South Asia Citizens Wire | 13-14 June, 2006 | Dispatch No. 2257 [The South Asia Citizens Web initiative is now 10 years old! ]
[1] Pakistan: TV channels and the Hudood debate (Edit, Daily Times) [2] India - Chhattisgarh : Militarising Civil Society - Citizens' panel warns of civil war in Chhattisgarh (Press Release, Independent Citizen's Initiative) - Waging War Against The People - Dangerous anti-Naxal strategy (Praful Bidwai) - Salwa Judum: Nothing unofficial about it (Nandini Sundar) - Physiognomy of Violence (K Balagopal) - Chhattisgarh : Repression Garbed as Security (Editorial, EPW) [4] Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation In South Asia edited by Ravinder Kaur (Reviewed by Harsh Mander) [5] India Pakistan Arms Race and Militarisation Watch No 162 [6] Call For Papers/Conference: 'The Independence of India and Pakistan: Sixtieth Anniversary Reflections.' _____ [1] The Daily Times June 13, 2006 Editorial: TV CHANNELS AND THE HUDOOD DEBATE The current debate about the abolition of Hudood laws is throwing up an interesting array of opinion. It is unprecedented because, on Islamic subjects, most private TV channels had only one point of view - that of the orthodox cleric - and there was usually no space for disagreement that could give the state an opportunity for reform. But after six years of freedom and "market-driven" Islamisation, the private TV channels are paying back good dividends. If the politicians want, they can do away with the horrible laws that punish the raped woman as if she had fornicated. The TV debates show the reactionary clerics sticking to their anti-reform stance - supported by the clerical alliance MMA in the parliament - although the people clearly think that the laws should be abolished. In this context, it is important to know whether the two non-clerical mainstream parties, the PPP and the PMLN, are inclined to side with the people or go with the mullahs. Pakistan began its Islamisation in 1948 with the Objectives Resolution. It reached its climax in the 1979-1988 interregnum of General Zia ul Haq's military dictatorship when coercion was used in line with the provisions of enforcement contained in Islamic jurisprudence. After General Zia, the civilian governments were never strong enough in the face of the entrenched and Islamised organs of the state to roll back the process. In at least two instances, when the elected governments were dismissed by the president under Article 58/2/B of the Constitution with the approval of the military establishment, one of the charges was that the government had stopped or neglected Islamisation. One unsuccessful military coup in 1995 also made de-Islamisation one of its grounds for staging the coup. Indeed, after 1998, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attempted further 'Islamisation' under the projected 15th Amendment. He failed only because he didn't have a sufficient majority in the Upper House. Under General Pervez Musharraf the process of de-Islamisation began in earnest with a measure of "indirect" international coercion under UN Security Council resolution 1373 under Chapter Seven of the Charter. An order imposed under duress is easily rolled back by bringing the situation to normal: usually the laws remain unchanged but their enforcement by the state is allowed to default. But here an opposite thesis had in fact been proved: if a coercive order aimed at the transformation of society is allowed to reign for some years the target population internalises it and its effects become embedded in society. A "public demand" for Islamisation appeared to have become irreducible. Therefore even under General Musharraf Pakistan's discourse at least remained as intensely Islamic as it was under General Zia because after a decade of dictatorship the public mind had become unfamiliar with the secular-pluralist discourse. So when the private TV channels opened in Pakistan after 2000 the owners were struck by the high public demand for religious programmes. The process of religious communication on TV in Pakistan was market-driven. It catered to the aggressive fundamentalist as well as to the "accretive" magic-oriented istakhara type of discourse. Since under General Zia, Pakistan had only one state-owned TV channel, the religious discourse under General Musharraf - through half a dozen new private TV channels - seemed actually to be several times more extensive in volume and quality than what General Zia was able to achieve officially. This "stampede" for Islam was aided in no small measure by the earlier proliferation of jihadi clergy, which had formed its own centres of power in parallel to the state. The organisations banned by a UN committee under resolution 1373 for terrorism remained present on the ground and continued to assert their power in favour of a privatised