SACW - 23 May 2017 | Pakistan - India: New life for War Talk / Bangladesh: Ideological Struggles / Pakistan: Forced conversions / Myanmar: Anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism / India: Media Freedom ; Fire in the Mountain / Indonesia teetering towards theocracy / Brazil, Interview: MST Leader Joao Pedro Stedile / Presidential Elections 2017 - France Has Dodged a Bullet in its Head / Russia Is Getting a Patriotic Council

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 23 May 2017 - No. 2937 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Ideological Struggles Within | Nahela Nowshin
2. Bangladesh: A note and a hacking | Esam Sohail
3. India: On triple talaq, court must say - Religious practice cannot trump modern constitutional morality | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
4. The Hoot’s Report on Media Freedom in India (January 2016-April 2017)
5. India: The disdain for a marvel of architecture - Tearing down of the Hall of Nations in Delhi
6. Interview with historian Anirudh Deshpande on the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946
7. Presidential Elections 2017 - France Has Dodged a Bullet in its Head: Macron’s Victory Offers a Much Needed Reprieve Against Narrow Nationalism | Harsh Kapoor 

8. Recent on Communalism Watch:
- India: Intermarry and be damned. 2 Parsi women challenge bias (Bachi Karkaria)
- South Asian Societies: Intolerance on Rise
- The growing business of religion in India (Pranav Gupta & Sanjay Kumar)
- India: Ayodhya and the wisdom of cabbies (Dipankar De Sarkar)
- India: BJP's electoral math and caste violence in Saharanpur between Dalits and Thakurs (Edit, The Telegraph)
- India: Religion and constitutional tenets need to be reconciled in triple talaq case 
- India: Right wing outfits with their agendas driven by violence and hooliganism now get more clout
- India: Hindutvaficaion of Institute of Mass Communications - state funded journalism school
- India: Ministry of Tourism and Culture coming out with a blueprint of a multi million dollar Ram museum in Ayodhya
- India: ‘Pehlu Khan, a cattle smuggler’ - BJP must stop this awful victimise-the-victim game

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
9.  Pakistan - India: Hype around war gets a new life | Ayesha Siddiqa
10. Pakistan: Raising national conscience | Kamila Hyat
11. Forced conversions given seal of approval in Pakistan | F.M. Shakil
12. Roots of anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar | P.K.Balachandran
13. Critics assail India’s attempt to ‘validate’ folk remedy
14. 'Enemy property': India's answer to Trump wants to raze Pakistan founder's home | Vidhi Doshi
15. Fire on the mountain - New Delhi must open communication links in Kashmir | Bashir Manzar
16. Mata Din: Cows or women, all we have we owe to udders  | Bachi Karkaria
17. Subramaniam on Andrade and Hang, 'Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550-1700'
18. Miller on Pietikainen, 'Madness: A History'
19. World Bank fudges on inequality | Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury
20. Brazil, Interview: MST Leader Joao Pedro Stedile - ‘We need direct elections now and an emergency plan for the people’ | Joana Tavares
21. Russia Is Getting a Patriotic Council to Fight 'Cultural Extremism'
22. Is Indonesia teetering towards theocracy? | John McBeth

========================================
1. BANGLADESH: IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLES WITHIN | Nahela Nowshin
========================================
If you’re one of the somewhat-politically-conscious individuals who bother to gloss over lengthy op-eds (and not just the trending news of the day) you will have noticed the term “cultural diversity” thrown around quite a lot in recent times. You will have seen oft-repeated phrases about cultural pluralism and religious tolerance that either paint a wholly rosy picture of present day Bangladesh (almost always politicians) or decry the threats that our cultural fabric is under
http://www.sacw.net/article13268.html

========================================
2. BANGLADESH: A NOTE AND A HACKING | Esam Sohail
========================================
In countries where religion is imprinted into the DNA of social life, it becomes — literally sometimes — a matter of life and death. Juxtapose Muslim societies into the scene, and the concept of blasphemy and apostasy becomes an additional factor of fear for those who are considered cast out from the folds of Islam.
http://www.sacw.net/article13267.html

========================================
3. INDIA: ON TRIPLE TALAQ, COURT MUST SAY - RELIGIOUS PRACTICE CANNOT TRUMP MODERN CONSTITUTIONAL MORALITY | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
========================================
Underlying the “triple talaq” questions are deeper issues about the nature of constitutional law in India.
http://www.sacw.net/article13265.html

========================================
4. THE HOOT’S REPORT ON MEDIA FREEDOM IN INDIA (January 2016-April 2017)
========================================
The Hoot’s comprehensive report on free speech issues in India, released on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day 2017
http://www.sacw.net/article13261.html

========================================
5. INDIA: THE DISDAIN FOR A MARVEL OF ARCHITECTURE - TEARING DOWN OF THE HALL OF NATIONS IN DELHI
========================================
The Hall of Nations and Hall of Industries at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi was demolished in April 2017 and except for a group of city historians, artists and architects, no one raised their voices as the city lost one of its architectural marvels
http://www.sacw.net/article13264.html

========================================
6. INTERVIEW WITH HISTORIAN ANIRUDH DESHPANDE ON THE ROYAL INDIAN NAVY MUTINY OF 1946
========================================
Professor Anirudh Deshpande, Delhi University
http://www.sacw.net/article13263.html

========================================
7. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS 2017 - FRANCE HAS DODGED A BULLET IN ITS HEAD: MACRON’S VICTORY OFFERS A MUCH NEEDED REPRIEVE AGAINST NARROW NATIONALISM
by Harsh Kapoor
========================================
The decision of Melanchon and many on the Left [including London-based Left media star Tariq Ali who argued for Brexit] calling for mass abstention in the final round of the French elections by equating Macron and Le Pen is inexcusable. We are reminded of the many Bernie Sanders’ voters who chose not to vote for Hilary Clinton and how the chouchou of the leftists Julian Assange used Wikileaks to damage Clinton. The imperative to oppose racism and hate should have been above opposition to neoliberal policies.
http://www.sacw.net/article13266.html

========================================
8. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
- India: Intermarry and be damned. 2 Parsi women challenge bias (Bachi Karkaria)
- Anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar
- South Asian Societies: Intolerance on Rise
- The growing business of religion in India (Pranav Gupta & Sanjay Kumar)
- India: Ayodhya and the wisdom of cabbies (Dipankar De Sarkar)
- India: BJP's electoral math and caste violence in Saharanpur between Dalits and Thakurs (Edit, The Telegraph)
- India: Religion and constitutional tenets need to be reconciled in triple talaq case (Edit, The Times of - - - India: Right wing outfits with their agendas driven by violence and hooliganism now get more clout
- India: Hindutvaficaion of Institute of Mass Communications - state funded journalism school
- India: Ministry of Tourism and Culture coming out with a blueprint of a multi million dollar Ram museum in Ayodhya
- India: ‘Pehlu Khan, a cattle smuggler’ - BJP must stop this awful victimise-the-victim game

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
========================================
9. PAKISTAN - INDIA: BILATERAL SILENCE
Hype around war gets a new life in India, Pakistan, increasing public support for the armed forces
by Ayesha Siddiqa
=========================================
(The Indian Express - May 10, 2017)

It was a cool winter morning in late December 2001 when India decided to mobilise its forces on its border with Pakistan, in retaliation to the terror attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13 that year. The reaction, which was meant to pressure the seemingly recalcitrant neighbour, was the biggest troops deployment since the war in 1971. However, no lines were crossed due to foreign intervention and a realisation around the world that a conflict between the two South Asian neighbours who had gone overtly nuclear in 1998 might result in something very ugly. It was in the backdrop of this standoff or the earlier Kargil crisis that redlines were drawn informally.

Sixteen years later, the region stands on the brink of an impending conflict with little clarity regarding the threshold and even less lucidity regarding which international player will intervene. Unlike in the past, the US may not be in a position to give its advice due to its own internal chaos, lesser interest in South Asia and an inability to develop a relationship with anyone in Islamabad. Although deterrence and an understanding of each other’s thresholds worked for almost a decade after 2002, both sides worked towards finding means to challenge the status-quo. So, India’s “cold start” doctrine was meant for Delhi to circumvent the four redlines highlighted by the head of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division (SPD), Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai. Pakistan reacted to India’s plan by developing a range of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons.

Since 2013-2014, all lines have become muddled and the military-strategic visibility has become poorer as both sides enjoy a certain level of confidence that any initiative will be to their advantage, not to the adversary’s. While Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party’s political gains are unquestionable, the military in Pakistan has managed to cobble together a popular opinion regarding its role as the defender of the territorial and ideological integrity of the state. Voices that question the narrative no longer hold centrestage in public discourse — not to forget the tremendous confidence gained by Islamabad through finding space in the evolving regional political map as China’s partner.

This description of similar levels of confidence enjoyed by the two states tends to point towards an increased threat of war and conflict. Historically, every time both India and Pakistan attained higher degrees of self-confidence, the results were not good. These are indeed interesting times when military thresholds are being re-checked in a nuclear environment. Given the absence of direct conversation, there is also little clarity as to how far the two sides will go. The Pakistan Army has stated that it is not involved in mutilating bodies of Indian soldiers. But even if it is random militants, or someone else to blame, the question is finding a possibility to talk before things go too far out of hand.

