SACW - 15 Aug 2017 | Pak-India nuclear war avoided / Sri Lanka: Nationalism / Bangladesh: last night of Bangabandhu / Pakistan: Maria Toorpakai / India: Vandalising art work of Ramkinkar Baij ; March for Science; Anglo-Indians / Toxic University / Story of Sex

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 15 August 2017 - No. 2946 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Pak-India nuclear war — avoided | Pervez Hoodbhoy
2. Pakistan: Hiding From The Taliban in Plain Sight - Maria Toorpakai at Oslo Freedom Forum Recounts
3. On Partition of India 1947 - 70 years of Independence for India and Pakistan
4. India: Ranchi Citizens unite against communalism / Jean Dreze on growing communalism in Jharkhand; the speech which was interrupted by BJP ministers
5. India: SAHMAT Statement against proposed vandalism of Ramkinkar Baij’s artwork
6. Protests in various parts of India against the brutal arrest of Medha Patkar and others on fast since 27th July - Press release from NBA
7. Text of Scientists Call for a Pan India March for Science on 9 August 2017

8. Recent on Communalism Watch:
India: A minority like no other - Partition didn't do to the Muslims what 'secular' India has done Asad Zaidi (Catchnews)
India: With its angry words against the outgoing vice president, BJP indicts itself - Editorials, The Indian Express and Times of India
South Asia: Our collective cross to bear - the mob against the weak | Pulapre Balakrishnan
India's 2019 Elections: How will BJP and Narendra Modi deploy their social capital? | Anil Padmanabhan
India: How support for the BJP has grown after communal riot in West Bengal's Dhulagarh
India: In Rajasthan, Savarkar is the new hero of history textbooks
India: Have Indians become more exhibitionist in their faith? Chandan Mitra speaks to Hindustan Times Video conversation
India: VHP to push for separate cow ministry at the Centre and states
India: Mughals Are Out of Maharashtra History Textbooks
India: People’s Watch appeals to the police and citizens not to disturb Irom Sharmila in Kodaikanal
India: Crosses have been desecrated, hate speeches made by Hindutva fundamentalist groups in Goa

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
9. URLS: Sameeksha Trust / Economic Development for Transformative Structural Change / U.S. Workers in the Late Neoliberal Era / Trans-national America
10. Sri Lanka: Beware Of Arousing The Genie: What Is Wrong With Nationalism? | Laksiri Fernando
11. Bangladesh: Nation's shame darker than the night that saw the last of Bangabandhu, his family | Wasim Bin Habib and Tuhin Shubhra Adhikary
12. A new baptism: Seventy years later we imitate Pakistan | Harish Khare
13. Why protest against rise of violence in India is significant | Pushkar Raj
14. India: Gujarat Operation and the Bharatiya Janata Party | Radhika Ramaseshan
15. India at 70: Making patriotism a coercive act is objectionable and unconstitutional - editorial, Hindustan Times
16. Post-1947, the mixed fortunes of the mixed race Anglo-Indians | Kanishka Singh
17. Wanderings in the world of Lingua Indica | Karthik Venkatesh
18. Ghanoui on Brenot and Coryn, 'The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots'
19. David Wheeler on The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars, and Neoliberal Ideology, by John Smyth
20. Fake news is bad. But fake history is even worse | Natalie Nougayrède

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1. PAK-INDIA NUCLEAR WAR — AVOIDED
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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PAKISTAN and India celebrate their 70th anniversaries next week. Shall they be around for their 100th one too? It depends on how long their luck holds out, and if they can stop their mad rush to increase the chances of disaster.
http://www.sacw.net/article13424.html

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2. PAKISTAN: HIDING FROM THE TALIBAN IN PLAIN SIGHT - MARIA TOORPAKAI AT OSLO FREEDOM FORUM RECOUNTS
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Maria Toorpakai who overcame cultural restrictions to become an international squash player recounts
http://www.sacw.net/article13419.html

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3. PARTITION OF INDIA 1947 - 70 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE FOR INDIA AND PAKISTAN
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DISPELLING NOSTALGIC NATIONALIST MYTHS
by Nyla Ali Khan
Historically, the Partition of 1947 fragmented the writing community by redistributing its members into two separate territorial nations. One of the significant consequences of the Partition was the migration of Urdu writers of Muslim origin to Pakistan.
http://www.sacw.net/article13426.html

THERE’S A PART OF INDIAN HISTORY THAT HAS BEEN KEPT HIDDEN FROM YOUNG PEOPLE FOR TOO LONG | Hasan Suroor
Millions of young Indians and Pakistanis know little about one of the 20th century’s worst manslaughters in which their near and dear ones died
http://www.sacw.net/article13425.html

PARTITION, 70 YEARS ON: SALMAN RUSHDIE, KAMILA SHAMSIE AND OTHER WRITERS REFLECT | THE GUARDIAN
More than a million were killed and many millions more displaced by Indian partition. Authors consider its bloody legacy and the crises now facing their countries
http://www.sacw.net/article13414.html

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4. INDIA: RANCHI CITIZENS UNITE AGAINST COMMUNALISM / JEAN DREZE ON GROWING COMMUNALISM IN JHARKHAND; THE SPEECH WHICH WAS INTERRUPTED BY BJP MINISTERS
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India: Ranchi Citizens unite against communalism under banner of "Sajha Kadam"
A broad coalition of citizens and organisations came together today under the banner of Sajha Kadam to discuss the menace of growing communalism in Jharkhand and possible responses to it. The threat of communalism, evident in recent lynching incidents, was seen in the context of other threats to the right to life, including attempts to dilute people’s rights to land, work and food.
http://www.sacw.net/article13422.html

o o 

India: Video of the lecture by Jean Dreze on growing communalism in Jharkhand; the speech which was interrupted by BJP ministers
Jean Dreze speech on growing communalism in Jharkhand in Prabhat Khabar conclave in Ranchi which was disrupted by BJP ministers
http://www.sacw.net/article13427.html

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5. INDIA: SAHMAT STATEMENT AGAINST PROPOSED VANDALISM OF RAMKINKAR BAIJ’S ARTWORK
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Artists and Creative Community of India are aghast at the vandalism proposed against the artwork of one India’s greatest artists by a representative of the BJP government in Guwahati. Ramkinkar Baij pioneered the modern movement in mid-twentieth century India. He was dedicated to the person and philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, as he was to the adivasi communities and subaltern figures in the ethos he inhabited. He sought to find a form for this in several smaller sculptures of the Mahatma. This large sculpture was made by his students under Ramkinkar’s mentorship.
http://www.sacw.net/article13423.html

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6. PROTESTS IN VARIOUS PARTS OF INDIA AGAINST THE BRUTAL ARREST OF MEDHA PATKAR AND OTHERS ON FAST SINCE 27TH JULY - PRESS RELEASE FROM NBA
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​ Today people across the country protested against the high handed action of MP Police of the Dhar and Badwani administration which used excessive force leaving 48 people injured, some of them were admitted to ICU in Badwani.
http://www.sacw.net/article13418.html
  
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7. SCIENTISTS CALL FOR A PAN INDIA MARCH FOR SCIENCE ON 9 AUGUST 2017
========================================
For perhaps the first time, the scientific community is poised to take the protest route to get their voices heard. An appeal for ‘India March for Science’, scheduled on August 9, [2017] has already drawn more than 40 researchers, journalists and activists.
http://www.sacw.net/article13415.html

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8. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
India: Jean Dreze interrupts speech on communalism following angry objection by Jharkhand agriculture minister
India: A minority like no other - Partition didn't do to the Muslims what 'secular' India has done Asad Zaidi (Catchnews)
India: With its angry words against the outgoing vice president, BJP indicts itself - Editorials, The Indian Express and Times of India
South Asia: Our collective cross to bear - the mob against the weak | Pulapre Balakrishnan
India's 2019 Elections: How will BJP and Narendra Modi deploy their social capital? | Anil Padmanabhan
India: How support for the BJP has grown after communal riot in West Bengal's Dhulagarh
India: In Rajasthan, Savarkar is the new hero of history textbooks
India: Have Indians become more exhibitionist in their faith? Chandan Mitra speaks to Hindustan Times Video conversation
India: VHP to push for separate cow ministry at the Centre and states
India: Mughals Are Out of Maharashtra History Textbooks
India: People’s Watch appeals to the police and citizens not to disturb Irom Sharmila in Kodaikanal
India: Crosses have been desecrated, hate speeches made by Hindutva fundamentalist groups in Goa
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

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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9. URLS: SAMEEKSHA TRUST / ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FOR TRANSFORMATIVE STRUCTURAL CHANGE / U.S. WORKERS IN THE LATE NEOLIBERAL ERA / TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA
========================================
STATEMENT ISSUED BY THE SAMEEKSHA TRUST: 2 AUGUST 2017
http://www.epw.in/statement-issued-sameeksha-trust-2-august-2017

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ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FOR TRANSFORMATIVE STRUCTURAL CHANGE
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=832&Itemid=74&jumival=1643

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U.S. Workers in the Late Neoliberal Era
The Pressures, the Changes, the Potential
by Kim Moody	
http://newpol.org/content/us-workers-late-neoliberal-era

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TRANS-NATIONAL AMERICA
by Randolph S. Bourne (The Atlantic, July 1916)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1916/07/trans-national-america/304838/

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10. SRI LANKA: BEWARE OF AROUSING THE GENIE: WHAT IS WRONG WITH NATIONALISM?
by Laksiri Fernando
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(Colombo Telegraph, 14 August 2017)

There is nothing wrong with nationalism if it is moderate, balanced, civic, and realistic enough to incorporate global trends. Nationalism at a personal level might manifest as ‘patriotism,’ to mean love for one’s country of origin or even adopted country. There can be people who could balance between the two without much antagonism.

