South Asia Citizens Wire - 30 January 2015 - No. 2845 [since 1996] --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents: 1. Afghanistan: Threats to Media - A report by Human Rights Watch 2. Sri Lanka: AHRC Welcomes People’s Victory and Calls for CJ’s Resignation / Impeachment 3. An end to culture of retaliation: Transitional justice in Sri Lanka | Jude Fernando 4. Pakistan: Mosque versus state (Pervez Hoodbhoy) 5. Bangladesh Politico: Understanding the 2015 political crisis in Bangladesh (David Bergman) 6. At point blank range - The killing of plural Hindustan | Gopalkrishna Gandhi 7. Long Live Charlie Hebdo! : A letter to the left leaning in wake of Charlie Hebdo shootings of January 2015 (Harsh Kapoor) 8. After the Charlie Hebdo Massacre, Support those Fighting the Religious-Right: Statement by concerned citizens 9. India: Responses of the Assam government and the Centre to Bodo violence are mired in apathy | Suhas Chakma 10. India: Joint Appeal by PUDR and Others to Punish the Culprits of Shankar Bigha Massacre of Bihar 11. From SACW ARCHIVES: Text of 1985 Acceptance Speech by Rajni Kothari, for Right Livelihood Award to Lokayan 12. Jan 2015 SAHMAT Cards with Gandhi quote on Secularism 13. Pakistan: Tributes paid to communist Sobho Gayanchandani - Media Reports 14. Rajni Kothari (1928 – 2015) - Eminent Social Scientist and Democrat remembered 15. Romila Thapar: “We have to be secular. There is no choice” 16. R.K. Laxman - The Great Indian Cartoonist is no More; He will live on in our memories 17. Trade union writes to India and Pakistan regarding fishermen’s detention on both sides 18. Sindh Provincial Convention of Pakistan India Peoples Convention held in Karachi - a report on Jan 21, 2015 19. India, Pakistan: Build on goodwill, not hate (Beena Sarwar) 20. Pakistan - India: Ceasefire violations and effects on civilians in border areas of Jammu and Kashmir - a preliminary report by PIPFPD 21. India: Gandhi, Masses and Elite (V.K. Tripathi) 22. India: Press release by Committee for Resisting Saffronization of Textbooks, Karnataka - 20 Jan 2015 23. India: Mass violence and displacement of adivasis in Assam in December 2014 - A report by Wing-Assam and AAWAA 24. India: In support of Perumal Murugan - statement by SAHMAT 25. India: Left playright S.M. Mehdi recalls stories from life and days in the communist party commune in Bombay 26. Why Narendra Modi Stole Christmas (India United Against Fascism) 27. India - Pakistan: Wagah-Attari border cermony a macho, comic farce egged on by thousands of cheering, jingoistic supporters 28. India: Promoting Prejudice, Poisoning Minds - Parivar’s intrusions into education (Praful Bidwai) 29. India: For the BJP-led government, development and communalism go nicely together (Kanti Bajpai) 30. India: The conversion crusade - Competing for people’s souls (Harsh Mander) 31. India: A B Bardhan’s Tribute to Perin Chandra 32. Nehru’s Admiration for Trotsky 33. Text of Resolutions adopted at the Indian History Congress December 2014 34. Recent On Communalism Watch: - India: legal action planned on Information and Broadcasting Ministry advertisment - Justice Rajinder Sachar - India: Hindu Mahasabha plans to install Godse statue in temples on 30 january 2015 ? - India: Modi Led BJP govt minister says let the nation debate whether the words “socialist and secular” should remain in preamble of constitution - India: Urdu newspaper editor arrested over reprint of Hebdo’s Prophet cartoon - India: Evangelist IAS officer dares TN govt on his Right to preach - India: The Real & Insidious Nature of 'Ghar Wapsi’ Campaign (Subhashini Ali) - Retracing Godse’s journey [Part 2]: A hotel in CP, a city divided and a failed bid to kill the Mahatma - India: UP on the Boil - Meerut clash and more (Story in Mail Today 29 Jan 2015) - Announcement: civil society groups and individuals to pay a homage to Gandhi on 30th Jan 2015 - 6-7pm at 11 Murti, New Delhi - Announcement for Citizens March for Peace, Justice and Democracy (30 Jan 2015, New Delhi) - India: Retracing the journey of Nathuram Godse the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi [Part 1] - 67th anniversary of Gandhi's assassination 30th Jan. 2015, 2 pm on, Audi 1, Convention Centre, JNU (SAHMAT and others) - India: Furore over omission of 'socialist, secular' from Govt. advertisement - India: A section of Dawoodi Bohra community alarmed at the late Syedna being nominated for the Padma Bhushan Award - India: A fifty-fifty democracy - Seven threats to freedom of expression (Ramachandra Guha) - India: Ahmedabad Urdu medium schools in a fix over Saraswati puja circular - India: New Film Censor Board under the Modi led govt - Loaded with BJP Cronies [see report in NDTV) ::: FULL TEXT ::: 35. India: Second chance - Why is Amit Shah being allowed to make MPs out of bigots? (Ramachandra Guha) 36. Egypt’s War on Atheism (Mona Eltahawy) 37. The original sin (Marvi Sirmed) 38. The death of an illicit whisperer (Garga Chatterjee) 39. Mike Marqusee obituary (Colin Robinson) 40. Roy Bhaskar obituary (David Graeber) 41. Read the homeopathy article that the Hindustan Times would not publish (Simon Singh) 42. The Marshall Islands Versus the World’s Nuclear Weapons States (Peter Weiss) ========================================= 1. AFGHANISTAN: THREATS TO MEDIA - A report by Human Rights Watch ========================================= The 48-page report, “‘Stop Reporting or We'll Kill Your Family': Threats to Media Freedom in Afghanistan,” documents harassment, intimidation, and attacks on journalists and the Afghan government's failure to investigate and prosecute those responsible. The failure to protect journalistic freedom has emboldened those determined to suppress criticism of the government, the security forces, and other powerful entities in Afghan society. http://www.sacw.net/article10451.html ========================================= 2. SRI LANKA: AHRC WELCOMES PEOPLE’S VICTORY AND CALLS FOR CJ’S RESIGNATION / IMPEACHMENT ========================================= A decisive new stage in the political life of Sri Lanka has arisen as a result of the people’s verdict, which overwhelmingly affirms the commitment of Sri Lankans to democracy and the rule of law. Victory to the new President Maithripala Sirisena and the New Democratic Alliance is a mandate given by the people to carry out promised constitutional and other reforms. http://www.sacw.net/article10369.html ========================================= 3. AN END TO CULTURE OF RETALIATION: TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN SRI LANKA | Jude Fernando ========================================= Former President Mahinda Rajapaksha did not gracefully turn over power to Mr. Maithripala Sirisena after losing the election and step down peacefully as the President of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Those claiming he did are dressing an autocrat in gentleman’s clothes and sanitizing the abuses of power by him and his regime—abuses unprecedented by any government since our independence from the colonial rule. http://www.sacw.net/article10404.html ========================================= 4. PAKISTAN: MOSQUE VERSUS STATE by Pervez Hoodbhoy ========================================= THE mosque in Pakistan is now no longer just a religious institution. Instead it has morphed into a deeply political one that seeks to radically transform culture and society. Actively assisted by the state in this mission in earlier decades, the mosque is a powerful actor over which the state now exercises little authority. http://www.sacw.net/article10375.html ========================================= 5. BANGLADESH POLITICO: UNDERSTANDING THE 2015 POLITICAL CRISIS IN BANGLADESH by David Bergman ========================================= By no means comprehensive, but here are eight points to understand the current crisis in Bangladesh and why it appears particularly intractable. http://www.sacw.net/article10465.html ========================================= 6. AT POINT BLANK RANGE - THE KILLING OF PLURAL HINDUSTAN | Gopalkrishna Gandhi ========================================= The Taliban gunmen who shot their targets, unarmed children, on their heads did so at "point blank range". The heinousness of that act, accompanied by that description of the range, took me back to when, a child myself, I wanted to know what "point blank range" meant. The term had been used almost mechanically, without sufficient explanation, to describe the assassination of M.K. Gandhi and was taken generally to mean "from up close". http://www.sacw.net/article10448.html ========================================= 7. LONG LIVE CHARLIE HEBDO!: A LETTER TO THE LEFT LEANING IN WAKE OF CHARLIE HEBDO SHOOTINGS OF JANUARY 2015 by Harsh Kapoor ========================================= The January 2015 terror attack on the Paris satirical weekly and its gross misinterpretation by people of Left liberal sensibilities in India and much of the world. http://www.sacw.net/article10438.html ========================================= 8. AFTER THE CHARLIE HEBDO MASSACRE, SUPPORT THOSE FIGHTING THE RELIGIOUS-RIGHT: STATEMENT BY CONCERNED CITIZENS ========================================= After the massacre in Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015, expressing indignation, as so many are doing, is not enough. http://www.sacw.net/article10356.html ========================================= 9. INDIA: RESPONSES OF THE ASSAM GOVERNMENT AND THE CENTRE TO BODO VIOLENCE ARE MIRED IN APATHY | Suhas Chakma ========================================= It has been about a month since India witnessed the largest terror killings in 2014 in which a total of 81 innocent Adivasis were massacred in Kokrajhar and Sonitpur districts of Assam on December 23, 2013, by the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) headed by Songbijit Ingti Kathar. It took place just one week after another equally heart-wrenching massacre of 145 people, including 132 schoolchildren by the Tehrik-i-Taliban (Pakistan) terrorists who attacked the Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16. http://www.sacw.net/article10434.html ========================================= 10. INDIA: JOINT APPEAL BY PUDR AND OTHERS TO PUNISH THE CULPRITS OF SHANKAR BIGHA MASSACRE OF BIHAR ========================================= The recent judgment of the Additional District and Sessions Judge of Jehanabad (Bihar), given in the much reported case of Shankar Bigha Massacre, has not only depicted the travesty of justice, but also exposed the frivolity of Bihar police and its prosecution machinery. The Judge of the trial court has acquitted