SACW - 23 Feb 2017 | Bangladesh: Protect labor activists / Pakistan: Blood Splattered Sehwan Sharif / India: Protect universities and academic freedom / Manmar: Rohingya insurgency / Turkey: Erdogan leads a witch-hunt

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 23 Feb 2017 - No. 2928 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Stop intimidation of unions and Garment labor activists - Text of Statement by Human Rights Watch (15 Feb 2017)
2. Pakistan: Blood Splattered Sehwan Sharif / The Sufi must sing
3. India: Protect universities and academic freedom from threat of violence and intimidation - say human rights groups
4. India: RSS - BJP and the Importance of Education for Hindutva | Ram Puniyani
5. A statement from India’s feminists in solidarity with women of Nagaland 
6. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - India: The Shape of the Beast (Amit Sengupta)
 - India: Goons of the Hindu Right Have A Free Run on Delhi University North Campus - Violence and Assault on 22 Feb 2017
 - India: Voting choices are based on needs, greed and security | Irfan Engineer
 - Book Review: Looking Back at the Colonial Origins of Communal and Caste Conflict in India | Steve Wilkinson
 - India: Violence and rioting at Ramjas College and in Delhi university by ABVP the Hindutva right wing youth organisation
 - Announcement: Discussion on the book 'Life, Emergent - The Social Afterlives of Violence' (2 March 2017, New Delhi)
 - Announcement: Mass Violence and the Idea of Healing - a Talk by Manoj Jha (February 25, 2017, New Delhi)
 - Jawed Naqvi: . . . how far can a foot soldier fight on without a motivated army
 - India: ABVP Disrupts, Vandalises Literary Event at Ramjas College by Akshit Sangomla on 22/02/2017 - The Wire
 - India: Move to hand over radio news broadcasts to an RSS-controlled news agency called Hindusthan Samachar
 - Hindi Article: Demography and Religious communities 2017
 - What is our Nationality: Indian or Hindu?
 - India: Invitation to a Discussion on the 15th Anniversary of the Gujarat Carnage (28 Feb 2017, New Delhi)
 - Attack on Unit Filming Padmavati
 - Book Review: Audrey Truschke on Cynthia Talbot. The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Sri Lanka: ellamma & her struggle to reclaim her house and land in Puthukudiyiruppu | Ruki Fernando
8. India: Sign an appeal to save the Hall of Nations [Pragati Maidan, New Delhi]
9. Pakistan: Women’s vote | Editorial in Dawn
10. India: Amend constitution and set the women of Nagaland free - Editorial, The Times of India
11. India: Question from Ramjas to JNU - Is ABVP a students’ organisation or a bunch of hooligans? - Editorial, Hindustan Times
12. India: The Shape of the Beast | Amit Sengupta
13. The man angling to become the U.S. envoy to India shares Trump’s love of the limelight | Annie Gowen
14. India: Monuments to a nation’s journey | Amit Srivastava , Peter Scriver
15. Photos: India’s incredible shrinking Bene Israel community, through an outsider’s lens
16. India: Kaziranga - The park that shoots people to protect rhinos | Justin Rowlatt
17. Truschke on Talbot, 'The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000'
18. Rohingya insurgency heralds wider war in Myanmar | Anthony Davis
19. Turkey: ‘I feel like I have been buried alive’ - families live in fear and isolation as Erdoğan leads a witch-hunt | Constanze Letsch
20. Turkey academics speak of fear and loss amid mass sackings | Rengin Arslan
21. Hobson on Downs, 'Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation' and Stewart-Winter, 'Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics'

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1. BANGLADESH: STOP INTIMIDATION OF UNIONS AND GARMENT LABOR ACTIVISTS - TEXT OF STATEMENT BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH (15 FEB 2017)
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Dozens of garment workers and labor leaders are facing unfair or apparently fabricated criminal cases in Bangladesh after wage strikes in December 2016, says Human Rights Watch
http://www.sacw.net/article13114.html

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2. PAKISTAN: BLOOD SPLATTERED SEHWAN SHARIF / THE SUFI MUST SING
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Articles by Suleman Akhtar and by William Dalrymple following the terrorist attack on the Sehwan Sharif Shrine - Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s dargah in Sindh
http://www.sacw.net/article13117.html

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3. INDIA: PROTECT UNIVERSITIES AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM FROM THREAT OF VIOLENCE AND INTIMIDATION - SAY HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS
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Authorities need to protect academic freedom, which is crucial to the right to education. Violence and hooliganism in the name of nationalism must cede ground to civil debate on Campuses. Violent actions by right wing student organisation ABVP on campuses must be halted
http://www.sacw.net/article13119.html

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4. INDIA: RSS - BJP AND THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION FOR HINDUTVA
by Ram Puniyani
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Education has been the major area of work for RSS all through. Since it has a view of Nationalism which is opposed to the concept of Indian Nationalism, it already had made lot of efforts to promote its views through Shakhas, through Sarswati Shishu Mandirs and through Ekal Schools. It has set up organizations to influence the policies in the field of education like Vidya Bharati. It has also started putting its followers in the top positions in Universities and major research institutes of the country. The previous BJP led NDA regime had already started the process of saffronisation by changing the school books
http://www.sacw.net/article13115.html

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5. A STATEMENT FROM INDIA’S FEMINISTS IN SOLIDARITY WITH WOMEN OF NAGALAND
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We, the undersigned women’s organisations and concerned individuals take serious note of the fierce opposition to women’s reservation of 33% seats in Nagaland Municipal Councils by male dominated tribal bodies in Nagaland in the name of protecting their tradition and customary practices that bar women from participating in decision- making bodies.
http://www.sacw.net/article13118.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - India: The Shape of the Beast (Amit Sengupta)
 - India: Goons of the Hindu Right Have A Free Run on Delhi University North Campus - Violence and Assault on 22 Feb 2017
 - India: Voting choices are based on needs, greed and security | Irfan Engineer
 - Book Review: Looking Back at the Colonial Origins of Communal and Caste Conflict in India | Steve Wilkinson
 - India: Violence and rioting at Ramjas College and in Delhi university by ABVP the Hindutva right wing youth organisation
 - Announcement: Discussion on the book 'Life, Emergent - The Social Afterlives of Violence' (2 March 2017, New Delhi)
 - Announcement: Mass Violence and the Idea of Healing - a Talk by Manoj Jha (February 25, 2017, New Delhi)
 - Jawed Naqvi: . . . how far can a foot soldier fight on without a motivated army
 - India - UP elections 2017: BJP's communal propaganda . . . is the default setting of the party - Apoorvanand
 - India: 2017 यूपी विधानसभा चुनाव में नरेंद्र मोदी का प्रचार अभियान - A video recording with Prof Apoorvanand on the language of communal propaganda
 - India: ABVP Disrupts, Vandalises Literary Event at Ramjas College by Akshit Sangomla on 22/02/2017 - The Wire
 - India: Move to hand over radio news broadcasts to an RSS-controlled news agency called Hindusthan Samachar
 - India: ABVP’s protest turns violent at Ramjas College in Delhi University
 - Hindi Article: Demography and Religious communities 2017
 - What is our Nationality: Indian or Hindu?
 - India: Invitation to a Discussion on the 15th Anniversary of the Gujarat Carnage (28 Feb 2017, New Delhi)
 - Attack on Unit Filming Padmavati
 - Book Review: Audrey Truschke on Cynthia Talbot. The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000
 - India: JNU's progressive student leader Shehla Rashid is accused by Aligarh Univ students union on grounds of 'hurt religious sentiments'
 - India: Does the Supreme Court See Secularism And Identity Politics as Incompatible? (M.P. Raju)
 - India: Ram Puniani to launch "Diploma In Communal Harmony" course - Media Invitation
 - India: BJP is hoping to repeat in 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections the performance of 2014 Lok Sabha polls
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. SRI LANKA: ELLAMMA & HER STRUGGLE TO RECLAIM HER HOUSE AND LAND IN PUTHUKUDIYIRUPPU
by  Ruki Fernando
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Sellamma is 83 years old. She has a house in Puthukudiyiruppu (PTK) East, Ward no. 7, in the Mullaitivu district in the Northern Province. It’s opposite the PTK Divisional Secretariat (DS). But for more than two weeks, she has been braving the hot sun and cold nights on the street, opposite her house. Because her house and land is occupied by the Army. In fading light of evening, and beyond an Army watchtower, she showed me her house.
http://groundviews.org/2017/02/20/sellamma-her-struggle-to-reclaim-her-house-and-land-in-puthukudiyiruppu/

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8. INDIA: SIGN AN APPEAL TO SAVE THE HALL OF NATIONS [PRAGATI MAIDAN, NEW DELHI]
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http://buff.ly/2kV5F90

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9. PAKISTAN: WOMEN’S VOTE | Editorial in Dawn
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(Dawn, February 17, 2017)

IN a country that gave the Muslim world its first woman prime minister, it is surprising to see opposition to measures designed to bring out the women’s vote. A proposal to order re-election in any constituency where women have cast less than 10pc of the vote has been under discussion for a while now, but is being resisted by the JUI-F and the Jamaat-i-Islami. Both parties claim the proposal amounts to “forcing women to vote” and such mandatory measures should be avoided. But in a country like Pakistan, where it is so important to increase women’s political participation and where their right to vote is not always respected, it makes perfect sense for there to be a requirement that a minimum threshold of women’s votes be present in any election for it to be considered fair and representative. We need more robust assurances that parties have not colluded to suppress the women’s vote in certain constituencies, like Lower Dir, where this has happened more than once. In the last by-election there in May 2015, none of the 50,000 registered women voters cast their ballots, because some of the religious parties who are opposing the current proposal had joined hands to ensure that women would not turn out to vote.

