SACW - 24 June 2016 | Pakistan: Amjad Sabri or Mullah Fazlullah / Nepal: China or India? / India: Hindutva Rule / From Great Britain to Little England / Satire on Trial

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 24 June 2016 - No. 2901 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) gets the First Praful Bidwai Memorial Award
2. Droning Mullah Fazlullah | Pervez Hoodbhoy
3. China or India: Leave Nepal free to develop its international outreach | Commentaries by Barbara Nimri Aziz and Kanak Mani Dixit
4. India: Two Years of Hindutva Rule | Mukul Dube
5. India: Public Statement(s) by Sabrang Trust on Ministry of Home Affairs Cancellation of FCRA
6. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: How RSS is making Modi's chosen ministers play fetch (Swati Chaturvedi)
  - Chia Barsen on The Orlando Terrorist Attack and the Response from the Secular Left
  - India: Editorial in The Hindu on the dangerous claim making re Hindu exodus by BJP MP Hukum Singh in Uttar Pradesh
  - India: Gulbarg Society Carnage - Who Cast the First Stone? (Ram Puniyani)
  - India: Legalese by Alok Prasanna Kumar re Uniform Civil Code - As Fiction
  - Video: Why is India called Hindustan if it is secular?
  - India: PIL against Muslim Judge probing Mathura Violence: HC imposes Rs 25 thousand Cost on BJP Leader, directs Bar Council to take action against Lawyer
  - India: Book Excerpt From 'Hindu Hriday Samrat' [The story of the emergence of the Right Wing Shiv Sena] (Sujata Anandan)
  - India: As terror charges against Sanatan Sanstha grow, why isn’t the government banning it? (Shoaib Daniyal)
  - India: Times of India Editorial on Junior HRD minister’s talk of ‘saffronising’ education
  - India: Less than justice - No closure for Gulbarg Society victims (Editorial, The Tribune)
  - India: Auto drivers, washerman, diamond cutters: Meet the life convicts in the Gulberg killings
  - India: Secular education in doldrums (Arshia Malik)
  - What more evidence needed to ban sanatan sanstha ?
  - India: Modi government chose Subramanian Swamy over Raghuram Rajan
  - Outraged by complete disregard for eye-witness testimonies: Teesta Setalvad on Gulberg Society verdict
  - India: RSS Ideologue Govindacharya: ‘We Will Rewrite the Constitution to Reflect Bharatiyata’ (Interview in The Wire)
  - Assam 2012: The Story of a Riot [between Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims] (Rahul Bhattacharya)

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Pakistan: Qawwal Amjad Sabri of Sabri Brothers fame shot dead in Karachi
8. Ehsan Jafri and the eroding of India's secular origins | Kuldip Nayar
9. Turkish students up in arms over Islamization of education | Sukru Kucuksahin
10. Mr. Modi, Don't Patent Cow Urine | Achal Prabhala And Sudhir Krishnaswamy
11. In the Darkroom review – an elegant masterpiece | Rachel Cooke
12. Book Review: Ross on Shah. Sex Ed, Segregated: The Quest for Sexual Knowledge in Progressive-Era America
13. Britain is in the midst of a working-class revolt | John Harris
14. From Great Britain to Little England | Neal Ascherson
15. UK: The mood is ugly, and an MP is dead | Polly Toynbee
16. Satire on Trial: Erdogan's Demand for Legal Action Puts Merkel in a Bind | Hasnain Kazim

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1. PEOPLE’S ARCHIVE OF RURAL INDIA (PARI) GETS THE FIRST PRAFUL BIDWAI MEMORIAL AWARD
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New Delhi, June 23: The first Praful Bidwai Memorial Award has gone to the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), which was set up in 2014 by noted Mumbai-based journalist and commentator, Palagummi Sainath.
http://sacw.net/article12831.html

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2. DRONING MULLAH FAZLULLAH
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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In Pakistan, anger has greeted the killing of Afghan Taliban head, Mullah Mansour, by an American drone on Pakistani territory. When senior US officials visited army chief Gen Raheel Sharif at the Rawalpindi GHQ, he expressed strong displeasure at the violation of Pakistan’s air space and demanded that Tehreek-i-Taliban head, Mullah Fazlullah, together with other TTP militants, be targeted by drones.
http://sacw.net/article12827.html

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3. CHINA OR INDIA: LEAVE NEPAL FREE TO DEVELOP ITS INTERNATIONAL OUTREACH
Commentaries by Barbara Nimri Aziz and Kanak Mani Dixit
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http://sacw.net/article12830.html

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4. INDIA: TWO YEARS OF HINDUTVA RULE
by Mukul Dube
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According to a report in the Hindu newspaper of 12 June 2016, Sanatan Sanstha spokesperson Abhay Vartak said that he is “sad to see that Hindu organisations [are] being targeted in spite of a Hindu government being in power”. He forgot that the law has no religion and that the law is above the government in power. A man who kills another human being is a murderer, plain and simple, and he is liable to the same punishment regardless of his religion. Most important, the Constitution of India requires the government of India to have no religion.
http://sacw.net/article12829.html

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5. INDIA: PUBLIC STATEMENT(S) BY SABRANG TRUST ON MINISTRY OF HOME AFFAIRS CANCELLATION OF FCRA
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the MHA issued a notice cancelling the FCRA of Sabrang Trust. Sabrang Trust’s primary activities have involved working in the area of secular education, advocacy and documentation while Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) have been working on the issue deliverance of justice to the Survivors of Mass Crimes, especially Gujarat 2002. Both need continued and sustained citizen’s support.
http://sacw.net/article12826.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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  - India:: A vindictive state at the very highest level at the Centre is bent on using repressive, even extra legal means: Teesta Setalvad & Javed Anand (Livelaw.in)
  - India - Kerala: Yoga display under CPI(M) auspices
  - Press Release : NAPM Condemns Sangh Parivar's and Caste Panchayats Attack on HDRC Ahmedabad (22nd June 2016)
  - India: How RSS is making Modi's chosen ministers play fetch (Swati Chaturvedi)
  - Chia Barsen on The Orlando Terrorist Attack and the Response from the Secular Left
  - India: Editorial in The Hindu on the dangerous claim making re Hindu exodus by BJP MP Hukum Singh in Uttar Pradesh
  - India: Gulbarg Society Carnage - Who Cast the First Stone? (Ram Puniyani)
  - India: Legalese by Alok Prasanna Kumar re Uniform Civil Code - As Fiction
  - Video: Why is India called Hindustan if it is secular?
  - India: PIL against Muslim Judge probing Mathura Violence: HC imposes Rs 25 thousand Cost on BJP Leader, directs Bar Council to take action against Lawyer
  - India: Book Excerpt From 'Hindu Hriday Samrat' [The story of the emergence of the Right Wing Shiv Sena] (Sujata Anandan)
  - India: As terror charges against Sanatan Sanstha grow, why isn’t the government banning it? (Shoaib Daniyal)
  - India: Times of India Editorial on Junior HRD minister’s talk of ‘saffronising’ education
  - India: Less than justice - No closure for Gulbarg Society victims (Editorial, The Tribune)
  - India: Auto drivers, washerman, diamond cutters: Meet the life convicts in the Gulberg killings
  - India: Secular education in doldrums (Arshia Malik)
  - What more evidence needed to ban sanatan sanstha ?
  - India: Modi government chose Subramanian Swamy over Raghuram Rajan
  - Outraged by complete disregard for eye-witness testimonies: Teesta Setalvad on Gulberg Society verdict
  - India: RSS Ideologue Govindacharya: ‘We Will Rewrite the Constitution to Reflect Bharatiyata’ (Interview in The Wire)
  - Assam 2012: The Story of a Riot [between Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims] (Rahul Bhattacharya)
  - India: In Rajasthan and Haryana, new rules for contesting panchayat polls exclude women, minorities from political system
  - India: Kairana about which BJP is spewing hate is also famous for a great gharana of Hindustani classical music (Saba Naqvi)
  - India: Modi talks of samvedana (sensitivity) . . . His party has other plans in UP

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. PAKISTAN: QAWWAL AMJAD SABRI OF SABRI BROTHERS FAME SHOT DEAD IN KARACHI
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(India Today - June 22, 2016)

Some of their most memorable qawwalis are 'Bhar Do Jholi Meri', 'Tajdar-e-Haram' and 'Mera Koi Nahin Hai Tere Siwa'.
IndiaToday.in  | Posted by Shruti Singh
New Delhi, June 22, 2016 

Briefcase
    1 Amjad Sabri was shot dead in Karachi today.
    2 He was shot twice in the head and once on the ear.
    3 His driver and associate were also killed.

