South Asia Citizens Wire - 10 November 2015 - No. 2876
[since 1996]
Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Truth be damned - The ’Other’ is always the culprit | Mahfuz Anam
2. Progress fans flames of militant unrest in changing Bangladesh | Jason Burke
3. Keeping Praful Bidwai’s Legacy Alive - An appeal for contributions
4. Open letter to Indian authorities from historians and social scientists of
India at academic institutions overseas
5. India: Bihar Steals Modi’s Firecrackers | Jawed Naqvi
6. India: JAM and the Pursuit of Nirvana | Jean Drèze
7. Recent On Communalism Watch:
- Bold protest in London by Awaaz Network ahead of Modi's visit starting 12
Nov 2015
- India: Modi bites the dust - Bihar did not fall for sectarianism (Edit, The
Tribine, 9 Nov 2015)
- India: The Modi Presidency is Over (Harish Khare)
- UK: Modi Not Welcome large sized image project on the British parliament by
Awaaz Network protesting Modi's visit to Britain starting 12 Nov 2015
- India: The making of a new politics of inclusion (P. K. Datta in The Hindu)
- India: Who Failed in the Bihar 2015 Election? Narendra Modi or Amit Shah
(Seema Mustafa in The Citizen)
- India: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh knickers in a twist
- India: When the Fringe goes Mainstream (Radha Kumar)
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
8. Can Myanmar’s New Government Control Its Military? | Jon Emont
9. Nepal Facing 'Humanitarian Crisis' as Fuel Shortage Continues | Fiona Broom
10. Sri Lanka Law and Order Minister resigns over Avant Garde controversy
11. India: Narendra Modi - the divisive manipulator who charmed the world |
Pankaj Mishra
12. Pakistan: Raw deal for labour | Umair Javed
13. India: Bihar’s Message to the Indian Right | Vijay Prashad
14. The Price of Light: India's Huge Need for Electricity is a Problem for the
Planet | Annie Gowen, The Washington Post
15. Patrick Cockburn on the state of the Syrian war
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1. BANGLADESH: TRUTH BE DAMNED - THE ’OTHER’ IS ALWAYS THE CULPRIT | Mahfuz Anam
========================================
The PM blames Khaleda, the BNP chief blames Hasina, the killers continue to
kill, the victims’ families live in fear, people remain confused and angry,
friends of Bangladesh watch in disbelief and the smile of our enemies grow
wider. So what more needs to happen to wake us up to the challenges we now face
in our ’Sonar Bangla’?
========================================
2. PROGRESS FANS FLAMES OF MILITANT UNREST IN CHANGING BANGLADESH | Jason Burke
========================================
A wave of brutal killings has plunged Bangladesh into deep apprehension. Many
fear endless political strife and economic exclusion will spur Islamic terrorism
========================================
3. KEEPING PRAFUL BIDWAI’S LEGACY ALIVE - AN APPEAL FOR FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS
========================================
(sacw.net - 9 November)
Praful Bidwai, noted Indian journalist and author, who passed away in June
2015, was able to combine the qualities of being a public intellectual and
activist with a rare distinction. For his many friends, admirers and readers,
his premature death is a gap that is hard to fill. They continue to miss his
incisive journalistic and scholarly observations on contemporary concerns, both
in India and the world. His much acclaimed last book, ‘The Phoenix Moment’, is
a magisterial look at the challenges confronting the Indian Left. We need to
work together to keep that legacy alive and it is in that spirit that it has
been decided to institute a Memorial Fund in his memory which will undertake,
among other interventions, to institute an annual prize to recognize a
promising scholar-journalist from the region, whose work is marked by a zest
for investigation, a commitment to social justice and a capacity for critical
analysis.
========================================
4. OPEN LETTER TO INDIAN AUTHORITIES FROM HISTORIANS AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS OF
INDIA AT ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS OVERSEAS
========================================
(sacw.net - 9 November)
On October 26, a group of distinguished Indian historians issued a statement of
concern about the damage being done in the current political climate to the
traditions of tolerance, and freedom of speech, belief and practices, for which
India was long applauded. We – historians and social scientists engaged in
researching and teaching about the richness of Indian history and society in
different locations overseas – write to express our solidarity with their
statement. We share the deep concern over recent happenings in India, which are
affecting freedom of artistic expression and historical and social science
inquiry, and serving to produce a dangerously pervasive atmosphere of
narrowness, intolerance and bigotry.
