SACW - 12 Sept 2017 | Pakistan: Hazara killings / India: Gauri Lankesh murder; sit in by NREGA Workers / Rohingyas / Turkey: Erdogan rides on / Burma: The Hateful Monk / North Korea: War not the answer / In capitalist Russia, a socialist garden flourishes

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Tue Sep 12 06:26:54 EDT 2017


South Asia Citizens Wire - 12 Sept 2017 - No. 2951 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. India: on Day 2 of 5 Day Sit-in by NREGA Workers - Workers Demand Fair Wages and Timely Payment
2. India: P.A.D.S. statement against Lankesh’s murder
3. Noted Indian Journalist Gauri Lankesh Assassinated at her Home in Bangalore - Statements by citizen’s groups
4. Anarcho-syndicalism, Internationalism and The Federación Anarquista Ibérica in Spain
5. Women, Violence, and the Subject of Feminism | David Spreen
6. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: National Herald speaks to Harsh Mander, organiser of Aman Biradari on his Karwan-e-Mohabbat peace caravan
 - India: Are we really prepared for a Uniform Civil Code? | Faizan Mustafa
 - The harrowing prospects of soft Hindutva | Kuldip Nayar
 - Like the Rohingya, Indians too were once driven out of Myanmar | Shoaib Daniyal
 - Gauri Lankesh, fundamentally | Jawed Naqvi
 - The Hateful Monk (Gavin Jacobson / NYRB)
 - Hindi Article-Gurmeet Ram Rahim: Religion as social political enterprise
 - India: Caste runs deep doesnt matter if you are senior Indian Meteorological Department scientist files
 - India: Solution is elsewhere - editorial in The Indian Express regarding the Supreme Court saying cow vigilantism “must stop”
 - India: Supreme Court is wrong in ruling that Gujarat need not pay for shrines destroyed in 2002
 - India: “Hindu terror units killed Gauri Lankesh” says her lawyer B T Venkatesh
 - A brave journalist falls - Editorial in Dawn on the murder of Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh
 - Announcement: "Gauri Ke Naam" - an evening of poetry and songs (15 Sept 2017, New Delhi)

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Pakistani Journalist Criticizes 'Little Substance' In Trump's Address On Afghanistan
8. Pakistan: Hazara killings - Editorial in Dawn
9. There is a Rohingya in all of us | Shiv Visvanathan
10. I know who is behind my death | Hamid Mir 
11. Virago, not martyr - The importance of Gauri Lankesh | Mukul Kesavan
12. India: Why Gauri Lankesh was killed | Harish Khare
13. India: Gauri Lankesh was lionhearted in defending socialist, secularist values – which won’t be silenced by gunshots | HS Shiva Prakash
14. NYT editorial : The Murder of an Indian Journalist
15. Nip in bud: Threats to secular writers should not go unpunished - Editorial, The Times of India
16. State of intellectual freedom | Prathibha Nandakumar
17. 'My friend and first love, Gauri Lankesh was the epitome of amazing grace' | Chidanand Rajghatta
18. India: When the Constitution and religious laws collide | Arif Mohammed Khan
19. India: In defence of the individual | Apoorvanand 
20. Ironically, Erdogan has done exactly what the failed coup wanted to do in Turkey | Pete Weatherby QC
21. Burma: The Hateful Monk | Gavin Jacobson
22. Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’ | Emma Brockes
23. Kate Millett obituary | Julie Bindel
24. North Korea: why war is not the answer | Kate Hudson
25. In capitalist Russia, a socialist garden flourishes | Fred Weir

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1. INDIA: ON DAY 2 OF 5 DAY SIT-IN BY NREGA WORKERS - WORKERS DEMAND FAIR WAGES AND TIMELY PAYMENT
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Thousands of NREGA workers from at least eleven states assembled again at Jantar Mantar in Delhi today for the second day of a five-day dharna called by NREGA Sangharsh Morcha from 11-15 Sept 2017.
http://sacw.net/article13463.html

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2. INDIA: P.A.D.S. STATEMENT AGAINST LANKESH’S MURDER
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Well known Kanada journalist Gouri Lankesh was murdered outside her house in Bangaluru on 5th September. Like the murder of Prof MM Kalburgi in 2015, the killers came on a two wheeler, and without any warning shot her dead at point blank. Spontaneous protests against the murder were held next day in many parts of Karanataka, as well as in many cities outside. Lankesh was a trenchant critic of Hindutva politics and did not mince words in her writings against its majoritarian authoritarianism.
http://sacw.net/article13462.html

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3. NOTED INDIAN JOURNALIST GAURI LANKESH ASSASSINATED AT HER HOME IN BANGALORE - STATEMENTS BY CITIZEN’S GROUPS
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National Alliance of People’s Movements is deeply shocked and shattered at the cowardly and cold-blooded murder of well-known journalist, editor and fearless firebrand activist, Gauri Lankesh who, time and again, locked horns with divisive, communal and casteist forces, in particular the right-wing Hindutva brigade. We have enough reason to believe that her political assassination is a direct consequence of her publicly expressed progressive positions as well as the lack of conviction of the murderers responsible for the calculated political killings of M M Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar, even after months and years!
http://sacw.net/article13459.html

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4. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM, INTERNATIONALISM AND THE FEDERACIÓN ANARQUISTA IBÉRICA IN SPAIN
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At her speech at the last interwar congress of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in 1938, Emma Goldman pointed out how “anarchists ... were a sore in the eye of an entire school of Marxists and liberals.”[1] Goldman’s remark still applies for the postwar era as the Spanish anarchist movement has been vilified by both Marxist and liberal historians.
http://sacw.net/article13394.html

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5. Women, Violence, and the Subject of Feminism | David Spreen
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“Can political violence be feminist?” is the question behind Patricia Melzer’s exciting study of women within the West German militant Left of the 1970s.
http://sacw.net/article13461.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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India: National Herald speaks to Harsh Mander, organiser of Aman Biradari on his Karwan-e-Mohabbat peace caravan
India: Are we really prepared for a Uniform Civil Code? | Faizan Mustafa
The harrowing prospects of soft Hindutva | Kuldip Nayar
Like the Rohingya, Indians too were once driven out of Myanmar | Shoaib Daniyal
Gauri Lankesh, fundamentally | Jawed Naqvi
The Hateful Monk (Gavin Jacobson / NYRB)
Hindi Article-Gurmeet Ram Rahim: Religion as social political enterprise
India: Caste runs deep doesnt matter if you are senior Indian Meteorological Department scientist files
India: Solution is elsewhere - editorial in The Indian Express regarding the Supreme Court saying cow vigilantism “must stop”
India: Supreme Court is wrong in ruling that Gujarat need not pay for shrines destroyed in 2002
India: “Hindu terror units killed Gauri Lankesh” says her lawyer B T Venkatesh
A brave journalist falls - Editorial in Dawn on the murder of Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh
Announcement: "Gauri Ke Naam" - an evening of poetry and songs (15 Sept 2017, New Delhi)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. PAKISTANI JOURNALIST CRITICIZES 'LITTLE SUBSTANCE' IN TRUMP'S ADDRESS ON AFGHANISTAN
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(NPR - August 22, 2017)

Heard on All Things Considered

NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid about President Trump's address Monday night on the path forward in Afghanistan and the broader region.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Our next guest warns against seeing Afghanistan strictly through a military lens. Ahmed Rashid is author of such books as "Taliban" and "Descent Into Chaos." In June in the New York Review of Books, he wrote about more troop increases for Afghanistan as a recipe for disaster. He spoke with us from Madrid via Skype. And I asked Rashid if he found anything at all encouraging in the Trump speech.

AHMED RASHID: Well, I think the biggest factor has been that he remains committed to Afghanistan, an open-ended commitment, which is a very good thing. And I think the Afghans breathed a sigh of relief that he did not take advice of some of his right-wing advisers who wanted him to pull out. That's the first thing. But then when we get to the substance of what he wants to do, frankly, there was very little substance.

He started off by saying no nation building. And there was, you know, all these issues that remain that Afghanistan - the political economic crisis in Kabul, the economic crisis. Will the U.S. continue giving up to 10 billion to 12 billion a year for the budget and for the army? The regional crisis - there was no mention - apart from Pakistan, there was no mention of the interference by many regional countries. For example, not just Pakistan is hosting the Taliban, but so are Iran and Russia.

SIEGEL: Yes. You write of the risk of the government in Kabul collapsing. It's a partnership that was brokered by the U.S. after an election in which each presidential candidate said he was robbed by the other. There are daily protests that you describe in the capital. There have been some big terrorist bombings.

Given that lay of the land in Afghanistan today, is there anything that the U.S. could actually do to make a collapse of the government less likely? Or would the money go straight through the hands of the government into other people's pockets if we spent more on the country?

RASHID: Well, the fact is that, you know, this government in Kabul was actually the brainchild and the creation of Secretary of State John Kerry. He held the hands of the Afghan leaders, and they formed a coalition government. Now, that kind of hand-holding is necessary once again. But we don't have a diplomatic team in the U.S. who could carry that out. There is still no U.S. ambassador in Kabul. So it's very difficult to see how the U.S. is going to move forward on resolving some of these very critical issues quite apart from the war effort.

SIEGEL: Donald Trump was very critical of Pakistan for offering safe haven to terror groups, both Afghan and Pakistani. Can you imagine U.S. pressure or the threat of withholding aid leading the Pakistanis to crack down on, say, the Haqqani network?

RASHID: Well, certainly Pakistan has resisted all attempts so far by the U.S., by former administrations to crack down on the Afghan Taliban who are living in Pakistan, which of course includes the Haqqani network. And certainly Pakistan was expecting pressure again in Trump's speech. But I think what has come as a bit of a shock was President Trump announcing that India is now a strategic partner of the U.S. and inviting India into Afghanistan.

Now, one of the main reasons why Pakistan has hedged its bets and maintained links with the Taliban is because it wants to keep India out of Afghanistan. And here was the U.S. president inviting India into Afghanistan. What people hoped for and expected was that the U.S. would try and broker some kind of talks between India and Pakistan so that they could get over this competition and help the Afghan government defeat the Taliban.

SIEGEL: And when you hear President Trump swear off nation building and say that that's not what the U.S. military is all about, does that strike you as a - well, as a serious negative for Afghanistan? Is it a conceivable positive that without the U.S. there, more homegrown institutions might thrive? What reactions would you have to that?

RASHID: Well, unfortunately, what we've seen in the last two years because Afghanistan was literally abandoned in the last year of the Obama administration and of course we've spent eight, nine months waging for Trump's strategy to emerge - what we've seen is that, you know, institutions have broken down. Things that were doing very well like education, health are being run by the government. So many of them have packed up or have been attacked by the Taliban.

As we know, there have been tens of thousands of educated Afghans who fled Afghanistan last year, abandoning their jobs and, as it were, giving up with Afghanistan. So nation building is as much a message of hope as it is a practical issue. And by saying we are not into nation building, you are denying the Afghans that hope that, you know, their country can improve.

SIEGEL: Journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, thanks a lot for talking with us today.

RASHID: Thank you.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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8. PAKISTAN: HAZARA KILLINGS - EDITORIAL IN DAWN
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(Dawn, September 12, 2017)

IN the violence against civilians in the country, the repeated targeting of Hazaras in Balochistan stands out as a particularly grim failure of the state. On Sunday, yet another family of the Shia community was targeted in Kuchlak as they were travelling to Quetta. Four individuals, including a child, were killed in the attack. What followed is also distressingly predictable: the assailants rode off on a motorcycle unimpeded; security forces arrived at the scene after the gunmen had fled; and hasty search operations in the immediate aftermath of the killing failed to lead to the attackers. Meanwhile, the Hazara people have been left to mourn more deaths in a seemingly never-ending descent into fear and terror. To be sure, the vast physical expanse of Balochistan and the sparse population of the province mean that protecting all the people all the time would challenge even the best-resourced, most-committed security forces in the world. But there have been several such incidents in Balochistan; they are clearly linked to a flawed security policy in the region and the failure of the political leadership. The Hazaras, as indeed the general population in Balochistan, will not be safe until the state changes its approach to security in the region.

Yet, delay in long-term changes should not stand in the way of short-term improvements where possible. The enemies of the Hazara people are a relatively narrow band of militants on the militancy spectrum. Among the groups likely to attack the Hazaras, active militants are estimated to be relatively small. So while there is no possibility of physically protecting every Hazara, the state can use its significant intelligence and security apparatuses to identify and progressively shut down groups targeting the community. Further, while the state has pointed repeatedly at external sponsors of militancy being responsible for terrorism in Balochistan, the networks used are invariably local. So is preventing violence against Hazaras not a priority for the state, or are lessons that ought to be learned not being learned because there is little accountability? Finally, the Balochistan government, weak and sidelined as it may be in security matters, needs to take a stand. When it comes to the Hazaras, there has long been a suspicion that the political class is indifferent to their plight. The provincial government needs to demonstrate empathy and concern for all its people.

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9. THERE IS A ROHINGYA IN ALL OF US | Shiv Visvanathan
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(The Hindu, September 06, 2017)

By contemplating deportation of the hapless refugees, India undermines itself

The timing could not have been more immaculately disastrous. At a time when Rohingya are being forced to flee the violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, in the Supreme Court this week the Centre refused to revise its stand on deporting Rohinya immigrants in India. It was in effect adhering to its position taken on August 9, when the Minister of State for Home Affairs informed Parliament that 40,000 Rohingya were to be deported. With that, the idea of India, the India of democracy and hospitality disappeared in a single stroke. A dream of India disappeared in a single moment. The marginal life of the Rohingya became a greater nightmare. The Government of India has returned to an idea of hard state, dropping its dreams of compassion, care and civility. Behind the tragedy of the decision will be a nit-picking bureaucracy and the security think tanks, convinced that an aspirational India does not need a defeated people like the Rohingya.

