South Asia Citizens Wire | 22 September, 2004 via: www.sacw.net
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[1] India Pakistan Peace March : From Delhi to Multan (23rd March 2005 on . . . )
[2] Religious bigotry, intolerance . . . affecting the entire subcontinent ... (Mollica Dastider)
[3] Pakistan: HRCP urges women to condemn Iraqi abductors seeking revocation of French law
[4] India: Large Dams in India: Temples or Burrial Grounds (Robert Jensen)
[5] India: Shaheed Niyogi Memorial Award for Journalism 2004 for P. Sainath, Subhash Gatade
[6] Publication announcement: "The Law Reform Proposals Relating to the Rights of Sex Workers and Sexual Offences in India"
[7] India: Online petition in favour of Dr. D'Mello: a victim of Hindutva
[8] Book Review: 'The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason By Sam Harris" (reviewed by Natalie Angier)
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[1]
INDIA PAKISTAN PEACE MARCH
A peace march is being planned by PIPFPD (Pakistan India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy) starting from Delhi, on 23rd March and will make its way to Multan, on 11th May, 2005.
Probably nowhere in the world do we have a situation where people are as emotionally entwined as between India and Pakistan and yet there is an enmity thrust upon them. The cruel turn of events in history resulted in political separation leading to a bloody migration of masses of people. Family links were severed and a deep scars were left. Even the post partition history has remained quite tumultuous, interspersed with four wars and loss of innumerable innocent lives. Kashmir remains a sore point between India and Pakistan threatening to take both countries to self-destruction. Even though common people never benefit from violence and hatred, fundamentalists groups within religion and politics in South Asia have ensured that the animosity will continue to take heavy toll on both sides.
Common people on both sides are now fed up of being targets of violence and of atmosphere of antagonism. They want friendship, peace and normal relations to be established between the two countries. We have seen that even though the ruling elites of the two countries are usually suspicious of each other, whenever the common people of the two countries get to meet, all walls of reservation against each other melt as warm emotions of affinity surge. It is like people of same family meeting each other after years of forced separation. Enmity, hatred and distance are only superficial and soon give way to warmth and friendship.
We feel that if real peace and friendship has to be established between the common people of India and Pakistan, the initiative will have to be taken by people themselves. So far, the governments have created trade and travel barriers between the two countries preventing easy access to the other country and free mingling among the people. However, now there is a subtle change in the atmosphere. The governments seem more willing than before to allow the people of two countries to interact freely and also seem to be supportive of the people-to-people level initiatives. Various initiatives are being undertaken. We plan to organize a peace march between Delhi and Multan beginning March 23, 2005. The long march will allow peace-loving people of both countries to participate in the grassroots initiative for peace and friendship and will help build an atmosphere among the common people of the two countries, which will ultimately persuade the two governments to follow suit.
For more details about the peace march or interest in participating in the peace march [...]
Subscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to receive regular information about the peace march or send mail to moderator at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
All persons wishing to march must register by 1st December, 2004 with their passport details.
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[2]
The Telegraph September 21, 2004
NO COUNTRY IS SAFE ANYMORE
Religious bigotry, intolerance and the discourse of exclusivity are affecting the entire subcontinent, and not merely Bangladesh, argues Mollica Dastider.
The author is fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi
"It is a question of ideology. We are against fanaticism while they are against secularism", claimed a shaken Sheikh Hasina Wajed, opposition leader of Bangladesh, after surviving an assassination attempt during a political rally in Dhaka. The rally was, among other things, to protest against the government's sponsoring of religious extremist forces. Politics in Bangladesh, in keeping with the trend in the subcontinent, has taken a decisive turn towards extreme polarization on this issue. While the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its radical Islamist allies insist on a more explicitly Islamic identity of the Bangladeshi people, the opposition Awami League has been forced to spell out its anti-fundamentalist position.
"[It] is high time for all to offer a united resistance [to religious fanatics]," Hasina urged, "otherwise none [in] this country will ever be safe." However, Begum Khaleda Zia's political secretary told the BBC that Bangladesh remains "established and identified as a moderate Islamic country". But the recent assertions of Islamist terrorist groups in this fourth-largest Muslim majority country of the world clearly shows that battle lines are drawn between the fanatics, democrats and secularists"here.
