LOKGANGA

Gandhi, the Light-bearer

2009-08-31T15:26:00.002-04:00

STEPHEN HOBHOUSE

Each of us human beings has had to construct a world of his own out of materials set before him. Within this universe of our consciousness there are certain objects which stir the central fibers of our nature, our heart and our reason; and there comes to us in our better moments a constant longing to know them, to love them, to identify ourselves with them more and more completely, ever seeking to liberate ourselves from the trivial and the impure.

I am one of the many who find this central attraction chiefly in the inexpressible wonder and beauty of personality through the best and loveliest of men and women who cross our path whether in the flesh or in books, as well as in the same wonder and beauty breathed upon us from visible nature; in sky and earth and living things. And from these I am inescapably drawn to a faith in that which we call God.

Unhappily, too, I am equally conscious of dark elements of ugliness and discord which mar the growth of harmonious life. They are present within the hearts of men. Unaided I too often lose faith and am all but helpless before the demonic power of these evil tendencies; and I must turn for aid to a closer fellowship of spirit with some other personality.

I have been born and bred in a community where past and present have united in confronting me with the historic figure of Jesus Christ. The same spirit lives in other human personalities whose memory is preserved as the shining lights of our race’s history. I think of them all as messengers of the eternal Christ. Of these historic light-bearers, one of the greatest of all time is Mohandas K. Gandhi.

The decay of ancient faiths, the tyranny of the machine, the evil use of science by misguided industrialists and militarists have produced in world history an unexampled crisis. It is even conceivable that civilization or orderly, kindly, enlightened human society may perish completely in the universal confusion engendered by the self-seeking of human passions. Gandhi's

great ideals of Ahimsa and Satyagraha present the only means by which salvation can come to the diseased environment in which we find ourselves.

(From a forthcoming publication of tributes to Gandhi, compiled by Mahendra Meghani)

We Are All Hindus Now

2009-08-31T15:09:00.004-04:00

LISA MILLER

America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that's the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.

The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: "Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names." A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur'an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me."

Americans are no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65 percent of us believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life"—including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely to believe that salvation is theirs alone. Also, the number of people who seek spiritual truth outside church is growing. Thirty percent of Americans call themselves "spiritual, not religious," according to a 2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from 24 percent in 2005. Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, has long framed the American propensity for "the divine-deli-cafeteria religion" as "very much in the spirit of Hinduism. You're not picking and choosing from different religions, because they're all the same," he says. "It isn't about orthodoxy. It's about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great—and if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that's great, too."

Then there's the question of what happens when you die. Christians traditionally believe that bodies and souls are sacred, that together they comprise the "self," and that at the end of time they will be reunited in the Resurrection. You need both, in other words, and you need them forever. Hindus believe no such thing. At death, the body burns on a pyre, while the spirit—where identity resides—escapes. In reincarnation, central to Hinduism, selves come back to earth again and again in different bodies. So here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we're burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. "I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to de-emphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection," agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard. So let us all say "om."

[Condensed from Newsweek of Aug 15, 2009]

HOMAGE TO DR. HOLMES

2009-06-30T14:11:00.003-04:00

MAHENDRA MEGHANI

Dr. John Haynes Holmes

(1879-1964)

It was Helen Keller’s birthday when on the sunny morning of June 27, 2009, I took a train to New York. I was off on a pilgrimage to the Community Church of which Dr. John Haynes Holmes was minister from 1919 to 1949. I wanted to pay homage to the memory of Holmes whom C.F. Andrews described as ‘the very first to make the name of Gandhi known and loved in America’. “What Romain Rolland has done in Europe, he has accomplished in the New World,” said Andrews, the greatest interpreter of Gandhi to the whole Western World, and a very dear friend of both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

And, I wanted to have a look at the pulpit which John H. Holmes climbed tremulously nearly nine decades ago, on April 10, 1922 to preach to his people on the subject: “Who is the greatest man in the world?” and to answer his own question: “M.K. Gandhi of India.”

Amazingly, that was nine years before Holmes met Gandhi face to face for the first time in London in 1931. He was to meet him again for the last time during a visit to India in 1947-48. Later, Holmes recalled the audacity of his 1922 declaration and asserted: “Everything that has happened since that date, every word spoken and deed done by Gandhi, his life, his death, all have conspired, as it were, to confirm my pronouncement.”

In 1953 Holmes published an intimate account of his experiences with Gandhi in a volume called My Gandhi. Incidentally, it was in the magazine Unity, edited by Holmes, that Gandhi’s autobiography was first published in America in serial form.

I was told at the Church that the original building from which the moving sermon of 1922 was delivered is now no more. In fact, the present building at 40 East 35^th Street is the fifth home the church has moved into. Holmes preached here also in his last years, and I was shown a plank in the hall underneath which are stored the ashes of Dr. and Mrs. Holmes. Looking down upon them from the platform are two small busts: of Gandhi and Schweitzer.

I presented a copy of The Gandhi Story: In His Own Words to the church. How I wish I had the privilege of placing it in the warm hands of Dr. Holmes as a humble attempt to carry forward the task of making the name of Gandhi loved in America! He would have blessed my appeal to Indians in America to gift the book to at least one American friend.

As I walked back to the Penn Station, I passed by the Empire State Building, once the tallest in the world, now under repairs. As my eyes stretched to the pinnacle of the great skyscraper, my ears seemed to resound with Holmes’ words on Gandhi:

“Where was there anybody to match him in our troubled and wicked world? Did he not hold in his heart the secret of man’s deliverance from the evils, mostly of man’s own choosing, now threatening to destroy him?”

Slokas After A Noon Namaaz

2009-02-01T15:10:00.008-05:00

NAMRATA JOSHI

Muslim children study Sanskrit and Hindu ones read Quran in these UP madrassas

We arrive at Madrassa Anwarul-Islam Salfia at 12.45 pm, a little before namaaz. As the students gather around the row of taps to wash their hands and feet and line up for prayers, this modest building in the dusty, narrow bylanes of Chauri in Jalalpur, in eastern UP's Jaunpur district, looks exactly how we expect a madrassa to be: a place for rigorous study of Islam, Urdu, Arabic. What we encounter instead is a complete contradiction. The bare, red brick walls of the Standard 7 classroom are yet to be plastered, the window frames still to be fitted. Here, 12-year-old Nadima Bano and Hishamuddin are reciting, their pronunciation perfect and elocution chaste, this ode to India, "Yasyottarasyamdishibhati bhumao Himalayah parvatraj eshah..."

It's a sloka in Sanskrit that translated means 'the land shielded by the Himalayas in the north'. "Sanskrit padhne se zubaan saaf ho jaati hai (the diction becomes clear by learning Sanskrit)," Hishamuddin tells us. "Sanskrit is considered the mother of all languages," says their teacher Rabindra Kumar Mishra. "It's ironical that institutions like this madrassa should be nursing it while it's vanishing elsewhere."

That it's no exception we have stumbled upon becomes clear to us as we proceed north to Ambedkarnagar district, to Madrassa Azizia Islamia in Kamharia village. The hands of the wall clock might be stuck at 6.45 in this primary school or maktab, but the school itself has progressed in other ways. Space is obviously at a premiumClasses 2-5 are being held simultaneously in separate, little rows in a large hall. Sirajuddin is teaching Sanskrit grammar to Class 3. "It was my favourite subject when I was a child," he says with a smile. "Balakah pathati; Sah pathati; Balakau pathatah (A child studies, he studies, they study)...," his student Muhammad Shahid recites for us. They soon move on to another lesson. "Asmakam deshasya asti ateev shobhanah (our country is very beautiful)...".

However, this story is not only about Hishamuddins learning Sanskrit. It's also about 13-year-old Ravi Prakash Pandey, a Brahmin and the son of a Sanskrit professor, opting to learn Quran in Class 1. A former student of Azizia Islamia, he can now recite the holy text from memory and has a copy at home that he peruses religiously. "Quran teaches that we must help others and do good deeds and stay away from evil," he says, without batting an eyelid, and then rushes to wash himself and wear a cap before reading it aloud for us.

We hear this echo back in Salfia where two Hindu - year-old Arti Kumari and Anita Kumari - are writing about Prophet Mohammed in Urdu on the blackboard: "Jab hamare Hazrat ki umr paintees baras ki thi (when our prophet was 35 years old)...". "They face absolutely no problem in writing, reading or understanding Urdu," their teacher Kaiser Jahan informs us.

At Madrassa Arbiya Zia-ul-uloom in Mandey in Azamgarh district, sisters Manju and Ranju Kumari have been learning Urdu from Class 1. They mean it when they recite: "Urdu hai jiska naam hamari zubaan hai, duniya ki har zubaan se pyaari zubaan hai (Urdu is the sweetest of the languages in the world)." Passing by Class 1, you can hear Prashant Kumar explaining Urdu numerals to his classmates.

The teachers on either side of the linguistic divide find much in common between Sanskrit and Urdu: both languages, they say, have an evolved, complex grammar. "Their grammar must be the toughest," says Muhammad Tariq of Madrassa Arbiya. They see this coexistence of Sanskrit and Urdu as normal and not deliberately symbolic in these troubled, divisive times. "How can you associate a language with any religion?" asks Brijesh Kumar Yaduvanshi, a long-time resident of Jaunpur and president, All India University Students' Union."Urdu doesn't belong to Muslims nor does Sanskrit have to do just with Hindus."

Nevertheless, the focus on Sanskrit, a language that has long gone out of everyday use, is intriguing. "It's not about helping students get jobs," says Qari Jalaluddin of Salfia, "but about teaching them humanity, about great thoughts and the right way to live, about being able to distinguish right from wrong." Sanskrit is taught at Salfia till Class 9, Urdu is compulsory in Class 1-5, after which it's up to the Hindu students to decide whether they want to study it further. Well versed: Ravi Prakash reciting Quran.

This easy cohabitation of Sanskrit and Urdu in Jaunpur's madrassas could well be regarded as a legacy of the town's liberal Sufi past. "It was a centre of education in the middle ages," says Yaduvanshi, "has never witnessed a single Hindu-Muslim riot, and has always been a symbol of unity." The Salfia madrassa has, in fact, been built on land bought from a Brahmin family in 1987.

The Azamgarh-Mau madrassas too offer a counterview for an area that has of late been made infamous for its alleged association with terrorist activities. "After all, it's the land of Rahul Sankritayan, Maulana Shibli, Firaq Gorakhpuri," says Sanjay Srivastava, professor at the Poorvanchal University. "It's a literary and cultural centre and people here have been feeling humiliated for being targeted for all the wrong reasons."

At a time when stereotypes about madrassas, especially those in eastern UP, as breeding grounds for terrorists have been gaining currency and every succeeding terror attack has boxed Indian Muslims further into neat categories as either educated, patriotic liberals or misinformed, misled fundamentalists, these madrassas are a powerful rejoinder, a heartening testimony to the unspoken, uncelebrated, broad-mindedness and inclusiveness of the common, faceless Muslim. The madrassas we visit have a sizeable number of Hindu students. Salfia currently has 475 students, of whom about - 45 per cent - are Hindus. In Azizia Islamia, 35 of the 143 students are Hindus. The newly set up Madrassa Faizul Quran operates out of a small makeshift building in an obscure corner of Amari village in Azamgarh district. The maktab has 100 kids, of whom 20 are Hindus. At Arbiya, 22 of the 374 students are Hindus.

There is little to distinguish students. You know Vinky and Reena Yadav from Soni and Rehana Banu only by their names or in the way they wear their head scarves. "We don't believe in bhed bhav," says Salfia's Jalaluddin. "Tameez and tehzeeb are the same in every religion." And though the madrassas do teach hifz, or memorization of the Quran, all have a progressive vision too. "You can't move forward with religious education alone, our students need to be taught everything: science, geography, math, English," says Salfia principal Muhammad Saikat. It is the only school in the village which offers high school education for girls, or else they'd have to walk 10 km to the next school. The aim now is to start computers and electronics classes.

Like many others, these madrassas are yet to get government aid. There is no midday meal scheme, nor are students given free uniforms; it is all provided by the madrassa management boards. Azizia and Arbiya give students free books and charge no fee. In Salfia the fee's just Rs 5. Faizul Quran charges Rs 40 but only 10 per cent of the students pay up. The teachers themselves get no regular pay from the government but survive on the grants patrons give to the madrassas, the salary averaging from Rs 800-1,500. In contrast, teachers on the government payroll get a princely sum of Rs 3,000.

Humble and ill-equipped though they are, these madrassas are incredible examples of how Hindus and Muslims live as one than as separate entities in these forgotten hamlets."They represent the Ganga-Jamuni sanskriti of our villages. Why would anyone want to break the sacred thread of this age-old relationship?" asks Srivastava. Why indeed?

[From Outlook Magazine, 22 December 2008 issue]

Death of a Salesman and Other Elite Ironies

2009-01-31T21:29:00.005-05:00

TARUN J TEJPAL

Rohinton Maloo was among the 13 diners at the Oberoi, who were marched out onto the service staircase, ostensibly as hostages. But the killers had nothing to bargain for. The answers to the big questions — Babri Masjid, Gujarat, Muslim persecution — were beyond the power of anyone to deliver neatly to the hotel lobby. The small ones — of money and materialism — their crazed indoctrination had already taken them well beyond. With the final banality of all fanaticism — AK-47 in one hand; mobile phone in the other — the killers asked their minders, “Uda dein?” The minder, probably a maintainer of cold statistics, said, “Uda do.”

Rohinton caught seven bullets. He was just 48, with two teenage children, and a hundred plans. In his outstanding career in media marketing, he was ever at the cutting edge of the new . The place was always Mumbai, and he exemplified its attitudes: the hedonism, the get-go, the easy pluralism.

For me there is a deep irony in his death. He was killed by what he set very little store by. He was bemused and baffled by TEHELKA’s obsessive engagement with politics. He was quite sure no one of his class — our class — was interested in the subject. Politics happened elsewhere. Mostly, it had nothing to do with our lives. Eventually he came to grudgingly accept we may have some kind of a case. But he remained unconvinced of its commercial viability. Our kind of readers were interested in other things — food, films, cricket, fashion, gizmos, television, health. Politics, at best, was something they endured.

In the end, politics killed Rohinton, and a few hundred other innocents. In the final count, politics, every single day, is killing, impoverishing, starving, denigrating, millions of Indians all across the country. If the backdrop were not so heartbreaking, the spectacle of the nation’s elite — the keepers of most of our wealth and privilege — frothing on television screens and screaming through mobile phones would be amusing. They have been outraged because the enduring tragedy of India has suddenly arrived in their marbled precincts. The Taj, the Oberoi. We dine here. We sleep here. Is nothing sacrosanct in this country any more?

What the Indian elite is discovering today on the debris of fancy eateries is an acidic truth large numbers of ordinary Indians are forced to swallow every day. Children who die of malnutrition, farmers who commit suicide, dalits who are raped and massacred, tribals who are turfed out of century old habitats, peasants whose lands are taken over for car factories, minorities who are bludgeoned into paranoia — these, and many others, know that something is grossly wrong. The system does not work, the system is cruel, the system is unjust, the system exists to only serve those who run it. Crucially, what we, the elite, need to understand is that most of us are complicit in the system. In fact, chances are the more we have — of privilege and money — the more invested we are in the shoring up of an unfair state.

It is time each one of us understood that at the heart of every society is its politics. If the politics is third-rate, the condition of the society will be no better. For too many decades now, the elite of India has washed its hands off the country’s politics. Entire generations have grown up viewing it as a distasteful activity. In an astonishing perversion, the finest imaginative act of the last thousand years on the subcontinent, the creation and flowering of the idea of modern India through mass politics, has for the last 40 years been rendered infra dig, déclassé, uncool. Let us blame our parents, and let our children blame us, for not bequeathing onwards the sheer beauty of a collective vision, collective will, and collective action. In a word, politics: which, at its best, created the wonder of a liberal and democratic idea, and at its worst threatens to tear it down.

