South Asia Citizens Wire | 26 May, 2005
[1] The successes and failures of Pakistan's nukes (M B Naqvi)
[2] India: BJP's dirge on 'democracy' (J Sri Raman)
[3] India: Sensitive Souls (Editorial, The Telegraph)
[4] A lethal mix of censorship and identity
politics wreaks havoc in Indian public life, yet
again (Ananya Vajpeyi)
[5] Book Reviews:
- Story-Wallah: Short Fiction From South Asian
Writers Edited by Shyam Selvadurai
- Husband of a Fanatic by Amitava Kumar
[6] Announcements:
(i) Public Meeting: 'Mill Lands : The final chance' (Bombay, May 26, 2005)
(ii) Lecture by Vahida Nainar- 'Women and Genocide' (Montreal, May 28, 2005)
[7] Hindutva groups among those receiving McDonald's settlement money
[8] India: High Court dismisses PIL on Taj Mahal
[9] India: Self-Respect Marriage Proposal
Provokes Hindutva Ire (Yoginder Sikand)
--------------
[1]
The News International
May 25, 2005
Nukes' seventh anniversary-III
THE SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF PAKISTAN'S NUKES
M B Naqvi
From the start Pakistan's nuclear programme was
military-oriented and India-specific. The initial
proposition was that Pakistan was a weaker rival
of India and had business to transact with India
that could require application of military force.
The ambivalent nature of India-Pakistan relations
is known, with its three wars and three
semi-wars. Pakistan was decisively defeated in
1971 and concluded thereafter that there is no
future in conventional wars with India because it
is richer and can always outspend Pakistan.
Pakistan therefore decided to go nuclear to
offset India's advantages.
When exactly Pakistan started its nuclear
programme does not signify; it was sometime in
1970s. Pakistan succeeded in the middle of the
1980s in enriching uranium. That key success led
to other successes and soon Pakistan was able to
fabricate nuclear weapons, admitting only its
major components in 1990. But it was able in 1986
to threaten India with a nuclear riposte to the
likely extension of India's exercise Brass Tacks
into a thrust into Sindh, as was feared.
Once Pakistan became nuclear-capable, it decided
to twist the Indian lion's tail in Kashmir,
fearing no military response from it. It chose an
undercover semi-war with India in Kashmir. Events
in India-administered Kashmir late in the 1980s
gave Pakistan an opportunity: it metamorphosed
Kashmiris' non-violent secular political protest
agitation -- against India's manipulation of
elections in Kashmir -- and captured the
movement's leadership, converting it into an
Islamic jihad. It did so through jihadis, most of
them veterans of Afghanistan's anti-Soviet war
and many of whom had doubled as Taliban. This led
to many consequences.
India chose to suppress the jihad by inflicting
horrible human rights violations on Kashmiris.
The Indians need to be blamed for these gross
human rights violations. But Pakistan also shares
some responsibility. Why? Because it did not
think its options through. It should have
foreseen what the Indian reaction would be. And
whether the pressure Pakistan was putting on it
was enough to make India cry "uncle." In the
event, Indians fought on -- i.e., to kill as many
Kashmiris as possible. The result is that
Kashmiris have lost something like 80- to 85,000
lives and many more limbs. Loss of property is
astronomical in purely Kashmiri terms. Despite
these sacrifices the Kashmiris are not an inch
nearer their azadi. The outlook is more Indian
atrocities, if jihad continues.
True, India might continue to inflict human
rights violations even after Pakistan has stopped
sending militants from outside. So long as there
is an armed insurgency in Kashmir, the Kashmiri
freedom fighters are offering India its chance:
in a violent conflict, India would crush the puny
violence by Kashmiris with its far greater
violence-making machine. Adopting violent
insurgency is a foolish game for Kashmiris.
Remember Pakistan's military thinkers, who
controlled the nuclear programme throughout, wove
strange strategic doctrines in the hubris created
by nuclear weapons. On the one hand, they dreamed
dreams of federating Iran, Afghanistan and
Pakistan in order to confront India with this
strategic depth. How unrealistic this foolish
project was should be clear. On the other hand, a
theory was evolved that keeping Indians engaged
in a proxy war in the Kashmir Valley would free
Pakistan from the worry of an Indian attack. So
long as India was kept on the hop, Pakistan was
safe. In retrospect, this can be seen as foolish
ratiocination.
In 2002, the Indians called Pakistan's bluff.
They brought forward their troops on the Pakistan
border in staggering numbers. They made as if
they would invade. The threat was credible for
both friend and foe. The rest of the world
thought that thanks to balance of power, Pakistan
would be obliged to use its nuclear option first.
