SACW - 16 March 2017 | Afghanistan: New Generation / Nepal: equal citizenship rights to women? / Bangladesh: Moral Police on Campus / Pakistan: a shrine to murder for ’blasphemy’ / India: BJP’s growing hegemony / Being Indian in Trump’s America / Russia commemorates 1917 revolution—timidly

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Wed Mar 15 17:27:31 EDT 2017


South Asia Citizens Wire - 16 March 2017 - No. 2931 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: CPA Statement on Proposed Amendment to the Code of Criminal Procedure (Special Provisions) Act No. 2 of 2013 – (rights of detainees – access to legal counsel)
2. In Pakistan, a shrine to murder for ’blasphemy’ | Asad Hashim
3. Bangladesh: Moral policing has no place in universities | Maitreyi Islam
4. India: Social justice turned on its head - BJP’s successes in 2017 assembly elections in UP and Uttarkhand
5. India: Links to Reportage & Commentary on Right-Wing Violence in Ramjas College and Delhi University (February - March 2017)
6. India: Why Deendayal In Rajasthan Government Schools ? - Neglecting Education, Indoctrinating Exclusion | Subhash Gatade
7. Batwara Vs Azaadi: How Indian And Pakistani Writers Viewed The Partition | Rakhshanda Jalil

8. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Previously known for assault and intimidation... Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga appointed as Delhi BJP Spokesperson
 - Bangladesh: Sufi leader shot, hacked to death in Bangladesh
 - India - Politics: The art of building majorities (Chibber, Verma and Shah)
 - India: ‘Even the RSS is following Modi’s dictates’
 - India - 2017 assembly elections: The mystery of the Invisible Wave? (Santosh Desai)
 - India 2017 Assembly elections: It is a hegemonic moment for BJP …
 - India - Karnataka: Hindutva activists of Hindu Jagaran Vedike held for attack on Kannada writer Yogesh Master
 - India: At Rajasthan University, Gita and Vedas replace banking, finance
 - India - Assembly Elections 2017: Modi’s U.P. wave and after (Vidya Subrahmaniam)
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
9. Myanmar: With Karate and Wooden Guns a Rohingya Insurgency is Born | Wa Lone, Simon Lewis and Krishna Das
10. ‘How long do we have to die?’ Terrorist attacks in Kabul put a human face on violence in a remote war | Pamela Constable
11. Battles Lost and Won: In post-Taliban Kabul, a new generation of educated women is making itself heard | Shalini Nair
12. Will Nepal give equal citizenship rights to women? | Catherine Harrington and Amal de Chickera
13. India: Small game - BJP, power, money and horse-trading - Editorial, The Telegraph
14. India: Assembly Elections 2017: How to understand Modi’s magical political appeal | Pankaj ​ Mishra
15. India: A Hindu Vote-Bank Consecrated - Politics Of Exclusion Will Take Its Toll | Harish Khare
16. Faith in democracy declining in South Asia: Report
17. India: The new face of politics - BJP’s growing hegemony is a direct threat to democracy | Yogendra Yadav
18. Being Indian in Trump’s America | Amitava Kumar
19. Rudrappa on Pande, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India
20. Russia commemorates 1917 revolution—timidly | Sophia Kishkovsky 

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1. SRI LANKA: CPA STATEMENT ON PROPOSED AMENDMENT TO THE CODE OF CRIMINAL PROCEDURE (SPECIAL PROVISIONS) ACT NO. 2 OF 2013 – (RIGHTS OF DETAINEES – ACCESS TO LEGAL COUNSEL)
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These provisions, if enacted, allow for a situation were the Officer in Charge of a Police Station can deny lawyers from accessing detainees and even police stations if such access would “impede ongoing investigations”. . . . As such the Bill would curtail existing constitutional and administrative protections for detainees
http://www.sacw.net/article13138.html

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2. IN PAKISTAN, A SHRINE TO MURDER FOR ’BLASPHEMY’ | Asad Hashim 
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11 Feb. 2017) As a Senate committee mulls Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, thousands visit shrine to Mumtaz Qadri, killer of Salman Taseer
http://sacw.net/article13142.html

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3. BANGLADESH: MORAL POLICING HAS NO PLACE IN UNIVERSITIES | Maitreyi Islam
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what exactly the authorities think as being the role of universities? To create new knowledge and critically analyse ideas, even if they may be uncomfortable? Or is intellectual thought subservient to dominant ideologies or pressure? If questioning and engaging in debate about the politics of sexuality is considered taboo or obscene, then why even keep any of the liberal arts subjects in our universities?
http://www.sacw.net/article13141.html

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4. INDIA: SOCIAL JUSTICE TURNED ON ITS HEAD - BJP’S SUCCESSES IN 2017 ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS IN UP AND UTTARKHAND |Apoorvanand
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. . . the BJP has established it pan Indian hegemony in a decisive manner. Its determination to capture India is seen by many with admiration and some with fear.
http://www.sacw.net/article13136.html

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5. INDIA: LINKS TO REPORTAGE & COMMENTARY ON RIGHT-WING VIOLENCE IN RAMJAS COLLEGE AND DELHI UNIVERSITY (FEBRUARY - MARCH 2017)
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 A compilation of relevant links to commentary and reports on violence in Ramjas college and Delhi university’s North Campus on 21-22 Feb 2017 and the response that has followed. ". . .That Ramjas was the staging ground for this violence wasn’t an accident; given the college’s freethinking past, there could be no better place for the student’s wing of the RSS to enact the new normal. In its present avatar, with the BJP in command of an absolute majority at the Centre, the ABVP isn’t a student body, it is a vigilante organization, the sole purpose of which is to coerce Indian universities and their students into obeying the ideological writ of the sangh parivar. The BJP sees Indian universities as treacherous swamps that need to be drained."
http://www.sacw.net/article13133.html

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6. INDIA: WHY DEENDAYAL IN RAJASTHAN GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS ? - NEGLECTING EDUCATION, INDOCTRINATING EXCLUSION | SUBHASH GATADE
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the recent order by the [Rajasthan] state education ministry asking every secondary and senior secondary school to purchase collected works of Deendayal Upadhyaya.
http://www.sacw.net/article13135.html

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7. BATWARA VS AZAADI: HOW INDIAN AND PAKISTANI WRITERS VIEWED THE PARTITION | Rakhshanda Jalil
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Just as there was no uniform, un-variegated, one-dimensional reflection in contemporary Urdu literature to the First War of Independence of 1857, there is no generalised or undifferentiated response to the partition among the Muslim intelligentsia. The Urdu literature of the Partition years – which, it must be stressed, was written by both Muslim and non-Muslim writers – reflects a bewildering and often contradictory array of opinions.
India: Why Deendayal in Rajasthan Government Schools ? | Subhash Gatade
the recent order by the [Rajasthan] state education ministry asking every secondary and senior secondary school to purchase collected works of Deendayal Upadhyaya.
http://www.sacw.net/article13139.html

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8. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - India: Previously known for assault and intimidation... Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga appointed as Delhi BJP Spokesperson
 - Bangladesh: Sufi leader shot, hacked to death in Bangladesh
 - India - Politics: The art of building majorities (Chibber, Verma and Shah)
 - India: ‘Even the RSS is following Modi’s dictates’
 - India - 2017 assembly elections: The mystery of the Invisible Wave? (Santosh Desai)
 - India 2017 Assembly elections: It is a hegemonic moment for BJP …
Invitation to Book Release: "KANDHAMAL: Miscarriage of Justice by Former Chairman, Law Commission of India, Justice A P Shah (31 MArch, New Delhi)
 - India - Karnataka: Hindutva activists of Hindu Jagaran Vedike held for attack on Kannada writer Yogesh Master
 - India: At Rajasthan University, Gita and Vedas replace banking, finance
 - India - Assembly Elections 2017: Modi’s U.P. wave and after (Vidya Subrahmaniam)
 - India: If Ordinance For Jallikattu, Why Not For Ram Temple, Asks VHP
 - The fall of Mayawati: Brahmins leave the BSP building (Ajoy Bose)
 - India - Assembly elections 2017: Anger in Goa as BJP shocks by forming of morally illegitimate government
 - India: Roshan Kishore on BJP’s stellar rise under Modi
 - Polluting Universities with Sectarian mindset
 - India: ABVP waves saffron shawls at burkhas on campuses
 - The safforinsation of India an inforgraphic on BJP ruled states in 2016 and in March 2017
 - India: 125 West Bengal Schools on Notice For Allegedly Promoting ‘Religious Intolerance’
 - India: 2017 Assembly election results - debate, analysis and reports
 - France: Le Pen seems very popular with young voters (Financial Times)
 - Temple desecration in pre-modern India by Richard Eaton (Dec, 2000)
 - India: On the status of Hindu right-wing terror cases india (Rajesh Ahuja / Hindustan Times)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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9. MYANMAR: WITH KARATE AND WOODEN GUNS A ROHINGYA INSURGENCY IS BORN
by Wa Lone, Simon Lewis and Krishna Das
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http://epaper.indianexpress.com/1134787/Indian-Express/March-13,-2017#page/14/2

