SACW - 01 July 2016 | Pakistan: Funding bigotry / Memo From Bangladesh: To U.S. in ’70s / India: Hindutva vigilante / American Underclass / Ex USSR - Opera as the highest stage of Socialism

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Thu Jun 30 14:34:52 EDT 2016


South Asia Citizens Wire - 01 July 2016 - No. 2902 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Pakistan: Funding bigotry | Zahid Hussain
2. Video: TV discussion on Muslim Extremism in Bangladesh
3. India-Pakistan: ’On the Partition issue, Jinnah and Ambedkar were on the same page’ - Interview with Venkat Dhulipala
4. India: Act against the hindutva vigilante ’Gurgaon Gau Raksha Dal’ for assault and violation of fundamental rights of two cattle transporters - Statement by PUDR
5. India: Letter to World Bank from Social Movement Groups Opposed to Dilution of Safeguards in Favour of Businesses and Violation of Community Rights
6. India: Gay celebs cite right to life, move Supreme Court against Sec 377 - Petition sent to the Chief Justice of India
7. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: The shadowy group accused of planning the 2008 Malegaon blasts has deep roots in the Sangh
  - India: SP Mookerjee exhibition - BJP gleefully targets Nehru in his own home
  - Assam Election Results 2016: Challenges to India's Pluraist Ethos (Ram Puniyani)
  - India - Punjab: Malerkotla Quran sacrilege: One of 3 arrested men is VHP Punjab secretary
  - Modi Govt Run Nehru Memorial Museum and Library engaged in Hindutva Propaganda - Public event of 29 June 2016 is an example
  - India: Hindutva Icon Shyama Prasad Mukherjee was a collaborator of the British and the Muslim League (Shamsul Islam)
  - India: Gita, religious lessons to be taught in schools in Haryana
  - India - Hindutva Propaganda via Cinema: Ashutosh Gowariker’s ‘Mohenjo Daro’ Falls Prey to Hindutva Horseplay
  - Comic Strip: Bombay and Partition of 1947
  - Timely Brexit U-turn by RSS connected think tank (Radhika Ramasheshan)
  - India: ‘Given the political backlash in Kashmir, no Pandit can or will return to Valley’ - Sanjay Tickoo, Kashmiri Pandit Sangarsh Samiti (KPSS)
  - India: Photo reportage - Saffron Paint (raiot.in) 
  - 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)

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
8. Memo From Bangladesh: To U.S. in ’70s, a Dissenting Diplomat. To Bangladesh, ‘a True Friend.’ | Ellen Barry
9. Pakistan sings the blues | Sonya Fatah
10. Dubai syndrome in Indo-Pak rivalry | Jawed Naqvi
11. A Journalist and a Gentleman: Inder Malhotra (1930-2016) | Ajoy Bose
12. India: Behind CPI(M)’s Decline Lies Stalinist Structure, Ideological Confusion over Electoral Strategy | Kuldeep Kumar
13. India is slowly cleaving into two countries – a richer, older South and a poorer, younger North | Samar Halarnkar
14. UK: Thomas Piketty quits as Jeremy Corbyn adviser over 'weak' EU fight 
15. UK: Put-upon at the Ritz | Neda Neynska 
16. American Medical Association warns of health and safety problems from ‘white’ LED streetlights | Richard G. 'Bugs' Stevens
17. Review: ‘White Trash’ Ruminates on an American Underclass | Dwight Garner
18. Former Soviet Union: Opera as the highest stage of Socialism | Artemy Kalinovsky

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1. PAKISTAN: FUNDING BIGOTRY | Zahid Hussain
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The KP government’s funding of a radical seminary raises questions about the PTI’s adherence to NAP.
http://sacw.net/article12837.html

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2. VIDEO: TV DISCUSSION ON MUSLIM EXTREMISM IN BANGLADESH
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A discussion on Rajya Sabha TV
http://sacw.net/article12833.html

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3. INDIA-PAKISTAN: ’ON THE PARTITION ISSUE, JINNAH AND AMBEDKAR WERE ON THE SAME PAGE’ - Interview with Venkat Dhulipala
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Both thought it was a good remedy to resolve the communal problem in India’ and that ’transfer or exchanges of populations was inevitable and necessary’.
http://sacw.net/article12835.html

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4. INDIA: ACT AGAINST THE HINDUTVA VIGILANTE ’GURGAON GAU RAKSHA DAL’ FOR ASSAULT AND VIOLATION OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF TWO CATTLE TRANSPORTERS - Statement by PUDR
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PUDR expresses outrage at the barbaric incident of 10th June where, in a horrific example of discrimination and violation of dignity, two men - Rizwan and Mukhtiar - accused of transporting beef from Mewat to Delhi, were forced to eat cow dung by members of the Gurgaon Gau Raksha Dal. A video has surfaced showing the two being threatened, and forced to eat panchgavya, a mixture of cow dung, cow urine and other bovine products.
http://sacw.net/article12836.html

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5. INDIA: LETTER TO WORLD BANK FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENT GROUPS OPPOSED TO DILUTION OF SAFEGUARDS IN FAVOUR OF BUSINESSES AND VIOLATION OF COMMUNITY RIGHTS
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We are representatives of people’s movements, civil society organisations, and other concerned citizens from India, who have been engaged with, or monitoring World Bank financed projects for the past many years.
http://sacw.net/article12839.html

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6. INDIA: GAY CELEBS CITE RIGHT TO LIFE, MOVE SUPREME COURT AGAINST SEC 377 - PETITION SENT TO THE CHIEF JUSTICE OF INDIA
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n what could lend more heft to the fight for their rights, leading lights of the LGBT community have moved the Supreme Court seeking quashing of Section 377 of IPC to protect their sexual preferences, saying these are part and parcel of the right to life.
http://sacw.net/article12834.html

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7. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 

  - India: The shadowy group accused of planning the 2008 Malegaon blasts has deep roots in the Sangh
  - India: SP Mookerjee exhibition - BJP gleefully targets Nehru in his own home
  - Assam Election Results 2016: Challenges to India's Pluraist Ethos (Ram Puniyani)
  - India - Punjab: Malerkotla Quran sacrilege: One of 3 arrested men is VHP Punjab secretary
  - Modi Govt Run Nehru Memorial Museum and Library engaged in Hindutva Propaganda - Public event of 29 June 2016 is an example
  - India: Hindutva Icon Shyama Prasad Mukherjee was a collaborator of the British and the Muslim League (Shamsul Islam)
  - India: Gita, religious lessons to be taught in schools in Haryana
  - India - Hindutva Propaganda via Cinema: Ashutosh Gowariker’s ‘Mohenjo Daro’ Falls Prey to Hindutva Horseplay
  - Comic Strip: Bombay and Partition of 1947
  - Timely Brexit U-turn by RSS connected think tank (Radhika Ramasheshan)
  - India: ‘Given the political backlash in Kashmir, no Pandit can or will return to Valley’ - Sanjay Tickoo, Kashmiri Pandit Sangarsh Samiti (KPSS)
  - India: Photo reportage - Saffron Paint (raiot.in) 
  - 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)
   
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

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8. MEMO FROM BANGLADESH: TO U.S. IN ’70S, A DISSENTING DIPLOMAT. TO BANGLADESH, ‘A TRUE FRIEND.’
by Ellen Barry
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(The New York Times, June 27, 2016)

Archer K. Blood at the American Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1966. His 1971 “dissent cable” urged condemnation of Pakistan’s assault on Dhaka. Credit Associated Press
On a recent visit to Bangladesh, around the anniversary of its hard-fought war of independence from Pakistan, I conducted an experiment.

Stopping a group of teenage boys at a museum devoted to the 1971 war, I asked them which American leaders had played an important role in that conflict. Henry A. Kissinger? They looked at me with blank faces. Edward M. Kennedy? Nothing. Richard M. Nixon? Crickets.

I was running out of names when I tried one more: That of a midlevel Foreign Service officer stationed in Dhaka, the capital, during that war. It was the name of a man who was recalled to Washington hastily and whose career would falter on his way to an ambassadorial post. What about Archer K. Blood, I asked? And one of the teenagers gave me a big, delighted smile of recognition.

“Archer Blood,” he said, “was a true friend of Bangladesh.”

This exchange came to mind when news broke this month that 51 American diplomats had signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, and had filed it through the State Department’s designated “dissent channel.”

To many, the fact that the State Department has a dissent channel was news in itself. What sort of bureaucracy would devote an elaborate formal pathway to carry the message that the boss is wrong?

This mechanism, introduced in 1971, allows diplomats to directly protest American policy to the secretary of state. No other government bureaucracy has anything like it. It has been used to call for action to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, to register opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and, now, to urge a tougher policy toward Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria.

