SACW - 27 June 2017 | Afghanistan: Opium use booms / Pakistan: Sufi shrines / India: Lynching as sport; seditious to cheer the Pakistan cricket team? / Bangladesh: Protect Sultana Kamal / Myanmar: Shadowy rebels / Turkey: No to teaching Evolution / The Nihilism of Julian Assange

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 27 June 2017 - No. 2941 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh authorities must protect Sultana Kamal: Letter to Special Envoy for the promotion of freedom of religion or belief outside the EU
2. Open letter to Prime Minister Rutte about the visit of Indian Prime Minister to the Netherlands: Talk to Narendra Modi about human rights violations
3. India: Abuse of law / How is it seditious to cheer the Pakistan cricket team?
4. India: Lynching mobs, repressive regime and glamourisation of war!
5. India: Hate and prejudice are heavy burdens to put on our children; why not teach them to question? | Subhadra Sen Gupta
6. India: 2017 Praful Bidwai Memorial Award goes to the Maharashtra-based Andhashradha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS, Maharashtra Blind Faith Eradication Committee) - Press Release and Audio
7. India: Release the people arrested for cheering Pakistan in cricket - Amnesty International Press Release
8. The Scramble for Houses: Violence, a factionalized state, and informal economy in post-partition Delhi | Rotem Geva
9. Call for Research Papers on Cultural Productions from a Gender Perspective 

10. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - Is Tajmahal not a part of Indian Culture? - Ram Puniyani
 - India: Statement by National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) on Lynching of Muslim Youth-Junaid
 - India: Lynch mob republic (Ipsita Chakravarty)
 - India - Rajasthan: Swachh murder by municipal workers in Pratapgarh (G.S. Mudur's report)
 - India: Towards deciphering BJP’s hegemonic project | Srinath Raghavan
 - (Un)Modifying India: Nationalism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Hindutva | Rashmi Varma
 - A story of two lynchings – and the silence of Hindu India | Samar Halarnkar [25 June 2017 in scroll.in]
 - India: Hindutva brigade is using sadhvis and sanyasins [women religious preachers and monks] only for inciting masses
 - India: Statement by CPI(M) communal attack on a Muslim family in a local train on the outskirts of Delhi
 - Announced Not in My Name - Silent protest against targetted lynchings of Muslims in India (28 June 2017, New Delhi)
 - India: Delhi journalist assaulted by a mob when identified as a Muslim

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
11. Opium use booms in Afghanistan, creating a ‘silent tsunami’ of addicted women | Pamela Constable
12. India: lynch mob terror (Two editorials)
13. India: Telegraph editorial re refusal to allow the screening of three documentaries
14. India: Speaking truth to power: The media must question those in power | Rajdeep Sardesai
15. WhatsApp, Crowds and Power in India | Alia Allana
16. In the Republic of lynching |  Shiv Visvanathan
17. How Pakistan is trying to rewrite the history of its Sufi shrines to wipe traces of Indian links | Haroon Khalid
18. India: Tubelight is a Critique of Rising Muscular Militarism | Shohini Ghosh
19. The return of Mao: a new threat to China’s politics | Jamil Anderlini
20. Shadowy rebels extend Myanmar’s wars | David Scott Mathieson
21. Thinking Beyond Boundaries: An Interview with Susie Tharu  | Sohana Manzoor
22. Turkish schools to stop teaching evolution, official says | Kareem Shaheen and Gözde Hatunoğlu
23. Turkish Lessons | Emre Sencer
24. The Nihilism of Julian Assange | Sue Halpern

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1. BANGLADESH AUTHORITIES MUST PROTEST SULTANA KAMAL: LETTER TO SPECIAL ENVOY FOR THE PROMOTION OF FREEDOM OF RELIGION OR BELIEF OUTSIDE THE EU
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joint letter from European Humanist Federation and International Humanist and Ethical Union seeking for protection of Sultana Kamal in Bangladesh
http://sacw.net/article13335.html

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2. OPEN LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER RUTTE ABOUT THE VISIT OF INDIAN PRIME MINISTER TO THE NETHERLANDS: TALK TO NARENDRA MODI ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
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On June 27, Prime Minister Modi of India will pay his first official visit to the Netherlands. Reasons for this visit are the 70 years diplomatic relations between India and the Netherlands and the fact that the Netherlands is one of the largest investors in India.
http://sacw.net/article13338.html

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3. INDIA: ABUSE OF LAW / HOW IS IT SEDITIOUS TO CHEER THE PAKISTAN CRICKET TEAM?
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Providing more evidence that the sedition law – Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code – is prone to serious misuse, several people across the country have been booked under its tough provisions when all they were doing was celebrating the Pakistani cricket team's victory over India in the recently concluded Champions Trophy final.
http://sacw.net/article13331.html

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4. INDIA: LYNCHING MOBS, REPRESSIVE REGIME AND GLAMOURISATION OF WAR!
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A society made habitual of violence, intimidations, suspicions where killings, torture, sexual abuse and pellet-gun related blindings are the norm is so brutalized that it will try to respond with its own idiom of brutality. Humanity today, sadly so, stands throttled in Kashmir and there is need to reflect and introspect, if this trend is to be reversed or even arrested.
http://sacw.net/article13336.html

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5. INDIA: HATE AND PREJUDICE ARE HEAVY BURDENS TO PUT ON OUR CHILDREN; WHY NOT TEACH THEM TO QUESTION? | Subhadra Sen Gupta
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So, there are parents who are filling their children's minds with prejudice and hatred of the other — Muslims, Dalits, dark-skinned people, women, the people from the North East, the LGBT community, and, now, everyone who eats beef. Have you noticed how the list keeps growing? I would like to ask these parents — how are you different from the Islamic fundamentalists teaching children to kill?
http://sacw.net/article13334.html

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6. INDIA: 2017 PRAFUL BIDWAI MEMORIAL AWARD GOES TO THE MAHARASHTRA-BASED ANDHASHRADHA NIRMULAN SAMITI (MANS, MAHARASHTRA BLIND FAITH ERADICATION COMMITTEE) - PRESS RELEASE AND AUDIO
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MANS has over the years involved itself in multiple social interventions, from battling superstition and caste to engaging with young students. The organisation's prime focus has been to challenge blind faith and superstition and disseminate ideas of rationalism and secularism.
http://sacw.net/article13332.html

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7. INDIA: RELEASE THE PEOPLE ARRESTED FOR CHEERING PAKISTAN IN CRICKET - AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE
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The arrests of at least 19 people for celebrating the Pakistan cricket team's victory over India in the final of a major tournament is another worrying sign of the erosion of freedom of expression in India, Amnesty International India said today.
http://sacw.net/article13330.html

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8. THE SCRAMBLE FOR HOUSES: VIOLENCE, A FACTIONALIZED STATE, AND INFORMAL ECONOMY IN POST-PARTITION DELHI | Rotem Geva
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The article investigates the spatial aspect of Muslim minoritization in the city, namely their ghettoization, resulting from ongoing struggles over Muslim houses. It traces the gradual encroachment on the Muslim-majority neighbourhoods designated ‘Muslim zones'.
http://sacw.net/article13337.html

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9. CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS ON CULTURAL PRODUCTIONS FROM A GENDER PERSPECTIVE
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Critical assessment of the cultural productions including paintings, literary productions, dramas, folk dramas and films produced in the South Asia region
http://sacw.net/article13329.html

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10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - Is Tajmahal not a part of Indian Culture? - Ram Puniyani
 - India: Statement by National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) on Lynching of Muslim Youth-Junaid
 - India: Lynch mob republic (Ipsita Chakravarty)
 - India - Rajasthan: Swachh murder by municipal workers in Pratapgarh (G.S. Mudur's report)
 - India: Towards deciphering BJP’s hegemonic project | Srinath Raghavan
 - (Un)Modifying India: Nationalism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Hindutva | Rashmi Varma
 - A story of two lynchings – and the silence of Hindu India | Samar Halarnkar [25 June 2017 in scroll.in]
 - India: Hindutva brigade is using sadhvis and sanyasins [women religious preachers and monks] only for inciting masses
 - India: Statement by CPI(M) communal attack on a Muslim family in a local train on the outskirts of Delhi
 - Announced Not in My Name - Silent protest against targetted lynchings of Muslims in India (28 June 2017, New Delhi)
 - India: Delhi journalist assaulted by a mob when identified as a Muslim
 - India - Pakistan Cricket Match Aftermath: No one knows who cheered Pakistan win, sedition charge dropped
 - Hindi Article: Is Taj Mahal not a part of Indian Culture?
 - India: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has landed in a soup after a tribal woman from Assam filed a case against him for sharing her bare photograph on his social media page 10 years ago, taken during a stir in Guwahati ten years ago
 - India: Hindu fundamentalists use nationalism stick over cricket match defeat - VHP, Bajrang Dal members barge into Meerut dental college
 - India: A convention of Hindu fundamentalists held in Goa calls for abolition of democracy and for establishing a Hindu theocratic state
 - Pakistan- India: War as Game and and Game as War - 15 arrested for celebrating Pak's win over India in Cricket, charged with sedition
 - India: Fears over ICHR 'objectivity' goal (Basant Kumar Mohanty)
 - India: state driven by a hard definitive set of ideas, dividing people into “us” and “them”, presents problems for policing
 - India: Bombay blast cases of March 1993 trial: Closure and lessons (Edit, Asian Age)
 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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9. OPIUM USE BOOMS IN AFGHANISTAN, CREATING A ‘SILENT TSUNAMI’ OF ADDICTED WOMEN
by Pamela Constable
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(The Washington Post, June 19, 2017)

A woman recently admitted to the National Center for the Treatment of Addiction for Women and Children in Kabul is calmed by nurses and doctors after collapsing in a corridor during withdrawal from her opium addiction. She was brought to the facility by her 16-year-old daughter, who insisted she stay there until she recovered, saying, “She is our mother, but she has ruined our family.” (Andrew Quilty/For The Washington Post)

One recent morning, three figures in white lab coats descended cautiously into a pitch-black netherworld beneath a crumbling bridge in the Afghan capital. They picked their way through garbage and sprawled limbs, passing hundreds of huddled men whose gaunt, wary faces were briefly illuminated by the flare of matches and drug pipes.

The doctors were headed to a lone tent pitched nearby on the dry riverbed, where they knew that a female addict named Marzia had been sleeping on her own. They approached quietly, saying they had come to help. From within came shouts of “Go away, leave me alone!” Suddenly the young woman flung open the tent flap, cursing and hurling debris. Stumbling along the riverbed, she darted under the bridge and vanished into the protective company of fellow lost souls.

While rehab center staffers search for women in the dry bed of the Kabul River near a notorious addict colony under the Pule Sukhta bridge, plainclothes police destroy makeshift shelters at the site last month. This one was home to an addict, right, who is also an amputee. (Andrew Quilty/For The Washington Post)

Drug addiction in Afghanistan, once mostly limited to men who spent years as laborers or war refugees in Iran, has exploded into a nationwide scourge that affects millions of people, including a growing number of women and children. 

Over the past five years, programs of crop eradication and substitution have been largely abandoned as foreign funding has ended and insurgent attacks have increased. As a result, tens of thousands of farmers have returned to the lucrative business of growing opium poppies. Last year, 420,000 acres in Afghanistan were devoted to poppies, and opium production rose 43 percent over 2015, to 4,800 tons, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. 

Most Afghan opium is sold for export to the heroin trade in Europe and Russia, with an estimated revenue value of nearly $1 billion. But the boom has also led to a sharp drop in domestic prices, while widespread unemployment and anxiety created by years of war have fueled demand for the cheap escape of drugs. 

 In 2010, U.N. experts estimated that there were about 1 million regular drug users in Afghanistan, mostly using opium as “a kind of self-medication against the hardships of life.” They warned that addiction was following “the same hyperbolic growth of opium production.” By 2015, they reported, the number of addicts in the country had soared to 3 million — an astonishing 12 percent of the populace — and more of them were using heroin.  

Today the problem has burst into the open, overwhelming police and public health agencies. Dirt-streaked men can be seen passed out on almost any sidewalk in Kabul, and the few treatment centers are constantly full.  

The most startling aspect of the drug boom, though, is still largely hidden from sight. Tens of thousands of Afghan women, confined to their homes by tradition and often dependent on addicted men, are succumbing, too. This has created a growing phenomenon of drug-centered households where family relations, economic stability and social traditions can easily collapse. 

“It is a silent tsunami, and if it is not controlled, in another few years it will be a disaster,” said Shaista Hakim, a physician and drug rehabilitation specialist who works at the recently opened National Center for the Treatment of Addiction for Women and Children in Kabul.

