South Asia Citizens Wire - Dispatch #1 | 14 October, 2004 via: www.sacw.net
[1] Egypt : God Has 4,000 Loudspeakers; the State Holds Its Ears
[2] Pakistan: Uniformly Hypocritical - MMA opposition to Musharraf (Razi Azmi)
[3] Pakistan: Press Release HRCP condemns Multan outrage
[4] India - Observations re upcoming Maharashtra Elections
- The Battle For Maharashtra - Will BJP be the bigger loser? (Praful Bidwai)
- Beyond Bal Thackeray's beard (J Sri Raman)
[5] India: Land of Gandhi where citizens do not have right to know and Media is not FREE (Digant Oza)
[6] India: The International Day of Dalits' Struggle: Call for Solidarity
[7] Call for Papers on Partition and Migration
[8] Books and Book Reviews
[9] Upcoming events :
(i) Film Screening: Anand Patwardhan's "Father, Son, and Holy War"
(UC Berkeley - Oct. 22, 2004)
(ii) Seminar: History of Science and Religious Fundamentalism (Paris, 23 October 2004)
(iii) 2nd National Convention Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP)
(November 26-28, 2004, Jaipur)
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[1] [Relevant material, from outside south asia]
New York Times, October 12, 2004 CAIRO JOURNAL
GOD HAS 4,000 LOUDSPEAKERS; THE STATE HOLDS ITS EARS By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Amro Marachi/Agence France-Presse--Getty Images The call to prayer in Cairo is sounded from loudspeakers in minarets.
Mohamed El-Dakhakhny for The New York Times Sheik Aly, a muezzin at Al Azhar mosque, gave the call the old way.
AIRO - Given the cacophony that afflicts any Cairo street - the braying donkeys, the caterwauling vegetable vendors, the constant honking of car horns - it might seem a particularly daunting task to single out just one noise to prosecute as the most offensive.
But the minister of religious endowments recently did that, more or less, making a somewhat unlikely decision in these times when many Muslim faithful believe that their religion is under assault.
The call to prayer, the minister declared, is out of control: too loud, too grating, utterly lacking in beauty or uniform timing, and hence in dire need of reform. The solution, the evidently fearless minister decided - harking back to an answer Egyptian bureaucrats have seized upon since long before Islam - is to centralize it.
The minister, Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq, announced that one official call to prayer would be broadcast live from one central Cairo mosque five times a day, and that it would be carried simultaneously by the 4,000-plus mosques and prayer halls across the capital.
From the ensuing national brouhaha - the outraged headlines, the scathing editorials, the heated debates among worshipers - one might gain the impression that Mr. Zaqzouq was leading an assault against Islam itself. "Minarets Weep," intoned one banner headline, while another suggested sarcastically that the minister was less than a good Muslim. "The Call to Prayer Upsets Minister," it read.
Comedians and intellectuals had a field day. Ali Salem, one of Egypt's leading playwrights, envisioned a turbaned, high-tech SWAT team dispatched across Cairo whenever one mosque or another inevitably sabotaged the centralized prayer-call operation.
Not everyone ridiculed the idea, though.
Secular Cairenes endorsed it as a possible means toward greater government control over all of the tiny storefront mosques that have often proved a font of violent, extremist Islam. And Mr. Zaqzouq insisted that his proposal enjoyed wide grass-roots popularity.
In the surging religious environment of the last decade, the multiplication of mosques and prayer halls is such that any random Cairo street might house half a dozen, each competing with the others in volume and staggering the timing of their call slightly in an effort to stand out.
Particularly at dawn prayers, some mosques blast not just the roughly dozen sentences of the call itself, but all of the Koranic verses and actual prayers intoned by the local imam. When three different mosques do the same thing, what should be an announcement lasting at most two minutes can drag on for 45 minutes, keeping the entire neighborhood awake.
"There are loudspeakers that shake the world," the minister protested. "Everyone hears them. Every day I receive bitter complaints from people about the loudspeakers, but when I ask them to register official complaints, they say they fear others will accuse them of being infidels."
Opponents, meanwhile, express deep outrage at the very idea of someone tampering with the tradition of each mosque having its own muezzin, of different voices echoing across the city in a continuous round.
"During the time of the Prophet there used to be more than one mosque in each town, in each quarter, and he didn't unify the prayer, so why do it now?" asked Sheik Mustafa Ali Suliman, who works as a muezzin in a small mosque amid the twisting streets of Cairo's medieval quarter. "There is even a saying by the Prophet Muhammad that implies that in God's eyes muezzins will garner special honor and respect on judgment day."
Given the widespread sentiment that no decent Muslim could ever consider such a change, no small number of Cairo residents seized on the obvious alternative: it is a C.I.A. plot, they muttered, right up there with other American attacks on Islam, like demanding changes in the Muslim world's curriculums.
The conspiracy theorists further prophesied that the centralized system was just a test case for the real goal: to disseminate a single Friday Prayer sermon, written, naturally, in Langley, Va. The outcry reached such a level that the minister felt obliged to hold an hourlong news conference to quell the sense, as he put it, that doomsday was at hand.
