SACW - 12 Nov 2017 | Afghanistan: Sima Wali passes away / Sri Lanka: cost of war &peace / Open Letter to world leaders re Rohingya / Pakistan: Ousted Prime Minister / India: hurt sentiments; Naga women; / Putin’s Russia: Revolution, What Revolution? / Ben Shephard obituary

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 12 Nov 2017 - No. 2962 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. The Rohingya are facing genocide. We cannot be bystanders - Open letter by Salman Rushdie and others
2. Pakistan: The QAU strike explained | Pervez Hoodbhoy 
3. Ceylon and The October Revolution | Kumari Jayawardena
4. The Soviet Retreat From Emancipative Ideas of 1917: muffled tones of a nation of whisperers and diarists | Arup Banerji
5. India: Proposed Code on Wages Bill 2017, Violating the Rights of the Workers - Statement by PUDR
6. Long-Term Implications of Upholding World Bank’s Immunity in Case Against Gujarat Fishermen | Manju Menon & others (in The Wire)
7. India: The Supreme Court issues notice to Madhya Pradesh and Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) regarding Sham Lease Deeds on Tribal Lands
8. India: Letter from Eminent Citizens to Data Protection Committee
9. India’s Jobless - Some Photos, Visuals, Reference Data etc

10. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - Bangladesh: 53 arrested over attack on Rangpur Hindu houses
 - India: Ministry of foreign affairs seeks details on US move to fund NGOs to promote religious freedom in India
 - Undermining Nehru to Glorify Patel
 - India: Apex court Supreme Court refuses to entertain plea seeking minority status for Hindus in several states.
 - India: Tyranny of hurt sentiments | Ravi Shanker Kapoor
 - India: Anand Kochukudy on ABVP-OBC Front alliance . . . Ambedkar, Marx, Maududi 
 - India: The terror tactic of beheading returns to Kashmir
 - Sangh Parivar’s attitude towards Articles 35 A and 370 has heightened scepticism in Kashmir
 - India: Cow protection militia continue to operate with impunity
 - India: Pogroms and politics - Nellie, Delhi, Bombay and Gujarat are dots on a learning curve
 - India - Uttar Pradesh: Saffron painted state secretariat building for Saffron robed Chief Minister -- Tax payer's money is 
 - India: Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha says Actor Kamal Hasan should be shot dead
 - Video Recording: Ramachanda Guha on ‘Patriotism versus Jingoism’ at the 23rd Justice Sunanda Bhandare Memorial Lecture 
 - UK: Charity Commission to investigate Hindu group over ‘extremist’ speaker

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
11. Sri Lanka counts high cost of war and peace | Simon Mundy
12. Bangladesh: Most of city's human waste untreated
13. Sima Wali, Afghan refugee who battled 'gender apartheid' in her homeland, dies at 66 | Steve Marble
14. Pakistan Politics: Nawaz Sharif wrote his obit | Faraz Ahmad
15. Pakistan court backs first wife in landmark polygamy case
16. India: What happened in first 2 months of note ban alone was an unforgivable catastrophe - Jean Dreze 
17. India: The callous disregard of worker safety - Editorial in EPW 
18. India - Pakistan: BSF, Rangers to work for tranquillity | Jawed Naqvi
19. Tyranny of hurt sentiments |  Ravi Shanker Kapoor
20. India: March of the Naga women | Ashwaq Masoodi
21. Who is to blame for the crisis of the Left in India? Roshan Kishore
22. The rise of intolerance in Sri Lanka - Muslims and upcountry Tamils have different problems | Kumar David
23. Putin’s Russia: Revolution, What Revolution? | Anastasia Edel
24. Religion and Violence in Myanmar: Sitagu Sayadaw’s Case for Mass Killing | Matthew J. Walton
25. How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war | Pankaj Mishra
26. China's Booming Sharing Economy: Why a Bust May Be Near | James Yan
27. Ben Shephard obituary | Jörg Hensgen

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1. THE ROHINGYA ARE FACING GENOCIDE. WE CANNOT BE BYSTANDERS - OPEN LETTER BY SALMAN RUSHDIE AND OTHERS
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We call on leaders to pressure the Myanmar government to stop these atrocities, grant the Rohingya citizenship, and allow them to return to a place they call home.
http://sacw.net/article13565.html

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2. PAKISTAN: THE QAU STRIKE EXPLAINED | Pervez Hoodbhoy
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Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the QAU strike is that it exposes Pakistan’s failed attempt at nation building. As the May episode showed, ever-deepening ethnic and regional tensions need only a spark to ignite.
http://sacw.net/article13564.html

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3. CEYLON AND THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION | Kumari Jayawardena
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It was not until eighteen years after the October Revolution of 1917 that the first Marxist- led political party appeared on the Ceylon scene. This was in striking contrast to other Asian countries, where soon after the revolution small groups of Marxists began to organize.
http://sacw.net/article13556.html

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4. THE SOVIET RETREAT FROM EMANCIPATIVE IDEAS OF 1917: muffled tones of a nation of whisperers and diarists | Arup Banerji
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The second decade of Soviet history, the 1930s, was volatile and consequential in ways that none of the other six were. The revolution that occurred then, explicitly designated as a revolution, and the third since February 1917, recast economy and society in ways that justify the use of adjectives like tectonic and paradigmatic. Unlike the first two revolutions, the apical character of agricultural, industrial and social change – directed by the Politburo ‘from above’ – rendered this revolution a semantic mystery: where was popular participation in support of the regime, as against its strength in opposition?
http://sacw.net/article13559.html

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5. INDIA: PROPOSED CODE ON WAGES BILL 2017, VIOLATING THE RIGHTS OF THE WORKERS - STATEMENT BY PUDR
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People’s Union for Democratic Rights has long been drawing attention to egregious violation of rights of workers governed under various labour laws. Most important of these rights is the fundamental right to form trade union, so as to engage in collective wage negotiations and to ensure that conditions on shop floor do not become tyrannical.
http://sacw.net/article13560.html

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6. LONG-TERM IMPLICATIONS OF UPHOLDING WORLD BANK’S IMMUNITY IN CASE AGAINST GUJARAT FISHERMEN | Manju Menon & others (in The Wire)
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Such a decision by US Supreme Court would allow, even encourage the International Finance Corporation – World Bank’s lending arm – to continue to act irresponsibly without worrying about consequences.
http://sacw.net/article13563.html
  
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7. INDIA: THE SUPREME COURT ISSUES NOTICE TO MADHYA PRADESH AND RELIANCE INDUSTRIES LIMITED (RIL) REGARDING SHAM LEASE DEEDS ON TRIBAL LANDS
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The petition states the tribals in Madya Pradesh, who were dependent on an agrarian economy, were induced to sign the papers as ’lease deeds’ in way of cash by
http://sacw.net/article13562.html

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8. India: Letter from Eminent Citizens to Data Protection Committee
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Eminent jurists, concerned citizens write to Justice Srikrishna seeking more balance and greater transparency in Data Protection Committee
http://sacw.net/article13558.html

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9. India’s Jobless - Some Photos, Visuals, Reference Data etc
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Some visuals, URLS to key reference materials for data and select commentary
http://sacw.net/article13528.html

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10. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - Bangladesh: 53 arrested over attack on Rangpur Hindu houses
 - India: Ministry of foreign affairs seeks details on US move to fund NGOs to promote religious freedom in India
 - Undermining Nehru to Glorify Patel
 - India: Supreme Court refuses plea to ban the release of the Film 'Padmavati' that was sought by some Hindu groups and political parties
 - India: Madras High Court reverses its order that made singing of Vande Mataram compulsory in schools, government offices etc
 - India: In Kerala RSS worker blows up roof while making bomb
 - India: Apex court Supreme Court refuses to entertain plea seeking minority status for Hindus in several states.
 - India: Tyranny of hurt sentiments | Ravi Shanker Kapoor
 - India: Anand Kochukudy on ABVP-OBC Front alliance . . . Ambedkar, Marx, Maududi 
 - India - Haryana: A self-styled religious pressure group forced a man to strip to prove his religious identity
 - India: The terror tactic of beheading returns to Kashmir
 - Sangh Parivar’s attitude towards Articles 35 A and 370 has heightened scepticism in Kashmir
 - India: Cow protection militia continue to operate with impunity
 - India: Pogroms and politics - Nellie, Delhi, Bombay and Gujarat are dots on a learning curve
 - India - Uttar Pradesh: Saffron painted state secretariat building for Saffron robed Chief Minister -- Tax payer's money is 
 - India: Head priest of Swaminarayan Temple at Vadtal in Kheda appeales to the devotees to support the BJP
 - India: Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha says Actor Kamal Hasan should be shot dead
 - Video Recording: Ramachanda Guha on ‘Patriotism versus Jingoism’ at the 23rd Justice Sunanda Bhandare Memorial Lecture 
 - India: Case filed against Actor Kamal Haasan over Hindu terror remark
 - UK: Charity Commission to investigate Hindu group over ‘extremist’ speaker

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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11. SRI LANKA COUNTS HIGH COST OF WAR AND PEACE | Simon Mundy
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(Financial Times [Sri Lanka], 7 November 2017)

President Sirisena is accused of backsliding on pledge to heal country’s damaged reputation

In August this year, Jagath Jayasuriya, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Brazil, left the country abruptly after encountering an unexpected legal challenge: a suit accusing him of war crimes.

Mr Jayasuriya was one of the army commanders who in 2009 led a crushing victory against Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka’s north — ending one of Asia’s longest-running conflicts, but at the cost of an estimated 40,000 civilian deaths in the war’s bloody final months.

In their suit filed in Brasília and Bogotá, Latin American activists accused Mr Jayasuriya, who was also ambassador to five other countries in the region, of involvement in alleged atrocities including shelling of hospitals, torture and summary executions.

The move prompted a defiant response from the country’s president. “I will not allow anyone in the world to touch Jagath Jayasuriya or any other military chief or any war hero in this country,” Maithripala Sirisena said.

The incident is a sharp reminder of how the conflict still dogs Sri Lanka’s global reputation. But equally revealing was the reaction of Mr Sirisena.

Elected in 2015 when he defeated Mahinda Rajapaksa, a charismatic but divisive figure who had led Colombo’s uncompromising final campaign of the war, Mr Sirisena had promised a new era of reconciliation, including accountability for atrocities that had stained Sri Lanka’s international reputation. The result raised hopes that Sri Lanka would conduct the sort of credible process that would enable the country to put its bitter internal conflict firmly in the past.

Instead, the defence he offered of Mr Jayasuriya is the latest in a series of signs that the new president is backtracking on his commitments and of the unwillingness of his government to prosecute the soldiers who allegedly broke the articles of the Geneva Convention during the final months of the conflict.

http://tinyurl.com/y76ts8ts

Two Sri Lanka maps showing the wealthy Western province contributes the lion’s share to the economy. One map shows GDP per capita and the other shows population density

Despite a high-profile 2015 UN report that flagged apparent war crimes by the Sri Lankan military, the government has failed to outline a plan for a judicial investigation of the matter.

In March, the UN Human Rights Council accepted Sri Lanka’s argument that it needed an additional two years to set up a probe. But Mr Sirisena’s vow to protect “war heroes” undermines hopes that a promised international process will ever go ahead, while the war-ravaged north remains economically far behind the rest of the country.

As concern mounts over military violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority, the handling of Sri Lanka’s war legacy will set a powerful precedent for other governments, says Dharsha Jegatheeswaran at the Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research in Jaffna, capital of the Tamil-majority Northern Province.

“There’s been absolutely no accountability for what happened in the last phase of the war,” she says. “Sri Lanka has shown how it’s possible to hoodwink the international community, always asking for space and time — and now Myanmar is following their lead.”
Sri Lankan soldiers during a Victory Day parade in Colombo. There were 265,200 Sri Lankan army personnel in 2015, according to the IISS © AFP

At Mullivaikkal beach, the silence is broken only by lapping waves and the murmured chatter of S Manialakan and his fellow fishermen, preparing to head out to sea.