And it was a mechanism that signally changed the life of Mr. Blood, whose dissent cable, the first ever sent, called on Washington to condemn its ally Pakistan’s bloody assault on Dhaka.

Photo

Guerrillas beat people suspected of collaborating with pro-Pakistan militias in 1971 during Bangladesh’s war for independence. Credit Horst Faas and Michel Laurent/Associated Press

On the spring day when I visited Bangladesh’s Liberation War Museum, Mr. Blood was enjoying a sort of vogue. In 2013, newly declassified documents had become the basis for Gary J. Bass’s prizewinning history, “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide,” which cast his dissent in heroic terms.

The United States government, in recent years, has been eager to embrace Mr. Blood. The story of his cable is part of the curriculum for incoming foreign service officers. Among the first acts of the current ambassador to Dhaka, Marcia S. Bernicat, was to present Bangladesh’s government with an official copy of the so-called Blood telegram, calling it a “reminder of the value in voicing dissenting views against existing power and authority structures.”

If Mr. Blood, who died in 2004, became a sort of poster child for dissent, it is partly because he proved to be correct, on both practical and moral grounds. In 1970, he had been appointed United States consul to what was then East Pakistan. But Pakistan’s control was slipping: Bengali nationalism was surging through Dhaka. Pakistan was flying in more and more troops. Its officers were on edge.

When Pakistan’s military began its assault on March 25, 1971, Mr. Blood’s staff was virtually paralyzed, but two officers managed to reach a wireless transmitter to report the carnage to the State Department. The reports infuriated Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger, who were then seeking Pakistan’s assistance in opening up communications with China.

Mr. Blood’s cables became increasingly angry.

“Full horror of Pak military atrocities will come to light sooner or later,” he wrote, in a cable that was headed, “Selective Genocide.”

On April 6, frustrated by the lack of response from Washington, a young political officer wrote up a formal dissent cable, using a brand-new format that had been devised in response to internal turmoil over the Vietnam War. It was the first ever submitted to an American secretary of state.

But no one knew whether Mr. Blood would endorse it; as the ranking official in the mission, he had the most to lose. Mr. Kissinger’s fury did focus on the consul, Mr. Bass recounts. He was swiftly transferred to Washington, to a position in human resources.

The cable had no discernible effect on Washington’s policy, but it irreparably damaged Mr. Blood’s career. By the time he received another foreign posting, he had “lost career time” and never became an ambassador, said Howard B. Schaffer, one of 29 diplomats who signed the dissent cable in 1971.

“I found it remarkable that in the years I worked with him he never expressed any bitterness about the treatment meted out to him,” said Mr. Schaffer, who was later appointed United States ambassador in Dhaka. “The only time I was aware that he did so was at his retirement ceremony.”

I grew up around American diplomats. My father was one of a wave of young men who joined Foreign Service in the 1960s, under the influence of John F. Kennedy, and he served until his retirement, more than 30 years. I knew they could be sent into exile for vocally challenging American policy — this, in retrospect, accounts for the formative years I spent in Bulgaria. I also knew they did it routinely.

So Mr. Blood’s story held personal interest, in part because he chose the perilous course of challenging a policy from inside the system. Would his act of protest have been more effective if someone had leaked the cable to The New York Times? Would it have been better for him to resign in protest, to make a racket, rather than sit back and watch his bureaucratic punishment unfold?

In fact, during the 40-year history of the dissent channel, the cables have had little or no direct impact on policy, say researchers who have reviewed them. Hannah R. Gurman, who has written extensively on the subject, says the mechanism has succeeded mainly at “quelling internal dissent in a way that the public could actually support.”

But this deflating view will not get you very far in Dhaka. Mr. Blood’s cable means something to the people of Bangladesh. They see it as confirmation that someone, in the heart of the system, was arguing their case. I don’t know, but I imagine many Syrians feel the same way.

Not long after the United States presented Bangladesh with a copy of Mr. Blood’s cable, I sat down for an interview with Gowher Rizvi, a distinguished adviser to the country’s prime minister. The governing party was in the late stages of sidelining its opposition, and my questions were mostly spiky and unwelcome, but when I brought up the famous 1971 dissent, Mr. Rizvi lighted up.

“This is my personal feeling: The U.S. is, at the end of the day, an open society, so they respect these things,” he said. “I sometimes feel like criticizing them for many things. We criticize America, I suspect, because we hold America to America’s own standards.”

Follow Ellen Barry on Twitter @EllenBarryNYT.

A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 2016, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: To the U.S. in the ’70s, a Dissenting Diplomat. To Bangladesh, ‘a True Friend.’.

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9. PAKISTAN SINGS THE BLUES
by Sonya Fatah
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(Economic Times - June 27, 2016)

The paint hasn’t dried yet on the new street signs that will come up on Karachi roads marking the departure — and legacy — of slain social activists Sabeen Mahmud and Parveen Rehman. But before these are erected, the wails emanating from the home of master qawwal Amjad Farid Sabri, brutally gunned down last week, sound a fresh alarm for Pakistan.

Mahmud and Sabri had very different professions and came from different backgrounds. But by being gunned down in Karachi’s Liaquatabad neighbourhood — named after Pakistan’s first prime minister who was also assassinated by gunmen — the two have found a grisly common cause. If Mahmud represented the city’s literary imagination, Sabri fulfilled its musical needs, filling the air on so many occasions with the familiar sound of the qawwal. That, too, in a climate of some difficulty.

The classical music and dance traditions have long been under attack in Pakistan. Those that have been passed down from generation to generation have sustained through the decades largely on account of private patronage. With the murder of one of the last remaining Sabris, the music that drives open and collaborative compositions on new platforms like the popular Coke Studio brand is also under threat in Pakistan.

The political elite has rushed to offer their condolences, condemning what has been recognised as an act of terror, executed repeatedly on the institutions threatening the existence of a sober, colourless interpretation of Islam.

Various factions have tried to root out this malady by first attacking the places of worship where Sufi Islam exists in its utterly syncretic nature. A combination of vile forces have struck at those roots by bombing the Data Darbar complex in Lahore in July 2010 that killed 50 people. That same year in October, the bloody tentacles of terror reached Abdullah Shah Ghazi Mazaar, yet another Sufi institution, this one in Karachi.

Such attacks were unprecedented in Pakistan where some of the more politically devout have worked to undermine the influence of Sufism — and also of all minorities such as the Ahmedis, treating them as threats to a convoluted idea of qaum or nation — and to eradicate the culture of ‘the east’ (read: India), a notion that has infiltrated the Pakistani Street even as the high walls of bureaucracy and realpolitik that prevent real India-Pakistan interaction.

In an interview, artist and art scholar Salima Hashmi, in a documentary exploring dance and identity in Pakistan, spoke passionately about how, even during the height of President Zia-ul-Haq’s regime in the early 1980s, the ‘God’s Faithful’ flocked to Sewan Sharif in interior Sindh, dancing — men and women together — and whirling to the beat of devotional music. Amjad Sabri is the latest, and one of the most grievous, casualty of modern-day Pakistan’s identity rot, a festering sore oozing ugliness as various actors from known and unknown groups claim responsibility for committing brutal and criminal acts.

But here’s the nub: bullets can cause fear, they can lead to bodies being carted away, they can leave behind a wife to raise five children or, as in Sabeen’s case, a mother to suffer the death of her only child. What they can’t do is convert people at large to a worthless cause.

And, yet, shooting bullets into the bodies of individual path-breakers, symbols of resistance — like Sabeen and Amjad, Parveen Rehman or Salman Taseer or former minorities affairs minister Shahbaz Bhatti — all point to aclear and established pattern. So, Pakistanis now need to ask the establishment what it’s doing to support those who are vulnerable to attack.

The media are reporting that Sabri knew he was a target. He had received threats and he had asked for police protection. That protection never came. Instead, the 45-year-old was murdered in broad daylight during the holy month of Ramzan while en route to perform a devotional song as part of a Ramzan transmission for a private television channel. Instead of hearing his voice over the airwaves, Pakistanis will have to tune in to the more acceptable performances of pop TV ulemas like Junaid Jamshed and Amir Liaquat.

The strategy of silencing those who continue to spread their artistry across Pakistan through the magic of the pen, the stage or music and voice seems like one that’ll continue unabated. So, now seems the right time for the Pakistan’s powers that be to draw up a list of potential targets and figure out how to prevent one more funeral, one more name removed from the tally that today is the deeply vulnerable, existentially suffering Land of the Pure.