Legendary Pakistani qawwal Amjad Sabri of the Sabri Brothers group was shot dead in Karachi today by unidentified motorcycle-borne gunmen, two days after masked men kidnapped the son of a top provincial judge.
Sabri, 45, and an associate were travelling in a car in Karachi's Liquatabad area when unidentified gunmen fired at their vehicle, critically injuring them. The two were rushed to Abbasi Shaheed hospital, where Sabri succumbed to his injuries.
"Three people including Amjad Sabri have been killed in a targeted attack on his car in Liaquatabad 10 area this afternoon," a senior police official said.
"He was shot in the chest and head and he was shifted to Abbasi Shaheed hospital immediately, where he succumbed to his injuries. The driver and associate have been killed in the targeted attack," the official said.
Additional police surgeon Dr Rohina Hasan confirmed Sabri's death. He was shot thrice, twice in the head and once on the ear, police sources said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
In 2014, Sabri was involved in a blasphemy case after the Islamabad High Court issued notices to Pakistan's Geo News and ARY TV channels over some songs played during a show.

VIOLENCE COMMON IN KARACHI
Violence is common in Karachi despite a sharp decline in murders since the Pakistani military launched a crackdown two years ago against suspected militants and violent criminals.
On Monday, a lawyer, the son of Sindh High Court Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, was abducted outside a city supermarket. The motive for the kidnapping was not immediately clear, authorities said.
In May, gunmen shot dead prominent Pakistani rights activist Khurram Zaki, known for his outspoken stance against the Taliban and other radical Islamist groups, in the central part of the city.
In April last year, prominent activist Sabeen Mahmud was shot and killed while travelling in her car.

PAKISTAN SHOCKED
"Shocked at the murder of famous qawwal Amjad Sabri & his companions in Karachi. A complete failure of law & order & writ of the govt," cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan tweeted.
Amjad Sabri was the son of renowned Qawwal Ghulam Farid Sabri whose family is famous in the subcontinent for their contribution to this sufi art and mystic poetry. Amjad was one of Pakistan's finest qawwals, known for his soul-stirring renditions of mystic poetry.
Almost whatever the Sabri Brothers sang became an instant hit. But some of their most memorable and famous qawwalis are 'Bhar Do Jholi Meri', 'Tajdar-e-Haram' and 'Mera Koi Nahin Hai Tere Siwa'. 

o o o

see also:

PAKISTANI SUFI SINGER, AMJAD SABRI, SHOT DEAD IN KARACHI
Outpouring of grief across Pakistan as famed musician Amjad Sabri is killed in Taliban gun attack on car
by Emma Graham-Harrison (The Guardian - 23 June 2016)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/22/pakistani-sufi-singer-shot-dead-in-karachi
 
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8. EHSAN JAFRI AND THE ERODING OF INDIA'S SECULAR ORIGINS
by Kuldip Nayar
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(The Daily Star -  June 24, 2016)

[Ehsan Jafri and the eroding of India's secular origins] The prejudiced police had neither done their job, nor homework thoroughly, and so the court had come to the conclusion that the provocation came from Jafri (in picture).

With all due respect to the Gujarat High Court, I beg to differ with its judgment that the firing by Ehsan Jafri ( Indian politician and former member of the 6th Lok Sabha for the Congress Party, who was killed in the Gulbarg Society massacre, which was one of the episodes of mob violence against Muslims during the 2002 Gujarat riots) provoked the mob to kill him. I knew him and he was a staunch Congressman. The Gulbarg Society massacre was the doing of local Gujarati leaders, hoping to parochialise the people.

When Jafri was surrounded by the Hindu mob, he rang me up, seeking my help to rescue him from the frenzied crowd he had around him. I rang up the Home Ministry in Delhi and told them about the telephone call. They said they were in touch with the state government and were “watching” the situation. As I put down the telephone, the bell rang again, and Jafri was at the other end, beseeching me to do something because the mob was threatening to lynch him. His cry for help still resounds in my ears.

I admit I could not do anything beyond ringing up the ministry once again. Therefore, the court's verdict that Jafri provoked the crowd is misplaced. It is a travesty of justice. But then the Bench is not to blame, because it has to go by the evidence placed before it. The prejudiced police had neither done their job, nor homework thoroughly, and so the court had come to the conclusion that the provocation came from Jafri.

I hope the matter will come up before the Supreme Court and the real facts may emerge for the knowledge of the wider public. This is important because the general impression is that Jafri was to blame. The tragedy is that even the judges have now been taken in by the sordid job done by the police. India is a pluralistic state and it is ruled by the Constitution which Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians in the Constituent Assembly together had adopted.

It goes to the credit of leaders of the national struggle that they adopted a secular Constitution, although the population of Hindus was an overwhelming 80 percent. The Hindu Mahasabha, which gave birth to the Jan Sangh, could not even return 10 members to the Lok Sabha. The party has, in fact, improved its position and today commands a majority in the House on its own. It has 262 seats in the Lok Sabha, guaranteeing it a clear majority. Close allies like the Shiv Sena have added to its strength.

What plagues India is that the government apparatus reflects the ideology of the party in power. This applies as much to Congress as to BJP. Even the communists are not innocent. How we reconcile these shortcomings with the rule of law is the biggest problem that the nation faces. Since all political parties are culpable, there doesn't seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel.

Unfortunately, the main onslaught today is against the minorities and the marginalised. If the rule of law is not maintained, all members of the society will be vulnerable. The 'enemy phobia' will sustain. Today, the Muslims are blamed; tomorrow it will be the turn of some other members of society. Where will it end? There is no option from the rule of law.

Fortunately, some activists are still trying to bring democracy back on the tracks, but the atmosphere has become so polluted that their job looks tremendous and almost impossible. Ultimately, Parliament is the arbiter. The nation will have to ensure that it elects people who have faith in the rule of law and the Constitution which came into being from 1950.

In fact, there were many options before the Constituent Assembly. Adviser B.N. Rao, who had gone around the world to see various systems in operation, placed before the advisory committee of the Constituent Assembly the presidential form of government pursued by the US and the one followed by France. Jawaharlal Nehru, whose ideas prevailed at that time, preferred the parliamentary system. It is alleged that his education at Harrow and Cambridge had moulded his thoughts. That may well be true, but he wanted a system where every adult would participate.

In the Constituent Assembly, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, who was in the chair, wanted some educational qualification as a requirement for voters. Nehru replied that the uneducated and the ignorant constituted the main force which fought during the independence struggle. Now when the country was free, should he tell them that they were not entitled to vote?

Another principle which goaded the movement was secularism. This was embodied in the Constitution which gives one person one vote, whatever their community's strength in the country. It may be unthinkable today in certain circles of society, but the representatives of the majority community accepted this principle.

So much so that the Muslim community's leaders in the Constituent Assembly refused to have reservations or quotas in legislatures, educational institutions and even in government jobs which they had enjoyed under the British. This is the practice even today. Yet, the prejudice is evident in jobs in the private sector. Very few Hindu establishments have Muslims as their employees. In fact, the Sachar Committee, appointed by Dr Manmohan Singh, then the prime minister, has said that the condition of the Muslims in India was worse than that of the Dalits. Very little improvement has been noticeable since then.

Regrettably, judgments, like the one in the Jafri cas,e could only provide the Hindutva crowd with the justification that aggressiveness of Muslims force Hindus to adopt a communal line. I might be overly optimistic, but I still hope that the society would realise on the whole that a country with so many complexities can survive in a pluralistic and democratic alignment.

People will themselves see the incongruity between the values of the Constitution and what is being practised otherwise. Pluralism is not only an ideology to prize, but also something to cherish, something that is needed to sustain the country's integrity. 

The writer is an eminent Indian columnist. 

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9. TURKISH STUDENTS UP IN ARMS OVER ISLAMIZATION OF EDUCATION
by Sukru Kucuksahin
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(Al-Monitor - June 20, 2016)

Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2002, Turkey has had six education ministers, each of whom made major changes to the education system, some argue to turn students into guinea pigs. The most significant change, bulldozed through parliament amid fistfights and protests in March 2012, expanded the imam-hatip religious schools and introduced Quranic studies and the life of the Prophet Muhammad as elective courses in public schools, among other changes. The opposition has long decried the Islamization of education, while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted on raising a “devout generation,” lauding imam-hatip schools, which train Muslim clergy and offer extensive Quranic studies.

