive Against Islamist Radicals (Two reports from The Associated Press)
India: Hindu men, go home and worship your manhood: VHP leader Pravin Togadia
India: BJP’s Assam win is proof Hindutva has reached areas where it was marginal
Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa Regime Gave Millions Worth Free Rides To Militant Buddhist Monks And Journalists
Bangladesh: Will the anti-terror crackdown stop further attacks ?
India: Why is unilateral talaq still valid? (Syed Mohammed)
India: Land allotments to RSS bodies during during NDA-I
India: RSS to give lecture to IAS successful aspirants (that passed out of RSS-backed coaching institute Samkalp); RSS claims 60 per cent of this year's UPSC picks studied at Samkalp
Bangladesh: Anti Terror clampdown in response to recent targeted killings
Two Islamist terror groups may be behind the killings in Bangladesh
India: Thanks to Ram Bahadur Rai (an RSS man), the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts has become a venue for events by Hindutva front organisations
India: The ghost of Malegaon
India: Re-reading Mathura [Violence & the politics of ashrams, sects their shadowy side and echo in lower-middle class etc..]
India: The Republic of Ram Briksh Yadav (Apoorvanand)
-> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. AFGHANISTAN: MEET SULTANA, THE TALIBAN’S WORST FEAR
by Nicholas Kristof
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(Sunday Review - The New York Times, June 4, 2016)
Photo
Sultana pursued an education from inside her home in Afghanistan after the Taliban threatened to douse her with acid if she went back to school. Because of the danger to her and a photographer if she was visited there, her picture was taken via Skype. Credit Andrew Quilty for The New York Times
OF all the students preparing to go to college this fall, perhaps none have faced a more hazardous journey than a young woman named Sultana. One measure of the hazard is that I’m not disclosing her last name or hometown for fear that she might be shot.
Sultana lives in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan, and when she was in the fifth grade a delegation visited her home to warn her father to pull her out of school, or else she would have acid flung in her face. Ever since, she has been largely confined to her high-walled family compound — in which she has secretly, and perilously, educated herself.
“I’m unstoppable,” Sultana laughs, and it’s true: She taught herself English from occasional newspapers or magazines that her brothers brought home, in conjunction with a Pashto-English dictionary that she pretty much inhaled. When her businessman father connected the house to the internet, she was able to vault over her compound walls.
“I surrounded myself with English, all day,” she told me by Skype. Today her English is fluent, as good as that of some Afghan interpreters I’ve used.
Once she had mastered English, Sultana says, she tackled algebra, then geometry and trigonometry, and finally calculus BC. She rises about 5 a.m. and proceeds to devour calculus videos from Khan Academy, work out equations, and even read about string theory.
Sultana, now 20, says she leaves her home only about five times a year — each time, she must wear a burqa and be escorted by a close male relative — but online she has been reading books on physics and taking courses on edX and Coursera. I can’t independently verify everything Sultana says, but her story generally checks out. After reading a book on astrophysics by Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, she reached him by Skype, and he says he was blown away when this Afghan elementary school dropout began asking him penetrating questions about astrophysics.
“It was a surreal conversation,” Krauss said. “She asked very intelligent questions about dark matter.”
Krauss has become one of Sultana’s advocates, along with Emily Roberts, an undergraduate at the University of Iowa who signed up for a language program called Conversation Exchange and connected with Sultana.
Photo
Sultana at her desk in a photo taken by her family.
By Skype, Emily and Sultana became fast friends, and soon they were chatting daily. Moved by Sultana’s seemingly unattainable dream of becoming a physics professor, Emily began exploring what it would take for Sultana to study in the United States.
With Emily’s help, Sultana has been accepted by a community college in Iowa, with a commitment by Arizona State University to take her as a transfer student a year later. Emily started a website to raise money for Sultana’s university education.
Sultana reminds us that the greatest untapped resource around the globe isn’t gold or oil, but the female half of the population. Virginia Woolf wrote that if Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister, she never would have been able to flower — and Sultana is Shakespeare’s sister. Yet it’s also clear that internet connections can sometimes be a game changer.
Sultana’s family is wary of her passion for education but surrenders to her determination. “My mom said a lot of mouths will be open, a single girl going to the Christian world,” she said. “But I will die if they stop me.”
Unfortunately, the United States isn’t helping. Last month, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul rejected her application for a student visa. That happens all the time: Brilliant young men and women are accepted by American universities and then denied visas because, under U.S. law, they are seen as immigration risks.
(As a Muslim, Sultana would also be barred by Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims. I asked her what she thought of Trump, and all she would say, with quiet dignity, was: “He thinks all Muslims are bad. It’s painful.”)
Michelle Obama has pushed an impressive campaign called Let Girls Learn, yet her husband’s administration has never seemed as enthusiastic, and America routinely denies visas that would actually let girls learn. The United States spends billions of dollars fighting terrorism by blowing things up; I wish we understood that sometimes the most effective weapon against terrorists isn’t a drone but a girl with a book.
The Taliban understand this: That’s why their fighters shot Malala Yousafzai in the head. If only we were as cleareyed as the Taliban about the power of girls’ education to transform societies.
Sultana now spends her days working on calculus equations, listening to Bon Jovi and doing household chores while listening to the BBC or self-help audiobooks. It also turns out that she is a longtime Times reader and gets my email newsletter. She’s now working her way through more serious reading: Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.”
Sultana has set up another appointment for a visa, for June 13. It won’t be Sultana who is tested but American policy itself. I’ll let you know what happens.
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11. WOMEN BEEDI ROLLERS AND NECROCAPITALISM IN SRI LANKA
by Prashanthi Jayasekara
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(open democracy - 1 June 2016)
Women in one village in the Jaffna district of northern Sri Lanka have been rolling beedi with their bare hands for over fifty years in a gendered survival economy. This is no accident.
Women beedi workers in Jaffna, Sri Lanka"Economic empowerment” and “restoring livelihoods” are tropes that are too often fetishised within Sri Lanka’s post-war development discourse, especially in relation to women living in former war-affected regions. Be it providing small grants, microfinance, or cattle and poultry to “rebuild livelihoods”, the state and development actors alike have been spearheading various development projects targeting women. While the extent to which these programmes empower women remains questionable, some women continue to be left out of post war development altogether. This is the case with the women of Vettikadu, a poor low caste village in former war affected Jaffna in Northern Sri Lanka.
For over fifty years women in Vettikadu have been rolling beedi within the confines of their homes. Despite the fact that the bare hands of these workers undertake the core production functions associated with the beedi trade, they are only compensated one fifth of the final market value of each beedi stick that they roll. The remaining market value goes to the bigger players within the trade.
This alienation of workers from the final product is maintained through informality that is imposed upon the workers. In other words, the company’s only connection with the workers is through middle men who manage the extraction of labour. In this way the company escapes its obligation to pay fair compensation, provide other welfare benefits such as insurance and pensions, while seriously undermining the workers’ health and wellbeing. Given the paltry wages that are paid, women are compelled to manage by borrowing - buying food on credit, mortgaging lands or pawning jewellery - or simply by cutting down on essentials like the number of meals or medical treatment. Meanwhile, the island-wide beedi industry has been growing exponentially, almost at 200%, since 2007, and is currently an industry worth 4 billion rupees a year.