all the 24 accused persons, of being involved in the infamous massacre, on 13th January, 2015, citing “lack of evidence”. http://www.sacw.net/article10464.html ========================================= 11. [FROM SACW ARCHIVES] TEXT OF 1985 ACCEPTANCE SPEECH BY RAJNI KOTHARI, FOR RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARD TO LOKAYAN ========================================= May I on behalf of the Lokayan community of activists, scholars, and intellectuals and the scores of concerned individuals and organizations that have supported Lokayan over the nearly six years of its existence, extend our warm greetings and grateful thanks to the Right Livelihood Foundation, the Swedish Parliament and the Swedish society and people. Ours is a fairly modest and still developing endeavor towards broadening the base of the democratic process in India by drawing upon diverse practical initiatives and experiments in alternatives at the grassroots of our society as well as new thinking and reflection that have become necessary at the macro level as a consequence of this. http://www.sacw.net/article10463.html ========================================= 12. JAN 2015 SAHMAT CARDS WITH GANDHI QUOTE ON SECULARISM ========================================= cards with Gandhi quote on Secularism produced by Sahmat for 30 Jan 2015 event marking the anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by the Hindutva Activist Nathruram Godse http://www.sacw.net/article10462.html ========================================= 13. PAKISTAN: TRIBUTES PAID TO COMMUNIST SOBHO GAYANCHANDANI - MEDIA REPORTS ========================================= KARACHI: Well wishers, comrades, poets, writers, intellectuals, human rights activists and politicians here on Sunday paid rich tributes to the noted Communist leader, writer and intellectual of the country Sobho Gayanchandani at a reference, jointly organized by many civil society organizations under the banner of Comrade Sobho Gayanchandani Memorial Committee Karachi http://www.sacw.net/article10454.html ========================================= 14. RAJNI KOTHARI (1928 – 2015) - EMINENT SOCIAL SCIENTIST AND DEMOCRAT REMEMBERED ========================================= Tributes to Rajni Kothari by scholars Shiv Vishvanathan, Partha Chatterjee and Suhas Palshikar and by PUDR and NAPM http://www.sacw.net/article10453.html ========================================= 15. ROMILA THAPAR: “WE HAVE TO BE SECULAR. THERE IS NO CHOICE” ========================================= Romila Thapar on history and politics of India. Professor Romila Thapar, 83, needs no introduction. She is known among intellectuals of the world for her path-breaking work on Indian ancient history. She has memories of old Lahore where her grandfather used to live at Lawrence Road. It was her father, a doctor in the Indian army, who made her go through old manuscripts, thus developing in her an interest for history. http://www.sacw.net/article10455.html ========================================= 16. R.K. LAXMAN - THE GREAT INDIAN CARTOONIST IS NO MORE; HE WILL LIVE ON IN OUR MEMORIES ========================================= R.K. Laxman the celebrated Indian cartoonist who worked for the Times of India died in Pune, on 26 January 2015. He was 93. He cartoon character 'Common Man' lives on in the imagination all who grew up in post independent India. His 'You said it' daily cartoon was awaited by all everyday. In 1994 the ‘Cartoons Against Communalism' exhibition organised by the artists platform SAHMAT was attached by the goons of Hindutva right wing RSS in Pune who were mad at cartoons of L.K. Advani by R.K. Laxman. http://www.sacw.net/article10452.html ========================================= 17. TRADE UNION WRITES TO INDIA AND PAKISTAN REGARDING FISHERMEN’S DETENTION ON BOTH SIDES ========================================= The Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF) on Thursday sent letters to the Indian and Pakistani authorities, demanding an amicable resolution of fishermen’s detention issue. Both the countries, it says, must release all the fishing boats, confiscated at the time of fishermen’s arrest. It also calls for setting up a high-level working group involving representatives from the fishing community to monitor and prevent fishermen’s arrest and boats’ confiscation. http://www.sacw.net/article10436.html ========================================= 18. SINDH PROVINCIAL CONVENTION OF PAKISTAN INDIA PEOPLES CONVENTION HELD IN KARACHI - A REPORT ON JAN 21, 2015 ========================================= The participants adopted a Resolution and expressed concern on increasing tension and firing incidents at borders causing loss to human life. . . . http://www.sacw.net/article10437.html ========================================= 19. INDIA, PAKISTAN: BUILD ON GOODWILL, NOT HATE by Beena Sarwar In the wake of escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan, people on both sides of the border continue to express solidarity through peace initiatives http://www.sacw.net/article10435.html ========================================= 20. PAKISTAN - INDIA: CEASEFIRE VIOLATIONS AND EFFECTS ON CIVILIANS IN BORDER AREAS OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR - A PRELIMINARY REPORT BY PIPFPD ========================================= The ceasefire violations on the International Border and the LoC between Pakistan and India that have taken place in the past few months, after the ceasefire was agreed to in 2003, has been shocking Over 550 incidents of ceasefire violations took place in 2014 and the Indian and Pakistani governments are busy giving each other a neck to neck competition with the number of jawans and civilians on both sides dying and many sustaining injuries. http://www.sacw.net/article10425.html ========================================= 21. INDIA: GANDHI, MASSES AND ELITE by V.K. Tripathi ========================================= Gandhi, the unarmed man who stood against the might of imperialism and fanaticism with unprecedented courage, is so much a target of hate by large sections of educated and affluent classes in India that they are lavishing praise on his assassin, Godse. They view the leader of the organization responsible for spreading such venom as the fortune maker of India. http://www.sacw.net/article10418.html ========================================= 22. INDIA: PRESS RELEASE BY COMMITTEE FOR RESISTING SAFFRONIZATION OF TEXTBOOKS, KARNATAKA - 20 JAN 2015 ========================================= The Bharatiya Janata Party might be out of power in Karnataka, but it does hold the reigns of power at the Centre. Naturally the state unit of the party is now more active and all pervasive than ever before. So when it heard of a new committee being set up by the state government to review the school textbooks (most of which were prepared during its rule) it began employing all sorts of tactics to put obstacles in the way. http://www.sacw.net/article10417.html ========================================= 23. INDIA: MASS VIOLENCE AND DISPLACEMENT OF ADIVASIS IN ASSAM IN DECEMBER 2014 - A REPORT BY WING-ASSAM AND AAWAA ========================================= The massacre of 23rd December 2014 where numerous people were severely injured, killed, houses set on fire leading to the displacement of a large number of Adivasi people mainly Santhals from their settlements, inflicted terror on the entire state. Women in Governance (WinG)-Assam and All Adivasi Women Association of Assam (AAWAA) conducted a fact finding intervention from 2nd January to 6th January 2015 on the 23rd December and subsequent incidents where more than 80 Adivasis were brutally massacred by the National Democratic Front of Bodoland belonging to the Songbijit faction NDFB (s) in the districts of Sontipur,Chirang and Kokrajhar. http://www.sacw.net/article10411.html ========================================= 24. INDIA: IN SUPPORT OF PERUMAL MURUGAN - STATEMENT BY SAHMAT ========================================= In another shocking and serious blow to the freedom of expression, Perumal Murugan, an influential Tamil writer at the peak of his creative powers, has been bullied, blackmailed and harassed by anonymous vested religious elements led by the Hindutva right, in collusion with the police and the state administration of Tamil Nadu, into helpless submission – so much so that he has, in pain and frustration, announced that he is giving up writing altogether. ========================================= 25. INDIA: LEFT PLAYRIGHT S.M. MEHDI RECALLS STORIES FROM LIFE AND DAYS IN THE COMMUNIST PARTY COMMUNE IN BOMBAY ========================================= Episode from the Indian TV series Mamujaan ki Diary, originally aired on state run Door Doordarshan Urdu. http://www.sacw.net/article10394.html ========================================= 26. WHY NARENDRA MODI STOLE CHRISTMAS by India United Against Fascism ========================================= On 2 December 2014 , Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that in future 25 December would be celebrated as Good Governance Day because it was the birthday of Hindu nationalists Madan Mohan Malaviya and Atal Behari Vajpayee. Subsequently a circular was sent out to schools ordering them to cancel the public holiday on the 25 th and require children to come to school on Christmas Day for a variety of activities. Education Minister Smriti Irani was suspected of sending out the circular and lying when she denied it http://www.sacw.net/article10391.html ========================================= 27. INDIA - PAKISTAN: WAGAH-ATTARI BORDER CERMONY A MACHO, COMIC FARCE EGGED ON BY THOUSANDS OF CHEERING, JINGOISTIC SUPPORTERS ========================================= what we have is an over-the-top ceremony with troopers reduced to caricatures. They come rushing towards the gates and halt in front of them, adjust their turbans, thump their chests and flex their muscles — pretty much like Popeye. The goose steps — a chilling throwback to the Nazi era — are way more exaggerated than they should be, a seemingly impossible anatomical feat with the leg almost touching the forehead. http://www.sacw.net/article10387.html ========================================= 28. INDIA: PROMOTING PREJUDICE, POISONING MINDS - PARIVAR’S INTRUSIONS INTO EDUCATION by Praful Bidwai ========================================= If there’s one thing that the 102nd Indian Science Congress, held in Mumbai, will be remembered for, it’s the outrageous claims made at it about the achievements of science in ancient India, including the assertion that Indians between 7000 and 6000 BC knew how to