SACW - 21 Nov 2017 | Sri Lanka: labour movement / Pakistan: Capital under siege / Myanmar: ethnic conflict / India: Mobs throttle free expression; Kashmir's history / USSR: Svetlana Alexievich’s Wars

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 21 Nov 2017 - No. 2963 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. What happened to the labour movement in Sri Lanka ? | B Skanthakumar
2. India - Culture: Vigilante mobs decide over what films get shown in the cinema
3. India: Faking history starts online | Manimugdha S Sharma
4. India: Judge To Worker - The Spread Of Sexual Harassment In India | Namita Bhandare
5. India: Interview with Colin Gonsalves, distinguished lawyer, winner of 2017 Right Livelihood Award | Jyoti Punwani
6. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - India: Row over the film Padmavati - A tweet by Ramachandra Guha
 - Tipu Sultan: Diverse Narratives | Ram Puniyani
 - India: Directive by the Rajasthan Minister for Primary & Secondary Education to send school students to attend a 5 day ‘Hindu Spiritual and Service Fair’ in Jaipur
 - Disturbing story on the mysterious death of the judge who was presiding over Sohrabuddin trial | The Caravan
 - India - Shouldnt the Police take action when there is incitement to violence: Haryana BJP' media coordinator Suraj Pal Amu's announces award for beheading lead actress and director of the film Padmavati
 - India: Ayodhya dispute - Supremacy of Constitution or faith? | Irfan Engineer
 - India: Hindu mahasabha sets up a temple in Gwalior for Gandhi's assassin
 - India: In the quarter of a century since the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Hindu communal prejudices have acquired greater legitimacy
 - India: A tweet regarding caste or religion in circular from Kerala govt schools
 - India: Civil society activists file complaint against ominous markings on Muslim homes in Gujarat
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Pakistan: The capital under siege | Zahid Hussain
8. Pakistan: Right-wing threat - Editorial in Dawn
9. Pakistani Cleric’s Supporters Block an Entrance to Islamabad | Salman Masood
10. Pakistan: Barelvis’ political agenda | Abdul Sattar
11. Taliban makes a comeback in Pakistan’s tribal areas | Sanya Dhingra
12. On Nepali coal migrants of Meghalaya | Kanak Mani Dixit
13. Long history of ethnic conflict in Myanmar | Yola Verbruggen
14. India: Towards a Hindu Pakistan? Sadanand Dhume
15. India: Hurdles to freedom are sprouting in every field in India - Editorial, The Telegraph
16. Autonomy matters - Most Indians are ignorant of Kashmir's history | Manini Chatterjee
17. India: The only thing that can protect a writer’s freedom is you, the reader | Perumal Murugan
18. A super elite club of lawyers dominates India’s justice system. How long will it rule? | Shubhankar Dam
19. India - Pakistan: Geopolitical Problem of Water War | H S Mangat 
20. What If the Russian Revolution Had Never Happened? | Simon Sebag Montefiore
21. In Yerevan | Daniel Trilling
22. I Knew Somebody Would Come: Svetlana Alexievich’s Wars | Paul Delany

========================================
1. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN SRI LANKA ? | B Skanthakumar
========================================
In stark contrast to its current disarray, Sri Lanka’s labour movement was once influential. One of Asia’s first trade unions was formed by printers in Colombo in 1893 in the teeth of opposition from the British colonial administration and European-owned business interests.
http://www.sacw.net/article13573.html

========================================
2. INDIA - CULTURE: VIGILANTE MOBS DECIDE OVER WHAT FILMS GET SHOWN IN THE CINEMA
========================================
Today there are many senas who have declared themselves protectors of Indian culture. The film Padmavati is seen to be injurious to Rajput pride, but what about the pride we Indians take in our rich tradition of movie-making? The Karni Sena is offended by any suggestion of carnal lust but the Karnis are positively carni-vorous when it comes to violence.
http://www.sacw.net/article13571.html

========================================
3. INDIA: FAKING HISTORY STARTS ONLINE | Manimugdha S Sharma
========================================
A social media corps looks to win ancient battles with hearsay, hoaxes and pure fantasy
http://www.sacw.net/article13570.html

========================================
4. INDIA: JUDGE TO WORKER - THE SPREAD OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN INDIA | Namita Bhandare
========================================
On paper, the law against sexual harassment is supposed to protect all women in jobs, even those in the unorganised sector. But on the ground, reality is very different.
http://www.sacw.net/article13572.html

========================================
5. INDIA: INTERVIEW WITH COLIN GONSALVES, DISTINGUISHED LAWYER, WINNER OF 2017 RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARD | Jyoti Punwani
========================================
The distinguished lawyer spoke to Jyoti Punwani about his journey from IIT Bombay to fighting for the wretched of the earth in the apex court.
http://www.sacw.net/article13568.html

========================================
6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - India: Row over the film Padmavati - A tweet by Ramachandra Guha
 - Tipu Sultan: Diverse Narratives | Ram Puniyani
 - India: Directive by the Rajasthan Minister for Primary & Secondary Education to send school students to attend a 5 day ‘Hindu Spiritual and Service Fair’ in Jaipur
 - Disturbing story on the mysterious death of the judge who was presiding over Sohrabuddin trial | The Caravan
 - Hindi Article on Tipu Sultan
 - India: Padmavati Row - An Open Letter from Shurpanakha to the Karni Sena and Men Sharpening Knives Everywhere | Nisha Susan
 - India: Shouldnt the Police take action when there is incitement to violence - Haryana BJP' media coordinator Suraj Pal Amu's announces award for beheading lead actress and director of the film Padmavati
 - India - under the Hindutva Right: Delhi's well known Dyal Singh College (Evening) renamed Vande Mataram Mahavidyalaya
 - India: Ayodhya dispute - Supremacy of Constitution or faith? | Irfan Engineer
 - India: The film Padmavati should not be allowed to become a victim to violent vigilantes - Editorial in The Hindu
 - India: Due to Pressure from Akhil Bhartiya Brahmin Mahasabha Pune cinema cancels screening of award-winning movie 'Dashakriya'
 - India: Row over the film Padmavati ... people who threaten violence and to burn theatres, . are patronised by leaders of the BJP
 - India: According to Nirmohi Akhara, Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) Has 'Embezzled' Rs 1,400 crore in the name of the Ayodhya temple
 - India: Hindu mahasabha sets up a temple in Gwalior for Gandhi's assassin
 - India: In the quarter of a century since the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Hindu communal prejudices have acquired greater legitimacy
 - India: A tweet regarding caste or religion in circular from Kerala govt schools
 - India: Civil society activists file complaint against ominous markings on Muslim homes in Gujarat
 
-> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

========================================
7. PAKISTAN: THE CAPITAL UNDER SIEGE | Zahid Hussain
========================================
(Dawn, November 15, 2017)
   
The writer is an author and journalist.

FOR the past one week, Islamabad has been virtually under siege with the followers of a radical cleric blocking the expressway connecting the city to the airport. The administration’s move to enclose the Red Zone with containers has added to the chaos.

While the clerics blast the civil and military leadership with their highly inflammable harangue, inciting their supporters to violence, there is no sign of the government moving against them. Seldom has one witnessed such a state of inertia with the security agencies unable to act against even a small group of zealots paralysing the seat of government.

It is a case of a matter being blown out of proportion and used by the extremist clerics to whip up religious sentiments. It is all about an oversight, missing a clause in the Election Act related to the finality of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) in an oath that was turned into a religious and political controversy. Although the omission was immediately rectified, it has failed to satisfy some radical clerics.

It is mainly the weakness of the administration and an increasingly divided state authority that has given these zealots complete impunity. The demand that includes the resignation of the law minister is certainly not acceptable. Although the hard-line clerics have failed to draw any significant public support on the issue, some vested political interests have joined in to keep the matter alive.

    Why are those who preach hate allowed to participate in electoral politics?

However small the number of those laying siege to the capital, the episode is a manifestation of a more serious problem related to the rise of a new and more radical Barelvi sectarian movement that publicly espouses violence in the name of its narrow view of religion. The siege has coincided with the emergence of a new political outfit, by the name of Tehreek Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah, or TLY, whose members are spearheading the protest.

Led by a firebrand cleric, Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who is notorious for his vitriolic sermons, the TLY announced its appearance in the electoral politics by putting up candidates in the recently held National Assembly by-elections in Lahore and Peshawar. In both constituencies, TLY candidates received a significant number of votes, eating into the support base of old mainstream religious political parties like the Jamaat-i-Islami.

What is more worrisome is that its entire campaign revolves around the glorification of Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. In fact, the group has gained momentum after Qadri’s execution. The group that represents a new Barelvi militancy is now planning to go into the 2018 general elections using the highly sensitive blasphemy issue to mobilise votes. The Islamabad sit-in seems to be a part of its election campaign.

A major question is how these preachers of hate are allowed to participate in electoral politics in violation of the country’s laws. It is likely to stoke the fires of violent sectarian extremism, threatening the democratic political process in the country. Not surprisingly, the Islamabad siege and the arrival of the TLY on the electoral scene have triggered a host of conspiracy theories about its backers.

Many in the ruling party smell a conspiracy to destabilise the government. There is, however, no substance to these wild theories imagining a ‘hidden hand’ behind everything. What is missing in the whole discourse is the stark failure of the state to contain the spread of religious extremism in the country. The National Action Plan has long been dead and buried, providing complete freedom to parties like the TLY to operate and hatemongering clerics to preach violence from the pulpit.

While the security agencies have been quick to take action against some bloggers espousing secular views and branded them ‘traitors’ for questioning the establishment’s policies, no action is being taken against clerics like Rizvi who publicly instigate violence against the civil and military leadership. Their vitriolic speeches are freely posted on social media.

Now the monster is coming back to haunt us. Last year, the same group had occupied Islamabad’s D Chowk for several days threatening to storm key government installations. The stand-off was defused through negotiations and with a promise not to take any action against the clerics. That further emboldened the group.

It is quite intriguing that the march that started from Lahore was allowed to enter Islamabad this time too. Instead of stopping the protesters on the way, the administration is playing ostrich and enclosing part of the city with containers. That has become a common practice of the Islamabad administration while dealing with such protest marches.

It is apparent that the country’s civil and military leadership has never taken counter-extremism policies seriously. That may be either out of political expediency or a fear of backlash or both. It may be true that the situation is not yet completely out of control, but continuing with the current state of inaction could create a very dangerous situation and reverse the gains made in the battle against terrorism.

The siege of Islamabad and the induction of the TLY into electoral politics are ominous developments. Not only will they add fuel to violent sectarian extremism, they will also cause the space for moderate Islamic parties to shrink. The results of the NA-120 and NA-4 by-elections showed a marked rise in electoral support for TLY candidates though at the expense of right-wing parties.

Its participation would cast a huge shadow over the elections, particularly in Punjab that has been the stronghold of sectarian-based politics — not a good omen for democratic politics in the country. The present political uncertainty and the worsening tension between the civil and military leaderships provide a favourable atmosphere for the extremist groups that have recently emerged on the political scene.

It is a tragic commentary on our state policy which gives such leeway to a group that glorifies a murderer and exhorts its supporters to follow his example. The siege of Islamabad gives some insight into the shape of things to come.

The writer is an author and journalist.

========================================
8. PAKISTAN: RIGHT-WING THREAT - EDITORIAL IN DAWN
========================================
(Dawn, November 12, 2017)

test near Islamabad by elements of the right wing, led by Tehreek-i-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah Pakistan and the Sunni Tehreek, has taken an ugly turn, with a potential for worse.

During their Friday sermon, clerics from the religious groups holding the demonstration threatened to attack the families of federal ministers if the government did not accede to their demands.

It is several days since the protest began, sparked ostensibly by the controversy surrounding the amendment to the Elections Act, 2017, an amendment swiftly reversed by parliament.

Among other demands, the protesters want Law Minister Zahid Hamid to resign for what they believe is his culpability in the short-lived change to the election law; Asiya Bibi executed; cases against religious leaders dismissed; and clerics removed from the Fourth Schedule.

The Punjab government is acting as an interlocutor between the protesters and the federal government. As always, those suffering the most from the sit-in at Faizabad interchange, the main artery linking Islamabad and Rawalpindi, are ordinary citizens trying to go about their daily lives.