Rolled beedi
The entrapment of these workers in a violent trade is mediated through poverty. Anandhi Amma, an eighty year old woman from Vettikadu, has been rolling beedi since her childhood owing to dire poverty. In 1996 her son, a fisherman, who was the primary breadwinner of the family disappeared after being taken away by the military on suspicion of ferrying LTTE cadres. With her son gone, the sole burden of supporting her family fell on Anandhi Amma’s aged shoulders. Other women such as Sarojini and Geethanjali also started making beedi at a tender age following the death of family members.
Sarojini was barely ten, when hunger within the family pushed her to start rolling beedi. Twenty seven years later, it is this everyday experience of poverty that keeps her entrapped in a trade that exploits her labour. Her “choice” of the way in which she expends her labour is therefore determined by poverty, and the obligation to provide for her husband who is injured and unable to work, and their five school going children. This is an added burden to her household obligation to cook, clean, and care. Often, she is subject to beatings by her husband for failing to ‘fulfill’ these ‘duties’.
For years these workers have been rolling beedi with no breaks during the day, at inconceivable speed under precarious, exploitative and injurious conditions, and inhaling the thick air filled with tobacco dust and fumes through their lungs and their skin. The physical and emotional toll on women’s bodies is immense. Many work until their death. And this exploitation continues all the way to India where tendu leaves - which are used to roll beedi - are plucked by poor Adivasi women, whose labour is exploited within a transnational trade.
The violent nature of alternative forms of work available to these women who have missed school due to war and poverty, exacerbates their dependency on the beedi trade, which requires limited skills and no capital outlay.
The village’s predominant form of livelihood is fishing, and is a masculine domain, controlled by powerful upper class boat owning men. It is an economic space which is difficult for women to access and navigate without being subject to sexual harassment and unfair competition. There are not that many alternative jobs outside the village for these women. The limited jobs that are available in textile shops for example are also mired in violence. Some women workers our reseacrh team met in Jaffna town cited the exploitation and harassments within these workplaces. The terms and conditions of employment are severe: no proper breaks or facilities, including toilets, absence of contracts, leave and statutory welfare benefits, and low wages that are often not paid in full or on time. The women workers also said that they are generally paid much lower than their male counterparts. We were told that caste is an unwritten element of hiring practices; some textile shops hire poorer women from lower castes because it provides the employers with greater room for exploitation, and sexual harassments that they are subjected to within the workspace, as well as while travelling outside for work.
It is within this context of “outside” and “inside” the village being unsafe that a large cardre of women is engaged in rolling beedi within their houses. While rolling beedi is a form of survival for the women, it is part of an accumulation economy for the big players within the trade. It is on the backs of these poor rural women living in a gendered survival economy that the beedi trade is accumulating capital. It is a trade within which women’s bare labouring bodies are exploited in a necroeconomic space, where the labouring body is exposed to violence until death. It is precisely through the entrapment of workers by their continuous alienation from the end product value that the workers must continue to work in such necroeconomic spaces to pay for daily necessities.
Women’s entrapment within necroeconomic spaces is by no means an accident. It is under the auspices of the necropolitics of the state that the spaces of violent accumulation such as the beedi trade have thrived for over fifty years. A necropolitical state order that fails to provide secure work and social protection to alleviate poverty and rebuild lives after a war, reduces these women - to borrow from Agamben - to a ‘bare life’, lives that are unprotected, and exposed to all forms of violence.
Even though the war has ended, in Vettikadu, the continuation and expansion of necroeconomic spaces such as the beedi trade is indicative of how conditions of war and conflict exist even within a ‘post-war’ political economy. The necropolitics of the centre that produce, regulate and exploit these women within necroeconomic spaces can collectively be identified as a necrocapitalist project - the legalised process through which women’s labouring bodies are exposed to violence until their death.
This is not a failure of development in post-war Sri Lanka; this is the face of development.
The names of individuals and the village in this article have been changed to protect identities.
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12. PAKISTAN - INDIA: THE ELEPHANT AT THE PEACE TABLE
by Ayesha Siddiqa
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In order to establish peace between India and Pakistan, two parallel conversations would have to begin: one between Pakistan’s military and its political leadership, and the other between New Delhi and the military [. . .].
FULL TEXT HERE: https://tinyurl.com/jowokeu
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13. PAKISTANIS PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION PETITION IN DEFENCE OF MARVI SIRMED
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[I support and endorse the petition below. Bravo Marvi for holding your ground. Furthermore, this is not just about two individuals but about a larger culture of misogyny and lack of media ethics, where channels deliberately invite individuals who have a history of being volatile and unrestrained, to create a "tamasha" for viewers and increase ratings.
Beena Sarwar]
Petition in defence of Marvi Sirmed Filed by Imtiaz Alam
To 1. JUI chief Maulana Fazalur Rehman; 2. Mr Raza Rabbani Chairman Senate; 3. Mr Absar Alam Pemra chairman; 4. IG Police Islamabad; 5. CEO and anchor News One
Subject: Criminal Assault and Harassment of Marvi Sirmed on a TV show on News One anchored by Nadia Mirza, recorded at 04 pm and aired at 10 pm that caused greater humiliation:
It is submitted and as evident from the recording of the show that before Marvi Sirmed could respond to earlier discussant's remarks Senator Hamadullah of JUI interrupted her and increasingly became aggressive and abusive. He used extremely foul language against the honourable rights activist and columnist. He even tried to physically attack her. But the abuses he hurled is below any ethic and civility. Blaming her for responding to his misbehaviour adds salt to the injury and represents patriarchal approach that women should submit to men's beating (light or otherwise).
1. We request the chairman Senate to form an inquiry committee to look into the conduct of the Senator and take appropriate action to keep the prestige of upper house of our Parliament;
2. Appeal to JUI chief Mohtrum Maulana Fazalur Rehman to take a serious notice of the conduct of his party member and forcefully discourage his followers/leaders from granting religious sanction to the widespread violence against women. It's a matter of concern that JUI is now been seen as a prompter of violence against women, even if You treat your women at home with great respect;
3. Request Pemra Chief to issue a notice to NewsOne Management regarding the violation of Pemra ethics code and give appropriate punishment to the television that preferred not to seek break while an honourable lady was being humiliated and then aired it without fully editing the objectionable content and ugly scenes;
4. The Anchor and her production team and the top management should apologise on its tv to the lady and the audiences who were offended by such an ugly program for the sake of rating; it is to discourage media from not progressing from verbal rape to actual rape on the screen)
5. Request IG Police Islamabad to register an FIR against Hamadullah for harassing and physically threatening a woman and the immediate arrest of the culprit;
6. Call upon the parliament to take serious cognisance of increasing crime against and humiliation of women now on the rise across the country and immediately pass the pending legislation passed by Senate against violence against women;
7. Call upon people, media and civil society to join hands against violence against women and to bring an end to gender/based discrimination against women.