A drug-addicted woman who was admitted the day before sleeps on the floor where she fell in the detoxification ward last month at the National Center for the Treatment of Addiction for Women and Children in Kabul. The center, which opened several months ago, is one of the few such facilities for women in Afghanistan. (Andrew Quilty/For The Washington Post)

During the Taliban era, when drugs were banned, “you could hardly find a woman using hashish, and even more rarely opium,” Hakim said. But in the past five years, she said, the number of female addicts has tripled. “Every woman here has problems like mountains, layer on top of layer,” she said. “They are so vulnerable, and their addiction involves the entire family, so we have to treat the entire family.”

According to experts, most Afghan female addicts are introduced to drugs by their husbands or male relatives. Daily routines collapse, and traditional Muslim norms — including women’s expected roles as modest, devoted wives and mothers — are upended by the frenzy of hunting for drugs and the haze of getting high.

Some women become prostitutes or thieves. Children are given opium to keep them quiet, sent out to beg, turned over to orphanages or sold into marriage to pay for drugs. At their most desperate, younger women gravitate to drug markets such as the infamous addicts’ colony under the Pule Sukhta, or Burned Bridge, in southwest Kabul, where they can share a pipe, purchase a baggie of heroin for pennies and hide from the world. 

“The addicted women feel safe there among the men, even though it’s dangerous and some abuse them,” said Hakim, who regularly visits the bridge area with her co-workers. “If they come with us, we can help them recover, but then they have to face the shame and gossip of being identified as an addict. For a woman in our society, that is worse.” 

The new rehabilitation center, run by the Ministry of Public Health but funded largely by the U.S. government, houses and treats women for 45-day stints of detoxification and therapy at no cost. The premises are locked and guarded; no women are allowed out, and no men are allowed in except for limited visits. Children are welcome to stay, but they are separated from their mothers for play and study, and some are also under treatment for addiction.  

Children of drug-addicted women with a nurse after a class at the rehab center. They are separated from their mothers for study and play. (Andrew Quilty/For The Washington Post)

At the moment, 72 women and children are living at the center, a brightly decorated, four-story hive of activity. Some of the women were found by the medical intervention team at Pule Sukhta or picked up there by police and transferred to the center in lieu of arrest. Others have checked in voluntarily or been brought by relatives from other provinces. Almost all are uneducated; the center offers literacy classes as well as training in tailoring and hairdressing. 

During a recent visit by a Washington Post reporter and photographer, the staff tried to keep things orderly, but emotions ran high and drama erupted often. Several women going through withdrawal pleaded to go home, swearing they would never touch drugs again. There were sounds of pounding on locked doors and babies wailing. 

The only quiet area was a dorm room where two disheveled women who had just arrived from Pule Sukhta were sprawled in sleep. 

Some patients were reluctant to tell their stories for fear of family gossip or public stigma. Others were proud of their progress and eager to explain the paths that had led them to drugs, as well as the hard choices they had made to escape them. 

Their tangled tales had some common threads: addicted and jobless husbands, children taken away and sent to orphanages, conflicts with disapproving relatives, and lives of poverty and wartime hardship in which drugs offered short-term release but caused lingering damage. 

An elderly patient at the rehab center wails in a hallway. Emotions run high at the facility, and drama erupts often. (Andrew Quilty/For The Washington Post)

“I want the world to know what I went through,” said Shaimsa Khan, 26, who was about to complete her second 45-day stay. She said she had run away from her addicted husband and tried to kick drugs at the center. But after health authorities refused to return her young son, she relapsed and found herself drawn back to the addicts’ colony. 

“I was alone and had no one to protect me. It was better under the bridge than going off with a strange man,” Khan said.  

At lunchtime, the women and children crowded together on the floor, eating bowls of stew and bread. Suddenly there was a commotion at the front door. A gaunt woman had arrived, weeping and shrieking in protest. Three children were with her: a slender, grim-faced girl of 16 and a distraught 9-year-old boy who took turns holding a year-old baby. 

As the argument continued, it became clear that the mother had not brought her children; they had brought her. The daughter, Mahdia, who has never been to school, alternately scolded and soothed her mother while explaining the situation to the center staff. She said her mother’s addiction was out of control, that she kept running away to find drugs, and that she had forced both Mahdia and her sister to marry older men so she could use the dowry money to buy drugs.  

“She is our mother, but she has ruined our family,” Mahdia said, balancing the baby on her hip. “She goes to the bridge, and if she doesn’t find drugs she beats us, and she faints all the time. I want her to be healthy, not crazy. I want us to have a normal life.”

The girl handed the baby to her brother and put her arms protectively around her weeping mother’s shoulders, but her eyes were hard with resolve. 

“It doesn’t matter what she says. She must be kept her here until she recovers,” Mahdia said. “There is no other way.”

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12. INDIA: LYNCH MOB TERROR (Two editorials)
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(The Tribune - June 26, 2017)

Editorial

THE ITCH TO LYNCH
It is not just about cows now

Till Pehlu Khan’s videographed lynching, the prevalent wisdom held the plight of Muslims like him, and the many Akhlaqs beaten to death before him, to their association with the cattle trade. It was argued that the lynchings were a result of the new government's attempts to instil a new set of values replacing those that had prevailed since Independence and even before that. Even this veneer of justification does not hide the ugliness and pathos of helpless men in a strange land being beaten to death by enraged mobs on mere suspicion of indulging in an act that went against their belief systems. It also does not camouflage the ugly truth that each of these actions is squarely illegal and the law has been slow to apprehend the culprits. 

But the lynching of the police officer in Srinagar and a Muslim teenager in a train in Haryana are symptoms that the blight has spread. As political parties adopt a muted response to the blood on the streets, mobs of angry men are now raring to settle their societal and political disagreements by lynching the hapless and the outnumbered. The dark undertones and the motive that led to the Srinagar lynching are qualitatively different from the dozen cases of mobs beating Muslims to death in mainland India. But the intent remains the same: to sentence to death someone outside the law without a trial.

As was the case in the US after slavery was abolished, the intention behind lynching is to sow terror. There is no attempt to gather proof. If the mob in Srinagar and on the Mathura train had the inclination to sort out facts from fiction, it would have found neither the police officer nor the Muslim teenager guilty of a crime that deserved a death sentence in the most painful and humiliating manner possible. Prime Minister Modi has publicly spoken just once on this issue but saffron mobs have carried on nevertheless. Helmsmen will come and go. But as the US discovered, the price for state-condoned violence is paid by several generations thereafter.

o o o 

The Times of India - 26 June 2017

Editorial

DANGEROUS TREND: FROM BALLABGARH TO SRINAGAR, COMMUNAL POLITICS UNDERMINES PERSONAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY

The most remarkable thing about the murder of a young 19-year-old and assault on family members out for some pre-Eid shopping is not that it took place on a railway train in Haryana’s Ballabgarh, only a few miles out of the national capital. It is that the perpetrators came up again with the ‘beef’ excuse, hoping this will swing the administration and public opinion their way.

What’s even more shocking is that the SHO of Government Railway Police at Ballabgarh has admitted they couldn’t rescue the youths, nonchalantly stating that “such things happen”. It’s clear from the sequence of events that the brothers were victims of a hate crime to which the police were bystanders. And there’s no denying that such crimes are taking place in an atmosphere of increasing communalisation and suggestions from BJP and Sangh Parivar leaders, starting from the Mohammad Akhlaq case, that beef lynchings are understandable and their perpetrators may have had some cause. The signal that goes out to lawless mobs and even policemen is that it is open season on minorities, and the mere imputation of carrying beef or being ‘anti-national’ is enough for mobs to run amok.

This trend is extremely dangerous for a diverse country like India. To check this, authorities must signal unambiguously they are on the victims’ side. Senior government functionaries should forthwith meet murder victim Junaid’s family and assure them that justice will be done. And they must be as good as their word by ensuring tough punishment for the perpetrators. Moreover, it’s also time to roll back dog-whistle communalism through such things as unjust food laws, or rules restricting cattle trade that end up hurting the whole economy.

Pursuing a religious agenda in politics not only undermines the security of the country, it also assists those pursuing a religious agenda in Kashmir. Mirroring the Ballabgarh incident insofar as communalisation leading to a breakdown of law and order is concerned is the ghastly lynching of a police officer, seen as a government agent, by a mob raising pro-Pakistan slogans outside Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid. The grim situation in Kashmir today is also the result of Valley politicians being sympathetic to the religious agenda of separatists. Both Ballabgarh and Srinagar show that communalism as a political tool comes with hefty collateral damage. Things will get much worse unless politicians wake up to this reality.

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13. INDIA: TELEGRAPH EDITORIAL RE REFUSAL TO ALLOW THE SCREENING OF THREE DOCUMENTARIES
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(The Telegraph - 22 June 2017)

Editorial

Black out

Appearances can be deceptive. With 56-inch chests and surgical strikes without and within, the electorate is being invited to gaze at a 'macho' government, a 'strong' State. But exactly how insecure is it? Not only are citizens being told what to say, what to eat, who to love, but they must also be told what not to see, and that too not by the scissor-happy chief of the Central Board of Film Certification, but the Centre itself. The government has refused to permit the screening of three short films at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. This could have been seen as the usual muscle-flexing, but what makes the refusal suspect is the content of the films: The Unbearable Being of Lightness is a documentary on Rohith Vemula; In the Shade of Fallen Chinar is a film on the lives of some Kashmiri student artists; and March, March, March is based on the recent protests at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. All three documentaries focus on issues wherein the Central government has been accused of using excessive force and running roughshod over constitutional rights. The Union ministry of information and broadcasting - films without CBFC certification need to be granted exemption by the ministry before they can be screened - has revealed, once again, the inability of this government to accept criticism. This unmistakeable sign of insecurity is sought to be disguised by its high moral, purist approach that censors flimsier matters too, for example, the "trendy language" spoken by Hanuman - a favourite of the saffron camp - in an animated feature. And even though bans may seem farcical in the age of the internet as the proscribed films are often made available online, the price that filmmakers pay is steep. The costs incurred while making films cannot be recovered once they are available on the internet for free.

In a diverse society like India there will always be grievances against films. But the extensive control that the Cinematograph Act, derived from colonial era censorship laws, gives to the State and its instruments over information disseminated to people is out of place in today's civilization. Discussions with filmmakers could help in cases of disagreement, but the refusal to allow the screening of the three documentaries is a frank and unashamed act of repression by the State.

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14. INDIA: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: THE MEDIA MUST QUESTION THOSE IN POWER | Rajdeep Sardesai
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(Hindustan Times, June 22, 2017)

When the country’s most powerful politicians won’t take ‘political’ questions, isn’t that indicative of the skewed nature of our democracy?

Sadly, rather than defend the media’s right to dissent and speak truth to power, there are many who choose to applaud an opaque, authoritarian leadership. It wasn’t always like this.(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

“We don’t need to be told by media or opposition what we need to do for farmers. We would rather listen to farmers and not to carping, negative opposition or ‘know-all media’ that knows little of grassroot realities”: GVL Narasimha Rao, BJP spokesperson during a television debate on July 12. When one of the more affable voices of the ruling party chooses to launch a diatribe against the media when asked a simple question on whether demonetisation is one of the causes for growing farmer unrest, you realise how easily power can accentuate hubris and reduce serious issues to an echo chamber for the ruling class.

But why blame Mr Rao, whose nightly task is to defend the government on prime time television. The disdainful attitude towards the media begins right at the top. The prime minister has chosen to virtually bypass the mainstream media, preferring instead the one way communication offered by routine messages through Twitter or a feel-good monthly Mann ki Baat on radio. No press conferences and only the odd pre-scripted interview, prime minister Narendra Modi, who was once an extremely popular and communicative BJP spokesperson himself, has now chosen to make himself mostly inaccessible to media scrutiny.

As a result, there hasn’t been, till date, any serious questioning of the prime minister on the single biggest move undertaken by his government. Why, for example, do we still not know how much of the old demonetised currency is back in the system? Or what exactly happened to the government’s ‘war’ on black money or on counterfeit currency? Is it not legitimate to ask for at least a White Paper on demonetisation? Unfortunately, with the narrative being spun in a manner where any questioning of authority is now seen as ‘anti-national’, influential sections of the media are being pushed on the defensive, forced to oscillate between self-censorship or else get fully embedded as cheerleaders of the ‘establishment’.

But why single out the prime minister? The Congress president Sonia Gandhi has been in public life for almost two decades but has never shown a willingness to answer uncomfortable questions on contentious issues like political corruption. Last November, I had the rare chance of interviewing Mrs Gandhi. Just ahead of the interview it was made clear that only questions related to Indira Gandhi on the occasion of her centenary celebrations could be asked. “No political questions!” I was told in no uncertain terms. When one of the country’s most powerful politicians won’t take ‘political’ questions, isn’t that indicative of the skewed nature of our democracy?

This unwillingness of those in public life to be held accountable has now spread like virus through the political system. In 2015, Mamata Banerjee chose to walk out of an interview because I raised the issue of the Saradha chit fund scam. Mamata at least agreed to an interview; Mayawati hasn’t given one in a decade so we still don¹t have answers to allegations of disproportionate assets. An imperious Jayalalithaa refused to step out of Fortress Poes Garden to meet the press, Naveen Patnaik follows a similar ‘no questions’ policy in Odisha, while in Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan has never hidden his open hostility towards the media.