We stand faulted then in two ways. For turning our back on the collective endeavor; and for our passive embrace of the status quo. This is in equal parts due to selfish instinct and to shallow thinking. Since shining India is basically only about us getting an even greater share of the pie, we have been happy to buy its half-truths, and look away from the rest of the sordid story. Like all elites, historically, that have presided over the decline of their societies, we focus too much of our energy on acquiring and consuming, and too little on thinking and decoding. Egged on by a helium media, we exhaust ourselves through paroxysms over vacant celebrities and trivia, quite happy not to see what might cause us discomfort.

For years, it has been evident that we are a society being systematically hollowed out by inequality, corruption, bigotry and lack of justice. The planks of public discourse have increasingly been divisive, widening the faultliness of caste, language, religion, class, community and region. As the elite of the most complex society in the world, we have failed to see that we are ratcheted into an intricate framework, full of causal links, where one wrong word begets another, one horrific event leads to another. Where one man’s misery will eventually trigger another’s.

Let’s track one causal chain. The Congress creates Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to neutralize the Akalis; Bhindranwale creates terrorism; Indira Gandhi moves against terrorism; terrorism assassinates Indira Gandhi; blameless Sikhs are slaughtered in Delhi; in the course of a decade, numberless innocents, militants, and security-men die. Let’s track another. The BJP takes out an inflammatory rath yatra; inflamed kar sewaks pull down the Babri Masjid; riots ensue; vengeful Muslims trigger Mumbai blasts; 10 years later a bogey of kar sewaks is burnt in Gujarat; in the next week 2,000 Muslims are slaughtered; six years later retaliatory violence continues. Let’s track one more. In the early 1940s, in the midst of the freedom movement, patrician Muslims demand a separate homeland; Mahatma Gandhi opposes it; the British support it; Partition ensues; a million people are slaughtered; four wars follow; two countries drain each other through rhetoric and poison; nuclear arsenals are built; hotels in Mumbai are attacked.

In each of these rough causal chains, there is one thing in common. Their origin in the decisions of the elite. Interlaced with numberless lines of potential divisiveness, the India framework is highly delicate and complicated. It is critical for the elite to understand the framework, and its role in it. The elite has its hands on the levers of capital, influence and privilege. It can fix the framework. It has much to give, and it must give generously. The mass, with nothing in its hands, nothing to give, can out of frustration and anger, only pull it all down. And when the volcano blows, rich and poor burn alike.

And so what should we be doing? Well, screaming at politicians is certainly not political engagement. And airy socialites demanding the carpet-bombing of Pakistan and the boycott of taxes are plain absurd, just another neon sign advertising shallow thought. It’s the kind of dumb public theater the media ought to deftly side-step rather than showcase. The world is already over-shrill with animus: we need to tone it down, not add to it. Pakistan is itself badly damaged by the flawed politics at its heart. It needs help, not bombing. Just remember, when hard-boiled bureaucrats clench their teeth, little children die.

Most of the shouting of the last few days is little more than personal catharsis through public venting. The fact is the politician has been doing what we have been doing, and as an über Indian he has been doing it much better. Watching out for himself, cornering maximum resource, and turning away from the challenge of the greater good.

The first thing we need to do is to square up to the truth. Acknowledge the fact that we have made a fair shambles of the project of nation-building. Fifty million Indians doing well does not for a great India make, given that 500 million are grovelling to survive. Sixty years after independence, it can safely be said that India’s political leadership — and the nation’s elite — have badly let down the country’s dispossessed and wretched. If you care to look, India today is heartbreak hotel, where infants die like flies, and equal opportunity is a cruel mirage.

Let’s be clear we are not in a crisis because the Taj hotel was gutted. We are in a crisis because six years after 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in Gujarat there is still no sign of justice. This is the second thing the elite need to understand — after the obscenity of gross inequality. The plinth of every society has been set on the notion of justice. You cannot light candles for just those of your class and creed. You have to strike a blow for every wronged citizen.

And let no one tell us we need more laws. We need men to implement those that we have. Today all our institutions and processes are failing us. We have compromised each of them on their values, their robustness, their vision and their sense of fair play. Now, at every crucial juncture we depend on random acts of individual excellence and courage to save the day. Great systems, triumphant societies, are veined with ladders of inspiration. Electrified by those above them, men strive to do their very best. Look around. How many constables, head constables, sub-inspectors would risk their lives for the dishonest, weak men they serve, who in turn serve even more compromised masters?

I wish Rohinton had survived the lottery of death in Mumbai last week. In an instant, he would have understood what we always went on about. India’s crying need is not economic tinkering or social engineering. It is a political overhaul, a political cleansing. As it once did to create a free nation, India’s elite should start getting its hands dirty so they can get a clean country.

[Edited from Tehelka Magazine issue of 13 December 2008]

At a Fork in the Road

2009-01-07T14:14:00.011-05:00

ARUNDHATI ROY

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian cities this year [2008] in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded.

Though nothing can ever justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm’s way.

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America’s ally, first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan is careening towards civil war. The Pakistani government is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam should rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much as it does on India.

If, at this point, India decides to go to war, perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India’s shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of ‘non-state actors’ with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbors.

How should we view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful in as much as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse. The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which

have made the United States the most hated country in the world. These wars have contributed greatly to the unravelling of the American economy. Hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers, have lost their lives. The frequency of terrorist strikes on US allies and US interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically.

Homeland security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It’s not that kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbor, we have a military occupation in Kashmir, and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than a hundred and fifty million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world. If ten men can hold off the NSG commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half-a-million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir Valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?

What we’re experiencing now is the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds.

The only way to contain terrorism is to look at the monsters in the mirror: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says ‘Justice’, the other ‘Civil War’. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.

[Edited by Mahendra Meghani from Outlook : 22-Dec-2008]

Now, Micro Terrorists

2008-12-07T13:59:00.006-05:00

Who will protect us from the unlawful protectors of our ‘native cultures’?

DILIP CHITRE Marathi/English writer, painter and filmmaker

A small news item in Pune’s Marathi newspaper, Sakal, profoundly disturbed me. The headline of the story, dated September 13, 2008 read: Censorship by the VHP: Curtain on children’s play before its performance, Woodland Society’s play on Jesus, objected to.

The story reported that the children of Woodland Co-operative Society, Kothrud, Pune, had been rehearsing for four months, to present a play at their Ganesh festival celebrations. At the last minute, it was abruptly called off due to strong objections by the local Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). About 50 children were to take part in this production, presenting the universal spiritual message of Jesus Christ. The previous year, the same children had presented the universal message of Saint Jnanadev, the Marathi poet-saint. The parents were persuaded by the police and the local municipal councilor to call off the production, lest it might cause local unrest.

Are we getting used to such extra-constitutional interventions in civil life by the many senas, brigades, dals and assorted pseudo-political goon outfits masquerading as moral policemen?

The VHP, Bajrang Dal, Sambhaji Brigade, Shiv Sena, Maharashtra Navanirman Sena and even smaller local ‘armies’ habitually take the law in their hands and yet, the police just placates them. In fact, it persuades citizens to succumb to their force and avoid a confrontation to help maintain peace and order. The destructive power and guerilla tactics of these ‘armies’ is not unknown to the government and the security agencies. People live in fear of them. Even the media is scared to inflame their wrath and now accepts invitations to televise their protests and agitations. Our democracy has rapidly slid from downhill to rock bottom.

For myopic political reasons, the state in India (both the Union and the state government) goes soft on acts of domestic micro-terrorism. These homegrown terrorists may not be infiltrators from enemy countries, sponsored by enemy states or international terrorist organizations. They may not explode bombs or shoot civilians at random. But what they do, time and again, without fear of the law, is to subvert the Constitution of the country by depriving the silent majority of civilians of their liberty.

Recently, Raj Thackeray, self-appointed spokesperson for the ‘Marathi manoos’, challenged an Assistant Commissioner of the Mumbai Police to step down from his chair and go out to the streets of Mumbai to learn, ‘Mumbai ka baap kaun hai?’ The message was clear: ‘Only your uniform protects you from us. We own and rule Mumbai.’

This asserts that Raj Thackeray and the likes of him, whatever political or communal faction they belong to, are above the law of the land. Ordinary citizens have to suffer them because the government and the judiciary prefer to turn the other way when such self-styled protectors of ‘native culture’ tell them who’s boss.

In the 60 years since we proclaimed ourselves a republic, we have only fabricated a grand facade of democracy, whereas real democratic values have not yet taken root. Police codes and procedures remain virtually the same as they were during the British Raj when ordinary people were subjects, rather than citizens. The bureaucracy shows no inclination to be transparent and citizen-friendly. Politicians are sworn in to hold the Constitution supreme but do exactly otherwise. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening and helping to increase the number of frustrated lumpen youth willing to join a spectrum of senas, dals and other anti-constitutional activist ‘movements’. Violent demonstrations are the order of the day and citizens can do no more than read about them in the papers or watch them on television. The legitimization of violent disruption of civil order, and the glorification of its openly defiant leaders, are crimes committed by a passive government and an overenthusiastic media.

A proactive judiciary is only part of a possible answer. The real answer lies with citizens who allow themselves to be misled by communal and religious propaganda and appeals to uphold a narrow ‘pride’ of religion, native history and communal culture above the Republic of India and its broad, secular and democratic spirit.

[From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 38, Sep 27, 08]

Clash of Conversions

2008-12-07T13:12:00.004-05:00

VALSON THAMPU

About five years ago, at the height of communal polarization, I took a calculated risk in suggesting a voluntary moratorium on conversions as a Christian sacrificial investment in peace-making. This envisaged a temporary suspension of the fundamental right of all citizens as enshrined in article 25 of the Constitution to “propagate” one’s faith. Perhaps I was the only Christian priest who ever made such a proposal. This was done not because I had lost faith in article 25 but to test the waters: to map the extent to which the Sangh Parivar really considers conversions a serious issue. I knew that it is merely an emotive catalyst to activate mass animosity. No one from the Sangh Parivar responded to my initiative and no debate ensued.
It is surprising that the vast, educated middle class in this country are not amused at the blanket assumption that all conversions are necessarily by “force, fraud or allurement”. One has to be willfully credulous to buy the canard that a tiny community like the Christians (2.18 per cent of the population) can convert anyone by “force”! All available evidence proves that the truth is the other way round: force is used against the Christian community. That leaves us with “fraud” and “allurement”. What is the fraud that is perpetrated on the alleged victims of conversion? What are the ingredients of this allurement? Help in times of sickness? The prospect of dignity and empowerment? If these comprise the substance of “allurement” then what political parties promise is worse than “allurement”.
The agenda of the Sangh Parivar is to convert India into a theocratic State; a tolerant, non-violent, secular society into a homogenized, militant and intolerant society.
Addressing the National Integration Council, the Prime Minister lamented that violence is increasing in many parts of the country and that the spirit of tolerance is waning. This is true. But what the PM needs to take into account is the fact that this is happening for two reasons. First, unless the rule of law is effectively upheld we grant, by default, free play to the agents of violence. Second — an unprecedented taste for, and faith in, violence is emerging in our midst. When the rule of law is kept in suspended animation and the dogs of war are let loose, the public at large — especially the youth — can come to only one conclusion: nothing pays like violence and only violence pays.
Those of us who have abiding faith in the spirit of India, even against sinister evidence, are obliged to believe that sanity will prevail . That after the present surfacing of poison, the elixir of life will emerge. But that still leaves us with the all-important question: who will drink this emerging poison, in the meanwhile?

The writer is a member of the National Integration Council and the principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi...

[The Indian Express, Oct. 23, 08]

She Speaks for the Trees

2008-12-07T12:22:00.004-05:00

SIMON RODBERG, a writer in Washington, D.C., taught elementary and secondary school English for five years.

Children are natural environmentalists. Not yet conditioned to separate themselves from the rest of creation, especially from other mobile, noisy, eating and excreting creatures, they delight in all that grows. In awesomely clumsy fashion, they care for anything that is given to them, apt to love too much rather than too little and they have an instinctual distaste for desolation.

Somewhere along the way, most of us lose this connectedness; or, as our field of action enlarges, our environmental horizons do not. We disassociate our natural affections from the natural world.

Two new picture books about Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, aim to halt that process at just the right moment of child development, when wonder and wider awareness briefly coexist. Sophisticated and humane, these books want to help children’s concerns go beyond the local and the fantastical to a faraway country with problems very dissimilar to our own.

Maathai’s Nobel was the first given to an environmental activist, for her work in Kenya’s Green Belt Movement. She inspired and helped organize the planting of 30 million trees in 30 African countries, and protested destructive growth in Nairobi and elsewhere. Maathai is still at it, These picture books wisely focus on her early career, which affords the clearest story line: a girl who loved trees, and mourned their loss, helped reforest her home.

“Planting the Trees of Kenya,” written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola, tells the story both in wide angle and in detail. Her stippled landscapes feature intricate views of Kenyan farmland, full of women in colorful outfits, and men, women and children bearing seedlings. Nivola explains: “They did not need schooling to plant trees. They did not have to wait for the government to help them. They could begin to change their own lives.”

Jeanette Winter’s simpler, more down-to-earth book, “Wangari’s Trees of Peace,” strikes the balance between fact and child-friendliness. With blocky illustrations and bright colors, Maathai is treated as a friendly icon. As a child Wangari harvests sweet potatoes with her mother, and after college she gets her knees dirty with first seedlings of her own; she’s a role model who makes gardening look like serious, if back-aching, fun. This is a heroine children can relate to.

She is also one whose story will bring up uncomfortable issues. Men laugh at the women planting trees: “ ‘Women can’t do this,’ they say. ‘It takes trained foresters to plant trees.’ ” Later, a policeman beats Maathai with a billy club at a demonstration against tree-cutting, with bloody results. These episodes suggest that activism, like planting, is hard work. We see Maathai in jail: “And still she stands tall. Right is right, even if you’re alone.” She is not alone, as the sequence of planting women on the next page makes clear.

Global consciousness has to start somewhere. It is the one plant, the one girl who inspires the lifelong, worldwide change. “We are planting the seeds of hope,” Maathai tells the village women. The trick is to turn those seeds into a revitalized earth.

PLANTING THE TREES OF KENYA

The Story of Wangari Maathai

Written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola

Unpaged. Frances Foster Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.95 (Ages 5 to 8)

WANGARI’S TREES OF PEACE

A True Story From Africa

Written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter

Unpaged. Harcourt Children’s Books. $17. (Ages 3 to 7)

[The New York Times, Sep 14, ‘08]

Once Upon A Time In Hinduism...

2008-12-07T11:57:00.005-05:00

ANNA SUJATHA MATHAI

Hinduism once had a large and open heart (Bowstringed!, Oct 20). It can no longer claim that, if the bullying and mob violence by its extreme fringe goes unchallenged by the all-too-silent majority. If there were mass conversions, why are Christians still such a small minority? Hindus too go abroad and set up ashrams and temples everywhere. Hindu literature is freely distributed in the West. The first state-aided temple has opened in London. Diwali is celebrated right across the UK, and it should be so. It is good to be able to share one’s view of the sacred. Equally, one should reserve the right to have one’s own view of the Universe, which may not be religious at all.

Christianity has always served the lowly, the dispossessed. Christians have set up so many great institutions, hospitals, schools, colleges. Did these not serve people of every religion? Did Mother Teresa refuse to hold a dying Hindu? Have Christians ever asked for a separate state or retaliated with violence? I write all this with a heavy heart. People who raped and killed children at an orphanage can’t claim to be high on the scale of human evolution. Gandhiji believed violence against fellow humans ultimately degrades us and prevents us from building a fine society. Christ too was a radical and revolutionary against a barbaric Roman empire and a caste-conscious Jewish people. India should be proud to be home to so many faiths. Kerala’s indigenous [Christian] church is 2,000 years old; it also has the first Indian synagogue. There was no persecution of Jews here. This is the country we must regain. We can’t be run by fear and mob violence. In a civilized country, we can follow any religion we choose, read any book, see any film and draw conclusions by virtue of our reason and compassion.

[Outlook Express, 3 Nov, 2008]

Manmohan Singh Speech on the Trust Vote

2008-07-27T15:43:00.009-04:00

PM'S REPLY ON THE MOTION OF CONFIDENCE

July 24, 2008

(Manmohan Singh was not actually allowed to read his statement by the opposition parties. Instead he gave a copy to the Speaker to file. Below is his condensed address to the Lok Sabha on the Nuclear Deal and also the 4 years of UPA rule.