A nuclear war will result. The rest of the world
was not prepared to accept it. Everyone advised
the two to make up.
Pakistanis too saw that the Indians meant
business. Pakistan made a U-turn in the Kashmir
policies by promising no more infiltration from
this side. That firm promise by Pakistan's
president resolved the crisis and Indian troops
began withdrawing by October 2002. Normalcy took
some time to return. India later offered
negotiations and the hand of friendship (April
2003). How genuine it was, or is, is hard to say.
Anyhow, the long stalled Composite Dialogue,
first agreed in 1997, was resumed. Although it
has gone nowhere for over a year, it has not
finally broken down. The talks are going on and
more are scheduled.
Dispassionate assessment of the true utility of
Pakistani nukes is urgent. There are two clear
negative entries in the national ledger. One,
nukes were of no use to Pakistan vis-ý-vis
Kashmir and it had to promise it will not longer
send jihadis. The promise was repeated several
times to Indians and Americans. The second
context was the 2002 war crisis. India was ready
to attack if Pakistan had it not made those
promises about Kashmir. That is to say, India was
taking the risk of a war despite the presence of
Pakistan's nuclear deterrent, probably not less
effective than India's own. One calls for taking
purposeful note of the mere fact that Indians
made a credible move to attack Pakistan, ignoring
the presence of the Pakistani nuclear deterrent.
That simply shows that this Nuclear Deterrent did
not deter India threatening war.
Why does one make such a sweeping claim? Because
Pakistani nuclear devices were sold as giving
Pakistan an impregnable defence against India; it
was argued that given the nukes' presence, no one
would dare attack. The fact that India dared
makes those nukes less credible than they were
thought to be. It is being argued that India did
not finally attack because of those nukes. But
that is a non sequitur and takes us nowhere. The
decisive moment was when the Pakistan president
made the premise of virtually ending the jihad in
Kashmir. Obviously, nukes were no help to
Musharraf; if the notional benefit of the nukes
had to be sacrificed to keep peace, the nukes'
value gets heavily diluted. The nukes are no
longer vital for Pakistan's security because (a)
Pakistan could not win Kashmir through the proxy
war; and (b) these nukes could not defend
Pakistan against India's threatened attack
without Pakistan making vital political
concessions.
Let's note that no outsider loves Pakistan
because of these nukes. No outsider appears to
dread Pakistan's nukes, not even India. No
outsider is prepared to do as Pakistan wishes him
to do because it has nukes. It is true the same
is true of India. But India is out of context
here.
There is another negative aspect of the nukes:
there is Dr A. Q. Khan's underground bazaar of
nuclear contraband. The story has not ended. The
rest of the world is still interested. They all
think that Pakistan is vulnerable to various
threats from inside. They believe that there are
anti-Musharraf and anti-Pakistan elements inside
who can get hold of these weapons. They feel that
extremist forces can, in conceivable
eventualities, get control of these weapons.
Pakistan is more vulnerable because of these
nukes. Conceivable threats of external
intervention exist.
Pakistanis have paid through their nose for these
nukes. Pakistan's economy has been put under a
pressure that it cannot really bear. The kind of
inflationary pressures and the growth of poverty
that has taken place are due to Islamabad not
being able to invest enough in the social
sectors. The economic price of the nukes is lost
opportunities.
_______
[2]
Daily Times
May 26, 2005
BJP'S DIRGE ON 'DEMOCRACY'
by J Sri Raman
The far right has always preferred a holy cloak
to hide its true intentions. This is not the
first time the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has
mounted an offensive on democracy in the name of
defending it. Actually the party has done so
twice in a single eventful year.
A year ago it raised a deafening cry of
'democracy' as it responded with medieval
savagery to a mandate given by the Indian people.
The moment the Congress under Sonia Gandhi's
leadership returned to power in New Delhi, the
BJP was up in arms against the formation of the
new government under a 'foreigner'. The norms and
conventions of the national polity were flouted
with contempt, as the defeated and disgraced
party resorted to unabashedly reactionary devices
to stop the elected leader of the triumphant
Congress parliamentary party from taking over as
prime minister.
A saffron-clad Uma Bharati set off on one of her
numerous pilgrimages of political protest. Sushma
Swaraj went several horrendous steps farther by
threatening to shave off her tresses, start
sleeping on the floor and to live on gram if the
'vilayati' were to have her way. The symbols of
holy widowhood were expected to evoke a
'Hindutva' wave in the party's favour.
By refusing the repeatedly proffered crown, Sonia
Gandhi had the better of the BJP. The subsequent
far-right fiasco in the Maharashtra assembly
election pointed further to the folly of
Sonia-bashing. The BJP has never since been at
its xenophobic best (worst?). This, however, has
not deterred it from trying its deceptive
'democracy' tag once again.
