South Asia Citizens Wire #2 | 30 October, 2004 via: www.sacw.net
[1] India: Batuk Vora, Voice of the 'Other Gujarat' (Subhash Gatade)
[2] India: The Civil War On Saffron (Tehelka)
[3] India: Message From Maharashtra - The tide has turned (Praful Bidwai)
[4] India: Tiger's whimper - The Shiv Sena today stands on the threshold of disintegration
(Kumar Ketkar)
+ Shiv Sena - Unfit for democracy (Indian Express)
[5] India: Catch them young (Kushwant Singh)
[6] India: Minority Rights, Secularism and Civil Society (Yamini Aiyar, Meeto Malik)
[7] Looking for films - for a FILM FESTIVAL at the WORLD SOCIAL FORUM 2005
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[1]
Date: 25 Oct 2004 18:34:50 -0000
Obituary BATUK VORA Voice of 'Other Gujarat' -Subhash Gatade
''Badi Shouk se Sun Raha Tha Sara Jamana Tumhi So Gaye Dastaan Kahte Kahte'
It was late 40s when a young lad from a modest town Palitana in Saurashtra made a small committement to himself and the society around him. Little did his near and dear ones must have dreamt at the time that it would not prove to be a ' passing fad commensurate with his age' and would stick on to him throughout his life. Hardly anyone realised that this young man who had embraced Marxism by then would make 'history of sorts' to become the first and only Communist MLA from a state which continued to remain under the influence of conservative politics for a long time.
One does not know why his parents christened him 'Batuk' ( the small) but even a cursory glance at his life, work and other creative endeavours would make it amply clear that he rather kept on 'falsifying' it all his life. Not only did he prove himself to be a militant trade union activist as well as a famous journalist but he also became a well known literary figure in Gujarati. This 'small' man who made it 'big' in the true sense of the term breathed his last a few days ago after fighting a long battle with liver cancer ( 19 oct 2004)
Batuk Vora, ex MLA, journalist and a leading voice of the the civil society in Gujarat following the communal carnage of 2002 is no more. He was 74 years old at the time of his death. It appears that many of his close friends had an inkling of what was coming, possibly Batuk also. But that did not deter him from his lifelong committment to a better and humane world free from any injustice or oppression. It did not stop him from blasting the US for its barbaric role in Iraq in one of his last despatches nor did he spare Narendra Modi, the ringleader of the 'modern day Neroes'.
Very few people who might have read hundreds of his despathches from different parts of the world would in fact be knowing that he was one of the pioneers of the left movement in Gujarat. In fact, Batuk alongwith Pravin Shridharani, Niruben Patel, Dinkar Mehta and Subodh Mehta worked together to launch a communist movement in the state. Active in the railway employees union in his hometown of Palitana in his young age Vora led a number of agitations.Among them one against a "betterment levy" imposed on farmers of the state in the 1950s received such massive support that it nearly brought down the government. He had even actively participated in the 'Maha Gujarat' agitation in the 1950s demanding a separate Gujarat state. In a report in the Indo Asian News Service to which Batuk Vora contributed regularly it was told that "..[w]ithdrawing from active politics, Vora returned to his first call, journalism and joined the "new Age", the official newspaper of the CPI. He drew on his early experiences as a journalist in Mumbai in 19499-50, with progressive Gujarati journals "Jay Gujarat" and "Mashal".
This report also reveals another dimension of Batuk's personality which is not known outside Gujarat. He was famous in Gujarat also for his literary masterpieces. His novel " Lok Thok Thok ( A lot of Masses) published in 1969 dealt with rural life adn the exploitation of have nots. His book on his four year stay in US " Aah America" was also a commercial success.
Political activist, writer, journalist and to top it all a nice human being who according to the famous Gujarati poetess and social activist Ms Saroop Dhruv ,"combined in him a vision for a just society with a lifestyle which was very very modern.'
In fact, in one of the darkest chapters in the history of Gujarat when the state had connived with the marauders of the Hindutva brigade unleashing a reign of terror against the minorities, when many a erstwhile secular activists also preferred to remain quiet, Batuks' was one of those voices of the 'other Gujarat' which could never be intimidated into silence. Very few people know that the much discussed petition to the Supreme Court in 2002 requesting it to intervene in the situation in state was moved by four signatories only. Apart from Mallika Sarabhai, Teesta Setalvad, veteran journalist Digant Oza it had only Batuks name on it.
