SACW - 24 Oct 2017 | Sri Lanka: labour standards / Pakistan: Educated Jihadi’s / India: Taj Mahal as Tej Mahal; Prof Gopal Iyer passes / El Diablo in Wine Country / #HimToo / ‘post-antibiotic apocalypse’

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 24 Oct 2017 - No. 2959 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Pakistan’s Educated Jihadi’s | Muhammad Suleman
2. Pakistan, Land of the Intolerant| Mohammed Hanif Mohammed Hanif
3. Pakistan A Cartoon from Zia Years
4. EU approval of Sri Lankan labour standards whitewashes abuse | Thulsi Narayanasamy
5. India: Sectarianism suppressing democratic right of Expression | Ram Puniyani
6. India: Welfare Needs Aadhaar Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle? | Lecture by Reetika Khera
7. India: Cartoon on fatwa banning Indian muslims from posting photos on social media
8. India: The Story of Forced Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits [An NDTV programme in Hindi]
9. India: Taj Mahal and the Communalisation of Cultural Heritage - Video from The Wire
10. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - Five myths about Nazis | Thomas Childers
 - [Cultural Heritage] The Taj is Everybody's | Jyoti Punwani
 - India: Lotus shadow over the Taj (Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal)
 - India: The new attack on the Taj Mahal is ominous (Manini Chatterjee)
 - India: Is it legal for poltical party to access someone's voter ID card and publish on social media to prove someone's religion?
 - India: Will Ayodhya again be the epicentre of Hindutva politics ?
 - Indian cinema's prominent film maker Yash Chopra was active in the RSS in his youth
 - India: Court raps Delhi university for not taking action against ABVP rowdies who terrorise teachers
 - India’s religious right exploits faith and steps in where the state has failed
 - Hindi article: Taj Mahal and Divisive Politics
 - India: Kerala High Court’s indictment of ‘love jihad’ brigade is an urgent dose of secular sanity for India
 - India: Art is subjective, but some interpretations are dangerous | Karthik Venkatesh
 - Taj Mahal as Tej Mahal - Once again "There is a Bee in the Bonnett" (subhash gatade)
 - India: UP govt has tax payers money to fly actors dressed as gods for Diwali festival not for urgently needed oxygen supplies for hospital in gorakhpur

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
11. Sri Lanka: Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga returns to active politics from Attanagalla | Harim Peiris
12. Pakistan: The Exodus Of Quetta’s Hazaras | Muhammad Akbar Notezai
13. Racial politics gaining resonance in Indonesia | John McBeth
14. Finding a way out - The current upsurge of fascism | Prabhat Patnaik
15. India: Manipur Christian group’s denial of burial rights to woman reflects growing intolerance in India | Nandita Haksar
16. India: Sex with minor bride a crime - Editorial, The Tribune
17. The slowdown in jobs shows that India is headed for demographic disaster | Devangshu Datta
18. India: Prof Gopal Iyer, people’s scholar, dies at 75 | Vishav Bharti
19. Gandhi's Role in the Partition of India | Mohammed Ayoob
20. #HimToo: A Reckoning | C. Christine Fair
21. The benefits of a lousy passport | Leo Mirani
22. World leaders urged to act on ‘post-antibiotic apocalypse’ by chief medical officer  | Ella Pickover
23. El Diablo in Wine Country | Mike Davis
24. One Woman’s Liberation, Set Against the Russian Revolution | Simon Sebag Montefiore 
25. Ruble on Creech, 'Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Films'

========================================
1. PAKISTAN’S EDUCATED JIHADI’S | Muhammad Suleman
========================================
The recent trend in Pakistan is of the gradual penetration of radicalization and religious violent extremism into academic institutions. Traditionally, there were the madaris (religious seminaries) that played a vibrant role in breeding the jihadists and promoting religious violent extremism and terrorism in the society.
http://www.sacw.net/article13529.html

========================================
2. PAKISTAN, LAND OF THE INTOLERANT| Mohammed Hanif Mohammed Hanif
========================================
KARACHI, Pakistan — This country has a poor record of protecting its religious minorities, but we outdo ourselves when it comes to Ahmadis. Members of the sect insist on calling themselves Muslims, and we mainstream Muslims insist on treating them like the worst kind of heretics.
http://www.sacw.net/article13537.html

========================================
3. PAKISTAN A CARTOON FROM ZIA YEARS
========================================
Scan from an American newspaper from Zia years but the source details are missing. Difficult to provide credits for the cartoon since the newspaper source is unavailable.
http://www.sacw.net/article13538.html

========================================
4. EU APPROVAL OF SRI LANKAN LABOUR STANDARDS WHITEWASHES ABUSE | Thulsi Narayanasamy
========================================
At the forefront of the fight for labour and union rights in Sri Lanka’s garment factories is the Free Trade Zones and General Services Employees Union (FTZ&GSEU). Anton Marcus, the General Secretary, says: “The EU says Sri Lanka now meets labour and human rights standards but core ILO conventions still aren’t implemented through legislation, let alone practice. The only people benefiting are the same as always, and there is nothing done to ensure workers benefit at all.”
http://www.sacw.net/article13536.html

========================================
5. INDIA: SECTARIANISM SUPPRESSING DEMOCRATIC RIGHT OF EXPRESSION | Ram Puniyani
========================================
Freedom of expression has been the core value which accompanied the struggle for India’s Independence. The British did attempt to stifle the voices of dissent but the freedom fighters did see this as a crucial mechanism of rooting democratic ethos in the society. At heavy cost the major leaders had to face the wrath of British colonialist powers for upholding the foundation of a democratic society through freedom of expression.
http://www.sacw.net/article13533.html

========================================
6. INDIA: WELFARE NEEDS AADHAAR LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE? | Lecture by Reetika Khera
========================================
Video recording of a lecture delivered by Prof Reetika Khera at Institute for South Asia Studies UC Berkeley on October 17 2017. Aadhaar, India’s ambitious biometric ID project, was portrayed as one that would enhance India’s welfare efforts by promoting inclusion and reducing corruption. From being a voluntary ID, it has become de facto compulsory for most welfare programmes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the Public Distribution System (PDS). Despite early warnings of its limited role in its stated objected, successive government’s have ramped up its use. Using a variety of data sources, this paper reviews the impact of Aadhaar on welfare programmes. Far from being inclusive and reducing corruption, Aadhaar is becoming a tool of exclusion, with little evidence of an impact on corruption in NREGA, PDS and pensions, etc.
http://www.sacw.net/article13532.html

========================================
7. PONNAPPA CARTOON ON FATWA BANNING INDIAN MUSLIMS FROM POSTING PHOTOS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
========================================
Nala Ponnappa responds to news report regarding a fatwa that bans Muslims from posting pictures on social media sites
http://www.sacw.net/article13530.html

========================================
8. INDIA: THE STORY OF FORCED EXODUS OF KASHMIRI PANDITS [AN NDTV PROGRAMME IN HINDI]
========================================
The Story of Kashmiri Pandits (on Hum Log - a hindi TV programme anchored by Ravish Kumar for NDTV)
http://www.sacw.net/article13531.html
  
========================================
9. INDIA: TAJ MAHAL AND THE COMMUNALISATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE - VIDEO FROM THE WIRE
========================================
THE WIRE - Maya Mirchandani discusses some BJP leaders’ claims of Taj Mahal not being representative of the Indian cultural heritage along with Sunil Kumar, professor of history at Delhi University, and Historian Sohail Hashmi
http://www.sacw.net/article13535.html

========================================
10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 

 - Five myths about Nazis | Thomas Childers
 - [Cultural Heritage] The Taj is Everybody's | Jyoti Punwani
 - India: Lotus shadow over the Taj (Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal)
 - India: The new attack on the Taj Mahal is ominous (Manini Chatterjee)
 - India: Is it legal for poltical party to access someone's voter ID card and publish on social media to prove someone's religion?
 - India: Will Ayodhya again be the epicentre of Hindutva politics ?
 - Indian cinema's prominent film maker Yash Chopra was active in the RSS in his youth
 - India: Court raps Delhi university for not taking action against ABVP rowdies who terrorise teachers
 - India’s religious right exploits faith and steps in where the state has failed
 - Hindi article: Taj Mahal and Divisive Politics
 - India: Kerala High Court’s indictment of ‘love jihad’ brigade is an urgent dose of secular sanity for India
 - India: Art is subjective, but some interpretations are dangerous | Karthik Venkatesh
 - Taj Mahal as Tej Mahal - Once again "There is a Bee in the Bonnett" (subhash gatade)
 - India: UP govt has tax payers money to fly actors dressed as gods for Diwali festival not for urgently needed oxygen supplies for hospital in gorakhpur

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

========================================
11. SRI LANKA: CHANDRIKA BANDARANAIKE KUMARATUNGA RETURNS TO ACTIVE POLITICS FROM ATTANAGALLA
by Harim Peiris
========================================
(The Island, October 17, 2017)

An election the opposition has been clamouring for, the local government elections are finally expected to be conducted on or around the 20thof January 2018. Preceding those elections was what some sections of the media described as a purge of SLFP dissidents from the all-important post of organizer of an electorate. JO stalwarts, Kumara Welgama and Mahindananda Aluthgamage, being among others sacked from their positions by President Maithripala Sirisena as SLFP Party Leader. Consequently, President Sirisena appointed a range of new SLFP electoral organizers, mostly fresh, younger politicians from the provincial level. What was clear though, through the sackings, was that the attempted rapprochement between the two factions of the SLFP, those within the government and those with the Opposition, was now effectively over and the battle lines for the local elections have been drawn. We are headed for an essentially a three-way contest, between the two partners in government, the UNP and the SLFP, and the new SLPP - the most likely political vehicle of the Joint Opposition and its smaller allies.

Most interestingly though was the reinduction of retired President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga as SLFP organizer for the Attanagalla electorate, a Bandaranaike stronghold which the family has nursed for generations and which has stood with the SLFP during good times and bad, including the nadir of the 1977 defeat. The appointment as electoral organizer, signals a return from retirement back to electoral politics for the matriarch of the SLFP. The Gampaha District, Sri Lanka’s second most populous district on which a national election can turn. With her profile and stature, President Kumaratunga is now effectively the SLFP District Leader for Gampaha.

CBK’s return to electoral politics did not occur in a vacuum, and is largely the logical conclusion of her active architecture of the rainbow coalition which ousted the former Rajapaksa Administration in 2015; a feat thought near impossible then, both due to President Rajapaksa’s popularity, and more importantly due to the fractious nature of the political opposition around 2013 and 2014. But President Kumaratunga sensed the winds of change, did the impossible, and formed the grand national "rainbow" coalition of the NDF, and of course the rest is our nation’s recent history.

