SACW - 30 May 2017 | Nepal turns the corner / Bangladesh: Lady Justice Statue vs Fundos / Kashmir: Hard Choices Only / Pakistan: secular myth / India: War Porn; Lynch mob republic / Russia: vigilante informants making a comeback
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Mon May 29 14:40:03 EDT 2017
South Asia Citizens Wire - 30 May 2017 - No. 2938
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]
Contents:
1. Kashmir: Hard Choices Only | Pervez Hoodbhoy
2. Bangladesh: The govt should not have removed the Lady Justice Statue from its initial location and should now firmly stand up against fundamentalists
3. Pakistan: The secular myth | Afiya Shehrbano
4. India - Rise of war porn: The hyper-nationalism being unleashed today has electoral rather than strategic considerations | Manoj Joshi
5. India: Lynch mob republic
- India: A nation of vigilantes - Lynch mob republic | Mukul Kesavan
- India: Virulent vegetarians | Manini Chatterjee
- India: Our own Animal Farm | Pamela Philipose
- India: Over to the vigilante | Christophe Jaffrelot
6. The dark side of India’s self-styled godmen | Murali Krishnan
7. Recent on Communalism Watch:
- India: Stiffer cow slaughter laws may save cattle but what about people? (Aakar Patel)
- India: 7 men of Vishwa Hindu Parishad held for setting Banjara man’s truck ablaze in Bhilwara
- Vigilantes In India: Protecting Sacred Cows, Promoting A Hindu Way Of Life | Julie McCarthy - National Public Radio
- India: Javed Jaffrey’s shayari on intolerance
- India: How Jayaprakash Narayan Helped the RSS Overcome Its Stigmatic Past (Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay)
- Secularism and the State - the Nehru Model | Anil Nauriya
- India: AAP leader moves Supreme Court seeking protection of life, citing threat from ‘Right-wing bodies’
- India: Do not blame Nehru for today’s communalism | Apoorvanand (27 May 2017)
- India: Nehru against Nehruvians | Rajeev Bhargava
- India: RSS Controlled Garbh Vigyan Sanskar in pursuit for “Master Race”
- How national narratives have obscured the history of India’s most controversial king (Excerpt from Audrey Truschke's Blog)
- India: How RSS plans to take over West Bengal (Snigdhendu Bhattacharya and Dipanjan Sinha in HT)
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
8. Nepal turns the corner | Kanak Mani Dixit
9. India: A bleak outlook - The road to mob rule in Uttar Pradesh | Ramachandra Guha
10. 'Enemy property': India's answer to Trump wants to raze Pakistan founder's home | Vidhi Doshi
11. India: Army faces a tough mob in front of it. But it has more to fear from the mob behind it, egging it on | Pratap Bhanu Mehta
12. India: ’Naxalbari’ - Fifty years later | Pritam Singh
13. Increasing rhetoric on women’s rights in Iran: a positive sign or a mere campaign tool? | Ava Homa
14. The Whisperers: vigilante informants are making a comeback in Russian society | Alisa Kustikova
15. USA: Meet the Nerds Coding Their Way Through the Afghanistan War | Issie Lapowsky
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1. KASHMIR: HARD CHOICES ONLY
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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Kashmiri nationalists must realise the grave dangers of giving more space to religious extremists
http://www.sacw.net/article13284.html
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2. BANGLADESH: THE GOVT SHOULD NOT HAVE REMOVED THE LADY JUSTICE STATUE FROM ITS INITIAL LOCATION AND SHOULD NOW FIRMLY STAND UP AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISTS
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The removal and then re-installation of the Lady of Justice statue within 24 hours shows signs of a confused govt against fundamentalist demands. The govt should now resolutely stand up against Hefazat-e-Islam
http://www.sacw.net/article13281.html
[see also: Bangladesh “Gay Party” Raid Flouts Privacy Rights - Human Rights Watch, May 25, 2017 https://tinyurl.com/ybyne7bs ]
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3. PAKISTAN: THE SECULAR MYTH
by Afiya Shehrbano
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Debates around secularism often follow religious wars or conflict and, like many countries, Pakistan also faces this dilemma.
http://www.sacw.net/article13273.html
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4. INDIA - RISE OF WAR PORN: THE HYPER-NATIONALISM BEING UNLEASHED TODAY HAS ELECTORAL RATHER THAN STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS | MANOJ JOSHI
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But the politicians should beware. History has shown that it is easy to start a war, but very, very difficult to figure out how it will end. This fantasy lust for war must end
http://www.sacw.net/article13283.html
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5. INDIA: LYNCH MOB REPUBLIC
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INDIA: A NATION OF VIGILANTES - LYNCH MOB REPUBLIC
by Mukul Kesavan
Yogi Adityanath’s provincial government is the first fruit of this fusion of the State and the street. Adityanath is best understood as Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Vigilante. His democratic mandate legitimizes his private vigilante militia, the Hindu Yuva Vahini. The anti-Romeo squads who police Hindu-Muslim romance, the cow goondas who patrol UP’s highways attacking cattle transporters and butchers are examples of the state government of India’s most populous province informally sub-contracting out law enforcement functions to avowedly Hindu militias.
http://www.sacw.net/article13279.html
INDIA: VIRULENT VEGETARIANS | Manini Chatterjee
First they went after slaughterhouses. Then they turned to meat shops. Next they will invade our kitchens. That is not all. Yesterday beef was taboo. Today it is mutton. Tomorrow it will be fish and fowl, and eggs too. Let us be warned. The vigilantes are on the rampage and Uttar Pradesh is only their latest stomping ground.
http://www.sacw.net/article13193.html
INDIA: OUR OWN ANIMAL FARM | Pamela Philipose
In all the states where the BJP is now in power, there is a smoothly functioning patronage system for cow protection, not just in terms of large outlays for cow shelters and the like, but through a lower bureaucracy and police that extend all possible assistance for such activities, from issuing licences to cow protectees to ensuring that criminal action is largely reserved for the alleged “cow smugglers/thieves” rather than their murderous, extortionist assaulters.
http://www.sacw.net/article13262.html
INDIA: OVER TO THE VIGILANTE | Christophe Jaffrelot
vigilantism has grown so fast in the last few years that its new forms differ not just in degree from the earlier versions, but also in kind.
http://www.sacw.net/article13282.html
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6. THE DARK SIDE OF INDIA’S SELF-STYLED GODMEN | Murali Krishnan
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An increasing number of so-called "spiritual" gurus or "godmen" in India are implicated in ghastly crimes ranging from sexual abuse to murder. Murali Krishnan from New Delhi explores the reasons behind it.