The growing erosion of secular values is well demonstrated by the visible apathy of the BNP regime in bringing to book the zealots who indulge in terror. The alarming rise in Islamist militancy is particularly evident in north-eastern Sylhet and the Chittagong provinces, where subversive activities reached a peak in May this year. While a grenade attack injured the visiting British high commissioner at a Sufi shrine in Sylhet, the militants killed a senior Awami League leader in Satkhira, murdered a newspaper editor and, more recently, killed another Awami League activist in Sylhet. Besides threatening to stop the circulation of the country's leading daily, Pratham Alo, for reporting extremist activities in Chittagong, they have managed to back up their persecution of the Ahmadiya community with a government ban on the latter's worship and literature. These developments, together with the apparent unconcern of the regime in expediting investigations into violence, only underscore the belief that the BNP's coalition partners Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamic Oikya Jote simply do not want the government to pursue the terrorists. The public reiteration of the jihadis to kill Hasina Wajed further exposes the immunity enjoyed by them in the country's civil and political space.
Even though the Awami League has been at the receiving end of extremist ire, its secular credentials are also open to question. When it enjoyed power in the past, the party showed a clear lack of political will to check the activities of pro-taliban Islamic radicals, apparently so as not to lose support of the Islamic constituencies in the country.
Hasina Wajed's public appearance as a devout Muslim during the 2001 general elections illustrated this aptly. Furthermore, on the eve of the elections, when systematic violence was unleashed against religious minorities in the countryside to deter them from exercising their voting rights, the Awami League did little to resist the persecution. Despite its well-entrenched support base in rural Bangladesh, the party sought to silently tide over the episode, lest it be branded anti-Islamist before the general elections. Nonetheless, its current desperation to save Bangladeshi civil and political society from fanatics calls for the urgent attention of democratic forces of all hues.
From the partition of Bengal on the basis of the "two nation" theory, to the assertion of Bengali nationalism against Pakistan to the latest refashioning of an Islamic identity the history of Bangladesh has proceeded in a strange spiral. If the native peasantry's Islamic identity was the original ground to secede from a Hindu zamindar-dominated Bengal, for East Pakistan, this identity mattered little during its struggle against the Urdu-speaking Pakistani rulers. Yet the centrality of Bengali language and cultural nationalism that so animated the liberation of Bangladesh seems powerless today to resist a return to an orthodox Islamic fold. In effect, this Islamic Bangladeshi identity aims to dissolve, once and for all, the shared space of Bangladeshi people with the Indian and Hindu Bengalis, and to deny the cultural traditions that upset all exclusive nationalist frameworks and religious borders.
The BNP is now intent on appropriating Islamic symbols for its legitimacy. But the supervening role of Islam was reiterated in the Eighties when General H.M. Ershad declared Islam as state religion. This process has met with sporadic but powerful public resistance, but has been unleashed once more in recent years. The aim is to drive a permanent wedge between the Islamic and the syncretic Bengal, erasing residues of the secular Bengali nationalism once upheld by the constitution of Bangladesh.
Of course, the rise of "Islamophobia" in the Anglo-American bloc makes it easy for fundamentalists across the world (Christian right, the Zionists and Hindutvavadis) to equate Islam with terrorism. But the appeal of Islamist militancy among the poor and marginalized in Muslim majority countries is also taken as a licence by political elites to flirt with the forces of Islamic obscurantism. The primary identity of the Bangladeshi people is an emotional and ideological battleground today, making it extremely vulnerable to intolerant discourses of exclusivity.
In fact, rather than isolate the case of Bangladesh, one needs to recognize that religious bigotry, intolerance and the discourse of exclusivity are factors affecting the subcontinent-- partitioned once on these grounds already. Such factors have not only led to a renewed and bitter polarization between the religious right and the tolerant liberals around us, but there is also a distinct parallel in the modus operandi of the forces involved. In its new avatar, religious majoritarianism has shrewdly resurfaced as a majority community-based nationalism, trying to eliminate inherent differences in our plural contexts, targeting minorities and fomenting waves of assault and subjugation in a ploy to gain political power. The overwhelming presence of the Hindutva forces in India, the first-ever electoral success of Jamaat-e-Islam in Bangladesh and the pro-taliban Muttahida Majlis-e Amal in Pakistan, are all symptomatic of this particular development. The polarization in Bangladesh between Muslims and non-Muslims is no different from that in India.
Should this be taken to mean that religious extremism in one country is in reaction to the extremism spawned in the neighbouring land? This theory has many takers even among seasoned observers who explain the developments in Bangladesh as a response to prior developments in India and in the West. Not surprisingly, Bangladeshi fundamentalists warm up to such explanations quite easily, and their representatives spare no effort in underscoring the point. No one can deny that the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 and the subsequent rise of the Hindu right in India did play an extremely significant role in the process. But the adoption of this reaction theory in effect leads one to unduly ignore the internal factors behind Bangladesh�*�s Islamization, factors that reveal the relative lack of its development under successive regimes. More important, such a view wrongly pits the Hindu right and Islamist right as antagonist forces, missing their underlying proximity in action and rhetoric.