The political story of the SLFP post the elections of 2015 is that it did not fully fall in behind President Sirisena, with a section of the Party remaining in the opposition and fashioning themselves as the Joint Opposition, while a section of the Party joined the National Unity Government or the grand national coalition of the two major parties. Joining the intra-party fight at an early stage, though initially in only a semi-executive manner was President Kumaratunga who made no secret of her desire to keep the Rajapaksa’s from ever making a political comeback to the national leadership. President Kumaratunga is also actively committed to the National Unity Government, believing that a measure of consensus between the two major parties is required to give effect to the next generation of state reforms - economic, political and social - required to solidify our transition to a post conflict, upper middle-income country, with social cohesion and justice.

Within the SLFP, the return of CBK to a post of electoral organizer, and especially in the key Gampaha District, puts her on SLFP party parity status with Mahinda Rajapaksa, as a formidable political player and former president, with a mass public following with an electoral appeal to the base of the SLFP party faithful. It significantly strengthens President Sirisena’s hand, with President Kumaratunga aligning her support in line with President Sirisena’s.

The return to active politics from retirement is a not unusual political phenomenon globally, while how it plays out in Sri Lanka and the SLFP will remain to be seen. The most well-known international example is that of President Daniel Ortega, head of the Sandinista political movement in Nicaragua, who governed Nicaragua for eleven years from 1979 to 1990 and then made a comeback after seventeen long years, being re-elected President in 2007 and governs to date.

The Rajapaksa-led Joint Opposition, however, also did not let the grass grow under their feet during these past two and a half years, and have formed the Sri Lanka Podu Jana Pakshaya (SLPP), under Basil Rajapaksa, which is likely to be the political vehicle of choice for the Joint Opposition (JO), for the local government elections. This sets up an interesting three-way contest, between the UNP, the SLFP and the JO (SLPP), the first time in nearly three decades when one of the two major parties faced an election seriously divided, the prior occasion being when late Gamini Dissanayake and Lalith Athulathmudali broke away from President Premadasa and the UNP to form the DUNF (Rajaaliya). In the ensuing election, the DUNF came a respectable third place, but the weakening of the UNP through the schism witnessed the return to power of the SLFP in 1994, under the then young and newly returned from self-imposed exile, daughter of the SLFP founder, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.

The January 2018 local government elections will also end up being a three-way political context and it remains to be seen what the outcome would be. The practice of coalition or alliance partners contesting elections separately and then forming post-election alliances is not unusual, not just globally, but even in Sri Lanka, where essentially the August 2015 General Elections was contested while the SLFP was in coalition with the UNP in the post presidential election national unity government.

Perhaps it is appropriate to conclude with a quote from a senior Indian journalist and political analyst who once told me, some years ago, "it would be a serious political analytical error to ever count out and disregard, the Gandhi’s of India, the Bhutto’s of Pakistan and the Bandaranaike’s of Sri Lanka". With general elections due in Pakistan in 2018, with local elections due in Sri Lanka early next year, and Indian elections due in 2019, time will tell to what extent the old adage still holds true.

========================================
12. THE EXODUS OF QUETTA’S HAZARAS | Muhammad Akbar Notezai
========================================
(Dawn, October 22, 2017)
https://www.dawn.com/news/1365031/the-exodus-of-quettas-hazaras]

========================================
13. RACIAL POLITICS GAINING RESONANCE IN INDONESIA | John McBeth
========================================
(Asia Times - Jakarta, October 19, 2017)

Newly elected Jakarta governor Anies Baswaden has again inflamed racial and religious controversy, with an eye on one day winning the presidency

As calculated as it may have been, newly-inaugurated Jakarta Governor Anies Baswaden has started off on just the wrong foot by re-igniting the religious and ethnic controversy which paved the way for his victory over Basuki “Ahok” Purnama, his ethnic Chinese-Indonesian predecessor currently serving jail time for alleged blasphemy.

In a prepared speech after he was sworn in by President Joko Widodo, the former education minister triggered a storm in the press and on social media by declaring it was time for pribumi (indigenous Indonesians) “to be the hosts in our own land.”

With his supporters unfurling a banner reading “The success of Anies-Sandi (running mate Sandiaga Uno) is a Symbol of the Rise of the Muslim Pribumi,” Baswaden, 48, who is of mixed Arabic blood, went on: “We worked hard to get rid of colonization and we must enjoy our freedom.”

“It was clearly well-calculated, although I think he was surprised at the reaction he got,” says one senior government official. “He has an ambition to be president, if not in 2019, then in 2024.”

Critics say the overall implication of his statement was that anyone who isn’t pribumi cannot call themselves Indonesian – this in a country whose national motto, effectively embodied in the Pancasila state ideology, is ‘Unity in Diversity.’
REFILE - CORRECTING STYLE A man holds a Koran as Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan stands during a swearing-in ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 16, 2017. REUTERS/Beawiharta
A man holds a Koran as Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan stands during a swearing-in ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 16, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Beawiharta

But the logic behind the statement was also puzzling given the fact that the once-popular Purnama was the first ethnic-Chinese Christian among 18 mayors and governors who have led Jakarta dating back to the 1945 declaration of independence.

Baswaden and Uno won last April’s election with a resounding 57.9% of the vote, well ahead of the 42% polled by Purnama and then-deputy governor Djarot Hidayat; following Purnama’s conviction, Hidayat filled in as governor until the October 16 handover.

Although he alienated the poor by clearing riverbanks of slum dwellings that contributed to the city’s perennial flood problems, Purnama was a popular and effective administrator who initiated live television coverage of town hall meetings to promote transparency.

In the end, however, the blasphemy charge was enough to bring him down. It was a telling lesson that, on contentious religious issues, many Muslims march in lock-step conformity with the views of conservative clerics in neighborhood mosques.

Once regarded as an enlightened reformist, the American-educated Baswaden has been a disappointment to Muslim pluralists and minority groups for the way he has played the Islamic card to further his political ambitions.

Whether it was his intention or not, his pribumi remark appears to keep alive a strategy that Purnama’s rivals used during the Jakarta gubernatorial campaign and may employ again on a wider stage in the 2019 legislative and presidential elections.
Hardline Muslim groups protest against Jakarta's incumbent governor Basuki Purnama (Ahok), an ethnic Chinese Christian running for re-election. The sign reads: "Reject Ahok." Photo: Reuters/Beawiharta
Hardline Muslim groups protest against previous Jakarta governor Basuki Purnama who was later convicted on blasphemy charges. Photo: Reuters/Beawiharta

Baswaden later struggled to explain that his statement should be seen in context, saying his use of the word pribumi was meant to be historical in nature and had no religious or racial connotation.

But critics asked whether the same excuse could be applied to Purnama’s reference to a verse in the Koran, conservatively interpreted as meaning Muslims should not be ruled by non-Muslims, that ultimately cost him his freedom and last April’s election.

Vice-President Jusuf Kalla came to Baswaden’s defense, saying his critics shouldn’t just isolate one word and extrapolate from there — even though a careful reading of the language shows the governor was speaking in the present tense.

But maritime coordinating minister Luhut Panjaitan, a Christian and Widodo’s chief political adviser, reminded Baswaden he should be the leader of all Jakarta citizens, not just Muslims. “There should not be pribumi or non-pribumi,” he said. “He must be governor to all ethnic groups.”

Indonesia’s political leaders, Widodo among them, continue to refer to pribumi despite then new president B J Habibie issuing a formal instruction in 1998 that the word should be avoided; the move came after bloody anti-Chinese riots that preceded ex-president Suharto’s fall from power that same year.

Indonesians of mostly Yemeni ancestry make up about five million of the 264 million-strong population, compared to an official census of 2.8 million self-identified Indonesian-Chinese, although that number is probably a lot higher.

Anies Baswedan (R), a candidate in the running to lead the Indonesian capital Jakarta, and his deputy Sandiaga Uno stand in front of their supporters during campaigning in Jakarta, Indonesia, February 5, 2017 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Picture taken February 5, 2017. Antara Foto/M Agung Rajasa/ via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. MANDATORY CREDIT. INDONESIA OUT. - RTSY9CX
Anies Baswedan (R), on the campaign trail in February this year. Photo: Antara Foto via Reuters/M Agung Rajasa/ 

Ethnic Arabs aren’t discriminated against, however, because they are invariably Muslim and do not command the same control over the national economy as the Chinese do, something that has long been a source of social friction.

Baswaden is the grandson of diplomat and freedom fighter Abdurrahman Baswaden, one of several notable Arab-Indonesians who include former foreign ministers Ali Alatas and Alwi Shihab and renowned Dutch-era painter Raden Saleh.

So-called Hadramis are also prominent in the Islamic extremist movement, among them Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist network, and Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, self-exiled founder of the violent Islamic Defenders Front (FPI).

What remains to be seen now is whether Baswaden continues to pander to his conservative Muslim supporters, perhaps seeing them as a way to broaden his base across the country and eventually take the same path as Widodo to the state palace.

Although he was supported by opposition leader Prabowo Subianto’s Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) and the sharia-based Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) in the Jakarta election, he is still officially an independent and will need party backing to take his political career any further.

With Prabowo expected to run in 2019, Baswaden’s long-term bet would seem to be PKS. But at this point Jakartans are more likely to judge him on how he manages the capital’s 70 trillion rupiah (US$5.2 billion) annual budget and whether he fulfils his 23 campaign promises, including the creation of 200,000 new jobs.

Ironically, he stands to get some of the credit for the work done first by Widodo, during his two years as governor, and then by Purnama, in the construction of the Mass Rail Transit (MRT) and Light Rail Transit (LRT) systems, both of which come into operation in 2019. 

========================================
14. FINDING A WAY OUT - THE CURRENT UPSURGE OF FASCISM | Prabhat Patnaik
========================================
(The Telegraph, October 22, 2017)

There is at present an upsurge of fascism all over the world, though it is often described as 'nationalism' or 'right-wing populism'. Such terms, however, are misleading, and reflect a neo-liberal mindset. The pejorative use of the term, 'nationalism', serves implicitly to laud neo-liberal globalization as its contrast; it is also misleading because it does not distinguish between the 'nationalism' of a Gandhi and the 'nationalism' of a Hitler. Likewise, the term 'populism' is used these days to characterize all redistributive or welfare state measures, contrasting them unfavourably with neo-liberal measures of 'development'; to apply it to the current fascist upsurge is misleading both because it promotes such a tendentious use of the term and also because the implicit suggestion of a transfer to the people does not figure anywhere in the agenda of these movements.

The current fascist upsurge, of course, is not a replication of the 1930s. Today's context is different; and even within any particular context each such movement has its own country-specific features. But the term, 'fascism', is apposite because at least four features common to all fascist upsurges can be found in the current upsurge as well.

The first is supremacism and the associated repression of the 'other': white supremacism in the West, Hindu supremacism in India and so on. In fact, 'supremacism' describes these movements more accurately than 'nationalism'. When a leader of the fascist German party (AfD) exclaims that while walking down a German street he does not meet a single German, he is obviously identifying German-ness with a white skin, and ruing the citizenship of less 'congenial' people. This is a symptom of supremacism rather than nationalism.

