South Asia Citizens Wire - 8 Nov 2016 - No. 2916 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Violence in Brahmanbaria | Khushi Kabir and Enamul Hoque 
Chowdhury
2. 2016 Santasilan Kadirgamar Memorial Lecture - Casteism vs. Social Justice | 
S. K. Senthivel
3. The Future of Pakistan Conference - SAATH 2016 Declaration for Pluralism and 
Democracy in Pakistan (October 29, 2016)
4. Revival of Pluralism in Kashmir: Not an Outdated Concept | Nyla Ali Khan
5. Come and see Fukushima before signing India-Japan Nuclear Agreement: 
Japanese Women Appeal to Prime Minister Modi
6. India: Growing Attack on Media Freedom - Response to curbs on NDTV
  - India: Attack on Media Freedom - NDTV India off the air for a day - 
Statement by Editors Guild of India
  - India: SAHMAT Statement on censorship of NDTV
  - India: Day long ban on NDTV smacks of Ministry of Truth | T K Arun
  - India: Social Movements Platform Condemns Curbs on NDTV As Well As on Press 
in Kashmir, Chattissgarh
7. UK: BBC Asian Network facilitates the Islamist Project by silencing the 
feminist voice
8. Indian Maids in Raj-era Britian: The story of the abandoned ayah 
9. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - India: RSS imprint on Khattar government runs deep in Haryana
  - India: The Debate on Triple Talaq Must be Based on Proper Research and Data
  - India: DN Jha’s ‘The Myth of the Holy Cow’ examined facts, and its 
detractors didn’t like that
  - India: ‘Uniform civil code should drop anti-women laws of all religions’
  - India: Karan Johar controversy mirrors rising populist politics
  - India: Electoral malpractices and “Hindutva” in the Supreme Court: Who 
argued what? [Bar & Bench November 2, 2016]
  - India: Uniform civil code good only if it seeks gender equality says NFIW
  - My name is Khan: Inter-religious marriages still draw questions and 
incredulity in India
  - India: Gutsy journalist Akshaya Mukul refuses to receive Ramnath Goenka 
award from Modi
  - 'History in India has been driven by identity': Dipesh Chakrabarty on 
historian Jadunath Sarkar
  - India: Bombay Christian group files complaint against Goregaon Social for 
pub's 'blasphemous' interiors

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
10. Empire shaped the world. There is an abyss at the heart of dishonest 
history textbooks | Moni Mohsin
11. India: Need to wage a war against warmongering - Civil society
12. A Generals' India - The politician ceding democratic space | Harish Khare
13. Why Kashmiris feel that India and the world have abandoned them | Bharat 
Bhushan
14. Burning the light of education in Kashmir | Arshia Malik
15. UK: 'I never thought I'd be terrorised by my fellow Sikhs at a wedding' ’ 
Nazia Parveen
16. Pakistan: Behind the image - Privatisations driven good governance in 
Punjab | Arif Azad
17. India: World Bank Funding the coal boom | Darryl D'Monte
18. India: Tribes at the altar of democracy | Sudeep Chakravarti
19. Rao on Paik, 'Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double 
Discrimination'20. Through a charred landscape | Uddalak Mukherjee

========================================
1. BANGLADESH: VIOLENCE IN BRAHMANBARIA | Khushi Kabir and Enamul Hoque 
Chowdhury
========================================
The vicious attacks on Hindu homes, establishments and temples since October 30 
indicates an increase in the level of bigotry among certain sections of the 
society.
http://sacw.net/article13009.html

========================================
2. 2016 SANTASILAN KADIRGAMAR MEMORIAL LECTURE - CASTEISM VS. SOCIAL JUSTICE | 
S. K. Senthivel
========================================
Santasilan Kadirgamar Memorial Lecture delivered by S. K. Senthivel at the 
Trimmer Hall, Jaffna on July 16, 2016. English translation by S. Sivasegaram
http://sacw.net/article13003.html

========================================
3. THE FUTURE OF PAKISTAN CONFERENCE - SAATH 2016 DECLARATION FOR PLURALISM AND 
DEMOCRACY IN PAKISTAN (OCTOBER 29, 2016)
========================================
Several prominent liberal, progressive and nationalist intellectuals, human 
rights and social media activists, and public figures from Pakistan gathered in 
London for a conference on ‘The Future of Pakistan’ organized under the banner 
of South Asians Against Terrorism and for Human Rights (SAATH), co-hosted by 
US-based columnist Dr Mohammad Taqi and former Pakistan ambassador to the 
United States, Husain Haqqani.
http://sacw.net/article13000.html

========================================
4. REVIVAL OF PLURALISM IN KASHMIR: NOT AN OUTDATED CONCEPT | Nyla Ali Khan
========================================
I have always viewed Kashmir as a palimpsest on which there are several 
overlapping discourses, most of which have valid historical and theoretical 
contexts.
http://sacw.net/article13007.html

========================================
5. COME AND SEE FUKUSHIMA BEFORE SIGNING INDIA-JAPAN NUCLEAR AGREEMENT: 
JAPANESE WOMEN APPEAL TO PRIME MINISTER MODI
========================================
Mr. Modi, we would like to invite you to visit Fukushima and see its condition 
firsthand. The destroyed reactor, the towns where people can no longer live 
that have become like abandoned towns, the mountains of radioactive rubble, the 
towering incinerators, and children who can no longer play freely outside. 
After you have seen the reality of Fukushima, then we urge you to think 
carefully about the nuclear cooperation agreement.
http://sacw.net/article13010.html

========================================
6. INDIA: GROWING ATTACK ON MEDIA FREEDOM - RESPONSES TO CURBS ON NDTV
========================================
INDIA: ATTACK ON MEDIA FREEDOM - NDTV INDIA OFF THE AIR FOR A DAY - STATEMENT 
BY EDITORS GUILD OF INDIA
 The Editors Guild of India strongly condemns the unprecedented decision of the 
inter-ministerial committee of the Union Ministry of Information Broadcasting 
to take NDTV India off the air for a day and demands that the order be 
immediately rescinded.
http://sacw.net/article13005.html

INDIA: SAHMAT STATEMENT ON CENSORSHIP OF NDTV
 We strongly condemn the arbitrary and vindictive action by the Narendra Modi 
government, ordering the popular Hindi news broadcaster NDTV-India off the air 
for a twenty-four hour period. NDTV-India has been accused of violating a 2015 
amendment to the cable TV rules, which obliged news broadcasters to restrict 
live reporting of anti-terrorism operations and confine themselves to facts 
revealed in “periodic” briefings by “designated” officials of the “appropriate” 
government.
http://sacw.net/article13006.html

INDIA: DAY LONG BAN ON NDTV SMACKS OF MINISTRY OF TRUTH | T K ARUN
The charge against NDTV India is patently absurd. It did not reveal any 
information of strategic importance that was not already in the public domain 
and was not reported by other news channels and newspapers.
http://sacw.net/article13008.html

INDIA: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS PLATFORM CONDEMNS CURBS ON NDTV AS WELL AS ON PRESS IN 
KASHMIR, CHATTISSGARH
http://sacw.net/article13011.html

========================================
7. UK: BBC ASIAN NETWORK FACILITATES THE ISLAMIST PROJECT BY SILENCING THE 
FEMINIST VOICE
========================================
A really sad day for BBC Asia Network whose journalistic inadequacies are all 
too evident and an even sadder day for feminists who are branded as 
unrepresentative of ‘Muslim’ women because they dare to talk in terms of 
secular universal human rights and to challenge religious power. How and why 
have black and minority women in the UK, who have achieved so much in terms of 
advancing our rights, arrived at this point of political bankruptcy?
http://sacw.net/article13004.html

========================================
8. INDIAN MAIDS IN RAJ-ERA BRITIAN: THE STORY OF THE ABANDONED AYAH
========================================
Imagine being abandoned at London’s King’s Cross railway station with just one 
pound in your pocket. In 1908, this is exactly what happened to an ayah who had 
travelled from India to Britain to look after a family’s children on the 
journey home.
http://sacw.net/article13001.html

========================================
9. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
======================================== 
India: RSS imprint on Khattar government runs deep in Haryana
India: The Debate on Triple Talaq Must be Based on Proper Research and Data
India: DN Jha’s ‘The Myth of the Holy Cow’ examined facts, and its detractors 
didn’t like that
India: ‘Uniform civil code should drop anti-women laws of all religions’
India: Karan Johar controversy mirrors rising populist politics
India: Electoral malpractices and “Hindutva” in the Supreme Court: Who argued 
what? [Bar & Bench November 2, 2016]
India: Uniform civil code good only if it seeks gender equality says NFIW
My name is Khan: Inter-religious marriages still draw questions and incredulity 
in India
India: Gutsy journalist Akshaya Mukul refuses to receive Ramnath Goenka award 
from Modi
'History in India has been driven by identity': Dipesh Chakrabarty on historian 
Jadunath Sarkar
India: Bombay Christian group files complaint against Goregaon Social for pub's 
'blasphemous' interiors
India: The non-inclusion of the word ‘secular’ in the original Constitution 
cannot be a reason to recommend its removal now
India: Break the myths - The tendency to stereotype communities alienates and 
fuels communal tensions (Sabir Ahamed)
India: Maharashtra Chief Minister Fadnavis isn't the first ruler to prop up Far 
Right's Raj Thackeray for petty political India: Here's why mixing politics 
with religion is a bad idea (Akshaya Mishra)

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::

========================================
10. EMPIRE SHAPED THE WORLD. THERE IS AN ABYSS AT THE HEART OF DISHONEST 
HISTORY TEXTBOOKS | Moni Mohsin
========================================
(The Guardian - 30 October 2016)

Nearly 90,000 Indian soldiers laid down their lives for Britain in the second 
world war, yet the scale of that sacrifice – and the troubled history of the 
imperial project – is barely recognised

Indian soldier Bhandari Ram with his father after he was awarded the Victoria 
Cross in New Delhi in 1945. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

When I was a child in Lahore in Pakistan, my parents employed a driver called 
Sultan. Sultan, a retired soldier, was from a village near Jhelum. He was a 
cheerful man in his 60s who readily joined in our games of badminton. But to me 
the most interesting fact about Sultan was that he could speak Italian. A 
fragmentary, broken Italian, but Italian nonetheless, picked up as a prisoner 
of war in Italy. He called me signorina and taught me three Italian words: si, 
grazie and buongiorno. Decades later, when I told my children about Sultan, 
they were gobsmacked. What was a Pakistani villager doing fighting in Italy? He 
wasn’t Pakistani then, I explained, he was Indian. Sultan was one of more than 
two million Indian soldiers who fought for the allies in the second world war. 
“No! Really?” they breathed.

