SACW - 16 Nov 2016 | Myanmar: Destruction of Rohingya Villages/ India and Pakistan: Culture War / Bangladesh: Brahmanbaria violence / Pakistan: Establishment’s dilemma / India: Citizens’ Statement on De-monetisation / Sharia courts across Britain

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 16 Nov 2016 - No. 2917 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. 2016 South Asia Report on Minorities
2. Myanmar: Massive destruction of Rohingya Villages Captured by Human Rights Watch Report
3. A Troubling Culture War Between India and Pakistan | Rozina Ali
4. India - Pakistan: Press release and Glimpses from Delhi Citizens Action Against War-Mongering (9 Nov 2016)
5. India: The very first attack on Parliament | Jairam Ramesh
6. India: Eighty years on, the RSS women’s wing has not moved beyond seeing the woman as mother
7. India: Assault on Academic Freedom  & on Public Intellectuals - Chhattissgarh Police File Murder Case Against Scholars and Activists
8. India: Statement of the Right to Food Campaign against the repeated police firings in Jharkhand
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: Education ministry should stop the RSS from furthering its ideological agenda in schools (Editorial, Hindustan Times)
  - India: Fire of Una Ignites Saffron Udupi (Anand Teltumbde)
  - India: BJP raises pitch of Hindutva rhetoric in Karnataka
  - A surge of Islamist hyper-extremism in the Middle East
  - India: A Hundred and forty thousand (1.4 lakh) students in 2,000 schools to take RSS science exam
  - India: increase in donations to temples after demonetization
  - Citizenship Act: BJP's religion-based amendment threatens the secular fabric of India (Garga Chatterjee)
  - India: Raking up 'hurt pride' (Ajay Gudavarthy)
  - Ideas of India - A BJP-RSS intellectuals’ conclave spoke to — and heard out — diverse thinkers (Jyoti Malhotra)
  - India: Nationalism (and Militarism) dressed up as the Holy Cow Keshav's Cartoon from The Hindu - oct 2016

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. A dark day for democracy - Editorial, Dhaka Tribune
11. The sounds of madness | Iffat Nawaz
12. After Trump, Fear and Gloating in Pakistan | Mohammed Hanif
13. The establishment’s dilemma | Pervez Hoodbhoy
14. The Incendiary Appeal of Demagoguery in Our Time | Pankaj Mishra
15. Religion v politics: Hinduism and the political project of Hindutva | Seema Chishti
16. India: In Telangana, a farewell to arms | Ravi Reddy and S. Harpal Singh
17. India: The hand that built this city | Jyoti Punwani
18. Republic of Unfreedom - NDTV and Bastar incidents display the undemocratic instincts of India’s politicians and public officials | Ramachandra Guha
19. Sharia courts across Britain are denying Muslim women their legal rights | Gita Sahgal
20. India: Citizens’ Statement on De-monetisation (November 15, 2016)
21. Burma: Massive Destruction in Rohingya Villages (Press Release by Human Rights Watch)

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1. 2016 SOUTH ASIA REPORT ON MINORITIES
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This inaugural 2016 report is a first-of-its-kind effort to bring together research and advocacy groups from various countries in the region to form a “South Asia Collective” that will periodically track and document the situation of minority rights, country by country. The report utilizes a common UN minority rights framework that looks at various indicators such as identity, culture, discrimination, participation in public life, and access to socio-economic rights to assess the situation of minority rights in the region. The current report covers six countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
http://www.sacw.net/article13021.html

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2. MYANMAR: MASSIVE DESTRUCTION OF ROHINGYA VILLAGES CAPTURED BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT
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Human Rights Watch identified a total of 430 destroyed buildings in three villages of Maungdaw District from an analysis of very high resolution satellite imagery recorded on the mornings of 22 October, 3 and 10 November 2016.
http://www.sacw.net/article13022.html

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3. A TROUBLING CULTURE WAR BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN | Rozina Ali
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Culture and cinema have long been a way to thaw the frosty relations between the two countries—one of last year’s most popular Bollywood films was about a Hindu man helping a lost Pakistani girl find her way home. Today, the cultural bridge has been severed . . .
http://www.sacw.net/article13023.html

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4. INDIA - PAKISTAN: PRESS RELEASE AND GLIMPSES FROM DELHI CITIZENS ACTION AGAINST WAR-MONGERING (9 NOV 2016)
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Several groups came together to organise a public meeting at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, on 9 November 2016, where speakers and singers and artists demanded a stop to war mongering. Photos via twiiter and facebook and a whole set by Mukul Dube are posted here
http://www.sacw.net/article13017.html

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5. INDIA: THE VERY FIRST ATTACK ON PARLIAMENT | Jairam Ramesh
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Fifty years ago, an anti-cow slaughter mob nearly stormed Parliament House. Those who launched that attack constitute the core of the ruling establishment today
http://www.sacw.net/article13015.html

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6. INDIA: EIGHTY YEARS ON, THE RSS WOMEN’S WING HAS NOT MOVED BEYOND SEEING THE WOMAN AS MOTHER
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For a snapshot of how the all-male Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has kept its women’s wing relegated to a domestic role and away from all issues of gender justice, visit the three-day training camp of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, which was inaugurated by the organisation’s chief, Mohan Bhagwat, at Chhatarpur in Delhi ...
http://www.sacw.net/article13020.html

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7. INDIA: ASSAULT ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM  & ON PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS - CHHATTISSGARH POLICE FILE MURDER CASE AGAINST SCHOLARS AND ACTIVISTS
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INDIA: STATEMENT BY DELHI UNIVERSITY TEACHER’S UNION IN DEFENSE OF ACADEMICS BEING FALSLY IMPLICATED BY CHATTISSGARH POLICE
It is clear that the police and the state have been systematically targeting these public intellectuals and political activists since the time they wrote a fact-finding report on the repressive state machinery.
http://www.sacw.net/article13018.html

INDIA: INTIMIDATION OF INDEPENDENT CIVIC INITIATIVES TO HIGHLIGHT PROBLEMS OF ADIVASIS OF CHHATTISGRAH - STATEMENT BY SAHMAT
We condemn the charges filed by the Chhattisgarh state police against members of a fact-finding team that visited the Bastar region in May 2016
http://www.sacw.net/article13016.html

INDIA: STATEMENTS BY INDIAN PEOPLES’ THEATRE ASSOCIATION AND PROGRESSIVE WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION ON TRUMPED-UP CHARGES BY CHHATTISGARH POLICE AGAINST SOCIAL, CULTURAL AND POLITICAL ACTIVISTS
IPTA and PWA strongly condemn such misuse of office and authority by Chhattisgarh police and initimidation of the voices demanding justice for people of Chhatisgarh. We demand that these charges are revoked immediately and disciplinary actions are taken against the police officers guilty of undermining the ethics of police force.
http://www.sacw.net/article13014.html

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8. INDIA: STATEMENT OF THE RIGHT TO FOOD CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE REPEATED POLICE FIRINGS IN JHARKHAND
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Right to Food Campaign strongly condemns the violence unleashed by the Jharkhand Government on tribals which has resulted in the deaths of 7 persons and injuring more than 80 persons in the last two months. Adding on to the suffering of the people, large numbers of innocent people have also been arrested, criminalising people’s peaceful resistance movements and undermining democracy.
http://www.sacw.net/article13013.html

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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
  - India: Education ministry should stop the RSS from furthering its ideological agenda in schools (Editorial, Hindustan Times)
  - India: Fire of Una Ignites Saffron Udupi (Anand Teltumbde)
  - India: BJP raises pitch of Hindutva rhetoric in Karnataka
  - A surge of Islamist hyper-extremism in the Middle East
  - India: A Hundred and forty thousand (1.4 lakh) students in 2,000 schools to take RSS science exam
  - India: increase in donations to temples after demonetization
  - Citizenship Act: BJP's religion-based amendment threatens the secular fabric of India (Garga Chatterjee)
  - India: Raking up 'hurt pride' (Ajay Gudavarthy)
  - Ideas of India - A BJP-RSS intellectuals’ conclave spoke to — and heard out — diverse thinkers (Jyoti Malhotra)
  - India: Nationalism (and Militarism) dressed up as the Holy Cow Keshav's Cartoon from The Hindu - oct 2016
   
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. A DARK DAY FOR DEMOCRACY
Editorial, Dhaka Tribune
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(Dhaka Tribune - 9 November 2016)

In the wake of Trump’s shock election, we are now likely to see the rise of demagogues using xenophobia, bigotry, unapologetic dishonesty

Common courtesy requires us to congratulate Donald Trump on his election as the 45th president of the United States of America.

Respect for democracy requires us to acknowledge that he has won the presidency with a considerable mandate, and that the world no less than his fellow countrymen and women must honour and abide by the verdict of the American people.

But we cannot pretend that we think that Trump’s ascension to the highest office in the US — and his consequent consecration as the most powerful man on Earth — is a positive development, either for his country or for the world.

There can be no two ways about it.

Trump has been elected US president on the back of the most divisive, bigoted, and xenophobic American presidential campaign in recent memory.

Not to put too fine a point on it, his campaign has been a disgrace to the ideals of his country, and should never have been dignified with electoral endorsement.

The fact that he could fan the flames of hatred and resentment all the way to the White House is a sobering realisation, both for the US and for the rest of the world.

An America which could elect so patently unfit a man to the highest office in the land has some serious questions to ask itself about the poison simmering below the veneer of its civility and what this might mean about the health of its society and polity.

The concern for the rest of the world is two-fold.

The first is that Trump has vowed to remake the entire world order, and the implications of having so mercurial, pugnacious, and megalomaniacal a man at the helm of the world’s sole superpower is something we must all contend with.