Another interesting development in the past decade or more pertains to war and conflict becoming matters in which popular opinion weigh in. While this may be a deliberate formula of the states, the issue is that the media hype around war and peace has acquired a life of its own. But this means that any escalation will result in greater public support to their respective armed forces.

The recipe is dangerous especially if India tries to go beyond its claims of a surgical strike in September 2016. The fact that Pakistan did not react or admit to such strikes having happened kept things from boiling over. However, if India intended to make its response more visible, it could result in serious repercussions for the entire region. Strategic analysts have often talked about the rationality of Pakistan’s armed forces that, it is believed, may force it to not up the ante and cap it at a lower level. The question is, what if it does not follow this script?

It is beyond doubt that this is one time when the two states need to engage in a dialogue through reliable interlocutors. Understandably, Pakistan must solve its internal confusion of civil-military being on separate pages as far as a policy on India is concerned. In fact, the business tycoon Sajjan Jindal’s visit to see Nawaz Sharif did not benefit the prime minister. If anything, the narrative popularised through the media presented him as suspicious and unreliable. From a common sense perspective, this is not the best of conditions a country ought to find itself in, especially when confronted with a grave situation.

However, the military believes it can protect the territory and the core strategic understanding is that there can be no peace with the bigger neighbour unless outstanding disputes are resolved. It would certainly not allow a political leadership to conspire a solution without taking key stakeholders on board. The civil-military squabble tends to hide the difference of opinion that exists within the military regarding how far negotiations between Islamabad and New Delhi should go. While some may support the idea of negotiations, there are those who would like to go the whole hog in de-Indianising their society and culture.

Unfortunately, for South Asia, peace and camaraderie amongst the people is the biggest collateral damage of the present environment. The talk of action-reaction and hostility is increasingly de-sensitising people towards the idea of peaceful co-existence or building upon a shared culture of the soil. Any further increase in hostility is likely to make common people even wearier of each other. While it is understandable to see the militaries brace themselves for greater conflict, the leadership ought to find ways to talk. It is important to realise that talking is imperative.

The writer is a Pakistani military scientist, political commentator and an author

=========================================
10. PAKISTAN: RAISING NATIONAL CONSCIENCE
by Kamila Hyat
=========================================
(The News, May 18, 2017)

What will it take to raise our conscience and our understanding that there are things that need to be remedied urgently in our country? There is no sign that this change in thinking is coming about.

After that horrendous attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar in December 2014 in which at least 140 people – almost all of them children – were literally butchered in their own classrooms, there was much talk about the change this would have on the nation’s psyche and mindset. While paying moving tributes to the children and labelling them as martyrs, the army pressed for an operation against terrorism and an all-out effort to crush it. The National Action Plan was launched and for many months we saw great fervour, but at the end of all this we have no actual semblance of change.

Terrorist attacks continue to occur as they did at Sehwan Sharif and militant leaders such as Ehsanullah Ehsan are suddenly being labelled as people who can in some way help the country. The question of punishment for the crime they have openly confessed to doing does not come up in these discussions.

Just over a month ago we had another incident that could have possibly brought about national change. The killing of Mashal Khan at Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan truly shocked many. It showed people that mob mentality can run wild given the absence of state mechanisms to control it or civilisation that normally exists within developed societies. We once had this civilisation – indeed in our region of the world it existed in many forms long before it was introduced in Europe and other parts of the world. The advance of the mob and the age of brutality when nothing, including human life, seems to matter is a relatively recent development. In the death of Mashal Khan there is no evidence of any direct involvement by an organised outfit – only of rage and uncontrolled insanity from the students’ own fears.

It had been thought that the video footage of the killing and the events that followed would move the government to make policy decisions or take action. Events of this kind after all signal catastrophe for a nation. Most leaders with any vision would recognise this and at least discuss the ways to resolve the problem in parliament. The sporadic taking of human life is increasingly becoming a norm in our nation and those who engage in such acts such as Mumtaz Qadri are being portrayed as heroes. Something has gone very wrong with our basic sense of justice and humanity. Life, it appears, has no meaning.

The signs of limited protests and attempts to bring change seen after the murder of Mashal in mid-April have now evaporated. While at least five people have been arrested, including the man the police say shot the young student, there can be no certainty that these people – if they are indeed the true culprits – will be brought to justice or that measures to prevent other mobs from acting in a similar fashion will be put in place. We have seen so many brutal incidents that it appears none of them move us very much any longer. The expectations that a change would arise on its own, as a reaction to the killings and brutalities we have seen, has not transpired. The state has not lived up to its responsibilities – a fact that Mashal Khan’s father has with enormous dignity pointed out again and again.

His words have not been heeded. The pain of that family continues even when we as a nation turn to other events and developments. The media appears to have virtually forgotten the incident in Mardan. Occasionally, images of Mashal’s abandoned room at home with the trophies and medals he had won for excellence in various spheres appear on social media. But these pictures can really do very little except invite a sudden spate of comments and expressions of concern. Beyond this, nothing really happens.

Not far from Mardan, the same holds true. In Peshawar, families of the children who died at the Army Public School have indeed been provided support from the military and in some cases voluntary bodies. But the parents state that all they seek is an end to the environment that puts an end to the lives of children in a similar fashion. Fathers and mothers have come together on platforms and have bravely said that while they have learnt to suffer the unending pain of their own child’s death, they cannot live in peace until those who carried out the killings are punished or greater safety is ensured for people everywhere, whether they live in Parachinar, Karachi, Lahore, Mastung or other places that have been torn apart by internal war.

This is a war that does not involve weapons alone. Most of all, it involves thinking and the apparent loss of reason. Reason is a very difficult entity to fathom or to piece together. There has been much conjecture and analysis as to how this reason was lost and why we have descended into a current state of anarchy. Taking a deeper look at this issue is important. Piecemeal solutions will not work. It is pointless to try and remedy only one symptom at a time. Yes, efforts have been made to tackle some terrorist outfits. Others however have been left intact. This duality in policies has been a problem for a very long time and appears to be continuing today. Indeed it has grown worse from one year to the next.

We already know that there are no easy answers. Long- and short-term solutions – beginning with eradicating intolerance to changing school curriculum – have all been discussed in detail. But at the moment our biggest fight is against time. Do we have enough time to save our country before it is completely torn apart by hatred and uncontrolled rage that emanate from a lack of knowledge and dearth of people’s ability to empathise and live alongside other citizens as equals? Recreating this is perhaps the most urgent task before us.

Emergency measures are required. These will need to include making some effort to restrain our media which has embarked along a highly dangerous path and has had a damaging influence on millions. In addition, we need to ensure that our centres of learning – whether at the school or university levels – truly impart the training necessary to create sensitive citizens who can understand the problems of others and comprehend that violence will only make matters worse. Precisely how this task is to be achieved is not something that can be answered easily.

Most important of all, we need to find the will and commitment to work on the task at hand rather than pretending that it simply does not exist. If we fail to do this, we will allow the most heinous of crimes to be covered up under the guise of inquiries and other events that form a part of our disunited political reality will wipe out major matters that come and go, leaving behind nothing that resembles true change or true remorse.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

=========================================
11. FORCED CONVERSIONS GIVEN SEAL OF APPROVAL IN PAKISTAN
by F.M. Shakil
=========================================
(Asia Times, May 10, 2017)
Legislation in Sindh province would have made abductions and forced conversions punishable. Instead, facilitators and perpetrators are being allowed to operate with impunity

When the provincial government of Sindh assembly tabled a bill against forced religious conversion in November, the clergy reacted angrily, with the Council of Islamic Ideology – the country’s highest religious consultative forum – wasting no time in declaring the law un-Islamic, forcing the government to withdraw its bill before it could see the light of the day.

Politicians in Sindh – a Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) stronghold – had drafted the legislation following a string of abductions, forced conversions and rape cases involving Hindu girls and boys in various parts of the province.
The DailyBrief
Must-reads from across Asia - directly to your inbox

The NGO South Asia Partnership-Pakistan (SAP-PK) reported in July 2015 that at least 1,000 Hindu girls are forcibly converted to Islam in Pakistan every year. Its report also defined “forced conversion” as involving the use of pressure, force, duress, or threats – either physical, emotional, or psychological – to make someone change their religion.

Another NGO, The Pakistan Hindu Council, has claimed that at least 300 girls and boys have been abducted and converted to Islam under duress since January 2016. In early May last year, three sisters –Saweeta 18, Kajal 15, and Leelan Kolhi 13 – were kidnapped from the Lalu Lashari district of Hyderabad. The police did not make a report when the family approached them to investigate.
Read: Pakistan’s assault on cyber-terrorism is proving toothless

Dr Azra Fazl, a Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader, told the National Assembly last year that Hindu girls were being taken to madrassas in Sindh and later forced to marry with Muslim men. Speaking on the issue of Rinkle Kumari, a Hindu girl had allegedly been abducted then forced to convert and marry, she said Hindus needed legal protection.