(The writer is a Toronto-based commentator on Pakistan)

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10. DUBAI SYNDROME IN INDO-PAK RIVALRY
by Jawed Naqvi
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(Dawn - June 28, 2016)

THERE seems to be a pervasive belief in Pakistan that India is somehow being indulged by the West, chiefly the United States, because of Delhi’s new money power or its ascendant economy. Some analysts add democracy as a factor. This is a fib. India, with or without its democracy, is as much a wannabe client state of the US as Pakistan ever was, with or without its military.

One doesn’t have to be rich to get America’s indulgence though it can help, as is obvious in its nexus with Saudi Arabia. In which case, discount democracy as a factor. In contrast, Israel, in the same area, gets loads of unaccounted funds from Washington, wrapped in futuristic military technology. Is this in exchange for the fine wine from the stolen grapes of Golan Heights Israel exports? Egypt with nothing to give to anyone is a recipient of American charm and largesse. There are others.

Of course, India has a far bigger economy than Pakistan’s. How else should it be? But nearly all its defence architecture was set up with generous loans and armament from the Soviet Union.

But then Pakistan too had secured an early credit line with Washington, packaged with Patton tanks, Sabre jets and a short-lived formal military alliance. That was the logic of the Cold War. That’s how patron-client relationships played out everywhere.
India has been clamouring to replace Pakistan to be by America’s side for sometime.

India was not the prosperous economy of Pakistani analysts’ imagination, however, when it was exerting its far more genuine influence in Africa and Indo-China through the heart of the Arab world and beyond. Nehru was not in the habit of giving bear hugs to Nkrumah or Nyerere, Tito, Sukarno or Nasser, though some say he did momentarily overstretch his arms towards Zhou Enlai. There was no room for first-name cosiness in India’s dignified friendships with small and powerful leaders.

So what has come to pass that Pakistan’s ties with the United States seem to have hit the doldrums? Is it India’s potential as a rising economic power that is behind America’s alleged switching of sides, as some in Pakistan may feel? Or is it more likely that Pakistan’s current problems have their origins in its own misreading of allies?

There is a perception, for example, that it got avoidably addicted to religious bigotry that was drummed up for one-time use in Afghanistan. Pakistan was globally cheered for the Afghan outing. Subsequently, though, the bigots were nurtured for other uses, against India and possibly against American interests in Afghanistan, and now, apparently against the Afghans themselves.

There is another theory, more compelling than the one about India’s growing economic clout, to explain Pakistan’s diplomatic difficulties. It has to do with the so-called ‘all-weather friend’. Gone are the days, sadly for Islamabad, when it occupied diplomatic centre stage, ushering Kissinger into Mao Zedong’s private chambers. But what role can it possibly play for Washington in the South China Sea? Will it abandon the economic zone project with Beijing to set sail for the distant blue ocean? What will it do there? Could it conjure another round of ping pong diplomacy?

India has been clamouring to replace Pakistan to be by America’s side for sometime. Remember how badly Delhi had sought the post-9/11 US operations in Afghanistan to be launched from Indian bases. There was desperate wooing to be of help, any help, at any cost. But Delhi was defeated by geography.

To my mind, this compulsive urge between India and Pakistan to outdo each other with Washington (and now Saudi Arabia) is a diplomatic variant of the Dubai syndrome. This is an illness in which an intensely acquisitive society loses its social bearings. The men go off to earn so that their families can keep up with the Joneses. The Pathan taxi driver in Dubai would send all manner of white goods — fridge, TV, electric iron — to his family beyond Peshawar because his wife saw all these things in the neighbour’s house. The twist in the tale is there was just no electricity where the cargo was headed. But this was the cabby’s way of preventing his wife from going into deep depression. A similar syndrome was reported from Kerala.

The brouhaha about the Nuclear Suppliers Group is of a piece with this syndrome. India already has what it needs from the NSG. You check it out with any unbiased analyst. I would suggest some of the former envoys to Pakistan since you can’t really question their views on India’s national interest.

The Modi government’s “obsessive quest for membership” of the NSG “is very like the hunting of the Snark, a macabre, tragi-comic pursuit which ends with the hunter becoming the quarry,” says Satyabrata Pal, a former high commissioner in Islamabad. With the NSG waiver of 2008 “India no longer needs [NSG membership] for its civil nuclear facilities. It does not have to sit outside its closed door; this government has chosen to park itself there, begging to be let in, like a supplicant outside the portcullis of a castle,” Pal wrote in The Hindu.

And what is the cost India has to pay for its embarrassing bid to be at the high table which incidentally includes Belarus, Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg among its members?

American terms are stiff. “The future of the relationship depends … on a continued convergence of national interests and on India’s willingness to break away from its historic posture of strategic autonomy and fully engage with the US,” wrote Sarah Watson. In other words, the associate fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. is reminding the cat that it must wet its paws to get the fish. That’s not the same thing as having a perpetual catfight, particularly with a nuclear-armed neighbour coping poorly with a syndrome that afflicts both.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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11. A JOURNALIST AND A GENTLEMAN: INDER MALHOTRA (1930-2016)
by Ajoy Bose
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Veteran journalist, political commentator and author Inder Malhotra who passed away on 11 June refused to present himself as a crusader. In a long and distinguished career, however, his commitment to journalistic ethics was exemplary. As a quintessential reporter, he had a vast network of contacts but his work remained fearless and unbiased 
http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/25/web-exclusives/journalist-and-gentleman.html

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12. INDIA: BEHIND CPI(M)’S DECLINE LIES STALINIST STRUCTURE, IDEOLOGICAL CONFUSION OVER ELECTORAL STRATEGY 
by Kuldeep Kumar
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(The Wire - 29 June 2016)

The party’s recent decision to expel popular women’s leader Jagmati Sangwan highlights the increasing gap between its ideological standpoints and political practice.

On July 9, 1986, I met the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), general secretary E.M.S. Namboodiripad in Delhi for an interview. Over the past years, a number of important leaders of his party – Siyavar Sharan Srivastava in Bihar, Onkar in Andhra Pradesh, Mohan Punamia in Rajasthan, and Chatunni Master and M.V. Raghavan in Kerala – had been expelled. Raghavan was the last to be expelled, as he was in favour of an alliance with the Muslim League against the party line. In the course of the interview, the veteran leader declared, “No individual, no minority, has the right to differ with the party.” When I asked him if a member could differ with the majority view while continuing to implement the accepted party line in the day-to-day political work, he answered in the negative.

The recent summary expulsion of Jagmati Sangwan has once again shown that the kind of ‘democratic centralism’ advocated and practised by many communist parties including the CPI(M) does not really work. It may come as a surprise to many that the CPI(M) constitution virtually rules out the possibility of a member resigning from the party. Members are not allowed to resign. They are expelled. “If,” the party constitution says, “the resignation is on political grounds, the unit may refuse to accept the resignation and may expel him.” It goes on to state: “In the case where a party member wishing to resign from the party is liable to be charged with serious violation of party discipline which may warrant his or her expulsion and where such a charge is substantial, the resignation may be given effect to as expulsion from the party.”

The Sangwan episode has exposed the fault lines of a party that is still being run on Leninist organisational principles. While the first thing that Namboodiripad did after formally taking over as its general secretary in 1978 at the Jalandhar Congress was to turn it into a ‘mass revolutionary party’, the reality is that it has mostly acted as a ‘mass’ party with the self-image of being a ‘revolutionary’ party. Understandably, the mismatch between reality and self-image produces tensions in its functioning and eruptions take place rather regularly.

Not that the party is unaware of the problems it has been facing. It held a plenum on organisation in Kolkata in the last week of December 2015 and adopted a detailed report that frankly discussed the problems of corruption, moral turpitude, factionalism, federalism and careerism among its members and leaders. However, if one looks at the previous such documents of the party, one finds an extraordinary capacity for introspection and identification of everything that had been ailing it. Yet, instead of improving, its condition has been steadily deteriorating over the past so many decades.

Although Sangwan has been expelled from the CPI(M), she happens to be an elected general secretary of its affiliate All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA). She is also the most popular left woman leader in the Hindi-speaking region and has earned wide acclaim for her stiff and obviously risky opposition to Haryana’s Khap Panchayats. While the Kolkata plenum resolution underlines the need to ensure the ‘independence’ of mass organisations from the party, it will be interesting to see if the party is able to put this understanding into practice and allows Sangwan to continue as AIDWA general secretary or not. After all, she has not resigned, or been expelled, from the women’s organisation.