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10. ‘HOW LONG DO WE HAVE TO DIE?’ TERRORIST ATTACKS IN KABUL PUT A HUMAN FACE ON VIOLENCE IN A REMOTE WAR
by Pamela Constable
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(The Washington Post - March 9, 2017)

People mourn at the graves of three polio vaccinators who died in a suicide bombing in Kabul on March 1. (Sayed Salahuddin/for The Washington Post)


KABUL — Behroz Haidary was a skilled surgeon, army captain, environmental activist and father of three. On Wednesday, he was making rounds at Kabul’s main military hospital when he was shot dead by gunmen who had infiltrated the facility, disguised as medics. It was his 37th birthday. The attack, claimed by the Islamic State, left at least 49 people dead and 70 wounded.

Abdul Qadir, 23, was a laborer from a poor neighborhood, with a part-time job as a government vaccinator. On March 1, he was giving polio drops to a girl outdoors when a suicide bomber rammed a nearby police station. The blast hurled Qadir into a ditch, and his charred body was found hours later. He was one of 23 people who died that day in twin attacks claimed by the Taliban.

Haidary and Qadir were among the most recent victims of the urban terror war in Afghanistan, a series of bombings and gun attacks that officials fear will intensify this year, with insurgents gaining territory and civilian deaths reaching a record 3,500 nationwide in 2016. In Kabul alone, such attacks have killed thousands in the past decade — and nearly 100 this month.

But most of the 16-year war has been fought in far-flung rural provinces, and most civilian victims as well as security forces die there. Often there are few witnesses and no detailed news coverage, so the deaths remain a remote abstraction. 
Afghans cry after an attack on a military hospital in Kabul on Wednesday. (Rahmat Gul/Associated Press)

When a convoy carrying supplies to snowbound villages was ambushed last month in Jowzjan province, leaving six aid workers dead, their names and faces remained unknown to the public. The same was true when a policeman fatally shot 11 of his sleeping fellow officers at a desert checkpoint in Helmand province two weeks ago.

But when terrorist violence invades the capital, the impact is more immediate; destruction and death zoom into public view. Television crews quickly reach bombing and shootout scenes. People post constant queries and reactions on social media — a mix of worry, relief, anger about the endless war and frustration about the government’s inability to protect the public.

“We are supposed to thank the president for going to visit people in the hospital and condemning a savage act,” one resident wrote Thursday on Facebook. “But saying sorry and condemning are not enough. Why can’t they do more to prevent it?” 

On Thursday, the Ministry of Defense said the military hospital had been sealed shut while investigators try to discover how the attackers entered the hospital after blowing up the main gate. On Wednesday, security officials said they had driven an ambulance into the compound. 

[Afghan government controls just 57 percent of its territory, U.S. watchdog says]

Officials also said they were trying to confirm whether the Islamic State was behind the attack, as its news outlet claimed. The Taliban issued a statement saying it had not been involved, but the group sometimes denies attacks that kill many civilians.

A posting on Facebook showed five masked men posing with assault rifles in front of a sign in Arabic naming them as “our sacrificers” in the “killing and maiming of mercenaries” at the military hospital. There was no way to tell where and when the photo was taken.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2017/03/09/Foreign/Graphics/2300-afghanviolence-0309.jpg?uuid=_CVrXgUSEeedFJck1I9WZg

When the victims of such fatal attacks are well-known figures, their losses can resonate across social media and Afghan society. On Thursday, the news of Haidary’s death sparked an outpouring of condolences on social media, and photos of him with his children and colleagues circulated online.

He was buried at the hillside Deh Kapaik cemetery, below a monument to Marshal Mohammad Fahim, the late anti-Soviet militia leader and defense minister, with whom his family had military and ethnic ties. A portrait of Haidary in his army uniform rested among the flowers on his grave. Mourners in military garb raised occasional shouts of “Allah is great.”

But colleagues from medical, environmental and academic circles also testified to his contagious good spirits and desire to help build a modern, professional Afghan society.

“Behroz was an exceptional person who cared about his country and thought about big issues,” said Samim Hoshmand, a friend at the crowded burial ceremony, which Afghan TV crews filmed. He brought five pine saplings to plant nearby. “He told me we must all die someday, but we can all keep something alive after us,” Hoshmand said.

In contrast, the death of Qadir one week earlier was virtually unnoticed in public and mourned quietly by relatives and neighbors. Yet he and his two fellow vaccinators were much more  typical of victims of urban terrorism — people selling fruit or used clothing, riding buses or praying in mosques, going about daily routines in a dangerous, crowded city. 

Qadir’s body lay for hours in a culvert, alongside those of his two friends, lost in the citywide chaos of a double bombing and gun battle. That night, relatives finally located it in a forensic hospital. For their day’s work delivering polio drops, the three would have each taken home $23.

[Amid Kabul winter, Afghan war refugees shiver in frigid settlements ]

Word spread quickly through their community, and the next morning, hundreds of men gathered to carry their pine coffins through the alleys to a prayer ceremony and then a small graveyard, where they were buried side by side in plain earthen mounds. 

“He was a humble, honest, easygoing person. He had dreams for his life, like all of us,” said Ahmad Samir, a cousin close to Qadir. “He was saving to buy a small flat for his mom, because their house was old and leaked a lot when it rained.”

These families, too, were angry at the war, at the government, at the fate of these ordinary young men who had done nothing to deserve a horrific death.

“We are losing our youths every day in this war,” said Mohammad Gul, a retired police officer whose son Jalal died with Qadir. “Our government leaders have their families abroad and they are safe in expensive villas. America is doing nothing to stop this war. How long do we have to die? Why are they killing us? Who is there to answer our question?”

The day after Qadir died, Samir and another friend made a poster of his photo. It showed him smiling and handsome, with a fashionable haircut. In the cemetery, they planted the poster next to his grave. Across the top was written one word in Afghan Dari: ­“Martyr.”

Sayed Salahuddin and Sharif Walid contributed to this report. 

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11. BATTLES LOST AND WON: IN POST-TALIBAN KABUL, A NEW GENERATION OF EDUCATED WOMEN IS MAKING ITSELF HEARD
by Shalini Nair
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(The Indian Express, March 12, 2017)

Hung on the walls of Bhost restaurant in Kabul are portraits of 13 first ladies of Afghanistan. Right on top is the iconic picture of Queen Soraya in a sleeveless gown, wife of reformist King Amanullah, who was a vocal opponent of polygamy and veiling, and had started the country’s first school for girls in the 1920s. Below is a recent picture of Rula Ghani, wife of President Ashraf Ghani, an advocate for women’s rights in present-day Afghanistan. Since no one knows what she looks like, the wife of Mulla Omar, Taliban founder and the self-proclaimed emir between 1996 and 2001, is represented with the ubiquitous symbol of the regime’s oppression: the woman in a blue shuttlecock burqa.

The Bhost restaurant is only a few months old, but it encapsulates the brewing storm in the country. Its owner, Mary Akrami, finds a place of pride in the BBC 2016 list of 100 most influential women for having established the country’s first shelter home in 2003 for women survivors. A year ago, she opened the restaurant serviced entirely by female inmates of her shelter home. Attached to the restaurant is a tea house called Tahakhana and a conference hall. The entire premise is reserved exclusively for female customers, making an exception for those who want to come with their families.

“Every restaurant in Kabul is a male-dominated space, which slowly, but surely, have kept women out,” says Akrami. Her attempts to get women to reclaim public spaces is part of the larger struggles of women in Afghanistan’s capital city to re-appropriate spaces once denied to them, both physical and socio-spatial.