The instructions had not, in fact, come from Washington, he said. Opponents call this initiative an American one, as if every step of reform should come through instructions from abroad, Zaqzouq said dismissively.
.
The most serious religious charge against him was that centralizing the call to prayer would amount to 'Bida' the Arabic term for any innovation that borders on heresy. While Saudi Arabia's Wahhabite clergymen tend to be the all-star team of bida police, slapping the label on practices like giving flowers to hospital patients or using mobile phones with cameras, declaring something bida in Egypt is far less common.
The minister was having none of it.
"The real bida is the loudspeaker," Zaqzouq said. "Islam did just fine without loudspeakers for 1,350 years." Any mosque where the muezzin wanted to actually climb up into the minaret and sing out the call to prayer without electronic amplification would be exempt from the centralized system, he vowed.
There were also dire predictions that the change would throw at least 100,000 muezzins out of work in a country already suffering severe unemployment. The minister noted that the proposal was just for Cairo, although the country's other 26 governorates could follow suit if they wanted, and that the capital had exactly 827 officially recognized muezzins who could surely find other useful tasks around each mosque.
Various clerics said they hoped the proposal would remain under study for years to come and indeed Salam, the playwright, unearthed a joke predating the automobile that he said underscored the timeless nature of the debate.
A Maltese visitor riding a donkey through an Egyptian village hears beautiful music and asks his dragoman the source. "That is our call to prayer, sir," the guide responds, and the Maltese adopts the Muslim faith on the spot.
By the next prayer time, a few hours later, they have arrived at a different village where the muezzin calls out with a particularly ugly, rasping voice. "Hurry up, hurry up" the dragoman says, beating the donkey to speed it through the village. Lest our visitor hear the muezzin and recant.?
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[2]
Daily Times October 14, 2004
UNIFORMLY HYPOCRITICAL by Razi Azmi | THINKING ALOUD
The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) has announced that it will launch a movement during Ramazan to force President Pervez Musharraf to 'give up his uniform'. So uniformly has the issue of President Musharraf's uniform dominated the political discourse in the country recently that a foreign reader of Pakistani newspapers may be excused for thinking that it is the main stumbling block in the nation's march to progress.
Foremost among those insisting that the president shed his 'uniform' are the religious parties now united in the MMA, which were zealously cooperating with President Zia ul Haq for over ten years, right until the day he blew up in mid-air wearing his uniform. The Jamaat-i-Islami had no compunction in joining his martial law government, yet it is now most vociferous in demanding that President Musharraf relinquish the post of chief of army staff. Judging by the intensity of their demand, one would think that the Islamist parties have suddenly discovered that Islam prohibits the holding of the two offices by the same person!
Whereas General Zia was a religious bigot, General Musharraf is by all accounts a liberal, secular-minded leader who would like to put Pakistan on the path of progress and extricate it from the stranglehold of fundamentalist and retrogressive forces, in the manner of Kemal Ataturk, whom he admires. Which explains why they are determined to harass and weaken him. But they need not worry, for except for a few FM radio stations blaring out a bit of rock music and some popular talk shows, there is precious little to show for his five years in power.
In fact, from a strategic perspective, things are much worse for the liberal-secular forces now than when Musharraf had taken over in 1999. Having been driven out of Kabul, the Taliban now run the government in two of the four provinces of Pakistan. The NWFP government is steadily enforcing Taliban-style Islam on the population and Talibanisation is creeping into the Punjab University in Lahore, which has now banned female students from going on educational trips with male students. Maulana Fazlur Rahman, a Taliban mentor, sits in the National Assembly as leader of the opposition. Maulana Samiul Haque's seminary, among others, graduates new Taliban for domestic duties as well as export. Qazi Hussain Ahmed struts about like he controls Pakistan's political destiny.
The process of the so-called Islamisation of Pakistan initiated by General Zia with great gusto over a quarter century ago seems to have reached a point of no return. Its consequences range from the ludicrous to the tragic. It allows the police to arrest Ahmadi brides and bridegrooms and their parents for the blasphemous act of printing Assalam-o-Alaikum and Bismillah ir Rahma ir Rahim on wedding invitations, just when the wedding guests are arriving. A woman who becomes pregnant as a result of being raped is convicted of adultery while the rapist goes scot-free for lack of four reliable, male eyewitnesses. Sunnis and Shias are now killing each other en masse while offering congregational prayers in mosques. The Islamists' only success, it seems, has been to dispatch more and more people to paradise, for all the victims of these sectarian massacres are assumed to have embraced martyrdom.
There is near-unanimity among Pakistanis that the Taliban's archaic laws contravene the spirit of Islam and should have no place in a modern, civilised society, yet Musharraf's government finds itself powerless to break the vice-like grip of the Islamists. Rather than rally the mainstream parties and secular forces, such as PML, PPP and those outside of political parties, myopic political expediency has made President Musharraf dependent on minor entities, opportunists and turncoats. This has forced him to clutch his uniform for political survival. In fairness to Musharraf it must be said that PML and PPP were not averse to making opportunistic alliances with the fundamentalists in the ten years when they took turns at government.