Please be aware that, although condensed, this is still a fairly long post. To read the original unabridged article on the PM's official website, please click on the title of this post.)

The Leader of Opposition, Shri L.K. Advani has chosen to use all manner of abusive adjectives to describe my performance. He has described me as the weakest Prime Minister, a nikamma PM, and of having devalued the office of PM. To fulfill his ambitions, he has made at least three attempts to topple our government. But on each occasion his astrologers have misled him.

As for Shri Advani’s various charges, all I can say is that before leveling charges of incompetence on others, Shri Advani should do some introspection. Can our nation forgive a Home Minister who slept when the terrorists were knocking at the doors of our Parliament? Can our nation forgive a person who single handedly provided the inspiration for the destruction of the Babri Masjid with all the terrible consequences that followed? To atone for his sins, he suddenly decided to visit Pakistan and there he discovered new virtues in Mr. Jinnah. Alas, his own party and his mentors in the RSS disowned him on this issue. Can our nation approve the conduct of a Home Minister who was sleeping while Gujarat was burning leading to the loss of thousands of innocent lives? Our friends in the Left Front should ponder over the company they are forced to keep because of miscalculations by their General Secretary.

As for my conduct, all I can say is that in all these years that I have been in office, whether as Finance Minister or Prime Minister, I have felt a sacred obligation to use the levers of power as a societal trust to be used for transforming our economy and polity, so that we can get rid of poverty, ignorance and disease which still afflict millions of our people. This is a long and arduous journey. But every step taken in this direction can make a difference. And that is what we have sought to do in the last four years. How far we have succeeded is something I leave to the judgment of the people of India.

When I look at the composition of the opportunistic group opposed to us, it is clear to me that the clash today is between two alternative visions of India’s future. The vision represented by the UPA and our allies seeks to project India as a self confident and united nation moving forward to gain its rightful place in the comity of nations, making full use of the opportunities offered by a globalised world, and using modern science and technology as important instruments of national economic and social development. The opposite vision is of a motley crowd who have come together to share the spoils of office to promote their sectional, sectarian and parochial interests. Our Left colleagues should tell us whether Shri L.K. Advani is acceptable to them as a Prime Ministerial candidate. Shri L.K. Advani should enlighten us if he will step aside as Prime Ministerial candidate of the opposition in favour of the choice of UNPA. They should take the country into confidence on this important issue.

I have already stated that the House has been dragged into this debate unnecessarily. I wish our attention had not been diverted from some priority areas of national concern. These priorities are:

(i) Tackling the imported inflation caused by steep increase in oil prices. Our effort is to control inflation without hurting the rate of growth and employment.

(ii) To revitalize agriculture. We have decisively reversed the declining trend of investment and resource flow in agriculture. We have achieved a record food grain production of 231 million tonnes. But we need to redouble our efforts to improve agricultural productivity.

(iii) To improve the effectiveness of our flagship pro poor programmes such as National Rural Employment Programme, Nationwide Mid-day Meal Programme, to improve the quality of rural infrastructure of roads, electricity, safe drinking water, sanitation, irrigation. These programmes are yielding solid results. But a great deal more needs to be done to improve the quality of implementation.

(iv) We have initiated a major thrust in expanding higher education. The objective is to expand the gross enrolment ratio in higher education from 11.6 per cent to 15 per cent by the end of the 11th [5-Year] Plan. To meet these goals, we have an ambitious programme which seeks to create 30 new universities, 8 new IITs, 7 new IIMs, 20 new IIITs, 373 new degree colleges and 1,000 new polytechnics.

(v) To deal firmly with terrorist elements, left wing extremism and communal elements that are attempting to undermine the security and stability of the country. We will continue to vigorously pursue investigations in the major terrorist incidents that have taken place. Charge-sheets have been filed in almost all the cases. Our intelligence agencies and security forces are doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances. We will take all possible steps to streamline their functioning and strengthen their effectiveness.

Considerable work has been done in all these areas but debates like the one we are having detract our attention from attending to these essential programmes.

I say in all sincerity that this session and debate was unnecessary because I have said on several occasions that our nuclear agreement after being endorsed by the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group would be submitted to this august House for expressing its view. All I had asked our Left colleagues was: please allow us to go through the negotiating process and I will come to Parliament before operationalising the nuclear agreement. This simple courtesy which is essential for orderly functioning of any Government worth the name, particularly with regard to the conduct of foreign policy, they were not willing to grant me. They wanted a veto over every single step of negotiations which is not acceptable. They wanted me to behave as their bonded slave.

In 1991, while presenting the Budget for 1991-92, as Finance Minister, I had stated: no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. I had then suggested that the emergence of India as a major global power was an idea whose time had come.

I outlined a far reaching programme of economic reform whose fruits are now visible to every objective person. Both the Left and the BJP had then opposed the reform. Both had said we had mortgaged the economy to America and that we would bring back the East India Company. Subsequently both these parties have had a hand at running the Government. None of these parties have reversed the direction of economic policy laid down by the Congress Party in 1991. The moral of the story is that political parties should be judged not by what they say while in opposition but by what they do when entrusted with the responsibilities of power.

I am convinced that history will compliment the UPA Government for having taken another giant step forward to lead India to become a major power centre of the evolving global economy.

What is the nuclear agreement about? It is all about widening our development options, promoting energy security in a manner which will not hurt our precious environment and which will not contribute to pollution and global warming.

India needs to grow at the rate of at least ten per cent per annum to get rid of chronic poverty, ignorance and disease. A basic requirement for achieving this order of growth is the availability of energy, particularly electricity. We need increasing quantities of electricity to support our agriculture, industry and to give comfort to our householders. The generation of electricity has to grow at an annual rate of 8 to 10 per cent.

Now, hydro-carbons are one source of generating power and for meeting our energy requirements. But our production of hydro-carbons both of oil and gas is far short of our growing requirements. We are heavily dependent on imports. We all know the uncertainty of supplies and of prices of imported hydro-carbons. We have to diversify our sources of energy supply.

We have large reserves of coal but even these are inadequate to meet all our needs by 2050. But more use of coal will have an adverse impact on pollution and climate. We can develop hydro-power and we must. But many of these projects hurt the environment and displace large number of people. We must develop renewable sources of energy — particularly solar energy. But we must also make full use of atomic energy which is a clean environment friendly source of energy. All over the world, there is growing realization of the importance of atomic energy to meet the challenge of energy security and climate change.

India’s atomic scientists and technologists have developed nuclear energy capacities despite heavy odds. But there are handicaps which have adversely affected our atomic energy programme. First of all, we have inadequate production of uranium. Second, the quality of our uranium resources is not comparable to those of other producers. Third, after the nuclear test of 1974 and 1998, the outside world has imposed embargo on trade with India in nuclear materials, nuclear equipment and nuclear technology. As a result, our nuclear energy programme has suffered. Some twenty years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission had laid down a target of 10,000 MW of electricity generation by the end of the twentieth century. Today, in 2008 our capacity is about 4,000 MW and, due to shortage of uranium, many of these plants are operating at much below their capacity.

The nuclear agreement that we wish to negotiate will end India’s nuclear isolation, nuclear apartheid and enable us to take advantage of international trade in nuclear materials, technologies and equipment. It will open up new pathways to accelerate industrialization of our country. The essence of the matter is that the agreements that we negotiate with USA, Russia, France and other nuclear countries will enable us to enter into international trade for civilian use without any interference with our strategic nuclear programme. The strategic programme will continue to be developed at an autonomous pace determined solely by our own security perceptions. We will not accept any outside interference or monitoring or supervision of our strategic programme. Our strategic autonomy will never be compromised.

I confirm that there is nothing in these agreements which prevents us from further nuclear tests if warranted by our national security concerns. All that we are committed to is a voluntary moratorium on further testing. The nuclear agreements will not in any way affect our strategic autonomy.

Our critics accuse us, that in signing these agreements, we have surrendered the independence of foreign policy and made it subservient to US interests.

We appreciate the fact that the US has taken the lead in promoting cooperation with India for nuclear energy for civilian use. Without US initiative, India’s case for approval by the IAEA or the Nuclear Suppliers Group would not have moved forward. But this does not mean that there is any explicit or implicit constraint on India to pursue an independent foreign policy determined by our own perceptions of our national interest. I state categorically that our foreign policy, will at all times be determined by our own assessment of our national interest. This has been true in the past and will be true in future regarding our relations with big powers as well as with our neighbours in West Asia, notably Iran, Iraq, Palestine and the Gulf countries.

We have differed with the USA on their intervention in Iraq. I had explicitly stated at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC in July 2005 that intervention in Iraq was a big mistake. With regard to Iran, our advice has been in favour of moderation and we would like that the issues relating to Iran’s nuclear programme which have emerged should be resolved through dialogue and discussions in the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The management and governance of the world’s largest and most diverse democracy is the greatest challenge any person can be entrusted with, in this world. It has been my good fortune that I was entrusted with this challenge over four years ago.

I have often said that I am a politician by accident. I have held many diverse responsibilities. I have been a teacher, I have been an official of the Government of India, I have been a member of Parliament, but I have never forgotten my life as a young boy in a distant village.

Every day that I have been Prime Minister of India I have tried to remember that the first ten years of my life were spent in a village with no drinking water supply, no electricity, no hospital, no roads and nothing that we today associate with modern living. I had to walk miles to school; I had to study in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. This nation gave me the opportunity to ensure that such would not be the life of our children in the foreseeable future. My conscience is clear that on every day that I have occupied this high office, I have tried to fulfill the dream of that young boy from that distant village.

The greatness of democracy is that we are all birds of passage! We are here today, gone tomorrow! But in the brief time that the people of India entrust us with this responsibility, it is our duty to be honest and sincere in the discharge of these responsibilities. As it is said in our sacred texts, we are responsible for our actions and we must act without coveting the rewards of such action. Whatever I have done in this high office I have done so with a clear conscience and the best interests of my country and our people at heart. I have no other claims to make.

The Job of the Media

2008-07-11T23:19:00.009-04:00

[Joseph Lelyveld, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, was executive editor of The New York Times from 1994 to 2001, and was recalled to the newspaper in 2003, after a period during which it went through a credibility crisis. He has reported from India from 1966 to 1969. In an interaction with The Indian Express staff, Lelyveld talks about American politics, reporting, and new trends in the media.]

Q: When you returned to the New York Times, it was going through a credibility crisis. How did you go about correcting the situation?

A: My theme when I returned was that we are just going back to work and we are going to do things the way we know was the right way to do them. I was also trying to push authority down, because one of the features of the previous regime was that there were a lot of edicts out there and people were afraid to do things without making sure that the guys on top were going to approve it in advance.

Q: What is the guiding philosophy of the New York Times which makes it such a standard of excellence in journalism?

Basically, the New York Times covered everything — the whole world, culture, business and finance, sports, everything. And did it in a responsible way with its own reporting and a high standard of journalist excellence. It was a general interest newspaper with a vengeance. Now the New York Times and all other papers are getting smaller because of the finances in the newspaper business and it can’t promise quite as much. . The Times in London loses money, the New York Post loses huge amounts of money. Even the New York Times had to announce cuts of over a 100 journalistic positions. They have a staff of over a 1,000 journalists and a large foreign staff.

Q: How does media shape public opinion?

The most important ways newspapers shape opinion is by what they choose to cover and the subjects they go into deeply. I don’t think it’s our job to worry about the effects of the story. Our job is to give people information so they have the opportunity of making reasonable judgments.

Q: How do you decide the balance between what the people may want to read and what you think the people should be reading? You don’t believe that what the reader wants is what you should give?

I’ve always mistrusted that phrase “the reader wants”, because how do we know exactly what the reader wants? I think you should give the reader a fresh and original paper that’s very well-written and covers all sorts of things —.social trends, fashion, the works but I think you are at your best when you give the reader something the reader wants that the reader didn’t know he or she wanted it till you gave it to her. Today, reporting staffs are getting smaller. Major news organisations that maintain large foreign staffs have gotten smaller. The number of American news organisations that still cover the world the way they covered it in 50 years earlier is two or three. And in the US, it’s also about the number of reporters the national news organisations maintain around the country. It’s just down, down, down.

[Condensed from The Indian Express : May 11, 2008. The full text is available at http://www.indianexpress.com/story/308046._.html]

Stray Thoughts

2008-07-02T12:36:00.005-04:00

WILLIAM J. BENNETT

The problem is not that modern politics has become particularly uncivil and nasty. The problem today is that politics has become boring and unengaging. Too much political discourse is lame, mushy, and vapid.

[Thomas] Jefferson closed one of his letters to Madison with the hope that “the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.” Madison echoed the sentiment: “The diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.”

The greatest debates in American history have involved sharp, vigorous, spirited clashes. That’s fine; politics was never intended to be confused with a garden party. This cultural war is not an undertaking for people with delicate sensibilities.

Politicians often try to protect their views by suggesting that sincerity can substitute for sound reasoning. [But] sincerity has nothing to do with whether [one] is right or wrong. Sincerity is not the test of truth. Sincerity is a reliable guide to action or belief only when it is joined with intelligence. No fact was ever altered by believing it wasn’t one, no matter how sincerely.

There is plenty to be disappointed, angry, and even furious about the way politics is practiced. This side of Washington was captured best by C.S. Lewis’s description of hell:

"We must picture Hell as a state where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. Everyone wishes everyone else’s discrediting, and ruin; everyone is an expert in the stab in the back."

There is no oversupply of good character anywhere. Character is part and parcel of the individual, not his party or institution. People with enough regard for the common good merit confidence and praise and are worthy of Walter Lippmann’s reminder: “Those in high places are the custodians of a nation’s ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals.”

Pericles said the secret of democracy is courage. Assume the worst, act your best. Assume there is going to be trouble with everything, that nothing is going to go through unchallenged. And be ready. Prepare more of the case than you think you are going to need. In the face of distortions of what you believe, the key is perseverance; hold shape and keep explaining your views; if you articulate your views well, forcefully, and often, your point of view will gradually get across.

The character of a society is determined by how well it transmits true and time-honored values from generation to generation.

[Excerpts from The De-valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children; 1994]

Time to give women their due

2008-07-02T11:59:00.005-04:00

MEGHNAD DESAI Email: m.desai.lse.ac.uk

In The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen says with some pride that 50 years before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party, Sarojini Naidu was president of the Congress. Hence we Indians are way ahead of the Brits etc in honouring women. Of course, Sarojini Naidu had a ceremonial role for one year in an organisation, while Thatcher was PM.

The point is worth discussing. But what does that say about the lives and opportunities of women in Britain as against India? Across South Asia, upper caste and upper class women have made it to the top. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was a cabinet minister in the first Nehru government after Independence. Indira Gandhi was prime minister some dozen years before Margaret Thatcher. Benazir Bhutto, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, her daughter Chandrika Kumartunga, Sheikh Hassina and Begum Zia - all made it to the top when women find it hard to get to the top in the West. Just look at Hillary Clinton's struggle.

But Sen has also been the first to point out how many millions of women are 'missing' in South Asia. The sex ratio in South Asia is one of the lowest in the world. These are women who were either killed in the foetus or throttled at birth once they revealed their sex. The rest were malnourished, beaten up, died in child birth or for the glory of our ancient culture persuaded to perform Sati.

Thus it is not at all surprising that men were seen on live TV in Rajya Sabha tearing up the Women's Bill which the UPA had stealthily introduced on last day of the session much to the mirth of the women ministers. Clearly both sides treat this matter as frivolous. The UPA is interested more in being able to claim that they have done something for women with no intention of passing the Bill. The opponents of the Bill can pretend that they are not so much against women's representation but they must have their OBC piece of flesh. The Bill has been around for 12 years. I bet if it had been about MPs' perks and privileges or their freedom to misbehave and disrupt proceedings, it would have been carried unanimously in five minutes.

Yet a Bill so important should invite a big national debate in Parliament. As a legislator in UK I know we would have extensive debates on the floor of the House of Lords if such a vital piece of legislation was before us. We would be lobbied by NGOs and ad hoc organisations. The Bill would lead to debates outside Parliament.

