SACW - 29 Nov 2016 | Nepal: Long wait for Justice / Bangladesh: 2012 Tazeen Fire compensation / India and Pakistan Tensions / India: Demonetisation Disaster ; Indian Environmentalism / Fidel Castro Passes on / 'Lysenko's Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia' / Dealing with Doctors, Denial, and Death

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Mon Nov 28 13:58:56 EST 2016


South Asia Citizens Wire - 29 Nov 2016 - No. 2919 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Nepal: Decade After Peace, Scant Progress On Justice - Political Parties Fail to Deliver on Promises - Statement by Human Rights Watch
2. Bangladesh: Tazreen fire 2012 - Quantifying injury, feminising victimhood | Saydia Gulrukh
3. Full Audio: The Three Waves of Indian Environmentalism - Ramachandra Guha
4. India - Gujarat: Lifting of the Moratorium from Vapi, Ankleshwar & Vatva is a set back to environment protection and for those affected by industrial pollution in the area
5. India: Dangerous order by district magistrate of Indore banning any criticism on social media of de-monetisation by Govt. of India - Press statement by Free Software Movement of India
6. Demonetisation Blues in India - Youtube song in Hindi
7. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India Sets Up Muslim Registry To Deport 20 Million Illegals
  - India - Mumbai: State decides to name new train station in Oshiwara 'Ram Mandir'
  - India: Tufail Ahmad on Islamist Radicalism in Kerala
  - India: Awakening to the religious divide in Kerala
  - India: RSS Gives Ideological Colour to Demonetisation Debate
  - India: BJP biggest receiver of funds from electoral trusts (Nidhi Sharma / ET)

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
8. Divisions within Afghanistan’s government reach a new crisis point | Pamela Constable
9. India Pakistan Tensions - Reports and Commentary
10. Pakistan: Shades of McCarthyism | I.A. Rehman
11. A reasonable state | Afiya S. Zia
12. The new abnormal in Kashmir | Jean Drèze
13. Students Under Siege as Schools Burn in India’s Troubled Kashmir | Stella Paul
14. Who can become an Indian citizen? |  Sanjib Baruah
15. India: It’s permanent revolution - Law does not matter, form does not matter. There will be constant mobilisation | Pratap Bhanu Mehta 
16. Demonetisation And A Divided India  | Ali Khan Mahmudabad 
   + Quixotic quest? Pain from demonetisation is tangible, gains appear out of reach | TOI Editorial
17. The decline of India’s universities is an attack on the young and nation | Anuradha Chenoy
18. Rohingyas: It’s a case of State policy-feeding terror - Editorial, Hindustan Times 
19. Book Review: A Political History of Bangladesh
20. Dileep Padgaonkar: A sparkling journalist who lived his life without fuss | Anikendra Nath Sen
21. Fidel Castro - Neruda, Pablo
22. A Requiem for a Revolutionary: Will History Absolve Fidel Castro? | Deepak Bhojwani
23. The voice of the Third World | Vijay Prashad
24. Cuba’s Health Care System: a Model for the World | Salim Lamrani
25. Foreign Exchange - Two inadvertently related classics of Polish and Hindi literature | Keshava Guha
26. Dealing with Doctors, Denial, and Death - A Guide to Living Well with Serious Illness | Aroop Mangalik
27. Inflamed: The debate over the latest cure-all craze | Jerome Groopman
28. 1917, edited by Boris Dralyuk, review — a vivid portrait of Russia’s fateful year
29. deJong-Lambert on Graham, 'Lysenko's Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia'

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1. NEPAL: DECADE AFTER PEACE, SCANT PROGRESS ON JUSTICE - POLITICAL PARTIES FAIL TO DELIVER ON PROMISES - Statement by Human Rights Watch
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Ten years after signing a peace accord, successive Nepali governments have failed to deliver on its central human rights promises, Human Rights Watch said today. The international community, and particularly the United Nations, should press the government to fulfill its pledges as victims wait in vain for information about missing family members and accountability for crimes committed during the war
http://www.sacw.net/article13039.html

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2. BANGLADESH: TAZREEN FIRE 2012 - QUANTIFYING INJURY, FEMINISING VICTIMHOOD | Saydia Gulrukh
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. . . gender stereotypes posed particular challenges for workers demanding compensation. In the eyes of lawyer in question, it seem impossible to call attention to Shahnaj’s undeniable suffering without reproducing images of passive female victimhood
http://www.sacw.net/article13040.html

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3. FULL AUDIO: THE THREE WAVES OF INDIAN ENVIRONMENTALISM - Ramachandra Guha
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The 3rd Sunil Memorial Lecture held on 25 November 2016 in JNU, New Delhi. [audio recording via: sacw.net audio archive]
http://www.sacw.net/article13035.html

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4. INDIA - GUJARAT: LIFTING OF THE MORATORIUM FROM VAPI, ANKLESHWAR & VATVA IS A SET BACK TO ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION AND FOR THOSE AFFECTED BY INDUSTRIAL POLLUTION IN THE AREA
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The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change refuses to take policy decision to protect and improve the environment; it should drop the pretense of its existence and merge itself with the Ministry of Industry. The State Pollution Control Boards and Central Pollution Control Board should also now be merged with the Industries Commissionerate
http://www.sacw.net/article13037.html

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5. INDIA: DANGEROUS ORDER BY DISTRICT MAGISTRATE OF INDORE BANNING ANY CRITICISM ON SOCIAL MEDIA OF DE-MONETISATION BY GOVT. OF INDIA - PRESS STATEMENT BY FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT OF INDIA
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The District Magistrate of Indore has issued an order – Order/2956/RADM/2016, Indore/Date 14/11/2016 under Section 144 – banning any criticism on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc., on exchange of old currency that is "objectionable" or can "cause incitement" his, in effect, is a blanket ban on any criticism of the Government on its failure to provide sufficient new notes for the old Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes that it has demonetised.
http://www.sacw.net/article13034.html

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6. DEMONETISATION BLUES IN INDIA - YOUTUBE SONG IN HINDI
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Ye line me khada hai tu jo aajkal
http://www.sacw.net/article13036.html

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7. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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India Sets Up Muslim Registry To Deport 20 Million Illegals
India - Mumbai: State decides to name new train station in Oshiwara 'Ram Mandir'
India: Tufail Ahmad on Islamist Radicalism in Kerala
India: Awakening to the religious divide in Kerala
India: RSS Gives Ideological Colour to Demonetisation Debate
India: BJP biggest receiver of funds from electoral trusts (Nidhi Sharma / ET)

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

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8. DIVISIONS WITHIN AFGHANISTAN’S GOVERNMENT REACH A NEW CRISIS POINT
by Pamela Constable
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(The Washington Post, November 16, 2016)

KABUL — The scene this week in Afghanistan’s majestic new Parliament was one of bickering and bedlam. Legislators shouted to be heard and argued over points of procedure. They were fired up and in no mood to stop. 

By the end of four days, they had impeached seven cabinet ministers. The foreign minister was gone, and the finance minister had barely survived a vote of confidence. Technically, the process was about under-spent budgets, but ethnic politics and opportunism were at its core.

Once again, political melodrama has taken over the national conversation. The spectacle of renewed discord — in a government that underwent a wave of defections last spring — is dominating the news and shifting focus from pressing issues that include a spate of attacks by Taliban insurgents, record-high unemployment and a mass influx of returning refugees. 

The revolt in the parliament is only one symptom of the disarray. In recent weeks, several aides to President Ashraf Ghani have publicly criticized his administration, while opposition leaders are plotting to divide it from the outside. Long-promised elections are still far off, and public confidence is weakening.

[Four Americans die in suicide blast at U.S. base in Afghanistan; 17 others wounded]
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani speaks during a news conference in Kabul in July. (Omar Sobhani /Reuters)

The tensions have resurfaced just as the United States, a mainstay of Afghan defense and economic aid for years, has elected a new president with different priorities and no investment in Afghanistan’s success. Many Afghans fear President-elect Donald Trump may withdraw the 10,000 U.S. troops that President Obama kept here to help Afghan security forces take over the anti-insurgent fight.

“Everyone in Afghanistan is worried about what Trump will do. We are so dependent on American aid, and the government needs to be sending a positive message to Washington. Instead, it is sending a message of political dysfunction,” said Haroun Mir, an analyst in Kabul.

Just six weeks ago, Ghani and his governing partner, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, managed to present a united front and an ambitious agenda at a crucial donors’ conference in Europe, even though the two men were on frosty personal terms and the legitimacy of their two-year-old arrangement was being widely questioned.

Since then Ghani and Abdullah have had numerous meetings, and aides say they now have a good working relationship. But defections by ethnic opposition leaders who once backed Abdullah have left his future in doubt, while others who joined Ghani’s team have publicly criticized him as autocratic.

First Vice President Abdurrashid Dostum, a former ethnic Uzbek warlord, accused the president of controlling too much power, then threatened to lead an uprising and accused members of Ghani’s National Security Council of plotting to kill him. The rift was mended through negotiations, but the northern strongman remains a political wild card.

[Latest Afghan attack raises perplexing questions on security]

The other powerful figure who could make or break the national unity government is Atta Mohammad Noor, an ethnic Tajik and wealthy northern governor from Abdullah’s Jamiat-i-Islami party. Noor bankrolled Abdullah’s run for president, but he recently has been negotiating with Ghani on his own, seeking a larger share of power for Jamiat.

“Governor Noor doesn’t want a job for himself. He wants the full implementation of the national unity agreement and our rights in it, which Dr. Abdullah has not been able to get,” said an adviser to Noor. “That means 50 percent of power, a bigger role in policy and appointments.”

While such maneuvering goes on behind closed doors, another ethnic power play was televised live all week in Parliament. The first group of three ministers scheduled to appear included two Tajiks, but after opposition legislators cried foul, the lineup was switched to one Pashtun, one Hazara and one Tajik.

It was Ghani, a reformist technocrat and ethnic Pashtun, who unwittingly triggered the melodrama when he warned that he might dismiss any minister who failed to spend 65 percent of the budget. But legislators, seizing what analysts called an opportunity for influence and profit, turned his cleanup effort into something else. 

“This is muscle flexing by politicians who see their fortunes dwindling under Ghani and are trying to squeeze as much patronage from the situation as they can,” said a Western expert in Kabul, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Noting that ministers regularly pay bribes to win or keep their jobs, he called the impeachment process a “gold mine.”

Aides to several impeached ministers said the hearings were biased, with few questions asked before votes were taken. Mujib Mehrdad, an aide to the dismissed education minister, said that his boss tried to explain his under-spending but that the legislators “didn’t listen. That means they had another agenda. It’s not fair.”

[Afghanistan has many problems. Its president may be one of them.]

Ghani’s response has been an awkward mix of conciliation and confrontation. He refused to let several ministers appear before parliament, then called a group of lawmakers to his palace late one night and asked them to delay the process. Finally, he referred the issue to the Supreme Court. 

“We were not trying to start a fire in the jungle. Our main purpose was to benefit the country,” said Fawzia Koofi, a Tajik legislator. “But Ghani reacted very strongly. When we went to meet him, he left without saying goodbye. He takes everything too personally. He needs to have broad, welcoming shoulders, like a traditional leader.”

Aides to the president acknowledged he had been taken aback by the impeachment fever, but they said that the internal conflicts with Abdullah, Dostum and others had been resolved, and that Ghani has been reaching out to all political groups for support. 

“Our democracy is in the process of maturing. This is a power struggle between branches of government, driven by political and financial interests, but it will not affect long-term issues,” said Nader Nadery, a senior adviser to Ghani. “This is not a major setback. It is a temporary distraction.”

Still, international observers said the growing political uncertainty, including a potentially nasty fight over refilling the cabinet and the shifting loyalties among powerful ethnic figures such as Dostum and Noor, could be a bigger worry.

“Things are changing every day. No one knows who is in or out, friend or enemy,” said the Western expert, who is not authorized to speak publicly. “That makes it more likely that Ghani will survive, but it could functionally bring the government to a standstill.”

Pamela Constable is The Post’s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She previously served as a South Asia bureau chief and most recently covered immigration in the Washington area for several years.

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9. INDIA PAKISTAN TENSIONS - REPORTS AND COMMENTARY
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Water that belongs to India cannot be allowed to go to Pakistan: PM Modi
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/water-that-belongs-to-india-cannot-be-allowed-to-go-to-pakistan-pm-modi-in-bathinda-4394371/

Pakistan's opposition seeks to sever trade ties with India, demands response to 'aggression' along border
http://www.firstpost.com/india/pakistans-opposition-seeks-to-sever-trade-ties-with-india-demands-response-to-aggression-along-border-3126804.html

The abyss ahead of the line of control: Where India, Pakistan are; where they’re going
http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/india-pakistan-relation-army-jammu-kashmir-terrorism-4392082/

‘Revisionist history was earlier Pak forte, now India following suit’
Rosamma Thomas | TNN | Updated: Nov 26, 2016
Former Pakistan ambassador to Sri Lanka and the US Husain Haqqani said he regretted that India too was following the path that was followed decades ago in Pakistan, with a rising trend of "revisionist history". Instead of seeing the government's primary responsibility as one of securing the welfare of citizens, the state is constructed as the upholder of an ideology, with a larger goal.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/litfest/litfest-delhi/news/Revisionist-history-was-earlier-Pak-forte-now-India-following-suit/articleshow/55638187.cms?

