SACW - 7 Dec 2016 | Pakistan: Sectarian Conundrum / Bangladesh: Ajoy Roy / India and Pakistan Tensions / India: Popcorn Patriotism; Demonetisation, Right Wing Populist Fog / Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border / Ukrainian Far Right / Rewriting Balkan history / Myth of Trump’s white working-class support

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 7 Dec 2016 - No. 2920 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Pakistan: Sectarian Conundrum | Umar Riaz
2. Bangladesh: Ajoy Roy, My Father
3. India: Popcorn Patriotism - Top Court Orders National Anthem .. in the Cinema - Select Editorials and Commentary
4. India: It’s 2016 But The Practice Of Witch-Hunting Still Persists | Pranjali Bhonde
5. Aatish Taseer and Amulya Gopalakrishnan on India’s Right Wing Populist Fog
6. Statement In Opposition To Privatization of Internet and Capture Of internet.org by Facebook/Zuckerberg
7. Recent On Communalism Watch:

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
8. Taliban leaders may have moved to Afghanistan from Pakistan | Mirwais Khan and Lynne O'Donnell
9. Kashmir’s hidden uprising - We know the Kashmir crisis. Or do we? | Jean Dreze
10. India: Democracy, direct to home | Neera Chandhoke
11. Dawn Editorial: Pak-India dialogue
12. India: Vijayanagara in Bengaluru - The big fat Reddy wedding has underlined the privatisation of the public in Karnataka | Janaki Nair
13. India: Consequences of the demonetisation shock | Sudipto Mundle
  + India: Demonetisation — Modi Digs a Ditch for the BJP | Anand Teltumbde
14. The Ukrainian Far Right—and the Danger It Poses | Lev Golinkin
15. Rewriting Balkan history | Jean-Arnault Dérens
16. USA: The myth of Donald Trump’s white working-class support | Vito Laterza and Louis Philippe Römer
17. Fatal Attraction | Michael Burleigh
18. Google, democracy and the truth about internet search | Carole Cadwalladr
19. Maithili Stories - Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border

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1. PAKISTAN: SECTARIAN CONUNDRUM | Umar Riaz
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n our country, the sectarian fault lines are too deep, fissures too vast and consensus on exclusion too solid. These sectarian faiths have political, social and violent capital at their disposal and they wield all three, or any one, depending upon the situation.
http://sacw.net/article13050.html

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2. BANGLADESH: AJOY ROY, MY FATHER
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Ajoy Roy, veteran leftist politician, passed away on October 17, 2016. He had actively taken part in movements opposing the British rule in the Indian sub-continent. He was also one of the organisers of Bangladesh’s war of independence. Anindita Roy, his daughter, gives a glimpse into the life of the revolutionary soul.
http://sacw.net/article13051.html

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3. INDIA: POPCORN PATRIOTISM - TOP COURT ORDERS NATIONAL ANTHEM .. IN THE CINEMA - SELECT EDITORIALS AND COMMENTARY
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The song dictated by force won’t be as sweet as the one that’s freely sung. When people are pressganged to show respect for the national anthem their real feelings may end up as entirely the opposite.
http://sacw.net/article13044.html

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4. INDIA: IT’S 2016 BUT THE PRACTICE OF WITCH-HUNTING STILL PERSISTS | Pranjali Bhonde
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According to some reports, about 1,000 women have been killed across India in the past decade for "practising witchcraft". According to the Assam Parliamentary Affairs Minister Rockybul Hussain, at least 77 persons were killed and 60 others were injured in witch hunting incidents across Assam since 2010, and 35 of them were women. Though official cases have been filed against witch hunters, not much progress has been made due to absence of witnesses.
http://sacw.net/article13042.html

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5. AATISH TASEER AND AMULYA GOPALAKRISHNAN ON INDIA’S RIGHT WING POPULIST FOG
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Populism can hurt the poor even as it gives rousing voice to their dissatisfactions
http://sacw.net/article13052.html

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6. STATEMENT IN OPPOSITION TO PRIVATIZATION OF INTERNET AND CAPTURE OF INTERNET.ORG BY FACEBOOK/ZUCKERBERG
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The effort to privatize the internet and through fraudulent advertising to control what the internet is for the purpose of increasing profits of private companies is a threat to the internet.
http://sacw.net/article13049.html

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7. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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India: Violence in Bombay and the Death of an Old Milkman (Saeed Mirza)
India: Audio from BBC Report of 6 December 1992 Babri Masjid Demolition
India: The road to sedition (Preeti Jha)
Ayodhya, the Battle for India’s Soul: The Complete Story (Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett in WSJ)
Video: Prof. Suraj Bhan on Archaeology and Communal Forces
India: BBC Urdu video discussion on Indian Muslims
India: Rejoinder to Gujarat Police Affidavit alleging embezzlement of trust funds by Teesta, Javed
India: A Secular Case for Common Civil Code | Abdul Rahman
India: Modi's gamble in service of fascist Hindutva (Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal)
India: For a pop culture expression of resurgent Hinduism, turn to Hindi TV channels
India: Hindu outfits protest over relaxing dress code for women
India: Charge sheet filed against Hindu Janajagruti Samiti member Dr. Virendra Tawde in Pansare’s murder case
India: BJP leaders using defamation law suits to intimidate journalists - Senior journalist & campaigner against communalism Gauri Lankesh convicted of defamation India: Hindu Mahasabha irked at IAS topper's inter-religious wedding
India: Compulsary Nationalism Serenade in All Cinema Halls Now
   
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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8. TALIBAN LEADERS MAY HAVE MOVED TO AFGHANISTAN FROM PAKISTAN
by Mirwais Khan and Lynne O'Donnell
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(The Washington Post - AP November 26, 2016)

FILE - In this Aug. 15, 2016 file photo, Taliban suicide bombers stand guard during a gathering of a breakaway Taliban faction, in the border area of Zabul province, Afghanistan. After operating out of Pakistan for more than a decade, the leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement may have moved back to their homeland to try to build on this year’s gains in the war and to establish a permanent presence. If confirmed, the move would be a sign of the Taliban’s confidence in their fight against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. (Mirwais Khan, File/Associated Press)

KABUL, Afghanistan — After operating out of Pakistan for more than a decade, the leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement may have moved back to their homeland to try to build on this year’s gains in the war and to establish a permanent presence.

If confirmed, the move would be a sign of the Taliban’s confidence in their fight against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. It could also be an attempt by the militants to distance themselves from Pakistan, which is accused of supporting the movement.

The Taliban’s leaders have been based in Pakistani cities, including Quetta, Karachi and Peshawar, since their rule in Afghanistan was overthrown in the 2001 U.S. invasion after the 9/11 attacks.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the leadership shura, or council, relocated to Afghanistan “some months ago,” although he would not say to where.

One Taliban official said the shura had moved to southern Helmand province, which the insurgents consider to be part of their heartland and where most of the opium that funds their operations is produced. The official refused to be identified because of security reasons.

Other Taliban sources said the justice, recruitment and religious councils had also moved to southern Afghanistan. The statements could not be independently confirmed.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s office said it had no confirmation that any such move had taken place.

“No intelligence confirms that the Taliban has shifted its shura to Afghanistan,” said Haroon Chakhansuri, Ghani’s spokesman. “We still believe they are still operating in their safe havens outside Afghanistan.”

Mujahid, however, said Kabul officials were aware of the moves, prompted by battlefield gains that the insurgents believed would put them in a strong position once talks with the Afghan government aimed at ending the war were restarted. Dialogue broke down earlier this year.

The insurgents have spread their footprint across Afghanistan since international combat troops scaled down in 2014. They have maintained multiple offensives and threatened at least three provincial capitals in recent months: Kunduz, in northern Kunduz province; Lashkah Gar, in Helmand in the south; and Tirin Kot in Uruzgan.

The U.S. military has conceded the insurgents have gained ground, although definitive breakdowns are difficult to verify. This year, Afghan security forces are believed to have suffered their worst losses since 2001, with the military estimating 2016 fatalities at more than 5,000 so far.

A permanent Taliban presence in Afghanistan would send a message to followers and fighters that the insurgents now control so much territory they can no longer be dislodged by government security forces, said Franz-Michael Mellbin, the European Union’s ambassador in Kabul.

He said he has not confirmed the reports, which have circulated for weeks. But such a move could also be part of “the Taliban’s attempt to try to create a more independent position,” he said, as “parts of the Taliban would like to be under less direct pressure from Pakistan.”

Ghani has failed to make headway in efforts to fully engage Pakistan in cutting support for the Taliban and bringing them into a dialogue aimed at peace. After a year-long diplomatic offensive, Ghani in late 2015 cut ties with Islamabad and has since openly accused Pakistan of waging war on Afghanistan, using the Taliban as its proxy.

Pakistani authorities deny accusations that their powerful ISI intelligence agency supports the insurgents.

With the major councils based in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s role could be reduced at a time when the Islamabad government is under pressure from the United States and major ally China to rein in what many see as its terrorist-supporting activities.

If the move is confirmed, it could also indicate a unity among leaders, who have recently been portrayed by some observers, including the U.S. military, as suffering widening divisions and struggling for cash — even though the opium production under their control has an annual export value of $4 billion, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

The Taliban’s leadership shura consists of 16 elected officials who oversee activity across Afghanistan, give permission for any changes in planning and strategy, and mediate disputes among military commanders. The military commanders include Mullah Yaqoub, the son of the movement’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar — who was declared dead last year — and Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the brutal Haqqani network and a co-deputy leader with Yaqoub.

The Afghan Taliban are led by Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, who took over after the death of Mullah Omar’s successor, Akhtar Mansoor, in a U.S. drone strike this year. High-ranking Taliban officials say Haibatullah is not engaged in day-to-day decision-making. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

A senior Taliban commander, Asad Afghan, told The Associated Press the move would consolidate the insurgents’ military gains and help lay the ground for a dominant position if and when peace talks resume.

“We are in the last stages of war and are moving forward,” said Afghan, who is closely involved in formulating the insurgents’ war strategy.

“We are the real government in Afghanistan,” he said. The move across the border would give the movement “more focus” at a time it needs to be “quick, clear and more secure about our decisions.”

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9. KASHMIR’S HIDDEN UPRISING - WE KNOW THE KASHMIR CRISIS. OR DO WE?
by Jean Dreze
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(Indian Express, December 5, 2016)

A historic popular uprising is happening in Kashmir, but the Indian public is barely aware of it. I was unaware of it myself before I went there in October and travelled across the Kashmir Valley. I had read, of course, about some sort of “shutdown” happening there since early July, and also about the stone-pelting and pellet guns. But nothing I had read did justice to the situation on the ground.

The first thing that strikes the visitor on entering Kashmir is the massive military presence. Heavily-armed soldiers and paramilitary forces are all over the place. Their number is estimated at 6,00,000 or so, for a population of six million — that’s one soldier for 10 civilians. In sensitive areas such as Sopore, Shopian and even parts of Srinagar, there is a heavily-armed soldier in front of almost every house, at least on the main roads.