But Batuk did not limit his opposition to only writing and signing petitions . He fearlessly tried to reach out to people with all the might. Critical of the Narendra Modi government handling of the situation, he served on a number of people's tribunals.In a 'Sadbhavana Sammelan' organised in Bhavnagar he in his popular style "..[r]idiculed the BJP government�s self-righteous postures. He said he had travelled around the world but nowhere had he witnessed such an exercise of the state itself encouraging strife. In Gujarat, peace endeavours were being threatened and those who work for peace and harmony are considered enemies of the state."
There is no doubt that all those persons who yearn for a better humane world would definitely miss him for a long time to come. People will miss him despatches, they will miss the deep analysis of capitalism or fascism which he could do in simple words which even a layperson could understand. And everybody would agree that it is such a crucial juncture in our country's life when the forces of hatred have been put on the defensive that we needed him on this part of the barricade to deliver them a knock out punch.
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[2]
Tehelka 30 October
THE CIVIL WAR ON SAFFRON
Civil society groups played a crucial anti-communal role in Maharashtra, reports Aman Khanna
Now that the Maharashtra polls are done and over with, and the bjp-Shiv Sena combine sidelined, there will surely be much talk of the political causes � infighting within the Shiv Sena, etc. But it is scarcely realised by the media and the political parties that there was another faint, small and invisible reason that pushed the rightwing forces to the wall.
Hidden from arc lights, a tiny band of activists were quietly prodding the public to vote against communal politics. About 40 non-governmental organisations rallied in a strong alliance, disseminating anti-communalism messages through creative leaflets, posters, booklets and stickers all over Maharashtra.
This followed a pattern. A similar 'campaign' was organised in the nooks and corners of India during the last Lok Sabha elections. Lakhs of pamphlets and thousands of documentaries, especially on Gujarat, added with concerted workshops and door-to-door campaigns, consolidated the secular vote. While professors marched in the inner lanes of Old Delhi, talking to "parents of students", iit students from Bombay took a sabbatical and worked in the villages of Maharashtra. So did jnu and du students, artists, filmmakers and women's groups. This was the quiet revolution that helped the upa turn the tide.
Once again in Maharashtra, with Shabnam Hashmi of Anhad at the forefront, they targeted railway stations and bus stands, reminding ordinary people of Gujarat�s deep wounds. "We wanted to raise the issues of secularism, the concept of India," says Hashmi. "It was important to defeat the communal forces in these elections. Their victory would have paved the way for their return to the Centre in the months to come."
More than 15 lakh leaflets were distributed across the state � from Jalgaon, Dhule in the north, Pune, Mumbai in the west, Aurangabad in the centre, Amravati, Chandrapur, Nagpur in the east, within one week. Hundreds of volunteers woke up early in the morning to insert Hindi, English and Marathi pamphlets in daily newspapers.
Poets Javed Akhtar and Gauhar Raza penned the text for some of the campaign literature. Other leaflets documented a conversation through letters between an old woman and her granddaughter. Aaji (grandmother in Marathi) reminisces the days gone by, when they joined Mahatma Gandhi on the banks of the Sabarmati. And then she says, "Yesterday Pinku's aaji returned from Ahmedabad. She was telling us that they did not spare anybody: babies, children, men, women and old women. Nobody was spared."
Surprisingly, as is their normal reaction, the Right did not strike back at the activists. "Perhaps it was a sign that they were truly down and out," Hashmi explains.
Civil society groups, however, were not the only ones trying to tap the power of information. As in Gujarat, rightwing forces too distributed hate literature in Maharashtra before the polls, exhorting Hindus to vote en masse against Muslims and Congress. And what was their argument? "Muslims have an animalistic tendency to rape Hindu women� Muslims are rising in numbers."
The 40-page leaflet has a photograph of Qutubuddin Ansari, the tailor whose grief-stricken face came to sum up the story of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat. Tears in his eyes, hands joined together, Ansari was pleading to frenzied vhp/Bajrang Dal mobs to spare his family's lives. In the saffron pamphlet, the photograph carries the caption: "Hinduon ki aisi sthiti na hone de (Don't let the Hindus come to this.)"
