SACW - 19 June 2017 | Sri Lanka: A Betrayal / Nepal: Madhes crisis of UML / India: Spreading Hate / Bangladesh: Protect enlightened voices / Peter Waterman (1936-2017) / Myanmar, An Unfinished Nation / North Caucasus: inequality for Women

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 19 June 2017 - No. 2940 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: A Betrayal, Repugnant & Lethal | Tisaranee Gunasekara 
2. Nepal: The Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist)’s Madhes crisis
3. Bangladesh: Dissenting voices are crucial to the health of a democracy (Edit, Dhaka Tribune)
4. Pakistan: Life and death of a worker | Fahmida Riaz
5. Peter Waterman (1936-2017)
6. The Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights ‘Futures Report’: Springboard or Tombstone? | Peter Waterman
7. Lahore still lives in the Partition Moment | Yaqoob Khan Bangash
8. Attari and Wagha | Nyla Ali Khan
9. Why Gandhi’s favourite bhajan ‘Vaishnav Jan To’ is so important in Modi’s hate-filled India | Ananya Vajpeyi
10. India: Saffronisation of education in BJP-ruled Rajasthan | Tabeenah Anjum
11. India: Four activists of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) convicted in a 20 year false case in Rajasthan
12. India: Letter from NAPM to Kerala CM on Police Excesses against peaceful protestors of Puthuvypeen, Kochi
13. Get up, stand up: Extreme nationalists, racists and bigots enjoy a renaissance across the world | Gautam Adhikari
14. India: Programme of Praful Bidwai Memorial Award 2017 presentation ceremony in New Delhi on 23 June 2017
15. Recent on Communalism Watch:
- India: The Vitriolic Fringe Is Mainstream
- India: Brutal vigilantism - A trait Hindutva shares with political Islam (Ajaz Ashraf)
- At sixth All India Hindu Convention 132 Right-Wing Hindu organisations demand creation of Hindu theocratic state by 2023 
- Hindi Article-Was Gandhi a Chatur Baniya?
- India: Gandhi had simple ways to fight destructive forces . .. .
- India: Convictions in 1993 Mumbai blasts case but no justice yet for victims of riots that came before that
- India - Govind Pansare murder case: Far right Sanatan Sanstha activist Samir Gaikwad gets bail
- India: Far right Bajrang Sena wants a ban on the sale of Kamasutra books and obscene figurines at Khajuraho temple
- India - Govind Pansare murder case: charge sheet hints at more than two killers
- India: If vigilante violence is spreading in India, it’s because it has state approval
- India: Historians aghast at the UP chief minister's description of the Taj Mahal
- India: Govt should hang people who eat beef says Sadhvi Saraswati [hindu women preacher] at convetion of Hindu Janajagriti Samiti in Goa
- India: Inauguration Sabka Ghar (Dedicated to all those killed in the name of Religion/Caste/Gender and Boundaries) on 17th June 
- India: Manipulation of History for 'Social Engineering' (Ram Puniyani)
- India: Douse language fires: Mamata has blundered in trying to impose Bengali in Darjeeling Hills (Edit, Times of India)
- India - The Demand for Gorkhaland: How language identity and ethnic strife is driving violence in Darjeeling
- India: Hindu Far Right 'Bajrang Dal' training camps teach school children use of firearms and swords in Rajasthan's Hanumangarh
- Bangladesh: Propaganda booklets of the Islamists such as '“Passport to Paradise” sugar-coat extremist ideology to lure members
- New India is running amok (Latha Jishnu)
- India's minstry of Ayush [traditional medicine] recommends 'No meat, no sex, pure thoughts' for pregnant women
16. Myanmar, an unfinished nation | Thant Myint-U

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
16. Myanmar, An Unfinished Nation | Thant Myint-U
17. A new India rises | Tavleen Singh
18. India: Sattvik food and patriotic children?
19. India: What Manipur’s upcoming WWII war museum says about the state today | Paramita Ghosh
20. India’s wells are running dry, fast | Asit K. Biswas, Cecilia Tortajada and Udisha Saklani
21. Visions of India: how film and TV romanticises life after the Raj | Stuart Jeffries
22. Attwood on Hauser and Jha, 'Culture, Vernacular Politics, and the Peasants: India, 1889-1950: An Edited Translation of Swami Sahajanand's Memoir'
23. Warsaw exhibition turns spotlight on golden age of Polish-Indian relations | Sneha Bhura
24. Faith no more | Sami Shah and Ishma Alvi
25. The inequality of women keeps the North Caucasus vulnerable | Victoria Gurevich
26. Hungary: NGO law a vicious and calculated assault on civil society

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1. SRI LANKA: A BETRAYAL, REPUGNANT & LETHAL | Tisaranee Gunasekara
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increasingly a level of tolerance is being accorded to the most toxic purveyors of Sinhala-Buddhist racism which bodes ill for the dream of a pluralist, tolerant and humane Sri Lanka
http://www.sacw.net/article13323.html

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2. NEPAL: THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF NEPAL (UNIFIED MARXIST–LENINIST)’S MADHES CRISIS
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In March, five people were killed in police firing as Madhesi cadres disrupted the East-West election campaign of the UML. The mob that attacked the rally in Siraha was led by Dinesh Yadav, a defector from the UML and once protected by the party’s Suman Pyakurel. Many saw him as being almost his foster son.
http://www.sacw.net/article13324.html

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3. BANGLADESH: DISSENTING VOICES ARE CRUCIAL TO THE HEALTH OF A DEMOCRACY (Edit, Dhaka Tribune)
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Prominent human rights lawyer Sultana Kamal was threatened by Hefazat-e-Islam with physical violence after making hypothetical comments on a television talk show. In the meantime, a legal notice was served demanding the arrest of veteran journalist Afsan Chowhdury, who has been accused under the ICT Act of defamation in a Facebook post.
http://www.sacw.net/article13322.html

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4. PAKISTAN: LIFE AND DEATH OF A WORKER | Fahmida Riaz
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The recent death of sanitary worker Irfan Masih in Umerkot [Pakistan] raises questions about unsafe working conditions and religious disharmony in the region
http://www.sacw.net/article13320.html

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5. PETER WATERMAN (1936-2017)
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Peter Waterman, the romantic rebel and eternal dissident and internationalist passed away on the night of 16 June 2017
http://www.sacw.net/article13319.html

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6. THE SOUTHERN INITIATIVE ON GLOBALISATION AND TRADE UNION RIGHTS ‘FUTURES REPORT’: SPRINGBOARD OR TOMBSTONE?
by Peter Waterman
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This paper is focused on a Futures Report of the Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights (Sigtur), raising major challenges as to its authorship and contents. It is at the same time a challenge to the Sigtur project as a whole. As to the Futures Report, the challenges have to do with the subject positionality of the authors (mostly White, Northern, Male professors/promoters of Sigtur), their overwhelming dependence on Northern sources, and the relevance of their essays to the challenges facing Sigtur.
http://www.sacw.net/article13292.html

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7. LAHORE STILL LIVES IN THE PARTITION MOMENT | Yaqoob Khan Bangash
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Seventy years on, Punjabis on both sides of the Radcliffe Line continue to use words like ‘batwara’ or ‘vand’, the word for division, which overtook the euphoria of ‘independence’ and ‘azaadi’
http://www.sacw.net/article13311.html

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8. ATTARI AND WAGHA
by Nyla Ali Khan
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A couple of days ago, I got a chance to go to Attari Railway Station and Wagha Border, on either side of which the flags of India and Pakistan are brandished with pride as well as a belligerent ferocity. I witnessed the histrionics and performativity of the Border Security Force of India and Pakistan Rangers.
http://www.sacw.net/article13317.html

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9. WHY GANDHI’S FAVOURITE BHAJAN ‘VAISHNAV JAN TO’ IS SO IMPORTANT IN MODI’S HATE-FILLED INDIA
by Ananya Vajpeyi
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First they killed the Mahatma. And then they went after his message of empathy
http://www.sacw.net/article13315.html

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10. INDIA: SAFFRONISATION OF EDUCATION IN BJP-RULED RAJASTHAN | Tabeenah Anjum
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There have been continuous attempts by the ruling BJP to saffronise the education system and root out liberal influences. For this, the ruling dispensation is back to its preferred tool — rewriting history. The idea is clear that the party wants to spread its ideology and iconise its own leaders.
http://www.sacw.net/article13313.html

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11. INDIA: FOUR ACTIVISTS OF MAZDOOR KISAN SHAKTI SANGATHAN (MKSS) CONVICTED IN A 20 YEAR FALSE CASE IN RAJASTHAN
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The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) is shocked and dismayed to receive the judgment of the Munsif Magistrate Court, Kishengarh, Ajmer convicting senior activists Nikhil Dey, Naurti, Ram Karan, Babulal and Chotu Lal Malakar of trespass and simple hurt under sections 323 and 451 of the IPC. The judgment comes on 13th June 2017 in an incident which took place on 6th of May 1998.
http://www.sacw.net/article13309.html

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12. INDIA: LETTER FROM NAPM TO KERALA CM ON POLICE EXCESSES AGAINST PEACEFUL PROTESTORS OF PUTHUVYPEEN, KOCHI
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We are writing to you in the context of the serious repression by your Government on the people of Puthuvypeen, near Kochi who have been peacefully protesting against the LPG Import Terminal Project of the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) for the past 108 days. Just as we were pleased to note certain positive decisions by your Govt. on other fronts, we are constrained to note that like in any other state, people’s voices and struggles continue to be muzzled in Kerala, particularly when the justifiability of ‘development projects’, pushed against popular consent is questioned in democratic ways.
http://www.sacw.net/article13318.html

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13. GET UP, STAND UP: EXTREME NATIONALISTS, RACISTS AND BIGOTS ENJOY A RENAISSANCE ACROSS THE WORLD | Gautam Adhikari
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Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights, sang the late Jamaican reggae master Bob Marley. Would he sing with the same verve if he were around today?
http://www.sacw.net/article13321.html
  
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14. INDIA: PROGRAMME OF PRAFUL BIDWAI MEMORIAL AWARD 2017 PRESENTATION CEREMONY IN NEW DELHI ON 23 JUNE 2017
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Presentation Ceremony Praful Bidwai Memorial Award, 2017 to Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS) [MANS, Maharashtra Blind Faith Eradication Committee] Date: June 23 (Friday), 2017 at 18.00 Hrs. Venue: Multi-Purpose Hall, Kamla Devi Complex, India International Centre, 40, Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi
http://www.sacw.net/article13310.html

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15. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
- India: The Vitriolic Fringe Is Mainstream
- India: Brutal vigilantism - A trait Hindutva shares with political Islam (Ajaz Ashraf)
- At sixth All India Hindu Convention 132 Right-Wing Hindu organisations demand creation of Hindu theocratic state by 2023 
- Hindi Article-Was Gandhi a Chatur Baniya?
- India: Gandhi had simple ways to fight destructive forces . .. .
- India: Convictions in 1993 Mumbai blasts case but no justice yet for victims of riots that came before that
- India - Govind Pansare murder case: Far right Sanatan Sanstha activist Samir Gaikwad gets bail
- India: Far right Bajrang Sena wants a ban on the sale of Kamasutra books and obscene figurines at Khajuraho temple
- India - Govind Pansare murder case: charge sheet hints at more than two killers
- India: If vigilante violence is spreading in India, it’s because it has state approval
- India: Historians aghast at the UP chief minister's description of the Taj Mahal
- India: Govt should hang people who eat beef says Sadhvi Saraswati [hindu women preacher] at convetion of Hindu Janajagriti Samiti in Goa
- India: Inauguration Sabka Ghar (Dedicated to all those killed in the name of Religion/Caste/Gender and Boundaries) on 17th June 
- India: Manipulation of History for 'Social Engineering' (Ram Puniyani)
- India: Douse language fires: Mamata has blundered in trying to impose Bengali in Darjeeling Hills (Edit, Times of India)
- India - The Demand for Gorkhaland: How language identity and ethnic strife is driving violence in Darjeeling
- India: Hindu Far Right 'Bajrang Dal' training camps teach school children use of firearms and swords in Rajasthan's Hanumangarh
- Bangladesh: Propaganda booklets of the Islamists such as '“Passport to Paradise” sugar-coat extremist ideology to lure members
- New India is running amok (Latha Jishnu)
- India's minstry of Ayush [traditional medicine] recommends 'No meat, no sex, pure thoughts' for pregnant women
- India: Chief minister of Uttar Pradesh State Yogi Adityanath promises to‘correct history’ in textbooks
- India: Rashtriya Sevika Samiti (RSS women's wing) training camp for girls teaches use of swords and knives and pushes 'family values' & 'motherhood'
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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16. MYANMAR, AN UNFINISHED NATION | Thant Myint-U
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(Nikkei Asian Review - June 17, 2017)

Historical tensions over identity still threaten country's future

Shan chiefs from what was then Burma at the Delhi Durbar 1903 (Courtesy of the author)

Almost exactly 80 years ago, Burma, now Myanmar, was separated from India. It is an anniversary that has passed virtually unnoticed, even though separation was one of the most important turning points in the country's history.