Love for the country or country of origin also could be identified different to nationalism or patriotism in a more sublime and a sophisticated form. There is no name, other than just ‘love for the country.’ It may be driven by old memories, having relatives or some attachment to the culture or physical landscape. Those who could be identified in this category may have their sentimental or ideological leanings elsewhere different to the ‘nation’ or ‘fatherland.’ 

There were many ‘Ceylonese’ who were in this category before or even after independence, but they have become a vanishing tribe, given the polarizations. Some also remained in the early diaspora. I have come across many Burghers or even Eurasians, talking about Ceylon with affection and love. They were born in Ceylon. 

Nationalism and Patriotism

If we wish a contrast between nationalism (of any kind) and patriotism, then the ‘nation’ is the cornerstone of nationalism, while the ‘fatherland’ constitutes its place for patriotism. The distinction is also geopolitical. Nationalism is more widespread than patriotism. Patriotism was nationalism’s equivalent or predecessor in some countries (i.e. Germany, Russia, some Eastern Europe countries). It is also through this tradition that communist countries in Europe opted to promote patriotism instead of nationalism. But in the case of China or Indo-China, it is more of nationalism than patriotism.   

I am not sure about the Tamil equivalent, but in Sinhala, there is no even a proper term for patriotism. Usually, it is ‘Deshapremaya’ (love for the land), but it does not signify the ‘ism’ part. Therefore, a possibility is to call it ‘Deshavadaya’ which is not so impressive for propaganda.

But in contrast, the notion of ‘nation’ has been there for a very long period with the Sinhala equivalent as ‘Jathiya,’ originating from Sanskrit ‘Jati,’ to mean an identity group. In this sense, it was similar to ‘Nacione’ in the Medieval Europe. It is based on this tradition that even today the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims are called ‘Jathien’ or ‘nationalities.’ There were times that ‘Jathi’ meant caste in Sri Lanka as the strict ‘Varna’ concept was not very popular. However, the distinction between ‘Jati’ and ‘Varna’ was clear in the subcontinent. For example, Nepal was considered a ‘flower garden of 32 Jatis and 4 Varnas.’ What a beautiful description? It was the characterization by the King Prithvi Narayan Shah, who founded modern Nepal in 1769.

There had been and are debates among theoreticians and historians whether the ‘nation’ is a modern concept or an ancient one. Those who argued it to be a modern concept called themselves modernists and often called the others ‘primordialists.’ In a sense, both were correct as they were talking about different stages of the same social development. Nations appeared as ethnicities in ancient times. The nations as united political entities are of course a modern necessity or phenomenon, although still embracing ethnic nations or nationalities within it. This is the modern reality even in Sri Lanka.

Nationalism undoubtedly is a modern phenomenon. It can be defined as an ideology or a movement or both. Although there were some nationalist ideological traits in ancient times, there were no nationalist ideologues, ideologies or mass nationalist movements. It is primarily the modern nationalists who glorify the past and invent their forefathers as heroes of nationalism. Otherwise, the ancient (ethno) nations were more dormant than active. Therefore, the intermixing was possible and it is as a result that there are many hybrid nations in the world today.

Nationalist Dilemma    

Nationalism or nationalist movement in Sri Lanka had been a belated and a temperate phenomenon compared to India before independence. Leading to independence, what appeared in politics was mainly a ‘constitutional reform movement’ within which there were conflicts, bargaining and compromises. The conflict aspect was characterized as ‘communalism’ (G. C. Mendis), and the compromising aspect ‘liberalism’ (A. J. Wilson). The movement was confined to the elite, so much so this elite even opposed the universal franchise in 1931. However, only thanks to the ‘liberal aspect’ of this movement, that Ceylon could achieve independence in 1948 in one piece. Therefore, this ‘liberal’ aspect is not something we should underestimate.   

The above of course was on the surface. Underneath, there were several other movements and two of them were: (1) the trade union and the left movement and (2) the Buddhist and Hindu (also Muslim) revivalist movements. Many of the writers who admire ‘nationalism’ today from the Sinhala side (nothing particularly wrong with it!), usually trace the inspirations from the Buddhist revivalist movement, their ideologues, the priests, the poets and fictions writers. What must be understood, however, is that there was the ‘other side’ to it, from the Hindu revivalist movement, of course from a minority community.   

What the modern historians have skipped largely is the parallel Muslim revivalist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. If not for this, there wouldn’t have been a Sinhala-Muslim riots in 1915. When you go through Piyadasa Sirisena’s novels, this antagonism is extremely clear. Therefore, it was not merely against the Christian missionaries, ‘who came with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other,’ that the ‘nationalist’ rage was unleashed, but also against our own ‘other’ people. Of course, it is possible, that the same rage was cultivated against the Buddhists as ‘infidels’ among the Muslims.

Who were the promoters of these antagonisms? Those were the emerging middle (petty bourgeois) classes who competed each other at the ‘market place’ or for the positions in the professions and the colonial administration. Who could possibly rescue the situation? The working class/s, the trade union movement or more pertinently, the socialist thinking. In this respect, there was a gap until the left movement was formed in the 1930s, as A. E. Goonesinghe succumbed to the nationalist pressures. Then the left movement also split into different segments, making the whole struggle weakened, and also capitulating to narrow nationalism, directly and indirectly.

For some, ‘socialism’ is about different theories of Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky. But socialism in essence is about social equality, social justice and a new economic order where major class differences could be eliminated. It cannot be achieved overnight, but socialism can be the guiding principles in the modern age, going beyond even the best of nationalism.

There is no one variety of nationalism but several. It is not about the hazy subjective understanding of the ‘good variety’ and the ‘bad one,’ but objective analysis of different varieties without hesitation to take knowledge from even the ‘western scholarship.’ What is mostly pertinent in the case of Sri Lanka is the distinction between ‘ethno-nationalism’ and ‘civic nationalism.’ I have written on this subject several times before. Hans Kohn (‘The Idea of Nationalism,’ 1944) interpreted the difference as possible stages in the evolution of an economic/social system from underdeveloped conditions to developed conditions. But the evolution is not automatic or certain as revealed in the case of Britain, for example. Uneven conditions might perpetuate ‘ethno-nationalism’ even after development (Tom Narin, ‘The Break-up of Britain,’ 1977).   

SWRD Bandaranaike and CBK

When SWRD Bandaranaike came back after studies in Britain, he had a good grasp of the potential as well as the dangers of nationalism. Although I am not able to quote him off hand now, his broad understanding was very clear in his early writings. His path was contradictory though. He formed the narrow nationalist Sinhala Maha Sabha (1936), but at the same time was supportive of federalism. His justification was that there was this Tamil Mahajana Sabha formed in 1921. 

Even when he was forming the SLFP in 1952, Bandaranaike’s ‘idea’ was to unite the Sinhalese first and then all others. That is there in the documents. People can have ‘ideas,’ but there are historical ‘dynamics’ as well. What is more pertinent is to refer to what E. W. Adikaram said in 1958 (Jathivadiya Manasika Pisseki – Communalist is a Lunatic). When you take the Genie out of the bottle you cannot control the fellow, he said. This is exactly what happened to Bandaranaike in 1959. A genie came and shot him!

This is also what happened lately to many Tamil leaders as well. The genies came and killed them. Most tragic was the killings of Amirthalingam and Yogeswaran in July 1989, thirty years after Bandaraniake killing. Only Sivasithamparam narrowly escaped. 

Therefore, if there is some antipathy for (narrow) ‘nationalism’ on Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s (CBK) part, it is understandable. She was just 14 years when her father was killed. She had to rush from school to see her father struggling for life in hospital. She was the most affected, I believe, given her sensitivities and age. But as far as I am aware, she has a good grasp of the country’s history, Buddhism and people’s sentiments for culture and heritage. The difference is that she is ready to understand the other side as well.

In recent times, her efforts for ‘Sanhidiyawa’ (reconciliation) have come under attack from those who perhaps don’t know where they stand. Groping in the dark for genies perhaps, one has said (Uditha Devapriya, Colombo Telegraph, 11 August), “That didn’t mean I disagreed with her point: it was a case of disagreeing with the person making the point”! This is just personal. This was with reference to the proposal that the ‘schools with mon-ethnic, and mono-religious student populations must be diversified.’

Theosophy and ‘Cosmopolitanism’

If the resistance came from the ‘Olcott schools,’ as reported, it is more unfortunate. If CBK was not that tactful in handling the matter, it was also unfortunate. Because ‘Sanhidiyawa’ is the crust of Henry Olcott’s philosophy of theosophy. While Olcott had more affinity for Buddhism (he became a Buddhist), he and theosophy in general was/is more for interfaith and above faith spiritualism. Theosophical Society founded in 1875, Henry Olcott as the President, moved its headquarters to Adyar, Chennai in 1886. It is still there. The Society emblem while having the Buddhist Swastika, among other symbols, says, ‘There is no religion higher than the truth.’

I am rather hesitant to raise this issue, but in his later work in Ceylon, Olcott was not that impressive of the emerging trends of narrow-nationalism and narrow-religiosity, to my knowledge. The following is what the Theosophical Society, Australia, is advertising in its website. 

“The Theosophical Society welcomes students or seekers, belonging to any religion or to none, who are in sympathy with its Objects.” What are the Objects?

    To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour.
    To encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science.
    To investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in the human being.

Of course, the above comes from Australia! However, there is something for the Olcott schools or former students of them to learn from those sentiments and principles. If Olcott was living, he would be proposing the same on the lines of ‘Sanhidiyawa.’

The Dangers

It is erroneously claimed that “Benedict Anderson strived with his research to prove that nationalism inspired selflessness, the kind of selflessness that cosmopolitanism could not inspire.” Anderson didn’t try to prove anything about nationalism against cosmopolitanism! He was not at all an admirer of nationalism. He was rather neutral. His thesis was his objective reflections on the subject. He was perplexed when even the Marxists or so-called Marxist regimes were capitulating to nationalism particularly in Indo-China.