Why are these soldiers there? Clearly, they are not there to repel a possible attack from Pakistan — that would require them to be near the border. Nor are they watching for terrorists: Standing at street corners in full battle gear is not the way to hound underground militants. Perhaps the soldiers are there to counter stone-pelters? That makes no sense either, because the simplest way to clear a neighbourhood of stone-pelters is to demilitarise it: The stones are directed at army personnel, not civilians.

We are led to conclude what every Kashmiri knows: The purpose of this massive army presence is to control the civilian population, and especially to prevent so-called “anti-India protests”, however peaceful they may be. It was a revelation for me to learn that all forms of peaceful protest in Kashmir are banned in one way or another, if there is any hint of a demand for “freedom” (azadi). The authorities have ample powers to prevent protests, not only under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), but also under Jammu and Kashmir’s draconian Public Safety Act (PSA) as well as Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). These and related powers are used with abandon to prevent any expression of the popular aspiration for freedom — not just stone-pelting but also processions, vigils, assemblies, pamphlets, graffiti, or just undesirable statements on social media.

Despite these restrictions, there have been continuous protests or attempted protests all over the Kashmir Valley ever since Burhan Wani was killed on July 8. Stone-pelting was part of the protests, but the uprising also included a wide range of non-violent activities. In fact, the main protest was a general strike: During the last four months, shops have been closed in Kashmir, traffic has been halted and schools have been deserted. This is called a “shutdown” in the Indian media, with calculated ambiguity, and often confused with curfews that have occasionally been imposed by the authorities. But it was a general strike — one of the largest and longest in Indian history.

There is something puzzling about the ability of Kashmir’s economy to withstand such a long strike. This was possible for several reasons. First, Kashmir has a vibrant and relatively egalitarian rural economy, a feature that owes much to the land reforms of the 1950s. The strike did not prevent self-employed farmers, artisans and apple growers from continuing with their work to a large extent. Second, migrant workers from Bihar and elsewhere left Kashmir en masse soon after the strike began. Kashmiri workers, therefore, continued to find work, that too at relatively high wages by Indian standards. Third, Kashmir has a strong tradition of mutual support. For instance, neighbourhood relief committees (often associated with the local mosque) were active after the 2014 floods, and again on this occasion. Indeed, relief work was an integral part of the Hurriyat’s “protest calendars” during the strike. Finally, living standards in Kashmir are quite high. Unemployment is certainly an issue, but poverty and hunger are rare, except among migrant workers. Anyone who thinks that the Kashmir problem is due to lack of development is severely deluded.

In the absence of any space for peaceful protest, stone-pelting became the highlight of the uprising. The security forces responded with overwhelming force. More than 100 civilians (including many children) were killed, at least 1,000 were victims of blinding or other eye injuries from pellet guns, and thousands were thrown into jail. Much larger numbers were harassed by the security forces in one way or another.

On October 18, I joined a fact-finding team of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). We visited the family of Faisal Akbar (name changed), a young lecturer who was said to have been beaten to death by the Rashtriya Rifles last August. According to witnesses, there was a “crackdown” in the village that evening. This means that soldiers barge into people’s homes, beat them up, smash their belongings, and generally spread terror — typically by way of retaliation against stone-pelting. One officer apparently told the terrified villagers, “we know that you are innocent, but if we don’t beat you up, you will never learn”. Interestingly, the local Station House Officer (SHO) agreed with their account of the event. Faisal, as he put it, “succumbed to his injuries”. One rarely hears such consistent accounts of human rights violations from the police and the people. The SHO promised a fair enquiry, but hastened to add that requests for permission to prosecute army personnel were routinely turned down by the home ministry in Delhi.

Every incident of this sort intensifies the rage of the Kashmiri people against the Indian Army, and against India itself. This rage, and the passionate desire for “azadi” (freedom), were already evident 16 years ago, when I visited Kashmir for the first time. They are even stronger today. In fact, the recent uprising, and the repression that followed, have turned almost every Kashmiri into an active participant in the struggle for freedom.

The government of India’s sledgehammer response, aside from being inhuman, does nothing to solve the problem. If the root of the problem is the alienation of the Kashmiri people from India, then state repression can only make things worse. It also undermines Kashmir’s peaceful traditions and pushes Kashmiri youngsters towards armed resistance and radical Islamist groups. The possible consequences, not only for Kashmir but also for India, are too horrible to contemplate.

None of this is to say that there is a simple solution to this situation. Any solution would have to address multiple complexities such as the status of Ladakh, the rights of minorities in Kashmir, the injustice done to Kashmiri Pandits, how to take Pakistan on board, and more. Perhaps the important thing for now is not to devise a ready-made solution, but to initiate a process that might lead to a solution. The status quo is certainly intolerable.

 
The writer is visiting professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University

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10. INDIA: DEMOCRACY, DIRECT TO HOME
by Neera Chandhoke
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(The Hindu - 2 December 2016)

The subordination of political parties to populist leaders has cast a shadow on democracy. A representative party system is infinitely preferable to personalised forms of power

Delivering his third Independence Day address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had remarked that he deliberately stayed away from populist measures that deplete exchequers and opted for a culture of governance. His referent point was, obviously, strategies that politicians employ to garner votes. In political theory, however, the term populism originates from the Latin term populous or ‘people’. If we take the political theory of populism as our cue, the Prime Minister appears quite a populist.

Let me hasten to add that in democratic contexts populists are not anti-democratic. On the contrary they claim to be true democrats, obsessed with rescuing democracy from the clutches of incompetent and venal elites. This class, it is alleged, has betrayed the confidence of citizens, and derailed the political system. Arvind Kejriwal does so directly and abrasively. Prime Minister Modi mockingly dismisses the Opposition. Both represent themselves as preferable alternatives to corrupt and non-performing elites. The second rescue operation launched by these leaders is to free popular sovereignty from the mediations of liberal democracy, and relocate the concept in ‘the people’. By appealing to ‘the people’ over the heads of democratic institutions deemed ineffectual and dishonest, populist leaders forge a personal constituency that they can confide in, admonish, and instruct.

Need for checks and balances

The problem is that ‘people’ is not a homogenous unit. The category is divided and hierarchised along the lines of class, caste, religion, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preferences. More significantly, ‘people’ are organised into majorities and minorities, and majorities — as our history tells us — can seriously impair the basic rights of minorities. For this precise reason, liberal democrats fear the ‘brute power’ of majorities and try to curtail the power of elected majorities through constitutions, legislation, judiciaries, and, more importantly, the institutionalisation of a system of checks and balances.

Notably, democracy is not only about a party that has won the largest number of seats taking over state power. It is about protecting the basic rights of all individuals, and, in particular, the rights of vulnerable minorities against depredations of majorities. This is secured through the establishment of procedures and institutions. That is why democratic governance is complex, time-consuming, and demanding. Each proposal has to go through several stages of scrutiny, including debates in the public sphere on the virtues or otherwise of the proposition on offer, before it is transformed into law. The insertion of layers of intermediary institutions that range from elected assemblies to civil society organisations, between citizens and the state, safeguards ordinary citizens against abuses of power.

The populist’s penchant

It is precisely the complicated procedural and institutional aspect of democracy that populist leaders are impatient with. They would rather reach out directly to citizens. There is, of course, nothing wrong with reaching out to people. The problem is that populist leaders show scant respect for the give and take of arguments during processes of decision-making. This can breed ominous outcomes: witness the sharp and painful crisis that followed demonetisation. The eminent statesman of ancient Athens, Pericles, had warned against decisions that do not take the consequences of a particular action into consideration. But populists defy laborious and cumbersome processes involving critique of, reflection on, and modification of proposed policy. They would rather take shortcuts and evoke naïve and simplistic notions of direct democracy. Direct democracy is, however, the ultimate illusion.

Let us not forget that in ancient Athens, participation in direct democracy was confined to property- and slave-owning males, provided they were born in the city-state. The rest were consigned to the lowly category of subjects. In complex societies, direct democracy simply does not work; it slides easily into populism and, worse, into the cult of the leader. Democracy is diminished.

Democracy is doubly diminished when the complexities of public opinion are simplified through the mechanism of snap referendums through the social media. Citizens have the right to debate on the pros and cons of ‘this’ or ‘that’ law, unearth hidden dimensions of issues, highlight grey areas, and propose alternatives. Snap polls that demand a simple answer — yes or no — in effect depoliticise the deliberative capacity of citizens and undermine their competence to skilfully debate all sides of an issue. It is precisely this aspect of deliberative democracy that populists avoid when they ask for instant referendums.

What history tells us

The proposition that populism harms democracy has been amply borne out by our history. Recollect Indira Gandhi, popularly known as the first populist leader in independent India. Taking over the reins of the Congress in adverse circumstances, she set out to consolidate her status. Regional leaders, who till then had wielded considerable influence in the party through a network of ‘big men’, were rendered irrelevant through the Kamaraj Plan, and by the 1969 split in the party. The announcement of radical programmes such as the abolition of privy purses of former princes and nationalisation of banks endeared Mrs. Gandhi to the political public. More significantly, she fashioned a nationwide constituency by detaching parliamentary elections from State Assembly elections. This enabled her to speak directly to citizens, and dispense with the mediation of regional satraps.

Mrs. Gandhi’s charisma, style and oratory gripped popular imagination. But the process of securing acclaim carried heavy costs. Concentration of power in the person of the Prime Minister spectacularly subverted democratic norms. Her call for a committed judiciary and a committed bureaucracy compromised the autonomy of both institutions. The Supreme Court undercut its own status as an impartial institution by supporting the Emergency declared by Mrs. Gandhi’s government.

More significantly, personalisation of power irreversibly damaged the Congress. Till the 1960s, the party was known as one that could skilfully reconcile diverse interests within the organisation. It had perfected the art of compromise. This changed after Mrs. Gandhi’s accession to power. The party was reduced to a group of courtiers paying ritual obeisance to a supreme leader. The Congress is today a pale shadow of what it used to be. Once it was a dynamic party that could mobilise millions, today the fate of the party is tied to the fate of the Gandhi family.

After Mrs. Gandhi, it is Mr. Modi who has caught the imagination of Indians across caste and class. He speaks directly and powerfully to them through the radio, social media, and televised speeches. We, of course, cannot respond to his suggestions. Most of his ministers do not utter a sentence except in his praise, his initiative, his courage, his imagination, and his expertise. What on earth has happened to the norm of collective responsibility, and to the status of the Prime Minister as the ‘first among equals’ in a parliamentary democracy? The BJP has till now privileged ideology and principles over individual leaders. Today the party hangs on to the coat-tails of the Prime Minister.