The ravages of over three decades of invasions, insurgency, and extremism — the Soviet-Afghan war, the rise of the mujahideen followed by usurping of power by the Taliban, and the subsequent US occupation — have dealt its heaviest blow to basic rights that most women, in other parts of the world, take for granted. While the reconstruction efforts started soon after the overthrow of the Taliban in the wake of 9/11, it is only as recently as 2015 after the US-led NATO forces formally ended combat operations, that the country’s institutions are coming into their own. The decimation of the Taliban, at least from the power centre if not from the country, has meant that women have been able to emerge out of the shadows and make themselves heard, most importantly, in the arena of nation-building.

Women members make up 28 per cent of the Afghan Parliament. There has been a proliferation of newspapers launched by and for women. “There are several women who are owners or chief editors today but women journalists in many of the provinces still face threats if they don’t wear the burqa or if they appear on television,” says Shafiqa Habibi, director of Afghan Women Journalist Union (AWJU). Women who did seminal work for women’s health and education during the Taliban regime today occupy important positions in post-conflict Afghanistan, such as Sima Samar, who chairs the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and Habiba Sarabi, the deputy chairperson of the Afghan High Peace Council. A year after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, the total number of students in schools, all boys, was merely 9 lakh. The numbers have now increased 10-fold, with 40 per cent of the students being girls thanks to government efforts and work of women-led organisations.

Zohra Daoud, the chief advisor to First Lady Rula Ghani, points out that women continue to face threats, but that has not stopped the new generation of educated Afghan women. “On her very first day, Rula Ghani had said that her attempt would be to restore the respect of Afghan women, which has been lost due to 40 years of war,” she says, adding that the Ashraf Ghani government is responsible for the reform of the justice department, which now has 280 women judges.

However, many admit that it is still a protracted struggle. Afghanistan is all too familiar with a pattern where any attempt at radical gender reforms has unleashed the worst kind of backlash. The country, even today, ranks a low 171 out of 188 countries on the Gender Inequality Index.“It still is very difficult for elected women representatives to get the required vote from the parliament to become ministers. Female judges face character assassination while women journalists are threatened and killed,” says Mary.

In July 2015, the Afghanistan government launched the Afghan National Action Plan (ANAP) for implementing the United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. “The NAP is serving its purpose, but the pace is very slow. Moreover, when it comes to peace talks with the Taliban, women are still excluded,” says Hasina Safi, director of Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), which represents 140 women’s organisations across the country. She adds with optimism, though, “in spite of the security issues, women have managed to get a foothold as decision makers.”

Within the confines of Kabul University, 16 women and seven men bear testament to this change in the institute’s 85-year-old history. They are the first batch of students of the gender studies masters programme that was started only last year. During the Taliban regime, women were banned from studying or teaching. Today, in classes conducted in Dari, men and women discuss everything from écriture féminine to anarchist and lesbian feminism.
taliban kabul, kabul, kabul women, women education kabul, kabul news, world news Sima Samar, the head of the Afghan Human Rights Commission. Photo: Shalini Nair

Like most women in the class, Sajia Sediqi and Wagma Yameen were able to finish their schooling as their family immigrated to Peshawar during the conflict and came back to Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. “My personal favourites are Betty Friedan and Simone De Beauvoir,” says Sajia. She finds the latter’s brand of feminist existentialism relevant to her country today. “Decades of war and repression have entrenched themselves deep into the psychology of women in Afghanistan,” she says. This has left a vacuum in the area of academic research on strategies to deal with women’s post-conflict concerns, says Wagma, who also works for the United States Institute for Peace. “Right now, our greatest concern is to ensure that the government should not come under the influence of the mujahideen or Taliban and end up compromising on women’s issues. Most of the peace negotiations have men sitting on the table and deciding what’s best,” says Wagma. A case in point, she says, is the recent peace agreement between the Afghan government and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Pakhtun warlord whose Hezb-e-Islami militia notoriously threw acid at young women who were spotted without a veil.

Terror and conflict is still a quotidian reality. Military surveillance balloons, known as Aerostats, continue to dot the horizon. In addition to the occasional terror strikes, kidnappings for ransom are not uncommon, a reason why children from well-off families are often home-schooled and women hesitate to venture out after dark. The gate outside Mary’s restaurant has a sign that reads, “No guns allowed”. On a lighter vein is another board with the words: “Fat people are harder to kidnap. Eat more, stay safe.”

“In a country like Afghanistan, even the mere fact that women are in powerful positions is a visible impact of the strides we have taken,” says Mary. Right at the entrance to her restaurant are photographs of women who were slain over the last decade for just braving the odds: Top cop Malalai Kakar, the former head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women, and journalists Sanga Amaaj and Nazifa Zaki. There is also a picture of former child rights commissioner Hamida Barmaki, who was killed along with her family in a suicide attack in 2011. These serve as a sombre reminder of hard-won battles and the legacy that Mary and others have to carry forward.

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12. WILL NEPAL GIVE EQUAL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS TO WOMEN?
Catherine Harrington and Amal de Chickera
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(Open Democracy - 9 March 2017)

Nepali women are treated as second-class citizens, due to discriminatory nationality law. 

A Nepali woman holds a sign as part of the World Bank 'Think EQUAL' campaign. Credit: Stephan Bachenheimer / World Bank

“Is it my fault that I don’t have a nationality?” a young Nepali girl asked recently on one of the country’s prime-time talk shows. “No it is not. It is your mother’s,” replied the male authority figure. The girl is one of countless women, men, girls and boys in the country who are classified as stateless, despite being born in Nepal to Nepali mothers. 

Nepal remains one of twenty-six countries that denies women the equal right to confer nationality on their children, and one of roughly fifty that denies women the right to pass nationality to their spouses and to even acquire and retain their own nationality.

We recently travelled to the country, on behalf of the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights to increase government authorities’ and legislators’ awareness of the significant harm done by this discriminatory nationality law to individuals, families, and indeed to the country’s economy and reputation.

We witnessed a country striving to write a new chapter marked by stability and a shared prosperity. Ten years after its historic peace agreement, one year after the establishment of its new Constitution, and still recovering from the devastating 2015 earthquake, this young democracy is considering how to lay the foundation for a fairer society that transcends the political conflict and economic hardship of the past.  

Like too many countries though, it is trying to do so having tied one of its own hands behind its back.

The impact of gender discrimination in nationality laws is significant and wide-ranging: from denied access to education and healthcare, to the inability to own property, hold a bank account or drivers license, vote, or run for public office. Many end up statelessness, not considered citizens by their own countries, or indeed, any other country in the world.

Denied equal rights, the child of a Nepali woman whose father is ‘unknown’ (a term with great stigma attached) should, according to the Constitution, have access to citizenship. In practice, such children can only apply for naturalized citizenship – which is citizenship not by right, but at the discretion of state authorities, most of whom are deeply conservative. The child of Nepali woman and a foreign man may only apply for naturalized citizenship if the child has not acquired any other citizenship and is a permanent resident of Nepal. Even when it comes to securing one’s own citizenship, Nepali girls must do so through their father and married Nepali women through their spouse.

This year, laws that conflict with the new constitution, including the nationality law, are expected to be amended. This presents an opportunity to advance the nationality rights of Nepali women and their children in some circumstances – an opportunity that, if leveraged, would benefit the country and further gender equality. However, to achieve equal nationality rights for Nepali men and women, a Constitutional amendment is urgently needed.

The cost of exclusion

“If my daughters become refugees in another country, will they then be able to get a nationality?” This was the question being asked by Deepti Gurung, a Nepali woman unable to secure Nepali nationality for her children born in Nepal, despite trying everything possible for many years. That an educated woman would even fleetingly consider refugee status in a foreign country as a ‘solution’ to securing her children’s future, points to a profound sense of helplessness.

When we visited Deepti and her family, sitting in her living room and eating her expertly made samosas, we could feel the deep sadness, frustration, and desperation of this mother who would do anything to give her daughters the opportunity to succeed in life. She knew that, despite all her efforts, the list of opportunities that her daughters would be denied was long and the burden heavy.

Nepali woman and daughter outside a clinic. Credit: Possible Health

When speaking with her daughter, what struck us was not just that here was an intelligent young woman who would never become the doctor she dreamt of being, or whose plans to be a lawyer were indefinitely put on hold until she got citizenship. Here also was a country heavily dependent on its next generation, but missing out on some of its best and brightest young talent due to an ill-conceived and discriminatory law that most countries have relegated to the history books.

Though ‘lucky’ is never a word Deepti would use to describe her family’s situation, many affected families face situations that are far more dire. Sapana Pariyar's husband abandoned her and their two children, refusing to grant his citizenship to his wife or daughters. Single mothers who were married before applying for citizenship have little chance of securing theirs or their children's. Lacking the documents needed for formal employment, Sapana does hard labor to try to put enough food on the table for her children. The meager salary was not enough, however, to pay primary school fees or rent in their modest home. As a result, the family is homeless and the two young daughters cannot go to school.