My children (daughter 17, son 15) were born and raised in London and have had 
the good fortune to attend fantastic schools where they have been offered, 
alongside the usual array of subjects, a rich diet of music, drama, art, sport 
and languages. Their extracurricular clubs include Arabic, feminism, astronomy, 
mindfulness and carpentry. In my convent school in Lahore, I had to listen in 
respectful silence. In London, they are encouraged to question and argue.

Yet, for all the range and candour of their education, they haven’t once 
encountered Britain’s colonial past in school. My daughter is now in her second 
year of A-levels. She has studied history from the age of nine, but the closest 
she has come to any mention of empire was in her GCSE syllabus that included 
the run-up to the second world war. While studying the Treaty of Versailles, 
she learned that some countries had colonies at the time and, as part of 
Germany’s punishment, it was stripped of its colonial possessions. Period.

Though she read about the brutal battles in the Pacific and North Africa, no 
mention was made of the 2.5 million Indian soldiers who volunteered to fight in 
the second world war – or the 1.3 million who served in 1914-18. There was 
nothing about the 87,000 jawans killed in 1939-45. She had no notion of the 
massive contribution India – and Britain’s other colonies – made to the war 
effort. Hence her astonishment at Sultan’s Italian connection.

Of course, my kids know that their grandparents, along with the citizens of 
almost half the globe, were once British subjects. But they have acquired this 
knowledge at home, not at school. Aged 11, my son learned in a geography class 
that one of the many reasons Ghana (the Gold Coast to its 19th-century British 
rulers) was economically less developed was because of its colonial past. It 
had been stripped of its wealth by the British. Just one bland sentence. Now, 
in secondary school, he is currently reading a past Booker winner, The White 
Tiger by Aravind Adiga. For half-term, his English teacher has asked him to 
read another novel about India. The list she has given him includes Rudyard 
Kipling’s Kim, EM Forster’s A Passage to India and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s 
Children. I imagine some mention of colonialism will be made when discussing 
those texts.

But even this is off-piste learning, the initiative of an individual teacher; 
it is not part of the curriculum. Last year, my daughter, who is studying 
history of art at A-level, was taken to see Tate Britain’s exhibition Art and 
Empire. Her teacher thought it important for the paper on orientalism and, 
something of a political activist in her youth, gave them an impassioned 
lecture on Britain’s imperial past. But the historical context was not 
obligatory in the curriculum. Students were required to restrict themselves to 
a technical visual analysis of the paintings they studied, not explore the 
political background that produced them.

Dr Mukulika Banerjee, director of the South Asia Centre and associate professor 
of anthropology at the London School of Economics, talks of British students 
who “arrive at university completely ignorant about the empire, that vital part 
of their history. When we talk of Syria today, they have no knowledge of 
Britain’s role in the Middle East in the last century. When discussing burning 
political questions today, they have no historical context to  draw on that 
links Britain’s own past with those events. Similarly, they have no clue about 
the history of the immigration. They don’t understand why people of other 
ethnicities came to Britain in the first place. They haven’t learned any of it 
at school. So, in their second year at university, when my students discover 
the extent of their ignorance, they are furious.”

I don’t know whether this amnesia is due to embarrassment or fear of 
reparations or, indeed, a sinister desire to keep the electorate ignorant and 
pliable. Whatever the original rationale, the ugly xenophobia unleashed since 
the EU referendum has brought home the urgent need to reform history textbooks 
and address this abyss at their heart. Without it, they are distorted, 
dishonest. I used to laugh when British people asked me where I had learned my 
English. (Despite 20 years in this country, I still have a strong Pakistani 
accent.) Post-Brexit, I am not amused. And it’s no good pretending that the 
history of Malaysia, Nigeria, India or Kenya is world history and therefore not 
relevant to the modern British curriculum. It is British history. To quote 
Kipling, that controversial yet compelling poet of empire: “What should they 
know of England who only England know?”

========================================
11. INDIA: NEED TO WAGE A WAR AGAINST WARMONGERING - CIVIL SOCIETY
========================================
02 Nov 2016 07:11 PM, IST

Need to wage a war against warmongering: Civil society
L-R) Shabnam Hashmi, Gurmehar Kaur, Kavita Krishnan, Jhon Dayal, Priya Pillay, 
Maimoona Mulla at press conference in Delhi on 02 Nov 2016. (Photo - 
IndiaTomorrow.net)

Ghazanfar Abbas, IndiaTomorrow.net,

New Delhi, Nov 02: Eminent faces of Delhi civil society came together here 
today to express their deep concern on the current warmongering in the 
subcontinent particularly between India and Pakistan.

"Does a common citizen want war? Whenever there is a warmongering, it is said 
that it is people's opinion...Dialogue is the solution; war is not the 
solution. Common people on both sides want peace not war," said eminent 
environment activist Priya Pillai while addressing a press conference here 
along with civil rights activists John Dayal, Shabnam Hashmi and others.

The press conference was to brief the media about their upcoming campaign Joint 
Action Against Warmongering (2-9 Nov).

"This campaign is also to say - please don't do warmongering in my name. I 
don't war. Don't make your political gain on my name. This is your diversion 
tactics. Elections are coming in UP, so this tactic is to divert attention from 
real issues like oppression on Adivasi, land acquisition bill, Bhopal encounter 
case, Dadri case. Today there is no talk on development," said Priya.

Addressing the press conference, Shabnam Hashmi said, "This warmongering is a 
conspiracy to divert from the issues and all the hate is being spread to wage 
war against Pakistan. All this play of nationalism is going on because promises 
were not delivered."

"Don't use pen for war; rather against war. Common people don't want war," she 
said.

Civil rights activist Kavita Krishnan said, "War mongering is creating and 
spreading hatred among people in India. Pakistan and India should talk along 
with Kashmir. A soldier has just committed suicide yesterday here. If PM is 
really concerned towards soldiers he should see why soldiers are compelled to 
take such steps."

To lend her support to the civil campaign against war, Gurmehar Kaur, daughter 
of Capt. Mandeep Singh who was killed during the Kargil war in 1999, also came 
up and expressed her views against war.

"I lost my father in Kargil war. Four wars have already happened. No more. If 
you are a better citizen why aren't you working for country's development and 
to eradicate social evils," asked Gurmehar while talking to IndiaTomorrow.net.

"All the money which will be wasted can be spent on education and jobs and 
women safety," she said.

"I want to say the youth who are being targeted to make their mind for war -- 
Please improve those things which are needed for real development like women 
safety and cleanness of our cities. If you love your country do those things 
which develop your country rather to support war. And media people should take 
responsibility and tell the people how war will impact people's life as they 
are also the citizen of this country first," she said.

Dr John Dayal while expressing concern on shrinking space of dissent said, "If 
Admiral Ramdas speaks against war, he is called anti national. This kind of 
environment is in our country today."

Woman activist and member of AIDWA Maimoona Mulla said, "It is being played 
with the emotions of people. War mongering is to polarize people."

"Jang ke khilaf ye hamari jang hai (This is our war against war). The money is 
being invested on arms. If it is used for welfare of people, many good things 
can be achieved," she said.

========================================
12. A GENERALS' INDIA - THE POLITICIAN CEDING DEMOCRATIC SPACE
by Harish Khare
========================================
(The Tribune -Nov 4, 2016)

It is the Diwali day. The text message landed at 9.17 am: “Happy Diwali! Mins 
of YAS Sh Vijay Goel will celebrate Diwali with Army Jawans today 11.30am 
Rajputana Rifles Regimental Centre, Delhi Cant wid  NYKS students. Pl. cover.” 
At 4.30 pm, there is another text: Hello Kindly check your mail box for Press 
Release — “Vijay Goel celebrates Diwali with Army Jawans” along with pictures 
of the event. 

It is possible to infer confidently that other 60-odd Cabinet members were 
celebrating Diwali similarly in  the conspicuous company of this or that Army 
unit.  Nor can any one of them be chided for this PR overkill because they have 
been commanded to do so. In fact, advertisements had been appearing for days 
prior to Diwali, drawing attention to a PMO-directed campaign, called 
“Sandesh-to-Soldiers”, exhorting the citizens to remember this Diwali “our 
courageous jawans who constantly protect our nation. Lakhs of people have 
already sent their messages, have you?” 

A few days earlier, the Chief Minister of Punjab, Parkash Singh Badal, was 
reported to have decreed that all officers be appropriately respectful to the 
soldiers and ex-soldiers whenever they visited a government office.  The 
Economic Times (October 27) had reported how the BJP was preparing to send out 
Diwali greetings to soldiers' households in Uttar Pradesh. Both Punjab and 
Uttar Pradesh are due to have assembly elections in a few months’ time. 

And, then, a few days after Diwali, we had on Wednesday a retired Army Subedar 
committing suicide, in support of the demand for  one rank, one pension (OROP). 
That a retired Army man should commit suicide was sad enough; it is even sadder 
and uglier that professional political leaders should have sought to draw 
political mileage out of this tragedy.  Earlier, the non-BJP political leaders 
were tut-tutting the government for wanting to do a bit of khoon ki dalali, now 
it was the turn of the BJP to pretend that a veteran’s suicide was nothing to 
get excited about and that it was in bad taste that someone should want to 
“politicise” the death. 

How are the republican voices and constituency to view this extraordinary 
state-sponsored glorification of the military men, values and demands? Are we 
in the process of re-arranging the ensemble of institutional preferences? 
Examine, for instance, the Income Tax Department’s sales pitch. It takes out 
advertisements, showing a solitary solider standing guard over the forbidding 
mountainous border: “He is doing his duty…How about you?” The “he” is the Army 
Jawan, and “you” is the “tax deductor”, who is sternly reminded that TDS 
procedures must be totally complied with.  