========================================
5. INDIA: BIHAR STEALS MODI’S FIRECRACKERS
by Jawed Naqvi
========================================
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cow politics was put out to pasture
on Sunday as the impoverished state of Bihar gave a resounding verdict against
the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) campaign to pit Hindus against Muslims over
beef eating.
The hefty score of 178 seats in the Bihar 243-member assembly for Chief
Minister Nitish Kumar’s grand alliance demolished virtually all poll
predictions, including the highly acclaimed NDTV. The news channel was
predicting a (...)
========================================
6. INDIA: JAM AND THE PURSUIT OF NIRVANA
by Jean Drèze
========================================
Reference is often made to the international experience with cash transfers,
such as the Bolsa Família programme in Brazil. As it happens, Brazil spends a
full 25% of GDP on the social sector (health, education and social security),
of which less than 0.5 per cent goes to Bolsa Família. Brazil provides a wide
range of services and facilities to its citizens (including universal health
care) aside from income support. This is a general pattern in Latin America,
not confined to Brazil. In India, by contrast, social spending is around 6% of
GDP. Public expenditure on health is among the lowest in the world, as a
proportion of GDP.
========================================
7. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
========================================
- Bold protest in London by Awaaz Network ahead of Modi's visit starting 12
Nov 2015
- India: Modi bites the dust - Bihar did not fall for sectarianism (Edit, The
Tribine, 9 Nov 2015)
- India: The Modi Presidency is Over (Harish Khare)
- UK: Modi Not Welcome large sized image project on the British parliament by
Awaaz Network protesting Modi's visit to Britain starting 12 Nov 2015
- India: The making of a new politics of inclusion (P. K. Datta in The Hindu)
- India: Who Failed in the Bihar 2015 Election? Narendra Modi or Amit Shah
(Seema Mustafa in The Citizen)
- [Bihar] State election in India delivers a significant blow to Modi’s
popularity (Rama Laxmi in WAPO)
- Working to saffronize education in entire country: RSS ideologue Dina Nath
Batra
- India: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh knickers in a twist
- India: When the Fringe goes Mainstream (Radha Kumar)
- India: 'Religious places of Muslims, Christians in Odisha should be under
state regulating authority' - RSS
-> available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
=========================================
8. CAN MYANMAR’S NEW GOVERNMENT CONTROL ITS MILITARY?
by Jon Emont
=========================================
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/can-myanmars-new-government-control-its-military
=========================================
9. NEPAL FACING 'HUMANITARIAN CRISIS' AS FUEL SHORTAGE CONTINUES
by Fiona Broom
=========================================
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Nepal-Facing-Humanitarian-Crisis-as-Fuel-Shortage-Continues-20151109-0012.html
=========================================
10. SRI LANKA LAW AND ORDER MINISTER RESIGNS OVER AVANT GARDE CONTROVERSY
=========================================
(ColomboPage, Nov 9, 2015)
Nov 09, Colombo: Sri Lanka's Minister of Law and Order Thilak Marapana has
decided to resign from his ministerial portfolio over the controversy
surrounding the Avant Garde security firm.
The Minister at a press conference held Monday morning at his residence
announced his decision to step down from his post.
Marapana, who had represented the security firm in the center of controversy,
came under fire for his remarks defending the firm during last Wednesday's
parliamentary session.
Senior cabinet ministers and a number of civil society leaders expressed their
opposition on Marapana's statement regarding the Avant Garde floating armory at
the parliament.
Marapana defended the security firm dismissing that there is anything illegal
about the Avant Garde vessel carrying unauthorized weapons and the whole
controversy was due to lack of understanding about the floating armory creating
confusion.
It has been reported that heated exchanges took place during Thursday's cabinet
meeting with senior ministers criticizing Minister Marapana's stance on the
controversial maritime security firm investigated for corruption.
