SACW - 28 March 2017 | Sri Lanka Telecom Workers Strike / Pakistan: Who’s enemy number one?’ / India: Modi has chosen to defeat India; Spinning the Yogi / Transnational Commercial Surrogacy / Baryshnikov on Joseph Brodsky

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 28 March 2017 - No. 2932 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Dispossession and Landlessness in post-war North | Ahilan Kadirgamar
2. ’Equal Wages For Equal Work’ - The Strike And Struggle Of Sri Lanka Telecom’s Contract Workers
3. The Bloody Line - A Film By Ram Madhvani
4. India: A History and Nature of the Ayodhya Dispute | Irfan Engineer
5. India: Secular manifesto for change | Saba Naqvi
6. India: Video of Teesta Setalvad's testimony was before a full session of the UN Human Rights Council on March 15, 2017
7. India: Uttar Pradesh moral teaching vice squads picking on couples in public places / Romeos, Majnus and Mahants
8. India: Morality TV aur Loving Jehad - Ek Manohar Kahani
9. India: Digital version of historian D.N.Jha's myth busting book on beef eating by Hindus and Buddhists in ancient times
10. India: Online petition seeks ’Non Religious - No Caste’ category in government forms in all walks of life
11. India: Q & A with Reetika Khera on the Aadhaar Card - A BBC Hindi video
12. Right Wing Radicalism and a Reactionary Working Class? | Asbjørn Wahl

13. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: All Bengal Minority Youth Federation (ABMYF) wants the bust of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman removed from hostel and calls it 'anti-islamic'
 - India: Chief Minister Adityanath’s army - Hindu Yuva Vahini gets a boost for its Hindutva agenda in Uttar Pradesh
 - India: Rise of Hindu ‘extremist’ spooks Muslim minority in India’s heartland (Michael Safi)
 - India: The spectre of eviction that haunts Assam’s Bengali Muslims (Suvojit Bagchi)
 - USA: Historian [Audrey Truschke] Finds Herself at the Center of India’s Hindu-Muslim Conflict
 - India: Hindutva at play in most BJP-ruled states - Cow vigilantes getting paid in Gujarat / Changes in Textbooks, dress code, renaming of places
 - Modi and the Yogi - Editorial, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 March 2017
 - India: What Does Adityanath’s Alleged Meeting With Ajmer Blast Convict Mean For Hindutva Terror Cases? (The Wire)
 - India: Gorakhpur and the Ghost of Gangadhar Adhikari (Rahul Pandita)
 - India - Rajasthan: Kamal Didi, a sadhvi and her cow vigilante group are slowly gaining popularity
 - India: Despite invalidation of Sections 66A (Punishment for sending offensive messages through communication service) of IT Act Police continue to use it

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
14. Pakistan: Who’s enemy number one? | Pervez Hoodbhoy
15. Pakistan holds its first census in 19 years, but not everyone is ready to be counted | Aoun Sahi, Zulfiqar Ali, Shashank Bengali
16. India: Limited overs format - The RSS-BJP has finally thrown off all coy costumes | Ruchir Joshi
17. In the moment of his political triumph, Modi has chosen to defeat India | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
18. India: The Yogi and the magic of numbers | Gopalkrishna Gandhi
19. India: Spinning the Yogi - Vanguard and fringe | Mukul Kesavan
20. From the Nepali Press: After Adityanath
21. India: Riot manufactured in Gorakhpur | Apoorvanand (an article from 2007)
22. Pakistan: Non-Fiction - Histories of resistance | I.A. Rehman
23. Rudrappa on Pande, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India
24. French literary boy wonder Édouard Louis on saving the working class from Marine Le Pen | Kim Willsher
25. Why The Necessary Cooperation Does Not Happen: Introduction To A Conversation Between Emmanuel Macron and Sigmar Gabriel on Europe’s Future | Jürgen Habermas
26. How a Sleepy German Suburb Explains Europe’s Rising Far-Right Movements The Interpreter By Amanda Taub (The New York Times, March 20, 2017)
27. Poetry and motion: Mikhail Baryshnikov on Joseph Brodsky | Neil Munshi

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1. SRI LANKA: DISPOSSESSION AND LANDLESSNESS IN POST-WAR NORTH
by Ahilan Kadirgamar
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Grievances around land – including military occupation, the normalisation of land titles and permits, displaced squatters on lands of other displaced people and persistent landlessness of historically marginalised communities – have been surfacing since the end of the war. While these issues gained attention in the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission’s proceedings between 2010 and 2011, it is with the opening of democratic space in January 2015 that the people in the North became increasingly vocal
http://sacw.net/article13151.html

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2. ’EQUAL WAGES FOR EQUAL WORK’ - THE STRIKE AND STRUGGLE OF SRI LANKA TELECOM’S CONTRACT WORKERS
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SLT first began hiring contract workers from manpower agencies in the 1990s. Initially, only drivers were hired through manpower agencies. Over time, SLT also began hiring technical officers this way from around 2002. The contract workers were supposed to be hired to fill positions that were not part of SLT’s core operations.
http://sacw.net/article13152.html

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3. THE BLOODY LINE - A FILM BY RAM MADHVANI
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on the Radcliff Line that dividend India and Pakistan in 1947
http://sacw.net/article13161.html

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4. INDIA: A HISTORY AND NATURE OF THE AYODHYA DISPUTE | Irfan Engineer
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In a surprise development, the Supreme Court, on March 21, 2017 urged the rival parties in the Ram Janamabhoomi – Babri Masjid (RJBM) case to negotiate and resolve the dispute in a spirit of give and take. The Chief Justice of India offered himself to be a mediator should both the parties agreed. The observations came on application of Subramanian Swamy seeking urgent hearing of the appeal against the order of Allahabad High Court dated September 30, 2010 in the RJBM title suit. Subramanian Swamy, a BJP leader, has no locus standi in the case and he is not a party in the Appeal.
http://sacw.net/article13162.html

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5. INDIA: SECULAR MANIFESTO FOR CHANGE | Saba Naqvi
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Here's how secularism must be reinvented to credibly challenge the Hindutva narrative
http://sacw.net/article13153.html

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6. INDIA: VIDEO OF TEESTA SETALVAD'S TESTIMONY WAS BEFORE A FULL SESSION OF THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL ON MARCH 15, 2017
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Video of Teesta Setalvad speaking at the UNHRC - 34th Regular Session Human Rights Council Advocates for Human Rights
http://sacw.net/article13160.html

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7. INDIA: UTTAR PRADESH MORAL TEACHING VICE SQUADS PICKING ON COUPLES IN PUBLIC PLACES / ROMEOS, MAJNUS AND MAHANTS
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If the police can't tell the difference between molesters and amicable couples, the squads portend humiliation, extortion and violence on innocent young people in public places. Such bullying couldn't be more out of step today when, across India, walls between the genders are breaking. More and more young women are in schools, colleges, workplaces and recreation spots, frequently with male colleagues, boyfriends, friends who are boys.
http://sacw.net/article13163.html

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8. INDIA: MORALITY TV AUR LOVING JEHAD - EK MANOHAR KAHANI
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A 2007 documentary film by Paromita Vohra
http://sacw.net/article13167.html

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9. INDIA: DIGITAL VERSION OF HISTORIAN D.N.JHA'S MYTH BUSTING BOOK ON BEEF EATING BY HINDUS AND BUDDHISTS IN ANCIENT TIMES
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The killing cows for meat was a prevalent practice in ancient India.
In The Myth Of The Holy Cow, the author reveals that in ancient times, Hindus and Buddhists ate beef. According to him, the cow earned its status as the holy animal of Hinduism only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book states that hindus regularly used cows both as part of dietary traditions and as offerings to God.
http://sacw.net/article13168.html

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10. INDIA: ONLINE PETITION SEEKS ’NON RELIGIOUS - NO CASTE’ CATEGORY IN GOVERNMENT FORMS IN ALL WALKS OF LIFE
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We Humbly wants to bring these few lines to your kind notice. Our’s is an Inter caste and Inter religious marriage. We have different Caste and Religious Origins. Of course one of us believe in religion and others do not follow any religion. We have decided not to impart any caste and religious beliefs to our children. But, In our Country there is no option to claim for the people with Non Religious and No Caste practice.
http://sacw.net/article13155.html

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11. INDIA: Q & A WITH REETIKA KHERA ON THE AADHAAR CARD - A BBC HINDI VIDEO
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http://www.sacw.net/article13164.html

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12. RIGHT WING RADICALISM AND A REACTIONARY WORKING CLASS?
by Asbjørn Wahl
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Large parts of the western working class now seem to gather around right populists, demagogues and racists. They vote for reactionary and fascist oid political parties. They helped to vote the UK out of the EU, to make Trump president of the world’s superpower number one, and they vote so massively for the far right political parties so that they have government power in sight in several of Europe’s most populous countries.
http://sacw.net/article13145.html

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13. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - India: All Bengal Minority Youth Federation (ABMYF) wants the bust of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman removed from hostel and calls it 'anti-islamic'
 - India: Video Clip of Moral Police Vigillantes at Work in BJP ruled Jharkhand
 - India: Chief Minister Adityanath’s army - Hindu Yuva Vahini gets a boost for its Hindutva agenda in Uttar Pradesh
 - India: Rise of Hindu ‘extremist’ spooks Muslim minority in India’s heartland (Michael Safi)
 - India: The spectre of eviction that haunts Assam’s Bengali Muslims (Suvojit Bagchi)
 - USA: Historian [Audrey Truschke] Finds Herself at the Center of India’s Hindu-Muslim Conflict
 - India: Hindutva at play in most BJP-ruled states - Cow vigilantes getting paid in Gujarat / Changes in Textbooks, dress code, renaming of places
 - Modi and the Yogi - Editorial, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 March 2017
 - India: What Does Adityanath’s Alleged Meeting With Ajmer Blast Convict Mean For Hindutva Terror Cases? (The Wire)
 - India: Gorakhpur and the Ghost of Gangadhar Adhikari (Rahul Pandita)
 - India: The politics of pashu-dhan and pratibandh - crackdown on meat processing plants in UP
 - India - Rajasthan: Kamal Didi, a sadhvi and her cow vigilante group are slowly gaining popularity
 - India: Despite invalidation of Sections 66A (Punishment for sending offensive messages through communication service) of IT Act Police continue to use it 
 - Hindi Article: UP Elections: Deepening Communal Polarization
 - India: Listen up liberals, stop cribbing . . . Nehruvian order is facing an existential challenge (Harish Khare)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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14. PAKISTAN: WHO’S ENEMY NUMBER ONE?
Pervez Hoodbhoy
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(Dawn, March 18, 2017)

ASK people around you to identify the three greatest threats facing Pakistan. Ordinary people, chatterbox anchors, mullahs, generals and politicians will name everything from corruption, bad governance and religious terrorism, to Indian and American conspiracies, and general moral decay. But few, if any, waste sleep worrying about the country’s exploding population. Some educated people do have misgivings, but they show concern only when prodded.

Fortunately, the ultra-religious sorts — which this land is abundantly blessed with — are free from useless doubt. For them more is better. Every newborn, say the ultras, comes with a guaranteed rizq (provision) stamped on its forehead. Now let’s assume, ignoring the visible contrary evidence, that this is correct. Yet there shall remain an impossibly difficult problem even if food and water were to drop miraculously from the skies. Fact: Pakistan will eventually run out of physical space. This is what the law of exponential growth says.
Only a miracle can now prevent Pakistan from becoming 400 million people in around 35 years.

An old Persian story helps understand the mathematical concept of exponentials.

Once upon a time, a clever courtier presented an elaborate ivory chess set to his king. In return he asked for only one grain of rice for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, etc. Now, kings in those times did not have degrees in math, and this one was no exception. He foolishly agreed and ordered the rice be brought out from the storage. Working on the agreed upon terms, the 10th square had 512 grains, the 14th weighed around 1kg, and the 20th around 128kg. Long before reaching the last square (64th) the kingdom’s entire rice stock was exhausted.

The moral: if something doubles, and doubles again and again, then even the sky is not high enough.

Let’s return to Pakistan. In 1947 it had 27 million people and now has over 200m. This gives a doubling time of roughly 25 years. Now assume for a moment that the ultras have their way and the doubling time stays unchanged. Then 25 years later there will be 400m Pakistani CNIC holders. Wait for another 100 years and that number will comfortably exceed the world’s current population of 7.2 billion.