A second feature of fascism is the apotheosis of unreason, of which supremacism itself is an expression. Propositions like 'the blacks are inferior' or 'the Dalits are inferior' or 'the Muslims are inferior' are themselves indicative of unreason. But this unreason is sustained by a more pervasive appeal to unreason, a more general assault on reason, of which hostility to the intelligentsia, a complete disregard for evidence in any argumentation, a running down of centres of learning, physical attacks against dissenters, and browbeating the media, are some obvious symptoms.

Third, fascism is a movement, as distinct from mere skulduggery by some violent gangs, though fascism may use such gangs and the latter may have fascist mindsets. In Latin America, for instance, murderous gangs have been used against the Left for decades, especially during the years of military rule. But military rule cannot be called fascist for this reason, because fascism, unlike military rule, is sustained by a movement.

Fourth, the fascist movement at a certain stage of its career invariably makes a deal with big corporate capital, which alone enables it to acquire centre-stage presence and, if possible, come to power. Fascists knocking on the doors of State power, fascists in State power (which is the case in India), and fascists converting their hold on State power to set up a fascist State (which we have not yet seen anywhere at present), can do so only on the basis of the support of corporate financiers. Behind Narendra Modi's rise too there is the solid support of the Indian corporate-financial oligarchy.

This last point also gives a clue to the reasons behind a fascist upsurge. Fascist, semi-fascist, and neo-fascist movements exist as fringe phenomena in most societies. They suddenly erupt into prominence in periods of economic crisis. This happens not because, as is often believed on the Left, the corporate houses get worried about a working class challenge to their hegemony at such times and prop up the fascists, but for precisely the opposite reason, namely the traditional establishment parties are incapable of finding a way out of the crisis and the Left is too weak to assert its agenda. Fascism, which starts out pre-eminently as a middle-class petty bourgeois movement, acquires strength at such times, not because it offers any solution to the economic crisis, but because it changes the discourse altogether, by projecting a 'messiah' who would miraculously cure the ills of society. (The appeal to unreason becomes essential for such projection.) And because of this acquisition of strength it gets 'adopted' by corporate capital to buttress its position.

Walter Benjamin, the well-known philosopher and theorist of culture who was himself a victim of fascism, had seen it as arising from a "failed revolution". This had certainly been true of Germany, and of Europe in general, where a series of working class uprisings had occurred in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, whose failure had left the working class divided and debilitated. But the question that arises is: why in the present era, when there has been no revolutionary attempt anywhere for at least four decades, should there be such a weakening of the working class movement, and of the Left as its political expression, that the current capitalist crisis is producing a world-wide fascist upsurge as opposed to a Left upsurge?

An obvious reason for this is the weakening of the trade union movement everywhere as a consequence of globalization and the neo-liberal policies associated with it. The globalization of capital, which entails outsourcing of activities from the advanced countries to low-wage third world countries, constrains the trade union movement in the former. In the latter, on the other hand, the undermining of petty production and of peasant agriculture that also occurs under neo-liberalism, ensures that labour reserves swell in spite of such outsourcing from the advanced countries, as displaced peasants and petty producers pour into cities in quest of jobs whose increase is not large enough even to absorb the natural increase in workforce. Such swelling labour reserves obviously cripple trade unions, apart from the ever-present fear that union militancy would drive investment to other destinations. Besides, privatization, a ubiquitous phenomenon under neo-liberalism, weakens the trade union movement everywhere, since trade unions invariably tend to be stronger in the public compared to the private sector.

There is a second reason for the weakening of working class politics, which has to do with its not shaking off the ideological hegemony of neo-liberalism. It is not just the likes of Tony Blair of the British Labour Party and Gerhard Schroeder of the German Social Democratic Party, who have been the instruments of such hegemony. Even the Marxist Left, notwithstanding its criticism of neo-liberalism, has not drawn the inevitable conclusion from it, namely the need to put capital controls in place, and hence to delink to an extent from globalization, for pursuing an alternative agenda. And in countries like ours where the Marxist Left has ruled only in some states, it has often pursued conventional policies on the grounds that the Centre alone can effect a shift away from neo-liberalism.

But where the Left has broken away from neo-liberalism, it has managed to challenge the fascists. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, who presented a different, anti-Wall Street, agenda, got substantial support from the people, and may have even beaten Donald Trump had he continued in the presidential contest. Jeremy Corbyn, who has come out with a new Left agenda, including even nationalization, has revived working class politics in Britain to an extent where the vote share of the fascist United Kingdom Independence Party went down from 11 per cent in the previous general election to just 2 per cent in the latest one. In France, where Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Left Party together with trade unions has been spearheading opposition to the neo-liberal agenda of the president, Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen's fascist party's vote share has gone down from 23 to 13 per cent between the presidential and parliamentary elections, reducing it to just eight seats in Parliament. In fact, its votes are marginally less than those of the Communist Party and Mélenchon's party put together. In spite of their not fighting the parliamentary election together, they got 27 seats, which is way above the fascists. The fascist upsurge in short can be reversed if the Left breaks out of neo-liberal hegemony and offers the people an alternative concrete agenda.

What does all this mean for India where the Left is divided over whether to have a broad anti-fascist alliance that includes the Congress or whether to shun any alliance with neo-liberal parties? The foregoing would suggest that this debate should be turned upside down. The point is not who is 'touchable' and who is not; the point is to push for an alternative agenda and ally with whoever comes on board. Such an alternative agenda has to be minimal but significant. Even an agenda with just two points, a State-run national health service offering free and quality healthcare to all, and a chain of quality State-run neighbourhood schools providing free education to all children, will go a long way in changing the ethos of this country.

The author is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

========================================
15. INDIA: MANIPUR CHRISTIAN GROUP’S DENIAL OF BURIAL RIGHTS TO WOMAN REFLECTS GROWING INTOLERANCE IN INDIA | Nandita Haksar
========================================
(scroll.in )- Oct 03, 2017)

Ritah Haorei, who died in August, was not buried for over a month as a debate raged between religious and tribal groups.

Women march in Imphal demanding that Ritah Haorei be buried. | HT

It may seem far removed from the reality we live in but the debate in the past month over the burial of a Catholic woman in a Baptist society in Manipur is just another reflection of growing religious intolerance in our country.

Ritah Haorei’s body lay in a Catholic church in Hundung village in Ukhrul district from August 7 to September 18 after neighbouring Leingangching village denied her husband Yangmi Haorei permission to bury her. Yangmi Haorei, a resident of Leingangching, had been excommunicated because of his faith. The village had in 1973 passed a resolution banning all religious denominations except Baptist Christians.

Both villages are predominantly inhabited by the Tangkhul Naga tribe. Many Naga villages in Manipur and in Nagaland have passed similar resolutions.

When Ritah Haorei was finally laid to rest in Leingangching, it was on “humanitarian grounds” and not as her constitutionally-guaranteed right to practise the religion of her choice.

Looking through the records of the case and the parties involved, it is ironic that the judge of a secular High Court quoted passages from the Bible, an insurgent group with the motto “Nagaland for Christ” gave orders based on the principles of secular laws and cited humanitarian law to deny people their human rights, while tribal bodies used customary laws to justify religious intolerance.

The parties to the dispute are: (a) the Leingangching village authority, (b) Yangmi Haorei and four other Catholic families, (c) the parish priest of the Catholic church, (d) the Catholic joint action committee, (e) the Baptist church, (f) the Tangkhul Naga Long, the tribe’s apex body, (g) the Government of the People’s Republic of Nagalim, a government-in-exile established by the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), an insurgent group fighting for a sovereign Naga state, and (h) the Indian state, which includes the district administration, courts and state government.

The first question that must be addressed: can a village in India pass a resolution stating it will be “a Baptist village” and not allow people to practise other religions? Can the village authority throw out villagers, damage their property and not allow them to till their land if they convert to another religion?

Catholic versus Baptist

Though Leingangching passed its Baptists-only resolution in 1973, no one bothered about it for several decades, perhaps because there were no Catholics in the village.

But in 2009, the parish priest of the Sacred Heart church in Hundung wrote to the Leingangching headman and village authority informing them that five families had converted to Catholicism and they should not be disturbed. In his reply on November 24, 2009, the headman said no other religious denominations could be allowed within the village. He said the five families had broken the village law and must apologise, failing which they would have to find somewhere else to live and work.

In March 2010, the families were evicted, their properties destroyed and their “citizenship of this village” cancelled. They, in turn, filed a first information report against the villagers.

Their treatment angered the Catholic community, which sought the intervention of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah).

In November 2010, the Government of the People’s Republic of Nagalim run by the insurgent group gave its order. It fined Yangmi Haorei a pig worth Rs 20,000 “for violation of their village avowed sectarian constitution/agreement” but held that he and the other families could not be prevented from converting to any religion. It also said all five families “being bonafide citizens of the village shall enjoy all rights as entitled to other fellow citizens of the village” and that they should not be harassed. It directed Yangmi Haorei to withdraw the FIR and the villagers to pay compensation to the five families.

The families withdrew the FIR and the Catholic community paid the Rs 20,000 fine. But the Leingangching village authority rejected the order.

The Catholic community marches with the coffin of Ritah Haorei in Manipur's Ukhrul district. Photo credit: via Facebook)

Fightback over funerals

On September 15, 2014, Joseph Lungshi’s wife Ningmila died. Lungshi was among the villagers who had converted to Catholicism. He was not allowed to bury his wife in the village.

On December 10, 2016, Ninghorla, also among the five families, died and was denied a burial. The Sacred Heart church in Hundung gave her a spot in its cemetery.

When Yangmi Haorei too was not allowed to bury his wife, the Catholic community decided to fight back. And so Ritah Haorei’s body lay in a glass coffin in the Sacred Heart church for over a month. Three days into the protest, the Catholics marched to Leingangching to bury her but failed to get past the Baptist villagers.

The procession was led by Paotam Zimik, a well loved leader of the Catholic community. He died on September 1 and I attended his funeral. Zimik was married to my husband’s sister. When the funeral procession made its way to Ukhrul, the two-hour journey took five hours because people wanted to pay their respects. Many said the stress of Ritah Haorei’s case had taken a toll on him.

The president of the Tangkhul Naga Long was conspicuous by his absence at the funeral. He had sent Zimik a notice for a Rs 5,000 fine for leading a protest march on August 16. Zimik had received permission from the deputy commissioner for the procession. The same day, the Catholic joint action committee had submitted a memorandum to Chief Minister N Biren Singh seeking his intervention in the case.

On August 28, Yangmi Haorei filed a writ petition in the Manipur High Court seeking security for his wife’s burial and resettlement of the five families in Leingangching. He cited a Gauhati High Court order in a case where Catholic families had been thrown out of Phokhungri village in Nagaland. In that case, the court had on May 26, 2014, quashed a village resolution that allowed only Baptists to live in Phokhungri.