 The Making of the India–Pakistan Dynamic: Nehru, Liaquat, and the No War Pact correspondence of 1950*
PALLAVI RAGHAVAN
Journal: Modern Asian Studies / Volume 50 / Issue 5 / September 2016 

In January 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan, seeking a joint declaration of a No War Pact by the governments of India and Pakistan. The two prime ministers undertook a lengthy correspondence on this subject, spanning a year that saw rising levels of resentment and hostility between the two countries. Yet, as the inter-dominion correspondence on the No War declaration during this period shows, neither government was actually predisposed to take a belligerent position and critically engaged with the possibility of signing a declaration that renounced the use of war. As I hope to show through my discussion of the ‘No War Pact’ correspondence, relations between India and Pakistan were not necessarily confined to hostile exchanges, and both governments also repeatedly engaged with each other to attempt to find spaces of agreement and compromise.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/the-making-of-the-indiapakistan-dynamic-nehru-liaquat-and-the-no-war-pact-correspondence-of-1950/091C9228053BF0028CD13DB7B75F2C1B

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10. PAKISTAN: SHADES OF MCCARTHYISM | I.A. Rehman
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(Dawn - November 24, 2016)

MALICE and bravado, which have become the main ingredients of public discourse in Pakistan, now threaten to develop into a wave of persecution against whoever is considered to be on the wrong side of the all-powerful authorities.

We recently went through a phase when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was lambasted for being a friend of Narendra Modi. The propagandists, both official and non-official, found Modi’s hand behind the unrest in Balochistan; those who asked questions about CPEC were labelled his stooges; and he was even blamed for the smog that paralysed life across parts of Pakistan. One wondered as to when Modi would be blamed for the filth in Karachi, the Nandipur project scandal, and damage to the cotton crop.

Although Prime Minister Modi had himself announced his intention to interfere in Pakistan’s internal affairs, our reactions carried a confession of incompetence in protecting our interests – which even the Cold War rivals never did, even while nabbing each other’s spies.

The rise of the Panama Papers in popular ratings helped move the media away from Modi. Its verdict on the performance of the PTI counsel in court was utterly indefensible. The judges make observations during hearings in an effort to unravel the truth; these are not verdicts on any plea before them. If everything that happens in courts were reported, the majesty of the law could be undermined. Hamid Khan perhaps overreacted to his trial by the media, but his grievance is legitimate. Many others before him have been similarly treated.
What is happening in Pakistan now should worry all conscientious citizens.

Meanwhile, another media trial has begun, concerning a report that was first described as a leak but then later denounced as a fabrication and a plant. In this case, quite a few media persons have become prosecutors. They seem determined to undo the principle of their autonomy in deciding complaints against them, which they had won in the 1960s by obliging Ayub Khan to accept a moratorium on actions against media persons. Eventually, the government yielded to the media’s demand for its own court of honour and, after a long hassle, the Press Council was established. It is a classical example of shooting one’s own feet.

Citizens who care for their basic freedoms and the rule of law must be on guard against hate-driven campaigns designed to silence the voices of reason, for they carry the germs of McCarthyism. It might be useful to decision-makers, politicians, administrators and the people at large to recall a modern-period witch-hunt, known as McCarthyism, and what it did to American society.

In the 1950s, a Republican senator called Joseph McCarthy forwarded his ambitions by exploiting the bogey of a communist threat to the United States. He launched a campaign to purge the US State Department, other government agencies and Hollywood of communists, causing several thousand Americans to lose their jobs and unmitigated suffering to countless others. No one dared to denounce him, not even president Eisenhower. The McCarthy juggernaut ran aground when it targeted the army, which had the means to counterattack and expose him.

The US Senate eventually condemned McCarthy, but not before the whole of society had been affected by this witch-hunt. The victims included Hollywood celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Miller and Dalton Trumbo. The latter won an Oscar for his screenplay, The Brave One, written under a pseudonym since he had been blacklisted. The paranoia led to many ridiculous excesses, such as the banning of the story of Robin Hood in some educational institutions; robbing the rich to help the poor was perceived as communism.

What makes McCarthyism especially reprehensible is that its disastrous effects are not confined to its direct victims. The climate of suspicion, hate and intolerance (that any witch-hunt generates) suppresses not only dissent but also free thinking. Ordinary people become afraid of associating with fellow beings. Society stops receiving the benefits of productive associations, assemblies and collective endeavours. In a way, the persecution of individuals or groups for their racial identity or political views dehumanises society to an extent that it consumes itself within a short period. The Nazis built their power by liquidating the Jews and communists — what horrible tribulations this brought to the German people and all of humankind.

McCarthyism’s most sinister aspect is the social acceptance of questionable laws, regulations, and policies adopted to fight so-called subversion. One of the most widely used weapons in the hands of South Africa’s racist authors of Apartheid was the Suppression of Communist Activities Act, which was invoked to persecute political workers, writers, journalists and rights activists.

What is happening in Pakistan now should worry all conscientious citizens. Efforts are already under way to find scapegoats for the state’s failures and bunglings. The selective targeting of international NGOs; police licensed to hound civil society organisations; a blanket cover over the issue of internment centres and its detainees under the Actions (in Aid of Civil Power) Regulation; the studied neglect of enforced disappearances; and the judiciary’s surrender to the idea of parallel courts are all signs of a drift towards McCarthyism. The supreme interest of Pakistan’s people demands a halt to this suicidal trend.

Tailpiece: the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong wrote a letter to the president of Pakistan about the hanging of two men who were subsequently acquitted by the Supreme Court.

The director-general (C-II) at the president’s secretariat (Public) forwarded the letter “for appropriate action” to the secretary of the law and justice division. The following day, the latter’s senior private secretary simply marked the letter to ‘Law-I’. The very next day, the section officer (Law-I) wrote to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (which, incidentally, was mentioned nowhere in the dispatches): “The reference Asian Human Rights Commission pertains to Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Therefore, the same is forwarded to Human Rights Commission of Pakistan for appropriate action.” The letter was countersigned by consultant (C).

One can only marvel at the speed with which papers are disposed of by the authorities, and the efficiency with which matters are put aside.

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11. A REASONABLE STATE | Afiya S. Zia
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(Dawn - 25 November 2016)

THE recent US election has confirmed an unconventional president and the realisation that we live in a post-truth culture. Reliant on emotional appeal, the seductive quality of post-truth politics is that anyone can launch baseless allegations against the state, judiciary and each other with no proof required. Accusations of rigged polls, corruption, nepotism, moral bankruptcy and personal attacks need no substantiation — just a sense of outrage and a messianic need to achieve power. Emotional calls by political leaders ignite an adrenalin rush, triggering a battle of media-amplified abuse, catharsis or cutting, clever sound-bites.

Post-truth practice is not the exclusive preserve of racist, sexist, insular Anglo-American bigots. Globally, the progressives have also mastered the art of learned deception disguised as intellectual analysis. The rear- and vanguard depend on new media landscaping as the main driver of post-truth politics.

Any researcher with a Facebook and Twitter account is an analyst. Any unpublished author with a blog is a self-made analyst. Post WikiLeaks, any journalist who claims to be a whistleblower and conceals evidence as respect for his sources qualifies as an unaccountable victim-analyst. The post-Chomsky media does not have to manufacture consent or be accurate — it just has to perform as hormone replacement treatment.
Academia’s absence gives rise to post-truth discourse.

The absence of academia as a site of relevance in Pakistan and the poverty of research in limited cultural festivals and NGO reports have given rise to post-truth public intellectuals reliant on descriptive narratives sold as analysis. For nearly 60 years, political analysis was heavily statist under the influential Hamza Alavi thesis. The ubiquitous civil-military ties dominated as definer of the overdeveloped state. Recently, some social scientists challenged this reliance on the Alavian model around three main findings: the changing nature of economics, Islam and gender.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the tryst between women’s rights, the political economy of Ayub Khan’s One Unit and Ziaul Haq’s Islamic state was the core feature in any analysis of the Pakistani state. This yielded fantastic foundational, empirical and theoretical findings. By Musharraf’s era, post-truth politics reigned supreme — with political co-optation, fudged economics, a ‘short-cut’ prime minister and a truckload of apparently dubious experts on jihad, security and Islamic politics. This trend has had a lasting effect. Since the lawyers’ movement, a new generation of travelogue analysts have seamlessly snuck into the post-truth fabric, sewn almost entirely by social media in the new millennium.

Contemporary freelance analysts may be divided into two competing lots. One group fixates on the neoliberal state dominated by the military establishment of the 1980s’ Cold War, subservient to America’s satanic capitalism. These refuseniks insist Pakistani liberals are US-funded, collaborative compradors and that ‘NGO Islamophobes’ persecute our poor, passive Muslim men mislabelled as militants. India and China do not exist for such analysts; there is no genuine resistance amongst the people, and if there is, then the wardi is behind it. Through this myopic fog they see no structural change and rave about politics in cyberspace. Occasionally, they dip into ‘relevant’ liberal causes, such as protesting drone warfare or capital punishment.

The other group reifies democratic forces as the panacea to state interests. It values parliamentary governance and the restructuring of political landscapes through devolution, the NFC and progressive laws on women and social reform over the last decade. For them, consolidation of the state’s writ via violence or coercion indicates progress towards finally materialising into a (stable?) nation state. These analysts minimise the role of elite-capture, rent-seeking and patronage politics or, the role of the private sector, capital and media as brokers and drivers of non-change.

Both sets of analyses are independently and simultaneously partial or contradictory. The former relies exclusively on a post-human economic framework while the latter is practically post-economics. The former is outraged at everything and the kitchen sink, while the latter is laissez-faire at its non-confrontational best. The abstract focus on flawed neoliberalism and something called the ‘state’s writ’ erases any class analysis. Inconveniently, though, neoliberalism and globalisation have supporters amongst working classes, and the changing nature of our state has limited beneficiaries.

The post-Alavian Pakistani state holds promise for women, the transgender community, media moguls and Riaz Malik capitalists alike. The rest of the subalterns, religious and ethnic minorities will continue to rely on the tethered forces of an economy steered by a status quo bureaucracy, judiciary and privatised interests of the military establishment.

A post-human state described in scintillating terms such as ‘metaphoric DNA’ and analysed through feel-factor observations does not put people’s economic worth and dignity at the centre. This ends up as misleading because, very simply, a reasonably good state just needs pragmatic, truthful, people-centric economic practice.

The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi.

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12. THE NEW ABNORMAL IN KASHMIR | Jean Drèze
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(The Hindu - 25 November 2016)

 Continued repression is likely to intensify the alienation in Kashmir. It would be much wiser for the government to realise the futility of stonewalling and initiate unconditional talks with all concerned

Sixteen years is a long time to do something about a situation that causes immense suffering to millions of innocent people. But when I returned to Kashmir last month, after a gap of 16 years, I found that people’s agony and anger had — if anything — intensified.
Deciphering the shutdown

As in 2000, I found an intense popular aspiration for azadi (freedom). The Indian Army is perceived, almost unanimously, as an occupying force, and people are fed up with the controls, crackdowns, searches, arrests, beatings, torture and pellet guns. The most common graffiti found around the towns and villages of Kashmir is “Go India, go back”.

The latest expression of this anger is the popular uprising that has rocked Kashmir during the last few months. The Indian media commonly refers to it as a “shutdown”, an ambiguous term that fails to clarify who is shutting what. This so-called shutdown is actually a general strike (hartal). Ever since Hizbul Mujahideen ‘commander’ Burhan Wani was killed in early July, shops have been closed in Kashmir, traffic has been halted, and schools have been deserted. There have been thoughtful exemptions from the strike, say for street vendors, chemist shops and specific times of the week. Some public services, notably health care and the public distribution system, were not only allowed but encouraged to keep going. For the rest, the strike has brought public life to a halt for months on end. That, at any rate, was the situation until I visited Kashmir in late October.