Islamisation. In fact in 2002, jihadi and sectarian clerics were emboldened enough by General Musharraf's "secular ambivalence" to announce that they would take over cities and start Islamising them by force. After September 11, 2001, the Islamic discourse on TV became more intense and aggressive. It was spearheaded by a clergy now scared of General Musharraf's "subservience" to the United States, which might result in his taking steps to restrict clerical activity in Pakistan. (This was actually seen to happen later when General Musharraf tried to "normalise" the seminaries and sanitise the ideologically loaded textbooks.) This was compounded by a pan-Islamic wave of grievance, which was further strengthened by the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. Since this invasion was opposed by all levels of Pakistani society, the TV discourse reflected it through the new supremacy of the clerical speaker. It now began to express an unrelated cosmic grief that looked less like a protest against global injustice and more a like a regret over Islam's inability to dominate. As astounding proof of how the mass media affected the mind of society, Imam Mehdis began to emerge from various cities of Pakistan and had to be arrested! Because of the private TV channels, the era of General Musharraf has been in effect more of an "Islamic" era than the one presided over by General Zia. The tone of the Islamic discourse has been aggressive, if not paranoid, and freedom accorded to secular and moderate voices to come and compete with the orthodox clergy has simply led to more acrimony as youthful audiences tend to defend the hard-line positions taken by the clerical discussants. The moderate discussants are tentative and apologetic because of their inability to quote from the Quran and Hadith in Arabic, and can clearly see the dice loaded against their point of view. The audiences are motivated by a number of external influences, which have been induced by the TV channels themselves. The rise of collective namaz in mosques was witnessed under General Zia and the period following his death, but the real dominance of the mosque was seen under General Musharraf and his liberal media policy. In an interesting departure, however, the same TV channels are now projecting a public consensus that a woman who is raped - an act of violence, not sex, because a woman often dies during rape - cannot be punished with qazf (wrongful accusation) simply because she can't prove it with four pious male witnesses. This is largely because of the obvious and blatant injustice. It is also because the human rights dialogue in the country has sharpened because of crusaders like Mukhtar Mai. Meanwhile, the MMA is watching and will definitely defy it if the non-clerical parties support its defiance. But why should the PPP and PMLN stand in the way of a much-needed reform? Let us keep our fingers crossed because both mainstream parties have shelved earlier commission reports recommending abolition of Hudood laws when they were in power. * _____ [2] MILITARISING CIVIL SOCIETY Press Release by Independent Citizens Initiative, New Delhi 29th May 2006 CITIZENS' PANEL WARNS OF CIVIL WAR IN CHHATTISGARH CALLS FOR END TO 'SALWA JUDUM' CAMPAIGN AND JUDICIAL INQUIRY An Independent Citizen's Initiative of writers, senior journalists and former civil servants visited Dantewara district of Chhattisgarh State between 17 and 21 May 2006. It traveled through the entire district talking to a wide cross-section of people - displaced villagers in camps, political leaders, government and police officials, social workers, journalists, and other citizens. It found that the situation in Dantewara district is extremely serious. There is an atmosphere of fear and a great deal of violence in which ordinary villagers, and tribals in particular, are the main sufferers. The violence by Maoists guerillas continues. On the other side, in several areas the Chhattisgarh administration appears to have 'outsourced' law and order to an unaccountable, undisciplined and amorphous group which calls itself Salwa Judum. The leadership of this group has passed into the hands of criminal elements who are not in the control of the administration. Violence is no answer to violence. Our investigations show that the civil administration is on the point of collapse. Despite carrying letters from the Additional Chief Secretary and informing all officials of our visit, our movement was strictly curbed. We were prevented from visiting villages where serious human rights violations were reported. We were physically attacked three times by Salwa Judum members, manhandled, and our possessions stolen, with the police standing by. We found that society has been deeply divided. Villages and families have been set against each other. Minors are being used as