SACW - 12 Oct 2017 | Myanmar: Rise of MaBaTha / Pakistan’s spy agencies / India: Learning from history / Women’s ‘Empowerment’ / Freud's Furniture

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 12 Oct 2017 - No. 2957 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Nobel Peace Prize winner ICAN has disarmed critics. The nukes are next | Vidya Shankar Aiyar
2. The Rise of MaBaTha - Extreme Buddhist Nationalism in Myanmar
3. Pakistan: The Promise of Democracy - The triumph of populism 1971-1973 | S. Akbar Zaidi
4. India becoming dangerous for intellectuals, social activists | Pushkar Raj
5. WESO REPORT 2017: Global unemployment reached 201 million people, says new ILO report 

6. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Religious body SGPC to take back the Shiromani Patarkar Award from Kuldip Nayar
 - India: Lord Ram's statue in Ayodhya part of govt's Hindutva agenda for 2019 elections?
 - India: Fatwa by Darul-Uloom Deoband prohibits women from cutting hair
 - India: Mukul Kesavan on Liberals and the anti-Modi Right
 - India: Amid controversy over Buddhist-Muslim union, Stanzin Saldon, Murtaza Agha get wedding reception
 - Important suggestion from UGC panel regarding universities - Drop ‘Muslim’ from AMU, ‘Hindu’ from BHU names
 - India - Kerala: Questioning Islam is taboo - Interview with K S Radhakrishnan

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7.'Braid chopping' claims in Kashmir spark mass panic and mob violence | Michael Safi and Azhar Farooq
8. Ken-Betwa linkage will destroy India’s mini Grand Canyon | Himanshu Thakkar
9. India: No second coming for Anna - A bogus morality is dangerous | Harish Khare
10. I’m Indian. Can I Write Black Characters? | Thrity Umrigar 
11. The growing ‘tug-of-war’ between Pakistan’s spy agencies | F.M. Shakil
12. India: The citizens’ corner | Narayani Gupta
13. India: Learning from history | Neera Chandhoke
14. The Myth of Women’s ‘Empowerment’ | Rafia Zakaria
15. Freud's Furniture | Scott McLemee

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1. NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER ICAN HAS DISARMED CRITICS. THE NUKES ARE NEXT | Vidya Shankar Aiyar
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The peace Nobel to ICAN has disarmed many of its critics. It’s a recognition that ridding the world of nuclear weapons is not an idealist’s fantasy, but a robust action plan
http://www.sacw.net/article13520.html

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2. THE RISE OF MABATHA - EXTREME BUDDHIST NATIONALISM IN MYANMAR
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based groups like the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion (MaBaTha), the government should address underlying causes and reframe the debate on Buddhism’s place in society and politics.
http://www.sacw.net/article13518.html

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3. PAKISTAN: THE PROMISE OF DEMOCRACY - THE TRIUMPH OF POPULISM 1971-1973 | S. Akbar Zaidi
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WITH the surrender of Pakistani troops on December 16, 1971, in Dhaka, Bangladesh came into being, and with that, the end of the Pakistan that Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had originally created. It also resulted in the end of 13 years of military rule in what remained of the country.
http://www.sacw.net/article13492.html

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4. INDIA BECOMING DANGEROUS FOR INTELLECTUALS, SOCIAL ACTIVISTS | Pushkar Raj
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When journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead in front of her house early last month, quite a few writers and social activists in India must have felt a chill down their spines as the country steadily becomes a dangerous place for intellectuals.
http://www.sacw.net/article13519.html

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5. WESO REPORT 2017: GLOBAL UNEMPLOYMENT REACHED 201 MILLION PEOPLE, SAYS NEW ILO REPORT
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The World Employment and Social Outlook 2017: Sustainable enterprises and jobs
http://www.sacw.net/article13517.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - India: Religious body SGPC to take back the Shiromani Patarkar Award from Kuldip Nayar
 - India: Lord Ram's statue in Ayodhya part of govt's Hindutva agenda for 2019 elections?
 - India: Fatwa by Darul-Uloom Deoband prohibits women from cutting hair
 - India: Mukul Kesavan on Liberals and the anti-Modi Right
 - Hindi Article: Communalism and Freedom of Expression
 - India: Amid controversy over Buddhist-Muslim union, Stanzin Saldon, Murtaza Agha get wedding reception
 - Important suggestion from UGC panel regarding universities - Drop ‘Muslim’ from AMU, ‘Hindu’ from BHU names
 - India - Kerala: Questioning Islam is taboo - Interview with K S Radhakrishnan


 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7.'BRAID CHOPPING' CLAIMS IN KASHMIR SPARK MASS PANIC AND MOB VIOLENCE
by Michael Safi in Delhi and Azhar Farooq in Srinagar
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(The Guardian, 11 October 2017)

Briton and Australians among several people briefly detained by vigilantes in unrest over alleged attacks on women’s hair
A protest in Srinagar this month over alleged ‘braid choppings’. Photograph: Zuma/Rex/Shutterstock


A British woman and three Australians have been briefly detained by vigilantes amid mass panic in Indian-administered Kashmir over a spate of alleged “braid choppings”.

Police in the Himalayan region say they have received reports of at least 40 instances of women’s hair being forcibly cut by unidentified assailants.

Though the veracity of the claims has been questioned, they have sparked mob violence and mass protests, and some young women say they are too afraid to leave their homes.

