SACW - 7 Aug 2017 | Afghanistan: ex-warlords / Sri Lanka: reconciliation / Bangladesh: Jihadi Extremism / Pakistan: Court Sets a Dangerous Precedent / India: Nirupam Sen Obituary; Struggle of Sardar Sarovar Dam Affected; Hindutva in Goa; Rumour & Riots in Bengal; Reinventing EPW / Hiroshima Peace Declaration 2017 / South African Indian people / Europe: Progressive Mobilization / Can Poetry Change Your Life?

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Sun Aug 6 21:00:50 EDT 2017


South Asia Citizens Wire - 7 August 2017 - No. 2945 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. India:: Obituary : H.E. Shri Nirupam Sen | Dan O’Connor
2. India: Two minute silence for Bhiku Daji Bhilare | Subhash Gatade
3. India: Should the state promote astrology at all? | Patralekha Chatterjee
4. India: Supreme court ruling regarding section 498A based on erroneous facts - favours parallel justice dispensation | Indira Jaising
5. Undoing the soul of democratic-secular india: The RSS pracharak Batra way | Shamsul Islam
6. India: Sardar Sarovar Dam affected with Activist Medha Patkar to go on Indefinite Mass Fast - Statement from Narmada Bachao Andolan [Save the Narmada Movement]
7. Yashpal: A Life in Science - A documentary film
8. India: Vice-Chancellor’s ’Tank’ Talk - Statement by Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers Union

9. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Crosses have been desecrated, hate speeches made by Hindutva fundamentalist groups in Goa
 - Bangladeshi national, who is suspected to be a member of banned outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team detained in India
 - India: Man Thrashed by Cow Vigilantes in Nagpur Turns Out to be BJP Member
 - A report on gau rakshaks in Ahmednagar and on Swami of Samasta Hindu Aghadi
 - India: It’s time to enact an anti-lynching law | G. Sampath
 - A narrow brand of nationalism will end up breaking India
 - India - Gujarat: BJP, RSS behind attack on Rahul Gandhi's Convoy
 - India: P.M. Bhargava’s Biochemistry Lesson on Beef Threw Golwalkar Into a Fit | Chandana Chakrabarti
 - Dalits Struggle for Social Justice
 - India: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's pragmatic choice reinforces a fraught idea — of Hindu consolidation and Muslim peripherality
 - Army veterans make an impassioned plea that India grows stronger by celebrating differences
 - India: BJP All Set to Test UP School Students on Hindutva Propaganda
 - India: Daman and Diu administration made it compulsory for women to tie rakhis to their male colleagues
 - Hindi article on RSS Agenda in Education
 - India: Mobs are a weapon of violence, fake news a trigger | Ravish Kumar
 - India: Author Taslima Nasreen sent back from Aurangabad airport after protests
 - India: PG-13 nation - No adults please, we’re proud Indians | Mitali Saran
 - India: Rumour to Riots in Bengal (Rumela Sen and Niloy Sengupta)
 - Hindu nationalism risks pushing India into war with China | Yu Ning (Global Times, July 19, 2017)
 - What the gods drank in ancient India - Historian D.N. Jha
 - Hindi Article on Amarnath Yatra
 - How do India’s mainstream liberal Hindus perceive their own reality vis-a-vis the Hindu Right?
 - India: The UP Government’s Colossal Cover-Up Attempt to Protect Adityanath from investigation into his role in anti-Muslim violence
 - RSS's education man DN Batra wants Tagore, Urdu, English, Arabic words removed from school texts

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Hiroshima Peace Declaration (August 6, 2017)
11. India - China: Doklam is not about a road
12. On Jihadi Extremism in Bangladesh
13. On Pakistan's parallel judicial system in form of Panchayats & Jirgas . . .
14. Pakistan’s Court Sets a Dangerous Precedent | Aqil Shah
15. Pakistan: WAF condemns character assassination of Ayesha Gulalai
16. Silenced stones mark hard path to Sri Lankan reconciliation | Duncan McCargo
17. ‘A coalition of killers’: The ex-warlords promising Afghanistan’s ‘salvation’ | Max Bearak
18. Indian TV news channels must stop humiliating Kashmiris | MP Nathanael
19. India: Reinventing EPW - The journal must be saved and resurrected. Is the Sameeksha Trust up to it? | Omkar Goswami
20. India: Agra’s Mala Devi was no braid-chopping witch, just a soft target | Shobhaa De
21. Malema might have a point about South African Indian people | Aaisha Dadi Patel
22. China: Liu Xiaobo Is Gone, But Resistance Continues | Maria Repnikova
23. Progressive Mobilization in Europe | Jayati Ghosh
24. Can Poetry Change Your Life? | Louis Menand

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1. INDIA:: OBITUARY : H.E. SHRI NIRUPAM SEN
by Dan O’Connor
========================================
At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom’ - Nehru’s words at Indian independence. Hence, ‘Midnight’s Children’, a novel about those born at that time, None, though, of the fictional variety was as deeply imbued with Jawaharlal Nehru’s noble vision as Nirupam Sen, born that year, 1947, in Allahabad on 15th February, and dying in New Delhi, on 1st July, 70 years on. Throughout his career, he served his country and, as Nehru would have had it, the human community, with exceptional courage and distinction.
http://www.sacw.net/article13411.html

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2. INDIA: TWO MINUTE SILENCE FOR BHIKU DAJI BHILARE
by Subhash Gatade
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 Bhiku Daji Bhilare (Born on November 26, 1919) who died at the age of 98 years rather proved to be an exception. Not only thousands of people from all walks of life and various political streams participated in his cremation, the mainstream media also reported about it. It may be mainly because of this member of the Rashtra Seva Dal in his youth, who was active in the "parallel government" movement in Satara district run by revolutionary Nana Patil and others, had mainly devoted himself to social-political service, after representing Jawali assembly constituency in the state legislature for 18 years.
http://www.sacw.net/article13412.html

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3. INDIA: SHOULD THE STATE PROMOTE ASTROLOGY AT ALL? | Patralekha Chatterjee
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Madhya Pradesh is by no means the only state where the government promotes astrology education. In New Delhi, there is the Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth, a deemed university, under the ministry of human resources development. It offers a variety of courses on astrology, including “medical astrology” besides its regular fare. There are others.
http://www.sacw.net/article13404.html

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4. INDIA: SUPREME COURT RULING REGARDING SECTION 498A BASED ON ERRONEOUS FACTS - FAVOURS PARALLEL JUSTICE DISPENSATION | Indira Jaising
========================================
Supreme Court order saying the law on cruelty against women is misused is based on erroneous conclusions drawn from NCRB figures that don’t reveal the whole truth. It needs to be revisited.
http://www.sacw.net/article13408.html

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5. UNDOING THE SOUL OF DEMOCRATIC-SECULAR INDIA: THE RSS PRACHARAK BATRA WAY | Shamsul Islam
========================================
Apart from physical attacks and threats of elimination to these centres of learning, a more insidious game-plan of RSS is unfolding through RSS pracharak, Dina Nath Batra. He, as a father-figure of the RSS demolition squad against the largely liberal-democratic-secular system of school education which aimed at producing inquisitive young scholars who would question the status quo. Batra has come out with a new HIT LIST to be cleansed from educational content.
http://www.sacw.net/article13407.html

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6. INDIA: SARDAR SAROVAR AFFECTED WITH ACTIVIST MEDHA PATKAR TO GO ON INDEFINITE MASS FAST - STATEMENT FROM NARMADA BACHAO ANDOLAN [SAVE THE NARMADA MOVEMENT]
========================================
After 17 days of Relay Fast at 21 Places in Narmada Valley, Sardar Sarovar affected with Activist Medha Patkar to go on Indefinite Mass Fast from July 27th, 2017 on the Narmada River Bank
http://www.sacw.net/article13403.html
  
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7. YASHPAL: A LIFE IN SCIENCE - A DOCUMENTARY FILM
========================================
A documentary film about India’s scientist, Prof.Yashpal (1927-2017), produced at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia, New Delhi. Directed by Yousuf Saeed, 2004
http://www.sacw.net/article13402.html

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8. INDIA: VICE-CHANCELLOR’S ’TANK’ TALK - STATEMENT BY JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY TEACHERS UNION
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The JNUTA is amused by the JNU VC’s earnest desire that a tank be rolled onto JNU campus. It is surprising that Prof. Jagadesh Kumar can only be inspired to patriotism upon beholding instruments of war. This seems to be only a personal affliction, since the rest of the JNU community does not need these visual aids to feel love and concern for this land, its environment and all its peoples, whether in the armed services or elsewhere.
http://www.sacw.net/article13401.html

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9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - India: Crosses have been desecrated, hate speeches made by Hindutva fundamentalist groups in Goa
 - Bangladeshi national, who is suspected to be a member of banned outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team detained in India
 - India: Man Thrashed by Cow Vigilantes in Nagpur Turns Out to be BJP Member
 - A report on gau rakshaks in Ahmednagar and on Swami of Samasta Hindu Aghadi
 - India: It’s time to enact an anti-lynching law | G. Sampath
 - A narrow brand of nationalism will end up breaking India
 - India - Gujarat: BJP, RSS behind attack on Rahul Gandhi's Convoy
 - India: P.M. Bhargava’s Biochemistry Lesson on Beef Threw Golwalkar Into a Fit | Chandana Chakrabarti
 - Dalits Struggle for Social Justice
 - India: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's pragmatic choice reinforces a fraught idea — of Hindu consolidation and Muslim peripherality
 - Army veterans make an impassioned plea that India grows stronger by celebrating differences
 - India: BJP All Set to Test UP School Students on Hindutva Propaganda
 - India: Daman and Diu administration made it compulsory for women to tie rakhis to their male colleagues
 - Hindi article on RSS Agenda in Education
 - India: Mobs are a weapon of violence, fake news a trigger | Ravish Kumar
 - India: Author Taslima Nasreen sent back from Aurangabad airport after protests
 - India: PG-13 nation - No adults please, we’re proud Indians | Mitali Saran
 - India: Rumour to Riots in Bengal (Rumela Sen and Niloy Sengupta)
 - Hindu nationalism risks pushing India into war with China | Yu Ning (Global Times, July 19, 2017)
 - What the gods drank in ancient India - Historian D.N. Jha
 - Hindi Article on Amarnath Yatra
 - How do India’s mainstream liberal Hindus perceive their own reality vis-a-vis the Hindu Right?
 - India: The UP Government’s Colossal Cover-Up Attempt to Protect Adityanath from investigation into his role in anti-Muslim violence
 - RSS's education man DN Batra wants Tagore, Urdu, English, Arabic words removed from school texts

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. HIROSHIMA PEACE DECLARATION (AUGUST 6, 2017)
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http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1317948556078/simple/english.pdf

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11. INDIA - CHINA: DOKLAM IS NOT ABOUT A ROAD
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Doklam, like other recent stand-offs in Depsang or Demchok, is not about a road: It is is a message about China’s ire at India building alliances with its adversaries in Asia, and with the US. Beijing seeks, through the threat of force, to instruct India on how countries ought to conduct themselves.
by Praveen Swami 
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/doklam-is-not-about-a-road-india-china-4771984/

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12. ON JIHADI EXTREMISM IN BANGLADESH
========================================
(Foreign Affairs -  July 27, 2017)

WHY EXTREMISM IS ON THE RISE IN BANGLADESH
Dhaka's Secular Traditions Have Never Been More Vulnerable
By Michael Kugelman and Atif Ahmad
On July 1, 2016, five militants stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery, a restaurant frequented by foreigners in an upscale neighborhood of the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility, but local officials blamed members of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), a Bangladeshi militant organization. A 12-hour siege ended with the deaths of 22 hostages, 18 of them foreigners. This tragedy, which generated headlines around the world, was the country’s deadliest single terror attack in recent history. All of a sudden, Bangladesh—long overlooked not just by the international media but also within policy circles in Washington and other key capitals, despite being the world’s seventh most populous country and third-largest Muslim majority country—was on everyone’s radar.