Kindly sign, if you agree, and send it to Imtiaz.safma at gmail.com
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14. PAKISTAN: CII REFORM A PRIORITY
by I.A. Rehman
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(Dawn, June 09, 2016)
THE issues raised by the Maulana Sheerani-led Council of Islamic Ideology’s keenness to ensure that wife-beating does not end in Pakistan will be solved neither by protests by women activists nor by the growing storm on social media. The real issue is whether the Muslims of Pakistan can afford to be led by the nose by a state institution determined to prevent their release from concepts unjustly described as Islamic.
No informed Pakistani should have been surprised by the CII’s latest broadside because the council has been proclaiming its love of retrogression quite regularly. Its liking for corporal punishment in schools and child marriage, its rejection of co-education in post-primary institutions and women’s working with men in offices and factories, and its closed mind on the rights of non-Muslim Pakistanis have long confirmed it as the champion of narrow-minded conservatism. What it has done now is to sum up its case for denying women’s basic rights.
These efforts of the CII have off and on revived debates on the justification for its existence. It has often been pointed out that the CII opposes the Muslim people’s right to interpret Islam so as to enable them to face the challenges of the age and defreeze the Islamic fiqh, an objective for which Iqbal had called for a Muslim homeland in the subcontinent. Iqbal had also specifically opposed the creation of a body of ulema to advise democratically elected representatives on religious issues on the grounds that parliaments alone were competent to rule on religious questions as well as on other issues.
The Council of Islamic Ideology has been proclaiming its love of retrogression on a regular basis.
Further, the need for an Islamic research body to help Muslims get rid of concepts and practices rooted in superstition or feudal culture has often been recognised. At one stage, Dr Fazlur Rahman, the great scholar who fell foul of Ayub’s dictatorial regime, had conceived of the CII as a national body presiding over the work of provincial research and reform councils that could help the country benefit from ijtihad. Perhaps it is time to retrieve the Fazlur Rahman plan and reconstruct the CII as a dynamic institution to rid Islam in Pakistan of its un-Islamic accretions.
Those who demand disbandment of the CII rely on Article 228 of the Constitution, which describes review of the existing laws as the council’s primary function, and Article 230, which requires the CII to submit its final report within seven years of its appointment. The council completed the task of examining the existing laws many years ago. As for fresh legislation, the need to end the council’s encroachment on the rights of parliament as advised by Iqbal is manifest.
However, the CII is not going to be dissolved soon because no government is likely to give up, in the foreseeable future, the policy of appeasing the religious orthodoxy. Besides, Muslims in Pakistan, as a whole, have not even begun to realise the horrible consequences of mixing religion with politics. Thus, neither the state nor society is in a position to appreciate the harm a CII dominated by retrogressive elements could cause to their future. Realism demands that, while waiting for the rise of a secular Pakistan, priority should be given to restructuring the CII so as to enable it to better serve Islam and the people’s interests.
First of all, it is necessary to re-examine the principles that should guide the government while selecting CII members, especially the body’s chairman. (This issue will acquire additional importance in December this year when Maulana Sheerani’s second term as CII head comes to an end.)
Considerable confusion has been caused by the authors of the Constitution by providing for the CII immediately after the article that calls for bringing all laws in conformity with Islamic injunctions and prohibits the making of any law that is repugnant to such injunctions.
This has tended to limit the CII’s functions as the final authority for determining the legitimacy of laws, and this impression is further strengthened by the language of Article 230 which defines the CII’s functions. It also extends indefinitely the period of the council’s encroachment on parliament’s authority to decide upon legislative measures’ repugnancy or otherwise to Islam.
The CII was never intended to be dominated by traditionalist ulema. Its members are to be chosen from two groups: “persons having knowledge of the principles and philosophy of Islam” and those having an “understanding of the economic, political, legal, or administrative problems of Pakistan”.
The council must comprise eight to 20 members, and it is reasonable to expect that the two groups referred to here should be evenly represented on it. Further, it is not necessary that the CII should be headed by a traditionalist aalim. In fact, various governments have avoided appointing tradition-bound ulema as CII chairmen, except for Allauddin Siddiqui, Maulana Kausar Niazi and Maulana Sheerani. Out of the 12 heads the CII has had, five were retired judges, three non-traditionalist scholars (Prof Halepota, Dr S.M. Zaman and Dr Muhammad Khalid Masud) and one lawyer-politician (Iqbal Ahmad Khan).
If the CII is to work towards freeing the Pakistani people from the effects of a ‘frozen fiqh’ and enable them to reinterpret their faith through ijtihad, a few changes in its composition are absolutely essential.
First, the CII head should be a scholar who understands the socioeconomic problems of Pakistan and can engage the ulema in a progressive discourse.
Secondly, the ulema, should be chosen from both traditionalist and progressive schools.
Thirdly, the quota for women members should be raised to at least one-third (if not 50pc) of the total membership. For every two women appointed to the council, one of them must represent the forward-looking woman.
At some stage, the government may consider giving the National Commission on Human Rights, the National Commission on the Status of Women and the National Commission on Minorities (whenever it is set up) observer status at the CII.
Published in Dawn, June 9th, 2016
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15. TWO GENOCIDES, TWO PEOPLES, AND ONE GRIEVANCE - ARMENIANS IN DHAKA
by Adnan Morshed
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(The Daily Star - June 09, 2016
Turkey seems to have a burlesque history of genocide denial. On June 2, the German Parliament voted to recognise the 1,915 killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as "genocide." Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's reaction was predictable: “Germany has no right to comment on genocide.” Ankara recalled its ambassador from Berlin.
Sounds familiar? Ankara's recent withdrawal of its ambassador to Bangladesh following the execution of an indicted “war criminal” reveals the Erdogan regime's grotesquely negligent attitude toward the genocide in Bangladesh during 1971.
My goal here today is not to psychoanalyse Turkey's peculiar discomfort with histories of genocide. Rather, I am intrigued by the common history of massacre that Armenians and Bangladeshis share, and how this history, in many ways, shapes the national personality of these two peoples. More fascinating yet that Dhaka presents a robust Armenian history, which I propose to explore through the lens of the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection on Church Road in Old Dhaka.
The church is modest in its architectural scope, yet its history offers a rich tapestry of the Armenian footprint on the commerce, politics, and education of East Bengal. More important, the church is an architectural testament to the story of how the Armenian diasporas spread out from their historic homeland, located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, to far-flung regions, and thrived as a versatile cosmopolitan community.
Armenia occupies a crucial geographic location at the intersection of various civilisations and trading routes, such as the Silk Road from China to Rome. A vital link between East and West, the country was under the domination of various competing political powers, including the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Persians again, the Ottomans, and the Russians. Their long political subjugation, on the one hand, made it difficult for them to maintain their Christian faith, language, culture, and national identity. (The Armenians were the first people to embrace Christianity as a state religion in 301 CE). On the other hand, challenging circumstances exhorted Armenians to be resilient in the face of political repression, to develop entrepreneurial acumen and mediating skills, and to be a “trade diaspora.” Wherever the Armenians went to trade, they typically learned the local language - unlike other Asian or European merchants - and they benefitted from the ability to communicate with primary producers.