In the Leingangching case, though, a day before the Manipur High Court was to give its order, Ritah Haorei was buried. The judge observed, “This court would like to express happiness at the admirable accommodating spirit shown by both sides in resolving a very contentious issue relating to the burial of late Smt Ritah Haorei. This court would like to put on record the genuine humanitarian gesture shown by the private respondents.”

Quoting from the Bible, the judge said: “… Surely there is at least one wise person in your fellowship who can settle a dispute between fellow Christians.”

That “wise person” was the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), but it specifically stated that Ritah Haorei’s burial was on humanitarian grounds and not as a right. In its September 2 order, it also directed Yangmi Haorei to withdraw all cases.
Growing hatred, from Manipur to Goa

Many Baptists have expressed anger, distress over the incident. But these liberal voices remain isolated, ineffective. The fundamentalists have both the organisation and the arms.

I watched the events in Manipur unfold from the other end of the country, Goa, where a similar controversy is raging. Here, Catholics and Hindus in a village have objected to a Muslim graveyard. It is a controversy that, like the one in Ukhrul, began before the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014. The Muslim villagers’ plans for a new cemetery have faced resistance for several decades, forcing them to dig up old graves to bury their dead.

The opposition is now more vociferous, with religious extremists from the majority community fanning the flames of disharmony. Liberal voices can hardly be heard. Slowly, we are witnessing the hyper-normalisation of intolerance and as we watch, we are unable to imagine a political alternative.

Nandita Haksar is a human rights lawyer, teacher, activist and writer

========================================
16. INDIA: SEX WITH MINOR BRIDE A CRIME - EDITORIAL, THE TRIBUNE
========================================
(The Tribune, Oct 13, 2017)

EDITORIAL

It is rape
Sex with minor bride a crime

THE Supreme Court on Wednesday plugged a loophole in law that so far allowed a married man to have sex with a girl even if she is under 18, the age of consent. While the criminal code protects a child by prohibiting anyone from having sex with anyone below 18 years, the law provided an exception for married couples. The exception says that sexual intercourse with a minor wife above the age of 15 would not qualify as rape. This meant that while you could be charged with rape for having consensual intercourse with a girl below 18, non-consensual sex with a minor bride would be legal. By striking off the clause in response to a public interest lawsuit, the court has aligned the millions of married minors with their unmarried minor peers regarding sexual assault laws. Perhaps, now we will have fewer underage girls being married off to much older filthy rich men.

The new legal regime is a huge step forward for the child brides — UNICEF-2016 report says that 47 per cent of girls are married off before they are 18 in India — considering that successive governments have fought shy of invalidating the regressive rule, all in the name of tradition and socio-economic realities. But while criminalising rape empowers girls to have sexual autonomy and a say over their bodies, for the law to be effective, the government — and society — need to first strictly prohibit child marriages. Rather than cooking and cleaning for their husbands and becoming mothers at a young age and suffering from consequential health issues, girls must be encouraged to go to school. 

The Supreme Court’s ruling reflects a shift in social mores. The Indian society is no longer happy being chained to medieval rites and traditions. And, it is incumbent upon the judiciary to nudge the society towards progressive practices and laws. Earlier in August, the Supreme Court had boldly protected the rights of Muslims women by declaring instant triple talaq unconstitutional. Next on the progressive agenda should be protection and autonomy to married women above 18, notwithstanding the government’s specious plea against criminalising marital rape in the name of protecting the institution of marriage.

========================================
17. NO DIVIDEND HERE: THE SLOWDOWN IN JOBS SHOWS THAT INDIA IS HEADED FOR DEMOGRAPHIC DISASTER | Devangshu Datta
========================================
(Scroll.in - 19 October 2017)

The double blow of demonetisation and GST has triggered job losses.

Youngsters appear for an entrance exam to qualify for vacant posts in the Madhya Pradesh State Police Department. India has a large workforce but massive levels of unemployment and underemployment mean much of it is underutilised. | AFP

Devangshu Datta

India’s telecom industry offers direct employment to around two million people, according to the Department of Telecom’s Annual Report for 2016-’17, and indirectly employs at least two million more, besides giving life to entire industries that wouldn’t have come into existence without it. But by this time this time next year, at least 100,000-200,000 of this workforce is likely to be aggressively sending out their resumes as they find themselves without work.

The Department of Telecom reckons that it will receive just Rs 29,500 crore as revenue share (a percentage of their gross revenue that telecom operators give the government body) in this fiscal. That is 37% less than the Rs 47,300 crore revenue share estimated in the Union Budget released in February. As revenues contract, telecom operators will have to consolidate and shed between 5%-10% of their workforce just to survive, industry analysts estimate.

Major players will merge and those who cannot will shut down. The Idea and Vodafone merger is the biggest one on the anvil, while Airtel has acquired Telenor’s India business and is set to merge with Tata Teleservices and Tata Teleservices Maharashtra. After the Reliance Communications-Aircel merger fell through, both companies are also on the lookout for partners.

Every merger will be followed by downsizing and at least 15,000-20,000 jobs have already been dispensed with after the existing deals were struck. Many of those laid off will be white-collar employees, some of them with annual compensations running to tens of lakhs.
Where are the jobs?

Two other massive employment generators – construction and textiles – have shed an even larger number of employees. Construction and infrastructure, hit hard by demonetisation, has laid off a chunk of its 30-million-strong workforce. While precise numbers are hard to get in this fragmented industry, as an indicator, one of India’s largest companies in this sector, Larsen & Toubro, has laid off about 11% of its workforce in the last six quarters.

The textile industry, already hurt by the November 8 note ban, has been crippled with the rollout of the Goods and Services Tax, with job losses reportedly running into lakhs.

Across other sectors too, jobs are scarce and net employment dwindling. For instance, HDFC Bank reportedly cut its workforce by about 11,000 in the last financial year, while YES Bank has cut about 2,500 jobs. FICCI’s Quarterly Manufacturing Survey released in July indicates that 73% of the respondent businesses have no plans to hire in the next three months. The Survey polled 300-odd companies with an aggregated turnover of more than Rs 3.5 trillion.

The Information Technology sector, another major recruiter in India, is also generating fewer jobs than before – Nasscom’s projections of a 200,000 net increase in employment across the sector in 2016 was belied as only 170,000 jobs were generated – and its employees are facing the risk of becoming irrelevant in the age of automation. Mckinsey predicts that about 600,000 of the industry’s 3.9 million workers will be laid off by 2020 and another one-third of the workforce needs to be re-skilled to hold on to their jobs, as Indian IT has failed to catch up new technologies like artificial intelligence and digital- and cloud-based services.

Nobody seems to have started aggregating the GST’s impact on the services sector in the public domain – across medium-sized business in industries like advertising, hospitality and in small-scale enterprises like electrical and plumbing, hardware assembly, repair and maintenance services. But preliminary information suggests that most small and medium-sized units are struggling to cope with GST. Many are said to have laid-off staff or simply shut-down for the moment.
Blow to services

Why has the services sector has been particularly disadvantaged by GST?

Manufacturing had always faced inter-state barriers in terms of transportation of goods and different excise rates in various states. With the implementation of the GST, this sector is currently struggling to come to terms with an absurdly complex compliance system but it can hope for things to ease-up in the long term as the market integrates.

But the services sector has always operated across an integrated market. There was no compliance barrier, or extra tax incidence if, say, an advertising agency in Chennai serviced clients in Guwahati. But post-GST, a business in the services sector will have to file a whole extra set of documents for every out-of-state client.

The fact that tax has to be paid upfront under GST, at the time of generating invoices, has also created a working capital crunch. Moreover, input tax credit – refunds on taxes that businesses paid while buying the inputs that went into the business – are not refunded on time.Most firms also have to wait 60 to 90 days before they are paid by their customers or clients, leaving them cash-strapped. The upfront tax incidence for many services 18%, which may actually be higher than the operating margin in many industries. So, the services sector is hit without discernible long-term benefits.
Broken promises?

Eventually all the reasons cited above come down to one over-arching factor: the Indian economy is not growing fast enough to create new jobs. What’s more, the supposed reforms, like demonetisation and GST, have not improved ease of doing business, to put it mildly.

If there is no hiring across sectors, and companies have to file umpteen amounts of paperwork and advance taxes even before receiving payments, there’s not much room for start-ups and self-employment opportunities either.

This is at a time when India is expected to reap the benefits of the so-called demographic dividend. It has a very young, growing workforce that should be able to generate growing output for decades. If per capita productivity improves, good. But even otherwise, GDP should grow simply because the workforce is growing.

Every nation goes through a version of this workforce bulge, when a large proportion of its population is within the working age (15-65). Historically, the Asian Tigers – Japan, China, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – and before them, the Europeans and Americans in the 19th century, saw accelerated GDP growth during their respective bulges. (Significantly, the Tigers as well as the Europeans made huge investments in universal primary education before the dividend even arrived).

The scale of unemployment and under-employment in India is hard to grasp because of poor statistical data. But it’s huge. One million or so Indians enter the workforce every month. That’s roughly 40 million additions to the workforce since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in May 2014 with the promise of bringing acche din.

The BJP’s poll promises included the creation of 25 million jobs per year. But every indicator suggests that 2017 will see net job losses. The Centre For Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt Ltd started estimating employment trends in January 2016 when it reckoned that around 39 million people were looking for work. Between April and December last year, the employed workforce grew from 401 million to 406.5 million. The workforce had fallen to 405 million by April this year. That implies a net 5.5 million jobs were generated between January to December 2016 but a net 1.5 million jobs were lost between January to April this year.

If policymakers are incapable of creating the preconditions for the Indian workforce to be educated or employed, that dividend is just jumla. It could be a demographic disaster instead.

========================================
18. INDIA: PROF GOPAL IYER, PEOPLE’S SCHOLAR, DIES AT 75
Vishav Bharti
========================================
(The Tribune, Oct 21, 2017)

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, October 20
Wherever people fought oppression, Prof K Gopal Iyer, just had to be there. He did not not mind boarding a train, whether or not his seat was reserved, or travelling atop a crowded bus to reach the trouble spot — his meagre belongings stuffed in a sling bag. 

Known for his work on bonded labour, peasant movements and land reforms, the 75-year-old “people’s scholar” passed away in Chandigarh on Thursday. He was suffering from a heart ailment.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Prof Iyer hailed from Tamil Nadu. But his interest in popular movements took him to Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Punjab and other parts of the country. A gold medallist from Patna University, he retired from Panjab University’s Sociology Department in 2002, where he had been teaching since 1978.

Prof Manjit Singh, his student and later a colleague, describes him as an “organic intellectual, who lived among the people, understood their language and culture and shared their suffering with the world”. 