In defining his proposition, ‘nation as an imagined community,’ he defined it as (1) imagined, (2) imagined as limited, (3) imagined as sovereign and (4) imagined as a community. This is what he further said on the last point.

“Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.” (‘Imagined Communities,’ p. 7).    

What he said about ‘limited imaginings’ is more pertinent to Sri Lanka unfortunately. Forget about ‘cosmopolitanism,’ if you are allergic! It is the ‘limited imaginings’ that paved the way for thousands and thousands of people in our country, after independence, to kill each other. Or ‘to kill or willing to die,’ whatever way you like to describe it. In addition, there were so much of other people who got killed even without belonging to those two categories. They are the innocents and the bystanders. More pertinent lesson for the present-day leaders and advocates of nationalism is from the fate of SWRD Bandaranaike and A. Amirthalingam. Beware of arousing the Genie.

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11. BANGLADESH: IN PAIN, IN ANGER
Nation's shame darker than the night that saw the last of Bangabandhu, his family | Wasim Bin Habib and Tuhin Shubhra Adhikary
========================================
(The Daily Star, August 15, 2017)

It was not dawn yet.
At House 677 on Road 32 in Dhanmondi, a contingent of security personnel comprised of police and army was on duty at the residence of President Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Nurul Islam Khan, the then deputy superintendent of police, was supervising the guards that night. Bangabandhu's personal assistant AFM Mohitul Islam was with him.
Inside the residence, everybody was still in deep sleep: President Mujib, his wife Sheikh Fazilatunnesa Mujib, sons Sheikh Kamal, Sheikh Jamal and Sheikh Russell, daughters-in-law, and brother Sheikh Naser.
It was early August 15, 1975. Around 4:45am, Havildar Md Quddus Sikder along with other guards arrived at the residence as it was the time for changing the guard.
They were hoisting the national flag to the tune of bugle and it was then they heard gunshots coming from the lakeside.
Nurul heard the voice of Bangabandhu on the first floor. They guessed the Father of the Nation was getting down hurriedly.
Bangabandhu reached the ground floor and tried to call somebody on the telephone at the receptionist's room.
Just then a hail of bullets slammed the room and smashed the windowpanes. As Nurul asked the sentries where the bullets were coming from, they replied it was from outside. He ordered them to fire back.
The building seemed trembling with rumbles of heavy gunshots and cannon shells from outside. The firing stopped around five minutes later.
Bangabandhu came out on the veranda. Nurul and a police sergeant stood by him.
"Why so much firing?" Bangabandhu asked them. "Sir, there has been an attack," replied Nurul.
Bangabandhu asked the security guards outside the gate the same question. A sepoy gave a similar answer.
Right at the moment, some people in army dress were crawling towards the southern part of the residence. There were some others from eastern-south and eastern-north sides.
Little did Bangabandhu know that the assassination attempt had begun.
He went back to his room. After a while, Sheikh Kamal came downstairs and stood on the veranda of the drawing room. He asked Nurul whether the army had come. As he nodded, Kamal joyfully said: "Brothers from the army! Come inside!" Kamal said this twice loudly.
There was an eerie silence for a minute.
Just then five to six army men in khaki and black fatigues appeared holding SMGs in their hands. One of them had a sten gun. They barged into the residence and shouted: "Hands up!"
Bangabandhu's PS Mohitul was standing at the drawing room's door.
Dumbfounded, Kamal said: "I am Sheikh Mujib's son."
Havildar Quddus saw Captain Bazlul Huda, Major Nur and Major Mohiuddin at the gate.
Without any warning, Huda shot Kamal in the leg. Kamal jumped to Mohitul's side.
Two bullets were fired at Nurul -- one struck just above his right knee while the other pierced his right shoe and hit a finger.
The killers went upstairs. Around 20-25 more people in army uniform joined them.
Meanwhile, Nurul went to a room next to the drawing room with his bullet-hit leg. He saw two police officials there and then heard gunshots and screams of women. Mohitul was also dragged into the room.
Huda and Nur ordered Havildar Quddus to follow as they headed to the first floor along with their force.
As they walked up to the landing of the staircase, they saw Major Mohiuddin and his soldiers were taking Bangabandhu down.
"What do you want?" Bangabandhu asked.
Nobody answered.
Suddenly, Huda and Nur pulled the triggers, and bullets from their Sten guns rained down on Bangabandhu.
The president collapsed on the stairs and breathed his last with blood flowing down the stairs.
The killers now ran riot at the house. The other members of the family took shelter inside the bathroom attached to the main bedroom. But that did not help.
As the soldiers fired at the door, Begum Mujib opened it.
The killers sprayed bullets at Begum Mujib, Sheikh Jamal, his wife Rosy, and Kamal's wife Sultana.
On the ground floor, an army man went to the room where Nurul and others were staying and asked them to come out. They were lined up.
The officer then shouted at Nurul, "We will kill you as you issued the order to fire." He was dragged out through the main gate towards an armed vehicle. The man then informed his superior about Nurul but the superior asked him to go away.
Nurul went inside the house and he was again made to stand in a line. He was then taken to the reception room where he saw Sheikh Naser lying in a pool of blood. Within moments, Nurul heard gunshots and groaning.
After a while, the killers brought Bangabandhu's 10-year-old son Sheikh Russell and a house help to the ground floor.
Shivering in fright, Russell ran to Mohitul.
Holding Mohitul, he asked: "Will they kill me too?"
"They won't kill you," replied Mohitul.
One of the soldiers took Russell away from Mohitul. Russell then asked the man whether they would kill him and cried to be taken to his mother.
The kid was taken upstairs. Then came a burst of gunshots and screams.
Around 6:00am, some army men came out of the house, walked towards the gate and talked to the army personnel waiting outside.
"All are finished," one of them said.

[Based on the deposition Nurul and Quddus gave as prosecution witness before the trial court in Bangabandhu murder case. We collected the deposition from the book "Bangabandhu Hatya Mamla” by advocate Shahida Begum. Injured on August 15, 1975, Nurul took treatment first at Dhaka Medical College Hospital and then at his village home. Three months later, he rejoined his service.]

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12. A NEW BAPTISM: SEVENTY YEARS LATER WE IMITATE PAKISTAN
by Harish Khare
========================================
(The Tribune, August 11, 2017)

Seventy years ago, two nations were created in the Indian sub-continent.  A new nation, Pakistan, was carved out; this 'moth-eaten' new nation was to be home to the Muslims of the British India. A truncated India became the successor state to the British imperial order, its pretensions, its institutions, its boundaries and its flawed control model. The grand hope was that after these cartographic rearrangements in the East and the West,  the two new states and their newly endowed citizens would rediscover the joys of  civilizational co-existence. That hope got definitely belied by all the bloodshed, dislocation, riots, violence, massacres that attended the Partition. 

Seventy years later the two nations are yet to find a modus vivendi to live in benign comfort with each other.  In 1971, India helped Pakistan’s eastern wing to discover its separate national identity; consequently, Pakistan became a much more compact nation. It is much more a natural state today than it was before 1971. And, it now has a huge historic grievance against India to sustain its national narrative; it continues to define itself as a nation — internally and externally — in hostile terms towards India.

For seventy years, we in India had permitted ourselves a glorious air of grand superiority over Pakistan. As long as Jawaharlal Nehru lived, his aura, political legitimacy, global stature, mass popularity and dedicated leadership gave us in India a new sense of collective equanimity. We were imaginatively engaged in creating a new India, building its new “temples” and inculcating a scientific temper in this ancient land of medieval superstition and ignorance.

 For seventy years, or most part of it, we could legitimately assure ourselves that we were better than Pakistan. We have had a Constitution and its elaborate arrangements; we were a democracy and held free and fair elections to choose our rulers; we had devised a dignified political culture of peaceful transfer of power among winners and losers after each election at the Centre and in the States;  we had committed ourselves to egalitarian  social objectives; we were determined not to be a theocratic State; we were proudly secular and  we put in place procedures and laws to treat our religious and linguistic minorities respectfully; we had  leaders who drew their legitimacy and authority from popular mandates;  our armed forces stayed in the barracks; we had a free and robust judiciary;  a mere high court judge in Allahabad  could unseat a powerful prime minister. And, when a regime tried to usurp the democratic arrangement, the citizens threw the offending rulers out at the first opportunity. 

For seventy years, we had every reason to believe that we were superior to Pakistan. Above all, we were not Pakistan. In recent decades, we became even more smug about our superiority as we have unthinkingly bought into the Western narrative that Pakistan was a “failing state” or a “failed state” — that too with nuclear weapons. What we have failed to appreciate is that Pakistani elites, too, have devised a working political culture best suited to its genius. Pakistani elites are not untroubled by inequities and inequalities in the land. We may bemoan that the Army has emerged as the senior partner in the Islamabad-Rawalpindi axis; nonetheless, it is a state that remains unwavered in its animosity towards us but still runs a coherent foreign policy and maintains internal order. Its elites have perfected the art of taking the Western leaders for a ride and have seen off super-powers' intervention in neighbouring Afghanistan. There is a certain kind of stability in Pakistan's perennial instability. 

Seventy years later we in India find ourselves itching to move towards a Pakistani model, notwithstanding our extensive paraphernalia of so many constitutional institutions of accountability. In recent years, we no longer wish to define ourselves as a secular nation; our dominant political establishment is exhorting us to shed our ‘secular’ diffidence and to begin taking pride in us being a Hindu rashtra. Just as in Pakistan, the dominant religion has come to intrude and influence the working of most of our institutions.