So far as I can tell from many discussions with students, farmers, workers, businessmen, intellectuals and others over a whole week, the strike has overwhelming popular support. It is difficult, of course, to believe that public life can be paralysed to this extent without an element of coercion or pressure. Sometimes the pressure is explicit: anyone who drove a car in Kashmir (outside privileged areas of Srinagar) during the last few months ran the risk of a broken windscreen. But this traffic control was not the work of armed squads or antisocial goons. It was the job of local residents and youngsters who support the strike. In any strike, there is a difficult question of how to deal with potential strike-breakers and free-riders.
Protest calendar for the people

Along with the strike, a series of protests took place all over Kashmir during this period. A “protest calendar” was issued every week (with varying effect) by Hurriyat leaders, who seem to have wide popular support. Examples of suggested protests include occupying the roads, freedom marches to the district headquarters, converging to the United Nations office in Srinagar, performing namaz (prayers) on the road, sit-ins in various locations, visiting those injured by pellet guns, boycotting government offices, reading collective pledges, wall painting, playing resistance songs or music, sending letters to the armed forces, holding conventions on the right to self-determination, displaying banners and placards saying ‘We Want Freedom’, and more. To my knowledge, there are no calls to stone-pelting in the calendars, though it is perhaps taken as read that protests in Kashmir often end up with stone-pelting for one reason or another.

The spirit of these protest calendars was well expressed by Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq in a “preface” published on August 24 in Greater Kashmir: “As a war has been waged against us by a mighty force, our only means of resistance against the oppression is peaceful protest. The space for that is also highly constricted. Yet individually and collectively we have to find ways and means of registering our protest. The protest calendar is our collective voice. Each one of us especially our intelligentsia, artists, poets, writers, painters have to come forward and use their skills and creativity to express our pain and sentiment. Every Kashmiri’s contribution to the movement counts.”
State clampdown on protests

So-called “anti-India” protests, however, are effectively banned in Kashmir, no matter how peaceful they may be. The authorities have sweeping powers to prevent protests, not only under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, but also under Jammu and Kashmir’s draconian Public Safety Act. Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, prohibiting assemblies of more than four persons (an old tactic of the British Raj to prevent nationalist protests), is in force throughout the Valley. Assemblies, marches, graffiti, pamphlets, even silent vigils — all these are banned if there is any trace of a demand for freedom.

Further restrictions on civil liberties ensure that this state of affairs goes unchallenged. Student politics is banned. International human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Council are not allowed to visit Kashmir. Local human rights activists are also on a short leash — the arbitrary detention of Khurram Parvez during the last two months is the latest warning that they should not go too far. Similarly, when Kashmir Reader (one of Kashmir’s leading dailies) was banned on September 30, other media outfits “got the message”, to quote a prominent Kashmiri editor. Kashmir, in short, has been turned into a kind of open jail.

In an insightful article (“Address the ‘new normal’ in Kashmir”, The Hindu, October 10), former National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan candidly acknowledged that the current unrest in Kashmir is a “home-grown” popular uprising which cannot be blamed on Pakistan or outsiders. He did not comment, however, on the “new abnormal” that accompanies this uprising — an extreme suppression of civil liberties.

When all forms of dissent are banned, the line between peaceful protest and armed resistance becomes blurred. The main difference, it may appear, is that violent deeds receive more attention. Everyone in India has heard of stone-pelting, but daily acts of peaceful protest — or attempted protest — in Kashmir have been ignored.

The refusal to engage

Today, the towns and villages of Kashmir are peppered with “Burhan Wani chowks”, often marked with slogans such as ‘Burhan Wani is in our heart’ and ‘We are all Burhan Wani’. Those who remember Burhan are not hot-headed guerrillas — they are ordinary people who aspire to a peaceful life. If they admire him, it is not because he killed anyone (quite likely, he never did), but because he gave his life, at a tender age, for the freedom struggle. It is for the same reason that we remember and admire Bhagat Singh. Gandhi himself urged us to “bow to them [Bhagat Singh and his associates] for their heroism”, even as he criticised their acts.

There is, possibly, an insightful paradox in the fact that it took the death of an armed militant to spark a largely non-violent uprising across the Kashmir Valley. Many people proudly told me that the strike would continue “to the finish”. Yet they realised that azadi may not come any time soon. Thus, they often added that other uprisings would happen if need be. Indeed, it is not the first one — similar events happened in 2010.

The response of the Indian government to this uprising is to stonewall: refuse any concessions (even just a ban on pellet guns), arrest the leaders (Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik, the lot), and wait for people to lose hope. This strategy, however, perpetuates the repression, and every act of repression intensifies the yearning for freedom in Kashmir. Nothing unites people like shared persecution.

If the current policy of inflexible suppression of the freedom movement persists, the brutality will continue for decades. Continued repression is likely to intensify the alienation of the Kashmiri people from India, and could also foster a revival of armed resistance in Kashmir and beyond. It would be much wiser to realise the futility of stonewalling, and initiate unconditional talks with all concerned. Atal Bihari Vajpayee (then Prime Minister of India) had taken significant steps in that direction, and seems to be remembered for it in Kashmir. Today, however, the iron fist is back.

The conformist nature of public opinion in India, when it comes to Kashmir, does not help matters. It is hard to understand how opposition parties, civil society and social movements have remained silent on Kashmir for so long. There have been no major demonstrations of solidarity with the people of Kashmir anywhere in India during the last few months. Even public discussions of the situation in Kashmir are extremely rare in India. As veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar observed many years ago, “When it comes to Kashmir, the conscience of most in the country becomes dead.” If anything, the situation is worse today, as the Indian media further dull our conscience with a barrage of distorted accounts of the situation in Kashmir. The new abnormal threatens to engulf us all.

Jean Drèze is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University.

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13. STUDENTS UNDER SIEGE AS SCHOOLS BURN IN INDIA’S TROUBLED KASHMIR
by Stella Paul
========================================
(Inter Press Service - November 23, 2016)

Shugufta Barkat, a former teacher, and her brother Rasikh Barkat, a former student, stand the charred remains of the Nasirabad Government High School in Kulgam – one of the many schools in India’s Kashmir that have been recently burnt down. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

KULGAM, Kashmir, India, Nov 23 2016 (IPS) - In the fading light of a November afternoon, 12-year-old Mariya Sareer bends over a textbook, trying to read as much as she can before it gets dark. It’s been nearly five months since the seventh grader from Shurat, a village 70 kms south of Srinagar city, last went to school, thanks to a raging political conflict.

“Studying like this is hard. I don’t know where to focus. My scores won’t be as good as before,” says the young student, who has always been top of her class. Her siblings Arjumand, 9, and Fazl, 6, both students at the same school, nod in agreement.
Unlike other terror attacks, the arsons have remained a mystery, with no one claiming responsibility.

Mariya is still luckier than many of her friends. Although her school – the Taleem-Ul-Islam Ahmadiyya Institute – has been closed for the past four and half months, the building is still standing. But for thousands of others, there will be no classrooms to return to when the shutdown ends because their schools have been destroyed in fires.

Burning down a generation’s future

Schools across Kashmir were closed for Eid ul Fitr, which was celebrated on July 6. They were expected to reopen soon after the festival. But violence erupted across the valley after Burhan Wani, a young militant, was gunned down by security forces on July 8. Amidst mass rallies, stone-throwing and renewed demands for “freedom” from India, the pro-separatist parties called for a total shutdown of the valley.

The shutdown effectively kept the valley’s 1.4 million students from returning to their classrooms.

A few weeks later, on Sep. 6, the first news of a school fire was reported in Mirhama village of Kulgam district. Soon, similar reports began to pour in from all over the valley. So far, nearly three dozen schools – both government-run and privately-owned – have been burnt down. A majority of these schools are in South Kashmir where Burhan Wani was killed.

One of them is the Nasirabad Government High School in Kulgam. The building was set on fire on the evening of Oct. 16 and although locals and police tried to douse the flames, the library, gymnasium, computers, laboratory and desks were destroyed. Locals allege that the arsonists wanted to prevent the school from reopening – a reason why they burnt the upper floor, instead of the ground floors that had little equipment.

Shugufta Barkat, a former teacher at the school, says it was among the best in the district. “They are burning down the children’s future,” a visibly shaken Barkat told IPS.
Mariya, Arjumand and Fazl Sareer, students from the village of Shurat in India’s Kashmir valley, study at their home. Educational institutions have been closed for four and half months due to political unrest in the state. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Mariya, Arjumand and Fazl Sareer, students from the village of Shurat in India’s Kashmir valley, study at their home. Educational institutions have been closed for four and half months due to political unrest in the state. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Surprisingly, unlike other terror attacks, the arsons have remained a mystery, with no one claiming responsibility. Separatists and the government have both blamed each other, while some locals say they are the work of “fringe elements” in society who just want to cause disruptions. The police have made some arrests, but in each case, the accused has been identified as a “pro-separatist” without any clear link with any terror group.

With the increased cases of arson, the government has asked teachers to protect their schools during the nighttime hours. Accordingly, schools have created charts of teachers on “night duty”. Female teachers have been asked to send a male relative to patrol on their behalf.

Unease in a minority community

Basharat Ahmed Dar is the head of Asnoor, a village of the minority Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Kulgam. In a state of long political turmoil, violence, murders and torture, this is a community campaigning for love, peace and harmony. Their unique principles have earned them global respect, as well as scorn from many, especially the radicals.

The community strongly advocates for education as a healthy path to progress and also runs five schools in South Kashmir. The schools – which admit both Ahmadiyya and non-Ahmadiyya students – are known for a high standard of education and superior infrastructure.

Since the shutdown began, the Ahmadiyya youths, including some of the teachers, have been guarding their schools to repel possible attacks and arson. The patrolling will continue until the snow begins to fall, says Dar.

“It has not rained here for several months, so everything is very dry and prone to catching fire. But once snowfall begins, setting fire will not be as easy,” he explained.

Mass promotions and continued uncertainty

In Kashmir, a study year begins in April and ends in November- just before the three-month long winter vacation begins. The annual examinations are held in late October. However, this year, none of the schools could conduct the final examinations. With no signs of an end to the shutdown, government this week declared a mass promotion for students from first to ninth grade across the valley.

Private schools have decided to conduct examinations, even though they had completed only about 40 percent of the syllabus.

Farooq Ahmed Nengroo, a private school teacher, calls the mass promotions a “dangerous mistake.”

“In 2014 also, after a flood hit the valley, the students had a mass promotion although only two to three percent of all schools were affected. In future, we will definitely see a vacuum of knowledge and skills in the state’s labour force,” he warned.

High school students are also not pleased with the government decision. Ishfaq Ahmed, an eleventh grade student in Kulgam, says, “I had joined a coaching institute to prepare for the engineering college entrance test next year. But because of the shutdown, all the coaching institutes are closed. Unless those are allowed to function, nothing else is going to help.”

Meanwhile, Mariya Sareer is praying for an end to the shutdown and the burning of schools so she can get her life back. “I just want to return to school, study and play cricket,” she says.

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14. WHO CAN BECOME AN INDIAN CITIZEN?
by Sanjib Baruah
========================================
(The Indian Express - 28 November 2016)

Partition’s long shadow is evident on the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which seeks to introduce a religious distinction in the law. It must be debated

It is not hard to guess why the joint parliamentary committee (JPC) reviewing the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 decided at the last minute to postpone the public hearings in Assam it had scheduled for the first week of November. The decision apparently was made after RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat met Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal. Too much of a spotlight on the citizenship amendment bill, they seem to have concluded, could hurt the party’s electoral prospects in the by-election in Lakhimpur — the BJP won the seat, though with a reduced margin.

No one familiar with the deeply contested history of immigration and citizenship in Assam should be surprised that the citizenship amendment bill would be controversial in Assam. It has rekindled the long-standing foreigner controversy. Opinion is divided along expected lines between the Brahmaputra Valley and the Barak Valley that nurture very different memories of the Partition.

The bill’s staunchest critics are the old guard of the Assam Movement. Since Sonowal himself was one of its prominent leaders, he has been criticised for not openly objecting to the bill. But the vociferous opposition by some of Sonowal’s one-time comrades in the Assam Movement, who are now leaders of regional parties and allies of the BJP-led state government, has made the bill politically toxic for the BJP.

The BJP must reconsider the bill, says the AGP president and Assam’s agriculture minister, Atul Bora, since it had promised to implement the Assam Accord. The controversy threatens to unravel the coalition that brought the BJP-led alliance to power in the state only a few months ago.

Electoral tacticians will have no trouble understanding the decision. But the JPC’s action sends troubling signals: The ruling party appears unwilling and unprepared to engage in a serious public debate on an issue that involves how the membership in the nation is defined. Winning elections by any means necessary is its priority.

Critics of the bill have expressed concern that it could trigger a new influx of Hindu refugees from Bangladesh. Former Assam chief minister and AGP founder-president Prafulla Kumar Mahanta has said that religious persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh is not as much of an issue under the Sheikh Hasina government than what it once was. He points out that more than 29,500 Durga pujas were held in Bangladesh this year and that many of them had received financial assistance from the government.

Mahanta’s statement is entirely consistent with the Modi government’s policy towards Bangladesh. The concern that the change in India’s citizenship laws could trigger a new influx is not out of place. Yet the BJP accuses Mahanta of “causing confusion” on the issue by opposing the bill. A BJP leader has charged that the AGP did little to implement the Assam Accord when it was in power under Mahanta’s leadership. But whatever the shortcomings of the Mahanta-led AGP government, the reason for its failure to implement the Assam Accord is not hard to find. Most people in Assam understand the main obstacle to be the IMDT law: It had severely limited the government’s capacity to act.

