Muslim India
MONTHLY
JOURNAL OF REFERENCE, RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION
VOL. XXV NO. 285 CONTENTS MARCH, 2008
From the Editor’s Desk:Muslims under the UPA Raj- A Critical Review II Achievements 4
Chronology of the Month: (129 February, 2008)
Communal Violence: Study by V. N. Rai, on Prejudiced Perceptions of Police
Education: Maulana Azad Education Foundation’s Annual
Report for 2005-06 (Summary)
Government: President’s Address to Parliament, Feb. 25, 2008 (Extracts) *Allocation for Minorities General Budget 2008-09
Gujarat Election:‘A Team Beats B Team’ Editorial, Hardnews
*From Despair to Hope’ Editorial The Hindu
*Dr. P.C. Alexander, MP, on Lessons of Gujarat
*On Modi’s Claims of Achievements as Advertised by Gujarat Govt.
Gujarat Genocide: Javed Naqvi on Killing Music and Poetry in Gujarat.
Genocide: Arundhati Roy on Genocide: Motivation Denial and Celebration
Hindu Terrorism: Jawahirullah on First Arrest of Sangh Parivar
Activists for Bomb Blasts
Human Right: Iqbal Ansari on Hate Speech and Human Rights Case
Against Taslima Nasreen
History: Abraham Erally on Overview of the Mughal World & British Rule
Identity: Sameera Khan on Exclusive Identity and Muslim Women-II
Kashmir Situation: Gautam Navlakha on Changing Pattern of
Resistance in Kashmir
* Towards Solution - Wajahat Habibullah, Member Working Group on J&K
*S. Dogra, Kashmiri Demand for Civil Amenities
Minority Uplift: Nehru’s Letters to CM’s on Neglecting or Trying to
Absorb Minorities (1953) and on Minorities in Public Service (1958).
Muslim Minorities: Report on American Federation of Muslim from
India (US and Canada)
Muslim World: Pakistan: Indian Press on 2008 Election
* E. Girdner on Democracy as Threat to US Elite Interests-II
* Pervez Hoodbhoy on Rise and Fall of Science and Technology-I *Kuppusamy on Hindu Minority, Quest for Identity in Malaysia.
National Politics: N.K. Singh on Social Security System for 800 million
Poor & Vulnerable
* Draft Resolution for 19th CPI Congress 2008 (Extracts)
* Kuldip Nayar on Congress’ Soft Hindutva – A Threat to Pluralism.
* Harish Khare on the Hambug of BJP’s Gujarat Model.
* Pankaj Vohra on BJP’s Post Gujarat Strategy
* Ashok Mitra on CPI (M)’s Gloomy Future in West Bengal
Reservation: P. Sainath on Multi-Form Bogey of Reverse Discrimination
against the Deprived
Secularism: Ram Puniyani on National Dharam Shastra?
Terrorism: Declaration of National Conference of Madrasas against
Terrorism, Deoband, 25 Feb, 2008 and Press Comments.
Tribute to the Mahatma: Ashis Nandy on 60th Year of the Murder of Mahatma
* A Model of Communal Harmony from Kerala
Urdu: Khushwant Singh and Shahabuddin on Comparative Growth of
Urdu in India and Pakistan
World Trends: William Dalrymple on Contemporary Reversal of Role
between UK and India


FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
Muslims under UPA Raj- A Critical Review-II
Part I of this editorial published in December, 2007 concluded with the statement that ‘Muslim euphoria on the formation of the UPA government had already evaporated; the UPA government should wake up and ensure that Muslim hopes do not turn to ashes in the remaining one and a half years’. The assembly election and its aftermath in Gujarat have shown that the Congress which is the core of the UPA has unfortunately not learnt any lesson and did not change its strategy and tactics or approach towards resolving Muslim problems, redressing their grievances and fulfilling their legitimate aspirations, on one excuse or the other.
As already explained, the much- trumpeted Sachar Report has proved to be the proverbial rat emerging for the digging of a mountain. Indeed, apart from the provision of scholarships for the minorities, proposed upgradation of some backward districts of Muslim concentration and planned establishment of some educational institutions in the deprived areas (which, without any reservation, can contribute little to Muslim uplift) nothing substantial is likely to reach the Community.
11th Five Year Plan
The 11th Five Year Plan simply brushed aside the idea of a Muslim Sub-Plan. It also failed to give any direction for equitable distribution of the benefits of all non-universal social development and welfare schemes targeting individuals at the ground level to eligible Muslims, as to other deprived groups, in proportion to their population in the distribution area.
The Prime Minister has constantly reiterated his plea for the uplift of the weaker sections and graciously included the minorities. The BJP galvanized by its victory in Gujarat and having revived its old Hindutva line has condemned the idea of allocation of 15% of the plan outlay for minorities, even under a few specified schemes, as ‘communal budgeting’ and put the government on the defensive. Perhaps the BJP wants to deny the Muslims any development benefit. The fact is that neither had the Prime Minister set a goal of 15% allocation across the board for Muslims in the overall annual outlay nor has the 11th Plan anywhere mentions it. But the BJP has once again adopted the Goebbelsian technique of inventing a lie and go on repeating it till it sounds like truth. And the authorities remain silent. As, on the major question of constitutionality of reservation for Muslim, not on the basis or religions but as a Backward Class on ‘the Karnataka and Kerala’ model, or as recommended by Justaice Ranganath Mishra Commission, with a separate sub-quota in accordance with judicially approved principle of categorization.
Political Under-representation:
The main reason for persistence of status quo is failure of the UPA to link Muslim backwardness to their political powerlessness. No steps have been taken to raise their level of representation within the coalition parties or within the decision-making bodies, for less in the legislatures.
The second reason is the conspicuous absence of Muslims in the administration, even at the bottom of the ladder, when unemployed Muslim graduates are not in short supply. The placement of a few hand-picked individuals, close to the establishment, in the charmed circle does not change this abysmal reality.
Thirdly, Muslim cries of anguish do not penetrate the corridors of power. They have never engaged in violent agitation but their peaceful and non-violent mobilization, through letters, memoranda, meetings and rallies never wakes up the keepers.
Fourthly, the political establishment, the government and the administration continue to be monopolized by high castes and the elite. With their growing anti-Muslim bias, Muslim problems do not receive the attention they deserve and even government policies and programmes for their uplift are subverted.
Fifthly, Government remains so allergic to reservation that it has placed the Mishra Report in the freezer and forgotten it. Even the latest address by the President to the Parliament (25 Feb.) omits to mention it.
Religious Grievances:
Muslims in any case, survive but they are pained that the calumnies heaped upon their religion and the Holy Prophet through deliberate vilification and demonisation are all ignored by the state. The same government which raises the question of Sikh turban with France, of Hindu temples with Malaysia, extends residence visa to a second rate foreign writer who has found a flourishing market in India for her filth in the name of ‘freedom of expression’ because she bears a Muslim name. It is a pity that a secular government is so insensitive to the religious dignity of 150 million citizens while catering to the tantrums of a foreigner!
Their religious grievances have been growing under UPA notwithstanding constant lip service to secularism and misconceived and token gestures like the Haj subsidy. Government ignores their legitimate demands relating to Masjids & Madrasas & Qabristans, illegal occupation of wakf properties, detention, torture and custodial killing of Muslim youth, branded as terrorists, forcible displacement of Muslims from their slums, Hinduisation of school culture and text books and, what is worse, projection of their institutions as cradles and shelters of terrorism. Indeed, in the public eye, Muslims have today become synonymous with terrorists.
Judicial Over-reach:
Of late, some judges have adopted a rather hostile attitude towards minorities like redefining ‘minority’ and denying that Muslims or Jains are minorities. Minorities are angry but have no option but to live with their rulings. Muslims have come to feel that the Judiciary has replaced the Executive and the political establishment as the instrument to erode Muslim identity and to promote religious assimilation. One reason is that Muslims have remained poorly represented in the higher judiciary; just a few have been appointed since 2004. The Muslims simply fail to see the logic of the Supreme Court in admitting a misconceived PIL against the centuries old system of Dar`ul Quza to deal with marital and succession disputes through arbitration with the consent of parties and ruling on replacement of their more or less national system of registration of marriages. They do not see why it cannot be woven into the government-sponsored compulsory registration system. Amazingly the SC ruling which virtually nullified the Muslim Divorcees Act, 1986 burdened the former husband with life-time alimony, has rewritten history.
Parliament, a Silent Spectator:
The great failure of Government lies in that institutions created for the welfare of the minorities have remained inactive and dormant. Practically all of them have failed to make any impact on the public mind or worthwhile contribution. This is because their allocations are small and their annual reports, tabled in the Parliament, simply gather dust and are never taken up for discussion. People, thus, remain unaware of the injustice and discrimination suffered by the Muslims and thus open to the anti-Muslim propaganda about ‘pampering’ and ‘appeasement’. Government has never allocated Parliamentary time even for one annual review of the minority’s situation. There is no Parliamentary Committee to goad the Government into action on Minorities, not even a separate Standing Committee or Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Minority Affairs, which has turned into a sleepy hollow.
Educational Standstill:
On the educational front, the AMU followed by the JMI, has de facto lost its minority character. On one hand a substantial number of Muslim educational institutions remain unrecognised or unaffiliated and deprived of grant-in-aid. It is doubtful whether Muslim enrollment in government ‘model schools’, colleges, technical institutions and universities will register any rise under the UPA.
Urdu : Exiled from Schools :
Fewer schools than needed to meet the deficit have been opened under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in Muslim areas. Indeed, no area-wise survey has been done, no targets have been set and there is no monitoring system. Government does not realize that the siting of higher institutions in Muslim areas is a cruel joke as they do not ipso facto impact its backwardness.
Urdu remained exiled from the school system, even from the Central Schools, under the UPA. It is treated as a foster-child for all practical purposes. Urdu speaking children have been denied primary instruction through Urdu. The Three Languages Formula which had been distorted has not been revived and Urdu has been replaced by Sanskrit in Hindi states and by state languages in others. Govt. has done precious little to preserve Urdu both as a spoken and written language and as a great cultural heritage for the coming generations.
Public Employment :
Government having discarded the promised Kerala/Karnataka pattern, Muslims stands exactly where they were in 2004. They continue be barred from all avenues of gainful employment. The Armed Forces and the Central Para Military Forces have kept their door shut. Government shamelessly defended the refusal of the Army even to admit the low level of recruitment of Muslims which stands at 2-3 %. What is worse, Muslims continue to be distrusted and cannot enter the CBI, the IB and the RAW. State police and intelligence remain out of bounds for Muslims.
Government has failed to recognize its consequences; the deep-seated hostility of police, even in normal times, the immediate attribution of all acts of terrorism to Muslims, exclusive surveillance and search of their Mohallas and detention and torture of their youth, despite Prime Minister’s personal assurance to the contrary. Police force is neither composite nor is compositely deployed. So, it has become communalized, with honourable exceptions. The result is that all Central and state agencies generally ignore other leads that may point away from the Muslims, and towards the Hindu extremists, while SIMI continued to be banned, without a single-case against it.
Major Issues- Little Progress:
Important issues like settlement of the Babri Masjid dispute, prosecution and punishment for the national crime of Demolition, legislation to control and contain communal violence, implementation of Srikrishna Report, release of POTA detainees, prosecution of criminal cases related to the Gujarat Genocide, 2002 and the Hashimpura Massacre, 1987 have registered no progress. National Commission for Minorities is yet to be given Constitutional Status. In Kashmir, the heart and mind of the people, have not been touched though peace has partially returned and militancy is down. But the army stays where it was with the special powers, it enjoys, and resultant tension continues.
External Relations-Bonding with USA & Israel:
An over-view of the course of external relations over the last 4 years cannot but bring into focus the palpable deviation from, even renunciation of the policy of non-alignment. Strategic partnership with the USA is growing. So, is technological, economic and defence cooperation with Israel, with the natural attenuation of our traditional support for the people of Palestine. India has accepted US/NATO military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, down- graded relations with the Muslim and the Arab worlds. No doubt, a minority in any democracy cannot dictate foreign policy but our country has boarded the US band-wagon at a time when the Muslims all over the world hate it.
What has gone Wrong?
Today Muslims feel helpless; they cannot even protect their identity and dignity. They have no place in the corridors of power because without reservation they have no share power in governance. They live in a state of siege and face the mounting pressure of assimilation . Government does not show sympathetic understanding or take positive action. It appears to stand paralysed, gripped by its misperception of the mind of the common Hindu.
UPA government has no doubt become apathetic and indifferent. But has it become hostile and turned communal, as some people feel? No, but it has become ideologically bankrupt and politically spineless. It lacks the guts to defend the secular order, the courage to challenge the Sangh Parivar. But why? Because it does not trust the people of India, because it misperceives the Hindu as anti-Muslim. The Hindu is not intolerant and unfair or unjust; he will support the government if the latter takes on the communal forces head on. Government has given liberty to Hindu chauvinists to misguide and incite the masses; at the same time, it itself fails to counter the lies, falsehoods, untruth and half truths. Burdened with its own presumptions it is unable to take resolute steps to curb criminal incitement and resort to violence.
Government is lost in computing possible electoral impact, counts possible loss and gain of votes before uttering a word, before raising a finger. Caution blurs its vision and kills initiative. Inaction vitiates social environment and encourages the adversary to make inroads in the public mind.
Also, government and leadership have lost touch with Muslim masses. And the darbar is flush with ideas on why and how to ignore Muslims, put them in their place, in order to regain Hindu support which it sees as shifting to the BJP. So it adopted pale saffron strategy in Gujarat, which twice proved its hollowness; the gainer has been the hard saffron. People always flock towards A team and not B team.
Can Government Turn a New Leaf ?
Government has lost precious time and in its remaining period it can do little in the face of political opposition, electoral constraints, bureaucratic resistance and its mortal fear of Hindu backlash.
Government must shed its pale saffron strategy, adopt zero tolerance towards communalism and introduce distributive justice and become sensitive to the urges and aspirations of all deprived and marginalized groups including the Muslims.
Perhaps, the UPA shall take the support of the minorities for granted with the BJP as the main adversary. But the Muslims are beginning to ask how long shall they continue to be bluffed and taken for a ride every five years. Today there is no hope left in the Muslims that at the end of the 5 years of UPA rule they would register any upward movement, visible and quantifiable, by any economic, social or educational index. Indeed, as a social group 84.5% of the community shall continue to figure, as indicated in the Nitish Sen Gupta Report, among the extremely poor, poor, marginally poor and the vulnerable.
The common Muslim suffers deprivation like other common people. But he doubly suffers because he a Muslim. For him, Democracy has been transformed into Majoritarianism. Secularism has become a farce; Social justice, a distant dream. Discrimination and humiliation have become his lot. Parliament has become a spectator, permanent executive is hostile; political parties are apathetic and wear multiple masks to suit the occasion.
The common Muslim is showing reluctance to play the old game . Since his faith in the UPA lies shattered, there is growing alienation from the political system. Willit drive him towards electoral boycott? Will he take to the streets?

New Delhi

1 March, 2008                                                                                                  (Syed Shahabuddin)


GOVERNMENT
Address by President of India, Smt. Pratibha Patil, to Parliament on February 25, 2008 (Relevant Extracts)
My Government remains firmly committed to ensuring that the economic growth process is socially inclusive, regionally balanced and environmentally sustainable.
The architecture of inclusive growth is further consolidated through the Eleventh Five Year Plan. The Plan has set a target of 9 per cent GDP growth.
The share of the Central Gross Budgetary Support (CGBS) allocation to key sectors is being substantially increased. The outlay on education goes up to 19% of the CGBS. The outlays on agriculture, health and rural development have been tripled. Taken together with education, these sectors account for more than half of the CGBS. This is a major structural shift in Plan priorities, aimed at reducing disparities and empowering people.
To bring the “financially excluded” population within the formal banking system, banks have been directed to utilize the services of self-help groups (SHG), micro finance institutions and other civil society organizations. Over 5 lakh self-help groups are being assisted under the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana. Government has also introduced the Micro Financial Sector (Development and Regulation Bill) in Parliament.
With a view to provide social security to workers in the unorganized sector, my Government has introduced the Unorganised Sector Social Security Bill, 2007. The Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana to provide health cover of Rs. 30,000 for every unorganized sector worker living below poverty line and for the family, the Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana to provide relief to about 1 crore families of rural landless labour in the first year itself and the Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme, entitling those below poverty line and above 65 years to a monthly pension of Rs. 200, have been launched. Government has also enhanced the National Floor Level Minimum Wage to Rs. 80 per day. Workers employed by building contractors have also been made eligible for payment of bonus.
Government has put in place a National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy with effect from October 2007, a Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2007 and a Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill 2007 have also been introduced in Parliament.
Government has strengthened panchayati raj through untied funds to support local area development planning in addition to reorienting delivery systems to work through panchayats. Government has brought forward a legislation to establish Gram Nyayalayas.
The Prime Minister’s New 15 Point Programme aims at ensuring that benefits of the development programmes flow equitably to the minorities. Certain proportion of development projects will be located in minority concentration areas and, wherever possible, 15 per cent of targets and outlays under various schemes would be earmarked for the minorities.
The 11th Plan provides Rs. 800 crore for Merit-cum-Means scholarships for professional courses, nearly Rs. 3300 crore for post and pre-matric scholarship programmes and Rs. 3780 crore for the development of 90 minority concentration districts. The proportion of priority sector lending will be stepped up from the present 9% to 15%.
It has been decided to expand the coverage of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act from 330 districts to cover all rural districts of the country from April 2008. Under this Act, 2.7 crore people were provided employment till the mid of January, 2008 during the current financial year.
The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan for elementary education is being strengthened with expansion of the Midday Meal programme for children to the upper Primary level in 3479 educationally backward blocks. My Government seeks to provide universal access to secondary education by supporting 6000 new high quality model schools, with one school in each block, to set standards of excellence. Higher education will receive massive investment in the 11th Plan with 30 new Central Universities, 370 new colleges in educationally backward districts, 8 new IIT’s, 20 new IIIIT’s, 7 new IIM’s, and 2 more IISE’s in addition to the three started at Pune, Kolkata and Mohali. The National Skill Development Mission will ensure employability of our youth and address the skill deficit.
Under the National Rural Health Mission 1.38 lakh sub centres, 22,669 primary health centres, 3,947 community health centres and 540 district hospitals have been supported. Nearly 5 lakh ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) and Link Health Workers are now in position in our villages.
Rural sanitation coverage has improved significantly to about 50% of rural households today through enhanced peoples’ participation .
Under the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission projects worth Rs. 25,287 crore are under implementation in 51 cities across 26 States. Under its Basic Services component. more than 8 lakh houses have been sanctioned for the urban poor. Government will promote affordable housing through the National Housing and Habitat Policy.
Government has taken various measures to promote Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the First War of Indian Independence, the Red Fort was added to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites.
The Urdu Channel of Doordarshan has commenced 24x7 service.
Internal security situation remains under control. My Government is fully alive to the threat of terrorism and Left-wing extremism. The entire nation stood as one in condemning inhuman acts of terrorism in J&K, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Assam.
Government will remain ever vigilant against the machinations of any anti-social and anti-national groups seeking to disrupt law and order, communal harmony and the unity and integrity of our Republic.
My government, working with the State Governments, is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy to ensure peace, normalcy and development in J&K. The Prime Minister’s Reconstruction Plan is being implemented vigorously. ....
Government had held a series of Round Table Conferences with all segments of population in J&K. These deliberations reflect a wide-ranging civic and political consensus on political and developmental issues. Government is working on easier travel across the LOC, better governance and closer attention to the aspirations of the people. ...
Our foreign policy seeks to promote an environment of peace and stability in our region and in the world. Since the 14th SAARC Summit in New Delhi in April 2007, India has made every effort to strengthen SAARC, moving it from a declaratory to an implementation phase.
Our goal remains a peaceful, stable and prosperous neighbourhood... As a close and friendly neighbour, India hopes that the people of Bangladesh will be able to exercise their will through free and fair elections for restoration of full democracy…. We will continue to help Afghanistan in whatever manner we can in its reconstruction and in building a pluralistic and prosperous society. We are committed to peace, friendship and good neighbourly relations with Pakistan. A stable and prosperous Pakistan, at peace with itself, is in the interests of our entire region. When conditions permit we will resume our dialogue process with Pakistan, aimed at resolving outstanding issues, premised on an atmosphere free from terror and violence.
Our relations with the United States of America have improved …., and now span a wide spectrum including high technology, space ….. It is our hope that civil nuclear cooperation with the USA and other friendly countries will become possible…. The 8th India-EU Summit was held in New Delhi in November 2007….
We have considerably enhanced our interactions with of the Gulf region that is home to over 4.5 million Indians and is an important economic partner and a major source for our oil and gas imports…. Government hopes that peace and stability would soon return in Iraq. Government has also supported a rejuvenated Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and looks forward to a peaceful resolution of issues leading to an independent state of Palestine living side by side at peace with its neighbours…. India stands ready to help the peace process to move forward.
Government has also been engaged with Central Asian countries to widen cooperation with them. As an Observer, India participated in the higher level meetings of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2007.



Allocation for Minorities
General Budget, 2008-09
PIB Release, 29 February, 2008
Presenting the Budget in Lok Sabha, the Finance Minister, Shri P. Chidambaram announced that the allocation for the Ministry of Minority Affairs would be increased from Rs. 500 crore in 2007-08 to Rs. 1,000 crore in 2008-09. Rs. 75 crore as additional corps for NMDFC and 60 crore for Maulana Azad Educational Foundation, the following schemes/measures have been proposed to be implemented in 2008-09:
*A multi-sectoral development plan for each of the 90 minority concentration districts will be drawn up at a cost of Rs. 3,780 crore. The allocation in 2008-09 will be Rs. 540 crore;
*A pre-matric scholarship scheme with an allocation of Rs. 80 crore next year;
*A provision of Rs. 45.45 crore has been made in 2008-09 for modernizing Madrasa education;
*256 branches of public sector banks have been opened this year until December 2007 in districts with substantial minority population. 288 more will be opened by March 2008 and many more in 2008-09.