http://www.sacw.net/article13272.html
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7. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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- India: Hindutva's leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar - collaborated with British rulers & had a role in Gandhi's assasination
- India: Stiffer cow slaughter laws may save cattle but what about people? (Aakar Patel)
- India: 7 men of Vishwa Hindu Parishad held for setting Banjara man’s truck ablaze in Bhilwara
- Vigilantes In India: Protecting Sacred Cows, Promoting A Hindu Way Of Life | Julie McCarthy - National Public Radio
- India: Javed Jaffrey’s shayari on intolerance
- India: How Jayaprakash Narayan Helped the RSS Overcome Its Stigmatic Past (Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay)
- Secularism and the State - the Nehru Model | Anil Nauriya
- India: AAP leader moves Supreme Court seeking protection of life, citing threat from ‘Right-wing bodies’
- India: Do not blame Nehru for today’s communalism | Apoorvanand (27 May 2017)
- India: Nehru against Nehruvians | Rajeev Bhargava
- India: RSS Controlled Garbh Vigyan Sanskar in pursuit for “Master Race”
- How national narratives have obscured the history of India’s most controversial king (Excerpt from Audrey Truschke's Blog)
- India: How RSS plans to take over West Bengal (Snigdhendu Bhattacharya and Dipanjan Sinha in HT)
- Bangladesh: The govt surrenders to demands Muslim fundamentalists of Hefajat and removes the statue of the Greek Goddess of Justice Themis at the Supreme Court
- India: BJP MP Paresh Rawal’s tweet against Arundhati Roy amounts to incitement of violence
- India: Why the BJP must fear its own fringe (Abhijit V. Banerjee)
- India: Hindu Far Right outfit Sanathan Sanstha (SS) sends ina written death threat to Ashish Khetan, former Journalist and leader of Aam Adami Party
- India: Scrap Reference to ‘Anti-Muslim’ Riots, Vajpayee’s Lesson in ‘Rajdharma’ to Modi, NCERT Told (Akshaya Mukul in The Wire)
- India: Intermarry and be damned. 2 Parsi women challenge bias (Bachi Karkaria)
- Anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar
- Indian textbooks, a disturbing whitewashing of the worst communal riots since Independence
- South Asian Societies: Intolerance on Rise
- The growing business of religion in India (Pranav Gupta & Sanjay Kumar)
-> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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8. NEPAL TURNS THE CORNER
Kanak Mani Dixit
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(The Hindu - May 20, 2017)
If there were more curiosity about Nepal in Delhi circles, there’d be fewer geopolitical blunders and self-goals
Many Western diplomats and development-walas, cheered on by their Kathmandu plaudits, tend to portray Nepal as a failed or failing state. The alternative view would describe a resilient polity finding its balance despite the chicanery of national politicians and unremitting external interventionism.
Nepal emerged in 2006 from the under the weight of Maoist killings and state atrocities to finally promulgate a Constitution in September 2015, overcoming the suffocating embrace of Western aid agencies and overt activism of Indian diplomats and intelligence-walas. It has had to contend with the Great Earthquake of 2015 and the Great Blockade of the same year, and an almost-successful attempt at state takeover by a narcissistic anti-corruption czar. Last month saw the drama of an attempt to impeach the upright Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Sushila Karki.
The citizens at the grassroots had been prevented from choosing their representatives for two full decades, which bureaucratised and corrupted local administration and prevented the injection of new blood into politics. However, overcoming these obstacles, Nepal has finally arrived at the vitally important local level (village, town and city) elections.
Caretaker Parliament
The polls, whose first phase happened on May 14 and the second stage is scheduled for June 14, mark a step towards implementing Nepal’s new Constitution. Within the next year, this needs to be followed with elections for seven newborn provincial councils, and national parliamentary elections. Nepal will have ‘normalised’ only when the present oversized House, an extension of the Constituent Assembly elected in 2013, is replaced by the new Parliament.
The gravest danger of recent times has been the attempt to divide the citizenry between hill pahadiya and plains madhesi, but fortunately the fight has remained one between the plains-based ‘Madhes-baadi’ parties and the Kathmandu state. While the plains politicians, many of whom lost elections in 2013 and don’t have a seat in Parliament, have created endless hurdles in attempts to implement the Constitution, the ‘national’ politicians of Kathmandu refuse to exhibit the inclusive spirit that permeates the new charter they themselves adopted.
The Constitution has bad press in India because, rather than read the document, New Delhi’s observers have preferred to follow MEA’s geopolitical positioning (which ‘noted’ rather than welcomed the promulgation). The Constitution has impressive progressive features adopted through due democratic process, but because it was written by politicians rather than jurists, applying the provisions will be a great challenge.
As far as local bodies are concerned, the Constitution provides unprecedented executive, legislative and judicial powers to village and urban units. Three provinces having already voted on May 14, the second stage involves four provinces that include within them all of the Terai plains. The plains-based parties, which recently coalesced into the Rastriya Janata Party (RJP), have been able to manipulate the weaknesses of the present Nepali Congress-Maoist coalition government to force unconscionable compromises in conduct of the elections.
More importantly, as this is being written, the RJP leaders seek to shift the goalposts between the first and second phase of elections. Through immediate amendment to the Constitution, running roughshod over parliamentary procedure, they want to increase the number of local bodies units in the plains, adjust the electoral college system for the Upper House, and redefine the boundaries of the newly minted provinces — essentially setting a Lakshman Rekha between hill and plain.
All of which is a travesty of constitutionalism, as the proper entity for amendment of provisions of substance would be the newly elected Parliament rather than the caretaker House of today. Among other things, redrawing of boundaries should require concurrence of the federal units concerned, rather than be a matter of unilateral decision by the centre.
The borderlands
Seen from the vantage of Kathmandu, India very much wants to be a world player but has failed to build a global voice even in these times of geopolitical and economic convulsion. From Brexit to the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative and the multiple crises from Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa, few seem to be asking for New Delhi’s position and perspective. And it remains intriguing that for its massive presence at the centre of the Subcontinent, India is not able to take South Asia together on its plans.
One possible reason for this state of affairs is that members of New Delhi’s civil society, including its hallowed commentators, have a tradition of following MEA positions when it comes to foreign relations (including neighbourhood policy). As a result, watchdogging suffers, institutional memory dies, blunders are made by policymakers.
Against such a backdrop, one feels constrained to suggest that New Delhi’s commentariat does not exhibit curiosity on Nepal, even though the country lies adjacent to India’s most important and impoverished States by politics and population density. This suggests the intelligentsia’s willingness to neglect India’s ‘peripheral regions’ such as North Bihar and Purvanchal. Democratic stability, social transformation and economic growth in Nepal will have an immediate downstream impact on Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal to begin with (and vice versa), but this requires a pruning of geostrategic thinking and increased sensitivity to economic growth and social justice in the borderlands.
The weakness in civic oversight of foreign affairs means that there was no demand for accountability when, for example, India’s power players got cosy with the very Maoist leaders (Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Baburam Bhattarai) who built their violent movement on the basis of anti-India vitriol. And if the observers were observing Kathmandu with more care, there would have been less of a shock when Nepal pivoted to the north, and even joined the Belt and Road Initiative last week, all of which was accelerated by New Delhi’s attitude and actions in relation to the new Constitution.
No one perhaps doubts the need for Nepal and India to lift their relationship to a mature and transparent level, so that diligent discussion can begin on crucial bilateral matters. These include the open border, job migration, security concerns, mutual economic growth, environmental issues including pollution and climate change, and India’s increasing desperation for water. As for China becoming suddenly proactive on Nepal, New Delhi should try and shift its perceptional gears on the Himalayan range.
‘Connectivity’ was a term propagated by Indian diplomats, but Beijing is running away with the ball. Even if it stayed away from the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, New Delhi may want to open up to the idea of trans-Himalayan commerce through the Nepal corridor. The Qinghai-Tibet Railway will arrive from Lhasa and Shigatse to a point north of Kathmandu by 2020, and the roads from the south are already being upgraded to receive goods and passengers.