It is not too complicated to break the code of a new civil-military chemistry.  
Legitimacy, political respectability and electoral advantage are being sought 
to be derived from the soldier and his shahadat (martyrdom). Unthinkingly, new 
space, new respect and new autonomy are being ceded to the Army brass and other 
security forces.   

In the post-surgical strike days, various ministers and authorised 
spokespersons have made it clear: (1) it is for the Army to decide whether or 
not to give the lie to Pakistan's preposterous claim that there were no 
cross-border raids; (2) it is for the Army to decide what should be the 
response to provocations, if any, from Pakistan; and (3) that what the Army 
says or claims ought to be accepted, without any kind of reservation or 
dissent. 

   The Republic finds itself at a fork in the road, an unfamiliar stage which 
could, in the long run, produce only democratic unhappiness.  After all, all 
these years, generations after generations of Indians took pride in the fact 
that Jawaharlal Nehru and other democrats saw to it that the Army stayed in the 
barracks, and that the civil authority was firmly in control of matters of war 
and peace. 

The political crowd did not need to piggyback the soldiers. The fundamental 
reality was that the constitutional and political legitimacy accrued to the 
political elites only because they could garner for themselves a mandate to 
govern, and that too, in an open, fair and transparent electoral contest. There 
was a sacredness to this authority from the citizens and it entitled them to 
obedience and respect. “We, the people of India” were to be the ultimate and 
only sovereign. 

And, the political leader was deemed to be endowed with certain laudable skills 
and attitudes. He was respected as “a politician” because he undertook to 
understand the people's issues and grievances. A political operative who 
aspired to be recognised as a “leader” had to have the willingness to harmonise 
conflicting social values and claims to produce a kind of “public good.”  
Coercion was not to be his calling card; persuasion and motivation were to be 
his first, second and third preferences.  Only autocrats rely on force and 
intimidation. 

All these years, there had been a complete consensus that the armed forces were 
a valuable institution, deriving its authority and parameters from the 
Constitution, and, that, as an institution, the armed forces were committed to 
democratic and secular values.  The armed forces, to be fair, never asserted 
that they were outside the ambit of democratic accountability; nor did they 
demand a lion's share in the national resources. Unlike in our neighbourhood, 
the armed forces never subscribed to a grammar of entitlements. This despite 
the fact that in the last three decades or so we have come to depend heavily on 
the coercive arm of the Indian state to restore a semblance of order in large 
parts of the country. 

Yet, we find ourselves witness to the process of re-arranging some of the 
working assumptions that have served the Indian republic well for all these 
years.  Unlike in Pakistan, where it were the Army Generals who made the 
judgement that the politicians were incompetent and incapable of safeguarding 
the best interests of their nation; we are not just deferring too much to the 
Generals, we are also redefining “competence”. Suddenly, it would seem that 
competence of a leader is to be judged by his willingness to allow the use of 
force. And, a willingness to let the “security forces” be the judge of how to 
use force, when to use it. 

And, once we let the “security forces” write their own ticket, the others who 
have capacity to initiate and inflict violence also take a cue. If the Army can 
give a “bloody nose to the Pakis”, so can the BSF; and if, the BSF can be 
allowed to over-react, why can’t the cops in Bhopal go on a shooting spree and 
gun down a few SIMI boys?  

All this adds up to a new but troublesome acceptance of violence. Nehru's India 
is forging a new identity under the shadow of joyful acceptance of conflict. 
Elements of a garrison state are being grafted on to the republic's escutcheon.

========================================
13. WHY KASHMIRIS FEEL THAT INDIA AND THE WORLD HAVE ABANDONED THEM
by Bharat Bhushan
========================================
(catchnews.com - 1 November 2016)

The situation in the Kashmir Valley is exceptionally grim. Not that there 
haven't been protests earlier holding security personnel responsible for 
civilian deaths. Schools have shut down before. Shops and establishments have 
also followed a centralised protest schedule dictated by separatist leaders in 
the past. The State has restricted the movement of separatist leaders many 
times before and jailed people under the notorious Public Safety Act.

Then why does the current political atmosphere in Kashmir have an unprecedented 
sense of desperation and despair?

There is a growing sense amongst the Kashmiris that no one in the international 
community has time for them. The attention of the world is engaged in West Asia 
where the larger Islamic world is in turmoil. Any misstep by Russia or the US 
in Syria can lead to unforeseen and disastrous developments for the whole world.

India's growing closeness with the US and its emergence as one of the potential 
engines of global economic growth has meant that the world wants New Delhi on 
its side. It is keen to woo India rather than reprimand it for any perceived 
domestic misdemeanours.

Pakistan on the other hand has become branded as the nursery of global 
terrorism, and its international credibility on India-related issues is 
severely reduced. In more proximate terms, the terrorist attack on Uri has 
damaged Pakistan and Kashmir more than anything else could have. The indigenous 
dimension of the Kashmir protests has been subsumed under a dominant public 
discourse of Pakistan inspiring terrorism against India, of which Uri is seen 
as the latest example.

Modi's Kashmir policy

Within India, the ascendancy of Narendra Modi had initially created some hope 
among the people of Kashmir as they thought he might take forward the Kashmir 
legacy of Atal Behari Vajpayee. That did not happen.

The Modi government's brand of politics has instead resulted in a discernible 
rightward shift in the national social and political discourse. Government 
policies - whether accidental or deliberate - seem to be moulding India into a 
national security state. Everyone is expected to be on the same page as the 
government on security issues - and Kashmir has been reduced from a political 
issue to one of national security and law and order.

This situation has been complicated by the Bharatiya Janata Party 
(BJP)-Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) government in Jammu and Kashmir. It 
legitimised the entry of the BJP into the governance structures of Jammu and 
Kashmir on the basis of Hindutva ideology. As a result, the BJP thinks it is 
all right to see Jammu and Kashmir as a Hindu-Muslim problem and the state's 
governance as contest for loaves and fishes between Hindu-dominated Jammu and 
Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley.

"Tendency to blame Pakistan for everything ignores the need to recognise 
disaffection among Kashmiris"

India's problems with Pakistan have further impacted the public perception of 
the Kashmir situation. Dissident Kashmiris can now be equated with Pakistanis 
and everything that happens in Kashmir can be blamed on Pakistan. This obviates 
the need to recognise the disaffection among the Kashmiris simmering for nearly 
seven decades. Once the discourse is oversimplified and the perception is 
created that Pakistan pulls all the strings (not that it is uninvolved in 
Kashmir), then every protesting Kashmiri can be dubbed a pro-Pakistani fifth 
columnist. It doesn't matter then how the 'enemy' is dealt with shot guns or 
pellet guns.

The mainstream media - especially TV news channels and the Defence and Home 
Ministry correspondents of national dailies - have become a force-multiplier 
for this narrow, self-serving propaganda of the State. Narrow, because it 
cannot lead to a proper diagnosis of the problem and, therefore, cannot provide 
any remedies. It is also self-serving, because it helps the political interests 
of the party in power by boosting its image as the sole defender of national 
interest. The frighteningly simplistic question every critic of the government 
gets asked is whether (s)he is with India or against India.

"TV channels and defence reporters have become force-multipliers for the 
State's narrow propaganda"

The changes that this emerging reality has brought about in Kashmir and its 
people are profound and worrying.
Despair

Today, there is unprecedented despair and desperation among the people. The 
Kashmiris think that they have fallen off the map, including amongst Indians, 
and that nobody cares for their fate.

When people in the rest of India showed little or no concern for the grief and 
hurt of Kashmiris, there was bound to be disillusionment and loss of faith in a 
tired political rhetoric that describes Kashmir as an integral part of India.

Kashmiris see such talk as nothing more than political posturing. One often 
hears them say that India is only interested in the land and not in the people 
of Kashmir. They believe that TV and the government in New Delhi have 
conditioned most Indians into seeing them through anti-Pakistan lenses.

When Atal Behari Vajpayee talked of 'insaniyat and jamhooriyat" (Humanity and 
Democracy), Kashmiris believed that he was sincere. This was also evident in 
the various initiatives taken by Vajpayee.

Today, people view Prime Minister Narendra Modi with skepticism when he repeats 
the same phrases.

Why is it, they ask, that people in rest of India do not get upset when 4 to 12 
year olds get blinded by pellet guns or when nearly a hundred people die in 
police firing in just four months? And why are pellet guns used for crowd 
control only in Kashmir when they were not used against Jats who went on a 
rampage including indulging in gang rapes in Haryana or against those who burnt 
more than one hundred buses and other vehicles during the Cauvery water dispute 
in Karnataka?

The government may have some rationalisation for its actions but these 
questions ought to shame ordinary Indians. That they don't is worrying the 
Kashmiris.

The most significant change that has taken place in Kashmir is that among the 
youth the fear of the Indian security forces has diminished significantly. An 
anarchic element has sprung up on the streets while the separatist leaders were 
locked up in jail. There is speculation that militant elements belonging to 
Pakistan-based groups are sheltering behind this chaos and fanning it further.
"Among Kashmiri youth, the fear of the Indian security forces has diminished 
significantly"

People in the rest of India may say that stone pelting will lead nowhere but 
that is not the perception in Kashmir. Kashmiris believe exactly the opposite. 
They claim that the stone-pelting children have shaken India - after all they 
forced a discussion on the Kashmir issue and the use of pellet guns in 
Parliament. They will tell you that the world has also noticed - even if it did 
nothing - what Indian security forces have been doing in Kashmir. The point, 
however, is that the streets

today are ruled by teens who dare the army saying "shoot us, blind us" and not 
by the older generation of less impetuous and thoughtful political leaders, 
even though they espouse separatism.

There are those who talk of dialogue with India but increasingly people do not 
see the dialogue process as seeking a permanent and amicable resolution to the 
Kashmir tangle. They view it as a way for vested interests to bargain for 
personal benefits.

That is what makes the situation in Kashmir virtually intractable

Bharat Bhushan @Bharatitis
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, Wa...

