South Asia Citizens Wire | 21 Dec., 2004 via: www.sacw.net
[1] Pakistan-Bangladesh-India: Might have beens can yet be (M B Naqvi)
[2] India: Fighting poverty with arms (Omar Kureishi)
[3] Buying Arms, Talking Peace - India, Pakistan in an insecurity trap (Praful Bidwai)
[4] India: Dead end in Punjab (Brad Adams)
[5] India - Announcements :
(i) Ram Puniyani, the well known crusader for secularism gets ACHA Award 2004
(ii) Lecture on Democratic Decentralization in India and Minorities by Dr Omar Khalidi (N Delhi, Dec 22)
(iii) Beyond Lines Of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India
(Ravina Aggarwal)
(iv) 'Tragedy Of Commons -The Kerala Experience in River Linking' by S.P.Ravi, C.G.Madhusoodhanan, Dr.A.Latha, S. Unnikrishnan and K.H. Amita Bachan
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[1]
December 15, 2004
MIGHT HAVE BEENS CAN YET BE
Pakistan must opt for open and people friendly borders after the '71 divide. The countries making up the subcontinent can form a union yet retain their sovereignties
by M B Naqvi
Mid-December brings memories of 16 December 1971, the Pakistan Army's decisive defeat and the birth of Bangladesh. Most Pakistanis regard that surrender as a disaster and mourn it; the largest and strongest Muslim army in Islamic history was defeated for the first time. But the circumstances of 1971 make it a much larger tragedy.
What happened in East Pakistan was a civil war of the Pakistan Army's making -- it had taken over governance since Oct 7, 1958, it held a free election in Dec 1970 and did not accept the election results. Instead, it militarily cracked down perhaps technically only on the Awami League, the spectacular winner. But in practice the soldiers, clearly under orders, fired at random on all Bengalis without discrimination. A civil war ensued. Before too long, India began helping the Bengali insurgents, and together they routed the Pakistan Army and took the entire Bengal command prisoner.
For the Bangladeshis, December '71 was their liberation from the yoke of military tyrants. The birth of their own new nation state elated their spirits particularly after their terrible sufferings at the hands of West Pakistani soldiers and the numerous atrocities for which no one in Islamabad took responsibility or punished wrongdoers. It is undisputed that the Bengalis' human rights were grossly violated, though there may be different estimates about the number of murders and rapes. Islamabad disputes the numbers, insisting that there couldn't have been three million murders or hundreds of thousands of rapes. In a memorable interview, Gen. Tikka Khan admitted to "only" 30,000 rapes! Islamabad refuses to formally apologise to the people of Bangladesh even today; it thinks simple regrets over the unhappy (but unenunciated) events is enough.
But this is to be expected because of the Army's continuing and overwhelming influence over Pakistan's governance, including during the 'democratic' interlude of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1971-77). Bhutto could have begun to end the Army's domination on policy-making but didn't. Instead, he rehabilitated Army's morale, increased their pay and perks, and expanded their role by militarily cracking down on Balochistan in 1973. His solution to the military's domination was to purge a few generals and appoint a pliable general to head the Army. He paid with his life for his inability to distinguish between the jungle of the institution with the tree of generals. The Army assumed power in 1977. Ten years later they instituted a power-sharing formula and made their dominance of security, foreign and economic policies permanent, notwithstanding the strutting around of 'elected' civilians; since 2002, Gen. Musharraf has made these trends clearer.
In 1971, the Indians were happy that Pakistan was so demonstratively humbled and broken into two. They could, and did, proclaim that Mr. Jinnah's Two Nation Theory had decisively collapsed. Then there were Indira Gandhi's remarks about 'avenging a thousand years' humiliation', reflecting the pith and substance of the psychosis that has produced the Hindutva version of Indian nationalism. Islamabad replies that the Two Nation theory is still valid because Bangladesh emerged as an independent state and is unlikely to join India. This view has a limited justification on two counts.