‘Stability in democracy’
The results of the first phase elections have been telling. The CPN-UML and Nepali Congress have emerged as the two largest parties, with the Maoists a distant third but with ability to tip the balance. Kathmandu Valley has thrown up two new parties with a modernist urban agenda, while Baburam Bhattarai and his Naya Shakti have receded further into the shadows. The poor showing of the Hindutva-oriented Rastriya Prajatantra Party or Kamal Thapa should give pause to India’s cultural revivalists that have an eye on Nepal. The results also augur well for the RJP, were its leaders to agree to join the second phase elections.
These civic polls are the harbinger of long-lost political stability, for they will anchor the new Constitution. This will in turn lead to economic growth, and already the International Monetary Fund is predicting a dramatic turnaround for an economy long in the doldrums, with the GDP growth for the current fiscal forecast at 7.5%.
News reports indicate that New Delhi may be in the process of pulling back from its proactive presence in Kathmandu in relation to constitutional implementation, including taking a back seat on the matter of local elections rather than continue with the proactivism of the past. This would, to begin with, leave Nepal’s plains-based leaders free to speak for the people they represent. It would also help secure the ‘stability in democracy’ that the citizenry of mountain and plain have craved for all these years.
Kanak Mani Dixit, a writer and journalist based in Kathmandu, is founding editor of the magazine Himal Southasian
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9. INDIA: A BLEAK OUTLOOK - THE ROAD TO MOB RULE IN UTTAR PRADESH
by Ramachandra Guha
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(The Telegraph - 27 May 2017)
In March 1946, a three-man 'Cabinet Mission' arrived from England to seek to transfer power from British to Indian hands. They invited Mahatma Gandhi to come from Sevagram to meet them. Gandhi's old patron and disciple, G.D. Birla, wanted to host him at his capacious house in the heart of New Delhi. But Gandhi decided to stay in the Bhangi (sweepers') colony instead. Birla now hastened to install electricity and provide fresh water to the humble home which his Master had chosen to grace.
Before Gandhi came to Delhi, his secretary, Pyarelal, sent Birla a note conveying the Mahatma's wishes that "these arrangements will be permanent. If the wires are removed the moment he goes out of the Bhangi Niwas, the whole thing will become a farce". As Pyarelal, speaking here for Gandhi, directly and clearly put it: " There should be some permanent improvement in the Bhangi Niwas as a result of his stay there."
Gandhi arrived in Delhi on April 1, 1946. The same evening, at a prayer meeting, he called "Untouchability the blackest spot in Hinduism". The "least expiation" caste Hindus could do, he remarked, was " to share with the Harijans their disabilities and to deny ourselves the privilege[s] which the latter cannot share".
I was reminded of this incident when reading of the recent visit by the Uttar Pradesh chief minister to the home of a Border Security Force soldier who had been brutally murdered by the Pakistani army. Before the UP chief minister reached the dead soldier's house, his staff had installed an air-conditioner in the living room, along with sofas and a carpet. Fresh towels had been placed in the bathroom as well. However, no sooner had the visiting VIP left that the AC, the sofa, the carpet, were all removed.
×
When this incident was reported in the press, some commentators professed surprise that a ' yogi' could want an air-conditioner. But it is not merely a love of luxury that should call into question the appellation the UP chief minister has awarded himself. Where yogis are supposed to eschew power for a life of meditation and spiritual quest, this man ran a powerful and resource-rich enterprise before acquiring political control of India's most populous state. And where holy men are supposed to preach compassion and mutual understanding, this man has often preached and sometimes provoked violence against his fellow Indians.
Shortly after the head of Gorakhpur's Gorakhnath Math became his state's chief minister, Nayantara Sahgal - one of UP's most respected writers - observed: "As a practitioner of yoga for many years, I have been taught that a cardinal principle on the spiritual path is non-violence. No one who advocates violence is a yogi so permit me to refer to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh as Shri Adityanath."
While Sahgal was disturbed by Adityanath's appointment as chief minister, other writers celebrated it as a master stroke. One columnist wisecracked that making the naughtiest body in the class the monitor was the best way to keep the class in order. Some reporters thought the belief that Adityanath was anti-Muslim could not be true, since at least one of the keepers of cows in the Gorakhnath Math was a Muslim.
Adityanath has been in power in UP for a mere two months. In that brief period, he has - sadly - proved that the older and more independent-minded writer, Nayantara Sahgal, has a deeper understanding of his character and politics than younger writers anxious to keep in with the ruling order.
No sooner had he assumed office that the new chief minister ordered a crackdown on 'illegal' slaughter houses. However, before checking the records as to which abattoirs had proper clearances and licences and which did not, the police, goaded by Adityanath's followers, indiscriminately attached properties across the state. Meat export is one of UP's few viable industries, earning valuable foreign exchange as well as employing tens of thousands of people. By his hasty order, and the bullying manner in which it was implemented, the chief minister imperilled his state's economy as well as the livelihood of many of its citizens.
Meanwhile, Adityanath's appointment as chief minister emboldened freelance gau gundas to venture into the streets, looking for targets. In the past two months, several attacks on innocent citizens by cow vigilantes in UP have taken place. Remarkably the police have sided with the gau gundas, letting them go free while foisting criminal charges on those they attacked. There have also been more generalized attacks on Muslim homes and hamlets, by Hindu extremists claiming to be against 'love jihad'.
Hindu-Muslim tension has been visibly on the rise since Adityanath took office as chief minister. So have tensions between upper and lower castes. In Saharanpur district, the Thakurs - perhaps emboldened by the spectacular rise of one of their own - savagely attacked Dalits and burnt their homes. As one Dalit who was at the receiving end of Thakur brutality so poignantly put it: " Jab Chunav hoté hain humko Hindu bana diya jata hai, aur baad mein Dalit (When elections take place we are told we are Hindus, but as soon as the elections are over we become Dalits once more)."
The UP police seem to be intimidated by Adityanath's gangsters, increasingly prone to taking orders from them. Meanwhile, some courageous citizens of UP have moved the courts seeking the prosecution of Adityanath for hate-filled speeches that he made in the past. In one recorded speech he said that "if they take one Hindu girl, we will take 100 Muslims girls", and further: "If the government is not doing anything, then the Hindus will have to take matters into their own hands." On another occasion, Adityanath sat on the dais while one of his supporters said Hindus should dig out dead bodies of Muslim women and rape them.
The evidence that Adityanath and his supporters have made hateful speeches and encouraged violence is incontrovertible. However, for the court to proceed towards prosecution, sanction has to come from the state government. And this, with Adityanath himself now being chief minister, has inevitably been refused.
Adityanath's impoverished worldview is captured in a quote from a recent speech he made in Lucknow. He said there that "Akbar, Aurangzeb and Babar were invaders. The sooner we accept the truth, all the problems of our country will vanish." Poverty and ill-health, violence against women and Dalits, environmental degradation, Maoist extremism and police brutality, caste and religious conflict, the collapse of our criminal justice system, the corruption and corrosion of public institutions - to make these problems go away, claims Adityanath, one has to merely chant: "Akbar, Aurangzeb and Babar were invaders! Yes, invaders!" Such is the man to whom the prime minister has entrusted the future of 200 million Indians.
