SACW - 17 Oct 2017 | Afghan Girls Access to Education / Nepal: Tail wags the dog / Pakistan: Shifting towards the Right / India: ‘Beef Lynchings’ ; Historian Audrey Truschke; Baba Yaga on the Ganges / Havana lector / Plea by Mikhail Gorbachev

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 17 Oct 2017 - No. 2958 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Afghanistan: Oct 2017 Report by Human Rights Watch on Access to Education for Girls
2. Pakistan - India: People to people reality and myth | I A Rehman
3. India: Subsistence Under Siege - Women’s Labor and Resistance in Eastern India | Ranjana Padhi
4. Revolution Destroyed | Jairus Banaji
5. Baba Yaga on the Ganges - on reading Soviet books in socialist India | Palash Krishna Mehrotra
6. Recent on Communalism Watch:
- A petition in supreme court seeks to deny Savarkar’s role in Gandhi’s assassination
- Book Review: Force of Hindutva
- India: BJP's Sangeet Som terms Mughal emperors traitors - names would be removed from pages of history
- India: Pahlu Khan & economic destruction by Gau Rakcchaks
- India: Soibal Dasgupta starts to reveal what goes on inside RSS camps in West Bengal
- India: Assam’s Muslims are living at the mercy of the mob, the unknown assailant and a partisan state
- India: SC To States: Compensate Victims Of Cow Vigilantes Even Without Any Judicial Order
- India: Cow vgilantes continue to work - The supreme court had said "This must stop" but in response the RSS chief said: pious gau rakshaks’ needn’t fear govt
- Ashok Swain on Why Right-Wing Supporters Are Openly Uncivil, Abusive And Misogynistic
- After RSS meet in Bhopal plans for outreach and expansion in Kerala, Bengal
- What Yogi Adityanath overlooks: Hindus prefer a stable world of material benefits over the destabilising one of perennial religious activism | Pavan K Varma
- India: Text of draft of the uniform civil code submitted to the Law Commission by eminent citizens
- India: Teenaa Kaur's documentary film on the survivors of the Genocide of Sikhs in 1984 in Widows Colony, New Delhi
- India: Religious body SGPC to take back the Shiromani Patarkar Award from Kuldip Nayar

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Tail wags the dog in Kathmandu | Kanak Mani Dixit
8. Who are the Haqqanis, Afghanistan's most feared insurgents? | Afp
9. More blinkered than blind: Pakistan is “mainstreaming” misogynist tribal justice
10. Shifting towards the Right - The systematic persecution of the Ahmadis in Pakistan | Mehmal Sarfraz
11. What’s Behind India’s ‘Beef Lynchings’? | Amitava Kumar
12. India: BJP’s secret poll dealings need to be exposed | A G Noorani
13. India: Pluck Egos, Not Just Tea - Lingering misogyny prompts Kerala women to keep fighting for basic rights | Minu Ittyipe
14. The Kim analogy for Modi | Jawed Naqvi
15. Security panic after Indian minister lost unlocked phone | Majid Hyderi
16. Audrey Truschke | The historian who engages
17. Losing Your Religion - EPW Edit
18. At 5% trade between South Asian countries with shared borders is the lowest in the world. Why? 
19. Life stories of significant South African women told through the prism of love | F. Fiona Moolla
20. Havana lector - The people who read to Cuban cigar-factory workers
21. My Plea to Trump and Putin | Mikhail Gorbachev

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1. AFGHANISTAN: OCT 2017 REPORT BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH ON ACCESS TO EDUCATION FOR GIRLS
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132-page report by Human Rights Watch, on Girls’ Access to Education in Afghanistan points out Insecurity, Government Inaction, and Donor Disengagement Reversing Vital Gains
http://www.sacw.net/article13525.html

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2. PAKISTAN - INDIA: PEOPLE TO PEOPLE REALITY AND MYTH | I A Rehman
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People to people dialogues, if allowed to develop to their full potential, can not only resolve tensions between states, they can also lead to fruitful cooperation between them for the mutual good of their populations.
http://www.sacw.net/article13523.html

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3. INDIA: SUBSISTENCE UNDER SIEGE - WOMEN’S LABOR AND RESISTANCE IN EASTERN INDIA | Ranjana Padhi
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Few areas of economic life in India have been so transformed by the last quarter-century of neoliberal policy as women’s labor. Economic restructuring and the promotion of corporate interests in the globalized economy are increasingly linking the eastern Indian state of Odisha to mining companies and steel conglomerates.
http://www.sacw.net/article13524.html

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4. REVOLUTION DESTROYED | Jairus Banaji
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Stalinism produced a ferocious culture of conformity, in part through the intimidation produced by terror but even more importantly through the figure of Stalin himself
http://www.sacw.net/article13521.html

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5. BABA YAGA ON THE GANGES - ON READING SOVIET BOOKS IN SOCIALIST INDIA | Palash Krishna Mehrotra
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The Soviets we loved. When printing technology in India was restricted to black and white, Russia bamboozled us with colorful comics and magazines. Russian ballets and circuses performed in Indian cities and were broadcast frequently on Indian state television.
http://www.sacw.net/article13526.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
- A petition in supreme court seeks to deny Savarkar’s role in Gandhi’s assassination
- Book Review: Force of Hindutva
- India: BJP's Sangeet Som terms Mughal emperors traitors - names would be removed from pages of history
- India: Pahlu Khan & economic destruction by Gau Rakcchaks
- India: Soibal Dasgupta starts to reveal what goes on inside RSS camps in West Bengal
- India: Assam’s Muslims are living at the mercy of the mob, the unknown assailant and a partisan state
- India: SC To States: Compensate Victims Of Cow Vigilantes Even Without Any Judicial Order
- India: Cow vgilantes continue to work - The supreme court had said "This must stop" but in response the RSS chief said: pious gau rakshaks’ needn’t fear govt
- Ashok Swain on Why Right-Wing Supporters Are Openly Uncivil, Abusive And Misogynistic
- After RSS meet in Bhopal plans for outreach and expansion in Kerala, Bengal
- What Yogi Adityanath overlooks: Hindus prefer a stable world of material benefits over the destabilising one of perennial religious activism | Pavan K Varma
- India: Text of draft of the uniform civil code submitted to the Law Commission by eminent citizens
- India: Youths accused of lynching Mohammad Akhlaq have landed contractual jobs with public sector NTPC
- India: Teenaa Kaur's documentary film on the survivors of the Genocide of Sikhs in 1984 in Widows Colony, New Delhi
- 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

-> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. TAIL WAGS THE DOG IN KATHMANDU | Kanak Mani Dixit
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(The Hindu, October 10, 2017)

As Nepal’s left-wing parties strike a surprise pact, New Delhi should let the electoral process play out

The Dasain (Dushhera) holiday was a time of a secretive exercise in Kathmandu between the leaders of the mainstream left Communist Party of Nepal (Unified-Marxist Leninist) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Centre) leaders on seat adjustment for the upcoming provincial and parliamentary elections slated for November-December.

The announcement took everyone by surprise, including the public, the ruling Nepali Congress that is actually in coalition with the Maoists, and the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi, which has long been invested in Kathmandu politics.

There has been every reason to look forward to the dual elections up ahead, following on local government polls already concluded, as this would mean the long-awaited ‘normalisation’ of the polity. We needed respite after the decade of conflict, the decade of Constitution-writing, and times of communal polarisation and foreign interventionism. The economic resurgence emanating from political stability would also serve the people well, as also India, especially the northern ‘peripheries’ of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

But one is confronted instead by this distasteful cohabitation between a communist party that was developing a home-grown liberal democratic ethos and the unapologetic radical force led by the opportunistic Pushpa Kamal Dahal (‘Prachanda’). The latter wants simply to keep his past from catching up — vis-à-vis conflict era accountability and financial scam on demobilisation funds — by using his party and cadre to remain personally, politically relevant.

The deal provides respite for a Maoist party that has been in steady decline, and Mr. Dahal can now once again be expected to disrupt democratic evolution for sake of personal survival. Even Baburam Bhattarai, who broke from Mr. Dahal and was wandering in the political wilderness, has found refuge in the new alliance.
Seeking the rationale

The UML, together with the Nepali Congress, constituted the democratic force that chaperoned Nepal out of the decade of excruciating conflict and into the new democratic era under a new Constitution. But today, not only is the UML going for electoral adjustment with the Maoists at an unbelievable 60:40 ratio, they have also declared plans for unification after the elections.

Why this desperation on the part of UML Chairman K.P. Oli, this risking of ignominy? Why has the UML seen fit to endanger Nepal’s normalisation, cooperating with the unrepentant bosses of the ‘people’s war’ who have proceeded to sabotage ‘transitional justice’ and generated hopelessness among conflict era victims?

To try for a rationale, one needs to go back to 2015, when Nepal was still in the middle of the second Constituent Assembly, with the NC and UML in a democratic alliance that was to remain for a year after the promulgation of the Constitution through to parliamentary elections. New Delhi made no bones about its dislike for the Constitution that was promulgated, and slapped a five-month economic blockade, which began during the prime ministership of the NC’s Sushil Koirala and continued under Mr. Oli.
Delhi in denial

As Nepal reeled under shortages, the resulting public resentment gave Mr. Oli the political leverage to reach out to Beijing to sign 10 agreements, including on trade, transit, energy, commerce, infrastructure and investment. The blockade made Kathmandu’s pivot northward possible, but New Delhi retained its ability to influence Nepal affairs, and its mandarins helped engineer the collapse of the NC-UML coalition and the power-sharing arrangement between the NC’s Sher Bahadur Deuba and Mr. Dahal.

The latter became prime minister in August 2016, and relinquished the post to Mr. Deuba in June 2017. With an eye to post-election government formation, Mr. Deuba picked up tiny parties into the NC-Maoist coalition, creating the largest cabinet ever in national history. Claims of Indian involvement in Nepal’s political affairs tend to be pooh-poohed by New Delhi’s phalanx of ‘Nepal experts’, many of them former diplomats or think tank-walas closely aligned to Raisina Hill. But the wearer perhaps knows better where the shoe pinches, and the first qualification of Nepal’s leaders became the ability to keep Delhi mollified but at arm’s length — which in fact is how the Constitution ultimately got promulgated.

While certainly New Delhi does not spend its waking hours conspiring against the neighbour, the fact is even the modest swish of the wand at South Block creates a windstorm in Kathmandu. And the messages came loud and clear, including via a Rajya Sabha Television programme in August with heavyweight panellists speaking ‘the line’, that Mr. Oli must be prevented at all costs from becoming Prime Minister. Some Kathmandu players were pleased at the prospect, others naturally distressed.

Besides annoyance with Mr. Oli, New Delhi’s concerns have been heightened by Beijing’s accelerating proactivism in Nepal, signalling a shift in the hands-off policy that had survived since the days of Zhou Enlai. Beijing has long favoured a coming together of the ‘communist’ forces, which too is a result of an under-appreciation of the democratic sophistication of Nepal and lack of understanding of the democratic chasm between the UML and Maoists. It is obviously too much to expect Beijing to respect democratic nuance, but at the same time it would be wrong to claim that the northern neighbour engineered the dramatic announcement of Dasain.
Altar of realpolitik

Mr. Oli is the political leader who has been the most clear-headed about Maoist atrocities from the conflict era. It was during his time as Prime Minister, nine months till July 2016, that Mr. Dahal was brought close to accepting the principle of accountability for (stateside and rebel) excesses committed during the conflict. Which is why it is incongruous (some would say poignant) to see the shifting political sands pushing him now into the arms of Mr. Dahal.

It was hardly as if others had not collaborated with the Maoists before this, which is why the remonstrations of the NC faithful and New Delhi commentators lack credibility. Even as this is written, the NC, avowed ‘democratic’ party started by B.P. Koirala, remains in coalition government with Mr. Dahal’s Maoist party, and had an electoral alliance with him in the local government polls.

