South Asia Citizens Wire - 18 Sept 2016 - No. 2909 [via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]
Contents: 1. Statement from Human Rights Watch regarding Pakistani Repatriation of Afghan Refugees 2. Pakistan - Bangladesh: The hanging of Mir Quasem Ali | Pervez Hoodbhoy 3. India: Stalin’s Ghost Won’t Save Us from the Spectre of Fascism - A Response to Prakash Karat | Jairus Banaji 4. The Feasibility of the a return to the pre-1953 position in Jammu and Kashmir| Nyla Ali Khan 5. India: Only the constitution - Muslim women must count on its guarantees, not readings of religion | Razia Patel 6. India: The working class loses a friend - A tribute to Sharit Bhowmik 7. India: Statement by ASEAK on the Delhi University copyright judgement by Delhi High Court (16 Sept 2016) 8. Border to Border in Tangra: a documentary film on the Chinese community in Calcutta 9. Recent On Communalism Watch: - 'The Mobilizing Effect of Right-Wing Ideological Climates', Political Psychology - August 2016 - India: A Hindu Mahapanchayat on Eid after violence in Mewat - India: Prakash Karat Unable To Locate Fascism In Hindutva (Shamsul Islam) - India: Growth of Hindutva in coastal Karnataka has been accompanied by intense communal polarisation (Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed) - India: Cow politics and a mob attack: A window to the Sangh Parivar's rise in West Bengal (Subrata Nagchoudhury) - India: Secular moorings Rahul, Cong’s only hope (C.P. Bhambhri) ::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: 10. Letting Nepal be | Kanak Mani Dixit 11. Modi's Pakistan policy and newfound interest in Balochistan (Commentary by Bharat Bhushan and Tapan Bose) 12. The Return of Sanskrit - How an Old Language Got Caught up in India’s New Culture Wars | Ananya Vajpeyi 13. Healing The Valley: Article 370 is a constitutional provision, let’s honour it | Kanti Bajpai 14. India: A foreign woman's response to Mahesh Sharma - It's got nothing to do with dressing modestly | Carissa Hickling 15. India: Raman Singh Is Circumventing A Supreme Court Order That Shamed Him | Mani Shankar Aiyar 16. Time Stops at Jamalpur | by Pratik Kanjilal 17. Women Empowerment in Bangladesh of the Forest, Tree & Grassroots 18. Russia: Administration orders mass reindeer killing, fast-tracks gas extraction 19. Luconi on Guarnieri, 'Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism: From Florence to Jerusalem and New York' ======================================== 1. STATEMENT FROM HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REGARDING PAKISTANI REPATRIATION OF AFGHAN REFUGEES ======================================== Since July 2016, Pakistani police and provincial authorities have stepped up pressure against Afghans living in Pakistan in what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has called “a concerted push” to repatriate a large number of Afghan refugees before the end of 2016. http://sacw.net/article12945.html ======================================== 2. PAKISTAN - BANGLADESH: THE HANGING OF MIR QUASEM ALI by Pervez Hoodbhoy ======================================== PAKISTAN’S Foreign Office says Pakistan is “deeply saddened” by the execution in Bangladesh last week of Mir Quasem Ali. Mir Quasem was found guilty in 2014 by a Bangladeshi court of torture, multiple murders and arson. He was sentenced to death after what Pakistan describes as “a flawed judicial process”. But why is Pakistan so worried about the integrity of Bangladesh’s judicial process? http://sacw.net/article12946.html ======================================== 3. INDIA: STALIN’S GHOST WON’T SAVE US FROM THE SPECTRE OF FASCISM - A RESPONSE TO PRAKASH KARAT by Jairus Banaji ======================================== While all authoritarianisms are not fascist, all fascisms are a form of authoritarianism. What is distinctive about fascist authoritarianism is its appeal to forms of mass mobilisation and attempt to create sources of legitimacy among ‘the masses’ – through cultural (e.g. pseudo-religious) and ideological domination http://sacw.net/article12942.html ======================================== 4. THE FEASIBILITY OF THE A RETURN TO THE PRE-1953 POSITION IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR by Nyla Ali Khan ======================================== Unlike a lot of political actors in J & K, my work is not based on hear –say, so here is my response to all those, including jingoistic media persons, who assume that the pre-1953 position is impractical and completely nullifies the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of India over J & K. Achievable solutions get relegated to the background when federal countries emphasize centralization as opposed to decentralization. http://sacw.net/article12941.html ======================================== 5. INDIA: ONLY THE CONSTITUTION - MUSLIM WOMEN MUST COUNT ON ITS GUARANTEES, NOT READINGS OF RELIGION | Razia Patel ======================================== The path of women’s liberation is through the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution. It is unfortunate that rather than leading the community towards absolute human rights, intellectuals are making the situation for the community worse by resorting to the logic of a religious framework. http://sacw.net/article12938.html ======================================== 6. INDIA: THE WORKING CLASS LOSES A FRIEND - A TRIBUTE TO SHARIT BHOWMIK ======================================== Around 18 years ago, taking time off from a seminar on street vendors at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Sharit Bhowmik took a student to a fishery co-operative near Mumbai. He had recently declined the position of director, TISS and the student asked him why. He said had he accepted the offer, he would not be able to do the kind of work that was important to him. The response typified Bhowmik, scholar, teacher, activist, advocate for the rights of working class, mentor, friend and amongst India’s most respected sociologists, whom I have the honour of calling my teacher. http://sacw.net/article12943.html ======================================== 7. INDIA: STATEMENT BY ASEAK ON THE DELHI UNIVERSITY COPYRIGHT JUDGEMENT BY DELHI HIGH COURT (16 SEPT 2016) ======================================== In a rare and incredible order today, the Delhi High Court has dismissed the copyright infringement case filed by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor and Francis (Routledge) against Rameshwari Photocopy Shop in Delhi School of Economics and Delhi University. Justice R.S Endlaw in a 94 pages long judgment interpreted educational exception under section 52(1)(i) of the copyright act in broad enough manner to cover the acts of photocopying. http://sacw.net/article12949.html ======================================== 8. BORDER TO BORDER IN TANGRA: A DOCUMENTARY FILM ON THE CHINESE COMMUNITY IN CALCUTTA ======================================== http://sacw.net/article12940.html ======================================== 9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ======================================== - 'The Mobilizing Effect of Right-Wing Ideological Climates', Political Psychology - August 2016 - India: A Hindu Mahapanchayat on Eid after violence in Mewat - India: Prakash Karat Unable To Locate Fascism In Hindutva (Shamsul Islam) - India: The steady growth of Hindutva in coastal Karnataka has been accompanied by intense communal polarisation (Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed) - India: Cow politics and a mob attack: A window to the Sangh Parivar's rise in West Bengal (Subrata Nagchoudhury) - India: Secular moorings Rahul, Cong’s only hope (C.P. Bhambhri) - India: Douse the flames - Both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu must quell violence and manage available water better - - India: Fears Over Land, Identity Fuel Manipur’s Bonfire of Anxieties (Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty) - India - Cauvery river water sharing dispute: Is the Bengaluru violence really about Kannada identity? - India's War On Biryani Mixes Caste, Religion, Cow-Avenging Vigilantes (Sandip Roy | 12 sept 2016 on NPR) - India: Film on 1946 riots refused censor nod (Shiv Sahay Singh) - India - Cauvery row: Fear and panic spread across Bengaluru - India: Why Flavia Agnes ends up on the same side as the anti-women Muslim Personal Law Board: Javed Anand - India: Nathuram Godse pulled the trigger, but who really killed Mahatma Gandhi? (Tushar A Gandhi) -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/ ::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: ======================================== 10. LETTING NEPAL BE by Kanak Mani Dixit ======================================== (The Hindu - 15 September 2016) It should be in India’s interest to leave Nepal free to sort out its own challenges. New Delhi should consider the need for economic growth in U.P. and Bihar when it sits down to strategise on Nepal It is time for New Delhi to decide to what extent it is in the interest of India to deepen its intervention in the political affairs of Nepal. There is much to do bilaterally on the environmental, cultural, economic fronts, and the dangers of keeping Nepal constantly insecure and on the boil open up the possibility of societal instability leaching to adjacent Indian States. One doubts whether New Delhi think tanks have considered the economic impact political stability in Nepal would have on the dispossessed northern regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The open border creates such an interconnected sociocultural web that a stable and prosperous Nepal will be a catalyst for this region. The weakness of Nepal Studies in Indian academia is astounding, and can only be the result of overwhelming preoccupation with geopolitics, with little interest in the welfare of India’s own peripheral populations. The attention of South Block seems focused entirely on ‘correcting’ Nepal’s new Constitution through amendments, mainly relating to the configuration of federal units. Given the lack of active interest amongst Indian politicians, academia and civil society, the field has been left open for diplomats and intelligence operatives to determine the course of action, the latter having enjoyed increasing leeway in Kathmandu over the past decade. The level of interference claimed by the writer is confirmed by authors and analysts celebrated in New Delhi circles, but there has been no pullback perhaps because of an unspoken acknowledgement of India’s ‘right’ to intervene in the neighbourhood. Micro-meddling Few independent observers in Kathmandu (or New Delhi, for that matter) would doubt that Indian interlocutors had a hand in the cobbling together of the present coalition government of the Maoists and Nepali Congress, headed by the Maoist Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’. The government of K.P. Oli had aroused displeasure in New Delhi corridors for standing up to the economic blockade and signing trade and transit agreements with Beijing (themselves made possible by the economic blockade). Despite all this, the visit of Prime Minister Dahal to India is important to get the relationship back on track after the train wreck of the past year. His Cabinet is also well-placed to hold out an olive branch to the irate ‘Madhesbaadi’ politicians, whose participation is needed for a stable polity. New Delhi must now internalise the lessons from its unfettered show of displeasure regarding Nepal’s adoption of the Constitution of 2015, by a Constituent Assembly elected through democratic, representative elections. Meanwhile, the larger Indian polity must pay heed to the fallout of micro-meddling on Nepal. There was a time when Nepal’s polity was supported at the highest level in India because of the respect and clout of top-rung political leaders who had fought for Indian independence alongside Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad et al. The last of these statesmen was G.P. Koirala, after whose passing in 2010 Nepal’s governance came under the influence of little men willing to kowtow even to junior personnel at the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu, or any passer-by who claimed to speak for ‘India’. Kathmandu’s politicos are the primary culprits for this erosion of the bilateral relationship, and their inability to stand up to pressure has been well-exposed. There is also not a little confusion in Kathmandu as to who speaks for ‘India’ besides South Block — the intelligence operatives, the Bharatiya Janata Party/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, assorted godmen, and so on. India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) will hopefully deepen its own study of Nepal. An understanding of the