The personal cost of statelessness is well-documented and wide-ranging, but states are not necessarily motivated into action by this alone. However, the cost of statelessness is not only individual. States also pay a price: an opportunity cost of a growing disenfranchised population with no means to support itself or contribute to the formal economy; the development cost of not being able to benefit from the full potential of all its people; the socio-political cost of ever-increasing inequality and tension.

The link between gender equality and sustainable economic development is not groundbreaking. Development experts and human rights actors have emphasized the connections for years. That is why the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include ending discrimination against women as a stand-alone goal (Goal 5), while also integrating gender indicators throughout the other sixteen goals. Nepal and countries with similar laws will not be able to reach targets on nine of the seventeen SDGs, as long as they retain gender-discriminatory nationality laws. These include targets related to achieving peace, justice and strong institutions (Goal 16), quality education (Goal 4), the eradication of poverty and hunger (Goals 1 & 2), and the reduction of inequalities (Goal 10).

We have all been patriarchal societies and continue to be, to varying degrees. No country has a monopoly on that history. But it is a legacy that is holding every country back – notably so when gender discrimination is sanctioned by law and prevents access to citizenship. Discriminatory nationality laws provide insight into the state’s position that despite whatever else is written, rights and responsibilities are ultimately defined (and denied) by gender. They show that all citizens are really not equal before the law.  

Nepal will be drafting a new citizenship law in the coming year. Like other countries with discriminatory nationality laws, it will also be establishing a national action plan to realize the Sustainable Development Goals. And so, well into the 21st century, it has a dual opportunity to finally end one of the great exclusions of the 20th century and to set its course on the path to equality, justice, and sustainable development for all. For the sake of its people, its future, we can only hope that this is an opportunity it will take.

Amal de Chickera is a co-founder and co-director of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion.

Catherine Harrington is Campaign Manager of the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights – an international coalition led by organizations including the Women’s Refugee Commission, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It is housed at the Women’s Refugee Commission and includes the Nepal-based Forum for Women, Law and Development.

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13. INDIA: SMALL GAME - BJP, POWER, MONEY AND HORSE-TRADING - EDITORIAL, The Telegraph
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(The Telegraph - March 14 , 2017)

Editorial

Small game

The Bharatiya Janata Party had a wonderful chance to prove that it really is a party with a difference. Its overwhelming victory in Uttar Pradesh and in neighbouring Uttarakhand handed it this opportunity on a platter. These not only established the BJP as the dominant party among the states of northern and western India, but also gave it the edge in the selection of the presidential candidate for the change of presidential guard in July and a longed-for advantage in the Rajya Sabha, where 10 seats from UP go to the polls in 2018. The prime minister's speech after the results seemed as though the victory in UP, on which he had staked so much, had evoked humility, for he exhorted his party to abjure arrogance. He also stated a fundamental truth of democratic governance, something that the BJP appears to have long forgotten: governments cannot discriminate - in UP the government would be for everyone.

Such balance and humility, however, did not mean that the BJP was snug in being the party with a difference. In Manipur and Goa, in each of which it was not only short of a majority but behind the Congress too, it moved like lightning. The smaller parties and Independent candidates, only a part of whose support would have given the Congress the majority in those states, were whisked into the BJP's ambit. It did not matter that the Congress was the single largest party in these states, not even that, in Goa, the erstwhile BJP chief minister and various other sitting BJP ministers had been defeated. Power and money are irresistible, and the BJP has both. It is logical for smaller regional parties to hitch their wagons to the party that rules at the Centre, especially when its bargaining power is superior in other satisfying ways. The Congress was never averse to these methods; only it is far from its best right now. But the BJP has shown that it is no better than any other party. Its naked eagerness to elbow out contenders in Manipur and Goa, both under governors who were former BJP leaders - in line with its earlier encouragement of defections in Uttarakhand and the covert takeover in Arunachal Pradesh - suggests that the outstanding win has not given it either humility or calm. The killer instinct may be a virtue in competitive politics, but as long as a party wins its small victories by horse-trading, it cannot lecture anyone on morality.

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14. INDIA: ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS 2017: HOW TO UNDERSTAND MODI’S MAGICAL POLITICAL APPEAL
by Pankaj ​ Mishra
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(The Economic Times - Mar 14, 2017)

via Bloomberg

How it all stacks up in Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Manipur, Uttarakhand and Punjab

We are now deep in the era of political shocks. One electorate after another has expressed its anger with mainstream parties and technocratic elites by favoring political outsiders and know-nothing anti-incumbents. But what explains the appeal of demagogues once they start governing and reveal themselves to be exponents of chaos

QuickTake India’s Aspirations
The widespread disorder predicted last November, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi abruptly withdrew 86 percent of the cash in circulation, has come to pass. This poorly conceived and ineptly executed demonetization damaged above all the toilers in India’s large informal economy.

Yet voters in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest states, rewarded Modi last week with an overwhelming victory in elections to the local legislature, making him the country’s most powerful politicians in decades.

For those who predicted that Modi had committed political suicide with demonetization, the results may look like another example of voters acting against their rational self-interest. Certainly, any impartial analysis of Modi’s performance in office since 2014 would have to conclude that he hasn’t delivered on most of his promises, especially the most electorally profitable of them -- the creation of jobs for the one million Indians entering the workforce each month. Formal job growth under Modi is the weakest in seven years.

But those who seek to correlate voter choices with political and economic outcomes don’t quite grasp the emotional and psychological allure of a figure like Modi, a leader with a repertoire of masks and costumes. On the day of his election victory in 2014, I described Modi as “India’s canniest artist,” who knew that “resonant sentiments, images and symbols rather than rational argument or accurate history galvanize individuals.” In other words, Modi is someone who creates his own reality with powerful rhetoric and imagery, and then, using his mastery of digital communications, seduces many people into believing it.

He’s offered his followers a fantastical vision of making India great again. Furthermore, for the angry and frustrated among them, he’s gratifyingly identified a range of enemies that stand in their way: unreliable minorities, liberal elites and other rootless cosmopolitans.

No invocation of hard facts, it seems, can dent Modi’s make-believe world. Indeed, one can be counterproductive. The Harvard-based economist Amartya Sen may be right to point to the multifaceted harm inflicted by demonetization. But Modi has primed many struggling and aspiring Indians to distrust such cosmopolitan bearers of bad news, and to repose their faith in him, the authentic man of the soil. He clarified this us-versus-them opposition in a campaign speech in Uttar Pradesh: “On the one hand, there are those who talk of what people at Harvard say and on the other is a poor man’s son, who, through his hard work is trying to improve the economy.”

Contrasting his “hard work” to Harvard critiques, Modi has successfully persuaded many of those who feel left or pushed behind by uneven economic growth that he shares their resentment of the economically and culturally privileged. He shrewdly presented demonetization as a revolutionary cull of India’s rich, dynastic, venal and unaccountable elites. The poor, who stood in queues before banks and ATMs for hours, seemed to bear their suffering with equanimity since, in their view, the rich were suffering a lot more.

Like many political Svengalis, Modi has understood that, as Tocqueville pointed out, people in a democracy “have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion” for equality, and that “they will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy.” Having grasped the political potency of ressentiment, Modi can continue to repeat his unfulfilled and unfulfillable promises by presenting himself as a relentless scourge of elites and sentinel of the upwardly mobile.

Donald Trump’s white, working-class voters don’t seem to mind his cabinet of plutocrats. Likewise, Modi’s poor supporters don’t seem to have noticed that their loudest champion came to power with the help of the richest people in India, and remains closely allied to them.

In fact, dwelling on such apparent inconsistencies makes us badly prepared for the political upheavals of our time. We must grasp that mass politics is often irrational rather than a negotiation between rational interests. Far from being a logical affair, it is “magic,” as the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who lived through the first great onslaught of demagogues in modern history, wrote. Certainly, Modi’s victory against all odds confirms von Hofmannsthal’s prediction that “he who can summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.” 

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15: INDIA: A HINDU VOTE-BANK CONSECRATED - POLITICS OF EXCLUSION WILL TAKE ITS TOLL | Harish Khare
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(The Tribune, 13 MArch 2017)

A simple question: why did the Modi magic work in the old Uttar Pradesh so gloriously, but failed so conspicuously to cast its charm in Punjab, Goa and Manipur? If the Bharatiya Janata Party is the new pan-India party and if Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the only pan-Indian leader, as was loudly claimed after the civic polls in Maharashtra, then why have the party and the leader failed to click beyond the old UP?