One year later, Bangladesh has faded from the headlines, yet terrorist attacks continue, and the country’s deep secular traditions have never been more vulnerable thanks to Islamist extremists’ increasing inroads into society.

A Wave Of Jihadist Attacks

Not even a week after the Holey Artisan attack, militants carried out another assault—this one in eastern Bangladesh during the country’s largest prayer gathering for the Eid holiday. There were no formal claims of responsibility, but officials in Dhaka once again blamed JMB. Four people died, prompting an increase in counterterrorism efforts from the government. In July and August 2016, security officials seized large amounts of explosives around Dhaka that they claimed were in the possession of operatives of JMB and also Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), another local Bangladeshi terror group. They also targeted dozens of jihadists, leading to the deaths of nearly 20 militants, including the alleged mastermind of the Holey Artisan attack, Tamim Ahmed. In late July, police claimed to have killed nine militants affiliated with JMB and reportedly planning to carry out an attack similar to the Holey Artisan attack.

After the government crackdown there were no reported attacks until March 17, 2017, when a suicide bomber attacked a camp of the Rapid Action Battalion—an elite counterterror wing of the Bangladeshi police—in Dhaka,
[. . .]
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2017-07-27/why-extremism-rise-bangladesh

o o o

BANGLADESH: THE YOUNG GUY BEHIND THE HOLEY CAFE ATTACK IN GULSHAN
(Dhaka Tribune - July 29, 2017)
How Rashed got involved in terrorism
http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/crime/2017/07/29/how-rashed-got-involved-in-terrorism/

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13. ON PAKISTAN'S PARALLEL JUDICIAL SYSTEM IN FORM OF PANCHAYATS & JIRGAS . . .
========================================
(The Nation - August 04, 2017)

MOB JUSTICE INSTITUTIONS

Editorial

A woman in Bahawalpur tried committing suicide along with her three children on Wednesday. She decided to end her life after a panchayat accused her husband of theft and ordered him to pay Rs 600,000 within two days, for allegedly stealing the amount from a landlord. Several people were able to convince her to refrain from taking her life, however, the irony is that a case has been registered against her husband for the suicide attempt.

Despite the presence of the local police, no case was registered against any panchayat member because of their affluent background and the general acceptance of the panchayat system. The reason why it still prevails is because it is believed to offer speedy justice unlike the slow moving judicial system.

No one should be subjected to such a system of justice that does not relay on unchangeable codified laws. Human rights are guaranteed by the state, and the state is complicit in blatant abuse when it allows such systems to service. Panchayats and jirgas end up upholding practices of honour killings, revenge rape, and of siding with the affluent party. More often than not, the system is the most unfair to women. In 2016, a 16-year-old girl from the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was ordered to be burnt alive for helping her friend elope.

It is not just tribal elders who are a part of such panchayats and jirgas, but jirgas are also held under the chairmanship of political party leaders, nazims, ministers, and MPAs. This shows how the society has internalised the system and accepts its decisions – like a mob.

In the last couple of years, human rights groups and activists have been calling for the abolishment of an alternate judicial system to no avail. In February 2017, the National Assembly passed the Alternate Dispute Resolution Bill that legalises the parallel judicial system because of its ease of access, and highlights areas that can come under its jurisdiction; mostly financial matters. Just because it is the easy option, does not make it right. The idea of speedy justice can often lead to jirgas giving unimaginable and inhumane punishments. No man, woman or child should have to be subjected to such an unpredictable system of justice, and anyone calling for it is either ignorant or cruel.

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PAKISTAN VILLAGE COUNCIL ORDERS 'REVENGE RAPE' OF GIRL 
(BBC News - 26 July 2017)

Some 20 people from Multan, Pakistan, have been arrested for ordering the rape of a teenage girl, in revenge for a rape her brother allegedly committed.
Police said the families of the two girls are related.
Members of both had joined forces to decide what should be done.
"A jirga [village council] had ordered the rape of a 16-year-old girl as punishment, as her brother had raped a 12-year-old," police official Allah Baksh told AFP.

He said the village council was approached earlier this month by a man who said his 12-year-old sister had been raped by their cousin.
The council then ordered the complainant to rape the sister of the accused in return - which police say he did.
Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reported that the girl was forced to appear before the group and raped in front of them and her parents.
The mothers of the two girls later filed complaints at the local police station.

Medical examinations have confirmed rape in both cases.

Another officer, Ahsan Younas, told BBC Urdu that the first girl to be raped was aged between 12 and 14. The victim of the revenge rape is said to be 16 or 17.
He said police had registered a complaint against 25 people, and that the suspect accused of raping the 12-year-old was still at large.
While some reports say the group that ordered the rape was a jirga - or village council - BBC sources said it was actually formed by members of the two families.
Jirgas, a kind of council formed of local elders, often settle disputes in rural Pakistan. However, they are illegal and have been condemned for a series of controversial rulings - including ordering so-called "honour killings" and past incidents of "revenge rape".

In 2002, a jirga ordered the gang rape of 28-year-old Mukhtar Mai, whose 12-year-old brother was accused of an affair with an older woman.

Image copyright BHASKER SOLANKI/BBC
Image caption Mukhtar Mai, pictured in 2011, was gang-raped by order of a tribal council

Ms Mai took her rapists to court - an act of extraordinary courage in Pakistan, where sexual assault victims still face considerable stigma.
When their convictions were overturned by Pakistan's Supreme Court, she was offered many ways out of the country. However, she chose to stay in her village and start a girls' school and a women's refuge yards away from where she was raped.

Profile: Who is Mukhtar Mai?
Ms Mai is now a prominent women's rights activist, and her story inspired an opera, "Thumbprint", which opened in New York in 2014.

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14. PAKISTAN’S COURT SETS A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT
by Aqil Shah
========================================
(The New York Times July 28, 2017)

Pakistan’s Supreme Court disqualified Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Friday from holding public office for life in a corruption inquiry linked to the Panama Papers, which had named three of his children as owners of offshore companies suspected of laundering money. The court also ordered the National Accountability Bureau, the country’s top anticorruption agency, to file corruption cases against Mr. Sharif and his family members based on the evidence collected by the court appointed Joint Investigation Team (J.I.T.).

The verdict came as no surprise. Even though Mr. Sharif was not named in the Panama leaks, and there is no evidence that he abused public office for private gain, the judges disqualified him for hiding assets, and therefore, not being “honest,” an insidious constitutional requirement for being a member of Parliament. They had already made their intentions clear by turning the inquiry into a zealous inquisition into his moral character, with the head of the five member bench disparagingly comparing the Sharif family to the mafia in “The Godfather” by Mario Puzo.

Pakistan’s superior judiciary — made up of the Supreme Court and five High Courts — has increasingly asserted its independence and power in recent years. But it has an abysmally poor record of defending democracy against authoritarian interventions. While there have been a handful of dissenting judges, the Supreme Court has legalized each one of Pakistan’s three successful military coups in 1958, 1977 and 1999 under the “doctrine of necessity.”

This judicial capitulation stems from legal precedents used to legitimize executive actions in the formative decade of Pakistan’s existence, the severe limits placed on judicial autonomy by prolonged military rule in subsequent decades and the judges’ strategic compromises for maintaining a modicum of institutional autonomy.

The empowered judges have become media-courting populists and have typically joined forces with the military by using allegations of corruption against disobedient prime ministers. In June 2012, the Supreme Court, led by Iftikhar Chaudhry, then the chief justice, convicted and disqualified Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of the Pakistan People’s Party for contempt after he refused to comply with a court order to reopen a dormant corruption inquiry against President Asif Ali Zardari.

Civil-military tensions had intensified after the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 and Mr. Gilani was put on the chopping block after he openly denounced the military for being “a state within a state,” and for allowing Mr. bin Laden to hide in Pakistan for six years.

The judiciary’s recent assertion of power was born out of the conflict between Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in March 2007 over judicial investigations into the military’s illegal detention of terror suspects. General Musharraf fired Justice Chaudhry, which incited countrywide protests by lawyers against the military ruler.

Justice Chaudhry was reinstated but fired again, along with 60 other judges, in another contest with the general. It triggered a broader protest movement of lawyers, opposition parties, journalists and rights activists, which hastened the end of General Musharraf’s rule.

The Pakistan Peoples Party led by Mr. Gilani formed a new civilian government in February 2008. Mr. Gilani was reluctant to restore Justice Chaudhry and other judges fired by General Musharraf because his party feared Justice Chaudhry might restart corruption investigations against Mr. Zardari. Protests by the opposition and an ultimatum from Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, then head of the Army, forced him to reinstate Justice Chaudhry and other justices.

Justice Chaudhry mended fences with the military and promptly returned General Kayani’s favor by heeding his demand that the Supreme Court investigate allegations by a Pakistani-American businessman that Husain Haqqani, then Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, had written a memo seeking American help in averting a military coup. Justice Chaudhry’s court upheld the military’s view that the memo was authentic and accused Mr. Haqqani of disloyalty to Pakistan.

Neither Justice Chaudhry nor any other judge prosecuted a single military official for human rights violations. When a senior intelligence officer was charged with kidnapping a civilian, the court restrained the police from executing arrest warrants out of the “respect of an institution.”

Yet the judges have exhibited disdain for elected prime ministers. The Panama hearings have appeared arbitrary and unfair from the start. The five-member bench returned a split decision in April with three judges calling for an investigation and two judges calling for Mr. Sharif’s outright disqualification. The investigation has been marred by reports that the judges cherry-picked members of the Joint Investigation Team, including one with known ties to Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of Mr. Sharif’s bitter rival Imran Khan.

Most significantly, the judges also included two officials from the military intelligence and Inter-Services Intelligence in the probe team investigating the wealth of the Sharifs. The craft of the Pakistani military spies lies not in legal or financial matters but in blackmailing politicians and destabilizing elected governments. The judges also ignored the Sharif family’s complaints of witness harassment and illegal wiretapping.

Pakistan’s politicians are not paragons of probity, but corruption is not the main reason for Mr. Sharif’s predicament. He has been ousted from the prime minister’s position twice before — in 1993 by presidential decree, in 1999 by General Musharraf’s coup — primarily for asserting civilian supremacy over the military and seeking peace with India.

While the Panama leaks were fortuitous, Mr. Sharif’s crime seems to be the same this time around: crossing the military by pursuing conciliatory policies toward India as well as Afghanistan and by reportedly demanding that Inter-Services Intelligence end its use of militant groups as tools of foreign policy. With coups globally out of fashion, the generals could not have been happier to topple Mr. Sharif without rolling the tanks.

The judges have clearly undermined the perception of justice by deposing Mr. Sharif without due process or trial to prove his innocence. Pakistan’s next national elections, scheduled for 2018, could have resulted in a historic second democratic turnover of power through elections.

Even though Mr. Sharif’s party will nominate another leader as interim prime minister to serve out the full five-year term, Mr. Sharif’s ouster will mar the country’s democratic transition. The court has set a dangerous judicial precedent that can easily be used to unseat elected leaders in the future.