Bengali Muslims were in the forefront of the Pakistan Movement -- the Muslim League was formed in 1906 in Dhaka; it was the Muslim vote in 1946 election in united Bengal that made Pakistan inevitable. To a large extent, the communalism of the Indian Muslims' deepened after the 1905 attempt to divide Bengal failed. This communalism became more raucous after the Muslim landlords in UP, Bihar and CP were frightened out of their wits by the provincial Congress governments' rhetoric in 1937, leading to the emergence of the hitherto toady Muslim League into a strong populist organisation.
To remember 1971 is to remember multiple failures. That Bangladesh stays independent despite millions of commonalities with India represents the huge failure of Indian nationalism. It also underlines the basic weakness of Bengali nationalism based on language and culture, which have proved too weak to overcome the Hindu-Muslim communal distinction. Above all else, it was a decisive collapse, and rejection, of Pakistan's and Muslim League's Muslim Nationalism. The Muslims, who under Jinnah's leadership, claimed to be a separate nation proved unable to keep Pakistan united.
The West Pakistanis' attitude toward their Muslim brethren in East Pakistan speaks volumes. While Pakistani soldiery - mostly West Pakistanis, particularly Punjabi - was engaged in grievously violating East Pakistanis' human rights, the press, political parties and civil society in West Pakistan went into a self-induced amnesia. They pretended not to know what was happening in East Pakistan. They did have an alibi: the press was tightly controlled by military government and spoke not the truth. But the transistor revolution had happened, and people widely listened to other radio stations than those that were state-controlled. Yet there were no major protest demonstrations or adverse writing. One does know of a few journalists who went to jail for opposing the military action. But their numbers can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Except for a few regional nationalists and one Muslim Leaguer, the political leaders remained silent. There was indeed a silent support for military action.
It was the military-dominated West Pakistani leadership that convinced East Pakistanis that Pakistan would never be a democracy, and would remain under the military jackboots and that they would continue to exploit Bengal's resources - thus leaving the East Pakistanis with no alternative but to seek independence. The writer believes that the West Pakistani leadership consciously wanted to get rid of the troublesome Bengalis, especially after the 1965 war with India. It was after this that the Bengali economists, after a heroic battle in the Planning Commission, forced a commitment from the Third Plan to transfer the net amount of Rs.100 crore annually to East Pakistan to enable it to catch up with the western wing. That was the last straw for the civil service, which convinced its military overlords that Pakistan should dump its eastern wing.
How do people change their dearest ideals, and what happens when mass hysteria is created and taken to a high pitch? Born in the 1920s' and educated in the 1930s and 40s, in one's earliest recollection the small boy was proud to be an Indian, aware of the freedom movement. Toward the end of 1930s one became conscious of the international war against Fascism. One celebrated its denouement and thought UNO was uplifting, while a new threat to mankind emerged in the shape of the Atomic weapons. One shared the excitements of 1947: the bloody partition of India, the passing into history of British Indian Empire and the achievement of independence.
Through such events one noticed that ardent Indian patriots, proud of their Indianness above all, could become implacable communalists. The demand for Pakistan triggered off an opposition in Congress that at the lower levels was not free of Hindu communal sentiment. How could both Hindus and Muslims engage in genocidal ethnic cleansing? As an aside, compare how Canada has handled the issue of Quebec's secessionism, twice asking it to vote whether it wanted to stay in Canada or be independent. Both times, the majority of Quebecois voted to remain with Canada; the issue never produced a crisis. It is surely time to analyse the basic psychoses that underlay the Congress-League animosity that led to the ghastly happenings of 1946 and 1947.
The early years of independence (1947-1954) saw the elation of Muslim nationalism -- followed by the Muslim Bengalis' estrangement with their co-religionists in West Pakistan. Why? Because the West Pakistanis refused to share power with them, causing a visible decline in the Bengalis' belief in Muslim nationalism and patriotism for Pakistan, leading, in 1971 to a civil war between 'us' and 'them' where once 'we' were one. And each side, let us remember, comprised mainly Muslims. Just as the Arab states unions in the Middle East and Meghreb, all predominantly Muslim, could not work or last, so too Islam in the subcontinent could not keep the ethnically different Muslims united. Who can envisage Iran and Turkey uniting into one state or Bengali Muslims uniting with, say Indonesians?
