Muslim India
MONTHLY
JOURNAL OF REFERENCE, RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION
VOL. XXIV NO. 282 CONTENTS DECEMBER, 2007

From the Editor’s Desk: A Critical Review of Muslims under UPA Raj-1
Chronology of the Month :( 1 – 30 November, 2007)
Achievements 18
Assam Situation : Ethnic Minority Status for Assomiya Muslims
Books
Babri Masjid : AIMMM-BMMCC’s appeal on 15th Anniversary of Demolition-
*Shahabuddin on Negotiations with Shankaracharya
Communalism : Rajdeep Sardesai on Modi’s Acceptability to Electorate-
* Vir Sanghvi on Hindu-Muslim Relation-
Communal Violence : Harsh Mander on the Displaced in Bodoland-
*Review of Ian Talbot’s ‘Deadly Embrace: Religion, Politics, Violence’ by D.Leighton
*The Hindustan Times Editorial on Unfinished Business-
Economic Status : National Commission on Unorganised Labour-
Gujrat Genocide 2002 : People’s Democracy and Indian Express editorials on
Remorseless Perpetrators-
Heritage : Report on Champaner World Heritage Site-
Human Right : NCHRO Resolution, Mumbai 26 June, 2007
Islamophobia : Report on Rising Intolerance in Europe
Judiciary : Double Standards in Justice Delivery System-
Kashmir Question : Anguish of a Kashmiri Emigrant-O.N.Kaul-
Muslim Uplift : AIMMM’s Letter to CPI(M) on West Bengal-
Muslim Situation : V.T.Rajshekhar on Muslim Tolerance-
Muslim Politics : Correspondence between Bandukwala and Shahabuddin on
Muslim Withdrawal from Politics
* Malini Bhupta & Aditi Pai on Simmering Discontent
Muslim world : Pakistan : Text of Proclamation of Emergency, 3 Nov. 2007
*AIMMM Statement –
* Editorials of Indian Press-
* Vice President, Hamid Ansari on US Policies in West Asia
* William Darlymple on lessons of 1857 Repeated Today-
* Facts about Iran- 41
* Review of Francis Robinson’s Islam, South Asia and the West by Asaduddin
Nandigram Tradegy : W.B.Governor’s Reaction
*AIMMM’s Statement -
National Politics : Rahul’s Gandhi’s Role in Gujrat
*Modi’s Interview in Indian Express-
* M J Akbar on Exploitation of Muslim Voters-
Overview : Partha Ghosh on Muslim Situation in India-
Other Minorities : John Dayal’s Report on Persecution of Christians
Personal Law : SC Order on Compulsory Registration of Marriages-
* Dr. Tahir Mahmood’s View-
Palestine: Chris Hedges on USA’s Need to Declare Independence from Israel
* Saurabh Shukla on India strengthening Relations with Arab World.
Reservation : RSS View on Reservation for Dalit Muslims and Christians
Sachar Report : Dr.Abusaleh Shariff on Pending Promises-
Secularim : Sardar Bailur on Assertive Secularism-
* Jagdeep S.Chhokar on Achievable Secularims-
*Pavan K Varma on Rising Communal Consciousness-
*Shashi Tharoor on Religion and Indian Secularism-
Srikrishna Report : Farah Baria’s Report on Non-implementation-
State Terrorism : Statement by Hyderabad Organizations on Detention and
Torture of Blast Suspects
Taslima Nasreen Case : Government Statement
*AIMMM’s Statements-
Terrorism : Subhash Gatade on saffron Terror-





FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

A Critical Review of the Muslims under the UPA Raj
The Congress formed the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government in May 2004 in coalition with like-minded parties and with the support of the Left. The pre-election Manifesto of the Congress and the post-election Common Minimum Programme (CMP) of the UPA raised high hopes among the minorities, particularly in the biggest but the most deprived and most backward, the Muslim Community. Muslims had played a critical role in the victory of the UPA and in the defeat of the NDA and expected immediate and concrete steps from the UPA government on a priority basis to raise their educational, economic, social and political level. Unfortunately, three and a half years later, the hopes have not been fulfilled. A pervasive sense of disappointment, with a strand of frustration has filled the vacuum. For the first time since independence, sections of the community have begun thinking in terms of withdrawing from the political process and even boycotting elections. A general feeling has emerged that if the BJP was bad for them, the Congress has proved to be no better.
Soon after the formation of the Government the Muslim leaderships took note of the heart-warming assertion by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in private to a representative Muslim delegation, that he would measure his success by what he is able to achieve to uplift the minorities. Subsequently, the Community noted, in every pronouncement by the Prime Minister for the first time the term ‘minorities’ had been explicitly added to the list of deprived groups namely, SC’s, the ST’s and the OBC’s. Once the Prime Minister went to the extent of telling the nation that the minorities being backward, had priority claim on development resources. This was ungivable ‘blasphemy’ in the eyes of the communal forces, an ultimate exercise in appeasement.
With only a year and a half to go before the next general election the Muslim community finds to its shock and disappointment that there is no visible change at the ground level, no increase in the recruitment of Muslims to government jobs, even at Groups C and D levels, or in access to education, even at the school level, or in flow of bank credit, even at the mini-entrepreneur or the self-employed artisan level, or in benefit from social development schemes at the operational level. Since very few Muslims have been nominated to key posts under the Union Government or in the Judiciary or in the Public Sector, the Muslim face remains as conspicuous by its absence in the corridors of power as it ever was. Even in the political field the UPA has been no more generous in selection of Muslim candidates for successive assembly elections or in appointing them in the party machinery.
Change in Ambience
The Muslims, however, recognize that there is a change in the ambience. There is less fear in the air, more acceptances at the administrative level, more freedom to express their feelings and to mobilize themselves for redressal of their grievances. At the same time the police and intelligence authorities have increasingly identified of Muslims with terrorism. Whenever a terrorist act occurs, without any investigation, without any evidence, immediately an accusing finger is pointed at the Muslims; their localities are put under siege, their youth and even respectable members of the community are detained and tortured, sometimes to extract fake confessions. Also there is an ironical tendency to relate attacks on Muslim religious places to long-standing sectarian differences. Terrorism has no religion and Muslin Indians have repeatedly disowned terrorism but ever since the USA declared its War against Islam giving rise to a surge of Islamophobia throughout the West, our authorities have been branding the Muslims as terrorists and thus blackening their image as the ‘hostile adversary’ in the mind of the opinion-makers and the common Hindus alike.
Institutional Innovations
No doubt there have been a number of innovations by the UPA. For the first time, a Ministry of Minority Affairs has been created at the Union level. Unfortunately, it has received a step-motherly treatment; its area of operation and authority has been limited. It has not received adequate resources. It has not even been given full control on all programmes, schemes and institutions of the Government which are exclusively for the benefit of the minorities. It has been denied an effective oversight in the distribution of fruits of development so that the minorities receive due share in of benefit of all common schemes, programmes and institutions.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Ministry has been a non-starter. Three years later, it is yet to prove its worth in terms of providing conceptual framework or an effective machinery for assessing the changing status of minorities and assertively monitoring the results achieved by other Ministries and departments, whose policies and actions affect them. The fact is that the Ministry does not yet have a Consultative Committee of the Parliament or a Standing Parliamentary Committee. The Parliament has not yet established a Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Welfare of the Minorities as it has for the SC’s & ST’s. There is no explanation why there has been no discussion on the floor of the Parliament on minority situation or on the annual reports of various bodies concerned with their welfare like the National Commission for Minorities, the Linguistic Minorities Commissioner, the Maulana Azad Educational Foundation and the National Minorities Development and Finance Corporation, the Haj committee or the Central Wakf Council. The Ministry of Minority Affairs has not been able to breakthrough the traditional resistance of the other ministries and departments to maintaining statistics, relating Muslims as in the case of SC’s/ST’s.
The Ministry therefore, doest not even keep a tab on benefits to Muslim and other minorities from the universally applicable schemes like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the Public Distribution System, the Central Pension Scheme for the aged and the indigent or welfare schemes for children. It has not been able to persuade the other Ministries and Departments that the benefits of all non-universal schemes should reach the Muslim community at the ground level in proportion to their population in the zone of operation, or to introduce parallel schemes for minorities. An average Muslim feels the Ministry not only needs a more assertive Minister at its head but due complement of committed officers.
Some other institutions and programmes have been revived by the UPA Government. The National Integration Council has been reconstituted but has remained toothless and ineffective. It was supposed to meet twice in a year but in three years it has met only twice. The first was its formal inauguration. The second was devoted to a consideration of the proposal for a comprehensive law for effective control of social violence. The Bill, as drafted by the Ministry of Home Affairs, did not incorporate suggestions from the major target community namely the Muslim. It was criticized by the Muslim intelligentsia and has been pending in the Parliament.
The Prime Minister’s 15 Point Programme for the Welfare of the Minorities has been revised and reintroduced with much fanfare. But even after two and a half years there is no quantitative target, no allocation, no implementation machinery and no monitoring mechanism. In fact, only recently the empowered Committee of Secretaries met for the first time to review the ‘progress’ of the Programme and to remind the state governments. The Government is hardly in a position to present in good conscience a progress or achievement report to the nation or to the minorities. Like its two previous incarnations under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi the third under Manmohan Singh is destined to be a talking point and show piece, and no more.
In fulfillments of its promise in the CMP the Government has proposed constitutional status for the National Commission for Minorities. The amendment however does not envisage increase in its power or authority. In any case, the Bill has been lying dormant in the Parliament.
The Government has also set up a National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (MEI) as promised in the CMP. But how far it has fulfilled its basic purpose of removing obstacles in the path of recognition and affiliation of the MEIs is not know because no annual report has yet been tabled in the Parliament.
Unfortunately, the NCMEI has been actively engaged in promoting a nebulous and vague proposal for creating a Central Madrasa Education Board. The idea has been, for various reasons, universally rejected by all Madrasas of national eminence primarily because of the sour experience of the community with government- regulated Madrasas in West Bengal, Bihar and UP which have not produced a single recognized Alim over decades. The community fails to understand why the Government shows so much anxiety for improving the quality of the madrasas attended by merely 4% of the Muslim children of school-going age and improve the employability of their products and not for providing equal and quality education to the other 96% and finding avenues for gainful employment of millions of an employed educated Muslim youth.
Fiasco of Sachar Report
Then came the Sachar Committee which laboriously compiled and masterfully analysed all available data on the economic, social and educational backwardness of the Muslim community in record time. The Sachar Committee engaged representative cross-sections of the community in various parts of the country in a dialogue to get a feel of their perceptions and expectations. But its Report showed that while the Committee had made an excellent diagnosis of the malaise, it had failed to provide effective remedy. To sum up its diagnosis, it found the Muslim community, as a whole, almost as backward as the SC/ST and more backward than the non-Muslim OBCs. Of course, this was no news to the community but it was disappointed that it did not recommend that this backward community be declared a Backward Class within the meaning of the Articles 15 (4) and 16(4) of the Constitution and that it did not suggest a separate sub-quota for it in proportion to its national population and its level of backwardness which was legally and judicially permissible and an essential requirement to combat the communal bias to which the Muslims have been consistently subjected. Obviously, there was a political reason, considering that even creation of the Sachar Committee had lead to a furore by anti-Muslim and that the Report had been greeted with cries of appeasement and threat of Hindu backlash.
A year and a half have elapsed. There have been many conferences, symposia and seminars organized both by the drum beaters of the establishment as well as by Muslim organizations, big and small. Indeed the streets have resounded with the slogan of “Sachar Report ko Lagoo Karo”. But the Report is yet even to be discussed in the parliament which would have provided an opportunity to the Government to responds politically to the anti-muslim forces, helped it to evolve a national consensus and produced a momentum for doing something concrete and positive and immediate for the Muslim community which has been wallowing in backwardness for the last 50 years. But the government just had a preliminary discussion in the Cabinet and later placed an ‘ATR’ in the Parliament. This was not an Action Taken Report but a confession of inaction; with an inadequate and misdirected plan for the future.
Before we discuss the flaws in the conceptual approach and draw the balance sheet of the Report in our next editorial, let us have a quick look at the fate of the Report of the National Commission on the Economic and Educational Backwardness of the Minorities headed by Mr.Justice R.N.Mishra submited in May 2007. This has not even been released but simply filed away. It is learnt reliably that it has made two far-reaching recommendations, the first, 15% reservations for the minorities, of which 10% exclusively for the Muslims, plus the unutilized part of the remaining 5%; the second, deletion of the ‘Hindu’ clause from the Constitution (SC) Order 1950, which will open door for the inclusion of Dalit Christians and Muslims who follow the same vocations as their Hindu counterparts in the SC List. The Mishra Report not only supplements the Sachar Report but goes beyond it to prescribe a panacea.
Reason for Inaction
The reason why the Government has frozen the Mishra Report and even the secular parties and the Left have remained silent is obvious: no political party is intellectually or psychologically prepared to recognize the Muslim community as a Backward Class and to extend it the benefit of reservation; the secular establishment is paralysed by the fear of ‘Hindu backlash’, the political parties contesting elections in a communally polarized ambience make electoral gain- and -loss accounts and conclude that on balance they will lose votes if they do anything positive for the Muslims. They have also lost the political courage to take head on the demon of Hindu communalism, thus the opportunity to educate the Hindu masses and win their support by exposing the hollowness of the anti-Muslim propaganda and convincing them that in the national interest, to take the country as a whole forward, like the other Backward Classes, the Muslims must also be taken on board and given their due.
No doubt, the Government has maintained the subsidy on Haj which has now reached the figure of nearly Rs.400 crores. No doubt, the Prophet’s birthday is recognized as a public holiday. No doubt, for the first time a representative of the IUML has been included in the Council of Ministers. No doubt the UPA government is responsive on many petty questions but these are symbolic. The Muslim community is more concerned about why the 11th Plan practically finalized, has killed the idea of Muslim Sub-Plan, why the government is mortally afraid of implementing reservation for Muslims on the Kerala and Karnataka model promised in the Congress Manifesto, why those displaced in communal violence cannot go back to their homes, why the Shrikrishna Report which indicted political leaders and police officers for the Mumbai Killing of 1992-93 remains unimplemented; why the term of Liberhan Commission has been extended time and again, perhaps to enable it to rewrite its report, why the National Integration Council remains a lifeless body, why there is no discussion in the Parliament on Muslim situation, why the Sachar Report has been reduced to a dead letter, a toy for the Muslims to play with, and why the Mishra Report has been locked up.
The UPA has still one and a half year to go. The euphoria has already evaporated. Let the hopes not turn to ashes!



New Delhi
1 December, 2007 ( Syed Shahabuddin)

SECULARISM
Sonia Gandhi on Mahatma’s Message
UN General Assembly, 2 October, 2007
Today Individuals and movements all over the world, continue to develop innovative, nonviolent ways to overcome oppression, combat discrimination and build democracy.
As we look around us today, we see violence everywhere. Violence against each other reflected in the spread of terrorism, the disturbing emergence of non-state players and our collective failure to move towards comprehensive, universal nuclear disarmament.
Violence against the poor and the vulnerable, women and children, caused by social strife and inequities spawned by economic globalization.
Even as we are inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s life, lit us today affirm our commitment to the Gandhian way, a commitment that is reflected in demonstrable actions and results. Let us srive to adopt his methods to our present day challenges, with earnestness and perseverance.
What is in question today is whether we have the courage to emulate, what he preached and practiced, what he lived and died for. There are some who believe that violence and aggression, are innate in human nature. There are those who have shown that human beings, can and have often evolved to a higher stage.

In Defence of Assertive Secularism
Sharad Bailur
The recent controversy over Sethusamudram brought to the fore a number of issues. First, all religions are intolerant some more so; some less. We had better accept this and deal with it in the true spirit of secularism. We have now reached a stage where it is possible to annihilate mankind itself in defence of our beliefs. What is more important? Belief right or wrong or the survival of mankind? Apparently belief.
As for “equal respect to all religions”, everybody knows that if you respect one religion, you cannot respect any other. What in reality is being asked is this: irrespective of your beliefs you should, at least in public, pretend to ‘show respect’ for the other person’s religion. Or at least don’t do anything to provoke him. Apparently religious people have a divine right to get provoked more easily than those who follow no faith.
Secularists in India skirt around the problem to avoid ‘giving offence’ to religionists. Everybody respects the religionist’s right to give offence in ‘defence’ of his faith. Therefore you have a right to get angry in defence of unreason. By implication unreason is respectable, and should be respected, and reason is not and should not be respected.
The word ‘secular’ in our Constitution is not clearly defined. This has led to politically correct expressions like ‘equal respect to all religions’. When a president or PM attends a public religious ceremony it is not just the person who does so but the office he/she occupies. We should enact a law that says that once a person occupies a high office he should not attend a public religious ceremony so long as he is in office. He should, of course, be free, as a citizen of this country to pray to his various gods in the privacy of his home.
The secular person can only be heard above the din of unreason if he maintains a sustained campaign in favour of reason. We need a more assertive secularism in India in favour of liberal values and against religious obscurantism of any colour. It is time secular people stood up and told the rest that what they are doing goes against their freedom to live in peace. And it is time the Constitution openly stood by the secularist, and the agnostic in view of what its own Preamble states.
(Source: Indian Express 8 October, 2007)

Secularism is Achievable
Jagdeep S. Chhokar
Religion is one of the most potent forces in human existence. It provides a sense of solace and an anchor in an increasingly complex world, notwithstanding, and often due to, all the scientific and technological advances made every day. Given its fundamental and deep-seated impact, it also has the potential of causing the deepest divisions.
Dr S. Radhakrishnan, the modern equivalent of our philosopher-king, said “religion is what we do when we are alone”, religion is an individual’s belief or an individual activity, although obviously if several individuals share the same belief, as indeed often is the case, it can even be a group activity. Politics, being essentially concerned with acquiring and exercising power in societies, is very much a group activity.
Since individuals and groups have to exist together, a way of reconciling religion and politics is a necessity. Ever since George Jacob Holyoake (1817-1906) coined the term, secularism has come to be the so-called modern society’s response to the intersection of religion and politics.
In single-religion societies/countries, secularism is not a concern. India’s complexity arises because it has an ancient, living and evolving religion practised by the majority as well as innumerable other religions. Additionally, it has countries on its borders which were carved out of its own territory on the sole basis of religion, one of which is Pakistan. Thus we have peculiar issues facing Muslims in India.
Sharad Bailur is right when he says that we are now in a state of “competitive obscurantism” because ever since the 42nd Amendment (January 1977) all of us have been free to interpret secularism in the way we liked, with politicians being the most creative in this endeavour in order to garner votes.
While several countries have their own interpretations of secularism France enacted a law as far back as 1905 for this purpose India has, as Sharad Bailur hints, shied away from dealing with it directly. This should actually not be difficult given that the complexity of ‘Indian-ness’ has been noticed. Herbert Hope Risely, a census commissioner, talked in 1891 of an “equally mysterious thing called national character” and that “beneath the manifold diversity of physical and social type, language, custom and religion, there is an Indian character, a general Indian personality which we cannot resolve into its component elements”.
Our politicians will have to rise above the parochial instincts. The citizens should practice religion ‘they are alone”, rather than practising it on the streets.
(Source: Indian Express 13 October, 2007)


Changing Middle Class in India
Pavan K. Varma
A decade later, it is perhaps time to refocus our attention on a class that has continued to play a pivotal role in the making of modern India. Some of its defining characteristics are still the same. Yet, there is evidence of change too.
One area where the middle class does seem to have changed is in its response to communal provocation. When the agitation against the Babri Masjid was at its peak in the early 1990s, a great many middle-class Indians were effortless recruits to communal forces. Today, Gujarat notwithstanding, this class seems to have largely seen through the use of religion by political parties. The difference in the way the middle class reacted in Mumbai to the bomb blasts in 1993 and in 2003 illustrates my point. In 1993, the explosions militantly polarised the two communities and the social gulf persisted for years. In 2003, both Hindu and Muslim organisations strongly—and immediately—condemned the dastardly provocations and Hindus and Muslims could be seen standing in line together to donate blood for the injured. The truth is that lesser middle-class Indians are joining the RSS or the Bajrang Dal and more Muslims at the conservative Darul Uloom at Deoband are studying computers and English than ever before. Instability caused by religious strife militates against middle India’s unwavering focus on upward mobility. Political parties have been forced to contest the secular ground to woo middle-class Indians and this is all for the good.
In fact, the expansion of the secular arena has spawned a pan-Indianness that has the entire middle class in its embrace. In the gradual conversion of India’s salad bowl into the melting pot that it has become today, the middle class has undoubtedly been in the vanguard.
(Source: Outlook, 12 November, 2007)

Religion & Indian Secularism
Shashi Tharoor
Religion: Is ever-present in Indian life. Whether it is the loudspeaker-aided call of the muezzins or the raucous din of the puja-pandals, the stray half-starved cow meandering through a gully or the profusion of cakes in the stores at Christmas, the presence and influence of religion is everywhere apparent. Hardly a foundation-stone is laid or ship launched without the ritual smashing of a coconut or the offering of a puja to propitiate the gods. Fundamentally, Indians are a religious people. Three of the world’s major faiths Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism originated on Indian soil, and most of the others notably Islam, Christianity have found fertile ground here. Unfortunately, though, in India as elsewhere, religion has also served to justify injustice, to provoke division and to whip up hatred: the faithful rarely live up to the gentle precepts of their faiths.
Secularism: Is an article of faith in the Indian political ethos, but where dictionaries define it in opposition to religion, Indians equate it to toleration of all religions. Either way, secularism presumes that the state shall grant no favour on the basis of religion, even though 82 per cent of the population may have one in common. In an intensely religious nation like India, this credo is easier stated than adhered to, but there is widespread recognition among opinion-leaders that India can no more abandon secularism than it can democracy.
At least at the top, secularism has worked well, with armed services chiefs having represented every major community and Rashtrapati Bhavan having been home to Presidents of three leading faiths. For all the attacks upon “pseudo-secularism”, the overwhelming majority of Indians remain non-communal, wedded to the pluralism of our civilisation, of which secularism is merely the official reflection.
(Source: The Times of India, 11 November, 2007)