Maybe the reason why these parties are opposed to measures designed to encourage the women’s vote is that they have difficulty in mobilising that segment — or perhaps, in winning their vote. In fact, the requirement of 10pc minimum women’s vote is too low, and in time should be raised further. And on top of that, women’s votes should be recorded in more detail at the polling station level, to reflect not just the number of votes cast by them, but also give a party-wise breakdown. This will facilitate greater analysis of the role of the women’s vote in various constituencies across Pakistan, and help incentivise parties to seek this vote as their political strategy rather than trying to suppress it.

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10. INDIA: AMEND CONSTITUTION AND SET THE WOMEN OF NAGALAND FREE - EDITORIAL, THE TIMES OF INDIA
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(The Times of India - February 21, 2017)

Editorial

Nagaland chief minister T R Zeliang quit on Sunday. His party, the Naga People’s Front, has 46 lawmakers in a house of 60. Its allies, the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland, have the rest: Nagaland has no elected opposition. Yet, Zeliang’s ouster shows the real opposition comes from conservative outfits like the Naga Hoho, an all-male body of tribal elders. Trouble started last year, when the Supreme Court upheld an appeal by the Naga Mothers’ Association to allow 33 per cent reservation for women in urban local body elections.

Zeliang wanted to conduct municipal polls on February 1, with such reservations. Tribal organisations protested, saying the Constitution upholds tribal customary law, which allows little space for women in public life. After protests paralysed administration, Zeliang called off municipal polls. But that was not enough: zealots prevailed upon cowed legislators, who got Zeliang to quit. This has revealed the deep patriarchal bias in Naga society. Since Nagaland’s first election in 1964, there has been no woman representative in its assembly.

Male chauvinism prospers on the back of a constitutional ambiguity. Article 371 (A) says, “No Act of Parliament shall apply to Nagaland in relation to religious or social practices of the Nagas, Naga customary law and procedure, administration of civil and criminal justice involving decisions according to the Naga Customary law, ownership and transfer of land and its resources.”

This contradicts not just Article 243(D) that guarantees reservations for women, but the basic right to equality and the overall principle that when custom conflicts with fundamental rights, rights must prevail. The Constitution should be amended to make this explicit. Nagaland’s women have the right to be part of the democratic mainstream.

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11. INDIA: QUESTION FROM RAMJAS TO JNU - IS ABVP A STUDENTS’ ORGANISATION OR A BUNCH OF HOOLIGANS? - EDITORIAL, HINDUSTAN TIMES
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(The Hindustan Times - 23 February 2017)

Editorial

Just a year after ABVP activists disrupted and shut down the Jawaharlal Nehru University by alleging that some of its students have indulged in anti-national sloganeering, its members are at it again. On Wednesday, ABVP members clashed with students in the Delhi University campus over a protest march the latter were holding against the organisation for disrupting an event at the Ramjas University. On Tuesday, ABVP members disrupted an event for which JNU student Umar Khalid was invited, prompting the college to take back an invitation to another JNU student, Shehla Rashid. The college was forced to call off the seminar after heated protests against Rashid and Khalid, who was accused of shouting anti-India slogans last year. Mr Khalid was invited by the college’s Literary Society to speak in the afternoon on a subject related to his PhD, which he is doing from JNU. His topic at the seminar was The War in Adivasi Areas. Mr Khalid, a former member of the ultra-radical Democratic Students Union (DSU), was arrested last year on charges of sedition for his role in organising a rally at JNU to commemorate the anniversary of the execution of 2001 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.

The clash broke out when the ABVP tried to intercept the protest march of DU teachers and students and threw bottles at the students. They also snatched Shehla Rashid’s phone. Ms Rashid was to speak at the Ramjas event on Wednesday but the invitation to her was cancelled after Tuesday’s protest, and the event was called off.

As in the JNU case, in this case too, the ABVP activists said that they cannot “allow anti-nationals” to speak on the campus. The students have protested saying, correctly so, that this intervention goes against the basic tenets of freedom of speech. Things could not have gone out of hand at DU if the police had been cautious enough to keep them at bay. But it seems that the police inaction only emboldened the ABVP. In the last one year, ABVP has created ruckus in at least three major campuses: JNU, Hyderabad Central University and now in DU. Such actions raise an important question: Is ABVP a students’ organisation or a bunch of thugs? 

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12. INDIA: THE SHAPE OF THE BEAST
by Amit Sengupta
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(South Live - 22 February 2017)

The ghastly, violent and vicious attacks on a seminar on ‘Cultures of Protest’ with eminent academics, filmmakers, students and researchers at Ramjas College in Delhi University since the last two days (21 and 22 February 2016), as an open show of bully power, in full view of the administration and police which seemed to play footsie with the ABVP goons let loose and unleashed, is as inevitable as the contemporary culture of the dominant diabolical discourse set by the ruling leadership of the ruling regime in India. This is the nature and shape of the beast. They understand no other language, or theory and praxis. This is their only window of enlightenment. And they flourish, especially so, like carnivorous creatures, under State patronage.

Professors and students, girls and boys, members of the audience, have been physically attacked. Several journalists have also been attacked and beaten up. People have been hospitalised. Stones have been pelted inside the seminar room while teachers and students were inside. A peace march was disrupted in the most violent and brutish manner. Even while the seminar was a legitimate academic exercise, held with much preparation and high expectations, and with due permission of the college authorities and all concerned.

It seems that the ABVP was given a free run by the police in Delhi University on Wednesday. They beat up several journalists, and allegedly broke up their cameras and mobile phones. A female student from St Stephen's called up this reporter saying that they are being chased by ABVP "goons" and the police is too with the ABVP. Another girl student called up just now that some of them have taken shelter in a flat, but they have been threatened of a "raid" by the ABVP. She said that while the ABVP "goons" were abusing her and threatening to "rape them", the cops stood by, without taking any action. Section 144 has been imposed in Delhi University.

Students who were attacked, and who were holding peaceful protests, have been picked up and taken in buses, according to sources. students are alleging that the police is taking them to all kinds of distant places in buses. students have reportedly been brought from the north campus to South Delhi at the Hauz Khas police station too.

What is it about the young followers of the Sangh Parivar that they are almost always so pathetically Hobbesean: short, nasty and brutish? Why is it that they refuse to argue and debate, and instead always choose to flex their muscles and use violent mob power? What compels them to be so illiterate and boorish, when all they could do is enter the seminar peacefully and express their dissent – with refinement and finesse? If you disagree, prove your point. Use the power of argument. Who is stopping them?

Why do all of them xo compulsively choose to behave like the eternal cow vigilantes of Una and elsewhere, or the lynch mobs of Dadri, or the ‘Hindutva warriors’ who destroyed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, if not those who ravaged human beings and communities in Gujarat, 2002? Why are they so damned predictable?

If they are in power, and if they are enjoying the trappings of power, then why are they so perpetually angry, so unhappy, frustrated and insecure, about alternative opinions, differing views, parallel streams of consciousness? Surely, they have the entire State and RSS machinery to propagate their ideology – with their favourites appointed in cushy positions across the academic kaleidoscope – from FTII to JNU, HCU to IIMC? So what is this phobia with a simple seminar, a medium of academic dialogue, being quietly held in a hall at a college, on cultures of protest? Why are they so driven by this mad, fanatic frenzy of schizophrenic violence?

Why not hold their own seminar?

If their leaders are their role models, and if kabristan, shamshan and slaughterhouses are the dominant symbols dished out from the pulpit, if not hanging criminals upside down, then there is a vicious method to their repetitive madness, unleashed with the backing and patronage of the state machinery. The current regime has only set yet another ‘achche din’ agenda for its followers in the campuses. Crush all forms of intelligent and democratic dialogue, kill all dissent and debate, eliminate the legitimate and time-tested norms of civilized and academic decency, and brand all and sundry who peacefully protest against your full-scale and large-scale criminalization -- as anti-national and anti-Hindu. Period.

    If you question the surgical strikes -- you are anti-national. If you question demonetisation — you are anti-national. If you question the fanatic and narrow notion of nationalism – you are anti-national. If you question cow vigilantism – you are anti-nationalism. Earlier, they would ask all and sundry who don’t agree with them to go to Pakistan. Now, they are not even allowing a seminar to be held in Delhi University.

In Jodhpur, they suspended an assistant professor for holding a seminar, and a filed an FIR against a JNU professor, who participated in it. In JNU, they are banning open spaces of free speech and discussion. Pray, is this a democracy, or a Nazi State?