It is a stark contrast with the scene at the beach eight years ago, when it hosted the last stand of a rebel army that had fought the Sri Lankan state for more than two decades, seeking a homeland for the Tamil minority in the island’s north and east.

Herded into the area by what remained of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, thousands of civilians were allegedly killed by intense military shelling in the months leading up to the LTTE’s final surrender in May 2009.

“Shells and cluster bombs were falling all around — it’s a miracle that I survived,” says Mr Manialakan, a few yards from a cross that the fishermen say marks the remains of a Christian family killed by a single blast.

Nine months after Mr Sirisena’s 2015 election, Sri Lanka backed a resolution of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva calling for a judicial process, with local and foreign judges and prosecutors, to assess the claimed human rights abuses towards the end of the war.
Former army commander Jagath Jayasuriya faced a suit in Brazil accusing him of war crimes © AFP

UN investigators had cited evidence of “horrific” violations by LTTE and government forces, including the use of child soldiers by the Tamil rebels, and summary executions and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas by the Sri Lankan army. But analysts say Mr Sirisena’s reluctance to go ahead with the investigation is a predictable reflection of his vulnerable political position.

With Sri Lanka in a $1.5bn International Monetary Fund loan programme since last year, the government is under pressure to prove its economic competence. Mr Sirisena’s coalition government also faces strong parliamentary opposition, with Mr Rajapaksa still a popular figure among the Sinhalese majority. Many lionise the former president for ending a war that his predecessors had struggled to contain, and which brought suicide bombings to Colombo.

The issue of military prosecutions is “dynamite for the government”, says Jehan Perera, executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka. “No Sinhalese wants the military to be punished.”

The government’s slow movement on the investigation earned a strong rebuke from Ben Emmerson, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights, who told reporters in the capital in July that progress had ground “to a virtual halt”, and warned that the matter could be referred to the Security Council.

Yet despite the continuing criticism from UN officials, Sri Lanka’s bilateral relations with foreign powers appear to be warming. The EU, which had removed the country’s preferential market access in 2010 over human rights concerns, reinstated it in May, while the US this year pledged $700m in aid to Sri Lanka. This friendly treatment follows an eastward shift in Colombo’s foreign policy over the past decade.

China provides the backdrop for some of Sri Lanka’s improved international standing. Ostracised by western powers during the latter part of his rule, Mr Rajapaksa forged closer bonds with Beijing, which has been investing billions of dollars in the country’s infrastructure including an underused port at Hambantota on the island’s southern coast.

One western diplomat in Colombo denies suggestions that the recent rapprochement reflects an effort to counterbalance Beijing’s influence.

“This government seems to be moving in the right direction,” the diplomat says, citing a broad improvement in transparency and civil liberties under the new administration. “It’s about supporting a government that is trying to do the right things.”

But others in Sri Lanka say the easing of foreign pressure reflects a broader disengagement by major powers that had previously been vocal in their criticism of human rights violations.

“If this government does nothing about the Geneva resolution, what the hell is going to happen to them internationally?” says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, founder of Colombo’s Centre for Policy Alternatives. “The Americans are turning away; the Brits are mired in Brexit . . . There are no champions.”

Clad in his usual white traditional dress, Mr Sirisena last month visited the LTTE’s old administrative capital of Kilinochchi to open an agricultural centre, promising to boost farmers’ livelihoods through debt relief and irrigation schemes.

Even before the new government took office, Mr Rajapaksa had overseen a huge infrastructure investment scheme for the region, at a cost of more than $2bn. Yet official statistics bear grim testament to the economic devastation during the war, when most of the Northern Province was ruled for years by the LTTE in defiance of an embargo imposed by the national government.

According to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, the province’s per capita gross domestic product was a third below the national average in 2015. Areas of the Eastern Province that were ruled by the LTTE also rank among the country’s poorest. This partly reflects the dramatic deindustrialisation of the north and east during the war — symbolised by the hulking Kankesanthurai Cement Factory, once the country’s largest, which has been slowly corroding since closing in 1990.

The government this year unveiled the country’s most generous corporate tax incentives to attract investment to the Northern Province, where per capita manufacturing output was just $72 in 2014, compared with $1,262 in the Western Province where Colombo lies.

But many in the region fear that no policy will be able to make up for its disastrous loss of human capital. The education system, once one of the strongest in Sri Lanka, was disrupted under the LTTE, which turned to forced conscription of teenagers as the war progressed, says Rajan Hoole of Jaffna-based University Teachers for Human Rights. “They stultified our political and intellectual life,” he says.

Beyond those killed in the conflict, tens of thousands more — including many of the region’s most educated and prosperous people — emigrated to India or western nations. The Tamil diaspora was a crucial source of funding for the separatist movement, helping the LTTE to maintain an army equipped with field artillery, as well as a small air force and crude submarines. But since the end of the war, the flow of expatriate cash has slowed, says Ahilan Kadirgamar, a researcher in Jaffna. “People send funding for a war, but not for peace,” he says.

And the reintegration of the conflict region into the national economy has come with worrying side-effects, notes Indrajit Coomaraswamy, governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. He points to the rise in consumer credit offered by branches of southern banks that have opened in Jaffna and other northern cities. “The biggest short-term problem is now indebtedness. Livelihoods have not been created in a commensurate way, so people have taken on debt but they have no means of servicing it,” he says.

Harsha de Silva, a deputy minister and close aide to prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, rejects the idea that the government lacks commitment to postwar reconciliation. In July, he notes, the government established a new Office of Missing Persons — tasked with finding answers for the families of more than 16,000 people who remain unaccounted for since the end of the war. The state is accused of mass “disappearances” of suspected LTTE personnel.

“We are genuinely attempting to converge on something that can be acceptable to all communities in this country,” he says, in his Colombo office overlooking a vast new Chinese container terminal. “As Sri Lankans, we must find a Sri Lankan solution to this problem.”

The government has been inching towards a long-debated overhaul of the constitution, which could bring greater autonomy for the Northern Province. This prospect has been welcomed by the Tamil community, which accounts for about 11 per cent of Sri Lanka’s 21m population. But it marks yet another tricky task for the government, with Sinhalese hardliners warning the reform could re-energise Tamil separatism.

In the Northern Province, however, the likes of Kalimuttu Selvaraja show little appetite for a renewed independence struggle. Now 39, he says he became a teenage LTTE fighter in 1996 after the arrest and torture of his father — embarking on a military career that ended three years later with the loss of his right leg in a shell blast.

Having spent three years in internment camps after the war’s end, he relies on a $20 monthly disability allowance, and is hoping for further support from the government he once fought.

“All my life, I’ve been suffering from violence,” he says, seated outside his home in the coastal town of Mullaitivu. “Now we just want jobs to do.”
Army widens role in north but presence upsets locals

On a hot afternoon in Jaffna, A Gunapalasingham unfolds a large map of the nearby district of Valikamam North, dominated by a sprawling mass of military-held land that covers more than 3,000 acres. Within that area lies Mr Gunapalasingham’s ancestral home, from which he has been exiled since fleeing an air raid in 1990 and which was later incorporated into the high-security military zone after the war. Now, he is campaigning for the army to scale down its presence in the area, leading what he says is a group of several thousand displaced families.

As well as Colombo’s determination to pacify the region, the huge and lingering army presence in the north reflects the bloated scale of a military that surged in manpower during the war, with the government still reluctant to cull its numbers. Sri Lanka had 265,200 military personnel in 2015, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies: more than 10 times the number 30 years earlier.

Brandishing photographs of Buddhist Sinhalese soldiers assisting Hindu Tamils in a religious festival, Northern Province governor Reginald Cooray argues that the army’s positive work in the region is often overlooked. Soldiers have been dispatched to work on projects such as road-building and mass electrification, says Mr Cooray.

But Mr Gunapalasingham is more concerned with speeding up the troops’ departure. “They are actually doing their own farming on the people’s land,” he says. “People are buying vegetables for their curry from the army.”

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12. BANGLADESH: MOST OF CITY'S HUMAN WASTE UNTREATED
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(The Daily Star, November 11, 2017)

Editorial

Water bodies, public health at grave risk

We are shocked to know from a report in this paper that 80 percent of Dhaka city's human waste goes directly into its water bodies, leaving the water contaminated and untreatable. This poses a huge risk to public health (outbreak of serious waterborne diseases) and the environment. What is appalling is why a crucial apparatus as sewage management has not been upgraded to meet the demands of a city growing at such an exponential rate. Dhaka now has around 1.75 crore people and the sewerage authority, Wasa, can treat only 20 percent of the city area. Can this be an acceptable rate of sewage treatment that leaves unmanaged the remaining 80 percent of waste? 

The growth in the city's population and unplanned construction of buildings are an ongoing process so it is hardly news that the original sewage system will not be able to manage the huge increase in solid waste. The recent official letter from a ministry to the LGRD and cooperatives minister says that rivers are being contaminated by septic tanks illegally connected to storm drains and the minister has duly called upon Rajuk (Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha) to ensure that there are proper septic tanks at every house and prevent such connections while issuing building permits. 

Why do such instructions need to be given now for what should have been a routine task for Rajuk—to enforce the 1984 building rule that requires every owner to set up septic tanks or soak pits and manage the sewage on their own? Rajuk can fine a violator a minimum of Tk 50,000 and even cancel the building's approval. Yet the law has been shamelessly flouted for decades.

Wasa, Rajuk and the city corporations must immediately start coordinating with each other to make sure that each house has a septic tank or soak pit. Localised treatment plants for cluster neighbourhoods can also be set up to manage the waste. Without immediate steps to enforce building rules and introduce practical, innovative methods of waste management, the city will face a huge public health and environmental disaster.

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13. SIMA WALI, AFGHAN REFUGEE WHO BATTLED 'GENDER APARTHEID' IN HER HOMELAND, DIES AT 66 | Steve Marble
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(Los Angeles Times, Oct. 24, 2017)

Buildings in ruins, cars buried under fallen masonry — the scars of warfare seemed to touch every corner of the landscape as Sima Wali stared silently at her homeland.

An exile since 1978, it had been 24 years since Wali had fled Afghanistan. And as her car bounced along a broken highway in Kabul, she struggled to comprehend the level of destruction.

“Good god,” a companion murmured.

An Afghan human rights fighter and one of the loudest voices against what she called the “gender apartheid” leveled first by the communists and then by the Taliban, Wali spent decades in the United States pushing for reforms for women in Afghanistan and those — like herself — who lived life as a refugee.

And though the scene was sobering when she returned for the first time in 2002 with a pair of documentary filmmakers, Wali said she retained faith in the ability of her fellow Afghans to overcome even the most crushing forms of oppression.

“The Afghan spirit is indomitable, especially the women,” she told listeners during a seminar on Afghanistan during her 2002 trip, which was chronicled in the documentary “The Woman in Exile Returns: The Sima Wali Story.”

Soft-spoken yet hard-charging, Wali was diagnosed with a rare neurological disease called multiple system atrophy soon after her last visit to Afghanistan in 2005. She died Sept. 22 at her home in Falls Church, Va., her nephew Suleiman Wali said. She was 66.

Wali was one of three women who served as a delegate at the 2001 U.N.-organized summit in Bonn, Germany, at which a new Afghan government was being formed. Though skeptics viewed their inclusion as window dressing in a country that had devalued women for so long, Wali successfully pushed for the creation of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs in the new administration and then was asked to lead the ministry. She declined the offer in order to focus on her international activism.

Born April 7, 1951, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Wali spent her childhood in India, where her father worked as a banker. She earned a degree in business administration from Kabul University and worked at the American Embassy and the Peace Corps but then fled at her parents’ urging to the United States after a 1978 communist coup. A year later, the Soviets invaded.

Wali became a U.S. citizen, earned a master’s degree at American University in Washington and reunited with her parents, who had been jailed after the Soviet occupation.

If the grinding, decadelong Soviet occupation had eroded what gains women had made in Afghanistan, their fate became all the more desperate under the Taliban.

Wali spoke out where she could, raised money and visited refugee camps along the Pakistan border, trying to teach those who’d fled Afghanistan how to organize and empower themselves.