The effects will be much more dramatic after yet another 25 years — ie 150 years from today. Imagine that all 800,000 square kilometres of Pakistani territory is somehow levelled. Even so, there will be only room for standing shoulder to shoulder. In such circumstances it is hard to imagine how further reproduction will be physically possible. Generals who receive retirement gifts of 93 acres (approximately 37 hectares) of land today will be lucky if they get 93 square feet.

The good news is that this is not actually going to happen. Every demographer is shouting from the rooftop that birth rates are declining and doubling times are increasing. Indeed, according to the CIA World Factbook, birthrates in Pakistan have fallen from 32.11 in 2000 to 23.19 in 2014.

The bad news is that even this decline isn’t good enough. Short of nuclear war or a miracle, nothing can now prevent Pakistan from reaching 400m people in 35-40 years. Hence the demand for living space will vastly accelerate. Even now, green areas are vanishing as villages become towns, and one city spills over into the next. Karachi and Hyderabad are approaching their eventual merger, just as Islamabad and Rawalpindi have become practically one city, and Islamabad is furiously racing towards Taxila.

Doubling Pakistan’s population means that there will only be half as much fresh water as today, the air will become yet filthier, pollutants will poison the land and sea, and road traffic will become nearly impossible. As poverty skyrockets, hordes of beggars will roam the streets, madressahs will swell in size and number, and the unemployed and unemployable will chafe in anger and frustration. They will be easily persuaded that their predicament comes from some international conspiracy.

Although this holocaust is only some years away, curiously it is the suicide terrorist — whose ball-bearing filled jacket can kill only dozens — that draws our attention. Why? The story of two frogs loitering near the kitchen stove is instructive.

One frog fell into a pot of hot water and was so jolted that he jumped out instantly. He was saved. The other one fell into a pot wherein the water was only slowly warming up. He swam around and around but did not summon the energy to make a sudden jump. Ultimately he was boiled to death. The obvious moral: instant shocks are better survived than long-term threats.

How to avoid a similar doom? As a first step we must declassify our best kept national secret — knowing how babies are made. Only then can contraception be discussed in the public media, and in schools and colleges. Phenomenal ignorance on these matters has led to extremely low rates of contraceptive usage by Pakistani women. This also reflects their disempowerment in deciding the number of children. Hence birth and fertility rates in Pakistan exceed those in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and the rest of South Asia.

With discussion suppressed in the name of Mashriqi sharm-o-haya, all kinds of nonsensical belief are going unchallenged today. Should we be surprised that countless workers administering polio shots — which are falsely alleged to decrease fertility — have been shot and killed?

The government’s supreme cowardice makes one shudder. Fearing the wrath of violent ultras, Pakistan abolished the ministry for population planning many years ago. Upon googling, I came across the website of the Population Welfare Department. This ridiculous name suggests that PWD will seek, and succeed, in delivering welfare to Pakistanis irrespective of their number. I could not find an Urdu version of the website. Apart from giving advertisements in newspapers, where it matters little, I am unaware if the PWD does anything else.

Averting catastrophe because of overbreeding does not need rocket science but it does need common sense. It also needs courage, which our pusillanimous leaders — both civil and military — have so far failed to muster. Much more than Zarb-i-Azb, we need Zarb-i-Tauleed. Unless we learn from the second frog’s fate, Pakistan doesn’t have much of a future.

The writer teaches physics and mathematics in Lahore and Islamabad.

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15. PAKISTAN HOLDS ITS FIRST CENSUS IN 19 YEARS, BUT NOT EVERYONE IS READY TO BE COUNTED
by Aoun Sahi, Zulfiqar Ali, Shashank Bengali
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(Los Angeles Times, March 21 2017)
 
A police officer escorts government workers through the slums of Karachi, Pakistan, to collect data during the country's first census since 1988. (Fareed Khan / Associated Press)

Like many countries, Pakistan allocates federal resources to its provinces and administrative regions based on population.

Trouble is, Pakistan’s last census took place nearly two decades ago, and insecurity and political wrangling have stalled efforts to carry out a fresh head count.
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This month Pakistan launched a national census for the first time in 19 years, deploying 200,000 soldiers alongside 118,000 civilian enumerators in an effort to count and compile demographic data on every person.

The census will not only count the population and ethnic and faith groups in each of the country’s four provinces and other administrative units. It will also determine provincial shares of federal revenue and subsidies, as well as shares of seats in the National Assembly and civil service quotas.

Transgender people will also be counted for the first time, officials said.

“We will be able to share provisional summary results of the data by the end of July,” said Asif Bajwa, Pakistan’s chief census commissioner.

In a country with desperate shortages of electricity and other basic infrastructure, experts say a fresh count is badly needed. The constitution requires a census every 10 years. Pakistan’s population is estimated to have grown by as much as 40% since the last census, in 1998, counted 130 million people.

“Since then the country is being run on guesstimates,” said Abid Suleri, head of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, a think tank in Islamabad, the capital.

“The best plans and policies fail to deliver, partially, when we do not have our numbers right. It is like stitching someone’s clothes without knowing the age, height, weight and measurements.”

But even before door-to-door counting began last week, the census stirred controversy as women’s rights groups, smaller provinces and ethnic and religious minorities voiced concerns over the process.

Despite acknowledging that the 1998 census undercounted women and girls, officials this year did not appoint any female census workers, according to Sarwar Bari, a human rights activist in Islamabad. In many areas, male census workers would not be able to interview women because of religious and cultural taboos, Bari said.

“There is not even a single female enumerator appointed in Punjab, the largest province of the country,” Bari said. “Male enumerators will face problems in counting women.”

Ethnic Baluch and Pashtun political parties, which have long agitated for greater autonomy from the federal government, fear that officials in Punjab will attempt to manipulate census figures to maintain the province’s large share of national resources and political clout.

“The census has become a political — in fact a politicized — issue in Pakistan,” Suleri said.

Currently, Punjab holds 183 seats in the 342-member assembly, meaning it can unilaterally elect the prime minister. The current prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, hails from Punjab.

“The federal government had planned to manipulate census figures to maintain the hegemony of Punjab over smaller provinces,” said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the general secretary of the Awami National Party, a Pashtun nationalist party.

The party also complained that census data from its heartland in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the adjacent tribal region would be counted in Islamabad because of a lack of equipment locally.

“We believe that [bad faith] intentions are involved,” Hussain said, adding that ethnic Pashtuns might not accept the census results.

In the federally administered tribal areas, lawmakers have raised concerns that their population will be undercounted because residents have fled their homes to escape Pakistani counter-terrorism operations and U.S. drone strikes against suspected militants.

Residents of the Orakzai tribal region boycotted the campaign for two days, saying that census takers were going to areas that residents had vacated years ago.

In the southwestern province of Baluchistan, Pakistan’s poorest, some lawmakers filed a lawsuit to stop the census, saying they feared that thousands of mainly ethnic Pashtun refugees from Afghanistan — many of whom have lived there for more than three decades — would mistakenly be included in the count.

Afghans in Pakistan are often accused of carrying fake citizenship documents to avoid deportation. The presence of the refugees — and the fact that many ethnic Baluch have migrated to other provinces — could make the Baluch a minority in the province that is their heartland, according to the lawsuit by the Baluchistan National Party.

The government has no mechanism to collect accurate census figures in the absence of the local population, who were forced to migrate to other parts of the country,” said Baluchistan National Party leader Ghulam Nabi Marri. In response to the lawsuit, a provincial court directed authorities to exclude Afghan refugees from the census.

In several provinces, leaders of the Sikh community have objected to their faith being left off the census forms. Sikhs, whose religion was founded five centuries ago in what is now Pakistan, have to list themselves as members of “other” religions.

There has never been an accurate count of the Sikh population of Pakistan, which is estimated to be in the tens of thousands. There are about 20 million Sikhs in neighboring India.

It would mean “total disrespect to the community if their religion is not mentioned and they remain unrecognized in a land which means the most to them,” Sardar Ramesh Singh, leader of the Pakistan Sikh Council, told the daily Dawn newspaper.

The census is expected to cost Pakistan about $178 million.

Special correspondents Sahi and Ali reported from Islamabad and Peshawar, Pakistan, respectively, and Times staff writer Bengali from Mumbai, India.

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16. INDIA: LIMITED OVERS FORMAT - THE RSS-BJP HAS FINALLY THROWN OFF ALL COY COSTUMES
Ruchir Joshi
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(The Telegraph, March 21, 2017)

So here we have it. All the talk of developing the economy, of ' sabka saath', of bringing in a non-corrupt rule of law and order, was just so much cow manure. Exactly as many of us had warned it would be. With the installation of Ajay Bisht aka 'Yogi' Adityanath, as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the RSS-BJP has finally thrown off all its coy costumes. If they didn't before, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah now stand before us in all their unadorned starkness. These are two small-minded and fearful men who care first, second and third about continuing and expanding their hold on power, and fourth, fifth and sixth about spreading their poisonous Hindutva agenda. Any improvement in the quality of the ordinary Indian's life that may take place, would, at best, be a fluke, a fortunate by-product of the project of spreading the RSS's tentacles across India and shoring up their oligarch funders' profit-making. Shame, sharam, maryada, vivek, are all clearly pesky concepts that get in the way of this continuing power-grab. All pretensions to these are clearly to be jettisoned the moment they are no longer useful, like spent booster rockets.

Slotted into the chair at Lucknow we now have a man who has built his political career entirely on propagating the idea of Hindu supremacy, on developing an extra virulent strain of Toxin Hindutva, on repeatedly threatening minorities with the murder and rape Hindutva muscle can wreak. Taking oath on the Constitution which he hates and hopes to dismantle is a committed anti-national, a man whose sole aim has been to destroy all ideas of a democratic and secular Republic of India. While the ideas Bisht-Adityanath and his followers spew out are not ancient as they claim, having only a twisted connection to the ancient Hindu texts, neither are they particularly new - their stink has been around for nearly a hundred years: Bisht is the latest inheritor of the mantle of the so-called sants of Gorakhpur, supposed holy men who were primarily musclemen in orange outfits, allegedly involved in everything from the violence at Chauri Chaura in 1922 that sabotaged Gandhi's first non-violent campaign, to forming the Hindu Mahasabha a few years later, to installing the idols at the Babri Mosque in 1949. Bisht-Adityanath's 'spiritual father' was Avaidyanath, who was involved in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

With Bisht being handed the UP chief ministership we have a moment where two parallel strands of Hindutva thuggery lock together openly. If Bisht's predecessors kept the Babri pot boiling over 40 years, it was the RSS-BJP of Vajpayee and Advani who used Babri to catapult themselves into becoming the main challengers of the disintegrating Congress. Flanking the RSS-BJP in the late 1980s and early 1990s were assorted other parivar outfits. If the Shiv Sena were the first to go up one gear by declaring open season on Bombay's Muslims in early 1993, the BJP, once they were in power, brought in their own specialist in 2001: when Narendra Modi took over as the chief minister of Gujarat he declared he wasn't there to play political test cricket, he was a votary of the limited overs format. Whatever his instructions from Delhi-Nagpur, soon after Modi took over Gujarat delivered the bloodbath of 2002. The shock in 2001, at the brazenness of Advani unleashing an extremist RSS man as the chief minister of a big state, should now acquire some perspective: if Modi is both an ODI expert and a long-term chess grand master, Bisht-Adityanath is surely a T-20 hack.