On May 22, the first anniversary of the
Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)
government, the BJP and its National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) sounded the bugle of 'democracy'
again in defence of an open mockery of democratic
norms, launching an all-out agitation against an
alleged betrayal of 'democracy' in Bihar.
The 'betrayal' consists of the dissolution of the
Bihar state assembly elected three months ago -
after the failure of all attempts to form a
coalition government. The BJP's case now is that
the front led by it was close to cobbling
together such a government by splitting one of
the parties.
The Dalit leader of the party in the question,
Lok Janashakti Party (LJP), Ram Vilas Paswan, had
repeatedly and emphatically declared its
equidistance from the BJP and the Rashtriya
Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad (Yadav), the far
right's bete noire.
The BJP has for days been gloating over its
success in grabbing the support of several newly
elected LJP legislators, disgruntled with the
long delay in the formation of government. The
party has taken this group of legislators on
all-expenses-paid excursions to places in Bihar
and neighbouring Jharkhand (under the party's own
rule).
The BJP is now writing a dirge on 'democracy'
claiming that it has been barred from tasting the
fruits of the LJP factionalism that it has worked
so hard to fuel. Strange but true, much of the
mainstream media including the television
channels and the holier-than-thou middle class
see no trace of irony in this outrage and tirade
against the 'murder of democracy'.
The current agitation may prove no bigger a
success than the 'anti-foreigner' crusade. There,
however, seems to be no end in sight to the
paralysis of India's parliament resulting from
the BJP-NDA's tactics on the issue of 'tainted
ministers', the collective label that has come to
refer above all to Lalu Prasad.
Whether a solution to the impasse will be found
in the fresh Bihar elections (to be held within
six months) remains to be seen. A win, say some
Bihar watchers, may see Lalu's return to his
state from the rough and tumble of his political
journey as a union railway minister.
But for Bihar, the first anniversary of the UPA
government has been a rather tame affair. The
technocrat prime minister himself gave his
government's performance six marks out of ten.
Evaluations by others sounded more like
economists' reports - the kind that make little
or no sense to the layman. Buried amid all the
balance sheets, which dealt with esoteric
subjects like a double-digit growth, were more
basic questions.
No one, not even the Left, bothered to assess the
advance made in this one year towards peace,
internal and regional, endangered more than
anything else under the NDA regime. Pokharan II
and the Gujarat carnage were the two events after
all that drew the widest international attention
during the Vajpayee government. The threats
represented by the desert blasts and the Narendra
Modi pogrom, however, have not engaged the UPA
government's attention to any degree.
The India-Pakistan 'peace process' envisages no
reversal of the post-Pokharan II process that
makes South Asia one of the world's danger spots.
The government has come out with a draft
comprehensive bill to deal with communal
disturbances. The draft, however, only threatens
to vest the federal government with formidable,
draconian powers. Enactment of the bill can
endanger communal peace even more in the event of
the BJP returning to power in New Delhi.
_______
[3]
The Telegraph
May 25, 2005 | Editorial
SENSITIVE SOULS
The abuse of the word, "sensitive", has never
been more lamentable in India. Religious
enthusiasm is perhaps the most powerful factor
behind turning one of the gentlest words in the
English language into one of the most oppressive.
It is certainly a very serious crisis in
democracy when books and films bring out the most
violent emotions in sensitive people. Such
sensitivities place any society on the
treacherous foundation of fears, resentments,
unfreedoms and unreason. And the dangers are
manifest. The two blasts that violently disrupted
the screenings of Jo Bole So Nihaal in Delhi have
spread panic all over the country. Cinema halls
have stopped screening the film in most major
cities and towns, Mumbai being a notable
exception. West Bengal has gone a step further by
having the withdrawal of the film from its halls
governmentally endorsed. The blasts have been
variously linked with Sikh as well as Kashmiri
extremism. But the most lasting - and damaging -
fallout of these reactions has been the stances
taken by the highest body in the community, the
Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, and by
the national commission for minorities.
The former has objected to the use of a line from
the Sikh daily prayers for the film's title and
to the depiction of a Sikh man smoking. The
latter has made the entirely outrageous
recommendation to the censor board that any film
that might offend religious sentiments should be
referred to a panel of "religious leaders". This
pre-emptive censorship is inimical to the most
fundamental tenets of democracy. A critical
spirit that can engage with debate, controversy,
complexity and even caricature in a rational,
open-minded and balanced and, if need be,
humorous manner is essential to the functioning
of a healthy and mature society. The power of
critique that the arts are granted by any
civilized society had been shamefully denied them
recently in Britain when Ms Gurpreet Kaur
Bhatti's play, Behzti, was taken off the boards
in a reputed Birmingham theatre. The local Sikh
community had demonstrated against it, and there
were death threats against Ms Bhatti, for having
depicted corruption, murder and rape in a
gurdwara. Not a single British politician stood
by her then. In India, such a reign of fear would
be a far more unfortunate and dangerous thing.