For Pakistan this history is relevant: the country comprises several sub-nationalisms, based on differing races, languages and cultures. To unite them, more than Islamic or other airy-fairy rhetoric is needed. The primary condition that can enable Pakistan to survive is democracy that ladles out power to all groups equally - leading to the individual citizen's full share in decision-making and enabled to actually enjoy their human rights. Pluralistic states survive because of sharing power democratically and providing a sense of solid wellbeing. Note that the USA, Canada and India survive, while USSR did not despite initially raising its peoples' living standards. A holistic view of human rights is therefore the vital requirement.
One is not advocating any formal reunion: either between Pakistan and Bangladesh, or between India and Bangladesh. Let's retain our borders and our national sovereignties. But given that the 1947 solution did not solve our problems and our three states have not delivered much to their people, our problems require unified action for actual progress. Why can't we open these borders and let the people be friends? Why can't we follow the Europeans who have kept their sovereignties and yet have a Union? South Asia cries out for such a solution.
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[2]
Dawn January 21, 2004
FIGHTING POVERTY WITH ARMS By Omar Kureishi
India's arms shopping spree is not so much a spree as a binge. India is buying weapons from the US, Russia, France, the UK and Israel and whoever else who has set up shop in the arms bazaar.
The educated guess is that the bill for this will be in the vicinity of $95 billion spread over the next 15 years. Does India know of some new enemy that threatens it? India is a nuclear power as is Pakistan and thus there is a balance of terror which acts as a deterrent. Neither country would commit the monumental folly of an armed conflict.
Who else is in India's neighbourhood? Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, not even flies in the ointment. So it becomes intriguing why a country with millions of desperately poor people should be spending such colossal sums of money on arms, which are for all practical purposes worthless.
I want to take the figure of $95 billion and what might happen if it was to be invested in the social sector over the next 15 years. Let me start with HIV/Aids. Globally India is second only to South Africa in the number of people living with the disease but is likely to overtake South Africa so fast is it spreading.
The estimates are horrifying. The UN Population Division projects that India's adult HIV prevalence will peak at 1.9 per cent in 2019 (when it will have spent its $95 billion for arms).
During 2000-15 the UN projects 12. 3 million AIDS deaths and 49.5 million deaths during 2015-50. These projections are on the conservative side because of the difficulties involved in collecting data. The situation could be worse.
Except on special, photo-op occasions such as World Aids Day, I have not read of any concern shown by Indian leaders for what is a clear and present danger that has the making of a national calamity. The BJP fought the elections on the slogan of Shining India. The Congress promised to improve the lives of the people of Rural India.
There was some recognition that the poor of India had to be given some stake in the elections. But both parties saw India's poverty as an abstraction. HIV/Aids did not come in the category of poverty. Imagine $95 billion invested in saving lives instead of buying arms to kill people.
This is not an original thought. For years people have been saying that the Third World has no business in wasting its scant resources in buying arms instead of medicines and more often than not the arms are used to kill their own people or, at best, making war against an equally poor neighbour.
The main beneficiaries of this cock-eyed arrangement of priorities are the arms merchants and a few in government who get their share of kickbacks. Nowhere in the world, not even in the United States does the standard of living go up by a fraction because a country goes on an arms buying binge.
On the contrary is often bankrupted and there is no better example than the Soviet Union. We like to believe that the misadventure in Afghanistan brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union. The reality is that it got sucked into an arms race with the United States, trying to match it gun for gun and it went broke.
But an even more important consideration is that most of weapons that are bought (or gifted) are never used and they gather dust until they become obsolete and are replaced.
There is something else that makes a country strong. The United States is the most powerful country in the world and militarily stronger than the rest of the world combined. Yet its military power seems next to useless in the war on terror.
It should have learnt this lesson in Vietnam. Military might matters in conventional wars but future wars will not be conventional wars. Barring a nuclear bomb, the Americans threw everything at their enemy in Vietnam. True, they killed an awful lot of people, destroyed cities and towns, poisoned the village and hamlets with Agent Orange but they lost the war.