Unfortunately, the US is so central a nation that it is no exaggeration to say that the impact of its decisions have the potential to affect every person on the planet.

But even more worrisome is that Trump’s election will undoubtedly embolden others like him to bully, bluster, and bludgeon their way to high office, and could usher in an era of unprecedented ugliness and bile the world over.

In the wake of Trump’s shock election, we are now likely to see the rise of demagogues using xenophobia, bigotry, unapologetic dishonesty, and appeals to the lowest common denominator to come to power, and the consequences for the comity of nations are potentially catastrophic.

We fear that dark days lie ahead for the entire planet and can only hope that the 45th president-elect of the US proves us wrong and our fears unfounded.

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11. THE SOUNDS OF MADNESS
by Iffat Nawaz
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(Dhaka Tribune - November 14, 2016)

There is no escaping it -- the world is increasingly being divided by hatred

How fast does sound travel? Certainly not as fast as light. Under the bright sun, all sounds seem to dissolve into light, no residues, no gripes. But what about at night?

Especially in those, where sounds of decay, destruction, and discrimination travel fast through frothing mouths and seep into the homes of sleeping children dreaming of tomorrow? With no light to balance out the effect of these damages to their senses.

It’s November 8, 2016. I am sitting cozy on my couch in Washington DC as America’s fate is decided. Polls are being announced one by one, and the man with the wig is still screaming while, somewhere, a child’s brain is forming with the beat to that broken rhyme of Trump’s voice.

In the last year and a half, the children who were born in America will have Donald’s voice embedded in their first set of echoic memory, some research will reveal the consequences of this tragedy maybe twenty years from now.

Sound is like that — it can creep up on you. It can blend in to an environment and slowly become a part, one can get used to the irritation that it may cause, and eventually even sleep with and through it.

I remember doing that, in a village at the border of India and Bangladesh. I slept in the home of a Garo-Christian family, in a village which were mixed with Hindus, Christians, and Muslims. It was a Thursday night. The beginning of the weekend. We had gone to bed around 9pm. There were sounds of insects and the leaves against the breeze.

Children were whispering the day’s secrets to each other before they were made to close their eyes by their parents. But over it all, there was that sound which traveled sharp through the cracks of our windows — the sound of a mullah’s sermon.

The religious discourse eventually started to sound like a half-baked rant piercing through the night.

I figured they would stop around 10pm, but, by the time they wrapped up, it was 4am. The sound became louder as the night progressed, the tone went from preachy to semi-angry, almost violent. The awfully-loud speakers were pointed towards our homes, the side of the village where the Hindus and Christians resided.

I woke up feeling drunk on lunatic chatter the next morning.

    It was reported that 632 Hindus are leaving Bangladesh every day on average. This is 49 years after Bangladesh’s independence — a Liberation War fought to gain the identity of Bengal, its culture, with the dream of a secular nation

The next week, a similar village like the one I was staying in, of Hindus and Christians, was burnt to ashes. A procession was led by a sermon leader of a mosque. He had worked on his audience all night, provoking them with a poisonous destructive rant. He had managed to spread his hatred amongst enough individuals who then partook in the burning and killing of their Hindu neighbours.

Fairly recently, it was reported that 632 Hindus are leaving Bangladesh every day on average.

This is 49 years after Bangladesh’s independence — a Liberation War fought to gain the identity of Bengal, its culture, with the dream of a secular nation. Many of these displaced Hindu families have their ancestors’ blood mixed into the Bangladeshi soil, they had fought for freedom and they thought the time for sacrifice was over.

Last week, a hate attack on a Hindu village in Brahmanbaria burned more homes.

In the hopes of grabbing land, a group attacked Hindu families over a dispute on a Facebook post. According to the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, since October 30, more than 100 Hindu houses and 17 temples have been vandalised and looted.

I wonder how many of these attacks started with the sound of a preacher’s voice.

How many people who participated in these attacks were conditioned year after year, night after night, for that day when they would finally become monsters, and kill and destroy for greed and power, in the name of religion.

What is the long-term effect of these hateful sounds on our brains? If Trump wins the election how many people are closer to being brainwashed into participating in active destruction in America?

How many children will grow up to think of this man-made madness as a normal state of business? How many immigrants or naturalised citizens will look to relocate? Migrating again to run away from the fast traveling sounds of night?

These sounds, they sneak up so easily, through the cracks of our walls and windows, and then they spread like fire, they burn our ears, then they take other forms in our dreams.

On the night of November 8, as I deliberately sit in an almost soundless room, I wish for light at night, light for the tortured homes of Bangladesh, and for the fear-filled homes in America.

When sounds betray all our senses, common, foreign, and forgotten, we need more light.

Tonight the half-moon is simply not enough.

PS: It’s the morning after and it rained all night in DC. The sun was shining from behind the clouds. Even if we can’t see it. Raindrops make for a good healing sound, blending in with the tears rolling down in faces. Suddenly everything is very quiet, we have chosen silence over language today.

Iffat Nawaz is a writer and development practitioner.

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12. AFTER TRUMP, FEAR AND GLOATING IN PAKISTAN | Mohammed Hanif
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(The New York Times, Nov. 11, 2016)

Pakistani residents read coverage of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, in Islamabad on Thursday. Credit Aamir Qureshi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KARACHI, Pakistan — There is dread, and fear and loathing. But mostly there is gloating. Those who are gloating here in Pakistan have a convincing enough narrative: Everything we already knew about ugly America just got a chest-thumping confirmation from Americans themselves.

The bully that roamed the earth proposing to start wars, topple governments and bankroll tin-pot dictators has finally come home and brought with it all the racism and vulgarity it doled out in various parts of the planet. It has come home to assert its supremacy, its whiteness, its right to be ugly and foul-mouthed and to get rewarded for it. America, say the gloaters, is a bit like that aging thug who can’t terrorize the neighborhood anymore and so has turned on his own family.

Trump’s win has made the rest of the world more self-righteous, especially here in Pakistan, especially among men. He is the final proof, if any proof were needed, that a man can have it all, that a man can be all the man he wants to be — a billionaire and a porn star in his own life’s movie — and still make people love him and trust him with their future.

Pakistani democrats feel they have a special right to gloat. Over the last few days, some of them have been reminding the rest of us Pakistanis that we have never elected a right-wing fascist as our leader. They have reminded us that we elected a woman as our leader way before America even contemplated the possibility for itself.

The late Benazir Bhutto was indeed the first woman to be elected as prime minister of a Muslim country. But we seem to have forgotten the ugly campaign against her, the sexual innuendoes and the doctored pictures — all this before Photoshop and social media. And let’s not forget that we managed to assassinate her 70 days after really, seriously, trying to kill her. We have also not even gotten around to finding out who killed her. And, as any working politician will remind you, her legacy doesn’t get you very many votes.

Photo

US presidential elect, Donald J. Trump. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

So we can gloat all we want, but hating powerful women is definitely not just an American thing. When Hillary Clinton was last in Pakistan as secretary of state in 2011 and she brought her town hall-style meeting to Islamabad, the most intimate compliment she got was that she behaved like the envoy of a quarrelsome mother-in-law who is always asking Pakistan to do more.

Still, Pakistan’s ruling elites were hoping Hillary would win — not because they believed she stood for something, though, but because some of them once had dinner with her and met her family.

If American presidents have had many quarrels with their Pakistani counterparts, they have had many more love-ins. America has bankrolled all three of Pakistan’s military dictatorships. It was very close to us when our dungeons were full of political dissenters and F-16s bought in the United States were bombing our people.

American presidents have been fond of hosting Pakistani dictators at Camp David. Now it’s the turn of Americans themselves to be ruled by a dictator, and of their own choosing. We, at least, never picked ours.

The U.S. election result will make democrats in my part of the world rethink terms like “anti-establishment” and “working class.” To them, it looks like white men and women led by a pretend-billionaire and real bigot are rebelling against other white men and women with slightly better manners. Those here who gloat over the Trump win are basically saying that those previous American presidents weren’t that different. They’d put their arm around your shoulder and walk beside you for a bit, and then they’d stab you in the back. Trump kicks you while spitting on your face with a crowd cheering on.

The race was made to look like a fight between education-hungry, willing-to-do-anything immigrants and the white blue-collar working class ignored by the elite. But why would the struggling white working class vote for Trump? Because he is from the elite but doesn’t have its pretensions? Do people really vote for one rich man in order to spite the other rich men?

I have seen pictures of your apartments, your private jet, your gold-plated crockery. Thanks for sharing. Here’s my vote. Is that the essence of democracy that America has championed all over the world?

Pakistani democrats are quite fond of explaining away their own contradictions by saying, This is the beauty of democracy. One day the American nation is being asked how a person who can’t handle his Twitter account will deal with nuclear codes. The next day that person is handed down those very codes. This is indeed the beauty of democracy. This is also the curse of democracy when democracy is practiced to keep brown and black people and women in their place.

Americans are often accused of being ignorant about the world, of not being able to tell their Mosul from their Kandahar, of having no memory of who they bombed and why. If the world beyond your borders doesn’t really interest you, maybe there is some merit to staying home, cooking dinner and taking out the trash. But first stop calling each other trash and then decide whose turn it is to take it out.

I asked my son, a freshman at college in London, what his American roommates thought of the election results. He said his best friend is glad because the country needs a revolution. Everyone else, he said, is shattered. I asked: You mean your American friend thinks that the Trump win is good because it will trigger a revolution? No, he corrected me. Trump is the revolution.

Mohammed Hanif is the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti,” and the librettist for the opera “Bhutto.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 12, 2016, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Fear and gloating in Pakistan. 