The economic and social backwardness of UP is due to the faulty and flawed policies of many previous chief ministers. Congress chief ministers encouraged cronyism and corruption; Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party chief ministers promoted casteism and corruption. The belief that the 'U' in UP stands for 'Ungovernable' long precedes the rule of Adityanath. Yet there is little question that in the 60 days he has been in office, the state has moved further backwards. One statistic says it all. Before Adityanath became chief minister, reports the Indian Express, his Hindu Yuva Vahini received between 500 and 100 applications for membership per day. Now more than 5,000 people seek to join this vigilante army each day. That translates into a lakh- and-a-half volunteer vigilantes a month, 1.8 million in a year, or 9 million if Adityanath serves out his full term. I suppose that is one way of solving UP's unemployment problem.
But this, of course, is too serious a matter to make jokes about. One in every six Indians is a resident of UP. If UP descends into mob rule, the rest of us, living elsewhere in the country, cannot escape its ripple effects. It is said that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the central leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party are seeking belatedly to rein in Adityanath. But given his background and his temperament, it is unlikely that, in policy terms, he can change course, and begin to sincerely preach Hindu-Muslim harmony, actively profess and practise respect for the rule of law, credibly reach out to entrepreneurs who might invest in UP.
The fate of India's most populous state seems bleaker than ever.
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10. 'ENEMY PROPERTY': INDIA'S ANSWER TO TRUMP WANTS TO RAZE PAKISTAN FOUNDER'S HOME
Vidhi Doshi
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(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.
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11. INDIA: THE MARCH TO SPECTACLE - ARMY FACES A TOUGH MOB IN FRONT OF IT. BUT IT HAS MORE TO FEAR FROM THE MOB BEHIND IT, EGGING IT ON
by Pratap Bhanu Mehta
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(The Indian Express - May 29, 2017)
Army faces a tough mob in front of it. But it has more to fear from the mob behind it, egging it on
army, indian army, army india, kashmir tensions, kashmir crisis, india news
The threat emanates from an unlikely source. Whether we like it or not, we live in an age of spectacle, where the dominant political idiom is a seemingly unmediated conversation with the public. (Representational)
The relationship between the Indian Army and Indian democracy might be entering new and unchartered waters. The ethical and constitutional issues in the incident involving Major Nitin Leetul Gogoi using a human shield have been discussed well by two columns (‘Why Major Gogoi is wrong’, by Omar Abdullah, IE, May 24, here and ‘A blemished medal’, by Praveen Swami, IE, May 25 here). But there is a larger institutional transformation underway that does not bode well, either for democracy or the army. A professional army needs three things: Broad social legitimacy where the worth and excellence of the institution is recognised; a clear set of political goals and a legal framework within which it can operate; and the right degree of professional autonomy, where it can exercise judgment based on the highest professional standards. The “human shield” crisis has revealed that all three are under more threat than we recognised.
The threat emanates from an unlikely source. Whether we like it or not, we live in an age of spectacle, where the dominant political idiom is a seemingly unmediated conversation with the public. It used to be that you were nobody if you did not have money or power; now, that is sometimes not necessary, and often, it is not sufficient. Politics has become a frenzied contest over unmediated representation, with an impatience for all institutions and processes. But that has also inflected other institutions. Parts of many institutions, including the judiciary and bureaucracy, have also convinced themselves that merely doing their professional jobs will not get them social legitimacy or visibility. Something else, some splash, was required. In boring terminology, this is called communication. But underlying it is a shift in the norms of social legitimacy. You are nobody if you have not trended. This is disfiguring many institutions.
The army is becoming a double victim of this. There is no doubt about the army’s social legitimacy. It has also had to do our dirty work for us. But there is a growing sense in the army that it was being socially marginalised. In quotidian terms, everything from the OROP, to shifting norms of social acclaim, convinced many in the army that it was being given short shrift. Second, there always have been, and should be, people who ask questions of the army. And a professional army will answer them professionally. If it is institutionally strong, it can remind people that it even court-martials officers for wrongful killing, as it did after the Machil incident.
But those who really question the army are always politically insignificant. Yet, the media has managed to create the impression that the biggest challenge the Indian Army faces is assorted human rights activists out of control. This is patent nonsense. But the society of spectacle has exaggerated the suspicion under which the army operates; it has created imaginary internal enemies for the Indian Army.
The widespread support for Major Gogoi, both inside and outside the army, has little to do with operational considerations or the wisdom of the action. Instead, the issue has become a symbol of standing up for the army. In this sense, the army is being drawn into a vortex where a quiet, dignified and assumed acknowledgment of its professionalism will no longer be enough. It will constantly have to be granted its place in a society of spectacle. Chasing media phantoms disfigured other institutions. There is a danger this rot can afflict the army as well. It may begin to measure its social legitimacy in a different way.
Two other things are drawing the army into this vortex. The first is the giving in to the need for cutting short processes. Just as a practical matter, the controversy was dying down; there was a process on to assess the incident. The tearing hurry in which the commendation to Major Gogoi was issued undermines the credibility of its processes. It created the impression that the army was not thinking professionally. It was thinking more about teaching its supposed media critics a lesson.
But most importantly, war is becoming a spectacle as well. From Uri to the recent cross-border firings to destroy Pakistani bunker posts, the circulation of videos prompts the question: Who are you trying to convince? How effective you are will be judged by whether you achieve your goals of a lasting, secure peace. But this TV war will be a disaster for the army for three reasons. It will make achieving objectives more difficult. It is not that operations or cross-border firing were not done before. But we had the good sense to understand that giving the adversary the option of a quiet way out is also part of sensible strategy. After a routine operation, the adversary may or may not escalate; after a publicised operation, he will have only one option: To escalate.
TV wars give a much distorted picture of war. The Americans landed in the quagmires they did in Iraq because generations of political elites, post-Vietnam, began to internalise the fantasy that war was like a video game. It created a set of false expectations of what the means at the disposal of the army could achieve. Does the army really want the public to be asking in a frenzied way, “Under X government, you fired at bunkers, why are you not firing now?” “If Major Gogoi’s tactic was really so well-judged, and within the law, why does not the army use it more?” It is shocking how much the latter question is being asked. The army’s professional autonomy cannot be maintained if there is an expectation that it will constantly produce war videos.
The spectacle of those operations will distort the political goals we set for the army. It may create operational pressures of the kind it will find it hard to withstand. Finally, the army will always run up against the problem of incompatible constituencies. The entire effort behind the Major Gogoi operation seems to have been premised upon the idea that it is India that needs to be shown that the army can stand up for its own. But surely, it is in the army’s interest to win over Kashmiris, a constituency this one act has alienated even more.
Civil-military relations are not just about the government and the army. They are fundamentally mediated through the public. The form of that mediation has a huge impact on the army. The current form of mediation is placing spectacle at front and centre. The army is facing a tough mob in front of it; but it has even more to fear in the long run from the mob behind it, egging it on.