The Maoists have in fact long been kosher for New Delhi, which has engaged, cajoled and intimidated Mr. Dahal for over a decade to get its way, even overlooking his ‘anti-Indianism’ on the altar of realpolitik. India has employed a carrot-and-stick approach on Mr. Dahal — even selectively making use of the platform of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva to put the fear of retribution in him — and so New Delhi may fulminate today but its options are limited.

Having worked tactically with the Maoists, it does not behove the NC to decry the UML-Maoist alliance. Instead the deal must be firmly questioned on objective considerations — because it denies the Nepali public’s desires for peace and accountability, for being opportunistic and abandoning ideology and morality altogether. The alliance must be challenged because it opens the avenue for extended political instability when we thought the society was settling down at last.

Directly and indirectly, the alliance will contribute to the further enfeebling of state institutions, as has been the case over the past decade of Mr. Dahal’s ascendancy. Rampant politicisation and skyrocketing corruption has already accelerated the deterioration of bureaucracy, judiciary, education (school and higher education), government services and economic activity.
Back to ideology

If one were to desperately search for a silver lining, it would be the hope that the Nepali Congress will take advantage of being let off the Maoist hook, with new leaders to bring some civility back into the politics. The smaller, newer or regional parties may be attracted to work by the principles abandoned by the seniors, or there may be a useful consolidation of heretofore fragmented forces including the Madhes-centric parties of the plains. And, who knows, the UML’s Mr. Oli may have something up his sleeve to bring the Maoists to the point of apologia and accountability.

New Delhi diplomats, meanwhile, will hopefully try and understand how meddling can lead to unexpected results that spiral beyond one’s control. Certainly, they should desist the urge to rope in some Western powers and try to influence Kathmandu players for a postponement of upcoming elections. Such an effort to buy time would surely boomerang, as the Nepali public is primed and ready for the polls.

As the Maoist tail wags the UML dog, as it did wag the NC dog before this, it is important for the two large democratic parties to get back to ideology and come to a minimum understanding on democratic values and accountability. Elections have shown the commitment of the citizens of mountain, mid-hill and plain to representative democracy based on ideological differentiations. If only the parties showed the same commitment, resilience and acuity.

Kanak Mani Dixit, a writer and journalist based in Kathmandu, is founding editor of the magazine ‘Himal Southasian’

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8. WHO ARE THE HAQQANIS, AFGHANISTAN'S MOST FEARED INSURGENTS? | Afp
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(Daily Mail (UK) - 17 October 2017)

This 1991 file picture shows Jalaluddin Haqqani, centre, the founder of the Haqqani network who rose to prominence as an Afghan mujahideen commander fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s

The rescue of an abducted US-Canadian family in Pakistan last week has spotlighted their captors the Haqqani network, former CIA assets now considered one of the most dangerous factions fighting US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, who doubles as the Afghan Taliban's deputy leader, the extremist group has been blamed for spectacular attacks across Afghanistan since after the US invasion.

Long suspected of links to Pakistan's shadowy military establishment, the network was described by US Admiral Mike Mullen in 2011 as a "veritable arm" of Pakistani intelligence.

"When you hear US officials, including in private settings, talking about what worries them the most, they always talk about the Haqqanis," said analyst Michael Kugelman, of the Wilson Center in Washington.

- Who are they? -

The group was founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan mujahideen commander fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s with the help of the US and Pakistan.

Jalaluddin gained notoriety for his organisation and bravery, garnering attention from the CIA and a personal visit from US congressman Charlie Wilson.

A fluent Arabic speaker, Jalaluddin also fostered close ties with Arab jihadists including Osama Bin Laden who flocked to the region during the war. Later, Jalaluddin became a minister in the Taliban regime.
Jalaluddin Haqqani, seen here in a 1991 file picture, fostered close ties with Arab jihadists, including Osama Bin Laden, and later became a minister in the Taliban regime

Jalaluddin Haqqani, seen here in a 1991 file picture, fostered close ties with Arab jihadists, including Osama Bin Laden, and later became a minister in the Taliban regime

Now designated a terrorist group by the US, the Haqqanis are known for their heavy use of suicide bombers.

They were blamed for the truck bomb deep in the heart of Kabul in May that killed around 150 people -- though Sirajuddin later denied the accusation in a rare audio message.

The network has also been accused of assassinating top Afghan officials and holding kidnapped Westerners for ransom.

That includes recently released Canadian Joshua Boyle, his American wife Caitlan Coleman, and their three children -- all born in captivity -- as well as US soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was released in 2014.

- Where are they now? -

Following the US invasion of Afghanistan, Taliban fighters flooded across the border into Pakistan, where they regrouped before launching an insurgency against the Americans.

That included the Haqqanis, who coordinated attacks on NATO from across the border in their stronghold of Miran Shah, the biggest town in North Waziristan, one of Pakistan's semi-autonomous border tribal areas.
Freed Canadian hostage, seen on CBC News, accused his kidnappers of murdering his baby daughter and raping his wife during his family's years-long captivity by the Haqqani network.

Freed Canadian hostage, seen on CBC News, accused his kidnappers of murdering his baby daughter and raping his wife during his family's years-long captivity by the Haqqani network.

The US has launched repeated drone attacks targeting the group -- including one late Monday -- while Pakistan's military has conducted successive clearing operations, though sceptical Afghan officials have noted they always seemed to miss the Haqqanis.

Pakistan intensified a military operation in the area in 2014, however, and some militant sources say the pressure has forced many of the Haqqanis underground or over the border into their Afghan strongholds, claims that AFP could not confirm.

- Why are they linked to Pakistan? -

Pakistan sees its arch-nemesis to the east, India, as an existential threat, and has long sought influence over Kabul as a bulwark against Delhi.

The Haqqanis have frequently been accused of targeting Indian installations in Afghanistan, spurring speculation they were overseen by Pakistani intelligence agencies.

"For Pakistan the calculus comes down to India," said Kugelman.

"It views the Haqqanis and also more broadly the Afghan Taliban as a useful asset to help push back against the presence of India in Afghanistan."

Politicians and retired military officials in Islamabad acknowledge privately that having open channels with the Haqqanis is vital.

Some stressed the nature of the connection. "There's a difference between contact and supporting them or being part of them," Mehmood Shah, a retired brigadier who worked in Pakistan's tribal areas, told AFP.

- What does the US want Pakistan to do? -

Washington has long pressured Pakistan to crack down on militant groups, with the Haqqanis a top priority.

US President Donald Trump turned up the heat this summer when he accused Pakistan of playing a double game in Afghanistan and upbraided Islamabad for sheltering "agents of chaos".

Islamabad has repeatedly denied the claims and accused Washington of ignoring the thousands of Pakistani lives lost in its struggle with militancy.

The recovery of Boyle, Coleman, and their children came weeks later, with Pakistan using its role in securing their freedom to urge the US to trust it is doing its best.

But, Pakistan's desire for strategic depth aside, a crackdown on the Haqqanis might not be easy in a tribal society where social relations matter, warned Pakistani political analyst Imtiaz Gul.

"You can't simply pluck out somebody because they've gone politically incorrect," he said.

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9. MORE BLINKERED THAN BLIND: PAKISTAN IS “MAINSTREAMING” MISOGYNIST TRIBAL JUSTICE | The Economist
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(The Economist)

It is fast and cheap, if not always edifying

Oct 13th 2017 | Rawalpindi

ONE evening in August Bakht Jan, a 15-year-old girl, attempted to elope with her boyfriend. Before she could meet him, relatives found her and brought her home. Although both families agreed on a swift marriage for their children, a jirga, or tribal council, demanded blood. Obeying its edict, Ms Bakht’s father drugged and then electrocuted her. Her boyfriend was murdered by his own father in the same way the next day, restoring “honour” in the eyes of the jirga.

Such barbarism has become synonymous with jirgas, a traditional form of justice that blends tribal and Islamic customs with the whims of participants. Despite a law passed in 2011 that allows police to arrest members of jirgas suspected of “anti-women” practices, grotesque abuses continue unabated, activists say. Mukhtar Mai, who was gang-raped on the orders of a jirga in 2002 as recompense for a sexual assault supposedly committed by a male relative, recently lamented that her subsequent campaign to curb the use of jirgas had not succeeded. Just three months ago a girl, aged 16, suffered a horrifically similar “revenge rape” in the same province.

Instead of trying to stamp out jirgas, however, the government has decided to integrate them into the formal justice system. Earlier this year it won parliamentary approval for a law that gives their rulings force, subject to certain reforms. The government will appoint “neutral arbitrators” to each jirga, who must approve their verdicts—a measure it hopes will eliminate misogynist horrors.

MPs seem untroubled by the plan. Just 23 of the 342 members of the lower house bothered to vote on it. The debate centred on whether to use the term jirga, given its diabolical reputation, rather than on whether the reform itself was a good idea.

Support for jirgas stems as much from the disrepair of the formal courts as from respect for tradition. The judiciary is smothered by a backlog of 2m cases. Lawsuits take almost a decade to resolve, on average. Lawyers often charge exorbitant fees, in advance. All this puts the formal justice system out of reach for many Pakistanis. This is not just a gross injustice in itself; it is also bad for security, says Syed Ali Akhtar Shah, a former chief of police of the state of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Such was the frustration with the courts in the northern district of Swat that the Taliban won local support by promising “speedy justice” when they took control of the area in 2009.

From his seat in a circle of plastic lawn chairs, Mahfooz Waheed, a former bureaucrat who runs a popular jirga in the city of Rawalpindi, close to Islamabad, argues that informal justice does not deserve its grim reputation. Only a sliver of the caseload concerns sexual or marital disputes, he argues, and only jirgas in illiterate backwaters produce the sort of decisions that end up making shocking headlines. Jirgas offer more than speed and economy, he notes: whereas judges in murder cases can only punish, he can offer compensation. Through his mediation, a widow whose husband and son were killed in a land dispute was paid $60,000—something of far more practical benefit to her than a conviction. Even the well-to-do seek his help. When a group of businessmen embroiled in a commercial dispute start to shout at one another, he snaps: “This is not a mall, or a court, or a police station, it is a jirga—so behave yourselves.”

Support is growing in unlikely corners. In 2016 a report commissioned by Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) advocated studying the “merits” of jirgas, given the power they wield. Accordingly, DFID has recently funded gender-sensitivity training for tribal elders in Peshawar, a conservative northern city.

But activists for women’s rights tend to snort at such moves. British colonialists, points out Nazish Brohi, a researcher, also tried to preserve jirgas while eliminating their most abhorrent practices. But threats to banish those guilty of “honour killings” merely led to a spike in the number of violent deaths labelled suicides.

Lawyers, too, snarl at the idea of “mainstreaming” jirgas. Whoever drafted the new law “should be shot”, says one, since it grants licence to a system totally at odds with Pakistan’s constitution at a stroke. Rather than indulging mobs of senescent villagers, another suggests, the government should give the authority to resolve petty disputes to nazims, the lowliest of elected officials. Another option is to produce a proper land register. Given that, by some estimates, 90% of civil cases involve disputes about land, that would drastically reduce the burden on the formal courts. Instead, Pakistan is on the verge of cementing into law a tribal code that considers the term “property” to include women.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "More blinkered than blind"

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10. SHIFTING TOWARDS THE RIGHT - THE SYSTEMATIC PERSECUTION OF THE AHMADIS IN PAKISTAN | Mehmal Sarfraz
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(The Telegraph - October 13, 2017)

Pakistan has no dearth of bigots but if bigotry had a name, it would have been Captain (retd) Muhammad Safdar Awan. He is not just an ordinary member of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz; he is also the son-in-law of the former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. On Tuesday, Captain Safdar turned the National Assembly of Pakistan into a hate speech centre. His vitriol against the Ahmadiyya community was disgusting and dangerous at the same time.