Addressing a rally, Bisht says, "If the blood flows of one Hindu, in the coming times we will not register an FIR with the administration, we make the blood flow of ten people who were involved in the murder of the Hindu." This is the man now in charge of the rule of law he holds in such contempt. Responsible for the welfare of UP's population, including 38 million Muslims (that's 38 million Indian women, men and children) is the man who repeatedly and openly states that Hindus and Muslims cannot live together, who constantly implies that all Muslims are jihadis and that Hindus should prepare for a dharma-yuddha. This is also a man who makes 180 degree flip-flops in a flicker, without even the obfuscatory manoeuvres of his U-turn guru, Narendra Modi. Speaking to a crowd Bisht can say, "No non-Muslim is allowed in Mecca [true], no non-Christian is allowed in the Vatican [a complete lie] but we let all sorts of people enter Varanasi, so who is more generous?" Yet, on another occasion this 'generosity' goes into the garbage bin and he proclaims that no non-Hindus should be allowed to enter Hardwar. This is a man who, in 2017, subscribes to the worst kind of male chauvinism, stating that if they (Muslims) take one of our (Hindu) girls then we will take a hundred of theirs. Coming from a man who sits there while his followers demand the rape of dead Muslim women, one can only imagine what this 'taking' (hum unki sau kanyaein lengey) actually means. This is the junior Vikas Purush Modi and Shah have put in place to support the progress of 95 million Indian women.
×

Appalling as this appointment is, it fits an analysis far better articulated in Hindi newspapers than in the English language media: having won massively in UP, Modi and Shah don't actually know what to do with their victory; theirs is a panic of a man who was hoping to win 10 lakhs in a lottery but who has won one crore. Post their state elections bonanza, Modi-Shah could have made some different decisions, but those would have meant tangling with principle and an increased likelihood of some short-term setbacks. For instance, with UP in the bag, they could have done standard MLA shopping in Manipur but let go of Goa where there was a clear anti-incumbent verdict. Instead they ripped Manohar Parrikar out of his defence ministry and sent him back to shore up a small state. Why was the greed of controlling Goa more important than the able ministering of the nation's defence? Likewise, with such a massive majority in UP, the RSS-BJP could have put in charge absolutely anyone they wanted: they could have gone for a pliant but honest and efficient man or woman, who would have had carte blanche to actually work for the vikas of India's most populous state; in the two years remaining for the 2019 elections, with the Centre and Lucknow working together, they could have shown everybody how progress is brought about. Instead they chose a regressive, reactionary, know-nothing, small-town muscleman to run one of the most important state governments in India. These decisions, examined together, suggest a couple of things that take a lot of shine off the RSS-BJP's supposedly great triumph.

First: either, after nearly three years in power, Modi & Co have nothing further in their bag as far as plans for actual economic progress are concerned, or, a small, rogue political nuclear reactor like Bisht has the capability to derail the BJP's UP victory and they would rather have him inside the tent, pointing out, rather than outside it, pointing in. Second: either Parrikar was botching up the defence portfolio, and this would reflect badly on Modi's ability to choose effective ministers, or, Parrikar was perceived as doing a good job, therefore becoming a figure who could, down the line, challenge the Modi-Shah combine for leadership of the government. Third: for all his travelling abroad and flirting with new technological concepts Modi has learned nothing, and he - and Shah - actually have no other vision, no other plan save to paint the country a brightly lethal orange; in the confusion of winning this jackpot the only thing they could do was revert to the default agenda and choose in UP the person who most resembled themselves.

In spite of their reservoirs of low cunning, Modi and Shah are, at their core, intensely blindered and unimaginative men. Exactly like Adityanath, they are basically vicious provincials, trapped waist-deep in the gutter of their ignorant world view. This ignorance, this narrow-mindedness, this mountain of lies constantly piling up is bound to cost our country dear, but it will bring about the spectacular undoing of these men. One question, of course, is how soon. And the second one: what will be the extent of the damage we'll end up surveying once they're gone?

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17. IN THE MOMENT OF HIS POLITICAL TRIUMPH, MODI HAS CHOSEN TO DEFEAT INDIA
by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
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(the Indian Express - March 20, 2017)

Hubris has set in. The BJP believes it can get away with anything — it now intends to 

The elevation of Yogi Adityanath as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh is an odious and ominous development. It is an odious choice because the BJP has picked someone who is widely regarded as the single most divisive, abusive, polarising figure in UP politics. He is a politician who has, for most of his political career, been the mascot of militant Hindu sectarianism, reactionary ideas, routinised conflict and thuggery in political discourse, and an eco-system where the vilest legitimations of violence are not far away. It is an ominous development because it sends as clear a signal as it is possible to send at this time; the already accomplished political fact of the marginalisation of minorities in UP and elsewhere will now be translated into a programme of their cultural, social and symbolic subordination.

It signals that the BJP will now be dominated by extremes, its politics shaped largely by resentment rather than hope, collective narcissism rather than an acknowledgement of plurality, hate rather than reconciliation, and violence rather than decency. Hubris has set in. The party believes it can get away with anything. It now intends to.

The election results gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi an unprecedented mandate. It is true that most of us who did not expect the mandate are hardly in a position to explain what the results represented. All we know is that for a variety of reasons, people reposed trust in Modi overwhelmingly over his rivals. He got credit for leading from the front. He has chosen to interpret his mandate in a way that licenses and empowers the worst tendencies of his party. This is now not a statement just about UP: It is a statement about the prime minister’s inclinations and judgement. In the moment of his political triumph, he has chosen to defeat India.

BJP supporters are hiding behind the façade of party democracy to legitimise this choice. Yes, the formal imprimatur of the legislative party is behind him. But given Modi’s power, this explanation is hard to digest. If Adityanath was so clearly a popular choice, what was the hesitation in declaring him the chief ministerial candidate before the elections? If it was uncertainty about his ability to win across the state, then the result does not alleviate it. So, the only conclusion is that it was a duplicity of sorts —”of sorts” because the ideological currents were apparent in the prime minister’s speeches and the BJP manifesto.

But every argument that leads to legitimising this choice bodes ill for the country. If the legislature electing Adityanath is indeed the best interpretation of the mandate, then Indian democracy is corroded to the core: For it is effectively saying that India is now communalised to the point where a figure like Adityanath is the popular choice. We have to then give up the last vestiges of democratic hope in the idea that while the people may misjudge or commit mistakes, while they may occasionally excuse a crime, they will not vote for the wholescale destruction of basic values. It has been hard to resist misanthropy towards the role of citizens in Indian democracy. Many elites have succumbed to it in a self-defeating way. But it is that democratic respect that has perhaps made us underestimate our capacity to legitimise political evil.

Taking a stand against a democratic mandate, without losing democratic faith, is not an easy political act to juggle. If Adityanath is indeed the popular choice, then the crisis of Indian democracy deepens: It will essentially seem like a contest between fundamentalism and democratic misanthropy, both destructive of the idea of democracy. On the other hand, if his elevation is a misreading of the mandate, then too we are in deep trouble: For it will show the limits of democracy in containing sheer hubris. Either way, unless there is some imaginative ideological regeneration, India will become a democracy intoxicated by sheer power.

“Every saint has a past and every sinner a future.” This refrain has often been used to excuse big political crimes in India. And it has to be said, from Rajiv Gandhi to the current prime minister, leaders have got away with a lot of political culpability. But even in the tainted annals of our democracy, sinners have had to keep up appearances of reinventing themselves, positioning themselves to show they had something more than the taint to offer — what is striking about Adityanath’s political career so far is that there is not even a whiff of acknowledgement that he might need to speak to something larger, acknowledge civility, or stay away from fear-mongering and the legitimisation of violence. There is nothing else here, other than a tissue of resentment and hate, unless you think the Gorakhpur model of politics is a harbinger of development.

There is an element of truth in Yogi Adityanath’s claim that the BJP is consolidating a politics that goes beyond caste, at least in the way it was conventionally understood. But we are left with the disquieting conclusion that the form of consolidation “beyond caste” he practises will rely on an even more insidious communal politics. The political challenges of this moment are going to be immense. Modi’s rise to power has empowered a lot of nasty characters. Now they get wholescale control of the state apparatus in India’s largest state, and with every intention to reshape it in their image.

A forcing of the hand on the Ram Mandir issue is now an imminent prospect. Visible opposition will be difficult to mount because of the BJP’s total dominance, and this will likely make the situation worse. The usual safety valves of Indian democracy are slowly shutting. We have no idea of what kind of politics this suffocation will spawn. India’s enemies will be exulting that at a moment in world history, when all India had to do was to have a sensible policy, we have chosen to empower the worst of ourselves.

Naths have a distinguished spiritual tradition. But militant Nath yogis have a destructive history in politics: They were even patronised by Aurangzeb. They were influential in Jodhpur, my home town. The 19th century ruler, Man Singh, was a disciple. He called his kingdom an “arpan” to the Naths. Raja Man Singh was talented. He fancied himself a poet, a king and a yogi. The only catch was that he was not the self-possessed ideal king. He had frequent bouts of madness. He was paranoid, had power but could not master it. Now we have been again asked to do a political arpan to the Naths. Madness cannot be far away.

This column first appeared in the print edition titled 'Yogic Madness'. The writer is President, CPR Delhi, and contributing editor, The Indian Express.

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18. INDIA: THE YOGI AND THE MAGIC OF NUMBERS
BY GOPALKRISHNA GANDHI
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(The Hindu - 20 March 2017)

Will India’s democrats let majoritarianism plant the seeds of counter-democracy?
We are a democracy.
What an original thought!
And with the second biggest population, the largest democracy in the world.
Cheers !

We are proud of being such a democracy.
But of course!
We must, as a democracy, respect the will of the majority.
Absolutely!
Because the voice of the people — vox populi — is the voice of truth.
Er…

This is where bombast and its counter — sarcasm — ends. Where irony, humour retires. And hard-rock reality stares us in the face, the reality that is Yogi Adityanath, Chief Minister of India’s most populous State.

We cannot get anyone more democratic than him.

Gradual ascent

Born to no privilege in the hinterland isolation of the temple-town of Gorakhpur, he was raised in no metropolis, educated in no sequestered school or ivy-covered college. But being sharp-witted, he turned social stagnations into political steroids and taking his town’s eponymous dedication to cow protection seriously, became not just a priest but head priest of the temple. And then, as such head priest, offered himself as a parliamentary candidate, becoming the youngest member of the Lok Sabha to which he was first elected, winning each of the five subsequent elections that he contested as a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party. More, MP Adityanath remained that quintessence of parliamentary democracy — the private Member, the back or middle-bencher, sometimes of the party in power, sometimes in the Opposition, speaking the language of his people, the language of the masses as their chosen MP, the legislative digit that really counts, that makes up the numbers, the ‘body’ that gives that august body not its augusta meaning, in Latin, ‘majestic, grand’, but its body, its bones, sinew, muscle and flesh.

He studied, one discovers, at the Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University in Uttarakhand for his BSc., not music or philosophy (both courses being on offer there), but mathematics. And so he knows his numbers, knows that numbers count and that in a democracy they are all that count — apart from money. Yogi Adityanath deserves to be congratulated, and I do so, for rising to the pinnacles of our legislative architecture from its very foundations, not being air-dropped on its carpeted terrace from a helicopter.

This is where factoids and their theoretical master, empiricism, end. Where chronology, ‘plain’ narration, retires. And where another stony reality stares us in the face, the reality that is our democracy’s subversion, distortion — in fact, its perversion.

Of the many forms of government — old, new, and still in the making — electoral democracy, the system which enables people to choose their law-makers, their leaders and lodestars in freedom and without fear, is only the least imperfect. It is far from, very far from, being perfect. Worse, it can and does recoil to shapes and forms that are in their nature and impact, un-democratic, anti-democracy. This process can be called counter-democracy. India holds a doctorate in democracy; it is doing a post-doc in counter-democracy.

Ours is, of course, a global classroom.

West to east

Few persons can be as different as Donald J. Trump is from Yogi Adityanath. The President of the United States, according to a Forbes listing, has a net worth of $3.7 billion, or nearly ₹24,000 crore. The new Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, according to National Election Watch and Association for Democratic Reforms, has assets amounting to a modest ₹72 lakh. Thrice married, part owner of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants from 1996 to 2015, Donald Trump is hedonism personified compared to the celibate head priest of the Gorakhnath temple. But there is the great connect between them: the inter-leaved action of democracy and counter-democracy.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Adityanath are, both, their people’s gifts to themselves. They are the creations of the people’s own choice, their own voice as counted in numbers. They are the sum of the vox populi — enumerated. They are where they have reached by wholly licit procedures in the exercise of legitimate, constitutional, democratic choice. No one can question, let alone challenge, their democratic accomplishment. In this they are as twinned by the popular vote.
 
They are also where they have reached, by the skilful, adroit managing of the processes of that same legitimate, constitutional and democratic choice to do something that is wholly counter-democratic – polarise the electorate. “Skilful?” an admirer of political bi-ceps might interject. “Is being skilful a crime?” Of course not. But not being criminal is not the same thing as being innocent. Adroitness is a skill, not a virtue. The creation of the bogey of the ‘Other’, an entity to be feared, hated, isolated, ostracised, intimidated, blocked from entering, perhaps hustled out, is a technique of emotional branding that is adroit; it is not clean. And so Mr. Trump and Mr. Adityanath are also twinned by the polarised vote.