For seventy years our political class looked down upon Pakistan for its inability to keep its Generals in their place. Seventy years on, we are ready to ape those despised “Pakis.”  Our Army was never so visible or as voluble as it is now; our armed forces are no longer just the authorised guardians of our national integrity, they are also being designated as the last bulwark of nationalism. Consequently, as in Pakistan, we no longer allow any critical evaluation of anything associated with the armed forces. Those who do not agree with the armed forces’ performance or profile stand automatically denounced as ‘anti-national.’ What is more, we are thoughtlessly injecting violence and its authorised wielders as instruments of a promised renaissance. 

Seventy years later, we are cheerfully debunking all those great patriots and towering leaders who once mesmerised the world in the 20th century world and who were a source of our national pride and who had forged an inclusive political community across the land by instilling in us virtues of civic togetherness. As Pakistan has done, we too now seek national glory and garv  from re-writing our history books to cater to our religious prejudices. Just as Pakistan has institutionalized discrimination, we too are manufacturing  a 'new normal' in which it is deemed normal and natural to show the minorities their place at the back of the room.  

Seventy years later, the most complex legacy of the Partition — Kashmir — remains unresolved.  It continues to bleed both Pakistan and India, financially, politically and spiritually.  All these years we had allowed ourselves to believe that for Pakistani elites the Kashmir dispute provides a dubious platform of a meretricious coherence; not to be left behind, we in India are increasingly content to use the Kashmir problem to help us redefine the content and contours of our edgy and brittle  nationalism.  Worse, Kashmir continues to take a toll on our collective sensitivities. As a nation, we are getting comfortable in the use of violence and coercion to resolve differences at home and abroad. 

Seventy years ago we were determined to be different from Pakistan; seventy years later we are unwittingly beginning to look like Pakistan. Mohammed Ali Jinnah must be permitting himself a crack of a smile at our unseemly hurry to move away from Jawaharlal Nehru and his founding legacy.  

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13. WHY PROTEST AGAINST RISE OF VIOLENCE IN INDIA IS SIGNIFICANT
by Pushkar Raj
========================================
(Asia Times - August 4, 2017)

Thousands of people in several cities in India have protested against the widespread incidence of mob violence against Muslims, its normalization in social and political life and its implications for them as citizens.

According to IndiaSpend, a data journalism website, 38 people have been killed in 61 attacks since Narendra Modi became the prime minister of India in 2014. These attacks have risen steadily since the country’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, went to the polls and Hindu nationalist Yogi Adityanath became its chief minister in March this year.

In a glaring case of administrative failure, none of the accused have reached the trial stage yet.

Normalized violence condemned

The Not in My Name campaign against the rise in violence is significant as the protests represent citizens’ demands for protection of their lives and liberty from a motivated and unruly crowd reducing society to a Hobbesian nightmare where life is in “continual fear and danger of violent death”.

People from all walks of life have been voicing their disapproval of the government’s failure to punish the killers, thereby granting impunity to a section of society on religious grounds and providing a predatory incentive that acts to normalize violence in social life for political gains.

The government has done little except to repeat the customary statement, “the law will take its own course”, notwithstanding that only the government has means to make the law and execute it.

There is still no law against a heinous crime like lynching, the Prevention of Communal Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill having been deferred and finally dying in 2014 before the end of the Indian National Congress government because of strong objections from the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The government, however, has ruled out enacting a new law to deal with crimes such as lynching or others involving organized violence, implying that it refuses to acknowledge the problem and rejects to address it.

This indicates that the tolerance level for violence has increased within the Indian state and society.

According to a report this year by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, violence has risen in India in recent times. Though the commission was denied entry to the country in 2016 to gauge the ground-level situation, the Indian-educated Tibetan Tenzin Dorjee, one of the USCIRF commissioners, regretted listing India as a Tier 2 country, in the company of Turkey and Iraq. Rather, he recalled the glorious Indian tradition of non-violence and tolerance and urged the government to “effectively address problematic religious conditions including outbreaks of communal violence due to interfaith conflicts and politics”.

The rise of violence in the country is shown in incidents such as the one in Una, Gujarat, where Dalit boys were tied half-naked to a vehicle and beaten publicly by “cow vigilantes“. Besides lynching of suspected child lifters (people suspected of abducting children and mistreating and brainwashing them) in Jharkhand and mob attacks on police stations in Uttar Pradesh, hundreds of people are routinely wounded and killed in Kashmir, including being used as human shields to counter violence.

Norbert Elias, a German sociologist, theorized in his book The Civilizing Process that violence in a society decreases with cultural advancement on the civilizational ladder, but what explains the increase in violence in India lately despite growing prosperity and modernization?

Violence not innate

Experimental psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined plausibly argues that violence is not innate in human nature but something that can be socially and culturally learned and taught.

This is further borne out from the findings of Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist and director of a cure-violence project, who showed that violence is like a contagious disease that can be transferred from one person or group to others.

Thus preaching, justifying, condoning and ignoring violence for any objective is a shortsighted, dangerous game, irrespective of whether it is played by vigilante militants (with political support) in the name of Hindu culture in India or by Muslim terrorists in the name of freedom and Islam in Kashmir.

Viewed from this perspective, the protests in different parts of the country are the sane and civilized voices in a belligerence-charged atmosphere that is sowing deep divisions in a diverse country with the ominous prospect of a tyranny of the majority at the national, state and panchayat (local assembly) level.
Asia Times is not responsible for the opinions, facts or any media content presented by contributors. In case of abuse, click here to report.

India Opinion Communal Violence cow vigilantes Narendra Modi Yogi Adityanath Uttar Pradesh protests Indian National Congress BJP Religious Intolerance Kashmir hindu nationalism	

Pushkar Raj is a social analyst/author based in Melbourne. Formerly he taught political science in Delhi University and was the national general secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). He writes on society, politics, culture and human rights.

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14. INDIA: GUJARAT OPERATION AND THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY
by Radhika Ramaseshan
========================================
Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 52, Issue No. 30, 29 Jul, 2017
Gujarat Operation and the Bharatiya Janata Party

Radhika Ramaseshan is consulting editor, Business Standard.

The impending election to three Rajya Sabha seats in Gujarat has laid bare the Bharatiya Janata Party's strategy to use every opportunity to win electoral battles at every level and at the same time demolish the opposition.
 
The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) strategy to spirit away heavy -hitters  from the Congress party and regional parties who are endowed with a significant social base is not new. In 1998, current home minister Rajnath Singh, who was at the helm of the Uttar Pradesh BJP, conceived and executed Operation Shakti (Operation Might) that saw the splintering of the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) into independent entities, and propped up a minority BJP government in Lucknow (Ramakrishnan 1997). In 2009, the BJP launched Operation Kamala (Operation Lotus) in Karnataka to entice elected representatives of other parties from every tier of governance, including panchayats, in an attempt to spread itself before even properly finding its feet (Shastri 2010). Both the experiments fetched mixed results in the ensuing elections. 

Lately, Gujarat has dominated the news because BJP president Amit Shah, backed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has resolved to defeat Ahmed Patel, the right-hand man of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her political secretary for years, in the Rajya Sabha election scheduled to be held on 8 August 2017. Patel’s tenure ends next month. In the normal order of politics, his re-election was a given because the Congress has enough votes in the legislature to see him through.  Three seats from Gujarat to the Rajya Sabha have fallen vacant out of the total number of 10 seats from other states.

When the BJP initially announced the names of two candidates—Smriti Z Irani and Shah himself—for the Rajya Sabha elections, there was speculation in the media that it might decide not to contest the third seat as Patel was “too formidable” a name to be entrapped in the stratagems of the BJP. However, party insiders in the know unambiguously stated that they would go for the third seat, make it a “fight to the finish” and defeat Patel, knowing the “high stakes” the battle entailed in the prelude to the Gujarat assembly polls in November–December this year.

For Modi and Shah, Patel’s “defeat” in an indirect election—obviously facilitated by the anticipated cross-voting by Congress legislators with the help of Shankersinh Vaghela,  a former BJP leader who joined the Congress and recently parted ways with it—was expected to obliterate the remotest scrap of “challenge” from the opposition (Bhatt 2017). But has the country’s reigning duo factored in the churn in Gujarat that was triggered by the agitation for education and job reservations from the powerful Patels (who constitute the BJP’s backbone since it won its first election in 1995), the persecution of Dalits and the discontent among the textile traders after the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST)?

Whatever the BJP's calculations, the “fight” against Patel rattled the Congress so much that it herded many of its legislators to a resort in Karnataka, among the few states where it is in power, to stem the poaching. Disastrously for the Congress, Patel’s opponent for the third Rajya Sabha seat is his protégé, Balwantsinh Rajput. A successful industrialist and a Congress funder, Rajput is also Vaghela’s brother-in-law. However, their kinship is less of a factor in Rajput’s defection; what spurred the move was the perception that Patel’s overweening influence over the Gujarat Congress had  yielded no electoral dividends for several years. If anything, Rajput, like others, felt that Patel worked against leaders with a mass following, such as Vaghela. The latter was viewed with suspicion because he was earlier tethered to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s ideology, went public with his disgruntlement against the Congress and encouraged his “loyalists” to rebel and quit the party. For Shah, Vaghela’s script was perfect because the theme of the mentee falling out with his mentor was in sync with his blueprint to finish off the Congress.

There was a subtext to the BJP’s adoption of Rajput as its nominee. Modi and Shah were convinced that the relentless pursuit of the cases implicating them,  that related to the 2002 communal violence or the killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Kausar Bi, Tulsiram Prajapati and Ishrat Jahan in alleged staged encounters during the United Progressive Alliance’s tenure was commissioned and monitored by Patel on Sonia Gandhi’s prodding. Shah was jailed and subsequently externed for a long period from Gujarat. 