ECONOMIC STATUS
Poverty, Informal Work Status & Identity
Extracts from the Report of National Commission on
Unorganized Sector , August, 2007
1.27 When 92 per cent of the country’s workforce isemployed in the informal or unorganised economy (i.e. those who work in the unorganized sector plus the informal workers in the organised sector), it is but natural that there is a high congruence between the poor and the vulnerable segments of the society (who may be called the common people). But, there is an empirical challenge to demarcate, the segments that constitute the group of the poor and the vulnerable and then to link them up with the informal economy. The Commission has therefore attempted, as a first approximation, to measure this category by dividing the total population of the country into six groups based on their consumption expenditure. The first four are clubbed together to get the segment of the common people. The first group of “Extremely Poor” are those who have a monthly per capita consumer expenditure of upto three-fourths of the official poverty line (i.e. an average of Rs.8.9 per capita per day (pcpd) in 2004-05); the second group “Poor” are those between the Extremely Poor and up to the official poverty line (average expenditure of Rs. 11.6 pcpd); the third is called “Marginally Poor” with per capita consumer expenditure of only 1.25 times the poverty line (i.e. Rs.14.6 pcpd); and the fourth called “Vulnerable” have per capita consumer expenditure of only two times the poverty line (i.e. Rs.20.3 pcpd). In 2004-05, the Extremely Poor constituted 6.4 per cent, the Poor 15.4 per cent, the Marginally Poor 19.0 per cent. These three constituted 41 per cent of the population. If the vulnerable are added to this group the total accounts for 77 per cent of the population (Table 1.2). We would categorise this 77 per cent, totalling 836 million people, with an income roughly below $2 in PPP terms, as the poor and vulnerable segment of the Indian population.
Table 1.2: Population in Different Expenditure Class, 2004-05
Sr. Expenditure Class In Millions % Share
No. (pcpd)
1. Extremely Poor (up to 075PL) 70 6.4
2. Poor (0.75Pl to PL) 167 15.4
3. Marginally Poor ( PL to 1.25PL) 207 19.0
4. Vulnerable (1.25PL to 2PL) 392 36.0
5. Middle Income (2PL to 4 PL) 210 19.3
6. High Income (>4PL) 44 4.0
7. Extremely Poor and Poor (1 + 2) 237 21.8
8. Marginal and Vulnerable (3 + 4) 599 55.0
9. Poor and Vulnerable (7 + 8) 836 76.7
10. Middle and High Income (5 + 6) 253 23.3
Total 1090 100.00
(Source: NSS 55th Round
1.28 While the percentage of population below the poverty line has come down, albeit at a slower rate during the nineties and until recently compared to in the eighties, the movement is within the group of broadly poor (41 per cent) or the poor and vulnerable (77 per cent) of the population. What is significant to note is the reduction in extreme poverty from close to 12 per cent to 6 per cent between1993 and 2005. Similarly the share of the poor has also come down from 19 to 15 per cent. Equally significantly we find that the share of the marginal group has hardly changed while the share of the vulnerable increased from 32 to 36 per cent. The overall gain has been quite limited from a staggering 82 per cent to just 77 per cent. Given the increase in population, even this gain has not meant a decrease in the total burden because the total population of the poor and vulnerable increased from 733 million to 836 million.
1.29 ......................
1.30 The other side of the picture is the increase in the high income group from 18 to 23 per cent that now totals 254 million compared to 163 million in the early nineties. More significantly, there has been a very noticeable growth in the consumption of the next category the “Middle Income” with a per capita consumption two to four times the poverty line and a last category say, the “High Income” class with a per capita consumption above four times the poverty line. The compound rate of growth of consumption of these two groups have been high; 4.3 per cent and 6.2 per cent a year respectively compared with less than one per cent increase forthe “Extremely Poor”, “Poor” and “Marginal”. If we include the fourth group of “Vulnerable”, then th growth rate increases to 2.8 per cent a year.
Table 1.3: Expenditure Classes by Social Identity,
Sr. Economic Social Class %
No. Status STs/SCs All OBCs All Mu- Others Unor
except slims ganised
Muslims Workers
1 Extremely Poor 10.9 5.1 8.2 2.1 5.8
2 Poor 21.5 15.1 19.2 6.4 15
3 Marginally Poor 22.4 20.4 22.3 11.1 19.6
4 Vulnerable 33 39.2 34.8 35.2 38.4
5 Middle Income 11.1 17.8 13.3 34.2 18.7
6 High Income 1 2.4 2.2 11 2.7
7 Extremely Poor
& Poor (1+2) 32.4 20.3 27.4 8.5 20.8
8 Marginal and
Vulnerable (3+4) 55.4 59.6 57.1 46.3 57.9
9 Poor and
Vulnerable (7 + 8) 87.8 79.9 84.5 54.8 78.7
10 Middle & High
Income (5+6) 12.2 20.1 15.5 45.2 21.3
All 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
All ( million) 302 391 138 258 423
(Source: NSS 61st Round 2004 - 2005)
1.31 79 per cent of the informal or unorganised workers, 88 per cent of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, 80 per cent of the OBC population and 84 per cent of the Muslims belong to the poor and vulnerable group. They have remained poor at a bare subsistence level without any job or social security, working in the most miserable, unhygienic and unliveable conditions, throughout this period of high economic growth since the early nineties. There have been some inter se changes within this total group, such that the proportion of the Extremely Poor and the Poor has come down, while the number of marginally poor and the Vulnerable groups have increased. But the percentage of population suffering from poverty and vulnerability has remained substantial. The illiterates have a very high probability of being poor or vulnerable, almost nine out of ten, and they are predominantly unorganised workers. Even with education up to only primary level 83 per cent are in the poor and vulnerable group. Education can be a liberating capability but access to it is made difficult, if not impossible, by such inherited characteristics as lower social status, rural origin, informal work status and gender or a combination of these. These issues (of the relationship between social origin, educational status and work status) have been analysed by us in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

SACHAR REPORT
Sachar Report and Pending Promises
Abusaleh Shariff, Former Secretary, Sachar Committee
It is one year since the Sachar Committee Report on the Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India was tabled in Parliament. Subsequently, debates took place in media, academic, and civil society platforms. It is a pity no discussion took place within the political system, including in Parliament, although an “action taken report” (ATR) was presented by the Minister for Minority Affairs. which appears to be confused and short-sighted. More overr the context of Muslim focus is missing & has been diluted.
The ATR is loaded with misinformation. For example:
* When Prime Minister constituted a seven-member committee of experts (of which I was the member-secretary), considerable hope was built up among Muslims as well as among the intelligentsia and visionaries who believed that in order to harness India’s economic potential, it is imperative that Muslims along with the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes are brought into the developmental fold. The parameters empirically evaluated by the Sachar Committee, especially in the areas of elementary and higher education, access to employment and credit, provisioning of welfare and social development, showed that among comparable groups (including the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes), Muslims were falling out of the growth paths, as in the case of literacy, education, and that poverty is deepening among urban Muslims across India.
* The government has made some efforts during the past year to address various aspects of Muslim deprivation. To begin with, a revised 15-point Programme was announced. Debates continued on the type of affirmative action for Muslims, even before the Ranganath Mishra Committee revealed that Muslims (including Dalit Muslims) could be provided with the benefit of reservation.
Then came the 2007-08 Budget announcements — exclusive scholarships to poor and deserving Muslims, increased allocation for the “Minorities Development and Finance corporation” and the “Maulana Azad Education Foundation.” These special programmes have inadequate funding and are difficult to implement — in the absence of “motivation, desire and efforts” from the States to utilise such funds. Often, the lack of trained personnel and an institutional mechanism to implement and monitor such programmes are the obstacles. Also the Finance Minister made an announcement, earmarking 15 per cent of the developmental budget for the benefit of the minorities including Muslims. But it was not clear what kind of programmes and under what budget heads the task would be undertaken in the absence of institutional set-up to create a separate statistical profile for Muslims in the application forms, and monitoring tools.
* A flat policy of earmarking 15 per cent of budgetary allocations to favour the minorities is not implementable. Rather, the service delivery procedures must use population shares at the “programme specified operational levels” so as to ensure maximum coverage and provide a sense of equity.
* The Sachar Committee recommendations were aimed at effecting systemic changes in institutional functioning and improvement in governance, essential to enhance the inclusiveness of the marginalised communities. But the poor performance of the Ministry for Minority Affairs is shocking; it has failed to deliver any noteworthy service. The larger malice of exclusion has to be fought unitedly by all ‘regular-line departments’ and Ministries at the national and State levels. It also needs collaboration and partnership with civil society and private institutional structures.
(The MMA yet to set up a framework for monitoring of common programmers administered by the other ministries and departments. -Editor )
1. The ATR recommends geographic targeting — 90 minority districts identified to provide “basic amenities and employment opportunities.” Only about half of the districts have Muslims, and then basic amenities are not specified. Only about 30 per cent of Muslims are covered, and the question is: what happens to the remaining 70 per cent?
2. Further, the ATR refers to a “substantial Muslim population. Substantial Muslim population concentrations” must be defined at the level of the taluks and blocks and not at the level of the district or confined to only 90 districts, the taluk-block level focus will help reach out to the maximum number from the deprived communities.
3. The ATR is silent on the need for universalisation of education. Besides, no mention is made about promoting higher education among Muslims.
4.A strategy must be evolved to determine the mechanism, and how it will be used, to improve the representation of Muslims in the Central and State administrations, and in public sector.
In the absence of any time-line, programme-specific implementation strategy and clarity with respect to monitoring tools and mechanisms, no results will be forthcoming. The early euphoria and expectations are dying out. The people at large are becoming disappointed. One only hopes this does not lead to frustration.
(Source: The Hindu, 17 November, 2007)

MUSLIM UPLIFT
Suggestions on Muslim Uplift Deficiencies in West Bengal
AIMMM Letter’s to Sitaram Yechury, MP, Member Politbureau CPI(M), 7 November, 2007
I have now read the detailed report in People’s Democracy of the Convention organized by the CPI (M) at Calicut on Sachar Report and Kerala on 25 October 2007 which you had inaugurated with a survey of the entire scene. I have already written to you on the question whether reservation for Muslims demands a constitutional amendment. In my view, supported by many jurists, it does not. We have, above all, the example of Karnataka which has not been challenged so far. What is really needed is to have a separate sub-quota for the Muslim community as a whole, if it is found to be backward, as it has been by the Sachar Committee and the Mishra Commission, or at least for those Muslim sub-communities which already stand included in the OBC Lists, in addition to inclusion of the left-out Muslim sub-communities as in West Bengal.
Secondly, the Supreme Court has indeed ruled that the total reservation should not normally exceed 50%. There is no logic or reason for this cap. The Government must press the Supreme Court to review this ruling in view of the fact that the incidence of backwardness and its total in terms of social groups and its levels vary from State to State.
I welcome your suggestion that all State Governments should be directed to hold surveys to identify the backward Muslims. I feel that the CPIM should vigorously demand a caste census which should include explicit development parameters so that both the population and level of backwardness of any sub-group which demands inclusion or a higher share in OBC quota, can be scientifically determined.
You have attributed the lack of parliamentary interest in discussing the Sachar Report to opposition from the BJP. The BJP cannot always block the will of the majority in the Parliament. I think the primary reason is the ambiguous stand of the Government itself, which is evident from its decision to freeze the Mishra Commission Report. Once again, we request the CPIM to demand that the Mishra report be tabled in the Parliament and discussed along with the Sachar Report in the coming session of the Parliament.
In your speed you have dealt at length with the Muslim situation in West Bengal. Firstly, it is not correct to say that 1/4 of the Muslim Indians live in West Bengal. It is only 1/7. In absolute numbers, it is second highest just after UP and followed by Bihar. The three States together account for nearly 50% of the national Muslim population.
I do not follow when you say that rate of unemployment of Muslims in West Bengal is much lower than the national rate! As far as public employment is concerned, the Muslim share is of the order of 2 to 3% for a population of nearly 25%. Muslims are better off in many other States and in the country as a whole.
You have mentioned the high proportion of Muslims in the PRIs but we have no figures. I would be grateful if you kindly ask the Government of West Bengal to publish them.
You have spoken about the current programme of modernization of madrassas. The Muslim community demands more primary, middle, high and higher secondary schools in Muslim pockets, and not government madrasas, according to help the private madrasas acquire infrastructure and educational tools, the Government may set up a Madrasa Development Fund which should be available on equal terms to all madrasas in the State.
It has been said that the Government of West Bengal is the first to set up monitoring committees at various levels in respect of the PM’s 15-point programme. I regret to point out that these committees have no community representation. They are merely bureaucratic bodies. I hope Kerala does not follow this pattern.
It has also been said that West Bengal is the first state to have a Muslim Sub-Plan. I requested your colleague Prakash Karat to publish its details but so far we have no information.
CPIM’s Muslim Charter suffers from the basic flaw that it does not cater to the aspirations of the entire Muslim community in all parts of the country but limits it to some designated areas and to a fixed percentage of benefits. If the Muslim community forms a backward class it should receive a proportionate share of benefits of all social schemes at all levels of distribution for example, Panchayats, blocks and districts. If its proportion in population is low, it should receive a low share. If its proportion is high it should receive its due share. I request you to review the Charter from the point of view of equality and justice.

OVERVIEW
Ghettoised & Obsessed with Politics Crying for Development
P. S. Ghosh on Muslim Situation in India
Following the Nine Eleven there were reports of Muslim protests, particularly in north India. In Kashmir there was a total strike in support of Al Qaeda when America declared its war against the latter. An Outlook report revealed that Muslims in general were unhappy with America and had latent support for the Taliban and Usama but they were scared to express it openly for fear of Hindu reprisal. The fear was not unfounded. The Hindu-Muslim riot that rocked Malegaon in Maharashtra in the last week of October was directly linked to the pro-Taliban sentiments expressed by the local Muslims and Hindu reactions thereto.
Articles and opinions appearing in the Urdu press contained involved debates on the definition of jihad, whether the attacks of Nine Eleven could constitute a jihad and whether the situation that followed could lead to Pakistan’s destabilization and what impact this would have on Indian Muslims. In all these debates there was an undercurrent of anger against America. The way the Muslims criticized America and the way they gave their tongue-in-check rationalization of what happened on Nine Eleven, tended to suggest that they attributed their perceived misery across the world, particularly in West Asis, to America’s global role. Israel was their bete noire. There was an undercurrent of nostalgia about the glory that was Islam. An interesting dimension of the Indian Muslim mind found expression in their sudden glorification of the parliamentary system in preference to the presidential one, a debate that had caught the imagination of the Indian political class lately.
But while the electronic and the print media in general were replete with stories of anti-Americanism amongst the Indian Muslims there was a relatively sober analysis of the developments in the Urdu press. Most of the mainstream dailies, namely, the Inquilab from Mumbai, the Siasat from Hyderabad, the Azad Hind from Kolkata, the Qaumi Awaz from Delhi and the Rashtriya Sahara from Lucknow, held a moderate editorial view. Indeed, there was no dearth of sane and reconciliatory Muslim voices too.
The response of the Indian Muslims, however, cannot be understood without reference to the overall communal context of India. The fear of Hindu backlash works like the Damocles’ sword preventing Muslims from expressing themselves freely if their views are at variance with the ‘mainstream’ Hindu view. Ever since the early eighties there is a clear trend in Indian politics indicating the emergence of Hindu right on the political scene. The rise of the Hindu nationalistic BJP with active support of militant Hindu organizations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena has instilled a sense of insecurity amongst the Muslims. The destruction of the Babri mosque on 6 December 1992 was a watershed in Indian politics. If the Muslims had lost their trust in the Indian State’s capacity to protect them from Hindu vandalism they had their reasons. Often the Hindu right is vitriolic in its condemnation of Muslim disloyalty to the nation and in the context of Pakistan it tends to see Indian Muslims being hand in glove with that country. Even the government’s attitude towards them, notwithstanding the fact that it may belong to the Hindu right, as was the case during the NDA rule; it is seen as unnecessarily placatory. The VHP, the Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena are in the forefront of this tirade.
In creating the popular Hindu image of Muslims as pro-Taliban and, therefore, by implication, as a community unconcerned about India’s national interest, the role of the electronic media cannot be underestimated. Since ‘seeing is believing’ and since TV creates in instant history, selective images of brash and full-throated criticism of America and praise for Usama bin Laden are taken as general Muslim sentiment. The silent majority, which may have a different view, is totally ignored. Till recently, Usama bin Laden was an unknown commodity with the poor and uneducated Muslims. But thanks to the Hindu TV channels they do not know him now, they also know that he is a champion of Islam and for this reason the mullahs are up in arms to defend him from the bully that is America. Who cares to watch the English TV channels, which bring in progressive Muslims to debate the issue and express their sentiments against these retrograde mullahs?
It is difficult to authentically gauge the mind of the Indian Muslim without a nationwide survey. Still, going by what appears in the Indian press and what one can see and feel, it appears that Indian Muslims are generally unhappy with the United States. By and large they are convinced that the latter has found a bete noire in Muslims after the end of the Cold War. In the same vein they seemed to believe that the improved relationship between the United States and the Hindutva-oriented Vajpayee government was part of a global conspiracy against the Muslims. At the core of this distrust is their conviction that the US policy towards the Muslims, read Arabs, is indicated by its commitment to the security and welfare of Jews at the cost of the Arabs, most notably the Palestinians. Another reason for their anti-Americanism is that the United States is not with the Muslim masses but only with the dictators who have no mass base.
In the context of the Hindu-Muslim divide, Indian Muslims feel that the ghost of the Partition still haunts all Hindus. As a result Muslims are looked at with suspicion even if they have nothing to do with Pakistan. They lament that most of the Hindus have no idea as to how the Muslim leadership had accepted secular India as the Darul Aman, meaning a land of peace and as such the question of their disloyalty to India did not arise. In the same vein it is completely ignored that the Urdu press is as much concerned with the growth of Islamic terrorism in India. The general impression that is created, even at the highest political levels, is that Muslims are not sufficiently critical of terrorists. The latter feel sad that it has never been highlighted either by the Indian press or in political circles that while all kinds of nationalities, including of course Pakistanis, have been found amongst the captured or killed terrorists in Kashmir not a single Indian non-Kashmiri Muslim has figured in those lists. What is worrisome is that if the Hindu-Muslim cleavage is not contained effectively through genuine doses of development endeavours, India might face Islamic terrorism in a much bigger scale in years to come. They are quite sore that whether it is a Hindutva oriented party or a secular party, they all use the Muslims as fodder in the vote bank politics without bothering the least about their welfare. As a result of all this Muslims have been reduced to a ghettoized community with an obsession with politics, electoral politics in particular, with least concern for their own welfare. It is a vicious circle and they find themselves in a bind from which they find it difficult to extricate themselves.

MUSLIM SITUATION
What is wrong with Indian Muslims? Why are they not getting Angry ?
V.T. Rajshekhar, Editor, Dalit Voice
What is happening to India’s Muslims who form the country’s single largest community with a 20% population plus endowed with a powerful religion?
Some Dalit friends complain that despite DV giving so much support, Muslims are not coming to support it. This is true.
Our representative in Hyderabad, Dr. Yadaiah, said every time the Muslims invited him to their meetings he would never fail but when he invited them there was hardly any response. Barring two leaders of the Tameer-e-Millat (Rahim Qureshi) and Jamate-Islami others did not turn up at our Hyderabad function. Even they also went away after speaking.
Our Delhi silver jubilee celebrate on April 8, 2007 was attended by Syed Shahabuddin and the editor of the Radiance of the Jamate Islami.
Dalit-Muslim unity: Rahim Qureshi of the Tameer-e-Millat, a friend of the Editor for the past 25 years, in his speech at our Hyderabad meeting called upon the Dalits to join hands with Muslims. In our speech we told him that We were the founders of the Dalit-Muslim unity movement and published a book on the subject which was released by the late Moulana Ali Miyan.
We went around the country several times, meeting Muslim religious leaders all of whom welcomed the Dalit-Muslim unity but did hardly anything to further the cause.
The Muslim leadership is more interested in Hindu-Muslim unity which is never possible. Will the lamb ever believe the wolf?
Dalits are too willing to join Muslims. They have nothing against them. In fact all their literature and all their speeches are directed only against their Brahminical enemies.
In the Old Ahmedabad, Dalits and Muslims have been living together since generations. During 1981, we rushed to Ahmedabad and brought about tremendous Dalit-Muslim unity to fight the upper caste Patels. But within a couple of years the BJP won over the Dalits and instigated them against Muslims. And the result was the 2002 Gujarat Genocide. Why the Muslim leadership failed to keep up the Dalit-Muslim unity brought about in 1981 of which Gujarat Dalit Panther leaders Ramesh Chandra Parmar and Valjibhai Patel were the main actors?
Today, the Muslim isolation from Dalits is total. This the case all over India. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh fooled the Muslims through the Sachar Report the cunning Khatri PM master-minded the Sachar committee to mislead the Muslims.
Muslims are hated, persecuted, jailed, dubbed terrorists and killed in thousands not because they are poor. But because they are hated by the Hindus. Muslims are killed only because they are Muslims.
But the PM with the help of his jatwala Khatri chairman of the committee succeeded in fooling the elite Muslims and the Sachar Report became a talking point at hundreds of Muslim seminars. Sachar committee was aimed at diverting the anger of the revolutionary Muslims and keeping the elite Muslims entertained.
The PM and the Brahminical ruling class thus fooled the Muslims. They fooled the Muslims because the Muslims are willing to be fooled.
The Muslim problem is not economic but social and cultural. The Sachar Committee had nothing to say on the social and cultural slow death of a community.
How long this elite Muslims, who are not even 5% of the Muslim population, go on fooling to community? it is now over an year since the Sachar report was presented. Except discussions, seminars and shedding of crocodile tears over Muslims, nothing has been done.
Another committee on Sachar Report: Now the Khatri PM has come with another brain-wave to further fool the Muslims: set up another committee to examine the Sachar committee recomendations. It will be called “Equal Opportunities Commission” to hoodwink the Muslims. But many upper castes will get Cushy job for 2-3 years.
The Brahminical game plan is when you want to kill something se up a committee.
This is how the Srikrishna Commission Report on the Shiv Sena-led mass murder of Muslims in Bombay was simply thrown to in the waste paper basket.
Muslims are being continuously deceived even as thousands and thousands of innocent Muslims are rotting in the jail for years.
India’s single largest community is condemned as anti-national as terrorist. But there is no murmur from the condemned community. Look at UP, India’s politically most important state which 18% Muslim presence.
Dalits (23%), has a party (BSP). When Dalits can form a party why not Muslims? But Yadavs who are just 7% used the MY (Muslim-Yadav) unity stunt under Mulayam and ruled the state thrice. Kurmis have Apna Dal. Every jati is having its own party in UP. But Muslims run around six parties — without having their own.
(Courtesy: Dalit Voice, 1-15 November, 2007)

NATIONAL POLITICS- GUJARAT ELECTION
Will Rahul Dethrone Modi?
1995 Shankersing Vaghela, alias ‘Bapa’ now a Congress leader, revolted against chief minister Keshubhai Patel, alias ‘Bapa’ engineered a split in the party. Now it is Keshubhai’s turn to split the party to oust arch rival Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, even if that means campaigning for Congress. Ironically, political compulsions are likely to bring ‘Bapa’ and ‘Bapu’ on the same side.
BJP has switched over from Ram Mandir to Ram Setu in Gujarat. What is the exact position of Modi.
There is talk of anti-incumbency in air in Gujarat. Caste and Community groups like the Patidars, Kolis. Tribals, OBCs, Barhamins, Muslims, Dalits as well as Sangh Privar outfits like the VHP, RSS and BKS are declaring their resentment against the Modi-led BJP dispensation.
The overall gap in the vote share between the BJP and Congress, which had narrowed in the 2004 Loksabha poll by 3 percent, has once again expanded to its earlier decade-old position of 10 percent.
The BJP’s strongest social support group, comprising of the patidars, has not only remained intact but their support has increased form 82 percent.
Caste wise population in Gujarat
Koli (Tada Pada Koli, Patanvadia Koli,
Baria Koli, Thakor, Koki Patel) 22%
Muslim 10%
Barhamin and Bania 8%
Other OBC Caste 10%
Dalits 7%
Patel: (Liuva, Kadva and Anjana) 15%
Tribal 15%
(In % projections are based on 2001 census)
Also the much hyped threats of withdrawal of support to the Modi-led BJP by the coastal Kolis and Brahmins are not supported by the survey data. Only tribal voters have changed their party preference in a big way. The tribal support to BJP has slid to only 27 percent.
The OBC vote share of the BJP which slipped to 40 percent in 2004 has been retrieved by BJP and it stands today at 60 percent.
Political sociology of Gujarat voter’s preferences places the BJP in a comfortable position. The rebellion, factionalism and leadership crisis in the BJP are apparently only skin deep. The anti-BJP and anti-Modi, it seems, is superficial.
On the whole the BJP under Modi continues to dominate the electoral contest in the state.
The new general secretary of the Congress, Rahul Gandhi has taken a crash course in Gujarati and plans to speak extensively in Gujarati during the election campaign and this challenges Modi’s hold over Gujarat. He is expected to campaign in Gujarat for nearly 21 days.
(Source: Eastern Crescent, November, 2007)

‘I am a state level worker,’
Modi in The Indian Express, 1 Nov., 2007
During the 2002 riots I personally briefed the media daily. I answered all questions that were put to me. The assembly session was on at that time and I have replied to all questions in detail there. Even a booklet has been published on the topic. Parliament has also debated the issue for hundreds of days. The topmost leaders of this country have debated this issue. Thousands of newspapers in this country have written reams about it. There were thousands of editorials on the subject.
Now that many cases are pending before the Supreme Court, now that a commission headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court is seized of the issue, my stand is that I should not talk about the subject. I do not want that any statement of mine should influence either the Supreme Court or the Judicial Commission. I feel that I should maintain this forbearance. I will wait till the Supreme Court or the Judicial Commission pronounce their verdict. I do not want to influence the judiciary in this country, knowingly or unknowingly. This is a principled stand for me.
The second part of my stand relates to the media. The common man has never asked me this question. I go to thousands of meetings and seminars, but I was never asked this question. This question emanates from a particular group, which has vested interest, which belongs to a particular ideology.
In 2002 the entire media was after me that I was contesting the election on emotive issues, that I did not talk about development. And now in 2007 when I talk about development they asked me why I am shy of discussing emotive issues!
I am not one of those who only returns love for love. It is my sanskar to give love. That is why I am giving love.
Gujarat’s political life is not caste-based. Take Madhavsinh Solanki’s period. The KHAM that he had created seemed to enjoy strong bonds. But within five years it lost its roots. Caste is not a part of Gujarat politics.
The Sangh Parivar is with me. They have always backed me, helped me, guided me. The Sangh Parivar is my eternal strength.
Thirty per cent of the districts in the country are living under the shadow of the gun — terrorism, Naxalism, insurgency, Compared to these areas, Gujarat is an oasis of peace and security.
Sting operation about the 2002 riots. I will not comment on Tehelka. A person who has just been released from jail, do you expect him to shower flowers on me?