If the election results are anything to go by, the people of Maharashtra (as the people of India earlier) did distinguish what is secular information and what is hate politics. One of the young campaigners, Sahir Raza, a St. Stephen's student in Delhi who distributed pamphlets around the state, says, "Loads of people came back and said 'you are doing good work'. At one of the railway stations, a person working in an icici Bank collected 250 leaflets from us.
He promised he would distribute them to his colleagues."
There is no data to prove this painstaking effort, and so invisibly done, with such intense humility. But as Hashmi concludes, "Our campaign alone may not have dented anything. But everything put together does make a difference." As the old slogan goes: The people united will always be victorious.
October 30, 2004
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[3]
The Praful Bidwai Column October 25, 2004
Message From Maharashtra - The tide has turned By Praful Bidwai
The victory of the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party-led Democratic Front (DF) in the Maharashtra Assembly elections will go down as a political landmark. The result is all the more creditable because the ruling alliance faced heavy odds both from the burden of incumbency and from a rebellion by dissidents in the two parties. The DF admittedly provided a shabby government, whose top leader (Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh) had to be changed midstream and his deputy (Chagan Bhujbal) was dropped because of the Telgi stamp-paper scandal.
Under the DF, India's second most populous state-and its most industrialised one-sank under a debt mountain of nearly Rs 100,000 crores. Hundreds of farmers committed suicide under the impact of a drought and the DF's mismanagement of relief provision. Even more shamefully, 3,500 children died of malnutrition.
This created a fertile ground for an unambiguous electoral triumph of the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena. Yet, that alliance managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! The DF did reasonably well in all the six regions of Maharashtra, although in Western Maharashtra, its undisputed fortress, it lost some ground to Congress-NCP "rebels". The voter emphatically rejected its communal rivals and affirmed the secular, inclusive politics centred on livelihood issues, on which Ms Sonia Gandhi and Mr Sharad Pawar concentrated their campaigns. They were rewarded with 141 seats in the 288-member Assembly, seven more than their 1999 total. With its Left allies, the DF can now sew up a clear majority.
The Sena-BJP campaign was fettered by the failing health of star performers like Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr Bal Thackeray. It was further affected by the BJP's demoralisation from the loss of power at the national level and by the bitter succession battle in the Sena. But this only partly explains the defeat suffered by the Right-wing alliance. A much weightier factor for the debacle was the erosion of the BJP-Sena's appeal and social base, even in regions considered their strongholds-Mumbai, Vidarbha and Marathwada.
Clearly, the Congress's traditional constituencies like the urban poor, Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis are returning to it as the party gets revitalised. The Congress-NCP's increased attraction seems in no small measure attributable to the Left-leaning National Common Minimum Programme of the United Progressive Alliance government and to the waiving of power charges in agriculture and other "populist" measures taken by the DF.
The BJP-Sena further damaged themselves by running a highly divisive, vitriolic and negative campaign. During his sole public rally in Mumbai, with Mr Vajpayee, Mr Thackeray launched a vicious attack on Mumbai's immigrant community, which forms 60 percent of its population, and he brazenly peddled "sons-of-the-soil" Maharashtrian chauvinism. Rather than counter this with moderation, Mr Vajpayee acquiesced in it. This cost the BJP-Sena many non-Marathi votes. Equally significantly, even traditional Marathi/Gujarati BJP-Sena strongholds in Mumbai like Matunga, Khetwadi, Chembur and Vile Parle returned Congress candidates. Given the BJP-Sena's shrinking social base, and its unconvincing programmatic alternative to the DF, its so-called "development" agenda didn't sell.
Nor did its Hindutva appeal. BJP "master-strategist" Pramod Mahajan turned out a dud in his home state: his much tom-tommed "micro-management" didn't work. The BJP's cynical calculation, namely that the Bahujan Samaj Party would eat into the Congress's votes, enabling many easy Sena-BJP victories, went awry. Nor did the fiery rhetoric of Ms Uma Bharati, fresh from her rather ludicrous Tiranga Yatra, or the demagoguery of Ms Sushma Swaraj, back from a pro-Savarkar demonstration at Andaman Jail, produce results. Supposedly more "sophisticated" leaders like Mr L.K. Advani too failed to make an impact.