The Armenians also played a significant role in the history of world architecture. In the early medieval period, when the Byzantine world abandoned classical stonework in favour of brick masonry (the sixth-century Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is basically a brick construction), only the Armenians retained the knowledge of concrete work and continued the Hellenistic attitude to buildings as a compact, object-like impression in space. Their contribution had a crucial influence on subsequent development of church architecture in Europe.
There is no consensus on exactly when the Armenians arrived in Dhaka. Some historians, however, suggest that they were in Bengal in the early 17th century, most likely arriving with the southbound migration of Armenian diasporas from Persia. During the Safavid-Ottoman wars of 1603-1605, the Safavid monarch Shah Abbas (r. 1587-1629) deported up to 300,000 Armenians from the Armenian mercantile town of Old Julfa to what became known as New Julfa in the suburb of Isfahan.
Because the official language of the Mughal court was Persian, the Persian-speaking Armenians could easily adapt to the life in the Mughal Empire. Being skillful in the textile business, the Armenians naturally gravitated to Dhaka, one of the trading hubs for fine textile, contributing significantly to the city's commercial life. In addition to textile and raw silk, the Armenians engaged in the trade of saltpeter (used as gunpowder), salt, and betel nut. They pioneered jute-trading in the second half of the 19th century and popularised tea-drinking in Bengal. When they began to lose the textile business to the British private traders in the late 18th century, the Armenians reoriented their focus to landholding, eventually becoming prominent and wealthy zamindars (or landowners). Examples of Armenian zamindars in Dhaka include: Agha Aratoon Michael, Agha Sarkies, and Nicholas Marcar Pogose.
Another major Armenian contribution to Dhaka was the introduction of the ticca-garry (or horse-carriage), which became the main mode of transportation in the city until the first decade of the 20th century. Armenians also introduced western-style department stores for European and British goods, including wines, spirits, cigars, bacon, reading lamps, shoes, toys, table cutlery, shaving soap, saucepans, frying pans, traveling bags, and umbrellas, among other items.
The Armenian community contributed significantly to Dhaka's civic life and urban administrative bureaucracy. Nicholas Pogose founded the first private school of the city, Pogose School, in 1848. It still functions as a prestigious school in Old Dhaka. In response to Nicholas Pogose's resolution that the Dhaka Municipality Committee had no corporate entity and that steps should be taken to remedy the problem, the British colonial administration enacted the District Municipality Act of 1864. Subsequently, the Dhaka Municipality became a statutory body with its own legal jurisdiction.
Compared to those in Calcutta and Madras, Dhaka's well-knit Armenian community was small but wealthy, exerting a great deal of influence on local and regional businesses. The Armenians resided in Armanitola, an Old Dhaka neighbourhood that was named after their colony where they once lived (although not all Armenians lived there).
Many of Dhaka's wealthy Armenians lived in European-style bungalows in Old Dhaka. One of the most famous was the Ruplal House (now derelict), built by the Armenian zamindar Aratoon. The religious life of the community revolved around the Armenian Church of the Holy Resurrection, built in 1781 on the ruins of an earlier chapel and cemetery. The land for the Armenian Church was originally gifted by the Armenian noble man Agha Catchick Minas, whose wife died in 1764 and is buried inside the church.
The Armenian Church stands today like a quiet and dignified monument amidst the frenzied urban growth surrounding it. Residential apartment towers dwarf its two-story structure and the belfry (or the bell tower). The oblong plan of the church is a simple basilica type with a double-height nave flanked by a pair of one-story, 14-foot wide arcades that open to the surrounding graveyard. The three-tier bell tower, capped with a conical roof, on the west provides a square-shaped and arched vestibule, followed by a ceremonial entrance to the nave.
The high boundary wall around the Armenian Church in Dhaka shields the property from rampant land speculation that characterises the capital city today. The main entrance to the site is from the east, near the circular apse. Visitors must walk through the graveyard all the way to the western forecourt of the church. Reading the tombstones of the graveyard feels like a journey back to a time when the Armenians played pivotal roles in the life of the city.
It is hard not to feel empathy for the Armenians, particularly in light of their and our “neglected” genocides.
The author is an architect, architectural historian, and urbanist. He teaches architecture and architectural history in Washington, DC, and is the author of Oculus: A Decade of Insights into Bangladeshi Affairs (2012) and Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (2015).
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16. SHOULD SUU KYI LEAD BURMA? | DAVID HUTT
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(New Internationalist - 9 June 2016)
Seldom do political leaders resign after their ‘struggle’ has been achieved. David Hutt explores whether this should be the case in Burma.
If asked to draw up a list of today’s democracy icons, seldom would the name Aung San Suu Kyi be excluded. Burma’s long-suffering symbol of democratic hope has won more peace prizes than most can remember, was imprisoned under house arrest in Burma for almost 15 years, bears the personal scars of her country’s oppression at the hands of military criminals, and has served as general secretary of the National League for Democracy (NLD) since the pro-democracy political party was formed in 1988.
Burma was renamed Myanmar by the military government in 1989. However, democracy movements prefer the name Burma. Both names have the same linguistic root.
This sacrifice, however, was not in vain. Last November, the NLD clenched victory in Burma’s first true democratic election in decades, putting an end to more than 50 years of military rule – a military junta between 1962 and 2011, followed by a military-backed civilian government. Nevertheless, just five months since the NLD officially took office, iconoclastic chisels are beginning to chip away at Suu Kyi’s previously unquestionable sanctitude.
Despite the NLD’s victory, a constitutional wrangling imposed by the former military rulers meant Suu Kyi could not become president. Yet, by promising to be ‘above the president’ and handpicking her obscure confident and former driver Htin Kyaw to take up the position, she has become the country’s premier in all but name. She has also given herself four out of 21 cabinet posts, including foreign minister, the president’s officer minister, and the uniquely-crafted role of state counsellor, which, according to AFP, gives her ‘vaguely-defined powers to guide parliamentary affairs’.
In Peter Popham’s recent book, The Lady and the Generals, Suu Kyi is described as possessing a ‘ravenous egotism’. The Nikkei Asian Review recently posited that ‘some foreign commentators have even labelled her a “democratic dictator” in the making.’ It can be reasonably assumed that when NLD politicians are frequently prevented from speaking to the media or attending civil society events without the permission of party headquarters – restrictions known as than mani, or ‘iron rules’ – it is Suu Kyi’s permission that is needed. Another assumption, it was her decision to fill the remaining cabinet posts with NLD politicians who, according to one commentator, ‘are all over 60, relatively unknown, with limited management experience and will follow Suu Kyi’s lead unquestionably.’
As David Mathieson, senior researcher on Burma in the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, recently told the Diplomat: ‘There’s a culture within the party of being very untransparent and authoritarian… A lot of MPs are under gag orders not talk. They’re really trying to keep party discipline to an undemocratic degree.’
