South Asia Citizens Wire - 13 February 2015 - No. 2846 [since 1996] --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents: 1. Sri Lanka: A Democratic Revolution in the Making? (Faizun Zackariya, Rohini Hensman) 2. Sri Lanka: Civil Society Statement on Human Rights 3. Sri Lanka: Call for Genuine Accountability Initiatives By Women Affected by War 4. International Crisis Group on Bangladesh's Political Crisis 5. India - Pakistan: Fishermen as cannon fodder 6. Pakistan: Council for Agrarian Reforms in Sindh launched 7. Video report: In Pakistani Schools, Jihad Is Back 8. State of Indian politics: Arundhati Roy interviewed by Tariq Ali (Two part video) 9. Video: Irfan Habib on Gandhi’s Finest Hour 10. Why secularism and socialism are integral to the Indian Constitution (Salil Tripathi) 11. Book Review: Whewell on Kiely, ’The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901-1956’ 12. India: Take action on police high-handedness on peaceful protest against vandalism of Delhi churches - Press release 13. India: Statement in support of Shirin Dalvi Editor, Awadhnama 14. India: 2015 National Health Policy — Draft 15. [From the Sacw.Net Archive Project] India: Less Than Gay - citizens report on the status of homosexuality 16. Music Video: Breathe Fire, Ami Kaelyn for Bhopal Medical Appeal 17. India: Diverse Statements and a Citzens Online Petition in Defence of Prominent Activists Teesta Setalvad & Javed Anand Under Threat of Arrest 18. India: Teesta Setalvad & others Vs State of Gujarat - Notes on the Gujarat High Court Anticipatory Bail Application Order dated 12.2.2015 19. India: Massive rally of farmers, workers, fishworkers and urban poor 24 Feb 2015 in Delhi Announced 20. India: Let waves of humanism and not hooliganism define political landscape and social life of diverse India 21. India: From a politics of hatred to a politics of hope (Praful Bidwai) 22. India: Hurt sentiment has become the cutting edge of tyranny (Dilip Simeon) 23. Recent On Communalism Watch: - Valentines Day Unites Bigots from India and Pakistan - What’s Wrong With Blasphemy Laws? - India: The crisis in the congress party is deeply worrysome - India: Supreme Court Ruling on Polygamy - Muslims They Can't Have Multiple Wives ? - Appeal to AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal To Take His Oath of office as the Chief Minister of Delhi not in the name of any religious denomination - India: VHP propaganda about developing a hundred and fifty thousand ‘model Hindu villages’ - India: Delhi University's Aryan Project - to fix dates of vedic literature - India: We will kill Kejriwal - says Swami Om ji Hindutva activist and Palika Bazaar for the New Delhi Assembly Elections 2015 - India: By giving in to bigots we are nourishing the soil of intolerance says editorial in EPW - [Publication Announcement] Beyond Doubt: A Dossier on Gandhi’s Assassination compiled and introduced by Teesta Setalvad - Space for pseudoscience of the Hindutva variety at the Indian Science Congress reflects all-round saffronisation - India: RSS Chief Bhagwat Stokes Hindutva Fire - India: Police ban defied, VHP leader Praveen Togadia's recorded speech played at Bangalore rally - India: will not allow ant-national activity in the RSS shakhas in Delhi - Statement by Aam Aami Party official in December 2014 (Outlook, 11 Dec 2014) - India: Behind Sangh Parivar’s Ghar Wapsi, The politics Of Power And Profit (Ajaya Kumar Singh in countercurrents.org) - Book review: Menon on Jayal, 'Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History' - India: This valentine's day, a Hindutva Helpline for those in Love - India: anti english language nativist from Maharashtra makes silly claims, gets told off by Rushdie - and More ... available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/ ::: FULL TEXT ::: 24. Bangladesh on the Brink - Editorial in NY Times 25. A Glimmer of Hope for Victims of Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law (Phelim Kine) 26. India: Make No Mistake. This Is Modi's Defeat (Siddharth Varadarajan) 27. India Delhi elections: Kejriwal's tectonic ghar wapsi (Bharat Bhushan) 28. India:: Pride and fall: Sorry BJP, AAP victory is indeed a verdict on Modi’s arrogance (MK Venu) 29. Iranian Religious Intellectuals and the “Islamist Left” (Rasmus Christian Elling) ========================================= 1. SRI LANKA: A DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION IN THE MAKING? by Faizun Zackariya, Rohini Hensman ========================================= Two disasters were recently averted in Sri Lanka. The first would have been the re-election of the corrupt and brutal Rajapaksa regime in the presidential election of 8 January 2015. For this we must be grateful, first and foremost, to democracy acitivists across the spectrum – Sobitha Thera, trade unionists, students, teachers, women’s groups, political parties, social activists, artists, lawyers, civil society organisations (CSOs) and people’s movements (especially the Movement for Social Justice), social media activists, and so on – who organised the campaign for a common opposition candidate with such skill and courage that it succeeded despite the huge amount of money and muscle-power employed on the other side, and also to the Election Commissioner, who managed to carry out a tolerably free and fair election against heavy odds. Secondly, to Tamil voters, who overwhelmingly rejected the Tamil nationalist plea to boycott the election on the grounds that restoring democracy in Sri Lanka would offer nothing to Tamils. http://www.sacw.net/article10505.html ========================================= 2. SRI LANKA: CIVIL SOCIETY STATEMENT ON HUMAN RIGHTS ========================================= 4 February 2015: We, the undersigned conveners on behalf of civil society organizations and individuals who have focused on human rights protection through the dark and dangerous days of the Rajapaksa regime, welcome the victory of Mr. Maithripala Sirisena in the 08th January 2015 Presidential Election and the formation of a new government. We look forward to a positive and constructive association with the new government to ensure an end to the culture of impunity which defined the Rakapaksa regime’s record on human rights http://www.sacw.net/article10528.html ========================================= 3. SRI LANKA: CALL FOR GENUINE ACCOUNTABILITY INITIATIVES BY WOMEN AFFECTED BY WAR ========================================= We, as women impacted by war and ongoing post-war violence in Sri Lanka and working on issues of truth and justice, call upon the Government of President Maithripala Sirisena to take immediate steps to address past violations and to initiate credible and independent investigations that lead to indictments and prosecutions of alleged perpetrators. http://www.sacw.net/article10585.html ========================================= 4. INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP ON BANGLADESH'S POLITICAL CRISIS ========================================= On 5 January [2015], the first anniversary of the deeply contested 2014 elections, the most violent in Bangladesh's history, clashes between government and opposition groups led to several deaths and scores injured. The confrontation marks a new phase of the deadlock between the ruling Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) opposition http://www.sacw.net/article10571.html ========================================= 5. INDIA - PAKISTAN: FISHERMEN AS CANNON FODDER ========================================= When gung-ho posturing happens, the pit-poor daily wage earners like fishermen ultimately pay for it http://www.sacw.net/article10556.html ========================================= 6. PAKISTAN: COUNCIL FOR AGRARIAN REFORMS IN SINDH LAUNCHED ========================================= Sindh Agrarian Reforms Council was launched on Friday at a gathering held at a local hotel. The meeting was organized by National Peasants’ Coalition of Pakistan (NPCP) and Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment (SCOPE) in collaboration with Oxfam. More than 80 participants including Parliamentarians, civil society activists, journalists, peasants and people belonging to different sections of society attended the meeting and endorsed the initiative. http://www.sacw.net/article10551.html ========================================= 7. VIDEO REPORT: IN PAKISTANI SCHOOLS, JIHAD IS BACK ========================================= Officials in northwest Pakistan have revised school textbooks to make them more Islamic — no unveiled women, references to world historical figures replaced with prominent Muslims, and Koranic verses about jihad. http://www.sacw.net/article10533.html ========================================= 8. STATE OF INDIAN POLITICS: ARUNDHATI ROY INTERVIEWED BY TARIQ ALI (TWO PART VIDEO) ========================================= Tariq Ali in conversation with Arundhati Roy about the state of Indian politics on The World Today on teleSUR English - December 2014 http://www.sacw.net/article10561.html ========================================= 9. VIDEO: IRFAN HABIB ON GANDHI’S FINEST HOUR ========================================= Prof. Irfan Habib, eminent historian, speaks on "Gandhi’s Finest Hour" at ’Aman Ka Ailaan: A Festival in Defence of Secularism’, organised by the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) in association with the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) in JNU on 30 January 2015, the 67th anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. The festival was supported by the All India Forum for Right to Education, Tulika Books and Social Scientist. http://www.sacw.net/article10516.html ========================================= 10. WHY SECULARISM AND SOCIALISM ARE INTEGRAL TO THE INDIAN CONSTITUTION by Salil Tripathi ========================================= The words Secular and socialist were added to reassure the nation that minorities would be safe and the moneyed class would not dominate the economy http://www.sacw.net/article10506.html ========================================= 11. BOOK REVIEW: WHEWELL ON KIELY, ’THE COMPELLING IDEAL: THOUGHT REFORM AND THE PRISON IN CHINA, 1901-1956’ ========================================= The era of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often associated with its practices of “thought reform”—the ways in which the masses were indoctrinated into CCP ideology, self-criticism sessions, and mass “struggles” against counterrevolutionaries. However, until now, a comprehensive study of the pre-Communist origins of thought reform as a concept, and its evolution in implementation, have been left curiously understudied. http://www.sacw.net/article10550.html ========================================= 12. INDIA: TAKE ACTION ON POLICE HIGH-HANDEDNESS ON PEACEFUL PROTEST AGAINST VANDALISM OF DELHI CHURCHES - PRESS RELEASE ========================================= The Delhi Police comes directly under the Union Home Ministry and the Christian groups in Delhi had organmised a Peace March yesterday upto the office of the Home Minister Mr. Rajnath Singh. Not only the Delhi police has been dishing out ridiculous and irresponsible statements justifying its inaction against the miscreants, it resorted to beating and thrashing peaceful protesters today in the national capital. http://www.sacw.net/article10546.html ========================================= 13. INDIA: STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF SHIRIN DALVI EDITOR, AWADHNAMA ========================================= We, members of the Mumbai based human rights group Hum Azaadiyon Ke Haq Mein are disturbed at reports of the multiple cases lodged against Shirin Dalvi, the editor of Awadhnama, Mumbai, and her arrest by Thane district police on January 28, for publishing a news-item on the Charlie Hebdo issue and one of the covers of the magazine on January 17, 2015. We are also shocked at the reports of the continual harassment of Shirin Dalvi. http://www.sacw.net/article10526.html ========================================= 14. INDIA: 2015 NATIONAL HEALTH POLICY — DRAFT ========================================= Draft Placed in Public Domain for Comments, Suggestions, Feedback http://www.sacw.net/article10504.html ========================================= 15. [From the SACW.NET ARCHIVE Project] INDIA: LESS THAN GAY - CITIZENS REPORT ON THE STATUS OF HOMOSEXUALITY ========================================= This is a scanned and digitised version of Less Than Gay the celebrated 1991 report published by ABVA in New Delhi http://www.sacw.net/article10497.html ========================================= 16. MUSIC VIDEO: BREATHE FIRE, AMI KAELYN FOR BHOPAL MEDICAL APPEAL ========================================= Breathe Fire is a project conceived, and written, for the Bhopal Medical Appeal. This is the second version of Breathe Fire to be recorded. Ami Kaelyn is a multi-instrumentalist singer songwriter, from Malmesbury in Wiltshire http://www.sacw.net/article10594.html ========================================= 17. INDIA: DIVERSE STATEMENTS AND A CITZENS ONLINE PETITION IN DEFENCE OF PROMINENT ACTIVISTS TEESTA SETALVAD & JAVED ANAND UNDER THREAT OF ARREST ========================================= Public statements by diverse groups and a sign online petition in solidarity appeared on 12 February 2015 to protest the threat of arrests of prominent journalists and secular activists in India http://www.sacw.net/article10592.html ========================================= 18. INDIA: TEESTA SETALVAD & OTHERS VS STATE OF GUJARAT - NOTES ON THE GUJARAT HIGH COURT ANTICIPATORY BAIL APPLICATION ORDER DATED 12.2.2015 ========================================= Text of the order regarding denial of anticipatory bail to