Sadly, rather than defend the media’s right to dissent and speak truth to power, there are many who choose to applaud an opaque, authoritarian leadership. It wasn’t always like this. When Indira Gandhi muzzled the media in the Emergency in the mid-1970s, those who stood up to her were celebrated. In the late 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi introduced the Defamation Bill, the media rose in one voice to protest. In almost every instance of arbitrary use of state power against the media, the citizenry has been on our side. Not any longer: now, when a politician takes on the media, there is a sizeable audience which cheers from the sidelines, perhaps reflective of ideological cleavages in society.

Maybe we in the media also need to introspect as to why we have allowed this to happen to us. When sensation replaces sense on television news, when political alignments determine news priorities, when ownership patterns are non-transparent, then we make it that much easier for the netas and their hired armies to chastise us as ‘presstitutes’. Actually, we aren’t a ‘know-all’ media as Mr Rao suggests; maybe we are just a media which has lost its moral spine to fight back.

Post-script: Earlier this month, the BBC, in the spirit of true democracy, had both the prime ministerial candidates in Britain face the general public with no choreographed questions. How many of our political leaders are willing to subject themselves to a similar no-holds-barred interrogation?

Rajdeep Sardesai is senior journalist and author

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15. WHATSAPP, CROWDS AND POWER IN INDIA
by Alia Allana
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(The New York Times - June 21, 2017)
 
MUMBAI, INDIA — One evening last month, a WhatsApp message urged villagers in the Indian state of Jharkhand to watch out for a group of men wearing black clothes, prowling across villages, kidnapping children. The rumors traveled across a region that is home to India’s impoverished indigenous tribes living on subsistence agriculture and manual labor.
 
The villagers trusted the authenticity of the WhatsApp message, which included morbid photographs of mutilated children, and forwarded it energetically. That belief quickly morphed into panic, suspicion of outsiders and the lethal rage of a crowd seeking violent release.
 
On May 17, Sheikh Haleem, a 28-year-old businessman from Haldipokhar village in East Singhbhum, who ran a workshop that fixed old cars, set out to meet his brother-in-law in Shobhapur, a village about 10 miles away. He traveled in a small Tata Indica car with three of his business associates: 25-year-old Sheikh Sajjad, 26-year-old Sheikh Siraj and 35-year-old Sheikh Naeem.
 
A few miles into the journey, Mr. Haleem and his companions reached Gadu, a small tribal village. Overwhelmed by the child-kidnapper rumors, the villagers had set up a makeshift check post on the road. An S.U.V. ahead of Mr. Haleem’s car sped contemptuously through the check post. Villagers threw bricks at it. Mr. Haleem sped after the vehicle. Villagers sent out WhatsApp messages alleging that child kidnappers had fled toward Shobhapur village in a Tata Indica car.
 
Several hundred villagers had surrounded Mr. Haleem’s brother-in-law’s house by the morning. The mob set Mr. Haleem’s car on fire and threatened to burn down the house unless Mr. Haleem and his companions were handed over.
 
The mob grew to about 1,000 people by 6:30 a.m. A small group of policemen tried to pacify them. Mr. Haleem’s brother, who came looking for him, couldn’t find him but saw Mr. Naeem on his knees, covered in blood, begging for mercy with that very Indian gesture of joining your fingers and palms.
 
<img class="span-asset-img " src="https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2017/06/21/opinion/21allana-inyt/21allana-inyt-articleLarge.jpg" />
WhatsApp hoaxes and fake stories on social media have led to mob violence in India.
 
Yui Mok / Press Association
 
The policemen watched until the mob was done and carried Mr. Naeem to a nearby hospital, where he died. Police found the broken and burned bodies of Mr. Sajjad and Mr. Siraj in a neighboring village later in the day. Mr. Haleem’s corpse was found the day after.
 
Within hours of Mr. Naeem’s murder, three more men — the brothers Vikas and Gautam Varma, and their friend Gangesh Gupta — were killed by another mob agitated by rumors of child kidnappers. Two of them had been trying to buy some land to set up a business. “One event set off the other event,” R. K. Mallick, a senior police officer, said.
 
The allure of WhatsApp, the mobile messaging application owned by Facebook, is that it is free, simple to use and encrypted end-to-end. Researchers have found that 66 percent of the 180 million internet users in urban India and 85 percent of rural Indians regularly use the internet for access to social media. India has about 300 million smartphones now, a significant portion being very cheap and made in China. About 200 million of WhatsApp’s one billion users are in India, making the country the app’s biggest market.
 
On New Year’s Eve, 14 billion messages were exchanged on WhatsApp in India, according to data released by the service. WhatsApp rolled out the video-calling feature for India in November 2016. Indians have made over 50 million minutes of video calls every day using WhatsApp since then, more calls than from any other country.
 
The gifts of free usage and anonymity have made WhatsApp the most popular tool to spread both outlandish stories and politically motivated rumors. On an ordinary Indian morning, messages on the app can include the rumor of a popular mango drink being laced with H.I.V.-positive blood, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization’s rating of Narendra Modi as the best prime minister in the world or Julian Assange describing him as an incorruptible leader.
 
WhatsApp forwards are deftly tailored toward target audiences. Last year, the Indian middle class debated for weeks whether new 2000 rupee bills introduced by the Indian government after demonetization featured a chip that could be used to track the bills. There was no chip, but the rumor lived for a while.
 
Nationalist rage, often with sectarian overtones, dominates the world of India’s WhatsApp messages. One of the most popular WhatsApp hoaxes of this year featured the purported beheading of two Indian soldiers by Pakistani soldiers with a chain saw and a knife. India’s national song played in the background.
 
 
Pankaj Jain, who runs Hoax Slayer, a website that debunks fake viral stories on social media, found it to be a Mexican gang war murder video. “Almost 80 percent of the misinformation comes from right-wing groups and just spreads like wildfire,” Mr. Jain said.
 
Another popular WhatsApp message blamed the writer Arundhati Roy’s Christian heritage for her critical writings about Indian politics. The proof was believed to lie in Ms. Roy’s shrewd ploy to hide her Christian self by not using her full name: Suzanna Arundhati Roy.
 
During the three years of Mr. Modi’s government, there has been a distinct rise in majoritarian politics and an attendant increase in prejudice and violence against minorities and dissenters. WhatsApp has been turned into the primary messenger of prejudice, delivering relentless virtual fuel to keep the embers of modern hatreds alive.
 
There has been no national tabulation of the number of crimes in India after rumors spread through WhatsApp, but several major incidents have been reported across the country. An old video of a mob assault was circulated on WhatsApp as a major riot unfolded in Muzaffarnagar, a small town in Uttar Pradesh in August 2013. More than 40 Hindus and Muslims were killed, several Muslim women were raped, and about 40,000 Muslims were forced out of their homes and lived in refugee camps in nearby towns and villages.
 
On June 4, 2014, a week after the inauguration of Narendra Modi as prime minister of India, Mohsin Sadiq Sheikh, a 24-year-old information technology professional, was returning to his apartment in the western Indian city of Pune. He was beaten to death by members of a radical Hindu outfit, who went on a rampage after derogatory pictures of two of their icons — Shivaji, a medieval king, and Bal Thackeray, the Hindu nationalist strongman from Mumbai — were uploaded on social media and forwarded through WhatsApp. Mr. Sheikh’s killers didn’t know him, but his short beard made him visibly Muslim.
 
On Sept. 28, 2015, WhatsApp played a role in spreading the rumor that Mohammad Akhlaq, an ironsmith in Bishara village in Uttar Pradesh, had killed a cow and eaten beef. Pictures of the meat and body parts of animals were shared on WhatsApp, and a mob of his neighbors dragged Mr. Akhlaq from his house and lynched him on his street. Several similar cases have been reported throughout 2016 and 2017.
 
Why have India’s impoverished and powerless minorities become the subjects of virtual and real-life rage? “Small numbers represent a tiny obstacle between majority and totality or total purity,” Arjun Appadurai, the Indian sociologist, wrote in “Fear of Small Numbers.” “In a sense, the smaller the number and the weaker the minority, the deeper the rage about its capacity to make a majority feel like a mere majority rather than like a whole and uncontested ethnos.” The mob is majoritarian, and it has WhatsApp.


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16. IN THE REPUBLIC OF LYNCHING |  Shiv Visvanathan
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(The Indian Express - 26 June 2017)

In this sense the lynch squad is not pathological but part of the normalcy of a paranoid society, of a politics of suspicion which has no purpose. Rumor becomes a way of processing anxiety. It is almost as if violence has a social function when law breaks down.

o o 

Modern sociology like modern constitutional law posits a contrast between a state of nature and the state of society. Thomas Hobbes, the great contractarian had described the state of nature as a condition where the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, short and brutish. A society was created for security, for survival, and for civility. A society and state guaranteed the rule of law. Yet when an epidemic of lynchings takes place all over India, one has to ask a few basic questions. What is lynching and what is it symptomatic of?

The surreal nature of lynching can be understood in six frames. In the beginning, there is a sense of lawlessness, there is anarchy but most of all there is a politics of anxiety and insecurity. The very anarchy of society needs the focus, someone the violence can zero on. Many societies created the idea of scapegoat, a stranger, a marginal, an alien who became the focus of violence. Society returns to normalcy after an orgy of blood-letting. The Jew played that role throughout most of European history. However, in these societies, the scapegoat is a fixed category.

Today the scapegoat is a floating signifier. It can be anyone. All one needs is a climate of suspicion, insecurity, and paranoia. Hate and anger surface and then die. In India, old and new stereotypes mix. We have fear of the child lifter, the cattle stealer, the spy and the alien. All the ritual of lynching demands is a mob and a target. Surreally, the act of lynching is not seen as a breakdown of law and order. The crowd fancies itself as restoring it. The crowd becomes the force of law and order. There is no role for reason, rationality, and dialogue. In one case in Bihar, the victim begs for mercy and keeps insisting it is a mistake. The crowd is deaf and beats him to death.

Violence is ritual; everyone participates it. Almost everyone will get the victim or enact out a chorus of approval, which is almost as violent as the physical act. All lynching needs is a rumor. The crowd needs to believe it is the primordial state. Violence is indiscriminate. The target can be Hindu, Muslim, Dalit or Pandit. The events might vary but the genre of violence is the same. The victim has to die a horrible death in the Republic of lynching. Often, he is innocent but there is no remorse from the crowd. The victim’s family is the only one who remembers the event. The silence and closure is amazing.

Oddly the state watches lynching as a spectacle. The policeman sits curiously as the orgy is enacted out. Violence has a quality of spectacle. The crowd pretends it is the state and enacts law and order as the substitute for the rule of law. The mob disappears, the memory fades till the next event. It is as if lynching has become the extension of the paranoid security state, where mob and state share a division of labour as a division of violence. The isomorph between crowd and state is worrying.

There is no use being politically correct and sane but some forms of violence are more equal than other. A policeman’s lynching and a cattle lifter’s lynching possess the same order of bestiality. In fact, part of the paradox of lynching is that it reflects the breakdown of the state and the irony of the crowd playing sovereign. There is a reciprocity here that we must understand as the national security state allows the circle of non-listeners to enforce its panopticon.

A lynching was to consolidate the power of the state. There is a complementarity between state brutality and the lynch squad. Only the mob might be more primordial. This return of the primordial is worrying. What is different is the aftermath. In a lynching ritual, the sequence is rumor, suspicion, scapegoat, orgy and then silence. In a legal society, one would argue the lynch squad is a thing of the past. What one senses in the contemporary nature of lynching is that it is a complement to the state apparatus. The two together create a balance of violence we call law and order. In this sense the lynch squad is not pathological but part of the normalcy of a paranoid society, of a politics of suspicion which has no purpose. Rumor becomes a way of processing anxiety. It is almost as if violence has a social function when law breaks down.

Law and lynching mirror each other in disorder and we pretend to call it society. In a society where old maps are gone and norms do not work, lynching becomes a desired mode of control. This is the irony of contemporary society. Editorials might deny it, but ground level narratives substantiate this new complicity of violence.

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17. HOW PAKISTAN IS TRYING TO REWRITE THE HISTORY OF ITS SUFI SHRINES TO WIPE TRACES OF INDIAN LINKS
Haroon Khalid
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scroll.in - 23 June 2017

Ironically, to be patriotic, one needs to often dissociate with their land that was once shared with India.

The shrine of peacocks. Image credit: Iqbal Qaiser

At the entrance of a shrine stood a plaque with the purported story of its patron saint. “He is a martyr and martyrs never die,” it said. “He laid down his life helping the Muslims of this region against the Hindu Marathas. And now, even the birds from heaven come to the shrine to pay homage to the holy martyr.”