In the Rajya Sabha a Standing Committee on which men are in an overwhelming majority - except for the vacancies they are all men - will discuss the Bill away from public gaze. Even so, the country should make this an occasion to highlight the plight of women in India. It is not the case that the deprivation is only a SC/ST/ OBC issue where women are concerned. Foeticide happens in rich middle class families. I was at a restaurant in Delhi - GK II, since you ask - where on the next table a group of women, obviously affluent, were chatting away in Punjabi about this or that child in the family which had been aborted after amniocentesis. This as they chomped their way through delicious South Indian food.

South India is not as bad in terms of women's health This has to do with Christian missionaries and the strong anti-Brahmin movement since the early 20th century. Women's literacy and infant and maternal mortality numbers are also better. Move across the Vindhyas and the situation is dire. Gujarat which is progressive in many aspects is backward in women's human development numbers.

Reservation at 33 per cent is much below the women's share of the population. If such concessions were granted it would be just the beginning of the solution which requires the full redress of all the handicaps women suffer. Of course the Bill will be dropped as one or the other of the 'secular, anti-communalist' dada of North Indian politics - Lalu or Mulayam or Paswan - will issue a veto. Congress lacks the guts to stand up to any opposition be it from current allies or future possible friends.

But then Put Not Your Faith in Princes. In the West, women's position is by no means fully equal. What has changed is the language in which they are spoken of and spoken to, the respect with which they are treated in public and private, the fury which any news of domestic violence arouses - even if defended as 'part of our culture' by Asians and Africans, the tremendous boost to girls' education and their participation in sports and public life. Indian men should begin to examine their own behaviour towards women. Do men indulge in needless lewd talk when women are around, do they belittle their women colleagues and friends pointlessly - as I witnessed to my shock in a Parliamentary delegation from India visiting the House of Lords, do they condone or even worse indulge in beatings up their wife/mother/daughter/maid servant?

Do Indian men still regard women as their property, their chattel? This is what they call a no-brainer. Reform will have to come from below and start at home.

Everyman's Tagore

2008-06-20T19:36:00.009-04:00

EVERYMAN'S TAGORE : Edited by Mahendra Meghani, Lokmilap Trust, 2008, p.96, Rs. 30

Rabindranath Tagore was described as the Poet of Humanity by Jawaharlal Nehru. Tagore’s 147th birth anniversary fell on May 7th, 2008. A few days before that, Lokmilap Trust published Everyman’s Tagore. Compiled by Mahendra Meghani, who last year had given Everyman’s ABC of Gandhi, this book contains 400 extracts from the poetry and prose of the Poet, who was the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Here are a few specimens from Everyman’s Tagore:

All the great civilizations that have become extinct must have come to their end through slavery imposed upon fellow-beings, through parasitism on a gigantic scale bred by wealth.

*

The butterfly flitting from flower to flower ever remains mine,
I lose the one that is netted by me.

*

Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked – this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind.

*

Wrong cannot afford defeat, but right can.

*

Every child comes with the message that
God is not yet discouraged of man.

*

Grant me that I may not be a coward,
feeling your mercy in my success alone;
but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

*

I am able to love my God because
He gives me freedom to deny Him.

*

I love India, not because I have had the chance to be born in her soil, but because she has saved through tumultuous ages the living words that have issued from the illuminated consciousness of her great sons. I love India, but my India is an idea and not a geographical expression. Therefore I am not a patriot. I shall seek my compatriots all over the world.

*

The leaf becomes flower when it loves.
The flower becomes fruit when it worships.
Let life be beautiful like summer flowers,
and death like autumn leaves.

*

Let me not beg for the stifling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

*

Make me thy poet, O Night, veiled Night!
There are some who have sat speechless for ages in thy shadow;
let me utter their songs.

*

The moon has her light all over the sky,
her dark spots to herself.

*

My King, thou has asked me to play my flute at the roadside, that they who bear the burden of voiceless life may stop in their errands for a moment and say, the flowers are in bloom, and the birds sing.

*

Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water
sings the pebbles into perfection.

*

The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby’s limbs – does anybody know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the mother was a young girl, it lay pervading her heart in tender and silent mystery of love – the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed on baby’s limbs.

*

They try to hold me secure who love me in this world.
But thy love is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free.

*

The life is the crossing of a sea,
where we meet in the same narrow ship.
In death we reach the shore, and go to our different worlds.

*

When a religion develops the ambition of imposing its doctrine on all mankind, it degrades itself into a tyranny and becomes a form of imperialism. That is why we find a ruthless method of fascism in religious matters prevailing in most parts of the world.

*

“Who is there to take up my duties?” asked the setting sun.
“I shall do what I can, my Master,” said the earthen lamp.

*

The 96-page hard cover book costs $5 outside India, inclusive of airmail postage, and 25 copies will be available at $4 each.

Being simultaneously published in Gujarati is રવીન્દ્રનાથ સાથે વાચનયાત્રા (Ravindranath Sathe Vachanyatra). Also edited by Mahendra Meghani, it contains about 90 selected translations of Tagore’s writings by about a dozen writers, including Nagindas Parekh, Jhaverchand Meghani, and Umashankar Joshi. The 160-page book in hard cover costs $5 outside India, inclusive of airmail postage, and 25 copies will be available at $4 each. Books sent by airmail from India usually take a fortnight to reach USA.

Those interested in buying either book may send their checks to: Lokmilap Trust, P.O.Box 23, Bhavnagar, 364001, India. Their telephone number is: (0278) 256 6402, and E-mail address: lokmilaptrust2000@yahoo.com.

The Ideal of America

2008-06-10T13:27:00.002-04:00

David Vander Pool

[In a letter to the Editor: NY Times: June 4, 08]

I along with millions of other school students, committed to memory these words of Emma Lazarus:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

For me these words continue to form the foundation of what I believe about America. The suggestion that the bounty of our country is diminished by sharing with less fortunate men, women and children from anywhere in the world is sickening. America is not about how much we have; it is about how much we share.

Selfishness, as a national ideal, is un-American, un-Christian, un-Muslim and un-Jewish. It is time for the anti-immigration zealots to abandon their claims of patriotism; they are the ones destroying America I love. We are in sure need of more, not fewer, brave souls willing to make any sacrifice to share the ideal of America.

The Challenge of Our Times

2008-06-10T13:05:00.004-04:00

RABINDRANATH TAGORE
[Extracts from a letter to Professor Gilbert Murray: September 16, 1934]

We have seen Europe unscrupulous in its politics and commerce, spreading slavery over the face of the earth. And yet, in this very Europe, protest is always alive against its own iniquities. Martyrs are never absent whose lives of sacrifice are the penance for the wrongs done by their own kindred.

There was a time when we were fascinated by Europe. She had inspired us with a new hope – of liberty. We had come to know only her ideal side through her literature and art. But modern Europe has portioned out this wide earth. In our traffic with her we have learnt, as the biggest fact of all, that she is efficient, terribly efficient. But this is only one side of Western civilization. The Western humanity, when not affected by its unnatural relationship with the East, preserves its singular strength of moral conduct in its social life which has its great inspiration for all of us.

In India, what is needed more than anything else is the broad mind which, because it is conscious of its own vigorous individuality, is not afraid of accepting truth from all sources. Fortunately we know what such a mind has meant in an individual who belongs to modern India. I speak of Rammohun Roy. Thoroughly steeped in the best culture of his country, he was capable of finding himself at home in the larger world. The ideal I have formed of the culture which should be universal in India, has become clear to me from the life of Rammohun Roy.
Religion today in its institutionalized forms both in the West and the East has failed in its function to control and guide the forces of humanity; the growth of nationalism and wide commerce of ideas through speeded up communication have often augmented external differences instead of bringing humanity together. Yet I do not feel despondent about the future. There is today all over the world, in spite of selfishness and unreason, a greater awareness of truth. It is this stirring of the human conscience to which we must look for a reassertion of man. In this fact lies the great hope – this emergence in every nation, in spite of repression and the suicidal fever of war-mindedness, of individual consciousness. To these individuals of every land and race, these youthful spirits burning like clean flame on the altar of humanity, I offer my obeisance from the sunset-crested end of my road.

I feel proud that I have been born in this age. Let us announce to the world that the light of the morning has come, not for entrenching ourselves behind barriers, but for meeting in mutual understanding and trust.

Letters : Sukhpreet Kaur's Stance

2008-04-05T11:02:00.010-04:00

(Note : Sarabjit Singh is an Indian National sentenced to death in Pakistan for his alleged involvement in the Lahore bomb blasts in 1990. Sarabjit Singh's wife Sukhpreet Kaur said the family did not want him repatriated from Pakistan "in exchange for any hardcore Pakistani terrorist lodged in Indian jails,” in a statement to PTI on March 19, 2008. The Hindu readers' responses:)

Commendable

I salute Sukhpreet Kaur, Sarabjit Singh’s wife, for saying she does not want her husband in exchange for hardcore Pakistani terrorists lodged in Indian jails. It is patriotism at its best. It is all the more laudable because Sukhpreet has said this knowing full well that it may harm her cause of getting her husband released from the death row in Pakistan.

Her resolve is significant, especially in the context of the release of three terrorists in exchange for the passengers of a hijacked plane in 1999.

C.P. Srinivasan, Chennai

Sukhpreet’s statement that she is not for trading her husband’s release in exchange for hardcore Pakistani terrorists should serve as an eye-opener for the nation which was witness a few years ago to the release of some terrorists in exchange for the release of a Union Minister’s kidnapped daughter.

A.K. Pradeep Kumar, Thalasserry

I bow my head in salute to Sukhpreet Kaur. This is bravery of the highest order which should be widely publicised. It is an outstanding demonstration of putting the nation’s interest before one’s self.

S. Rajagopalan, Chennai

Our political leaders whose actions reek of parochialism and opportunism should learn a lesson or two on patriotism from Sukhpreet.

K.K. Cherian, Bangalore

Ms Kaur is truly one of a kind. What courage! I salute her. All the jingoistic raving and ranting on the cricket field, by comparison, seem so hollow.

P.R. Lochan Sarathy, Chennai

It is heartening to see Sukhpreet Kaur take such a brave and bold stand. No doubt, she wants her husband to be freed from the Lahore jail. At the same time, she and her daughters do not want his release in exchange for any hardcore Pakistani terrorists. Their patriotism deserves the highest praise.

Subhas Yadawad, Bijapur

(Condensed from The Hindu : March 21, 2008)

Our Feathered Friends

2008-04-05T09:55:00.006-04:00

RANJIT LAL

Birds of India: A Literary Anthology, edited by Abdul Jamil Urfi, Oxford University Press, 2008, p.385, Rs.650.

As birds and birding rapidly gain popularity in India, the number of books on birds that has been published in the last decade or so has also risen considerably. This wonderfully entertaining and eclectic collection of writings about birds and birders and ornithologists can only make birds even more popular in the public perception, with hopefully the add-on benefits of such popularity (better conservation, better conservation, better conservation!) accruing in their favour too.

For a start, Urfi has picked a star cast of writers: The contributors include Kipling, the emperor Jahangir, Khushwant Singh, Mark Twain, Maulana Azad, Jim Corbett, M. Krishnan, Jawaharlal Nehru, EHA, Salim Ali, Jerdon, Malcolm Macdonald, E.P. Gee, Nissim Ezekiel, Douglas Dewar, Peter Jackson, Madhav Gadgil, A.R. Rahmani, Otto Pfister, Theodore Baskaran, Zai Whitaker and Zafar Futehally, pretty much the Who’s Who of Natural History writing in India, past and present.

He has chosen the pieces, he says in his introduction, not merely on the basis of their information content or ornithological value, but majorly on the basis of their ranking high in reading pleasure. Every piece is a gem: sheer good, sometimes classy writing backed up by sharp observation and comment; of course some shine brighter than others, but that will always be the case.

The book has been divided into six broad sections namely, Birds in the Human Mindscape; Sport, Entertainment and Falconry; Naturalists on the Prowl; Natural History and Science; Birdwatching and Beyond; and Personalities and Controversies. It is not the kind of book you need to start at the beginning and read chronologically, but you can dip in anywhere at will, and enjoy yourself equally. Of course, by the end of it you will pull favourites as I did. Mark Twain’s wonderful piece, “In Praise of the Indian Crow”, is surely a classic. Maulana Azad’s “Sparrows of Ahmad Nagar Fort Prison” came as a pleasant surprise.

Apart from the lay reader, I think this book ought to be made mandatory reading in schools — both for language and content. There’s a wonderful range of writing styles on display, and the content is pretty much faultless too.

(Condensed from The Hindu, March 9, 2008)
You can read the original at http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2008/03/09/stories/2008030950140700.htm

The Meaning of News and Getting It Right

2008-04-05T09:02:00.006-04:00

Hasan Suroor

To ask “what is news” might seem like a silly question. Vaguely, we all know what is news. We read it in newspapers, hear it on radio and television and some of us often end up making news ourselves, even if for all the wrong reasons. The COED (Concise Oxford English Dictionary) defines it as “newly received or noteworthy information about recent events.”

Yet the question pops up frequently. It is asked, especially, after every new case of media “excess” such as a sting operation gone too far; or an exposé turned ugly. And at what point does news descend into titillation dressed up as analysis or investigation?

Take the controversy in Britain over the media reporting of a cluster of suicides by young people in the Bridgend area of South Wales. Over the past year, 17 youngsters have killed themselves for no apparent reason.
The debate over the Bridgend coverage is not that the suicides should not have been reported, but whether they should have been reported the way they were. And it is apparent that outside the cosy media fraternity the overwhelming sense is that much of the coverage, especially in the regional press and the tabloids, was insensitively sensational — based more on pub gossip than hard facts.

As a journalist I must admit that we, in the media, are not always on the same wavelength as our readers. Although the media might strive to give readers what they want, the fact is that frequently they get it wrong. A major problem, according to British readers, is the level of media intrusion into privacy. Particularly distasteful is the sight of television crews camped outside people’s homes with complete disregard for public decency or sensitivities of those they may be targeting at a given point — a grieving family, a controversial public figure, a celebrity whose picture they must have because there is money to be made from it.

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of complaints about the media’s intrusive behaviour. Last year alone, the Press Complaints Commission received 4,000-plus complaints — a 30 per cent increase over the previous year — mostly relating to breaches of privacy. Although celebrity magazines and regional newspapers were among the worst culprits, the national press too had its share of brickbats. Commentators said the PCC’s figures were simply the “tip of the iceberg” as many cases went unreported.

Meanwhile, a new book Flat Earth News by Guardian’s award-winning journalist Nick Davies raises some fundamental issues about modern approach to news, the commercial and political pressures on newspapers and broadcasters, and the increasing trend of cost-cutting even in major media outlets which, he says, has reduced reporters to “cutting and pasting” wire stories, or peddling “PR material.” (Researchers from the journalism department of Cardiff University, commissioned by him, reported that a “massive 60 per cent” of stories in Britain’s four quality newspapers — The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent — and the mass-circulation Daily Mail consisted “wholly or mainly of wire-copy and/or PR material.”)

The book, whose title refers to the trend of recycling a story simply because it is “widely accepted as true … even if it is riddled with falsehood, distortion and propaganda,” is a scathing attack on British journalistic practices and will be an eye-opener to British media’s starry-eyed admirers in the Third World. It portrays a picture of journalism in which “any meaningful independent journalistic activity by the press is the exception rather than the rule.”
Mr. Davies raises questions such as: Is there a moral dimension to news? Is there such a thing as completely “objective” news? Who decides what’s news and to what extent the decision is influenced by commercial and political considerations?

Although he discusses these issues specifically in the context of the British media, they will resonate wherever there is a functioning press. India, with its bourgeoning media and a “look-West” tendency, must beware of the “flat earth news” syndrome.