About India

But this article is not about Mr. Trump and Adityanath, twinned or separate. It is about India, united or divided. It is about an India that is a Republic in which all its citizens are constitutionally equal and a democracy in which they are politically unequal. Our Constitution separated politics from religion. Today they are becoming co-extensive. ‘Hindus vote Hindu’ is cunning, it is not clean. “Clean?” the same interjector will put in. “Does the law define ‘clean’?” No, it does not. But it does talk of something that is the opposite of clean, namely, ‘corrupt’.
 
The Representation of the People Act, 1951, declares in its Section 123(3) as “corrupt practice”, “The promotion of, or attempt to promote, feelings of enmity or hatred between different classes of the citizens of India on grounds of religion, race, caste, community, or language, by a candidate or his agent…” It is for the courts, if moved, to say whether in the U.P. elections that section of the Act was offended or not. But it is for us to ask, is it democratic or counter-democratic for a State of which 19% are Muslim to be ruled by a party that did not put up a single Muslim candidate? Is it democratic or counter-democratic for a State to have a Chief Minister said to face charges of promoting enmity between different groups on the ground of religion, injuring or defiling places of worship?

Beyond U.P.’s election and its Chief Minister, a grim anomaly, a bitter truth, about our political selfhood faces us. Introducing the draft Constitution to the Constituent Assembly on November 4, 1948, B.R. Ambedkar said: “Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” Notwithstanding this diagnosis, he went ahead and introduced the text. With his associates in the Assembly, Nehru foremost among them, and with Gandhi’s eclectic spirit brooding over the proceedings, he looked ahead to a future in which a truly representative democracy would percolate India’s soil. With setbacks, for half a century almost, its tender roots did deepen, protecting ethnic minorities and strengthening the ground for gender justice, Dalits, tribals, for free-speech, dissent.

Today, will India’s democrats let majoritarianism lift that topsoil and plant in its place seeds of a counter-democratic biochemistry? I believe they will not. Wherefrom this optimism? It comes not from anything hopeful that I find in our country but because in Mr. Trump’s America, a statue of that little Fearless Girl has just come up facing, four square, the flared nostrils of Wall Street’s Charging Bull. And how she inspires!

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and Governor

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19. INDIA: SPINNING THE YOGI - VANGUARD AND FRINGE
Mukul Kesavan
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(The Telegraph, March 26, 2017) 	
	
The zombification of right-wing publicists in contemporary India is a small but significant part of our intellectual history. When the Bharatiya Janata Party's turn at the top comes to an end and the bruised republic shuffles back to the centre, historians of this political moment will explain why Right-leaning commentators chose to make a Hindu-supremacist turn seem respectable and how they committed intellectual suicide to join the shambling ranks of the living dead.

There are moments when the world seems to speed up and the aftermath of the BJP's massive election victory in Uttar Pradesh was one of those times. The naming of Adityanath as chief minister took the commentariat by surprise and for a political nanosecond the party's modernizing fellow travellers paused before galloping into the promised land: UP remade in the image of Gorakhpur. This is a very particular kind of pastoral: tame Muslims tending cows, squads of north Indian men keeping women safe, silent slaughterhouses and a temple stirring in Ayodhya. It is a preview of Pax Hindutva: an unnatural calm and a boding quiet.

The difficulty with these fast-forwarded moments is that they rob pundits of the time they need for plausible transitions. The political journey from a no-nonsense nationalism, to a communalized jingoism, to the snarling accents of a realized Hindu rashtra, needs time if it is to be mainstreamed as common sense. In the first three years of its term, the BJP government was attentive to this need: the rhetoric of vikas, or development, was braided with communal consolidation in a way that allowed its apologists some intellectual cover.

There is no contradiction in working for the vikas of a consolidated Hindu nation, but development as misdirection worked for those who wanted a reason to look away from the BJP's majoritarian agenda, hidden in plain sight. But the elevation of Adityanath to chief ministership after an electoral triumph that left the prime minister beholden to no individual or coalition partner, makes looking away impossible.

We are left looking at the head priest of the Gorakhnath temple whose political career has been built on the aggravation of communal division and an explicit hostility towards minorities. Adityanath's political résumé reads like a Hindutva hit parade: a political apprenticeship served in the campaign to raze the Babri Masjid; the raising of a vigilante Hindu army, the Hindu Yuva Vahini, with a hard-won reputation for violence and intimidation; the conversion of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism (ghar wapsi); the campaign against 'love jihad' (Muslim men allegedly preying on Hindu women); the related 'anti-Romeo' squads; the singling out of the meat trade because of its Muslim connection and a long history of berating the BJP for being insufficiently committed to the Hindu cause.

It's very hard to assimilate the yogi to the cause of progress because he has spent a lifetime successfully embodying reaction. And it isn't just communal bigotry that marks him out; on every major public issue, he represents a Great Leap Backwards. He defied the BJP's whip on the women's reservation bill, he was an ardent advocate of the restoration of the monarchy in Nepal, and he remains an outspoken defender of the hierarchies of caste.

How then, to 'normalize' his ascension? The party's apologists offered a set of overlapping arguments.

The first of these emphasized the democratic mandate of the BJP and the electoral clout of Adityanath. By winning around 40 per cent of the popular vote, the BJP hoovered up a massive legislative majority and Adityanath's political constituency in eastern UP contributed substantially to this victory. He was a mass leader and the BJP had the intelligence to make a charismatic leader with broad social acceptability the chief minister of a politically vital province. To criticize this was, in effect, to publicly crib about a democratic outcome.

Related to this argument was an emphasis on Adityanath's caste liminality. As a Rajput who had become the mahant of a temple with a broad following amongst backward castes and Dalits, Adityanath was the caste-transcending leader the BJP needed to symbolize its electoral success in UP.

The problem with these arguments is that the political significance of Adityanath's elevation is a matter quite separate from his eligibility for that office or his electoral history. The BJP is entirely within its rights to make him chief minister; the question that interests people outside the party faithful is what this tells us about the politics of the party and the prime minister who put him in office.

And what it tells us is this. When it is in a position of strength the BJP will, other things being equal, choose the most viscerally communal and Hindu-supremacist candidate on its shortlist. And it will choose him not despite the bigotry of his past utterances and actions but because of it. What we are seeing in UP is a textbook example of how a genuinely extremist party behaves when it is released from the constraints of coalition building and negotiation.

The chief minister and the BJP have had their differences in the past with Adityanath routinely calling the party out for cowardice in the Hindu cause. But the party never broke with him because it recognized that his explicit commitment to the subordination of Muslims was a state of political grace to which it aspired. Institutional caution ensured that Adityanath wasn't a candidate for the chief ministership; a pan-Indian political party must be prudent. But after the landslide, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah felt free to install a chief minister made in their own image. Adityanath is Hindutva unbound.

And what does Hindutva unbound look like? If you go to Adityanath's website, the home page highlights a warning. It says, "Hindutva is the special consciousness of the nation. To attack it is to invite Armageddon." In Hindi 'special consciousness' is rendered as 'sanchetna'. It is useful to listen in when the aspirations of this 'consciousness' are being spelt out. Some years ago, Adityanath presided over a 'Virat Hindu Chetna Rally'. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the stage while a rabble-rousing speaker outlined the contours of a Hindu rashtra. This was the infamous occasion when this speaker declared that the need of the hour was to dig dead Muslim women out of their graves and do unspeakable things to them. But lost in the controversy over this vile and grotesque utterance were the remarks that came earlier.

In this passage the speaker predicted that the day India became a Hindu rashtra and passed into the hands of young sanyasis like Adityanath, Muslims would be reduced to the condition of Hindus in Pakistan. They would be second-class citizens. The right to vote would be taken away from them and once that happened, no political party would be able to use a fake secularism to deceive Hindu society. At no point during this rant did Adityanath intercede or express disagreement.

The Right's publicists argue that to make him chief minister is to draw him away from the fringe into the constraining ambit of governance. His principal task, apparently, is to bring order to UP's badlands, to redress the balance that the previous regime had upset by allegedly pandering to Muslims. It is certainly the case that a chief minister who has arrived at his present eminence by naming Muslims as the enemy is uniquely equipped to make sure that the state doesn't 'pander' to them. It is less clear how a politician whose vigilante militia has been involved in multiple incidents of communal violence since 1999 can be seen as a specialist in 'law and order' unless that phrase has a coded Hindutva meaning.

The elevation of Adityanath isn't an attempt to co-opt the fringe: it is the BJP's candid acknowledgment that the fringe is the parivar's ideological vanguard. The publicists who went the extra mile to normalize this moment have earned their tawdry footnote in the intellectual history of our time.

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20. FROM THE NEPALI PRESS: AFTER ADITYANATH
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(Nepali Times, 24-30 March 2017 #851)

by Sanghu

The naming of a Chief Minister in India is of little importance to Nepal. But Yogi Adityanath’s appointment as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has shaken up Nepal’s political sphere.

While secularists are suspicious, proponents of a Hindu monarchy are in high spirits. Adityanath, a firebrand Hindu cleric, shared a very close relationship with the Shah monarchs in the past, and has been advocating for the restoration of a Hindu monarchy in Nepal. Hindu royalists are hopeful that the rise of Adityanath will help their cause.

Ex-king Gyanendra Shah has not spoken about Adityanath’s political feat, but the anointment of the head priest of Gorakhapur Math, the deity of the Shah dynasty, must have reassured him that he will reclaim his throne.

Not just the ex-king, some leaders of the NC, which backs republicanism and secularism, are also excited about Adityanath’s triumph. NC General Secretary Shashank Koirala is happy. So are Khum Bahadur Khadka and Laxman Ghimire. Old NC leaders like Rambabu Prasain, PL Singh, Prakash Koirala and Debendra Nepali were preparing to launch a campaign for restoration of a Hindu monarch. They are now more confident about the success of their yet-to-be-launched campaign.

Keshar Bahadur Bista and other nationalists who feel that Kamal Thapa’s RPP use the agenda of Hinduism only for electoral gains are now on cloud nine. The RPP, too, feels emboldened now.

o o 

[related report from 2015: Nepal must declare itself a Hindu rashtra: Adityanath (Times of India, Jul 23, 2015) http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Nepal-must-declare-itself-a-Hindu-rashtra-Adityanath/articleshow/48194975.cms ]

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21. INDIA: RIOT MANUFACTURED IN GORAKHPUR
by Apoorvanand
========================================
[From Communalism Watch archive - 2007)

What happened in the eastern Uttar Pradesh town was not a conflict but violence unleashed by MP Yogi Adityanath and his henchmen

If one tries to understand the developments in Gorakhpur and its neighbouring areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh (Poorvanchal) from January 26 to 31, 2007 through the eyes of the print and electronic media, one moves further away from the truth. It is a sordid story of a highly communalised media conjuring up a riot, collaborating with BJP MP Yogi Adityanath, a Bal Thackeray clone and heir to the Gorakhnath Peeth operating from the Gorakhnath temple. Adityanath is a BJP MP for ‘technical’ reasons and cares a damn for the niceties of party discipline because he knows that the party cannot dissociate itself from him. Though he mocked the party by holding a Vishwa Hindu Maha Sammelan at the same time as the BJP’s National Council meet in Lucknow, the party did not mind. It had earlier swallowed the defeat of its candidate in the Assembly election by Adityanath’s candidate. One should know that he is a Thakur; a Thakur heads the BJP now and the Samajwadi Party is also being run by a powerful Thakur. The Thakur spread across partylines ensures that Adityanath is allowed to have his own way in his fiefdom, i.e. Poorvanchal. He makes it a point to give calls for a Gorakhpur bandh whenever the chief minister visits the town.

Poorvanchal mein rahan hai to Yogi-Yogi kahan hoga (You have to chant Yogi’s name if you want to live in Poorvanchal) is a slogan popularised by his gang. But how true is the claim of his hold on Gorakhpur, leave alone Poorvanchal? He has lost all local elections held recently in and around Gorakhpur, and could only manage to lure the relatively respected Samajwadi Party (SP) member and mayoral candidate Anju Chaudhary to his side.