The crucial link

The crux of the matter is that since independence, communist parties like the CPI(M) have been functioning in a democratic environment, but on the basis of Leninist principles of party organisation that envisage the party virtually as a well-disciplined army in which the command issued by a higher authority has to be obeyed unquestioningly. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party had to function under an autocratic monarchy and often go underground. Leszek Kolakowski explains that Lenin’s party was one “distinguished by ideological unity, efficiency, a hierarchic and centralized structure, and the conviction that it represents the interests of the proletariat whatever the proletariat itself may think”.

In the democratic India of the 21st century, even a modified Leninist party does not have much chance to attract the youth. At a time when people are enjoying their freedoms, the idea of submitting them to a party organisation is certainly not very appealing.

The mainstream communist parties in India have made little effort to establish what Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called ‘hegemony’. Gramsci, who died in Mussolini’s prison, had said that the ruling classes did not rule only by force but by establishing ideological dominance through forging social alliances. He underlined the need for a communist party to eschew sectarianism and establish this hegemony if it wanted to engineer a political revolution and set up an alternative class regime.

However, European communist parties from 1975 onwards made an attempt to change their ways. This trend came to be known as Eurocommunism and it placed a great deal of emphasis on the link between socialism and democracy. The Italian and French communist parties issued a joint communiqué in 1975 wherein they stated that “the French and Italian communists consider that the way to socialism…must be realized in a framework of constant democratisation of economic, social and political life. Socialism will the highest stage of democracy and freedom, democracy taken to the limit.” The two parties expressed complete faith in all the civil liberties that Western democracies traditionally offered such as freedom of thought, expression, press and association, and particularly the right of opposition and the plurality of political parties.

Eurocommunists gave up the theoretical concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, as the experience of the Soviet Union and China had shown that in practice it meant the ‘dictatorship of the communist party’. Italian communist leader Enrico Berlinguer said in 1977: “The experience we have gained has led us to the conclusion… that democracy is not only the terrain on which the class enemy is compelled to retreat but also a historically universal value which must be at the basis of the construction of an authentic socialist society.” This vision necessitated a new kind of communist party that would be very different from the Comintern type of Stalinist party.

Centralism sans democracy

However, Indian communist parties, though claiming to be mass revolutionary organisations, have not shed their Stalinist baggage. Their basic organisational principle remains ‘democratic centralism’ and this often degenerates into ‘centralism’ sans democracy. It is also obvious that revolution – people’s democratic or socialist – is nowhere on their immediate agenda and their revolutionary noises notwithstanding, the fact remains that they have more or less become full-fledged parliamentary parties that aim to change the country’s polity and economy through winning elections. The fast-changing political alignments in a parliamentary system necessitate quick reactions and changes in tactics. The communist parties find their hands tied in this respect as, in accordance to Leninist practice, the party’s political-tactical line can be changed only at a party congress and only minor adjustments can be made.

This constraint was at the root of the crisis recently faced by the CPI(M) à la the Sangwan affair. Contrary to its political-tactical line adopted at the party congress last year, the party went ahead and forged an informal alliance with the Congress in the West Bengal elections. Unfortunately, the move failed to pay off and the party’s poll performance was rather pathetic. Thus, for the party leadership, it was a case of double jeopardy. Sangwan was one of those who wanted this decision to be criticised unequivocally as a ‘violation’, while the leadership was in favour of describing it as ‘not in consonance with the party line’.

Perhaps the time has come for Indian communists to start thinking afresh about what kind of a party structure would be most suited to the democratic environment in which they have to function. Gone are the days when the communist party functioned as the well-regimented army of the working class led by a general command largely made up of intellectuals. It is true that no political party can be run without discipline but it is equally true that discipline cannot be rammed down the throat of party members and leaders without giving them opportunity and freedom to express themselves. More democracy and less centralism seems to be the need of the hour. 

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13. INDIA IS SLOWLY CLEAVING INTO TWO COUNTRIES – A RICHER, OLDER SOUTH AND A POORER, YOUNGER NORTH
by Samar Halarnkar
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(scroll.in - 28 June 2016)

Support to the elderly is fraying in India. But no one appears prepared for this – not families, not companies, not the government.
India is slowly cleaving into two countries – a richer, older South and a poorer, younger North

At traffic intersections, drivers in Delhi tune out the brown-haired, snot-nosed waifs who tap and scratch insistently at their car windows. Sometimes, the children are joined by equally ragged parents, mostly in their 20s, trying to sell cheap Chinese-made junk – from plastic flowers to cellphone and steering-wheel covers. The defining feature of destitution in North India appears to be youth. These are the people who should – but are unlikely to – fuel India's great demographic dividend: The productivity and energy that should ideally flow from a country where more than half the people are under 25 years of age. Much has been written about that dividend and how India could be on the cusp of letting it lapse, as it fails to adequately educate and keep healthy the million young people who join the job market every month.

Down South in Bengaluru, the scene at traffic signals varies substantially, although it is equally depressing. Almost all the destitute are elderly. The braver ones hesitantly touch windows with lined, calloused hands. Mostly, they stand at a distance, in silence, palms open. Move on from the signals and the widespread distress of senior citizens is apparent. There is the shrunken, old woman who sits outside my grocery store without a word, moving only when a shopper offer alms – almost all the others are old women, outside the church, the mosque, the bakery. For those who tell me this is all part of a racket, my answer is: Even if that were true, how desperate must these people be to subject themselves to such humiliation at this age.

Ageing India

But beyond the remarkable ability of Indians to look away from – or not see – destitution, whether among the young or elderly, lies a story of swiftly changing demographics that could wipe off India's promise as a youthful, energetic nation, the world's fastest-growing economy. Sooner than we realise, India is starting to age, the old people I encounter a disturbing reminder of how unprepared the country is for old age.

“Industrialisation, urbanisation and migration of population have brought the concept of nuclear family, as a result of which a section of the family, primarily the elders, are confronting the problems of financial and physical support," writes TCA Anant, the government's chief statistician, in the foreword of a 2016 Central Statistics Office report on India's ageing. In the 10 years to 2011, the population of Indians 60 and older grew 27 million, a 35% increase over 2001, and the largest increase over a decade, says the report.

The share and size of the elderly population is steadily rising. There are now 104 million elderly Indians. Together, they would constitute the world's 14th largest country; 71% live in rural areas where medical and psychological support is minimal. By 2050, the number of sexagenarians will rise to 300 million, a three-fold jump, predicts a report from CRISIL Research, a research agency.

North, South divide

The future, then, appears to show fewer children and more elderly, but parse the data and the details get complicated.

After years of reasonably good healthcare, rising literacy and infant survival rates, 10 states, including South India's big four, virtually form a country distinct from the giants of the Hindi heartland. India's fertlity rate is now 2.6, the number of children born to each woman, but the rate in the southern states has fallen below two. That is below the replacement level of 2.1, the level at which population neither increases nor decreases. Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh (including Telengana) have fertility rates that match the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway – 1.7 to 1.9 children per woman. Fertility rates in six other states – Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi – have also fallen below replacement levels.

In contrast, women in the cow-belt states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh are popping out three children or more; Chattisgarh and Jharkhand are just below three. These fertility rates are in line with countries like Haiti, Lesotho and Guatemala. In 2011, 505 million people lived in these six states, whose population surges will take India past China in six years and keep it still young at an average age of 29 by 2020, when China's will be 39, the US', 40.

Bleak fallout

It isn't clear when India's population will stop growing. It could be as late as 2050 (by which time the average Indian will be 37), earlier if rising literacy and female emancipation holds down family size, a bleak prospect in the patriarchal north.

Falling fertility and fewer children implies that three southern states (Kerala, Goa and Tamil Nadu) contain the highest proportion of elderly in India, my colleague Saumya Tewari has written. As family size shrinks and community support fragments, familial ties that offer support to the infirm and elderly are fraying. Those old people on the streets of relatively prosperous Bengaluru, I believe, offer anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon.

A labour shortage is also evident in large swathes of the southern economy. Internal migration tends to compensate and explains why despite below-replacement-level birth rates, populations continue to rise in the south, Maharashtra and West Bengal. Vacant slots are filled by migrants from the North and the Northeast, which has the least proportion of elderly people in India. This filling of vacant slots is visibly evident in the form of migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh into Mumbai and Kolkata. A quieter migration was revealed three years ago in Bengaluru when thousands of northeasterners streamed out of the city in panic after widespread rumours of attacks against them.

The youth bulge of the North and Northeast and the ageing of the South (and some other states) have two implications in the years to come. First, working Indians will have more dependents to look after, young children and old people. Second, India's overall youth bulge can only delay its greying.