Most persecuted minority

In many ways, the Rohingya represent “the last man” of international society that Gandhi talked about. They are the world’s most persecuted minority. They are Muslims, belonging to the Sunni sect, scattered mainly over the Rakhine state of Myanmar. Harassed by the Myanmar Army and forced to serve as slave labour, they have also been systematically persecuted by the Buddhist majority. The persecution of the Rohingya also highlights the silence of Aung San Suu Kyi, destroying another myth of ethics and human rights. A woman whose campaign for human rights won her the Peace Nobel now stands embarrassingly silent in case her broader political strategies are affected. The dispensability of the Rohingya is clear and so is the callousness of the nation state. India can no longer criticise the West for being hostile to Syrian and Sudanese refugees.

One thing is clear. No Nehruvian state, or even regime of Indira Gandhi, would have made such a decision. Both upheld the principle of hospitality, of the openness of borders. Jawaharlal Nehru was open to Tibet and courageously invited the Dalai Lama to make a home here, and Indira Gandhi played host to refugees from the then East Pakistan, ignoring the threats of tough people such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

The Rohingya situation has been bleak for years. The turning point was the attitude of the Burmese military junta which cracked down on them in 1982, contending that Rohingya as late comers were not part of the original ancestors of Burmese society. Denied an autonomous cultural status, they lost all claims to the entitlements of citizenship. They were denied not only access to health, education but also any claim to the idea of citizenship.

A slow exodus

Persecuted by the army and the Buddhist majority, they began a slow exodus over India, Bangladesh, spreading to States such as Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, moving as far as Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Their exodus has once again a cynical side to it as agents arranged for their travel. These touts of international suffering arranged for their travel at exorbitant rates. The Rohingya became temporary boat people as Bangladesh shut its borders on them piously condemning them as drug peddlers. The Rohingya then attempted to cross into Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia only to realise that fellow Islamic nations had little sympathy for them. The no-welcome sign was clear and categorical. Each state would react piously, claiming to have fulfilled its humanitarian quota. It was also realistically clear that unlike the Syrians, the Rohingya, as a tiny speck of the refugee population would hardly be front page news for a sufficient length of time. At the most their memories would survive in a few PhD theses in international relations. The refugee has always been an enticing topic for PhDs.

In fact, Pope Francis’s statement that the “campaign of terror” against the Rohingya must cease fell on deaf ears. Sadly, India missed the leadership and compassion of a Mother Teresa. She would have stepped out and offered some care and relief to them, stirring the Indian middle class into some acts of caring.

The odd thing is that the genocide, the vulnerability of such a people is often lost in bureaucratic issues of legal and political status. It is not clear whether Rohingya are refugees or illegal migrants. As refugees they are entitled to some care; as illegal migrants they become subject to harassment and exploitation. Refugees become a target for an informal economy of bonded labour.

Union Home Minister Kiren Rijiju already sounded the warning signals in response to a question in the Rajya Sabha. He was clear that the Rohingya were illegal migrants. He was cited as claiming in an interview that the Rohingya “have no basis to live here. Anybody who is an illegal migrant will be deported.” Yet one wonders whether in terms of humanitarian law and the conventions of the UN, Mr. Rijiju is right. This is a group that is threatened with continuous persecution, whose homes are unsafe, whose livelihoods have been destroyed. To be forced to return to Myanmar would only subject them to harassment, ethnic persecution and a genocidal future.
Being human

One is grateful that the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which often plays the Rip Van Winkle of human rights, responded quickly. On August 18, it issued a notice to the government over its plan to deport Rohingya staying illegally in India, asking the government to report in four weeks.

The Commission added hopefully that the Supreme Court had declared that fundamental rights are applicable to all regardless of whether they are citizens of India. Yet such appeals to rights and humanitarianism cut little ice in today’s bureaucracy which is obsessed with security issues and content to raise the bogey of terrorism and law and order when it comes to such a helpless people. The NHRC came up with a memorable line that Rohingya refugees “are no doubt foreign nationals but they are human beings.”

It is clear that the everydayness of Rohingya life must be miserable. They face the challenge of survival and the prospect of persecution if they return to Myanmar. One need not hide under legal excuses. What India confronts is a case of ethics, a challenge to its understanding of citizenship and freedom. If we abandon the Rohingya, we abandon the idea of India as a home of refugees and hospitality. A country which offered a home to the Parsis, the Tibetans, the Afghans and the Jews cannot turn a little minority of helpless people back. One hopes civil society protests, challenging the indifference of the state. It is not just a question of saving a beleaguered people, it is question of saving the soul of India. The idea of India is being threatened today. Should civil society remain mute and indifferent? There is a Rohingya in all of us.

Shiv Visvanathan is Professor, Jindal Global Law School and Director, Centre for Study of Knowledge Systems, O.P. Jindal Global University

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10. I KNOW WHO IS BEHIND MY DEATH
by Hamid Mir 
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(The Indian Express - September 7, 2017)

Gauri Lankesh received three bullets in her body and died. I got seven bullets, but survived. I know I'm really lucky to be alive. Gauri's terrible death made me search for other similarities -- perhaps, I want her friends and family, my readers, anyone, someone, to know that I understand the pain and the grief and the anger, all twisted into one emotion, that follows when Death comes calling.

Journalists pay tributes to journalist Gauri Lankesh, in Mumbai on Wednesday. PTI Photo

Journalist Gauri Lankesh was very much aware that her days were numbered but she never named her killers. She knew her enemies did not belong to a particular group or party but to a mindset and ideology. Her brutal murder on September 5 in Bangalore has sounded an alarm bell for journalists all over the globe, that journalism is becoming a most dangerous profession — that too in the world’s largest democracy.

I never knew her personally. Some of my colleagues and friends asked me, ‘Who killed her?’ The question reminded me of the last editorial of the late Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge who was assassinated in Colombo in 2009. He was the editor of the ‘Sunday Leader ‘newspaper and a thorn in the flesh of then Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse ,who was furious over his criticism of the human rights violations committed by Sri Lankan security forces against Tamil civilians in the war against the LTTE.

Lasantha was threatened many times but he refused to accept dictation from the powerful establishment. Some pro-establishment colleagues sometimes called him a “traitor”. That’s when he wrote the editorial which said that “when finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me”.

This editorial was published after his murder. Eight years have passed. Mahinda Rajapakse is no more President of Sri Lanka but Wickrematunge’s family is still waiting for justice.

The same was the case of Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya. The Russians weren’t happy with her reporting from Chechnya. I met her in Chechnya in 2004 when I was detained by the Russian Army and she tried to help me. She was shot near her home in Moscow in 2006. She received four bullets. It was not a secret that Anna Politkovskaya was a prime target of the Russian establishment. President Vladimir Putin was hauled over the coals for some time over her death, but nothing happened to him. Three suspects were arrested but later acquitted by the courts.

I also named three people as my possible killers only a few days before an attempt was made on my life in Karachi in 2014. I received six bullets in my shoulder, stomach and legs. The seventh bullet grazed my lower back. Two bullets  remain in my body. An Inquiry Commission was set up to investigate the assassination attempt. I was told not to appear before the commission but I decided to speak my mind. I believed it was my right to do so.

So I recorded my statement in front of three Supreme Court judges, not once but twice and produced the best available evidence. Instead of providing me justice the democratically elected government of Nawaz Sharif filed a treason reference against my TV channel, Geo News, because Geo pointed an accusatory finger towards powerful elements within Pakistani establishment, including the ISI.

Gauri Lankesh received three bullets in her body and died. I got seven bullets, but survived. I know I’m really lucky to be alive. Gauri’s terrible death made me search for other similarities — perhaps, I want her friends and family, my readers, anyone, someone, to know that I understand the pain and the grief and the anger, all twisted into one emotion, that follows when Death comes calling.

Gauri Lankesh’s father was a journalist. My father was a columnist and a teacher of journalism in Punjab University, Lahore. She was declared anti-establishment, by her establishment, and a traitor. I also faced the same allegations.

There is one big difference. I can’t claim that democracy and media is very strong in Pakistan but Gauri Lankesh lived and worked and was a citizen of the biggest democracy of the world. So what happened? How did “they” dare target her? Don’t “they” care what Gauri’s colleagues and friends in the world’s largest democracy will say? Aren’t “they” worried that “they” will be exposed? And what about the collective democratic conscience and pride of the Indian media? How do they deal with this direct challenge to their credibility?

It’s not difficult to determine that who is behind the assassination of Gauri Lankesh. Just read her article published in ‘The Wire’ in May 2017. She pointed out that “Karnataka has a long history of attacks on the freedom of press”. She criticized several Congress, BJP and Janata Dal MLAs who had joined hands to suppress media freedom.

She fought against the double standards of the powerful ruling elite. She never spared her own community. She wrote, “with the number of Kannada news channels increasing, things are becoming murkier…They are just as aggressive in shouting down participants with a different point of view, even more patriotic than self-proclaimed nationalist(s) and are prone to exaggeration while breaking news every minute of the day”.

According to noted Kannada writer K.Marulisdappa, who knew Gauri Lankesh from her childhood “she was taking a bold stand against the Sangh Parivar here”. He added that “the same people who killed Dabholkar,Pansare and Kulburgi have now killed Gauri Lankesh”.It is also important to note that Gauri Lankesh was held guilty of defamation in 2016 for an article she wrote in 2008 about the alleged corruption of two BJP leaders.

Karnataka’s chief minister Siddaramaiah condemned Lankesh’s murder as “an assassination of democracy”, but continues to face a hatred campaign on social media even after losing her life. Some people tried to link her death with that of Kashmiri militant Burhan Wani. Ashish Singh, who is followed by prime minister Narendra Modi on Twitter, tweeted, “After Burhan Wani, Gauri Lankesh also killed, how sad”.

Gauri Lankesh’s brutal death is a sad day in the life of the Indian media as well as the media across South Asia. I, a Pakistani journalist, am deeply saddened and angry about the ultimate sacrifice that a fellow journalist from India has paid. She was fighting against religious extremism as we are. This ideology is a common enemy of journalists all over the world. According to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), Pakistan and India are among the world’s ten most dangerous countries in which to work as a journalist.

This is a matter of shame for both countries. Impunity is becoming a dangerous way of unannounced censorship in South Asia. Impunity will generate more corruption in our countries. If we want to get rid of corruption and extremism we have to support all those journalists who raise their voices against these evils. That is why the killers of Gauri Lankesh need to be exposed. When they are, no establishment in any part of the world will dare kill journalists like Wickrematunge and Politkovskaya who named their killers when they were alive.

Gauri’s last writings and tweets tell us, “I know who is behind my death.” Whether or not her killers are convicted, it is our collective responsibility to find them and name and shame them.

Stop this culture of impunity against the media. Salute Gauri Lankesh.
Hamid Mir is one of Pakistan’s best known journalists and anchors a programme on Geo News called ‘Capital Talk.’ He tweets @HamidMirPak

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11. VIRAGO, NOT MARTYR - THE IMPORTANCE OF GAURI LANKESH
Mukul Kesavan
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(The Telegraph, September 10 , 2017)

It's hard to know why some deaths affect us more than others. Most people appalled by Gauri Lankesh's assassination neither knew her, nor even knew of her till she died. She was the editor of a tiny and declining Kannada tabloid. Yet the news of her assassination went viral and inside a day or two there were memorial meetings protesting her death all over the country. There was one at the Press Club in Delhi, for example, that was massively attended.

In some quarters this led to complaints of partiality and special pleading. There was a newspaper report from Assam that pointed out that 32 journalists had been murdered in the state since 1987 and no notice had been taken of these killings by India's Delhi-centric news organizations. If the villain here was metropolitan snobbery, other critiques blamed discriminatory coverage on the tendency of anglophone Indians to reserve their sympathy for one of their own.

Before she became the editor of a bhasha tabloid, Gauri Lankesh had worked as a journalist in the English language press and she continued to write columns in English to subsidize her Kannada weekly. The English press might have shallow local roots but it has a pan-Indian presence and it's not unreasonable to point out that being connected with it creates a network of familiarity and recognition that might be missing when a tragedy occurs outside the boundaries of this print community. And since English in India is closely connected with class, this empathy might have something to do with the powerful sense of belonging that holds this all-India middle-class together.

But these criticisms weren't only intended as sociological insights; they were also political arguments. They were political arguments aimed at discrediting the outrage that Gauri Lankesh's murder had occasioned by characterizing it as selective and biased. There was more to this bias than class and language; after all, India's most successful and widely watched English television news channels like Times Now and the Republic were, at the time, often preoccupied by news other than Gauri Lankesh's death. The adjacent argument, implied and explicit, was that the outrage about Lankesh had more to do with her vehemently anti- Hindutva position in life than the tragedy of her death.

The anglophone New Right argued that Gauri Lankesh's death had been weaponized by liberals and the left. Instead of waiting for the criminal investigation to catch the murderer, Narendra Modi's enemies had jumped the gun by laying the blame for Lankesh's murder at the door of Hindu communal parties and organizations. It isn't hard to show that 'jumping the gun' is something of an Indian pastime, but that would be whataboutery and unworthy of a moment as tragic as this one. It might be more useful to examine the patterns of violence, callousness and impunity that make majoritarian organizations suspects in a murder of this sort.

The executions of rationalists and free thinkers politically hostile to majoritarian beliefs and practices in Maharashtra and Karnataka over the last four years has led to members of two militant Hindutva organizations, the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and its parent body, the Sanatan Sanstha, being charged with or linked to these murders by the designated investigative agencies, variously the CBI, the CID and the SIT. No one has been convicted but given the politics of the victims and the identity of the suspects in every one of these cases, an extraterrestrial might be forgiven for believing that the majoritarian right has a hand in these killings. Given that Gauri Lankesh was executed in exactly this way, it isn't surprising that the needle of suspicion points in a specific direction.