The BJP is not alone in this. The subordination of regional political parties to populist leaders has cast a shadow on the party system and on democracy. Parties mediate between leaders and citizens because they represent the interests of their constituency. Today parties have become practically irrelevant because the image of the leader looms large over them. This is a serious setback for democracy. A representative party system is infinitely preferable to personalised forms of power. It is time party organisations asserted their identity and control over leaders. Otherwise history will repeat itself not as ‘farce’, but as ‘tragedy’.

Neera Chandhoke is a former Professor of Political Science at Delhi University.

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11. DAWN, EDITORIAL: PAK-INDIA DIALOGUE
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Dawn - 30 November 2016

IN the midst of jingoism and false bravado, it can be difficult to remain restrained, sensible — and diplomatic.

But despite New Delhi’s excessive brinkmanship and emotional calls within Pakistan to respond in the same manner, the Foreign Office continues to hew to a measured and dialogue-driven approach towards India.

So not only is the prime minister’s adviser on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, set to visit Amritsar next week for a Heart of Asia conference, but Pakistan’s high commissioner to India Abdul Basit has let it be known that the foreign adviser’s schedule is flexible and that if bilateral talks are made a possibility, Mr Aziz could extend his daylong trip if necessary.

In continuing to keep the door to dialogue open in the face of blatant rejection by India and somewhat strong opposition at home, the government is doing the politically difficult but diplomatically necessary thing.

What remains to be seen is how India reacts. The signs are not good at the moment, but the possibility of a surprise change in attitude should not be ruled out.

Unhappily, India seems to be more in a mood to test Pakistan’s resolve and to try and find chinks in its diplomatic armour internationally.

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi declined to attend a heads of government Saarc summit in Islamabad, the Indian diplomatic machine went into overdrive to play up other withdrawals from the summit and suggest that Pakistan is isolated regionally.

But that is not the case and perhaps India should consider that it has drifted further away from its original goals.

Indeed, given India’s long-standing demand for a completion of the 2008 Mumbai attacks-related investigation and trials in Pakistan and the progress that was made on the Pathankot probe earlier this year, it ought to be apparent that slamming the door shut on dialogue will see little progress even in areas where both sides have long pledged to cooperate.

The Heart of Asia conference would be a welcome forum in which to pick up the threads of bilateral dialogue because security, economic and political cooperation in the region are at its core objectives, while Afghanistan is a country that Pakistan and India need to have an open dialogue about.

While Mr Modi has shown alacrity in trying to whip up domestic support for electoral purposes, he has proven himself to be an unexpectedly positive risk-taker externally. After all, it was last Christmas that the Indian prime minister briefly stopped in Lahore on his way back to New Delhi from Kabul.

A handshake with a visiting senior Pakistani official should not be impossible a mere 11 months later.

Arguably, given Mr Modi’s own hawkish bent, now is the time for another opening: if Mr Modi believes the Pakistani military dictates India policy, then why not see what a new chief has in mind first?

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12. INDIA: VIJAYANAGARA IN BENGALURU - THE BIG FAT REDDY WEDDING HAS UNDERLINED THE PRIVATISATION OF THE PUBLIC IN KARNATAKA
by Janaki Nair
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(The Indian Express -  November 30, 2016)

Gali Janardhan Reddy’s daughter Brahmani Reddy married Rajeev Reddy, son of Andhra businessman Panyam Vikram Deva Reddy, who has mining interests in Africa. (Source: File)

Time was, when south Indian monarchs built temples to commemorate their political victories, their changes of religious allegiance, their command of agrarian economies. Sometimes they were acts of piety as well. From the Gangas, Hoysalas and Chalukyas, down to principalities such as that of the Wodeyars, the temple was the monumental “gift of power,” as historian James Heitzman said about the Cholas. Into its fretted stone or towering gopuram was hewn the grandeur of triumph. Sometimes, when idols were the spoils of war, they took new life in distant homes: Chikkadevaraja in 1675, flushed with military successes to the north, south and east of Mysore, “removed” the idol of Shweta Varahaswamy from Srimushna to its new location in Srirangapatna; in 1809 it found a new home in Mysore.

The Karnataka people, in short, are spoilt for choice in monumental grandeur. Former chief minister Kengal Hanumanthaiah was mindful of this heritage in choosing Chalukyan motifs for Bengaluru’s Vidhana Soudha, that quintessential symbol of representative democracy.

Monarchical symbols of power have held an irresistible attraction for many in contemporary southern Indian politics. Given the special place occupied by cine-politics in exaggerating the power of southern matinee idols, there has been a doubling of these spectacles, both as cinema and as politics. Jayalalithaa learned, at great political cost, that such spectacles can be counter-productive when she lost the election following her sponsorship of the ostentatious wedding of her foster son and Shashikala’s son in 1995. Since then, she has taken to the more productive path of bestowing more durable gifts on citizens, and thus ensured lasting adoration. At a time of massive withdrawal by the state from social security programmes, these schemes serve as new redistributive mechanisms.

No such redistribution was envisaged when Janardhan Reddy staged the massive wedding of his daughter Brahmini. The obvious contrast with the sufferings of the hoi polloi following demonetisation has distracted from the event itself and its possible meanings for our public life. In the cacophonous clucking of tongues about this extravagance in the midst of obvious misery, we missed an important voice, that of Karnataka’s health minister, Ramesh Kumar, who called for a cap on wedding expenditure. In this, he paid, perhaps unwittingly, obeisance to another of Mysore’s — now much maligned — monarchs, Tipu Sultan, who, in his many efforts to redraw social life in his kingdom, also attempted to limit extravagant wedding expenses.

Kumar’s voice may sound like Rip van Winkle’s at a time when consumption is not only good, but a patriotic duty. But Kumar must be recalled for another more important remark that he made in passing, when he said that today, the private has become the public, and the public, private. For many people, a wedding is the most familial of all events. But it has periodically erupted into public view as a time to declare wealth, display power, flaunt political connections, and indulge in sheer fantasy. This pot-latch of Reddy, this symbolic burning of wealth, picked its symbols well in recreating Hampi’s Vittala temple, and Tirupati’s Tirumala Devasthana, one a UNESCO heritage site, and the other one of the most powerful corporations in southern India.

The setting itself was important. Bengaluru’s Palace Grounds have been, for some time, the site of ostentatious weddings. The “public” here has long become “private”, since these grounds, which have already been distributed between various Wodeyar heirs, despite the state’s legislative takeover of the space, epitomise the compromised nature of state power. The temporary theme park erected at the Palace Grounds included some of Ballari’s landmarks, haunted by memories of a better time. A new kind of heroism revels in the flagrant abuse of all standards of decency but also declares the divided sovereignty that is a feature of contemporary India. The ease with which public became private in Ballari since 1999 (and the state lost Rs 16,000 crore in revenue) was matched only by the devastation that Reddy wrought on the region. The simulacrum in Bengaluru was necessary not only because Reddy has been exiled from the region that he ravaged; it was his insouciant thumbing of the nose at those who ended his reign of terror at Ballari. The wedding reasserted Reddy as one who made the public into private, and now placed that illegitimately won private sphere on display. He demonstrated that he continues to straddle both licit and illicit forms of power.

In this sense, Reddy’s actions may be placed alongside other shows of extra-legal power from an assortment of actors ranging from Shahabuddin to the Shiv Sena. Reddy’s public assertion of financial power, at which the IT department, much like the police in the Hindi film, arrived too late, was not only his claim to continued relevance in the political realm. He also reclaimed the power of the neighbourhood tough in that forever reddened earth of Ballari.

The fake temple-building cannot be mistaken for even temporary piety. If he once placated his conscience by donating to Tirupati, Reddy thought nothing of blasting the Sugalamma temple at Ballari to recover the ore in the ground beneath. Nor did the strings of pearls that adorned the neck of Reddy recall the monarchs of Mysore/Karnataka. Coming at a time when the government has placed the entire Indian people under the shadow of criminality for wanting to access their own money, the robber-baron’s return to public life is a garish reminder of the continued importance that extra-legal power enjoys in our public life. It also personifies Raghuram Rajan’s observation at Davos, that the Indian state is getting the reputation of going after the small and the defenceless, while letting big fish get away. That has been the enduring legacy of colonialism, and for so long has been a staple of our democracy. It is perhaps this aspect of contemporary India that Ramesh Kumar was trying to warn us about.
The writer teaches history at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU

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13. INDIA: CONSEQUENCES OF THE DEMONETISATION SHOCK | Sudipto Mundle
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(Live Mint - Nov 18 2016)

We are likely to see a significant dip in economic activity till January or even till the end of the financial year because of this disruption

The images on television are troubling. Harassed people queuing for hours. An elderly man, obviously quite sick, crying helplessly. The hospital wouldn’t admit him for the required surgery nor would the chemist sell him the drugs he needed because his money had ceased to be legal tender. A lady crying, her husband had just died because no hospital would admit him. The treatment money she had had suddenly become worthless. Frustration is widespread, patience is running thin, and there are worrying reports about incidents of violence, fortunately still isolated. It is a challenging moment for the country. It is a pity that instead of empathizing with the people in the queues, some TV panellists are dismissing their plight or even provocatively asserting that all complainants must be black-money wallas or terrorist sympathizers. Let’s step back from emotion and dispassionately consider the consequences of the demonetization shock.

In tune with Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction”, disruptive technologies and events are now considered to be good things, the forces that drive competitive capitalism. The demonetization shock is certainly disruptive. Eighty-six per cent of the money in circulation has been extinguished at a moment’s notice. It had to be done suddenly, without warning. Otherwise, its whole purpose would have been defeated. But is it good for Indian capitalism? What are likely to be its immediate and longer term consequences?

In addressing these questions, we must first recognize that the big fish who have amassed huge wealth from black money, i.e., tax-evaded income, hold most of it as real estate, gold and other real assets. Some of it is also held as assets abroad. None of these will be affected by demonetization. A relatively small portion is held as non-bank money to finance “black” transactions. This component is the target of demonetization.

However, black money cannot be easily separated from white money. It depends on whether or not a particular transaction generated any tax-evaded income. Some portion of such black money flows from criminal activities such as drug peddling, human trafficking or worse. But most of it is generated from normal economic transactions.

Thus, you may purchase something from your tax-reported income, i.e. from white money. But if the shopkeeper doesn’t report the transaction, the money now becomes black money. If he then spends it on something with tax-compliant billing, the money is transformed back into white money. Alternatively, he could under-report your transaction by, say, 50%. In which case half of the transaction is white money and the other half is black. Thus, the same Rs 1,000 note is white at some stage of its circulation and black at another, or a part of it is white and the other part black! It is therefore extremely difficult to estimate how much of the money in circulation is white or black or, for that matter, how much of India’s national income is white and how much is black.

Without getting into technicalities, let it suffice to say that black money is so intermingled with white money and so widespread that any attempt to curb it sends shock waves through the system. The shock can have both negative and positive effects.