There was no mention of any time period, or the context of the conflict that took the purported saint’s life. But none was required. Decades of state propaganda had laid the ground for statement of a Muslim being martyred at the hands of Hindus to be accepted as fact.

Several devotees, a few locals and many tourists entered the shrine and paid their respects to the elaborately decorated grave, with a green shawl containing verses of the Quran, a few garlands and a turban on one side.

Moron wali Sarkar, or the saint of the peacocks, is a fairly well-known shrine in Pakistan’s Punjab. It is located in Kallar Kahar, a town which has in the past two decades become quite popular with the tourists because of the motorway connecting Islamabad to Lahore that passes through it. Located on top of a small mound, the open courtyard of the shrine provided a panoramic view of the surroundings – the lake, Kallar Kahar and the M2 Motorway a few kilometers away. Little hillocks dominated the landscape as far as the eye could see.

Photo: Iqbal Qaiser

A middle-aged man sat at entrance, making sure devotees maintain decorum. “Cover you head before entering the shrine,” he said to a woman. I asked him how he was attached to the shrine. “I have been appointed by the Auqaf department [a state department] as their representative at the shrine for the past few years, but I am a resident of this town, so my association with the shrine goes a long way back,” he said.

Keeping control

Established in 1959 by the first military dictator, Ayub Khan, the Auqaf department looks after the affairs of prominent mosques and shrines around the country, even collecting revenue on their behalf. It is claimed the dictator set up this department to weaken the authority of the heads of Sufi shrines, most of whom still are prominent feudal lords and have immense political influence. Moreover, Sufism, with its multi-cultural influences, syncretic nature, mysticism and celebration of music and dance was viewed as a threat to a more purtanical Islam that the State was aligning with.

The official charter of the department drafted by Javed Iqbal, the son of politician-poet Allama Iqbal, claims its agenda is to discredit the “superstitious” beliefs of these shrines and reinterpret them in a “modernist” light. In practice this, translates into aligning the diverse religious traditions of these distinct shrines with the state’s interpretation of the official religion of Islam.

In the six decades of its existence, the department has managed to succeed at this to some extent. In certain shrines, such as Data Darbar in Lahore, dedicated to a sufi saint, it has managed to alter its religious traditions to align it with the purported mainstream.

But in other cases, such as at the shrine of Madho Lal Hussain – dedicated to mystic Shah Hussein and his disciple and lover, Madho Lal – also in Lahore, the department has failed to rid it off non-Islamic influences. Sufi shrines located in smaller towns and villages, far away from Pakistan’s political centres of Lahore and Islamabad have also largely managed to retain their distinct nature.

Creature care

A little over a year ago, I wrote about a shrine in a small town, about 80-odd km from Lahore, which holds dogs sacred. Dogs were allowed to roam the premises of the shrine devoted to Peer Abbas, a saint who loved the animal that is otherwise looked down on in Islam. The dogs were offered meat to seek the saint’s blessings. One reason why such an idiosyncratic practice has survived for such a long time is because it is in a small town, away from the State’s glare.

But the same was not the case with a similar shrine in Lahore, where cats were revered because of their association with its patron saint, in Lahore. Over the years, the cats that lent the shrine its name, Billiyon wali sarkar, have been driven out.

After the horrendous attack on the Shah Noorani shrine in Baluchistan on November 12, where more than 52 devotees as a bomb exploded while they were performing the dhamal – a whirling dance that puts devotees in a trance of sorts – I wrote about how, even in the eyes of the State, several practices at Sufi shrines are seen with disdain because of their pre-Islamic and diverse religious influences. It is this ideological position that also leads Sunni extremist organisations to bomb Sufi shrines.

Wiping the past

It is this disdain for diverse religious influences that have also led to the rewriting of the history of these shrines. Coming back to the Moron wali Sarkar, I first heard about the shrine while I was looking out for animistic cults within the Sufi culture, as part of research for my book In Search of Shiva. A number of people told about the shrine at Kallar Kahar, where peacocks roam freely and are revered by the locals and devotees.

However on my visit to the shrine, I found no peacocks in the courtyard. I was told tourists often chase the birds away and so peacocks now only visit at sunrise and sunset, when there are just a handful of people at the shrine.

“For the locals the birds are sacred,” said the Auqaf appointed official. “A few devotees would also bring food offerings for these birds. But the tourists don’t show the same kind of respect.”

Surrounded by a jungle known to have many wild peacocks, this shrine is likely to have derived its name from its geographical surroundings. This was an essential characteristic of pre-colonial Islamic and Hindu shrines, whose sacredness reflected their geography. For example next to the banks of Indus, the lifeline of Sindh, the cult of Udero Lal, the river god, emerged. In Sufi Islamic tradition, sacred shrines developed around ancient trees that have been worshiped in this part of the world since time immemorial.

Because of their abundance in the region, peacocks may have held a special place for locals in this region, which found expression in this shrine. However, the state-appointed overseer of the shrine had a different explanation. “These peacocks were brought here by the saint who came here from Baghdad,” he said. “The muster of peacocks is the progeny of the original muster brought by the saint.”

This has been one of the biggest dilemmas of the Pakistani State’s interpretation of religion and national identity. Given the immense emphasis on distinguishing themselves from Hindus, it has been hard to reconcile the ancestral heritage of a majority of the population. Therefore, history is often reinterpreted and several castes claim Arab, Persian or Afghan ancestry insteading of acknowledging their Indian roots. This was also the attitude adopted by the State when it took charge of the syncretic Sufi shrines.

Somehow, to identify as “Pakistani”, people and places had to dissociate with the land (that was once shared with India) its geography, and its history. Several such shrines, with their idiosyncratic traditions that were rooted deeply in the land surrounding them had to shed their geographical context to fit this new framework sanctioned by the State. In order to belong in the new State, it became essential to dissociate with their land.

Haroon Khalid is the author of three books: Walking with Nanak, In Search of Shiva and A White Trail

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18. INDIA: TUBELIGHT IS A CRITIQUE OF RISING MUSCULAR MILITARISM
by Shohini Ghosh
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(The Wire - 25 June 2017)

Salman Khan in a still from the film Tubelight

Tubelight, Salman Khan’s much awaited Eid release, is the superstar’s third film with director Kabir Khan after Ek Tha Tiger (2012) and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015). If Tiger was a transnational spy-thriller traversing a global landscape, Bajrangi Bhaijaan was a road movie unfolding on both sides of the cinematic Indo-Pak border. Tubelight, an adaptation of Little Boy (Alejandro Gómez Monteverde, 2015), unfolds in the fictional Jagatpur, an arcadian hamlet in Kumaon. Staged across a diversity of landscapes and shot evocatively by Aseem Mishra, all three films are about transformative journeys.

Set against the India-China war of 1962, Tubelight revolves around Laxman Singh Bisht (Salman Khan), Jagatpur’s equivalent of the village idiot whose dim-wittedness has earned him the moniker `Tubelight’- the one who lights-up a tad too late. Having lost his father to alcohol and mother to grief, Laxman grows up protected by Bharat (Sohail Khan), his devoted and doting younger brother. When during an army recruitment drive, Laxman fails to qualify for the Kumaon Regiment, Bharat puts him in charge of the fictional ‘Jagatpur Regiment’ to stay back and protect the village. In the universe that Bharat creates around him, Laxman is as good as anyone else. When Bharat leaves for the warfront, a distraught Laxman tries to find solace in the power of faith (‘yakeen ka taqat’), an idea that Gandhi inspired in him when he was a schoolboy. Laxman confuses faith with what he imagines are his telekinetic powers. Banne Chacha (Om Puri), a parent-figure to the brothers, explains that faith is the power of self-belief and tenacity, not a result of magic or mysticism. He instructs Laxman to follow Gandhi’s teachings of which one is to befriend the enemy. More specifically, he has to befriend the two new inhabitants of Jagatpur – the Chinese boy Gu Won (Matin Ray Tangu) and his mother Li Leing (Zhu Zhu).

Laxman is entrusted with the task because when the two first arrived in Jagatpur, he had roused the village shouting, “The Chinese have come”. The local bigot Narayan (Zeeshan Ayub Khan), debarred from the army for having knock-knees, decides to fight the ‘Chinese Invasion’ by inciting a mob to burn down their house. The `patriotic mission’ backfires when the flaming projectile lands on the pyromaniac himself. Narayan survives as does the house but Gu and Li feel thoroughly unwanted. Later, Laxman is shocked to discover that contrary to all appearances, they too happen to be Indians.

The comparisons between Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Tubelight are unavoidable. In both films, Salman Khan plays a pacifist simpleton whose friendship with a child belonging to an ‘enemy’ community leads him to confront his own prejudices. While no consensus can be assumed about responses to a cultural text, it is likely that in comparison, Bajrangi Bhaijaan would score much higher in scripting, performance and overall cinematic appeal. Salman’s charismatic star presence is dulled by his unidimensional interpretation of Laxman’s character. Despite these weaknesses, Tubelight makes a number of daring interventions both in the representation of war – which merits a longer discussion – and in the volatile debates raging within the country.

Tubelight asserts that loving one’s country is not synonymous with hating the enemy and in war there is no gain or glory, only death and destruction. Major Rajbir Tokas (Yashpal Sharma) tells Laxman that if indeed he has magical powers, he should use it to end the war so that soldiers on both sides could return to their loved ones. At a time when the cult of muscular militarism demands complete submission, Tubelight mounts an unapologetic indictment of war. At a recent event Salman Khan remarked that those who propagate war should be asked to pick up a gun and sent to the warfront. (“They will tremble and shake and eventually take the route of dialogues and discussions”) The fury that met his comments indicates that pacifism no longer resides in the realm of common sense.

War also instigates the toxic social sorting of insiders and outsiders. When Li tells Laxman that the rest of her family has been taken to a “jail in Rajasthan”, she references a shameful chapter in Indian history. In 1962, thousands of ethnic Chinese were picked up from different parts of India and incarcerated without trial in a concentration camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. Some remained incarcerated for years even after the war ended. This experience triggered a mass exodus of the Chinese from India. Tubelight would have done well to make this point more forcefully. During a moment of confrontation, Li tells the xenophobic Narayan: “We love this country as much as you do and we don’t need a certificate from anyone for that.” The predicament of the Chinese in Jagatpur raises the spectre of the Muslim in contemporary India; a minority under siege.

Progressive politics is no guarantee for good cinema but Kabir Khan’s repertoire – especially New York (2009), Ek Tha Tiger and Bajrangi Bhajaan – have demonstrated that mainstream cinema can effectively counter majoritarian assumptions to create a memorable cinematic experience. He has consistently sought to bend the tropes of popular cinema to subvert the predictable representations of minorities. It is therefore, only fitting that the first on-screen Chinese protagonists of Bollywood should debut in his film. In such cinematic endeavours, some films will fare better than others. The task at hand is to keep making films that will resist the temptation to make the mainstream synonymous with the majoritarian.

Shohini Ghosh is Sajjad Zaheer Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia.

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19. THE RETURN OF MAO: A NEW THREAT TO CHINA’S POLITICS | Jamil Anderlini
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(The Financial Times - September 30, 2016)

A heavy pall of pollution hangs over Tiananmen Square and from a distance the giant portrait of Mao Zedong above the entrance to the Forbidden City looks a little smudged. It is 8am and the temperature in central Beijing is already approaching 30C. But the heat and smog are no deterrent to the thousands of people waiting in hour-long queues to pay respects to the preserved body of the “great helmsman”. Since his death 40 years ago, Chairman Mao’s corpse — or, more likely, a wax replica — has been on display in a purpose-built mausoleum in the geographic and figurative heart of the Chinese capital. Well over 200 million people have visited. [. . .]
https://www.ft.com/content/63a5a9b2-85cd-11e6-8897-2359a58ac7a5

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20. SHADOWY REBELS EXTEND MYANMAR’S WARS | David Scott Mathieson
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(Asia Times, June 11, 2017)

The little-known Arakan Army, one of the country's newest insurgent outfits, is responsible for rising violence in the country's remote western regions

The stirring soundtrack of the video ‘Dream in Our Heart’ is accompanied by statements of defiance by ethnic Rakhine soldiers, male and female, of the Arakan Army (AA) from their mountain redoubt in Myanmar’s northern Kachin State.

Army commander Major General Twan Mrat Naing (aka Tun Myat Naing) speaks to the camera: “Our message to Naypyidaw and Burmese army is we will never ever give up, we will fight until we achieve our objective.”
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That objective, articulated in the video widely distributed online, is the total liberation of Myanmar’s Rakhine State from “Burmese fascism” and the Myanmar army which has long occupied Rakhine State and oppressed its people.

The little known Arakan Army is unique in that as one of Myanmar’s smallest ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) still fighting the central government, it operates in four ethnic states at either end of this large country: far from ‘home’ in Kachin and northern Shan States, and in the west in the borderlands of Chin and Rakhine State, where many of the groups fighters hail from.