Progressive thinkers would invariably throng Prof Iyer's house at PU, where any student in distress was received with warmth. Lallan Singh Baghel of the Department of Philosophy calls him a saint-scholar. “If studying in his office till late in the night, he would join tables and sleep there. While in the field, he would sleep on gunny bags and eat whatever was given. Scholars like him are rare.”

Prof Iyer neither chased projects, nor lobbied for fellowships. His sole pursuit was to understand the masses and their struggle. “Invited as a senior fellow by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla in 2010, he abandoned the fellowship after a year. He told me they (institute) wanted to ‘fortify’ him whereas he wanted to be out in the field,” recalls Baghel. Perhaps, that is why he could understand people’s movements so well.

Professor Iyer was well-versed in several Indian languages, says Prof Satish Kumar, his former colleague who retired from HPU, Shimla.  “He was equally proficient in Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, and Punjabi. Amazed at his command over Punjabi, we rechristened him as Gopal Singh Brar,” he smiles.

========================================
19. GANDHI'S ROLE IN THE PARTITION OF INDIA | Mohammed Ayoob
========================================
(Foreign Affairs, October 19, 2017)

When the All-India Muslim League was established in Dhaka in 1906 by leading Muslim figures from around the country, India had just begun to slowly transition to self-rule from the British Raj. From the outset, the political party’s primary goal was to protect the interests of India’s large Muslim minority, especially its elite. Its initial strategy was to use the demographic weight of the Muslim-majority provinces in northwestern and eastern India, particularly the two large provinces of Punjab and Bengal, to secure larger Muslim representation in the legislature, in the executive branch, and in public services in minority provinces, where Muslims were most in need of protection.

In the end, the 1947 partition of India, which the Muslim League later advocated, accomplished exactly the opposite. The separation cut away the Muslim-majority provinces from the rest of India, leaving Muslims in the minority provinces far more vulnerable to the will of the Hindu majority. The division of the subcontinent reduced Muslims’ share of the population from over a quarter in British India to just ten percent in independent India, allowing Hindu chauvinists to openly equate Indian nationalism with Hindu nationalism.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and the leader of the Muslim League in its final phase, is often assumed to have been the one who brought about partition. But some leading scholars, such as Ayesha Jalal, contend that Jinnah never wanted it. According to Jalal, the demand for Pakistan was a bargaining chip for Jinnah that unfortunately took on a momentum of its own, leading not only to the division of India but also to the partition of its largest Muslim-majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal, into two parts. Partition left Jinnah, in his own words, with a “truncated or mutilated moth-eaten” Pakistan.

Partition, however, cannot be blamed on the Muslim League and Jinnah alone. There had always been an explicitly Hindu majoritarian streak in Indian nationalism that equated Indian identity with Hinduism and defined India in Hindu terms, for example as a mother goddess akin to Kali and Durga. The literature that this strand of thinking produced was explicitly anti-Muslim in character. Organizationally it took the form of the Hindu Mahasabha, an exclusivist Hindu party set up to defend the rights and privileges of the Hindu majority, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a proto-fascist paramilitary group that spawned a number of other organizations, including the Bharatiya Janata Party in power in India today. The RSS propagated a militant Hindu supremacist ideology that defined the Muslim Indian as the other. M. S. Golwalkar, the leader of the RSS from 1940 to 1973, openly declared that “in this land Hindus have been the owners, Parsis and Jews the guests, and Muslims and Christians the dacoits [band of armed robbers].”

Explicit Hindu chauvinism was only of secondary importance during the independence movement. The predominant strand of Hindu nationalism, in contrast, blended Hindu nationalism with Indian nationalism far more subtly—by adopting Hindu symbols, for example—but without explicitly denouncing Muslims as outsiders. This predominant strand of Hindu nationalism was always a part of the mainstream Indian National Congress (known simply as the Congress) and was exemplified by nationalist stalwarts such as the activists Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai in the earlier phase and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first deputy prime minister, at the time of independence.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leading figure of the nationalist movement from 1920 until independence, professed that above all his mission was to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims; yet large segments of the Muslim elite consistently considered him to belong to the implicit Hindu nationalist tradition. In their view, Gandhi imperceptibly equated Hinduness with Indianness by his dress, vocabulary, and demeanor and his obsession with the protection of cows, considered sacred by Hindus. Consequently, the Muslim elite felt their identity under greater threat with Gandhi at the helm of the Congress than they had before he became the undisputed leader of the party.

HINDU NATIONALISM AND THE MUSLIM ELITE

The politics of Indian independence was above all elite politics; the masses had only instrumental value. Even in the last elections held in India under the Raj in 1946, only 13 percent of the adult population had the right to vote based on property and income criteria. In the run-up to Indian independence, the Muslim elite harbored a sense of great insecurity connected to history, demography, lack of progress in English education, and other factors. Before the Raj, the center of gravity of Indian politics was the heartland of northern and central India, where much of the Muslim elite was concentrated. When control began to shift to the hands of the East India Company, power shifted as well to the coastal cities of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, where the trading company had established its bases. These coastal cities and their hinterlands were dominated by an emerging English-educated, predominantly Hindu elite who made up the bulk of Indian administrators in subordinate positions in the Raj as well as spokespersons for self-government in India.

Whether Muslims’ insecurities at the time of independence were warranted is beside the point. They pervaded the psyche of the Muslim elite and had to be addressed in a manner acceptable to community leaders if India was to remain united. As Gandhi’s grandson and leading public intellectual Rajmohan Gandhi has succinctly stated, “A journey towards independence that did not remove Muslim anxieties was bound to lead to Partition.”

Gandhi’s appearance on the scene changed the character of the national movement from a constitutionalist to a populist one. As a leader interested in mobilizing the masses, Gandhi couched part of his political terminology in Hindu religious idioms. He used the term ram rajya (governance by the Hindu deity Ram), for example, to signify that a just order would prevail after independence. But that alienated much of the Muslim elite because it alluded to a mythical Hindu golden age before the advent of Islam in India. Gandhi’s deliberate adoption of the attire of a Hindu holy man, or sant, also repelled large segments of Muslims. The use of the term mahatma—great soul—by Gandhi’s acolytes as his title introduced Hindu spiritual terminology into the political arena and further increased Muslim alienation.

In 1920, Jinnah, then a senior and thoroughly secular leader of the Congress, strongly opposed Gandhi’s use of religious idioms in politics and warned that “it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done.” Jinnah believed that doing so contributed to communal polarization. He was also staunchly against Gandhi’s support for the antediluvian Khilafat movement, which sought a restoration of the Ottoman caliphate after its defeat in World War I. Gandhi joined the Khilafat movement to draw the support of the Muslim masses for his noncooperation movement, aimed at boycotting all British-created institutions in India in an effort to gain independence for the country.

For Jinnah, reference to a backward-looking golden age specific to the Hindu or Muslim communities from which the other was excluded was a recipe for division. Jinnah had been the principal architect of the Lucknow Pact of 1916 between the Congress and the Muslim League, for which he was called the “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.” He left the Congress in 1920 in disgust after he was hooted down at the Nagpur session of the party for not referring to Gandhi as “Mahatma” and for refusing to endorse the noncooperation policy because of his commitment to constitutionalist means for gaining independence.

Muslim suspicion of Gandhi increased in 1932 after his stubborn opposition to the Communal Award of British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. The award granted separate electorates, or reserved legislative seats, to India’s depressed classes, a euphemism for the untouchables of the Hindu caste system, now known as Dalits. The Dalits were given the same privilege the Muslims had enjoyed of choosing their own representatives to the legislature in future elections. The Muslim League accepted the award, but the Congress rejected it. Gandhi considered the award a device meant to divide Hindu society and pledged a fast unto death to persuade the British to repeal it. This hunger strike forced B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of the Dalits, to drop his demand for separate electorates for his people, a decision he publicly regretted in an interview to the BBC in 1955. In the same interview, Ambedkar disparaged Gandhi for his unwavering commitment to the caste system, implying that his concern for the untouchables was a sham.

Gandhi’s rejection of the Communal Award seemed to send a message to the Muslim leaders that he and the Congress were more interested in promoting a monolithic Hindu bloc under upper-caste control than in nurturing Hindu-Muslim unity and allowing Muslims their fair share of power in independent India. The logic was simple: if implemented, the award would have led to parity between Muslim and upper-caste Hindu representatives in the legislatures; Dalit representatives elected through separate Dalit electorates would have held the balance. The Muslim elite did not find the Dalits threatening. In fact, they saw them as potential allies against upper-caste Hindus who had mistreated the Dalits for centuries and, according to many Muslims, were now bent on dominating the Muslims in a similar manner.

THE PATH TO PARTITION

Soon after Gandhi’s rejection of the Communal Award in 1932, Jinnah returned from self-imposed exile in London in 1934 to take over the leadership of the Muslim League. The leader who returned, however, was very different from the Jinnah who warned Gandhi about the dangers of mixing religion with politics in 1920. He now decided to emulate Gandhi. The Qaid-e-Azam (Great Leader), as he came to be known among his followers, eventually outdid the Mahatma in his use of religion for political purposes. He argued that Hindus and Muslims were not just a majority and a minority community but two distinct nations. This formula became the steppingstone for the demand for Pakistan first put forward, although in rather vague terms, at the Lahore session of the Muslim League in 1940.

Simultaneously, the Congress, which claimed to represent all Indians, became increasingly Hindu in its composition under Gandhi’s leadership, which continued unofficially even after he resigned from party membership in 1934. Although the Muslim vote at the time was divided among the Muslim League and numerous regional Muslim parties, the Muslim League nevertheless won four times the number of seats reserved for Muslims—106 to 25—as did the Congress in the 1937 provincial elections.

The Congress, which claimed to represent all Indians, became increasingly Hindu in its composition under Gandhi’s leadership.

The December 1945 election to the Central Assembly was a major victory for the Muslim League, which won all 30 seats allocated to the Muslims. In the subsequent provincial elections held in 1946, it won an overwhelming majority of 425 out of 476 seats reserved for the Muslim community, thus demonstrating that it was well on its way to becoming the sole representative of the Muslims of India, or at least of its elite.

A partial explanation for this shift is that in Muslim perceptions, the Congress governments in power in most provinces between 1937 and 1939 treated the community unfairly. Congress President Jawaharlal Nehru’s disdain for Jinnah and the Muslim League and his refusal to accommodate the league in the provincial government in the United Provinces after the 1937 elections, for example, contributed to the Muslim disenchantment with the Congress. Gandhi, with his immense influence over the Congress leadership, could have overruled Nehru but decided not to do so. That he had the power to override the Congress leadership was demonstrated two years later when he forced Subhas Chandra Bose out of his elected position as president of the Congress because Gandhi found him insufficiently pliable and too radical for his taste.

