SACW - 30 Nov 2017 | Pakistan: Surrender to extremism / India: Hurt Sentiments; Demonetisation; Corporate Elites & Natural Resources / Mugabe - A Political Epitaph / USA: A ’60s Radical Reflects / A birthday in the Urals

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 30 Nov 2017 - No. 2964 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Five years after deadly factory fire, Bangladesh’s garment workers are still vulnerable | Rebecca Prentice & Geert De Neve
2. India: People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (P.A.D.S) condemns incarceration of Akhil Gogoi and Chandrasekhar under the National Security Act
3. India: Demonetisation - One Year After | Sukla Sen
4. Growth Through Industrialisation & Natural Resources - Audio Recording of 4th Sunil Memorial Lecture by Prof. Amit Bhaduri
5. The Workers Cup a documentary film on migrant workers building facilities for Qatar’s 2022 FIFA world cup, have tournament of their own
 
6. Recent on Communalism Watch:
 - Bangladesh Catholic priest goes missing
 - India: Question to Supreme Court - Does an adult woman not have a right to privacy and autonomy? | Kavita Krishnan
 - In 21st century India, the Supreme Court is treating an adult woman like she’s her father’s property | Anjali Mody
 - India: ‘Padmavati’ protests driven by Hindutva, not Hinduism: Nayantara Sahgal
 - India: In the name of faith - Kapil Sibal
 - Subtle idiom of prejudice | Jawed Naqvi
 - The challenge to the Indian-ness of the Taj Mahal is a challenge to the Indian-ness of Muslims | Harrison Akins
 - India: Views of Hindutva RIght Wing Thinkers on Indian Culture and Values, Form part of of Refersher Course for University Teachers
 - Love in the times of Fundamentalist Politics-Case of Hadiya
 - India: Gujarat bishop’s plea to save India from nationalist forces is an act of citizenship we must support
 - India: Sure, Yogi Adityanath, do build a Ram statue but not with tax payer's money | Sanjeev Sabhlok
 - India: Padmavati Row - BJP's Objection Over Distorting History Is The Double Standard Of 2017 Betwa Sharma
 - India: BJP’s Bihar chief says 'Fingers, hands raised against PM Modi will be broken, chopped off' | Indian Express
 - India: Rajasthan which is taking giant strides backward - Editorial, Indian Express
 - India: Row over the film Padmavati - A tweet by Ramachandra Guha

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Editorials : Has Pakistan surrendered to extremism?
8. Pakistan Strikes Deal With Islamist Protesters in Islamabad | Salman Masood
9. Pakistan: Textbooks – kudos to Punjab | Pervez Hoodbhoy
10. India: The Game of Hurt Sentiments - Editorial in EPW 
11. India: Rajputs redux - Padmini's long afterlife | Mukul Kesavan
12. Tagore’s idea of nationalism was alien to the Indian psyche | Rohan D’Souza
13. The worrying rise of militarisation in India’s Central Armed Police Forces | Devesh Kapur
14. India: Absurdity of epic proportions - Are people aware of the content in Jayasi's Padmavat? Purushottam Agrawal
15. Joel Lee. Review of Gupta, Charu, The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print
16. Zimbabwe: Mugabe - A Political Epitaph | Yash Tandon
17. USA: A ’60s Radical Reflects | Richard Ohmann
18. A birthday in the Urals | Tetiana Bezruk

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1. FIVE YEARS AFTER DEADLY FACTORY FIRE, BANGLADESH’S GARMENT WORKERS ARE STILL VULNERABLE | Rebecca Prentice & Geert De Neve
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Exactly five years ago, in November 2012, a fire in the Tazreen Fashions factory in Bangladesh killed at least 112 workers. Probably caused by a short circuit on the ground floor of the building, the fire rapidly spread up the nine floors where garment workers were trapped due to narrow or blocked fire escapes. Many died inside the building or while seeking an escape through the windows. Just five months later, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building killed 1,134 garment workers and injured  
http://www.sacw.net/article13580.html

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2. INDIA: PEOPLE’S ALLIANCE FOR DEMOCRACY AND SECULARISM (P.A.D.S) CONDEMNS INCARCERATION OF AKHIL GOGOI AND CHANDRASEKHAR UNDER THE NATIONAL SECURITY ACT
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Akhil Gogoi, the leader of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti of Asom, and Chandrasekhar of Bhim Sena in Western Uttar Pradesh have been under detention for many months now. . . . Laws like the NSA which give unlimited power to state authorities to detain anyone without trial should be repealed. Police officials and political leaders who conspired to detain them under NSA should be given sufficient punishment to act as a deterrent.
http://www.sacw.net/article13579.html

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3. INDIA: DEMONETISATION - ONE YEAR AFTER | Sukla Sen
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Demonetisation in Nov 2016 is, beyond doubt, the most talked of action taken by the incumbent Narendra Modi regime in India. . . this is a factual evaluation, even if from a specific standpoint, of the measure, its actual impacts and to what extents it has succeeded or failed to meet its initially, and also subsequently, stated goals over the span of the last one year.
http://www.sacw.net/article13578.html

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4. GROWTH THROUGH INDUSTRIALISATION & NATURAL RESOURCES - AUDIO RECORDING OF 4TH SUNIL MEMORIAL LECTURE BY PROF. AMIT BHADURI
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audio recording of the 2017 Sunil Memorial Lecture by (the widely acclaimed Indian economist) Professor Amit Bhaduri which was delivered at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on 25 November 2017.
http://www.sacw.net/article13577.html

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5. THE WORKERS CUP A DOCUMENTARY FILM ON MIGRANT WORKERS BUILDING FACILITIES FOR QATAR’S 2022 FIFA WORLD CUP, HAVE TOURNAMENT OF THEIR OWN
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In 2022, Qatar will host the biggest sporting event in the world, the FIFA World Cup. But right now, far away from the bright lights, star athletes and adoring fans, the tournament is being built on the backs of 1.6 million
migrant workers. The Workers Cup is a feature-length documentary giving voice to the men who are laboring to build sport’s grandest stage.
http://www.sacw.net/article13574.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
 - Bangladesh Catholic priest goes missing
 - India: Question to Supreme Court - Does an adult woman not have a right to privacy and autonomy? | Kavita Krishnan
 - In 21st century India, the Supreme Court is treating an adult woman like she’s her father’s property | Anjali Mody
 - India: ‘Padmavati’ protests driven by Hindutva, not Hinduism: Nayantara Sahgal
 - India: In the name of faith - Kapil Sibal
 - Subtle idiom of prejudice | Jawed Naqvi
 - The challenge to the Indian-ness of the Taj Mahal is a challenge to the Indian-ness of Muslims | Harrison Akins
 - India: Views of Hindutva RIght Wing Thinkers on Indian Culture and Values, Form part of of Refersher Course for University Teachers
 - Love in the times of Fundamentalist Politics-Case of Hadiya
 - India: Gujarat bishop’s plea to save India from nationalist forces is an act of citizenship we must support
 - India: Sure, Yogi Adityanath, do build a Ram statue but not with tax payer's money | Sanjeev Sabhlok
 - India: Padmavati Row - BJP's Objection Over Distorting History Is The Double Standard Of 2017 Betwa Sharma
 - India: BJP’s Bihar chief says 'Fingers, hands raised against PM Modi will be broken, chopped off' | Indian Express
 - India: Rajasthan which is taking giant strides backward - Editorial, Indian Express
 - 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 Government and private 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

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. EDITORIALS : HAS PAKISTAN SURRENDERED TO EXTREMISM?
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Dawn, November 29, 2017 

Editorial

THE LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY

Picking up the pieces after a devastating shock to the system is not easy.

Pakistan is not the country it was until mere days ago. Yet, failure is not an option and it is time to ask searing questions.

Has extremism truly gone mainstream? Or was capitulation by each and every institution of the state to a violent mob a last-gasp attempt at salvaging a modicum of stability in order to allow the state an opportunity to regain its composure before it can press ahead with its counter-extremism project?

Surely, decisions made in desperate, fearful moments cannot mean that for all time and for all intents and purposes the country has surrendered to extremism. Pakistan has had to contend with several such inflection points in its recent history.
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The decisions made in the aftermath of 9/11 and the US-led war in Afghanistan; the events leading up to and after the Lal Masjid operation; the assassination of Benazir Bhutto; the military operation in Swat; the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad by US special forces; Operation Zarb-i-Azb in North Waziristan Agency; the Army Public School attack in Peshawar — each of those, and several other episodes have underlined both the fragility and resilience of this country.

What ought to be clear is that business as usual is absolutely no longer an option. The National Action Plan was Pakistan’s halting, uncertain attempt at devising a counter-extremism strategy, but it has gone nowhere. While there may have been several good ideas in NAP, none of them have been implemented to any degree that any sensible or rational analysis can deem satisfactory.

The significant strides made in the fight against anti-Pakistan militants who have taken up arms against the state and society have masked the broader failures in the fight against extremism.

There is simply no measure, no analysis and no assessment that can suggest that Pakistan is a country less threatened by extremism of any and every stripe than it was threatened by a decade ago. More desperately, there is a real sense that the state’s capacity to even understand the scale and scope of the problem has been undermined by its head-in-the-sand approach to extremist challenges.

