SACW - 29 July 2016 | Sri Lanka:Sinhala Extremism / Bangladesh: The challenge ahead / India: Militarised Kashmir - State and Non State; Tribute to Mahasweta Devi 1926-2016 / Witch-hunt in Turkey / Mountaineering & Nation Building in Germany and Austria

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 29 July 2016 - No. 2905 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Where Majoritarian Part Subsumes The Whole: The Ideological Foundation Of Sinhala Extremism | Michael Roberts
2. Bangladesh: The challenge before us | Mahfuz Anam
3. India: Leftists should'nt fall for the jihadist position on Kashmir like they once did for Pakistan
4. India: The pseudo alternative - The Sangh Parivar has furthered the colonial understanding of India's past | Harbans Mukhia
5. India: Photos from Delhi Protest and Remembrance for Assassinated Rationalists (20 July 2016)
6. India: PUDR statement on public floggiing and violence against dalit workers by hindutva vigilante in Gujarat
7. [Video] Conflict - Gary Bardin’s 1983 Animation Film Against War

8. Recent On Communalism Watch:

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
9. India: The charge of the cow brigade | Shiv Visvanathan
10. India: Kashmir, and the Inheritance of Loss | Basharat Peer
11. Inda: Mahasweta Devi 1926-2016 - She gave voice to those on the margins (Aruti Nayar)
12. This is the biggest witch-hunt in Turkey’s history | Can Dündar
13. Jim Harris's review of Tait Keller. Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860-1939
14. I’m frightened by the nationalism that’s been unleashed in Turkey | Liz Cookman

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1. SRI LANKA: WHERE MAJORITARIAN PART SUBSUMES THE WHOLE: THE IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION OF SINHALA EXTREMISM | Michael Roberts
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The ideological groundings of Sinhala supremacist and chauvinist thinking remain today – perhaps all the stronger and deeper because of (a) the defeat of the LTTE in 2009; (b) the persistent propaganda of the Tamil nationalist lobbies abroad, with many seams of fabrications mixed with fact; and (c) the pressures of a Western cabal posing as the “international community” and driven by a form of secular righteousness that is impervious to the double-standards imprinted on its masthead.
http://sacw.net/article12883.html

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2. BANGLADESH: THE CHALLENGE BEFORE US | Mahfuz Anam
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The Indian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 on the basis of religion. Bangladesh was born 31 years later, in 1971, on the basis of nationalism, democracy and secularism. Democracy we lost first, in the mid-seventies and then in the early eighties, and are yet to recover it fully. Secularism, which was on a gradual decline, now faces its most severe threat.
http://sacw.net/article12882.html

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3. INDIA: LEFTISTS SHOULD'NT FALL FOR THE JIHADIST POSITION ON KASHMIR LIKE THEY ONCE DID FOR PAKISTAN
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Well-wishers of Kashmiris and Palestinians should be vocal in their denunciation of any form of supremacism and bigotry instead of misrepresenting jihadism as fight for freedom and summoning apologia for terror-mongering. For, armed liberation attempts aided by jihadist neighbours have failed in both territories for the past 70 odd years.
http://sacw.net/article12881.html

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4. INDIA: THE PSEUDO ALTERNATIVE - THE SANGH PARIVAR HAS FURTHERED THE COLONIAL UNDERSTANDING OF INDIA'S PAST | Harbans Mukhia
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The Sangh Parivar's claims to being the true repository of Indian history and culture become louder every time it wields political power. It announces purging history of all the impurities that colonialism, and the evils that Marxism, had introduced into it. It promises to rewrite history completely and produce nationalist history in all its pristine purity. However, whether during its earlier stint or during campaigns to capture power or now, it has gone wrong on historical facts.
http://sacw.net/article12879.html

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5. INDIA: PHOTOS FROM DELHI PROTEST AND REMEMBRANCE FOR ASSASSINATED RATIONALISTS (20 JULY 2016)
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On the third anniversary of the death of Narendra Dabholkar, 20 July 2016, a sit-in was held at Jantar Mantar [New Delhi] to demand that his murderers and those of Prof. M.M. Kalburgi and Comrade Govind Pansare be brought to justice.
http://sacw.net/article12878.html

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6. INDIA: PUDR STATEMENT ON PUBLIC FLOGGIING AND VIOLENCE AGAINST DALIT WORKERS BY HINDUTVA VIGILANTE IN GUJARAT
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PUDR condemns the incident of flogging, stripping and parading of seven men belonging to the chamar caste by vigilante gaurakshaks on 11 July 2016 in Mota Samadhiyala village, Una taluka, Gir Somnath District Gujarat, which has brought the Brahmanical character of Hindutva cow politics and the caste character of the state to centre stage.
http://sacw.net/article12884.html

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7. [Video] CONFLICT - GARY BARDIN’S 1983 ANIMATION FILM AGAINST WAR
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Russian animation film using match sticks on conflict between nations
http://sacw.net/article12885.html