(Condensed from The Hindu, March 18, 2008)

Read the original at : http://www.thehindu.com/2008/03/18/stories/2008031854521000.htm

(In Gujarati) આપણી માંહેલા ‘ભલા જર્મનો’

2008-03-17T23:23:00.007-04:00

(This Gujarati article is set in Shruti Unicode font. It may not be viewable on your computer if your Operating System is Windows 98 or a non-Windows system. In that case, please click on the following link that takes you to a .pdf document that should be readable on most systems :
http://lokmilap.com/lokganga/bhalA%20jarmano.pdf
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માનવજાતને બીજા વિશ્વયુદ્ધના મહાવિનાશમાં ઘસડી જનાર જર્મનીના સરમુખત્યાર એડૉલ્ફ હિટલરના સિતમોના દાવાનળમાં યુરોપના મુલકો એક પછી એક ભસ્મીભૂત થતા ગયા ૧૯૩૫ પછીના લગભગ એક દાયકા સુધી. એ દાયકા દરમ્યાન થયેલા અમાનુષી અત્યાચારોનો ઇતિહાસ દુનિયા જેમ જેમ જાણતી ગઈ, તેમ એને એક વિમાસણ થતી રહી કે જર્મનો જેવી સુસંસ્કૃત પ્રજાએ આવી સંહારલીલા સાંખી કેમ લીધી હશે? તેના જવાબમાં કેટલાક જર્મનો બોલેલા કે, અરેરે! અમને તો આ બધી હેવાનિયતની કાંઈ ખબર જ નહોતી!

એ વાતને યાદ કરીને, "આપણી માંહેલા ‘ભલા જર્મનો’" મથાળા વાળો એક લેખ ફ્રઁક રીચ નામના પત્રકારે ‘ન્યુ યોર્ક ટાઇમ્સ’ના ૧૪ ઑક્ટોબરના અંકમાં લખ્યો છે. તેનો આરંભ તે આ રીતે કરે છેઃ

"‘બુશ જૂઠાણાં ચલાવે છે,’ એમ કહેવાથી હવે કશું વળતું નથી. આપણે જ આપણી જાત સાથે જૂઠાણાં ચલાવીએ છીએ, તે વધુ કારમી વાસ્તવિકતાનો સામનો કરવાની ઘડી આવી પહોંચી છે."

ઇરાક પરના આક્રમણ દરમ્યાન અમેરિકન સેનાએ તેના વિરોધીઓની જે ઘોર રિબામણી કરી છે તેના દાખલાઓ ટાંકીને ફ્રઁક રીચ કહે છે કે આ બધાંનો એકસરખો જવાબ પ્રમુખ બુશ તરફથી મળતો રહે છે કે, "અમારી સરકાર કોઈની રિબામણી કરતી નથી."

પોતે કેદ પકડેલા ઇરાકીઓ પાસેથી માહિતી કઢાવવા તેમની પર અમેરિકન સૈનિકો જે જુલમ ગુજારે છે, તેની છબીઓ સાથેની સાબિતી ત્રણ વરસ પહેલાં પ્રગટ થઈ ત્યારથી અમેરિકન પ્રજા જાણે છે કે પોતાના નામે ચાલતી સરકાર મનુષ્ય ઉપર કેવા કેવા સિતમ ગુજારે છે. એ બાબત અમેરિકન સંસદના કેટલાક સભ્યો જરીક ગણગણાટ કરે છે અને પછી બીજી વાતે ચઢી જાય છે. પાનું ફરે છે.

યુદ્ધો તો અનાદિકાળથી થતાં રહ્યાં છે. પણ દરેક યુગમાં યુદ્ધમાં પણ કેટલાક નિયમો પળાતા રહ્યા છે. આધુનિક કાળમાં સહુ રાષ્ટ્રોએ એવા જે નિયમો પાળવાનું સ્વીકારેલ છે તેનો ભંગ કરનારાને યુદ્ધ-ગુનેગારો ગણવામાં આવે છે. બીજા વિશ્વયુદ્ધમાં પરાજિત જર્મની અને જાપાનના ઘણા આગેવાનો પર વિજેતા મુલકોએ સ્થાપેલી અદાલતોમાં યુદ્ધ-ગુનેગારો તરીકે કામ ચલાવવામાં આવેલું ને તેમને દેહાંતદંડ સુધીની સજાઓ થયેલી.

આવી જાતના અપરાધો ઇરાકની લડાઈમાં અમેરિકનોના હાથે થાય છતાં તેનું આળ પોતાની પર ન આવે, તે માટે બુશ સરકારે એક કરામત કરી છે. તેને જરા વિગતે સમજીએ.

બધી સરકારોને લશ્કર રાખવાં પડે છે. ઘણા દેશમાં, કાયદા મુજબ, લડાઈ આવી પડે ત્યારે તેના નાગરિકોને લશ્કરમાં ફરજિયાત ભરતી થવું પડે છે. ભારતમાં સ્વરાજ પહેલાં અને પછી ગરીબી અને બેકારી એટલી બધી રહી છે કે લાખો માણસો સામે ચાલીને લશ્કરમાં નોકરી કરવા પડાપડી કરતા હોય છે. એટલે આપણા દેશમાં ફરજિયાત લશ્કરી ભરતી કરવી પડતી નથી. બીજા વિશ્વયુદ્ધ વખતે અને તે પછી અમેરિકામાં ફરજિયાત લશ્કરી ભરતી લગભગ દરેક યુદ્ધ વખતે થયેલી છે. હાલમાં તેમ નથી. અનેકવિધ સવલતોથી આકર્ષાઈને હજારો અમેરિકન જુવાનો સ્વેચ્છાએ લશ્કરમાં ભરતી થાય છે. તેવાની જરૂર ઓછી પડે માટે બુશ સરકારે ઇરાકમાં ભાડૂતી સિપાહીઓની જંગી ફોજ કામે લગાડી છે. ઇરાક પર જબરદસ્ત વિમાની બાઁબમારો અને તોપમારો ચલાવીને અમેરિકનોએ પહેલાં વિનાશ વેર્યો. પછી સડકો, પૂલો, મકાનો વગેરે બાંધવાનું કામ હજારો કાઁટ્રાક્ટરોને સોંપાયું, તેમના નોકરિયાતોની સંખ્યા ૧,૮૦,૦૦૦ જેટલી થવા જાય છે. તે પૈકી ૪૮,૦૦૦ હથિયારધારી નોકરિયાતો એવા છે કે જેની પર ઇરાકની કે અમેરિકન સરકાર સુઘ્ધાં કશો કાબૂ ધરાવતી નથી.

સરકારી સેનાની કામગીરી વિષે અમેરિકન સંસદમાં ને અખબારોમાં ટીકા થઈ શકે છે, પણ આ ભાડૂતી સિપાહીઓને હાથે જે હત્યાઓ થાય તેના કોઈ આંકડા જાહેર થતા નથી. કેટલા ઇરાકી પ્રજાજનોની ખુવારી આ લડાઈમાં થઈ તે પણ ઘણા સમય સુધી જાહેર થયું નહોતું. ચાલીસ લાખથી વધુ ઇરાકીઓ યુદ્ધને લીધે નિર્વાસિત થયા છે ને તેમાં પ્રમાણ બહારનાં તો બાળકો છે. બ્લૅકવોટર નામના એક અમેરિકન કૉન્ટ્રાક્ટરના ભાડૂતી સિપાહીઓએ ૧૬મી સપ્ટેમ્બરે બગદાદમાં સત્તર નિર્દોષ ઇરાકીઓની કતલ ચલાવેલી, તે અંગે ઇરાકી સરકાર કે અમેરિકન સેનાથી કશું થઈ શકતું નથી. ૨૦૦૫ની સાલ પછી ગોળીબારોની તડાફડીના આવા ૨૦૦ બનાવોમાં બ્લૅકવોટરની સંડોવણી બહાર આવી છે. પણ ઇરાક પરની ચડાઈ વખતના સર્વોચ્ચ અમેરિકન અધિકારી બ્રેમરે તે વેળા કાઢેલા ફરમાન મુજબ આવા ભાડૂતી સિપાહીઓને ઇરાકના કાનૂનોથી પર રાખવામાં આવ્યા છે. અને છતાં એ કૉન્ટ્રાક્ટરો અબજો ડૉલર મેળવે છે અમેરિકન સરકાર પાસેથી, એટલે કે કરવેરા ભરનારા અમેરિકન નાગરિકો પાસેથી.

ફ્રઁક રીચ એમના લેખમાં કહે છે કે ઇરાકની લડાઈ વિષે અમેરિકન પ્રજાને સુખકારી અજ્ઞાનમાં રાખવાની બુશ સરકારની કુનેહભરી યોજના રહી છે. અમેરિકન સંસદ અને અખબારોએ પોતાની ફરજ બજાવી હોત તો ઘણા વધારે નાગરિકોએ આ લડાઈ વિષે વધુ વાંધા ઉઠાવ્યા હોત. અંતમાં લેખક કહે છે કે, ઇરાકની ભીષણતાઓ માટે આપણે બુશ સરકારને દોષ દેવાનું ભલે ચાલુ રાખીએ, પરંતુ આપણે નામે જે બીભત્સ કૃત્યો આચરવામાં આવ્યાં તે માટેની આપણી જવાબદારી કેટલી છે તે પણ તપાસવું જોઈએ.

ફ્રઁક રીચનો આ લેખ ભારતનાં અમુક અંગ્રેજી અખબારોમાં છપાયો હોય એવી આશા હું રાખું છું. બે કૉલમ જેટલા એ લેખમાં ૧/૮ ભાગ જેટલી કાપકૂપ કરીને ઈ-મેઈલથી તે અહીંના ને ભારતના કેટલાક મિત્રોને મેં મોકલ્યો છે. પણ ગુજરાતી છાપાં-સામયિકોયે પોતાના વાચકોના ઘ્યાન પર તે લાવે એવી મારી નમ્ર વિનંતી છે. કારણકે ગુજરાતની પ્રજામાં પણ આવા "ભલા જર્મનો"ની સંખ્યા સારી એવી હશે. ઇરાકની લડાઈ વિષે જેમ અમેરિકન પ્રજાને બુશ સરકારે સુખકારી અજ્ઞાનમાં રાખી છે, તેમ ગુજરાતનાં રમખાણો વિષે આપણી પ્રજાને બેહોશીમાં રાખવાની ભરચક કોશિશ રાજયના સત્તાધારીઓ કરતા રહ્યા છે. જેમ અમેરિકન સાંસદો અને અમેરિકન અખબારો, તેમ ગુજરાતના મોટા ભાગના ધારાસભ્યો અને છાપાં પણ પોતાની
જવાબદારી અદા કરવામાં નિષ્ફળ નીવડ્યાં છે. હિટલરની છૂપી પોલીસ ગેસ્ટાપોને શોભે તેવી તરકીબો જેમ બુશના અમેરિકામાં તેમ મોદીના ગુજરાતમાં અજમાવવામાં આવી છે, તેથી આપણી માનવતા નીચી પડી છે. એ લોકો આવું કરતા રહે ત્યાં સુધી આપણે જેટલા લાંબા કાળ લગી નિષ્ક્રીય ખડા રહેશું, તેટલા આપણે પેલા "ભલા જર્મનો" જેવા લાગશું, જે એમના પોતાના જ ગેસ્ટાપો વિષે અજાણ હોવાનો દાવો કરતા હતા.
ફ્રઁક રીચના લેખનો અંત આ શબ્દો સાથે આવે છે : "નિદ્રાભ્રમણ કરતા સાંસદો સરકારની નીતિને રોજેરોજ પડકારતા રહે તે માટે એમને જગાડવાની જવાબદારી આપણી છે. તેમાં હવે આપણે કશું ગુમાવવાનું રહ્યું નથી - સિવાય કે આપણા દેશનું ઉજ્જ્વલ નામ."

ગુજરાતના "નિદ્રાભ્રમણ કરતા" હાલના ધારાસભ્યોને જગાડવામાં આપણે નિષ્ફળ નીવડ્યા હોઈએ, તો એમને સ્થાને જાગતા ધારાસભ્યોને બેસાડવાની તક ડિસેમ્બર માસમાં જ પ્રજાને મળવાની છે.
હિટલરની હેવાનિયત લાખો નરનારી-બાળકોને ભરખી રહી હતી તે વરસો દરમ્યાન તેના મૂંગા પ્રેક્ષક બનીને બેસી રહેનારા પોતાના બાપ-દાદા વિષે જર્મનોની આજની પેઢી જે નામોશી અનુભવી રહી હશે, તેના જેવો અનુભવ કરવાનું ગુજરાતની આવતી પેઢીઓનાં બાળકોના કિસ્મતમાં ન આવે, તે માટે આપણે આજે કશુંક પણ કરશું?

છએક માસનો વતન-વિયોગ વેઠીને ઘરભણી પાછાં વળતાં આ સવાલ મારો કેડો છોડતો નથી.

[અમેરિકાથી લિખિતંગ મહેન્દ્ર મેઘાણી]

Bilkis Bano's Brave Fight

2008-02-24T11:20:00.007-05:00

S. ANAND

Justice has been a fugitive in the Republic of Gujarat, but sometimes it finds refuge in neighbouring Maharashtra. In 2006, the retrial in a Mumbai Special Court of the Best Bakery case — the burning to death of 14 Muslims on March 1, 2002 in Vadodara resulted in nine of the 17 accused being sentenced to life imprisonment. Now, the Mumbai Sessions Court’s verdict after the in-camera retrial in the Bilkis Bano gang rape and mass murder case reinforces the point. Thirteen of the 20 accused were convicted on charges of criminal conspiracy, rape and murder. Additional Sessions Judge UD Salvi awarded life imprisonment to 11 accused and three years’ jail for the head constable of Limkheda police station for framing a false complaint. One policeman died during the trial. This is also a landmark judgment, as Supreme Court lawyer Vrinda Grover points out: “For the first time in post-independence India, a communal riot-related rape case has seen conviction.”

Sexual violence against women has been used as a key weapon in the many communal riots and pogroms in India. Yet, as feminist legal activist Flavia Agnes says, “The scale and extent of atrocities perpetrated upon Muslim women in Gujarat far exceeds any reported sexual crime during any previous riot in the post-independence period. Such violence was part of the genocide in Rwanda too.”

Bilkis was raped on March 3, 2002. Soon after news of the post-Godhra violence reached Randhikpur village in Dahod district, Bilkis, who had been at her father Abdul Issack Ghanchi’s place, was traveling with her relatives from one village to another in search of a safe refuge. On the afternoon of March 3, a gang of 30 Hindu men — wielding sickles and swords — descended on the entourage of 17 near Pannivella village. Bilkis and her relatives knew most members of the gang since they were all from their village, Randhikpur. Fourteen of Bilkis’ family were murdered. Shailesh Bhatt, one of the accused, killed Bilkis’ 3-year-old daughter Saleha — smashing the infant’s head on the ground. Bilkis, five months pregnant and 19 years old, was raped by Jaswant Nai, Govind Nai and Naresh Kumar. She was left for dead. Regaining consciousness after two hours, she says in her deposition: “I found myself naked. I saw dead bodies of my family members lying around. I got frightened. I looked around for some cloth to cover myself. I found my petticoat... I was carrying fear in my heart. I felt that I was saved by God. I went sitting and squatting up the hill. As I proceeded, I saw the dead body of [my cousin] Shamim’s newborn daughter. Many dead bodies were there. I did not try to know whose dead bodies were lying there. I stayed at the top of the hillock the entire day and night…”

Bilkis subsequently sought refuge in an Adivasi home, gathered her wits, and bravely made her way to the Limkheda police station. Like in almost every other case, the derailment of justice began right here. The police threatened her, saying if she insisted on filing charges of rape the hospital authorities would administer her a “poisonous injection” and kill her. She says, “I was frightened but I told them to write what I was narrating.” The police did not. They wrote a distorted and truncated version stating that about 500 unidentified persons came and attacked Bilkis and her relatives. The FIR did not record even one of the 12 persons Bilkis named. Says Harsh Mander, social activist who has been tracking the Gujarat genocide, “This was the pattern. In most cases, the accused were not named, and instead the violence was attributed to anonymous mobs, to render investigation completely unwieldy and confused.”

The Limkheda judicial magistrate predictably closed the case on March 25, 2003. Backed by activists and civil rights groups, Bilkis, the only survivor of the massacre, then moved the National Human Rights Commission. The NHRC got senior counsel Harish Salve to argue her case in the Supreme Court. The NHRC-backed Bilkis petition in the SC sought the quashing of the Limkheda magistrate’s order, an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation, action against erring Gujarat police officers, and compensation. On December 18, the SC directed the CBI to take over the investigation. Soon, the results followed: the CBI arrested 12 accused by January 22, 2004; and by March that year arrested two police officers as well. The CBI’s final report also mentioned gross violations by and complicity of the Gujarat police. In May, Bilkis, facing threats, was given CISF protection. In July, Bilkis sought the transfer of the case outside Gujarat; in August 2004 the SC obliged and even sought the appointment of a public prosecutor by the Centre.