The first alleged incidents were reported on 14 September in the restive southern districts of the disputed state, and the reports have now spread to its capital, Srinagar.

Vigilante groups armed with axes and wooden boards have been formed in some neighbourhoods in response to the alleged attacks. At least 12 people, including the tourists, have required police to rescue them from mobs.

The British and Australian travellers, accompanied by an Irish and South Korean national, became lost at around 2am on Sunday while en route to Srinagar.

“They were checking their mobiles asking me to go right and left,” their driver, Abid Hussain, told the Guardian. “At one point they asked me to stop and said they had reached the hotel.

“One of them went down to check the hotel and shouted to open the door. Within seconds a crowd of 1,000 or more people had gathered. It was very scary,” he said.

Consular officials said the group were quickly set free unharmed, but police say several other people have been “beaten and thrashed severely” by the vigilantes.

Police are at a loss to explain the alleged crimes but have doubled the reward for information about the culprits to 600,000 rupees (£7,000). The government has called emergency meetings and put local officials on high alert.
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Popular anger culminated on Monday with protests across Kashmir, many led by women, that shut businesses and schools and were dispersed by police in riot gear using smoke shells. A five-year-old boy was seriously injured in the unrest.

The claims made by some alleged victims give few clues for police to pursue and are more akin to ghost stories than crime reports. Bilqees Jan told the Guardian she had been cooking cheese in her home when she felt someone grab hold of her hair.

“I thought it was my son, but then I was dragged and I thought my son cannot do it,” Jan, 35, said. “I could only see that the person was wearing a black dress. I don’t know whether the person was man or woman.

“When I tried to scream, another person sprayed something on my face and I fell unconscious,” she said. “I gained consciousness at a hospital. For the next two days I had no idea what was happening around me. Even now I am very scared. I sit under a blanket and feel scared at every knock.”

A police official, Parvez Ahmad, said investigating Jan’s allegations was challenging because she had a history of severe mental health problems, experiencing hallucinations even as she was being interviewed by officers.

Another alleged victim, Safoora Ashraf, 13, said she had been studying when she felt someone touch her hair. “I ignored it. Then I heard someone jump out the window and when I went to see, there was no one. When I returned to my place I saw my chopped braid there,” she said.

In Kulgam district, where 13 braid chopping incidents have been reported, the police superintendent Shridhar Patil said he was exploring several leads, including personal grudges involving victims, “love triangles” and psychological illness. The majority of the complainants in his district either had a history of mental illness or regularly visited faith healers, he added.
India’s crackdown in Kashmir: is this the world’s first mass blinding?
Read more

As with many events in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where a bloody insurgency has raged since 1989, the braid chopping has taken on political dimensions. Separatist leaders have claimed the attacks are an Indian government conspiracy to undermine the independence movement and “the dignity of our womenfolk”.

Armed militants say it is a strategy by intelligence agencies to inhibit their free movement. The fighters use sympathetic villages as hideouts and staging grounds for attacks – a much more difficult enterprise when villagers are paranoid of any outsiders.
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Government officials in Kashmir have been ordered to keep quiet about the issue, but a senior psychiatrist at a public hospital in Srinagar said “unscientific” police investigations were complicating the cases and creating unnecessary fear.

“It has reached a level where nothing can be concluded,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Since there is a reward now, that means officially [police] are searching for someone. This entire episode needs multi-dimensional assessment, which includes law enforcement agencies, forensic and mental health experts.”

A panic over braid chopping swept northern India earlier this year, with more 100 cases reported in Delhi and neighbouring states. Dr Sudhir Khandelwal, a former head of the psychiatry department at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, said he had not examined the Kashmir incidents but was certain the alleged attacks earlier in the year were part of a “mass hysteria”.

No suspects were identified and the cases did not stand up to thorough forensic examination, he said. “In right-handed individuals, the braid chopping conformed to their right-handedness, and the same with left-handed people. All these people were getting attention, going on TV, being quoted in newspapers. So we believe it was a mass hysteria, an attention-seeking phenomenon.”

He said the families of future victims should seek out doctors before going to the police. “In many of these cases people will be found to have psychological conflicts,” he said.

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8. KEN-BETWA LINKAGE WILL DESTROY INDIA’S MINI GRAND CANYON
By Himanshu Thakkar (Asia Times - October 3, 2017)
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http://www.atimes.com/indias-grand-canyon-will-drown-ken-betwa-linkage/

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9. INDIA: NO SECOND COMING FOR ANNA - A BOGUS MORALITY IS DANGEROUS | Harish Khare
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The Tribune, October 6, 2017

ANNA HAZARE, that tired but persistent theoretician of a moral society, has again been heard from. On Gandhi Jayanti, he popped up for a photo-op at Raj Ghat and expressed himself to be thoroughly unhappy at the way things have worked out these last three years; in particular, he appears to be annoyed that there is no sign of a Lok Pal, the presumably magical piece of legislation that the India Against Corruption cabal had waved so earnestly before a credulous nation. It is a measure of how the times have changed that, with a minor exception here or there, most newspapers relegated the Old Gandhian to the inside pages. 

When he threatens to resurrect his anti-corruption movement, it becomes difficult to decide whether Anna Hazare is an incorrigible fool or a very, very shrewd old man. It is quite possible that he has cunningly sensed that the Modi sarkar has become wobbly and that it has rendered itself vulnerable to public anger after having so brazenly abused and misused people’s confidence to indulge in its whims and fancies. Any regime that enters this zone of doubtful respectability invites poaching from moral archers of the Anna Hazare type.