The writer is president, CPR Delhi and contributing editor, ‘The Indian Express’
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12. INDIA: ’NAXALBARI’ - FIFTY YEARS LATER | Pritam Singh
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In March, 1967, a decision was taken in Naxalbari to carry out an armed rebellion for the rights of peasants and workers. This isolated revolt led to a movement that has lasted half a century
http://www.sacw.net/article13285.html
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13. INCREASING RHETORIC ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN IRAN: A POSITIVE SIGN OR A MERE CAMPAIGN TOOL?
Ava Homa
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(open democracy - 18 May 2017)
Why women’s rights rhetoric is suddenly on the rise in Iran, again.
Iranian women lining up to vote in the holy city of Qom. Khademian Farzaneh/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.In elementary schools, before we girls could understand why our bodies – unlike those of boys our age – had to be hidden away and covered, we were told good girls were inconspicuous. Speaking and laughter were discouraged. The only occasion in which screaming was applauded was when we were chanting: “Death to America”, “Death to Israel.”
Every four years during the presidential elections, Iranians are offered a unique level of freedom. Women who are otherwise punished for their non-Islamic dress codes are seen in photos with candidates, uncovered. Gender segregations are limited, and women’s rights rhetoric rises. The melancholic culture, whose holidays are mainly death anniversaries of some Imams, allows street celebrations. Citizens pressed under a crippling economy caused by sanctions, corruption, and mismanagement of resources, are offered a ray of hope, provided that they vote for so and so.
What do women rights mean in a country whose supreme leader calls gender equality a “Zionist plot”?
But what do women rights mean in a country whose supreme leader calls gender equality a “Zionist plot”? How is women’s participation encouraged when their very gender disqualifies them from running for the presidency? The constitution decrees the president has to be male, a believer in the Islamic Republic, and follower of the dominant sect of Islam (Twelve-Imam Shia). Thus, the greater half of the Iranian population is automatically excluded. Hence, women’s “rights” means voting, not being trusted with an important position.
The number of Iranian women working in government positions has slightly increased compared to two decades ago and this has provided a perfect propaganda tool for the state. However, influential ministers such as Maryam Mojtahidzadeh, head of the women’s ministry, talk about ‘complementary’ roles for women – not equality. To this day, a woman’s most important decisions in life (marriage, child custody, divorce, employment, traveling abroad) legally require a man’s approval: a father or grandfather, a husband, or one of the all-male judges.
To this day, a woman’s most important decisions in life... legally require a man’s approval.
Moreover, to draw voters and earn legitimacy, the government banks on horrors of invasions. Iranians are fearful that their country would be torn apart like their neighbors: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. Women know they are the first victims of war and destruction and so they avoid reaching that point at all costs, even if that means supporting a dictator.
The prevailing myth in Iran, what the hardliners and the so-called reformists promote, is: choose between violence and reform. They undermine options such as civil disobedience or boycotting the elections. “Reformists” have offered no plan to make significant changes to the discriminatory laws of the constitution and yet they pressure the marginalised to vote for them “for stability”.
When women are legally allowed to run for lower rank positions such as city councils or parliaments, they lack the confidence in themselves and other women to trust them(selves) with managerial roles. Although globalisation, the massive population of Iranians in diaspora and access to the internet and satellites, have put Iranian women’s unfair situation in sharp contrast with the West, gender equality is not systematically taught in Iran.
Many still wonder how feminism is not “a threat to families and society”.
Hence, many still wonder how feminism is not “a threat to families and society”. Rising numbers of divorce are seen not as a protest to patriarchy, but as a negative impact of women’s relative liberation from cultural taboos.
Although 60% of Iranian college graduates are women, they make up just 13% of the workforce. A portion of women has gained divorce and travel rights by stating those in their marriage licenses. However, the implementation of legal loopholes by the upper-middle class has not improved life for the rest of the women.
The protests to gender inequality are sometimes uneducated and misguided. Society has not been taught how everyday language is inherently denigrating for women e.g. “dakhator shohar dadan”, “They married the girl” not “The girl married”. The widespread jokes that mock girls as dullards, incapable of thinking, reproduce patriarchy and recreate the distrust in women.
Globalisation has changed much in Iran, but women are still welcomed only when they contribute to patriarchy and nationalism. The small freedom and hope offered during the election season, the massive propaganda about empowering women, the prevailing myth of ‘war or reformists’, allure women, minorities and other second class citizens to the polling stations. This, in turn, further legitimises the Islamic Republic and recreates a vicious cycle.
Ava Homa is the author of Echoes from the Other Land and the second vice chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Born and raised in the Kurdish region of Iran, she earned a Master’s degree in English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor and works as a journalist and editor.
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14. THE WHISPERERS: MEET THE SNITCHES MAKING A RETURN TO RUSSIA
AFTER LOSING INFLUENCE AND APPEAL, VIGILANTE INFORMANTS ARE MAKING A COMEBACK IN RUSSIAN SOCIETY.
BY ALISA KUSTIKOVA (Novaya Gazeta)
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(The Moscow Times - May 26, 2017)
The word donos — the act of ratting on someone to authorities — is a hallmark of Stalin’s Great Terror. In those troubling times, a single denunciation from a neighbor, colleague or relative was enough to have an innocent person interned in labor camps. Sometimes, worse. Donos was the foundation of society — one built on fear and the knowledge that anyone could suddenly vanish.
But donos was also a way to get ahead in life. It provided a way to deflect attention. Over time, as consequences became less severe, the power of donos faded, but it never disappeared entirely.
Today, it is making an unexpected comeback in Russia. But 21st-century informants are different. Acting in the name of conservative and fundamentalist laws, some act in search of fame, others out of personal conviction. Many combine both.
Yury Zadoya: “Culture begins with prohibition”
Yury Zadoya, chairman of the Novosibirsk branch of the conservative People’s Cathedral movement, is a thin man with a high forehead and delicate features. His voice is reminiscent of a schoolteacher.
“Culture began with prohibition,” he tells a meeting of the local Culture Ministry’s Public Council for Culture. “Russian culture has its roots in Orthodoxy and six of the 10 Commandments are prohibitory in nature, and so culture cannot be created without them” he said.
Zadoya began public activism in 2009. In quick succession, he made official complaints about the logo of a chain of sex shops, picketed ice cream ads featuring the buxom and scantily clad TV personality Anna Semenovich, and expressed outrage over ads for the Mour Mour adult club.
Then he turned his attention to Pussy Riot. It was not enough that group members Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina had already been imprisoned for their 2012 performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. After watching recordings of their performance, Zadoya realized he was deeply offended by their actions, and so filed a lawsuit for moral damages. He lost.
Zadoya complained about anything and everything. His was concerned by a Marilyn Manson concert, by galleries and exhibitions, by shows and operas. He was instrumental in the banning of the Wagnerian opera “Tannhauser” from the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater, as well as the firing of that theater’s director.
His work landed people in jail. When 21-year-old Siberian blogger Maxim Kormelitsky reposted photos of people holding signs with obscene inscriptions, Zadoya duly informed the local Investigative Committee that he had been offended. The blogger was given 15 months in prison.
Zadoya has filed so many lawsuits in various local courts, it is difficult for journalists to keep up with of his exploits.