In 2014, Pakistan Muslim League (N) parliamentarian Ramesh Kumar Vanwani told the national assembly that around 5,000 Pakistani Hindus were migrating to India every year.

“I made this disclosure on the strength of [parliamentary] records,” Vanwani told Asia Times on Monday, adding that Hindus were still seeking to move to India. He said the Sindh anti-conversion bill’s withdrawal was regrettable: “By taking it back… the government of Sindh has further damaged the morale of the Hindu community.” Peaceful religious co-existence was the solution, he said.

    “The government of Sindh has further damaged the morale of the Hindu community”

The withdrawal of the bill is viewed as a serious setback to human rights in a highly polarized society where religious hardliners enjoy absolute power to alter legislation, bully opponents, persecute minorities, brand people as heretics and blasphemers and kill them with impunity. The state, in most instances, has seemed helpless in protecting citizens, and on occasion law enforcers have conspired with the religious zealots in persecuting minorities.

According to a US Department of State International Religious Freedom Report, Hafiz Saeed – the leader of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a designated foreign terrorist organization – has consistently issued statements calling for holy war against Jews and Hindus. Some Sunni Muslim groups have also published literature calling for violence against Ahmadis, Shi’ite Muslims, other Sunni sects, and Hindus. Some newspapers frequently publish articles containing derogatory references to religious minorities, helping to inculcate hatred among the population.

The bill could have served as a barrier against forced marriages and religious conversion of Hindu teenagers, a phenomenon closely linked with growing faith-related social hostilities in Pakistan. For the first time, perpetrators and facilitators of these crimes would have faced punishment: three to five years imprisonment. Instead, they are being let off.

=========================================
12. ROOTS OF ANTI-MUSLIM BUDDHIST NATIONALISM IN MYANMAR | P.K.BALACHANDRAN / DAILYFT
=========================================
(NewsIn.Asia - 20 May 2017)

If Myanmar is known throughout the world today, it is not for the fabled “Burma” rice and teak, or its ornate Buddhist pagodas, but for the persecution of its Muslim minority, chiefly the Rohingyas, who were formerly known as Arakanese or Rakhine Muslims.

Ironically, anti-Muslim feelings and actions have surged with the restoration of democracy in Myanmar, after 50 years of rule by a military junta. Even more ironical and deeply disturbing is the fact that this is taking place also under the rule of pro-democracy icon and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Today, more than 150,000 Rohingyas are living in refugee camps and thousands have fled to other countries, principally to Bangladesh. But wherever they go, doors are slammed on their face. Along with Sri Lankan Tamils, the Rohingyas have the dubious distinction of being the only “boat people” from the South Asian region.

Muslim population in Myanmar

The Muslim population in Myanmar is varied, both racially and linguistically. In the north, in Rakhine state, formerly called Arakan, the Muslims are basically immigrants from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and speak Bengali. A majority in North Arakan, the Rohingyas trace their history to the 15th Century, though the bulk of the immigration took place after the establishment of British rule in Myanmar in the 19th Century. In South Arakan or South Rakhine, however, Myanmarese Buddhists are in majority.

In the southern part of Myanmar, the Muslims are of mixed origin, tracing their ancestry to a bewildering variety of ethnic groups from various parts of India, Iran and the Middle East. Those Indian Muslims who have Myanmarese blood are called Zerabadis. Many Myanmarese Muslims in the south sport Myanmarese names but that has not given them any protection.

Before the British established themselves in Myanmar after the First Anglo-Burman War in 1826, the Muslim population in the country was small, even in Arakan, which is close to Muslim-majority East Bengal. But the violent way in which the British took over Myanmar following the First and Second Anglo-Burma Wars (1826 and 1852 respectively), and the heavy Indian immigration which they encouraged as rulers,  created anti-Indian feelings among the Myanmarese, who, unlike the immigrants, were also Buddhist.

It was as if the British had opened the floodgates to Indian immigration. At the turn of the 20th Century, annual arrivals had touched 250,000 and Yangon had become an Indian majority city. According to Anthony Ware of Deakin University of Australia, Yangon, which was a Buddhist town with innumerable pagodas and monasteries, became a multi-ethnic and multi-religious town in less than 50 years of British occupation.

Since the town had been burnt down completely during the 1852 war, and only major Buddhist shrines like the Sule and Shwedagon pagodas were allowed to stand, Yagon was laid out afresh by the British. In that process, shrines of non-Buddhist communities were built, vastly outnumbering Buddhist shrines.

With their places of worship having disappeared or pulled down to make way for development, the Myanmarese Buddhists of Yangon migrated virtually en masse to Upper Myanmar.

Buddhism and the Myanmarese were both marginalised simultaneously by British power. Their place was taken by Hindus, Muslims, Parsees, Jews, and others from all parts of India.

Anti-Muslim demonstration in Myanmar

Marginalisation of Buddhism

The abolition of the Myanmarese kingdom by the British also contributed to the marginalisation of Buddhism as the king was seen as the embodiment of Buddhist power and as its protector. The Myanmarese Buddhist edifice had lost its cornerstone with the abolishing kingship.

It is therefore not surprising that Myanmarese nationalism kicked off with the establishment of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association. Buddhist feelings ran quite high in 1938, when an Indian Muslim cleric made an anti-Muslim remark. Buddhist mobs attacked Muslims all over Myanmar. Malayalam speaking Moplah Muslim tea vendors in Myanmarese railway stations, a fixture in Myanmar railways, made easy targets. Thousands were forced to flee to their native Kerala.

When World War II spread to Myanmar in 1942, most Indians fled to India but the Muslims stayed on. To fight the Japanese invader, the British formed a local resistance group called the V Force in Arakan and recruited Arakan or Rakhine Muslims for it. The Buddhists of Myanmar and Rakhine tended to be pro-Japanese and had formed the Burma Independence Army to fight alongside the Japanese who had promised to make Myanmar an independent country after the war.

Buddhist-Muslim war

In the event, this war-time division triggered a Buddhist-Muslim war in which the majority of the victims were the non-militarised Muslim and Buddhist populations of Arakan or Rakhine.

As the British were clearing out of the Indian sub-continent in the late 1940s, a largely Hindu India and a largely Muslim Pakistan were going to be formed and Myanmar was going to be independent with a Buddhist majority to boot. At this time, the Muslims of Arakan or Rakhine started a movement to get their area attached to Pakistan as East Bengal was to become East Pakistan. This exacerbated relations between the Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine and elsewhere in Myanmar.

But the Muslim movement failed because Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, rejected the plea for accession in order not to annoy Myanmarese nationalist leaders.

However, the Rakhine Muslims were unfazed. They started a Jehadi movement to secure independence for Rakhine. This eventually became the most fiercely contested separatist movement in Myanmar after independence in 1948. It was finally put down by force in the 1960s by the military government led by Gen. Ne Win.

During the 50-year rule of Myanmar by a military junta, the communal situation was kept under control even as the regime actively promoted the Mynamarisation and “Buddhistisation” of the country. Most of the remaining Indians, barring the Muslims, fled as a result of this.

Vote bank politics

However, when democracy was being restored in phases, the Muslims of south Myanmar, who seemed to be getting along the Myanmarese Buddhists, gradually began to feel the heat. Democracy, even in its incipient phase, had unleashed the politics of numbers and the Buddhist majority saw the need for maintaining its numerical superiority and also for using it to capture and retain power.

The Muslims were portrayed as an ever-increasing group based on the belief that that they had at least four wives and that they encroached on the Buddhist population by marrying and converting Buddhist females.

When ex-General Thein Sein was in power, he brought in a law to govern inter-faith marriage, family size, religious freedom and conversion to other religions. The “Ma Ba Tha” (Association for the Protection of Race Religion) movement, led by the vitriolic monk Ven. Ashin Wirathu, praised President Sein for this, even though it was campaigning for the full restoration of democracy to fully unleash Buddhist power.

Intense anti-Muslim propaganda led to riots in 2012 and 2014. By the time Nobel Peace Prize winner and pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi came to full power in 2016, Wirathu’s movement had become the strongest in the country with branches in 250 of the 330 townships in Myanmar and thousands of followers. By this time, the Muslims had also begun to be seen as local representatives of the world-wide Jehadi or Wahabi movement and as a security threat to the country as well as Buddhism.
Rohingyas trek to Bangladesh from Maungdaw village in Rekhine State in Myanmar

Persecution continues

Meanwhile, efforts to marginalise and push out the Rakhine Muslims had progressed. Way back in 1982 itself, the Rakhine Muslims had been entered as “Stateless Bengali Muslims” in the census. Since the 1990s, they have become refugees in their own country and also abroad. 150,000 of them are presently in refugee camps and several had tried to flee to countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan (Karachi) and India.

But nowhere are these people welcome. Bangladesh, which has had to bear the brunt, put them up in a previously uninhabited island called Thengar Char, which is accessible only in winter and is a refuge for pirates.

Attempts to get the Aung San Suu Kyi Government to take back the Rohingyas and stop the violence against them by Buddhist extremist-inspired Myanmarese mobs drew no response from Suu Kyi. She would dismiss these pleas by saying simply: “We have other priorities” or “There is another side to the story”.