Tessta setalvad and others - 12 Feb 2015 http://www.sacw.net/article10590.html ========================================= 19. INDIA: MASSIVE RALLY OF FARMERS, WORKERS, FISHWORKERS AND URBAN POOR 24 FEB 2015 IN DELHI ========================================= To protest amendments in Land Acquisition Act 2013, forcible land acquisition and Land Acquisition Ordinance 2014, demonstration planned in Delhi on 24 February 2015 http://www.sacw.net/article10586.html ========================================= 20. INDIA: LET WAVES OF HUMANISM AND NOT HOOLIGANISM DEFINE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE AND SOCIAL LIFE OF DIVERSE INDIA ========================================= 11th February 2015, New Delhi: The National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) congratulates Aam Aadmi Party for its over whelming performance in the Delhi elections. We also applaud the people of Delhi for this unequivocal mandate, sweeping away corrupt and communal elements. The Delhi vote is a negation of the multiple vices that mainstream parties represent a vindication of the need to prioritize pro-people agenda. It is therefore, a significant moment for Indian democracy. http://www.sacw.net/article10578.html ========================================= 21. INDIA: FROM A POLITICS OF HATRED TO A POLITICS OF HOPE by Praful Bidwai ========================================= The Aam Aadmi Party has accomplished a stupendous political feat in India's capital. Not only has it won more than half the total vote and 95 percent of all seats, which even the luckiest of parties don't do in India's periodic referendum-style “wave” elections. More, by unabashedly championing the cause of the poor, and the interests of underprivileged social and religious groups, it has signalled the arrival of a new moral force in national politics. http://www.sacw.net/article10574.html ========================================= 22. INDIA: HURT SENTIMENT HAS BECOME THE CUTTING EDGE OF TYRANNY by Dilip Simeon ========================================= Shirin Dalvi, the editor of the Mumbai edition of Urdu newspaper Avadhnama, has become the latest victim of the running saga over cartoons. Since mid-January, when she unwittingly published a Charlie Hebdo cover, she has been slapped with criminal charges, her newspaper shut down, its employees rendered jobless, and she herself forced underground. http://www.sacw.net/article10595.html ========================================= 23. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ========================================= available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/ - Valentines Day Unites Bigots from India and Pakistan - What’s Wrong With Blasphemy Laws? - India: The crisis in the congress party is deeply worrysome - India: Supreme Court Ruling on Polygamy - Muslims They Can't Have Multiple Wives ? - Appeal to AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal To Take His Oath of office as the Chief Minister of Delhi not in the name of any religious denomination - India: VHP propaganda about developing a hundred and fifty thousand ‘model Hindu villages’ - India: Delhi University's Aryan Project - to fix dates of vedic literature - India: We will kill Kejriwal - says Swami Om ji Hindutva activist and Palika Bazaar for the New Delhi Assembly Elections 2015 - India: By giving in to bigots we are nourishing the soil of intolerance says editorial in EPW - [Publication Announcement] Beyond Doubt: A Dossier on Gandhi’s Assassination compiled and introduced by Teesta Setalvad - Space for pseudoscience of the Hindutva variety at the Indian Science Congress reflects all-round saffronisation - India: RSS Chief Bhagwat Stokes Hindutva Fire - India: Police ban defied, VHP leader Praveen Togadia's recorded speech played at Bangalore rally - India: will not allow ant-national activity in the RSS shakhas in Delhi - Statement by Aam Aami Party official in December 2014 (Outlook, 11 Dec 2014) - India: Behind Sangh Parivar’s Ghar Wapsi, The politics Of Power And Profit (Ajaya Kumar Singh in countercurrents.org) - Book review: Menon on Jayal, 'Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History' - India: This valentine's day, a Hindutva Helpline for those in Love - India: anti english language nativist from Maharashtra makes silly claims, gets told off by Rushdie and More ... available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/ ::: FULL TEXT ::: ========================================= 24. BANGLADESH ON THE BRINK Editorial in NY Times ========================================= (The New York Times) Bangladesh is on the edge of political chaos, and the intransigence of both the ruling Awami League and the opposition Bangladesh National Party is to blame. Unless both parties take immediate steps to pull back from entrenched positions, restrain the violent elements of their activist bases and embark on a genuine dialogue to restore legitimacy to Bangladesh’s troubled democracy, the wave of violence engulfing the country risks spinning out of control. The latest crisis began just before the Jan. 5 anniversary of last year’s elections — the most troubled in Bangladesh’s history. The Bangladesh National Party boycotted the 2014 elections to protest the Awami League’s refusal to allow a caretaker government to oversee the voting, as had been the case since 1996. As a result, pro-government candidates ran unopposed in more than half of parliamentary districts. The result is that the Bangladesh National Party has been effectively excluded from mainstream politics, causing a sharp rise in fierce protests by activists in the party and its political ally, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party. Rather than seek a political compromise. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina seems bent on neutralizing her opponents. On Jan. 3, Mrs. Hasina’s government confined the National Party’s leader, Khaleda Zia, herself a former prime minister, to her party’s headquarters in Dhaka. Mrs. Zia and her party responded by calling for a transportation blockade and a general strike. Party goons have tried to enforce the blockade with violent attacks that have claimed 63 lives as of Feb. 7. Mrs. Hasina’s government has responded with a tough crackdown on protesters. While perpetrators of violence need to be arrested and punished, Mrs. Hasina’s hard line is only adding fuel to the fire. The Bangladesh National Party must rein in its violent base and sever ties with the Jamaat-e-Islami party and its street-power tactics. But Mrs. Hasina’s government must also hold accountable security forces guilty of abuses. The government must invite the opposition to negotiate electoral reform and a return to the democratic process. The future of democracy in Bangladesh is in the balance. A version of this editorial appears in print on February 13, 