South Asia Citizens Wire   |  21 June,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

[1] Kashmir Diary (David Devadas)
[2] Amnesty sought for detenus in Kashmir (B. Muralidhar Reddy)
[3] BBC Urdu to bridge divided families in Kashmir
[4] Pakistan: Hudood Ordinance (Farhatullah Babar)
[5] People's SAARC: Colombo Declaration
[6] The invention of the Hindu (Pankaj Mishra)
[7] Upcoming Event: Rohini Hensman will be reading from 'Playing Lions and Tigers' (London, 29 June)
[8] Upcoming Event: `The New Mandate Civil Liberties’ to commemorate the anti-emergency day '(New Delhi, 25 June)


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[1]


The Tribune [India] June 20, 2004

KASHMIR DIARY
Peace efforts should not be allowed to lose momentum
by David Devadas

MUZAFFAR (name changed) is a handsome 22-year old who lives in a middle class Srinagar locality. Over the past couple of years, he has developed a close friendship with a married woman of the neighbourhood who is separated from her husband. Her little children are very fond of Muzaffar and enjoy outings with him, but it is of course the sort of relationship that is frowned upon in a conservative society.

Having known the young man's family for several years, I can vouch for the fact that he is not involved in any way with the secessionist movement. Indeed, he holds the view - common enough, incidentally, among the generation that grew up amid the staccato rattle of gunfire - that economic development is what Kashmiris need rather than a changed political status. Nonetheless, Muzaffar has been picked up by the security forces several times and tortured.

Each time, it turns out, his lady friend's husband has reported him as a terrorist. For although the couple are separated, the man shares the male mentality so common across the subcontinent, that she is his property and that it is his right and duty to beat up any other male friends that she might have.

The difference is that, in the peculiar circumstances of Kashmir, such a man finds it easier to get the security forces to do his dirty work for him. Any security force set to combat a guerrilla war thrives on information about who is covertly involved with one or other guerrilla group and so they lap up such tips and act on them expeditiously.

Torture being the favoured method of security forces in not just Iraq, the typical reaction to such a tip about a young man like Muzaffar is that he is picked up and bundled into a closed security force vehicle and driven straight to a torture chamber. The forces' logic is that they must extract information about the whereabouts of other members of the group and of weapons dumps before the group realises their fellow has been caught and changes hideouts. The result is that the torture victim's family is left searching high and low for him for perhaps a couple of days - or, at times, forever. Muzaffar has been treated to electric shocks and the application of chilly paste to wounds and other exposed areas of a naked body, apart from thrashing and humiliation.

When the Border Security Force has picked up Muzaffar - twice so far over the past couple of years - he has been released after the first round of torture. It does not take long for them to figure out that the fellow is innocent - at least of the sort of crime they are trying to stop. The local police, on the other hand, are a different kettle of fish. The police picked up Muzaffar on his little nephew's birthday a few weeks ago and, although they too knew the fellow was innocent, they wanted money and other favours to let him go. Given the pattern of police forces in many parts of the subcontinent, the man who had reported him had also no doubt paid them.

Muzaffar's is not an isolated case. Unfortunately, this sort of thing has been almost a pattern through the traumatic 15 years that Kashmir has spent in the grip of turmoil. Property disputes and rivalry of one sort or another have all too frequently led to such malicious reports.

The forces cannot know which complaints are genuine and which are motivated, unless they investigate. But such action only creates fresh bitterness and alienation among people who have nothing to do with secessionist politics or militancy.

One must remain constantly alert to the fact that the extraordinary powers that have been given to the security forces in Kashmir can and do lead to abuse. The powers that be should never become complacent about these extraordinary powers.

Although Dr Manmohan Singh's government intends to repeal the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), the answer finally is to repeal all the special powers acts in Kashmir. The best road towards that is the peace process. It must not be allowed to lose momentum. The talks between the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan over the next few days should push forward the process.


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[2]

The Hindu
June 21, 2004

AMNESTY SOUGHT FOR DETENUS IN KASHMIR

By B. Muralidhar Reddy

ISLAMABAD, JUNE 20. The Joint Committee on Kashmir appointed by the Pakistan-India People's Forum has recommended the release of all prisoners held without charge and the declaration of a general amnesty for all those held in detention under special laws, civil or military detention laws or without trial.

At its meeting in Lahore today, the Committee also favoured free movement of people of Kashmir on either side of the border without requirement of passport or visa and rapid reduction in the size and presence of troops throughout the `former' state.

Tapan Bose, Pushpa Bhave, Sumit Chakravarty and Amit Chakravarty attended the meeting from India. Anees Haroon, Abdul Majeed Malik, Haji Mohammad Adeel, Farooq Niazi, Munir Hussain, Shahid Fiaz Kishwar Naheed and Mubashir Hasan represented Pakistan.

The Committee has been asked to facilitate a dialogue between the people from both sides of the LoC and interact with all organisations involved in the efforts to achieve peace and democratic resolution of the Kashmir issue.

It deliberated in the light of the stand of the Forum that Kashmir not merely being a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, a peaceful democratic solution in accordance with the aspirations of all the peoples of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir has to be achieved.

It recommended that there was need to mobilise, besides political parties, activists in the civil society, especially among the groups such as Bar Councils, Bar associations of districts, teachers, human rights organisations, women, chambers of commerce and industry, labour unions, youth and others.