make airplanes that could undertake “interplanetary travel”, and fly backwards and sideways, as well as forwards! http://www.sacw.net/article10388.html ========================================= 29. INDIA: FOR THE BJP-LED GOVERNMENT, DEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNALISM GO NICELY TOGETHER by Kanti Bajpai ========================================= Liberals in India who lost patience with the UPA government and became supporters of Narendra Modi are puzzled by the prime minister’s silence over Sangh Parivar’s growing communal interventions. They should not be. That is his record in Gujarat over 12 years, it worked for him there, and he has come to power nationally on the back of it. http://www.sacw.net/article10328.html ========================================= 30. INDIA: THE CONVERSION CRUSADE - COMPETING FOR PEOPLE’S SOULS by Harsh Mander ========================================= Free India was born in a tumult of religious hatred. This, and the fact that this country is home to followers of almost every major religion, persuaded members of the Constituent Assembly to exercise great care to protect the freedom of religious belief in the Constitution. http://sacw.net/article10472.html ========================================= 31. INDIA: A B BARDHAN’S TRIBUTE TO PERIN CHANDRA ========================================= The news that, on January 7, Perin Chandra passed away at the ripe old age of 96 rekindled the memory of a day when 1941 was coming to a close. The All India Students Federation (AISF) was holding its conference in Patna. I had joined the previous year, and had come to attend the conference as a delegate from old Madhya Pradesh. Two women delegates (there were several more of course) from Lahore impressed all of us very much. One was Perin Bharucha and the other was Litto (who was later to marry Ajoy Ghosh). http://www.sacw.net/article10383.html ========================================= 32. NEHRU’S ADMIRATION FOR TROTSKY ========================================= Here are three extracts from Jawaharlal Nehru’s synopsis of world history called Glimpses of World History which he put together in the early thirties as a series of letters to his daughter. The extracts date from April and July 1933. Given that Nehru wrote Glimpses in a series of jails where he barely had access to any literature, his assessments of the Russian Revolution and admiration for Trotsky’s role in it are quite extraordinary. Like most of the book (1129 pages in the Penguin edition), the extracts reproduced here were written in the District Gaol, Dehra Dun. http://www.sacw.net/article10381.html ========================================= 33. TEXT OF RESOLUTIONS ADOPTED AT THE INDIAN HISTORY CONGRESS DECEMBER 2014 ========================================= Resolutions Passed ByThe Executive Committee ofThe 75Th Session Of Indian History Congress At Academic Staff College, JNU http://www.sacw.net/article10368.html ========================================= 34. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ========================================= available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/ - India: legal action planned on Information and Broadcasting Ministry advertisment - Justice Rajinder Sachar - India: Hindu Mahasabha plans to install Godse statue in temples on 30 january 2015 ? - India: Modi Led BJP govt minister says let the nation debate whether the words “socialist and secular” should remain in preamble of constitution - India: Urdu newspaper editor arrested over reprint of Hebdo’s Prophet cartoon - India: Evangelist IAS officer dares TN govt on his Right to preach - India: The Real & Insidious Nature of 'Ghar Wapsi’ Campaign (Subhashini Ali) - Retracing Godse’s journey [Part 2]: A hotel in CP, a city divided and a failed bid to kill the Mahatma - India: UP on the Boil - Meerut clash and more (Story in Mail Today 29 Jan 2015) - Announcement: civil society groups and individuals to pay a homage to Gandhi on 30th Jan 2015 - 6-7pm at 11 Murti, New Delhi - India: Modi Govt Ally Shiv Sena demands removal of ‘secular’ from Constitution - Announcement for Citizens March for Peace, Justice and Democracy (30 Jan 2015, New Delhi) - Press Statement: on the govt responses to the IndiaResists.com's e-petition against the mischievous R-day advertisement - India - West Bengal: VHP converts 150 tribal Christians converted to Hinduism - India: Retracing the journey of Nathuram Godse the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi [Part 1] - 67th anniversary of Gandhi's assassination 30th Jan. 2015, 2 pm on, Audi 1, Convention Centre, JNU (SAHMAT and others) - India: Furore over omission of 'socialist, secular' from Govt. advertisement - English, Urdu words in NCERT’s Hindi books under scrutiny of RSS's DN Batra (July 2014 report in Times of India) - India: A section of Dawoodi Bohra community alarmed at the late Syedna being nominated for the Padma Bhushan Award - detailed critique of the CBI court's order discharging Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin encounter case - India: A fifty-fifty democracy - Seven threats to freedom of expression (Ramachandra Guha) - India: Ahmedabad Urdu medium schools in a fix over Saraswati puja circular - India: New Film Censor Board under the Modi led govt - Loaded with BJP Cronies [see report in NDTV) and More ... available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/ ::: FULL TEXT ::: ========================================= 35. INDIA: SECOND CHANCE - WHY IS AMIT SHAH BEING ALLOWED TO MAKE MPS OUT OF BIGOTS? Politics and play - Ramachandra Guha ========================================= (The Telegraph, January 10 , 2015) In the latter part of 2014, four members of Parliament made provocative statements. Yogi Adityanath, the MP from Gorakhpur, claimed that young Muslim men had launched a "lovejihad" to entrap Hindu women, by marrying and converting them to Islam. Sakshi Maharaj, the MP from Unnao, said that the murderer of Mahatma Gandhi, Nathuram Godse, was a true patriot. Sadhvi Jyoti Niranjana, MP from Fatehpur (and who had been recently inducted into the council of ministers), said that all those who did not worship Lord Rama or vote for her party were " haramzadon" (a term that we can politely translate as 'rascals', although the original Hindustani admits of more pejorative connotations). Satish Gautam, the MP from Aligarh, proclaimed his support to a programme of converting Muslims and Christians to Hinduism. The four MPs all belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party, the party that is running the Union government. As a result, the Opposition asked the prime minister, as head of government, to clarify his stand on the MPs' remarks. The Rajya Sabha was stalled for days on end, with the prime minister first declining to appear and then making a statement, which, in the Opposition's view, was not sufficiently condemnatory of his errant MPs. In the vast press coverage on these controversies, one salient fact seems to have been obscured. This is that the four fire-raising MPs of the BJP had all been elected from the state of Uttar Pradesh. They had all been chosen to contest for Parliament by the then general secretary of the BJP, Amit Shah, who had been given sole charge of the campaign in India's largest state. Remarkably, neither the press nor the Opposition had noticed the connection. While the prime minister was repeatedly asked to state his stand, no one - whether inside Parliament or outside it - directed their criticisms to the man principally responsible for having made MPs out of bigots. The mainstreaming of Amit Shah is one of the more worrying aspects of public discourse in India. This is a man who was the first serving home minister of any state to be arrested; the man who was sent away from his own state for two years by the Supreme Court for fear he would tamper with the evidence in important criminal cases; the man who many say so completely politicized his state's police force that those who did not toe his line were punished. The controversial background of Amit Shah was forgotten when his party won the Lok Sabha election, their victory owed in good part to their near-clean sweep in Uttar Pradesh, where they won 71 out of 80 seats. The BJP's spectacular showing in India's largest state, and the majority gained overall, prompted the party to elevate Amit Shah to the post of president. Meanwhile, his role in fashioning a BJP victory led to a flurry of appreciative pieces on Amit Shah in the press. The man with a distinctly dodgy past was now celebrated as a political genius, as the modern Chanakya, and more. The pundits in the press particularly praised Amit Shah for his "candidate selection". The candidates he selected included Yogi Adityanath, Sakshi Maharaj, Sadhvi Jyoti Niranjana and Satish Gautam. And yet no one has called the BJP president to account for the statements of his MPs from Uttar Pradesh. Meanwhile, other members of the extendedsangh parivar have made their intentions very clear. The head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has declared that India is a Hindu rashtra, and that everyone who is a citizen of this country must acknowledge that he is of "Hindu" origin. In keeping with this ambition, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad has launched a series of conversion programmes. Its president, Pravin Togadia, has said that their ultimate goal is to make every Indian a Hindu by faith. Narendra Modi was, for many years, a fervent believer in a Hindu rashtra himself. In his first years as chief minister, he made disparaging remarks about Muslims and Christians. However, from about 2008 or so he began to fashion a more moderate image. He was now a vikash purush, a man of development, who wished to take all of Gujarat along on the road to prosperity. Once he launched his prime ministerial campaign, he further sought to present himself as a politician of the future, rather than of the past. Although his penchant for polemic remained, the barbs were now directed at individual politicians opposed to him, rather than at communities per se. Narendra Modi's adroit re-branding, along with his brilliant oratory, played a major role in the success of his party in the Lok Sabha elections. Although such things are impossible to quantify, it does seem that a large number of those who voted for the BJP do not subscribe to the view that India is or must be a Hindu rashtra. They cast their votes as they did because (a) they were (rightly) disgusted by the corruption and dynastic culture of the ruling Congress, and (b) they saw in the