The same is happening in Iraq. The billions of dollars that make up the defence budget is not proving particularly helpful in putting down the insurgency. No one doubts that the United States has might on its side, not just superior force but overwhelmingly so.
It demonstrated that in Fallujah where the town was destroyed in an effort to flush out the insurgents who had long fled just leaving innocent men, women and children to bear the brunt of the military fury of the world's only superpower.
The United States is also the world's most powerful economic power and, perhaps, can afford its war-machine though surely a day must come that it has to acknowledge that it has more than enough.
But there's lot of money to be made from the defence industry and so the arming of the United States will go on because there is no such condition as more than enough when it comes to making money.
But India is in a different league altogether and does not have money to burn. The Congress party will have to start making good on the promises it made to India's poor. So far there are no indications that Pakistan will want to enter into an arms race with India.
Perhaps, India is hoping that Pakistan will do so. Both Pakistan and India must take poverty alleviation beyond the level of rhetoric and slogan-mongering. I don't think that the poor of the two countries and they number in the millions, are fooled any more. Poverty is neither their dharma nor their kismet. If a lack of food does not kill them, then disease will do so. Nehru's "tryst with destiny" sounds not only hollow but also a cruel joke.
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[3]
The Praful Bidwai Column December 20, 2004
Buying Arms, Talking Peace India, Pakistan in an insecurity trap
By Praful Bidwai
It is regrettable that India and Pakistan have made so little progress on the worthy proposal, now 14 months-old, to launch a bus service between the capitals of divided Kashmir. And it is equally distressing that they remain stuck in a conservative groove while discussing nuclear and conventional military confidence-building measures (CBMs) which will genuinely reduce the threat of a conflict in this volatile and now-nuclearised region. While the hitch on the first issue concerns the nature of the documents to be carried by passengers, the talks on the second are marred by a lack of will to take the bold steps that are absolutely necessary in the South Asian context.
In Islamabad talks last week, India and Pakistan complacently declared that Kashmir is no longer a nuclear flashpoint. This is a dangerous delusion. So long as Kashmir remains a contentious issue, it will trigger military rivalry with a nuclear escalation potential.
Beyond a point, it is immaterial who deserves the blame for this stagnation. Each state has its own special concerns, compulsions and anxieties. At the end of the day, what matters is whether the two succeed or fail to address these concerns and allay their fears. The stagnation comes almost a year after the Islamabad breakthrough which re-started their first serious dialogue since the nuclear tests of 1998, punctuated by Kargil and the 10 months-long military standoff of 2002. Unless the dialogue leads to concrete results, India and Pakistan will fail in the eyes of the world community to achieve minimal peace or stability.
That is bad enough. Even worse, the two governments have since launched a huge arms-buying spree. India is acquiring sophisticated air defence systems, new submarines from France and Russia (including a nuclear-powered submarine), the Patriot range of anti-missile missiles from the US, as well as new warplanes and an air-defence ship. India is now among the world's three largest arms importers. Pakistan is buying more P-3C Orion maritime surveillance-cum-submarine-hunter aircraft, six Phalanx rapid-fire anti-ship guns, and TOW missiles, etc.-worth a big $1.2 billion from the US alone.
Washington is encouraging both states to acquire new, ever-deadlier weapons. Indeed, selling such weaponry to them was the principal function of US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfold's recent visit to New Delhi and Islamabad. This has created rancour and resentment in both the South Asian capitals. India's Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee has protested at the arms sales to Pakistan. He says the US argument that the sales are meant "to contain terrorist groups like Al-Qaida and Taliban � does not stand� Nobody uses F-16 fighter planes and other weapons meant for big wars to fight terrorists". He has even warned that the arms transfer could "jeopardise" the India-Pakistan peace process.
Pakistan retorts that India is being "paranoid"; Islamabad's arms acquisition will only "restore symmetry and bring stability to the region". As Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan put it, in criticising Pakistan, India is "misleading Indian public opinion and misinforming the international community." According to him, "Pakistan is pursuing a modest programme to fill up the gap that emerged during the 1990s due to US sanctions�" He also accuses India of having a highly ambitious $95 billion arms acquisition programme spread over 15 years.