They tried it in JNU, HCU, FTII, Jadavpur University last year – they failed miserably. They even tried it inside the court premises – using mob violence as the first and last resort of vigilant justice, brutally attacking students, teachers, journalists etc – they failed. They have tried it in the past – again and again – and they have so terribly failed.

Parasites of State power, bereft of an iota of intellectual or academic content, aggressively sexist, racist and xenophobic, unable to write or ask a simple question in a clear sentence without abuses, trolling or perversities, sick to the core of their soul – they can only flourish under state patronage. Give them the backing of the cops and the government, and their chests fly out of their shirts into 56 inches plus. Give them a level-playing field – in terms of ideas, resistance or politics, peacefully – they will end up playing in full volume some stupid Hindutva song, of mythical cows and milk and honey in mythical times, as ‘besura’ as it can get.

    When Narendra Modi first came to SRCC, peaceful students protesting at the north campus of Delhi University were attacked by ABVP goons in full view of the police. This reporter was on the spot, and, when asked, the cops feigned ignorance, ended up backing the ABVP, and charging two professors from St Stephen’s and Hindu College who were protesting in solidarity with the students.

This was much before the May 2014 Lok Sabha elections. When a delegation met a top Congress leader, he did sound out the then home minister under the UPA regime, but, added, with a caveat: “Sections of the police have also become communalized. The fight is not against a man. It is against an ideology.”

This is not a fight anymore; this seems to be becoming a war. From Jodhpur to JNU, a relentless, endless, infinite, breathless war – against intellectual sanity, normative structures of university life and collective discourse, rule of law and conduct of the academia, and basic adherence to basic decency and freedom of the mind. Everything seems to be getting buried and blurred by the ‘instant mob justice’ of self-righteous Hindutva mobs going berserk, and Sangh protagonists in top official positions, let loose on all and sundry, with the backing of the police and the state machinery. The campuses are facing the brunt of it, despite the valiant and infinite resistance of teachers and students. If this is the kind of hate politics in the dominant discourse being witnessed in the polls in UP, it has now found full play with total impunity on the university campuses, as in Delhi University today and yesterday.

Indeed, if the rulers are cocksure of their victory in UP, why are they so desperately using the communal card and so openly? Why pitch community against community in the greatest battleground of peaceful and constitutional democracy – the right to vote? Have the wounds of those raped, murdered and the thousands displaced in Western UP in 2014, healed? So why rake up fresh wounds, injustice and mass insomnia?

Politicians, opposition leaders, students, teachers, women’s groups, trade unions, farmers and workers, the middle and educated classes, the media, the civil society and people’s movements – they will all have to answer these terrible and diabolical questions which are at full play for all to see. We can’t run away from them anymore. In a mobocracy, there is no safe space for anybody.

India cannot become a Nazi Germany. India, with all its fragmentations and inequality, is a pluralist, secular, democratic country. It is our constitutional right to vote peacefully and reject a party or leader – however great a messiah he can be. It is also a constitutional right to debate and discuss, and break the walls of prejudice and dogmatism, and celebrate the free movement of ideas and ideologies, with refinement, restrain and respect to all concerned. It is a right to hold a seminar on ‘Cultures of Protest’, as it is on nationalism at Freedom Square in JNU, or parallel cinema in FTII, or Jai Bhim Comrade in IIMC.

Surely, those who behave like uncivilized violent mobs, they will be defeated finally in the kaleidoscope of free minds and with the currents of civilized pluralism. Surely, those who spread hate politics, they will also be defeated by the steadfast rainbows of secularism. Everything is ephemeral – even very, very dark times. Democracy in India is under strain. Democracy in India has to be reclaimed, like women and youngsters reclaimed the nights in Delhi after the ghastly rape of a paramedic in a bus; like JNU, HCU, FTII and Jadavpur University reclaimed their spaces of intellectual and political resistance and freedom last year, when under siege by the fascists.

Surely, India will not succumb. The students and teachers of this country will not succumb. The Ramjas campus will not succumb. The seminar will continue, so will the resistance. We shall overcome.

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13. THE MAN ANGLING TO BECOME THE U.S. ENVOY TO INDIA SHARES TRUMP’S LOVE OF THE LIMELIGHT
by Annie Gowen
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(The Washington Post - February 22, 2017)

Shalabh “Shalli” Kumar, founder of the Republican Hindu Coalition, speaks to reporters at Trump Tower on Dec. 15. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

NEW DELHI — Chicago industrialist Shalabh “Shalli” Kumar kept the Delhi press corps waiting for over an hour before he finally showed up with a Bollywood starlet in tow — a woman he euphemistically refers to as his “daughter.”

Kumar, 68, was there to discuss his role as “chief architect” of the Trump campaign’s outreach to the Indian American community, but first things first: “You can clap now,” he instructed.

The Indian-born Kumar — one of Trump’s major donors and a tireless surrogate — may be an unconventional choice for a U.S. ambassador, but countries around the world are dealing with rumors of unconventional American ambassadors heading their way. The notion that Sarah Palin would go to Ottawa was in the Canadian air until the Trump administration knocked it down, and officials from the European Union were aghast to hear that an anti-E.U. professor might be named to the U.S. post in Brussels.

Kumar, intent on being more than a rumor, has been quietly waging a behind-the-scenes campaign to be America’s envoy to New Delhi, although, publicly, he says he would “have to think about it” if asked.

He has made trips to India, given high-profile media interviews and scored a coup last week, when he hosted U.S. Chargé d’Affaires MaryKay L. Carlson for tea at his vacation “palace” in southern India. He quickly posted photos on Twitter, cc’ing Trump insiders Jared Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon.

“They think that to get into Trump’s head they need to understand me,” Kumar said of the sudden, intense interest in him here.

Indian officials and diplomats — who prefer their U.S. ambassadors to be statesmen — are dismayed that Kumar is on Trump’s short list. But as one of the few Indian Americans arguably close to Trump, Kumar has to be taken seriously, they say.

“He clicks well with Trump; that’s what matters,” said Robinder Sachdev of the Reston, Va.-based U.S. India Political Action Committee. “He’s quite an outgoing personality, and whatever he does, he tries to do it with a lot of flair.”

Kumar boasts that, through his efforts, Indian Americans shifted dramatically to Trump in this election, although an analysis by the Asian American and Pacific Islanders Data project at the University of California at Riverside shows that they went decisively for Hillary Clinton, in keeping with past trends, by a margin of 78 to 16 percent.

Kumar jumped on the Trump bandwagon early. He formed the Republican Hindu Coalition and, along with his wife and son, donated $1,162,400 to Trump’s campaign and victory fund, campaign filings show.

Trump spoke at a campaign event Kumar organized in New Jersey, enveloping his “good friend” in a big hug onstage. He later agreed to read a few words in Hindi in an advertisement Kumar made aimed at the community of more than three million.

Since then, Kumar and the former Miss India he calls his daughter, Manasvi Mamgai, have enjoyed special access to the first family.

They went with Eric Trump to an event at a Hindu temple, met with the president in New York and cozily chatted with him at a candlelight dinner for major donors the night before the inauguration.

The Indian media have called Kumar and Mamgai “the father and daughter with a direct line to Donald Trump” and likened them to the “power duo” of Trump and daughter Ivanka.

After the December meeting, Kumar and Mamgai, 27, stood in the lobby of Trump Tower and said they discussed the coming administration with the president-elect and Mamgai’s dreams of a Hollywood career.

“He said, ‘OK, what can I do?’ ” Kumar said. (Kumar thinks she should run for office and said she would make the “prettiest congresswoman,” although she is not yet an American citizen.)

Kumar uses the Hindi term for “goddaughter” to describe their relationship, which he says is platonic.

“It’s more of a soul connection than a biological connection,” he said. “If you have this soul connection, it’s because we believe in reincarnation. Two people come together, and they enter into this godfather and goddaughter relationship.”

With Mamgai’s “foster or adoption,” as Kumar puts it, he now boasts he has two Miss Indias in his family — his daughter-in-law, Pooja Chitgopekar, was Miss India Earth in 2007.

Kumar is a native of Punjab who came to the United States in 1969 to study for a master’s degree in electrical engineering, becoming a citizen in 1981. The married father of four lives in the Chicago suburbs and heads AVG Group, which manufactures and sells electronic component systems.

Kumar made his first big splash in 2011, staging a lavish wedding in New Zealand for son Vikram and Chitgopekar that was on the TV show “The Big Fat Indian Wedding.” Traffic ground to a halt as guests danced through the streets, groomsmen rode white horses and helicopters flying in a “V” formation — for Vikram — zoomed across the sky.

In 2013, Kumar organized a controversial trip to India for a delegation of Republican congressmen to meet Narendra Modi, India’s future prime minister. At the time, Modi was a state leader banned from entering the United States on charges that he had not stopped Hindu-Muslim riots in his state where hundreds were killed. One of the congressmen was Aaron Schock, the Illinois lawmaker later indicted for improper spending, including luxury travel.

Over the years, Kumar has served as adviser to Republican entities and joined Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) to recruit and train Indian Americans to run for office.