Less than a year ago, Nawaz Sharif, the then premier, had renamed the Quaid-i-Azam University's physics centre after Professor Abdus Salam, Pakistan's first Nobel laureate and an Ahmadi. Captain Safdar had the gall to demand that this be undone. "These people [Ahmadis] are a threat to this country, its Constitution and ideology," said Safdar. He further went on to say that he wants to table a resolution in the Assembly asking for a ban on the recruitment of Ahmadis in the armed forces. Maybe he has forgotten the names of several brave Ahmadi soldiers who have served Pakistan valiantly. But, then again, maybe Safdar knows this all too well since he had also once served in the army. But he has wilfully chosen to ignore their services and wants to play to the religious galleries.

It is not the first time that he has made a bigoted statement. In the past, Safdar had praised Mumtaz Qadri, the self-confessed murderer of Punjab's governor, Salmaan Taseer. Even on Tuesday, he chanted slogans in favour of Mumtaz Qadri while he was still on the premises of the National Assembly. Just last week, Pakistan's interior minister, Ahsan Iqbal, had said something quite opposite of what his party leader's son-in-law is propagating. Iqbal said: "Another thing people do is give out fatwas [religious decrees] about who can be murdered - that is not for individuals to decide, only the State can decide such matters. No individual has the right to do that." It is time Iqbal puts his money where his mouth is and takes action against Captain Safdar for raising slogans in favour of a convicted murderer, Qadri, who was hanged by the State itself. If a member of parliament justifies, nay glorifies, a man who assassinated a sitting governor because of wrong and unlawful fatwas against him, he/she does not deserve to be part of our Parliament. Safdar is guilty of glorifying a terrorist, a murderer, and, on top of that, he crossed all limits of decency and virtually called out for the ostracization and disenfranchisement of the Ahmadiyya community.

The Ahmadiyya community already faces persecution at the hands of the State as well as our society. Ahmadis were declared non-Muslims in 1974 by the State of Pakistan. When General Zia-ul-Haq came to power a few years later, he further amended Pakistani laws by introducing Ordinance XX, which specifically targeted the Ahmadis. It is for this reason that Safdar's diatribe against the Ahmadis makes it all the more alarming as religious zealots are already out there in full force against this community. There have been countless attacks on Ahmadis all over the country, be it in educational institutions, Ahmadi mosques, their homes and/or on the street. Safdar and his ilk are the ones who legitimize violence against the Ahmadis and other minorities by questioning their patriotism. Shame on Captain Safdar and shame on all those who silently stand by and not condemn such hateful acts.

On the one hand, we have parliamentarians like Captain Safdar who wear their faux-religiosity on their sleeves and on the other our State has decided to mainstream jihadis/militants. Both paths spell doom and danger.

For many, the recent by-elections in Lahore's NA-120 were an eye-opener. While the main contestants were Nawaz Sharif's spouse, Begum Kulsoom Nawaz, and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's Yasmin Rashid, the surprise factor was how well candidates from the religious (or in this case militant) parties did. The candidate from the Milli Muslim League, which is the newly launched political party of Lashkar-e-Toiba, got fourth position while the candidate of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah, a party that supports Mumtaz Qadri, came third. Astonishingly, both these parties were far ahead of the Pakistan People's Party which shows that Punjab's shift towards the Right, be it Centre-Right or extreme Right, is now complete and it is very difficult to undo this damage. Some believe it is not just Punjab but Pakistan as a whole that is shifting towards the Right.

The military establishment may think it is alright if militants are mainstreamed and become part of our political process but for any sane person, this policy should raise alarm bells. Who are these militants that are going to be part of our political process? The likes of LeT and Qadri supporters? If so, they have certainly not renounced violence or given up arms - the preconditions for any mainstreaming process. No good will come out of this policy until and unless these proscribed organizations give up militancy completely. Such half-baked and flawed policies in the past have led Pakistan to a juncture where it is hard to move forward because of religious extremism, violence and intolerance. Just a day before Captain Safdar's anti-Ahmadi spiel, three Hazara Shias were gunned down in Quetta. Sectarian militant outfits were once nurtured by our State for proxy wars and jihad. Whether they have outlasted their use still remains to be seen but on the surface our State has started taking action against some sectarian terrorists, but most of them are still operating with impunity.

Pakistan's foreign minister, Khawaja Asif, said many a good thing during his recent visit to the United States of America as far as militant organizations are concerned and on changing the narrative but we need to walk the talk. Making progressive and liberal statements in front of international audiences will not do us any good. Our rulers need to understand that this country has already borne the brunt of the Afghan jihad, the Kashmir jihad, and various other wars that have no relevance whatsoever when it comes to Pakistan's own vested interests. We are leaving a bleak future for our next generation, which will grow up watching terrorist attacks on their television screens, on their schools, on the streets. We need to leave behind a country where no one will hand out certificates of patriotism, where no one will ask which faith/sect you belong to, where your religion is not the State's business, where you can have a peaceful debate on religion without worrying for your safety, where you can walk without the fear of a terrorist attack and where people - even powerful parliamentarians - are taken to task for hate speech. If our ruling elite is actually interested in a progressive and peaceful Pakistan, they need to challenge the narrative of the far-Right.

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11. WHAT’S BEHIND INDIA’S ‘BEEF LYNCHINGS’? | Amitava Kumar
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(The Nation, 13 October 2017)

Bans on cow slaughter have become a pretext for violence against the country’s Muslim minority.


I’ll confess to the sin of beef eating in a moment. let me first confess to the sin of not having a true knowledge of science.

In May of this year, Justice Mahesh Chandra Sharma of the Rajasthan High Court suggested that the cow be adopted as the national animal of India. His rationale was that millions of gods and goddesses reside in the cow. And here’s the crucial science bit: According to the judge, the “cow is the only living being which intakes oxygen and emits oxygen.”

I grew up in India during the 1960s and ’70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating—on special occasions—chicken, or fish, or mutton. But I had never eaten beef in India until this summer. And what I ate in restaurants in Mumbai and Delhi, I was repeatedly informed, technically wasn’t beef—it was buffalo meat, or “buff.” It has become too dangerous, in the current political climate, to kill a cow. On the very day I had my first taste of what turned out to be a surprisingly tender buffalo steak in Mumbai, national newspapers carried a report from my hometown of Patna, headlined “Three thrashed in Bihar on suspicion of carrying beef.”

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a landslide victory in the national parliamentary elections in 2014, one of the planks of his campaign was a ban on cow slaughter. He accused the party in power at that time of promoting a “Pink Revolution” (pink because “when you slaughter an animal, then the color of its meat is pink”). The government, Modi said, boasted of India being the world’s leading meat exporter. Even in his earlier speeches, available on YouTube, you can hear him declaiming against the killing of cows: “Brothers and sisters, I cannot say whether your heart is pained by this or not, but my heart screams out in agony again and again. And why you remain silent, why you tolerate this, I just cannot understand.”

Speeches like this were not simply about animal welfare. Modi’s words are an incitement for India’s Hindu majority, which mostly doesn’t eat beef, to turn against the minority, particularly Muslims, who are conventionally represented as beef eaters. Cow slaughter has long been banned in parts of India, but after the BJP’s victory, frenzied mobs of vigilantes felt emboldened to make accusations and mete out brutal punishment.

In Mumbai, two journalist friends took me to a restaurant named Imbiss, which bills itself as a “meating joint.” The chef-owner, Bruce Rodrigues, said that he’d love to serve beef, but added that it’s “a sensitive issue.” Since 2015, when the right-wing Hindu government in Maharashtra state criminalized the consumption (or even possession) of beef, Rodrigues has relied on the buffalo brought by farmers to the city’s largest abattoir, in the suburb of Deonar. Deonar is also Mumbai’s biggest garbage dump, the waste standing 18 stories high. (It’s not too much of a stretch to say that, in a Hindu-dominated society, meat and waste can often be relegated to the same place. A conjecture favored by some historians is that India’s beef taboo has its roots in the cow’s hallowed position in an agricultural society adversely affected by traditional animal sacrifice.)

In a country where a large segment of the majority holds fast to this taboo, a steak is cheaper than chicken. Rodrigues told me that prior to the ban on cow slaughter, he served steaks for only 180 Indian rupees (roughly $3) apiece. Away from a middle-class restaurant like Imbiss, there is a grave economic and social cost to the ban: It deprives some of the poorest Indians, mostly Dalits and Muslims, of the cheapest source of animal protein. As journalist Shoaib Daniyal pointed out a couple of years ago, this subset is far from insignificant: The number of people who eat beef in India—about 80 million—is larger than the population of Britain, France, or Italy.	

Before I left Mumbai, I had dinner with the controversial columnist Shobhaa De. She told me that eating beef was, for her, “an act of defiance.” After the government in Maharashtra enacted the proscription, De tweeted: “I just ate beef. Come and murder me.” She received many angry responses, and a complaint against her was filed with the police.

The truth is that, in recent times, it is more often than not the poor and the powerless who have been lynched for eating beef—or merely the suspicion of doing so. Earlier this year, in June, two brothers were stabbed on a train in Haryana state, in northern India, in a fight over seats. The victims, one of whom died from his wounds, were Muslim; the men who attacked them had called them “beef eaters.” And last year, also in Haryana, a Muslim woman who was gang-raped said that her attackers had asked her if she ate beef; when she said no, they insisted that she was lying.	

While we will not kill cows, killing human beings is an entirely different, and entirely palatable, matter.

When I went from Mumbai to Delhi, a friend took me to a restaurant called Mahabelly. The restaurant serves Malayali food from the southern Indian state of Kerala, where a left coalition is in power and the consumption of beef is legal. But at Mahabelly, too—because it was in Delhi and not Kerala—we were served buff. The dish was called “Erachi double fry”: small pieces of the protein fried with grated coconut, mustard seeds, cumin, curry leaves, pepper, and other spices, generating a dark, intense flavor.	

About a two-hour drive east from the restaurant where we were sitting is a village called Bisada. On a late September night in 2015, a middle-aged carpenter named Mohammad Akhlaq had just finished dinner when a mob poured into his house. Akhlaq’s family were the only Muslims in the Hindu village, it was later reported. Earlier that evening, an accusation was made from a public-address system at the village temple that a calf had been stolen and slaughtered. The enraged crowd, led by the son of the local Hindu-party legislator, cornered Akhlaq in his bedroom, where he was hiding with his daughter and one of his sons.	
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The assault was brutal. Akhlaq’s son was left for dead after a sewing machine belonging to Akhlaq’s wife was used to split his head open. Akhlaq was dragged out of the house by his legs and then beaten with bricks and iron rods. While he lay dying in the lane outside his home, some people recorded videos on their cell phones as others called him a Pakistani and shouted for his death.

There is a further twist to this horrifying story. The police couldn’t find any evidence that Akhlaq had slaughtered a calf. Was the meat found in his fridge beef? At least one lab test concluded that it was mutton. Regardless, Akhlaq’s killing was a crime, and by now most of those accused of his murder have been released on bail. The sad truth that Akhlaq’s lynching has revealed about us Indians is that, while we will not kill cows, killing human beings is an entirely different, and entirely palatable, matter.


Amitava Kumar is the editor of World Bank Literature (Minnesota) and the author of Bombay-London-New York (Routledge) and Husband of a Fanatic (Knopf). His latest book, Immigrant, Montana: A Novel, is forthcoming from Knopf.  

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12. INDIA: BJP’S SECRET POLL DEALINGS NEED TO BE EXPOSED | A G Noorani
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(Asian Age Oct 15, 2017)

No government has the right to take such a decision without consulting all major political parties.