Special Police Officers (SPOs), and armed with lathis and guns. An entire section of society is being criminalized by being made complicit in salwa judum's violence, and also made vulnerable to retaliatory attacks by Maoists and their village level supporters. Instead of bringing in peace and security, Salwa Judum has increased insecurity all around. The Independent Citizen's Initiative found evidence of killings, the burning of homes, and attacks on women, including gang-rape. Only the killings by Maoists are recorded, while the killings and other incidents of violence by Salwa Judum have been ignored. Arrests appear arbitrary, and several people seem to be missing. All these incidents need to be thoroughly investigated. The press is tightly controlled and intimidated, and feels unable to report the truth. Thousands of villagers have been forced to come and live in camps. Camp conditions are seriously inadequate. Beyond building some roadside houses, the government appears to have no long-term plans for the rehabilitation or safe return of villagers. We believe that for the violence to end, and for the citizens of Dantewara to live peaceful and normal lives, the Government of Chhattisgarh needs to immediately take these corrective measures: 1. The Salwa Judum must be stopped immediately, its members disarmed, and control reasserted by the state administration. 2. To restore governance, the government must revamp all top level administration in the area and position those known to have empathy for adivasis. The law-and-order machinery must be repaired and restored so that it is fully accountable and protects the lives, security and dignity of the citizens of Dantewara. 3. The government must facilitate and enable the return to their villages of those in camps. For this, both Maoists and the government must come to a ceasefire. 4. The Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Act 2005 must be repealed since its provisions are vague and vulnerable to misuse. We appeal to the Government of India, jointly with the Government of Chhattisgarh, to: 5. Institute a full, impartial, credible and time-bound enquiry into the incidents of violence by Maoists as well as Salwa Judum in Dantewara in the last one year. 6. Since the Maoists are not confined to Chhattisgarh, the Government of India must start a national dialogue with the Maoists. We appeal to the Maoists to stop violence, to facilitate conditions of peace and normalcy, and enable the return of displaced people to their own homes and villages. The members of the Independent Citizen's Initiative were: Dr Ramachandra Guha (historian and columnist, Bangalore) Mr Harivansh (editor, Prabhat Khabar, Ranchi), Ms Farah Naqvi (writer and social activist, New Delhi), Mr EAS Sarma (former Secretary, Government of India, Visakhapatnam), Dr Nandini Sundar (Professor of Sociology, Delhi University), Mr. B. G. Verghese (former editor, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, New Delhi). o o o The Praful Bidwai Column June 5, 2006 WAGING WAR AGAINST THE PEOPLE DANGEROUS ANTI-NAXAL STRATEGY By Praful Bidwai The Chhattisgarh Government is about to launch a massive military operation against the Naxalites with more than a dozen Central Reserve Police Force battalions under the command of the so-called "Supercop" and former Punjab Director-General of Police KPS Gill. The operation has been called the "ultimate" blow or "knockout" punch against "the Red Menace" and will reportedly involve the use of helicopters. The CRPF will be assisted by special commandos from Mizoram, who have been trained in "counter-insurgency" operations by United States troops at Vairangte for more than a decade. Mr Gill's strategy, whose blueprint is with the Union home ministry, involves gathering reliable intelligence on the Maoists' hideouts and movements, and hitting them hard "in a sudden and well-coordinated attack". According to a leak to the media, "the thrust of the Gill [strategy] is to launch a swift offensive, giving little time to [the] Maoist guerrillas to regroup and retaliate". The plan also involves evacuation of large numbers of people from the forests of southern Bastar and clearing them of mature trees. It's a safe bet that this operation will further brutalise the civilian population without being particularly effective against the Naxalites. The whole plan is thoroughly ill-conceived, and will involve violations of the law of the land and the human rights of vulnerable Adivasi tribals. The Union and state governments should call off the operation at once. The operation is a sequel to a "people's campaign" called Salwa Judum (peace hunt or movement) launched a year ago by the state government, which has all but triggered a civil war in parts of Chhattisgarh. Salwa Judum (SJ) targets the Naxalites for violent attacks. Its