Some ministers were of the view that Marapana could not be in charge of the
Avant Garde case, when he had provided legal services to the company before he
was appointed as the law and order minister in the UNF Government.
A special cabinet meeting has been convened under the patronage of President
Maithripala Sirisena today to discuss the issue.
=========================================
11. INDIA: NARENDRA MODI - THE DIVISIVE MANIPULATOR WHO CHARMED THE WORLD
by Pankaj Mishra
=========================================
(The Guardian - 9 November 2015)
This week the Indian prime minister makes a triumphant visit to the UK after
cosying up to everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to Rupert Murdoch. What’s
behind the uncritical embrace of a man who has presided over a rising tide of
assassinations and religious zealotry, and driven the country’s writers and
artists into revolt?
Modi’s speeches about his country’s cruelly postponed and now imminent glory
have packed stadiums around the world with ecstatic Indians. Photograph: Javed
Dar/Xinhua Press/Corbis
In 2005, when Narendra Modi was the chief minister of the wealthy Indian state
of Gujarat, local police murdered a criminal called Sheikh Sohrabuddin in cold
blood. At an election rally in 2007 for the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP, Modi
assured his citizens that Sohrabuddin “got what he deserved”. What should be
done, he asked, to a man found possessing illegal arms? The pumped-up crowd
shouted back: “Mari nakho-mari nakho!” (Kill him, kill him!)
The lynch mob’s cry was repeated in a village near Delhi last month as zealots
beat to death a Muslim farmer they suspected – wrongly – of keeping beef in his
house. While Modi makes a triumphant visit to the UK after more than a year as
India’s prime minister, the Hindu supremacists are, as the novelist Mukul
Kesavan wrote last month, in “full hunting mode, head up and howling”. In
recent weeks, activists and scholars have been shot dead amid a nationwide
campaign against “Hindu-baiters” that targets secular intellectuals and
“westernised” women as well as public figures with Muslim and Christian names,
and western NGOs such as Greenpeace. The assassinations follow months of
violence and intimidating rhetoric by Hindu supremacists. A range of public
figures, from Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood’s biggest star, to India’s respected
central banker, Raghuram Rajan, have spoken out against the rising tide of
sectarian hatred. More than 40 of India’s most distinguished writers have
returned their awards to the Sahitya Academy, the national literature academy.
Many others, including artists, scholars, filmmakers and scientists, have since
joined the protests, which reached boiling point after Hindu fanatics lynched
at least four people in connection with beef-eating.
Modi with David Cameron in Australia last year. Photograph: LUKAS COCH /
POOL/EPA
Modi turned beef into an incendiary issue during his run for India’s highest
political office; he and his party colleagues reinfused it with anti-minorities
venom during recent local elections in the state of Bihar. The chief minister
of one of India’s richest states declared last month that Muslims could only
live in the country if they stopped eating beef. The house magazine of the RSS,
the parent outfit of Hindu nationalists, cited ancient scriptures to justify
the killing of “sinners” who slaughter cows. The culture minister Mahesh Sharma
said of protesting authors: “If they say they are unable to write, let them
first stop writing. We will then see.” On Saturday, Modi hinted at his own
views on the subject by posing for pictures with organisers of a Delhi
demonstration against protesting writers, where slogans such as: “Hit the
fraudulent literati with boots” and, “Presstitutes suck up to Europeans” had
echoed.
Why the 'Modi Toadies' are after Salman Rushdie
On the day of Modi’s election last May, I wrote in the Guardian that India was
entering its most sinister phase since independence. Those who had monitored
Modi’s words and deeds, noted their consistency, and feared that Hindu
supremacism could deliver a mortal blow to India’s already enfeebled democratic
institutions and pluralist traditions had come to much the same conclusion.