Election commissioner O.P. Rawat (Photo: PTI)

Election commissioner O.P. Rawat is the latest victim of flattery. Recently, he said that the Election Commission of India would be capable of holding Lok Sabha and states Assemblies elections simultaneously by September 2018, and that the government had sought the EC’s views. The government was told that funds would be needed for electronic voting machines and other equipment, but the EC had already placed orders; machines were already being delivered. “But it is up to the government to take a decision and make necessary legal amendments for it.”

No government has the right to take such a decision without consulting all major political parties. Rawat knows they have done nothing of the kind. He also knows that many are opposed to the decision. Why, then, did he — or perhaps his two other EC colleagues, assuming they were consulted — do so without the requisite consensus and announce it?

Unsurprisingly, the day after his announcement, most Opposition parties responded by rejecting the proposal. They pointed out that there was no political consensus on the matter. Rawat belatedly acknowledged that all parties had to be brought on board. The EC itself favoured simultaneous polls, he said, to give the government more time to formulate policies.

This absurdity was capped by a damning disclosure. The government had sought the EC’s views in 2015, which it provided “in March that year”. The exchange was kept secret for two years. The government had floated the proposal in several trial balloons in recent months. Rawat was well aware of these moves — he reads the newspapers. Why he chose to walk into a political minefield so confidently, with his eyes wide open, can only be guessed. On its merits, the proposal violates the country’s federal Constitution, parliamentary system and democracy itself.

It is well known that Narendra Modi and his energetic stooge Amit Shah are out to capture total power over the country by targeting non-BJP-ruled states. Two of them, Karnataka and Tripura, will go to the polls next year, along with Gujarat where the ruling BJP faces serious challenge. The next targets are West Bengal and Odisha, where the BJP’s ally Naveen Patnaik has discovered that the alliance provides no protection against threats to his rule.

In a parliamentary system, the head of government (Prime Minister or chief minister) wields a necessary and powerful weapon: dissolution of the legislature. It keeps his unruly followers in check. (After an aborted revolt, Prime Minister Harold Wilson warned Labour MPs that “every dog is allowed one bite”.)

He could advise the queen to dissolve the House of Commons and send the MPs packing to their constituencies to fight a mid-term election at great expense and risk to their seats. He also has the right to a dissolution if a major issue crops up on which he is entitled to seek a fresh mandate. To deny him this right by imposing a fixed term is to deny the electorate its democratic right to pronounce its verdict on that issue. This is not all.

Heads of state also enjoys the power of what jurist Eugene Forsey called a “forced dissolution”: if the head of government chooses to brazen it out, the head of state may step in and ask him to secure a mandate through fresh election. In the last century, Britain had two general elections within a year when the king exercised this power. There is also the anachronism of imposing direct Central rule over a state, which denies the people the right to pronounce on the Centre’s violation of state autonomy.

In a federal polity, states need not be ruled by the political party that holds sway at the Centre. Political diversity infuses life into federalism. In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress swept the polls in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The Karnataka chief minister, Ramakrishna Hegde — who belonged to the Janata Party opposed to the Congress — advised the governor to dissolve the Assembly even though he was not obliged to do so. An impressive majority returned him to power. Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and West Bengal all had powerful chief ministers in the 1980s, who opposed the Congress and provided an invaluable political check on the Centre’s power by forming a group. Simultaneous polls at the Centre and in the states are not a matter of administrative convenience; they touch the entire constitutional and political system.

We now have one EC member pronouncing his opinion and revealing the government’s interaction with the commission. This is not a private affair between them. The people have a right to know. The entire correspondence must be published so that the public knows the terms of the governments’ reference and of the EC’s response.

The writer is an author and lawyer based in Mumbai

By arrangement with Dawn

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13. INDIA: PLUCK EGOS, NOT JUST TEA - LINGERING MISOGYNY PROMPTS KERALA WOMEN TO KEEP FIGHTING FOR BASIC RIGHTS | Minu Ittyipe
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(Cover Story, Outlook Magazine, 23 October 2017)

Tea pluckers in Idukki’s Munnar stage protest

Kerala’s protest landscape has in the recent past seen numerous women’s collectives asserting themselves to demand their rights. Historically, the state has witnessed leftist as well as renaissance movements, where women resisted and agitated shoulder to shoulder with men. That legacy has made the landscape fertile for such women’s movements to sprout and grow. Today’s crop of women’s collectives, which seems to have shunned political ideologies to carve a space for themselves, are but a natural corollary to those early movements. True, some of these recent collectives have been torpedoed by muscular patriarchal forces, but these assertions show newer ways for emulation.

Perhaps, the most significant of these women’s protests came from Munnar’s poor women tea-pluckers, who called themselves the Pembila Orumai (women’s unity). On September 5, 2015, an unorganised group of those labourers in hilly Idukki district rejected the diktat of various trade UNI­ons to accept lesser bonus and wages offered by the Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Company. The small group simply plonked in protest right in the middle of the road, blocking vehicular traffic to the busy touristy hill-town. More and more women tea-pluckers from other tea companies joined in. Finally, then chief minister Oommen Chandy had to intervene to arrive at a settlement.

Says writer-activist Sarah Joseph: “It is important that more women’s groups are being formed in every sector for women to demand their basic rights.  Usually, women’s voices are sil­enced because the organised movements are male-dominated. The reason Pembila Orumai emerged victorious is because the trade unions, which had both men and women, failed to understand the basic problems of plantation workers.”

Prior to Pembila Orumai, smaller groups outside the organised mainstream trade UNI­ons fought for the rights of women workers in malls and textile showrooms, asserting for their right to sit down, among others. These workers fell. Early 2017 saw the emergence of few young girls in the Kerala Law Academy (KLA) taking control of a strike that seemed to fizzle out. Their protest was against an autocratic KLA principal Lekshmi Nair. The media, political parties and pol­ice were uninterested in their issues. Undaunted, the girls continued their stir for a month. forcing politicians to support. It ended only after the principal was removed.

This June, more than 20 women in Malayalam cinema joined together to form the Women in Cinema Collective to fight for the rights of women actors and technicians in the Malayalam film industry. The collective was formed soon after a popular Malayalam actress was abducted and raped by a gang of six men in a moving vehicle. Such was the misogyny even later that the rape survivor had to, more than once, herself write open letters to the media in an attempt to correct fabricated lies against her.

If the first government in Kerala went for the historic land reform, minister K.R. Gowriamma played a lead role in its execution.

Likewise, when transport minister A.K. Saseendran was forced to quit in March this year , The Network of Women In Media came out against typecasting all women journalists as those with low morals. The senior leader’s alleged phone sex conversation with a journalist was aired on nascent Mangalam channel.

The women in Kerala, according to Sarah Joseph, are educated and politically aware too. The state also has an impressive list of women as lawmakers and judges. Nona­genarian K.R. Gowriamma, a lawyer, was politically active when women rarely ente­red that arena. She took part in peasant movements in the 1950s and was elected to the Travancore council of Kerala Legislative Assembly and later elected in the first communist government of E.M.S. Namboodiripad. Her initiative to introduce the revolutionary Land Reforms Act changed the landscape of Kerala, giving at once land rights to the landless.

Feminist activist K. Ajitha has penned in her book, Ormakkurippukal, that during her Naxalite years when she was imprisoned during the Left period, it was Gowriamma who ensured that she was not raped or molested. Gowri­amma, in her early years, was herself subjected to terrible torture when she was jailed for her political activities.

India’s first women judges Anna Chandy and Fatima Beevi to both the High Court and the Supreme Court came from Kerala. Communism and the introduction of printing press by the missionaries gave the people education and political literacy. Before that, under Sethu Lakshmi Bayi as the queen of Travancore, Kerala saw rapid reformation in society. Though partially empowering was Kerala’s matriliny, the system gave women the impetus to be bolder: Mary Roy fought the case for equal property rights for Christian women and won the case.

There has to be course corrections in these new women’s collectives as they negotiate the space they are trying to occupy. Says political activist K.M. Shahjahan: “Many a time, these organisations are formed out of Leftist thinking, and are not independent-minded. Even Pembila Orumai was later suppressed.” That said, more and more women’s collectives can ideally bring in certain guidelines, lest they are unwittin­gly subverted by patriarchy-governed political ideologies.

By Minu Ittyipe in Kochi

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14. THE KIM ANALOGY FOR MODI | Jawed Naqvi
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(Dawn, October 17, 2017)

“HE would make a drum out of the skin of his own mother in order to sound his own praises.” Winston Churchill was taking a celebrated shy here at his arch rival Lloyd George to everyone’s mirth. How would the humour work in India?

Hindutva cohorts spent most of the 10 years of prime minister Manmohan Singh’s years in office hurling abuses at him, calling him a thief and even a eunuch. The gentleman that he was, Singh responded with studied silence, eyes lowered. Now try critiquing Hindutva.

Last week, the police in Kanpur arrested one person and booked 22 others for putting up posters that likened Prime Minister Modi to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The posters featured photos of the two leaders side by side with an accompanying Hindi text: “Kim has decided to destroy the world, Modi has decided to destroy business.”

The traders missed a more telling point, however. India under Modi has slipped in the world hunger ratings to a level below North Korea. And both claim to be muscular nuclear powers that won’t baulk at the idea of using their arsenal against a challenger.

According to The Hindu, an FIR was filed against the 22 traders named on the posters under Sections 505 (statements conducing to public mischief) and 153 (wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot) of the Indian Penal Code.

   The threat Hindu extremists pose is by no means limited to their abusive tongue.

Indeed, people who lampoon Modi or his aide Amit Shah, not to forget their handpicked Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, face a real danger at the very least of being abused on social media by their strangely virile followers. If the critic is a woman — and women happen to lead the spiralling chorus against the regime — she can expect to be threatened with rape. In case the indignant critic is male, he would have to endure the choice of his sister or mother being threatened with sexual assault.

In both events, it is the woman that ends up as the eventual victim of Hindutva’s rage. On a lean day, the critics can be arrested or served with a legal notice, as was the case with the traders or like a certain movie actor in southern India who ribbed Modi. Elsewhere, they can be bashed up by an irate mob, often under the watch of indulgent policemen.

Everyone mocks everybody in a world where regional, linguistic, religious or tribal prejudices abound. In India, the caste system has spawned its own vocabulary. Elite Muslims, mostly comprising the ashraaf, share the cultivated litany of caste-based abuses with their elite Hindu allies. Contemptuously calling someone a cobbler or a toilet cleaner, forbidden under Indian law, has been a cultural trait of Hindus and Muslims alike.

Of course, the upper castes are cursed back in turn, and that is the inevitable equaliser. Najman Bua of Rudauli had her peasant response in a rage. She was the Muslim house help who raised me as a child. Her choicest abuse was to call someone an offspring of a bearded Turkish rapist, reference to marauding soldiers.

As a convent-educated girl turned away her face in the old Bombay bus because a sweat-soaked fisherwoman had just found a seat next to her, what was the earful she got from the fish vendor? “Thaavk hai ga, moti baamna chi poar haais ti.” (I know you are a Brahmin’s daughter, and so what!)

Urdu speaking Muslims flaunt their genteel wit and humour often but seem to mask their own peculiar genre of perverse talent with slights. When the lights would go off at the Aligarh Muslim University hostels — and the problem of power outrages was perennial in the 1970s — the ashraaf Muslims, mostly those who would be teaching the path of piety to the newcomers during the day, would resort to the foulest invectives they mindlessly hurled at the inmates of a rival hostel in the cover of darkness. Women were again the targets.