2015, ========================================= 25. A GLIMMER OF HOPE FOR VICTIMS OF PAKISTAN’S BLASPHEMY LAW by Phelim Kine ========================================= (Dispatches: Human Rights Watch - February 10, 2015) Relatives mourn over the body of Rashid Rehman, a lawyer who was killed by unidentified gunmen a day earlier, on May 8, 2014. Gunmen shot dead the prominent human rights lawyer who was defending a professor accused of blasphemy. Some of the hundreds of people jailed and awaiting trial on charges of violating Pakistan’s dangerously ambiguous and discriminatory blasphemy law have reason to be cautiously optimistic. Punjab’s provincial judiciary has drawn up a shortlist of 50 cases of alleged blasphemy in which it found the accused have been “victimized” by inadequate evidence or lack of legal counsel. The provincial government will undertake the legal defense of those defendants – some of whom may be mentally ill – in special “fast track” trials. It’s a mostly symbolic initiative – there are at least 262 people awaiting trial on blasphemy charges in Punjab alone – but one that’s desperately needed. The majority of those charged with blasphemy are members of religious minorities, often as the result of personal disputes. Pakistan’s blasphemy law, as section 295-C of the penal code is known, makes the death penalty effectively mandatory for those convicted. To date, there have been no executions carried out, but at least 19 people in the country are on death row for blasphemy. In Pakistan today, even an accusation of blasphemy can be a death sentence. On November 4, 2014, an angry mob attacked a Christian couple, Shama and Shahzad Masih, in Kot Radha Kishan in Punjab for suspected blasphemy. The couple was savagely beaten and then burned to death in a brick kiln. The next day, a police officer in Gujrat, also in Punjab, decapitated a man with a mental disability who was in custody in the city’s police station for allegedly committing blasphemy. Lawyers who seek to defend individuals accused of blasphemy do so at great risk. On May 7, two unidentified gunmen killed Rashid Rehman, a prominent human rights defender and member of the nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, for his willingness to represent people accused of blasphemy. His killers remain at large. The Punjab provincial initiative can’t address the enormity of the abuses fostered by Pakistan’s blasphemy law. But it’s an important official recognition that the law is unfair and dangerous. Pakistan’s federal government needs to take the next step and finally amend or repeal the blasphemy law – and end the fear and discrimination it breeds. ========================================= 26. INDIA: MAKE NO MISTAKE. THIS IS MODI'S DEFEAT by Siddharth Varadarajan ========================================= (ndtv.com, 10 Feb 2015) (Siddharth Varadarajan is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, Shiv Nadar University) Narendra Modi, as the saying goes, should have been careful about what he wished for. "Jo desh ka mood hai," he declared during the election campaign for the Delhi assembly, "wahi Dilli ka mood hai." Now that Delhi has given the Aam Aadmi Party 67 out of 70 seats and 54 per cent of the popular vote, the Prime Minister must be wondering what this means for the emerging mood elsewhere in the country. To understand the scale of the defeat that Modi - who was not just the face and voice of his party's campaign but its totem as well - has just led his party to, consider this simple statistic: the 3 seats the BJP managed to win under his leadership this time represents a massive 95 per cent drop from the 60 assembly segments he delivered in the 2014 general election, and a 78 per cent fall from what the party's local leadership managed on its own in December 2013. In that election, Rahul Gandhi, by contrast, had at least managed 20 per cent of the Congress party's 2009 Lok Sabha tally. His MPs would fit in a bus, people joked at the time. Modi's MLAs can get around Delhi in an auto-rickshaw. Had the BJP won, the party would have exulted in the potency of the Modi wave and the master strategizing of Amit Shah. But now that the Great Leader has failed to get even the meager waters of the Yamuna to make way for his juggernaut, this defeat will be pinned not on his "56-inch chest", or even on Shah, but on the drooping shoulders of Kiran Bedi and the party's city leadership. Success in the BJP has not many but only one father; failure, on the other hand, can never be his fault. I have written elsewhere about the blunders the BJP committed in the run up to the Delhi election and the reasons behind the AAP's re-emergence. But the scale of AAP's victory -- and the BJP's defeat -- suggests some fundamental shifts in the political tectonics of Delhi, and perhaps even of India as a whole. Modi's victory in 2014 was meant to represent that fundamental shift -- the arrival of a new "aspirational" India that wanted economic betterment and did not trust the "handout" politics of the past. When the voters of Delhi were exhorted to "move ahead with Modi", the BJP was trying once again to hold out the same promise of inclusive development that allowed it to increase its vote share in the capital from 33 to 46 per cent last year. The fact that the BJP's popular vote has fallen back to 33 per cent suggests the "aspirational" section of the electorate deserted it this time. Why did these voters leave the BJP and go over to the AAP? Because eight months of Modi rule at the Centre have made it clear that while the BJP makes vague announcements for the poor, it delivers concrete results for the corporate sector. Like the ordinance which makes it easier for the land of farmers and adivasis to be acquired and made over to industry. Like labour laws and environmental reform which makes it easier for industry to violate existing standards. The citizens of Delhi may not have experienced what these changes mean, but they are clever enough to realise the development being pursued isn't quite inclusive. The aspirational voter also aspires to her vision of modernity, to a life in which the individual's right to live, dress, work, travel, love and enjoy life as she likes is as important as economic progress. For young voters, the Sangh Parivar's cretinous attempts to dictate cultural and lifestyle choices are completely unacceptable; and while they are not moved by the traditional concerns about "secularism", they are smart enough to see the dangers that the RSS's divisive sectarian agenda holds out for their city and country. Modi's complicity-by-silence with the book burners, film vandals and religious hate-mongers has not gone unnoticed among the swing voters he attracted just one year ago. I argued earlier that the BJP's '3 M strategy' - Modi, Money and Mud-slinging - failed to cut any ice with Delhi's voters. One day before votes were