Mr Mukherjee is right to say that weapons like the Orion and F-16 or anti-tank missiles are meant "for big wars and not to fight terrorism. Nobody uses F-16s to fight terrorism". But that's hardly the point. The new deadly toys are a reward for Pakistan's invaluable assistance to the US in fighting al-Qaeda in and around Afghanistan. Similarly, Washington has rewarded India for its "strategic partnership": first by approving the sale of the US-Israeli "Green Pine" radar and an associated air defence system, and then by offering top-of-the-range weapons such as the Patriot-II missile interceptor which is reportedly effective against low-flying aircraft, as well as other conventional materiel.
Two transformations are visible here. During the Cold War-particularly between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, and then again in the 1980s-, the India-Pakistan arms race was fuelled by rival powers: respectively, the USSR and the US. Today, the same power drives the engine of that race: the US. India and Pakistan both vie for its attention and favours. In the process, both sustain, and in the long run intensify, their rivalry.
Second, the US is far from even-handed in its treatment of India and Pakistan. In one phase, it tilts towards one; in another, towards the other. A pro-Pakistan tilt took place, for instance, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. In 2000, following President Clinton's South Asia visit, this tilt was reversed. Washington also consciously plays one rival off against the other by offering different things to them.
In the 1980s, Washington sold F-16s to Pakistan on an exclusive basis. But in the early 1990s, it imposed restrictions under the Pressler Amendment, etc. Then, after 2000, it warmed up to India and offered it "strategic partnership" plus a role in Ballistic Missile Defence. But a few months ago, it suddenly designated Pakistan a Major non-Nato Ally. For all its rhetoric about India's worthy democracy and the country's great "potential", the US does not support India's candidature for permanent membership of the UN Security Council.
Now, Washington is dangling different carrots before the two states. President Bush has again described Pakistan as a "frontline state" which is successfully fighting al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups and called General Pervez Musharraf "a world leader". Washington is even more effusive in describing India as an "emerging power, a regional power and a world power with which we want a growing relationship".
US ambassador to India David Mulford says Washington is eager to increase its military market in India. "We would like to be a bigger supplier of military equipment�" Mr Mulford says Pakistan does not fall in the same category as India. "It is important to view these relationships each in their own context. � It is very important to de-hyphenate the relationship�" However, the relationship does remain strongly hyphenated-not least because of Washington.
Washington practises double standards based on short-term considerations. Such double standards come naturally to a Superpower. India and Pakistan realise and resent this. Regrettably, they have both fallen a victim to it. All this would be relatively unimportant if it did not have strategic consequences. But it does. The India-Pakistan rivalry is exacerbated by Washington's policies and moves, with their profoundly destabilising and harmful consequences. In particular, the US's conduct can vitiate the present climate of goodwill and put a spoke in the India-Pakistan peace process.
It is not just hypocritical, but downright foolhardy, for Washington both to supply new weapons to India and Pakistan, and then expect them to negotiate an authentic peace. The logic of the first process-arms race, escalation of military preparations, and increased hostility-is sharply different from the logic of dialogue, reconciliation and peace.
It is even more unrealistic and foolish of India and Pakistan to imagine they can continue to arm themselves to the teeth against each other out of insecuity, and at the same time, become self-assured and secure. The hawks told us this would happen in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s-through the conventional rearmament route. It didn't. The sale of F-16 warplanes to Pakistan probably featured on the front pages of Indian newspapers on an average of 200 days out of 365 days in the year during the 1980s as a major bone of contention. But the contention didn't end when the planes' spares stopped reaching Pakistan.
Then, said our Right-wing experts, nuclear weapons would provide "strategic balance" and stability. They didn't. India and Pakistan went to war within a year of their nuclear tests! Unless they reach a durable peace, conflict could break out yet again-with a definite nuclear escalation potential.