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13. PAKISTAN: THE ESTABLISHMENT’S DILEMMA
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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(Dawn, November 12, 2016)

THE oligarchy which runs Pakistan, often called the establishment, is in a quandary. The problem is that whatever it says through its diplomats abroad — and with however much energy — the world insists on perceiving Pakistan as an ideological state wedded to exporting jihad. This is undesirable, but so also is the idea of changing course.

Writing in this newspaper, Ambassador Munir Akram admits that Pakistan has “few friends and many enemies” in Washington. Indeed, Trump’s victory can only worsen matters. But Europe, Russia, and Japan also see things similarly. Few there would be impressed by Akram’s frank admission that, “Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed participated in the legitimate post-1989 Kashmiri freedom struggle”, do not attack Pakistan, and “enjoy a degree of popular support” — or with his suggestion that no action be taken against such groups until things improve in Kashmir.

Akram’s views likely reflect the current thinking of a powerful section of the establishment. But what precisely is the establishment? Who can belong to it, and what does it want?
Missing from the establishment’s perception of national interest is a positive vision for Pakistan’s future.

From Pakistan’s birth onwards, the establishment has set Pakistan’s international and domestic postures, policies, and priorities. Today it rules on the extent and means by which India and America are to be confronted, and how China and Saudi Arabia are to be wooed. It sanctions, as well as limits, militant proxy forces for use across borders; closely controls what may or may not be discussed in the public media; and determines whether Balochistan or Sindh is to be handled with a velvet glove or banged with an iron fist.

Establishment members are serving and retired generals, politicians in office and some in the opposition, ex-ambassadors and diplomats, civil servants, and selected businessmen. The boundaries are fluid — as some move in, others move out. In earlier days English was the preferred language of communication but this morphed into Urdu as the elite indigenised, became less cosmopolitan, and developed firmer religious roots.

Arguably, most forms of government anywhere are reducible to the rule of a few. In Pakistan’s case how few is few? In 1996 Mushahid Husain, long an establishment insider and currently a senator, had sized the establishment at around 500 persons plus a list of wannabes many times this number.

Stephen Cohen, an astute observer of Pakistani politics over the decades, remarks that establishment membership is not assured even for those occupying the highest posts of office unless they have demonstrated loyalty to a set of “core values”. That India is Pakistan’s archenemy — perhaps in perpetuity — is central. As a corollary, nuclear weapons are to be considered Pakistan’s greatest asset and extra-state actors an important, yet deniable, means of equalising military imbalances. These, and other, assumptions inform Pakistan’s ‘national interest’.

National interest means differently in different countries. For example the post-War American establishment considered the export of American values — particularly free trade — as America’s national interest. Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China competed to implant their respective brands of communist ideology overseas. On the other hand today’s China is purely pragmatic. So is India. Not being ideological states, they are not mission-driven. They just want to be modern, rich, powerful, and assertive.

Let’s compare Pakistan’s national interest with the above. Just what is it in the eyes of its establishment? In search of an answer, I recently browsed through theses and articles in various departments of universities, including the National Defence University in Islamabad.

What I found was unsurprising. National interest is defined exclusively in relation to India. This means resolving Kashmir on Pakistan’s terms, ensuring strategic depth against India via a Talibanised Afghanistan, nurturing the Pakistan-China relationship to neutralise Indian power, etc. To “borrow” power through military alliances against India is seen as natural. Hence, switching from America’s protection to China’s happened effortlessly.

Missing from the establishment’s perception of national interest is a positive vision for Pakistan’s future. I could not find any enthusiastic call for Pakistan to explore space, become a world leader in science, have excellent universities, develop literature and the arts, deal with critical environmental issues, achieve high standards of justice and financial integrity, and create a poverty-free society embodying equalitarian principles.

This lopsided view has distorted Pakistan’s priorities away from being a normal state to one that lives mentally under perpetual siege. To its credit, Nawaz Sharif’s government attempted — albeit only feebly — to make a break and concentrate on development. It knows that the use of covert jihad as an instrument of state policy has isolated Pakistan from the world community of nations, including its neighbours. Diplomats tasked to improve the national image are rendered powerless by the force of facts.

Keeping things under wraps has become terribly hard these days. For example, Pakistan denies any involvement in the Uri attack. But, to commemorate the dead attackers, Gujranwala city was plastered with Jamaatud Dawa posters inviting the public to funeral prayers, to be led by supremo Hafiz Saeed on Oct 25, for the martyred jihadists who had “killed 177 Hindu soldiers”. I did not see any Pakistani TV channel mention this episode. The posters were somehow quickly removed but not before someone snapped and uploaded them on the internet.

To conclude: while the rise of the hardline anti-Muslim Hindu right and India’s obduracy in Kashmir is deeply deplorable, it must be handled politically. One cannot use it to rationalise the existence of non-state militant groups. Such groups have taken legitimacy away from those fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. They have also turned out to be a menace to Pakistan’s society and armed forces.

Today’s crisis of the establishment can lead to positive change provided gut nationalism is subordinated to introspection and reflection. It is a welcome sign that a significant part of the establishment — the Nawaz Sharif government — is at least aware of the need for Pakistan to reintegrate itself with the world. Concentrating on our actual needs is healthier than worrying about matters across our borders. One can only hope that other parts of the establishment will also see this logic.

The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

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14. THE INCENDIARY APPEAL OF DEMAGOGUERY IN OUR TIME
by Pankaj Mishra
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The New York Times, November 13, 2016

Brexit, Erdogan, Putin and now Trump. Something is rotten in the state of democracy.

The stink first became unmistakable in India in May 2014, when Narendra Modi, a member of an alt-right Hindu organization inspired by fascists and Nazis, was elected prime minister. Like Donald Trump, Mr. Modi rose to power demonizing ethnic-religious minorities, immigrants and the establishment media, and boasting about the size of a body part.

To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre: If the truth remains cloaked in the motherland, in the colonies it stands naked. Before Mr. Trump’s election in America exposed the failures of democracy, they had been revealed in Mr. Modi’s India. Most disturbing, in both places, the alt-rightists were enabled by the conceits, follies and collusion of impeccably mainstream individuals and institutions.

Arguments over what precisely is to blame for Mr. Trump’s apotheosis — inequality, callous globalized elites, corruptible local legislators, zealous ideologues, a news media either toxic or complaisant — will only intensify in the coming months. Writers as various as George Packer and Thomas Frank have already identified as a culprit a professional class of bankers, lawyers, technocrats and pundits. Promoting free trade and financial deregulation around the globe, the Washington Consensus eventually produced too many victims in Washington’s own hinterland.

In the case of India, the role of institutional rot — venal legislators, a mendacious media — and the elites’ moral and intellectual truancy is clear. To see it one only has to remember that Mr. Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, was accused of supervising mass murder and gang rapes of Muslims — and consequently was barred from travel to the United States for nearly a decade — and that none of that prevented him from being elected to India’s highest office.

Mr. Modi’s ascent, like that of many demagogues today, was preordained by the garish dreams of power, wealth and glory that colonized many minds in the age of globalization. Americans are, as Mr. Frank writes, “a population brought up expecting to enjoy life in what it is often told is the richest country in the world.” In India, one of the poorest countries in the world, “the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite” — to borrow from Ross Douthat, describing America — spawned a much more extravagant sense of entitlement. In that elite’s phantasmagoria, the India that embraced deregulation and privatization was a “roaring capitalist success story,” according to a 2006 cover of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The narrative went something like this: Now that the government was getting out of the way of buoyant entrepreneurs, a rising tide was lifting the boats of all Indians aspiring to the richness of the world. Suave technocrats, economists and publicists (mostly U.S.-trained) endlessly regurgitated free-market nostrums (imported from America) — what Mr. Frank calls the “liberalism of the rich.”

The fervent rhetoric about private wealth-creation and its trickle-down benefits openly mocked, and eventually stigmatized, India’s founding ideals of egalitarian and collective welfare. It is this extraordinary historical reversal, and its slick agents, that must be investigated in order to understand the incendiary appeal of demagoguery in our time.

Writing after its explosion in 20th-century Europe, Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book “The Great Transformation” how civil society and individual liberty are threatened as never before when a society has to reconfigure itself to serve the “utopian experiment of a self-regulating market.” Social and political life in India, America and Europe was drastically remade by neoliberal economism in recent decades, under, as the legal scholar David Kennedy has argued, the administration of a professional global class of hidden persuaders and status-seekers.

One of the first signs of this change in India was a proliferation of American-style think-tanks, sponsored by big business as eager as ever to influence political decision-making and military spending. In recent years, smooth-tongued “policy entrepreneurs” (Paul Krugman’s term) advocating free-market reforms and a heavily armed security-state have dominated India’s public sphere.

Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University economist who claims to be the intellectual father of India’s economic liberalization, argued in 2013 that the poor celebrate inequality, and with the poise of a Marie Antoinette, advised malnourished families in India to consume “more milk and fruits.” Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Mr. Bhagwati’s who now works for the Indian government’s economic policy think-tank, took to arguing that Indian children were genetically underweight, and not really as malnourished as the World Health Organization had claimed. The 2015 Nobel laureate Angus Deaton rightly calls such positions “poverty denialism.”

The sheer potential of India’s market — 1.2 billion consumers, many of them young — bred intoxicating illusions among businesspeople, investment consultants and financial journalists. Never mind that it was the extraction of natural resources, cheap labor and foreign capital inflows, rather than high productivity or innovation, that was fueling India’s economy. Or that economic growth, of the uneven and jobless kind, was creating what the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have called “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.”

Many foreign journalists reporting on globalizing India had a knack for parachuting only into islands like tech-y Bangalore, from where the world perhaps does look flat. Their delusion was deepened by India’s own, chauvinistic, media: The country’s leading business daily, The Economic Times, even had a regular feature called “Global Indian Takeover.” Described with enough Ayn Randian clichés about ambition and striving, every slumdog looks like a budding millionaire.