Apparently, Chaudhary fell a victim to the myth spun around him during the last 15 years. Adityanath has been called the Yuvak Hindu Samrat, Narendra Modi of Poorvanchal, the premier of the Hindu Rashtra of Poorvanchal. He has used the wealth of the Gorakhnath Temple to sustain his army of lumpen youth. Adityanath has followed the rss methodology in creating organisations with different names that he calls cultural bodies. Among these are Hindu Yuva Vahini, Sri Ram Shakti Prakoshtha, Gorakhnath Purvanchal Vikas Manch, Hindu Mahasabha and Vishwa Hindu Mahasangh. Adityanath himself is the main functionary of these unregistered outfits. He also controls much of the functioning of the Bajrang Dal and the Hindu Jagran Manch. He holds his durbar in his temple that is attended by local police and officials.

Adityanath has perfected his technique of manufacturing riots. An insignificant incident like a Hindu’s clothes getting stained accidentally by the paan spat by a Muslim is turned into an act of humiliation of Hindus. A rape in which the victim is dalit and the perpetrator Muslim is used to substantiate the allegation that “Muslims rape our women” and all hell is let loose on the Muslims. The last 11 years are witness to several such acts. No criminal case has been registered against him except once in 1999 when a case was registered against him in Maharajganj after the killing of the official gunman accompanying sp leader Talat Aziz. The police and administration have remained mute spectators with the political leadership looking the other way. All this has given him an air of invincibility. Muslims have been given to understand that neither the Bahujan Samaj Party, nor the sp is willing to rein him in. Perhaps the SP is seeking to counter Mayawati’s Brahmin card with its own Thakur card by indulging him. The Congress is nowhere and also lacks a will to take him on. All this leaves the Muslims here with no option but to resign themselves to their fate.

This time, however, his plans went awry. On the night of January 26-27, Pankaj Rai, a history-sheeter, and his gang chased a dance party performing at a marriage. They mingled with a Muharram procession and the processionists thought that they were being attacked. Suddenly a gunshot was heard, which the then administration thinks was Rai’s act. As panic set in, more people — both Hindu and Muslim — were beaten up and a young man, Raj Kumar Agrahari, was badly injured and hospitalised. The District Magistrate (DM) was informed at 1.30am and he told officials to brief Adityanath that he should not visit the site. Initially, the MP agreed. But as Agrahari died, Adityanath declared that now he would go to the spot and seek revenge for the killing of a Hindu by Muslims. He reached the spot with his lumpen who destroyed a mazhar. He declared his resolve to ensure justice for the Hindus, swords were flashed before the dm and senior police officers. Short of policemen, the administration tried to persuade the MP to vacate the place but he didn’t budge.

When the now-determined dm took the dagger away from a goon, they charged towards him and demanded the dagger back. Upon this, the dm ordered the police to disperse them by force. Suddenly the MP found himself facing a situation that was not in the script. Afraid that the lathis might find Adityanath, his well-wishers cried out for compromise. The MP demanded that curfew be imposed and withdrew. Though the dm didn’t think a curfew was required as the violence was designed to disrupt Muharram, he agreed to the MP’s demand.

Later, however, Adityanath announced a torchlight procession. The administration succeeded in preventing it from moving but it was captured on camera and a non-procession was turned into one by the willing media. Emboldened, he announced a Shraddhanjali Sabha the next day at the town’s busiest crossroad. By this time, the dm had resolved not to allow it any further as the police reinforcements were in. He issued orders that no meeting was to be allowed and that any violator was to be arrested. With unambiguous orders, the police moved. Adityanath dismissed the warning as a hollow threat but landed in an unforeseen situation. He and his ‘followers’ were taken to the police line. Soon, a police van arrived and the detained people were asked to board the jail-bound vehicle. Adityanath jumped into the bus, declaring that he cannot leave his followers. To their surprise, the bus started moving and they realised that they were in trouble. The three-km journey to the jail took more than 90 minutes as his goons pelted stones and every other means to block the van but to no avail. For the first time in his life, Adityanath is jailed under Section 151A of the crpc only to find later that he has also been booked under Sections 146, 147, 279, 506 of the Indian Penal Code for leading the attack on the mazhar. On the strength of this fir, Adityanath is remanded to 14-day judicial custody.

On January 29, his followers assembled at Gorakhnath Temple that falls in an area where more than 50 percent of the population is Muslim. They start hrowing stones and burning tyres in the direction of the Muslim locality and on the road. But there is no retaliation from the other side.

Dr Hari Om, the then dm in-charge, wishes to put it on record that not a single incident of slogan-shouting or stone-pelting was resorted to by Muslims. He wants the world to know that although much grieved by the decision to impose curfew as it hampered Muharram, the Muslims, led by the venerable Miyan saheb, assured the administration of all cooperation as peace was more important and kept their word. Meanwhile, the media kept screaming that Gorakhpur was burning, the walls of the Gorakhnath Temple were demolished. Which, of course, was a naked lie.

And all of a sudden, the dm was informed that he’s been shunted along with the superintendent of police. As he moved away, Rashid, a Muslim youth, was killed. It is a matter of discussion in Gorakhpur that it was done by a Hindu Yuva Vahini man who injured himself to use it as a cover. Newspapers flashed the pictures of the Yuva Vahini man’s bandaged leg, obliterating the killing of Rashid altogether.

So where was the riot, as imagined by the interested media, asks Hari Om. From January 27 to 29, Adityanath and his goons laid siege to Gorakhpur without any provocation from Muslims. A mazhar was gutted, masjids and shops of Muslims destroyed, government properties damaged by the gangs, stone pelting on the police by his goons: do these make a perfect riot? A riot involves some degree of involvement of two warring groups. How is it that areas with substantial Muslim population did not experience any untoward incident barring the planned attacks of Adityanath’s gangs? Why did cm Mulayam Singh Yadav remove the officers who jailed the BJP MP who was hell-bent on destroying peace? Why did the officers’ successors go straight to Adityanath for forgiveness? Why did the media fail to report the facts as facts?

Hari Om has one regret — that he had assured Muslims that by giving a reprieve of 7-8 hours in the curfew on January 29, he would ensure that the Muharram tradition was not disturbed. However, the moment he was removed, Rashid was killed to celebrate it as Adityanath’s victory and the curfew was extended. Tazias remained where they were. The Muslims kept their word, he did not. This young officer has just one question for his country: can a community feel at home where it is prevented from even mourning by all kinds of machination? Can a community celebrate its existence in a country where law-keepers look over their shoulders when it is attacked? Such is the sad story of Uttar Pradesh, the truth of one of the many riots that were not.

    (First published in Tehelka.com, Feb 17, 2007)
    available at: https://communalism.blogspot.in/2007/02/riot-manufactured-in-gorakhpur.html

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22. PAKISTAN: NON-FICTION - HISTORIES OF RESISTANCE | I.A. Rehman
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(Dawn - March 19, 2017)

Steeped in the tradition of simple-looking but wise Sindhi fakirs, Aslam Khwaja wanders across his land, taking note of crowd-set courts along the way, and picking up stories of his people’s struggles for democracy, socio-economic rights and self-realisation. His book, People’s Movements in Pakistan, tells us of the sacrifices made by a large number of men and women, their modest successes and their terrible heartbreaks, and offers many a lesson to all those who have the courage to pursue their dreams.

Khwaja begins with a concise account of the Balochistan imbroglio, from the opening part of the Baloch ballad to the killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti. We are told of the treaties the British signed with Kalat, the promises made to the latter on the eve of the British withdrawal from the subcontinent, the circumstances under which the state was made to accede to Pakistan, how Gen Ayub Khan’s regime went back on his pledges to the Zehri sardar, and how the first elected government was demolished. Using his access to some of the actors of the 1973 uprising, especially to Asad Rahman, the author throws fresh light on the role of the ‘London group’ of students from Punjab, and supplies some links in Balochistan’s tale of endless woes that are not commonly known.

The longest chapter, nearly one-third of the volume, is devoted to the democratic struggle against Gen Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship. It begins with the launch of the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) in 1981 and concludes with a summary of the first steps to offer relief to workers, students and women announced by Benazir Bhutto on becoming prime minister in December 1988.
Revisiting the stories of ordinary Pakistanis who had the great courage to stand up and fight against oppression

After describing the roles played by the various opposition parties in starting the MRD, the author tries to compile a day-by-day record of the agitation in different parts of the country — though in greater detail in Sindh — and also takes notice of differences among the MRD parties on some constitutional issues. Despite a few gaps in the narrative, students of this part of Pakistan’s history will find considerable material on which to build their research.

The overview of the trade union movement, the second-longest chapter in the book, is considerably rich in information about the rise of workers’ organisations in Pakistan and their struggles for labour’s uplift. Khwaja begins with a brief survey of factories and village crafts in Sindh during the 10th to the 17th centuries and traces the founding of cotton-ginning and textile units in Punjab in the last quarter of the 19th century. Workers started organising themselves into unions soon afterwards and the first strikes took place in the 1890s. Extreme action was sometimes resorted to when relevant laws were changed. Notice is also taken of the political parties’ interaction with trade unions.

The author brings to light the history of the trade unions’ fight for their economic rights to the 1970s while giving special attention to the tobacco workers’ agitation in the 1960s. The period of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government (1972-77) is covered in some detail, especially the June 1972 clashes between the workers and the government in Karachi, which many thought marked the beginning of the suppression of the long working-class movement that had begun in the 1960s. While covering the Gen Zia period, the author takes special note of the massacre of workers at the Colony Textile Mills and the regime’s anti-labour policies. At the end of the chapter he provides a table of labour strikes from 1947 to 1977.

Peasant movements are dealt with province-wise, beginning with Sindh. The chapter includes a fairly detailed account of the struggle and martyrdom of Shah Inayat and a survey of the work done by the Sindh Hari Committee in its various incarnations until 2007, along with brief life sketches of prominent leaders of the committee. The author then adds short notes on bonded labour, the Tando Bahawal case in which an army officer was hanged for the killing of nine villagers, and the courageous resistance to wadera raj shown by Munnoo Bheel and several other bonded workers.

While recalling peasant agitations in Punjab since 1936, the author concentrates on the 1943 resistance to an increase in malguzari [land revenue] tax, the first national Kisan conference in 1948, followed by conferences in 1952 and finally the Toba Tek Singh conference in 1970. A survey of the struggle of tenants settled on military farms in Punjab, which is still continuing, follows. Some extremely useful references have been made to peasant agitations in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.

The chapter ‘Art, Culture and Literature’ is full of information about the struggles of writers, artists and cultural workers and their suppression by the state. The highlights are: the arrest of communist workers soon after Independence, the Bangla language movement, the rise of the Progressive Writers’ Association and its being banned, the suppression of the Sindhi language, the formation of Awami Adabi Anjuman, some criticism of leftist writers’/intellectuals’ attitude towards the military operation in East Bengal, the Sindh Language Bill, the campaign of the Zia regime to hegemonise literary and cultural organisations, the theatre of defiance led by Dastak, Zamir Niazi’s chronicle of the plight of the press, and a short survey of books written in prison.

As in other chapters, while discussing women’s struggle for equality and rights, Khwaja includes in the definition of ‘people’s movement’ the work of organisations established to defend and advance women’s causes, such as the Democratic Women’s Association, All Pakistan Women’s Association, Women’s Action Forum, Shirkat Gah, Tehreek-i-Niswan, and the Sindhiani Tehreek. Also included is the work of the commission on women’s rights. Further, he offers brief references to outstanding woman activists, from Shanta (Mrs Jamaluddin Bokhari) and Rana Liaquat Ali Khan to Hajra Begum, Perin Bharucha, Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan, Alys Faiz, Asma Jahangir, Hameeda Ghanghro, Shahida Jabeen, Begum Abbasi, Malala Yousafzai and Parween Rehman. The price that many of these women had to pay for their views and their work is also briefly touched upon.

The author’s desire to record events on a daily basis finds relatively fuller expression in the chapter about the travails of the press and journalists. In addition to taking note of the journalists’ movements against the Press and Publications Ordinance 1963 (the first one), for implementation of the wage board award, and against the sacking of Musawat employees, Khwaja records the persecution of journalists by both state and non-state actors, from the early days of Independence to the murder of Saleem Shahzad. If this is a complete record of actions taken against newspapers and their staff, its value cannot be exaggerated.