Or, is he too simple a man who continues to believe genuinely that he led a genuine ‘anti-corruption’ movement in 2011? Granted, his movement attracted honest, idealistic souls to his corner at the Ram Lila ground, those who thought that a ‘change’ was possible. Well, a kind of ‘change’ did take place. Simply put, Anna Hazare ended up preparing the ground for a new regime to come to power. This Anna has to be a very, very simple man to believe that he can once again recapture public imagination and that he can summon agitated souls to rally around his banner.

Gandhians make poor insurgents —unless there is a shrewd Mohandas in charge of both tactics and strategy. Anna is no Gandhi. He was just an earnest man, who wore a Gandhi cap (which the Mahatma never needed). He is entitled to feel that he has been betrayed by his spear carriers — the Kiran Bedis, the Arvind Kejriwals — but he remains curiously innocent about the very nature of the movement that was put together in his name. 

The India Against Corruption was a perfect platform to bring together assorted babas, NGOs, media moguls; there was corporate funding, and retired intelligence hands were there to lend a hand with planning and disinformation. If Anna Hazare cares to look around, he will find that since 2014, his “moral army” has been the principal supplier for raj niwas’, Parliament and assemblies, councils of ministers, etc. 

That is not enough. The babas have become entrepreneurs, presiding over multi-billion-rupee empires; prospering with government patronage and protection; and, behind-the-scenes strategists now man national security portals. The political capital the Anna Hazare movement generated has been encashed to the last rupee. And, above all, all that flag-waving at Ram Lila ground was rather cleverly choreographed, preparing the ground for the carnival of a resentful nationalism. 

Some may find it charming that he refuses to see that he had already been once taken for a ride; but he should not be encouraged to think that he can replicate his “movement” again. No society will allow itself to be hoodwinked a second time. We feel morally cheated. Those who proffered themselves as our saviours and social cleansers have turned out to be very ordinary political operatives, if not worse. 

Nor will he be allowed to pitch his tent. In hindsight, it can be suggested that in 2011, Anna faced a rather benign adversary. The Manmohan Singh regime was a decent arrangement. Anna will discover that he has underestimated the official ruthlessness the New India is capable of unleashing on all those who decide to annoy it.

 More pointedly, the global context has disappeared; the Arab Spring has turned out to be a State Department sleight of hand; none of the countries subjected to a presumably moral renewal has experienced peace, harmony or political stability. The Indian middle classes get easily frightened at the slightest hint of disorder and they are ready to run to the safety offered by this or that strong man. The moral economy of Arab Spring disintegrated long ago. The Anna movement was part of this global subversive project; but, now, there is a businessman and a deal-maker in the White House. 

Nor will corporate India dare to offer any kind of comfort to a second Anna movement. The corporates today make a deeply tamed crowd, barely managing to survive the inspired governmental incompetence in handling the economy.

Media was a powerful ally in the anti-corruption movement. This time round, Anna will discover that the media has found it profitable to sup with the big boss; it no longer thinks of itself as an ally of the underdog in his fight against the daily ritual injustice and indifference; it has enrolled itself in the nationalistic cause. Even if Anna was to find another bunch of innocent souls to help him try to re-enact the Jantar Mantar tableau of righteousness and disapproval, he will find the media laughing him out of town. 

Above all, we are an emotionally exhausted society. The creative power of our passions is degraded every night. A slow intellectual haemorrhage is inflicted on our collective sanity. Our righteousness has been so subtly, so shabbily — and, so toxically — directed against Pakistan. Our anger has been channelled — and wasted — against the Left, minorities and other assorted deshdrohis. 

The Prime Minister has abused our trust; he asked us to trust him because he came from a poor family and then made millions of poor, honest and hard-working people stand in line to get their own hard-earned money while the fat cats were able to work out deals with the Ashoka Road managers. Not only that, he told them to feel good, feel empowered in their misery. Every week, if not every evening, he tries to frog-march us emotionally back to his depleted leadership corner. We are not persuaded to feel good, we are even made to feel small when a Yashwant Sinha is mocked and jeered as a job applicant.

Today, we are an emotionally exhausted nation. Perhaps, even morally tired. We are in a dangerous zone. There is a certain kind of moral coercion in the Anna Hazare variety of earnestness. This is an avoidable trap because it ends up in authoritarian cul de sac.

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10. I’M INDIAN. CAN I WRITE BLACK CHARACTERS?
By Thrity Umrigar 
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(The New York Times, Sept. 14, 2017)

In retrospect, it seems incredible I didn’t anticipate the questions.

My seventh novel, “Everybody’s Son” — about an affluent white couple, their adopted black son, and his search for identity and reconciliation with his past — came to me in a flash of inspiration. I wrote the story in a white heat, in about four months.

So I was unprepared for what interviewers I spoke to about the book asked me: Why, and how, had I chosen to write from the perspective of an African-American protagonist? I hadn’t expected this line of inquiry to come up because, although race and racial identity are central preoccupations of the book, I saw Anton not just as a black character, but as a singular, distinctive character born of my imagination and efforts.

I soon realized I had been naïve. While I might define myself as an American writer, I grew up in India. That means, to many, I’ll always be an Indian-American writer, with all the freight that the hyphen carries.