energetic, charismatic, self-made Narendra Modi a viable alternative, who could meet their aspirations for a safer, more prosperous, and less corrupt India. The presentation of Modi as a modernizing, go-getting, growth-and-good-governance-generating reformer was widely shared by the electorate. It may indeed be that Modi has undergone a genuine ideological transformation. Is that also true of his second-in-command? Here the scepticism must run deeper. During the election campaign, Amit Shah was reprimanded by the Election Commission for remarks he made urging Hindus to take 'revenge' through the ballot box. The statements made by his chosen MPs from UP show that they take no part in the professed agenda of the government, but subscribe still to the reactionary, polarizing view of India that it was thought (or claimed) that the prime minister had himself left behind. Shah's own failure to publicly reprimand Yogi Adityanath and Sadhvi Jyoti Niranjana suggests that he is not entirely averse to their worldview. When asked by reporters to comment, he has offered anodyne remarks such as "our party stands for social harmony". The signs are ominous - more so because in the communalizing of UP, Shah and his party have a willing ally in Mulayam Singh Yadav and his party. Both sides have a vested interest in further polarization. As the next assembly elections in UP come closer, the worry is that the likes of Mulayam and Azam Khan will stoke fear among insecure Muslims, and that the likes of Yogi Adityanath and Sadhvi Jyoti Niranjana will stoke fear among insecure Hindus. Further stoking the sectarian pot will be Asaduddin Owaisi and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. The BJP under Shah's leadership might then play a double game - getting the prime minister to give stirring speeches promising jobs to all young men and 24x7 power to all rural homes, while on the ground the cadres work at consolidating "Hindu pride". Shah's defenders have made much of the "clean chit" recently given him by the CBI. The discourse on clean chits (given in this case by an agency notorious for bowing to the wind) obscures a fundamental question, namely, whether association with, or endorsement of, statements and actions so manifestly at variance with our Constitution are at all compatible with the presidentship of India's most important political party. Shah's career as home minister in Gujarat, his management of the campaign in UP during the general elections, and his conduct as party president all suggest that for him ends are far more important than the means. That is why we must be troubled by the mixture of deference and adulation by which he is currently treated by large sections of the media. ========================================= 36. EGYPT’S WAR ON ATHEISM by Mona Eltahawy ========================================= (The New York Times January 28, 2014) CAIRO — It took one session on Jan. 10 for a court in the Nile Delta province of Beheira to sentence Karim al-Banna, a 21-year-old student, to three years in prison for saying on Facebook that he was an atheist. The student’s lawyer complained that he was denied the right even to present a defense, but an equally chilling aspect of Mr. Banna’s case is that his father testified against him. Also telling is that Mr. Banna was originally arrested, in November, when he went to the police to complain that his neighbors were harassing him. This was after his name had appeared in a local newspaper on a list of known atheists. Instead of protecting him, the police accused him of insulting Islam. Such tag teams of family, media and state are not uncommon in cases against atheists. Because atheism itself is not illegal in Egypt, charges are laid under laws against blasphemy or contempt for religion. In 2012, a 27-year-old blogger, Alber Saber, received a three-year sentence on charges of blasphemy for creating a web page called “Egyptian Atheists.” In 2013, the writer and human rights activist Karam Saber (no relation) was convicted of defaming religion in his short story collection “Where Is God?” Similar charges have been used for political purposes against Egypt’s Christian minority. In 2013, a Coptic Christian lawyer, Roman Murad Saad, was sentenced in absentia for “ridiculing” the Quran. From 2011 to 2013, Egyptian courts convicted 27 of 42 defendants on charges of contempt for religion. It is no surprise that Mr. Banna’s conviction occurred on the watch of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army general who led the ouster of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to become president. Regardless of which way the seesaw of power in Egypt tips — toward the Islamists or toward the military — it is always a heterosexual, conservative Muslim man who heads the moral hierarchy. The further from that identity you are, the more vulnerable you are. If anything, Egypt’s nominally secular ruler is more Catholic than the pope, to borrow a metaphor from another religion. Assuming the role of defender of public morality is a deliberate reminder that the Islamists do not hold the copyright on piety. This is not new: The regime of the ousted President Hosni Mubarak often vaunted its religiosity to outdo its Islamists rivals. Nowhere is this morality power play exercised more vehemently than in curbing perceived religious and sex crimes. Hence Egypt’s witch hunt against gay men. Rights activists say that 2014 was the worst year in a decade for gay people in Egypt, with at least 150 men arrested or put on trial. Same-sex relationships are not illegal, but gay men are targeted under “debauchery” laws. Last month, 26 men were arrested in a televised police raid on a public bathhouse in Cairo. The men should never have been arrested, but the surprise was that they were all acquitted on Jan. 12. Understandably upset at their loved ones’ ordeal, the families of the acquitted men chanted “Here are the real men!” — ever-keen to reassert their relatives’ identity as heterosexual, conservative Muslims. After the outcry that followed the men’s humiliation, the court’s ruling perhaps reflects a tacit acknowledgment of prosecutorial overreach. But why all this hullabaloo over already marginal groups like atheists and gay people? Dar al-Ifta, the institute for the study of Islamic law that is responsible for issuing religious edicts, was deservedly derided after it published a report in October saying that Egypt had the highest number of atheists in the Middle East: exactly 866— hardly a plausible number in a nation of 87 million. Yet the pro-government media and religious officials are waging a “war on atheism.” Atheists are described alternately as threats to national security or as carriers of a dangerously contagious virus. In this atmosphere, it’s impossible to gauge people’s candid views on religion. For those who don’t genuflect to the official order, a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in Egypt long provided cover. But to admit atheism is to invite not just arrest but a threat to one’s life. In a speech this month honoring the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Mr. Sisi called on Muslim leaders in Egypt to start a “religious revolution” to counter the jihadist message of the Islamic State. He also sent his foreign minister to the solidarity march after the attacks in Paris at the office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. The contradiction in Mr. Sisi’s aim of keeping the heterosexual, conservative Muslim man at the top of Egypt’s moral hierarchy is glaring. You can’t trump the Islamists in their piety and lead a campaign against minorities like atheists and gay men even as you condemn extremist violence and show solidarity for free speech and free thinking. This week we mark the fourth anniversary of the 2011 revolution. Although it has not delivered the political freedoms it called for, it did begin an unraveling of authority that has left Egypt’s self-appointed moral guardians disconcerted and scrambling. Armed with social media, more people are insisting on asking and telling — about personal belief and sexual identity. A reckoning is long overdue in a country where religion and morality have so often been bent to suit the political expedients of its rulers. Despite the clampdown, atheists are openly challenging such hypocrisy. Social media has allowed those who “deviate” from the authoritarian template to find one another and express themselves in ways that the regime, its men of religion and its media otherwise deny them. A religious revolution has begun, but not on Mr. Sisi’s or the clerics’ terms. We all stand to gain if fathers no longer testify against sons, and families no longer feel the need to prove their loved ones are “real men.” Mona Eltahawy is the author of “Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution.” ========================================= 37. PAKISTAN: THE ORIGINAL SIN by Marvi Sirmed ========================================= (The Nation January 27, 2015) Self proclaimed mouthpieces of Pakistani military establishment never seize to surprise you with their twisting facts and moulding history to fit their narrative. Whenever one attributes the creation of terrorists groups to the Afghan Jihad strategy adopted by Pakistan, they start admonishing you for ‘going back in history’ in spite of the fact that Pakistan was ‘now a changed country’, was making amends in its previously held policies and that Afghan Jihad should not be cursed because it was the only option available to Pakistan. Really? Although the original sin would date back to 1949 with an undesirable addition to the would-be Constitution of Pakistan, but at the strategic level, let’s fast-forward to the early 1970s when we decided to support insurgents in neighboring Afghanistan. Originally authored by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the strategy coincided with the uprising in Balochistan and was born out of Pakistan’s hyper apprehensive external affairs sensitivity. What we call Afghan Jihad had started much before 1979 when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan started supporting Islamist groups that were opposing Daud Khan’s government in Afghanistan, as early as 1973. By that time, Pakistan had started using America’s communism-phobia as bait, eyeing the latter’s money and weapons – the lesson the US had learnt during its dealings with the Pakistan military in the 1950s and 60s. As part of this, we had offered the US in 1972 to use our ports as their bases. In addition to repeated appeals to the US for defense support in case of a Soviet invasion, Pakistan had also