NATIONAL POLITICS
Muslim Voters will No Longer be Item Numbers in Hindi Films
M.J. Akbar, Editor, The Asian Age
The Muslim vote, my Calcuttan friend said bitterly, had become like an item number in Hindi films. It was used to pump up the box office, and then dumped completely from the script. For the very, very few of you out there who still do not know what an item number is in a Hindi movie: this is the generally raunchy song that is planted into the sequence without any pretence of reason, and with absolutely no consequence on the narrative. The Muslim voter feels similarly used by the political parties he supports. As my friend pointed out, at least those in the item number get paid for their contribution.
The best way to prevent disillusionment, of course, is to avoid the trap of illusion. And yet, the Left, spearheaded by the CPI(M), has given Indian Muslims cause for some comfort. Three decades of communal peace in Bengal during the reign of the Left Front have erased memories of what Bengal once was. Bengal is a border state that has been partitioned, and embers from 1947 raged till the mid-Seventies. In a sense the Marxist generation of Biman Bose, the present head of the party in Bengal, won its spurs during the frequent riots in Calcutta during the 1960s when it mobilised its cadre and stood on street corners, preventing hired goons from entering the city’s Muslim mohallas. Ever since the Left Front came to power in 1977, and Jyoti Basu became chief minister, a deft combination of political and administrative management has kept this particular beast out of people’s lives.
But over three decades, the Left in Bengal has slipped, unconsciously perhaps, into another trap: “soft secularism”. Because it has prevented riots, it tends to believe that it has done enough for the community. There is an element of patronage in this attitude, as if providing protection to the lives of Muslims is a special favour rather than a government’s duty. One statistic, available in the seminal report on minorities prepared by Justice Rajendra Sachar, should be enough to make the point. Muslims constitute 25.2% of the population of West Bengal, but have only 2.1% of state government jobs. Kerala, which has almost the same percentage of
Muslims (24.7%), has given 10.4% of state government jobs to the community. The situation is no better when it comes to health and education indices.
The anger in Bengal therefore is much greater than the appalling mismanagement of one incident would warrant. Muslim disenchantment with the Congress, the other party that received its enthusiastic vote in 2004, is more widespread and deeper. The cause is the same, a perception of injustice. Maharashtra’s Muslims are still waiting for the Congress to take action against those named in the Srikrishna report for fomenting riots in the wake of the demolition of the Babri mosque. The Congress and its ally, Sharad Pawar’s NCP, have been in power in the state for eight years. They have no alibis left. A second reason is the treatment of Muslim suspects after the recent blasts by the Andhra Pradesh police. Torture was pervasive. This was the finding of the Andhra Pradesh State Minorities Commission, which sent its report to the government which, till date, has opted for familiar silence. The street has its own means of forming an opinion, through what it sees. It notes police indifference in the investigation of the bomb blasts at Mecca Masjid, where only Muslims died. A voter does not make up his (and more important, her) mind in one eureka moment. It is a slow accretion of evidence that takes the voter in one direction or the other when his moment comes, on polling day. And then of course there is George Bush, the omnipresent ghost hovering over Dr Manmohan “Hamlet” Singh. The Muslim voter may not understand the finer points of the 123 Agreement, or the hammer blows of the Hyde Act, but he can see the headlong rush of Dr Singh into the embrace of the man who has wrought unprecedented havoc on Iraq, whose record is stained with the blood of perhaps half a million Iraqis, who has turned four million Iraqis into refugees and talks of permanent bases in a nation that wants his troops out yesterday.
Hamlet’s fatal flaw was not sleaze but indecision. The iron law of public life is clear: people will accept a wrong decision, but they have no respect for indecision. Dr Hamlet Singh’s sudden waffle on the nuclear deal has done the worst possible damage. It has made him look silly, and Bush look clueless. But for the Indian Prime Minister to slip from Super Saviour to Hiccup Hamlet is not good electoral news for the Congress. Dr Hamlet Singh is also probably beginning to appreciate the unpleasant fact that his admirers, were supporters of the deal, not his supporters. The moment he suggested that life could go on beyond the deal, they began to demand his resignation. Hero-worship is a merciless profession.
Nor has the foreign policy story played out. Russia’s (recent) snub to external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee, and defence minister A.K. Antony, is a reminder that those who have stood by India with both military hardware and nuclear fuel have their own views on Dr Singh’s lurch towards Bush.
It is already evident that while Muslims will still prefer Congress to the BJP in a straight contest in next year’s general election, Congress governments in the states and the Centre have not done enough in three years.
How badly will the Left Front be affected in Bengal? There is one important difference between the Left and the Congress: while Muslims still expect some redress from the Left, they are cynical about the Congress. The Congress has habitually been long on rhetoric and short on delivery when it comes to affirmative action. The Left has a chance to cut its losses in Bengal but it needs to get its act in place fast.
What is beyond dispute is that Muslims are tired of being the item number of a general election, flashed out for five minutes and sent back to political purgatory when the elections are over. The elections of 2008 will probably be the last time that they will stick to their traditional anchors. If the only reward for their support is indifference, the item girl will write her own script for a movie in which she will be the star.

MUSLIM POLITICS
Bandukwala’s Controversial Acceptance Speech
Indira Gandhi National Integration Award, Delhi, 31 October, 2007
I-Extracts from of the Speech
“ National integration requires a level playing field for every Indian, but severe constraints caused essentially by education, religion and politics make such an ideal difficult to realize. Millions of primary students in panchayat and municipal schools receive very poor education; they are permanently segregated to the lowest strata of our society. Regretfully the state is increasingly abdicating its responsibility towards education and even health. An education mafia fills the vacuum. This is a sharp decline in the position and prestige of a teacher. And who will fire young minds to create an India that is just and fair to all?
The religious angle is more serious. We Indians wear our religion on our sleeves. There is nothing wrong in being proud of one’s faith. Yet religion should not be a barrier in interpersonal relations. We talk of tolerance of other faiths. That is a very poor term. We may tolerate something we do not like. The correct word should be respect for all faiths.
As a Muslim I must introspect and find why my community lags behind on most socio-economic and educational indices. This makes an honest bonding between Muslims and non-Muslims difficult. The reasons are partly historical. But at root is the inability to pursue knowledge, Shockingly, a prominent Maulana recently decreed that Madrasa education must be purely religious. There should be no economic motive involved. Hence, subjects like maths, science, and computers must not be taught in Madressas. By closing the world view of future ulemas, we may invite disaster for the Muslims of India.
I am strongly against any reservation for my community. Reservation is a crutch that will permanently cripple it. I do not want Muslims to join the race for backwardness. Further, reservation for Muslims will arouse very strong emotions among non-Muslims. The price will be too heavy. The gains will be confined to a very tiny layer. We can and must stand on our own feet. There are Wakf properties whose net worth may be over one lakh crores. It is our tragedy that these vast resources have been so horribly managed.
I appeal to those who practice the politics of hate. It hurts both Muslims and non-Muslims. It is the biggest roadblock to national integration. It also severely limits India’s role in south Asia and the world.
I was a victim of the horrors of Gujarat 2002. I know the pain and the trauma my family went through in those dark days. Yet I forgive those responsible. Muslims only seek security, dignity and equality from the Indian State. .Let us pledge that there shall never again be another Gujarat.”
[Source: The Milli Gazette, 16-30 November 2007]
II-Shahabuddin’s Letter to Bandukwala, 5 Nov., 2007
We felicitate you for the Indira Gandhi National Integration Award. I was looking forward to seeing you when you were in Delhi as you had promised but perhaps you did not have the time. The Indian Express (3 Nov.) has published your statement about the coming elections for Gujarat Assembly. Your basic advice to the community is not to contest the election but it is not clear whether you would like the Muslim electorate to boycott it. As it is, the Muslim community is hardly represented in the Gujarat Assembly and if it takes your advice, its representation would be reduced to zero. Every party has its own priorities and since there can be no witness more effective than a plaintiff, who will bring their problems to the notice of the Government? I, therefore, totall disagree with your approach.
We think that the problems the Muslim community faces arise primarily from their exclusion from the political process and the power structure Unfortunately, since 1952 there is no legislature – Central or State – in which the Muslims have been adequately represented. The existing electoral system is itself weighted against minority groups, but secular parties, if they so wish, can and do field Muslim candidates in Muslim concentration areas. Depoliticisation of the Community will mean its total disempowerment and continuous victimisation.
In Gujarat the only beneficiary today of your prescription will be the BJP. Since I have high regard for you, I request you for a discussion at the earliest.
III-Bandukwala’s Reply to Shahbuddin, 6 Nov., 07
My apologies for notcontacting you on October 31.
Concerning the comment on staying away from politics for a decade, but voting in elections. Here is my explanation. First it pertainsessentially to Gujarat. Polarisation along communallines is so deep right now, that a Muslim candidateeven from the Congress has a very low chance ofwinning. The only exceptions are about fiveconstituencies where Muslims are in a majority. Buthere too I am worried about the large number ofMuslims desperate to stand for elections. For examplethe Shahpur seat in Ahmedabad can be won if only oneMuslim stands. But already the BSP, the NewSocialists,the Samajwadi Party, the Lok Shakti ofPaswan, among others are looking for Muslim candidates. I expect the BJP to romp home with anintact minority Hindu support base. The same thingoccured in the Municipal and Panchayat elections acouple of years ago. Even heavily Muslim areas inAhmedabad and Baroda could not elect Muslim corporators. To gain advantage from a democraticelectoral process, our community needs a measure ofdiscipline and unity that is badly lacking today.Thisinspite of the the horrible experience of 2002.
Hence my submission to consider a decade of total social , economic, andeducational concentration, that may bring ourcommunity to a level where they can play a pivotalrole in the democratic process. We have started a newbody “ ZIDNI ILMA TRUST”, to focus only on helpingbright Muslim boys and girls, from all over Gujarat,go for professional education in medicine,engineering, management etc. This is generating anexcellent response from the common Muslim. This newclass of professionals will, Inshallah ,change thevery face of Muslims in gujarat. My vision is that weemulate the Jews in America. Through business andeducation, they have completely controlled the US andeven Europe for the last 60 years. Oddly very few Jews are in the US Congress. Yet this 6 million community,so easily dominates the American political, businessand intellectual scene.We can and must follow along those lines.
IV- Shahabuddin’s Letter, 11 November, 2007
Let me say frankly at the very outset that all your arguments for withdrawal from politics and boycott of elections do not appeal to me. I wish I had an opportunity of sitting across the table with you and discussing your approach at length.
For the present, suffice is to say that in Gujarat the Muslims as a community are not very backward educationally or economically compared to the Hindu community. In fact, they are much ahead of the Community in other States of north and east India. If the Muslims are weak politically in Gujarat, this is primarily because the electoral system is majoritarian and weighted against minorities and becomes more weighed, when there is tension. Their backwardness, therefore, is largely political, which cannot be corrected except by wading in the political waters. Without political participation and due representation in the legislature, there cannot be any empowerment or any place in the corridors of power or due attention by the Government of the day.
By all means the Muslim community should promote education and invest all its surplus resources to support young men who have potential. But even if the number of Muslim doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, managers and professionals were to rise three times, the Community will not achieve what it desires - political support in times of crisis, insecurity and justice in abnormal situations.
Comparison with the US Jews is misplaced, far-fetched and unrealistic. They influence US administration through wealth, the mass media and in the academy. They have built up their influence over at least a century in an environment which welcomed and encourage them. In my opinion, they are well represented in the Congress not only in terms of Congressmen, who are Jews but in terms of those who are under obligation to the Jews because they recognize who put them where they are.
Let me say, that your line of thought is neither novel nor new. It has been a strand in the thought process of the Community since Sir Syed’s days and, particularly, after Independence. It realized its backwardness having lost a hundred years and wanted to close the gap single but there was no democracy but foreign rule. After Independence it has been motivated largely by the fear of antagonizing the Hindus more burdened with the guilt of helping to create Pakistan. Today the situation is different. Our democracy may be flawed; our secularism may to some extent be a facade. But there is a genuine upsurge for social justice which spells empowerment for all groups. But, we have never learnt to play the political game. We have to learn it so that we can make our presence felt and use our numbers, low as they are, to fullest advantage. We can not merely lie low to let the Hindutva flood pass over our heads. Indeed, Hindutva is being held at bay not by us alone but by the secular elements in the Hindu community. Our withdrawal from politics will weaken them, by abdicating our responsibility to be on their side, and help the ‘enemy’.
We can have further discussion when we meet.
V- Shahabuddin’s Letter, 28 November, 2007
I have now seen the text of your acceptance speech on 31 October 2007.
You have spoken forcefully against reservation for the Muslim community. I wish you had spoken against reservation in principle and asked for necessary amendment to the Constitution to take it away from SC, ST and OBCs; but you lack the courage to do so. If reservation is a scourge, which is totally a misunderstanding, why have those who have enjoyed it for decades not turned cripple? They have in fact advanced. Today in half the districts of India at least, a member of the SC/ST is posted as the DM/SP which is a source of strength for the community, not only in those districts, but all over the country.
You do not want Muslims to join the race. Muslims over the last 60 years have been reduced to backwardness at the same level as the SC/ST. So they want to join the race for advancement and uplift. Why should you deny them?
Your real reason is your fear psychosis, the fear of the Hindu backlash.
You have spoken of strong emotions among non-Muslims and the price being too heavy. How long shall the Muslim Indians abstain from claiming their constitutional, legal and human rights for fear of negative reaction among the Hindus? Why cannot you address the Hindus to appreciate the reasonableness of the Muslim demand which does not by any means restore Muslim rule over India but merely permits them minimum participation in governance.
Finally, you spoke of the benefits being confined to a very thin layer. This is absurd because reservation will benefit the entire community. Indeed, we have proposed that the candidates coming from the backward families should have the first claim on the Muslim sub-quota and that the creamy layer should be properly defined and strictly applied.
Muslims are indeed anxious to stand on their own feet; but they have to develop necessary muscles. It is totally unreasonable to think that the presence of a few Muslims in business, management, sports, art and films and in various professions is a substitute for the advancement of the community as a whole. Are you aware that 85% of Muslims have been categorized in the recent Arjun Sen Gupta Report as poor and vulnerable belonging to the lowest four(out of six) economic categories.
As for the wakf properties, we have been crying hoarse for proper legislation and management, their exemption from rent control and rent ceiling and recognition as public premises for removal of vacation of illegal occupation, for payment of compensation at market rates for wakf properties in hands of the Governments and semi-Government institutions, so that the income can be raised and the surplus, after fulfilling the intent of the wakif, can be utilized for education and welfare of the community.
All in all, it seems to me that you are only playing to the Hindu gallery. I note that you did not say a word about the national need to take urgent measures for the uplift of the Muslim community.

PERSONAL LAW
Supreme Court Orders Compulsory Registration
of Marriages with Three Months
Extracts from 2 Judges Bench Order in TPC 291/05
Seema vs Ashwani Kumar, 14 February, 2006
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (in short ‘CEDAW’) was adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly. India was a signatory to the Convention on 30th July, 1980 and ratified on 9th July, 1993 with two Declaratory Statements and one Reservation. Article 16 (2) of the Convention says “though India agreed on principle that compulsory registration of marriages is highly desirable, it was said as follows:
“It is not practical in a vast country like India with its variety of customs, religions and level of literacy’ and has expressed reservation to this very clause to make registration of marriage compulsory”.
While a transfer petition was being heard it was noted with concern that in large number of cases some unscrupulous persons are denying the existence of marriage taking advantage of the situation that in most of the States there is no official record of the marriage. Notice was issued to various States and Union Territories. Without exception, all the States and the Union Territories indicated their stand to the effect that registration of marriages is highly desirable.
It has been pointed out that compulsory registration of marriage would be a step in the right direction for the prevention of child marriages still prevalent in many parts of the country. List III (the Concurrent List) of the Seventh Schedule provides in Entries 5 and 30 as follows:
“5. Marriage and divorce;
30. Vital statistics including registration of births and deaths.
The registration of marriages would come within the ambit of the expression ‘vital statistics’.
In five States provisions appear to have been made for voluntary registration of Muslim marriages. These are Assam, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa and Meghalaya. The “Assam Moslem Marriages and Divorce Registration Act, 1935,” the “Orissa Muhammadan Marriages and Divorce Registration Act, 1949” and the “Bengal Muhammadan Marriages and Divorce Registration Act, 1876” are the relevant statutes. Under the special marriage Act, 1954 which applies to India citizens irrespective of religion each marriage is registered by the marriage Officer.
In the affidavit filed on behalf of the National Commission for Women (in short ‘National Commission’) it has been indicated as follows:
“That the Commission is of the opinion that non registration of marriages affects the most and hence has since its inception supported the proposal for legislation on compulsory registration of marriages. Such a law would be of critical importance to various women related issues such as:
(a) Prevention of child marriages and to ensure minimum age of marriage.
(b) Prevention of marriages without the consent of the parties.
(c) Check illegal bigamy/polygamy.
(d) Enabling married women to claim their right to live in the matrimonial house, maintenance, etc.
(e) Enabling widows to claim their inheritance rights and other benefits and privileges which they are entitled to after the death of their husaband.
(f) Deterring men from deserting women after marriage.
(g) Deterring parents / guardians from selling daughters / young girls to any person including a foreigner, under the garb of marriage”.
As noted supra, except four statutes applicable to States of Maharashtra , Gujarat, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh registration of marriages is not compulsory in any of the other states.
As is evident from narration of facts though most of the States have framed rules regarding registration of marriages, registration of marriage is not compulsory in several States. As rightly contended by the National Commission, in most cases non registration of marriages affects the women to a great measure. If the marriage is registered it also provides evidence of the marriage having taken place and would provide a rebuttable presumption of the marriage having taken place. Though, the registration itself cannot be a proof of valid marriage per se, and would not be the determinative factor regarding validity of a marriage, yet it has a great evidentiary value in the matters of custody of children, right of children born from the wedlock of the two persons whose marriage is registered and the age of parties to the marriage. That being so, it would be in the interest of the society if marriages are made compulsorily registrable.
As a natural consequence, the effect of non registration would be that the presumption which is available from registration of marriages would be denied to a person whose marriage is not registered.
Accordingly, we are of the view that marriages of all persons who are citizens of India belonging to various religions should be made compulsorily registrable in their respective States, where the marriage is solemnized.
According, we direct the States and the Central Government to take the follow steps:
(i) The procedure for registration should be notified by respective States within three months from today. This can done by amending the existing Rules , if any, or by framing new Rules. However, objections from members of the public shall be invited before bringing the said Rules into force.
(ii) The officer appointed under the said Rules of the States shall be duly authorized to register the marriages. The age, marital status (unmarried , divorcee) shall be clearly stated. The consequence of non-registration of marriages or for filing false declaration shall also be provided for in the said Rules.
(iii) As and when the Central Government enacts a comprehensives statute, the same shall be placed before this Court for scrutiny.

On Compulsory Registration
Dr. Tahir Mahmood
The case of Muslims is rather different, as Muslim marriage law has never been codified by an Act that could have made a provision for marriage registration.
In 1876, a Mohammedan Marriage and Divorce Registration Act was enforced in the province of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, furnishing the facility of optional registration of marriages and divorces with government-appointed ‘Mohammedan Marriage Registrars’. The Act, however, clarified that neither non-registration would affect the validity of any marriage nor would mere registration validate a marriage that is otherwise invalid under Muslim law. This law remains in force in West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand, while Orissa had enacted it afresh in 1949. A similar law, called the Moslem Marriage and Divorce Registration Act, was enacted by the Assam legislature in 1935, which Meghalaya re-enacted after the creation of that state. No such law has ever been enacted in any other state.
There is an old central law called the Kazis Act, 1888, empowering provincial (now state) governments to appoint kazis for the purposes of helping Muslims with the solemnisation of marriages, etc. The Act, now in force in most states, makes it clear that the presence of a State-appointed kazi will not be mandatory for any marriage. Under this Act, kazis are appointed by some, but not all, state governments. In 1978, this Act was amended in Maharashtra to make it obligatory for official kazis to maintain proper records of marriages that they may be invited to solemnise by the parties or their guardians in their discretion.
The only laws under which state governments can frame and notify rules for registration of Muslim marriages are either the central Kazis Act, 1888, or any of the local Mohammedan Marriage and Divorce Registration Acts referred to earlier. The present version of none of these Acts, however, empowers any government to make registration of marriages compulsory. For this, these laws will have to be suitably amended by the competent legislature.
Apart from official kazis appointed under the Kazis Act, private kazis operate all over the country. Although, under Muslim law, the presence of a kazi is superfluous and the parties themselves can comply with formal requirements for marriage, in India it is customary to have every marriage solemnised by a kazi. The private kazis religiously maintain records of the marriages they solemnise and issue nikahnamas (marriage deeds) to the parties. All such records and documents are legally admissible as evidence in civil courts. The claim of Muslim religious leaders that the community already has an effective system of marriage registration thus cannot be rubbished. But, by an amendment in the Kazis Act, all kazis may be required to compulsorily transmit their records to the state registry; and this will not clash with Muslim law.
In Muslim society, what is more important than registration of marriages is registration of divorces. Unlike marriages, talaqs (pronounced without the involvement of a court or any other authority) are never registered with a kazi and no kazi keeps records of talaqs. The provision of the aforementioned state laws for registration of divorces is also not in use. In view of the system of unofficial records of marriages maintained by the kazis, a Muslim may not easily deny the fact of his marriage. But in order to defeat the claims of deserted wives, Muslim men do unscrupulously claim to have divorced them at some unknown time in the past. Compulsory registration of talaqs may put an end to this unhealthy (and un-Islamic) practice.
A more effective way of ensuring registration of marriages and divorces will be to enact proper legislation, rather than expecting state governments to remedy the evils by executive action. Since, personal laws are in the concurrent jurisdiction of the Centre and states, parliamentary legislation on the subject would be an ideal choice.
(Tahir Mahmood is Member, Law Commission of India)
(Source: The Hindustan Times, 7 November, 2007)

ACHIEVEMENT
Dr. Abu Saleh Shariff eminent economist and former secretary Sachar Committee nominated a member of 13th Finance Commission.
Abdul Ali Azizi nominated a member of the National Commission for Backward Classes the first Muslim.
Justice Aftab Alam Acting Chief Justice of the J&K High Court appointed a judge of the Supreme Court.
Shaharyar noted Urdu poet appointed a member of the General Council of Sahitya Academy.
APJ Abdul Kalam former President awarded King Charles II medal by the Presidential Society and honorary D. Sc. by University of Wolverhumpton in UK.
Noted Akbar Padamsee conferred Dayawati Modi Award by Modi Foundation.
Shafiqa Parveen of Kashmir University nominated a member of the Board of the IGNOU.
Maia Bilquis of AMU and Mohiyuddin Bombai walla of Gujarat conferred the Presidential Award as Persian Scholars for services to Persian language and literature in India.
Amin Patel appointed as chairman of the newly constituted Maulana Azad Financial Corporation by Government of Maharashtra.
Ehteshamul Haque of AMU awarded Young Scientist Fellowship by Dept. of Science and Technology.
J. S. Bandukwala conferred Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration by the Indian National Congress
M. J. Akbar Editor Asian Age and Tariq Ansari Editor Midday elected member of the Executive Committee of the Indian Newspaper Society.
Shamim Jairajpuri Prof. of AMU former Director of Zoological Survey of India selected for Life time Achievement Award by Indian Society of Parasitology.
Farhatullah former Prof. of AMU appointed Professor Emeritus in English.
Faizan Ahmad, Centre of Inter-disciplinary Research in Basic Science JMI nominated Fellow of National Science Academy.
Khalifa Gufran of Saharanpur conferred Kabir Puraskar for Communal Harmony for 2007 by Governmet.