geography, demography, economy, the democratic urge of the citizenry, as well as the history of the oldest and non-colonised nation-state of South Asia makes Nepal (comparatively) a different kind of country within South Asia. For now, MEA-India’s focus seems exclusively geo-strategic, to do with ‘controlling’ Nepal and its natural resources and countenancing China across the Himalayan range. This exclusive preoccupation must be reviewed because of the transformed ground realities where much has changed in terms of aspirations and access to information on all sides. Geophysical sensitivity The transforming economy, terrain and geopolitics of the central Himalaya demand an evolved doctrine of engagement with Nepal, even for India’s own self-interest. A new world is beckoning, far different from when India’s doctrine on the Himalayan rimland was encoded in the early 1960s. Environmental stresses have increased right along the Himalayan chain over the past half century, and human intervention is drastic, as seen in the violence done to the Teesta’s flow in Sikkim or the madness in the construction of hill roads in Nepal. The entire Himalaya and the plains of the Ganga make up one ecosystem, requiring geophysical even more than geopolitical sensitivity. Certainly, it will not do for South Block to act like an imperial directorate on Nepal, foisting a uniform and unchanging vision of Himalayan security. It is past time for New Delhi’s commentariat to get over the perfunctory tags of who is ‘pro-Indian’ and ‘pro-Chinese’, a simplistic formulation which hurts only oneself vis-à-vis the need for nuance in international relations. At a time when the railway has arrived on the Tibetan plateau, there is no need to deny Nepal’s need to ease its landlocked-ness by extending highway connectivity northwards — especially when the Indian economy itself stands to benefit. Terai-Madhes fixation But as Mr. Dahal arrives, the main focus of the Indian authorities is disappointingly narrowed down to amendments to the new Constitution, mainly having to do with altering the demarcation of the announced seven provinces to make them more plains-oriented and stretching east-west from end-to-end. Whereas this is purportedly at the behest of ‘Madhesbaadi’ politicians, it is not at all clear that this will benefit Nepal’s Madhesi people of plains origin and whether the demographic make-up of the Terai-Madhes plains will allow the proposed reconfiguration. Since the Indian interlocutors are so openly pushing the amendment agenda, almost as if to teach Kathmandu a lesson, let them consider that the final formula must perforce benefit the Terai-Madhes plains, where there is both density of population and concentration of poverty. The Madhesi people, citizens suffering historical discrimination at the hands of the Kathmandu state, should not be penalised by geopolitics and the all-too-evident weaknesses of the Nepali national leadership. Tourism-without-borders There are myriad other pressing issues beyond constitutional amendment where the Nepal-India relationship is presently wedged. Vitally, there is the need to plan cross-border linkages and projects related to natural resources — whether and what kind of dams and reservoirs are to be built; evaluating embankments along the main rivers for the silt they trap; the environmental dangers to both sides from excavation of the Chure (Shivalik) hills to feed India’s need for rocks and boulders; or the meaning of receding glaciers (mainly the result of the South Asian ‘brown cloud’) for the entire downstream region. Nepal and India need to discuss regulating the open bilateral border without compromising its status as the most ‘naturally evolved’ frontier of the region. Kathmandu needs to consider social security of the uncounted but more than three million Nepali citizens working in India, while New Delhi must address the vulnerabilities of Indian citizens of Nepali origin, as well as Indians working north of the border. How will the introduction of biometric ID cards in India impact the status of Nepali citizens working legally under the umbrella of the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, and can Nepal’s own upcoming national ID card help in the managing the movement of citizenry? From public health to shared economic growth, promoting tourism-without-borders to developing mutual academic depth, Nepal and India must work as one. But the future cannot be built by ‘controlling’ Nepal through planned build-up of a pliant political class in Kathmandu. There has to be a rebuilding of empathy and trust between the two governments, which must start by rolling back the hyper-activism of the bureaucracy and rebuilding of relationships between the politicians of two sides. Despite his problematic past, Prime Minister Dahal must be perceived as a representative of Nepal’s polity rather than a leader in trouble with vulnerabilities to be exploited. Nepal is hardly a paragon nation-state, and historical prejudices and inequities have percolated down to the present. But one daresay that Nepal should be allowed to make and learn from its own errors rather than evolve as a client state that will forever be a canker on the side of India. Nepal must move on, starting with local government elections in the spring (they have not happened for 18 years), which will also indicate the start of the Constitution’s actual implementation. It should be in India’s interest to leave Nepal free to sort out its own challenges. It would also help if New Delhi would consider the need for economic growth in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar when it sits down to strategise on Nepal. Kanak Mani Dixit, a writer and journalist based in Kathmandu, is founding editor of the magazine Himal Southasian. ======================================== 11. MODI'S PAKISTAN POLICY AND NEWFOUND INTEREST IN BALOCHISTAN (Commentary by Bharat Bhushan and Tapan Bose) ======================================== (Catchnews - 12 September 2016) DON'T BE FOOLED BY HIS BALOCHISTAN RHETORIC, MODI'S PAKISTAN POLICY IS RASH by Bharat Bhushan Raising the issue of Pakistan's terrorism at all available global fora plays well with the domestic audience. But whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts will lead to the isolation or marginalisation of Pakistan internationally remains to be seen. There is no certainty that even the US, with whom India is trying to forge closer strategic ties, will give up on Pakistan.That the US will continue to assuage both sides was evident from US Secretary of State John Kerry's statements during his recent visit to India. At one point, sitting next to External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj, Kerry seemed to suggest that peace talks between India and Pakistan could not be sustained in the face of terrorism. He said, "It is vital that Pakistan join other nations in tackling these issues (terrorism and sanctuary for militants)." A day later, however, while still in New Delhi, Kerry suggested that Pakistan had also suffered greatly due to terrorism and talked of the "blowback" Pakistan had suffered by acting against terrorism. "More than 50,000 people have been killed...people define a great religion Islam in a way that doesn't reflect that religion. They steal it, hijack it. When Pakistan does take action, there's usually pretty intense pushback and blowback which makes it (tackling terror) harder," he said. "The US, with whom India is trying to forge closer ties, is unlikely to give up on Pakistan anytime soon" This is not merely a recognition that homegrown terrorism exists in Pakistan. It also underlines the US desire to keep Pakistan on its right side. It requires Pakistan's help in its efforts to bring peace to Afghanistan. After all, the entire Taliban leadership and the leaders of its various factions continue to be hosted by Pakistan. US compulsions in Afghanistan were evident when it agreed to a role for Pakistan's 'all weather friend' China in a quadrilateral dialogue (Afghanistan, US, Pakistan and China) - to start a reconciliation process with the Taliban. Not one to be ignored The relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan is not sufficiently appreciated in India. It is as close and as complicated as the relationship between India and Nepal. There is an open border between the two countries, the ethnic composition of the population on both sides of the border is the same and the links of the hinterland with the larger and more powerful neighbour are strong. What's more, the bigger neighbour gives Afghanistan its only access to warm water ports. Geography and cultural links make the relationship almost impossible to break in the short to medium run. Afghanistan will always be compelled to seek good relations with Pakistan just as Nepal does with India. The relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan is also complicated by the fact that all Afghan armed insurgents find safe haven, training and an unlimited supply of weapons in Pakistan. It gives Pakistan a huge leverage in stabilising or destabilising Kabul's politics and deciding who controls it. India's strategic role in Afghanistan, even with US encouragement, is unlikely to go beyond giving a bit of military hardware and training to Afghan security forces. Thus, irrespective of how strong the strategic relationship between the US and India or India and Afghanistan, Washington cannot afford to ignore Islamabad. This is why the Indian strategy of trying to isolate Pakistan amidst big international players like the US, is unlikely to be effective. The diplomatic potential of the Prime Minister's new aggressive line on Balochistan is also uncertain. There are those who think that raising the Balochistan issue is a fitting riposte to Pakistan for their role in Kashmir. By speaking on Balochistan one also draws attention to the fact that there is a major component of internal misgovernance to the Kashmir problem. Not everyone believes that every protest in Kashmir is orchestrated by puppet masters sitting in Pakistan. One hopes therefore that this is a calibrated strategy that allows for dynamic modification, including a graceful retreat from the current aggressive posture if relations with Pakistan improve. Running from reality Unfortunately, the government in power today has suddenly decided not to recognize Kashmir as an unresolved issue with Pakistan. It refuses to talk with either Pakistan or to the pro-Azadi factions of the separatists (as opposed to people like Syed Ali Shah Geelani who act as agents of Pakistan). It supports and is a part of an unpopular alliance of unlikely political partners in Srinagar who do not see eye to eye with each other and whose constituencies are as different from each other as chalk and cheese. "Only brainwashed neo-nationalists believe that everything happening in Kashmir is orchestrated by Pakistan" Delhi takes a long time to take corrective action when Kashmiris either suffer natural calamities, such as the floods of 2014, or at the hands of the paramilitary forces (such as using pellet guns to control protestors leading to eye injuries). Aggressive statements about human rights in Balochistan will not improve the condition of the people of Kashmir, the impunity of the Indian security forces or do away with the history of suffering of the Kashmiris. Meanwhile, in one fell swoop, the PM's Balochistan gambit has taken away the deniability of the Indian intelligence agencies for any past or present role they may have had in intelligence gathering operations in Balochistan. Henceforth, every incident that takes place in Balochistan is likely to be blamed on India. The alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav will continue to be paraded by Pakistan as proof of India's involvement in that restive province. If for a moment India were to seriously consider taking the Balochistan issue beyond the level of rhetoric, replicating Pakistan's strategy in Kashmir, a plan of action pushed on TV channels by Indian hawks, we would have to factor in the response of countries other than Pakistan. The homeland of the Baloch is divided between Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. There is no evidence of any awareness in the policy-making establishment of how Iran and Afghanistan might react to India upping the ante on Balochistan. Iran which is a Shia state has managed to exploit the energy and natural resources of Sistan Baluchistan but the Baloch population living there is a religious minority practicing Sunni Islam. Some estimates suggest that 80 per cent of the Baloch in Iran live below the poverty line, their life expectancy is eight years less than the national average and their infant mortality rates are the highest in the