She blamed outside forces for the years of war and repressive leadership that left women with fewer and fewer rights, and recalled the brighter times of her youth when she said women enjoyed greater freedoms and ethnic divisions were unheard of. More so than her fellow human rights activists, she blamed the United States for supporting the guerrilla fighters during the Soviet war and then abandoning the country when the Soviets finally withdrew. She also fought to prevent the U.S. from formally recognizing the Taliban government in the years before 9/11.

“I still hear their cries,” she wrote about Afghan women in the introduction to “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” the 2009 book written by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. “During this entire time I carried with me their pleading voices and ultimately their screams, while the world looked away.”

In 1981, Wali established Refugee Women in Development, a group that assisted refugees in the U.S., and helped launch feminist think tank Sisterhood Is Global Institute. She spoke before Congress and the United Nations and addressed groups such as the Los Angeles-based Feminist Majority Foundation. She was awarded the Amnesty International Ginetta Sagan Award in 1999 and the Gloria Steinem Women of Vision Award in 1989.

In her last trip to Afghanistan in 2005, Wali was nearly taken hostage by Taliban and Al Qaeda fundamentalists while visiting Jalalabad, a town along the Pakistan border. In a first-person account published in the Huffington Post, she described hearing gunfire and explosions outside the governor’s compound where she was staying and then hiding in a darkened garden as the mob broke through the palace gates.

To escape, Wali and others scaled a wall and dashed across a field to a gardener’s house, where a woman took them in and offered them food. She said she wore a bedsheet in a “desperate attempt to render myself invisible.” A burka, she said, would have come in handy.

When an airlift was hurriedly arranged to ferry out the governor and other government officials, Wali joined a convoy and made it to the waiting plane.

“Many Afghans came to our aid unconditionally even though it put them at great risk,” she wrote. “But as the world has come to see in vivid terms, Afghan bravery cannot alone stop the tide of barbaric extremism.”

Afflicted with a crippling disease that robbed her of the ability to walk and, finally, to talk, she used an alphabet board to communicate, before even that limited ability disappeared. Her nephew said it was a cruel irony that a woman who had spent her life “giving a voice to the voiceless” would then lose her own.

He recalled one of the messages she formed: “T-h-i-s-i-s-m-y-w-a-r.”

Wali’s lone marriage ended in divorce in 1987. She had no children. She​​​​​​ is survived by two sisters, Sohaila and Soraya Wali; and four brothers, Ahmad, Jahed, Zia and Abdul Wali. 

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14. PAKISTAN POLITICS: NAWAZ SHARIF WROTE HIS OBIT | Faraz Ahmad
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Former Prime Minister of Pakistan Mian Nawaz Sharif ousted from power by a deceitful judgment of Pakistan Supreme Court two months back is facing the same existential crisis which confronted exactly forty years ago Pakistan’s first duly elected Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Only, the Pakistani military establishment’s hand maiden the judiciary of the Mulke Khudadade Pakistan (God’s own gift) won’t dare hang Mian sahib because he happens to be a Punjabi. The rest of the story is almost identical to what befell Bhutto, the charismatic, aristocratic and arrogant connoisseur of good life who carried alongside his populist symbolism addressing the poor, deprived and mercilessly exploited sections of the Pakistani society.

Mian Nawaz Sharif was a creation of that mullah in Khaki , the cock eyed General who fought no wars, Mohammad Ziaul Haq who ruled Pakistan with an iron hand in collusion with the mullahs and a kept judiciary. It was Zia, who in a bid to contain the continued popularity of Bhutto even after his death, made a young Mian sahib a minister in the Punjab government apprehending Benazir’s rising popularity in the late 70s and early 80s.

But soon as Zia was bombed into smithereens in the Presidential plane in October 1988, Benazir rode to power in an election held after 11 years’ gap. But the Pakistan army did not trust her for two reasons. First she was a woman which the patriarchal conservative mullahs of Pakistan could not digest. Besides she had been reared by her father on some amount of considerably diluted liberalism and secularism, an anathema to Pakistan’s mullahs for whom any such trait is to date Kufr which made Bhutto and Benazir Kafirs and Kafirs for them lived and ruled in India so by implication Bhutto and Benazir too were Indian agents. They even carried an insidious campaign that Bhutto’s mother was actually a Hindu woman whom his father Shahnawaz had secretly married. Worse Benazir’s mother Nusrat happened to be a Shia Muslim, another red rag for the Wahabi Sunni sect to which Zia too belonged.

It is worth mentioning because all this was brought out against Bhutto when he decided to take on the Pakistan Army and successfully negotiated with Indira Gandhi to take back over 90,000 Prisoners of War interned in India after Pakistan was defeated by India in 1971-72 war and liberation of Bangla Desh.

Initially after the historical 1969 elections when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won an overwhelming majority in Pakistan National Assembly by virtue of sweeping then East Pakistan which had more seats because of greater population density, Bhutto was an accomplice in the excesses committed against Bengalis and therefore when eventually General Yahya Khan had to step down after the humiliating dismemberment of Pakistan, Bhutto created a history of sorts by becoming the first civilian Martial Law Dictator perhaps anywhere in the world.

But as things progressed and Bhutto decided to push the army behind the barracks, introduce some  administrative reforms to set the Pakistan bureaucracy and later the judiciary to order, and make Pakistan a modern state, the Army-judiciary-mullah combine in Pakistan decided to teach him a lesson. Mind you at the height of his popularity Bhutto had the gumption to declare to wide acclaim at a massive public meeting in Lahore “Haan main sharab peeta hoon, kisi ka khoon to nahin peeta hoon.”

His Punjab chief minister Ghulam Mustafa Khar had dragged out mullahs by their beards from the famous Mughal masjid in Lahore and beat them in public for their audacity to pronounce Bhutto a Kafir. But when Bhutto superceded six general to make the apparently pliant and submissive Ziaul Haq the army chief, whom Bhutto disdainfully considered supine, the entire Army establishment decided not to forgive him for this sacrilege and tell Bhutto who was the real boss. So a blasphemous Bhutto was sentenced to death on the most specious plea. The allegation against Bhutto by Ahmad Raza Kasuri, still alive, contained in the FIR registered after Bhutto deposition was that at Bhutto’s orders the secret service of Pakistan called the CIA shot at him while he was driving, carrying his father sitting next to the driver’s seat. The bullet missed him. Instead it hit his father who died. The most basic student of law knows that since the ostensible target of the attack was the complainant who survived without the least injury, Section 302 of the PPC identical to IPC cannot apply and therefore no law could prescribe a death sentence for the accidental unintended death of Ahmad Raza Kasuri’s father.

But then Bhutto was so popular that alive, even interned within the Kot Lakhpat jail, he was a threat to Zia.  So he had to be removed from the political scenario of Pakistan.

Main Nawaz Sharif faces an identical situation. He was created by the conservative Army-Mullah-judicairy clique of Pakistan and the benevolence and generosity of Zia and the Pakistan Army extended to his entire family. Thus father Sharif within no time became from a moderate businessman to a multi-millionaire steel mill owner and the family continued rising in wealth and prosperity along with political power.

In 1990 when the Pakistan army and mullahs wanted to get rid of Benazir the then Pakistan President Ghulam Ishaq Khan dismissed Benazir’s duly elected PPP government on corruption charges and then ordered fresh elections where the Army-mullah coalition not just backed Nawaz Sharif led Muslim League, but pumped huge money into his campaign and even rigged the elections to ensure his victory.

But Ishaq Khan another proxy of the same conservative establishment and a relic of Zia era had tasted blood. So in 1993 he decided to dismiss Sharif again on corruption charges. But this time since the Army-mullah combine was divided in its loyalty the Supreme Court too was indulgent to Nawaz and eventually the Army intervened asking both to quit bringing back Benazir for a second term, much to the chagrin of the Pak establishment.

Again Benazir was dismissed by President Faroooq Leghari this time and Mian sahib put back into the seat of power. Mian saheb’s politics encouraged or rather patronized the private Wahabi armies like Sipahe Sahaba and  Lashkare Jhangvi  let loose on Pakistan’s Hindu, Christian, Shia and Ahmediya minorities. He toed the Army line targeting India as an enemy.

But by 1999 Mian sahib started having second thoughts on relations with India and invited the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to Lahore, receiving him and the Indian delegation with a warm welcome. The move may have been welcomed all over the world. But certainly did not go well with the Army-mullah coalition and within no time the Army led by the then Army chief General Parvez Musharraf launched the surreptitious Kargil aggression embarrassing Mian sahib and making his position untenable. Musharraf deposed Nawaz soon after but the mullahs and their patron Saudi Arabia had not lost all hope in Mian sahib, an old and tested friend and so Musharraf was forced to allow Nawaz Sharif exile in Saudi Arabia where he remained till 2007.

But if the USA succeeded in persuading Musharraf to allow Benazir to return to Pakistan and contest the elections proposed to be held in 2008, the patriarchal, Wahabi  Islamist Saudi Arabia couldn’t stomach Benazir once more and forced Musharraf to take back Mian sahib too to politically challenge Benazir. So far so good. But then Pakistan’s politicians do not believe in forget and forgive thesis and once back in the saddle in June 2013 he contemplated trying out Musharraf for treason against the 1973 Constitution of Pakistan. Simultaneously he refused to send in his troops to Saudi Arabia to fight its battles against the Yemenis. With the PPP being largely leaderless and rudderless he also decided to cultivate the Hindu minority, participating  in their Diwali and Holi festivities as also breaking ice with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. All this put together caused tremendous suspicion and  resentment against Mian sahib whom once the Army-mullah combine and its hand maiden judiciary adored.  So their proxy that Imran Khan was let loose and finally the Supreme Court deposed him.

In Pakistan therefore you cannot dream of ruling if you show any indulgence towards the Hindu minorities or “Hindu India.” Pakistan was created on Hindu enmity and the Army has perpetuated its iron rule on Hindu India enmity. The day they let their guards down on this front the raison d’ etre for Pakistan ceases and could lead to the state falling apart. At least that the conservative establishment of Pakistan fears and this is yet again evident in incarceration of Mian Nawaz Sharif. This notwithstanding the fact that there is a groundswell of support within Pakistan for amicable peaceful coexistence with India and a warm feeling for we Indians.

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15. PAKISTAN COURT BACKS FIRST WIFE IN LANDMARK POLYGAMY CASE
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(Deutsche Welle, November 2, 2017)

A court in Pakistan has sentenced a man to several months in prison for marrying a second woman without his wife's consent. Activists say the landmark ruling is a huge win for women's rights in the Islamic country.

A judge in the northeastern city of Lahore ordered Shahzad Saqib to serve a six-month jail term and pay a fine of 200,000 Pakistani rupees (about €1,630 or $1,900) for taking a second wife, local media reported on Thursday.

The man's first wife, Ayesha Bibi, successfully argued that her husband had broken Pakistan's 2015 family law by going ahead with the marriage without her approval.

The court rejected the man's reasoning that he did not need permission because Islam allows men to have up to four wives. He has the right to appeal the verdict.

Empowering married women

Women's rights activists welcomed the ruling, saying it marked the first time a court had sided with the woman in a polygamy case.

Fauzia Viqar, chair of the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women, a body promoting women's rights, said the decision sets an important precedent.

Read more: Woman tortured and set on fire for refusing marriage proposal in Pakistan

"It will discourage polygamy and encourage women to take up their case with the courts. It will create awareness among people, in general, and women, in particular. Wronged women using this law will lead to their empowerment," Viqar said.

In the lead-up to the court decision, the country's Council of Islamic Ideology had repeatedly criticized the right of the first wife to have a say if her husband wishes to remarry. The panel advises the government on the compatibility of laws with Islam, but its recommendations are not legally binding.