The CBI discovered several packets of salt while exhuming human remains from a mass grave in Dahod where Bilkis’ family had been buried. The CBI found that 60 kg of salt had been used in March 2002 to ensure early disintegration of the bodies; but fortunately the high moisture content in the soil countered the salt’s effect.

Justice in Bilkis’ case was achieved not merely by the transfer of the case out of Gujarat. One of those involved with the case says, “There was a broadbased team, involving a cross-section of people and activists, who gave Bilkis emotional, material and legal support for six years.”

More speciously, every effort was made in Gujarat to subvert justice with the State becoming an active colluder in ensuring injustice. Says Prashant Bhushan, senior advocate, “Communalisation has set in at all three levels: investigation, the prosecution that involves the police, and the judiciary itself. … “In Gujarat the problem is compounded by the fact that the entire government, from the chief minister down to the constable, is totally communalised.”

The strongest indictment of the Gujarat government’s complicity, of course, came from the SC judgment on April 12, 2004 in the Best Bakery case, when it said, “The justice delivery system was being taken for a ride and literally allowed to be abused, misused and mutilated by subterfuge.” The investigation was “perfunctory and anything but impartial, without any definite object of finding out the truth to book those who were responsible for the crime. The public prosecutor appears to have acted more as a defence counsel... The role of the state government... [suggests] that there was no seriousness... in assailing the trial court’s judgment.” The SC also rapped the Gujarat High Court for failing to provide the necessary corrective justice in the Best Bakery case, saying “the entire approach of the High Court suffered from serious infirmities, its conclusions [were] lopsided”.

The facts and figures related to the Gujarat genocide cases tell their own story. Of the 4,252 cases registered, more than 2,107 were closed within months of the carnage without even the issue of a chargesheet to the courts. More than 200 courts in 17 districts passed these completely illegal orders of closure. In around 300 cases, the accused were acquitted after trial in the early months after the carnage. Under pressure from the SC, the state government reopened 1,602 cases, but over 500 cases were again quickly shut. The price of return for Muslims was withdrawal of cases.

This is the path Narendra Modi rode to victory. In his Gujarat, justice shall remain a fugitive. And Bilkis Bano a refugee on the run.

***

Bilkis Bano spoke to S. ANAND

What’s your reaction to the conviction and the life term for the 11 accused?
There’s some relief. But what still rankles me is the fact that several employees of the government — policemen and doctors — who actively tried to scuttle the case havebeen let off. I shall ask my lawyer to appeal against this.

Gujarat had an Assembly election in December. Were you there then, did you manage to cast your vote?
I was indeed in Gujarat during election time, but I did not vote. I do not want to vote. When such a huge tragedy befell me — I lost my two sisters, two brothers, my mother, my 3-year-old daughter, my uncle, aunt, my in-laws… they murdered them all; they raped and killed my kin, they raped me. After all this, it was the duty of the Gujarat government to protect me, to get me justice, to support me. But the government did nothing. I had to abandon Gujarat and move to other lands with my little children to get justice. I have no faith in the electoral process in Gujarat. The elections have no meaning for me.

Are your relatives still there in Randhikpur?
Some of them were there till the judgement date was announced. But they have since fled the village. We still fear for life. The government should now assure me that I need not fear anything and that I can return to my village. But I have not received any such assurance.

Did you ever wish to seek an audience directly with Modi to demand justice?
No. I would never want to see him. I do not trust him. After all this happened to me, he did not get me justice in my state. He knows of everything that happened in Gujarat. It was he who orchestrated the murders and rapes.

(Condensed from Tehelka Magazine, February 2, 2008)

The Master in His Absurd Exile

2008-02-23T17:41:00.007-05:00

SHOMA CHAUDHURY

On 19 January, 2008, the day twenty men with hockey sticks smashed NDTV’s office in Ahmedabad, and beat two of the staff, for running an SMS poll on whether MF Husain should be awarded the Bharat Ratna, the master himself sat quietly on the floor of his home in faraway Dubai, rapt in a sketch of two ceremonial horses — a wedding card for Ustad Amjad Ali Khan’s son. A meditative silence enveloped the room, heightened by the rhythmic sound of his sketching pen. Nothing could touch him, immune in his concentration. The sun set outside on a brilliant skyline. The beautiful room acquired a sense of prayer. Husain had just spent hours outlining his love for Hindu philosophy and culture, a life lived in its worship. Eight years spent painting the Ramayana, as many painting the Mahabharata. Hundreds of canvases of Ganesha and Shiva and Parvati and Hanuman, the ragas, the natyas and Benaras. Seventy years spent as “Chobi Das”, a devotee of the image. Seventy years spent roaming the earth, seeking to enrich its understanding of India. And now, they were smashing offices in his name. Declaring him an apostate.

“It is just a moment in history,” says Husain. “Kya kar sakte hain (what can one do)?”

Exile, however, is not a dark experience for the 93-year-old. Not for him the stereotype of the bitter and the hunted. That would be a terrible defeat. His statement is to live in celebration. In Dubai, plush, ordered, but as he says with a laugh, “like a Hollywood set, a façade with nothing behind”, he has bought apartments for each of his children, and two giant 21st century apartments facing a quay for himself. In one, he lives in an affectionate nucleus with his nephew, Fida and his family, and two valets, Hasan and Imraan. The other, he has converted into a “Red Light Museum” — a name designed, he chuckles, “to make people sit up”. Three rooms are dedicated to his art: one room houses 88 canvases from the late 1950s; another houses a series of paintings he calls Husain Decoded; the third has a series on Mughal-e-Azam. In between these two apartments, Husain lives his life, in an ever-widening flurry of excitement and action that people a third his age cannot keep up with. “When chacha is at home, there is no time to breathe,” laughs niece Sabiha, Fida’s wife. Husain is in constant, infectious, prodigious motion, his fingers drumming restlessly to an imaginary tabla. One day in Abu Dhabi, the next in Qatar. Each summer in London. He is currently learning Arabic and working on four simultaneous projects: a series of 99 canvases on the Arab Civilisation, commissioned by the Queen of Qatar; a series of similar scale on Indian Civilisation, commissioned by Lakshmi Mittal; a series on the history of Indian cinema; and a series on Mughal-e-Azam. For all this, for all his Kubla Khan-like wealth, he sleeps on a mattress in the drawing room, as he has always done, and everywhere, he travels alone. A man of 93. Fluid, unfaltering, possessed of a mysterious joie de vivre — an embrace of life — that borders almost on the divine.

Husain, the dramatic, flamboyant persona, associated more with the pursuit of wealth than the work, will never admit to a sense of betrayal in finding himself, at 93, hounded out of the country he has loved and promoted for close to a century. “Why is there no anguish, no political statement in Husain’s work?” asks Anwar Siddiqi, a close friend and admirer of Husain. “I really feel no bitterness,” Husain responds. “My life’s work is my statement. I reached my peak as an artist in the late 1950s. All my other work is a manifestation of that. I do not feel called to make any other statement. I lost my mother when I was one-and-a-half. I lost my first child, Shabir, when he was three. I lifted his body out of a gutter. What is loss after that?” There is a kind of wisdom in his stance. He makes it look easy, so it is easy to mistake it for something shallow.

Yet, cast even a cursory eye over the span of Husain’s prodigious life, and the sad absurdity of his exile comes through with unnerving force. Here is a man who has borne witness — enshrined — every facet of Indian life for close to a century. By 1955, he was one of India’s leading artists and had been awarded the Padma Shri. By 1971, he was being invited to Sao Paulo Biennial with Pablo Picasso. He was Rajya Sabha Member in 1986. And these are merely surface things: cast your eye over the work: more than 10,000 paintings in celebration of India, and the absurdities gather greater and greater force.

MF Husain is a kind of living history, a national heritage site. And what do we do? We drive him out.

Husain had left India for good in 2006, when an increasingly violent right-wing mood had precipitated a non-bailable arrest warrant against him by a Haridwar court, directing the attachment of all his properties in India. Though the Supreme Court stayed the order, the past year alone has seen several incidents of violence against Husain and his work. An exhibition at Asia House, London, was stalled and vandalised by a Hindu right wing group in 2006. Ditto for the Peabody Essex Museum in the US, which was exhibiting his Mahabharata series, Epic India. The same show was broken into at the India International Centre in Delhi, late last year. The attack on the NDTV office is only the latest in the line.

This does not comprise even a decimal percent of India’s population. The pity is, this decimal percent — intolerant, disinterested in dialogue, brazen violators of law — has come to dictate our public life. And no arrests have been made in any of these incidents, though as Sibal says, the State, courts and police have not only the power but an obligation to intervene when any violation of law and order is brought to their knowledge.

In being the most high profile of its kind, Husain’s case, in a sense, has become a litmus test for the country. Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, Mridula Garg, Habib Tanvir, Vijay Tendulkar, Deepa Mehta… the list of artists and writers vandalised by intolerant Hindu, and Muslim, fringes runs painfully long. Artists censored not by dialogue but by coercion. TEHELKA itself is facing a criminal case in Bombay for publishing photographs of nude women by reputed photographer Raghu Rai. Every time the hearing comes up, the editor-in-chief has to appear in court to take bail.

Four big civilisational questions underlie all these cases. What is the definition of “obscenity”? What is the threshold of “religious sentiment” — today an easily hurt thing — that should not be crossed? What is the role of the writer and artist in society? And, how will we conduct our dissent in a civilised society?

MF Husain came most vigorously into the line of fire in 2006, when an untitled painting, a depiction of the country as a naked woman was auctioned by Sharon Apparao’s Saffronart. Some Hindu groups took great umbrage to this.

Husain's other work, which gets the conservatives in a twist, is a Saraswati painted way back in ’88, sold privately, and published only in a limited edition of a book produced by Tata Steel. Its publication details are significant because one of the crucial questions in any consideration of obscenity is: how public was the act? In Husain’s case — in the case of any artist — they are not thrusting their work on you, they are not splashing their work on giant hoardings that you must look at every day. Common sense would say, if you don’t like their work, don’t look at it. Don’t go to gallery, don’t buy book. Publish scathing counter articles in some sympathetic media. That would be a civilised response.

Hearteningly, the Supreme Court has been fairly nuanced in its considerations of what constitutes“obscenity” in public life. In several seminal cases like the Ranjit D. Udeshi vs State of Maharashtra (1965), Ajay Gosw ami vs Union of India (2005), Samaresh Bose vs Amal Mitra (1985), the court has ruled that sex and nudity in art, per se, cannot be deemed obscene. Only if there is an intention to deprave and corrupt, or arouse the lascivious and prurient instincts of the viewer can something be deemed obscene. Further, the Court has ruled that it will not use the“standard of a hypersensitive person” in defining what is obscene. Intention counts for much.

Given this, the cases against Husain can never stand in court.Barely three paintings, out of a body of over 10,000 canvases, are in dispute. Did he mean to insult? On the contrary, the entire body of his work has been a testimony of devotion.

Husain himself will not speak. He lives by a dictum. “Never explain. Never complain.” Disraeli’s advice to Queen Victoria.

***

MF Husain tells Shoma Chaudhury

why his faith in India’s secular and tolerant traditions remains undiminished

Husain saheb, what do you feel about the fundamentalist attacks against you?

I’m not really perturbed by all this. India is a democracy, everyone is entitled to their views. I only wish people would air their views through debate rather than violence.The media comes to me looking — almost hoping — for strong statements, but I am actually very optimistic about India. I see this as just a moment in time. For 5,000 years, our work has been going on with such force, this is just a minor hiccough. I am certain the younger generation will get fed up of the fundamentalist, conservative mood in the country and change things. I didn’t want to leave my home. At the same time, it’s not even as if I want the conservative element to be pushed out of society. We are all part of a large family and when a child breaks something at home, you don’t throw him out, you try and explain things to him. Yeh aapas ka mamla hai. (This is a family matter.) Those opposed to my art just do not understand it. Or have never seen it.

Why don’t you come back to India and take on the fight?

As things stand, I cannot come back. No one has exiled me; I came away myself because I am an old man and vulnerable to physical danger. It’s not just the cases. If I came back, given the mood they have created, someone could just push or assault me on the street, and I would not be able to defend myself. The only way I can come back to India, perhaps, is if the BJP comes to power at the Centre. Or maybe, Mayawati. This government has no spine. Their hands are tied. They think if they speak out or take action, they will be accused of appeasement. The irony is, out of power, the BJP uses issues like this to fan its votebank. In power, they would probably control their extreme brigades to look respectable and secular! (laughs) These are the ironies of India. Actually, it is for the courts to sort this out. The allegation that my work is obscene or hurts religious sentiment can never stand merit in a court.

Why did you apologise for your art? You know more about Hindu iconography and the shastras than the goons who deface your work.Never.

I have never apologised for my art. I stand by it totally. What I said was that I have painted my canvases — including those of gods and goddesses— with deep love and conviction, and in celebration. If in doing that, I have hurt anyone’s feelings, I am sorry. That is all. I do not love art less, I love humanity more. India is a completely unique country. Liberal. Diverse. There is nothing like it in the world. This mood in the country is just a historical process. For me, India means a celebration of life. You cannot find that same quality anywhere in the world.

Could you talk about how your exposure and love for Hindu iconography and culture began?

In Hyderabad, in 1968, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia suggested I paint the Ramayana. I was completely broke, but I painted 150 canvases over eight years. I read both the Valmiki and Tulsidas Ramayana and invited priests from Benaras to clarify and discuss the nuances with me. When I was doing this, some conservative Muslims told me, why don’t you paint on Islamic themes? I said, does Islam have the same tolerance? If you get even the calligraphy wrong, they can tear down a screen. I’ve painted hundreds of Ganeshas in my lifetime — it is such a delightful form. I always paint a Ganesha before I begin on any large work. I also love the iconography of Shiva. The Nataraj — one of the most complex forms in the world — has evolved over thousands of years and, almost like an Einstein equation, it is the result of deep philosophical and mathematical calculations about the nature of the cosmos and physical reality. When my daughter, Raeesa wanted to get married, she did not want any ceremonies, so I drew a card announcing her marriage. On the card, I had painted Parvati sitting on Shiva’s thigh, with his hand on her breast — the first marriage in the cosmos. Nudity, in Hindu culture, is a metaphor for purity. Would I insult that which I feel so close to?

(Condensed from the article in Tehelka magazine, 2-Feb-2008)
(Visit http://www.tehelka.com/story_main37.asp?filename=Ne020208the_master.asp to read the original)

Genocide, Denial and Celebration

2008-02-20T19:54:00.005-05:00

Arundhati Roy

I never met Hrant Dink. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half million plus one". [One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]

I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right; the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was ready for harvesting.

"When we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says. "They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 'Go get it.' So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all his clothes. When he came back there—this my mother tells me story—when he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his arms...so he die in jail.And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted, killed every one of them."

Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of them perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor. This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well. The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant. The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim community in 2002. I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive. Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes. Even today, many of them live in ghettos—some built on garbage heaps—with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered 'normal'.The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness. This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states. As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.) But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the grasshoppers have landed in mainland India. It's an old human habit, genocide is. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself—genocide—was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:

"Any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt.Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator."

Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million), Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society. Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:

"Those that escaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyre, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice...."

And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:

"We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire...hacked, burned, set on fire... we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it... I have just one last wish...let me be sentenced to death... I don't care if I'm hanged... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay... I will finish them off... let a few more of them die... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die."

I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial. Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."

Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur. Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. For example, the death of two million in the Congo goes virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (which is what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child? Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population. (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him). In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg—which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians—were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. Since the end of World War II, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population). None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.

And what when victims become perpetrators? (In Rwanda, in the Congo?) What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one of the cruelest genocides in human history?