In early June, a wave of protests spread through leading high schools around the country, with students demanding “modern” education. The spark was ignited at the graduation ceremony of the prestigious Istanbul Erkek Lisesi when the students turned their backs in protest to their principal as he delivered a speech. The protest continued the following day at the school’s traditional party, which the principal chose not to attend. The students unfurled a large banner demanding “a modern and not partisan administration,” setting the tone for more protests to come.

Students at the Galatasaray Lycee, one of Turkey’s oldest and most influential schools, quickly followed suit, calling for a “modern” principal who had not succumbed to the “servitude of any sultan” and could live up to the legacy of Tevfik Fikret, the famous Turkish poet who headed the school in the late 19th century. Within a week, students and graduates from about 370 schools had issued similar statements. One school, in the Black Sea city of Samsun, was raided by anti-terror police, called in by the principal.

Erdogan and his new education minister, Ismet Yilmaz, blamed anti-government forces for inciting the students, and many in AKP circles wondered anxiously whether a "second Gezi Park" was on its way. The protests have remained peaceful so far.

Under the AKP, education at Turkey’s mainstream high schools notably declined, as the government focused on expanding imam-hatip schools, using both incentives and coercive measures to increase enrollment at them. Erdogan, himself an imam-hatip graduate, has routinely promoted these schools as the “apple of our eye,” calling them “exceptional” and “moral” centers of learning. In doing so, he not only raised alarm about the future of secular education, but ostracized the students at other types of schools.

Following the 2012 amendment, drawn up hastily and over the head of the then-education minister, the government changed the administrators of schools virtually overnight. The newcomers belonged overwhelmingly to a trade union close to the AKP.

The real problem with Turkey’s school system, however, is the quality of the education provided, but no progress has been visible in this regard. Take, for instance, several statistics from this year’s nationwide university entrance exam, which more than 2 million people took, including 912,000 students graduating from high school. In the latter group, the average number of correct answers for the Turkish-language and social sciences tests, each consisting of 40 questions, stood at 19.31 and 10.45, respectively. As for the science test, about 750,000 of the 2 million who took it had no correct answers, while another 500,000 managed only three at most, leaving little to be said. In global school rankings last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based on test scores in math and science, Turkey fared 41st among 76 countries, hardly good news for a country that boasts one of the world’s top 20 economies.

The AKP, however, has shown little concern about the current situation. With another controversial amendment in March 2014, the government laid hands on 174 schools that produce the country’s highest achievers, dubbing them “project schools,” with the stated aim of raising future scientists and inventors. Many of these schools have established traditions for selecting their principals from among in-house candidates and through exams. This approach was discarded, and the government appointed new principals of its own choosing who were unfamiliar with the schools and their students. Moreover, thousands of experienced teachers were dismissed due to what was described as "mental fatigue" and replaced with younger colleagues who belong to the pro-government trade union.

The makeover has also affected social life at these schools, where students tend to have an avid interest in arts, sports and scientific and creative activities. Events the students wanted to organize were axed in favor of religiously themed conferences and activities. Some principals were accused of interfering with how students dress and trying to keep boys and girls apart.

All this led to the wave of protest, with graduating students speaking up for modern, scientific and secular education. The rebellious schools may represent only a small portion of Turkey’s 10,550 high schools, but they boast the country’s brightest students. Hence, whether the government lends them an ear or not is vital to Turkey’s future.

Representatives of critical trade unions in the education sector are both upset and disappointed with themselves. “The kids had to raise their voices after we, the adults, failed to do what was up to us,” Veli Demir, the head of the Education and Science Workers Trade Union, told Al-Monitor. “Our respectable schools, and therefore their students, were ostracized, while the imam-hatip schools were glorified.”

According to Demir, the number of secondary imam-hatip schools grew from 1,099 in 2012 to 1,961 at present, while imam-hatip high schools increased from 708 to 1,149 in the same period. Meanwhile, the number of students attending them has risen from 932,000 to 1.2 million. Back in 2002, the figure stood at 71,000, he said, recalling a leaked audiotape from a 2013 meeting in which Erdogan’s son Bilal allegedly lectured education officials and pro-AKP charity representatives on how enrollment in imam-hatip schools should reach 1 million in a short period of time. “They don’t want students involved in science, arts and sports, but students who are [only] pious,” Demir said.

Another critical trade union leader, Kamuran Karaca of the Education and Science Laborers Syndicate, said the main reason why students at the so-called project schools rebelled was the appointment of principals with religious motivations, keen to bring “all kinds of Islamists” to the schools “under the pretext of panels, discussions or book days.”

“The students, however, demand secular, scientific and modern education and want activities accordingly,” Karaca said. “What they imposed was a dead end, and now that this has become obvious, they are targeting the students and trying to portray them as puppets. We’ll only move forward if we remember that these places are not mosques but schools. Otherwise, the problems will persist and our future will be undermined.”

Sukru Kucuksahin
Contributor,  Turkey Pulse

Sukru Kucuksahin has been a journalist for 35 years. He has worked for Ankara Ekspres, Gunaydin, Sabah, CNBC-e/NTV and Hurriyet as correspondent to the parliament, Prime Ministry and Presidency. From 2003 to 2016, he served as deputy Ankara representative and columnist for Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s leading newspapers. He is also a frequent TV commentator on domestic political affairs.

Translator Sibel Utku Bila

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10. MR. MODI, DON'T PATENT COW URINE
by Achal Prabhala And Sudhir Krishnaswamy
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(The New York Times - June 16, 2016

BANGALORE, India — The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is famously obsessed with the cow, which is venerated in Hindu cosmology. Most Indian states have now banned cow slaughter. The government of Punjab wants to tax alcohol to pay for shelters for stray cattle. Last year, after a Muslim man in Uttar Pradesh was lynched by a mob for eating beef, a cabinet minister from the B.J.P. demanded to know who else was “involved in the crime” — meaning the beef eating, not the man’s killing.

It should probably come as no surprise, then, that the B.J.P. is also touting the medicinal virtues of consuming cow urine. The therapy is mentioned in the Ayurveda, an ancient healing system described in Hinduism’s foundational texts. In the early 2000s, when the B.J.P. led the governing coalition of the day, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, a state-funded network of research laboratories, started promoting cow-urine technology as a treatment for diabetes, infections, cancer and even DNA damage.

Today, the Indian government holds more than a dozen patents related to cow urine and has filed applications for them in nearly 150 countries. Many nations, including the United States, France and South Korea, have recognized these, but not India, which has much stricter standards for patents. For now.

The B.J.P. government released India’s first National Intellectual Property Rights Policy last month, and it is dangerously misguided. Although the paper reaffirms the basic tenets of India’s admirably farsighted patent laws, it also calls for protecting traditional remedies like cow urine. Taken to its logical conclusion, this policy could open the door to many more exceptions, playing into the hands of patent-happy international pharmaceutical companies.

Big Pharma justifies aggressive patenting by claiming that profit-making drives invention by giving labs and companies an incentive to invest in research. Indian law takes the opposite view: Higher standards for legal protection leave more room for innovation. Unlike many other countries, India does not allow patents for natural substances, traditional remedies, frivolous inventions or marginal innovations.

This is a good thing — a great thing, in fact. Having fewer patents means more competition for more generic drugs, which means more affordable medicine for more people. Imatinib, a drug used to treat a form of leukemia, is available in India at about one-tenth the price it costs in much of the world. In 2000, when the only anti-retroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS available were produced by Western companies, the annual cost of treatment was about $10,000. The price has dropped to about $350, at least in the developing world, thanks to generic equivalents that were developed in India.

Naturally, all this drives Big Pharma mad. Its business model relies largely on patenting small tweaks to existing technologies, which multiplies financial returns with only minimal investment in research. A recent Plos One study found that about 36 percent of all new drugs approved in the United States between 1988 and 2005 were protected solely by secondary, or trivial, patents.

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This, being precisely what Indian law prohibits, has made India a fixture of the “Priority Watch List” of the U.S. Trade Representative’s Special 301 Report, a kind of most-wanted roster of the world’s intellectual-property deviants. Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States last week, 17 U.S. industry associations, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, wrote to President Obama to complain about India’s business environment, in particular its patent laws.