Modi is a stalwart member of the RSS, a paramilitary organisation explicitly
modelled on European fascist parties, whose members have been found routinely
guilty of violence against Indian minorities. A pogrom in Modi-ruled Gujarat in
2002 killed more than 1,000 Muslims and displaced tens of thousands. (It was
what prompted the US and UK governments to impose a visa ban on Modi). Whether
or not Modi was personally complicit in the murder and gang rapes, they had
clearly been “planned in advance”, as Human Rights Watch said in the first of
countless reports on the violence, “and organised with the extensive
participation of the police and state government officials”. Among the few
people convicted was Maya Kodnani, Modi’s ministerial colleague, and a fanatic
called Babu Bajrangi, who crowed to a journalist that he had slashed open with
his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman, and claimed that Modi sheltered
him after the riots and even changed three judges in order for him to be
released on bail (Modi has not responded to these allegations).
Modi turned beef into an incendiary issue during his run for India’s
highest political office
Though sentenced to dozens of years in prison, Kodnani and Bajrangi are
frequently granted bail and allowed to roam free in Modi’s India. India’s
foremost investigative body, the CBI, had accused Modi’s consigliere, Amit
Shah, who is now president of the BJP, of ordering the execution of Sohrabuddin
(among others), but withdrew its case against him last year, citing lack of
evidence. Meanwhile, Teesta Setalvad, a human rights activist and one of Modi’s
most persistent critics, is saved from arrest only by the interventions of the
supreme court.
Modi conveyed early the audacity – and tawdriness – of power when in May 2014
he flew from Gujarat to the oath-taking ceremony on a private corporate jet
emblazoned with the name of his closest corporate chum. In January this year he
turned out in a $15,000 Savile Row suit with personalised pinstripes to hug
Barack Obama. Launching Digital India (a programme to connect thousands of
villages to the internet) in Silicon Valley last month, the eager new
international player seemingly shoved Mark Zuckerburg aside to clear space for
a photo-op for himself (the video has gone viral). One of his most fervent
cheerleaders in India now complains that the prime minister is like a new bride
remaking herself for her powerful and wealthy in-laws.
Narendra Modi calls for unity in wake of Muslim man’s murder for eating beef
Consequently, many in his own neglected family are turning against him. On
Sunday, his party’s vicious and lavishly funded campaign in elections in Bihar,
one of India’s largest and poorest states, ended in humiliating defeat. But
Modi’s glossy makeover seems to have seduced many in the west; Rupert Murdoch
tweeted after a recent meeting that Modi is India’s “best leader with best
policies since independence”. Sheryl Sandberg declared she was changing her
Facebook profile in honour of Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley in September. His
libertarian hosts did not seem to know or care that, just as Modi was arriving
in California to promote Digital India, his factotums were shutting down the
internet in Kashmir, or that earlier this year his government advocated a
draconian law that the Indian police used repeatedly to arrest people posting
opinions on Facebook and Twitter. Nor did the Bay area’s single-minded
data-monetisers fuss about the fact that Modi had launched Digital India in
India itself with a private party for his most fanatical troll-troopers –
people who are, as the magazine Caravan put it, “a byword in online terror,
hate and misogyny”. In a dog-eat-dog world primarily organised around lucrative
deal-making, the only value seems to be economic growth – albeit, for a small
minority.
Modi’s speeches about his country’s cruelly postponed and now imminent glory
have packed stadiums around the world with ecstatic Indians. At Wembley this
weekend, some more grownup men and women chanting “Modi, Modi!” will embarrass
themselves in history. The seemingly unembarrassable Tory government discovered
new muscles while kowtowing to Xi Jinping, and will no doubt find them useful
for some Indian style-prostration, sashtanga pranam, before Modi.
Modi was always an odd choice to lead India into the 21st century. Meeting him
early in his career, the distinguished social psychologist Ashis Nandy assessed
Modi as a “classic, clinical case” of the “authoritarian personality”, with its
“mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life” and “fantasies of
violence”. Such a figure could describe refugee camps with tens of thousands of
Muslim survivors of the 2002 pogrom as “child-breeding centres”. Asked
repeatedly about his culpability in the killings, Modi insisted that his only
mistake was bad media management. Pressed repeatedly over a decade about such
extraordinary lack of remorse, he finally said that he regretted the killings
as he would a “puppy being run over by a car”.
With Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty
Images
More importantly, Modi was a symptom, easily identified through his many
European and Asian predecessors, of capitalism’s periodic and inevitable
dysfunction: he was plainly the opportune manipulator of mass disaffection with
uneven and unstable growth, who distracts a fearful and atomised citizenry with
the demonisation of minorities, scapegoating of ostensibly liberal,
cosmopolitan and “rootless” people, and promises of “development”, while
facilitating crony capitalism. To aspiring but thwarted young Indians Modi
presented himself as a social revolutionary, the son of a humble tea-seller
challenging entrenched dynasties, as well as an economic moderniser. He
promised to overturn an old social and political order that they saw,
correctly, as dominated by a venal and unresponsive ruling class. His
self-packaging as a pious and virtuous man of the people seemed especially
persuasive as corruption scandals tainted the media as well as politicians and
businessmen in the years leading up to 2014.
Modi’s earliest supporters in his bid for supreme power, however, were India’s
richest people, lured by special favours of cheap land and tax concessions.
Ratan Tata, the steel and car-making tycoon, was one of the first big
industrialists to embrace him in the wake of the anti-Muslim pogrom. Mukesh
Ambani, another business magnate and owner of a 27-storey home in the city of
slums, Mumbai, soon hailed his “grand vision”. His brother declared Modi “king
among kings”. Even the Economist, reporting on Modi-mania among “private-equity
types, blue-chip executives and the chiefs of India’s big conglomerates” was
startled by the “creepy sycophancy”. It shouldn’t have been: in Modi’s India
the Ambanis are fast heading towards a Berlusconi-style domination of both news
and entertainment content and delivery mechanisms.
Media management has ceased to be a problem for Modi; the television channels
and press owned by loyal supporters hectically build him up as India’s saviour.
Modi also attracted academics, writers and journalists who had failed to
flourish in the old regime – the embittered pedantocrats and wannabes who
traditionally serve in the intellectual rearguard of illiberal movements.
Predictably, these victims of ressentiment – who languished, as Nietzsche
wrote, in “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge” – are now taking
over Indian institutions, and filling the airwaves with their “rabid
mendaciousness and rage”.
Many non-resident Indians, denied full dignity in the white man’s world, also
hitched their low self-esteem to Modi’s hot-air balloons about the coming
Indian Century. The Modi Toadies, as they are widely referred to on social
media, have turned out to be an intriguingly diverse lot: they range from
small-town zealots campaigning against romantic love between Muslim and Hindus
to a publicist called Swapan Dasgupta, a former Trotskyite and self-proclaimed
“anglophile”. But it should not be forgotten that a variety of global elite
networks went to work strenuously on Modi’s behalf: the slick public-relations
firm APCO that works with Central Asian despots and suave technocrats as much
as the rented armies of cyberthugs rampaging through social media and the
comment sections of online articles.
Protestors after the murder of a Muslim who was beaten to death for allegedly
eating beef. Photograph: Rupak de Chowdhuri/Reuters/Corbis
A former special adviser to Tony Blair authored a hagiography for
English-speaking readers. The Labour peer Meghnad Desai helped alchemise Modi’s
record of assisting big corporations into an electorally potent myth of
“efficiency” and “rapid development”. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya –
two Ivy League Indian economists charged with “poverty-denialism” by the recent
Nobel laureate Angus Deaton – said in a letter to the Economist that the
anti-Muslim pogrom in Modi’s Gujarat was actually a “riot”. As Modi appeared
likely to become prime minister, the intellectual grunts at American thinktanks
churned out op-eds hailing Modi as the man to accelerate India’s
neoliberalisation, and reorient its foreign policy towards America and Israel.
Many foreign correspondents and “India hands” lost their intellectual
confidence and judgement before such diligently manufactured consensus.
Thus, Modi rose frictionlessly and swiftly from disgrace to respectability in a
world where money, power and status are the measure of everything, and where
human beings, as Balzac bitterly wrote, are reduced to being either fools or
knaves. He may be very far from fulfilling his electoral promise of creating
adequate jobs for the one million Indians who enter the workforce every month.
He still deals mostly in fantasy, gushing about “smart cities” and “bullet
trains”, and a digital India in which fibre-optic cables will bring remote
villages online. But among global elites who see India as a fast-growing
economy and counterweight to China, poverty-denialism shades easily into
pogrom-denialism. A tweet by a New-York-based venture capitalist responding to
protests by Indian writers sums up the prevailing morality: “The icons of new
India are the wealth creators. Nobody gives a rat’s ass anymore about the
writers.”