There is never a time quite like the run-up to elections for groups with political aspirations to flex their muscles, and expand their space. September’s by-election in NA-120 saw the TLY-backed candidate win enough votes to come in third place behind the PML-N and PTI.

It was an electoral endorsement that has further emboldened an organisation that derives its inspiration from the man who murdered Salmaan Taseer — it is hardly surprising that violence, whether in the name of religion or otherwise, is its stock-in-trade.

For the clerics to threaten the families of those against whom they are directing their ire is a form of blackmail that is particularly detestable and should be denounced in the strongest terms. The democratic right to protest is not a licence to engage in hate speech or incite violence.

Moreover, the protesters’ demands are such that no government could possibly acquiesce to them; their very unreasonableness shows them for what they are, a naked attempt to browbeat authorities.

Although the government has been right to show restraint thus far, there must be a more concerted and skillful effort to engage with the protesters so that the increasing tension can dissipate. Any violence will work to the advantage of the right wing, and they know it.

Those taking part in the sit-in are spoiling for a fight. The government must not give in to them.

========================================
9. PAKISTANI CLERIC’S SUPPORTERS BLOCK AN ENTRANCE TO ISLAMABAD
by Salman Masood
========================================
(The New York Times, NOV. 12, 2017)

Pakistanis prayed in Islamabad on Friday during a protest to demand the removal of the country’s law minister. Credit B.K. Bangash/Associated Press

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Thousands of supporters of a firebrand Pakistani cleric, many armed with sticks and iron rods, have blocked a main entrance to Islamabad since last week, demanding the resignation of the country’s law minister and a strict adherence to blasphemy laws.

Led by Khadim Hussain Rizvi of the Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan party, at least 3,000 protesters were staging a sit-in on one of the main highways leading to the capital.

Officials say they suspect some of the protesters are carrying more serious weapons, and there is concern the standoff might turn violent. In response, the government has blocked several other roads to stop the protesters from moving to important government buildings.

Crippling, hourslong traffic jams have resulted. Long lines of vehicles could be seen for much of the past week and on Sunday on the roads leading to Islamabad from the suburbs and neighboring Rawalpindi. Several schools near the protest site remained closed. Shipping containers barricading the main streets are a ubiquitous sight.

“Hectic efforts and negotiations are on to resolve the issue,” said Kamran Cheema, the assistant commissioner of Islamabad.

But the leaders of the protesters remained defiant.

“We will lay our lives, but we will not step down from our demands,” Mr. Rizvi, the cleric, said from atop a stage set up on a cargo truck as his supporters chanted “Labaik Ya Rasool Allah, Labaik” (I am here, Prophet of God, I am here).

Photo
Members of a far-right political party used a row of buses to block a highway in Islamabad on Friday. Credit Caren Firouz/Reuters

The sit-in underscores the difficulties the government faces in dealing with right-wing extremist groups. The governing political party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, is already reeling from the fallout over the disqualification in July of its leader Nawaz Sharif, as prime minister, over a corruption investigation.

Any violent confrontation with hard-line clerics would further exacerbate a tumultuous political situation.

The latest controversy erupted last month, when the government introduced changes to electoral laws. A change in the wording of an oath for lawmakers that dealt with a declaration of Prophet Muhammad as God’s final prophet quickly set off a furor among opposition parties, especially the religious groups.

They protested that the change amounted to blasphemy.

Blasphemy is a particularly combustible issue in Pakistan, often leading to violent riots and vigilante justice. Critics and rights groups say the blasphemy laws are used to persecute religious minorities, especially the Ahmadis, who are considered non-Muslims, according to the country’s Constitution.

The government quickly reversed the change to the oath, but the damage had been done. It remains unclear what prompted the alteration of the electoral oath. Officials initially said the change had been the result of a “clerical error.”

The law minister, Zahid Hamid, is now in the center of the storm. Religious leaders have accused him of blasphemy and of being an Ahmadi. Mr. Hamid has denied both accusations, and in a video message last week, emphatically stated that he believed that Muhammad was God’s final prophet.

But the protesters are calling for Mr. Hamid to be fired — a demand unacceptable to the government.
Photo
Khadim Hussain Rizvi, the leader of the Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan party, leads members in shouting slogans during a sit-in in Rawalpindi on Friday. Credit Caren Firouz/Reuters

Mr. Rizvi, a virtual unknown few years ago, belongs to the Barelvi sect and has built his reputation as a staunch defender of the country’s blasphemy laws. In the process he has amassed considerable political muscle. His sermons are often laced with invectives and profanities aimed at religious minorities and opponents.

In September, Mr. Rizvi’s party entered the political fray and — to the surprise of many observers — won more than 7,000 votes, or 6 percent, in a by-election in Lahore, in eastern Pakistan, for the seat vacated by the ouster of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

The relatively strong showing seems to have further emboldened Mr. Rizvi, as he used the electoral oath controversy to charge toward the capital. The ease with which the protesters were able to gather near Islamabad has drawn attention.

“Any violence will work to the advantage of the right wing, and they know it,” Dawn, a leading newspaper, said in a Sunday editorial. “ The government must not give in to them.”

The protesters have threatened to lay siege to the airport in Islamabad, a railway station in Rawalpindi and several other government buildings if their demands are not met.

At least 10,000 law enforcement officers were poised to act if negotiations failed and protesters tried to take the law into their hands, officials said.

“The current situation cannot be tolerated endlessly,” Mr. Cheema warned.

A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2017, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Supporters Of Cleric In Pakistan Block Road. 

========================================
10. PAKISTAN: BARELVIS’ POLITICAL AGENDA | Abdul Sattar
========================================
(The News on Sunday, November 12, 2017)

The sit-ins in the capital by an extreme Barelvi group hint at the possibility of Barelvis trying to reclaim political space. Analysts believe this is being engineered to weaken the vote bank of PML-N

The specter of another sit-in haunted the federal capital again on November 8 and 9. But this time it was not the middle classes from posh areas but a Barelvi group called Tehreek Labaik Ya Rasool Allah that threw its blanket support behind Mumtaz Qadri. The group’s political wing Tehreek Labaik Pakistan stunned the world by securing more votes (7130) than the PPP and Jamaat-e Islami in Lahore’s NA-120 by polls besides making its presence felt by obtaining 9935 votes in the recently held by polls in Peshawar’s NA-4.

The group is known for employing incendiary language to muster political support. Its leaders have been accused of hurling abuses at ex-army chief General Raheel Sharif and ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif in a demonstration in March last year in front of the parliament house.

The leader of the group, Khadim Hussain Rizvi may be considered a demagogue by many liberals but for his supporters he is a charismatic leader. The group was established more than a year ago. Rizvi, originally from Rawalpindi district, is based in Lahore. He openly defends Qadri and is known for spreading religious hatred against minorities. He even hurled abuses at Abdus Sattar Edhi, accusing him of “taking care of illegitimate children”.
For Mufti Waqar of Labaik Ya Rasool Allah Al Alami the biggest fear is what he calls “the onslaught of liberal and secular-minded people who are against the Islamic character of the Pakistani constitution. If we don’t stop them by entering into electoral politics, they will destroy the country.”

The sit-in followed another protest by a pro-Qadri group – Labaik Ya Rasool Allah Al Alami – in Islamabad that ended on November 3. This group parted ways with Rizvi last year but subscribes to the same ideology.

Those who thought the Rizvi group will evaporate after a few months were startled to see its big public gathering in Karachi a few months ago. The story does not end here. They have held rallies in Gujranwala, Kasur, Lahore and Faisalabad in recent months. Now, they are eyeing Islamabad not only for protests and demonstrations, but for capturing power through the ballot.

This has prompted many analysts to conclude that the Barelvi sect that constitutes a majority in Pakistan is trying to claim political space.

Barelvi leaders corroborate this. Maulana Tahir Iqbal Chishti, leader of Sunni Tehreek Pakistan, a Karachi-based Barelvi outfit, says “there is a sense of frustration among the Sunnis because they have no political representation in the parliament despite being the majority sect in the country. All Sunni parties are forging a unity and we will make it to the parliament”.

Mufti Waqar of Labaik Ya Rasool Allah Al Alami tells TNS that his group would contest polls and may make an alliance with other Barelvi parties. For him the biggest fear is what he calls “the onslaught of liberal and secular-minded people who are against the Islamic character of the Pakistani constitution. If we don’t stop them by entering into electoral politics, they will destroy the country”.

Some analysts believe the establishment is launching the Barelvi factions to weaken the vote bank of PML-N. “A large section of voters in Punjab is from the Barelvi sect that has traditionally supported the PML-N. The establishment does not want the PML-N to win the 2018 polls so it is patronising the Barelvi groups. These groups may not be able to win many seats but they can undermine Nawaz’s votes,” says Prof. Aman Memon of Preston University, Islamabad.

Defence analyst Ayesha Siddiqa partially agrees. “The establishment may want to achieve different purposes through this sit-in. They might want to pressure Nawaz Sharif into abdicating politics and handing over the party leadership to Shahbaz Sharif and Chaudhry Nisar.

“Another purpose may be to provoke the government into taking some action against the protesters which might lead to a situation where the government is forced to call early polls. If that happens, the PML-N may not be able to get a majority in the Senate.”

Tehreek Labaik Ya Rasool Allah that contested the recently held by polls in Lahore and Peshawar under the banner of Tehreek Labaik Pakistan has been working to expand its organisational structure across Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan. “We have announced our organisational bodies for almost all divisions, districts, cities, towns and tehsils,” says Pir Ejaz Shah, the spokesperson of Tehreek.

Some other Barelvi parties are making silent efforts to forge unity among the Sunni groups. The faction of Jamiat Ulema Pakistan (JUP) led by Awais Ahmed Noorani, the son of ex-Senator Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani recently held a meeting in Karachi to unite various Barelvi groups and organisations on one platform. “The JUP also had many factions before 1970, but then my late father united all those groups. This unity helped us to get representation in parliament,” says Awais Noorani. “Now, I am uniting all Sunni groups so that we can contest the upcoming polls from a united platform. All Brailvi parties, including the one led by Khadim Hussain Rizvi have been invited to attend consultations for such a platform. I am hopeful about the possibility of this united platform.”

Noorani accuses the establishment of having kicked out the Barelvis by following the policy of divide and rule. His rival Qari Zawawar Bahadur, the chief of his own faction of JUP, agrees with him on this claim. “There are around 35,000 registered seminaries in Pakistan, half of them are affiliated with the Deobandi school of thought because America and Saudi Arabia pumped billions of dollars into them. General Zia, himself a Deobandi, patronised our rivals.

“The boycott of 1985 polls also harmed us politically. But now efforts are underway to unite Barelvi groups, and reclaim lost political space.”

Political analyst and public intellectual Pervez Hoodbhoy says “the groups inspired by Mumtaz Qadri are politically ambitious. So far Pakistanis have refused to vote in large numbers for religious parties but this could change for two reasons. First, Pakistanis today are much more overtly religious than they have been in the past. Second, the mainstreaming of groups that were once considered extreme is being done with support from parts of the establishment, both military and civil”.

“What else can explain the fact that the military cracks down on the first expression of provincial rights in Balochistan or Sindh, but remains unmoved by those who close down Islamabad day after day?” asks Hoodbhoy.

Hoodbhoy is concerned about the impact of groups like the Labaik. “It will further splinter Pakistan along religious lines, and array one set of people against another. The already shrunken space for non-Muslims will shrink further, blasphemy allegations will be used to silence liberals and minorities, and mob violence will become yet more common,” he concludes.

========================================
11. TALIBAN MAKES A COMEBACK IN PAKISTAN’S TRIBAL AREAS | Sanya Dhingra
========================================
(The Print, 17 November, 2017)

The Taliban has banned women's movement outside their homes in the FATA region | Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Terror outfit operates in the guise of ‘peace committee’ in FATA region, bans cultural activities, women’s movement outside their homes.

Prohibitions on cultural and social activities, music, traditional dance forms, use of narcotic drugs as well as restrictions on women’s mobility — all have made a comeback in Wana, Pakistan, an erstwhile Taliban hotbed.

According to reports in the Pakistani media, Taliban has made a reappearance in this largest town of South Waziristan Agency in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) under the guise of a “peace committee”.

The report comes at a time when the country is already engulfed in the larger debate of mainstreaming terror and extremist outfits.