When in 2005 the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, it said in its ruling that the IMDT law had created “insurmountable difficulties” for the government in the identification of unauthorised immigrants living in Assam. Indeed the court had agreed with much of what the leaders of the Assam Movement were saying. The IMDT law, said the apex court, encouraged massive illegal migration from Bangladesh to Assam and that it was the “main barrier” to identifying illegal immigrants.

Ironically, the BJP’s evident disinclination to openly engage in a public debate on the citizenship amendment bill reminds people in Assam of the way in which the IMDT law was passed. The seventh Lok Sabha elected in 1980 had enacted the IMDT law in 1983. While the 1980 election is remembered in the rest of India for sweeping Indira Gandhi back to power, the memory of that election is very different in Assam. The Assam Movement had just begun and its organisers had called for a boycott of the elections. Elections could be held in only two of Assam’s 14 parliamentary constituencies — both located in the Barak Valley, where the Assam Movement had little resonance. Thus a law that had more consequences for Assam than for any other part of the country was passed by Parliament at a time when Assam was grossly under-represented. That’s not how a deliberative law-making body should function.

One hopes that Parliament this time will not make the same mistake: That it will do more to facilitate public participation and public input in the course of legislating the citizenship amendment bill. A thorough discussion of the bill, however, requires that its goals be spelt out in a more transparent manner.

The proposed amendment, in its current formulation, seeks to exclude undocumented immigrants belonging to certain minority communities of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan — Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians — from the category of illegal migrants making them eligible to apply for Indian citizenship. The list of religious minorities excludes Muslim groups like the Ahmadis, certainly a persecuted religious minority in Pakistan.

It is hard not to read the proposed amendment as being about something else: To deal with what some people have long taken to be a piece of unfinished business of the Partition. They believe that Indian citizenship laws should recognise a right of return of Hindus from Pakistan and Bangladesh to India, similar to the right of Jews to return to Israel, or of ethnic Germans to Germany. Those of this persuasion are unhappy with the Indian Constitution’s rejection of the two-nation theory since Indian law cannot distinguish between Hindu and Muslim arrivals from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The real purpose of the citizenship amendment bill seems to be to introduce this distinction into India’s citizenship laws.

The implications of the amendment are huge, not only for Assam, but for the rest of India and the subcontinent. The Constitution’s rejection of the two-nation theory is crucially important for the status of Indian Muslims as equal citizens. The proposed amendment will impact not only the sense of security of Indian Muslims, but also the future security of Hindus in Bangladesh, and the credibility of India’s historical position on the Kashmir question.

Whatever the form the amendment finally takes, there is no alternative to developing a shared understanding of the issue through a hard national conversation. The implications of the bill are far more profound than the innocuous formulation “persons belonging to minority communities, namely, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.. shall not be treated as illegal migrants” might suggest.

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15. INDIA: IT’S PERMANENT REVOLUTION - LAW DOES NOT MATTER, FORM DOES NOT MATTER. THERE WILL BE CONSTANT MOBILISATION
by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
========================================
(The Indian Express, November 26, 2016)

The government has stepped on the escalator of seemingly radical disruption; it can only now continue on that path. (File Photo)

Just as a matter of pure political analysis, it has to be said that we are now entering the politics of “permanent revolution.” Gambling on demonetisation commits the government, one way or the other, to come up with new and radical moves with increasing frequency. If demonetisation fails, the government will have to come up with something equally radical to make up for this loss. If by some chance demonetisation is considered a partial success, it will whet the appetite for more gambling. Either way, expect new googlies from the government with increasing frequency, whether it is on expenditure or the taxation side or institutional reform proposals. The government has stepped on the escalator of seemingly radical disruption; it can only now continue on that path. Whether it is for good or for ill, we shall see.

These disruptions will have more than passing association with the language of permanent revolution. For Marx, permanent revolution was the thought that the working class pursues its interest without compromise. Except now the state will wear the mantle of a discourse where it will present itself above compromise. And the only way to establish this is disruption, often for the sake of it. This permanent revolution of the state will also have a Trotskyist feel to it. For Trotsky, permanent revolution was about force feeding history. It was about how one could create a socialist revolution where conditions for it did not pre-exist. Similarly, the nature of proposals: Cashless economy, for instance, will be about force feeding the march of history. The whole point of this form of politics is to immobilise those pedantic social questions about whether the preconditions exist for success.

Like all revolutionary talk, this doctrine will have nothing but contempt for all bourgeois institutional forms. The fact that there is no governing legislative or statutory provision for rationing money (as opposed to demonetisation of particular series), will not give anyone pause. There is no ordinance, no declaration of a financial emergency. That the RBI’s credibility has been severely decimated will not matter much. It should be truly alarming that a secretary to the government of India, by fiat, can stand up every morning and issue more than a hundred and fifty directives regarding your own money. In the history of independent India, we have not seen this arbitrary a use of state power when it comes to the sanctity of money. The promise on your note “I promise to pay the bearer a sum of X rupees” did not say “only if you keep it in a bank account or only if you withdraw a certain amount a day or spend it in a certain way or in the case of marriage withdrawals give it only to people who you can prove do not have a bank account.” Whatever your substantive moves on demonetisation, the fact that you have rationing without accountability, seems not to bother us. It is not an infringement of liberty or exercise of mad discretion. In the age of permanent revolution, law does not matter, form does not matter. Even the sovereign’s breaking of a promise does not matter; after all, if a sovereign promises, he can also withdraw the promise.

Like permanent revolution, there will be constant switch and bait. So, very subtly, the discourse from government is now shifting from unearthing black money to the fantasy of a cashless economy. The language of permanent revolution works by a constant mobilisation. First, it is mobilisation against anti-nationals. Then we had a new move: A seeming revolution in our Pakistan policy, a claim to a new form of surgical strikes. Never mind the fact that it has done nothing to diminish cross-border shelling and killing of both military personnel and civilians. But the revolution moves on to the next big act of total mobilisation. And there will be more to come. The opposition will be foolish to assume that we are now in an era of conventional politics, whether in form or substance. In fact, one of the challenges of permanent revolution is that combating it by the standard repertoire of arguments — the preconditions do not exist, the law might not permit it — comes across as nothing but an apology for the status quo. That is the magical alchemy that permanent revolution produces.

There will be a new moral language: Permanent revolution is always Janus-faced about the virtues of the people. On the one hand, the people can overcome the absence of initial conditions for a revolution. On the other hand, those who don’t will be enemies of the revolution, and therefore inherently suspect. We cannot decide whether the act of lining up in queues is an act of civic commitment on the part of citizens, or does it reflect widespread complicity and cheating. The revolution started out by declaring the people as virtuous; government directives then ended up declaring them cheats. Permanent revolution begins by appealing to virtue, it ends up using state power.

You hope to god some of this succeeds. For, permanent revolution, as it fails, is usually followed by war of some kind, the last switch and bait. We are a long way from that. But Marx’s warning may not be inappropriate. In the Holy Family he wrote of Napoleon, “Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d’affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself.”

So far we have only gone as far as declaring that the prime minister can even pronounce on what public opinion is, on his own app, by his own methodology. But soon the drumbeat of mobilisation will demand more. Uma Bharti is quoted as saying that Modi is fulfilling Marx’s ideas. Perhaps there’s more truth in that characterisation than we realised.

The writer is president, CPR Delhi and contributing editor, ‘The Indian Express’

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16. DEMONETISATION AND A DIVIDED INDIA  
 by Ali Khan Mahmudabad 
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The Times of India - November 22, 2016

Demonetisation has divided India. These divisions tell a tale where those fortunate enough to have their salaries paid into their account or indeed those who have bank accounts to begin with, have gushed over just how brave and far-sighted the government has been. Of course, nothing can be further from the truth. While the very people who have access to internet and telephone banking argue on social media about how people should bear some pain for ‘the nation,’ others who depend on daily cash payments have been stuck in interminable lines outside banks. It seems that many people think that the life of the poor is not anyway circumscribed by hardship and pain. Meanwhile, citizens have been told that they can only access a limited amount of their money while the very same public banks into which money is being deposited are being unable to collect loans worth billions from wealthy individuals and corporations. Indeed, it is incredible how large parts of the middle classes and the elites have bought into the narrative that this move is all about fighting corruption and terrorism. Both these issues evoke such emotional and indeed visceral responses that most people are unwilling to think about them dispassionately.

India Currency Notes Scrapped

Firstly, it is a mistake to think of corruption as one homogenous problem. Indeed it is crucial to separate the high-powered world of rent seeking from the everyday corruption that is practiced by petty officials including bureaucrats, police officers and low-level government employees. It is the latter that affects the vast majority of the population with the former largely being the subject of interminable judicial commissions and sporadic parliamentary and public debates. Then there are instances such as the Vyapam scam, which involved both high and low level officials. The large scale admission and recruitment scam of petty officials perpetrated by an organised network of senior politicians, officials and businessmen, is no longer even whispered about in the corridors of power. It is still unknown just how many people paid kickbacks to obtain a government post. Furthermore it is precisely this level of government servant- food inspectors, teachers, transport officers, forest guards and petty clerks amongst many others- whose corruption affects citizen’s daily lives. It is undeniable that the demonetisation will affect these kinds of officers but it is a gross exaggeration, actually completely wishful thinking, to assume that the move will also affect those big builders, politicians, bureaucrats and government officers whose scale of corruption is nowhere near taking a few thousand rupees to move a file from one desk to another.

Tackling the kind of low-level corruption practiced by revenue officers, local policemen and municipal government employees amongst others is a positive step but it would be mistaken to think that demonetisation will eradicate larger-scale corruption from India. Of course there are those who have hoarded large amounts of cash and who will now be stuck as to what to do but for the most part, anyone with half a brain and a large amount of cash will have already laundered it. Gold, diamonds, property and even luxury watches- the ones that do not depreciate-, are just some of the ways in which this money is converted. Another efficient way of laundering money and one that is highly visible across India is by building educational institutions. It is virtually impossible to drive across rural constituencies in any state without noticing the plethora of engineering colleges, polytechnics, law schools, dentistry colleges and teachers training colleges that have cropped up. Most of these places will only have a small number of real students and then have many more ghost students on their rolls who do not really exist but who are phantoms that pay fees. The point is that anyone worth their salt would not only have converted their illegal cash but furthermore would have created ‘legitimate’ businesses in order to protect their assets.

INDIA-ECONOMY-CURRENCY

As is already abundantly apparent, people have found ways to get around demonetisation and as is usual the poor and those who have kept their life’s savings in cash are getting affected. The going rate in UP for 2000 rupees last week was 1800 rupees. Obviously those conducting these transactions have a way of guaranteeing their profits. Prominent politicians have already started mobilising workers and others to convert old currency for a cash incentive. Money-lenders and others are having a field day converting money for a cut and now there are also stories of bribes being paid in kind rather than cash. The fact is that people will always find ways around corruption when large sections of society are also looking for a shortcut or a way to bypass the system.  It is nothing less than naïve to think that demonetisation will suddenly transform India into a country of upstanding politicians and government servants and even more upright citizens. It is not as if a land registry official or a petty clerk at a government office will stop accepting bribes in the new denominations out of some nostalgia for the old currency. Neither is demonetisation going to suddenly inculcate civic sense where people will happily pay a fine rather than get away with a bribe at a fraction of the cost. In any case, for larger transactions there are always other ways to pay bribes: foreign bank accounts and gemstones being just two.

India Currency Overhaul

Meanwhile, as the government slowly realizes that demonetisation will have an adverse impact on the upcoming state elections in Punjab and UP, local BJP workers have started to overplay the terrorism card. There is no doubt that terrorist networks often operate with cash so as to not leave a trail behind but the fact remains that these very same networks also have trans-national actors and other states backing them who will merely switch to another currency: real or even virtual, like bit-coins. So the fact remains that while the demonetisation might make a temporary dent in criminal organisations, it is not going to do anything more in the long term. Indeed, the whole terrorism discourse is actually manifesting itself in communal way on the ground where in parts of western UP, which is already largely divided along Hindu-Muslim lines, the presence of women in burqas in bank lines is being deduced as some kind of massive money laundering ploy by ‘terrorist’ organisations.

As it happens, most of the people involved in the informal cash economy in Western UP are Muslims and so their families are coming out in large numbers to deposit cash. This is not only being equated with them hoarding black money but also resonates with the old adage that ‘all Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.’ And so the whispering campaign has begun where common people, frustrated by the demonetisation, have yet again found the mysterious, visible yet invisible ‘other’ onto which they peg their problems, rather than facing the reality that the government’s policies are fundamentally the cause of their current problems. The resentment bourn out of this will no doubt benefit those who are seeking to communalize and divide the electorate as various states go to the polls.