========================================
14. BURNING THE LIGHT OF EDUCATION IN KASHMIR | Arshia Malik
========================================
(The News - November 03, 2016)

   Now faced with a civil war in their midst with families pitched against 
families again after a cycle of 26 years, Kashmiris watch in horrified silence 
as 25 schools are gutted in the last few weeks

I am reminded of this story of  Cecil Earle Tyndale-Biscoe, a 19th-century, 
British missionary and educationist working in Kashmir. His Wikipedia entry 
writes:

    'In the late 19th century, Kashmir was a princely state made up of a Muslim 
majority ruled by a Maharaja and his Hindu minority. The Maharaja often 
utilized the services of British and European experts, though Kashmir was an 
independent kingdom. Seeing the squalid conditions and caste system as a 
serious problem, Tyndale-Biscoe aimed to use his own Christian values and 
western civic ideals to improve Kashmiri society.

    Tyndale-Biscoe's educational philosophy was one in which conspicuous 
intellect, or "cleverness", was valued less than the acquisition of more 
profound attributes and abilities. His schooling placed emphasis on physical 
activities – boxing, boating, football – which would stimulate senses of 
courage, masculinity, and physical fitness. The pupils were also engaged in 
civic duties, such as street-cleaning, and in helping deal with flooding and 
cholera. Enforcing participation in team sports and activities in a highly 
socially stratified culture had significance beyond the replication of 
Tyndale-Biscoe's English public school educational experience.

    By his later years, Tyndale-Biscoe had founded six schools with 1,800 
students. In 1912 he received the Kaisar-I-Hind Medal, and an additional bar in 
1929.' 

    Morning Assembly at Mission School, 1950s

The story which is common lore goes like this. Biscoe was himself involved in 
the construction of the first modest school houses in Kashmir. Legend says that 
he was not allowed to get bricks to the designated place one day which he had 
piled on a tonga (horse-driven cart) common in South Asia. The next day he 
arrived with the sack of bricks on a horse. The locals created a scene because 
they had heard about this 'missionary' and were not sure of what he wanted to 
achieve. The next day he walked with a sack of bricks on his bare back. The 
locals by now realized the man was determined and quietly watched him get to 
work as he started the foundations of a school room. 

The Mission School, Fateh Kadal, 1890

I am proud of this story but prouder of the lore in the women of my family 
about Miss Mallinson. The Mallinson Girls Higher Secondary School was founded 
in 1912 by Miss Violet B. Fitze as the Girls' Mission High School. Its name was 
later changed to Mallinson Girls' School in honor of Miss Mallinson, a 
missionary who served in the school from 1922-1961. Renowned as the state's 
most prestigious educational institution, the Mallinson Girls Srinagar was 
established at Fateh Kadal in 1912 at the time when there was no concept of 
education among the people of the valley. 

Miss Mallinson, sometime in 1970s

My aunts told stories of how Miss Mallinson would go and visit the local 
families and encourage the parents to send their girls to school. The 
conservative and superstitious Kashmiris were reluctant but Miss Mallinson's 
fortitude and determination prevailed after she reached a compromise with the 
families. The girls and young women would attend school if and only if a purdah 
covered shikhara (boats used on the waterways and lakes of Kashmir) picked and 
dropped them off. 

She didn't stop at that and any girl playing truant found Miss Mallinson at her 
door in the evenings, with ''nun-chai'' (salt-tea) in hand and the famous 
Kashmiri tsechewour (baked croissant, my rudimentary translation) talking 
delicately to the village headman and the mohalla (community) elders about the 
philosophy of education and its importance for the girls. 

Mallinson Higher Secondary School, Sheikh Bagh, 2016

There is a certain stand alone pride among pass outs of the first Mission 
Schools like Biscoe, Mallinson, Burnhall Boys School and Presentation Convent, 
recognizing the pioneering efforts of the missionaries in imparting education 
to the masses and trending the graph of literacy in the State of Jammu and 
Kashmir upwards and rising with girls surpassing boys in the Matriculation 
Results and enrollment data.

When Malala Yousufzai's story first hit the news stands and social networking 
websites in 2012, I remember contempt and disgust among families across Kashmir 
which took pride in the education of their daughters. Families from Kargil, 
Leh, Dras, Kishtwar, Rajouri, Doda, Poonch, Uri, Kupwara, Srinagar, Budgam, 
Anantnag, and other newly formed districts in J&K expressed utter horror at 
this despicable act. Editorials, letters to the editors, school essays, 
Parent-Teacher-Meets, and the usual social networking sites were abuzz with the 
deplorable act and the expose of the face of the Taliban. Slowly and gradually, 
Kashmiris started to make the connection to the tehreek movement, the early 90s 
militant diktats and the interesting divide between the strike calendars that 
the Hurriyat issued every summer and their own children getting a stable 
education outside the conflict-torn Valley. 

16 December 2014 was the final light bulb for Kashmiris when 7 gunmen 
affiliated to the Tehrek-i-Taliban (TTP) conducted an attack on an Army Public 
School in Peshawar. Militants shooting schoolchildren in cold blood before 
confirming whether their fathers were in the Army or not; one lone class 9 
survivor from the entire 9th grade because he did not go to school - all of 
this is not fathomable to the silent, moderate Kashmiri who vacillates between 
''India is bad'', ''Indian dogs go back'' and goes rabid when National Highway 
NH-1 the sole link to Udhampur and Pathankot and India beyond is not opened up 
in time by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) due to snow and landslides and 
the everyday supplies brought in. 

Now faced with a civil war in their midst with families pitched against 
families, brothers against brothers again after a cycle of 26 years, Kashmiris 
watch in horrified and cynical silence as 25 schools are gutted in the last few 
weeks and reports of banks and vehicles being targeted coming in. A school is a 
sacred place for Kashmiris, be it the maktabs, madrasas and peeths before the 
European Missionaries structured the whole education system or the government 
run schools or private and public schools or even the Army Goodwill Schools 
under Operation Sadhbhavana. They resented the CRPF and other paramilitary 
troopers occupying schools in the 90s and didn't mind them taking over the huge 
cinema houses until most of them were gutted or converted to hotels or 
hospitals, depending. They will never tolerate their schools being gutted daily 
especially those that cater to the lower rung of society, the financially 
impoverished. Of course, they will never come out on the streets protesting 
this because of the ever present threat of the ''unidentified gunman'' and 
intimidation to family members by thugs. But just like the underground movement 
of the Arabs after the failed Arab Spring, their resentment will increase and 
when it will really matter be it a controlled voting day or the elusive 
plebiscite, they will speak.

Govt. School burnt by arsonists in Chatawan, Shopian, Kashmir, 2016

Whatever the Pakistan establishment is planning to do next in collaboration 
with their proxies in Kashmir, they better not target the civilian population. 
Whatever media reports may show, there is a silent majority being kept away 
from the intifada factory of the Press Enclave at Srinagar, or some choose to 
stay away and pull on the famous Kashmiri resilience in the face of bad days. 
After all, ''paan kemus chu kharaan?'' - who dislikes one's own self!   

More by Arshia Malik

Arshia Malik is a Srinagar-based writer and social commentator with focus on 
women issues and conflict in Kashmir. She makes her living as a school teacher 
and is an avid collector of literature. She is currently writing a book about 
her life as a female in Kashmiri Muslim society

========================================
15. UK: 'I NEVER THOUGHT I'D BE TERRORISED BY MY FELLOW SIKHS AT A WEDDING' ’ 
Nazia Parveen
========================================
(The Guardian - 3 November 2016)

When interfaith marriages take place, UK temples now often hire security guards 
to protect weddings from demonstrators

A Sikh wedding at a London temple. Photograph: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

The ceremony in Leamington Spa is a lot smaller than the newlyweds had hoped. 
Just close family and friends – those they can really trust. The marriage takes 
place in secret, on a Friday afternoon.

It’s a beautiful, bright day at the town’s Gurdwara Sahib temple, but there is 
an anxiety in the air that is more than typical pre-wedding jitters: the young 
couple have been forced to marry under “oppressive circumstances” after 
previous weddings were disrupted by protesting religious men who do not want 
Sikhs to marry out of the faith.

The protesters dress in hoods, cover their faces and intimidate guests at the 
temple. Yet they are Sikhs – a religion readily associated with peace and 
inclusivity.

“I have got through the days of being called a Paki and a nig-nog,” the 
registrar Bhopinder Singh tells the Guardian. “I never thought that the day 
would come when I would be frightened and terrorised by people of my own faith.”

The most recent incident at the Sikh temple was on 11 September when women, 
children and committee members feared for their safety after 55 men with their 
faces covered in black cloth flooded into the temple. The temple was held under 
siege and the couple who were due to marry were forced to cancel their nuptials.

Among those trying to keep the peace that day was the 79-year-old Green party 
councillor Janet Alty, who was questioned under caution for allegedly calling 
one protester a terrorist. No further action was taken against Alty. Those who 
run the temple say protests have become an unfortunate recurrence during the 
wedding season.

Eventually the disrupted wedding did take place under a shroud of secrecy the 
following Monday, but the protest has sent shockwaves through the close-knit 
community.

When an interfaith marriage now takes place, the temple is forced to hire 
security guards to protect couples and their families. To avoid trouble, some 
couples are choosing to get married on weekdays, which are less likely to be 
disrupted.

Five weeks after that last protest, the Guardian was invited along to the 
temple for Friday’s secret wedding.

The bride is a follower of Jainism, an ancient Indian religion similar to 
Buddhism, and her groom is a Sikh. The couple do not want to be identified for 
fear of repercussions.

At the temple, volunteers cook sabzi and chapattis in the kitchen, preparing to 
feed the forty or so people of every faith who will walk through its doors to 
attend the wedding.

Upstairs, in one of the prayer rooms, the couple – both 29-year-old 
professionals - and their relatives are anxious.

The Gurdwara Sahib Leamington Spa & Warwick. Photograph: Ben Gurr for the 
Guardian

The bride says she received a phone call that morning and was told her wedding 
would have to be a day sooner than planned, for her own safety.

“We have been educated here and are moderate and should be free to marry 
whomever we wish,” she says. “I had to rush up from London – this is no way to 
be. There is a fundamental problem with the way [the protesters] are behaving 
and it will not be accepted.”