According to the committee’s guidelines, any activity that promotes immorality or violates Islamic teachings would be prohibited. In a series of pamphlets, the committee has particularly banned movement of women outside their homes without male members, warning that any violation could have serious repercussions.

“The movement of women outside their homes has been restricted and they would not be allowed to visit markets and clinics or faith healers without adult male members of their families, including husbands and brothers,” the pamphlets read.

What is also of significance is that the committee is headed by Salahuddin alias Ayubi, a successor of Mullah Muhammad Nazir — an influential Taliban leader, who was killed in a US strike in January 2013.

It was in 2003 that Pakistani Taliban had first appeared in the South Waziristan Agency, the region becoming the hotbed of Talibanisation and Nek Muhammad Wazir emerging as its leader. Gradually, Talibanisation began to spread its roots in other tribal regions along the disputed Durand Line. In fact, the first ever US drone strike in Pakistan was carried out against Wazir, who was ultimately killed in the operation. Unfazed, the Taliban spread to the adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province – Swat Dir, Buner and suburbs of Peshawar.

The government, however, seems to be wary of taking a clear position on the issue. When the secretary of FATA’s law and order was approached by Dawn to comment on reports of Taliban emerging in Wana, he only expressed ignorance over the issue.

“Are these committees, then, part of those former fighters who have been ‘cleaned’ and slowly incorporated into the mainstream,” asks an editorial in Pakistan Today.

Only last week, six mainstream religious parties in the country — Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat Ulma-i-Islam-Fazal, Jamiat Ulma-i-Pakistan-Noorani, Markazi Jamiat Ahle Hadith, Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Samiual Haq and Islami Tehreek — decided to revive Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) – an ultra-conservative, Islamist, religious, and far-right political alliance, which had dissolved a decade ago.

The alliance has been formed months after two religious outfits — Taheek Labaik Ya Rasul Allah and Jamat-ud-Dawah’s Milli Muslim League — fared well in the by-poll in Lahore’s NA-120.

It is not just the political arena, however, where extremism is spreading its tentacles. Only last month, a report by the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad (ISSI) said that extremism in Pakistani universities is “far more complex and alarming than it appears”.

========================================
12. ON NEPALI COAL MIGRANTS OF MEGHALAYA | Kanak Mani Dixit
========================================
(Nepali Times, 10-16 November 2017 #883)

Still silently crying

People without faith in the state migrate for survival, the new Constitution must change that

[photo caption] Nishant Rai engaged in ‘rat-hole’ mining at the head of the pit.

Ludwig Stiller SJ wrote in The Silent Cry (Sahayogi, 1976) on how Nepalis were pauparised in the aftermath of empire-building attempts following unification. The people were taxed beyond survival and sustainability, and so the process of out-migration began. When the going got tough, the people got going.

The process of departure had already started as the 18th century gave way to the 19th, with already large numbers of Nepalis in Lahore before the Anglo-Nepal War of 1814-16. That war led to the formalisation of Gurkha recruitment, which has continued in the British and Indian (Gorkha) regiments.

‘The cry is still there,’ Stiller wrote in 1976, ‘will it be heard any more than it was during the silent years?’ Forty years after he wrote the line, one must conclude that the cry remains unheard. And two centuries after citizens started arriving in northern Punjab in search of work, the exodus of ‘lahures’ continues. Citizens of hill and plain fan out to fill menial positions all over north and peninsular India – as restaurant labour, agricultural workers, chowkidars, load carriers and in road-building gangs.

With passports made easy to get after the 1990 political transition, the ‘remittance economy’ took off, and now Nepali migrant labour is found in the farthest reaches, from Namibia to Nebraska. The largest numbers overseas, of course, are found in the Gulf and Malaysia. The poorest of all still go to India.

This saga of migration is thus a continuing ‘silent cry’, the stoic and practical reaction of a populace confronted by an insensitive, inefficient state administration. There is no meaning in reaching back to the deep past, but we must question the Nepali state regarding its record in the modern era, starting 1950 when the Ranas were ousted and Kathmandu developed a political class and civil society – a polity. The finger can be pointed with the help of Fireflies in the Abyss, a film by Bangalore-based documentary filmmaker Chandrasekhar Reddy, who over six months filmed Nepali migrants in the illegal coal-mining camps of Northeast India’s Meghalaya state. The ‘rat-hole mining’ is carried out in suffocating tunnels deep in the womb of the earth, beneath the bucolic setting of rural Meghalaya. The rolling hills and dales are interspersed with square pits that go down 100-200 feet. Catching coal seams, the miners then dig laterally through tiny tunnels.

Reddy brings out the humanity of the migrants in the coal pits and camps. Nishant Rai is smothered in coal dust as he works in the darkness with head torch. Lying on his side, he strikes at the coal strata with his pickaxe, shovels the material to fill the low cart that he pulls along, thereafter drags it out to the mouth of the tunnel, transfers the load to a doko basket, and makes the long and hard climb to the top. Then it is back down into the pit.

[photo caption] Suraj Rai

When Nishant takes a break, washing the coal dust off his skin, he is a man transformed. Smartly dressed, he heads out to meet the miners in other camps, carrying his hobby camera to create a poignant portrait gallery of life at the absolute margin. Nishant’s ambition? “I want to start a photographic studio in Nepal, later to make films, and to marry the lady of my dreams.”

Subba used to sing and act in Nepal, but finds himself in the same pit at Nishant. He looks out over the beautiful landscape. Expertly strumming his guitar, he sings Danny Denzongpa: “Chiso, chiso hawa ma, yo man tesai baralinchha.”

He is old and wrinkled, does not remember his age, nor his name – they just call him ‘Baje’. He has ended up in Meghalaya after decades spent around the Northeast, tending fields, woodcutting and doing all kinds of hard labour. His arms are nearly useless now, so Baje stands like a sentinel above Nishant’s and Subba’s pit, his job reduced to counting the carts.

Suraj Rai, 11, wants to study English but his pride and his sense of responsibility has him leaving school and returning to the mine – the documentary ends with his descent into the pit, pickaxe in hand.

These coal migrants of Meghalaya all have Nepal as their reference point in terms of hopes and desires. For now, they are crying in silence, surviving as best they can, their pride intact, expectations and aspirations hardly abandoned. Nepal’s new Constitution has to be implemented so that this nation-state, established two-and-half centuries ago, can deliver the prosperity promised by the landscape. No more excuses.

The documentary Fireflies in the Abyss received the Unicef Award for Best Film on Children’s/Social Issues at the recently concluded Film Southasia Festival of Documentaries 2017.

========================================
13. LONG HISTORY OF ETHNIC CONFLICT IN MYANMAR | Yola Verbruggen
========================================
(Himal SouthAsian - 15 November 2017)

Legacy of conflict

    (This article is part of our special package on Myanmar. Read more articles http://bit.ly/2A6PK3D.)

    The first night she heard the gun shots, Mar Lar (not her real name) was not afraid, the popping of guns sounded like it was coming from far away. Two days later, the sounds drew nearer and gunfire became more frequent. After the military burned down nearby sugarcane fields to drive out ‘enemy’ fighters, leaving the house became too dangerous and the fighting was so intense that sleeping had become impossible.

    “We stayed after most people had left because we thought it would be over soon,” said Mar Lar. But the conflict continued and after days of hiding in silence for fear of being found, Mar Lar and her family decided to leave the bullet-ridden town of Laukkai, the capital of the Kokang Special Region in the northeastern Shan State, near the Myanmar-China border.  Fighting intensified as Myanmar’s armed forces launched airstrikes against the Kokang, an ethnic Chinese minority, in February 2015. This was in response to the renewed offensive by the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (Kokang Army), which had been ousted from the area by the government forces, the Tatmadaw, in 2009. Little did Mar Lar know that she had fled from a conflict that military analysts of the security risk advisory group IHS Jane would later call “the largest war since Myanmar’s independence”.

    The conflict which lasted till June 2015 displaced an estimated 80,000 Kokang residents, as well as thousands of Myanmar migrant workers employed in the sugarcane fields. Mar Lar narrowly escaped death as the convoy transporting her family to safety came under attack, fatally injuring one Red Cross volunteer who helped facilitate their escape. Mar Lar made it safely to a monastery outside the conflict zone.

    The fighting in Kokang exposed the precarity of the peace process under the Thein Sein government which, when concluded, excluded many of the country’s myriad armed ethnic groups. The exclusionary nature of that agreement has come back to challenge the peace process itself, and will cast its shadow on the initiative of the new government in Naypyidaw.

    A divisive legacy
    After assuming office in March 2011, Thein Sein started a push for a ‘nationwide ceasefire agreement’, stalling discussions on political demands of the ethnic armed groups until after the ceasefire accord. Between 2011 and November 2012, when the accord was signed, several ethnic armed groups participated. However, the Kokang forces were not invited to any of the talks. The military refused to enter into negotiations with the group, saying its 2015 attacks had been against the peace process and the country’s transition to democracy. Two of the Kokang forces’ allies – the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army – were also not invited, despite them expressing an interest. The military demanded that these three groups disarm before they joined the peace agreement, a condition they find unacceptable.

    The arbitrary nature of who was invited to the talks is evident from the fact that the Kokang conflict took place even as the government held bilateral talks with the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) though it was engaged in hostilities with the Kachin forces. A 17-year ceasefire between the Tatmadaw and the Kachin Independence Army had broken in June 2011, ending a period of relative peace for the predominantly Christian ethnic minority in the country’s north.

    In November 2014, the Tatmadaw drew the ire of ethnic armed groups when it bombed a military academy near the Kachin army’s headquarters in Laiza, killing 23 cadets. Most of them were trainees from the group’s allies and the attack left a mark on the peace process that was already hampered by a lack of trust in the military’s commitment to a ceasefire. However, the Kachin leadership remained committed to bilateral talks with the government despite criticism from some Kachin groups that the November attack had shown the military could not be trusted. Kachin political leaders reiterated the need to pressure the government “in many different ways”, in parliament, through talks, and on the battlefield. The Kachin Independence Organisation – the political wing of the Kachin army – became a powerful voice in the nationwide ceasefire talks as it demanded an end to hostilities before any agreement was signed. They did not sign the October 2015 nationwide ceasefire agreement.

    Since 2011, over 100,000 people have been displaced in Kachin State and many remain unable to return home as the conflict continues. Many of the refugees live in areas that are beyond government control, often out of reach of international aid organisations. According to the United Nation’s 2016 Humanitarian Response Plan for Myanmar:

    Approximately half of the displaced population live in areas beyond government control, where local and national NGOs have access but most international organizations do not. While many of the displaced are living in camps that are being managed by national NGOs, others still live in crowded conditions in temporary accommodation that was not designed to house people for a protracted period of time.

    In the Mai Na internally displaced persons (IDPs) camp just outside of the Kachin capital Myitkyina in government-controlled territory many women and children live in make-shift shelters on the two square metre assigned to each family in the camp. Refugees described how, after years of fighting, their hopes of returning home were fading. Most men have left the camp to look for jobs in one of Myanmar’s larger cities, in nearby jade mines or overseas as jobs are scarce in the area.

    Fractured peace accord

    Set on achieving an accord before the November 2015 election, the Thein Sein government had pushed ahead with the ‘nationwide ceasefire accord’ that it said would be the first step toward ending the protracted civil war. Pressure on armed groups mounted from inside and outside of the country to sign the agreement. And, just before the end of his term, Thein Sein got the legacy he wanted.

    On 15 October 2015, of the ethnic armed groups invited, eight signed the ceasefire, despite the exclusion of the three armed organisations fighting in Kokang and the refusal of seven other groups to sign a ceasefire that was not all-inclusive and did not provide safeguards for excluded armies. Though championed by the international community and the government’s EU-funded Myanmar Peace Center, which had brokered the agreement, the ceasefire soon divided ethnic armed alliances and more conflict followed.

    “The problem is that because of the failed Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), various fields have emerged and there are now more tensions between the various groups,” said Tom Kramer, a researcher with the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute. He said that there now seem to be three main ‘blocks’ that have powerful positions within the ceasefire talks, namely the groups that signed the ceasefire, the ethnic umbrella organisation the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) – of which the Kachin Independence Army is a member – and the United Wa State Army.

    After the signing ceremony, the UNFC expelled ethnic armed groups who signed the ceasefire and continued to negotiate on behalf of its remaining nine members outside of the accord, focussing mainly on its demands that the government end fighting with allied armed groups and hold all-inclusive talks. The alliance said the ceasefire fitted perfectly into the Tatmadaw’s well-known divide-and-rule tactics that it has used against the ethnic armed groups for decades.