country. Disgruntled Baloch elements in Iran have formed the Jundullah, which leads an insurgency against the Shiite-regime in Tehra. Under attack, Jundullah militants find safe-havens on the Pakistan side of Balochistan. Therefore, any ratcheting of violence on the Pakistani side of Balochistan by India, could have direct consequences for Iran. Forces inimical to Iran, such as the Saudis, could also launch a false flag operation there, where the blame could fall on India. The point is unless the consequences of raking up the Balochistan issue are fully thought through, and carefully calibrated strategies for graceful retraction planned for, precious little is likely to be achieved in the long term. And most importantly, the Indian PM must identify what India wants to achieve with Pakistan. Do we want peaceful co-existence, if not friendship, with Pakistan or do we want to be in a state of constant war mongering, threatening each other with worse things to come? Impetuous declarations will not help find lasting answers to these questions. Bharat Bhushan is Editor of Catch News, Bharat has been a hack for 25 years. He has been the founding Editor of Mail Today, Executive Editor of the Hindustan Times, Editor of The Telegraph in Delhi, Editor of the Express News Service, o o o (catchnews - 15 September 2016) MODI'S NEWFOUND INTEREST IN BALOCHISTAN: WHY INDIA COULD BE ON A STICKY WICKET by Tapan Bose Human rights violations in Balochistan When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's declared that his government would highlight the violation of Baloch people's human rights by Pakistan, it was welcomed by Baloch nationalists. The Baloch have been desperately seeking international support for their cause. Unfortunately, no foreign government has taken it up till date. However, non-government human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, FIDH and Médecins Sans Frontières have been raising the issue for a long time. So have regional and national groups like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the Asian Human Rights Commission and the South Asia Forum for Human Rights. As a human rights defender, I am happy that India will join the group of human rights defenders at the United Nations and other international fora. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned Balochistan in his Independence Day address last month" Since the Indian government is a newcomer in this field, I would like to share my experience in the hope that it will help Modi and his officials in their new role as human rights defenders/campaigners. The most difficult task is proving human rights abuses. Governments routinely dismiss these complaints as unsubstantiated, and human rights defenders are discredited as anti-national, and motivated by foreign agencies. Proving the identity of the perpetrators is not an easy task. A complaint needs to be substantiated with credible facts and figures, doctors' certificates, forensic reports, testimonies of witnesses and court proceedings. Getting all these in countries where the government and its forces are the violators is a risky job. How Justice Chaudhry highlighted the abuse For long, the issue of large-scale disappearances in Balochistan did not attract the attention of the Pakistani media. Perhaps the plight of the ordinary Baloch people was not attractive. However, this changed when a Lahore-based Baloch businessman, Masood Janjua, disappeared in 2005. The newspaper Dawn took up the case, but it made little difference. The real change occurred when Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the then-Chief Justice of Pakistan, took a keen interest in these complaints. Encouraged by Justice Chaudhry and aided by human rights groups, the families of the missing persons filed well-documented petitions in the Supreme Court. By October 2006, nearly 458 cases were before the court. Thanks to the efforts of the Supreme Court, 186 persons were traced, some were released while others were relocated to designated detention centers. "By October 2006, nearly 458 missing persons cases had been filed before the Pak Supreme Court" Pakistan's army, intelligence and other security agencies refused to cooperate, and attempted to block the hearings on the grounds of national security. Then, in October 2007, an angry Justice Chaudhry declared he would summon the heads of the intelligence agencies to testify and take legal action against them, if warranted. By challenging the government on the issue of the disappearances, Justice Chaudhry had intruded into the domain of national security. His last hearing on the disappearances was on 1 November 2007. Three days later, he was dismissed, precipitating a chain of events that brought down General Musharraf's government. Thanks to Justice Chaudhry, and the work of the human rights groups, a large body of evidence of gross abuse of human rights of the Baloch people is available in the public domain. With the assistance of some members of the Baloch diaspora, I am sure Indian officials will be able to prepare a well-documented case. The history of the struggle However, Modi needs to be aware that the Baloch people are struggling for 'independence'. The grandson of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, who thanked Modi, represents the Baloch national movement for self-determination. The Baloch did not support the Pakistan movement. The Khan of Kalat, the largest of the princely states of Balochistan, wanted to remain independent. The Muslim League had tried to win him over through the Lahore Resolution of 23 March 1940, which had pledged that the Pakistani state would be a confederation, and the powers of the Central government limited to defence, foreign affairs, foreign trade, communications and currency. The resolution promised that the constituent units would be "autonomous and exercise sovereign" power in all other areas. (It is reminiscent of the terms of the 1952 New Delhi Agreement signed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah. In 1953, New Delhi removed Sheikh Abdullah and set up a government with pliable persons.). In 1948, when Pakistan asked the Khan of Kalat to join it on the basis of religion, the democratically-elected parliament of Balochistan unanimously voted against the merger. "In 1948, the parliament of Balochistan unanimously voted against its merger with Pakistan" Pakistan invaded Balochistan on 27 March 1948. The Baloch resisted. But their insurgency was subdued in 1955, and Balochistan was incorporated as the westernmost province of Pakistan. In 1958, the Pakistan Army occupied Balochistan once again, as the locals had taken up arms against the "One Unit Policy" of General Ayub Khan. (India enacted the Armed Forces Special Powers Act to quell the Naga insurgency in the same year.) Since 1948, the Baloch have been waging an armed struggle against the Pakistani State to win the autonomy promised in the Lahore resolution, or, failing that, independence. The current phase of the insurgency began in 2004 and was led by Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti and Mir Balach Marri. Nawab Bugti was killed in 2006. A sticky wicket Non-governmental human rights groups generally support the Universal Declaration on Human Rights' provision that "all people have the right to self-determination". India does not accept the right to self-determination of peoples. It will be on a sticky wicket if it goes to the UN Human Rights Council with the case of the Baloch people. As human rights have become a tool of diplomacy, the credibility of State parties raising the issue of human rights violations is no longer an issue. The United States, the biggest violator of human rights globally, is the most aggressive advocate of human rights. However, the US is a superpower. Its neighbours do not raise the issue of the US government's violation of human rights of US citizens. India, on the other hand, is not a superpower. Its neighbours are certainly capable of hitting back with records of abuse of human rights by India. The "brave new policy" should not boomerang on us. Tapan Bose is Secretary General, South Asia Forum for Human Rights. ======================================== 12. THE RETURN OF SANSKRIT - HOW AN OLD LANGUAGE GOT CAUGHT UP IN INDIA’S NEW CULTURE WARS by Ananya Vajpeyi ======================================== (World Policy Journal 2016 Volume 33, Number 3: 45-50) Indian scholar Ananya Vajpeyi examines the way the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is using Sanskrit to advance a Hindu supremacist agenda. She argues that academics need to step out of the ivory tower and resist the government’s manipulation of this ancient language. NEW DELHI—If you look out your plane window during landing or take off at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, the view of the nearby Jawaharlal Nehru University campus can be startling. From above, you can see that the Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies building has the shape of a swastika. Based on the Sanskrit word svastika, meaning “bringing good luck,” the swastika is an ancient symbol that looks like a cross with its four arms bent at right angles. For at least the past two and half millennia, Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists have considered the sign auspicious. But in the 1920s, the National Socialist Party in Germany adopted it, rotating it to give it a diagonal orientation. Ever since, outside of Asian ritual settings, the association with Nazis has stigmatized the symbol. The two meanings of the swastika—one ancient, one modern; one good, the other evil; one Eastern, the other Western—encapsulate the contradictions within Sanskrit itself. Sanskrit is an old language rich with liturgy, scripture, philosophy, and literature, but its use has, for the most part, been restricted to men and religious and political elites. Traditional scholarship has continued to study and debate the narratives, ideas, and ritual practices set out in the estimated 30 million texts of this language, but contemporary understandings have also critiqued the restrictive social contexts in which Sanskrit has all along been embedded. Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, when British rule was established in India, Sanskrit became a weapon of anti-colonial resistance and a source of pride for Indians embattled by the hegemony of Western values and foreign knowledge systems. But by the end of the 20th century, secular and left-wing scholars began to criticize the elitism—indeed the outright social inequality—associated with Sanskrit learning. Undeniably oppressive for some communities within India, especially non-Brahmin castes and women, but arguably empowering for Indians when seen against the backdrop of colonialism, Sanskrit continues to oscillate between negative and positive meanings, like the swastika-shaped building of the Sanskrit department at JNU. Since independence in 1947, the postcolonial state had largely ignored Sanskrit. In 1956, a specially appointed governmental commission under the leadership of the eminent linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji released a massive report on the state of Sanskrit education. This document was presented to the Indian Parliament in 1957, and its recommendations languished for almost six decades. And so, until recently, Sanskrit had settled into a kind of quiescence (seemingly even an obsolescence). Only in the past two to three years, with the rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has Sanskrit re-entered the public imagination as part of the “culture wars” between the Hindu right and secular left. After a decisive victory in the 2014 national elections, the BJP consolidated power and formed a majority government. The ruling party is now fighting to legitimate the two cornerstones of its interpretation of Hindu culture: caste and Sanskrit. These ideas constitute an assault on the more egalitarian, pluralist, participatory, and progressive visions of political modernity that have prevailed since India’s founding. It is not that caste or exclusivist high culture based on Sanskrit erudition had ever died away, but India’s postcolonial leaders had managed to build a consensus that valued equal citizenship and democracy over the relics of the past. The ghosts of the caste system and of Sanskrit have now returned to haunt the Indian polity. In this environment, it is important to understand what sort of object Sanskrit is, why we should care so much about it today, and why it’s so crucial to resist the BJP’s manipulation of this ancient language. THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST All travelers, immigrants, imperialists, invaders, and seekers of salvation or wealth who have