If there is to be a solution — and it is not clear that there is an obvious solution — it may have to start with a simple premise: no more, no longer and never again. A zero-tolerance approach to bigots, zealots and mobs.

This country has the greatest of men, the most remarkable of leaders in the 20th century, as its founding father. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the best of all statesmen, who knew not hate or bigotry or violence, is the reason this country exists. To his ideals we must return, to his vision we must re-commit ourselves.

Acknowledge extremism; defeat extremism; and let Jinnah’s Pakistan prevail.

O o o

The News, November 28, 2017

Editorial

DIVIDED WE FALL

After nearly three weeks of being held hostage by Khadim Hussain Rizvi and his Tehreek-e-Labaik Ya Rasool Allah, the people of Islamabad are finally free to leave their homes. The rest of the country can breathe easy knowing that the government’s inability to handle just 2000 people will not bring any more violence to the streets. On Monday, Rizvi announced an end to his sit-in after saying he had received assurances from the army chief. The agreement between Rizvi and the state was a capitulation. Law Minister Zahid Hamid handed in his resignation and the government agreed to release all TLYRA workers without charging them while also committing to pay for any damages caused by the protesters. Everything about this sorry episode, from the way this dharna sprung up to its eventual ‘resolution’ reinforces every fear we – and the rest of the world – had about the Pakistani state and its resolve in the fight against extremism. The message sent out by this debacle is that protestations by the government that all state institutions are working in harmony cannot be taken at face value. There has always been chatter about differences within the state on matters of foreign policy and external security but we have now seen evidence that those differences extend to a small gang of extremists shutting down the capital city. The government was paralysed with fear, leading to debate and negotiation within institutions and, finally, an abject surrender to Rizvi.
The ramifications of caving in to the TLYRA will continue to be felt for years. Every extremist group in the country now knows that it only needs to gather a couple of thousand people to blackmail the government into acquiesce. We may have always known that the power of our government is not particularly strong but to have its weakness confirmed in such a manner is humiliating. The hesitation of the government in tackling the protest was not entirely unreasonable, though it was unfortunate. The government was scared from the very beginning that no matter what course of action it took, it would be besieged by criticism. While that may have been true, allowing a violent mob to dictate policy should never be countenanced. The demands of the TLYRA were unreasonable to begin with since the change in the election oath clause was accidental and immediately rectified. In any case, just the law minister alone could not have been single-handedly responsible for this change. Despite what is being said now, we know the draft bill was signed by the members of the standing committee which included representatives from every major party. At its most innocent even, this protest was never about just that one issue. It was a way for extremists to snatch yet more political space and in this it succeeded. This is apart from any drawing-room discussions on the matter. The rest of the world will now look warily at Pakistan, wondering if this is a country in which they want to invest. India too will surely not miss the opportunity to point out how just two thousand armed men were able to hold the country hostage.
During the course of his protest, Khadim Hussain Rizvi was unsparing in the vitriol he spewed against every institution of the country, be it the government, the judiciary, the civil administration or the media. The only institution he spared was the army, which ended being pivotal to the resolution of the matter. Over the weekend, there were reports and speculation about the army not involving itself in any possible operation against the protesters. There was also consternation in some quarters about a moral equivalence being drawn between an elected government and two thousand violent extremists. In the end, everyone within the state was on board in this act of collective surrender, with the rest of us watching aghast. Now that the protest seems to be over, we as a nation need to reflect on our governing norms. In most countries, the constitutional duties and responsibilities of governments in such scenarios are laid out. They know who they can call upon to defuse such situations. Over here, it is not clear if orders are being followed and if everyone is operating in concert. The government was clearly unprepared for this situation. In the past, it has shed ministers in moments of pressure even when many felt there was no reason to do so. Capitulations such as these only reinforce the belief held by some commentators that the government has very little maneuvering room in its dealings. That room was further shrunk when the judiciary kept giving deadlines for dispersing the protesters and essentially ordered action against them. When that action took place, it made statements about the operation and how it played out. The courts too perhaps required a more pragmatic approach to the matter. It is always difficult to deal with potentially violent groups without some use of force. And it is to be expected then that once the government is boxed in it will be unable to move forward without the assistance of the army.
One manifestation of the disunity within the state were reports that the government in Punjab was not wholly committed to an operation against the protesters. It was notable that Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif himself called on Zahid Hamid to resign. Should that turn out to be true, it would show that the PML-N, for all its external problems, needs to get its own house in order. The optics that are presented by this are that of a ruling party in disarray and disagreement while the army presents a united front. It is now the responsibility of the PML-N to show some clarity and resolve. It has a tendency to dither and prevaricate whenever it is in trouble. Whether it’s the refusal of the government to release the report of the Model Town killings or not publicising the results of the investigation into the election oath change, the government is unable to take a clear stance and stick to it. Chaos is created when you have Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal explaining how it is trying to solve the issue peacefully but others in the party undercutting his message by calling for Hamid’s resignation. The prime minister didn’t help matters by staying on the sidelines throughout, leading to further confusion. Some would argue that the position in which the PML-N finds itself pushed into makes the party want to please various quarters at the same time.. That said, was enough done by everyone to act together? The army certainly was clear on what was required. True, the nature of institutions which operate in various spheres in the county is different but they do need to work in cooperation. Perhaps the government could have done more. Perhaps the Raja Zafarul Haq report could have been released with greater urgency. Perhaps Ahsan Iqbal’s emphasis on a peaceful resolution needed to change. But all this would have happened only in an environment of harmony within the government and amongst institutions. There is no definite evidence that this harmony existed.

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8. PAKISTAN STRIKES DEAL WITH ISLAMIST PROTESTERS IN ISLAMABAD
By Salman Masood
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(The New York Times, November 27, 2017)


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A clash between security forces and protesters in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Saturday. On Monday, the government said the law minister would step down in return for an end to the protests. Credit Sohail Shahzad/European Pressphoto Agency

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s government struck a deal on Monday with leaders of a fundamentalist Islamist protest movement, saying that the country’s law minister would step down in return for an end to demonstrations that had brought violent clashes and paralyzed the Pakistani capital for weeks.

The embattled law minister, Zahid Hamid, whom protesters had accused of blasphemy, resigned as part of negotiations overseen by Pakistan’s military, officials said.

Public anger over the protest’s disruption of Islamabad, the capital, had been growing by the day, and the agreement was widely seen as another in a string of capitulations by the government to religious extremists who command growing popularity in Pakistan.

Just a few days before, a judicial panel ordered the release of the Islamist militant leader Hafiz Saeed from house arrest. Though Mr. Saeed stands accused in the deadly Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 and is wanted internationally as a terrorist leader and financier, he also enjoys huge popularity in Pakistan, and was seen as very likely to publicly take up leadership of a political party started by his inner circle.

The agreement on Monday was hashed out after violent clashes between the protesters — from a hard-line religious party belonging to the Barelvi sect of Islam — and police officers. The party’s leader, the cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi, had rallied thousands of supporters near one of the main entrances to Islamabad, disrupting traffic for more than two weeks.

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Khadim Hussain Rizvi, center, the cleric leading a hard-line religious party belonging to the Barelvi sect of Islam. He had rallied thousands of supporters in Islamabad, disrupting traffic for more than two weeks. Credit Aamir Qureshi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An attempt by the governing party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, to clear out the protest site earlier on Saturday ended in deadly clashes, with at least six protesters killed and more than 200 people injured.
Continue reading the main story

The government was forced to suspend the operation, but violence quickly spilled over to other parts of the country, especially in Punjab Province, the most important political base for the governing party. The law minister’s house there was attacked, and several other party figures also came under pressure.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi met with Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistan’s army chief, to discuss the crisis. The army chief said his troops would not use force to stop the protests, but agreed to safeguard important buildings around the capital, military officials said.

The Barelvi party’s protest started over proposed changes to the oath taken by incoming lawmakers, including altering the language that declared the Prophet Muhammad as God’s final prophet.

Mr. Rizvi and other hard-line clerics said the changes, under the supervision of Mr. Hamid, the law minister, resulted in blasphemy, which is listed under the country’s laws as a capital offense. Even isolated accusations of blasphemy have led to lynchings or mob violence, and Mr. Rizvi has often used the issue to whip up outrage at sermons and party rallies.

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Supporters listening to Mr. Rizvi in Islamabad on Monday. Credit Aamir Qureshi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The law minister denied the charge, releasing a video in which he stated that he personally believed that Muhammad was God’s final prophet, and the government quickly dropped the proposed changes to the oath. But the efforts to placate Mr. Rizvi and several other religious leaders failed, and demonstrations began three weeks ago.

The agreement signed in the early hours of Monday called for an immediate removal of the law minister. In turn, religious leaders assured that they would not issue an edict against him — apparently to ensure that the minister did not come under further attacks; blasphemy accusations have often led to killings of the accused. The agreement called for the release of all workers and supporters of Mr. Rizvi’s party apart from asking the government to pay for the damages to public property.

One particularly telling part of the agreement was a note of gratitude to General Bajwa, the army chief, who was thanked for “saving the country from a big catastrophe.” In some circles, the military has been criticized as being too tolerant, or even supportive, of extreme Islamist groups.