started hosting Afghan insurgent leaders in Peshawar, Quetta and Islamabad. Rabbani and Hekmatyar used to be seen visited by officials and being granted enough support to continue their activities back home. In Afghanistan, Daud had seized power after a successful coup against King Zahir Shah thereby ending Zahir’s project-democracy. For his Pashtunistan ambitions and opposition of the Durand Line – the colonial border between Afghnistan and Pakistan – the Pakistani establishment was not very keen to see Daud in power. In response to violent treatment that the Daud government meted out to the communist-leaning People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), it had to face a popular uprising. As a result of the Saur Revolution of 1978, the Daud government was uprooted while he met a violent end. Since centuries, Afghanistan’s tribal countryside had peculiar power-relations with the Center. Kabul had always held a peripheral influence in the country’s administrative control. What PDPA did not realize was the fact that being highly decentralized in nature, Afghanistan had historically maintained that balance between Kabul and the countryside. Making the Center very strong and in its bid to aggressively pursue rapid restructuring of the state in favor of socialism, PDPA initiated social reformation considered to be ‘non-Afghan’ by the Islamist groups. Its steps like rendering bride money unlawful, limiting the influence of the clerics and above all, strong land reforms limiting the landholdings were PDPA’s unforgiveable sins. These errors of judgment and hasty reforms created a popular uprising against PDPA government, which was by then a divided and fragmented administration under the two factions Khalq and Parcham. After fierce conflict between Noor Mohammad Tarakai, the pro-Soviet Afghan leader and Amin on the anti-Soviet side, Kremlin decided to intervene in September 1979. Prior to it, the Troika, as is evident from the Kremlin Documents, did not agree to use force in Afghanistan. These developments after the Saur Revolution (the military coup against Daud supported by the people) had brought USSR directly in Afghanistan while Pakistan was able to drag USA, UK and Saudi money funnelled in the proxy war that followed. The US that had been taking Afghanistan lightly till then, woke up to the danger and gladly took Pakistani bait of Soviet occupation. There came the money, the weapons, the drugs, and the trade with a lot of cash that filled many coffers in Islamabad with seepage into Afghan Islamist groups. The US dreamed of bleeding the Soviet Union, writes Hussain Haqqani so correctly in his Magnificent Delusions. Ironically, Bhutto who had come to power on his socialist credentials – or at least the narrative – became responsible for starting the Islamist project in Afghanistan that undermined socialist agenda in Afghanistan. Using the decades old bait of ‘Soviet threat’, military dictator Zia ul Haq expanded Bhutto’s Project of Islamist Afghanistan. The threat was constructed around the 19th century ‘Warm Waters Theory’ whereby it was perceived that USSR wanted to reach the warm waters of the ocean where the ports are not frozen, which made Afghan bordering areas of British India (now Pakistan) vulnerable to Soviet occupation. Although the theory has already been rubbished by scholars who have examined Kremlin Archives opened in the late 1990s as well as Wikileaks that has made public the American thinking on the subject. Had USSR any interest in Indus waters through Pakistan, there was nothing stopping it throughout 1950s, then 60s and after. Moreover, to reach warm water ports, occupation was not the only option available to the second ‘pole’ of the bipolar world. Even if we accept for a moment that the Afghan threat to Pakistan’s existence was real, the big question is, was it the only option to use Islamist proxies to engage the Soviet forces? When asked, senior journalist Wajahat S. Khan emphatically nodded to a strong nay. “If there were no other option but to militarily engage the USSR via proxies, Pakistan should have foreseen the cost of the blowback of the so-called jihad in its strategic calculus,” Khan said. “The proxy warfare itself could have been conducted differently. Why were certain insurgent groups backed at the expense of others? Why the emphasis on supporting Pashhtuns and Islamists, not all Afghans. That selective process left Pakistan in the unenviable position of a unfair broker of peace when the time for talking came, and as for the blowback, it hits Pakistan every day, even now.” The point made by Khan here is quite valid. The Pakistani-supported insurgents, commonly called Peshawar Seven, were all Sunni groups. There was sort of a coalition of other predominantly Shia groups – the Tehran Eight – supported by Iran. This selective support to Sunni, Pakhtun part of Afghan insurgency ultimately alienated all other communities in Afghanistan, who still cringe at the mere mention of Pakistan. Making it ethnic and sectarian brought radical and violent effects to Pakistan. Harboring the insurgents on the soil of Pakistan landed us in the quagmire of never-ending violence and insurgency. Giving it religious color by calling it ‘Jihad’ and bringing umpteen foreign groups including Arab terrorists (although for the US, UK and KSA they were freedom fighters at the time), destroyed the prospects of a peaceful Pakistan for a very long time. It is still possible to reverse it. The reversal is only possible if we recognize the root cause honestly and with sincerity of purpose. If the establishment is still trying to justify its wrong-doings through its big-mouthed proxies on Pakistani media and among the intelligentsia, then one is obliged to conclude that nothing has changed in official policy. Treating the symptoms while leaving out, rather justifying the cause, is not going to take us anywhere. If you still say the Afghan Jihad was a righteous and justified cause, pardon me for saying it, but you are lying through your teeth when you say you don’t believe in good or bad Taliban. Addendum: In my last column that appeared on January 20, an Urdu couplet of Mir Taqi Mir was mistakenly attributed to Mirza Ghalib. Please accept my apologies for the glaring mistake and thanks to all the readers who made the correction. ========================================= 38. THE DEATH OF AN ILLICIT WHISPERER by Garga Chatterjee ========================================= (Dhaka Tribune - 29 January 2015) There was something in the enthusiasm of the Bangladesh solidarity initiatives that didn’t quite fit into the India-Bangladesh narrative For decades, the ruling groups of the subcontinent have duped its peoples into submission by using so-called “national security” smokescreens and various other whipped-up concerns. This should not come as a surprise. The word “con” is right there in the middle of the subcontinent. The transfer of power in 1947 created enduring myths of glory in entities to which the British transferred their power. The simultaneous partition of the sub-continental British territories also created other more pernicious myths around questions of loyalty, nationality, and identity – refashioning ideas of self, friend, and enemy. These schemes, hatched from the deepest bowels of the deep state, do have considerable power. With the right combination of propaganda and guns, carrots and sticks, awards and torture, celebrations and prison-terms, pursued doggedly over decades, these projects have started bearing poisonous fruits to whose tastes we have grown attached. The nation-states of the subcontinent have matured. This means that they have been able to shape a significant number of human beings into anxious, enemy-hating, self-delusional, narcissistic consumers of national and national security myths. They are called citizens. Selfhoods have been forcibly beaten into post-partition national shapes to serve the interests of the mandarins sitting in Delhi, Dhaka, and Islamabad. This is a crime of epic proportions. People pay for it by being killed, maimed, and silenced for not toeing the line in silence. As a collective, we pay for it by accepting the death of dreams and possibilities of plural and interwoven loyalties and loves as absurd. It must be the shallowness of our imagination and memory that we think it is natural that our respective unitary nation-states demand that loyalty, longing, and love should end at the Radcliffe border with clinical precision. In 1971, an epic struggle made some of these clean-cut things fuzzy. This was the movement leading up to the liberation of the landmass that now calls itself the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. It is true that the Indian Union and many of its peoples were supportive of East Bengal’s struggle for independence. While Delhi had its own calculations and cost-benefit analysis, the people had various reasons, ranging from Pakistan-hate to solidarity, with a people facing genocide. But there was something in the enthusiasm of the Bangladesh solidarity initiatives in West Bengal that didn’t quite fit into the India-Bangladesh narrative. West Bengal was closer to East Bengal in a way that Mizoram wasn’t. This kind of closeness runs against the grain of nation-state narratives emanating from Delhi but in reality, often the least embarrassing reaction to such closeness is to publicly ignore. Think about how Delhi reacts to resolutions about Eelam Tamils in the Tamil Nadu assembly. It does not react publicly. What its agencies do privately we don’t know. There are similar examples elsewhere in the subcontinent. Think about what Kabul or Peshawar thinks about the Durand Line and Islamabad’s somewhat onlooker status in that narrative. This special closeness that poured out in West Bengal during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation struggle is something Delhi knew to be a tricky thing. It does not exist anymore as West Bengal has also learned to look east through a Delhi lens – hence all it sees now are cattle-smugglers, Islamic terrorists, and Muslims plotting a demographic takeover. But this special closeness was spontaneous and that was problematic. Delhi knew of this affair – something that wasn’t quite infidelity or disloyalty but a complicated kind of lopsided polyamory that only unfortunate victims of partition zones can relate to. It is a love that dare not tell its name in front of a nation-state that demands total fidelity and loyalty not only in public but also in realms of fantasy. Gobindo Haldar was one such lover. He died on January 17 in Kolkata, aged 84, in a very modest