COMMUNALISM
Why has Modi become Acceptable to the Electorate?
Rajdeep Sardesai, Editor-In-Chief, CNN-IBN
On the face of it, the anti-Sikh riots were far more horrific than the post-Godhra violence. More than 2,700 people were killed in 1984, as per the official death toll; in Gujarat, it was a little over a thousand. The 1984 riots have seen just 13 convictions; in Gujarat, the fast-track courts have already convicted more than 15 persons in different cases. It took a Sikh Congress PM in 2005 to finally accept that 1984 was a “national shame”, and that the truth had never come out. Rajiv Gandhi’s statement that “when a big tree falls, the earth shakes” is recorded history; Narendra Modi’s “action-reaction” comment was officially denied.
Why then is Modi such a hate figure today for the secularists while Rajiv Gandhi, then Home Minister Narasimha Rao and the entire top Congress leadership have escaped public censure? The answer might unlock not just the Modi enigma, but also the content of Indian secularism, and perhaps indicate just how much India has changed in the last two decades.
Firstly, in 1984, the Indian judiciary was perhaps a little less adversarial towards the politician than it is today, and certainly less proactive in driving the political agenda. Secondly, human rights activists were perhaps far less organised in 1984 than they are today. The ability to create a sustained moral and legal pressure on the system, to network with other NGOs and to cultivate the media is perhaps far greater now than it was in 1984, A Teesta Setalvad can actually become a rallying point for those seeking justice in a manner that was perhaps not possible 23 years ago.
Thirdly, and most crucially, the 2002 riots were the first in the age of round-the-clock ‘live’ television. Gujarat was India’s first televied riot. the power and sanctity of the written word cannot match the impact and immediacy of the television image. Whether it was the visuals of street carnage five years ago or the voices of Sangh parivar footsoldiers bragging about their ‘achievements’ with chilling candour, the audio-visual image has the ability to confirm, even magnify, the gravity of the crime in a way that, at times, even the finest prose cannot. The television camera reduced the mental and geographical distance between the Gujarat riots and a national viewership in a manner that the newspaper in 1984 could not. It also, especially in the context of a paralysed political class, became the ‘real’ opposition, questioning and challenging the Gujarat government’s claims to be a non-partisan upholder of the Constitution.
Ironically, what the television also did was transform Modi into a larger-than-life figure. From a relatively anonymous pracharak who had never fought an election, he was now either the hero or villain of hate politics, depending on one’s ideological leanings. Modi, in fact, brilliantly used the media exposure to create the spectre of a confrontation between himself and the so-called ‘anti-Hindu’ English language media. to position himself as a macho hero who was being targeted by an ideological media, Modi was able to cultivate a sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ within his core constituency. As a result, far from being apologetic about the post-Godhra violence, he was almost dismissive of the criticism. This seeming lack of remorse at the violence has only added to the polarisation: the critics demonised him, and his supporters valourised him as a Hindu hriday samrat.
In a sense, Modi has become symbolic of the Hindu-Muslim faultlines that exist in our society, a symbol of the darkness within. Those faultlines run far deeper and are far more central to identity politics than the Hindu-Sikh divide of the 1980s could ever have been. The divide of the 1980s was a temporary eruption, occasioned more by political mismanagement than any fundamental shift in attitudes between members of the two communities. The scars of 1984 could be healed with time, because the origins of the Hindu-Sikh tension were not based on historic resentments and popular prejudices.
By contrast, and rather uncomfortably, 2002 seems part of a more sustained campaign of hate, prejudice and violence between Hindus and Muslims, one which tapped into a wider constituency in Gujarat and beyond. Which is why there isn’t a greater sense of collective outrage at the behaviour of those caught on camera detailing the worst possible crimes against humanity. Which is also why a substantial section of the rank and file of the BJP, a party whose rise in national politics was spurred by the growing communal divide, seems to have endorsed Modi’s brand of politics.
Interestingly, the original patent to this type of militant Hindutva politics belonged to Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray. Like Modi in 2002, Thackeray too was unapologetic about his actions during the 1992-93 Mumbai riots. In fact, he went a step further than Modi when he openly said “he was proud of his boys”. Both Modi and Thackeray revelled in their image as authoritarian political bosses who would tolerate no internal dissent.
The difference is that while Thackeray had little to offer beyond the demagoguery. Modi, as Chief Minister, has chosen a ‘Hindutva-plus’ model, one in which a fierce commitment to ideology is matched by an equally aggressive commitment to economic growth.
So, while sociologist Ashis Nandy may have come out of a meeting with Modi 10 years ago and warned a colleague that he had met the country’s first “textbook fascist”, industrialists who shared a dais with him at the Vibrant Gujarat celebrations last year admiringly described him as a “growth-oriented, highly motivated chief minister”. Perhaps, it’s this dualism that lies at the heart of the Modi phenomenon. Not only does he appeal to the desire for greater material progress, but his existence is perhaps a symbol of a hidden alter ego, a doppleganger that undoubtedly still exists in many Hindu hearts. Modi says in public what many may say in private. A centuries-old, unsaid prejudice that still has not been properly confronted and cauterised is Modi’s secret weapon. It makes him more electable. And also more feared.
(Source: The Hindustan Times)
Are Hindus Less Suspicious towards or Angry with Muslim
Vir Sanghvi, Editor, The Hindustan Times
Is it my imagination or is there a qualitative difference in the way in which we are reacting to the just-concluded cricket series with Pakistan? In the old days, each India-Pakistan series was the sporting equivalent of war by other means. Passions would run so high that I always feared that they would spill out on to the streets.
This time around, however, the response seems curiously different. Of course, we care about winning. And of course, we are devastated when we lose — as we did in Mohali and Jaipur. But we treat the series in exactly the same way that we treated the matches against Australia. Finally, we have an India-Pakistan series that is about cricket and not about war.
What’s changed? There’s no shortage of explanations. It could be that as people-to-people contacts increase, the tension between our two countries has a way of dissipating. It could be that we are just playing so well that we have no reason to worry or get overly agitated. And it could even be that given the current chaos in Pakistan, Indians are much too smug to bother.
All these explanations are probably valid to different degrees. But I have one of my own, and it is slightly more complicated. As much as we talk about India-Pakistan relations in terms of geo-politics, the truth is that a large part of how many Indians respond to Pakistan is determined by simple Hindu-Muslim hostility. I am something of a hawk on Pakistan, but I’m always a little embarrassed to find that many of those who agree with me do so not out of any considered assessment of India’s interests, but out of simple anti-Muslim feeling. An India-Pakistan cricket series, therefore, becomes a barometer of the state of Hindu-Muslim relations. The complaints about Muslims rooting for Pakistan emerges out of the traditional suspicion of the patriotism of India’s Muslims and the baggage of Partition. The sneering about Pakistani players cheats, etc. also emerges from this same hostility to Muslims.
My conclusion, therefore, is that the relatively healthy atmosphere that has surrounded this series has less to do with our attitude to Pakistan or the sudden development of sporting spirit among Indians, but is a direct reflection of the relative communal harmony that prevails in India today.
For a start, even the BJP has largely abandoned the sinister notion that Muslims have some secret loyalty to Pakistan. Just before the last general election, Advani declared that his party would now get a substantial chunk of the Muslim vote because his government had improved relations with Pakistan. There were angry protests from eminent Muslims at the suggestion that they cast their votes not as Indians but on the basis of how Pakistan is treated. And Advani quickly backtracked.
But he is a slow learner. So, shortly after he took over as Leader of the Opposition, he went to Pakistan and attempted to prove his secular credentials (in an effort to occupy the space that A.B. Vajpayee was vacating) by showering excessive praise on Jinnah. Advani’s ill-advised visit nearly became a suicide mission and, since then, he has finally learnt from his mistakes. Everything may not always be perfect between India’s Hindus and Muslims, but that doesn’t mean that Muslims have any loyalty to Pakistan or to the man who ensured that they became a tiny minority in their own country, thanks to Partition.
The breaking of the psychological connection between Indian Muslims and Pakistan in the minds of Hindutva advocates is a significant phenomenon that has gone largely unnoticed. The last time around when Narendra Modi won a landslide in Gujarat, he did it by linking Gujarati Muslims with Pakistan by making gratuitous references to ‘Mian Musharraf’. This time, even Modi has stopped raising Pakistan for domestic electoral gain.
Then, there’s the attitude of India’s Muslims as well. The Sachar Commission’s findings show how badly Muslims have done on most measures of development. But the community’s leaders ignore these real and substantive issues to focus on a lunatic religious agenda.
How does it benefit India’s Muslims if some man is killed for drawing offensive cartoons in a Danish newspaper?.
Time and time again, the Muslim leadership focuses on issues that caricature Muslims as primitive, bloodthirsty fanatics, intolerant of dissent and obsessed with global pan-Islamic issues. In doing so, they play into the hands of Hindutva extremists.
The good news is that over the last year or so, the moderates within the Muslim community have reasserted themselves and the extremists have adopted a lower profile. Politicians have also learnt that shameless cultivation of extremist Islamic agendas does not necessarily yield any electoral benefit. For all his pandering to the lunatic fringe of the Muslim community, Mulayam Singh Yadav was booted out of office when large numbers of Muslims switched their votes. Similarly, even the Congress, which came to office determined to win back the Muslims, has realised that there is no gain in encouraging the extremists.
You can sense the improvement in the communal mood when you see the way in which mainstream India responds to Hindu-Muslim issues. We still don’t know whether Rizwanur Rahman was murdered or whetherdrove him to suicide. But for me, the most significant aspect of the episode was the manner in which Hindus and Muslims alike rose up together in protest. Most gratifying was the fact that so many of the protestors were young and completely unsympathetic to the traditional view that Hindu girls should not marry Muslim boys against the wishes of their parents.
Am I being too optimistic? Possibly. As of now, it is hard to deny that the Hindu backlash that seemed in danger of building up two years ago seems to have largely dissolved. Even the BJP has distanced itself from the VHP and its crackpot agenda. And the Muslim leadership has behaved with a responsibility that is as encouraging as it is surprising.
Who knows? Perhaps India is finally coming of age.
(Source: The Hindustan Times, November 20, 2007

COMMUNAL VIOLENCE
The Nowhere People in Bodoland
Harsh Mander, Convener, Aman Biradari
Forgotten by their governments and their people, tens of thousands of people who were uprooted from their homes and villages by waves of ethnic violence are living hopeless lives in makeshift camps in Assam for more than a decade. In a region that has near-fatally imploded with the politics of competing persecutions, as oppressed groups arm and organise themselves to drive away other wretched and deprived people, in pursuit of dangerous, impossible (and unconstitutional) aspirations of ethnically cleansed homelands. Their plight is aggravated by bankrupt and opportunistic politics and state policy, and equivocal rationalisations by civilian observers. In the past, strife in the region was manifested in clashes between armed groups and security forces of the state. Since the 1980s, dispossessed people have increasingly turned against each other. In battles between indigenous inhabitants and settlers, many of the region’s poorest people are living in fear, confined to camps, people whom no one wants and who have nowhere to go.
The camps in the Bodo heartland of Kokrajhar and Bongaigaon are of people of Bengali Muslim and Jharkhandi tribal origin. They were driven out of the villages, which they shared with indigenous Bodos in surrounding hills and forests, in a series of attacks and slaughters in the 1990s. Today, an estimated 50,000 people, of whom a third are children, still live in camps, surviving on erratic supplies of rice rations for ten days a month. They are unable to return to their lands and homes, boycotted from seeking work and attacked if they stray back to indigenous habitations.
At a Bengali Muslim camp in Salabila, people barely surviving in flimsy thatch hovels that are flooded with water when it rains; what passes for a school is a thatched roof held up by wooden stumps with only one untrained teacher paid a thousand rupees monthly. There are no markers of even elementary citizenship: no mid-day meals, no pre-school feeding centres, no ration shops, no health centres and no pensions for the aged. The mosque where a few devout men were offering prayers is the humblest I have seen anywhere, just straw walls and an uncovered earth floor. A silence shrouds the sombre reality of many girls and women trafficked to other parts of the country, as the only option of shameful survival. A young man who grew up in the camps mourned, “We have lost 14 years of our lives. It is like living in a jail”. An elder testifies: “The government assures us that they will do something for us every few years, then nothing happens.” He adds sadly but truthfully, “People do not want us anywhere.”
Conditions at the Deosri Santhal camp of descendants of 19th century tea garden workers from central India in the foothills of Bhutan are no better. Adivasis were driven out by in 1996 from villages they had peacefully shared for generations with Bodo, Bengali Muslim and Nepali residents. They were attacked one night by their Bodo neighbours, and their homes and houses burnt down. Like the Muslim settlers, few had legal titles to the lands they cultivated, since land records in the region are perfunctorily maintained. The lands they cultivated are now occupied by indigenous tribal people. They too survive only on occasional rice doles and on dwindling hope. Even today, years later, they are fearful to stray too far from the camp, and young men take turns to stand vigil every night to protect their settlements from attacks. They have long lost all contact with their original villages in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Assam is the only home they have ever known. Yet, it is not accepted to be their ‘homeland’: militants want only to see them gone, and the state government, in a political alliance with the leadership of the Bodo Autonomous Council, looks the other way.
Today, as pointed out by scholar Monirul Hussain, Assam has gradually morphed from a major host of displaced people to a major generator of displacement fuelled by conflict. Large numbers subsist in state-sponsored relief camps for long years, deprived of basic life supports and public amenities, and with little hope or real support to return.
Thousands of Bengali Muslims were killed at the peak of the ‘anti-foreigners’ agitation from 1979 to 1985 in organised slaughters. in one of the most brutal forgotten communal massacres in India, in Nellie in 1983.
But the militant Bodo agitation from 1987 was originally not targeted against Bengali Muslims: it saw them as allies in a fight against the dominant Hindu Asamiya people. The situation changed in 1993 when the government brokered the Bodo Accord, which watered down the demand for Bodo self-determination, but laid down that only settlements with populations of more than 50 per cent Bodo people would be included in Bodoland. The die was thus cast by state policy itself for violent ethnic cleansing.
The local militants organised themselves to drive out the settlers. In 1993 itself, the Muslims were killed and their homes looted and burnt. The terrified survivors went to camps. Attacks were launched against the Adivasis in 1996, and at its peak around three lakh people were displaced by the violence. In 1997, some returned, but returned after fresh clashes in 1997. In 2000, the Muslims were forced to vacate their camps, but were subject to attacks and set up their own camps, on the side of the National Highway, or on private land. That is where they continue until today.
The Assam government says it can do nothing for the people in camps, who must return to their homes. The displaced people plead that to return is to live daily in the shadow of fear of the assured next attack, by a people determined to reclaim their ‘homeland’ from the settlers.
These are just some of India’s ‘nowhere people’. Unwanted, they live without hope or rights only because of their ethnicity or faith. The country needs urgently to redeem to them its pledge of a secular democratic constitution.
(Source: The Hindustan Times, 17 October, 2007)

Deadly Embrace: Religion, Politics, Violence
Book Review by Denys P. Leighton
Ian Talbot has seven of the nine contributions to this collection of essays were presented as papers at a workshop held in Oxford in 2004, sponsored by the Coventry University South Asian Studies Centre and Balliol College, University of Oxford.
Editor Ian Talbot, formerly director of the Coventry South Asian Studies Centre and presently Professor in the University of Southampton, offers a summation of the contributors’ findings that can scarcely surprise any honest person observing conditions of communal violence in contemporary India and Pakistan. He remarks first that ‘ extended violent outbreaks’ in which communal identities are brought to the fore ‘ usually occur with the acquiescence, if not the actual participation, of civil administration’; second, he claims that such outbreaks are rarely ‘spontaneous’ but instead are ‘carefully planned and orchestrated and occur within a context of political mobilization’.
Talbot argues: if, as some scholars contend, most instances of communal violence int eh subcontinent have been spontaneous, passionate and improvised, then each is unique and there would be little ground for comparative analysis. None of the contributor to this volume gets bogged down in the question of the historical origins of communal political mobilization in India, and none is so bold as to lay blame for communal violence after 1947 on the British. Nevertheless, many of the essays include substantial analyses of preconditions of outbreaks of communal violence in various Indian states and cities since partition.
The first seven essays illustrate patterns of provocation and mobilization producing communal violence, taking us from Punjab and the United Provinces in 1947, to Meerut in 1961 and 1982, to the Delhi anti-Sikh riots of 1984, to the ‘Gujarat Carnage’ of 2002. Talbot’s essay surveys communal violence in Punjab between March and August 1947, showing how carefully orchestrated was much of the violence and how decisive was the communal bias of local leaders and police officers. Paul Brass attempts to expose mechanisms of the ‘institutionalized riot system’, taking here Meerut as a case study. Indeed most of the contributors to this volume take as their primary reference points Brass’s studies Riots and Pogroms and The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, in addition to the work of Ashutosh Varshney (e.g., Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life: Hindus and Muslims in India), Steven survivors express surprise that events unfolded without ‘warning’, despite subsequent emergence of evidence that politician, officials and senior police officers prepared for violence. Harlock also shows how social class was a significant factor in determining the vulnerability or security of Delhi Sikhs.
Asghar Ali Engineering asserts that the architects of the Gujarat violence in 2002 received substantial ideological and financial support from NRI communalists, not to mention the encouragement of central state leaders.
In the end, these essays support Brass’s claim that ‘full causal explanation of a complex event such as a large scale riot can never be arrived at’ and that contestation continues as perpetrators, victims and bystanders attempt to capture and deploy the meaning of riots and pogroms. This collection of essays will be useful to students of political violence—though many of the latter will want to examine more closely the relationships between ‘religious’ violence and conflicts of caste, social class, and gender.
(Source: Book Review, October, 2007)

A Reminder about an Unfinished Business
Editorial, The Hindustan Times, 26 October, 2007
Pressure groups from within the media and civil society play an important role by keeping an issue alive. What would have either fogged into the background remains visible because of the attempts made to place public interest above private or political ones. In the case of something as monstrous as the Gujarat riots of 2002, it is such pressure that has allowed us to remember that the perpetrators of the pogrom unleashed more than five years ago against Gujarat’s Muslim populace still remain unpunished by the law. The sting operation conducted by Tehelka, purportedly capture RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders ‘bragging’ about the gruesome murders and runaway violence that they carried out in the name of ‘teaching Muslims a lesson’. Both these claims made on hidden camera, as well as those implicating the top leadership of the Gujarat BJP government, are yet to be confirmed. But in a way, all the grisly details have been recorded and known for some time now. So while the Tehelka footage seeks to provide a ‘flesh and blood’ reminder and has re-stirred many of us into sitting up with horror, the real business — that of bringing the guilty to justice and providing the nation with a closure on the episode — lies elsewhere, it is time for the Nanavati Commission to deliver that report and set the ball in motion.
The National Human Rights Commission report, also mentions what the latest Tehelka sting ‘shows’. It had called for the CBI to look into those cases that it stated to be the very worst incidents. Tehelka has jogged our memories is the job is pending with the Nanavati Commission. Instead of sinking into the quicksand of politics that is bound to develop from the Tehelka ‘exposé’ let the Commission findings be expedited fast. Before a very real genocide turns into a myth them into a rumour that no hand of the law will be able to touch.

TERRORISM
History of Hate Saffron Terror
Subhash Gatade
Post-Independence India is replete with examples of the participation of Hindu extremists in aggravating communal situations, targeting particular communities, and aiding and abetting riots. Those who have watched the organisation since its inception say that the ‘terrorism’ label may be modern, but the acts themselves, fundamentalist to the core, are decades old: making communally sensitive speeches that culminate in riots; leading religious processions in sensitive areas inhabited by Muslims and other minorities; and outright provocations leading people to engage in violence.
Rajeshwar Dayal, chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh at the time of Partition, provides in his 1999 memoirs A Life of Our Times details of another kind: damning evidence of RSS chief Golwalkar’s plans to conduct a pogrom against Muslims. Pyarelal Nayyar, Mohandas Gandhi’s secretary during those tumultuous times, adds to these accusations: “It was common knowledge that the RSS … had been behind the bulk of the killings in [Delhi] as also in various other parts of India.”
Contrary to the perception that the Sangh Parivar has gained momentum only since the 1990s, various commissions that have looked into communal riots since 1947 have gathered a significant body of evidence on the role of the RSS and affiliated organisations. The Reddy Commission, which in 1969 looked into rioting in Gujarat; the Justice Madon Commission, which analysed the riots in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra, in the early 1970s; the Justice Vithayathil Commission, which probed the 1971 Tellicherry riots – all of these provide solid details of the involvement of either the RSS or its mass political platform, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, in fomenting the trouble.
Justice Venugopal’s report, on the Kanyakumari riots of 1982, also severely indicted the RSS for its role in instigating riots against Christians. According to Justice Venugopal, the RSS methodology for provoking communal violence was as follows: rousing communal feelings in the majority community; deepening fear in the majority community; infiltrating into the state administration; training young people of the majority community in the use of weapons; and spreading rumours to widen communal splits. About the shakhas that the RSS organises under the rubric of physical training, Justice Venugopal said that the aim appeared to be “to inculcate an attitude of militancy and training for any kind of civil strife”.
It was only in 2004 that the Terrorism Research Centre (TRC), a US-based institute, declared the RSS a ‘terrorist organisation’, lumping it together with a host of jihadi and secessionist outfits, including the Lashkar-e-Toibyah, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the Hizb ul-Mujahideen. It took more than eight months for the RSS to formally react to the TRC’s assessment. But this was not the first time that Hindutva organisations had earned international opprobrium. In 2002, secular activists in the US brought out a thoroughly researched report called “Funding Hate”. To expose how funds collected in the US by the India Development and Relief Fund (the IDRF), an umbrella organisation floated by the Hindutva brigade were directly sponsoring sectarian violence in India.
One potential reason for the inability of the powers-that-be to establish a connection between Hindu militants and acts of terror in India could be the near absence of non-Hindus in the central government’s various intelligence wings. Whatever the reasons, this dearth is shocking. Barring the Intelligence Bureau, which has around 12,000 personnel and only a few Muslim officers, none of the other intelligence departments have even a single Muslim officer between them. From 1969 until today, neither the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) nor the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) has hired even one Muslim officer. Following the Malegaon blasts, S M Mushrif, a retired India Police Service officer, publicly disparaged the Intelligence Bureau for having long been the source of “unsubstantiated rumours” due to “deep-seated bias”. The state of affairs has inevitably led to what can be dubbed the government’s rather monochromatic presentation of the menace of terrorism in recent years, with sole responsibility for attacks almost immediately placed on various Islamist groups, regardless of evidence.
Despite a ‘secular’ coalition currently holding power at the Centre and in many states, there have been depressingly few sincere attempts to move beyond post-9/11 mythology and the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’, which demonises Islam. So complete is this perspective that it is difficult to decipher any qualitative difference between the ‘secular’ Congress and the ‘communal’ BJP in their responses to any act of ‘terror’. Instead, even while we have been witness to the dilly-dallying of the Congress following the Nanded and Malegaon blasts, the same Congress-led government had no qualms in targeting Muslims as a community after the July 2006 bomb blasts in Bombay. (In the immediate aftermath of the Bombay attacks, an anti-terrorist squad singled out the Muslim community for suspicion, and immediately began ‘combing’ operations.) The Maharashtra state administration has also shown its anti-Muslim bias in times of tragedy. Even while attesting to their sadness over the Malegaon blast, state officials saw to it that victims, the majority of whom were Muslim, received just a fifth of the compensation received by the victims of the Bombay blasts of 1993 – the majority of whom were Hindu.
The fallout of this situation has been the administrative failure to address terrorism unleashed by Hindutva activists and formations. One possible reason for the government’s ostrich-like position could be that, due to electoral considerations, nobody has wanted to displease the majority Hindus.
While it is true that Hindutva groups are not currently in a majority at the Centre, the impact of Hindutva nonetheless transcends its strength in government. Note the inability of ‘secular’ groups to bring criminal cases against the likes of communal leaders like Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, and the champions of Hindutva: Praveen Togadia or Narendra Modi. Indeed, the present-day Congress itself is a faint shadow of its Nehruvian avatar: after all, it ‘discovered’ the idea of ‘soft Hindutva’ decades ago, in a bid to further its hold on the reins of power.
It is time that the public be made aware of the rising trajectory of Hindutva criminality. The dangerous understanding that a particular community, region or religious ideology is more prone towards ‘terrorist’ activities needs to be refuted. The people of Southasia in general, and India in particular, need to be convinced that there is no qualitative difference between the violent acts committed by LTTE, al-Qaeda , Khalistani or militant Hindutva organisations. This realisation could be the first step in organising simultaneous social and political strategies to expose, challenge and dissolve these groups.
(Source: The Kashmir Times, 9 October, 2007)

GUJARAT GENOCIDE 2002
Remorseless Perpetrators of Gujarat 2002
The Editorial,People’s Democracy, 4 November, 2007
THE tehelka sting operation on the Gujarat communal massacres has, once again, shocked the nation. It reconfirmed, that what happened in Gujarat in 2002 was, indeed, a State-sponsored communal genocide. The 14 main characters in the sting operation have, in graphic detail, explained how they executed cold-blooded massacres and killings and how the State machinery, particularly the State police, not only supported them but, on occasions, actively participated in these communal pogroms.
Those who boastfully spoke of their accomplishments, on camera, narrated the inhuman barbarity that the communal forces are capable of. One of the main accused in the Naroda Patiya massacre, in which officially 89 people were killed, Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi (now with the Shiv Sena) describes in chilling detail how he slit open a pregnant woman and destroyed the foetus. Another, Madan Chawal, accused in the Gulbarg Society massacre where officially 39 were killed describes revoltingly of how a former Congress MP, Ehsan Jaffri, was chopped to pieces before being set on fire. All this happened in broad daylight with the police remaining mere spectators! Another, Dhimant Bhatt, presently the Chief Auditor of MS University, Baroda, revealed that at a meeting in the presence of the BJP, RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and other communal organisations, chief minister Modi gave them three days to do whatever they wanted to ‘avenge’ the deaths in the Godhra train fire.
Even constitutional bodies like National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and the Election Commission had then gone on record indicting the state administration. The NHRC Report of May 2002 concludes by stating that, “There was a comprehensive failure of the State to protect the constitutional rights of the people of Gujarat”.
The impression was that under instructions ‘some people’ were being ‘taught a lesson’ to avenge the Godhra deaths. Indeed, that was what was happening in the genocide in Gujarat. Not only did the state administration fail to comprehensively protect the rights of the people, as NHRC concluded, but it actually connived in sponsoring the communal massacre.
Today, five years later, the cases of these crimes continue to languish in the courts. This is turning out to be a severe indictment on the efficacy of our justice delivery system. In fact, Babu Bajrangi is, on record, stating that the CM got him out of jail and kept on changing judges to protect him. Justice Nanavati who, alongwith Justice Shah, is still probing this massacre told the media that he was unable to watch the sting broadcast on the Aaj Tak channel as it was mysteriously taken off air. However, Justice Nanavati said that, “Prima facie, it appears we can take cognisance of what those caught on camera were saying”.
This must be done as all the incidents described in the sting operation are pending before the courts for justice. These details must be admitted as justice must be expedited. It is high time that the central government should intervene to ensure that justice is delivered. After all the UPA was formed to protect and strengthen the secular foundations of modern India. It is impermissible to allow the perpetrators of such ghastly crimes to go unpunished five years after the crimes were committed.
The graphic details of the sting operation, once again, drives home the fact that the communal forces have no scruples for basic human values. Sharpening communal polarisation for political benefit at the expense of death, destruction and misery is their staple diet. Not only is their methodology mercilessly inhuman but their agenda is diabolic, to seek the transformation of modern secular democratic Indian republic into a rabidly intolerant fascistic ‘Hindu Rashtra’. It is this diabolic agenda that needs to be defeated.
BJP Must Acknowledge its Responsibility
Editorial, The Indian Express, 27 October, 2007
What a sting operation in 2007 says has been in the public sphere since 2002. We have always known that the state in Gujarat allowed the gruesome violence to play out, when it didn’t actively collude in the killings. But there is more to this moment than just that. It frames the special resonance of Gujarat 2002 in the nation’s consciousness. In a country where outbreaks of communal violence have been much too frequent — the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi 1984 ranks among the most shameful — the post-Godhra carnage will not allow us to move on. The evidence of state culpability and the absence of reparation is far too insistent. It calls for some form of accountability to be enforced, before any possibility of closure.
The BJP’s reaction has served up yet more proof of its complete failure to either acknowledge the meaning of Gujarat, or the onus it has cast on the party. The BJP’s continuing refusal to look back and meet Gujarat in the eye is not just morally repugnant, it’s also politically paralysing. To get a sense of that, the party need only look at its current predicaments at the Centre and in Gujarat and wonder why the two just won’t add up. On the eve of Gujarat’s assembly polls, it is widely speculated that Narendra Modi is poised to win another popular mandate. Yet, all suggestions that Modi could be the answer to the BJP’s leadership crisis must be scotched before they can be shouted down. The reason is not hard to find: Modi cannot be deemed acceptable as a national leader as long as his regime is seen as a live metaphor for the complicit and unrepentant state. Till then, he may get the vote in Gujarat, but he cannot hope to achieve the wider acceptance required for a national footprint. Till then, all his attempts to reinvent his persona and change the subject to development, will be essentially in vain.
Till the guilty of Gujarat 2002 are brought to book, the opprobrium, moral as well as political, will attach to the BJP. The party must realise that it does not have the option to evade and to sidestep. The BJP’s politics runs through Gujarat.