Maj. Gen. Faiz Hamid, the director general of the counterintelligence wing of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the country’s powerful spy agency, signed the agreement as representative of the army chief.

Later on Monday, roadblocks and barriers were removed from Islamabad’s highways and connecting roads after Mr. Rizvi addressed a news conference and called off the protest. Sanitary workers began to remove debris from the area where the protesters were camped.

Maj. Gen. Azhar Naveed Hayat Khan, the director general of the Pakistan Rangers (Punjab), a paramilitary force, which had been ordered to clear the protest site, distributed cash to some protesters who needed it to buy tickets for the trip home. When one older protester demurred, the general insisted, put his hand over his heart and said, “It is from our side. Are we not with you?”

A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2017, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Pakistan’s Deal With Islamists to End Protests Is Seen as a Capitulation

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9. Pakistan: Textbooks – kudos to Punjab | Pervez Hoodbhoy
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(Dawn, November 25, 2017)

MANY think that our education rot is irreversible. Among countless other problems one stands out — school textbooks written and produced in Pakistan. These are probably the world’s worst. For decades, children have studied from books printed upon smudgy newsprint replete with mistakes, stuffed with materials containing hate against other peoples and religions, and impoverished of actual subject content.

There’s now a ray of hope. Last week, two towering piles of books from the Punjab Textbook Board somehow found their way onto my desk. Many bear the imprimatur ‘Punjab Chief Minister’s Programme for Education Reforms’ stamped upon their front cover. This immediately sent to me a negative signal — what business is it of any minister, prime or chief, to advertise himself using public money? But having flipped through thousands of pages I must reluctantly concede that the sin of self-promotion stands ameliorated.

The new books are cleanly printed on paper of decent quality, typographical errors are infrequent, and coloured cartoons show smiling girl children in class. Earlier textbooks typically showed docile boys facing grim-faced elderly teachers. My heart gladdened at suggested science experiments that are both interesting and doable. And, instead of beating the tired old drum of Muslim scientists from a thousand years ago, one now sees a genuine attempt to teach actual science — how plants grow and breathe, objects move, water makes droplets or freezes, etc.

    There’s a belated realisation that thousands of Pakistani lives were lost to militancy fuelled by hate material.

On the history front one feels instant relief. Pakistan’s date of birth has thankfully been set at 1947 and away from 712 — the year Arab imperial conqueror Mohammed bin Qasim set foot in Sindh. Schoolbooks during Gen Ziaul Haq’s years contained this claim and no subsequent government dared to reset the clock. Astonishingly, one book frankly admits that Muslims had fought against other Muslims and ascribes the Mughal Empire’s downfall after Emperor Aurangzeb to his quarrelling sons rather than eternally scheming Hindu Rajputs.

But here’s the wonder of wonders: an Urdu translation of Quaid-i-Azam’s famous speech of Aug 11, 1947, has finally found its way into at least one social studies book! This declares that religion is a matter for the individual citizen and not of the state. The speech had hitherto been kept hidden for fear of polluting students’ minds and weakening the two-nation theory. Whether it will actually be covered in Matric examinations is difficult to say; if not then students and their teachers won’t take it seriously.

Of course, not all is well and troubling issues remain. Books for teaching Urdu as a language read as if they are equally meant for teaching Islamiat; there is only passing reference to the ancient civilisations of Mohenjodaro and Harappa; why East Pakistan sought independence from West Pakistan is unexplained; and there is a continued blackout of Operation Gibraltar — the Kargil-like venture of Gen Ayub Khan to liberate Kashmir that precipitated the 1965 war. I might parenthetically mention that weeks ago, while speaking before 250-300 students at the GIK Institute (supposedly among the best universities in Pakistan), only nine said they had heard of the operation.

But these remaining flaws, though serious, pale in comparison to what children were forcibly fed in earlier decades. Samples: “Make speeches on jihad and shahadat”; “Acknowledge and identify forces that may be working against Pakistan”; “Know about India’s evil designs against Pakistan”; “Visit police stations”; and “Collect pictures of policemen, soldiers, and National Guards”. (These quotes are from pages 154-158 of the Curriculum Document for Classes K-V, National Bureau of Curriculum and textbooks, Federal Ministry of Education, 1995.)

The older curriculum helped create a militant, intolerant mindset. A generation later, Pakistan saw jihad-obsessed youngsters emerging even from mainstream schools. Willing to kill and be killed, they are now everywhere and have to be crushed with Islamic-sounding operations like Zarb-i-Azb and Raddul Fasaad (for which great credit is claimed). Terrorist networks of students and teachers that target policemen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens have been discovered within many colleges and universities.

The eventual revamping of Punjab’s school textbooks owes to a belated realisation that thousands of Pakistani lives were needlessly lost to militancy fuelled by hate materials in textbooks. Many years will be needed for the new books to produce a more enlightened, less xenophobic generation. This welcome step needed to be taken sooner rather than later. I have no knowledge of the blacked-out province of Balochistan but Punjab’s bold move has not been matched by other provinces.

Sindh remains frozen. Its education ministry and the Sindh Textbook Board have long set the highest standards of laziness, depravity and stupidity. An earlier analysis of STB’s science books was published in this newspaper two years ago. It has had zero effect; matters are just as grim there today as then.

Those who rule Sindh continue to stifle education. Sindh could have outraced Punjab by taking advantage of the 18th Constitutional Amendment which frees the provinces from the federal diktat. Instead, secretaries of education in Sindh who worked to improve things were defeated and shunted out. Sindh’s misfortune has been the ideology-free money-grabbing PPP which oversees a system based upon patronage and unlimited corruption.

With KP’s cleaner administration one expected better. The earlier ANP government had considerably softened textbooks in KP. But after Imran Khan’s PTI entered into an alliance with the Jamaat-i-Islami (and now possibly with arch-conservative Maulana Samiul Haq), there was drastic backpedaling. For example, there are newly added chapters in KP textbooks that glorify Ghazi Ilm Din — who preceded Mumtaz Qadri by almost a century — for murdering a blasphemer. This will gladden the hearts of those in Khadim Hussain Rizvi’s dharna who have paralysed Islamabad now for over two weeks and will surely swell their future ranks.

No country with a reasonable standard of education would think much of celebrating the publication of decent schoolbooks. Like having air to breathe or water to drink, these are considered givens. But with Pakistan being what it has become, let us be happy with what Punjab has done and hope that people in other provinces will insist upon the same or better.

The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

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10. INDIA: THE GAME OF HURT SENTIMENTS - Editorial in EPW
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(Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 52, Issue No. 47, 25 Nov, 2017)

Only when you have the power, can you afford to be hurt, and to show it.

When a Hindi feature film, Padmavati, based on an epic poem written centuries ago, occupies the attention of elected representatives and the media in India for weeks, you have to wonder about the direction the politics of protest is taking. Even though India has witnessed increasing incidents of mob violence encouraged by a silent state, it is remarkable that the protests of a localised community, the Rajputs, who the Karni Sena claims to represent, have so quickly found supporters across the country. Chief ministers of five states, all ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and several elected representatives from the BJP, have supported the protestors who demanded that the director and lead actress be beheaded and that the film be banned or burned.

The reasons they list for their objections are that the film hurts Rajput sentiments, distorts their history, defames Rani Padmini and her honour, and glorifies and glamorises the ­Muslim ruler Alauddin Khilji. They are also unhappy that the Rajput “community” was not consulted in the making of the film. But what seems to trouble them the most is the fear that the film depicts intimate scenes and a possible romance between Khilji and Padmavati.

Such accusations about “distorting history” are part of a larger and recurrent discomfort—the self-imagination of India’s “real” history in light of medieval “Muslim” rulers of India. Invariably, it is the character of a woman, imaginary or real, which has to bear the burden of how this self-imagination will be interpreted. Needless to say, not one protestor has actually seen the film. Earlier this week, when Lokendra Singh Kalvi, the chief of the Karni Sena, was asked about issuing death threats based on a film he has not seen, he clarified that he had seen the trailer in which, according to him, “Padmavati’s husband Ratan Singh looked like a goat and Alauddin Khilji looked like a monster.”

In fact, very few have asked why the director has portrayed Khilji as a beast. Why is the Muslim emperor attacking the meat he is eating; why is he so rugged and unkempt; and why is his medieval army carrying what looks like a blend of the flags of the Islamic State and Pakistan?

Apart from the Rajput protests against the film, it would be interesting to consider what would have happened if some Muslims had protested against this film for demonising them, and placing them at an even greater risk to live in peace, considering the current climate in the country. Sanjay Leela Bhansali has managed to host every kind of stereotype about Muslims in the short trailer itself, and tried to sell a clash-of-civilisations narrative. Still, no Muslim protested. How the state would have reacted if they had protested to this film is left to our imagination. In fact, far from the luxury of speaking out against misrepresentation in a movie based on a fictional story, Muslims in India have not even been able to protest against the “epidemic” of mob-lynchings that has made travelling in public spaces a potential hazard, nor against the cold and calculated onslaught on their food, livelihoods and dignity by the present government.