cast, the party played a fourth M card, majoritarianism, by trying to whip up hysteria over the support declared by the Shahi Imam of the Jama Masjid for AAP. No less a leader than Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was deployed in a last desperate attempt to inject religious polarization, but the strategy failed when Aam Aadmi leaders rejected the Imam's offer and accused the BJP of activating him in order to communalise the campaign. As we look beyond Delhi for the national implications of the BJP's spectacular defeat, two questions loom large: one for the BJP, the other for the opposition. First, will Modi and the BJP learn from the Delhi result and put an end to the divisive politics of the Sangh Parivar? And will the PM realise he cannot carry the electorate on announcements alone, that sooner rather later he must deliver on the promises he made of mass employment, growth, sanitation and infrastructure? A rational leadership would read the Delhi result as a small-sample expression of the emerging national mood and put in place a major course correction. But my sense is that Modi and Amit Shah are not likely to act rationally. Already we see attempts to ring-fence the "national government"and its policies. In the absence of any change, there is also the danger that the BJP's negative, sectarian impulses may actually sharpen. As for the opposition, the question on everyone's mind today is how easily can the AAP's act of stopping the Modi wave be replicated elsewhere. The short answer, of course, is "not very easily". Looking at the 2014 general election and all the major state elections we have seen so far -- Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir, and Delhi -- this "wave" needs two conditions in order to prevail. First, a ruling party discredited by corruption, poor governance and anti-incumbency. And second, the lack of a strong, clear alternative to the BJP. In 2014, the UPA was discredited and there was no real 'national' alternative to the BJP. The same was true of Haryana, where the Hooda government was swept aside by the Modi wave. But the Modi factor showed its limits in Maharashtra because of the Shiv Sena, and in Jharkhand, where an alliance with the All-Jharkhand Students Union was needed to push the BJP over the finishing line. In Delhi, the AAP was unencumbered by negativity and was the obvious choice for anyone unhappy with the BJP. That is why the Modi machine was stopped in its track. Can this set of circumstances be replicated in Bihar? Perhaps, if Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal and Lalu Yadav's RJD stay united and strong, and remedy the poor governance record of the past year. But in West Bengal, it is the BJP that is looking to play the same 'third alternative' role to the Trinamool and the Left that the AAP played in Delhi, and there it is likely to meet a measure of success. The victory of AAP has galvanised non-BJP parties everywhere. In Jammu and Kashmir, the Peoples Democratic Party may feel tempted to drive a harder bargain with the BJP now about a coalition government. However, in its most essential sense, what has defeated the BJP in Delhi is not some tactical alignment of political forces, but the emergence of New Politics. Only if this New Politics -- whether under the leadership of the AAP or of other kindred forces -- begins to take hold elsewhere, will Modi's national supremacy come under serious strain. ========================================= 27. INDIA DELHI ELECTIONS: KEJRIWAL'S TECTONIC GHAR WAPSI by Bharat Bhushan ========================================= (Business Standard. February 11, 2014) Having come of age after the Delhi victory, AAP will have to take a call on alliance politics. If it makes the right kind of choices, it can pose a formidable challenge to the BJP in the 2019 general elections An impatient Delhi has rejected the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and sided overwhelmingly with the underdog, ensuring the ghar wapsi of its prodigal son, Arvind Kejriwal. This is a tectonic shift in Delhi's politics and will also impact the nation's overall political perception. The duo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his consigliere Amit Shah, stands humbled. With just three seats, someone on social media jibed, the BJP is one short of the number of children its leaders urge every Hindu woman to have. The immediate consequences of the victory of the Aam Aadmi party (AAP) should not be underestimated. A day after the Delhi voters cast their vote, a BJP apprehensive of defeat held a review meeting of its Delhi leaders to discuss the outcome and the possible fallout of the election. This is the first such meeting of the BJP leadership since the Modi-Shah duo assumed control. The immediate consequence of the electoral rout will not be a revolt in the BJP. However, those who had been muzzled would now find their voice again. The internal criticism of the government and the party leadership will begin. One should not expect any open defiance of Modi, as the BJP is a disciplined party. But the pall of terror that hung over his critics would be lifted and his authority considerably weakened. Modi may even soften his style of functioning, jettisoning his 'ekla chalo' (walk alone) policy for getting others on board on governance and party matters. This would buy him insurance, so that he would not be the only one blamed if things went wrong. The Delhi election results would also impact the BJP-run states. Their chief ministers, reduced to cyphers despite their electoral victory-runs and popularity, will start enjoying a greater degree of autonomy. Vasundhara Raje, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh can once again start functioning as real chief ministers without constantly looking towards Delhi. In terms of its policy direction, the Modi government would now enter unchartered waters. Modi's projection as prime minister was a corporate project and he has tried to live up to the expectations of his sponsors by ramming through ordinances to improve the business atmosphere. However, the Delhi results demonstrate the clear advantages of pro-poor politics. As a BJP sympathiser put it, "The Rs 10-lakh suit has cost us dear. It reinforced the arrogance of Modi. Perhaps people wanted to bring him down a notch or two." That the BJP conceded the shortcomings of its governance policy was evident when, taking a leaf out of AAP's book, it offered not only cheaper water and electricity but also promised to convert all slums into free pucca houses by 2022. The party would be hard-pressed to convince its corporate sponsors that subsidies for the poor and the marginalised can be a part of the sound economic management it promised. Yet Modi will have to increasingly put such issues centre stage in his economic programmes. Internationally, Modi may still not think twice before chumming around with world leaders. However, the reversal of electoral fortunes in Delhi just nine months after assuming power might dampen the rock-star treatment that he received. Foreign leaders will no longer be sure about his longevity in power. The Delhi results would have a salutary impact on the morale of the Opposition. Besides the government facing more hurdles in pushing its legislative business in Parliament, there would be a greater incentive for the Opposition to come together on issues of common interest. Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav in election-going Bihar will get a shot in the arm. And the voter sentiment in Punjab will be affected, even though the election there is still two years away. As for AAP, it would have to give more space to sober, policy-oriented intellectuals in the party rather than the hotheads who seek overnight change. Then alone a graduated movement towards pro-people policies and politics can take place. Having come of age after the Delhi victory, AAP would also have to take a call on alliance politics, wherever conducive and necessary. If it makes the right kind of compromises without diluting its politics of empowerment, it can pose a formidable challenge to the BJP in the 2019 general elections. The author is a journalist based in Delhi ========================================= 28. INDIA:: PRIDE AND FALL: SORRY BJP, AAP VICTORY IS INDEED A VERDICT ON MODI’S ARROGANCE by MK Venu ========================================= (FirstPost.com, 11 Feb 2015) Hubris, in politics, is never cultivated. It really creeps in without your being aware of it. In a way this process is unconscious. You really can't do anything about it because for a period you see nothing outside your own narrative. You become aware of what lies outside only with the benefit of hindsight, post crash. Narendra Modi has experienced a small sample of this pattern in the Delhi election. He is lucky because he has time to course correct. Many leaders in the past have fallen victim to this pattern. Of course, this phenomenon was more acute in the days of Indira Gandhi when India didn't have a decentralised polity. Modi seemed to have been following Indira Gandhi's style in state assembly election after election. Delhi has put a stop to that. Slogans like "Indira is India, India is Indira" are unimaginable in today's polity where young voters have far less patience. Technology shrinks time, space and patience. The overwhelming presence of Modi Bhakts in the social media space is not to be seen on the scale we saw during the Lok Sabha election and the months after he became PM. Where have they all disappeared, one doesn't know. Has a Modi fatigue set in? Has Modi spoken too much too early? Such questions may become more frequent in the days to come. More generally, are Narendra Modi and Amit Shah aware of the kind of arrogance their body language has conveyed in recent months, especially after the victories in Maharashtra and Haryana elections? Two of Modi's remarks in public meetings take the cake. He told an audience in Delhi that they should vote for him because he was proving to be lucky for the people. Even more self-obsessive was his claim that a BJP government in Delhi, if voted, would work out of fear of Modi. Megalomania comes so naturally to Modi that he talks about himself in the third person! One has rarely come across leaders doing that --except for Rahul Gandhi in his now infamous Times Now interview. In his first big public meeting in J&K election campaign, he boasted, "It is only the Modi government which showed courage to make the Army apologise for a wrong encounter killing." Arrogance was also on display in the manner in which Modi and some close advisors around him built a new narrative, which turned into a self-delusion, that the PM's ever growing popularity after successive assembly election victories gave him the right to circumvent democratic procedures. The manner in which BJP leaders casually talked about ordinances and joint sessions of a Parliament showed their belief that the people would forgive their beloved PM anything. At some level the caucus around Modi also came to believe that the mandate for Modi included a desire on the part of the people to have a semi-authoritarian leader. This was the big mistake Modi and Amit Shah made. Indian polity is far too decentralised today to allow for any form of autocracy in democratic clothing. Indian voters are deeply averse to concentration of power. The defeat in Delhi evoked sharp comments from the Chief of Shiv Sena, Uddhav Thackeray, who said it was a defeat for Modi. It may be recalled how the Shiv Sena was humiliated by Amit Shah who is currently on a mission to establish Modi as the undisputed leader across the entire terrain where regional parties have taken firm roots over the past many decades. The BJP has even coined an arrogant sounding expression for this exercise - "creeping acquisition" of new states to get a majority in a Rajya Sabha. Amit Shah's aggressive forays in West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa have caused a backlash of sorts and some of these leaders are now talking about working with AAP on national issues. The opposition is bound to corner Modi on several key legislations which the BJP supported as opposition but is in the process of reversing now. The Land Acquisition Ordinance will certainly act as a glue for opposition unity in the forthcoming budget session which is expected to be very disruptive. Modi and Shah have squandered a lot of political capital in recent months. Political hubris has been responsible in large measure for the current state of affairs. This is being felt even within the BJP where many leaders are smarting from a Modi-Amit Shah centric political decision making structure. Modi will have to effect fundamental change in both the style and substance of his politics. His over- articulation in respect of some issues, and his deafening silence on others, will need review. The Delhi election result carries a larger message for the ruling dispensation. If Modi shrugs off the Delhi election as having no relevance to his style of governance, he would merely continue the narrative in which he is currently trapped. The author is Executive Editor Amar Ujala group ========================================= 29. IRANIAN RELIGIOUS INTELLECTUALS AND THE “ISLAMIST LEFT” by Rasmus Christian Elling ========================================= (Dissertation Review: February 3, 2015) A review of Disenchanting Political Theology in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Reform, Religious Intellectualism and the Death of Utopia, by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi. When Islamic revolutionaries jumped the fences of the US Embassy compound in Tehran on November 4, 1979, they also precipitated two other