The history of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system. It's a habit as old, as persistent, as much part of the human condition, as love and art and agriculture. Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been an integral part of Europe's search for what the Germans famously called Lebensraum—living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species' natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one. The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion" cost 10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia. Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler's quest for lebensraum—in a world that had already been carved up by other European countries—that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia stood in the way of Hitler's colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native people of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be enslaved or liquidated. It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union & Progress. 'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide. Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of 'progress' is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and the dying has already begun. It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the two major national political parties, the BJP and the Congress, embarked on a joint programme to advance India's version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism and Development. The Union project has been largely entrusted to the RSS, the ideological heart, the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the 1930s, its founder, Dr Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler too was, and is, an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:

"Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening."

Then:

"In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation... All others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots...The foreign races in Hindustan... may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen's rights."

And again:

"To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here...a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."

By the year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 shakhas and an army of seven million swayamsevaks preaching its doctrine across India. They include India's former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former home minister and current leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, and, of course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. It also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the intelligence agencies, judiciary and the administrative services who are informal devotees of Hindutva—the RSS ideology. These people, unlike politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery. But the RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard work and has created a network of organisations at every level of society, something that no other organisation can claim. The BJP is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), a women's wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch). Its front organisation Vidya Bharati is the largest educational organisation in the non-governmental sector. It has 13,000 educational institutes including the Saraswati Vidya Mandir schools with 70,000 teachers and over 1.7 million students. It has organisations working with tribals (Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram), literature (Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad), intellectuals (Pragya Bharati, Deendayal Research Institute), historians (Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojanalaya), language (Sanskrit Bharti), slum-dwellers (Seva Bharati, Hindu Seva Pratishthan), health (Swami Vivekanand Medical Mission, National Medicos Organisation), leprosy patients (Bharatiya Kushtha Nivaran Sangh), cooperatives (Sahkar Bharati), publication of newspapers and other propaganda material (Bharat Prakashan, Suruchi Prakashan, Lokhit Prakashan, Gyanganga Prakashan, Archana Prakashan, Bharatiya Vichar Sadhana, Sadhana Pustak and Akashvani Sadhana), caste integration (Samajik Samrasta Manch), religion and proselytisation (Vivekananda Kendra, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Hindu Jagaran Manch, Bajrang Dal). The list goes on and on... On June 11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift. He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram. At the National Executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. "I'm sure the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani. In 1990, he criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament. (It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998, the BJP was in power at the Centre. In 2002, Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide. In the elections that took place a few months after the genocide, he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He ensured complete impunity for those who had participated in the killings. In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of course the lowly footsoldiers, and not the masterminds, who stand in the dock. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder. Ehsan Jaffri, the Congress politician was publicly butchered. In the words of a man who took part in the savagery:

"Five people held him, then someone struck him with a sword... chopped off his hand, then his legs... then everything else... after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they'd piled and set him on fire. Burned him alive."

The Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey, was kind enough to visit the neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, murdered 70 people, and gang-raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was promoted, and made Gujarat's Director-General of Police. The entire killing apparatus remains in place. In the Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel at prime time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted how the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior politicians and police officers had been personally involved. None of this information was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the news networks, not just admitting to, but boasting about their crimes. Modi did win the elections. And this time, on the ticket of Union and Progress. At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi masks, chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat has physically mutated into a million little fascists.

Preparations to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' are currently in different stages in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. While the 'people' were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred, India's Progress project was proceeding apace. The new regime of privatisation and liberalisation resulted in the sale of the country's natural resources and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created an unimaginably wealthy upper class and growing middle classes who have naturally become militant evangelists for the new dispensation. The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely observing the struggle between Native Indians and their European colonisers in North America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation doesn't necessarily mean the physical extermination of people—by bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting them. Historically, the most efficient form of genocide has been to displace people from their homes, herd them together and block their access to food and water. Under these conditions, they die without obvious violence and often in far greater numbers. "The Nazis gave the Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into 'reserves'," Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the Indians, the Hereros, the Bushmen, the Amandabele, and all the other children of the stars had been crowded together. They died on their own when food supply to the reserves was cut off." With the possible exception of China, India today has the largest population of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced more than 30 million people. The displacement is being enforced with court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, by government-controlled militias or corporate thugs. The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a means of earning a living, they spiral into poverty.

(Abridged from a lecture delivered in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos.)

(Click http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080204&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=1 to view the original article in Outlook, 4-Feb-2008 issue)

The Question in the Mirror

2008-02-20T19:45:00.001-05:00

TARUN J. TEJPAL

In Auschwitz, the exposed-brick barracks sit in neat rows. The sweet boxy buildings could be town-houses, or school blocks, or military quarters. Or killing factories that smoothly sucked in human beings, separated them from their clothes, their hair, their gold teeth, their reading glasses and their children, and then processed them in a furnace. The imagination can never fully get around the horror of Auschwitz – and adjoining Birkenau – where in less than three years the Nazis gassed and incinerated nearly one-and-a-half million men, women and children, many no more than a few years old. In a world full of memorials to our creativity and genius, this is a memorial to the darkness that ever lurks in the heart of men.

The battle of life against death is the battle of memory against forgetting. To not look the beast in the face is to have the beast on your back all the time.

Because we do not remember, we repeat; because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time. This special issue of Tehelka shows us the beast in us. For five years since the carnage, we have heard charges and counter-charges. We have heard the victims, the government, the police, the judiciary, and the civil rights groups. Now for the first time we hear the story of the killings from the men who did it.

One problem is, we live in an age of spiraling hype and sensation. An age of cheap spectacle in which the indulgences of sports and cinema can be so easily deemed landmark and historic. An age in which words like chilling, appalling, inhuman, outrageous, have all lost their charge. We are all desensitized viewers set upon by a turbo-fuelled media. Image is chasing image at such blistering speed that we dare not hold on to anything – lest we burst.

Of the many things that are uniquely appalling about Gujarat 2002, three are particularly disturbing. The first, that the genocidal killings took place in the heart of urban India in an era of saturation media coverage – television, print, web -- and not under the cloak of secrecy in an unreachable place. The second, that the men who presided over the carnage were soon after elected to power – not despite their crimes but seemingly precisely because of them (making a mockery of the idea of the inevitable morality of the collective). And finally, as Tehelka’s investigation shows, the fact that there continues to be no trace of remorse, no sign of penitence for the blood-on-the-hands that – if Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky are to be believed – is supposed to haunt men to their very graves.

Like Germany and Italy once, Gujarat begs many questions. How do a non-militant people suddenly acquire a bloodthirsty instinct? Does education not diminish the impulse to bigotry? If tolerance and wisdom will not flourish in a garden of well-being and learning, then is there any hope for these things at all? Today, it is the overwhelming question in the mirror. Each of us needs to see it and to answer it.

Is it possible, that contrary to all the hoopla, we may have already lived out the high tide of our democracy? Many Indians may get richer and richer, but as a people – a deep civilization – we will now only get poorer and poorer? Is it possible that a country sprung from the vision of giants can now only sustain small men with small concerns? Once a few good men shaped a modern egalitarian nation out of a devastated colony; are there none now to staunch the rot?

Today, India has a thousand mutinies awaiting an opportunity to violence. We could still become other things, the beast within us could still tear us apart if we do not look into the mirror and fix our face.

[Condensed by Mahendra Meghani from Tehelka weekly, 3 November, 2007]

A Beacon of Hope

2008-02-20T19:37:00.001-05:00

Shivam Vij

“She’s a very brave woman,” said the host, Kavita Srivastava, about the “Chief Guest”, who was blessing the newly married couple. Kiran and Vinod have actually been married for a year and a half; the occasion was only a formal reception, which made their marital status public. Both hail from different parts of rural Rajasthan, and were studying in different colleges in Jaipur when they met. Vinod’s father is an agriculturist and belongs to the Mali caste; Kiran belongs to a Jat family, which owns four village schools. Therein lay the problem.

When Kiran’s parents found out about her attachment, they took their daughter away. She escaped. So they took her away once more, drugged her and beat her up. It was some days before she could call Vinod. He approached Kavita Srivastava, national secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, who in turn went to police.

At the reception held on September 28, the couple recited marriage vows that invoked Gandhi and Marx. Srivastava had invited Bhanwari Devi as the chief guest and paid her transport fare so that she could come from her village, Bhateri, 55 km from Jaipur. “All these movements are related to each other”, Srivastava said. “The women’s movement, the Right To Information movement, development - one has led to the other”. No one would know that better than Bhanwari Devi.
Fifteen years ago, she was gangraped by Gurjar men when she tried to prevent them from marrying off a baby girl who was just nine months old. They could not stomach the fact that Bhanwari Devi, a Dalit, had had the audacity to inform the police about the child marriage. Bhanwari Devi was just doing her job. She was employed as a saathin, a worker for the Women’s Development Programme run by the government of Rajasthan. To prevent child marriages from taking place was part of her job.

Women’s groups in Rajasthan and Delhi took up Bhanwari Devi’s case in a big way. They were shocked when the district sessions judge pronounced in November 1995 that an upper-caste man could not have raped a Dalit. The honorable judge made some other interesting observations; a man could not possibly have participated in a gang rape in the presence of his nephew; Bhanwari Devi could be lying that she was gangraped as her medical examination happened a full 52 hours after the said event; and that her husband couldn’t possibly have watched passively as his wife was being gangraped – after all, had he not taken marriage vows which bound him to protect her?

The judgement led to a huge nationwide campaign for justice for Bhanwari Devi. Which makes it all the more surprising that the Rajasthan High Court – in the fifteen years since the event – has held only one hearing on the incident. Today, perhaps Bhanwari Devi is the only person still clinging to the hope that she will get justice.

The High Court judge has refused to transfer the case to a fast-track court; two of the five accused have died; the families of the other three claim that the case is closed. Which, for all practical purposes, it is.

The Bhanwari Devi case became a landmark in women’s rights movement. She could have chosen to remain anonymous, in keeping with (still) prevalent notions of “honor” and “shame”. But she was made of bolder stuff. “First there was silence around the rape and when Bhanwari broke that”, says Srivastava, “there was denial – the police, the press and the judiciary maintained she was lying. The resulting furor led to the case being handed over to CBI.

The residents of Bhateri were very sore at Bhanwari Devi; they said she had besmirched the village’s name. When she was taken to Beijing for an international conference, they said, “Usne to Bharat ki naak kaat di”. (Bhanwari has sullied India’s honour.)

Bhanwari Devi refused to leave Bhateri. Her work as saathin earned her an honorarium of Rs 200 a month; nobody in the village bought her husband’s – who is a potter – wares anymore.

But Bhanwari Devi refused any monetary compensation, lest the people say that she cooked up the rape story to get money. “People tend to equate compensation for rape with prostitution, which is money in exchange for the body”, says Srivastava.

When her father died, Bhanwari Devi was not served food at the funeral ceremonies. She realized even her own caste had ostracized her as she had been “polluted” by rape. When Bhanwari Devi accepted Rs 25,000 from then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao (even as the Bhairon Singh Shekhawat government in Rajasthan remained hostile to her), her brother spent all of it in organizing a Kumhar caste panchayat to make the community accept her. It has made all the difference to her that her husband Mohan Lal has always stood by her.

Bhanwari Devi also got a one-lakh rupee bravery award, which she did accept.
After all these years the villagers still boycott Mohal Lal, choosing to buy their pots from another village. In his old age, Mohan Lal works as a labourer; Bhanwari Devi’s saathin honourarium has been raised to Rs 500.

She asks her husband to bring some registers, files and bank passbooks from the other room. Dalit women deposit money with her as membership fees and take a loan when they need it. At times the kitty has gone up to one lakh rupees.

Bhanwari Devi’s transformation from victim to a pillar of strength for many can be gauged from pictures of women showing their bruises, letters asking her to intervene in land disputes and cases of dowry harassment, domestic violence, rape and murder. To many women from villages around Jaipur and the neighbouring districts, she has become a beacon of hope.

Her two daughters are married – one is a school teacher; the other illiterate. Just like her, they were married when they were still children.

Mukesh, Bhanwari Devi’s youngest son, a married, unemployed man now, was barely four in 1992. He was ostracized everywhere. When he went to college in Dausa, local Gurjar boys would beat him up and kick him out of the bus. It wasn’t easy finding a family willing to marry their daughter to Bhanwari Devi’s son.

[Condensed by Mahendra Meghani from Tehelka weekly of Oct. 13, 2007]

The Only Way to Fight Feudalism

2008-02-20T19:23:00.001-05:00

Nicholas D. Kristof

Around Mukhtar Mai I can feel true greatness. Her village of Meerwala is an unassuming collection of huts, and she can be shy and quiet, but you follow her through the village and you sense that she is leading a revolution—against rape, illiteracy, and the repression of women—that is reverberating through all of Pakistan and indeed the entire world.

The backdrop of Mukhtar’s story is well-known: Her young brother was accused (wrongly) on having an affair, and so a tribal council decided to punish her family by ordering that she be gang-raped. The sentence was carried out then and there, and she was forced to walk home nearly naked before a jeering crowd. She was meant to commit suicide, and initially she thought she would—but then she became more angry than humiliated. Instead of killing herself, she prosecuted her attackers and told her story.

If Mukhtar’s story had ended there, it would have been one more tragedy in a world full of them. Fortunately, that was just the beginning, for Mukhtar used her compensation money from the rape to start a school in her village. Ultimately, she believed that the only way to fight feudal attitudes was to educate people.

I had heard of Mukhtar’s story, and in 2004 while on a visit to Pakistan I traveled to Meerwala to meet her. (Back then she mostly went by a variant of her name, Mukhtaran Bibi.) Visiting her involved a succession of flights from Islamabad to Lahore to Multan, and then a drive for several hours through the Punjab countryside, ending up on a dirt road. Meerwala then had no electricity, and when I finally got to her house her father and brothers were introduced to me but she hung back. If I had expected a magnetic and charismatic leader, that wasn’t her—she struck me instead as retiring and a bit traditional. She didn’t seem to think it was appropriate for a woman to do much talking, and so at first her brothers and father spoke.

Gradually, though, she began speaking to me more. She spoke bluntly of her shame at being raped, of crying endlessly, of having disgraced her family. She spoke passionately about her school, and increasingly she dominated the room. Mukhtar told me that her school was running out of money, so she was selling family jewelry to pay the teachers; she was at her wit’s end. The police who were supposedly protecting her were losing interest, and she feared she would soon be killed.

I wrote a column about Mukhtar and the responses deluged my office. American readers were moved by her story and wanted to help. I blithely told readers they could send checks, and I would forward them to her. Eventually, I was able to arrange to do so through the aid group Mercy Corps, and in the end readers sent more than $ 160,000, which she used to buy a van to function as an ambulance and school bus, and to start a high school.

Since that first trip, I’ve seen Mukhtar repeatedly—both in New York and in Meerwala. In the U.S. she appears at banquets, is hailed at the White House, and is feted at luxury hotels—and yet she is always counting the days to return to Pakistan.

For all the acclaim and goodwill that Mukhtar has won for Pakistan, she has had mostly trouble from Pakistan’s leaders. I think the problem is twofold. First, they feel she is displaying Pakistan’s dirty laundry in public, embarrassing her country. Second, they’re resentful that an uneducated peasant woman from a Punjab village is celebrated as a hero, getting more attention than they are. The upshot is the government has repeatedly tried to muzzle her.

In Pakistan the government has applied constant pressure on Mukhtar. Her mail is confiscated, her phones are tapped. Newspapers close to the government constantly publish disparaging articles about her, suggesting that she is an unpatriotic woman who allows herself to be used by foreigners to make Pakistan look bad.

Mukhtar is sensitive, and these criticisms really sting her. But over time, I’ve watched her mature and toughen. When I first visited her, she was still asking her brothers for permission every time she wanted to leave the house. That became ridiculous as she began to jet around the world and be feted by foreign ministers, so Mukhtar just breached tradition and came and went as she saw fit.

In March 2006 I visited Meerwala again, and I was impressed by Mukhtar’s school. They are much better equipped today. The high school was under construction, and at the elementary school graduation there was a wonderful school play in which the kids acted out the dangers of early marriage (the main danger turned out to be that the wide is murdered.) But what struck me the most in Meerwala was how Mukhtar tirelessly browbeat parents to keep their daughters in school.