Matters of guilt can only be settled by the courts but the callousness of the Hindutva right towards murders by vigilantes and others is more easily demonstrated. The spectacle of ministers, members of parliament, chief ministers and various office bearers of the sangh parivar blaming the victims and dissembling on behalf of the accused in the aftermath of a lynching is a familiar sight. The rash of lynchings and thrashings in recent times has created an environment where communal militias seem like arms of the State.

The prime minister's speaking silences punctuated by belated and perfunctory admonitions have done nothing to clear the air. On the contrary, his more feral admirers have begun to vie with one another to win laurels in the vileness stakes. After Gauri Lankesh's assassination and the protests that followed, Nikhil Dadhich, a businessman from Gujarat, tweeted this: 'A b**ch died a dog's death and her pups began to howl in tune.'

Three years into Narendra Modi's prime ministership most people are inured to the excesses of his followers on social media; what still has the power to shock is the fact that the prime minister of India follows this man on Twitter. What's worse, in the aftermath of the uproar caused by Dadhich's tweet, he continued to follow him. In a way this is unsurprising. Four years ago, in 2013, chief minister Modi (as he was then) also used a canine metaphor to explain the regret he felt about the 2002 killings in Gujarat. He said that it was the sort of regret any human being would feel if he were riding in a car driven by someone else that happened to accidentally run over a puppy.

Gauri Lankesh has been killed in a political environment where the State's attitude towards freelance violence has become increasingly permissive. It is a world where the curious locution 'condemnable' has come to indicate that the speaker is about to produce a dangling 'but' that will make it clear that he doesn't, in fact, condemn murders and lynchings unequivocally. In 1937, the Congress came to power in Uttar Pradesh (then called the United Provinces) and managed in two years of rule to alienate Muslim political opinion. This was partly because the party's rank and file was overwhelmingly Hindu and saw in the Congress's ascension an opportunity to settle old disputes about Holi processions and animal sacrifice. In 2017, we're seeing something similar on a pan-Indian scale.

In death, Gauri Lankesh has become a lightning rod for the anxiety that this violence induces. We don't know why some people become causes and not others. Anti-semitism was rife in France's civil and military establishments well before the Dreyfus affair and yet it was Captain Alfred Dreyfus's wrongful conviction and Émile Zola's famous indictment that made it a cause célèbre. There is no bias or injustice to this; history is a contingent business, not an equal opportunity tribunal. It helps the cause if the person being memorialized is as brave and true as Gauri Lankesh but even if it had been someone less worthy, his death or hers would still have borne witness to an existential menace that threatens the Republic and could consume us all.

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12. INDIA: WHY GAURI LANKESH WAS KILLED | Harish Khare
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(The Tribune, September 8, 2017)

PERHAPS we will never know who killed Gauri Lankesh, but maybe we can make a reasonable guess as to why she was killed. Or, rather, we can be fairly certain as to why she had to be killed. Come to think of it, there is no mystery to it. Nor anything complicated about it, either. She had to be killed because she had become an eyesore and in our New India, we are no longer inclined to tolerate eyesores. 

Of course, there is the local context. But remember, all politics is local. Outside the limited media fraternity, Gauri Lankesh was not all that well known. On the national stage, she sounded like a very distant and a very small voice in the company of big megaphones. But her voice was indeed heard — and, indeed resented — within the Kanadiga ecosystem of fundamentalism and its political demands. And, this political ecosystem has been experimenting with a new grammar of intimidation and coercion: shut up or be prepared to be simply silenced. An inconvenient voice is jarring — and, unacceptable — to the new overseers of the New India.

It may still be argued that the charioteers of the Hindutva juggernaut need not have bothered themselves with a relatively obscure voice. After all, the Hindutva project is a divinely blessed enterprise and the presumed spiritual and religious nobility of its journey itself is so self-evident that no one has to feel distracted by a few pseudo-secular dissenters. Let them waste their breath and energy, we move on. 

Yet, Gauri Lankesh was very much resented. Voices like her could not be left alone to keep on articulating their dissent. After all, it is the untamed individual voice that is found to be particularly irritating. Even on social media, we generally reserve our most venomous rebukes and scorns for individual voices. How dare these individual voices question the official line? And, the resentment acquires a sharp edge, especially when the autocrat's authority has found it so easy to tame the much bigger corporate media.

Without much effort, the corporate media — print and electronic — has been made to see the wisdom of not annoying the new sultans of the New India. Our new saviours know the nature and extent of resources and deep pockets that enable the corporate media to buy for themselves an unprecedented nationwide presence; and, it is this very vastness that also renders it organisationally and professionally vulnerable to the danda’s gentle poke. In the New India, there is no inhibition about tapping the State instruments and their enormous coercive reach against anyone who does not fall in line — it may be a political leader (rival or ally), a businessman or a journalist. 

The corporate media has eagerly subscribed to the logic of “one nation, one tax, one leader, and one voice”. This logic comes wrapped up in the deshbhakti colours; and, given our perennial conflicts and standoffs with Pakistan and China, we are never short of occasions and provocations to feel good about waving the flag vigorously and, even, menacingly. So much so, after the massively dislocating demonetisation, influential sections of the corporate media had reduced themselves to be the government's unpaid voice.

In fact, it can be suggested that there is a New Media to suit the temperament and expectations of the New India. Never before has the Indian media redefined its role — from someone charged with the obligation to keep a sharp eye on the powers-that-be to a vicious breaker of the Opposition’s ranks and morale. Instead of questioning the government's very doubtful claims — from demonetisation to Doklam — the corporate media has taken it upon itself to shut up the critic and the dissenter. 

The ruling establishment believes, like General Sam Manekshaw, that once it has captured the headquarters (Dacca, Chittagong), the villages will easily give up. But there is resistance in villages. And a Gauri Lankesh mocks at this very controlling strategy. Something has to be done to bring these pockets of resistance to their knees. The regional subedars feel emboldened, empowered by the sultan's licence, to do something about this or that Gauri Lankesh. In her death, Gauri Lankesh becomes a metaphor. 

A million atrocities — and a million mutinies — take place every day across the length and breadth of this vast land. These may be small and insignificant insurgencies and, indeed, rarely make it to the front pages of even the regional press; yet these acts of defiance and anger do take place because the iniquitous local power structure insists on and often manages to extract submission and compliance.

And then, there are millions and millions of citizens who believe in the Old India and its old Nehruvian values and ideas; they may not be able to articulate their thoughts in a shouting debate in television studios, but they do live out the practices of pluralism and secularism in village after village and mohalla after mohalla.

The Gauri Lankesh model gives voice and legitimacy to that tradition of dissent and disagreement and that is why it has to be confronted and dismantled, if necessary, by force. When the famous, the glamorous and the familiar faces on the so-called national television can be tamed or converted, who is this two-bit of a woman, refusing to fall in line! If she refuses to appreciate the great national renewal and monumental progress that New India has brought about, she must be silenced. 

This is a familiar temptation. The itch to silence and control is part of the medieval rites of power and authority. All that Henry II had to do was to whisper aloud “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” and some loyalists took it upon themselves to silent permanently the meddlesome priest, the Archbishop of Canterbury. That, as we know, was in 1170. Since then, the art of getting rid of this or that turbulent priest has been finessed many times over. 

In the modern times, the autocrat has invoked the support and endorsement of the masses as a licence to liquidate the “enemy” of the people — or, anyone who is deemed to stand in the way of “progress”. And now, in this digital age, the new intrusive technology has given the overseers of the New India a sense of robust empowerment about their ability to calibre events and control individuals in even distant places. Little voices, like that of a Gauri Lankesh, will not be allowed to defy. That is why she had to be killed.

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13. INDIA: GAURI LANKESH WAS LIONHEARTED IN DEFENDING SOCIALIST, SECULARIST VALUES – WHICH WON’T BE SILENCED BY GUNSHOTS
by HS Shiva Prakash
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(The Times of India, September 7, 2017)

The murder of Gauri Lankesh, the journalist and social activist, has sent shockwaves around Bengaluru and the country. It has come close on the heels of the murder of rationalist scholar MM Kalburgi two years ago. There is still mystery shrouding the fatal attack on Kalburgi. Before that has been unravelled another similar murder has taken place in the same state of Karnataka. Both these victims of unidentified bullets were upholders of secularism and egalitarianism – and crusaders against cant, convention and superstition.

Kalburgi had spoken to me a couple of days before he was killed. I had known him for years because both of us were students of pre-modern Kannada culture and literature. On rare occasions, we also exchanged notes. Gauri was the daughter of one of my teachers, also a great Kannada writer and journalist, Lankesh. Her father inspired many writers and thinkers of my generation. He innovated prose and poetry and revolutionised Kannada journalism singlehandedly.

Gauri was the symbol of socialist, secularist and humanist values that she inherited from her great father. When he passed away in 2000, she perhaps had no particular reason to take up the mantle and keep alive the unique weekly ‘Lankesh Patrike’ which had played a major influence in directing the culture and politics of Karnataka for over two decades. It had survived only because of its popularity among readers. Always an uncompromising dissident, the weekly survived without any private or public funding. It was not at the mercy of any party, group, caste or class.

Born in 1962, Gauri got her undergraduate education in Bengaluru and then went onto a postgraduation in journalism and mass communication in Delhi. She worked for several newspapers and media houses till her father’s death. But by taking on her father’s mantle, Gauri took the difficult path.

To keep alive her father’s heritage she started her own weekly, ‘Gauri Lankesh Patrike’. Till then only an English journalist, she now became a powerful communicator in Kannada. But the circulation of the weekly had shrunk. It was no more a financially viable option. It was only her single-minded commitment that kept it going. Her journalism became a weapon to defend the cause of progressives, minorities and the underdogs. She was fierce and fearless in her attacks. She was also active on social media. She was stoutly defended by her friends and brutally attacked by her foes.

Where her father often invoked the Gandhian or Lohiaite common pursuit and was deeply critical of communists, Gauri’s journalism took an open Leftist turn. This drew a lot of bitterness from her ideological antagonists.

She was a lone fighter in her life and profession. She lived alone in financial straits. I learn from my close friends that her health was feeble. But she was lionhearted when it came to her fights. During the recent troubles in JNU, she stood firmly behind Left groups. She declared on social media that Kanhaiya Kumar was her son. She fully supported the demand by Lingayats for recognition as an independent religion, which elicited the ire of Hindutva groups. This was also a cause that was close to Kalburgi’s heart.

Lankesh rejected any kind of patronage throughout his journalistic career. In spite of all hardships, Gauri followed the same example. However she was going through such a big money crunch that she had to start looking for government advertisements for the special issue of her weekly. Unidentified gunshots have put an end to all that.

There is demand everywhere that justice should soon be done. It’s the job of the police to name, shame and punish the murderers. This particular event is frightening enough, but the overall context is much more alarming. This murder is one in a chain of political murders drenching the earth with more blood. What can we do to set that right? Let there be crusades for forgiveness, tolerance and compassion.

Author
HS Shiva Prakash
The writer is a Kannada poet and playwright, and Professor of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University

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14. NYT EDITORIAL : THE MURDER OF AN INDIAN JOURNALIST
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(The New York Times, September 7, 2017)

Editorial

The Murder of an Indian Journalist

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Photo
People protesting and mourning the killing of the Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh in New Delhi, on Wednesday. Credit Tsering Topgyal/Associated Press

The murder on Tuesday of the Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh, a fearless critic of rising Hindu-nationalist militancy, has all the hallmarks of a hit job.

“The message and not to independent journalists but to all dissenters is loud and clear,” tweeted Sidharth Bhatia, founding editor of the Indian online news site The Wire. “We are watching you and one day we will get you.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has let a climate of mob rule flourish in India, with his right-wing Hindu supporters vilifying “secularists.” The venom that reactionary social media trolls direct at journalists, or “presstitutes” as they call them, is especially vicious, but not entirely new. At least 27 Indian journalists have been killed since 1992 “in direct retaliation for their work,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Only one of the killers has been convicted.

Still, Ms. Lankesh’s murder shocked India’s news media and set off protest marches in several Indian cities. “Journalists are increasingly the targets of online smear campaigns by the most radical nationalists, who vilify them and even threaten physical reprisals,” Reporters Without Borders said.

The government of the state of Karnataka is investigating the killing of Ms. Lankesh, an editor and publisher of a Kannada-language weekly tabloid, who was shot outside her home in Bengaluru. Her family has given the police closed-circuit video of the murder scene, so that the killers, and anyone who may have ordered the assassination, may be brought to justice.

This has not happened so far in the murders of other outspoken critics of right-wing Hindu nationalists. Narendra Dabholkar, whose campaigns against superstitious practices angered many Hindu religious activists, was shot to death near his home in Pune in 2013. Two years ago, Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi, a former vice chancellor of Kannada University who spent decades debunking peddlers of superstition, was fatally shot in his home in Dharwad.

Ms. Lankesh had voiced concern about the climate of menace against journalists who didn’t toe the Hindu-nationalist line. If Mr. Modi doesn’t condemn her murder forcefully and denounce the harassment and threats that critics of Hindu militancy face daily, more critics will live in fear of deadly reprisal and Indian democracy will see dark days.

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15. NIP IN BUD: THREATS TO SECULAR WRITERS SHOULD NOT GO UNPUNISHED - Editorial, The Times of India
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(The Times of India

September 12, 2017, 2:00 am IST TOI Edit in TOI Editorials | Edit Page, India | TOI

Hindu Aikya Vedi leader KP Sasikala, after lauding the assassination of journalist Gauri Lankesh, has publicly threatened secular writers at a function in Kerala. In her speech, Sasikala warned secular writers of the same fate as Lankesh and advised them to pray for their lives. Such publicly uttered threats amount to incitement to violence and demand immediate action by authorities. No one should be allowed to issue threats like these and get away with impunity – be that person a politician, a religious leader or a social activist.