But he has gotten in trouble for pushing the boundaries of these relationships. In 2013, he was sent a “cease and desist” note by the House Republican Conference for misusing its seal and insignia for political purposes on his stationery, a former staffer confirmed last week.

He still gives out business cards with an official-looking seal that identify him by this old title — “chairman, Indian American Advisory Council, House Republican Conference.” A leadership aide from the conference said Friday that there is no such council.

Kumar denied receiving a “cease and desist” notice and said the council still exists.

Since Trump’s election, Kumar has predicted that U.S.-India trade will jump from $100 billion to $300 billion and that Pakistan will be designated a state sponsor of terrorism.

His support for Trump’s travel ban prompted a public rebuke from U.S. Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), an Indian American who said Kumar’s Republican Hindu Coalition does not reflect “the breadth and diversity of the Indian American Community, or our diaspora.”

The coalition racked up $237,800 in expenses in 2016 and has not filed an end-of-year report, risking fines, an audit or legal action, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Many Republicans support Kumar, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich.

“He’s obviously known much more in the community now than he was,” Sachdev said. “He’s regarded pretty well among Republicans. They find some of his straight talk really good — especially his core ideas about fighting radical Islam.”

The White House did not respond to emails requesting comment about Kumar.

Last week, Kumar sat down for tea with Carlson, a naval attache and other embassy staffers at his sprawling vacation home in Bangalore that he calls Rana Reagan Palace, a tribute to President Ronald Reagan and an Indian maharaja who defied Mughal invaders. The home’s centerpiece is a vaulting “dome of freedom” hung with a crystal chandelier and emblazoned with photos of Reagan, Mohandas Gandhi and other leaders. The embassy said in a statement that it is “customary” for embassy officials to meet with American business leaders.

After showing off the dome, Kumar had a lot of questions for Carlson, who is serving as the acting ambassador until the new one is named.

Kumar said he wanted “to see what they do on a day-to-day basis and what all the activities the U.S. Embassy is engaged in. . . You can never stop learning.”

Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report in New Delhi.

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14. INDIA: MONUMENTS TO A NATION’S JOURNEY
by Amit Srivastava , Peter Scriver
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(The Indian Express - February 15, 2017)

The project of replacing Pragati Maidan’s structures ignores their significance as cultural artefacts that commemorate and showcase a distinctly Indian approach to problem-solving

The current discussion about the upgrading of facilities at Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, pending a court-ordered stay on their demolition, has called for the replacement of the so-called “permanent” exhibition structures. Built in 1972 to the designs of architect Raj Rewal and engineer Mahendra Raj, these monumental clusters of pyramidal structures comprise the exhibition halls — such as the Hall of Nations and Hall of Industries — that have been the landmarks of the fairground for over 40 years.

Pragati Maidan, as any Delhiite knows, is the exhibition facility that has, for half a century, served as the premier stage for the promotion of national trade and culture, attracting innumerable visitors from across the country and around the world. As the name signifies, these facilities exist to showcase the “progress” (pragati) of the nation’s industries and, by extension, the nation itself. It seems reasonable, therefore, to expect that some of these facilities will require upgrading from time to time to accommodate changing exhibition needs and, not the least, to continue to express progress. The urgent question this raises is how do we want to move forward, and what, if any, of the past do we wish to carry forward with us?

It is worthwhile to recall here that “progress” is not just about “any” future, but about our future, and the journey by which to arrive at it. What do we know of the existing facilities, and how do we decide what to hold on to as we move forward? In this case, it depends on whether we see these exhibition structures as merely a technical shell for the activities they contain, or as buildings that are also cultural artefacts with intrinsic value.

In our considered view, we have no doubt that the permanent exhibition structures are iconic artefacts, integral to the built fabric and identity of modern Delhi that most certainly should be carried forward. Indeed, as we and others have argued previously, these structures have an even broader significance. In our book, India: Modern Architectures in History, we note, “The principal function of the exhibition complex, apart from sheltering the exhibited contents, was to represent the modernity and productivity of the nation in the most progressive light… [and] the bold cluster of voluminous exhibition halls … clearly emulated the architecture and technophilia of recent World Fairs at Osaka and Montreal with their structural system of octahedral lattice space frames. But the predictable symbolism and derivative style were … inadvertently given renewed meaning and vitality, as later commentators were to observe, by the [ingenuity] and sheer monumentality of the way in which these structures were ultimately built. Contrary to the logic of the structural system employed, which called for lightweight, factory-produced modular assemblies in steel or aluminium, the structures were necessarily constructed by the labour-intensive technique of cast in-situ concrete, which remained the considerably cheaper option in the still only semi-industrialised state of the Indian building industry. Successfully accomplished on time and within budget through this [creatively] improvised [but] effectively ‘hand-made’ approach, this was an example of what has more recently been celebrated among the entrepreneurial elite of Indian business… as jugaad or frugal engineering.

“The visceral structure that resulted was a monument to the marriage of ambition and pragmatism that emphasised the prevailing drive for a self-reliant mode of technological progress and social development in the context of the socialist nationalism of the early 1970s… it brokered a compromise between the old Nehruvian idealism of universal modernist ambition, and the weight of a socio-economic reality in which an abundance of labour, however poor in technical skills and resources, had to be redressed. But there is no reason to believe that Rewal’s and Mahendra Raj’s solution was therefore any less triumphant an expression of the, as yet, unquestioned modernist ideals that underpinned it.”

The permanent exhibition structures are not just a generic artefact of a historical condition. They are an extraordinary exemplar of a distinctly Indian approach to problem solving and innovation, that has overcome many resource and infrastructural issues in the past to be celebrated by business and cultural leaders alike for its continuing validity today. Should they survive, these heroic structures will be a marker for future generations of where they have progressed from, and how.

It is a welcome and timely coincidence, in light of the current stay on demolition, that Dehliites have the opportunity over the next few months to reflect on the broader significance and impact of these and other iconic architectural structures of the era — including the NDMC and NCDC complexes designed by Rewal’s contemporary, Kuldip Singh, also in collaboration with engineer, Mahendra Raj — as these have been explored in the exhibition, “Delhi: Building the Modern” at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

Curated by photographer Ram Rahman, whose father, the late Habib Rahman, was another key protagonist of the architectural hubris of modern Delhi in the early 1970s as CPWD’s chief architect, the exhibition is a striking assemblage of the original architectural artefacts, photos, and discourse. These include large-scale images of these buildings in their prime by the legendary architectural photographer, the late Madan Mahatta, together with original wooden models, and the astonishingly elegant structural drawings of Mahendra Raj. Together, these fascinating traces of the design genesis of the buildings enable the viewer to revisit the individual qualities and shared ethos of these bold projections of possible architectural and urban futures that began to redefine the physical identity of Delhi in the 1970s, as the capital began to expand exponentially into the megalopolis it has since become.

It is pertinent to note that the physical presence and power of such innovative structures in the cultural landscapes that have shaped the modern world, and the urgency of addressing the immanent prospect of demolition faced by many of these seemingly coarse, now unfashionable buildings of the recent past, is also driving a coordinated international conservation effort. Readers of this newspaper will be interested to know that some of Delhi’s own most iconic buildings of the 1970s will be featured in another major exhibition, “SOS Brutalism”, to be mounted at the Deutcher Arkitectur Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, later this year, in which India’s seminal role in the development of the global architectural movement that became known as “Brutalism” will be a feature.

Who could have predicted that the Eiffel Tower, a temporary exhibition structure commissioned to showcase the architectural and engineering genius of its day, would be the very embodiment of both Parisian and French cultural identity today? It would be a tragedy if Delhi could not renew or find a suitable new purpose for the noble exhibition structures that so boldly stated, almost half a century ago, India’s confidence in the future that it is now realising.
 
Srivastava is director (India) at the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide and Scriver is the founding director of CAMEA and author of ‘After the Masters: Contemporary Indian Architecture’ (1990) and ‘Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon’ (2007)


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15. PHOTOS: INDIA’S INCREDIBLE SHRINKING BENE ISRAEL COMMUNITY, THROUGH AN OUTSIDER’S LENS
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(scroll.in - 15 February 2017)

Photographing festivals, weddings and feasts, Bindi Sheth spent three years with the Jewish community of Ahmedabad
by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri

https://scroll.in/magazine/828937/photos-indias-incredible-shrinking-bene-israel-community-through-an-outsiders-lens

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16. INDIA: KAZIRANGA - THE PARK THAT SHOOTS PEOPLE TO PROTECT RHINOS
by Justin Rowlatt
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(BBC News 10 February 2017)

The authorities at a national park in India protect the wildlife by shooting suspected poachers dead. But has the war against poaching gone too far?

Kaziranga National Park is an incredible story of conservation success.

There were just a handful of Indian one-horned rhinoceros left when the park was set up a century ago in Assam, in India's far east. Now there are more than 2,400 - two-thirds of the entire world population.

This is where David Attenborough's team came to film for Planet Earth II. William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, came here last year.

But the way the park protects the animals is controversial. Its rangers have been given the kind of powers to shoot and kill normally only conferred on armed forces policing civil unrest. [. . .]