There are no statistics on the prevalence of polygamy in Pakistan. According to the Institute of Policy Studies, an Islamabad-based nonprofit research organization, it is not widespread, but has been most common in rural areas in families without a male heir or in cases when men fell in love with another woman.

nm/rt (Reuters, epd, KNA)

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16. INDIA: WHAT HAPPENED IN FIRST 2 MONTHS OF NOTE BAN ALONE WAS AN UNFORGIVABLE CATASTROPHE: JEAN DREZE 
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(First Post Nov, 07 2017 | Ankita Virmani)
 
What happened in first 2 months of note ban alone was an unforgivable catastrophe: Jean Dreze
Development economist Jean Dreze has been vociferous critic of the Narendra Modi government's demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes a year back. He had famously warned that "demonetisation in a booming economy is like shooting at the tyres of a racing car". A year on, it seems his caution has come true. In the first quarter of the current financial year, the GDP growth slowed to a three-year low of 5.7 percent due to twin effect of goods services tax and note ban.
 
On the eve of the anniversary of the most disruptive step taken by the National Democratic Alliance government, Firstpost did an email interview with Dreze. Here are the excerpts:
 
It’s been a year since demonetisation. Do you see it as a success or as a failure?
 
I think that it is best to be frank about demonetisation and admit that it was a goof-up. The objectives outlined by the prime minister in his speech of 8 November 2016 have certainly not been met. If there were other objectives, let him spell them out. Otherwise, let him accept that it was a blunder.
 
I used to wonder, like many other economists, what the objective of the exercise really was. Various hypotheses have been put forward. None of them really explain why the prime minister would want to take this sort of risk with the economy. Today, my hunch is that he meant what he said on 8 November last year. He really believed in the myth that black money is a gigantic hoard of cash, waiting to be raided.
 
Why is this a myth?
 
Because it reflects the common misconception that black money is a stock rather than a flow. In economics, black money essentially refers to illicit earnings. That is a flow, not a stock. Illicit earnings do not stay still and accumulate, like a hoard. They are used to buy Jaguars, shop in Dubai, fund lavish weddings and so on. In the process, black money gets laundered, so to speak. The wrong idea that illicit earnings are stashed away in an accumulating hoard is a source of endless confusion. At any particular point of time, of course, some black money is held in cash. But launching a one-off strike on that cash residual does very little to stem the flow of illicit earnings. It’s like a swipe of the mop under the running tap.
 
The RBI has said that almost all the money that was withdrawn has come back into the system. Does it mean that there was no black money in the system?
 
There is plenty of black money around, in the sense of illicit earnings. But as I said, we have to distinguish that from the myth of tainted cash hidden in suitcases. To the extent that some of that tainted cash did exist, it was neatly laundered as demonetisation unfolded. Indeed, we know that most of the high-denomination notes came back to the banks. So either demonetisation was futile, because there was very little tainted cash in the first place, or it turned into a money-laundering operation. Today, the government is saying that it will go after the laundered black money by investigating millions of bank accounts, conducting tax raids and so on. But this is just another delusion.
 
What do you think of cashless economy? As a country, are we ready for this transition?
 
I think that this idea is characteristic of a tendency to try and climb the ladder from the top. Other examples are the fixation with bullet trains and smart cities. What most people actually need is trains that run on time and cities with essential amenities. Similarly, when it comes to transactions, people need good banking services, along with the obvious convenience that cash provides on a daily basis. Effective banking services are still lacking in large parts of India. The cashless economy, if desirable at all, is a futuristic idea that has little relevance to the pressing problems that millions of people face today.
 
With demonetisation, even the small shopkeepers have started using Paytm or other such Apps. In a way, demonetisation has provoked us to go digital and digital means white transactions?
 
I have nothing against these Apps, let those who find them convenient use them. But I see no case for promoting them through coercive or reckless means such as demonetisation. At best, there is a case for facilitating or subsidising some digital payment systems.
 
The economic survey suggests that demonetisation has impacted the GDP growth by as much as 1.2 percent. But then any changes, even a smallest of change in our personal live, make an impact.
 
This estimate is highly speculative, and the correct figure may be much worse. But assuming it’s 1.2 percent, that is what the central and state governments combined spend on health care. In other words, the economic loss from demonetisation was equivalent to a whole year’s public expenditure on health. My fear is that the loss will not end there, and that demonetisation will turn out to have pushed India onto the slippery slope of economic slowdown and adverse expectations. The main issue, however, is not GDP growth but what happens to people’s lives. In that respect, what happened in the first two months of demonetisation alone was an unforgivable catastrophe.
 
How do you see remuneration, particularly to weaker sections of society like those engaged in MNREGA getting it straight into their bank account. It negates role of middlemen in whatever capacity taking cuts. Would you call it a welcome move?
 
The payment of NREGA wages into bank accounts began almost 10 years ago. In fact, the big breakthrough in financial inclusion in India came with NREGA, much before Jan Dhan Yojana. I think that bank payment of NREGA wages is not a bad thing, except that the banking system is still unequal to the task. Payments are routinely delayed and bank premises are awfully overcrowded in many areas. That is why I feel that what people need today is good banking services, not the rosy promise of a cashless economy.
 
Published Date: Nov 07, 2017 

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17. INDIA: THE CALLOUS DISREGARD OF WORKER SAFETY - EDITORIAL IN EPW 
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Economic and Political Weekly
Vol. 52, Issue No. 45, 11 Nov, 2017 
Editorial

When Workers Die
The callous disregard of worker safety is the cost of “ease of doing business.”

Human life is cheap in India. So cheap that when the poor, or members of the working class, die, there is little by way of outrage. The media fuels outrage on any number of other issues, but rarely on one where we stand exposed as a society that fails to care for those who are the most vulnerable. And so the death of 32 workers and grievous injuries to another 100 in a major public sector thermal power plant went past as yet another accident. The state government offered compensation, an inquiry was instituted, and the subject disappeared from our consciousness. The “accident” at the 500 megawatts thermal power plant operated by the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) in Unchahar, Raebareli district, Uttar Pradesh, on 1 November has exposed the callous disregard for worker safety and the violation of labour laws that is virtually a norm in India.

While the details of precisely what happened at the NTPC plant will hopefully emerge from the inquiry, some facts are already known. The high pressure steam boiler in the newly commissioned Unit 6 of the Unchahar thermal power plant was supposed to have been shut down to rectify technical problems. Yet, it was still running even as workers were asked to manually remove the ash that had collected in the boiler as a result of the malfunction. When the pressure built up in the boiler, leading to the blast, there were around 300 workers in the vicinity. Surely, this could have been avoided had the safety of workers been a priority.

We must also remember that this tragedy has not occurred in an unregulated factory, or a small unit operating outside regulatory laws. This was a thermal power plant run by the NTPC, India’s largest power utility that manages 48 thermal power stations. We must also note that the majority of the workers affected were migrant contract workers, brought to the unit by contractors to whom jobs had been subcontracted. This is a ploy used by many large industrial units. It helps employers minimise their liabilities to a smaller number of permanent workers who are covered under labour laws, while much of the work, often the more hazardous tasks, are farmed out to contractors who employ casual workers, often on daily wages. These workers have no health insurance in the event of accidents or exposure to hazards. This murky underbelly of the formal sector in India stands exposed when such accidents take place.

Even in the best-maintained industries, there can be accidents. These can be prevented, and their effects minimised if there is no compromise on routine maintenance. We know, however, from the example of the Bhopal gas disaster at the Union Carbide factory on 2 December 1984, that poor maintenance eventually contributed to the explosion in the methyl isocyanate tank on the factory premises. Till today, the fallout of that poisonous gas cloud that enveloped parts of Bhopal, is being played out. It was this tragedy that led to the tightening of laws with regard to worker safety.

Today, under the excuse of enhancing the “ease of doing business,” these laws are being deliberately diluted in many states under the prompting of the Narendra Modi government. Since 2014, there have been proposed amendments to the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, the Factories Act, 1948, and the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. Even the Indian Boiler Regulations, 1950 that required inspection and certification by the Central Boilers Board, have been changed to permit self-certification. The justification is that “inspector raj” must end. Instead, what is happening is that there is little by way of oversight to ensure that safety regulations are not compromised.

Furthermore, there are proposals to dilute laws governing contract labour that will facilitate the use of casual labour for the more hazardous jobs, as in Unchahar. Under the existing law, the NTPC can be held liable for all workers, permanent and contract, following the landmark Asiad case (Peoples Union for Democratic Rights v Union of India and Others, 1982) in which the Supreme Court held the government responsible for contract workers as the principal employer. We must also emphasise that government’s largesse in the form of compensation to injured workers, or to the families of the deceased, cannot replace the responsibility of the NTPC to all the workers. Unfortunately, if amendments to the contract labour law come through, this could change to the detriment of the rights of contract workers.

This government has also brought in rules restricting labour inspections, thereby violating Article 81 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) to which India is a signatory. It has introduced the Shram Suvidha Portal that permits employers to “self-certify” compliance to 16 central labour laws. Such “self-certification” has been proved to be a fraud in compliance with environmental laws. How can it be any different with regard to labour laws or industrial safety? In the name of “Make in India,” and encouraging investment, the government is turning its face away from egregious violations of worker safety and rights, particularly for the most unprotected amongst them, the casual and daily wage workers. Unchahar is a grim reminder of this emerging reality.

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18. INDIA - PAKISTAN: BSF, RANGERS TO WORK FOR TRANQUILLITY | Jawed Naqvi
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November 11, 2017
EW DELHI: Pakistan Rangers and India’s Border Security Force (BSF), apparently weary of recent ceasefire violations and other costly transgressions, agreed on Friday to work for peace and tranquillity, and to return to the 2003 ceasefire agreement between the two countries. 
https://www.dawn.com/news/1369764/bsf-rangers-to-work-for-tranquillity

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19. INDIA:: TYRANNY OF HURT SENTIMENTS: PADMAVATI CONTROVERSY TYPIFIES HOW, IN INDIA, DEMOCRACY IS MADE TO STAND ON ITS HEAD |  Ravi Shanker Kapoor
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(The Times of India, November 9, 2017)

The needless controversy surrounding the Sanjay Leela Bhansali-directed Padmavati is just an episode in the Indian saga of appeasement of the sanctimonious, the mischievous and the tetchy. For too long the enemies of liberty have been dealt with kid gloves. Filmmakers, authors, journalists and, most shamelessly, politicians have humoured the self-appointed guardians of morality, public order, decency, etc.

Therefore, the anti-freedom villains need to be confronted. This can be done by exposing the fallacy of the concept of ‘hurting sentiments’ and comprehending its baleful effects on a liberal democracy.

In our country, wrong questions are asked when somebody cries that their sentiments or feelings have been hurt because of some movie, song, book, etc. Public debate revolves around such questions as: Whether there is any merit in the protests? Did the artist or author actually do something offensive? Were sentiments really hurt? Were the demands made for a ban just? Why should a movie be banned when it has been cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification?

But the fundamental question is: How valid are the demands for proscription based on the principle of hurt sentiments or feelings? The Indian Constitution imposes “reasonable restrictions” on the fundamental right to freedom of expression. The restrictions can be imposed for the maintenance of “the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.”

But the restrictions ought to be reasonable; nowhere in the Constitution is it mentioned that hurting somebody’s sentiments can be a ground for curtailment of the freedom of expression.

The grounds restricting the freedom of expression have to be reasonable and not sentimental, not only because it is the constitutional position but also because reasons can be objectively debated, while sentiments and feelings can’t be. Merriam Webster describes ‘sentiment’ as ‘an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling’, ‘predilection’, ‘a specific view or notion’, ‘opinion’, ‘an idea colored by emotion’, etc. Similarly, ‘feeling’ is defined as, among other things, ‘an emotional state or reaction’ and ‘often unreasoned opinion or belief’.

It is crystal clear that the defining feature of sentiments and feelings is subjectivity. This is the reason that while many Hindus say that some of MF Husain’s paintings hurt their feelings and thus should be banned, many of their co-religionists don’t feel offended by the paintings concerned. There is no objective standard that can lead to the decision that the feelings of the tetchy can be privileged over those of the tolerant.

It is true that there are legal provisions, for example Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, that criminalise anything deliberately and maliciously “outraging the religious feelings of any class”. But, as argued above, these sections militate against the spirit as well as letter of the Constitution.