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8. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - India: How Golwalkar the RSS boss threatened to kill Gandhi -- say 1947 police reports
 - Indian state steps up hunt for mythical glow-in-the dark plant - £28m committed from tax payers money
 - India: Cow Vigilantism as Terror - Statement by New Socialist Initiative
 - India: Hindutva historians totally deserve to be read (Mihir S Sharma)
 - India: VHP demands suspension of ‘anti-national’ faculty from Hyderabad university
 - India: Lesson from Gujarat - Cow protection vigilante groups need to be banned
 - India: RSS didn’t kill Gandhi but created an ideology against him, say historians
 - India: Kashmir's prominent leader of the Hurriyet Conference Mirwaiz Umar Farooq warned people against Ahmadiyas (a report from 2015)
 - India: Eating Beef is not an Offence as there is no Law touching eating habits of any religion; Madras High Court
 - India: RSS Just Disowned Cow-terroists and Godse. Here are 9 more things RSS has disowned in the past
 - Turkey: Who prevented the coup and who hit the streets? – Ali Ergin Demirhan
 - Indian State and Religion: UP's tax payer to pick up costs for free train rides to Gujarat's hindu religious sites - Samajwadi party playing team B for BJP
 - USA: Hindu Nationalists and California’s History Curriculum (Pepper Chongh)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

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9. INDIA: THE CHARGE OF THE COW BRIGADE
by Shiv Visvanathan
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(The Hindu, 25 July 2016)

The cow rakshak syndrome needs to be analysed and exposed as a threat to Indian democracy

One of my friends, who is an anthropologist, argues that the middle class Indian does not need to be psychoanalysed on a couch. “A crowd,” he claims, “is a better method of analysing Indian repressions.” India’s politics of anxiety emerges more at the level of the crowd. “Crowds,” he adds, “are for negative democracy, the public for citizenship.”

For him, the psychology of India unravels at two levels. The first is at the level of the family, and where violence is more patriarchal. The second is at the level of an imaginary Jajmani system — a socio-economic system more predominant in rural areas and of its interaction between the upper and the lower castes. In this caste bundle, there is constant shuffling which provides a sense of order and disorder. But the fact is that what looks like order at one level might be mayhem at the second level. For this he uses the example of the cow and the politics around it which are very much in the news. At the domestic level, the cow is a god and represents something sacred. Simultaneously, it is the embodiment of an agricultural way of life. The cow is Gau Mata representing man’s oneness with nature and is embodied in his totemic relation with the animal.

Now, a symbol of social fissures

But this domestic arrangement acquires political overtones. The nature of the symbol, the cow, changes and it soon comes to represent the worst in the caste system. The political battles around the cow soon become deep. Let me put it this way. The cow expresses the social tensions within an agricultural society that is turning urban in its ways. Here, local panchayats disrupt what is normal by becoming vigilantes. Ironically, the cow becomes a symptom of the deep fissures within a society. Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits are fast losing their moorings in agriculture and the cow becomes a source of violence. Ironically the cow, instead of representing the best of agricultural values, embodies the tension between a changing caste system and the ideals of a constitutional India.

As a result, we are soon inundated with images of and reports about social violence. In such moments of change, the Constitution becomes an empty document. Neither the rule of law nor law and order is maintained. Vigilante groups play kangaroo courts while the rest of the nation can only watch. It is this sociology of violence that we must confront.

One thing is clear. The Government of India is blissfully deep in slumber as this process plays out. As victims protest the violence, the regime plays a game of being indifferent. I must add that I am not reporting one singular event but a cascade of events. As the urban social landscape flares up, one even begins wondering whether the much talked about smart cities of the future will have a civic place for the cow, even as imagination. Given the nature of Twitter and the Internet, every act soon goes viral. Events in even the remotest corners of the country soon become a global spectacle. They become a part of the ecology of everyday memory and are difficult to shrug off.

It is not as if these “cow protection” groups protect the cow. They are not like the Jain goshalas where there is deep respect for animal life and cattle are given shelter. These groups see little connection between the cow and the future of agriculture. In fact, the cow, which is an icon, honoured in festivals, and considered as a totem, becomes a symbol that leads to irrational violence. The high caste Hindu, instead of seeking harmony between nature and culture in which the cow is cosmologically represented, now brutally disrupts both.

Minorities at the receiving end

Consider a typical scene that went viral. Four men were stripped, tied to a car and beaten by a high caste group. The brutality of the scene is stark. What added to the brutality was the piety of the gau rakshak pretending he was protecting the ideals of a fading society. Yet it is not as if the gau rakshak understands the Jajmani system or the political economy of a society where lower castes carry away carcasses, playing a scavenging role that keeps other castes pure. The four Dalits were taking away a dead cow to be skinned. This has been a part of tradition, yet the gau rakshak is illiterate about social functions. Worse, these vigilante groups obtain encouragement from the rhetoric of government spokespersons who announce elaborate plans for cow protection. Stopping illicit cattle trade between India and Bangladesh is understandable, but using this as a pretext to inflict atrocities on Dalits is not.

Such atrocities have been recurring with impunity and Dalits are deeply frustrated. Some have even gone to the extent of ending their lives.

In all this, one realises that vigilante-sponsored violence is not sporadic but involves organised networks. They even patrol highways looking out for trucks ferrying cows and then attack those in the vehicle, using weapons to mete out instant justice. In turn, the Centre remains silent, almost tacit in what it considers an informal validation of government policy. It is not sacred cows that the regime is protecting. What it is tacitly desacralising is the Constitution. The so-called rights of a cow are getting precedence over the rights of Dalits. The very sacred idea of a cow which seeks harmony between nature and culture now stands emasculated. It is here that fundamentalist movements get some of their energy from. It appears that the Modi government is operating on split levels, with one entity suggesting modern proposals for policy, while the other wants all of this to be anchored to a fundamentalism. It is this which makes the violence so overt. Oddly, the function of policing is being handed over to these groups and the regime sees them as arms that are helping to consolidate the ideology of the government.