Full Text at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-38909512

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17. TRUSCHKE ON TALBOT, 'THE LAST HINDU EMPEROR: PRITHVIRAJ CHAUHAN AND THE INDIAN PAST, 1200-2000'
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 Cynthia Talbot. The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 325 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-11856-0.

Reviewed by Audrey Truschke (Rutgers University - Newark)
Published on H-Asia (February, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Those looking for the true story of Prithviraj Chauhan, an Indian king famous today for his failed stand against the invading Ghurid army in late twelfth-century North India, will not find it in Cynthia Talbot’s The Last Hindu Emperor. At the outset Talbot states that her interest lies not in the hard history of Prithviraj but in the idea of him. Indeed, even the title of Talbot’s book invokes a misleading characterization of Prithviraj. As Talbot tells us, the appellation “the last Hindu emperor,” first applied to Prithviraj by colonial scholar James Tod, is a patently false descriptor.

Talbot argues that what is most interesting and compelling about Prithviraj is not his true story (which we know little about anyway) but rather memories of him and their development over the centuries. She is right, and her book takes the reader on a compelling journey through the shifting sands of stories told about Prithviraj. Prithviraj is one of India’s longest remembered kings, and Talbot traces remembrances of the ruler over the better part of a millennium, from the late twelfth century until the 1940s.

The Last Hindu Emperor proceeds chronologically. Talbot begins in chapter 2 with early mentions of Prithviraj in texts and inscriptions, written in both Sanskrit and Persian, in the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. She devotes chapters 3 to 5 to Rajput memories of Prithviraj from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, largely accessed through the early modern Hindi work, the Prithviraj Raso. Chapters 6 and 7 narrate the colonial treatment of Prithviraj’s tale, especially the Raso, and the epilogue provides some thoughts on memories of the king in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Talbot gives a succinct overview of her book by chapter in the introduction, and so rather than repeat that structure here I will draw out some of the many striking features and threads that run throughout Talbot’s thought-provoking work.

Talbot’s sources are almost entirely textual and yet she does an admirable job reconstructing the social world in which those texts were written and consumed. She discusses Sanskrit and Persian texts, especially in chapters 2 and 3 (she also discusses, in a more limited manner elsewhere in the book, images produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). But most of all she is preoccupied in the book with the Raso, a Braj Bhasha telling of Prithviraj Chauhan’s life, probably first written in the late sixteenth century for the Rajput elite of Mughal India. It is difficult to get a grip on the Raso. Readers will find some information about the Raso scattered throughout the book, and the rest is outlined in an appendix on the Raso’s textual history. The text exists in roughly 170 manuscripts, which can be roughly divided into four recensions that vary considerably from one another in terms of their content and length. Part of Talbot’s project of reconstructing how Prithviraj came to be remembered as a hero involves tracing the development of certain recensions of the Raso, especially the long recension produced in the Mewar between 1635 and 1703. At other times, the work of reimagining Prithviraj took place outside of the Raso and can be detected by reading texts in other traditions or, later, by reading scholarly articles.

While Talbot’s archive is almost entirely restricted to the written word, she executes a sensitive reading that allows her to furnish a nuanced picture of the communities that wrote and read such works. Especially rich is Talbot’s description of the Rajput elites for whom the Raso was a central text beginning in the late sixteenth century. Talbot underscores that these elites lived in Mughal India, and accordingly she turns to Mughal court texts, especially Abu al-Fazl’s A’in-i Akbari, to help understand the value that Rajput elites found in remembering Prithviraj (chapter 3). In chapters 3 and 4, she offers some close readings of sections of the Raso in order to delve into its Rajput martial ethos. She discusses, for example, how the text focuses on Prithviraj’s many samants (military subordinates) who came from different Rajput lineages and thereby consolidated an aristocratic Rajput identity. The Rajput community was neither uniform nor stable, however, and Talbot gives attention to such nuance especially in her discussion of how the Raso was rewritten in Mewar in the early eighteenth century to showcase Sisodiya superiority.

While overall Talbot traces the development of the historical memory of Prithviraj from the twelfth century to the Raso to Tod and to the present, she also allows herself tangents at times, and these are some of the most interesting tidbits in the book. Talbot emphasizes that there were competing images of Prithviraj at any given moment in history, and she recognizes that some images fell away as time went on. She pauses to describe some of the failed visions of Prithviraj, such as fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sanskrit texts that envision him as an incompetent, even a lazy, king (chapter 2). In chapter 6, she details Sufi hagiographical memories about Prithviraj interfering with Chishti religious activities and oral Alha legends that portray Prithviraj as an oppressor, rather than as a savior. Such passages—almost asides in the grand narrative arc of the book—are rich in detail and well worth the reader’s full attention.

Talbot stresses identity shifts throughout the nearly eight-hundred-year period that she covers in the book. Often she talks about how the memory of Prithviraj changed. He began as king of Ajmer and later became remembered as king of Delhi, for example. Given the importance of Delhi from the thirteenth century onward as a political center in North India, this shift was critical to Prithviraj’s longevity as a site of memory. Talbot is at her best when she discusses how the identity of those who found it valuable to remember Prithviraj changed over time. She traces, for example, how the Raso morphed from being a text for elite Rajputs in the Mughal Empire to being relevant across Rajasthan through the work of Tod, an early nineteenth-century colonial figure who was quite taken with Rajput culture. Other British thinkers in the nineteenth century treated the Raso as the first work written in Hindi (as opposed to Hindustani or Urdu), which made the Raso an important work of cultural heritage for Hindi-speaking Hindus, an even broader community. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Prithviraj’s tale became coopted into a religious patriotism and was recast, largely in vernacular Indian languages, as a story for all Hindus that crystallized Hindu identity in opposition to a common Muslim enemy. Talbot argues that these shifts were man-made, and she identifies the relevant historical actors where possible. But she also tells parts of the tale where the historical causality remains murky, and thereby she allows her readers to glimpse the evolution of historical memory even when we cannot see who was operating behind the scenes.

Talbot offers an insightful discussion of colonial-era views on Prithviraj, espoused by both British colonialists and Indians from a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, that challenges some common assumptions about the nature of colonial knowledge. As Talbot points out, basic identity markers do not indicate what a given nineteenth- or twentieth-century individual thought about Prithviraj and the Raso. Tod, a British agent, understood the Raso as a genuine historical account of Prithviraj that dated to the late twelfth century (chapter 6). Tod’s views held sway for fifty years until they were repudiated by Kaviraj Shyamaldas, an Indian with no formal historical training who could not even write in English (chapter 7). Yet Shyamaldas used the tools of Western historiography to make a case that most historians still accept today: the Raso dates to the sixteenth century and is not a reliable resource on Prithviraj’s life. Many Indians (and some Westerners) cried foul at Shyamaldas’s revelations, and today, as Talbot points out, English-medium and Indian vernacular histories of Prithviraj tend to treat the Raso in distinct ways. One larger point that comes out of this discussion is that crude ideas about colonial agents misunderstanding Indian texts and Indians protecting their cultural heritage do not help us understand the historical memory of Prithviraj. Talbot uses a complicated historical toolset to make sense of this delightfully convoluted historiographical tale.

One of Talbot’s strongest and more far-reaching arguments in The Last Hindu Emperor is that older historical memories make claims on invocations in the present. For instance, for hundreds of years, people have remembered that Prithviraj ruled Delhi, and yet the older memory that he ruled Ajmer thrives still. Talbot opens the book by discussing a statue of Prithviraj in a memorial park in Ajmer. Prithviraj has been cast into the unlikely role of a hero over time, but the basic story that he was in fact killed by the Ghurids has not been altered much throughout time (although the details have shifted in various retellings). In fact, some versions of the Raso dwell on the costly military conflict between the Chauhans and Jaychand’s kingdom of Kanauj—the major military confrontation of the Hindi text according to Talbot and an all-Hindu conflict, to use modern terms—in order to explain why such a great warrior was weak enough to later be killed by Muhammad Ghuri. Many modern South Asianists work with ideas about historical memory, and Talbot usefully outlines how new memories do not unfold against a blank slate but rather carry the weight and, sometimes, the details of prior reiterations with them.

My criticisms of Talbot’s The Last Hindu Emperor are few and far between. One wonders if she sells short modern visions of Prithviraj. She says explicitly at several points that memories of Prithviraj are never singular but rather always varied, even today. Yet in the epilogue she seems to flatten the modern-day Prithviraj, going so far as to say, speaking of the long recension version of the Raso, that “its complex meanings have been muted and mutated” in nationalist visions of the king (p. 275). Such nit-picking criticisms are a testament to a great book that is rich in detail and even richer in its overarching arguments about historical memory and the relationship between social identities and texts.

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18. ROHINGYA INSURGENCY HERALDS WIDER WAR IN MYANMAR
by Anthony Davis
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(Asia Times - February 21, 2017)

The Harakah al Yaqin insurgent group, with leadership in Saudi Arabia and ties to Bangladeshi extremist groups, threatens to bring global jihad to Myanmar

Since Rohingya militant attacks on Myanmar border police last October and the a retaliatory security force crackdown, an uneasy lull has descended over northern Rakhine State. Major military-led “area clearance operations” have given way to occasional arrests of suspected militants. On February 9, an earlier 11 hour evening to early morning curfew was reduced to eight.