This is not to suggest that all communities should have an equal right to wreak havoc because of supposed “hurt sentiments” but to point out that immense power is needed to complain against perceived injustice. Only when you have the power, can you afford to be hurt, and to show it. The power to be hurt in this country needs a certain impunity. The right to be violent can be availed only by a favoured few.

Furthermore, in this game of “hurt sentiments” that includes casual communalism, entrenched patriarchy, and caste pride, what cannot be overlooked are the shared assumptions between the director and those baying for his blood regarding what makes heterosexual romance thrilling. For both, women are simultaneously objects of honour and of lust. For the Karni Sena, the brutishness of Khilji is enviable because it masculinises him; his ability to be violent is a strength, not a weakness. The Karni Sena would rather identify with the “monster” Muslim than the Hindu “goat.” What it cannot accept is the possibility of a Hindu woman having any sexual interest in a Muslim “brute.” The possibility of something like this is what drives the proto-Rajput insane.

In the end, we see that this controversy is not just a simple one about artistic freedom being restricted because Bhansali’s “celebration” of Rajput pride and honour, is steeped within a certain politics. And the people opposing the so-called arti­stic licence he has taken with what they consider “history” care ­little about the reality of women in Rajasthan today, a state with some of the worse social indicators, while they threaten to maim and murder those who transgress their meaningless sense of “honour.”

The Padmavati imbroglio has laid bare the ugly face of the future in India. We now have people in power willing to encourage distractions in the form of meaningless protests. They turn a blind eye to the virtual Talibanisation of our society as people speak openly about chopping off people’s noses, hands, and heads. Meanwhile, the creative community remains impervious to the real agenda behind this politics of protest, which will ultimately bleach all meaning from the concept of “artistic freedom.”


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11. INDIA: RAJPUTS REDUX - PADMINI'S LONG AFTERLIFE | Mukul Kesavan
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(The Telegraph, November 24, 2017)

The rearguard action that Rajputs have steadfastly fought to find honour in medieval defeat continues with the battle of Bhansali. Once upon a time the effort to salvage glory from the wreckage of history consisted of bardic narratives and modern hagiographies that talked up episodes of individual valour, embedded though they were in collective failure.

Indian cricket fans of a certain age will sympathize with this strategy. There was a time when the Indian cricket team won very little: it managed a few honourable draws and lost most of the Tests it played. Being a fan meant lingering over great individual performances in a losing cause. Pataudi, hobbled but heroic, limping to two brave fifties in Australia; Gavaskar scoring centuries in both innings of a Test against Pakistan on a tour that we lost 2-0; Azharuddin's blazing hundred in England in reply to Graham Gooch's match-winning triple century; these performances gave us something to remember. We found consolation where we could: we totted up individual averages, counted Gavaskar's centuries and proved to our satisfaction that Kapil Dev was a better all-rounder than Ian Botham, Richard Hadlee and Imran Khan. Especially Imran Khan.

Likewise, revisionist patriots and virile Hindus were fans first and historians afterwards. They looked to former Rajput captains for both inspiration and consolation. Rana Sanga and Rana Pratap became names to conjure with in colonial India as generations of Bengali boys called Rana will tell you. The heroic refusal of the rulers of Mewar to serve as vassals was read as a moral victory in the absence of any other kind. More recently, Hemu, who occupied Delhi before being defeated by Akbar's army, was hailed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad as an Indic night-watchman who briefly occupied the imperial crease before Akbar's long innings.

This habit of restaging history's hinge moments by writing romances like like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Anandmath or epic poems like Shyam Narayan Pandey's Haldighati amounts to a kind of book cricket where your team scores eight hundred runs between morning assembly and the tiffin break and wins by an innings and five hundred runs by the time the school bell rings. It happens everywhere, this cult of the Light Brigade that ennobles defeat. In other countries, though, the fact of defeat isn't disputed, just its meaning.

In India, however, the Bharatiya Janata Party government of Rajasthan and its historians have expanded the possibilities of this consolatory genre: they have discovered that Maharana Pratap of Mewar didn't just live to fight another day in 1576, he actually won the battle of Haldighati. In Rajasthan's Class X textbooks, the canard that Rana Pratap lost the battle has been fixed. This has opened up other inflection points in history that might have been misread, not just in India but elsewhere. For example, the real but neglected possibility that Napoleon might have won Waterloo. Or the suppressed alternative history of 1857 where Rani of Jhansi didn't die but went into hiding in the Terai. This shouldn't be a stretch in a country where reasonable people open to evidence believed that Subhas Chandra Bose was recently alive.

But the growing controversy over the film Padmavati has taken revisionism to the next level: it's now at the stage where it is possible to see history as a form of augmented reality. The potential of this breakthrough is incalculable. The Shri Rajput Karni Sena which has campaigned against anti-Rajput calumny throughout recorded history (people say that it's nearly as old as Facebook but that might just be folklore), is a storied army that has defended the honour of Rajputs one film at a time. It tried to stop the screening of Jodhaa Akbar on the grounds that showing Akbar romancing a Rajput princess was a form of love jihad. Here the Karni Sena was an anti-Romeo squad with Akbar cast as Romeo. It also protested the Salman Khan film, Veer, by vandalizing theatres. This time round, its leaders threatened to cut off Deepika Padukone's nose and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's head.

Predictably, media coverage has focused on the violence of this statement while missing its real significance. Its real significance is the Hindu Right's collective decision to transcend narrowly Hindu categories and put communalism on a stable, secular footing. The Padmavati controversy, properly understood, marks an ideological shift. For the first time, the historical narrative of Hindutva is being advanced without sectarianism.

Consider the facts. Not only the Karni Sena but also three BJP chief ministers, Shivraj Chouhan, Yogi Adityanath and Vasundhara Raje, have asked that Padmavati be banned because it insults a fictional Rajput heroine dreamt up by a medieval Muslim poet. Padmavat is an epic written in Avadhi by Malik Muhammad Jaisi that dramatized the story of the siege of Chittor by by inventing a wife for Chittor's king called Padmini and making her the object of Alauddin Khilji's desires. Once Jaisi invented this story in the middle of 16th century, his fiction went viral. Persian historians and Rajput bards retold it as history.

Now we have the inspiring spectacle of a Rajput monk who runs Uttar Pradesh, a Maratha queen who rules Rajputana and a Thakur chief minister in charge of India's central province, asking that a film be banned or bowdlerized because a medieval Muslim poet created a fictional Hindu heroine and turned a real Muslim ruler into a proper villain. What could be more secular than that?

The willingness of these BJP chief ministers to overlook the Muslim provenance of the story plus their refusal to pull their punches merely because the director of the film and its stars are Hindus, is a good example of desi secularism in action. The media coordinator of the BJP in Haryana has offered a ten-crore-rupee bounty to anyone who decapitates both Padukone and Bhansali. It's important to attend to the consistency of this position and its principled blindness to religious affiliation. Instead of harping on the vigilantism that this bounty might encourage, we should acknowledge the intellectual sophistication that allows this BJP functionary to read Hindus like Bhansali, Padukone and Singh as floating signifiers of Muslim hegemony over the medieval past.

It is also notable that the BJP's chief ministers grasp the postmodern insight that fictional origins don't disqualify a narrative from being true. There's nothing true or false but thinking makes it so. Even the Sikh chief minister of Congress-ruled Punjab has backed the queen, the yogi and the commissar in their demand that the film be banned. This secular, post-partisan, multi-faith coordination of prejudice makes the total rout of Muslims in medieval India an exciting possibility.

India's cricket fans eventually found heaven in a television show called 'India Glorious' that ran a loop of Test footage in which India never lost. After a thousand years, born-again bharatvasis are poised to write a history of India where Hindus always win. In the standard Class X textbook derived from this new narrative, the chapter on medieval India might be called "Rajputs Rampant". The chapter heading for primary schoolchildren could be more colloquial: "Thakurs on Top", for example, or "Ranas Rule!". In either case, a millennium of mortification will be wiped away in a single stroke.

Where does that leave Akbar, then?

Akbar who?

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12. TAGORE’S IDEA OF NATIONALISM WAS ALIEN TO THE INDIAN PSYCHE | Rohan D’Souza
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(The Indian Express, November 22, 2017)

This government has been able to find anti-nationals or Naxalites whenever it wanted to. Recently, an entire course in Nalanda university was unceremoniously scrapped and the professor asked to apologize - based on a tweet by a politician from the ruling party.

Once again, students in India have been found wanting in patriotism. The state government of Rajasthan has recently directed all state Universities to install statues of Swami Vivekananda on their campuses. And since such ‘Make in India’ initiatives do not come cheap, student unions and an assortment of patriotic individuals have been urged to step forward and foot the bill.

Earlier, the then Human Resources Minister (HRD) Smriti Irani had directed all Central Universities to ‘proudly’ fly the national flag at a height of 207 feet. This was followed by the ‘Wall of Heroes’ campaign. Also titled as the ‘martyr wall’ which required portraits of soldiers – who bravely fell in battle and were awarded the Param Vir Chakra – to adorn corridors in universities and thereby instill (not simply inspire) nationalism and sacrifice. The campaign was soon followed by another call for students and academics to carry out ‘tiranga rallies’. Which, we also learn, so inspired the Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University that he along with a band of enthusiasts marched with a 2200 foot long Indian flag for almost a mile. At the end of which, the said VC proceeded to support a ‘request’ for parking a retired army battle tank in the university campus, to further stoke the fever and fervor for patriotism and nationalism.