The panel demanded that the judicial process provided in the laws should be activated for all other Kashmiris who are in custody in Kashmir, India or Pakistan and tribunals to investigate missing persons set up.


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[3]


Pak Tribune Friday June 18, 2004 (0320 PST)

BBC URDU TO BRIDGE DIVIDED FAMILIES IN KASHMIR
LONDON, June 19 (Online): The BBC's Urdu service is launching a three-day event in the Indian and Pakistani administered Kashmir, starting on Monday 21 June.


Members of divided families will be able to talk to each other via video and satellite phones. The exchange co-hosted in Srinagar and Muzaffarabad will be streamed live on the BBC Urdu online site, bbcurdu.com Excerpts will appear on BBC programmes including BBC Urdu's flagship news and information programme, Sairbeen.

Head of BBC Urdu service Mohammed Hanif said that the initiative breaks new ground: "We haven't done anything like this before. The Kashmir event allows people divided by a political conflict to share their lives, times and experiences amongst themselves and with the Urdu-speaking Internet audience across the world."

Users of bbcurdu.com will be asked to comment and send their opinions on this exchange, which will then be published on the website and broadcast in BBC programmes.


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[4]

The News International
June 21, 2004

HUDOOD ORDINANCE

Farhatullah Babar

Last week General Pervez Musharraf once again called for a review of the Hudood laws saying, 'after all, these are man made laws and there is no harm in reviewing them'. It is yet to be seen whether the government will really do something to change the law.

The Hudood Ordinance was promulgated in from behind the back of the Parliament, without taking into account the views of the cross section of religious scholars and public opinion, and prescribes punishment which are not ordained by the Holy Qur'an and Islam.

The Ordinance has heaped shame and miseries on hapless women. Those opposing changes in it will be held accountable before both Allah and the bar of public opinion.

Besides many other lacunae, rajam or stoning to death for adultery as prescribed in the 1979 Hudood Ordinance, has nothing to do with Islam and the Holy Qur'an. It has only stolen the Islamic title of 'hadd' to make it appear as a law ordained by the Holy Qur'an.

There is not a single verse in the Holy Qur'an that prescribes the punishment of stoning to death for adultery.

Some people argue that rajam is sanctioned by what they claim to be the traditions and Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (SAW) and therefore, it is Islamic even if there was no mention of it in the Holy Qur'an. This amounts to asserting that even if an injunction has no basis in the Qur'an, it can still be enforced as Islamic just because in the view of some, it was in conformity with the Sunnah or some saying of the Prophet (SAW). If this argument is accepted, it would shake the very foundations of Islamic jurisprudence.

True, that it is obligatory for a Muslim to emulate and obey Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (SAW). However, there are huge differences on what constituted Sunnah. There are differences, not only between the Sunni and Shia accounts of Sunnah but also between the Qur'an, the Holy Prophet (SAW) and all his noble companions, on one side and the main body of the ulema of most of the sectarian varieties, on the other.

It is correct that the Qur'an prescribed punishment under the hadd for certain offences, but it is wrong to say that the punishment for adultery under the Hudood Ordinance 1979 was also Qur'anic.

A true believer is ordained to accept the Holy Qur'an by itself as a comprehensive and self-contained source of Islam, free of any ambiguity and inconsistency. This indeed is the command in numerous verses of the Holy Qur'an, such as "the Book explaining all things" (16:89), "...it contains a detailed exposition of all things," (12:111), it "makes things clear" (27:1), "a book consistent with itself" (39:23), "free of crookedness" (18:1) and "discrepancy" (4:82).

Allah and Holy Prophet (SAW) are uncompromisingly intolerant of the admissibility of any other formulation, even in a subsidiary role as a source of Islam. "In what exposition will they believe after Allah and His signs (the word and work of Allah)(45:6).

Any human formulation, which fails to measure up to the letter and spirit of the Qur'an, is not acceptable in Islam. On the other hand, any thing that lies within the ambit of the Qur'an is truly Islamic, no matter what its source or origin. Says the Qur'an, "If any do fail to judge by what Allah hath revealed, they are unbelievers" (5:47). And if any fail to judge by what Allah hath revealed, they are wrong-doers" (5:48).

The Qur'anic concept of Sunnah, the words and deeds of the Holy Prophet (SAW), therefore has no identity independent of the letter and spirit of the Qur'an. If it were so, the Holy Prophet (SAW) would not be commanded to say: "I hope that my Lord will guide me ever closer (even) than this to the right course" (18:24), or "ask forgiveness for thy faults" (40:55).

The contemporary Arab society was primarily oral. The Qur'an and the Holy Prophet (SAW), however, both uphold the superiority of the written over the oral word. That is why the Holy Prophet (SAW) dictated every revelation to a scribe for authentic record.

It is highly significant that the a man so meticulous in ensuring that Divine guidance be passed on correctly down to the last word, would ignore his personal sayings so completely, if in his view the same constituted, in any way, a separate, independent or a complementary source of Islam. He left behind not a single line in writing that could then or later be called his normative Sunnah.

The argument that rajam is part of Sunnah, and even if not ordained by the Qur'an, is Islamic, therefore, cannot be accepted.

The Hudood laws, authenticating rajam as Islamic, were rooted partly in General Zia's obsession with the so-called Islamisation, and partly in the devious scheme to co-opt the religious extremists to punish and banish democratic leaders.