The BJP had reckoned that a victory in Maharashtra would enable the National Democratic Alliance to present its Lok Sabha debacle as an aberration, a freak phenomenon, or a flash in the pan. The NDA would resume its interrupted victory run and reaffirm its claim to being the "natural" party of governance, while undermining the UPA's credibility and its chances of completing its full term.
The opposite happened. After Maharashtra, the UPA has consolidated itself. By-lections in other states too showed that the Congress has expanded its social support-base. In the UP by-elections, it pushed the BJP to the fourth or fifth position. The next round, due in February in Bihar, Jharkhand and Haryana, could result in a further setback to the NDA. That defeated, beaten and increasingly fragmented alliance is on the ropes in these states.
In Bihar, Mr Laloo Prasad's RJD and the Congress make a formidable combination. In Jharkhand, Mr Shibu Soren's "martyrdom" through his resignation and arrest will work against the BJP. And in Haryana, Mr Bansi Lal's re-entry will help the Congress immensely. And in the round that follows in 2006, with elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the BJP isn't even in the reckoning.
To escape harsh realities, the BJP has taken to daydreaming. First, its leaders convinced themselves, on the basis of astrology, that the UPA would disintegrate by September 26. When that didn't materialise, they conjured up a scenario of a "third front"-to be formed by the DMK, NCP and Mr Ram Vilas Paswan's Lok Janshakti Party quitting the UPA and eventually teaming up with the Samajwadi Party, Janata Dal(U), and other non-Congress, non-BJP parties. The BJP would support such a front from the outside and topple the UPA.
The Rashtriya Swabhiman Manch, recently formed by Messrs George Fernandes, Chandrasekhar and Subramaniam Swamy and Ms Sushma Swaraj, was to be a step in that same direction. Now, these leaders have been put out of business at least for a while. And it's highly unlikely that Mr Paswan, leave alone Mr M. Karunanidhi, will quit the UPA.
Instead, the NDA will face disarray. Some of its constituents (e.g. Trinamool Congress) are already in a state of disintegration. The power struggle within the BJP isn't going to end with Mr L.K. Advani taking over as party president. This sudden move to re-induct the man who launched the BJP on a belligerent course in the 1980s betrays desperation and panic. It was meant to pre-empt a wholesale RSS takeover of the BJP-something the sangh has been pressing for since the BJP's Lok Sabha debacle. The move also cut Mr Murli Manohar Joshi out of the leadership race. It shows that the BJP's "second-generation" leaders aren't up to the mark. Indeed, no BJP leader, including Mr Advani, has a strategy or the imagination for innovative politics. For far too long, the BJP flourished on catchy slogans and gimmicky formulas. They aren't working anymore.
There is a reason for this. The BJP's rise since the mid-1980s wasn't primarily the result of its own positive appeal or Hindutva. Rather, the BJP gained from circumstances of others' making, such as the long-term decline of the Congress system. The Left was unable to fill the vacuum this left in the political centre. The BJP entered that space from the Right. For a period, mobilisation on Ayodhya/Babri helped the BJP grow out of the confines to which its earlier avatar, the Jana Sangh, was restricted: geographically, largely to Northwestern states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat; and socially, to the relatively affluent upper-caste Hindus-in some cases, downright reactionary feudals like former princes and zamindars.
Thus, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the BJP implanted itself in Uttar Pradesh, through a unique combination of mandal (OBC politics) and kamandal (Hindutva) personified by Mr Kalyan Singh. The Ayodhya mobilisation could help garner OBC, and to an extent, even Dalit, support for the BJP's pan-Indian "Hindu nation" project. For the first time, the party sank roots in the heart of North India. But this didn't last long.
The continuing "Forward March of the Backwards", and the rise of the politics of Dalit self-representation under the BSP, reversed the BJP's ascendancy. Barring Gujarat, and some desultory gains in states like Jharkhand and Himachal, the BJP couldn't expand beyond the old Jana Sangh zone of influence.