Throughout this period, Gandhi remained the unofficial but undisputed leader of the Congress. He attended all Congress Working Committee meetings; no member could be appointed to the CWC and no decisions could be taken by the Congress High Command without his approval. This continued until the spring of 1947, when Nehru and Patel broke with him, for different reasons, on the question of accepting the idea of partition.

Gandhi opposed partition to the very end. Despite his opposition, Gandhi’s earlier alienation of the Muslim elite through his deliberate adoption of Hindu garb and vocabulary as well as through some of his political decisions that they considered pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim means that he cannot be absolved from at least partial responsibility for what came to pass.

In the light of historical evidence, only some of which has been presented here with specific reference to Gandhi, it would be a mistake to attribute partition solely to the machinations of Jinnah and the Muslim League. From the late nineteenth century onward, one cannot deny the existence of a strong streak among the Muslim elite that emphasized the distinct identity of Indian Muslims. This streak of thought resisted unconditional amalgamation into the national mainstream, which the Muslim elite perceived could become a vehicle for Hindu domination because the latter composed about 65 percent of the population in preindependence India. (The Aligarh Movement founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan bears testimony to this fact.)

This feeling among the Muslim elite was augmented, however, by a similarly strong streak of Hindu nationalism evident from the same period both within and outside the Congress. The difference between the two was that emphasis on Muslim identity, because it was a minority phenomenon, could be easily labeled separatism, while Hindu nationalism—especially of the implicit and subtle variety—could easily pass off as Indian nationalism because it represented the nationalism of the majority. Unfortunately, this was a conundrum that the Indian national movement and its leaders, including Gandhi, could not resolve. Partition was the result of the cumulative failure of the Hindu and Muslim elites to find a satisfactory solution to this dilemma. 

========================================
20. #HIMTOO: A RECKONING | C. Christine Fair
========================================
(Huffington Post, 10/19/2017)

I am a 49-year old American woman. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, a niece, grand-daughter, an aunt, and an educator. I have survived forced sexual acts, countenanced groping in busses, planes and on sidewalks and endured catcalls and gross displays of sexual aggression that rendered ordinary activities like shopping, jogging, biking or walking my dogs unpleasant experiences. I am an ordinary American woman and I am not alone. I am a member of a band of sisters and brothers who persist despite these experiences. We bare their scars—some of which are evidenced on our bodies while many more yet remain invisible.

I’ve been vocal about my experiences for decades. I am not enthralled by campaigns like “#MeToo,” in which the onus is upon the victims to stand up and once again be counted, to educate people about our myriad numbers, to encourage folks to literally see the faces of victim-hood and survivorship.

The only #MeToo posts I want to see are those written by the perpetrators who acknowledge their injurious acts and their gravity and seek atonement from their victims.

[. . .]

FULL TEXT AT: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/himtoo-a-reckoning_us_59e91090e4b04a400db8afef

========================================
21. THE BENEFITS OF A LOUSY PASSPORT | Leo Mirani
========================================
 1943 Magazine - The Economist - October 12th 2017

Having to choose from a limited number of holiday destinations can be strangely liberating

“What are you doing here?” is a question I got used to hearing pretty quickly in Kiev. It’s not that people were unhappy to see me – quite the opposite. But nobody in Ukraine could figure out why I was spending my summer vacation in a country that is the second poorest in Europe (after Moldova), at war (with Russia), and expensive to get to (a planned Ryanair route never took off). Perhaps, they ventured, I had an interest in Communist history and post-Soviet countries? Or maybe (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) because Ukrainian girls are very pretty?
 
The real reason is deeply unsexy. I went to Ukraine because Ukraine would have me. I hold an Indian passport – ranked 159th out of 199 countries on a list of the world’s most powerful passports measured by ease of travel. In April the Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs announced that it would grant visas on arrival to citizens of nearly three dozen countries. Earlier this year, the president of neighbouring Belarus decreed visa-free access for citizens of 80 countries. Both lists included India. So I went.
 
The top five slots in the ranking of powerful passports are shared by 22 countries, two thirds of which are within the European Union. EU citizens can go to more than 150 countries visa-free or get a visa on arrival. People from Canada, Japan, Singapore and America have similar privileges. At the other end of the scale are Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, which occupy the bottom five ranks. Each one of those passports grants its holder access to, at most, 35 countries. The Indian passport is more useful, but not by much. It gives me easy access to a paltry 51 countries. The rest, including North America and all European countries, require a visa.
 
On the plus side, this means Indian passports tend to be full of stamps and stickers. On the minus side, getting a visa is hard. It requires lots of money in the bank, pre-booked flights and hotels, the disclosure of tax returns and payslips, proof of intent to return home, hefty fees and ritual humiliation. When a visa is rejected, it means losing money on application fees, plane tickets and other bookings as well as having to explain yourself the next time you make a visa application. 
 
If you work in a profession that requires you to travel abroad at short notice, like journalism, having to apply for visas can hold you back. Once, in a previous job, I had to decline a free trip to report on a cocktail-making competition in Athens because I couldn’t get a visa appointment in time. 
 
When I am travelling for leisure, I prefer to avoid the hassle of applying for a visa. I do not choose destinations so much as they choose me. That is why I have gone on holiday twice to Iran. I have ended up in countries where people are surprised and genuinely happy to meet a visitor. In Isfahan, a city in central Iran, a friend and I were stopped by a gang of excited youths as we crossed a bridge – they wanted a picture with us. (Europeans relate similar stories about feeling like mini-celebrities in small-town India.) In Minsk, complete strangers I emailed agreed to meet for drinks and acquaintances of acquaintances offered to show me around. I’ve gained valuable insights into how societies operate. In Kiev, I spent an afternoon sitting in an ancient flat chatting to a bunch of undergraduates about everything from Ukrainian education standards and the local indie music scene to the situation in Donbas and corruption in the judiciary. I have experienced extraordinary acts of generosity. In Albania a few years ago, a complete stranger drove me halfway across the country after a bus driver decided against plying his route that day.
 
Letting the world’s bureaucrats choose my destinations has led to enriching, unforgettable holidays. I hope there will be many more to come. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have recently started granting e-visas to Indians. Over the past few years south-east Asian countries have liberalised their visa regimes, with the result that Indian and Chinese tourists have started pouring in. In September, Serbia abolished the visa requirement altogether. For the first time, I find myself confronted with a choice of where to spend my money. It is nice to feel wanted.

Leo Miraniis news editor at The Economist

ILLUSTRATION MICHEL STREICH

========================================
22. WORLD LEADERS URGED TO ACT ON ‘POST-ANTIBIOTIC APOCALYPSE’ BY CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER  | Ella Pickover
========================================
(The Independent (UK), 12 Oct 2017)

Professor Dame Sally Davies warns that resistance to treatments a growing threat that could mean 'the end of modern medicine'

England’s chief medical officer has warned of a “post-antibiotic apocalypse” as she issued a call to action urging global leaders to address the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.

Professor Dame Sally Davies said that if antibiotics lose their effectiveness it will spell “the end of modern medicine”.

Without the drugs used to fight infections, common medical interventions such as caesarean sections, cancer treatments and hip replacements would become incredibly “risky”, she said.

And transplant medicine would be a “thing of the past”, she added.

“We really are facing, if we don’t take action now, a dreadful post-antibiotic apocalypse,” she told the Press Association.

“I don’t want to say to my children that I didn’t do my best to protect them and their children.”

Health experts have previously warned that resistance to antimicrobial drugs could cause a bigger threat to mankind than cancer.

In recent years, the UK has led a drive to raise global awareness of the threat posed to modern medicine by antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Around 700,000 people around the world die annually due to drug-resistant infections including tuberculosis (TB), HIV and malaria.

If no action is taken, it has been estimated that drug-resistant infections will kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

Dame Sally said that because AMR is “hidden”, people “just let it pass”.

The comments come as the UK Government and the Wellcome Trust, along with others, have organised a “call to action” meeting for health officials from around the globe.

At the meeting in Berlin, the Government will also announce a new project which will map the spread of death and disease caused by drug-resistant “superbugs”.

Dame Sally told the Press Association: “This AMR is with us now, killing people.

“This is a serious issue that is with us now, causing deaths.

“If it was anything else people would be up in arms about it. But because it is hidden they just let it pass.

“It does not really have a ‘face’ because most people who die of drug resistant infections, their families just think they died of an uncontrolled infection.

“It will only get worse unless we take strong action everywhere across the globe.

“We need some real work on the ground to make a difference or we risk the end of modern medicine.”
42-sally-davies-rex.jpg
Chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies (Rex)

She added: “Not to be able to effectively treat infections means that caesarean sections, hip replacements, modern surgery, is risky.

“Modern cancer treatment is risky and transplant medicine becomes a thing of the past.”

Dame Sally warned that if the global community did not act then the progress which had been made in Britain may be “undermined”.

She added: “We use more than I would like and we estimate that about one in three or one in four prescriptions in primary care are probably not needed.

“But other countries use vastly more antibiotics in the community and they need to start doing as we are, which is reducing usage.

“Our latest data shows that we have reduced human consumption by 4.3 per cent in 2014/15 from the year before.”

In September the World Health Organisation warned that antibiotics are “running out” as a report found a “serious lack” of new drugs in the development pipeline.

The new project which will map the spread of superbugs is a collaboration between the UK Government, Wellcome Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the University of Oxford and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Foreign and international development minister Alistair Burt said the project will help to “pinpoint problem areas”.

He said: “The UK is not content to sit back and let this turn into a catastrophe.

“Part of the problem has been a lack of co-ordination of global efforts and an understanding of where we need to target our future efforts.

“The partnership we are announcing today – part of more than £160m in new research funding in the past year – will help us to pinpoint problem areas.

“This is just one part of our more than £615m investment by the UK Government into tackling drug-resistant infections since we launched our National Strategy at the end of 2013.”

As well as the global project, the Government has also pledged to highlight the threat at home with a domestic awareness campaign which will alert the public to the issue of AMR, reduce their expectation for antibiotics and supporting change among healthcare professionals.

Tim Jinks, head of drug resistant infections at the health research charity the Wellcome Trust, which is investing £2.4m in the mapping project, said: “While we have seen progress in recognition around the world of the threat that superbugs pose, we need to retain momentum. High-level commitments must quickly become action.

“The Global Burden of Disease AMR project will provide vital information on the spread and impact of drug resistance and is one of a number of activities Wellcome is supporting to help address this urgent global problem.

“Together, we can stop superbugs undermining the whole of modern medicine.”

Meanwhile, the Wellcome Trust, along with the UN Foundation, has conducted analysis on global action plans to tackle superbugs.

The research found that while 151 of 195 countries are developing a plan, just one in five commit to reducing antibiotic use, improving hygiene and preserving antibiotics of last resort.

And only 5% are adequately funded and monitored, Wellcome said.


Meanwhile another joint research project has been announced by the Academy of Medical Sciences.