Two separate commissions on the rights of women, each headed by, and including eminent jurists and religious scholars have held this view and demanded repeal of the Ordinance. They have not denied that Qur'an ordains hadd punishment for certain offences. But they do assert that the Ordinance made in the name of Islam and hudood by Zia has nothing to do with Islam, and must therefore be repealed.

The Hudood Ordinance punishes the victim even before an attempt is made to catch the real culprit. The women, even after proved to be innocent, have to live forever with the shame of infamy. This is murder of equity and justice that cannot be the purpose of any Islamic law.

Those religious elements who claim that rajam is Islamic, assert an exclusive right to interpret Islamic teachings. But this is not correct. Islam does not ordain that interpretation of its tenets is the prerogative alone of those wearing green turbans or black robes.

A resolution has been submitted in the Senate that states: "This House expresses the opinion that whereas Islam prescribes Hadd punishments for certain offences, the punishments under The Offence of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance 1979 are unIslamic"

How can the religious elements claim that those demanding a change in the law are guilty of the negating the Qur'anic injunctions? The enlightened elements within the religious parties must support this resolution. Also, the parliamentarians not belonging to the religious parties should prepare themselves for the debate and not abandon the field to those who claim sole monopoly of interpretation religious tenets.

The writer is a Senator



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[5]

19 June 2004
Subject: PEOPLE'S SAARC


Establishment of People's SAARC With the formal declaration of the ìFree Tradeî in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) through the twelth SAARC Summit. Having been learnt the meaning of the Free Trade through the documents of the summit, is that the trade would be at the center and the Human Being would be at its periphery. It has completely wiped out the importance of humans. Thus the civil society of South Asia has the responsibility to push up the human cause in the trade scenario. It is a well-known fact the South Asian region is most poverty stricken in comparison to the entire world. The summit has also reconstituted the Independent South Asian Commission for Poverty Alleviation (ISACPA), which is commendable step. But this commission,that has the objective to play an advocacy role and set SAARC Development Goals for the next five years does not constitutes of a broader civil society including the weaker section to represent their specific cause, the reconstitution may not have a fallback with the cause of suppressed class. The areas of poverty alleviation, health, environment, education giving due regard to the suggestions of the ISACPA report definitely require the people from the field the questions come from without which, the answer can not be true in their sense. The summit has also appreciated by signing the SAARC Social Charter that puts up the cause of poverty alleviation, population stabilization, women empowerment,health and nutrition, youth mobilization, human resource development and also protection of children. We too appreciate the above cause taken up by through the charter but would like to indicate that the charter despite speaking on several issues misses out a few vital ones. It does not talks about Human Right for marginalised, development and democracy through empowerment in regard to the women and even after talking about child protection the abuse on children has been left out that makes a key issue in South Asia. Trafficking of children is a major issue to be touched very specifically keeping the various laws of SAARC nations by the Charter without which the document purpose would not be complete. The document does talks of the child and women protection against trafficking of against prostitution. It does not specifies the other hazards which are or could be of trafficking for bonded labour or for Camel Jockey that specially includes India and Bangladesh as route for the trafficking. The document also lacks the measures against the threats of organ transplantation, forming a major business boom for traffickers. Also the document ignored the cause of men and their right under the association. As the summit declaration deal with the varied culture of the SAARC nation it speaks of the cultural mosaic. However the underline does not specify the formation of a composite culture with the varied forms of culture and does not even deals with the communal facism rigging in these very SAARC nations. We demand a clear vision on the issue to culture for it is the identity of any nation and mixture of same shall there be crystal clear and not opaque by any means. It has been observed that conscience has at various stages hindered relations and development of nations and despite attempts an unclear military stand gives an unwanted threat. The topic is same with the SAARC nations who do talk of protection but the military threat and the cold war going between the nations has been ignored from the nations. Any expense on bomb is a worry on many faces and the same investment on creative thing if dwelling smile on millions. The document as it talks of development and protection shall be incomplete if it does not specifies the associationÅfs stand on military operations between the nations as this would continuously bring upon a fear psychosis on human under the big umbrella, pulling down the efforts. Taking examples of Cuba where the military expense if five per cent against fifty five per cent expense on health and education, of it GDP, can not the association put pressure on the SAARC nations to adopt a similar pattern and give boost to peopleís health rather then bringing military threat. The fourteenth summit of the association is going to be held in January 2005. There is time for a Peopleís SAARC to be formed that may take up the burning topics before the next summit begins and pressurize to include the peopleís cause in their existing agenda or may modify the present one. It is the responsibility of the people of South Asia to get united on this bigger issue and form a unified force before the January of 2005. COLOMBO Declaration

Letís begin ìGlobalisation of Sensitivitiesî in South
Asia.

South Asia has the worldís most populous youthful
growing set of communities.  These people are poor and
rural by global standards.

Globalisation has been ìhollowing outî the more
advanced areas in this region.  Wages in the regionís
globalised workplaces are declining.  (Sri Lankaís
export garments workersí monthly wages have fallen
from USD50 to USD30 between 1983 and 2003, a high
growth period for this industry.)

Isnít it time we organise for decent Social living for
our people.  A SAARC for what? Global capital or
global people?