In 1935 the U.K. parliament passed its Government of Burma Act, and in mid-1937 Burma went from being a province of the Indian Empire to something just shy of a dominion, with its own semi-elected government, a parliament, and a governor answerable directly to London. It was meant as a step toward home-rule and a recognition of Burma's distinct identity.

Separation had come after years of heated deliberation. But problems related to issues of identity were only just beginning, and over the remainder of the 20th century would lead to war, isolation and impoverishment. Today, the same issues haunt the peace process between the government and ethnic-based armed organizations, the fate of Muslim communities, and even the country's opening to global business. They remain largely unresolved and are central to Myanmar's future.

Separation from India was a triumph for Burman nationalism. The Burmans (now generally referred to as the Bamar) are the overwhelmingly Buddhist, Burmese-speaking majority of the Irrawaddy valley. Three 19th century conflicts, known as the Anglo-Burmese Wars, had crippled and then destroyed their empire, which at its zenith stretched from near Bhutan to the outskirts of Bangkok. In 1885 the British abolished their thousand-year-old monarchy and annexed the Irrawaddy valley to the new Indian province of "British Burma." The Burman national psyche never really recovered.

An extract from the 1931 Imperial Census showing immigration to Burma (Courtesy of the author)

Colonial rule brought economic growth and with it the unregulated emigration of millions of people from across the Indian subcontinent. Burma was then a more prosperous land, the "first America" for many Indian families, a place of opportunity and personal reinvention. In the late 1920s Rangoon, now Yangon, rivaled New York as the world's largest immigrant port, receiving 428,300 people in 1927 alone (when the total population was around 10 million). Rangoon became an Indian city.

For the Burmans, modernity meant a society with Europeans at the top and Indians dominating the professions and business and filling out the new urban working class. Feelings soured, also against the much smaller but significant immigrant Chinese community. With the Great Depression, tensions boiled over: the first anti-Indian riots in Rangoon were in 1930, the first anti-Chinese in 1931.

Racial pride

A fresh generation of politicians emerged around this time, aiming to restore racial pride. One of the more radical groups named itself Do Bama or We Burmans, inspired in particular by the Irish nationalism of Sinn Fein. Their song, which is today's national anthem, includes the refrain: "This is our land." In other words, it is not yours. Many viewed foreign corporations as naturally exploitative and were attracted to Europe's far right as well as far left. Some saw Buddhism as endangered, and communal violence by 1938 began to take on an anti-Muslim complexion. Burman nationalism started as what we might today call an anti-globalization and anti-immigration movement.

It was not always like this. Burman kings in the 18th and 19th centuries had claimed descent from the Sakiyan clan of the Gautama Buddha and saw India as a sacred land and center of knowledge. Right up to the fall of Mandalay in 1885, Indian ways were viewed as something to be emulated. That year, a Brahmin from Benares named Govinda was invited to review and, as necessary, correct royal rituals.

Colonial police breaking up nationalist demonstration , in Rangoon, probably 1939 (Courtesy of the author)

This May, Facebook banned the word Kala as a racial slur, a form of hate speech. But not long ago, to be a Kala suggested high status. There was though, even in the pre-colonial era, a rising anxiety about the Kala. To the Burman court, the word Kala was an ethnonym that incorporated all similar looking (in local eyes) peoples from the west: Indians primarily, but also Persians, Arabs, and Europeans, including the Kala of Bilat (or England, from the Urdu Wilayat, the same as "Blighty"). But by the 19th century a notion had entered Burman thinking, that they were the race of the Buddha and that the Christian and Muslim Kala were interlopers in the holy land. In 1855 King Mindon told the visiting official Sir Arthur Phayre: "Our race once reigned in all the countries you hold. Now the Kala have come close up to us."

Colonialism turned respect mixed with anxiety into racial animosity. With separation came curbs on immigration. When the Japanese invaded in 1942, hundreds of thousands of Indians fled, fearing Burman nationalist violence, never to return. Many more left at independence, and again in the 1960s when both Indian and Chinese businesses were nationalized as part of the "Burmese Way to Socialism." By then xenophobia had become official policy.

Divided lands and loyalties

The 1935 Burma Act also reinforced internal divisions. Burma before colonialism was always a place of different peoples and kingdoms, rising and falling, as anywhere else. The map of modern Burma is new. But late colonial rule did nothing to integrate this new country, instead hardening ethnic categories and political partitions.

Through the imperial censuses, conducted every 10 years from 1861 to 1931, the British tried to make sense of the ethnic mix. In India, people were differentiated by caste. And for a while, Burmans, Arakanese, and some others were listed together in caste tables as "Semi-Hindooised Aboriginees." By the early 1900s, however, the British began categorizing peoples in Burma by language, drawing on fashionable ideas in comparative linguistics. This dovetailed to an extent with pre-colonial conceptions that also listed distinct Burman, Shan, Mon and other "races" (lu-myo or "kinds of people").

But it was in the 20th century that ethnicity became seen as something immutable and linked to state policy. Some races were seen as indigenous, others not. Some were recruited into the army while others, like the Burmans, were largely left out.

There was a geographical division as well. The lowlands of Burma were placed under direct colonial administration and then granted increasing self-government. This was the Burma of globalization, immigration, anti-colonial politics and rising Burman nationalism. The biggest "indigenous" minority were the Karen, with their own Christian leadership and their own rising nationalist aspirations; together with Indians and "Anglo-Indians" they were given communal seats in the 1937 parliament.

In the approach to independence, Karen leaders asked London for their own ethnic homeland within the Commonwealth. They had fought loyally with the British during the war, and felt betrayed when this was politely refused

Colonial-era map of British India with Burma included (Courtesy of the author)

But there was an altogether different Burma, the "Frontier Areas," comprising half the country, ruled indirectly, through their own hereditary chiefs, and excluded entirely from economic modernization and from the political reforms of the 1930s. In 1947 with the British rushing for the exits, the Shan and other chiefs opted, somewhat tentatively, to join the rest in a new republic. Autonomy was promised and in this way, ideas of ethnicity and territory were fused.

The decades since have been a time of failed nation building, a failure to overcome colonial legacies, war linked to ethnicity, and self-imposed isolation from the outside world.

At the heart of the challenge is Burman or Bamar nationalism and its relationship to a potentially inclusive national identity. The Burman nationalist focus has been to unite and protect the country from what it sees as the existential threat posed by outsiders, especially the big neighboring peoples, the Indians and the Chinese. Integrating minorities accepted as "indigenous" is for many Burmans an obvious aim.

For other "indigenous" peoples though, the challenge is Burman nationalism itself, inequality in the post-independence republic, exclusion from economic opportunities, and fear that their own identities will dissolve in a Burman-dominated process of modernization.

Remaking identities

And who is indigenous? Drawing in part on the 1921 imperial census, Myanmar's military overlords in the early 1990s published a list of 135 indigenous "nationalities." Included at the margins were the Kaman (a Muslim people descended from the bodyguard of a 17th century refugee Mughal prince), and the Chinese-speaking Kokang (whose ancestors fled the Manchus in the 1600s). The old ethnonym Myanmar was rebranded to include all those deemed indigenous (taing-yin-tha).

Excluded were the descendants of 19th and 20th century Indian and Chinese immigrants. Also excluded was the Muslim population in Rakhine State - now accounting for about one third of the state's 3.1 million-plus population. Burman (or "Bamar") and Rakhine nationalists view them as the product of colonial-era migrants from Bengal, or more recent illegal immigrants. They themselves have increasingly adopted the name "Rohingya," implying that they, too, are indigenous. It is this implication of indigeneity that is so hotly contested and makes the very word "Rohingya" a centerpiece of fiery debate.

The upsurge in violence since 2012 is to an extent a local ethnic conflict going back to World War II, but the pathology that fuels discrimination is tied to the anti-immigration roots of modern politics. And on all sides are views of ethnicity as never-changing, of "ethnic groups" that must be included or excluded from the emerging nation.

And what of the future? Myanmar is a country changing fast. People are moving around as never before, both abroad and within the country, mixing and inter-marrying. Urbanization is gathering pace and soon most will live in a few of the bigger cities. Myanmar's leaders say they are marching toward democracy, peace and economic integration with the outside world. But the country carries with it the baggage of colonial-era ethnography and post-colonial nativism that can readily feed further ethnic conflict and renewed xenophobia.

In this respect, Myanmar's biggest threat is not the return of dictatorship but an illiberal democracy linked to a negative nationalism. It is time for an honest and critical reexamination of history and a fresh search for a more inclusive, 21st century Myanmar identity.

Thant Myint-U is a historian and an author, most recently of Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (2014).

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17. A NEW INDIA RISES | Tavleen Singh
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(The Indian Express - June 18, 2017)

What I found both fascinating and very scary was the extent of their hatred for those who subscribe to faiths that are not Indian in their origin.

This week I begin with an apology for hurting the religious sentiments of millions of pious Hindus. I did this by posting a picture of Yogi Adityanath on Twitter that showed him drinking cow’s urine straight from a cow. I did not know that the picture was fake and withdrew it as soon as I found out, but by then I was under virulent attack from Hindus who believed I had deliberately insulted Hinduism.

Their hate tweets charged me with having insulted the Hindu religion out of ‘hatred’ for Yogi Adityanath. It is true that I have expressed publicly my unhappiness with the Yogi being chosen to lead our most populous state, but this is because I disapprove generally of priests in politics. I also disapprove of some of the things that the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has said but having never met him cannot be charged with hating him. In any case to all those Hindus who have taken offence I offer my sincerest apologies.

What explanation do I have for causing the inadvertent offence? Only that I was under the mistaken impression that cow’s urine was considered so sacred by believing Hindus that I saw the picture as intriguing rather than offensive. I know that cow’s urine (gomutra) is used in religious ceremonies and drunk as a tonic. I know people who market it in bottles for commercial gain and its medicinal properties. So I found the picture credible. While visiting Yogi Adityanath’s gaushala in Gorakhpur recently I saw people reverently lining up to collect cow dung from the Yogi’s cows. When I asked what they were taking it for they explained that it was used for making idols of Gauri and Ganesh for worship. So I assumed that there was something extra holy about the Yogi’s cows. Once more I apologise to those who took offence.