ever come to India, from Alexander the Great in the 3rd century B.C. to American hippies of the 1960s, have encountered the enigma of Sanskrit. The language has something in common with Latin and Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, Persian and Chinese, Hittite and Aramaic, Turkish and Japanese, Tamil and Tibetan, and a few other great languages of the pre-modern world, in that we associate it with revelation, scripture, and ritual; with culture and civilization; indeed, with the very origins of linguistic communication among humans. Yet Sanskrit is also different from its peers, because unlike some of the other classical languages, it has neither disappeared nor been reborn as a modern language used by any nation, region, or people (unlike Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Greek, or Hebrew). It is the only classical language that has extraordinary political valence today, despite only being used in limited and specialized contexts. The Hindu nationalists that rule India rest much of their agenda of religious revivalism and cultural pride on the age and prestige of Sanskrit, which emerged “out of the myth smoke” (in the evocative words of the historian of India, John Keay) some 3,500 years ago. The Hindu Right, however, thinks nothing of dialing back its origins many thousands of years before this. The point is to prove that Hinduism pre-dates not only all of the Semitic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) but also all other Indic religions (Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism). Moreover, in the Hindu Right’s view, Sanskrit is not only India’s essential language of belief but also its once and future language of science. In this nativist project, Sanskrit takes precedence over Hindi, English, Tamil, Persian, Pali, or any other contenders whether ancient, medieval, or modern as the one language that represents and embodies Indian civilization. Pushing back against this insistence on the centrality of Sanskrit are Indian secularists (for whom the language’s overwhelmingly Hindu baggage weighs it down), liberals (who are uncomfortable with its non-modern provenance), leftists (who object to the ideologies of social inequality embedded in Sanskrit texts), feminists (who deem it a repository of patriarchal values), and Dalits (formerly known as Untouchables, who see Sanskrit as inseparable from the caste system, the language of Brahmin domination over the rest of Hindu society). Even many of those who know and appreciate the Sanskrit corpus for the wealth of its knowledge systems, the aesthetics of its literary genres, the beauty of its poetry, the brilliance of its thought, the regularity of its grammar, and the profundity of its insights have a hard time defending it against the charges leveled by its many detractors. SANSKRIT AND ITS CRITICS The first modern critic of Sanskrit as the font of ideologies of social inequality and Brahmin domination was Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956), the leader of India’s Dalits. When Ambedkar was a young student, he was denied the opportunity to study Sanskrit at school or university, thanks to his outcaste status. He later responded by aggressively teaching himself not just Sanskrit but also Pali, the language of ancient Buddhism. When Ambedkar oversaw the drafting of the Indian Constitution, which was promulgated in 1950, he argued that eliminating caste hierarchy, abolishing untouchability, and establishing equal citizenship were the prerequisites of democracy. In the last year of his life, 1956, he inaugurated a sect of neo-Buddhism and declared himself no longer a Hindu. Ambedkar converted his Brahmin wife and close to half a million Dalits, recalling the first revolt against Vedic religion and Hindu caste society by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, two and a half millennia ago. In our own times, Sheldon Pollock, 69, professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University, has consistently pointed out that regardless of the intellectual, philosophical, artistic, or religious value that may be retrieved from the texts and practices of Sanskrit, its complicity with conservative, patriarchal, and unequal ideas of social order cannot simply be set aside. Pollock has developed a thesis of “critical philology” that departs from both the age-old knowledge practices of Sanskrit pundits in India and the Orientalist biases of Western Indology. Philology—in Pollock’s redefinition of this discipline—requires the study of texts in their social contexts. By this he means both the contexts of their production, which lie in pre-modern times, and the contexts of their reception, which include the modern day. Pollock believes that a text must be studied along three axes of interpretation: authorial intention, traditions of reading, and the assumptions and expectations of the present moment in which the text is once again received. Without these complex interpretive parameters, he argues, a text can be neither read responsibly nor understood fully. Naturally, critical philology challenges the claims of Sanskrit’s ahistorical perfection. For Hindu nationalists, even the etymology of the word Sanskrit—which comes from samskrta, meaning “perfectly constructed”—suggests its timeless authority. Pollock, on the contrary, argues that both texts and textual meanings are the work of human minds and therefore inescapably situated in human society. In recent years, Pollock has supported a number of campaigns to preserve and augment the freedom of expression and civil liberties in India, including a massive protest against the banning of two books on Hindus and Hinduism by his erstwhile colleague, the University of Chicago religion professor Wendy Doniger. In the spring of 2016, he publicly advocated for graduate students at JNU when they asserted their right to dissent against government policies and found themselves evicted from their hostels, prohibited from continuing their doctoral research programs, and, in some cases, thrown in jail without trial for their allegedly “anti-national” activities. Back in the U.S., Pollock used a personal grant and award monies to institute a scholarship named after Ambedkar to sponsor a Dalit student from India and fund his or her graduate coursework in South Asian studies at Columbia—where, from 1913 to 1916, Ambedkar himself had studied for an M.A. and Ph.D., the first Dalit to do so. Pollock’s efforts to democratize the world of classical Indic scholarship, desacralize Sanskrit, and bring expertise on premodern India to bear on our understanding of modern India have generated a storm of controversy. After he spoke out in support of JNU’s beleaguered students, right-wing “culture warriors” of the BJP and their troll armies launched an aggressive campaign this spring to remove Pollock from the general editorship of the Murty Classical Library of India, published by Harvard University Press. To their consternation, however, the publisher of HUP and sponsor of the MCLI, Rohan Narayana Murty ruled out any plans to unseat him. THE COSMOPOLITANISM OF SANSKRIT Apart from its powerful connotations of caste-based inequality, Sanskrit texts are also deeply, perhaps irremediably, patriarchal in their social ideology. Add to this the BJP’s insistence that Sanskrit symbolizes the greatness of Hindu civilization exclusively—thereby marginalizing the equally significant Islamic aspects of Indian history and culture. At the same time the government is promoting Sanskrit, it has been sidelining the study of Urdu and Persian, the modern and classical languages, respectively, of “Muslim” India. New scholarship, much of it undertaken by colleagues, students, and research collaborators of Pollock, shows that there were rich linkages between Sanskrit and Persian literati, and that intellectual exchange and translation across these languages and their respective knowledge systems flourished at the Mughal Court as well as other Muslim kingdoms in medieval India. Despite the serious criticisms leveled against it, from Ambedkar to Pollock, no one has suggested that Sanskrit should or could be abandoned entirely. We cannot write the history of any of the major world religions that arose on the Indian subcontinent—including Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—without it. Sankrit’s texts, vocabularies, concepts, and theories permeate these systems and pervade the many other languages in which Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh thought come down to us: Pali, Prakrit, Tibetan, Braj Bhasha, and Punjabi, to name just a few. Not even Islam and Christianity in India are untouched by Sanskrit, through translation, dialogue, and syncretistic flows across cultures. Many Sanskrit words—Om and Namaste, karma and avatar, guru and dharma, Brahmin and pundit—have been naturalized into English and are recognized around the world. Yoga and Ayurveda originated in hoary Sanskrit texts, but are now integrated into globalized understandings of “alternative” medicine and self-care. Previous Section THE CULTURAL BATTLEFIELD Since Modi came to power, the BJP government has made Sanskrit a key component of its goal to recast the secular Republic of India as the “Hindu Rashtra”—a nation for, of, and by Hindus alone, to the exclusion of Indians with other religious identities. The BJP instituted June 21 (summer solstice) as “International Yoga Day,” and renamed Teachers’ Day “Guru Utsav”—literally “Festival of the Guru,” a name with strong Hindu connotations. Teachers and students are expected to celebrate this festival with a religious fervor unknown to previous generations of Indians. There are newly revised national policies on education, languages, and textbooks either being drafted or recently put on the table. At this point, it appears a major rightward shift in all these areas is unavoidable. Hindu nationalist agendas are being translated into concrete policy frameworks. Secular identities and social inclusion are bound to be reined in. Most significantly, the government wants Sanskrit to be showcased as a language of teaching, learning, and research at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), India’s apex institutions for engineering and technical disciplines. By encouraging Sanskrit studies at the IITs, Modi’s party wants to drive home the “modern,” “rational,” and “scientific” capacities of Sanskrit, thereby dislodging it from its received status as an artifact of the ancient world, and instead project it as the most appropriate and empowering idiom for 21st century India. Modi’s minister of external affairs, Sushma Swaraj, who also likes to display her ability to “speak” in Sanskrit, portrayed the language as a wellspring that could solve almost any woe: “Knowledge in Sanskrit will go a long way in finding solutions to the contemporary problems like global warming, unsustainable consumption, civilizational clash, poverty, and terrorism.” The current government, through its Department of Higher Education and Ministry of Human Resource Development, which houses the crucial Departments of School Education and Literacy, has sought to re-introduce and emphasize the study of Sanskrit at all levels of education, from primary school through college and university. Talking about science, technology, and mathematics in the context of traditional Sanskrit knowledge is an important part of what the government wants to convey about the “advanced” and “developed” character of Hindu civilization. A lot of money and effort is going into this particular kind of propaganda. But historical facts don’t bear out the assertions. Government-appointed scholars have claimed, preposterously, that stem cell research, organ transplants, and plastic surgery existed in Vedic times, and were discovered by Hindus long before Western science. The 102nd Indian Science Congress held in Mumbai in January 2015, which featured papers by Fields Medal winners and Nobel laureates, had a presentation claiming that Indians had built airplanes some 7,000 years before the Wright brothers. Introducing “Yoga Day” and “Guru Day” to the offical national calendar, funding three new Sanskrit universities, and implementing Sanskrit language teaching at the IITs should all be seen as parts of BJP’s strategy to normalize majoritarian religious culture in civil and secular institutions. Scholars—particularly Sanskrit philologists, linguists, and historians of pre-modern India—need to remain vigilant about changes at the level of textbooks, institutional policy, public discourse, and symbols of the state. The promotion and preservation of Sanskrit and its knowledge systems and texts is important, but its political meanings cannot be dissociated from the ideological agenda of a Hindu nationalist government. Today Sanskrit has come out of the ivory tower and descended onto the cultural battlefield. It’s time that scholars and academics did the same. ANANYA VAJPEYI is an associate fellow with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi and a global ethics fellow with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. She is the author of “Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India” (Harvard University Press, 2012). Copyright © 2016 World Policy Institute ======================================== 13. HEALING THE VALLEY: ARTICLE 370 IS A CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISION, LET’S HONOUR IT by Kanti Bajpai ======================================== (The Times of India, September 10, 2016) In dealing with Kashmir, a good dose of empathy is vital. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, empathy is “the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions”. A lot of Indians puzzled by the recent upsurge in the Kashmir Valley are asking themselves why Kashmiris are so agitated. Here is my empathy thought-experiment on the reasons. The most fundamental reason Kashmiris are angry is that New Delhi and non-Kashmiris have not kept their word. Kashmir acceded to India and then negotiated a deal whereby the state would have considerable autonomy. This is enshrined in the Constitution in Article 370. The original spirit of accession and Article 370 was that Kashmir would have considerable autonomy, with the central government looking after only three areas – defence, foreign affairs and communications. The steady dilution of the article over time has caused Kashmiris to conclude that the central government is dishonest and no one outside Kashmir cares very much. When a party comes to power in New Delhi that talks of abolishing Article 370 altogether, is it any wonder that Kashmiris feel even more resentful? A second reason for Kashmiri aloofness from the rest of India is historical. Kashmiris in the Valley have never been keen on the Indian plains and way of life there. Whether they are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists, Valley Kashmiris have kept resolutely to themselves. Given the physical beauty of the Valley and the bracing climate, who can blame them? Who can blame them also for not identifying with the squalor that is the rest of India? We may love our existence in the plains, but surely we can understand that Kashmiris are not attracted to it. It is not just Kashmiris who are not attracted to it. Many in the northeastern states are not attracted to it either. My thought-experiment suggests a third reason for Kashmiri anger. Most Valley Kashmiris are Muslim. Is it so hard for us to understand that they may not be ecstatic about being part of a Hindu-majority India, even if India has formally declared itself to be secular? Today, India is as far from being secular as it has ever been. Since May 2014, we have had a succession of violent outrages on India’s secular fabric. Kashmiris read the papers and tune into television every day like millions of other Indians. They can see the increasing intolerance in the country. There were outrages and attacks before this government came to power, but Kashmiris can see that these are far more widespread than before. Why should they want to be part of an increasingly intolerant, illiberal India? Finally, Kashmiris are boiling over in anger because they are frustrated about their political future. What are their choices? They have experienced what it is to be part of India. To be part of Pakistan, one of the most violent and ill-governed states in the world, would certainly be worse. An independent Kashmir is what many Kashmiris crave. But what are the prospects of true independence, as a landlocked country between China, India and Pakistan? Almost zero. Which power will tolerate a truly independent Kashmir even if it is a member of the United Nations? Deep in their hearts, Kashmiris know that no power will accept the state’s independence, and this is why they are so frustrated. Can anything be done in Kashmir beyond riot control? New Delhi must reassure the state that Article 370 will be honoured. Kashmiris of the Valley must in turn reassure the other parts of the state that their hopes and fears will be addressed. This will not guarantee that Kashmiris will love India or that Jammu and Ladakh will love Srinagar. However, with the change on Article 370, violence should abate. In time, Kashmiris will identify better with the rest of India and shun the militants. And in this situation Pakistan may be persuaded to worry more about its own failings rather than the failings of India. The government’s statement that there has to be a solution within the framework of the Constitution is correct. Article 370 is a constitutional provision. Let’s honour it and begin the healing. ======================================== 14. INDIA: A FOREIGN WOMAN'S RESPONSE TO MAHESH SHARMA: IT'S GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH DRESSING MODESTLY | Carissa Hickling ======================================== scroll.in 6 Sept 2016 A story of surviving India as a woman, and how things are changing, slowly but surely. Thank you Mahesh Sharma for reminding me that it is up to us foreign girls to dress modestly rather than for desi boys to behave appropriately or for the police to be actively part of ensuring everyone’s safety in India. There is nothing new, however, in the tourism minister suggesting handing out welcome kits telling women not to wear skirts or go out at night. It eerily reminded me of the guidelines given to me over 25 years ago before I first came to India. My first taste of India Rewind to 1990 in Montreal. I sat through a pre-orientation for a Summer Study Abroad in India programme. We were provided tips on appropriate behaviour, dress, health and safety. Some of these suggestions were remarkably similar to the tourism minister’s controversial comments. Traveling all over India, we were struck by the contrast in what was acceptable in different contexts and parts of the country. We witnessed clear gender segregation and strict hierarchies, norms of behavior in rural Gujarat that contrasted completely with young couples merrily sauntering hand-in-hand on the streets of downtown Bangalore. And those guidelines? Dressing modestly was no magic shield from being harassed. Instead, traveling in a group, sprinkled with our limited male members, did the trick. It was a remarkable experience and an early lesson on how multiple realities and rules coexist – particularly in matters of gender relations. Introduction to eveteasing Fast forward to 1995, I returned, as a student in Delhi. This time, I was on my own. No orientation, no guides, no group. I lived as a paying guest with a family for a year. From the first week, I navigated Delhi Transport Corporation buses and was immediately acquainted with the real meaning of the innocuous sounding phrase eveteasing. On the buses, it meant various body parts rubbed and hands grabbed private places they had no right to. Did what I wore make a difference? Only slightly. A simple salwar kurta did not prevent unwanted attention. I was young, blue-eyed, fair and, therefore, fair prey. And then the family I was living with shared a story. A story of how the matriarch mashi was driving past a bus stop near IIT Gate and saw a young woman being taunted by a young man on a bicycle. The girl kept her eyes downcast, shrinking into herself. The boy grew more emboldened. Until, mashi intervened. She leapt out of her car, yanked the boy off his bike, grabbed her chappal and started hitting him on the head. “How dare you abuse this girl? Have you no shame? No mother? No sister?” Scared witless, the boy ran off. But the story did not end here. Mashi then turned to the girl. “Why did you let him get away with misbehaving? If he does this to you today, what more will he try in future?” The girl in question was not a foreigner. It had nothing to do with her eye, skin or hair colour. Only her gender. The story empowered me to shed my polite Canadian demeanour and fight back. Practising my rudimentary Hindi, I embarrassed the perpetrators by shaming them loudly, shoving away their groping fingers. Simplistic notions of not wearing a skirt or going out alone at night were not enough to survive Delhi. What I had to learn was to behave boldly if required. To expect harassment and be prepared for battle. It worked. And as I accepted this new reality, I began to see a social revolution around me. Urban India was changing. Night clubs pulsed till the wee hours. Ad campaigns pushed the boundaries of censorship. Couples lived together before marriage. And the hypocrisy that sometimes lay beneath conservative veneers was revealed. That elderly tauji who demands you behave modestly, giving due respect to his stature? He had a long-term mistress with two daughters. The India I knew on the inside was not the India people perceived on the outside. Adopting India For more than a decade, I’ve been fortunate to call India my adopted home. And I found it ironic when I was asked to give advice for a Study Abroad in India programme. How do I translate my years here to guide young women coming to India for the first time? How do I encourage them to find a delicate balance between being true to themselves and open to new experiences and, yet, being sensitive to the different environments they will encounter? Knowing that any step they take to reduce unwanted attention simply may not make a difference. How do I alert them to the shifting sands of acceptability based on context, time of day, location, company and more? How do I make them acknowledge that India is not alone in its male chauvinistic notions and its inability to keep the vulnerable safe, that sexual harassment is unfortunately universal? Today, I have age on my side. I have grown from being a young didi to a mature aunty, my hair spiked with silver. In Mumbai, I can wear a dress, go out at night and, chances are, I will be fine. Yet, I look back on those guidelines I was given in 1990 and wonder how much has really changed. And isn’t there another story in that? ======================================== 15. INDIA: RAMAN SINGH IS CIRCUMVENTING A SUPREME COURT ORDER THAT SHAMED HIM by Mani Shankar Aiyar ======================================== (ndtv.com - 7 September 2016 Rarely has a state government been castigated more severely than Raman Singh's in Chhattisgarh in the 2011 Supreme Court judgement in Nandini Sunder & Otrs. v/s State of Chhattisgarh (WP-205/2007). Utterly shocked at Salwa Judum, an "armed civilian vigilante group" given "impunity" by the state government, having "burned and emptied" 650 tribal villages, displaced 35,000 fellow-tribals, and resorted to "mass killings" and "rape", the Supreme Court rejected the Chhattisgarh government's claim that "it has constitutional sanction to perpetrate, indefinitely, a regime of gross violation of human rights in a manner, and by adopting the same modes, as done by Maoist/Naxalite extremists." It also deplored the state's claim of "the right to perpetuate the state's violence against anyone, much less its own citizens, unchecked by law". The judges declared themselves "aghast at the blindness to constitutional limitations of the State of Chhattisgarh", adding "the primordial value is that it is the responsibility of every organ of the State to function within the four corners of constitutional responsibility. That is the ultimate rule of law." Chhattisgarh's arguments before the court's two-judge bench, they said, would "seriously undermine constitutional values" and "may cause grievous harm to national interests." Describing the Chhattisgarh government's "muscular and violent statecraft" as "bleak and miasmic", the court deplored Raman Singh's resort to "the iron fist". It amounted, they said, to establishing a social order "in which any person is treated as suspect" and "anyone speaking for human rights is deemed as suspect". It warned that when "order comes with the price of dehumanization, of manifest injustices of all forms perpetrated against the weak, the poor and the deprived, people revolt." All this, pronounced the court, points to the "yawning gap between the promise of principled exercise of power in a constitutional democracy and the reality of the situation in Chhattisgarh." One would have thought such strictures from the highest judicial authority would have shamed any self-respecting Chief Minister into circumspection, but Raman Singh clearly has the hide of a rhinoceros. He, in cohorts with Rajnath Singh, has determined on circumventing the substance of the court's finding by replacing Salwa Judum with a "Bastariya Battalion". Home Ministry