TRIBUTE TO THE MAHATMA
‘He Died as the Kings do, Felled at the Height of their Powers
Ashis Nandy
On the 60th year of the murder of Mohandas Gandhi, we must recognise the ambivalence towards him in India’s modernising middle classes. Gandhi was not killed by British imperialism or Muslim fanatics, but by middle-class Hindu nationalists committed to conventional concepts of statecraft, progress and diplomacy. He was not killed by a lunatic, but by one who represented ‘normality’ and ‘sanity’.
The middle-class antipathy to Gandhi cuts across ideologies. During one of her earlier tenures, Mayawati precipitated a first-class public controversy by attacking Gandhi. But she was only joining a long line of distinguished critics of Gandhi, stretching from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the classical liberal turned Muslim nationalist, to Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena. New, aggressive critics of Gandhi are now being thrown up by the knights of globalisation in India.
The fear of Gandhi has been consistent in India and it has never been confined to the expensively educated Indians now flourishing in the global knowledge industry. This fear is the fear of ordinary Indian citizens suffering from that incurable disease called Indianness and suspicion of the open politics that empowers them and allows them to bring into public life their strange, alien categories. It was this fear that Godse took to logical conclusion on January 30, 1948. His was the third attempt on Gandhi’s life by the Hindu nationalists. They made no such attempt against any other key secular leader in India or against Muslim leaders seen as enemies of Hindus.
Godse thought he was executing Gandhi on behalf of a majority. Exactly as Mayawati and, before her, E M S Namboodiripad. However, once the movement to which Godse belonged began to falter as an ideological formation and succeed as a political party dreaming of capturing power, it began singing a different tune. The RSS included Gandhi’s name in the daily prayers of its branches and, in the 1980s, the BJP even adopted ‘Gandhian socialism’ as its official party ideology.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Leninists have always considered Gandhi a menace to progress, modernity and rationality. Some of the retired Stalinists have begun to show respect. The vendors of secular salvation now find that Gandhi has survived our times better than they have.
M N Roy, came to grudgingly appreciate Gandhi’s ability to touch the ordinary Indians despite his ‘irrational’ credo.
Indian Maoists in the late 1960s and early 70s were no less hostile to Gandhi. He with his toothless smile seemed to them a sly, scheming warhorse brainwashing rural India with his bogus ideology, whereas they, despite their direct communion with objective, scientific history and theoretical guidance from Beijing, had been exiled to urban India to survive as an ordinary terrorist outfit.
Within a decade though, from within the ranks of Indian Maoists emerged some who drew heavily, often creatively, upon Gandhi. Pushed to the margins of politics, with their dreams of an early revolution in tatters, the ageing lions began to ruminate over their failures and take Gandhi seriously. Two steps backward and one step forward, as the great helmsman might have said! The liberals have never found Gandhi digestible either. Shankaran Nair, an early Congress leader, said that Gandhi was against everything that the great sons of 19th century India stood for. Gokhale was even more forthright. He declared Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj to be “the work of a fool. Such honest estimates are now rare, because the liberals in the meanwhile have produced their own house-broken Gandhi - modern, nationalistic, progressive, statist and secular. There is nothing left of the politically incorrect, intellectual maverick who took on the imperious Enlightenment vision and refused to accept that its dominance was proof of its finality.
It is possible that Gandhi sensed his growing isolation in public life. The 200 years of western domination had done its job and the definition of normal politics had changed in India. Gandhi chose death. Robert Payne understands this when he says, “For Gandhi this death was a triumph. He died as the kings do, felled at the height of their powers”. And Sarojini Naidu was right when she said: “What is all this snivelling about? ...Would you rather he died of old age or indigestion?”
(Source: The Times of India, 30 January, 2008)

Charity for Communal Harmony
For the last 20 years, at the Munakkal Juma Masjid in Valancherry in Muslim-dominated Malappuram, have been doling out rice to the poor.
40 per cent beneficiaries are members of other communities. More than 10,000 families get their quota of 7-10 kg raw rice every fortnight. For many, this is the only way they get two-square meals a day.
To cope with ever-increasing number the mahal committees have issued ration cards, which will beat the ailing PDS any day.
“We are in touch with more than 150 local committees. We ask them to identify the needy. Once we get their approval, we issue cards instantly. Out of 10,000 families about 4,000 are Hindus,”.
Every fortnight, they get 800-1000 sacks of rice (around 6000-8000 kg). Some wealthy families ensure a regular supply and others give it as an offering,” Secretary P. Sharif, a teacher at Edayur UP School, explained. When offerings are generous, the committee makes weekly distribution.
“This mosque is said to be 900 years old. Many families vow to donate rice here after their wishes are fulfilled. We even get offerings from faraway places,” the president Puthukudi Abubaker said.
Many Hindu families have joined in ensuring uninterrupted supply of rice.
(Source: The Hindustan Times, 18 February, 2008)

SECULARISM
What is the National Dharma Shastra?
Ram Puniyani
Judiciary as the top arbiter of the disputes on all the issues is some times caught up in delivering judgments on things for which an individual judge may not be well equipped. The case in point is the famous ‘Hindutva as a way of life’ by Justice Varma of Supreme Court. Here the theological and political paraphernalia to opine on this concept were not clear. Many a term have been coined over a period of time which one does not find in the earlier texts so one resorts to overlap of terms.Hindu, Hinduism, and Hindutva. While passing a judgment on the word Hindutva, the judge took it as synonym of Hinduism and pasted on it the definition of Hinduism, where due to the lack of single cohesive one, it came to be called as a way of life. It is another matter that the word Hidutva came to be coined in the early twentieth century to express the composite politics of Hindu Mahsabha and later RSS based on race; (Aryan), language; (Sanskrit) and culture; (Brahmanic). This elaboration may not be the part of the training imparted for the judgeship.
The judgment by Justice Srivastava, (signed on August 30th 2007) Bhagvat Gita should be a national dharma shastra, Holy book, falls in another genre. Here the judge was giving his verdict on the dispute on the sale of temple land between two brothers. As an, add on to the basic verdict he was generous enough to share his personal wisdom as a part of the judgment. It was an unwarranted and unsolicited advice. His novel point was that as we have national animal, bird and what have you, we should have national Dharma Shastra and that should be Gita. He advised the nation that all citizens should follow the dharma propounded in it. The VHP immediately stood to lap this up and its vocal face, B.P.Singhal was quick to endorse the same by adding that the judgment has nothing to do with judges’ being Hindu, “He has justice in his mind, not as a Hindu, but as a judge. Leaders of other religious communities vehemently opposed this. Also the legal authorities and legal experts pointed out that a book from any single religion cannot qualify for being a national Holy book.
One recalls that in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition many an ideologues from Hindutva camp asserted that Ram is the national figure, far surpassing the Father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi. The assertion was that Lord Ram should be the basis of Indian identity.
Many a confusions are crossing our path and the nature of Hinduism, being a complex ensemble of different traditions does not help the maters in the least. As far as Gita is concerned it has been a source of inspiration for many Hindus who also participated in freedom movement. Its impact on the section of Hindus is humongous, and it does have a special place in the culture of the land. But neither is it the holy book of all the Hindus nor it can have a place in the scheme of things of followers of other religions. We have Vedas, Upanishads, Purans, Dharmshatras, and a whole plethora of holy books. While for Dayanand Sarswati Vedas were supreme, for Viekanand Vedanta, for Lokmanya Tilak and Vinoba Bhave Gita had a central place. For the followers of Hindu Mahasabha/ RSS, Manusmriti had a central place. Gandhi, the tallest Hindu in the freedom movement did not comment about the individual books as he gave preference to values.
Gita is essentially a sermon given by Lord Krishna to Khstriya warrior Arjun. Seeing all his relatives on the other side of the divide in war, Arjun gets pensive and wants to withdraw from the battle. Here the Lord building up on the Dharma as given in the Vedas, the system based on the Varna (hierarchical location in social order) of the individual, advices that if we do our duty as per our Varna it is not a sin, on the contrary running away from this Dharma, Varna based duties is a sin. So go ahead and engage in a battle even with those who are your kith and kin. Also one should not look at the results ofone’s action as it is dharma itself. The Lord also says that whenever this dhrama, Varna based social system, is in danger, he takes birth to reinstate it.
Now how many Hindu streams will hold on to this? Surely Nath, Siddha, Tantra and Bhakti tradition of Hinduism reject the varna based preaching. Buddhism and Jainism will look the other way as far as Varna dharma is concerned and they will have nothing to do with the violence and war. Gita’s base is Varnashram Dharma, unacceptable to the teachings of other religions as well. Similarly Lord Ram, despite all his virtues may not be acceptable to the tribe of Shambuk, or Bali or women, even with the mildest aspiration of equality, today.
This debate about certain holy books/ laws has been affecting many a nation states. In India many a Hindutva ideologues have been calling far the institution of laws based on our Hindu books, i.e. Manusmriti, Gita etc. and to do away with the Indian constitution.
Earlier during the process of the formulation of Indian constitution they felt this whole exercise is futile as ‘we’ already have the best of the laws in the form of Manu’s laws. It is another matter that the chairman of the drafting committee, Dr. Ambedkar had burnt the Manusmriti. Tragically some authorities even today pledge more to those laws than Indian Constitution. Not long ago after the pronouncement of K.Sudarshan of RSS, BJP led NDA wanted to review the Indian constitution.
India’s freedom movement sorted out many of these issues. This movement was based on values of pluralism and drew people from all the streams of society cutting across religion, caste and gender. It built up o the solid secular foundations where religion was the private matter of the individuals and politics was to be based on the principles of this World, the matters profane. And that’s what came to be enshrined in the values of Indian Constitution. If one is to use the language of religiosity one can affirm today that our National holy book is Indian Constitution, while people can revere and draw their personal inspiration from the plethora of Holy books. As on individual Judge Shrivastva has the liberty to follow this or that holy book but making it the national holy book, is an abuse of his position as a judge. It is heartening that barring few, those deliberately mixing religion in political life, all Indians steeped in the values of freedom movement will ignore this pronouncement which is derogatory to Indian values.
(Source: India Skeptic, December, 2007)

MINORITIES UPLIFT

Do not Neglect or Try to Absorb Minorities
PM Jawahar Lal Nehru’s Letter to Chief Ministers, 30 September, 1953
My colleague, the Home Minister, Dr. Katju is sending you separately a note on the reform of judicial administration in India. This note is a preliminary approach to this problem and we should like to have your comments on it before we consider it in detail. We shall also consult judicial authorities and others concerned. We do not, however, wish to go through any lengthy process of consultation. That would delay matters too much and we are anxious to go ahead. We shall make every effort to produce a Bill for Parliament next November.
I want to share with you a certain apprehension that is growing within me. I feel that in many ways the position relating to minority groups in India is deteriorating. Our Constitution is good and we do not make any distinction in our rules and regulations or laws. But, in effect, changes creep in because of administrative practices of officers. Often these changes are not deliberate. Sometime, they are so.
In the Services, generally speaking the representation of the minority communities is lessening. In some cases it is very poor indeed. In looking through Central Government figures, as well as some others, I am distressed to find that the position is very disadvantageous to them, chiefly to the Muslims and sometimes others also.
In our Defence Services, there are hardly any Muslims left.
In the vast Central Secretariat of India, there are very few Muslims. Probably the position is somewhat better in the provinces, but not much more so. What concerns me most is that there is no effort being made to improve this situation, which is likely to grow worse unless checked.
It is all very well for us to say that we shall not pay any attention to communal and like considerations in appointments. I am no lover of communalism and its works. But at the same time, we have to realize that in a vast and mixed country like India we must produce a sense of balance and of assurance of a square deal and future prospects in all parts of the country and in all communities of India. If the tendency is to upset any balance or to emphasize one aspect at the cost of another, the result is a lack of equilibrium and dissatisfaction and frustration among large groups. This is exactly what is happening and it is not a good thing. I think. We should make a very special effort to check this wrong tendency in so far as the Services are concerned.
The question is a wider one than the Services, although the Services are an important part in the texture of India. We have to create a sense of partnership in every group and individual in the country, a sense of being a full sharer in the benefits and opportunities that are offered. It is only then that we produce the right attitude of mind. Nothing seems to me so unbecoming as to preach loyalty to others, meaning by that word ‘loyalty’ that everyone should fall in step with us. This is very much like the approach of the Communists in some parts of the world and of the Americans in other parts of the world, each of whom demand uniformity and submission to their way of thinking and life. That brings conflict in the international sphere, and a like approach in the national sphere must inevitably lead to conflict also, apart from being intrinsically wrong.
We have always to remember India as a composite country, composite in many ways, in religion, in customs, in languages, in ways of life, etc. An attempt by the majority group to impose itself on others can only lead to inner conflicts, which are as bad as outer conflicts. The basic problem for us today in India is to build up a united India in the real and inner sense of the word, that is, psychological integration of our people. ...
The feeling of nationalism is an enlarging, and widening, experience for the individual or the nation. More especially, when a country is under foreign domination, nationalism is a strengthening and unifying force. But a stage arrives when it might well have a narrowing influence. Sometimes, as in Europe, it becomes aggressive and chauvinistic and wants to impose itself on other countries and other people. Every people suffer from the strange delusion that they are the elect and better than all others. When they becomes strong anf powerful, they try to impose themselves and their ways on others. In their attempt to do so, sometime or other, they overreach themselves, stumble and fall. That has been the fate of the intense nationalism of Germany and Japan.
But a more insidious form of nationalism is the narrowness of mind that it develops within a country, when a majority thinks itself as the entire nation and in its attempt ot absorb the minority actually separates them even more. We, in India, have to be particularly careful of this because of our tradition of caste and separatism. We have a tendency to fall into separate groups and to forget the large unity.

Minorities and the Services
PM Jawahar Lal Nehru’s Letter to Chief Ministers, 26 March, 1958
I am writing to you about a matter which has troubled me greatly for a long time. That is the position of minority communities in India. Our constitution lays down very good provisions and we are never tired of saying how well we deal with our minority communities.
But have we any reason to be pleased about this matter? We are apt to become complacent and pleased with ourselves, even though there might be little reason for this. The real test about a minority community is not how we feel about it, but how they feel. If they are not satisfied, then we have to search for some remedy for their malaise. In a democracy this is especially important. Democracy means rule by the majority, but it means something more, that is, full play and opportunity for the minorities. It means also that the minorities should have the sensation of having this full play and opportunity.
I realize that when the vast majority of our people in India lack so much, it is difficult to please the minorities. When we cannot satisfy the needs of the majority, it is not easy to meet the needs of the minority. Nevertheless, we must always remember that a minority community is a trust for the majority and constant thought should be given to its needs and complaints.
In a country like India, with its great variety, this is particularly necessary. We have also many hangovers from the past which it is difficult to forget or get over. We have also, let us be frank about it, communalism not only in the minority but very much so in the majority. The chief difference is that in the majority it puts on the garb of nationalism and democracy. But that is a false democracy.
The fact is that the minorities have a sense of grievance and that is enough to put us on our guard and to induce us to meet these grievances. I am not thinking in terms of elections and the like, but of much more basic issues.
Question of Language
There is the question of language which has agitated many of our people so much. It is a vital question and we have made laws and rules which should meet the situation. But how far do we implement these laws or carry out these rules? Everything depends on a host of petty officials who are often very far from being impartial or fair-minded. Therefore, it is important that those who sit in high positions should be vigilant and should impress upon the army of officials and others what our policy is and how it must be followed.
Recruitment to the Services
I shall not refer here to many matters which affect the minorities. I want to lay stress on one particular aspect. This relates to the Services. In our present conditions in India, recruitment to the Services plays a very important part in producing a sense of satisfaction or the reverse in the minds of the minority groups. I have sometimes called for figures of recruitment and these have been very unsatisfactory in so far as the minorities are concerned.
When I have asked for an explanation, I have been told that recruitment was made by examinations and it is nobody’s fault if people did not pass the tests. That is not a good enough explanation. Firstly, there is a tendency for the minority group not to appear for these examination in sufficient numbers because they imagine that things are weighted against them. Secondly, subjects and tests for the examinations also come in their way. For instance, in the Hindi-speaking areas especially, Hindi is a compulsory subject and the type of Hindi required is high-flown and difficult. Many people who know simple Hindi quite well, cannot easily pass that difficult test. This applies often to Muslims in the Hindi-speaking areas. They know the Urdu version of Hindi(?) and they learn Devanagri, etc., and try hard to improve their knowledge of the language. But this is no easy matter after a certain age. The result often is that while they are quite good in osther subjects, they fail in Hindi.
This is unfair and bad for the minority as well as for the state which loses sometimes good people and gets second-raters.
All India Examinations
Long ago, the Congress Working Committee, dealing with the question of all-India public examination, laid down a rule that while these examinations may in future be conducted in Hindi, English, or the regional language, a compulsory paper on Hindi should not be included as this would obviously be unfair to the non-Hindi speaking people. After the person has passed the examination, Hindi or any other regional language should be learnt and, if necessary, and examination could be held in it at a later stage. This was, I think a fair provision.
This should apply to the State examinations in every State and more especially in the Hindi-speaking areas. Thus, in a Hindi speaking area no person should fail in an examination because of inadequate knowledge of Hindi provided he has passed in other subjects. He may be called upon to improve his Hindi later and even to pass a test then. But the door of service should not be closed upon him because his knowledge of Hindi appears to be not up to mark.
Hindi becoming Atrificial
Further, of course, the question arises of the content of Hindi. I am not referring to the other regional languages, because I do not know enough about them, and perhaps this may apply to them also to some extent. Hindi, as used now, is becoming more and more and artificial language far removed from common speech. In our Parliament here questions are often answered in Hindi. Most Hindi-knowing people even do not understand these answers and there is frequently a hubbub in the House when these answers are read out. Something very radical has to be done about this if the growth of Hindi is not to be checked.
(Source: The Oxford India Nehru Independent years)


HUMAN RIGHTS
Hate Speech Case Against Taslima Nasreen
Legal Analysis according to Human Rights
Iqbal A. Ansari, Editor Human Rights Today Quarterly
Attack on Islam
Taslima Nasrin’s autobiography Dwikhandito says:
“If somebody, being inspired by Islam, follows the commandments of Allah and wants to be a true Muslim, then he easily may take oath from the Quran wherein it has been advised not to make friendship with the Jews and the Christians i.e. non-Muslims. If somebody does not follow this, Allah will throw him into the fire of the Hell. Not only this, (Quran says) wherever you get non-Muslims destroy them, kill them. Whenever you find a non-believer (who does not believe in Islam) cut his left arm and right leg with one strike and his right arm and left leg with another.”
This is sheer perversion of the teachings of the Quran which unambiguously declares that “there is no coercion in religion”. The Quran the principle of co-existence of multiple faiths by stating “for you your religion and for me my religion”.
The Quran categorically says that if God had willed it, all mankind would have followed the same religion. God therefore commanded Mohammad to exhort people to strive and compete for moral excellence. Religious pluralism thus enjoys the sanction of the Quran.
The general rule laid down by the Quran for conducting relations with non-Muslims is the very opposite of what has been stated by Taslima Nasrin.
The Quran says: “God doth not forbid you to deal with kindness and fairness toward those who have not made war upon you on account of your religion, or driven you forth from your homes; for God loveth those who act with fairness. Only doth God forbid you to make friends of those who, on account of your religion, have warred against you, and have driven you forth from your homes, and have aided those who drove you forth: and whoever makes friends of them are wrong doers.” (Ch. Lx, verses 8-9 Rodwell’s Translation). Whereas the Quran forbids only friendly relations with such enemies during hostilities, all civilized nations have laws even more strict forbidding any alliance with enemies at war including terrorists.
The true import of verse 33 of Chapter V wherein capital punishment or cutting off of hands and feet or exile from the land of those who wage war and commit disorder on earth is prescribed, can be understood by paying attention to the context of the story of the first murder of Abel by Cain, after narrating which the Quran lays down the principle of absolute sanctity of human life in the following words:.
What Taslima Nasrin has stated implies that it is the religious duty of all Muslims to kill or destroy every person who does not believe in Islam i.e. all Muslims are potential if not actual terrorists. It is a view not held even by President George Bush and his allies. The U.S. Commission on 9/11, for example, has clearly stated that recourse to terrorism adopted by Al-Qaida is a perversion of the teachings of Islam. She seems to be more Islamo-phobic than Christian and Jewish extremists and Hindu fascists, who are thriving on the image of Muslims as terrorists, and want to perpetuate this image.
Attack on Holy Quran
About Prophet Mohammad, Taslima says that “he killed people without any hesitation, bathed in the blood of people of other communities, ruthlessly killed the people of other religions, ordered his soldiers to loot the wealth of the Jews and he raped their women, thus he could hoist his victory-flag.” The following are her concluding remarks about the Prophet and Islam: “What could I say! This is the character of our Scoundrel Prophet. And there is the great fraud named Allah in his jobba. The billions of fools all over the world are keeping this Islam still alive. This is nothing but tricks of politics.”
Given the world-wide revival and rediscovery of ethno-religious identities by communities large and small including Muslims, and given the extensive and intensive hate campaigns against them, by their old and new adversaries, the nations of the world must fulfil their obligation to enact laws, if they are missing from their statute books, and strictly implement them in case they exist but are lying dormant, prohibiting all hate speech as provided for in proviso (3) of Article 19 and proviso (2) of Article 20 of the ICCPR which read as follows:
Adequate provisions for reasonable restrictions already exist in the Indian Constitution and law. Article 19(1) (2) subjects the right to freedom of speech and expression to restrictions imposed on grounds, among others, of ‘defamation’, ‘public order, decency or morality’ and ‘friendly relations with foreign States’.
Certain passages on pages 48 to 50 in Taslima Nasrin’s Dwikhandito attract the penal provisions under Ss 499, 500, 501, 502 of the IPC as they are extremely defamatory for the reputation of individual and collective dignity of all Muslims of the world. Given the state of inter-faith sensitivities in India, they also attract the provision of Ss 153 A and 153 B as, for example, in the Indian situation the characterization of Muslims as perpetually hostile to non-Muslims (i.e. Hindus etc.) is disruptive of communal harmony and of Muslims’ integration in the Indian society. Lastly her words like ‘ruthless murderer’, ‘rapist’ and ‘scoundrel’ for Prophet Mohammad and God as a fraud within Mohammad’s loose garment are maliciously and deliberately intended to outrage religious feelings of Muslims 295 A of the IPC is becomes eminently applicable.
All these provisions are applicable irrespective of Taslima Nasrin’s status as a non-citizen supplicant for asylum.
All those liberal Indians who want Taslima to enjoy absolute freedom, must take into consideration the fact that such indulgence has not been shown recently in India to the poor song writer who used the line in one song in a film wherein mochi (cobbler) is shown claiming to be a sonar (goldsmith), as offense was taken by champions of the lower castes, who found it derogatory for the entire caste. The line had to be expunged and exhibition of the film got suspended for some time. They must also recall how the TV programme Nikki Tonight was taken off the TV channel just because one participant in a discussion called Mahatma Gandhi “bastard bania”, whereas Taslima has used murderer and rapist. It also needs to be recalled how British Prime Minister had to apologise to the film actress Shilpa Shetty for a racist remrk in a TV programme.
Even if we accept that we have arrived at the stage of secularization and liberalism wherein nothing can be treated as sacred so to forbid its questioning and criticism, or even ridicule, our concern for the dignity of all persons and all communities under the ongoing celebration of diversity and multiculturism should make us respect every group’s cultural identity – of which religious beliefs and icons are an integral par.
Indian media generally is projecting her as the innocent victim of Muslim religious frenzy, who has done no wrong (most of them have not carefully and critically read Dwikhandito (pp. 48-50).
But the real question is whether Taslima is ready to do some introspection and correct her course.
(Source: The Milli Gazette, 16-31 January, 2008)


NATIONAL POLITICS-POVERTY
National Social Security System-Must for 800 million Poor &Vulnerable
N K Singh, former Member Planning Commission
The Ministry of Labour and employment, in September, 2007 poverty figures have improved: the percentage of poor people has come down from 26.1 per cent in 1999-2000 to 21.8 per cent in 2004-2005, based on the National Sample Survey’s (NSS) 61st Round of household consumer expenditure. The survey also found employment growing at a faster rate (2.95 per cent) than population (1.71 per cent) over the period.
Yet the recent report on ‘Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector’ presented to the government by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector in August gives an unnerving picture. It appears that the number of extremely poor, having a monthly per capita consumer expenditure of up to three-fourths of the official poverty line of Rs 8.90 per day has come down from 31 per cent to 21 per cent. But the number of ‘marginally poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ has gone up significantly — they constitute 77 per cent of the population, “a total of 836 million people” having an income roughly below $2 in PPP terms.
The ‘high-income’ group has also increased and totals 254 million, against 163 million in the early 90s. So has the ‘middle-income’ group.
In short, the new India that is receiving global attention and that’s at the centre of new surveys on prosperity is of less than 300 million people, and while extreme poverty may have come down, the number of marginally poor and economically vulnerable is a staggering proportion of our population. What is worse is that a high percentage of this group comprises Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes, OBCs, minorities, and Muslims.
The Commission believes public intervention is the answer and suggests two legislations — an Agricultural Workers Conditions of Work and Social Security Bill and a similar bill for non-agricultural Workers in the Unorganised Sector, defining their rights and entitlements. The Commission suggests that the entitlements — estimated outlay for the agricultural sector is Rs 19,400 crore and that for the unorganised sector Rs 12,950 crore — come from a proposed ‘National Social Security and Welfare Fund’. It says those below the poverty line needn’t make any contribution to the scheme; for the rest the schemes will be contributory.
But the recommendations have received a somewhat cavalier treatment from the nodal ministry. The bills introduced in Parliament are an emasculated version of the proposed drafts and leave out the creation of a fund. These proposals need wider public debate before rushing through with legislation devoid of meaningful content.
Second, India doesn’t have a social safety net for the unorganised sector. Do we need one with universal coverage? Is there a broad national consensus on its features, the implicit burden-sharing, as well as the fiscal choices involved?
Third, while there is no substitute to sustained high growth for poverty elimination, it is clear that growth alone may not ensure desired outcomes. Well-targeted public intervention is inescapable. But we need to integrate and optimise our multiple and often overlapping efforts.
Fourth, while reduction in extreme poverty is an index of our success, we cannot avoid revisiting issues of how poverty is defined. The Commission recognises that revisiting the official poverty line is the “first step towards recognition of the multi-dimensional nature of poverty” and that it is perhaps overdue. But it has done little to dwell further on the issue and invigorate the ongoing national debate on poverty definition and amelioration.
The XIth Five Year Plan. must frontally address the many complex issues related to poverty, including the need for a broad-based National Social Security System.
We can ill-afford to overlook the compelling needs of the 800 million people who remain poor and vulnerable even while we celebrate our prosperity.
(Source: The Indian Express, 30 September, 2007)


Draft Political Resolution for 19th CPI Congress (Extracts) Coimbature, March 29 to April 3, 2008
118. Muslim Minority: Since the presentation of the Sachar Committee report in Parliament in November 2006, there has been quite a lively debate on affirmative actions for the Muslim minority whose condition has been portrayed as worse than the already recognised marginalised section, in the matter of education and employment.
119.For the first time the minority community is concentrating on the real socio-economic issued faced by it. This may help in changing the agenda of the muslim community from emotional issues that have dominated in six decades of independence. The political emotionalism or emotional politics of the minority community has always been feeder for religious fundamentalism and communalism of both varieties. It is time that the CPI utilises this opportunity to bring the real socio-economic issues at the centre of the political agenda of the Muslim community.
120. In 2007-08 Budget the UPA government has announced exclusive scholarship to poor and deserving Muslims students increased allocation for the Minorities Development and Finance Corporation and Moulana Azad Education Foundation. But there is neither any mechanism to oversee the implementation of these schemes nor have the states shown any inclination, desire and efforts to utilise these funds. Though the NDC has not approved the sub plan for the Minorities, the UPA government has repeatedly announced that 15 per cent funds of all welfare schemes will be earmarked for the minorities. It must be legislated with reference to the provisions of Article 16 (4) of the Constitution of India.
121. State governments of Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu haveannounced sub quota for Muslim OBCs on the pattern of the measures taken by the Kerala government when CPI leader C. Achhuta Menon was the chief minister. If other states follow the pattern a large section of the minority community will get benefits, at least in the matter of education and employment. To end the discrimination against Muslims in the matter of government jobs, a mechanism needs to be devised at all recruiting levels to ensure that Muslims are recruited in proportion to their percentage among the eligible applicants.
122. The minorities, particularly the Muslims, look upon the Left, as the most steadfast champion of secularism and the rights of the minorities. Consistent anti-imperialist positions of the Left too has attracted the Muslims towards it. But all this evaporates when emotional issues rock the community.
123. It is high time that our comrades at the grass-root level take up the various socio-economic measures and assurances for implementation. This will help in changing the agenda of the minority community but will also help in expanding the secular democratic base.
124. The appalling condition of Muslims as detailed in Sachar Report compels serious attention. The revelations are very alarming. In certain respects they are worse than already recognized socially, economically and educationally backward sections. The Sachar Committee Report is a wake-up call. It has set an urgent agenda for all those who stand for secular democratic values and for all-round development of the country, who oppose discrimination in any form. The leadership of the Party in each state must study the situation as revealed. The socio-economic and educational backwardness of the Indian Muslims, even after sixty years of independence, exposes the communal propaganda of the Sangh Parivar that there has been Muslim appeasement.
125. Communists have to boldly champion the cause of the minorities. Test of a democratic system is how it treats its minorities. By perpetuating the socio-economic and educational backwardness among such a large section of our population the country can neither progress nor prosper.
126. CPI has continuously fought for the redressal of genuine grievances of the Muslim minority. It took initiatives to force the governments to establish institutions like Urdu Academies in several states, Minority Finance Corporation, Maulana Azad Foundation and NCPUL. But they were not provided enough funds. There was also lack of political will to make these institutions work for betterment of the targeted beneficiaries. Besides, there had been discrimination against the Muslims in the matter of government employment and their share in government’s welfare schemes.
127. All professional Muslim communities should be accorded all those benefits that are available to their professional counterparts in the majority community. Besides there should be no discrimination in recognizing the SCs and STs on the basis of religion.
128. As large segments of the Muslim community belong to various artisan communities like weavers government of India should announce special packages for their promotion. These artisans must get bank loans on soft terms.
129. Adequate funds must be allotted to already existing institutions for the upliftment of the Muslims.
130. More educational institutions, including for girls should be established in areas populated by Muslims. Liberal grants should be given to minority educational institutions, particularly upto secondary level. Technical education needs to be provided to the artisans including from among Muslims.
131. There should be no bias and discrimination on the basis of religion in the matter of government jobs and other benefits of the government’s welfare scheme.
132. The party has to mobilise secular opinion in the country for more affirmative actions. A beginning has been made in some states to set up a forum like INSAF to provide a platform to the minorities to promote rational thinking and to struggle for redressal of their genuine grievances. Similar initiative has to be taken in other states also.
On Kashmir
163. Jammu & Kashmir: To arrive at a solution of the vexed Kashmir problem, it is necessary to have talks with all political sections and parties in the state, in addition to a dialogue between India and Pakistan. Such a solution should meet the aspirations of people of all regions of J&K, including the Pak-occupied region, besides being acceptable to both India and Pakistan.
On External Relations
149. American support to Israel, which is an US outpost equipped with nuclear capabilities in all its moves against Palestine, its occupation of Iraq, its threat to military action in addition to sanctions against Iran, have turned the Middle East into a hotbed of war and instability. It is a matter of deep concern that India has become a major buyer of military hardware from Israel. This is helping Israel’s military-industrial leadership to carry on its aggressive designs against Palestine and other Middle East countries. This policy needs to be reviewed and changed.
150. India must maintain its traditional policy of support to the Palestinian people. The issue of Palestinian home land is a central issue at international level. The ongoing onslaught of Israeli forces against the Palestinian people not only jeopardise the possibilities of peaceful solution of the problem but also strengthen Islamic fundamentalism in the world.
153. In our immediate neighbourhood, there is great turmoil in Pakistan. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has been a set-back to the process of restoring democracy. Terrorist organisations, which have been nurtured by the ISI have come home to roost. It is to be hoped that the peace process and solution of outstanding issues between India and Pakistan would continue after elections in that country.
(Source: People’s Democracy January 27, 2008)