In fact, the climate of intolerance prevailing in the country is a direct outcome of the impunity with which such threats are uttered these days. They are then justified with a misleading defence of free speech, often by those who have no time for free speech otherwise. In the US, for example, the First Amendment to the American Constitution gives wide latitude to free speech. However, criminal intimidation is taken very seriously and swiftly acted upon. Similarly, Sections 503, 506 and 507 of the Indian Penal Code punish criminal intimidation. However, these are hardly implemented, especially when the accused are people with political influence.

Unless and until hate speech and communal threats are nipped in the bud, there’s a serious possibility that murders like that of Lankesh or attacks on Dalits and Muslims by cow vigilantes will continue unabated. As it is India’s international reputation as a democracy governed by rule of law – an invaluable foreign policy asset as it confronts the China-Pakistan axis – has been diminished by recent events. But apart from such considerations the first job of any modern state is to provide security to its citizens. It should not fail in this basic function.

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16. STATE OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM
by Prathibha Nandakumar
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(Bangalore Mirror
Bangalore Mirror Bureau | Updated: Sep 11, 2017)

Sometime back, writer and free thinker KS Bhagwan had said in an interview (indiawrites.com) that global guidelines are needed for security and freedom of thinkers and writers. Answering a question about security being an issue for the class of writers, thinkers and journalists he had said “Security is a very big issue for them because they do not understand the thin lines between expressing freely and expressing themselves keeping political interests in mind. Most of the time, they cross it and differ. That puts them into a very risky situation. Therefore, they should be given a security cover in terms of guidelines, police protection and some legal cover to live in a free and fair society.”

Now, following the killing of Gauri Lankesh, a select number of Kannada authors and free thinkers (25) have been provided police protection, based on the advice of the Intelligence Department, as suggested by the Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. The question is, will this guarantee their safety or the safety of their free thinking? Meaning, do we need police protection for freethinking? To have a society of free thinkers, what is the kind of security the government needs to provide? The Chief Minister instructed the police to “ensure the protection of members of the intelligentsia who have been espousing frank views on matters of religion and rituals in the country.” Is the protection in anyway limited to frank opinions on matters of religion and rituals only?

The social media is abuzz with debate over this. Someone has even commented that “easy way to get police protection in Karnataka, just write something anti-Hindu. If you also happen to be a journalist, you may get Z security.”

Another extreme opposite view expressed is “why only protect free speech of Naxal-supporters? More Hindu activists have died in Karnataka than the leftists?
But the list of personalities who will be protected includes some right-wing intellectuals also, it is said. The complete list is not published. Actually when a person is provided with police protection, it should not be revealed. The killers will definitely know if somebody is a sitting duck target or some complex planning has to be made.

In case of Gauri Lankesh, she was a sitting duck, absolutely unmindful of her vulnerability. Coming to Bhagwan’s quote about the free thinkers not understanding the thin lines between expressing freely and expressing themselves keeping political interests in mind, Gauri was extremely aware of the implications of her writings and understood the political interests also. The question to ponder is not how she courted risk but why the dissent has become intolerable.

Take for example the Charlie Hebdo killing in Paris. The editor and the magazine cartoonists were famous for targeting all forms of authority in the world with their sharp, no-holds-barred political cartoons. Did they do it from behind the wall of protection? Should all dissent take the cover of a life jacket? Did the 12 brilliant journalists know that they were daring the fundamentalists?

On the contrary, in India, has it become inevitable to get protection before voicing dissent? Also, what is dissent has also become subjective. If the personalities in the forefront of the Lingayat independent religion movement fear attack and seek police protection from another faction of the hitherto same community, where does one draw the line?

The answer is free expression. If people can talk freely and everybody learns a bit tolerance that the person is expressing his or her thought and is ready to live with it, then we may not need to protect free thinkers by providing extra security. Just because a man on the street is not protected, should he not freely express his views, for the fear of being attacked or killed? The only solution is that dissent should not be an anomaly. The silent majority needs to break that silence and start speaking. When the common man is not afraid to voice his dissent and counter the overbearing fundamentalists, he will not need police protection.

For now, if we have to define the State of intellectual freedom as providing police protection to the likes of Chennaveera Kanavi, an 89-year-old soft spoken gentleman, to enable him to express himself, seems a bit odd.

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17. 'MY FRIEND AND FIRST LOVE, GAURI LANKESH WAS THE EPITOME OF AMAZING GRACE'
by Chidanand Rajghatta
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(NDTV.com, September 7, 2017)

This is a Facebook post by late journalist Gauri Lankesh's ex-husband, Chidanand Rajghatta. Ms Lankesh was shot dead outside her home on Tuesday.

I just deplaned after a 15 hour flight to see hundreds of messages of love and support for the work Gauri did and her shining ideals. She lived a beautiful life of purpose and fought the good fight. It will not be in vain. On the flight, I reflected on our growing up years and updated some of the recollections below because it is important to understand the wonderful milieu we grew up in. Thank you friends for the touching messages. Love and peace.

Gauri Lankesh: Amazing Grace

If Gauri Lankesh read all the tributes and accolades for her, particularly those that refer to soul and afterlife and heaven, she'd have cracked a good laugh. Maybe not a laugh, but at least a chuckle. We had decided in our teens that heaven and hell and afterlife were a lot of b.s. There was enough heaven and hell on earth, and we should just leave god alone - he has enough on his hands - instead of begging him for favors.

But part of our compact was we would not be hurtful to others - including family -- even if we disagreed with their beliefs and practices. We didn't always succeed - ah, the impetuosity of youth! -- but it was a good principle that served us well later. Which is how even when we divorced 27 years ago, after five years of courtship and five years of marriage, we remained great friends. Part of the compact. Don't be hurtful. Even to each other.

We met at a school that was the birthplace of the Rationalist Movement of India - National College. Our principal, Dr H.Narasimaiah, and the Sri Lankan rationalist, Dr Abraham Kovoor, were pioneers of the movement, and right from our teens we took to the thrill of questioning and debunking a variety of godmen/godwomen, charlatans, frauds, superstitions etc.

More on this another time, but I'm putting this out here early to provide some context to Gauri's murder. Rationalists and agnostics are in the cross hairs of uber-religious bigots.

One of the first books we read together -- before getting into the weeds (I mean metaphorically) of religion, politics, and life itself -- was Will Durant's Story of Philosophy. Neither of us was proficient in our mother tongue Kannada (at that time), so we regretfully forsook our own bounteous literature for everything from Wodehouse to Graham Greene, devouring anything that Premier Book Shop's Mr Shanbhag could produce for us - at a matchless 20 per cent discount (others got 15 per cent). She returned to Kannada years later, but more on that soon.

Meanwhile, we "skinned our hearts and skinned our knees, learned of love the ABCs." Terry Jack's sappy, saccharine "Seasons in the Sun" had been released a few years earlier, and we hummed it between Dylan and Beatles. I'd return to Indian music years later; she was tone deaf. We read and laughed at Eric Segal's Love Story, saw the movies Abba, Saturday Night Fever, and Gandhi on our first dates, and went to the boonies on moonless nights to see billions and billions of stars and galaxies after reading and watching Carl Sagan.

Feisty wouldn't even begin to describe her. She hated the fact that I smoked in college. Years later, when I had given it up for a long time, she had begun to smoke. One time, she visited me in U.S (crazy innit? ex-wife visiting me? But we were better friends!) I insisted that she not smoke in the apartment because it was carpeted and the stink wouldn't go away. It was winter.

"What do you want me to do?"
"If you have to smoke at all, go to the rooftop and smoke."
"But it's cold and snowing!"
"Shrug"
"You tightass!...I started to smoke because of you!"
"Awww...sorry old girl. I'm asking you to stop now."
"Yeah, right. You've become too *&^%$#@ American!"
"American has nothing to do with it. Being healthy."
"Bollocks. I'll outlive you!"

Liar.

Many friends were bemused by our unbroken friendship. Separations and divorces are often messy, bitter, and spiteful in India, or anywhere for that matter. We had our volcanic moments, but we transcended that quickly, bound by higher ideals. On our day in court, as we stood next to each other, our hands reached out. Fingers interlaced. If you want to go your own ways, better disengage, the lawyer hissed.

After it was done and dusted ("by mutual consent"), we went out for lunch at the Taj down MG Road. The restaurant was called Southern Comfort. We laughed at the irony and said goodbye as I moved first to Delhi, them Mumbai, then Washington DC. She visited me in each place to argue about Life, the Universe, and Everything (we read Douglas Adams in school).

My parents loved her despite her rebellious nature, and remarkably for traditional, orthodox Indian parents, kept in touch with her - and she with them -- even after we split. One time, when I told her about a budding dalliance, she drew herself to her full height (all of five feet and HALF INCH - she never failed to emphasize the half inch) and said: "Ha! You can never take away the honor of being the first daughter-in-law of the family." When my mother passed away this past February, Gauri Lankesh was there, literally "live casting" for me the final rites as I flew home.

My ties with her family were as unusual. Through our separation and splitsville, I continued to meet her dad P.Lankesh, a writer, playwright, film-maker and an inspiration for a generation of rebel writers and journalists, and her sister Kavitha - "baby" to us-now a fine film-maker in her own right. Early in our college dalliance, after Lankesh's due diligence determined that I passed the literary litmus test, I became part of the family - including the extended family of writers, poets, artists, teachers, and what I'd kid as the "buddhijeevi" (intellectual) crowd.

Starting early 80s, we met every Sunday evening for a game of cards, where the stakes were modest but the conversation was rich. Poetry, proverbs, epigrams, aphorisms, bon mots in English and Kannada flowed ebulliently at the table. If someone slowed down the game, someone else would intone "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..." Another person: "....creeps at this petty pace from day to day." Third one: "...to the last syllable of recorded time!" It became bad form to speak in anything other than through literary allusions - in any language. A daring pick always invited "Vinashakaale Vipareetha Buddhi."

They were brilliant, effervescent men, and Gauri (who joined us occasionally and was the only woman at the table) and I marinated in their learning. Appa, as I called Lankesh, taught Eng.lit in Bangalore University, but had decamped to Kannada when we met, having just directed his first movie (I think it was either Anuroopa or Pallavi, and it won the national award). Like many great Kannada writers (Bendre, Kuvempu etc) he started out wanting to write in English before finding his métier in his roots. His play "Sankranti' was prescribed reading for undergrads, but we discussed everyone from Kalidasa to Ibsen, Chekhov, and Brecht.

All this continued through courtship, marriage, separation, and divorce, and even after I moved to U.S. Every time I went home, over a drink or two, pop-in-law and I, refereed by his daughter, would argue about politics, religion, literature, movies, U.S-India ties, farming distress, health, the world. Father and daughter would tease me about abandoning the good fight, while I'd insist that it was temporary, and a little time and distance is good for perspective. Lankesh had a low threshold for idiocy (there was a high turnover at the cards table in the initial years with those unable to handle his temperament scramming quickly) but his continued affection for me earned brownie points from Gauri. When he passed away in 2000, she truly became her father's daughter, taking over the newspaper he founded and continuing the good fight.

To this day, I unfailingly drop into to the Sunday cards table (long after Lankesh passed away, Doc Gowda, the writer-physician, is the current torchbearer). At every other visit or so, as the years took their toll of the older generation, I'd see someone missing at the table. "Yelli Sharma? (Where's Sharma?)" I'd ask, as they made place for me at the cards table, referring to the wonderful poet Ramachandra Sharma. "Oh! He's gone up to join Lankesh at another table," someone would respond, without batting an eyelid or breaking the game. "And Mysoremath is on his way to join them. He's in hospital."

I'm relating all this to give a sense of the intellectual atmosphere Gauri grew up in - practical, rational, and largely agnostic. Death was just incidental. Respect, affection, and admiration for the good people did and what they stood for was important. Her - our - favorite word and topic of conversation in recent years was "horaata" - a Kannada word roughly meaning a movement/agitation/revolution. "Haegide horaata?" I'd ask during our occasional phone calls. She'd launch into a litany of struggles she was in at the moment.

Gauri's presence at the cards table became rare as she threw herself into the fight against right-wing bigots, zealots, and extremists. We argued about that too at the cards table because some friends thought she had gone the other extreme. There was no doubt she was left of center, even extreme left of center. But heart was in the right place, and there was no place in her world for violence. Only cowards took to violence.

Some eight years back, after I had built a new home in Bangalore in the fond hope that I'd return to India some day, she determined that I needed a housekeeper to manage the place. "I am sending someone over," she declared over the phone. "She's a widow with two young daughters. Make sure you take care of them and put them through school." It was an order. I complied.

Ramakka, her gift to us, is still with us; her daughters Asha and Usha both finished from school, earned degrees, and now work - Asha in Syndicate Bank and Usha at an NGO. There are hundreds of Ashas and Ushas because of Gauri Lankesh.

Just a few weeks ago, when Mary, the kids and I were in India, Gauri called to announce she was coming over. She always came to see the kids, bearing gifts, none more precious than the love and warmth she brought with her. Days passed, and she did not turn up. Busy, busy, busy, she said...you know how hard it is handling the paper and fighting the chaddis (she called the right wing nutters "chaddis").

One day, she called to announce that she's coming with her son. "Who have you adopted now?" I asked. "Kanhaiya Kumar," she chuckled. "You mean the JNU bloke?" "Yes, you'll love meeting him." Little later she called to say his flight was late and she can't make it. That was the last time I heard her voice. Bubbly and bursting with energy and passion for causes big and small.