Survival having become Musharraf's primary concern, his reformist agenda has been consigned to oblivion. While his troops win battles against Al Qaeda forces ensconced in the Tribal Areas and his police ferrets them out from our cities, the madrassas continue to produce hundreds of jihadis for every one apprehended or killed. While the president preaches enlightened moderation to the world, our textbooks continue to impart lessons of hate and violence to our youth.
It will be recalled that Musharraf's government gave free rein to the five terrorists who had hijacked an Air India plane to Kandahar in 1999, along with the three militants who were released from Indian prisons in response to the hijackers' demand. No matter that the hijackers had stabbed to death an Indian passenger on his honeymoon trip. No matter that Pakistani law prescribes the death penalty for hijacking. They were allowed to resume their vocation in Pakistan and are now hunted by Pakistani forces. One cannot allow the country to be an incubator, a breeding ground and a safe haven for jihadis and then hope to succeed in stamping out the scourge of terrorism by chasing individual militants.
It is often said that the fundamentalists give too rigid and literal an interpretation of Islam, that the hate-mongers have "hijacked Islam". There is no shortage of Muslims who propound a liberal and progressive version of Islam, which allows Muslims to peacefully coexist with followers of other religions, respects women's rights, treats minorities fairly, and looks forward rather than backwards. Arguments are put forth, for instance, that Islam neither prescribes the burqa nor proscribes music, yet the fundamentalists are allowed an institutional monopoly to interpret Islam and to hold sway over mosques and madrassas, while the liberals limit themselves to expressing their views in drawing rooms and in articles and letters in English-language newspapers.
Is it not time for the liberal and progressive forces to wrest control over religious interpretation from these 'hijackers' and become pro-active rather than remaining reactive? It is obvious that, lacking institutional and state support, these individuals - despite being numerous - feel isolated, overwhelmed and intimidated before the organised power of the fundamentalists, who control the mosques and religious schools, which confer on them a monopoly over interpretation.
If he is serious about liberating the country from the grip of fanatical murderers and suicide maniacs, President Musharraf can and must use the government's control of television and radio to promote the moderate, liberal and progressive interpretation of Islam. The government must rewrite the curricula and bring madrassas and mosques under its control. It cannot fight a war against Al Qaeda and jihadi fundamentalists while allowing them to preach from the pulpit, indoctrinate through the classroom and teach terror and hate in the name of religion.
The fundamentalist forces are determined to force President Musharraf to shed his army uniform not because it is incompatible with democracy, which they denounce as a Western concept, but because their goal is to weaken him. Once that is achieved, the central government will be in total disarray. With Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in exile, the MMA will be in a strong position to launch its final bid for power at the centre, or so they hope.
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[3]
Text of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) Press Release HRCP condemns Multan outrage
Multan, 7 October 2004 :
MULTAN: The terrible sectarian terrorist outrage in Multan today, that has left at least 40 people dead and many dozens injured, is terrible testimony to the immense devastation and human suffering militant violence inflicts.
HRCP denounces the outrage in the strongest possible terms, and extends its condolences to all the bereaved families.
HRCP also holds the government must accept responsibility for the continuing cycle of violence. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, the country is paying for its investment over a considerable period of time in the training of raw minds and the provision of arms to unstable young men. Secondly, while dealing with the symptoms of sectarianism, the root causes have not been addressed. The government has made no effort to reclaim and rehabilitate youth claimed by blood-thirsty militants, or to better understand why they have chosen to turn to a life of violence and hatred. Merely blaming sectarian outfits for the killings is not enough.
As has been stated many times in the past, it is obvious the cycle of violence that has shattered so many families over the past two decades cannot be ended unless far broader-ranging policies are put in place. These must address difficult issues such as educational curriculums, the teaching offered at the thousands of seminaries in the country and problems such as unemployment and poverty, which have played a huge part in the growing social desperation and frustration among young people. No purpose can be served by arresting an odd militant or two, while thousands others are trained to kill and to maim.
It is clear too that policing alone cannot offer a solution to the spiraling violence. With the number of deaths in sectarian killings already having risen sharply over the past two years, the threat of more such attacks looms even more dangerously after the recent incidents in Sialkot and Multan. There is an increasingly urgent need to address the immediate threat by building a wider consensus on possible strategies to achieve this. Still more crucially, longer-term policies aimed at rooting out all violent trends and growing intolerance in society need to be put in place, to spare future generations the kind of misery terrorism has inflicted on so many citizens over the past decades.
Tahir Mohammad Khan Hina Jilani
Chairperson Secretary-general
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[4]
[2 Observations just prior to the State Assembly Elections in Maharashtra, India]
(i)
The Praful Bidwai Column October 11, 2004
THE BATTLE FOR MAHARASHTRA WILL BJP BE THE BIGGER LOSER?