Now I would like to express my gratitude to those of you who took enough umbrage to send me those hate-filled tweets. Your tweets have taught me more about the current mood in India than any research I could have conducted on my own. For some time now I have been pondering over why so many angry Hindus have suddenly manifested themselves on social media, television and on our highways, without being able to understand the reasons why. Now I understand them a bit better.

In the vanguard of those who abused and threatened me were people who described themselves in their Twitter handles as Hindu nationalists and supporters of the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. What intrigued me was that their support seems to be more for religious rather than political reasons. Many of the handles from which the hate tweets originated had Hindu gods and religious symbols in them and although some listed secular interests in cricket, golf and travel, most said they were ‘proud Hindus’ interested only in nationalism.
Many admitted that they had nothing but contempt and hatred for Muslims.

Some posted a picture of a man in Arab robes collecting camel urine in a glass and taunted me for being the sort of person who objected to cow’s urine as a holy beverage but approved of camel urine. Their hatred was not just for Muslims but for Christians as well, so I was taunted for being too scared to criticise Christians for using wine in their religious ceremonies as symbolic of the ‘blood of God’.

More than Muslims and Christians, they admitted to a hatred of Pakistan and ‘presstitutes’ like me who have grown ‘senile’ in the ‘ivory tower’ of Lutyens’ Delhi. Their hatred for journalists who may or may not reside in this despised quarter of India’s capital city knows no bounds. It is based entirely on the impression that every political journalist who lives in ‘Lootyens’ is a supporter of the detested Dynasty and the Congress party.

What I found both fascinating and very scary was the extent of their hatred for those who subscribe to faiths that are not Indian in their origin. It was as if they believed that Muslims and Christians have less right to live in India than they do. Both their heroes — the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh — have repeated their belief in ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’. This is not understood.

This should worry them even more than it worries me. As someone who has often in this column denounced the fake secularism of the Congress party, I now find myself in a very peculiar position. I have said before that I understand Hindu rage created by decades of that fake secularism and support totally an Indian renaissance founded on a truly Indian idea. But, never has there been a renaissance founded on hatred. Our neo-nationalists need a more inclusive approach or there is no hope.

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18. INDIA: SATTVIK FOOD AND PATRIOTIC CHILDREN?
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(The Telegraph - June 17, 2017)

Editorial

Unhealthy trait

Mothers reign supreme in New India. As such, the health of mothers, whether it is of the motherland or the cow mother, is of paramount importance. To ensure this, the government sometimes resorts to 'surgical' strikes and sometimes to bans on cattle slaughter. Now it has turned its attention to humans. The ministry of ayurveda, yoga, naturopathy, unani, siddha and homoeopathy has come up with suggestions to keep the expectant mother and her child healthy. In a booklet titled Mother and Child Care, the Ayush ministry advises women to consume "sattvik" food - supposed to encourage pure thoughts - and stay away from presumably sinful inputs like garam masala, fried and oily items, eggs and, of course, flesh of all kinds. The advice betrays a total ignorance of, or indifference to, ground realities. Repeated surveys have found that more than 50 per cent of pregnant women in India suffer from anaemia and half of them are malnourished. A malnourished mother will pass on the deficiencies to the foetus. Meat and eggs are excellent - the second also cheap - sources of iron and protein, nutrients crucial for the unborn baby. The Union health minister has asked the Ayush ministry for a report on the matter, but this is, possibly, just a gesture.

The thrust of the advice becomes clearer in the detailed instructions. In case the ban on tamasik food - believed to rouse the passions - was not enough to drive the moral in, the booklet goes on to add that pregnant women should have "spiritual thoughts" and stay away from "desire, anger, attachment, hateredness (sic) and lust". In case someone has lost the thread by now, a reminder: this is the same booklet on mother and child care and not a manual on how to become a yogi by renouncing base feelings. In addition to being absurd - pregnancy is often accompanied by heightened emotions and sexual drive - the booklet reinforces the image of the woman as a birthing machine - once she has conceived, no scope should be given to her to want sex.

The instructions, especially the ones about lust and desire, are a manifestation of the recent national obsession with so-called celibacy (be it in humans or peacocks), which is linked to the idea of purity. A similar promise, of abstinence leading to healthy and 'pure' babies, was made by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-organized garbha samskar workshop. The inheritors of New India being built after purifying the nation of "all forms of filth" can only be of a 'pure' race. It is worrying that a Central ministry is disseminating misinformation in the name of ancient practices that are dear to the political party in power. The ministry is blithely dispensing advice meant to come only from doctors. Since a government has great authority, it should, as a rule, be cautious about advising the people. But since this government is always happiest when directing what citizens should eat, wear and see, the Ayush ministry's wisdom should cause no surprise.

Predictably, the booklet suggests that a woman put up beautiful pictures on her wall as this will have an effect on the child. Maybe a "wall of heroes" would come in handy in producing patriotic children?

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19. INDIA: WHAT MANIPUR’S UPCOMING WWII WAR MUSEUM SAYS ABOUT THE STATE TODAY | Paramita Ghosh
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(Hindustan Times, June 18, 2017)

A forgotten World War II battle and current realities... What an upcoming museum near Imphal says about Manipur today

Manipur World War 2 museum
Ninglam Tankhul participated in World War II as part of the British army. He retired as a Subedar of the Indian army. He lives in Imphal. (Raj K Raj / HT Photos)

Arambam Angabam Singh is willing to take a wide-angled view of history, and make allowances for lapses in memory, but only up to a point. An engineer by training, and a dedicated history buff for more than 10 years, he has been scouring the Manipuri countryside for relics of the Battle of Imphal-Kohima (1944), a turning point in World War II, fought between the British and the Japanese (along with Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army) in northeastern India. Singh now has a museum to build.

He and his team have found scores of rifles, artillery shells and grenades lobbed by the British at the Japanese and vice-versa. They have also found war witnesses such as Yangmaso Shishak, 80. But the ‘biscuit-and-Bose’ stories of Shishak have been difficult to digest.

Yangmaso Shishak, then a student, was a witness to the Battle of Shangshak, 1944, in Ukhrul district, Manipur. But some of his stories are full of fancy. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

In ’44, Shishak, then a student, had been a runner carrying letters from camp to camp for the British on top of a hill near Imphal. When the British retreated and the Japanese overran his village, he ran errands for them too. Iwaichi Fujiwara, one of the top Japanese intelligence officers, Shishak says, fed him biscuits. Shishak says he also stood next to Subhash Bose on a hill as Bose looked through the binoculars towards Imphal – crying.

Really?

“Bose’s INA had reached Manipur, but not Bose,” says Singh, steering the conversation with Shishak back to that part of the story where the old man stays on the side of facts. When the museum to commemorate the Battle of Imphal (see box) finally comes up, with sections on participating soldiers and war witnesses, not all of Shishak’s accounts will be included.

Further background checks will have to be done when the museum – a civilian initiative awaiting some clearances from the central government and funds from Japan’s Nippon Foundation – comes up on Imphal’s Tiddim Road. We are, however, sitting with Shishak on top of a hill in Ukhrul district, outside Imphal. Tiddim Road is to its north-east.

Faultlines

Daytime in Ukhrul is straight out of a tourist brochure: men lounge outside roadside inns; women sell berries and chips from behind shop-counters; tractors turn slowly on rice fields. The Assam Rifles regiment, a paramilitary force born in the belly of the British Empire, still patrols the area, underlining the difference between night and day. At night there are more patrols, say locals. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act is in place in Manipur since 1980.
(Second from right) Angabam Singh, co-founder of a foundation of history buffs in Manipur. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

But Ukhrul is Thuingaleng Muivah territory. A leader of one of the more powerful factions of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, Muivah is a Tangkhul Naga from Manipur. Meitis, Kukis and Nagas of Manipur have been locked in conflict for years. Angabam Singh, a Meiti, hopes when the museum comes up it will remind them of a time when they fought together, not each other.

Subedar Ninglam Tangkhul, 90, a Naga, fought in the Battle of Kohima. “I was given 200 rounds of ammunition, a rifle and a water can. The British told us to fight, we fought.” Years later when he battled Naga insurgents fighting for a separate nation, as part of the Indian army, he seemed to have applied the same rationale. “I’m a soldier. In a situation where I’m likely to be killed, I will kill,” says the retired Subedar. The north-east’s ethnic conflicts intensified post World War II with various ethnic groups contesting joining the Indian nation.

Chaoba, the caretaker of the memorial Manipuris built in the memory of fallen Japanese soldiers at Red Hill on Tiddim Road. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

Nagas, Kukis (people of the Hill) and Meitis (the Valley people), however, participated in the war in no small measure. At the INA memorial in Moirang, the gallery lists at least 20 of them. Some of them went on to have successful political careers: Moirembam Singh (latter-day Congressman and Manipur CM); Laiphrakpam Sanaba Singh, who later became a follower of Irabot Singh, one of the founder leaders of the Communist Party of India in Manipur; Hemam Nilamanisingh, who turned Congressman after being returning home after his release from a Burma jail. “This is India’s forgotten war. We’ve to revive the story,” says Santosh Shekhar, Singh’s counterpart in the Manipur Tourism Forum, joint partners of the museum initiative.

Shekhar’s father, a Malayali, landed in Imphal following his brother, an Armyman posted in the Northeast. His mother is Manipuri. “All the world’s soldiers seemed to have converged here at some point,” says Shekhar with a laugh. “The Japanese lost around 30,000 soldiers here during World War II and they haven’t forgotten it,” he adds. Shishak’s Fujiwara, the main liaison man between Bose and the Japanese army top brass, even wrote a book after the war where he anointed himself “Lawrence of Arabia of Southeast Asia”.
World War II veteran 90 years old subedar AS Ninglam Tangkhul. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

In the Battle of Imphal, Manipuris fought on both sides. With the British and the Japanese. Henkholun Vaipei, a Kuki, 92, who joined up as a rifleman with the 3rd Assam Rifles of the British army, says he heard the Japanese appealing to Manipuris in their language to join them over loudspeakers; but he didn’t do so. Desertion was an option he did not exercise, he says, as “the times were confusing”.

An ordinary soldier like Vaipei went to battle against the Japanese because he was asked to, without any stakes. At the end of it he had a character certificate. It said his character and his musketry were “good”. “I went without water for days. I couldn’t move my tongue. The war taught me to fight. And it taught me to stay alive,” says Vaipei, now a farmer.

Side effects

The Manipuris’ dream of being an independent people (Manipur was conquered by the British in the 1890s and merged with India in 1949) with a new post-colonial destiny was virtually finished by the time World War II was over.

“The monarchy had been humiliated into obedience, Manipuri generals hanged in the time of the British…. Manipuri youth even today hardly know their history,” says Sam Tonsingh (name changed on request), a retired scribe whose relative was one of the front-ranking leaders of the United National Liberation Front, one of Manipur’s oldest insurgent groups. “After accession to India, the history books that Manipuri children grew up reading were full of Rajputs, Aibaks, Tughlaqs… and other stories about mainstream India.”

The Japanese corner with photos of Japan officers, including Fujiwara, in the makeshift museum at Arambam Singh’s home in Imphal. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

Integration with India in Manipur, is, however, not a done deal. The conflict is still talked of behind closed rooms. Youngsters who point to the growing number of Audis or brightly-painted stand-alone restaurants on Imphal streets still give no straight answer to whether separatism is dead or alive. The Battle of Imphal, which Manipuris call the ‘Japanese War’, in such circumstances, seems a neutral terrain on which many Manipuris appear ready to build a new history of reconciliation – with its own divided ethnic groups and with mainland India.