The factor that binds these forces together is their identical hate campaigns against the respective religious other-- Muslims in India and Hindus in Bangladesh. The so-called cultural nationalist agendas are premised upon excluding the other in each context, which becomes the self in another location. This is how they draw a positive sustenance from the mutual conflict, targeting in common the democratic ethos of the region. Thus, we are told that nationalism is another word for Hindutva by the Bharatiya Janata Party after its chintan baithak in Goa, or that Uma Bharti is a staunch nationalist fighting the "pro-Muslim, anti-national" Congress in India.
On a similar vein, the Bangladeshi Islamists adopt a nationalist pose and dismiss the minority persecution in their country as mere "anti-Bangladesh campaign" by the "pro-India" opposition of Sheikh Hasina. Together, they constitute a south Asian political fraternity, and this is what political analysts need to recognize.
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[3]
The Daily Times - September 2, 2004
HRCP URGES WOMEN TO CONDEMN IRAQI ABDUCTORS
ISLAMABAD: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan condemned the kidnapping of two French journalists by terrorists in Iraq and urged Muslim women to raise their voice against such attacks.
"It is important that Muslim women around the world make it clear that the militants guilty of barbarianism in Iraq do not represent them," said a statement issued by the commission. "They should make it absolutely clear that these insurgents do not speak for their political and religious concerns. Their actions have already tarnished the image of Islam and threaten to inflict still more damage in the future.
The journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, were kidnapped last month by a Sunni Muslim group called the Islamic Army of Iraq. The group has demanded that France repeal the controversial law that disallows Muslim women from wearing head scarves. The law also bans other outward signs of religious affiliation in French public schools and is scheduled to take effect this week. Despite the terrorists' threats, French officials have asserted that the law will stand.
"It is time that Muslims around the world dissociate themselves from the acts of such militants," said the HRCP statement. [...].
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[4]
Counterpunch.org | September 21, 2004
LARGE DAMS IN INDIA: TEMPLES OR BURRIAL GROUNDS by Robert Jensen
FULL TEXT AT URL: www.counterpunch.org/jensen09212004.html
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[5]
The Hindu- Sep 22, 2004
AWARD FOR P. SAINATH
By Our Special Correspondent
CHENNAI, SEPT. 21. The Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu , P. Sainath, has won the Shaheed Niyogi Memorial Award for Journalism 2004 for writings on labour issues and the workers movement.
The second prize was shared by Subhash Gatade, a freelance journalist in New Delhi, and Susheel Sharma of Bastar Bandhu, Kanker, Chhattisgarh. Special inspirational prizes would be given to Kumar Pankaj of Rashtriya Sahara, New Delhi; Anuj Sinha of Prabhat Khabar, Jamshedpur; Shyam Kishore Sharma of Hari Bhoomi, Rajim, Chhattisgarh; and Kamal Kamokar of Nav Bharat Times, Raipur.
The award will be given on September 28 during the public meeting organised by the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha to observe Shaheed Niyogi's "shahadaat diwas."
The jury, consisting of Kuldip Nayar, Anand Swaroop Verma and Jameela Nishat, took into consideration writings during the last three years.
The award was instituted in 1998 to recognise the contribution of journalists in upholding the legacy of Shanker Guja Niyogi, the firebrand trade union leader and social activist from Chhattisgarh who was murdered on September 28, 1991 by the industrial mafia.
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[6]
New Publication by Centre for Feminist Legal Research (CFLR)
"The Law Reform Proposals Relating to the Rights of Sex Workers and Sexual Offences in India"
In the memorandum, the Centre for Feminist Legal Research (CFLR) examines the existing legal provisions that regulate sex work and unpack some of the underlying assumptions on which these laws are based. Our intention is to assist sex workers groups represented by the National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW) and especially those advocating for law reform on their behalf, to fully understand the implications of the existing legal provisions on the rights of sex workers, sexual minorities, quite specifically, and on women more generally. This memorandum is further designed to assist in developing an informed approach towards law reform in this area. Finally, this document is intended to assist policy makers and lawmakers who will ultimately engage in the practical work of reform laws the deal with the rights of sex workers and other similarly disadvantaged groups.
We review the existing law relating to sex work, and explore the limitations with regard to its implementation. On the basis of these insights, CFLR has developed some law reform proposals that are designed to eliminate the provisions, which adversely impact on the rights of sex workers, sexual minorities and other women, and propose amendments that will facilitate their rights. The memorandum does not take a stand for or against sex work, but does take the view that human rights are non-negotiable. Rights are an essential tool for fighting abuse, exploitation, and harm, and should not be made contingent on the nature of the work in which an individual engages nor curtailed in the name of conservative sexual morality.