Congress’ Soft-Hindutva is Destroying Pluralism
Kuldip Nayar, Eminent Journalist
I do not know why the Congress changed its strategy not to take on the communalists in Gujarat. Party president Sonia Gandhi rightly characterised chief minister Narendra Modi and his supporters as maut ke saudagar (merchants of death). How else can they be described when they have fattened themselves on the sufferings of and denials to Muslims? After having effected an ethnic cleansing in Gujarat, Modi and the BJP continue to ostracise the Muslim community. It is boycotted economically and socially, and is treated in a manner that it seems as if the nine per cent Muslim population in the state does not exist. It is the best specimen of the BJP’s best governance. Up to a point, Sonia Gandhi stuck to her remark of maut ke saudagar and told the Election Commission of India that calling a spade a spade did not violate any code of election. But then she herself watered down her stand. Whoever advised her, did great harm to the party and its cause.
Even if Sonia Gandhi had not made the remark, Modi would have turned the polls into a Hindu-Muslim conflict. Communalism is the only field in which he and his kind excel. The person-to-person propaganda against Muslims had already begun in Gujarat. Sonia Gandhi’s observation gave Modi a chance to bring it out in the open a day or two earlier than the timing he had in view. The Congress needs no introspection. It needs courage to challenge the Hindutva forces within and outside the party. It is shirking a confrontation with the communal forces, without realising that at stake is our pluralistic society, the bedrock of our democratic polity.
In fact, BJP’s ideology of Hindutva is dividing the country into two communities, Hindus and Muslims, or maybe three, because the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a front organisation of the RSS, like the BJP, is also targeting the Christians. Communalism is bad enough, but worse is the BJP’s attack on the ethos of our freedom struggle. India’s independence was won on the resolve to keep it pluralistic and democratic. Pluralism is our proud heritage. The Congress is diluting this heritage. For improving chances in elections it has even embraced erstwhile BJP members. This has harmed the Congress most.
Election is the means, not an end in itself. Even if you may win elections without adhering to values, you are creating a society where there would be no elections one day. The value system is what distinguishes a democracy from other systems. There can be no letting down of the fight against communalism, because if it succeeds, fascism is bound to emerge.
I feel that Gujaratis need to be retrieved. Modi has given them a bad name in the country and abroad, as if they are a community of fanatics, totally opposed to pluralistic thinking. The turning point is going to be the re-thinking on the part of BJP’s allies. Except the Shiv Sena from Maharashtra, there does not seem to be any party agreeing to BJP’s Hindutva. They have, by and large, secular credentials. They cannot go to the voter with Modi who is the BJP’s mascot.
The Congress is still learning its lesson from Gujarat. Sonia Gandhi is a crowd-puller, but not a vote-catcher. No use re-emphasising that Rahul Gandhi is not making any impact. Yet the biggest drawback with the Congress is that - it does not come across as an unequivocal exponent of pluralism, as it should. The party gives the impression of being Hindutva’s soft version. The Congress should not compromise with the ideals. The BJP is understandably against secularism, but a diluted, half-hearted Congress can only do harm. It is sad that the party is not conscious of this.
(Source: The Asian Age, 05 January, 2008)

NATIONAL POLITICS-BJP
Old Wine in a New Bottle
Pankaj Vohra, Eminent Journalist
The three-day meeting of the BJP’s national executive ended as expected, without much headway. Several issues were raised but no solutions were offered. Neither the party’s prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani nor party chief Rajnath Singh gave any new direction to the party.
In fact, on some issues, they differed on their approaches. The BJP spoke about terrorism, but did not say how it should be tackled. The NDA’s track record on the issue was not very flattering — the attack on Parliament and some temples as well as the shameful Kandahar episode, all happened during its tenure.
In fact, some resolutions passed at this meet were similar to some earlier ones. No new ideas emerged from the meeting where everyone was busy praising Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi — more out of the fear that he could be the next icon of the party — rather than for bringing back a BJP government to power after serving a full term. There were some off-the-record remarks that tried to convey the impression that Modi was a strong administrator and would be one of the campaigners in the next parliamentary polls since the “prime ministerial nominee” has already been decided and the next polls will be held under Advani and Rajnath’s leadership.
Though the party discussed the plight of farmers and the weaker sections of society, there did not seem to be any representation from these sections at these discussions. Most of those who talked about these issues were from the middle-class, the BJP’s traditional votebank. Rajnath spoke about ‘Shining India’ when A.B. Vajpayee was the PM. This, however, is in variance with Advani’s earlier comment that the emergence of shining India had begun during the NDA regime.
The executive meet was marked by Vajpayee’s absence and the fact that he did not send any written message did become the talk in the political circles. Rajnath tried to cover up the matter by claiming that an oral message had been sent by the former PM. The meeting also saw a verbal duel between Rajnath who was trying to portray himself as a leader of the farmers’ community and Vinay Katiyar, former Bajrang Dal chief who was in the forefront of the Ayodhya movement. It was obvious that beneath the façade of unity, there were serious differences between individuals and issues.
After a long gap, an attempt was made to include Murli Manohar Joshi in the scheme of things. His inclusion could be a part of the undertaking given to the RSS by senior leaders that the core groups and decision-making processes would be made broadbased. There was also a feeble reference to his ‘Ekta Yatra’ and his unfurling of the Tricolour at the Lal Chowk in Srinagar on Republic Day in 1992. But that was made in reference to the unfurling of the flag at the same spot this year when conditions are more relaxed and not as dangerous as they were 16 years ago.
The national executive also discussed plans to include 33 per cent women in the hierarchy. One wonders how this will be achieved when there are only two women — Karuna Shukla and Kiran Ghai — among the party’s office-bearers. Sushma Swaraj is the spokesperson of the BJP parliamentary party and Kiran Maheshwari is the chief of the mahila wing. There are no women state presidents. Only Chandigarh, a Union Territory, recently got its first woman president. Like many other parties, the inclusion of 33 per cent women in the political process is a distant dream for the BJP because it has always found it difficult to find women candidates to contest polls. The party failed to offer any concrete plan or policies for women and mere lip service to the cause will not go down well with the voters.
There was also a call to rejuvenate the NDA ahead of the next polls so that it can win at least 360 seats. Realistically speaking, the NDA, which Vajpayee led in 1998 and 1999, has become fragmented down the years due to the policies pursued by the BJP-led government. First it was Ramvilas Paswan (Lok Jan Shakti Party) who parted company with the NDA, followed by Farooq Abdullah (National Conference), M. Karunanidhi (DMK), Om Prakash Chautala (Indian National Lok Dal) and some of the outfits from the North-east. As things stand today, Mamata Banerjee (Trinamul Congress) is also doing a flip-flop. Chandrababu Naidu (Telugu Desam Party), who supported the NDA from outside, has distanced himself and it is unlikely that Mulayam Singh Yadav (Samajwadi Party) or Sharad Pawar (NCP) would ever accept Advani as their leader. Bal Thackeray (Shiv Sena) has an agenda and so have many others. The socialist component within the NDA cannot be at all taken for granted and Advani knows this only too well.
The BJP — the core of the alliance — has to grow. Under Vajpayee — who was more acceptable than Advani — the BJP could never get past the 182-seat mark. Now when anti-incumbency threatens its governments in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Punjab, how will it replicate its earlier performance? The party can improve its position only if it comes up with concrete ideas and plans and not depend on rath yatras. Advani may be embarking on yet another yatra but he will have to offer something new and original to the voters, the majority of whom are below 35.
An ageing Advani, who is almost under a contract from the RSS, has a very tall order to accomplish. On the one hand, he has to put the BJP back on its Hindutva rails and on the other, carry the allies with him. His criticism regarding the Kremlinisation of politics needs to be seen in the light of the BJP’s own flirtations directly or indirectly with the Left parties in 1967, 1977 and 1989.
Undoubtedly, he is one of the most astute leaders of our times, but one has to realise that his best years are behind him. He has no Govindacharya to assist him any longer and Modi is getting ready to become the new face of the BJP. This will be Advani’s last shot at the office that has eluded him. But then he has to compete for the job with several others both within and outside the BJP. Between us.
(Source: The Hindustan Times, February 03, 2008)


Gujarat Model of Statecraft-A Humbug
Harish Khare, Editor, The Hindu
Ever since the BJP registered a famous victory in Gujarat in December 2007, the party — or at least a section of its leadership — has given the impression that Narendra Modi has invented the winning formula which can be and should be replicated outside Gujarat. A large number of retired (and frustrated) bureaucrats and “security experts” have expressed the view that Mr. Modi is the idea whose time has come. And, in his opening remarks at the national executive before the national council, the party president, Rajnath Singh, did manage to create the impression that he was asking the BJP’s other Chief Ministers to emulate Mr. Modi’s formula for beating the anti-incumbency syndrome.
It was no coincidence that the day the BJP national council began its deliberations the Gujarat government chose to put in full-page paid advertisements in newspapers, extolling the “Gujarat model,” based on three claims: a strong, honest and efficient leadership; transparent governance that nurtures innovations; and a vision to make development a people’s movement. It was Mr. Modi’s calling card. It was no coincidence that no national iconic leaders — Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani or Rajnath Singh — found a mention in the full-page advertisement. The “strong leader” does not like to share his space with other leaders, however tall.
It was also no coincidence that there was no particularly marked enthusiasm for the “Gujarat model” in the two neighbouring States of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, both ruled by the BJP, with comparatively young and clean Chief Ministers, enjoying comfortable legislative majorities. What these two Chief Ministers may not be able — and even may not like — to assert is the claim to “strong leadership,” with all its not-so-comforting connotations. Minus this “strong leadership” narrative, the claims of “performance” and “achievements” in the Modi model are so Gujarat-centric that no serious student or practitioner of governance, in and out of the BJP, would be taken in.
Nor can the BJP establishment be entirely pleased with the exclusive focus in the “Gujarat model” on an individual, however “strong,” to the total exclusion of the party’s organisational robust profile. It is because of this organisational edge that the BJP has been winning in Gujarat since 1989, much before Mr. Modi metamorphosed into a “strong leader.”
Perhaps it was no surprise that the BJP’s national council did not allow itself to be overwhelmed by the specious claims made in the name of the Gujarat model. Apart from the simple fact that such a romantic engagement would have necessarily distracted from L.K. Advani, Rajnath Singh and prompted serious misgiving among the National Democratic Alliance partners, without whose support and parliamentary numbers the BJP cannot possibly hope to make a comeback to the Delhi throne. And the misgivings, well-pronounced in private, converge on the anti-minorities appeal in the “Gujarat model.”
However, there is no mistaking that the “strong leader” was able to re-kindled the fears and prejudices of the majority of voters on the so-called “security” issues. This is a code word for minority-bashing. He also showed a remarkable virtuosity in manipulating the media discourse to his advantage; especially shrewd by enlisting the presumed secular faces of the national media, print and electronic, in giving respectability to his subtle-messaging.
Crudely put, the BJP leaders too see through the claims of the Gujarat model and have refused to take a call on whether to settle for the crude bottom-line of Mr. Modi’s appeal. The temptation is strong. After all, a cultivated anti-minority animosity is ingrained in the party’s ideological DNA.
Nor can there be any doubt about a nation-wide disquiet on the internal security front. This disquiet emanates mostly on account of the embarrassingly lacklustre leadership at the Union Home Ministry, as also on account of a perception that the Manmohan Singh government’s alliance politics will not help meet the challenge of the professional terrorist. Given its penchant for small-time cleverness, the BJP can be expected to repackage the anti-minority appeal as an alternative to the “weak” UPA.
Yet it would require a tremendous leap of faith to convince the country that the BJP leaders will somehow be able to cut through the unhealthy demands of unhelpful allies; having danced variously in the past to the discordant tunes of a Chandrababu Naidu, a Bal Thackeray, or a Jayalalithaa, the BJP leadership may find that its self-belief is not widely shared beyond the party faithfuls.
An objective need for a strong leadership notwithstanding, the country in its collective wisdom has come to appreciate that the Gujarat model of permanent exclusion of the minorities is a recipe for long-term trouble. In fact, the 2004 vote was a rejection of the BJP solution of an unending civil war, modelled on George W. Bush’s agenda. The country has repeatedly rejected the linkage — which is implicit in the Gujarat model — among Indian Muslims, Islam, Pakistan and terror.
What the country needs is a leadership that will help political parties and professional politicians to break out of our current debilitating partisanship. Every national or regional leader can be faulted on count of having a moral deficit and for lacking a strategic appetite. An unhealthy pre-occupation with winning the next electoral battle in this or that State keeps the so-called national leaders permanently locked in a state of compromise, timidity and accommodation. No leader is able to invoke our collective energies and nicer impulses; every leader is content to keep us a prisoner of our own negativities. And the Gujarat model is premised on the consolidation of our baser instincts.
(Source: The Hindu, 2 February, 2008)




NATIONAL POLITICS-CPI
The Party’s Over
Ashok Mitra, CPI(M) Leader, former Finance Minister, W. Bengal
Till death I would remain guilty to my conscience if I keep mum about the happenings in West Bengal over Nandigram. Those against whom I am speaking have been my comrades. The party whose leadership they are adorning has been the centre of my dreams and works for last sixty years.
The Governor has condemned, in no uncertain terms, the way in which those who were forced flee Nandigram to take shelter in Khejuri have been brought back.
The government had had enough scope to rehabilitate these devastated people in their own homes through political mediation or administrative arrangements during the last eleven months. The attempts through unilateral threatening, police action, indiscriminate firing had a tragic end. But there were still many avenues left to be explored. The government could have announced compensation for the family of dead and injured after public firing. Promises could have been made to take action against the police officers and personnel involved. Days passed, and the government did nothing.
Jayoti Basu had to take the initiative to call up Mamata Banerjee, sit and discuss with her a few conditions for resolution. The government was intimated of them. It did not proceed on them. The flame of tension was kept burning by a variety of organisations of different colour and class. The discontented whining one hears from the ruling party over this has no rationale whatsoever. The responsibility of unspoken suffering of those who spent eleven months as homeless rests squarely upon the shoulders of the government.
It is better to look further into the past. Nandigram was not after all the first blood. Singur episode had happened before that. All of a sudden peasants were told: leave the land, the masters would set up industries here. If it had learned minimum lessons from the protests, clashes and the blood letting of Singur, it remained as arrogant as ever. Even the top leaders of the ruling party have been saying there was no existence of the opposition parties in Nandigram. The government itself provided them with the opportunity to grow. The loyal followers of the ruling party declared revolt and those who were not with them were driven out. The onus of this rests on the government as well.
For eleven months complete silence and inactivity were carefully maintained, no political or administrative alternative was explored. And suddenly a new plot was hatched. As has been admitted by the home secretary, the police was instructed to remain inactive. Mercenaries were collected from across the state. Workers of the ruling party encircled Nandigram from all directions. No one was given the permission to penetrate the blockade.
And then the light brigade of the ruling party charged in, beat the wayward militants of Nandigram to a pulp and into submission. Those who had fled returned. However houses were torched anew, those who were inside Nandigram were butchered in a massive celebration of revenge. At presently, the Nandigram sky is reverberating with screams of the recent batch of refugees.
The problem is much more deep and serious. The repetition of mistakes has become a habit. It has only been a year and a half since the Left Front has won a massive mandate; and what examples of arrogance and stupidity during this brief span! Come what may, we shall have control over every nook and corner of the state. The cricket board will get its chief elected to our dictates. If our candidate loses we would say, “evil power has won, we will chase him out.” Not only the ordinary people, economic thinkers have offered diverse views over land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram. These different opinion holders are nothing but bookworms, what do they know about running a government! Consequently prominent economist and party comrade of the stature of Prabhat Patnaik is hounded. We are an all-knowing government: from cricket, poetry, theatre, films to the magic of land acquisition – we know everything. Neither should anyone lecture us on the pros and cons of the nuclear deal, for we have won 235 seats.
Inaptitude also. Decades have passed shouting hoarse about universal education, and still West Bengal is behind so many states. Money is flowing in from the centre for employment generation schemes, there is zero administrative initiative, the hungry and the unemployed go hungry and unemployed. The centre has arrangement for wheat and rice; these are not even lifted so that they could be sent to the middle and lower class through the ration system.
90% of its members have joined after 1977, 70% after 1991. They do not know the history of sacrifices of the party. To them ideological commitment to revolution and socialism is simply a fading folktale. As the new ideology is development, many of them are associated with the party in the search for personal development. They have come to take, not to give. They are learning different tricks so as to appropriate various privileges by aligning with the governing party. One efficient way to bag privileges is to flatter the masters. The party has turned into a wide open field of flatterers and court jesters. Moreover, there has been a rising dominance of ‘anti-socials’. They remain in the background and are called into duty at urgent times.
I feel sorry for Mr. Jyoti Basu. His current state of an imprisoned Shah Jahan saddens the heart deeply. State leadership does not heed the little advice he tries to offer from time to time. If his talks are a tad uncomfortable for the party they are not published in the party organs. Every Friday after the meeting of the party secretaries he comes down stairs and is made to say different things; what he says today may completely be the opposite of what he had said the last time.
But my real concern lies elsewhere. Mamata Banerjee is the safest insurance for the current ruling party. Urban, rural masses may have become discontented with the Left Front, but whenever they imagine Mamata Banerjee’s ascent to power, they vote for the Left Front.
But if it comes to a situation that the hubris and ineptitude of leaders of the Left Front government frustrate them so much that they begin to think there is no difference really, it’s all tweedledum and tweedledee, that will be a real disaster.
My ardent appeal to the central leadership of the party which I still love to think to be mine, please think it over, you shiver at the terror of Maoism, will that shivering compel you to throw West Bengal into the gutter of fascism?


GUJARAT ELECTION, 2007
A Team Beats B Team
Editorial, Hardnews
Modi proved everyone wrong and won the assembly elections 2007 resoundingly.
However, not everything has gone the Modi way. The Congress has got 42 per cent votes. In Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar (LK Advani’s constituency), the BJP polled 81,864 votes and won the seat. But 78,116 votes were polled against the BJP. Atleast in 33 constituencies the BJP has won with very close margins with the BSP playing spoiler in many places. The BJP lost decisively in central Gujarat. If anything it proves that, as usual, the Congress did not push too hard, and five crore Gujaratis are not with Modi as he repeatedly claims.
Did Modi win because communal politics still works in Gujarat, or was it over development issues? The truth lies in the way the Congress approached the elections.
The BJP dissidents decided on the Congress policy and their list of candidates. Traditional secular Congressmen were dropped in favour of those who still swore by Hindutva. The Congress leadership also responded to a strongly held view among the Hindu-minded political class that tickets should not be given to Muslims as they might antagonise the majority community. As a result, only six Muslims were given tickets. The Congress did not utter a word about the 2002 riots. They scrupulously chose to confine themselves to development issues. They left the task of criticising Modi to the BJP dissidents.
The Congress did not represent any alternative vision.
Congress managers did not realise that their positive outlook was cleverly orchestrated by those who wanted the elections to remain within the Hindutva framework. The ground was prepared for a Congress defeat.
The real truth lies in the inability of the Congress to stick to its core values and how it progressively deserted social constituencies — minorities, tribals and intermediate castes — that had sustained it politically in the past. The formidable social compact of Kshatriya, Harijan, adivasi, Muslim (KHAM) was allowed to wither away due.
The 2004 Lok Sabha elections provided ample evidence that the Congress’s traditional constituencies were coming back when the party attacked BJP and Modi’s conduct during the Gujarat killlings. It was ahead in 90 odd assembly constituencies in the state.
The Congress gave up on these policies to reposition itself as the ‘B team’ of the BJP. Not surprisingly, the voters of Gujarat decided to vote for the ‘A team’ rather than the charlatans. What was worse was the tendency of Congress managers to ensure that no one of any substance campaigned in Gujarat other than Sonia and Rahul Gandhi.
Lot of anger is welling up within the Congress against the caucus around the Congress president and how it is making the party effete.
What also worked for him was the fact that during his six year term, there was no drought or any other calamity like a cyclone or an earthquake.
What does Modi’s victory really mean for the Indian polity? All the secular parties would once again close ranks. For them Modi and a resurgent Hindutva presents a greater danger than the nuclear deal.
It represents a big opportunity for the Congress leadership to create and sustain a solid, principled and secular political-ideological platform based on genuine equity and social justice — even as Modi’s shadow begins to fall on Delhi. The fact that the Muslims, the poor and adivasis voted in big numbers for the Congress in Gujarat would reinforce such a view.
The Gujarat election results are a watershed in the sense that it might force the Congress to return to its core values. It may also contribute in forcing UPA allies to close ranks and take on the challenge of the BJP together.
(Source: Hardnews, January, 2008)


From Despair to Hope
Editorial, The Hindu, 31 January, 2008
Today with the leadership issue settled, and Gujarat retained by the new saffron hero, Narendra Modi, the BJP looks more united than in a long, long time. That the party is focussed on the 15th general election, and is in agenda-setting mode, is evident from its overture to the Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK and the decision to reserve 33 per cent of party posts for women. Does all this portend a National Democratic Alliance victory in 2009? Not by a long shot. The BJP has visibly recovered from its 2004 defeat but the NDA is far from looking the winner. Since 2002, as many as nine constituents have parted ways with the BJP and the NDA. This does not include the Telugu Desam Party, which was the NDA’s biggest outside prop, and the Trinamool Congress. Should BJP stalwarts introspect on this, they will discover a pattern: the deserters uniformly cited the party’s anti-Muslim policy as the reason for quitting the NDA. To be sure, politics has made strange bedfellows in the past, and the BJP’s dream of expanding the NDA may yet come to fruition. But many of the Hindutva party’s former allies need the Muslim vote more than they need the BJP. Indeed, there is a lesson in this for those who are in a hurry to anoint Mr. Modi as the BJP’s great white hope in General Election, 2009.