______
[4]
Outlookindia.com
Web | May 25, 2005
NO 'IF' OR 'BUT'...
...JUST KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT: A LETHAL MIX OF
CENSORSHIP AND IDENTITY POLITICS WREAKS HAVOC IN
INDIAN PUBLIC LIFE, YET AGAIN.
Ananya Vajpeyi
Whoever says this, is blessed:
"That One outside of Time
Is Truth."
The film Jo bole so nihal opens with these words
appearing on the screen: "This is not a religious
film". My companion in the theatre leans over to
me, and says, "We never thought it was. Why the
disclaimer?" I whisper to him in the silent hall,
"It's the way things are, now, in this country.
You can never be too careful." Seconds later, the
audience erupts into laughter. For the next three
hours, we can't stop laughing. At some points,
spectators clap their hands, they whistle, they
stand up and applaud - the lines are so funny,
the situations so absurd.
Before property was damaged, people got injured,
and lives were lost in a fresh spate of the
intolerance that has become a permanent threat to
creative freedom in India, Jo bole was just
another comedy. In a film industry that is always
low on comic relief, a movie that actually
manages to amuse ought to get a special prize.
Instead, inevitably, the producers have had to
withdraw it from circulation in the face of
censorship that can, at any moment, turn violent,
endangering the life and safety of actors and
viewers alike.
Growing up with a Sikh mother and a Hindu father,
I got to see the famous clash of civilizations
between Punjabis and UP-wallahs from both sides
of the imaginary fence. From Lahore and from
Lucknow, driven by forces of history larger than
us all, my parents came to Delhi more than half a
century ago.
Like so many of my generation in this city, my
experience of the linguistic environment was a
grating, head-on collision of Punjabi and Urdu;
depending on the season's fashion, the
bottom-half of a kurta suit invariably alternated
between a salwar and a churidar pajama, and the
seasoning in the food, while always tasty, kept
switching between the wholesome tadka and the
spicy chhaunk. Passing by the mandir one folded
one's hands and raised them to one's brows,
closing one's eyes and bowing one's head
momentarily; passing by the gurudwara one
muttered, quickly, under one's breath: "Jo bole
so nihal, Sat Sri Akal". It wasn't necessary to
actually stop and go into either house of worship
- gods and gurus are easily appeased by gestures
of respect made from a safe distance.
In Delhi's social gatherings, the rule for jokes
was that they were always about sardars, but the
other rule was that it was usually sardars who
told them with the greatest glee. Everybody could
laugh at these jokes, because they never rose
above the lowest common denominator of silliness
- the real trick, however, was to tell them with
the right Punjabi accent. Even at the height of
the militancy in Punjab, sardar jokes
proliferated, only then they were fine-tuned for
a while to take pot shots at the idea of
Khalistan.
In 1984, my mother and the entire family on my
mother's side suddenly became the targets of the
most gruesome anti-Sikh violence; for days of
curfew that horrible November, we stood on our
rooftop, my parents and I, watching fires burn in
all directions on the near horizon.
We knew - even I, as a child, could tell - that a
composite way of life had ended forever, charred
to a handful of ashes along with the turbans,
beards, holy books, homes and dreams of thousands
of innocents. But immigrant and refugee cultures
are the most resilient. Despite the slaughter of
Sikhs in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's
assassination, in the following two decades,
Delhi's dominant temper became more aggressively
Punjabi than ever before.
Justice may not have come to the Sikhs, but
Punjabis have had their revenge all right.
______
[5] [BOOK REVIEWS]
(i)
The Christian Science Monitor
May 17, 2005
EMPIRE WRITES BACK
South Asian emigrants put today's spins on
stories like Kipling's tales about people far
from home
By Ben Arnoldy
More than a century ago, a young reporter named
Rudyard Kipling began to publish a series of
short fiction works in an Indian newspaper. These
enormously popular "plain tales," as he called
them, chronicled the exploits of British
colonists in India. A recurring character was the
Englishman who had "gone native" - often lured by
love of an Indian girl. Without fail, a cultural
misunderstanding would doom these men. After all,
for Kipling, East was East....