Formed in April 2009, the AA’s central aims are self-determination for the Arakan people, to safeguard national identity and cultural heritage and promote ‘national’ dignity. Its political wing, the United League of Arakan (ULA), was formed soon after the militant wing.

The army partly formed as a response to widespread frustration amongst young Rakhine with the largely moribund Arakan Liberation Party/Army (ALP/A) and its political wing based on the Thailand-Myanmar border, which only ever operated alongside the large Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and not for many years in Rakhine State.

The ALP signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement in October 2015, and some of its members have voiced support for the AA and condemned allegations of Myanmar army abuses against its supporters.

Most international understanding of ethnic Rakhine grievances stem from the long persecution of Rohingya Muslims and communal violence which rocked the state in 2012. But this obscures long-standing resentment of decades-long of neglect by the Myanmar state which has made Rakhine State one of Myanmar’s least developed and poverty wracked areas.
Migrants collect rainwater at a temporary refugee camp near Kanyin Chaung jetty, in Myanmar June 4, 2015. Soe Zeya Tun: This group of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants were rescued from a boat carrying 734 people off Myanmar's southern coast. Those on board had been at sea for more than two months - at the end with little food or water. The men in this photo were part of a group of 400 crammed into a warehouse by Myanmar police. They had arrived the day before, but while the women, children and some men had already been moved, these men were left behind. There was no sign of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR or foreign aid agencies. Just moments before this shot, the sky opened and the monsoon rains started coming down. The men were jostling with each other for space to catch water in their bottles and plates. The authorities were hesitant to grant us access at first, but as the morning wore on and the rains started, we were able to enter and start photographing and speaking to migrants. Just after taking this photo, the men were loaded into buses and trucks and driven to a camp where international aid agencies were waiting. I have worked on long and difficult assignments where I have gone days without a proper shower. But for these people it had been months without enough water. Everyone was dirty and had likely washed little while at sea. I could see just how meaningful it was for them to suddenly have a chance to drink and clean themselves with whatever small amount of water they could capture. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun - RTX1XXAV
Migrants collect rainwater at a temporary refugee camp near Kanyin Chaung jetty, in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, June 4, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

The AA explicitly uses the colonial era Arakan terminology, rejecting ‘Rakhine’ as a Myanmar term that implicitly sees the Rakhine as second class citizens, and that fuels broader Myanmar ridicule of the Rakhine as yokels who speak a tortured dialect of the Burmese language, akin to the dismissal of people from the Deep South in the United States.

The Kingdom of Arakan was sacked by the Myanmar kings in the 15th Century, and evidence of this rich cultural heritage is preserved in the ancient ruins of Mrauk-U.

Drawing on disaffected migrant workers from the Hpakant jade mines, the AA was hosted and trained by the Kachin Independence Army, one of Myanmar’s oldest and most sophisticated insurgent groups. Within two years, the AA was on the frontline alongside its Kachin allies, after the 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin and government collapsed in 2011, leading to heavy fighting which displaced over 100,000 civilians, hundreds of civilian casualties and destroyed villages, and combatant casualties numbering in the several thousand.

The AA operates in Northern Shan State as part of the Northern Alliance, which includes the Kokang-Chinese Myanmar Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Ta-ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and Brigades 4 and 6 of the Kachin Independence Army. Underscoring the bewildering relationships of the Myanmar civil war, the Arakan Army also operated alongside ethnic-Myanmar soldiers of the All Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF) until that group signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) in October 2015.

The alliance has markedly stepped up operations against government targets, including the November 20, 2016 attack on the China-Myanmar border trade city of Muse, in which several civilians were killed and injured, bridges blown up, and the subsequent seizing of the border town of Mong Ko, before alliance fighters were driven from the town by the Tatmadaw’s use of heavy artillery and air-strikes.

The Northern Shan State fighting has been largely eclipsed by international attention on the repression of the Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, but it seizes domestic attention far more because of its marked intensification in recent years.

The Alliance assault on the former MNDAA stronghold of Laukkai in March, in which AA troops took part, included attacks on the main hotel and casino in which civilians and policemen alike were targeted, and allegedly scores of men and women were abducted as human shields during the insurgents retreat into the hills.
Miners search for jade stones at a mine dump at a Hpakant jade mine in Kachin state, Myanmar November 25, 2015. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun - RTX1VQOM
Miners search for jade stones at a mine dump at a Hpakant jade mine in Kachin state, Myanmar November 25, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

The AA’s participation in these northern operations for the past several years is predicated on the expansion of their trained and battle-tested fighters to open a front in their home state. As early as 2013, Rakhine political leaders were lobbying the previous government of U Thein Sein to open an area for AA fighters to relocate from Kachin State to Rakhine State, although with little support from the government.

In 2015, the AA opened a new area of operations in the borderlands of Buthidaung, Kyauktaw, and Mrauk-U townships of Rakhine State, and Paletwa township of Chin State close to the Bangladesh border. In several bouts of fighting between the AA and the Tatmadaw, the military admitted to losing several troops, including officers to Arakanese sniper fire.

The Tatmadaw reported 15 clashes between December 28, 2015 to January 4, 2016 in which large amounts of weapons and ammunition were captured. Fighting flared again in April and May, and in December 2016 in Paletwa, as Tatmadaw troops continued to sweep the area to interdict AA movements along the borderlands.

According to AA sources, the Tatmadaw have deployed ten battalions from their Western Command and Military Operations Command 15 based in Buthidaung to pacify their movements in three townships (Infantry battalions 374, 375, 376, 539 in Kyauktaw, 377, 378, 540 in Mrauk U, and 379, 380 and 540 in Min Bya).

The current size of the AA is difficult to measure. Some estimates place their total numbers at 1,500, which is fairly standard size for many smaller ethnic insurgent groups, while training in the north continues to attract large numbers of male and female recruits. (The KIA numbers around 7,000, while the United Wa State Army has over 25,000 under arms.)

The fighting has generated a cycle of dynamic civilian displacement necessitating international and national relief operations to supplement large humanitarian operations that exist for civilians displaced by communal violence in 2012 and responses to natural disasters.

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported 1,100 IDP’s in eight temporary sites in Kyauktaw, Rathedaung and Buthidaung, and worked with Rakhine relief agencies and the state government to assist civilians.
Policemen stand guard as firemen work to extinguish fire during fighting between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya communities in Sittwe June 10, 2012. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has voiced deep concern over sectarian violence in Myanmar, unrest that threatens to endanger democratic and economic reforms in the country after decades of military-ruled isolation. Picture taken June 10, 2012. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun (MYANMAR - Tags: SOCIETY CIVIL UNREST CRIME LAW) - RTR33H1N
Policemen stand guard as firemen work to extinguish fire during fighting between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya communities in Sittwe June 10, 2012. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

Reports of extortion, ill-treatment and forced recruitment by the AA have increased, which are often countered by allegations of Tatmadaw brutality, including in one statement “witnesses and victims described how the armed forces forcedly (sic) displaced entire villages and destroyed, beatings with the barrel of a gun, executions, gun rape, looting and the burning of their homes.”

The fighting has exacerbated tensions between the AA and ethnic Chin civilians in Paletwa, and has sparked public criticism by Chin leaders and reports from the Chin Human Rights Organization that AA soldiers have been abducting Chin civilians, using others as forced labor, and planting landmines around civilian areas.

Chin political parties have condemned both sides of using of landmines without apportioning specific blame for reports of widespread human rights violations. Just days ago, Indian media reported that an estimated 300 Chin civilians, predominantly women and children, had fled Myanmar to seek sanctuary in Mizoram in northeast India, claiming that the AA had detained the men from Ralie village inside Chin State.

The AA dismissed these allegations in a statement posted to Facebook, and alleged that renegade Arakan Liberation Army soldiers were masquerading as AA forces to extort money from civilians and discredit the insurgent outfit. In such isolated settings, verifying various allegations of abuses is almost impossible.

The Myanmar military has responded to the the AA’s increased operations in Rakhine State with a wave of arrests of civilians suspected of providing material support to the insurgents. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma, 58 Rakhine civilians have been sentenced under Section 17(1) of the Unlawful Association Act, with eight more facing trial while in detention in Sittwe Prison.

Bonds between Rakhine politicians, activists and the AA are tight: Maj-Gen Twan Mrat Naing’s father-in-law is the Rakhine State parliamentary Speaker of the House, U Saw Kyaw Hla.
Tun Myat Naing, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Army (AA), attends a meeting of leaders of Myanmar's ethnic armed groups at the United Wa State Army (UWSA) headquarters in Pansang in Myanmar's northern Shan State, May 6, 2015. Rebel leaders in Myanmar on Wednesday urged the government to amend the military-drafted constitution to give more autonomy to ethnic minorities, a step they said would make it easier to sign a national ceasefire agreement. REUTERS/Stringer - RTX1BTVZ
Tun Myat Naing, aka Twan Mrat Naing, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Army (AA), attends a meeting of ethnic armed group leaders at the United Wa State Army (UWSA) headquarters on May 6, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Stringer

In early April, the authorities stopped a fund-raising football match in Mrauk-U, dubbed the ‘Arakan Army Cup’ during the annual Thingyan water festival, and arrested a Buddhist abbot Nanda Thara and a lay supporter Khaing Ni Min charging them under Section 505 of the Penal Code related to causing public alarm or inciting people to violence.

These arrests have evinced widespread protests throughout Rakhine State and contribute to a sense of persistent Burman persecution of the Rakhine, the dismissal of their political aspirations, the continued plunder of their natural resources with only perfunctory development projects from the central state to assuage them.

Further antagonizing Rakhine political leaders, in May 2016 the national parliamentary speaker U Win Myint blocked a proposal by ANP MP Daw Khin Saw Wai for an urgent discussion on aid for civilians displaced by fighting between the AA and Myanmar army, because, the speaker said, the proposal was predicated more on raising the issue to push for inclusion of the AA in the nationwide ceasefire process.

The AA attended the Union Peacemaking Conference in Naypyidaw, having been invited as part of the Northern Alliance, facilitated by the Chinese special envoy to the peace talks. But the AA’s attendance comes after two years of official denunciations of their activities, with statements from both the military and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi being all but identical, demanding the group disarm and then seek peace.
Myanmar's General Min Aung Hlaing takes part during a parade to mark the 72nd Armed Forces Day in the capital Naypyitaw, Myanmar March 27, 2017. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun - RTX32TZF
Myanmar’s General Min Aung Hlaing takes part during a parade to mark the 72nd Armed Forces Day in the capital Naypyitaw, Myanmar March 27, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

Defense Minister Lieutenant General Sein Win told the national parliament the AA had to cease its activities and sign the controversial nationwide ceasefire agreement. In a statement from Suu Kyi in March, she warned the non-signatories to the ceasefire that the only way to achieve peace was to sign, and to be ‘extremely careful’ in how they respond to that condition.

Exactly how does the AA pay for all this expanding activity? Given their popularity in Rakhine State, tax collection not just amongst supporters in their home state, but the many thousands of migrant workers in peri-urban factories of Yangon and the jade mines of Kachin State and Sagaing Region would be lucrative.

Involvement in the drug trade cannot be ruled out. In one of the most evocative front pages of the state-run newspaper Global New Light of Myanmar, in February 2016, the headline boldly proclaimed ‘How to Fund a War’, outlining a series of raids and arrests of AA officers in Yangon in which large numbers of arms and ammunition were seized, and reportedly 330,800 methamphetamine pills, or yaba.

The AA issued a ‘condemnation letter’ on the same day refuting the allegations as “childish and undignified” and blamed the Myanmar military for being the main player in the drug trade. Reporting on the drug trade in Rakhine State is perilous: last March the Sittwe home of the online editor of the Root Investigation Agency, Min Min, was bombed and the journalist forced to flee to Yangon.

International analysts reporting on restive Rakhine State guardedly claim that the AA has rarely publicly articulated anti-Rohingya or anti-Muslim sentiments, even though many AA officers will privately declare that Rohingya are all Bengali illegal immigrants and should leave: a position identical to the Myanmar army and many ultra-nationalist activists in the country.
People and Buddhist monks protest while Malaysian NGO's aid ship carrying food and emergency supplies for Rohingya Muslims arrives at the port in Yangon, Myanmar February 9, 2017. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun
People and Buddhist monks protest against ethnic Rohingya Muslims many claim are illegal migrants in Yangon, Myanmar February 9, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

This changed recently, however. Following the coordinated attacks on Myanmar Border Guard Police outposts in Maungtaw by suspected Rohingya militants of the Harakah al-Yaqin (Faith Movement, later renamed as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army), the ULA/AA issued a press release which called the militants “savage Bengali Muslim terrorists” and the violence a “rampage of the Bengali Islamic fundamentalist militants in Northern Arakan.”