historic steps for Iran: on the one hand, the ensuing hostage crisis prompted condemnation and demonization by Western powers, pushing Iran into the role of pariah state in global politics; and on the other hand, it enabled a “second revolution,” in which those who questioned Ayatollah Khomeini’s growing power and its basis in a particular, contentious reading of Islam were purged. The embassy crisis, in other words, consolidated the authoritarian, theocratic-populist political order of the Islamic Republic. At that stage, few had imagined that among those staunchly Khomeinist hostage-takers, several would one day regret their actions and turn into voices of moderation, tolerance, dialogue and democracy in Iran. What made those who paved the way for the supreme rule of a cleric become disenchanted with the political order they had brought into being? How did they convert from ideological legitimators to internal dissidents? And why did they, after a decade of political marginalization, resurface and rise to prominence in the 1990s? In a comprehensive, eloquent, and sophisticated dissertation, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi attempts to answer these questions by tracing the historical evolution of the so-called “religious intellectuals” (rowshanfekran-e dini) and their associated political currents, “the Islamic left” and the reformists. The dissertation is informed by an immensely broad reading of political, sociological, and philosophical literature. It draws on a number of methodological approaches, most notably from Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock of the Cambridge School of the historical study of political thought. These (as well as J.L. Austin and Judith Butler’s) approaches to the language of politics (and politics as language) are applied throughout the analysis of the religious intellectual production: articles, editorials, essays, sermons, speeches, monographs, memoirs, etc. – a vast material in Persian that Sadeghi-Boroujerdi has studied meticulously, and from which he provides excellent translations and stringent transliteration of key concepts. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi sets the stage in Chapter 1 by outlining the religious intellectuals’ mode of production as political interventions, and the religious intellectuals as public personages rather than mere producers of knowledge. In order to analyze the intellectuals as authors, agents, and actors in a matrix of political, tactical, professional, and personal relations, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi draws on Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony and authority and on Bourdieu’s notions of “field” and “game.” The intellectuals and their production play into a struggle for political influence and social capital in post-revolution Iran, and as such, the intellectuals operate in tenuous public and semi-private spaces for critique and criticism – perpetually bound to observe (and sometimes, strategically transgress) the shifting “red lines” for debate set out by coercive powers in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The intellectuals draw on a number of resources to navigate censorship and repression: their credentials, their religious identity and their social networks, personal relationships, and familial ties across the political landscape. These resources are not always enough to keep the intellectuals safe from harm; but nonetheless, they have been able to expose and challenge a number of critical, sensitive, and complex points at the heart of Iranian politics. These include the post-revolution state’s appropriation of religious doctrine, the divinization of political authority, the utopianism of revolutionary ideology, the unequal distribution of power, and the contentious issue of legitimacy. The religious intellectuals have championed the virtues of gradualism, reform and rationalism over revolution, zealotry, and extremism. The larger context of these debates is of course the question of what the Islamic Republic is and what it should be. In order to properly grasp this context, Chapter 2 is devoted to an exposition of the ideological lineages on which the political theology of the Islamic Republic was forged. For this purpose, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi focuses on three key activists and thinkers who in the Pahlavi Era envisioned the state as a vehicle for a far-reaching moral and political transformation of society: Navvab Safavi (leader of the radical Islamic group Fada’iyan-e Eslam), Ali Shariati (intellectual and sociologist) and Khomeini. Through the oeuvres of these thinkers, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi outlines three inherently contentious ideas: the establishment of an Islamic state, the ideologization of Islam, and the endowment of supreme political authority to a cleric. When these ideas were sought materialized in the Islamic Republic, and then failed to produce the promised utopia on earth, religious intellectuals would address them critically from political, historical, philosophical, and theological perspectives. The history of the religious intellectuals is woven together, through inter-personal relations and through a number of nodal points in Iran’s institutional landscape, with that of the so-called “Islamic left.” In Chapter 3, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi details how this “Islamic left” came into being after a split with “the right” in a key clerical/political organization in the late 1980s over not only issues of economic policy, but also factional rivalries that were exacerbated by the removal of Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri as heir-designate to Khomeini in 1989. The “left” was marginalized in parliamentary politics during the early 1990s, and instead created new avenues through the above-mentioned nodal points: in the editorial teams of newly-established progressive journals and newspapers, in more or less informal reading circles, in particular university faculties, and in government think-tanks. Around these nodal points ousted parliamentarians met intellectuals who had grown wary of post-revolutionary purges, a devastating war with Iraq, and factional infighting. Many of these intellectuals had been among the pioneers and unswerving supporters of the Islamic Republic but had by the 1990s become disillusioned with the ascendance of the conservatives and with the technocratic government of Rafsanjani. Foremost among these intellectuals were Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari. In Chapter 4, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi explains how the two – the former a once-radical ideologue who had been busy Islamizing universities and purging liberals in the early 1980s, and the latter a mid-ranking theologian from Khomeini’s circle of