In a phenomenon cleverly known as "the empire
writes back," the genre has been turned on its
head by emigrants from former European colonies -
particularly British India. A new collection of
short fiction entitled "Story-Wallah" gathers
these modern plain tales from the South Asian
diaspora. They show that being a stranger in a
strange land holds psychological perils even in a
world free of the imperial politics of Kipling's
day.
STORY-WALLAH: Short Fiction From South Asian Writers
Edited by Shyam Selvadurai
Houghton Mifflin
438 pp., $14
Some of the writers are well known: Salman
Rushdie of fatwa fame; Michael Ondaatje ("The
English Patient"); and Jhumpa Lahiri ("The
Interpreter of Maladies"). All the writers or
their ancestors hail originally from India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka, but they also
have a dual identity, living in locations as
diverse as Trinidad, the United States, and
Tanzania. The editor, Shyam Selvadurai, calls
himself Canadian-Sri Lankan, writing novels from
the hyphen space between.
In Rushdie's "The Courter," the narrator attends
an English boarding school. Over the summers, he
lives in a cultural no man's land between India
and England: a "seedy mansion" rented by his
Indian family "which lurked furtively in a
nothing street" of London. In adjacent apartments
live two maharajas, who have been cashiered into
a life halfway between royalty and oblivion. The
mansion's Eastern European doorman is a mentally
handicapped former chess Grand Master.
The narrator is the least conflicted: He clearly
prefers an English life - singing Beatles tunes
and aspiring for a British passport. He dislikes
his father, a distant and capricious drunk. When
his father is slapped by a shopgirl after mixing
up words, the narrator feels schadenfreude as
well as fear that he would have made the same
faux pas.
Ultimately the gambling and philandering of the
two maharajas bring doom to the house. In the
end, each character leaves the "seedy mansion"
and, in an echo of Kipling, chooses either
England or India - not both.
Other stories hold out more hope for
cross-cultural understanding. Anita Desai's
"Winterscape" begins with a fight between Rakesh
and his pregnant American wife, Beth. Rakesh has
booked tickets for both his mother and his aunt
to fly from India to California to help after the
baby arrives.
Beth was annoyed. "It had seemed an outlandish,
archaic idea even when it was first suggested;
now it was positively bizarre. 'Why both of them?
We only asked your mother,' she insisted."
South Asian identity within an extended family
versus Western individualism is a common conflict
throughout this collection of stories. Beth comes
to understand this difference through a parable
of sorts about Rakesh's upbringing. She learns he
had been raised by both women - he had "two
mothers."
For Beth, the concept was not only foreign but
frightening. Why wasn't Rakesh's mother jealous
about sharing her role? After all, Beth could not
imagine entrusting her baby to her own,
irresponsible, sister. Beth begins to understand
the depth of the relationship between Rakesh's
two moms when she catches sight of them standing
at a window, looking out for the first time at
snow. "Their white cotton saris were wrapped
about them like shawls, their two heads leaned
against each other as they peered out,
speechlessly."
For all the cultural friction present in these
works, there shines in all of them a universal
humanity. The reader will see in Michael
Ondaatje's Lalla that one crazy relative in
anybody's family. "She stole flowers
compulsively, even in the owner's presence."
Meanwhile, at a time of deep divisions between
the West and Islam, Zulfikar Ghose's "The Marble
Dome" comes as the reassuring voice of moderate
Muslims. A few other stories break the general
tone with explicit sexual scenes and vulgarity.
Beyond this collection, other works of the South
Asian diaspora are well worth checking out. "The
Unknown Errors of Our Lives," a collection of
short stories by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,
explores the contemporary struggles of Indian-
Americans trying to bridge the cultural divide.
And the film "East Is East," a British dark
comedy, tackles the tribulations of raising
children in a mixed English-Pakistani marriage.
* Ben Arnoldy is on the Monitor staff.
(ii)
Village Voice
May 10th, 2005
Anatomy of Hate: South Asia's Hindu-Muslim Hostility
Amitava Kumar's Husband of a Fanatic
by Uday Benegal
Husband of a Fanatic
by Amitava Kumar
The New Press, 296 pp., $24.95
Buy this book "Isn't that a bit like a Catholic
marrying a Protestant back where I'm from?" asks
the Irish officer at the Canadian office as
Amitava Kumar, a Hindu writer from India, and his
soon-to-be wife, Mona, a Pakistani Muslim, submit
their marriage application. It's much worse,
according to Kumar's Husband of a Fanatic, the
reciprocity of hate between South Asia's Hindu
and Muslim communities having reached new levels
of hostility over the last decade or so. Inspired
by Underground, Haruki Murakami's book on Tokyo's
1995 sarin gas attack, Kumar tries to get to the
root of this animosity via the personal
experiences of victims. He visits scenes of
carnage and sites of remand and retribution, and
attempts to discourse with casualties and
aggressors in places as distant as India, South
Africa, and Queens.