Aqil Shah (@AqilShah_), the author of “The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan,” is Wick Cary assistant professor of South Asian politics at the University of Oklahoma.

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15. PAKISTAN: WAF CONDEMNS CHARACTER ASSASSINATION OF AYESHA GULALAI
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(The Nation, 3 August 2017)

PRESS RELEASE

Women’s Action Forum, Lahore condemns the attacks on Ayesha Gulalai from various quarters for alleging sexual harassment by PTI party leader Imran Khan. Gulalai resigned from the PTI claiming that she had been receiving inappropriate text messages from Khan without her consenting to receiving such messages. The unfortunate reality is that many women in Pakistan face such unwanted sexual harassment, especially on social media but are expected to remain silent about this.

When women do speak up, there is a resort to character assassination of the woman in question resulting in impunity for the harassment. This practice is reflected in Gulalai’s case too where her moral character and family is being subjected to scrutiny. While her motives may be questioned, this character assassination is unacceptable. Not only is Gulalai being subjected to mass public shaming on social media and news channels, her sister, too, who is an internationally renowned squash player, is being shamed for wearing shorts in tournaments.

Unfortunately, character assassinations and attempts to shame women in the political arena is far too common and women from every party have been subjected to such attacks. For example, the daughters of PTI’s Shireen Mazari, who has condemned Gulalai for her statements, have faced the same level of public shaming because of their attire. Politicians routinely shame women. Mazari was part of a live television show where Firdous Ashiq Awan attacked Kashmala Tariq as a “prostitute” in 2009. WAF condemns all such of attacks on women and believes that the reaction to Gulalai’s statements is yet another example of actions designed to intimidate women from entering the public arena and speaking up about sexual harassment. The threat of subjecting Gulalai to a jirga unless she withdraws her statements is preposterous. This is vicious mindset which women need to unite against.

Women’s Action Forum strongly believes that all allegations of sexual harassment must be taken seriously and victims should be provided support.

WAF demands that the elected official and party workers start to ensure safer spaces for women to be able to speak up against harassment. The common woman cannot hope for much unless those in power model behaviour that can be admirably replicated.

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[see also:

Tribesmen threaten to besiege Ayesha Gulalai’s house
Bureau Report [Dawn - August 05, 2017]

PESHAWAR: A member of grand tribal jirga from North Waziristan Agency has warned that the tribesmen will besiege the house of MNA Ayesha Gulalai if she doesn’t produce the proof about the allegations she has levelled against Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf chairman Imran Khan.

Speaking at a news conference here on Friday, Malik Jalal Khan Wazir took strong exception to the reports attaching her with tribal society, saying Ms Gulalai neither belonged to Waziristan nor was she a tribal woman, because whatever she had done during last four days was against the norms of tribal people.

“We cannot expect a tribal woman to adopt such lifestyle. The woman is unaware of the South and North Waziristan Agencies because she is not a resident of the tribal region,” Mr Wazir claimed.

He said the tribal families never allowed their daughters to show up before media or irrelevant people. But, he said Shamsul Qayyum, the father of Ms Gulalai, used her for the sake of money only.

Jalal Wazir stressed the need for an inquiry against Mr Qayyum for bringing a bad name to the tribal people for his own personal interests. “The tribal people want to know as to how much money Ms Gulalai has taken for levelling such allegations,” he demanded.

Flanked by other tribal elders, Mr Wazir said her statement about sending of inappropriate messages on her mobile by Imran Khan had not only insulted the Pakhtuns but also disgraced a large number of women workers affiliated with PTI.

The tribal elder asked Ms Gulalai to present her blackberry to any relevant forum to clear her position. He said her allegations against Imran had earned her disrespect in the hearts of people.

The tribal elder also sought a probe into the funds collected by the MNA during her foreign visits in name of building a hospital. She must be held accountable for fundraising campaigns in Dubai and Qatar, he added. He also asked her to immediately resign as member of National Assembly as she did not come through direct election but the seat was given to her by PTI.

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16. SILENCED STONES MARK HARD PATH TO SRI LANKAN RECONCILIATION
by Duncan McCargo
========================================
(Asia Times -  July 26, 2017)

Security forces have erected numerous monuments celebrating their 2009 victory over Tamil Tiger rebels. No such privilege has been accorded to the Tamil insurgents or civilians who died in the fight

A monument to Sri Lanka's civil war victims. Photo: Duncan McCargo

An eerie art installation near an idyllic Sri Lankan beach symbolizes many of the contradictions of this post-war society, comprising a sculpture of a man carrying his brutalized daughter, an old suitcase full of clothes and a small ‘graveyard’ punctuated by tiny stones.

The core sculpture was inaugurated on May 18, 2016 – the seventh anniversary of the end of the decades–long civil war, which the Sri Lankan government celebrates as a day of victory over the Tamil insurgents.

One year later, police obtained a court order preventing Father Elil Rajendram, the Tamil Jesuit priest behind the project (and an activist and co-spokesperson for the Tamil Civil Society Forum), from presiding over a ceremony to add some stones bearing the names of people who had died during the war.

The following day, after a legal challenge mounted by Kumaravadivel Guruparan, head of the law department at Jaffna University, the court decreed that the ceremony could only take place within the premises of the nearby church. The name-bearing stones have since remained out of public view, while Father Elil was questioned by the authorities on four separate occasions.

The police claimed that some of those memorialized might be members of the banned Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) separatist group, better known as the Tamil Tigers, although Guruparan argued that commemorating the names of deceased LTTE members was not banned under any Sri Lankan law.

In the event, the police proved unable to confirm that any of the names were actually those of LTTE members: they were simply acting on suspicion.

Sri Lanka – War grave markers – Duncan McCargo – July 2017
A cemetery of stone markers inscribed with the names of victims of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Photo: Duncan McCargo

Mullivaaikaal, the beach in question, lies at the heart of ‘the cage’, a narrow isthmus where the remnants of the Tamil Tigers were slaughtered by the Sri Lankan army in the bloody culmination of a long-running civil war in May 2009. Tens of thousands of people were killed in what the government still refers to as a ‘humanitarian’ operation.

Sri Lankan security forces have erected numerous monuments to celebrate their victory and to recognize their war dead, but no such privilege has been accorded to those from the LTTE, nor to the Tamil civilians who perished during the fighting.

In refusing to allow ordinary families to honor or even to remember their dead, Sri Lankan authorities claim they are responding to pressure from hardline Buddhist groups who insist that brutal terrorists are not entitled to such decencies.

The outspoken Chief Minister of the Northern Province, former Supreme Court Justice Canagasabapathy Visuvalingam Vigneswaran, has been the one of the loudest elected voices for the Tamil cause in recent years.

A Britain-based Tamil man holding the flag used by the former seperatist Tamil Tigers movement as he takes part in a protest opposite Downing Street in central London on November 15, 2013 against British Prime Minister David Cameron's visit to Sri Lanka for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Cameron arrived on November 14 in Sri Lanka ahead of a Commonwealth summit which is set to be overshadowed by his historic visit to the island's former war zone. Cameron has come under fire from campaigners for not joining the leaders of Canada, India and Mauritius in boycotting the three-day meeting in protest at alleged war crimes committed in the final days of Sri Lanka's decades-long ethnic conflict.

A Tamil man holding the flag used by the former separatist LTTE, or Tamil Tiger, movement. Photo: AFP/Carl Court

This writer asked why he couldn’t erect a memorial to the Tamil war dead right in front of his office (there is a handy patch of waste ground right next to the gate), but he answered rather melodramatically that if he pushed too hard on this issue, even he could be taken into custody: the government has made holding meetings about memorials hard enough, let alone building them.

I later had chance to ask a senior military commander why the memorialization issue was so sensitive. While acknowledging that during many years of fighting the army had developed ‘a bit of an arrogant mindset’, he insisted that negative sentiments of people and politicians in the South were now the main obstacle to any memorial to Tamil victims or LTTE fighters, rather than military obstructionism.

Nevertheless, he personally believed such memorials should be possible in the future. Meanwhile, he noted, progress had been made – until recently, even private memorial ceremonies were banned, not just public commemorations.

FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena gestures as he speaks during a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia March 23, 2017. REUTERS/Kirill Kudryavtsev/Pool

The 30-year civil war in Sri Lanka remains a subject of intense controversy. But since the more compromising and pragmatic President Maithripala Sirisena assumed power in early 2015 with the support of the country’s Tamil minority, reconciliation has figured prominently in public discourse.

The incoming government established the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation (ONUR), chaired by the redoubtable former president Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.

Numerous worthy unity and reconciliation projects have been initiated, focusing on areas such as youth exchanges, vocational training, agricultural livelihoods and the construction of new homes for those displaced during the conflict.

Yet in the Northern Province – an overwhelmingly Tamil region where much of the fighting took place – local people remain skeptical about development-oriented, top-down reconciliation projects that are largely conceived and implemented by the bureaucracy and security forces. Among recurrent local concerns are missing persons, military land occupation and memorialization.

Sri Lankan special forces commandos take part in a military ceremony honouring 10 battlefield commanders who led the final push against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels in Colombo on May 28, 2009. General Sarath Fonseka said the Tigers could carry out hit-and-run attacks, but did not have the ability to militarily regroup after their defeat that ended almost three decades of strife. AFP PHOTO/Ishara S. KODIKARA / AFP PHOTO / Ishara S. KODIKARA

Critical observers, such as human rights activist Ruki Fernando, argue that until these core issues are addressed, token projects will do little to assuage Tamil frustrations with the state. He argues that rather than exercising leadership, the Colombo government has become the captive of the military and Buddhist hardliners.

During the civil war, huge numbers of people were driven out of their homes in the North and East of the country. When they tried to return after 2009, many found their land occupied by the military. In the Jaffna peninsula alone, the military currently holds more than 10,000 acres of land, around half of it used for bases.

The military points to progress in releasing occupied land, but insists that for security reasons the process has to be incremental.

In recent months, there has been a mushrooming of protest encampments by villagers seeking the return of their property from security forces. These round-the-clock vigils illustrate a remarkable opening up of political space in Sri Lanka: they would have been unthinkable during the time of hardline former president Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse (R) waves to the crowd upon arrival at a state-sponsored festival to commemorate the defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels in Colombo on May 22, 2009. Tens of thousands celebrated in the grounds of parliament, just outside Colombo, as UN chief Ban Ki-moon is expected to arrive on a 24-hour mission to press for unrestricted humanitarian access to an estimated 280,000 civilians displaced by the war on Tamil rebels. AFP PHOTO/ROSLAN RAHMAN / AFP PHOTO / ROSLAN RAHMAN

Yet while they have attracted some attention from the media and Tamil political parties, and in a few cases have won concessions from the military, most of the protests are being quietly ignored. Similar vigils have been established in other locations to demand information about those who went missing during the war.

Since 1994, the government has received more than 65,000 complaints relating to missing persons: in the absence of death certificates, their surviving relatives face serious problems over access to bank accounts, inheritance and re-marriage.

A major government initiative is needed to resolve these issues, but so far efforts to address them have been piecemeal; the president only finally approved the establishment of a long–promised Office of Missing Persons on July 20.

Land, missing persons and monuments are important examples of reconciliation-related issues. All highlight the importance of granting agency and authority to victims in a post-war order like Sri Lanka’s. Similar challenges have dogged other post-conflict societies such as that of Northern Ireland: education and development projects can only go so far, if sensitive core concerns remain unaddressed.