SRIKRISHNA REPORT
1993:Two Bombay Stories
Farah Baria
After 15 years, 14,000 pages of evidence, a 10,000-page charge sheet and a 3000-page sentence, 100 people will pay for the brutal murder of 257 in the Bombay blasts of 1993: twelve with their lives, others with life sentences and varying jail terms.Blood for blood, in the cold-blooded language of terrorism. And yet, it seems, not every drop has been accounted for. “While the blast convicts have got capital punishment, those who killed innocent Muslims in the Mumbai riots are free,” says Abdusatar Yusuf Sheikh, secretary of the All India Personal Law Board.
This, of course, is an absurd argument. Fortunately for us all, the law is not an exercise in tit-for-tat, which is why one crime cannot possibly justify another. Nevertheless, despite what Ujwal Nikam, public prosecutor in the Bombay Blasts trial, will have us believe, these two are irrevocably linked. Indeed, many of the key conspirators in the bombings were victims of the deadly pogrom that gutted Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993.
They were not the only ones. About 900 citizens were killed in the blood bath after the demolition of the Babri Masjid - 275 Hindus, 575 Muslims - nearly three times the toll of the bombs that followed them. The great majority were victims of stabbing, while others succumbed to arson, mob violence and shootouts - not the cold, impersonal genocide of terrorism, but the vindictive, visceral violence of loathing, the kind that turns neighbours into butchers and friends into murderers. Worse, 356 others - mostly Muslims - were actually killed in police firing by trigger-happy protectors of the law, with the active support of several political leaders.
Then, to add insult to injury, the ‘Muslim’ bomb trial was conducted in a high-profile TADA court, while the ‘Hindu’ riot trial was quietly consigned to a commission of inquiry - that classic Indian euphemism for official stonewalling. Headed by Justice B.N. Srikrishna, now a retired Supreme Court judge, the commission was, predictably, denied the authority to prosecute the guilty. Presumably, its function was to be purely therapeutic, a chance for victims to sob on a sympathetic judicial shoulder.
But Justice Srikrishna - a devout Hindu - went beyond the call of dharma, to equal the task of the TADA Court. For five gruelling years, the judge summoned 502 witnesses, whose depositions ran into 9655 pages, painstakingly recorded 2903 documents totalling about 15,000 sheets of evidence, and passed 536 orders to present a 700-page report on February 16, 1998.
It is a damning document, indicting 31 policemen, an “effete” political leadership that waffled over arresting the violence, and several saffron leaders including Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray “who, like a veteran general, commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organised attacks against Muslims.” Also accused are the BJP’s Gopinath Munde, Madhukar Sarpotdar and Ram Naik, for blatantly inciting the riots. Although Sarpotdar and Munde were later booked under the National Security Act and TADA for possession of illegal weapons, the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition that came to power in 1995 dropped all cases against the four. Subsequently, in January 1996, the Maharashtra government brazenly disbanded the commission altogether. It was forced to revive it in May 1996 after a public outcry.
But perhaps the biggest blow to justice was the acquittal of former Joint Police Commissioner R.D. Tyagi, charged with killing nine young Muslim boys in the Suleiman Usman Bakery operation. All nine, says the report, were “shot point-blank and in cold blood”. The police ultimately charged Tyagi, but the prosecution was so feeble that he and eight other accomplices were acquitted by a sessions court judge for lack of substantial evidence.
Not surprisingly, the Shiv Sena has accused Justice Srikrishna of being “biased against Hindus” and many of the khaki offenders have audaciously been promoted to plum posts. But when it comes to covering up, even politicians make faithful bedfellows - so Maharashtra’s ruling Congress government obligingly “disagreed with the conclusions of the commission,” and conveniently buried the report along with its skeletons, for “fear” that it might “re-open old wounds”.
Now, pushed against the TADA court wall by minority ire, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh has promised to implement it, nearly a decade later. His healing formula: another committee to “identify the alleged lapses” in the implementation of the Commission’s report. But this, of course, is just another classic eyewash because, if implemented, Srikrishna’s entire exercise will have to be repeated in a court of law - a logistical farce, since prosecuting a government servant requires the sanction of the government.
Yet, India simply cannot afford to ignore the Srikrishna Commission Report. Here’s why:
• Firstly, despite political fears that it may “re-open old wounds”, it will actually complete the cauterisation begun by the bomb blast verdict. Pain is inevitable but is part of the healing process.
• It will establish, once and for all, that terrorism in any form will not be tolerated even if it has official sanction.
• It will restore the secular spirit of India’s most liberal city, where sweat has always been more important than blood, and the cosmopolitan has always superseded the communal.
• It will ensure that even justice delayed is better than no justice at all.
• But, most importantly, it will prove that those in power are not above the law - a fundamental precept of any democratic system. This is precisely why the Srikrishna Commission is much more than a tit-for-tat trial to mollify aggrieved Muslims. And also why ignoring it is a dangerous precedent for the future of Indian democracy.
(Source: The Indian Express, 31 July, 2007)

NANDIGRAM TRAGEDY
Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s Reaction to Nandigaram
I- Statement, 14 March, 2007
The news of deaths by police firing in Nandigram this morning has filled me with a sense of cold horror. We will soon know more details of the sequence of events that led to this tragedy. But the point uppermost in my mind is not ‘who started it’, ‘who provoked it’ or whether there were agents-provocateur behind it. Investigations will reveal that. The thought in my mind – and of all sensitive people now is – ‘Was this spilling of human blood not avoidable? What is the public purpose served by the use of force witnessed today?’
Force against anti-national elements, terrorists, extremists, insurgents, is one thing. They are not at receiving end of the force used today .
It is not my intention to enter into blame-fixing. But I can not be so casual to the Oath I have taken as to restrict my reaction to a pious expression of anguish and outrage. I trust the Government will not only go into the whys and wherefores of this tragic occurrence but will also ensure that it leaves no room for a repetition of this kind of trauma.
I leave it to the conscience of officials responsible to atone for the event in the manner they deem fit. But I also expect the Government to do what it thinks is necessary to mitigate the effects of this bitter March 14, and to do it visibly and fast.
II- Press Release, 7 November., 2007
Deeply concerned by the recent worsening in the tension-charged situation in Nandigram, the Governor is observing the rapidly evolving developments closely.
The Governor has received communications and reports alleging violence and divisive activities by outsiders in the district as also incendiary statements made by people within the district. He has brought these reports to the notice of the State Government and the Government of India.
The Governor takes this opportunity to express his sincerest sympathy with the next -of- kin of those who have died in the tragic development.
He trusts that even at this late hour, representatives of the people and the Government will confer together to find an end to the fears besetting the people of Nandigram.
He shares the widespread desire of the people of the State that those compelled to leave their homes, farmsteads and means of livelihood in Nandigram will be able to go back to them and that everyone in Nandigram will be spared the agonies of an insecure present and an uncertain future.
III- Statement, 9 November, 2007
The ardour of Deepavali has been dampened in the whole State by the events in Nandigram. Several villages in Nandigram are oscillating believe gloom to panic. Large numbers of armed persons from outside the district have, it is undeniable, forced themselves onto villages in Nandigram Block I and II for territorial assertion. Thousands of villagers have consequently been intimidated into leaving their homes
I have received calls from responsible persons in Nandigram saythat several huts are ablaze. Large numbers of villagers have taken refuge in the local high school in Nandigram, bereft of food and personal security.
The most accurate description for Nandigram by the Home Secretary, namely, it has become “a war zone”. No Government or society can allow a war zone to exist without immediate and effective action.
I am fully aware of the fact that, earlier in the year, many villagers in Nandigram who were perceived as sympathizers of the ruling establishment had been obliged to leave the villages and seek shelter in Khejuri. I am also aware of the apprehension that some Maoists, their numbers being unverified, have entered the area.
Those who had to flee to Khejuri must come back with full confidence and dignity. And no quarter should be given to the cult of violence associated with Maoists. But the manner in which the ‘recapture’ of Nandigram villages is being attempted is totally unlawful and unacceptable.
I find it equally unacceptable that while Nandigram has been ingressed with ease by armed people on the one hand, political and non-political persons trying to reach it have been violently obstructed. Some of them were bearing relief articles for the homeless. The treatment meted to Smt. Medha Patkar and her associates was against all norms of civilized political behaviour.
A group of five MPs and one MLA, representing the CPI-M met me this morning and urged me “to use my good offices for the peace processes in Nandigram”. Peace is the need of the hour in Nandigram. For peace to come, I told them, effective action will have to be taken in terms of action initiated against those responsible for the March 14 events in due process.
The people of West Bengal have a right to know that following discussions with political leaders like Smt. Mamata Banerjee, MP, Shri Partha Chatterjee, Leader of the Opposition, West Bengal Legislative Assembly, Shri Pradip Bhattacharya, Working President, West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee, Shri Manash Bhuiyan and non-political persons, I have been in regular communication with the Hon’ble Chief Minister and requested the State Government to take certain immediate steps. These include (i) the immediate return of the ingressers (ii) the giving of urgent relief to the displaced persons in Nandigram and (iii) the facilitation of their return to their homes.
I have also asked the administration to remove the unauthorized manmade blocks at entry points to the arch in order that the isolation of Nandigram ends. I have made it clear that unless these steps are taken within hours, and the syndrome of “capture and recapture” is not ended, the beginnings for a resumed dialogue through the package announced by the Chief Secretary last night will not get off the ground and the peace talks process will remain grounded. Peace talks must resume soon and, despite the lateness of the hour, I welcome the pragmatic optimism expressed in this regard by our elder statesman, Shri Jyoti Basu.
Let me conclude by saying : Enough is enough. Peace and security should be restored, without any delay, in Nandigram.
AIMMM Statement, 22 November, 2007
‘The All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM) deplores the outbreak of violence in some areas of Kolkata, triggered by the untimely call of the little known organization All India Minority Forum for a protest against the extension of visa to the Bangladeshi writer Tasleema Nasreen which led to confrontation with the police.
It appears that the demonstration was taken over by political elements, across the spectrum, to exploit the accumulated outrage and anger in the Muslim community against the tragic happenings in Nandigram in a mischievous bid to damage both the image of the Community and the cause of Nandigram.
The AIMMM has been urging the Government to cancel the extension of visa to Tasleema Nasreen whose repeated attacks on Islam and the Holy Prophet have not only violated the law but also angered the Muslim Community. When the Muslim Ittehad Parishad, on which MMM West Bengal is represented, was planning to organize a public meeting on 15 November in Kolkata on the Nandigram question it was advised by the AIMMM not to mix up Nandigram, which was not a religious issue, with the Tasleema Nasreen question.
The AIMMM once again cautions the Muslim Community not to play into the hands of irresponsible demagogues and agents provocateur, while exercising its legitimate right to participate fully in national politics as well as to seek due and prompt government action on any offence against their religious susceptibilities.
The AIMMM appeals to the mass media as well to make a clear distinction between religious and communal questions and not to project the Kolkata incident as a communal outbreak.
The AIMMM notes, with a sense of relief that the situation was brought under control, without much bloodshed, through timely action by the state government.
The AIMMM takes this opportunity to request the state government to expedite relief measures and ensure return of the displaced to their homes in dignity and security.

TASLIMA NASREEN CASE
Government Statement on
Taslima Nasreen Case, 24 November, 2007
The Centre on Wednesday said Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen would continue to get shelter in the country but implied that she should refrain from activities that “hurt sentiments of the people” here.
“Throughout history, we have never refused shelter to those who seek our protection, and the same applies to Nasreen also”
“This civilizational heritage, which is now government policy, will continue, and India will provide shelter to Ms. Nasreen”
“Those given shelter in India have always undertaken to eschew political activities in India or any actions which may harm India’s relations with friendly countries. It is also expected that the guests will refrain from activities and expressions that may hurt the sentiments of our people.”
Constitutional, Legal and Administrative Aspects of Taslima Nasreen
AIMMM Statement, 24 November, 2007
‘The AIMMM welcomes the second thought by Governmet of West Bengal on the continued residence of Taslima Nasreen in Kolkata. However both state and Central Government have failed to clarify the correct constitutional , legal and administrative aspects of the case.
1. Grant of long term residence visa to foreigners or extension thereof is the prerogative of the Union Government but only after consulting the Government of the state of residence. So the Government of West Bengal can not plead innocence. Now that she is out of West Bengal final authority to grant any further extension rests with the Union Government.
2. Secondly no foreign national has the right to an entry or residence visa.
3. Thirdly a visa subject to the conditions of issue. For example, the foreigner has to keep to the purpose for which the visa was granted , respect the law of the land desist form any activity which might violate the law and disturb law and order and become a security problem.
4. A foreigner does not enjoy the fundamental rights of freedom of expression, of free movement throughout the country or of residing at a place of his choice, particularly if he or she moves around to commit unlawful acts and creating disturbance to peace.
In the above circumstances, the AIMMM demands that even if Taslima Nasreen is allowed to be in India upto date of expiry of her visa, she may be advised to lie low and not make any provocative statements and leave the country peacefully, if extension is refused, for a destination of her choice.
The AIMMM, further, suggests that the Government should advise her to leave the country at earliest possible.’

JUDICIARY
Facing Double Standards in Justice Delivery System
Vishal Arora
The three most important factor on which the delivery of justice depends are: independence of judiciary, its accountability and the administration of police. Unfortunately, all the three areas are plagued with gross problems in India, paralyzing the justice delivery system and making it out of the reach of weaker sections of society and religious minorities.
As regards the separation of powers, there can be little doubt that judiciary and executive are independent of each other. However, in the functioning of the judiciary interference or subversion of justice by the executive is commonplace and crystal clear.
Given the fact that it is the state that fights criminal cases on behalf of its citizens, the delivery of justice depends to a great extent on the police, who are responsible for investigation, and public prosecutors, who are supposed to present the case. Both police and public prosecutors report to their state government. The “independent” courts merely weigh the evidence collected by the police and presented by the public prosecutor.
Whether the agents of the state government discharge their duties depends on which party controls that government.
For instance, after the post-Godhra carnage in Gujarat in 2002, in which more than 2,000 Muslims were killed, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government filed away more than 2,000 cases, a majority of which allegedly involved party workers and cadre of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and its youth wing bajrang Dal. By not filing even first information reports (FIRs), the Gujarat police prevented these cases from reaching the judiciary.
Only a minority of cases related to the post-Godhra violence managed to reach the courts. However, even these cases were not investigated properly by the police. On the contrary, in February 2003, the authorities detained those accused of involvement in the killing of kar sevak in Godhra under the POTA following the ‘confession’ of an accused who pointed to the involvement of Maulana Hassan Umarji, who, it was alleged, has planned the attack. No charges were framed under POTA for those accused of taking part in the subsequent communal violence.
In the right of the dubious role of the police and public prosecutor, the Supreme Court in 2004 ordered retrial of the Best Bakery case and the Bilkis Bano gang rape and murder case. The apex court transferred these cases outside of Gujarat to Maharashtra.
Referring to the Best Bakery case, the Supreme Court on April 12, 2004 stated, “The investigation appears to be perfunctory and anything but impartial without any definite object of finding out the truth bringing to book those who were responsible for the crime”. The judgment also mentioned the “possibility of the investigation agency trying to shield the accused persons”, describing the act as “worse than that of a terrorist and more dangerous than an alien enemy”.
But, what happened after the unprecedented indictment of the Narendra Modi- government by the apex court? More than five years later, only a few culprits have been punished in connection with the 4,000 police cases filed after the 2002 carnage, thanks to the Gujarat police and public prosecutors, who seem to be hell bent on protecting the culprits.
The deplorable role of the police in subverting justice in cases related to communal crimes, the brunt of which is born by members of the Muslim community, brings us face to face with a need to reform the police system, without which the justice delivery system cannot function properly.
Numerous investigation reports have indicated connivance of the police in communal violence. The Ahmedabad riots of 1969; the Bhiwandi, Jalgaon, and Mahad riots of 1970; the Tellicherry riots of 1971; the anti-Sikh riots of 1984; the Mumbai riots of 1992-93 are instances.
The police force continues to be governed by the Police Act of 1861, which came 1857 with intent to preserve the British Empire by curbing any uprising, so it is understandable why the men in khaki remain anti-people and acquiescent to ruling parties.
The first report of the National Police Commission (NPC) released in 1979 pointed out, “The basic and fundamental problem regarding the police today is how to make them function as an efficient and impartial law enforcement agency fully motivated and guided by the objectives of service to the public at large, upholding the Constitutional rights and liberty of the people”. The situation has not changed in 2007 even 28 years later.
The NPC submitted as many as eight reports till 1981 with numerous recommendations. Similarly, the Rebeiro Committee, the Padmanabhaiah Committee on Police Reforms, the Human Rights Commission, the Commonwealth Human Rights. Initiative, and many other commissions have also called for reforms. Besides, the Supreme Court has also ordered the Central government to ask all the states to reform their police administrations, but the court’s order is yet to be implemented.
Justice V.D. Tulzapurkar’s remarks on judiciary’s independence made a few years ago are apt in the context of delivery of justice in the cases related to he Post-Godhra killing: “If an independent judiciary is regarded as the heart of a republic, then the Indian republic is at present suffering from serious heart ailment”. And today, this trend has reached a stage where we can say the judiciary is “on the verge of collapse”.
How to respond to the tragic fact that Muslims face gross discrimination in how the cases in which they are victims are handled by the agents of the State? Scholarship and active participation in the ongoing advocacy and lobbying efforts along with the civil society something that Shabnam Hashmi and Teesta Seetalvad are already doing.
Besides, the evil of communalism must not be viewed in isolation. The growth of communalism depends on various factors, such as the problems of unemployment, corruption, illiteracy, lack of proper education, election laws, and so on. Therefore , an overall development should be sought along with the call to end discrimination and atrocities particularly against Muslims and other minorities.
Last but not the least, one must try not to become a doomsayer, but rather strive to see positive developments, of which there is no dearth. For instance, police reforms will happen sooner or later, given the Supreme Court order. As regards communal politics, this too is likely to be contained, as coalition politics is becoming a reality in the Indian politics, and as the voters are taking more interest in development issues, as was visible in the 2004 general election. In addition, the Indian media is fairly free and has a great potential to fight communalism.
(Source: Radiance Views Weekly, 14-20 October, 2007)

BABARI MASJID
Joint Appeal of A.I. Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat & BMM Co-ordination Committee for Dignified Observance 28 November, 2007
‘The 15th Anniversary of the Demolition of the Babri Masjid falls on Thursday 6 December 2007.
The Demolition has become a landmark in post independence history. It was a national tragedy and a matter of shame for the government and the people of secular state.
The AIMMM and the BMMCC regret that 15 years later the people of India, particularly the Muslims and other secular-minded people, are still waiting for the report of the Ayodhaya Commission of Inquiry, for the prosecution of the culprits named in the FIR and identified during subsequent police investigations and for the final judicial verdict on the title to the disputed site.
The AIMMM and the BMMCC note that the title suit has made considerable progress despite the tactics of deliberate delay adopted by the other side. But the final argument has begun and it is hoped that the Special Bench shall deliver its verdict within 2008 which will open the door for the execution of the road-map drawn by the Supreme Court in 1994.
The Muslim Community has repeatedly committed itself to accept the final judicial verdict but the Hindutva forces headed by the VHP have continued to proclaim publicly that they shall not abide by the verdict, if it goes against them. The AIMMM and the BMMCC once again request the Union Government to reiterate its commitment, preferably on the floor of the Parliament, that the final judicial verdict, whatever it be, shall be accepted and executed without any hesitation. This would serve to caution the Hindutva forces against launching another agitation, if they lose the case.
The AIMMM and the BMMCC deplore the fact that no one has yet been punished for planning, organizing and executing the Demolition. Criminal prosecution under the two FIRs 197/92 and 198/92 has been deliberately circumvented and subverted by the accused and the successive State Governments of UP have aided them by failing to issue a fresh notification to facilitate joint trial under both the FIRs by the same Special Court.
The AIMMM and the BMCC reiterate their request to the present Government of UP to issue the necessary notification and thus place criminal prosecution on the right track.
The AIMMM and the BMMCC consider it extremely unfortunate and deplorable that the Liberhan Commission has not submitted its Report, three years and a half after the closing of the hearing and the final argument. They find no justification for the delay in drafting the Report despite grant of repeated extensions, the latest to expire on 31 December 2007.
The AIMMM and the BMMCC consider that the public controversy between the Chairman of the Commission and its Counsel has given rise to many misgivings and apprehensions in the public mind that the Report is being doctored in order to protect some political personalities who, by their acts of omission and commission, had contributed to this great tragedy.
The AIMMM and BMMCC emphasize that if the Commission loses its credibility the Report will not be worth the paper it is printed on and, therefore, request the Commission to ensure that its conclusions fully take into account all the facts and circumstances that emerged during the hearing and to submit an objective report at the earliest possible.
The AIMMM appeals to all Muslim and secular organizations throughout the country to observe the 15 Anniversary of the Demolition on 6 December 2007 peacefully, in a suitable and dignified manner, to emphasise that only justice shall heal the wounds of December 1992 and that the community awaits, with faith and hope, the restoration of the Babri Masjid.’

