SACW - 16 Sept 2017 | Pakistan: Struggle for democracy / Sri Lanka: Ensure safety of Naheed / India: Promoting inequality; Assassinating Dissent / Religious fundamentalism - Marieme Helie Lucas interviewed / Why do Nazis fear clowns ? / Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Fri Sep 15 18:51:35 EDT 2017


South Asia Citizens Wire - 16 Sept 2017 - No. 2952 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Excerpts concerning South Asia from Statement by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at Human Rights Council 36th session
2. India: Urgent Alert From Narmada Valley - Sardar Sarovar Dam versus the rights of citizens
  * Dont let the Govt. Drown the Narmada Valley to celebrate Modi’s Birthday
  * India: Inauguration of Sardar Sarovar Dam a Cruel Joke on people of the Narmada Valley
  * India: Why Tribals Do Mind being Ousted by Dams - Response to SA Iyer’s Unsupported Clean Chit to Sardar Sarovar Rehabilitation | Shripad Dharmadhikary
3. India: Assassinating Dissent | Mukul Kesavan
4. India: What ever happened to the right to equality ? Inequality is at its highest level in 92 years
5. India: NREGA workers’ demands - Govt Doesn't give a Damn
6. Transnational Writers and the Politics of the English Language | Nyla Ali Khan
7. Why do Nazis fear clowns ? | Sarah Freeman-Woolpert
8. Why do cartoons offend us more than mass assaults against women? | Harsh Kapoor
9. Recent on Communalism Watch:
  - India: Infantilising Hadiya - by ordering the annulment of marriage, the court has legitimised the love jihad propaganda | Manisha Sethi
  - India: Central Bureau of Investigation names Virendra Tawde of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) as key conspirator in Narendra Dabholkar murder
  - India: An Inter-Faith Marriage Sparks Communal Tensions in Ladakh
  - India: Harsh Mander Defies Cow Vigilantes and Rajasthan Police to Lay Flowers At Spot Where Pehlu Khan was Lynched | The Citizen
  - India: Holy Cow and Bullet Train cartoons by Nala Ponnappa and Hemant Morparia‏
  - Facebook Live Event: Invitation from the Indian Writers' Forum - a conversation between Nayantara Sahgal and Githa Hariharan (18 September 2017)
  - The eloquence of silence - The choice is between speaking up and keeping quiet | Samantak Das
  - Silence helps oppressive forces | Mehmal Sarfraz
  - India: Rajasthan police investigation against hindutva activists involved in murder of Pehlu Khan closed | Deep Mukherjee / Hindustan Times
  - India: How Political Patronage Has Kept the Sanatan Sanstha Afloat in Goa | Devika Sequeira
  - Why Do Almost All Terror Probes Reach Nowhere In India? The Clue Lies In Communal Divide | Aakar Patel
  - India: Thousands turn up at 'I am Gauri' Rally in Bangalore
  - Graphic on Cow vigilante violence in India
  - India: [Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and Lankesh] Similar murders, different investigations | K V Aditya Bharadwaj
  - India: Supreme Court’s places of worship ruling betrays a selective reading of constitutional provisions | Tahir Mahmood
  - How Vivekananda laid the foundation for India’s politics of sectarianism
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Nancy Hatch Dupree, the 'Grandmother of Afghanistan,' has died in Kabul
11. Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney urges Sri Lankan authorities to ensure safety of former Maldives President Nasheed
12. In Pakistan, Sunday's election plays into larger struggle for democracy | Pamela Constable
13. Nepal: Manjushree Thapa - "The Stories We Hear and the Stories We Don’t" (Video)
14. Doklam: How India misjudged China’s intentions and it escalated into a major standoff | Bharat Bhushan
15. The eloquence of silence - The choice is between speaking up and keeping quiet | Samantak Das
16. UN says it all, but is New Delhi listening? |  Ravi Nair
17. India: The right to murder? Violence against anyone dubbed ‘anti-national’ is being legitimised and endorsed | Sagarika Ghose
18. Bullet train project exposes India’s misplaced priorities | E Jaya Kumar 
19. India: All that data that Aadhaar captures | Jean Drèze
20. Publication Announcement:  Religion, Science and Society: Indian Context by Ram Puniyani
21. Religious fundamentalism as extreme right political forces - Marieme Helie Lucas interviewed by Claudia Maldonado
22. Disqualified knowledges and theory building | Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
23. The Case Against Civilization - Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better? | John Lanchester

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1. EXCERPTS CONCERNING SOUTH ASIA FROM STATEMENT BY UN HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AT HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL 36TH SESSION
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According to UNHCR, in less than three weeks over 270,000 people have fled to Bangladesh, three times more than the 87,000 who fled the previous operation. Many more people reportedly remain trapped between Myanmar and Bangladesh. The operation, which is ostensibly in reaction to attacks by militants on 25 August against 30 police posts, is clearly disproportionate and without regard for basic principles of international law. We have received multiple reports and satellite imagery of security forces and local militia burning Rohingya villages, and consistent accounts of extrajudicial killings, including shooting fleeing civilians.
http://www.sacw.net/article13474.html

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2. INDIA: URGENT ALERT FROM NARMADA VALLEY - Sardar Sarovar Dam versus the rights of citizens
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* DONT LET THE GOVT. DROWN THE NARMADA VALLEY TO CELEBRATE MODI’S BIRTHDAY
WE APPEAL TO THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY TO STAND WITH PEOPLE OF NARMADA VALLEY AND CALL OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES and ask them to immediately stop filling Sardar Sarovar dam till the rehabilitation is complete as per the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award (NWDTA), state policy and many court judgments. Please call to the following contact numbers, email them and held them accountable for safeguarding the constitutional right of life and livelihood.
http://www.sacw.net/article13472.html

* INDIA: INAUGURATION OF SARDAR SAROVAR DAM A CRUEL JOKE ON PEOPLE OF THE NARMADA VALLEY
New Delhi | September 14, 2017: Today, a group of citizens protested in front of Ministry of Water Resources and submitted memorandum against the decision to inaugurate the Sardar Sarovar Dam on Modi’s Birthday
http://www.sacw.net/article13464.html

* INDIA: WHY TRIBALS DO MIND BEING OUSTED BY DAMS - RESPONSE TO SA IYER’S UNSUPPORTED CLEAN CHIT TO SARDAR SAROVAR REHABILITATION
by Shripad Dharmadhikary
 SA Iyers’s piece in Times of India dated 10 Sept 2017, "Why many tribals don’t mind being ousted by dams", examining the condition of some of the oustees of Sardar Sarovar Narmada dam, (https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Swaminomics/why-many-tribals-dont-mind-being-ousted-by-dams/ ) is a classic case of misinterpretation of data, hiding the more important issues, and conclusions not supported by research findings. Indeed, a proper reading of the article itself shows that unlike Iyer’s assertion, his own figures show that tribals do mind being ousted. Some important points are given below.
http://www.sacw.net/article13466.html

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3. INDIA: ASSASSINATING DISSENT | Mukul Kesavan
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Gauri Lankesh was the editor of a weekly tabloid published in Kannada, the main language of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She was murdered on the fifth of September at the gate of her house in Bangalore, shot in the head and chest at close range. Her killers got away on motorcycles. This gangland-style assassination of a journalist would have made a stir in any case, but coming as it did after a series of political murders, it resonated across India and beyond its borders
http://www.sacw.net/article13473.html

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4. INDIA: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE RIGHT TO EQUALITY ? INEQUALITY IS AT ITS HIGHEST LEVEL IN 92 YEARS
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In a paper aptly titled ’Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’, they conclude that income inequality in India is at the highest level since 1922, when the country’s income tax law was conceived, and that the top 1% earners corner 22% of income. These research findings should send a powerful warning signal to power elites
http://www.sacw.net/article13469.html

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5. INDIA: NREGA WORKERS’ DEMANDS - GOVT DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN
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INDIA: GOVERNMENT PAYS LITTLE HEED TO NREGA WORKERS’ DEMANDS
15 Sept 2017 - New Delhi: For the past five days, hundreds of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) workers and their supporters from across the country have gathered at Jantar Mantar to demand the implementation of the employment guarantee act in letter and spirit. They are demanding a substantial increase in the NREGA wages, timely payment of wages, implementation of local plans, expansion of existing entitlements and adequate budget for their demands.
http://www.sacw.net/article13470.html

INDIA: LETTER TO THE FINANCE MINISTER ARUN JAITLEY BY NREGA SANGHARSH MORCHA
The below letter was handed yesterday [13 Sept 2017] to the Finance Minister, Shri Arun Jaitley, by the signatories, on behalf of NREGA Sangharsh Morcha. The Finance Minister read the letter carefully and thanked the delegation, but did not comment.
http://www.sacw.net/article13467.html