It is quite probable that the next logical step would be to actually get the Indian army to carry out regular flag marches within University campuses and perhaps even get a fully battle kitted soldier from, say the infantry division in the western command, to pace back and forth in a classroom before teaching can begin. The question, nonetheless, remains over whether an upwelling of patriotism can be actually generated by a show of such ‘nationalist’ objects and symbols? Put differently, is there any verifiable metric that can help us meaningfully measure the ‘ease of doing patriotism and nationalism’ in India?

The above question, however, cannot be answered because patriotism or nationalism are not real emotions, sentiments or feelings. They are, in essence, political constructs and political concepts and their effects are made real only through political action. Nationalism or patriotism, in other words, cannot be meaningfully felt or evoked as acts of faith. Rather, these terms require us to constantly redefine, debate and reinterpret ourselves as a political community.

One should not be terribly surprised, therefore, that the great poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) – whose song Jana Gana Mana we know to be the national anthem of India – had many anxieties and worries about the very idea of nationalism itself. Between 1916 and 1917, Tagore travelled to Japan and the United States of America. In lectures at the Imperial University (now Tokyo University), Keio University and in several places in the United States, he put forward several stunning and soul-searching reflections. With thoughtful and poetically infused metaphors, Tagore urged those gathered to aspire for the ‘higher ideals of humanity’ rather than accept what he called as the ‘organized selfishness of Nationalism’. He also added the equally severe admonishment that one should never “gloat upon the feebleness of its neighbours.” For Tagore, importantly enough, the idea of India was a moral project that needed to engage with its own deep and troubled history of “social adjustment.” In other words, for Tagore, the idea of India was to realize its civilizational possibilities and potential rather than to allow it to inhale the “fumes” of “patriotic bragging.”

Tagore thus considered the idea of nationalism as being profoundly alien to the Indian psyche and the subcontinent’s many pasts. These insights or claims of his, in fact, find strong resonances with a great deal of contemporary scholarship on the subject. In particular, the writings of the celebrated British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1925-95), who was able to convincingly trace the emergence of nationalism to the oftentimes violent social, economic and political processes of the industrial revolution and modernity itself.

Clearly and understandably so, India’s tryst with nationalism as a by-product of British colonialism remains cluttered by unresolved tensions, disagreements, disputes, discussions and varying ideologies. Consequently, if one is to take on the task of meaningfully being a nationalist or patriot in India today, it requires a repeated and constantly evolving engagement with some of the founding imaginations that made possible modern India as a democratic republic. In other words, nationalism and patriotism are not frozen or dead concepts but ideas that require constant nourishment through critical reflection.

Here is where the Indian university system, especially its social science and humanities departments, are particularly significant. Alongside the noise on the street and debates in Parliament, universities can help us open up, examine and deepen the content of nationalism and patriotism. For which, of course, freedom of thought and speech and space for political activism within campuses are vital. It is the argumentative citizen who makes democracy possible and stronger.

Sadly, by design or otherwise, the Modi led government in the past three years has spent too much time and effort in curtailing a range of freedoms within Indian universities. This government, almost at will, has been able to find anti-nationals or Naxalites whenever it wanted to. Recently, an entire course in Nalanda university was unceremoniously scrapped and the professor asked to apologize – based on a tweet by a politician from the ruling party. A wrong impression is also being created that studies in higher education amount to receiving one-way instruction rather than being the context for debate and disagreement. In other words, the universities seem to be hurtling towards the RSS shaka model of calisthenics, obedience and faith.

Similarly, while the army is intended to be a professional fighting force and correctly based on command, control and strict hierarchy, ideas about nationalism and patriotism actually thrive mostly in the messiness of democracy and within the social and political world of the citizen.

While the Indian citizen has many miles to go for further deepening democracy through gender equality, social justice and economic empowerment, none of these onerous challenges actually require a single bullet. All they need are good winning arguments and lots of people to talk and disagree.
Rohan D’Souza is Associate Professor, Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University.

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13. THE WORRYING RISE OF MILITARISATION IN INDIA’S CENTRAL ARMED POLICE FORCES | Devesh Kapur
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(The Print - 29 November, 2017)

Once one has a hammer, one tends to see a nail everywhere — the use of lethal force by organs of the state against its own citizens needs utmost vigilance.

Over the last two decades, the size of India’s Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) has almost doubled. At the same time, expenditures on these forces have increased by almost an order of magnitude. These increases are occurring at a time when virtually all major ministries and departments of the central government have witnessed a decline in their personnel.

The implications of this growth in the militarised approach to policing have not received the attention they deserve. [. . .]
http://bit.ly/2nfuWRQ

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14. INDIA: ABSURDITY OF EPIC PROPORTIONS - ARE PEOPLE AWARE OF THE CONTENT IN JAYASI'S PADMAVAT? Purushottam Agrawal
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(India Today, November 23, 2017)

Malik Muhammad Jayasi sure composed his magnum opus Padmavat, glorifying a Rajput legend of valour, and casting one of the most powerful, competent Muslim kings as the villain of his narrative. Why is there an issue with Padmavati despite Sanjay Leela Bhansali reiterating that his movie is based on Jayasi's work? [ . . . ]
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/padmavati-karni-sena-malik-muhammad-jayasi-sanjay-bhansali/1/1095409.html

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15. JOEL LEE. REVIEW OF GUPTA, CHARU, THE GENDER OF CASTE: REPRESENTING DALITS IN PRINT
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Charu Gupta. The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. 352 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-99564-9.

Reviewed by Joel Lee (Williams College)
Published on H-Asia (November, 2017)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Caste, Gender, and the New Historiography

A new historiography of modern India is emerging—a historiography that reveals the constitutive role of late colonial conflicts over untouchability in the formation of the contemporary political landscape. With some exceptions, earlier historians who took cognizance of Dalit lives in the archive used such material to make arguments about happenings on the margins of society. History’s “mainstream” remained untouched, so to speak, by untouchability. Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that such cardinal features of Indian political life as constitutional democracy, the secular value of tolerance, laws regulating religious conversion, and the idea of religiously “hurt sentiments”—all of which present themselves as having little to do with caste—have the contours that they do precisely as a consequence of bitter, early twentieth-century struggles over the control of Dalit labor, political agency, and social value. Recent monographs by Anupama Rao (The Caste Question, 2009), C. S. Adcock (The Limits of Tolerance, 2013), Rupa Viswanath (The Pariah Problem, 2014), and others demonstrate that the insight of W. E. B. DuBois into the constitutive centrality of race in American history applies, mutatis mutandis, with equal force in South Asia: the generative problem of the twentieth century—and indeed, of the twenty-first—is the problem of the touchability line.

Suggesting new angles of enquiry to this emerging historiography, and supplying it with north Indian archival ballast, are not exactly the stated goals of Charu Gupta’s The Gender of Caste. I would argue, however, that these are among the book’s signal achievements, and are elements of Gupta’s monograph that will make it a resource of enduring value to a range of fields: not only Dalit studies and gender studies—to which the book primarily addresses itself—but also religious studies, sociology/anthropology, and above all, modern Indian history. As Gupta’s analysis makes clear, representations of Dalit women in early twentieth-century Hindi print publics throw at least as much light on their “mainstream” authors as they do on their “peripheral” subjects; and such representations were foundational, not marginal, in the consolidation of Hindu majoritarian nationalism.

Gupta frames The Gender of Caste as a corrective to social histories of the colonial period. Such are the blind spots of prevailing historical narratives that “the implicit conclusion has been that in colonial India most women were upper caste and middle class, while virtually all the lower castes and Dalits were men.… So this book questions both the presumptive maleness of most Dalit studies, and the presumptive upper-casteness of many feminist writings of the colonial period” (p. 6). Gupta also seeks to reveal in the historical record indications of the agency of Dalit women and men despite their structural dispossession. “Through showing and discussing dialogical counter-representations, and dissonant voices and actions, this book … also venture[s] to decode the concealed scripts of Dalit agency” (p. 269). Such “decoding” of subaltern agency is, of course, a genuinely thorny endeavor; like other scholarly efforts in this direction, Gupta’s is more persuasive in certain domains and less in others. 

Equally as significant as the book’s explicit aims, though, are some of its unheralded accomplishments. Anchored in the archives of Hindi print publications in the first half of the twentieth century, The Gender of Caste considers topics as apparently disparate as conversion to Islam, labor migration to Fiji, sartorial revolutions, folktales of the witch-goddess Nona Chamarin, and stories of women who were militants in the revolt of 1857. But this is no miscellany. Rather, Gupta is stitching together a fabric of north Indian Dalit lifeworlds that the division of scholarly labor has long rended asunder. Instead of relegating conversion to religious studies, Nona Chamarin to folklore, and Fiji to labor history—as norms of academic specialization would tend to encourage—Gupta demonstrates that for Dalit women in the 1910s, each of these phenomena was readily at hand, and represented a potentially emancipatory path or agentive model; for the Hindi writers and publicists that depicted these phenomena in word and image, they represented a collective threat to caste Hindu dominance and nationalist integrity.