If Patel is indeed worsted, the BJP has its “victory”  lines in place because his “defeat” would become another trope in Modi and Shah’s “Congress mukt Bharat” (a Congress-free India) narrative.

The Congress was either caught napping or forsook its instincts for realpolitik, or worse, abandoned the battle-ground in Gujarat when Vaghela and Shah were planning their move. It has not even revisited the past to understand the single-minded way the BJP identifies its targets and moves to demolish them. In the 2012 elections, for instance, the BJP's strategists were resolute from day one that two Congress leaders, Arjun Modhwadia, then the state president, and Shaktisinh Gohil, the opposition leader, must be trounced. They succeeded. Modhwadia and Gohil were the spearheads of the Congress offensive against Modi. Vaghela was not on the BJP’s hit list because the word was that he was marked out as a “weak link” in the Congress chain of attack and had, therefore, to be handled with velvet gloves because he could be “useful” in future.   

The BJP’s poach-and-split operations of the past did not end happily. In 1998, after breaking the Congress and BSP and installing its chief minister, Kalyan Singh, it gained in the Lok Sabha election that followed, augmenting its voting  percentage from 33.43% in 1996 to 36.48%. But in the 1999 election, its vote share in UP dipped to as low as 27.64%. The drop was attributed to the skulduggery it used to keep itself in power after issuing lofty moral averments.

In Karnataka, the machinations resulted in bitter internal feuds, arising from the compulsions of appeasing the new entrants at the cost of ignoring the old-timers. The BJP was routed in the 2013 elections (Ali 2009). From a high of 110 seats and a vote share of 33.93% in 2008, the BJP plummeted to 40 seats and a vote share of 20.07% in 2013.

Modi and Shah were not present even as bit players when Operation Shakti and Operation Kamala were staged. Gujarat is their fiefdom. Shah has done everything it takes to end the long hegemony of the Congress party over every power structure and source of patronage. Shah first went for the rural bodies, underpinning his strategy on the belief that for every elected village representative, there was an equally powerful and resourceful leader who did not make the cut but was unprepared to wait for another five years. Such defeated and discontented pradhans were approached and set up as a parallel pull of attraction, creating a pretty unassailable rural network for the BJP (Ramesh 2014). It was not as though Shah delivered the coup de grace to the Congress in the panchayats.   From time to time, the Congress bounced back in the rural bodies as in the elections held in December 2015 against the backdrop of the agitation for reservations for the Patels and the Gujarat government’s crackdown on the agitators. The Congress bested the BJP in the zilla parishads and the taluka panchayats by a long shot (Rawat and Ramaseshan 2015).       

Next, Shah unseated the Congress from the sports bodies, especially in cricket and chess.

Finally, he laid siege on the powerful cooperatives that were a pillar propping up Gujarat’s economy that were in the grip of the Congress. He put himself up as a candidate in an election to a primary cooperative body in 1998 , won and became the president of the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank, India’s biggest cooperative bank. Traditionally, such banks were controlled by Gujarat’s dominant castes slike the Patels, Kshatriyas and the Gadariyas (shepherds). Shah was the first Bania to break into an impervious zone (Ramesh 2014).

Before every election, to the assembly and to Parliament, Amit Shah used the by-now familiar tactic of weaning away one or more influential leaders from the Congress. In 2012, it was Narhari Amin, who derived much of his clout by being a former president of the Gujarat Cricket Association and a former vice-president of the Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI). Before the 2014 elections, Shah ensnared Vithalbhai Hansrajbhai Radadiya, a Porbandar strongman who never lost an election. Radadiya not only won Porbandar but also helped the BJP secure the neighbouring Lok Sabha seats.

The Congress was optimistic about Ahmed Patel fending off the BJP’s predatory moves on its legislators and pulling through. Shah had once tried to defeat another Congress notable, Kapil Sibal, in a Rajya Sabha election in UP in June 2016. It was a tenuous attempt that saw him field a Mumbai entrepreneur of Gujarat origin, Preeti Mahapatra as an Independent against Sibal. The latter, who had lost the previous Lok Sabha poll from Delhi, just about made it with a margin of seven votes (Rashid 2016).

Shah’s long and intimate association with Gujarat’s politics, the  dwindling status of the Congress coupled with the prospect of the rebels being “rewarded” with BJP tickets in the assembly poll, the caste kinship that Vaghela is playing on with Rajput leaders from the Congress and above all, the “killer instinct” with which Shah has jumped into the high-stake contest have cast doubts over Patel’s chances of getting re-elected. But if the BJP imagines that a “victory” in this joust would enhance the odds in the assembly polls, it may need a re-think because its insiders admitted that quite apart from the objective circumstances, the degree of anti-incumbency against several of its legislators was “too serious” to be sidestepped.

References

Ali, Sowmya (2009): “BJP’s ‘Poach-all’ Operation in Karnataka,” Mail Today, 15 May, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/BJPs+poach-all+operation+in+Karnataka....
Bhatt, Sheela (2017): “BJP President Amit Shah Takes Battle to Rajya Sabha,” NewsX, 27 July, http://www.newsx.com/national/70304-bjp-president-amit-shah-takes-battle-to-rajya-sabha.
Ramakrishnan, Venkitesh (1997): “A Pyrrhic Victory,” Frontline, Vol 14, No 22, pp 1-14, http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1422/14220200.htm.   
Ramesh, P R (2014): “His Master’s Mind,” Open Magazine, 11 April, http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/india/his-master-s-mind.
Rashid, Omar (2016): “Despite BJP’s Strategy, Sibal Wins RS Seat from UP,”  Hindu, 11 June, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/Despite-BJP%E2%80%99s-strategy-Sib....
Rawat, Basant and Radhika Ramaseshan (2015): “BJP Bloodied on Modi Turf,” Telegraph, 3 December, https://www.telegraphindia.com/1151203/jsp/frontpage/story_56457.jsp.
Shastri, Sandeep (2010): “Karnataka’s Please-all Party,” Indian Express, 8 Oct, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/karnataka-s-pleaseall-party/694299.

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15. INDIA AT 70: MAKING PATRIOTISM A COERCIVE ACT IS OBJECTIONABLE AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL - EDITORIAL, HINDUSTAN TIMES
========================================
(Hindustan Times, 14 August 2017)

editorial

States such as West Bengal have resisted the heavy-handed diktats of the government on celebrating Independence Day in the manner that New Delhi deems fit. Why do Muslims have to express their nationalism more loudly than the majority community ?

Patriotism appears to be the flavour of the Independence Day week. Governments in the Centre and states are creating a nationalist frenzy among the citizens, by way of instructions on hoisting the tricolour and singing patriotic songs. But as the nation turns 70, a disturbing new trend is expecting minority educational institutions to flaunt their patriotism and furnish evidence of the same. Last week, the Yogi Adityanath government instructed 8,000 madrasas affiliated to the Uttar Pradesh Madarsa Shiksha Parishad to organise programmes on August 15 that pay a tribute to freedom fighters. The circular issued by the Parishad to minority welfare officers expressly stated that officers should ensure shooting of videos at madrasas and keep recordings as evidence. Just last week an influential Muslim preacher from Mumbai asked madrasas to fly the national flag on Independence Day. Also the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation made the singing of Vande Mataram compulsory in civic schools. Yesterday, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray demanded that the Union government enact a law making the singing of Vande Mataram mandatory. Also, the Madras High Court ruled that ‘Vande Mataram’ must be sung at least once a week in Tamil Nadu’s schools and colleges.

The idea has created a kerfuffle among Muslims since the lyrics of Vande Mataram deify the Motherland. Leaders of the community argue that Islam prescribes ‘vandan’ (worship) only for Allah. Even when India became independent, Vande Mataram was among the songs considered for the status of national anthem but the idea was discarded when a section of Muslims perceived it inappropriate. The suggestion isn’t just odious but also unconstitutional. In February, observing that the Constitution didn’t have provision for the concept of a national song, the Supreme Court had refused to entertain a plea that directed the Centre to frame a national policy to promote Vande Mataram. A bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra said Article 51A (fundamental duties) of the Constitution required the promotion and propagation only of the National Anthem and the Tricolour.

States such as West Bengal have resisted the heavy-handed diktats of the government on celebrating Independence Day in the manner that New Delhi deems fit. Why should the voluntary expression of patriotism through singing Vande Mataram become a mandatory act? Also, do Muslims have to express their nationalism more loudly than the majority community and furnish proof of their patriotism on a day to day basis? This doesn’t agree with the ideals of freedom or secularism that India set out with in 1947.

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16. POST-1947, THE MIXED FORTUNES OF THE MIXED RACE ANGLO-INDIANS
by Kanishka Singh
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(The Indian Express - August 3, 2017)

When the British finally packed their bags to leave India for good, White says her family was also struck with insecurity. However, they didn’t leave the country due to a sense of endearment they had developed with their birthplace.

An Anglo-Indian gathering. (source: Poorvi Singhania, Wikimedia Commons).

“Who am I? ..is a question that I have found more difficult to answer than any other in my life,” says Margaret White, an Anglo-Indian culinary consultant who lives in Bengaluru and gives weekly classes at her home for reviving the Anglo Indian cuisine, something which she feels is a responsibility on her part. Margaret’s ancestors were supervisors in the Kolar Gold Fields, a mining region in Karnataka, and she grew up with rich tales of life in the Colonial era and how things changed post Independence.

When the British finally packed their bags to leave India for good, White says her family was also struck with insecurity. However, they didn’t leave the country due to a sense of endearment they had developed with their birthplace. It was only after a couple of years that the community found some promise by the constitutional safeguards provided by the founding fathers.

The Indian Constitution recognises Anglo Indians as a citizen of mixed Indian and European descent (paternal side). Between the 18th and 20th centuries, the term described Britons in India. But the term was formalised in the Census 1911. Anglo Indians were for the first time officially recognised as a specific community by the British. The Government of India Act, 1935 identified Anglo Indians as “a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is a native of India.”