    “We see that the current government and Tatmadaw are using the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement as a military and political weapon. We strongly condemn the current government and Tatmadaw’s acts of causing racial hatred among the ethnic nationalities, with the military-political strategy of divide-and-conquer,” the UNFC said in a February statement. At that time, Thein Sein was still in office, though newly elected MPs had already assumed their seats in the legislative.

    A direct consequence of the ceasefire accord, according to Kramer, is the current conflict in Shan State between two ethnic armed groups from different power blocs. The Restoration Council of Shan State (a signatory to the NCA) has, with help of the Tatmadaw, reinforced its troops in the area and, as a consequence, fighting has erupted with the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (supported by the KIO). Fierce clashes erupted in February – though skirmishes had been reported earlier – displacing thousands of civilians in a matter of weeks.

    According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), 3900 people fled their homes in May 2016 alone. More than 11,000 people have been displaced so far in 2016 of which only 7500 have been able to return home. Interventions by representatives from the now-defunct Myanmar Peace Center and other ethnic armed groups have thus far failed to cool tensions. “Right now, the RCSS/SSA is still coming into our territory and, every time they come in, there will be fighting,” said Mai Aik Kyaw, a spokesperson of the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA). This conflict persists even as TNLA’s ally, the Arakan Army, has clashed anew with government troops in its home state of Rakhine. Fighting intensified in April and the conflict has displaced more than 1000 civilians.

    Since the NCA, direct clashes between the Tatmadaw and the KIO have also intensified. The KIO has accused the military of reinforcing its existing troops in Kachin State. “The conflict is still going on today. Since the ceasefire the military has moved in more troops and increased their strength more and more,” said Dau Kha, a spokesperson for the KIO. Fighting has been particularly intense recently around the jade-rich area of Hpakant.

    Since the new government took the initiative to start talks, the UNFC has engaged with negotiators and has welcomed an announcement made by State Counsellor and leader of the ruling National League for Democracy party, Aung San Suu Kyi, in which she committed to work towards a democratic and federal state.

    The third negotiating force is the powerful United Wa State Army, based near the Chinese border in Myanmar’s Shan State. It has an estimated 25,000 troops and has occasionally attended talks with the previous government’s peace brokers. And though it signed the bilateral ceasefire agreement, it has not signed the NCA.

    The Wa, which have the largest ethnic army in the country and do not belong to any ethnic alliance, invited non-signatories to its remote base in Pangkham for talks in 2015 and again late March 2016 to discuss its strategy during the peace process. Two groups that operate in areas near to the Wa territory, the Ta’ang and Kokang armed groups, have recently requested to withdraw their membership from the UNFC. Whether they plan to form an alliance with the Wa is not known.

    What the two non-signatory factions have in common – UNFC and the United Wa State Army – is their distrust of the NLD’s position on the peace process, mainly because the country’s de facto leader has remained silent on attacks and abuses committed by the military, despite her commitment to peace and federalism “Both groups see the NLD as being too close to the military,” said Paul Keenan, an independent researcher and analyst on Myanmar. Keenan also adds that “For non-signatories, the current situation is unstable due to differing factions trying to take control of the peace process, primarily the KIO/UNFC and the UWSA.

    21st century Panglong
    Disturbing reports continue to appear almost daily from the frontlines of the various conflict zones in Myanmar, where people continue to be displaced as they flee from the clashes and dangers that come with the fighting, including landmines, forced conscription or portering, rape and indiscriminate killings.

    On 1 June 2016, the Shan Human Rights Foundation issued a statement condemning the alleged torture, killing and the use of civilians as human shields by the Tatmadaw in areas where it is fighting the non-signatory group, the Shan State Army (north). “Grave human rights violations by the Burma Army during this offensive include the use of 43 villagers, including women, as human shields; severe torture of five villagers; and extrajudicial killing of at least 3 civilians, with 5 other bodies yet to be identified,” the statement read. Since fighting broke out between ethnic armed groups in northern Shan State, these groups have also accused each other of human-rights violations.

    Against this backdrop, it is now up to Suu Kyi to negotiate a truce that would end the world’s longest-running civil war. As a first step, she has proposed organising a new Panglong Conference, mirroring the one organised by her father and independence hero General Aung San in 1947, who concluded  an agreement with some ethnic minority representatives just before Myanmar gained independence from the British in 1948.

    Panglong, the name of the market town where the meeting was held, has remained a magical term to people in Myanmar and enchants many hoping for peace. But not all are convinced that it would be enough. Some observers have warned against that the results of this “21st century Panglong” are likely to differ significantly from those achieved in 1947. At that time, Myanmar had not yet achieved independence and was drafting a constitution, in which the accord was eventually immersed. During a military coup in 1962, however, the constitution was abolished and the agreement was never honoured. Today, the country is ruled under the 2008 constitution, drafted by a military regime to safeguards its position. Its reservation of 25 percent of the seats in the legislature and three key ministries for itself ensures an effective veto on constitutional amendments. While the 1947 Panglong granted administrative autonomy to the frontier areas and the right of secession from the Union after 10 years to Shan and Karenni states, this time, the military has made clear it will maintain unity of the country above all else.

    Moreover, the 1947 agreement was signed by a limited number of ethnic groups including the Shan, Chin and Kachin peoples. Other ethnic groups, including the Karen, Karenni and Mon, did not sign the agreement – they too will be looking for a seat on the table and a slice of the development pie.

    Ethnic armed groups are divided over what a 21st century Panglong Conference could actually achieve, especially since the NLD-led government is deemed to have close to no influence over the Tatmadaw. According to Keenan, while the military appears conciliatory, it will likely take control over all aspects of security which will limit the outcome of the talks. “The NLD government needs to see at least some limited success in relation to ethnic issues… The [first] Panglong served some, not all, of the ethnic groups well, this one is likely to do the same,” he added.

    Various ethnic armed groups, which haven’t signed up for the nationwide ceasefire, have laid down demands for talks with the peace body that is led by Suu Kyi herself, with her personal doctor and long-time trustee Dr Tin Myo Win as the chief negotiator. The KIO, for instance, has demanded that the new government address fighting between armed groups before holding any further talks about a ceasefire or peace. The United Wa State Army, the third major power bloc, on the other hand, demands the involvement of China and the UN in these talks. While the spokesperson for the TNLA, Mai Aik Kyaw, has said that while the group was willing to participate in the Panglong Conference, they had not been invited as of 1 June. TNLA, he added, wanted to move away from just talking about a ceasefire and instead focus on peace and democracy in the talks.

    The government has said that it wants the Panglong Conference to be inclusive and that it is reaching out to these armed groups. However, though the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has said he would support the peace meeting, it is unclear whether the military will support the participation of the groups excluded from talks by the previous government.

    “While the NLD may be able to influence it [the military] in some areas, there are some issues that the military consider to be off-limits. This is especially true in relation to the [Arakan Army] AA and MNDAA [the Kokang Army]. The former primarily due to the fact that the Tatmadaw has suffered serious losses in Rakhine State and that the AA were seen as a KIO created proxy. The latter due to their defeat in 2009 and subsequent resurrection by the KIO,” Keenan said.  What will be equally challenging is the role of the Tatmadaw-supported militias and the role of Myanmar’s substantial illicit drug economy in the conflict.

    Illicit narcotics

    The leader of the Kokang forces, Peng Jiasheng, is a former commander of the military wing of the Communist Party of Burma and had a ceasefire deal with the army for about two decades, until he withdrew in 2009, after Tatmadaw attacks led by the now Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. A Wikileaks cable from the US embassy in Yangon, dated 1 September 2009, stated Jiasheng was heavily involved in the drug trade. “Peng Jiasheng has been identified by the US Drug Enforcement Agency as a major trafficker since approximately 1975. Once a source of opium, the Kokang’s Special Region Number One more recently has been documented as a source of high-quality methamphetamine, to include methamphetamine ICE,” it reads.

    An important issue that will need to be addressed in the negotiations between the government and ethnic armed groups is how to reduce the trade in illicit drugs. While last year’s nationwide ceasefire agreement includes a line on the cooperation for the “eradication of illicit drugs”, it provides no details.

    A number of armed groups have been implicated in the drug trade and the production of illicit narcotics is highest in the country’s border areas. About 90 percent of the 55,000 hectares of opium cultivated in Myanmar in 2015 was produced in Shan State – where many of the non-signatories to the ceasefire are based. Farmers also grow opium in Kachin, Karenni and Chin states. “There is a very close relationship between peace and illicit narcotics in Myanmar. On the one hand, conflict fuels illicit drugs and on the other hand illicit drugs fuels conflict.” said Troels Vester, country manager of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

    Myanmar is the second-largest producer of raw opium and ranks increasingly high on the list of countries for the production of methamphetamines. While drugs are produced in various ethnic states, the problem is largest in Kachin and Shan states, where fighting is the heaviest. Some armed groups levy taxes on opium farmers, whereas others traffic it across the border mainly to China, one of the largest markets for illicit drugs from Myanmar.

    Most ethnic armed groups claim to have eradicated opium production in the areas under their control, including the KIA and the Wa army, though the latter is often accused of producing and trafficking illicit drugs. But the most heavily implicated in the trade of illicit narcotics are the country’s Tatmadaw-backed militias whose involvement in the drug trade is reportedly condoned by the military as a trade-off for their help in fighting the country’s ethnic armed groups. Because they do not receive funding from the government, they use profits from the drug trade to sustain their armies.

    The formation of the militias is constitutional and the military “has the authority to administer the participation of the entire people in the Security and Defence of the Union”, Article 340 of the constitution states. Though there are calls to include the militias, who are under the control of the military, they are not yet involved as a separate stakeholder in the peace process.

    Myanmar’s most notorious drug king-pins Lo Hsing Han and Khun Sa were leaders of Tatmadaw-backed militias that went underground in 1973, after defying a military order to disarm. Lo Hsing Han died in 2013 leaving behind a business empire that is now run by his son, Steven Law, who is targeted by US sanctions. Khun Sa controlled about 70 percent of the country’s heroin trade in the 1980s, according to the New York Times. He passed away in 2007.

    “To destroy all opium fields and factories, the government, all armed groups and the people need to cooperate,” said Reverend Samson Hkalam, general secretary of the Kachin Baptist Convention. He said solving the problem was urgent, as research from 2012-2013 showed 65 percent of all people living in Kachin State were addicted to drugs.

    While the military may see no reason to include the militias in the negotiations, since they fall officially under the direct command of the army, observers hope that the new government will recognise the importance of at least including the issue of the militias. The main question remains what power the NLD-led negotiating team has over the military to convince its highest generals to participate in an inclusive dialogue and adhere to its outcomes, said Kramer.

    “Can the NLD control or convince the military? Only time will tell,” he adds.

Yola Verbruggen is a print and radio journalist. She has been based in Myanmar since 2012.

========================================
14. INDIA: TOWARDS A HINDU PAKISTAN? Sadanand Dhume
========================================
(The Times of India, November 18, 2017)

 India may never mirror its western neighbour, but already apes some of its worst aspects


Is India in danger of becoming a Hindu Pakistan? In Washington this question, once too ludicrous to contemplate seriously, has lately acquired currency. For an Indian, it’s a query that can trigger a powerful emotional response. At one extreme stand those who greet it with bilious outrage. At the other are those for whom it evokes quivering concern.

Let me start by stating the obvious: the odds of the officially secular republic of India ever fully mirroring the Islamic republic of Pakistan are vanishingly small.

To begin with, look at demographics. About one-fifth of Hindu-majority India’s population consists of religious minorities; the Pew Research Center predicts that this will rise slightly to nearly one-fourth by 2050. By contrast, Pakistan is 96% Muslim. The only minority group of note is the beleaguered Shia community, estimated to number between 10% and 15% of the country’s 208 million people.

Founding principles matter too. India was born as a secular republic in 1950. Indira Gandhi only wedged the word “secular” into the Constitution’s preamble in 1976, during Emergency, her infamous suspension of democracy. But right from the start India’s Constitution guaranteed equality before the law and freedom of worship, and prohibited any religious test for office.

By contrast, as early as 1949 the Objectives Resolution passed by Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly declared that “Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accord with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Quran and the Sunna.”