healthcare facility. Gobindo Haldar was born in Bongaon, Jessore district, Bengal. Jessore was one of the districts that were partitioned up to the thana level. Bongaon fell in the Indian Union. Gobindo worked in the Income Tax department but was a lyricist for Akashbani. Akashbani was crucial in 1971 for many in East Bengal depended on it to learn things beyond war-time propaganda from Pakistani occupation administration. Later, when the Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra (Free Bengal Radio) was set up by the Bangladesh government-in-exile, Gobindo was asked by Kamal Ahmed to write songs for Free Bengal Radio. And he wrote what became words that stirred a people in dire need for hope and inspiration in the face of occupation and genocide, a people valiantly resisting a militarily superior force. The most famous songs he wrote include Mora Ekti Phulke Bachabo Bole Juddho Kori (We fight to save one flower), Ek Sagor Rokter Binimoye Banglar Swadhinata Anlo Jara (Those who gave a sea of blood to bring freedom to Bengal), Purbo Digonte Surjo Uthechhe Rokto Lal (A red sun has risen in the eastern horizon) and Padma Meghna Jamuna Tomar Amar Thikana (The land of Padma, Meghna, Jamuna rivers is where you and I belong). The name of the last song comes from a famous political slogan that was posited against the Pakistan-loyalist Islamist slogan Tomar Amar Thikana Praner Bhumi Madina (Beloved land of Madina is where you and I belong). He died unsung in today’s West Bengal where a foreign government sent funds for this poor man’s treatment. In 1971, he wasn’t acknowledged by Free Bengal Radio who removed this “foreigner’s” name from the title list – only own patriots were allowed. He wrote the right songs for the wrong nation-state – otherwise, he would have bhushans, bibhushans, and what not. I have a picture of him holding a Bangladesh flag to his chest. Very anti-national, eh? He was from a different universe, representing a different universe of loyalty. He lived amongst us, in West Bengal, in the Indian Union. And we did not care, because we are prisoners of divisive national narratives that make such smaller as humans. How many such people are there? Let us look around. There may be a billion epics unfolding under our noses, in wars and insurgencies, in nations and proto-nations, legal and otherwise, dreamt up and very real, in desperate search of numerous fantastic paradises. Let us expand and see the many fights for justice all around us for what they are. Let us salute such lovers and have the humanity to criticise ideologies that deem saluting love as “illegal.” Let us learn to listen to the illicit whispers of Gobindo Haldar. One of the many clues to this subcontinent’s salvation may lie there. After all, this fecund land also teaches to love as did Shah Abdul Karim: Bondhe maya lagaise, piriti shikhaise, dewana banaise, ki jadu koriya bondhe maya lagaise (My friend has entranced me, has taught me love, has made me diwana, had entranced me by some magic). - See more at: http://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2015/jan/29/death-illicit-whisperer# ========================================= 39. MIKE MARQUSEE OBITUARY by Colin Robinson ========================================= (The Guardian, 15 January 2015) Journalist, political activist and author with eclectic tastes in sport, art and music He was born in New York but made his home in Britain, where he developed a love of cricket. Photograph: Felix Clay The writer and political activist Mike Marqusee, who has died of cancer aged 61, enjoyed an intellect as dazzling as it was unique. A true polymath, he made the most of a boundless curiosity and a powerful memory to educate himself, and others, about a kaleidoscope of topics: Renaissance art, cricket and empire, British labour politics, Indian history and culture, Zionism, the music of Andalucía and Tamil Nadu, the poetry and art of William Blake, the American civil rights movement, the films of John Ford, the songs of Bob Dylan. The list could go on and on. He sometimes speculated that such eclecticism resulted in his work being undervalued by specialists. If that was true, those in error failed to see how his range of interests often enabled one sphere of knowledge to provide an exhilaratingly original insight into another. Further, beneath the panoply lay a set of core values: a commitment to socialism, a belief in the transformative nature of art, a rigorous internationalism and a prioritising of intellectual and personal honesty heedless of cost. A joyful, hedonistic appreciation that life’s pleasures were there for the sampling was also a vital part of Mike. He was born in New York, the son of John and Janet Marqusee, who were involved in property development, publishing and radical politics. Seeking to escape the pressures exerted on a precocious anti-war leader at his high school in Scarsdale, an conservative and affluent suburb of New York, Mike left the US for Britain in 1971. He read English literature at Sussex University before moving to north London, where he was to settle for the rest of his life. Mike started out as a youth leader, based at Highbury Roundhouse, driving minibuses full of inner-city children on field trips around Britain. He later said that he learned more about politics from his work on the youth schemes there than in any of his subsequent activism. Though a lifelong Marxist, Mike eschewed membership of the competing revolutionary tendencies that attracted many young radicals of the period. Indeed, in later years, he endured a bitter falling out with Socialist Workers party sectarians in the Stop the War Coalition, of which he was a founding member. He joined the Labour party around 1980, supporting the leadership of Haringey council in its fight against cuts and resisting Neil Kinnock’s attacks on the left that would pave the way for the emergence of New Labour, a development that saw Mike eventually leave the party. He chronicled Labour’s rightwing drift in a book co-authored with Richard Heffernan, Defeat from the Jaws of Victory (1992). He also became involved in the radical publication Labour Briefing, going on to become its editor. It was through his engagement with the Labour party that he met his partner, the housing rights barrister Liz Davies, who survives him. Together they formed an alliance that was as formidable in the political arena as it was supportive at home. Mike had already written one book, his only published novel, Slow Turn (1988), which featured the game of cricket, a sport he had come to love while watching county matches in Sussex as a student. He turned his focus to the overlap between the game and nationalism, drawing openly on the legacy of CLR James to produce a rivetingly original analysis. Anyone But England (1994) went on to be shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and laid the foundation for Mike’s regular cricket commentary in publications such as Wisden and The Hindu. Two years later, he published another book on the game, War Minus the Shooting, that dealt with events surrounding the 1996 World Cricket Cup in South Asia. He co-founded Hit Racism for Six and could often be found practising his own swing in the nets at Finsbury Park, providing ample evidence that, in his case, the pen was mightier than the bat. Mike now transferred his attention to another sport. Redemption Song (1999) was a paean to Muhammad Ali, setting the world heavyweight’s sporting achievements in the context of the political battles in the US. Moving seamlessly from descriptions of Ali’s bouts in the ring to the music of Sam Cooke, from the machinations of the Nation of Islam to the burgeoning of the anti-war movement, it was a fine example of Mike’s ability to weave together strands from different disciplines into a rich new cloth. The distinction, so often snobbish, between high and popular culture held little appeal for Mike. He had a deep familiarity with Quattrocento art and I was lucky enough to be among a small group of friends that he introduced to the sublimity of Giovanni Bellini’s paintings on a trip to Venice. His mother was both a painter and a successful art dealer and Mike’s ability to scrutinise the formal qualities of a painting was probably acquired from her. But he was equally at home analysing the wider meanings of the plots of John Ford westerns or the character development in TV series such as Rome or The Wire. A large TV, a comfortable sofa and a strong joint was always a combination that made Mike happy. His taste in music was equally catholic. Mike was a big fan of the driving rock of Springsteen and Steve Earle while, at the same time, his engagement with Indian culture resulted in several trips with Liz to the Carnatic music festival in Chennai. A subsequent enthusiasm for Cante jondo music saw expeditions to the flamenco bars of southern Spain and an immersion in the poetry of Lorca. Mike wrote poems himself and published two collections, and it was the ear of a poet that he employed in his next book, Wicked Messenger (2003), an analysis of the lyrics of Bob Dylan. At the end of his life he was working on a book that examined the relationship between Thomas Paine and yet another poet, William Blake. Mike’s penultimate book was perhaps his most daring and controversial. A firm atheist, he delighted in describing himself as a “deracinated Jew”. In If I Am Not For Myself (2008), he melded together, in characteristic fashion, his own family history, political theory and close reading of canonical religious texts, separating out Jewishness from its co-option by the state of Israel. In 2007 Mike was diagnosed with the bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma. Though it took him a couple of years, he predictably reverted to type, responding to his illness by writing about it. His last book, The Price of Experience, a collection of pieces about his disease (several of them for this paper), ranges over withering contempt for the mercenary activity of the big drug companies, an appreciation of the fastidious care provided to him by the NHS and its selfless staff and quiet sensitivity concerning how we talk to each other about illness. In his introduction to the book, which, like a number of his titles, I had the privilege of publishing, he wrote: “Writing itself was a precious continuity with ‘life before cancer’. While so many of my other capacities had been taken away from me, I could still write.” Now he no longer can. However, through his books and journalism, we will still be able to remember his voice, with its glorious combination of profusion and