The largest adversely affected group, numerically, is the working class. Casual workers are at the bottom of the working-class hierarchy. Their incomes are the lowest and least secure. They spend the money as they earn it. Those paid in old Rs500 or Rs1,000 notes would have had to lose a day’s wage to queue up at banks to convert their money. If the cash ran out, they would have had to lose another day’s wage. Meanwhile, they would have had no money to buy food, medicines or other essentials, and God help them if they had a medical emergency. In the towns and cities, these workers are queueing up at banks. What about unbanked villages? The banks have reportedly despatched armies of mobile-banking correspondents to service such villages. How that is working out on the ground I have no idea.

Next, there are the medium-skilled blue- and white-collar workers in the unorganized sector and contract workers in the organized sector. Finally, there are the regular organized-sector workers, the most skilled and the best paid. All of these wage/salary recipients would have received their wages shortly before the demonetization. They too would have had to miss work and queue up at banks or ATMs to convert their money. Without conversion, they would have had no usable money for food, medical expenses and other essentials.

The entire working class adds up to about 400 million persons. Most of them are unlikely to have any tax-evaded income because their annual incomes would be below the income-tax-exemption threshold. They and their families are bearing pain for the sins of others. Hopefully, the pain will be short-lived and the working class will be back to business as usual once the demonetized notes are replaced by new notes and normal money supply is restored.

The next major group adversely affected are the small-medium enterprises in services and industry, especially wholesale and retail traders. Cash transactions are an integral part of their daily operations, especially for traders. Their range of goods includes everything from raw materials to intermediate inputs to food items and other consumer goods. Numerically, this class is not as large as the working class, but their impact on economic activity is very large. Demonetization is a bit like a car running out of fuel in their case. Their businesses have been severely disrupted. Those with substantial stocks of black money are also probably taking large haircuts. We are likely to see a significant dip in economic activity till January or even till the end of the financial year because of this disruption.

The third group adversely affected are the self-employed professionals, for example, doctors, lawyers, accountants. It has been suggested that the incidence of tax-evaded income is high among this group, many of whom are high net-worth individuals. Their wealth portfolios would be similar in structure to those of the “big fish” even if not quite as large. For both groups, the large non-monetary component of their wealth would be unaffected, but the monetary component will be extinguished to the extent that demonetization forces the unloading of hoarded black money.

For all the three groups above, the impact would probably be quite short-lived. But for a fourth category, the real-estate industry, the disruption is likely to be quite severe and long lasting. This sector is the destination where large proportions of black-money flows are converted into real assets, and black-money transactions are all-pervasive. The sector has already been in the doldrums for the past couple of years and transactions are likely to remain frozen for quite a while, with corresponding downstream effects in cement, steel and other construction materials.

Turning to broader macroeconomic implications, let’s first look at the fiscal impact. Of the large deposits flowing into banks every day, if a significant component turns out to be tax-evaded income, it will generate an incremental flow of direct-tax revenue and penalties. On the other hand, as mentioned above, we are likely to see significantly reduced economic activity during the next few months, and that will reduce the flow of indirect-tax revenue. Clearly, no hard estimates of the net effect is possible at present. But my judgement is that total tax revenue will be well below budget projections, leading to an increase in the fiscal deficit.

On the monetary side, a very interesting phenomenon is playing out. On the one hand, 86% of currency in circulation by value has been extinguished in one shot, delivering a huge negative monetary shock. On the other hand, there is a massive increase in bank deposits. Essentially, a part of the money supply that was taken out of the banking circuit has been brought back into it, i.e., from the black economy to the white economy. The large growth of bank deposits will enable the enhanced flow of bank credit. Whether that actually happens or not will depend on the banking sector’s other problems, particularly the dire stressed assets situation in public sector banks. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has provided some accommodation on that front by recently easing its asset classification norms.

Thus, there will be two forces acting to increase aggregate demand. The increased fiscal deficit and, possibly, the increased flow of bank credit. Whether this will be enough to offset the immediate negative impact of the monetary shock on economic activity is a judgement call. My own guess is that on balance, we will see a reduction in economic activity over the next few months.

Will demonetization curb the growth of the black economy, its main goal? This question has to be addressed in the larger context of an evolving policy environment. The legislation on benami transactions is now in place. So is the bankruptcy code. Demonetization is forcing the declaration of hoarded black money. The goods and services tax will also tilt the scale against tax evasion. With the overall tightening of the regulatory environment, tax evaders and wilful defaulters may consider changing their game.

Describing this as a possible paradigm shift in the policy environment, former RBI governor Y.V. Reddy mentioned in a recent conversation that action may gradually shift to the courts as tax evaders and wilful defaulters look for legal protection. Whether or not measures like demonetization can clean up Indian capitalism will depend ultimately on how effectively the judiciary, the legislature, the executive and RBI cooperate in the joint campaign against black money.

Sudipto Mundle is emeritus professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, and was a member of the Fourteenth Finance Commission.

o o o 

(EPW, Vol. 51, Issue No. 49, 03 Dec, 2016)

INDIA: DEMONETISATION — MODI DIGS A DITCH FOR THE BJP
by Anand Teltumbde

The demonetisation move has boomeranged on the Bharatiya Janata Party badly. The unprecedented hardship it caused people has surely paved the way to the BJPs Waterloo in the forthcoming assembly elections in some crucial states.

Stories of devastation and deaths, caused by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to demonetise ₹500 and ₹1,000 currency notes, are pouring in from all over India. In a country where 97% of all transactions (by volume) are done in cash, the summary demonetisation of 86.4% of its currency value was bound to create chaos. As I write, 70 deaths have already been reported. The entire informal economy that accounts for 94% of India’s workforce and 46% of its gross domestic product (GDP) has almost halted. The already distressed rural masses are aghast at their savings being reduced to worthless paper. Many of them have not even seen the inside of a bank. Long queues of people, clutching their hard-earned money, are seen in front of banks all over the country. The initial euphoria of the middle classes and Modi-philes also has melted away in the heat of this harsh reality.

The harshest comment, however, has come from Manmohan Singh, who has perhaps the best possible credentials in the country, as ex-governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), ex-finance minister and ex-Prime Minister for two terms, to assess this Tughlaq-esque action. Describing the implementation of the demonetisation drive as “monumental mismanagement” and a case of “organised loot and legalised plunder,” he said in the Rajya Sabha that it would drag down the country’s GDP by 2 percentage points. He is not alone; a host of economists, experts and think tanks revised their growth outlook for India downwards, some of them lowering it to a mere 0.5% for the six-month period ending 31 March 2017. Modi, however, would not budge and instead called all those who questioned this calamitous move as anti-nationals, reminding us of Samuel Johnson’s famous adage: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

No one has any doubt about the real motivation behind such outlandish bravado. It was meant to be a stratagem to bolster his image for the forthcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, and Manipur. All the pre-election promises remain undelivered, and most of his actions, including the so-called surgical strike, have flopped; people, bored by the empty verbiage and hyperboles, needed some dramatic action. The opposition parties were sure to remind people during the elections about Modi’s 2014 poll promise to get them ₹15 lakh each from the black money stashed in the Swiss Banks within 100 days of his being elected. This demonetisation was certainly meant to show that the government is determined to take courageous action to cleanse the economy. Alas, it has boomeranged on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) badly. The unprecedented hardship it caused people has surely paved the way to the BJP’s Waterloo in the forthcoming assembly elections in some crucial states. This, despite its success in reducing the cash stacks of the opposition parties to trash, and thereby weakening them.

Counterfeit Economics

Modi claimed that demonetisation was done to attack black money and corruption, neutralise fake currency, and curb terror money. By now, many economists have competently exposed the fakery of these claims. As the data on raids reveal, the cash component of the disproportionate assets, inclusive of jewellery (counted as cash), has been just 5%. As such, the demonetisation has had an impact, if at all, on a minuscule percentage of illicit money. This small cash is held by the rich only as lubricant for the big machine that produces and reproduces black money. Black money is generated in overseas operations through under-/over-invoicing (businessmen), rentier operations (politicians, police, bureaucrats), and various means of hiding income (realtors, private hospitals, education emperors). There are many ways to convert black money to white, ranging from small-timers (many charity institutions that are only on paper indulge in these scandals) to the big fish who route black money through tax havens to India as foreign direct investments. These channels of production and reproduction of black money are not affected by the demonetisation of currency.

Fake money, if its incidence is alarming enough, may be curbed by demonetisation. However, as per the report of the Kolkata-based Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), it is only ₹400 crore or just 0.002% of the total currency value in circulation, not enough to threaten the economy. The ISI report never suggested demonetisation as a measure to counter counterfeit notes. If counterfeit currency was the concern of the government, the new currency being printed to substitute the demonetised ones should have had better security features. According to the RBI’s admission, the new ₹2,000 notes are being released without any additional security features.

The “terror money” argument is absolutely untenable. If terrorists have a way of sourcing cash, they will always have ways to deal with new currencies too. Then, there is the additional cost of printing new notes, estimated to be in the range of ₹15,000–₹18,000 crore, as well as the aggregate losses due to disruption to the economy, which are to be borne until the situation stabilises.

‘Swachh Bharat’

Modi rhetorically associated the demonetisation decision with his Swachh Bharat campaign, knowing full well that little has come out of that very campaign. If he had given half the amount of money spent on just advertising the campaign to the Dalits who actually do the sanitation work needed to keep the country clean, much could have been accomplished. He claims to be freeing India of corruption and dirty money. One of the reasons for his being voted to power was the spate of corruption scandals that took place when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) II was in power, which he had effectively exploited promising the country transparent and “minimal government with maximum governance.” Halfway through his tenure, the sources of big-ticket corruption appear to be thriving more than ever. The political parties, the fountainheads of corruption, still stay opaque and out of the purview of the right to information (RTI) net. The names of 648 traitors given in the “Panama list” are yet to be divulged. His government has written off ₹1.14 lakh crore in corporate loans owed to banks in the name of non-performing assets (NPAs). The NPAs of the public sector banks have crossed ₹11 lakh crore, but there is no action whatsoever against the corporate thugs. The direct tax arrears of corporate billionaires hover over ₹5 lakh crore, but Modi never spoke against this. The tax exemptions to them during the last decade exceed ₹40 lakh crore, the annual rate of which during Modi’s regime has crossed ₹6 lakh crore, as against ₹5 lakh crore during the UPA rule. Modi as such has been hugely supportive of corporate corruption, the real generator of black money.

Even the implementation of the demonetisation is suspected to be engulfed in corruption. The dramatised secrecy of the decision is for public consumption; it was known to the inner circle of the BJP, comprising politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen. It could be clearly seen from the spurt in bank deposits during the quarter ending 30 September 2016. The West Bengal unit of the BJP is reported to have deposited a total of ₹3 crore in its bank accounts in the hours before the announcement. A BJP leader posted pictures of wads of ₹2,000 notes much in advance of the demonetisation, and a digital payments company printed a full-page advertisement lauding the demonetisation move in a newspaper on the morning following the announcement at 8 pm on 8 November 2016. Actually, the demonetisation gave impetus to an entirely new business of converting demonetised currency notes for a commission. No wonder that there has not been a change in India’s rank by Transparency International, at 76 out of 168 countries, during Modi’s regime.