Terrorism, by its very nature, is present everywhere and yet nowhere because it is largely grounded in a fear that the terrorist can strike anywhere at anytime. This trope lends itself well to misdirecting people’s insecurities as well as public anger. The spectre of terrorism combined with a false sense of nationalism- the comical equivalence drawn between standing in a bank queue and defending the borders- has meant that people have willingly ignored the cold hard reality of demonetisation and have sought to justify it by invoking emotional and moralistic arguments. Ultimately, demonetisation, like most anti-corruption measures, only adds another obstacle or impasse that has to be negotiated by those who seek to bypass the system. Real measures involve institutional reform but these rarely pay the political dividends that populism, at least in the short-term, guarantees.

o o o

The Times of India - November 23, 2016

QUIXOTIC QUEST? PAIN FROM DEMONETISATION IS TANGIBLE, GAINS APPEAR OUT OF REACH
TOI Editorial

As India’s painful cash queues stretch on endlessly, data from RBI suggests why. It managed to release by Monday currency notes worth Rs 1.36 lakh crore, which is less than 10% of the value rendered illegal by the November 8 demonetisation. India’s cash requirement is estimated at Rs 10 lakh crore, which will need seven more weeks to be met if currency notes are released at the current rate. Secrecy has clearly trumped preparation for the big demonetisation move; implementation is turning into a logistical nightmare.

Apart from the suffering caused to vulnerable sections of the population such as migrant labourers, farmers, senior citizens and those employed in the informal sector, a cash drought running into nine weeks will likely cut economic growth and jobs over the next year. Even the government expects that growth over the next two quarters will take a hit. While the gains from demonetisation are nebulous – black money will not go away as long as wildly unrealistic spending caps on election campaign funding are allowed to stay in place – the pain is tangible and not about to go away easily.

When India was supposed to enter a brave new 21st century era demonetisation appears to have catapulted us back into the pre-liberalisation days of the 1970s – characterised by a shortage economy, unending queues and exhortations to citizens to sacrifice for patriotic reasons. While the late 1960s and 1970s were characterised by radical, supposedly pro-poor moves such as nationalisation of banks and other industries, it does feel now as if people’s money has been partially nationalised, as they spend much of the working day standing in queues to withdraw as little as Rs 2,000 of what is, after all, their own money.

An economy is a delicate mechanism and radical disruptions can create any number of unintended effects rippling across different domains. For example, if truckers are stalled due to a cash shortage, that could translate into rampant inflation in the prices of food and essential commodities in cities. If a referendum were held today demonetisation may still be popular as the notion of striking against black money elicits sympathy from people. But, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in another context, this is just the beginning. As the economic damage from the move becomes clearer, Modi and the NDA government could have all their work cut out managing its political fallout.

 ==

SEE ALSO: 

In India, Black Money Makes for Bad Policy by  Kaushik Basu in The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/opinion/in-india-black-money-makes-for-bad-policy.html?_r=0

Wrecking the system By V. SRIDHAR
http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/wrecking-the-system/article9373779.ece

India’s Demonetization “Shock Therapy”: State Sponsored Financial Repression By Sridhar Chakravarthi Raman
http://www.globalresearch.ca/indias-demonetization-shock-therapy-state-sponsored-financial-repression/5559182

Demonetisation: PM Modi Acted Without Updated Facts and Figuresby PRABHA JAGANNATHAN 
http://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/OldNewsPage/?Id=9294&Demonetisation:/PM/Modi/Acted/Without/Updated/Facts/and/Figures

India rupee crisis: the false dawn of a cashless society by Aritra Bhattacharya 
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/the-review/india-rupee-crisis-the-false-dawn-of-a-cashless-society

Foreign investors pull out close to $5 billion so far in November on demonetisation drive
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/foreign-investors-pull-out-close-to-5-billion-so-far-in-november-on-demonetisation-drive/articleshow/55648776.cms

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta / Did Modi receive over ₹55 crore from the Sahara Group as the chief minister of Gujarat?
http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/47/web-exclusives/did-modi-receive-rs-55-crore-sahara-group-gujarat-cm.html

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17. THE DECLINE OF INDIA’S UNIVERSITIES IS AN ATTACK ON THE YOUNG AND NATION | Anuradha Chenoy
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(Hindustan Times - Nov 23, 2016)

The belief that the rot in universities comes from student politics is mistaken (HT Photo)

India has been internationally known for its great learning centres but many of the State universities face serious decline today, disappointing students and teachers. Many are performing poorly and do not have adequate opportunities to do research . Others that are better in research and performance face delegitimisation for being ‘different’. Universities generate ideas, inform citizens and form the basis of a democracy. They need urgent and appropriate attention.

All Indian governments — past and present — claim human resources and knowledge are precious assets. But when it comes to investing in these universities, they are lacking.

One problem is that successive governments use public universities for political and personal patronage. The political class has always tried to usurp university positions ‘for their own,’ starting from the top positions. The ‘open position’ is often seen as a placement opportunity for favoured clients of politicians, political parties and powerful individuals. Good universities have tried to resist this, but have not always succeeded. This has often led to a choice of candidate who has a patron as opposed to the one who has better teaching abilities. The earlier power elite did this, the current one believes that their turn for this ‘fix’ has finally arrived. So it goes on.

Why blame the politicians only? Public universities are often held hostage by the bureaucracy in the form of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and other bodies. Many committees have been appointed to look into courses, appointment guidelines, scholarship exams, qualification criteria, etc. The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education (Yashpal Committee) made some good suggestions such as giving more autonomy to teachers and students, increasing funding, bringing state and central universities on a par with creative measures, bringing liberal arts into technology institutes and assisting more research in universities. It also recommended that the UGC be replaced by a national higher education authority, since it was felt that it was beyond reform.

Similarly, the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) suggested an independent regulatory authority for higher education which would ensure the autonomy and freedom for knowledge creation and dissemination and avoid conflict of interest . All the good, the controversial and the valid suggestions of these various committees have been shelved. Now another education committee has been set up.

The Supreme Court set up the controversial Lyngdoh Commission to curb student activism and elections in campuses. The belief that the rot in universities comes from student politics is mistaken. Student activism is part of the national political activism as long as it is balanced with academics. Leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, AB Vajpayee, Sitaram Yechury and Arun Jaitley — to name a few — were honed by student activism. So to put unreasonable curbs like being elected only once appear rather draconian.

Now the most major assault on universities comes from a set of ideas — termed neo-liberal — that propose: Cuts in social and public spending on education; outsourcing research to non-teaching research institutes and think tanks while the universities’ focus is put on teaching. Even though teaching barely counts for purposes of promotion or accreditation, the emphasis is on skills and vocations in tandem with downgrading social sciences; rejecting critical thinking and dissent, and making an attempt to reverse autonomy; emphasising technology without looking at the philosophy of science; encouraging expensive private and foreign universities; and so on.

Indian universities face an attempt at homogenisation that includes injecting ‘neo-nationalism’ into syllabi, as if the former was anti-national. The truth is that most of the university syllabi has been reviewed by generations of scholars though some may need upgrading. There is also a prevailing false consciousness that assumes social sciences is subversive and thus we hear arguments like: “Make JNU into IIT”. Funding support for technology and not science, skills and management courses is a ploy to depoliticise, control critical thinking and dissent. If this view prevails it will undo academia as a whole.

Great thinkers and teachers from Socrates to Einstein have stood for autonomous universities. Nobel laureate JM Coetzee and Henry Giroux argued that a university “is nothing if it is not a public trust and social good”. And if a university loses its critical insights, modes of questioning, struggles for social, economic and other justices, it loses its reality.

Indian universities can be revived if development is on our agenda. For this universities should be made accountable to the public. This accountability has to start from vice-chancellors, directors, principals of colleges and education bureaucrats to each layer of the academic system. Universities must have autonomy with social responsibility. They must expand to include the marginalised in terms of gender, caste and communities. They need funding and support. The VCs and principals should be agents of the university/college and not of the political regime.

There should be no externally dictated agendas on university functioning. Higher education needs to be expanded, the Knowledge Commission had recommended a 100 new universities. Let us start with at least 20. The private universities must come under public scrutiny with regard to standards.

Old reports on education should be looked at and the best suggestions should form a consensus by the political class and public as a whole and be implemented. This is the only way to save universities and save democracy.

The decline of universities is an attack on the young people and the nation. There is a need to revitalise Indian universities. Reconstructing the university to suit a particular brand of politics is a rejection of the centuries-old accumulated wisdom and plural heritages. This will not be forgiven. The rethinking on universities must be a collective responsibility.

Anuradha Chenoy is professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The views expressed are personal 

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18. ROHINGYAS: IT’S A CASE OF STATE POLICY-FEEDING TERROR - Editorial, Hindustan Times 
========================================
(Hindustan Times - Nov 27, 2016)

The world does not lack a shortage of humanitarian crises but among the most alarming and most neglected is the oppression of the Rohingyas, Myanmar’s Muslim minority. It is not only because the oppression is state-sponsored and because it has a brutal ethnic cleansing as its primary goal. There is good reason to believe it could metastasize into a full-blown case of genocide. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has warned that the present wave of violence by the Myanmar military includes mass murders, physical assaults and rapes followed by the physical burning of entire villages. Thousands of Rohingyas have fled to Bangladesh, which recently closed its borders to further refugees. Presumably other Rohingyas have taken to the sea as they have done in the past.

The provocation for the latest spike in violence is an attack, supposedly by a militant Rohingya group, that left nine Myanmar border guards dead last month. While the killing was reprehensible, the violent response by the Myanmar army is also reprehensible in every way: it is collectively punishing an entire ethnic group, there was no attempt to determine who was guilty of the attack and it is almost certainly disproportionate. There is a strong sense that Naypyidaw seeks any ready excuse to oppress its Muslim minority — or at times no excuse at all.

The international community seems to have put all its hopes in Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel peace prize-winner and global human rights icon. However, Suu Kyi seems to have concluded that given the antipathy of her people to the Rohingyas and her delicate relationship with the military, her best policy is silence and passivity. The world needs to find other means to pressure the Myanmar military in particular. This has its own problems. At the time of a growing great power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific, Myanmar holds an especially pivotal position. Countries like India and Japan, focused on constructing east-west connectivity as a response to China’s north-south plans for Southeast Asia, are wary of bearding Myanmar on such issues. China has no interest whatsoever of raising human rights issues with any country anywhere. Combined with the belief that Myanmar is going to be the next Asian tiger economy, the result leaves Naypyidaw sitting pretty. A collective response is needed to neutralise this geopolitical conundrum. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations and perhaps South Asian countries like India and Bangladesh should consider engaging on how to offer a united front to Naypyidaw on the Rohingya issue. Malaysia and Indonesia have already begun taking more openly critical stances, but have constrained the debate by treating it as a matter of Islamophobia. New Delhi should begin to take closer note. If nothing else, there is now considerable evidence of the Rohingyas being recruited by Islamicist terror groups and Myanmar’s policies are directly responsible for this.

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19. BOOK REVIEW: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF BANGLADESH
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(The Daily Star - 28 November 2016)

Author: Ali Riaz || (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016) pp. 317

Reviewed By Ahrar Ahmad

THERE is an entirely justifiable lament in Bangladesh regarding the lack of sound scholarly materials on the country, particularly those produced by Bangladeshi academics themselves. While some disciplines, such as economics, have managed to produce work of high quality and relevance, most other areas in the social sciences and the humanities have been a bit wanting. Except for the determined efforts of some individuals (e.g., Prof. Rounaq Jahan and a few others), Political Science has remained among the low performers in the contemporary period. Not only is original research and scholarship on the subject a bit sketchy and scattered, even a reliable and readable book on the political history of Bangladesh is not readily available. In his latest book, Prof Ali Riaz, one of the few political scientists whose intellectual engagement with the country has been persistent, sophisticated and productive, satisfies that last need in a most commendable manner.

Bangladesh presents a very interesting challenge for scholars particularly in the context of the “paradoxes” it reflects. This is a country that had been established through a brutal and intense liberation war inspired by some lofty ideals about constitutionalism, secularism and social justice which witnessed those principles gradually becoming complicated, if not compromised,over time. This is a country that is predominantly Muslim but has a fairly well established history of tolerance and inclusiveness, has a touching and, often, assertive faith in democracy, and repeatedly chooses women to head its governments. This is a country that is mired in corruption, inefficiency, political polarization and weak governance but, nonetheless, enjoys a fairly lively pace of economic development, significantly lowers the rate of poverty, and has made substantial progress in improving the quality of life of the people as measured through various social indicators. Riaz seeks to unravel some of these puzzles.