The assumption by agents, editors and readers was that I would continue writing novels featuring Indian characters or set in India — as I did in my first six novels — even though I have not lived there for over 30 years.

But I’ve always thought about it this way: If men can write about women and science fiction writers can write about space aliens, surely I can write about someone from a different race. And I have spent my entire adult life in the United States. Why shouldn’t I write about that most American of topics — race and race relations?

The debate about whether writers should create worlds and characters based in cultures other than their own is an important one. At its core, pushback in this area serves as a corrective to centuries of colonialism, stereotypical portrayals and racist caricatures. But I worry about how we balance pertinent questions about appropriation with the creative freedom to push boundaries and take risks that are essential to good writing.

To add another wrinkle to this debate, I have never been asked about the appropriateness of creating white American characters, as I did in an earlier novel, “The Weight of Heaven.” Of course, this probably has to do with our country’s ignoble history of racism and racist stereotypes, especially about African-Americans. There’s justifiably less concern about misrepresentation of white Americans.

In my career, the skeptical questions about my decision to write black characters have been balanced by the emails I’ve received from black women. Another novel, “The Story Hour,” is about the friendship between an African-American therapist and an Indian immigrant. The therapist, Maggie, is a well-adjusted professional in a loving marriage. Black women wrote to thank me for this. Often I had tears in my eyes when I read their notes. How low is the bar, how badly do we portray black women in this country, I’d think, that readers feel compelled to thank me for a single fair fictional depiction?

The black woman who is my protagonist’s birth mother in “Everybody’s Son” is very different. She’s addicted to crack and leaves her son locked up in a hot apartment while she goes searching for drugs. If that is all that you know about the book, you’d think that this Indian-American writer was indulging in poisonous stereotypes about black women. But there is also the white father, who epitomizes white privilege and uses his power to get what he wants. In fact, one of the things I wanted to explore is the limits of white liberal piety.

Literature is about empathy. If I have done my job well, the reader will understand the forces working against my protagonist’s mother and how, despite her one terrible mistake, she is still the person her son believes her to be — a good parent.

I operate in an industry where I have been told to my face that a publishing house won’t look at my book because they “already have an Indian-American writer.” I have made my peace with the fact that I have to defer to the publisher’s expertise about the realities of the marketplace. But to limit myself to write books only about India is to condemn me to tell the same stories. And that kind of pigeonholing is a creative death.

So, I will continue to tell the stories that I am called upon to tell. I know I’ll spend many more interviews explaining the characters I create, and that this tension contains its own revealing, dramatic and painful story about our culture and history.

Thrity Umrigar is the author, most recently, of the novel “Everybody’s Son.“

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 17, 2017, on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: An American Story of Writing Across Race

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11. THE GROWING ‘TUG-OF-WAR’ BETWEEN PAKISTAN’S SPY AGENCIES
By F.M. Shakil
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Asia Times - October 4, 2017

Conflict between the civilian Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is at boiling point, with the former accused of overstepping constitutional bounds

Pakistan has long been beset by tensions between its civil and military authorities. Now even its spy agencies seem to be at loggerheads, with accusations of political maneuvering and the overstepping of constitutional bounds being leveled at the government’s Intelligence Bureau (IB).

The civilian watchdog – under instruction from a ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) administration whose grip on power looks ever-more shaky – has been carrying out round-the-clock surveillance of the judiciary, opposition parties and military intelligence for some time.

It is known that officials from the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had their phone calls listened to at the height of civil-military tensions in 2014, following an attempt on the life of the Geo TV anchor Hamid Mir, who said he suspected ISI involvement. The order to bug their phones allegedly came from the now-deposed Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, himself.

The bubbling rivalry between the IB and ISI boiled over in June this year when a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) probing alleged money laundering by the Sharif family made a written complaint to the Supreme Court that the IB was wiretapping JIT members, including ISI and Military Intelligence (MI) personnel. Other JIT members from the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and the Security & Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) were also alleged to have had their phones bugged.

The JIT further reported that the IB was hampering its inquiries, adding that military-led intelligence agencies were not on “good terms” with the IB. It said the IB had collected intelligence on members of the JIT from the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and presented it to Nawaz to use against them. The Supreme Court inquired how the IB came to be working for a “private person” instead of the state, adding that – as it owed its loyalty to the latter – it seemed, prima facie, to have been misused.

Last week, the spy agencies’ hostilities again echoed in court when an IB officer moved a petition at the Islamabad High Court (IHC) to have his seniors’ alleged protection of different national and transnational terrorist organizations probed by the ISI.

In his petition, the IB’s Assistant Sub-Inspector, Malik Mukhtar Ahmed Shahzad, claimed to have filed “reports against various terrorist groups having roots in Uzbekistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and India and providing evidence but no action was taken by the IB in this respect.”

The court, however, remarked that the ISI could not be authorized to carry out an investigation due to the ongoing “tug of war” between it and the IB. It fixed October 9 as the date for the next hearing.

A call-to-attention notice was moved in Pakistan’s Senate by Farhatullah Babar of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party on Saturday over a recent report on intelligence agencies “sheltering” terrorist elements. Citing Maulana Masood Azhar, Babar said the head of the banned Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) was being shielded against UN sanctions for unknown reasons. He also hinted that Mullah Mansoor Akhtar, a Taliban leader who was killed in a drone strike last year, had enjoyed Pakistani intelligence protection.