Back in 1970, India withdrew drug patents in order to support its generic-drugs industry. They were reintroduced, with caveats, in 2005 when the country’s entire intellectual property regime was updated to comply with World Trade Organization rules. Acting on the advice of public-health activists, a group of Communist parties that formed an indispensable minority of the governing coalition forced the Congress Party to go along with the innovation-friendly restrictions that remain today.

Last month, when the B.J.P. announced its new intellectual property policy, it in effect repeated India’s longstanding response to its critics: Tough luck; our patent laws comply with W.T.O. standards, and that’s that. Or, as Mr. Modi himself put it when he addressed the U.S. Congress last week: “India’s ancient heritage of yoga has over 30 million practitioners in the U.S. It is estimated that more Americans bend for yoga than to throw a curve ball. And no, Mr. Speaker, we have not yet claimed intellectual property rights on yoga.”

But there’s yoga and then there’s cow urine. Even as the Modi government’s new policy paper reiterates the need to limit patents in the name of public health, it repeatedly argues for plucking “traditional knowledge” out of a multimillennial cultural commons and patenting it.

With this move the B.J.P. is picking up unfinished business from its previous excursion in power, when it led the National Democratic Alliance government between 1998 and 2004. That was the time when the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Center for Research in Cow Science, an outgrowth of Hindu nationalist groups, first tried to patent cow-urine technology in India.

According to the Hindustan Times, over the last decade the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research has spent around $50 million on patent applications, including for using cow urine in health tonics, energy drinks and chocolate. The health ministry’s special department for traditional knowledge — known as the AYUSH department, for Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy — was elevated to a full ministry after the B.J.P. won the general election in 2014.

Patenting cow urine is a natural extension of the Hindu right’s obsession with the cow. It makes ideological sense for a nationalist party that rides on a wounded Hindu psyche to claim that Indian science was well ahead of Western science. But this is bad history. A large part of what India claims as its indigenous heritage isn’t exclusively ours: Unani medicine comes from Persia; the origins of homeopathy are German.

The B.J.P.’s nativist, Hindu-pride approach to patents is also bad economics. It unwittingly serves the interests of Big Pharma, and in time this will undercut India’s own pharmaceutical industry, which generates some $15 billion in annual revenues even while producing affordable drugs that benefit the public.

India’s patent laws, currently under consideration as a model in South Africa and Brazil, are a world-class innovation; our cow-urine technology, which has yet to garner much interest abroad, is not. To patent cow urine isn’t just silly. It also endangers a remarkably innovative patent system that has served India’s people and many others around the world so well.

Achal Prabhala is a writer based in Bangalore. Sudhir Krishnaswamy is a professor of law at Azim Premji University, in Bangalore.

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11. IN THE DARKROOM REVIEW – AN ELEGANT MASTERPIECE | Rachel Cooke
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(The Guardian - 19 June 2016)

Susan Faludi’s funny, painful investigation of identity centres on her father’s gender reassignment and a family history of Hungary under Nazi occupation

Rachel Cooke

In the summer of 2014, Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and her father, whose name we will get to later, visited the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. Although the museum was then participating in what the country’s rightwing government, desperate for some good PR, had decreed was Holocaust Remembrance Year, it was obvious to both Faludis that in this case the word “remembrance” meant something close to precisely the opposite. The forgetting was everywhere. In the room dedicated to the second world war, the theme was mostly one of German culpability in the matter of the deaths of 565,000 Hungarian Jews; just two small plaques made any mention of the Arrow Cross, the country’s very own national socialist party, and then in language so evasive as to be almost meaningless. Only when they descended to the basement did they finally discover an exhibit that really did do some remembering, for here they found, after two hours of searching, some portraits of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their descendants by the Israeli photographer Aliza Auerbach.

The room was small and windowless, and the pair were at first discombobulated. Slowly, though, they came to their senses, circuiting it until they arrived at a photograph of the 16 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren of Dina Friedman, who was deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. It was – this may sound odd – an intoxicating moment. Upstairs, the fact that Adolf Eichmann, no less, had declared himself delighted by the Hungarian state’s enthusiasm for the Final Solution appeared to have escaped the attention of the museum’s curators. But in this room, blame had not been pushed elsewhere, for which reason, perhaps, it could now be spoken aloud. “Let the people of Hungary look at them!” said Faludi’s father, addressing a non-existent crowd. “They turned their back. They never looked at who was taken. These people were just like them. They spoke the same language. They were your neighbours. They were your friends. And you let them die!” Susan Faludi listened to this in silence, and then the two of them turned on their heels and left. They had seen – or not seen – quite enough for one day.

As I’ve described it, this scene probably doesn’t seem so remarkable: what right-minded person wouldn’t have felt some measure of fury at such a wiping of history? But when it appears in Faludi’s mighty new book, In the Darkroom, it does so at a point when the reader has long since given up hope of hearing such words. Her father, a photographer who was born in Hungary and has now, in old age, made her home in the country once again, has hitherto been in denial about its latent fascism. “It’s not a problem,” she tells her daughter, when black-shirted young people are seen marching through Budapest’s public squares; when a party dominated by outspoken antisemites does well in the election; when the Jews and Roma are once again the victims of violent assaults. Such willed blindness. What has made this all the more distressing – and you’ll have noticed those rogue pronouns, the feminine “she” and “her” used in conjunction with the masculine “father” – is that she (Faludi’s father) is not only a Jew, much of whose family was wiped out in the Holocaust, but also a transgender woman. Her refusal to acknowledge Hungary’s slide back into extremism isn’t only an insult to others; it’s a violent attack on herself.

What prodigious self-loathing. First, it bewildered me, and then it disgusted me, and then, as she stood in that basement allowing the rage to rise inside her at last, it filled me with pity. Faludi is a mercilessly droll and careful writer. The emotional incontinence and narcissism that pass for insight and power in memoirs these days is not for her; being interested in facts, she is unlikely to play the dubious trump card of personal experience. All the same, I cried quite often as I read her book, and at this point, I had to go off and stare at some flowers for a while. What it cost her father to say these words, and how expertly Faludi had ensured that I would feel that price.

Faludi’s book, a searching investigation of identity barely disguised as a sometimes funny and sometimes very painful family saga, begins in 2004, when she receives an email from her estranged father, Steven. It is headed, with some understatement, “changes”, and it contains a bit of “interesting news”: Steven, having undergone gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, now wishes to be known as Stephanie. Faludi is a reporter to her bones. She and her father, to whose violence and controlling personality she attributes the birth of her own passionate feminism, have not spoken for 27 years. But she is soon on a plane to Budapest, her Dictaphone in her bag (Stephanie, having divorced her American mother in 1977, returned to Hungary from New York after the fall of communism). She has questions, though not of the banal “when-did-you-first-start-thinking-you-were-a-woman?” kind. Faludi is suspicious of the bottle labelled Identity, vexed by the peddling of female stereotypes when it comes to the literature of transgender women and, in the case of her father, unconvinced that psychological ambiguity can be turned “into certainty in the flesh”. She cannot go along with the idea of a past that is just that – gone, absolutely – whether in the case of a Jew who, like her father, can’t bear “whining” about the Holocaust and prefers to pass as a shiksa, or of a man who is now a woman (Stephanie regards Steven as dead). What does it mean to kill someone off, metaphorically speaking? This is the question that informs the extraordinary narrative that follows.

Love is the best revenge for the evils of the Holocaust

In her house on a Buda hill, Faludi and her father get reacquainted, a difficult and sometimes awkward experience: at first, Stephanie is all performance, her appearance at her daughter’s bedroom door in her floral housecoat, or a dress that she requires zipping up, at once both provocative and gently comic. “Stephanie’s Schloss was starting to feel more like Dracula’s Castle,” writes Faludi, of her refusal to take her out to see her childhood haunts. On the page, Stephanie is a huge character: Holocaust survivor, American dad, Magyar repatriate, overdressed shiksa. Her new identity is in a bizarre dance with the old. As a Jew, Steven fled Hungary after the war, travelling to Brazil and then America. Back in the country, Stephanie can’t get her family’s stolen property back. But thanks to her new gender, she finds herself employing the son of their former gardener: “Now that I’m a lady, men have to help me,” she says, delightedly.