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6. TRANSNATIONAL WRITERS AND THE POLITICS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
by Nyla Ali Khan
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Many scholars are of the opinion that contemporary transnationalism helps in a new post-national era. But such transnationalism does not necessarily weaken nationalism; on the contrary, it can at times operate to reinforce a nationalist agenda. Despite the creation of a new global order, has not transnationalism led to the politicization of identity in the form of fundamentalism, xenophobia, and a fanatical espousal of tradition, as many critics observe?
http://www.sacw.net/article13471.html
  
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7. WHY DO NAZIS FEAR CLOWNS ? | Sarah Freeman-Woolpert
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Use of humor and irony to undermine white supremacy dates back to the days of the Third Reich
http://www.sacw.net/article13475.html

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8. WHY DO CARTOONS OFFEND US MORE THAN MASS ASSAULTS AGAINST WOMEN?
by Harsh Kapoor
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[written on 28 January 2016]
Our progressives (and I share their opposition to class inequality and injustice) apparently have no sense of humour when it comes to visceral satire or derision. Their revolution is dead serious, it isn’t funny. Some of our radical left media - pamphlets, posters etc have no problem reproducing horrific photos of dead bodies, body parts or of the wounds of victims of riots or repression. This is meant as evidence and is often intended also to shock. Is it  (...)
http://www.sacw.net/article13457.html

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8. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
  - India: Infantilising Hadiya - by ordering the annulment of marriage, the court has legitimised the love jihad propaganda | Manisha Sethi
  - India: Central Bureau of Investigation names Virendra Tawde of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) as key conspirator in Narendra Dabholkar murder
  - India: An Inter-Faith Marriage Sparks Communal Tensions in Ladakh
  - India: Shehla Rashid's Poetic Tribute to Gauri Lankesh
  - India: Harsh Mander Defies Cow Vigilantes and Rajasthan Police to Lay Flowers At Spot Where Pehlu Khan was Lynched | The Citizen
  - India: Holy Cow and Bullet Train cartoons by Nala Ponnappa and Hemant Morparia‏
  - Facebook Live Event: Invitation from the Indian Writers' Forum - a conversation between Nayantara Sahgal and Githa Hariharan (18 September 2017)
  - The eloquence of silence - The choice is between speaking up and keeping quiet | Samantak Das
  - Silence helps oppressive forces | Mehmal Sarfraz
  - India: RSS has alerted the BJP to credible signs of a shift in the public mood
  - India: Rajasthan police investigation against hindutva activists involved in murder of Pehlu Khan closed | Deep Mukherjee / Hindustan Times
  - India: How Political Patronage Has Kept the Sanatan Sanstha Afloat in Goa | Devika Sequeira
  - Persecution of Rohingya's in Mynamar
  - Why Do Almost All Terror Probes Reach Nowhere In India? The Clue Lies In Communal Divide | Aakar Patel
  - India: Thousands turn up at 'I am Gauri' Rally in Bangalore
  - Graphic on Cow vigilante violence in India
  - India: [Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and Lankesh] Similar murders, different investigations | K V Aditya Bharadwaj
  - India: Supreme Court’s places of worship ruling betrays a selective reading of constitutional provisions | Tahir Mahmood
  - How Vivekananda laid the foundation for India’s politics of sectarianism

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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10. NANCY HATCH DUPREE, THE 'GRANDMOTHER OF AFGHANISTAN,' HAS DIED IN KABUL
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(Business Insider, September 10, 2017)

REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail: A photograph of late Nancy Hatch Dupree, an American historian, and a bouquet of flowers are seen in her office after she passed away, in Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University (ACKU), in Kabul Thomson Reuters

KABUL (Reuters) - Nancy Hatch Dupree, a historian from the United States who helped set up the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University, has died in the country whose culture she worked for more than five decades to preserve, the university said on Sunday. She was 89.
Dupree arrived in Kabul in 1962 as a diplomat's wife but soon divorced and married Louis Dupree, an archaeologist celebrated for his adventurous exploits and groundbreaking discoveries of Paleolithic Afghan tools and artifacts.
For the next 15 years, they traveled across Afghanistan by Land Rover as Louis Dupree excavated prehistoric sites and Nancy wrote a series of witty and insightful guidebooks to a country since torn apart by decades of warfare.
"She called herself an old monument and a lot of Afghans called her the 'Grandmother of Afghanistan,'" said Wahid Wafa, Executive Director of the Afghanistan Centre. "She understood and knew Afghanistan much better than anybody else."
A fixture in the social scene of Kabul during the 1970s, a now-vanished world of smart cocktail parties and mini-dresses, they were forced to leave in 1978 after the Soviet-backed government accused Louis Dupree of being a spy.
Her husband died in 1989 and much of the time before her return to Afghanistan in 2005 was spent in Pakistan, where as well as briefly meeting Osama Bin Laden and working with the growing number of war refugees, she assiduously gathered as much documentation on Afghanistan as she could.
In 2005, after the fall of the Taliban and the installation of a new Western-backed government in Kabul, she returned with some 35,000 documents wrapped up in fertilizer bags, which became the basis for the Afghanistan Centre archive.
A prolific writer, she was director of the Centre between 2006 and 2011 and continued to go into her office after she stepped down, remaining an institution in the cultural life of Kabul and receiving a stream of visitors.
"It was Nancy's aim to preserve Afghanistan's heritage," said Wafa. "She was a very funny, interesting person who loved to talk to anyone coming to visit. She was kind, she was very giving with the information she had and she was always lobbying for the Afghanistan she first knew."

While she could be waspishly critical of both blundering Westerners and Afghans she felt were promoting a bigoted version of their culture, she retained her faith in her adopted country to the end, Wafa said.
"Despite the 40 years of war in Afghanistan she was always hopeful of the future and hopeful for the future of the new generation in Afghanistan."

(Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)

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11. HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER AMAL CLOONEY URGES SRI LANKAN AUTHORITIES TO ENSURE SAFETY OF FORMER MALDIVES PRESIDENT NASHEED
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(Sunday Times [Sri Lanka], 14 September 2017)

Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney is urging Sri Lankan authorities to respect the rights and ensure the safety of her client and former President of the Maldives Mohammed Nasheed should  he set foot in the country.
 Clooney on Wednesday raised fresh fears for the safety of her client, former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, after an official vowed to have him arrested and deported, AFP reported.
The London-based lawyer said she was "very concerned" about remarks by Male's ambassador-designate to Colombo, that he would have the exiled leader arrested if he set foot in Sri Lanka.
Clooney, who is married to Hollywood star George Clooney, had successfully petitioned a UN body which ruled in late 2015 that Nasheed was wrongfully convicted on a terrorism charge earlier that year and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

Amal Clooney with former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed at a press conference in London in January 2016/AFP

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also ordered the government of President Abdulla Yameen immediately to free Nasheed and pay him compensation, a demand rejected by the Maldives.
Nasheed travelled to London in January last year on prison leave for medical treatment and has since then remained in self-imposed exile. He travels frequently to Sri Lanka to meet fellow dissidents.
The new Maldivian envoy to Sri Lanka, Mohamed Hussain Shareef, told a local television station Monday that he would have Nasheed arrested in Colombo should he visit and would deport him.

"If a Maldivian authority requests me to detain and return Mohamed Nasheed back to the Maldives, I will," Shareef said.
"It's very simple. They have to say, this is an individual who we are seeking. I'll even go out to the street myself and do it."

Clooney said Nasheed should not be returned to the Maldives to serve his prison sentence.
"Any attempt by a Maldivian diplomat to detain president Nasheed in Sri Lanka would constitute a violation of international law as well as Sri Lankan criminal law," she said according to a statement mailed to AFP by Nasheed's party.

She also said Sri Lankan authorities must ensure that Nasheed's rights were respected while he was in their country.
Her co-counsel Jared Genser said Shareef's remarks were "as outrageous as they are in flagrant violation of international law".
Nasheed's Maldivian Democratic Party said they were not taking Shareef's remarks lightly in view of the illegal arrest of a Maldivian national in Colombo in November 2015 and his deportation.
Sri Lanka's foreign ministry had in 2015 warned the Maldivian envoy in Colombo that any similar action in future could seriously damage relations.
The Maldives has faced tough international criticism over the jailing in March 2015 of Nasheed, the first democratically elected president, following a rushed trial which the UN said was politically motivated.
Yameen, who came to power following a controversial run-off against Nasheed in November 2013 faces international censure over his crackdown on dissidents. 

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12. IN PAKISTAN, SUNDAY'S ELECTION PLAYS INTO LARGER STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY
by Pamela Constable
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(Washington Post - September 15, 2017)

Supporters of the Pakistan Movement for Justice wave their party flags at a rally in Islamabad in July. (Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images)

LAHORE, Pakistan — Precinct 120 is a small pocket of a sprawling city, with less than 340,000 voters amid a hodgepodge of slums, shrines and stately monuments. It is also the electoral heart of a political dynasty that has long ruled Pakistan’s wealthiest, most influential province and made Mian Nawaz Sharif the country’s prime minister three times. 