Suggested Contribution: INR - Rs.125/- US$ 10
Centre for Feminist Legal Research Flat No. 5, 45 Friends Colony (East) New Delhi-110 065, India www.cflr.org/
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[7] [ONLINE PETITION]
[September 17, 2004]
Dear Friends:
Dr. Bernard D'Mello, a professor of management and economics at MDI-Gurgaon (Haryana, India) has been targeted by the institute's administration for removal because of his opposition to the administration's promotion of a communal agenda and its underhanded ways. In an EPW article of November 1999 he had critiqued Hindutva influences in management education and also challenged MDI's attempt to invite RSS ideologues to the MDI campus.
It is very important that we put pressure on India's Union Minister for HRD Arjun Singh, and the Union Minister for Finance P. Chidambaram to intervene in this case and deliver justice to Dr. D'Mello. Purges like this are artifacts of the anti-intellectual HRD policies of the erstwhile BJP-led NDA government, and need to be addressed in the spirit of fairness and protection of academic freedom.
Please take a moment to sign an electronic petition in favour of Dr. D'Mello. The petition is available at http://www.petitiononline.com/dmello1/petition.html
Thank you, Rakhi Sehgal
Doctoral Candidate/American University, Washington, DC (USA) Currently in New Delhi for research
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[8] [BOOK REVIEW]
New York Times, September 5, 2004 | Book Review Desk
'The End of Faith': Against Toleration By NATALIE ANGIER
THE END OF FAITH Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. By Sam Harris. 336 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
When I was 8 years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother's living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father's Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle's station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
It's not often that I see my florid strain of atheism expressed in any document this side of the Seine, but ''The End of Faith'' articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood. Sam Harris presents major religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of socially sanctioned lunacy, their fundamental tenets and rituals irrational, archaic and, important when it comes to matters of humanity's long-term survival, mutually incompatible. A doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America: ''We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common, we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad,' 'psychotic' or 'delusional.' '' To cite but one example: ''Jesus Christ -- who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose bodily into the heavens -- can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad?'' The danger of religious faith, he continues, ''is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.''
Right now, if you are even vaguely observant, or have friends or grandmothers who are, you may be feeling not merely irritated, as you would while reading a political columnist with whom you disagree, but deeply offended. You may also think it inappropriate that a mainstream newspaper be seen as obliquely condoning an attack on religious belief. That reaction, in Harris's view, is part of the problem. ''Criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.''
A zippered-lip policy would be fine, a pleasant display of the neighborly tolerance that we consider part of an advanced democracy, Harris says, if not for the mortal perils inherent in strong religious faith. The terrorists who flew jet planes into the World Trade Center believed in the holiness of their cause. The Christian apocalypticists who are willing to risk a nuclear conflagration in the Middle East for the sake of expediting the second coming of Christ believe in the holiness of their cause. In Harris's view, such fundamentalists are not misinterpreting their religious texts or ideals. They are not defaming or distorting their faith. To the contrary, they are taking their religion seriously, attending to the holy texts on which their faith is built. Unhappily for international comity, the Good Books that undergird the world's major religions are extraordinary anthologies of violence and vengeance, celestial decrees that infidels must die.
In the 21st century, Harris says, when swords have been beaten into megaton bombs, the persistence of ancient, blood-washed theisms that emphasize their singular righteousness and their superiority over competing faiths poses a genuine threat to the future of humanity, if not the biosphere: ''We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation,'' he writes, ''because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.''
Harris reserves particular ire for religious moderates, those who ''have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths'' and who ''imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.'' Religious moderates, he argues, are the ones who thwart all efforts to criticize religious literalism. By preaching tolerance, they become intolerant of any rational discussion of religion and ''betray faith and reason equally.''
Harris, no pure materialist, acknowledges the human need for a mystical dimension to life, and he conveys something of a Buddhist slant on the nature of consciousness and reality. But he believes that mysticism, like other forms of knowledge, can be approached rationally and explored with the tools of modern neuroscience, without recourse to superstition and credulity.
''The End of Faith'' is far from perfect. Harris seems to find ''moral relativism'' as great a sin as religious moderation, and in the end he singles out Islam as the reigning threat to humankind. He likens it to the gruesome, Inquisition-style Christianity of the 13th century, yet he never explains how Christianity became comparatively domesticated. And on reading his insistence that it is ''time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development,'' I couldn't help but think of Ann Coulter's morally developed suggestion that we invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert their citizens to Christianity.
Harris also drifts into arenas of marginal relevance to his main thesis, attacking the war against drugs here, pacificism there, and offering a strained defense for the use of torture in wartime that seems all the less persuasive after Abu Ghraib. Still, this is an important book, on a topic that, for all its inherent difficulty and divisiveness, should not be shielded from the crucible of human reason.
Natalie Angier has written about atheism and science for The Times, The American Scholar and elsewhere.
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Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on matters of peace and democratisation in South Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit citizens wire service run since 1998 by South Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
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