Another of the book’s contributions is the opening it provides for theorizing caste in terms of intimacy. While the application of this category may seem, at first blush, counterintuitive, Gupta deploys it for good reasons: “Intimacy provides us with a new way to talk of caste, not only through identity categories, politics, and structural and institutional inequalities, but also as an idea made material through the physical body.  It allows us to see the subtle manner in which caste functions as body history and body language, the politics of which permeates the most intimate spaces of our lives” (p. 15). Caste’s intimacy, that is, is part of its insidiousness: we can neither leave it at the door nor shed it with our clothes; our very bodies, styles of comportment, and modes of intimate engagement with the world are trained by our social location.  That caste works upon us intimately, and that its intimacy is essential to its power, is among the most fertile insights of The Gender of Caste.

A discussion of two arguments sustained across multiple chapters may help substantiate these observations. One of the central claims of The Gender of Caste is that there was a gradual but definite shift in the representation of Dalit women in Hindi print publications in Uttar Pradesh over the early decades of the twentieth century, a shift from stereotypes of filth and dangerous sexuality to stereotypes of patient and forbearing victimhood. Drawing on figures of Hindu mythology present in her sources, Gupta glosses this transformation of the represented Dalit woman as the shift from Surpanakha—the aggressive “demoness” and target of Lakshman’s disciplinary violence—to Shabari—the humble devotee who gathers fruit daily in hopes of offering it to Rama. The evidence for this claim is overwhelming, and a biting reminder (particularly on the Surpanakha side of things) of how socially acceptable the public expression of caste contempt was. For instance, in the popular Hindi monthly Chand in 1927, privileged-caste writers held that “They [untouchables] are completely indifferent to personal cleanliness. They do not bathe for months together. Their hair is a jungle-house of lice. Their clothes are a bundle of filth and their teeth show half an inch of grime deposit. Muck has seeped into their very veins; that is to say, they have made dirt their everyday and constant companion” (p. 62). Or consider this sample from the didactic literature aimed at privileged-caste women, warning them against closeness with their Dalit women servants: “We have to engage daily with women like the malin, nain, kaharin, chamarin, dhobin, pisanharin, maniharin, and dai. All these women also indulge in forms of pimping. They provoke quarrels in peaceful homes. They roam around criticizing others.… These kutnis [home-breakers] work hand in glove with other wicked characters.… Dear daughter, be very careful of these women.  They are notorious for their false and unwholesome tales. You must clearly tell them you have no time for their dirty stories” (pp. 34-35).

Having demonstrated the ubiquity of such characterizations in the archive, Gupta argues that Dalit women provided the foil against which the ideal woman of Hindu and nationalist narratives was constructed. “The crafting of an ideal upper-caste woman … required a repeated denigration of the perceived practices of low-caste women” (p. 32). A parallel argument, notably, could be made using Urdu didactic literature of the same period; for example Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi’s influential Mirat-ul Urus (Mirror for brides), a story structured on the contrastive opposition of the virtuous daughter who keeps her distance from Dalit women, and the wicked daughter who fraternizes with them and adopts their putative habits, illustrates how caste contempt was as constitutive an element of ideal ashraf femininity in colonial north India as it was of ideal Hindu femininity.  

The Surpanakha stereotypes do not disappear from Hindi print; they are, however, gradually superseded by the figure of the Dalit woman as a humble bhakta or as the victim of British or Muslim depredations. Gupta suggests a number of conditions that enabled this extraordinary shift. One was the migration of north Indian women—including relatively high numbers of Dalit women—to the plantations of colonial Fiji as indentured laborers, whose brutal exploitation became an impetus to and focus of anticolonial Indian nationalism in the 1910s. A key text in catalyzing organized opposition to the indentured labor system was the account of Kunti, a Chamar woman of UP who migrated to Fiji as a worker, of an attempted rape by a white overseer in 1913. In taking up Kunti’s cause, nationalists were, probably for the first time, claiming a Dalit woman not as “Other” but as one of their own, as someone whose injuries should be understood as injuries to the nation. Other causes of the shift toward sympathy were as Hindu majoritarian as they were nationalist: the Arya Samaj, whose role in refiguring the Dalit woman as victim in Hindi print was paramount, pursued this path precisely insofar as her victimizer could be identified as Muslim, and in the interests of “incorporating the untouchables within a putative Hindu community and nation” (p. 52). Gupta adduces often startlingly frank evidence of the rationale that Hindu reformists offered for extending sympathy to Dalit women, such as this from Chand: “If untouchables eschew the protection of Hindus and convert [to Islam], will you clean your own toilets? Will your women do the work of midwives? Will you do the work of a washerman? Will you do all the work of Chamars?” (p. 116).

Another key set of claims, sustained across chapters 3, 4 and 6, relate to Dalit masculinity and various domains in which Dalits have had some measure of agency in representing themselves in Hindi print. One such domain is the popular literature—poems, plays, and counter-histories penned primarily by Dalit men—of Dalit viranganas, or martial heroines in the revolt against the British East India Company in 1857.  In chapter 3, Gupta considers how the portrayal of viranganas in this literature counters privileged-caste stereotypes about Dalit women with “what might be termed the Dalit Amazonian,” an emancipatory yet almost superhumanly unattainable narrative figure in which “an embattled Dalit masculinity can be seen as professing itself in the public-political sphere” (p. 106). That representations of Dalit women in the virangana literature are mediated by Dalit men is demonstrable, and raises important questions about the relations between discourses of gender advanced by dominant and subordinate castes, by women and men, in print and in oral tradition. The complexity of this terrain is acknowledged in the virangana discussion and at times in chapters 4 and 6; at other times, however, a somewhat reductive approach is on display, wherein acts of Dalit political and labor assertion are interpreted as perforce masculist and at the expense of Dalit women, when the evidence adduced does not seem to support such a claim. 

Much of chapter 4, for example, is devoted to an analysis of the labor struggles of UP sanitation workers from the 1920s to the 1940s. With considerable archival detail Gupta recounts a series of collective actions through which sweepers and conservancy workers fought colonial municipalities over working conditions and hereditary rights to nightsoil. She then writes: “During a strike the sweeper was king, ruling the city and robustly marking his presence and importance in urban civic public life.… He was claiming his masculinity through stigmatized symbols, but turning them into statements of power for that short time” (p. 151). But this is problematic; first, because it obscures the fact of women’s significant participation both in the labor of street sweeping and in sweepers’ strikes—the refusal of women sweepers to submit to arbitration in sanitation laborers’ strikes sufficiently impressed M. K. Gandhi that he remarked on it in his mouthpiece Harijan in 1946. Second, the claim that strikes represented an assertion of Dalit sweepers’ masculinity is made in the absence of any evidence other than a caricature by a British cartoonist, in the Civil and Military Gazette, of a mustachioed sweeper wearing a crown. That is, the imputation of an androcentric Dalit discourse to sweepers’ strikes is given no evidentiary ground in Dalit writing or even the Hindi print sphere. The problem is not one of lack of sources that might shed light on Dalit perspectives; one could imagine mounting an effective argument about gendered discourses of assertion based on a close reading of lists of sweepers’ demands, speeches made and posters distributed at workers’ rallies, and other such sources. And indeed, in some of the other domains in which Gupta presents the “claiming masculinity” argument—efforts to increase Dalit recruitment in the colonial army and struggles over “respectable” women’s clothing, for instance—the evidence makes for a persuasive case. In other domains, like the “marriage” of Nona Chamarin to Ravidas in twentieth-century reworkings of myth—the “Dalit masculinist ethos” (p. 163) is not so much demonstrated as assumed, when one suspects something more complex might be at work. To point this out is by no means to imply the absence or irrelevance of androcentrism in these spheres of early twentieth-century Dalit assertion; rather, precisely because the interrelations of caste and gender ideologies have been so consequential in the transformation of north Indian society, it is to call for treating them with the same care for evidentiary anchoring that the Surpanakha-to-Shabari argument—and indeed most of the book—exemplifies.

These concerns by no means detract from the indispensability of The Gender of Caste for students and scholars of caste, gender, religion, and modern India. The book’s archival richness, its success in drawing together spheres of Dalit experience ignored or kept separate in historical narratives, and its generative suggestions about the intimacy of caste make it a landmark study. And in its demonstration of the centrality of representations of Dalit women—as indentured worker, as potential convert to Islam, as vamp and victim, Surpanakha and Shabari—to the middle-class Hindi print publics that so decisively shaped nationalism and Hindu majoritarianism in north India, The Gender of Caste opens an important front for the emerging historiography. 

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16. ZIMBABWE: MUGABE - A POLITICAL EPITAPH | Yash Tandon
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(http://yashtandon.com - November 21, 2017)

If the following reads like an epitaph, this indeed is what it is. The end of Mugabe’s political life at the age of 93 is like an end of his life.