On Sunday, voters there will select someone to fill the National Assembly seat vacated by Sharif, who was ousted July 28 by the Supreme Court. In essence, they will choose between competing images of the former premier: one as an example of the corrupt political elite; the other as the victim of an establishment plot to remove an independent, popular leader.
Deposed Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif addresses a crowd on Pakistan Independence Day in Lahore in August. (Lahore/AP)

The pro-Sharif side is likely to win by a solid margin, polls show, but the race has been skewed by new legal battles for the Sharifs, electoral muscle-testing by religious groups, and a confusing cast of absent and proxy candidates. All of this has distracted attention from the larger struggle for Pakistani democracy at stake.

Even a strong showing by Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N, analysts said, may not revive its larger fortunes or restore calm as national elections loom next year. Months of upheaval have created a swirl of shifting political forces and revealed deeper institutional struggles.

“The cry for ‘change’ becomes ever more shrill,” Najam Sethi, publisher of the Friday Times newspaper, wrote recently. It appears to be “an angry rally” against corruption, “but the underlying reality is more unsettling.” Frustrated people are looking to the military and Islam, he warned, but only with elected civilians in charge does Pakistan “have a chance of reinventing a new democracy.”

One anomaly in the current race is that neither of its two dominant figures — Sharif’s daughter Maryam Nawaz, 43, who has barnstormed the constituency known as NA-120, and Imran Khan, 64, the former cricket star and rabble-rousing opposition leader — are on the ballot. 

Maryam Nawaz, the daughter of Pakistan's former prime minister, poses with a supporter at a rally in Lahore. (Drazen Jorgic/Reuters)

Pakistani opposition leader Imran Khan speaks at a new conference in Islamabad in August. (B.K. Bangash/AP)

Nawaz is standing in for her mother Kulsoom, the official candidate, who is hospitalized in London with lymphoma. She is also representing her father, calling on voters to avenge Sharif’s “betrayal” and to stand up for “the sanctity of the vote” that elected him in 2013. He has been temporarily replaced by Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, a former cabinet minister. 

Traveling to rallies in a convoy of SUVs with heavy security, Nawaz is feted with rose petals, music and fireworks. At a meeting Tuesday with religious minority groups, she stressed her father’s support for an “inclusive” Pakistan that respects all faiths. When she asked the audience to “bring back the lion,” the Sharif party’s symbol, people shouted, “Lion! Lion!” in response. 

In an interview later, she spoke angrily of the Supreme Court ruling. “This was not about corruption. This was a ruse, a ploy, to get rid of him,” she said, describing her father as “the only real leader” in Pakistan with the courage to “call a spade a spade.” She declined to elaborate, but other Sharif aides described him as challenging the army and other state institutions. 

Khan, who heads the Pakistan Movement for Justice, is supplying the passion that its candidate, a medical doctor named Yasmin Rashid, 67, is at pains to display. She is effusive when talking about medical research, but on the campaign trail, she murmurs that she hopes people will vote for her. Khan, whose party symbol is a cricket bat, paints the race as a fight between good and evil.

Yasmin Rashid greets voters in her campaign to fill ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif's seat in parliament. (Pam Constable/The Washington Post)

“This is not an ordinary election. It is a decision for the future of Pakistan,” he thundered in a campaign speech here last week. He called on voters to “tell all of Pakistan” that “the most powerful robber of this country” was declared unfit to lead. “Your vote will strengthen the system to take action against other and bigger robbers,” he vowed.

Nawaz’s defense of her family is hampered by the legal battles they still face. In a court challenge spearheaded by Khan, Sharif was accused of hiding assets abroad and failing to explain how he paid for apartments in London; Nawaz was accused of concealing her ownership role in them. 

Both deny the allegations, but with the election days away, the case continues to intrude. An anti-corruption court has filed cases against the Sharifs and ordered them to appear by Tuesday. 

Despite Rashid’s more modest campaign, her message of bringing change seems to be resonating with voters; she is expected to come in second. On Wednesday, as she inched her way through cramped markets in sweltering heat, followed by a single sound truck, people greeted her warmly.

“We have been waiting for you for a long time,” said Mohammed Nadeem, 35, a garment worker. “We need a new generation in politics,” he explained a moment later. “No corruption, no violence. We want leaders who are honest and simple. We want change.”

Rashid, who ran for parliament in 2013 against Sharif, complained that the family’s campaign is abusing official resources; his brother Shahbaz is Punjab’s top official. “We are fighting the whole provincial establishment,” she said at her clinic, now serving as a call center for volunteers. “But the lion’s roar has become hollow.”

There are half a dozen other candidates, all with slim prospects. But one, a bearded Muslim scholar named Sheikh Yacoob, represents a strategic first foray into electoral politics by the hard-line Islamist movement Jamaat-ud-Dawa. It is led by a controversial cleric, Hafiz Saeed,  who once headed a militant group accused of terrorist attacks in India. He has been under house arrest for months but enjoys public support as a champion of Kashmiri Muslims in India. 

Sheikh Yacoob, right, a Muslim scholar from a hard-line Islamic movement, canvasses for votes. (Pam Constable/The Washington Post)

Jamaat, which has softened its image through humanitarian aid drives, founded a political party last month. It was rejected by election officials, so Yacoob is running as an independent. Posters plastered across NA-120 feature him and the party’s symbol, a power-saving lightbulb. 

On Wednesday, he strode through a maze of alleys, stopping with leaflets at every vegetable stand and bicycle repair shop. Many people welcomed him, often praising Saeed. It was not clear if that sentiment would translate into votes, but even a few thousand could matter in a tight contest between the Sharif and Khan camps.  

“People are demanding new leadership. There is a lot of neglect here. There is sewage and contaminated water,” Yacoob, 46, said afterward. He said he opposes terrorism and believes in religious tolerance. “Our policies are about helping people, not making sermons,” he said.

Pamela Constable is The Post’s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She previously served as a South Asia bureau chief and most recently covered immigration in the Washington area for several years.

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13. VIDEO: MANJUSHREE THAPA - "THE STORIES WE HEAR AND THE STORIES WE DON’T"
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The Himalayan Studies Conference V at CU-Boulder began with Manjushree Thapa's keynote talk on September 1, 2017 
https://youtu.be/LhCv-3Q71As

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14. DOKLAM: HOW INDIA MISJUDGED CHINA’S INTENTIONS AND IT ESCALATED INTO A MAJOR STANDOFF | Bharat Bhushan
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(Catch News - 15 September 2017)

The India-China military standoff at Doklam was apparently based on Indian misperception of Chinese intentions.

An alternative narration of events leading to the military standoff suggests that the skirmish might have been blown out of proportion and was completely unnecessary. And even though eventually the standoff was resolved through diplomatic negotiations, India was not a net gainer at the end of it.

The Chinese army personnel are still present at a distance of 250 metres from the site of the confrontation. This is where they were before June 16. The Indian Army meanwhile has vacated the area that the Chinese wanted vacated.

According to sources in the security establishment, the standoff which was projected as a result of Chinese road construction activity in the Doklam area was anything but that. A Chinese motorable road apparently already exists in the area. It has been there since 2003 or 2005, according to different estimates.

The standoff, according to these sources, had its origins not in any road-construction activity in the disputed area between China and Bhutan but in the destruction of two Indian Army bunkers in the area.

[ . . . ]

http://www.catchnews.com/international-news/doklam-how-india-misjudged-china-s-intentions-and-it-escalated-into-a-major-standoff-81477.html

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15. THE ELOQUENCE OF SILENCE - THE CHOICE IS BETWEEN SPEAKING UP AND KEEPING QUIET | Samantak Das
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(The Telegraph, September 13, 2017)

About a month ago, a US-based cousin was driving back home from work when the car in front of her braked in such a way that she was forced to pull over. The driver of the car, a large White woman, got off her vehicle, came up to my cousin, said, "You f***ing black w****, go back to your own country!" then turned on her heel and walked away. In her 20 years in the US, my cousin, a university professor who works with poor, marginalized and dispossessed groups of people (including many 'illegal immigrants'), had never had to face such visceral racial hatred. She has worked in areas where there are poor Whites who might legitimately feel deprived and upset, whose anger could easily have focused on her - a woman of colour, doing what many feel is a White person's job - and turned violent. But it never had. Until now.

The change, of course, is due to the election to the country's highest office of a man who wears his racism, sexism and bigotry as a badge of pride, who makes no bones about the fact that he sees the United States of America as an essentially White, Christian, 'masculine' nation, where all other ethnic and religious groups (not to speak of women) are present on sufferance. Donald Trump's narrowness of vision, stridently racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, his characterization of Blacks and Mexicans as drug dealers, rapists and thieves, are not just disturbing and deeply scary in themselves, they also embolden others of his ilk to express thoughts and perform actions they might otherwise have kept to themselves. Witness, for example, the open display of Confederate flags and Nazi swastikas in rally after rally or the murderous car attack on anti-racism protestors in Charlottesville last month.