In ‘Purifying the Land of the Pure’, a compelling history of Pakistan’s religious minorities, Farahnaz Ispahani argues that this was the first step towards the country’s further Islamisation over the decades. In Pakistan, by law only a Muslim can become president or prime minister.

Nor do Indian secularists face the ideological challenge faced by their counterparts in Pakistan. The Sangh Parivar’s Hindu nationalism may look upon Muslims and Christians with suspicion, but it lacks both the global organisation and the overarching ambition of Islamism, the quest to order all aspects of the state and society according to the tenets of Islamic orthodoxy.

Islamists can fall back on vast jurisprudence and relatively recent historical memory to make their case for a state governed by sharia law. Luckily for India, even the most rabid Hindu fanatic does not seek to reorder 21st century life by the ancient laws of Manu.

All this is for the good, but suggesting that India’s record on minority rights will likely always be better than its western neighbour’s is not really saying very much. Once we get beyond the false question of equivalence, we’re left with an unpleasant truth. In some ways India has already begun to copy some of Pakistan’s worst aspects.

Take, for instance, impunity for violence against members of a religious minority. A string of high profile lynchings of ordinary Indian Muslims by Hindu cow vigilantes has yet to lead to a single conviction. In some cases, as in the 2015 murder of Mohammad Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh, powerful politicians have instead demanded an investigation of the victim’s family.

Or consider the gradual ghettoisation of concerns about minority rights. Increasingly, India’s secularists appear almost as inconsequential as their Pakistani counterparts. They can draw attention to outrages, such as the roadside lynching of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan in Rajasthan this year. But their ability to sway public opinion has withered.

Chief minister Vasundhara Raje may well receive a thrashing from Rajasthan voters next year. But it won’t be on account of her failing to protect the lives of Pehlu Khan or Ummar Khan, another alleged victim of cow vigilantes, or to swiftly bring their murderers to justice.

In parts of India, cow vigilantism has come to resemble Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy law. Merely the accusation carries with it the implicit threat of mob violence. Earlier this month, Reuters reported on vigilante gangs in BJP-ruled states that seize cows from Muslims with impunity. Apparently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s calls to end cattle-related violence have not worked.

Given what has come to pass already – with little effective pushback – it’s not hard to imagine things taking an even darker turn.

Take the term Islamophobia, described by one wag as “a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.” A new generation of Hindu activists has begun to actively promote the related term Hinduphobia. While framed as a tool to fight discrimination, it will likely have the same malign impact as its Islamic equivalent – of shutting down critical inquiry and fostering a destructive culture of conspiracy theories and self-pity.

From here it’s only a short hop, skip and jump to a Hindu version of takfirism, the dangerous Islamist innovation that allows radicals to declare fellow Muslims as apostates. I grew up in an India where a person who seldom visited a temple and was known to enjoy a fine steak was no less a Hindu than anyone else. It’s fair to wonder whether in the promised new India this will remain the case.

In sum, it’s absurd to claim that India will turn into a Hindu Pakistan. But the readiness of some Hindu nationalists to pilfer the worst ideas from Islamism suggests that fears about India’s trajectory are not entirely misplaced.

========================================
15. INDIA: HURDLES TO FREEDOM ARE SPROUTING IN EVERY FIELD IN INDIA - EDITORIAL, THE TELEGRAPH
========================================
(The Telegraph, November 19, 2017)

Editorial	

Space of art

Hurdles to freedom are sprouting in every field in India; artistic expression has become a sphere of struggle. Works of art, particularly films and often books, are almost always suspected of offending someone's sensibilities or of being anti-national or even just anti-traditional. So it is deeply reassuring when the Supreme Court does not merely speak in crystal clear terms of the non-negotiability of the freedom of expression - it is "sacrosanct" - but also leaves no doubt as to the distinct freedom that creativity must be accorded. The court's remarks about the freedom of speech and expression were made in connection with a plea against the release of a documentary on the life of Arvind Kejriwal. The petitioner, who had once thrown ink at Mr Kejriwal, felt that a sequence in the film could harm his case in court. The Supreme Court reportedly refused to delete this sequence, saying that courts should be "extremely slow" in passing any restraint order in such situations. If this can be read as a message to all courts in the country, it is possible to hope for fewer bans. The Supreme Court referred to the "respect" that should be 'allowed' a "creative man" who enjoys producing a book, play, playlet, book on philosophy or any thought expressed on celluloid or in the theatre. The list is important because the court mentioned the various arenas in which the thought police are most active. Visual arts are left out, perhaps because little has happened in that space after the shameful tragedy regarding M.F. Husain. The most remarkable item on the list is the book on philosophy. The Supreme Court seems to be saying, in effect, that thought is creative - an understanding that is of immeasurable importance for these times.

To foil the repeated claim that all freedoms have limits that the Constitution itself identifies, the Supreme Court underlined the artist's "own freedom" to express himself in a manner which is "not prohibited in law", that is, such prohibitions are not meant to be used "by implication to crucify the rights of [an] expressive mind". The word, "crucify", suggests perfectly the attitude of the dominant dispensation towards artistic and intellectual freedom and its impact on culture. This is one of the strongest statements upholding creative rights at a time when art and thought are repeatedly attacked because they pose the dangers of insight and criticism. The fear of the transgressive nature of art dictates its repression by forces that cannot bear scrutiny or a different plane of thinking or fulfilment. The Supreme Court's remarks were sorely needed.

========================================
16. AUTONOMY MATTERS - MOST INDIANS ARE IGNORANT OF KASHMIR'S HISTORY | Manini Chatterjee
========================================
(The Telegraph, November 13, 2017)	

WORM'S EYE VIEW

It might be tempting to view the prime minister's vitriolic attack on the former Union minister, P. Chidambaram, for his remarks on Kashmir last month as election-time rhetoric, aimed at playing the 'nationalist' card in poll-bound Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat.

In an interaction with local businessmen and intelligentsia in Rajkot on October 28, Chidambaram - not exactly a seditious jholawallah by any stretch of the imagination -advocated a more accommodative approach to India's most intractable national problem.

In reply to a question, the Congress veteran said: "The demand in Kashmir Valley is to respect in letter and spirit Article 370. And that means they want greater autonomy. My interactions in Jammu and Kashmir led me to the conclusion that when they ask for azadi, most people - I am not saying all - (but an) overwhelming majority want autonomy. Therefore, I think we should seriously examine that question and consider in what areas we can give autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir."

Granting such autonomy, he added, would be "perfectly within the Constitution of India" and that the state would remain an "integral part of India but it will have larger powers as promised under Article 370".

His comments were met with an avalanche of abuse from the leading lights of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Union ministers, Piyush Goyal and Smriti Irani, put out tweets slamming him for batting for "separatists" which Chidambaram clearly didn't.

Arun Jaitley, reading out from an oft-repeated Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh script, told reporters in Mumbai, "It was the flawed policy of the Congress right since 1947 which is responsible for the Kashmir problem." He went on to accuse the Congress of "encouraging separatism in Jammu and Kashmir".

And much like a lead singer who takes the mike after the orchestra has played the opening bars, Narendra Modi lashed out at Chidambaram - without naming him - during a visit to Karnataka the next day. Unmindful of the facts of history, Modi thundered: "Those in power until yesterday have suddenly taken a U-turn and are shamelessly raising their voice for autonomy in Kashmir."

Resorting to characteristic theatrics, he added, "The mother who lost her son and the sister who lost her brother and the children of soldiers who fought to protect Kashmir are asking questions and the Congress shamelessly uses the language of separatists in Kashmir and the language used in Pakistan."

Taking a cue from the prime minister, BJP leaders and RSS cadres have made the Congress's 'anti-national' views a part of their campaign in both Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat.

Modi himself made a particularly odious remark during a speech in the Himachal town of Una on November 5. Insisting that demonetization had starved terrorists of their funds and ended stone pelting in Kashmir, he said, Himachal ke hamare veer jawan Kashmir ke raksha ke liye seena taan karke khade the, aur kuch bachhen aakar maar dete the (the brave soldiers from Himachal were bravely guarding Kashmir when some children threw stones at them...) - an unprecedented attempt by a prime minister to pit state against state, religion against religion.

But that should neither surprise nor shock us. Narendra Modi, after all, is a dyed in the wool RSS pracharak, and sheds all pretence to be anything else when campaigning for elections. Just as his "kabristaan versus shamshaan" speech during the Uttar Pradesh election was aimed at furthering the Hindutva agenda of polarizing the electorate, his tirade against Chidambaram is part of the consistent campaign of the RSS-BJP combine against Article 370.

What is disconcerting, though, is that large sections of educated Indians are also equivocal on the question of Kashmir's autonomy. The Congress itself was quick to distance itself from Chidambaram's remarks. The party spokesman, Randeep S. Surjewala, issued a statement on the night of October 28, saying, "Jammu-Kashmir and Ladakh is an integral part of Indian Union and will always remain so unquestionably... (the) opinion of an individual is not necessarily the opinion of the Indian National Congress."

This squeamishness on the part of even those who are otherwise critical of the Hindutva agenda stems from two reasons. One, an assertion that Kashmir is an integral part of India with no ifs or buts has become the touchstone of patriotism, more powerful than any Tebbit test, and few of us dare fail it. And second, many of us are ignorant about the genesis of the Kashmir problem since it does not figure in textbooks or in mainstream consciousness.

That is perhaps why the BJP's view of Kashmir that sees Pakistan as the chief trouble-maker, Jawaharlal Nehru as the chief villain, and Syama Prasad Mookerjee as the 'saviour' has far more takers than the facts warrant.

The truth is very different. Barring historians and Kashmir experts, few are aware today that it was not the majority Muslim populace but the Hindu king of the erstwhile princely state, Maharaja Hari Singh, who dithered on joining India at the time of Independence and fantasized about running an independent kingdom.

It was only when "raiders" from the newly formed Pakistan entered Kashmir on October 22-23, 1947 and threatened to take over the state that a panicked Maharaja sought Indian help and fled Srinagar. New Delhi agreed to send troops on the condition that he formally accede Kashmir to India. But that formal accession would have had no meaning if the biggest mass leader of Kashmir - the staunchly secular and hugely popular Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference cadres - had not chosen to rebuff Pakistan and the "two-nation theory" that brought about Partition. They fought the raiders on the streets of Srinagar even though, by the logic of Partition, Muslim majority Kashmir (especially after being subjected to onerous Dogra rule for a century) ought to have preferred joining the new nation adjoining their border.

For Nehru and Gandhi, the accession of Kashmir was not just about gaining territory but a reaffirmation of the idea of India, a nation wedded to secularism and diversity as opposed to the idea of Pakistan based on a singular religious identity. Given the complexity of the situation, compounded by the internationalization of the Kashmir issue after Pakistan and India went to war over its territory, the Indian Constitution that came into being in January 1950 recognized the special status of the state. Article 370, conferring autonomy to Kashmir, was a measure of that recognition.

As the elected leader of Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah - whose personal friendship with Nehru never frayed even after spending over a decade in free India's jails on charges of "treason" that were never proved - was instrumental in ensuring that Kashmir remained with India in those tension-filled years between 1947 and 1953.

But the Sheikh began having doubts about India's secularism as Hindu communal forces based in Jammu and egged on by the newly formed Jana Sangh started baring their fangs. The Hindu king of Kashmir and the Hindu right-wing elements had done little to secure Kashmir against the Pakistani raiders and army. But once Kashmir's accession was final, they began to assert themselves.

The Jana Sangh leader, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, led the agitation against the special status given to Kashmir, and his death in a Srinagar jail in June 1953, worsened the already fraught situation in the state. Sheikh Abdullah was dislodged from power and it took 22 years for him to return to the helm of the state after the accord with Indira Gandhi in 1975.

By then, most Kashmiris knew that accession to India was irrevocable. But that did not mean giving up the dream for autonomy bestowed on them by a combination of history, geography and geopolitics.

In the last seven decades, the Kashmir situation has undergone innumerable twists and turns; the Kashmiri people have experienced an excess of trauma and torment. Most of us today blame Pakistan and its 'proxy war' for the tragedy in the valley. For Pakistan, acquiring Kashmir certainly remains part of the "unfinished agenda of Partition".

India's military strength will likely ensure that that never happens. But India's moral claim on Kashmir - that rests on being robustly secular as a nation and on redeeming the promises given at the time of the state's accession - has for long been tenuous.