As my plane now wings towards India to a place without Gauri, my mind is a cauldron of fragmented memories. One phrase keeps repeating and resonating in my mind: Amazing Grace. Forget all other labels: leftist, radical, anti-Hindutva, secular etc. For me, there is just this: She is the epitome of Amazing Grace.

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18. INDIA: WHEN THE CONSTITUTION AND RELIGIOUS LAWS COLLIDE | Arif Mohammed Khan
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(The Times of India - Sep 10, 2017)

Believers can keep their customs, but any dispute brought to the Indian courts should be settled on the basis of a civil code.

At the time of the passage of the Muslim Marriage Dissolution Act 1939, the Muslim ulema (clerics and scholars) had insisted on a stipulation that cases under this law should only be heard by a Muslim judge. In case the Muslim judge hearing the case was transferred and replaced by a non-Muslim judge, then the case should also be transferred either to the same Muslim judge or to a nearby court with a Muslim judge, they demanded. The government passed the bill, but turned down this demand. The ulema were displeased and said that the bill in its final form was more harmful than useful.

The Jamiatul Ulema issued a statement explaining their opposition: "The Jamiyat would like to make it clear that if a marriage is annulled by a non-Muslim judge, the decree will not be valid in the eyes of the Shariah. If a woman, after obtaining a divorce decree from a non-Muslim judge, marries someone else, she will be committing adultery . Although the court may have dissolved the marriage, she would still be the wife of her first husband."

In 1952, a Muslim girl, whose husband had gone over to Pakistan and had refused to take her with him or divorce her, filed a petition for divorce which was decreed by a non-Muslim judge. The ulema issued fatwas that the girl was not divorced.

The ulema have not changed their stance even today, and that is the reason they keep demanding that institutions like Darul Qaza (parallel Muslim courts) be vested with judicial powers. In an Urdu book published in 2011 titled `Divorce by the Courts of nonMuslim Countries', Maulana Khalid Saifullah Rahmani, the secretary of the MPLB, explains the position in detail. After quoting from the Quran, he refers to a classic Hanafi scholar Isa bin Usman to conclude: "In this matter the guardianship of a disbeliever over a Muslim is not right because judicial authority is guardianship, and a disbeliever cannot be the guardian of a Muslim even in small matters. The judicial power is guardianship of the highest order because the judge enforces the laws of God".

This explains why the Muslim personal law board always challenges the authority of the courts to test the constitutional validity of religious laws. Admittedly, the authority to hear cases under personal laws rests with the lower courts and the power to test these laws on the anvil of Chapter 3 of the Constitution is vested in the higher courts of India.So, as long as religion-based laws are in operation, this conflict will remain unresolved. Whenever the courts give a verdict that is not approved by the clergy, they will accuse the courts of interference in religion.
In this context, I would like to recall an interesting observation by two professors of Islamic jurisprudence from Medina university , made in response to a question raised by me at the India International Centre a few years ago. I asked them pointedly whether Islamic law can be administered through the non-Muslim judges of a secular country. Both of them emphatically said no. They explained that since Islamic law has a devotional aspect, therefore, according to the shariah it can be administered only by a believer and no one else.
 
 Notwithstanding bold assertions, no religious community is a monolith and Muslims are no exception.Serious and major differences on the question of law have existed almost right from beginning, giving rise to many schools of jurisprudence and sects among Muslims. The differences in interpretation are so complex that nobody has succeeded in presenting one comprehensive code that would be ac ceptable to all the schools of Muslim jurisprudence. The question is whether it is desirable that the power of a secular state should be used to enforce one interpretation, and thus deny freedom of religion to others belonging to the same community .

So what is the way out?
Personal laws are of civil nature and civil laws do not forbid any action on the pain of punishment. These personal laws may be treated as customs and rituals, and the freedom to practice what one believes on a personal basis is well recognized. But if any dispute arises and the matter comes to the court, those disputes should be settled by an Indian civil code as envisaged by our Constitution. This code will prescribe equal rights and obligations and permit no discrimination or special rights on the basis of religion, caste, gender or sex. This will ensure not only full freedom of religion to the individuals but also fulfill the constitutional goal of a Uniform Civil Code. But a detailed discussion of this subject cannot happen in the absence of a draft proposal, and for that, the government needs to take the initiative.

(The writer is a former Union minister)

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19. INDIA: IN DEFENCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL | Apoorvanand 
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(The Indian Express - September 7, 2017)

That an individual can source divinity within herself was unimaginable for religious institutions. But for the institution of the nation state, the individual remains as suspect.

The recent order of the National Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA) penalising a popular TV channel for misrepresenting the poet Gauhar Raza in its news bulletins is significant in many ways. It restores to Raza his dignity and integrity which the channel felt free to play with. But it has larger implications for the question of individual liberty in a democracy like India. It leads us to think about the role of institutions in ensuring that an individual can hold her head high when pitted against the most sacred deity of our times — the nation. This order is also important in times when an individual with a public face is destined to be the representation that the media decides to make of him.

The Shankar-Shad Mushaira, an iconic cultural event held annually in Delhi featuring poets from Pakistan and India, was called a mushaira of a gang of Afzal lovers. Raza was dubbed as a supporter of those who seek to break the nation. His fault? He had dedicated one of his nazms, written much earlier, to Rohit Vemula and had mentioned Kanhaiya Kumar while reciting another poem.

JNU academic Nivedita Menon was portrayed by the same channel as a professor teaching anti-nationalism to her students. In its repeat telecast focusing on Menon, the channel kept asking its viewers to decide for themselves what to do with such professors. It was not difficult to sense the violence it hid. Away from Delhi, Rajshri Ranawat of the Jai Narain Vyas Jodhpur University was declared a collaborator of anti-nationals by newspapers in Rajasthan for having dared to invite the “anti-national” Menon to a seminar. Close to Delhi, Snehsata Manav of the Central University of Haryana, Mahendragarh, was similarly denounced as an anti-national for having staged a play, based on a short story by Mahasweta Devi, criticising the security forces.

That an individual can source divinity within herself was unimaginable for religious institutions. But for the institution of the nation state, the individual remains suspect as well. It was thought that modernity coupled with democracy would automatically establish the primacy of the individual. That has not happened. The idea of the individual still remains hazy. Not only does the idea need constant clarification and interpretation, it also needs to be practised unceasingly and visibly. Who can do it? Who has the resources to work on it?

Capitalism, according to Marx, robs a person of her individuality. How can one assert her individuality when her abilities to hear, see, taste, touch, see, speak, think, imagine or create remain at their crudest? A majority of people are not allowed to evolve these faculties because the resources essential for growth are denied to them. The idea of individuality remains alien to them. Marx was critiquing the political economy. But we have seen that the enslavement of the self also takes place in various other ways. Put slightly simplistically, the nation state has become an agency of the economy to subjugate the self. After religion, it is the nation at the altar of which people are willing to sacrifice their selves.

But the call of individual autonomy remained powerful. It means a person is not merely a serviceable entity, either for the economy or for the nation state. She can choose to distance or withdraw from them, and even try to create greater space for herself.

However, the idea of the autonomy of the self or the individual is so difficult that even after 70 years of being a practising democracy, the Supreme Court — in its verdict on privacy — had to remind not only the state, but the people as well, that individuals are not the creatures of the state. What the Court told us sounds strange to a lot of common people: Nobody can tell me that I have to salute the tricolour or keep the national anthem on my lips to claim legitimacy. My words, my colour, my tastes, my affection cannot be dictated by an agency outside me.

For the Court to deliberate on it, the idea of individuality had to be refined by education, literature, art, and science. Teachers, poets, writers, artists, scientists have an enviable opportunity and luxury to practice individuality which is simply not available to everybody. It is natural that they are difficult to understand. It is therefore also easy to dub them as enemies of the people. Their ideas appear threatening or keep challenging people, asking them to break out of their lazy nationalist, or socialist, shell to discover and fashion their selves.

It is also not difficult to see why in the last three years, the idea of an autonomous individual has been mercilessly assaulted. Constitution-makers had devised institutional mechanisms to assist individuals against such assaults. An individual lives only when these institutional processes function properly.

The writer teaches Hindi at Delhi University	

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20. IRONICALLY, ERDOGAN HAS DONE EXACTLY WHAT THE FAILED COUP WANTED TO DO IN TURKEY | Pete Weatherby QC
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(The Independent, 7 September 2017)

Some conspiracy theorists think Erdogan himself was behind the coup – indeed, that is Gulen’s contention. Yet the reality is more straightforward: he has seized an unexpected opportunity


[Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses security forces during a ceremony in Istanbul on 25 August]
Turkey has remained in a state of emergency since the failed coup Murad Sezer/Reuters

If President Erdogan is to be believed, last year’s failed coup in Turkey was an attempt by his erstwhile ally, Fethullah Gulen – a conservative Islamist like him – to overthrow the Government and do away with the Constitution and National Assembly. Gulen, it should be said, denies that he was in any way involved.

Still, while Turkey has had a chequered history on human rights – particularly with respect to the Kurds – it was a functioning democracy with a Constitution protecting fundamental rights, and a relatively independent judiciary to provide some counterweight to executive excess. Even though suspicions about Erdogan’s penchant for power had been gathering for some time, it was nonetheless a relief to most in Turkey that the coup failed within hours. And although there was considerable loss of life – about 300 died – it could have been much worse.

The irony, however, is that what followed the attempted coup has gravely damaged the institutions and constitutional framework that the plotters themselves sought to sweep away.

A masked witness points to the police officers suspected of killing 17-year-old Kian delos Santos as she testifies during a senate hearing in Pasay, Metro Manila, Philippines Reuters/Dondi Tawatao

Within hours of the coup, Erdogan had started rounding up his adversaries, far beyond those involved in the plot. To date, something like 160,000 public officials – judges, academics, military and police officers, and civil servants – have been dismissed from their posts. More than 50,000 have been detained and mass trials are now taking place on charges alleging support for the coup.

Erdogan declared a state of emergency which continues to this day, giving him enormous power by decree, and he has consolidated many of these emergency powers by a referendum heavily criticised by the EU, not only for dubious ballot results but also because those opposed to the President were not on a level playing field – harassed and refused access to mainstream media.

In tightening his grip on power, Erdogan has particularly targeted the judiciary and journalists, removing supervision of the executive from within the state and criticism of it from without.

Over 4,000 judges and prosecutors, a quarter of the total, have been dismissed from their posts for alleged links to Gulen. By decree, Erdogan changed the way judges are appointed, from an independent judicial committee to one of executive selection. Judicial independence has thus been substantially undermined by the fear of dismissal and by the replacement of a sizeable proportion of existing judges and prosecutors by government appointees. Defence lawyers face similar jeopardy with a number facing indictments of their own.

Freedom of expression has also been severely curtailed, with sections of the media closed down, websites blocked and some 169 journalists detained and facing indictments alleging support for the coup.

In June, a major trial of journalists began and it resumes on 19 September. Together with fourteen others, ten of whom have fled, Nasli Ilicak and Ahmet and Mehmet Altan are charged with conspiring to overthrow the government, constitution and national assembly, and with assisting a “terrorist” organisation.

The prosecution case is that the three – all well-known secularist, liberal journalists, academics and writers in their 60s and 70s – took part in a current affairs TV programme the day before the coup, which contained “subliminal messages” to the plotters. Quite why the dark forces supposedly connected to Fethullah Gulen could not use WhatsApp or Viber remains a mystery, as does the nature of the alleged communications. Several of the other allegations go back years – well before Gulen fell out with Erdogan over a corruption scandal in 2013.
Turkey's Erdogan steps up anti-Europe rhetoric

Other defendants are “linked” to the coup by the fact that they held accounts at Bank Asya, said to be a Gulenist institution. Others are said to have produced TV adverts for a pro-Gulen newspaper some nine months before the coup.

The reality of the coming court appearance of the Altan brothers and others is that it is a show trial being held to render opposition to the President illegal. It is a clear and outrageous affront to freedom of expression, which is ostensibly protected by Article 26 of the Turkish Constitution and by various international legal instruments by which Turkey is bound – including Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Some conspiracy theorists think Erdogan himself was behind the coup – indeed, that is Gulen’s contention. Yet the reality is more straightforward: he has seized an unexpected opportunity, galvanizing the popular revulsion at a coup which apparently sought to destroy Turkish democracy and using it to suppress any opposition and all independent supervision and criticism of his administration.

In so doing, Erdogan has himself done the damage to democracy arguably intended by those behind the coup – but has done so in order to vastly expand his own powers as President.

Unless there is a return to normality – the ending of the state of emergency; a reinstatement of an independent judiciary; the release of all post-coup detainees (except where there is clear evidence of involvement in violence); and a clear commitment to freedom of expression – Turkey risks becoming a pariah, trapped between the failed states of Syria and Iraq to the south and former EU friends, who no longer want to know, to the north.

Pete Weatherby QC is the author of a Bar Human Right Committee report on the Altan trial, published this week

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21. BURMA: THE HATEFUL MONK | Gavin Jacobson
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(New York Review of Books, August 31, 2017)

The Hateful Monk
Gavin Jacobson	

Les Films du Losange
Ashin Wirathu and his followers in Barbet Schroeder’s The Venerable W., 2017

Ma Soe Yein is the largest Buddhist monastery in Mandalay, Myanmar. A dreary sprawl of dormitories and classrooms, it is located in the western half of the city, and accommodates some 2,500 monks. The atmosphere inside is one of quiet industry. Young men, clad in orange and maroon robes, sit on the floors and study the Dharma or memorize ritual texts. There is little noise except for the endless scraping of straw brooms on wooden floors, or the dissonant hum of people in collective prayer. Outside, the scene is livelier. Monks hurriedly douse themselves with cold water, and chat politics over a table of newspapers. They do so in the shadow of a large wall covered with gruesome images depicting the alleged bloodlust of Islam. Photographs, displayed without any explanation or evidence of their origins, show beaten faces, hacked bodies, and severed limbs—brutalities apparently committed by Muslims against Myanmar Buddhists.