Her new husband says: “We have had to get married under oppressive 
circumstances. We were forced into this. The other option was to have a bigger 
wedding but hire security and we didn’t want to do that.

“These guys have a wicked PR machine and they post videos of supposed ‘peaceful 
protests’ online all the time. But they are not peaceful – they are 
threatening. They come with hoods on, with larger than normal kirpans [Sikh 
daggers] and act in an abusive manner.”

One relative, Simon Gronow, a Christian solicitor from London, married into the 
groom’s family 12 years ago. “This temple has decided to welcome interfaith 
marriage, but there is a group who want their way to prevail and there is an 
inevitable conflict,” he says.

“I have always found Sikhism a welcoming religion and I am still Christian but 
also take part in Sikh traditions. It has never been an issue before and this 
is a new thing for all of us to come to terms with.”

Mota Singh, a councillor and former mayor of Leamington Spa, calls the 
protesters “fundamentalists”. Singh, 77, says because of his moderate outlook 
he has received repeated threats from the group online and in person and has 
even had a brick thrown through his window.

He was present at the temple on the morning of the protest on 11 September. He 
said the protesters arrived at the temple at 6.30am, forcing their way past 
hired security guards into the main atrium. The couple were warned and did not 
attend. Armed police eventually cleared the protesters, all of whom were 
arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass.

Warwickshire police said no further action would be taken against 50 of the 55 
people arrested. A 28-year-old man from Coventry was given a caution for 
religiously aggravated criminal damage. A 39-year-old from Birmingham and two 
men aged 33 and 36 from Coventry have been re-bailed until the end of November. 
No further action was taken against a 31-year-old from Oldbury.

The protests had been organised by a group called Sikh Youth UK and were part 
of an increasingly active youth movement within the community.

Deepa Singh, who describes himself as a Sikh Youth UK co-ordinator, said the 
group had thousands of members including teachers, barristers and accountants. 
Others estimate membership to be in the low hundreds.

Another member, Shamsher Singh, previously told the Guardian: “More and more 
young people are becoming interested in the true interpretation of what it 
means to be Sikh.

The prayer hall at the Gurdwara Sahib temple in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. 
Photograph: Ben Gurr for the Guardian

“The elder generation arrived [in the UK] and fitted their faith round the need 
to assimilate, survive and to get work. This led to a stripping back of the 
spiritual nature of what it means to be a Sikh to a series of symbols.

“Now younger people want to reclaim Sikhism as a deeply spiritual, peaceful and 
encompassing religion and this is why we are seeing these protests.”

Mota Singh, the councillor, said he first became aware of two Birmingham-based 
groups who have been involved in protesting, Sikh Youth UK and the Sikh 
Federation, around six years ago. He claims that they have strong links to the 
Sikh Council, an organisation set up in 2010 to deal with issues affecting the 
Sikh community in Britain and Europe. The council denies any affiliation with 
the group, and say they have no involvement in the organisation of protests.

Shortly after the Sikh Council was formed, it issued an edict saying weddings 
between Sikhs and non-Sikhs could not take place in temples, arguing that the 
Sikh wedding ceremony, Anand Karaj, should be reserved only for Sikhs.

Marrying people of other faiths is acceptable, they say, but conducting that 
marriage in a Sikh temple is not. Non-Sikhs can only be involved if they accept 
the Sikh faith and change their name to include Singh or Kaur, the council 
insists.

Around 10 of the estimated 360 Sikh temples in the UK are thought to be 
affiliated to the council. However, many in the Sikh community are wholly 
opposed to these rules, saying Sikhism is a faith of acceptance and equality.

Mota Singh believes there has been a “cultural change” where young British-born 
Sikhs are “attracted by fundamentalism … They stick together and they want 
their own societies which exclude other groups.
The Guardian view on interfaith marriage: a human right | Editorial
Read more

“They are different to their parents – the first generation immigrants – who 
wanted to integrate. They want the religion to remain ‘pure’.

“They have been born in Britain, have had a British education yet they don’t 
believe in democracy and free will and allow mixed marriages to take place. It 
has staggered some of the older generation. They are shunning the moderate way. 
Their fathers were clean-shaven and wanted to integrate. This is a whole new 
breed of Sikhs.”

The temple’s registrar, Bhopinder Singh, said he was pleased the wedding season 
was almost over for the year. “I have been in this country since the age of 
nine and have lived through the football hooliganism of the 1970s. These guys 
were far more scary than football hooligans,” he said. “They were foul-mouthed 
and intimidating and I have never experienced anything like this.”

Other temples across the country have been less robust under pressure from the 
protests groups and no longer hold interfaith marriages. But the temple 
committee in Leamington is adamant that they will continue. “On the face of it 
what they are protesting is against mixed marriage – but it is deeper than 
that,” said the temple trustee Jaswant Singh Virdee. “They want to control the 
temple with their own people and with their own extremist views.

“It is seems these protests apply only to England. Throughout the rest of the 
world this is not happening. Ultimately, it is a way to gain power.”

Balraj Singh Dhesi, the first Asian mayor of Leamington, said the protests were 
a British phenomenon. “Interfaith marriages have been taking place since the 
birth of Sikhism hundreds of years ago. These prejudices, which are growing and 
are very concerning, will cause damage to British society. They are indigenous 
to this country but yet have an obvious disregard for integration.”

Friday’s wedding passed off without incident, but there is a grim irony in a 
couple spending the biggest day of their lives praying for it to be totally 
uneventful.

========================================
16. PAKISTAN: BEHIND THE IMAGE - PRIVATISATIONS DRIVEN GOOD GOVERNANCE IN PUNJAB
by Arif Azad
========================================
(Dawn - 3 November 2016)

PUNJAB is considered the epitome of good governance by many donors, the media 
and political classes. A large part of this perception is formed by Chief 
Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s hyperactive managerial style: his on-the-spot 
sackings or demotions of officials found negligent, his personal immersion in 
mega infrastructure projects and his fondness for target-heavy presentations 
given by development experts.

Together, these defining traits constitute a perception of a better-managed 
province. Beyond this, however, is little scrutiny of Punjab’s so-called good 
governance agenda. In fact, emerging trends show that the good governance 
agenda is laced with an unbounded privatisation agenda, and that the 
privatisation of state entities in the name of efficiency is being pushed 
through without consultation.

Without wider public and political discussions on privatisation, the notion of 
a public service delivery ethos in public entities is corroded. Political 
parties have made the occasional, feeble noises, but to little effect. The PPP 
— normally a party of state-delivered public services — is conspicuous by its 
absence in the province’s political field. Thus, no sustained or coherent 
critique of the current governance model comes from the social democratic party 
of the PPP coloration. The PTI — caught up in its accountability verbosity — is 
miles away from the political tide when it comes to offering opposition to the 
privatisation agenda.
In Punjab, privatisation is being dressed as good governance.

Although part of a larger ideological agenda (as is the case in other 
countries), privatisation is most visibly being forced through the education 
and health sectors at breakneck speed. With education, the plan involves the 
privatisation of education at all levels. Primary schools are being privatised 
with little or no opposition; the plan involves handing primary schools over to 
NGOs and the private sector. The teachers union offered only desultory 
opposition. In this move, critics see the stripping of state assets, such as 
infrastructure and expensive lands on which some of the schools are situated, 
with the involvement of the land mafia.

Privatisation of the primary education sector is being pushed through, in part, 
to drive up enrolment figures. This has seen some success. Yet, the policy of 
public-private partnerships is muddled. In some cases public-private 
partnerships are working at cross purposes when it comes to enrolment drives. 
There are instances where NGOs are working with donor funding to enhance 
enrolment figures in government schools, while the government is incentivising 
donor-funded provincial education foundations to enhance enrolment in private 
schools in the same area.

With limited numbers of primary schoolgoing students in the project area, there 
is often a shift from the state school to the foundation-funded school where 
enrolment is financially incentivised. This tends to demoralise state-sector 
schools, staff and students. The unspoken message here seems to be that private 
schools are better than state schools.

Post-graduate colleges are similarly being forced down the path of 
privatisation. The net effect of runaway privatisation of post-graduate 
colleges is an unaffordable fee hike for poorer students, thereby pricing them 
out of higher education.

Also under the privatisation hammer is the health sector. Here, again, there is 
an unseemly and unreflective haste to slash and burn everything that stands in 
the way of a supposedly efficient private sector. There may be evidence that 
some NGO-managed basic health units work better than health department-managed 
BHUs, yet these examples hardly give licence to the government to attempt to 
dismantle the public sector and abdicate its responsibility of providing 
universal affordable healthcare.

Curiously, this is happening in Punjab at a time when the neo-liberal consensus 
on the so-called infallibility of the market has been vigorously challenged in 
the West. This trend has seen the return of social democrats and socialists to 
power on the back of public ownership agendas. In the UK, for example, some 
parts of British Rail are already back in public ownership. Similarly, calls 
for abolishing the private market in the National Health Service are gathering 
momentum. The British government has already retreated from its policy of 
turning state schools into private academies.

Yet Punjab is headed down this path, irrespective of cautionary tales from 
other places. Add to this an utter lack of regulatory control over the 
privatised entities, and the socially unequal impact of full-blown 
privatisation on affordable access to education and health, and it becomes too 
glaring to ignore. Therefore, it is vital that a proper audit of Punjab’s 
privatisation experiment be undertaken and appropriate caution exercised in 
expanding the private sector’s role in education and health. Good governance 
can only be delivered by a high-performing and incentivised public sector.

The writer is a consultant and policy analyst. 

========================================
17. INDIA: WORLD BANK FUNDING THE COAL BOOM | Darryl D'Monte
========================================
(India Together - 1 November 2016)

India figures as the lead story in a report this October by a little-known 
United States of America organisation, Inclusive Development International 
(IDI), titled Outsourcing Development: Lifting the Veil on the World Bank 
Group’s Lending Through Financial Intermediaries in October.

It questions how the World Bank, contrary to its affirmations to the contrary, 
has through its affiliate, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), funded 
coal power plants in India and other developing countries.

The study has been co-authored by three other organisations, including the Bank 
Information Centre, which scrutinises the World Bank’s operations for 
violations of environmental and other laws.