The answer is simple: the Hindu vote bank has been cobbled together and sustained because the old UP has a sizeable Muslim population, against whom ancient prejudices and new resentments could be stimulated. This is the bottom line of an otherwise complicated electoral contest. 

The Modi crowd can be expected to reject any suggestion of a Hindu vote-bank and the secular parties and leaders may also refuse to acknowledge it, but there is only one way to read the UP vote: the Hindu vote stands consecrated. The process that was initiated prior to the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign was never allowed to fade away. The Muzaffarnagar violence and its memory were assiduously kept alive. Even Kabir's famous verse ...Rahimin dhaga prem ka... got to be cited to remind one and all of the knotted connection  that had come to define the Hindu-Muslim ties in village after village. 

  It may be instructive to remind ourselves that the BJP and its allies had not fielded a single Muslim candidate in Uttar Pradesh. It had contested 380 seats and left 23 for its allies.  This exclusion was a matter of conscious choice, a part of an unsentimental, unconfused strategy. It had worked so well in 2014 when for the first time since 1952 Uttar Pradesh did not elect a single Muslim to the Lok Sabha. In 2014, a message was successfully transmitted that the majority community was under siege and that the BJP, under Modi's leadership, was the only party that could see to it that the community's interests were defended and its values preserved.

It has been suggested that the UP verdict is a vote on demonetisation, as well as an endorsement of the 'surgical strikes'. The suggestion is that the voters were happy to put up with all the notebandi-centric dislocations and disruptions because it had put the terrorists out of business and that Pakistan's dirty designs had been put to a naught. But, then, why should this nationalistic messaging be confined to the old UP? No one can argue that the voters in Punjab, Goa and Manipur lack in patriotism; Punjab being the border state has every reason to be receptive to any anti-Pakistan sales-pitch. Yet, the BJP lost even the Pathankot, Dinanagar, Gurdaspur assembly seats in the area of the terror-attacks under Modi's watch. In fact, the BJP contested 23 seats and managed to win only three. Similarly, Goa has the honour of being the home state of our Hon'ble Defence Minister, who single-handed instigated a muscular anti-Pakistani narrative. Modi campaigned in all the other three states, though not in every galli as he did in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Yet the electorate remained immune to the Modi charm, as also to the presumed curative power of his leadership.

The Modi magic worked in Uttar Pradesh because of a very sizeable Muslim presence, and, therefore, it was easy to inject effortlessly zero-sum sentimentality into the election-time discourse. This is not the first time a Hindu consolidation has been attempted. It has been working rather well in Gujarat since 2002. It worked in UP in 2017 perfectly because of three convergences. First, the Hindus could be made to feel aggrieved. The BJP's two principal rivals -the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party ---could be portrayed as being too solicitous and too eager to court the Muslim voter. A certain kind of moral authority was grafted around the Hindus' perceived sense of grievances. In particular, the upper castes and the non-Yadav OBCs could be made to feel the threat of being deprived of their legitimate share in the power arrangements because both the BSP and the SP (along with the old culprit, the Congress) were pandering to the Muslims. Because Behn Mayawati's  BSP was openly basing its electoral pitch on a Dalit-Muslim axis, the BJP rhetoric and tactics seemed morally justified to the upper castes . A kind of moral equivalence was manufactured about speaking up for the Hindus.  

Second, the Hindus in UP could be summoned to a kind of solidarity because the anti-Muslim sentiment was served up with an anti-Pakistani dressing. The Prime Minister's reference to the Kanpur rail accident and to the "conspirators" sitting across the borders was not at all an innocent invocation. The trick has always been as how to make the Hindus see a connection between the Muslims and Pakistan. This was made when the BJP president used the acronym KASAB to make the point — and the connection.  

Third, Modi is an authentic salesman for the "Hindu cause."  At the core of Modi's appeal, since 2002, is a political persona that is unapologetically committed to securing the majority community's interests. He does not suffer from any secular squeamishness. His Fatehpur speech, on February 23, was a classic: "If you create kabristan in a village, then a shamshaan should also be created. If electricity is given uninterrupted during Ramzan, then it should also be during Deepavali without a break. Bhedbhaav nahin hona chahiye [there should be no discrimination]."

Pitch perfect. Modi's BJP has won a famous victory in Uttar Pradesh on a stupendous scale that eluded the party during Atal Behari Vajpayee's heyday. The 'Modi wave' has eclipsed the 'Ram wave' of the 1990s. For now, Corporate India will be expected to shed its reluctance to invest, just as the foreign investor would also feel emboldened to take a few risks. 

The Indian polity stands re-jigged. First after 2014, and now after 2017, the message is clear: the Muslim votes are not needed to capture power in India because a Hindu vote-bank has come into existence and it will not be allowed to disintegrate. A kind of politics of exclusion would inevitably assert itself.

The votes have been counted, a mandate procured, and Narendra Modi's unchallenged leadership established. What next? Will a renewed Modi do a better job of protecting and securing our best national interest? The primary responsibility of a leader, anywhere and at any time in any society, is to establish and deepen social harmony and trust among communities and citizens. That task has just become a little complicated. At the moment of his resounding success, Modi has also incurred a fault-line for the Indian State.

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16.  FAITH IN DEMOCRACY DECLINING IN SOUTH ASIA: REPORT
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(The Hindu, March 02, 2017)

Staff Reporter
Bengaluru  

‘Support’ dropped significantly in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka

The faith in democracy has gradually eroded in most South Asian countries, while the ‘preference’ for dictatorship is on the rise, shows the second “State of Democracy Report” released here on Thursday.

The survey, which enumerates the opinions of over 18,500 citizens in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, shows that ‘support’ for democracy has gone down significantly in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

If 70% of Indians supported democracy in 2005 (the first edition of the global report), the support has fallen to 63% by 2013 when the questions for the second edition of the report were framed and answered.

The same is seen in Nepal (down 11% from 62% in 2005). Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, on the other hand have seen their support for democracy rise.

When Indians were asked, ‘[If] Dictatorship is preferable sometimes’, 15% have answered in the affirmative, up from 9% nearly a decade ago. Only Pakistan with 38% has a higher preference for ‘dictatorship’ than India.

The study reveals that preference in dictatorship was highest among those between 18 and 25 years and those with a graduate degree. “While the report shows that multi-party democracy is firmly rooted in South Asia, there are concerns. Faith in elected bodies is reducing; while faith in unelected bodies such as judiciary and army is increasing,” said historian Ramachandra Guha, during the report release function.

In government offices

This is also perhaps reflected in the citizens’ expectations in getting work done in government offices. Just 17% in India think following rules and procedures is an ‘effective’ way of getting governmental work.

An overwhelming majority – 55% – believe bribes are needed, while 19% believe influence through politicians and others is needed.

The report, done under the aegis of the Global Barometer Survey and conducted by Lokniti, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and printed by Jain University, also shows that discrimination among the police based on caste (62%) was the highest in India; while discrimination based on religion (50%) was only second to Pakistan.

On a scale of 1 (highly undemocratic) to 10 (highly democratic), those surveyed in India gave the present government (then, the UPA-led Centre) a score of 5.4, lower than the scores given to their governments in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. 

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17. INDIA: THE NEW FACE OF POLITICS - BJP’S GROWING HEGEMONY IS A DIRECT THREAT TO DEMOCRACY | Yogendra Yadav
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(The Tribune - March 15, 2017)

Stamp of approval: The BJP’s brute power seems to enjoy popular endorsement.
LET’S face it. The stunning verdict of the Assembly elections has signalled a new phase in national politics. The BJP is now not just a ruling party at the Centre and in some states. It is the pole around which national politics is organised. It is the hegemonic party in national politics. Mr Narendra Modi now takes the position last occupied by Mrs Indira Gandhi.

It is a hard reality to swallow. Those who are opposed to Mr Modi’s vision of ‘new India’ find this very disturbing. I belong to this category. I have maintained that Mr Modi stands in opposition to the very idea of India. But it is one thing to like or dislike his politics, quite another to assess where he stands today. Here, Mr Modi’s critics are guilty of living in denial. For the last two years, they were hoping that his regime would collapse under its own weight. They had taken great solace in the BJP’s crushing defeat in Delhi in 2015 and Bihar in 2016. They had predicted that demonetisation was to prove his nemesis. That, clearly, did not happen. Any serious opposition to the BJP must begin by acknowledging this truth.