The contrast between the monastery’s inner calm and this exterior display of violence is a fitting inversion of Ma Soe Yein’s most infamous resident, Ashin Wirathu, the subject of Barbet Schroeder’s new documentary, The Venerable W. On the outside, Wirathu is composed and polite, with large brown eyes and a sweet, impish grin. His voice is smooth and its cadence measured. Yet beneath this civil disguise seethes an interminable hatred toward the 4 percent of Myanmar’s population that is Muslim (the wall of carnage stands outside his residence). Wirathu is responsible for inciting some of the worst acts of ethnic violence in the country’s recent history, and was described by Time as “The Face of Buddhist Terror.”

Les Films du Losange
A wall covered with images depicting the alleged bloodlust of Islam at the Ma Soe Yein Buddhist monastery, from The Venerable W., 2017

Schroeder, an Iranian-born Swiss filmmaker, has spent decades documenting the morally despicable. His “Trilogy of Evil” began in 1974 with General Idi Amin Dada:  A Self Portrait, a character study of the Ugandan dictator. The second installment, Terror’s Advocate (2007), was on the French-Algerian defense lawyer Jacques Vergès, whose clients have included Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal, the Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan, and the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. Wirathu is Schroeder’s final subject, and, for him, the most terrifying. “I am afraid to call him Wirathu because even his name scares me,” he said in a recent interview with Agence France-Presse. “I just call him W.”

The film charts Wirathu’s rise from provincial irrelevance in Kyaukse to nationwide rabble-rouser. It centers on the crucial moments of his budding ethno-nationalism, such as in 1997, when he says his eyes were “finally opened” to the “Muslims’ intentions” after reading a pamphlet entitled In Fear of Our Race Disappearing, which appeared in print by an unknown author; or 2003, when he delivered a chilling sermon—caught on camera—against Muslim “kalars” (kalar is the equivalent of “nigger”). “I can’t stand what they do to us,” he says to rapturous applause. “As soon as I give the signal, get ready to follow me…I need to plan the operation well, like the CIA or Mossad, for it to be effective…I will make sure they will have no place to live.” One month later, in Kyaukse, eleven Muslims were killed, and two mosques and twenty-six houses were burned to the ground. Wirathu was arrested by the military junta for inciting violence, and spent nine years in Mandalay’s Obo prison.

Les Films du Losange
The remains of a mosque in Meiktila, central Burma, after the March 2013 anti-Islamic riots, from The Venerable W., 2017

Like Marcel Ophüls, a filmmaker who explored the quotidian aspects of intolerance and oppression, Schroeder’s interviewing style is never hostile or moralistic. As he writes in the notes to the film, the point is to let the subjects speak, “without judging them, and in the process evil can emerge under many different forms, and the horror or the truth comes out progressively, all by itself.” In one instance, Wirathu bares the depths of his self-regard when he claims to have been the inspiration for the Saffron Revolution of 2007—a delusion scorned in the film by one of its leaders, U. Kaylar Sa, who describes the desperate social conditions that forced the monks onto the streets of Rangoon.

Wirathu was freed as part of a general amnesty for political prisoners in 2012, and he quickly went on to revitalize the 969 Movement—a grassroots organization founded earlier that year by Wirathu and Ashin Sada Ma, a monk from Moulmein, and committed to preventing what it sees as Islam’s infiltration of, and dominance over, Buddhist Myanmar. Since 2014, Wirathu has operated under the auspices of the Ma Ba Tha, or Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion. Like 969, many members of the Ma Ba Tha spread propaganda about how Muslims steal Buddhist women and outbreed Buddhist men. “The features of the African catfish,” Wirathu tells Schroeder near the beginning of the film, “are that they grow very fast, they breed very fast, and they’re violent…The Muslims are exactly like these fish.”

W. is tougher viewing than its predecessors. Archival material and scenes Schroeder filmed undercover are spliced with footage from YouTube and Facebook captured on camera phones and personal video recorders. Most of this documents atrocities committed in Rakhine state in 2012—when clashes between ethnic Arakanese and Rohingya Muslims forced 125,000 of the latter into displacement camps—and anti-Muslim riots in central and eastern Myanmar in 2013. There are graphic images of burning homes, men beaten to death with wooden clubs, and people left to burn alive. All the while state police stand back and let it happen—Amartya Sen has called the violence committed against the Rohingya a “slow genocide.”

Using video uploaded to YouTube and Facebook helps convey one of Schroeder’s most important points about Wirathu. What was frightening about Idi Amin was his combination of absolute power and volatility, a man whose dormant rage erupted without warning. With Jacques Vergès, it was his gifts of seduction and dexterity of logic that made him something like Woland from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—a Devil with impeccable tailoring. What’s disturbing about Wirathu is how, as one anti-Wirathu monk puts it, he wants people to “experience his words before accepting them.” The aim of his public sermonizing is to transform the impressionable into unthinking agents of his intolerance, which accounts not only for his call-and-response style of preaching, and the fact that, as the film shows, he regularly instructs children, but also for his extensive use of Twitter and Facebook, and the Islamophobic DVDs he produces and distributes throughout the country. Like his favorite politician, Donald Trump—the only presidential candidate, he says in the film, who will prevent Islam’s global domination—Wirathu both channels and reflects the ways in which social media has transformed hate into a thoughtless pastime. His evil, an attempt to deepen and normalize the mores of racial enmity, might be encapsulated by a line from Byron, which serves as an epigraph to the film: “Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;/ men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.”

Les Films du Losange
A meeting of the Buddhist extremist Ma Ba Tha movement, from The Venerable W., 2017

This is an important documentary that not only illuminates the rank underbelly of Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar, but also captures one of the first major tests faced by the new political order, especially regarding freedom of speech and assembly. Wirathu is a thorn in the side of a Suu Kyi government that is trying to end a near seventy-year civil war and rebuild the country after decades of economic catastrophe. A question many of those in government must surely (hopefully?) be asking is, “Who will rid us of this turbulent priest?” In the short term, it is unlikely to be the monks themselves. Although Myanmar’s official Buddhist authority—the Ma Ha Na—has banned the Ma Ba Tha from using its full Burmese name, it has not addressed the group’s discriminatory aims and activities. This is partly to do with the widespread support enjoyed by the Ma Ba Tha, which builds Sunday schools, provides legal aid, and raises money for charities.

The state of race relations in Myanmar is far more complex than Schroeder’s film allows. It is not uncommon to hear members of the Bamar majority say they “hate Islam” but, when pressed, admit they have no issue with Muslims living in their towns. One of the film’s other blind spots is the military. Aside from a brief glance at the mass population shifts between Rakhine and Bangladesh in the late 1970s, there is very little on how the army had been inciting ethnic violence in places like Rakhine long before Wirathu appeared, nor is there any mention of a popular theory that Wirathu is paid, or at least encouraged, by senior generals, some of whom are often photographed at his monastery. In this lack of a deeper historical setting, and the argument that the film could have gone further to expose the involvement of the military in ethnic violence, Schroeder’s film resembles Joshua Oppenheimer’s harrowing documentary The Act of Killing (2012), which examines former members of the Indonesian death-squads responsible for the mass killing of communists between 1965-1966.

A greater problem with The Venerable W., and the “Trilogy of Evil” as a whole, is how Schroeder assumes evil to be a given in the world. He is the filmmaker’s Kołakowski, someone who believes evil isn’t rooted in social circumstance, but is a permanent feature of the human condition. Only the concept of “evil” can capture the immoral extremities reached by figures like Amin, Vergès, and Wirathu. But there is little sense in W., or in the other two films, of evil’s potential origins, or how Wirathu’s ideas may have formed and why they are admired in places like Maungdaw in Rakhine, where there has been historical tension between Muslims and Buddhists, but less so in Yangon or Mandalay, where there has not. Imploring us to think of evil without considering what it means does little to illuminate the darker side of human behavior. As the American clergyman William Sloane Coffin put it: “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, and nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”

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22.  SALMAN RUSHDIE: ‘A LOT OF WHAT TRUMP UNLEASHED WAS THERE ANYWAY’ | Emma Brockes
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(The Guardian, 2 September 2017)

Beginning with the inauguration of Obama and ending with the election of Trump, Rushdie’s latest novel is an intimate portrait of New York. The author talks about the journey from hope to despair and always feeling an outsider

The image that came to Salman Rushdie, around which he would build his new novel, was an enclosed garden in downtown Manhattan. It is a space that exists in real life (although, as one of the characters in The Golden House observes, real life is a category from which it is increasingly hard to distinguish less reliable entities) and with which Rushdie is familiar; old friends inhabit one of the houses backing on to the garden. “The idea of there being a secret space inside this noisy public space,” he says. “I had this lightbulb moment that it was like a theatre – with a Greek tragedy, amphitheatre quality – where the characters could enact their stories. It also had a Rear Window quality, of being able to spy on everybody else’s lives. At that point, the Golden family decided they wanted to move in.”

We are in the offices of Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s agent of 30 years – “my longest relationship!” he says gleefully – a mile north of Rushdie’s apartment in lower Manhattan. He is looking particularly Rushdie-esque today: part rumpled intellectual, part something less sober. At 70, Rushdie has had more public incarnations than most writers of literary fiction – brilliant novelist, man on the run, subject of tabloid scorn and government dismay, social butterfly, and, in that singularly British designation, man lambasted for being altogether too Up Himself – but it is often overlooked what good company he is. His humour this morning is not caustic, nor ironised, nor filtered through any of the more protected modes of engagement, but is a kind of jolliness – a giggly delight – that simply makes him a good laugh to hang out with.

The Golden family are transplants to New York from Mumbai (or “Bombay” as the author continues to call it in conversation, with what feels like particularly Rushdian obstinacy), an outlandishly wealthy father and his three dysfunctional sons in flight from a personal tragedy; the loss of their mother during the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. We never discover their “real” names; on arriving in the US, the patriarch renames himself Nero Golden – Rushdie, anticipating a collective eye-roll perhaps, points out in the novel this is no more ridiculous a name than Huckleberry Finn or Ichabod Crane – and tests the principle that the US is a place where one can leave one’s past at the door. It is an issue with which Rushdie is intimately familiar; the split in identity, the ability to shed one’s skin after a trauma and potentially skip off scot-free, and he explores both the impossibility and, ultimately, the undesirability of this. That the novel opens with the inauguration of Barack Obama and closes with the election of President Trump, “the Joker” as Rushdie brands him, is the novelist’s reminder there is no progress in history that can’t be undone.

    The biggest news of the day used to be that Charlie Sheen did cocaine. Now there are 10 colossal news stories a day

The week of our meeting last month, reverberations from the fascist march in Charlottesville are still being felt, along with myriad other stories from Trump’s White House. “I remember when there wasn’t that much news,” says Rushdie, “when the biggest news of the day used to be that Charlie Sheen did cocaine. Now there are 10 colossal news stories a day.” It would seem to be a bad time to be a novelist and if Rushdie’s new novel seeks to compete with real life, it is by retreating from the polemicism of so much news and social media to get inside a non-partisan reality.

There are a lot of topical references in The Golden House – from “no-platforming” and illiberal campus activism to the transgender debate and other iterations of identity politics, which Rushdie approaches as symptoms of a broader cultural change. “In America when you talk about identity issues, at the moment a lot of that is gender identity. If you’re in England, there’s this other argument about national identity, which was behind the Brexit catastrophe; and in India, when people talk about identity, they’re really talking about religious sectarianism. In all three places, the identity subject is colossal but it is understood completely differently. I was thinking about that, too.”

Although Rushdie is of a vintage inclined to get grumpy about aspects of the gender identity debate – the suggested replacement of he/she with a spectrum of alternative gender markers – he tried to remain open-minded. “I wanted to approach the subject completely not judgmentally, just get into it. What is it? All this language stuff. The 73 pronouns, all of that. I’m a writer, I should know this. The point was to enter into it as seriously as I could and present it without preachiness. And I think in real life that’s what’s happening; people are wrestling with it. And they don’t always resolve it properly for themselves.”

President-elect Donald Trump, left, and President Barack Obama arrive for Trump’s inauguration ceremony in Washington DC, in January. Photograph: J.scott Applewhite/AFP/Getty Images

One of the novel’s protagonists works at the “Museum of Identity”, a mildly satirical invention that “I was very happy to have come up with”, says Rushdie, “and that I’m sure will exist in the next five years”. Meanwhile, Nero Golden’s youngest son, D, struggles to suppress his transgender leanings. “This modern obsession with identity revolts me,” says D. “It is a way of narrowing us until we are like aliens to one another. Have you read Arthur Schlesinger? He opposes perpetuating marginalisation through affirmations of difference.” This sounds less like the talk of the 20-something fictional character and more like the novelist addressing the reader.

Rushdie isn’t persuaded that solipsism on the left contributed to the rise of Trump, nor that economic disparity was the only cause. “I had a lecture gig in a city called Vero Beach in Florida: big audience, older people, quite affluent, very well educated, and almost all Trump voters,” he says. “Not at all the cliche of the ignorant blue-collar Trump voter. These were people with college degrees who’d had highly paid jobs, many retired, readers.” When the author mentioned climate change, he says, “this gentleman – they were all very courteous – disagreed with me and he said: ‘When you say that all the scientists agree on this, that’s not true.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, it is true actually.’ And he said: ‘No it’s not.’ And I said: ‘Sir, we can’t go on like this, it’s silly. But let me put it to you this way: if you say the world is flat, it doesn’t make the world flat. The world doesn’t need you to agree that it’s round in order to be round, because there’s this thing called evidence.’”