But any suggestion that the current lockdown in northern Rakhine that still remains sealed off from independent observers will see a return to what passes for normality can almost certainly be dismissed, with security analysts and diplomats in Yangon predicting renewed violence in the months ahead. A clash this week that injured two government soldiers along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border underscored those concerns.  

Described in a ground-breaking International Crisis Group report in December as the Harakah al Yaqin (HaY), or Movement of Faith, the ethnic Rohingya insurgent group emerged from the unrest of 2012, when scores were killed in communal rioting involving Buddhist and Muslim mobs.

With a leadership council reportedly based in Saudi Arabia and apparently committed to securing Rohingya rights within Myanmar, HaY has been building up a clandestine village infrastructure and providing rudimentary guerrilla training to recruits since at least 2014.

That agenda appears to distance the group from virulent strains of transnational jihadism espoused by Islamic State and Al Qaeda. But regional intelligence sources are concerned that a combination of military pressure on HaY and a lack of ideological cohesion in its leadership could render an essentially moderate movement with local goals vulnerable to the blandishments of Bangladeshi Islamist radicals with wider jihadist connections and agendas.

Given the sheer savagery of the security force campaign – condemned in a United Nations report released on February 3 as likely involving “crimes against humanity” – events on both sides of the Myanmar-Bangladesh border suggest that further trouble is brewing.
Rohingya refugees wait in a queue to collect relief, including food and medicine, sent from Malaysia at Kutupalang Unregistered Refugee Camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, February 15, 2017. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
Rohingya refugees wait in a queue to collect relief, including food and medicine, sent from Malaysia at Kutupalang Unregistered Refugee Camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, February 15, 2017. Photo: Reuters / Mohammad Ponir Hossain 

Since the HaY attacks on border police on October 9 and a major clash that followed on November 12, many militants not caught up in mass arrests are believed to have fled into Bangladesh where, according to regional intelligence sources, they are now regrouping and planning.

At the same time, a measure of low-level insurgent activity has continued on the Myanmar side of the border. Some of the violence has gone unreported in mainstream media but has been covered in on-the-ground reports circulated over social media.

In other cases, incidents have been briefly reported in Myanmar’s state-run media, though without any fanfare that might suggest a deliberate attempt by authorities to play up an ongoing “terrorist” threat with links to the Middle East.

Security analysts in Yangon estimate that since the October 9 attacks, in which nine police officers and eight militants died and now viewed as the shadowy insurgent group’s first salvo in what threatens to become a wider conflict, a further 10-15 security force personnel have been killed.

Rohingya fatalities in the military crackdown have officially been set at over 100, while reports from international organizations estimate several hundred people may have been killed in often indiscriminate sweeps through villages.

To date, residual militant operations in the affected area of Maungdaw and parts of Buthidaung township have involved three distinct tactics, albeit in a tentative fashion that suggests would-be insurgents are still testing the waters.

One has been pinprick hit-and-run attacks on security forces and what appears to be reconnaissance probing of likely targets. Sources in Yangon noted that in the period between mid-November and mid-January there had been somewhere between 10 and 20 mostly minor incidents.

Two incidents covered by the state-run Myanmar News Agency (MNA) provided some reflection of the current situation in the blacked out area. The first involved an attack in the first week of January on a police post in Norula village in Maungdaw, the township where most of the violence has been centered.

It was carried out by six militants on motorcycles who reportedly killed one policeman. The MNA report of January 7 failed to mention whether any militants had been captured or killed, but did note that a pistol and three motorcycles were seized from the attackers.

An armed Myanmar police officer in Rakhine State. Photo: AFP / Khine Htoo Mrat 

Another incident in the early hours of February 3 involved an estimated six men approaching Aung Zayya police station, also in Maungdaw. Police reportedly opened fired into the darkness, driving off the intruders and following up with an apparently fruitless “area clearance operation.” It was unclear whether the incident was a foiled insurgent attack or simply a probing operation aimed to test police responses.

A secondary tactic has involved occasional use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). This was immediately evident in the first days of the unrest when several devices were used in Maungdaw.

Since then a small number of further incidents have occurred, though apparently without inflicting serious casualties. As one Yangon-based analyst with sources in the security service put it in mid-January: “Since October they have hit their targets less than five times.” 

What evidence is available suggests that these IEDs have been produced in only limited numbers and remain fairly crude. One device reportedly found and disarmed by security forces in Maungdaw on November 16 was made from car engine parts, suggesting an inability to source or locally manufacture more suitable bomb-making materials.

Moreover, those deployed to date appear all to have been triggered by unsophisticated battery-charged hard-wire connections rather than remote detonation using mobile telephone or radio transceivers, which would permit less risky stand-off attacks and pose a far more serious threat.

A third militant tactic employed in recent weeks has been targeted killing of Rohingya Muslims known or suspected of being security force intelligence assets. At a time when the HaY is likely to be seeking to re-infiltrate from across the border and reestablish a clandestine village-level network, this tactic has been fairly blatant and involved over 10 victims to date, some stabbed or beaten to death, others abducted and disappeared. 

At least two victims were serving or former village headmen, individuals likely to be vulnerable to pressure or blandishments from local security forces to provide information. According to one report carried in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar on February 4, the result in one area has been that “no one dares tell the truth and cooperate with authorities.”

It remains to be seen whether the current low tempo of militant activity gains traction and escalates into a more serious insurgency; or alternatively can be effectively suppressed beneath a suffocating security lockdown akin to that imposed by Chinese security forces with notable success across the violence-prone Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang in that country’s remote far west.
Soldiers parade to mark the 70th anniversary of Armed Forces Day in Myanmar's capital Naypyitaw, March 27, 2015. Myanmar's powerful army chief Min Aung Hlaing and his deputy are slated to extend their terms for another five years, a local newspaper said on February 13, 2016, as the military and democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi negotiate the terms of transition. Picture taken March 27, 2015. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun - RTX26XYV
Soldiers parade to mark the 70th anniversary of Armed Forces Day in Myanmar’s capital Naypyitaw, March 27, 2015. Photo: Reuters / Soe Zeya Tun 

Several factors, however, militate against a similarly effective lock-down in northwestern Myanmar. Most compelling is the existence of a militant organization already embedded on both sides of Myanmar’s international border.

Much of this organizational infrastructure will have been seriously disrupted by the sheer ferocity of the security force response and the flight of an estimated 69,000 refugees into neighboring Bangladesh.

But ongoing HaY activity inside Myanmar indicates that the organization has survived the onslaught. The new refugee presence inside Bangladesh, meanwhile, will undoubtedly prove fertile ground for further recruitment by HaY cadres regrouping in the border districts of Teknaf and Ukhia.

Secondly, international publicity and a new wave of condemnation of Myanmar security force atrocities against unarmed civilians is likely to galvanize both financial assistance from the broader international Rohingya diaspora and logistical support from sympathetic Islamist extremists groups in Bangladesh.

Thirdly, any prospect of a sustained security lockdown will inevitably be undermined by the porous nature of the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. From the mouth of the Naf River at its southern extremity to the jungled hills at its northern end, the border runs for 271 kilometers.

To date, patrols by para-military police on both sides reinforced by several stretches of fencing have proved conspicuously ineffective in countering cross-border flows of contraband narcotics, cattle and people. The chaos of recent months on the Myanmar side of the line will not have improved that situation.

Anthony Davis is a Bangkok-based analyst and security consultant

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19. TURKEY: ‘I FEEL LIKE I HAVE BEEN BURIED ALIVE’ - FAMILIES LIVE IN FEAR AND ISOLATION AS ERDOĞAN LEADS A WITCH-HUNT | Constanze Letsch
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 The Observer - 12 February 2017

More than 125,000 people have been sacked on suspicion of links to a dissident cleric. Two teachers and a law student describe how this has affected them

Riot police detain a demonstrator during a protest against the dismissal of academics from universities. Photograph: Umit Bektas/Reuters

On 1 September, the life of Ahmet and Fatma Özer*, married teachers from Istanbul, changed dramatically. Accused of being sympathisers of Fethullah Gülen, both were fired. On the same day Ayse Yilmaz*, a law student, received a text informing her that her father, a civil servant, had been detained for alleged involvement in terrorism and coup plotting. “It was the day we were blacklisted,” Fatma recalls. “The day we were erased as citizens.”

The Justice and Development party (AKP) government accuses Gülen, an Islamic cleric who lives in the US, of organising the bloody coup attempt on 15 July. However, the extent of Gülen’s involvement remains unclear. Nevertheless, those who have expressed even the slightest sympathy with the cleric’s views, or who have made use of his businesses – which include a bank, schools and media organisations – have found themselves accused of coup plotting, like the Özer and Yilmaz families.