Today, the BJP faces a three-fold crisis-a crisis of strategy (it has no coherent counter to the Centre-Left); an organisational crisis (its leadership structure is dysfunctional and has seen four presidents in six years, three of whom didn't complete their term); and a crisis of leadership succession. It's too heavily invested in globalisation and Right-wing neoliberalism to be able to pursue an independent policy. It's too deeply mired in Hindutva to be able to broaden its appeal beyond a small, bigoted Hindu minority. It's too cravenly devoted to power to be able to rejuvenate itself when out of office. Today, the BJP is in danger of becoming too dependent on the RSS for coherence, mentorship, and votes.
Mr Advani's very first decision after becoming party president was to pay his respects to RSS leaders on Vijaya-Dashami Day in Nagpur! Over-dependence on the sangh could be suicidal. The BJP has tried every trick in the Hindutva book, including Savarkar, Tiranga and terrorism. It conjured up the spectre of Muslim demographic colonialism, and played the anti-Pakistan card. Nothing has worked. As Messrs Vajpayee and Advani fade out, the party seems set for prolonged exile.-end-
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[4]
Indian Express, October 30, 2004
TIGER'S WHIMPER THE SHIV SENA TODAY STANDS ON THE THRESHOLD OF DISINTEGRATION Kumar Ketkar
For the Shiv Sena, the moment of reckoning has come. If the Sena-BJP alliance had won, perhaps, this moment could have been postponed. Power would have held the alliance together and the Sena could have gained a breather.
Indeed, it would not have been difficult for the outfit to have won. Even a quick glance at the Maharashtra results would make it clear that the Congress Front won almost by fluke. The elections were too close to call. In as many as 31 seats, victory could have gone either way. The margins were so narrow that even God, forget the psephologist, would have got it wrong. Leaders of the Congress Front was in a state of shock after the results as they had anticipated electoral humiliation, notwithstanding the bravado they had displayed during the campaign. They knew in their heart of their heart that the performance of the Democratic Front government for all the five years it was in power was dismal, to put it mildly.
During the campaign, they had perceived a very strong anti-incumbent current and even the Maratha strongman had conceded defeat in private. On the morning of the results, he had started an arithmetical exercise to somehow reach that magical number of 145, with help from the small parties and rebels. Today he may be gloating about the NCP's two-seat lead over the Congress, but on the morning of October 16, he was gasping - and it was not because of his indifferent health.
Be that as it may, a victory is a victory and a defeat, a defeat. Instead of Sharad Pawar and his Nationalistic Congress Party facing that moment of reckoning, history has handed over that bitter experience to Balasaheb Thackeray, who has ridden the Shiv Sena tiger for almost 39 years now. The Thackerays have virtually enjoyed First Family status in Maharashtra for the past 20 years, although the Sena was in power for just over four years - 1995 to 1999. It is difficult to decide whether it was Thackeray's charisma or his terror which had inspired large numbers of lumpen Marathi youth. Bal, before he became Don Balasaheb, was in his forties when he founded the Sena. He held sway over his saffron guards for close to four decades. He did this, not with any ideology or by building a well-knit organisation. The Sena was a spontaneous movement and the Marathi urban youth felt drawn towards Thackeray because he appeared to provide some meaning to their utterly purposeless and otherwise hopeless existence.
Mumbai became the capital of Maharashtra after a long drawn movement for Samyukta Maharashtra. But industry and trade continued to be controlled by the Gujaratis and Marwaris. The white collar jobs appeared to be going to the South Indians ("Madrasis", as the Sena called them). Small businesses, shops and establishments, taxis and restaurants, belonged to the Punjabis or the Shetty community. In the otherwise cosmopolitan and plural social life of Mumbai, the working class as well as lower middle-class Marathi youth felt lost. Mumbai belonged to him and yet he did not belong to Mumbai. The Shiv Sena was born out of this frustration and cultural identity crisis. It was a collective, and often violent, expression of that frustration.