He still deals mostly in fantasy, gushing about “smart cities” and “bullet
trains”
Modi’s ascent through a variety of enablers, whitewashers and wealth-creators
invites us to probe our own complicity as fools and knaves in increasingly
everyday forms of violence and dispossession. For Modi’s ruthless economism is
a commonplace phenomenon, marked everywhere by greed, sophistry and a contempt
for human life and dignity – symptoms, as GN Devy, one of India’s most bracing
thinkers, put it last month, of a worldwide transition into a “post-human”
existence.
In India itself, the prostration before Mammon, bellicose nationalism, boorish
anti-intellectualism, and fear and hatred of the weak predates Modi. It did not
seem so brazen previously because the now supplanted Indian elite disguised
their hegemony with what Edmund Burke called “pleasing illusions”: in this
case, reverential invocations of Gandhi and Nehru, and of the noble “idea of
India”. Thus, the Congress party, which first summoned the malign ghosts of
Hindu supremacism in the 1980s and presided over the massacre of more than
3,000 Sikhs in 1984, could claim to represent secularism. And liberal
intellectuals patronised by the regime could remain silent when Indian security
forces in Kashmir filled up mass graves with dissenters to the idea of India,
gang-raped with impunity, and stuck live wires into the penises of suspected
militants. The rare protestor among Indian writers was scorned for straying
from literature into political activism. TV anchors and columnists competed
with each other in whipping up patriotic rage and hatred against various
internal and external enemies of the idea of India. The “secular” nationalists
of the ancient regime are now trying to disown their own legitimate children
when they recoil fastidiously from the Hindu supremacists foaming at the mouth.
One can only hope that the barefaced viciousness of Hindu supremacists will
jolt the old elites out of their shattered dogmas and pieties while
politicising a cheated young generation. It is true that Modi and his Toadies
embody without shame, ambivalence or euphemism the brutality of power; they
don’t give a rat’s ass about pleasing illusions. Yet their assaults on the
authorised idea of India are creating a fissure in the unfeeling monolith
through which a humane politics and culture might flow. The alternative, as
recent weeks show, is a post-human India, where lynch mobs roused by their
great leader shout: “Kill him! Kill him!”
=========================================
12. PAKISTAN: RAW DEAL FOR LABOUR
by Umair Javed
=========================================
(Dawn, November 09, 2015)
AT the time of writing, more than 30 labourers were reported dead due to the
collapsing roof of an under-construction polythene-bag manufacturing unit in
Lahore’s Sundar Industrial Area. Almost 100 are injured, and the chances of
rescuing over 20 still trapped underneath the rubble are decisively slim.
Two months ago, Sept 4, the roof of a garments manufacturing unit located in
the residential area of Nishter Colony caved in killing four, and injuring 18.
Three years ago, a factory fire in a two-storey shoe-manufacturing unit (set up
in a house) killed at least 30 workers. There was only one entry-exit point for
the entire building. Earlier in the same year, a boiler blast in a
pharmaceutical factory in Hassan Town killed 15, and injured at least 60
others. Of those killed, seven were women, and four were children.
That’s almost 100 workers killed in accidents during the last three years in
the provincial capital. This list is not exhaustive. It’s what a quick Google
search throws up on the first few pages.
There are few, if any, diligent labour inspectors carrying out their work in
Lahore, let alone in other cities.
The reason why I’ve focused on incidents only in Lahore is because this is a
city that commands the greatest amount of political and economic attention from
the Punjab government. It has the greatest amount of resources thrown at it, it
is frequently referred to as the economic and cultural heart of the province
and is flaunted as a shining beacon of good governance, proactive
administration, and efficient service delivery. Its track record of
guaranteeing workplace safety and rights for the poorest strata of workers,
however, is pathetic.