Little preparation

The old-age dependency ratio – the proportion of people above 65 who do not work for every 100 people aged 15 to 64 – has risen by four percentage points over half a century to 2011. That may not sound like much, but given India's numbers, this means every family has likely had more elderly people to support, a burden that will soar. Between 2000 and 2050, India's old-age dependency ratio will go from 13% to 33%, said the Central Statistics Office report.

This is especially bad news for women, who are surviving better and growing older in greater numbers than men, without being any more independent or financially secure than before. These developments might also explain why there appear to be more destitute women than men. India had 53 million women above 60 in 2011, compared to 51 million men, a situation that has reversed since 1991, when there were more elderly men than women.

As India ages, social-security spending, which the government is now trying to trim, will increase. Fewer working people means fewer taxpayers and less money available to spend on things that will grow the economy, although medical services will clearly be a high-growth area. Resources will shrink, expenditure will rise and the government, warns the Central Statistics Office, must be prepared for “a double whammy”. It says: “New priorities must be added to the scarce resources for social programs for elderly, while still having to deal with the problems of the younger populations.”

Currently, no one appears prepared for India's greying, not families, not companies, not the government. Horror stories abound in the media of old people turned out, murdered while living alone, cheated out of their life savings by fraudsters and their own children.

In the private sector, no more than 8% of retirees have pensions, while nine in 10 have no health insurance or assured incomes, said the CRISIL report.

Government-funded care for the elderly is limited. Over four years to 2016, the central government provided no more than Rs 34 crore to build and maintain old-age homes, day care centres and mobile medicare units for indigent senior citizens, according to an analysis by researcher Nishtha Bharti for IndiaSpend. But five states, adept at working through Delhi's bureaucracy but with no more than 32% of India’s population of sexagenarians, cornered 71% of that money.

For instance, with a fertility rate of 3.4 children per woman, India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is at the heart of India's youth bulge, but it also has more people above 60 than any other state: 15 million or 14.9% of its population. Yet, UP got 3.2% of central funds for the elderly, Bharti found.

As on the streets, old-age care in India appears to boils down to chance, grit and survival of the fittest.

Samar Halarnkar is editor, IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit. This fortnightly column will track and interpret India's transformation.


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14. UK: THOMAS PIKETTY QUITS AS JEREMY CORBYN ADVISER OVER 'WEAK' EU FIGHT 
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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/29/thomas-piketty-quits-as-adviser-to-jeremy-corbyn

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15. UK: PUT-UPON AT THE RITZ | Neda Neynska 
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(London Review of Books - 28 June 2016)

Tags: employment | eu referendum	

To supplement my freelance writing income, I started working as a waitress in the staff restaurant of the News Building in London Bridge a few months after it was renamed by Rupert Murdoch (it used to be known as the Baby Shard) and inaugurated by Boris Johnson. If I managed to ignore the curry-stained newspapers with their anti-immigration front pages while clearing the lunch, I could finish a shift with my dignity largely intact. We had a half-hour break, more than the twenty minutes required by law. Most people were nice – including, I suppose, the writers of anti-immigration copy. Nearly everyone employed in the restaurant was foreign, and most of us were European (there was one Londoner on what must have been the most boring gap year in history). My manager was Italian. The hospitality industry is the largest employer of EU-born workers in Britain; 94 per cent of them would fail to meet the visa requirements for non-EU nationals.

I also worked in various upmarket West London hotels. A shift would begin with a briefing on morale and discipline from a very well-groomed manager (who was almost always Italian, French, Swiss or Polish). After the obligatory flannel about the hotel’s ‘values’, staff would get shouted at for having creases in their uniforms, unpolished shoes, bad posture, no sense of urgency. More often than not, the upcoming event would be described as ‘very, very VIP’ – which included dinners for financial services providers; weddings with film stars and minor royals among the guests; and a surprising number of birthday parties for white men over 50 called Richard.

Shifts in hotels are notoriously long – often going over 14 hours – and overtime is an unspoken rule if you want to be called back for another shift. My overtime was never paid at a higher hourly rate. You often don’t get a break. My first shift at the Ritz involved eight hours of polishing champagne flutes and silverware with hot steam under a strand of blue light. I wasn’t allowed to lean against a cupboard, let alone eat. ‘People pay a lot of money to be here,’ a manager once told us. ‘I can’t tell them they are not getting their dessert on time because the staff has to eat.’ When breaks are given, they are rarely longer than fifteen minutes. Shifts are never shorter than six hours. There is a strange kind of humiliation in having to ask your manager to use the bathroom, and an even stranger one in his saying ‘no’. Sometimes there is simply no time, because service is relentless.

I was born in Bulgaria, one of the most vilified countries in the EU, but in my six years of living and studying in England, I was never made to feel less, or different, until I started working in London’s luxury hotels. And it wasn’t an issue of nationality: not for me, or for my Croatian, Lithuanian, Italian, Spanish or Brazilian colleagues, senior management included. Not being allowed the breaks you’re legally entitled to isn’t an issue of nationality, or immigration control. When, at a Conservative Party event in a Knightsbridge hotel, a young man in a suit tries to feed a cocktail sausage to a waitress while she’s handing round canapés, it has nothing to do with her being Bulgarian, or Romanian, or French. A hotel waiter’s nationality makes no difference to the fact that an hour of his time is worth a little over a pound more than the bottle of mineral water he’s expected to serve with a smile. Working 12-hour shifts, five days a week, covers little beyond rent and basic expenses in London, for foreign and British employees alike. I often worked alongside English fine art graduates, classically trained dancers from Scotland, Irish actors.

On one of my last shifts, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, I served duck magret with glazed baby carrots to a man who had a picture of the queen as his phone’s wallpaper. The chair of a trade association, he went on at length about the great benefits of Britain expanding its markets towards China. He praised, without an ounce of irony or moral restraint, the Chinese business model of growth and profit at any cost. One Sunday afternoon in the mid-1990s, he said, he saw thousands of Chinese labourers carrying steel rods and wooden planks to build a new railway. He thought of Brits back home watching Manchester United, slacking, having a pint at the pub. And he asked himself: ‘What are we doing?’


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16. AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION WARNS OF HEALTH AND SAFETY PROBLEMS FROM ‘WHITE’ LED STREETLIGHTS
by Richard G. 'Bugs' Stevens
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(The Conversation - June 18, 2016)

The American Medical Association (AMA) has just adopted an official policy statement about street lighting: cool it and dim it.

The statement, adopted unanimously at the AMA’s annual meeting in Chicago on June 14, comes in response to the rise of new LED street lighting sweeping the country. An AMA committee issued guidelines on how communities can choose LED streetlights to “minimize potential harmful human health and environmental effects.”

Municipalities are replacing existing streetlights with efficient and long-lasting LEDs to save money on energy and maintenance. Although the streetlights are delivering these benefits, the AMA’s stance reflects how important proper design of new technologies is and the close connection between light and human health.
Light is composed of light of different colors (red, blue and green) and some LED streetlights have a relatively high portion of blue light, which can disrupt people’s circadian rhythms. flakepardigm/flickr, CC BY-SA

The AMA’s statement recommends that outdoor lighting at night, particularly street lighting, should have a color temperature of no greater than 3000 Kelvin (K). Color temperature (CT) is a measure of the spectral content of light from a source; how much blue, green, yellow and red there is in it. A higher CT rating generally means greater blue content, and the whiter the light appears.

A white LED at CT 4000K or 5000K contains a high level of short-wavelength blue light; this has been the choice for a number of cities that have recently retrofitted their street lighting such as Seattle and New York.

But in the wake of these installations have been complaints about the harshness of these lights. An extreme example is the city of Davis, California, where the residents demanded a complete replacement of these high color temperature LED street lights.

Can communities have more efficient lighting without causing health and safety problems?
Two problems with LED street lighting

An incandescent bulb has a color temperature of 2400K, which means it contains far less blue and far more yellow and red wavelengths. Before electric light, we burned wood and candles at night; this artificial light has a CT of about 1800K, quite yellow/red and almost no blue. What we have now is very different.

The new “white” LED street lighting which is rapidly being retrofitted in cities throughout the country has two problems, according to the AMA. The first is discomfort and glare. Because LED light is so concentrated and has high blue content, it can cause severe glare, resulting in pupillary constriction in the eyes. Blue light scatters more in the human eye than the longer wavelengths of yellow and red, and sufficient levels can damage the retina. This can cause problems seeing clearly for safe driving or walking at night.

You can sense this easily if you look directly into one of the control lights on your new washing machine or other appliance: it is very difficult to do because it hurts. Street lighting can have this same effect, especially if its blue content is high and there is not appropriate shielding.

The other issue addressed by the AMA statement is the impact on human circadian rhythmicity.