Lessons of Gujarat
Dr P.C. Alexander, MP
The Gujarat elections have thrown up several lessons which the leaders of political parties can hardly ignore. A few important among them deserve special mention here.
The first is the repudiation of the incumbency theory.
The fact is that, incumbency is never a handicap for a leader who provides clean and efficient administration. The Gujarat elections have clearly made the incumbency theory an exploded myth.
The second lesson of the Gujarat elections is that for elections, in a country like India, which is still struggling to cross the threshold of social and economic progress, development is the most potent argument for winning votes. Ultimately, the people are the best judges about development, and no argument can convince them except their own experience. From the Gujarat experience one can say that in future the report card from the people on development is going to be the most decisive factor in deciding as to who wins or loses in the elections.
A third lesson from the Gujarat elections is that people are inclined to repose their confidence in a leader who has proved to be capable of taking bold decisions in the interest of the state rather than in others who try to win votes by promising every good thing to everybody. Certain bold measures he had taken, like, for example, enforcing payment of arrears of electricity dues, would cost him the votes. But such action by Modi seems to have only enhanced his reputation for courage in taking unpopular decisions.
Again his decision to deny tickets to as many as 47 sitting MLAs based largely on their poor performance had showed him up as a leader who will not make compromises with sloth or inefficiency. The fact that 33 of the 47 new faces won the elections, has confirmed the people’s perception about him as a leader who can take sound and bold decisions. People will repose their trust more in persons with courage to take quick and sound decisions than in leaders with a “please all” policy.
The Gujarat elections have also served to deflate the exaggerated importance which has been attached to caste and sub-caste loyalties at the time of elections. This is not to say that caste is not a major factor in Indian elections. In a socially advanced state, caste and sub-caste loyalties will have only a limited influence in deciding the fortunes of the candidates.
Another important lesson is that people do not favour opportunistic party hopping by their leaders and that the parties which welcome such persons to their fold will suffer by such decisions rather than be benefited from them. If these people were criminals and vicious communalists when they were with Modi, a quick change from saffron to khadi could not have washed away their guilt. The ordinary people saw this action as opportunistic endorsement of defections without any consideration for principles and ideology and this had affected the credibility of these candidates and also of the Congress as champions of secularism. The people cannot any longer be expected to follow blindly their leaders wherever they choose to go.
(Source: Bharatiya Pragna, January, 2008)


Modi’s Claims of Achievement
Gujarat Govt. Advertisement
Social Sector Achievements
Ø Attained nearly cent percent enrolment in primary school
Ø Reduce dropout rate at primary level from 49% to 3% in five years.
Ø Recruited 1 lakh teachers in schools
Ø Open 2000 spoken English
Ø Enabled safe deliveries at private clinics paid for by the state government through ‘Chiranjeevi Scheme’ which ensured 1.32 lakhs safe deliveries and averted death of 5,000 new born babies. The scheme received ‘Asian Innovations Award 2006’
Ø Improved sex ratio from 802 to 870 in five years due to ‘Beti Bachao Andolan’
Ø All villages are connected through state transport buses running twice a day.
Ø Provided Rs. 1 lakh Insurance cover for over 3 lakh differently abled persons
Ø Reduced the number of pending cases in the state’s courts by 25%, through innovative initiatives in judicial system like the country’s first evening court
Governance
Ø Best state in the implementation of poverty alleviation schemes under the 20 point programme for five years in row.
Ø Best e-governed state in the country the last three years in a row.
Ø No communal riots in five years.
Ø No man-days lost.
Ø Not a single incident of terror in five years.
Economic Achievements
Ø Attracted 54% of jobs generated in the country, in five years, in the private sector.
Ø Increased agricultural income Rs. 34, 000 crores in five years from Rs. 9,000 crores
Ø Average annual growth rate of 10.6% against the national average of 7.6%
Ø Rs. 6.6 lakh crores worth investments in 2006-07, 26% of total investment in India
Ø Only state to reduce financial deficit and no overdraft
Ø Discovered enormous gas and crude oil reserves worth Rs. 2 lakh crores in the Krishna-Godavari Basin
Infrastructure Achievements
Ø Spent Rs. 13, 000 crores on Narmada Project in five years, against Rs. 10,000 crores since beginning
Ø Established 11 universities, including a petroleum university, technical university
Ø Provided drinking water to 4,698 village with perennial water problem, thereby improving quality of life for women
Ø Constructed over 3 lakh water conservation structures (Check, dams, Khet, talavadis, Bori bandhs), thereby improving water table levels and agricultural production
Ø Provided 24 hours of uninterrupted three-phase power supply under Jyotigram Scheme in all 18,000 villages
Ø Increased power generation by 2,456 MW in five years
Ø Commissioned the world’s largest LNG Terminal at Dahej and Hazira


COMMUNAL VIOLENCE
V.N. Rai’s Study on Prejudiced Perceptions of Police Cause of Biased Action Against Muslims in Riots
Edited by Iqbql A. Ansari
The following findings are based on Shri V.N. Rai’s dissertation on “Perception of Police Neutrality During the Communal Riots by Different Strata of Society”. His report on ‘Combating Communal Conflicts: Perception of Police Neutrality During Hindu-Muslim Riots in India’ published by National Academy of Administration Mussoorie, 1996, makes the following observations:
The percentage of Hindu riot victims who would treat the police as friend is 71.5% while the corresponding figure among Muslims is 1.5 % Hindu riot victims treating the police as enemy is 6.5 %, and among Muslim riot victims 97 % would consider the police as enemy. 22% of Hindus and 1.5 % Muslims are neutral to police.
Given the above perception 16 % of Muslims and 93 % of Hindus would seek help from police during riots.
The study is mainly devoted to finding the reasons behind this widely discrepant perception on police during riots among Hindus and Muslims. He comes to the conclusion that it is the biased way that the police has conducted itself during all stages of riots over a period – intelligence, firing, arrests, curfew, searches, reporting, investigations and prosecutions that has caused Muslims to treat the police as the enemy. The main finding of the study are the following:
(a) Police behave partially during most riots. In all the riots discussed in this study, they did not act as a neutral law enforcement agency but more as a “Hindu” force.
(b) Perceptible discrimination was visible in the use of force, preventive arrests, enforcement of curfew, treatment to detained persons at police stations, reporting of facts and investigation, detection and prosecution of cases registered during riots. Muslims suffered in all of the above mentioned areas.
(c) The perception by Hindus and Muslim of the police during communal strife is diametrically opposed. Hindus viewed policemen as their friends and protectors during communal riots. Muslims, by and large, consider policemen their enemies in similar situations.
(d) An average policeman does not shed his prejudices and predetermined beliefs at the time of his entry into the force, and this is reflected in his bias against Muslims during communal violence.
(e) The expectations of the Indian society from an average policeman is communal. The policeman is believed to be a protector of the interests of his community.
(f) The inimical relationship between police and Muslims make them over-react in a confrontation-like situation.
The first thing the study does is to demythologize the widely held notion of the Muslims starting the riots. On the basis of case studies of riots Mr. Rai makes the following observations:
In order to guard against external criticism and to preserve their (Hindu) self-righteousness, the attack had to be seen as being made by the Muslims. It is as if the weaker person is pushed into a corner by the stronger one forcing him to raise his hand so that he may be suitably punished for his “attack”. Before and after the punishment is meted a suitable hue and cry can be made about the fact that because the persons concerned is naturally wicked and violent, he is bound to attract fists.
The riot of Jamshedpur (1979) and Banaras (1977) are two examples among the many of how a communalized situation is created in which Muslims are manoeuverd into apparently throwing the first stone:
On both occasions precisionists were armed and raised provocative slogans deviating from prescribed route, stopping at sensitive points like mosques.
These examples help us to understand that a riot does not readily begin at the point when violence starts. The creation of tension starts much before this point is reached…….. The background of a riot should be examined before holding any community or person responsible for starting it.
Mr. Rai traces the reasons behind the discriminatory behaviour of the police against Muslims manifested during riots in intelligence gathering, firing, imposition of curfew, arrests and searches as well as in reporting of facts, investigation and prosecution to his psychological make up as an average Hindu. Average policeman, according to the study, believes that Muslims are generally cruel and violent by nature, and the they were untrustworthy, anti-national and easily influenced by fanatical leadership, who could indulge in rioting at the slightest provocation. Policemen generally believed that Muslims initiated riots. With these assumptions they sincerely believe that controlling a riot required crushing the mischief mongering Muslims. To illustrate how deeply entrenched stereotyped perceptions were responsible for police savagery against Muslims. Mr. V.N. Rai refers to the case of “horrifying non-professionalism of police behavior” in Hashimpura (Meerut) during 1987 riots. Mr. Rai observes that when, in spite of heavy deployment of police, P.A.C. and even the army, riots could not be controlled in Meerut, they got “fully convinced that the riots could be ended only by teaching Muslims a lesson. Consequently one section of the P.A.C. picked up more than two dozen Muslims from a locality known as Hashimpura on 22nd of May where house to house searches were going on and killed them at two places in Ghaziabad after transporting them thrice in one of their trucks”. At that time Mr. Rai was S.P at Ghaziabad. He had the opportunity to talk a large number of policemen deployed in Meerut during his tenure (1985-88) as well as during the course of the present study, which yielded the following frame of mind of the police:
“Most of the policemen posted in Meerut in 1989 though that the riots were the result of Muslim mischiefmakers. They were also of the opinion that Meerut had become a mini-Pakistan because of the stubbornness of the Muslims and that it was necessary to teach them a lesson in order to establish permanent peace in Meerut. They were badly affected by rumours which suggested that Hindus in Meerul were totally vulnerable to Muslims’ attacks. Their belief that Muslims of Meerut deserved a suitable lesson resulted in Hashimpura.”
Mr. Rai also makes the point that not only during the course of riots the policemen have prejudiced and distorted ideas and information about the causes, course and events of riots demonizing Muslims, but even much after the riots “when it has been established that Muslims suffered most, they had many arguments to prove that Muslims were responsible for riots”. Mr. Rai says that “while talking to some of the policemen who were posted in Bhagalpur (1989) and Bombay (1992-93) I was amazed to find that the perception of Muslims being violent and cruel was so deeply inbuilt in their psyche that even after admitting the disproportionate destruction of Muslim life and property, they had many “reasons” to deny the suggestion that “naturally non-violent and pious Hindus” were in any way responsible for the damage to Muslims”.
The study makes the following revealing observation in this regard:
“The most interesting example of the hostile relationship between Muslims and the Police can be found in the behaviour of a police party entering a Muslim locality during communal tensions. The briefing, preparation and weaponry of this party intending to enter a Muslim locality for arrests or searches or even normal patrolling is such that it appears that it is going to enter enemy territory. I have seen many such groups and always found them comprised of people full of apprehensions and fears. Their behavior is not without reason. Alertness on their part is necessary as they might be attacked at any time. Who is responsible for this feeling of distrust and enmity? Perhaps the seeds are to be found in the terms “we” and “they”, used by police officials for Hindus and Muslims, during their conferences organized to devise ways and means to deal with a communal situation.”
Police biases get reflected, according to the study, at all stages of tension and violence. Preparation of list of communal agitators and incitors in usually taken to mean list of Muslim agitators. It is such biased perceptions causing damage to police professionalism which, Mr. Rai holds, was responsible for the destruction of Babri Mosque.
Mr. V. N. Rai’s study report makes four-fold recommendations for effecting improvement in the situation. They are: 1. Representation of Minorities in the Police 2. Training interventions 3. The concept of Accountability 4. Participation of the People.
Regarding representation of minorities in the police the study presents the following figures:
It is an unfortunate fact that after Independence, the representation of the minorities in the forces has consistently declined.
1. The inadequate representation or, rather, complete absence of minorities in functional police groups, leads to the total lack of understanding of their point of view and, in many cases, to a hostile reaction to their behavior by the police.
The study suggests increased representation of minorities, especially Muslims, in the police either through reservation or by developing some inhouse methodologies to achieve the target. The reasons of providing adequate representation to minorities are given in the following words:
“First, by recruiting more Muslims, Christians and Sikhs in the police, we will provide better opportunities to members of various religious groups to understand and appreciate each other’s point of view better. Policemen belonging to different religious living in one barrack, dining together in one langar, playing on one ground or performing the same duties together will certainly develop a sense of comradeship or spirit-de-corps which will help them shed unfounded prejudices and beliefs regarding each other. Mere co-existence will help them to appreciate one other’s religions better. Representation of minorities in the functional police groups (section, platoon or company) will have a dramatic impact on their reaction in a riot situation. A functional police group, having a fair sprinkling of various beliefs, cannot show those biases in its actions like arrests, use of force or treatment of detained persons, which we have found in the course of this study. The experiments of providing representation to the ethnic and racial minorities have been tried successfully in U.S.A and U.K. The increase in the numbers of Black Asian and Irish people has helped the average white U.S or U.K. policeman get rid of many of his biases and improve his conduct while dealing with these minorities.”
2. Training interventions: The study laments the fact that policemen and officers are not made to undergo periodic training after they pass out of their initial training courses. It emphasizes the importance of regular training programmes for professional competence as well as for shedding of distorted perceptions about other communities based on prejudices. The study strongly recommends that after every five to seven years and before every promotion police officers should undergo a training course, which should include components on understanding of different religions, and on scientific study of ethnic conflicts. The course should include training in better handling of communal riots with detailed analysis of police failures in some earlier riots. For senior level police officers the study suggests case studies of riots like Ahmedabad (1969), Bhiwandi (1970), Bhagalpur (1989) or demolition of Babri Mosque (1992) all of which came in for near unanimous criticism and condemnation for the role of the police. It also recommends study of police methods of dealing with ethnic and racial riots in countries like the U.K and U.S.A.
3. Discussing the prime importance of the accountability of senior level functionaries of police and magistracy for maintaining communal peace so specifically recommended by the National Integration Council, the study laments lack of any serious action against erring officials. It gives two examples of how guilty officials escape punishment. In Bhagalpur riots of 1989, 116 Muslims were butchered at Logain. The district administration, however, kept denying this incident for more than a month. The senior most officer punished for the incident was an A.S. I No senior officer got any punishment. Similarly the ghastly incident of Hashimpura, Meerut (1987) was not considered serious enough to attract any punishment for senior officers.
The study suggests that some statutory provisions need to be made to hold District Magistrate or Superintendent of Police responsible for mishandling of a communal situation.
4. The study also suggests institutionalization of people’s participation in preventing and controlling communal riots as earlier recommended by the National Integration Council (1986).
Another Study Reveals Prejudiced Perceptions of the Police Against Muslims
The results of the field study made by Mr. V. N. Rai are exactly the same as that of the earlier study done by the Minorities Commission in 1983. Its findings are given below:
The perceptions of a number of magistrates and senior police officers about riots is as follows:-
(a) Riots take place in such districts where Muslims are either in a majority or they constitute a sizeable minority.
(b) Muslims are excitable and irrational people who are guide by their religious instincts. Hindus, on the other hand, are law abiding and cooperate with the police in controlling communal violence.
(c) Riots are started by the Muslims and they invariably take the first opportunity to strike at the other community and at the police.
(d) In all other previous riots in the country before the current riot, Muslims took the upper hand which resulted in huge loss to the Hindu community. Therefore, there is moral justification if in the current riot casualties on the Muslims side are heavier.
(e) State Government attaches a great deal of importance to ensuring quick control of rioting. Since Muslims are aggressive, therefore, in order to control violence, it is necessary that Muslims mobs must be taught a lesson through arrests, firing and third degree methods.
(f) Hindu casualties are as a result of Muslim mob action, whereas Muslim casualties are due to isolated stray incidents. Because of this difference in the nature of aggression by the tow communities, more Muslims have to be arrested. Very little evidence is possible to collect regarding Hindu aggression and this explains why the number of Hindus arrested for substantive offences is less.
* Mr. V. N. Rai, a senior I.P.S. officer of the U.P. cadre, Additional Director General, Police, U.P.
(Source: Human Rights Today, July-September, 2007)


TERRORISM

Deoband Declaration
25 February, 2008 (Extracts)
“The present situation of the country demands joint and constant efforts to denounce terrorism,” the declaration said, “and (to denounce) the biased and discriminatory attitude of the government against the Muslim community.”
The declaration cited Naxalites to reinforce its point: “The situation has worsened as every Indian Muslim, particularly those associated with madarsas are gripped by the fear of being framed by the police any time while Naxalites (are) attacking police stations, looting arms and ammunition (and) roaming freely with no effective and preventive steps being taken by the government to check their acts of terrorism.”
“This partial attitude of the government has put a big question mark on the secular character of the government posing a great threat to the country. The conference strongly condemns and expresses its deep concern over the discriminatory attitude of government officials, and declares its continuous joint struggle for the domination of law,justice and secularism,”
The Conference urges the government to curb activities of those agencies “maligning” madarsas and Muslims, the declaration calls for freeing “innocent youths” and stern action against “officers who framed them.”
(Souce: The Indian Express, 25 February, 2008)



Declaration of National Conference of Madrasas against Terrorism Deoband, 25 February, 2008 & Comments of National Press, (Extracts)
Faith Forward
The Hindustan Times, 27 February, 2008
It has come as a breath of much-needed fresh air that the influential Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband, long known for its hardline stand, has come out in no uncertain terms against the outrages being committed in the name of Islam. Its rector Maulana Marghoobur Rahman has said, “Killing of innocents is not compatible with Islam. This is the first time that a religious institution has so strongly condemned violence in the name of Islam. …
This will prove a shot in the arm for moderate Muslims not just in India but in the region who have been uncomfortable with the new jehadi Islam that has been promoted by certain sections. So far, the Indian Muslim community has been reactive in its public position …. Now the Deobandis have broken that mould and assumed a proactive role. This will not only take the wind out of the sails of those within the community who have chosen to interpret Islam to serve their own nefarious ends, but also fundamentalists within the Hindu fold who have always been quick to equate Islam with terror. ...

Message From Deoband
The Times of India, 27 Feb.
The Darul Uloom Deoband, is said to have inspired the Taliban ideology.
It’s heartening, therefore, that the same seminary convened an anti-terrorism conference that was well attended by scholars and top clerics from different Islamic schools of thought.
It has also defined terrorism as any action that hurts innocent individuals.
… They may be responding to dismay among Indian Muslims to the hijacking of Islamic tenets by a small group of ideological extremists and the consequent backlash across the world which targets Muslims. Indian Muslims are by and large moderate.
It’s no surprise that such a large body of Muslim scholars getting together to denounce terrorism should have happened in India.
It’s also significant that Bashir-ud-din, the grand mufti of Kashmir, has supported the Deoband declaration. ….
Deoband reverberates beyond South Asia and its new message could well influence how the Muslim world looks at terrorism… There is room for debate on whether the Deoband declaration amounts to a fatwa against terror or not.
But whatever its status, the message from Deoband is important. …

After the Fatwa
The Indian Express, 27 February, 2008
With his dark essay on Islamism, The Age of Horrorism, novelist Martin Amis horrified many liberals and voiced the corrosive, culturally blinkered argument that casts all Islam as a totalitarian cult …. Islam is totalist; it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma — the community of believers.
Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means ‘submission’ — the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.”
The Darul Uloom’s statement opposes exactly this brand of illogic, condemning terrorism as well as the easy conflation of Islam and terrorist activity. The Deoband seminary is heavy with history and association…. Though Deoband movements stress utter adherence to the textual standards set by Hanafi tradition and are “illiberal” in that sense, they are vastly different from what Amis tars as “Islamist”. As Barbara Metcalfe has written, politics is an empty box for Deobandi movements, filled expediently with what is best in a given situation — and they work best in secular regimes that give them the autonomy to prescribe “correct practice”. And this statement fits right into their policy of pragmatic response, protecting their flock and highlighting Islam’s concept of peace, in this current climate of suspicion and hostility, and the spiralling alienation of Muslims worldwide.
Muslim scholars have attempted to engage with and accommodate democratic values within the framework of Islamic law…..
Deoband has called upon itself a standard of engagement with modern democracy it will have to strive to match.

HINDU TERRORISM
First Arrest of Sangh Parivar Activists for Bomb Blasts in Tamil Nadu
M.H. Jawahirullah
The cat is finally out of the bag. In numerous bomb blasts that have taken place in the country, the investigating agencies as well as the media swoop on certain Muslim organisations and brand them as terrorists, who perpetrated the ghastly crime.
Irrespective of whether the crime has taken place in a masjid or mandir or Market, the same stereotype stories are flashed. However the Tamilnadu Police have turned the table and their investigation have pointed the real perpetrators. It has arrested 3 Sangh Parivar activists for triggering blasts in the RSS office at Tenkasi on 24 January, 2008.
Tenkasi is a busy town in Tirunelveli district of Tamilnadu. Hindus belonging to various castes as well as Muslims and Christians have been living here in harmony from time immemorial. Tenkasi means Kasi of South. It has a famous temple called Kasi Viswanathar Temple. Local Sangh Parivar outfit Hindu Munnani has been long objecting to the renovation of the Bazaar Masjid situated very near to the temple, perfect communal but harmony has prevailed.
The Sangh parivar elements have been trying to communally polarise this town for a long time. However their attempts have been futile. But the killing of Kumara Pandian, an activist of Hindu Munnani in December 2006 disturbed the peaceful atmosphere. Kumara Pandian was murdered by group of Muslim gangsters out of personal animosity. However the Sangh Parivar elements targeted leading Muslim businessmen as well as Tamilnadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam (TMMK) for during behind the murder. On March 2, 2007, Mohideen Sait Khan the then District President of TMMK was brutally attacked by Hindu Munnani activists. He suffered grievous injuries but survived. The police arrested some Hindu Munnani activists in this case.
On 14th August (just a day before the Independence Day Celebrations) 6 persons (3 Hindus and 3 Muslims) were hacked to death in a fight between two groups. These two groups comprised persons who were charged for the Murder of Kumara Pandian and assault on Sait Khan and were out on bail. Police clamped down on both sides and arrested a number of persons from both communities.
In the aftermath of these incidents, when Tenkasi was limping back to normalcy just two days before the Republic day, on 24th January 2008, there were bomb blasts in the RSS office in Tenkasi and in a nearby Bus Stand. The Sangh Parivar organised demonstrations in various parts of the state, demanding the arrest of Muslim ‘terrorist’. However the Tamilnadu Police did not budge like their counterparts in other states. A Special Investigation team led by Mr. Kannappan, DIG, Tirunelveli Range made a thorough investigation and have arrested so far 3 persons S Ravi Pandian (42), a cable TV operator, S Kumar (28), an auto driver, both from Tenkasi, and V Narayana Sharma (26) of Sencottai, all Sangh Parivar activists. The last name accused had assembled 14 pipe bombs in the office of Ravi Pandian.
Explosive experts were deployed to probe the blasts at the RSS office and the bus-stand. It has been found that low-intensity ‘pipe’ bombs had been placed in these areas, a police official told PTI.
According to Sanjeev Kumar, IG, South Zone, the bomb blast inside the new bus stand was planned to divert the police investigation. DIG of Police Kannappan said the trio tested the capacity of the bombs at Papanasam before executing the plan. Since the bombs contained substances like ammonium nitrate, electric detonators, batteries and timer devices, the explosion was possible within 30 to 40 seconds.
The Investigation is still going on. The Police said 14 pipe bombs were assembled and the operations began from July last year. The arrested persons have confessed that the trio executed the plan to create a Communal divide thereby pave way for a backlash and generate sympathy for the family of the four deceased. They have also confessed that in the past they could not generate support from the Hindu community in Tenkasi and thought this blast would give the right impact.
With the Lok Sabha elections approaching, it is reliably learnt that Sangh Parivar outfits want to repeat Coimbatore in Tenkasi to get sympathy 2009 votes. The BJP which contested the last Assembly elections alone drew a blank. It is desperate to mobilise the Hindu votes. Tamilnadu Police have exposed their nefarious intentions.
The Tirunelveli Police have also indicated that the explosives used in Tenkasi are similar those used in the Makkah Masjid blast at Hyderabad. They have also indicated that these blasts would not have been triggered without the knowledge of the top brass of Sangh Parivar in Tamilnadu.
In the light of the revelations of the Tamilnadu Police, the CBI should reinvestigate the Makkah Masjid Blasts and other Blasts which took place in different parts of the country. In all these blasts, there is a general feeling that the investigating agencies have mechanically blamed Muslim outfits and booked innocent persons instead of the real accused.
(Writer is the president of TMMK.)
(Source: Radiance Viewsweekly, 17-23 February, 2008)