Mugabe has been the lead story almost globally – even in the western media – for the whole of the past week.  How so? There are two reasons for this. The most superficial reason is that at the age of 93 he is the oldest ruler on earth. His 37 years rule spans two generations. People born when he came to power in 1980 are now in their late 40s. Hence the formation of a group called Generation 40, better known as G40. The second reason is that he will be remembered as the leader of a guerrilla movement that finally ended the rule of the white man in what was then Rhodesia (named after the arch-imperialist, Cecil Rhodes). He is an emblematic, historical figure. He is a giant, whose boot steps inaugurated a revolutionary era in the early years – boots that, sadly, became too heavy for him, and too painful for the ordinary people for whose liberation he had fought.
Two perspectives

There are those who might be tempted to drag Mugabe down to an ignominious end.  And I must confess that if I were one of the millions who have suffered pangs of poverty, deprivation, and neglect, I too might, perhaps, be tempted to take the same view.  So I do not stand in judgment of people whose living life has been as if they were dead, as if their lives did not matter, people who are now dancing in the streets of Zimbabwe at the end of this dictatorship.

My shared empathy with people who have suffered does not distract me from presenting another perspective. I remember Mugabe from the time he came to Dar es Salaam in mid-1970s. I had gone with the late Comrade Nathan Shamuyarira to meet him and other militants of ZANU. During those years, I had an opportunity also to meet with Comrade Joshua Nkomo, leader of ZAPU, another revolutionary leader. I will not go into the feud between ZANU and ZAPU, which later reconciled and joined forces. Zimbabwe was our second home where my wife and I stayed longest (for 23 years) after being exiled from my home, Uganda.  I did not take up Zimbabwean nationality, but I am a Zimbabwean.  So I am qualified to say that in my eyes, both Nkomo and Mugabe qualify as the “fathers of the nation”.

Mugabe will be remembered for the good he did for the nation. He refused to compromise with imperialism; at independence, he was generous enough to open his arms even to those with whom he had been fighting in the bush for twenty years. Along with his party, he transformed the lives of the ordinary people by bringing education, health, water, sanitation and housing to millions of rural people. I was witness to all this. Instead of joining the University of Zimbabwe (which is what Shamuyarira expected, I (with my wife, Mary, and the late Ludwig Chizarura) worked with communities in the rural areas for over two decades.

I also worked with Morgan Tsvangirai, when he was leading the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) – jointly co-editing a small book on five Zimbabwean trade unions – including the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers’ Union (GAPWUZ). I witnessed the move for land reform starting in 1998. I was hired as consultant by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to help design a planned, systematic and efficient five-year program of land reform. I attended a meeting of donors, where countries such as Sweden, Norway and Germany were willing to put in money for compensation and development, but it all came to nothing. It was aborted by the British government which refused to be part of it, and so the others also withdrew. Following this, the War Veterans Association organised marches in Harare, more or less forcing Mugabe to fast-track land reform. Land reform has its critics – especially in imperial Britain – but its account by the late Sam Moyo is the most objective analysis. Land was one of the reasons for the guerrilla war – an objective that the South African government has not been able to fulfill (yet) – more than twenty years down the road.
Regime change

The land reform was the last revolutionary change in Zimbabwe. Already, as Mugabe was presiding over the land reform, his Finance Minister, the late Bernard Chidzero was negotiating with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan to bail the country out of a debt situation – created largely by a massive importation of machinery (including farm implements) to revolutionise the economy. Mugabe was never a good economist (I had several opportunities to discuss economics with him).  So, against better judgment of people like Shamuyarira and Ibbo Mandaza, Mugabe fell in line with Chidzero. The government signed an agreement with the IMF in 1989, which ushered in an era of the Structural Adjustment Agreement (SAP). This was effectively the real “regime change” – yes, a change in regime – now led by the empire with Mugabe as its head of state!

There was some opposition in the cabinet.  Fay Chung resigned her post as Minister of Education.  The other person who wanted to resign was Shamuyarira.  We talked about it. I suggested that he too should resign. He said he was under pressure from Mugabe to stay. He did, but Nathan confided in me that he had told Mugabe that time had come for those who had fought for the Chimurenga to make space for a new generation of leadership.  If Shamuyarira was alive today, he might have joined forces with the G40. Shamuyarira died in June 2014, penniless and neglected by Mugabe and the party.
Reigniting peoples’ revolutionary spirit

After a last minute attempt to retain his position as Chairman of ZANU (PF) – wanting to open the party’s December conference – Mugabe yielded to pressure and saw wisdom in throwing away his baton today (21 November) resigning as President.  Sadly, he may still not recognise that he has been on the wrong side of history for at least the last two decades.

I agree with SADC Council of NGOs statement of solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe – released on 15 November – on how Zimbabwe has been “auctioned at the altar of counter-revolutionaries”.  I also agree with the recommendations of the more than a hundred Zimbabwe civil society organisations (CSOs) made on 16 November.

Mugabe’s resignation opens the potential for returning to the revolutionary yonder days.  I say “potential” guardedly … for the pro-ESAP, pro-IMF, pro-austerity regime is still in power, and likely to remain in power … unless challenged. The people power is on the streets, but not in the corridors of power.  The pro-democracy, pro-justice CSOs, the trade unions, and progressive intellectuals and anti-imperialist nationalists in the private sector – with the participation of the people at large – might want to set up a “steering committee” (or something like that) to monitor the development of the country in the coming months and years. There should be not a single person in Zimbabwe who should go without food, clothes, shoes, water, free education until secondary school, housing, employment … and yes, freedom of speech and movement … and dignity. These are going to be difficult days!

This is also the time – the eclipse of a great nation – to remember all those who sacrificed their lives for the people.  We all have our stories about a country that was once a revolutionary beacon in Africa degenerating into a beggar nation.  Mugabe is not the only leader who has lasted for so long; he is not the only corrupt leader to have profited from the rich diamonds and gold of the country. He is not the only person responsible for the degeneration of this great nation.

Mugabe is a stubborn old man, a hero to young people in South Africa wishing that South Africa had emulated Mugabe’s programme of land reform, earning him the wrath of the West. At the same time, let us not forget that his mistakes have been monumental, indeed staggering, but the weight of responsibility should fall on the shoulders of the whole party – ZANU (PF) – and its current leadership.

So give the old man Mugabe the dignity that the “father of the nation” deserves.

In solidarity and peace

@Yash Tandon

21 November, 2017

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17. USA: A ’60S RADICAL REFLECTS | Richard Ohmann
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(Inside Higher Ed - November 13, 2017)

Richard Ohmann describes two scenarios of what happened in universities and society, then and afterward.

Activists from my cohort will soon mark 50th anniversaries of events that shook the world in 1968. We will recall, retell, reinterpret, revalue, reflect upon and draw lessons from those famous events, as well as from less famous ones that nonetheless changed alignments and life scripts.

One such event for me and other scholars in language and literature was a 1968 uprising within the Modern Language Association. It derailed the stately procedures of that learned society, infused it with rebellious politics and enraged or inspired 30,000 members. For me and others in the new MLA Radical Caucus, it helped open a pathway -- on which we joined many from other academic fields -- to what students were calling “relevance” in education. A heady moment. We imagined ourselves struggling toward a just and democratic society. We thought of ourselves as the academic wing of international popular movements.

At a session of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, I thought to relive that rush of political euphoria and talk about its reverberations half a century later. But the conference took place this past March in a dysphoric rush instead, brought on by a decisive win of what for most academics was the “other side” -- not our movement, but a nationalist one that might have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of a very different uprising and consolidation, post-Goldwater. I decided to juxtapose those two different takes on the last 50 years and suggest a few of the implications. Here are the two stories that I told.

Story No. 1

The post-World War II boom increased the prosperity of all classes and groups. Economic inequality stood at a historic low. Social movements arose to challenge injustice, especially of race and gender, and to protest an imperial war. Those movements flourished in a society that had rapidly expanded to beat swords into TV sets and cars and suburbs; to return millions of people from military to civilian life via the GI Bill; to build a military-industrial complex and fight a Cold War; to organize research and make consumer goods for profit. The flow into college of new populations both resulted from the civil rights and women’s movements as well as fueled their growth. The Vietnam War and the draft blew up a storm of antiwar activism on campuses.

With new kinds of students came demands for changes in college education. One demand was for a new kind of professor. More female, working-class and black students entered graduate study and college teaching. Their dissidence led to critique and revision of the arts and sciences curriculum: history from below, insurgent sociology, revised literary and artistic canons, the serious study of commercial culture, science for the people, African-American and women’s studies, and much more.

New disciplines like gender studies sprouted. Old ideas like Marxism, banished in the 1950s, were recovered, refreshed and blended with New Left thought. Social forms and ideas that had seemed natural turned out to be socially constructed. The university became a freer, more stimulating place to learn and teach about the world.

At the same time, classroom routines and relations lost their unquestioned authority. Composition and rhetoric became a leading venue for critique of hierarchy and for pedagogical innovation in the name of democracy and of respect for the lives, cultures and knowledges students brought with them to college. Practices of student-centered education and collaborative learning flourished.

Those changes swept through academic work and culture. They seemed liberating. When countermovements rose up against them -- like the culture wars waged in the humanities by federal officials like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney -- we were ready for, even a bit flattered by, the hostile attention. Higher education seemed to be developing in the direction we wanted. The university had become our neighborhood.