“There is no problem in being with India. I mean we don’t think about it,” says Singh while going on to add that “anyone who is 70 plus now and was in the British army and then the Indian army, has fought in the Battle of Imphal. Air Marshal Arjan Singh [the only Indian Air Force officer promoted to a rank equal to a Field Marshal] flew Spitfires around our skies.”

Japanese enthusiasm to remember the Battle of Imphal has also provided tourism professionals like Singh with opportunities. “We were surprised by their interest – for the 70th anniversary day function, the Japanese ambassador was the first to confirm his participation,” says Shekhar.

At least 15 Japanese (veterans, soldiers’ children, academics) visit Manipur every month to re-connect with their personal histories or individual quests. Singh and Rajeshwar Yumnam, his co-founder at 2nd World War Imphal Campaign Foundation, are the go-to guys for all sorts of war-related projects these days. Even bone collection!

Relic-hunting also has its funny moments. The first time the group came across a hand grenade was on top of a hill in 2014. “We were terrified,” says team member Jayanta Luwangcha, a swimmer and a telecom professional. “We threw ourselves on the ground and threw stones at it. And waited. The outer part of these things are rusted but the TNT is still alive. We even had a stretcher ready….” Collecting relics across the state also gave them an opportunity to understand that there could be multiple narratives about the war.

Japan love

The Battle of Imphal wrecked local economies and lives. Trees were burnt, bridges blasted, people died. The number of Manipuris who died in that battle is still unclear. “For the British we were just a buffer state between them and Burma. There is not much documentation about us,” says Shekhar.

In the ’60s, Maibamlotpaching, a little village in Manipur, near the proposed museum site, decided to make history on its own terms. Or let’s put it this way: its people just have a very big heart.

Henkholun Vaipei, a Kuki, joined up as a rifleman with the 3rd Assam Rifles during the Battle of Imphal. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)
Henkholun Vaipei’s Burma Star. The Burma Star is a military campaign medal given the UK to its soldiers who served in the Second World War, especifically in the Burma Campaign from 1941 to 1945. The Battle of Imphal is considered tobe part of the Burma Campaign. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

The Japanese had been aggressors but had the British been any different? “We had seen death at close quarters. There were bodies of Japanese soldiers everywhere and no one to take care of them. They were far from home... We decided to honour the dead. We cremated them and built a memorial,” says Gourmohan, a local, who began the initiative. Veterans of the 33 Japanese Division returned to this village and erected the pillars. A Japanese professor teaching in Imphal paid for the fence.

Everyone loves a success story. Should nation-states not embrace, or at least acknowledge their failures and miss-steps, people who aren’t on the right side of the story, people with whom they go to battle? The price of forgetting one’s own history has always been steep.

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20. INDIA’S WELLS ARE RUNNING DRY, FAST | Asit K. Biswas, Cecilia Tortajada and Udisha Saklani
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(The Conversation - June 16, 2017)

Over the past three years, the monsoon – the rainy season that runs from June through September, depending on the region – has been weak or delayed across much of India, causing widespread water shortages.

With the onset of summer this year, southern India, particularly Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu states, are already wilting under a blistering sun and repeated heatwaves. Drought is expected to affect at least eight states in 2017, which is a devastating possibility in a country where agriculture accounted for 17.5% of GDP in 2015 and provides the livelihood for nearly half the population.

Across rural India, water bodies, including man-made lakes and reservoirs, are fast disappearing after decades of neglect and pollution.

“They have drained out the water and converted the land into a plot for schools, dispensaries, and other construction activities,” Manoj Misra of the NGO Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan warned in The Hindu newspaper as far back as 2012.

Residents wait for the government-run water tanker in Masurdi village, Maharashtra. Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
Not a drop to drink

It wasn’t always this way. For the past 2,500 years, India has managed its water needs by increasing supply.

Prior to industrialisation and the accompanying global “green revolution” in the 1960s, which saw the development of high-yield variety crops using new technologies, India’s water availability was plentiful. Households, industries and farmers freely extracted groundwater and dumped untreated waste into waterways without a second thought.

But such practices are now increasingly untenable in this rapidly growing country. Per capita availability of water has been steadily falling for over a decade, dropping from 1,816 cubic metres per person in 2001 to 1,545 cubic metres in 2011.

The decline is projected to deepen in coming years as the population grows. India, which currently has 1.3 billion people, is set to overtake China by 2022 and reach 1.7 billion in 2050.

Water scarcity is also exacerbated by a growth in water-intensive industries, such as thermal power production, extraction and mining, as India seeks to feed and power its growing population. In addition to affecting biodiversity, these activities also alter natural water systems.

Still, successive governments have pursued the same old supply-centric policies, paying little heed to the country’s waning clean water supplies.

For nearly 50 years, a misguided groundwater policy has sucked India dry; water tables have declined by an average of one metre every three years in some parts of the Indus basin, turning it into the second most over-stressed aquifer in the world, according to NASA.

Across nearly the whole country, basic sewage management is also lacking. According to the Third World Centre for Water Management, only about 10% of waste water in the country is collected and properly treated. As a result, all water bodies in and around urban centres are seriously polluted.

Today, the country is struggling to provide safe drinking water to every citizen.

What conservation?

Even so, residents of New Delhi or Kolkata today use more than twice as much water, on average, than people in Singapore, Leipzig, Barcelona or Zaragoza, according to data compiled by the Third World Research Centre.

The water use in Delhi is 220 litres per capita per day (lpcd), while some European cities boast figures of 95 to 120 lpcd.

Excess consumption is attributable in part to citizen indifference about conserving water after so many years of plentiful supply. Since large swaths of many Indian megacities lack piped supply of clean water, leaks and theft are common. Cities in India lose 40% to 50% due to leakages and non-authorised connections.

At this point, the only viable option for India would seem to be managing demand and using water more efficiently.

The country is making tentative steps in that direction. The 2016 new National Water Framework, passed emphasises the need for conservation and more efficient water use.

But under India’s Constitution, states are responsible for managing water, so central policies have little resonance. Neither the 1987 and 2012 National Water Policy documents, which contained similar recommendations to the 2016 policy, had any real impact on water use.

And after millennia of exclusive focus on expanding the water supply, the idea of curbing water consumption and increase reuse remains a mostly alien concept in India.
Water wars

Consistent supply-centric thinking has also resulted in competition for water as states negotiate the allocation of river water based on local needs.

India’s inter-state disputes on water usage have reached a critical point. 

The century-long conflict over the Cauvery River, for example, involves Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka – three major south Indian states. With each state demanding ever more water, the river simply cannot keep up.

In Karnataka, where agricultural policies are heavily skewed towards water-guzzling commercial crops, such as sugarcane, mismanaged ground and surface water are dying a slow death. Still the state continues to petition the Cauvery Water Dispute Tribunal for an increase in its share.

Water scarcity in Karnataka is aggravated by non-existent water quality management. Its rivers are choked with toxic pollutants, and oil-suffused lakes in Bengaluru, the capital, are reportedly catching fire.

Meanwhile, in the northern part of the country, the Ravi-Beas River is causing conflict between Punjab and Haryana states.

In India’s water wars, rivers are a resource to be harnessed and extracted for each riparian party’s maximum benefit. Very little emphasis has been placed on conserving and protecting existing water sources. And not one inter-state negotiation has prioritised pollution abatement or demand management.

Even policies from the national government, which claims to target water conservation and demand management, remain reliant on supply-side solutions. Big infrastructure programs, such as the Indian river-linking plan, envision large-scale water transfer from one river basin to another, again seeking to augment supply rather than conserve water and reduce consumption.
Sand mining on the Cauvery river in 2017. Prashanth NS/Flickr, CC BY-SA

For inspiration on managing demand, India could look to Berlin in Germany, Singapore and California, all of which have designed and implemented such policies in recent years. Successful measures include raising public awareness, recycling water, fixing leaks, preventing theft and implementing conservation measures such as water harvesting and stormwater management.

Between rapidly disappearing fresh water, unchecked pollution and so many thirsty citizens, India is facing an impending water crisis unlike anything prior generations have seen. If the nation does not begin aggressively conserving water, the faucets will run soon dry. There is simply no more supply to misuse.

(Asit K. Biswas, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore / Cecilia Tortajada, Senior Research Fellow, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore / Udisha Saklani, Independent Policy Researcher)

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21. VISIONS OF INDIA: HOW FILM AND TV ROMANTICISES LIFE AFTER THE RAJ
by Stuart Jeffries
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(The Guardian - 17 June 2017) 

Why can’t Britain depict its troubled relationship with India without getting stuck in a fantasy of the past?
Characters from TV’s Indian Summers, plus the more realistic forthcoming movies Victoria & Abdul and The Black Prince
Continental drift ... Characters from TV’s Indian Summers, plus the more realistic forthcoming movies Victoria & Abdul and The Black Prince Composite: Alamy; Peter Mountain/Focus Features

The Real Marigold Hotel review – is India prepared for Miriam Margolyes and pals?

“In India,” said Miriam Stoppard earlier this year, “we saw people living very simple, pure lives, with not very much, and it did make me think that somewhere in the west, we’ve gone off course.”

The 80-year-old agony aunt was reflecting on her experiences in series two of The Real Marigold Hotel, in which eight veteran celebrities stayed in a Keralan guest house as part of the BBC’s TV experiment to see if they might consider the region a nice place to retire to. The cunningly conceived reality show was inspired by John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, which saw the likes of Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith get third-age third-world spiritual rejuvenation from Harrow-born Dev Patel’s hotel owner.

What Stoppard was talking about is an India that exists only on British TV. It’s an India seen from the eye of the post-colonial European beholder, a projection of western fantasies and a spiritual corrective to Britons’ presumed materialistic lifestyles. “When we sailed up the backwaters in Kochi,” recalled Stoppard, “we were surrounded by calmness, tranquility and the simplicity of village life, so different from our hectic lives at home.”

Miriam Stoppard (second from left) checks into The Real Marigold Hotel with Dennis Taylor, Amanda Barrie, Rustie Lee, Lionel Blair, Paul Nicholas, Sheila Ferguson and Bill Oddie

Full of eastern promise ... Miriam Stoppard (second from left) checks into The Real Marigold Hotel with Dennis Taylor, Amanda Barrie, Rustie Lee, Lionel Blair, Paul Nicholas, Sheila Ferguson and Bill Oddie. Photograph: Ali Harshad/BBC

“I thought the Marigold Hotel shows were very sweet and charming, but they didn’t really have much to do with modern India,” says Paul Rutman, writer of Channel 4 drama Indian Summers. “India’s exploding and thanks in part to that energy, you feel that the 21st century will be the Asian century.” If you want hectic, suggests Rutman, forget the western way of life and go to Bangalore: “It’s a city experiencing an incredible economic surge. It has a kind of swagger and confidence you don’t get in the UK.”

What Stoppard said recalls what Edward W Said wrote in Orientalism, the Palestinian critic’s nearly 40-year-old study of the west’s patronising representations of the east: “The European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached.”

Europeans have always gone to India and found what they wanted; now more than ever, if the recent spate of TV dramas and reality shows are anything to go by. What is India really like? British TV doesn’t really care. Instead, the point of India on telly is to serve as an exotic backdrop to western dramas of self-discovery. For instance, when the ITV drama The Good Karma Hospital started earlier this year, broadsheet critic Michael Hogan noted that all the India cliches were duly ticked off: “Bustling marketplace? Check. Dangerous rickshaw drivers? Check. Elephants and cows randomly roaming around? Check. Cute children playing cricket? Check.”