And yet, vivid as she appears, she remains, for a long time, a cipher. “Waaall,” she will say, about to evade yet another of Susan’s inquiries. Why won’t she talk of the past? What is the relationship between the confection that is Magyar history – a history to which she is confoundingly attached – and the confection that is her own life? Finally, her story begins to spool out: the beginning (and perhaps the end) of it is that Steven’s neglectful bourgeois parents left their son to his own devices during the Occupation, and so he spent his days alternately hiding and masquerading as a Nazi, and all the while hoping never to be asked by any passing officer to drop his trousers. At this point, you hope for clarity, for closure. What you get, however, is something much better. Faludi’s book, reticent and elegant and extremely clever, will not be to everyone’s taste. But this doesn’t preclude it from being an out-and-out masterpiece of its kind. Its author understands that reinvention and disavowal are different things, with very different consequences, but she also has the wisdom to grasp that sometimes you can’t slip a cigarette paper between cowardice and bravery. Quite often, in fact, they may be exactly the same thing.

In the Darkroom is published by Collins

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12. BOOK REVIEW: ROSS ON SHAH. SEX ED, SEGREGATED: THE QUEST FOR SEXUAL KNOWLEDGE IN PROGRESSIVE-ERA AMERICA
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 Courtney Q. Shah. Sex Ed, Segregated: The Quest for Sexual Knowledge in Progressive-Era America. Gender and Race in American History Series. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015. 228 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-58046-535-9.

Reviewed by Karen Ross (Troy University)
Published on H-SHGAPE (June, 2016)
Commissioned by Julia Irwin

Progressives, Power, and Sex Education

Published in 2015, Courtney Shah’s Sex Ed, Segregated: The Quest for Sexual Knowledge in Progressive-Era America is the latest addition to the University of Rochester Press series Gender and Race in American History. Shah analyzes the debates over sex education in the early twentieth century to illuminate how identity—race, class, and gender—shaped and was shaped by “power relationships” between “reformers and conservatives, whites and nonwhites, [and] men and women” (p. x). Like other controversial topics, sex education is ideally suited to reveal conflict. Shah writes convincingly about the roles that identity and power played in the conflicts over the message (and appropriate messenger) of sex education.

Shah defines sex education broadly. Similar to Robin Jensen’s Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924 (2010), Shah’s work encompasses information about venereal diseases, physiology, anatomy, and sexual behavior delivered to young people in schools, via character-building organizations such as the YMCA, in popular literature, and in military training camps during World War I. Her analysis reveals a rigidly segregated approach that divided Americans by gender, race, and class and reinforced white, male power.

In the first three chapters, Shah focuses on the efforts of white, middle-class reformers to bring sex education to American young people. For these progressives, the main obstacles to frank discussions about venereal disease and sexual behavior were the Victorian double standard that tolerated male transgressions and the notion that innocence was best protected with silence. Since parents and religious leaders had, in reformers’ estimation, failed to deliver adequate information about sex, reformers sought to bring the expertise of physicians and social hygienists to sex education. Joining forces with social purity advocates, social hygienists created the highly influential American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) in 1914 to promote improved access to information about sexual health and an end to venereal disease. Although readers of Jensen or Jeffrey Moran’s Teaching Sex (2000) will find much that is familiar in this section, Shah’s focus on identity provides a particularly effective lens through which racial and gender hierarchies, and class to a lesser extent, can be understood. She concludes that the early social hygiene movement focused on preserving and developing white youths, particularly boys, for the future of the white race (replete with the complications of defining who was white), thus perpetuating racial and gendered assumptions.

Shah emphasizes the conservatism of influential reformers like Prince Morrow, whose progressive faith in scientific expertise was moderated by his rather Victorian views on female sexuality. Assuming women did not possess strong sexual passions, Morrow and many other reformers focused on providing substantive sex education for boys alone. Boys were to be taught abstinence to eliminate the double standard, while girls were told to rely on their families for protection from male desires. White reformers like Morrow also largely accepted assumptions about the moral superiority of middle-class, white, native-born Americans. Not coincidentally, the early social hygiene movement evolved amid native-born white anxiety over “race suicide” and the emerging eugenics movement. Shah convincingly argues that against this backdrop, sex education was more reforming than revolutionary.

A further impediment for reformers, even with this relatively conservative program, was how to reach American youth. After parents and community religious leaders in Chicago rejected sex education as part of high school curriculum in 1913, reformers turned to “morally acceptable agents,” such as the Boy Scouts and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), to mediate between experts and adolescents (p. 12). By partnering with character-building youth organizations, ASHA accepted a highly modified program of sex education that emphasized a religious message of purity. As Shah demonstrates, neither the Scouts nor the YMCA provided boys with a systematic sex education before World War I. For girls, Girl Scout and Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) leaders emphasized some basic knowledge about puberty but, as with the boys, stressed purity and character over sexual knowledge. Shah’s analysis of this cautious mediation reveals that the message of sex education changed in the negotiation between social hygienists and mediators.

Shah next investigates the debates surrounding sex education efforts for and by African Americans, employing a wealth of evidence from medical journals, popular magazines, and advice literature. Here Shah is at her best, delving deeply into the complex roles race and gender played in shaping sex education for African Americans in the Progressive Era. Many white experts, especially white southern physicians, argued that sex education for black youths was a waste of resources due to purportedly rampant venereal disease among African Americans and racist stereotypes of limited intellectual and moral development. Black reformers thereby found themselves battling two fronts: white prejudice on the one hand and the dangers of venereal disease and undesirable sexual behaviors on the other. For black elites, this entailed constantly stressing propriety and self-control to promote sexual respectability.

Shah notes that the debates over sex education were not only divided by race, but also that within the community of African American reformers, men and women had different constraints. While black male physicians debated the merits of sex education for girls in the pages of the Journal of the National Medical Association, they unanimously opposed birth control and abortion as dangerous for the future of African Americans. They used these debates to distinguish themselves as experts to provide blacks with reliable advice. For middle- and upper-class black women, speaking openly about sex in a culture that viewed them, regardless of their behavior, as sexually degraded was impossible. Here Shah draws heavily on the cultural practice of “dissemblance” as described by Darlene Clark Hine and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s politics of respectability to explain how African American women covertly discussed sex and sexuality.[1] Ultimately, black reformers created their own sex education curriculum within the constraints of segregation and American racial hierarchies, emphasizing character and middle-class virtues of self-control as a path to racial uplift.

In the final chapters of the book, Shah describes the impact of the First World War on sex education as wartime necessity trumped reticence. She deftly analyzes YMCA and ASHA papers, the Journal of Social Hygiene, newspapers, and government reports to paint a picture of an effective and progressive strategy. Alongside medical treatment and prophylaxis, American servicemen received comprehensive sex education that was both moral and practical in an effort to reduce the alarmingly high rates of venereal disease. Recognizing that they would also have to deal with the young women who worked and lived in the vicinity of the training camps, the War Department’s Committee on Protective Work for Girls also offered educational programs for girls and their mothers. Shah notes that in this context, reformers began to acknowledge that women and girls, of all races and classes, had the potential for sexual desire. If not properly managed, young women could contract “khaki fever” and become a threat to the war effort. Lessons emphasized honor and patriotic virtue alongside sexual virtue. Reformers urged mothers to teach their daughters about menstruation, sex, and pregnancy and to prepare them for traditional motherhood within marriage.

Wartime sex education and disease prevention was progressive; however, its execution continued to support racial and gendered hierarchies. Cities expanded their detention homes for wayward girls to confine women who were suspected of spreading venereal disease, and women of color and working-class women were far more likely to be punished for real or perceived sexual aberrance. Black soldiers, likewise, faced more repressive policies and were less likely to receive effective medical treatment than white soldiers.

After the war, federal funding for sex education was largely withdrawn, excepting the US Public Health Service, and detention centers and prophylactic stations were eventually discontinued. Sex education, however, did not end with the war. It moved into the burgeoning consumer culture of women’s magazines, film, popular music, and advice literature. In an attempt to “domesticate sex education” (p. 109), social hygienists turned their attention to preparing young people for a healthy and satisfying marital sex life, which could best be realized by premarital abstinence. Despite broader cultural changes, reformers’ efforts reveal more continuity than revolution.

Shah’s compact volume (only 185 pages, including 36 pages of notes) is well written and is ideally suited for undergraduates seeking a broad synthesis of the role race, gender, and class played not only in the development of sex education but also in the Progressive Era more generally.