Indifferent to poverty and inequality, and immune to evidence or irony, India’s largely corporate-owned press and television reveled in the fame and wealth of corporate magnates and of cricket and Bollywood stars. All the while they stoked hatred against such enemies of rising India as Kashmiri separatists and their Pakistani supporters.

But in 2010 corruption scandals began to expose India’s government — headed then by technocrats trained at Oxford, Harvard Business School and the World Bank — as both venal and inept. Mr. Modi and his hawkish Twitter account emerged into national politics just as growth faltered and many frustrated aspirers and also-rans started to think of the promise of widespread enrichment as an elaborate hoax. He noticed that they were venting against flailing political representatives and their apparent cronies among newsgatherers. He accordingly packaged himself as an efficient executive, exploiting Indians’ great esteem for technocratic managerialism. (“Mein Kampf” is a perennial bestseller in India, Hitler being seen as an exemplary nationalist-cum-people-manager.)

More important, Mr. Modi grasped then, as astutely as Mr. Trump does now, the terrible political potency of ressentiment. Positioning himself in the gap between the self-righteous beneficiaries of globalization and irascible masses, he claimed to be the son of a modest tea-vendor who had dared to challenge the corrupt old dynasties of quasi-foreign liberals.

For all his humblebragging, Mr. Modi, like Mr. Trump, illustrated perfectly how money talks, power seduces and success eclipses morality. One of Mr. Modi’s most loyal fan bases was rich Indian-American businesspeople, who were naturally attracted to the promise of a wealthy India allied with the United States. And conversely. At a charity event in New Jersey last month, Mr. Trump sought their support, and hailing India’s prime minister as a “great man,” declared, “I am a big fan of Hindu.” “Big, big fan.”

Long before Peter Thiel plumped for Mr. Trump and Mark Zuckerberg defended Mr. Thiel, Silicon Valley lined up to hail Mr. Modi’s vision of “Digital India.” Sheryl Sandberg declared that she was changing her Facebook profile in “his honor.” These data-monetizing fans of Hindu may not have known that Mr. Modi, supervising a radical ideological purge at home, had launched Digital India at his residence in New Delhi with a private reception for some of India’s most vicious trolls.

Following authoritarian ruling parties in Hungary and Poland, and a brazenly despotic one in Turkey, India’s Hindu nationalists, a fringe outfit for much of the country’s existence, have swiftly occupied the state, staffing chief institutions with loyalists while intimidating nonstate actors like NGOs, journalists, writers and artists.

B.R. Ambedkar, the main framer of India’s constitution, warned in the 1950s that democracy in India was “only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” Now the top dressing is being hosed away.

Synergies between Indian and American technocrats continue to develop: The son of Mr. Modi’s foreign secretary writes on Mr. Modi’s foreign policy, approvingly, for Brookings India. At the same time, India’s press, fearfully self-censoring, if not barefacedly mendacious, has become, as The Economist reported last month, “more craven than Pakistan’s.” Since July Indian security forces have conducted a brutal campaign in Kashmir; they have killed nearly a hundred people and injured thousands, including many children. Bellicose television anchors and op-ed writers, who acclaimed the savagery, are now calling for the war on “anti-nationals” to be extended to nuclear-armed Pakistan.

The blood-thirstiness against internal enemies and evil foreigners won’t subside anytime soon. Fewer jobs are being created on Mr. Modi’s watch than under the previous government of quasi-foreign liberals. India’s supposed “demographic dividend” — an overwhelmingly youthful population — seems like so much more boosterish talk by those policy entrepreneurs. Even the country’s comparative advantage in software technology is shrinking. And last week, Mr. Modi abruptly withdrew two currency bills that account for the vast majority of cash in circulation, unleashing chaos across India.

Two years after he became India’s most powerful leader, Mr. Modi appears to be an opportunistic manipulator of disaffection with little to offer apart from the pornography of power and a bogus fantasy of machismo. Mr. Trump looks set to follow his lead.

Such firebrands emerged out of economic and political crises in almost every major European country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, distracting angry citizens with the demonization of minorities, cosmopolitans and liberals. Drawing a cautionary tale from this blood-stained history, Polanyi assumed that the catastrophic triumph of economism over social and political necessities would be reversed. The three decades after World War II proved him right. Social-welfare policies underpinned national reconstruction in war-ravaged Europe, as well as in postcolonial Asia and Africa after decades of imperialism.

In our own time, a global network of elites has tried to restart the discredited utopian experiment of a self-regulating market. The experiment failed, and again the rage of cheated masses has spawned demagogues who simultaneously promise to avenge the left-behinds and to rewire their alliances with the elites. Any attempt to rebuild democracy must reckon with the deeper reasons for its great and drastic transformation — above all in India, where Hindu supremacism, in its cruelty and callousness, anticipated the big, big American fan of Hindu.

Pankaj Mishra’s new book, “Age of Anger: A History of the Present,” will be published in January 2017.

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15. RELIGION V POLITICS: HINDUISM AND THE POLITICAL PROJECT OF HINDUTVA
Hindutva was a clear political project in the way political Islam was or is.
by Seema Chishti
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The Indian Express, November 14, 2016

As the Supreme Court considers aspects of the debate between religion and politics and what constitutes a violation of the founding principles of the Representation of the People Act, attention has been drawn to a 3-judge bench of the Supreme Court, which 21 years ago (December 11, 1995) famously spoke of Hinduism or Hindutva as a “way of life”. The BJP manifesto of the following year quoted this judgment to claim it had stamped the BJP as secular, as it “endorsed the true meaning and content of Hindutva as being consistent with the true meaning and definition of secularism”. 1996 was also the year that saw the BJP-led 13-day government at the Centre, followed by the first government by a coalition of non-BJP parties.

The 1995 judgment has been criticised and remarked upon for several things it did and did not do — but the main issue has been its conflation of Hinduism and Hindutva.

‘Hindutva’ was coined by V D Savarkar of the Hindu Mahasabha, one of the most polarising figures of the early 20th century, and now regarded as one of the BJP’s central philosophers. While several government schemes have been given the name of Deendayal Upadhyaya, the former BJP president, L K Advani, swore by Savarkar far more frequently. Whether it was the plaque to honour him at the Andaman jail, or his portrait in Parliament’s Central Hall – significantly positioned to face Mahatma Gandhi — Savarkar was constantly used to push the BJP’s cause ideologically in the days of NDA 1.

Much before he was made an accused in Gandhi’s assassination trial, and even before the Muslim League pronounced its divisive two-nation theory, Savarkar, in his essay, Hindutva, published in 1923, put forth the idea of a citizenship of “Hindusthan” based on blood/‘race’ — which effectively ensures that Mohammedans and Christians would remain non-citizens, and would be seen as permanent outsiders.

A Hindu, he wrote, was “A person who regards this land of Bharatvarsha, from the Indus to the Seas as his Fatherland as well as his Holy-land, that is the cradle-land of his religion.”

The 1995 judgment chose to draw the parallel between Hindutva and Hinduism from an essay by Wahiduddin Khan, rather than the mother-book of Hindutva, Hindutva. The judgment reads: “Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and it is not to be equated with, or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism. In Indian Muslims: The Need For A Positive Outlook by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (1994), it is said (on page 19): ‘The strategy worked out to solve the minorities problem was, although differently worded, that of Hindutva or Indianisation’.” But, as A G Noorani has pointed out, this was a misinterpretation — Wahiduddin Khan went on to reject the idea “of solving the minorities problem like this…”

The Constitution of independent India deemed all adult Indians as equal, and consciously rejected the central theme of Hindutva, which relied upon exceptionalism and the exclusion of non-Hindus. The Hinduism of Gandhi and others in the dominant nationalist stream did not tie the Gods one worshipped or where one went for pilgrimage, to the questions of citizenship or Indianness.

While there is a temptation to see the Right to Equality or Universal Adult Suffrage as ‘modern’ ideas drawn from west European philosophies, historians speak of centuries-old traditions that saw several “ways of life” co-existing, sometimes amicably and sometimes with arguments, fights for dominance, and sometimes with indifference. Leading exponents of ancient Indian traditions have written on almost a shade-card like set of beliefs, even before the advent of Christianity or Islam, where the numberline spanned between the Brahmanas and the Shramanas, with a thousand colours in between. Indeed, the folk Hinduism of multiple beliefs cannot be forced into the Abrahamic framework of One Book, One Deity and one way of doing things.

Hindutva was a clear political project in the way political Islam was or is. While the Muslim League pushed the two-nation theory and separatist Muslims got a Muslim Pakistan, those arguing for Hindutva (not Hinduism) did not get their wish. Underscoring the differences and separateness with those who were not Hindu, Savarkar derisively referred to ‘universalism’ and a belief in ‘non-violence’ as opiates. To counter Gandhi’s teachings of peace, and to keep alive the “political virility” of separateness was, and remains, the project of Hindutva.

The huge leap of faith that the Supreme Court made in bracketing Hinduism with Hindutva was noticed by the court itself just months after this judgment. On April 16, 1996, the court said: “It is not necessary to consider the philosophy of Hindu religion and its tenets of tolerance and respect for different religious faiths for the purpose of appreciating whether appeal was really made for Hindutva which is something different from outward practices and some of the following professed by followers of Hindu religion.” The Bench called for a relook at the judgment by a Bench of five judges expeditiously.