By Praful Bidwai
As campaigning for the Maharashtra Assembly elections nears its end, opinion polls put the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party Democratic Front slightly ahead of the Shiv Sena-BJP. While an Indian Express-NDTV poll gives the DF 132 seats (of a total of 288) in a hung House and the Sena-BJP 111, a Telegraph-STAR poll gives the DF a slender majority (148) and its rival 128 seats. But an Aaj Tak-ORG-Marg survey forecasts a convincing majority (165-175) for the Congress-NCP and only 95-105 seats for the Sena-BJP.
In Maharashtra, pollsters could prove even more unreliable than elsewhere. There are any number of rebel candidates fighting the official nominees of the major parties; the contest is unevenly divided across regions, in which Vidarbha's 66 constituencies could play an important "swing" role; and Ms Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party has emerged a significant player even as the Republican Party factions traditionally supported by the Dalits face serious fragmentation and marginalisation. The greatest uncertainty arises from the internal revolts brewing in all the four big parties.
Perhaps the greatest churning is taking place inside the Congress, which split five years ago, leading to the NCP's creation. The Congress/NCP both remain plagued by multiple crises. Scores of former Congress/NCP candidates who stood second in the 1999 Assembly elections now aspire to a ticket. (Some probably will win the elections.) Some 110 Congress rebels and 60 NCP rebels are reportedly contesting against their parties' official candidates. Bandkhors (rebels) are spoiling the party for the NCP, and to an extent, the BJP too.
However, the greatest-and newest-loser from the ubiquitous phenomenon of "rebellion" in Maharashtra will be the Shiv Sena. This is because in the Sena's leadership succession battle, Mr Bal Thackeray has sided with his son Uddhav against his nephew Raj, who is far and away the more capable and better-known organiser. The Raj Thackeray faction will work against official candidates and damage their chances. Uddhav's elevation has also put off Messrs Narayan Rane and Manohar Joshi, both former Chief Ministers, who (especially, Mr Rane) can claim a political base. Mr Rane feels especially cheated because his government was prematurely dissolved in 1999 as a result of the BJP's insistence on an early Assembly election. In the past, the Sena supremo would resolve internal differences through his network of patronage. But big cracks are now visible in that network because of his son's new role as working president.
Another new factor will shape the Maharashtra electoral contest. That is Big Money. Following the Election Commission's orders, about 200 candidates have declared assets worth Rs one crore to Rs 100 crores! Of these, as many as 54 candidates are not even registered as income-tax payees-a terrible comment on their probity. In addition, there are hundreds of candidates (of a total of 2,678) who are no longer bound to any party leaders through campaign-finance arrangements. They act more as individual political entrepreneurs. This too complicates matters.
The issue of separate statehood for Vidarbha (which was earlier part of the Central Provinces and Berar) will influence the elections. The statehood demand is growing. Vidarbha admittedly has a "development backlog" thanks to the non-fulfilment of promises made at the time of its merger into Maharashtra. The Congress is divided over the demand. The BJP is inclined to support it, but its ally (the Sena) vehemently opposes it. The BSP alone strongly advocates separate statehood. This could help it win many votes in the region where 20 percent of the population is Dalit (or Adivasi) and another 40 percent is OBC.
In the last Lok Sabha elections, the fast-expanding BSP caused a loss of nine seats to the Congress-NCP in Maharashtra. This time around, it could affect about 50 Assembly seats. Large sections of Dalit youth are disillusioned with the constantly warring RPI factions organised around individuals like Messrs Ramdas Athavale, Prakash Ambedkar, R.S. Gavai and Jogendra Kavade, which ally with this or that party as a subordinate force. Many youth are attracted to Ms Mayawati's strategy of an independent, exclusive Dalit party, which seeks to tilt the balance of power.
Amidst this political mosaic, the Congress-NCP is working up a high-energy campaign, in which it has a distinct advantage over its rival. Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr Bal Thackeray were too ill to campaign for the BJP-Sena except in the very last phase. Mr Advani is no substitute for them. Nor are BJP top state leaders Pramod Mahajan and Gopinath Munde. By contrast, Ms Sonia Gandhi has been attracting huge crowds. Along with Mr Sharad Pawar, her canvassing will certainly make a difference to the election.
The real question is, Will vigorous campaigning help overcome the DF's anti-incumbency burden? This burden is real. The Front has failed to provide even remotely decent governance and has changed Chief Ministers midstream. Mr Sushilkumar Shinde, no resolute leader himself, hasn't improved matters much.
The Congress-NCP could, in a worst-case scenario, lose the Maharashtra elections-although the Sena-BJP is unlikely to get a thumping majority. (It might form a shaky government by allying with the unreliable BSP and independents, etc.) A defeat in Maharashtra will represent a significant setback for the Congress and the UPA in general. But it's unlikely to be a grave, leave alone fatal, setback. Soon after Maharashtra, Assembly elections are due in Bihar, Jharkhand and Haryana, which the BJP and its allies are likely to lose. This will have a more decisive influence on the national trend.
The NDA faces a likely rout in Bihar, where the Janata Dal (United), which once had 30-odd MPs, is fragmented and badly depleted. The JD(U) performed disastrously in the last Lok Sabha elections. All its Central ministers lost, barring Mr George Fernandes and Mr Nitish Kumar (who scraped through). The JD(U)-BJP are no match for the RJD-Congress.