Perhaps an even bigger tragedy than his own bigotry is Trump's repeated refusal to even acknowledge, let alone condemn, that of others. American media, especially online journals, have noted time and again the ways in which such wilful blindness and calculated silence regarding acts of racism, sexism and other kinds of bigotry have led others to spout hate speech and commit hate crimes; how the once-defunct and all-but-forgotten Ku Klux Klan is once again news; how violent crimes against non-Whites and incidents of gender and racial discrimination have grown since Trump assumed office.

These thoughts have been provoked by the news that a prominent Bengaluru law firm has served legal notice on behalf of a Bharatiya Janata Party politician seeking an unconditional apology from noted historian and writer, Ramachandra Guha, for daring to suggest that the killers of Gauri Lankesh may have had Hindutva links. The legal notice states, quite accurately, that no evidence has been unearthed so far linking Gauri Lankesh's killers with the BJP or any of its associated bodies and goes on to add, for good measure, that the murders of other anti-Hindu-fundamentalist writers - Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi - too, are still under investigation. But therein lies the rub. That the murderers of Dabholkar (killed four years ago), Pansare (killed in February 2015) and Kalburgi (August 2015) have still not been identified undoubtedly speaks volumes about the efficiency of the investigative arm of our executive but, equally, they point to a conspiracy of silence on the part of our rulers regarding hate crimes committed against those considered 'anti-national' or 'anti-Hindu' (the two are rapidly becoming synonyms). Why have politicians who profess to be patriots not raised a hue and cry over the delay in these investigations? Why has our prime minister not once mentioned, leave alone condemned, the brutal gunning down of Gauri Lankesh, in his prolific Tweetery? Why have gau goondas, who lynch those they suspect of trading in cow flesh, received tacit approval from those professing love for cow and Hindu dharma?

This climate of silence - of a refusal to speak up and condemn such heinous acts, or to speak up just a little too late and say too little, perfected to a fine art by our nation's supreme leader - is just as pernicious and soul-destroying for India as Trump's calculated silences and equivocations are proving to be for the US. And it applies not just in the cases of urban, urbane, cosmopolites such as Lankesh and her like; silence in the face of mob violence, or the lynching of alleged beef-eaters and cow-transporters is just as shameful and condemnable.

The verbal racial violence faced by my cousin is a very far cry from the killing of an anti-racism protester or the physical assault launched on Mexicans post-Trump, but - and this is really the point - it is merely a difference of degree, not of kind. And something eerily similar seems to be happening here, too. People, otherwise perfectly normal, apparently sober and decent people, people like you, dear reader, and me, are no longer afraid to express sentiments they would have been ashamed of articulating even a short while ago. The tide of venom against minorities, women, Dalits, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes that seems to have engulfed social media like a tsunami of hate and bigotry has to be seen and read to be believed.

Equating the 2002 Gujarat pogrom and the murder of Lankesh with the killing of street dogs is as nothing when compared to the kinds of things being said about those who condemn the killings and beatings by cow vigilantes or ask for more proactive measures from the government to protect dissenting voices. The ruling party's troll army is a well-organized, well-oiled piece of sophisticated machinery that can and will use all means to stifle and silence voices that question or condemn their masters' motives and machinations and our natural propensity to kowtow to power will ensure that we either fall in and join our voices to this chorus of abuse and hate or, at best, keep quiet and justify it to ourselves in the name of peace or busy-ness or a sense of being above such pettiness or what have you. To speak up will invite reprisal and to keep quiet will make us complicit in the rapid unravelling of whatever ideals India still stands for - that seems to be the stark choice facing each one of us. The question each one of us needs to ask is: which side will I be on?

The author is professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a rural development NGO for the last 30 years

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16. UN SAYS IT ALL, BUT IS NEW DELHI LISTENING? |  Ravi Nair
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(The Indian Express, September 12, 2017)

Underlying the UN High Commissioner’s statement is less outrage and more a deep sense of disappointment at India’s stonewalling and obfuscation. India’s attitude to all well-meaning advice and mild criticism has been procrastination. 

“I deplore current measures in India to deport Rohingyas at a time of such violence against them in their country… by virtue of customary law, its ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the obligations of due process and the universal principle of non-refoulement, India cannot carry out collective expulsions, or return people to a place where they risk torture or other serious violations.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights could not have said it more bluntly. It was part of his opening statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 36th session earlier this week. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein has been regularly calling countries to account at the UN where, in nine cases out of ten, nations unite to thwart meaningful international scrutiny of their records.

It is clear that the entire UN human rights system has got the measure of the Goebbelsian spin that the Indian political and diplomatic leadership has been engaging in, particularly since 2014, on human rights, tolerance, democratic norms and standards. Coincidentally, India’s membership at the UN Human Rights Council ends this year.  In his statement, Al Hussein did not confine himself to the utterances of the Narendra Modi government. He also commented on the climate of fear amongst not only the minorities but among large numbers of citizen of India.

“I am also dismayed by a broader rise of intolerance towards religious and other minorities in India. The current wave of violent, and often lethal, mob attacks against people under the pretext of protecting the lives of cows is alarming. People who speak out for fundamental human rights are also threatened. Gauri Lankesh, a journalist who tirelessly addressed the corrosive effect of sectarianism and hatred, was assassinated last week. I have been heartened by the subsequent marches calling for protection of the right to freedom of expression, and by demonstrations in 12 cities to protest the lynchings. Human rights defenders who work for the rights of India’s most vulnerable groups – including those threatened with displacement by infrastructure projects such as the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada river valley – should be considered allies in building on India’s achievements to create a stronger and more inclusive society. Instead, many are subject to harassment and even criminal proceedings, or denied protection by the State.”

Underlying the UN High Commissioner’s statement is less outrage and more a deep sense of disappointment at India’s stonewalling and obfuscation. India’s attitude to all well-meaning advice and mild criticism has been procrastination, in the forlorn hope, that the concern about India will be overtaken by concerns elsewhere. Yemen, Syria, Myanmar, et al.

One example of this stonewalling is how India deals with important UN communications. During India’s third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the UN Human Rights Council on May 4, 2017, in Geneva, the Human Rights Council made many important suggestions in the hope that the country that styles itself as the world’s largest democracy will be responding to recommendations on September 21, 2017, when there is review of India’s obligations.

The recommendations of the UPR pertained to restrictions presently placed against civil society, freedom of association, media freedoms, ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture to name just a few.

New Delhi’s insouciance on human rights or democratic behavioural norms is breathtaking. It is 20 years since it signed the Convention against Torture but has not found the time to ratify it. It has not reported to the UN Human Rights Committee, a requirement under the UN Civil and Political Rights Convention since 1997. The reporting cycle is four years. The number 20 seems to be a favourite with the MEA. India signed the Convention for the Protection of all persons from Enforced Disappearance 10 years ago; it is yet to ratify it by passing a domestic law. Meanwhile, individuals like Jawaharlal Nehru University student Najeeb Ahmed continue to vanish into thin air. For the forlorn half widows in Kashmir, it is time to discard the hope that they will have any information about their ‘disappeared’ husbands.

India last reported to the Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination 10 years ago. Caste is a millstone around India’s neck and domestically there is a sense of ennui even in liberal circles. The Hindutva brigade knows that when caste goes the Vedic Hindu order will go too. The treatment of Africans in India has shocked world opinion and it will continue to revisit us in all international fora. This is only a representative list, not exhaustive.

Rajnath Singh, clearly the most experienced political hand in the BJP stable, has made some statements in Kashmir that are different from the rhetoric that we have been hearing since 2014. Can we have the banning of the use of pellet guns for starters? The trust of the Kashmiri people is to be earned today.

Here’s more from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, one of the strongest and most courageous voices in the UN, and indeed in the international community, today.He has spared no government during his tenure. On Kashmir: “I regret the reluctance of both India and Pakistan to engage with my Office on the human rights concerns I have raised in recent months. This includes their failure to grant access to Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control to verify the worrying developments that continue to be reported there. In the absence of such access, my Office is undertaking remote monitoring of the human rights situation in Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control, with a view to making the findings public in the near future.”

The Supreme Court of India follows normal procedure even when it has urgent items on its list. It postponed the hearing on the government’s intention to deport Rohingya refugees, scheduled for September 11, by one week. This means the police will continue to do the rounds of Rohingya homes in Jammu, Jaipur, Mewat, Delhi and Hyderabad, intimidating an already beleaguered community. One week is a long time when your lives and your children’s lives and safety are on the line.

Against the backdrop of such thoughtlessness and the rabid posturing of right-wing elements, it is the Sikh community that has set a wonderful example. A group of Sikh volunteers has arrived at the Bangladesh-Myanmar border to provide much needed relief and more importantly a spirit of solidarity and compassion to a physically and mentally broken people.