The US and human rights groups have highlighted the plight of the Rakhine Muslims or Rohingyas as they are called generally now. But to no avail. Apparently, the Western powers do not want to pressurise Aung San Suu Kyi so as not to push her towards China. The military junta which ruled Myanmar before her, had been very pro-China and had kept the West out of Myanmar. Suu Kyi had reversed this. The West had rewarded her for her pro-West leanings by giving her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

With emerging Asian power China not interested in human rights, the West and India indifferent to their plight, and Bangladesh having shut the door to them, the persecution of the Rohingyas in Myanmar is likely to continue unabated.

(The featured picture at the top shows Rohingya boat people pleading for mercy)

========================================
13. CRITICS ASSAIL INDIA’S ATTEMPT TO ‘VALIDATE’ FOLK REMEDY
========================================
https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link/10.1126/science.355.6328.898

========================================
14. 'ENEMY PROPERTY': INDIA'S ANSWER TO TRUMP WANTS TO RAZE PAKISTAN FOUNDER'S HOME
Vidhi Doshi
========================================
(The Guardian - 5 April 2017)

Property magnate and politician Mangal Prabhat Lodha, business partner of Donald Trump, reignites tensions over Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Mumbai house

Donald Trump’s alliance with Lodha complicates hopes of the US acting and a meditator between India and Pakistan Photograph: Hindustan Times/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Donald Trump’s Indian business partner is leading a campaign to raze a bungalow in Mumbai that was once the home of Pakistan’s founding father, in a dispute threatening to provoke a diplomatic row between Delhi and Islamabad.

The property was the primary residence of Mohammad Ali Jinnah before he moved to Karachi after partition. It has long been a bone of contention between the two nations.

This week, the property magnate and politician Mangal Prabhat Lodha reignited tensions over the house, describing Jinnah House an “enemy property” and calling for it to be demolished.

Lodha, a multi-billionaire property magnate and owner of Lodha Group, which is building Mumbai’s first Trump Tower, said upkeep of the bungalow was costing the government millions of rupees every year and called for it to be replaced with a cultural centre.

“The Jinnah residence in south Mumbai was the place from where the conspiracy of partition was hatched. Jinnah House is a symbol of the partition. Demolishing the property is the only option,” he said, speaking to the state of Maharashtra’s legislative assembly.

Demolishing Jinnah House would cause a major diplomatic row with Pakistan, which has repeatedly claimed ownership of the building and asked India to allow it to house a consulate in the property.

Pakistan foreign office spokesman Nafees Zakria has said in response to the campaign that the property belonged to Pakistan’s founding father and “ownership rights” must be respected.

In Pakistan, Jinnah is celebrated as a hero for creating a nation for Muslims, where they could enjoy self-determination. In India he is depicted as a weak leader who betrayed Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a secular India, and whose demands for partition led to the loss of between one and two million lives.

Relations between the two countries have declined in the past year, with India blaming Pakistan for a series of terror attacks on Indian soil and retaliating with night-time raids on Pakistan-based terrorists in the contested territory of Kashmir.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Monday that the Trump administration was “concerned about the relationship between India and Pakistan” and “very much wants to see how we de-escalate any sort of conflict going forward”.

Soon after his election victory, Trump called Pakistan’s president, Nawaz Sharif, and expressed a desire to strengthen relations. In the surprise phone call, the US president described Pakistan as a “fantastic country” and Pakistanis as “one of the most intelligent people”.

But Trump’s alliance with Lodha complicates hopes of the US acting as a meditator between the two countries, which are still fighting over disputed territory of Kashmir, and of reinstating strong ties with Islamabad.

Lodha still owns a majority stake in the real estate business partnered with the Trump Organisation in Mumbai.

His rise to mogul status in India mirrors Trump’s in the US. Both are known for building glitzy high-rises and golf courses, and both handed over control of their property empires to their sons to pursue political ambitions.

In January, after Trump’s election, Lodha’s political website even carried the slogan “Make Mumbai great again”, echoing Trump’s campaign mantra. The slogan has now been removed.

A member of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata party, Lodha launched his political career in 1994, capitalising on the anti-Muslim sentiment after the Bombay riots of 1992-93 in which Hindus and Muslims clashed after Hindu hardliners demolished an iconic Muslim worship site.

Over the years Lodha has campaigned to imprison Christians and Muslims for converting Hindus, to stop Hindu-Muslim marriages, to lower the volume of the Muslim prayer call in Mumbai, and to demolish a mosque which he argues was illegally constructed.

Capturing anti-Muslim sentiment has also been a keystone of Trump’s political career so far, with verbal attacks against the family of a Muslim-American war veteran and failed efforts to introduce a Muslim travel ban.

For a separate Trump Towers project in Gurgaon, Trump partnered with Lalit Goyal, owner of IREO Realty which was investigated by Indian intelligence authorities for siphoning off funds for the Commonwealth Games through Goyal’s brother-in-law and BJP leader Sudhashnu Mittal. A third Trump Towers project in the western city of Pune is also being investigated for illegally obtaining building permissions.

The White House did not immediately replied to the Guurdian’s request for comment.

========================================
15. FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN - NEW DELHI MUST OPEN COMMUNICATION LINKS IN KASHMIR | Bashir Manzar
========================================
(The Telegraph - 11 May 2017)

Kashmir is on the boil like never before. We have been in dark and depressive depths for so long now that we have forgotten our vocabulary and expression. Civilian street anger and spiralling militant violence have made the place scary. Not my word, the Election Commission's; scary is the word it used to cancel the Anantnag Lok Sabha by-election last week.

So, what is the message from here? Very clear and very loud - governments, both in Srinagar and in New Delhi, have lost their writ. Streets, almost all over Kashmir Valley, are controlled by angry mobs armed with stones. They are ready to take pellet and bullet hits, they are ready do die.

The interiors of the Valley, particularly in south Kashmir, are controlled by new-age militants - young, energetic, tech-savvy. They are killing pro-India political activists; they are looting banks; they are killing police personnel, attacking their residences. They are in control, so much so that the police brass had to issue an advisory to its men not to visit their homes if they happen to be in south Kashmir.

After the killing of the Hizbul militant, Burhan Wani, last July, Kashmir has not been what it was before. Alienation has reached such levels that younger Kashmiris are prepared to look death in the eye, mock at it. Nothing frightens them, not the military or the paramilitary, not bullets or pellets, not the prospect of detention and torture, nothing.

In the 2014 assembly elections, we saw the same youth campaigning for political parties, particularly the Peoples Democratic Party. Remember that over 65 per cent voters turned out during that election despite a boycott campaign by separatists. So what has changed? What has angered them to a degree that they won't allow the same PDP government to function?

During the 2014 election campaign, all the major political parties in Kashmir Valley, except Sajjad Lone's Peoples Conference, beat just one drum - 'We have to stop Modi, come what may!' PDP drummers were the loudest: if the Bharatiya Janata Party is not stopped from entering Jammu and Kashmir, the state will lose special status under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution; Hindutva forces will engineer demographic changes in the state, and so on.

But after the elections, the PDP jumped into bed with the same BJP, shocking the young generation that had come out in its support. Those who were asked to vote to stop the 'BJP's march' were disillusioned to see that it was actually their votes that had facilitated the BJP's ride into power for the first time in the state's history.

However, there was no immediate reaction. The reason: people probably had faith in Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's wisdom and his 'Agenda of Alliance' that talked about dialogue and reconciliation besides reviewing the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. As Mufti continued to remind his support base of A.B. Vajpayee's 'era of peace and normality', the young generation swallowed the bitter pill in the hope that it may cure the ailment (Kashmir conflict).

Unmindful of the Valley's unease, the BJP leadership in Delhi made it a point to make things difficult for Mufti from day one. Knowing his people's psyche, Mufti began his fresh innings as chief minister with the tested slogans of 2002 - 'battle of ideas', 'dialogue and reconciliation', 'space to voices of dissent' and so on. He released the hard-core face of Kashmiri separatism, Masarat Alam, who had been in prison since the 2010 unrest. But Alam emerged from detention to wave the Pakistani flag in public. That set India's television sets afire and New Delhi forced Mufti to re-arrest Alam.

Shock upon shock upon shock were delivered to Mufti by New Delhi. The biggest of them came on November 7, 2015, when the prime minister, Narendra Modi, virtually snubbed Mufti at a public gathering in Srinagar, saying, "I don't need any advice from anyone on Kashmir."

Ahead of the prime minister's speech, Mufti had strongly pitched for dialogue with all stakeholders, including Pakistan. Although the prime minister, at the same function, announced a Rs 80,000 crore financial package for flood-hit Jammu and Kashmir, he missed the point that Kashmir was more about politics than money. (The first installment of the prime minister's promised aid came only after Mufti's death at AIIMS in New Delhi.)

Following Mufti's demise, and after prolonged prevarication, his daughter, Mehbooba, occupied the hot seat, but things had already started to drift. The BJP complicated the situation further by backing the controversial proposal for exclusive enclaves for sainiks and Pandits in the Valley, advocating citizenship for West Pakistan refugees settled in Jammu and displaying utter disregard to the signed and agreed 'Agenda of Alliance'.