Hegemonic does not mean just powerful. Hegemony is power with legitimacy. If the BJP is hegemonic today, it is so because its brute power enjoys popular endorsement. The Prime Minister is not just popular, as most Prime Ministers are at the beginning of their tenure. He has captured national imagination like few leaders have in the recent past. The BJP is shaping popular common sense.

There are three components to the BJP’s hegemony. First, it enjoys and exercises brute power like few Central governments have. Some of this is effective use of legitimate state power. Unlike the Congress, the BJP uses it executive power to keep state institutions under its thumb. From education to culture to defence, the Modi government has appointed those who can be trusted to carry out its agenda. It also stretches its legal power to push decisions that do not quite belong to it. Dislodging of state governments in Arunachal and Uttarakhand, the latest attempt to install BJP governments in Goa and Manipur, bypassing of the Rajya Sabha to enact laws that the Opposition may not approve are some examples from this category. The ruling party combines all this with the exercise of violence and intimidation, reminiscent of the terror of the Sanjay Gandhi brigade. The ABVP hooliganism on the campuses across the country and violence against rights activists is becoming the norm now.

The second component of the BJP’s hegemony is its electoral dominance, which reached a new height last week. The significance of its victory in UP and Uttarakhand is not just its spectacular and unprecedented seats tally. The BJP’s victory in 2014 was about as spectacular. The real point is that the BJP managed to repeat this victory in a state Assembly election where anti-incumbency was not that strong, and where the BJP did not have any state-level leadership to project. Yes, Mr Modi is unable to wipe out the anti-incumbency sentiment against his party in Goa and his ally in Punjab. But the BJP’s powerful entry in Manipur, coming at the back of its victory in Assam, gains in Odisha, expanded footprint in the southern states and earlier victories in Haryana and Maharashtra makes it a nationwide political force to reckon with. The Congress is now confined to a few states and is rapidly shrinking. The BJP and the Congress have swapped places in the last 10 years.

The third component is the moral and ideological acceptance of the regime by the people. The PM has extended his popularity well beyond the usual ‘honeymoon’ period. His ability to survive the demonetisation fiasco shows that ordinary people continue to trust him and are willing to overlook his mistakes. It is also clear that the taint of the startling disclosures in the Birla-Sahara case have not stuck to him yet. He has managed to convince the people that he stands for national interest and stands above the partisan battles that political parties fight. On demonetisation, he managed to sell his narrative that it was a move against the big, fat hoarders of black money. Above all, the BJP has managed to win the nationalism debate in the battle of public opinion. A party that had little connect with India’s freedom struggle now shapes the ordinary citizen’s common sense on nationalism.

There are three major limitations to this legitimacy. This circle of BJP’s legitimacy does not include the entire nation. It firmly excludes the minorities. It is not just that the minorities do not respond enthusiastically to Mr Modi. He actually makes a point of excluding them, mainly the Muslims and Christians. He gains legitimacy with the majority Hindu community by showing that he does not care for the Muslims. We also need to note that this popular acceptance is not spontaneous. Good deal of spin doctoring, image management and media manipulation has gone into creating this popular acceptance for the PM. Since the Emergency days, the media has never faced the kind of governmental pressure that it faces today. Such domination is inherently fragile. At the moment it is awesome, but as and when it shakes, it can collapse like a house of cards. And finally, there is little objective ground for this popularity. Economic growth has slowed down, rural distress continued unabated, and so does unemployment. Most high-profile programmes like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and the PM’s Fasal Bima Yojna have not delivered what they promised.

What does this hegemony mean for our democracy? It is true that this offers lot of room to the government on the policy front. Although a government that could push through a momentous decision like demonetisation is not constrained on this front, but it would remove any possible excuse for non-performance. Largely, however, this hegemony poses a challenge to our democracy. There is an imminent possibility of rapidly shrinking democratic spaces. This hegemony can reinforce the hubris this government suffers from. We face a real possibility of an onslaught on the foundational values of our republic.

How do we counter this hegemony? The whole point of calling it hegemony is to remind ourselves that simple-minded opposition does not work against it. Headlong and courageous streetfight may not work. A grand alliance of Opposition is likely to be counterproductive. Counter-hegemony must begin by developing a cultural toolkit to take on the ideological and moral legitimacy of the regime. This is the principal political challenge of our times. 

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18. Being Indian in Trump’s America | Amitava Kumar
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(The New Yorker - 15 March 2017)
					
Sunayana Dumala at the funeral of her husband, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian engineer who was murdered last month as part of a hate crime in Kansas.
Sunayana Dumala at the funeral of her husband, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian engineer who was murdered last month as part of a hate crime in Kansas.PHOTOGRAPH BY NOAH SEELAM / AFP / GETTY	

On a September evening in 1987, Navroze Mody, a thirty-year-old Indian man living in Jersey City, went for drinks at the Gold Coast Café, in Hoboken. Later that night, after he left the bar, he was accosted on the street by a group of about a dozen youths and severely beaten. Mody died from his injuries four days later. There had been other attacks on Indians in the area at that time, several of them brutal, many of them carried out by a group that called itself the Dotbusters—the name a reference to the bindi worn by Hindu women on their foreheads. Earlier that year, a local newspaper had published a handwritten letter from the Dotbusters: “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her.”

When I first read about the attack on Mody, I had only recently arrived in the United States. I was a young graduate student at Syracuse University then, and although the news alarmed me I wasn’t fearful. In those days, distances felt real: an event unfolding in a city more than two hundred miles away seemed remote, even in the imagination. I might have worried for my mother and sisters, who wore bindis, but they were safe, in India. Whatever was happening in Jersey City, in other words, couldn’t affect the sense that I and my expat friends had of our role in this country. The desire for advancement often breeds an apolitical attitude among immigrants, a desire not to rock the boat, to be allowed to pass unnoticed. Since 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the racist quotas of the nineteen-twenties, our compatriots had been bringing their professional skills to America. If we didn’t hope to be welcomed, we at least expected to be benignly ignored.

A lot has happened in the long interregnum. Indian-Americans have the highest median income of any ethnic group in the United States. There is a greater visibility now of Indians on American streets, and also of Indian food and culture. I’ve seen the elephant-headed deity Ganesha displayed all over America, in art museums, restaurants, yoga centers, and shops, on T-shirts and tote bags. The bindi isn’t the bull’s-eye it once was. But the bigotry, as we have witnessed in 2017, has not gone away. In early February, an Indian man in Peyton, Colorado, awoke to find his house egged, smeared with dog feces, and vandalized with racist slogans. Two weeks later, at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, a U.S. Navy veteran named Adam Purinton allegedly opened fire on two Indian patrons. Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a thirty-two-year-old aviation engineer, was killed; his colleague Alok Madasani survived. Ten days later, a Sikh man was attacked outside his home in Kent, Washington, while washing his car. A white man wearing a mask told him to go back to his country, then shot him in the arm. Soon after that, as if to confirm that Indians across the country were now on notice, an unsettling video began to circulate online. Originally posted in August by a sixty-six-year-old computer programmer named Steve Pushor, it shows a crowded park in Columbus, Ohio. As the camera pans past immigrant parents playing with their children, Pushor says, in voice-over, “The Indian crowd has ravished the Midwest.”

The racist’s calling card is ignorance: he cannot discriminate (if that is the right word) between nationalities and religions, between Indians and Saudis and Egyptians, Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs. One of the first hate crimes to take place in the days following 9/11 was the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas-station owner in Mesa, Arizona. The killer probably thought that Sodhi, with his turban and beard, was Muslim; he had told his friends that he was “going to go out and shoot some towelheads.” This year’s attacks bear some of the same hallmarks. Purinton reportedly shouted “Get out of my country!” before firing on the men from India, who he believed were from Iran. And last Friday a white man in Florida set fire to an Indian-owned convenience store because, he told police, it didn’t carry his brand of orange juice and he wished to “run the Arabs out of our country.” We, the mistaken people.

The incitement sixteen years ago was 9/11. Today it is Donald Trump. The President’s nationalistic rhetoric and scapegoating of racial others, not to mention his habitual reliance on unverified information, have sown panic among immigrants. I’ve often asked myself lately whether I’ve been right to suspect that people were looking at me differently on the street, at airports, or in elevators. Whenever a stranger has been kind to me, I have almost wanted to weep in gratitude. Unlike when I first arrived here, distance no longer offers any reprieve from these feelings. The Internet delivers ugly fragments of report and rumor throughout the day, and with them a sense of nearly constant intimacy with violence.