Timur Isayev: “Persistent guy”
Timur Isayev entered public life in June 2013, when the State Duma passed its now-notorious law prohibiting the “promotion of non-traditional sexual relations” to minors. Isayev became prominent as a coordinator for the Head Hunters movement, and then as the founder of the organization Parents of Russia. Both groups were purportedly founded in order to protect minors.
Isayev’s first victim was Yury Vlader, a vice principal in a St. Petersburg school. Isayev’s organization claimed the Vlader had recruited a schoolteacher on the pages of an LGBT website. Isayev led anti-gay activists in a campaign of intimidation. He even descended on the teacher at his workplace. Unable to bear the pressure, Vlader quit, and Isayev recorded the first name on his list of teachers he has removed from their posts.
Soon afterward, Parents of Russia convinced officials in Magnitogorsk to fire a female teacher for reposting quotes in support of the LGBT movement. This time, the campaign of harassment lasted three months. Isayev went on to lodge complaints against a dozen more teachers in different Russian cities.
Isyaev’s organization offered rewards of 5,000 rubles [US$ 90] for information about LGBT people working in public schools. He told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper that he has helped bring about the dismissals of 67 teachers.
Isayev’s hunt for gays was interrupted only by his imprisonment in December 2014. As Isayev became prominent, state investigators recognized him as an embezzler who had been on the federal wanted list for nine years. Isayev was imprisoned for six months, before gaining his freedom through an amnesty in August 2015.
Since then, Isayev has returned to the hunt. One of the most recent victims on Isayev’s list was Maria Shestopalova, a 21-year-old music teacher from Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. After a campaign of harassment, she quit her job. Isayev had sent letters to the offices of various authorities calling her an “immoral woman” and someone who “spread the propaganda of pederasty.” One of Isayev’s complaints against Shestopalova was her piercing: “Schoolteachers cannot have tunnels in their ears or piercing on their lips,” Isayev declared.
Isayev has framed his fanaticism in terms of his religious beliefs.
“I am a Muslim. My path is jihad. I fight for the purity of our children’s surroundings,” Isayev told Novaya Gazeta. “I am simply a persistent guy in a tubeteika [Uzbek skullcap]. If I see sin, danger, and evil for our children, then I will go through all the circles of hell to take care of the problem.”
Maxim Rumyantsev: “Procedural Journalist.”
Journalist Maxim Rumyantsev owes his fame to blogger Ruslan Sokolovsky, who was controversially sent to trial for shooting a video about catching Pokemon in a church in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s third-largest city.
While associated with Sokolovsky’s misfortune, Rumyantsev did not initiate the trial himself. “I was credited with initiating the trial, but I am sorry that I was not the one who sued him first.”
Rumyantsev hosts a TV show on local networks called The Rumyantsev Case, which encourages viewers to lodge complaints about everyone and anyone. He calls his approach “procedural journalism.” According to the description of the program on the TV channel’s site, the journalist acts on any information he receives by “submitting requests and statements to authorities and agencies.”
While Sokolovsky was Rumyantsev’s most famous victim, he is certainly not his most exotic catch. That award belongs to Voodoo master Anton Simakov, who found himself subject to criminal proceedings following Rumyantsev’s procedural efforts. Basing a complaint on Article 148 of the Criminal Code ( “insulting the religious feelings of believers”), the journalist said he had been insulted when Simakov slaughtered a rooster on a shroud with a wooden crucifix. During the investigation of the criminal case, Simakov was kept in hospital for compulsory psychological treatment.
Several NGOs in the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk also fell victim to Rumyantsev’s efforts. Nadezhda Kutepova, whose “Planet of Hope” human rights NGO was listed as a foreign agent following a complaint from Rumyantsev, recalls how he pursued her throughout the city while filming his latest documentary “exposé.”
“He declared me an enemy of Russia in his film,” says the activist. “Some of the people who viewed the program even demanded that I be executed on the electric chair.”
TV Witch Hunt Drives Human Rights Activist Out of Russia
In July 2015, Kutepova gathered her children and fled to France. “Rumyantsev trampled everything I stood for, destroyed my organization, and caused my children to suffer,” she says.
Rumyantsev, on the other hand, says he “cannot remain indifferent to legal violations.”
“True believers cannot be bribed or intimidated,” he says. “The only way to silence them is by killing them — and if that happens to me, it will be the greatest victory of my life.”
Dmitry Zakharov: “Socially responsible patriot”
Moscow city councilor Dmitry Zakharov began his patriotic campaign by identifying outlets selling alcohol illegally. In 2012, he became a co-founder of “Carriage 17,” which describes itself as “an innovative totalitarian sect” fighting against “vile enemies of this Great Country.”
What this meant in practice were flashmob “demonstrations” held ostensibly in support of sobriety, as well as disrupting any activities of those opposed to the ruling regime. Zakharov also made regular complaints to Roskomnadzor, the federal communications watchdog. He protested against alleged homosexual propaganda on the Interns TV series. He raised concerns about photographers Alexander Vasyukovich and Sergei Loiko over their work documenting Ukrainian casualties during the war in eastern Ukraine.
Zakharov was also the driving force behind a campaign against the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow and its director, Natalia Sharina. It was Zakharov’s complaint to Russia’s Investigative Committee about a banned “extremist” book that shuttered the library. Sharina herself now faces a criminal case and charges of extremism and misuse of funds.
Director of Moscow Library of Ukrainian Literature Accused of Inciting Hatred
“As a socially responsible patriot, I am going after the [...] Ukrainian threat,” Zakharov says. “For a Russian patriot, it isn’t about ratting, but about observing the law.”
Within the law
Herein lies the rub: However aggressive the actions of Russia’s patriotic informers, they usually fall within the boundaries of the legally permissible.
According to Daria Sukhikh, a lawyer acting for Team 29, an association of lawyers and journalists, any victim can in theory file a claim against the offender “in defense of honor, dignity, and business reputation.” If the court concludes that the denunciation was groundless and dictated by bad intentions, it can, again theoretically, make a ruling in favor of the victim.
But the opacity of many laws and articles of the Criminal Code are such that it is exceptionally difficult for someone falling victim to moral vigilantes to defend their dignity. How, for example, can someone respond to charges of offending the feelings of a believer if there is no clear definition of exactly what that means? Even if investigators do not find any concrete evidence of a crime, a case can be made that the informer is still offended.
Government and law enforcement officials rarely fail to act on vigilante denunciations, however ludicrous they might appear. The motivation for officials in these cases is understandable, says Yan Rachinsky, member of the board of the Memorial foundation: they do not want trouble and they are afraid that if they do not react they will get sacked.
At this trajectory, fear will likely remain a driving force within Russian bureaucracy. The country will remain a paradise for slanderists, careerists, and off-kilter morality champions, posised to make a name for themselves.
This story was adapted from an article first published in Novaya Gazeta.
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15. USA: Meet the Nerds Coding Their Way Through the Afghanistan War
Issie Lapowsky
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(Wired - 05.27.17)
Defense Digital Service Team members from left, Hunter Pitelka, Brandon Bouier, Eduardo Ortiz, Chris Lynch, Erin Delaney and Nick at the Pentagon.Jared Soares for WIRED
A disembodied voice sounded over a loudspeaker. “Incoming. Take cover,” it warned to anyone within earshot. Then, the sirens began to wail.