Watch a clip from The Good Karma Hospital.
The Good Karma Hospital review – the TV version of a package holiday

It was a mash-up of medical drama and post-Raj exoticism, in which junior doctor Ruby Walker exchanged cheerless Nottingham for a cottage hospital in sunny, beach-fringed Kerala run by Amanda Redman’s Dr Lydia Fonseca, that staple of exotic fish-out-of-water dramas, namely a Brit expat who’s as tough as old boots but has a heart of gold. Another character, Maggie Smart, was a mum from Stourbridge who came for her daughter’s wedding but couldn’t quite bring herself to back to the West Midlands.

Actor Phyllis Logan told What’s on TV that her character is “blown away by India, and has embraced the culture, the people and the sunshine. She’s desperate to be a part of it all, while her husband just wants to go back to Stourbridge.” You’ll remember Logan as Downton Abbey housekeeper Mrs Hughes; she’s moved from one Sunday night drama to another; from one that helped sustain British viewers’ illusions about what their class-stratified Edwardian past was like, to one that helps us bask in no-less deluded fantasies about what India is.

If The Good Karma Hospital were a holiday, it would be a package one, hermetically sealing visitors from anything challenging. But it was such a ratings success that a second series was commissioned while the first was being screened. By contrast, a British series that dealt with the dark side of the Raj, Channel 4’s big-budget drama Indian Summers – for all its palette of hot pinks, electric blues and saffron yellows, its symphony of saris and titillating cross-race dalliances – was cancelled after two series last year. Opening in 1932 at Shimla, the Raj’s summer capital, the Julie Walters-fronted show was envisaged by its makers as a five series, 50-part retelling of the birth of modern India. Writer Paul Rutman says he was inspired to write it after staying in a hotel in Darjeeling where he saw old Raj photographs.

Dark materials ... Channel 4’s Indian Summers.

“There were British people having tea and carrying on like Lord and Lady Muck, and in the background there were Indians. I thought that these stories needed to be told, capturing both sides, but giving the Indian experience a weight that hasn’t been put forward in this country before. Nostalgia for the Raj was never a huge interest to me. We’re so ignorant about the empire. It seemed right for a drama to recreate that lost world.”

However, viewing figures collapsed from 3 million to 1 million between the two series. “We felt very sad [the show was axed] because we were just getting to the interesting material,” says Rutman. “It was going to go on to the war. It’s a story I haven’t been able to finish. We continue to hold out hope that we can come back to it. Who knows?”

One supects that the story Rutman wants to tell, however, is not one that white Britons would paticularly enjoy watching. When we make a collective passage to India, we want the sanitised package holiday version.

James Fox with Victor Banerjee and Saeed Jaffrey in A Passage To India
Hungry for cinema ... James Fox with Victor Banerjee and Saeed Jaffrey in A Passage To India. Photograph: Allstar/EMI
End of empire: why Bollywood needs to grasp India's story
Read more

Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra thinks that Britain is airbrushing its shameful past.He worries that what gets lost, in recent British films and in TV depictions of his homeland is what today’s India is really like. He argues there is “a uniform resistance within the British media to any sort of consistent coverage of the dark political realities of contemporary India, and, in particular, its far-right leader, Narendra Modi. Bollywood gets more airtime. “Perhaps,” he says, “it’s more consoling for many in Britain to think of themselves as civilising patrons and of the Indians as simple folk who can still be awed and impressed, rather than deal with the complex and often melancholy realities of these post-imperial and post-colonial peoples.”

Worse, he thinks that British attitudes towards India are mired in delusion and fantasy now more than ever, especially when it comes to depicting colonial rule on screen. “The further we get from the days of the Raj, the more comfortable many people in Britain – or perhaps just television producers – become with colonialism,” Mishra says. “And I am amazed by how many people tend to forget that it was, above all, a grotesquely racist enterprise that has cast a long shadow on race relations in Britain.

“It is hard to imagine Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, EM Forster’s A Passage to India, JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, or even [Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film] Gandhi, with their unflinching gaze at the cruelty and absurdity of the British empire, being made now or achieving a high degree of success.”

Danny Ashok and Darren Kuppan in Guards at the Taj

Crossing swords ... Danny Ashok and Darren Kuppan in Guards at the Taj. Photograph: Marc Brenner

That cultivation of nostalgia for the colonial era is a dangerous thing, argues Rajiv Joseph, a US dramatist of Indian ancestry, who wrote the recent play Guards at the Taj. “To view the Raj nostalgically, from my perspective, relates to Trump’s ‘Let’s make America great again’, which really means: ‘Let’s get back to being led by white males.’ In the US, there’s a certain nostalgia for the white male perspective, and the same it seems to me is true of films and TV about India. There’s always going to be the perspective that those were the good old days. But, of course, they weren’t.”

What is more, Raj nostalgia is a British luxury product that doesn’t appeal to Indians. “Among the Indian middle classes today, particularly those who come from families who lived in abject poverty, there is none of the nostalgia for the Raj that there might have been in previous generations,” says Sanjoy K Roy, one of the organisers of the current UK-India Year of Culture, “The Raj has nothing to do with their lives.”

Rajiv Joseph remembers an uncle showing him the statue of Queen Victoria in Kolkata. “I said to him: ‘Why are you showing me this?’ And he replied: ‘It’s hundreds of years of our history.’ And he was right. He wasn’t proud of it, but he didn’t want to ignore it.”

Judi Dench and Ali Fazal in Victoria & Abdul (2017).

By royal command ... Judi Dench and Ali Fazal in Victoria & Abdul. Photograph: Peter Mountain/Focus Features
Judi Dench to star as Queen Victoria in Stephen Frears drama

Can Britain depict its relationship with India without being stuck in delusion and fantasy? It seems a worthwhile thing to do in 2017 which, after all, marks the 70th anniversary of the end of British rule and India’s bloody partition (to be revisited by a special BBC season later in the year). Before that, two new films take up the challenge. Stephen Frears’s Victoria & Abdul traces the hidden relationship between the British queen and her Indian Muslim attendant Abdul Karim, with Judi Dench reprising her role as Victoria from the 1997 film Mrs Brown.

Judging from the trailer, Frears’s film looks a little like Mrs Brown 2, with the charming Abdul (played by Ali Fazal), like Billy Connolly’s Highland ghillie John Brown, cutting through the dreary phalanx of crusty old courtiers to cheer up our poor old queen, in one scene serving her a wobbly jelly for tea, which puts a smile on her otherwise spirit-crushed face. Indian journalist Shrabani Basu, whose 2010 book was adapted for the film, says: “The fact that there was a Muslim at the heart of the British administration at the height of the empire is something that is hugely significant.” Significant, too, is the fact that this relationship was airbrushed; Karim’s letters were destroyed and he was hounded out of Britain.

The Black Prince, written by Indian-born British actor Kavi Raz, deals with another little-known relationship likely to make nostalgists for the Raj feel queasy, this time between Victoria and Maharajah Duleep Singh, the last ruler of a Sikh empire. In 1849, Punjab was annexed to British India and the boy prince removed from his throne, placed under the guardianship of an army surgeon. Singh was cut off from his language, religion and culture, and eventually converted to Christianity.

Maharajah league omission ... Amanda Root and Satinder Sartaaj in The Black Prince.

“What’s striking is that the British government treated him terribly, but throughout his life, there was a relationship of great fondness between him and Queen Victoria,” says The Black Prince producer Jasjeet Singh.

“What we hope is to give proper weight to the terrible things the British did,” says the film’s co-producer Asa Singh Dhaliwal, “but at the same time from a British point of view – and I consider myself British – the film can be enjoyed not as nostalgia but as showing what really happened and yet has never been put on screen before.”

It’s a good point, since seeing what really happened might just help shake Britons out of the cosy sense of nostalgia and wish-fulfilment that dominates too many of our dramas about India.

The BBC’s Partition season will screen in the summer; The Black Prince is in cinemas on 21 July; Victoria & Abdul is out on 22 September; series two of The Good Karma Hospital is due on ITV next year

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22. ATTWOOD ON HAUSER AND JHA, 'CULTURE, VERNACULAR POLITICS, AND THE PEASANTS: INDIA, 1889-1950: AN EDITED TRANSLATION OF SWAMI SAHAJANAND'S MEMOIR'
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 Walter Hauser, Kailash Chandra Jha, eds. and trans. Culture, Vernacular Politics, and the Peasants: India, 1889-1950: An Edited Translation of Swami Sahajanand's Memoir. Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2015. 708 pp. n.p. (cloth), ISBN 978-93-5098084-2.

Reviewed by Donald W. Attwood (McGill University)
Published on H-Asia (June, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

ATTWOOD ON HAUSER PEASANTS AND POLITICS

As the subtitle indicates, this is an edited translation of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s Mera Jivan Sangharsh (My Life Struggle). Sahajanand wrote this memoir, in Hindi, while jailed in 1940 for opposing British rule. By age fifty-one, he had lived many lives: as a boy from a village family, an avid student, a sannyasi (ascetic or wandering holy man), a scholar of Hindu scripture, a campaigner for Brahman self-respect, a Gandhian leader in the freedom movement, and (in the 1930s) an organizer of peasants fighting oppressive landlords. Even for India, this was a remarkable sequence of vocations, testifying to Sahajanand’s intellectual brilliance, asceticism, and devotion to the poor. Serving the peasants, he found, was his best way of serving God.

Walter Hauser, professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia, edited and translated this memoir with Kailash Chandra Jha. Much of Hauser’s career has been devoted to Sahajanand’s life and works. Hauser’s generous endnotes to each chapter provide essential background on Indian society, religion, history, and politics. These notes show meticulous attention to detail plus a broad and convincing grasp of the changes confronting India in the first half of the twentieth century. Careful reading of notes and text is rewarding but challenging. (For example, chapter IIIC, on the peasant movement of the 1930s, is eighty-seven pages long; the accompanying notes are eighty-one pages.)

In homage to Sahajanand and his editor, it seems appropriate to offer a few words on the varied phases of Sahajanand’s life. He grew up in a village in Ghazipur district in the eastern United Provinces, near Bihar. His parents were poor but encouraged his schooling. One day in the harvest season, he was told to stay home and tend the oxen, yet “it was not acceptable for me to absent myself from school even for a day” (p. 15). The oxen ate part of the harvest, but Sahajanand went unpunished. It seems that he decided what was acceptable, then and later.

In high school he took a new direction, deciding to become a sannyasi and seek salvation through renunciation. He had been married at about the age of fourteen, but his wife died soon after. While his family was planning a second marriage, he slipped away to Varanasi, the holy city; took the vows of sannyas; and severed all family ties.

For the next few years, Sahajanand traveled far and wide, mostly on foot, begging for food and eating once a day. He hoped to find a guru, a guide to salvation—hidden deep in a forest, perhaps. But the holy men he met were disappointing: some were ignorant, others waxed fat on donations, still others were obsessed with meaningless austerities. Disillusioned, he returned to Varanasi.

There he decided to focus on scriptural studies. He learned a great deal but found that some printed texts contained errors that went uncorrected. And some teachers taught whatever was in demand, whether they were trained in a given tradition of Hindu philosophy or not. Moreover, he found the schools too worldly, permeated with striving for wealth and influence.

In 1914, as salvation continued to elude him, Sahajanand accepted an invitation to a regional meeting of Bhumihar Brahmans, a large caste of landlords and tenant cultivators in the United Provinces and Bihar. Not known as priestly or religious, Bhumihars felt that other Brahmans looked down on them. Steeped in the pious tradition of his own (Jujhautiya) Brahman caste, Sahajanand decided it was his duty to promote Bhumihar self-respect.

Many castes had started self-respect movements, but Sahajanand took an unusual, possibly unique, approach. Rather than write Sanskrit verses on the divine ancestry of this caste (for which there were many precedents), he gathered empirical evidence. Touring several districts, he documented marriages between Bhumihars and others, such as Maithil and Kanyakubja Brahmans, including some families of great nobility and wealth. These marriages went both ways. (If brides go only one way, bride givers are assumed to be lower in status than bride receivers.) All this evidence was published in a four-hundred-page book, Sahajanand’s first of many. If you wonder how a sannyasi and religious scholar became a systematic ethnographer, I have no explanation except that he was brilliant and eccentric.