Professional Incompetence 

The demonetisation move has showed up India’s institutional character, which is ready to buckle before the powers that be. Leave aside Modi, it speaks badly of the calibre of the finance ministry mandarins, particularly RBI Governor Urjit Patel, who has not only failed to preserve the prestige of his office, but also earned the ignominy of having his professional incompetence exposed. It is unlikely that the monetary experts in the RBI could not have seen the flawed economics of the decision, but they obviously fell before the emperor’s will. Demonetisation is no cure for corruption. However, it was tried out by rulers at various times in history, but never with the currency of the common people. The last time that it had taken place was when Morarji Desai had demonetised the ₹1,000 note in 1978, which was hardly seen or used by the common people. It constituted just 0.6% of the money in circulation then, as against the 86.4% of that today.

Modi, during his foreign visits, always brags about his achievement of the Jan-Dhan Yojana (JDY), which is just an extension of what the UPA called financial inclusion. He forced the banks to open accounts, just to score a Guinness world record. According to a survey conducted in July 2015, 33% of the customers indicated that their JDY account was not their first account, and, according to the World Bank report, 72% of them have zero balance in their accounts. Another survey by the World Bank–Gallup Global Findex Survey showed that about 43% of the total bank accounts in India are dormant. Even the RBI says that only 53% of Indians have bank accounts, and many do not operate these. Most bank branches are moreover bunched in tier 1 and tier 2 cities and vast rural areas are scantily served. It is a delusion to dream of a cashless economy in India in such a situation. It would be utterly ignorant to think that such a decision could endear the BJP to the people.

Needless to say, that the lower strata, like the Dalits and Adivasis, are the worst hit and they will never forgive the BJP for it. The BJP has variously tried to project through its hanumans (Dalit leaders in their fold) that the demonetisation decision was as per the advice of B R Ambedkar. It is a white lie. But, even if Ambedkar had said such a thing in some context, can it override the actual sufferings of the masses or alter the nature of reality? It would have been better if the BJP had heeded Ambedkar’s more pertinent advice that the bigger-than-life leaders in politics are the biggest danger to democracy.

- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/49/margin-speak/modi-digs-ditch-bjp.html

Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj at gmail.com) is a writer and civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.

[See also:

INTERVIEW: DEMONETISATION IS A LARGE SHOCK TO THE INDIAN ECONOMY – WITH LITTLE IMPACT ON BLACK MONEY
http://scroll.in/article/821913/interview-demonetisation-might-have-little-impact-on-black-money-but-will-hurt-the-indian-economy

THE 1991 MONETARY REFORM IN THE SOVIET UNION
https://sputniknews.com/business/20110202162419049/

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14. THE UKRAINIAN FAR RIGHT—AND THE DANGER IT POSES
by Lev Golinkin
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(The Nation - 5 December 2016)

With violence and intimidation, neo-Nazis and other far-right groups are influencing the country’s domestic and foreign policy.

Members of the Ukrainian National Guard’s Azov Battalion and the far-right radical group Right Sector take part in a rally in Kiev on October 14, 2016. (Reuters / Gleb Garanich)
 
It should be a priority for the incoming Donald Trump administration to reexamine America’s role in the Ukraine crisis. Over the past year, Washington has focused solely on Kiev’s failure to tackle Ukraine’s endemic corruption, while ignoring another fundamental obstacle to Ukraine’s democracy: the country’s far-right forces.

In Ukraine today, power is split between Kiev and heavily armed ultranationalist battalions, which have a long record of not only clashing with Kiev but also defying the will of the EU and Washington.

The ultranationalists’ influence via a policy of veto-through-violence is best exemplified by their continued derailment of the Minsk Accords, the agreement for settling the conflict in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. Minsk is also the key to lifting the anti-Russian sanctions that are hurting European economies and fomenting resentment in countries like France and Italy. It’s no surprise that Paris, Berlin, and the UN have repeatedly stressed that Minsk remains the only solution to the Ukraine conflict. For Ukraine’s far right, however, the accords—which require Kiev to grant Donbass special status, including the right to use the Russian language—are anathema. Accordingly, whenever the West nudges Ukraine to fulfill its Minsk obligations, the far right steps in, often with violence.

In July of 2015, the US State Department took extraordinary pains in urging Kiev to implement the special-status law required by Minsk: Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland flew to Kiev and, together with then-Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, watched as the parliament introduced the bill. A month afterward, during the first reading, ultranationalists killed four guardsmen and injured over 100 others in a grenade attack outside the parliament building; the special status law has remained in legislative limbo ever since.

Nearly a year after, leaders of France and Germany, whose economies have suffered as a result of Minsk-related sanctions, attempted to breathe life into the peace process by telling Kiev to conduct elections in Donbass (another provision in the road map). This time, the far right didn’t wait for a vote. Andriy Biletsky, the commander of the 3,000-strong Azov Battalion, publicly warned that his forces will remove the entire parliament if it allows the elections to take place, as 10,000 men marched through the capital to underscore the threat. Needless to say, the election provision wasn’t brought to a vote.

In addition to stymieing the Ukraine peace process and resolution of EU-Russia sanctions, the far right has flouted the rule of law, fostered instability, and undermined basic democratic institutions within Ukraine. Gangs tied to the Azov, Aidar, Right Sector, and Tornado battalions have had gun battles with police, intimidated court proceedings, overturned local elections, torched media buildings, attacked undesirable Soviet monuments, violently threatened journalists, and overtly spoken of overthrowing the government.

It is difficult to imagine any stable administration tolerating three years of such brazen challenges to its monopoly over the use of force, yet nearly all of the far right’s actions have gone unpunished.

One reason behind Kiev’s inability and unwillingness to rein in the battalions is because they remain the fiercest, most battle-hardened units in the armed forces; it’s hard to send in the National Guard to restore order when the National Guard itself consists of ultranationalist formations. An equally disturbing reason is that Ukraine’s far right enjoys the support of two extraordinarily powerful politicians: Parliament Speaker Andriy Parubiy and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

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Both men played a critical role in harnessing neo-Nazi street muscle during the winter 2013–14 Maidan uprising that resulted in the ouster of corrupt, albeit democratically elected, president Viktor Yanukovych. Parubiy’s ties with the far right go back decades: He co-founded and led the Social-National Party of Ukraine, which used neo-Nazi symbols and whose name, according to Der Spiegel, is an intentional reference to the Nazi Party.

Although Parubiy has not been formally affiliated with far-right organizations since the early 2000s, he has spoken fondly of his past; when prodded to repudiate his background in a 2015 interview, he insisted that his “values” have not changed. Parubiy’s history served him well: He was responsible for organizing ultranationalists into Maidan “self-defense” units that made Yanukovych’s overthrow possible, and assured Parubiy a prominent role in the new government. (The information that the man spent over a decade leading neo-fascist organizations was conspicuously absent from press releases during his 2015 and 2016 visits to meet with members of Congress and Washington think tanks.)

Avakov, in turn, developed Maidan’s “self-defense” formations into heavily equipped paramilitary units that fought in Donbass as well as brutally suppressed any hint of secession in Russian-speaking cities that had not yet fallen to the rebels. In the process, these units amassed a horrific record of rape, torture, kidnapping, murder, and possible war crimes, as attested by numerous Amnesty International and United Nations reports.

After becoming interior minister, Avakov has promoted figures such as a veteran of the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine and the Azov Battalion who recently became acting chief over Ukraine’s National Police. The National Police—which was funded, equipped, and trained by Washington—was once held up as a shining example of Washington’s guiding Ukraine toward democracy. The fact that it’s now run by a man with neo-Nazi ties is a particularly ironic example of unintended consequences.

It’s no surprise that, with influential leaders tied to the far right, inquiries are quashed by Kiev. Requests by the Council of Europe to look into the May 2, 2014, massacre in which 48 pro-Russian Ukrainians were burned alive after being chased into an Odessa building by radicals have yielded nothing. When an ultranationalist website leaked personal information about journalists who reported from the Donbass conflict zone, labeling them “terrorist collaborators,” it triggered an international backlash from The New York Times and The Daily Beast to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The website, however, is tied to Avakov, and despite a vociferous outcry from Western media, it has not been shut down.

Kiev’s tolerance of the far right is even generating pushback from Poland, one of Ukraine’s biggest supporters and certainly no friend of the Kremlin. This summer, Ukraine renamed a major boulevard in honor of Stepan Bandera, the leader of partisan groups responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Jews and over 100,000 Poles during WWII. In response, the Polish parliament unanimously passed legislation calling the massacres a genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists. Kiev’s insistence on glorifying Bandera’s organizations has eroded Polish-Ukraine relations to the point where a Ukrainian flag was recently burned in Warsaw.

Washington has been right to pressure Kiev to battle corruption and enforce the rule of law—as a New York Times editorial bluntly stated, America “cannot continue to shovel money into a corrupt swamp unless the government starts shaping the democratic rule that Ukrainians demanded in their protests.” The presence of armed white-supremacist formations with free rein to influence domestic and foreign policy poses a threat to democracy that’s at least as serious as graft. It is especially necessary to address this in 2017, as ultranationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism are surging throughout European nations, many of which lack the democratic safeguards of the United States. Washington must stop ignoring the far right in Ukraine, or risk sending an unhealthy message of tolerance to white supremacists, both at home and abroad. 

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15. REWRITING BALKAN HISTORY
by Jean-Arnault Dérens
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(Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2016)

Croatia and Serbia are inventing new pasts as a foundation for very nationalist futures.

It’s been claimed that Winston Churchill said the Balkans ‘produce more history than they can consume’. This summer, arguments between Serbia and Croatia over their history flared up again. Serbia accused Croatia of rehabilitating the fascist Ustaše regime of 1941-4, which killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma and Serbs. All the nationalist governments of the Balkans have distorted or manipulated historical facts to justify or bolster their own authority. All try to reformulate national histories to gloss over or play down the memory of the antifascist struggle that was the foundation of Yugoslavia (1945-91). A quarter of a century after the collapse of the socialist federal republic, this is getting out of control again.

In July the court of appeal in Zagreb annulled the 1946 verdict that found Cardinal Alojzije Viktor Stepinac (1898-1960) guilty of collaboration with the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), established by the Ustaše in 1941 under the protection of Nazi Germany. Stepinac, named archbishop of Zagreb in 1937, is a controversial figure. In office throughout the war, he backed the regime, though his supporters point out that he condemned its racial policies in some of his sermons, and claim that his trial was held at the instigation of the Communists to curb the Catholic Church’s influence. Imprisoned in Lepoglava, then under house arrest in his native village of Krašić, near Zagreb, where he died, he was elevated to cardinal in 1952 by Pope Pius XII and beatified in 1998 by John-Paul II. The Vatican has put his canonisation on hold so as not to compromise its dialogue with the Orthodox Churches, a priority for Pope Francis.