Erin Delaney assumed it was a drill. She peeked down the hallway to see how other people were responding. Then she hit the deck. It was not a drill. The NATO base in Kabul where Delaney had been working for weeks was being attacked.
Delaney, 24, had never had any military training. She grew up in San Diego, traveled up the coast for college at UC Berkeley, and spent the next two years nestled in the safe, Tesla-filled San Francisco bubble, working in the compliance department at Dropbox. Now, with her nose to the ground, she was getting a taste—however brief—of life in a war zone.
She flipped over the visitor’s badge she’d received when she first arrived at the base. In case of attack, it said, she should stay on the ground for two minutes. Assuming nothing dire happened, she was to shelter in place until the shelling stopped. So, for about an hour, that’s what she did. “Then when things were normal, we went back to work,” Delaney says with a shrug. “And that was that.”
The petite brunette doesn’t like to play up the drama of her time in Afghanistan. She spent only a matter of weeks on the base, and she’s wary of comparing her brush with danger to the risks that soldiers in Afghanistan face every day. Unlike them, she hadn’t traveled to Kabul to track terrorists or spend time in the countryside rebuilding the bullet-riddled nation. She’d come on a more mundane mission: to make the tech tools that NATO uses in Afghanistan suck a little less.
Delaney is part of a 27-person unit that comprises the Defense Digital Service, a sort of tech SWAT team within the Department of Defense. Engineers and data experts from across the country leave their jobs at companies like Netflix, IDEO, Palantir, and, yes, Dropbox and join DDS for tours of duty that typically last about two years. They spend that time revamping and often completely reinventing the “tools and practices that lag far behind private sector standards,” as the Pentagon itself puts it. This past winter, that work brought the team to Kabul, where NATO troops have spent years advising Afghans on how to make their country self-sustaining.
Founded in 2015, the DDS is the Defense Department’s spinoff of the United States Digital Service, an Obama-era program established at the White House. So far, the Trump administration appears inclined to keep the group in place. “The Defense Department must move at the speed of relevancy,” Defense Secretary James Mattis told WIRED in a statement. “The Defense Digital Service team plays a critical role in meeting that commitment.”
The Afghanistan project demonstrates why. It turns out that dispatching just a few private-sector experts to the battlefield can make life a little easier for personnel on the ground. To be sure, the situation in Afghanistan is messier than ever. But now at least some of the software driving the mission isn’t.
Rebel Alliance
If Kabul was like an alien planet to Delaney, the DDS office looks a lot like home, Silicon Valley-style. Situated deep inside the Pentagon, the whiteboard-covered walls pop with multicolored flowcharts and checklists full of projects the DDS team has completed over the past two years. There in teal marker are the words “Hack the Pentagon,” a bug-bounty program aimed at finding vulnerabilities in Defense Department websites. Below it in blue, there’s “Data.mil,” an experiment in opening up DoD data to the public.
Star Wars embellishments abound. The tiny conference room is called Yoda, and the front door of the office bears a placard that reads “Rebel Alliance.” It all but announces to the beribboned generals and suit-wearing bureaucrats passing by that yes, this is where the nerds work, and they may not be entirely under your control.
That’s Chris Lynch’s doing. As director of DDS, he views it as his duty to shake up the Pentagon, and he’s not trying to fit in. “We trigger a lot of antibodies,” says Lynch, who may be the only person in the building’s nearly 4 million square feet of office space wearing a stormtrooper T-shirt and sneakers to work.
Before becoming head of the group, the 41-year-old entrepreneur started three tech companies, where he enjoyed the autonomy that comes with being the boss. Inside the DoD, the first answer to almost everything he proposes is no. Even when the DDS team manages to untangle one bureaucratic knot, they often find miles more red tape underneath it. For the rank and file in the military, the relief is fleeting. “It’s like a cold glass of water in hell,” Lynch says.
Even so, Lynch clearly relishes the challenge. He may also be the only person in the building who gets choked up talking about the Defense Department’s arcane technology procurement process. He’s seen firsthand how poorly conceived tech tools, designed around some conference table in DC without input from users, can impact life and death decisions for members of the military.
Take Lynch’s first project at DDS, which focused on the system that keeps track of service members’ active duty records. Those documents—critical to providing proper medical services to veterans—would often go missing on their way from the DoD to the Veterans Affairs office. Finding them could sometimes take years—years that many veterans with serious conditions don’t have.
The problem, Lynch soon learned, stemmed from an almost comical glitch at Veterans Affairs: The agency only accepted PDF documents. If paperwork was filed as a JPEG, it was rejected, or simply disappeared. So DDS built a suite of simple file converters to standardize the process. It’s not the type of fix Lynch considers particularly innovative or magic. “I don’t consider it anything other than something that should make you so angry that you say, ‘I can do better than that,’” he says. “It’s fucking wrong.”
When he signed on, Lynch only planned to stay at DDS for 45 days, but fixing the VA’s document problem hooked him. “This is the worst job I’ve ever had,” he says. “But if you’re lucky, and you do what you came to do, you’ll get a win that will be unlike anything else you could ever do in your life.”
That passion has helped the DDS team weather one of the most tumultuous White House transitions in recent history. The election result shocked the young, largely liberal staff, but not a single member of the team left because of it. That doesn’t mean they’ve stayed quiet about their new boss. Eduardo Ortiz, a designer on the Afghanistan project and a former Marine, tattooed the word “RESIST” in giant block letters on his right forearm shortly after the election and now wears his hoodie sleeve slightly rolled up to ensure that the world can see.
Still, most members of the team say Trump’s election hasn’t had much impact on their day jobs. “A lot of my friends asked, ‘Are you going to stick around, now that you work for the Trump administration?’” former engineer Hunter Pitelka says, raising his lanky arms over his head boogeyman-style. His answer? A hard yes. “Whether or not you believe there should be a war in Afghanistan, whether or not you believe President Trump should be doing the things he does, there are US soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all over the world who are making decisions every day, and I want them to have the best possible information to make those decisions.” he says. “Nobody wants us to make bad decisions.”
A Giant Tire Fire
Pitelka, 27, is the reason the team went to Afghanistan. Before joining the Pentagon, the bespectacled beanpole had worked at Palantir, the secretive data science company that has big contracts with the DoD. During that time, he did a two-month tour on a Marine aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean, where he too saw how antiquated military technology can be. “The technology we’re giving our service members is shit,” says Pitelka, who shares Lynch’s affinity for four-letter words. “It boils my blood to think about it.”
Pitelka asked whether his boss might consider sending the DDS team to “theater,” military talk for the battlefield. Until then, DDS had focused on tools that would make the Pentagon more efficient. But Pitelka says that often by the time Washington hears of a technological obstacle in Afghanistan, “it’s been on fire for a long time already.” So, last summer, with former defense secretary Ashton Carter’s encouragement, the DDS team decided they would go to Afghanistan to find some fires to extinguish.
At the time, Matt Cutts was two weeks away from joining the DDS team. The 45-year-old former Googler, best known as the grandfather of the search engine’s spam fighting efforts, was still hunting for an apartment in DC when he got a call from Lynch: Would he be able to start working a week early—and would he consider starting in Afghanistan? “I was like, ‘Let me just say that out loud so my wife can hear it,’” Cutts remembers. She gave him the thumbs up, and within a week, he, Lynch, Pitelka, and a few other members of the team were strapped into a Blackhawk helicopter, flack jackets on, heading to Kabul.