Note

[1]. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912-920; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 

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13. BRITAIN IS IN THE MIDST OF A WORKING-CLASS REVOLT
by John Harris
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(The Guardian - 17 June 2016)

Across the nation this past week I’ve heard the same refrain: ‘No one listens to us, no one cares.’ Now those ignored for so long are demanding a voice

For the last five days I have been driving around England and Wales, filming scores of people as they talk about which way they’ll vote in the European Union referendum.

For 50 years voters have been denied a genuine debate on immigration. Now we’re paying the price | Gary Younge

From ardent leavers in Merthyr Tydfil and undecided people on the English-Welsh borders to university students in Manchester who were 95% for remain, my Guardian colleague John Domokos and I have sampled just about every shade of opinion, and soaked up an atmosphere of often passionate political engagement. If a common journalistic pose is to roll one’s eyes and pronounce oneself impossibly bored with the whole thing, that is not where most people are at all.

Hardly anybody talks about the official campaigns, and the most a mention of the respective figureheads of each camp tends to elicit is a dismissive tut – but just about everyone agrees that this is a fantastically important moment, and a litmus test of the national mood.

What must David Cameron make of it all? This story is unfolding, let’s not forget, because of his ludicrous belief that a referendum might somehow definitively address the EU-related divisions in his own party and the public at large – as if a month or so of political knockabout under Queensberry rules could sort everything out, and the country could then go back to normal.

Fat chance, obviously: he now finds his Eurosceptic foes emboldened by a sense that many Conservative voters are on their side, while politicians of all parties – and Labour people in particular – are gripped by something that has been simmering away for the best part of a decade. To quote the opinion pollsters Populus: “Both socioeconomic groups C2 and DE disproportionately back the UK leaving the EU.” To be a little more dramatic about it, now that Scotland has been through its political reformation, England and Wales are in the midst of a working-class revolt.

To be sure, there are many nuances and complications among leave voters. In the inner-city Birmingham neighbourhood of Handsworth, I met Sikh shopkeepers who claimed that the country is full, with just as much oomph as anyone white; in Leominster, Herefordshire, there are plenty of Tory voters gleefully defying Cameron’s instructions, and fixating on questions of sovereignty and democracy.

But make no mistake: in an almost comical reflection of the sacred lefty belief that any worthwhile political movement will necessarily be built around the workers, the foundation of the Brexit coalition is what used to be called the proletariat, large swaths of which are as united as in any lefty fantasy, even if some of their loudest complaints are triggering no end of anxiety among bien-pensant types, and causing Labour a great deal of apprehension.

In Stoke, Merthyr, Birmingham, Manchester and even rural Shropshire, the same lines recurred: so unchanging that they threatened to turn into cliches, but all the more powerful because of their ubiquity. “I’m scared about the future” … “No one listens to us” … “If you haven’t got money, no one cares.”

And of course, none of it needs much translation. Instead of the comparative security and stability of the postwar settlement and the last act of Britain’s industrial age, what’s the best we can now offer for so many people in so many places? Six-week contracts at the local retail park, lives spent pinballing in and out of the benefits system, and retirements built on thin air?

It may have been easy to miss in the London-centred haze of the “knowledge economy” and the birth of the digital future, but this is where millions of lives have been heading since the early 1980s – and to read that some Labour MPs have come back from their constituencies, amazed by the views they encounter on the doorstep, is to be struck by a political failure that sits right at the heart of the story. How did they not know?

What has any of this got to do with the EU? Not much, but such is the nature of referendums: offer people a ballot paper, and they will focus whatever they feel strongly about on to it. There again, one obvious issue is directly linked to the EU, and so central to the political moment that it arises in countless conversations within seconds.

Yes, some people – from bigots in the stockbroker belt to raging gobshites in south Wales shopping precincts – are simply racist. But in a society and economy as precarious as ours, the arrival of large numbers of people prepared to do jobs with increasingly awful terms and conditions was always going to trigger loud resentment. For many places, the pace of change and the pressures on public services have arguably proved to be too much to cope with.

Before anyone with a more right-on view of all this explodes with ire, they might also consider the numbers. Between 1991 and 2003, on average about 60,000 migrants from the EU came to the UK each year. Between 2004 and 2012, that figure rose to 170,000. The 2011 census put the number of UK residents from Poland alone at 654,000.

To state the obvious, that’s a lot. If people had felt more connected to politics, public services had been quicker to adapt, and the Blair/Brown government had opted for transitional controls, perhaps such huge changes might not have triggered quite so much rage and worry.

But such thoughts are now for the birds: for millions of people, the word “immigration” is reducible to yet another seismic change no one thought to ask them about, or even explain.

What people seem to want is much the same as ever: security, stability, some sense of a viable future, and a reasonable degree of esteem. To be more specific, public housing is not a relic of the 20th century, but something that should surely sit at the core of our politics.

If the modern labour market amounts to a mess of uncertainty – something driven as much by technology as corporate greed – it is good to hear so much noise about the principle of a citizen’s income, but disheartening to hear it talked about as something that might only arrive in a few decades’ time, at best.

The most imaginative parts of the political left might have at least some of the answers – but there again, they still seem far too reluctant to confront more troubling matters. One is screamingly obvious: free movement may be an inevitable feature of a world shrinking at speed, but people have good reason to worry about it, and their anger and anxiety will not go away.

I have no idea what result will be announced next Friday. But at the centre of where we find ourselves there is an undeniable irony, which may yet turn cold and cruel. If the revolt succeeds and Brexit wins, the party in power is likely to take a political turn that will lead us even further away from what the moment demands, while Labour will likely tumble further into division and introspection.

On that score, a quotation flips into my mind so often these days that I ought to have it printed on a T-shirt, or possibly present it to a tattooist. Nearly a century ago, when the workers were increasingly restive, and his part of the planet was once again tipping towards chaos and disaster, that great European Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new is yet to be born. And in the interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

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14. FROM GREAT BRITAIN TO LITTLE ENGLAND
by Neal Ascherson
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(The New York Times, June 16, 2016)
    
Sunday Review | OPINION

London — IT was Queen Elizabeth’s official 90th birthday celebration last Sunday, and tables for 10,000 guests were set along the Mall in central London. Steadily the rain fell, dripping out of the tubas of the bands and softening the sandwiches, but Her Majesty’s subjects munched on with stoic British spirit, standing up to cheer as she passed.

In her fuchsia coat and matching hat, she waved and grinned as if nothing had changed and never would. But next week, a very great change may come.

On Thursday, Britons will vote in a referendum on whether their country should stay in the European Union or leave it. If a majority opts for “Brexit,” a long earthquake begins. It will topple the old facade of Britishness. It will disrupt, perhaps mortally, the foundations of European unity. The sense of a fateful moment suddenly peaked on Thursday, when, the police say, a young Labour member of Parliament named Jo Cox was shot to death in her West Yorkshire district by a man who is said to have shouted, “Put Britain first!” and to have been involved in the white-supremacist National Alliance in the United States.

All campaigning was suspended for a day of appalled mourning, amid fears that widespread anxiety about European immigration was being inflamed into violent racialism. Ms. Cox was a rising star, admired in and outside Parliament for her selfless energy on behalf of refugees and the poor. Her friends hope her death may cool referendum passions, reminding sullen voters that “not all politicians are in it for themselves.”

Royal ceremonies offer a brief, reassuring illusion of continuity, but at the back of many minds on the Mall was this thought: Could we be saying goodbye not just to this beloved old lady, but to a certain idea of nationhood? An outward-looking, world-involved Great Britain may soon shrink into a Little England.

As the queen’s guests finished their tea in sight of the familiar gray mass of Buckingham Palace, opinion polls showed the Brexit vote surging. The early lead for the Remain campaign has melted away. In less than a week, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland could be tearing up its European treaties and backing into Atlantic isolation.

The slogan “Take back control!” has been showing up everywhere in the last two weeks. It’s about sovereignty: the idea that unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, not the Westminster Parliament, make the laws of England. Above all, it means taking control of the country’s frontiers. This would break decisively with a sacred principle of the European Union: the free movement of people, which, for more than 20 years under the Schengen Agreement, has allowed Europeans to travel among member states without passport checks, and live and work in those countries with no visa requirements.

With fateful timing, the latest official figures for net migration to Britain, published at the end of May, showed the second-highest annual number on record, 333,000 in 2015; European Union nations accounted for more than half of that figure. This was far higher than government targets, and played directly into the Leave campaign’s refrain about “uncontrolled immigration.”