singularity. • Michael John Marqusee, writer, born 27 January 1953; died 13 January 2015 ========================================= 40. ROY BHASKAR OBITUARY by David Graeber ========================================= (The Guardian, 4 December 2014) One of the most influential voices in the philosophy of science and a political revolutionary Roy Bhaskar, who has died aged 70 of heart failure, turned to philosophy only after becoming an economics lecturer at Oxford University in the late 1960s. Feeling that economic science had virtually nothing useful to say about real-world issues of global wealth and poverty, he embarked on research that led to the foundation of the philosophical school known as critical realism. The Oxford curriculum for PPE – philosophy, politics and economics – provided a training for would-be politicians and civil servants who were more likely to contain or even reinforce society’s problems than resolve them. Roy wanted to provide the tools for understanding society’s problems in a deeper, structural sense that might allow ways to put them right. Before long, he concluded that the problem ran deeper: western science and social theory itself were based on a series of intellectual mistakes, which created false dichotomies such as those between individualism and collectivism, and scientific analysis and moral criticism. The most important of these he called “the epistemic fallacy”, arising from the conventional study of how we can know things, or epistemology. Almost invariably, philosophers have treated the questions “does the world exist?” and “can we prove the world exists?” as the same. But it is perfectly possible that the world might exist and we could not prove it, let alone be able to obtain absolute knowledge of everything in it. In this way, Roy argued, the two camps into which the left has been divided – positivists, who assume that since the world does exist, we must, someday, be able to have exact and predictive knowledge of it, and postmodernists, who believe that since we cannot have such knowledge, we cannot speak of “reality” at all – are just rehearsing different versions of the same fundamental error. In fact, real things are precisely those whose properties will never be exhausted by any description we can make of them. We can have comprehensive knowledge only of things that we have made up. Roy’s approach adopted a version of Kant’s transcendental method of argument, which asks “what would have to be the case in order for what we know to be true?” For science, he argued that two key questions must be asked simultaneously: first, why are scientific experiments possible, and second, why are scientific experiments necessary, in order to obtain verifiable knowledge of what scientists call natural laws. Why is it possible to contrive a situation where you can predict exactly what will happen, when, say, water is heated to a certain temperature in a controlled environment, but also, why is it that one can never make similar predictions in natural settings – no matter how much scientific knowledge we acquire, we still cannot dependably predict the weather. Why, in other words, does it take so much work to create a situation where one does know precisely what will happen? His conclusion was that the world must consist of independently existing structures and mechanisms, which are perfectly real, but they must also be, as he put it “stratified”. Reality consists of “emergent levels” – chemistry emerges from physics, in that chemical laws include physical ones, but cannot be reduced to them; biology emerges from chemistry, and so forth. At each level, there is something more, a kind of leap to a new level of complexity, even, as Roy put it, of freedom. A tree, he argued, is more free than a rock, just as a human is freer than a tree. What a scientific experiment does, then, is strip away everything but one mechanism at one emergent level of reality. To do so takes enormous work. But in real-world situations, like the weather, there are always all sorts of different mechanisms from different emergent levels operating at the same, and the way they interact will always be inherently unpredictable. The resulting books, A Realist Theory of Science (1975) and The Possibility of Naturalism (1979), made Roy one of the most influential voices in the philosophy of science. He later applied this approach to a critique of the “new realism” of Tony Blair. Vaunted as a belated adjustment to the facts of political life, Roy said that it fails to recognise the underlying structures and generative mechanisms, such as property ownership and the exploitation of labour, that produce observable phenomena and events such as low pay and intolerable working conditions. In other words, New Labour was based on realism of the most superficial sort. He presented these and other political implications of his work at the Philosophy Working Group of the Chesterfield Socialist conferences, associated with Tony Benn and Ralph Miliband, in the late 80s. This work was eventually published as Reclaiming Reality (2011). Roy was a political revolutionary. The unifying purpose of his work was to establish that the pursuit of philosophical knowledge necessarily implied social transformation; the struggle for freedom and the quest for knowledge were ultimately the same. His way of engaging with the world was wide-eyed, playful, impractical, always evolving and learning. He continually announced new breakthroughs. In the 90s, he announced that the Hegelian dialectic – an assertion, its contradiction, and the resolution of the two – was but an odd and idiosyncratic version of a universal principle that formed the basis of all human thought and learning. This launched the second phase of his philosophy, culminating in the ambitiously titled Plato Etc: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (1994), inspired by Alfred North Whitehead’s famous claim that “all of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato”. Roy came to realise that Whitehead was speaking of only western philosophy; respect for the full range of human thought required engagement with eastern philosophy too. This had to mean taking spiritual ideas seriously – a domain of human experience that the left had abandoned to the fundamentalist right. In a number of books, notably The Philosophy of MetaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom (2012), he argued that spiritual experiences should be considered a constant feature of everyday life; that every successful act of communication is, in effect, an example of the spiritual principle of nonduality, where both parties become, momentarily, the same person. These developments created heated contention among critical realists, but Roy maintained his cheerful generosity of spirit, playing an active role in the Centre for Critical Realism and the International Centre for Critical Realism, always brimming with projects, visions, and ideas. Born in Teddington, west London, to an Indian father, Raju Nath Bhaskar, a GP, and an English mother, Kumla (nee Marjorie Skill), an industrial administrator, Roy was educated at St Paul’s school, London, and gained a PPE degree at Balliol College, Oxford (1966). Another critic of the PPE course and student activist was Hilary Wainwright: in 1971 they married, and they collaborated intellectually and politically for the rest of Roy’s life. Roy fought against the grain of conventional academic philosophy throughout his career. Following his time as an economics lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford, he held philosophy posts at Linacre College, Oxford; Edinburgh University; the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala; and the University of Tromsø, Norway. After losing a foot in 2008 to Charcot’s disease, he made use of a wheelchair, and survived on only a partial salary as a world scholar at the Institute of Education in London. Nonetheless, he remained a figure of unparalleled energy and invention, and of almost preternatural kindness and good humour. His recent partner was his carer Rebecca Long. She survives him, as do Hilary and his brother, Krish. • Ram Roy Bhaskar, philosopher, born 15 May 1944; died 19 November 2014 ========================================= 41. READ THE HOMEOPATHY ARTICLE THAT THE HINDUSTAN TIMES WOULD NOT PUBLISH by Simon Singh ========================================= (simonsingh.net) 29/01/2015 Whenever I return to India, I am always unpleasantly surprised at the popularity of homeopathy. I hear of senior political figures endorsing this quackery. I read that PM Narendra Modi has appointed a minister whose portfolio includes homeopathy. And I see that Bollywood stars endorse this pseudoscience. Perhaps I should not be so surprised, after all the situation is very similar in London, where I currently live. We have several senior politicians in the House of Commons who believe in the power homeopathy, we have a National Health Service that wastes money on these pointless pills and we have also have celebrities who endorse the biggest joke in medicine. So, how did this peculiar form of medicine (which believes in the ridiculous notion of diluting ingredients to the point of non-existence) become so popular in both Europe and India? Homeopathy was invented in Germany in the late 1700s, and soon became popular among the gentry in Paris and London. In 1829, Dr Martin Honigberger, a Transylvanian physician, brought it to India when he joined the court of Maharajah Ranjit Singh. The idea then spread rapidly, prospering largely because it was perceived as being in opposition to the imperialist medicine practised by the British. Attitudes towards British medicine were so negative that vaccination programmes failed dismally in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, Indians who wanted to pursue a career in conventional medicine often encountered prejudice when they attempted to join the Indian Medical Service, so a more realistic career option was to train to be a homeopathic practitioner. It was also felt that homeopathy and the Ayurvedic system of medicine could work together in harmony. As the decades passed, tens of millions of Indians came to rely on homeopathy for their healthcare, and this European invention is now firmly embedded in the Indian culture of healthcare. And, back in Europe, homeopathy still remains popular in Britain, France and Germany. Given its long history and global popularity, what makes me so sure that homeopathy is bunkum? Homeopaths will tell you that they have plenty of happy patients. Even more impressively, a study of 6,500 patients at