A structure of violence

Let me look at another incident which happened last year where a 50-year-old man, Mohammad Akhlaq, was beaten to death and his 22-year-old son severely injured in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, allegedly by residents of Bisara village, after rumours spread in the area about the family storing and consuming beef. In fact, if one looks at the lynching of Akhlaq and the attack on the four Dalit men for skinning a cow, one sees similarities. There is a third incident I will look at. This time it is on a video that emerged in late June this year which showed volunteers of the Gau Raksha Dal forcing two “beef smugglers” to eat cow dung and drink cow urine. According to reports, their leader admitted that his group had forced the two Muslim men to eat cow dung on June 10. The man claimed that volunteers, acting on a tip-off, intercepted a vehicle transporting “700 kg of beef from Mewat to Delhi” on the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal Expressway. He said the group chased the car for a few kilometres before stopping it near the Badarpur border. “When we caught them, they had 700 kg of beef in their car. We made them eat panchgavya, a concoction of cow dung, cow urine, milk, curd and ghee, in order to teach them a lesson and also to purify them,” the man said. Thus there seems to be adequate evidence of a new fundamentalist rule of law. The sad part is that the political Opposition, especially the Congress party, is reading all this as sporadic events rather than as an emerging structure of violence that does need to be confronted.

We must understand that there is a style to the violence and its staging. In one way it is plain bully boy brutality, where brute majoritarianism seeks to make a point to some minority group, be it Dalit, Muslim or tribal and that “they must be taught a lesson”. Vigilante and policeman literally mirror each other even as the government appears to be instructing the victims to be restrained!

The unending sequence of probes being demanded matches the widening cycle of violence. It is almost as if it takes only one sacred cow to kill another —in this case, democracy. In all this, middle class India watches silently as it is overcome by “atrocity fatigue” and wants to get back to “aspiration and desire mode”.

In the end, the Muslim and the Dalit are violated twice. Riots first displace the Muslim, and vigilante groups then forbid him from pursuing his occupation. In the case of the Dalit, he has to face never-ending atrocities. Thus in the roster of democracy, both Muslim and Dalit are less than equal. What needs to be exposed is the sanitised hypocrisy behind these acts of brutality. The cow rakshak syndrome needs to be analysed and exposed as a threat to Indian democracy.

Shiv Visvanathan is Professor at Jindal School of Law. 

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10. INDIA: KASHMIR, AND THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
by Basharat Peer
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(The Ne York Times - JULY 25, 2016)

Kashmiri villagers carrying the body of Burhan Wani during his funeral procession in Tral, east of Srinagar, in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
DAR YASIN / ASSOCIATED PRESS

SRINAGAR, Kashmir — On July 8, Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old rebel, was shot dead by Indian soldiers and police officers in a small village in the central part of Indian-controlled Kashmir. News of his killing spread as fast as the bullets that had hit him. Cellphones, emails, social media went wild: “They’ve killed Burhan! They’ve killed Burhan!” Everybody called Burhan by his first name.

He had become an Internet sensation over the past year, first in Kashmir, then in India and Pakistan, after putting together a small band of Kashmiri militants. Barely out of their teens, they had taken to the forest and social media to challenge the Indian government. Photos they posted on Facebook show them in military fatigues and with stubbly chins, posing with AK-47s against backdrops of apple orchards or mountains. In one video, Burhan plays cricket.

A dozen boys with a few guns — they were no threat to the Indian army, one of the largest in the world. There is no record of Burhan and his crew waging any attack. Their rebellion was symbolic, a war of images against India’s continuing occupation of Kashmir, where about half a million of its soldiers, paramilitary and armed police are still stationed.

According to top police officials, Burhan and two other militants were killed on the evening of July 8 in a gun battle that broke out after Indian soldiers and Kashmiri police surrounded the house in which they had sought shelter.

Protests erupted on the day of Burhan’s funeral and were repressed by Indian troops with indiscriminate force, including pellet guns: As of Monday, about 50 people had been killed and 3,100 injured, nearly half of them Indian troops but also children as young as 4. Instead of opening political negotiations to address Kashmiris’ calls for independence, India continues to unabashedly use military force to maintain a status quo that for years has suffocated millions in the region.

When I first saw the photos of Burhan and his boys, I thought: another generation of young Kashmiris about to be consumed. Those apple orchards and mountains in the background, which I know intimately and call home, brought back memories of the early ’90s, when I was a teenager in southern Kashmir. An armed insurgency supported by Pakistan and a popular rebellion were underway then, triggered by the Indian government’s meddling in a recent state election.

By the time the insurgency was quashed in the late 2000s, more than 70,000 militants, soldiers and civilians had been killed. Still, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris would occasionally take to the streets. Indian troops continued to respond with violence, even against civilians armed with nothing or nothing more than stones. Hardly any soldier has been prosecuted for civilian killings because Indian law has long granted immunity to troops posted in Kashmir and other troubled regions. (A recent decision by India’s Supreme Court may change this.)

Burhan came of age with this inheritance of loss and rage. He was 15, a top-ranking student from a middle-class family, in 2010 — that summer alone Indian forces killed more than 110 Kashmiri protesters. One afternoon that year, Indian police officers posted in Burhan’s town reportedly sent him and his brother Khalid to fetch cigarettes and then beat up the boys when they returned. Humiliated, Burhan left for the mountains and joined a tiny group of militants. Then last year, Khalid, who was doing post-graduate work in economics, was killed by Indian soldiers.