Let’s leave aside the hollow invocations – and hypocrisy – of ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’.We will only abide by the call to ‘We The People’, in the preamble to our Constitution. It is, and must, continue to be our guiding light, our pole star, not any other Nakshatram.

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17. INDIA: THE RIGHT TO MURDER? VIOLENCE AGAINST ANYONE DUBBED ‘ANTI-NATIONAL’ IS BEING LEGITIMISED AND ENDORSED
by Sagarika Ghose
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(The Times of India - September 13, 2017)

The gunning down of journalist Gauri Lankesh is yet another bullet in the heart of those who value free thought in India. Gauri’s murderers remain unknown, some pointing to a Naxal link, others like her own lawyer alleging that ‘Hindu terror units’ took her life.

When it comes to allegations about ‘saffron terror’, not since Nathuram Godse has a Hindutva-inspired assassin openly taken authorship of his act of murder. While Islamist or Maoist extremists generally claim responsibility for their killings, ‘saffron terror’ has been suspected in several cases like recently in the murders of rationalists Dabholkar, Kalburgi and Pansare, arrests have been made but there haven’t been any convictions.

We don’t know who killed Gauri, but we do know who is celebrating. Those on social media jubilant at Gauri’s slaying describe themselves as proud Hindu nationalists, people who Gauri described as her greatest enemy. In fact, Hindu nationalism seeks a new enemy every day.

If Gauri had been alive and expressed her views for example on how India should not deport Rohingya Muslims, she would surely have been screamed at by furious ‘nationalist’ television anchors and branded as a traitor, anti-national jihadist and Naxalite. The fever pitch of TRP-driven accusations often builds to such a crescendo that the individual against whom prime time fingers are pointed ends up becoming public enemy No 1, the equivalent of a criminal who is publicly paraded on TV every night with a metaphorically blackened humiliated face even as a gladiatorial mob on social media howls for her blood.

Violent minds, violent language and violent speech beget violent acts. In an atmosphere where violence is legitimised, endorsed and even seen as a ticket to creating an electoral constituency, the actual act of murder of an ‘anti-national’ only becomes part of a ‘war’. The so-called ‘just war’ against those who insist on the right not to be Hindu nationalists, to be atheist and rationalist, or to criticise superstitions, or to eat beef, to wear mini-skirts, to be homosexual, to attack government policy on Jammu & Kashmir, or to speak in support of JNU students.

The toxic divide between ‘nationalists’ and ‘traitors’ is deeply worrying. Gauri had strong ideas, she spoke out against Hindutva politics, attacked caste discrimination, pushed for Naxals to abandon the gun and argued passionately for sexual liberation of women. In a conservative regional milieu, her voice may have been offensive to some but instead of mounting counterarguments, someone decided her voice had to be forever silenced.

Her killers may have used a gun but don’t we see a symbolic gun pointed at the heads of student activists like Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid in the manner they are publicly vilified? Doesn’t the gun loom large when hit lists are circulated, naming women journalists and activists as next targets after Gauri? The cult of violence is breeding faster than the aedes aegypti mosquito and infecting many with the fever of blood lust against those they disagree with.

Particularly violent language is directed at the media. Ministers can label media as ‘presstitutes’, a BJP MP can call for a noted author to be tied to a jeep, noxious foul-mouthed abusers get strength and even legitimacy from the fact that they are ‘followed’ by our top political leadership. Journalists have been threatened, intimidated and murdered before, especially in far flung areas where telling the truth means risking all. But today, are attacks against journalists being endorsed by the ruling party when it issues only perfunctory condemnations of Gauri’s murder, instead of a ringing declaration that attacks on media persons will not be tolerated?

When the government itself takes pride in an anti-media stance, when certain journalists are boycotted by ruling party ministers, when critical journalists are censored and labelled ‘news traders’ by the political leadership, when lawyers who beat up female reporters are not censured, then is the government itself creating an environment encouraging violence against the press?

Too much religious ideology in politics inevitably creates violence in society. Those rulers who practice ‘soft Islamism’ or ‘soft Hindutva’ open the gate for more radical extremists to gain legitimacy. The divide between Hindus and Muslims is being catastrophically sharpened today, with every new issue like azaan, or beef ban or Vande Mataram or even the so-called competing claims of shamshans and kabristans becoming a tacit political signal for violent goons to take over the argument and physically attack the targets of their rage.

‘Shout don’t shoot’ is supposed to be the mantra of democracy, but when democracy becomes entwined with irrational religious ideology then shout becomes tacit permission to shoot, all norms of parliamentary democracy brushed aside by those empowered by blind faith.

In a recent interaction former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan said that open-mindedness is a crucial pre-requisite for high growth economies that rely on the service sector. The manner in which Gauri’s death is being legitimised as just punishment for traitors shows that far from open-mindedness, those who dare to think differently are seen as natural targets for assassination.

If we as a society don’t speak up now, there will be more deaths, and each ‘anti-national’ murder will be celebrated more noisily than ever. As TV anchors unleash deadly calls to metaphorically eliminate the enemy, the legitimacy of violence will become widespread. That’s why, strict exemplary action must be taken against those who celebrate violence because they are just as culpable as Gauri’s killers.

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18. BULLET TRAIN PROJECT EXPOSES INDIA’S MISPLACED PRIORITIES
by E Jaya Kumar  
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(Asia Times - September 14, 2017)

The $17 billion project, connecting Mumbai with Ahmedabad, comes at a time when Indian Railways is struggling with safety and hygiene

Railway workers repair the tracks next to derailed coaches of a passenger train at the site of an accident in Khatauli, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India on August 20, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi
Railway workers repair the tracks next to derailed coaches of a passenger train at the site of an accident in Khatauli, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India on August 20, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

The Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe is in India to inaugurate the prohibitively expensive ‘Bullet Train’ project between the Indian cities of Mumbai and Ahmedabad, at a time when the Indian Railways are reeling under a spate of accidents. Japan has struggled to export the ‘Shinkasen‘ for years, lobbying with the US, among others. India is now its first international buyer.

The estimated $17 billion (Rs1.1 trillion) Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail (MAHSR) project comes at a time when critics feel that the money could have gone towards improving basic safety and services. The Indian Railways are critical to the Indian economy and is considered a political hot potato.

Unsustainable costs

The expected cost of the tickets is expected to make it unsustainable, even though Railways Minister Piyush Goyal promises to make the high-speed train journey affordable to the common public.

The money to be spent on MAHSR could have been earmarked for upgrading the safety of the fourth largest railway network in the world. A spate of derailments during the past three weeks had alarmed millions of train travelers and forced the federal government to sack some top railway officials and move Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu, who had  offered to resign, to another ministry.

Since Mumbai’s crowded trains had been soft targets for terrorists, the bullet train project featuring 21 km of tunnel with seven kilometer going under sea at Thane Creek raises security and safety concerns, as well.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Abe jointly laid the foundation for MAHSR project at Sabarmati station in Ahmedabad on Thursday.

The 508-km rail track work for the project using Japanese ‘Shinkansen’ (bullet-train) technology is expected to be completed by 2022. The bullet train passing through 12 stations and running at 320 km per hour will cut travel time between Ahmedabad and Mumbai cities to two to three hours from seven hours. Mumbai, India’s financial capital has a large Gujarati population who travel often to the capital of their home state in Gujarat. Prime Minister Modi, a Gujarati, was the Chief Minister of the state before moving to the Center in May 2014. The inauguration comes months ahead of the state going to the polls.

The 10-car bullet train with a capacity of 750 people will carry 36,000 passengers per day. It will have 16 cars in future and 35 trains will run in one direction every day.

After commissioning of the project, 4,000 people are expected to get jobs for operation and maintenance of the high-speed line. It is likely to generate indirect jobs for 16,000 people.

Safety & hygiene challenges

The bullet train was among the promises given to voters by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during the campaign for 2014 national elections. When Modi visited Japan in November last year, he traveled by bullet train from Tokyo to Kobe to visit a plant making cars for such trains.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pose in front of a Shinkansen bullet train before heading for Hyogo prefecture at Tokyo Station, Japan November 12, 2016, in this photo taken by Kyodo. Mandatory credit Kyodo/via REUTERS
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pose in front of a Shinkansen bullet train before heading for Hyogo prefecture at Tokyo Station, on November 12, 2016. Photo: Kyodo/via Reuters

While dream projects like MAHSR will certainly help the rich move faster between cities, Indian Railways need to focus more on upgrading safety measures and facilities for millions of passengers in existing trains. Derailments were happening even after Goyal took office.

The minister has formulated the following plan to reduce accidents:

    Replace rails on old and accident-prone tracks with those procured to lay new lines
    Replace old couplings that join coaches with center-buffer couplers which can prevent pile-up of coaches during accidents
    Replace all traditional train cars with Linke-Hoffman-Busch cars in a decade
    Install anti-fog LED lights in train engines for safer operations during winter
    Remove all unmanned level crossings by 2019

All these safety steps are easier said than done. Although railway budgets in the past had focused on passenger safety, accidents continued unabated with over 70 mishaps recorded since 2010.