GUJARAT GENOCIDE
Can They kill the Mockingbirds of Gujarat? Can they
Snuff out Music & Poetry?
Jawed Naqvi
Mockingbirds are symbolise both gay abandon and innate mirth. The unfortunate state of Gujarat has had its share of mockingbirds.
Gujarat is after all where Rasoolan Bai, Ustaad Fayyaz Khan, Wali Dakhani and Ehsan Jaafri had sung paeans to syncretic icons like Krishna and Radha, Buddha and Meera. This is where Begum Akhtar gave her last concert and died clasping the harmonium amid a multitude of stunned listeners.
As with India’s other provinces, where music and art flourished under feudal patronage, the royal house of Baroda, now Vadodra, favoured the very best from across the country. Ustaad Karim Khan founded the Kirana Gharana of vocal musicians after coming here from Punjab. He married a Hindu princess of Baroda and settled down in Miraj where they produced the legendary singers Hirabai Barodekar, Saraswati Rane and Suresh Babu Mane.
This is a tribute to just four of Gujarat’s countless mockingbirds that were humiliated or killed by the people they sang for. People have tried to explain the Gujarat tragedy 2002 in the context of provocation and reaction. This is utter nonsense. The same people had earlier justified the demolition of the 16th century mosque in Ayodhya in similar terms.
The relevant question is: why did a mob burn down the house of
Rasoolan Bai in Ahmedabad in 1969? There was no Godhra then for an excuse. So what could be the provocation for anyone to drive out an extremely gifted and popular Muslim singer from her adopted home in Gujarat? After her trauma, Naina Devi, herself a Hindu princess and a much beloved patron saint of music and musicians, nursed Rasoolan Bai to health, but she never sang again.
All the rioters and their neighbours can still hear Rasoolan’s thumri in Raag Bhairavi on the web. Would you believe what the words are? “Kaanha, visbhari basiya sunaai gaile na” (O Krishna, please do not torment me any more with your mesmeric flute).“Ab naa baajaao Shyaam/ bansuriyaa naa baajaao Shyaam/ (e rii) vyaakul bhaayii brajabaalaa/ bansuriyaa naa baajaao Shyaam/ nit merii galiin men aayo naa/ aayo to chhup ke rahiyo/ bansii kii terii sunaaiyo naa” (Play your flute not Shyaam/ It perplexes my little heart/ Play not your flute Shyaam/ Nor come round my street/ Come not, keep it down/ Play not your flute Shyaam).
In the 2002 violence, the mob in Ahmedabad destroyed the several centuries old grave of Wali Dakhani. The state government did one better. It flattened the grave to build a metalled road over it. Who was Wali Dakhani and why was his memory so viciously abused? The 17th century poet loved Gujarat and was an advocate of Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis. Here’s a small sample from this mockingbird’s otherwise large repertoire, reflecting the earliest form of Urdu poetry.
“Kuuchaa-e-yaa ‘ain Kaasii hai/ Jogii-e-dil vahaan kaa baasii hai/ Pii ke bairaag kii udaasii suun/ Dil pe mere sadaa udaasii hai/ Zulf terii hai mauj Jamnaa kii/ Til nazik uske jyun sanaasii hai (Shah Abdus Salam translates it thus: “Beloved’s lane is exactly like the holy city of Kashi/ My ascetic heart dwells therein/ Due to the sadness of the separation from the beloved/ My heart is always immersed in dejection/ Your tresses are the waves of Jamuna river/ And the mole next to the tresses is the ascetic on the bank).
In 2002 also attacked the grave of Ustaad Fayyaz Khan, a scion of the Agra Gharana of musicians. The ustaad, honoured in the 1950s as Aftab-i-Mausiqi by popular consensus, had sung countless compositions to Krishna, the favourite icon of much of Gujarat and Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. “Manmohan Brij ko rasiya” an early morning composition in Raag Paraj, and “Vande Nand Kumaram”, a late afternoon composition in Raag Kaafi, among other soul-searching bandishes were rendered as a full-throated celebration of Lord Krishna. Fayyaz Khan’s grave in Baroda was razed unceremoniously during the fanatical mayhem. Now we can’t just snuff out anyone’s memory at will. People have a right to know the tradition Fayyaz Khan represented. Legend has it that it possibly goes back to the Mughal court in Agra. Emperors Akbar and Jehangir were both lovers of music. There were 36 musicians in Akbar’s court including Tansen, Baiju Bawra and Guru Haridas, but Tansen alone was among the famous ‘nine jewels’ of the court.
In her fascinating study, Imaging Sound, ethnomusicologist Bonnie Wade shows how the depiction of musical instruments in Mughal paintings also reveals the cultural synthesis during that era; how the synthesis of Hindu, Muslim, Sufi and Central and West Asian musical traditions led to the emergence of a north Indian classical musical culture.
Whatever the date of its origin, the Agra Gharana represented a sound Indian tradition of open-minded synthesis and assimilation.
Let me end this tribute to Gujarat’s lost mockingbirds with a note on Ehsaan Jaafri. He was brutally cut down by a mob along with several members of his family and neighbours who had tried to protect him. Jaafri was once a trade union leader before he joined the Congress and won a seat in the Lok Sabha. But it is his little known flair for Urdu poetry that gives an insight into the man’s secular credentials far removed from the culprits of
Godhra, the Hindutva mob, may have been hunting. Jaafri’s book of verse is called Qandeel (Lamp). Published in 1994, it is a collection of his poems from the time of his association with progressive writers with a foreword by Majrooh Sultanpuri, himself a notable progressive poet.
Here’s an example and that reflects Jaafri’s nation-loving personality, which only heightens the irony of his lynching:
Geeton se teri zulfon ko meera ne sanwara/ Gautam ne sada di tujhe Nanak ne pukara/ Khusro ne kai rangon se daaman ko nikhara/ Har dil mein muhabbat ki ukhuwat ki lagan hai/ Ye mera watan mera watan mera watan hai. (Meera adorned your locks with her songs/ Gautam called you out, as did Nanak/ Khusro filled colours in your frills/ Every heart beats here for love and tolerance/ This is my homeland, this is it).
(Source: The Dawn, 12 February, 2008)


GENOCIDE
Genocide Motivation,
Denial, Celebration, Extermination-I
Arundhati Roy
I never met Hrant Dink, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, “We are all Armenians”, “We are all Hrant Dink”.
That comes from a history that is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well.
The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it’s yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there’s celebration, and I really don’t know which is worse.
In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim community in 2002.
The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindus were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive.
Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes.
Even today, many of them live in ghettos—some built on garbage heaps—with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered ‘normal’. In 2004, both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India’s leading industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a dream destination for finance capital.
The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness.
This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states.
As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.) But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic vision.
It’s an old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in the march of civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself—genocide—was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust.
The definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt.
Genocide, they say, “is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.” Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million) Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).
All things considered, the word extermination, with its crude evocation of pests and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society.
Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:
And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera.
I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial.
Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens’ rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. “Denial is saying, in effect,” says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, “that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren’t killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide.”
Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining.
The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading and plain old economic and military might.
In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country’s economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur. Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. Was the death of a million
Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called it) or was it ‘worth it’, as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child?
Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World’s Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population. In America’s second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg—which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians—were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. The argument is that the government didn’t intend to kill civilians. This was the first stage in the development of the concept of “collateral damage”.) Since the end of World War II, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population).
None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.
The question is,” says Robert MacNamara—whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 to being the architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the World Bank—now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in his comfortable country, how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?”
And what when victims become perpetrators? What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one of the cruellest genocides in human history? What of its actions in the Occupied Territories? Its burgeoning settlements, its colonisation of water, its new ‘Security Wall’ that separates Palestinian people from their farms, from their work, from their relatives, from their children’s schools, from hospitals and healthcare? It is genocide in a fishbowl, genocide in slow motion.
The history of genocide tells us that it’s not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system.
It’s a habit as old, as persistent, as much part of the human condition, as love and art and agriculture.
Most of the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been an integral part of Europe’s search for what the Germans famously called Lebensraum—living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species’ natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.
The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus landed in America.
The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while in the Congo, the Belgians’ “experiment in commercial expansion” cost 10 million lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia.
Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler’s quest for lebensraum—in a world that had already been carved up by other European countries—that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia stood in the way of Hitler’s colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native people of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be enslaved or liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, the Nazis’ racist dehumanisation of Jews cannot be dismissed as a paroxysm of insane evil. Once again, it is a product of the familiar mix: economic determinism well marinated in age-old racism, very much in keeping with European tradition of the time.
It’s not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union & Progress.
‘Union’(racial/ethnic/religious/national) and ‘Progress’ (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.
(To be continued)
(Source: Outlook 4 February, 2008)


IDENTITY
Exclusion, Identity & Muslim Women in Mumbai-II
Sameera Khan, Social Activist, Mumbai
Since their community is under threat and surveillance, the issues surrounding Muslim women’s access to the public and sexual safety become all the more complex. In fact, the restrictions imposed on Muslim women by their own community are closely linked to the exclusion of the Muslim community as a whole.23
The fact that their entire community is looked upon with hostility and habitually fears violence, means that Muslim women not only have less of a chance to venture out of communityboundaries but also that their movements and behaviour are more closely policed by their families and their community. While homogeneous community dominated neighbourhoods or ghettoised localities create the perception of greater physical safety and security, they also allow for increased policing of all residents, particularly the women. This has a severe impact on women’s negotiation of the public and their capacity to engage risk.
An example of how ghettoisation caused by increased communalism has affected the lives of Muslim women can be seen in Jogeshwari (east), which has seen five riots – 1964, 1974-75, 1984, 1990-91 and 1992-93 – in the last four decades. With each episode of violence, Muslims in the area were systematically pushed into a smaller and smaller settlement area at the peak of a hill, surrounded by Hindu settlements all aroundand having almost no access routes out of their pockets except through these Hindu areas. As each riot pushed Muslims inwards and ghettoised them further – and now they are limited to an area called Prem Nagar – women’s access to the outside of theslum settlement was the first to go.
Changes in social geography, thus, often have a drastic impact on women’s access to healthcare and education.26 Many girls said that going to school and college usually meant some sort of limited access to the world outside their homes. Parents who do not want their daughters to cross neighbourhood lines in order to access English-language schooling are choosing the new Islamic- English schools which offer mainstream English-language education along with religious instruction in the mohalla. On they wantquality education rooted in their way of life”,
Many middle-class families, however, did allow Muslim girls access to higher education and work outside the mohalla but they closely monitored the subjects studied or the jobs pursued. “We cannot allow her to do something which is not appropriate from the point of view of our family and community’s ‘izzat’ said one father in Nagpada. Usually “not appropriate” referred to jobs that demanded long hours out of the home and neighbourhood or prolonged contact with men outside the community. “Eventually you can’t do what you want to do, you pursue a job that fits in with their ideas of appropriate timings for girls to be out, so usually you become a teacher”,
Even poor Muslim women living in the slums, where employment is not a matter of choice but of economic necessity, often feel trapped by community strictures. Thus, they are usually encouraged to pursue home-based but low-paying work like tailoring, or working at piece-rate basis putting together electronic parts or toys, or sorting recyclable parts for industry.
The surveillance of leisure activities is even more stringent. In interviews, several Muslim women in the city reported that while they faced less restrictions to access places like the market or the ‘jamaatkhana’, their movements were closely controlled when motivated by socialisation or leisure.
Aside from family and neighbours, a higher and more menacing level of policing is being encouraged by neo-fundamentalist forces who are gradually entrenching themselves more firmly in Muslim ghettos. The activities of the tablighi jamaat31 and the influences of wahabism are fostering a new religiousity that threatens to make the community more inward looking, thus isolating it further from the mainstream. It is in this context that one should see the rise in purdah or veiling among women and the expanded role of sharia jamaats in solving domestic disputes and addressing community grievances.
The ‘hijab’ or ‘burqa’ has always been an important physical marker of the presence of Muslim women in public Since the Mumbai riots, there has been a perceptible increase in the number of women wearing the burkha. Immediately after the riots it was probably triggered off by the desire of a victimised community to mark its identity and demand its space in a communalised city. It also led some Muslims towards a re-Islamisation process. The jamaat, which holds regular ‘ijetemas’ or religious assemblies to raise awareness about Islamic practice, fervently encourages Muslim women to observe the hijab.34 At least two of the four Islamic-English schools in Mumbai are run by the tablighis and one is funded by the wahabis. These schools encourage the segregation of girls, the wearing of hijab, and limiting the participation of girls in life outside the community.
The other method adopted by fundamentalist groups to police women’s bodies is by handing out ‘fatwas’ to regulate women’s movement.36 In recent times, ‘fatwas’ have being routinely issued on just about anything – from banning women from wearing lipstick and putting flowers in their hair to blocking cable TV access and music at weddings37 – by just about anyone in the religious hierarchy – from the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary to any local masjid or maulana. In the last two years itself, we have seen some fairly strong fatwas that have got implemented quite brutally. Many fatwas relate to women, some relate specifically to their movement outside the house – such as visiting restaurants on their own – and others to marriage celebrations, not leaving home and always observing purdah. “We notice not only a rise in the number of women-related fatwas being issued – on totally absurd matters – but also on harsher methods of ensuring that they get imposed”,
Even when nuanced by other factors such as economic and social class, nuclear or joint family type and individual family levels of tolerance and conservatism, the overall experience of living in a community ghetto is severely limiting for women’s mobility. Muslim women’s groups testified that this had particularly strengthened in the years after the Mumbai riots and more recently the Gujarat riots. In comparison, Muslim women who moved away from a community specific ghetto or grew up in multi-community areas reported much more ease in accessing the public.
Community Risk, Women and Safety
Women’s access to publicspace is closely linked to the way in which their community is framed in the larger narrative of the nation. While our research Economic and Political Weekly April 28, 2007 1531 confirms that Muslim women have fairly similar restrictions and limitations imposed on their mobility and access to public spaces as women from other communities, this is inflected by their identities as members of a minority community which is viewed with both prejudice and suspicion. Marginalisation and recurrent pogromatic communal violence – which has visibly included sexual assaults on their women – has meant that Muslims increasingly feel physically and psychologically vulnerable and continually at risk as a community.
In the context of threatened communal violence, while homogeneous neighbourhoods create the perception of greater safety and security resulting from “being with one’s own kind”, they also lead to increased isolation and segregation of the community. In addition, it diminishes women’s power to negotiate private violence.
Women also report being wary of the rising tide of conservatism and orthodoxy within their own community as a result of neofundamentalist groups gaining a foothold especially in community- specific mohallas – this, they said, forced them into the private sphere and into traditional gender specific roles with limited access to the public.
In the circumscribed world of the mohalla, Muslim women thus negotiate the risks of violence – public and private – interwoven with questions of identity. Women desirous of pursuing higher education and careers will often toe conservative community diktats, if only to appear as “good” women not transgressing cultural boundaries.
By appearing good, such as in being veiled, they could better negotiate some level of public access with their families and community. Veiling in particular made some feel safer in areas not specific to their community; in their own areas however, the veil did not always keep them safe from street harassment. I argue that in any case the discourse of keeping Muslim women within community boundaries on the reasoning of safety is flawed because by their own admission community leaders state that the threat to Muslim men is now even more real and discomforting. At times of heightened tension, such as bomb blasts, Muslim men sporting religious markers such as beards and skull-caps often feel as vulnerable and at risk if not more than Muslim women. In fact, aware that the current socio-political and law enforcement climate tends to disfavour Muslims in general, even those Muslim women who are stringently policed by the community or face horrific domestic violence often silence their voices against such abuse fearing that this might be used as an opportunity to further harass male members of their community.
In conclusion, to clarify the links between exclusion, risk and civic and cultural safety. civic safety cannot be separated from and exist in the absence of the cultural safety of various community groups in the city. Every cultural and community group in the city has the right to be different and be accepted for the same. If Muslims with their beards and veils feel excluded and unsafe then civic safety cannot truly exist. Similarly, one cannot establish civic rights by taking away someone’s cultural rights or the right to be different. Placing civic safety and cultural rights in opposition to each other serves to effectively other the Muslim, suggesting that the presence of Muslims and their culture hinders the establishment of civic safety. Further, the larger discourse that perceives Muslim women as being oppressed by their own culture (and male relatives) obscures the fact that this same discourse exacerbates the restrictions that Muslim women experience.41 It also obscures the fact that Muslim men as much as Muslim women are excluded from public space.
When a community finds itself excluded and perceives high levels of risk to itself, all its members are unable to engage more fully and substantially with public space. This perception of risk to the community facilitates and legitimises a greater surveillance of the women of the community; the restrictions on them are more carefully and extensively imposed and their capacity to engage risk in public space, as elaborated by Phadke (2007), are severely diminished. Therefore, women’s capacity to engage risk in public is dependent largely on their entire community also being able to take similar risks.
The anxiety that marks Muslim women’s engagement with public space is both the anxiety of being a woman in public as well as the anxiety of being a woman of a particular minority community group in public. Thus, for them, political and cultural safety as a Muslim is as much a concern as the issue of everyday civic safety.
To even begin to tackle the issue of Muslim women’s exclusion from public space we need to engage more deeply with the kinds of marginalisation that the Muslim community as a whole has experienced from public space. The access of Muslim women to public space then is inextricably linked to both – the rights of all women to access public space and the rights of all Muslims to access public space. In the absence of Muslims being able to access and lay claim to the city – even just in the matter of finding housing for themselves in non-community specific locations, it is not surprising that Muslim women cannot further their claim to the city’s public spaces either.
(Concluded)
(Source: New Age Weekly, January, 20-26, 2008)


URDU
Comparative View of Urdu in India & Pakistan
Khushwant Singh
When we parted company with Pakistan in 1947, we not only divided our sub-continent and its individuals into three, we also divided languages we spoke. India declared Hindi as its national language. Pakistan declared Urdu its national language. We failed to make Hindi acceptable to all Indians and regional languages—more than held their own and Hindi was confined to Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Bihar. Pakistan on the other hand, reduced its regional languages: Punjabi, Pushto, Baluchi, Sindhi to secondary positions and Urdu became the sovereign language.
Strange by while Pakistanis speak their regional languages, put a microphone in front of them and they will promptly switch to Urdu. Or put a writing pad in their hands and they will write in Urdu. It was after Bangladesh became independent, that it rejected Urdu and made Bengali its lingua franca.
Another important aspect was the status of English. In India it retained its position as the link language; English journals and publishing Houses flourished. In Pakistan English yielded to Urdu. It has only a couple of English dailies with modest circulations; most people read Urdu papers.
It also has one English publishing house of repute, the Oxford University Press at Karachi; others are mushroom growth of little consequence. As a result Pakistani poets and novelists who write in English first look for American or English publishers, their third choice is India. They also get many more readers in India than they get in their own country. Recent examples are Bapsi Sidhwa, Tehmina Durrani and Mohsin Hamid.
(Source: The Hindustan Times, 9 February, 2008)


Comments of Syed Shahabuddin
Letter to Khushwant Singh, 14 February, 2008
I have read your latest column about Urdu in Pakistan. No doubt, Hindi’s progress as a pan-national language in India as compared to that of Urdu in Pakistan has been very slow. But the main reason is that the Constitution does not give status of the sole national language to Hindi as Pakistan gave to Urdu. According to the Constitution all languages included in Schedule 8 are national languages but Hindi is the Official Language of the Union and of those states which choose to adopt it as such. Naturally the non-Hindi speaking states have adopted their own Official Languages and largely prefer to deal with the Union as well as other states through the medium of English.
Also, in education, if at all, they have treated Hindi as the second or the third language at the secondary level after the principal language of the state. I do not know the educational status of regional languages in Pakistan in relation to Urdu and English. Also, I doubt if official business in Pakistan either in the executive or the judicial branch is being conducted in Urdu or continues to be conducted in English.
I would like to add for your information that unlike other national languages, Hindi’s position has been artificially bolstered by the inclusion of merely 40 other languages and dialects, some of them spoken by 10 million persons or more as Hindi. Many of them are struggling to be recognized as national languages and included in Schedule 8. Maithili was recently taken off the Hindi list and included in Schedule 8.
Hindi is not the language of the majority of the people in India but is said to be the Mother Tongue, declared by nearly 40%. However, if we exclude the Other Languages, which have been counted as Hindi the proportion will fall to about 27%. It would still be the first national language but it cannot claim any preponderance over other more developed languages.
As you are aware, Hindi has successfully exiled Urdu from its main base in UP and Bihar. Though Urdu survives and progresses as a spoken language; it is losing ground as a written language. As a spoken language, it has indeed staged a come-back through Mushiaras, films & electronics and even print media which are today using more Urdu words than they did until the two decades ago.
I feel that the false cloak worn by Hindi of being the sole national language, should be discarded and we should honestly develop as a multi language state and society with equal status for all languages which are spoken at least by 10 million people and have a grammar and literature and are taught at least up to High School as mother tongue.
The Union should act as the guardian of all languages, treat them equally and promote and develop them. The pseudo national even chauvinistic objective of having one national language for a sub-continent should also be given up and the Union and the states should communicate through English which should be recognized and accepted as a national language. Already English is becoming more and more of a link language than it was before ‘47’, both in the country and with the rest of the world.



EDUCATION
Maulana Azad Education Foundation
Annual Report for 2005-06 (Summary)
Resources and Achievements
* The Foundation has a Corpus Fund of Rs. 100 crore as on 31st March, 2006, which has been invested in Government of India Banks and ICICI.
* Upto 31st March, 2006, the Foundation has sanctioned grnat-in-aid to the tune of Rs. 85.87 crore to 666 NGOs/Local Bodies under its education schemes. State-wise summary is at Annexure.
* During the year 2005-206, the Foundation sanctioned grant-in-aid amounting to Rs. 4.3 crores to 34 NGOs for various educational purposes, i.e. construction/expansion of schools / colleges/girls hostels out of which Rs. 2.47 crores has been released. The Foundation has also sanctioned grant-in-aid of Rs. 0.46 crores to 4 NGOs for setting-up/strengthening technical institutions and Rs. 0.59 crores for establishing 6 Sadbhawna Kendras.
* In addition to the above the Foundation has also released an amount of Rs. 2.1crores as subsequent installments of grant-in-aid to NGOs sanctioned during earlier years.
* Under the scheme of Mualana Azad National Scholarship the Foundation has sanctioned an amount of Rs. 3.57 crores to 3571 meritorious girls students belonging to minorities. The state-wise during 2005-06 state-wise breakup is in Annexure – I.
* The Foundation has selected the following NGOs / Institutions for Mualana Abul Kalam Azad Literacy Award, of Rs. 1 lakh for 2005:
1. Hamdard Education Society, New Delhi
2. Muslim Education Society, Calicut (Kerala)
3. Falahe Darian Education Society, Ahmedabad (Gujarat)
The Foundation has provided financial assistance for organizing Inservice Teachers Training Program at the Shibli College, Azamgarh (UP), Maualna Azad College, Ranchi (Jharkhand), Nayab Abbasi Girls Degree College, Amroha (UP) and Marwar Muslim Educational Society, Jodhpur (Rajasthan) during this year.
Since inception the Foundation is running a vocational training centre in the old building of Dr. Zakir Hussain College at Ajmeri Gate, for training to girls like Cutting and Tailoring, Textile Designing, Beauty Culture, Arts and Crafts and Computers.
State-wise Summary of Grant-in-Aid/Scholarship
State/ Grant No. of No.of
U.Ts Sanctioned Projects Scholarship
upto 2005-06 during 2005-06
AP 4.9 34 145
Assam 1.7 9 131
Bihar 4.3 28 221
Delhi 1.7 13 49
Gujarat 5.9 39 76
Haryana 1.0 7 —
J&K 1.6 11 34
Jharkhand 0.6 4 62
Karnataka 7.4 51 838
Kerala 6.8 35 159
MP 2.8 27 64
MS 8.7 73 406
Rajasthan 1.9 13 76
Tamil Nadu 1.8 14 91
UP 28.0 254 727
West Bengal 3.8 27 398
Others 3.0 27 94
Total 85.8 666 3571
(Source: MAEF Annual Report)



RESERVATION
Reservation-the Bogey of Reverse Discrimination
against the Deprived has Many Forms
P. Sainath, Noted Social Analyst
A signal achievement of the Indian elite in recent years has been to take caste, give it a fresh coat of paint, and repackage it as a struggle for equality. The agitations in the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences and other such institutions were fine examples of this. Casteism is no longer in defensive denial the way it once was. Today, it asserts that caste is killing the nation — but its victims are the upper castes. And the villains are the lower orders who crowd them out of the seats and jobs long held by those with merit in their genes.
This allows for a happy situation. You can practise casteism— and feel noble about it. You are, after all, standing up for equal rights, calling for a caste-free society. Truth and justice are on your side. More importantly, so are the media. Remember how the AIIMS agitation was covered?
The idea of “reverse discrimination” (read: the upper castes are suffering) is catching on. The Wall Street Journal. It profiles one such upper caste victim of “reverse discrimination” with sympathy. (“Reversal of Fortunes Isolates India’s Brahmins,” Dec. 29, 2007.) “In today’s India,” it says, “high caste privileges are dwindling.” The father of the story’s protagonist is “more liberal” than his grandfather. After all, “he doesn’t expect lower-caste neighbours to take off their sandals in his presence.”
A lot of this hinges, of course, on what we like to perceive as privilege and what we choose to see as discrimination. Like many others, the WSJ report reduces both to just one thing: quotas in education and jobs. No other form of it exists in this view. But it does in the real world. Dalit students are routinely humiliated and harassed at school. Many drop out because of this. They are seated separately in the classroom and at mid-day meals in countless schools across the country. This does not happen to those of “dwindling privileges.”
Students from the upper castes do not get slapped by the teacher for drinking water from the common pitcher. Nor is there much chance of acid being thrown on their faces in the village if they do well in studies. Nor are they segregated in hostels and in the dining rooms of the colleges they go to. Discrimination dogs Dalit students at every turn, every level. As it does Dalits at workplace.
Yet, their achievements in the face of such odds are impressive. Between 1961 and 2001, when literacy in the population as a whole doubled, it quadrupled among Dalits. Sure, that must be seen in the context of their starting from a very low base. But it happened in the face of everyday adversity for millions. Yet, the impact of this feat in terms of their prosperity is very limited.
The WSJ story says “close to half of Brahmin households earn less than $100 (or Rs. 4,000) a month.” Fair enough. But the writer seems unaware, of the report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. Which says that 836 million Indians live on less than Rs.20, or 50 cents, a day. That is, about $15 a month. As many as 88 per cent of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (and many from the Other Backward Classes and Muslims) fall into that group. Of course, there are poor Brahmins and other upper caste people who suffer real poverty. But twisting that to argue “reverse discrimination,” won’t wash. More so when the WSJ admits that, on average, “[Brahmins] are better educated and better paid than the rest of Indian people.”
Oddly enough, the WSJ ran a very good summary of the Khairlanji atrocity a year after it occurred. That story, rightly suggests that the economic betterment and success of the Bhotmange family had stoked the jealousy of dominant caste neighbours in that Vidharbha village. But it ascribes that success to India’s “prolonged economic boom which has improved the lot of millions of the nation’s poorest, including Dalits.” Which raises the question: were other, dominant caste groups not gaining from the “boom?” Were Dalits the only “gainers?”
36 per cent of rural and 38 per cent of urban Dalits are below the poverty line. That’s against 23 per cent of rural and 27 per cent of urban India as a whole. More than a quarter of Dalits, mostly landless, get work for less than six months a year. If half their households earned even $50 a month, that would be a revolution.
Most of the Indian media share the WSJ’s “reverse discrimination” views. Take the recent Brahmin super-convention in Pune. Within this explicitly caste-based meeting were further surname-based conclaves that seated people by clan or sub-group. You don’t get more caste-focussed than that. None of this, though, was seen as odd by the media. Almost at the same time, there was another high-profile meeting on within the Marathas. That is, the dominant community of Maharashtra. The meeting flatly demanded caste-based quotas for themselves. Again, not seen as unusual.
But Dalit meetings are always measured in caste, even racist, terms. This, although Dalits are not a caste but include people from hundreds of social groups that have suffered untouchability.
How many upper caste men have had their eyes gouged out for marrying outside their caste? How many higher caste bastis have been torched and razed in land or other disputes? How many upper caste folk lose a limb or even their lives for daring to enter a temple?
How many Brahmins or Thakurs get beaten up, even burnt alive, for drawing water from the village well? How many from those whose “privileges are dwindling” have to walk four kilometres to fetch water? How many upper caste groups are forced to live on the outskirts of the village, locked into an eternal form of indigenous apartheid? Now that’s discrimination. But it is a kind that the media does not see, can never fathom.
In 2006, National Crime Records Bureau data tell us, atrocities against Dalits increased across a range of offences. Cases under the Protection of Civil Rights Act shot up by almost 40 per cent. Dalits were also hit by more murders, rapes and kidnapping than in 2005. Arson, robbery and dacoity directed against them — those went up too.
It’s good that the molestation or rape of foreign tourists (particularly in Rajasthan) is causing concern and sparking action. Not so good that Dalit and tribal women suffer the same and much worse on a colossal scale. The same Rajasthan saw an infamous rape case tossed out because in the judge’s view, an upper caste man was most unlikely to have raped a lower caste woman.
In the Kumher massacre which claimed 17 Dalit lives in that State, charges could not be framed for seven years. In a case involving a foreign tourist, a court handed down a guilty verdict in 14 days. For Dalits, 14 years would be lucky.
Take contemporary Maharashtra, home to India’s richest. The attention given to the Mumbai molestation case — where 14 arrested men remained in jail for five days after being granted bail — stands out in sharp contrast to what has happened in Latur or Nanded. In the Latur rape case, the victim was a poor Muslim. The Latur case was close to being covered up but for the determination of the victim’s community.
The discrimination that pervades Dalit lives follows them after death too. They are denied the use of village graveyards. Dalits burying their dead in any place the upper castes object to could find the bodies of their loved ones torn out of the ground.
Every year, more and more instances of all these and other atrocities enter official records. This never happens to the upper castes of “dwindling privileges.” The theorists of “reverse discrimination” really uphold perverse practices.
(Source: The Hindu, 18 January, 2008)