Reports indicate that IB chief Aftab Sultan visited Nawaz in London last month, on official expenses, to brief him on the latest political developments and to take further instruction from him. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) demanded Sultan’s resignation. “IB head must resign immediately. What was he doing visiting a disqualified PM in London over 4 days at taxpayer expense?,” tweeted the party’s leader, Imran Khan. 

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12. INDIA: THE CITIZENS’ CORNER | Narayani Gupta
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(The Indian Express, October 11, 2017)

The site of protests in Delhi may shift from Jantar Mantar to Ramlila Maidan. But is anyone listening? 

In 1911, when Delhi, to its surprise, found itself honoured with the title of capital of British India, it was evident that national politics would become a real presence in the city, not just a long shadow. The open space outside the Town Hall in Chandni Chowk became a piazza for protesters. The new city was designed to ensure that such gatherings would not take place in New Delhi. Like most planned capital towns, the government offices were at the centre, surrounded by a protective swathe of open land. Kingsway matured into an expanse of green and water. Even in the 1950s, its two kilometres saw little traffic and few people, except at 9 in the morning and 5 in the evening when serried rows of bicycles flowed down, bearing babus big and small to work and then homeward.

Protest marches come in different lengths — some start at the Red Fort, others at ITO, some only the distance between India Gate and Krishi Bhavan. Their destinations have varied. The most defiant was that of December 2012 when crowds swarmed up Raisina Hill. (What an opportunity the President lost when he refused to come out!)

In the 1950s people could go up to Parliament House and shout slogans. I recall admiring my college-going sister who, with other students from Delhi University, assembled there and sang out, “Purtgaali, Goa Chhodo!” But the agitators-turned-legislators wanted a greater distance between themselves and the people. An invisible cordon was thrown round Parliament House, and the “Boat Club” lawn on Rajpath was approved as an Indian Hyde Park Corner. This lasted till farmers’ leader Mahendra Singh Tikait and his supporters in 1988 turned the lawns into a lively village (similar to protesting French farmers in 2010 turning the Avenue Champs Elysees literally into a champ/field). The venue for protests was moved to the Jantar Mantar crossing. At that time I wondered whether the Mandi House roundabout would be next, followed by the Ramlila Maidan. Sure enough, the National Green Tribunal has suggested just this.

For the three generations from the 1940s, nostalgia is about different public places — the kabab-ery on the India Gate lawns cheekily called “Gayladies” (Gaylords was THE posh restaurant then) which was banished to Pandara Road; the Connaught Place Central Park coffee house which exuded fumes of political dissent, and which vanished during the Emergency; the gulmohur-studded Central Park for a still older generation; open-air film shows in neighbourhood parks… and it is but natural that if Jantar Mantar were to return to the anonymous sleekness of a New Delhi landscape, there are many who will feel a sense of loss.
Jantar Mantar, Jantar Mantar Protest, NGT, National Green Tribunal, ban on protest at Jantar Mantar, protestors, protests sites in India, GST Protests, Student protests, political protest, India News, Indian Express Activists of various student organisations at Jantar Mantar, participating in the Chalo Delhi rally. (Express Photo/Aaron Pereira)

The Jantar Mantar site links Jaisinghpura of the 1730s with Lutyens’ city centre of the 1930s. The Ramlila Maidan links 14th century Tughlaq Delhi with Shahjahanabad and with the New Delhi of the 1960s. The Ramlila was enacted there in Mughal times and to the south were forests (jungle baahar), the shrine named for Mata Sundri, and the endless ruins of older cities (khandraat kalan). When the Lutyens team prepared a plan for New Delhi, they left the area from Dilli Gate to what we call ITO un-designated. This grew into a landscape of modern Delhi, with newspaper and administrative offices and educational establishments. The east-west boundary has two parallel roads, each named for a nationalist leader, Jawaharlal Nehru and Asaf Ali. The former is lined with hospitals and a college, the other curves along Shahjahanabad’s southern boundary, lined with business establishments. Between them lies the Ramlila Maidan. Here, in a moment of silence, the memories of Jayaprakash Narayan’s rally in 1975 come crowding back, and the optimism of the swearing-in of the AAP government in 2015.

Jantar Mantar, with its shady full-grown trees, has a pleasant ambience, as has much of Lutyens’ New Delhi. But an equally pleasant landscape can be generated on the frontier between the two Delhis. This area could be made into a dedicated public space, organised at different scales depending on the number of people to be accommodated, kept scrupulously clean, with provision for shade, for refreshments, and for people to stay overnight. A tribute to democracy, and a way to integrate the two cities in Delhi.

To the north is Ajmeri Gate, a densely-built neighbourhood, to the south, in counterpoint, the towering Civic Centre, depressingly gigantic, looming over the Mughal city. In 2004, when it was under discussion, it had been suggested by the Delhi Urban Art Commission that the Civic Centre be faithful to its name, and create an atmosphere which welcomed its citizens, with open access to a good library, a museum, a restaurant serving simple clean food, and extend landscaped spaces to link New Delhi with Ajmeri and Turkman Gates, an area which carried memories of the brutality of 1975. This would bridge the gap between “Old” and New Delhi. Need I say that earnest assurances were given that this would be done, and none of it was. What a pity that the designing of public spaces in a city like Delhi is not seen as an opportunity to create an inclusive society.