In contrast to the Congress, a defeat in Maharashtra will mean a heavy loss for the BJP-NDA. A power struggle has already broken out in the BJP, driven by competition for succession to the first-rung leadership. As Mr Advani recently indicated in a BBC interview, neither he nor Mr Vajpayee will probably head any future BJP government at the Centre-assuming it forms one. This has spurred the "second-generation" aspirants-all of them ambitious men and women-to stake out their territories and position themselves for a fierce battle with one another. They include Messrs M. Venkaiah Naidu, Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitly, Rajnath Singh, and Ms Uma Bharati and Sushma Swaraj. None of them has a well-defined independent social base or constituency.
Their factional alignments with one another became apparent during Ms Bharati's Tiranga Yatra, following her arrest in the Hubli idgah maidan case. The party president seized the opportunity provided by a court warrant to get rid of Ms Bharati from the Madhya Pradesh Chief Ministership and did his utmost to marginalise her yatra, in which no major BJP leader participated right till the end (when an embarrassed Mr Vajpayee was called in).
Mr Mahajan, for his own reasons, despises Ms Bharati. He has assigned her only five campaigning days in Maharashtra, with 15 meetings, while Ms Swaraj has been allotted seven days and 28 meetings. Mr Advani will address 12 rallies and Mr Naidu 15. Mr Mahajan's rival, Mr Jaitley, will only get to address five meetings. But Mr Mahajan will speak in 71 places, and his brother-in-law Munde in 60! This means the power struggle will sharpen no matter how the BJP performs at the hustings. If it does well, Mr Naidu, Mr Jaitley and Ms Bharati will sulk. If it does poorly, Mr Mahajan will be blamed and isolated.
Today, no top BJP leader can moderate and resolve such internal power rivalries. Mr Vajpayee seems to have lost both the acumen and the political prestige needed to do so. Mr Advani seems to be in a state of disbelief and denial about the Lok Sabha results. The RSS has stepped into this vacuum with its pet theory-which not many BJP leaders can convincingly refute-namely, that the electoral rout of April/May was caused by the party's deviation from Hindutva.
Besides its own leaders, the RSS-VHP too are pushing the BJP towards a harder line-a reborn Jana Sangh obsessed with raucous, sectarian Hindu-communalism, and narrowly upper caste- based, which doesn't even try to build a broad social base involving groups like the OBCs and Dalits.
The BJP's Jana Sanghisation is a recipe for its contraction into a parochial, special-interest party, or a pressure-group. This contraction is likely to get greatly accelerated before the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and other states, and then in the Lok Sabha polls. The BJP has lost much of its ground support in UP and Bihar, and suffered massive electoral erosion in 25 out of India's 28 states. A defeat in Maharashtra, India's second largest state, will prove especially costly. It will greatly erode the chances of the BJP's revival even in a future period of Congress decline. In Maharashtra, the stakes are much higher for the BJP than the Congress. And the dice are loaded against it.-end-
o o o o o
(ii)
The Daily Times October 14, 2004
BEYOND BAL THACKERAY'S BEARD by J Sri Raman | HUM HINDUSTANI
Thackeray broke the silence of the far right. Addressing a public rally in Mumbai, he reverted to his favourite subject of the peril of Muslim population growth and the diabolically-plotted demographic invasion from Bangladesh. Thence he proceeded to a castigation -not for the first time - of Congress leaders as eunuchs (hijre) for following 'a woman and, that too, a foreign one'
"Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter", said Blaise Pascal, "the whole face of the world would have been different." Will the beard of Shiv Sena (SS) leader Bal Thackeray change the face of India?
Or at least Maharashtra, the State where he is the 'Supremo', according to his flock that adores Italy's Commando Supremo Benito Mussolini as much as it abhors Sonia Gandhi of Italian origin?
As you read these lines, the voters in India's most industrialised state would have answered these questions. To judge by much of the campaigning for the Maharashtra Assembly elections of October 13, and of its media coverage, the fate of this fuehrer's facial hair had made issues of ideology and politics almost irrelevant.
For those who came in late, Thackeray hit the headlines once again some time ago by appearing unshaven before the media and announcing that he would not shave off his beard until and unless the SS-BJP alliance won the elections and returned to power in the state. He did not say he was emulating the example of his avowed idol, Chhatrapati Shivaji, the anti-Mughal Maratha warrior, with hi-flowing beard.
The 'Supremo', however, laughed off apprehensions of the opposite kind. "No, no, I am not changing my religion", he was reported to have assured some alarmed followers. He did once joke that he had actually nicked himself while shaving and had put away the razor for some days. Political considerations, however, prevailed, and the beard was soon back, campaigning for the far-right.
Frivolous and trivial as all this may seem, the subject helped everyone involved in the elections. The irrelevance of issues helped the opposing alliance of the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which was not exactly dying to air its ideological differences with the SS-BJP camp, though it waxes eloquent about them at a safe distance from elections. It helped much of the mainstream media, which was happier projecting ideology as irrelevant to all political conflicts. It also helped the SS-BJP alliance.