Mortar attacks aside, life on the base was relatively luxurious, with tree-lined roads and an onsite boutique froyo shop called Ministry of Yogurt. The DDS team slept in souped-up shipping containers the size of some New York City studio apartments, with their own bathrooms. They worked 12- to 16-hour days, and in their spare time they’d unwind with one of a handful of ’90s DVDs. (Total Recall and My Cousin Vinny were favorites.) Of course, there were some quirks to life on the base: the strict instructions not to peek their heads over the perimeter’s walls (Lynch did it anyway), the weaponry strapped to every soldier in the mess hall, the Mongolian troops racing one another to assemble machine guns, blindfolded, outside their yurt.
But while the accommodations exceeded the team’s expectations, technologically speaking the place was “a giant tire fire,” says Nick Small, an engineer on the project. There was the piece of training software that only came in English, even though it was for Afghan officials who almost exclusively spoke Dari or Pashto. Army computer filters prevented a public affairs officer from clicking links on Twitter, even though his job was to teach Afghan government officials how to use social media. As a workaround, he’d write down URLs on a piece of paper, walk to a desk with an unfiltered, so-called dirtynet computer, and enter it there. “It was unbelievable,” Pitelka recalls, clapping both hands to his cheeks as he often does when explaining technological atrocities.
But it wasn’t until an Army colonel shuttled them over to his computer to show them a tool called ANET that the team found a project they believed could impact thousands of people. NATO advisers use ANET to track their progress guiding Afghans through the endlessly complex process of standing up a modern government. The advisers, who started arriving in January 2015, spend their days teaching their Afghan counterparts skills like training and recruiting police, budgeting, fostering transparency. They use ANET to keep track of every conversation and step forward. Logging information into the system is a way to retain institutional knowledge as advisers cycle in and out of the country.
Nick Small.
Nick Small. Digital Defense Service
Which sounds great in theory. But until recently, ANET hardly worked. Reports that should have taken minutes to write often took hours. “You’ve never seen a user interface that looked so early Netscape Navigator,” Lynch says. A banner at the top of the home screen read “Welcome to ANET.” Below that no fewer than 20 icons and a series of old-fashioned clip art images cluttered the page. Searches in the program were, inexplicably, set to “not” results, meaning that if you searched for the word “corruption,” ANET would produce all the past reports that did not include the term. But it wouldn’t have mattered much, because the search results weren’t clickable.
Advisers underwent hours-long training sessions in how to use the program. “If you could stay awake for it, you kind of had a very rudimentary working knowledge of the system when you walked away,” says Lt. Col. D’artagnan Deanda, an adviser with the US Air Force, who goes by Dart.
Compiling reports on ANET took hours out of Deanda’s day. “You’d click the button, go get a soda and come back and hope your page had loaded,” he explains. Managing the quirks and failures of this software became one giant, distracting obligation for a group of people whose core job—rebuilding Afghanistan—should have had very little to do with software.
It was, in other words, a perfect DDS target. It took the team a week to settle on ANET as a target; getting permission from the DoD and NATO to move fast and break the very thing that thousands of advisers in Afghanistan became a months-long struggle. “I don’t want to characterize it as resistance, but people were uncomfortable with the speed at which DDS worked,” says Col. David Meyer, who directs the Army’s Security Forces Assistance Center, which oversees advising efforts.
Delaney joined the team specifically to be a “bureaucracy hacker,” working with Meyer to knock down roadblocks thrown in the engineers’ paths, like the time NATO officials told them JavaScript was banned from NATO software. That turned out to be untrue, but it took a tricontinental goose chase to figure that out. Delaney became adept at the art of what the DDS team calls “choke con,” the principle that getting anyone in government to do anything requires you to be physically close enough to choke them.
Among the military personnel, there was also some healthy skepticism that this team of young nerds—many of them the age of the advisers’ children—would keep their promises. “In the military we get pitched often, and people say, ‘You’ll get new kits and new things,’ and then you wait three years to get Army hand-downs,” says Ortiz, the tattooed former Marine and designer for the US Digital Service, who lent a hand on ANET.
But the DDS team kept coming back, making four trips to Afghanistan in all, and relished the chance to show off new features to the dubious troops. By January, they had got the beta test of the new ANET up and running. It was pretty humdrum by Silicon Valley standards—not exactly the kind of software that would wow investors at a Y Combinator demo day. The team merely created a streamlined, functional website where advisers could create reports in a matter of minutes and search for reports in a matter of seconds. It did the basics, like remembering a user’s prior searches and suggesting the names of their Afghan counterparts. “We did autosave,” Delaney says, laughing. “That blew people’s minds.”
Finally, at the end of the January trip, it was time for Lt. General Jürgen Weigt, the NATO mission’s chief of staff, to either green light the project or scrap it altogether. On the day they were set to leave Afghanistan, Delaney, Pitelka, and other members of the team gathered around a table with Weigt and a few of his assistants. Delaney launched into the demo, showing off the speed of the new search function compared to the old one. As soon as she finished, the room fell silent.
Then Weigt spoke up. “He just asked us, ‘What do you guys need from us?’” Delaney says, before Pitelka corrects her: “I think the specific quote from the assistant to the chief of staff was ‘Whose ass do I need to put my boot up?’”
Chris Lynch.
Chris Lynch.Jared Soares for WIRED
Mission Accomplished
The battle to revamp ANET might not make it into the annals of military history. But it has all the plot points: It brought together a scrappy band of military neophytes who deployed to a war zone, traversed mountains of red tape, and finally planted their flag of intuitive tech on the front lines. Unlike the service men and women who remain mired in what seems like a never-ending war in Afghanistan, though, the tech troops actually got to pack up their MacBooks and head home.
With the new ANET up and running, Pitelka and Delaney took off from Afghanistan for the last time in March, leaving the tool in the hands of NATO coders. In a few months, they’ll leave the Defense Digital Service, too. That’s by design. Lynch warns his team that they will stagnate if they spend too long within the Pentagon’s walls. Two years in, Pitelka is already starting to speak in acronyms. (“The SFAC is the owner of the mission-wide POAMs.” Sure.)
There’s a certain kind of anxiety that comes with moving on. “In 10 years everybody here’s going to be gone. This team might be a giant evil bureaucratic nightmare,” Pitelka says. And of course, they’re leaving DDS in the hands of an administration that Pitelka says “most people in this office are probably not super excited about.” But he argues that this is even more reason why his fellow technologists—even the liberal ones—should come work for the government. “I feel like you kind of want to be at the table,” he says.
The members of the military who worked with the DDS team found that kind of idealism infectious and inspiring. “They could all be making a heck of a lot more money in places infinitely nicer to be than Afghanistan,” Col. Meyer says of the crew. “It’s kind of a trite saying, but, frankly, there’s a lot of patriotism in that.”
One casualty of the DDS team’s Afghanistan deployment was the Silicon Valley article of faith that technology alone can solve all the problems of the world. They know that sophisticated software won’t get international troops out of the quagmire that is Afghanistan anytime soon. They also know—now, better than most—that lousy software certainly won’t help.
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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/
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