Did he get the impression these positions were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? “Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.”

    I once sat next to the Trumps at a Crosby, Stills & Nash gig. Donald Trump knows all the words to ‘Woodstock’!

Rushdie has been in the US for more than 15 years, but he is still on the outside, a survivor, or beneficiary depending on your view, of a double displacement, first as a child moving from India to England to attend boarding school and then as an adult, when he left London for New York in 2000. It is a gift, he says, “to feel really connected to three places”, and it has nourished his fiction. The 70th anniversary of partition this year reminded one of the startling effect of Midnight’s Children when it was published in 1981, Rushdie’s second novel that is still unmatched for exuberance and a sense of talent unleashed. His third novel, Shame, cemented his reputation, since when he has produced novels ranging wildly across the spectrum between here and there, now and then, fantasy and reality. Fury, Rushdie’s 2001 novel, was a less intimate portrait of New York than The Golden House, his panoramic social novel of the city. While his two sons, Zafar, who is in his late 30s, and 20-year-old Milan, both live in London, Rushdie feels his roots in the US have deepened enough to get inside the city with something like the assurance with which he tackles London and Mumbai. (His youngest son, meanwhile, is threatening to move in with him in New York, as 20-year-olds will, reminding Rushdie that “children take up a lot of time and brain space”. He smiles. “But on the other hand, there are rewards.” )

And of course Trump came as a great shock. Rushdie recalls sitting next to him in Madison Square Garden many years ago, at a Crosby, Stills & Nash concert, accompanied by “the then much younger Ivanka and the disgusting boys. And the thing that surprised me was that he was on his feet and knew all the words to all the songs. Donald Trump knows the words to “Woodstock”?!”

Setting the novel against the backdrop of the years preceding Trump’s election was not only a way of creating an elegy to the Obama era, but of suggesting that Trump didn’t emerge from a vacuum. “One of the reasons why I think it was possible to write the book is that a lot of what Trump represents and unleashed was there anyway, if you were looking properly, and would not have been destroyed by his defeat. Once you take the cork out of the bottle, things fly out.”

And while the rise and fall of Obama’s US – “the journey from that moment of optimism to its antithesis” – gave the novel a structural symmetry that has, says Rushdie, “horrible to say it, but a formally pleasing quality”, he is clear of the connection between then and now. “A big chunk of white America has been unable to stand the fact that for eight years there was a black man in the White House. Couldn’t stand it. And unfortunately Hillary was a bad candidate, and I think everybody underestimated, including me, the incredible hatred for her, including among leftwing people, young people and women.”

...

All successful people are status aware, but it is a rather endearing quality in Rushdie, who is either disinclined or unable to disguise it. It was there in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir (the title is the pseudonym he assumed while living for 10 years under the fatwa) and in which his willingness to appear in less than flattering light – going on bitchily about his ex-wives, grumbling about protection officers calling him “Joe”, documenting the end of his marriage to Elizabeth West and the infatuation that led to his marriage to Padma Lakshmi – made it a more revealing memoir than most, although it was hard to know, at times, whether this was due to a surfeit of self-awareness or its opposite.

‘I have an itch to get outside the bubble’ … Salman Rushdie. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian

When he first joined Twitter, he says, “one and a quarter million people rushed in my direction. Which sounds like a lot until you look at people who really have a lot – Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, and so on, and that’s before you get to the real aristocrats, Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, the gods.” He giggles. “Even down here among writers a million people is a lot, so that was nice, to feel that you were having a conversation with a lot of people who were interested in you and your work, because it’s a self-selecting group.”

Twitter suited Rushdie, his belligerence and his sense of fun. He rolled up his sleeves and got stuck into fights and responded to people with puny numbers of followers. He was funny and generous and not at all like the popular view of him as pompous, plaintive, pain-in-the-arse Rushdie. Then, as has happened with many early fans of the platform, “I began to really dislike the tone of voice of Twitter. This kind of snarky, discourteous, increasingly aggressive tone of voice. I just thought I don’t like this. These people would not speak like this if they were sitting in a room with you. I had planned to stop earlier and then it was the election campaign and I got into it, and the last thing I tweeted was this pathetic tweet, having just voted: ‘Looking forward to President Hillary’.” He laughs. “After which total silence. And I thought, just stop, and I did and I haven’t missed it for one second.”

Too much exposure to strangers online can collapse one’s faith in humanity. In the novel, Rushdie refers to “synderesis”, the philosophical principle that people are born with an innate moral consciousness directing them towards good. Does he believe that? “I think there is an ethical sense,” he says. “I do believe that we’re born with a need to know what is right and wrong, which is why children accept the instruction of parents on the subject. We need to know what are the boundaries of good and bad behaviour in order to function in the world. I don’t think we automatically know what is right or wrong, but I think we have the desire to know.”

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie – from Nero to Obama, via The Godfather

These are hard calls at the moment, when the very nature of reality and the meaning of “facts” are in dispute, long before one gets to the big existential questions. In the wake of Charlottesville, the issue for the left has been to what extent should one tolerate the intolerant and defend their right to freedom of speech. “I think the great boundary is to not tolerate people who would destroy the world that makes it able to tolerate people,” says Rushdie. “That’s the great mistake made in Germany during the rise of nazism, which was to allow it to rise through the ballot box and then abolish the ballot box. Something similar happened in Algeria, where the old administration thought that they would defeat the insurgent FIS [Islamic Salvation Front] and GIA [Armed Islamic Group] by letting them run for election and defeating them. Instead they ran for election and won and then abolished elections. There is a limiting point. If the thing that is happening would destroy the system that allows it to happen, that’s a deal breaker. I’m a huge admirer of and supporter of the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union, which defended the marchers’ right to protest] and I give them money and so on, but I think they might have been wrong about Charlottesville. I think when people are running over other people with motor cars, that’s not legitimate free speech. And they went there for a fight. And got it.”

This is, of course, the “provocation” argument which was directed at Rushdie during the years of the fatwa; “oh, well, he brought it on himself, he went looking for a fight and found it”. “Provocation” was also the word used by Francine Prose about the offence caused by some of the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine. Along with other high profile members of PEN, she withdrew from a PEN event at which the magazine was to be honoured in 2015. “Provocation is simply not the same as heroism,” wrote Prose, a statement for which Rushdie attacked her on Twitter.

Salman Rushdie accuses the White House of weaponising ‘fake news’

These weren’t just fellow writers, but old friends: Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Prose herself, who had been Rushdie’s vice-president when he was president of PEN. “Those people were wrong,” he says now. “In light of what’s happened in France subsequently, I hope they’re embarrassed. Because it’s quite clear that people can get killed for anything. Get killed for going out to a club on Friday night. The idea that that particular group of people in some way called down their own damnation is not even tenable. It was a terrible division inside PEN and it’s left some very bad wounds; Francine and I don’t talk any more – and we go back.”

Rushdie won’t hold with the argument that the cartoons were racist. “There was a problem of taking up positions before they really looked for information. For instance, Le Monde had done a survey of Charlie Hebdo covers over a 10‑year period: 520 covers. And the number of covers that dealt with Islam was six. The number of covers dealing with Catholicism, or Israel, was much higher. But then hundreds and hundreds attacking the Front National and Sarkozy. So here you have this anti-racist, anti-state little paper, which is being accused of being an organ of the establishment and racist. The exact opposite of what it is. And I said: ‘Just look at this. And think again.’ And nobody thought again. I’d met one or two of the people who were killed and they were just these … sweethearts. These old, soixante-huitard lefties. And nobody read the fucking magazine.” He laughs. “Another big French survey showed that a very substantial majority of French Muslims identifies as primarily secular, and only a small minority identifies as religious. I thought: ‘Look at this; they don’t care. They have real issues of employment and racism and this isn’t the thing that’s attacking them.’ Anyway it was a horrible fight and it has left damage. I did patch it up with Michael O. I’ve been friends with Michael since 1980.” But no other fences were mended.

    I hate it when the liberal progressive left become stupid. We are supposed to be smarter, they are supposed to be stupid

There is an assumption that Rushdie has been pushed to a more extreme position on Islam because of the years of the fatwa, something he finds irritating and belittling. He does react very strongly against bullying, but along with everything else at the moment, who is the bully and who the victim is a question on which no one can agree. Trump, he says, “is someone who has successfully bullied the country”, and there is bullying elsewhere on the political spectrum. Did it, I wonder, give Rushdie any satisfaction to see Germaine Greer, who was unsupportive of him during the years of the fatwa, be “no-platformed” for her remarks about transgenderism? “No, I felt sad for her. I felt it’s so stupid. I hate it when the liberal progressive left becomes stupid. Because we’re supposed to be smarter and they’re supposed to be stupid. I’ve known Germaine since the dawn of time, and we’re not close, but I thought that was stupid.”

Brexit has been depressing him, too. “It made me think I’ve been wrong about this place all this time. And I know, anecdotally, that rudeness towards people with brown skin and eastern European accents has exploded. People going up to people on the bus and saying: ‘We’ve voted now so when are you leaving?’ In the same way as Trump here has enabled the far right.”

Rushdie thinks he might like to write about the Other Side next; the part of the US that is, to those living in downtown New York, completely alien. “I have an itch to get outside the bubble. There’s such a rift in this country. Maybe you have to go to the other side of the rift.”

The Golden House, viewed as representative of a social class and wealth category rather than characters moving around a fictional space, may attract the remark “check your privilege”, which Rushdie responds to by saying of course that’s what people said about The Great Gatsby; “who cares about these rich people?”

They’ll still say it, I suggest. “Well,” says Rushdie, momentarily eliding into his image as impossibly grand, “read another book.” And he bursts into laughter.

• The Golden House is published by Jonathan Cape.

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23. KATE MILLETT OBITUARY | Julie Bindel
========================================
(The Guardian - 7 September 2017)

Radical feminist writer best known for her pioneering 1970 book Sexual Politics

Kate Millett in 1980. She developed the notion that men have institutionalised power over women, and that this power is socially constructed as opposed to biological or innate. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Kate Millett, author of the groundbreaking bestseller Sexual Politics, was the feminist who launched the second wave of the women’s liberation movement. Millett, who has died aged 82, developed the theory that for women, the personal is political.

The basis of Sexual Politics (1970) was an analysis of patriarchal power. Millett developed the notion that men have institutionalised power over women, and that this power is socially constructed as opposed to biological or innate. This theory was the foundation for a new approach to feminist thinking that became known as radical feminism.

Sexual Politics was published at the time of an emerging women’s liberation movement, and an emerging politics that began to define male dominance as a political and institutional form of oppression. Millett’s work articulated this theory to the wider world, and in particular to the intellectual liberal establishment, thereby launching radical feminism as a significant new political theory and movement.

In her book, Millett explained women’s complicity in male domination by analysing the way in which females are socialised into accepting patriarchal values and norms, which challenged the notion that female subservience is somehow natural.

“Sex is deep at the heart of our troubles …” wrote Millett, “and unless we eliminate the most pernicious of our systems of oppression, unless we go to the very centre of the sexual politic and its sick delirium of power and violence, all our efforts at liberation will only land us again in the same primordial stews.”

Sexual Politics includes sex scenes by three leading male writers: Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and DH Lawrence. Millett analysed the subjugation of women in each. These writers were key figures in the progressive literary scene. Each had a huge influence on the counterculture politics of the time, and embedded the notion that female sexual subordination and male dominance was somehow “sexy”. Mailer, darling of the liberal left, responded with an article in Harper’s magazine in which he viciously attacked Millett’s theories.

And the well-respected critic Irving Howe wrote that Sexual Politics was “a farrago of blunders, distortions, vulgarities and plain nonsense”, and its author guilty of “historical reductionism”, “crude simplification”, “middle-class parochialism”, “methodological sloppiness”, “arrogant ultimatism” and “comic ignorance”.

It was never the intention of Millett to become a career feminist, being much more interested in her art, as a sculptor. But after being featured on the cover of Time magazine, in August 1970, she was catapulted into fame, which led to a backlash from some feminists who accused Millett of styling herself as a movement “leader” – an accusation she rejected.

That December, Time outed Millett as bisexual, and claimed that “[the] disclosure is bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her cause, cast further doubt on her theories, and reinforce the views of those sceptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians”.

At the time the women’s movement was divided over the issue of lesbianism – Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), had labelled lesbians the “lavender menace” – and many liberal feminists turned against Millett. Yet more than three decades later, the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin wrote of Millett: “Betty Friedan had written about the problem that had no name. Kate Millett named it, illustrated it, exposed it, analysed it.”

Born in St Paul, Minnesota, Kate was raised by strict Catholic parents. Her mother, Helen (nee Feely), worked as a teacher and an insurance saleswoman to support her three daughters after her alcoholic husband, James, an engineer, abandoned the family when Kate was 14. Millett went to the University of Minnesota, graduating in English literature in 1956, and then to St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She taught briefly at the University of North Carolina before focusing on sculpture in Japan and then New York. In 1965, she married the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura. During their open relationship, Millett had sexual relationships with a number of women.

She went to Columbia University in 1968, and Sexual Politics, based on her doctorate, was published in 1970. At the time, Millett was living as an impoverished hippy in the Bowery district. She wrote about the impact of her newfound fame in Flying (1974) and followed this up with Sita (1976), about her relationship with an older woman. In 1979, she travelled to Iran’s first International Women’s Day with her then partner, Sophie Keir, a photojournalist. They were arrested and expelled, an experience they documented in their book Going to Iran (1981).