On Negotiations with Shankarcharya
Letter to The Editor, Milli Gazette, 29 Sept., 2007
The write-up about Maulana Abdul Karim Parekh in your issue of 1-15 October, 2007 states that on the Babri Masjid question he tried to evolve an understanding with the Shankarcharya of Kanchipeetham (not Kanchipuram) in co-operation with Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi, Shri Krishna Kant, then Governor of Andhra Pradesh, and Mr.Yunus Salim, former Governor of Bihar and had reached a formula on which there was almost unanimous understanding but it was an irony of fate that the ‘contractors of hate succeeded in foiling this effort and Babri Masjid was demolished’.
I recall that after his visit to Kanchipeetham Maulana Ali Mian verbally informed me of the ‘formula’ in the presence of two other colleagues of the Babri Masjid Movement. We advised him that the ‘formula’, which was in fact presented to us as the Shankaracharya’s, formula should be put in writing by the Shankaracharya before inviting comment. There was no further communication from Maulana Ali Mian. Later Maulana Parekh claimed at a meeting of Muslim leaders that he had with him the written formula. I requested him then as well as later wrote to him to place the formula on record, which he never did.
As far as I recall we were informed by Maulana Ali Mian that the Shankaracharya wished to be appointed as the Mutawalli of the Babri Masjid; he would then have the Ram Janambhoomi Mandir constructed at a distance of 20 feet from the Babri Masjid and, on its completion, transfer the idols from the Babri Masjid to the Ram Mandir. I told the Maulana that it was for the Ulema to decide whether the Shankaracharya could be appointed as the Mutawalli of the Babri Masjid, but I did not believe that once they had full control and legal possession of the Babri Masjid it would be ever vacated. Incidentally, to the best of my knowledge, the team did not see the senior Shankaracharya Shri Chandrashekhar Saraswati but his junior Jayendra Saraswati who, on his death, become the head of Kanchipeetham. He was and is close to the VHP and later held negotiations with the AIMPLB.
I may add that about a year later Shri Krishna Kant who was instrumental with the help of Shri V.P.Singh in arrange a visit by Maulana Ali Mian, Maulana Parekh and Mr.Yunus Salim to Kanchipeetham asked me why when everyone had agreed, I had opposed the proposed formula. I told him that this was not true and that I had never seen the formula and so the question of opposing it did not arise. I had the impression that he had been briefed by Maulana Parekh.
I request the heirs and particularly the eldest son of Maulana Parekh to go through his papers carefully and recover the Shankaracharya’s formula under reference.
But I would like to ask him whom he refers to as ‘contractors of hate’ and why, irrespective of the stand taken by the Babri Masjid Movement, the ‘formula’ could not be placed before the Muslim Community for approval.

RESERVATION-RSS VIEW
Reservation to Converts – A Threat to Scheduled Castes
RSS , Akhil Bhartiya Karyakari Mandal, Resolution
The Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal takes strong exception to the recommendation of the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities (NCRLM) popularly known as Js. Ranganath Mishra Commission that the Scheduled Caste status must be ‘completely delinked from religion’ and ‘all those groups and classes among the Muslims and Christians should also be covered by the Scheduled Castes net’. What is more intriguing is the Commission’s effort to project its recommendations as consistent with the ‘letter and spirit of the constitutional provisions’.
The ABKM is of the view that, in reality, these recommendations are against the basic spirit of the Constitution and in negation of all the efforts of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar who struggled relentlessly in his personal and public life to reform the Hindu society. Besides, these recommendations are also an aggression on the welfare of the Scheduled Castes and a major impediment to their upliftment.
The ABKM feels that the Commission has failed to take note of the fact that the framers of our Constitution, after prolonged deliberations, concluded that Caste system is a part only of Hindu society and hence the reservations offered to the Scheduled Castes must be confined to Hindus only. The ABKM also wants to remind that the Church leadership, with an eye to increasing their numbers, has been vigorously campaigning for the inclusion of the converts into the Scheduled Castes purview which was steadfastly resisted by all the right-thinking leaders during the making of the Constitution as well as in the last six decades.
The ABKM decries the brazenness of the petitioners, who have gone to the Supreme Court with the demand of inclusion of the Christian converts in the Scheduled Castes category, with the contention that ‘the Dalits remain Dalits even after converting to Christianity’. Christianity claims that there is no caste system in it. It is a matter of shame that the Church leaders, in their greed for harvesting a few more souls, have no qualms in endorsing the petitioners’ contention which is against the proclaimed basic tenets of Christianity.
The ABKM reiterates that the demand for the converts to be treated on par with the Scheduled Castes is against the provisions of the Constitution since only castes, races or tribes can be deemed to be Scheduled Castes under Art 341 of the Constitution.
The ABKM cautions the Government that any effort to implement the recommendations of the NCRLM, which are against the Constitution, is fraught with serious consequences. It calls upon the Government not to succumb to the pressure tactics of the Church lobby in politics and outside and to stand steadfast on the path carved out by the leaders of the country in the last several decades by rejecting outright the demand for inclusion of such converts into the Scheduled Castes category.
The ABKM is of the considered opinion that the Church leadership is indulging in this duplicitous contention with the conspiracy to encourage mass conversions from the Scheduled Castes. It is clear that the reservations, if extended to the converts, would be considerably eaten up by the converts thus pushing the already backward Scheduled Castes into further backwardness.
The ABKM appeals to the Scheduled Caste brethren to resist any move by the vote hungry politicians in that direction which is going to be detrimental to the welfare of the Scheduled Castes.
(Source: The Organiser Weekly)

ASSAM SITUATION
Are Asomiya Muslims a Muslim Sub-Community or an Ethnic Group
Bikash Sarmah
If the Asomiya Muslims are feeling insecure in their own homeland — mind you, not adopted by virtue of immigration — and have harangued the ‘secular’ government for having appealed exclusively to the Muslims of East Bengal/East Pakistan/Bangladesh origin, they have a point. Since they are not carried away by any routine ‘secular’ rhetoric and have seen through the government’s initiatives to uplift the ‘minorities’ in the State, the Asomiya Muslims do not constitute the prized vote banks. Therefore, they just do not matter if elections are a thing to reckon with.. In this country, elections are fought not on the basis of performance of political parties and leaders, but on the basis of the rate of consolidation of vote banks, casteist or religious or otherwise. In that scheme, Asomiya Muslims are not a fascinating community. Even the Hindus are a vote bank in the Hindutva narrative. Political Hinduism does have a meaning — and relevance. It is another matter that political Hinduism is overshadowed by the sheer strength and time-tested politics of pseudo-secularism.
What about the Asomiya Muslims? They are all orphans: they have no political mentors who matter or who are visible; there is no party that would champion their cause. They are a community sandwiched between the Asomiya Hindus who face the threat of being annexed by an alien and hostile Bangladeshis y, and the immigrant Muslims. The Asomiya Muslims are a forgotten people because they do not add to the political expediency of the avowed saviours of ‘minorities’. No Asomiya Muslim seems to fit into the ‘minorities’ paradigm designed in Asom to protect illegal Bangladeshis.
The Asomiya Muslims, in fact, do not even need to prove that they are first Asomiya and then Muslim. That is pretty well understood, proven since past 800 years or so. That they follow Islam, is a choice in secular India. That is individual freedom. Otherwise, there is no difference between an Asomiya Hindu and an Asomiya Muslim. Which means the Asomiya amalgam as such cannot be diluted by the differential parameter called religion — it is secondary in pluralist Asom. The fact of one being an Asomiya by virtue of commitment to the cause of the State and its legal populace, and of a relentless pursuit to salvage the State from anarchy and imminent doom, is primary. This narrative is spontaneous in every patriotic Asomiya Muslim when it comes to the cause of the homeland, Asom.
The Asomiya Muslims are also one of the most liberal and progressive species in the Islamic world. Many would argue that they are not one of the, but the most, liberal and progressive species in the Islamic world. That has them position themselves in far more secular ways than what the rest of their religious brethren have scripted in their societies. The Asomiya Muslim society, therefore, is not guided by any sinister religious exclusivity as has stemmed from minorityism, which is a political concept and practice based on electoral considerations. As a people so far, they are a class apart from the so-called minorities. The argument is simple then: the Asomiya Muslims are not a component of the so-called minorities because they are intrinsically one of the components of the Asomiya society. So much so, that one need not even define any greater Asomiya society for the purpose. One needs to define a greater Asomiya society to incorporate communities that have migrated to Asom and that have assimilated in the Asomiya amalgam by accepting the Asomiya way of life, by cherishing that way of life, and by proving time and again that they will protect that way of life. Therefore, the Asomiya Muslims are not a minority in the usual sense of the term; they are in fact an ethnic community.
The Asom United Democratic Front (AUDF) has described the recent outburst of some enlightened Asomiya Muslims — that they are threatened by immigrant Muslims — as a divisive ploy to splinter the greater Asomiya society.
L et the AUDF first decry the past IM(DT) Act regime before dwelling on the cause of the greater Asomiya society. It is the same AUDF, one of whose MLAs from Dhubri had raised the demand for an autonomous council for the ‘minorities’ in lower Asom in June this year — which, the Unfinished Agenda of Partition’’. A responsible party, committed to the cause of Asom and its people, would have shown him the door then and there. Or, a responsible party would have made the MLA apologize to the people of Asom for having raised such a divisive demand. Who is dividing whom, is there for all to see.
Having said that, one would like to ask the AUDF as to what its problems are if the Asomiya Muslims want to be identified as Asomiyas, not as any minority community in the State. What does the AUDF fear? If the Asomiya Muslims want to be declared as an indigenous ethnic community in the State, what has the AUDF to fear — or lose? The AUDF’s fear is that it will lose its bastion as the sole and righteous protagonist of the ‘minorities’ cause in the State. The AUDF should know that the Asomiya society is not hostile to any legally settled Indian citizen in the State. But it has every reason to resist the flow of illegal Bangladeshis to the State. And the Asomiya Muslims are naturally part of that resistance. Does the AUDF deplore it? If not, what stops it from hailing the Asomiya Muslims who have had the courage to say what and how things are in Asom, and what should be the officially recognized fact — Asomiya Muslims as an ethnic community?
(The writer is the Consulting Editor of The Sentinel)

KASHMIR QUESTION
The Anguish of a Kashmiri Emigrant
Omkar Nath Koul, Retired Director of Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore
I was born at village Bugam (Kulgam) in Anantnag district. Inhabited by about three hundred Muslim and six Hindu households, it had a primary school where I studied. From the sixth to tenth class in school, I along with other children had to travel on foot ten kilometers daily to attend the high school at Kulgam. The houses of all Hindus (except one) were on one side of the river Maav and those of Muslims on the other side. Another small river Vejinaar would join Maav near our house, thus forming a Sangam. The water level was deep at the river joint, we would bathe and swim at this place. Maav and Vejinaar would overflow with water during the time of floods. The rivers would present a frightening look. Contractors to carry the timber From the hills downstream, it was quite a different scene altogether, providing an opportunity to children to join the planks to take a ride down the stream and have a lot of fun. During autumn, Muslims would catch fish on moonlit nights. Winter months were a lot of fun as the school would remain closed and we would play in snow, use charcoal to write slogans and draw sketches on frozen snow.
I have always been in love with my village. The more I stayed away from it, the more attracted I was to it. After my high school, I joined an intermediate college at Ananatnag (1957-59), about 18 kilometers away from my village. I had to share a small room at the top of a Muslim baker’s shop in Khanabal with two roommates. It was a unique experience of cooking, cleaning, studying, sleeping in one room, and attending the college. I could afford to visit my village once in a fortnight by a tonga or a bus, and at times walk on foot. A weekend at home was refreshing to play with school friends who couldn’t study further and to have home-cooked meals. Two years later, I joined S.P. College (1959-61) in Srinagar for my B.A., and later the Jammu and Kashmir University (1961-63) for my M.A. Living in Srinagar was a different experience. I started living in a hostel, which was badly managed and later moved to a rented room.
I got a new roommate from a neighbouring village. We hired a two-room accommodation nearby. My roommate was an ‘intellectual’ companion. He used to write fiction in Urdu and would ask me to transliterate his love letters from the Urdu script into Devanagari for his girlfriend across the street, and to read her letters to him.
During 1964-67, I would visit my village in Kashmir at least twice a year. I would meet all my school-time friends, and take long strolls in and around the village. Later,
As a permanent resident of my village, I have a few ‘firsts’ to my credit. I was the first from my village to get degrees of B.A., M.A., and later Ph.D. I was the first from my village to visit the USA. This earned me a lot of love, affection from the village folk and friends. On my visits to my village, I would visit all the houses in my neighbourhood,. Many of my childhood friends would visit my house too. When I returned to my village after being away to the USA for about two and half years, there were unusual festivities at my house. Almost everybody from my village (men, women and children) visited my house, hugged me and showered their blessings and good wishes. My job took me to Patiala and Mysore till I retired in 2001.
I always looked forward going to my village - my permanent address -for a longer and relaxed stay. The worst happened in between. My dreams were shattered. I cannot All houses and property my family owned have gutted in fire the lost treasure of photographs cherishing the memories of my student days. A huge collection of my books and papers (including diaries ), were destroyed in fire. Indeed an irreparable loss!
I always thought my village is a unique example of communal harmony and brotherhood. This faith was slightly shattered when in early seventies a group of youngsters (mostly from neighbouring villages) destroyed the temple of Ganesha in our village and threw stones at the houses of Hindus. Some officials and policemen from Kulgam visited our village next day to assess the situation. I saw first time tears in the eyes of my father while narrating the incident to them. The re-built temple was attacked again in 1986. As a result of killing of some Hindu men in the neighbouring villages, most of the Hindu families were forced to move out of Bugam in early 1990, and their houses were looted and gutted in fire later.
It may sound strange. In the heart of my hearts, I still consider my village as my permanent address. It is not lost yet. I visited my village in October 1989 last. On my arrival in Srinagar, I was stranded at my sister’s place at Karfali Mohalla during the three-day curfew. We couldn’t come out of the house as all the houses of non-Muslims were continuously stoned during night and day. When the curfew was relaxed for a short period early in the morning, I rushed to the bus stand at Batmaloo to board the first bus for Anantnag. The moment the bus reached Batwara, it was attacked with stones by a crowd raising slogans. Many passengers including me were injured by stones and the pieces of broken window panes. The driver showed a lot of courage by speeding up the bus. The bus with broken glass panes moved on, and was stopped by police about ten kilometers before reaching Anantnag. The situation was very bad over there. This town and other neighbouring small towns were under curfew. I had to walk about 25 kilometers to reach my village avoiding main road and police. This turned out to be my last visit to my village with injuries on face and left arm. I left the village after three days when the situation was somewhat normal.
Though I visited Srinagar a couple of times in last seventeen years, I could not venture to visit my village. Perhaps, I am not bold enough to visit the village and to see the destruction of our ancestral property with my own eyes. I cannot, perhaps, face the village elders and acquaintances, whose love and affection I still cherish. I cannot probably face the youngsters who would not understand my ties with my village, my permanent address.
I had a long cherished dream to settle down in my village after I retire from my service, and do whatever I could to help the people of the village especially the youngsters. Alas! this dream is not fulfilled yet.
(Source: The Kashmir Times, 14 October, 2007)

HUMAN RIGHTS
National Confederation of Human Right Organisations
National Convention on Encounter Killings etc
Resolution Mumbai, 26 June, 2007
This National Convention on Encounter Killings organized by the NCHRO in association with Amnesty International of India on this 26th day of June 2007, to work the International Anti-torture Day, where noting gross violations of human rights, especially torture and extra-judicial deaths in many countries, the US, Iraq and other countries of the middle east.
The Convention demanded that the Union Government and State Government in India.
1. Takes Urgent and effective measures to stop fake encounters, disappearances, custodial violence, custodial and extra-judicial killings by police, special squads and security forces;
2. Reforms the criminal justice system and the Indian penal code, by repeal all special legislation that enable a culture of torture and culture of impunity;
3. Prevent cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment by authorities.
4. Stop discrimination and violence against women, indigenous peoples, Dalits and minorities and ensure genuine safe guards;
5. Strengthen the statutes of the NHRC, State Human Rights and the National Commission for Minorities and other statutory bodies.
6. Protect and rehabilitate the victims and survivors of encounters and other police atrocities, and compensate them.
7. Ratify UN convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman and Degarading Treatment or Punishment.
8. Establish a National Register of the Missing, and of Victims of torture, custodial deaths and encounter killings under the supervision of the NHRC;
9. Establish public grievance redressal mechanisms on the pattern of Lokayukta and Ombudsman to take cognizance of excesses committed by police and armed personnel, and enforce command.
10. Immediate release of Dr. Binayak Sen (National Vice Chairman PUCL, Chhattisgrah) immediately.
The Convention elected the following as office bearers of the NCHRO.
President : Justice Hosbet Suresh (Mumbai)
Vice President: Dr. John Dayal and Dr Shams-ul-Islam, Prof. Bahayya (Bangalore), Dr. Abraham Mathai (Mumbai)
Secretary General: Adv. K. P. Mohammed Shareef (Kerala);
Secretary: Ms Gouri Lankesh (Bangalore), G. Subramanian (Chennai), Dr. Abdul Salam (Kerala)
Treasurer: Justice (Retd.) Co Chenna Basappa, (Mangalore)

OTHER MINORITIES
Report on Persecution of Christians
John Dayal, President of All India Catholic Union
* 4 cases a week in 2007,
* 190 Cases recorded in 2007 January 1 to November
* 178 Persecution Cases recorded in 2006
* 165 Persecution Cases Recorded in 2005
The victims include members of almost every Christian denomination in the country, Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelicals. They include catholic Fathers, catholic Nuns, Pastors, wives of Pastors, believers, Seminarians and Bible School students, and ordinary folks. Violence includes attempted murder, armed assault, sexual molestation, illegal confinement and grievous injury.
These figures do not include cases that have not come to the notice of the All India Christian Council, the All India Catholic Union, the GCIC, the Evangelical Fellowship of India and the Christian Legal Association. There are other cases where the Church groups involved or the pastors have chosen not to file cases with the police, or have sought anonymity for fear of violence against the families of innocent people, particularly in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa.
This, of course, does not include widespread incidents which we do not want to include as “violence” but which certainly are indices of religious intolerance, bigotry, social discrimination and ostracisation. These cases include refusal to give share of the community profits in forest produced to those who have converted to Christianity, denial of civic and social benefits to Christians, particularly Dalits, in many parts of the country, denial of official permission to hold community meetings, official and informal ban on Bible sale and distribution of religious tracts, in places where habitat of and books of other majority faiths are freely distributed.
This list also does not include anti-Christian hate crimes. Nor does it include violence in which Christians are the victim together with others, such as the police actions in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and other places, the displacement of tribals because of government action, the suicides of farmers in Andhra and Maharashtra .
The Christian community acknowledges a debt of gratitude to the secular people of India, their brothers and sisters. Those in authority, including leaders of political parties, perhaps are not as concerned with a micro community that hardly figures on their political radar because it does not matter electorally in most states, barring perhaps Tamil Nadu and Kerala and the micro states of Goa, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram where it impacts on a handful of Lok Sabha and Assembly seats.
In fact, leaders of the Bharatiya Janata party and its mother organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, continue an almost daily harangue against the Church while militant frontal organisations such as the Bajrang Dal, the Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and others peak the hate campaign at a feverish pitch.
The Evangelical Fellowship of India has called for a National Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church on Sunday, November 18, 2007

HERITAGE
Beyond Green And Ochre Hill-World Heritage of Champaner
Anjali Puri
The magic begins when the misty outlines of a hill begin to fill up the horizon. On the from Baroda to Champaner. The hill, called Pavagadh, comes up on your side. And remains a looming presence during your wanderings through an enchanting wonderland of monsoon-green woods, shimmering lakes, citadels, mosques and maqbaras. Like the plains at its foot, the hill, too, holds treasures?the ruins of darwazas, palaces, bastions, granaries, and catapults that once tossed down huge stone balls to repulse enemies. But year after year, lakhs of visitors to a famous local pilgrimage spot bypassed them, oblivious to their charms.
Foresters planted trees over them, nature and vandals damaged them, quarries dynamited near them. Apart from a few archaeologists who spoke of Champaner-Pavagadh in the same breath as Hampi and Fatehpur Sikri, few had heard of the medieval city that once flourished here, among the Panchmahal forests.
But change is in the air. It’s there in page after page of comments in local historian Ghanshyam Joshi’s thick visitor’s book, opened in 2005, shortly after Champaner-Pavagadh was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s there in the visible signs of restoration work, and the growing ticket sales to the monuments 80,000 Indian tourists last year, double the number in 2004, and more foreign tourists too. And it’s there in the conservation politics making its presence felt, now that the Gujarat government has declared the medieval city and its environs a 22-sq km archaeological park.
Champaner’s journey from virtual oblivion to recognition as one of India’s major heritage sites is an extraordinary one.It began over three decades ago when the late R.N. Mehta, an archaeologist from Baroda’s MS University, made this deserted site his passion and his cause. Mehta, who supervised excavations that established Champaner as a well-planned and zoned capital city built by the 15th-century Gujarat sultan Mahmud Beghara, infected a motley groupKaran Grover, a young architect; bureaucrat Hasmukh Shah, Jaimini Mehta, who taught architecture; painter and art historian Ratan Parimoo; various businessmen, artists, academics, and other residents of Baroda.
Most only knew Champaner, a place just over 40 km away, as the site of the Kalika Mata temple, ASI protected a few monuments, there was no public recognition for its glories.
The city dealt a death blow by Mughal emperor Humayun in 1535, but some outstanding buildings survive?among them a grand citadel with a village of 2,500 people living within it, and the stunningly beautiful Jami Masjid. Embellished alike with Jain and Hindu temple motifs, the mosques and maqbaras here speak eloquently of a cultural pluralism and tolerance. There are also ruins of impressive hillside fortifications and palaces of the Khichi Chauhan (Rajput) rulers, who ruled from Pavagadh until vanquished by Beghara in 1484 AD, and exquisite Jain temples.
However, it wasn’t just a question of a few monuments. The entire site cried out for integrated management as a heritage zone, with its splendid natural setting?the majestic hill, Beghara’s capital spread out below, its monuments, its profusion of water bodies (with) sophisticated medieval water management systems, its vibrant living traditions, its communities, and the wealth that lies buried below the ground.
The group inspired by Mehta decided to get Champaner its due, through their NGO, considerably more panache and ambition than you might. A focused two-decade campaign succeeded in eventually putting Champaner on regional, national and international platforms. The trust mainstreamed Champaner with an international conference attended by eminent archaeologists and architects, got corporate sponsors on board, and persuaded an array of dignitaries to descend on the site.
With the help of the diplomatic network it had built up, the trust managed to get Champaner nominated to the World Monuments Watchlist of the 100 most endangered sites for 2000. That opened the door for money to document the 120 monuments in Champaner, and paved the way for World Heritage status. But when UNESCO came out with a ruling that a country could only apply for one site in a given year, the trust had to lobby hard for Champaner. In 2004, finally, Champaner was declared a World Heritage site.
Late last year, on UNESCO’s recommendation, came a state law, aimed, “at checking unplanned and uncontrolled development of Champaner”, put into place an authority that will manage the Champaner-Pavagadh Archaeological Park,. Mostly, it’s all still on paper, and will take shape, after the trust submits its management plan for the site in 2008.
However, in the heart of Champaner—the living village inside its citadel—a debate is currently raging between “pro-heritage” and “anti-heritage” camps. Over tea, we hear a diatribe against Champaner’s World Heritage status from the sarpanch and her deputy, in which both trust and government come in for flak. (Later, we hear a more optimistic view of the future, from Vinod Patel, sarpanch of the neighbouring village—mainly because he expects land prices to rise because of the archaeological park!) The sore points for the “anti-heritage” camp are restrictions against construction in the protected zone, lack of local consultation, and the communally tinged complaint that Muslim monuments are getting more attention than the Kalika Mata temple and the pilgrimage route. these villagers, who live off the pilgrimage, are yet to see, the tangible benefits from heritage conservation. Shah squarely blames local “vested interests” and a BJP rabble-rouser from Vadodara, Niraj Jain, but adds, “I would also look within and ask, could we have done more?”.
(Source: Outlook, 15 October, 2007)