The law and public administration are moulded, or should be moulded, by objective realities. Poetry is to sentiments and subjectivity what political philosophy is to statecraft, jurisprudence, and objectivity. In India, however, the founding principles of polity have grown poetic in nature since Independence.

It is not surprising that sentimentality and sanctimoniousness, those illegitimate children of poetry, figure highly in the manifestos, speeches, statements, and announcements of political parties. The upshot is that reason and informed arguments have taken a back seat in public discourse. It is sentimentalism all the way.

Without the ballasts of rationality, poise and gravity, sentiments behave like malfunctioning robots; fortuitous combinations of circuits make their working arbitrary and often dangerous. Unbridled sentimentalism occasions the basest human instincts, grossest emotions, and stupidest ideas; it promotes the proclivity to capitulate to the cantankerous and the intractable; and it inevitably results in politicians’ covenants with self-righteous charlatans and pious goons.

All in the name of not hurting sentiments. The biggest casualty, of course, is the freedom of expression. Sentimentalism also pollutes the public discourse; some stark facts are lost sight of.

For instance, millions of Indians have travelled to Western countries where they get exposed to writings and audio-visual depictions slamming, ridiculing and blaspheming all religions, often in the crudest manner. But there is hardly any report of any Indian Hindu, Muslim or Sikh vandalising a cinema hall, exhibition, or literary festival. Why is it that their sentiments – which overwhelm them to the extent of provoking them to beat artists in India – don’t get hurt in the US, UK, or France?

The answer is simple: They know that there would be very unpleasant consequences. For the rule of law is a reality in Western countries – not a slogan as in India. It is as it ought to be in a liberal democracy: anybody can say or do anything so long as they don’t harm others.

In our country, on the other hand, democracy stands on its head: professional protesters can hurt a filmmaker or any other creative person physically and financially so long as they can convince the powers that be that the action was the result of ‘hurt sentiments’. It’s worse than that: often, the enemies of freedom also get immunity and patronage from those who matter.

It’s time democracy, as it exists, was turned upside down or more precisely right side up; it’s time the concept of hurt sentiments and offended feelings was discarded.

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20. INDIA: MARCH OF THE NAGA WOMEN | Ashwaq Masoodi
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(Livemint, Nov 03 2017)
http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/URkzhfycsCGFTHYBD1yBcK/March-of-the-Naga-women.html

Despite a high female literacy rate and an active women’s rights movement, the struggle for political empowerment in Nagaland is only just beginning

Members of Naga Mother’s Association in Dimapur. Photographs: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

In 2005, when Tokheli Kikon contested the village council election, she was the only woman candidate against three male candidates in the Naharbari village of Nagaland’s Dimapur district. She got 13 of the 21 votes, and became the state’s first woman village council chairperson. Twelve years later, she continues to be the only woman village council head in Nagaland.

“Men kept discouraging me from contesting.... They said, ‘How will you negotiate in a system that runs on muscle and money power? How will you, being a woman, go to jails, to army camps, to underground factions?’ They keep forgetting, or maybe deliberately ignore, that I did it all even before I was elected,” says Kikon, 58, who is into her third term.

Tokheli Kikon, Nagaland’s first and only woman village council chairperson.

In her initial years as an administrator, people kept reminding Kikon of her gender. For instance, when, a few months after taking over, she started a campaign to protect a historical pond in her village, angering those who were trying to encroach the land around it, men attacked her; some even tried to pull out her mekhela (a traditional wraparound skirt). All this because women members are still a rarity in village councils, and among some tribes, they are not even allowed to sit through a decision-making meeting. Since 1963, when Nagaland attained statehood, it has not elected a single woman to the assembly. The late Rano M. Shaiza is still the only woman to ever be elected to the Lok Sabha (in 1977) from the state.

Men kept discouraging me from contesting.... They said, ‘How will you negotiate in a system that runs on muscle and money power? How will you, being a woman, go to jails, to army camps, to underground factions?
- Tokheli Kikon

How deep the gender crisis in the state is, became evident when in January-February, large-scale protests were held to oppose women’s demand for 33% reservation in urban local body elections. Two people died, several government offices were set on fire, and the chief minister had to step down. The all-male apex tribal body, Naga Hoho, said it wouldn’t give up its customary laws, and eventually, in late January, the Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA), an apex women’s body that was at the forefront of this battle in court, decided to withdraw its petition.

“Women from different tribes, who were part of the NMA, started receiving threats asking them to either dissociate from the joint action committee on women’s reservation (a conglomeration of several women’s rights organizations, including the NMA and Watsu Mungdang), or else stop being the citizens of their tribes. These are all married women, living in a society like ours where family and tribe play such an important role. Some of them had to go underground. With all this in mind, and the assurance from the government that it will hold elections, we decided to dissolve the JACWR (Joint Action Committee for Women Reservation) and withdraw the petition,” says Rosemary Dzuvichu, lecturer at Nagaland University, and chief adviser of the NMA.

The state’s gender story is no different from that of the other North-Eastern states where traditional governance models are followed, but as N. Vijaylakshmi Brara, associate professor at the Centre for Manipur Studies, Manipur University, says, “There is discontent among women even in matrilineal states like Meghalaya, but it hasn’t reached the level it has in the case of Nagaland where educated women have started asking for their rights within democracy.”

Depending on whom you ask, there are different versions on why both men and women were out on the streets. Locals say the violence in Dimapur and Kohima, among other districts, was not just about Nagaland not being prepared for gender equality in politics. It was a cocktail of simmering anger stoked by slow development, a feeling of alienation, and the belief that attempts are being made by the Centre to infringe upon the state’s special status under Article 371(A) of the Constitution. Most of those who formed the official opposition said reservation would tamper with Article 371(A), and would mean that people would be forced to pay tax even for their livestock—this didn’t go down well with anyone. Under the Article, the Union government cannot intervene on matters related to Naga religion or social practices, customary law, ownership and transfer of land and the state’s resources, without the concurrence of the state legislative assembly.

“Our only fear was that Article 371(A) and women’s reservation contradict each other. Everyone was interpreting it in their own way. We need to educate the common masses because, as Nagas, our identity is dear to us, and we don’t think a law that is applicable in, say, the north or south can be used here, in our context,” says P. Chuba Ozukum, president, Naga Hoho. “Times have changed, but politics is still about money and muscle power. Under this corrupt system, no refined woman would be able to participate. Women here are free, independent, so if they are good enough in politics, they should also find their way like the other women politicians in India have. Why reservation?”

The period of unrest brought in political and social crisis, but what it also did was, as activists say, “burst the bubble of an empowered Naga woman”, bringing to the fore the gender battles that were being fought by several women’s rights groups within the state.

“When you look at it from a distance, the status of Naga women is good, but a closer view shows that it is far from good. Right from the grass-roots level to the highest decision-making bodies, where are the women? First, as a woman, second, as a government servant, I wish I could say everything is in place for women. But I can’t because there is no rosy picture to present,” says Daisy Mezhur, mission director of the State Resource Centre for Women, Nagaland.

Gender can wait

For the greater part of the state’s early history, women’s rights organizations were not vocal, or as aware of discrimination as they are now—mostly because they started as branches of churches, with general social reform as their main mandate. For example, this was the first time that the NMA, a 33-year-old organization, took up the issue of women’s rights on such a scale. Initially, the organization concentrated on issues such as alcohol and drug abuse, which were big problems in Naga society till the 1980s. They then initiated campaigns for peace. In fact, it was the mothers, as they call themselves, who intervened on several occasions between the Armed Forces and the militants, or even the different factions.

“We shifted from social issues to peace politics, from motherhood politics to exploring the issues of political discrimination of women, and the need for emancipation. And for all our fights against social issues and for peace politics, men were always on our side, fighting along with us,” says Abieu Meru, president, NMA. But when it came to women’s rights, support started dwindling.

The reservation for women in town councils, as enacted by the Nagaland Municipal (First Amendment) Act, 2006, was actually a watershed moment for the gender rights movement in the state. The NMA only decided to step in that year. But as Dzuvichu says: “Naga women started articulating their rights so late because of militarization, because of the conflict. Women didn’t have time to think about themselves. It was only after the ceasefire was signed, when there was a semblance of peace, that women looked at their reproductive health rights, then social rights, and women’s roles in decision-making bodies, village judiciary, and the village council.” Dzuvichu has several public interest litigations (PILs) pending in courts on issues such as reproductive health and maternity deaths.

Women running small businesses is a common sight in Kohima.

Tribal identity

Understanding gender in Naga culture needs an understanding of social stratifications, tribal loyalties, and women’s roles. For it’s not as if women can’t be seen on the streets—as vendors, or running small businesses. They can wear what they want, without inviting judgement. They are educated, and can generally decide whom to marry. But they are not encouraged to participate in politics, take part in battles or hunt, and there are some religious functions, such as the Sekrenyi festival, where, as the NMA’s Angela Yhome points out, women are excluded from some rituals because they are not considered pure enough. A Naga woman is not entitled to inherit her clan’s ancestral or landed properties, and this is true for all tribes. She may construct a house or buy some land, but, on her marriage, it will belong to her parents or brothers. Once a married couple decides to separate or divorce, the children and property belong to the husband. A woman does not have any rights over her biological children or her property.

While they all identify with the exonym Naga outside the state, within it their tribal identity is dominant.

Verrier Elwin, in his book Nagaland (1961), writes: “The basic interest of every Naga is his family, the clan, the Khel, the village. This is what he regards as his culture, which must not be interfered with. He is passionately attached to his land, his system of land tenure, the arrangements for the government of his village, the organization of cultivation, the administration of tribal justice through the village and tribal courts.”

Some customary laws, like those among the Konyak tribe nudging a rapist and the survivor to reach a consensus on marriage, aren’t as commonly followed. Others, regarding inheritance and marriage, hold good even among the educated class. Nagaland has 16 tribes and the amount of freedom a woman gets depends on how liberal her tribe is. For instance, according to last year’s “Enquiry Into The Status Of Women In Nagaland”, a 192-page report brought out by the Nagaland chapter of the well-known grass-roots organization North East Network, an Ao Naga woman can’t become a member of the Putu Menden, the traditional village council. In the Chakhesang tribe, if a woman commits adultery, she is forced to leave her husband’s house with only the clothes she is wearing. But if a married man brings his lover home, he doesn’t need to leave, but will have to give his wife half the property acquired during his married life.

A vegetable market en route to Dimapur from Kohima, predominantly run by women.

Invisible fights

Watsu Mungdang, the apex women’s organization of the Ao tribe, was formed in 1983 in Mokokchung, after a series of sexual assaults and human rights violations.

The organization has also been fighting for property rights, but even these activists believe the sanctity of ancestral land needs to be maintained. They believe it is only acquired land that is unjustly denied to women. “Because we are a patriarchal society, if I have to marry in a different clan, I will become their family, and if I inherit my ancestral property, that will go to a different family, a different clan. Inheritance among tribes is a big issue. How can we give the land of our ancestors, a part of our land, to the other clan? But acquired (property), we should have a right on,” says Amenla Sashi from Watsu Mungdang.

In the last two-three years, the organization has shifted its focus to economic empowerment. “In so many aspects, we are working on an equal footing with men. When we look at the family structures, we are not deprived of any right, we are liberated, but when it comes to political representation or economic empowerment, we are far behind. Economic independence of a woman will pave the way for her empowerment in many other aspects of her life, so that’s our focus now,” says Chubasangla Longkumep, president, Watsu Mungdang’s Kohima branch.

The organization is holding seminars, helping women farmers find ways to enhance their farm produce, and introducing them to different ways of marketing. A committee was set up this April to pull in trainers and experts to convert women’s agricultural work into income.

The economy of the state depends largely on agriculture, with the majority of the population living in rural areas. A large number of women in Nagaland are cultivators—a substantial number are engaged in informal trade, and make for a majority of the market-stall holders and vendors selling vegetables and indigenous produce. Even though these women are the major source of support for their families, few of them have access to government schemes, economic credits and opportunities to improve their economic status.