Thackeray and the SS were eager not to unduly embarrass the Election Commission (EC). He even promised to comply with its directive not to raise religious issues, though he taunted it with the query: "Is not Ayodhya a religious issue?" The BJP preferred to go back to its policy and practice of keeping such issues "on the back burner" whenever it went for an alliance. As an all-India party, it had differences even with the SS that combines religious and regional chauvinisms - with Thackeray for throwing not only Bangladeshi immigrants out of India but also 'outsiders' out of metropolitan Mumbai.
The effort by the contending alliances - through almost the entire campaign - has been to appear almost the same. The manifestos made the same promises, mainly free power to farmers and a Shivaji memorial. Both avoided taking a stand on the demand for a Vidarbha state to be carved out of Maharashtra. And both were silent on Hindutva issues, as controversies of communal-fascist creation are called in an outrageous affront to the peace-loving majority of the Indian people.
Both the camps were silent on these issues, however, for different reasons. The SS-BJP silence was tactical. The Congress-NCP silence was just timid.
Both broke the silence on October 11, the last day of public campaigning. Congress president Sonia Gandhi broke it for her camp during her 'road show' through Mumbai, when she called upon the voters to defeat "the communal forces" that "talked of Indian traditions but destroyed our culture". None else from her party or alliance, however, took on the SS-BJP combine in similar terms. None, not even Gandhi, told Thackeray that Ayodhya was not indeed a religious issue but only a pseudo-religious one of cynically political motivation.
The 'Supremo' himself broke the silence for the far right, and how. Addressing a public rally in Mumbai, he reverted to his favourite subject of the peril of Muslim population growth and the diabolically-plotted demographic invasion from Bangladesh. Thence he proceeded to a castigation - not for the first time - of Congress leaders as eunuchs (hijre) for following "a woman and, that too, a foreign one".
I have been looking for a reaction of disapproval to these remarks from the Congress, the NCP, any other party (even of the Left), the EC, the media, or any organisation of women. I have found none. Transvestites, of course, don't talk back to Thackerays.
The way fascist exhibitionism of such crudity and cruelty has come to be accepted as part of political discourse is truly frightening. So is the fact that, regardless of manifestos and such other statements that no party really means, the SS-BJP combine continued its communal agitprop as its unofficial campaign, run by other members of the parivar (the far right 'family'). This took several forms ranging from an agitation by the Bajarang Dal against cow slaughter to distribution of tridents (trishul) and literature calling on Hindus to make a Babri Masjid of Afzal Khan's tomb in the state.
After the last general election lost by he BJP-led alliance, Thackeray had attributed the loss to what he saw as insufficient use of the Hindutva plank. This should sound a warning.
We don't know what the Maharashtra elections will do to his beard. Whatever the result, however, it can only bode ill for the state and the country. Unless, of course, forces opposed to Thackeray-type fascism take it on frontally and with ideological frankness.
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[5]
LAND OF GANDHI WHERE CITIZENS DO NOT HAVE RIGHT TO KNOW AND MEDIA IS NOT FREE
Digant Oza
Gandhi bhaktas (devotees) of Gandhinagar, Gujarat, had to be content with performing the annual ritual of garlanding the Mahatma's statue on his birthday from outside the closed iron gates of the Secretariat, because their entry into the compound was prohibited due to "Security" reasons, according to Laljibhai Wadia, secretary general of Swaichhik Seva Sanstha, a NGO. The ban was imposed by the state government, which on 2nd October exhorted the people through advertisements to follow the path of Mahatma Gandhi.
This is one of the several paradoxes the Gujarat of Gandhi is facing today. The citizens have lost the voice of dissent, and are silent in the face of the injustices meted out to civil society in the name of pride of Gujarat. Citizens of Gandhi's Gujarat do not have the right to know. The press is not free.
From Gujarat's perspective, this conference could not have been held at a more appropriate time. We have just left behind October 2, the third after the communal holocaust in Gujarat, but one is just not able to put behind the paradox that the Mahatma hailed from this part of the country. This is not to refer to Gandhiji's principle of non-violence and tolerance in the context of the 2002 violence in Gujarat, but in the larger scenario in Gujarat where any dissent is quickly described as an insult to Gujarat and, by implication, anti-national.
It was Gandhi who taught Gujarat and the country to dissent, and have the courage to stand up for it. It was from here that major national movements took shape, and caught the imagination of an entire generation. It was the courageous journalist in Gandhi (of "Harijanbandhu" and "Young India") who pioneered the campaign for the freedom of the press. He stood for these rights when our fellow countrymen were considered to be the white man's burden, and the dream of a free India was nowhere in sight. [...]
[FULL TEXT AT:
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2004/10/land-of-gandhi-where-citizens-do-not.html ]
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[6]
THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF DALITS' STRUGGLE: CALL FOR SOLIDARITY
5th December is the International Day of Dalit Struggle � the World Dignity Day. The hopes and struggles of Indian Dalits, and Dignity as a universal human concern, are the axis on which Dalits, Adivasis, unorganised workers, minorities, other marginals and their organisations have come together for the first time in the recent past. Nine Dalit organisations, peoples� organisations and movement groups from different parts of the country have jointly called for a Peoples� Dignity Rally on 5th December at Ramlila Grounds in Delhi.