In the final chapter Khwaja recalls the circumstances in which student organisations — Muslim Students Federation, East Pakistan Students League, Democratic Students Federation, National Students Federation, Baloch Students Organisation, Peoples Students Federation and All Pakistan Muttahida Students Organisation, et al. — were formed, the high points of their agitations, and the state’s actions against them.

Khwaja’s book is a mine of information not only about what are somewhat generously described as ‘people’s movements,’ but also about the strivings of a large number of organisations and a larger number of individuals who struggled for years — often at grave risk to their lives — for justice, democracy and individual and collective rights. It should become a standard book of reference for students of politics and Pakistan’s social history if — while preparing the next edition for the press — the long MRD narrative is split into sub-chapters, the more glaring gaps in accounts relating to workers, peasants, women and students are filled, footnotes and sources of information are added, the author is persuaded to check his iconoclastic zeal, and the editor pays a little more respect to the Oxbridge community’s sensibilities.

People’s Movements in Pakistan
By Aslam Khwaja
Kitab Publishers, Karachi
648pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 19th, 2017

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23. 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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24. FRENCH LITERARY BOY WONDER ÉDOUARD LOUIS ON SAVING THE WORKING CLASS FROM MARINE LE PEN
by Kim Willsher
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(The Observer - 19 March 2017)

His bestselling novel about growing up gay in a violent, neglected town in northern France sparked a national debate. A month from the presidential election, the young writer issues a furious challenge to leftwing politicians

Growing up in gritty, post-industrial northern France, Édouard Louis learned as a boy that politics was about more than putting a cross in a box. As his mother struggled to deal with his unemployed and frequently drunk father and feed the family of five on little money, she would lament the days of better leaders. “When the left was in power, we had steak on our plates,” she would tell her son.

Today, Louis, whose account of his escape from a violent, joyless childhood has made him a bestselling author, can have steak any day he chooses. Back in his home town, meanwhile, just six weeks from a presidential election, his parents, like much of France’s underclass, are heeding the siren call of the poor’s new perceived champion, Marine Le Pen, and her promises of plenty in a France for the French.

Far from making him turn away from his background, Louis’s access to the literary beau monde of Paris has heightened his belief that politics remains a curse for what his mother would call the “poor, small folk”.

“The word politics means different things to different social classes. How can politics create a better life if the individuals who create those politics are so lightly touched by its effects, if politics doesn’t strike them in the way that it would strike the people of my childhood?” he asks.

“In the lower classes, politics has always been a matter of life and death. My parents were desperate at the idea of losing some badly needed social benefit, which might make the difference between whether we could go to the dentist. I was 15 when my father went to the dentist for the first time because the government created a new health benefit.

    Each time I heard Eddy, I heard 'poverty', 'homo'. That's how it started – with my first name

“On the day when the amount of the allowance at the start of the school year was raised, my father, with a joy we rarely saw because he usually played at being the man of the house who could not show his feelings, shouted: ‘Sunday, we’re going to the seaside.’ And indeed we went, six of us in a car big enough for five. I rode in the boot.

“All during my childhood, politics could change anything. Our lives beat to the rhythm of politics. It was like a storm that hung over those lives. an adult, I found the same storm was not present for those in the better-off classes.”

That is a powerful theme of his first book, The End of Eddy, published last month in the UK, in which Louis describes his childhood among a “dominated” social class overlooked by the cultural and political elite, a disregard, he says, that has led directly to the rise of the far right.

This autobiographical novel came out in France in 2014 when Louis was 21, and was an instant hit, selling more than 300,000 copies. and sparking an anxious debate in France around class, poverty, social and sexual inequality and racism. It has been translated into several languages and was shortlisted for the prestigious Goncourt literary prize. He wrote it, he says, to give a voice to the working class and to “fight for them and with them because they seem to have disappeared from the public eye.”

Set in Hallencourt in the Somme, a small and isolated factory town of 1,300 people where Louis grew up, the book is a stark tale of his life below the poverty line, punctuated by his father’s drunken violence – the rage of the humiliated working-class male: racism, homophobia and casual daily brutality.

Eddy Bellegueule (Louis’s real name, which means “beautiful face” in French) is an effeminate child; as a “faggot”, “queer”, “poof”, as he is regularly reminded, he is even worse than an “Arab”, “Jew” or “black”.

Another oft-repeated phrase – “just who do you think you are?” – serves to remind him who he is, where he comes from and where everyone assumes he is going. Instead, Bellegueule forges a new path, via a scholarship and one of France’s elite university schools, writes everything down and changes his name.

“Each time I heard ‘Eddy’, I heard ‘poverty’, ‘homo’. That’s how it started. With my first name. He was poor and he was a poof,” Louis says.

It was a “huge shock” to come to Paris and discover the curse of politics did not afflict those who were better off, he says: “Among the Parisian bourgeois, I realised that politics is absolutely not about life or death, about being able to eat and afford medical care or not; that whatever the government right or left does will not stop them living, eating. And because the bourgeoisie is the dominant class everywhere in the world, there is a kind of amnesia about what politics means to other people. Whatever happens, no government is going to radically change their lives as it does for the poor and dominated.”

Sitting in a cafe near the Left Bank of the Seine, Louis speaks with controlled fury. Under the table, his leg is twitching, like a physical manifestation of an internal struggle between the desire to conform and the urge to leap up and rail at the world.

“In the village I grew up in, 50-55% of people vote FN [Front National]. Thank goodness for abstention, because otherwise the figure would be 70-75%. These people support the FN because they’re excluded, dominated, poor and abandoned. My mother used to say she voted FN and for Marine Le Pen because “she is the only one who speaks to us”.

“Today I don’t want to insult Marine Le Pen, I want to attack Manuel Valls [former prime minister] and François Hollande for putting my father in this situation. I accuse them directly. When I see my father voting for Le Pen, I am revolted by the current government and its failings. Of course, I’m revolted by the right, but I never expected the right to do anything for the lower classes, but the left… the left has stopped speaking about poverty, misery and exclusion. People talk about Le Pen winning the presidential [race], but the FN has been winning for the last 20 years because the left that should be representing people like my mother has abandoned them.

“I’m astonished at the feeble level of discussion that tries to explain the extreme right vote or the FN. Instead of inventing a new debate, people are falling back on historic explanations and errors, saying, ‘people live in misery, but it’s not just poverty; misery means so much more, it’s anguish about your place in the world. Take the person who plays the triangle in the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, the lowest of the orchestra hierarchy; it’s no good saying, ‘fter all it is the Berlin Philharmonic, the best in the world, if, within their world, the triangle player feels the lowest of the low.

“My father lives in the village where my grandfather and great-grandfather lived. He worked in the factory where my grandfather and great-grandfather worked. My mother left school at 14, my brothers and sisters also. Nobody is giving people like them a way out of their prison, their misery.

Marine Le Pen on the campaign trail. ‘Even the most ridiculous thing she says makes headlines,’ says Edouard Louis. Photograph EPA/Arnold Jerocki

“This social hierarchy, the dominated and the dominant, is in itself a violence. People say to me, ‘Ah, but you managed to escape,’ but to me that doesn’t show it’s possible – quite the opposite. Now I’m out, I can see how difficult it is to escape. I can see the extraordinary violence of it… and who speaks for these people whose lives are shattered, who are humiliated by the system? These people feel forgotten, so they turn to someone. In France’s case, Marine Le Pen, who they think is listening and who they believe will make life better for them.”

Louis is equally angry about what he sees as the “global fascination with the extreme right” that has hijacked the news agenda and made everyone a prisoner of the far-right discourse. “Even the most ridiculous thing said by Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage makes headlines, while anyone who is young, who is trying to invent a new discourse, is ignored. It’s a shrinking democracy: the right speaks to the right, the left speaks to the right, where is the left’s discourse? What’s even more dramatic is that the whole world is speaking the language of the extreme right; Marine Le Pen is imposing the language, the subjects we talk about.

“My friends go and debate with the FN on television, but I say no. I will not legitimise their issues by responding. Twenty years ago nobody listened to them or their views because they were considered so outdated.”

He adds: “Silence has to be a part of our progress. We have to put silence at the centre of politics today. Stop responding to the questions, stop letting them control the language, the debate, the agenda. I hear some argue it’s better to be open about these things. If you are racist and hide your racism, then you’re a hypocrite. I say no, it’s better you keep quiet.

“To me, democracy is not about saying everything. Some things, like racism, antisemitism, shouldn’t be issues, they shouldn’t be talked about. Some subjects should be considered obsolete, and yes, let’s shut down the debate because they are obsolete. I grew up as a queer child in a small village. Lots of gay children in this situation suffer the same things: being threatened, beaten up. When I published my book in Paris, some said, ‘Well, if you’d grown up in a bourgeois milieu, people would have thought the same thing, they just wouldn’t have hit you.’ Are they joking? I would rather that, than being constantly beaten up for being queer. Of course I’d rather people weren’t racist or homophobic, but if they are they can keep it to themselves. Just shut up.

‘Now I’m out, I can see how difficult it is to escape’: Édouard Louis. Photograph: Magali Delporte for the Observer New Review

“And if they don’t and won’t, we need to start redistributing shame, making people feel ashamed, so when they repeat what the FN is saying, we reply, ‘Quelle honte!’ [Shame on you]. That would be progress, that would be democracy, not letting people say what they want, not giving their racist, homophobic views the same value, the same credibility as other propositions. Not giving those stupid, unacceptable propositions weight and currency by responding to them. This has been the great tragedy of recent years in literature, the press, intellectual life, this ideology that in a debate all views have the same weight, that we can debate with the FN, with the extreme right. That’s wrong.

“We should say to the FN and far right: just shut up. Keep your stupid, nasty views to yourselves. This shame business is quite important.

“Today, we see the far right vote and we understand there is racism, of exclusion of poverty of violence around the world, but when we speak of it, we are always accused of exaggerating. Primo Levi spoke of the concentration camps and how the Nazis would tell prisoners that, even if they did escape, nobody would believe them. Nobody would believe what had been done. It is the difficulty in transmitting the truth of violence.”

Last year, Louis, who has been compared to the Norwegian autobiographical novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, published his second book, Histoire de la Violence (story of violence), based on an incident when he was throttled and raped by an Algerian man he picked up in the street on Christmas Eve. Again, he examines questions of class and culture. A few hours after we meet, he is flying to the United States to talk about film projects and visit Dartmouth College, which has made him a fellow. He is working on his third book, which he says will be “a tragedy”.

Relations with his family back in Hallencourt are strained. His mother was furious that he had described them as “poor” in The End of Eddy. Louis says the difficulty is they do not speak the same language, so conversations are like “treading on eggshells, trying not to say something that will hurt”.

The search for a common language is a challenge for his writing too, he says. “I ask myself, how can we write about the dominated without using the language of the bourgeoisie, who have the advantages, or the language of my childhood, the language that called me a poor faggot, the language that was no friend of mine but a language of violence. For me, that is the challenge: how to find a new voice, a new way of speaking.

“As a writer, every single line I write is intended as a reminder to the dominant class, not to forget that for most individuals like my parents, like refugees, politics is still a question of life and death. We must put that idea of life and death back in the centre of politics.”

• Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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25. WHY THE NECESSARY COOPERATION DOES NOT HAPPEN: INTRODUCTION TO A CONVERSATION BETWEEN EMMANUEL MACRON AND SIGMAR GABRIEL ON EUROPE’S FUTURE
by Jürgen Habermas
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 (Social Europe - 20 March 2017)

Henrik Enderlein has granted me the privilege of making a couple of introductory remarks on the topic of the conversation between our illustrious guest Emmanuel Macron and Sigmar Gabriel, our Foreign Minister who recently rose like a phoenix from the ashes. Both men’s names are associated with courageous responses to a challenging situation. Emmanuel Macron has dared to cross a red line that has remained sacrosanct since 1789. He has broken open a constellation between the camps of the political Right and the political Left that seems to have become deadlocked beyond compromise. Since nobody in a democracy can stand above the parties, it will be interesting to see how the political spectrum is rearranged after a victory in the French presidential election.