members generally comprise the local elite, including wealthy Adivasis, traders and contractors. Formally, SJ is the creation of Congress legislature party chief Mahendra Karma, politically known as "the 60th member of BJP CM Raman Singh's cabinet". In truth, the SJ idea was conceived by former BJP home minister Brij Mohan Aggarwal. A group called Independent Citizens' Initiative (ICI), comprising former Union government secretary EAS Sarma, Delhi sociology professor Nandini Sundar, veteran journalist BG Verghese, historian Ram Guha, Prabhat Khabar (Ranchi) editor Harivansh, and social activist Farah Naqvi, recently inquired into Salwa Judum's activities. Its just-released fact-finding report makes extremely disturbing reading. It shows that SJ is not the "people's spontaneous resistance or uprising" against the Naxalites that it's claimed to be. It's a government-sponsored and -funded organisation which has an armed wing consisting of 3,200 Special Police Officers, widely seen as the tribal face of the police. In essence, says ICI, the Chhattisgarh government has "outsourced" its law-and-order functions to an "unaccountable, undisciplined and amorphous group" not trained to use firearms properly. The SJ and the SPOs have no legitimate authority, but have become a law unto themselves. SJ has been forcing tribals to take up arms against the Naxalites-on pain of being beaten up, illegally fined, or have their homes burnt down. SPOs are meant to work under the authority of the state police. But in Chhattisgarh's Naxalite-affected districts, the regular police has ceded all power to SJ's lumpen elements. SJ's violent operations have turned the tribal belt of Bastar into a virtual war-zone, in which Adivasis are pitted against Adivasis and forced to fight the Maoists to whose retaliation they become vulnerable. Scores of villages have been evacuated. The Adivasis' social life has been destroyed. Officially, as many as 46,000 people have been compelled to move into so-called relief camps near highways. According to interviews conducted by ICI with local people, officials, journalists and foresters, the number of displaced people is as high as 70,000. ICI found "evidence of killings, the burning of homes, and attacks on women, including gang-rape." There are arbitrary arrests and "several people seem to be missing. The press is tightly controlled and intimidated" Local villagers complain of harassment, extortion, frequent beatings (to extract information about Naxalites) and other human rights violations. SJ is guilty of recruiting even minors as SPOs-a breach of the Geneva Conventions and of several covenants on child rights to which the government is a signatory. Equally disturbingly, an attempt is under way to break up tribal communities into the equivalent of "Strategic Hamlets" which the U.S. created in the 1960s in Vietnam in its brutal. The "Strategic Hamlet" model is not as far-fetched as might appear. Just last fortnight, two officials of the U.S. Embassy met the Chhattisgarh chief secretary (home) BKS Ray to offer the state assistance in fighting the "Naxalite threat". Although the government has not accepted the offer, it's clearly following the same militaristic approach that the U.S. favours to deal with insurgents and guerrillas, for instance, in Latin America. Ostensibly, the UPA government advocates a "two-pronged" strategy: deal sternly with Naxalite violence; but simultaneously address the socio-economic sources of discontent underlying it through development programmes. In March, Union home minister Shivraj Patil tabled a status paper on the issue in which he spelt out a 14-point policy based on such a dual approach. In reality, the government has concentrated much of its effort on "modernisation" of state police forces, long-term deployment of paramilitary troops, and use of modern lethal weaponry. The bulk of the financial assistance of Rs 2,475 crores committed to India's 55 worst Naxalite-affected districts has been earmarked for police-paramilitary operations. Very little has translated into development funding. According to ICI, relief camp conditions are seriously inadequate. The government appears to have no long-term plans for rehabilitation or safe return of villagers. The government has concentrated only one thing: force. This approach springs from a "thanedar mentality": coercion is the most effective way of dealing with social dicontent. This approach is fundamentally misbegotten. It fails to understand that Naxalite activity has spread to some 160 of India's 600 districts because of rising agrarian distress, destruction of forests by the timber mafia, uprooting of Adivasis due to predatory mining, irrigation and metallurgical projects, and rapidly growing income and regional disparities. It's not a coincidence that more than two-thirds of the 55 most severely Naxalite-affected districts lie in the tribal belt. In state after tribal state, the Adivasi economy has been squeezed and marginalised to a point where millions of Adivasis have ceased being an agricultural people and lost the organic historical links with land, forests and water. Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand were created on the explicit rationale of a tribal identity. But in both, the influx of outsiders has reduced Adivasis to a minority. More generally, Naxalite activity has grown-year after every single year-because of India's jobless and destructive growth which benefits only a tenth or so of the population. The growth is extremely rapid in areas in which the state has withdrawn from public services or colluded with entrenched interests, and become predatory on the people. It's hard to defend the violent justice that many Naxalite groups readily hand out to their enemies. Some have even developed a stake in extortion. However, the problem this poses cannot be resolved, even mitigated, by coercion, especially the lawless use of force without accountability. That's precisely what Salwa Judum has practised. This cannot but further alienate Chhattisgarh's Adivasis and throw even the more neutral of them into the Naxalites arms. Each time an innocent tribal is brutalised, and separated from his/her means of livelihood, a Naxalite sympathiser is created. Social discontent typically takes a violent turn when all peaceful avenues are closed. Mr Gill is a dogmatic votary of the coercive approach. One of the greatest myths created about him is that he effectively, yet lawfully, crushed the Punjab insurgency. His methods were egregiously lawless: torturing suspected militants, harassing their families, deploying unnumbered jeeps, and killing hundreds of those merely suspected to have harboured Khalistani guerrillas. The National Human Rights Commission has just authenticated the judicial finding that almost 2,000 people were cremated without identification in a single year in Punjab. It has ordered compensation for the victims' relatives. Clearly, Mr Gill has a lot to answer for. In a more just society, he would be tried for crimes against humanity. The Khalistani movement died not because of Mr Gill's brutal methods, but because its militants antagonised the people and lost support. By relying on contingents trained in "counter-insurgency", and more generally, on brute force, Mr Gill will visit even more violence than SJ on Chhattisgarh people. He must be stopped in his tracks. Salwa Judum must be disbanded. The Centre must radically revise its Naxalite strategy and open a dialogue with Maoist groups. If the Manmohan Singh government can hold round after round of talks with separatists from Jammu and Kashmir and with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, there is no reason why it cannot talk to non-secessionist groups which voice the grievances of the people. The Naxalites have a history of 39 years. If they have flourished, it is because they represent something in this society. It just won't do to ignore them, or worse, to try to crush them.-end- sacw.net June 4, 2006 SALWA JUDUM: NOTHING UNOFFICIAL ABOUT IT by Nandini Sundar On June 4, the Chhattisgarh government celebrated the first anniversary of Salwa Judum, the officially-sponsored anti-insurgency campaign against Naxalites in Dantewada district. Officially, the campaign is a spontaneous, self-initiated people's movement for peace. But as the Independent Citizens Initiative of which I was part found out during an intensive fact-finding visit to the region last month, the truth is far more alarming. Simply put, the district is in the vortex of an officially-sponsored civil war that has displaced nearly 50,000 people and led to the deaths of over 250. A police video talks of 'Operation Salwa Judum' starting from January 2005 onwards when the police launched overt and covert operations to mobilise villagers against the Maoists, and the government appoints and pays special police officers (SPOs) Rs. 1,500 a month. A work proposal for the 'People's Movement against Naxalites' drawn up by the Collector of Dantewada in 2005 describes its modalities, noting, inter alia, that informers will not trust government unless their information is immediately acted upon and Naxalites are killed. Para 10 notes that if innocents die in large operations, higher-up authorities must keep quiet. The Collector also advocates controls on the media. Far from being a "peace campaign", the Salwa Judum has led to increased violence all round. The "peace" activists go in mobs from village to village, asking people to join. If they don't, they are warned their houses will be burnt. As the Chhattisgarh government itself has acknowledged, Maoist violence has increased as a result. The Dantewada