50,000 Dalits of all religious and sub-caste backgrounds, minorities, forest people, unorganised workers and women from Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi in northern India; Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in southern India; Orissa, Bihar and Jharkhand in eastern India; and Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra in western and central India will participate in this Rally.
The Rally demands the right to reservation in the private sector, comprehensive legislation to protect the interests of unorganised workers and artisans, especially the weavers, and the implementation of comprehensive land and agrarian reforms. The Rally also demands that the State and the governments immediately stop the eviction of the forest people from the forest lands, and slum dwellers from their habitations, and accord a Scheduled Caste status to the Dalits among the Muslims and the Christians. The sufferings and miseries of farmers, artisans, weavers, displaced people, unemployed youth and victims of communal riots and sectarian violence must be urgently and thoroughly addressed.
�Rights� are the core of dignity and dignified living. Right to work, right to livelihood, right to food, right to health and education, women�s right to agricultural land, peoples� right to natural resources � these all should be protected and expanded in myriad ways.
From 4th to 6th December, various participating organisations of the Peoples� Dignity Rally and the World Dignity Forum will organise a series of programmes to emphasise their demands and their dignity: on 4th December, the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz will be organising a Dalit Muslim Mahapanchayat, to assert the rights of Dalits among the Muslims and to prepare a plan of action for the political inclusion of Dalit Muslims. Lok Shakti Sangathan of Bihar will organise the Musahar Maang Diwas (Demands Day) on 6th December, and will raise their voices for socio-political inclusion, dignity in occupation and land, and water rights of their community, which stands among the lowest even within the Dalits. Lok Shakti Abhiyan of Orissa will be holding its meeting on 6th December on livelihood rights of the indigenous people of Orissa in the context of globalisation. On the same day itself, the World Dignity Forum will hold a dialogue on Peoples� Dignity, i.e. �Lok Samman par Samvaad�, where common men and women, grassroot activists and local citizens from the underbelly of the country, from all backgrounds and genders will articulate as to what dignity means to them. In this process, a �Peoples� Charter of Dignity� will be chalked out.
Social Movement International Network/World Assembly of Social Movements has given a call to observe 5th December as the World Dignity Day, in solidarity with the Peoples� Dignity Rally in Delhi. Thus, there will be worldwide actions on 5th December. In UK, USA, and other countries of Europe, Africa and Latin America, there will be several solidarity programmes for the dignity and social inclusion of dalits, tribals and other marginals of India and Asia.
Various social movements and mass organizations of the world assembled at the World Social Forum 2004, Mumbai, India. After the World Social Forum, Dalit organizations, organizations of workers, women, Adivasis, Muslims, and other marginals, and mass movements of India came together to discuss strategies and plans for action against social exclusion, neo-liberal policies and religious fundamentalisms. The World Dignity Forum, a forum against casteism, racism, other forms of discriminations and exclusions, that roots itself amidst the Indian Dalits and Dalit organizations and which was officially launched in the World Social Forum 2004, channelised this process. All elaborated a common action agenda. 5th December -- the Day of Peoples� Dignity Rally in Delhi -- is an important part of this common agenda.
In another sense, this also signifies an important paradigmatic shift. The World Dignity Forum and the Peoples� Dignity Rally try to evolve a coherent peoples� agenda, in which a single goal is achieved only with the coming together of the other. This interconnected imperative -- Dalits with Dalit Muslims, forest people with unorganised labourers, unorganised labourers with tribals, tribals with Dalits -- poses new challenges for our institutions and our governance.
The 1980s and 90s saw the emergence of many alliances and fronts in our country around specific themes and issues. The politics of the Asian Social Forum and the World Social Forum have provided an opportunity for these many alliances and fronts to know each other, and share their experiences. However, in the new political reality of today, working for better labour legislation, or for reservation, or for community ownership on resources, or for social security -- each by itself, functioning in an autonomous domain � is not sufficient. Dalit and tribal groups need to come together with environment groups. Environment groups need to support actions necessary to advance various labour and health policies and agendas, which if designed effectively, will inevitably advance the environment agenda. On the other hand, labour and health groups need to support actions necessary to advance the environment agenda, which without doubt will benefit the health agenda. Groups supporting poverty reduction should encourage both health and environment agendas as integral to their own. Environment, labour and health groups should buttress the poverty reduction agenda. Education is a key to all three of these agendas, as is gender equality. 'Networks of Networks' is the need of the times, and if the Peoples� Dignity Rally leads us to this one goal in our present-day activism, then India will surely be a much better place to live in for millions of the poor and the marginalised.