On Reservation for Muslims
Mohan Bhagwat, General Secretary, RSS
The policy of Muslim appeasement will never forge unity between the two communities and if the so-called secular parties continue it, the consequences could be lethal. If one brother gets more, then other brothers will naturally resent it. All brothers must be treated equally if there is to be harmony in the house. The RSS favours reservation but only on social and economic criteria and not on religious grounds.
(Muslim Community demands reservation as a Backward Class- Editor)


KASHMIR SITUATION
Changing Pattern of Resistance in Kashmir
Gautam Navlakha,Well-known Intellectual
Faced with a public demand for troop reduction in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the government had constituted three committees in March 2007. On December 5, 2007 in response to an “unstarred” question number 1672 in the Rajya Sabha, which asked the minister of defence to state “whether the committee headed by Defence Secretary…to look into demand of troops reduction in J&K has submitted any report and if so the salient features thereof”, a terse answer was provided:
The main recommendations pertain to reconciling of the details of the properties occupied by the security forces and the rentals paid as also to resolve old cases that have remained unsettled for many years; vacation of public utility services by the security forces such as school buildings, hospitals; the timings of the convoys of the security forces may be reworked so as to cause least inconvenience to the local population; dos and don’ts issued by the security forces need to be strictly followed. Implementation of the recommendations is an ongoing process…
The conspicuous absence of any reference to “troop reduction” speaks for itself. Also missing are terms such as “relocation” (moving forces from one place to another) and/or “restructuring” (replacing army with paramilitary formations). Instead no more than cosmetic changes are recommended by way of resolving old cases, vacating some buildings and reworking of convoy timings. Besides, the “ongoing process” of implementation reveals its own drawback. For instance, out of the 1,572 buildings occupied by security forces, only “public utility service buildings” (such as schools, hospitals) would be vacated. The total number of such buildings is less than a hundred. And even these are being vacated half-heartedly. All this amounts to trivialising a popular demand and raises serious concern over Indian government’s sincerity to address real issues.
Land Question
There are reportedly 671 security forces camps in J&K (excluding those in Jammu, Kargil, Leh, Akhnoor and Udhampur) and these occupy 90,000 acres of farm and orchard land and 1,500 buildings. But the quest for land continues to grow.1 For instance, in saffron rich Lethapora in Pampore tehsil the central reserve police force (CRPF) has demanded 5,000 ‘kanals’ (one-eighth of an acre) for its group headquarters. The army is demanding 10,000 kanals for expansion of its Kundru Field Ammunition Depot (FAD).2 Besides, the air force, which is in possession of 850 acres in Awantipora, has asked for an additional 763 acres. Such is the demand for land that the army, which was given 212 acres in Sharifabad, in exhange for vacating 139 acres of Tattoo grounds Garrison in Srinagar, has taken possession of 100 acres at Sharifabad but refuses to vacate Tattoo ground. In the Cattle Research Centre at Manasbal, spread over 352 acres, the army first asked to set up a few bunkers in 1990. Then it built barracks and in 2005 laid claim to 252 acres!3 Moreover, the annual Landmine Report 2007 states that about 160 sq kms in Jammu and 1,730 sq kms in Kashmir remain mined. The speaker of J&K assembly recently pointed out that 3,500 acres of agricultural land in his constituency Chamb (Jammu) have been mined and 6,000 families displaced. The J&K tourism minister told the media on October 19 that the army violated the master plan for Gulmarg and without requisite permission “(t)hey have occupied 400 acres of land on which they have raised huge concrete structures” (The Asian Age, October 20, 2007).
It is obvious that involuntary alienation of land in general, cultivable tracts in particular, will arouse passions. This turns into fury when land is acquired for armed security personnel, who maintain an intrusive presence among civilians designed to control their public and private lives.
Why is this ground reality so difficult to comprehend? And why is the government unwilling to reduce troop levels or withdraw 6,67,000 security force personnel to the barracks? After all, the new army chief Deepak Kapoor recently stated that the situation in J&K “starting from 2004 onwards has improved” (Statesman, December 10, 2007). So much so that the government now claims that there has been a 70 per cent decline in militancy-related incidents between 1990 and 2007, from 3,500 to 1,000 incidents. Firing incidents came down from 671 to 183. Bomb explosions declined from 1,000 to just 50. Killings of civilians declined from 914 to 153 (Tribune, December 12, 2007). Besides, the ceasefire is being observed by India and Pakistan along the line of control since November 2003 resulting in an end to mortar shelling and a fall in infiltration.
In any case infiltration is said to have peaked in 2001 when an estimated 2,706 persons allegedly entered the state illegally. The estimates tabled by the ministry of home affairs in the Lok Sabha on November 27, 2007 show that their numbers declined to 597 in 2005, 573 in 2006 and 499 up to October 2007. As final proof it is being claimed that non-militancy related crimes have shot up. Granted that statistics can be manipulated any which way, the point is, if the government is itself downplaying militancy, then why are they fighting shy about troop reduction?
Evidently, 18 years of military control have enabled the government to restore its authority over a recalcitrant people. But the government does not enjoy the confidence of the people. It is naïve to believe that presence of a military armed with “unrestricted and unaccounted powers”,5 would be a source of comfort to the Muslims of J&K, who have borne the brunt of atrocities. Unfortunately, this reality has escaped public perceptions of J&K.
While crimes by government forces occur in other parts of India as well the difference is that in J&K it is the scale, simultaneity and sustenance of which set them apart. A death toll over two decades of 70,000, detention of more than 60,000, torture of at least 20,000 detainees, enforced disappearance of 8,000, denial of passports to 60,000 persons are evidence of this.
Limits of Peace Process
What perpetuates a narrow minded perspective is the belief that with Pakistan and India now engaged in working out a deal between themselves and imposing it on the people of J&K the situation is on the mend. What is missed out is the fact that precisely for this reason no longer does the militancy depend on outside assistance for training nor has the resistance wilted. And however much infiltration is cited to whip up public support outside J&K, even the security forces are split on its importance. The Deputy Inspector General of Border Security Force once said that More than infiltration it is an estimated 1,000 militants already present in J&K who pose a bigger problem (Indian Express, June 29, 2007). Be that as it may, to this day6 people come out in large numbers to mourn the death of a militant. In owning the militants as their own there is a message not to write off the resistance.
These militants are maligned as “cross border terrorists” or “Islamic terrorists”, although it is the government and the judiciary, which remains innocent of the Rome statute, Geneva conventions and protocols.
Significance is also attached to recent incidents of clashes between people and soldiers. It appears that resentment is now spilling over into the public sphere. This overcoming of fear of security forces is in many ways the defining feature of 2007. Soldiers have been detained, paraded and in some cases beaten by villagers and even by residents of towns. The presence of the armed CRPF soldier in cities is also no longer as intimidating as it once was. There have also been a spate of incidents when young boys and girls have protested frisking and misbehaviour by personnel of security forces.
Consequently, scepticism mounts over the legitimacy of the “peace” process which does not address the issue of the presence of hostile security forces among civilians and instead has turned into an excuse for doing nothing. It is, therefore, misplaced enthusiasm to believe that we are anywhere close to a just solution, let alone a democratic closure, to a six-decade-old dispute.
(Source: Economic & Political Weekly, February, 2008)


Towards Solution
Views of Wajahat Habibullah, Member Working Group on Economic Development of J &K
Points made in Interview to Priyashree Andley
*Yasin Malik’s Safar-e-Azadi he three dimensions.
The first dimension is the demand for rehabilitation of the Kashmiri Pandits. The second dimension is the support extended for the Indo-Pak dialogue process. The third dimension is the demand for involvement of the Kashmiris in that dialogue. It has certain objectives: First, to restore the secular fabric and culture of the state that has been shattered. Second is to reach out to the youth of the state. The youth are extremely frustrated as they feel that there is no future for them. Yasin Malik is trying to tell them that there is a future provided that the dialogue process succeeds. Third, when there is a future, the Kashmiris should have a part to play in decision making.
Yasin Malik does not project himself as the sole representative of the Kashmiris. He is deeply committed to the resolution of the conflict and does not suggest that only ‘he’ should be involved in the dialogue process.
*The Mirwaiz’s group claims to be the representative of the Kashmiri people, demanding that it should be included in the dialogue process. The All Party Hurriyat Conference is very strident in supporting the ‘Musharraf’ line (the official Pakistan line). They favour Musharraf’s four point programme. The Hurriyat could be willing to contest the elections if the first three points of Musharraf’s plan are accepted. Then the only point to discuss will be self-governance. If it wins the elections then it contends that it will provide the people with self-governance. So far it is only Professor Butt who has enunciated the idea suggesting the appointment of a prime minister and president for the state. This idea gels well with the National Conference’s concept of autonomy. However, both claim that it is ‘their’ idea of autonomy or self-governance!
On the positive side, there is increasing recognition on all sides that present boundaries will remain. I prefer using the term present boundaries than the line of control. They will remain but they will be open boundaries. Within the framework of the constitutions of India and Pakistan, the people of the state will have maximum self-government that is achievable within these systems. These principles need to be discussed and not become the bases for killing each other. Therefore, there is a general retreat from the idea of using violence. There is a very strong negative side too. The young people are highly dissatisfied. The older generation is willing to reconcile unlike the youth. There is so much money but the opportunities for employment are limited. This makes it difficult for young people to generate their own livelihood. So, this can become a formula for destruction. It will cause jealousy and envy among the people. The moral fibre of the society is in complete disarray. There are increasing cases of suicide and retreat from traditional moral values. This would have a disruptive effect on the stability of the society.
The kingpins of that highly stable society were the women. The kingpins of the insurgency were also the women. They virtually led it as I personally saw it. However, at present they are the group that is highly discriminated against and marginalized. There is no role for them even though they are the strongest resource base for peace. The negative elements were kept under check only because of the women. All sections including the police have victimized them.
*The government of India agrees that it is necessary to talk to all elements in the conflict. The modalities will have to be worked out to host a RTC in which separatists will participate. This has not been the case so far in J&K. None of the Kashmri Pandits in the valley were invited. Will the Pandits who left the valley decide on its future or those who are still inside? In my opinion, different groups could have met separately and then an RTC should have been organized.
*The mirage of Pakistan stands broken especially after the latest developments in Pakistan. There is increasing disillusionment with Pakistan. Consequently. India should not be afraid of this trend. In 1947 the fear was justified as we had gone through a partition. It should be remembered that in the 6th century BC, India was still India even though it was comprised of 16 states. Even today, our strength lies in the fact that every state’s people regard themselves as being Indian while still being Bengali, Marathi or Bihari.
*Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has openly stated that Musharraf’s four points could be considered for discussion.
These are not the only four points that can resolve the Kashmir conflict. Nor is New Delhi putting forth another formula to counter Musharraf’s four points. This is not how negotiations are conducted. If Musharraf makes a statement in front of the media, New Delhi cannot be expected to respond in like manner. Is television the means for conducting dialogue?.
New Delhi fears the aspirations in Kashmir as it has a Muslim majority population. However, the Kashmiri aspirations are the same as that of a Tamil for Tamil Nadu, a Kannada for Karnataka and a Telangi for Telengana. However, Kashmiri aspirations do not even converge with what the people feel in Doda, Poonch or Rajouri. This suggests that it is a very regional aspiration. The Indian system is well accomplished to deal with such regional aspirations. Still we fear it because of years of suspicion.
In Tamil Nadu, the Tamils sympathize with their counterparts in Sri Lanka but this does not mean that they all want to leave Tamil Nadu and go to Sri Lanka. This also holds true for the Muslims in Kashmir. The sympathy for Pakistan is declining. There was always a small group that had pro-Pakistani aspirations but this was never in a majority. That is why Sheikh Abdullah had cashed in on this opportunity and opted for India. He knew that this population would not reconcile with the Punjabi Muslim majority. We have to understand this situation. We are on a threshold but it could go either way. We have to speak and persuade to change the situation. Anger should not be allowed to rise among the youth. Our aim is much larger and we have to work harder.
The Indo-Pak dialogue has made much headway. Unfortunately, it has had a reverse effect in some ways because the Kashmiris feel they are being left out of the dialogue. Borders are still relevant but they can become irrelevant. Unless separatists and the other leadership are part of such conferences little headway can be made on issues like irrelevance of borders.
Economic activities across the border are a significant means to improve relations in the region. For example the forests were the richest resource of Jammu and Kashmir. Today, the so-called LoC runs through these forests. This has prevented their fruitful utilisation by both sides. They have been badly exploited and decimated in the recent past. There is a need to reconsider this issue and structure a joint forest development plan on both sides of the border.
A younger generation of politicians in the state can bring change and exercise leadership. Yasin Malik, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah are the leaders that have to be encouraged to work to improve the scenario. They may blame each other, but that will be part of an electoral process and should be accepted.
*The basis concept of “Naya Kashmir is local self-governance at the village. It is based on the Panchayati Raj system in India. I have suggested the village level, the district level and the regional level. I have suggested two assemblies for the Jammu region because it includes a mountainous region and large plains. The Valley forms one unit. There can be no attempt to trifurcate the state.


Azadi Not off his Mind, Kashmiri Demands Civil Amenities
Chander Suta Dogra
Kashmir is agitated, and not so much about azadi. Development instead is the new demand of the people of the Valley. And they are taking to the streets in large numbers for power, roads, civic amenities, dispensaries and educational institutions. If earlier it was the separatists who brought men and matters to a standstill by calling for a bandh, now it is civil society retired government officials, students and orchard owners who organise protests. And the best part: the public response to the bandhs is impressive enough for political parties to sit up and take notice.
Not too long ago, even talking of development would cast you as traitor to the azadi cause, inviting immediate reprisal from the militants and separatists. Demanding basic amenities from the state government would be tantamount to diluting the freedom struggle. The stridency survives, but its course has shifted.
Tehsils of Tangmarg and Khag are agitated for a degree college.” The trigger for this protest was the state government’s announcement in December of setting up 18 new degree colleges—nine each in the Jammu and Kashmir regions. And the outcry was against the discrimination shown in locating the colleges—most were allotted to the constituencies of ruling party legislators.
January was also witness to the Valley staging protests against power shortages in several areas, protesters demanding more than the two hours of electricity a day they were getting. Angry residents put up barricades and blocked roads.
Kashmir’s strong protest culture, incubated and nurtured during the years of militancy, is now being harnessed by its people to make demands from the state. Even as Srinagar-based analysts discuss these developments threadbare in the local media, those spearheading the freedom struggle had seen it coming for sometime now. Says Dr Hamida Bano, associate professor at Kashmir University, “There is a feeling that you cannot suppress basic development issues for long, as people will rebel and move away from the cause altogether. So now the intelligentsia and thinkers within the movement are even beginning to advise the people to agitate for development and basic rights.”
Other voices strengthen the chorus. “All these years separatists have been unable to deliver the promised azadi,” says a Srinagar-based doctor. “Now with militancy on the wane, they no longer call the shots. How long can people live on mere slogans? They are fed up.” Adds Gul Mohammed Wani, professor of political science at Kashmir University: “People are now worried about their future. This has led to a rethink along economic lines.The opening of roads across the LoC too is being looked at, not so much as a means to meet family members across the border, but more for the economic gains it can bring. Even the reconciliation process between India and Pakistan is welcomed for the promise of economic upliftment that it holds.”Nowhere is this desire to forget the bleakness of the past and welcome a brighter future more visible than in Srinagar. No longer is the city the dreary, bleak and dirty shadow it had been reduced to in the ’90s. Business has grown in the last five years, as have domestic and international tourism, along with a real estate boom. Public expectation from the government has but naturally risen with this restoration of normality. Kahsmiri bolo: Youth agitate for making Kashmiri compulsory in schools and colleges And the Kashmiri is not just stopping at badgering politicians of mainstream parties to deliver on their promises. They are also rejecting the cult of violence that has disrupted life in the Valley for over two decades. Any killing of civilians by militant outfits now is opposed by the people. Sensing their complete alienation perhaps, the separatists have been quick to reinvent themselves. The first to do so was the pro-azadi Syed Ali Shah Geelani of the Jamait-e-Islami who a few weeks ago advised militant groups against killing informers. “Although anti-movement activities are intolerable for us, death cannot be the punishment. Killing goes against the teachings of Islam. Sometimes exhortation and social pressure is a better weapon to keep a man from erroneous activities,” he said after four civilians were killed by alleged militants in his own home turf of Sopore.More interesting is the latest fiat from the United Jehad Council headed by the PoK-based Syed Salahuddin. While urging pro-freedom groups to step up their campaign to ensure the boycott of assembly elections scheduled later this year, Salahuddin clarified that the council was against the use of the gun in the campaign. “The gun will be used only if troops coerce people to vote. But if someone comes out to vote willingly, we won’t stop him,” he said in a press note released in Srinagar. Significantly, the number of civilians killed by militants in j&k has seen a sharp drop from 371 deaths in 2006 to 151 last year.Is azadi off the mind of the Kashmiri then? “Make no mistake, the desire for azadi remains as strong as before,” says Dr Rekha Chowdhury of Jammu University. “But people have realised that it is unachievable in the near future. So, they have become reconciled to the fact and are now clamouring for development.” Adds Gul Mohammed Wani: “The end of violence does not mean that the sense of alienation will go. There is a sense of deep sacrifice for something. That something need not necessarily be azadi, it could also be a grand reconciliation package.”And elections are a good time to make fresh beginnings. The political space in Jammu and Kashmir is fast getting cluttered by a number of smaller parties which earlier had no presence in the state. The mainstream parties are still dominating the agenda but the smaller players too want to make their mark. “Even the Hurriyat is feeling the challenge of electoral politics,” says Dr Rekha.And it’s not all for azadi. The constant refrain across the state—whether from academics or political representatives—is that the institution of the state government has failed to usher in development and provide good governance. Points out Abdur Rahim Rather, senior National Conference legislator from Magam: “No one from the government is responding to the genuine demands being made by the public.People are therefore justified in taking to the streets. How can you expect peace if elected representatives think only of themselves?” Indeed.
(Source: Outlook, 11 February, 2008)


HISTORY
Historian Abraham Erally
An Overview of The Mughal World & British Rule
‘Of the future there is no hope’, Aurangzeb lamented in his farewell letters to his sons a few days before his death. And that indeed was how it came to pass: for him personally, and for the Mughal Empire.
Within a mere decade of Aurangzeb’s death, courtiers insolently wrested power from the reigning emperor and turned him into a pawn in their own ruthless power games. Soon the provinces became independent domains. The Marathas bit off large chunks of the empire here and there. And invaders from across the western mountains, Nadir Shah of Persia and Ahmad Shah of Afghanistan, swooped down to ravage the crippled giant. In a few decades the empire disappeared altogether and the authority of the emperor became confined to the city of Delhi alone. Soon he lost even that petty privilege, and became a pensioner, first of the Marathas, then of the British.
He was, however, still called the Mughal Emperor others might seize his territory, plunder his treasures, deprive him of power, but none could take away his title, or the prestige (however hollow) that went with it. So the Mughal continued to occupy the imperial throne in Delhi for a century and half after the death of Aurangzeb. In 1857 the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah II a feeble old man of eighty one who dabbled in poetry, music and calligraphy was arrested by the British for his complicity in the great anti-uprising. The emperor was bundled out of Delhi in a lowly peasant’s bullock-cart deported to Myanmar, where he died in obscurity a few years later.
HOW DID THE great empire come to this whimpering end? Aurangzeb’s theocratic policies, contrary to common perception, had little to do with it. By the end of his reign, Muslims had been ruling India for over 500 years, and many of their early rulers had been far harsher than Aurangzeb in their treatment of Hindus. Yet there were no serious religious uprisings against them. Nor were there any against Aurangzeb. His policies certainly gave an edge to the Maratha opposition to the Mughals, but they did not cause that opposition the primary motive of the Marathas was to gain power, not to defend religion. It is significant that a very large number of Hindus, including several prominent Marathas, continued to serve Aurangzeb despite his policies, in fact, in the second half of his reign the number of Hindu officers in his service actually increased, and became substantially higher than it had been even under Akbar. And just as there were a number of Marathas in the Mughal service, there were a number of Muslims in the Maratha service. It was all politics as usual.
The reason for the Mughal collapse was that the empire had grown for to large, beyond the capacity of the emperor to hold it together or to govern it efficiently, especially since most of the later emperors were effected. The administrative problems of the empire were compounded by its financial crisis, because of poor revenue collection on the one hand and the ballooning cost of government on the other. Towards the end of Aurangzeb’s reign, the pay of soldiers and officers was usually in arrears, sometimes by as much as three years, which demoralized them, and led to further deterioration of administrative and military efficiency. Moreover, the entire administration had become rotten to the core, shot through with corruption.
Writes the historian Grant Duff. It was inwardly decayed, and ready to fall to pieces as much by its own irrecoverable weakness, as by the corroding power of the Marathas.
OUTWARDLY, THE CENTURY from the accession of Akbar to the accession of Aurangzeb was a glorious period in India history.
The Mughals also had major political and economic achievements to their credit they brought nearly all of India under one rule, standardized currency, weights and measures, and galvanized trade with their insatiable craving for luxuries. Towns prospered under them, a millennium after they had fallen into decay in the post-Gupta period, and urban prosperity in turn stimulated cultural efflorescence.
This was the bright side of the Mughal legacy. But there was a dark side to it, too. The emperor and the nobles lived incredibly luxurious lives.
There was a price to be paid for such profligacy, however. And that price was paid by the common people, who lived in mud hovels, half-naked, half-starved, and ‘from whom every drop of sap had been wrung out by their predatory masters, Muslim as well as Hindu … At the height of Mughal splendour under Shah Jahan, over a quarter of the gross national product of the empire was appropriated by just 655 individuals, while the bulk of the 120-odd million people of India lived on a dead level of poverty.
India was in ruins by the end of Aurangzeb’s reign. Incessant wars had laid waste the country. Famine and pestilence wept the land every few years, scything down hundreds of thousands of lives. Comments the economic historian W.H. Moreland: ‘India in the [late] seventeenth century must have been an inferno for the ordinary man.
The Mughal golden age was golden only for the elite, and only for the minuscule Mughalized political elite at that. It had no transformative effect on India civilization. The Mughal culture, on the other hand, was an exotic plant introduced into India from another cultural clime Islamic Persia. The Mughals did refine the derived culture exquisitely, particularly in the field of architecture, and added a few distinctive Indian elements to it, but it remained essentially Persian.
The Persianized Islamic culture had first been introduced into India by the Delhi sultans at the turn of the twelfth century. But even by the eighteenth century, after 500 years of acclimatization, it still remained a hothouse plant which has not sunk its roots into the Indian soil, but looked to Persia for nourishment. So when the Persian culture declined in the late seventeenth century, inevitably the Mughal culture withered too. The Hindu culture was in a worse state of decadence, having been in decay for many centuries. Neither of the two cultures had the vitality to lift India out of the medieval morass.
Perhaps a synthesis of the Hindu and Muslim cultures, along with openness to external cultural influence, could have stimulated the transformation of India. But India was not yet ready to take that path of progress. The cultural ferment that Akbar stimulated did not survive him.
At the end of Aurangzeb’s reign the country was being rapidly sucked into a whirlpool of total anarchy. What saved India from terminal chaos was the establishment of British rule. Three hundred and odd years after Gama’s arrival, they established themselves as the dominant power in India, stepping into the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Mughal Empire.
The British, of course, did not conquer India out of altruism, for the benefit of Indians, but to exploit the country for their own gain. Nevertheless, India benefited as much as Britain from the relationship.
They incidentally, provided the lifeline for India to pull itself out of the vortex into which it had been sinking. And by and large the British ruled the country justly, especially in contrast to the notoriously corrupt, arbitrary and whimsical rule of the decadent rajas and sultans.
The British provided this ancient civilization with the external stimulus it needed in order to catalyse its evolution into a modern nation.