Color temperature reliably predicts spectral content of light – that is, how much of each wavelength is present. It’s designed specifically for light that comes off the tungsten filament of an incandescent bulb.

However, the CT rating does not reliably measure color from fluorescent and LED lights.

Another system for measuring light color for these sources is called correlated color temperature (CCT). It adjusts the spectral content of the light source to the color sensitivity of human vision. Using this rating, two different 3000K light sources could have fairly large differences in blue light content.

Therefore, the AMA’s recommendation for CCT below 3000K is not quite enough to be sure that blue light is minimized. The actual spectral irradiance of the LED – the relative amounts of each of the colors produced – should be considered, as well.
The reason lighting matters

The AMA policy statement is particularly timely because the new World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness just appeared last week, and street lighting is an important component of light pollution. According to the AMA statement, one of the considerations of lighting the night is its impact on human health.

In previous articles for The Conversation, I have described how lighting affects our normal circadian physiology, how this could lead to some serious health consequences and most recently how lighting the night affects sleep.
LEDs (the yellow device) produce a highly concentrated light, which makes glare a problem for LED streetlights since it can hamper vision at night. razor512/flickr, CC BY

In the case of white LED light, it is estimated to be five times more effective at suppressing melatonin at night than the high pressure sodium lamps (given the same light output) which have been the mainstay of street lighting for decades. Melatonin suppression is a marker of circadian disruption, which includes disrupted sleep.

Bright electric lighting can also adversely affect wildlife by, for example, disturbing migratory patterns of birds and some aquatic animals which nest on shore.
Street lighting and human health

The AMA has made three recommendations in its new policy statement:

First, the AMA supports a “proper conversion to community based Light Emitting Diode (LED) lighting, which reduces energy consumption and decreases the use of fossil fuels.”

Second, the AMA “encourage[s] minimizing and controlling blue-rich environmental lighting by using the lowest emission of blue light possible to reduce glare.”

Third, the AMA “encourage[s] the use of 3000K or lower lighting for outdoor installations such as roadways. All LED lighting should be properly shielded to minimize glare and detrimental human and environmental effects, and consideration should be given to utilize the ability of LED lighting to be dimmed for off-peak time periods.”

There is almost never a completely satisfactory solution to a complex problem. We must have lighting at night, not only in our homes and businesses, but also outdoors on our streets. The need for energy efficiency is serious, but so too is minimizing human risk from bad lighting, both due to glare and to circadian disruption. LED technology can optimize both when properly designed.

(Richard G. 'Bugs' Stevens is Professor, School of Medicine, University of Connecticut)

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17. REVIEW: ‘WHITE TRASH’ RUMINATES ON AN AMERICAN UNDERCLASS | Dwight Garner
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(The New York Times -  June 21, 2016

Books of The Times

Crackers and squatters, rednecks and hillbillies, sandhillers and mudsills, clay eaters and hoe wielders: America has developed a rich vocabulary to describe one part of its permanent underclass. The epithet that subsumes them all, to borrow the title of Nancy Isenberg’s formidable and truth-dealing new book, is white trash.

Ms. Isenberg’s project in “White Trash: A 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” is to retell United States history in a manner that not only includes the weak, the powerless and the stigmatized, but also places them front and center.

As such, she has written an eloquent volume that is more discomforting and more necessary than a semitrailer filled with new biographies of the founding fathers and the most beloved presidents. (Look, here are six more in my mailbox.) Viewed from below, a good angle for no one, America’s history is usefully disorienting and nearly always appalling. “White Trash” will have you squirming in your chair.

Ms. Isenberg is a professor of American history at Louisiana State University. Her books include a well-regarded biography of Aaron Burr. Her own class background goes unmentioned in “White Trash.” This study does not require the emotional accelerant of memoir.

Like Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), Ms. Isenberg presents an alternative interpretation of American history. Unlike Mr. Zinn, she is not interested in crusaders and labor organizers and politicians of a socialist bent. Do not come to her book to learn about the Wobblies. The story she tells is more intimate. It’s an analysis of the intractable caste system that lingers below the national myths of rugged individualism and cities on hills.

Ms. Isenberg contends that adults in America are spoon-fed their history as if they were toddlers. We are eager consumers of the national hagiography. She subverts this hagiography at every turn, starting at the beginning.

America’s colonial beginnings tend to be viewed, Ms. Isenberg writes, through the “beliefs of those principled leaders molded in bronze — the John Winthrops and William Penns — who are lionized for having projected the enlarged destinies of their respective colonies.”

Yet she demonstrates that most early settlers did not buy into these destinies. Nor did most come to escape religious persecution. “During the 1600s,” she writes, “far from being ranked as valued British subjects, the great majority of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable ‘rubbish.’”

Many were indentured servants. Others were “roguish highwaymen, mean vagrants, Irish rebels, known whores and an assortment of convicts shipped to the colonies for grand larceny or other property crimes.” Others were simply lazy — “idlers,” in the lingo of the time. They would rather drink rum than clear an acre of pine trees.

America did not develop a House of Lords, yet we imported the rigging of the British class system, Ms. Isenberg argues. This was hardly a land of equal opportunity. Brutal labor awaited most migrants. There was little social mobility.

“Puritan religious faith did not displace class hierarchy, either; the early generations of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the routine reliance on servants or slaves,” she observes. “Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.”

From this beginning, Ms. Isenberg moves confidently forward, through, for example, the class issues that undergirded the Civil War and the popular eugenics movement, favored by Theodore Roosevelt, that marked many as targets for sterilization. Slavery and racism are hardly discounted in this book, but she maintains her focus on poor whites.

She singles out North Carolina as “what we might call the first white trash colony.” It was swampy and, thanks to its shoal-filled shoreline, lacked a major port. It had no real planter class. Its citizens were viewed as sluggards, “cowardly Blockheads” in the words of one early writer. Another referred to the state as the lawless “sinke of America.”

Ms. Isenberg moves through the Great Depression, pausing to admire James Agee’s complex yet urgent nonfiction account of the lives of poor tenant farmers in Alabama, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941). Elvis arrives. So does Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Trailer parks, redolent of “liberty’s dark side,” come under her appraisal, as do movies like “Deliverance.” (She finds its redneck caricatures to be loathsome.) The careers of Dolly Parton, Jimmy Carter, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Bill Clinton are analyzed. Mr. Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky resulted in a spectacle that the author likens to a “white trash outing on the grand national stage.”

She considers the phenomenon of Sarah Palin, and reality television shows like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” and “Duck Dynasty.” Donald J. Trump the politician is not on this book’s radar, yet Ms. Isenberg writes in her Palin section: “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance the dancing bear will win.”

Throughout this volume, there is an awareness of a cruel aspect of our moral complexion. “Americans not only scrambled to get ahead,” she writes, “they needed someone to look down on.” Gore Vidal put this another way: “It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.”

Ms. Isenberg does not skimp on economic analysis. She notes how the central engines of our economy, from slave-owning planters up through today’s bank and tax policies, have systematically harmed the working poor. “We have to wonder,” she writes about her book’s subjects, “how such people exist amid plenty.”

Part of her answer is the “backlash that occurs when attempts are made to improve the conditions of the poor,” from the New Deal through Obamacare. “Government assistance is said to undermine the American dream,” she writes, adding: “Wait. Undermine whose American dream?”

This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. It reminds us that, as Simon Schama wrote, venting his dislike of “Downton Abbey,” “History’s meant to be a bummer, not a stroll down memory lane.”

“White Trash” is indeed a bummer, and a thoroughly patriotic one. It deals in the truths that matter, which is to say, the uncomfortable ones.

White Trash
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Nancy Isenberg
Illustrated. 460 pages. Viking. $28

A version of this review appears in print on June 22, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: American History, Viewed From Below

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18. FORMER SOVIET UNION: OPERA AS THE HIGHEST STAGE OF SOCIALISM
by Artemy Kalinovsky
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(IIAS Newsletter 74 Summer 2016)

In the 1930s, the USSR undertook a crash program to build opera theatres – and create national operas – across the Union’s newly created republics. The creation of national operas and ballets was just one of the many cultural policies of the 1930s. By following the debates on the proper cultural forms for the new republics, the musical and literary sources for the new operas, and the relationship between European and local musicians, one can trace many of the tensions and contradictions of the Soviet experiment.

Artemy Kalinovsky

The first few months I spent in Tajikistan in the summer of 2011 I paid little attention to the Saddridin Ayni Theater of Opera and Ballet. Situated on a square off its main thoroughfare, Rudaki Avenue, the white neoclassical structure was impressive, but its existence seemed unsurprising – after all, every Soviet republican capital had an opera theater, and many medium sized provincial cities did too. (My father, an opera singer, had first fallen in love with the form attending performances in Donetsk in the years after the Great Patriotic War. Donetsk was the closest city to the factory town where he grew up.) In any case, it was already June when I arrived and the season was winding down, so for the moment the theater became for me what it was for many of the city’s residents – a backdrop to the beer and kebab tents spread out along the fountains in the square.