We are witnessing a similar impulse in Germany, albeit under different auspices. Here Sigmar Gabriel has also chosen his friend Martin Schulz to play an unorthodox role. Schulz is being acclaimed in public as a largely independent Chancellor candidate who is supposed to open up new horizons for his party. Although there are stark differences between the political, economic, and social situations in our respective countries – indeed, as regards the economy, the differences are too stark – it seems to me that the general sentiment among the citizens reflects a similarly irritable mood. There is widespread irritation at the frenzied stagnation of governments which, in spite of the marked increase in the pressure of problems, are muddling through without developing any perspective for shaping the future. We find the lack of political will numbing, especially in the face of those problems that could only be solved jointly at the European level.

Emmanuel Macron personifies the antithesis to the quietism of those authorized to act. During their overlapping terms as economics ministers, he and Sigmar Gabriel promoted an initiative to strengthen cooperation in fiscal, economic and social policies within the eurozone, though this has remained without consequences. If I remember correctly, they proposed to establish a finance ministry for the eurozone and a shared European budget controlled by the European Parliament. With this proposal, they sought to create room for maneuver at the European level for a flexible economic policy designed to overcome the primary hurdle blocking closer cooperation between the Member States – namely, the sharp differences in levels of rates of growth, unemployment and public debt, especially between the economies of the northern and southern members of a monetary union which must enforce convergence even as the countries concerned are drifting apart – and whose political cohesion is also being eroded by persistent, indeed widening, differences in economic performance. In the course of imposing the present austerity regime, which was bound to have a dramatically asymmetrical impact on national economies in the North and the South, contrasting experiences and opposing narratives in the corresponding public spheres promoted mutual aggressions and a deep split running through the eurozone.

Initiatives for addressing this dangerous development can fail for many reasons, including institutional reasons. Thus, for example, the governments of the Member States, which must derive their legitimacy from their respective national publics, are the least suited to implementing Community interests; and yet, as long as we lack a European party system, they are the only actors who can achieve anything at all. What interests me is whether an extension of European competences is bound to fail because of a lack of acceptance of possible redistributive consequences if restructuring the burdens reaches across national borders. Concisely put: Are appeals to solidarity, for example in Germany, condemned to failure because of the population’s response to the “transfer union” club that certain politicians as so fond of wielding? Or are political elites avoiding the problem of the still simmering financial crisis because they simply lack the courage to address the burning topic of the future of Europe?

On the concept of solidarity, I would just like to point out that, since the French Revolution and the early socialist movements, this expression has been used in a political rather than a moral sense. Solidarity is not the same thing as charity. Someone who acts in solidarity accepts certain disadvantages in his or her long-term self-interest in the expectation that the other will behave likewise in similar situations. Reciprocal trust – in our case: trust across national borders – is indeed a relevant variable; but so too is long-term self-interest. It is not a fact of nature, as some of my colleagues assume, that political issues of distributive justice are exclusively national issues and could not be fairly disputed within the wider family of European peoples across national borders – especially since these peoples have already formed a legal community and most of them are affected by the systemic constraints of a shared monetary union – though in rather different ways.

European unification has remained an elite project to the present day because the political elites did not dare to involve the general public in an informed debate about alternative future scenarios. National populations will be able to recognize and decide what is in their own respective interest in the long run only when discussion of the momentous alternatives is no longer confined to academic journals – e.g. the alternatives of dismantling the euro or of returning to a currency system with restricted margins of fluctuation, or of opting for closer cooperation after all.

At any rate, other current problems that attract more public attention speak in favor of the need for Europeans to stand and act in common. It is the perception of a worsening international and global political situation that is slowly driving even the member governments of the European Council to their pain threshold and startling them out of their national narrow-mindedness. There is no secret about the crises that, at the very least, necessitate reflection on closer cooperation:

• Europe’s geopolitical situation had already been transformed by the Syrian civil war, the Ukraine crisis, and the gradual retreat of the United States from its role as a force for maintaining global order; but now that the superpower seems to be turning its back on the previously prevailing internationalist school of thought, things have become even more unpredictable for Europe. And these questions of external security have acquired even greater relevance as a result of Trump’s pressure on NATO members to step up their military contributions.

• Furthermore we will have to cope with the terrorist threat in the medium term; and Europe will have to struggle with the pressure of migration for an even longer time. Both developments clearly require Europeans to cooperate more closely.

• Finally, the change of government in the United States is leading to a split in the West not only over global trade and economic policies. Nationalist, racist, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic tendencies that have acquired political weight with the program and style of the new US administration are combining with authoritarian developments in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and other countries to pose an unexpected challenge for the political and cultural self-understanding of the West. Suddenly Europe finds itself thrown back upon its own resources in the role of a defensive custodian of liberal principles (providing support to a majority of the American electorate that has been pushed to the margins).

These crisis tendencies are not the only thing impelling the EU countries to cooperate more closely. One can even understand the obstacles to closer cooperation as just as many reasons for accelerating a shift in European politics. It will become more difficult to effect such a shift the longer the unresolved crises foster right-wing populism and left-wing dissidence as regards Europe. Without an attractive and credible perspective for shaping Europe, authoritarian nationalism in member states such as Hungary and Poland will be strengthened. And unless we take a clear line, the offer of bilateral trade agreements with the US and – in the course of Brexit – with the UK will drive the European countries even farther apart.

The only response to these tremendous pressures that I can see to date takes the form of groping attempts to promote a “Europe of different speeds” in the field of military cooperation. In my estimation, this attempt is bound to fail if Germany remains unwilling to entertain simultaneous measures to defuse the ticking time bomb of structural imbalances among national economies in the eurozone. As long as it suppresses this conflict, cooperation will not be possible in any other area of policy either. Moreover, the vague formula of “different speeds” misses the proper addressees. The willingness to cooperate is most likely to be exhibited by the member states of the monetary union, hence where the populations, since the onset of the banking crisis, have experienced their mutual dependence on each other. I am not of the opinion that Germany is the only country that needs to reconsider its policy. Emmanuel Macron stands out from the ranks of European politicians also because he frankly acknowledges the problems that can be addressed only in France itself. But, even though it did not choose this role, it is now up to the German government to join France in taking the initiative to pull the cart out of the mire. The blessing of being the greatest beneficiary of the European Union is also a curse. For, from a historical perspective, a possible failure of the European project would be attributed with good reason to German indecision.

A non-decision is also a decision; and it is hard to exaggerate the implications of such a non-decision. The institutionalization of closer cooperation is what first makes it possible to exert democratic influence on the spontaneous proliferation of global networks in all directions, because politics is the only medium through which we can take deliberate measures to shape the foundations of our social life. Contrary to what the Brexit slogan suggests, we will not regain control over these foundations by retreating into national fortresses. On the contrary, politics must keep pace with the globalization that it set in motion. In view of the systemic constraints of unregulated markets and the increasing functional interdependence of a more and more integrated world society, but also in view of the spectacular options we have created – for example, of a still unmastered digital communication or of new procedures for optimizing the human organism – we must expand the spaces for possible democratic will-formation, for political action, and for legal regulation beyond national borders.

This article was the introduction to a conversation between Emanuel Macron and Sigmar Gabriel on 16 March 2017 at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

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26. HOW A SLEEPY GERMAN SUBURB EXPLAINS EUROPE’S RISING FAR-RIGHT MOVEMENTS THE INTERPRETER By Amanda Taub (The New York Times, March 20, 2017)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/world/europe/how-a-sleepy-german-suburb-explains-europes-rising-far-right-movements.html

BUCH, Germany — Buch, a small community on the outskirts of Berlin, seems at first glance to be the kind of place Goldilocks would declare “just right.” It is not too rich or too poor, not too expensive or too scruffy, not too close to the crowded city center but not so far that its tree-lined streets of tidy apartments are beyond a daily commute.

It is probably not the sort of place people picture when they think about the tide of far-right populism overwhelming Europe. But beneath the surface, this cozy, safe neighborhood is starkly different from the depressed postindustrial zones often portrayed as the populist wellspring, and is emblematic of the forces threatening to upend Western politics as we know it.

In this apparent stronghold of ordinariness, the Alternative for Germany, a far-right populist party, won more than 22 percent of the vote in the 2016 local election — more than any other party.

I went to Buch to better understand how far-right populism has taken root across much of Europe. I found signs of subtle forces that social scientists have long theorized could be driving the populist surge rising across Western societies.

Photo

The center of Buch. Beneath the surface, this cozy, safe community on the outskirts of Berlin is starkly different from the depressed postindustrial zones often portrayed as the populist wellspring. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
‘You Should Be Careful’

The streets were blanketed with several inches of snow the day I visited in January, lending a picturesque quality to the brown-brick shopping area in Buch’s center. A fast-food restaurant glowed invitingly, its sign advertising hamburgers and salad as well as falafels and doner kebabs.

Mahmoud Ceylan, whose cousin owns the restaurant, stood behind the counter. Right-wing parties sometimes accuse Turkish immigrants like him of being unable to assimilate in German society. Asked whether he’d experienced any harassment, he snorted.

It happened all the time, he said. People would say things to him on the train and on the street.

“People look at you and they don’t know you’ve been here almost 25 years,” he said. “They don’t know you work.”

But asked about the Alternative for Germany, he shrugged. Though the party’s rise had shocked much of Europe, to Mr. Mahmoud it was the Germany he already knew.

As we spoke, a middle-aged customer who had been chatting volubly at the counter, Jakob Raff, grew quiet. He leaned over to offer a warning: “There are right-wingers here,” he said. “You should be careful asking such questions.”

Photo

A sidewalk at a shopping area in Buch. There are few migrants in the town, and it has remained overwhelmingly white. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

The Halo Effect

Buch, on the surface, appears to be an unlikely source of anti-immigrant anger.

For one: There are few migrants here. While many nearby parts of Berlin are tremendously diverse, filled with refugees and other immigrants from all over the world, Buch has remained overwhelmingly white, despite the presence of a small refugee center in the middle of town.

Social scientists call this the “halo effect”: a phenomenon, repeated across Europe, in which people are most likely to vote for far-right politicians if they live close to diverse areas, but not actually within them.

Jens Rydgren and Patrick Ruth, sociologists at the University of Stockholm, wrote in 2011 that people in such communities may be close enough to immigrants to feel they are under threat, but still too far to have the kinds of regular, friendly interactions that would dispel their fears.

Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at Birkbeck College in London, has found that rising diversity can push the “halo” outward. East London was a center of far-right activity in the 1970s, but as neighborhoods there became more diverse, far-right support fell and rose in the whiter suburbs just beyond them.

Buch, too, seems to fit that pattern. Despite the arrival of some refugees, there are so few Muslims that the supermarket does not even stock halal meats. But it lies in a district that borders Wedding, one of the most diverse parts of Berlin.

Buch’s white residents, according to this theory, are fearful not because their lives or jobs have been upended by migration, but because they perceive this as happening in areas like Wedding and worry they could be next.

A Negative Identity

Across town, down a road lined with communist-era apartment blocks, I arrived at the church building where Cornelia Reuter and her husband, Hagen Kühne, live and work as pastors.

Ms. Reuter said some of her parishioners were preoccupied with fears that more refugees would be sent to Buch.

She and her husband traced this fear, in part, to a deeper problem: Many within their community, they said, long for a clear sense of identity and belonging, but struggle to find one.

After World War II, celebrating or even defining German identity became taboo, often seen as a step toward the nationalism that allowed the rise of the Nazis. The attitude shifted somewhat with the 2006 World Cup, where the German hosts unabashedly flew their flag and celebrated national pride.

But there is still enough of a void that leaves people with an “inner emptiness,” Ms. Reuter said. This gap in self-definition has left them no way to express their identity except by what they are not — what is sometimes termed a “negative identity.”

“You can say ‘I’m not a Muslim,’ but most people can’t say ‘I am a Christian,’” or otherwise articulate a positive identity, she explained. “There is an emptiness. And I think that’s a societywide thing. It’s not just one group. It’s a very wide problem.”

Germany’s identity taboo is not new. But recent events may have made it suddenly feel more painful.

Immo Fritsche, a political scientist at the University of Leipzig, has found that when people feel they have lost control, they seek a strong identity that will make them feel part of a powerful group.

Identifying with something powerful and capable of bringing about change, like a strong nation, becomes very attractive, he said.

Ms. Reuter said that many people in Buch did feel a sense of lost control. The refugee crisis was perceived as a sign that Germany’s borders had become lawless. And the presence of the local refugee center, though home to just a few hundred people, brought a sense of heightened stakes.

Many of her elderly parishioners, she said, had told her that they couldn’t believe what young people today had to contend with. “And these are people who grew up during World War II! Who were bombed, and experienced the war!”