officials briefing journalists on background (see Rahul Tripathi, Economic Times, and Deeptiman Tiwary, Indian Express) have confirmed that the battalion will be raised from precisely the same tribal communities that were sourced by the state government for Salwa Judum. Thus has the Supreme Court's observation been given the go-by: "The young," the court had said, "have literally become cannon fodder in the killing fields of Dantewada and other districts of Chhattisgarh". The Bastariya Battalion is to be deployed in the Naxal-infested districts of Narayanpur, Bijapur, Sukhna and Dantewada. As with Salwa Jadum, tribal casualties are likely to be much higher proportionately than other CRPF casualties because they are likely to be deployed, as the Salwa Judum was, on the frontlines since the Home Ministry briefing said tribals "are better suited to fight in the region". This is an absurd argument. For whereas there are strict physical parameters relating to height, chest and weight for regular CRPF recruits, all these parameters have been relaxed for Bastariya Battalion tribal recruits. These tribals are bound to be much less physically capable for the tasks that will be imposed on them than the battle-hardened veterans of the CRPF. What the relaxation of norms amounts to is what the Supreme Court described in the Salwa Judum case as "a cynical, and indeed inhuman attitude, that places little or no value on the lives of such youngsters". Moreover, the families of these Bastariya recruits are as liable to be targeted by the Naxals as was the case with Salwa Judum - yet another concern expressed by the Supreme Court. Technically, the Raman Singh government might argue that this is not a "volunteer" force as was Salwa Judum but regular recruitment to the CRPF. Yet, by adding a Bastariya battalion to the over one hundred battalions already deployed in the area - and that too for decades - is the core of the problem being addressed? The Supreme Court had underlined that 23 per cent of India's iron ore was located in Dandakaranya besides abundant coal resources. The exploitation of these natural resources constitutes the "development paradigm" for the region. The Supreme Court had quoted extensively from the Expert Committee report of 2008, commissioned by the Planning Commission, which concluded that this development paradigm depends "largely on the plunder and loot of natural resources", involving "gross and inhuman suffering of the displaced and dispossessed", which had led to "countless millions having been condemned to lives of great misery and helplessness." The Supreme Court backed up these charges with quotes from two well-known economists, Ajay K. Mehra and Amit Bhaduri. Mehra was cited as ruing that "the resultant miseries of the development dichotomy" that the judges described as the "deliberate infliction of misery on large sections of the population" have made them "vulnerable to calls for revolutionary politics". Bhaduri is harsher: what Mehra calls "the sense of disempowerment wrought by a false development paradigm without a human face", Bhaduri calls "developmental terrorism". He writes, "guns for the youngsters among the poor, so that they keep fighting among themselves, seems to be the new mantra from the mandarins of security." Unable to find their own words to fully express their feelings at these terrible revelations, the judges of the Supreme Court resorted to Joseph Conrad's famous novel, The Heart of Darkness, where at the end, the principal sinner in the gory ivory trade in the Congo dies exclaiming, "the horror, the horror." So is it in all of Dandakaranaya: "The Horror, The Horror"! The 2008 Expert Committee had talked of the "corrupt practices of a rent-seeking bureaucracy and rapacious exploitation by the contractors, middlemen, traders and the greedy sectors of the larger society." Mohan Guruswamy of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, in his monograph, The Heart of Our Darkness, which also drew from Joseph Conrad, puts it vividly: "In the vast Central Indian Highlands, the occasional visit of an official invariably means extraction by coercion of what little poor people have. It doesn't just end with a chicken or a goat or a bottle of mahua, it often includes all these and the modesties of the womenfolk." He cites a Citigroup report that says 40 percent of all land acquired for "development" is of the tribals who constitute just over 8 per cent of our population, in consequence of which, says Citigroup, "the Naxalite movement had local support". However, he does not cite the Twelfth Plan papers that confess to 55 percent of the 65 million displaced and dispossessed belonging to the tribal communities. Guruswamy points to bauxite mining that is expected to "displace over one lakh tribals while creating jobs for a mere 400". He calls attention to the Mahanadi Coalfields case where Aftab Alam and Mohanty, JJ, of the Supreme Court held "blinkered" development policies responsible for "fuelling extreme discontent and giving rise to Naxalism and militancy". No wonder the Supreme Court in Salwa Judum squarely pointed to the "amoral political economy that the State endorses, and the resultant revolutionary politics that it necessarily spawns". Is there then an answer? Yes, there is - and it was provided nearly 70 years ago by the great tribal leader Jaipal Singh Munda, Oxford Blue and President of his College Junior Combination Room, and captain of the Indian hockey team that won the gold at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, and who got into the ICS but resigned to devote himself to his people. He said in the Constituent Assembly: "You cannot teach democracy to the tribal people; you have to learn democratic ways from them." The Provisions of The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 [PESA] ensures the protection and promotion of tribal rights through the devolution of true democracy to tribal habitats. Although this revolutionary legislation was passed unanimously by parliament all of two decades ago, state governments like Chhattisgarh's have been observing the Act mostly in the breach. The record of implementing the Act in letter and spirit has been dismal. If instead of raising "Bastariya battalions" to pit tribal against tribal in the colonial mode of "divide and rule", the governments at the centre and state capitals concerned were to concentrate on effectively devolving functions, finances and functionaries to elected tribal panchayats, Naxalism can be extinguished by providing to tribal panchayats the attractive alternative of well-funded autonomy to the depredations of Naxal tyranny. Obviously, this is not possible in the very heart of darkness where the state governments have forfeited any pretense of governance to the Maoists. But there are at least a hundred districts on the periphery of the Naxal heartland where making available directly to the tribal panchayats the thousands upon thousands of crore of development funds to which they are entitled will open to the tribal people a real alternative to Naxalism for elementary social and economic justice. Vice President Hamid Ansari has underlined that "governance is the weak link in our quest for prosperity and equity". PESA offers the substitute of local "self-government", as promised in the 73rd amendment to the Constitution, for the weak and corrupt governance by state bureaucracies now on offer. Guruswamy stresses that we must "distinguish Adivasi aspirations from Maoist intentions" but adds "the problem is that this is beyond the capability of the public administration apparatus." Of course it is, which is why full-scope Panchayati Raj empowerment for our tribals is the surest and swiftest way out of Naxal insurgency. (Mani Shankar Aiyar is former Congress MP, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.) ======================================== 16. TIME STOPS AT JAMALPUR Written by Pratik Kanjilal ======================================== (The Indian Express - 11 Sepember 2016) No matter what happens to the rail budget, the romance of the Indian Railways lives on in Kipling’s work. Rudyard Kipling, indian railways, Rudyard Kipling trains, Kipling railways, Rudyard Kipling train stories, Rudyard Kipling indian railways, Rudyard Kipling books, Rudyard Kipling works, Rudyard Kipling india, jamalpur, Rudyard Kipling jamalpur, books, books news, lifestyle news, latest news, sunday eye, indian express The train has arrived: An archival image of the Viceregal party at the East Indian Railway Workshops in Jamalpur in December 1897. The rail budget is in some danger of extinction this year, privatisation of the world’s biggest railroad system is being seriously considered in certain quarters and India appears to be preparing to leave behind over 150 years of the romance of the rails to embrace the hard-nosed futurism that the bullet train symbolises. Maybe it’s a done thing already, in the mind. If train passengers are ordering chicken salami pizza over the internet instead of the fabled railway chicken from the liveried bearer in the pantry car, something critical has changed. The popular literature of the age of steam is being forgotten, too. Rudyard Kipling is enjoying a popular resurgence because of the success of the 3D Jungle Book movie, but for decades now, he has been useful only to academics, who dissect Mowgli and Kim in search of arrant colonialist ideas which their predecessors may have missed. His verse was written to memorialise the middle and lower orders of British society which powered the colonial project, which is extinct. And his journalistic work, like Among the Railway Folk, is forgotten. In 1887, Kipling quit the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore to join the Pioneer, its sister publication in Allahabad (a century later, it helped to popularise the paper when it was revived by Vinod Mehta). His duties included a daunting responsibility. The author of Plain Tales From the Hills was to be to Anglo India what Boz had been to London, contributing sketches of the life of the community. Kipling took to the rails, starting his journey in the vast loco sheds of Jamalpur, the town near Munger where the sinews of the East India Railway were built. It is on the Sahibganj Loop, which prestigious trains no longer use. But it was then on the route, which is still called the ‘Main Line’ of the Indian Railways, running from Old Delhi to Howrah. × “They (railwaymen) have towns of their own at Toondla and Assensole; a sun-dried sanitarium at Bandikui; and Howrah, Ajmir, Allahabad, Lahore, and Pindi know their colonies. But Jamalpur is unadulteratedly ‘Railway,’ and he who has nothing to do with the EI (East Indian) Railway in some shape or another feels a stranger and an interloper,” wrote Kipling. He started his journey on Jamalpur’s Steam Street (this naming convention continues in industry: data storage leader Seagate used to be located on a California street named Disk Drive). It led to 40-50 acres of “shops” — workshops which could hold 25 locomotives at a time, where 3,500 men, English, Anglo Indian and “native”, worked under supervisors from Manchester and Clydeside. Jamalpur was “a sort of Crewe of Eastern India, where men make locomotives and control many hundreds of miles of lines.” Kipling’s journey continued down to Kolkata, which he explored by night in the company of a European police party from 22 Lalbazar Street (No 18 is now headquarters of the Kolkata Police), and his ethnological findings enliven a very adventurous two-part essay titled ‘City of Dreadful Night’. These sketches appeared in the Pioneer through 1888 and later featured in several collections of Kipling’s work. The two most popular books were City of Dreadful Night and Among the Railway Folk, a very slim volume with three sketches of Jamalpur, exploring the personal and professional lives of railwaymen. Neither seems to be in print in India, but both are available from various collections online. The versions in Project Gutenberg and at the University of Adelaide are well proofed, and extensive background notes are available online from the Kipling Society in the UK. They’re worth looking at, since both India and its railways were quite different at the time. Jamalpur was a neat little town where everyone lunched between 11 and 12 o’clock, had neat little gardens and a tendency to call clubs “institutes” (Kolkata still has its Dalhousie Institute, an excellent watering hole). They lived on the assurance that after retiring from a job paying Rs 370 (for a train driver) to Rs 400 (station master) per month, one could expect one’s son to be apprenticed for the princely sum of Rs 20. The only hardship faced by the 200 Europeans at the station was a paucity of beef, since the local