Is it a baseless panic? Many European countries tolerate far higher levels of immigration. Scotland, with a new community of some 55,000 Poles, actively encourages it. In England, support for Brexit and for the xenophobic U.K. Independence Party is often in inverse proportion to the scale of the problem: The fewer immigrants there are in a town, the louder the outcry against foreigners. In contrast, polling in inner London, where about four out of 10 inhabitants are now foreign-born, shows a clear preference for staying in Europe. By chance, Ms. Cox’s killing fell on the same day that UKIP unveiled a poster titled “Breaking Point?” It shows a mass of black and brown refugees pouring toward a frontier. With grief still raw, there has been widespread revulsion at the poster, now reported to the police on grounds of “incitement to racial hatred.”

The English, normally skeptical about politics, have grown gullible. Both sides pelt the voters with forecasts of doom should the other side win. None are reliable, and the Leave figures have been especially deceitful. Remainers predict an economic armageddon of lost growth, a devalued pound and withered City of London. The Leavers’ Conservative leaders, assuming the mantle of a government in waiting, promise that “their” Britain could cover all the lost European subsidies and grants to farmers, poor regions, universities and schools. Evidence that they could find these additional billions is scant.

But there are deeper motives here than anxiety about the exchange rate or banks in London decamping to Frankfurt. Behind Brexit stalks the ghost of imperial exception, the feeling that Great Britain can never be just another nation to be outvoted by France or Slovakia. There’s still a providential feeling about Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle” as “this fortress built by Nature.” Or as an old Royal Marines veteran said to me, “God dug the bloody Channel for us, so why do we keep trying to fill it in?”

But in a Britain after Brexit, there will be internal border issues to worry about. London politicians look nervously north toward Scotland. Home to less than 10 percent of Britain’s population, Scotland has enjoyed a high degree of self-government since 1999. The pro-independence Scottish National Party dominates the country’s politics, consolidating its grip after losing a close-fought independence referendum in 2014.

Most Scots insist that they want to stay in the European Union. So what happens if a British majority says Leave and Scotland is dragged out of Europe against its will?

Many nationalists will demand an immediate new independence referendum. But Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s shrewd and popular first minister, will want to wait until polls show a settled majority of Scottish voters in favor of leaving the British state. It’s Ms. Sturgeon’s gamble that an economic downturn following Brexit, combined with the loss of European Union guarantees for workers’ rights and European subsidies for Scotland’s farmers and infrastructure projects, will deliver that support soon enough.

If Ms. Sturgeon’s strategy works out, Brexit could hasten the breakup of Britain. The constitutional fallout extends to Northern Ireland. A Leave vote would turn the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic into a guarded frontier with Europe, since Ireland would remain a member in the union. This would undermine a major provision of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal that ended three decades of the Troubles.

Her Britannic Majesty would then be left with a simmering Ulster, the potential for resurgent nationalism in Wales, and a dominant population of 54 million English people. There is a logic to that, for Brexit is overwhelmingly an English, not a British, idea.

English nationalism, though inchoate, is spreading. For older generations, it was cloaked in British patriotism. But now, having watched the Scots and the Welsh win their own parliaments, England — with no less than 84 percent of Britain’s population — feels aggrieved and unrepresented. And so the English have gone in search of their own identity politics, finding common cause with the general impatience with old political elites that is flaming up all over Europe.

For now, their angry sense of powerlessness is aimed at the European Union. But the truth is that it’s from bloated, privileged London, not Brussels, that the English need to take back control. The Brexit campaign orators, themselves members of that metropolitan elite, have carefully diverted English fury into empty foreigner-baiting. In France this month, English soccer hooligans’ chant was “We’re all voting Out!” as they beat up fans from other nations.

A rump Britain that quits the European Union would not be the same country back in its old familiar place. It would be a new, strange country in an unfamiliar place.

For foreigners, it would be less easygoing, more suspicious and more bureaucratic for work and travel. For its own citizens, it would become a less regulated, more unequal society. For the young, as European color drained away, it could come to seem a dim and stifling place that anyone with imagination would want to escape.

A Leave victory in the referendum is expected to topple Prime Minister David Cameron, and replace him with a radically right-wing Conservative team, which the impetuous former mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is eager to lead. The new government would immediately have to face the problems of disengaging from Europe, and possibly from Scotland. Negotiating new treaties with European trading partners would take many years. And Germany is warning that Britain will no longer have access to the European Union’s single market.

That would knock the bottom out of the Leave campaign’s central promise: that Britain could have its cake and eat it, too — retaining full access to 500 million European customers while clamping controls on immigration from the union. Cynics predict that Britain will spend five years trying to get out, and the next five trying to get back in.

Then come the constitutional nightmares. Most lawmakers in Britain’s Parliament are pro-Europe. Can they be forced to vote for legislation to leave the union? What happens if the government loses an election and a pro-European administration — say, a Labour-led coalition — takes power?

And who is supreme here, anyway? The British people, who will have expressed their will in a binding referendum? Or Parliament, which by convention is sovereign and cannot be overruled? In a kingdom with no written constitution, nobody knows the answer.

It is certain that Brexit would do gross damage to both Europe and America. For the United States, it would mean the failure of many years of diplomacy. Britain would become at once less useful as an ally and less predictable. Washington would turn increasingly from London to Berlin.

For Europe, Britain’s departure would be like a first brick pulled from a flimsy wall. The union is already fragile. Its mismanagement of the eurozone debt crisis after the 2008 crash was followed by its mismanagement of the refugee crisis. No wonder a recent Pew Research Center poll showed plummeting approval ratings for the union in key European countries.

British withdrawal isn’t likely to be followed instantly by that of other member states. But nationalist governments like those in Poland and Hungary, and others besides, will be encouraged to defy European rules from trade regulations to human rights, until the whole structure disintegrates. Disputes once soothed by multinational bargaining in Strasbourg or Brussels may grow toxic.

And Europe, though often vexed by London’s halfheartedness, will miss the sheer negotiating skill of British diplomacy: its genius for avoiding confrontations and inventing compromises. As more countries strike mutinous attitudes, those skills have never been more needed.

“For 70 years, my Foreign Service has been Britain’s rear guard,” a British ambassador told me. “We have prevented its orderly retreat from world greatness turning into a rout.” But Brexit now seems to propose a final retreat across the English Channel to the white cliffs of Dover.

Isolation brings out the worst in Britain. And it never works. In the 1930s, a complacent Britain refused to help Spain fight fascism, appeased Hitler and Mussolini, and for too long turned away refugees fleeing persecution. As Czechoslovakia cried out for help, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain dismissed “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” Will a British leader soon speak again about faraway Europe in the same tones?

When Britain did admit that it belonged to Europe, after all, it was at the 11th hour. In 1940, isolation ended in a fight for survival, and complacency gave way to five years of grim determination. During those war years, the Continent was devastated and its nation-states discredited.

Thanks to that harsh experience, the British after the war recognized their share of responsibility by supporting the vision of a united Europe. Must Britain learn that painful, costly lesson all over again?

Correction: June 17, 2016 
An earlier version of this article misstated the site of Jo Cox’s killing. She was attacked on the street after a meeting with constituents, not near her office.

Neal Ascherson, a journalist, is the author of “Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland.”

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15. UK: THE MOOD IS UGLY, AND AN MP IS DEAD
by Polly Toynbee
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The Guardian June 17, 2016

It’s wrong to view the killing of Jo Cox in isolation. Hate has been
whipped up against the political class

In an era when many question the validity of their elected officials, Jo Cox stood out. She rose to represent the area in which she was born. And she arrived at the Commons with hinterland, a career campaigning for Oxfam, Save the Children and the NSPCC. On Thursday, shock among MPs was palpable.

This attack on a public official cannot be viewed in isolation. It occurs against a backdrop of an ugly public mood in which we have been told to despise the political class, to distrust those who serve, to dehumanise those with whom we do not readily identify.

There are many decent people involved in the campaign to secure Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, many who respect the referendum as the exercise in democracy that it is. But there are others whose recklessness has been open and shocking. I believe they bear responsibility, not for the attack itself, but for the current mood: for the inflammatory language, for the finger-jabbing, the dogwhistling and the overt racism.

It’s been part of a noxious brew, with a dangerous anti-politics and anti-MP stereotypes fomented by leave and their media backers mixed in. Only an hour before this shooting Nigel Farage unveiled a huge poster showing Syrian refugees fleeing to Slovenia last year, nothing to do with EU free movement – and none arriving here. Leave’s poster read: “Breaking Point. We must break free from the EU and take control of our borders.” Nicola Sturgeon, Caroline Lucas and many others condemned it as “disgusting”, and so it is.