While the international community is now pressing for large-scale transitional justice initiatives in Sri Lanka, neither a hybrid tribunal nor a truth commission will be easy to realize. In the meantime, displaying the names of some Tamil war victims near a Northern beach might be one small place to start.

Duncan McCargo is the author of Tearing Apart the Land (2008), a study of the Southern Thai conflict

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17. ‘A COALITION OF KILLERS’: THE EX-WARLORDS PROMISING AFGHANISTAN’S ‘SALVATION’
by Max Bearak
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(The Washington Post - August 6, 2017)

Afghan presidential candidate Abdul Rashid Dostum climbs on top of a horse and waves at throngs of supporters at a campaign rally in a Kabul stadium Oct. 6, 2004. (Associated Press/David Guttenfelder)

MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan — Afghan President Ashraf Ghani likes to say that he has the world’s most difficult job, and no one doubts that he is at least in the running. But amid the plethora of problems he faces, it might come as a surprise that his first vice president, whom he selected, is one of the biggest.

Then again, Abdurrashid Dostum’s name is synonymous with volatility and brutality. For decades, the former plumber, wrestler and oil refinery worker has led northern Afghanistan’s ethnic Uzbeks, first as a ruthless — and reckless — militia commander, now as a politician. The U.S. State Department, in cables released by WikiLeaks, once called Dostum a “quintessential warlord,” and Ghani himself termed him a “known killer.”

That didn’t stop Ghani from making a deal with him. In last year’s presidential election, Dostum promised and delivered to Ghani the crucial Uzbek vote, propelling the unlikely duo to a narrow victory. But what was convenient a year ago is now quite the opposite. Instead of helping Ghani unite the country, Dostum has revived a sense of indignation toward Afghanistan’s ethnic Pashtun majority and cobbled together an insurrection in the multiethnic north.

Ghani and Dostum’s fragile compact began to unravel when the vice president was accused last December of ordering an elderly political rival to be manhandled and sodomized with a Kalashnikov. It was the second time he had been charged with a similar offense. After the first instance in 2008, Dostum went into a long exile at his lavish home in Turkey. Since refusing to cooperate with the attorney general in May, he has been out of Afghanistan, mostly in Turkey again.

Dostum claims the charges are a form of blackmail, aimed at stripping him of his authority. His followers contend that Ghani used Dostum for votes and is consolidating power into a cabal of ethnic Pashtuns. They say the government neglects and even encourages the deterioration of security in the minority-dominated areas in the north where the Taliban and the Islamic State’s regional affiliate have wrested control of numerous districts and launched a string of suicide bombings and kidnappings.

Last month, Dostum attempted to fly from Turkey to the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, but the government prevented the plane from landing once it learned who might be on board. At a meeting of Dostum’s followers in late July, two of his closest aides expressed hope that he would return any day, probably by barging across a nearby land border with either Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan. His return, they said, would mark the beginning of a massive wave of protests.

Dostum’s co-conspirators call themselves the Coalition for the Salvation of Afghanistan. They have not always been friendly with each other. Foremost among them is Tajik warlord-turned-provincial-governor Attah Mohammed Noor — against whom Dostum fought vicious battles in the early 1990s. They are joined by Mohammad Mohaqiq, an ethnic Hazara leader and deputy to the government’s chief executive, and Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani, a member of Noor’s Jamaat-e-Islami party. Together they claim to represent Afghanistan’s three largest ethnic minorities, although the depth of their support among the public, let alone within their own parties, is yet to be put to the test.

They insist that they are not calling for the collapse of the government, only that Ghani relinquish power to officials and cabinet ministers hailing from various parties and ethnicities, Dostum prime among them. A key demand is that the criminal case against Dostum be dropped and his return to Afghanistan expedited. Their rhetoric is menacing.

“We see this as a tyrant government,” Noor said in an interview at his opulent office in Mazar-e Sharif. He said that the coalition is negotiating with the government but that if coalition members aren’t heeded, that could change. “We may have to take control of administrative buildings and airports to put pressure on and paralyze the government,” he said.

Noor took aim at the U.S. government, too, which coalition supporters see as taking Ghani’s side in what should be an internal political dispute.

“We were the ones — not Ghani — who helped the U.S. fight the Taliban,” he said. “It is wrong that the U.S. should use us when they need us and then throw us away like empty Pepsi cans. They shouldn’t support a group of five individuals against everyone else,” he added, referring to an earlier claim that all government decision-making is channeled through Ghani and four others, all Pashtuns.

The allegations of unscrupulousness fly both ways. Ghani’s office has been dismissive of the coalition, saying that its members’ outrage stems not from any illiberalism on his part but from the fact that his firm stance on eliminating corruption has cut off strongmen such as Noor and Dostum from systems of patronage. Ghani, a Western-educated former World Bank employee who gave up U.S. citizenship to run for president, has emphasized transparency as a way of shoring up Afghanistan’s corruption-riddled institutions.

“For the first time, powerful people feel that their wrongdoings will be accounted for through a proper apolitical, independent judiciary — and they feel threatened,” said Haroon Chakhansuri, a deputy chief of staff in Ghani’s office.

The rift risks exacerbating ethnic polarization, especially with coalition leaders claiming that Ghani is brazenly limiting power, not just to Pashtuns, but also to a small group of confidants from his clan — and all under the nose of American advisers who espouse inclusive governance.

On the other side, the lack of any major Pashtun leader in the coalition has made Pashtuns in the north uneasy about the coalition’s intentions.

“This coalition is nothing but a coalition of killers,” said M.W. Matin, a doctor in Mazar-e Sharif who plans to run for office in next year’s parliamentary elections. “But the tragedy is that Ghani had to bring a killer like Dostum into his office just to win.”

For some Uzbeks, Dostum’s violent past is a source of pride. They believe him when he claims to be descended from an ancient line of Uzbek emperors. His face looks out from dozens of giant billboards over Mazar-e Sharif’s drab grid of streets.

“We say that Ghani has a ‘money bank’ but Dostum has a ‘people bank,’ ” said Sher Aqah Tataroghla, a 23-year-old student living in a hostel that is mostly Uzbek. “In the past we couldn’t even speak Uzbek in public, but now you’ll see it on signs around the city. One hundred percent of us are behind him.”

Tajiks in Noor’s party and Hazaras in Mohaqiq’s do not seem to be uniting behind the coalition as uniformly as Uzbeks. Those leaders command more limited cachet in their communities, with followings that pale in intensity compared with Dostum’s. Stoking that sense of ethnic solidarity — mobilized through voting blocs as well as people in the streets — may well be the crux of the coalition’s ultimate strength. Without it, many Afghans may find it difficult to see its leaders as fighting for anything but themselves.

“It’s not for salvation as they say, it is about their money and their pride — that’s how politicians are all over the world, right?” said Moqaddas Rahim, 28, who has been unemployed for four years after serving as an interpreter for U.S. forces. He knows how to use a computer and speaks six languages, including fluent English with a distinctly southern twang.

“To be a good Afghan, you can’t trust your government,” he said. “Look, I’m hopeless, man — not about my God but about my country. Here, the worst criminals become the most powerful people.”

Sayed Salahuddin contributed to this report.

Max Bearak writes about foreign affairs for the Washington Post. Previously, he reported from South Asia for the New York Times and others.

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18. INDIAN TV NEWS CHANNELS MUST STOP HUMILIATING KASHMIRIS | MP Nathanael
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(Hindustan Times - July 17, 2017)

Electronic media by its irresponsible actions is widening the chasm between Kashmiris and the rest of India

A Kashmiri woman at a funeral, Srinagar. If New Delhi is serious about changing the scenario in the Valley, the security forces, the administrative machinery and politicians need to pay attention to the sensitivities of the people(REUTERS)

In the last one year, the unending cycle of violence (including the cross-border ones) and protests in the Kashmir Valley have given prime time television news anchor a lot of fodder. Unfortunately, very few have taken a professional, matured and balanced approach on these issues; instead, they have assumed an overtly aggressive (read nationalist) posture. Things have come to such a pass that they themselves are deciding whether the Centre should impose president’s rule in the Valley or not.

Some of the television channels seem to be devoted to the Indian Army; they behave as if they are part of the forces and fighting the battle on the ground along with them. Every action of the Army is eulogised, howsoever, reprehensible such a stance may appear to its viewers. These channels have been joined by a band of former Indian Army officers who are invited to the studios just for one reason: They happily toe the channel’s nationalist line.

On the opposite side, there are the retired Pakistani army officers. They are first invited to the studios to discuss a matter of bilateral importance and then insulted thoroughly. In the process, their voices are rarely heard.

Unfortunately, the Indian Army chief General Bipin Rawat has also been in the news in stark contrast to his reticent predecessor. No one grudges him the publicity he gets from the media but it is not appropriate of such a senior army officer to get embroiled in controversy.

We are elated when TV news shows that the Indian Army has destroyed posts across the border. The other side too brags about inflicting heavy casualties on us.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand who is telling the truth.
I know Kashmir well because I have served in the Valley between 2006 and 2009 as DIG (operations) of Srinagar and I have no hesitation to add that the electronic media by its irresponsible actions is widening the chasm between the citizens of the Valley and the rest of the country. They must stop humiliating the people of the Valley. If they continue to do so, even those who don’t support violence will be forced to review their stand. As it is the lynching of Muslims in different parts of India is affecting the Valley.

If New Delhi is serious about changing the scenario in the Valley, the security forces, the administrative machinery and politicians need to pay attention to the sensitivities of the people.
By all means the Union government and the security forces must be firm with those who break the law, but, at the same time, it must also remember that a large number of people in Kashmir want peace and normalcy, and rebuild their destroyed lives and careers.

These people are on our side, let us not alienate them.
If that happens, India will find it difficult to contain the disaster.

MP Nathanael is former inspector general of police, CRPF

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19. INDIA: REINVENTING EPW - THE JOURNAL MUST BE SAVED AND RESURRECTED. IS THE SAMEEKSHA TRUST UP TO IT? | Omkar Goswami
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(The Indian Express - August 3, 2017)

From 1969 till his death in 2004, Krishna Raj edited the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) out of a tiny office at Hitkari House in the Fort area of Mumbai. An extremely competent yet self-effacing man, Raj ran EPW for 35 years over 1,800 issues, and died quietly in his sleep aged 67. Raj dealt with several battles not only between the left and the right, but also across bands of Marxists. None took away from the quality or fairness of the EPW. Yes, it leaned left. Yet, thanks to Raj’s commitment to debate, the journal had enough articles from across the fence.

Raj came from a milieu that didn’t prompt him to be in the limelight. He never wrote a signed piece in EPW. In his scheme of things, his job was to sift through piles of material stacked up on his tiny table, pre-select, send the longer pieces for refereeing, suggest changes to contributors, choose which piece went to what issue, and burn the midnight oil putting the weekly to bed. Through Raj’s tenure, almost every academic worth her name contributed, and every subscriber felt a sense of pride and ownership.

After Raj, the Sameeksha Trust which publishes EPW opted for C. Rammanohar Reddy, who took a huge pay cut when he quit The Hindu. Reddy was cut of the same cloth as Raj, and through much of his tenure EPW held on to its basic characteristic of being a reader’s journal — informative and fair, irrespective of a contributor’s political weal. Yet, the quality of articles started deteriorating. From the 1970s to the 1990s, EPW had excellent refereed articles and opinion pieces. In economics, articles by T.N. Srinivasan, Jagdish Bhagwati, Amartya Sen, Suresh Tendulkar, B.S. Minhas, Pranab Bardhan and, later, Ashok Gulati, Kaushik and Alaka Basu, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, Abhijit Sen, Pulapre Balakrishnan, Jean Dreze, Bharat Ramaswami defined the quality. That started to disappear.