raja was a gau rakshak. That era, when Anglo Indian train drivers were elite and surpassed only by river pilots, is long past. Now, the railways are about to lose the last sign of a service held in esteem, a separate budget. But a few threads of continuity remain. The gau rakshak is still a high-profile citizen, though he has acquired an appetite for cinematic and puritanical violence in the meantime. And as in Jamalpur in 1887, the Babu still keeps the trains running by doing battle with a sea of ledgers, “silent as the Sphinx and busy as a bee”. ======================================== 17. WOMEN EMPOWERMENT IN BANGLADESH OF THE FOREST, TREE & GRASSROOTS ======================================== (The Daily Star - September 12, 2016) Women Empowerment in Bangladesh of the Forest, Tree & Grassroots AUTHOR: MANZURUL MANNAN [Women Empowerment in Bangladesh of the Forest, Tree & Grassroots ] Reviewed by Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain State University of New York Press, 2015, pp.379 The issue of emancipating women raises obvious questions: Is there a final point; indeed, is the starting point similar across countries; can diverse groups within any country reap benefit simultaneously? Hillary Clinton claimed her 2008 presidential campaign had “cracked the [gender] glass-ceiling,” then, in 2016, how “the sky [had become] the limit” for women. Is the sky also the gender limit in Bangladesh, where a woman has been prime minister, leader of the opposition party, current speaker, and recent foreign minister, while also scaling Everest and making ready-made garments (RMGs) upon which the country has thrived for a quarter century? Manzurul Mannan's incisive and enriching book posits a critical picture. His “ethnographic” analysis of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), inquires if the purpose of “the largest transnational NGO [non-governmental organization] in the world,” was “benign” (to “empower poor women in social transformation”), or “manipulative” (to create a “poverty enterprise” out of “developmental pursuits,” p. 35). Since his measurement yardstick, “global policy language” (GPL), is the BRAC/NGO instrument for “managing and exploiting the 'third world',” Mannan's conclusion finds the “manipulative” prevails: “the disempowerment of the poor sustains the development process,” and that “poverty in Bangladesh has not decreased,” though “the nature of poverty itself” has changed (295). Behind a theoretically sound, empirically rich, and methodologically compact research lies a Bangladesh just entering a middle-income bracket, doubtlessly with women paving the way. Is this a paradox or interpretive problem? Mannan's GPL triptych identifies the “West”/“North” (281), where “the culture and dynamic of the development organizations originates” (43), the “South”/“rural”/“traditional Bengali culture” (129), where development means “interventions.” His first three chapters elaborate the corresponding tensions: (a) “western” equality confronting Bangalee “hierarchy,” (b) “development anthropology” against “anthropology of development,” and (c) past values battling present materialism. Chapter 4 challenges BRAC's organization claim, Chapter 5, coaxes a “hybrid culture” from that triptych, and Chapter 6 pits researchers (such as Mannan is in the book) against NGO managers (what he was, no less at BRAC, beforehand). They highlight two of Mannan's literary contributions: evaluating NGO engagements “through the lens of anthropology of organization”; and coining “development-scape” to rival the extant “ethno-scape,” “techno-scape,” “finance-scape,” “media-scape,” and “ideo-scape” approaches (10-1). The next three chapters elaborate how women village organizations challenge male-dominated “samaj” (Chapter 7), moral versus immoral microcredit interpretations (8), and the NGO-religion incompatibility (9). Logically concluding a “hybrid culture” is unstable (ch. 10), Mannan's women-based construction of poverty in a society described as male-dominated is eye-opening. His book finds local religious and political leaders reacting to a new village dynamic called women empowerment, caused single-mindedly by foreigners, as if to take rural womenfolk away. Far more interesting to students, scholars, and conscious citizens is Mannan juxtaposing BRAC's shifting “organizational” imperatives (p. 151), from developmental (between 1972 and 1990), to institutional (1990 to 2000), to market (2000-the present), against the segmented Bangladeshi NGO experience (p. 69), from gestation (1971-5), through consolidation (1975-90), towards globalization (1990-present). Bouncing off two other sequences might have helped: (a) Bangladesh's shift from war, socialism, and famine until 1975, to military rule, Islamization and privatization by 1990, then democracy and neo-liberalism thereafter; and (b) globally, the shift from war and economic stresses during the Cold War years of the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the 1990s neoliberal emergence and regionalization, before a conjunction of Islamic restlessness and terror-infusion from 9/11 took over. When our poverty was at rock-bottom in the 1970s, the “west” and not any socialist country, save India, came to our rescue. Our women were far freer than he found them in his research, so free that they engaged in the liberation war alongside males without any “moqtab” intervention; and the absence of today's Islamic constraint means Mannan's “traditional Bengali culture” carried far softer tones than his triptych admits. Softer interpretive hues riddle anthropological studies of social transformation. For example, John Steinbeck's “Grapes of Wrath” also targets organization-based exploitation, like Mannan's BRAC analysis. Though fictional, it expounds the realities of Oklahoma's Dust Bowl family-farms being converted into California's seasonal factory-farm workers in the 1930s. Even when not analyzing modernizing organizations, other “genuine anthropologists” (author's term, p. 164), also reduce tensions to merely the tradition-modernity transformation. Laurence Wylie's “Village in the Vaucluse,” as well as “Behind Mud Walls” in Karimpur, North India, by Charlotte and William Wiser, show how 20th Century social transformation is inescapable but “benign” when seen over the long-haul (30-odd years). If he was not so alarmed at the BRAC/NGO-induced poverty, Mannan might have noticed how RMG wages and migrant remittances were also changing the village landscape softly, as in Vaucluse and Karimpur. Women emigrants have not faced similarly hardened “moqtab” and “samaj” reactions upon returning. In evaluating a concurrent International Labour Organisation report, Arafat Ara acknowledges how these women need “moral rehabilitation” and “socio-economic support” (Financial Express, August 28, 2016, p. 8), they face no qualms “to best utilize their remittance through savings and investment,” that is, to deepen the cash nexus of a modern society in barter-based traditional society. “They come back with skills and experience,” the report continues, “which they can then utilize in the domestic employment market.” Writing on the same issue Hasnat Abdul Hye noted how the more positive aspect of BRAC-type engagements helped the country to take “the baby steps of the first generation of women entrepreneurs” (p. 4). Since these are “now a reality,” he adds, “both in the rural and urban areas,” women still stand on their two feet, vindicated, not vanquished, from crossing many fundamental transformational thresholds. Their “acquired valuable experience,” he says, and “confidence,” overcame the “many obstacles and disincentives that impede their progress”. Development is not just about adding up the “parts” that make the “whole,” meaning taking anthropological, economic, political, social, and all other inputs and interpretations together, but also ensuring the “whole,” that is the big-picture, portrays more than the sum of its “parts.” Mannan's novel anthropological approach fulfilled the former with panache, but to conquer the latter requires defusing his filters. True to his profession, Mannan digs deep; but the deeper he goes, the more the shape, size, and future of the “forest” of Bangladesh development gets obscured by “grassroots” intricacies: we learn of the “scape”-based nitty-gritty details, that is, the “trees” in this parlance, but cannot, and should not, subordinate the big-picture to them. The reviewer is Professor & Head, Global Studies & Governance, Independent University of Bangladesh. ======================================== 18. RUSSIA: ADMINISTRATION ORDERS MASS REINDEER KILLING, FAST-TRACKS GAS EXTRACTION ======================================== iwgia.org - September 17 2016 On Yamal Peninsula, the administration is planning to urgently slaughter 250,000 of the currently 700,000 reindeer living on the peninsula. At the same time, the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources proposes to fast-track the development of new gas fields in the Arctic. Between June and September, a subsidiary of Russia’s second gas producer "NOVATEK" has received 4 licenses for areas located on the Yamal and Gydan Peninsulas in the region. Many herders may lose their means of existence. After the anthrax outbreak on the Yamal Peninsula this summer, which claimed the life of one boy and 1,200 deer and caused persecution of the group Greenpeace, which was visiting the Yamal Peninsula at the time, the spiral events surrounding the fate of the Yamal reindeer herding has taken an unexpected turn for the worse. On August 23, an article quoted Federal agencies blaming the abnormal heat which melted the old animal graveyard, the lack of veterinary services and the excessive number of reindeer for the epidemic. On September 12 another article appeared, entitled "After the anthrax Yamal natives are ready to slaughter deer for the sake of apartments". It says, that “in Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area, complex negotiations about the slaughter of 250,000 deer are underway and overgrazing may be an indirect cause of the spread of the infection. All sides proposed options how to make reindeer-owners give up a large portion of their livestock for slaughter. Early last week, Governor Dmitry Kobylkin announced the intention of developing a programme to reduce the number of deer by 250,000 within one month.”, the news agency URA.RU writes. The Vice President of the Association of Indigenous Peoples ‘Yamal-potomkam’ (‘Yamal for our descendants’), Sergei Khudi proposes to increase the purchase price of the reindeer meat, but the money should not be given to the herders, instead they should be "transferred to a bank for mortgage pay-off." "My family are reindeer herders and those with whom I communicated, are not opposed to such an initiative. If the price is increased, I would go for the proposed reduction of livestock", Sergei Khudi said to “UralPolit.ru”. Meanwhile, private reindeer herders and owners know nothing about these plans. "According to the order of the Governor, the measure has to be executed before the end of September, and if you start to gather the herders now, it will be impossible to complete in time, because it is quite difficult to gather the private herders", says private herder, Eiko Serotetto. To ease interaction between officials and nomadic herders, he suggested to appoint a ‘universal herder’, who will, on behalf of the herders, communicate with representatives of the city administration and the regional government. Eiko Serotetto sent his proposal to the administration of the Yamal district. In the reply dated 2 September, he is asked to come to the district centre Yar-Sale for discussions. The reindeer owner intends to visit the Yamal district within one month," URA.RU says. The idea of paying off mortgages from subsidies for the mass slaughter is not supported by the President of the Association of Indigenous Minority Peoples of the North and the far East (RAIPON), Grigory Ledkov. The State Duma Deputy is convinced that "the nomads need appropriate conditions where they live and all the herders have to be integrated into the region’s economy", URA.ru quotes. "In connection with these plans I am very worried about the fate of the private herders, who still perpetuate the tradition of family and clan based reindeer herding. It is not clear how many of the reindeer herders may have mortgages. Most of them have small herds of about a hundred deer. They have no property, that would qualify them for a mortgage. The deer of the private herders are neither counted nor insured. Only the deer of the big collective farms (Sovkhoz) and those owned by wealthy urban Nenets close to the administration.