On the morning of July 9, Burhan’s body was brought to a vast open ground in Tral, his hometown, about 25 miles east of Srinagar. In the early hours, the photojournalist Javed Dar saw that hundreds of people who had come from nearby villages were sleeping on the streets, some using rocks as pillows. About 200,000 people are reported to have attended the funeral throughout the day. Prayers were repeated several times to accommodate newcomers. A slogan I had heard at numerous funerals in the 90s roared up from the valley again: “Burhan, tere khoon se, inquilab aayega,” “Burhan, your blood will bring forth the revolution!”
Indian paramilitary solders near their base camp in Kashmir, earlier this month.
DAR YASIN / ASSOCIATED PRESS

As Kashmiris seethed with desperate anger that day, Indian paramilitaries and police were deployed across the region. In hundreds of locations, people came out to mourn Burhan and raise their voices against the Indian occupation. The vast majority were unarmed. In some places, protesters picked up stones and charged at camps of Indian soldiers and police.

The troops responded with a brutality rare even by the grim standards of their record in Kashmir. They fired bullets, tear gas and lead pellets. Soon, the Indian government imposed a military curfew.

I reached Kashmir from Delhi on July 11, and the next morning when I woke up in my parents’ house in southern Srinagar, I heard only crickets chirping in the backyard. The streets were desolate except for groups of Indian paramilitary troops with guns and bamboo sticks. The pro-India politicians who run the Kashmir government had all but disappeared from public view.

Kashmiris, as they do in crisis, turned to themselves for support. At Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) Hospital in central Srinagar, where the injured had been brought by the hundreds, scores of volunteers were offering medicine, money, clothes and care to the patients and their families. On one wall in the lobby hung a banner with the words, “The Martyrs Ask of You: Remember Us,” and two photographs of Burhan. One showed him standing against a mountainous backdrop; the other was of his bullet-ridden corpse on a stretcher.

I walked into an ophthalmology ward. There were about 20 beds with a teenager or young man in each and relatives standing around in anxious huddles. Almost every patient had large, black sunglasses. “Seventy-two patients with pellet injuries arrived here in one day,” one doctor told me. As of Sunday, SMHS Hospital alone had received more than 180 people with serious wounds to the eyes.

A single shot from a pellet gun sprays more than a hundred pellets. A pellet is a high-velocity projectile 2mm to 4mm around and with sharp edges. It doesn’t simply penetrate an eye; it ricochets inside it, tearing the retina and the optic nerves, scooping out flesh and bone.

I walked through the hospital with Dr. Javed Shafi, a surgeon in his early 40s, as he was making bed calls with his patients.

The day before he had operated on Shafia Jan, a pale, slim woman in her mid-20s from Arwani, a village about 50 miles south. She had stepped out of her house after hearing commotion on the street during protests following Burhan’s death, she explained. A police officer fired his pump-action gun toward her.

“I didn’t feel anything at first. Then, my left leg crumbled and I fell. I saw my intestines falling out,” Ms. Jan told me. She pushed her guts back into the wound and held them in with her hands. Scores of pellets had pierced her lower abdomen, opening up the scars of an earlier C-section.

Omar Nazir, a reed-thin boy of 12, barely filled one corner of his bed. A thick swathe of bandages formed a cross across his chest and belly. He had black, adult-size glasses. “He’s lost both his eyes,” Dr. Shafi said. Doctors had yet to deliver the news to Nazir Ahmad, the boy’s father, a day laborer in Pulwama, a district in southern Kashmir, but he already seemed to know. Mr. Ahmad, tall and wiry, looked at the doctor, his eyes liquid with entreaty: “Dr. Sahib, we own one-fifth of an acre of land in the village. I will sell all my land, but please make him see.”

In other corners of the hospital: A young man with the face of Adrian Brody whose penis had to be amputated because it had been shredded by pellets. A four-year-old girl, her legs and abdomen riddled by what she called “firecrackers.” And Insha Malik.

I had read about Insha, 14, in that morning’s paper. The photograph accompanying the article showed a face with red wart-like wounds. Her nasal bridge was a lump of raw flesh held together by black surgical thread. The bloodied lids of her left eye had been sown shut. Her right eye was a red alloy of blood, flesh, bone and metal.
A Kashmiri protester facing off with Indian government forces in Srinagar this month.
MUKHTAR KHAN / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Insha was in the surgical intensive care unit of SMHS Hospital, a few rooms away from the ward I visited with Dr. Shafi. Afroza Malik, her mother, a woman in her early 50s, sat right by the I.C.U. door on the bare floor. Her husband, who had a leg injury from an earlier accident, was lying on a blanket, his head in his wife’s lap. She was stroking his graying hair.

Ms. Malik explained that on July 12, she, Insha and several relatives had taken refuge in an upstairs room of their two-story house in Sedew, a tiny village 40 miles south of Srinagar. They closed the thick wooden windows and sat on the floor. They heard tear gas canisters being fired; they heard gunshots. A loud noise followed. A pellet gun had been fired at the window. Insha was sitting nearby. “The window was blown to pieces,” Ms. Malik told me. “I heard her wail and saw blood flowing out of her eyes. She fell on the floor.”