At one level the book, particularly the first three chapters, is a fairly brisk introduction to the society and politics of Bangladesh from its emergence as an independent country in 1971 till more recent times. There is a brief history of “Bengali” nationalism as a response to the economic disparity, cultural insensitivity and political injustice that the Pakistani ruling classes had inflicted. The author then proceeds to describe the country's political evolution after its independence – its struggles to establish democracy and occasional experience of militaryor semi-authoritarian rule, the emergence and consolidation of new regimes, the policy and ideological spaces they tended to occupy, and conflicts over political power sometimes expressed in rhetorically bombastic and strategically cynical ways. That history is complex, at times a bit messy. Nonetheless, it is presented with admirable detachment and objectivity.

But the book is not a mere chronological account of events and leadership changes. In the second part of the book, encompassing the last four chapters, Riaz explores several themes that are essential to an understanding of Bangladesh today. First, he discusses the nature and quality,as well as the challenges and trends, of democracy through a thorough review of the extant literature in reference to the results of various pertinent public opinion surveys, electoral data, and the delineation of different regime types. Second, he draws upon his previous and well-respected work on the schizophrenic malaise of Bangladeshis as they are torn between embracing their religious or their linguistic-cultural identity, the politicization of this issue, and the rise and influence of extremism and intolerance in the country. Third, he analyses the confusing situation regarding the large number of political parties in Bangladesh, particularly the contradictory tendencies towards fragmentation and their simultaneous enthusiasm for (at times opportunistic) alliance formations. And finally hetries to identify the factors which have fueled the “engine” of economic development in Bangladesh against, what many would consider to be, insurmountable odds. In all of this, Riaz demonstrates his command of the available material and his considerable skill in weaving them together in coherent and elegant ways.

There are a few, hopefully constructive, suggestions that may be offered. First, there are some intriguing silences in the book that are a bit unusual from a writer otherwise so perceptive and compassionate. Women's role in development work is mentioned, but gender issues either in terms of the structural inequities women suffer, or the routine physical and psychological traumas they have to endure, are not given adequate space. Similarly, some attention to the violence in the country driven by partisan, communal, or class considerations (sometimes all three simultaneously), or environmental concerns and mobilizations, or Bangladesh's location in a globalized structure of production and exchange (particularly its relationship with its neighbors) and so on, may have added to the book's comprehensiveness.

Second, one of the greatest merits of the book is that it presents a formidable compilation of appropriate information(including survey data, electoral results, development indicators, dates/names relevant to important events, and so on). But the efforts at explanation may, at times, be a bit uneven. For example, the chapter on Democracy is both empirically and theoretically rich and unique. However, the one on “Unpacking the Paradox of Development” suffers in comparison because the author relies on the traditional trisect of causes usually cited as relevant to Bangladesh's economic accomplishments – generous remittances from abroad, the burgeoning RMG sector, and resourceful NGO activism. Perhaps some reference to the conditions in which these three opportunities came about, the specific reasons that led to their success, the current challenges or future prospects they face, and other factors contributing to economic growth, may have made the discussion more consistent with the standards he himself has set elsewhere.

It must be remembered that a book which is an overall survey of political history of a country cannot possibly be all things to all people, and there are limits to the explanatory frameworks that may be marshaled. To criticize a book for what it does not contain is probably a bit churlish. What it does contain is most impressive. The language is judicious, the analysis rigorous, the insights astute, the research exhaustive. Those studying Bangladesh, or just interested in knowing about the country, should be grateful to Riaz.  Political scientists should feel proud and, in some ways, vindicated.

The reviewer is Prof. Emeritus, Black Hills State University, USA and Director, Gyantapas Abdur Razzaq Foundation, Dhaka. 

Email:ahrar.ahmad at bhsu.edu

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20. DILEEP PADGAONKAR: A SPARKLING JOURNALIST WHO LIVED HIS LIFE WITHOUT FUSS
by Anikendra Nath Sen
========================================
(The Hindustan Times - Nov 26, 2016)

Padgaonkar passed away at a private hospital in Pune where he was brought in a critical condition last week. (AP)

Dileep Padgaonkar went very much the way he lived his life, quietly and without any fuss. To say that India has lost one of its most sparkling journalistic talents is to diminish his many talents and the myriad dimensions of his personality. For me, this is a huge personal loss as we have been friends virtually all our adult lives. We got particularly close after I began working with him in the Times of India, first putting together the Sunday Times of India and then as Resident Editor of the Times of India in the early nineties, but our friendship which began well before lasted till his all too early exit from this world on Friday, November 25, 2016. He was my closest friends and a great mentor to my sons.

Read: Dileep Padgaonkar, journalist and Kashmir peace interlocutor, dies at 72

For those who did not know him or know much about him, he began as a cub reporter at the age of 24 in what was then called the Pune Herald. Over a “couple of stiff ones” of an evening he recalled his great scoop that traced the antecedents of one Dr Stephen Ward to Pune. Ward was a key figure in the celebrated “Christine Keeler” sexcapade case that brought down the government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963. The scoop brought the then sensational Blitz weekly to Dileep’s doorstep, in the shape of one Captain Colabavala investigative journalist par excellance who eventually parted with a 100 rupee note, a princely sum in those days and now once again in high demand. He told me: “My old school friend Farook Dhondy found out and we first drove around in Colabavala’s ship sized American convertible astounding Poonaites all round and then proceeded to drink and eat our way through most of that 100 Rupees.” That was Dileep all round.

After his doctorate from the Sorbonne in June 1968, he joined the Times of India as its Paris correspondent, from where he chronicled the epoch-making May ’68 Movement that spread swiftly through all of Europe---East and West. With a few years between us and then unknown to each other Dileep and I were witness to a world in joyful ferment often with tragic endings be it anti-Vietnam war protests worldwide or Naxlaites being shot dead in fake encounters in India.

Dileep took off from Times of India to serve a stint at Unesco (1978-86) --- first in Bangkok and later at the HQ in Paris. A close aide to Unesco’s colourful secretary general, Amadou-Mahtar M’bow, he was instrumental in setting up the controversial non-aligned newspool much despised by some Western powers and embraced warmly by newly emerging nations.

He returned to the Times of India in 1986 and became its editor two years later. As editor, he presided over what was arguably India’s finest editorial team, representing viewpoints that encompassed virtually every conceivable political, economic and indeed philosophical angle. The Times saw great changes in this period including the introduction of the Sunday Times, a second section covering lighter areas and so on.

Dileep and some of us left the Times in 1994 in a restless search to do something of our own and that naturally in journalism. We did a lot of television for Doordarshan in our early days as a fledgling media venture. We had adventures galore producing a breakfast show in Kashmiri with Kashmiris in Srinagar. The adventures continued in Nepal and Mauritius with three newspapers in English, Nepali and French. A Legion d’Honneur (France’s highest civilian award) he floored everybody in Mauritius with his many different accents in French. With a pretence of contempt on his face he told me the French-speaking “aristocracy” in Mauritius were nothing more than provincial Bretons who fled during the French Revolution and never returned long enough to acquire the unparalleled (for him) qualities of modern France. He deliberately spoke to them in the slang spoken only by people in Paris.

Read: Dileep Padgaonkar believed in human creativity and wanted to change the world

Dileep was twice selected to examine the issues affecting Jammu and Kashmir, once in a team headed by Ram Jethmalani when Atal Behari Vajpayee was PM and later in 2010 in a three-member panel of interlocutors. Sadly the recommendations of the latter which entailed full-fledged devolution of powers, especially financial, right down to the Panchayat level all over the state, was not implemented either by the UPA government nor the present BJP-led one. But then that’s the way of all governments.

He and I along with others set up our own independent media venture in 1994 and it was his presence that saw us through difficult days. The success of our venture is a testimony to his efforts and inputs through all these years.

I have rarely come across anyone with such a vast and eclectic taste in reading. His fluency in French meant he could read most of the original works of France’s great thinkers in their language. He was a personal friend of some of the greatest thinkers of our time like Andre Malraux, Isaiah Berlin and Claude Levi Strauss. His friends among academia, the world of film, gastronomy and politics are too vast for me to enumerate. His knowledge of music too was stupendous. His ability to mimic in a variety of languages and accents used to keep us in stitches in our evenings all over from Delhi to Kathmandu to Rose Hill in Mauritius and Bangkok in Thailand! My colleagues and I were the privileged few who enjoyed the wit and humour of Dileep Padgaonkar, a rare honour since oftentimes he maintained a poker faced solemnity before the outside world.

One of the things that bound us was a common love for food. Dileep was ever in search of that elusive recipe and it was his plan to create a map of India based on dals, achars-murabbas and papads, similar to the wine and cheese maps of France. Food was a subject which fascinated him and about which he would speak with rare eloquence. For a man who had eaten at the high table of the finest gourmet chefs in Europe, he could be remarkably simple in his taste on occasion. Much of our time before we visited each other would be spent on discussing where to eat to which Dileep would add his dazzling knowledge of the right wine pairing.

Writing on someone with whom I had made many plans, most of them impractical but enjoyable to discuss, like buying land on an island in a river in Goa and waking up to the bicycle bell of the daily fish seller is the most painful task for me on this most difficult of days in my life. Dileep was a raconteur extraordinaire and his stories enthralled his peers and juniors alike. His vast knowledge of Hindustani classical music, he was a fine singer, and intimacy with the Vedas earned him unlikely admirers across the globe. Yet, he was a secularist to the core, a person who understood the real meaning of Hinduism so unlike the interpretations by so-called scholars we hear and see today. He had a magnificent sense of humour and his seemingly laconic manner hid a deep concern on a gamut of issues ranging from the rise of the far right across the world to the growing alienation of Kashmir against which he fought so hard to be heard.

Both journalism and public life had a lot more to gain from Dileep Padgaonkar but that is not to be. I can see him in my mind’s eye, ever the Francophile, with his jaunty beret and omnipresent muffler, sometimes replaced by a Peshwa pagdi or a Rana topi, his favourite books clutched in one hand. Well Dileep, au revoir till we meet again drink in hand, song on lip and mischievous glint in eye!

Anikendra Nath (Badshah) Sen is chairman, Asia Pacific Communication Associates and a senior journalist 

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21. FIDEL CASTRO
=======

"Fidel, Fidel, the people are grateful
for words in action and deeds that sing,
that is why I bring from far
a cup of my country’s wine:
it is the blood of a subterranean people
that from the shadows reaches your throat,
they are miners who have lived for centuries
extracting fire from the frozen land.

They go beneath the sea for coal
but on returning they are like ghosts:
they grew accustomed to eternal night,
the working-day light was robbed from them,
nevertheless here is the cup
of so much suffering and distances:
the happiness of imprisoned men
possessed by darkness and illusions
who from the inside of mines perceive
the arrival of spring and its fragrances
because they know that Man is struggling
to reach the amplest clarity.

And Cuba is seen by the Southern miners,
the lonely sons of la pampa,
the shepherds of cold in Patagonia,
the fathers of tin and silver,
the ones who marry cordilleras
extract the copper from Chuquicamata,
men hidden in buses
in populations of pure nostalgia,
women of the fields and workshops,
children who cried away their childhoods:
this is the cup, take it, Fidel.

It is full of so much hope
that upon drinking you will know your victory
is like the aged wine of my country
made not by one man but by many men
and not by one grape but by many plants:
it is not one drop but many rivers:
not one captain but many battles.

And they support you because you represent
the collective honor of our long struggle,
and if Cuba were to fall we would all fall,
and we would come to lift her,
and if she blooms with flowers
she will flourish with our own nectar.

And if they dare touch Cuba’s
forehead, by your hands liberated,
they will find people’s fists,
we will take out our buried weapons:
blood and pride will come to rescue,
to defend our beloved Cuba."

Autor: Neruda, Pablo

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22. A REQUIEM FOR A REVOLUTIONARY: WILL HISTORY ABSOLVE FIDEL CASTRO?
by Deepak Bhojwani
========================================
There is no bust of Fidel Castro in Cuba, but he has earned his place in history
http://thewire.in/82890/a-requiem-for-a-revolutionary-will-history-absolve-fidel-castro/#disqus_thread

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23. THE VOICE OF THE THIRD WORLD
by Vijay Prashad
========================================
You cannot kill ideas. Castro, for the Third World, was not merely another leader. He was the mirror of its aspirations. That mirror is now shattered.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/The-voice-of-the-Third-World/article16711547.ece?homepage=true

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24. CUBA’S HEALTH CARE SYSTEM: A MODEL FOR THE WORLD
by Salim Lamrani
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(Huffington Post - Oct 08, 2014)
According to the UN’s World Health Organization, Cuba’s health care system is an example for all countries of the world.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/salim-lamrani/cubas-health-care-system-_b_5649968.html

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25. . FOREIGN EXCHANGE - TWO INADVERTENTLY RELATED CLASSICS OF POLISH AND HINDI LITERATURE
by Keshava Guha
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Caravan - 1 November 2016

Nirmal Verma, like the unnamed narrator of Ve Din, spent many years in Prague, first as a student of Czech, and then as a translator.