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16. INDIA: IN TELANGANA, A FAREWELL TO ARMS
Ravi Reddy and S. Harpal Singh
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(The Hindu, November 12, 2016)

While Maoist insurgency still rages in parts of the country, there are many in the State who have given up the extremist path and reposed faith in the establishment once more. Ravi Reddy and S. Harpal Singh report on their new lives

He could have been dead in that encounter with the police. After 25 years in the jungles of Dandakaranya, ducking bullets, 48-year-old Kumar (name changed) sums up an explanation for the October 24 encounter in the heavily forested Andhra Pradesh-Odisha border in which 30 Naxalites (or Maoists, as they are now called) were killed. This was the biggest damage inflicted on the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist), the group described as the “gravest internal threat” to the country, in recent memory.

Kumar’s voice drops to a whisper: “The villagers may have poisoned or added sedatives in the food the comrades ate on that fateful day,” he says.

Villagers are often deployed to carry ration for Maoists, specially when large meetings are convened. And the one in which they came under fire was one such meeting.

The dust has not settled on the “encounter”, as civil liberties groups echo Kumar’s doubts; a bandh call given by Maoists on November 3 in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Maharashtra evoked a lukewarm response.

Three years ago, Kumar, identified as a top Maoist leader, parted ways with his comrades-in-arms and traded his SLR for a pen. Well-versed in Telugu, Gondi, English and Hindi, he today works in a leading media organisation. “With the Maoist movement on the back foot, where was the need for the police to launch such an assault? The movement is at its weakest now,” says the former Naxalite leader whose stints in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra saw him handling key assignments, normally assigned to deputy commanders in the CPI(Maoist). Kumar accuses the mining lobby, which has several politicians on its rolls, of working overtime to ‘crush’ the Naxal movement.

The lapsed Maoist speaks with conviction when he takes stock of the movement in light of the recent ‘encounter’. “I feel that the Maoist leadership has failed to take up the right issues. They have failed to take the common man’s issues to their logical end. The deterioration in their leadership is visible — some of them are bogged down in redressing petty issues.”

From bullet to ballot

Like Kumar, 58-year-old Durva Nagubai, an Adivasi Gond, too has sued for peace. The unlettered, gutsy woman hails from remote, impoverished Vaipet village in the farthest corner of Adilabad district — a hotbed of Naxalite activity when it was at its peak. It is a quiet, sleepy village now.

The period between 1985 and 2000 is often regarded a watershed in the history of left-wing extremism in the then undivided Andhra Pradesh, with eight out of 10 districts in the Telangana region under the influence of the People’s War Group (PWG), which merged with the Maoist Communist Centre of India in 2004 to become the CPI(Maoist). Over 100 armed squads of Naxalites used to move in and out of the forests, targetting the police and civilians who they regarded as ‘enemies’ and leaving a grisly bloody trail: 3,035 naxalites, 599 police officials and 3,105 village folk have died to this day.

On June 15, 2001, Nagubai, then 43, quit the violent movement and decided to embrace the ballot. Support from the then Superintendent of Police (SP) Mahesh Muralidhar Bhagwat saw her winning the local body election as a Mandal Parishad Territorial Constituency member — equivalent to gram panchayat elections — soon after her ‘surrender’; she was subsequently elected president of Indervelli Mandal Parishad on July 28 the same year.

Though Nagubai insists she had surrendered, police records mention it as an arrest by the Indervelli police. There were two cases against her name: aiding extremists with transport arrangements and raising pro-Naxalite slogans at a public meeting. Bhagwat, currently Police Commissioner of Rachakonda, says “she was a sympathiser but her importance in the underground movement could be understood from the fact that we could regain control of the Vaipet forests from the extremists following her arrest”.

Former Naxalite MLC Naradasu Laxman Rao in Karimnagar district. Photo. Thakur Ajay Pal Singh

Nagubai was 35 years old when she decided to side with the Singapur dalam (later known as Indervelli dalam) of the PWG, and went on to become a key village-level organiser for the group. “I was angry at the way Adivasis were being discriminated against by all concerned, including government officials,” she says.

Vaipet has a large tribal habitation and, till 2002, was associated with an important camp of the PWG. The prevalent socio-economic conditions of the area had given Naxalites the scope to establish their base in the village. Almost all the aboriginal tribal farmers in Vaipet and nearby Bhimpur are small farmers who depend on rainfed agriculture and often, the main crops of cotton and soya bean failed due to drought or proloned dry spells.

“Agriculture was unremunerative and the government was doing little to help the poor farmers,” Nagubai recalls. “Joining forces with the PWG seemed to be an ideal choice under those circumstances.”

Nagubai had worked for the extremist outfit for about eight years and had learnt to fire weapons. Familiar with carbines, she claims to have been in the vicinity when an exchange of fire between Naxalites and police took place at Fakeerpet in Ichoda mandal sometime in 1997. “I decided to give up after realising that development is more just and reasonable through the path of peace than of violence. My aim was to get a proper road and electricity for my village,” she says. One chilly night in the winter of 2001, Naxalites finally landed up to confront her. “I was taken to the village outskirts but returned unscathed, proof that my former comrades were satisfied with my reasoning,” says Nagubai.

Nagubai contested the election from the then ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP) on the plank of development. During her three-and-half years as Mandal Parishad president, she secured approval for constructing homes for 800 extremely backward people; built a gravel road on the 10-km stretch between Sirikonda and Vaipet; and brought electricity to remotely located villages. Today, she lives a quiet life, cultivating cotton and soyabean in her 20-acre farm.

New life, new challenges

A 15-km drive from Toopran, on NH-44, with agriculture fields on both sides leads to Annala Malkapur (Naxalite Malkapur) in the newly formed Toopran revenue division headquarters. The thick forest and hilly terrain was once perfect shelter for the PWG.

Pitla Chandram and Pallapati Mahankali, former PWG cadre, are trying to persuade fellow villagers to participate in the laying of a pipeline — part of the ambitious drinking water scheme of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti government.

Chandram, 45, was attracted to the Naxalite movement in the late 1980s because of the dominance of the Doras, landlords who held sway over agriculture and people’s lives. Starting as a messenger boy, he graduated to becoming a dalam member before severing links after the police ransacked his house in 1991. “When Naxalites failed to respond even after the police attack, I communicated to them about my decision to surrender,” he says,

Mahankali, now 43, had a similar courier-dalam member-surrender experience, and a close encounter with death to boot. In 1994, after arresting him, the police took him to the Gundreddipally forest area and asked him to run away saying he was being released. “I refused, as I knew it was nothing but a trap to bump me off,” he says, his voice choking.

Toopran Deputy Superintendent of Police A. Balasubramanyam was instrumental in his eventual release later that year, but back with his comrades, Mahankali and Co. laid an ambush near Pillutla in Shivampet mandal in which six policemen including Balasubrahmanyam were killed. Mahankali used a rifle in that encounter. He surrendered subsequently and spent three years in isolation, surviving horrific beatings at the Musheerabad jail in Hyderabad; five cases were registered against him, all dropped over time.

Decades after leaving the Naxalite ranks, Chandram and Mahankali are now grappling with the challenges thrown by a political system they have chosen to engage with.

Some prosper, others struggle

Unlike others in Jagannapeta village, Danasari Anasuya did not take the exploitation by feudal lords in the area lightly. She joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Janashakti, the armed group that was working in the forest belt of the district, in 1993. Unlike the more aggressive and potent PWG, others working in smaller groups such as CPI(ML) Janashakti were less pursued by the police. After eight years, she rejoined the mainstream. “There was a leadership crisis in the party and divisions that made us lose morale. Many left the party and so I also decided to come out,” says Anasuya, also known as Sitakka.

Sitakka, a matriculate, resumed her studies, obtained a law degree and enrolled as an advocate, and went on to work with an NGO. In 2009, she made her electoral debut and became a TDP MLA in the State Assembly.

In a similar vein, from life as a ‘revolutionary’, it’s now life as a public representative for Karimnagar Zilla Parishad Chairperson Tula Uma (46), MLA Bodige Shoba (42) and MLC Naradasu Laxman Rao.

Former Naxalite Pitla Chandram in Medak, Telangana. PHOTO: Mohd Arif
Life after surrender, however, hasn’t been as kind for the likes of Kurasam Arun. After nine years in the Dandakaranya forests, Arun, 30, a former deputy commander of the CPI (Maoist) special guerrilla squad, came overground in 2013 and became a farmer. Once carrying a reward of Rs.4 lakh on his head, today Arun and his wife Jyothi cultivate paddy on a five-acre plot they have taken on lease in his native Bollaram village in the newly carved out Bhoopalapally district of Telangana. The upside is he has no cases pending against him.

But the downside is stark. “We need agricultural land and a tractor to diversify our crops to supplement our income and secure our only son’s future,” says Arun.

On the other hand, Gopi alias Shankar, 39, who quit the PWG in 2000, still believes in the Maoist ideology. The native of Lingapur village, Darpally mandal in Nizamabad district, became mandal parishad president in 2014 but is so vexed at the increasing corruption in public life that he feels history will repeat some day.

The state’s change of tack

“Petty village rivalry, lack of political stakes, despondency often led to some youth joining the underground outfits,” says Telangana Inspector General of Police (IGP) R.S. Praveen Kumar, who had worked as SP, Karimnagar during 2001-2004 and is credited with two mass surrenders — that of 46 Janashakti Naxalites on April 28, 2002, and of 32 Praja Pratighatana [another of the multiple splinter groups in the region back then] cadre on June 5, 2003. “The protracted struggle and subsequent realisation that little can be achieved through revolution often prompts the underground cadre to surrender,” the IGP reasons.

The police’s strategy to counter Naxalites in the 1980s and early 1990s relied heavily on “cordon and search” operations but such methods drew severe criticism. A “cordon and search” operation meant locals being made to come to the village centre where suspected Naxalite sympathisers would be harassed and warned. In the process, innocents often bore the brunt of the police high-handedness. “We realised that the cordon and search operations during 1985-1996 paid little dividend,” admits Telangana Director General of Police C.V. Anand, who was the Nizamabad SP between August 1996 and December 1999.