At a ward meeting this week my local Labour councillor in Camden, north London, showed us a sign that had been left on a member’s car windscreen. The car had a remain poster on it and was parked round the corner from where I live. This is what the message said, printed in capitals (I’ve left the original spelling): “This is a lave [leave] area. We hate the foriner. Nex time do not park your car with remain sign on. Hi Hitler. White Power” – accompanied by racist symbols. The car’s owner had passed it on to the police.

Rude, crude, Nazi-style extremism is mercifully rare. But the leavers have lifted several stones. How recklessly the decades of careful work and anti-racist laws to make those sentiments unacceptable have been overturned.

    This campaign has stirred up anti-migrant sentiment that used to be confined to the far fringes of British politics

This campaign has stirred up anti-migrant sentiment that used to be confined to outbursts from the far fringes of British politics. The justice minister, Michael Gove, and the leader of the house, Chris Grayling – together with former London mayor Boris Johnson – have allied themselves to divisive anti-foreigner sentiment ramped up to a level unprecedented in our lifetime. Ted Heath expelled Enoch Powell from the Tory front ranks for it. Oswald Mosley was ejected from his party for it. Gove and Grayling remain in the cabinet.

When politicians from a mainstream party use immigration as their main weapon in a hotly fought campaign, they unleash something dark and hateful that in all countries always lurks not far beneath the surface.

Did we delude ourselves we were a tolerant country – or can we still save our better selves? Over recent years, struggling to identify “Britishness”, to connect with a natural patriotic love of country that citizens have every right to feel, politicians floundering for a British identity reach for the reassuring idea that this cradle of democracy is blessed with some special civility.

But if the vote is out, then out goes that impression of what kind of country we are. Around the world we will be seen as the island that cut itself off as a result of anti-foreigner feeling: that will identify us globally more than any other attribute. Our image, our reality, will change overnight.
Nigel Farage's anti-migrant poster reported to police
Read more

Contempt for politics is dangerous and contagious, yet it has become a widespread default sneer. There was Jo Cox, a dedicated MP, going about her business, doing what good MPs do, making herself available to any constituents with any problems to drop in to her surgery. Just why she became the victim of such a vicious attack, we may learn eventually. But in the aftermath of her death, there are truths of which we should remind ourselves right now.

Democracy is precious and precarious. It relies on a degree of respect for the opinions of others, soliciting support for political ideas without stirring up undue savagery and hatred against opponents. “Elites” are under attack in an anarchic way, when the “elite” justice minister can call on his supporters to ignore all experts.

Something close to a chilling culture war is breaking out in Britain, a divide deeper than I have ever known, as I listen to the anger aroused by this referendum campaign. The air is corrosive, it has been rendered so. One can register shock at what has happened, but not complete surprise.

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16. SATIRE ON TRIAL: ERDOGAN'S DEMAND FOR LEGAL ACTION PUTS MERKEL IN A BIND
by Hasnain Kazim
=========
(Spiegel Online - 12 April 2016)

German television comedian Jan Böhmermann could face criminal proceedings for insulting Turkey's prime minister. Zoom
DPA/ ZDF / Ben Knabe

Turkey is calling for criminal proceedings against a German comedian who crudely disparaged its president on public television. Personally ordered by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the complaint threatens to create a massive political crisis for Chancellor Merkel.

Would Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan really go so far as to personally go after a German television comedian over a poem he wrote? The answer came on Monday evening with confirmation from the public prosecutor in Mainz that a complaint had been submitted against Jan Böhmermann, a well-known TV personality.

Böhmermann sparked headlines around the world after his satire show "Neo Magazin Royal" broadcast a poem mocking Erdogan in the most below-the-belt manner possible last Thursday. In the poem, aired by Mainz-based public broadcaster ZDF, Erdogan is mocked for being a "professional idiot, cowardly and uptight" and is disparaged as having had sex with animals.

Erdogan responded on Monday, with a formal legal complaint.

According to prosecutors, Erdogan himself filed the criminal complaint, with his lawyers citing Paragraph 185 of the German Criminal Code, which makes slander a prosecutable offence. Officials at the public prosecutor's office say they are now reviewing the complaint.

'Slander and Insults'

Turkish government officials also say that Böhmermann has been served with a cease-and-desist order and that he now has until Wednesday to sign it and, by doing so, to show his intention to "not repeat the slander and insults."

With his poem, Böhmermann deliberately used disparaging formulations in order to highlight the difference between satire, which is legal in Germany, and forbidden abusive criticism. During the broadcast, he stated repeatedly that the highly disparaging poem was illegal. In response to massive criticism, ZDF deleted the broadcast from its archive.

The affair has created a major dilemma for the German government. Even prior to the Böhmermann affair, many observers believed Chancellor Angela Merkel had been too reserved in her criticism of Erdogan and his recent incursions into press freedoms and violations of human rights because she needs Turkey to help bring the refugee crisis under control.

And even before Erdogan filed a complaint on Monday, it had already become clear that Böhmermann's poem would create a major scandal and spark tensions between the Turkish and German governments. On Monday morning, during a press conference that itself almost bordered on satire, Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert and Sawsan Chebli, the deputy spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, answered questions about Böhmermann's broadcast. They came across as being confused and perplexed -- as if they had been caught off guard.

Government To Review Request

Seibert confirmed Sunday's news that Turkey had submitted an official diplomatic communication known as a note verbale to the Foreign Ministry. It included the demand that criminal proceedings be initiated against Böhmermann. In this instance, the Turkish government cited Paragraph 103 of the German Criminal Code, which can include the penalty of "imprisonment not exceeding three years" or a monetary fine in the case of a slanderous insult against a foreign head of state. In contrast to the complaint already filed by the Turkish government, these additional proceedings would require authorization by Germany's federal government.

Seibert said Monday that the German government would now review "Turkey's formal request." This could "take a few days, but not weeks," he said, adding that the first discussions would take place at the level of the appropriate authorities in the Foreign Ministry, Justice Ministry and Chancellery.

On Monday, the Turkish government left no doubt that it would like to see Böhmermann charged over the satire. Erdogan's spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin told reporters that the Turkish Foreign Ministry had taken the necessary steps: "The note was submitted and the German authorities have launched an investigation within the scope of their laws."

Turkey To Closely Monitor Actions

"From now on, it is of course a process to be conducted by the German authorities and to proceed within the framework of the German legal system," he said. "However, we would like to underline that assaults which contain such insults and are voiced with vulgar expressions targeting the president of a country and a people have no relation either with freedom of expression or with freedom of press. This is an insult and a crime anywhere in the world." He said officials would closely follow the actions taken by the German justice system.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus also made similar remarks during an appearance in the southeastern city of Sanliurfa on Monday, where he said that Böhmermann's words weren't just an insult to Erdogan, "but all 78 million Turks." He said Böhmermann's poem represented a "serious crime against humanity" that had "crossed all lines of indecency." He called the poem unacceptable. "This is why we as the Republic of Turkey want this insolent man to be punished immediately under German law for insulting a president." However, Kurtulmus also insisted his country "absolutely did not want to place political pressure on Germany."

Turkey's Most Common Political Charge

Erdogan's actions in recent days come as little surprise. There are currently around 2,000 cases pending in Turkey in which the defendants are accused of insulting the president. No one, it seems, is immune from the accusation. Youth have even been charged on the basis of comments posted on Facebook and Twitter, and opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu faced the government's wrath after daring to call Erdogan a "tinpot dictator."

There's also novelist Perihan Magden, who wrote that Erdogan acts like a "wild tiger, like a wild animal trapped in a corner." In the case of journalist Onur Erem, all it took to get charged was noting in an article that when you type the word "Erdogan" into Google, its autocomplete feature suggests the words "thief" and "murderer" -- in other words, the terms people most often use as part of their Erdogan searches.

In Turkey, under Paragraph 299 of the Turkish Penal Code, a person can be sentenced to up to four years in prison if convicted of insulting the president. Another paragraph criminalizes "degrading the Turkish nation, the State of the Turkish Republic or the Organs and Institutions of the State." Based on the number of cases, however, it is Erdogan who is insulted most often. Disparaging the president has become the most common political crime charged in Turkey today.


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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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