The coal plant in Singrauli, MP. Pic: Joe Athialy

Sub-titled Disaster for us and the planet: how the IFC is quietly funding a 
coal boom, the report begins with the case study of an impoverished farmer, 
Lalshah, in Singrauli district of Madhya Pradesh.

Financing the pollution

The district is known as the Energy  Capital of India due to proliferation of 
thermal power plants and coal mines which blot the landscape. It accounts for a 
full tenth of the country’s thermal power capacity. Emissions and dust from the 
1,200 MW Mahan power plant near Lalshah’s home have affected his health, his 
fields and crops.

The power plant is built by Essar Power, which resumed generating power in May 
this year after a 17-month hiatus due to people’s protests. Essar received 
“substantial financing” from two Indian financial institutions, ICICI and IDFC, 
to build the plant.

The IFC channelled money into the Mahan plant despite claims from the World 
Bank that it is no longer funding such projects. In 2013, the Bank made history 
when it pledged to get out of the coal industry for good, except “in rare 
circumstances.”

After decades of funding coal, the environmental consequences of continuing to 
do so – catastrophic global climate change, rapid deforestation, air and water 
pollution – were just too severe, states IDI.

This May, World Bank President Jim Kim was unequivocal in his remarks. Building 
more coal plants, in particular in Asia, where there has been a boom, would 
lead to catastrophe. “That would spell disaster for us and the planet,” he said.

According to the report, the World Bank continues to be a major funder of the 
coal industry, and the ramifications extend far beyond India’s Singrauli 
district.

It says,"..Billions of dollars in IFC funds have quietly flowed into new coal 
projects around the world through multi-layered financial transactions that 
exist beyond the scrutiny of the public. The IFC is funding coal through its 
highly opaque support for commercial banks and private equity funds. These 
financial intermediaries received $40 billion in IFC funding between 2011 and 
2015. They now represent over half of the IFC’s lending portfolio, a proportion 
that has steadily increased over the past decade."

Thanks to the IFC, these financial institutions have gone on to fund many of 
the largest and dirtiest coal projects and companies in the world. The IFC does 
not publicly disclose the details of most of these transactions, but IDI was 
able to follow the trail of money during  months-long forensic investigations.

According to IDI, IFC supported financial institutions have funded at least 41 
new coal projects – either the facilities directly or the companies that own 
them – since the World Bank announced its coal ban in 2013. The investigation 
tackled only a small portion of the IFC’s sprawling financial-sector portfolio. 
As such, there are doubtless many more projects yet to be uncovered.

In total, these projects account for 56,137 MW of new coal capacity. Adding 
fuel to the fire, these projects have also decimated some of the world’s 
forests. Coal plants, and the mines that feed them, are a leading cause of 
deforestation globally, further contributing to climate change.

Thermal plants are a major source of pollution. Pic: Joe Athialy

IFC’s support for the Mahan power plant is “a microcosm for how it funds coal 
around the world”. In 2005, the IFC loaned $50 million to IDFC in order to help 
meet its “growing needs for disbursements in infrastructure projects as well as 
to diversify its borrowing sources,” according to publicly disclosed project 
documents.

The following year, IFC loaned ICICI, a large commercial bank, $150 million to 
support its “capital requirements to finance growth”.

At the time, IDFC and ICICI were major players in India’s infrastructure and 
industrial sectors. The IFC loans, and the resulting prestige conveyed by a 
World Bank Group investment, put them in an even better position to fund the 
kinds of mega-projects they have been financing for years.

The IFC’s support for the project did not end there. Essar, in need of a source 
of coal to fuel the plant, entered into a joint venture with Hindalco, owned by 
the Aditya Birla group, to establish a mine nearby. The companies received 
approval from the government to establish the project, even though 
environmental groups warned that the mine would destroy one of the largest and 
oldest indigenous forests of sal trees.

In addition, Greenpeace found that the mine would displace or otherwise harm 
50,000 people who lived in the forest or depended on it for their livelihoods 
like Lalshah, whose dilemma begins the report. “Without the forest, we would 
lose our major income source. It would be like living as a dead person,” he 
says.

In 2011, ICICI was one of four banks to provide an $888 million syndicated loan 
to Essar Power to build the Mahan coal plant. In 2014, ICICI Bank was one of 
six banks to provide a $163 million syndicated loan to Essar Power MP Ltd, a 
special vehicle created by Essar Power to develop the Mahan coal plant.

Also in 2014, when Essar faced cost overruns on the project, it secured another 
massive loan from five banks, including ICICI and IDFC, for the plant. In 
total, these two IFC-supported banks provided approximately $1.9 billion in 
financing to build the Mahan coal plant.

Axis Bank, after receiving a $100 million investment in an infrastructure bond 
from the IFC in 2014, participated in a $1.5 billion syndicated loan to 
Hindalco. Yes Bank, another recipient of IFC funding, underwrote $570 million 
in Hindalco bonds.

The company was free to use the capital from these transactions any way it 
chose, with no strings attached, including to fund the Mahan mine project.

Mint reported on October 26 that Axis Bank recorded  a 71 per cent rise in 
quarter-on-quarter bad loans and there was “more pain in store”. Some Rs 7,288 
crores of assets had turned bad in the three months ending September. The list 
of bad debts is “dominated by the power sector, which comprises 41 per cent”.

According to Greenpeace, company representatives began surveying and 
demarcating land for the mine without the consent of people living in or 
depending on the forest, a clear violation of India’s Forest Rights Act and the 
IFC Performance Standards.

Opposition and overcapacity

Local residents quickly organized themselves into a resistance movement.  The 
situation came to a head in 2014, when activists formed a human chain around a 
survey team. “We were fighting for our constitutional rights. Our forest was 
not for sale,” Lalshah said. As a place of spiritual importance, losing it was 
unthinkable. “Our gods live in that forest,” he said.

Local residents are suffering from the air and water pollution caused by the 
coal plants. Pic: Joe Athialy

Following the protest, Lalshah and other activists were arrested. He spent 28 
days in jail. Despite these setbacks, the movement made an impact. Facing bad 
press in India and abroad, the government cancelled clearance for the mine – 
though not the power station - in 2015, only the second time in history that it 
had done so. It was a major victory for the activists.

The IDI report comes precisely the same month as a Greenpeace India study which 
reveals that India would be wasting Rs 3.23 lakh crores to build 62 gigawatt 
(GW) of idle coal power plants by the year 2022.

Overcapacity appears to be endemic and the banks are partly to blame for 
lending funds to projects which are environmentally and financially unviable.

By contrast, Chinese leaders have called a halt to construction work on 30 
large coal-fired power plants with a combined capacity of 17 GW — greater than 
the UK’s entire coal-powered stations. This unprecedented move indicates just 
how serious the Chinese authorities are about bringing the country’s coal power 
bubble under control.

Another 30 large coal plant projects in China, for which transmission lines 
were already under construction, are being axed. Spending money to complete 
these unneeded coal plants would have been even more wasteful— it would likely 
have cost well over $20 billion.

On October 25, Business Standard  reported that the demand for power in India 
had reached a new low. Some 30 power generating companies which have been 
contracted to purchase 400 million tonnes of coal from Coal India are sourcing 
far less. Some were only buying 4 per cent of their commitment and were facing 
penalties.

The two adverse reports also come at a time when bidders for solar power 
projects are quoting Rs 4.30 per kilowatt hour (kWh), cheaper than electricity 
from coal!

Darryl D'Monte, former Resident Editor of The Times of India in Mumbai, is 
Chairperson of the Forum of Environmental Journalists of India and founder 
President of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.

========================================
18. INDIA: TRIBES AT THE ALTAR OF DEMOCRACY
by Sudeep Chakravarti
========================================
(Live Mint - Nov 03 2016)

Tribals account for less than 10% of the population and have accounted for over 
40% of all project displacement in India since Independence

The court has also cautioned against govt and businesses being complicit in 
human rights violations. Examples abound in Chhattisgarh’s iron-ore rich south, 
and coal-rich north. Photo: Reuters

Perhaps the ongoing fracas in the US with the Sioux tribe in North Dakota 
protesting an oil pipeline within polluting distance of their homeland and 
traditionally sacred spaces, will, in the spirit of globalization, give tribal 
folk in India some reflected recognition.

Perhaps we will learn to not call our tribal folks ‘Naxals’ or ‘Maoists’ or 
‘primitive’ when they defend their constitutional, and very human, rights.

Last week, nearly to the day the North Dakota protests flared up, Prime 
Minister Narendra Modi addressed the National Tribal Carnival 2016, a 
government-sponsored jamboree in New Delhi. Tribals heard from Modi about how 
in tune they were with nature, how much they conserved nature.

“Nobody should have the right in this country to snatch the land of Adivasis,” 
Modi declared in Hindi. “Nobody should have the opportunity… And to ensure it, 
the government supports the strictest application of law and we are doing so…” 
The Twitter handle @narendramodi reinforced it: “Tribal communities must get 
their rights. No one has the right to snatch the land of tribal communities.”

He then mentioned Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh and praised his 
initiative to aggregate funds for the development of tribals. It was a 
remarkable, and ironical, acknowledgment as Singh’s administration has in the 
past decade been accused of several violent acts against tribals, some under 
the guise of combating insurgency. Even the Supreme Court has censured 
Chhattisgarh.

The court has also cautioned against government and businesses being complicit 
in human rights violations. Examples abound in Chhattisgarh’s iron-ore rich 
south, and coal-rich north. Examples also abound in Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya 
Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, among other states, which have harassed, 
attacked, displaced without consent, provided scant rehabilitation—and continue 
to strong-arm tribal communities for mineral and project development, bypassing 
or attempting to bypass a community’s denial to projects.

Modi followed up with a palliative. “We have to save our forests, we have to 
save the land of our tribal communities, we have to also protect whatever 
economic means they posses, so we wish to with modern techniques strengthen the 
process of underground mining. So that the jungle remains as it is, lives 
remain as they are. We ought to dig deep for minerals like coal, et cetera, so 
difficulty doesn’t accrue to lives and livelihoods. The government of India is 
determined to pursue this direction of applying modern techniques.”