Why? Here’s my conjecture. The earlier generation of economists who regularly contributed to the EPW became too old or passed away. Many of the newer breed either didn’t work on areas that were the EPW’s, or published in other journals that carried greater weight in their curriculum vitae. Bereft of a stream of good manuscripts, EPW’s editorial staff began accommodating sub-standard pieces. As Reddy recently observed: “The journal continued to appear with clockwork regularity but seemed to be drifting, as if what was published depended only on what came in” [The Wire, July 23, 2017].

Reddy left in early 2016 because of several factors, including his differences with the Sameeksha Trust. It caused a turmoil then but soon died down. The trust then chose Paranjoy Guha Thakurta as the editor. It was a big mistake. Either the trustees did not know where Paranjoy came from or ignored it, perhaps assuming that being EPW’s helmsman would change his journalistic persona. Paranjoy prides himself as an investigative crusader against the wrongs wreaked by corporate India often in collusion with the state. He lives to crusade and, like all journalists and column writers, he cares about his by-line.

Paranjoy tried to spice up the EPW the way he knew — by writing or commissioning investigative pieces and by creating a distinct anti-corporate edge. For most of his 15-month tenure, this did not bother the trustees, until the Adani group slapped a notice against two articles written by Paranjoy and others and insisted that these be taken down. Paranjoy then sent a lawyer’s response in his name and that of the trust without taking the trustees into confidence.

The trustees asked Paranjoy to take down one of the articles, which he did. Then they asked him to desist using his by-line, use a co-editor of the trustees’ choice and agree to the trustees drawing up a code of behaviour between the trust and the editor. Paranjoy refused, quit and shared everything with the public. Though Paranjoy’s style of working had created considerable disquiet among the EPW’s editorial staff, his friends in the fourth estate and others in academia backed him. And the Sameeksha Trust had egg on its face.

This too shall pass. More important questions relate to the future of the EPW. It is sliding, and urgent turnaround actions are needed. Here is my list. It is time to get fresh blood into the Sameeksha Trust. The median age of the trustees is in the 70s. Though eminent, most are light years removed from the web age. And few have any sensible set of ideas of where the EPW should be in 2020.

The EPW needs an energetic but sane editor, not a glory seeker. Moreover, it needs an editor with an address book strong enough to coax contributions from at least 100 good authors across the spectrum — who will still write because of the EPW and the editor’s request. Seminar, a monthly with far lesser subscribers, does this brilliantly: None can refuse the requests sent out by Mala and Tejbir Singh. I can think of five such editorial candidates who might be persuaded to take a sabbatical to turn the ship around.

The EPW needs to re-brand itself for today’s world. That requires several initiatives. First, it must reach out to university students and faculty to increase the subscriber base. Second, it must create four major EPW conferences covering different topics — public platforms that get funding to gather the best to discuss various aspects of the political economy and society. Third, it needs to better leverage its excellent computerised data base maintained by the EPW Research Foundation. I use it frequently. But how many do? Fourth, it needs to learn from The Economist how to create special projects to widen and increase the strength of its brand. And, fifth, while doing so, it needs to seriously improve the quality of its articles.

All these require effort and funding. The Sameeksha Trust should start a regular funding drive to increase its corpus and, if donors so demand, take annual donations for specific projects. That requires networking and energy. Hence the need for bringing in fresh blood in the trust. The EPW must be saved. But is the Sameeksha Trust up to it? There lies the question.

The writer is the founder and chairperson of CERG Advisory Private Limited, and is author of ‘Corporate bankruptcy in India: A comparative perspective’

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20. INDIA: AGRA’S MALA DEVI WAS NO BRAID-CHOPPING WITCH, JUST A SOFT TARGET | Shobhaa De
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(The Times of India, August 6, 2017)

Women across North India are having way too many bad hair days these days. This has been going on for over two months with over a hundred cases reported from villages in Rajasthan, UP, Delhi, Haryana. Mysterious forces are at work in places like Agra, Bikaner, Jaipur, Kanpur, Bareilly, Aligarh, Meerut, to name just a few, chopping off the lustrous locks of unsuspecting young ladies in deep slumber. What a story, Sirji! We could have had a good laugh and forgotten all about it, but for the tragic consequences. Like the case of Mala Devi, a 60-year-old woman with weak eyesight, who was lynched in Agra, after she lost her way late at night. The incident took place when she was returning home, after relieving herself in the fields close by at 3.45am. The poor woman landed up in a neighbour’s hut, instead of her own. What followed is shocking. Two men pounced on her with rods and sticks, suspecting her of being a braid-chopping witch. They later told the police they were defending the locks of their womenfolk, sleeping inside the hut. The women said they were sure Mala Devi was a ghost. Well, this is the first time we are hearing about a ‘ghost’ getting caught, then attacked and beaten.

Witches, of course, are soft targets. Any woman who doesn’t play by society’s rules can be branded a witch and killed. But here was Mala Devi, a neighbour, a senior citizen with a weak bladder and weaker eyes, who needed to urinate every two or three hours. Normally, she returned to her own hut within 15 minutes. This time, her five sons were woken up by villagers after an hour or so, and informed their mother was lying unconscious, with a swollen face and eye injuries. The police were summoned and Mala Devi named Sonu and Manish as the two who had mercilessly beaten her, instead of alerting her sons and escorting her back to her home. Later, Mala Devi was taken to the district hospital 30km from the police station on — hold your breath — a motorcycle! In her precarious condition — just imagine. She died of cardiac arrest soon after doctors discharged her. Mala Devi, a widow who had lost her husband six years ago, was a Dalit.
By then, the ‘braid-chopping’ stories were flying across northern India, with young girls posing with their lopped locks. It’s entirely possible the girls had taken scissors to hair themselves. Maybe they wanted a Bollywood cut, and their parents weren’t agreeing. Maybe, they were victims of mass hysteria. Or perhaps, they wanted their pictures in the papers. TV channels, as always, were the biggest culprits, playing up this absurd story, and ‘braid chopping’ became the new dengue — a killer epidemic.

Mala Devi was not a ‘braid chopper’. But she paid for these crazy rumours with her life. Her death has once again highlighted the abysmal sanitation conditions in our villages. Agra, the pride of India, host city of the Taj Mahal which is a World Heritage site, is filthy beyond description. Mala Devi’s village is a mere 19km east of the main city. Her village has no latrines. We talk of the tremendous strides made by the Swachh Bharat campaign. We sign on mega stars as brand ambassadors. CMs pose with brooms. Schools and colleges conduct cleanliness workshops. But just 19km from Agra city, in the village of Mutnai, two able-bodied young men attacked a 60-year-old woman with sticks and rods, ignoring her pleas to drop her home and spare her as her eyesight was poor and she had lost her way. Look at the number of subtexts in this single story: no latrines for women, no access to an eye doctor, no convenient transport to the nearest hospital, no required treatment available, no action taken so far against the assaulters. “Mala Devi died of cardiac arrest,” states the official report. Yes, she did. And didn’t. She died because of the shock she suffered at the hands of her neighbours. She died because of rumour-mongering in the region. She died because she was wrongly accused of being a ‘braid-chopper’. She died because she could not control her bladder. She died because the government simply does not care. The Mala Devis in India can live and die in conditions worse than hell. Nobody gives a damn.

Bona fide, scissors-carrying braid-choppers, beware. You may be next on the hit list. Hang on to your precious locks, young ladies. There are ghosts and witches all around you. And if you really want to resemble your favourite Bollywood actress, wait till you get to a haircutting salon in a city nearest you. Or else, more Mala Devis may lose their lives proving they are just vulnerable women trying to locate a secluded spot to relieve themselves in the dead of the night.

Shobhaa De
One of India's most popular writers, Shobhaa De has seen it all: life as a model, a copywriter, a journalist, a socialite, a scriptwriter, a bestselling novelist and a busy mother of six children. "Politically Incorrect", which has been appearing as a column in The Times of India, carries her sharp observations on politics, society, economy and relationships.

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21. MALEMA MIGHT HAVE A POINT ABOUT SOUTH AFRICAN INDIAN PEOPLE
by Aaisha Dadi Patel
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(Mail & Guardian Online - 2 Aug 2017)

Post-apartheid, there are countless uncomfortable questions of race and class that South Africans have to deal with. (Anthony Schultz, M&G)

After Economic Freedom Fighters commander-in-chief Julius Malema made controversial comments about Indian people during the party’s 4th anniversary celebrations in Durban on July 29, many have come out condemning him – but by doing so, are we shutting down an important conversation that needs to be had?

Speaking in Durban, Malema told the crowd, “We also want to call upon our fellow Indians here in Natal to respect Africans. They are ill-treating them worse than Afrikaners will do. We don’t want that to continue here in Natal. This is not anti-Indian statement, it is the truth.” While condemnation has come from all sides, from political parties to convicted fraudsters, the EFF has since said that they will not apologise for the CIC’s comments.

Even Schabir Shaik got involved, calling Malema a “misinformed fool”. “I am disappointed in Malema and will not support his political agenda, as he is clearly causing dissension and division in our society. A true leader does the opposite,” he told News24.

By condemning Malema’s comments and indulging knee-jerk outrage, we are only doing ourselves a disservice. What Malema has done is raise an uncomfortable point that happens to be a reality for some, and – while inflammatory for sure – his comments deserve further engagement.

He isn’t the first to raise these issues. Back in 2002, playwright Mbongeni Ngema’s song ‘AmaNdiya’ (‘Indian’) raised many of the same criticisms of Indians as Malema – that they do not accept Africans as equals, are only interested in money, and are exploitative. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission banned the song from being publicly aired, saying it “promoted hate in sweeping, emotive language against Indians as a race”.

Historians Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai note in a 2010 study that despite the majority of Indian South Africans having indentured roots and shopkeepers making up a tenth of working Indians at present, “the stereotype of the exploitative trader remains strong.”

Given South Africa’s history, it’s difficult to ignore race in any context. It is disingenuous to dismiss conversations that broach the idea that perhaps there are alternatives to Rainbowism. The Minority Front’s Jonathen Annipen says, for example, that by making his utterances Malema was “trying very hard to frustrate the democratic gains of social cohesion and nation building and is deepening the divide between blacks and Indians.” This kind of thinking, as well as Shaik’s comments, ignores the very prevalent reality of the deep disjointedness that continues to exist – the very issue that must be dealt with before making window-dressing attempts at reconciliation. It is the same as immediately dismissing the #MenAreTrash movement with #NotAllMen – it only takes away from the fact that there are structural issues at hand that are very prevalent, and very oppressive.

Tensions between Indian and black South Africans have existed throughout our history. Vahed and Desai show that the violent clashes that occurred between the two groups in KwaZulu-Natal were not easy for either side to forget, including three days of rioting in 1949 which left 142 people dead and 1 087 injured. The researchers say, “this violent experience haunted Indo-Africans relations throughout the period of apartheid.” Despite the aspirational idea of non-racialism put forward since the end of apartheid, however, they note that “tension between Indian and African was a persistent feature of the landscape [of KwaZulu-Natal] and continues into the present.”

During apartheid, Indians were subjugated by the white regime, but were still considered superior to coloured and black people. Although the state of things has supposedly changed, this mentality still exists in Indian communities today – even among those from my generation, who were born after apartheid ended.