In the 1920s his relations with Bhumihar leaders (who were great landlords) turned sour. Sahajanand had assumed that society could be improved—made more pious, educated, even ethical—from the top down. He later decided this was a mistake. In the 1929 meeting of the Bhumihar assembly, Sahajanand opposed the landlord who was elected president. The meeting fell apart and was never reconvened. That same year, he founded the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (or Peasant Assembly), the organization to which he devoted the rest of his life.

In 1919 Sahajanand had started reading newspapers and learning about politics. He met Mahatma Gandhi in 1920 and attended the historic meeting of the Indian National Congress in Nagpur. There the Congress adopted a stance of non-cooperation toward British rule and also resolved that the Congress would “seek the support of the voiceless and oppressed citizens of the nation—the peasants, the agricultural labourers, and the factory workers” (p. 201). The idea of grounding the nationalist movement in the will of the common people was Gandhi’s, but Sahajanand would take this far more seriously than most Gandhians.

One step in his new vocation was focused on cows. In 1921 he organized a campaign, near Buxar in south Bihar, aimed at delinking the annual mela or religious fair from the regional trade in cattle. Cow slaughter was a growing pretext for anti-Muslim agitation, and the fair provided a venue for the sale of cattle to Muslim butchers. Sahajanand thought that if this trade were suppressed there would be less Hindu-Muslim antagonism and disunity. He and other Congress workers asked the butchers to leave the fair, but this move was furiously opposed by Hindu landlords, temple priests, shopkeepers, and ferrymen—all who derived incomes, directly or indirectly, from the cattle trade, including many Hindu cultivators looking to offload surplus cattle. Sahajanand neatly described these interest groups and his growing suspicion of institutional religion, which “could be entirely superficial and a matter of complete hypocrisy.” He concluded that “it is in fact Hindus who are 100 per cent responsible for cow slaughter” (pp. 213-214).

Sahajanand was arrested in 1921 along with many other Congress workers. Jail was educational. While he followed Gandhi’s instructions on civil disobedience to the letter, others did not. Some of the “first class [educated] political prisoners” demanded special treatment: good food, including milk, ghee, and sweets (p. 225). Sahajanand wondered what sort of mass movement had leaders demanding such treatment. The 1920s was a period of growing idealism for many, but he sensed the moral rot in some quarters.

The last half of the book concerns Sahajanand’s work with the Kisan Sabha, or Peasant Assembly, which he founded in 1929. At first, he saw this as an extension of his work for the Congress, though later the Kisan Sabha was opposed by the Congress. He began by organizing meetings and demonstrations urging the government to set limits on landlord oppression. (Bihar was largely controlled by zamindars—great and small landlords who, in exchange for loyalty to the British, wielded unchecked power over the countryside. Their agents used violence to extort rents and other cesses from villagers in dire poverty.)

The Kisan Sabha gradually became more militant, partly in response to the 1934 earthquake that destroyed homes and fields over a wide area of north Bihar. The Kisan Sabha raised funds and organized relief camps, but instead of helping, the landlords seized relief loans granted to their tenants and forced them to sell whatever they had left—“utensils, goats, cattle”—to pay their rents (p. 414). Sahajanand appealed to Gandhi for help in shaming the landlords. Gandhi suggested that well-documented complaints be forwarded to the maharaja of Darbhanga, whose vast zamindari was in the earthquake area. After all, the maharaja’s manager was a congressman; he would surely help. Sahajanand was appalled at this response. To document every complaint was not feasible during a massive relief operation. After years of fighting landlords, including this maharaja, Sahajanand knew that big landlords were not going to express sympathy or even neutrality. His devotion to Gandhi ended abruptly.

Gandhi’s reaction was shaped by high policy in the Indian National Congress, which was wooing landlords away from loyalty to the British. Unity against the British, not social justice, was paramount. In 1937, as a step toward self-rule, legislative elections were held in a number of provinces, including Bihar. Uncertain of his strategy, Sahajanand and the Kisan Sabha helped the Congress to victory in Bihar. Yet except for appointing committees that never issued reports, the new Congress ministry did nothing to curtail the zamindars.

That alliance between the Congress and landlords forced Sahajanand into doubt, though he remained committed to peasants. Some of his lieutenants were members of the Communist Party, and he began reading up on Marxism. When he was jailed, he wrote (after his memoir) a lengthy treatise interpreting the Hindu religious classic, the Bhagavad Gita in Marxist terms.

The long concluding chapter on peasant unrest in the 1930s was, to me, disappointing. Some passages recall the author’s skill as ethnographer. For example, there was a prolonged struggle in Reora, in Gaya district: we read of the precipitating act of extra oppression, the brutalities of the landlords’ agents, the tactics of resistance, and the peasants’ gains. This partly appeases the hunger of anthropologists and historians for a participant’s description of peasant resistance. But in general, Sahajanand’s attention in this chapter is fixed less on his peasant base and more on his maneuvers vis-à-vis other national and provincial leaders. This focus will interest historians of the Indian freedom movement, but they already have abundant sources.

Straying into the geopolitical realm, Sahajanand lost his direction. In 1940 the Congress declined to oppose the British war effort, but the Communist Party of India (following Moscow’s lead) did oppose. Sahajanand was so fed up with the Congress and the Brits that he followed suit. That’s what got him thrown in jail in 1940. This arrest was of no use to the villagers, yet shortly before it happened, he had vowed “to invest all my time and energy in the activities of the kisans” (the peasants) (p. 569).

It did not help when Adolf Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. The Communist Party reversed itself, declaring that the war against Hitler was not an imperialist war but a people’s war. Sahajanand agreed, but this again meant nothing to the peasants. All this maneuvering fractured the leftist alliance that had supplied educated leaders to the peasant movement. Sahajanand lost touch with his base, and the left alliance fell in tatters. The villagers got national liberation instead of justice.

Sahajanand died in 1950, writing about class oppression but now without an active peasant movement to lead. This was sad, but the cumulative effects of his life struggle included the eventual abolition of zamindari landlordship in Bihar. He also left us this memoir, which offers a vivid portrait—much enhanced by the editorial notes—of life in India during the late colonial period.

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23. WARSAW EXHIBITION TURNS SPOTLIGHT ON GOLDEN AGE OF POLISH-INDIAN RELATIONS | Sneha Bhura
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livemint.com, June 16, 2017

From Rajdoot motorcycles to smuggler-mountaineers, an exhibition in Warsaw had been witness to the gallivanting tribe of merchants and mountaineers, engineers and bohemians soaking in the richness of the East


Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Poland in 1955 juxtaposed with an image of Brij Mohan Sethi, former owner of the Prince Polonia hotel. Courtesy Max Cegielski and Janek Simon

In May, when Polish journalist Max Cegielski and his artist friend Janek Simon visited Delhi for a teaser of an exhibition on Polish-Indian relations, they devoted an entire day to negotiations with the former owner of a three-star hotel in Paharganj to procure one exhibit. They were keen on taking back with them the chipped and fraying signboard of what was once Prince Polonia, or Prince of Poland, a backpacker’s hotel popular with Polish tourists in the 1980s.

The exhibit had been witness to the gallivanting tribe of merchants and mountaineers, engineers and bohemians soaking in the richness of the East at a time when Polish-Indian relations were prospering under the overarching shadow of the USSR. It is estimated that some 6,000 Poles visited India in 1988, three times more than the number recorded a decade earlier.

The signboard’s neon-studded days must have also spied on the early education of Polish businessmen in the art of capitalist economics via smuggling—long before Poland embraced capitalism in 1989. The Prince Polonia signboard reached Warsaw, but only a month later—a week before the start of the exhibition, Polish-Indian Shop, on 14 June in Warsaw. The exhibition will travel to Mumbai in November. Cegielski and Simon try to redeem a neglected strand of Polish identity that was shaped by Indian ethos, objects and ideas. Edited excerpts from an email interview:

How and when did the idea of ‘Polish-Indian Shop’ come together?

Simon: Max and I have been frequently going to India for almost 20 years. You can say we are kind of Indophiles. We are both interested in the less obvious geographies of exchange and cultural transfers. How Poland, or Eastern Europe in general, situates itself in a geography broader then the East-West divide it’s usually pressed into. We are also both really excited about the anarchistic, less legal side of things. Especially when it turns out that this grey zone had a bigger influence on reality than the official “high note” political exchange. And this is the case of the trade networks between Poland and India in the 1980s. It motivated us to start working on this project.

The hotel juxtaposed with a 1955 drawing.

Polish economists, who visited India in the 1950s and 1960s, advised the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to adopt a mixed economy.

Cegielski: These economists are Michał Kalecki and Oskar Lange. They were leaders of the Polish School of Development who were allowed by the Polish government to stop following the principles of the Marxist economy and devise development plans based on analyses of the local socio-economic conditions, and postulated the introduction of “mixed economy”, which combines socialism and capitalism. They did it because these pre-World War II economists were looking for any opportunity to escape strict Marxist rules. We are showing Kalecki’s photo with Nehru and the Indian prime minister’s letter to Kalecki, as well as Kalecki’s papers on the development of India, apart from the Hindu sculptures that Lange brought from India to Poland.

The Indo-Polish Friendship Association (Ipfa) in Warsaw and smaller towns incubated a vibrant hippie subculture. Can you tell us more about the Ipfa network and what impact it had on the cultural landscape of Indo-Polish relations?

Cegielski: For the exhibition, we did video recordings with the prominent hippies of the 1960-70s: Polish musicians, painters and poets, etc., who regularly went to these places. Through the country’s network of association clubs, Hinduism, Buddhism, theosophy, yoga and the Hare Krishna movement were gaining popularity. Thus, the Eastern forms of spiritual practices competed with the socialist and catholic lifestyles. Authorities then were, on the one hand, happy that there was a sort of counter-power to the Catholic Church, but on the other hand were afraid that these “Eastern influences” will get out of control.

Yoga legend Stanisław Górski against the 1969 edition of ‘The Polish Review’.

So Polish mountaineers used to smuggle goods into India to finance their expeditions?

Cegielski: First of all, we have to remember that Polish climbers (Jerzy Kukuczka, Wanda Rutkiewicz, et al) were really brave and ambitious people, but Poland was too poor to provide them with proper equipment to sponsor expeditions. In the homeland, they sometimes worked as painters or cleaners of high chimneys, roofs, etc., but it was not enough to cover the costs of faraway trips or hire Nepalese or Pakistani porters on the spot. An obvious and great idea was to bring to Asia as much stuff as could be sold (crystals, alcohol, some simple electric stuff like hairdryers, photo cameras, etc.) and also bring some Indian goods on the way back. Polish climbers were people looking for freedom, and as one of them said in a documentary called Art Of Freedom, about Himalayan expeditions, that we are showing, “Smuggling is another act of freedom.” We are also displaying some of these historical goods used for sale.

The exhibition is centred around archival material: photographs, ads, maps, architectural plans and mock-ups, films and other complementary texts. What were some of the challenges of mounting a public exhibition with such text-heavy historical objects?

Simon: The main challenge of making an exhibition out of archival material in a contemporary art institution is not to make it boring. So we put in a lot of energy into finding unusual objects to tell the story: We have a motorcycle (dating from the 1960s) since Poland sold a motorcycle production line to India in the 1960s. It was called Rajdoot in India and SHL in Poland. The architectural competition for the building of the Polish embassy in Delhi is a major theme—it shows what the discussion was, about the way Poland wanted to present itself in India. We are showing an architectural model that is a recreation of one of the models submitted for that competition. We are using personal photo archives of people involved in the suitcase trade of the 1980s—both from India and Poland. We are also putting a lot of attention to the display itself. It’s designed from modular crates used in Polish markets. Crates symbolize the movement of things around the world—kind of like containers.