Our stand is for our regional countries
1.      To develop certain common standards and fronts in
dealings with Capital Movements and ownership of large
Companies

2.      To develop common standards and fronts in dealings
with the agents of the global system as donors and
World Bank/ IMF

3.      To develop common standards of decency of workplace
and treatment of workers

4.      To develop common standards of minimum wages

5.      To develop common standards of decent housing and
social infrastructure for all.

Our Campaign is to create and promote, within our
regional countries, a grass roots level activism of
direct action including:
1.      Creating awareness of the World Bank/ Donors/ State
Ministries/ Elite Corporates & Professionals nexus
which is the Complex that is causing our problems and
economic distortions
2.       Creating actions that challenge and overcome this
Capital Using Complex in simple activities as housing
or agricultural development in a way that is
developmental and creates the participation of the
people in the exact operations of Capital and Prices
in the economy.
3.      Creating public demands for a People driven SAARC.


Dr Lenin Raghuvanshi Dr Darin C Gunesekera PVCHR Wiros Lokh Institute Varanasi, India Colombo, Sri Lanka.

30 May 2004


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[6]

Axess Magazine [Sweden]
June 11, 2004

THE INVENTION OF THE HINDU
By Pankaj Mishra

Hinduism is largely a fiction, formulated in the 18th and 19th centuries out of a multiplicity of sub-continental religions, and enthusiastically endorsed by Indian modernisers. Unlike Muslims, Hindus have tended to borrow more than reject, and it has now been reconfigured as a global rival to the big three monotheisms. In the process, it has abandoned the tradition of toleration which lie in its true origins.

Earlier this year, I was in Rishikesh, the first town that the river Ganges meets as it leaves its Himalayan home and embarks upon its long journey through the North Indian plains. The town's place in Indian mythology is not as secure as that of Hardwar, which lies a few miles downstream, and which periodically hosts the Kumbh Mela; nor is it as famous as places like Allahabad and Benares, even holier cities further down on the Ganges. People seeking greater solitude and wisdom usually head deep into the Himalayas. With its saffron-robed sadhus and ashrams, its yoga and meditation centres, and its internet and dosa cafes, Rishikesh caters to a very modern kind of spiritual tourist: the Beatles came, most famously, in the sixties to learn Transcendental Meditationâ„¢ from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their quick disillusionment seems not to have deterred the stylishly disaffected members of the western middle class that can be found wandering the town's alleys in tie-dye outfits, trying to raise their kundalini in between checking their Hotmail accounts.

I was in Rishikesh to see my aunt, who has just retired to one of the riverside ashrams. She has known a hard life; widowed when she was in her thirties, she worked in small, badly paid teaching jobs to support her three children. In my memory, I can still see her standing at exposed country bus stops in the middle of white-hot summer days. She had come to know comfort, even luxury, of sorts in later life. Her children travel all over the world as members of India's new globalised corporate elite; there are bright grandchildren to engage her at home. But she was happiest in Rishikesh, she told me, living as frugally as she had for much of her life, and devoting her attention to the end of things.

True detachment, however, seemed as difficult to achieve for her as for the spiritual seekers with email. I had only to mention the political situationâ*”India was then threatening to attack Pakistanâ*”for her to say, angrily: "These Muslims need to be taught a lesson. We Hindus have been too soft for too long."

In the last decade, such anti-Muslim sentiments have become commonplace among the middle class upper-caste Hindus in both India and abroad who form the most loyal constituency of the Hindu nationalist BJP. They were amplified most recently in Gujarat during the BJP-assisted massacre in early 2002 of over a thousand Muslims. They go with a middle class pride in the international prominence of Indian beauty queens, software professionals and Bollywood films. Perhaps I wouldn't have found anything odd about my aunt's anti-Muslim passions had I not later gone up to her monastic cell, one of the several in a large quad around a flower garden, and noticed the large garlanded poster of a well-known Sufi saint of western India.

Did she know that she revered someone born a Muslim? I don't think so. The folk religion to which the Sufi saint belongs, and which millions of Indians still practise, does not acknowledge such modern political categories as "Hindu" and "Muslim." I think the contradiction between her beliefs and practice would only be clear to the outsider: the discrepancy between the narrow nationalist prejudices she had inherited from her class and caste, and the affinities she generously formed in her inner world of devotion and prayer. It is not easily understood; but it is part of the extraordinary makeover undergone by Hinduism since the nineteenth century when India first confronted the West, and its universalist ideologies of nationalism and progress.

THE REMARKABLE quality of this transformation is partly shown by the fact that there was no such thing as Hinduism before the British invented the holdall category in the early nineteenth century, and made India seem the home of a "world religion" as organised and theologically coherent as Christianity and Islam. The concepts of a "world religion" and "religion" as we know them now, emerged during the late 18th and early 19th century, as objects of academic study, at a time of widespread secularisation in western Europe. The idea, as inspired by the Enlightenment, was to study religion as a set of beliefs, and to open it up to rational enquiry.

But academic study of any kind imposes its own boundaries upon the subject. It actually creates the subject while bringing it within the realm of the intellect. The early European scholars of religion labelled everything; they organised disparate religious practices into one system, and literally brought into being such world religions as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Not only Hinduism, but the word Hindu itself is of non-Hindu origin. It was first used by the ancient Persians to refer to the people living near the river Indus (Sindhu in Sanskrit). It then became a convenient shorthand for the Muslim and Christian rulers of India; it defined those who weren't Muslims or Christians. Modern scholarship has made available much more information about the castes, religious sects, folk and elite cultures, philosophical traditions and languages that exist, or have existed, on the Indian subcontinent. But despite containing the world's third largest population of Muslims, India is still for most people outside it, a country of Hindus; even a "Hindu civilisation" as it featured in Samuel Huntington's millenarian world-view.