A belated ‘national revolution’ is under way in Croatia. At independence, and during the 1991-5 war, under the presidency of the nationalist Franjo Tuđman and his party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Croatia made a first attempt to distance itself from the symbolic and ideological heritage of the antifascist resistance during the second world war. Some Croat combat units openly claimed allegiance to the Ustaše, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The government chose to give less emphasis to the annual commemoration of the prisoner revolt at the Jasenovac concentration camp on 22 April 1945, while making that of the Bleiburg massacres official. (In May 1945, near Bleiburg in the hills of southern Austria, Tito’s partisans surrounded fleeing civilians and soldiers of the Ustaše state, and killed several tens of thousands (1).) Every year, the celebration of these events rekindles an internal war of memories. The presence of government officials at either ceremony attracts criticism. This year Croatia’s president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (HDZ) was ‘unable’ to travel to Jasenovac, though she attended the ceremony at Bleiburg.

Yet the Ustaše regime has never been officially recognised. The constitution adopted at independence lays claim to an ‘antifascist’ heritage. This ambivalence is partly explained by the personal position of Tuđman, a former partisan general who became a cadre in the Yugoslav regime before turning nationalist in the 1970s. Independent Croatia rejected the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Tito’s socialist Yugoslavia, but claimed the resistance as part of its own history. A further step was taken when the right returned to power after the November 2015 election. The Patriotic Coalition led by the HDZ, which brings together all Croatia’s far-right movements, was obliged to form an alliance with Most (Bridge of Independent Lists), a ‘popular movement’ whose leaders are close to the Catholic hierarchy, while the post of prime minister went to Tihomir Orešković, a Croatian-Canadian businessman with no party affiliation but strong links to Opus Dei. The partnership broke down this June, leading to a fresh election in September after months of acrimonious debate over revisionism.

Internal enemies

Croatia’s culture minister, Zlatko Hasanbegović, a popular figure in the present government, is a holocaust-denying historian and was a member of the far-right Croatian Pure Party of Rights (HČSP) before joining the HDZ. He rejects Croatia’s antifascist heritage, which he calls ‘a concept devoid of meaning’, put forward by ‘Bolshevik dictatorships’. His work attempts to play down the extermination policies of the Ustaše regime. As a Muslim from Zagreb, Hasanbegović comes from the hyper-marginal political tradition of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who supported the Ustaše. Some joined the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of SS Handschar, in response to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini’s appeal to collaborate. Historian Tvrtko Jakovinasays: ‘The government puts collaboration and the crimes of communism on the same footing. It claims that the two forms of totalitarianism, communism and fascism, were equally bad. In practice, this allows it to stigmatise “internal enemies”, starting with “communists” and all those who are nostalgic for Yugoslavia, not to mention Serbs and other national minorities, as well as bad Catholics, feminists and members of sexual minorities.’

Croatian revisionism is part of a trend affecting all of central Europe. Under Ivo Sanader, prime minister 2003-9, the HDZ began a clear repositioning with a view to joining the European Union. After accession in July 2013, the party shifted far to the right. Milorad Pupovac, president of the Serb National Council in Croatia, said this May: ‘An [HDZ] leader told me “We achieved our first goal with independence, and our second by joining the EU; now it’s time to create a truly national state”.’Once Croatia was admitted, the EU lost most of the leverage it had during the accession process to prevent or punish deviation from acceptable ideological norms. Croatia, which secretly longs to join the very conservative Visegrád Group (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), believes EU approval has given it the means to affirm its ‘national identity’, and even a very rightwing version of it.

    The government puts collaboration and the crimes of communism on the same footing. It claims that communism and fascism were equally bad
    Tvrtko Jakovina

Revisionism flourishes in Serbia too. In 2004 the parliament enacted a law giving the same pension rights to former partisans and former Chetniks. The new legislation had been proposed by Vojislav Mihailović, an MP representing the monarchist Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO). He is the grandson of Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović (1893-1946), head of the Yugoslav army in Serbia, which during the second world war included irregular units known as Chetniks. This movement, loyal to the government in exile in London, initially fought the occupying armies (Nazi, Bulgarian, Italian), their Serbian collaborators in the puppet Government of National Salvation, and the Ustaše regime. Later, some units chose to collaborate, preferring to fight Tito’s Communist resistance, whose growing influence earned them the support of the UK from 1943 (2). Hunted through the mountains of eastern Bosnia, Draža was arrested in 1946, tried in Belgrade and shot. After a retrial that started in 2006, he was rehabilitated in May 2015. Though historians recognise the ambivalence of the nationalist Chetnik movement, which was a genuine resistance movement before turning partially to collaboration, this rehabilitation raises other issues: if Draža was innocent, then his execution was a crime by Yugoslavia’s Communist regime.

Serbia took a further step with the opening, in May 2015, of the rehabilitation trial of General Milan Nedić (1878-1946). Nedić served as chief of staff of the Yugoslav army 1934-5 and was appointed army and navy minister in 1939. He was forced to resign a year later by the prince regent, Paul, because of his declared sympathies with Nazi Germany. Nedić is considered responsible for the collapse of the Yugoslav defence against the Axis invasion of April 1941. In August 1941 he became head of the puppet Government of National Salvation. Under the direction of the German military governor, Nedić’s troops were involved in the arrest, deportation and murder of thousands of Jews and resistance fighters. Historian Bojan Dimitrijević, an ardent advocate of Nedić’s rehabilitation and a member of the leadership of the Democratic Party (DS), affiliated with the Socialist International, said at the trial: ‘Collaboration is not a crime. It is merely a form of cooperation with the occupier.’

An obscured debate

Before Dimitrijević, the Serbian Liberal Party (SLS), a small organisation that ceased to exist in 2010, had also pressed for Nedić’s rehabilitation. This enthusiasm did not stem from support for Nazi ideology, but from a rejection of Yugoslav Communism so violent that it legitimated all the party’s adversaries. The SLS rejected Tito’s regime both as a social system and as a federal and multinational project that had stifled the Serbian people. It claimed that Serbia, a constitutional monarchy from the mid-19th century and therefore one of the oldest democracies in Europe, had been prevented by Tito from following its natural evolutionary path. Serbian revisionists see themselves as fighting the monolithic vision of history imposed by the Communist regime; they denounce the ‘myth’ of the fraternity and unity of the Yugoslav peoples, a central doctrine of the Tito regime. This debate was obscured under Slobodan Milošević (1989-2000), who excelled at playing both sides. As former head of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in Serbia, Milošević presented himself as defender of the Yugoslav heritage, undermined by the secession of the other federal republics; at the same time, he rehabilitated Serbian nationalism in its most conservative and orthodox forms.

1941: members of Croatia’s nationalist Ustaše militia take down the Serbian street sign in King Peter I Square, Zagreb
Ilse Steinhoff / Ullstein Bild / Getty

Since 2014 Serbia has been governed by the liberal conservative Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Rooted in the nationalist far right, the SNS radically updated its image in 2008, and since then has claimed to be firmly pro-European. Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, who as an ambitious young member of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) in the 1990s famously called for the killing of Muslims, is trying to cultivate the image of a smooth technocrat. He is pursuing a programme of ultraliberal reforms while encouraging the unbridled personality cult around him, and is careful not to talk too much about the past. He glorifies a ‘Serbia of the future’ that will break with its ghosts and settle its historical accounts — especially Kosovo, whose independence, declared in 2008, Serbia is tacitly coming to recognise.

To the West, the history of the Balkans seems complicated and confused. Its complexity is used as an excuse to avoid any attempt to make it intelligible, and is part of an ideological package that Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova (3) calls Balkanism, close to Edward W Said’s Orientalism.

The prospect of joining the EU after war in the 1990s was supposed to offer Balkan states a way to avoid a repetition of their tragic past. Accession would give them a way out of history, a process inherent to Europeanisation. The example of Croatia shows the futility of such claims. But now that EU enlargement is no longer the order of the day, many European diplomats are comfortable with Vučić’s de-ideologised discourse, since he seems able to guarantee Serbia’s stability. His nationalist excesses are forgotten, forgiven as sins of youth. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has failed to prevent the former dogs of war from remaining centre-stage in politics. The supposed equality between Ustaše and partisans in Croatia, and the Serbian authorities’ professed historical neutrality have the common goal of erasing the memory of and denigrating the Yugoslav resistance, which combined a socialist vision with a will to coexist peacefully and a promise of equality.

In Macedonia, erasing memory takes a stranger form. Since 2011 the impressive Museum of the Macedonian Struggle for Sovereignty and Independence in Skopje has told the story of Macedonian nationalist fighters hunted by the Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and finally Yugoslav Communists. This allows Macedonia, finally ‘reconciled’ (4) under the leadership of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE), to forget its historical wounds and divisions, though its birth as a state stems from the antifascist resistance. It is this moment that must be erased. Coloured fountains replace historical analysis; Nazi collaborators and resistance fighters become no more than characters in a pageant.


Jean-Arnault Dérens is editor of Le Courrier des Balkans.
Translated by Charles Goulden

(1) Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration, Stanford University Press, 2002.
(2) See the memoirs of Churchill’s envoy to Tito, Fitzroy McLean, Eastern Approaches, Penguin Global, 2004.
(3) Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans,Oxford University Press, New York, 2009.
(4) See Jean-Arnault Dérens and Laurent Geslin, ‘A challenge to Macedonia’s establishment’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, June 2016.

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16. USA: THE MYTH OF DONALD TRUMP’S WHITE WORKING-CLASS SUPPORT
 by Vito Laterza and Louis Philippe Römer
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(Africa is a Country - November 17, 2016)

Whiteness is the biggest single factor that emerges from the US presidential election. The majority of white voters across gender and most income groups who went to the polls voted for Donald Trump, someone who does not hide his white supremacist views, condones sexual assault, and built his campaign on openly anti-immigration, anti-Latino and anti-Muslim themes.

Yet sectors of the Euro-American left adamantly stress the role of the white working classes in facilitating Trump’s victory, and dismiss race as “identity politics”, not completely explaining the Trump phenomenon.

Two leaders of the left, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, were quick to frame this election as a kind of “popular revolt” – very much like they did with Brexit a few months ago. For them, progressives should pay attention to Donald Trump’s anti-establishment narrative, so that we can offer alternatives without the “divisive rhetoric”. Sanders went as far as offering to collaborate with Trump on select issues that will help people come out of the crisis, as long as the president-elect does not engage in racism, sexism and xenophobia. Trump has just announced that he will immediately deport three million migrants, but that has not weakened the Vermont senator’s resolve. Influential commentators say that the anti-establishment left alternative to Trumpism should begin from white workers who supported Trump.

This story of an aggrieved “white working class” who joined Trump in huge numbers to rebel against neoliberal elites and neglectful Democrats is less an objective appraisal of working class voting trends, than a reflex of leftist common sense, inflected perhaps by a yearning for the heyday of (white) union solidarity in the Rust Belt.