the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital over six years concluded that 70% of them showed clinical improvements following homeopathic treatment. However, there are many reasons beyond homeopathy that might explain why these patients reported that they felt better, including the body’s own healing abilities, conventional medicine and the placebo effect. In order to set aside the issue of the placebo effect, homeopaths will often cite how pets and babies seem to get better after taking homeopathic remedies. They argue that pets and babies have no expectations and so cannot exhibit placebo responses. However, both pets and babies may react positively to the loving care of their owners or parents, and we should not underestimate the temporary effect of a shot of sugar, particularly on a baby who is teething. On top of this, those who report apparent improvements are not unbiased observers, but presumably believers in homeopathy who want their loved ones to get better. Homeopaths will often state that some conventional doctors prescribe homeopathy. Some do, but many do not. In fact, the overwhelming majority of real doctors think homeopathy is pseudoscience. After all, homeopaths typically dilute their remedies until they contain no actual ingredients. Even though zero was invented in India, I suspect that most Indians would spurn the ridiculous notion of pills containing zero. Of course, the ultimate factor in deciding whether or not homeopathy works is putting it to the scientific test. The bad news is that after 200 years and after more than 200 clinical trials, there is no good evidence that homeopathy works for any condition whatsoever. Last year, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council reviewed the evidence for homeopathy in relation to 61 health conditions and concluded that “…the evidence from research in humans does not show that homeopathy is effective for treating the range of health conditions considered.” It was the latest in a long line of such damning assessments. Without doubt, conventional medicine is far from perfect, and I could write an entire article pointing out its many flaws. However, compared to the quackery of homeopathy, conventional medicine is positively miraculous. Indeed, many readers of this article would not be alive if it were not for vaccinations and antibiotics alone. When we are ill, we need to turn to treatments that have been shown to work. This does not just mean pharmaceuticals, but also nutrition, exercise and counseling and other so-called evidence-based medicines. Those politicians and celebrities who have more money than sense will no doubt continue to rely on homeopathic pills, but the rest of us should be smarter and spurn it. ========================================= 42. THE MARSHALL ISLANDS VERSUS THE WORLD’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS STATES by Peter Weiss ========================================= (The Nation, January 26, 2015) The historic US nuclear testing site is taking its case for disarmament to the International Court of Justice. Operation Crossroads in the Marshall Islands The Baker nuclear test, part of Operation Crossroads, on Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls Islands, July 25, 1946. (US Army) Before “Bikini” became the name of a piece of female attire, it was the name of an atoll, part of the 1,156 islands and islets making up what is now the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). In 2010, at RMI’s request, Bikini was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List because of its historic importance as the site of twenty-three nuclear tests conducted by the United States between 1946 and 1958. There were sixty-seven US tests in the Marshall Islands altogether. Now RMI has invoked the aid of another UN agency: the International Court of Justice in The Hague (not to be confused with the International Criminal Court). Last April, in an extraordinary and commendable act of chutzpah, RMI sued all nine states currently possessing nuclear weapons—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea—accusing them of violating their duty to negotiate in good faith for the elimination of those horrific weapons. The theory of the case is based on three distinct but overlapping principles. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, each party “undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” The 1996 advisory opinion of the ICJ in the nuclear weapons case asserted that “there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament.” The addition of the words “and bring to a conclusion” was important and made clear that just negotiating, without reaching a specific objective, was not enough. Customary international law also supports the legal obligation to eliminate nuclear weapons. In some ways the NPT obligation, being treaty based, is the strongest arrow in RMI’s bow. But there is a small problem: four of the accused states (India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea) are not members of the NPT. The obligation proclaimed by the ICJ and that flowing from customary international law are applicable to every country in the world. But there is another problem: of the nine accused states, only three—India, Pakistan and the UK—are subject to the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ. (The United States, which was a great promoter of the ICJ in its early years, renounced compulsory jurisdiction in 1985 while the case involving military and paramilitary operations against Nicaragua was pending). RMI has asked the other six states to submit voluntarily to the court’s jurisdiction, but it remains to be seen whether any of them will do so. In the three cases actually pending, India and Pakistan have advised the court that they intend to file objections, and the UK is expected to follow suit. At this point it is not known exactly what the objections are or will be, but it stands to reason that the court will have to be satisfied that there is a genuine legal dispute between the plaintiff state and the defendants in order to proceed. In this respect RMI can argue that, as a member of the international community, it has the right and duty to enforce an obligation of fundamental and universal importance. It can also argue that, given the planetary consequences of a nuclear war, it can be adversely affected by such a war, no matter where it takes place. The latter argument is not as farfetched as it may seem. Last December, the government of Austria sponsored the third of three conferences in two years on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. Each was attended by about 125 to 150 governments and was largely ignored by the mainstream media. The Summary of Findings of the Vienna Conference included the following paragraph: The impact of a nuclear weapon detonation, irrespective of the cause, would not be constrained by national borders and could have regional and even global consequences, causing destruction, death and displacement as well as profound and long-term damage to the environment, climate, human health and well-being, socioeconomic development, social order and could even threaten the survival of humankind. RMI is represented at the ICJ by Tony deBrum, the country’s foreign minister, and Phon van den Biesen, a Dutch lawyer experienced in ICJ litigation. They are backed by a team of international law experts who are taking the cases very seriously. A substantial number of civil society organizations are supporting the cases, including the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy in New York and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara. One effect of the RMI initiative is to throw a spotlight on the policies of the nuclear weapons states, which claim to be committed to a nuclear weapons–free world while showing not the slightest willingness to reach that goal. Reduction, which can go on forever, is fundamentally different from elimination, which reaches an end point. The legal obligation to conclude negotiations for complete nuclear disarmament is not met by shrinking a nation’s nuclear arsenal from 600 to 300 weapons, as France has done, nor by the agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce the stockpile of deployed long-range nuclear warheads each to 1,550 by 2018, as was done in the New START Treaty negotiated in 2010. One might add that the deterioration of relations between these two countries has made further reductions unlikely for the foreseeable future—not to mention the fact that, according to a projection by the Monterey Institute, the United States plans to spend about $1 trillion over the next three decades to modernize its nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles. Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50! The Marshall Islands initiative may be a long shot, but it is not a fool’s errand. It is a cri de coeur by a people who, like the hibakusha of Japan, have experienced the barbarism of nuclear weapons on their own bodies and their own lands. It comes at a time when the members of the NPT, at the upcoming quinquennial review conference, may at long last decide to take concrete measures toward nuclear disarmament, or face the possibility of seeing the treaty disintegrate. Many civil society organizations will do their utmost to bring about the former. It also comes at a time when too many policy-makers, having lived so long with nuclear weapons, are beginning to regard them as just another kind of weapon, instead of the uniquely atrocious one that it is. To them, the Marshall Islanders are saying what the nuclear scientist Joseph Rotblat said to whoever was willing to listen when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995: “Remember your humanity.” Obama’s Prague vision of a nuclear weapons–free world has faded. It’s time to endorse Tony deBrum’s. Information about civil society events before and during the NPT Review Conference in April and May is available at peaceandplanet.org. _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ South Asia Citizens Wire Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on matters of peace and democratisation in South Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/ ##### #### _\_ ________ ##=-[.].]| \ \ #( _\ | |------| # __| | |||||||| \ _/ | |||||||| .--'--'-. | | ____ | / __ `|__|[o__o]| _(____nm_______ /____\____ DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers. ===================================== _______________________________________________ SACW mailing list SACW@insaf.net http://insaf.net/mailman/listinfo/sacw_insaf.net