The persistence of such labels in the West is not just due to ignorance, or to some lingering Christian fear of unconvertible heathens. Perhaps, the urge to fix a single identity for such diverse communities as found in India comes naturally to people in the highly organised and uniform societies of the West, where cultural diversity now usually means the politically expedient and hardened identities of multiculturalism. Perhaps, people who themselves are defined almost exclusively by their citizenship in the nation-state and the consumer society cannot but find wholly alien the pre-modern world of multiple identities and faiths in which most Indians still live.

Certainly, most Hindus themselves felt little need for precise self-descriptions, except when faced with blunt questions about religion on official forms. Long after their encounter with the monotheistic religions of Islam and Christianity, they continued to define themselves through their overlapping allegiances to family, caste, linguistic group, region, and devotional sect. Religion to them was more unselfconscious practice than rigid belief; it is partly why Indian theology accommodates atheism and agnosticism. Their rituals and deities varied greatly, defined often by caste and geography; and they were also flexible: new goddesses continue to enrich the pantheon even today. There is an AIDS goddess which apparently both causes and eradicates the disease. At any given time, both snakes and the ultimate reality of the universe were worshipped in the same region, sometimes by the same person. Religion very rarely demanded, as it did with many Muslims or Christians, adherence to a set of theological ideas prescribed by a single prophet, book, or ecclesiastical authority.

This is why a history of Hinduism, no matter how narrowly conceived, has to describe several very parochial-seeming Indian religions, almost none of which contained an evangelical zeal to save the world. The first of theseâ*”the Vedic religionâ*”began with the nomads and pastoralists from central Asia who settled north India in the second millennium BC. It was primarily created by the priestly class of Brahmans who conducted fire sacrifices with the help of the Vedas, the earliest known Indian scriptures, in order to stave off drought and hunger. But the Brahmans who also formulated the sacred and social codes of the time wished to enhance their own glory and power rather than propose a new all-inclusive faith; they presented themselves as the most superior among the four caste groups that emerged during Vedic times and were based upon racial distinctions between the settlers and the indigenous population of north India and then on a division of labour.

A NEW RELIGION WAS also far from the minds of the Buddhists, the Jains and many other philosophical and cultural movements that emerged in the sixth and fifth centuries BC while seeking to challenge the power of the Brahmans and of the caste hierarchy. People dissatisfied with the sacrificial rituals of the Vedic religion later grew attracted to the egalitarian cults of Shiva and Vishnu that became popular in India around the beginning of the first century AD. However, the Brahmans managed to preserve their status at the top of an ossifying caste system. They zealously guarded their knowledge of Sanskrit, esoteric texts, and their expertise in such matters as the correct pronunciation of mantras. Their specialised knowledge, and pan-Indian presence, gave them a hold over ruling elites even as the majority of the population followed its own heterodox cults and sects. Their influence can be detected in such Indian texts as the Bhagavad-Gita which was interpolated into the much older Mahabharata, and which, though acknowledging the irrelevance of ritual sacrifices, made a life of virtue, or dharma, inseparable from following the rules of caste.

At the same time, India remained too big and diverse to be monopolised by any one book or idea. Today, the Hindu nationalists present Muslim rulers of India as the flagbearers of an intolerant monotheism; but there was even more religious plurality during the eight centuries of Muslim presence in India. Sufism mingled with local faiths; the currently popular devotional cults of Rama and Krishna, and the network of ashrams and sects expanded fast under the Mughal empire. Medieval India furnishes more evidence of sectarian violence between the worshippers of Shiva and Vishnu than between Hindus and Muslims.

In the 18th century, the British were both appalled and fascinated by the excess of gods, sects, and cults they encountered in India. It was a religious situation similar to the pagan chaos a Christian from the eastern provinces of the Roman empire might have encountered in the West just before Constantine's conversion to Christianity. As it turned out, like the powerful Christians in Rome, the British in India sought and imposed uniformity. There were intellectually curious men among them: a judge called William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, whose amateur scholars began in the late 18th century to figure out the strange bewildering country the British found themselves in. Jones, a linguist, confirmed the similarity between Sanskrit and Greek. Another official, James Prinsep, deciphered the ancient Indian script of Brahmi, the ancestor of most Indian scripts, that the British found on pillars and rock faces across south Asia, and threw the first clear light on the first great patron of Buddhism, Ashoka. A military officer called Alexander Cunningham excavated the site near Benares where the Buddha had preached his first sermon.

These days, there is a common enough presumption, which was popularised by Edward Said's Orientalism, that much of western scholarship on the Orient helped, directly or not, western imperialists. Some people take it further and assert that any, or all, western interest in India is tainted with bad faith.

IT WOULD BE TOO simple to say that this great intellectual effort, to which we owe much of our present knowledge of India, was part of a colonialist or imperialist enterprise of controlling newly conquered peoples and territories. What's more interesting than the by now familiar accusations of Orientalism is how the assumptions of the earliest British scholars mingled with the prejudices of native Indian elites to create an entirely new kind of knowledge about India.