On October 24, the Modi government appointed the former Intelligence Bureau chief, Dineshwar Sharma, to carry forward a dialogue with various stakeholders in Kashmir. But Modi's tirade five days later, his equation of autonomy with secession and his party's determination to abrogate Article 370 makes any hope of a Kashmir solution - sans jackboot jingoism - that much more remote.

========================================
17. INDIA: THE ONLY THING THAT CAN PROTECT A WRITER’S FREEDOM IS YOU, THE READER | Perumal Murugan
========================================
(The Times of India - Nov 12, 2017)

The choice to read is always with the reader. If you do not like a book, throw it away. There is no compulsion to read a book. Literary tastes may vary - what is right and acceptable to one may not be so to others. Yet, the right to write is unhindered.
— Madras High Court, July 5, 2016

The freedom to write wholly depends on the reader's right to choose what they read. And reading can unlock incredible experiences, even if we shut every aperture and leave just a single door or window open to new ideas. If we let our minds dwell inside an impenetrable dark cave, nothing will get inside. We can gain from reading only if we are welcoming of unfamiliar ideas. A guest always arrives with different stories of her own to tell. Reading literature is exactly like inviting a guest to your home. The result is conversation, stimulation, exchange of news and ideas, and good cheer.

Popular literature of today does not raise any questions about our values or shed fresh light on life as we know it. It only addresses the superficial changes taking place around us and ends up glorifying outdated aspects of our culture and civilisation. This kind of writing is prized by readers who prefer the status quo and do not want to read anything that makes them uncomfortable.

Most people believe that the values with which they were brought up are superior to those of others. They hold the protection of those values to be their supreme duty. They cannot tolerate even minor ripples of change. Since they don't give the values they defend any serious consideration and have no grasp of them, the only armour they possess is their self-proclaimed righteousness. And when they join hands with others like them, they don't hesitate to aggressively announce their identity. Therefore, there is an urgent and constant need for us to talk and debate on the freedom to read and the avenues available to express disagreement. A writer's freedom today is in the hands of the reading public.

A reader has many freedoms. To not buy a book, to not read it, to put it down after a couple of pages, or explore it further. She can treasure her favourite book, and read it again and again. She can recommend it or even lend it to other people, and then badger them to give it back. She can praise that book and, if her skills permit, she can even write about it. She can feel elated when it wins a prize. She can then boast about having read that award-winning book. She can write letters to the author. She can celebrate it in any manner possible.

She can express her disappointment in just as many ways. She can close the book and toss it away. When my daughter was a child, she liked to tear the pages of any book she could lay her hands on. It was very difficult to save books from her. Eventually we found a middle ground. We allocated some books for her pastime — the books we wanted to discard. When she asked for a book, we offered her one from that pile. She tore them down beautifully. Even the books that we don't like can serve elegant purposes.

The reader can also generously give away the books she doesn't like, and earn a good name. Who wouldn't welcome freebies with open arms? She can wrap them up nicely and give them away as gifts. The truth is that many people never unwrap the books they receive as gifts. But we cannot go to a festivity empty-handed, can we?

She can also sell them off at shops that deal in old and used books. She can write scathing remarks on a book and its author. A little more effort and she can even don the reviewer-mask and set about proving that the book cannot pass for literature. She can engage in debate, or create memes about it. She can launch a campaign against that book and persuade others not to read it. There are lots of ways to express our opinion on social media. There are columns where the 'worst books of the year' are religiously listed every year.

These are but some of the punishments that a reader can mete out to the book and its author. The cruellest punishment though is if she spots an author she doesn't like at a literary gathering, goes up to them, tells them that she has read their book, and stops at that. And doesn't say anything further. I can assure you that that is the most excruciating torture for a writer.

If you think about it, a reader's freedom is unlimited. And readers should liberally exploit this freedom and employ all possible democratic means to protest or to celebrate literature. If they do, then the freedom to write — on anything, in any manner — would be protected. 

========================================
18. A SUPER ELITE CLUB OF LAWYERS DOMINATES INDIA’S JUSTICE SYSTEM. HOW LONG WILL IT RULE? | Shubhankar Dam
========================================
(Quartz India, November 05, 2017)

 FIRST AMONG EQUALS

A lawyer speaks on his mobile phone as he walks past India's Supreme Court in New Delhi April 1, 2013. India's highest court, the Supreme Court, has dismissed Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG's petition seeking patent protection for its cancer drug Glivec, a serious blow to Western pharmaceutical firms which are increasingly focusing on India to drive sales. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi (INDIA 


An oligarchy rules India’s courtrooms. It dons fancy robes and bills premium fees. Still, litigants desire it, junior lawyers suffer it, and judges respect it. It is the oligarchy of senior advocates.

That oligarchy shall continue, India’s supreme court recently decided. But key changes are afoot. Achieving seniority, until now, meant threading a black box. Few understood how the system worked and why.

Not anymore.

Now, advocates aspiring to an elevated status have an open, orderly path to it. This is a big bang reform. A new cast of counsels may sprint to prominence, altering how long-litigating Indians access legal services.
Caste of lawyers

Courtrooms in India are populated with two types of unequal lawyers: advocates and senior advocates. Engraved in the Advocates Act, 1961, this Indian hierarchy has a very British history.

 This is a super-elite club, and the law treats members fittingly. In its early days, the legal profession in Britain only distinguished attorneys from pleaders. Attorneys negotiated the bureaucracy of legal paperwork, and pleaders mastered the art of oral advocacy. Soon, a super-selective class of pleaders emerged: serjeants. But their fortunes fell as crown law officers, a class of government lawyers, rose. A new band of barristers followed, the king’s and queen’s counsels (QCs), and this category still endures.

QCs are an elite caste. Graduating into it demands professional eminence. In return, the title offers prestige, and catapults barristers to the privileged echelons of the British legal universe. Just about 10% of all barristers in Britain are QCs.

India’s senior advocates are like QCs, only rarer. A 2013 report of the Bar Council of India suggested that less than 1% of all enrolled lawyers are senior advocates. Only the supreme court and 24 high courts may ordain lawyers into seniority. Eligibility depends on the counsels’ “ability, standing at the Bar, or special knowledge or experience in law.” Advocates may apply directly, or judges may invite them.

This is a super-elite club, and the law treats members fittingly. Senior advocates enjoy a suite of privileges and few restrictions. They have a right of pre-audience in courtrooms: judges must hear them first. They do not file cases or handle legal paperwork; they only argue. And the law bars them from entertaining litigants directly. Instead, clients come through briefing counsels who act as go-betweens.
Profits of priesthood

Seniority magnifies a lawyer’s social capital. It brings contacts, experience, and honour. In courtrooms, judges may indulge seniors more. Outside of courtrooms, the media and the public do the same.

Naturally, the veneration has consequences.

Engaging senior advocates accelerates—sometimes almost doubles—the odds of winning certain types of cases in the supreme court, according to a 2015 analysis by the Viddhi Centre for Legal Policy, a Delhi-based think-tank. Senior advocates demand premium fees for good reason, and clients hanker after them for that very reason.

 Senior counsels do more than just devour special slots—they devour entire lists of cases pending in courts. They enjoy other perks, too. Courts, for instance, allow lawyers to seek out-of-turn hearings. Last month, a junior counsel in the supreme court protested senior advocates hogging all the time set aside for such pleas. He never had a chance to plead his urgency, he exasperated. His complaint has changed things. Now, senior advocates are barred from raising such pleas.

But senior counsels do more than just devour special slots—they devour entire lists of cases pending in courts. A handful of senior advocates are said to dominate the business of litigation. They take on more matters than they can deal with. But they can’t be everywhere every time. So, postponements are sought—and frequently granted. The result? A system of ministering justice that pampers a minority of lawyers over the masses of litigants.

The pyramid—this separation of senior and junior advocates—casts an unsavoury shadow on Indian courtrooms. Indira Jaisingh, and the National Lawyers Campaign for Judicial Transparency and Reforms, petitioned the supreme court against the pyramid. Grouping lawyers into classes violates the fundamental right to equality, the latter argued. And the Advocates Act, it claimed, is unconstitutional.

Recall the basis on which judges classify lawyers: “ability,” “standing,” “knowledge,” or “experience.” These are vague terms. They drip with discretion. And their abuse is too easy, and common. Judges, some allege, have at times graduated unfit ones into seniority.

In 2004, burdened by whispers of corruption, the UK (temporarily) suspended the system of appointing QCs. Would India’s supreme court adopt a similar approach? It turns out not.

The court shot down the Campaign’s talking points. Why?

A clumsy defence of seniority

Classifying lawyers has a rationale to it. Not all advocates serve their profession equally. Some do better than others—and the elevation rewards that. Judges may now and again err in measuring counsels’ worthiness. But these errors don’t invalidate the power to classify, the court reasoned. It only means that the power is at times misused.

Consider an analogy. The police are authorised to make arrests. They make wrongful arrests at times. Does that invalidate the very power to arrest? Surely not. The police still have it.

 When the police err, they are hauled up in courts. Victims have a remedy. But with senior advocates? Anyway, law isn’t the only profession that labels its practitioners. Medicine does it, too. There are “consultants” and “senior consultants,” “surgeons” and “senior surgeons.” So, classifying advocates isn’t new or unique, the court intoned.

These are anaemic reasons—they can hardly stand scrutiny.

Reconsider the arrest analogy. When the police err, they are hauled up in courts. Victims have a remedy. But with senior advocates? Imagine judges elevate an undeserving advocate. Who should challenge it? And against whom—the same judges who bestowed the lawyer with senior-hood? It doesn’t make sense, and has hardly ever happened. The court’s administrative power to confer seniority is unlike any. Its misuse has no real remedy.

The parallel with medical practice is suspect, too. The law makes a provision for seniority in legal practice. Courts confer it. It’s effectively a public (state) title. But medical designations are different. Doctors and their employers decide on them. The law doesn’t meddle.

For now, the legal fraternity in India shall remain divided between a smattering of royals and a sea of plebeian lawyers. But things won’t be the same. The court has promised to make the process of seniority less of a black box. The royals must earn their coronets more fairly.

A more democratic royalty

Criteria for seniority, until now, varied across courts. Some courts emphasised age, experience, and expertise. A few demanded specific income levels, too. All vested judges with the power to designate seniority.

The court has waved away the variations. Now a set of common guidelines shall apply. Only experience and expertise matter, not age or income. And a new method is in place.

The supreme court and all high courts shall house a “permanent committee for designation of senior advocates,” alongside a secretariat, the court decided. The committee shall consist of the chief justice and two senior-most judges of the relevant court, the attorney (or advocate) general, and an invited member of the Bar. The secretariat will process applications, prepare dossiers, and, in a radical move, upload all formatted data online. The public is free to comment on it. The committee shall quiz applicants and, in addition, score them on experience, expertise, and publications. Names of shortlisted candidates will be forwarded to the full court—i.e. the collegium of all judges in a court. It shall award seniority by a majority vote polled in secret.

 A diversified bench of judges can only come from a diversified roster of senior advocates. The procedure is refreshingly nuanced. It has a democratic flavour to it, something the black box didn’t have. Those barred from the old boys’ club now stand a better shot at seniority, especially women and younger lawyers.

Much will depend on those who sit on these committees and how they work it. The three senior-most judges in most high courts are men. So are most advocate generals in the states. Introducing gender diversity in the committees may mean proactively recruiting women lawyers to represent the Bar.

But that is a first step. Diversifying the current roster of senior advocates may mean encouraging women advocates and those belonging to the lower castes to apply for seniority. This is critical. Among practicing lawyers, only senior advocates are earnestly considered for judgeship. So, a diversified bench of judges can only come from a diversified roster of senior advocates.

A collective not always given to candidness has introduced a system of orderly vetting. Feisty local lawyers and global practices helped the supreme court to this moment. It is a welcome move. Still, procedures are as good as the people who apply them. We have a procedure. Now, people who matter must work on it. If applied less in letter and more in spirit, the new system will serve the Bar, bench, and the idea of justice in India better than it now does.

========================================
19. INDIA - PAKISTAN: GEOPOLITICAL PROBLEM OF WATER WAR | H S Mangat 
========================================
Indus Divided: India, Pakistan and the River Basin Dispute by Daniel Haines, Gurgaon: Viking and Penguin Random House, 2017; pp xi + 264, ₹599.