But this frustration was Mumbai-centric in nature and, therefore, the Sena could not really spread its tentacles over the rest of Maharashtra - apart from the Konkan region because, geographically and culturally, Mumbai is a part of the Konkan. In the rest of the state, it had to recruit its members from disgruntled elements within the Congress party. There can be no doubt about it, Mumbai was the soul of the Shiv Sena, a territory where it could exercise its invisible, and sometimes visible, terror. A Shiv Sena "bandh" call would evoke a total response. Nobody would dare to venture out. Balasaheb's charisma grew out of this ability to create terror. The Gujarati-Marwari businessmen and industrialists sought protection from the Sena, the managements of manufacturing units used the Sena to break strikes led by the Communists, the leaders of the ruling Congress surreptitiously promoted the Sena, sometimes to blackmail the central government and sometimes to settle scores within their own party.
Consequently the importance of the Sena and Balasaheb grew. For the past decade, the Thackerays had also become social celebrities. Bollywood crawled before Balasaheb, and it was a relationship mediated by the mafia. It was in everybody's self-interest to pay respects to the Sena chief. After the Sena-BJP came to power in 1995, the icon became much larger than life. The BJP Front, although in power in Delhi from 1998, had to bow before the Sena! Often this was humiliating to the Sangh Parivar, but the humiliation was silently swallowed because, without the Sena, the BJP was electorally weak. Moreover, Thackeray's violent rhetoric against the Muslims, against Pakistan or Bangladeshis suited the BJP. Balasaheb enjoyed this all-round adulation. An artist and cartoonist at his core, and kingmaker rather than a formal king, he displayed with gusto the power that he now had. The Shiv Sena's strength as well as its weakness was its living icon - Balasaheb.
But time was extracting its price. As Thackeray grew older he got increasingly isolated even within his family and among the top echelons of the party. Yet none of them - neither Manohar Joshi nor Narayan Rane, neither Uddhav nor Raj Thackeray - had any independent existence. If the Sena-BJP alliance had won, even marginally, the Sena would have got a shot in the arm. Balasaheb would have grown in stature and would perhaps have even competed with none other than Shivaji Maharaj himself. But this defeat has come like a body blow and that, too, when the infirmities of age had caught up with the man and his image!
Today the Sena has become a pathetic shadow of its supremo. With no ideology or faith to hold on to, with no organised set-up apart from the undependable network of frustrated and militant lumpens; with no second line leadership or charismatic successor, the Shiv Sena stands on the threshold of disintegration. The internecine rivalry between Uddhav Thackeray and Raj Thackeray, as well as between Joshi and Rane will soon consume the outfit. As for the Icon that has presided over the Sena's fortunes, it has become a mere Cut-out.
The writer is editor, 'Loksatta'
o o o o
Indian Express - October 25, 2004
Unfit for democracy
Bal Thackeray has no business inflicting the Sena's identity crisis on the voter
How does a political party react after an electoral setback? Some sulk, some go into a huddle, the BJP heads towards Nagpur. But if the party is the Shiv Sena, it blames the people, the voters, the media. Its supremo warns of a horrible backlash. He draws rabid spectres of Muslim fundamentalism and a take-over by Bangladeshi settlers. Bal Thackeray used his annual Dussehra speech to serve up dire images that are far too easily dismissed as the predictable rants of a sore loser. In fact, they amount to something far more worrisome. Thackeray's diatribe is an act of disrespect - no, insult - to the voter in Maharashtra and to all norms and conventions of democracy that he and his party are expected to abide by.
The Shiv Sena has a problem and the recent rout has only underlined it. It has been obvious for a while that the factors that muscled its rise are on the wane and that Thackeray's outfit has neither the political substance nor the organisational fibre to deal with it. Since it was formed in 1966, the Sena has relied on the electorate's insecurities, tight discipline of its cadres, their complete obedience to Thackeray himself. On each of these, the party is on shiftier sands today. The last five years or so have marked the maturing of a new voter who is less willing to do battle with imagined spectres and is more immersed in the search for a brighter future. The Sena's jingoistic campaigns against Gujaratis, South Indians, Dalits, Muslims and North Indians preyed upon an erstwhile socio-economic setting. Mumbai has grown since. It may even hold the Prime Minister to his promise of making it another Shanghai.
Then there is the lack of a single heir apparent, the receding of the base and greater centralisation. This time, Uddhav Thackeray selected the strategy and candidates; the room for manoeuvre at lower levels, always limited in the Sena, shrank further. There was an unprecedented number of rebels. A lot has gone wrong with the Sena. But by turning on the invective, Bal Thackeray is only giving further proof of his outfit's unelectability. Nothing short of a reinvention will do.