“Economically, women don’t have the strength men do. If she is economically empowered, she can do what she wants with her assets. At the moment, she has to depend on the menfolk,” says Longkumep.

According to the 2011 census, female literacy in the state is 76.11%, and male literacy, 82.75%. Longkumep says there was a time when educating girls was not the norm. There are still instances in the interiors where girls are denied education, but things have changed.

In eastern Nagaland, where the Eastern Nagaland Women’s Organization (Enwo) has been working since 2008, education and trafficking are two big concerns. “Eastern Nagaland is still dealing with extreme poverty and when you don’t have even one meal a day, families choose which ward to educate based on gender, rather than capabilities, because the woman will ultimately go to a different house. So, as an organization, Enwo works towards finding ways to educate as many girls as possible, without putting all the burden on the parents,” says Birila Tokiu, a former president of Enwo. Families in the eastern region send their girls to places like Kohima—they are promised a better life, education and money, but many of them are trapped into becoming domestic helps. Tokiu says several cases of sexual harassment and rape have emerged from such “trafficking”.

From violence against women to trafficking and discrimination in politics, the story is the same as in the rest of the country. But in Nagaland, says Juliana Medom, assistant state coordinator, State Resource Centre for Women: “The women’s movement hasn’t really taken a healthy growth. Women’s movements in other states, or even globally, always started with women who were enlightened, but slowly went to the grass-roots level—educating and involving them in the fight. What we saw recently was not a mass movement. So many women were completely unaware of what was happening.”

Given its history of violence and identity issues, the state buried the gender question for a long time. At least the conversation around Nagaland’s gender story has begun.

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21. WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THE CRISIS OF THE LEFT IN INDIA? Roshan Kishore
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(Live mint, Nov 05 2017)

The Communist Part of India (Marxist)’s atrophy in West Bengal has dealt a body blow to the Left’s influence in Indian politics

In a 2010 interview to the New Left Review, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked to list the global events that have surprised him in the post-1991 period—which is when The Age Of Extremes, the last of his four-part magnum opus, ends. Among things such as the growing crisis of capitalism and the global economy’s centre shifting from the north Atlantic regions, Hobsbawm talks about the imminent debacle of the three decade-long Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, led government in West Bengal. One might disagree with the importance Hobsbawm attached to the CPM losing power in West Bengal. However, it is definitely a watershed event as far the Left is concerned in India.

To be sure, the Indian Left is not confined to the CPM. A broad spectrum of parties and even non-party led struggles would fit in this category. However, it is also true that the fortunes of most of these have been tied to the performance of the CPM-led parliamentary Left. The Left’s parliamentary decline in the recent period has adversely affected all of them. What explains this debacle?

The contradictions of caste politics and the weakening of trade unions in urban centres had severely squeezed the Left’s support in many parts of India since the 1990s. Despite this, the CPM maintained its dominance in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. The biggest reason for a major decline in the Left’s parliamentary fortunes is its collapse in West Bengal. Why did this happen?

Anybody interested in this question must read Government As Practice: Democratic Left In A Transforming India by Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, a professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Bhattacharya’s analysis is important because it tries to explain the Left’s decline in the state as the result of a long-drawn process rather than the fallout of individual decisions or events.

Even after the Nandigram police firing, Nirupam Sen, a CPM politburo member and then industry minister of the state, maintained that there was no large-scale opposition to land acquisition in West Bengal. Was this just smugness? Bhattacharya does not think so. He argues that gradual churning in West Bengal’s rural economy and society had led to contractors and middlemen gaining control of the CPM’s rural organization. Their class interests were quite different from those of the rural poor. The former stood to gain from the boom in land acquisition for industrialization. The latter were anxious at the prospect of losing their sole source of livelihood and increasingly getting alienated due to the refusal of the local Left leadership to empathize with their concerns. The ground-based intelligence that the party leadership was getting from its cadres was simply wrong. There are multiple examples of this kind in Bhattacharya’s book. All of them point to one thing. Those who were tasked with taking the Left’s politics to the masses had little incentive to adhere to Left praxis.

Why could this not be arrested in time? In her book Rebuilding The Left, Chilean sociologist Marta Harnecker sees “hegemonist attitude” as one of the biggest reasons for the crisis of the Left. She describes this as a tendency to steamroll any opposition and sees this as a complete opposite of hegemony which refers to widespread support for somebody’s ideas. The West Bengal CPM leadership’s refusal to pay heed to the warnings of many fellow travellers on land acquisition-related discontent was a result of this hegemonist attitude. Harnecker’s views on political hegemony are worth reproducing: “Hegemony is not achieved once and for all. A constant process of renewal is necessary to keep it. Life goes on, new problems appear and with them new challenges. If the organisation is not capable of responding to these, it could lose its influence in the society.”

If the CPM is to make a comeback, it will have to regain its lost hegemony in the state. This requires a self-realization of what led to its loss in the first place. As the party prepares for its triennial congress next year, there does not seem to be any discussion on these lines. Instead, there is a near vertical split on the farcical question of whether or not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is fascist, which can then be used to stitch together an alliance with the Congress in West Bengal. The CPM lost the primary opposition status to the Congress after allying with it in the 2016 assembly election.

In 1996, the CPM did not allow Jyoti Basu to become the prime minister of India. Basu termed it a historic blunder. Recently, the CPM did not allow its general secretary, Sitaram Yechury, to get re-elected to the Rajya Sabha from West Bengal on Congress support. Many have termed this a second historic blunder. The CPM won two assembly elections in West Bengal after Basu was not allowed to become prime minister. It has been continuously losing ground in the state since 2008, despite Yechury being in the Rajya Sabha all this while. None of these had any impact on the party’s mass support in its strongest bastion.

Not many people talk about the real historic blunder, though. The person who told Hobsbawm about the left’s imminent debacle a year before the 2011 West Bengal assembly election was Prakash Karat, then general secretary of the party. That he and the entire national leadership of the party could not act in time to salvage the situation created by the West Bengal leadership is the ultimate sin in the history of the Left’s engagement with democracy in India.

Roshan Kishore is a data journalist with Mint.

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22. THE RISE OF INTOLERANCE IN SRI LANKA - MUSLIMS AND UPCOUNTRY TAMILS HAVE DIFFERENT PROBLEMS | Kumar David
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(The Island - November 4, 2017)

A Cost Moor of UNP-ITAK-LDP-ACIUF-Independent vintage, gets a leg up in 2009

Capable of better achievements outside the plantations

Here is a correspondence that is worth a wider readership than the few who have accessed it so far; for obvious reasons I do not give real names. The storyline goes like this. I was involved in a rather quarrelsome exchange with a friend of Engineering Faculty days who was a leftist; let’s call him/her Ratne. The issue of dispute was anti-Rohingya genocide against Muslims in Burma’s Rakine state. I was harshly critical of Burman Buddhists, the army, and I have not spared Aung San Suu Ki either. Such critiques are standard fare in political circles. Ratne, no longer a leftist, retorted with a bout of ‘whataboutism’; what about the Christians, what about the British etc.

I then raised the matter with a few friends and one of them, Gamma, was alarmed about possible outbreaks against upcountry Tamils and a wider e-mail discussion followed. The next item is how I initiated the wider circulation and includes an extract of Gamma’s concerns. Then I reproduce the two principal responses.

My general e-mail including a quote from Gamma

From: Kumar David
Sent: Friday, 13 October 2017
To: Several leftists and liberals
Subject: Is this a credible scenario?

Dear Friends and Comrades,

I received the e-mail quoted below from a politically alert friend. The context is the Army cum Buddhist assault on Rohingiya Muslims. What Gamma is asking, at rock bottom, I think is: "Will there be a similar perhaps JO led movement directed against Tamils in the plantations?" Presumably in addition to continuing BBS instigated, widely encouraged, anti-Muslim campaigns.

His reference to "another" in the first line in the quote refers to Burma - shameful support given to Burman anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing by a former the EFac leftist who is now a Buddhist extremist and corresponds with me supporting ethnic cleansing in Rakhine Province. He borrows anti-Muslim and anti-Christian parallels from the BBS. ("What about the Christians?" "What about colonial times?").

The question I am asking is this: "Is it credible that the JO, BBS or other extremists may resort to anti plantation worker race-baiting rhetoric in SL?" I hope not; but what do you think?

kd

An extract from Gamma follows.

QUOTE

"Dear Prof.

"What are the lessons for us, another "Buddhist country"? Will a similar situation arise in the plantation sector (now pronounced dead) with devolution of power?

"I see this as a strong possibility from what is happening in the tea industry. Small-holders outperform the big plantations which are loss making according to some. I know personally small-holders thrive. Big plantations have a few exceptions, where productivity is high and labourers get paid double. That’s a grouse of the extremists.

"I feel this picture is a prelude to taking back the plantations and redistributing to the villagers. It will be a popular slogan and serve chauvinist political forces nicely

Gama"

END QUOTE

Responses

Two of the responses I received are worth sharing. They are analytical and predictive. On the whole the responses were not symphonic; they are what I call creative cacophony, in counterpoint, in varied keys. Here are the two important ones.

Response 1 from Velkhu

"Kumar,

"In the plantations, the historic practices cannot continue anymore. Furthermore, they have connected with the external world.

"Now, there is a demand for land, education and housing. Already young people from the plantations are leaving the estates in droves and moving into urban areas searching for different kinds of jobs. They are not content with what the plantations have to offer. 

"And, they are not willing to accept the old CWC leadership. The weakening of the CWC has created several political formations. Competition among this new breed of politicians is bound to sharpen and their presence will be felt in the national polity.  They will be looking to use their clout through existing institutions to get more resources into their areas in order to improve condition in their base and ameliorate poverty. 

"The world is also watching these historic inequities and encouraging the government to address them. More than anything else the government of India will not be a passive bystander. You remember in 1977 after Sinhala mobs attacked the plantations, India without even the courtesy of informing the Sri Lankan government, very publicly sent an envoy from Delhi in the guise of fact finding. Jayewardene could not do anything about it. Nowadays India is fairly active in the plantation sector. Modi made a special visit there underlying India’s special interest.

"Yes, there is some Hindutva activity in the plantations. This is by RSS type organisations against the Christians who are proselytizing the uneducated and poor among plantation workers. I believe, presently, such groups are working closely with organisations like the BBS. 

"But as you say, when plantation workers are empowered and they take over Provincial Councils people will take notice. Further, when land is redistributed and houses are built for the plantation workers, Sinhala politicians can whip up the usual racist frenzy. I believe this is unlikely but not impossible. People have to be vigilant about such movements. Right now, the Rajapaksas are trying to mobilise a Sinhala Buddhist coalition using SAITM, land issues involving Hambantota Port and Airport etc. Spearheading anti Tamil and anti Muslim activities is unlikely to help them to power. Namal, without experience, may lead such activities, but they are vote losers; shouldn’t they have learnt their lessons by now?

"My conclusion is that it is possible that people like Namal in desperation, may try this route to power mobilising the disgruntled Sinhala poor. But they are aware of the forces arraigned against them. More than anything else, such moves will get serious responses from India and the international community. 

But ultimately, it is a vote loser.

Velkhu"

End of first response

Response 2 from: Jayasoma  

"Kumar

"My own sense of racially/religiously motivated extremism and violence in Sri Lanka, is that it is rooted in fear. And this fear is usually based on a sense of being marginalised or dispossessed.

 "A century ago, the antipathy towards the Coast Moors from India which led to the anti-Muslim riots of 1915, was based on the fear that they were exploiting the rural Sinhalese poor as well as eclipsing the nascent Pettah Sinhala trading class.

 "Similarly, the campaign against the in-migration of Tamil plantation workers and urban (Tamil and Malayalee) workers in the first quarter of the twentieth century was the result of a fear. A fear that was fanned both by Goonasinha at one end of the political spectrum, and Bandaranaike and Jayewardene at the other end. The fear that the livelihood of the Kandyan peasantry, the urban Sinhala worker and the Pettah Sinhala trading class would be affected by Tamil plantation workers, Malayalee urban and white-collar workers and Indian Chettiar and Nadar traders. The Citizenship Laws and the expulsion of TRP-holders in the 60s were seen to rectify this.