A few days later, the police raided the offices of Greater Kashmir, the daily that had run that story about Insha, as well as several other local newspapers, and shut down the printing presses. The authorities’ familiar silencing routine had begun again. Indian officials and thought leaders fell back on tired rituals of obfuscation and denial. But already one line of graffiti had appeared on every other wall throughout the entire valley: “Go India, Go Back!”

Basharat Peer is the author of “Curfewed Night,” a memoir of the conflict in Kashmir, and the forthcoming, “A Question of Order: India, Turkey and the Return of Strongmen.”

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11. INDIA: MAHASWETA DEVI 1926-2016 - SHE GAVE VOICE TO THOSE ON THE MARGINS
by Aruti Nayar
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(The Tribune, July 29, 2016)

Mahasweta Devi wrote with a crusader’s zeal to document histories of tribals.

MAHASWETA DEVI, the 90-year-old eminent writer-activist who passed away yesterday symbolised writing for life's sake. As she herself said, "It is my conviction that a storywriter should be motivated by a sense of history that would help her readers to understand their own times. I have never had the capacity nor the urge to create art for art's sake. Since I haven't ever learnt to do anything more useful, I have gone on writing. I have found authentic documentation to be the best medium for protest against injustice and exploitation." 

Mahasweta was no ivory-tower writer, a crusader's zeal propelled her. Be it her involvement with the Singur agitation in West Bengal or welfare of tribals of Bihar, Orissa, Bengal and Madhya Pradesh that won her the Padamshri in 1986, she chronicled the struggles of the subaltern classes. She fought for the rights of the landless and peasants, taking on corporate and politically entrenched interests. The recipient of the Jnanpith Award for 1996, explored motifs in modem Indian life through figures and narratives of indigenous tribes of India.

Born in 1926, she was reared in a Dhaka family whose bread-winner, a lawyer, chose against all odds to fight the imperialists. As she said: "My grandfather had to suffer a lot for fighting the cases of freedom fighters. But right from childhood, I was brought up in an atmosphere where compromise was taboo...". Her father, poet Manish Ghatak, uncles Sachin Choudhury, the founder-editor of the Economic and Political Weekly, and Ritwik Ghatak, a n avant garde filmmaker were dominant influences. Her mother and grandmother too wrote. In fact, the women in the family had a lively relationship with books. In 1948, Mahasweta married the legendary playwright Bijon Battacharya of IPTA, the author of Navanno.

Mahasweta studied literature but loved history and experienced life in varied ways — be it as a teacher or during a stint at the office of the DAG Posts and Telegraphs, assignments as a roving village reporter of the Bengali daily Jugantar. All these combined to hone the social realism that characterised her fiction. Besides 42 novels, 20 collections of short stories, five books for children, a collection of plays and translations, she also co-authored a book in Hindi — Bharat Mein Bandhua Mazdoor.

Mahasweta created a span of history, allowing individuals to evolve through their interactions with the historical process. While chronicling history, she captured tones of oral narratives, in the raw idiom of everyday speech, often drawing words from several sources simultaneously.

She was aghast at the casual way in which peasant up risings had been dismissed by chroniclers of India's freedom movement. By documenting the lives and times of folk heroes, Mahasweta felt she was lending voice to the voiceless sections of society. Winning the Sahitya Akademi award for Aranyer Adhikar (1977) was a personal triumph. She had reconstructed the career of Birsa Munda, leader of a millenarian tribal revolt at the turn of the century. Her first published work, Jhansir Rani (1956), was a fictional reconstruction of the career of feudal chieftain Laxmibai, who fought against the British for her rights. For this, Mahasweta delved into archival records and travelled through the desert villages and plateau where the queen had lived and fought more than a 100 years ago. 

With painstaking care, she collected scraps of legends and folk ballads treasured in the collective memory of the region. Some of her other works are Not, (1957), Ki Basantj Ki Sorate (1958), Amrita Sanchay (1964), Andhar Manik (1967), Hajar Churashir Ma (1974), Aranyer Adhikar (1977), Agnigaritha (1978)  and Chotti Munda o Tar Teer (1979). Besides this, Sunghursh, (1968) Rudaali (1993), Hazar Churasi Ki Ma (1998), Maati Maay (2006) and Gangor were  movies made on her stories.

From the late 1970s, the subjects of her stories became the subjects of her life and she got more and more involved with her work with tribals and underprivileged communities in the districts of Mednapur, Purulia, Singhbhum and Mayurbhanj. She set up several voluntary organisations for their welfare and helped bring their grievances to the view of an indifferent bureaucracy. With the funds sent by her translator Gayatri Spivak, she set up five schools in the tribal heartland of Purulia. 

While working with the tribals, Mahasweta noticed the peculiar paradox of tribal women's life — their almost superhuman lifestyle and their fierce independence. From this flowed greatest short stories — Standayini, Draupadi, Douloti and Gohuinni.

She was surprised at, the red-carpet treatment given to her when she visited Delhi to receive her Sahitya Akademi Award in 1979. All those who listened to her, at the India International Centre  were struck by her sharp manner. No glib urban sophistication. After all, she came to Delhi very often and made the rounds of offices to collect funds for her cause. This time it was in the air-conditioned confines where she was being questioned about feminism  For a woman with a cause, her preoccupations transcended boundaries of gender and facile generalisations. 