Politicians—prime ministers—routinely say whatever they wish to please a 
particular audience. The virus is party-agnostic. But this was ironic by any 
standard: artful, eco-friendly mining.

The central government buried a May 2014 report by a “high-level committee on 
socio-economic, health and educational status of tribal communities of India”, 
submitted to the ministry of tribal affairs. The report made several fine 
suggestions about healthcare, education, development, empowerment, and—as I 
have written earlier—resolution of the root causes of conflict in tribal areas.

Perhaps it’s on account of observations, as in the chapter titled Land 
Alienation, Displacement and Enforced Migration which pointed out several 
weaknesses in the 2013 land law—the community-consent parameters of which the 
current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government aggressively attempted to 
circumvent last year with ordinances, and failed.

“The definition of ‘public purpose’ in the new law is very wide and will only 
lead to greater acquisition and displacement in scheduled areas,” the report 
stated. “The exercise of ‘eminent domain’ and definition of ‘public purpose’ 
should be severely limited.”

The report added: “Government agencies acquiring land with the ultimate purpose 
to transfer it to private companies for stated public purpose, should be kept 
outside the ambit of the new law, as the public-private partnership mode of 
acquiring land is simply a backdoor method…” Exactly what Modi’s government 
attempted to do, and his senior ministers have since encouraged states to do.

Tribals account for less than 10% of the population—though they are more than 
100 million in absolute numbers—and have accounted for over 40% of all project 
displacement in India since Independence. Three-fourths are estimated as not 
being rehabilitated; many have gone from being marginalized to being 
impoverished. “We have to sacrifice ourselves for our country,” a tribal 
gentleman in Jharkhand, personally scarred by mining, told me not long ago. 
“This is democracy.”

Tribals know the truth. And it hurts.

Sudeep Chakravarti’s books include Clear.Hold.Build: Hard Lessons of Business 
and Human Rights in India, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country and Highway 39: 
Journeys Through a Fractured Land. This column, which focuses on conflict 
situations and the convergence of businesses and human rights in India and 
South Asia, runs on Thursdays.

========================================
19. RAO ON PAIK, 'DALIT WOMEN'S EDUCATION IN MODERN INDIA: DOUBLE 
DISCRIMINATION'
========================================
 Shailaja Paik. Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination. 
Routledge Research on Gender in Asia Series. New York: Routledge, 2014. xiv + 
356 pp. $160.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-49300-0.

Reviewed by Anupama Rao (Columbia University Barnard College)
Published on H-Asia (November, 2016)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Dalit Women in India

Shailaja Paik has written an elegant and nuanced book about women’s education 
and its centrality to Maharashtra’s Ambedkar movement. A signal contribution to 
the field of critical Ambedkar studies and South Asian histories of gender, 
Paik’s book focuses on Dalit women’s continued struggles to claim educated 
selfhood while navigating complex inequities of caste, patriarchy, and 
inherited privilege. The work is enriched by a rare focus on working-class and 
middle-class women whose experience of caste and gender discrimination is 
modulated by two things, the political economy of class and the spatialization 
of caste.

Paik describes her method as follows: “Rather than ‘going where women are,’ or 
‘recovering’ women through oral histories,... the book illustrates how Dalit 
women were formed within the limits of historically specific practices, what 
[Michel] Foucault calls ‘modes of subjectivation’: the very processes that 
secure a subject’s subordination are also the means by which she becomes a 
self-conscious identity and agent” (p. 8). Voice and experience have become the 
unfortunate focus of much critical engagement with Dalit literature, which 
views such writing as inherently ethnographic, a window into the life and times 
of otherwise inaccessible subaltern subjects. Paik instead challenges the 
categories of experience and embodiment, which constitute the privileged ground 
of feminist and Dalit history, to argue that the question of Dalit women must 
be posed, at the outset, as a problem of representation. Here liberal 
feminism’s inability to confront the exclusions of caste meets with Dalit 
history’s focus on the community’s emancipation at the cost of ignoring the 
specific needs of its women. Paik tempers her admiration for B. R. Ambedkar’s 
enlightened and far-reaching response to the woman question with her own focus 
on “Dalit women’s ideas and practices, as they not only actuated but extended 
and critiqued Ambedkar’s feminist praxis by challenging the politics of local 
leaders and men inside the household, howsoever limited” (p. 13). The signal 
contribution of Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India thus lies in tracking 
this double movement, modes of subjectivation and the refusal and resistance to 
them, as dialectical processes with contingent and often-unanticipated outcomes.

The book is divided into two sections each containing four chapters. Paik 
situates the oral narratives that constitute her main archive for the second 
half of the book in a complex economy of forces—caste reform, colonial 
modernity, struggles over institutional access, and movement history. Thus the 
first section of the book explores the contradictions of mass intellectuality 
in a society governed by a founding cleavage between intellectual and manual 
labor, and Dalit and non-Brahmin struggles against this social divide.

Paik’s thickly documented first chapter contrasts ideologies of class mobility 
and access to knowledge as these confronted the economic power and social 
resentment of Brahmins in the interwar, when the relationship between caste, 
colonial state, and Dalits underwent a major shift. Paik draws on personal 
recollections, newspaper accounts, and administrative reports to explore how 
Dalit demands for free and compulsory education were foiled, from the rise of 
novel practices of spatial segregation, to the psychological implications of 
the everyday repulsion that upper-caste students reflected back to Dalit and 
lower-caste students by refusing to share food and drink with them.

The 1813 Act tasked the East India Company government with the advancement of 
education. Decades later, in 1882, government-aided schools were opened to the 
public at large. Simultaneously, missionary societies dedicated themselves to 
Dalit schooling. However, both initiatives were subject to an implicit “go 
slow” policy as they faced social resistance from upper castes who withdrew 
students from “integrated” schools. Private initiative fared no better. Paik 
offers numerous accounts of efforts by Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s Servants of 
India Society to encourage Dalit education, albeit without allotting adequate 
funds for that purpose. Reformist commitment to mass education by reformers 
like N. G. Chandavarkar, M. G. Ranade, and R. G. Bhandarkar was coupled with 
apprehension about the social hygiene and mental fitness of Dalit students. 
Meanwhile conservative voices, such as B. G. Tilak, emphasized a tracked system 
of education, appropriate to the manual labor performed by the lower castes, 
that could curtail rebelliousness. Furthermore, resistance to mass schooling 
found an ingenious ally in quasi-participatory colonial institutions, such as 
the municipalities, which were controlled by Brahmins, and later, by 
economically well-off non-Brahmin communities, not to mention local school 
boards. Paik notes that with the onset of dyarchic government in the 1920s, 
“the transfer of power to school boards was brutal for Dalits” (p. 65): 
commitments to equal access were foreclosed by the inequities of political and 
economic power, and the persistence of caste dominance in new forms and spaces.

Dalits were far from docile. Paik tracks the growth of Dalit protests at social 
exclusion in schools after 1920, especially challenges to the separate drinking 
water system. This chapter records the unfolding of a student strike against 
that system in Foras Road Municipal School in Bombay in 1929, which saw 
counter-response by upper castes who shut down the stock exchange and a protest 
against uppity Dalits by the upper-caste headmaster of the Agripada school. 
Such protests were a response to private initiatives, including by Ambedkar’s 
Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (Society for the Welfare of the Excluded), which 
followed upon numerous local initiatives by Dalits across the region, and by V. 
R. Shinde’s Depressed Classes Mission to establish separate schools, though 
these were never as numerous as in Bengal, or the Tamil country. Ambedkar also 
argued for free and compulsory schooling, and struggled to mobilize public 
funds for that purpose. While the chapter focuses on the issue of Dalit 
schooling under conditions of severe inequity, it ends by noting efforts by 
Congress to shift focus away from the issue of free and compulsory education 
toward the cause of education for girls. Indeed by 1940, “upper-caste men 
appeared to reason that by replacing government high schools with girls’ 
schools, they would set women against Dalits, creating a rivalry between the 
two marginalized groups” (p. 66).

The third and fourth chapters of this section on Dalit women’s education 
precede a chapter that asks what education meant for Dalits and lower castes. 
Paik notes that Ambedkar’s focus on integrated schooling was distinctive when 
compared to Jotirao Phule’s arguments half a century earlier for developing 
intellectual confidence among Dalits and lower castes through separate schools, 
and when contrasted with Gandhi’s argument for separate schooling as a stopgap 
measure while generating upper-caste consent to integrated schooling. Paik 
connects these projects of transformative education with such thinkers as 
Antonio Gramsci, Franz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and John Dewey, whose investment in 
civic education and the autonomy of critical thought had a deep impact on 
Ambedkar.[1]

Dalit women’s education was forged in this context of viewing education as the 
right to think.[2] Across two rich chapters Paik addresses the unique 
relationship that was forged between Dalit reform, women’s public participation 
in politics, and the quiet but profound transformations that ensued from 
becoming educated. She argues that concerns with sexual respectability and 
bourgeois morality compromised the project of female education from the start. 
“There was a major concern with women’s ‘difference’ that resulted in much 
public debate about curricula, syllabi, textbooks, and even the best location 
for girls’ education. Hence, a major issue in women’s education was the 
emphasis on a ‘feminised’ curriculum” (p. 117). The idea of curricular 
distinction between men’s and women’s schooling was an idea supported by Hindu 
reformers, such as B. G. Tilak and V. S. Chiplunkar, while only a handful of 
men, such as G. G. Agarkar and the sexologist R. D. Karve, supported 
coeducation and a single curriculum. Meanwhile, ideas of “protection” pervaded 
institutions like Pandita Ramabai’s Seva Sadan (1889) and Karve’s Hingne home 
(1896) for deserted widows and upper-caste women fleeing abusive circumstances. 
The fact that there were only two women from the Depressed Classes against a 
total of sixty-eight women in Karve’s home testifies to the “double 
discrimination” Dalit women faced.