In India, right-wing Hindu nationalists consider
liberals and intellectuals as blinkered,
consistently siding with an undeservedly pampered
Muslim minority even as Hindus continue to remain
oppressed. Kumar transcends this typecasting,
finding a perch of objectivity as a university
professor in faraway Pennsylvania. But while
Kumar's search for the motives driving this
intractable enmity is sincere, he tends to lapse
into trite sentimentalism, as when asking a
distraught Indian war widow if she would like to
write a letter to a Pakistani counterpart (she
refuses). Sadly for Kumar, as for the
billion-plus people on the conflict-ridden
subcontinent, the reasons flow disparately and
the solutions remain unfound; individual tales of
grief only serve to reveal a greater failure. As
Kumar himself puts it, "All the truth and the
pity of the world, instead of finding its way to
a larger politics, gets reduced to a personal
soap opera of the self."
______
[6] [ANNOUNCEMENTS]
(i)
mumbai study group / gkss 26.05.05 Mill Lands : The final chance
date : May 26, 2005,
time: 5.30 pm
venue Rachana Sansad, behind Ravindra Natya
Mandir, Off Sayani Rd, Prabhadevi, Mumbai
Update on the mill land issue
The meeting, on February 16, 2005, at Rachana
Sansad, was attended by about 50 organisations --
environmental, human rights and women's
organisations, workers' unions and students'
groups - and media persons. Concerns about the
redevelopment of mill lands were expressed in a
set of resolutions looking at the interests of
mill workers and the city as a whole.
As the Bombay Environmental Action Group had
already filed a PIL in the High Court,
challenging the revised DCR 58, Girni Kamgar
Sangarsh Samiti also intervened. On hearing all
parties in April 2005, the High Court ordered a
stay on the new permission for land development,
and demanded a list of documents (such as lease
details and redevelopment permissions) from state
authorities. This order was crucial to monitor
the legality of mill land development.
The respondents and the intervenors in the
petition which included five mill owners, the
government and RMMS, BMC, MHADA, and others filed
a petition in the Supreme Court against the High
Court stay. The Supreme Court finally disposed of
the petition on May 11, 2005, and sent the matter
back to the High Court, to be heard and
preferably decided upon before July 30, 2005.
Although the Supreme Court has allowed
construction to be continued on the land of those
mills which have already received permissions, it
has highlighted that these permissions will be at
their own risk subject to the final decision of
the Bombay High Court division bench.
The Supreme Court has stayed all fresh
construction on the mill land while allowing the
authorities to process applications for
permission. Needless to say, the creation of
third-party rights and sale will be subject to
the final decision of the Bombay high court.
Mill owners have also been directed to issue
advertisements in newspapers and introduce
warning clauses in agreements for any new
transaction concerning mill land.
On May 18, 2005 the Mumbai Study Group and Girni
Kamgar Sangarsh Samiti organised another meeting
at Rachana Sansad to discuss the Supreme Court
order and to plan the future strategy to reclaim
public spaces and public housing. The
participants felt that a broad joint forum needed
to be formed at the city level to pursue the
issue on the legal, direct action and campaign
fronts.
The May 26 2005 meeting is the last chance for
the city efforts to re organise and get 200 acres
for use in low-income housing, amenities and
other public uses.
Your presence will be crucial to the success of
this meeting. Please inform other like-minded
organisations and invite them to participate.
Pankaj Joshi Datta Iswalkar
Mumbai Study Group Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti
(ii)
CERAS (South Asia Research and Resource Center)
and SAWACC (South Asia Women's Community Center
Invite you to a Public Lecture
On
Women and Genocide:
A feminist view of the 2002 Gujarat Genocide
By Vahida Nainar
Place: South Asian Women's Community Centre
1035 Rachel est -3rd floor (Montreal)
Between Christophe-Colomb and Boyer, Metro Mont-Royal
Time: Saturday May 28 @ 11.00 am
Vahida Nainar, author and feminist has been
involved in a number of international initiatives
centered around gender issues and the law, and
was part of a panel who authored 'THREATENED
EXISTENCE -- A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF THE GENOCIDE
IN GUJARAT' (December 2003).
______
[7]
The Hindu, May 22, 2005
HINDU [AND HINDUTVA] GROUPS AMONG THOSE RECEIVING MCDONALD'S SETTLEMENT MONEY
Silicon Valley, May. 22 (PTI): Fast food giant
McDonald's will pay USD 10 millions to 24 groups,
including International American Gita Society, as
part of a settlement of lawsuits charging that it
had misled Hindu and vegetarian consumers by
"wrongly describing" its French fries, containing
beef additive for flavouring, as vegetarian.