This is not due to a lack of legislation or frameworks. Pakistan has ratified
33 out of 35 ILO conventions on various aspects of worker rights. Chapter III
of the Factories Act 1934 provides a comprehensive strategy for combating all
kinds of industrial hazards. It also forbids the employment of children under
14 in any kind of factory. Relevant sections of the Punjab Factories Rules 1978
lists procedures required to minimise workplace accidents. Building codes and
by-laws enshrined in industrial acts and construction regulation frameworks
provide detailed guidelines for commercial and industrial building safety. The
provincial government has a Labour and Human Resource Department, and several
laws — such as the Factories Act, and Shops and Establishments Ordinance —
which allow for factory inspections.
And yet despite all the tons of paper wasted publishing these conventions, and
legislative effort put in the past 100 years, working conditions for low-income
labourers are nothing less than terrible. The crisis, therefore, is not one of
legal lacunae, or at least of law per se. The crisis is structural, deeply
rooted in the political-economy of this country.
To understand this better, imagine a world with two actors and a neutral
umpire. Both are trying to influence the umpire to give decisions in their
favour. One has greater resources, is more well connected, better organised,
and is thus able to buy off the umpire. At some point down the line, that more
powerful actor is so dominant it’s hard to distinguish him from the umpire.
This is what has happened not just in Punjab but also across the country. With
no unions, no political party relevant enough to take up their cause, and no
important social networks to tap into, industrial and service-sector workers
find themselves at the bottom of this country’s social and political
food-chain. Just like the 30 who’ve died in Lahore, more than 90pc of this
toiling mass is employed informally, on verbal contracts, with no recourse to
the 180 days of injury pay, or health and social security insurance guaranteed
by government legislation.
At the other end, businessmen eke out greater profits by continuously keeping
labour costs low, paying out less than half the minimum wage as daily rates,
ignoring health and safety guidelines, and undertaking illegal construction on
already unstable structures. This is currently being marketed as our great gift
and enormous potential to manufacturers based in China. All of it will be
guaranteed by a pliant state machinery, bought off where necessary, or kept
starved by a business-state nexus where needed.
In the last fiscal year, the Labour and Human Resource department of Punjab was
allocated a budget of Rs539 million. The figure was later revised downwards to
Rs113.6m — a sum that the government normally spends on uprooting and
reconstructing neighbourhood roads three times a week.
Given the proximity between all mainstream parties in Punjab and the business
elite who fund them and function as candidates for them, it also comes as
little surprise that under the aegis of a now-revolutionary sugar
industrialist, who served as advisor to the chief minister and subsequently as
federal minister for industries, labour inspections were done away with
completely in the 2003 Industrial Policy. They were called “archaic and
cumbersome”, and the “self-declaration” system introduced in their stead was
heralded as “modern”.
Ten years later, the Supreme Court intervened and had inspections restored, but
the governance structure to carry them out has suffered irreversibly. There are
few, if any, diligent labour inspectors carrying out their work in Lahore, let
alone in other cities. Most are on retainers of businessmen both large and
small, just like the rest of the state structure.
Shahbaz Sharif rushed to Sundar Estate when the accident happened, and
announced compensation packages for those who perished or sustained injuries.
He rushed back as quickly and is now probably giving his attention to some
grand development scheme for the city. A paltry 100 union workers protesting at
the Press Club are not enough to pressurise anyone into giving sustained
attention to a wholly avoidable factory accident. Rest assured, things will
continue as before even after the next accident happens.
The writer teaches politics at Lums.
=========================================
13. INDIA: BIHAR’S MESSAGE TO THE INDIAN RIGHT
by Vijay Prashad
=========================================
(counterpunch.org - November 9, 2015)
India’s elections are always a massive enterprise. In the Bihar state
elections, more than half the sixty-seven million eligible voters took to the
ballot to reject the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its alliance. Instead, it
gave a comfortable mandate to the Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance), made up of
the former socialist Janata parties (JDU and the RJD) and the Congress Party.
The result is significant because it means that the BJP – which rules the
Indian government – has been deeply embarrassed in North India, its main
bastion. The Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not campaign here on issues of
development, which had paid off in the national elections of 2014. He went into
the gutter – dredging up the worst of his ideology (Hindutva) to cast
aspersions at Muslims and at minorities in general. Modi, and his lieutenant
Amit Shah, gambled on hatred. The people of Bihar rejected them.