The 2017 railway budget has proposed a safety fund of Rs 1 trillion to be spent over the next five years. But passenger safety depends on timely use of funds for track and signal upgrades and alertness of train drivers and signalers. Human error by railway staff and others like trespassers is blamed for many train accidents in India. Besides safety, food and cleanliness are a major concern for passengers. A recent official report said food served in stations and trains are unfit for human consumption.

Some of its key findings are:

    No cleanliness and hygiene maintained at kitchens in railway stations and in pantry cars in trains
    Impure water from tap used in preparation of food; uncovered waste bins and food stuff attract flies, rats and cockroaches
    Contaminated and recycled food stuff found along with those whose shelf life has expired; unauthorized brands of water bottles sold.

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is planning to set up new kitchens and upgrade existing ones and bifurcate preparation and distribution of food. Meals for trains will be picked up from selected kitchens owned, operated and managed by IRCTC. Toilets remain dirty in most train cars. The situation may improve only if all the 55,000 train cars are fitted with 140,000 bio-toilets by 2019. 

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19. INDIA: ALL THAT DATA THAT AADHAAR CAPTURES | Jean Drèze
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(The Hindu, September 09, 2017)

The very foundation of Aadhaar must be reconsidered in the light of the privacy judgment

Predictably enough, the recent Supreme Court order affirming that privacy is a fundamental right sent Aadhaar’s public-relations machine into damage control mode. After denying the right to privacy for years, the government promptly changed gear and welcomed the judgment. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), suddenly asserted, “The Aadhaar Act is based on the premise that privacy is a fundamental right.” He also clarified that the judgment would not affect Aadhaar as the required safeguards were already in place.

Types of information

The fact of the matter is that Aadhaar, in its current form, is a major threat to the fundamental right to privacy. The nature of this threat, however, is poorly understood.

There is a common perception that the main privacy concern with Aadhaar is the confidentiality of the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR). This is misleading for two reasons. One is that the CIDR is not supposed to be inaccessible. On the contrary, the Aadhaar Act 2016 puts in place a framework for sharing most of the CIDR information. The second reason is that the biggest danger, in any case, lies elsewhere.

To understand this, it helps to distinguish between three different types of private information: biometric information, identity information and personal information. The first two are formally defined in the Aadhaar Act, and protected to some extent. Aadhaar’s biggest threat to privacy, however, relates to the third type of information.

In the Aadhaar Act, biometric information essentially refers to photograph, fingerprints and iris scan, though it may also extend to “other biological attributes of an individual” specified by the UIDAI. The term “core biometric information” basically means biometric information minus photograph, but it can be modified once again at the discretion of the UIDAI.

Identity information has a wider scope. It includes biometric information but also a person’s Aadhaar number as well as the demographic characteristics that are collected at the time of Aadhaar enrolment, such as name, address, date of birth, phone number, and so on.

The term “personal information” (not used in the Act) can be understood in a broader sense, which includes not only identity information but also other information about a person, for instance where she travels, whom she talks to on the phone, how much she earns, what she buys, her Internet browsing history, and so on.

Coming back to privacy, one obvious concern is the confidentiality of whatever personal information an individual may not wish to be public or accessible to others. The Aadhaar Act puts in place some safeguards in this respect, but they are restricted to biometric and identity information.

Sharing identity details

The strongest safeguards in the Act relate to core biometric information. That part of the CIDR, where identity information is stored, is supposed to be inaccessible except for the purpose of biometric authentication. There is a view that, in practice, the biometric database is likely to be hacked sooner or later. Be that as it may, the UIDAI can at least be credited with trying to keep it safe, as it is bound to do under the Act.

That does not apply, however, to identity information as a whole. Far from protecting your identity information, the Aadhaar Act puts in place a framework to share it with “requesting entities”. The core of this framework lies in Section 8 of the Act, which deals with authentication. Section 8 underwent a radical change when the draft of the Act was revised. In the initial scheme of things, authentication involved nothing more than a Yes/No response to a query as to whether a person’s Aadhaar number matches her fingerprints (or possibly, other biometric or demographic attributes). In the final version of the Act, however, authentication also involves a possible sharing of identity information with the requesting entity. For instance, when you go through Aadhaar-based biometric authentication to buy a SIM card from a telecom company, the company typically gains access to your demographic characteristics from the CIDR. Even biometric information other than core biometric information (which means, as of now, photographs) can be shared with a requesting entity.

Quite likely, this little-noticed change in Section 8 has something to do with a growing realisation of the business opportunities associated with Aadhaar-enabled data harvesting. “Data is the new oil”, the latest motto among the champions of Aadhaar, was not part of the early discourse on unique identity — at least not the public discourse.

Section 8, of course, includes some safeguards against possible misuse of identity information. A requesting entity is supposed to use identity information only with your consent, and only for the purpose mentioned in the consent statement. But who reads the fine print of the terms and conditions before ticking or clicking a consent box?

There is another important loophole: the Aadhaar Act includes a blanket exemption from the safeguards applicable to biometric and identity information on “national security” grounds. Considering the elastic nature of the term, this effectively makes identity information accessible to the government without major restrictions.

Mining personal information

Having said this, the proliferation and possible misuse of identity information is only one of the privacy concerns associated with Aadhaar, and possibly not the main concern. A bigger danger is that Aadhaar is a tool of unprecedented power for mining and collating personal information. Further, there are few safeguards in the Aadhaar Act against this potential invasion of privacy.

An example may help. Suppose that producing your Aadhaar number (with or without biometric authentication) becomes mandatory for buying a railway ticket — not a far-fetched assumption. With computerised railway counters, this means that the government will have all the details of your railway journeys, from birth onwards. The government can do exactly what it likes with this personal information — the Aadhaar Act gives you no protection, since this is not “identity information”.

Further, this is just the tail of the beast. By the same reasoning, if Aadhaar is made mandatory for SIM cards, the government will have access to your lifetime call records, and it will also be able to link your call records with your travel records. The chain, of course, can be extended to other “Aadhaar-enabled” databases accessible to the government — school records, income-tax records, pension records, and so on. Aadhaar enables the government to collect and collate all this personal information with virtually no restrictions.

Thus, Aadhaar is a tool of unprecedented power for the purpose of mining personal information. Nothing in the Aadhaar Act prevents the government from using Aadhaar to link different databases, or from extracting personal information from these databases. Indeed, many State governments (aside from the Central government) are already on the job, under the State Resident Data Hub (SRDH) project, which “integrates all the departmental databases and links them with Aadhaar number”, according to the SRDH websites. The Madhya Pradesh website goes further, and projects SRDH as “the single source of truth for the entire state” — nothing less. The door to state surveillance is wide open.

What about private agencies? Their access to multiple databases is more restricted, but some of them do have access to a fair amount of personal information from their own databases. To illustrate, Reliance Jio is in possession of identity information for more than 100 million Indians, harvested from the CIDR when they authenticate themselves to buy a Jio SIM card. This database, combined with the records of Jio applications (phone calls, messaging, entertainment, online purchases, and more) is a potential gold mine — a dream for “big data” analysts. It is not entirely clear what restrictions the Aadhaar Act imposes, in practice, on the use of this database.

In short, far from being “based on the premise that privacy is a fundamental right”, Aadhaar is the anti-thesis of the right to privacy. Perhaps further safeguards can be put in place, but Aadhaar’s fundamental power as a tool for mining personal information is bound to be hard to restrain. The very foundation of Aadhaar needs to be reconsidered in the light of the Supreme Court judgment.

Jean Drèze is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University

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20. PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT:  RELIGION, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: INDIAN CONTEXT BY RAM PUNIYANI
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RELIGION, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: INDIAN CONTEXT by Ram Puniyani
 
Religion and Science have been two major phenomenon of human society. Religion encompasses moral values on one side, faith and rituals on the other. Science is the attempt of society to grapple with the truth of nature in a rational manner. Religion developed in different societies in diverse ways. Science is an enterprise where global efforts contribute to a single endeavor, Religion has been used as a cover for expansion of Empires in the earlier times and currently the major imperialist goal of control over all resources is masquerading under the phenomenon of terrorism, which sounds to be emerging from religion. In India from last three decades in particular politics is wearing the clothes of religion. The issues related to religion are thrown up to whip up mass hysteria, under the din of which the real issues of society get undermined and society is polarized.
 
This book is a compilation of articles and essays which have been written to engage with issues related to these two phenomenon, religion and science, mainly in Indian context. The major global context is also taken up. The range of topics is very broad, covering from origin of religion and its facets to present phenomenon of violence in the name of religion.
   