Collector's list names 81 people killed by Naxalites in Dantewada from June to December 2005. An additional 60 or so have been killed in 4 major incidents in 2006. The Maoists have also released a list of civilians killed from June 2005 to March 2006. None of these 116 people are registered in any FIRs and no compensation has been paid to their families. Two separate investigative teams have independently confirmed 16 of these deaths. The Maoists have also published a list of 91 villages and 1,857 houses burnt by the Salwa Judum, and at least 31 women gangraped. Independent groups like PUCL-PUDR, Human Rights Forum and the Independent Citizens Initiative have all been forcibly prevented by the Salwa Judum from visiting villages where the maximum arson has been reported. Instead of responding seriously to these and similar findings, it is unfortunate that the Union Home Ministry, as the Economic Times reported on 31 May, has simply chosen to dismiss our report as "selective". The state government claims that people have fled to camps because the Naxalites have threatened retaliation for joining the Salwa Judum, and that they are simply responding to a crisis situation. In fact, at least five different probes (the three above as well as the Asian Centre for Human Rights and an enquiry by the state wing of the Communist Party of India) have confirmed that the majority of people have not come into camps voluntarily. They have been forcibly brought there by the Salwa Judum and security forces. Some have come to avoid their houses being burnt while others have been attracted by the payments to SPOs. The answer to why the authorities are wilfully displacing people lies perhaps in historical parallels with Mizoram, Malaysia, and elsewhere where governments have been unable to fight guerrillas militarily. By emptying the villages and strategically relocating them, the government deprives guerrillas of their support base. According to the Collector's work proposal, those in camps need to be resettled into permanent roadside settlements attached to a police station so that Naxalites cannot influence them and they can help the police in search operations. The government claims it is within its rights to appoint SPOs and to create village defence committees. But when people are forced to serve as informers against co-villagers, it leads to a dangerous spiral of intra-village violence. Many of the SPOs look like minors, have no identification and harass ordinary commuters. When our team was attacked (for the third time) at Bhairamgarh thana, we were carrying a letter from the Home Secretary but no one was willing to read it or take the SP's call. The Salwa Judum mob controlled the thana. Another common refrain in Salwa Judum circles is that the Naxalites have not allowed any development in the area. They do not allow schools, roads or any other development project. This problem needs to be looked at carefully. For example, school teachers -- some of whom like Salwa Judum leader, Madhukar, told us he attends school only sporadically -- often use the Naxalite excuse to shirk work. The government cannot abdicate its own responsibility for the lack of development and blame it on Naxalites. However, there are genuine grievances against the Naxalites. People have every right to want to vote in and contest elections. The Naxalites have boycotted elections and threatened those voting. They have killed suspected informers and subordinated the interests of local people to their wider armed struggle. It is true that the Naxalites have blown up schools, planted mines and killed people. These crimes have been registered and there are laws to deal with them. However, a democratic government cannot kill suspected Maoists or their sympathisers out of hand, and deny that such deaths have taken place. The Maoists have blown up schools because the CRPF used them as bases. Both are wrong. The Supreme Court and international conventions assert that civilian institutions must be kept out of armed conflict. One is often told that the Naxalites are outsiders from Andhra who are misleading local tribals. The Maoist leadership, is indeed, overwhelmingly from outside. However, so is the Salwa Judum leadership, and government officials themselves, many of whom are insensitive to adivasis and use pejorative terms to describe them such as 'primitive and promiscuous', 'lazy'. The official Bastar tourism website describes them as savages. The best way to deal with the Naxalite problem is not through military action. Both sides must declare a ceasefire. The government must build confidence among the people by stopping the Salwa Judum, holding an independent enquiry, engaging in a national dialogue with the Maoists and repealing the Chhattisgarh Public Safety Act. The Maoists, too, must enter a democratic negotiation process. Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology, Delhi University o o o The Economic and Political Weekly, June 3, 2006 PHYSIOGNOMY OF VIOLENCE A cycle of violence and counter-violence is devastating the lives of adivasis in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, a Maoist "liberated area". There is no official record of the number of persons killed as a result of the brutal violence of the Salwa Judum. While the Maoists had put an end to the severe harassment of the adivasis by forest and police officials, successfully resisted domination and oppression of the adivasis by the patel-patwari, and raised the rate for picking the tendu leaf, there are certain conflicts of interest in the present context of a counter-insurgency that have created a divide within the tribal community, which makes the present atmosphere tense. by K Balagopal http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2006&leaf=06&filename=10152&filetype=pdf o o o The Economic and Political Weekly May 27, 2006 Editorial CHHATTISGARH : REPRESSION GARBED AS SECURITY http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2006&leaf=05&filename=10119&filetype=pdf ____ 5 Book Review Seminar 561 by Harsh Mander RELIGION, VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL MOBILISATION IN SOUTH ASIA edited by Ravinder Kaur. Sage, Delhi, 2005. Ravinder Kaur's edited volume, Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia, is a useful collection of essays that seeks to map and analyse the phenomenon of socio-political mobilisation and mass violence around constructed religious and ethnic identities. Loosely termed 'communal violence' in South Asia, this has been and remains a source of enormous suffering and insecurity among the people of this part of the globe for more then a century. Ravinder Kaur herself persuasively rejects simplistic and facile explanations of such violence as 'spontaneous outburst of emotions', the handywork of a few 'anti-social elements' or as proof of regrettable mutual hatred that periodically recurs in South Asia. She also argues against the assumption that frequent incidents of violence occur like a disease in the society and leave everything unaltered, only to return to 'normal' once the disease has lapsed. Instead, she sees these episodes of collective violence against a community as part of a process of ongoing social control exercised by the dominant groups. Most popular and scholarly analyses of communal riots neglect the aftermath of the violence when survivors frequently seek 'safety in numbers', that is, migrate to areas considered safe because of the numerical strength of their group. Another neglected trend is of 'economic boycott' by the majority group that ensures further loss of economic and social power of the minority group. Kaur importantly sees significance in the lasting psychological, social, economic and political impact of the physical violence in terms of the violent rupture in people's personal lives, loss of faith in government agencies, and a deep sense of subjugation and alienation from the 'mainstream'. She aptly sees these trends as part of a project to reduce the victim community to 'second class citizens' - deprived of protection, fundamental rights, and basic human dignity. This framework is particularly useful in understanding the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Most analyses dwell on the grisly events of slaughter and rape and not on the lasting impact of ghettoisation, social and economic boycott and cultural suppression. She points out that conventional studies of communal violence view 'hatred' from the 'other' community in an almost ahistorical and de-contextualized mode, mainly in terms of actions and reactions, usually a response to provocation by minorities. She rightly observes that this obscures the central role of religious mobilization on the one hand, and of various arms of the state on the other. Bjorn Hettne makes a useful classification of forms of political violence that occur in South Asia. These range from assassination of political leaders (usually inspired by ethno-racial conflict); riots between communities usually sparked off by a provocative religious ritual or neighbourhood conflict but deriving from struggles for power and resources; sectarian violence within the same religion; inter-ethnic violence between 'sons of the soil' and poor immigrants; upper caste violence against Dalits; ethno-racial political violence aimed at political independence or autonomy; pogroms; and ethnically organised gang wars. In the post 9/11 context, Hettne finds that the highly contested term 'terrorism', usually prefixed with 'international', has penetrated the discourse mainly to justify greater tolerance for repression. It usually induces elements of fear, surprise, civilian