Add to this the vicissitudes of the electoral college, and it is no wonder that some on the left focused on the behavior of about four hundred thousand voters in the Great Lakes region –Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – and ignored the rest of the country. Closer analysis reveals that Republican support in the Midwest grew predominantly in rural areas, and in areas where whites are the overwhelming majority – these include both low and middle income areas. From our own data analysis in the three states above, Donald Trump’s growth compared to Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012 is significantly higher in counties with the biggest concentration of white residents than in the most racially mixed ones. This is not surprising, because negative attitudes toward immigration, non-white populations, gender, and LGBT issues are highest when whites live in racially homogeneous communities, and support for racism and anti-immigrant views are the strongest predictors for support for Trump.

Although the ballots are still being tallied, it looks like Hillary Clinton – the establishment candidate – will be receiving the third highest number of votes in the political history of the United States. People of color voted for Clinton. Moreover, Clinton won the support of most voters earning under USD$50,000 a year. Far from a popular rebellion against a neoliberal establishment, then, a vast majority of voters who have endured structural economic and political disenfranchisement as well as the negative effects of the recent economic crisis, chose Clinton – the “establishment” candidate. Surely, they too have economic anxieties and grievances about the system, but did not vote for Donald Trump.

The gender dimension is also glossed over. The vitriolic sexist rhetoric Clinton has had to face is easily dismissed. Women have suffered from the recent financial crisis too, and like all disadvantaged groups, they bear the brunt of it more than better positioned groups. White women supported Trump by a smaller majority than white men, and women of color voted for Clinton more than men of color, but these trends are largely ignored. Not to mention, an estimated 30 to 40 million US residents are politically disenfranchised and could not vote.

These larger facts are important context for interpreting Trump’s decisive but marginal gains in a few key states. But commentators downplay them both to bolster a tidy narrative of working class rebellion, and to dismiss the importance of race and gender. This story veers dangerously close to the long-standing caricature of the “poor white,” which elites have used to avoid a reckoning with their own complicity with economic and racial inequalities. This dismissal disregards the suffering of groups who have experienced centuries of structural discrimination and marginalization, both in the US and abroad. It reinforces racial, ethnic and gender divisions, and thus undermines the possibility for broader solidarities.

What is also left out is that many whites – many of whom are not impoverished working classes – now feel under attack as “whites.” The election of Barack Obama, the first African- American president, contributed to a feeling that the world is becoming hostile to their very existence. Some believe that a conspiracy of minorities, leftists, feminists, and multi-billionaires, often Jewish, have allied to marginalize the “common white folk.” White racial anxiety is not a new problem in the history of American politics. Even perceptions of economic insecurity are filtered by racial anxieties, which makes race and economics impossible to separate. Racism is neither false consciousness nor mere bigotry, but an ideological and material structure that confers social privilege and material benefits onto a group, and mobilizes that group against any attempt to take away their benefits.

Disregarding the advances made by queer, feminist and critical race theories and social movements, many (mostly white) leftists do not recognize that racism and sexism are structures that regulate the distribution of economic, social, educational and other resources. Instead, they treat racism as rhetorical baggage left-over from the bad old days of colonialism and Jim Crow, allegedly used by elites to “mislead” the working classes. Workers who are white must be included into a wider coalition, but to think that a mere change in messaging will do the trick vastly underestimates the forces that the left is up against. Proposals cannot avoid tackling white and male privilege simply because “that’s our base”.

Nobody doubts that the establishment is in crisis, and something must change. But why is it this is becoming common sense only now when it is affecting white Americans and Europeans? Why should a core of emboldened Trump supporters be the starting point for constructing a broad alliance against the devastating effects of a racial and gendered capitalist world order?

The role of the left should not be to focus its efforts on bargaining with the often misrepresented and caricatured concerns of a small sector of the working classes. It is to mobilize a broader intersectional alliance that can effectively tackle various forms of discrimination, and that addresses the differential levels of discrimination and exclusion experienced by various groups.

Framing the Trump phenomenon as the wrong response to the right concerns goes in the opposite direction. Knowingly or not, it feeds the growing wave of white nationalism and xenophobia that is taking America and Europe by storm.

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17. FATAL ATTRACTION | Michael Burleigh
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(Literary Review - December 2016)

Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy
By Larry Diamond, Marc F Plattner & Christopher Walker (edd)
John Hopkins University Press 243pp £26 

Recent years have witnessed many Western politicians flirting with authoritarianism. Think of Farage, Le Pen, Orbán, Sarkozy and president elect Trump and their admiration for Vladimir Putin. The same goes for many of the people who post comments underneath online newspaper articles whenever Russia or China acts ‘robustly’ against Islamists. ‘Hurrah’ cried most British readers when Thailand ‘refouled’ dozens of Uighurs back to Beijing in orange costumes and hoods that deliberately mimicked those worn by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. ‘Hurrah’ many of them cry as eastern Aleppo is pulverised by Russian bombers, even as the editorials deplore the carnage.

The authoritarians know that they cannot easily win universal approval for their world-view in established democracies, but they can influence policy, especially when the electorates are in volatile mood. Since the 2008 financial crisis, authoritarian governments have been crowing over the failures of Western capitalism; the US presidential election has given the Chinese plenty of ammunition to argue that the orderly decennial alternation of highly educated and experienced technocrats is better than having to choose between Clinton and Trump. After all, China has proved that authoritarianism and modernity can go together, in defiance of traditional views. The internet is an example. Some 640 million Chinese may be online, but it is ringed by the Great Firewall of China and monitored by thousands of spies (even the VPNs used to circumvent state control are sold at a profit by fronts run by the authorities). Iran and Russia have now adopted Chinese best practice.

A moment’s thought suggests why this authoritarian temptation is not a good idea. Forget about pursuing Chechen jihadis ‘into the shitter’ to kill them, attractive though that may be. Imagine your old car has a minor collision with a speeding convoy of SUVs carrying an oligarch or a government official, or their spoiled sons, on a lonely Russian road. The bodyguards attack you and then the obliging police arrest you when they arrive. Imagine you love the village where your ancestors have been buried for centuries and that now developers want to build new apartments and a shopping mall there. The local authorities, courts and police collude in your forced expropriation (for you have no legal title) and you join the huddled masses in the city slums. (See the film Leviathan to get an idea of how this works in Russia; even the local bishop is in on the act.) Finally, imagine you are an American-Iranian dual national and that you decide to show your children the old country. The mere fact of dual nationality results in your indefinite detention in a grim prison on charges you will never learn. This is before we even get on to the many journalists, publishers and opposition politicians who are murdered or abducted, often in broad daylight.

The main thing to note about the new authoritarian camp is its heterodox composition. Officially atheist China sits alongside an assertively conservative Christian Russia and an Islamic theocracy that has both democratic and revolutionary tinges. Eager hangers-on include the left-wing Chavista regime in Venezuela, the Saudi despots and Turkey’s Kemalist-cum-Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

This authoritarian turn is the central theme in a timely new collection of essays, Authoritarianism Goes Global. As a series of essays it lacks the coherent thrust of William Dobson’s fine The Dictator’s Learning Curve, about how autocrats no longer rely on naked repression, but the case is forcefully argued and some of the pieces are very good.

The finest is by Alexander Cooley. It explores how authoritarian regimes undermine democratic norms by copying the language and institutions used in the West. Fear of Western-engineered ‘colour revolutions’, similar to those that broke out in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in 2003–5, haunts all the regimes concerned, while a second Arab Spring is the cauchemar of Gulf rulers.

One tactic is to turn the West’s fabled ‘soft power’ against it. Many of the contributors, most notably Peter Pomerantsev, focus on television as the authoritarian medium of choice. The South American channel TeleSUR was apparently the inspiration for Iran’s Press TV, though both China’s CCTV News and Russia’s RT offered global English-language services earlier. But this is not just a matter of propaganda and the West is not entirely innocent of what is going on. Many of the West’s problems are self-generated.

The rise of the security state in the years since 9/11 has made the job of authoritarian regimes much easier, since nowadays anyone can be designated a terrorist. The Joint Security Agreement of the Gulf Cooperation Council makes it possible to extradite ‘extremists’ merely on suspicion of ‘terrorism’. After the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia added sixty thousand extra staff to the already large Interior Ministry. Interpol ‘red notices’ also make apprehension simple, as do mutual legal assistance treaties, which this country has signed up to. (How convenient that in early November a Chinese police chief was elected the head of Interpol.) The FSB can now pop into a police station in Omsk and cause the system to be activated on a global scale. Any erring citizen (or renegade oligarch) will find himself stopped at the first airport he visits if the Russian regime decides to blight his existence. It might also force him to ‘re-nationalise’ (in other words, repatriate) money kept in such pirate lairs as the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Panama and London.

But there is a bigger battle of ideas too. Founded in 2001, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation consists of China, Russia and four of the Central Asian ’stans (several other countries are trying to join it). This is the main international forum for asserting absolute state sovereignty (except when it comes to Ukraine). It also demands ‘respect for civilizational diversity’ (a nice touch, that last, talismanic word so beloved by academia) and ‘defense of traditional values’, a term that conjures up quaint Inuit folkways rather than hanging gays from cranes. Indeed, containing the values of what the Kremlin calls ‘Gayropa’ is very much part of the authoritarian strategy to rally the support of traditionally minded folk, something Putin has done most successfully. It is a pity that in an otherwise astute essay, Lilia Shevtsova does not ask why Putin’s fusion of Orthodoxy and neo-fascism resonates with many Russians, despite the pervasive corruption and poverty. At least the content Chinese middle classes have the excuse of a house price bonanza, and no capital gains and income taxes too.

If there is one glaring omission from this book it concerns the relationship between NGOs and Western intelligence agencies, as most obviously symbolised – manna from heaven for China and Russia – by James Woolsey, a former CIA director who went on to chair Freedom House. Such cases only fuel authoritarian suspicions that NGOs are fifth columns for Western governments. Some authoritarian regimes have created pseudo-NGOs that mimic the language of rights – Iran’s judiciary has established a Human Rights Council – and government-organised non-governmental organisations (GONGOs) to ensure, among other things, that rigged elections are declared fair. Thus, in 2013, forty-two ‘zombie’ monitoring agencies no one had heard of declared fair the re-election of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, even though his ‘victory’, with 73 per cent of the vote, was accidentally announced before the polling stations had even opened. This figure was massaged upwards to 85 per cent on the day of the election.

Authoritarian states have learned how to manipulate international organisations too. This enables them to leverage their power in a ‘jiujitsu-like’ fashion. As Andrew Nathan shows in an excellent chapter on China, the world’s biggest autocratic power seems intent on reshaping international organisations from within. Beijing is quietly trying to take over UN peacekeeping operations, minus human rights monitors of course. The authoritarians can also create cover versions of international agencies, with distasteful features edited out. The proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank will, it is hoped, rival the World Bank and IMF, but without coupling aid to a demand to uphold human rights. China’s aid and investment programme is untransparent: you do not see the strings attached.