Total Pages: 368
ISBN: 978-93-7495-701-1
   
Price: Rs.400/- US $18
   
For copies contact
 
MEDIA HOUSE
375-A, Pocket 2, Mayur Vihar Phasse-1, Delhi - 110 091.
Mob. +91-9555642600, +91-7599485900
E-mail: books.mediahouse[at]gmail.com
www.mediahousebooks.com
www.facebook.com/mediahousebooks

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21. RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM AS EXTREME RIGHT POLITICAL FORCES - MARIEME HELIE LUCAS INTERVIEWED BY CLAUDIA MALDONADO
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Claudia Ximena Maldonado: Could you explain why do you say that religious fundamentalism are extreme right political forces? You do a parallelism between fascism and religious fundamentalism. Could you explain?
Marieme Helie Lucas: One should analyze a political phenomenon in political terms, not in religious ones.
Muslim fundamentalists share many ideological similarities with other extreme-Right parties in the recent European past.
Just like Nazis, Muslim fundamentalists believe (not in a superior – Aryan - race but) in a superior creed – Islam -; like fascists they construct a mythical past (whether Ancient Rome or the Golden Age of Islam) that justifies their superiority – a superiority that grants them the right and duty to physically eliminate the ‘untermensch’ – and they include in this category: Jews, communists, gypsies, etc…; Muslim fundamentalists believe that non-believers or ‘kofr’ are also ‘untermensch’ ( some of them even used this very term !) who should be physically eliminated (remember that it is Muslims who do not adhere with the fundamentalist version of Islam that are first targeted by Muslim fundamentalists and are their first victims, as they brand them ‘kofr’ ); like fascists they are pro-capitalists; like Nazis they put women in their place ( church/mosque, kitchen and cradle); etc…
During the nineties in Algeria, a decade long attempt by Muslim fundamentalist armed groups to seize political power and impose a theocracy, people called them ‘green fascists’ (‘green’ being a reference to the colour of Islam) or ‘Islamo-fascists’. People were well aware of their political program. We had a ten-year long resistance to armed fundamentalism in Algeria and it made 200,000 victims. Armed Muslim fundamentalists slit throats, beheaded, burnt alive, killed and tortured in all possible manners the women and girls who refused to veil or persisted in going to school; they took them into domestic and sexual slavery and impregnated them so that they breed ‘good Muslims’ – just as Daesh does right now in Iraq and Syria. Muslim fundamentalists are against girls’ education, as one could also recently see in Pakistan and Afghanistan. No one in Europe would dream of justifying such atrocities in the name of religion today if they were perpetrated by ‘Christians’. But it seems presumed ‘Muslims’ do not deserve an equal access to universal human rights, freedom of thought and freedom of conscience.
How long will it take for the European Left and human rights organisations to defend the courageous people who, at risk to their lives, stand up to Muslim fundamentalists rather than their oppressors and killers?
[. . .]
FULL TEXT AT: http://www.siawi.org/article15193.html

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22. DISQUALIFIED KNOWLEDGES AND THEORY BUILDING
by Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
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As a political geographer whose work has concentrated on the everyday lives and agencies of children, I sometimes find that my research materials are considered unsuitable for building generally applicable theoretical ideas. Children’s everyday lives seem to comprise "disqualified knowledges"
http://societyandspace.org/2017/09/12/disqualified-knowledges-and-theory-building/

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23. THE CASE AGAINST CIVILIZATION DID OUR HUNTER-GATHERER ANCESTORS HAVE IT BETTER? 
by John Lanchester
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(The New Yorker, September 18, 2017)

Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as parts of STEM (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”). When it comes to the shiniest wonders of the modern world—as the supercomputers in our pockets communicate with satellites—science and technology are indeed hand in glove. For much of human history, though, technology had nothing to do with science. Many of our most significant inventions are pure tools, with no scientific method behind them. Wheels and wells, cranks and mills and gears and ships’ masts, clocks and rudders and crop rotation: all have been crucial to human and economic development, and none historically had any connection with what we think of today as science. Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method. I love my laptop and my iPhone and my Echo and my G.P.S., but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant on right now, as I sit typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses. Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin. That’s technology, not science.

In “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,” James C. Scott, a professor of political science at Yale, presents a plausible contender for the most important piece of technology in the history of man. It is a technology so old that it predates Homo sapiens and instead should be credited to our ancestor Homo erectus. That technology is fire. We have used it in two crucial, defining ways. The first and the most obvious of these is cooking. As Richard Wrangham has argued in his book “Catching Fire,” our ability to cook allows us to extract more energy from the food we eat, and also to eat a far wider range of foods. Our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, has a colon three times as large as ours, because its diet of raw food is so much harder to digest. The extra caloric value we get from cooked food allowed us to develop our big brains, which absorb roughly a fifth of the energy we consume, as opposed to less than a tenth for most mammals’ brains. That difference is what has made us the dominant species on the planet.

The other reason fire was central to our history is less obvious to contemporary eyes: we used it to adapt the landscape around us to our purposes. Hunter-gatherers would set fires as they moved, to clear terrain and make it ready for fast-growing, prey-attracting new plants. They would also drive animals with fire. They used this technology so much that, Scott thinks, we should date the human-dominated phase of earth, the so-called Anthropocene, from the time our forebears mastered this new tool.

We don’t give the technology of fire enough credit, Scott suggests, because we don’t give our ancestors much credit for their ingenuity over the long period—ninety-five per cent of human history—during which most of our species were hunter-gatherers. “Why human fire as landscape architecture doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by ‘precivilized’ peoples also known as ‘savages,’ ” Scott writes. To demonstrate the significance of fire, he points to what we’ve found in certain caves in southern Africa. The earliest, oldest strata of the caves contain whole skeletons of carnivores and many chewed-up bone fragments of the things they were eating, including us. Then comes the layer from when we discovered fire, and ownership of the caves switches: the human skeletons are whole, and the carnivores are bone fragments. Fire is the difference between eating lunch and being lunch.

Anatomically modern humans have been around for roughly two hundred thousand years. For most of that time, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, about twelve thousand years ago, came what is generally agreed to be the definitive before-and-after moment in our ascent to planetary dominance: the Neolithic Revolution. This was our adoption of, to use Scott’s word, a “package” of agricultural innovations, notably the domestication of animals such as the cow and the pig, and the transition from hunting and gathering to planting and cultivating crops. The most important of these crops have been the cereals—wheat, barley, rice, and maize—that remain the staples of humanity’s diet. Cereals allowed population growth and the birth of cities, and, hence, the development of states and the rise of complex societies.

The story told in “Against the Grain” heavily revises this widely held account. Scott’s specialty is not early human history. His work has focussed on a skeptical, peasant’s-eye view of state formation; the trajectory of his interests can be traced in the titles of his books, from “The Moral Economy of the Peasant” to “The Art of Not Being Governed.” His best-known book, “Seeing Like a State,” has become a touchstone for political scientists, and amounts to a blistering critique of central planning and “high modernism,” the idea that officials at the center of a state know better than the people they are governing. Scott argues that a state’s interests and the interests of subjects are often not just different but opposite. Stalin’s project of farm collectivization “served well enough as a means whereby the state could determine cropping patterns, fix real rural wages, appropriate a large share of whatever grain was produced, and politically emasculate the countryside”; it also killed many millions of peasants.

Scott’s new book extends these ideas into the deep past, and draws on existing research to argue that ours is not a story of linear progress, that the time line is much more complicated, and that the causal sequences of the standard version are wrong. He focusses his account on Mesopotamia—roughly speaking, modern-day Iraq—because it is “the heartland of the first ‘pristine’ states in the world,” the term “pristine” here meaning that these states bore no watermark from earlier settlements and were the first time any such social organizations had existed. They were the first states to have written records, and they became a template for other states in the Near East and in Egypt, making them doubly relevant to later history.

The big news to emerge from recent archeological research concerns the time lag between “sedentism,” or living in settled communities, and the adoption of agriculture. Previous scholarship held that the invention of agriculture made sedentism possible. The evidence shows that this isn’t true: there’s an enormous gap—four thousand years—separating the “two key domestications,” of animals and cereals, from the first agrarian economies based on them. Our ancestors evidently took a good, hard look at the possibility of agriculture before deciding to adopt this new way of life. They were able to think it over for so long because the life they lived was remarkably abundant. Like the early civilization of China in the Yellow River Valley, Mesopotamia was a wetland territory, as its name (“between the rivers”) suggests. In the Neolithic period, Mesopotamia was a delta wetland, where the sea came many miles inland from its current shore.

This was a generous landscape for humans, offering fish and the animals that preyed on them, fertile soil left behind by regular flooding, migratory birds, and migratory prey travelling near river routes. The first settled communities were established here because the land offered such a diverse web of food sources. If one year a food source failed, another would still be present. The archeology shows, then, that the “Neolithic package” of domestication and agriculture did not lead to settled communities, the ancestors of our modern towns and cities and states. Those communities had been around for thousands of years, living in the bountiful conditions of the wetlands, before humanity committed to intensive agriculture. Reliance on a single, densely planted cereal crop was much riskier, and it’s no wonder people took a few millennia to make the change.