A year later, I was sitting in a Moscow archive when I came across a surprising document: an order to speed up construction of the opera theater in Stalinabad (as Dushanbe was known between 1929 and 1961), and several other cities. What surprised me was the date – didn’t the Soviet Union have bigger things to worry about on the eve of war than building opera houses in far-flung parts of the USSR? I became fascinated with the story of the opera; whilst tracing the history of the theater through archives in Dushanbe and Moscow, Soviet periodicals, and tracking down people who still remembered Soviet-Tajik opera in its heyday, I realized that it held important lessons for me as someone researching economic development in the Soviet era. In the history of Tajik opera, I would find echoes of all of the major contradictions and dilemmas of the Soviet era: between the promise of anti-colonialism and the persistent legacy of imperialism, the celebration of national difference and the drive towards homogenization, the goal of rapid development and transformation and the reality of persistent material shortages.
National liberation and European civilization

The Soviet idea of development was revolutionary – defined by a break with the past – but also teleological. Literary culture was higher than oral culture; polyphony was more advanced than unisonal music. These were, however, not firm beliefs, and the emphasis on the development of ‘high’ culture, even at its height in the 1930s, sat uneasily with a veneration of everything ‘folk’, while the need to define a sharp break with the past often gave way to a reverence of ‘classical’ cultural production, major literary and artistic figures, and even forms. This confusion helped limit the dominance of any one cultural idea and created the space where the definition of ‘national culture’ could be contested and negotiated.

"The Opera in Dushanbe, Architektura SSSR", October 1972

Although the 1920s are seen as the decade of freedom and experimentation in the arts and the 1930s that of Stalinist bureaucracy bringing the arts under strict control, Katerina Clark reminds us that the latter decade, despite a growing xenophobia and isolationism, saw the biggest push to not just engage with ‘universal’ culture in literature, architecture, and other arts, but also to make Moscow (and, by extension, the Soviet Union) that culture’s centre. This bid for cultural leadership took place in the context of continued insecurity about Russia’s culture advancement relative to Europe.1 In attempting to bring European techniques to Central Asian music, Soviet composers were not simply looking for fusion, but for the connections that showed the universality of cultures just as they were insistently celebrating their individual particularities.

The 1930s was the decade when major Russian composers like Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and ‘the mighty handful’ were ‘rediscovered.’ Marina Frolova-Walker connects the mission of these Russian composers, who drew inspiration from traditional Russian folk music, with the ‘national opera’ projects of the Soviet period. Glinka’s and Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas drew on epic and heroic Russian legends; these were lionized in the 1930s and formed a model for the new ‘national’ operas. Taking their cues from German romanticism, these composers codified the music they heard in Russia’s villages and found ways of incorporating them into their own composition (either through ‘quotation’ or ‘assimilation’).2

The creation of Russian opera and ballet had put Russia on the cultural map of Europe; European audiences and critics appreciated the touch of exoticism developed within familiar and respected cultural forms. It was proof that Russia was an equal in cultural terms, not just as a military power.3 For the USSR in the 1930s, the creation of ‘national’ operas for its newly ‘liberated’ peoples was thus simultaneously proof that Moscow was the true centre of a ‘universal’ culture (and not of a more provincial, imperialist, bourgeois European one) and that the Soviet Union was helping these nations achieve the kind of elevation that Russia itself had reached vis-à-vis those people who had once looked down on it as something rather wild and uncultured.

Specialists and melodists

Like other development projects, the creation of theatres, orchestras, and especially operas involved groups of specialists who came to organize, teach, and supervise. The idea was that the development of local culture could be accelerated through the exchange of knowledge and expertise: Europeans brought the technical and professional skills, the Tajiks the local knowledge. Stage directors and voice teachers, young composers and choreographers all became a part of this cultural mission. In the periphery these relatively young composers, directors, and musicians could find room for experimentation and creativity that would be limited in the more crowded cultural capitals of Moscow and Leningrad.

The best known of the specialists was Sergei Artemevich Balasanyan, an Armenian born in what became Soviet Turkmenistan and product of Moscow Conservatory’s department of musical theory and history. Balasanyan volunteered to go to Tajikistan in 1936 to help prepare the republic for the festival of Tajik culture that was to be held in Moscow, excited by the opportunity to be a part of the creation of professional Tajik music. Once there he took on the roles of “composer, social-musical worker, [obschestvenno-muzykal’nii deiatel’], folklorist, and pedagogue."4 He would stay in Tajikistan until 1943, serving as the first chairman of the Tajik Composers Union and the artistic director of the opera theatre. Balasanyan’s work with ‘Eastern music’ did not end with Tajikistan. Moscow’s engagement with post-colonial states (and cultures) from the mid 1950s gave Balasanyan new opportunities, and a list of his compositions in the late 1950s and early 1960s seems to follow the itinerary of Nikita Khrushchev’s travels: ‘Afghan suites’ for orchestra in 1956, scoring for radio plays in India and Indonesia, arrangements of children songs from the latter country, a ballet, and a series of songs based on poems by the Indian writer Rabindrant Tagor. He would also write several pieces on African and Latin American themes.

If Balasanyan became the most famous of the ‘specialists’ to work in Tajikistan, Aleksandr Lensky is the composer who remained the longest and had the biggest influence on the musical institutions created in Tajikistan. Like Balasanyan, Lensky came from the periphery (the Mordavian SSR) to Moscow to study, then went to Tajikistan in 1937. He worked as artistic director of the Lahuti Theatre from 1937 to 1941, and later directed the Tajik Philharmonic. Lensky was the composer of the first Tajik ballet as well as an opera and a number of orchestral pieces. He also became the first secretary of the Tajik Union of Composers after it was founded in 1954, which he tried to use as a bully pulpit to advance the cause of ‘modernization’ in Tajikistan. Lensky’s relationship with local cultural figures became increasingly strained, however, and his failure to learn any Tajik cost him the respect of intellectuals.5
What’s so revolutionary about opera?

Whatever the project of creating national opera was supposed to be in theory, its realization in practice was a process of constant challenge and renegotiation. For one, there was the problem of defining what was the proper source of national culture. Was it the folk music that ethnographers and musicologists tried to record in villages? Or was it Shashmaqam, the music favoured by the elite of cities like Bukhara and Samarqand? And what about plot – did one draw on local legends, socialist themes, or great historical epics like the Shahnama? Moreover, how did one combine Central Asian music, which was unisonal, with European forms that called for polyphony? Indeed, the first productions focused on safe ‘socialist’ themes: a musical called ‘Lola’ which celebrated the life of Tajik peasants, and the Vose Uprising, “a heroic uprising of the Tajik people against the Emir’s oppression."6 The libretto for the latter was written by Mirzo Turson-Zade and A. Dekhoti, both of whom had already made names for themselves creating the new Tajik-Soviet poetry and were leading figures in the Tajik Union of Writers.

The Opera Square, Pavel Yevteyev, 1974. USSR Tajikistan. Novosti Press Publishing House. 

Poets like Mirzo Turson-zade, Abdulqasem Lahuti, and A. Dekhoti may have been enthusiastic about adopting new forms, but they also stood their ground to see that those forms were used to preserve and spread what they saw as their cultural heritage. They criticized the composers working in the musical theatre and the opera for focusing only on ‘folk’ elements. “The problem is that the classical [heritage] of Tajikistan is completely forgotten,” Lahuti complained in 1939. “It is not right that everything is being built entirely on folklore. The inheritance of world culture needs to be used, and we need to pay attention to classical compositions."7 This applied both to themes and to the music itself. Tursun-zade called it a travesty that party officials had labelled Shashmaqam ‘music composed for the Emir’ and refused to support musicians who could play it. “They do not understand that this music comes from the people."8 Turson-zade and Lahuti’s views won the day. Balasanyan’s next opera, ‘The Blacksmith Kova,’ was based on episodes from the great Persian epic Shahnama.