 "The post-1956 SLFP changes in language and university admission policies were aimed at the perceived disadvantage that the Sinhala middle class believed they were at vis-a-vis the English-speaking Burghers, Tamils and Christians. Victory in the Civil War and consolidation of a bipartisan Sinhala-Buddhist-first policy has addressed this perceived disadvantage.

  "Therefore, perceptions among the majority have changed over time. For example, between 1960 and 2010 the perception of Ceylon Tamils in the eyes of the south changed from a privileged professional westernised class (a threat) to a marginalised dispossessed community (no longer a threat). With the north and its people needing the assistance of the state and the south to get by.

 "As the perception of Ceylon Tamils, plantation Tamils, Burghers and Christians changed, so did the perception of the Moors. During the Civil War it was vital for the state to keep them onside for two reasons. First, they did not want a war on two fronts, second they needed Tamil-speaking Moors to man military intelligence and to win the war. (Lalith Athulathmudali told me in 1988 that he was using Moor teachers to provide Tamil language training to the military.)

 ‘The south had been made to believe that economic belt tightening was critical in order to win the war and that prosperity would follow on the morrow of victory. When this did not happen, and shows no sign of happening a decade later, it was necessary to create a new bogey, the Moors. The visible prosperity of Moors, who have always been a trading community, has made them a scapegoat for the perceived continuing economic disadvantage suffered by Sinhalese. This is now augmented with propaganda that the Sinhalese will be demographically swamped (this time by the Moors not by the Tamils of India and Ceylon), that they are receiving unfair aid from the Gulf, that Buddhists are being converted etc.

 "The plantation Tamils, the westernised Christians, the northern Tamils are spent bogeys. So, to answer your question: Unless there is a complete change in perceptions I cannot see the foregoing communities being a major target of antagonism. So, I do not expect the JO or the BBS to turn against the plantation workers of Indian origin.

  "On the other hand, the issue with the Moors, short of a miracle, is where the real problem lies. As you observe, your own Sinhala friends are expressing this. They are pointing to Burma as the parallel for understanding and legitimising what is happening in Sri Lanka.

Jayasoma"

End of second response.

Issues have been starkly posed and the best thing that I (KD) and do is to leave it that except add that though it is comfort that the upcountry Tamils may be spared, the anti-Islamism peril is alarming. I know many who unabashedly say to me "I don’t mind (sic!) Tamils and Christians, but I hate (exact word) the hambayas".

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23. PUTIN’S RUSSIA: REVOLUTION, WHAT REVOLUTION? | Anastasia Edel
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(NYR Daily / The New York Review of Books)

Yuri Maltsev/Reuters A woman holding a placard that reads, “Stalin is our father, homeland is our mother, Soviet power is our sister and our friend,” at a rally to mark the Russian Revolution’s centenary, Vladivostok, Russia, November 7, 2017

Imagine France canceling Bastille Day. Or America demoting the Fourth of July and celebrating British monarchs instead. That sounds fantastical, even in our “post-truth” West. Yet in Russia, this is how Vladimir Putin is trying to refashion the country’s history. The leader who once lamented the dissolution of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” deems the October Revolution itself, the USSR’s foundational event, no cause for celebration. Today, November 7, the official birthday of the USSR, is no longer part of Russia’s holiday canon.

National holidays tell a story of a nation. Every Soviet person born before 1985—more than half of Russia’s population of 144 million people—knew that on November 7 (in the old, Julian calendar, October 25) an armed insurrection led by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party overthrew the “bourgeois” Provisional Government and transferred power to the Soviets in the name of the people. On that date, we were told, the “bloody tyranny” of the tsars had fallen, and the clock of world history had been reset to zero. We, the Soviet people, were the beneficiaries of mankind’s century-long quest for freedom, justice, and communion.

This major event required major celebration. For some three generations, the “October Holidays” were one of the three pillars around which the country’s collective life revolved, followed by the New Year and May Day holidays. November 7, “The Red Day of the Calendar,” meant two days off work or school, a mass demonstration of labor collectives, streets closed to traffic, military bands, red balloons tied to everything from rocket carriers to strollers, carnations, giant portraits of party leaders on wheels. There were floats shaped as the revolutionary cruiser Aurora, which had fired upon the Winter Palace to signal the start of the insurrection, and as the steam train that brought Lenin to Petrograd in April 1917.

A mass demonstration of solidarity was an essential part of the ritual. Women carried flowers. Men struggled under the weight of heavy banners proclaiming, “Long Live Proletarian Revolution!” and “The Communist Party is the Brain, Honor, and Consciousness of Our Epoch.” Somewhere, a megaphone blasted, “Greetings to the laborers of the First of May District!” “Long live our Soviet youth, the loyal followers of the Lenin’s cause!” Endless hurrahs rolled through the crowd, intensifying as you approached the raised platforms holding city officials, and organizers urged, “Louder, louder.” Your mother held your hand, and a lucky boy ahead waived at the onlookers from his father’s shoulders. Two hours later, you’d be dressed in your best clothes at the festive table that was piled with food typically unavailable the rest of the year, listening to adult jokes while champagne bottles were uncorked with pops as loud as Aurora’s salvos. “To the Holiday!”

Then came perestroika and glasnost. Things started to shift. The people’s triumph over the bourgeoisie and capitalism, it turned out, had come at a steep price. Every newspaper article about the gulag, every documentary about a demolished church, every novel by a previously banned writer, chipped away at our collective understanding of Soviet history and of ourselves. Idol after idol in our proletarian pantheon came crashing down. Lenin, the man “more alive than all the living,” held out longer, but in the end, he fell, too. Nothing built on a lie, they say, ends well.

What to do with a foundational holiday when the foundation is gone? Do you continue to celebrate a day that signaled terror campaigns against your compatriots? But if you scrap the celebrations altogether, does that mean that your grandparents made their sacrifices for nothing? In the final years of the USSR, as people sat at festive tables laid with the same foods they now had to buy at astronomic prices, part of the economic “shock therapy” supposedly paving the way to capitalist bounty, an era of confusion settled in. When the USSR finally collapsed over the summer of 1991 and the Communist Party was banned, the official celebrations of the Revolution ceased. Some still flocked to city squares with red flags they’d procured on their own.

In 1992, nearly a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, “October holidays” became “The October Holiday,” with only November 7 celebrated. Later, a federal law enacted by President Boris Yeltsin designated that date as “The Day of the October Revolution of 1917,” dropping “great” and “socialist” from the former definition. In this new age of privatization, little was great and nothing was socialist.

The 1990s was, at least, a time of open and honest debate about the past, uncovering parts of our common history that had been buried under layers of propaganda. Everything was questioned—on TV, in the newspapers, in the classrooms, at the tram stations. Was the October Revolution a mass uprising or a coup? Who were the Whites, those villains of the old revolutionary movies? Did Lenin really choose Stalin as his successor? Even our current leaders we could discuss—openly, not in a whisper. We could laugh at them, too: a political satire titled Dolls commanded TV audiences in the millions. For all the economic chaos, Yeltsin’s were years of freedom.  

In 1996, November 7 changed once more, becoming “The Day of Accord and Reconciliation.” The following year, President Yeltsin, himself a former Communist Party official, called for atonement and forgiveness during the overdue burial of Tsar Nicholas and his family (they’d been murdered in 1918, just two months before “The Day of the Proletarian Revolution” was instituted).  

Then, in 2000, came President Putin. Of the many changes that Russians, longing for prosperity, chose not to notice was that in 2004 Putin abolished “The Day of National Accord and Reconciliation” and replaced it with “National Unity Day,” on November 4. Dolls was already off the air by then. Surreptitiously, and with little adverse reaction, Russia was ridding itself of its historic legacy.

The choice of November 4 was not random. The new holiday is tied to an episode of seventeenth-century Russian history that signified the end of the Times of Trouble, a fifteen-year period of political crises, famines, and foreign interventions that followed the demise of the Rurik dynasty in 1598. In early November 1612, a volunteer army chased Polish-Lithuanian occupiers out of Moscow. Three months later, a new tsar was appointed. It was then, said Patriarch Alexei in 2004, that the “Russian citizens of many confessions and nationalities overcame division, a powerful enemy and led the country to the stable civil peace.” Also, according to the Orthodox Church canon, November 4 had been celebrated before the Revolution as “The Day of the Kazan Icon of the Most Holy Theotokos,” with special liturgies and religious processions.

In promoting this little-known episode of the distant past as a major national holiday, the now perpetual President Putin has a clear purpose: to legitimize his right to rule. Merging an anniversary of tsarist restoration with an old religious holiday sends the message that his is the sacred power of an anointed autocrat. Russia is no longer a country forged in the crucible of revolution; it is the land of the tsars and the Orthodox Church. Straightforward historical parallels are drawn: the Times of Trouble are the Yeltsin years, the “evil Nineties,” as the state media now routinely referred to them; the heroic “people’s army of all confessions” are modern-day Russians longing for order after chaos; the savior tsar is Vladimir Putin.

All of this would be laughable, an absurdity in the style of the satirical writers of Dolls, had it not been for one thing: it worked. Having lived through the collapse of two ideologies, tsarist and communist, Russia has been a post-truth society for decades. In such a society, as long as there is an explanation, no matter how far-fetched, people will believe it. The majority of Russians, weary of official holidays, shrugged and accepted the new “National Unity Day” as an opportunity to enjoy their long-sanctioned toasts a few days earlier. People could afford to be cynical in an economy awash with petro-dollars.

This year, however, has presented a new challenge—the centenary of an event so fanatically celebrated for most of the twentieth century is hard to ignore completely. So President Putin urged Russians not to “politicize” the Revolution. “It is not allowed,” he said, “to speculate on tragedies that touched every family in Russia, for political interests.” Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, urged respect for urged respect for “heroes on both sides.” Sergey Naryshkin, a close friend of President Putin and the director of the newly-created Russian Historical Society, which was charged with organizing commemorative events, concurred. “Let us remember justly and dispassionately the victors and the victims, each of which had their own truth.”

Justice is a wishful concept in evaluating events with millions of victims, especially at a moment when Stalin, their executioner, is touted once more as a “great leader.” Yet Russia is no stranger to “Potemkin villages,” where colorful facades skillfully cover an absence of real structures. Just as the Kremlin pretends that Russia’s politics involve free elections and that its economy boasts a bustling manufacturing sector, it pretends to commemorate the Revolution.

Anton Vaganov/ReutersFireworks exploding over the Aurora cruiser, which fired the first shot of the Russian Revolution, during celebrations for the Revolution’s centenary, St. Petersburg, Russia, November 4, 2017

An imitation can only work if there is some truth mixed in. In the centenary commemorations, there is no want of period details. At the Central Museum of Modern History, formerly the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow, a hunter for historical curios can marvel at a porthole from the Aurora or at the rifles that dispatched the tsar and his family in 1918. The “Energy of the Dream” exhibition at the Museum of State History celebrates the development of hygiene among peasants and workers, with the slogans “Don’t Spit on the Floor” and “Fight Flies.” There was not much energy at the press conference for the opening.  

In St. Petersburg, commemorations include a digital extravaganza titled “The Storming of the Winter Palace” and army ensembles dancing in front of the Aurora. “Don’t take things too seriously,” advises a member of the St. Petersburg celebration committee. “Revolution can be a tourist brand of sorts.”

Alongside this effort to rebrand the Revolution, the symbols of the ancien régime that the proletarian radicals once fought against have been craftily revived. Back in 2014, the four-hundred-year anniversary of the Romanov dynasty was celebrated with lavish exhibitions, TV documentaries, and an imperial ball at the Kremlin. School history books have been revised to recast Romanov rule in positive terms: Peter the Great as a noble reformer, Catherine the Great as an enlightened empress, Alexander III as a fierce fighter against domestic terrorism, and Nicholas II as a martyr of the “revolutionary plague.” Such drastic reversals of historical narrative in a country that spent most of the twentieth century demonizing its former imperial rulers as “bloody tyrants” was bound to scramble ideological circuits for some.