On 20 July last year the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, declared a state of emergency, enabling him and the AKP cabinet to bypass parliament and rule by decree. The crackdown on possible coup plotters has since been turned into an all-out witch-hunt not only against alleged Gülen sympathisers but also leftists, Kurds and anyone critical of the government.

Since the coup attempt, more than 125,000 people have been dismissed from state jobs, and more than 45,000 are in jail on terrorism charges, including military personnel and police officers, but also large numbers of journalists, academics and civil servants. Erdoğan has repeatedly vowed to “root out” the entire Gülen network and threatened to reinstate the death penalty and “let the people take revenge”. The president, who wants to turn Turkey’s parliamentary system into a presidential one via popular referendum, is using the coup attempt as an excuse to rid himself of all unwanted critics.

“Many people have been dismissed not because they misused their positions, but because of their opposition to the AKP and Erdoğan,” says Andrew Gardner, Turkey researcher for Amnesty International. “If the state wants to bring proceedings against people, they need to do so based on individualised proof. But what we are seeing are blanket accusations against which people are unable to appeal.”

Fethullah Gulen is accused of orchestrating the coup attempt on 15 July. Photograph: Chris Post/AP

Ahmet Özer agrees. “I am not sure what we are accused of exactly,” he says. He has been teaching for over a decade. Neither he nor his wife received an official notice, a justification or a court order. Instead, they learned of their dismissal via the internet. “Our names were published in the official gazette. That was all,” Özer said. Both had been suspended earlier in August. “We have no means to defend ourselves, but since our names are now associated with terrorism and coup plotting we are blacklisted.” His wife underlines that they opposed the coup and had never been politically active. The sudden lack of income has landed the Özer family in dire straits. Ahmet used to be a popular tutor, but parents are no longer willing to have their children taught by a “terrorist”. Others are too scared to employ him, lest they will be seen as sympathisers. No school will hire him. He has been looking for day work in factories and textile workshops to earn at least a little money, so far unsuccessfully.

“Each time the people there ask: ‘Why did you quit your teaching job?’”, he explains. “And since my name is on a publicly accessible list it is no use to lie. So far I have not been able to find any work.”

Gardner underlines that being fired via decree does not only mean the loss of a job, but potentially loss of opportunity to work altogether. “Due to the decrees, fired police officers are banned from working in private security. Sacked judges and prosecutors are banned from practising as private lawyers.” Companies are scared to hire alleged Gülen supporters.

The Özers know they are comparatively lucky. Their parents have been able to help them out financially, at least for a little while. But that money is not safe either. “It is possible that the government freezes our assets at any moment,” Ahmet says. The couple now only use cash, too scared to put money into their bank account, lest it is confiscated without warning. This has happened to others, they say. The judges and prosecutors’ union has opened a donation account for members whose assets and bank accounts were seized overnight, leaving entire families penniless. “Hungry judges, imagine that,” Fatma whispers. “But that, too, is now reality in Turkey.”

For those dismissed or arrested on charges of being a member of the Gülenist network, lawyers are hard to come by. Many, including legal aid lawyers, refuse to take up their cases, either because of revanchist sentiments or because it seems too dangerous to defend the government’s sworn enemies in the current atmosphere. Some have reported threats for taking on these cases. Other lawyers that do take up their cases work for what one human rights activist described as “astronomical fees”. The Özer family is unable to afford such legal assistance. “There is a real black market now,” says Ahmet. “Those lawyers ask hundreds of thousands of lira; it’s impossible for us.”

Yilmaz’s father has been in jail for almost six months. There is no indictment. The case file, their lawyer was told, is secret. “They asked him if he stayed in a Gülenist dorm, if he received a scholarship during his university years,” she explains. “The lawyer cannot appeal against a case he gets no information about.”

The hardest thing for her father, a civil servant of over two decades, is not knowing what he might have done to deserve being in prison. Under emergency rule, detainees can be held without access to lawyers for up to five days and lawyers have no right to speak to their clients in private. “They tape all the conversations and send them to the prosecutor,” Yilmaz explains. “A guard is present during each consultation in prison.” This, Gardner underlines, impedes the right to a fair trial and keeps victims from reporting torture and ill-treatment to their lawyers. Human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented such practices in Turkish prisons.

President Erdogan is ruling through a state of emergency. Photograph: Turkish President Office Handout/EPA

“Every time a new emergency decree is published I panic,” she says. “Each time the doorbell rings I fear that it might be the police that have come to take my mother, too.” Yilmaz says all her family knows is that a secret witness has claimed her father belonged to the Gülen network. “But prosecutors tell those accused to give up names in order to get out of jail. My father was told that he would not get out of jail if he did not give them some names. People turn into informants to save themselves.”

The Turkish media has reported cases of business rivals, spurned admirers and angry spouses denouncing people in order to get revenge.

A little over three months after their dismissal, the Özers’ social security was annulled, resulting in the cancellation of state health insurance for them and their children. There is no money for private coverage. “The stress of the past months has had an impact on my health,” Fatma says. “But without insurance I cannot go to see a doctor.” The couple do not know how the cancellation of their social security will impact on their pensions. Both have worked, and paid into the state fund, for over a decade. “Nobody gives us any information,” Ahmet says.

Yilmaz, a successful law student, says that her trust in the Turkish justice system has all but vanished. “My beliefs and my idealism are gone,” she says. “This is a reign of fear, not justice.” She adds that she wants to go abroad to live and work there. “I do not want to serve a country that treats its citizens this way.”

For the Özers, the hardest part is the uncertainty, the fact of not knowing what they did wrong and therefore how to make it right again. Family members, friends and neighbours have turned their backs on them. “Much worse than the sudden lack of employment and an income is the complete isolation,” says Fatma. “We used to have visitors over all the time. Now people have either abandoned us or are too scared to even call.” The couple took their children out of their old school, for fear they would be targeted by teachers and other students.

“The government does not treat us as equal citizens of this country,” Fatma says, “It feels like they want us all just to disappear. I feel like I have been buried alive.”

* Names have been changed

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20. TURKEY ACADEMICS SPEAK OF FEAR AND LOSS AMID MASS SACKINGS | Rengin Arslan
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(BBC Turkish, Istanbul - 13 February 2017)

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Image copyright AFP
Image caption Academics and students at a university campus in Ankara laid down their gowns in protest on Friday

Turkey's university lecturers remain defiant, despite what they describe as heavy-handed police tactics during protests against the latest sacking of 330 academics.

In the last seven months following the failed coup attempt, nearly 100,000 civil servants have been removed from their posts. That includes teachers, police officers, soldiers, academics and lawyers.

The government accuses them of being members of terrorist organisations or groups seen as a threat to national security.

Among them is a famous music maestro, a leading neuropsychologist aged 82, a well-known constitutional professor and a lecturer who was imprisoned for signing a petition denouncing Turkey's conflict with Kurdish rebels.

Symbolic protests were held by students, academics and opposition MPs in the capital Ankara and in Istanbul, where sacked professors delivered lectures.

In some cases, academics laid their gowns on the ground protesting against the police blockades preventing them from entering universities. Photographs showed police trampling on their gowns, sparking a big reaction on social media.
The leading neuropsychologist

Eighty-two year old professor Oget Oktem Tanor, who founded the first neuropsychology clinic in Turkey, has been working as a guest lecturer in many universities.

In Turkey's state universities, staff are classed as civil servants. But she says the government's sacking cannot be applied to her because she is not working under a government contract.
Image copyright Ugur Cikrikcili
Image caption Oget Oktem Tanor founded the first neuropsychology clinic in Turkey

"Advisers tell me I might lose my title as a professor," Ms Tanor told the BBC. "This is nonsense. It is an academic title.

"They say I might lose my passport. OK, that's fine. They say my pension might be blocked. I cannot comprehend it. But, of course, they can do anything."

Her students describe her as a hard-working, colourful character. They say she is tireless when it comes to teaching and sharing her knowledge and experiences.
The music maestro

Ibrahim Yazici gave lectures in several universities in Turkey and has worked on the international stage as a conductor.

Mr Yazici told the BBC he could not think of "terror and music together".
Image copyright Ibrahimyazici.com
Image caption Music maestro Ibrahim Yazici says that Turkey should overcome fear through art

"During the concerts I conducted after big terror attacks in Turkey, I always turned to the audience and emphasised the fact that terror aims to create fear in people," he said.

"And we should overcome that fear through art. Especially in the times of terror attacks, art is holding people together."

The prominent law professor

Sacked constitutional professor Ibrahim Kaboglu warned in December against the timing of the amendments to presidential powers in Turkey.
Image copyright AFP
Image caption Sacked constitutional professor Ibrahim Kaboglu warned in December against the timing of the amendments to presidential powers

This followed a state of emergency being announced after the military coup attempt in July 2016 which has been extended several times.

He believes this means a fair public debate on constitutional change cannot take place.

The literary scholar

Last year Meral Camci was imprisoned after signing a petition of academics, objecting to violence in south-eastern Turkey.

She has since been sacked as a civil servant, which prevents her from working in Turkish universities in future.
Image copyright Alexander Englert
Image caption Last year Meral Camci was imprisoned after signing a petition

She is now working as a guest researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany.