ISLAMOPHOBIA
Rising Intolerance towards Islam & Muslims in Europe
Soumaya Ghannoushi, Director of Research at Islam Expo
A cluster of far-right groups under the name the Stop the Islamisation of Europe alliance will hold rallies in London, Copenhagen and Marseilles to demand an end to what they call “the overt and covert expansion of Islam in Europe”. Although the events are likely to attract no more than a handful of protesters, their message resonates widely.
Recent the rightwing People’s party, notorious for its virulent hostility to ethnic minorities and Muslims, emerged as the victor in the Swiss elections, taking 29per cent of the vote, the best electoral performance by a party in the country’s elections since 1919.
The far right is on the ascendancy in many parts of Europe. Beyond its explicit party political expressions, this assumes a more worrying form. What had been traditionally confined to the margins of dominant political discourse is progressively penetrating its mainstream, with parties of the centre absorbing much of the far right’s populist rhetoric. This underlies the complaint by Jean-Marie le Pen, leader of the racist National Front, that Nicolas Sarkozy had “stolen his clothes”. Across the Channel, the Tory candidate for the London mayoralty, Boris Johnson, believes that “to any non-Muslim reader of the Holy Qur’aan, Islamophobia - fear of Islam - seems a natural reaction”.
We are witnessing a reversion to the type of cultural essentialism that dominated political and academic discourse until the mid-1900s. Its central theme, the purity and superiority of European culture, was dealt a powerful blow by the tradition of post-colonial studies and radical critique of Orientalism. The trend brought together progressive, leftist voices from Europe and the US with others from the south amid the dismantling of modern-day empires and the rise of developing world liberation movements.
The same discourse is reconstructing its terms today by substituting the classical east-west bipolarity at its core with one of “Islam” and “west”. The west’s rationality, tolerance, individualism and freedom are now contrasted with Islam’s superstition, fanaticism, fatalism and repressiveness. In history books, this trend has manifested itself in the resurrection of the myth of the benevolent empire, championed by figures such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts.
The 9/11 attacks, the emergence of violent radical Islamic groups, and the war on terror have created fertile ground for the revival of this tradition. Its spirit permeates much of the language current in the political sphere and many sectors of the media.
What had once been cause for disrepute now goes unquestioned and barely remarked upon. The vocabulary is various, from immigration, integration and citizenship to terrorism, radicalism, Islamism and an endless chain of -isms. But the referent is consistent: Islam and Muslims. It is a game of insinuations, of codes, in which meaning is readily conveyable without need for explicitness or directness.
Beyond all the noise about Europe’s “Muslim problem” lurks a growing unease about the changing texture of European society. Gone are the days of pure white, Christian Europe. Now Europe is multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural, a fact which many find hard to swallow. Muslims are part of this evolving reality, but the idea that the continent is being Islamised is a figment of the right’s imagination.
In a European population of some 540 million, Muslims number between 20 million and 25 million, or about 4per cent. The majority are underprivileged, and socially, economically and politically marginalised. No Muslim armies are at Europe’s gate preparing to conquer.
Obsession with the question of Britishness in the UK and with les valeurs de la République in France reflects a state of anxiety about identity. The collapse of empire, globalisation and flow of immigrants from the old colonies brought new peoples into Europe’s bosom.
The Muslim other - the Saracen or Turk, defined by imaginary geographic and cultural borders - is now located within its frontiers, a sort of internal outsider. From the periphery of the empire in distant overseas colonies it has moved to the periphery of capitals and industrial cities in London or Paris. The borders of identity and culture are overlapping, making it impossible to draw rigid boundaries between east and west, Europe and Islam, white and black.
At the heart of Europe’s “Muslim problem” is an impotence and perhaps unwillingness to extend the norm of tolerance to newcomers from the Muslim world. Tolerance is not an abstract concept but the child of a specific historical context. In Europe it was the product of the religious wars. Following the horrors of the Holocaust, the norm was widened to include Jews. And with the civil rights movement in the US, this was further extended to black people and other ethnic minorities - legally and theoretically, though not in practice. There is still resistance to the norm’s broadening to encompass Muslims, something evident in the controversy over the building of mosques, as well as in the “veil problem”.
The question is: to what extent are those who profess tolerance really tolerant?
(Source: Hindustan Times, 25 October, 2007)

MUSLM WORLD-PAKISTAN
Judicial Intervention & Extremism Weakening Government’
Text of Proclamation of Emergency by General Pervez Musharraf , 3 November, 2007
“Whereas there is visible ascendancy in the activities of extremists and incidents of terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, IED explosions, rocket firing and bomb explosions and the banding together of some militant groups have taken such activities to an unprecedented level of violent intensity posing a grave threat to the life and property of the citizens of Pakistan;
Whereas there has also been a spate of attacks on State infrastructure and on law enforcement agencies;
Whereas some members of the judiciary are working at cross purposes with the executive nd legislature in the fight against terrorism and extremism thereby weakening the Government and the nation’s resolve and diluting the efficacy of its actions to control this menace;
Whereas there has been increasing interference by some members of the judiciary in Government policy, adversely affecting economic growth, in particular;
Whereas constant interference in executive functions, including but not limited to the control of terrorist activity, economic policy, price controls, downsizing of corporations and urban planning, has weakened the writ of the Government; the police force has been completely demoralised and is fast losing its efficacy to fight terrorism and Intelligence Agencies have been thwarted in their activities and prevented from pursuing terrorists;
Whereas some hard core militants, extremists, terrorists and suicide bombers, who were arrested and being investigated were ordered to be released. The persons so released have subsequently been involved in heinous terrorist activities, resulting in loss of human life and property. Militants across the country have, thus, been encouraged while law enforcement agencies subdued;
Whereas some judges by overstepping the limits of judicial authority have taken over the executive and legislative functions;
Whereas the Government is committed to the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law and holds the superior judiciary in high esteem, it is nonetheless of paramount importance that the Honourable Judges confine the scope of their activity to the judicial function and not assume charge of administration;
Whereas an important Constitutional institution, the Supreme Judicial Council, has been made entirely irrelevant by a recent order and judges have, thus, made themselves immune from inquiry into their conduct and put themselves beyond accountability;
Whereas the humiliating treatment meted to Government officials by some members of the judiciary on a routine basis during court proceedings has demoralised the civil bureaucracy and senior Government functionaries, to avoid being harassed, prefer inaction;
Whereas the law and order situation in the country as well as the economy have been adversely affected and trichotomy of powers eroded;
Whereas a situation has thus arisen where the Government of the country cannot be carried on in accordance with the Constitution and as the Constitution provides no solution for this situation, there is no way out except through emergent and extraordinary measures;
And whereas the situation has been reviewed in meetings with the Prime Minister, Governors of all four Provinces, and with Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Chiefs of the Armed Forces, Vice-Chief of Army Staff and Corps Commanders of the Pakistan Army;
Now, therefore, in pursuance of the deliberations and decisions of the said meetings, I General Pervez Musharraf, Chief of the Army Staff, proclaim Emergency throughout Pakistan. I hereby order and proclaim that the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan shall remain in abeyance.
This Proclamation shall come into force at once.”

National Press on Emergency in Pakistan
Peril in Pakistan
Editorial, The Hindustan Times, 4 November , 2007
The General’s move to implement Emergency rule in Pakistan was not unexpected. He had openly considered this option a couple of months ago, when the Supreme Court overruled his suspension of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on allegations of abuse of power. So it is hardly surprising that he decided to impose martial law at a time when Pakistan’s Supreme Court is — or was — hearing the case about his eligibility to continue as President. The court had stayed him from taking oath till it delivered its verdict, which, almost certainly would have invalidated his re-election.
Although his party, the PML-Q, had struck a deal with Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, the massive turnout of support for her in Karachi must have made him nervous about the outcome of any poll. After corruption charges against her were dropped, she has gives her more bargaining power with the General. Clamping khaki rule was the only way to arrest the worsening law and order situation in the country.
The morale of Pakistan’s army is reportedly at an all-time low as it fights a losing battle with pro-Taliban militants. It is unlikely that military muscle alone will solve the complex problems facing Pakistan, where growing unrest suggests public frustration against the military regime. if a real alternative to the entrenchment of the military in Pakistan’s civil society is yet to emerge.

Darkness in Pakistan
Editorial, The Hindu, 5 November, 2007
The General has now been revealed in his true colours as a ruthless military dictator, in the mould of all his dismal predecessors who had kept Pakistan in a state of permanent Army rule. The new martial law regime has placed seven of the Supreme Court judges, including Justice Chaudhary under house arrest, Pre-empting a possible refusal by the Supreme Court to validate and possibly apprehending the growing credibility of the movement for civilian democracy, Musharraf decided this was the time to strike. The general has attempted to justify his imposition of Emergency by arguing that judicial intervention had led to a paralysis in civil administration even as Pakistan was “on the verge of destabilisation” because of rising militancy and extremism. Such excuses ring hollow especially when it is so powerfully evident that the restoration of democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan would represent the best possible insurance against the forces of extremism and terrorism. Bhutto who has returned to Karachi now has a historic responsibility to lead the resistance to this sordid betrayal of her country by the deeply discredited general. There are heartening signs that the people of Pakistan are unwilling to be silenced by the guns of the martial law regime and it could well be that this is only a darkness before the dawn.

Pakistan’s war within
Editorial The Indian Express, 6 November, 2007
In Pakistan it is the army that owns the state and not the other way round. No surprise, then, that the existential crises both internal and external that confront Pakistan today are those of its army. As the final arbiter of domestic political disputes, and guardian of its internal security and foreign policy interests, the army not merely dominated the society, its position above and beyond the constitution was unchallenged. As he presides over a Pakistan that is in a shambles, Musharraf has robbed the army of its political legitimacy.
Musharraf’s first coup against corrupt and wayward civilian rule in 1999 was popular. After his second coup against his own government, Musharraf and his army find themselves despised by liberal forces east of the Indus in the Punjab and Sindh, and treated with utter contempt by the Islamic extremists and Baloch nationalists west of the great river. The army is now bereft of either a political strategy or the institutional competence to place Pakistan back on the rails. The generous economic and political support from the US after 9/11allowed Pakistan to break out of its economic stagnation of the 1990s and seemed to reinforce Musharraf’s own agenda of ‘enlightened moderation’. Musharraf’s failure to quickly transfer power to the civilians eroded support among the increasingly vocal middle classes. The decision to play both sides of the war on terror in Afghanistan has left the Pak army the main problem for both the US and Islamic extremists. The army no longer has the morale to confront the Islamic extremists that it once nurtured. If it gives up on a war that has little political support at home, Pakistan’s territory becomes a theatre for a direct confrontation between the US on the one hand and the Al-Qaeda and Taliban on the other. Pakistan and its army (are in a) quagmire.

MUSLM WORLD
US Policies have given an Impetus to Terrorism’
M. Hamid Ansari, Vice-President of India
Any discussion of contemporary West Asia must begin with three questions: What is happening in the region? Why is it happening? What is the way out?
The answer to the first question is obvious. It focuses on a set of well-known situations:
• A quagmire in Iraq that has dented the prestige and power of the United States;
• A failure to abandon the doctrines of ‘Pre-emptive Strikes’ and of ‘Regime Change’ despite the experience of recent years and sharply declining public support for it in the United States;
• Isreal’s failure to destroy the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza;
• America’s stand off with Iran, and the threat to regional and world peace emanating from it;
• Enhanced external pressure on Iran to terminate its nuclear programme;
• Demographic pressures and a developing gap between commitment and expectation in West Asian societies;
• Failure of the ‘Middle East Initiative’ and the ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’ and of the attempt to democratise West Asian societies. Also, the impact of this on indigenous reform movements; and
• The little mentioned problem of water.
There is no simple answer to the second question. West Asia has been and continues to be a pivotal factor in global geopolitics. These have been aggravated in recent years by a set of new considerations:
• Crisis of the Old Order and end of bipolarity;
• The attempt to impose a New Order;
• Failure to develop a security paradigm in the region and particularly in the Persian Gulf; and
An answer to the third question is contingent on variables of considerable size and diversity. One could begin by stating the factual situation as known publicly.
While the greater part of the region and its population are Arab, the principal factors in the strategic calculus are non-Arabs. Two are on the periphery - Israel and Iran, and one beyond it - the United States. The interaction of these with the region, and with each other, is having a decisive impact.
A beginning may be made with self-perceptions. The region, President Bush said in his State of the Union message earlier this year, is the venue of ‘the decisive ideological struggle of our times’. As Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns put it, it is the epicentre of American foreign policy.
On the other side is the view of Dr. Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American scholar of considerable repute who also serves as senior Middle East advisor to Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani. He said in a lecture the other day that ‘we must get ourselves back over the horizon and as much out of the Arab line of sight as possible’ and, as was done by the British, French, Ottoman throughout history. ‘Rule lightly, unless provoked. Delegate power and don’t tamper with local customs. Using these rules, great empires dominated the Middle East for centuries. Our problem, though, is that we don’t see ourselves as a great empire, and we don’t want to rule anyone directly. We just want to transform them thoroughly’.
The operative expression in both sets of perceptions is a desire to dominate. The discussion is only about modalities.
Israel, a mid-twentieth century factor in the region, has not been able to translate its military superiority into a total, definitive, victory. Its invincibility was dented in the war with Hezbollah. This is not reflected in political perceptions where right wing political parties and a small but effective settler lobby has defied moves towards a meaningful peace process. The lack of a serious U.S. interest in the peace process has helped sustain it. The American West Asian policy is hampered by the “Israel test” to which it is subjected in terms of domestic politics. Israel’s policy objective is to: (a) exhaust the Palestinians, riddle the West Bank with settlements, make impossible the emergence of a viable Palestinian state and (b) dominate the region militarily, technologically and economically.
Iran, driven by memories of the Revolution and the long war with Iraq, seeks to project a threefold desire: (a) acknowledgement of its regional weight, particularly in West Asia and the Persian Gulf, two development of a technological capability to assist it (c)bring to an end, on equitable terms, to the regime of sanctions to facilitate access to badly needed technology and foreign investment for economic development.
The stand off on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme is thus a political instrumentality resorted to maximise advantage in a complex negotiating process.
The United States today is not the Sole Super Power of the spring of 2003. The policies of unilateralism, ‘creative destruction’ and pre-emption have faltered. The U.S. has been mauled by non-state actors in Iraq; its policies have given an impetus to terrorism; it has lost domestic support for its Iraq policy; its unpopularity levels are alarmingly high in Arab and Muslim countries and its intentions are suspected. The financial burden of the war and the drain on the dollar has added to public concerns. The dissent in the national security establishment of the United States has become public.
Francis Fukuyama wrote last month that when he penned the End of History ‘the one thing I did not anticipate was the degree to which American behaviour and misjudgements would make anti-Americanism one of the chief fault lines of global politics’.
Israeli perceptions of Iran are nuanced. Since 1979 the relationship has been conditioned by ideology on the one side and geo-political interests on the other. The channels of communications have never completely closed. Iran’s support to the Palestinians and the Hezbollah has been a strategic irritant to Israel. An Iranian success in developing a nuclear weapon capability would deny Israel the regional monopoly it has in the matter. Israel has been extremely active in mobilising American opinion against Iran. On the other hand, Haaretz magazine cited on October 25, 2007 a remark by foreign minister Tzipi Livni that ‘Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel’.
Similarly nuanced are the Iranian positions on the U.S. and Israel. The Iranian proposal of May 2003 for negotiations on a package deal contains elements for serious consideration.
Why is it that all discussion on regional security in West Asia is not primarily centred on the Arab core? Even as we live in an age of multiple identities, the peoples of the region have not yet resolved their overlapping identities and the implications of such non-resolution are visible at key historical and evolutionary junctions.
The end of European colonialism in West Asia had unleashed three sets of forces whose complex interplay sets the background for all subsequent developments in the polity and society of Arab states:
1. The first is Arab nationalism; the concept that all Arabs are one nation was very strong in the immediate aftermath of the end of European colonialism. Later, conflict on who should steer the destiny of the Arab nation has led to a conscious downplaying of Arab nationalism. Today, the concept remains a significant cultural matrix but its impact on the Arab polity has diminished.
2. The second is the creation of nation-states in the areas vacated by the erstwhile colonial powers. The systems of governance in these nation-states have varied between kingdoms, emirates, sultanates and republics. The ruling regimes of some states had access to unforeseen riches from hydrocarbon resources. The colonial masters left behind border problems and other disputes. Ruling regimes found it convenient to obtain allegiance by emphasising the interests of their nation-state over that of the Arab nation.
3. The third is Islam. In the initial stages, religious revival was sought to be fused with anti-imperialism and modern grass-roots political activism. The energies of this activism were later directed against the ruling regimes. In some cases, Islamist movements came to power, in others they were thwarted from taking power. What is undeniable is that Islamism retains significant political space in West Asia - co-opted in some regimes and hounded in others.
Political evolution, propelled by these three factors, was aided by vast changes taking place in Arab societies. Rapid urbanisation set the scene for mass indoctrination; Arab nationalism filled the lacunae until its demise. Islamism readily provided a substitute. Its inherent anti-communism was looked upon with favour by the concerned Western powers. The slogan of Jihad in terms of armed resistance was promoted by the states of the region (with some exceptions) and actively endorsed by the western powers.
To these various factors must be added the security threats, including terrorism, emanating from non-state actors in West Asia - a direct product of the political impasse. Domestic, regional, external and ideological factors combine to produce chemical reactions of varying intensity. In traditional societies sustained by a mix of religious and tribal norms, neo-patriarchy and non-participatory governance cause resentments, that are subdued partially and for varying periods of time by largesse. Rapid inflow of wealth, on the other hand, brings in its wake social disruptions and awakened expectations.
Social systems also produce their anti-bodies. The youth who spent time in Afghanistan returned home Islamised and radicalised. They sought correctives from local rulers and their external friends. They found solace in traditional, religious, idiom, in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and in Iraq ample measure.
Islamism is an ideology of protest, and of change. Apart from slogans, it has little by way of a programme of social reconstruction. Suppression, however, gives it a lease of life.
Diagnosis and commentary on the first and the second questions inevitably propel us towards the third. The correctives are suggested by the diagnosis itself.
The question is of the will to undertake it. Simple logic, however, is not synonymous with state logic!
(Source: The Indian Express, 23 November, 2007)

History Repeats 1857 Lessons
William Dalrymple
The lessons of the bloody uprising of 1857 are very clear. No one likes people of a different faith conquering them, taking their land, or force-feeding them improving ideas at the point of a bayonet. The British in 1857 discovered what Israel and the US are learning now: that nothing so easily radicalises a people against them, or so undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the East. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the others.
The violent suppression of the great uprising of 1857 was a pivotal moment in the history of British imperialism in India. It marked the end both of the East India Company and the Mughal dynasty, the two principal forces that had shaped Indian history over the previous 300 years, and replaced both with undisguised imperial rule by the British government, initiating a very different period of direct imperial rule.
Yet in many ways the legacy of the period is still with us, and there is a direct link between the jihadists of 1857 and those we face today. For the reaction of some of the Muslim ulema after 1857 was to reject the West and the gentle Sufi traditions of the Mughal emperors, who they tended to regard as western puppets; instead they attempted to return to pure Islamic roots. So was founded a Wahabi-like madrasa at Deoband which went back to Koranic basics. One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaida, the most radical Islamic counterattack the West has yet had to face.
So does history repeat itself: not only are westerners again playing their old game of installing puppet regimes, propped up by western garrisons, for their own political ends, but more alarmingly the intellectual attitudes sustained by such adventures remain intact. Despite over 25 years of assault by Edward Said and his followers, old style Orientalism is still alive and kicking, its prejudices quite intact, with Samuel Huntingdon, Bernard Lewis and Charles Krauthammer in the roles of the new Mills and Macauleys. Through the pens of neo-con writers, the old colonial idea of the Muslim ruler as the decadent Oriental despot lives on; and as before it is effortlessly projected on to a credulous public by warmongers in order to justify their imperial projects.
Today, West and East again face each other uneasily across a divide that many see as religious war. Suicide jihadists fight what they see as a defensive action against their Christian enemies, and again innocent civilians are slaughtered. As before, western evangelical politicians are apt to cast their opponents and enemies in the role of “incarnate fiends” and simplistically conflate armed resistance to invasion and occupation with “pure evil.” Again western countries, blind to the effects of their foreign policies, feel aggrieved and surprised to be attacked, as they see it, by mindless fanatics. There are clear lessons here. For, in the celebrated words of Edmund Burke, those who fail to learn from history are always destined to repeat it.
(Source: Hardnews, September, 2007)

Facts about Iran
1. Iran spans 630,000 square miles, roughly comparable to Alaska.
2. About 69 million people call Iran home – twice the population of Pland - with a median age of 25 and a life expectancy of 70 years; about 60 percent are Persian, with Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs and others making up the rest.
3. Iran is 99 percent Muslim, consisting of 95 percent Shiites and about 4 percent Sunnis; Iran’s population of 25,000 Jews is second only to Israel in the Middle East.
4. Iran has one of the highest opiate addiction rates in the world; health experts say form 2 million to 4 million Iranians are addicted to narcotics.
5. Iran’s basic unit of currency is rial ($ 1.00 = 9, 326 rials) , bills in denominations of 1,000 rials and up display a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
6. An Ayatollah is a Shiite religious leader; both of Iran’s post-revolution supreme leaders, Ruhollah Khomeini and now Ali Khomeini, have been Grand Ayatollahs; the supreme leader is the highest-ranking political and religious figure in Iran; an elected president oversees the executive branch of government.
7. Iran produces about 4 million barrels of petroleum a day, about 5 percent of the world of the world total; Iran ranks second to Saudi Arabia worldwide in crude oil reserves.
8. Dating back 2,500 years, Persian rugs are crafted from wool, cotton or silk; in 1999.
9. Iran is one of the world’s top producers of luxury foods , such as caviar and pistachios; also a top source of saffron.
10.actively promotes contraception for family planning.
11.Skiing is a popular pastime in mountainous Iran, which boasts numerous ski resorts; cricket, baseball, women’s rugby and soccer also are popular.
12. Iran has a thriving film industry, producing hundreds of popular and art-house films each year.
13.Modern Iran has its roots in the Persian Empire, founded in 550 B. C.; the Persians were pioneers in mathematics and architecture- they built the first windmills. Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religious, began in Persia.
14.U. S. Census Bureau estimated in 2005 that 378,000 Iranian Americans live in the United States, largely migrants after 1979 Revolution.
15. Elected president of Iran in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 51, is a civil engineer who was a student leader in the 1979 revolution; he served as paramilitary engineer in the war with Iraq, then mayor of Theran. He is married with two sons and a daughter.
Engaging with Islam in South Asia
A Review of Francis Robinson’s Islam, South Asia & the West by M. Asaduddin
South Asian Islam has a unique and fascinating history. Quite unlike many other places in the globe that came under Islamic influences the multicultural and plurilinguistic tapestry of South Asia made it necessary for Islam to negotiate and often cohabit with a host of local customs and traditions which gave the religion a special complexion and a special flavour. The interface with indigenous practices in art and literature gave birth to a phenomenon knows as Indo-Islamic culture which left no facet of life in South Asia untouched. The Islamic literature emanating from this area has also been rich and variegated. Robinson is one among several notable scholars whose rigorous engagement with Islam in general and its manifestation in South Asia in particular has resulted in the building up of an archive of knowledge that is truly commendable.
The volume under review is in two parts: the first part contains eight articles written over a period of time. The second part contains 16 reviews of books, touching different facets of the core issue. In their broad weep the articles and reviews give the reader a fair idea of the way Islamic civilization has transformed the lives of the Muslim people around the globe, and specifically, the way it has impacted the lives of the people in South Asia. He endeavors to chronicle the story of Islam’s ascendancy and subsequent decline from the respective of a sympathetic scholar of Islam from the West.
In this introduction the author says that his concern was to give his audience ‘a historical framework in which to place the Muslim world’. To that effect he reminds the reader that the Muslims had inhabited the dominant world system for a thousand years, that over the past hundred years they were subject to, first the European empire and then to American hegemony, and that mourning of lost power has become a feature of many Muslim societies. Muslims must stop mourning and start acting in a concerted way if they want to catch up with the rest of the world. The opening essay, ‘Knowledge’ Its Transmission and the Making of Muslim Societies’ stresses the significance that Islam attaches to acquisition and transmission of knowledge which enabled Muslims to scale new heights in areas of knowledge such as Astronomy, Mathematics, Philosophy and Medical Sciences, and thus prepare the ground for the European renaissance.
The second essay, Ulama of South Asia from 1800 to the mid-Twentieth Century’ deals with the role of the ulama, the Muslim intelligencies, in shaping the destiny of Muslims in the British colonial period. Though deprived of state patronage after the Mughal era the ulama continued to cultivate different branches of learning and guide the Muslim society through many twists and turns of history. While recording their contribution Robinson also gives a clear account of intense and often violent factionalism that was rampant among the ulama of different hues, a phenomenon that continues to the present day, providing inspiration to many radical Islamist groups. However, for good or for bad, the ulama continued to exert considerable influence on the Muslims of the subcontinent, even after independence.
The essay, ‘The British Empire and the Muslim world’ is an in depth study of the ways the British Empire has transformed the social and cultural life in the Muslim world and in many cases decided their political boundaries. That is precisely why the British cannot shirk responsibility regarding what happens in the Muslim world. It also follows that the responsible of he British towards the Palestinians in immense. By the 1920s the British Empire effectively controlled more than half of the Muslim peoples of the world and for much of the twentieth century Britain was the single great influence in their political and economic development. In the essay ‘ Living Together Separately: the Ulama of Farangi Mahall c1700-1950’, Robinson traces the contribution of that illustrious family. The conscious policy of the Farangi Mahalis was to coexist harmoniously in the multi-religious tapestry of India, without intermingling with non-Muslims. This policy experienced a subtle shift during the Khilafat movement. Robinson brings the family saga to the contemporary times when the Farangi Mahallis ‘either continued to live together separately in the new India, or largely for financial reasons left India to live abroad.
Another interesting essay in the volume is, ‘Women as Patrons of Art and Culture: The Begums of Bhopal’ where he describes the seminal contribution in statesmanship and statecraft by several illustrious women of Bhopal.
In the essay, ‘Islam and the West: Clash of Civilization?’ Robinson comprehensively repudiates Huntington’s infamous thesis about the innate hostility and incompatibility of the Christian and the Muslim world.
The second part of the book features reviews of books written by scholars of Islam and Muslim societies touching upon the main theme/s of the volume. They give the reader a clear idea of the current debates in the field and the perspectives form which different writers approach the Muslim situation in the contemporary times and the activism which animates the Muslim world today. In his discussions and analyses, Robinson remains objective, rarely judgmental, though he does not shy away from taking positions. His disagreements are those of a scholar, devoid of personal animosity, rancour or prejudice.
( M. Asaduddin teaches in Jamia Millia Islamia)
(Source: The Book Review, October, 2007).3