The statement furthermore said “(T)he bordered area (sic) of the Northern Arakan and other cities such as Rangoon (Yangon) are now suffering adverse effects as a result of Arakan’s bordering with the population explosion of Bangladesh, the excessive entering of illegal Bengali immigrants into Arakan for decades and the neglect of the successive Burmese regimes to the Bengali’s intrusion and territorial expansion.”

There is little likelihood that the AA’s attendance at the largely symbolic Panglong 21st Century will make any real headway in addressing Rakhine grievances, and the expansion of their armed operations looks set to continue.

The intense nationalist messages expressed by Maj Gen Twan Mrat Naing and the AA troops under his command are widely held in Rakhine State, where resentment against the Myanmar state and military is widespread, and often misunderstood by the outside world which identifies Rakhine political grievances as being primarily driven by anti-Rohingya sentiment.

This lack of understanding of the AA’s armed revolt will only further postpone the resolution of the conflict and prolong the communal divisions that have generated conflict in Rakhine State for years. This is a dimension of the civil war in Myanmar that is only getting worse, not better, and is dangerously misunderstood.

David Scott Mathieson is a Yangon-based independent analyst

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21. THINKING BEYOND BOUNDARIES: AN INTERVIEW WITH SUSIE THARU 
by Sohana Manzoor
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(The Daily Star - June 24, 2017) 

Susie Tharu and K. Lalita are well-known in India and beyond for their path breaking publication Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. Published by Feminist Press in 1990, the two-volume collection is a comprehensive representation of 2600 years of women's writing in India. Seemingly unattainable, Tharu and Lalita's project unearthed women writers from various parts of India, examining local and oral traditions, and recovering a magnificent array of writers and poets from forgotten pasts. This significant contribution to the history of women's writingis reminiscent,in scope and achievement,of Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, worksthat recovered women writers from theWestern tradition.

Susie Tharu visited Dhaka this past May as one of the keynote speakers at Redrawing Gender Boundaries in Literary Terrains, an international conference arranged by the Department of English and Humanities at BRAC University. In her keynote speech, she spoke of the various challenges and achievements of women writers and activists, but her focus is on the larger perspective: she wants women to make connections with the world and not dealonly with the domestic sphere.

Tharu's more recent achievements include Towards a Critical Medical Practice: Dilemmas of Medical Culture Today (with Anand  Zacaraiah and R. Srivatsan), 2009, and No Alphabet in Sight, 2011, a dossier of new dalit writing from Kerala and Tamil Nadu (with K. Satyanarayana). The Exercise of Freedom: An Introduction to Dalit Writing (with K. Satyanarayana) is another example of Tharu's  groundbreaking efforts. The works in the later collection not only showcase the literature of a suppressed group of Indians, but alsosuggest how literary work can turn into social movements.

When I met her during the BRAC University conference, Susie Tharu's first observation on Dhaka was the cleanliness of the public toilet she had seen while walking from BRAC Centre to BRAC University. She said, “Now I know that it is possible to keep them clean, but I rarely see any in India.” The comment reflects her keen observation and interest in human behaviour; she certainly is not just a theorist or artist observing things from her ivory tower. No wonder she noticed the cleanliness of public toilets in Mohakhali and the fact that it was possible to keep them clean without making other humans carry excreta on their heads.

When Iasked about her accomplishments as a teacher, writer, editor and activist, she smiled as she said, “All teachers write at some point of their lives. I do, too. As for the projects you mention of unearthing the women writers—well, there were also some others who wanted to do it. We just got together, and then other women and even some men joined in. It was a delightful project with some very dedicated people in it.” She made it sound so simple; and yet the faraway look in her eyes was a tell-tale sign perhaps of the constraints her team had to overcome, or some experiences that still strike a chord when she reminisces about the project.

“I wanted to be connected with a variety of things in my own world,” she said with reference to dalit literature and how it came to acquire an identity of its own. As late as in 1979,dalits were refused a panel in a conference arranged by Kannada Sahitya Parishad. She condemned the caste system in India saying, “I am glad to see that it is not such a huge problem in Bangladesh.” When told there is no caste system in Bangladesh, she shook her head, “That I don't believe. It is everywhere in some form or other.” Suddenly, the image of a dehumanized manhole cleaner emerging from open sewer in a busy road near New Market loomed before my eyes and I became silent.

The other point of interest she referred to is the political culture of medical equipment. “Medicine has become politics, you know,” she said with a wry smile. Critical Medical Practice opened an untrodden path for her and many others. “It was an entire year of preparation. You surely cannot be unaware of the gigantic business enterprise the medical industry has become,” she said. Then her expression turned grim as she went on to explain how doctors and medical students are part of a huge conspiracy. For many of them working through this project was an “a-ha moment,” as they experienced flashes of an existential crisis. The original goal of this project was to look into the educational cost of a medical education. But instead, the study turned to examining the medical infrastructure providing the best for the rich, and a minimal service to the poor.

Our conversation turned finally to women's writing and sexuality in ancient and modern India. “Look at Khajuraho. Isn't it difficult to believe, or even conceive, some of the art forms depicted there? When right wing Hindu activists attack art scholars, we refer to those ancient examples. We have such a rich tradition. But then, we cannot go back; we have to live within today.” She paused and added,“Repression and suppression are two different things. We have to learn to differentiate between them.” As for feminism, she refuses to take the term as something static. “Feminism grows,” she said, “from carefully thought-through and grounded 'feminist' interventions in specific contexts and in relation to specific issues.” For Tharu, feminism is an unfinished project which developed in response to the challenges it had to confront. At this point, she turned to Bangalore Nagarathnama, the famed artist and courtesan of South India, and a figure given prominence in Women's Writing in India. She alluded to the patriarchal culture that incriminates such women for profanity and immorality because of their profession. Yet when it comes to art and literature, these same women often prove the pioneers, philosophers, and writers.

At one point Tharu said, “A text is so much more than just words on pages.” She talked about the miracle of meaning and how translation has become important in today's world. She calls it a “transaction” between different cultures. That is also when she said wistfully, “You know what you should do? You should write a history of the Indian subcontinent from the perspective of Bangladesh.” I could tell that she was glimpsing an undiscovered terrain and wondering at hidden treasures lying underneath. But it is a legacy to be explored by us Bangladeshis. As an onlooker, Susie Tharu could only advise and suggest directions for scholarly work.

But even before embarking on such a project, we need to write a literary history of women in Bangladesh, I thought. Some of this important work has already been taken up by scholars like Firdous Azim and Perween Hasan, but there is much more that needs to be done to uncoverlong forgotten Bangladeshi women writers from the rubble of oblivion. There must have been women writers who are now lost to us merely because of lack of documentation. The story of the eighteenth-century Telegu poet Muddupalani and her work Radhika Swantanam that Tharu's uncovered is inspiring, as are the efforts of Bangalore Nagaratnama to revive that classical tale. Even though the latter lost a legal battle against the British Raj who accused her of spreading immoral tales, her book continued to be sold and read in secret.

When it was time to leave, I took in her white hair, bright eyes and warm, engaging smile. She turned to thank the student volunteers for bringing us tea. As she held out her hands to say goodbye I knew that it was not just Tharu's scholarly work, norher fascinating projects as an activist, but her personality itself that has helped her shape contemporary South Asian feminist discourse.

Sohana Manzoor teaches English at the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh.

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22. TURKISH SCHOOLS TO STOP TEACHING EVOLUTION, OFFICIAL SAYS
Kareem Shaheen and Gözde Hatunoğlu
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(The Guardian - 23 June 2017)

Board of education chairman says subject is debatable, controversial and too complicated for students
​Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
The secular opposition has long argued that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pursuing a covert Islamist agenda contrary to the republic’s founding values. Photograph: AP

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish schools, a senior education official has said, in a move likely to raise the ire of the country’s secular opposition.

Alpaslan Durmuş, who chairs the board of education, said evolution was debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.

“We believe that these subjects are beyond their [students] comprehension,” said Durmuş in a video published on the education ministry’s website.

Durmuş said a chapter on evolution was being removed from ninth grade biology course books, and the subject postponed to the undergraduate period. Another change to the curriculum may reduce the amount of time that students spend studying the legacy of secularism.

Critics of the government believe public life is being increasingly stripped of the secular traditions instilled by the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The secular opposition has long argued that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pursuing a covert Islamist agenda contrary to the republic’s founding values. Education is a particularly contentious avenue, because of its potential in shaping future generations. Small-scale protests by parents in local schools have opposed the way religion is taught.

There is little acceptance of evolution as a concept among mainstream Muslim clerics in the Middle East, who believe it contradicts the story of creation in scripture, in which God breathed life into the first man, Adam, after shaping him from clay. Still, evolution is briefly taught in many high school biology courses in the region.

The final changes to the curriculum are likely to be announced next week after the Muslim Eid or Bayram festival at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. The draft changes had been put forth for public consultation at the beginning of the year.

The subject of evolution in particular stirred debate earlier this year after Numan Kurtulmuş, the deputy prime minister, described the process as a theory that was both archaic and lacking sufficient evidence.

Reports in Turkish media in recent weeks, based on apparent leaks of school board meetings, have also predicted a diminished role in the curriculum for the study of Atatürk, and an increase in the hours devoted to studying religion. Durmuş said that a greater emphasis would be placed on the contributions of Muslim and Turkish scientists and history classes would move away from a “Euro-centric” approach.

The changes were based on a broad public consultation in which parents and the public played a key role, he said.

The Islamist-secularist debate is just one of a series of divides in a country that two months ago narrowly approved a referendum granting President Erdoğan broad new powers.

Many in the religiously conservative element of the president’s support base admire his piety and see his ascension as a defeat of the elite “White Turks” – a westernised elite that used to dominate the upper echelons of society and was accused of looking down with disdain on poorer, more religiously inclined citizens.

The secular opposition worries that the president and his party are reshaping Turkish society and clinging to neo-Ottoman ideals that see Turkey as the vanguard of a greater Islamic nation.

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23. TURKISH LESSONS
Emre Sencer
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 Stefan Ihrig. Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014. 320 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-36837-8.

Reviewed by Emre Sencer (Knox College)
Published on H-German (June, 2017)
Commissioned by Nathan N. Orgill

When analyzing the rise of the Nazis, academics often tend to overlook how insecure the movement was in its early years. In their search for a counterweight to the emerging Weimar republic, Nazis and other radical right-wing movements of the early postwar period looked for examples of countries and leaders who opposed the series of post-World War I treaties. They scoured the map for examples of British and French hypocrisy in and around Europe. Theirs was a struggle to deny the moral supremacy of the war’s winners. The ideologues of this trend based their claims on internationalist principles on the one hand (Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points), and nationalist outrage on the other. According to these commentators, Wilsonian principles had been replaced by an unjust international order, symbolized by the Versailles Treaty, that mistreated states such as Germany. The image of a heroic nation, betrayed from within and surrounded by enemies, was a favorite trope of right-wing agitation, and it was shared by most radical nationalist movements of the early 1920s.

In this richly documented and exhaustively researched study, Stefan Ihrig investigates the Nazi movement’s obsessive interest in modern Turkey and its leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Focusing on the image of Atatürk as a national savior and state-builder, Ihrig examines how fascinated the extreme Right and radical nationalists in Germany were with Atatürk's Ankara government and its achievements in the interwar era. The resulting analysis carries some surprising findings for specialists of both German and Turkish history. Ihrig demonstrates that the Turkish nationalist movement, its leader, and his policies were much more influential for the Nazi worldview in the 1920s than many other potential examples, including Mussolini’s Italy. Ihrig’s claims about the early influences upon the Nazi movement will no doubt appeal to many in an era when cross-cultural and transnational analyses find increasing supporters. In particular, those who look for European right-wing echoes of single-party-era Turkey’s policies will benefit from Ihrig’s most seminal finding, that in the development of the Nazi movement’s ideas, Atatürk’s Turkey acted as a role model. As the Nazis saw it, the Turkish experience was a reflection of their own anti-Versailles, anti-imperialist, anti-Western struggle. It was just that the Turks under Atatürk had arrived there earlier than the Germans.

A major contribution of Ihrig’s work is to discuss the Nazi views of Kemalist Turkey within the broader context of modernity. As he details in the book’s epilogue, Atatürk’s Turkey represented a form of positive modernity for the Nazis, arising out of the experience of total war and nation building. As the Nazis endlessly refashioned the image of Turkey according to their political and ideological needs, however, the only constant in this process was Atatürk: a “chiseled-in-stone” figure, as Ihrig describes him (p. 229). For the Nazis, the Turkish “success story” was unthinkable without the leadership principle. From state building to its approach to minorities, New Turkey was a “hypermodern” example to be emulated. Whether this portrayal amounts to describing Turkey as an example of “völkisch” modernity, as Ihrig calls it, however, deserves closer inspection.