McDonald's has informed in a recent letter to the
International Gita Society, a Bay Area-based
non-profit organisation, that it is among the
groups receiving the settlement money, its
spokesman Ramananda Prasad said.
"We are such a small organisation, and nobody
supports us, the temples are busy with their own
activities," Prasad, who founded the Society in
1984, told India-West.
The money has to be used for developing a website
for the Gita, especially 'Gita for children,' he
said.
The 24 groups were approved by a US court, after
a Seattle Lawyer Harish Bharti, filed a class
lawsuit against the company, accusing the chain
of deception in its claims of cooking fries in
100 per cent vegetable oil.
The maximum compensation of $1.4 millions, or 14
per cent of the award, was for Vegetarian
Resource Group, followed by $1 million for North
American Vegetarian Society.
Other groups include Muslim Consumer Group for
Food Products ($100,000), International American
Gita Society ($50,000), Hindu Heritage Endowment
($250,000), Council of Hindu Temples of North
America ($200,000), Guru Harkrishan Institute of
Sikh Studies ($50,000), Hindu Students Council
($500,000), Jewish Community Centres Association
($200,000) and Tufts University ($850,000).
______
[8]
TAJ-PETITION
HC dismisses PIL on Taj Mahal
LUCKNOW, MAY 23 (PTI)
The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court
today summarily dismissed a public interest
litigation (PIL) which claimed that the Taj Mahal
was a Hindu temple and sought a directive to the
Union Government to conduct survey to ascertain
the monument's age.
A Division Bench comprising justices Jagadish
Bhalla and M A Khan while dismissing the PIL
allowed the petitioner to approach an appropriate
forum on the request of his counsel.
The Bench, in its oral observation, said the
issue of title could not be decided in this court.
The Taj Mahal is a national monument and without
going into any controversy we summarily dismiss
the PIL, the court said.
The petitioner one Amar Nath Mishra, a social
worker and religious preacher, had claimed that
the Taj Mahal had been built by a Hindu King
Parmar Dev in 1195-1196.
_____
[9]
[23 May 2005]
Self-Respect Marriage Proposal Provokes Hindutva Ire
Yoginder Sikand
The irony cannot be more striking. Known for
their fierce opposition to reforms in Hindu law
that sought to ameliorate the conditions of Hindu
women, Hindutva groups present themselves as
ardent champions of Muslim women. The image of
Muslim women as oppressed by their men and their
religion is central to Hindutva discourse,
buttressing the Hidutva-walas' claim of Islam and
Muslims being inherently and unrepentantly
'obscurantist' and 'barbaric'. This explains the
hypocritical defence by Hindutva ideologues of
Muslim womenís rights, while at the same time the
pogroms they unleash lead to the death and rape
of Muslim women in their thousands.
While Hindutva ideologues present themselves as
saviours of Muslim women from what they describe
as the 'tyranny' of Islam, they are fiercely
opposed to any measures that might threaten
Brahminical Hindu patriarchy. Thus, the cover
story of the latest issue of Organiser, the RSS
official English weekly, protesting against a
move to reform Hindu marriage, should come as no
surprise. Titled, 'A Mischievous Proposal to
Tinker With Hindu Faith', and written by a
certain R. Balashankar, the article furiously
denounces the proposal put forward by the Tamil
politician, M. Karunanidhi, leader of the
anti-Brahmin Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham, to allow
for 'self-respect' marriages that do without a
mandatory priest, who is generally a Brahmin.
The article refers to a letter sent recently by
Karunanidhi to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
demanding an amendment in the Hindu Marriage Act,
1955 in order legalise at the all-India level
marriages without a priest. Presently, such
marriages are recognized only in Tamil Nadu. This
demand has been a long-standing one, and was
first put forward by E.V.Periyar Ramaswamy
Naicker, the pioneer of the anti-Brahmin movement
in Tamil Nadu. Periyar was a bitter critic of
Brahminical Hinduism, seeing it as a
thinly-veiled guise for Aryan, North Indian,
'upper' caste Hindu hegemony. He regarded
Hinduism as a creation of wily Brahmins to assert
their control over the 'low' caste majority whom
they had reduced to servitude. He believed that
the non-Brahmins could effectively challenge
Brahmin hegemony only if they developed a sense
of self-respect and refused to consider the
Brahmins as 'gods on earth', a status that the
Brahmins claimed for themselves. As part of the
comprehensive plan for cultural revolution that
Periyar laid out, non-Brahmins would dispense
completely with Brahmins to officiate over their
religious and social functions. In particular,
the use of Brahmins to conduct the marriage of
Hindu couples was to be strictly avoided. In this
way, non-Brahmins would be able to assert their
equality with the Brahmins and would, at the same
time, be saved from paying the Brahmins the hefty
fees that they charged as ritual specialists. In
place of Brahmin-officiated marriage ceremonies,
Periyar launched what he called 'self-respect'
marriages, which were conducted without any
priest at all. Unlike the Brahminical marriage,
in which the bride is explicitly recognized as
subordinate to the husband and is given away as a
commodity to him, the 'self-respect' marriage
was an egalitarian one. In contrast to the
Brahminical marriage, the 'self-respect' marriage
did not entail any dowry.