These scholars organised their impressions of Indian religion according to what they were familiar with at home: the monotheistic and exclusive nature of Christianity. When confronted by diverse Indian religions, they tended to see similarities. These similarities were usually as superficial as those found between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But the British assumed that different religious practices could only exist within a single overarching tradition. They also started off with a literary bias, which was partly the result of the mass distribution of texts and the consequent high degree of literacy in Europe in the eighteenth century. They thought that since Christianity had canonical texts, Indian tradition must have the same. Their local intermediaries tended to be Brahmans, who alone knew the languagesâ*”primarily Sanskritâ*”needed to study such ancient Indian texts as the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. Together, the British scholars and their Brahman interpreters came up with a canon of sorts, mostly Brahmanical literature and ideology, which they began to identify with a single Hindu religion.

The Brahmanical literature, so systematised, later created much of the appeal of Indian culture for its foreign connoisseurs, such as the German romantics, Schopenhauer, Emerson and Thoreau. The strange fact here is that most Indians then knew nothing or very little of the hymns, invocations and liturgical formulae of the four Vedas or the philosophical idealism of the Upanishads that the British and other European scholars in Europe took to be the very essence of Indian civilisation. These Sanskrit texts had long been monopolised by an elite minority of Brahmans who zealously guarded their knowledge of Sanskrit. It was these Brahmans who educated the British amateur scholars. So they studied earnestly the canon of what they supposed to be ancient Indian tradition and managed to remain mostly unaware of the more numerous non-textual, syncretic religious and philosophical traditions of Indiaâ*”for example, the popular devotional cults, Sufi shrines, festivals, rites, and legends that varied across India and formed the worldview of a majority of Indians.

But the texts provided the British the standards with which to judge the state of contemporary religion in India. Since few Indians at the time seemed capable of the sublime sentiments found in the Bhagavad-Gita and the Rig-Veda, Hinduism began to seem a degenerate religion, full of such social evils as widow-burning and untouchability, and in desperate need of social engineering: an idea that appealed both to British colonialists and their Brahman collaborators who had long felt threatened by the non-Brahmanical forms of religion that most Indians followed. It was equally convenient to blame the intrusion of Islam into India for Hinduism's fallen state, even the caste system, and to describe Hindus as apathetic slaves of Muslim tyrants: a terrible fate from which the British had apparently rescued them in order to prepare their path to a high stage of civilisation.

These ideas about the Muslim tyrants, Hindu slaves and British philanthropists were originally set out in such influential books as History of British India, written by James Mill, a Scottish utilitarian, and the father of John Stuart Mill. Such books now tell you more about the proselytising vigour of some enlightened Scots and utilitarians than about Indian history.

BUT THEY HAVE HAD very serious political consequences. Many westernised upper-caste Indians, including middle class Hindu nationalists, now believe that Muslim invaders destroyed a pure and glorious Hindu civilisation, which a minority of Brahmans then managed to preserve. The rather crude British generalisation that Hindus and Muslims constituted mutually exclusive and monolithic religious communitiesâ*”a view which was formed largely by historians who never visited India, such as James Mill, and which was then institutionalised in colonial policies of divide-and-ruleâ*”was eventually self-fulfilled, first, by the partition of British India, and then by the hostility between India and Pakistan.

Even at the time, these ideas had a profound impact on a new generation of upper-caste Indians, who had been educated in western-style institutions, and so were well placed to appreciate the immense power and prestige that Britain then had as the supreme economic and military nation in the world. These Indians wished to imitate the success of the British; do for India what a few enterprising men had done for a tiny island; and they found a source of nationalist pride in the newly-minted "Hinduism."

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, educated people everywhere in the colonised countries of Asia and Africa were forced into considering how their inheritance of ancient tradition has failed to save them from subjection to the modern West. This was what preoccupied such Muslim intellectuals as Mohammed Iqbal, the poet-advocate of Pakistan, the Egyptians Mohammed Abduh, the intellectual founder of modern radical Islamist, and Sayyid Qutb, the fundamentalist activist who inspired Osama Bin Laden.

These were mostly people from the middle class who were educated formally in western-style institutions and who became the leading modernist thinkers within their respective traditions. Their most crucial encounter was with the West whose power they felt daily in their lives, and whose history they learned before they learnt anything else.

Travelling to the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they came up against the paradox that the western nations, which were mortal enemies of each other, and brutal exploiters in their colonies, had created admirably liberal civilisations at home. They remained opposed to the colonial presence in their countries and aspired for independence. But they were also dazzled by the power and prestige of the West, and they couldn't but grapple with the complex question of how much space to give to western values of science, reason, secularism and nationalism in the traditional societies they belonged to.

THIS QUESTION BEGAN to haunt Vivekananda when in 1893 he travelled to the West for the first time in his life. Born in a middle class family in Calcutta, he was educated in western-style institutions, and was studying law, in preparation for a conventional professional career, when he met the mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and renounced the world to become a sannyasi. He travelled all across India and first exposed himself to the misery and degradation most Indians then lived in. When he travelled to the Parliament of Religions as a representative of the Hindu religion in 1893, he hoped partly to raise funds for a monastic mission in India and, more vaguely, to find the right technology for alleviating poverty in India.