The advent of the parliament house of elected deputies, initially under upper-caste sway, put a period of restraint on the style and substance of the conversations in Indian politics. My guess is that the rise of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra ended the period of mandatory sobriety. The caste verbiage mutated into a ‘dhikkar (fie on you) rally’ by the Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. The middle caste Samajwadi Party returned the compliment with a ‘thoo thoo (spit on you) rally’ against the Dalits, recalling perhaps that the lowest in the caste heap had to wear a spittoon round their neck so as not to pollute the path of walkers.

As the two tramps in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot abused each other into an absurd crescendo the bout ended with Estragon calling Vladimir a ‘critic’.

But fascists would not be fascists if they limited their response to criticism with criticism. The threat Hindu extremists pose is by no means limited to their abusive tongue. That is where leaders like Rahul Gandhi miss the point. He personalises everything wrong with Hindutva. He says they routinely abuse him and his family, which is a fact. I have heard activists of Jan Sangh, an earlier avatar of the Bharatiya Janata Party, targeting Indira Gandhi for her gender.

True, they bashed up Rahul Gandhi, metaphorically of course, so much that it made him open his eyes to the real world. But the word fascism eludes him. Gandhi’s speechwriters seem thus to accord little space to fascist violence that ordinary Indians face at the hands of Hindutva vigilantes. They desist from mentioning the daylight murders of men and women of reason like Gauri Lankesh and Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi by suspected Hindutva assassins. For that he deserves to be called an opportunist. In which case, however, rest assured that his henchmen, if he keeps any, will not beat you up or lynch you. And that small blessing may be something to covet in 2019.

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15. SECURITY PANIC AFTER INDIAN MINISTER LOST UNLOCKED PHONE
by Majid Hyderi
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(Asia Times - October 17, 2017)

Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju lost his smartphone at a concert, leading to a security panic among his entourage. The phone, packed with sensitive information, was picked up and returned by a BJP colleague

The temporary loss of the personal smartphone of India’s junior minister for home affairs – the ministry tasked with internal security –resulted in something of a security panic for him earlier this month as he visited the conflict-prone state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Asia Times has learned that Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju lost his phone for a number of hours on October 7 while attending a music concert in Srinagar, the summer capital of a state that has been under an insurgency for almost three decades.
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The minister, it is reliably learnt, uses his smartphone to access social media as well as email. Other “sensitive information” stored on it includes contact details for key party colleagues from the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party, and for top security officials.

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs is primarily tasked with internal security issues and relations between the central and state governments, among other crucial functions. Rijiju was in Kashmir to to review the security situation. He was a special invitee to the concert, which was being given by Adnan Sami, a singer of Pakistani origin who has now been granted Indian citizenship.

Luckily for Rijiju, a party colleague happened to pick up his phone after he had left the venue.

There was no response from the Ministry of Home Affairs to requests for comment. However, official sources told Asia Times they believe Rijiju lost his phone when he got up to applaud Sami’s performance and it slipped out of his pocket.

   “It had no lock enabled at all, so I just opened it at once and called back on a missed call, hoping to return the phone”

Dr Hina Bhat, a senior BJP leader, found the missing phone lying at the venue – and in fact initially mistook it as one of her own. She put the “sleek silvery Samsung phone” in her purse and left, but was later surprised to discover she had a third phone in her bag, in addition to her own two. “The third one had numerous missed calls from one particular number but I had been unable to hear any of the calls as it had been on silent mode,” she recalled.

Cracking into the phone proved startlingly easy, however. “It had no lock enabled at all, so I just opened it at once and called back on a missed call, hoping to return the phone,” Dr Hina told Asia Times.

Her call was greeted by Rijiju. As he recognized her voice, there was a sigh of relief among his camp and the security agencies. The minister personally collected the handset from Dr Hina’s residence.

A police official speaking on condition of strict anonymity said: “Though out of protocol we didn’t ask if the lost smartphone carried any sensitive information, it was quite obvious that such a gadget, used by the second most high profile man in the home ministry, would be loaded with sensitive information.”

Ashiq Hussain Dar, an academic currently pursuing a doctorate in Information Security, stressed the need for better security on personal smartphones due to the rising number of hacks. “Sensitive information stored on modern computing devices, mainly smartphones, is always a soft target,” he said.

For his part, an exuberant Rijiju later tweeted: “Traditionally, Kashmir is all about beautiful Art, Culture & Tourism. Adnan Sami concert at Srinagar was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!”

In April 2013, a false tweet from a hacked Associated Press twitter account led to the temporary loss of billions of dollars from US stocks. 

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16. AUDREY TRUSCHKE | THE HISTORIAN WHO ENGAGES
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(The Mint on Sunday, Oct 14 2017 - Interview)

In the latest edition of a monthly series of long form interviews, Mint On Sunday’s Sidin Vadukut speaks to historian Audrey Truschke

Audrey Truschke is an assistant professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

Over a VOIP call from her offices at Rutgers University in the United States, Audrey Truschke, South Asia historian, speaks about her latest book, Aurangzeb: The man and the myth, her personal interest in South Asian history, and why she continues to persist with social media engagement.

Hi Audrey. Thank you for taking the time to speak with Mint on Sunday. For readers who may not be aware of your work, can you tell us a little bit about what you do, where you work and so on?

I am an assistant professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, a state university, in New Jersey. I live in New Jersey, about 10 miles from the university.

In terms of my job at Rutgers... I’m at the Newark campus. I am the only South Asian historian at that particular campus, and my job is pretty broad. I am responsible for teaching the entirety of South Asian history. We allow quite a bit of freedom in the United States academy, so it’s really up to me how to best proceed with that monumental task.

I choose to teach all of South Asian history, going back nearly 5,000 years. I teach a historical overview course every year over two semesters. We start from the Indus Valley civilization, and by the end, we go all the way into the current year. This spring, we ended in 2017 with Yogi Adityanath’s recent election. Next spring, it will be different. Who knows what will be going on by May 2018 in India.

Rutgers-Newark is an exciting place for someone who works on South Asia due to immense interest from the students. A high percentage of my students are of South Asian descent, often first or second generation immigrants to America. Their families come from India, Pakistan or some other nearby region, but they have gone through an American school system, which teaches basically nothing about India. It is rewarding to be able to provide them with knowledge about Indian history and give them the tools to analyse the past.

That is a very broad canvas. How do you stay on top of stuff?

It is both a challenge and a delight for me. I am aided in being able to teach roughly four to five thousand years of South Asian history by my diverse language training as well as my broad training in terms of historical periods.

Being both a Sanskritist and a Persianist is rather helpful here. Through my Sanskrit training, I have a certain amount of knowledge regarding the development of Hinduism over time, including the Vedic period, the composition of the epics, and so forth. Then through my emphasis on Persian, I am pretty good with the Indo-Islamic period.

There are chunks of time and certain topics that I teach in the historical overview course on South Asia on which I am far from being an expert. In other words, there are things that I teach because it is part of the job rather than a central research interest on my part, and that’s fine. In terms of how I keep up on the vast range of excellent research on South Asian history: I read. This is a core thing that academics do when we are not teaching or sitting on committees: we sit and read articles and books.

Is there an element, in your teaching, of making students unlearn before they relearn elements of Indian history?

Yes, but this is tricky for a couple of reasons. One is I have students coming in with vastly different levels of knowledge. I have students walk into my classroom who literally cannot pinpoint India on a map. One of the first things I do is give a map quiz.

Then I have students who have gone through some level of education in India and others whose families or cultural contexts have provided some type of background information about certain topics. There is a broad range in terms of the reliability of the preconceived ideas of such students. I find that, in general, the students I get at Rutgers-Newark are pretty hungry for real history and quite open to reconsidering their views in light of historical evidence and argumentation.

Of course, as a professor, I do not walk into a classroom and tell people, “Oh, forget everything you’ve ever heard. I am telling the only true story.” That is not how the academy works. I tell them, “Look, there are certain ideas in the world about Indian history. Some of those ideas are better than others. Some of those ideas have political reasons behind them, whereas others are backed by historical evidence and reasoning.”

I teach my students overtly about the politics of Indian history and why, say, it matters so much to some people in 2017 to undermine the Aryan migration theory (a theory that is backed by substantial evidence). I want them to appreciate the modern political stakes, but I also want my students to carefully distinguish between political versus historical reasons for endorsing a particular vision of the past. Political leanings are never a good reason to believe in anything, historically speaking. I try to arm my students with the tools they need in order to formulate their own opinions about history on the basis of historical evidence.

How did you get into South Asian history? Also, how does somebody become both a Sanskritist and a Persianist at the same time? One of those things sounds hard enough...

I did not enter into this field with a master plan that included learning both Sanskrit and Persian. I started learning Sanskrit as an undergraduate. I needed a language at the time, and I wanted to learn an ancient language. In the end, it came down to ancient Greek or Sanskrit, and a lot more people learn Greek than Sanskrit, so I thought, why not take the road less travelled. I quickly fell in love with Sanskrit, with the language, with its beauty and, above all, with classical Sanskrit texts.

I studied four years of Sanskrit as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Towards the end of my time there, I grew slightly dissatisfied with the limitations of my Sanskrit training up until that point and my own focus on ancient Sanskrit texts. So, I thought, why not learn another South Asian language that would ground me in a more recent historical period, such as Indo-Islamic rule, and so I started studying Persian in my last year as an undergraduate.

It was really only after learning a bit of Persian that I realized what I could do by pairing Sanskrit and Persian. In other words, I fell into a gold mine. Once I realized what I could research with knowledge of both Sanskrit and Persian, I thought, “Hey, why not go to graduate school and see I we can make a career out of this and do something interesting.”

What did you research on at the master’s and the postgraduate level?

For my master’s and PhD degrees, I conducted research on Sanskrit literature and Sanskrit literary cultures in the Mughal Empire that eventually led to my first book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, published by Columbia University Press and Penguin India. This project enabled me to bring together my language skills in both Sanskrit and Persian. It also drew upon my interest in different academic disciplines and methodologies. As a graduate student, I was largely trained as what we used to call a philologist, somebody who reads texts, not as a historian. Over the last several years I have transitioned into a more historical mode of research. My first book’s emphasis on literary cultures comes out of my philology background, but then the emphasis on the Mughals and imperial culture allowed me to bring in history in a robust, concrete way.

One very common domestic Indian critique of foreign historical scholarship that it is not philological enough. That it is not based on enough primary scholarship of the sources in the original languages...

I do not think that criticism holds much water. Philology as a term is very out of fashion in the West. Never use that term on the job market. But I think we still do a lot of philology and many scholars emphasize work on primary sources in their original languages.

In many ways, I am a historian now. I teach in a history department, for example. My most recent book on Aurangzeb is quite clearly a historical, rather than a philological, work. Nonetheless, I hope that my philological training still comes through in my scholarship and enables me to read texts with nuance and texture that helps us better grasp both individual texts and what they can tell us about the past.

I think this shows in your Aurangzeb book. Especially in that section on the end. The postscript note on historiographical sources.

I showed that postscript to various colleagues before I published it as part of the book. The most common response to it was: “Why are you bothering to include this? It’s so obvious and boilerplate.” I responded by pointing out that while the bare bones of historical method are obvious, even banal, to historians—people who study the past for a living—they are not obvious to anyone else.

There is a widening gap between specialists who work on Mughal history, or any other aspect of Indian history, and an Indian public that is interested in history. I think it important that specialists try to explain how we attempt to understand the past and how to read texts, namely the tools of our trade, to interested readers.

Why is that gap growing between historians and their broader audiences? Is it a political thing or are there other factors?

I think it is largely a political thing. Look at the amount of abuse that I receive on a nearly daily basis by being a fairly public intellectual who is on social media and has published a popular book. I am not being challenged on historical or evidentiary grounds but rather by those with a specific political agenda in modern India.