Paik’s analysis of the different emphasis of Dalit women’s education, its focus 
on svaabhimaan (respect) and svaavalamban (self-reliance) is the crux of her 
argument. She reminds us that the Starte Committee noted in 1927 that of 
1,983,415 girls from the Backward Class, 5,739 girls were receiving primary 
education, while another 159 girls were in middle school. Only one girl was in 
high school, and none was receiving university education (pp. 125-126). Dalit 
women were all too aware, and demanded educational equality, not merely 
differential access. “Caste identity, rather than gender, was the primary 
framework of political identity. While Dalit women battled to recover their 
individual and collective self-esteem, and to uplift their community, they also 
faced social discrimination at the hands of their upper-caste ‘fortunate’ 
sisters” (p. 132). Indeed the unmarked universality of liberal feminism 
confronted Dalit women’s claims to equality through struggle and solidarity: 
when they elided caste to claim gender equality, upper-caste feminists found 
themselves confronting Dalit women’s demands for a practical illustration of 
equality across the divide of caste, class, and gender.

Paik introduces us to the spate of organizational activism in which Dalit women 
were involved, from participation in the All-India Dalit Mahila Congress, to 
the establishment of an Untouchable Women’s Society in Amravati in 1921, and 
participation in the important temple-entry satyagrahas of the 1920s and early 
1930s. The climax came in 1942, at the Women’s Conference of the All-India 
Scheduled Caste Federation (AISCF) in Nagpur when Sulochana Dongre and 
Shantabai Dani spoke before twenty-five thousand women. This was soon followed 
by a Women’s Conference in Kanpur in 1944 attended by Dongre, while Dani was 
the chairperson of the Women’s Council of the AISCF that organized that Kanpur 
meeting, and functioned as secretary of the Bombay branch of the Scheduled 
Caste Federation. Paik notes that while Dalit communities privileged sexual 
respectability and bourgeois morality, they were also adamant about the 
significance of female political participation and public visibility in the 
Ambedkarite project to create a “confident, masculine Dalit womanhood” (p. 
176). There was surely a deep and enduring contradiction between the focus on 
emancipation as a collective project by streepurush (women-men, the term coined 
by Phule in the later nineteenth century to signal gender equality) and efforts 
to regulate female sexuality in the cause of gender modernization. Paik accepts 
this struggle to conceive a viable subject of political feminism but she 
argues, nonetheless, for a Dalit feminism that grew out of experiences of 
social exclusion and Ambedkarite revolution that was markedly different in 
character from liberal feminism.

Paik’s second section, “Paradox of Education,” is a tour de force, which 
considers the ongoing effects of caste and class in shaping Dalit women’s 
subjectivity. She focuses on women’s experience of gendered precarity and 
spatial inequality as mutually entailed, structuring forces. Through a 
discussion of the geography of Pune’s and Mumbai’s slums, Paik argues that 
young Dalit women who are subject to repeated insult and humiliation in the 
classroom, correlate identity with the inhabitation of stigmatized space, as do 
upper castes who enact forms of “urban indifference” and outright casteism. The 
book’s focus on the social disciplining of the senses—smell, speech, dress, 
gait—is a profound exercise in social psychology; Paik shows us that this is 
coeval with these young women’s fierce desire to better their lives, often via 
access to government incentives, to escape grinding poverty.

Escaping to the middle class is a key aspiration, and it marks an important 
milestone within the life of the community. Yet Paik reminds us, across three 
powerful chapters, that Dalit women’s aspirational mobility requires a daily 
confrontation with caste stereotype in public, and fraught engagements in 
intimate life with husbands, in-laws, and children. “The middle-class Hindu 
ideal of marriage, the unacceptability of divorce and the agony of perpetual 
oppression by men thus affected many women” (p. 309). New sites of struggle 
appear even as earlier paradigms are left behind.

Paik’s book is a profound meditation on the enduring effects of caste, class, 
and gender as these affect individual lives contingently, but through the path 
dependency of Maharashtrian social history. One wishes, at times, for a better 
sense of the complicated intellectual and political histories that shaped the 
terrain Paik describes, but then we would lose sight of the everyday, and the 
embodied experience of Dalit gender she provides. I would opt for the latter 
any day given the sheer paucity of such work, and the sophistication of Paik’s 
analysis.

The publication of Paik’s book coincides with a rise in Dalit activism. Many 
will recall the suicide of the doctoral student Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad 
after a lifelong experience with caste discrimination and social exclusion. 
That suicide has mobilized young Dalits to challenge social exclusion and 
intellectual invisibility. Set against this history of the present, Paik’s book 
is a powerful and enduring reminder of why the project of mass intellectuality 
is among anti-casteism’s most lasting legacies.

Notes

[1]. Arun Prabha Mukherjeee, “B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of 
Democracy,” New Literary History 40, no. 2 (2009): 345-370. Mukherjee’s article 
offers an important textual analysis of Ambedkar’s engagement with Dewey’s 
writing.

[2]. The political philosopher Jacques Ranciere reminds us that the right to 
think also involves the right to think otherwise as he engages with what might 
be termed an intellectual history of subaltern thought. Jacques Ranciere, 
Proletarian Nights: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. 
John Drury (London: Verso, 2012).

========================================
20. THROUGH A CHARRED LANDSCAPE | Uddalak Mukherjee
========================================
(The Telegraph - 4 November 2016)

THE BURNING FOREST: INDIA'S WAR IN BASTAR By Nandini Sundar, Juggernaut, Rs 699

In a recent interview, Ashis Nandy, one of India's foremost commentators, was 
asked whether he foresaw a future - say, in the next 100 years - in which 
India, following the American model, would succeed in consigning its indigenous 
people to designated reserves. Nandy replied that India's tribal people have 
been systematically displaced and "atomized", and, contrary to perception, 
there is a possibility of indigenous communities being exterminated. Nandini 
Sundar's book etches the chilling contours of the mechanism of their 
elimination in Bastar.

The Maoist insurrection - 'India's single biggest security threat' in the words 
of a former prime minister - has attracted the attention of writers, 
journalists and researchers. Sundar's book stands out in this body of work 
because it lays claim to being one of the most rounded accounts of the strife. 
Sundar draws on her long years of field work to give her book a depth that has 
eluded most other narratives. She also honours the fundamental tenets of 
anthropological enquiry. Even though Sundar experiences the horrors - 
vicariously or otherwise - that are being perpetrated on a vulnerable people, 
she refrains from taking sides. Yet, this distancing is not shorn of empathy. 
It is this rare balance that enables the book to capture the voices of a people 
trapped between a predatory State and its resilient enemy.

A Maoist sympathizer had once described his comrades as 'spirits of 
conscience'. Their secretive ways, brought about by State persecution, have 
contributed to their spectral presence in the public imagination. (In her 
insightful and moving essay, "Walking with the Comrades", Arundhati Roy 
recounted receiving nothing more than a cryptic note as a sign for her to 
travel to Bastar.) Sundar's research plugs the gap in public knowledge with her 
detailing of rebel organizations and their functions. In the documentation of 
the Maoist hierarchy, Sundar notes - not without irony - that their antagonism 
for State paraphernalia notwithstanding, the Maoists have ended up emulating 
some of the State's ritual trappings, such as a flag as well as a calendar of 
commemorative events.

Sundar's chronicling of the Salwa Judum's depredations is exhaustive. The 
Cherla Testimonies - public accounts of the murders, rape and arson committed 
by the Judum - would force readers to confront India's claim of being an 
unsullied democracy. The tales of Judum's excesses have, over the years, slowly 
trickled into the public domain. The importance of Sundar's research lies in 
providing the larger context to the violence of democratic institutions. Sundar 
contends, not without reason, that Maoist opposition to the State's design to 
strip Bastar of its mineral wealth has brought about this vicious response. 
India's earlier experiments in Mizoram, where the State let loose its army on 
armed dissidents, causing death, destruction and mass displacement - "grouping" 
is the term used to describe the resettling of people into fortified camps - 
served as the template for security operations in Bastar and Dantewada. The 
'collateral damage', the expression used to describe the deaths and human 
rights abuses by smug security analysts and urban commentators, is now there 
for all to see. Sundar draws our attention to other - less discussed - aspects 
of the conflict. Health services have been crippled; literacy rates have 
plunged; the landscape has been fragmented - "The highways became Judum 
territory, and the villages became Maoist country" - and there have been 
disturbing demographic shifts. There has been a surge in immigration of 
non-adivasi groups and tehsils have become urbanized: Bhairamgarh, which had a 
negligible urban population, is now a statutory town.

The book accommodates varied, undocumented voices belonging not just to State 
representatives and their adversaries but also to those who occupy the lower 
rungs in the warring camps. The Special Police Officers emerge as troubled, 
tragic figures. They talk of having escaped trials for their crimes but concede 
that their lives, nonetheless, are marked by meagre pay, ethnic discrimination 
and the constant terror of retribution at the hands of Maoists. Women SPOs - 
the victims of entrenched patriarchy - are worse off, preyed upon by the police 
and allotted menial tasks inside the camps. Where these diverse voices, those 
of the victims and the perpetrators, intersect is in the projection of the 
conflict as a futile, unrelenting war. A CRPF official tells Sundar, "If we 
die, there will be more where we came from... And if they die, there will also 
be more where they came from. As long as the forces are... replenished the war 
will continue."

The discourse on Bastar's civil war has, expectedly, been appropriated by the 
government. The narrative has been simplified - the benevolent State battling 
insurgents opposed to development - by successive dispensations. But Sundar 
diffuses the lines, thereby making it difficult for citizens and readers to 
choose sides. The Judum's perversity has, on occasion, been matched by Maoist 
retaliations. The exploration of Chhattisgarh's parallel economy also reveals 
significant areas of collusion among the stakeholders - the Maoists, 
politicians and businessmen.

Sundar takes care not to reduce her narrative to an account of the Maoists and 
their struggle. Her book is a thorough examination of a democratic State's ruse 
to project a contest over the denial of rights and distributive justice as a 
law-and-order problem. This sleight-of-hand, Sundar argues, would not have been 
possible without the State's aggressive agenda exemplified in the 
militarization of the collective imagination and the co-option of the media, 
law and human rights organizations.

Sundar remarks that the book had been written as a response to the rage she 
felt at the "annihilation of a people and their way of life". The bleak tone is 
warranted, given the erosion in dialogue and the profits accrued from the 
conflict. The dystopian future that Ashis Nandy predicted may be nearer than we 
think.


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

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/

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