The Constitutional Assembly kept the operating part and the community was listed as a minority in the Indian Constitution in 1950. Now, the community is largely urban, traces roots to early contact between Europe and India, as back as 1498 during the time the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama came on Indian shores for the first time. The government of India estimates the community to be around 1,00,000-1,50,000.
Anglo Indians, 70 years of independence, Vasco da Gama The picture shows the departure of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to India in 1497. Anglo Indians can trace their origins as back as 1498 when Vasco da Gama came on Indian shores for the first time. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In post-independence India, a generation of Anglo Indians left Indian shores against the advice of their community leaders writes Alison Blunt in Domicile and Diaspora:Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home.

Robyn Andrews, after speaking to migrant Anglo Indians in UK, Canada and Australia, concluded in his study Quitting India: The Culture of Migration that the reasons migration varied from search for employment, insecurity and one group even said it was a glamorous thing to do.

His study theorised that “fears of reprisals and insecurity about their future in India led to three major waves of migration from the sub-continent”. The first wave of migration came just after 1947. The second wave was in the early sixties during the time there was a push for Hindi to be made the national language which reduced chances of employment. The third wave came in the 1970s and is called by most sociologists as the ‘family reunion wave’.

Anglo-Indian leader Frank Anthony wrote in Britain’s Betrayal in India: Story of the Anglo Indian Community, “At the time of Independence there were estimated to be 200,000–300,000 Anglo-Indians in India… after over fifty years of steady exodus from India the population of Anglo-Indians in India is estimated to be less than half that number now.”

Independent India was as new to Anglo-Indians as was to other citizens, but brought with it an invidious situation for the community. British historian Arnold J Toynbee says survival was the prime challenge and response for the Anglo Indians. The challenges, he theorised, were from the early masters and later internally from the Indian counterparts.
70th independence day, Anglo Indians, Anglo Indians in India, 70 years of Independence, Independence Day, Anglo Indians after independence, anglo indians population, anglo indian migration, anglo indian schools, history of anglo indians, anglo indians research, express research, india news, indian express Photo by photographer Karan Kapoor’s series on Anglo-Indians in Calcutta and Bombay that he did in 1979-80.

“We were considered inferior by the Europeans due to our mixed descent and not accepted by our fellow Indians due to the colour of our skin, language, customs, upbringing etc. Europeans looked down upon us with equal resentment as they did other Indians. However, we faced the mistrust of Indians. Most of it was on account of our aloofness as a community. That was helped by our “European culture and looks,” says Noel Clarke, part of RootsWeb archive group that is helping people trace their ancestry.

Clarke’s family has been in India for nine generations and at least five members of his family have served the British Army. The identity dilemma is not overbearing anymore. “But it has come after we have developed a genuine community consciousness. That has been initiated by the community itself and not with outside help.”

The community was born with Europeans trying to create an indigenous support group, thus encouraging officers and civil servants to marry Indian women. One pagola or gold mohar was the reward provided for each child born out of such a marriage. In the initial days, the children were accepted promptly and got jobs in the East India Company. Several travelled to England for studies and schools came up in places like Madras, Bangalore and Lucknow for Anglo Indians. Their culture and propensity was in line with the Europeans. By the 1800s, the situation changed for the Anglo Indians. The British were averse to strengthening a parallel ethnic group in the country and discouraged all measures allowing the same. The newly framed policies tried to exclude them from the British societal setup and top echelons of the industry.

“It showed how the community was treated as second class Europeans. Low level positions in the government and company were offered to Anglo Indians, the ínferior jobs or dirtier jobs as my grandparents told me,” said Clarke.

Madras-born Anglo Indian author Moira Breen, one of the most vocal members of the community, wrote in the book Anglo Indians: The Way We Are: “We considered ourselves domiciled Europeans and 100% British”. However, the community has integrated well since the independence.

For “Anglo Indians: Vanishing Remnants of a Bygone Era”, US-based Blair R Williams conducted a decade long study and found that intermarriage trends picked up since the 1940s. The study finds that Anglo Indian-Anglo Indian/European marriages dropped from 94% in 1940s to 46% in 1990. It also found that Anglo Indian women marrying non Anglo Indian men increased from 3% in 1940s to 29.5% in 1990s and Anglo Indian men marrying non Anglo Indian women increased from 3% in 1940s to 24.5% in 1990s. This can also be seen in line with the fact that the population of the community has also reduced.

Post independence, Anglo-Indians continued to have reservations in civil and military jobs. However, the Anglo-Indians faced a host of problems too.
70th independence day, Anglo Indians, Anglo Indians in India, 70 years of Independence, Independence Day, Anglo Indians after independence, anglo indians population, anglo indian migration, anglo indian schools, history of anglo indians, anglo indians research, express research, india news, indian express Photographer Karan Kapoor grew interested in the subject, partly thanks to his own life, as a child of an Anglo-Indian marriage. (Photo: Karan Kapoor)

Crum Ewing and Willem Adriaan Veenhoven observed in their exhaustive analysis “Case Studies on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: A World Survey” that post independence, though the Anglo Indians enjoyed reservations in civil and military jobs, they faced a host of problems. The writers concluded that in the early years of independence, they were disinclined to accept inferior jobs. The larger lack of academic qualification and keeping away from learning Indian native languages became a hurdle. Occupational specialisation was something the community at large did not possess in the early years of independence.

The All Indian Anglo-Indians Association estimated most of the community is based in cities of Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Mumbai, Kochi, Goa, Secunderabad, Tiruchirapalli, Chennai and Kanpur. Some pockets are strong even in Visakhapatnam, Agra, and towns in Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal.

The community has been, like all other minorities, promised rights and benefits. However, proper representation of the community in Parliament is something that it cries out for and has strived for since Independence. The most celebrated leader Frank Anthony was nominated for seven terms in the Lok Sabha between 1952 and 1996. However, the inability to articulate the issues of the community in the Lok Sabha have been evident. The community has tried to push an Anglo Indian Welfare Bill but it has been stonewalled. The latest attempt was done by Professor Richard Hay in Lok Sabha, 2016. It is yet to be discussed.

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17. WANDERINGS IN THE WORLD OF LINGUA INDICA
Karthik Venkatesh
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(Mint on Sunday - July 16 2017)

Besides Indo-Aryan and Dravidian families of languages, which command the brute majority of speakers, there are three more such language families in India


That India is the home of many, many languages is something everybody knows. But how vast is it? That’s really a matter of conjecture. But in attempting to deal with this vastness, certain myths have come to dominate public perception.

Among the most persistent myths about languages in India is that Sanskrit is the ancestor of all Indian languages. This is as stubborn a myth as the other myth about Hindi being India’s national language. (It isn’t. The constitutional status of Hindi is that of an “official” language, along with English.)

The truth of the matter is that Sanskrit can rightly claim parentage over only one family of languages spoken in India—the Indo-Aryan languages spoken across a large swathe of India.

The Dravidian family of languages spoken in south India and in little pockets in northern and eastern India has borrowed Sanskrit vocabulary, but its grammar shows limited Sanskritic influence. In relation to the Dravidian languages, Sanskrit’s relationship could perhaps be termed as that of a step-mother or, more rightly, as a close neighbour.

But—besides these two families of languages, which command the brute majority of speakers—there are three more families of languages spoken in the country.

One of these is the Austro-Asiatic family of languages, which Gopal Haldar in his book The Languages of India also terms the “Nishada” languages, is another important family of languages which might justifiably called India’s “original” language group since, by some accounts, it predates both the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan language groups. Related to Khmer and Vietnamese, this family of languages is markedly different from the other language families.

Khasi (spoken in Meghalaya), Munda (spoken in Jharkhand) and Santhali (spoken in West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Odisha and Jharkhand, besides in neighbouring Nepal and Bangladesh) are among most widely spoken Austro-Asiatic languages in India.

The Santhali language is India’s largest tribal language and is spoken by close to 6 million people. Until 1925, this language did not have a written form. Pandit Raghunath Murmu (1905-82), known as Guru Gomke among the Santhals, an extraordinary personality by all accounts, then created a script for the language. This script, known as Ol Chiki, is markedly different from the Devanagiri school of scripts and is widely used today.

Further east from Santhal country, in Manipur, the old Meetei Mayek script is undergoing a revival. The script had been proscribed in the early 18th century with the advent of Vaishnavism in Manipur and the Puyas, written documents in Meetei Mayek on various matters, were burned.

The Bengali script was then used to write Meeteilon (Manipuri). Presently, the Meetei Mayek has been reintroduced in schools, infusing fresh life into the script.

In Arunachal Pradesh, a unique experiment of sorts is underway. A script called the Tani Lipi has been created as a single script for the various tribal languages (26 at last count). The creation of this script (by Tony Koyu) is essentially an attempt to record indigenous tribal knowledge. Not since the Roman script has one script been shared by so many different languages.

The languages of Arunachal Pradesh and Meeteilon are part of the Sino-Tibetan (sometimes called Tibeto-Burman) family of languages which is the fourth family of Indian languages.

While Burmese is the most widely spoken language in this family, in the Indian subcontinent, the largest spoken languages are Meeteilon (in India) and Newari (in Nepal). The Naga languages, too, belong to this group.

Newari, the classical language of Nepal, has been displaced today by Nepali. Under Rana rule, Newari was formally suppressed and its writers and users imprisoned. Since the 1950s though, Newari has made a gentle comeback, although the numbers of its speakers have fallen as many people opt to speak in the dominant Nepali.

Another important Tibeto-Burman language is Kokborok, the official language of the state government of Tripura. First written in the extinct Koloma script and later in the Bengali script, Kokborok has now opted for the Roman script.