Realising its futility, the Andhra Pradesh government adopted a multi-pronged strategy in the mid-1990s, using a combination of “people-friendly” policing and the elite Greyhounds force on the one hand and putting a rehabilitation package in place to encourage surrenders. This included an instant relief of Rs.5,000, and a promise to cut down repeated police summons and fast-track legal processes. In Karimnagar district alone, on a single day in 2004, as many as 647 records were burnt publicly to ‘free’ surrendering militants. Many surrendered Naxalites were acquitted for lack of evidence.

On the ground, though, many of the surrendered ultras are still awaiting benefits promised to them — Veko Joga alias Jangu, a member of the CPI(Maoist)’s special guerrilla squad in Cherla mandal of Khammam district, and his wife Nupa Paike, a squad member in Bijapur district of neighbouring Chhattisgarh, parted ways with the banned outfit due to ‘ill-health’ in September this year but are still awaiting sanction of land or any other kind of support from the government.

The Greyhounds’s success

The Greyhounds, the elite anti-Naxalite force raised in 1989 by IPS officer K.S. Vyas, has been instrumental in effecting the might of left-wing extremism in the region. Trained in guerrilla warfare, Greyhounds commandos, mostly in their 20s, act only on specific intelligence inputs.

Each Greyhounds unit, comprising 30 members, plans its operation meticulously, dividing itself into teams of four or five members. Wearing combat uniform and armed with grenade launchers, light machine guns and AK-47 assault weapons, Greyhounds commandos carry out “precision attacks”, preferably in the early hours of the day — as was the case on October 24. A typical operation sees them making their way into the forest in the middle of the night. The main assault party tries to neutralise the Maoists on sighting them. The other teams lie in wait at other points to target those fleeing the offensive.

The strike rate is 99 per cent. The only time Greyhounds personnel suffered heavy losses was eight years ago, when 38 commandos were killed in an ambush by Maoists in the Balimela reservoir in Malkangiri district of Odisha.

October 24, 2016, was payback time. But reformed Naxalite Kumar’s words serve as a chilling reminder to the never-ending cycle of violence: With the movement on the back foot, where was the need to kill?

With K.M. Dayashankar in Karimnagar, P. Ram Mohan in Nizamabad, R. Avadhani in Sangareddy, P. Sridhar in Khammam and G. Srinivasa Rao in Warangal. 

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17. INDIA: THE HAND THAT BUILT THIS CITY | Jyoti Punwani
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(Mumbai Mirror - Nov 6, 2016)

An eye-opening documentary by an IIT student reveals the trials and tribulations of construction workers

There is no commentary in Makaan, a 38-minute documentary on construction workers in IIT-Bombay's campus. The camera says it all, as it lingers on the sleeping family of Raaju and Muskaan in their tin shed, drinking their first cup of tea while watching a Bhojpuri qawwali on their mobile. Raaju tickles his youngest son lying beside him, the rat burrowing into the uneven floor. These scenes speak of the trust between the filmmaker and this community of workers, who are shown bathing outdoors, using their safety helmets as mugs; arguing; engaged in repetitive yet dangerous tasks on the ground and high above, balanced on ropes. In an unforgettable scene, Raaju erupts in anguish at the camera, railing against the pressure on him to finish work fast, despite not getting his payments on time.Nine screenings of the documentary, made by Masters in Design student Salik Ansari, were held earlier this week at IIT's Industrial Design Centre. The last screening was held especially for the workers and was scheduled late to suit their work hours. From their frequent laughter and comments during the screening, it was obvious Raaju's family and their two neighbours loved the film. Yet, when asked if they would show it to others back home in Darbhanga, there was a tinge of embarrassment at the rawness of their lives being shown on screen." This is all about our labour," said Raaju. "We didn't take it seriously when Salik told us he was making a film," added Muskaan.

Salik explains how one day when he was going back home in Bhiwandi he saw a massive construction project on the highway."The tall buildings seemed to be almost resting on a base of tin shanties where the construction workers lived. Once the buildings were completed, they would be gone."

Wanting to make a film on the subject as part of his MA project, Salik found a collaborator in Sreesh Venuturumilli, a B Tech student who had by then started a detailed investigation into the lives of construction workers on the campus.

The investigation has been recently published as a long essay in the latest issue of the student magazine Insight. The magazine had also collaborated on Makaan with IIT BBC (Bombay Broadcasting Channel, IITB's video journalism channel). The powerful, moving piece, titled The Unacknowledged Lives of the Bricklayers, questions the apathy of both IITB's management and students towards the living conditions of those who built their new hostels, labs and guest houses.

Sreesh's essay contrasts the lives of the students who occupy these "spaces meant for growth and innovation", and the young workers, one of them a topper in primary school who was forced to drop out to start working. The decision to invite workers to view Makaan in the IDC auditorium was "to make them step outside their temporary homes, into the permanent structures that they themselves had built," explains Sreesh.

Students of IITB, the institute of choice for JEE toppers, are not known to look beyond grades, placements and PhDs abroad. So what made these two spend time on a section of people that lives "in the shadows", as Salik puts it?

"Ever since I left home eight years back to study at the JJ School of Art,'' explains the 25-year-old, "I'd lived under space constraints with other students. So the anxiety of space has always been a concern. And every time I moved, I had to discard a lot of my work due to these constraints. That hurt.Yet, here were people who were constantly building the city with their own hands, and then leaving what they'd built."

Just before he started his third year in Engineering Physics, Sreesh (who has since graduated) attended a talk by two post-graduate students who had started a centre for the children of construction workers after a child fell to his death in one of the labour camps on campus. The accident had occurred when students were listening to Nobel Laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan's lecture at Techfest 2012. After the talk, the students were taken to one such camp.That's when the contrast between the two worlds: the AC hall where the talk took place and the labour camp, hit Sreesh. "This is where the people who built our buildings lived -in conditions I couldn't see myself living in," he recalls. "Everyone is aware about inequality, but this time it wasn't some abstract concept. It was here, to be seen and felt, right next to us and we were part of it. Yet, no one was talking about a community's consciousness or responsibility," he added.

The faculty advisors of Insight showed no hesitation in publishing his piece, shared Sreesh, and neither he nor Salik encountered any opposition from the administration. Sreesh interviewed them at length on their role as the principal employers of the workers, hence responsible for their working conditions. The administration "keeps a check on the quality of the materials and the output, but not on the workers who are involved in the very act of construction."

The experience changed both of them. "The more time I spent, the more I came to know first hand, that we're all not different," says Sreesh, "and the more I came to know how we can become a better community.It made me realize a better meaning of the word `empathy'. Most importantly, it made me reflect about the arbitrary luxury and privilege I possessed."

For Salik, the experience put an end to his quest for "a separate space to reflect on things. After almost living with this family, I realized, you don't need a space of your own. You can sit anywhere and create your own space."

In the last scenes of Makaan, Ladli, youngest of Raaju's three daughters, calls Salik to show him the moon above the tall building her parents have built, makes a sketch of him, and dances for him. The stars of Makaan are the children, playing make-believe games in the midst of cement, stones and noisy machines."I went there with this idea that their lives are so bleak," says Salik."But the children transformed this reality. In their games, leaves are turned into money and a ten rupee note becomes a butterfly."

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18. REPUBLIC OF UNFREEDOM: NDTV and Bastar incidents display the undemocratic instincts of India’s politicians and public officials
by Ramachandra Guha
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(The Indian Express - November 14, 2016)

This has been a bad month for Indian democracy. First, there was the one-day ban on NDTV India imposed by the government of India. This sparked much protest; bowing to the pressure, the government seems to have stayed the ban — whether for the moment or for ever, it is not clear. Just when Indian democrats began to breathe easier, however, news came that the Chhattisgarh police had booked a group of writers and activists for murder, among them India’s finest anthropologist, Nandini Sundar, a respected professor at Delhi University with a wide and deserved international reputation.

Freedom of expression has long been in peril in our country. Writers have had their books banned, artists their exhibitions vandalised, film-makers their films censored. But what happened recently in Chhattisgarh marks a new low. The group, of which Sundar was a part, had visited the strife-torn region of Bastar, and prepared a report on the deteriorating human rights situation in the state. This was their real crime, that so enraged the Chhattisgarh police that they filed a charge of murder!

Bastar is a part of India that has long interested me. I wrote a biography of Verrier Elwin, the great chronicler of Adivasi life and culture, who did his best work in Bastar. Elwin argued passionately in defence of tribal rights in land and forests. He hoped that Independent India would respect and protect tribal rights; instead, successive governments have treated them with contempt and condescension. The expropriation of tribal lands and forests has led to deep discontent, adroitly exploited by the Maoists, who in recent decades have made major strides in Adivasi areas, not least in Bastar.

A democratic state should have fought Maoism by redressing the many wrongs it had committed against the tribals. Instead, the Chhattisgarh government promoted a vigilante army named Salwa Judum, provoking a savage war, in which the violence of the Maoist was met by the equally brutal violence of the state-sponsored Judum. The tribals were caught in between, vilified by one side and victimised by the other. In this ongoing civil war, dozens of villages have been burnt, hundreds of Adivasis killed, and close to a hundred thousand people displaced.

In 2006, a group of independent citizens, which included Sundar and myself, visited Bastar. Afterwards, we filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court. In its judgement of July 2011, the court ordered the disbandment of Salwa Judum. The Supreme Court said it was “aghast at the blindness to constitutional limitations of the state of Chhattisgarh, and some of its advocates, in claiming that anyone who questions the inhumanity that is rampant in many parts of that state ought necessarily to be treated as Maoists, or their sympathisers, and yet in the same breath also claim that it needs the. sanction, under our Constitution, to perpetrate its policies of ruthless violence.” Judges Sudarshan Reddy and S.S. Nijjar remarked that “lawless violence, in response to violence by the Maoist/Naxalite insurgency, has not, and will not, solve the problems, and instead it will only perpetuate the cycles of more violence”.