MUSLM WORLD-PALESTINE
USA Must Declare Independence From Israel
Chris Hedges
Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist. The country came perilously close to extinction during the October 1973 war when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the Suez and the Syrians poured in over the Golan Heights. Huge American military transport planes came to the rescue. They began landing every half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army, which had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war was over, the United States had given Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid.
The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies. This was perhaps the most dramatic example of the sustained life-support system the United States has provided to the Jewish state.
Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S. recognized the new state 11 minutes later. The two countries have been locked in a deadly embrace ever since.
Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able to be a moderating influence. An incensed President Eisenhower demanded and got Israel’s withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza in 1956. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the USS Liberty. The ship, flying the U.S. flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both sides. The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded 171. The deliberate attack froze, for a while, Washington’s enthusiasm for Israel. But ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps, soon smoothed out by an increasingly sophisticated and well-financed Israel lobby that set out to merge Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance. It has been given more than $140 billion in U.S. direct economic and military assistance. It receives about $3 billion in direct assistance annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S. foreign aid budget. Although most American foreign aid packages stipulate that related military purchases have to be made in the United States, Israel is allowed to use about 25 percent of the money to subsidize its own growing and profitable defense industry. It is exempt, unlike other nations, from accounting for how it spends the aid money. And funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish settlements, bolster the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories and construct the security barrier, which costs an estimated $1 million a mile.
The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating isolated pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed ghettos. By the time the barrier is finished it will probably in effect seize up to 40 percent of Palestinian land. This is the largest land grab by Israel since the 1967 war. And although the United States officially opposes settlement expansion and the barrier, it also funds them.
The U.S. has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most sophisticated items in its own military arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets. The United States also gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies. And the United States stood by without a word of protest as the Israelis built the region’s first nuclear weapons program.
U.S. foreign policy, especially under the current Bush administration, has become little more than an extension of Israeli foreign policy. The United States since 1982 has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It refuses to enforce the Security Council resolutions it claims to support which call on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
Arab Reaction
There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this blatant favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any distinction between Israeli and American policies, nor should they. And when the Islamic radicals speak of U.S. support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the United States, we should listen. The consequences of this one-sided relationship are being played out in the disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being played out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is gearing up for another war with Israel. Most Middle East analysts say it is inevitable. The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is unraveling. And it is doing so because of this special relationship. The eruption of a regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic proportions.
There were many in the American foreign policy establishment and State Department who saw this situation coming. The decision to throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially a popular one with an array of foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall. They warned there would be a backlash. They knew the cost the United States would pay in the oil-rich region for this decision, which they feared would be one of the greatest strategic blunders of the postwar era. And they were right. The decision has jeopardized American and Israeli security and may lead to a regional conflagration.
The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics. The Israel lobby has become a potent force in the American political system. No major candidate, Democrat or Republican, dares to challenge it. Backers of Israel have doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to support U.S. political candidates deemed favorable to Israel. They have brutally punished those who strayed, including the first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in defense of Israeli interests. This was a lesson the next Bush White House did not forget. George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like his father.
Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and currently advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. The United States, which during the Cold War avoided direct military involvement in the region, now does the direct bidding of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.
President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq, publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would like Iraq to become. Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab street, which views Israel as the Algerians viewed the French colonizers during the war of liberation.
Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the world. They remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for this isolation. U.S. “spin” paints the rest of the world as unreasonable, but Israel, Americans are assured, will always be on our side.
Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards from its lock-down apartheid state. It has begun to sell systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope with terrorism. Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion dollars more than it received in American military aid. Israel has grown into the fourth largest arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth has come in the so-called homeland security sector
Precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror.’ ”
The United States, at least officially, does not support the occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state. It is a global player, with interests that stretch well beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, and the equation that Israel’s enemies are our enemies is not that simple.
“Terrorism is not a single adversary,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books, “but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.”
Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those with very close ties to the Israel lobby. Those who attempt to counter the virulent Israeli position, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are ruthlessly slapped down. This alliance was true also during the Clinton administration, with its array of Israel-first Middle East experts, including special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israel lobbying groups in Washington. But at least people like Indyk and Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state, however unviable, as long as it is palatable to Israel. The Bush administration turned to the far-right wing of the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for the Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel. These new Middle East experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.
Washington was once willing to stay Israel’s hand. It intervened to thwart some of its most extreme violations of human rights. This administration, however, has signed on for every disastrous Israeli blunder, from building the security barrier in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous invasion and saturation bombing of Lebanon.
The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize Israeli actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the face of Israeli pressure.
There were several reasons for the war in Iraq. The desire for American control of oil, the belief that Washington could build puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear of Saddam Hussein played a part. But it was also strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States. Israel wanted Iraq neutralized. Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty information to the U.S. about Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was taken in April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began to push for an attack on Syria. The lust for this attack has waned, in no small part because the Americans don’t have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much less launch a new occupation.
Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon. Israel’s iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take place. It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United States. It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It matters only that Israel demands total military domination of the Middle East.
The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare. American soldiers are dying in a useless war. The impotence of the United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests. There is no longer any debate within the United States. This is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. The political cost for those who challenge Israel is too high.
This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow. It means that American power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline. And it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East.
The weakening of the United States, economically and militarily, is giving rise to new centers of power. The U.S. economy, mismanaged and drained by the Iraq war, is increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds dollar reserves worth $825 billion. If Beijing decides to abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it would cause a free fall of the dollar. It would lead to the collapse of the $7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would be a wave of U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment. The growing dependence on China has been accompanied by aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with many of the world’s major exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The Chinese are preparing for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling resources.
The future is ominous. Not only do Israel’s foreign policy objectives not coincide with American interests, they actively hurt them. The growing belligerence in the Middle East, the calls for an attack against Iran, the collapse of the imperial project in Iraq have all given an opening to America’s rivals. It is not in Israel’s interests to ignite a regional conflict. It is not in ours. But those who have their hands on the wheel seem determined, in the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American ship of state headed at breakneck speed into the cliffs before us.
(Chris Hedges, for two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”)
(Source: © 2007 Truth Dig.com)

MUSLM WORLD
Need to Strength India’s Relation with the Arab World
Saurabh Shukla
There is growing concern that by pushing for a strategic relationship with the US, especially through the nuclear deal, India may be alienating the Arab Street with which it has had a long-standing relationship. Experts feel India has not done enough in recent times to engage Middle East countries.
It is not that India has kept out of the Arab circuit. In the last three-and-a-half years of the UPA regime, there have been almost a dozen high-profile visits from the Gulf countries including the King of Saudi Arabia, King of Jordon, Emir of Kuwait and Qatar. Yet the real issue is that there has so far not been a reciprocal prime ministerial visit to emphasise the importance that India places on such relationships. The special envoy for Middle East. Chinmay Gharekhan has only been used sparingly.
Officials say while a visit of the prime minister to Saudi Arabia was in the works, it ran into scheduling problems.
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There are also domestic political compulsions of the need to engage with the Muslim world to reassure its own substantial minority within the country that India is not embarking on a confrontationist approach. However beyond the electoral concerns, the real story is that India has to do more to gain its traditional foothold amongst the Arab countries, for strategic reasons. The Gulf region is more than just an employment destination for more than 4.5-million Indian diaspora. The growing economic interest in the region has added a new dimension to the relationship. India is fast becoming an attractive investment destination. Bilateral trade with the region is now close to $22.5 billion (Rs 88,400 crore). But while the relationship is on the upswing, trust is yet to come by. Despite Indias long-term strategic stakes in Middle East, which lies in its extended neighbourhood, just 350 km away from India, an adhoc approach has stymied the relationship.
Another important reason why India needs to revamp its Gulf policy is the fact that it has a shared interest in the stability of the Middle East. Instability in the region will have an adverse impact on the countrys economy since 70 per cent of its oil and gas comes from the Gulf region and has a direct bearing on the economy. We are not giving enough attention to the Gulf relative to its importance for India. We have vital economic stakes in the region and more engagement with the region at all levels is important for our energy security, says Ishrat Aziz, former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Security cooperation too has fuelled the relationship, with many Gulf countries now becoming more receptive to Indias security concerns. From the times, when Dubai had become a safe haven for Indian mafia dons like Dawood Ibrahim and his associates, there has been a sea change in their mindset. The authorities there have been able to effect a clampdown on these groups and force them to shift their base. In the recent past, Dubai has deported many Indian fugitives. Another country affected by Indias growing engagement with the US is Syria, which has been waiting for a presidential visit to Iran. India has put it on the back burner lest it create problems, did raise its concerns on the wider problem of money laundering and the need. Some of the Gulf countries have continued to overlook genuine humanitarian concerns of Indian workers. Beyond the realm of realpolitik what is needed is a more proactive Gulf policy, consistent with the countrys long-term strategic interests.
(Source: India Today, 12 November, 2007)

CHRONOLOGY
Monthly Chronology of Events of Concern
(1 – 30 November 2007)
I- National Affairs
Eleventh Plan: *Cabinet approves the draft 11th Plan (2007-12) based on 9% annual growth and creation of 70 million employment opportunities with an estimated outlay of Rs.36,50,000 crores out of which education will receive 18.2%, agriculture 10.5% and health 8.9% (30Nov.).
National Politics: *Karnataka Governor swears in BJP leader Yeddyurappa as CM of first BJP-led government in south India but the coalition partner JD(U) absents itself from the oath ceremony, later directs its legislators not to vote in favour of new government. CM resigns (19 Nov.). President’s Rule imposed (20 Nov.). Assembly dissolved (29 Nov.).
Gujarat Assembly Election: *Nomination begins for first phase voting on 11 Dec. Congress decides to contest all seats except 6 left for NCP, CP(M) and CP(I). BJP presents Modi as next CM, failing reconciliation with dissidents BJP, seeks active supports of RSS and VHP. Six dissidents join Congress and are given Congress tickets, other dissidents contesting as independents. For the first time, BSP enters the fray and contests all seats.
Nandigram Tragedy: * Simmering crisis in Nandigram Block (70% Muslim)since March, when CPI(M) sympathizers were pushed out, takes serious turn when CPI(M) armed cadres invade area, convert it into a ‘war zone’ and create a reign of terror. Governor condemns ‘invasion’. Home ministry and National Human Rights Commission seek report from West Bengal government. Centre posts CRPF, asks state to ensure speedy return of the displaced to their homes and establish peace in area. PM calls Nandigram violence unfortunate.* Nandigram development is condemned by the CPI(M)’s coalition partners as well as by leading leftists in the country and abroad, apart from other parties.
Nuclear Deal: *Left finally okays opening of talks with IAEA (16 Nov.). AEC Chairman reaches Vienna.
Delimitation: *Commission tables report on Lok Sabha constituencies (23 Nov.) raising total to 610 seats with 126 reserved for SC/ST.
Corruption: *Rajya Sabha calls for making judiciary more accountable and transparent (27 Nov.). *Panel against immunity of retired judges from probe but prescribes 2 year limit after retirement. *Supreme Court reiterates recommendation of promotion of Justice Bhalla as Chief Justice *Parliamentary Committee desires SC & HC judges declare family wealth every year including CJI (5 Nov.). However, several High Courts turn down provision in Judges Enquiry Bill 2006.
*Prime Minister asked all ministers to declare assets. * CBI files charge sheet in Delhi slum scam. *M.P. Lokayukta recommends prosecution of CM & wife, * SC authorizes CBI to report on assets of Mulayam Singh Yadav & family and take up NOIDA land allotment case.
*Government allots institutional land in Central Delhi to political parties, including Congress, at rock bottom prices.
Criminalization:*U.P. Minister A.S. Yadav resigns to face CBI enquiry and prosecution in a rape-cum-murder case. *SP MP Atique Ahmad’s bank account sealed. *LJP MP Suraj Bhan accused of murder of public prosecutor in Begusarai (9 Nov.).
SEZ: *Supreme Court lays down guidelines for fixation of market value for acquisition of land (8Nov.).
Small States: Bundelkhand Mukti Morcha plans to mobilize mass support through yatras (3 Nov.).
Freedom Movement: Government decides to make public select documents relating to Netaji’s death (4 Nov.).
II- Other Matters Of Special Interest to Muslims
Babri Masjid: *Supreme Court rejects PIL seeking permission for construction at disputed site (19 Sep.). *VHP announces plan for Shourya Diwas to mark 15th anniversary of Demolition. Muslim organizations propose commemoration in simple and dignified manner.
*VHP begins Ram Setu Yatra from Ayodhya (21 Nov.), without much public support.
Kashmir Question: *Four-day long gun-battle between militants and security forces at Sopore ends with 4 soldiers, including one major, and 3 militants dead (11 Nov.). *Army vacates several private houses and schools. *Hurriyat chief proposes restoration of pre-1953 status as starting point for negotiations but not as final settlement. *State government reported to maintain security dossiers on 60,000 families (7 Sep.). *PDP leader Mufti demands reaffirmation of AFSP Act.
*NC decides to project Farooq Abdullah as Chief Minister in coming Assembly election. *Both BSP and SP announce plan to enter arena.
Commemoration: *119th birthday of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad observed. Public memorandum proposes its declaration as National Education Day.
Reservation: *Supreme Court closes hearing on OBC reservation in education but reserves order (1 Nov.). *Gujjars hold mass rally in Delhi to demand ST status (10 Nov.). *Orissa reduces OBC quota from 27% to 11.25%.
*Women MPs cutting across party lines demand 1/3rd reservation for women in legislatures.
*OBCs and Muslims demands proportional sub-quotas.
*Supreme Court rules that a person’s caste follows that of his parents and cannot be changed.
*Clash between Assam adivasis demanding ST status and non-adivasis in Guwahati ends in toll of 7 lives and much damage. Curfew imposed and army called. Govt. sets up Committee to examine demand.
Sachar & Mishra Reports: *Parliament fails to take up discussion on Sachar Report; Mishra Report is not tabled. Some members demand implementation.
Muslim Uplift : * Scheme to provide 15 lakhs merit-cum-means post-matric scholarship to minorities with effect from current year approved by Cabinet (30 Nov.). * Marginal rise in representation of minorities in para military forces reported under PM’s 15 Point Programme. *Government decides to raise share of equity capital of NMDFC to 750 crores. *Government announces plan for development of artisan clusters in Muslim dominated areas (8 Nov.).* Maharashtra promises full implementation of Sachar Report. Forms Maulana Azad Financial Corporation; includes 44 more Muslim sub-castes in OBC list.
Taslima Nasreen Case: *Taslima Nasreen’s continued presence in India condemned by Muslim mass meeting in Kolkata, Govt. and media take no notice (16 Nov.). * Bandh in central Kolkata called by a local group leads to clash with police and damage to public properties. Army restores peace. Curfew imposed (22 N0v.). *Taslima moved to Jaipur (23 Nov.). *Brought to Delhi (24 Nov.) and placed in several safe houses. *Government agrees to permit her to stay on condition that she respects law and does not hurt people’s feelings. *Taslima asks publishers to delete 3 offensive pages from her book. Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind calls upon Muslims to forgive her (29 Nov.). Others want apology and promise to abstain from blasphemy.
III- Terrorism & Violence:
Bombay Riots 1993: *Supreme Court directs Maharashtra to report action taken against 31 leaders and police officers. Muslim organizations plan courting arrest from 7 Dec. (30 Nov.);
Gujarat Disturbances: *NCM demands CBI investigation on Tehelka tape and take necessary action. *Nanawati-Shah Commission requested to admit mobile phone records to reveal nexus between rioters, police and politicians. * Victims living in camps and make-shift colonies demand special arrangement for casting their vote.
Assam Situation: Saikia Commission indicts P.K. Mahanta, former CM, as responsible for extra-judicial killings of ULFA men.
Terrorism: * Two killed in Bomb blasts in Assam. ULFA’s hand suspected (25 Nov.).
*Simultaneous bomb blasts in court premises in Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow. 14 Killed over 50 injured (23 Nov.). Police suspects HUJI and Bangladeshis.
*Ajmer Dargah investigation makes no headway. *Muslim organizations accuse police of targeting Muslim community.
*Government extends ban on Deendar Anjuman, Hyderabad, for another two years.
*Police arrest 3 alleged JeM terrorists in Lucknow for planning abduction of Rahul Gandhi. vvvv*Assam government names 9 militants groups operating in Assam, including two Muslim.
Bhagalpur Disturbances: *A major culprit Kameshwar Yadav found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment (27 Nov.) * State government promises to revive cases against all indicted officials and political leaders, dropped by Lalu Pd.Yadav regime.
Communal Violence :*Toll in communal violence near Indore rises to 2 (14 Nov.).
IV- Religious Questions
Personal Law: All India Muslim Personal Law Board Working Committee forms Committee for discussion with govt. on draft Compulsory Marriage Registration Bill on practical difficulties in implementation and recognition of existing registration systems of Muslim community.
Haj Subsidy: *Akali Dal demands subsidy for Sikhs fir travel to religious shrines abroad. * Haj flights begin. Varanasi added as exit point.
Oath of Office: *Supreme Court dismisses petition challenging constitutionality of oath taken by MLAs in the name for Allah.
V- Education & Culture : *Reception to Assam CM Gogoi by India Islamic Cultural Centre criticized by several members and office bearers because of his anti Muslim record.
Vandematram : * Mufti-e-Azam Kashmir opposes move for recitation of Vande Mataram on Children Day (14 Nov.). Govt.denies move.
VI- Language & Culture :
Urdu : * Allahabad High Court upholds appointment of 13,000 Urdu teachers in UP (29 Nov.) * Rally in Meerut to commemorate Ismail Meerathi.
Monuments : * Red Fort declared as World Heritage (29 Nov.) * ASI proposes to allow construction with 100 metres radius of protected monuments (11 Nov.)
Education : * Planning Commission allocate Rs.1,25,000 lakhs for primary education in 11th Plan. * Supreme Court directs UGC to recognize private Amity Universtiy.
Ethnicity : * Assam government yet to define ‘Asamiya’; Muslim Asamiyas seek recognition as ethnic minority.
AMU : * Reopens in phases; takes strict steps to control access to campus and residence by outsiders in hostels.
Commemoration: * International Conference in Delhi to honour Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi (25Nov.)
Muslim Education:* UP forms Madrasa Shiksha Parishad (21 Nov.)
VII-MUSLIM WORLD :
Pakistan: *November was a month of turmoil in Pakistan. Fearing nullification of his 7 October election by National Assembly General Musharraf imposes emergency, suspends Constitution, dismisses Chief Justice and other Judges and later nominates their substitutes.
*Political parties condemn emergency. Pressmen, lawyers, students and youth including women protest in streets. Nearly 5000 persons detained. *Benazir Bhutto first leaves and then returns to Pakistan, softens criticism of emergency regime, placed under house arrest, when she tries to meet deposed Chief Justice; reported to hold secret negotiations with Musharraf.
*Nawaz Shariff returns to Pakistan with Saudi Arabian support, demands repeal of emergency, reinstatement of judiciary and restoration of civil liberties as pre-conditions for general election. *National Assembly endorses emergency. Supreme Court uphold emergency under doctrine of necessity. *Under US pressure Musharraf agrees to take off uniform, lift emergency and hold election. Senate Chairman, Somru appointed as caretaker PM.
* Supreme Court dismisses petitions against Musharraf’s election.Election Commission notifies Musharraf as President. Musharraf hands over army command to successor General Kiyani, selected by him. Takes off uniform to take oath. *Elecetion. Commission announces schedule for election to National Assembly in January 8, 2008 with December 15 as last date of nomination. *Musharraf promises to lift emergency on 14 December. *Political parties divided on participation. Nawaz sharif and Jamaat Islami Pakistan favour boycott while PPP and Jamiat Ulema Pakistan inclined to participate Civil war situation prevails in Swat. Shia-sunni clashes in Peshawar killing 50. Bomb blast take heavy toll.
Saudi Arabia: *King Abdullah calls on Pope at Rome, the first Saudi king to meet him. Prospects of reconciliation between Muslim and Christians worlds discussed. Also respect for rights of religious minorities.
Iran: *Iran defies EU pressure and resolves to proceed with nuclear plan. *Signs pact with Pakistan on Gas deal.
Malaysia: * Massive demonstration by Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections led by Anwar Ibrahim in Kuala Lumpur.* Malaysians of Indian origin (about 10%) agitate against alleged religious persecution and economic discrimination. * DMK supports them; PM expresses concern, Malaysia rebuffs India. Anwar Ibrahim calls for dialogue.
Afganishtan: * Suicide bomber kills 50 in North Afghanistan including 5 members of parliament.
Bengaladesh: Col.Abdul Rashid sentenced for killing Mujibur Rahman, accuses late President Zia-ur-Rahman of complicity.
Palestine: *International Conference on Palestine convened by USA in Annapolis meets (27Nov) with all Arab countries, India & Pakistan participating. *Hamas and Hizbullah condemn it as conspiracy against Palestinians. *Despite advance negotiations between Israeli PM Olmert and Palestinian leader Abbas, Conference fails to achieve any tangible result, except commitment to continue bilateral negotiations.

SOME BOOKS OF INTEREST

Khan Yasmin : The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, Penguin, Delhi
C. Heredia, Rudolf : Changing Gods: Rethinking Conversion in India, Penguin, Delhi
Basham, A.L. : The Illustrated Cultural History of India, OUP
Clarke, Peter : The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, Allen Lane, London
Dalley, Jan : The Black Hole: Money, Myth And Empire, Penguin, Delhi
Jalan, Bimal : India’s Politics: A View From the Backbench, Penguin Viking India, Delhi
Russel, Ralph : The Oxford India Ghalib Life, Letters and Ghazals, OUP
Hasan, Zoya (ed) : Democracy in the Muslim World, the Asian Experience
Singh, Amrik : A Fresh Look, Vitasta, Delhi
Mukherjee, R. : Great Speeches of Modern India, Random House
T.N. Madan : Images of the World: Essays in Religion, Secularism and Culture, OUP, Delhi
Carter, Lionel : Punjab: 1 January 1944-3 March 1947, Manohar, Delhi
Hasan, Mushirul : Seamless Boundaries: Lutfullah’s Narrative Beyond East and West, OUP,
Hasan, Mushirul : The Avadh Punch: Wit and Humour in Colonial North India, Niyogi
Reinert, Erik S. : How Rich Countries Got Richer and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, Constable & Robinson, London
Chanda, Nayan : Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warrio Shaped Globalization, Penguin, Delhi
Chakravarty, S. : The Raj Syndrome, Rupa, Delhi
Talbot, Ian (Ed.) : The Deadly Embrace: Religion, Politics & Violence in India & Pakistan 1947-2002, OUP, Delhi
Schulman, David, : Dark Hope : Working for Peace in Israel & Palestine, Chicago University
Khan, Lal : Crisis in the Indian Sub-continent; Partition – Can it be Undone, Aakar Books, Delhi, 2007
Baxi, Upendra : Human Right is a Post human World, OUP, 2007
Gandhi, G., (Ed.) : The Oxford India Gandhi – Essential Writings, OUP
Talbot, Phillips : An American Witness to India’s Partition
S. Swamy : Hindus under Siege: the Way not, Har Anand, New Delhi
Batra, M. L. : Dilli’s Red Fort by the Yamuna, ND.
Davdar, David :The Solitude of Emperors, Penguin, N.D.
Flahi, Masood Alam : Muslims and Casteism in India, Al Qazi Publisher, N. D.
Sikand, Yoginder : Bastions of the Believers, Penguin Books , N. D.
Puri, Balraj : Muslims of India Since Partition,
Chanda, Nayan : Bound Together, How Traders, Preachers, Adventures and Warriors Shaped Globalization Penguin,