A fifth family of languages has been identified and classified only recently—the Andamanese.

Great Anadamanese and Ongan (spoken by the Onge tribe) are confirmed members of this family. The Sentinelese language is believed to be a member too. But since the Sentinelese are an uncontacted tribe, this is hard to confirm.

Some scholars even speak of a sixth language family existing in India. This is the Tai-Kadai (sometimes Kra-Dai) language family, consisting of among others, Thai and Lao, the languages of Thailand and Laos. In India, a couple of languages spoken in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam are believed to belong to this family.

The big banyan of India’s languages reveals many more treasures on closer inspection. One such treasure is a language called Lingua da Casa or Daman and Diu Indo-Portuguese (two tongues in reality, but spoken of as one for reasons of simplicity).

Daman Indo-Portuguese appears to be a creole of Marathi and Portuguese, whereas Diu Indo-Portuguese appears to be a creole of Gujarati and Portuguese. Widely spoken in the past, it was first documented in the 19th century by German linguist Hugo Schuchardt. With barely a few hundred speakers today, this is a language biding its time before extinction.

Of similar vintage is the language of Korlai Indo-Portuguese, spoken by about 1,000 Luso-Indian Christians in and around the village of Korlai in Maharashtra’s Raigad district. The language is also known as Kristi (Christian), Korlai Creole Portuguese, Korlai Portuguese and Nou Ling.

(Luso-Indian was once a term used by people of mixed Portuguese and Indian ancestry. The term has largely been replaced by Anglo-Indian, though strictly speaking that term ought to apply only to Indians of mixed English and Indian ancestry.)

Two more distinct languages also bear mention here. One is Byari Bhashe (sometimes Beary), a language close to Malayalam and Tulu, and influenced by Arabic. The language also has words related to Tamil.

Spoken by the Muslim community having its roots in the Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka, speakers of this language can be found scattered all along the Malabar and Konkan coasts.

The word beary is said to be derived from the Tulu word byara, which means trade or business. Another popular theory is that beary comes from Arabic word bahar. Bahar means “ocean” and bahri in Arabic means “sailor” or “navigator”. A third theory says beary is derived from the word “Malabar”.

In Sugata Srinivasaraju’s delightful book Pickles from Home: The Worlds of a Bilingual, one essay speaks of a “language with no name”. Spoken by Brahmins from a couple of villages in Kolar district in Karnataka, this language borrows in equal measure from Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. It sounds somewhat like all three, and yet sometimes like none of them.

Christened Engalode Vathe (our speech) by its speakers, it is a language that owes its origin to geography—Kolar is located at the intersection of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

As is evident, the banyan of Lingua Indica is a capacious one. Accommodating a variety of languages and scripts, it is a veritable treasure trove of diversity. To walk in it is to be in a world of untold richness.

Karthik Venkatesh is an editor with a publishing firm and a freelance writer. Views are personal. 

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18.  GHANOUI ON BRENOT AND CORYN, 'THE STORY OF SEX: FROM APES TO ROBOTS'
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 Philippe Brenot, Laetitia Coryn. The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots. Translated by Will McMorran. London: Particular Books, 2016. 208 pp. RRP $49.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84614-932-0.

Reviewed by Saniya Lee Ghanoui (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Published on H-Histsex (August, 2017)
Commissioned by Katherine Harvey

In the first episode of Rashida Jones’s new Netflix documentary series on sex, pornography, and technology, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, Holly Randall sits with her mother, Suze, at their kitchen table. Holly, who describes herself as “an erotic photographer, producer, and director,” recounts how she got into the pornography business through her parents. In the 1970s, Suze became famous as the first woman to shoot a full-frontal spread for Playboy. As Holly and Suze sit and discuss their careers, the two women acknowledge the one aspect that was difficult for both of them to talk about: sex education. “I think it’s really awkward, to talk about sex” to children, Suze says. Her daughter responds immediately, “yeah, but someone’s gotta tell them.” 

In the preface to The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots, titled “Closely Guarded Secrets,” Philippe Brenot lays out his plan for this history book of sexuality: “At the start of the third millennium, sexuality seems to be all around us—within easy reach, shown on screen, talked about in the media—but, paradoxically, it’s rarely explained and almost never taught.” This lack of explanation, Brenot claims, presents an educational void in which sex education is not taught in schools, and the Internet and pornography take the place of true sexuality instruction. The Story of Sex seeks to counter that by revealing “this essential aspect of human intimacy” (p. vii). Originally published in France, the book’s call for improved sex education is brought before new audiences in Will McMorran’s English translation. Illustrated by Laetitia Coryn, The Story of Sex is a graphic novel treading the line between serious historical scholarship and playful sexual jokes and puns. The history in The Story of Sex is never far from the present and the author and illustrator make observations that echo modern-day conversations about sex, rape, relationships, and prostitution. 

It is no secret that many youths learn about sex from pornography, and its unlimited and free availability on the Internet over the last twenty-five years means that a whole generation has grown up with a “learning manual” of sex online. Combined with abstinence-only programs that are still popular in many parts of the world, including the United States, teenagers crave sexual knowledge with no credible place to actually get it. Furthermore, across the globe a majority of sex education is taught in a “don’t” model: don’t have sex before marriage; don’t have sex without a condom; don’t get an STI. Two large components of sex are lacking from such a model: an explicit understanding of bodies and how they work, and a positive reinforcement of a happy and healthy sexual life. The graphic novel’s focus is mostly on the latter. 

The first section of the book, aptly titled “Origins,” recounts the social division of gender groups, due to competition around food, and mating in hominoids. In one astute section, the story of the first rape is followed by the discovery of love. These two actions are contrasted based on species: forced sex is something that occurs in numerous species while love is, as far as we know, a distinctly human characteristic. The beginnings of families, the authors put forth, also constituted the beginnings of the subjugation of women. Primates understood the rule of dominance in which the alpha male mated with whomever he chose, while in the next chapter, we learn that married men, in Babylon, were free to frolic with prostitutes and maintain concubines. The fear of women’s sexuality is a theme running throughout the book. We are shown how different factions of society—from the church to witchcraft in the Middle Ages to the rise of psychoanalytical theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—have influenced and changed our understanding of female sexuality. 

The authors then take us on a romp through the sex habits of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. We learn that Cleopatra invented the vibrator—a gourd filled with bees—and the accompanying illustration humorously shows Cleopatra eyeing the gourd with the thought that “it had better not pop open” (p. 44). This is an example of the book’s greatest paradox. It presents itself as a sex education guide focusing on the history of sexuality, something that is direly needed, and yet the irreverent humor leaves one to wonder how much of an impact, instructionally, it can actually have. You finish the book with an overabundance of quirky sex facts—for example, Zeus fell in love with Clitoris, the daughter of an ant-man, and he had to turn himself into an ant to make love with her—but it is unclear how much of an impression, outside of pure entertainment, the book can have. If the authors’ goal, however, is to ease tensions surrounding sex, then the book succeeds in opening space for more authoritative sex education. 

The book’s core is about relationships, something that is not always presented in erotic or pornographic film, and it narratively connects the social construction of relationships in the primate world to contemporary digital sex outlets available to all. Numerous anecdotes are included to support this theme, notably contraception. One of the earliest stories focuses on prostitutes’ meetings with the wife of the Egyptian pharaoh’s architect. She gives the prostitutes cones filled with pomegranate grains to insert into their vaginas before sex. Brenot informs readers that these contraceptive cones contained estrogen and worked as a natural contraceptive. Next, the doctor provides an animal gut “membrane” to the prostitutes, instructing them to have the man put it on his penis before intercourse: the first condom. The sly look the doctor gives her female patients infers a sense of camaraderie among Egyptian women of all classes. The scenario shows how sexuality brings together both amorous relationships and companionship. 

The authors are strongest when they trace the nuances of change alongside the static nature of patriarchy. The authors show how even during the sexual revolution of the 1950s-70s, which they identify as “a great revolution,” there was constant pushback for women. In France, for example, through the 1950s a woman needed her husband’s approval for participating in professional activity or opening a bank account. 

In the second half of the book the authors explore the life of Marquis de Sade, the evolution of sexual freedom (masturbation gets its own chapter in this domain), the sexual research of Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, and the “futuresex” of the twenty-first century. This last chapter includes a fictional account of the next century in which human cloning makes sexual reproduction useless and prostitution declines due to the popularity of sexual robots—accompanied by an amusing illustration of R2-D2 donning an animal print bikini. 

In the end, this book may not be as revolutionary as its authors hope it to be, but it serves as a better sex education model than the porn magazines and videos that teenagers see on a daily basis. If nothing else, maybe it will make it easier for erotic filmmakers to talk about sex.

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19. DAVID WHEELER ON THE TOXIC UNIVERSITY: ZOMBIE LEADERSHIP, ACADEMIC ROCK STARS, AND NEOLIBERAL IDEOLOGY, BY JOHN SMYTH
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(Times Higher Education - August 10, 2017)

Book of the week: A cancerous, consumer-driven capitalism has weakened higher education, says David Wheeler

In the recent UK general election more than 60 per cent of the 18- to 24-year-olds who voted supported Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. It seems safe to assume that his post-austerity platform, which included a signature commitment to abolishing university tuition fees, now forms a credible alternative to the economic assumptions that have dominated British politics for nearly four decades.

Neatly bookending this momentous political development were two other events. In early May, the University of Manchester announced 171 job cuts, of which 140 were to be academic posts. Meanwhile, less than a month after the election, the apparently rehabilitated and irrepressible Michael Gove weighed in to defend tuition fees by saying “It’s wrong if people who don’t go to university find that they have to pay more in taxation to support those who do.”

It is doubtful whether John Smyth could have hoped for a more auspicious political context to illustrate the salience of the arguments contained in his latest polemic.