That a pro-democracy party should behave so undemocratically has confounded many. But is this justifiable? In the short term, arguably yes. Suu Kyi and the NLD would, most likely, not dispute the insinuation that they are liberating Burma from a militocracy. And, as with most liberators, if they want to prevent the inherent implication of French philosopher Regis Debray’s thesis – ‘the revolution revolutionizes the counter-revolution’ – and stave off their own Thermidor, then it is justifiable to prolong the struggle until it is safe. For Burma, this might mean curtailing the NLD’s internal democracy until national democracy is secure. (This is no foregone conclusion since the country’s constitution mandates that 25 per cent of parliamentary seats automatically go to the military, which continues to control important ministries, and which has already indicated that it would oppose any further democratic changes.)
Still, if this continues in the years to come, Suu Kyi could find herself in the similar position of earlier political leaders. A rather premature forewarning could be that she wields her ‘iron rule’ over the NLD for far too long, preventing younger generations of leaders from rising through the ranks, and endangering democracy which necessities more than the rule of a pro-democracy party, and one figurehead.
It is beyond doubt that, for now, after securing 80 per cent of available parliamentary seats in last November’s elections, the NLD and Suu Kyi have the support of the Burmese majority. And as for Suu Kyi herself, many inside and outside the country consider it her destiny to reign not only because of her lineage – her father was a hero of Burmese independence – but also because of the sacrifices she made for the struggle. This might explain why so much attention, or sympathy, was paid to her unceremonious inability to become president, an issue that occupied the media for months after the election, leaving perhaps more relevant issues, like what the NLD will do in government, a mere paragraph or two for consideration.
Now in power, however, the NLD and Suu Kyi face the unenviable tasks. Nicholas Farrelly, an expert on Burmese politics, recently wrote: ‘Wherever you looked around the country, there were issues that demanded attention including tough topics like human trafficking, drug production, HIV, civil war, child soldiering, economic malaise, forced conscription and crony capitalism. Most of these old issues are still on the agenda. But now that the NLD has a much greater say in how the government runs they can no longer expect somebody else to fix these problems.’
Important questions are also being raised as to how humanitarian the pro-democracy icon is, particularly with her government’s recent controversy of kowtowing to the country’s Buddhist extremists by failing to recognise the Muslim Rohingya minority, which has long been brutalised in the country, as a legitimate ethnicity. A ‘cowardly stance’, according to the New York Times.
The country’s democratic changes have yet to reach its ethnic minorities.
What’s more, as many commentators have pointed out, for too long the NLD has relied on Suu Kyi’s cult of personality, rather than policy or ideology. One of the main problems concerning the NLD is that it has long possessed very few policies. And now in power, it must decide upon them in a rather haphazard fashion – or, worse still, have them dictated by Suu Kyi herself.
At the same time, as Chit Win, a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, recently stated, the NLD must reach equilibrium between ‘necessary reforms [and] the existing political realities that constrain that very reform agenda. If the NLD pushes for drastic political reconfiguration without accommodating the military’s concerns and interests, it will undermine this balance and provoke a hostile reaction from the military.’ (Burma need only look south to Thailand for what this might entail.)
And by extension, should reforms not happen as expected, the NLD could also face a backlash from those who voted the party into government – an aspect of democratic rule Burma’s former military leaders never had to concern themselves with. As the head of the NLD’s economics committee, Hantha Myint, told AFP in March: ‘The people have very, very high hopes and then if we misbehave in some way… the people’s expectations will be crushed.’ Some commentators have asserted that so high were expectations, the NLD can never possibly appease them.
Few doubt that the NLD can rule Burma efficiently, or suggest that Suu Kyi should step down immediately; Burmese democracy must be sustained and strengthened, and by no means will this be an easy feat. However, so that democracy does not become synonymous with Suu Kyi, and for it to endure in decades to come, it is clear that the 70-year-old should be making real preparations for her own retirement, sooner rather than later. The NLD must become the NLD, and no longer Suu Kyi’s NLD.
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17. INDIA: UDTA PUNJAB - CBFC’S MANDATE IS ONLY TO CERTIFY FILMS, NOT TO CENSOR THEM OR CHOP THEM UP
by Nandini Sardesai
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(The Times of India - Edit Page - June 9, 2016)
The controversy over repeated cuts made in the film Udta Punjab reveals a deeper dilemma about the role of a film certification board in a modern democracy. Are societal evils, which were earlier on display in the rich legacy of Indian cinema from Bimal Roy to Satyajit Ray to films like Bombay which depicted communal riots, not to be shown at all?
Does the Board stand as the self-appointed guardian of community and religious sentiments, which are to be interpreted as it likes? CBFC stands for Central Board of Film Certification, yet it is known as the censor board in popular parlance.
The reason is that it is a scissor happy institution and over the years has arrogated to itself powers of censoring/ censuring at will. It is governed by a copyright act which is over three decades old and has failed to evolve with the changing ethos of Indian society.
Changes, albeit a few, have come thanks to some enlightened regional officers and chairpersons. Kissing was a strict ‘no no’ until the 1980s, but was subsequently permitted in ‘bits and pieces’.
The idea behind CBFC was that films are of various genres and should be certified for various categories of viewers. There is no question of ‘cutting and chopping’ being a part of its duties!
In the course of the film if anything is threatening the integrity of the nation, inciting violence, showing depravity (to name a few clauses) it is not to be shown. This is, of course, very subjective and judgments depend on the profile of the examining committee.
When i came in as a committee member i was appalled at the quality of some panel members who had little or no knowledge of the nuances of films but came with an archaic mindset. They were there because of political patronage.
I was there as an academic and my perspective very often differed. No wonder when i first met the current chairperson, he branded me as “liberal”, using it as if it was a term of abuse. And therein lies the crux of the matter.
There have been past chairpersons, each with their own viewpoint, and there were problems over censorship. But CBFC was never rocked by such controversy as it has since the current incumbent took over.
He is egoistic and dictatorial and will brook no difference of opinion. He has openly shouted down veterans like Chandraprakash Dwivedi and Ashok Pandit at the board meeting.
Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore’s words to me were that board members are on par with the chairperson. A board member is expected to chair a revising committee meeting and the chairperson plays a monitoring role. But it would seem that Pahlaj Nihalani goes over all heads and chairs revising committee meetings (especially involving big banner films) himself, which is where the problem lies.
He has done this in the case of Udta Punjab and embarrassed board members who have been reduced to passive onlookers. Sadly he is being abetted by the current CEO who is supposed to basically play an administrative function, but who also watches films himself.
No wonder there is something rotten in the state of CBFC. We need to understand that the role of the Board should not be to stifle creativity or vibrancy of Indian cinema. The so-called censor board is by definition only a certification authority, not a watchdog or a policeman on the cinema beat.
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18. PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT: WORDS MATTER: WRITINGS AGAINST SILENCE, EDITED BY K. SATCHIDANANDAN
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Words Matter: Writings against Silence, edited by K. Satchidanandan, and published by Penguin-Viking.