The Parliament of Religions was part of a larger celebration of Christopher Columbus's so-called discovery of America. The organisers planned to "display the achievements of western civilisation and to benefit American trade." Vivekananda addressed himself directly to such self-absorption. He spoke eloquently and enthrallingly on Hinduism in Chicago, drawing on his great knowledge of western philosophy. He claimed that it was an Indian achievement to see all religions as equally true, and to set spiritual liberation as the aim of life. Americans received his speech rapturously. He lectured on Hinduism to similarly enthusiastic audiences in other American cities.

The news of Vivekananda's success flattered insecure middle class Indians in India who wished to make Hinduism intellectually respectable to both themselves and to westerners. But Vivekananda himself, during the next few years he spent travelling in America and Europe, was to move away from an uncritical celebration of Indian religion and his hostility towards the West. He came to have a new regard for the West, for the explosion of creative energy, the scientific spirit of curiosity and the ambition that in the nineteenth century had made a small minority the masters of the world. He could barely restrain his admirations in letters home: "What strength, what practicality, what manhood!"

Vivekananda also claimed to sense a spiritual hunger in the West, which he said India was well-placed to allay. He thought that India could be Greece to the West's Rome, by offering its spiritual heritage to the West in exchange for the secret of material advancement. Together, he hoped, India and the West would lead a new renaissance of humanity.

Vivekananda returned to India after three years, his admiration for the West undiminished. He set up a monastic order devoted to social service and to reforming Hinduism which he saw as a decadent religion. In the midst of his endeavours, he died young, at thirty-nine. Nothing much could come out of what was mostly well-intentioned rhetoric: India was too far away from the West, which was then only in the middle of its extraordinary rise. It was not up to India, then a subject country, to impose terms on anyone.

Vivekananda appeared to have struggled in his short life with many new ideas. He didn't always have clear solutions. His value lies in that he was among the first Indians to realise clearly the fact of western dominance over the world; he attested above all to the inevitability of the West's presence, if not superiority, in all aspects of human life. There were other people who had reached the same conclusion:
Europe is progressive. Her religion is....used for one day in the week and for six days her people are following the dictates of modern science. Sanitation, aesthetic arts, electricity etc are what made the Europeans and American people great. Asia is full of opium eaters, ganja smokers, degenerating sensualists, superstitious and religious fanatics.


This could be either Vivekananda or Iqbal. It is actually Angarika Dharampala, the greatest figure of modern Buddhism. Born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1864, Dharampala was just a year younger than Vivekananda. He even went to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago as a representative of Buddhism but was more prominent than his Indian colleague. Like Vivekananda, Dharampala was influenced by the West, particularly by the Protestant missionaries that came with British rule over Sri Lanka, and came to denounce traditional religion in Sri Lanka as corrupt and unmanly. He wished to modernise Buddhism and also give it a political role. Following these contradictory desires, he became an anti-colonial nationalist, and the major icon of the Sinhalese nationalism that later brought Sri Lanka to civil war in the 1980s.

COMPARED TO SUCH Hindu and Buddhist modernists as Vivekananda and Dharampala, the Muslim intellectuals were more divided in their attitudes towards the West. Some of them, such as the young Turkish intellectuals of early twentieth century, wished totally to remake their countries along western lines so as to reach the summit of power and affluence that the West had arrived at. There were many others who chose the way of suspicion or antipathy. Iqbal stressed the need of Indian Muslims to form their own state where they could follow Islam in its most spiritual form and be able to resist the material ways of the West. Qutb advocated a return to the Koran and preached revolutionary violence against the West and its values that he saw incarnated in Arab nation-states.

But whether choosing nationalism or revolution, almost all of these intellectuals from colonised countries seemed to concede that the West had become the best source of ideas about effecting large-scale change and organising human society. They admitted the need for modernisation even in the sphere of religion and for cultivating a rational and scientific outlook.

ONLY A TINY MINORITY of upper-caste Indians had known much about the Bhagavad-Gita or the Vedas until the eighteenth century when they were translated by British scholars and then presented as sacred texts from the paradisiacal age of something called "Hinduism." But in the nineteenth century, movements dedicated to reforming Hinduism and recovering its lost glory grew very rapidly. The inspiration or rhetoric of these neo-Hindu movements might have seemed archaic. In fact, they were largely inspired by the ideas of progress and development that British utilitarians and Christian missionaries aggressively promoted in India. Modernist intellectuals in Muslim countries then exposed to European imperialism similarly absorbed western influences, but their distrust of the Christian and secular West was deeper.

Unlike Muslims, the Hindus tended to borrow more than reject. Ram Mohun Roy (1772-1932), who is often called the "father of modern India," was a Unitarian. He founded the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist society that influenced the poet Rabindranath Tagore and filmmaker Satyajit Ray, among other leading Indian intellectuals and artists, as part of an attempt to turn Hinduism into a rational, monotheistic religion. The social reformer Dayananda exhorted Indians to return to the Vedas, which contained, according to him, all of modern science, and echoed British missionary denunciations of such Hindu superstitions as idol-worship and the caste system. Even the more secular and catholic visions of Gandhi and Nehruâ*”the former a devout Hindu, the latter an agnosticâ*”accepted the premise of a "Hinduism: that had decayed and had to be reformed.