Two classes of characters dominate Mahasweta's stories The first are mothers bearing the brunt of social and political oppression and resisting with indomitable will. The other are sensitive individuals, initially apolitical, bound to the community with strong ties As the individual absorbs the dehumanising experience of exploitation, he grows to the role of a leader. Mahasweta's Bashai Tudus, Chotu, Mundas and Mastersaabs are products of exploitation, direct and inhuman. Right from Chandi, cast out by a superstitious community in Baoen (1971) , to the tribal Naxalite Draupadi in the story named after her, Mahasweta's mothers are too earthy and emotion-charged to bear overtones of any mystical, mythical or archetypal motherhood. 

The most famous novel, Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084) is set against the climactic phase of the annihilation of urban Naxalite movement and its aftermath. Sujata,the mother of corpse number 1084, can find a moral rationale for her son Brati's revolt only when she can piece together, exactly two years after his killing, part of her son's life she had never known. She can see in , Brati's revolt an articulation of  the silent resentment she has against her corrupt but respectable husband, her other children, their spouses and friends. 

Urvashi o Johnny, the story about the  relationship between a ventriloquist and his talking doll, is just about the Emergency. The cancer of the throat of the doll is a metaphor for the suppression of democratic rights. The shock,  pain and utter helplessness which the Emergency plunged Indian sensibility is captured in this strange story.

In an age where books are more about hype and market-savvy tricks, writers like Mahasweta are rare. Digging a well is a leitmotif in her stories and that is what she did even in life — digging away and carving out an existence for the people whom she had given herself to. In an era of liberalisation and, fast-changing beliefs (if any), the much-awarded writer embodied the triumph of substance over style.


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12. THIS IS THE BIGGEST WITCH-HUNT IN TURKEY’S HISTORY
by Can Dündar
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(The Guardian - 22 July 2016)

Power’s always swung between mosques and military. But the brutality of this clampdown is at a new level – and I’ve been jailed before. We need Europe’s help

The coup attempt took place on a Friday night. By Sunday evening a list of 73 journalists to be arrested had been leaked by a pro-government social media account. My name was at the top.

Within three days, 20 news portals were inaccessible, and the licences of 24 news and radio stations cancelled. Meydan newspaper was raided, and its two editors detained. (They were released 24 hours later.) Yesterday the journalist Orhan Kemal Cengiz, also on the list, was arrested at the airport with his wife. It is almost impossible to hear dissident voices now, in a media already largely controlled by the government. The European convention on human rights has been suspended until further notice. A cloud of fear hangs over the country.

When, this week, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared a three-month state of emergency, I thought: “Nothing has changed.” As a journalist who has produced documentaries on all the past coups in the country, and has lived through the past three, I knew all too well how terrifying a regime the coup could have brought about. However, I also saw how its failure would empower Erdoğan, quickly turning him into an oppressor too.

Related: Turkey state of emergency worries EU as Erdoğan promises 'fresh blood' in military

Turkey’s politics has always functioned like a pendulum: it swings from mosque to barracks, and back again. When it sways too near the mosque, soldiers step in and try to take it to the barracks. And when the pressure for secularism from the barracks becomes too great, the power of the mosques grows. And educated democrats, sitting in between these extremes, are always the ones to take a beating.

Why can’t we escape this dilemma? It’s easy to explain, yet hard to resolve. The Turkish military has, unfortunately, been the only powerful “guardian” of secularism – in a country where civil society has not matured, opposition parties are weak, the media are censored, and unions, universities and local authorities are neutralised. The armed forces have always claimed to be the sole protectors of the country’s modernity. Paradoxically, however, every coup the army has plotted has not only hurt democracy but also fuelled radical Islam. A recent scene at the funeral of a coup protester symbolised the situation perfectly. The president was there. The imam prayed: “Protect us, lord, from all malice, especially that of the educated.” “Amin!” (“Amen”) the crowd roared.

So last week’s attempted coup is only the latest example of a centuries-old oscillation. But it is also shaping up to be one of the worst. During the attempt on 15 July, crowds answered hourly calls from mosques. They yelled “Allahu Akbar” while lynching soldiers; they flew Turkish flags and the green flags of Islam, and shouted: “We want executions!”

Lists of all sorts of “dissenters”, not just journalists, circulated immediately. Nearly 60,000 people – including 10,000 police officers, 3,000 judges and prosecutors, more than 15,000 educationists, and all the university deans in the country – have either been detained or fired, and the numbers are growing daily. Torture, banned since the military coup of 1980, has resurfaced. A campaign has been launched to revive the death penalty, which was abolished in 2002. It is the biggest witch-hunt in the history of the republic.
Turkish prime minister Binali Yildirim (l), President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (C), Turkish Prime Minister andChief of Staff General Hulusi Akar.
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From left, Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim; President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and General Hulusi Akar, the prime minister and chief of staff, at the presidential complex in Ankara today. Photograph: Turkish presidential press office/EPA

What does this mean? Along with the state of emergency, this means that legislative authority will shortly be neutralised on a grand scale and redirected towards executive authority; access to fair trial will be obstructed; and greater restrictions on the media will be imposed. Erdoğan has already declared that if parliament decides in favour of the death penalty, he will approve it. If he is not bluffing, this may cause a total rift with the European family from which Turkey already feels excluded.

For reasons we still can’t understand, the soldiers who attempted to seize control on Friday night blocked only the road heading from Asia into Europe; passage to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran was unhampered. I find the decision symbolic, for Turkey now appears to be trapped in Asia. The door to Europe is closing.