Although the mass reception of the opera and other performances at the ten-day festival in 1941 are unknown, it was celebrated in Pravda as one of the finest of the ‘national’ festivals. Samuil Samosud, the conductor who would one day lead the Bolshoi, wrote a glowing response, noting that while it was clear that the performers still needed more training, what he had seen was already a remarkable achievement. Samosud also underlined that the opera’s very existence testified to the USSR’s commitment to blend egalitarianism with respect for and promotion of high culture: “We have already gotten used to the fact that every republic, every large oblast centre has an opera theatre. At the same time the largest theatres of Europe and America – not just now, during wartime, but even during peacetime – did not have permanent opera companies. This is easily explainable: in capitalist countries, everything, including art, is translated into the language of money. And opera does not bring big profits. Here, in the USSR, opera theatres are surrounded by the most serious attention on the part of the party and government. That is why the Tajik people were able to so quickly educate its own conductors, musicians, singers, and ballet performers."9 The economic irrationality of creating an opera theatre, even in conditions as unfavourable as those in Stalinabad, was actually something to celebrate, something that showed how different Soviet power was from European imperialism and Western capitalism in general.

Who is the opera for?

Within Tajikistan itself, responses to the project ranged from wholesale resistance to engagement. The director of the musical theatre complained in 1938 that “bourgeois nationalists” had been carrying on a “fierce battle” against the introduction of vocal training and notation because it “perverted national culture…Singers were intimidated, their lessons were deliberately interrupted, they were provoked, bullied…everything was done to discredit and disgrace the elements of musical and vocal culture that are so necessary for each artist of a musical theatre."10 There were those who saw polyphony as “foreign to Tajik music, as ruining and distorting Tajik music…as Russification of Tajik music."11 And many years later, the Tajik Union of Composers was confronted with the fact that radio stations in Tajikistan largely avoided playing its members compositions, “limiting [their broadcasts] primarily to one-voice singing."12

The creation of a Tajik Union of Composers in the 1950s was supposed to strengthen the position of Soviet-Tajik music within the republic. To an extent it did this, giving the remaining Russian composer in Tajikistan, Aleksandr Lensky, a bully pulpit from which to agitate for harmonic music and the institutional basis to find resources and reward composers who went along with the scheme. But it also provided a venue for Tajik composers, musicians, and occasionally other cultural figures to challenge these priorities and define what was acceptable as Tajik-Soviet music. Every new piece was now performed for a committee that repeatedly challenged music for not being ‘Tajik’ enough. Eventually some of these critics would challenge all of the assumptions of the Soviet musical project: that a ‘professional’ was someone who had studied at the conservatory and knew how to arrange music. At the Union’s second congress in February 1956, Lensky’s complaints were rebutted by cultural figures and officials. Why were Shashmaqam singers any less professional than those trained to sing in the Italian style? A culture that had risen so high, and valued in so many countries, said one speaker “was a great achievement of our ancestors that we have no right to reject.” The poet Abdusalom Dekhoti agreed, adding “is this the way that cultured peoples act towards their ancestors?"13

Dekhoti’s challenge to Lenski’s notions of culturedness and professionalism proved timely. The thaw was underway, and the room to define and redefine these terms was growing. In 1957 the Tajik Union of Composers held a plenum in which they denounced the ‘attacks on heterophonic music’ that had previously been so prominent. The plenum sparked a whole series of articles in Tojikiston soveti on the future of Tajik music. Z. Shakhidi, the chairman of the Union (and composer of the opera ‘Komde and Modan,’ which premiered in 1960) noted that the composers, scholars, writers, and listeners who took part in the debate on the pages of Tojikiston soveti were right in their criticism of Tajik composers who ignored unison, which is the “basis of national music."14 As the first Tajik head of the Union, and among the first Moscow trained composers to work in Tajikistan, however, Shakhidi defended the project of ‘modernization’ with the zeal of a convert, and felt that the criticism had gone too far. Composers had to know the musical culture of the people, he would argue, but “if they don’t master modern musical theory, if they do not know world musical culture, they will never be able to raise the musical culture of their people."15 Likewise, he advocated professionalizing vocal culture, which he did not see as incompatible with maintaining national characteristics: “uniting the virtues of one and the other, one can create something whole and wonderful."16 His successor similarly had to fend off criticism that Tajik composers failed to find an audience because they were neglecting classical and folk traditions.17

Opera Dushanbe, 2016, photo by Irna Hofman

Opera never achieved a mass following in Tajikistan, or even much support among the elite. It seems that performing for a nearly empty theatre was more or less the norm throughout the Soviet period (the Lahuti theatre, which performed drama in translation as well as original Tajik pieces, was supposedly much more popular). Of course, the theatre would be filled on occasion by groups of pioneers, workers, and visiting dignitaries. The proponents of opera and polyphony in Tajik music complained that the problem was with the listener, or more precisely, the institutions that were supposed to educate the listener. They complained that radio stations did not play enough symphonic music, to which station directors replied that their programming was based on requests from the public, and the public preferred either ‘Tajik’ music or popular songs.
Temples of modernity

The most difficult aspect of researching the story of Tajik opera is trying to understand what it meant to Tajiks beyond the elite. While I did meet some Tajiks who reported attending the opera frequently and who seemed to know the biographies of all of the theatre’s major performers, even most of the relatively Russianized intelligentsia seemed to be at best lukewarm about the theatre. But the response of one film director was particularly interesting. Although he said he hardly attended the opera, he was not immune to the effect that it produced: “When I was first brought here as a young pioneer, I remember that the inside of the theatre, the performance – it took my breath away.” In his view, it did not matter if Tajiks did not attend the opera; the purpose was rather to demonstrate what Soviet power was capable of, both in terms of raising the building, but also in terms of creating an art form that was so dependent on a high level of professional training and organization.

According to a legend that appears to have some currency in Dushanbe, the opera building was constructed using bricks from recently demolished mosques. While this is almost certainly false, the legend’s existence is instructive. As my interlocutor suggested, the building was constructed as a ‘temple’ to Soviet power. Similar things could be said about other facilities that were constructed as part of the Soviet modernization and nation-building programmes, such as libraries, universities, government buildings, and palaces of culture. They served simultaneously as markers of the people’s advancement to national consciousness and socialist consciousness, and as a reminder that their liberation came with the help of Soviet power. In the post-war period especially they would also serve to demonstrate the USSR’s egalitarian modernization to the outside world. The anthropologist Bruce Grant engages this contradiction in a helpful way; on the one hand, he points out that “the Soviet cultural project was unabashedly public, reified, intended for mass consumption and intended most importantly to be widely shared.” Yet in his own fieldwork he found libraries of atheistic literature where he was consistently the only visitor and houses of culture where musicians brought in by helicopter played to an empty hall. Nevertheless, Grant argues, by their existence and place in the city both institutions helped advance a “perceived project of Soviet civilization."18

Similarly, the opera theatre did not stand alone. Rather, it was a symbolic centrepiece of all of the investment that went in to cultural construction in the republic. In the 1950s, composers and other cultural figures fought for the creation of a conservatory, which they eventually got.19 Meanwhile educators and local party activists from across the republic petitioned for music schools, theatres, and resources to put together local choirs and mount amateur productions.20 The logic was clear – to create an opera theatre, one needed to train musicians, singers, and composers – and to find potential professionals one needed music schools and amateur productions. (The latter, too, helped to train new listeners). The fact that, like the radio, these schools may have professionalized ‘traditional’ music, rather than created professionals for Soviet Tajik culture, is almost besides the point. Development always has unintended consequences. All of these cultural institutions together are what made up ‘Soviet Tajik’ culture, with the opera theatre as its main temple. It did not matter that it often stood empty or that the local interpretations of its faith differed significantly from what was proselytized in the capital.

All Soviet republics developed national operas, and their fates since independence have varied. Kazakhstan, whose budget until recently was flush with money from hydrocarbons and where the president's daughter is a devoted opera fan, has invested in the opera and even built new facilities. In Turkmenistan, opera was banned between 2001 and 2009. In Tajikistan the theater of opera and ballet survived not only the civil war (1992-1997) and economic chaos that followed, but even the persistent effort to define an authentic Tajik culture. With help from foreign donors, the government even refurbished the theater and hired an Italian conductor to serve as artistic director for three years. Since my initial visit in 2011 I have gone to over a dozen performances. Russian and European classics such as Eugene Onegin and La Traviata share the schedule with ‘national’ operas like Komde and Madan. Often, the theater was almost empty, except it seems, for myself and some friends of the performers. Other times it was almost full, with an enthusiastic and engaged crowd. Although it seems far from the lives of most Tajiks today, the theater has its supporters. When I interviewed the theatre's director in 2013, he proudly gave me a glossy album that had been published to celebrate the theatre's 70th anniversary. It was called ‘The Temple of Fine Art’.

Artemy M. Kalinovsky is Assistant Professor of East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of several volumes, including Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies in the Cold War Era (Routledge, 2015). He is currently finishing a book on the politics and practices of development in Soviet Central Asia.


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