Soon after Kuchibhotla’s murder, a commentator in India pointed out a grave irony: in the run-up to the 2016 election, a number of right-leaning American Hindus supported Trump’s candidacy, not only with donations but also with elaborate prayer ceremonies to propitiate the gods. The more conservative of these people—those who backed the rise of a hypernationalist Hindutva ideology in India through the nineties—have made common cause with American conservatives, who share their view of Islam as the enemy. Trump’s fear-mongering found a ready echo in the ultra-right-Hindu heart. But to the homegrown racists emboldened by that same fear-mongering, the Hindu-G.O.P. alliance makes no difference. Purinton’s question for Kuchibhotla and Madasani in the bar in Kansas was not whether they were Muslim but whether they were in the country illegally. (They weren’t.) A week later, in a Facebook post, Kuchibhotla’s widow framed the question as Purinton perhaps really meant it: “Do we belong here?” This week, a possible answer came from Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, when an Indian-American woman confronted him at an Apple store. “It’s such a great country that allows you to be here,” Spicer told her. His interlocutor was an American citizen, but that didn’t seem to register. (Not white, not quite.)

An Indian man in the Midwest once told me that, every time an American shakes his hand and says, “I love Indian food,” he wants to respond, “I thank you on behalf of Indian food.” He might just as well thank the American on behalf of—take your pick—spelling bees, lazy “Slumdog Millionaire” references, yoga and chai lattes, motels, software moguls, Bollywood-style weddings, doctors and taxi drivers, henna, Nobel laureates, comedians, the baffling wisdom of Deepak Chopra, and Mahatma Gandhi. But perhaps it’s time he reminded the American of something, too. The man who shot Gandhi, in 1948, was neither Muslim nor Sikh nor a foreigner. He was a disgruntled member of the majority, like Purinton, and had once belonged to India’s most nationalistic party—the same party that, just today, told Indians in the United States to stop worrying for their safety.

Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist who teaches at Vassar College. His latest book, “Immigrant, Montana: A Novel,” is forthcoming from Knopf.

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19. RUDRAPPA ON PANDE, WOMBS IN LABOR: TRANSNATIONAL COMMERCIAL SURROGACY IN INDIA
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 Amrita Pande. Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 272 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-16990-5; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-16991-2.

Reviewed by Sharmila Rudrappa (University of Texas at Austin)
Published on H-Asia (March, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

International Surrogacy

As a researcher myself on reproductive politics in general and surrogacy in particular, I cannot emphasize enough the impact sociologist Amrita Pande has had on debates surrounding global surrogacy through her various articles published on the topic since 2009, and now collated into this more comprehensive monograph, Wombs in Labor. Between 2002, when India first legalized commercial surrogacy, to 2016, when Modi’s government banned commercial surrogacy altogether, cities such as Anand, Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai were multimillion-dollar nodes on a global infertility industry that drew clients from Australia, Britain, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Spain, and the United States.

Spanning academic discussions to popular culture (she is featured in an Indo-Norwegian Dutch play titled Made in India—Notes from a Baby Farm), Amrita Pande’s is among the first ethnographies on the topic based on fieldwork begun in 2006, before the phenomenal rise of surrogacy in India. As Pande notes, when she first began fieldwork at what she calls “Armaan clinic,” the clinic had been instrumental in the birth of perhaps ten surrogated babies, but that was to soon change. By March 2013 “Armaan clinic” had announced the birth of the 500th baby through surrogacy, and by December that year the 600th invitro-fertilized baby was delivered in “Armaan” (p. 19). An ethnographer’s sense of ethics keeps Pande from revealing her fieldwork site; she says that her study is located in the uncelebrated Indian city named “Garv,” where every auto-rickshaw driver knew that “Usha Madam” was very famous and that all foreigners went to her (p. 37). Yet, tying together all the details provided it becomes clear that readers are being led to India’s surrogacy doyen, Dr. Nayna Patel, and her much-celebrated and equally vilified Akanksha Clinic in Anand, Gujarat, which is regarded as ground zero for Indian surrogacy.

Though recruitment, labor practices, and class locations of surrogate mothers vary vastly from Indian city to city, as evinced by studies on surrogacy in Bangalore (Sharmila Rudrappa, Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India, 2015), Delhi (various publications by SAMA), and Mumbai (Daisy Deomampo, Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India, 2016), Dr. Patel’s model of strictly regulated surrogacy dormitories, wage structures, and recruitment strategies has come to stand as the norm for how to understand surrogacy in India. That itself makes Amrita Pande’s book a noteworthy contribution; she provides a rich and detailed ethnography of a surrogacy clinic and its surrogate mothers in the very place that came to epitomize commercial surrogacy in India.

Based on fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2011, with in-depth interviews mostly in Hindi with fifty-two surrogate mothers, their husbands, and in-laws; twelve intended parents; three doctors; three surrogacy brokers; three surrogacy hostel matrons; and several nurses, Amrita Pande provides thick descriptions of how surrogate mothers are recruited, how they are disciplined into industrial labor practices on the shop-floor in the surrogacy dormitory, how they perceive themselves as engaging in not wage labor alone, but divine labor, how they are cast as disposable workers, and how they reinsert themselves into the labor process by establishing kinship ties to clients and the surrogated babies. Given its ethnographic focus the monograph might seem to be a “narratives only” sort of account of surrogacy, but Pande provides a rich theoretical exegesis on how unpaid reproductive labor, that is, pregnancy and childbirth, become commodities that can be bought and sold on the market.

Briefly locating the larger process of surrogacy in the longue durée of controlled reproduction in India, Pande follows women from when they first sign up as surrogate mothers to a few years after. The women she interviewed almost all came from families that existed under the poverty line. And, they came to “Dr. Usha Khanderia,” aka Dr. Nayna Patel, either because they had heard about Akanksha Clinic over the news, were convinced or coerced by their marital families, or were recruited by brokers in the trade. Pande describes how the women,  through counseling and the labor contract, are produced into what she terms “mother-workers,” that is, workers whose primary task is to gestate and give birth to a baby. Counselors advise pregnant surrogate mothers, “You have to do nothing. It’s not your baby. You are just providing it a home in your womb for nine months” (p. 70). And though Pande skims over how the work of surrogacy is perceived, reading her ethnographic descriptions of Akanksha it becomes clear that labor effort is cast as not effort. Instead, the clinic staff propagates the perception that the only effort surrogacy requires is compliance to medico-technical bodily interventions. Such compliance is nurtured through the mother’s residence in surrogacy dormitories where she is trained into industrial discipline, to adhere to a labor contract that ostensibly involves no effort on her part—the work is all that of medical specialists—yet she produces a baby at the end of almost nine months in exchange for wages, which will allegedly pull her out of the cycle of poverty. Within this narrative structure, then, through bestowing children upon the infertile clients and cold cash for indigent Indian women, Dr. Nayna Patel, aka “Dr. Khanderia,” becomes a goddess-like figure. Thus, even as the mother-workers are perceived as engaging in “dirty” work at Patel’s surrogacy clinic, the women posit themselves as engaging in making the divine possible.

Yet, like all other capitalist labor processes, surrogacy is premised on worker disposability. That is, all that matters is the end product, which in this case is a baby and the clients’ entry into parenthood. The surrogate mothers, however, reinsert themselves into the labor process by emphasizing their unique characteristics, because after all, why else would the clients have chosen them if not for their specialness? They emphasize that they are not abstract wombs, but unique individuals who share exceptional bonds with client couples. Moreover, some claimed they received better wages because of their distinctiveness. Puja says of her client, “Mrs. Shah, the woman, is also a Brahman [upper caste]. Maybe that’s why she liked me, because I am clean…. Doctor Madam says to me, ‘Why can’t you get me ten, fifteen more Pujas” (p. 138). Surrogate mothers constructed kinship ties with clients, especially intended mothers, in “ties of ‘sisterhood’ that seemingly cross all borders in Garv” (p. 164).

Thus, Pande writes, global surrogacy in Garv (aka Anand) may be a site for the exercise of disciplinary power and extraction of surplus value, but it is also a site for “Third World” women’s struggles for control over their bodies and reproductive futures. The individual resistance she reads is at the discursive level, where they construct themselves as moral mothers, and challenge medical constructions of them as “disposable” workers by forging ties with clients and the surrogated baby. Surrogate mothers wrest back control over their lives from the state, their families, and husbands through using their bodies to receive wages to empower themselves. And finally, surrogate mothers form ties of solidarity with each other, which they then use for collective bargaining on the reproductive sweatshop. While Pande acknowledges that such forms of resistance do little to change the exploitative contours of transnational surrogacy, these discursive moves and acts represent a “constant process of negotiation and strategizing at the local level” (p. 170). Yet, a reader might be inclined to ask, to what end?