And the problems we are left with are these. Fine, we are rid of a military coup, but who is to shelter us from a police state? Fine, we are safe from the “malice of the educated” (whatever that is), but how will we defend ourselves from ignorance? Fine, we sent the military back to their barracks, but how are we to save a politics lodged in the mosques?

And the last question goes to a Europe preoccupied with its own troubles: will you turn a blind eye yet again and co-operate because “Erdoğan holds the keys to the refugees”? Or will you be ashamed of the outcome of your support, and stand with modern Turkey?


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13. JIM HARRIS'S REVIEW OF TAIT KELLER. APOSTLES OF THE ALPS: MOUNTAINEERING AND NATION BUILDING IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, 1860-1939
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 Tait Keller. Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860-1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 304 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-2503-4.

Reviewed by Jim Harris (The Ohio State University)
Published on H-War (July, 2016)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

In Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860-1939, Tait Keller draws on archival sources from four Alpine countries (Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland) to provide a history of an “ecoregion” that transcends national borders. Keller seeks to challenge the traditional historical approach that too often focuses on the nation-state, by examining the Alps as a site of natural and political connection between Germany and Austria in order to present a new perspective on the international relations between the two German-speaking nations.

Keller’s central actors are the “apostles of the Alps,” mostly middle-class mountaineers from urban centers, who presented the high mountains as a sacred space when they returned from their excursions. These first-wave Alpineers perceived the mountains as a space where “an inclusive pluralistic Grossdeutschland” could be formed (p. 2). Hiking and mountaineering became a means of transcending religious, ethnic, class, or regional difference. Yet, as Keller argues, as climbers invited a broader public to the heights in hopes that this would further “patriotic loyalties to a landscape that united Germany and Austria,” this ultimately resulted in “political fights, social conflicts, culture wars and environmental crusades” that soiled their sacred space--both politically and environmentally (pp. 2-3).

Apostles of the Alps is divided into two parts bridged by the First World War, but united by tracing the long history of the German and Austrian Alpine Association. In the first half of the book, “Opening the Alps, 1860-1918,” Keller examines what drew the rugged Alpineers to the high mountains. Most were middle-class men who sought a respite from urban life. The Alps came to be seen as antithetical to urban society, as they remained an “unfiltered” and “pristine” space (p. 21). For the early mountaineers the struggle to climb the Alps had a palliative quality, but this was a fantasy of the middle classes who “faced such low physical demands in their daily lives” (p. 50). Working-class narratives described mountain-climbing as an escape as well, but as an escape from a strict and regulatory state or factory management. 

Keller examines how the “apostles” preaching the tranquility of the mountains ultimately contributed to the desecration of their sacred Alps. In his third chapter, “Young People and Old Mountains,” Keller highlights how the building of roads and highways into the Alps came to be seen as the city encroaching on the sacred mountains. For the members of the Alpine Association, the key to the palliative nature of the Alps was the struggle to reach the peaks--a struggle under one’s own power--that roads and cable cars eliminated. Further, Keller explains that as more and more people began to visit the high mountains they brought with them the social conflicts that the mountains had been a refuge from: the religious Kulturkampf, generational struggles, and perhaps most significantly, anti-Semitic thought.

Keller’s chapter “The High Alps during the Great War” bridges his argument into its second half. During the Great War, German and Austrian soldiers fighting Italians in the mountains fought as a seamless military unit. The Alpine Association aided this by opening its huts and supplying guides to the military, as “martial and mountaineering ethos became one” (p. 90). However, as war turned the Alps into an industrial battleground, complete with roads and railroads, it ruined the Alps as a place of peace and solitude and of adventure and danger.

The second half of the book, “Dominating the Alps, 1919-1939,” presents the Alps as a contested space rather than a space of unity. Keller examines how Germans and Austrians, who sought to preserve the cultural connection to the region, subverted Italian political control over the southern Alps. Alpineers increasingly used the language of the Volk, exclusive of Jewish participation, in their efforts to cement a unified Germanic culture in the high mountains. Some Alpineers went as far as to suggest that an Anschluss “was the only natural solution to maintain stability in central Europe” in the mid-1920s (p. 128). 

One of Keller’s stated objectives in writing Apostles of the Alps is to challenge the idea of an Alpine Sonderweg. Keller very convincing demonstrates that while many Alpineers did support Hitler’s ideological position, this sentiment did not emerge until the interwar years. Before the First World War liberty, autonomy, and individual accomplishments were the values that the Alpineers held most dear. Only after the Great War, when the Alps came to be a barrier rather than a connection between Germany and Austria, did the rhetoric of struggle and conquest in order to restore a Greater Germany fully resonate with the Alpineers. For many Alpineers, Hitler’s Anschluss was crucial, because it would restore the Alps as a point of linkage between Austria and Germany, rather than the forcibly imposed division.

Apostles of the Alps is a useful read for German and central Europeanist historians, but will be of great value to environmental historians as well. Keller suggests, and demonstrates convincingly, that we must rethink the concept of “borderlands.” Keller demonstrates that studying environments as borderlands can just as useful as studying the edges of empires. As a military history, the book’s utility remains a bit more obscure. Keller’s chapter “The High Alps during the Great War” effectively discusses the environmental aspects of the First World War, especially the hazardous nature of the terrain and how Austrian local knowledge and mastery of the mountains gave them the advantage despite fewer divisions. Beyond this, however, there is very little traditional military history in this monograph. However, if we broaden our perspective on military history to consider the relationship between war and the natural world (as we should), Tait Keller provides an excellent example of how to study the “conquest of nature” in Apostles of the Alps. Keller very convincingly demonstrates how the ecoregion of the Alps was transformed from a “sacred” and “pristine” space into a conquered and industrialized space, and how this was in no small part a function of the First World War.