In Words Matter, edited by eminent poet and scholar K. Satchidanandan, scholars and writers including Romila Thapar, Githa Hariharan, Pankaj Mishra, Salil Tripathi and Ananya Vajpeyi discuss these definitive values from various points of view. In their perceptive and insightful essays, the contributors argue that we must nurture critical thinking to fight all kinds of discrimination and insularity.
https://www.amazon.com/Words-Matter-Writings-Against-Silence/dp/0670088935
http://www.amazon.in/Words-Matter-Writings-Against-Silence/dp/0670088935
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19. TRAUTMANN REVIEWS NAYANJOT LAHIRI. ASHOKA IN ANCIENT INDIA
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(H-Asia - May, 2016))
Nayanjot Lahiri. Ashoka in Ancient India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. 408 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-05777-7.
Reviewed by Thomas R. Trautmann (University of Michigan)
Ashoka
Ashoka is one of the most remarkable figures of the ancient world. We are fortunate to have a new biography of him by the eminent historian and archaeologist of ancient India Professor Nayanjot Lahiri of, aptly, the newly created Ashoka University. Professor Lahiri aimed to write a biography of Ashoka for a general audience, and in doing so to relieve the grind of an administrative job at Delhi University, where she then was. She has succeeded admirably at the first and, I take it from the cheery good nature evident in the writing, at the second as well. Issues of evidence and interpretation, large and small, are elucidated clearly and briefly. The tone is light and the pace brisk. She engages the vexing problems and the scholarly debates they have provoked but she does not linger over them. She turns to other societies of the ancient world when comparison is illuminating. There is no academic throat-clearing and portentous speech meant to signal the writer’s authority. It is a pleasure to read. She succeeds so well in the accessibility and plain-speaking department that scholars may get the idea that it is intended for beginners. They would be making a mistake.
The nub of the matter is Ashoka’s great change of heart, occasioned by his successful war of annexation against Kalinga, c. 260 BCE. This was perhaps the final act in the first unification of India, begun by his grandfather Chandragupta, and it was roughly contemporaneous, Lahiri points out, with the onset of Rome’s wars against Carthage (264-146) that prepared the way for the formation of the Roman Empire, and the first unification of China under the Qin (221 BCE). What makes Ashoka stand out among ancient kings is his public remorse over the suffering inflicted in the course of his victory, which he reckoned as 150,000 displaced persons, 100,000 killed on the battlefield, and many more who died subsequently, plus the unmerited suffering of noncombatants. “The triumph is recorded as a disaster. Defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory,” Lahiri writes (p. 117). Ashoka sets off on a new path, with the concept of nonviolence (ahimsa) at the fore. It is “a staggering reversal of the very conception of kingship.”
The scale of the reversal may be judged from the terms of the first unification. From Megasthenes, Hellenistic ambassador to Chandragupta, we get the picture of the Mauryan war machinery by which it was accomplished: an enormous army, with divisions of infantry, cavalry, chariots, and war elephants; the army a professional one, maintained out of what had to have been an enormous treasury built up by heavy taxation, the army’s manpower having no peacetime duties, that is, not a self-sufficient landowning yeomanry or aristocracy; and a royal monopoly of the means of making war, namely, horses, elephants, and arms. Ashoka inherited this machinery and deployed it in the enlargement of an empire that stretched across most of India as far as Kandahar, where Greek and Aramaic inscriptions of Ashoka were found in the 1950s. In adding Kalinga to the Mauryan Empire, he became the supreme Indian ruler of his time.
The edicts of Ashoka, though they survived the ages, were written in scripts that had become unreadable until they were deciphered in the 1830s by the combined efforts of Indian and European scholars under the leadership of James Prinsep of the Asiatic Society. It is an accomplishment that belongs with the more celebrated decipherments of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform, in what was truly a great age of decipherment that made the ancient world suddenly more legible. Once deciphered, the Ashokan edicts showed that the key to his life lay not in some trauma of childhood but in his remorse over the suffering he had caused during the military conquest of Kalinga. He considered his new policy to be without precedent, and hoped that future kings might continue it forever after.
This most interesting Ashoka, concealed in plain sight in his edicts, was lost until the great decipherment. A more conventional Ashoka, who was a pious Buddhist monarch, was preserved in Buddhist writings. These writings, in the form they have come down to us, were composed centuries after the events of which they tell. They are not completely disqualified simply because they are not contemporary with the events they describe; indeed, we suppose they come out of traditions some of which go back to those times, and are not pure fabrications. Lahiri herself accepts the testimony of the texts that Ashoka was not the heir to the throne and fought his way to it after the death of his father, the emperor Bindusāra. The main problem with these sources lies elsewhere, in their point of view, as monkish productions that attribute Ashoka’s change of heart exclusively to the Buddhist doctrine and the monkhood. Both, of course, were hugely important. By his own account, Ashoka had become a Buddhist layman before Kalinga, and grew more zealous in the religion as a result of of Kalinga. But the Buddhist writings make no mention of the Kalinga war and Ashoka’s remorse over it, or of his effort to conform state policy to the principle of nonviolence. In the Ashokavadana (c. second century CE, by a monk of Mathura) the early Ashoka is known for his cruelty, the late Ashoka not for nonviolence (ahiṁsā) but as a hero of royal gifts (dāna) to the Sangha and zealous in his violence against Jains, rather than for the religious tolerance he espouses in his inscriptions. In the Mahavaṁsa of Sri Lanka, written by monks of the Mahavihara monastery of the island in the sixth century CE, the emphasis is on the transmission of Buddhism to the island’s king and the establishment of the Mahavihara. Again there is no mention of the Kalinga war as the cause of Ashoka’s change of heart and his subsequent zeal for nonviolence.
When we compare the two Ashokas, as it became possible to do after the decipherment, the Aśoka of the inscriptions is seen to be so much more believable, and much more appealing, than the Ashoka of the Buddhist stories written from a monkish point of view. As Hendrik Kern has said, “If we knew Ashoka only through the Buddhist sources of the North [Ashokavadana] and the South [Mahavaṁsa], we would conclude that he was a monarch of rare insignificance, remarkable only in that he was half monster and half idiot. His coreligionists have transmitted us neither a good deed of his, nor an elevated sentiment, or a striking speech.”[1]
Lahiri set herself the task of telling Ashoka’s life in a chronological narrative, following a logic of before and after, of development through time. This is not easy to accomplish. The project comes up against the unevenness of sources. Until the tenth year of Ashoka’s reign, and at the very end of his life, we have no contemporary source, as the edicts say nothing of his ancestors and early life and, of course, his last days. What may be known of his beginnings and his end comes from the uncertain light of the later Buddhist texts. Most biographers have preferred to cope with this problem by partitioning the reliable sources among chapters arranged by themesrather than in chronological succession. Lahiri’s interpretation engages with the Buddhist legends critically, and employs an archaeological way of seeing to widen the context in which the life is displayed.