"Neither when I was sacked from my job in Istanbul after 14 years of hard work, nor during my imprisonment have I felt what I am feeling right now," she said.

"I am out now but I feel myself restricted and imprisoned."

The government says the ones who were expelled have links to terrorist organisations including the Gulen movement, a group that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses of being behind the coup attempt.

However, critics - including many academics - claim Mr Erdogan is using this as an excuse to strengthen his position

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21. HOBSON ON DOWNS, 'STAND BY ME: THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF GAY LIBERATION' AND STEWART-WINTER, 'QUEER CLOUT: CHICAGO AND THE RISE OF GAY POLITICS'
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 Jim Downs. Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation. New York: Basic Books, 2016. 272 pp. $27.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-03270-9.

Timothy Stewart-Winter. Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics. Politics and Culture in Modern America Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 320 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4791-6.

Reviewed by Emily Hobson (University of Nevada, Reno)
Published on H-1960s (February, 2017)
Commissioned by Zachary J. Lechner

From Gay Liberation to Queer Clout

Over the past several years, historians have turned increasing attention to the queer past, to the 1970s and 1980s, and to the interaction between social movements previously imagined to stand at odds. Timothy Stewart-Winter and Jim Downs shed light on these topics through two very different books: the first a richly archival piece of scholarship, the second an uneven synthesis.

In Queer Clout, Stewart-Winter explains how gay and lesbian people—principally, though not exclusively, gay white men—won power in Chicago by organizing a voting bloc within its political “machine.” Moving from the 1960s through the 1990s, Stewart-Winter argues that gay activists won “clout” by joining “progressive, black-led electoral coalitions” initially forged against shared experiences of police brutality (p. 2). Such alliances “ultimately foundered” as policing became harsher in black neighborhoods but eased in white gay enclaves, and as urban government shrank and segregation increased (p. 3). Stewart-Winter holds that black-gay alliances “clarify the gay movement’s radical roots” (p. 89). He describes Chicago as a leader and exemplar of these alliances and offers compelling evidence of how they were realized in both word and deed. Equally clearly, he states that contemporary LGBT gains in electoral politics have been won amid “neoliberalism and budgetary austerity” (p. 9).

Against dominant narratives of LGBTQ history, Stewart-Winter argues that the central cleavage in Chicago gay activism occurred not between the homophile and gay liberation eras (that is, in the 1960s), but two decades later as the focus on policing gave way to AIDS. This shift was also driven by geography, as the 1970s redevelopment of the Near North Side grounded a privileged gay “establishment” that assimilated itself into the Daley-style “machine.”

Importantly, Stewart-Winter tracks continuity as interwoven with change: while his early examples center on multi-issue radicalism, he argues that later and more single-issue gay politics also drew a model from black liberalism. When analyzing the 1960s, he shows that black activism held the single greatest influence on the early Chicago gay movement, and that gay liberationists were radicalized by police violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the police murders of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. He further highlights the police killing of James Clay Jr., a black gay man whose death inspired the creation of the Transvestites Legal Committee and the people of color group Third World Gay Revolution. By the early 1970s, a significant strand of gay activism moved in a more moderate direction toward electoral power; this organizing also modeled itself on black and other “ethnic” mobilization, but was more likely to pose black and gay communities as distinct rather than overlapping. Clifford Kelley, a straight black alderman, became a significant supporter of gay rights in the 1970s, and by the 1980s the black-gay coalition “achieved a greater degree of political integration than ever before” through Harold Washington’s successful mayoral campaign (p. 153). Chicago police stopped raiding gay bars and the city finally passed a gay rights ordinance in 1988. These shifts cemented “queer clout,” but did so at precisely the time that AIDS “brought into stark relief the class and racial divisions in gay politics that had been slowly emerging” (p. 186). By the 1990s, openly gay candidates won office in Chicago, but most were white men and none explicitly prioritized racial justice or anti-poverty work, and the self-declared “gay vote” shifted from supporting black candidates to backing Richard M. Daley.

Queer Clout is an excellent book—compellingly written, clearly argued, and deeply researched. It powerfully undercuts the tired trope of black homophobia and uses moving, striking anecdotes to illustrate its analysis of political relationships and political geography. The book’s main limitation lies in its assumption that electoral power stood as the central pole around which gay political culture was organized after the 1960s. Many gay and lesbian activists saw different avenues for change, including countercultural living, publications, street protest, and the arts. Acknowledging how electoral power both differed from and interacted with these forms of politics might have allowed Stewart-Winter to lend sustained attention to gay and lesbian activists of color and to cast a more critical light on the racial and class limitations of “queer clout.”

Downs’s Stand By Me engages such broader political culture, but with mixed results. Concentrating on the 1970s United States (with glancing attention to Canada), Downs challenges what he believes to be the dominant image of gay male life in the era: “the 1970s was more than a night at the bathhouse” (p. 6). He ignores another and even more common narrative of the 1970s—the one that Stewart-Winter so usefully complicates, the rise of liberal gay rights. Although focused on radicalism, Downs entirely ignores the question of liberal-left divides. He instead sets as his straw man the 2005 documentary Gay Sex in the 70s, a film whose squeamish portrait can hardly be overturned by making the topic of sex off limits. Indeed, by refusing to consider how nights at the bathhouse (or bar, newspaper collective, or commune) transformed sexuality, Downs naturalizes a binary between gay sex and gay culture.

The strength of Stand by Me is its structure, through which Downs highlights central but under-examined dimensions of the gay 1970s. The book moves across disparate settings, beginning with the arson fire at the New Orleans gay bar, the Upstairs Lounge, on June 24, 1973, then moving on to gay churches, New York City’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop, Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History (1976), gay newspapers including Body Politic, and gay poetry and prisoner activism, before concluding with a chapter on ideals of the body.

Downs uses his account of the Upstairs Lounge fire to frame the necessity of gay liberation. In addition to offering stark evidence of vulnerability and risk, this chapter shows how gay bars facilitated activism and camaraderie—though Downs insistently frames such bonds against, rather than potentially through, casual sex. This chapter also bridges to Downs’s discussion of religious life, which details both work to shift mainline churches and the creation of gay institutions, including the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC).

Downs is at his strongest when analyzing Craig Rodwell’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop and Katz. His discussion of Rodwell provides useful evidence of gay liberationist engagement with civil rights and Black Power, and offers the book’s most complex acknowledgment of sexuality by noting that Rodwell both celebrated cruising and refused to stock porn. Downs built on the bookstore’s social and intellectual world to discuss Katz’s Gay American History, first staged as a play in 1972 and published as a book in 1976. Like Rodwell, Katz drew lessons from African American and German history to theorize the gay past, and he further came to understand gay history through a Marxist lens. Sadly, Downs fails to acknowledge Katz and other gay Marxists’ entrenchment in socialist-feminism. This inhibits his understanding of how gay radicals used Marxist thought to imagine sexual liberation and how many gay men formed deep ties with lesbians and other women. The same mistakes mar his discussion of the scandal surrounding Body Politic’s 1978 publication of an essay backing pederasty and pedophilia. One of the many reasons debates over this essay were volatile was that gay men and lesbians struggled over it, both together and apart, in ways influenced by their friendships and their shared feminist analyses. Here as elsewhere in the book, Downs limits his worthwhile focus on gay men by imagining them as operating in a vacuum.

In his penultimate chapter, Downs addresses two little-known aspects of gay liberation—gay poetry and gay prisoner activism—linking the two by focusing on poetry by prisoners. This is an exciting approach, but would have been strengthened by greater attention to activists’ response to racism and state repression, as previously analyzed by Regina Kunzel and others. Downs concludes with a chapter on the ascendancy of the “clone,” a masculinist ideal of the white and muscular body that became popular at the end of the 1970s and which he contrasts with activism by gay men of color. As this is the only section where Downs centers people of color, the chapter has the effect of defining people of color identities only against gay whiteness. This diminishes recognition of the “Third World” gay world that black, Latina/o, Asian, and Native activists built simultaneously with but independently from white women and men.

Stand By Me offers multiple anecdotes of the richness of 1970s gay life, but is ultimately flawed by a limited engagement with LGBTQ history as a field. Downs reveals gaps in his knowledge at multiple points, for example, when he fails to note the 1960s Council on Religion and the Homosexual (previously analyzed by Nan Alamilla Boyd), or when he inaccurately describes the Gay Latino Alliance as national rather than local to the Bay Area (as detailed by the late Horacio N. Roque Ramírez). His claim that gay liberation collapsed at the end of the 1970s rings hollow when placed alongside a host of evidence from the following decade, including the widespread entry of gay men and lesbians into anti-nuclear and Central American solidarity work, the contributions of women of color feminism, and liberationist responses to AIDS.

Taken together, Stewart-Winter and Downs offer a compelling new investigation of recent LGBTQ history and postwar US politics. Stewart-Winter offers a sophisticated, engagingly written account of the development of gay electoral power and its formative ties to black urban politics. Downs offers many intriguing examples of the breadth of gay liberation, but leaves deeper investigations of the era’s political and sexual cultures to other scholars.

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