In a separate study, Vahed and Desai also highlighted how history often conceals the fact that even Mahatma Gandhi held rather racist views towards black people. “Gandhi believed in the Aryan brotherhood. This involved whites and Indians higher up than Africans on the civilised scale. To that extent he was a racist. To the extent that he wrote Africans out of history or was keen to join with whites in their subjugation he was a racist,” Desai told the BBC in 2015.

As South African Indian people, we often come from spaces where wilful ignorance is bred and racism is the norm. This doesn’t mean that everyone is racist – of course, we are generalising if we say that all Indians are racist towards black people. Malema himself highlighted what the issue is in his address: “If you are Indian and you pay people well and respect your fellow human beings‚ don’t worry.”

It is a simple question of respect. Of treating fellow human beings with dignity, no matter what their race is. But it must be acknowledged that there is a lot of unlearning which needs to be done in the community, and a lot of racism that needs to be addressed before we move on to lovely terms like ‘social cohesion’ and ‘nation building.’ I have witnessed firsthand the ways in which some Indian people mistreat black people. It deserves to be called out, and it needs to stop.

Nelisiwe Msomi recently wrote about her experiences as a black Muslim in South Africa, and the ways in which Indian Muslims mistreat her; “We attend Muslim festivals to we can get spiritual upliftment. We go to the masjid to talk with our creator. But instead, these places have become toxic places to our well-being. Racism lurks in and selective Islamic principles become the norm of the day. [Someone tells me] ‘You can only be a Muslim if you are married to a Bangladeshi or Pakistani man.’”

It is worth noting that within the South African Indian community, there is huge class disparity. As Vahed and Desai note, “the irony is that a poverty-stricken resident of Chatsworth and an affluent Houghton-ite are categorised under the all-inclusive label ‘Indian’.” Perhaps we also need to assess the fact that we allow middle-class Indians to hold the mic when it comes to narratives of Indian people in South Africa. Mistreatment of black people is a middle-class problem. It is irresponsible of Indian people to hang on to and yield power in that way.

Post-apartheid, there are countless uncomfortable questions of race and class that South Africans have to deal with. Perhaps by making the comments that he has on the platform that he has, Julius Malema has further paved the way for Indian people to confront some uncomfortable truths. Instead of outright rejecting his statements and typecasting him as a fool – which can also be seen as racist – let’s hear him out. He may just have a point. – The Daily Vox

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22. CHINA: LIU XIAOBO IS GONE, BUT RESISTANCE CONTINUES | Maria Repnikova
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(Dissent - July 18, 2017)
Treating Liu Xiaobo’s death as symbolic of the end of all meaningful dissent in the country is misleading 

As the Chinese state tries to submerge the story of Liu Xiaobo, Western media and public intellectuals are mourning the death of the country’s most famous dissident. In commemorating the writer, poet, and activist, the Economist argued that Liu “represented the best kind of dissent in China”; the Guardian declared that “a particular dream of a different China, is also lying on its deathbed.”

While the contrast between the cruelty of the state and the courage of Liu Xiaobo couldn’t be more stark, treating Liu’s death as symbolic of the end of all meaningful dissent in the country is misleading.

Our emphasis on the spectacular—the heroes, the exceptional—is natural, but it creates dichotomies: democracy versus authoritarianism, dissidents versus conformists. The reality, of course, is more complicated. Most dissent in authoritarian states, not only in China, occurs in the realm of the ordinary, in the shadows of the system. While the majority of Chinese might be incapable of Liu’s sacrifice, many resist in silence—they fight smaller battles, often striking awkward compromises with the state. These individual acts of defiance are all the more remarkable given that the past few years in China have been marked by sharp shrinkage of already fragile spaces for political expression.

My interviews with Chinese journalists, university students, educators, and even propaganda officials over the last decade have revealed their creative armor, a palette of negotiation strategies.

China’s critical journalists, the group I am most familiar with, have continuously reinvented their tactics for dealing with political pressures. They investigate officials outside their home jurisdiction, use social media to collaborate with each other, leak stories anonymously, and join and at times even start campaigns, such as Deng Fei’s famous initiative to crowdfund lunches for rural children, which eventually won support from the government. Often, they echo official discourses of progress and solutions in order to voice veiled criticism of the state. Would they prefer absolute freedom of speech? Of course, they would. But, given the unlikelihood of a wider opening for dissent in the country, those who remain on the margins of the media plough forward, despite frustrations and disappointments, in whatever ways they can.

This past June, a journalist friend showed me the striking photographs he took in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, home to China’s Uyghur population. He can’t write about Xinjiang, given its political sensitivity, but he has, over the years, collected images documenting the community’s tensions with the majority Han population. One day he hopes to present these at an international exhibit. “Not yet, but maybe in two years,” he says. An investigative reporter in Beijing expressed a similar quiet fortitude. “If we can do 70 percent of topics, well, then that’s better than nothing, right?” he remarked, as he came to terms with tightening restrictions on his work. This resilience is what makes these ordinary individuals extraordinary.

Journalism students I have met and interviewed have expressed their dissatisfaction with the status quo by choosing to quit journalism in order to avoid becoming propagandists for the government, by choosing to work for Western or Hong Kong news outlets instead of Chinese ones, by studying abroad, and by openly reflecting on the ideological underpinnings of their education. These students are far from brainwashed or indifferent. Some quietly mask their inner conflicts and pursue more lucrative paths, while others address them head on.

Chinese educators, on their part, try to instill values of objectivity and professionalism when teaching journalism, form international partnerships, and encourage students to be self-reflective—again, within the confines of what is permissible. After being laid off from his academic job, a close friend and mentor in Beijing still graciously gathers together his former students to discuss the traumas of the Cultural Revolution over a meal. Staving off pessimism, he smiles as he tells me how he just shared Chinese contacts with a PhD student from Paris, as part of his efforts to help the world see and understand China’s many layers. Over the past ten years, he has taught me the nuances of Chinese media politics, introduced me to journalists and intellectuals and urged them to trust me, and then, over a steaming plate of dumplings, spilled the latest gossip about censorship directives. While he is exceptional, other educators also try to be critical, open, and honest with their students about both the constraints and possibilities of being a journalist in China.

Even officials (including former ones) I have spoken to from party and state regulatory agencies have the ability to reflect on the limitations of the system. Another friend, a former high-ranking official at the Central Propaganda Department, uses a pseudonym to publish books and essays on Chinese society and culture that present a more complex and contradictory portrait of the country than what one might expect from someone enforcing the state’s policies of censorship. Other officials I have encountered have since quit their positions to become academics, often expressing more critical views than that of the average Chinese citizen, given their intimate knowledge of how the system operates.

These expressions of dissent are not mainstream, even if they might appear trivial to someone living in a Western democracy. While Western journalists and students quickly brush off the importance of critique unless it reaches the highest levels of the system, the individuals engaged in ordinary resistance see themselves as having some agency, and they take personal risks, even if they’re small, in expressing their discontent. Most wouldn’t consider their behavior resistance, but rather, a normal part of the daily reality of negotiating official lines and personal beliefs under an authoritarian regime.

What Liu Xiaobo showed the world was the possibility of radical dissent in the face of an all-powerful state. As we honor Liu’s courage, we should resist the reductive narrative of the demise of China’s resistance movements. Even in the most complex and controlled political societies, the possibility of creative rebellion is never closed. After all, it was these very inner conflicts and dualities, some argue, that yielded a “hegemony of form”—a superficial, performative, adherence to official ideology—that contributed to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet system. Though the space for dissent might be shrinking under Xi, the invisible struggles of ordinary citizens continue.

Maria Repnikova is an Assistant Professor in Global Communication and the Director of the Center for Global Information Studies at Georgia State University. This essay draws from her first book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge Press, 2017).

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23. PROGRESSIVE MOBILIZATION IN EUROPE* 
by Jayati Ghosh
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* This article was originally published in the Frontline Print edition: August 4, 2017.

Meetings of global leaders – such as recently occurred in the G20 meeting at Hamburg – increasingly have a ring of farce about them. The inability to come to agreement on pretty much anything of significance is leavened only by sideshows and media obsession with which global leader met with whom for how long, who sat in for which President at the “high table”, and similar trivia. Meanwhile, there is abject failure on the part of these leaders to recognize the pressing need for urgent and co- ordinated global action to solve so many current problems, ranging from the terrible state of the world economy to wars and conflicts, as well as the instabilities and inequalities created not just by the forces of globalization fostered by these same governments, but their own direct actions.
But such meetings sometimes have at least one positive outcome: they become the occasion for public mobilization and calls for action around the issues that really matter for most people, and thereby help in spreading ideas for a more positive policy agenda. In Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany with a long history of left groups and progressive movements, this was very much in evidence. For several days before the G20 Summit as well as during the official Summit, there were alternative gatherings, processions and protests that were dominantly peaceful and also thoughtful, imaginative and ultimately quite inspiring.
The mainstream media have portrayed what happened in Hamburg in early July in a very different light, focusing almost exclusively on violent protests. It is interesting that violence had been predicted by the authorities well before any actually occurred, and so there was a massive police presence that effectively created a lock down of the central part of the city. To any visitor to the city, the huge show of force well before any untoward incident was startling to say the least: massive deployment of fully armed riot police in black gear and helmets on the streets; barricades put up all over with no apparent reason, even in quite peaceful neighbourhoods; convoys of police cars sweeping through roads with sirens blaring when there was no apparent reason for it; helicopters constantly swirling overhead in somewhat menacing fashion for several days and nights.
The few stray incidents of violence, when they did occur, were mostly about problems at barricades and preventing what started out as peaceful marches because some of the marchers were masked. There was some violent activity by a few dozen members of the Black Block movement, a group of hard left anarchists that came to prominence in the 1980s during anti-nuclear and anti-eviction movements in the city. Others could even have been the work of agents provocateurs, as some participants in the demonstrations pointed out that the authorities needed something to justify their massive and very expensive security operations.
But these were in fact very much the tinier parts of what became quite a moving demonstration of people’s concerns. Discussions, protests and demonstrations were variously thoughtful, creative, humorous – and even the most massive marches were peaceful. A two-day Global Solidarity Summit of activists, people’s movements and civil society held just before the G20 Summit was an impressive gathering put together by more than 75 different organisations, which in itself was no mean feat. The energy and enthusiasm at that alternative summit were palpable, with so many people attending that the huge hall that can seat nearly 900 people could not accommodate everyone who wanted to come to the opening plenary session, and others had to listen outside. Even by the end of that summit, at the closing session that went on until 10 pm on the evening of the second day, the hall was still full for the closing plenary, as if two long and full days of intense, packed discussions around alternative strategies had only whetted people’s appetite for more.
Outside there were other, livelier events. At the Fish Market, young people gathered to listen to other speakers and to musicians and others who came and performed. At another place, a “performance art” demonstration by a thousand artists took the novel form of a “zombie march”, in which the apparently semi-dead people with grey clothes and faces and arms painted grey walked very slowly, sombrely and heavily through the streets, implying that this phase of capitalism is making us all into zombies. At the culmination, they tore off their grey clothing to reveal bright colours below, and danced to celebrate their liberation from zombie hood – and to point to better possibilities ahead.
Then there were five separate but simultaneous "rave demos" across the city in which trucks blaring music preceded hordes of young people dancing along on the streets, for hours. Over the next day, the streets were still full of the confetti and glitter they left behind, sending a cheerful and even joyous message that could make you smile, despite all the ominous police cars with their sirens and lines of armed policemen and helicopters flying overhead. There were large rallies and gatherings at different places, including the University.
The municipality had refused permission for protestors to camp at the usual designated ground, so the people, especially young, who had flocked to Hamburg could not be put up by the organisers of the various events. True to a city with its progressive credentials, the churches and theatres opened up their doors to house them, while some young people simply shacked down by the harbour and on any grassy bits they could find.
The climax of all these events was an enormous – and peaceful – march of around 100,000 people through some of the main streets. This contained all sorts of people from various walks of life: mostly young, but also some old grizzled lefties (whose views are suddenly finding renewed resonance and traction among the young across Europe), trade unionists and other groups representing different interests as well as young parents pushing prams, migrants and so on. The mood was serious but also lively, with lots of positive energy, as the very size of the gathering and its variety allowed participants to draw strength from it.
In her memoirs, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir had written about how solitude is a form of death, while participating in and identifying with something greater than ourselves gives us life as well as a reason for that life. So these collective occasions are important not only because of the wider message they send out of greater hope and the public mobilisation that they might result in. They also provide sustenance to the people who participate, who realise they are not alone and that together they can be a potent force for change.