For the first time since 1947, the Valley began to feel marginalized in the affairs of the state. The BJP was playing every trick to keep its core constituency, Jammu, intact while the PDP couldn't offer any reason to its constituency, Kashmir, to cheer about. Those who voted for the PDP watched their 'darling party' play helpless second fiddle.

With the Modi government hawkish on Pakistan, any hope of a political breakthrough began to die in the public imagination. Shock, disillusionment and a sense of betrayal pushed the Valley populace towards hopelessness.

This hopelessness triggered mass frustration and mass frustration triggered anger. Unfortunately, neither the Mehbooba-led government in Srinagar nor the Modi-led government in New Delhi could gauge the mood of the people.

Frustrations were at a peak and anger was simmering - all it needed was a trigger for Kashmir to explode. That happened on July 8 last year when Burhan, the poster-boy of new-age militancy, was killed in a security operation.

The situation in the Kashmir Valley is bad, very bad indeed - to the extent that it has brought governments in Srinagar and New Delhi to their knees. Yes, to their knees. That's the meaning of the cancellation of the Anantnag election. And yet, New Delhi refuses to understand and acknowledge the reality. The reality is that lookingat Kashmir through the security prism alone will not help.

Opening communication links is the only way. The Modi government can't shy away from it. Mehbooba knows it, and that is why she is repeatedly advocating dialogue, virtually begging for it.

You can't tell the Supreme Court that you will not talk to separatists and then hope that things will improve in Kashmir!

Someone needs to tell New Delhi that if your intention, by not talking to the separatists, is to deny them space, you are miserably mistaken.

The entire space available in Kashmir Valley right now has been occupied by the separatist polity. It is pro-India politics that has no ground beneath its feet here now. So, the offer to talk to separatists will not concede 'unnecessary' space to them. On the other hand, it may grant some relevance to the mainstream political parties.

Similarly, notwithstanding the continued tensions between India and Pakistan along the Line of Control or the international border, the government of India has to initiate a dialogue process at some level with the neighbour. History bears witness that when India and Pakistan talk, Kashmir breathes peacefully. Continued hostility towards Pakistan may help the BJP win a few more elections here and there but it will undoubtedly not help bringing Kashmir back to, at least, where it was before the killing of Burhan Wani.

The author is editor of Kashmir Images

========================================
16. MATA DIN: COWS OR WOMEN, ALL WE HAVE WE OWE TO UDDERS 
by Bachi Karkaria 
========================================
(The Times of India, May 11, 2017) 

Next Sunday is Mother’s Day. Who knows when it will be declared anti-national? It is a surrogate idea, fertilised with Western sperm and surreptitiously implanted into our chaste Hindutva culture, no? Totally illegitimate. Chhee-chhee! Should anti-M Day squads be unleashed, forcibly ripping it out of newspapers, malls and florists in a bloodied abortion? Don’t look wounded, and cry, ‘How you can say this? We are worshipping our mothers only!’ True, but that shouldn’t stop the bigotry brigands from waging a Supermom-sized battle against M Day.

After all, being the land of the shringara rasa hasn’t stopped us from waging a guerrilla war on love. Forget screen kissing, the way anti-Romeo squads have been uprooting couples, you’d think they were Pakistani spies planted in the bushes.

Just see, from where to where all this mother business has gone. It started with Bharat Mata and the singing of Vande Mataram in schools, and now it has spread from pathshala to goshala. What-ji, i’m sounding like those pseudo-sickular, elitist types who are ignorant of the great tradition of cow worship? No-ji, the point i’m trying to make on this Mata ka Din is that gaiyya maiyya and mundane maiyya have always been worshipped in theory but in practice have hardly been treated with the milk of kindness, human or A2. It really gets my goat.

But, hey gais, maybe we no longer have to wait for redress till the cows come home. With so much attention suddenly being showered on the desi dhenu, there may be some hope for the two-legged breed. Imagine an India where bands of mata-worshippers zealously track down and lynch anyone daring to even leer at women, who, after all, are mothers, present or future. Imagine shelters not only for the old and infirm Ma/ Ai/ Ammi, but also for female street children who are invariably foraged upon and become lust-fodder.

No chance. Ba will always be black sheep compared to the holy cow. So, here’s an idea. Instead of sending this foreign Mother’s Day to our new ethnic-cleansing abattoir, why don’t we assimilate it into our superior 5,000-year-old culture, the way we have absorbed so much from our invaders? Gomata Din, Jai Ho!

========================================
17. SUBRAMANIAM ON ANDRADE AND HANG, 'SEA ROVERS, SILVER, AND SAMURAI: MARITIME EAST ASIA IN GLOBAL HISTORY, 1550-1700'
========================================

 Tonio Andrade, Xing Hang, eds. Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550-1700. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016. viii + 386 pp. $69.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8248-5276-4.

Reviewed by Lakshmi Subramaniam (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences)
Published on H-Asia (May, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Subramaniam reviews Andrade, Maritime East Asia

This is a fascinating book of essays that evoke a magical maritime region of ports, nodes, and chokepoints inhabited by sea lords and absentee rulers and lubricated by silver and other commodities. The essays make for a coherent argument about maritime East Asia as a coherent, contested space, constituted by a intriguing array of state structures, informal networks, and eccentric players. In unraveling the complex skeins of this maritime world, the volume not only gives us valuable insights into the workings of a maritime region even less understood than the Indian Ocean, but also offers useful ideas about early modern globalization and the myth of hydrophobic China and persuades us to qualify easy narratives about the West and China and the Great Divergence between the two. Most of this is done by looking at activities of sea lords, especially Zheng Zhilong, better known as Zeng Ling or Koxinga, the sea lord of Fujian whose operations alongside those of European players like the Spanish and the Dutch and English were part of a complex and crucial maritime region that linked multiple trade networks and nodes. Almost all of the sixteen essays refer to Koxinga, his provenance, his exploits and reverses, and his latter-day representations in Asian and European sources and evoke a powerful set of impressions about the dynamics of East Asian maritime space. In a sense this makes the task of the reviewer easier as we can identify some of the key elements in the story through multiple vantage points.

But first we get a quick definition of the spatial configurations of the region, the processes that constituted it historically, and the immediate context for the articulation of a specific maritime regime that was dominated by sea lords or pirates. Their actions were prompted and persuaded by the demand for silver in China and the availability of silver supplies in Japan, and by the attitudes and policies of their rulers. The excellent introduction that prefaces the volume speaks of maritime East Asia as an identifiable physical space located within the South China Seas, bounded by the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean states and constituted by the trade and commodity flows that connected these states with insular and maritime Southeast Asia. The circumstances enabling mutlilateral trade flows largely derived from the official policies of China and Japan about trade—restricting and prohibiting it by regular embargo, occasionally allowing it by extending permission for licensed trading. These policies did not match the economic compulsions of the region, either the demand for Japanese silver in China or the demand for a range of goods (silk, wheat, iron) in China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Consequently, informal networks of traders stepped in to drive a huge trade, albeit illegally, and work within regimes of pirate kings whose protection policies in the littoral and the high seas became rampant and emblematic of a maritime order in the region from the sixteenth century. This was especially striking in the 1620s, which saw the rise of the Zheng family, of Koxinga and his successors whose state in Fujian not only embodied the maritime dynamics of East Asia but also gave the region’s maritime structure a distinct coherence. Xing Hang’s essay, “Bridging the Bipolar Zheng Jing’s Decade in Taiwan,” brings this out brilliantly and demonstrates how bands of Sino-Japanese armed traders became important carriers in the inter-Asian trade. Zhen was able to emerge as a pirate sovereign with immense military and commercial reserves, quite unparalleled in the annals of the Eastern seas and certainly of the Indian Ocean. The question that crops up in this connection is whether Zhen was an exception or whether his operations were part of an established coastal politics that mainland states were disposed to dub as piratical aggression, and in which case would open the larger issue of piracy and maritime power and violence as a significant resource of state building that has remained firmly anchored in territorial obsessions. The question is partially answered in the affirmative, as Peter Shapinsky’s essay refers to important sea lord families of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries offering protection to merchants and envoys. The case of Koxinga, however, was special in that he scaled up the operations, making his rise and fall that much more dramatic. The fall of Koxinga and the ruthless destruction and coastal depopulation of Fujian by the Qing is addressed by Dahpon David Ho in “The Burning Shore Fujian and the Coastal depopulation,” where he uses the episode of Qing retaliation against Fujian to critique the oft-held assumption of Chinese isolationism and disinterest in matters maritime and to consider the potential for early modern state-building strategies.