Ashok Bharti, Mukul Sharma, Ali Anwar, Ashok Choudhary, Subhash Bhatnagar, Prafulla Samantara, Sana Das, P. Chennaiah, Deepak Bharti, Vinod Raina
on behalf of
World Dignity Forum, National Conference of Dalit Organisations, All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, National Forum for Forest People and Forest Workers, National Campaign Committee for Construction Workers, Andhra Pradesh Vritudarulu Vyavasayu Union, Lok Shakti Abhiyan, Lok Shakti Sangathan, Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti
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[7]
Call for Papers on PARTITION AND MIGRATION
Papers are solicited for a book that seeks to connect the different facets of partition violence to histories of migration and relocation within and across the nation-states of India and Pakistan as well as to the West. For many survivors, the partition of 1947 remains the defining moment of trauma that marks their lives and memories. In recent years, historians, activists, and literary scholars have recovered stories of survivors of partition violence in order to understand its human side and the multiple dimensions of the ways in which the "partitioned subject" reconstituted him/herself in relation to the violence. This book seeks to complicate such stories in order to examine the ways in which forms of violence arising from the conflicts between "homeland" and the nation states' regulatory practices concerning issues of domicile, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity and language impacted the process of migration itself. How do such forms of violence mediate the afterlives of migrants in places that are marked by new pressures of differences, hopes and possibilities? What do they speak about the failures of nation and home? How do the mediations of gender account for the failures and possibilities of their new homes and nations? The aim of this book is to bring together essays that explore the ways in which representational forms such as literature, film, media, theatre, testimonies and oral histories negotiate these and other related questions. The book will also examine the interventions that such representations may make in existing opinion on the subject.
Please submit proposals (250-300 words) for essays, along with a title, by November 15th, 2004 to Nandi Bhatia and Anjali Gera (e-mail addresses given below).
Anjali Gera
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology
Kharagpur 721 302
Nandi Bhatia University of Western Ontario Canada
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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[8] [Book reviews and Books ]
a) Novel Look at Gandhi's Affections Tale of Icon's Relationship With British Woman Has India Talking
By John Lancaster Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, October 12, 2004; Page A17 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25361-2004Oct11.html
b)
Books with a Difference: Six books/booklets from Dr Shamshul Islam on communalism and casteism released recently.
Know the RSS (Pages 40, Price Rs 20.00) Undoing India: the RSS way (Pages88, Price Rs50.00) and Shudras in Manu�s India (Pages 80, Price Rs 50.00) (all in English) and RSS ko pahchane, (Pages 32, Price Rs 15.00) RSS ki rastra Vinash Yatra (Pages 80, Price Rs 30.00) and Manu ke Bharat me Shudra (Pages 70, Price Rs 30.00) (all in Hindi)
These books/booklets unveil mysteries, presents unknown documents from RSS literature, bringing light into the dark, shocking and deplorable episodes of the newest Hindutva icons.
Dr Shamsul Islam teaches political sience at Satyawati College, Delhi University. He is a well known authority on communal politics, religious fundamentalism, human rights, street theatre, Dalit and gender issues. He writes in leading publications of English, Hindi and Urdu.
Publisher of the above said books/booklets is
Books for Change, C-75, South Extension II, New Delhi-110 049 Mobile: 9810841159 Contact Person: MANIMALA
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[9] [Upcoming Events:]
(i)
Anand Patwardhan's documentary film "Father, Son, and Holy War" to be screened at UC Berkeley's PF on Friday, Oct. 22, 2004
(ii)
History of Science and Religious Fundamentalism Saturday, October 23 , Room 169, REHSEIS [*]
9:30 am - 18:00 pm
Organized by Rehseis (A. Keller) and MSH
09:30 : A. Keller et K. Chemla (REHSEIS) Introduction
10:00 - 11:15 : M. Nanda (Science and Religion Fellow, Templeton Foundation) Making Science Sacred: How Postmodernism Aids Hindu Nationalism
Pause
11:30-12:45 : S Irfan HABIB (Nistads, New-Delhi) Science and Islam from pluralism to religious essentialism
Lunch
14h15-15h30 : Pervez Hoodboy (Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad Returning Science to Islam - The Rocky Road Ahead
Pause
15h45-17h00 : Everett Mendelsohn (Harvard University)
Fundamental Religion, Scientific Research - Confronting the Stem Cell Controversies
17h00 : Discussion
During this workshop we will explore how religious fundamentalisms have, in the last twenty years, produced narratives in history of science. These texts highlight the political dimension of discourses on science's history. They also shed a light on fundamentalists' outlook on science, modernity and history. By inviting scholars to present different specific field works on this theme, dealing with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalists' discourses on science and its history, we hope to produce a better understanding of the diversity and popularity of these narratives.
[*] Rehseis CNRS- Universit� Paris VII UMR 7596 Centre Javelot 2 place Jussieu Paris Cedex 05 75256
(iii)
Nuclear Free Future World Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) 2nd National Convention
November 26-28, 2004, Jaipur [India]
Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) Website: www.cndpindia.org
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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/
SACW archive is available at: bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/
Sister initiatives : South Asia Counter Information Project : snipurl.com/sacip South Asians Against Nukes: www.s-asians-against-nukes.org Communalism Watch: communalism.blogspot.com/
DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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