To argue that the Jantar Mantar venue is more effective because it is three kilometres closer to Parliament House does not convince. I am not sure that the speeches reverberate inside Herbert Baker’s circular building or his secretariats, that MPs and officials pay any attention to the gatherings. The mental distance is as great at Jantar Mantar as in Ramlila Maidan. It is not measured in kilometres, it lies in the minds of men.
The writer is a historian of Delhi

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13. INDIA: LEARNING FROM HISTORY | Neera Chandhoke
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(The Hindu - October 12, 2017)

It’s not enough to know who killed Mahatma Gandhi — we must understand why he was killed

On January 30, 1948, at a time when northern and eastern India continued to be devastated by the horrors unleashed by the Partition, another appalling event rocked the newly independent and still fragile nation, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Detective novelists tell us that hapless people are murdered for mainly three reasons: greed, ambition and lust, not necessarily in that order. But Nathuram Godse of the Hindu Mahasabha assassinated Gandhi because the Mahatma stood for a world view implacably opposed to the hate-filled rhetoric of the religious right. Gandhi was a powerful moral exemplar — therefore, he posed a distinct threat to the dark forces of doom and destruction. He had to be removed physically.

An individual called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was not murdered, an entire perspective committed to ahimsa, toleration, and respect for other religious traditions was sought to be obliterated. Ironically, his killers failed, because Gandhi continues to live in our hearts, he inhabits our imaginations. We continue to hold right-wing groups responsible for the death of a man who defied an empire as well as obscurantism within India.

A re-investigation

Sixty-nine years down the line, Pankaj Phadnis has appealed that the Supreme Court reinvestigate the death of Gandhi, and holds that Gandhi was killed by a fourth bullet fired by someone else. His motive becomes clear the moment we recognise that Mr. Phadnis is a trustee of the organisation Abhinav Bharat, which is a part of the religious right. We also know that the complex of right-wing groups under the umbrella of the power wielded by the Bharatiya Janata Party seek to reduce the art of history writing to a tale told by knaves and fools on a stormy night. They labour in vain, for history does not go away at the wave of a wand, or by a PIL filed in a court of law. The past will sneak in on silent feet, relentlessly intrude into the present, and compel us to recollect murders and murderers most foul.

No country is more conscious of the persistence of the past than Germany. After the Second World War some German scholars spoke of the need to forget. The project was simply not doable, and soon enough intellectuals began to acknowledge the importance of coming to terms with the Holocaust. Theodor Adorno, the noted philosopher of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, spoke of the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz, or philosophising after Auschwitz, or even living after Auschwitz. We cannot, he concluded, break free of the past. All we can do is to come to terms with the past. More importantly, we must learn to critically reflect on our failure to prevent groups which trade in social hatred from dominating the present. The renowned philosopher Jürgen Habermas continues the task of acknowledging the past, and learning from it. A refusal to address the past results in social pathologies.

Remember the past we must, but how do we remember history? How do we remember Gandhi, a man of whom Albert Einstein is said to have remarked that “generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth”? For a long time, scholars did not write biographies of the man, they wrote hagiographies. Today it is acknowledged that he made mistakes, he seriously misunderstood caste discrimination, he went wrong in his debate with B.R. Ambedkar, he could be authoritarian, and he had peculiar ideas on crucial issues. But we also remember that Gandhi would rather suffer himself than impose suffering on others. When he walked the streets, he was regarded as the embodiment of non-violence. In contrast, when cadres of the religious right appear on our streets, they evoke trepidation. Confronted by threats of violence, people shiver, they run for cover. For the religious right nothing has changed since Gandhi was killed because of his world view. Indians continue to be murdered for the same reason — therefore, the murder of a Gauri Lankesh here, of a Narendra Dabholkar there, of a Govind Pansare here, and of an M.M. Kalburgi there.

This is not a whodunnit

How on earth does it matter who killed Gandhi? We are not reading a detective novel. Nor are we concentrating on discovering clues that will lead us to the murderer before our beloved detective, for example P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, does so. What matters is why Gandhi, and now other dissenters, are killed. Gandhi was killed because he defended an alternative notion of politics based on swaraj, non-violence, pursuit of the truth, and subordination of power to ethics. Putative assassins should recollect that there is a nasty phrase for those who prefer extermination of the opponent to debate, it is called moral cowardice.

What do we learn from two historical narratives, of violence and of non-violence? Violence is based upon the certainty that we know all there is to know, and that is why others who do not conform to our views have to be eliminated. Non-violence is based on the philosophical virtue of doubt. Socrates, who was condemned to drink hemlock by the Athenian jury, knew he did not know. Gandhi, who was assassinated, also knew that no one knows the truth. I, he wrote, have been striving to serve the truth and have the courage to jump from the Himalayas for its sake. But, he added, I know I am still very far from that truth: “As I advance towards it, I perceive my weakness ever more clearly and the knowledge makes me humble.”

This does not mean that we stop searching for the truth. But we are seekers, not finders. We would do well to seek together. If persons have the moral capacity to know the truth, but not the entire truth, then no one person or group can claim superiority over others because their truth is the ultimate. We also realise that just as our (partial) truth is dear to us, others’ (equally partial) truths are bound to be dear to them. There is simply no point in comparing world views, in grading them, or in pronouncing one conception of the good as superior to the other.