If something as indicative of the sorry state of the world as such a G20 meeting can inadvertently result in such public affirmations of the continued power of progressive ideas, clearly all is not lost even in Europe.

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24. CAN POETRY CHANGE YOUR LIFE?
By Louis Menand
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(The New Yorker, July 31, 2017 Issue)

Why we are so defensive about the art form’s value.

The disconnect between what people say about poetry and how people respond to poetry is probably as old as writing.
Illustration by Tamara Shopsin

The first eight pages of Michael Robbins’s new book, “Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music” (Simon & Schuster), make reference to Annie Dillard, Harold Bloom, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Kenneth Burke, Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Koch, Adam Phillips, Frank O’Hara, Emerson, Boethius, Nietzsche, Freud, and Miley Cyrus. The book is a collection of mostly previously published pieces, some on poetry, some on pop music, some on both, written, as the names suggest, in a critical style that could be called advanced pop.

Advanced-pop criticism would be criticism premised on the belief that you can talk about cultural goods loved uncritically by millions in terms originally developed to talk about cultural goods known mainly to an overeducated few. Advanced pop is Boethius and Springsteen, Artaud and the Ramones, and it yields sentences like “I assume that what Burke”—the literary theorist Kenneth Burke—“says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard.” It’s erudite but caj, geeky and hip, alienated and savvy—on the inside of the outside. Another word for the attitude might be “Brooklyn,” which is indeed where, as an author’s bio unnecessarily informs us, Michael Robbins lives.

“Equipment for Living” is funny and smart. It does feel a few bricks shy of a tome. The first and last chapters perform the same work: they unpack, uneasily, the claim stated in the title, which is that poems and songs can make a difference. Most of the chapters are essay-reviews, ranging in length from very brief to brief. Robbins has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and an excellent discussion of rhyme in the work of Paul Muldoon is apparently adapted from his dissertation.

To fill things out, there is a twenty-eight-page “Playlist,” consisting of staff-picks-type encomiums on the author’s favorites, such as:

    Skip James
    “Devil Got My Woman” (1931)
    Sometimes I think this song defines the limits of what is humanly possible. Sometimes I think it exceeds them.

And:

    Wallace Stevens
    “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Canto XXV (1937)
    A rumpus, a rollick, a roll in the hay . . .

There’s only one full-dress essay in the book, and it’s much more heavy-duty than the rest. The subject is the poetry of Frederick Seidel, and the essay handles a familiar critical problem—the morality of bad taste, the Jeff Koons–Michel Houellebecq–Bret Easton Ellis problem—expertly if not entirely originally. The essay does include observations like “The death drive is figured here as the desire to literalize the trope of the subject’s dispersal.” When I hear the words “literalize the trope,” I reach for my remote.

Hyperbole is an ever-present danger up there on the high-low tightrope. What helps the critic keep his or her balance is the acknowledgment that it is hyperbole, that there is a rhetoric of aesthetic experience—the experience of reading poems or listening to songs we’re strongly attached to—that is always in excess of the actual content. If you’re going to write about Skip James, it doesn’t make sense to strive for a judicious appraisal. You want to record the temperature at its hottest. By now, a lot of writers have done this sort of thing with Skip James and other old bluesmen, a sacred category for serious pop critics ever since those musicians were “discovered” by rock-and-roll (that is, white) audiences, in the nineteen-sixties, but Robbins can do it with seventeenth-century lyrics as well.

You also need to concede that the experience cools fairly quickly, and Robbins is alert to that, too. “No one has ever changed his life because of a poem or song,” he says in a chapter on metal, with reference to Blake, Milton, Rilke, William Empson, Peter Sloterdijk, Ozzy Osbourne, and Kant. “Changing your life is for Simone Weil or the Buddha. The rest of us need German poetry and Norwegian black metal because they provide the illusion that we are changing, or have changed, or will change, or even want to change our lives.” I don’t completely agree, but it’s a wise caution.

Another advanced-pop premise is that everything is happening now. Springsteen and Dylan speak to our current condition, and so do Boethius and Sappho. The envelope may be postmarked 600 B.C.E., but when you open it there is a letter inside, and it’s just for you. The responsible scholarly impulse is to historicize: those words were never intended for you, they signified something completely different in 600 B.C.E. than they do today, and so on. That’s all true. But the text still has a sting. It’s the news that stayed news. Robbins is more interested in the inarticulable or barely articulable sting than he is in reconstructing social relations in the Mediterranean gift economy. (I think you can do both, in fact, and that putting the “then” together with the “now” is the point of doing criticism.)

A writer with a playlist of culture heroes must also have a list of the undeserving, the fake, and the fallen, and Robbins does not disappoint us. He writes of the poet James Wright, “It is easy to feel that, if fetal alcohol syndrome could write poetry, it would write this poetry.” He suggests that Robert Hass “has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery.” Of Charles Simic: “If the worst are full of passionate intensity, Simic would seem to be in the clear.”

He calls Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” “wimpy crap.” He says that Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” is “highly acclaimed despite her apparent belief that serious writing is principally a matter of avoiding contractions.” His reaction to Neil Young’s memoir is “It’s depressing to learn that one of your heroes writes like a composition student aiming for the earnest tone of a public service announcement.”

The Jedi master of this mode of criticism—its presiding spirit, really—is Pauline Kael, the subject of an admiring chapter in “Equipment for Living.” Robbins calls her “the first tastemaker I trusted implicitly.” A lot of Kael’s criticism, like Robbins’s, is buildups and takedowns, but that kind of criticism can get interesting when the writer has to figure out why something that should be good is not, or why something that has no right to be good actually might be.

I enjoyed almost all of “Equipment for Living,” but I found Robbins most clever and entertaining when he is trying to make sense of what redeems bands like Journey and Def Leppard, or poets like Dylan Thomas and James Dickey. Those are artists who now seem obviously gassy or fatuous—“Like a mammoth wheel of Monterey Jack left in the sun” is Robbins’s description of Journey’s hit song “Only the Young.” And he often decides that what redeems such works is that they once spoke to him, even if they don’t anymore. “Every song you loved when you were young turns into ‘Tintern Abbey,’ ” as he puts it.

“I cannot paint / What then I was,” Wordsworth wrote in that poem, about revisiting the banks of the Wye as a grownup (only five years later, actually, but it’s a poem). Robbins expresses the sentiment this way: “As I listen to ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ ’ today, once again, in the arena of my soul, how high the highest Bic lights the dark.” You can’t go back to being fifteen, but you can remember with respect and longing that time of life, a time when, as Georg Lukács once put it, “the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars.” Oh, no! Now I’m doing it!

“Listening to most rock and roll now involves remembering what it used to do for me that it can’t anymore,” Robbins says. And, in fact, a surprising amount of pop-music criticism is bottled nostalgia, owls that fly at dusk. In preparation for writing about “Equipment for Living,” I got a copy of “Shake It Up” (Library of America), an anthology of fifty years of pop-music criticism, “from Elvis to Jay Z,” edited by Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar. I figured I would dip into its pages and refresh my recollection of the field of play. Many hours later, I had to force myself to put the thing down.

A few of the essays in “Shake It Up” are advanced-pop criticism (e.g., the literary critic Richard Poirier on “Learning from the Beatles,” in Partisan Review), but most are journalism, and the journalism beats the advanced-pop stuff cold. Partly this is because it was written for fans, so the writers could ignore the English department and other highbrow police. Partly it’s because pop-music journalism arose out of the intersection of early rock-and-roll magazines like Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, when they still had an alternative-press aura, and the New Journalism, with its promiscuous use of the first person, and that gave it a confessional tone and a voice that suggested that we’re all on the same side in the struggle, whatever struggle it is.
“Who are you kidding? You’re all about small government until you get stuck in a tree.”

But rock criticism does appear to be fixated on what has been lost. It’s always beating back against the current. It seems that in the pop-music business the shelf life of authenticity is tragically short. Ellen Willis on Janis Joplin, Lester Bangs on Elvis Presley, Chuck Klosterman on Mötley Crüe, John Jeremiah Sullivan on Axl Rose, Eve Babitz on Jim Morrison, Geoffrey O’Brien on the Beatles: all those pieces are “Tintern Abbey”s, elegies for gifts that were squandered or misapplied or evanescent. O’Brien thinks it all began to go south for the Beatles after “Help!” And I used to think the Beatles were only worth listening to after “Help!”

But how are poems and pop songs “equipment for life”? Here the balance pole begins to wobble. “There is no limit to what a poem can’t do,” Robbins writes on one page; “poetry makes all sorts of things happen,” he says on the next. Which is it? He doesn’t want to give in to the fantasy that poems taught to and songs bought by millions of people are also subversive of the established order. But his own politics are Occupy-era politics, and he naturally wants to put his views together with his tastes. The teen-ager’s enthusiasm for Def Leppard must in some way belong with the mature man’s concerns about income inequality.

He has a couple of ideas about how this might work. One is that the very excess of the aesthetic experience, the fact that it evaporates so fast upon contact with daily life, is a reminder of how impoverished daily life is. It seems that capitalism is to blame here. When capitalism is dead, Robbins suggests, we might not need poetry anymore.

O.K., that’s one idea. His other idea is that the key to the real-world effectiveness of poems and songs is “form.” The invocation of form is awkward, for the same reason that advanced-pop criticism itself is inherently awkward, which is that most popular music, and especially popular music categorized as rock, is magnificently and unambiguously hostile to everything associated with the word “school.” And form is a very academic concept. It’s the shell in the game teachers play to hide content.

The phrase “equipment for living” is taken from Kenneth Burke, who also wrote that form is “a public matter that symbolically enrolls us with allies who will share the burdens with us.” Robbins likes this. I think it means that the experience of poems and songs is shared with other people, even if often implicitly, and so it can be a means of achieving solidarity. Form “grounds us in a community,” Robbins says.

This might be a little wishful. Reading poems is normally a solitary pastime, and so is a lot of music listening, except at concerts, where the emotions aren’t really your own. In any case, form cuts no political ice. The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” once an anthem of antiwar protesters, is played at Trump rallies. I assume it instills feelings of solidarity among his supporters.

With aesthetic experience in general, after a certain age, the effects are probably as much a product of what you bring to it as what you get from it. “Records are useful equipment for living, provided you don’t expect more from them than they contain,” Robbins says. This is an echo of Dylan—“Songs are songs,” Dylan once said; “I don’t believe in expecting too much out of any one thing”—and it seems about right.