The outcomes have three notable tendencies. First, there is a focusing in upon the local particularity of each of the sites of Ashoka’s life and deeds. This includes, as far as it may be known or inferred, the local reception of the royal edict, which, it is sometimes possible to show, was not enthusiastic. An example is the royal promotion of vegetarianism in Afghanistan—archaeological sites show no diminution in bones of fish or large mammals. This aspect of the book often involves close consideration of the reasons a site was chosen for the inscription of Ashokan edicts. Second, much attention is devoted to reading the landscapes, the regional geography in which such sites are placed. And finally, some of the most interesting analysis concerns the reconstruction of the journeys taken by Ashoka from one region to another—the time they took, the means of transport, the probable itinerary, and so forth.
In each of these tendencies Lahiri’s work has the advantage of excellent recent scholarship. Harry Falk’s photographs and rereading of the Aśokan edicts in their original locations is a treasure house of what may be learned by systematic study and attention to local details. Dilip Chakrabarti’s works on the geography of ancient Indian regions are frequent touchstones for Lahiri’s book. Jean Deloche’s valuable studies of transportation have shown us that ancient India was many times larger than the India of today, because of the slower means of transportation and the high cost of transport before the age of fossil fuels, and are useful in the reconstruction of Ashokan journeys. These and other works of the more recent scholarship Lahiri finds useful and a directionality congenial to her own.
Lahiri made it her method to visit personally as many of the sites as her administrative duties permitted. This choice follows from her training in archaeology. Fieldwork gives her book the feel of having been made outdoors, and informs its orientation toward the concreteness of place and context, in which it excels.
The strength of her book lies here, in its feeling for the particularities of a given locality, of its region and landscape. In one passage, on the Greek and Aramaic inscriptions of Ashoka in Afghanistan, she asserts it in the form of a critique of existing biographies of Ashoka and histories of ancient India more generally. In her view the shortcoming of the first is to make the degree of centralization the central issue in analyses of his administration and the relations of the core with the periphery; that of the second is the tendency to focus on large states to the exclusion of formations deemed peripheral. The argument is that “macro analyses” taking the point of view of the large state tend to assume “singular ground realities across diverse regions” (p. 172), such that autonomy, subversion, resistance, local histories, and non-state societies are mostly flattened out and lost to view. It is an argument against the very concept of the peripheral, or at least of its reductive tendency. Professor Lahiri argues instead for local histories in the overall project of ancient history. I do not think that the view she advances is the negation of the one she criticizes, and incline to take both as complementary perspectives on a complex subbject. As Ashoka was ruler of a very large state, any biography of him must include the view from the center, but Lahiri endeavors to capture the specifics of reception. Readers will find this book a breath of fresh air, and a new way of looking at an irresistible figure of history.
Note
[1]. H. Kern, Histoire du bouddhism dans l’Inde, vol. 2 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1901-03), 335.
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20. BRAZIL: COUP OR FIASCO?
by Immanuel Wallerstein
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(Agence Global - Released: 15 May 2016)
The President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has been suspended from her office while she goes on trial by the Senate. If convicted, she would be removed from office, which is what is meant in Brazil by "impeachment." Anyone, even Brazilians, who have been trying to follow the last several months of political maneuvering may be excused if they are somewhat confused by the many turns this process has taken.
What is really at issue here? Is this a constitutional coup as Pres. Rousseff has called it repeatedly? Or is this a legitimate act of holding the president responsible for grave misdeeds by her and members of her cabinet and advisors, as the "opposition" claims? If the latter, why is this occurring only now and not, say, in Rousseff's first term as president before she was easily re-elected in 2015 by a significant margin?
Rousseff is a member of the Partido dos Trabalhores (PT) that has been long led by her predecessor in office, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula). One way to view these events is to see it as part of the story of the PT — its coming to power and now, quite probably, its ouster from power.
What is the PT, and what has it represented in Brazilian politics? The PT was founded in 1980 as a party opposed to the military dictatorship that had ruled Brazil since the coup of 1964. It was a socialist, anti-imperialist party, bringing together Marxist groups, large civil associations like the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement or MST), and Catholic movements of the liberation theology persuasion.
From the point of view both of the military and of the traditional Establishment parties in Brazil, the PT was a dangerous revolutionary party, which threatened the conservative economic and social structures of the country. The United States viewed its "anti-imperialism" as directed primarily at the U.S. dominant role in Latin American politics, which indeed it was.
The PT however did not seek power through guerrilla insurrection but rather through parliamentary elections, sustained and supported by extra-parliamentary demonstrations. It took four presidential elections to bring finally a PT candidate, Lula, to office in 2003. The Brazilian Establishment never expected this would actually happen and never accepted that it could possibly continue. They have devoted their energies ever since to bringing the PT down. They may have gotten their way in 2016. Historians in the future may look upon the period 2003-2016 as the fifteen-year PT interlude.
What in fact has happened in this interlude? The PT in office was something far less radical than the opponents of the PT feared, but still radical enough to have made them relentless in their desire to destroy the PT, not merely as the holders of the presidential office but as a movement with a legitimate place in Brazilian politics.
If the PT was able to come to electoral power in 2003, it was because of the combination of the growing attractiveness of its program and its rhetoric and the declining geopolitical strength of the United States. And what did the PT do with its time in office? On the one hand it sought to succor the poorest strata of Brazil through a redistributive program known as the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program that included the Bolsa familia (Family Allowance), which did indeed improve their income level and reduce the enormous inequalities from which Brazil suffered.
In addition, Brazil's foreign policy under the PT marked a significant shift away from Brazil's historic subservience to U.S. geopolitical imperatives. Brazil took the lead in creating autonomous Latin American structures that included Cuba and excluded the United States and Canada.
On the other hand, Brazil's macroeconomic policies remained quite orthodox from the point of view of neoliberal emphases on market orientations of governmental policies. And the PT's multiple promises to prevent environmental destruction were never seriously implemented. Nor did the PT ever carry out its promises of agrarian reform.
In short, its performance as a left movement was a mixed bag. As a result, groups within the party and in its larger political alliances were constantly defecting. This resulted in the weakened position that made it possible in 2015 for the enemies of the PT to implement a plan to destroy it.
The scenario was simple. It centered on charges of corruption. Corruption has been massive and endemic in Brazilian politics, and important figures of the PT itself were by no means exempt from the practice. The one person not subject to such charges was Dilma Rousseff. What then to do? The person who took the lead in the impeachment process, President of the Chamber of Deputies Eduardo Cunha (and an Evangelical Christian) was himself removed from office because he is being indicted for corruption. No matter! The process proceeded on the basis that Dilma Rousseff failed in her responsibility to contain the corruption. This led Boaventura dos Santos Sousa to summarize the situation as one in which the one honest politician was being ousted by the most corrupt.
Rousseff has been suspended from office and her Vice-President Michel Temer has assumed office as Interim President, immediately appointing a far-right cabinet. It seems almost certain that Rousseff will be impeached and removed permanently from office. She is not the real target. The real target is Lula. Under Brazilian law, no president can have more than two successive terms. It has been everyone's expectation that Lula would be the PT candidate again in 2019.