The energy and intrepidity of Koxinga was acknowledged by the European trading interests in the region, the Spanish in Manila and the Dutch in Southeast Asia, both of whom were important actors in the trading world of the region. Their accounts and representation of piracy and of Koxinga as well as those adopted by the ruling states of China and Korea form the subject matter of a number of the essays in the volume and are especially useful in tracking the hybrid nature of maritime East Asia and of the resilience and strength of local networks that were to hold their own against European technological and military aggression. Shapinsky’s essay, “Envoys and Escorts: Representation and Performance among Koxinga’s Japanese Pirate Ancestors,” unpacks the category of “Japanese pirates,” a category that evolved as Korean and Chinese officials from the fourteenth century represented all those as pirates who controlled the sea lanes between the coast of Guangzhou and the southern coast of Korea and the Seto Island sea at the heart of the Japanese archipelago. These representations predictably overlooked local specificity but carried the potential of defining the maritime world as non-agricultural, uncivilized, and peripheral. It was in any case, as Shapinsky shows, an unstable category. Even more illuminating is how certain perceptions of protection and ambush, popularized by ambassadorial accounts, gave sea lords a clear set of roles and priorities to aim for, thereby resulting in the demarcation of distinct maritime regions and choke points. Shapinsky’s fascinating account of sea lords like Zhen Shungong and Noshima Murakami, and of the negotiations that Chinese and Korean state officials had to employ with them, throws into relief the extraordinary dynamism of the maritime world and the social alliances that were forged between merchants and sea lords, Koxinga himself being an example of Sino-Japanese union.

Piracy, which was clearly an umbrella category that accommodated military power to ensure protection in the seas, preferential trade privileges, and control over vital sea lanes and chokepoints that worked like a state, was then key to the maritime identity of the East Asian region that was simultaneously local and global. Pirates performed crucial cross-cultural diplomacy and legal maneuvers as well. Adam Clulow’s essay on the history of the Breukelen case demonstrates how the Tokugawa regime responded to a claim made by Chinese merchants for an attack on a ship off the Vietnamese coast and how Nagasaki emerged as a legal node in the seventeenth century. Clearly this was an integrated maritime world where legal borders and jurisdiction were able to thwart European military incursions. The exploits of Koxinga in particular became fodder for later and retrospective acts of remembering; we have Peter Kang’s fine essay on how Koxinga was portrayed in Taiwan by opposing sides and how he was at once nationalist and anti-imperialist. The essay explores professional and popular histories of Taiwan, including comic books to reflect on history and memory and the process of memorialization, and observes how the celebration of Chinese maritime energies and achievements synchronizes well with Taiwan’s successful export-led growth. 

The volume thus makes a strong case for looking closely at the East Asian maritime region, whose dynamics were closely imbricated in the interface between the politics of the established empires of China, Japan, and Korea, and the workings of informal networks of merchants and sea lords who dominated the sea lanes between these three entities and the pull of global market economies represented by the Europeans--the Spanish and the Dutch in particular. Thus, if monsoon sailing schedules and the goods for bullion model explained the unity of the Indian Ocean world, then armed trading and protection and complex alignments between traders and sea lords gave East Asia a very distinct unity and coherence that in all probability found changing reincarnations in the following centuries. Piracy here was thus much more than what the term connoted in its European context. What one regrets in the volume, however, is its curious indifference to the potential of a comparative perspective on piracy and the world of trade in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Now that we have an important corpus of scholarship on piracy and its linkages with law, sovereignty, and markets, it would be useful to integrate the East Asian experience to push the frontiers of research on the politics of predation, especially in the centuries of transition. That the world of Asian trade was able to deflect the onslaught of European aggression and commercial demands until the very end of the eighteenth century is a point well established and well taken. It is perhaps time for us to reopen the larger questions of modernity, power, accumulation, and resistance by looking comparatively at the idea of space and its configurations, of society and polity—if not from the bottom up, then at least laterally, from the margins of the coast to the hinterland. In short, it is time to look at littoral spaces and their globalizing potential.

========================================
18. MILLER ON PIETIKAINEN, 'MADNESS: A HISTORY'
========================================
Reviewed by Ian Miller (University of Ulster)
Published on H-Disability (May, 2017)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

In Madness: A History, Petteri Pietikainen provides the first monograph-length study of the history of mental illness from antiquity to the present since Edward Shorter published his extensive A History of Psychiatry back in 1997. Madness differs from Shorter’s work, Pietikainen suggests, as the author is more willing to consider mental illness history beyond the environmental determinist perspectives of biological psychiatry. Instead, Pietikainen seeks to draw from a richer methodology base and pay closer attention to patient narratives and experiences (Shorter was quite wary of sociological models that threatened to reduce mental illness to a “myth” or social construct).

An up-to-date textbook on mental illness is certainly welcome, particularly one that incorporates the ever-expanding amount of research and publications on mental health history. A key strength of Madness is its synthesis of decades of increasingly detailed and nuanced research. When Shorter published his book, the history of psychiatry was still very much tackling the implications of structuralist accounts, such as Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady (1985) and Andrew Scull’s Museums of Madness (1979). These connected the social and economic histories of (Western) madness to feminist and neo-Marxist agendas respectively. Pietikainen’s Madness demonstrates the more diverse ways in which mental health history is now reflected upon. He concedes that mental illness cannot be reduced to a social fabrication to be erased by tackling negative social structures, values, and norms, and argues that mental disorder is also influenced by changes and problems in human biology—what Pietikainen considers to be the “reality” of mental disorder.

This approach mostly works. Pietikainen commences Madness by examining mental illness up to the Enlightenment, offering insight into the major epistemological shifts in understanding mental disorder in this period. While acknowledging the need to consider the biological reality of mental problems, at times, I remain a little unconvinced by the occasional integration of distinctively twenty-first-century approaches to understanding past maladies. For instance, in his examination of eighteenth-century “dancing mania” (a European-wide phenomenon in which relentless dancing, often to the point of exhaustion and death, spread in a contagious fashion), Pietikainen argues that the problem was most likely a “collective stress reaction” of the lower social classes to physical and spiritual anguish and despair caused by famine, diseases, and poor harvests (p. 43). This may well have been the case, but transposing twentieth- and twenty-first-century diagnostic categories onto past conditions is a precarious approach and one that, at times in this book, can distract a little from an otherwise thorough, thought-provoking, and clearly written synthesis of a vast subject.

Pietikainen is at his best when assessing the values and approaches of past societies and demonstrates a keen eye for areas of critical interest to scholars and students: possession, exorcism, witchcraft. The emphasis here, for the most part, is on Western medicine. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; to attempt to cover the entire world in full depth would have diluted the fine layers of detail that Pietikainen provides. Pietikainen occasionally provides fascinating glimpses into mental health-care systems in contexts such as medieval Islamic medicine and, later, Argentina during the military junta of the 1970s and 1980s, which add richness, rather than distraction, to his story.

Madness continues by examining the nineteenth-century rise of the “lunatic asylum” and the transformation of mental disorder into a medical condition to be cured by trained specialists (or “alienists”) in an institution. Pietikainen maintains his integrative approach by assessing the psychiatrists who treated patients, their diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal, and, where possible, the perspectives of patients themselves. Considerable space is given to the changing nature of mental diagnosis over time internationally.

Asylums are a well-trodden area. Indeed, medical historians seem to never tire of examining asylums. Nonetheless, Pietikainen draws together a rich literature in a clear, accessible manner. Surprisingly little attention is given to gender, an omission all the more noticeable given the centrality of debates between Showalter and other scholars, including Joan Busfield, not to mention the implications of conditions such as shell shock for expert and public thought on the gendering of mental disorder. Pietkainen is perhaps correct to avoid the excesses of feminist prescriptiveness inherent in some earlier research in this area, but those scholars were justified in pointing out significant gendered dimensions of mental health care which was replete with very “real” ideas, discourses, and practices with implications (often negative ones) for female patients. Similarly missing is sustained discussion of the impact of psychiatric practices on other marginalized groups, most notably homosexuals and immigrants. While it would be wrong to pick out inevitable omissions in a textbook with space limitations, these do seem to be areas of critical importance that help us better understand the nature of psychiatric thought and practice, its capturing of sexual and “moral” behavior, and the persistent impact of subjective sociocultural ideas on problematic implications for patients.

Madness closes with a detailed discussion of twentieth-century activities in mental health: the rise of problematic technologies (e.g., electroconvulsive therapy, coma therapy), de-carceration, and the pharmacological revolution. In many ways, this is the strongest section of the book. Perhaps due to a (comparative) lack of secondary material in these areas, Pietkainen relies more extensively on his own readings of primary texts and analyzes patient experiences more extensively than in other sections of the book.

Overall, Pietikainen’s Madness is a useful addition to mental health history. Its strengths rest in its impressive synthesis of a voluminous, ever-expanding historiography that covers the subject from antiquity to the present from an international perspective. Pietikainen adopts a big-picture approach that skillfully draws from a plethora of micro-histories and local studies to form opinion on the historical role of psychiatry and the nature of mental illness itself. Madness will prove of interest to scholars and students alike. 

========================================
19. WORLD BANK FUDGES ON INEQUALITY
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury
========================================
Inter Press Service

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007. Anis Chowdhury, a former professor of economics at the University of Western Sydney, held senior United Nations positions during 2008–2015 in New York and Bangkok.

KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY, May 9 2017 (IPS) - The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – collectively drafted and then officially agreed to, at the highest level, by all Member States of the United Nations in September 2015 – involves specific targets to be achieved mainly by 2030. The Agenda seeks to “leave no-one behind” and claims roots in universal human rights. Thus, addressing inequalities and discrimination is central to the SDGs. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016: Taking on Inequality is the World Bank’s first annual report tracking progress towards the two key SDGs on poverty and inequality.