The Academy had pledged to build stronger research links between the UK and India – where it is estimated that 60,000 babies die each year due to drug-resistant infections.

The programme, supported by The Yusuf and Farida Hamied Foundation, will include a visiting professor scheme and two major scientific meetings.

========================================
23. EL DIABLO IN WINE COUNTRY
by Mike Davis
========================================
(Counterpunch.org - October 18, 2017)

In 1942 Alfred Hitchcock recruited the author of Our Town, Thornton Wilder, to write the screenplay for Shadow of a Doubt, an innocence-versus-evil thriller set in an ‘idyllic American town’. After considering various candidates, Hitchcock and Wilder selected Santa Rosa, a picturesque agricultural community of 13,000 people, 55 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. The following year, Santa Rosa was introduced to millions of filmgoers in a series of establishing shots that began with aerial views of its pretty countryside and ‘all-American’ downtown. Wartime restrictions had precluded set-building and the exterior locations were all real, but it was difficult to believe that sunny Santa Rosa hadn’t been confected by Norman Rockwell on a Hollywood back lot.

Seventy-five years later, we contemplate another aerial view, this time of Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighbourhood. The scene, a thousand homes incinerated to their foundations, resembles the apocalypse Kim Jong-un keeps promising to bring to America. Especially shocking to Californians, these were not homes in the combustible foothills or mountains where fire danger traditionally lurks, but on the plain, next to a freeway, schools, fast-food outlets – the kind of landscape where most of us live. Altogether, in one terrible night, Santa Rosa (population 165,000) lost more than 2800 homes and businesses to what is officially known as the Tubbs Fire. But it’s premature to cite losses or add up body counts since, as I write, twenty fires still writhe across the Wine Country, and an army of exhausted firefighters fearfully awaits the return of the Diablo winds.

Although the explosive development of this firestorm complex caught county and municipal officials off guard, fire alarms had been going off for months. Two years ago, at the height of California’s worst drought in five hundred years, the Valley Fire, ignited by faulty wiring in a hot tub, burned 76,000 acres and destroyed 1350 homes in Lake, northern Sonoma, and Napa counties. Last winter’s record precipitation, meanwhile, did not so much bust the drought as prepare its second and more dangerous reincarnation. The spring’s unforgettable profusion of wildflowers and verdant grasses was punctually followed by a scorching summer that culminated in September with pavement-melting temperatures of 41ºC in San Francisco and 43ºC on the coast at Santa Cruz. Luxuriant green vegetation quickly turned into parched brown fire-starter.

The final ingredient in this ‘perfect fire’ scenario – as in past fire catastrophes in Northern California – was the arrival of the hot, dry offshore winds, with gusts between 50 and 70 mph, that scourge the California coast every year in the weeks before Halloween, sometimes continuing into December. The Diablos are the Bay Area’s upscale version of Southern California’s autumn mini-hurricanes, the Santa Anas. In October 1991, they turned a small grass fire near the Caldecott Tunnel in the Oakland Hills into an inferno that killed 25 people and destroyed almost 4000 homes and apartments.

In a post-mortem on the Tunnel Fire, the historian Stephen Pyne, whose case studies are required reading in every fire science curriculum, emphasised that the Oakland Fire Department was not only poorly trained but also epistemologically unequipped to deal with wind-driven fires at the urban-wildland interface:

    It did not appreciate how a city, full of internal firewalls, might be breached from the perimeter and find itself assaulted not from the streets but from the air … There was no single flaming perimeter or high-rise to focus the action, only hundreds of individual fires – the firefight as melee.

The current fires also disseminate as a wind-driven hail of burning debris. It remains to be seen whether Santa Rosa’s fire services had tried to apply any of the lessons of 1991.

Californians are notoriously solipsistic about their disasters and tend to save their sympathy for themselves. Yet even here we are so narrowly focused that the worst fire disaster since San Francisco in 1906 has probably generated fewer bytes than serial celebrity molester Harvey Weinstein. And who in the media has connected the dots between the burning wineries, the evacuation of Montana and the fires in Greenland?

Like California, which has an estimated 100 million dead trees, the forests of the Northern Rockies have been massacred by those unstoppable harbingers of global warming, pine beetles. White pines, the cornerstone of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, have been the hardest hit by the drought-induced infestation, which now affects perhaps 95 per cent of the iconic trees. With two-thirds of Montana experiencing the most extreme drought in a century of record-keeping, fire was the inevitable outcome. The authorities searched for the usual suspects (arsonists, idiot campers, terrorists and so on) to blame for the resulting 1.2 million acres of charcoal, but abundant dry lightning would have sufficed. The firestorms started in July (with parallel outbreaks in Washington, British Columbia and Alberta), led to mass evacuations, and their smouldering remnants still pose a threat.

A satellite first detected the blaze in Greenland at the end of July in reindeer-grazed tundra 90 miles north-east of the town of Sisimiut, not far from the Arctic Circle. The largest fire ever recorded on the great ice island, it was smaller than most of the 6400 wildfires that California experienced this year between New Year’s and Labor Day. Yet for science it will be more memorable. As the far north warms and permafrost begins to melt, peat is exposed and becomes combustible. Peat fires can be almost inextinguishable; in remote polar regions, they could potentially burn for years. (Los Angeles spent two years futilely fighting an underground peat fire in the La Cienega – Spanish for ‘bog’ – area in the late 1920s.) Along with the release of methane from thawing tundra and continental shelves, the carbon dioxide emitted by a burning Arctic is the wild card of global warming.

The big picture, then, is the violent reorganisation of regional fire regimes across North America, and as pyrogeography changes, biogeography soon follows. Some forests and ‘sky island’ ecosystems will face extinction; most will see dramatic shifts in species composition. Changing land cover, together with shorter rainy seasons, will destabilise the snowpack-based water-storage systems that irrigate the West. The Pacific Northwest, according to most researchers, will become even wetter, yet drought years will be more extreme, making great fires more common. In California, on the other hand, a drier, hotter climate will be punctuated by extreme rainfall events, reproducing the drought-fuel accumulation-firestorm cycle that we have seen over the last year. In the desert Southwest, studies point to the weakening of the North American monsoon that slakes Arizona’s thirst in late summer; as Phoenix becomes more like Death Valley, condo sales soar in San Diego.

Jerry Brown’s California enters this new age with a halo over its head. We ‘get’ climate change and thumb our noses at the mad denialist in the White House. Our governor advocates the Paris standards with rare passion and sends our anti-carbon missionaries to the far corners of the earth. We await impatiently that great day when the entire Mojave Desert will be covered with Chinese-made solar panels, and silent Teslas rule the freeways. And we continue to send urban sprawl into our fire-dependent ecosystems with the expectation that firefighters will risk their lives to defend each new McMansion, and an insurance system that spreads costs across all homeowners will promptly replace whatever is lost.

This is the deadly conceit behind mainstream environmental politics in California: you say fire, I say climate change, and we both ignore the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanisation of our increasingly inflammable wildlands. Land use patterns in California have long been insane but, with negligible opposition, they reproduce themselves like a flesh-eating virus. After the Tunnel Fire in Oakland and the 2003 and 2007 firestorms in San Diego County, paradise was quickly restored; in fact, the replacement homes were larger and grander than the originals. The East Bay implemented some sensible reforms but in rural San Diego County, the Republican majority voted down a modest tax increase to hire more firefighters. The learning curve has a negative slope.

I’ve found that the easiest way to explain California fire politics to students or visitors from the other blue coast is to take them to see the small community of Carveacre in the rugged mountains east of San Diego. After less than a mile, a narrow paved road splays into rutted dirt tracks leading to thirty or forty impressive homes. The attractions are obvious: families with broods can afford large homes as well as dirt bikes, horses, dogs, and the occasional emu or llama. At night, stars twinkle that haven’t been visible in San Diego, 35 miles away, for almost a century. The vistas are magnificent and the mild winters usually mantle the mountain chaparral with a magical coating of light snow.

But Carveacre on a hot, high fire-danger day scares the shit out of me. A mountainside cul-de-sac at the end of a one-lane road with scattered houses surrounded by ripe-to-burn vegetation – the ‘fuel load’ of chaparral in California is calculated in equivalent barrels of crude oil – the place confounds human intelligence. It’s a rustic version of death row. Much as I would like for once to be a bearer of good news rather than an elderly prophet of doom, Carveacre demonstrates the hopelessness of rational planning in a society based on real-estate capitalism. Unnecessarily, our children, and theirs, will continue to face the flames.

This essay originally appeared in the London Review of Books.

========================================
24. ONE WOMAN’S LIBERATION, SET AGAINST THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
by Simon Sebag Montefiore 
========================================
(The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 20, 2017)

THE REVOLUTION OF MARINA M.
By Janet Fitch
816 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.

“I was in love with the Future, in love with the idea of Fate. There’s nothing more romantic to the young — until its dogs sink their teeth into your calf and pull you to the ground”: So says the young Marina Makarova early on in Janet Fitch’s third novel, “The Revolution of Marina M.,” a vast, ambitious historical tale in which the coming-of-age of a quintessential revolutionary heroine dovetails with the events of October 1917.

Marina ticks all the boxes for the prototypical heroine of novels set in this period: Her parents are liberal aristocrats, while she is a radical poetess — gorgeous, red-haired and curvaceous. Her friends, who include a dashing counterrevolutionary officer lover, a lesbian Bolshevik girlfriend and a bank-robbing baron with a taste for S-and-M, straddle all sides of the struggle.

Over the course of more than 800 pages, Fitch conveys the importance of sex for a young woman’s development with Rabelaisian earthiness, and Marina’s liberation (at least until the novel plunges into the aforementioned S-and-M) reflects ideas and experiences that were quite common for her generation. Like Marina, the real women who became revolutionaries often hailed from noble families, perhaps the most famous of them being the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the Communist daughter of a czarist general. Women in this milieu endured prison sentences and Siberian exile but also enjoyed love affairs with male revolutionaries (some of whom they married).

Kollontai especially was a trailblazer who, in tracts such as her 1921 essay “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations,” advocated free love in powerful, forward-thinking axioms: “Sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst.” She believed that marriage was an oppressive bourgeois concept based on the presumption of female dependence on men, a notion that would be rendered obsolete under socialism, when both sexes would depend only on society.

After the revolution, female Bolsheviks like Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of a Soviet foreign minister, and Dora Khazan, the wife of a Politburo member, became People’s Commissars (or their deputies), or ministers in the Soviet government. Even so, Russian male chauvinism was deep, and Stalin distrusted these female activists both for their Jewishness and for their gender, ultimately firing and arresting several of them, including Zhemchuzhina.
Photo

In Fitch’s fictional version of this historical moment, following a confusing prologue set in Carmel, Calif., we begin in World War I Petrograd where Marina escapes her father’s salon to be kissed in the cloakroom by an attractive officer and childhood acquaintance named Kolya Shurov. Afterward he goes back off to war, but in feverish Petrograd, revolution seethes. Their romance does not end there: When Kolya returns once again, he picks Marina up outside her school and takes her on a sleigh ride that leads to her first sexual experience. The passage inaugurates Marina’s awakening; from here on out, she says, “I could not stop thinking about sex.”