That is why Mukhtar keeps refusing to move to safety in the city, or even to a haven in the West. Life might be more comfortable, but she would lose that sense of fulfillment that she now finds. This is a woman on a mission.

Most poignant of all is the scene in Mukhtar’s home. Desperate women from across Pakistan arrive in buses and taxis and carts, for they have heard of Mukhtar and hope that she may help. The worst cases have had their noses cut off—a common Pakistani punishment administered to women in order to shame them forever. So Mukhtar hears them out and tries to arrange doctors or lawyers or other help for them. In the meantime these women sleep with Mukhtar on the floor of her bedroom (she gave the bed to the principal of her elementary school, Naseem Akhtar). So every night, there are up to a dozen women sleeping with Mukhtar in her bedroom, lying all over the floor, huddled against one another, comforting one another. They are victims with wrenching stories—and yet they are also symbols of hope, signs that times are changing and that women are fighting back.

Women who were raped simply killed themselves, but increasingly they are following Mukhtar’s example. Gradually, Mukhtar is chipping away at the old repressive way of life, and helping to usher in a new Pakistan.

As you read In the Name of Honor, I think you will find a story that is tremendously inspiring. By the alchemy of her courage and stubbornness, Mukhtar has taken a sordid tale of gang rape and turned it into something heartwarming and hopeful. And that is one more reason why, when I’m around Mukhtar, I sense that this shy peasant woman is truly a great and historic figure—and why she’s one of my heroes.

[Abridged from the Foreword to In the Name of Honor: A Memoir
by Mukhtar Bai, p. 172, 2006]

Gujarat 2002, The Truth

2008-02-20T18:49:00.000-05:00

Readers’ responses to the expose ‘Gujarat 2002: The Truth’

in Tehelka weekly of 3 Nov. 2007

As I write this, I feel some part of my existence has gone numb. How can people take pride in nothing less than cannibalism?

Danish Iqbal (USA)

Can a country where police, judiciary and politicians collude to kill thousands of its citizens ever call itself developed? Do you really want your children to live in a society where the police can brutalize common citizens and go unpunished? Today you might belong to the right religion, but tomorrow it may be your/mine or our kids' turn.

Meha Khanduri

I sit here with my head down in shame, crying. When will this change? Is there any hope for India?

Saloni Puri

The country hangs its head in shame.

A.K.Amitava

If after this expose, the perpetrators still swagger around, how do we look at Islamic fundamentalists and feel any different? If an entire state turns against the values that define the nation, what is to be done? Less than 150 years ago, the US faced a choice between the universal right to liberty and equality and the right of 11 states to practice slavery. In this instance the US chose to go to war to defend its values and in doing so struck a blow against barbarity. India faces a similar choice. Not to act on this evidence of genocide is to begin our Nazification.

If Gujarat were an independent country, Modi and his men would have faced the same international military action which Milosevic faced in Yugoslavia for the genocide of minorities.

Vincent Fernandes

What more evidence do we need? Do we want the dead to rise from their graves and tell us who hacked and burned them?

Ashwin Kak

For the past 75 years, the RSS/VHP have been silently at work through schools that teach the young to hate the 'other'. It is from these kids that bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, journalists and politicians emerge. One had earlier thought that with the spread of education, awareness among people would rise, but that proved false during Gujarat 2002. In a democracy that's turned into a mobocracy, it is very hard to stand up and say, "So what if you are 80 per cent, you do not have the right to kill the rest."

Dastagir

When the Babri masjid was demolished by the Hindu fundamentalists, we failed to launch an all-out campaign against the perpetrators. Ten years later, they struck again, killing thousands. If we fail once again, we do not know what awaits us in 2012.

John Stanley

All I am asking of the BJP biggies is that, as human beings, you watch those tapes and read the transcripts and then tell me with a straight face that you don't suspect the Gujarat government people from your party of being involved in this.

Chitta Baral

Muslims should take a very cautious approach to the whole situation, for it is the intention of the RSS/VHP to provoke them. Instead of becoming vengeful and adopting violence, they should approach the peaceful path shown by Mahatma Gandhi. Think a while, think of Punjab, Kashmir, Palestine, Sri Lanka and the many instances where violent resistance generated more violence from the other side. There is no end to it.

Jahangir

This leaves me speechless. The rot that we live amidst. Have we really descended into hell? Can it be possible that these men roam free and wild in our midst?

Nisha

If we become the barbarians we despise, what is the difference between us and them? Do you think we will be wiped out by the actions of a few Jihadists? No, we are in danger of becoming one of them and losing our identity.

Mayank

I used to pin a BJP flag on my soft-board and supported the party in college politics. But 2002 changed that. I feel shame that I have never felt before. I feel guilty that because we kept quiet, this could happen.

Anirban Bhattacharya

The VHP/BJP and Pakistan have an identical agenda. They both believe in the one-nation theory. Pakistan believes India is no place for Muslims and so does the VHP.

Gopal Karunakaran

If we cannot work to get justice for the genocidal killers in India, it will inevitably be dismantled, as were the USSR, Yugoslavia etc.

Kuljeet Tuteja

I feel like hiding my face in the mud; for the first time in my life, I feel ashamed to call myself an Indian.

Paramjit Arora

Make no mistakes about it, Modi's Gujarat is the germinal of Hindu Rashtra. Its ideology is sectarian supremacy, its postulates are hatred and bigotry, violence is its key directive principle. It's a bewilderment how such a state has come to prosper in our midst. That's where the essential ideas of India needed to be fought for, rescued. The Congress [is] running scared from confronting Modi head-on. Why? It's the fear of losing the Hindu vote. The Congress cannot espouse secularism on paper and practice soft Hindutva on the street.

Sankarshan Thakur

Tehelka makes out a formidable prima facie case for prosecuting Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the others of the Sangh Parivar who, by their own admission, were privy to the pogrom. If former British prime minister Tony Blair could be interrogated by the police in the Cash-for-Honours scandal, there's no reason why a man like Narendra Modi should be placed beyond the pale of law.

A.G.Noorani

When such an expose is made it is the state government that must act since law and order is a state subject. The Central government cannot initiate action. With evidence from the Tehelka tapes, one can file a case against Modi after seeking permission from the governor. The Supreme Court could order a CBI inquiry.

Hosbert Suresh
(Former Supreme Court judge)

The UPA government at the Centre did not take any action against those responsible for the Gujarat massacre because the main coalition member, the Congress party, would have had to account for the 1984 massacre of Sikhs. What we call terrorism is a fallout of our system’s failure to ensure justice to the minorities. The expose calls for action against the Gujarat government. Failure to act even now would mean that we are not governed by the Constitution.

K.G.Kannabiran
(President, PUCL)

Following the Tehelka expose, the police has no choice but to file FIRs and take action. It would be right for the state government to refer it to the CBI, else the High Court or SC should be moved for a direction to that effect.

Nitya Ramakrishnan
(Supreme Court lawyer)

In 1985, unruly students at Columbia University, Cornell and Syracuse set up shantytowns on their campuses that resembled poor black settlements in South Africa, and demanded their universities divest funds from companies that did business with the apartheid regime. Companies like Pepsi, General Motors, Nestle, Citibank, Mobil and Union Carbide. Within a month, ordinary citizens, faith leaders and unions echoed the divestment cry. It was the single biggest push, Desmond Tutu said later, that was needed to topple the white regime. More than 100 companies were forced by their shareholders and customers to leave and the capital flight was estimated to be around $ 10 billion.

Just as the companies were forced to leave South Africa, it’s time to hold them culpable for their presence in Gujarat – both Indian and foreign firms.

Kunal Basu

Gujarat is the leading edge of the onslaught of communal fascism in this country. If we as a society do not show the nerve to confront this beast, future generations will remember us as cowards who caved in and squandered away a nation painstakingly built by the struggle of many led by the Mahatma.

Prashant Bhushan
(Supreme Court lawyer)

I visited Gujarat between April 1 and 5, 2002 as part of a group. This genocide, and the state’s total complicity…we had sensed all this. But after the ‘Tehelka’ report, I am beginning to feel that Godhara itself was staged. We realized this entire party is debased. We filed a case in the High Court seeking BJP’s de-recognition as a political party under the Representation of People Act. Our contention was that the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and BJP are all one. These different names are just for show; their identity is one. If all of them are violent, communal and have participated in genocide, the BJP as the political wing of the Sangh Parivar should be de-recognized under the RP Act. The judgement on the case is not yet out.

A lot of Muslims were killed; but the real murder happening here is that of Hinduism, of the liberal face of Hinduism.

Swami Agnivesh

The real crisis of Gujarat is the factor that seems to have paralysed everybody, that has muffled the media and emasculated the Congress, the real crisis is the fear of the ‘Hindu vote’. People would have us believe this is ‘Hindu sentiment’ today. But this is a lie. This is mere cowardice. The fact is that nations are built by the words men use to describe it. This strain of rabid Hindu thought – the RSS and its fascist thinkers – was in our bloodstream even when our nation was birthed out of the chaos of Partition. But the eloquent visionary men who led us then pulled the country away from the madness of the Hindu fanatic and gifted us a nation that was sane and inclusive. We could have gone another route. We could have been Pakistan.

Shoma Chaudhury

The inquiries and commissions and reports that we have piled for ourselves is a route of escape. A talkative society talking endlessly. About who and how. About cause and consequence. About crime and the absence of punishment. Never once do we dare look ourselves in the mirror. Never do we stop pointing fingers at others.

There are a myriad contemporary Indian stories we have forgotten. They are all true stories. They have pegs and dead people hanging by them. And there are, among us, the many hands that hung them there, that have since been washed in collective forgetting. The truth about mass murder in this country we haven’t learnt to tell. Even less to confront. Which is why, someday, when that diabolical sloganeer appears again with a manic prescription and a surcharged bloodcry, we will again turn upon each other and consume, and call it someone else’s ugly conspiracy. And someone will win an election.

Shankarshan Thakur
(Executive Editor: ‘Tehelka’)

The tragedy of Gujarat today – the tragedy of India altogether – is that perversion is becoming the norm. The men on the ‘Tehelka’ tapes do not represent Hindu sentiment. They are its distortion. The fact that Modi won the election in 2002 is not a true index of Hindu sentiment: it is the face of what happens when a communal experiment goes uncontested. Modi has not failed Gujarat, the Congress has. They have abandoned the people to their basest instincts. They have let the rabid strain flower unchecked. They have not erected any alternative rhetoric that people can cleave to. We need words that remind us of humanity and love. Words that force us not to succumb to the beast. India is not just about the Gujarat election of 2007, there is the longer road ahead. A higher truth at stake. To se that requires courage and intelligence.

The real crisis today is not between Hindus and Muslims. It is between Hindus and Hindus. For too long now, Hinduism, like Islam has been hijacked by its ugliest and most virulent face. Hindus have to reclaim what being Hindu means. It is not just the Muslim that the Hindu fanatic hates. It’s you and me and everyone who doesn’t subscribe to their narrow world. They hate lovers who hold hands, they black out channels, burn galleries, hostage films, destroy books, ransack institutions.

The truth about Gujarat 2002 is not just about 2500 Muslims killed, it’s also about a State that has turned its back on democracy. The perversion so quickly can become the norm. We are all in for a long fight, and there are many impediments along the way. There is none more dangerous and disheartening, however, than India’s glassy-eyed elite. And defunct political parties.

Writer unknown

(Condensed by Mahendra Meghani from Tehelka of 17 Nov. 2007)

The Good Germans Among Us

2008-02-20T18:25:00.000-05:00

FRANK RICH

“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.

As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter, the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200 other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The State Department, Blackwater’s sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars in contracts, won’t even share its investigative findings with the United States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the killings criminal. The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina. There will be no trial. We will never find out what happened.

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin. We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war. Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than one percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.” This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now, despite his repeated declaration that “America will not abandon the Iraqi people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

(The New York Times, Op-Ed Column, Oct. 14, 2007 – Abridged)

My Murders are Better Than Yours

2008-02-13T17:23:00.000-05:00

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar

Some analysts want to explain away Narendra Modi’s victory in Gujarat by saying Gujaratis are a special breed different from the rest of us Indians: that they have been especially communal since the Muslim destructions of the Somnath Temple; that they have shown unforgivable amnesia in not penalising Modi for the mass killings of Muslims in 2002; and that they are a special breed willing to tolerate the quasi-fascism of Modi. Phoeey!

I personally am dismayed that the high political principles of our independence movement have given way to the cynical tolerance and use of violence in politics, with criminals and killers winning elections. But this cancer affects all parties, not the BJP alone.

Before 2002, analysts did not denounce Gujaratis as insufferably communal and quasi-fascist. But when Gujaratis voted for Modi in 2002, and again in 2007, many intellectuals were aghast that voters had opted for a man clearly complicit in the mass killing of Muslims.

Very sad. But the solution cannot be to condemn Gujaratis for ignoring the bidding of their moral superiors. Some intellectuals come close to saying, if I may paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, that the Gujarati people have lost the confidence of intellectuals, and so we must elect a new people.

The post-Godhra killings in 2002 were horrifying. When I heard of a pregnant Muslim girl having her stomach ripped open and her foetus set on fire, I almost vomited. I fully agree with Sonia Gandhi that the BJP perpetrators were "messengers of death".

But were her own husband and partymen very different? When Indira Gandhi was killed by Sikh security guards in 1984, Congress party cadres went on a killing spree in Delhi, murdering 3,000 Sikhs. The PUCL report showed that many Congress leaders were complicit in the killings, and encouraged instead of curbing murderous mobs, exactly as in Gujarat in 2002.

According to data tabled in Parliament, the 2002 toll in Gujarat was 790 dead Muslims, 254 dead Hindus, and 223 people missing. Far more were killed in Delhi in 1984.

Many critics call Modi a fascist who carries out pogroms. They do not apply the same label to the Congress. Yet, the 1984 data are more suggestive of a pogrom than the 2002 data. The Hindu casualties in 2002 were a quarter of the total, suggesting two-way violence (even though Muslims suffered far more). But no Hindus died in Delhi, so it looks much more like a pogrom.

Around 190 people were killed in police firing in Gujarat, of whom slightly over half were Muslims. This confirms suspicions that the Gujarat police came down very harshly on Muslim rioters while treating Hindu mobs lightly. Yet, in 1984 there was no police firing at all on Hindu mobs. The Congress messengers of death co-opted the police more thoroughly than their imitators in Gujarat.

So, on virtually every parameter you can measure, 1984 was worse than 2002. Why then is Modi called a fascist while the Congress is heralded as a secular saviour? Sitaram Yechury of the CPM points out that the Congress ultimately apologised for the 1984 killings, but the BJP has still not done so for 2002.

That is indeed a difference. Modi needs to make a similar gesture. But have the two Communist parties apologised for the millions murdered by their comrades globally? Stalin killed 3 million kulaks in the Ukranian famine, not allowing food to go in or people to come out. Mao boasted of liquidating 3 million capitalist roaders. Our Marxists fulminate against American imperialism but will not apologise for their life-long support of murder and torture in the Red Empire. They object to murder only when committed by other parties. The people of Nandigram will tell you as much.

Many regional parties are tainted too. The DMK was hand-in-glove with the Tamil Tigers long after their murderous ways became public. Many Akali leaders were closely associated with the Sikh militants in Punjab in 1978-93, and allowed terrorist supremo Bhindranwale to occupy the Golden Temple.

Baba Ranjit Singh, who killed the Nirankari chief, was made head of the Akal Takht because of, not in spite of, that murder. When the courts ordered him jailed in 1997, the "secular" United Front government headed by Inder Gujral granted him an official pardon in the interest of communal peace! If peace can be legitimately bought by condoning a convicted murderer and making him Akal Takht chief, is the condoning of Modi by the Gujarati people so exceptional?

No, Gujaratis are not a bunch of communal fascists. They are no different from the Delhi wallahs who killed far more people in 1984. Rajiv Gandhi’s sins were forgiven/forgotten by voters just two months after the Delhi killings, and he won a landslide victory. Is it so strange for today’s Gujaratis to forgive/forget the sins committed five years ago?

When rivals denounce Modi, they divert attention from their own sins. In effect, they are saying "my murders are better than your murders." This is not the sort of competition democracy is supposed to encourage.

(The Times of India, 6-Jan-2008)