But what, in the end, do we get from poems and songs? “Aesthetic life is a sphere of self-directed activity whose external ramifications, despite periodic utopian exuberances, are minimal at best,” Robbins concludes (somewhat contradicting his “community” theory). Is this so? Are we past the days when people wrote poetry and read it for encouragement and guidance, the days when poetry was not merely a “self-directed activity” but was writing about something?

It certainly was once. On August 4, 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany. On August 5th, the first war poem appeared in the London Times—“The Vigil,” by Henry Newbolt. By the end of the year, at least two anthologies of war poetry were out, “Poems of the Great War” and “Songs and Sonnets for England in War Time.” Many would follow. Around the time the fighting ended, four years later, more than two thousand British and Irish writers had written poems about the war.

We might assume that the First World War inspired a lot of poems because that’s how people expressed themselves in the age of print, and that people express themselves differently today because the media are different. But we would assume wrong. Donald Trump was elected President on November 8, 2016. A poem about his election, “You’re Dead, America,” by Danez Smith, appeared on BuzzFeed on November 9th.

A few days later, hundreds showed up in Washington Square Park for a pop-up poetry reading sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and the Web site Brain Pickings. Three days after the Inauguration, the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof announced a Donald Trump Poetry Contest. He got about two thousand submissions. Several anthologies with anti-Trump poems have already come out, including, in May, “Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now” (Knopf), edited by Amit Majmudar, who was one of the winners in Kristof’s contest.

Every crisis is an opportunity for poetry, even in the twenty-first century. There are anthologies of 9/11 poems and anthologies of Iraq War poems. There are climate-change poems, income-inequality poems, and Black Lives Matter poems. Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen: An American Lyric,” a book-length poem about race, identity, and the imagination, has sold almost two hundred thousand copies since it was published, in 2014. After the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, hundreds of thousands read “It is not Paris we should pray for,” posted on social media by the Indian poet Karuna Ezara Parikh. When the going gets stressful, the stressed want poems.

So why are people who write about poetry so defensive? Robbins gives the appearance of a man straining to come up with a rationale for bothering to read and write poems at all. And he’s an optimist. In “The Hatred of Poetry” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), published last year, Ben Lerner argues that poems simply can’t do what people want them to do—create timeless moments, or express individual experiences with universal appeal, or create a sense of communal identity, or overturn existing social mores, or articulate “a measure of value beyond money.” All they can do is expose the impossibility of achieving any of these things by writing a poem. Of course people who don’t read poetry hate it, he says; it’s not doing what they mistakenly believe it’s supposed to do. But poets hate it, too. Poetry is a paradigm example of human inadequacy.

In “Why Poetry?” (Ecco), out this summer, Matthew Zapruder defines a poet as a writer who is prepared “to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility.” Where people who are puzzled by poetry go wrong, he thinks, is in expecting poems to say something straightforward about life, to be useful. Poems are really about language—ultimately, about the impossibility of fixed meanings.

Lerner and Zapruder are successful mid-career poets. (So is Robbins, who has brought out two collections with Penguin.) Lerner is also well known for his novels, “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04.” Zapruder has published four collections of poetry and was the editor of the Times Magazine poetry page. We can add to their books David Orr’s “Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry,” which came out in 2011. The title states the problem. “I can’t tell you why you should bother to read poems, or to write them,” Orr concludes. “I can only say that if you do choose to give your attention to poetry, as against all other things you might turn to instead, that choice can be meaningful.” Not the most robust commendation—and Orr is the poetry critic of the Times Book Review.

How can it be the case that poems are ineffectual and self-absorbed ephemera when the Presidential election produced a Trump bump in the poetry world, when hundreds of people submit poems to a newspaper contest, when dozens of poetry anthologies are in print, and when a book-length poem sells two hundred thousand copies, a number reached by very few works of prose? What would count for writers like Lerner and Zapruder as a meaningful poem, or a poem that made a difference? It is almost as though a poem that actually communicated something to someone could not be a real poem. There seems to be a disconnect between the practice and the theory. Where did that come from?

Probably it’s as old as writing. What has long been presumed to be the earliest writing, the Sumerian tablets, comprises administrative records. But if people could write down factual stuff they could also write down made-up stuff, and there must have soon developed an account of the difference. That account would have explained how made-up stuff needs to be read differently from factual stuff, why made-up stuff has effects on us that factual stuff does not, and what sort of practical work, if any, fiction might be doing in our lives.
“Well, I guess we can leave the sign as is.”

This distinction between fiction and nonfiction, whenever it dates from, but certainly, in the West, since Plato, has produced a heap of abstractions, and those abstractions are what I think these writers are getting hung up on. “Fiction” and “nonfiction” are made to operate as oppositely charged magnets attracting incompatible values. Nonfiction is logical; fiction is associative. Nonfiction is literal and truthful, fiction figurative and imaginary. Nonfiction is objective and communicates, but fiction is subjective and expresses. Fiction is supposed to represent not literal truth but a mysterious entity called “emotional truth.” Indeterminacy and obscurity are out of place in nonfiction but acceptable in fiction.

In this opposition, poetry sits at the extreme end, the mode of writing least like nonfiction. The consequence is a kind of inside-out justification for poems in which poetry beats nonfiction at its own game by refusing to play it. “He nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth,” Sir Philip Sidney famously wrote of the poet in “The Defense of Poesie,” and his is the model formulation. (“I have more just cause to make a pitiful defense of poor Poetry, which from almost the highest estimation of learning, is fallen to be the laughing stock of children,” Sidney began the “Defense.” It was posthumously published in 1595, around the time Shakespeare wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and the year before Edmund Spenser published a large portion of “The Faerie Queene.” That was a pretty big disconnect.)

So Lerner offers conundrums like poetry’s “usefulness depends on its lack of practical utility,” and Zapruder describes a poem as “making meaning by failing to fully make meaning.” With poems, Zapruder says, “we get to a truth that is beyond our ability to articulate when we are attempting to ‘use’ language to convey our ideas or stories.” Poetry isn’t true, in the ordinary sense, but apparently that makes it truthier.

Do readers really need these distinctions? Ancient-world readers of Homer must have known how much of the Odyssey was fanciful and how much of it was true, and in what sense. Their notion of what mattered was undoubtedly different from ours, but we, too, can read the Odyssey for what it tells us—about social relations in the Mediterranean gift economy, for example.

The distinction between the fictional and the nonfictional is much blurrier in practice than it is in theory. Lerner says that we expect too much from poetry. That’s right, and we expect too much from nonfiction, too. Virtually all writing is parts literal and parts figural, parts “critical” and parts “creative.” And its ability to effect change in people’s personal or political lives has nothing to do with its degree of “fictionality.”

One of Lerner’s chief examples of misplaced expectations for poetry is what he calls “nostalgia for a poetry that could supposedly reconcile the individual and the social, and so transform millions of individuals into an authentic People.” He says that this kind of poetry never existed. To which there is a one-word response: Dante. The Divine Comedy is a first-person poem about a man who suffers a crisis (“I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost”), which he resolves by undertaking an imaginary journey that he pretends has been made possible by the soul of a dead woman he loved. That poem, written in the vernacular in the fourteenth century, is still at the heart of national identity in Italy. As the Iliad and the Odyssey were for ancient Greece, and as the Aeneid was for Rome.

Lerner, to be fair, is mainly concerned with lyric poetry (another unstable category: is “The Waste Land” a lyric?). He argues that “there are no good examples of ‘superb lyric poems’ that at once ‘have something to say’ utterly specific to a poet’s ‘experience’ and can speak for all.” “Utterly” and “all” make for a narrow window—nothing is utterly one kind of thing, and no one speaks for all—but, even leaving aside the many lyric poets who, because of their bodies of work, became representative figures for a people or a nation, from Bashō to Yeats and Neruda, and even leaving aside the many lyric poets who were persecuted as threats to the regime, from Ovid to Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky, there are plenty of lyric poems that are “utterly” personal and yet speak for many. One of the founding documents of African and Caribbean anticolonialism, Aimé Césaire’s “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,” is a lyric poem. So is Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck,” an inspirational text for the women’s movement. It’s weird to think that these works don’t count.

All the poems in the anti-Trump collection “Resistance, Rebellion, Life” are lyrics, and many begin with a story that is utterly personal. Sharon Olds’s “Immigration Anthem” starts with her hip operation and ends on Ellis Island before the golden door:

    entering through it was a promise to leave it
    open behind us.

Zapruder is more hospitable to poems with political ambitions, and he discusses several, including one of the most controversial poems of the twenty-first century, Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” on the attacks of September 11th. Zapruder calls the poem “glorious” and “problematic.” But he thinks that what makes it a poem are the questions it raises and cannot answer, rather than any points it might seek to make. “We find genuine questions everywhere in poetry because they direct the language away from certainty and stasis,” Zapruder explains. “In the best poems, often the poet does not know the answer.” The less confident Baraka is about what he thinks, in other words, the more poetic his poem.

“Unlike other forms of writing, poetry takes as its primary task to insist and depend upon and celebrate the troubled relation of the word to what it represents,” Zapruder claims. Some version of this notion—that, whatever the ostensible subject matter, poems are “about” language—has been current in English departments since the days of the New Criticism. Language is a profoundly mysterious technology, so constitutive of the human mind that we can only get glimpses, from inside the fishbowl of consciousness, of how it works. And the study of literary technique is a great way to explore the nature of language.

But here is the opening stanza of Frederick Seidel’s poem in “Resistance, Rebellion, Life,” called “Now”:

    And you could say we’ve been living in clover
    From Walt Whitman to Barack Obama.
    Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes
    We the people voted in has taken over.
    Once we’d abolished slavery, we lived in clover,
    From sea to shining sea, even in terrible times.
    It’s over.

“The troubled relation of the word to what it represents” is not what jumps out at me here.

The funny thing about the resistance all these writers put up to the idea that poems can change people’s lives is that every one of them had his life changed by a poem. I did, too. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I found a copy of “Immortal Poems of the English Language” in a book closet in my school. It was a mass-market paperback, and the editor, Oscar Williams, had judged several of his own poems sufficiently deathless to merit inclusion. But he was an excellent anthologist, and I wore that book out. It changed my life. It made me want to become a writer.

Robbins, Lerner, and Zapruder all tell pretty much the identical story about themselves. One day, almost inadvertently, they read a poem, and suddenly they knew that they had to become writers. They did, and it changed their lives. Later, they all wrote books about poetry. I read those books, and it changed my life. You read this piece about those books. Maybe it will change your life. If it does, the change will be very, very tiny, but most change comes in increments. Don’t expect too much out of any one thing. For although the world is hard, words matter. Rock beats scissors. It may take a while, but paper beats rock. At least we hope so.

I started out as a poet, too, but I eventually realized that whatever my poems were expressing, it wasn’t me. They were too obsessed with looking like poems, I think—and sometimes they did, just poems that somebody else had written. I switched to nonfiction prose, and found, to my astonishment, that I could express myself much better by writing about things I had nothing to do with. (Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.)

But I got the same painful pleasure out of writing prose that I did out of writing poetry—the pleasure of trying to put the right words in the right order. And I took away from my experience with poetry something else. I understood that the reason people write poems is the reason people write. They have something to say. 

This article appears in other versions of the July 31, 2017, issue, with the headline “The Defense of Poetry.”

    Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001.


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