Polish painter Erwin Sówka’s 1986 work ‘Meditations III’.

In November, the exhibition will move to Clark House Initiative in Mumbai. Any particular reason why you collaborated with them?

Simon: Our friendship with Clark House has roots in shared interests, sensibilities and, I would also add, politics. People at Clark House explore the less obvious geographical connections, as we do. They also share our interest in the “low” bazaars, freelance traders and such kind of figures.

Polish-Indian Shop is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw till 10 September

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24. FAITH NO MORE | Sami Shah and Ishma Alvi
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(The Weekend Australian Magazine, June 17-18, 2017)

Sami Shah and Ishma Alvi thought long and hard about Islam before deciding to renounce it.

My name is Sami Shah, and I’m not a Muslim. I was born a Muslim, I grew up a Muslim, but at a point in my life I stopped being a Muslim. You can do that, but it’s not encouraged. No religion gets excited when an adherent tries to leave and Islam tends to frown on apostasy: it’s illegal in most Muslim countries, ­punishable by death in some. This is what the Quran says about apostates: … if they turn their backs, take them and slay them, wherever you find them. [Quran 4:89]. Now, I would really like that not to happen to me.

Every time I meet someone new, their first assumption is that I’m a practising Muslim – it’s practically an occupational hazard. It doesn’t upset me. I know that I have a Muslim-y name and a Muslim-y face. Brown skin, black beard, “Allah 4 lyfe” tattooed across my forehead. OK, so maybe not the last part. But I do have a face that’s Muslim-y enough that in a hostage situation, I’d be the suspect. Even if I was the hostage.

Growing up, I didn’t know it was a Muslim-y name or face. I was living in Pakistan, so it was just another face, just another name. Then, in 2012, I migrated to Australia, and all of a sudden I went from background scenery to curiosity. That’s ­actually unfair to parts of Australia. In Melbourne, for example, you can have a 17-syllable name only pronounceable through a combination of whistles, semaphore, eyebrow curls and a 13-person flash mob, and people will go out of their way to make you feel as though that’s just how it is for everyone. And having a beard means you’re expected to own a ukulele, not implement shariah law.

Unfortunately, I didn’t move to Melbourne when I first landed in Australia. Instead, because the immigration department has a sense of humour all its own, I spent almost four years living in Northam, a small country town two hours’ drive from Perth. I still have many friends there and an appreciation for the West Australian ­countryside – a thing of unparalleled beauty. But a small part of my love for Northam has to do with how far it is from the world I’d just left behind.

Sami Shah

Pakistan is a Muslim country. The religion ­suffuses every portion of the country: from the ­government to the media, and even to everyday conversations. To suddenly be away from Pakistan was a relief to me. I didn’t have my aural environment filled with constant calls to prayer, every sentence wasn’t ended with a religious invocation of gratitude for Allah’s blessings, and I could openly proclaim myself an atheist.

My departure from Islam had been gradual. I didn’t just wake up one day with the decision that I was no longer a Muslim – I came to it over time. Comedy replaced Islam as my primary identifier but it wasn’t this that caused Islam’s hold over me to disintegrate – rather, it was my decision to start truly studying the religion. By 2006, Pakistan’s briefly peaceful period under the rule of the ­dictator-president General Pervez Musharraf was wrapping up, with increasing terrorism. What stood out for me wasn’t just the mass murder and carnage initiated by the extremists but also their religious justification for it. The religion I had been told my entire life was a religion of peace – an argument I myself had propagated when  confronted with Islam’s critics while studying in America – was ­comfortably being used as a ­religion of war.

I decided then that if, as Islam’s defenders claimed, the extremists were perverting their pure religion, then perhaps if I studied once more I could counter those perverted and twisted arguments with the true wisdom of Allah. Except, a close ­reading revealed no true wisdom to me. Every time I approached it, I found the Quran to be maddening as a text – dense and convoluted. I found the Old and New Testaments equally incapable of ­having relevance to modern life.

I came to believe that the rest of Islam, derived from the life and times of the Prophet himself, was worse, containing phrases and quotes so contradictory that you can use them to justify almost anything you feel like doing. On the positive side, many Muslims lead lives of sharing, caring and empathic humanity because of just how vague those pronouncements are. However, if religion really is that Rorschach blot that I found it to be, then it’s no wonder psychopaths and mass murderers can also find within it whatever they seek.

So in Australia it felt good to no longer be ­surrounded by Islam. I looked forward to never having to worry about it again – until my daughter came home from school one day and began to tell me all about Jesus.

We’d put her in a Catholic school. It was close to our house, all our friends’ kids went there, and everyone told us it had the best-quality education in town. And, to be honest, I didn’t consider the “Catholic” part of the Catholic school to be that overt. So when, one morning, my daughter began lecturing me about “Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ”, I had a bit of an adverse reaction. What threw me into confusion wasn’t that I disliked the idea of her having religion. It was that I suddenly really wanted her to have some Islam in her life. At that moment, I realised that I may no longer be a practising, believing Muslim, but I’ll always be a cultural Muslim.

Until my daughter started talking about Jesus, I hadn’t considered just how much a part of my ­cultural genealogy Islam was. I’m proud of the ­culture that suffused my early life; or, at least, parts of it. Some things, like the grotesque misogyny, I’m happy to be rid of. But I still listen to Pakistani songs; some of them even make me cry. As does the right painting, or story. And I wanted my daughter to enjoy those works too. I wanted her to have some connection to the land of her birth and to the family she still has there. She needed to know why her grandparents prayed regularly and who exactly Muhammad was.

Both her maternal and paternal grandparents are still in Pakistan, so I asked them for help. And so their weekly Skype sessions with my daughter became about Islam. The Islam countered the Christianity enough that she enjoyed hearing and reading about both, but stopped caring about either. She didn’t talk about Islam beyond the Skype conversations, which, I felt, was just the right amount of Islam in our world.

My daughter is the main reason we migrated to Australia. If I’m to be perfectly honest, had I had a son, I would not have left Pakistan, despite the threats against me [in response to columns and news satire Shah wrote as a journalist]. Because, based on my own personal experience, being a boy in a Muslim country like Pakistan is a lot ­easier than being a girl. As a boy, your freedom of movement is unrestricted, you’re free to dress however you want, and your level of personal safety is much higher than that of a girl. I wanted my daughter to grow up in a place where her ­freedoms were the same as mine.

Nor am I alone in believing that; my daughter’s mother feels much the same. Ishma Alvi’s understanding of feminism within and without Islam has had a big influence on my own understanding of it. Which is why I turn this story over to her.

Ishma Alvi

I am an ex-Muslim. I was born into Islam, so a relationship with it was unavoidable. But by the time I was 17, I realised that Islam did not like me – not me personally, but women in general. I started seeing Islam as swinging between benevolent sexism (if there is such a thing) and venomous misogyny. So, Islam and I took a break. The relationship was on the rocks anyway; teenage rebellion beckoned. I drank and had sex and wore what I wanted.

Islam and I got back together when I was about 20, as a result of two events. The first was that I enrolled in a masters program at the ­University of Karachi. The campus was an hour away, so I decided to take public transport. Women from the higher socio-economic classes did not – in fact, still do not – use public transport in Karachi. There were horror stories about women on public ­transport being sexually assaulted and raped so I decided to defend myself by wearing the Arab-style abaya: a floor-length, closed-front gown made of heavy fabric, a hijab with niqab and gloves. And it worked – I felt protected from the worst of the assaults, and felt safe and even grateful to Islam for offering me this option. Islam had wedged a foot in the door of my psyche. At that time, it didn’t strike me that the only way for me to feel safe as a woman was to cover my woman-ness; that being a woman was the ­barrier to safety.

The second event that let Islam get a foot in the door of my life was that a close friend had turned passionately to the religion, embracing the hijab and abaya, along with religious classes called dars, which I started attending with her. The leader, a woman named Farhat Hashmi, encouraged her students to seek an education but was quite clear on her interpretation of the role of women within Islam – as primarily compliant with and obedient to their husbands. She also supported the idea that polygamy (by the men) was something women should be comfortable with as “other sisters can also ­benefit”, i.e. share the wealth. And she suggested that women could function as the saviours of their men, rescuing them from non-marital sexual intercourse (and thus, from the hell-fire) because men will be men. There was no mention of female sexuality – women were receptacles, handmaidens and pious saviours.

Despite my acceptance into this group, I was angry most of the time. Not just angry – I struggled with rage, doing things that put me at serious risk, like standing in front of a speeding bus to make sure it stopped for me, taking a crowbar to a man who tried to grab me between the legs as he walked past, throwing a brick at a car whose driver had tried to sexually solicit me. Some might argue that I was raging against a culture that was pitted against me. But I no longer differentiate very much between culture and religion when the boundaries between the two are so vague, as is the case in Pakistan.

I was tired of struggling to fit myself into what Islam wanted; tired of trying to make myself smaller, to hide my woman-ness just so I could be safe; tired of trying not to question things that were blatantly against me as a woman; tired of forcing my dissonance to resolve itself by citing faith, by citing context of the Quran. So Islam and I broke up for good. It wasn’t an impulsive decision: it took thought and reflection, and I homed in on the key issues that I couldn’t simply dismiss any longer.

For one thing, the issue of domestic abuse, where the Quran states: Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance – [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted and Grand. [Quran 4:34]

The obvious and the implied, in this single verse, summarise the entire attitude towards women in Islam. It does not matter to me – as a woman, a ­psychologist or a human being – whether “strike” is with a feather or a rod: abuse is not only about physical pain but also psychological pain and fear. And why would a man have to discipline his wife, anyway? Another area that I couldn’t just accept on faith alone was to do with a woman being valued as half a man: … And get two witnesses out of your own men. And if there are not two men (available), then a man and two women, such as you agree for witnesses, so that if one of them (two women) errs, the other can remind her… [Quran 2:282]

The Quran here is quite clearly stating that a woman is half a man: in judgment, in comprehension, in the ability to be objective and just. It can, and has, been generalised to an overarching ­perception of a woman’s ability to use her brain.

It’s also saying that women are ultimately to be obedient and submissive to men, that it is incumbent upon them to “save” their men from hell-fire by accepting polygamy, that a woman is not to inherit from her own parents what her brother might, that a woman can be beaten, that there is no legal/standard age for marriage in Islam, that marital rape is not directly and clearly addressed in Islam (a non-issue). That the woman is to cover herself, again to save the men from their carnal lusts. That there are guides to disciplining a wife/woman. And, finally, that there are no equal or even similar guides for women to be used with men/husbands. For all these reasons, I knew that I could not go back to Islam. That a return to Islam would be a betrayal of my gender.

Muslims in general, especially the ­moderate kind, twist themselves into convoluted knots trying to explain away the blatant misogyny ground into the fibre of the religion. They cite  context: context of the verses, context of the times, context of the politico-social environment. But context serves no purpose except to excuse and justify. I’m frankly bored of the arguments to do with Quranic context and interpretation that are feebly used to defend this or that sexist verse, because none of that changes anything in terms of women in Islam, nor does it make it more palatable.

The most controversial of Islam’s impositions on women, due to its visibility, is the hijab. Let me be clear: I by no means feel that the hijab should be banned. But my perception of women who wear it has become slightly skewed. Where once I was unquestioning about what I perceived to be an informed choice, even defending friends who chose to wear it later in life, I now speculate about the basis of that choice, whether or not it was informed.