The book begins with the story of the Turkish nationalist insurgency against the Entente occupation and the sultan’s government in 1919, then proceeds in chronological order to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Ihrig first covers the impact of the Turkish nationalist struggle on the German Right in the early Weimar years. In the second chapter, Ihrig continues with the early Weimar nationalist movements up to the November putsch of 1923. Chapter 3 covers the Nazi fascination with Turkey and Atatürk as its leader in the 1930s. The fourth chapter analyzes the creation of an Atatürk hagiography in the National Socialist education system. Chapter 5 turns the focus to Turkey’s place in the Nazi conception of the modern völkisch state. The final chapter looks at the development of this fascination with Turkey during World War II. In this way, Ihrig provides a thorough analysis of the Nazi obsession with Turkey and Atatürk from 1919 to the end of the Nazi era.

In the first chapter, we are introduced to a detailed overview and discussion of nationalist terminology in the early Weimar years (for example, irredentism, national action, and national revolution). Ihrig begins by stating that Turkey was a “major Weimar media event” (p. 10). Turkey’s struggle against the Entente occupation and the new European order that emerged after World War I fired up the German nationalist imagination and led to a focus on this country that can only be described as a fixation or obsession (p. 11). Ihrig offers a very close reading of a broad spectrum of German newspapers from 1919 to 1923. The difference between “active vs. passive politics,” later a staple of the Nazi lexicon, anchors these newspaper contributors’ understanding of the Turkish nationalist movement. What the Turkish resistance symbolized for them was active politics. The revision of the Versailles system could only come through “action,” not through “talk.” The author provides examples not only from articles and editorials but also illustrations from the German press of this period that hammered this point home. In their view, Turkish nationalists and their leader exemplified everything that wasn’t Weimar. Ihrig notes that this narrative “Germanified the Turkish topic” (p. 64). Unearthing this connection is what makes the book’s thesis so original.

Ihrig takes his thesis further in chapter 2 by describing just how much the Nazis “grew up with Turkey” in the 1920s (p. 70). As early as December 1920, the party organ Völkischer Beobachter was already pro-Turkish in its coverage of Middle Eastern affairs. Especially the newspaper Heimatland emphasized the point that the Turkish case was also one of “stab-in-the back,” and took a strong stance against treaty fulfillment policies. Ihrig correctly notes that one would expect an equally intensive coverage of Italian developments during the 1920s, but this was not the case. Instead, the radical right-wing press focused on the nationalist cause in Turkey before it did on Italy, and highlighted the importance of the “Turkish Führer” (p. 80). Ihrig distinguishes a shift in Nazi publications during this period. By October 1923, when the Turkish Republic was declared, the Nazi press was focusing more intensely on what it termed “Turkish lessons,” the methods and solutions for nationalist liberation as an example for Germany. It is interesting to note that the Ankara government was contrasted with the so-called Jewocracy of Weimar and its inability to withstand fulfillment policies. Ihrig provides examples from the writings of Hans Tröbst, who served on the Ankara government’s side during the 1919-22 conflict. Tröbst gave a glorified account of the nationalist struggle in his writings, praising the “direction and goals” of the struggle and its “iron energy” against local opposition (p. 83). It is quite clear that in the eyes of a commentator like Tröbst, the struggle of the Ankara government against the provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres was an instructive alternative to Weimar Germany’s attitude toward the Versailles settlement. The Turkish example (as opposed to the situation in the Germany of 1919) represented “National will” (p. 84). The parallels between Germany and Turkey, which Ihrig discovers in Tröbst’s articles, become uncannier with the mention of the comparison between Versailles Poland and “Sèvres Armenia” (p. 83). In addition, according to Ihrig, one of Hitler’s key political advisors during this period, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, was the former German vice consul in Eastern Anatolia, who witnessed the Armenian Genocide; presumably, he was the source of Hitler’s knowledge about the fate of Ottoman Armenians. Ihrig returns to this connection in chapter 5.

The book’s third chapter is in a way the pivotal chapter, whose conclusion outlines some of the most important arguments of the work about the level of emphasis placed by Hitler and other Nazis on the supposedly völkisch nature of Atatürk's Turkey. According to Ihrig, Hitler's 1933 description of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a  “star in the darkness” underlined the affinities between the two regimes and initiated what Ihrig calls a “minor cult” around Atatürk (p. 115). Ihrig states that for the Nazis, Turkey was the first example of a modern, völkisch state and first to implement “the Führer idea in a modern context” (p. 145). This is a theme which Ihrig revisits at various points in the book. Just how useful the term völkisch, a concept based on the uniquely German experience going back to the nineteenth century, is in the Turkish case is open to debate. But it is clear that both during Atatürk’s lifetime and immediately after his death in 1938, the Nazi press and Hitler often referred to Turkey as a model, a form of modernity to which Germany should subscribe.

By chapter 4, Ihrig begins to delve deeper into what Atatürk may have meant to the Nazi leadership, their sympathizers, and the broader reading public in Germany in the 1930s. He points out that books about Atatürk and the Turkish World War I experience sold quite well in interwar Germany; indeed, “nowhere in the world, except for Turkey itself, were as many books on Atatürk and the New Turkey published as in interwar Germany” (p. 151). The bulk of this publishing bonanza focused on the life of the leader, but another popular topic was the military prowess of Turkey in campaigns such as Gallipoli. The concepts of leadership and charisma, personified in the Turkish president as the “perfect Führer,” occupied center stage in the hagiographic accounts published in the 1930s (p. 149). His 36-hour marathon speech to the parliament in 1927, the Nutuk, also found ample coverage in the German press. Ihrig further demonstrates that in the minds of the pro-Nazi commentators, Atatürk exemplified the leader figure who could unite in his person such themes and concepts as national will, people’s war, national sacrifice, and soldier-statesman. Nazis seemed to identify a clear parallel with Hitler, and with the Führer ideal in Atatürk. Furthermore, Ihrig explains that the Nazis were also impressed by the way they thought Atatürk dealt with the opposition, and how he demanded and obtained obedience from the military and the nation. In other words, they were drawing “German lessons from a Turkish life” (p. 158). This of course is an important claim, one which Ihrig mostly proves and which provides one of the groundbreaking arguments of the book.

It is in the fifth chapter that Ihrig moves on to his analysis of the German perception of post-1923 Turkey and its transition from empire to republic, outlining the Turkish practices and policies that resonated with the National Socialist framework. Here he reiterates the Nazi fascination with Turkey as a modern völkisch state. Ihrig argues that the Nazis endlessly fashioned and refashioned Turkey in their image, and their understanding of the Turkish example reflected their ideology. This process also included a deep interest in the “Turkish methods” of dealing with minority questions. In connection with this argument, Ihrig returns to the matter of the Armenian Genocide. Carefully tracking the history of German coverage of the genocide and the anti-Armenian attitudes of right-wing commentators from the early 1920s on, he maintains that the German radical Right was in general hostile to the plight of the Armenians. Ihrig clearly defines a negative attitude toward minorities as an identifying characteristic of the völkisch state, and his reading of single-party, republican Turkey fits into this scheme. He provides ample examples from the negative references to the Armenians by numerous Nazi authors, and draws parallels between the ways the Nazis commented on the Jews and the Armenians. This analysis also allows him to highlight the Nazi visions of “old” vs. “new” Turkey (that is, Ottoman vs. Republican), where emergence of an officially homogenous state in the place of a multinational and multicultural one was a success story to be emulated.

This chapter also includes analysis of the Nazi coverage of several major Turkish reforms of the Kemalist era, such as secularization and limits on the role of religion in politics; involvement of women in the public sphere; and the development of Ankara as the model metropolis of the young state. Ihrig rightly assumes that the Turkish reforms fit into the Nazi perception of a nationalist, authoritarian, modernizing nation. Themes such as rebuilding the state from the ashes of defeat, mobilizing a healthy nation for the future, and encouraging physical fitness and fertility all were highlighted by Germans as they refashioned the Turkish example to fit a Nazi framework. But he is also quick to point out in the same chapter that by the end of the 1930s, the foreign policy aims and priorities of the two states were diverging. This divergence began to create tensions in the Nazi attitude toward Turkey, especially considering the German-Italian alliance during this period and the apparent sympathy in the German press for the Arab cause over the annexation of Alexandretta by Turkey. Nevertheless, Ihrig points out that the level of German media coverage of Spain and Italy never approached that of Turkey. The Turkish case was one of special “twinning” to Hitler and the Nazis, despite prominent Nazi ideologues’ insistence on the uniqueness of the Nazi experience and its Führer.

In the final chapter, Ihrig carries his analysis to the period after Atatürk’s death and World War II. Despite its neutrality in the conflict, Turkish excitement over the possibility of a Soviet defeat had its roots in pan-Turanism, an ideology that found support in some Nazi circles. A series of high-ranking Turkish officials visited wartime Germany, including its concentration camps and propaganda journals. At the same time, however, Turkey was clearly an opponent of Italian schemes in the eastern Mediterranean and it was also determined to resist pressure to join the war. But Ihrig claims that Hitler’s own interest in Turkey mostly helped to minimize negative perceptions of the nation, even after Turkey broke off diplomatic relations in 1944.

Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination is a bold and path-breaking book. It draws attention to a largely overlooked connection between Nazi Germany and Kemalist Turkey, and contributes to the scholarship on the cross-fertilization of authoritarian nationalist ideas in the post-World War I years. However, perhaps using some Turkish sources would have helped to clarify whether this fascination was mutual, especially during World War II. The focus on Turkey as a modern völkisch state might require further discussion. And so might the argument that the Turkish experience of “ultimate” and total war provided a model for the Nazis; Hitler presumably did not need the Turkish example to offer to Germans the options of either victory or destruction. But these are minor objections. Ihrig’s book is an insightful and highly original work. In the future, it will be difficult to discuss the transnational undercurrents of the radical Right in interwar Europe or German-Turkish relations under the Nazis without taking into consideration Ihrig’s arguments.

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24. THE NIHILISM OF JULIAN ASSANGE
Sue Halpern
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(The New York Review of Books - July 13, 2017 Issue)

Risk a documentary film directed by Laura Poitras
Praxis Films
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Laura Poitras’s documentary film Risk

About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitras’s messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. “This is not the film I thought I was making,” she says. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”

By the time she makes this confession, Poitras has been filming Assange, on and off, for six years. He has gone from a bit player on the international stage to one of its dramatic leads. His gleeful interference in the 2016 American presidential election—first with the release of e-mails poached from the Democratic National Committee, timed to coincide with, undermine, and possibly derail Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic Convention, and then with the publication of the private e-mail correspondence of Clinton’s adviser John Podesta, which was leaked, drip by drip, in the days leading up to the election to maximize the damage it might inflict on Clinton—elevated Assange’s profile and his influence.

And then this spring, it emerged that Nigel Farage, the Trump adviser and former head of the nationalist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) who is now a person of interest in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, was meeting with Assange. To those who once saw him as a crusader for truth and accountability, Assange suddenly looked more like a Svengali and a willing tool of Vladimir Putin, and certainly a man with no particular affection for liberal democracy. Yet those tendencies were present all along.

In 2010, when Poitras began work on her film, Assange’s four-year-old website, WikiLeaks, had just become the conduit for hundreds of thousands of classified American documents revealing how we prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis, as well as for some 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. All had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks site by an army private named Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning.

The genius of the WikiLeaks platform was that documents could be leaked anonymously, with all identifiers removed; WikiLeaks itself didn’t know who its sources were unless leakers chose to reveal themselves. This would prevent anyone at WikiLeaks from inadvertently, or under pressure, disclosing a source’s identity. Assange’s goal was to hold power—state power, corporate power, and powerful individuals—accountable by offering a secure and easy way to expose their secrets. He called this “radical transparency.” Manning’s bad luck was to tell a friend about the hack, and the friend then went to the FBI. For a long time, though, Assange pretended not to know who provided the documents, even when there was evidence that he and Manning had been e-mailing before the leaks.

Though the contradictions were not immediately obvious to Poitras as she trained her lens on Assange, they were becoming so to others in his orbit. WikiLeaks’s young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a £12 million penalty if it were breached. “[I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign,” Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assange’s “impulse towards free speech,” according to Andrew O’Hagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assange’s failed autobiography, “is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.”

Meanwhile, some of the company he was keeping while Poitras was filming also might have given her pause. His association with Farage had already begun in 2011 when Farage was head of UKIP. Assange’s own WikiLeaks Party of Australia was aligned with the white nationalist Australia First Party, itself headed by an avowed neo-Nazi, until political pressure forced it to claim that association to be an “administrative error.”

Most egregious, perhaps, was Assange’s collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally to whom Assange handed over all State Department diplomatic cables from the Manning leak relating to Belarus (as well as to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel). Shamir then shared these documents with members of the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who appeared to use them to imprison and torture members of the opposition. This prompted the human rights group Index on Censorship to ask WikiLeaks to explain its relationship to Shamir, and to look into reports that Shamir’s “access to the WikiLeaks’ US diplomatic cables [aided in] the prosecution of civil society activists within Belarus.” WikiLeaks called these claims rumors and responded that it would not be investigating them. “Most people with principled stances don’t survive for long,” Assange tells Poitras at the beginning of the film. It’s not clear if he’s talking about himself or others.