Sadly, while the Supreme Court can pass strictures it cannot ensure that its orders are followed on the ground. The brutal, barbaric civil war in Bastar continues. The Maoists fetishise and glorify violence, which is why this writer detests them. Tragically, a government sworn to uphold the Constitution has emulated the Maoists in showing an utter contempt for the rule of law and for basic democratic values. Bastar is a war zone, where ordinary citizens fear not just the Maoists but the Chhattisgarh police as well.

Chhattisgarh has had a series of freedom-hating police officers, each more vicious and vindictive than the last. The inspector general now in charge of Bastar was reported by The Hindu as saying, “We don’t need any interference or guidance, Bastar knows to handle its own problems. We don’t like any kind of interference”. In pursuance of this policy, the Chhattisgarh police have arrested several journalists on trumped-up charges, and hounded several others out of the region. Most recently, they have filed this FIR charging Sundar and several of her colleagues with murder. I have read the FIR, whose wording and precise recollection of names of people the witness had never met, make it clear that it was doctored and/or coerced.

The timing of this attack on one of India’s most admired scholars (a winner of the Infosys Prize) may not be accidental. Last month, Sundar published The Burning Forest, a deeply moving and richly researched book on the civil war in Bastar. This book, which by no means exonerates the Maoists, shines a sharp spotlight on the errors and crimes of the Chhattisgarh state government, its consistent and sometimes gross violations of the law, its utter contempt for the Constitution and for the Supreme Court. The FIR initiated by the police is a malicious act of revenge.

This act by a rogue police force brings shame on Indian democracy. As I write, the state and Central governments have stayed silent. Do they condone it? One hopes not. For foisting false murder charges on independent (and utterly non-violent) citizens is characteristic of police states like Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. I do not credit the Chhattisgarh government with a deep understanding of democratic principles. But surely some ministers in the Central government must understand the damage such arbitrary and vengeful behaviour does to the image of their party, the Union government, and the nation itself.

NDTV India is a prominent channel based in New Delhi. Professor Sundar has a high international standing. If they can be subject to such treatment, one shudders to think of the fate of writers, journalists, scholars and artists who work away from the glare of the national media. And of the fate of ordinary citizens too. Physical attacks on journalists in remote parts of India, often encouraged by the state and/or powerful politicians, are now increasingly common. The everyday harassment, by the police and paramilitary, of ordinary citizens in conflict-zones such as Bastar, Kashmir and Manipur is very nearly ubiquitous.

I have increasingly come to think of India as an “elections-only democracy”. Elections are free and fair; but once a party (any party) wins power, it considers itself immune from criticism or fair appraisal for the next five years. The NDTV and Bastar incidents display afresh how profoundly undemocratic are the instincts of Indian politicians and public officials.

Ramchandra Guha’s most recent book is ‘Democrats and Dissenters’
 
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19. SHARIA COURTS ACROSS BRITAIN ARE DENYING MUSLIM WOMEN THEIR LEGAL RIGHTS
by Gita Sahgal
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(Daily Mail (UK) - 12 November 2016)

Shame on Sharia: Women beaten, robbed and raped. A chilling expose of how BRITISH females are being sentenced to lives of misery by Muslim courts

    Sharia courts across Britain are denying Muslim women their legal rights
    Being encouraged by the British state in the name of increased security
    Commons Home Affairs Committee begun investigation into Islamic law
    The courts are used by Muslim families to adjudicate on personal matters

By Gita Sahgal, Human Rights Activist From The One Law For All Campaign And Centre For Secular Space


As a young British-Pakistani woman, Lubna faced an agonising decision. She was brought up a devout Muslim in a prosperous middle-class family in the north of England, but her arranged marriage to the father of her two children was a disaster.

He was both sexually abusive and physically violent; he and members of his family regularly beat up Lubna. 

When he suddenly disappeared to pursue a new life in America with a new woman, she was left to work night and day to support his elderly parents until they threw her out of their house.


Shame on Sharia: Beaten women, raped women and robbed women - being sentenced to lives of misery by Muslim courts

Lubna moved to London to rebuild her life. She studied for a university degree, and with the support of her family, began civil proceedings to divorce her husband.

Unlike her terrifying marriage, the process was largely pain-free. Thanks to a restraining order, her furious husband – who returned to contest the divorce – was banned from approaching her. 

The court granted her custody of their children and successfully hid her address from him for fear of reprisals. But after she was persuaded to obtain an Islamic divorce in the sharia court, her true nightmare began.

First, the clerics tried to persuade her to attempt a reconciliation with her abusive husband. Then, after they disclosed her address, he threatened to kill her, kidnapped her children, and subjected her to an horrific rape that left her needing an abortion.

Lubna had not even thought she needed a sharia divorce, but shortly before her decree nisi was made absolute, her estranged husband stood up before a prayer meeting at her local mosque in East London and denounced her as ‘a loose woman’ who was being pimped by her widowed mother Shagufta. 

He said he was ‘still willing to take her back for the sake of our children’.

Although at least one imam knew the horrific background to her marriage, a delegation from the mosque visited her family to persuade her to return. When that failed, the imam, an old family friend, put more pressure on Lubna to go to the sharia court.

To satisfy her devout Muslim mother, who was being intimidated by the wider Muslim community, she eventually went to the sharia court near London’s Regent’s Park. What happened there shocked her to her core. 

Faced by a ‘bench’ of clerics who described themselves as ‘judges’, she expected to be able to describe her plight at the hands of her violent husband.
Gita Sahgal: Britain has embarked on an unsavoury Faustian pact in which the rights and safety of Muslim women in this country have been sacrificed in the name of security

Gita Sahgal: Britain has embarked on an unsavoury Faustian pact in which the rights and safety of Muslim women in this country have been sacrificed in the name of security

She told me: ‘The court was incredibly difficult. My mother and I were repeatedly told to be silent. None of the information from the civil proceedings, including non-molestation orders, was admissible in the sharia court.

‘When my ex-husband said he wanted a reconciliation, the judges said I should comply.

‘I tried to tell them about the violence and abuse I had suffered throughout the marriage, but was advised to be quiet. My mother was also silenced.’

She faced intrusive questioning about the last time she had sex with her husband – crucial, the judges told her, to determine exactly when their relationship had ended. She was also forced to disclose her address.

This is the reality of sharia courts currently spreading across Britain and denying Muslim women their legal rights – a proliferation that is being encouraged by the British state in the name of increased security. The Commons Home Affairs Committee has begun an investigation into the spread of Islamic law.

Dr Ahmad Al-Dubayan, chairman of the new UK Board of Sharia Councils, told the committee that British Muslims have the right to use sharia courts. They have no legal force but are regularly used by Muslim families to adjudicate on personal matters, including religious marriages and divorces.
They apply a far more extreme version of Islamic law than Pakistan 

Dr Al-Dubayan’s colleague said that Islamic law allows polygamy, but the sharia judges and ‘regulators’ denied that they were promoting the practice. 

To me this sounded like double-speak from the very organisation that aimed to standardise procedures and prevent abuses which could be perpetrated by the scores of self-appointed ‘courts’ operating around the country with no regulation. 

In other words, they were the good guys who should be trusted to tame the extremists who might flourish if sharia law was driven underground.

The truth, however, is far more sinister. As an activist and documentary film-maker who has spent more than two decades investigating religious fundamentalism in Britain, I can reveal that sharia courts seek to undermine British law, subject women to humiliation, subjugation and the risk of physical harm, and apply a version of Islamic law that is far more extreme than that used in Muslim countries such as Bangladesh and Pakistan. 

The most prominent sharia councils are also the fundamentalist ones.

At the heart of their existence is a deliberate lie. The overwhelming majority of cases heard by sharia courts are divorce suits brought by women who are told that a British civil divorce does not count in the eyes of Islam. 

Any woman who embarks on a new relationship will, they say, have committed adultery – a crime only equalled in their eyes by apostasy [abandoning Islam] and blasphemy. 

Yet the courts in, for example, Bangladesh and Pakistan, are perfectly happy to accept a civil divorce certificate from Britain as evidence of the end of a marriage, which in the Muslim tradition is a civil contract rather than a sacrament. In those countries, the contract must be registered to count as a legal marriage. 

But, here in Britain, there are many unregistered marriages.

Hardline: Muslim women campaigning for Sharia law during a protest outside Downing Street

Nobody knows how many unregulated sharia courts there are in Britain. One unofficial estimate put the total at around 85, which means there is a sharia court in pretty much every area with a sizeable Muslim community. 

A Home Office study suggests there are about 30, but there are many individuals dispensing sharia law too, in mosques, Islamic centres and even below shops. Even the Home Office study did not name the sharia councils that it had identified.

Yet a generation ago, they were unknown. Now, because of pressure from radical mosques and elsewhere, the basic principle of equality in marriage is dispensed with in favour of an extreme interpretation of Islamic law. 

The ending of a marriage in a civil court is simply not enough for a woman to feel she will not be labelled an adulterer if she marries again. That is why some women ‘choose’ sharia divorce, even if they are already divorced.

Lubna was one such woman. After filling in apparently routine paperwork, she went to the sharia court with her mother to press her case for an Islamic divorce.

‘I left the sharia court in tears,’ she added. ‘My mother told me not to worry. But after the case was heard my ex-husband began a sustained campaign of harassment and stalking after learning my address from the sharia court document.

‘He kidnapped my children and threatened to keep them if I did not allow him to come and live with me in my new home.’