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14. I’M FRIGHTENED BY THE NATIONALISM THAT’S BEEN UNLEASHED IN TURKEY
by Liz Cookman
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(The Guardian - 19 July 2016)

Hearing explosions during the coup attempt was scary enough, but so are the abuses that are being carried out by Erdoğan’s supporters in the name of ‘democracy’
People take to the streets near the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge during the attempted coup in Istanbul
‘While an impressive display of people power prevented the armed coup, it will likely now result in unleashing a further crackdown on dissent.’ Photograph: Gurcan Ozturk/AFP/Getty Images

I was at a barbecue in the garden of the British embassy bar in Ankara on Friday night when F16s started roaring overhead. We soon heard that the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul had been blocked off, too, and there was talk from various off-duty officials of an attempt at a military coup. It seemed so unlikely.

A friend in Istanbul called and said state media institutions had been taken over by army and jandarma officers calling themselves a peace council, and that the broadcaster TRT was showing endless weather reports. Then the explosions started and we were told we had to leave.

    — Liz Cookman (@Lizonomy) July 15, 2016

    Jets intensly going over again, friends crying and sheltering and hiding in hall #ankara #turkey

Some who were there had been informed by their places of work to go home immediately so we sheltered nearby at a friend’s place, close to the prime minister’s palace – a Belgian, an Italian, a Syrian-born Jordanian and three Brits. I had been tweeting what was going on and was talking to various news agencies – before my phone battery predictably died – as the jets continued to fly low overhead. I heard an unfamiliar noise and stuck my head out of the window to see a stream of tanks going past. It seemed pretty serious.

Related: After Turkey’s failed coup, Erdoğan’s brutal clampdown | Yavuz Baydar

As the night crept on into Saturday morning, the gunshots drew close, it felt like they were metres away, and the bangs, too – a mix of bombs, aircraft fire and sonic booms that are not always easy to distinguish. Some of the explosions were so close the vibrations shook in my chest. My friends were crying and regularly running for shelter in the hall – the TV blanked out. There were frantic messages to loved ones. “This is much worse than it was in Damascus,” the Syrian-born friend kept saying. I even tweeted “I love you mum!”

“I am calling you into the streets,” President Erdoğan texted everyone with a Turkish number at some point in the early hours. He wanted everyone to “stand up” for democracy and peace against the junta. I was disgusted to see on social media later what that meant – boys barely old enough to vote pulled from tanks and beaten, whipped with belts, people posing for pictures next to the bodies of dead soldiers. The police looked on. What sort of democracy was this?
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Turkey coup: military faction fails to topple Erdogan – video

And much has been said about “democracy” – it was fıred out by the government as a motivational buzzword to mobilise people. The quashing of the coup was touted as a “victory for democracy” – but democrats don’t burn down the homes of Syrian migrants, they don’t threaten to rape the children of their enemies. The army claimed to be acting in the interests of democracy too. Yet they killed civilians in the street, civilians who should never have been there in the first place. These people were not motivated by democracy, on either side, but nationalism and sense of honour.

Related: The death penalty must not be the legacy of Turkey’s quashed coup | Mary Dejevsky

Erdoğan was Turkey’s first democratically elected president, but what he represents is not democracy. There is little understanding, it seems, among his supporters of the difference between the presence of elections and a true democracy. The concept is used in Turkey as an empty term to legitimise any mob mentality that works in the government’s favour.

For two days and nights, many got no sleep because the mosques regularly called for people to take to the streets. On Saturday, protests swelled in celebration of what they called democracy – there were flags everywhere, guns, chants of “Allahu Akbar” and nationalist songs. They were out again on Sunday and it continued well into this morning. The “Grey Wolf” salutes of those affiliated with the ultranationalist, arguably racist, Nationalist Movement party (MHP) were everywhere. My clothing has been disapproved of by passersby, something I have not experienced much of in Turkey. This sort of nationalism scares me and Erdoğan has asked for people to remain mobilised like this for a week.

While nationalism has become a global sickness – from Brexit to Donald Trump – as deglobalisation kicks in, Turkish society is crumbling under the weight of this growing tumour. Now an already polarised country will be further divided and many will be silenced with the label of “traitor”. Erdoğan and his party are whipping people into a nationalist frenzy to further their support and consolidate even more power.

    — Liz Cookman (@Lizonomy) July 16, 2016

    Finally been able to go home. My road on my way home... #TurkeyCoup #Turkey #ankara pic.twitter.com/lJMRBbdKUo

While an impressive display of people power prevented the armed coup, it will likely now result in unleashing a further crackdown on dissent. Aside from thousands of arrests, many press outlets have already had their websites blocked. Friday’s events may well grant the government free rein to purge enemies, presenting them as “the enemies of democracy”. Even the push to reinstate the death penalty is being touted as a democratic necessity.

When I finally got home on Saturday, I saw cars on my road squashed flat by tanks like they were little more than a Coke can – all in the name of democracy. I really hope Turkey’s democratic future won’t now suffer the same fate.


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

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