For a good part of 2017, the anemic national discourse about the Revolution was dominated by the controversy surrounding the movie Matilda, a historical blockbuster about a love affair between Nicholas II and the ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya. Scheduled for release a fortnight before the revolutionary anniversary, and sponsored in part by the Ministry of Culture, the movie became the object of a crusade by Natalia Poklonskaya, a deputy of the Russian Duma from the recently annexed Crimea. A former criminal prosecutor, Poklonskaya saw blasphemy in assigning “dirty passions” to the “holy martyr” Nicholas, who was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. She urged her constituents to join in the fight. When she wasn’t delivering impassioned speeches in the Duma, she collected petitions to ban the movie.

Movie theater owners received death threats. In September, two cars belonging to the firm representing the movie were set on fire in Moscow. In St. Petersburg, “the cradle of the Revolution,” thousands joined a religious procession formally dedicated to the transfer of the holy relics of Alexander Nevsky, a medieval Russian prince, and turned it into a demonstration against Matilda. The banners people carried had an uncanny Soviet ring: “The Honor of the Sovereign is the Honor of the People!” Instead of Communist Party symbols, there were icons and portraits of Nicholas.

Poklonskaya is hardly a product of the Soviet Union. She was eleven when the USSR collapsed; her values are truly post-Soviet, with an emphasis on religion and respect for autocracy. Earlier this year, she proclaimed the miracle of Nicholas’s statue weeping tears of myrrh in Crimea. “This is how the sovereign,” said Poklonskaya, “guards his country a hundred years after the Revolution. He died for us, and for Russia to be stronger.”

Framed like this, the spiritual superiority of the Russian people, tirelessly invoked as a counterweight to the “godless and corrupt” liberal West, reeks of obscurantism stoked to support the imperial revival. The religious renaissance of the 1990s has been hijacked in the service of swapping one authoritarian ideology for another. Out went the relics of communism, with its mass demonstrations and portraits of Lenin; in came the relics of the Orthodox Church, with its miracles and icons. In the new lyrics of the national anthem, still sung to the old Soviet tune, “The unbreakable union of free republics” becomes “Russia, our sacred dominion.” President Putin, who once served in the KGB, the Soviet organization tasked with surveillance of churches and religious leaders, stands next to the Patriarch for Christmas and Easter services, as the tsars of old did.

Nationalism rooted in religious concepts is not new for Russia. Nearly two centuries ago, Nicolas I responded to the European revolutions with a domestic triad of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” That reactionary ideology helped to make tsarist Russia “the prison house of nations,” as the Russian empire was known. Nicholas’s conservative mantra was the state’s official ideology until 1917, when the February Revolution dispensed with it, along with the autocracy. After the October Revolution, the nations of the former empire gained, at least in theory, the right to self-determination. Not surprisingly, every nation wanted to separate from the old dominion. In that brief window of opportunity during the Revolution’s early days and before communism restored Moscow’s iron rule, a few of the former imperial provinces—Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states—succeeded in gaining independence.

In the twenty-first century, Vladimir Putin has singled out Lenin’s original policy of granting nations self-determination as “an atomic bomb” planted under the USSR. Adopting a new patriotism that extols Russia’s “unique path,” Putin often echoes the ideas of Alexander Dugin, the notorious leader of the so-called Eurasian movement, which sees Russia as the head of a great empire founded on ultra-conservative values and Orthodox Christianity.

But world history cannot be changed by fiat. Whether Putin likes it or not, November 7, the day of Lenin’s revolution, will remain a major day in history marking a moment when the world was made anew. That moment expressed the hope of bringing justice and freedom to “the hungry and the slaves,” and challenging “the power of capital.” It also brought about totalitarianism, wars, campaigns of terror, prisons, famines, gulags. And it ultimately led to the cold war, casting a long shadow of potential nuclear annihilation.

Without confronting this tragic legacy, Russians can neither understand their revolutionary past, nor meaningfully commemorate it. The great sweeping of Russian history under the rug, this replacing of one set of lies with another, cannot work. It is only a matter of time before things blow up again.  

November 7, 2017

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24. RELIGION AND VIOLENCE IN MYANMAR: SITAGU SAYADAW’S CASE FOR MASS KILLING | Matthew J. Walton
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(Foreign Affairs,  November 6, 2017)

Since late August, more than 600,000 Rohingya have left Myanmar, fleeing a state-led campaign of violence against them. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority and predominantly live in Rakhine State, in Myanmar’s west. They have experienced persistent, institutionalized discrimination for years. (The members of the state’s Rakhine Buddhist majority believe that they, too, have been discriminated against, mostly by the central government.)

The most common explanation given for the persecution of the Rohingya revolves around their nationality. Government officials, media commentators, and religious leaders have claimed that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Ethnicity plays a role, as well. The government officially recognizes 135 indigenous ethnic groups, and Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution grants those groups certain rights. The Rohingya are not among them. More broadly, people in Myanmar insist that the Rohingya are not a real ethnic group because they worry about the unlikely possibility that the Rohingya will seek to secede, threatening the country's territorial sovereignty.

National identity in Myanmar has long been intertwined with Buddhist religious identity. But religion has had a particular effect in the case of the Rohingya. The so-called War on Terror—waged primarily against Muslims around the world—has made it easier for Myanmar’s elites to label the Rohingya as terrorists and for government officials to defend the violence against them as a legitimate response to extremism. The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s attacks on government targets in October 2016 and August 2017, meanwhile, have validated many citizens’ belief that Islam is inherently violent and poses an existential threat to Buddhism, Myanmar’s majority religion. It has also allowed political and religious elites to unfairly and inaccurately associate all Rohingya with terrorism. Thanks to anti-Muslim ideas spread through social media sites, the popular press, and the writings and sermons of influential laypeople and monks, Myanmar’s citizens have come to see the
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/burma-myanmar/2017-11-06/religion-and-violence-myanmar

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25. HOW COLONIAL VIOLENCE CAME HOME: THE UGLY TRUTH OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR | Pankaj Mishra
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The Great War is often depicted as an unexpected catastrophe. But for millions who had been living under imperialist rule, terror and degradation were nothing new. 
http://tinyurl.com/y84notc3

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26. CHINA'S BOOMING SHARING ECONOMY: WHY A BUST MAY BE NEAR | James Yan
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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2017-11-09/chinas-booming-sharing-economy?cid=int-lea&pgtype=hpg

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27. BEN SHEPHARD OBITUARY | Jörg Hensgen
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(The Guardian, 6 November 2017)
 
Historian who focused on the psychological effects of 20th-century warfare

Ben Shephard showed that although British intelligence knew that Belsen was in the grip of a typhus epidemic, the troops liberating the camp were ill-equipped and underprepared. Photograph: Sophie Baker

The historian and writer Ben Shephard, who has died aged 69 of cancer, had a lifelong interest in the psychological effects of war. His book A War of Nerves (2000) changed our understanding of military psychiatry and his work described entirely unsentimentally those who emerged from the wars of the 20th century uprooted, brutalised and traumatised, and who happened to receive only rudimentary, often flawed help in their efforts to rebuild their lives.

As Ben’s editor at The Bodley Head for the last 10 years, I was aware of how rarely he used the terms “victims” or “survivors”: he had little time for some of the recent, often emotive historical discussion that focused on these terms. In a lecture at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London before the book was published, Ben did not give a standard account, from first world war Blackadderish ignorance to current post traumatic stress disorder-led enlightenment. Rather, he made it clear that his heroes were to be found more during the course of the two world wars.

In the book, as well as in several other publications, Ben pointed to the conflict between “the tender and the tough”: between those medical practitioners who tried to understand the complex reasons for a soldier’s breakdown and those who wanted to get him fighting again quickly.

After Daybreak: the Liberation of Belsen, 1945 (2005) continued Ben’s investigation into efforts to assist and do justice to the survivors of war – both the successes and, more frequently, the failures. In his review for the Guardian, David Cesarani credited the book with asking “searching questions about the relief effort and the behaviour of the survivors. While never losing a tone of empathy he maintains a judicious distance from the subject matter and reaches awkward conclusions.”
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Ben showed that although British intelligence knew that the camp was in the grip of a typhus epidemic, the troops liberating Belsen were ill-equipped and underprepared, which meant that thousands more inmates died in the following weeks.

Similar to A War of Nerves in painting a huge canvas, The Long Road Home (2010) addressed the efforts of the international community to repatriate millions of “displaced persons” in Europe in the aftermath of the second world war. Again, Ben exposed the blunders while giving long overdue credit to those individuals whose actions made a difference. And again, the book served as a corrective to conventional wisdom, as Ben showed that the tragic consequences of the war were understood by the UN and other agencies not in terms of genocide but of the displacement of millions of people deprived of their homes.

A War of Nerves, 2000, by Ben Shephard, changed our understanding of military psychiatry

Headhunters: The Search for a Science of the Mind (2014) seemed in some ways a departure. Composed as a group biography, it traced the intellectual journey of four men – William Rivers, Grafton Elliot Smith, Charles Myers and William McDougall – whose work from the 1890s shaped the emerging discipline of neuroscience. Yet it also returned to Ben’s favourite subject, for what connected the four men, and shaped their thoughts and careers, was their treatment of shell-shocked soldiers in the first world war.

Despite the near-universal praise it received from reviewers, however, the book failed to become the success that both Ben and I had hoped for. Typically, he had focused both on the progress and some of the wrong turns of the fledgling discipline, which meant that many of his protagonists’ big ideas had not stood the test of time. “I suppose people don’t want to read about losers,” was his typically blasé explanation of the book’s performance.

At the time of his death, he was writing a book on the RAF in 1940, from disaster in the Battle of France to the miracle of the Battle of Britain. Ben had embraced the project with his usual diligence and enthusiasm, and we talked regularly about his progress and the highs and lows of research. “I spent a whole week in the Public Record Office at Kew: it’s given me half a page,” he told me earlier in the year. No doubt the book would have challenged prevailing wisdom about the RAF’s successes and failures and again ruffled a few feathers.

Born in Guildford, Surrey, Ben was the son of an artist, Rupert Shephard, and his wife, Lorna (nee Wilmott). In the year of his birth, the family moved to South Africa, where his father was director of the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

Ben grew up revelling in the physical freedoms of the landscape and loved to climb Table Mountain. In 1961 the family returned to Britain, where his mother died soon after. Ben found solace in excelling at sport and pursuing his passion for film with endless solitary visits to the cinema. He attended Westminster school and gained a history degree from Oxford, where he was the film critic for the student magazine Isis.

In 1971 Ben joined the production team making the TV series The World at War, under Jeremy Isaacs. A 26-episode chronicle of the second world war, it was shown on ITV in 1973-74. Fifty people worked on the series for three years, and, Isaacs recalled: “Ben, a quiet man, stood out.” When asked to produce, at short notice, the episode on the allied campaign in Italy, “he achieved more with less fuss than a clutch of others”.

Ben later joined BBC television and made several films for the music and arts department. It was at the BBC that he met Sue Boyd, a producer in general features; they were married in 1977. They shared many passions: for films, art, architecture, music, books, walking and exploring both cities and the countryside. When Sue joined Channel 4 as a commissioning editor, it enabled Ben to concentrate on being a full-time writer. By the time A War of Nerves was published, Ben, Sue and their two children had moved to Bristol, where Sue also became a non-fiction writer and the two companionably researched and “scribbled away” in a large, cold house.

Friends remember Ben as a superb companion, combining intelligence, erudition and a vast knowledge of 20th-century history with humour, honesty and academic and media gossip. He was in great demand as a speaker. As the psychiatrist Simon Wessely recalled, “He loved nothing better than finding a conventional windmill, and then ensuring that he didn’t just tilt it, but knocked it off its perch and into the sand.”

Ben is survived by Sue, their children, Louisa and Joe, and grandchildren, Carrie, Toby and Jack.

• James Benedict Lister Shephard, historian, born 26 July 1948; died 25 October 2017



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