disciples – had by the 1990s become firm critics of “jurisprudential Islam” and of “official readings” of religion. To investigate Soroush and Shabestari’s arguments against the doctrinaire, utopian, and violent ideologization of Islam, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi employs a theoretical framework derived from the works of Michael Freeden (with reference to Clifford Geertz, Karl Mannheim, Daniel Bell, and others). Soroush and Shabestari struck a nerve not just among peers and in Islamic leftist circles, but also in universities and, from the mid-1990s, in a broad segment of the population disenchanted with the conservative clergy and eager for social change. In that sense, the religious intellectuals played a key role in the societal surge that led to former Minister of Culture Mohammad Khatami’s landslide victory in the 1997 presidential elections. As Chapter 5 shows, the new reformist government of “The Smiling Seyyed,” under unmistakable influence of Soroush and Shabestari, significantly broadened the space for debate, reinvigorated civil society, and fueled a rapidly proliferating and increasingly bold press. All of this facilitated the dissemination of religious intellectual ideas to a much broader public. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi analyzes how Khatami discussed the key issues of “law,” “guardianship,” and “legitimacy” in his capacities as religious intellectual and president. As with other chapters, the analysis is both deep and broad: it looks into the social micro-level of domestic politics, networks, and institutions in the Islamic Republic while also stretching back to debates among clerics during the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11). Contrary to less reflective presentations of Khatami’s era, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi diligently explains why Khatami was not willing to become the great constitutional reformer that some had hoped – and why reformists constituted a diverse, internally divergent network rather than the monolithic and unified entity implied in the prevalent term “reformist camp.” The spotlight turns to the former intelligence officer and key strategist of the reformist movement, Sa’id Hajjarian. Providing more interesting biographic detail, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi outlines the evolution of Hajjarian’s conception of “sovereignty” and “political development”: the ambition of limiting state power (particularly restraining the unelected Guardian Council’s ability to strike down legislation) while increasing popular participation in electoral politics through more inclusive, less elitist channels. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi discusses how these ambitions, qua Hajjarian’s strategy of “pressure from below, bargain from above,” were translated and not translated into the reformist government’s policy – and how Hajjarian’s ambition surpassed that of Khatami. In 2000, Hajjarian was shot in the face by an unknown assailant, most probably in retaliation for his persistent critique of the hidden powers in Iran. But even before that, Hajjarian had realized that in the ever-growing arbitrary and violent coercive power and economic empire of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran was facing the specter of what Weber named sultanism. Mostafa Malekian is often overlooked in most Western literature on Iranian intellectual life. Chapter 6 introduces this popular intellectual, who was once aligned with the hardliner cleric Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi but would become disillusioned, break with the latter’s violent philosophy, and launch a career as independent, pacifist intellectual. By the 2000s, Malekian could lay claim to having surpassed the project of religious intellectualism that seemed to have reached a dead-end. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi provides an interesting insight into Malekian’s anti-utopian, cosmopolitan, and individualist religious philosophy that caught the attention of a large segment of jaded Iranian youth in the second half of Khatami’s presidency and onwards. By way of an “ethical turn,” Malekian shifts focus from the collective project of emancipation through Islamic revolution and reform towards the subjective project of self-development, thus championing a “spiritual” rather than “religious” intellectualism. The dissertation concludes with a summary of the various aspects of modernity, religion, politics, and ideology with which the intellectuals have struggled in post-revolution Iran – from the tactical concern with reform policy and factional interests to the more profound and far-reaching questions of the democratization of Islam. In a literature that tends to focus on either individual intellectuals or more broadly on reformism or political Islam, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s dissertation is a successful combination of both: it connects important dots to generate a comprehensive historical understanding of religious intellectualism as a phenomenon in post-revolutionary Iran, while giving insights into the lives, times, and works of key thinkers. It is a sober, balanced, and well-documented addition to our knowledge about the inner workings of Iran’s political landscape, and the sociological and biographical observations from this landscape are particularly interesting. Based on rigorous reading of not only Persian-language primary sources and secondary literature, but also of an impressive range of Western works on philosophy, history, and social science, the dissertation knits together a coherent narrative across Iranian, Islamic, Western, and global scales. It is this kaleidoscopic reading that enables Sadeghi-Boroujerdi to contextualize, analyze, and even evaluate and criticize the at times convoluted arguments and complex ideas in question: placing the Iranian religious intellectuals within several layers of thought, from Locke, Heidegger, Hayek, and Popper to al-Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Shariati, and Khomeini. As a book, the dissertation will become a highly valuable contribution to Iranian Studies, to Islamic Studies, and to intellectual history. Rasmus Christian Elling Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies University of Copenhagen [email protected] Primary Sources Articles, editorials, monographs, edited volumes, article collections and memoirs in Persian Iranian newspapers, journals and newsletters Sermons and speeches Interviews Dissertation Information University of Oxford. 2013. 431 pp. Primary advisor: Homa Katouzian. _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ South Asia Citizens Wire Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on matters of peace and democratisation in South Asia. 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