India and Pakistan have tried to talk peace without taking their foot off the nuclear accelerator or even halting the conventional arms race. This too suits a hawkish prescription based on the utmost cynicism. Indian ultraconservatives believe that the US's "coddling" of Pakistan to the point of it becoming, as one of them puts it, a US "protectorate", is a good thing. It will keep Pakistan on its "best behaviour"; by contrast, "whenever American interest flagged � [the] Pakistanis have run riot". Besides, argue these cynics, a close military sales relationship between Washington and Islamabad will help New Delhi demand "parity" or "fairness"-new, yet more lethal weapons from Washington, in keeping with India's "emerging" position.
This logic is fatally flawed: seeking "balance" through new armaments leads to the creation and widening of imbalances. These in turn furnish an argument for "balance" through yet more tilting of the scales. Such tilt in one direction, followed by a tilt in the other, violates the ends of fairness and justice-and peace. If you want peace, you must wage peace, not war. It would be suicidal for Indian and Pakistani policy-makers and opinion-shapers to forget this great lesson of the 20th century.-end-
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[4]
Deccan Chronicle December 20, 2004
DEAD END IN PUNJAB By Brad Adams
The story of history's losers is usually buried under layers of dirt, shovelled courtesy of the winners. At the bottom of these layers are individuals who opposed those in power. Lying next to them are people aligned with or sympathetic to the losers. Since the middle of the 20th century, social archaeologists have identified many losers by another name: "human rights" victims, eliminated by governments or their armed opponents. The nomenclature of human rights has had a salutary impact. It has posthumously turned forgotten or even scorned "losers" into individuals with flesh and bone and thoughts worthy of remembrance.
Perversely, rights-abusing governments sometimes benefit from the accretion of victims. In the rush to protect today's (and tomorrow's) victims, yesterday's are often de-prioritised, forgotten, even cast aside. This is now the plight of India's Sikhs. In the early Eighties, armed separatist groups demanded an independent State of Khalistan.
To destroy the movement, security forces were given a free hand, leading to the worst kinds of abuse. India, grappling with new battles in Kashmir and the North-east and coping with religious conflict leading to the Mumbai riots of 1992-1993 and the Gujarat pogrom in 2002, has largely forgotten the crimes in Punjab. Each of these problems has piled a new layer of dirt on the long-standing and still simmering problem of the Sikhs.
The Punjab violence peaked in June, 1984 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent the Indian Army and paramilitary forces into the most sacred of Sikh sites, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Huddled with hundreds of Sikh militants were thousands of civilians, many of them pilgrims who thought they were safe in a place considered an unthinkable target. A brutal battle left nearly a hundred Indian security personnel dead. Independent estimates suggest that thousands, mostly civilians, perished. Some were reportedly found with their hands bound and bullets in their heads.
The attack on the Golden Temple soon cost Indira Gandhi her life. On October 31, 1984, she was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Blaming all Sikhs instead of the individuals who pulled the triggers, members of Gandhi's Cong-ress party organised pogroms against Sikhs in Delhi. In a rebuke to the party's spiritual founder, Mahatma Gandhi, thousands were killed. Children were found beheaded. Seven government-appointed commissions have investigated these attacks, but all have either coated the layers of dirt with whitewash or been met with official stonewalling and obstruction.
Victim groups, lawyers, and activists have long alleged State complicity in the violence. For three days, the police failed to act as gangs carrying weapons and kerosene roamed the streets, exhorting non-Sikhs to kill Sikhs and loot and burn their properties. Reacting to the assassination, Rajiv Gandhi, however, appeared to bless the ensuing pogrom, saying, "When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake."
For the next 10 years, politically active Sikhs in Punjab, and those who stood up for victims and their families, were targeted for murder, disappearance, and arrest by the security forces. Violence and intimidation have continued at a lower level since, but a recent visit to Amritsar made it clear just how widespread the fear and anguish continue to be. Many Sikhs there continue to talk of fear of the police and security forces and of receiving threats, often speaking in the low voices of human rights victims in too many parts of the world.
Improbable and courageous leaders have emerged, such as Paramjit Kaur Khalra, whose husband, Jaswant Singh Khalra, exposed the secret and illegal cremation of thousands of bodies in Punjab officially labelled as "unidentified or unclaimed". The killers certainly knew their identities; they were "unclaimed" because their bodies were cremated before family members ever knew they were missing. Yet, about 65 per cent of the persons illegally killed and cremated by the Punjab police have yet to be formally "identified".