Horrified by what she had seen at the sharia court, Lubna’s mother sought advice from Islamic scholars in Pakistan and India, who told her a civil divorce was sufficient for a formal termination of the marriage and that Lubna was right to rely on the protection of the British law, which had granted her custody of the children. 

As a result, Lubna never completed the sharia divorce and went on to rebuild her life.

If imams here spread that message, the sharia business would collapse. By common agreement, Islamic divorces account for the vast majority of cases heard in the sharia courts, which are dominated in this country by fundamentalists who seek to perpetuate the male domination of marriage.

They believe that men can end a marriage simply by repeating the words ‘I divorce you’ three times, while women must come before them and subject themselves to the intrusive questioning of an Islamic scholar who might typically ask them what more they could do to please their violent and abusive husbands.
Words can not express my anger - I do not recognise this Islam 

Sharia courts can also interfere with the laws of property and inheritance. Hameeda, 70, was forced to abide by rules imposed by a sharia court consulted by her strict Muslim sons after her husband died.

The court told her she had to remain in iddat (seclusion) for 40 days. ‘I do not understand this rule,’ she said. ‘Iddat is for women who might be pregnant. I am an old woman. 

Did these judges think there was any possibility that I could be pregnant? Are they stupid? I was not allowed to answer the phone, the front door or even to go into the garden during this time because a man may see me! I felt like I was in prison.

‘Four months after my husband died, I came under a lot of pressure from my sons to sell my house and give the money to them. They have been speaking to this sharia judge again. He told them that in English law I may own the house I live in but this is not the right way in Islam.

‘He said that my husband’s property should have been given to my sons. I cry every day because I do not know what is going to happen to me. Where will I go? I worked as a machinist for many years – day and night – to build a home for my family. I do not want to give up the home I have worked so hard to make.

‘I am now being forced to listen to lecture after lecture from my sons about my religion and what it says about what happens to the family’s wealth after the husband dies.’

Sharia courts are now orchestrating a cynical public relations campaign in which they are rebranding themselves not as courts, but as mediation and arbitration services. But in truth the first was established around 1986 by Islamic fundamentalists in an attempt to promulgate their rigid version of faith.

The presiding imams often call themselves ‘judges’ and in the oldest sharia council, they sit at a raised bench, looking down at the women who are petitioning for divorce. Yet the ‘justice’ they dispense has none of the safeguards and legal rights that petitioners in properly convened courts of law enjoy.

The most sickening thing is that the spread of sharia law has been aided and abetted by the British state, which sees acceptance of these shadowy courts as a way to appease what they regard as ‘non-violent’ extremists. 

In doing so, Britain has embarked on an unsavoury Faustian pact in which the rights and safety of Muslim women in this country have been sacrificed in the name of security.

A disturbing example came earlier this year when the Home Office, then under Theresa May, announced an ‘independent’ review into sharia law as part of the Government’s counter-extremism strategy.

Alarmingly, the Home Office appointed two imams as advisers to the panel, which is chaired by Professor Mona Siddiqui, herself a theologian. Surely they should be discussing the rights of women who may have been harmed by sharia courts rather than the finer points of Islam?

Sharia courts are being wooed by local councils and the police, who see them as a valuable bridge to the Muslim communities.

But they have been accused of pressuring the Crown Prosecution Service to drop domestic violence cases, claiming that they have been successfully ‘mediated’.

It is a scandal, too, that some of these sharia courts have been given charitable status. Where is the public interest in allowing an abusive process and promoting a separate legal system? These so-called courts are businesses demanding fees of up to £800 for a divorce.

Lubna’s mother said: ‘I do not have words to convey my anger at what was being done in this supposed court. I do not recognise this Islam or how it is being portrayed. My time is coming to an end, but I am so sad for the generations to come if we continue on this path.’

    Find out about The One Law For All campaign at onelawforall.org.uk

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20. INDIA: CITIZENS’ STATEMENT ON DE-MONETISATION (November 15, 2016)
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We, the undersigned, support all efforts to stop corruption, stamp out black money and counterfeit currency, and act against funding that helps creates unrest in the country be it through terrorism or creating divisions and hatred among people. However, the decision to de-monetize Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes is misconceived and will not address the problem of black money
http://sacw.net/article13025.html

[see also:

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEMONETISING HIGH VALUE NOTES
by Jayati Ghosh (The Hindu, November 15, 2016) http://www.thehindu.com/news/resources/the-political-economy-of-demonetising-high-value-notes/article9348002.ece

Why the corrupt rich will welcome Modi’s ‘surgical strike on corruption’ | Jayati Ghosh https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/corrupt-rich-india-modi-500-1000-rupee-note ]

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21. BURMA: MASSIVE DESTRUCTION IN ROHINGYA VILLAGES (Press Release by Human Rights Watch)
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(Human Rights Watch - November 13, 2016)

(New York) – High-definition satellite imagery shows widespread fire-related destruction in ethnic Rohingya villages in Burma's Rakhine State, Human Rights Watch said today. The Burmese government should immediately invite the United Nations to assist in investigating reported destruction of villages in the area. 

Human Rights Watch identified a total of 430 destroyed buildings in three villages of Maungdaw District from an analysis of very high resolution satellite imagery recorded on the mornings of October 22, November 3, and November 10, 2016. 
© 2016 Human Rights Watch

“New satellite images not only confirm the widespread destruction of Rohingya villages but show that it was even greater than we first thought,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Burmese authorities should promptly establish a UN-assisted investigation as a first step toward ensuring justice and security for the victims.”

Human Rights Watch identified a total of 430 destroyed buildings in three villages of northern Maungdaw district from an analysis of very high resolution satellite imagery recorded on the mornings of October 22, November 3, and November 10, 2016. Of this total, 85 buildings were destroyed in the village of Pyaung Pyit (Ngar Sar Kyu), 245 in Kyet Yoe Pyin, and 100 in Wa Peik (Kyee Kan Pyin). Damage signatures in each of the assessed villages were consistent with fire, including the presence of large burn scars and destroyed tree cover. Because of dense tree cover it is possible that the actual number of destroyed buildings is higher.

Human Rights Watch identified a total of 430 destroyed buildings in three villages of Maungdaw District from an analysis of very high resolution satellite imagery recorded on the mornings of October 22, November 3, and November 10, 2016. Of this total, 85 buildings were destroyed in the village of Pyaung Pyit (Ngar Sar Kyu); 245 buildings were destroyed in the village of Kyet Yoe Pyin; and 100 buildings were destroyed in the village of Wa Peik (Kyee Kan Pyin). Damage signatures in each of the assessed villages were consistent with fire, including  the presence of large burn scars and destroyed tree cover. 

In addition to satellite imagery reviewed by Human Rights Watch, reports by human rights organizations, the media, and members of a delegation of nine foreign ambassadors who visited some impacted areas on November 2-3 confirm that the damage was substantial. The delegation conducted no formal investigation or assessment but confirmed that they saw burned structures in several towns.
 
The crisis follows violence on October 9 in which gunmen attacked three police outposts in Maungdaw township in northern Rakhine State near the Bangladesh border, leaving nine police officers dead. The government said that the attackers made off with dozens of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The Burmese government asserts the attack was carried out by a Rohingya group, but actual responsibility remains unclear.

Immediately after the attacks, government forces declared Maungdaw an “operation zone” and began sweeps of the area to find the attackers and lost weapons. They severely restricted the freedom of movement of local populations and imposed extended curfews, which remain in place. A UN-assisted investigation needs to examine the deadly attacks on border guard posts on October 9, and allegations by the media and local groups that government security forces subsequently committed summary killings, sexual violence, torture, arbitrary arrests, arson, and other abuses against Rohingya villagers in Maungdaw district, Human Rights Watch said.

On October 28, Reuters published interviews with Rohingya women who allege that Burmese soldiers raped them. The government also allegedly pressured the Myanmar Times to fire one of its editors who reported allegations of rape by Burmese army soldiers. Government-imposed restrictions on access to the area by journalists and human rights monitors continue to hinder impartial information gathering.

A second attack on a border guard post in Maungdaw was reported to have occurred on November 3. The attack reportedly resulted in the death of one police officer.

Burma is obligated under international law to conduct thorough, prompt, and impartial investigations of alleged human rights violations, prosecute those responsible, and provide adequate redress for victims of violations. Standards for such investigations can be found, for example, in the UN Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions, and the UN Guidance on Commissions of Inquiry and Fact-Finding Missions. Burma’s failure to conduct such investigations in the past underscores the need for UN assistance, Human Rights Watch said.

Reuters has reported that the military has ignored the civilian government’s request for more information about the situation.

“The Burmese armed forces are not only keeping independent observers out of affected Rohingya areas, they apparently aren’t even telling their own government what happened,” Adams said. “The authorities need to allow the UN, the media, and rights monitors unfettered access into the area to determine what happened and what needs to be done.”

The government recently granted the World Food Programme (WFP) access to four villages for a one-time food delivery. However, humanitarian aid groups continue to be denied full access, placing tens of thousands of already vulnerable people at greater risk. The vast majority of villages are not receiving any assistance, and the area remains sealed to humanitarian assessment teams and human rights groups. A statement by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on November 8 noted that the children in northern Rakhine State already suffer from high levels of deprivation and malnutrition. “Their futures depend on help from doctors, nurses, teachers and others who can provide them with nutrition, health and education services,” the statement said.

The Burmese government should immediately deliver on its assurances to resume humanitarian aid to all impacted areas, Human Rights Watch said.

“The Burmese government and military should immediately allow humanitarian access to vulnerable populations,” Adams said. “The UN and concerned governments need to dial up the pressure on the authorities to ensure aid reaches all affected areas as this crisis enters its second month.” 


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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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