TWO NOVELS THAT APPEARED within two years of each other in the mid 1960s—one set in Czechoslovakia and written in Hindi, the other set in north India and written in Polish—are like literary half-siblings. It is difficult to think of two books simultaneously so alike and so dissimilar. The first, Nirmal Verma’s Ve Din (translated into English, by Krishna Baldev Vaid, as Days of Longing), was published in 1964. The setting is Communist-era Prague, the narrator an Indian student. Wojciech Żukrowski’s Kamienne tablice (Stone Tablets, in the English translation from the Polish, by Stephanie Kraft), appeared in 1966. Its protagonist, Istvan Terey, is a Hungarian consular official in Delhi in the mid 1950s.

Both novels are products of an era of cultural exchange between India and the Eastern Bloc that began in the 1950s. Verma, like his nameless narrator, spent many years in Prague, first as a student of Czech, and subsequently as a translator. In 1959, he was invited by the Czech Institute of Oriental Studies to initiate a programme of translation of modern Czech fiction into Hindi, and he lived in Prague until 1968. Żukrowski was a cultural attaché in Delhi, like Istvan Terey, though, unlike his protagonist, he was with not the Hungarian embassy but the Polish one, from 1956 to 1959.

Verma and Żukrowski were both Communists who grew disillusioned with the Soviet Union after its violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Verma left the Communist Party of India in protest, and whatever socialism he retained dissipated in the face of the material deprivation and social repression that he witnessed in Prague in the 1960s. He returned to India convinced that socialism and communism did not hold the answers to his own country’s problems and, from the Emergency onwards, was a vocal critic of Indira Gandhi. Żukrowski, who lived in a society in which the range of views a writer could express was circumscribed, never fully broke with Communism. But in the 1960s, the two writers occupied essentially identical positions on the anti-Stalinist Left.

Reduce them to plot summaries, and the similarities between the books are startling. Both are, at core, romances—Days of Longing is little else. Each follows the relationship between its protagonist and a foreign woman who is new to the place, and thus knows him first as a guide and interpreter before they become lovers. Both women—the Austrian Raina Ramon in Days of Longing, and the Australian Margit Ward in Stone Tablets—are haunted by memories of the Second World War, in which Raina survived a concentration camp and Margit lost her fiancé. Our heroes are both laconic, ironic observers of life who are transformed into passionately, even cloyingly expressive sentimentalists at the sight of the women they love. And the outcomes of both romances are telegraphed more or less from the outset of each book: they are doomed.

But regarded as novels, rather than merely as plots, the two books could scarcely be less alike. Stone Tablets is a romantic melodrama, and a novel of cultural explanation that seeks to summarise India for Polish readers. The central romance is drawn out and padded with social and political detail, yielding a 700-page novel whose action can be summarised in a paragraph. Days of Longing, in Vaid’s translation, clocks in at barely 40,000 words, and the bulk of its action takes place over a week. There is no want of specific detail: the book presents a fully formed and historically grounded Prague. But nowhere does Verma address his Hindi readers in the voice of the travel writer or the ethnographer.

Half a century after their publication, Stone Tablets and Days of Longing remain popular classics in their original languages. Days of Longing was reissued as a Penguin Classic in 2013—the translation first appeared in 1972, from Hind Pocket Books—but has yet to find a substantial English-language readership. Stone Tablets appeared in English for the first time this year, from the Philadelphia-based small press Paul Dry Books. There are no immediate plans for an Indian edition. This is a pity, for even though, unlike Days of Longing, Żukrowski’s novel is of limited literary worth, it certainly has value as a historical document, and is revealing both of the India of the 1950s and a Western perspective that is neither Anglophone nor remotely colonial. This sets it apart from the English-language novels about the same period by Paul Scott, Aubrey Menen, Rumer Godden and John Masters—Żukrowski is unconcerned with the residues of Independence and Partition or with the situation of the few remaining Britons or Anglo-Indians. (While one of his characters, Grace Vijayaveda, has an English mother, she is part of elite Indian, rather than Anglo-Indian, society.) And Żukrowski’s lens, unlike those writers’, is uncomplicatedly that of the disinterested outsider. The mere existence of a bestselling epic novel of 1950s India, later adapted in 1984 into a Polish film, that is almost wholly unknown in this country and was unavailable in English for 50 years (though it was translated earlier, like many of Żukrowski’s other novels, into Czech and German), is a story worth revisiting.

WOJCIECH UKROWSKI WAS BORN IN 1916 in Krakow, in the south of Poland. During the Second World War, while Poland was under Nazi occupation, he worked in a limestone quarry with Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, and was a clandestine member of the Polish resistance. The two would remain friends and correspondents until Żukrowski’s death, in 2000. After the war, Żukrowski became a journalist, and reported on the last days of French Indochina. His subsequent years in Delhi may have helped shape his political thinking, but it was not until Stone Tablets that he emerged as an anti-Stalinist.

The choice of a Hungarian, rather than a Pole, as the novel’s protagonist is best understood in terms of the book’s politics—both in the use of commentary on the Hungarian uprising as a vehicle for opposition to the Soviet Union, as well as an attempt to avoid any accusation of having criticised his own Party bosses. The book was finished in 1965, but its publication was blocked by censors until the intervention of Wladyslaw Gomulka, the first secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party (the ruling communist party of Poland), who personally ordered its approval in 1966. Żukrowski went on to have a prolific and commercially successful career as a writer: he published 44 books of fiction and journalism.

The novel opens with the wedding, to a raja, of the improbably named Grace Vijayaveda—when it comes to Indian names, Żukrowski is on especially uncertain ground—a half-English heiress with whom Istvan Terey, our hero, has been having an affair. They make love one final time, and we encounter Istvan’s tendency to regard women with a morbid combination of passion and anxiety. But the opening is an act of misdirection: the wedding is notable only as the occasion for Istvan to meet Margit Ward. Like Grace, she is an heiress, the daughter of an Australian wool manufacturer, who has come to India to work for the United Nations as an ophthalmologist.

The novel follows the course of Istvan and Margit’s increasingly obsessive affair. At first he is her guide to the low and high life of Delhi. Appropriately enough, for a novel that aims to convey the sights of India to the Polish reader, her work treating the victims of a trachoma epidemic takes her, and thus Istvan, to the tourist magnets of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. But the romance is destined to be the victim of politics. Istvan’s bosses in the Hungarian embassy are openly suspicious of his affair with a woman from a capitalist country; and while he rages against Stalinism and imperialism, and dreams of abandoning the wife and sons who await him back in Hungary, to move to Australia with Margit, the reader, unlike his lover, senses that he never truly intends to act on these fancies. When not following Margit around the country, Istvan cultivates a diverse circle of Indian friends: from Grace’s father, the Uttar Pradesh industrialist Vijayaveda; to the struggling painter Ram Kanval; to Jay Motal (another unlikely name), who, in a delicious inversion of Żukrowski’s own position, hopes to be sent to Hungary to write a book for Indian readers, in Malayalam or English, on the greatness of the Hungarian Communist project.

Stone Tablets is a book of puzzling, often frustrating contradictions: simultaneously a sophisticated and learned political novel and a pulpy, obese love story. It is rare to encounter a novel in which fine and bad writing coexist in such regular and close proximity. The descriptive prose can be sublime, or cruelly observant:

In front of the fishbowl that was the doorman’s lodge a short servant with thin legs like a crane was sprinkling the gravel drive from a watering can, deluding himself that he was protecting it from the haze of dust that had settled on the leaves. The doorman slept with his forehead on his hand; his hair hung in glistening coils on the back of his bent neck.

When it comes to women, however, and Margit above all, the writing is a horrific compendium of juvenile sentimentality. Take this: “Incessantly, like the droning of bees, happiness sang in him: I love her neck, her lips, her little ear brightened by a streak of rose-tinted sunlight. He was choking with a tenderness beyond measure.” Or: “The shadow of a smile flitted over her opulent lips, the full lips he had smothered in kisses.”

Istvan and Margit’s love affair can be such painful going that it obscures Żukrowski’s fascinating portrayal of India. This, too, resists generalisation: it alternates between the sorts of lazy cliches presumably intended to satisfy the expectations of his audience, and the kinds of insight that speak of a genuine knowledge of and love for the country. On the former count, there are descriptions, on almost every page, of heat, dust and pungent smells; camels that move “in stately procession”; funeral pyres; and thieving servants. This aspect of the book is well summarised by the publisher’s unintentionally condemnatory jacket copy: “Draining heat, brilliant color, intense smells and intrusive animals enliven this sweeping Cold War romance.” Often the trite and the striking sit next to each other: “The odor of drains, of rotten peelings and steaming urine, beat into the nostrils. The three-story houses, solidly built below but with casually knocked together upper floors, pulsed with life.”

Against the cliches can be set Istvan’s own penetrating observations and, of even more interest to today’s Indian reader, those of his native interlocutors. Delhi “is just an oversized village. Rumors fly around faster than pigeons.” In India, “Thanks in the form of a word or a smile would be a sign of weakness, a breakdown of authority. In this country one said thank you with money.” Istvan is in the habit of provoking his hosts, often with barbs of remarkable prescience. On one occasion he argues that what India really needs is to be invaded by the Chinese:

“They would organize your life. They would teach you to work.” This at the peak of Nehru’s friendly overtures to China, with his slogan of Hindi-Chini bhai bhai, and three decades before India’s industrial rise. Vijayaveda has the Indian industrialist’s familiar habit of making sweeping pronouncements. Socialism is “an antiquated nineteenth-century economic theory elevated to the dignity of a philosophy.” The Second World War was very good for India; for all the millions that died of famine, “there are enough of us left.” What is common to all these statements is how contemporary they sound. While there are dozens of references to the specific events of 1956, a remarkable proportion of the characters’ opinions would not be out of place in a Delhi drawing room 60 years later.

IN MARKED CONTRAST to Stone Tablets, the Czechoslovakia of Days of Longing is rendered with a remarkable lack of ceremony. The setting is no more explicitly exotic than if it were some non-Hindi-speaking Indian city, such as Ahmedabad or Bhubaneswar: or, rather, its foreignness is taken as given. Prague’s geography and sights are described with the easy confidence of a local flâneur, rather than with a foreigner’s instinct for documentation: “The top of Petřín looked pink, transforming the time for a moment into a summer evening,” he says of the hill that rises over central Prague; at another point, he observes that “It had rained slightly, just enough to wash the roofs of the city clean.” The narrator’s identity as an Indian is eventually revealed—one character calls him “Indy,” the closest he comes to possessing a name. But even observations that speak to his origins do so in a manner so offhand and unobtrusive as to be scarcely visible: “I didn’t like the damp stink of overcoats that always reminded me of the stink of sweat. Snow and sweat lose their difference after mixing with people’s dirty clothes.”

Verma is perhaps best known as a short-story writer—unlike in European languages, as the literary historian Rupert Snell points out in a review of one of Verma’s collections, in Hindi the kahani, rather than the novel, has been the dominant genre of prose fiction. Verma’s first collection, Parinde (Birds), published in 1959 and written in the period immediately preceding his Prague years, is often seen as having inaugurated the Nayi Kahani or New Story movement. Nayi Kahaniwriters, such as Mohan Rakesh, Rajendra Yadav, Kamleshwar and Bhisham Sahni, created a new Hindi literature of middle-class urban life, with a particular interest in the changing relations between men and women in independent, industrial India.

Throughout his career, and despite his political activism, Verma stood apart from his contemporaries in the extent to which his books were concerned with individual psychology rather than politics or society. Days of Longing exemplifies another distinctive feature of Verma’s work: his use of European settings. This can only partially be traced to work as a translator in Prague. Verma was not the only Hindi writer to have spent time in the Eastern Bloc or in the West. Among his peers, Bhisham Sahni was based in Moscow from 1956 to 1963, translating Russian literature into Hindi. Verma’s translator, Krishna Baldev Vaid, himself a distinguished Hindi writer, moved between India and the United States, doing a PhD on Henry James at Harvard and later teaching at Brandeis and SUNY Potsdam.

But Verma’s fiction is marked to an unmatched extent by his years in Europe. As Snell writes, “Verma shakes himself free of the culture-bound contexts of much contemporary Indian fiction and writes in a style accessible to a wider readership”—“wider” meaning, here, one beyond India. At a time when writers were often expected to have firm political commitments, many of Verma’s contemporaries lamented his choice of subjects while admiring his talent. As Vaid wrote in an obituary—in the form of a letter—for Verma, published in Outlook magazine in 2005, “During those years you were often berated by your detractors for your ‘foreignness’ or ‘un-Indianness’ but even your adversaries conceded to you your artistic and intellectual rigour.”

Despite their very different approaches to their political contexts, Verma and Żukrowski’s novels share a sense of socialist scarcity. The Czechoslovakia of Days of Longing is a country in which a bottle of Slivovitz is an immense luxury; in Stone Tablets, the material contrast between Istvan’s situation and Margit’s is always apparent. Both novels use foreign cigarettes to stand in for the riches of the West; both the narrator of Days of Longing and Jay Motal in Stone Tablets use their access to these cigarettes to win favours from bureaucrats.