Millett had been committed to mental health institutions by her family on various occasions and she became an activist in the anti-psychiatry movement. She wrote about her experiences in The Loony-Bin Trip (1990). She also wrote The Politics of Cruelty (1994), in which she railed against the use of torture, and Mother Millett (2001), about her relationship with her mother.

In 1998 Millett wrote a piece for the Guardian, The Feminist Time Forgot, in which she said: “I have no saleable skill, for all my supposed accomplishments. I am unemployable. Frightening, this future. What poverty ahead, what mortification, what distant bag-lady horrors, when my savings are gone?”

I had met Millett the year before, when visiting Dworkin in New York. Millett was shy and warm, and not the angry, self-pitying person I had been warned about. She was preoccupied, however, with what she perceived to be the wealth held by other feminists, in particular those who had not contributed to the movement in any original way. Dworkin later told me Millett had lambasted her for owning a brownstone in Brooklyn, for no apparent reason other than she was unhappy with her lot.

In her later years, Millett and Keir lived on a farm in Poughkeepsie, New York state, where at first they sold Christmas trees, and later established a women’s art colony. In 2012 she received the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage award for the arts, and in 2013 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in New York.

Millett’s marriage to Yoshimura ended in 1985. She is survived by Keir, whom she married in later life.

• Katherine Murray Millett, feminist writer, activist and sculptor, born 14 September 1934; died 6 September 2017

========================================
24. NORTH KOREA: WHY WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER | Kate Hudson
========================================

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SAAN_/message/1755

Kate Hudson's Blog - Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [UK]

Terrible news this morning that North Korea has tested a hydrogen bomb, against international law and the wishes of the international community and all peace-loving people. This is a disastrous development and CND strongly condemns this action. We add our voices to all those that call for a diplomatic solution. Steps now towards war could lead to our annihilation.

I am pleased to share below an article published by our sister organisation in the US, Peace Action, which shares some anlysis about possibilites ahead.

Why war is not the answer

A conventional military strike against North Korea’s scattered and well-hidden nuclear sites would likely fail to wipe out North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Instead it could backfire.

The greater area of South Korea’s capital city Seoul, a metropolis of 25 million people (for reference, there are about 8.5 million people living in New York City), is just 30 miles away from the North Korean border and the world’s largest artillery force capable of raining down 300,000 shells an hour. In the first hours of an attack, tens of thousands of civilians could be killed. Pentagon projections estimate a minimum of 1 million casualties, including some of the roughly 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea. The conflict could easily spread to Japan if North Korea retaliates against U.S. military installations in the region. In the nightmare scenario, escalation begets escalation and the nuclear rhetoric turns into reality.

Thankfully, some administration officials appear to be working hard to avoid that scenario. For example, following President Trump’s threats of “fire and fury” and a “locked and loaded” military, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford visited South Korea in part to reassure our allies, and perhaps North Korea, that the U.S. is still seeking a diplomatic solution.

Unfortunately, most of the administration’s calls for diplomacy, including Gen. Dunford’s, are overshadowed by calls for ratcheting up a so-called “pressure campaign” through sanctions that have thus far failed to deter North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Why Sanctions Are a Dead-End

We should know by now that authoritarians like Kim can withstand the harshest of sanctions by shifting the burden to their people. North Korea has a relatively closed economy well-equipped to handle the pressure of sanctions. This week the U.S. trumpeted sanctions that are part of plan to increase pressure on China, North Korea’s biggest trading partner. But for China, North Korea is far more valuable as a strategic buffer than as just another trading partner. China will resist enforcing any sanctions that have enough bite to destabilize North Korea because that instability could threaten China’s own security.

Even if the U.S. were able to inflict serious pain through sanctions the strategy could still fail while harming innocent North Koreans. The Kim regime appears to have made a strategic calculation that the cost of sanctions is worth the benefit of having a nuclear deterrent. “No amount of sanctions will stop North Korea,” Jae Ku, the director of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies,recently told Foreign Policy. “Nuclear weapons are their sole survival strategy.”

How the Diplomatic Process Could Work

The time for direct talks is now. In March, Secretary Tillerson called for North Korea to denuclearize and said only then will we be prepared to engage them in talks.” But expecting North Korea to unilaterally disarm is a fantasy. Recently Tillerson hinted at a greater willingness to negotiate. Advocates for diplomacy need to support that hint of openness and keep pressuring the administration to come to the table in earnest. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California recently called for “high-level dialogue without any preconditions.” Other members of Congress should follow her lead.

Whenever talks begin, which will hopefully be soon, the immediate aim should be formalizing a parallel freeze, where North Korea agrees to freeze its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a freeze in major U.S. and allied military exercises in the region. An approach along those lines has support with some Western policy experts as well as in China and North Korea.

Such a freeze would accomplish the core U.S. objective of preventing North Korea from achieving the capability to reliably strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons. At the same time if a mutual freeze is put in place, that becomes the basis for further negotiations. Such negotiations might have to be be phased, with verifiable North Korean roll backs to its nuclear program exchanged for economic and security inducements offered by the U.S. and other countries.

As far as achieving long term stability in the region, potential outlines of a lasting peace and security settlement with North Korea are not difficult to see. Those outlines include a peace treaty to end to the Korean war (which has never formally ended), mutual declarations of no hostile intent, energy assistance and/or other economic aid for North Korea, an end to sanctions, and a Northeast Asian Nuclear Free Zone that would verifiably eliminate North Korean nuclear programs while committing South Korea and Japan to remain non-nuclear states as well.

We won’t know what’s ultimately possible at the bargaining table until we sit down. Critics of diplomacy with Iran said negotiations were a waste of time. They were wrong. It is long past time to start down the only sane path out of this crisis: sustained, hard-nosed negotiations without preconditions.

(Kate Hudson has been General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament since September 2010. Prior to this she served as the organisation's Chair from 2003. She is a leading anti-nuclear and anti-war campaigner nationally and internationally. She is also author of 'CND Now More than Ever: The Story of a Peace Movement'.)

========================================
25. IN CAPITALIST RUSSIA, A SOCIALIST GARDEN FLOURISHES
by Fred Weir
========================================
(The Christian Science Monitor

If the demise of the Soviet Union taught us anything, it was a sharp lesson in the fact that collectivized agriculture doesn't work – right? Not so fast, say the workers on the Lenin Sovkhoz collective farm.
– Marjorie

The 30 Sec. ReadNostalgia for the Soviet era continues to grow in Russia, reshaping perceptions of the past. But at the Lenin Sovkhoz in Moscow, workers do not just pine for the days of being a collective farm – they still live it. The former state farm survived the government’s decollectivization efforts of the 1990s, which saw most of its peers broken up into private plots or sold to developers. Instead, it was re-created in Russia’s new capitalist society as a cooperative project – effectively maintaining its Soviet lifestyle in a post-Soviet era. And it has thrived. The Lenin farm’s proximity to the huge Moscow market has proved a huge advantage; its fresh produce commands premium prices in city supermarkets. The average salary on the farm, about 78,000 rubles ($1,350) per month, is three times the Russian average, while housing, medical care, and children's education is guaranteed. “It turns out that survival doesn't necessarily go to the strongest, but to the one who can adapt to changing conditions,” says farm director Pavel Grudinin. “We have managed. Today ours are the only strawberry fields practically within sight of the Kremlin.”

SOVKHOZ IMENI LENINA, Russia

Just behind the glitzy Vegas shopping mall on Moscow's outer ring highway lies a huge island of Soviet socialism, the Lenin Sovkhoz.

This former state farm, with its broad fields growing berries, fruits, and vegetables literally amid the vast apartment blocs and rush hour traffic of outer Moscow, has maintained its collective roots and even prospered as everything around it has changed beyond recognition.

Some deride the place and its members' proud embrace of Soviet ideals and symbols as a "museum." But Farm Director Pavel Grudinin says it's more complicated than that. The survival of the Lenin Sovkhoz is an extraordinary post-Soviet tale of how the new freedoms afforded by capitalism can be harnessed to preserve a way of life that people here say they never wanted to give up.

"It turns out that survival doesn't necessarily go to the strongest, but to the one who can adapt to changing conditions," says Mr. Grudinin. "We have managed. Today ours are the only strawberry fields practically within sight of the Kremlin."

He claims that Lenin Sovkhoz is not so much a remnant of the past as it is a beacon for the future.

"We live quite well here. This is perhaps the way we would all have lived if not for the collapse of the USSR and all that mad privatization that followed," he says.

Agricultural transformation

The5-sq.-mile Lenin Sovkhoz is today the only farm of its kind within 30 miles of Moscow, though just 25 years ago, 11 similar ones were its immediate neighbors.

Russia passed laws in the 1990s aimed at dissolving the country's 27,000 state and collective farms into shareholder societies, while additional legislation 15 years ago allowed the sale of agricultural lands for commercial purposes. Most have since been broken up into private plots, sold off to big agro-concerns or – for those near big cities like Moscow – carved up by real estate interests who bought out their shareholders and resold the land for lucrative urban development.

Today, Russian agriculture is gradually recovering from decades of communist-era torpor and post-Soviet chaos, thanks mainly to systematic state support for private farming over the past decade. The rebound has been impressive. For example, the USSR was once the world's biggest importer of wheat. But today Russia has become wheat's biggest exporter, overtaking traditional leaders like Canada, Australia, and the United States. The war of sanctions and counter-sanctions in recent years, along with the devaluation of the ruble, has further stimulated domestic farming.

But serious bottlenecks and systemic failures remain, largely stemming from the disorderly decollectivization of Soviet farms in the past 25 years.

"Here in Pskov region [western Russia], farming is completely depressed, people are leaving the countryside in droves," says Alexander Konoshenkov, president of the independent Pskov Farmer's Association. "If our state had thought about it soon enough, it might have created conditions for people to stay on the land and develop it. Now restoration would be too expensive. The state and collective farms were doomed because if everything belongs to everybody, there is no sense of personal responsibility."

A socialist enterprise

The Lenin Sovkhoz seems to have squared that circle through good luck, the determination of its members to stick together, and astute management. According to Grudinin, the farm has endured four campaigns by "raiders," or outside investors, who tried to buy up enough members' shares to force the farm's dissolution so it could be repurposed for urban development.

After the first attack, he says, they circled the wagons by concentrating all the shares in the hands of 40 core members. Grudinin says the shares do not yield dividends, which means that no conflicts of interest crop up between the shareholders and the approximately 300 other members of the farm. But under Russian law, that makes the farm a "closed shareholder society," which is a huge legal leap from the industrial state farm it was not too long ago.

"Many different forms of property can co-exist and be effective. If it isn't profitable, it goes bankrupt," says Nabi Avarsky, an expert with the official Russian Institute of Agricultural Economics. "The Lenin Sovkhoz is a successful and well-managed cooperative farm." He says there are other examples of working cooperatives in the world, such as kibbutzim in Israel.

"The management of the Lenin farm, led by its director Grudinin, were able to resist takeover bids and the lure of quick, easy money, and convince their members that by staying together they had better long-term prospects. They have since demonstrated that. I must say that we are surprised about the success of that farm. No wonder the Communist Party is holding it up as a great example," Mr. Avarsky says.

The Lenin farm's proximity to the huge Moscow market has proven a huge advantage; its fresh produce commands premium prices in city supermarkets. It was also able to avoid the debt trap that has ruined so many other Russian farms by hiving off parcels of valuable real estate and selling it for huge sums. About 20 years ago they sold a plot of land next to Moscow's outer-ring highway to Russia's "mall king" Aras Agalarov (of recent Russiagate notoriety) to build the Vegas shopping center, and used the proceeds to buy modern farm equipment. Last year they sold another parcel to the Swedish furniture giant IKEA, and built a school for 600 local children. The farm has also constructed new housing for all its workers, a children's amusement park that attracts visitors from all over Moscow, and many other amenities for its members.

"I could have been a multi-millionaire many times over, if I'd chosen that path," says Grudinin. He insists that, despite having acquired the form of a capitalist company to survive, the farm remains a "socialist enterprise."

"How are we different from all these new businessmen? Well, we do not send our profits offshore or line our personal bank accounts. We invest in development of our own people, and our own farm. We carry out social programs like the school, kindergartens, and medical clinic. We take care of our pensioners and children," he says.

'I feel secure here'

Workers on the farm, most of whom have been there – like Grudinin – since Soviet times, say they like the way things have turned out. The average salary on the farm, about 78,000 rubles ($1,350) per month, is three times the Russian average, while housing, medical care, and children's education is guaranteed.

"I feel secure here. I know I have a place to live, good wages and solid work," says Vladimir Dolgachev, an agronomist who oversees the farm's experimental orchards, where they are developing new strains of apples, pears, and cherries for the Russian market. "More than that, this is the kind of work I studied to do many years ago. So many professional agronomists have had to give it up, become salesmen or computer repairmen, or something, but I'm doing what I want."

The farm has also benefited from the growing wave of Soviet nostalgia that is reshaping Russian perceptions of the past. Politicians, especially from the still-powerful Communist Party, make regular pilgrimages to the farm and stage photo ops amid its Soviet-like surroundings.

"The days are gone when Russians think imported goods mean high quality. Nowadays nostalgia is a great marketing tool. People want to have a 'taste of the USSR,' and the Lenin Sovkhoz has certainly benefited from this," says Svetlana Barsukova, an expert with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. "Another recent trend is to promote Russian producers who are feeding the country with pure, Russian products. Opinion polls show that 90 percent of people, given a choice between similar equally priced Russian and Western products, would choose the Russian one."

Grudinin argues it's about much more than that.

"The future is with popular enterprises like this," he says. "All the world is headed this way. The inequalities between rich and poor lead to explosions. Russia has had its own history lessons about this, and more and more people are realizing that we have to find a different path."

    By Fred Weir	Correspondent	


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South Asia Citizens Wire
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