Lula has been Brazil's most popular politician for a long time now. And while his popularity has been somewhat tarnished by the corruption scandal, he seems to remain sufficiently popular that he would win the election. So the right forces will try now to have him actually charged with corruption and therefore ineligible to run.
What will happen then? No one is sure. The rightwing politicians will fight among themselves for the presidency. The army may decide once again to take power. What seems sure is that the PT is finished. The PT sought to exercise its power as a centrist government, balancing its program. But the serious budget deficit and the decline of world prices for oil and other Brazilian exports has disillusioned a large swatch of its voters. As in many other countries today, massive discontent leads to a rejection of normal centrist politics.
What a successor movement of the PT might do would be to return to its roots as a consistently left anti-imperialist movement. This will be no more easy than it was for the PT in 1980. The difference between 1980 and now is the degree to which the modern world-system is in structural crisis. The struggle is worldwide and the Brazilian left can either play a major role in it or slip into global irrelevance and national misery.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).
Copyright ©2016 Immanuel Wallerstein -- distributed by Agence Global
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21. ATHEISM ON TRIAL IN RUSSIA'S STAVROPOL
by Victor Davidoff
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(Moscow Times - March 16 2016)
In a courtroom in Stavropol, Viktor Krasnov, a physician's assistant, is accused of the same crime as Giordano Bruno, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Salman Rushdie — atheism. Krasnov probably isn't thrilled to be in such illustrious company, just as no one else is thrilled by this felony case. Hopping into a time machine is a great fantasy, but not when it takes you to the dungeons of the Inquisition.
Krasnov is facing one year in prison under Article 148 of the Criminal Code — for "public actions that express clear lack of respect for society and are carried out with the aim of insulting the religious feelings of believers." His "actions" consisted of a verbal quarrel on the Stravropol page of the social network VKontakte in the fall of 2014.
It all began, as so much begins, with a conversation about women — specifically with a quote from the Apostle Paul: "Christ is the head of every man, and a husband the head of his wife, and God the head of Christ."
"Where's that crap from, the Domostroi?" Krasnov wrote, referring to a medieval Russian book of rules for family life, which recommend, in part, that a husband periodically beat his wife.
Not just one but two people on the forum explained to Krasnov that this was from the Bible. Krasnov got annoyed and called the Bible "a collection of Jewish fairy tales" — although to be fair, he did add, "for me, anyway." Then one of his opponents threatened to knock some sense into him, to which Krasnov replied, "There is no God!
Apparently deciding to not bother with theological proof of God's existence, Krasnov's opponents turned to the help of the police, prosecutor's office and court instead. They denounced him.
The current tougher version of Article 148 was put on the books in the fall of 2013 as a belated response to the Pussy Riot case. The women in Pussy Riot were charged with "hooliganism," which was absurd — as their lawyers pointed out — since Pussy Riot performed by themselves in an almost empty church. The new version of this article in the Criminal Code was supposed to make it possible to jail any other followers of Pussy Riot without changing the law too much.
But Article 148 is in fact a gross violation of the Russian Constitution. Article 14 of the Constitution clearly states that the Russian Federation is a secular state. Therefore, the rejection of religious dogmas shouldn't put anyone behind bars.
And the article is a violation of simple logic as well. In today's multi-confessional world, every minute of every day, followers of every religion commit public acts that "insult the religious feelings of believers" in other gods. Christians reject the divinity of the Quran; Muslims reject the divine nature of Jesus Christ; Jews reject both — and the list can go on and on to everyone, including practitioners of Voodoo. Therefore, according to the letter of the law, everyone should be sent to jail regardless of their faith, including atheists, too.
The linguistic analysis of the Krasnov case is like a document airmailed directly from the Middle Ages. It stipulates that Krasnov's words could not offend a person of a particular religious group since the subject under discussion is not a person or a group of people but rather religious dogmas and canons. That's why, the experts explained, "these statements are insulting to Orthodox Christianity and aimed at humiliating (offending) the feelings of believers." Medieval scholars would have turned green with envy: on the one hand, no Orthodox Christian was insulted, but on the other hand, that's precisely why all Orthodox Christians were insulted.
It's interesting to note that not all Orthodox Christians agree with these scholarly experts or consider themselves insulted. Father Antony Skrynnikov, a priest in Stavropol who doesn't have particularly warm feelings about Krasnov, all the same wrote in his defense: "My personal opinion is simple: the court case is senseless and I hope that he [Krasnov] is acquitted. In my view he is an unhappy, lost soul. You can feel sorry for him, but you can't want to take revenge against him, enjoy his suffering or be happy if he, God forbid, is convicted."
Certainly as the world slips into a period of new religious wars, governments must take measures to buffer growing sectarian conflicts. But the criminal code is already sufficient to protect believers from violence or insulting acts. Swastikas drawn on the walls of a synagogue offend more than practicing Jews and Jewish people. It is a coded message calling for the liquidation of people by race, which is a violation of the rights of everyone regardless of their religion or race.
To prevent such a violation, you don't need Article 148 which, as the Krasnov case clearly shows, doesn't so much defend the rights of Orthodox believers as it violates the right of citizens to express their opinion, the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion as defined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 148 of the Criminal Code is a case of the cure being worse than the disease — an indication that, as it was written in St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians that began Krasnov's case, "there must be also heresies among you."
Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based independent journalist, editor of the human rights web site Chronicle of Current Events
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22.Iran: Petition for the release of renowned anthropologist Prof Homa Hoodfar from Evin prison in Tehran
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The Government of President Rouhani in Iran: We call on you to secure the release of Homa Hoodfar
Release of Homa Hoodfar
ENGLISH:
Homa Hoodfar, a Canadian professor of Iranian origin and a world-renowned anthropologist of the Middle East who has an extensive publication record, has been imprisoned since her last visit to Iran. The authorities have not made clear whether Professor Hoodfar is being charged with espionage, sedition, or propaganda against the state. Her lawyer and family have not been allowed to see her, nor has the cause of arrest been explained to them. Furthermore, the authorities have refused to allow Professor Hoodfar’s relatives and lawyer to provide her prescription medication for a rare neurological illness (Myasthenia Gravis) from which she suffers. At the age of 65, Professor Hoodfar’s health is of great concern to her family, especially because she suffered a mild stroke last year.
Professor Hoodfar’s arrest coincides with her ethnographic research conducted on women’s public role. Since her arrest, her family in Iran has not been allowed to see her and are highly concerned about her fragile health.
We call on the international community, including the Canadian Government, the United Nations, the Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch as well as Canadian NGOs to pressure the Iranian government in order to secure the release of Professor Hoodfar. This is not the first time that the Iranian Intelligence agency has arrested an academic without clear charges. The Iranian government needs to account for the unfair imprisonment of Homa Hoodfar.
SIGN THE PETITION HERE: https://tinyurl.com/zues99n
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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web:
www.sacw.net/
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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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