Gandhi drew his political imagery from popular folklore; it made him more effective as a leader of the Indian masses than the upper caste Hindu politicians who relied upon a textual, or elite Hinduism. But it was Swami Vivekananda who in his lifetime was witness to, and also mostly responsible for, the modernisation of Hinduism. Vivekananda was the middle-class disciple of the illiterate mystic Ramakrishna Paramhans; but he moved very far away from his Guru's inward-looking spirituality in his attempt to make Hinduism, or the invention of British and Brahman scholars, intellectually respectable to both Westerners and westernised Indians. In his lectures in England and America, where he acquired a mass following, he presented India as the most ancient and privileged fount of spiritualityâ*”a line that many Indian Gurus were profitably to take with their western disciples. At the same time, he exhorted Hindus to embrace western science and materialism in order to shed their burden of backwardness and constitute themselves into a manly nation.

Vivekananda borrowed from both British-constructed Hinduism and European realpolitik. In doing so he articulated the confused aggressive desires of a westernised Indian bourgeoisie that was then trying to find its identity. But his ambition of regenerating India with the help of western techniques did not sunder him entirely from the folk religious traditions he had grown up in. He remained a mystic; and his contradictory rhetoric now seems to prefigure the oddly split personality of the modern Hindu, where devotion to a Muslim saint can co-exist with an anti-Muslim nationalism.

HIS IMPORTANCE DOESN'T END THERE. The marriage of Indian religiosity and western materialism Vivekananda tried to arrange makes him the perfect patron saint of the BJP, a political party of mostly upper caste middle class Hindus that strives to boost India's capabilities in the fields of nuclear bombs and information technology and also reveres the cow as holy. A hundred years after his death, the BJP has come closest to realising his project of westernising Hinduism into a nationalist ideology: one which has pretensions to being all-inclusive, but which demonises Muslims and seeks to pre-empt with its rhetoric of egalitarianism the long overdue political assertion of India's lower caste groups.

Vivekananda's modern-day disciples are helped considerably by the fact that the Indian bourgeoisie is no longer small and insignificant. It is growingâ*”the current numbers are between 150-200 million. There are millions of rich Indians living outside India. In America, they constitute the richest minority. It is these affluent, upper caste Indians in India and abroad who largely bankrolled the rise to power of Hindu nationalists, and who now long for closer military and economic ties between India and western nations. The new conditions of globalisationâ*”free trade, faster communicationsâ*”help them work faster towards the alliance Vivekananda proposed between an Indian elite and the modern West. As a global class, they are no less ambitious than the one which in the Roman empire embraced Christianity and made it an effective tool of worldly power. Hinduism in their hands has never looked more like the Christianity and Islam of Popes and Mullahs, and less like the multiplicity of unselfconsciously tolerant faiths it still is for most Indians. Their growing prominence suggests that Vivekananda may yet emerge as more influential in the long run than Gandhi, Nehru or Tagoreâ*”the three great Indian leaders, whose legacy of liberal humanism middle class India already seems to have frittered away as it heads for intellectually and spiritually oppressive times.


PANKAJ MISHRA
Author. Regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, The New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement as well as several Indian publications.




______


[7]

CENTRE OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, SOAS
ALL WELCOME

Rohini Hensman
(Mumbai-based researcher and activist in the trade union, women's liberation, and human rights movement and author of To Do Something Beautiful)


will be reading from
Playing Lions and Tigers
(Gratiaen Book Prize shortlist 2003)
on
Tuesday 29 June at 6.15pm,
in G57, College Buildings,
School of Oriental and African Studies
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG


"An indispensable book, a must-read Š It is really a book all readers who care about Sri Lanka should take up" - lines, May 2004


"In order to keep alive the flame of hope for the future, it is necessary to confront the memory of mistakes in the past, and Rohini's novel does that beautifully" - Silan Kadirgamar


Centre of South Asian Studies, SOAS 020 7898 4892 [EMAIL PROTECTED]


______


[7]

PEOPLE'S UNION FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES: DELHI
M-35 Greater Kailash I, New Delhi 110048.

    [...].

Dear friend

All of us would agree that during the reign of the last government the civil liberties environment had become extremely difficult for the vulnerable sections of the society. This happened directly as well as indirectly. The horror of Gujarat, draconian nature of POTA, its discriminate application and subversion of the judicial system to deny the justice to the victims of Gujrat riots were no less than a catastrophe for our civil society. Besides, the blind servility to WTO dictated market centric policies pushed the organised and unorganised labour and peasants to the abyss of poverty.

However following the parliamentary election 2004 the Indian electorate has chosen a new government led by the UPA. What do we expect from and impress upon the new government for ensuring a dignified life for the common citizen as well as restoring and strengthening nation’s civil liberties’ atmosphere?

To discuss this and all the related issues, PUCL-Delhi has organised an inter-active session, `The New Mandate Civil Liberties’ to commemorate the anti-emergency day on 25 June 2004 at 4:30 p.m., at Rajendra Bhawan, Conference Hall (in front of Gandhi Peace Foundation) Deen Dayal Upadhaya Marg, I.T.O., New Delhi. Several eminent people from the related fields are expected to take part in the discussion.

Your gracious presence is kindly solicited.

With thanks

Pushkar Raj

General Secretary, PUCL-Delhi



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Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on matters of peace and democratisation in South Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit citizens wire service run since 1998 by South Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
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