So why did our ancestors switch from this complex web of food supplies to the concentrated production of single crops? We don’t know, although Scott speculates that climatic stress may have been involved. Two things, however, are clear. The first is that, for thousands of years, the agricultural revolution was, for most of the people living through it, a disaster. The fossil record shows that life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers. Their bones show evidence of dietary stress: they were shorter, they were sicker, their mortality rates were higher. Living in close proximity to domesticated animals led to diseases that crossed the species barrier, wreaking havoc in the densely settled communities. Scott calls them not towns but “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps.” Who would choose to live in one of those? Jared Diamond called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake in human history.” The startling thing about this claim is that, among historians of the era, it isn’t very controversial.

The other conclusion we can draw from the evidence, Scott says, is that there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states. “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.

It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived through it.

War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing. “It is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping,” Scott maintains. All the good things we associate with writing—its use for culture and entertainment and communication and collective memory—were some distance in the future. For half a thousand years after its invention, in Mesopotamia, writing was used exclusively for bookkeeping: “the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.” Early tablets consist of “lists, lists and lists,” Scott says, and the subjects of that record-keeping are, in order of frequency, “barley (as rations and taxes), war captives, male and female slaves.” Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish cultural critic, who committed suicide while trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe, said that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that every complicated and beautiful thing humanity ever made has, if you look at it long enough, a shadow, a history of oppression. As a matter of plain historical fact, that seems right. It was a long and traumatic journey from the invention of writing to your book club’s discussion of Jodi Picoult’s latest.

We need to rethink, accordingly, what we mean when we talk about ancient “dark ages.” Scott’s question is trenchant: “ ‘dark’ for whom and in what respects”? The historical record shows that early cities and states were prone to sudden implosion. “Over the roughly five millennia of sporadic sedentism before states (seven millennia if we include preagriculture sedentism in Japan and the Ukraine),” he writes, “archaeologists have recorded hundreds of locations that were settled, then abandoned, perhaps resettled, and then again abandoned.” These events are usually spoken of as “collapses,” but Scott invites us to scrutinize that term, too. When states collapse, fancy buildings stop being built, the élites no longer run things, written records stop being kept, and the mass of the population goes to live somewhere else. Is that a collapse, in terms of living standards, for most people? Human beings mainly lived outside the purview of states until—by Scott’s reckoning—about the year 1600 A.D. Until that date, marking the last two-tenths of one per cent of humanity’s political life, “much of the world’s population might never have met that hallmark of the state: a tax collector.”

The question of what it was like to live outside the settled culture of a state is therefore an important one for the over-all assessment of human history. If that life was, as Thomas Hobbes described it, “nasty, brutish, and short,” this is a vital piece of information for drawing up the account of how we got to be who we are. In essence, human history would become a straightforward story of progress: most of us were miserable most of the time, we developed civilization, everything got better. If most of us weren’t miserable most of the time, the arrival of civilization is a more ambiguous event. In one column of the ledger, we would have the development of a complex material culture permitting the glories of modern science and medicine and the accumulated wonders of art. In the other column, we would have the less good stuff, such as plague, war, slavery, social stratification, rule by mercilessly appropriating élites, and Simon Cowell.

To know what it is like to live as people lived for most of human history, you would have to find one of the places where traditional hunting-and-gathering practices are still alive. You would have to spend a lot of time there, to make sure that what you were seeing wasn’t just a snapshot, and that you had a real sense of the texture of lived experience; and, ideally, you would need a point of comparison, people with close similarities to your hunter-gatherers, but who lived differently, so that you would have a scientific “control” that allowed you to rule out local accidents of circumstance. Fortunately for us, the anthropologist James Suzman did exactly that: he spent more than two decades visiting, studying, and living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari, in southwest Africa. It’s a story he recounts in his new book, “Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen.”

The Bushmen have long been of interest to anthropologists and scientists. About a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, fifty thousand years after the emergence of the first anatomically modern humans, one group of Homo sapiens was living in southern Africa. The Bushmen, or Khoisan, are still there: the oldest growth on the human family tree. (The term “Bushman,” once derogatory, is now used by the people themselves, and by N.G.O.s, “invoking as it does a set of positive if romantic stereotypes,” Suzman notes, though some Khoisan prefer to use the term “San.”) The genetic evidence suggests that, for much of that hundred and fifty thousand years, they were the largest population of biologically modern humans. Their languages use palatal clicks, such as a tsk, made by bringing the tongue back from the front teeth while gently sucking in air, and the “click” we make by pushing the tongue against the roof of the mouth, then bringing it suddenly downward. This raises the fascinating possibility that click languages are the oldest surviving variety of speech.

Suzman first visited the Bushmen in 1992, and went to stay with them two years later, as part of the research for his Ph.D. The group he knows best are the Ju/’hoansi, between eight and ten thousand of whom are alive today, occupying the borderlands between Namibia and Botswana. (The phonetic mark /’ represents a tsk.) The Ju/’hoansi are about ten per cent of the total Bushman population in southern Africa, and they are divided into a northern group, who retain significant control over their traditional lands, and who therefore still have the ability to practice hunting and gathering, and a southern group, who were deprived of their lands and “resettled” into modern ways of living.

To a remarkable extent, Suzman’s study of the Bushmen supports the ideas of “Against the Grain.” The encounter with modernity has been disastrous for the Bushmen: Suzman’s portrait of the dispossessed, alienated, suffering Ju/’hoansi in their miserable resettlement camps makes that clear. The two books even confirm each other’s account of that sinister new technology called writing. Suzman’s Bushman mentor, !A/ae, “noted that whenever he started work at any new farm, his name would be entered into an employment ledger, documents that over the decades had assumed great mystical power among Ju/’hoansi on the farms. The secrets held by these ledgers evidently had the power to give or withhold pay, issue rations, and determine an individual’s right to stay on any particular farm.”

It turns out that hunting and gathering is a good way to live. A study from 1966 found that it took a Ju/’hoansi only about seventeen hours a week, on average, to find an adequate supply of food; another nineteen hours were spent on domestic activities and chores. The average caloric intake of the hunter-gatherers was twenty-three hundred a day, close to the recommended amount. At the time these figures were first established, a comparable week in the United States involved forty hours of work and thirty-six of domestic labor. Ju/’hoansi do not accumulate surpluses; they get all the food they need, and then stop. They exhibit what Suzman calls “an unyielding confidence” that their environment will provide for their needs.

The web of food sources that the hunting-and-gathering Ju/’hoansi use is, exactly as Scott argues for Neolithic people, a complex one, with a wide range of animal protein, including porcupines, kudu, wildebeests, and elephants, and a hundred and twenty-five edible plant species, with different seasonal cycles, ecological niches, and responses to weather fluctuations. Hunter-gatherers need not only an unwritten almanac of dietary knowledge but what Scott calls a “library of almanacs.” As he suggests, the step-down in complexity between hunting and gathering and domesticated agriculture is as big as the step-down between domesticated agriculture and routine assembly work on a production line.

The news here is that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We’re flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great. Still, we are where we are, and we live the way we live, and it’s possible to wonder whether any of this illuminating knowledge about our hunter-gatherer ancestors can be useful to us. Suzman wonders the same thing. He discusses John Maynard Keynes’s famous 1930 essay “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Keynes speculated that if the world continued to get richer we would naturally end up enjoying a high standard of living while doing much less work. He thought that “the economic problem” of having enough to live on would be solved, and “the struggle for subsistence” would be over:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

The world has indeed got richer, but any such shift in morals and values is hard to detect. Money and the value system around its acquisition are fully intact. Greed is still good.

The study of hunter-gatherers, who live for the day and do not accumulate surpluses, shows that humanity can live more or less as Keynes suggests. It’s just that we’re choosing not to. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most valuable thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants, whose proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted meat is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . . We can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material inequality were not tolerated.”

This egalitarian impulse, Suzman suggests, is central to the hunter-gatherer’s ability to live a life that is, on its own terms, affluent, but without abundance, without excess, and without competitive acquisition. The secret ingredient seems to be the positive harnessing of the general human impulse to envy. As he says, “If this kind of egalitarianism is a precondition for us to embrace a post-labor world, then I suspect it may prove a very hard nut to crack.” There’s a lot that we could learn from the oldest extant branch of humanity, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to put the knowledge into effect. A socially positive use of envy—now, that would be a technology almost as useful as fire.

This article appears in other versions of the September 18, 2017, issue, with the headline “How Civilization Started.”

John Lanchester, the author of “How to Speak Money,” is a contributing editor at The London Review of Books, and has written for The New Yorker since 1995.


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South Asia Citizens Wire
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matters of peace and democratisation in South
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