Annual reporting on poverty, inequality
This particular report evaluates progress towards reducing extreme poverty to 3% of the global population and sustaining per capita income growth of the bottom 40% of the population faster than the national average. According to the Bank, with global economic growth slowing, reduction of income inequality will be necessary to ending poverty and enhancing shared prosperity.

The report focuses on inequality, which was generally neglected until fairly recently by most international organizations other than the UN itself. It provides some useful analyses of inequality, including discussion of its causes. However, it does not explain its claim of a modest partial reversal of previously growing inequality in the years 2008-2013 which it examines.

However, the report’s policy recommendations are surprisingly limited, perhaps because it neither analyses nor proposes measures to address wealth inequality, which is much greater than and greatly influences income inequality. Although it recognizes that increasing minimum wages and formalizing employment can contribute to reducing income inequalities, it does not talk about the determinants of wages, working conditions and employment. It also has nothing to say about land reform – an important factor contributing to shared prosperity in East Asia, China, Vietnam, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

Its discussion of fiscal consolidation’s impact on inequality is misleading, even claiming, “European Union (EU) countries have embarked on comprehensive fiscal consolidations based on clear equity considerations in response to the 2008–09 financial crisis”. This implies that fiscal consolidation yields long-run equity gains at the cost of short-run pains which can be cushioned by safety-net measures – a finding contrary to International Monetary Fund (IMF) research findings!

Instead of the more conventional inequality measures such as the Gini coefficient or the more innovative Atkinson index, the World Bank has promoted “boosting the bottom 40 percent”. Yet, in much of its discussion, the report abandons this indicator in favour of the Gini index. Nevertheless, the report dwells on its “shared prosperity premium”, defined as the difference between the increased income of the bottom 40% and the growth in mean income.

Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2017 implies labour market regulations adversely impact inequality, even though it admits that they can “reduce the risk of job loss and support equity and social cohesion”. Yet, the report promotes fixed term contracts with minimal benefits and severance pay requirements.

The Bank’s Doing Business Report 2017 also implies that lower business regulation results in lower inequality. It claims this on the basis of negative associations between Gini coefficients and scores for starting a business and resolving insolvency. However, curiously, it does not discuss the association between other Doing Business scores, e.g., paying tax or getting credit, etc., and the Gini index.

Recent progress?
About two-thirds of the 83 countries analysed had a shared prosperity premium during 2008-2013, a period characterized by asset price collapses and sharply increased youth unemployment in many OECD economies. This unrepresentative sample is uneven among regions, and surprisingly, even some large rich countries such as Japan, South Korea and Canada are missing.

Recognizing that the shared prosperity premium is generally low, the report concedes that “the goal of ending poverty by 2030 cannot be reached at current levels of economic growth” and that “reduction of inequality will be key to reaching the poverty goal”.

The global Gini index has declined since the 1990s due to rapidly rising incomes in China and India, while within-country inequality has generally increased. More optimistically, the Bank notes that Gini coefficients fell in five of seven world regions during 2008-2013 despite or perhaps because of much slower growth. The report notes that the “progress is all the more significant given that it has taken place in a period marked by the global financial crisis of 2008-09”. As others have noted, the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession may have only temporarily reversed growing inequality.

Greek tragedy
After very impressive growth for a decade, the Greek economy went into recession in 2008-2009, together with other European countries. With severe austerity measures imposed by the EU and the IMF as bailout conditions, Greece fell into a full-blown depression with various adverse income and distributional impacts.

The report finds that the greatest increase of inequality during 2008-2013 occurred in Greece, where the mean household income of the bottom 40% shrunk by an average of 10% annually. Fortunately, as the Bank notes, some measures – such as lump sum transfers, introduced in 2014 for low-income families and the vulnerable, along with ‘emergency’ property taxes – “prevented additional surges in inequality”.

Brazil progress at risk
Brazil is the most significant of its five “best performers” in narrowing income inequality, with its Gini coefficient falling from 0.63 in 1989 to 0.51 in 2014. The report attributes four-fifths of the decline in inequality in 2003-2013 to “labor market dynamics” and social program expansion. Alarmingly, the new government has threatened to end regular minimum wage increases and to limit social program expenditure.

“Labor market dynamics” – deemed far more important by other analysts – include regular minimum wage increases, formalization of unprotected workers and strengthened collective bargaining rights. Social pensions and other social program benefits account for much more of the decline in inequality than the much touted Bolsa Familia.

The report makes recommendations on six “high-impact strategies”: early childhood development, universal health coverage, universal access to quality education, cash transfers to the poor, rural infrastructure and progressive taxation. While certainly not objectionable, the recommendations do not always draw on and could easily have been made without the preceding analysis.

========================================
20. BRAZIL, INTERVIEW: MST LEADER JOAO PEDRO STEDILE - ‘WE NEED DIRECT ELECTIONS NOW AND AN EMERGENCY PLAN FOR THE PEOPLE’
by Joana Tavares
========================================
(The Dawn News,  May 18, 2017 Source: Brasil de Fato)

Joao Pedro Stedile, leader of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and of the People’s Brazil Front, analyzes the Brazilian political scenario, the role of the O Globo media network, the internal divisions among the putschists, and speaks about the need of building a transition government and the people’s project of Brazil.

Brasil de Fato: Why does the Globo network need to publish the audios that incriminate Michel Temer and why do they insist on indirect elections?

João Pedro Stédile: The Globo network became the main party of the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Ir protects the interests of capital, uses its force of manipulation of public opinion and coordinates with the ideological sectors of the bourgeoisie, which include the Judiciary Power, some procurators, and the press in general. They know that Brazil and the world are going through a serious economic, social and environmental crisis, caused by capitalism. That, in Brazil, became a political crisis, because the bourgeoisie needed to have hegemony in Congress and in the federal government in order to apply their plans to put all of the negative effects of the crisis on the shoulders of the working class. Therefore, the Globo network is an ideological author of the coup.

To them, putting Temer in power after Dilma’s impeachment was a faux pas, since his gang is full of lumpen politicians, opportunists and corrupts, who weren’t concerned with the bourgeois project for the country–they merely cared about their own pockets. The “weak meat” operation was another faux pas that helped discredit the PMDB (Temer’s party) since many of them were involved and ended up provoking a sector of the agroexporting bourgeoisie. Now they need to create an alternative to Temer. The way out of this will be decided over the next few hours or days, whether he resigns, or is judged by the Supreme Electoral Court or if the impeachment requests that were submitted to Congress are passed. Over the next few days the successor will be chosen, and many factors will influence that. The outcome won’t be the fruit of some Machiavellian plan by a particular sector (like Globo) but of the class struggle, and how that struggle plays out over the next hours, days and weeks.

How is the putschist sector reacting?

The sector that reached power through the coup is internally divided since 2014. And that helps us. Because in previous coups, like the 1964 one, and during the 1994 government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the bourgeoisie was united, under a single command, a single project for the country and a strong rearguard in US capital. Now, they don’t have a project for the country, they lost their US rearguard (because they were allied with Hillary Clinton) and want to salvatage only their own particular interest. In the words of José de Souza Martins, sociologist of the PSDB party, “reforms in retirement and labor policies are capitalist measures that increase exploitation of workers, but they’re also measures that go against a capitalist project for the country’.

The putschists also don’t have a unified command. They’re divided into the sector with economic power (which includes Minister of Finance Henrique Meirelles, and the company that denounced Temer, JBS), the group of PMDB lumpens (Romero Jupé, Eliseu Padilha, Temer himself, Moreira Franco), who have power over the law but are beginning to crack, like Renan Calheiros. There’s also an ideological group made up of Globo and the Judiciary Power, but there are many internal contradictions among them. That’s also why they don’t know who to put in place of Temer. Their ideal solution would be to take Lula out of the picture, make a transition government that the majority of the population accepts (it could be even led by Minister Cármen Lúcia) until October 2018, and then try to win the elections.

But their internal division also affects the candidacies, since they can’t manage to construct a candidate like Henrique Cardoso or Fernando Collor. They’re testing the public opinion, presenting João Doria (current Mayor of Sao Paulo) or Luciano Hulk. But the polls show they’re not viable and they know they would deepen the political crisis.

In this context, what can workers and people’s organizations do?

We, at the People’s Brazil Front,  which is made up of over 80 people’s movements and political organizations, are debating since last year that the best interest of the working class is in a packet of measures that complement each other.

First of all, to take the putschists down and suspend every legislative measure they have taken against the people. Then, having a transition government that calls to presidential elections on October 2017 and discussing a way to make an immediate political reform that guarantees that the will of the people is respected, and voting for a new Congress.

Another item is for the new government to commit to convene an Exclusive Constituent Assembly to build a new “Emergency Plan for the People” which includes over 70 emergency measures that the transition government and the new government will have to implement, which we believe would take the country out of the economic, social and political crisis.

During the electoral campaign we need to discuss a new model for the country, which takes into account the need for structural reforms in the mid-to-long-term, such as a tax reform, a reform of media, the agrarian reform and a reform of the Judiciary Power itself. But in order for all of this to be possible, the masses need to take to the streets urgently. The strength of the people is exercised there, in mobilizations, occupations and pressure.