The title of the book under review, Indus Divided: India, Pakistan and the River Basin Dispute, is quite attractive for the scholars interested in the study of water resources and their utilisation within the Indus drainage basin, particularly when it has become a bone of contention due to the emergence of an artificial international boundary bifurcating it into two halves. The partition of India divided the Punjab province, known as the “land of five rivers” constituting theIndus basin.
http://www.epw.in/journal/2017/46/book-reviews/geopolitical-problem-water-war.html

========================================
20. WHAT IF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION HAD NEVER HAPPENED? | Simon Sebag Montefiore
========================================
(The New York Times, Nov. 6, 2017)

The October Revolution, organized by Vladimir Lenin exactly a century ago, is still relevant today in ways that would have seemed unimaginable when Soviet Communism collapsed.

Marxist-Leninism (albeit in the unique capitalist-Maoist form) still propels China, the world’s surging hyperpower, even as that same ideology ruins Cuba and Venezuela. Meanwhile, North Korea, a dystopian Leninist monarchy with nuclear weapons, terrifies the world. Even more surprisingly, Communism is experiencing a resurrection in democratic Britain: Jeremy Corbyn, that quasi-Leninist comfortingly disguised as cuddly grey-beard, is the most extreme politician ever to lead one of Britain’s two main parties, and he is inching toward power.

But Lenin’s tactics, too, are resurgent. He was a sophisticated genius of merciless zero-sum gain, expressed by his phrase “Kto kovo?” — literally, “Who, whom?” asking the question who controls whom and, more important, who kills whom. President Trump is some ways the personification of a new Bolshevism of the right where the ends justify the means and acceptable tactics include lies and smears, and the exploitation of what Lenin called useful idiots. It’s no coincidence that President Trump’s chief campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, once boasted “I am a Leninist.”

One hundred years later, as its events continue to reverberate and inspire, October 1917 looms epic, mythic, mesmerizing. Its effects were so enormous that it seems impossible that it might not have happened the way it did.

And yet it nearly didn’t.

There was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik revolution. By 1917, the Romanov monarchy was decaying quickly, but its emperors may have saved themselves had they not missed repeated chances to reform. The other absolute monarchies of Europe — the Ottomans, the Habsburgs — fell because they were defeated in World War I. Would the Romanovs have fallen, too, if they had survived just one more year to share in the victory of November 1918?

By 1913, the czar’s secret police had dispersed and vanquished the opposition. Just before the fall of the czar, Lenin reflected to his wife that revolution “won’t happen in our lifetime.” Ultimately, it was a spontaneous, disorganized popular uprising and a crisis of military loyalty that forced Nicholas’s abdication. When that moment arrived, Lenin was in Zurich, Trotsky in New York and Stalin in Siberia.

Lenin initially thought it was “a hoax.” He was lucky that Germany inserted him like a bacillus (via the so-called sealed train) to take Russia out of the war. Back in Petrograd, Lenin, aided by fellow-radicals Trotsky and Stalin, had to overpower erring Bolshevik comrades, who proposed cooperation with the provisional government, and force them to agree to his plan for a coup. The government should have found and killed him but it failed to do so. He succeeded.

Even the “storming” of the Winter Palace — restaged in a 1920 propaganda spectacular as a people’s triumph — was no storming at all. Lenin rages as it took days to seize the main buildings of the government, while the palace itself was taken by climbing through unlocked windows, undefended except for adolescent cadets — followed by a bacchanalia, with drunk Bolsheviks slurping the czar’s Château d’Yquem 1847 out of the gutters.

October might have heralded a short-lived interim, like so many other failed revolutions of that era. Any coordinated attack by White armies, the other side in the Russian civil war, or any intervention by Western forces would have swept the Bolsheviks away. It all depended on Lenin. He was very nearly overthrown in a coup by rebellious coalition partners but he made his own luck, though, by a combination of ideological passion, ruthless pragmatism, unchecked bloodletting and the will to establish a dictatorship. And sometimes, he just got plain lucky: On Aug. 30, 1918, he was shot while addressing a crowd of workers at a factory in Moscow. He survived by inches.

Had any of these events foiled Lenin, our own times would be radically different. Without Lenin there would have been no Hitler. Hitler owed much of his rise to the support of conservative elites who feared a Bolshevik revolution on German soil and who believed that he alone could defeat Marxism. And the rest of his radical program was likewise justified by the threat of Leninist revolution. His anti-Semitism, his anti-Slavic plan for Lebensraum and above all the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 were supported by the elites and the people because of the fear of what the Nazis called “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

Without the Russian Revolution of 1917, Hitler would likely have ended up painting postcards in one of the same flophouses where he started. No Lenin, no Hitler — and the 20th century becomes unimaginable. Indeed, the very geography of our imagination becomes unimaginable.

The East would look as different as the West. Mao, who received huge amounts of Soviet aid in the 1940s, would not have conquered China, which might still be ruled by the family of Chiang Kai-shek. The inspirations that illuminated the mountains of Cuba and the jungles of Vietnam would never have been. Kim Jong-un, pantomimic pastiche of Stalin, would not exist. There would have been no Cold War. The tournaments of power would likely have been just as vicious — just differently vicious.

The Russian Revolution mobilized a popular passion across the world based on Marxism-Leninism, fueled by messianic zeal. It was, perhaps, after the three Abrahamic religions, the greatest millenarian rapture of human history.

That virtuous idealism justified any monstrosity. The Bolsheviks admired the cleansing purges of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror: “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless,” Lenin said. The Bolsheviks created the first professional revolutionaries, the first total police state, the first modern mass-mobilization on behalf of class war against counterrevolution. Bolshevism was a mind-set, an idiosyncratic culture with an intolerant paranoid wordview obsessed with abstruse Marxist ideology. Their zeal justified the mass killings of all enemies, real and potential, not just by Lenin or Stalin but also Mao, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. It also gave birth to slave labor camps, economic catastrophe and untold psychological damage. (These events are now so long ago that the horrors have been blurred and history forgotten; a glamorous glow of power and idealism lingers to intoxicate young voters disenchanted with the bland dithering of liberal capitalism.)

And then there is Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union. President Vladimir Putin’s power is enforced by his fellow former K.G.B. officers, the heirs of Lenin and Stalin’s secret police. Mr. Putin and his regime have adopted the Leninist tactics of “konspiratsia” and “dezinformatsiya,” which have turned out to be ideally suited to today’s technologies. Americans may have invented the internet, but they saw it (decadently) as a means of making money or (naïvely) as a magical click to freedom. The Russians, bred on Leninist cynicism, harnessed it to undermine American democracy.

Mr. Putin mourned the fall of Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, yet he regards Lenin as an agent of chaos between two epochs of national grandeur — the Romanovs before Nicholas II (Peter the Great and Alexander III are favorites) and Soviet Union’s superpower glory under Stalin.

Mr. Putin presents himself as a czar — and like any czar, he fears revolution above all else. That is why it is victory against Germany in 1945, not the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that is the founding myth of Putinist Russia. Hence the irony that while the West has been discussing the revolution at length, Russia is largely pretending it never happened. Lenin’s marble mausoleum in Red Square must echo with his laughter because that’s just the sort of serpentine political calculation he would have appreciated.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of “‘The Romanovs,” “Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar” and the forthcoming novel “Red Sky at Noon.”

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

========================================
21. IN YEREVAN | Daniel Trilling
========================================
(London Review of Books Blog, 3 November 2017)

The genocide memorial in Yerevan, a giant complex built when Armenia was part of the USSR, sits on a ridge overlooking the city: its museum tells of how ethnic Armenians in the final years of Ottoman rule were massacred and forcibly scattered and how the lands claimed by Armenian nationalists were reduced, by military defeat and international diplomacy, to the present-day republic in the South Caucasus. Passengers who leave the metro station at Yerevan’s central square are greeted with a giant map of Greater Armenia, a historical region that mostly falls within the borders of the current republic’s neighbours: Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan and Georgia. And on the streets, pasted to lamp-posts, walls and junction boxes, are fly-posters offering cheap minibus rides to distant cities: Krasnodar, Rostov, Novosibirsk. The republic’s economy is partly sustained by emigrant workers, most of whom go to Russia.

A local representative of the UNHCR gave me a sheaf of briefing notes in a folder with a picture of Fridtjof Nansen on the cover. Nansen was the Norwegian diplomat who, through the League of Nations in the 1920s, introduced the first form of international refugee protection, later replaced by the UN Refugee Convention of 1951. Travel documents known as Nansen passports, recognised by more than 50 countries, were issued to people made stateless by upheavals during and after the First World War. Displaced Armenians were one of the groups to be issued them; Russians outside the borders of the newly formed USSR were another: my grandmother was one of them. When I was a child she used to talk about her Nansen passport in almost reverential tones: a white document – the blankness seemed important – that allowed her to cross borders and never be tied down to one country. She regretted having ever given it up. I told this to the Armenian UNHCR official; she smiled and said: ‘You are from our country too.’

Per capita, according to the UNHCR, Armenia has received more asylum applications from Syrians than any other country in Europe apart from Germany and Sweden. Most of those who have come to Armenia are ethnically Armenian, so it has been treated in official rhetoric as a homecoming. Many Armenians have come from elsewhere to live in the republic over the last century but there are large diaspora communities in the US, Europe and the Middle East. The Ministry of Diaspora offers citizenship to anyone who can show they are Armenian by descent, by culture, or by membership of an Armenian church. Early in the Syrian war, the Armenian Consulate in Aleppo started issuing passports so people could leave the country more quickly – a temporary measure, taken when there was still hope the war would be over quickly, but the situation now looks permanent. More than 22,000 people have arrived from Syria since the war began (Armenia has a population of three million); 14,000 have stayed.

Policymakers sometimes take it for granted that refugees are better off in countries close to home, or among cultures similar to theirs, but as the UNHCR official explained, the Syrian-Armenians faced problems that occur elsewhere. People had trouble learning the language, or learning the Armenian script; their children struggled at school. Some of the younger men were claiming asylum to avoid military service. Finding jobs was difficult, though some people had brought their businesses – restaurants, for instance, or tailoring – with them.

Many people were living in rudimentary conditions, housed by the government in decommissioned Soviet barracks. Some had left, using their Arabic to pursue business connections in the Middle East, or travelling to the EU on their Armenian papers, then tearing them up and claiming asylum as Syrians. The EU now asks Armenia to share data on Syrians in order to stop this happening.

Another official told me that the arrival of people from Syria, more comfortable doing business in Muslim countries, had provoked ‘a new conversation about what Armenian identity is’. But the risk was that without local solidarity and international support some people would never quite settle: this had happened to some of the 360,000 Armenians displaced from Azerbaijan in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the two countries fought over possession of Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan’s territory.

One morning I took a marshrutka from the centre of Yerevan to the outskirts. A friend had offered to introduce me to people who had fled Azerbaijan two decades ago. Our stop, at the end of the line, was called Artsakh Avenue; Artsakh is another Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh, which Armenia still occupies. Opposing troops regularly take pot-shots at each other across the front lines and for four days in April last year, this descended into heavy fighting that killed more than 300 people. My friend told me how scared people were that a larger war would break out, and what it was like to grow up in a country bordered by hostile neighbours: Azerbaijan blockades Armenia, and Turkey has never maintained diplomatic relations. ‘You really feel trapped here,’ she said.

The bus stopped on an empty road surrounded by derelict industrial sprawl. We crossed an overgrown yard and approached a barracks-like building next to a tall factory chimney. This was accommodation for several hundred refugees who had arrived from Azerbaijan in the 1990s, supposedly temporary, but people had been living here for over twenty years. There was a grocery shop in a repurposed shipping container outside the building. The owner sat beside it in the shade of a tree, next to a backgammon board: he invited me to play, but I apologised and said I didn’t know how. He told us that a neighbouring building had recently been cleared and the inhabitants finally moved to more lasting accommodation; here they were waiting their turn.