Pande acknowledges that nothing changes with the nature of stratified reproduction in an industry where “First World” babies are privileged over laboring “Third World” women, and in spite of the few relationships that form between clients and workers, the vast majority of surrogate mothers end up excised from the clients’ lives upon delivering the baby. In spite of their discursive resistance, surrogate mothers are disposable workers. In an epilogue very oddly titled, “Did the ‘sperm on a rickshaw’ save the Third World?,” Pande returns to Anand in 2011, which is now home to a flourishing fertility market, and some surrogate mothers at Akanksha Clinic are now pregnant for the third time. She finds that though some of the surrogate mothers’ husbands are more likely than before to share in household chores, a vast majority of the women were unable to transcend their everyday lives of precarity. Yet, Pande desires to conclude with what she terms is a “[feminist] fairy tale ending,” where surrogacy transformed at least two surrogate mothers’ lives. With their earnings the two women intended to open their own beauty parlor, putting to use the skills they had learned as residents in Dr. Patel’s clinic. The monograph closes with the words spoken by one of these two women: “Manicure, mehendi [henna], and putting flowers in women’s hair…. There is demand for parlors here everywhere … we can even one day do bridal makeups.… Amrita didi, can you suggest a name for our parlor?” (p. 194).

If I were to have one critique of Wombs in Labor, it is this: the monograph’s limitations lie in its very strengths as an ethnography. The reader gets caught up with details on what the women feel, the ways by which they act and cast their compliance and resistance to becoming clinical laborers, but how are these structures of feelings generated? What are their caste locations? Are they recent migrants to Anand? Do they still have agricultural holdings, or are their family members landless laborers? And what of Anand itself? Home to the headquarters of Amul, India’s largest milk producers’ cooperative, and housing various large-scale industries that hire substantial numbers of blue-collar workers, Anand is far from being the nondescript, “uncelebrated” Garv that Pande describes. Moreover, even as the surrogate mothers are thickly narrated, Dr. Nayna Patel—who provides the author access to her clinic, her dormitories, and surrogate mothers in her hire—only appears briefly in the monograph, and that too as a demi-goddess! The media-savvy and charismatic Dr. Patel, who has netted for herself an international reputation, global clientele, and very substantial earnings through surrogacy, remains above the ethnographic gaze. Disappeared from the narrative are cesarian abuses performed much earlier than the forty-week gestation period (to be fair, Pande has a section on how the women feel about cesarian surgeries but she does not discuss the systematic nature of these sorts of surgeries); breast milk pumps surrogate mothers use to “breastfeed” their surrogated babies if the clients so demand; Patel’s avowed stance against working with gay men even prior to India’s ban on gay clients in 2012; the hiring of two surrogate mothers for every client; and Patel’s multimillion-dollar, newly constructed hospital located away from the bustle of Anand to the industrial city’s outskirts.

But these are not authorial shortcomings. Pande is bound by Institutional Review Board requirements on absolute anonymity. To begin to even describe Anand puts her in violation of such institutional requirements, because Anand is now synonymous with Dr. Nayna Patel. Rather than expecting the author to do all the work upfront, I would suggest that it is up to the reader to pick on the superb yet subtle details the author provides to weave that larger story of Anand, Dr. Patel, and the surrogate mothers who populate Akanshka Clinic. All in all, Amrita Pande has gifted us a beautifully crafted ethnography on what Melissa Cooper and Catherine Waldby term “clinical labor,” defined as “the process of material abstraction by which the abstract, temporal imperatives of accumulation are put to work at the level of the body.”[1] Wombs in Labor is a must-read for students of labor, gender, and reproductive politics.

Note

[1]. Melissa Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 12.
 
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20. RUSSIA COMMEMORATES 1917 REVOLUTION—TIMIDLY | Sophia Kishkovsky 
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(The Art Newspaper,  13 March 2017)

Ambivalence towards Soviet history has led to museums taking a cautious approach to tackling the centenary head-on

Tsar Nicholas II and his son, Alexei. A show about the ill-fated family will take place at the Hermitage (Image: © GARF; the State Archive of the Russian Federation)

The centenary of the Russian Revolution is being commemorated this year by major museums in Europe and the US. The Royal Academy of Arts in London, for example, is hosting a show (until 17 April), with loans from Russia, which examines the extraordinary creativity that followed the revolution and lasted until Stalin’s brutal regime clamped down on all forms of creative expression. Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has drawn on its collection to tell the story of the Russian avant-garde (until 12 March).

Back in Russia, however, museums have been subdued in their commemoration of a year that changed the world. Russia’s relationship with its revolutionary past is far from simple. Ever since the Kremlin crushed a fledgling uprising by urban liberals in 2012, it has been propagating the idea that revolutions are insidious foreign imports. Yet the preserved corpse of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, is still on display in Red Square and statues of him dominate public spaces around the country.

This ambivalence has made it difficult for Russian museums to produce straightforward exhibitions commemorating 1917. Perhaps the fear of falling foul of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, who is expected to run for another six-year term of office in 2018, underpins this timidity.

“Museums are taking the path of least resistance,” says Anatoly Golubovsky, a historian and curator. “If a museum has something in its collection connected to the events of 1917, [or an example of] revolutionary art”, it might choose to organise a show of these artefacts, Golubovsky says, but he does not expect “tough exhibitions that are capable of giving rise to discussions”.

Another difficulty for museums is the complexity of the story of the revolution. There were two very different uprisings in 1917: the February Revolution, which toppled tsarist autocracy and sought to establish liberal democracy, and the October or Bolshevik Revolution, which crushed the supporters of the previous uprising and led to the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children in 1918. Both upheavals set Russia on the path to Soviet rule, Stalin’s Great Terror and decades of social and cultural oppression.

End of the Romanovs
The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is taking an uncontroversial approach by focusing on the tsar and his family. A revamped version of the exhibition 1917 Romanovs & Revolution: the End of Monarchy, which runs until 17 September at the Hermitage Amsterdam, will be seen in St Petersburg later this year. This show, which includes works of art and archival materials, is an attempt to illustrate “how choices and decisions made by the tsar made revolution inevitable”, according to the website of the museum’s Amsterdam outpost.

The Hermitage has also announced plans to tell the story of the Winter Palace in 1917 and to examine the relationship between the museum and those in power. For now, only a broad overview of the exhibition has been released, giving the museum plenty of room to manoeuvre if it becomes necessary to revise its plans. The storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks became a symbol of the Revolution. Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic version of the event will be examined in an exhibition that is due to open at the museum’s General Staff building on 8 November (until 5 March 2018).

Finally, the institution plans a one-off event on 25 October. “We will stage a mystery play on Palace Square,” the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, said in a news conference in February. “There will be lighting to make the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building red.”

Another exhibition focusing on the Romanovs is The Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo and the Romanovs (until 15 January 2018) at the Tsaritsyno State Museum-Reserve in Moscow. Olga Barkovets, the show’s curator, effectively conveys the sense of impending doom of the family’s final few months. “We wanted to convey the feeling of terror of 1917 and what the family experienced,” Barkovets says. The show includes seven chairs from the living room in Alexander Palace, “where the family sat awaiting their departure”, Barkovets says. They departed to their deaths.

Indirect commemorations
Other museums are taking a less direct approach. Vladimir Gusev, the director of St Petersburg’s State Russian Museum, told reporters in February that the museum will mark the October Revolution with an exhibition that will address those events “not head-on, but through people’s lives and their art”.

Meanwhile, Alexei Levykin, the director of the State Historical Museum on Red Square, said that the good and the bad aspects of the revolution must be depicted. In an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official newspaper of the Russian government, he said: “We must treat what happened then as follows: this is our common history… in its victories and tragedies. If crimes and terror were committed and we lost millions of people, then we must speak of this boldly. But we also must not forget obvious achievements and victories.”

One notable exception among state-funded institutions is the Gulag History Museum in Moscow, which spells out its position on the revolution in no uncertain terms. At the beginning of its permanent exhibition, it states: “The spirit of freedom that seized Russian society during the revolutions of 1917 gave way after the Bolsheviks came to power to a sense of oppression and fear.”


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