Then there is the matter of redaction. After the Manning cache came in, WikiLeaks partnered with a number of “legacy” newspapers, including The New York Times and The Guardian, to bring the material out into the world. While initially going along with those publications’ policies of removing identifying information that could put innocent people in harm’s way and excluding material that could not be verified, Assange soon balked. According to the Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, their 2011 postmortem of their contentious collaboration with Assange on the so-called Afghan war logs—the portion of the Manning leaks concerning the conflict in Afghanistan—the WikiLeaks founder was unmoved by entreaties to scrub the files of anything that could point to Afghan villagers who might have had any contact with American troops. He considered such editorial intervention to “contaminate the evidence.”

“Well they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it,” Leigh and Harding report Assange saying to a group of international journalists. And while Assange has denied making these comments, WikiLeaks released troves of material in which the names of Afghan civilians had not been redacted, an action that led Amnesty International, the Open Society Institute, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission to issue a joint rebuke. The group Reporters Without Borders also criticized WikiLeaks for its “incredible irresponsibility” in not removing the names. This was in 2010, not long after Poitras approached Assange about making a film.

Lack of redaction—or of any real effort to separate disclosures of public importance from those that might simply put private citizens at risk—continued to be a flashpoint for WikiLeaks, its supporters, and its critics. In July 2016, presumably when Poitras was still working on Risk, WikiLeaks dumped nearly 300,000 e-mails it claimed were from Turkey’s ruling AKP party. Those files, it turned out, were not from AKP heavyweights but, rather, from ordinary people writing to the party, often with their personal information included.

Worse, WikiLeaks also posted links to a set of huge voter databases, including one with the names, addresses, and other contact information for nearly every woman in Turkey. It also apparently published the files of psychiatric patients, gay men, and rape victims in Saudi Arabia. Soon after that, WikiLeaks began leaking bundles of hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails, also full of personal information, including cell phone and credit card numbers, leading Wired magazine to declare that “WikiLeaks Has Officially Lost the Moral High Ground.”

Poitras doesn’t say, but perhaps this is when she, too, began to take account of the contradictions that eventually turned her film away from hagiography toward something more nuanced. Though she intermittently interjects herself into the film—to relate a dream she’s had about Assange; to say that he is brave; to say that she thinks he doesn’t like her; to say that she doesn’t trust him—this is primarily a film of scenes, episodic and nearly picaresque save for the unappealing vanity of its hero. (There is very little in the film about the work of WikiLeaks itself.)

Here is Julian, holed up in a supporter’s estate in the English countryside while under house arrest, getting his hair cut by a gaggle of supporters while watching a video of Japanese women in bikinis dancing. Here is Julian in a car with that other famous leaker, Daniel Ellsberg. Here is Julian instructing Sarah Harrison, his WikiLeaks colleague, to call Secretary Clinton at the State Department and tell her she needs to talk to Julian Assange. Here is Julian walking in the woods with one of his lawyers, certain that a bird in a nearby tree is actually a man with a camera. Here is Julian being interviewed, for no apparent reason, by the singer Lady Gaga:

    Lady Gaga: What’s your favorite food? 

    Assange: Let’s not pretend I’m a normal person. I am obsessed with political struggle. I’m not a normal person. 

    Lady Gaga: Tell me how you feel? 

    Assange: Why does it matter how I feel? Who gives a damn? I don’t care how I feel. 

    Lady Gaga: Do you ever feel like just fucking crying? 

    Assange: No. 

And here is Julian, in conversation with Harrison, who is also his girlfriend:

    Assange: My profile didn’t take off till the sex case. [It was] very high in media circles and intelligence circles, but it didn’t really take off, as if I was a globally recognized household name, it wasn’t till the sex case. So I was joking to one of our people, sex scandal every six months. 

    Harrison: That was me you were joking to. And I died a little bit inside. 

    Assange: Come on. It’s a platform. 

The sex case to which Assange is referring is the one that began in the summer of 2010 on a trip to Sweden. While there, Assange had sex with two young supporters a few days apart, both of whom said that what started out as consensual ended up as assault. Eventually, after numerous back-and-forths, the Swedish court issued an international arrest warrant for Assange, who was living in England, to compel him to return to Sweden for questioning. Assange refused, declaring that this was a “honey pot” trap orchestrated by the CIA to extradite him to the United States for publishing the Manning leaks.

After a short stay in a British jail, subsequent house arrest, and many appeals, Assange was ordered by the UK Supreme Court, in May 2012, to be returned to Sweden to answer the rape and assault charges. Assange, however, claiming that there was a secret warrant for his arrest in the United States (though the extradition treaty between Sweden and the US prohibits extradition for a political offense), had made other arrangements: he had applied for, and was granted, political asylum in Ecuador. Because the British government refused “safe passage” there, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Poitras was with Assange in an undisclosed location in London as the British high court in Parliament Square was issuing its final ruling. The camera was rolling and no one was speaking—it was all sealed lips and pantomime—as Assange dyed his hair red and dressed in biker’s leather in order to make a mad dash on a motorcycle across town to the embassy. (There’s a sorrowful moment when his mother, who, inexplicably, is in the room, too, writes “I love you, honey,” on a piece of notebook paper and hands it and a pen to her son and he waves her off.)

This past January, five years into Assange’s self-imposed exile, he promised to finally leave the embassy and turn himself over to the Americans if President Obama were to grant clemency to Chelsea Manning, who had been sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for giving documents to WikiLeaks. Obama did; Assange didn’t. In May, the same month Manning left prison, Sweden dropped all charges against Assange. He remains in the embassy.

The “sex case,” as Assange called it, figures prominently in Risk. It serves to reveal his casual and sometimes noxious misogyny, and it is a foil for him to conflate the personal with the political, using the political to get out of answering to the personal, and the personal to claim that he’s the victim here. “Who is after you, Mr. Assange?” Lady Gaga asks. “Formally there are more than twelve United States intelligence organizations,” Assange tells her, reeling off a list of acronyms. “So basically a whole fucking bunch of people in America,” she says, and then he mentions that the Australians, the British, and the Swedes are also pursuing him.

Whether this is true or not has long been a matter of dispute. The Swedes definitely wanted him to return to their country, and the British were eager for him to abide by the Swedish warrant, and he made no friends in the Obama administration. Following the Manning leaks in 2010, the attorney general, Eric Holder, made it clear that the Department of Justice, along with the Department of Defense, was investigating whether Assange could be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act, though no warrant was ever issued publicly. Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, said that WikiLeaks’s release of the diplomatic cables was “an attack on the international community [and] we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.” Still, Assange’s self-exile in the embassy, which the United Nations condemned as an “arbitrary detention,” was predicated on his belief that the Americans were lying in wait, ready at any moment to haul him to the US, where his actions might land him in prison for a very long time, or even lead to his execution.

All this was well before Assange was accused of using WikiLeaks as a front for Russian agents working to undermine American democracy during the 2016 presidential election. And it was before candidate Trump declared his love for the website and then watched as Assange released a huge arsenal of CIA hacking tools into the public domain less than two months into Trump’s presidency. This, in turn, prompted the new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, who appeared to have no problem with WikiLeaks when it was sharing information detrimental to the Democrats, to declare WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service,” and the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to prepare a warrant for Assange’s arrest. If the Justice Department wasn’t going after Assange before, it appears to be ready to do so now.

Despite Assange’s vocal disdain for his former collaborators at The New York Times and The Guardian, his association with those journalists and their newspapers is probably what so far has kept him from being indicted and prosecuted in the United States. As Glenn Greenwald told the journalist Amy Goodman recently, Eric Holder’s Justice Department could not come up with a rationale to prosecute WikiLeaks that would not also implicate the news organizations with which it had worked; to do so, Greenwald said, would have been “too much of a threat to press freedom, even for the Obama administration.” The same cannot be said with confidence about the Trump White House, which perceives the Times, and national news organizations more generally, as adversaries. Yet if the Sessions Justice Department goes after Assange, it likely will be on the grounds that WikiLeaks is not “real” journalism.

This charge has dogged WikiLeaks from the start. For one thing, it doesn’t employ reporters or have subscribers. For another, it publishes irregularly and, because it does not actively chase secrets but aggregates those that others supply, often has long gaps when it publishes nothing at all. Perhaps most confusing to some observers, WikiLeaks’s rudimentary website doesn’t look anything like a New York Times or a Washington Post, even in those papers’ more recent digital incarnations.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that WikiLeaks publishes the information it receives much like those traditional news outlets. When it burst on the scene in 2010, it was embraced as a new kind of journalism, one capable not only of speaking truth to power, but of outsmarting power and its institutional gatekeepers. And the fact is, there is no consensus on what constitutes “real” journalism. As Adam Penenberg points out, “The best we have comes from laws and proposed legislation which protect reporters from being forced to divulge confidential sources in court. In crafting those shield laws, legislators have had to grapple with the nebulousness of the profession.”

The danger of carving off WikiLeaks from the rest of journalism, as the attorney general may attempt to do, is that ultimately it leaves all publications vulnerable to prosecution. Once an exception is made, a rule will be too, and the rule in this case will be that the government can determine what constitutes real journalism and what does not, and which publications, films, writers, editors, and filmmakers are protected under the First Amendment, and which are not.

This is where censorship begins. No matter what one thinks of Julian Assange personally, or of WikiLeaks’s reckless publication practices, like it or not, they have become the litmus test of our commitment to free speech. If the government successfully prosecutes WikiLeaks for publishing classified information, why not, then, “the failed New York Times,” as the president likes to call it, or any news organization or journalist? It’s a slippery slope leading to a sheer cliff. That is the real risk being presented here, though Poitras doesn’t directly address it.

Near the end of Risk, after Poitras has shown Assange a rough cut of the film, he tells her that he views it as “a severe threat to my freedom and I must act accordingly.” He doesn’t say what he will do, but when the film was released this spring, Poitras was loudly criticized by Assange’s supporters for changing it from the hero’s journey she debuted last year at Cannes to something more critical, complicated, and at best ambivalent about the man. Yet ambivalence is the most honest thing about the film. It is the emotion Assange often stirs up in those who support the WikiLeaks mission but are disturbed by its chief missionary.

This ambivalence, too, is what makes Risk such a different film from Citizen Four (2014), Poitras’s intense, resolute, Oscar-winning documentary about Edward Snowden. While Snowden and Assange are often twinned in the press and in the public imagination, these films demonstrate how false that equivalence is. Snowden leaked classified NSA documents that he said showed rampant unconstitutional intrusions by the government into the private lives of innocent citizens, doing so through a careful process of vetting and selective publication by a circle of hand-picked journalists. He identified himself as the leaker and said he wanted to provoke a public debate about government spying and the right of privacy. Assange, by contrast, appears to have no interest in anyone’s privacy but his own and his sources’. Private communications, personal information, intimate conversations are all fair game to him. He calls this nihilism “freedom,” and in so doing elevates it to a principle that gives him license to act without regard to consequences.

The mission Assange originally set out to accomplish, though—providing a safe way for whistleblowers to hold power accountable—has, in the past few years, eclipsed WikiLeaks itself. Almost every major newspaper, magazine, and website now has a way for leakers to upload secret information, most through an anonymous, online, open-source drop box called Secure Drop. Based on coding work done by the free speech advocate Aaron Swartz before his death and championed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation—on whose board both Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden sit, and which is a conduit for donations to WikiLeaks among other organizations—Secure Drop gives leakers the option of choosing where to upload their material. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Forbes, and The Intercept, to name just a few, all have a way for people to pass secrets along to journalists.

It is not yet known why a National Security Agency contractor named Reality Leigh Winner didn’t use a digital drop box when she leaked a classified NSA document to The Intercept in May outlining how Russian cyber spies hacked into American election software. Unlike Edward Snowden, who carefully covered his tracks before leaking his NSA cache to Glenn Greenwald (before Greenwald started The Intercept) and Laura Poitras (who filmed Snowden’s statement of purpose, in which he identified himself as the leaker), Winner used a printer at work to copy the document, which she then mailed to The Intercept. What she and those at The Intercept who dealt with the document did not know, apparently, is that this government printer, like many printers, embeds all documents with small dots that reveal the serial number of the machine and the time the document was printed. After The Intercept contacted the NSA to verify the document, the FBI needed only a few days to find Winner and arrest her.

We will soon get to witness what the Trump administration does to those who leak classified information, and to those who publish it. WikiLeaks, apparently, will be providing the government with an assist. It is offering a $10,000 reward for “the public exposure” of the reporter whose ignorance or carelessness led the FBI to Reality Winner’s door. Such are the vagaries of radical transparency.


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

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