“ anthropologist Olga Murashko says . Many of them had lost much of their reindeer during the icing-over of 2013-14, which was caused by the abnormally warm winter. About 70,000 deer perished in the famine, of which about 45,000 belonged to private traditional herders. This year, according to official data, the traditional herders, lost 1200 deer; an unknown number is still ‘quarantined’, she continues. "In the whole of the Yamal Nenets Area, there are 3000 private reindeer herding households, keeping 63.1% of the total deer population. Only 36,9% of the deer are in the property of agricultural enterprises. Yamal and Tazovski districts in the Arctic have the highest proportion of deer in private ownership: 53.3% and 81.1%, respectively". Also troubling is another news that appeared these days, entitled "The Ministry of Natural Resources proposes to encourage the extraction and processing of gas in the Arctic". The Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology of Russia, Sergey Donskoy said at a meeting of Russian the President with the government: "The Resource potential of the Arctic regarding natural gas (up to 20 billion cubic meters of proven reserves) with a unique degree of concentration requires special measures to encourage their fast development. Otherwise, Russia may not be able to use this potential according to its own interests." The Ministry is actively pursuing the licensing of areas on the Yamal Peninsula. Accordingly, between June and September, NOVATEK-Yurharovneftegaz", a subsidiary of Russia’s second gas producer "NOVATEK", has received licenses over hydrocarbon deposits in the region, including the Syadorsky area in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area, the Zapadno-Solpatinski, Severo-Tanamski and Nyavuyakhski areas on Gydan peninsula, RIA Novosti reports. "The coincidence of those news on the plans to urgently reduce the reindeer population in Yamal by over one third with the rapid issuing of licenses for gas extraction in the same region causes the greatest concern over the fate of the reindeer herders, with continue their traditional family-based nomadic way of life and which have managed to defend this way of life throughout the Soviet era and who continue to defend it", Olga Murashko says . “This it means that a huge number of nomads on Yamal and Gydan peninsulas will lose their means of existence and opportunities to maintain their traditional way of life. Additionally, it is clear that within the short time frame given, the indigenous reindeer herders cannot be properly consulted on the administration’s plans to annihilate a large number of reindeer”. ======================================== 19. LUCONI ON GUARNIERI, 'ITALIAN PSYCHOLOGY AND JEWISH EMIGRATION UNDER FASCISM: FROM FLORENCE TO JERUSALEM AND NEW YORK' ======================================== Patrizia Guarnieri. Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism: From Florence to Jerusalem and New York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xv + 275 pp. $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-137-30655-5. Reviewed by Stefano Luconi (University of Florence) Published on H-Italy (September, 2016) Commissioned by Matteo Pretelli This fascinating and carefully researched volume is a revised and much enlarged version of a previous Italian-language monograph by Patrizia Guarnieri about the rise and the troubled survival of the Institute of Psychology at Florence’s Istituto di Studi Superiori Pratici e di Perfezionamento (the predecessor of the University of Florence) between 1903 and 1938.[1] In particular, the current book is a case study of the impact of fascism on Italian culture in the interwar years. Specifically, drawing upon an impressive amount of primary sources--which include coeval psychology journals and publications as well as manuscripts from private papers and archival repositories in Italy, the United States, England, and Israel--Guarnieri investigates how Benito Mussolini’s regime affected the field of psychology in Italy. To this purpose, she focuses on scholars who were active at the Institute of Psychology in Florence and analyzes how fascism antagonized and silenced most of them even before discharging and forcing into exile a few of these intellectuals, who were Jews, in the wake of the enforcement of its own 1938 anti-Semitic legislation. These issues are aptly placed within the broader perspective of Italian psychologists’ struggle to establish their branch of knowledge into an academic discipline after the turn of the twentieth century. In this respect, Guarnieri masterly delves into the details of academic politics and the complex dynamics of the recruitment for university chairs as these two elements eventually made a leading contribution to shaping the theoretical foundations of psychology in Italy. She shows the pioneering role that Florence’s Institute of Psychology, created in 1903, and its first director, Francesco De Sarlo, played in the legitimization of psychology in Italy, thanks in part to the commitment of Pasquale Villari, a senator and former minister of education who was the dean of the Istituto di Studi Superiori Pratici e di Perfezionamento. She also examines the uncertain status of the discipline, which initially experienced some blurring of lines between psychology and experimental psychology and held a sort of middle ground between the schools of medicine and those of philosophy before its practitioners ended up with being affiliated with the latter when the first three positions of full professor were awarded in 1906. Against this backdrop, the author highlights that the antiscientific bias of neo-idealistic philosophers added to fascist ideology and political reasons in order to marginalize psychology within Italy’s university system in the early 1920s. De Sarlo was an opponent of dictator Mussolini. As fascist activists and fellow travelers gained influence within the University of Florence, he had to confine himself to teaching theoretical philosophy and to step down as director of the Institute of Psychology in 1923. He was replaced by his assistant, Enzo Bonaventura, who lacked clout to promote the discipline because he did not have tenure. De Sarlo’s nemesis in the Italian university system was Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini’s minister of education, who was instrumental in preventing the professor from teaching psychology. Nonetheless, Benedetto Croce, Gentile’s fellow neo-idealistic philosopher and a former minister of education himself but also a prominent antifascist, had come out against De Sarlo as early as 1907, when he wrote in a private letter that he had “decided to give him no quarter and to write three, four, ten articles until he keeps quiet. I know I am right; and that De Sarlo, for the post he holds in Florence, has an influence and aspires to assume an authority, that may prove very damaging” (p. 53). As a result, contrary to conventional scholarly wisdom, Guarnieri helps demonstrate that, although neo-idealism may have restrained its criticism of hard sciences, it turned out to be highly prejudicial toward human sciences and psychology was among its academic casualties. Since Guarnieri’s preceding book has already disclosed, at least in part, this conclusion, the most original and engaging chapters of Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration are those that reconstruct the plight of two Jewish psychologists who left Italy after the enactment of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic measures in 1938, their strategies for expatriation, and their career after the fall of the fascist regime. The anti-Jewish provisions caused the discharge of Bonaventura and the expulsion of promising young scholars such as Renata Calabresi, another pupil of De Sarlo’s who held an untenured teaching position at the University of Rome, from the Italian Academia. Their experiences are representative of two different trajectories for Italian Jewish intellectuals who sought sanctuary from fascist anti-Semitism in foreign countries. Both Bonaventura and Calabresi exploited their international connections in their professional field and resorted to organizations that assisted displaced scholars from their headquarters in London and New York City in order to move abroad. Bonaventura also relied on the Zionist network to emigrate to Palestine in 1939 with an appointment as professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the same year, Calabresi arrived in the United States, where her brother had already resettled, thanks in part to the help of the antifascist circles in which her family was involved. A woman, she faced greater hardships than Bonaventura. She found a few temporary and low-paid jobs as instructor and researcher, but she managed to supplement her initially meager wages with a grant from the Emergency Committee in Aid to of Displaced Foreign Scholars before moving from educational to clinical psychology. The collapse of the fascist regime resulted in the repeal of its anti-Semitic legislation and the reintegration of the Jewish academicians who had been “exonerated from service” (p. 116), according to the fascist bureaucratic jargon, namely fired on racial grounds. However, neither Bonaventura nor Calabresi seized this opportunity to return to Italy. Their reinstatement would have been rather troublesome because they had been untenured instructors before expatriation. Furthermore, Guarnieri suggests that, in the specific case of Bonaventura, lingering postwar anti-Semitism might have persuaded him to remain in Palestine and not to participate in a 1947 concorso (public competition) that awarded a chair in psychology at the University of Milan. In particular, the author points the finger at Father Agostino Gemelli, a pre-1943 outspoken fascist and anti-Semite who was a full professor of psychology and the president of the Milan-based Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. Guarnieri offers at least circumstantial evidence that, far from helping Bonaventura find a job abroad in 1939, as the prevailing interpretation goes,[2] Gemelli failed to facilitate Bonaventura’s expatriation and even maneuvered against him on the occasion of the 1947 concorso. Overall, Bonaventura’s and Calabresi’s vicissitudes cast further light on the lot of both the exiles fleeing dictatorships and the Jews who had been the victims of fascist anti-Semitism. On the one hand, as the two scholars struggled to make a living in Italy in the wake of the racial laws, their experiences provide additional proofs that political and economic reasons for migration are usually intertwined and can be hardly separated.[3] On the other, they revealed the difficulties of the Italian university system to make amends for the prewar torts that its Jewish personnel had suffered.[4] Specialists of Italian history might find some pages outlining the context of the main events--for instance, the passages about Gaetano Salvemini’s antifascist activities or the remarks about Zionism in Italy--a bit too didactic. Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism also lacks a proper conclusion and is not always reader-friendly because the narrative does not follow a chronological order. In addition, a study of such relevance and importance deserved better editing to eliminate several typos and to rephrase clumsy expressions that sometimes mar the text. Furthermore, a less astronomical cover price would have given this volume a larger readership than patrons of lavishly funded libraries. One can only hope to see this valuable and illuminating book in a cheaper paperback edition soon. Notes [1]. Patrizia Guarnieri, Senza cattedra: L’Istituto di Psicologia dell’Università di Firenze tra idealismo e fascismo (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2012). [2]. See, e.g., Maria Bocci, Agostino Gemelli rettore e francescano: Chiesa, regime, democrazia (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2003), 517-18. [3]. See, e.g., Mathias Czaika, The Political Economy of Refugee Migration and Foreign Aid (New York: Routledge, 2009), 14. [4]. See, e.g., Roberto Finzi, “Da perseguitati a ‘usurpatori’: Per una storia della reintegrazione dei docenti ebrei nelle università italiane,” in Il ritorno alla vita: Vicende e diritti degli ebrei in Italia dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, ed. Michele Sarfatti (Florence: Giuntina 1998), 95–114. For the more general problems and delays in the restoration of Italian Jews’ violated rights, see Giovanna D’Amico, Quando l’eccezione diventa norma: La reintegrazione degli ebrei nell’Italia postfascista (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006). _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 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