We went into the barracks, up a crumbling staircase and knocked on a door. Inside a single, narrow room, a white-haired woman in late middle age was lying in bed with a blanket pulled up to her chin. An older woman sat and watched over her. The woman in bed introduced herself as Nina and her companion as her mother. She apologised for being ill, but insisted we stay. Nina wanted to know where I was from. She told me that she came from Baku, which had many beautiful boulevards, as beautiful as the boulevards in London. In a mix of Armenian and Russian, Nina told us that she had been a major in the KGB during Soviet times but that her real vocation was as a poet. She motioned to her mother to fetch something from a cabinet – every surface in the room was covered with piles of papers or stacked plastic utensils – and handed me a poem in Russian, along with a photograph of a young woman. ‘That’s me,’ she said. The poem was called ‘Nostalgia’.

Nina said that she’d had many Azeri friends before the war and had been shocked to see people who were kind to her in person writing anti-Armenian diatribes in the press. She described the pogrom of 1990 that had forced her and her mother to flee Azerbaijan: armed gangs with lists of Armenian residents going door-to-door, men in the street forced to drop their trousers to show if they were circumcised, an elderly neighbour thrown from a balcony and attacked as she lay dying. Her stories looped around, she kept stopping and saying ‘but there were people who were good to us too,’ the words tumbled out too fast to be caught by my rudimentary Russian. ‘I wish you could understand all of it,’ said my friend, who was translating. ‘She’s telling it so vividly.’

I had been told that some of the refugees from Azerbaijan never took up Armenian citizenship because they identified more strongly with the Soviet Union and were never quite sure of their new home. Was that the case for Nina, I asked. ‘I am Armenian,’ she said emphatically. ‘But we moved around.’ She came from a military family and had grown up in Ukraine as well as Baku. ‘My mother fought in the Great Patriotic War.’ Nina’s mother, who had stayed silent throughout the conversation except to tell her daughter to keep the blanket pulled up, leaned forward and pointed to a scar beneath her headscarf. I asked if they had ever taken up Armenian citizenship and Nina reached into her handbag, first passing me her mother’s Soviet war invalid’s ID card. I asked if I could take a photo of it; she laughed and praised my intelligence-gathering skills. Then she handed me her own ID, a blue booklet with ‘Travel document (Convention of 28 July 1951)’ printed on the front in English, Russian and Armenian. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s my Nansen passport.’

========================================
22. I KNEW SOMEBODY WOULD COME: SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH’S WARS | Paul Delany
========================================
(Los Angeles Review of Books, November 14, 2017)

THE EASTERN FRONT of 1941–’45 was the first, and perhaps the only war in which women fought on a mass scale. They fought on the Soviet side, up to a million of them, and mostly volunteers; they may have tipped the balance for the Soviet victory. Was this a great advance for the liberation of women, or was it a terrible exception, never to be repeated? The title of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of testimonies, The Unwomanly Face of War, implies that those women did not belong at the front, that they were “out of place.” The German army certainly agreed: as a Russian doctor remembers, “[they] didn’t take women soldiers prisoner … They shot them at once.” Or worse.

Soviet women soldiers fought with unimaginable courage and endurance, only to face slander and neglect after they returned. It was not until 30 or more years later that Alexievich began to gather their testimonies. The Unwomanly Face of War is both a tribute to what these women endured and a justification of what they chose to do. If there can be a feminist defense of mass violence, this book delivers it.

Alexievich says that she feels a deep hatred for war, and in Boys in Zinc — about the Soviet war in Afghanistan — she argues that wars are caused by some fundamental flaw in male nature. Yet the women who fought on the Eastern Front also tried to do so according to their own nature. The founding principle of Alexievich’s feminist approach to war is her sympathy for her women soldiers’ attempts to preserve and express their femininity. Many of them were doctors, nurses, battlefield medics, and cooks. In all these roles, they were more devoted to saving Russian lives than to killing Germans. The medics had the enormously hard, terrifying job of carrying wounded infantrymen back to safety. Still, many women were eager to kill the enemy, serving as tank crews, gunners, and snipers — and as fighter pilots:

We would sit under a parachute, waiting for our assignment. The men smoked, played dominoes, and we, while waiting for a signal to take off, sat and embroidered handkerchiefs. We stayed women.

Alexievich gives many details of women longing for proper underwear, using their sugar rations to curl their hair, and the like. She tries to reconcile femininity and the warrior spirit and this was also the aim, to some extent, of the Soviet authorities. Women were favored as snipers, for example, because they were “patient and cunning,” with flexible limbs and soft hands on the trigger. About two thousand graduated from sniper school, and proved themselves in battle. More than half were killed.

Should there be a distinction between a woman writing as a historian, and a historian writing as a woman? Alexievich is frank about making the latter choice, and about her lack of interest in military history proper, in the sense of weapons, battles, or strategy. She is writing a history of “little people,” and of feelings rather than events. There are no descriptions of Stalingrad, Kursk, or other great turning points on the Eastern Front, except for the fragmentary memories of women who happened to have fought there. “A great idea needs a small human being,” she writes, “I look for small great human beings.”

When Alexievich started work on The Unwomanly Face of War in 1978 she was 30. The women she found to interview were about 30 years older than her, and had effectively been silenced since 1945. To gather their testimony she had the new technology of the cassette recorder (which also protected her from subsequent lawsuits). The Unwomanly Face of War represents the experience of hundreds of thousands of women on the Eastern Front. Alexievich’s portrait is an assembly of fragments. The women relate things that happened to them, rather than things they caused to happen. None of them served at the decision-making level, as field officers or generals.

Like other pioneers of the oral history genre, notably Studs Terkel and Tony Parker, Alexievich removed her own questions from the published text thereby obscuring her own participation in “leading the witness.” She interviewed more than 500 women for The Unwomanly Face of War, most of whom achieved no mention in the published text. Of those women who are included, many speak for less than a page, or even for a few sentences. The impact of The Unwomanly Face of War, as of Alexievich’s other works, comes from condensation and selection. In subsequent attacks on her books, interviewees complained that their own words — preserved on tape — no longer represented their views, because of the way Alexievich had rearranged them.

The Unwomanly Face of War is necessarily a composite of reportage and creation. In their raw state, Alexievich’s thousands of hours of interviews document history, but cannot interpret it. To select from this material is to transform the brute facts of collective memory. For his classic photo-book The Americans — not a modest title! — Robert Frank took 28,000 pictures as he drove around the country. The book includes just 83 of them. This may be an extreme case, but Alexievich also presents a collection of decisive moments, taken from four years of struggle much of which must have consisted of boredom and routine.

Her first rule of selection may seem simple enough: these are all wartime experiences specifically of women. Yet most of them went to the front for reasons that were not specifically feminine: to defend the motherland, or to avenge family members who had already fallen. Further, their war was “unwomanly” in the sense that they were transgressing gender expectations by fighting in it. Alexievich’s more recent book, Boys in Zinc, shows over and over again that boys who went to fight in Afghanistan did so in the hope that they were going to become men. But as Valentina Chudaeva, an anti-aircraft gunner, says here: “God didn’t make us for shooting, He made us for love.”

Shoot they did, though, however much it conflicted with their sense of their own natures. Theirs was a personal dilemma, but also a provocation to the male order, on both sides of the front line. The Unwomanly Face of War contains horrific stories of the torture and sexual mutilation of women who fell into German hands. And those who survived and returned to the Soviet Union were often stigmatized as well, especially by women who had not fought. “Front women” were resented for being foul-mouthed and unfeminine or, conversely, as sluts who had only joined up to have sex with the real heroes — the men. When Alexievich started her interviews, most of her subjects had kept a long silence about their experiences at the front, or even denied that they had ever been there. Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva was a nurse who once looked after two hundred wounded men in a shed, single-handed, for four days without sleep. “I want to speak,” she said, “Finally somebody wants to hear us. […] I’ve been waiting all the while for somebody, I knew somebody would come.”

Boys in Zinc was begun while the Afghan War (1979–’89) was still in progress, and Alexievich visited the front herself a few months before the Soviet withdrawal. The title comes from the zinc coffins in which the dead were sent home. (Or parts of the dead, in which case dirt was added to make up the weight.) Half a million Soviet troops served in Afghanistan, and 15,000 of them died. No one counted the Afghan dead, but there were probably at least a million. Boys in Zinc enraged many veterans; there were legal attempts to suppress the book, or to claim damages by those who felt their own words had somehow been distorted. One veteran testified that Alexievich had “deprived our entire ‘Afghani’ generation of moral justification,” and had become rich and famous by doing so. To which one might respond that she did precisely the opposite, morally justifying the conscience of her country. Boys in Zinc may be a more stringent reckoning than any that has been made for US wars from Vietnam to Iraq.

In 1978 the Soviets had set up a client regime in Kabul with the aim of “modernizing” Afghan society, by force if necessary. When the Mujahideen started their rebellion, Brezhnev felt obliged to intervene militarily in support of his client. “They were defending their Homeland,” one veteran told Alexievich, “but what were we doing? We played the part of the Germans — that’s what one young guy told me.” The most savage fighting of World War II was between the German army and partisan guerrillas, especially in Alexievich’s Belarus. In Afghanistan the Soviets were not facing any visible army: just partisans everywhere. The Soviets called them “Spirits” because they were so rarely seen, except as corpses, and because they killed silently.

Then there was the lieutenant who found a small child at the side of the road, and went off with his driver to return the child to a nearby kishlak (village compound):

We waited for them for an hour; it was only twenty minutes there and back.

They were lying in the sand. The lieutenant and his driver. In the middle of the kishlak. […] The women had killed them with hoes.

It is not hard to imagine the consequences of such events. “We became even more cruel than the enemy,” one private recalls, “after what we did there, we’ll never get into heaven.”

In the courtroom where Alexievich was being tried for libel, a spectator said:

we believed that we lived in the best country, the most just country. But you tell us that we lived in a different country — a terrible country, drenched in blood. Who’s going to forgive you for that?

The case ended with no clear verdict, and many still attack Alexievich for airing her country’s dirty laundry in public, and for tarnishing the honor of the soldiers who had died. She could only reply that she had reported the truth, and had the tapes to prove it. Nonetheless Boys in Zinc, like The Unwomanly Face of War, presents narratives and explanations that are ultimately of its author’s creation. Whether in Afghanistan, the Eastern Front, or anywhere else, Alexievich’s message is the terrible seductiveness of war, and its terrible power to transform those who take part in it.

Unlike the Eastern Front, women did not serve in Afghanistan except in auxiliary roles, such as nurses or clerks. When Alexievich went there, it seemed to her “that war is a creation of the male nature and incomprehensible in many ways. […] At war everything’s different: you, and nature, and your thoughts.” This transformation is often self-willed, but it presents a cruel paradox. An infantry officer says: “If you ask me whether [I went] for an idea or to understand who I am, of course it was the second one. I wanted to test myself, see what I was capable of.” As in any war, men went to Afghanistan to confirm their identities, by finding out if they were the kind of person that a man should be. Except that, as one private says, “After two or three weeks there’ll be nothing of the old you left, just your name. You aren’t you any longer, but someone else.”

This sense of complete dissociation between before and after is part of the PTSD from which almost all of Alexievich’s informants seem to be suffering. It also fuels their rage against those who criticize them from the safety of civilian life. Alexievich begins Boys in Zinc with the story of a mother whose son dismembered someone with an axe, because he had lied about having been in Afghanistan. “My son was a murderer,” she says, “Because he did here what they did out there.”

In the United States, veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq also carry the scars of their service: violence, addiction, suicide. But there has been nothing like the radical disillusionment, across Soviet society, produced by Brezhnev’s decision to go to war in 1979. It could be argued that failure in Afghanistan took the entire Soviet system down with it. The troops found that they were miserably supplied with food, equipment, and medical treatment, especially in the early years of the war. There was also pervasive corruption and brutal treatment of incoming recruits by older soldiers, the so-called “grand-dads.” Another factor was the realization that Afghanistan, a supposedly backward country, had all kinds of consumer goods that were impossible to find in the USSR: jeans, toiletries, cassette players. When troops tried to take such things home, they were stolen by officials before they could board their return flights.

The Afghanistan campaign was a comprehensive disaster for the Soviets, but the story told by Boys in Zinc — and by The Unwomanly Face of War — is not entirely bleak. Alexievich’s informants can often speak of their trials with shattering insight and eloquence. Ordinary soldiers, both men and women, constantly quote the Russian poets and novelists and find consolation in them. If the Russian soul is formed by suffering, as Alexievich contends, it is suffering that has been given an unforgettable voice.

Paul Delany’s recent books include biographies of Bill Brandt, George Gissing, and Rupert Brooke.

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

South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

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

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