At times Żukrowski refers, with pleasing irony, to his own position as a Polish man writing a novel about a Hungarian in India. “We still have the old, proven system: suspicion, informing, fear,” Istvan tells Margit of his home country. “They already think differently in Poland.” Later, he tells her that his words in English are always translated from the Hungarian of his thoughts: “I am bound to that language … I feel every tremor, I express everything in it, and I am certain that I speak it unerringly even to you in our closest moments.” Days of Longing, too, is concerned with matters of translation—the narrator is employed by the state Tourist Agency as a guide and interpreter, and translates from Czech into English for Raina’s benefit.

Both translations read well, although Vaid’s is exceptional, especially by the standards of translation from Hindi to English, in its marriage of lyricism and clarity. “Literary translations,” wrote Geoffrey Wall, a biographer and translator of Gustave Flaubert, “have a life of about fifty years. After that they begin to show their age.” This is certainly not true of Vaid’s. He does, however, take a number of liberties, beginning with the unfortunate change of title—Ve Din being, literally, “Those Days”—and ending with the wholesale omission of Verma’s final paragraph, with its ambiguous last sentence, written in transliterated English rather than Hindi: “Dark and deep.”

Fifty years later, Days of Longing reads not as an artefact of a lost socialist world, but as an utterly contemporary novel of unfulfilled yearning. What is most indelible in it are the author’s many reflections on missed opportunities:

I kept forgetting it was her second visit to Prague. And whenever I remembered it, it bothered me. I wanted her to look at everything for the first time. But she seemed to be keen about revisiting places she had already seen. After knowing some people one can’t help feeling one’s met them a bit too late. When they had their first time one wasn’t in the running.

In his obituary-letter for Verma—it is a curious document, with a mix of affection, nostalgia and resentment characteristic of lost friendship—Vaid notes his reservations about his friend’s “proclivity for romantic sentimentality,” but concedes that “at your best, you succeeded in getting away with it.” It is difficult not to conclude that he has Days of Longing in mind.

While both novels rose out of cultural diplomacy between friendly socialist countries, only Stone Tablets is truly political. But despite the continued relevance of many of its insights, and the fact that it was written only a few years after the events it describes, it is best read as a kind of historical novel—of the sort written by a journalist, producing, in the phrase popularly attributed to the late Washington Post owner Phil Graham, the first rough draft of history. Part guide to India, part treatise on the individualist man’s inability to live under Communism—in the tradition of books such as the Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and The God that Failed—it often reads as if Żukrowski had one eye on the reader of the future who would want to know what, exactly, it felt like to be eastern European in India in 1956. Its enduring appeal is a little mystifying, given the tawdry and interminable romance at the book’s heart. But, read 50 years later in India, it is an odd, and oddly compelling, view on our own early history as a republic.

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26. Announced: Dealing with Doctors, Denial, and Death: A Guide to Living Well with Serious Illness by Aroop Mangalik
========================================
Hardback
Often when death is the inevitable and impending outcome of a health diagnosis, doctors are reluctant to discuss alternatives to treatment, feeding into a culture of denial that can result in expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary over treatment that may or may not extend life but almost always damages the quality of life. Here, a seasoned doctor and researcher looks at the ways in which we are accustomed to treating illness at all costs, even at the expense of the quality of a patient’s life. He considers our culture of denial, the medical profession’s role in over treating patients and... more »

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 276 • Size: 6 x 9
978-1-4422-7280-4 • Hardback • January 2017 • $33.00 • (£22.95)
978-1-4422-7281-1 • eBook • January 2017 • $32.99 • (£22.95) (coming soon) 

https://tinyurl.com/zgry2mh

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27. INFLAMED: THE DEBATE OVER THE LATEST CURE-ALL CRAZE.
by Jerome Groopman
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(The New Yorker, November 30, 2015 Issue)
Several years ago, I fell at the gym and ripped two tendons in my wrist. The pain was excruciating, and within minutes my hand had swollen grotesquely and become hot to the touch. I was reminded of a patient I’d seen early in medical school, whose bacterial infection extended from his knee to his toes. Latin was long absent from the teaching curriculum, but, as my instructor examined the leg, he cited the four classic symptoms of inflammation articulated by the Roman medical writer Celsus in the first century: rubor, redness; tumor, swelling; calor, heat; and dolor, pain. In Latin, inflammatio means “setting on fire,” and as I considered the searing pain in my injured hand I understood how the condition earned its name.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/inflamed

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28. 1917, EDITED BY BORIS DRALYUK, REVIEW — A VIVID PORTRAIT OF RUSSIA’S FATEFUL YEAR
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(Financial Times - 25 November 2016)

A broad and erudite collection of stories and poems from the Russian Revolution

by: Anna Aslanyan

Don’t you find that too much poetry is being written?” Vladimir Lenin once asked Maxim Gorky, referring to the literary scene of the young Soviet state. The writer replied that it was natural to turn to poetry in times of great upheaval. 1917, an anthology published to commemorate the forthcoming centenary of the Russian Revolution, is proof of that; a third of it is devoted to poetry and, compared to the rest, it is the poems that paint the more vivid portrait of their era.

Written between early 1917 and late 1919, these pieces are immediate reactions to the cataclysmic period that saw the overthrow of the Russian monarchy, the October Revolution and the devastating civil war. The range of authors brought together in this slim volume is deliberately broad: proletarians and aristocrats, traditionalists and experimentalists, those who welcomed the revolution and those who dreaded it. Those who fought for it, though, are in the minority, as their voices would not be heard until the 1920s.

Boris Dralyuk thematically organises the 28 pieces he has selected (mostly translated from Russian) into sections, introducing each in his erudite notes, a source of historical and biographical information, complete with suggestions for further reading. The breadth of the collection is also manifest in the inclusion of both famous names, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, and lesser-known authors. One such figure certainly deserving a wider anglophone readership is Mikhail Kuzmin, whose poem “Russian Revolution”, while hardly his finest, is an unflinching response to the trials of 1917: “Will there be space for all of us?/ We’ll think of that later.” There turned out to be little space for Kuzmin, an aesthete and homosexual, the “northern Wilde”; his works lay forgotten for decades, and some never resurfaced.

The centrepiece of the anthology is Alexander Blok’s “The Twelve”, a great Symbolist vision of the end of the old world and the advent of the new order. This translation by Dralyuk and Robert Chandler, brilliantly capturing the poem’s language while remaining as true as possible to its rhythm, ends, unlike the original, with a question mark: “up ahead — is Jesus Christ?”, as if echoing the poet’s doubts about making none other than Christ the “blizzard-invisible, bullet-untouchable” bearer of the revolution’s “blood-stained banner”. Equally skilful and inventive are James Womack’s recent translations of two poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky: “Our March”, a romantic paean to the revolution, and “To Russia”, a narcissistic self-portrait against its background.

The prose sections include short stories and non-fiction pieces, among them excerpts from The Apocalypse of Our Time, in which the religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov analyses the revolution as a catastrophe sweeping “thrones, classes, ranks, labour, wealth” into a great void left by Christianity. The ills of Russian life are seen differently by Alexander Serafimovich, a staunch Bolshevik, whose story “How He Died”, a soldier’s tale tragic in its banality, is told in a language that is simple yet powerful.

“The Dragon”, a miniature piece by Yevgeny Zamyatin, pictures revolutionary Petersburg as a “delirium-born” hell where “trolleys [are] screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown”. Zamyatin was to continue the dystopian theme in his novel We, a forerunner of Brave New World and 1984. Unable to fit into Soviet literature, he left for France in the early 1930s; Mikhail Zoshchenko, once his literary comrade, stayed and made a name as a satirist before being denounced in 1946. In his 1918 article “A Wonderful Audacity” Zoshchenko compares Russia to a woman whose desire to be dominated by a strong master has finally come true, concluding in a Nietzschean spirit: “There is a lot of blood, you say? [ … ] But then again, not so much that we shall drown in it … ”

The works and fates of these authors create an image of hope and despair, struggle and exile, triumph and death. Even as the revolution devoured its own writers, they remained its chroniclers. A century on, their writings — some revisited, some resurrected in this collection — can be read as historical documents, but also for their sheer literary value. The best of them bear a mark of the process described by Kuzmin: “Tough sandpaper has polished all our words.”

1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, edited by Boris Dralyuk, Pushkin Press, RRP£8.99/$14.95, 224 pages

Anna Aslanyan is a critic and translator

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29. DEJONG-LAMBERT ON GRAHAM, 'LYSENKO'S GHOST: EPIGENETICS AND RUSSIA'
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 Loren R. Graham. Lysenko's Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. 224 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-08905-1.

Reviewed by William deJong-Lambert (Bronx Community College)
Published on H-Diplo (November, 2016)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Although the excitement of the space race and fret over the atomic bomb have traditionally been center stage in the historiography of Cold War science, biology steals the spotlight from the “rocket scientists” with the “Lysenko affair.” The story of how a Ukrainian peasant who did not attend school until he was a teenager managed to destabilize the science behind the singular biological advance which could have fed the masses of perpetually starving Russia, is compelling reading. The Lysenko affair began in the fateful summer of 1948, when at the end of a week-long show trial at the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Moscow, Ukrainian agronomist Trofim D. Lysenko announced he had received the support of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to launch a purge of genetics. What followed, in global terms, was possibly the most extensive fallout of executions, arrests, demotions, liquidated university departments, research institutes, and careers of any event in the history of science: a lost generation of geneticists behind the “iron curtain” of Europe, the Americas, Asia and beyond.

Loren Graham’s chapter on these events in his 1966 survey of Soviet science, Science, Philosophy in the Soviet Union (1987), initiated the first wave of literature to analyze the history and consequences of what happened next. Now Graham has written a sobering update for Lysenko scholars, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia, in which he reveals that what in the English-speaking world we refer to as “Lysenkoism”—which in Russian is used as a binary term to Лысенковщина—“Lysenkovischina”—has survived by adapting to the environment of its origin today. 

In Russian, “Lysenkoism” is used solely to refer to the content of what Lysenko said— i.e., varieties of wheat can be transformed by subjecting them to colder temperatures, genes do not exist, etc. “Lysenkovschina” is the rest of the story—Party philosopher Isaac Prezent as Lysenko’s Karl Marx whisperer, and Joseph Stalin as the man who could make it happen. “Lysenkovschina” has been generalized to any context where power and influence are used to credit one scientific theory over another. 

In English we use the single word “Lysenkoism” to describe both these issues—the theory and the politics surrounding it,  and the problem then is that the content of what Lysenko said is not being separated from the fate of Nikolai Vavilov et al. The genius of the Russian distinction is that it enables a more nuanced analysis of what actually happened.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise to observers of contemporary Russian politics that a class of nationalists writing their own history have seized upon Lysenko as a martyr of Soviet biology. This literature consists of a steady stream of books and articles online and off that turn the tables by presenting Lysenko’s most famous victim, Vavilov, as a wastrel squandering state support on fruitless expeditions around the globe. Meanwhile, the fact that Lysenko used the enthusiasm of the Bolshevik press to promote a series of failed agricultural schemes which positioned him to usurp Vavilov, is portrayed as the triumph of a hero whose ideas had been given due recognition. Lysenko’s downfall was the result of the mechanizations of his enemies. Lysenko was right. 

There are many angles to this argument—but the most potent is that Lysenko should be credited as a precursor to epigenetics. Epigenetics is a field of study founded by British geneticist C. H. Waddington, which shows that genetic inheritance is in fact influenced by environmental factors. This is a very important point because it highlights the extent to which Lysenko’s reign of terror in Soviet biology provoked a counter-reaction against what many took to be centerpiece of his ideas—the inheritance of acquired characters, often referred to as “Lamarckism.” That there is a lot more to the legacy of French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck than this one idea is often ignored; nevertheless there certainly were anti-Lysenko Cold Warriors, Conway Zirkle at the University of Pennsylvania being probably the most conspicuous, whose ire towards Lysenko was fueled by their antipathy to Lamarck.[1] Then there is also the fact that Waddington, unable to get a hearing for his ideas in the West, first published his studies in Agrobiologia—Lysenko’s mouthpiece journal. 

Graham’s story of his lunch with Lysenko in the cafeteria of the Russian Academy Sciences, where the latter sat alone, shunned by his colleagues in the aftermath of his downfall, are among the riveting tales he recounts of his years following genetics and breeding in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. In the concluding chapter Graham neatly dismisses Lysenko with a few sentences and that would more or less seem to be the end of it, if not for everything that appears in the pages before. Ideas regain currency through reinvention. What a previous generation discarded comes back to life once the dead are buried and their stories are retold. Lysenko’s Ghost is a compelling case study of how it happens.

Note

[1]. Conway Zirkle, Death of a Science in Russia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), Evolution, Marxian Biology and the Social Scene (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), and “Some Biological Aspects of Individualism,” in Essays on Individuality, ed. Felix Morley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958).


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