A lot of academics don’t think that these sorts of political debates are worth having. I have colleagues who will ask me, often quite sincerely baffled, “Audrey, why do you persist on Twitter?” I have colleagues who have been surprised that I have published my books in India at all. An increasingly popular choice among some scholars is simply not to publish books in India in order to avoid political backlash.

In my colleagues’ defence, what I experience is not pleasant. I am often attacked on deeply personal levels using sexist and racialized language. I sometimes argue to my colleagues that, “Hey, maybe more of us should speak to a popular audience,” but some of them resist and respond, “Well, look at what’s happened to you.”

Audrey, why do you do it?

Oh, because I think it’s worth it.

I have a thick skin by nature. Some of the attacks do not bother me in the way that they would eat away at many people. But I do not persist for the trolls and those consumed by hate. Those that call me a colonialist or accuse me of being part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world are never going to be convinced by scholarly arguments. I persist for those more receptive to history. I think that there is a real hunger and a thirst for more serious history in India today.

As Hindu nationalism grows stronger and stronger in India, and as their agenda to make Indians ignorant about their own history continues, that only increases the appetite that many people have to gain a better sense of what actually happened in the past. People want to be able to think for themselves about history. To me, that is an exciting project to which I have something to contribute.

Maybe it helps to explain that I live in the United States of America, in a place where I am met with a totally blank stare when I tell people that I work on Mughal history. Nobody here knows who the Mughals are. To me, it is exciting that Indians know something about the Mughal Empire. I hope that I can help interested readers learn and care about the Mughals in ways other than just renaming roads after them.

Do you think historians need that kind of thick skin? Is it now a necessary part of their repertoire?

In order to be an academic, you have to have a thick skin in terms of attacks on your ideas. Academics can be a vicious lot when it comes to assessing one other’s arguments. Academic book reviews, for example, if you can get past their customary dryness, are often brutal.

But, in an ideal world, scholars should not have to tolerate personal attacks on their identity, family, and so forth. It is specifically these sorts of ad hominem attacks that I condemn when I talk about hate speech and hateful attacks against me.

Insofar as the attacks are merely on the level of ideas, “Audrey, I think you misread this particular text. I think this point is wrong for X, Y, and Z reasons,” that is all fair game. I wish I received more of those scholarly attacks and fewer messages filled with bigotry.

I finished reading your recent book on Aurangzeb a few days ago. One thing I liked about it is despite the tone of conversation you have on Twitter and the kind of abuse we just spoke about, it’s actually a very happy book in the sense that it’s not a book that seeks to grind knives or settle the score with anything. It’s a very well-written and reasonably careful look at the life of Aurangzeb, if those are the right ways to describe it.

What I want to know is... You said something in the book, which I thought was really interesting. That Aurangzeb is perhaps one of the best sources of Mughal history. In the sense that his reign has left us with some of the best documentary sources.

Broadly speaking, how do we know what we know about Aurangzeb? What are the sources? What are the sources you use?

Aurangzeb’s reign is incredibly well documented in the sense that we have a lot of sources about his life and rule. Our access to those documents is the problem. Your average person who can’t read Mughal Persian texts has more access to Akbar’s reign than Aurangzeb’s reign, largely by virtue of what has been translated.

For sources for Aurangzeb’s reign, we have written texts and material sources. I work with material sources, including buildings, illustrations, images, coins, and so forth. The bulk of my sources, however, are written texts, including histories, letters, reports from the courts, foreign travel accounts, and things like that. We have an incredible amount of material on the nearly fifty-year reign of Aurangzeb Alamgir.

The location of some of these materials is a challenge. Source on Aurangzeb’s reign—like sources on all Mughal kings—are scattered. A lot of texts remain in India, only available in manuscript format, and within India, the manuscripts are housed at many different archives. There are relevant documents in Kolkata, Delhi, Aligarh, so on and so forth. A certain number of manuscripts are available in Europe and even bits and pieces in the United States.

Getting access to some of these manuscripts can be difficult. Not all archives are welcoming of all scholars, so one often has to negotiate. Not to mention you have to physically get to the archive first and have time to sit wherever you are. Of course, many histories from Aurangzeb’s period are published. When we have a published edition, that is obviously easier for scholars to access, although the quality of the editing varies considerably.

A lot of material from Aurangzeb’s reign remains unpublished, particularly what are known as the akhbarat, the news reports from Aurangzeb’s court. If you can sit in Kolkata for months and months and read them, you are golden, but that is not a realistic option for everyone.

In terms of the reliability of sources, that all depends on what you want to know. There is no such thing as objectivity. Historians have not believed in complete objectivity for over half-a-century, at least. Some of the key starting questions are: What is the viewpoint of a given source? How does that viewpoint relate to what I, as the historian, want to know?

For example, if I am reading a premodern chronicler of Aurangzeb’s reign that I know is heavily into a fierce ideology about Islam dominating other religious traditions and I want to know about temple destructions, then I might want to take what that source says with a grain of salt and read it through the lens of the author’s own bias.

On the other hand, if I am reading the same source and I want to know who Aurangzeb’s second daughter married in the 1670s, then I might judge the chronicler in question quite reliable.

This is where people sometimes get a bit upset and feel that historians are distorting the past, but I would argue quite the opposite. The goal is to accurately reconstruct the past to the extent possible given the available sources. Sometimes the goal is also to understand why certain authors wrote as they did, complete with mistruths and biases.

One crucial error that non-experts make all the time and that I would caution against for anybody who works on or thinks about Mughal history is to take a source at its word. There are moments when historical sources tell you accurately about certain basic facts of the past, but before concluding that one has found such an instance, you have to analyse the given source.

You have to think about the author’s agenda, the genre of the text, and numerous other factors. This is all part of historical method and reading the nuances and textures of a given work.

Why is Aurangzeb particularly controversial? Particularly prone to arguments and disagreements? Is it because there are so many sources that lead to some different interpretations?

I don’t think that Aurangzeb is controversial because he is well sourced. As I said, his life and reign are well documented, but most of those sources are not accessible to non-experts. Many are not even accessible to experts.

Why is Aurangzeb so controversial? I will give two reasons. One, the British. When the British came to India and began the colonial project, going all the way back to the East India Company days, they had to sell Indians on a brutal idea, namely that a small group of foreigners ought to be allowed to do things such as take wealth out of India and cause massive famines. How can you justify such an enterprise to the Indian people?

The British came up with a whole lot of answers to that hard question, but one answer was to say, “Well, we are better than the guys who came before us.” Their predecessors were the Mughals. Going all the way back to the late 17th century, we have British documents that talk about the Mughals in general and they seize upon Aurangzeb in particular as, in their view, an especially egregious ruler. The British had a vested interest in making Aurangzeb out to be the worst-case scenario possible, so that they, the British, would look good by comparison.

The second reason I would name, and this is part of why the British chose Aurangzeb for this un-illustrious role of India’s worst ruler, is there are certain aspects of Aurangzeb’s reign that, especially through modern ways of thinking, can be fit fairly easily into a negative portrayal.

It is true, for example, so far as I can tell, that Aurangzeb was more pious than any prior Mughal king. He appears to have prayed more regularly. He took a hardline stance on certain aspects of Islam. When you combine that with modern anti-Muslim prejudices, which are widespread in India and around the world today, one gets a narrative of India’s most abhorrent king.

Additionally, the Mughal Empire fell apart shortly after Aurangzeb’s reign ended. If you are looking for a scapegoat for that event, Aurangzeb is the most obvious choice. Whether that is accurate or not is another question, but it is easy to uncritically slot Aurangzeb into the role of the big bad failure of the Mughal regime.

I must admit that I have always been under the impression that Aurangzeb’s reign was the tipping point for the Mughal Empire. And that this was because of his intransigence to non-Muslims. You say that this is not the case in your book. Could you kind of explain that a bit, especially for people who have not read the book?

If I understand the popular argument here, it goes as follows: “Aurangzeb oppressed Hindus and made their lives difficult. Some people even say he committed a genocide against Hindus. This destroyed the foundation of the Mughal Empire. Villainizing and killing huge numbers of the majority of people over which you rule generally does not bode well for imperial success.”

I think that this storyline is false because the evidence suggests something rather different, both in terms of the facts and causality. Factually, Aurangzeb did not commit a genocide of Hindus. He killed plenty of people, which was not unusual in Mughal India, but he did not target Hindus on a religious basis.

We also have evidence that the plight of at least some Hindus actually improved under Aurangzeb’s rule. For example, Aurangzeb employed more Hindus in the Mughal administration than any prior Mughal ruler by a significant margin. He increased the Hindu share in the Mughal nobility by 50%. That’s pretty substantial.

In brief, Aurangzeb’s reign was not especially disastrous for Hindus. For some Hindu communities, Aurangzeb’s rule was rather beneficial.

I leave open the possibility in the book that Aurangzeb may bear some responsibility for the fall of the Mughal Empire for other reasons. I decline to issue an opinion in the book, for example, on the theory that the Deccan Wars in the last two or three decades of Aurangzeb’s life stretched Mughal imperial resources too thin and made the entire imperial apparatus prone to shattering. I do not feel that I have enough evidence to date on which to adjudicate the validity of this argument, and so I chose not to comment further. This is what good historians do: we go as far as the evidence can take us, but no further.

By way of contextualizing this issue a bit more, I would point out that there are two levels of questions here, and this is part of why the debate over whether Aurangzeb destroyed the Mughal Empire is so muddled.

The first level of questioning, the meta level, is: What causes the fall of an empire? Can one man, even an emperor, even a very powerful emperor, really bring down an empire? Or should we be looking for more structural causes, such as economic shifts and social changes that are bigger than any single king? There is no consensus on this broad issue of causality, as far as I am aware.

The second level of questioning concerns the Mughals in particular: Was Aurangzeb responsible for the decline of Mughal power, or was somebody or something else? Maybe it was Shah Jahan, for example? Maybe it goes all the back to Akbar, who set up the empire for failure from the start? Or maybe Aurangzeb’s descendants are to blame?

In short, there are several levels of questions to be answered before we can fruitfully address—much less hypothesize about—the level of responsibility to assign to Aurangzeb for the fall of the Mughal dynasty.

Before we divert away from Aurangzeb a bit, I want to touch upon your references to British sources in the book. You mention that British sources sought to villainize Aurangzeb. That many of these sources are poor. One area in which they are less than credible, you say, has to deal with the idea of temple demolitions. Which are these British sources? I ask you just so that anyone who reads this can keep this in mind when they go back and look at sources and arguments and discussions in your book.

There are a wide variety of problematic colonial-era sources, some written by Europeans and others by Indians. Jadunath Sarkar’s scholarship, for example, is valuable in many ways, but advances views on Aurangzeb that I reject today and that I think reflect British propaganda to some degree. For people who look into such sources, I would say a couple of things.

Always think about the context in which people are writing. Though, you do not want to go too far with this line of thinking. It is an error to take any given thinker, especially a serious thinker, and say, “Well, they are just saying that because they were writing in 1930 in British India.”

You want to see nuance in the writings of scholars and take their ideas seriously, but you also want to consider their contexts, biases, and what people may have gotten out of making certain points. History is an evidentiary-based discipline to a great degree, but it also rests on arguments made by individuals, and nobody stands completely free of their own historical context.

If someone makes an argument, we should query their evidence and logic. Ask: What is the basis for this idea? Is this the best interpretation of this action or event given the available historical evidence? Has this scholar accurately represented the evidence? How is this particular interpretation helping me understand the past?

While interrogating sources and scholars, readers are also well advised to try to see their own potential biases and blinders in the context of 2017. As I said, nobody stands completely free of their own historical context.

The next question I think is actually a very good one for you to answer, given the breadth of Indian history you teach. And that is many people, for good or bad reasons, feel that the Mughals have tended to play an oversized role in Indian history and Indian history textbooks and school textbooks.