I believe that over the next few hours and days there will be plenary sessions to discuss specific dates for mobilizations. On our side, we believe that next week is decisive. We need to camp outside the Supreme Federal Court in order to ensure the putschists resign and the corrupt officials denounced by Joesley Batista go to prison. We need to make mobilizations in all capitals and big cities next Sunday 21. We need to transform May 24 into a nation-wide mobilizations, occupy Legislative Assemblies, routes, everything. The people needs to take the lead and put pressure to achieve the changes we need.

Can direct elections benefit the country? How? Who would the candidates be?

Of course, direct elections for President and for a new Congress are indispensable for democracy and to get the country out of the political crisis. Only through urns can we attain a government that represents the majority and has the legitimacy to make changes for the people that also allow us to leave behind the economic crisis. Because the economic crisis is the foundation of the whole social and political crisis. The candidate of the working class is Lula da Silva, who represents the vast majority of the Brazilian people, and can commit to a project of change and support our emergency plan.

There will probably be other candidates, like Bolsonaro, who represents the far-right, and Marina Silva, who tries to attract a centrist electorate, but her real voter base is only the Assemblies of God Church. The tucanos are in crisis, because ALckmin is involved in several denounces. Doria is a cheap playboy. And the Globo network hasn’t had time to create an alternative, like Collor was in 1989.

What’s the way to prevent the backlash of the putschist agenda?

To mobilize, fight, and not leave the streets. We need to work in the upcoming days on the possibility of a general strike with indefinite durations. All of our social militancy and the readers of this newspaper need to be in a state of alert, since the next few days will be decisive to define the destiny of the country. The strength of the working class is only expressed on the streets.

========================================
21. RUSSIA IS GETTING A PATRIOTIC COUNCIL TO FIGHT 'CULTURAL EXTREMISM'
========================================
(The Moscow Times - May 16, 2017

The Russian parliament is getting a new council to advise the country's top officials on morality, patriotism and "cultural extremism."
The new State Duma Council for Culture, Religion and Interethnic Relations will report to Parliamentary Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, Russian tabloid Izvestia reported Tuesday.
Its remit is expected to include monitoring society's "moral climate," "preventing cultural extremism" and promoting "patriotic education," sources told the outlet.
One of Volodin's voluntary advisers, church representative Alexander Shchipkov, confirmed the creation of the new board. 
Members will be appointed to the council in a closed session within the coming week, Izvestia reported.

========================================
22. IS INDONESIA TEETERING TOWARDS THEOCRACY?
by John McBeth
========================================
(Asia Times - May 15, 2017)
The conviction and jailing of Jakarta governor Basuki Purnama for blasphemy caps a rising trend of Islamic intolerance

Moderate Muslim leaders and human rights groups have renewed calls to scrap Indonesia’s 1965 blasphemy law following last week’s conviction and imprisonment of ethnic-Chinese Jakarta governor Basuki “Ahok” Purnama for his controversial reference to a verse in the Koran.

The growing use of the law, enshrined in Indonesia’s Criminal Code, inhibits free speech and has marginalized Christians, minority sect Muslims and other groups in a country whose secular Constitution clearly protects religious freedom.

This week’s influential Tempo magazine, in an editorial claiming the Pernama verdict has badly damaged the country’s reputation as a democratic, moderate and tolerant nation, asks provocatively: “One worrying question that emerges is whether Indonesia is turning into a theocracy.”

It’s a question worth asking amid a rising trend of religious intolerance. Analysts like University of Melbourne scholar Abdil Mughis Mudhoffir believe political elites are playing with fire by increasingly exploiting religious sentiments and racism ahead of the 2019 legislative and presidential elections.

A protest on Saturday against a visit to Christian-dominated North Sulawesi by deputy parliamentary speaker Fahri Hamzah, a member of the Sharia-based Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS), showed the potential for widening polarization on religious lines. 

On May 9, a Jakarta court sentenced Purnama to two years’ imprisonment for blasphemy, despite prosecutors reducing the charge to hate speech the day after the incumbent governor’s resounding defeat in the gubernatorial election’s run-off.

That alone would appear to be promising grounds for an appeal. But the court’s surprise decision to order Purnama’s immediate arrest means he will remain in jail during the appeal process and unable to serve out his remaining six months in office.

There was no dissenting opinion among the five judges, not all of whom were Muslim. Tempo’s op-ed said: “No question the blasphemy article was used as a political tool. The poorly-defined article can be used by anyone to throw a person in jail who dares question religious definitions.”

Most analysts blame Purnama’s surprisingly heavy election loss on the four-month trial and a coordinated campaign by Islamic hardliners and self-serving politicians determined to prevent the election of Jakarta’s first Christian governor.

Purnama assumed the post in 2014 after then governor Joko Widodo went on to win the Indonesian presidency in a close contest with Great Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) leader Prabowo Subianto, who had ironically supported the pair in the 2012 gubernatorial race.

The blasphemy law was used only eight times up until the end of former authoritarian president Suharto’s 32-year rule in 1998. But the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace lists 89 blasphemy cases since then –  all of them during the 2004-2014 tenure of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono puts the number higher at 106 as the Yudhoyono administration inexplicably expanded the Attorney-General Office’s (AGO) blasphemy law offices across the country.

He points to Yudhoyono’s 2006 creation of a so-called “religious harmony forum” under which “the majority should protect the minority and the minorities should respect the majority.”

In a country where the Muslim majority – 88% of the 260 million-strong archipelago’s population – often acts like a minority, there was only one way that was going to turn out with an estimated 1,000 Christian churches closed during the next decade.

In addition to notoriously intolerant religious affairs minister, Suryadharma Ali, one of Yudhoyono’s key advisers was Ma’ruf Amin, the director of the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI), which issued edicts against secularism, pluralism and liberalism.

An Acehnese woman gets whipped for spending time in close proximity with a man who is not her husband, which is against Sharia law in the city of Jantho, Aceh province on March 10, 2017. Indonesia's only province to impose sharia law caned Buddhists for the first time, after two men accused of cockfighting opted for punishment under the strict Islamic regulations. / AFP PHOTO / CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN

The council also threw its support behind a highly-inflammatory 2008 fatwa banning the propagation of Ahmadiyah teachings that played no small part in the violence that followed against the tiny Islamic sect.

In turning MUI into a quasi-state institution, Yudhoyono effectively handed control of religion and its impact on public life to a conservative lobby that went on to demonstrate its dislike of the trappings of secular Indonesia, including an edict against celebrating Valentine’s Day.

All convicted without exception, most of the blasphemy victims have been adherents of minority religions, including Shi’a and Gafatar, a tiny Kalimantan community whose three leaders were given harsh five-year jail terms for blasphemy last March.

The 2,000-strong Gafatar have been the target of repression for practicing so-called “deviant teachings” which combine Islam with Christian and Jewish beliefs — something even moderate mainstream Muslims find hard to accept. They were charged in part because they did not consider prayer obligatory, as emphasized in the Koran.

Other blasphemy victims have included Sufi, one of whose followers died recently in Medan Prison, and defendants as diverse as a declared atheist and a Muslim teacher who used the Malay rather than Arabic language for the Shahadah, an Islamic creed.

Most of the blasphemy cases have been brought in Aceh, the only province permitted to practice Sharia law, and in West Sumatra, West Java and Madura, where Islamists, politicians and police have joined forces to target minorities in the name of maintaining public order.

In Aceh, Muslim lecturer Rosnida Sari was forced to flee the province after being threatened by fellow lecturers and clerics for inviting her students to hold a dialogue in a Catholic church to improve religious understanding.

Another prominent case, highlighted by Amnesty International, was that of Tajul Muluk, a Shi’a Muslim leader from East Java, who was jailed for four years in 2012 after Sunni clerics called his teachings “deviant” and mobs drove his followers from their homes.

President Widodo has done little to reverse the discriminatory policies and practices. Instead, he has sought the help of the two mass Muslim organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, to counter the rise of the conservative lobby.

That has clearly failed, in large part because neither of the two organizations have widely respected leaders of the caliber of the late Nurholish Majid and ex-president Abdurrahman Wahid, who led the campaign for a democratic Islam.

After the Purnama verdict, Hidayat Nur Wahid, the speaker of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), Indonesia’s highest law-making body, said repealing the blasphemy law could spark a revival of communism — a bogeyman still used to influence public opinion.

A former PKS chairman, Wahid may have been firing a shot across the bows of Widodo, who had to fight off rumors during the 2014 presidential campaign that his parents were members of the murderously purged Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).

Aides fear those same rumors may surface again when Widodo seeks a second term in 2019 in what is shaping into another tight race with opposition leader Prabowo, who supported on the winds of intolerance winning Jakarta gubernatorial candidate Anies Baswaden and now feels emboldened to run again.


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

     #####
    #### _\_  ________
    ##=-[.].]| \      \
    #(    _\ |  |------|
     #   __| |  ||||||||
      \  _/  |  ||||||||
   .--'--'-. |  | ____ |
  / __      `|__|[o__o]|
_(____nm_______ /____\____ 

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