The central thesis of this well-constructed and well-referenced book is that in recent decades higher education policy – in common with much else that matters in human existence – has come to be shaped by neoliberalism’s blind and evidence-free prescriptions. As many commentators now assert, the real economy – which depends on cohesive social relations, humanism and respect for ecological integrity – has been usurped by a form of speculative, consumer-driven financial capitalism that may be divorced from reality but that nevertheless continues to dominate political discourse and, by extension, the governance of our institutions, including universities.

Apparently even the International Monetary Fund now believes that the virtues of neo-liberalism have been oversold because of the manifest social and economic failings of austerity. And yet such is the hold that even effete economic theories have on our collective mind-share, we seem unable to shake off their assumptions, attendant coercive rules and required behaviours, however negative and obviously damaging their effects.

Smyth describes the pernicious effect of fears peddled by politicians, policy elites and of course the eponymous “zombie leaders” of our universities, whom he accuses of slavishly adopting consumerist systems of rankings, metrics and reporting systems in order to demonstrate global competitiveness and thereby achieve reputational gain.

The price to be paid by individual academics for this institutionalised management by fear is significant. Smyth refers to the phenomenon of Pathological Organisational Dysfunction in our institutions of higher learning – a development others have described as “evil” (John Gatto) and “entering the mouth of hell” (Heather Höpfl).

He asserts that the emergence of non-ethical university leadership can be explained by an intrinsic logic framed by neoliberal assumptions. The same reasoning that allows the University of Manchester to try to prematurely terminate 140 academic careers also allowed the emergence of informal performance criteria at Imperial College London that were implicated in the suicide of toxicologist Stefan Grimm in 2014 – a tragic story retold in some detail in this book. It is the same amoral logic that has encouraged the emergence of an underclass of university teachers with no job security and no prospect of embarking on a research career.

A recurring and troubling theme in The Toxic University is Smyth’s observation that many in the academy are colluding in the new order that has overtaken our universities: “the enemy is within and we have all become complicit in managing our own decline”. He describes the resignation and sometimes schizophrenic behaviour of academics who go along with spurious systems of measurement and ranking in the forlorn hope of minor preferment or simply to be left alone to pursue their passions in the dwindling time left to them when they are not teaching or involved in administration.

Smyth seeks to explain the apparent collusion of academics by advancing a theory of class relations within universities, noting that there is a “growing separation between those who do the work, and those who lay claim to its outcomes or products”. But in this case the resulting class system is not based on traditional notions of ownership, but on who controls knowledge and its dissemination. Senior administrators and their public relations departments, “academic rock stars” and those in the academic administrative ranks tend to dominate those who do the work, whether as regular research-active academics or members of the aforementioned underclass that does half the teaching in most of the English-speaking world.

Rather than applying a classical Marxist analysis, Smyth prefers definitions of class based on John Holloway’s notion of dignity or at least the “negation of humiliation”, which then leads to a debate around insubordination and struggle. As a self-identifying critical social theorist, he anchors his perspective in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and others. Among several more contemporary theorists he references the work of French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in arguing for the critical importance of reflection and the emergence of a social realisation that “something is going wrong” before effective resistance can occur.

Fleeting thoughts are offered about what forms insubordination and resistance might take: “The starting point for contesting the neoliberal university resides in disavowal – that is to say, we need to stop deluding ourselves into believing that we need to continue endorsing stupid ideas.”

Some helpful biological analogies are offered for those who enjoy mental models as a context for change: John McMurtry’s concept of “cancerous capitalism” and Michael Hudson’s “financial parasites” both seem to invite surgical responses. Clearly, Smyth is advocating resistance, and he provides examples of a number of tactics that may be deployed in this regard, based on his knowledge of organisational theory, the work of Karl Weick and others. Academics are encouraged to be courageous and to challenge authority – although it is noted that the price of perceived disloyalty to an institution can be severe. Reclaiming the notion of academic citizenship and replacing competition with collegiality would help. But there is not much in this book that would act as a blueprint for fundamental reform, revolutionary or incremental.

Despite the absence of a roadmap for change, one of the strengths of The Toxic University is the inclusion of a comprehensive and yet mercifully brief review of critiques of the contemporary university. Smyth offers a helpful synthesis of more than a hundred works describing one or more of the following phenomena: “damage, despair, violence, and sense of loss”; “the rising tide of the marketised, corporate, managed, entrepreneurial, adaptive administrative, or neoliberal university”; “rampant confusion and loss of way”; and finally “attempts at reclamation, reinvention, reimagination, and recovery from this ill-conceived experiment”.

A fully developed theory and practice of reinvention remains to be written, but this is a helpful, if somewhat expensive, primer.

David Wheeler is chairman of the International Higher Education Group and former vice-chancellor of Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia.

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20. FAKE NEWS IS BAD. BUT FAKE HISTORY IS EVEN WORSE | Natalie Nougayrède
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(The Guardian - 4 August 2017)

From Turkey to China, strongmen rewrite the past to suit their ends. But democracies are not immune to this revisionism

On 22 July, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán stood before university students and delivered a speech titled “Will Europe belong to Europeans?” It contained rambling passages about how a “Soros plan” was in place to bring in “hundreds of thousands of migrants every year – if possible, a million – to the territory of the European Union from the Muslim world”. The aim was to transform the continent into “a new, Islamised Europe”. This, Orbán argued, was what lay behind “Brussels’ continuous and stealthy withdrawal of powers from the nation states”. Orbán has form when it comes to this kind of paranoid vision. He’s an authoritarian populist who has made a habit of stoking xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment. He eagerly amplifies far-right conspiracy theories about the Christian majority being threatened by demographic “replacement”. His message isn’t just fake news about the present, however. It comes laced with historical distortion.

    Orbán's message isn’t just fake news about the present. It comes laced with historical distortion

“Not since the treaty of Trianon”, he gloated, “has our nation been as close as it is today to regaining its confidence and vitality” – a reference to the post-first world war treaty that deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its territory. Orbán’s guiding idea is that Hungary must seek redress for historical humiliations. The suggestion is that, as his government clashes with the EU on migration quotas, it is avenging grievances rooted in the 20th century. Orbán’s manipulations go further, and involve completely rewriting dark chapters of the past. He’s on the record as saying Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian leader who cooperated with the Nazis, was an “exceptional statesman”.

Of course, he’s not alone in twisting history to further his political goals. In Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, school books have been modified to de-emphasise Ataturk, the founder of the secular republic. It’s all part of an effort to reverse that legacy and glorify the Ottoman past, as Erdoğan carves out ever more powers for himself.

Controlling memory is at the heart of the Putin regime in Russia. Not only has Stalin been rehabilitated, with new monuments built to honour him across the country, but historians and human rights activists who work to document Stalinist crime have come under political pressure. Some, like Yury Dmitriyev, have been tried on trumped-up charges. And rewriting the Soviet past doesn’t just serve domestic political purposes. Negating the crimes of Soviet occupation in central and eastern Europe, and excusing the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact with the Nazis, provides justification for Moscow reclaiming its “zone of influence”.

In Xi Jinping’s China, any mention of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution or of the Tiananmen square massacre is stamped out because it’s seen as a challenge to Communist party rule. Collective amnesia is what the regime seeks on issues that risk undermining its legitimacy. It’s not enough to throw dissidents in prison or censor information; the past is purged.

And while it’s tempting to think the rewriting of history is something found exclusively in illiberal or dictatorial systems, it has increasingly become a feature of democracies. Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw last month strove to cast Poland’s historical struggle for freedom and independence as a “civilisational” battle for family values, “tradition” and “God”, rather than an aspiration to democracy. The narrative entirely left out of the rich and varied political tapestry that gave rise to the solidarity movement. In a strange twist, Trump also drew a parallel between the threat Islamist terrorism poses to “the west” and the “danger” of “bureaucracy and regulation”. His nativist vision of the west as an embattled fortress of Christian nations in cultural danger reflected not only a personal political credo, but a wider attempt to rewrite the history of liberal democracies and the principles they are meant to uphold.

    He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past
    George Orwell

In Britain, Brexiteers have proven willing to supply their own version of history. Nostalgia for the days of empire and their “swashbuckling spirit” comes accompanied with the mantra that the European project was a tyrannical straitjacket all along. Britain never had a say in anything the EU decided, and now it has a chance to “free” itself, so the story goes. Never mind that Britain was at the table, a full and influential member of a club its citizens and its economy have benefited from. Fanaticism alters not only the perception of current realities (as negotiations limp forward), it also adjusts the past to suit one set of beliefs.

George Orwell’s 1984 contains a well-known phrase about history and its importance: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past”. We worry rightly about the impact of fake news, but today’s nationalist passions are even more deeply rooted in the distortion of history, which citizens in many countries lap up despite the fact it is poison. The past has always been a battleground. The 20th century showed to what extremes state control over memory could go. Primo Levi, who experienced the nightmare of Nazi concentration camps, once wrote that the entire history of the Reich “can be re-read as a war against memory”.
My fellow Americans, it’s time to intervene in our failed state | Moustafa Bayoumi
Read more

One of the blessings of living in a democracy is that researchers, students, journalists and citizens at large can all access the past without having to subject themselves to any form of centralised, censoring control. The philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has described this as “one of the most inalienable freedoms, alongside the freedom to think and express oneself”. Yet the security of memory in democratic societies may not be as assured as we think. Some politicians want to lead us in a march towards forgetfulness. But that way lies a world of senselessness and deceit. Learning about history, and being able to question some of the narratives advanced in the name of politics is as important as knowing where to get reliable news. “Can history save us from ourselves?” asked the historian Timothy Snyder at a recent conference on the nation state and the many falsehoods politicians attach to it. Perhaps it can.

• Natalie Nougayrède is a Guardian leader writer, columnist and foreign affairs commentator

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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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