I gave some thought to recent female converts to Islam. They do not have the prior conditioning and have no predisposition to wear the hijab, so perhaps their choice is truly objective and informed. However, I need to come clean about my own biases first. I feel that if someone has converted as an adult, they are seeking something that they hope to find in Islam, and will probably be willing to embrace the rituals, dress codes and mores to get to what is sought. It’s a decision perhaps based on a hungry need, not intellectual understanding.

While I’m clear on where I stand on Islam and my choices, I would like to think that I take issue with the religion and not the people. Whether I can neatly separate the ideology and the people who put it into practice is what I’m still trying to resolve. There are groups within the Muslim community that I take particular issue with – such as the fundamentalists – for impinging on the rights of women due to their literalist interpretation of the Quran. But then, to follow this train of thought, these very people are actually following the Quran as it’s written, with no convoluted explanations or hiding behind context: practising Islam in the way it was meant to be practised, in simple black and white. Therefore, as much as this literalist group is damaging women, they are at least easy to identify and address. However, the moderate groups – the Muslim reformists and Muslim feminists – are tangled in knots of convoluted arguments; they are the ones who create the cognitive dissonance, blur choices and boundaries.

So what, in my opinion, does Islam need to do? Islam can do nothing; it is a concept. Only ­Muslims can bring about a more female-positive change. This can happen when they stop presenting convoluted arguments that function only to manage their own dissonance and maintain the status quo. Justifications such as “But it was the first feminist faith” and “It’s about context” and “It depends on the interpretation” need to be discarded.

When the apologist approach to Islam from moderates ends, acceptance and an objective examination of Islam and women could happen. Which might be the impetus to positive change – reformists could then look at reinterpreting it from a women-friendly standpoint. But, frankly, I don’t see how that can happen. Even if it is reinterpreted, how can that new standpoint be accepted worldwide across the various Muslim subgroups and sects? And then be consistently practised and maintained so that the new practices and beliefs supplant the old ones? Maybe reformists and ­Muslims have the answer to this one. I don’t.

In the end, I believe Islam is not a religion for women, nor a religion for our times, or for any time – because, at its very heart, it does not like women. And since I’m a woman, I don’t like it back.

Edited extract from The Islamic Republic of Australia, by Sami Shah, $32.99 (ABC Books)

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25. THE INEQUALITY OF WOMEN KEEPS THE NORTH CAUCASUS VULNERABLE
Victoria Gurevich
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(Open Democracy - 12 June 2017)

Corruption, violence and underdevelopment still plague Russia’s North Caucasus. By empowering women, the Russian authorities could build grounds for a more sustainable peace. 

The North Caucasus has a challenging history. Underdeveloped, plagued with violence and corruption, the region has struggled to arrive at peace and stability. Similar to the Russian Federation in many ways, such as in their shared history, political systems and popular culture, the republics of the North Caucasus observe traditions, culture, legal codes and attitudes that diverge from, and in some cases and oppose, those of the rest of the country. As a result, life in the North Caucasus can differ starkly from the experience in the rest of Russia, particularly if you’re a woman.

Women in the North Caucasus, especially in its eastern republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia, routinely have their freedom limited and their potential suppressed. Bridal kidnapping, child marriage and honour killings are realities that threaten the lives of many girls and women. The circumstances of women in the North Caucasus are a major security vulnerability and a key cause of continued instability. But is it causally indicative that the region in Russia that marginalises its women the most is also the most dysfunctional and entrenched in violence? Or is it symptomatic?

Many, if not all, of the grievances of the North Caucasus (conflict-related violence, corruption and underdevelopment) can be ameliorated with the elevation of the social, economic and legal station of its women. It is in the Russian state’s best interests to advance the cause of peace and prosperity in its North Caucasus republics by protecting and empowering its female population.
Challenge: conflict-related violence

For decades after the collapse of the USSR, one of the most devastating and pressing concern facing the North Caucasus was armed conflict and violent insurgency. Various radical groups and extremely heavy-handed counter-insurgency have shattered the region, and continue to subvert any chance for stability.

If expulsion of violence from the region is the pursuit, then the inclusion of women in all spheres of life is a prerequisite

If expulsion of violence is the pursuit, then the inclusion of women in all spheres of life is a prerequisite. Beginning in the home, women play the central role in raising children and caring for the family. Empowering women through education and economic and legal initiatives translates into a generation of young people being raised in environments that are respectful, dignified and conducive to peace.

Mothers especially serve as an important figure in the lives of their children and their marginalisation adversely affects the worldview that the child holds. The case for the fair treatment of women expands beyond their immediate influence in the home, but also speaks as to how women pursue their emancipation.

July 2013: the house of the third wife of underground leader Magomed Suleimanov is destroyed by Russian security forces. CС Varvara Pakhomenko/International Crisis Group/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Recent trends indicate that more and more young, unmarried women from the North Caucasus are leaving to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq, a phenomenon that many experts observe as being a form of empowerment for them. In order to stop young girls and women from seeing violent radicalisation as the sole means by which to take control of their lives, more opportunities must be made available to them.

Women in the North Caucasus can be very outspoken against conflict-related violence and injustices, a recent example being the Mother’s Heart movement in Dagestan, which, in October 2016, organised in response to a string of abductions of young people.

Challenge: corruption

Widespread corruption can be found at virtually all levels of government and civil society, further debilitating development and contributing to instability.

Pervasive bribes at the local level may seem inconsequential in the overall elevation of the region. But the large scale graft, embezzlement and corruption that occur with federal and local budgets have stymied economic development and modernisation, thereby keeping the region dependent on Moscow. In 2013, Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia were dependent on federal subsidies for around 80% of their budgets; and in 2016, Chechnya benefitted from a 14 % increase in subsidies from Moscow during the first half of the year, despite the North Caucasus receiving a 12% region-wide decrease in subsidies. Furthermore, a program that was implemented in 2002 and intended to help finance Chechnya’s post-war reconstruction until 2020 was suspended in 2007 due to ineffective use of funds.

The large scale graft and corruption that occur with federal and local budgets have stymied economic development and modernisation, keeping the region dependent on Moscow

Evidence shows that there is a negative relationship between gender inequality and level of corruption, and a positive relationship between female employment and organisational effectiveness. A 2014 report for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on women in leadership found that “companies with three or more women in senior management functions score higher [in] organisational effectiveness.” This leads to the conclusion that women should be developed as leaders as they “contribute to their own organisations’ effectiveness and to the strength and resilience of their economies.”

While there are mixed reviews on whether or not women are less corrupt than men, several cities have tested the relationship between the inclusion of women and corruption, witnessing promising results. In Lima, Peru, public perceptions of bribery plummeted several years after 2,500 female traffic officers were deployed to the streets, and Mexico State's Transit Department took the Lima experiment one step further and removed every man from the traffic police force and hired 400 women.

In order to invigorate the economies of the North Caucasus and ensure financial reliability at the local and republic levels, more women must be encouraged not only to participate in public and professional spheres, but they must also be able to thrive and reach influential positions (where they are currently severely underrepresented). And with more women going to work, the child-care industry can undergo some much needed development.

Grandfathers and grandsons in a mountain village, Dagestan. CC-BY-NC-2.0: Dagestan Mountains and People Partnership / Flickr. Some rights reserved.As a result of high birth rates and insufficient funding, the North Caucasus has the “longest waiting lists for nurseries in the country”, with nurseries in Chechnya accommodating 146 children per 100 nursery places and Ingushetia being able to support “just over half of the republic’s children”. As women are able to join the workforce, the demand for child care services will increase thereby prompting expansion of such services through more private initiatives.

Challenge: under-development

In addition to corruption being a challenge in day-to-day operations and an impediment to financial security and sustainability, corruption also stands in conflict with growth and prosperity.

The North Caucasus republics are sorely underdeveloped, representing some of the highest levels of unemployment in Russia. While it may seem counter-intuitive to add people to an already underutilised labour force, a 2012 OECD report highlights a study that found that the inclusion of women in a work force actually helps economics grow. Studies done on household finances show that women are much more fiscally responsible and discretionary when it comes to allocating family resources. As opposed to fathers, mothers are more likely to prioritise expenses that benefit the children and other household operations rather than leisure activities. To take the decision-making values of women and elevate their role to a regional level would benefit the community at large. Initiative in this direction has been taken in India: a 1993 law which reserved 30% of the seats on village councils for women has been credited with improved public services and lower levels of corruption.

One analysis found that “gender equality is a better indicator of a state’s peacefulness than democracy, religion, or GDP”

An analysis conducted by Inclusive Security found that “gender equality is a better indicator of a state’s peacefulness than other factors like democracy, religion, or GDP” and that the more women there are in government, the less likely the state is to commit acts of political violence, another obstacle in the way of a flourishing society. Looking at the labour force participation rate in the North Caucasus, there are significant disparities between women and men’s engagement: 66.8% of women and 79.6% of men are counted as part of the labour force. Bringing more women in as decision makers would only benefit the North Caucasus, and Russia, as the republics would adopt qualities that promote stability and growth.

Proposed solutions

The challenges of the region do not have an easy cure, but any progress can only begin with the federal government abandoning its orientalist approach and taking the problem more seriously.

For one, Moscow should respond more strictly to official comments and announcements that oppose Russian federal law and values. Comments made by a Mufti in the North Caucasus during the summer of 2016 that encouraged the practice of female genital mutilation led to an international outcry, but resulted in little more than a few “official statements” and a half-hearted investigation in Russia.

Furthermore, Ramzan Kadyrov has been quoted as saying that Sharia law supersedes the laws of the Russian Federation, and has openly promoted polygamy, supported honour killings and enforces strict dress codes for women in his republic. The challenging and contradictory comments oftentimes made in the republics of the North Caucasus by various public figures have suggested claims that were not only illegal in Russia, their tolerance also threatens to exacerbate the conditions of an already repressive patriarchal society.

The first order of business must be the unshackling of North Caucasian women from local customs and regional laws that limit their potential and influence

At the same time, Moscow should encourage initiatives that promote the development and self-realisation of girls. A gymnastics centre in Grozny that opened in August 2016 met capacity enrollment for girls and boys just a few weeks after classes started , thereby demonstrating the eagerness of families to support both their sons and their daughters. Of the funding that Moscow already allots to the North Caucasus, a gendered aspect should be considered such that a portion of this funding is dedicated to initiatives that stand to benefit women and girls. Programmes, funding and other assistance should be made readily available to enable girls to flourish in all spheres — sports, arts and education — and opportunities for development and realisation stand to benefit women of all ages.

Besides programmes that promote activities, efforts should also be directed at making women and girls aware of their legal rights, inadequate knowledge of which is often used against women in their private and public life. Local NGOs and women’s initiatives should sponsor work in this direction, which the federal government would be smart to support.

Women should be positioned equitably with men in all public sectors for a variety of priority, perspective and opinion. In order to support the hiring of women, Russia can establish quotas — such as India did with 30% of parliament seats being reserved for female MPs — or offer incentives to republics or districts that meet certain benchmarks, especially in industries that are asymmetrically staffed between the sexes.

The North Caucasus region has a multitude of strong, distinct traditions that add vibrancy and character to the region. But the condition of women cannot be the cost of preserving culture. If Russia is going to better position itself to address the challenges of its territory — conflict-related violence, corruption and underdevelopment — the first order of business must be the unshackling of North Caucasian women from local customs and regional laws that limit their potential and influence.

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26. HUNGARY: NGO LAW A VICIOUS AND CALCULATED ASSAULT ON CIVIL SOCIETY
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https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/06/hungary-ngo-law-a-vicious-and-calculated-assault-on-civil-society/


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