That the RSS, and the Hindutva brigade as a
whole, are simply a new face of Brahminism is
well-known. Little wonder, then, that the
Organiser spies in Karunanidhi's proposal for
state recognition of ëself-respectí marriages
throughout India a conspiracy to 'meddle with
Hindu religion', going so far as to denounce it
as 'promot[ing] atheism by deritualising and
de-Hinduising Hindu marriages'. Clearly, it
recognizes that marriages that dispense with
Hindu priests, mostly Brahmins, are a potent
challenge to Brahminism. It is, however, careful
not to register its protest in a way that reveals
its own Brahminical agenda. Instead, it denounces
such marriages as 'anti-Hindu', as 'intimidation
of Hindu religion', and as calculate to 'to spite
the religious sentiments of the Hindu majority'.
The fact that the vast majority of 'Hindus' are
non-Brahmins, who might well believe that they
are equally capable as Brahmins to conduct their
own marriages, is, of course, ignored. So, too,
is the fact that many Dalit castes and Tribals,
whom the RSS seeks to include within the 'Hindu'
fold in order to augment 'Hindu' numbers,
continue to conduct their marriage ceremonies
without Brahmin priests and dispensing with
Brahminical ceremonies.
Any critique of Brahminism, therefore, is
interpreted as an attack on Hinduism as such by
the RSS. Any move that might challenge the
hegemony of the Brahmin minority or make a dent
in the citadel of Brahminism is presented as an
attack on the 'Hindu majority' and 'Hinduism',
even if such moves as 'self respect' marriages
might work in favour of the non-Brahmin majority.
As defenders of Brahminical or 'upper' caste
privilege, Hindutva ideologues see every issue
from the point of view of the Brahminical elites.
Hence, the reasonableness of Karunanidhi's demand
is completely dismissed, without any recognition
of the fact that it might well help the majority
of the 'Hindus', who are from the oppressed
castes, victims of Brahminism. The Organiser sees
no merit in the proposal at all, and, instead,
makes the ridiculous suggestion that it might be
a communist-inspired conspiracy to 'wean away
Hindu youth from the fold of family and religion
and make them tools of atheist, anti-Hindu
tirade'.
The Organiser ends its vehement denunciation of
Karunanidhi's proposal with by insisting that,
'as a declared non-believer, Karunanidhi and the
[sic.] likes have no right to talk on Hindu
religious affairs'. 'It is for Hindu religious
leaders and social reformers to talk on the
religion', it insists. If that is the case, then
why, one must ask, do the Hindutva-walas appear
to take such an inordinate interest in the
'plight' of Muslim women? If non-Hindus and
self-declared non-believers have no right to talk
about Hindu religious matters, what gives the RSS
and its affiliates in the Hindutva camp the right
to talk about Islam and shed crocodile tears over
the 'oppression' of Muslim women?
It is striking how, despite their visceral hatred
of each other, Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists
think alike on a range of issues. Both speak of
religious identity as a monolith, conveniently
ignoring the obvious fact that the interests of
the elites they champion have little in common
with those of the poor. On the issue of gender,
too, both are firm upholders of patriarchal
privilege. Like their counterparts among the
Muslim clerics, the Hindutva-walas see
patriarchal control as essential to their vision
of religion, and hence any step that threatens to
challenge it is regarded as a sinister
anti-religious plot, as the Orgniser's furious
reaction to Karunanidhi's sensible and very
welcome proposal makes amply clear.
[Related Material]
Chennai Online - May 11, 2005
DMK wants Hindu Marriage Act amended
URL:
www.chennaionline.com/colnews/newsitem.asp?NEWSID=%7B508BC33F-7E48-4C7E-8015-2F3FF08B7A77%7D&CATEGORYNAME=Tamil+Nadu
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
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/
SACW archive is available at: bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/
Sister initiatives :
South Asia Counter Information Project : snipurl.com/sacip
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Communalism Watch: communalism.blogspot.com/
DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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