But they felt lucky to have experienced a kind of agency and identity that young people today were denied, she said.
   
“‘At least at that time I could do something,’” she recounted them saying to her. “‘At least at that point I was a part of it.’”

That has left an opening for Alternative for Germany, which promises to restore German patriotism. Far-right politicians like the party’s Björn Höcke, Ms. Reuter said, know how to exploit that identity taboo. “People like Höcke are pushing against this thing,” she said. “He knows to put his words right there.”

In an interview, Mr. Höcke told me he believed identity was “the question” for Germany today.

Minutes later, he told a crowd of hundreds of cheering supporters that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of its capital,” referring to Berlin’s memorial to Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

“Germany needs a positive relationship with our identity,” he told me, “because at the foundation of being able to move forward is identity. The foundation of our unity is identity.”

Photo

A sticker welcoming refugees, top, and a neo-Nazi sticker in German reading “the boat is full,” on a sign in Buch. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

Comfort in Contact

As you approach the refugee center in Buch, signs of anti-immigrant hostility grow more obvious. Alternative for Germany placards, torn and strewn on the street, show grinning, swarthy men clutching handfuls of euros.

So does the air of menace. One of the refugee center’s buildings is scarred with scorch marks from a recent arson attack.

Juliane Willuhn, the center’s director, said the crime remained unsolved. No one was injured in the blaze, but the attack seemed designed to threaten: Investigators concluded the fire was set intentionally, in a room containing baby strollers. Nothing was left of them except ashes and a few charred wheels.

And yet several Buch residents who lived near the center, in interviews, expressed optimism about their refugee neighbors. They hinted at the flip side of theories like the halo effect: that contact with people who are different eases the fears that can drive populist backlashes.

Martin Orthman was walking his dog, Sunny, in the park near the refugee center. Mr. Orthman said that he had developed a positive view of refugees after becoming a security guard in a refugee center in a neighboring town.

Across the street, Elena Salow, who lives a few blocks over from the refugee center, was walking home with her young daughter. She said she didn’t have any “direct feelings” about the asylum center or Alternative for Germany, but that she had had good experiences with the refugees.

“Sometimes we meet on the playground and the children play together,” Ms. Salow said.

These interviews pointed toward something called intergroup contact theory. When people have direct contact with members of a particular ethnic or national group, studies find, they tend to become more tolerant of the group as a whole.

This suggests that regular contact with immigrants reduces support for right-wing populist parties by removing the sense of fear that fuels them.

If true, that hints that Alternative for Germany’s hold in Buch might be weaker than their recent electoral successes would imply. But that kind of contact is slow to take effect, while the party has already enjoyed a meteoric rise.

Far-right support may eventually diminish. But in the meantime it will leave Germany’s migrants, and European politics, under tremendous stress.

Shane Thomas McMillan contributed reporting

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27. POETRY AND MOTION: MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV ON JOSEPH BRODSKY
by Neil Munshi
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(Financial Times - March 17, 2017)

The first of our new ‘Out of Office’ series on the private passions of public figures

One of the first people Mikhail Baryshnikov met when he arrived in New York in 1974, newly defected from the Soviet Union, was the poet Joseph Brodsky. Both men had been invited to dinner by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, another exile, and their fellow guests included Salvador Dalí and prominent members of the Russian émigré scene.

“When I entered, I recognised immediately Joseph, who was sitting and smoking his cigarette,” says Baryshnikov, laughing. “At that time, he had red hair and, a little bit cocky, he said: ‘Mikhail, nice to meet you. Sit down — we have a few things to discuss.’”

It was a conversation that would continue for the next 22 years, until Brodsky’s death, and would sustain in the world’s most famous dancer a love of poetry that remains central to his life. 

The poet, who won the Nobel Prize in 1987, was an important influence on Baryshnikov in the years that he revolutionised and popularised ballet as a performer and choreographer, while launching a successful parallel career as an actor in film and television. 
At the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York © Adam Golfer

We meet on Manhattan’s west side at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a multimillion-dollar facility that offers space and funding to new artists and a 238-person theatre for performances. Nearing 70, and with a bum knee, Baryshnikov remains graceful. He rises on to his toes to peer through the window of a studio door, lifting his small frame to watch Justin Peck, the resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet, run a group of male dancers through rehearsals.

The centre is a monument to Baryshnikov’s life and work (and to his fundraising prowess). Each studio is named after important figures from his past: the dancers/choreographers Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins and Rudolf Nureyev, the composer John Cage.

Baryshnikov is an accomplished photographer and his works line a hallway. There is a haunting image of an onnagata kabuki performer applying make-up in a mirror; a portrait of the photographer Richard Avedon, taken weeks before he died in 2004; and photographs of Baryshnikov’s children — he has three daughters and a son — playing when they were young.
In his New York studio © Adam Golfer

A portrait of Brodsky hangs in Baryshnikov’s pied-à-terre a few blocks away. He had asked the poet to caption it on his 40th birthday: “Our native land is wide, it’s vast. Though neither Mouse nor Cat felt like living there to see their 40th.” “It’s very witty in Russian,” Baryshnikov says. It is also deeply personal. Brodsky called the diminutive Baryshnikov “Mouse”, which in Russian sounds like Misha, Baryshnikov’s nickname. The older, larger Brodsky was “Cat”.

Baryshnikov first read poetry for pleasure in 1964. He was a 16-year-old student at the prestigious Vaganova Ballet Academy, newly arrived in St Petersburg — at the time, Leningrad — from Riga. Four years earlier, his mother Aleksandra, who had taken him to the theatre performances that sparked his love of dance, had hanged herself in their bathroom. His distant father, Nikolai, was a high-ranking Soviet military official. When he remarried, he no longer had time for Baryshnikov. “It was not much of a home,” he says. “I was 16 years old and I felt like a man, in a way. My destiny was in my hands.”

At Vaganova, his classmate Olga Evreinoff handed him a sheaf of onionskin papers, each thinner than the last, on which were printed the banned works of Joseph Brodsky, recently sentenced to five years’ hard labour “up north”, as Baryshnikov puts it, after being convicted of “social parasitism”. The authorities had called the 23-year-old a “pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers”.
Photographs and books in his office © Adam Golfer

“It hit me pretty strongly — [the] elegance, very daring subjects, simplicity and grace,” he says. He consumed the samizdat and asked Evrienoff for more. “She said, [make] sure that nobody sees, because they might kick me out of school, and then you never know what else. She could’ve got in horrible trouble for giving me this.”

Baryshnikov had gone to a Russian school in Latvia, where rote memorisation of the classics — Pushkin, Lermontov — was an essential part of instruction. But now he began to read Anna Akhmatova, of whom Brodsky was a disciple, and other silver-age poets such as Marina Tsvetaeva and Alexander Kushner, “and people who had disappeared in Stalin’s gulag”, among them Osip Mandelstam.

***

Ten years later, having excelled as a danseur noble at the Kirov Ballet (now the Mariinsky) but chafing at Soviet-era artistic restrictions, Baryshnikov arrived in New York. His defection from the Soviet Union had been arranged by the dancer Natalia Makarova and took place in Toronto as he toured Canada with the Kirov. “Without her, I don’t know if [I would have done it], although I had many reasons, and I was in a very moody and dark state, and I was alone, and there was the situation in the theatre. Russia was so gloomy in all respects.”
Shoes in his office © Adam Golfer

In New York, he joined the American Ballet Theater and began preparing for his first show at the Lincoln Center — Giselle, with Makarova — while immersing himself in the culture. “We worked day and night, and I watched late-night TV, trying to learn English . . . [from] Johnny Carson,” he says.

And he met Brodsky. Baryshnikov had attended some of Brodsky’s readings in Leningrad, where the poet had read John Donne. “But my friends never introduced me to him. If I would have had a friendly relationship with him, it would have put me on a serious blacklist with the KGB. And I would never have been able to leave Russia.”

The first night they met, the pair went for a long walk down to Greenwich Village, where Brodsky was staying with friends. They sat for hours in a cafeteria, drinking coffee. For the next two decades, the pair would speak on the phone nearly every day, no matter where they were. They stalked the city together for hours at a time.

“He loved to be by the embankment, because it reminded him of Leningrad, with the water and perspective,” Baryshnikov says. “In his poetry, there are so many poems about water, from the north to Venice, to the Hudson, to the Caribbean. He really worked on a metaphysical level about the water: the proximity, and the colour, and the essence of it. Water is his church, Brodsky’s church, because he grew up [with the] Neva River.”

Baryshnikov has referred to Brodsky as his “university”, the man who gave him the higher education his dancing prevented him from receiving. Brodsky introduced him to not just the work of writers but to the writers themselves.
In the dance studio © Adam Golfer

“He said that he was surprised how much poetry I know, which was a total exaggeration. He was trying to pay me a compliment, I don’t know why. But I would rather sit and listen to his conversations with Derek Walcott, and maybe half of it, I couldn’t understand. Or with Stephen Spender, or Czeslaw Milosz. He’d just talk about politics with Susan Sontag,” he says.

Baryshnikov moved on to reading “Walcott from St Lucia, and Seamus Heaney in Ireland, or Louise Glück, in the States, or Mark Strand”. “One of the first books Joseph gave me was a book of Mark Strand,” Baryshnikov says. “He said, ‘Mouse, have this.’ And I said, ‘Joseph, I don’t speak a word of English.’ It was at the very beginning. He said, ‘You will, and very soon, and we will read this man.’ And he was absolutely right.” 

And there was always Brodsky. Baryshnikov keeps a full collection of his friend’s work in all of his homes and offices. “I always travel with one or two [of Brodsky’s] books. And some of them are still too difficult for me. I’m not pretending that I know his work inside-out at all,” he says. “I remember his voice, I remember the way he read. Sometimes he asked me to read. He said, ‘I want to hear a different voice, can you read this?’ Sometimes, I was lucky to be the first person to whom he read.” 

Their relationship forms the basis for Latvian director Alvis Hermanis’s experimental theatre piece, Brodsky/Baryshnikov, which features the dancer reciting his friend’s poetry in the original Russian. It runs at the Apollo Theatre in London in May, having already played in Riga and New York. 

He only reads Brodsky in Russian, as it allows him “to appreciate the rhythmical excellency of the way Joseph put these things”. Brodsky wrote in rhyme in Russian, but when translated — by Brodsky or others — it often ended up as free verse. 
Joseph Brodsky, New York, 1987

Baryshnikov has countless passages memorised. But he doesn’t have a favourite, “because it evolves — this for a few weeks, those few sentences, and that rhyme that sticks with you”.

The Brodsky piece dovetails with another work Baryshnikov has been performing recently, Robert Wilson’s Letter to a Man, an experimental stage treatment of the diary the Polish-Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky kept as he descended into madness in 1919. He was institutionalised for the next 30 years, probably suffering from schizophrenia.

Nijinsky was the greatest dancer of his time, and also a member of the Mariinsky Ballet, where Baryshnikov spent six years before his defection. His 1913 performance of The Rite of Spring sparked a riot in Paris. He introduced modernism to ballet in a way that Baryshnikov — above whom Nijinsky’s shadow always loomed — would later take even further.

“These two shows, back to back, I will do this in the spring and summer — it’s all about the same thing,” he says. “It’s about state of mind, which has affected me a bit, because it increases your anxiety about those things, and fear.”

Earlier, he had mentioned that his “battery is running out”. 

“And it is,” he says. “Luckily, I don’t have to do what I did years ago, because I’m kind of giving up. But that’s a conclusion. The two shows I’m doing now, it’s pretty much, I feel, that time is clicking, and this is a cul-de-sac. It’s a dead end. Right now, I put all the other projects aside, and I barely have enough energy to do these two plays, and it’s a huge responsibility. It’s two one-man shows, and it can be lonely out there. And the subject matter, it’s not such a Gaîté Parisienne — it’s heavy shit.”

He laughs. But the spectre of mortality looms, the first stirrings of a swansong. Earlier, he defined his life by the men who have been in charge.

“I was born during Stalin’s time, I ran away from Brezhnev, and I finish up under Trump — it’s not fair. It’s not f***ing fair,” he says. “But I don’t want to talk about it. I’m trying to live my own life.” 

Mikhail Baryshnikov performs in the UK premiere of “Brodsky/Baryshnikov”, Apollo Theatre, May 3—6


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