As hunger, war and government incompetence herald the February Revolution, the teenage Marina joins the crowds in the streets, feeling the thunder of history in the making. “What is history?” she asks. “Is it the trace of a footstep in wet cement?” She goes on to answer her own question: “History is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall.” She witnesses everything from women’s protests for food to the toppling of Czar Nicholas II. But never has the pace of the Russian Revolution progressed more sluggishly than it does in Fitch’s hands. “Gunfire sounded throughout the following day,” and we learn all the quotidian ways Marina finds to pass the time: “I played poker with the girls” and “rounds of chess with Mina”; “taught Dunya to waltz”; “won a bet with young Shusha by walking on my hands”; and “stood in the small kitchen, chopping cabbage.” The metaphors come like Cossack charges, and one is never enough: “The crown of Russia had gone from most precious object to poisoned apple, a rotten, stinking potato nobody wanted.”

Since Marina plays no part in high politics, we learn of major events indirectly. The leader of the new provisional government, Premier Prince Lvov, proposes a document that “granted freedom of speech and assembly, the right to strike, a constituent assembly elected by universal and secret ballot, men and women alike,” and much more. The author kindly lists all the measures outlined by this “daring piece of work,” which nevertheless touches our protagonist’s life only obliquely.

But Marina does stand in the audience at the Cirque Moderne to hear Leon Trotsky herald Russia’s “new epoch,” describing him as “a caldron melting the crowd into a single substance, and we threw ourselves in.” In the chaos of mid-1917, as the provisional government minister Alexander Kerensky becomes the dominant figure, Marina falls in love with a radical (but, for the reader, uninspired) poet named Genya, although Kolya remains the object of her true passion. Her best friend, the frizzy-haired aristocrat Varvara, becomes a Bolshevik activist whose speeches the book relates in full: “Far from improving the situation of the common people, the revolution in February has only increased your suffering,” Varvara pontificates before a line of women on the street. “We, the Bolshevik Party, say down with the imperialists!” Varvara persuades Marina to inform the Bolsheviks of her father’s political secrets. When he finds out she is sleeping with a poet and is a Communist spy, he disowns her. As Kerensky loses his prestige because of a series of military defeats and an attempted coup, Marina realizes the imminence of a Bolshevik takeover in a succession of familiar metaphors: “The world was cracking — I could hear it — like ice that had grown too thin to hold us.” On the night of the October Revolution, she and Genya burst into the Winter Palace to find a “Blakean hell” of Red Guards’ debauchery after they’ve just wrested power from the ministers of the provisional government.

In the months after October 1917, Petrograd under the new Soviet Republic is increasingly threatened by not just famine, chaos and disease but also counterrevolution, factional betrayal and foreign intervention. Lenin (who will soon move the Russian capital to Moscow) deploys murder and terror to keep power. Amid all this public turmoil, Marina’s personal life spins even more wildly out of control. She is kidnapped by the ruthless rapist and aristogangster Baron Arkady von Princip, who smells like “decaying pines.” He lures her to an apartment for an excruciating 10-page sadomasochistic marathon, during which Marina experiences a disturbing amalgam of pleasure, shame and fear. When Arkady subsequently tries to use her as a hostage in his criminal dealings, Marina’s horrid father outs her as a Bolshevik spy. For all her progressive defiance, Marina is still treated by the more politically empowered men in her life as merely an object for degradation — the details of which are perhaps a little crass even for the most jaded reader.

Marina, the reader concludes, is not a true revolutionary; she is tossed like flotsam by great events, and the novel would benefit were she more of a participant. Although Alexandra Kollontai’s own free, dramatic love life shocked not just the bourgeoisie but also other revolutionaries, she still disapproved of precisely the kind of casual promiscuity in which Marina engages.

In publicity materials, Fitch reveals her own lofty aspirations in her declared worship of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”: “I opened it, and there was my world.” Yet somewhere in the middle of its 800 pages, this novel loses any semblance of her 19th-century forebear’s sense of narrative control. That said, the feral descriptions of sex provide some of the novel’s most amusing, if decidedly un-Dostoyevskian, moments.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s most recent history book is “The Romanovs: 1613-1918.” His latest novel, “Red Sky at Noon,” will be published in January.

A version of this review appears in print on October 22, 2017, on Page BR20 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Rebel Rebel.

========================================
25. RUBLE ON CREECH, 'MOTHERS, COMRADES, AND OUTCASTS IN EAST GERMAN WOMEN'S FILMS'
========================================

 Jennifer L. Creech. Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Films. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. xix + 280 pp. $38.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-02301-8.

Reviewed by Alexandria Ruble (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Published on H-German (October, 2017)
Commissioned by David Harrisville

Women and East German Cinema

Jennifer L. Creech’s fabulous and provocative monograph Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film sets out to accomplish a large mission: to restore the East German film industry, Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft or DEFA, from an increasingly sidelined position in postunification German memory. While DEFA has long interested scholars, its role as a state-sponsored artistic institution has colored the public’s perception of the enterprise. Creech suggests, however, that DEFA directors may have subtly criticized the communist state more than previously thought. She asserts that “women’s films”—understood as films about, by, and for women—can be read as spaces of negotiation with the state.

More than that, Creech wants to rescue “women’s films” from marginalization within the study of DEFA films. DEFA’s liminal position between state-run institution and a space for artistic expression has long attracted scholarly interest. Still, only a few works, by scholars such as Gisela Bahr, Irene Dölling, Susan Linville, Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey, Ingeborg von Zadow, and Andrea Rinke, have assessed women’s films in the GDR. Her study therefore sits at an interesting crossroads. On the one hand, it sets out to build on this scholarship and offer new insights into the questions of to what extent East German “women’s films” and DEFA directors engaged feminist thought, and how they used film to shed light on women’s status in the GDR. On the other hand, she seeks to intervene in the larger historiography by placing these films in a much broader international context. She proposes that East German women’s films offer a lens into the relationship of East to West. Furthermore, this study aims to “demystify the cultural homogeneity of the Eastern bloc” (p. 6) and establish DEFA and other Eastern European film production companies as legitimate filmmakers in their own right.

Creech uses East German “women’s films” to interrogate four key issues at the core of socialist gender policies: the tensions between bourgeois and socialist marital and familial norms, motherhood, women in the labor force, and the everyday alienation of socialism. Each chapter centers on one or two case studies, with occasional references to similar films. Her first chapter, for example, examines Egon Günther’s Lot’s Wife (1965), a New Wave-inspired film about an unfulfilled and loveless marriage between Katrin, a teacher, and Richard, a naval officer and loyal SED member. Unable to convince her husband to grant her a divorce and barred by East German law from pursuing a divorce for reasons other than abuse or adultery, Katrin resorts to stealing so he will be forced into leaving her. The film, released right as East Germany loosened its divorce restrictions, had a decidedly political agenda, one that walked a fine line between critiquing the party and allowing the party to use the film as a talking point for the necessity of its reforms. Creech concludes that the film ultimately subverts and predates Western feminist theories of the male gaze and female emancipation.

Creech then moves on to the topic of mother-daughter relationships as depicted onscreen in the GDR. According to Creech, East German films revealed motherhood to be “a central signifier in the dialectical tension between production and reproduction” (p. 90). Creech asserts that since socialism was, at its core, a teleological progression toward utopia, filmic representations of socialist motherhood stood to disrupt this image, because they depicted motherhood as cyclical, not linear. To illustrate this argument, she compares and contrasts the films The Bicycle (1982) and On Probation (1981). In the former, a single mother, frustrated with her life, quits her job, commits insurance fraud, and then moves in with a lover to support her daughter, although none of these acts ultimately lead to her self-fulfillment. In the latter, a young single mother has her children taken away from her because of neglect and she must prove herself to be a responsible parent. Ultimately, she gives the children up for adoption. Both cases address the issue of public and private responsibility and failure, a significant issue in the socialist republic and one, Creech maintains, that deserves deconstruction.

Having covered marital relations and maternal responsibility in great detail, Creech shifts into the zone of collectivity and pleasure. DEFA directors of films such as All My Girls (1979) knew that their female viewers worked in high numbers, so they sought to appeal to that audience by depicting their workplaces and female camaraderie. Creech points out, however, that the directors did not always portray the industrial workplaces in the best light, nor did they weave in socialist ideology about motherhood. Ironically, while the films depicted collectives, Creech asserts that they really showed individuals’ emancipation from the group and the realization of autonomy. To this end, Creech also applies queer theory to her analysis, arguing that viewing the film from the perspective of Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum” illuminates same-sex relations in the workplace in the GDR as part of socialist identity formation. In doing so, the film discourages viewers from voyeurism and challenges them to identify with the female subjects on screen. Finally, Creech turns from fiction to fact, with an analysis of East German documentary filmmaking. Specifically, Creech homes in on Helke Misselwitz’s Goodbye to Winter (1988), a documentary that used the everyday lives of East German women as a subtle social critique of the GDR’s official narrative of gender equality.

Alongside her analysis of women’s films from a feminist perspective, Creech examines the ways East German directors used different filmmaking styles, often imported from the West, such as New Wave cinema in the 1960s, in their film aesthetics. She interrogates different film techniques and tropes that signal the directors’ critiques of, or conversely, support for the East German government. She pays close attention to the audience, as well as the context in which the films developed. Finally, Creech reminds us that East German film production never occurred in a vacuum, but rather was in a constant dialogue with the West and the rest of the Eastern bloc, by describing appropriate film plots from both spheres of influence.

Creech has delivered a well-written and fascinating study of feminist films under state socialism. Her descriptions and analysis of the films are rich and convincingly argued in elegant prose. This reviewer wondered, however, if Creech’s study was too wide in its scope at times. For instance, her comparisons to Western and Eastern European films at the start of each chapter were intriguing, but often served primarily as a foil to the discussion of East German films, which are the real heart of each chapter. Additionally, the structure of the chapters was occasionally uneven. The first chapter, for example, had a separate conclusion section that other chapters did not have. Despite these minor criticisms, the book as a whole provides the reader a plethora of fabulous material and insights that firmly establish Creech as a leading expert of feminist and socialist film. Those interested in feminist/women’s films, the study of socialism, or historical film studies will be excited to delve into this wonderful study.


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

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/

     #####
    #### _\_  ________
    ##=-[.].]| \      \
    #(    _\ |  |------|
     #   __| |  ||||||||
      \  _/  |  ||||||||
   .--'--'-. |  | ____ |
  / __      `|__|[o__o]|
_(____nm_______ /____\____ 

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
=====================================