WORLD TRENDS
Contemporary Reversal of Role between UK & India
William Dalrymple, Eminent Historian
After the chaos of the 18th century, Shahjahanabad was thriving again and growing fast. A major regional economic centre, it was also a period of great self-confidence and artistic achievement—this was the Delhi of the ghazals of Ghalib and Zauq; of the miniature painting of Ghulam Ali Khan and Mazar Ali Khan; of the mathematical achievement of Master Ramchandra and the theological sophistication of Shah Abdul Aziz and Mufti Sadruddin Azurda.As it turned out, I returned at a time when Delhi was again in the grip of one of its intermittent periods of growth and productivity, not only in terms of economic figures but also in literature, the arts and the media. This was all immediately apparent: we had settled down in a friend’s farmhouse in Kapashera, on the south western edge of Delhi, five kilometres from Gurgaon. From the end of my road, you could just see in the distance the rings of new housing estates springing up, full of call centres, software companies and fancy apartment blocks, all rapidly rising on land that only recently had been billowing winter wheat. The speed of change and the growth of the Indian economy in general affairs extraordinary to someone who first saw the plodding India of 1984—the India of the Licence Raj, of six months’ queues at Mahanagar Telephone Nigam and of the clumpy Hindustan Ambassador. It is easy to forget how little any of this talk of India’s great wealth and speed of growth would have surprised any of who sailed to India from the west in the 18th century.
The idea of India as a place of fabulous wealth was already a cliché by the time of Megasthenes. In Roman times, there was a dramatic drain of Western gold to India.
This is something that Strabo comments on with great anxiety in his writings—and an image graphically confirmed by the recent finding of several huge Roman coin hoards around Madurai in Tamil Nadu, and the discovery of a large Roman coastal trading post near Pondicherry. At the peak of the trade, during the reign of Nero, the south Indian Pandyan kings even sent an Embassy to Rome to discuss the latter’s balance of payments problems.
The great Pallava kings who made Kanchipuram their capital, and whose fabulous and witty sculptures still delight so many at their great port of Mamallapuram, were one of a number of South Indian dynasties which became rich and powerful from their control of the spice and silk trade and the wider maritime world this opened up.
From their great port, the Pallavas sent naval expeditions to Sri Lanka, Thailand and to South-East Asia, where inscriptions survive as witness to the scale of this first great Indian diaspora. An eighth century Tamil poem speaks of the port where “ships rode at anchor, bent to the point of breaking, laden as they were with wealth, with big-trunked elephants, and with mountains of gems of nine varieties.”
The Cholas who succeeded the Pallavas continued this tradition: Rajarajan I conquered Sri Lanka, and on making Tanjore his capital, erected what was then the most magnificent temple in the peninsula to commemorate his glory. On its completion in 1010, he donated to the new structure no less than 500 tonne of gold, jewels and silver looted from Sri Lanka.
It was rumours of India’s extraordinary wealth that drew the merchant adventurers of the East India Company to India 600 years later. They came to India as part of a desperate effort to cash in on the vast riches of the fabled Mughal Empire, then one of the two wealthiest polities in the world.
The Mughal Empire was far larger, more powerful and infinitely richer than its two would-be competitors to the West—the Ottomans and the Saffavids of Isfahan. Only the Ming Emperors in Peking could begin to compete with them. At their peak, the Mughals ruled over some 100 million subjects—five times the number ruled by the Ottomans. What the Poles and East Europeans are to modern Britain—economic migrants in search of better lives—the Jacobeans were to Mughal India.
By the 17th century, Agra was a vast megalopolis, while Lahore had grown larger even than Constantinople, and with its two million inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. From the ramparts of the Fort, the Great Mughal ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and great chunks of Afghanistan. His army was all but invincible; his palaces unparalleled; the domes of his many mosques quite literally glittered with gold. “The city is second to none either in Asia or in Europe,” thought the Portuguese Jesuit, Fr Antonio Monserrate, “with regards either to size, population, or wealth. It is crowded with merchants, who foregather there from all over Asia.”.
What changed all this was, quite simply, the advent of European colonialism. In 1498, the Portuguese discovered the sea route to the East. Only 12 years later, Afonso de Albuquerque, ‘the Caesar of the East’, arrived off the coast of Goa with a fleet. He massacred the Muslim defenders of the Fort, then carved out for himself a small crescent-shaped enclave clinging to the Western seaboard. Bypassing the Middle East, and conquering the centres of spice production in South Asia, European colonial traders slowly captured and destroyed the old trading network of the Arabian Sea. Before long, the Europeans were advancing out of their coastal forts and factories to take over and transform for their own benefits the economy of the interior.
The era of Indian economic decline had begun. Its most precipitous collapse took place in the 18th century in the region around the British headquarters in Calcutta. The British commander, Robert Clive, returned to Britain with the massive fortune of £300,000 making him one of the richest self-made individuals in Europe; after one single battle—Plassey—he transferred to the Company treasury no less than £2.5 million he had seized from that of the defeated Nawab of Bengal.
The conquered province was left devastated by war and high taxation, and striken by the famine of 1769. Its wealth rapidly drained into British bank accounts, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so many slaves” by their new British masters, and the markets flooded with British manufactures. As the 18th century historian Alexander Dow put it, before Plassey the, “balance of trade was against all nations in favour of Bengal… (it was) the sink where gold and silver disappeared without the least prospect of return… Bengal was one of the richest, most populous and best cultivated kingdoms in the world… We may date the commencement of decline from the day on which Bengal fell under the dominion of foreigners.”
This was certainly the view of Adam Smith who wrote of his horror at the way the Company “oppressed and domineers” those who it traded with. It was also the view of Edmund Burke who impeached Warren Hastings, the East India’s Governor General, charging him with oppression, corruption, gross abuse of power, and the ruthless plundering of India.
Hastings was in many ways the wrong target for Burke’s Parliamentary offensive—Clive would have been a much better choice—and partly because of this, after a trial lasting nearly 10 years, he was eventually acquitted on all charges. But it is well worth remembering the damage that the Company undoubtedly did to the flourishing economy of India as the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence dawns amid so much excitement at India’s rise towards superpower status.
Today, academics, historians and economists are fiercely divided between those who believe European colonial rule brought benefits to India, and those who believe Britain put India into irreversible political and economic decline.
Given the complex and emotive issues involved, it is hardly surprising that there is little neutral territory in this politically super-charged debate: did Western mercantile-imperialism bring high capitalism and free trade to India, or did it irrevocably destroy millennia-old trading networks?
Did it bring democracy to a part of the world inured to despotism and tyranny; or did it remove political freedom of expression from lands with long traditions of debate and public expression of dissent, as argued by Amartya Sen? Did the British Empire bring in constitutional guarantees of the freedom of the individual; or promote slavery, exploitation, indentured labour and forced migration? Did the British bring just governance and irrigate the deserts, or did they plunder natural resources, drive a succession of species to extinction and preside over a succession of famines which left many million dead while surplus grain was being shipped to Britain?
Certainly, the British introduced the important innovations of democracy and the rule of law, along with the railways. They also brought, in the Indian Civil Service (or ICS), a tradition of uncorrupt and impartial administration run by a meritocratic bureaucracy. It is also true that the English language has been crucial to India’s modern success, setting Indian eyes looking westwards to the rising power of Britain and America, and away from the declining Islamo-Persianate culture of Central and Western Asia. In the days that followed the fall of the Mughals after 1857, this turning away from the old cultural moorings and the reorientation of India towards the West caused heart break to the old North Indian Urdu and Persian-speaking elites. As the poet and critic Azad wrote: “The glory of the winners’ ascendant fortune gives everything of theirs—even their dress, their gait, their conversation—a radiance that makes them desirable. And people donot merely adopt them, but they are proud to adopt them.” Yet it was the depth of that reorientation and adoption, and the ease with which Indians can now cross the globe and work in either Britain or America, that today has given the country’s Anglicised elite such an easy access to the jobs and opportunities of the Western economy, and gives them such an advantage in so many fields over their only real rivals, the Chinese.
Nevertheless, many styles of architecture and art, forms of writing and ways of living were pushed into extinction in the course of the Colonial period, albeit assisted by the eagerness of so many Brown Sahibs to embrace Western ways of living. Even decades after Independence, India remained the epitome of a Third World nation, sustained by western charity.
Today, India is again famous not for deprivation but for its trading opportunities and its pockets of great wealth, as well as the brilliance of its writers (both of software and literature); for its fine food and beautiful women; for its growing political importance. As in the days of the Great Mughal, barely a week goes by without some diplomatic delegation arriving in Delhi, cap in hand, begging for trading privileges just as once William Hawkins and Sir Thomas Roe bowed before the musnud of Jahangir.
Today, firangis are no longer the ‘burra sahibs’, but clients for the goods and services of Mother India—and aspirants for her favours.
(Source: India Today, August 20, 2007)


MUSLIM WORLD-PAKISTAN ELECTION, 2008
Editorial Comments on Pakistan Election Results, 2008
Pakistan Speaks
Times of India, 20 Feb 2008,
Elections widely seen as a referendum on President Musharraf may be bringing to an end close to a decade of military rule.
Voter turnout is close to 40 per cent, which is good given the circumstances. Not only have past polls been rigged, leading to voter apathy, there was the ever present possibility terrorist effects.
That so many Pakistanis combated apathy and fear to come out to vote, and that the voting process was by and large peaceful, are indicators that the country may have turned a corner.
Fears of a poll rigged by the establishment in favour of the PML-Q turned out to be overstated, an unprecedented level of scrutiny, with international media, observers from the EU and American Congressmen present. That made it difficult to get away with large-scale rigging.
The myth that Musharraf had assiduously fostered to shore up his position as Pakistan’s strongman that without him at the helm the country was ripe for a fundamentalist takeover — has been shattered by the election.
Most Pakistanis have voted for moderate parties. What’s most significant is that the, which is seen as a Taliban backyard and where mullahs have held sway since the last election in 2002, has given more seats to the secular ANP than the Islamist (MMA).
No one party having a clear majority could be a blessing in disguise. Since the PPP has done well in Sind and the PML-N in Punjab, a coalition between them could provide a much-needed Punjab-Sind axis to stabilise the country.
There’s increasing pressure on Musharraf to step down, but what’s more important is to form a government of national unity that would shore up Pakistan’s institutions, restore parliament’s powers and repair the damage that’s been done to the constitution.
The PPP and PML-N have entered into consultations about a power-sharing arrangement, which could provide such a government. A condition for that to happen is that they shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
Together they would have enough votes to impeach him. That’s where the role of army chief Ashfaq Kayani, who was appointed by Musharraf, becomes important. Kayani has the clout to bail Musharraf out and could step in at that point. A peaceful, non-acrimonious transition of power may be best for Pakistan.
India should look forward to the transition to a civilian regime, which could revive the spirit of the Lahore declaration of. A full normalisation of ties between India and Pakistan can transform the subcontinent. Economic benefits would be immense if both sides could freely trade with and invest in each other. Lifting of travel barriers would improve the psychological atmosphere and transform them in to partners. Cooperation would help curb, poverty and terror. There are big constituencies on both sides crying out for peace.
Inspiring Outcome
Editorial, The Hindu, 20 February, 2008
The people of Pakistan have done themselves proud by voting decisively against military rule as well as religious extremism. The vote was so overwhelmingly in favour of liberal-centrist democratic forces. The PPP has swept its traditional stronghold of rural Sindh and in the Seraiki belt of Punjab, the PPP will be the single largest party in parliament. The Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), the party that served as the civilian mask for President Pervez Musharraf’s dictatorial regime, has fared poorly but remains a force. The PML(N), has won decent electoral dividends for the uncompromising fight it put up against authoritarianism and constitutional manipulation and fraud. It has demonstrated the strength of its roots in central and northern Punjab.
The people of Pakistan have voted for a stable coalition government of the PPP and PML(N). Such an arrangement has political merit since it would consolidate the leading elective democratic forces in Pakistan’s politics. The importance of strengthening this base to mobilise the masses against army-based authoritarianism and religious extremism cannot be overestimated. Parties with secular credentials have done well in urban Sindh and the NWFP.
The key question is whether Pakistan’s two leading parties can overcome their differences and tensions over the kind of intermediate political-constitutional arrangements they want for Pakistan. Mr. Sharif’s party has made it clear that it wants the restoration of the judiciary; the repeal of the 17th constitutional amendment, which enabled General Musharraf to remain in power; and the removal of all restrictions on the media. It has also indicated, that it wants President Musharraff to go, possibly through the threat of impeachment, which must now be reckoned to be on Pakistan’s political agenda. Nobody wants confrontation but the alternative scenario of the PPP turning to the PML(Q), the MQM, and the ANP to form a government will mean betraying the people’s mandate.
The results of the four provincial assembly elections reflect the same pattern as the parliamentary outcome. The PML(N) will be the single largest party in Punjab and can legitimately ruled as part of a coalition arrangement with the PPP. There is no uncertainty at all about who will rule Sindh; the PPP has won a clear majority of Assembly seats in this province where its ascendancy signals a welcome end to the era of unstable coalitions. Quite different types of coalition arrangements. the most sensible course of action for Musharraf is to step down, thus helping his country and people come out of their time of troubles.
More than Musharraf
Editorial,The Indian Express, 20 February, 2008
Tomorrow will bring a roster of questions about government formation, its agenda, possibly its limitations. To negotiate them, the new federal and provincial governments could return to the democratic triumph today to spot the ingredient that makes them better endowed to lead Pakistan than their predecessors. This has been by all accounts one of Pakistan’s freest and fairest elections. By that virtue alone, the next government in Islamabad will have unique legitimacy. And those worldwide with a perceived stake in Pakistan’s stability must celebrate it.
The politics of Pakistan is now firmly with Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. Coming days will demand for Pakistan’s sake an order of grace and humility from Musharraf that he has so far shown no evidence of possessing.
Pakistan’s new government needs for the West to refrain from demanding the kind of schoolyard loyalty Musharraf had become so expert at iterating. The quid pro quo of that process gave Musharraf cover to make incremental distortions in the polity. Those in the West who cowered at the success of the extremist parties in the 2002 elections must look at the result tally. In the Frontier province, the MMA alliance has disintegrated, and the more constitutional Awami National Party, which has an understanding with the PPP, is leading. The lesson: fullest spectrum of political participation keeps politics centred. And more stable.
Past the post in Pakistan
Editorial, The Hindustan Times, 20 February, 2008
Pakistan has shaken off years of dictatorship in what seems a surprisingly free and fair election. The ‘King’s Party’, has been leftbehind in their dust as together PPP & MLN have crossed the half-way mark. The fundamentalist parties have also taken a beating. Now that the general is up the creek without a paddle, he has called for reconciliation, ironically the title of Benazir’s last book.
The best Musharraf can hope for is that the two major parties, bitter rivals in the past, either don’t come together and form a coalition, or that, if they do, they don’t have the two-thirds majority to impeach him. What has caught many off guard is that the intelligence agencies and the army did not try and rig the polls more effectively. An obviously rigged election would have led to further violence and bloodshed, a handle for the fundamentalists to beat him with and would have earned him the opprobrium of the West. Assuming a statesman-like role and cooperating with a democratically elected government is his best bet for political survival.
For Nawaz Sharif, what better homecoming for him than to see his arch foe get a hammering in the polls. And to see even the Mohajir Quami Movement, once an ally of the ‘King’s Party’ say that it is not averse to an alliance with either the PPP or the PML(N). The biggest challenge now for the new government is to push the army back into the barracks and begin the task of genuine reconciliation.


Pakistan: General Election, 2008 Results
Political National Pro vincial Assembly
Parties Assembly Punjab Sindh NWFP B’stan
PPP 87 76 65 15 7
PML (Nawaz) 67 100 0 5 0
PML (Qaide Azam) 40 64 9 6 17
MQM 19 0 38 0 0
MMA 6 2 0 8 6
ANP 9 0 2 29 1
Independent 34 38 11 22 13
Total Seats 272 293 130 96 51
Total Result 262 280 125 85 44

Result of General Election, 2008
Electorate 82 million
Strength of National Assembly 342
Voter Turnout 46%
Election Cost $3 billion
Elected 272
To be Nominated by Parties 70 (60 for Women 0 & 10 for Minorities)
Cancelled / Postponed 4 & Result Awaited 6
Total Result 262

Political Elected Projected
Parties (With Nomination)
PPP 87 113
PML (N) 67 84
PML (Q) 40 55
QMM 19 25
ANP 9 14
MMA 6 7
Independents 34 39
Total 262 337
Possible Coalition Governments
I. Pakistan: Total: 342
PPP+PML(N)+ANP = 211
II. Punjab: Total 297: PML (N) + PPP = 181
III. Sindh: Total 130: PPP = 65
IV. NWFP: Total 99: ANP+PPP+ Ind. = 66
V. Balochistan: Total 51: PML(Q) + Ind.+ Ors = 32



MUSLIM WORLD
The US Neo-Wilsonian Grand Strategy for the Middle East-II
Democracy Danger for US Elite Interest
Eddiej Girdner
In many countries genuine democracy would militate against US interest. In Egypt, for example, it is very likely that a more open democracy would bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power.
The Bush Administration in Iran, the US is less than pleased with the election of Mahmoud Ahmedinefad. The Iranian elections were denounced as undemocratic.
Washington blocked elections in Palestine as long as Yasser Arafat was alive. After his death, the Americans pushed for elections, believing that Hamas could be contained and the farce of ‘the roadmap’ would allow Israel to control the situation in the Palestinian territories. As it turned out, Hamas surprised everyone and won the elections. Since the wrong party won. Hamas began to further the same policy of rejecting a two state solution, which the Americans and Israelis had played for years and aid from the US was cut off. The US refused to recognize the right of Hamas to take an independent stance on the recognition of Israel. Subsequently both the House of Representatives and the Senate passed bills blocking US money to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
Iraq is another country where the United States agenda has been tripped by democracy. After the invasion and occupation, the United States attempted to put into place a system whereby they could control the new government. Elections were to be delayed until there was greater stability. In the event, however, Ayatollah Ali Sistani demanded elections and the Americans were unable to suppress the groundswell of support for direct elections. The Americans rigged the elections, but the Shiites rigged them better and the US came out the loser. The new government of Ibrahim al –Jaafari moved closer to the Iranians. In the subsequent elections of December 2005, the Americans pushed Jaafari out and no one can doubt that the Americans continue to pull the strings and openly issue orders to a subservient Iraqi ‘government’. This is hardly what one could call democracy.
Pakistan is another case, where the US is not talking much about democracy, even though the country is included in the GMEI list of countries. The US needs General Pervez Musharraf to stem the tide of pro-Taliban sentiment and so falls back on the pro-Western autocracy and military rule.
In Saudi Arabia, no one doubts that democratization would strengthen the Wahabis, and result in a disaster for the United States. The Wahabis represent increasing numbers of the poor and Islamists.
A study by Thomas Carothers has noted, “ Where democracy appears to fit in well with US economic and security interest, the United States promotes democracy. Where democracy clashes with other significant interests, it is downplayed or even ignored”. How democratic is the neo-conservative Bush Administration in the United States? Is it plausible that such a government would genuinely promote democracy in the Middle East? Recent public opinion polls in the United States show that the policies of the neo-conservatives are not supported by a democratic majority. This shows the increasing gap between public will and public policy. It is clear that the American public overwhelming rejects the new-conservative foreign policy objectives.
In a six-country poll in the Middle East, 69 per cent said democracy is not the real goal of the US.
Clearly, the Greater Middle East Initiative cannot be taken seriously as a program for genuine democratization in the region. US foreign policy will continue to manipulate regimes to serve the interests of American elites and corporations and to control resources and markers. With genuine democracy, on the other hand, states would demand control of resources, particularly oil, autonomy from US and Israeli capital, and the freedom to oppose the agenda of Washington, including IMF austerity programs.
The neo-conservative agenda is about controlling global resources and global power. It actually endangers the entire world as never before. It has nothing to do with fighting or stopping terrorism. Instead, it has created conditions for the emergence of terrorism from the grass roots. Democracy would be a clear threat to the American agenda in the region. On the other hand it is ironic that the US may lead more people to resist the designs of the IMF and World Bank for the plunder of their local resources and control of their economies. As Robert Fisk, a veteran Journalist and scholar of the history of the Middle East States, “We are always threatening the Middle East with democracy. But there is another kind of democracy which they would like, and that is freedom from us”.


Decline of Science & Technology Causes-I
Pervez Hoodbhoy, Eminent Physicist
With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge?, I am here using the 57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a proxy for the Islamic world.
Past Record
It was not always this way. Islam’s magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body’s circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important element—although by no means the only one—that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of injustice and victimhood.
Islam’s encounter with science has had happy and unhappy periods. There was no science in Arab culture in the initial period of Islam, around 610 AD. But as Islam established itself politically and militarily, its territory expanded. In the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and enlightened caliphs, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A generally tolerant and pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam—such as on the issue of free will versus predestination—became intense and turned bloody. A resurgent religious orthodoxy eventually inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.1
A long period of darkness followed, punctuated by occasional brilliant spots.
The 20th century witnessed the end of European colonial rule and the emergence of several new independent Muslim states, all initially under secular national leaderships. A spurt toward modernization and the acquisition of technology followed. Many expected that a Muslim scientific renaissance would ensue. Clearly, it did not. What ails science in the Muslim world?
Muslim leaders today, realizing that military power and economic growth flow from technology, frequently call for speedy scientific development and a knowledge-based society. Often that call is rhetorical, but in some Muslim countries—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria among others—official patronage and funding for science and education have grown sharply in recent years. No Muslim leader has publicly called for separating science from religion.
Is boosting resource allocations enough to energize science, or are more fundamental changes required? The pioneering sociologist Max Weber, claimed that Islam lacks an “idea system” critical for sustaining a scientific culture based on innovation, new experiences, quantification, and empirical verification. Fatalism and an orientation toward the past, makes progress difficult and even undesirable.
In the current epoch of growing antagonism between the Islamic and the Western worlds, most Muslims reject such charges with angry indignation. They feel those accusations add yet another excuse for the West to justify its ongoing cultural and military assaults on Muslim populations. Muslims bristle at any hint that Islam and science may be at odds, or that some underlying conflict between Islam and science may account for the slowness of progress. The Pakistani physics Nobel Prize winner, Abdus Salam, would stress to audiences that one-eighth of the Qur’an is a call for Muslims to seek Allah’s signs in the universe and hence that science is a spiritual as well as a temporal duty for Muslims. Perhaps the most widely used argument one hears is that the Prophet Muhammad had exhorted his followers to “seek knowledge even if it is in China,” which implies that a Muslim is duty-bound to search for secular knowledge.
Poor State of Science Today
Let us seek to understand the state of science in the contemporary Islamic world.
The metrics of scientific progress are neither precise nor unique. Science permeates our lives in myriad ways, means different things to different people, and has changed its content and scope drastically over the course of history. In addition, the paucity of reliable and current data makes the task of assessing scientific progress in Muslim countries still harder.
Hoever reasonablties is a set of four metrics:
· The quantity of scientific output, weighted by some reasonable measure of relevance and importance;
· The role played by science and technology in the national economies, funding for S&T, and the size of the national scientific enterprises;
· The extent and quality of higher education; and
· The degree to which science is present or absent in popular culture.
Scientific output
A useful, if imperfect, indicator of scientific output is the number of published scientific research papers, together with the citations to them. The output of the seven most scientifically productive Muslim countries for physics papers, over the period from 1 January 1997 to 28 February 2007, together with the total number of publications in all scientific fields in comparison with Brazil, India, China, and the US reveals significantly smaller numbers. A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia2 showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (For more on the OECD, Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world’s science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The US NSF records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.
The situation may be even grimmer. Assessing the scientific worth of publications—never an easy task—is complicated further by the rapid appearance of new international scientific journals that publish low-quality work.
The situation regarding patents is also discouraging: The OIC countries produce negligibly few. According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years.
Among the larger countries—in both population and political importance—Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan are the most scientifically developed. Malaysia—a rather atypical Muslim country with a 40% non-Muslim minority—is much smaller than neighboring Indonesia but is nevertheless more productive. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and other states that have many foreign scientists are scientifically far ahead of other Arab states.
Conventional wisdom suggests that bigger science budgets indicate, or will induce, greater scientific activity. On average, the 57 OIC states spend an estimated 0.3% of their gross national product on research and development, which is far below the global average of 2.4%. But the trend toward higher spending is unambiguous. Pakistan set a record by increasing funding for higher education and science by an immense 800% over the past five years.
But bigger budgets by themselves are not a panacea. The capacity to put those funds to good use is crucial. One determining factor is the number of available scientists, engineers, and technicians. Those numbers are low for OIC countries, averaging around 400–500 per million people, while developed countries typically lie in the range of 3500–5000 per million. Even more important are the quality and level of professionalism, which are less easily quantifiable.
There is little correlation between academic research papers and the role of S&T in the national economies. The anomalous position of Malaysia in has its explanation in the large direct investment made by multinational companies and in having trading partners that are overwhelmingly non-OIC countries.
There are scientific areas in which research has paid off in the Islamic world. Agricultural research—which is relatively simple science—provides or case in point. Pakistan has good results. Defense technology is another area in which many developing countries have invested. Pakistan manufactures nuclear weapons and intermediate-range missiles. There is now also a increasingly export-oriented Pakistani arms industry that turns out a large range of weapons from grenades to tanks, night-vision devices to laser-guided weapons, and small submarines to training aircraft. Much of the production is a triumph of reverse engineering rather than original research and development
According to a recent survey, among the 57 member states of the OIC, there are approximately 1800 universities.5 Of those, only 312 publish journal articles. A ranking of the 50 most published among them yields these numbers: 26 are in Turkey, 9 in Iran, 3 each in Malaysia and Egypt, 2 in Pakistan, and 1 in each of Uganda, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan. For the top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about 1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article is less than 1.0. No OIC university made the top-500 “Academic Ranking of World Universities” compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
An institution’s quality is fundamental, but how is it to be defined? Providing more infrastructure and facilities is important but not key. Most universities in Islamic countries have a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection to job skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity.
Academic and cultural freedoms on campuses are highly restricted in most Muslim countries. At Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, , the constraints are similar to those existing in most other Pakistani public-sector institutions. This university serves the typical middle-class Pakistani student and, according to the survey referred to earlier, ranks number two among OIC universities. Here, as in other Pakistani public universities, films, drama, and music are frowned on. The campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics. The Ahmedi sect to which he belonged, and which had earlier been considered to be Muslim, was officially declared heretical in 1974.
Science and religion still at odds
Science is under pressure globally, and from every religion. As science becomes an increasingly dominant part of human culture, its achievements inspire both awe and fear. Religious conservatives in the US have rallied against the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Extreme Hindu groups such as the Vishnu Hindu Parishad, which has called for ethnic cleansing of Christians and Muslims, have promoted various “temple miracles,” including one in which God Ganesh miraculously came alive and started drinking milk.
Science, in the view of fundamentalists, is principally seen as valuable for establishing yet more proofs of God, proving the truth of Islam and the Qur’an, and showing that modern science would have been impossible but for Muslim discoveries. Antiquity alone seems to matter. One gets the impression that history’s clock broke down somewhere during the 14th century and that plans for repair are, at best, vague. In that all-too-prevalent view, science is not about critical thought and awareness, creative uncertainties, or ceaseless explorations. Missing are websites or discussion groups dealing with the philosophical implications from the Islamic point of view of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, superstrings, stem cells, and other contemporary science issues.
Similarly, in the mass media of Muslim countries, discussions on “Islam and science” are common and welcomed only to the extent that belief in the status quo is reaffirmed rather than challenged. (To be Continued)