So widespread was the practice that Jaswant Singh Khalra uncovered it by tracking the purchases of wood (he learnt that it takes 300 kilogramme to burn a single body) by the security services. He found that in just three crematoria in Amritsar district - one of the 13 districts in Punjab - thousands of unidentified people had been illegally cremated.
What Jaswant Singh Khalra learnt cost him his life. In September 1995, he was abducted in broad daylight in front of his house and later killed. His killers have been identified but have not been prosecuted. Impunity reigns over Punjab, to the point that former Punjab police chief K P S Gill has had the temerity to publicly demand that laws be passed to grant immunity to police officers or their crimes in recognition of their "service to the State".
For progress to be made, Congress will have to stop just pointing fingers at the BJP for its stoking of communal violence and deal with the skeletons in its own closet. Most of the killing and disappearances took place under Indira Gandhi and successor Congress governments. Some of those allegedly responsible for the violence in Delhi in 1984 were elected to Parliament in May's elections. Some are now ministers.
But groups like the Association of Families of the Disappeared in Punjab, the Committee for Inform-ation and Initiative on Punjab, the Committee for Coordination on Disappe-arances in Punjab (publisher of the seminal Reduced to Ashes, The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, www.safhr.org), and Ensaaf (www.ensaaf.org), which just released Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India, have refused to allow the issue to be buried.
It is largely due to their efforts that recently the National Human Rights Commission ordered compensation of Rs 2.5 lakh each for the families of 109 people who were killed in the custody of Punjab Police between 1984 and 1994. This could be the beginning of a proper accounting, although the families consider this too little, too late, and the State has made no admission of responsibility.
Justice will have failed unless the officials involved in such violations are vigorously and transparently prosecuted in a clear message that India does not tolerate human rights violations or excuse it because the perpetrators claim to be patriotic enough to break the law for national security. The best and only way for Congress to overcome its record of human rights abuses in Punjab and Delhi is to embrace the rule of law as the vehicle for accountability and reconciliation. But a genuine reconciliation requires a willingness to admit errors and rectify them.
Only a conscious exercise of political will on the part of the new government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh - seemingly a serious and principled politician - can bring about justice for the Sikhs.
Otherwise, discussions about the carnage in Gujarat and the need to take action against BJP leaders risk being seen as a partisan ploy, divorced from a genuine commitment to the rule of law and the imperative of re-establishing the secular credentials of the State. And it is worth contemplating the possibility that success in Punjab may open new windows for peace and reconciliation in other areas of conflict still visible in the dirt, such as Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland.
(The writer is the executive director, Asia Division, Human Rights Watch)
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[5] ANNOUNCEMENTS:
(i)
Association for Communal Harmony in Asia (ACHA)
www.asiapeace.org & <http://www.indiapakistanpeace.org>www.indiapakistanpeace.org
4410 Verda Lane NE, Keizer, OR 97303
Executive Director: Pritam K. Rohila, Ph.D.
ACHA Awards 2004
Dear Prof. Puniyani:
I am pleased to inform you that ACHA Board of Directors, in their meeting held at Wilsonville, OR, yesterday, November 18, 2004, have decided to select you as one of the recipients of ACHA Star Award. Congratulations!
The award ceremony will be held at 5:00 p.m., on Saturday, December 4, 2004, at Comfort Suites Hotel, 1477 NE 183rd Ave, Gresham, OR. Your physical presence at the ceremony is not required. Instead, we will contact you by phone. Please send me the best phone number for us to reach you.
It is difficult to determine exact time for our call. But it is estimated to be between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. Pakistan/India Standard Time.
You will have two to three minutes for a brief acceptance speech by phone. We will amplify it for our audience. But since it is hard sometimes to comprehend things said over the phone. It would be best, if you can email us your acceptance speech ahead of time, so that we can have transparencies made. We will project it on the screen, so that the members of the audience can read it while you are speaking over the phone.