What made Gandhi great

Gandhi himself was what he was, a great moral leader and a giver of remedies for the maladies of the human condition, because he drew inspiration from a variety of sources. His philosophy is indebted to four great spiritual and moral traditions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Gandhian philosophy is constituted as much by the Bhagavad Gita as it is by the Sermon on the Mount. And he drew inspiration as much from Tolstoy and John Ruskin as much as he drew inspiration from Vivekananda and other spiritual leaders in India. Gandhi’s truth led inexorably in the direction of toleration.

And it is precisely toleration that we need in today’s world where dissent is suppressed through annihilation. This lesson, the religious right, indeed fundamentalists of every hue, need to learn. We do not tolerate others because we alone know the truth, we tolerate because we do not know enough. Confidence that we know the truth leads to violence, doubt that we know enough leads to non-violence. We come to terms with history by learning from it, not by erasing it.

Neera Chandhoke is a former Professor of Political Science at Delhi University


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14. THE MYTH OF WOMEN’S ‘EMPOWERMENT’
by Rafia Zakaria
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(The New York Times - Oct. 5, 2017)

For only $100, you can empower a woman in India. This manageable amount, according to the website of the organization India Partners, will provide a woman with her own sewing machine, allowing her to take the very first step on the march to empowerment.

Or you can send a chicken. Poultry farming, according to Melinda Gates, empowers women in developing countries by allowing them to “express their dignity and seize control.”

If chickens are not your empowerment tool of choice, Heifer International will, for $390, deliver an “enterpriser basket” to a woman in Africa. It includes rabbits, juvenile fish and silkworms.

The assumption behind all of these donations is the same: Women’s empowerment is an economic issue, one that can be separated from politics. It follows, then, that it can be resolved by a benevolent Western donor who provides sewing machines or chickens, and thus delivers the women of India (or Kenya or Mozambique or wherever in what’s known as the “global south”) from their lives of disempowered want.

Empowerment did not always stand for entrepreneurship starter kits. As Nimmi Gowrinathan, Kate Cronin-Furman and I wrote in a recent report, the term was introduced into the development lexicon in the mid-1980s by feminists from the Global South. Those women understood “empowerment” as the task of “transforming gender subordination” and the breakdown of “other oppressive structures” and collective “political mobilization.” They got some of what they wanted when the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 adopted “an agenda for women’s empowerment.”

In the 22 years since that conference, though, “empowerment” has become a buzzword among Western development professionals, but the crucial part about “political mobilization” has been excised. In its place is a narrow, constricted definition expressed through technical programming seeking to improve education or health with little heed to wider struggles for gender equality. This depoliticized “empowerment” serves everyone except the women it is supposed to help.

In handing out chickens or sewing machines, Western feminists and development organizations can point to the non-Western women they have “empowered.” The non-Western subjects of their efforts can be shown off at conferences and featured on websites. Development professionals can point to training sessions, workshops and spreadsheets laden with “deliverables” as evidence of another successful empowerment project.

In this system there is little room for the complexities of the recipients. Non-Western women are reduced to mute, passive subjects awaiting rescue.

Take, for instance, the Gates Foundation’s poultry farming projects. Bill Gates has insisted that because chickens are small animals kept close to the home, they are particularly suited to “empowering” women. But researchers haven’t found that giving out chickens leads to any long-term economic gains — much less emancipation or equality for half the population.

To keep the money coming, the development industry has learned to create metrics that suggest improvements and success. U.S.A.I.D. statistics on Afghanistan, for instance, usually focus on the number of girls “enrolled” in schools, even if they rarely attend class or graduate. The groups promoting chicken farming measure the short-term impact of the chickens and the momentary increase in household income, not the long-term, substantive changes to women’s lives.

In such cases, there is a skirting of the truth that without political change, the structures that discriminate against women can’t be dismantled and any advances they do make will be unsustainable. Numbers never lie, but they do omit.

Sometimes development organizations actually render women invisible in the service of their narratives. One of my co-authors heard from a worker with an anti-human trafficking group in Cambodia about a Western donor organization filming a fund-raising video. When a woman was produced she was rejected because she didn’t fit the image of a young, helpless survivor that donors wanted.

When non-Western women already have strong political identities, their removal is sometimes required even if it involves pushing them back into the very roles from which empowerment was meant to deliver them. In Sri Lanka, a former soldier for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam told one of my co-authors that she and other ex-fighters were offered classes in cake decorating, hairstyling and sewing. A government official confessed that despite years of training programs, she had never seen any of the women earn a living from these skills.

It’s time for a change to the “empowerment” conversation. Development organizations’ programs must be evaluated on the basis of whether they enable women to increase their potential for political mobilization, such that they can create sustainable gender equality.

On the global stage, a return to this original model of empowerment requires a moratorium on reducing non-Western women to the circumstances of their victimhood — the rape survivor, the war widow, the child bride. The idea that development goals and agendas should be apolitical must be discarded.

The concept of women’s empowerment needs an immediate and urgent rescue from the clutches of the would-be saviors in the development industry. At the heart of women’s empowerment lies the demand for a more robust global sisterhood, one in which no women are relegated to passivity and silence, their choices limited to sewing machines and chickens.

Rafia Zakaria (@rafiazakaria) is a columnist for Dawn and the author of “The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 5, 2017, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: You Can’t ‘Empower’ Us With Chickens

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15. FREUD'S FURNITURE
By Scott McLemee
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(Inside Higher Ed - September 27, 2017)

Nathan Kravis’s On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch From Plato to Freud examines why that piece of furniture ever entered the analytic tradition and how its efficacy and centrality have now come under scrutiny, writes Scott McLemee.