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[5] [Book Review]
Deccan Herald, October 30, 2004 | Column - Sweet and Sour
[Excerpt]
Catch them young [by Kushwant Singh ]
At times I get very depressed watching channel after channel on my TV offloading garbage about astrology, Vastu and numerology, and wonder how our next generation will be able to face the hard realities of life. I am not alone in believing that next to sowing seeds of suspicion between different religious communities, the Sangh Parivar-dominated government has left us a legacy of belief in irrationality.
For this Murli Manohar Joshi, under whose patronage it took a new lease of life, will have a lot to answer for. So also ex-Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his Cabinet colleagues who not only failed to put an end to Joshi's eccentricities but often subscribed to them too. Their astrologers and Vastu experts assure them that their stars are in the ascendant and they should soon be back in power. Let us wait a while and see what happens.
I am heartened to find a kindred spirit in Githa Hariharan, who is more concerned about the way things are going and is doing her best to reverse the trend. She is a more accomplished writer than I am, a lot younger and far more gutsy. So far she has been writing novels and short stories for adults. She felt strongly that if you mean to clear the cobwebs of superstition and make-believe that are instilled into our minds by senile oldies, and immunise them against the poison of religious bigotry and belief in the irrational, you have to address school-going children. So she has turned her facile and gifted pen to writing a collection of short stories for children using old themes based on anecdotes about Tenali Raman, Naseeruddin Hodja, Gopal Bhor and Birbal. The Winning Team (Rupa) beautifully illustrated by Taposhi Ghosal is her offering. It should be translated in all our regional languages and made compulsory reading for boys and girls in schools across the country. Minister Arjun Singhji, please note! You can undo some of the harm done by your predecessor.
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[6]
The Economic and Political Weekly October 23, 2004
Minority Rights, Secularism and Civil Society
The Indian state has failed to recognise an actively address the issue of the socio-economic rights of Muslims. Civil society organisations mirror the tendencies of the state to prioritise cultural rights over the social and economic needs of the community. It is crucial for civil society to interrogate its own position and develop a platform for concerted advocacy on issues related to the socio-economic rights of the Muslim community.
Yamini Aiyar, Meeto Malik
[Full text at:
http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2004&leaf=10&filename=7832&filetype=html ]
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[7] [Call for Entries]
Looking for films for a FILM FESTIVAL at the WORLD SOCIAL FORUM 2005
The World Social Forum is a movement of movements that opposes neo-liberal capitalist globalisation. Since its inception in 2001 the Forum has provided open spaces for dialogue and debate on issues of concern to social movements, concerned groups and individuals. According to Chico Whitaker, one of the important contribution of the Forum has been in its ability to draw on the most significant recent political discovery, of the power of open, free, horizontal structures.
@Culture is a coalition of a few organisations and artists from India who were a part of the cultural committee at the WSF 2004, Mumbai. It believes that culture is a key site for transformative politics and recognises the centrality of culture in all political action. Enthused and inspired by the impact of its work during WSF 2004 a smaller group has decided to pursue its aims at WSF 2005.
At WSF 2005 @Culture is planning to author five self-organised events. One of these will be a film festival, curated by Magic Lantern Foundation.
The concern that drives the film festival is that while the movement extends easily because of its opposition to a common destructive force, what it aims at is not clearly articulated. We are still to visualise the other worlds that are possible. And yet they are breathing!
Hence, thematically, the film festival will reflect choices people make to create other kinds of worlds: how different communities, countries, individuals are re-inventing themselves, their lives and livelihoods and by their action challenging the homogenising attempts of neo-liberal capitalism.
The film festival is looking for films that explore issues of governance, trade, technological and farming alternatives, livelihood systems, cultural diversity, transmission of knowledge, changes in cultural terrains, etc.
If you have a film, or know of a film, that resonates any of these themes, please write to Gargi and Aur�lie at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Deadlines are tight. Do respond urgently.
The World Social Forum will take place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 26-31 January 2005.
For more details about the World Social Forum, visit http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Gargi Sen / Aur�lie de Lalande Magic Lantern Foundation
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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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