I will deliver the award to you personally, when I visit India and Pakistan December 27 through January 8, as a part of a Peace and Goodwill Delegation of Nonresident Indians and Pakistanis from UK, USA and Canada.
Best wishes,
Pritam
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(ii)
Institute of Objective Studies, New Delhi Cordially invites you to attend the
Lecture on Democratic Decentralization in India and the Minorities: Looking Back, Look Forward by Dr Omar Khalidi Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
Date & Time: December 22, 2004 at 3:00 p.m.
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(iii)
Duke University Press has just published a title that will surely interest South Asia Citizens Web readers:
BEYOND LINES OF CONTROL: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India by Ravina Aggarwal Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-3414-3
By placing cultural performances and political movements in Ladakh center stage, Ravina Aggarwal rewrites the standard plot of nation and border along the Line of Control, the disputed border between Pakistan and India. Aggarwal brings the insights of performance studies and the growing field of the anthropology of international borders to bear on her extensive fieldwork in Ladakh.
For more information about the book visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=8223-3414-3
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(iv)
BOOK LAUNCH ON RIVER LINKING EXPERIENCES OF KERALA
Dear Friends,
We happily announce that the book named, 'TRAGEDY OF COMMONS-The Kerala Experience in River Linking', an outcome of two years of study, authored by five researchers (S.P.Ravi, C.G.Madhusoodhanan, Dr.A.Latha, S. Unnikrishnan and K.H. Amita Bachan) under the River Research Centre, Kerala is out from the press. South Asia Network on Dams Rivers and People (SANDRP), Delhi and River Research Centre, C/O Chalakudy River Protection Samithi, Thrissur has published the book jointly.
We cordially inform and invite all to the launch of the book at G. Auditorium, Kochi (near Maharajah's College grounds) on the 20th December 2004 at 10 am by Sri.V.M.Sudheeran Ex M.P. Sri.K.P.Rajendran, the Opposition Party leader in Kerala Assembly and Smt. Savithri Lakshmanan, MLA, Chalakudy constituency, will also attend the book launch.
The main contents of the book include,
� Kerala experiences in River Linking through detailed case study of the famous and complex Parambikulam Aliyar Project (PAP), involving ten dams and three rivers projected as a 'success story' in inter state river water sharing by the GOI Task Force on River Linking. � Inherent flaws in the PAP Treaty, the violations therein, the impacts on the rivers and their tributaries and socio economic and environmental impacts with colour maps and photographs and figures. � Brief description of other river diversions involving Kerala; the century old Mullaperiyar Project and Bhavani river diversions. � Details and possible impacts of the proposed 16th Peninsular Link, the Pamba-Achnakoil-Vaippar link involving the diversion of Pamba and Achankoil Rivers of Kerala. � Critical analysis of projected benefits and possible impacts of proposed Inter Linking of Rivers Project. � Implications for the National River Linking Project against the background of Kerala experiences � The PAP Agreement as Appendix.
The 160-page book is priced at Rs. 120/- only.
To get a copy of the book please send a DD/money order for Rs. 120/-in favor of A.Latha, payable at State Bank of Travancore, Thrissur, Kerala in the address, A.Latha, River Research Centre, Karthika, Ollur.P.O. Thrissur, Kerala-680306. Ph-91-0487-2353021, e -mail- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Copies of the book are also available with Himanshu Thakkar, SANDRP, C/O 86-D, AD Block, Shalimar Bagh, New Delhi-110088. Ph-91-011-27484654, e mail- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For getting a copy of the book from SANDRP, DD/money order for Rs 120/- in favor of YUVA, payable at Mumbai, maybe sent to SANDRP Delhi address.
Inside India, Rs 20/- may be added for postage and packing in all cases.
For those friends residing outside India, please send the DD inclusive of the postage charges for Rs 200/- for South Asia and US D 12/- for outside South Asia.
Please circulate. Looking forward to your response and encouragement,
Warm regards, A. Latha, River Research Centre, Kerala And Himanshu Thakkar, South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, Delhi
Chalakudy Puzha Samrakshana Samithi Karthika, Manalattil Ollur.P.O Thrissur 680306 Kerala, India Ph: +91-487-2353021 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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