Quite a few naked women fill the pages of Nathan Kravis's On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch From Plato to Freud (MIT Press). Even those depicted as fully clothed tend to be conspicuously dishabille or sunk in languor, if not half-asleep. A number are mythological figures; none are patients. The painter or photographer (or, in the case of the oldest images, mosaic maker or relief carver) gazes at them full-on -- unlike the psychoanalyst, who normally sits perpendicular to the couch, with an ear turned to the analysand.

This arrangement, established by Freud himself, turned into one of the definitive protocols of “orthodox” analysis (along with 50-minute sessions conducted four or five times a week) as well as the premise of countless New Yorker cartoons. That a piece of furniture has become practically synonymous with psychoanalysis seems odd given how little the founder said about the couch. And when he did, as in the paper “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913), it’s clear that the practice originally had “a personal motive, but one which others may share, namely: ‘I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more).’”

OK, but still: Why a couch? For as Kravis points out, having the patient sit in a chair, suitably angled, would presumably do the trick just as well. Freud refers to having the patient assume a reclining position as a “ceremonial” aspect of the treatment. Someone unimpressed by psychoanalysis’s claim to the status of a science might well take this as an inadvertent admission that the technique is grounded in ritual, not research. In that case, the unconscious and the superego are mythological figures, too, just like Venus and Cupid.

The efficacy and centrality of the couch have come under scrutiny within the analytic community itself, and Kravis’s lavishly illustrated book contributes to that effort. The author, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, is also a supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He notes that many analysts now regard the couch as “nonessential” and “no guarantor of an analytic process,” and even “a relic of a more authoritarian era, a power play on the part of the analyst that unnecessarily regresses or infantilizes the analysand.”

On the Couch neither endorses those criticisms nor categorically rejects them. Kravis treats both automatic conformity to tradition and a dogmatic rejection of it as instances of “a frozen, rigid, doctrinaire or overly detached stance on the part of the analyst rather than an effort to sense what’s going on [in treatment] and adapt accordingly.” The challenge is to comprehend how the couch entered the analytic tradition in the first place -- following some 2,500 years of development as part of material culture.

The need for a piece of furniture designed for comfort during the hours one spends neither toiling nor sleeping was not especially urgent for most of humanity through most of its history. “If today the bed is associated primarily with sleep and sex,” writes Kravis, mentioning two matters of great psychoanalytic interest, “in earlier centuries it was strongly associated with grandeur and privilege, just as the couch was associated with ease and luxury in Greco-Roman culture.” The couch was more status symbol than convenience: the wellborn and prosperous would dine and socialize on their couches -- inspiring envy and, when possible, imitation by those lower in the social hierarchy. Among the early images that Kravis presents is a funerary sculpture depicting a woman reclining in the company of her children and a slave who, of course, stand. A number of depictions of the Last Supper less well-known than Leonardo da Vinci’s portray Jesus and the disciples lying on their sides on couches around a table.

The fall of the Roman Empire brought “the decline of reclining dining,” to borrow the author’s once-in-a-lifetime phrase, but imagery from later periods continue to associate the couch with luxury and social position. It also provided room for the pleasures of reading and conversation.

“Newly emerging ideals of comfort were becoming inseparable from notions of social intimacy,” Kravis writes. “These are among the changes that provided the cultural conditions necessary for the eventual emergence of psychotherapy in general, and psychoanalysis in particular.”

Finally, war casualties and the spread of tuberculosis in the 19th century saw the rise of the mass production of recliners and daybeds, including furniture that could be adjusted to provide “as many graduations as possible between sitting and lying.” Freud trained and practiced as a doctor while this market was growing, and it seems significant that the German word he used for couch (or “sofa,” in the earliest English translation) literally means “resting” or “calm” bed, with connotations of the sanatorium or “rest cure” rather than the bourgeois drawing room.

“For it even to become thinkable to lie down in the presence of another person for the purposes of talking to him or her,” writes Kravis, “there had to be an evolution in attitudes toward the private and the social reflected in the history of recumbence -- its social meanings and contexts.” And ultimately, it is the combination of intimacy and distance associated with analysis that he wants to preserve, whether or not the couch facilitates it in a given case. The analytic couch has a rich cultural heritage, which it is possible to defend without succumbing to a fetish.

But one of the articles in his bibliography is a reminder that it is not the public who need persuading. “The Couch as Icon” by Ahron Friedberg and Louis Linn appeared in The Psychoanalytic Review five years ago. The authors did a literature review of “over 400 papers on the usage of the couch in analysis.” And while they found no real consensus on its value or effects, clinical reports suggested that with some patients, the lack of eye contact could be a problem or even dangerous. A depressed person with limited social contacts “may come to an analytic hour and find his loneliness reinforced,” for example. Someone dealing with trauma or early loss can find the experience not just alienating but seriously damaging.

At the same time, Friedberg and Linn reported that a considerable number of their colleagues continued to think of the “orthodox” arrangement as the gold standard of the profession. It’s what they went through and what their training analysts did before them. And patients who do not benefit from it have, in effect, failed the legacy, not vice versa. On the Couch is an interesting and attractive perspective on the roots of an analytic tradition, but parts of that tradition sound downright compulsive.


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