My question is in two parts. One, do you think this is right? Two, if you were to look at the non-Mughal aspects of Indian history around that period and just before, are there enough historiographical sources to write interesting things about them?

It is hard for me to comment on this generally. Is there any specific textbook in current use in India that overemphasizes the Mughals and should possibly cut some mentions of the Mughals and talk more about the Rajputs? Maybe. I don’t know. There are a lot of different textbooks in India. I would say in general, from what I have seen and read, this is not a huge concern. The Mughals were the really big game in town for a couple of hundred years. The Hindu nationalists can kick and scream about that as much as they like, but it is not going to change that basic reality. It is reasonable to give the Mughals a fair amount of airtime in Indian history books.

Now, of course, Mughal history should not be presented at the total expense of other contemporary historical trends and topics. Sikh history, for instance, is a fascinating topic. There are a number of historians that focus on Sikh studies. We even have a couple of chairs in the US and Canada specifically in Sikh studies. There are people who work on Maratha history, an important aspect of early modern India. There are a number of people who work on Rajput history, which intersects with Mughal history.

There are historical sources for all of these aspects of early modern South Asia and more. In many cases, those historical sources overlap with my own. There is no serious historian of Shivaji that does not use Mughal sources, for example.

Unfortunately, I think that we are starting to see more radical rewritings of Indian textbooks that treat Mughal history in rather absurd ways. For instance, Maharashtrian textbooks have reduced the space given to Akbar to three measly lines; a Rajasthan textbook has misreported the outcome of the Battle of Haldighati. These sorts of things are patently ridiculous.

Basically, politicians are robbing Indian students of any chance of understanding the past, or the present for that matter. Much about present-day India—ranging from major monuments to why the currency is called the rupee—is inexplicable if you do not know the basics of Mughal history.

What is the point of teaching about Indian history in schools? If the point is just to teach politically current propaganda, that is not history at all. That is the equivalent of taking kids to a political rally. The point of history is to learn about the past, to learn about who one’s ancestors were, how people used to live, and why things are the way they are now. For all of those projects, in an Indian context, the Mughals are central.

Very well put. Now tell me how your field has changed over the years. Has it changed much? I ask from two perspectives. The first one is, are people approaching South Asian history from new perspectives? Is there anything like that happening? Secondly, in terms of sources. Do you have new sources to work with?

Yes, the field has changed quite a bit and continues to evolve. In terms of new perspectives, there are a couple of major trends going on right now. One has to do with global history and putting India in a wider context, whether that is the Indian Ocean world, links with Central Asia, or the like. Scholars such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Azfar Moin have made major contributions to this line of inquiry.

Another trend that we are seeing is to view specific communities as having fuzzy boundaries and even overlapping with one another. At an earlier point in time, scholars operated with the old colonial idea that there was a Hindu India and a Muslim India, Hindu history and Muslim history.

Now, people have broken down those barriers and emphasize shared spaces, links between specific Hindu and Muslim communities, and the value of using non-religious categories in specific instances. Scholars such as Allison Busch, Cynthia Talbot, and many others have made crucial interventions in this regard.

In terms of new sources, yes these exist in a few different ways. Sometimes we find previously unknown texts, such as the Majalis-i Jahangiri. Other times, scholars draw upon sources that have been neglected for so long that people have nearly forgotten they exist. For instance, I have brought significant Sanskrit materials to bear on Indo-Islamic history. These Sanskrit sources, especially Jain-authored materials, offer perspectives on the Mughals that we do not find in Persian-language sources.

The language barrier remains a big challenge for many scholars, however. Even if I convince my fellow Mughal historians that Sanskrit texts are essential, I cannot change the fact that most of them do not know Sanskrit and so are limited to accessing Sanskrit materials through scholarship produced by me and a couple of other people.

The multilingual landscape of South Asia, at least for me, has always been one of the challenges and the joys of the field. On the one hand, it is incredible. There are few places in the world that approach anything like India’s linguistic diversity, which make Indian history particularly fascinating in many ways. On the other hand, there are only so many languages that one can learn. The vast majority of texts remain untranslated for practical reasons, and so language abilities limit how much any single scholar can access.

Is enough happening in South Asia to bridge this gap? Do you see Indian historians, multilingual historians I mean, working on this?

In many regards, language training in premodern languages is weakening, not strengthening, right now in India. The Indian state has put pretty limited resources into such endeavors.

The state seems to have no problem paying for every school child to learn basic Sanskrit and be able to recite some shlokas from the Ramayana. In terms of actually training people to read, say, premodern Kannada, I think we are nearly down to single digits of capable individuals in South Asia. In the West, we have our own issues, including a lack of interest, reduced funding, so on and so forth.

We should try to end on positive notes. What are you working on right now? What’s your next exciting new book?

I am excited to be working on my third book. Book number three is on Sanskrit literary histories of Indo-Islamic incursions and rule. I have identified a series of Sanskrit texts, dating the late 12th century until the early 18th century, that address the advent and growth of Islamic rule in India. Basically, from the earliest moments when Islamic figures who would become Indo-Islamic figures start to move into South Asia, Sanskrit intellectuals wrote about the accompanying social and political shifts. I am going to trace this largely unrecognized Sanskrit tradition of historical writing that continues for about 500 years, roughly half-a-millennium.

The idea here is I want to kill two birds with one stone. One, I want to put to rest once and for all the tired but still prominent idea that Sanskrit has no written history. This is an old Orientalist idea you hear all the time still: Sanskrit intellectuals wrote great literature and poetry but no history.

I think that is false. There are a bunch of Sanskrit texts that I think are pretty identifiably historical in their tone. These works are found in various genres, but they exist, and focusing on texts that detail the Indo-Islamic past is one way to excavate a crucial part of the Sanskrit tradition of historical writing.

The second myth that I want to put to rest is, again, an old Orientalist idea, namely that Sanskrit writers had nothing to say about Islam. Sanskrit writers did not write about Islamic theology in much depth, but they wrote about Muslims a lot: Muslim conquerors, Muslim rulers, Muslim courts, and so forth. I want to access and outline the ideas of specific Sanskrit thinkers on the major cultural, social, and political changes associated with Indo-Islamic rule.

At the root of this book project is the, I think, relatively non-controversial postulation that the movement of Islamic peoples into South Asia and the establishment and ongoing reality of Indo-Islamic rule for several hundred years constituted one of the single biggest historical shifts of the second millennium in South Asian history. The only serious contender for a more seismic shift would be British colonialism.

I want to know how and what India’s traditional elite, Sanskrit intellectuals, thought about the changes initiated by Indo-Islamic rule as they lived through them.

What advice would you give a young Indian historian regarding how to work, how to think, how to deal with criticism, how to develop a thick skin? Anything. Top three things for the young historian to keep in mind?

Top three things. Focus on the questions, your questions. What do you want to know about the past? The starting point of good historical research is formulating good questions. For that, you really need to check out a little bit from the popular sphere, because few people in the popular sphere are asking questions likely to render worthwhile insights regarding the past.

A second key point is to read very widely, both primary and secondary sources. Do not fall for this trap you sometimes hear today that all the secondary scholarship is biased and you should just get back to the primary sources. That’s ridiculous. Read the secondary work. Even read the people you do not like. Read everybody, and read the primary sources, in their original languages if possible.

My third piece of advice: enjoy it. One thing that allows me to soldier on despite severe criticism is that I really love and care about Indian history. That is hard, I think, for a lot of people to understand. Why would some random person from America fall in love with the Mughal past? Why would they get so excited thinking about what made Jahangir tick or why Aurangzeb won the war of succession rather than Dara Shukoh?

For me, it is an intellectual love and perhaps that serves as a shield. It can be painful for me to see people taking something that I care so deeply about and making it into a blunt political weapon. But I try to set that aside and draw strength from my own excitement about what I study and the opportunity to share that passion with interested readers.


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17. LOSING YOUR RELIGION - EPW EDIT
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(Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 52, Issue No. 41, 14 Oct, 2017)

Editorial

Where does a woman stand with respect to the freedom of religion as a fundamental right?

There are many practices in various religions that are unequal and unfair to the women professing those religions. However, when the state is misogynist to the extent of stripping women of the religion they choose to profess for having married a person belonging to a different religion, it is an affront to the Constitution, which has enjoined equal treatment and autonomy of women.

We see this in the case of Goolrukh Gupta, a woman professing the Parsi Zoroastrian faith and married to a non-Parsi Zoroastrian. Her appeal to the High Court of Gujarat to be able to continue to practise and profess Parsi Zoroastrianism—which a religious trust in Valsad was obstructing—was dismissed in 2012. The court ruled that having married “a non-Parsi under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, [she] would be deemed and presumed to have acquired the religious status of the husband.” In other words, the court clamped down on her fundamental right to freedom of religion as is guaranteed in the Constitution.

The high court had stated that unless a specific law is made to the contrary, “the religious identity of a woman … shall merge into that of the husband.” Further, it declared that it would be incumbent on the woman to “claim her status” via a “declaration of the competent court that she has continued to profess and follow Parsi religion and therefore, [is] to [be] treated as Parsi for all purposes.” This absurd reading down of the Special Marriage Act of 1954 by the high court in such a manner is in reference to the antiquated “doctrine of coverture,” where a woman’s legal identity is subsumed by that of her husband upon marriage, thus considering the wife and husband as one person (the husband being the “person” for all intents and purposes).

In fact, the Special Marriage Act of 1954 was enacted with the intent to allow any woman and man, professing any religion, to be legally married without renouncing their respective religions or converting to another. The act had replaced the earlier 1872 law, which required that both renounce their religions in order for an inter-religious marriage to take effect. The passing of the 1954 act would give individuals—women—the right to retain their religious identity. In the same way that a woman’s caste does not change upon marriage to a person belonging to another caste—as years of case law demonstrates—her religion too cannot change, unless she expressly wishes to change it. This act, like many others following in the secular vein of the Constitution, allows for the separation of the institutions of marriage and religion in the interest of upholding the individual’s rights in the face of anachronistic personal laws.

Gupta has now had to approach the Supreme Court in order to ensure her rights, and a constitution bench is to hear her case in the coming weeks. The instance of prohibition and sanction imposed by a religious trust in the Goolrukh Gupta case is only the visible tip of the iceberg when it comes to the inequalities, prejudice and unfreedom that women face within the institutions of religion and marriage.

Despite the Supreme Court taking a significant and progressive stand on issues like triple talaq and pushing for reform in personal laws (EPW, 26 August 2017), we also have courts going to the other extreme where the religion and marriage of women is involved. A recent case is that of Hadiya, a woman who converted voluntarily to another religion, following which she got married of her own volition. The Kerala High Court’s annulment of her marriage and forcing her, an adult, into her parents’ custody (EPW, 26 August 2017) shows up the judiciary’s patriarchal mindset. The judgments in both the Goolrukh Gupta and Hadiya cases have subverted the autonomy of women.

For the longest time, the institutions of religion and marriage have been known to be oppressive, especially towards women. It then becomes the duty of the judiciary to champion the cause of gender equality when it is approached for redress in such cases. Why should it be that when it comes to women and their autonomy, personal laws and religious diktats can go unquestioned, as the Gujarat High Court judgment puts it, “in [the] larger interest of the society for the proper observance of the customs, traditions, etc”? While religion may be a social institution, it is more so a matter of deep personal belief and conviction. So, unless the autonomy of women is a threat to “public order, morality and health ..., all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion,” as is guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution. And that includes women.