MUSLIM MINOTITIES-USA
American Federation of Muslims from India
(US & Canada)
What is AFMI
AFMI is a philanthropic, service based, and issue orientated organization formed by Muslim Americans of Indian origin in 1989. AFMI s composed of Muslim organization, intellectuals, academicians and professional active in the United States of America. It strives to work towards the educational and economic upliftment of Muslim Indians through seeking between cooperation among the American and Indian relief and educational organizations.
AFMI also intends to serve as a bridge between Indian intellectuals, public officials and business men and Indian Americans especially Muslims.
AFMI distributes special scholarship and educational awards of gold sliver and bronze medals to Indian Muslim students of high merit from various states
AFMI takes pride in building schools in various states of India. In Faizabad, UP; it has helped to build over 24 primary schools similarly it has built schools in Maharashtra, Gujarat, MP, Karnataka and other states. AFMI has built many computer centres in various states. It also prides in building clinics and conducting free medical camps open. It has developed unique water delivery system in some villages. All together AFMI has over 75 projects, educational and social, all over India.
AFMI has hosted major public events in the past six years in honor of Indian leaders such as former president of India like G. Zail Singh. Prime Ministers, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, H. D. Deve Gowda and I. K Gujral, Governor, Dr. A. R. Kidwai, Dr. Khurshid Alam Khan, Chief Ministers, Chandra Babu Naidu, Digvijay Singh, Union Ministers Ram Vilas Paswan, Laloo Prasad Yadav, Arjun Singh, others such as, Chief Justice Ahmedi, Dr. Kiran Bedi, Mr. Justice Rajinder Sachar, Dilip Kumar, Sairabano, Shabana Azmi, Kuldip Nayar, N. Ram, M. J. Akbar, Faroukh Sheikh, and many others.
AFMI, Mission Statement:
American Federation of Muslims of Indian Origin (AFMI) is committed to advance the cause of Muslims and other underprivileged masses in India.
1. Improve literacy and economic status of Muslims in India.
2. Help Muslims in India to contribute towards social, political and economical development of India.
3. Advance the cause of underprivileged masses in India in general, and Muslim masses inparticular.
4. Promote exchange of technology and other resources to develop entrepreneurial and leadership skills.
5. Encourage excellence in Muslim youth in North America and India to strengthen their Muslim identity.
Short Profile of Activities
Education: AFMI’s highest priority continues to be the by to promote educational empowerment and educational excellence.
*Award of Gold, Silver and bronze medals to students scoring highest percentage marks of Secondary and Higher Secondary level in each states.
* Award of scholarships to deserving and needy students.
* Rehabilitation of Muslim institutions
*Vocational guidance of schools for specialized courses
*Establishment of centre of excellence
*Computer literacy projects
National Boards
Dr. Shakir Mukhi, President
Mr. S. M. Ali Qureshi, President-Elect
Ayub Khan, Secretary
Dr. Iqbal Ahmed, Treasurer Trustee
Dr. A. S. Nakadar
Dr. Aslam Abdullah
Dr. Syed Samee
Regional Chapters in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, Detroit, Michigan, Washington DC, Cleveland, Ohio, Houston, Texas, New York, Canada.


Annual Convention, Jaipur, 2007
The 16th Annual Convention of the American Federation of Muslims of Indian Origin (AFMI), was held in Jaipur on 29-30 December, 2007. The focus at this conference was on education. Over two days, panelists including AFMI members and invited speakers, elaborated on a variety of topics such as educating Muslims, girls education, modernizing Madrasa education, and new challenges and opportunities.
AFMI presented its Sir Syed Award for Excellence in Education to the chairman of the Hyderabad based Foundation for Economic and Educational Development and Hyderabad Zakat and Charitable Trust, Ghayasuddin Babukhan. Gold, Silver and bronze meritorious students from various states of the country.
Convention was held at Jamiatul Hidaya where Rector Maulana Muhammad Fazlur Rahim Mujaddidi welcomed the distinguished gathering.
Governors of three states, SK Singh of Rajasthan, Naval Kishor Sharma of Gujarat and AR Kiewai of Haryana, and the Union minister of steel and fertilizers Ram Vilas Paswan were among those who attended the two day conference.
Speakers felt that the Sachar Committee Report which was an authentic document elaborating the pitiable and appalling conditions of the Indian Muslims should be treated with seriousness and measures taken for the advancement of the community’s primary, higher and technical as well as madrasa education.
Other guests present on the occasion included the chairman of the National Commission for Minorities’ Educational Institutions, Justice MSA Siddiqui, and former vice chancellor of Agra University Manzoor Ahmed.
Two students from Kolkata, Mohammed Arif Shaikh and Mohammad Nasir, who scored 99.38 percent marks in the secondary examination this year were given gold medals on the occasion.



MUSLIM WORLD-MINOTITIES
Hindu Quest of Identity in Malaysia
Baradan Kuppusamy, Kuala Lumpur, December 7, 2007
In 1941 Malaysian Tamils, descendants of 19th-century indentured labourers from Tamil Nadu, rubber plantation workers downed their tools in Klang, some 30 km east of Kuala Lumpur, to protest against hardship and low wages.
Nearly seven decades later, an estimated 20,000 Tamils protested on November 25, condemning official discrimination, and demanding a fair share of the nation’s wealth. “Official discrimination and neglect has severely marginalised us,” says Uthayakumar Ponnusamy, a lawyer and the man behind the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf), the organiser of the protest. Tamil protesters being teargassed in Kuala Lumpur “We are trapped in a cycle of poverty, crime, drugs and alcoholism. They don’t treat us as citizens; they treat us as garbage—smelly, unwanted and better forgotten.”
Ponnusamy, a Londontrained lawyer who set up shop in Kuala Lumpur in 1994 and has spearheaded many campaigns, including a recent one to stop the demolition of temples in Malaysia. His latest campaign, rallying “oppressed and suppressed” Tamils around the banner of Hinduism, is potentially the most explosive. “The campaign pits the Tamil minority against the Muslim majority,” says Samy Vellu, a long time government minister and president of the Malaysian Indian Congress, a moderate Indian party that is a minor partner in the ruling National Front coalition government led by the dominant United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). “He spreads lies and works up racial emotions... it is explosive and dangerous. Where is it going to lead?”
UMNO president and Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, a moderate Muslim practising inclusive Islam, is also angry with Hindraf, which is a coalition of 30 Hindu organisations formed in 2006. Like Vellu, Badawi dismisses Ponnusamy’s accusations as “pure lies”, but has sought a report into the improvement of conditions for Tamils by employing them in the civil services, providing training in skills for Tamil youth and offering small business loans. He has also quietly ordered the demolition of temples to be curbed until further investigation. But Badawi has angered civil rights leaders by threatening to use security laws against protesters. With a general election widely expected by March next year, Badawi is weighing his moves. A hard crackdown would see minority votes fleeing to the Opposition. A soft approach, would embolden the “fanatics and extremists” to demand the sky.
The face-off is a potential minefield for India. A mild statement of “concern” from New Delhi was immediately rebuffed by Kuala Lumpur, indicating the deep sensitivities involved.
But the Hindraf campaign has struck a chord among the Tamil masses, going by the huge numbers that turned up for the protest. The turnout shocked many Malaysians. Says Law Minister Nazri Aziz. “We stand by the millions of Indians who stayed at home (instead of protesting on the streets). We are with them.”
Malaysia is a land of plenty in many ways. It successfully transformed itself from a backwater country getting by on rubber and tin, into a dynamic economic powerhouse. Annual per capita income has soared from under US$300 to over US$3,000 (Rs 1.18 lakh) in 20 years.
The economy is among the top 20 in the world, and nearly three million legal and illegal foreign workers remitted $6 billion in 2006 to their families across Asia, including India.
But many Tamils say progress has bypassed the community. The demonstrators wanted to march on to the British mission, located in the diplomatic enclave in Kuala Lumpur, to submit a memorandum urging the Queen of England to help them in a legal case brought against the British government. In the class action suit, filed in London in August, Hindraf chairman P. Waythamoorthy has demanded that the British pay $4 trillion (Rs 157 lakh crore) in damages to atone for “150 years of exploitation” of ethnic Indians by their former colonial masters. But the real intention was to humiliate the Malaysian government.
The protest by Tamils—who form 80 per cent of the two million people of Indian origin in a population of 27 million— is seen as a rude awakening in the land of the plenty. “The problem is that the plenty is in the hands of a few. There are Indians and Chinese who are poor and bypassed by development,” says Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang. According to the 2004 United Nations Human Development report, Malaysia has the highest income disparity in South-East Asia. The report says the richest 10 per cent of the Malaysian population have a 38.4 per cent share of income compared to the poorest 10 per cent who have a share of 1.7 per cent.
The Indian problem is a historical and inherited one. In the colonial scheme, Tamils were at the bottom of the hierarchy as unskilled labourers in plantations. As the economy boomed, the non-Tamils prospered and moved into high-skill professions, business or migrated. They saw more prosperity during the boom years of the 1990s, but Tamils suffered as they were uprooted when cities expanded and ate up plantations, and they ended up as urban squatters. Some did experience mobility through education, “the bottom 60 per cent of Tamils could not The Government didn’t pay attention to them and, they were ignored because they were voiceless.”
“The NEP’s (New Economic Policy) aim was to eradicate poverty, but it only lifted poor Malays into the middle class, neglecting Indians,” the Bhumiputra (sons of the soil), the affirmative action policy introduced in 1970 .
Says opposition legislator Kulasegaran Murugesan, “Our share of the national wealth. It was 1.5 per cent in 1970, but is 1 per cent now. The Malay share jumped from 3 per cent to 40 per cent .”
“Being voiceless, we are at the receiving end of fundamentalism, which has spread its wings in the Government and almost become an official policy,” said Ponnusamy. He alleges that this is the reason why some 500 of the 17,000 temples in the country have been demolished since 2004. Aziz disagrees, “It is not government policy to demolish temples. We gave millions to construct temples, why should we destroy them?”
The Government cannot ignore the protest, it has to offer a comprehensive ‘new deal’ for Indians that covers all areas of grievances— jobs, temples, schools and above all, the creation of opportunities.
It has to build confidence and a sense of belonging among the Tamil masses,” They want to belong. They don’t want to be excluded.” .
It will be a tight balancing act for New Delhi—between showing concern for Tamils and convincing the Malay majority on not interfering in its internal matter.
(Source: India Today, December 17, 2007)


CHRONOLOGY
Monthly Chronology of Events of Concern
( 1-29 February, 2008)
I- National Developments :
National Politics :
BJP : *BJP launches 24 Sandesh Vahans to touch 380 constituencies (1 Feb.), as Advani limits his own yatra following threat perception.* Advani launches Vijay Sankalp Yatra from Jabalpur and accuses UPA of weakness against terrorism (6 Feb.)* Several retired bureaucrats and armymen gather around BJP.* BJP reiterates stand on reservation of women in legislatures but JD(U) reiterates demand of quota for OBC women.
INC : * Congress holds meet of Chairmen and Convener of State Minority Cells and Committees (5 Feb.)
*Natwar Singh resigns from Congress as well as from Rajya Sabha (22 Feb.)
Left: * CPI stresses need for Left Democratic Alternative to keep both Congress and BJP out of power (12 Feb.) * RSP accuses INC of softness towards Hindutva (25 Feb.)
SP : * Newly formed United National Progressive Alliance endorses Chairman Mulayam Singh Yadav as Prime Ministerial candidates (18 Feb.) * Left parties propose ‘Third Alternative’ at joint rally in Delhi to launch struggle against UPA and NDA (26 Feb.)
BSP : * Mayawati intensifies her campaign for taking party beyond UP. Visits Patna (6 Feb.). Holds rally in Delhi (24 Feb.). Creates uneasiness in INC. Proposes law on reservation and promises quota for all.
Shiv Sena Campaign in Maharashtra : * Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), off-shoot of Shiv Sena, terrorizes and attacks people of Bihar and UP domiciled in Maharashtra. Nearly 40,000 people emigrate from various cities including Mumbai & Pune* Assault condemned by all political parties including BJP. * MNS Chief Raj Thackeray arrested but released within a few hours (6 Feb), demands amendment to Constitution to limit inter-state migration* To maintain leadership Shivsena leader Bal Thackeray sings same tune. * HC upholds police order against MNS prohibiting rallies etc.(25 Feb.) * NHRC takes notice and asks Maharashtra for report (18 Feb)
Delimitation : * President signs Delimitation Order of Parliamentary and Assembly constituencies in 24 states. Delimitation disturbs some constituencies held by prominent politicians. * Muslims organizations express concern on reservation of some Muslim concentration constituencies but final gain/loss is not clear. (14 Feb)
Secularism : * President Pratibha Patil pass official visit to Tirupati. * Madhya Pradesh Police holds Shiv Puja in Police Line, Bhopal ( 2 Feb.)* Centre files affidavit in Ram Setu case and seeks vacation of stay on dredging (29 Feb.)
Small States : * BJP announces support for Vidharbha and Telangana.* TRS President and former Minister K. Chandrashekar threatens action if Central government takes no action (7 Feb.)
Criminalisation : * Atiq Ahmad, former Samajwadi MP, apprehended in Delhi (1 Feb.) * Pappu Yadav, former RJD MP from Bihar, sentenced to life imprisonment with two others for involvement in murder (14 Feb.)
Corruption : * UP government refers Police Recruitment scam to CBI ( 4 Feb.)
Judiciary : * Government decides to increase strength of Supreme Court by 5 (21 Feb.) * Eminent jurist H.R.Khanna, 95, passes away (25 Feb.)
Office of Profit :*SC hears petition against constitutionality of 2006 Act on Office of Profit, exempting 56 sitting MP’s from disqualification (27 Feb.)
II- Developments of Special Concern to Muslim Community
Taslima Nasreen Case : *Government extends Taslima Nasreen’s visa for 6 months ignoring protest by Muslim organizations (17 Feb.)
*Her controversial book freely and openly sold at World Book Fair in its original edition ( 3 Feb.)
* Supporters of Taslima Nasreen invoke National Human Rights Commission for lifting restriction on her movement. Many writers and artists publicly demand grant of permanent residence in total disregard of her filthy attacks on Islam and the Holy Prophet and of deep hurt caused to Muslims.
Reservation : * National Commission for Scheduled Castes recommends extension of SC status to dalit converts to Islam and Christianity but ignores claim of Christian and Muslim dalits, who claim descent from converts of the past who did not change their vocations. *Commission wants additional SC quota to accommodate new comers (3 Feb.)
* UPA Government decides to launch special drive to fill backlog quota for OBC’s (12 Feb.)
*Maharashtra announces reservation for SC/ST in all India Medical Entrance Test
Kashmir :* Despite palpable improvement Govt. refuses to reduce army presence or to shift its location or withdraw special powers * Kashmir Solidarity Day observed in Pakistan (5 Feb.) Function organized by Lashar-e-Taiyaba in Lahore tele-addressed by Kashmiri leaders Geelani, Shabbir Shah and Yasin Malik (8 Feb.) * Valley observes death anniversary of JKLF founder Maqbool Butt ( 11 Feb.)
Babri Masjid Case : * Supreme Court dismisses petition seeking review of November 2002 judgement permitting separate trials under the two FIRs (12 Feb.)
* Muslim side continues argument before Special Bench in title suit.(14 Feb.)
Jama Masjid : * Revised Redevelopment Plan opposed by resident as well as shopkeepers of Old Delhi.* HC defers hearing (19 Feb.)
Cow Slaughter : *SC upholds Gujarat ban on cow slaughter. (29 Feb)
III-Religious Questions :
Personal Law : * Law Commission recommends age of consent for girls to be raised to 16 years.* Islamic Fiq‘h Academy reaffirms the well-accepted principle that no woman can be forced into marriage without her consent and that if a girl is so married, she may declare her marriage null and void on reaching maturity.
*Muslim Personal Law Board holds 20th session in Kolkata on 29 Feb- 2 Mar. opposes legislation for compulsory registration of marriages. Notes tack of progress in various legal cases relating to Babri Masjid cases and judicial out-reach of Supreme Court for rewriting Muslim Personal Law.
* Haryana & West Bengal introduce compulsory registration.
Haj : *Mismanagement of Haj Flights 2008 universllly condemned by several Haj Committees as well as Muslim organizations; cancellation of Air India monopoly and selection of Haj carrier by international tender demanded.
*JUH G.S.Mahmood Madni demands end to Haj subsidy
* AP decides to provide subsidy for Christian pilgrims to Israel on the line of Haj subsidy.
Wakf : * *NHRC asked AP Govt. to explain the constitutional position of three recent laws on transfer of Church properties.
Secularism : Clash between Tabligh Jamaats and Barehmins in Jaipur (20 Feb.)
Madrasa : * RSS Chief releases a vicious book against Madrasas, which inter alia attaks Islam, the Quran and the Holy Prophet.* Jamiat-e-Ulema Hind demands ban of this book.
Islamic Open School : Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi Islamic Study Circle, Bhatkal, holds all India examination on Islamiyat with more than 25,000 examinees, including estimated 15% non-Muslims (12 Feb.)
Commemoration : * 50th death anniversary of Maulana Azad noted with participation of BJP leader L.K.Advani and President Indian Council for Cultural Relation Karan Singh.* 31st death anniversary of former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed observed in Delhi (10 Feb.)
IV- Education and Culture:
Education : * UGC frames draft regulation on admission fee structure in private institutions, leading to wide protest (14 Feb.)
*Also issues guidelines on academic reforms in Universities.
* SC sets aside Maharashtra Order sanctioning schools without financial aid (24 Feb)
* Madrasa Teachers Association demand Central Arabic and Persian University (29 Feb.)
Urdu : * Urdu litterateur Nayyar Masood nominaterd for Saraswati Samman, 2007 by Birla Foundation (14 Feb.) *NCPUL holds three day seminar on Urdu poet and political activist Makhdoom Muhiuddin (8Feb.)* Ghalib Academy remembers Shibli Nomani on his 150th birth anniversary (8 feb.) * Ghalib Day celebrated by Anjuman Tarrqi-e-Urdu and Ghalib Academy in New Delhi ( 15 Feb.)
Minority Institutions: * Cautioned by NCMEI against abuse or misuse of constitutional rights of Minorities (6 Feb.)
Urs of Bedil : * 393rd annual Urs of Abdul Qadir Bedil held in Delhi (9 Feb.)
Ban on Film : * MP HC revokes MP Govt’s ban on film Jodha Akbar (26 Feb.)
Book on Shivaji: * SC suggests to US author James Laine to delete 4 pages from his book on Shivaji for resolving controversy (26 Feb.)
M F Hussain’s Painting : * SC transfers six cases petition filed against painter M.F.Hussain to Delhi (9 Feb.)
Vandalism : * Delhi University protests against vandalism by ABVP activists in History Deptt. Police arrests ABVP leaders (26 Feb.)
* Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal’s attack in several cities on Valentine Day as alien culture (21 Feb.)
Heritage : * Delhi Government seeks status of World Heritage City for Delhi from UNESCO ( 18 Feb.)
V- Violence and Terrorism :
Ban on SIMI : * Govt. decides to extend ban on SIMI for alleged involvement in terror-related incidents and links with foreign terrorist outfits. AIMMM regrets the move.
* Karnataka arrests Yahya, a software engineer, alleged to be SIMI activist (21Feb.), later three other educated Muslims for complicity in terrorism (26 Feb.)
Anti-Terrorism Conventions: * Muslim organizations hold National Convention against terrorism in Lucknow (2 Feb.) Decide to organize an Aatankwadi Virodhi Andolan in UP to provide legal assistance to detainees.
* National Convention of Madrasas organized by Darul Uloom, Deoband, issues Declaration to condemn terrorism and terrorization of Muslim community (25 Feb.)* BJP, INC and national media laud it.
Muslim Terrorism : * SC slays trials of Malegaon and Bombay bomb blasts cases under MCOCA (29 Feb.)* CRPF arrests a Muslim constable in Kashmir (21 feb.)* CRPF arrested another constable in Rampur for the attak on headquarters.
Hindu Terrorism : * INC General Secretary, Digvijay Singh alleges RSS engaged in manufacturing bombs (25 feb.)
Anti- Christian Violence :* Hindutva forces continue attacks against Christians in Orissa and Madhya Pradesh (14 Feb.)* Christian Bishops submit petition to PM.
Gujarat Genocide : * Government asks SC to transfer all specified Gujarat cases, outside Gujarat and direct the CBI for reinvestigation.
* SC hears bail of the accused in Godhra Train Burning case (5 Feb.)
Nandigram Violence: *NHRC criticizes ‘totally partisan’ approach of West Bengal government leading to ‘CPM’s recapture of Nandigram’ (9Feb.)
Firing on FB Activists : * 5 activists of All India Forward Block, a constituent of ruling Left Front, killed in police firing in Cooch Bihar, West Bengal ( 5 feb.). State govt. orders judicial enquiry
VI- Muslim World :
Pakistan : * General elections held peacefully in Pakistan, as scheduled with about 45% turn-out (18 Feb.). Asif Ali Zardari of PPP and Nawaz Sharif of PML (N) defeat pro-Musharraf PMLQ and MMA, the religious party. No party scores absolute majority but PML (N) agrees to PPP forming national government with PPP’s outside support (26 Feb.) while PML (N) shall form government in Pujab. * Musharraf under increasing pressure to quit since both PPP and PML (N) do not accept his legitimacy as President. USA intervenes and presses Zardari to accommodate Musharraf. PML (N) rules out indemnity for Musharraf and demands his dismissal, restoration of 1973 Constitution and reinstatement of SC/HC judges by National Assembly (26 Feb.)
* Mystery of Benazir assassination remains unresolved despite arrest of some individuals who have confessed to their involvement at behest of militants (7 Feb.)
* Sporadic terrorist acts continue. Chief of Army Medical Cap Killed in one bomb blast (25 Feb.)
Palestine : * Israel imposes economic pressure on Gaza including water and power cut. OIC holds Israel responsible and calls upon UN to stop starvation and deprivation (4 Feb.). India also criticizes Israel for blockade and use of force (4 Feb) and promises more aid to the Palestinians.
*Hizbullah declares open war on Israel after its military chief based in Damascus killed (15 Feb.) Israel intensifies air attack on Gaza, kills 200.
* CPM warns the UPA government against entering into any security tie-up with Israel.* In her opening address to Parliament, President Pratibha Patil reiterates support for formation of Palestine State ( 25 Feb.)
Iran : * Regrets launch of Israeli satellite by Indian rocket (5 Feb.)* Rejects UN Security Counsel Resolution to impose sanction.
Denmark : * Following government’s decision for archival preservation of original anti-Islamic cartoons, Danish newspaper reprint them.* Muslim organizations criticize government for inviting Danish Prime Minister to India.
Kosovo : * Kosovo Parliament unilaterally declares independence from Serbia ( 17 Feb.). USA and several EU countries recognize new state. * Serbia supported by Russia refuses to recognize. * Government adopts vague and ambiguous stand. CPI (M) criticizes development as encouragement to separatist movements everywhere. [People of Kosovo are 90% Turks and profess Islam. It is the second Muslim State in Europe.]
Bangladesh : * Bangladesh Supreme Court stays HC’s order(7 Feb.) in favour or former Prime Minister, Haseena and asks Govt. to file regular appeal. * Head of interim administration who is chief of Army staff visits India.
Turkey : * Turkish Parliament amends constitution to permit female university students to wear scarf (9 Feb.)
* Turkey ground forces invade north Iraq to ferret out Kurdish rebels (22 Feb.). Iraq warns Turkey.
Iraq : * Several major blasts including one during a Shia festival occur (24 Feb.)
Afghanistan : * Afghanistan experiences deadliest suicide bomb since Talibans’s fall; more than 80 lives lost (17 Feb.).Another bomb fells 37. *Taliban warns Pakistan not to support Karzai regime. Engages in guerilla action against NATO troops.
Minorities:
UK : * Archbishop Williams of Canterbury recommends official recognition of Muslim Personal Law for settlement of family disputes by community institutions (8 Feb.). Mass media demands his resignation. Archbishop refuses to withdraw suggestion (25 Feb.)
Malaysia:* Malaysia Prime Minister dissolves Parliament.
*Islamist Party moves from its goal of Islamic State to Welfare State (13 Feb.).
* Malaysia apologies for demolition of a temple and promises to redress other grievance (4 Feb.)* Police cracks down on peaceful demonstration by ethnic Indians ( 16 feb.)