The two essays devoted to Iran are among the finest in the book. The best is by Abbas Milani. It shows how four forces are in permanent tension in Iran: Shia Islam, authoritarianism, revolution and democracy (the country has had a parliament since 1906 and the voting age was only recently increased from fifteen to eighteen). This ensures that the power of the clergy is counterbalanced by regular waves of democratic opinion. Reformist presidents, such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami and the incumbent, Hassan Rouhani, have therefore managed to get elected, despite the many obstacles the system puts in their way, be it the mass disqualification of reformist candidates or the rigging of polls, as in the re-election in 2009 of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A chapter by Alex Vatanka examines the role of China in helping Tehran to establish the Great Firewall of Persia, probably with blocking and surveillance technology that the Chinese acquired from their friends in Israel, who also help their new Saudi friends monitor social media.

What to do about this authoritarian turn is easier to answer in the negative. A revival of Cold War agencies like the Foreign Office Research Department won’t cut it. Nor will pastiche versions of Encounter. Will conservative Western newspapers – in a country like ours, which allows an ex-KGB man to own a mass-circulation newspaper – stop publishing lavish advertorial supplements from China or Russia? The concluding essay, by Christopher Walker, does not offer many solutions to this challenge, beyond the need for democracies to jointly counter it. That is as hopeless as wishing the challenge would go away. It won’t, and cyber-interference in Western elections is just the latest step. More needs to be done to highlight what living in these states actually means for anyone without power or money. In the latter case, even that is often not enough to protect you.

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18. GOOGLE, DEMOCRACY AND THE TRUTH ABOUT INTERNET SEARCH
by Carole Cadwalladr
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(The Observer - 4 December 2016)

Tech-savvy rightwingers have been able to ‘game’ the algorithms of internet giants and create a new reality where Hitler is a good guy, Jews are evil and… Donald Trump becomes president
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook?CMP=share_btn_fb

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19. MAITHILI STORIES - STORYTELLING ON THE NEPAL-INDIA BORDER
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 Coralynn V. Davis. Maithil Women's Tales: Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 272 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03842-6.

Reviewed by Jessica V. Birkenholtz (University of Illinois)
Published on H-Asia (December, 2016)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Maithili Stories

In Maithil Women’s Tales: Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border, Coralynn Davis proves herself to be a masterful storyteller as she weaves together a rich, textured narrative about the tales that Maithil women tell and the lives of the women who tell them. The Maithils are a distinctive linguistic and ethnic community who inhabit both sides of the Indo-Nepal border zone in eastern India.

Over the course of the book’s 222 pages, Davis presents 140 stories as told by twelve women, who represent a spectrum of caste, class, age, and education. The folktales are accompanied with extensive discussion and commentary that contextualize their telling--such as who might tell the story and under what circumstances--and highlight the layers of meaning and voices--explicit, muted, or silently understood--that are contained within and expressed through their telling. The vibrancy of these narratives is further illustrated through the inclusion of well-known Maithil paintings. Each chapter opens with a custom-made painting in the traditional Maithil style that corresponds to one of the main stories discussed in the chapter. This visually reinforces the dynamic ways in which the storyworlds of Maithil women are locally visualized and articulated through different expressive traditions. The book is organized into seven chapters and an introduction.

In the introduction, Davis outlines the three main foci of the book: the “cultural work accomplished by Maithil women’s storytelling”; “the ontological and epistemological relationships among folktales, life experiences, and personhood” for Maithil women; and, a discussion of “how Maithil women’s perspectives evidenced in their stories complicate our understandings of South Asian Hindu conceptions of the self, the social, and the sacred” (p. 1). Davis draws on over two decades of research in the Maithili region and skillfully employs overlapping ethnographic, critical folklorist, and feminist methodologies to excavate the multiple layers, meanings, and functions of Maithil women’s taleworlds (the events in the story) and their utility for storytellers in navigating their storyrealms (the telling of the story and its mitigating social, cultural, and historical context). She also introduces and implements in this chapter the framework for the book, which pivots on the full retelling and detailed discussion of at least two Maithil women’s folktales in each chapter, supported by additional examination of numerous other tales that together exemplify key aspects of Maithil women’s lives, the specificities of Maithil patriarchal culture, and the variously fantastical and magically real taleworlds that serve as a critical, depersonalized outlet for expressing personal challenges and non-normative perspectives in a society in which women are marginalized and silenced. To this end, Davis notes here too that Maithil women’s narratives simultaneously provide a complement and alternative to the pervasive and often hegemonic story of the Ramayana epic and its idealized heroine, Sita, whose birthplace is Mithila’s Janakpur; that there are “alternative cultural and social constructions” (p. 14) is an important point that becomes clearer over the course of the chapters that follow.

Chapter 1 lays the theoretical foundation for the book through an examination of three aspects of Maithil women’s narratives: (1) their “irrepressibility,” which is significant in light of the often socioculturally constrained speech of women in their patriarchal, purdah culture, (2) their frequent movement and morphing, which mirror the movement and transformation of Maithil women in different contexts, and (3) their discursive political engagement that reveals “social configurations of power” (p. 23). Davis argues that Maithil women’s folktales “mediate silence and speech in a way that requires listening for what might not be, from another perspective, the central or ‘loudest’ or sanctioned message of the story” (p. 35). For her, the question is not just about who can speak, but about who can hear and when and what they hear. The point that Davis drives home in this chapter is that Maithil women’s folktales are a critical medium for the expression of personal and political agency and voice (for use or intentional disuse) in a culture in which women have little of either.

Chapter 2 examines metaphysical questions of fortune and social stratification, of the “fixity and fluidity of identity and social station,” evident in Maithil women’s tales (p. 37). Davis explores the tensions between personal agency, karma, and bhagya (fate/destiny) to consider the ways in which Maithil women understand the interplay of human and divine forces, and influences in one’s life. Further, she considers the cycles of sukha (happiness) and dukha (sorrow) in these women’s tales to highlight the fact that ultimately Maithil women’s tales are stories of hope that illustrate the ways in which patience and perseverance can eventually give way to (re)new(ed) prosperity, in whatever form that may take.

Chapters 3 and 4 similarly focus on larger concerns that order women’s lives and storyrealms in the larger context of Maithil patriarchy. Chapter 3 maps out notions of virtue--dharma (ethos), sat (purity), pap (sin), dushata (wickedness), and mamata (maternal tenderness)--in Maithil women’s taleworlds. Davis notes that Maithil morality tales place little emphasis on religious devotion and focus instead on dharmic and adharmic behavior, which is mediated by both gender and caste, that promotes or destabilizes social order. Her analysis of the chapter’s tales illustrate that the “main virtuous qualities highlighted in Maithil women’s stories are all pro-social and relationally proximate, that is, they are about how a person behaves toward other with whom he or she personally engages” (p. 74). Chapter 4 distills the discussion down to the virtue of compassion as embodied in the figure of the devoted mother. According to Davis, this is the one instance in Maithil women’s tales in which there is a clear and strong gendering to virtues. Focusing on mothers and mamata, here we see mothers idealized for their loving devotion to their children, in stark contrast to abusive or neglectful stepmothers, evil mothers-in-law, and hardened fathers. The social and cultural significance of the messages of these tales, Davis argues, is that they “highlight Maithil women’s understanding that the virtue of loving compassion is best exemplified in their own behavior toward children but also prescribes such devotion as an antidote to the constraints and dangers of life in a patriarchal, patrilineal society” (p. 111). One interesting conclusion that Davis comes to in these chapters is that Maithila’s patriarchal, socially stratified society pits women against one another in “their pursuit of security and resources” (p. 161). Therefore, these narratives serve as cautionary tales that highlight the importance of solidarity among women to serve as a counterparadigm of Maithil power structures and practices.

Chapters 5 and 6 shift the discussion from vices and virtues to forests, ponds, and the “spatiocultural orientations” of Maithil women and their tales (p. 113). The forest in narrative (examined in chapter 5) represents a “form of alterity to the settlement (village, city, kingdom, etc.),” and as such is a place of both great--but gendered--opportunity and danger for women (p. 114). Here Davis contrasts the Maithil women’s folktales to the normative, male-centric Sanskrit literature and, in particular, the tale of Rama and Sita, whose story dominates the Maithil religious and cultural imaginaire. Chapter 6 examines the centrality of ponds, which are often “sites for the articulation of women’s insights” (p. 135). Davis observes the women who frequent these ponds in Maithil women’s tales and considers the nature of the insights produced in the ponds’ proximity as a means for understanding the dynamics of shakti (primal feminine energy) in these tales and how this relates to shakti and the feminine divine in the Hindu tradition. Both chapters highlight these spaces as places that enable critical shifts in women’s actions and knowledge that engender greater agency, freedom, and power, especially in terms of women’s sexuality, either in playing it up or down.

In the final chapter, Davis explores a set of narratives about the initial suppression and eventual telling of women character’s tales of suffering, often at the hands of other women. Her analysis highlights culturally specific forms of patriarchy that render women (fictional and real) unable to share their personal stories of hardship. Noting that suffering women characters who do tell their stories ultimately experience an improvement in their lot, Davis concludes the chapter and the book by asking how this translates to the lives of the Maithil women telling these narratives. Storytelling and other expressive traditions are, she argues, “absolutely central to Maithil women’s selfhood” and are the “building blocks of life for Maithil women” (p. 181). In Davis’s final words: Maithil women and the stories they tell are irrepressible.

The greatest challenge of this beautiful and beautifully written book is keeping pace with Davis as she moves deftly and swiftly from story to story. While it is easy to imagine the difficulty in crafting it, it would have been helpful to have not only a list of all the Maithil women’s tales discussed but perhaps even a table that charted out the key elements, associations, and significance of these tales for readers who have not lived with these stories in our heads and thoughts for as long as Davis certainly has to have written a book such as this. Similarly, Davis paints the ethnographic setting with great precision. For those readers familiar with Janakpur and other areas of the Maithil cultural region in Nepal’s Terai, this will enhance their reading and interpretive experience. For those with less or no familiarity with the region, however, some of these details may be a distraction. These minor critiques in no way diminish the quality or invaluable contribution that this book makes to the fields of anthropology, folklore studies, and women’s and gender studies. This book joins the ranks of Gloria Goodwin Raheja’s and Ann Grozdin Gold’s Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (1994) and Smita Tewari Jassal’s Unearthing Gender: Folksongs of North India (2012), the standard-bearer and another more recent contribution, respectively, of women’s expressive traditions. As a scholar of religious studies, I also see great value in her original and vibrant account of a local form of Hindu culture, practice, and ideology in a geoculturally understudied region as seen through the telling of these Maithil women’s oral tales and the lives and daily realities of the women who tell them. 


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