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18. AT 5% TRADE BETWEEN SOUTH ASIAN COUNTRIES WITH SHARED BORDERS IS THE LOWEST IN THE WORLD. WHY? 
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http://www.worldbank.org/onesouthasia

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19. LIFE STORIES OF SIGNIFICANT SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN TOLD THROUGH THE PRISM OF LOVE
By F. Fiona Moolla
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(The Conversation, October 12, 2017)

[photo] Nelson Mandela and his comrade, anti-apartheid activist, Fatima Meer

a’s apartheid social engineering, the post-1994 victory over racialised inequality and the subsequent recognition that the victory may have been Pyrrhic have elicited a vast literary response, including a fascinating body of personal responses in the form of memoirs, biographies and autobiographies.

These narratives have sought to memorialise significant lives that drove the anti-apartheid struggle, and often focused on documenting the times that created the people.

An emerging trend is one that foregrounds the family in the lives of activists, rather than the established paradigm of the autonomous national auto/biographical hero. Examples that signal this shift are Gillian Slovo’s “Every Secret Thing” (1997) and Elinor Sisulu’s “Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime” (2002).

These auto/biographies take the social microcosm of the family, both nuclear and extended, as the most important matrix out of which lives committed to social justice emerge. They are then placed within the broader context of the nation.
Eros at the heart

“Love in the Time of Treason: The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood” (2008) by Zubeida Jaffer and the autobiography, “Fatima Meer: Memories of Love and Struggle” (2017), acknowledge and recollect the households that created – and are created by – political activists – households which occupy a shifting space between private and public spheres. What sets these two life narratives in relief is the way in which they position eros at the heart of the narrative.
Cover of ‘The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood’.

Veteran journalist, Zubeida Jaffer, presents a portrait of an extraordinary person in decidedly ordinary, yet moving terms. Ayesha Dawood was a young woman in the little country town of Worcester near Cape Town in the 1950s when the first effects of apartheid were being felt. Despite a conservative, sheltered upbringing as the daughter of an Indian shopkeeper, Ayesha is drawn into various social protests and the trade union movement through her innate sense of justice.

Ayesha’s political involvement leads to her being arrested and tried at the Treason Trial of 1956 along with Nelson Mandela, and various other more high profile figures. She also subsequently is jailed and kept in solitary confinement for an extended period in a women’s prison in the nearby town of Paarl.

But contrary to expectation, the biography is not constructed around her activist experience. In fact, the biography does not even open with a focus on Ayesha. Instead, the story of her South African struggle experience begins with her future husband in India.

The narrative is constructed as a love story. It’s a love obstructed by numerous separations. Yusuf Mukadam falls in love with Ayesha at first sight in the village in India where she visits her grandmother. After her departure, despite no real contact with or commitment from her, Yusuf later joins the merchant navy as a cook. His sole purpose: to meet Ayesha again in Cape Town as part of a two-year voyage.

Yusuf sends a letter to inform her of his arrival. But the letter is never opened since Ayesha is in police custody at the time. Yusuf arrives in Cape Town and thinks he has been spurned when he is not met as arranged.

Some years later, back in India, he discovers why he didn’t get a response from the woman to whom he feels incontrovertibly and inexplicably bound. He then signs up for another voyage. This time he jumps ship in Durban and travels to Cape Town to meet and marry Ayesha, almost a decade after their first meeting.

Years into their marriage, after the birth of two children, Yusuf is arrested as an illegal immigrant. But the arrest is a pretext to blackmail Ayesha into acting as a police informant. Since she does not cooperate, her husband is deported to India, an exile which she shares with her life partner.

The poverty of the Indian village means that Yusuf must become a migrant worker in Kuwait in order to support Ayesha and the children. The family finally returns to South Africa, many years later, after the release of Mandela.

Throughout the biography, Jaffer foregrounds romantic attachments. The narrative is prologued by the occasion when Ayesha sees Mandela again on his visit to Worcester on the Blue Train in 1997. The bonds of intimacy between Mandela and Graça Machel at the train station, and Ayesha and Yusuf, are paralleled.

The biography is structured around and locates its narrative momentum in this enduring, ethically cognisant love – or as Jaffer has Ayesha succinctly utter:

   Yusuf is my taqdeer (destiny).

Complex relationship

The love relationship is similarly foregrounded in internationally recognised academic-activist Fatima Meer’s autobiography, posthumously published by her daughter.
Cover of ‘Fatima Meer: Memories of Love and Struggle’.

What is surprising about Meer’s autobiography is the way in which the complex relationship with her husband, prominent struggle lawyer Ismail Meer, is used as the organising principle around which her life story is told.

If Yusuf was Ayesha’s destiny, Ismail seems to shape the destiny of Fatima. The Meer relationship is a curious one where a member of the extended family whom she had regarded as an uncle later comes to be her husband when they proverbially fall head-over-heels in love. As trusted “uncle”, Ismail plays a role in determining that Fatima, constrained by a conservative community, should get to study away from home at the University of the Witwatersrand, and influences what she should study.

In a somewhat less tranquil relationship than that of Ayesha and Yusuf, Fatima presents her husband, despite his fierce temper and tendency to domineer, as the central pole and pulse of her life. Fatima’s is a life that is internationally known for never being cowed, a life remembered for its outspoken, principled defiance and critique, even of comrades.

It’s not clear whether these two South African “romance” struggle auto/biographies are a harbinger of a trend, or whether they are anomalies that won’t be repeated. What they certainly do, is to focalise the anti-apartheid struggle through the lives of heroic women whose public and private lives were intimately bound and who were bound by love.

F. Fiona Moolla [is] Senior Lecturer in English, University of the Western Cape

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20. HAVANA LECTOR - THE PEOPLE WHO READ TO CUBAN CIGAR-FACTORY WORKERS
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(The Economist -  Print edition | The Americas)

Hearing The Count of Monte Cristo, while rolling Montecristos

Oct 12th 2017 | HAVANA

EVERY morning at 8:30 Gricel Valdés-Lombillo mounts a platform at the H. Upmann cigar factory and starts the first of her 30-minute shifts reading to an audience of 150 torcedores, or cigar rollers. Throughout the day she will divert them with snippets of news, horoscopes, recipes and, most important, dramatic readings of literature. In a career that began in 1992 she has read “The Count of Monte Cristo”, a longstanding favourite among torcedores, three times. The popularity of this tale of revenge is the origin of Cuba’s Montecristo brand. Another 250 workers—despalilladoras (leaf strippers), rezagadores (wrapper selectors) and escojedores (colour graders)—hear Ms Valdés-Lombillo’s readings through the public-address system.

Lectores have been reading at cigar factories since 1865, when Nicolás Azcárate, a leader of a movement for political reform, proposed the practice as a way to educate workers and relieve tedium. Perhaps influenced by the texts they heard, cigar workers helped win Cuba’s independence from Spain and later founded trade unions.

Around 200 lectores are still at work in Cuba and, despite television and the internet, they show no signs of disappearing. Cigars are one of the few export industries that is thriving. While Cuba’s merchandise exports fell by 33% in 2016, worldwide sales of cigars rose by 5% to $445m. UNESCO is considering whether to designate la lectura as a form of “intangible cultural heritage”, which should help keep it going.

The workers themselves choose the lectores. “This is the only job in Cuba that is democratically decided,” says an employee. The audience is demanding. Torcedores signal approval by tapping chavetas, oyster-shaped knives, on their worktables; slamming them on the floor shows displeasure. They vote on reading material: Ms Valdés-Lombillo recently finished “A Time to Die” by Wilbur Smith, a South African novelist, and “Semana Santa en San Francisco”, by Agustín García Marrero, a Cuban. When the readings get steamy, torcedores provide an accompaniment of suggestive sound effects. They laugh when a horoscope suggests that someone might inherit a fortune.

Like many lectores Ms Valdés-Lombillo has moved beyond her official role to become a counsellor, confidante and community leader. She has been an announcer at factory baseball games and a eulogist at funerals. If the cafeteria food is too salty or the tobacco leaves become too damp to roll, she will tell the managers.

But lectores no longer act as spurs to dissent. Granma, the Communist Party’s newspaper, is part of Ms Valdés-Lombillo’s daily literary fare. She describes the thoughts and deeds of Raúl Castro, Cuba’s president, and will do the same for his successor. The opinions of exiles and dissidents will not get a hearing. Unlike the cigar workers and the lectores, the party seldom turns over a new leaf.

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21. MY PLEA TO TRUMP AND PUTIN
By Mikhail Gorbachev
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(The Washington Post, 11 October 2017)

Mikhail Gorbachev was leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991.

This December will mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the treaty between the Soviet Union and United States on the elimination of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles. This was the start of the process of radically cutting back nuclear arsenals, which was continued with the 1991 and 2010 strategic arms reduction treaties and the agreements reducing tactical nuclear weapons.

The scale of the process launched in 1987 is evidenced by the fact that, as Russia and the United States reported to the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2015, 80 percent of the nuclear weapons accumulated during the Cold War have been decommissioned and destroyed. Another important fact is that, despite the recent serious deterioration in bilateral relations, both sides have been complying with the strategic weapons agreements.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, however, is now in jeopardy. It has proved to be the most vulnerable link in the system of limiting  and reducing weapons of mass destruction. There have been calls on both sides for scrapping the agreement.

So what is happening, what is the problem, and what needs to be done?

Both sides have raised issues of compliance, accusing the other of violating or circumventing the treaty’s key provisions. From the sidelines, lacking fuller information, it is difficult to evaluate those accusations. But one thing is clear: The problem has a political as well as a technical aspect. It is up to the political leaders to take action.

Therefore I am making an appeal to the presidents of Russia and the United States.

Relations between the two nations are in a severe crisis. A way out must be sought, and there is one well-tested means available for accomplishing this: a dialogue based on mutual respect.

It will not be easy to cut through the logjam of issues on both sides. But neither was our dialogue easy three decades ago. It had its critics and detractors, who tried to derail it.

In the final analysis, it was the political will of the two nations’ leaders that proved decisive. And that is what’s needed now. This is what our two countries’ citizens and people everywhere expect from the presidents of Russia and the United States.

I call upon Russia and the United States to prepare and hold a full-scale summit on the entire range of issues. It is far from normal that the presidents of major nuclear powers meet merely “on the margins” of international gatherings. I hope that the process of preparing a proper summit is in the works even now.

I believe that the summit meeting should focus on the problems of reducing nuclear weapons and strengthening strategic stability. For should the system of nuclear arms control collapse, as may well happen if the INF Treaty is scrapped, the consequences, both direct and indirect, will be disastrous.

The closer that nuclear weapons are deployed to borders, the more dangerous they are: There is less time for a decision and greater risk of catastrophic error. And what will happen to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if the nuclear arms race begins anew? I am afraid it will be ruined.

If, however, the INF Treaty is saved, it will send a powerful signal to the world that the two biggest nuclear powers are aware of their responsibility and take their obligations seriously. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief, and relations between Russia and the United States will finally get off the ground again.

I am confident that preparing a joint presidential statement on the two nations’ commitment to the INF Treaty is a realistic goal. Simultaneously, the technical issues could also be resolved; for this purpose, the joint control commission under the INF Treaty could resume its work. I am convinced that, with an impetus from the two presidents, the generals and diplomats would be able to reach agreement.

We are living in a troubled world. It is particularly disturbing that relations between the major nuclear powers, Russia and the United States, have become a serious source of tensions and a hostage to domestic politics. It is time to return to sanity. I am sure that even inveterate opponents of normalizing U.S.-Russian relations will not dare to object to the two presidents. These critics have no arguments on their side, for the very fact that the INF Treaty has been in effect for 30 years proves that it serves the security interests of our two countries and of the world.

In any undertaking, it is important to take the first step. In 1987, the first step in the difficult but vitally important process of ridding the world of nuclear weapons was the INF Treaty. Today, we face a dual challenge of preventing the collapse of the system of nuclear agreements and reversing the downward spiral in U.S.-Russian relations. It is time to take the first step.


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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
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

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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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