victims and political objectives, but mainly old internal conflicts increasingly described as 'terrorist'. In India after 9/11, Indian Muslims are increasingly seen as participating or at least sympathetic to terrorism. The paradox is observed that while India is evolving in a fundamentalist direction, explosive and chronically violent Pakistan under Musharraf is trying to break with fundamentalist forms of Islam. In Sri Lanka, the conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese which resulted in 65,000 deaths has come closer to a solution, in that the international war against terrorism has been reduced to the freedom of movement for the Tamil Tigers, branded as a terrorist organization by several countries, including India. In Nepal, Maoists are no longer simply dubbed 'terrorists' and are seen as more akin to the Indian Naxalite uprising. Among the other significant papers in the volume is Jan Breman's analysis of Gujarat 2002. An outstanding scholarly observer of the state over decades, he notes that the state apparatus - both the leading political party and government agencies - condoned or even facilitated the pogrom, rather than stop it. Moreover, the trade union movement which used to be the main platform for collective action has withered away. What he describes as the 'paralysis' of social movements, could not have been better illustrated than by the decision of the board of the Sabarmati Asharam to close its gates when the violence spread through the city. He observes that the front organizations of Sangh Parivar were able to mobilize mercenaries of subaltern castes to assist in operation of killing, burning and looting. Paul Brass is another perceptive foreign scholar who focuses on the discourse of Hindu-Muslim communalism that has corrupted history, penetrated memory, and contributes in the present to the production and perpetuation of communal violence. He notes that the 'memory' of Indian history has been kept vivid also by the militant Hindutva demand to recapture and restore temples allegedly destroyed by the Muslim conquerors and replace these by mosques. He evocatively maps how Hindu and Muslim bodies are both the location and the metaphor in the production of communal violence. This slim volume of essays is both brilliant and disturbing in its flashes of distilled insights and provocative analyses. The major limitation is that the essays were collected for a seminar, and inevitably are both uneven and fail to build a coherent discourse. Yet the flashes of insight into phenomena that constitute some of the gravest contemporary challenges to our survival as a secular democracy are enough to make the manuscript worth careful study. Harsh Mander _____ [5] India Pakistan Arms Race and Militarisation Watch Compilation (June 14, 2006) Year Seven, No 162 is available at URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IPARMW/message/173 _____ [6] CALL FOR PAPERS/CONFERENCE: The Hartley Library, which houses the Mountbatten papers, in conjunction with the Centre for the Study of Britain and its Empire at the University of Southampton seeks paper proposals for a conference entitled, 'The Independence of India and Pakistan: Sixtieth Anniversary Reflections.' The conference will be held at the Avenue Campus, University of Southampton on 17-20 July 2007. The event will be divided into panel discussion and keynote plenary lectures. Papers will be of 30 minutes duration followed by question. The following people have already agreed to participate: Gyanendra Pandey, Urvashi Butalia, Gurharpal Singh, Akbar S. Ahmed, Joya Chatterji, Victoria Schofield, Sten Widmalm and Sikandar Hayat. Proposals for panel papers will be especially welcome in the following areas: * The 'high politics' of the British departure from India * The 'history from beneath' of the British departure from India * Historiography, historical discourses and memory * Independence and partition in film and literature * Region, locality and partition * The legacies of 1947 for nation building and state construction in India and Pakistan * Diasporic narratives on 1947 Proposals including a working title and 250 word abstract should be sent by 1 September 2006 to Professor Ian Talbot, Department of History, University of Southampton at [EMAIL PROTECTED] The full line-up of papers will be confirmed by 1 October 2006. Full length papers will be required by 1 May 2007. It is anticipated that only limited funds will be available to cover the costs of paper givers from the subcontinent. _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 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/ DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers. _______________________________________________ Sacw mailing list [email protected] http://insaf.net/mailman/listinfo/sacw_insaf.net