Story No. 2

The robust economic growth that fueled expansion of universities after 1945 was itself driven by the conversion of wartime capacity to the making of consumer goods, by the dammed-up purchasing power of people who couldn’t buy much during the war, by the big lead that U.S. capitalists had over the ruined industrialists of Europe and Japan, and by advanced scientific and technical know-how -- with universities eager to help corporations further develop it.

Those conditions weakened in the 1960s. Borrowing to pay for the Vietnam War was a burden. So was the seeming end of cheap oil. By the early 1970s, U.S. capital was in trouble: meager profits, too much equality. Business leaders sought remedial strategies. They moved production south and then overseas in search of unorganized cheap labor. They outsourced and subcontracted and otherwise weakened industrial unions.

Reagan broke PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, in a show of toughness. Corporate leaders moved capital nimbly from one place to another, globalizing economic life. They fought successfully against the high marginal tax rates and support for public services that had prevailed for two decades.

Meanwhile, finances tightened up in education, especially at public universities. The party ended with the ’60s. Neoliberalism took root.

It’s no coincidence that the MLA job market in language and literature crashed in 1970, or that the crisis lengthened out into a 40-year depression. The job market in rhetoric and composition, which barely existed then, suffered less. But in both areas, the labor and rewards of teaching devolved from tenure-track faculty members to workers on contingent appointments with low pay, few benefits, little autonomy and almost no role in governance.

The degradation of labor has continued for 45 years in most of the arts and sciences -- and (unevenly) across the whole university. We approach the day when postsecondary education will be a marketplace where shoppers can buy credentials -- degrees, certificates, badges -- that promise the best return on investment.

Nor is this shift limited to the academy. Most established professions are in similar trouble. Even in law and medicine, most senior professionals are salaried employees, surrounded by technicians, paralegals and so on, with job security comparable to that of adjunct faculty members. The managers of economic life, having reorganized physical labor to their advantage, are now deporting, outsourcing and eliminating mental labor. Conservatives stigmatize “academic elites” along with political and media elites. The professional-managerial class declines in cohesion and influence.

Story No. 2 has a political and ideological plot, as well. Beginning in the 1950s, and picking up steam after the Goldwater challenge of 1964, wealthy people such as Joseph Coors, the Walton family and the Koch brothers funded the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and many other think tanks to incubate conservative thought, institutions and eventually political campaigns. The conservative movement worked for 50 years to gain control of the Republican Party -- through, for example, the Southern strategy, Reagan’s charisma, the revolt against taxes and “big government,” the mobilizing of a Christian “moral majority” and then of the Tea Party, and the nationalist fervor of last year’s presidential campaign.

Needless to say, none of those causes (even antitax purism) sits comfortably with the principles of the Republican Party’s old leadership, which Donald Trump rudely dismissed in the primaries of 2016 and has marginalized since becoming president. Old-guard leaders like David Rockefeller believed that as long as the GOP safeguarded free markets, it could tolerate such frivolities as open-carry laws on college campuses, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, a Muslim travel ban and abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol.

But how can the corporate and Wall Street factions live with an “America First” assault on the free movement of capital and labor? The tension is palpable. To be sure, many of us have grown old and hoarse forecasting a Republican Party implosion. And though one day we could be right, this band of warring factions has more power right now than any U.S. government since 1945.

What does Story No. 2 imply for the hopeful plot of Story No. 1? Might the diverse and liberated university we built in and after the 1960s survive in the interstices of the new order? Unlikely. Big history tends to swallow and digest small history.

Moreover, the main agents of big history today have aspirations for education that sharply oppose those of academic radicals 50 years ago. They want college education to be of direct use to those who will hire its consumers and would like to replace the faculty with robots. They want school and college to be private, profitable, nationalistic, maybe pious. They do not want it to be a critique of power or a force for equality and cooperation. They don’t want their taxes to support the humanities or most of the other liberal arts.

What’s to stand in the way of their project, now that they have turned back ours? As you can imagine, this is not a happy question for an academic lefty from the ’60s to ponder.

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” For years, I had Antonio Gramsci’s motto on my office door.

Optimism of the will, anyone?


Richard Ohmann is professor emeritus of English at Wesleyan University. The Conference on College Composition and Communication session in which he presented an earlier version of this piece was a collaboration with Christopher Carter and Russel Durst at the University of Cincinnati, who organized the panel, and Patricia Harkin at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

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18. A BIRTHDAY IN THE URALS | Tetiana Bezruk
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(Open Democracy Russia - 24 November 2017)

Oleksandr Kolchenko, a Crimean anarchist, is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence in Russia. There’s much to learn from his activism. 

Oleksandr Kolchenko, date unknown. This November, Crimean anarchist Oleksandr Kolchenko is celebrating his 28th birthday in a prison in Chelyabinsk, in Russia’s Ural region. The story of Kolchenko’s arrest and trial reminds me of reports by Luke Harding about Russia during the 2000s. But what happened to Kolchenko, and Crimean film director Oleg Sentsov, is actually a story of how the Russian Federation began to act outside its borders — and the bounds of international law.

Oleksandr studied in Taurida National University, Simferopol. In Autumn 2011, when former Ukraine’s Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk introduced fees for a range of activities at universities, Kolchenko, together with other anarchists and anti-fascists, protested against the commercialisation of education in Ukraine. Kolchenko and his friends, their faces covered, carried the red-and-black flag. Later, he participated in protests against changes to Ukraine’s Labour Code, which would have restricted the rights of working people, as well as taking part in feminist actions, environmental events and anti-fascist demonstrations.

After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Kolchenko was accused of belonging to the Ukrainian far-right organisation Right Sector. Initially, it was hard to say whether this was irony or a joke, a lack of political education or just Ukraine’s weak party system, which still can’t set firm ideological boundaries for political parties. The answer, however, turned out to be rather simple. Kolchenko and Sentsov were accused of belonging to a “terrorist group” that had allegedly set fire to the Simferopol offices of the Russian Community in Crimea organisation and the United Russia party. This, according to investigators, was the work of the so-called “Sentsov group”, whose leader was declared to be the Crimean director. Representatives of the Russian authorities, who had occupied public administration buildings in the city, started their tried and tested scenario for neutralising political opponents — they accused them of terrorism, thereby placing the security of Crimea’s residents in doubt.

Russia considers Kolchenko and Sentsov Russian citizens, although neither of them surrendered their Ukrainian citizenship, nor did they take Russian passports

Kolchenko, just like Oleg Sentsov, was tortured, though he didn’t reveal this in the beginning. At the initial interrogation session, which was not entered into Kolchenko’s arrest file, he was beaten in the face and body. He didn’t talk about this because, on finding out what happened to Sentsov, he decided that the violence he’d experienced was insignificant and not worth talking about.

Oleg Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko sing the Ukrainian national anthem during sentencing in August 2015. Source: Euronews / Youtube. Court sessions followed, and in August 2015 the North Caucasus Military District Court sentenced Oleksandr to 10 years in prison, and Oleg - 20 years. After an appeal filed by the defendants’ lawyers in 2015, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation declined it. Russia considers Kolchenko and Sentsov Russian citizens, although neither of them surrendered their Ukrainian citizenship, nor did they take Russian passports. Kolchenko himself on several occasions has affirmed he is a citizen of Ukraine.

Indeed, as an anarchist, he had to accept the primacy of law when he confirmed his citizenship in court. This meant foregoing his principles and convictions, and putting ideology to one side. This is the reality in which Kolchenko found himself.

Kolchenko’s anarchist and anti-fascist views have become an important example of how, if you’re left-wing in Ukraine, that doesn’t mean you’re a separatist or abetting the Kremlin

Kolchenko’s anarchist and anti-fascist views have become an important example of how, if you’re left-wing in Ukraine, that doesn’t mean you’re a separatist or abetting the Kremlin. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory is currently trying to re-write Ukrainian history — for the most part, only ultra-nationalists as heroic examples will remain. This year, Nikita Kadan, a Ukrainian artist, created an exhibition at Lviv’s Center for Urban History called “(Un)named”, about contemporary Ukrainian historical memory. The exhibition was based on Kadan’s work with archive photographs of the 1941 pogrom in Lviv and the 1943 Volyn tragedy. Kadan says that the discourse of the Institute of National Memory only concerns a number of “Bolshevik-Polish bands”, it lacks information about the crimes of Ukrainian military formations during World War Two. There can’t be Ukrainians who committed crimes, their line goes, and if there are, they weren’t true patriots. You can’t be a true Ukrainian if you aren’t a patriot.

In investigative detention in Moscow, Oleksandr Kolchenko wrote that he had been re-reading Mikhail Bakunin, Lesya Ukrainka and Ivan Franko. He doesn’t always receive letters, but those he does - he answers. Given that the range of topics you can speak about in prison is restricted, even the names of books or bands (written, for example, in English), aren’t permitted. As an anarchist from Crimea, Kolchenko isn’t often mentioned by politicians or the media. But Kolchenko demonstrated more democracy in his social activism and position on events in Ukraine than those who constantly speak about it today.


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South Asia Citizens Wire
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