Modi cleverly manipulated the message for the 2014 national parliamentary
elections. The BJP muted its core ideology – at its center, the hatred of
religious minorities – and crafted itself around the theme of development.
Corruption became its adversary and development was its promise. Beneath the
surface of the BJP’s Delhi press statements, more nefarious messages went to
its base.
Nawada, Bihar.
Nawada is one of the southern most districts of Bihar, in the badlands of the
fight between dominant caste landowners and the dispossessed. Denied of dignity
and the ability to make a living, backward castes and dalits pushed their
agenda to the fore from the 1970s. In reaction to this assertion – which
manifested itself in socialist and communist victories at the ballot box from
1977 to 1991 – the landlords went on the warpath. It was a brutal attack
against the dignity of the people and against any political opposition. The
rise of the BJP in wretched Nawada can be calibrated through the warlike
conditions produced by the landlords to their benefit. The data tells the
story. The dominant caste landowners, who make up less than a third of the
population, own ninety percent of the land. This is the BJP’s political base.
Most dalits are landless and live below the poverty line. Their right to vote
is often constrained by violence. The social condition of the entirely of the
population is produced by the landlords’ toxicity – only twenty-eight per cent
of the residents of the district can read and write. The rest – even some
children of the dominant castes – are shut out from literacy.
The BJP’s Giriraj Singh is the sitting Member of Parliament from Nawada. During
the 2014 election, he said – on many occasions – that anyone who dissents from
Modi should go to Pakistan. India is not for them. The BJP managed the press
very well. Its well-heeled spokespersons talked about development, while its
candidates on the hustings fulminated against minorities and dissenters. During
the parliamentary election, Modi went to Nawada, where he warned against the
Pink Revolution – the expansion, he said, of India’s meat industry, including
beef exports. Modi had already raised the politics of beef in the redoubts of
Nawada. After the parliamentary election, Modi’s followers would hound
dissenters – the murder of Communist leader Govind Pansare and the scholar M.
M. Kalburgi forms part of the outcome of Modi’s politics. So too does the
lynching of Muslim men alleged to have been part of the cattle market. All this
happened in the lead-up to the Bihar Assembly polls. At no time did Modi come
out and criticize his followers. How could he? He, and his confrères, had after
all pushed the message in places like Nawada. They are implicated in the
violence.
The Grand Alliance came to the polls with a great deal of confidence. Bihar’s
greatest political orator, Laloo Prasad Yadav, and its most respected former
chief minister, Nitish Kumar, joined forces to fight the BJP. They are both
products of the now largely defunct socialist tradition in India – which was
born in Bihar through the good offices of the great socialist firebrand,
Karpoori Thakur. One of Thakur’s legacies has been the demand for reserved
seats in colleges and in government jobs for historically oppressed castes.
While Laloo Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar betray little of Thakur’s socialism,
they nonetheless defend the right to democracy through reservations. The BJP –
which opposes reservations in theory – has generally held that element of its
politics in check. Demography goes against its landlord bias. But, in the
campaign for Bihar, Mohan Bhagwat of the RSS (the main ideological arm of the
BJP) questioned the utility of reservations. When dominant caste landlords
burned to death two Dalit children, Modi’s cabinet member, V. K. Singh,
compared the children to dogs. The dominant caste and landlord face of the BJP
emerged. It provided the former socialists with the necessary means to push
forward their main democratic demand. The dividends came easily.
Most of the Nawada assembly segments came to the Grand Alliance. They could not
wipe out the BJP entirely, but they certainly dented their control over the
countryside. The BJP and its leader, Narendra Modi, have without question been
defeated in Bihar.
The Left
Bihar’s socialists, led by Thakur and Jayaprakash Narayan, once had a strong
commitment to land reform, local democracy and social equality. Much of that
agenda has vanished in the various Janata parties that inherit the socialist
legacy. Their main link to the masses is through the idea of reservations and
democracy through caste assertion. There is something powerful about this
message. People who have been long denied dignity based on ideas of caste
hierarchy have fought to overturn both prejudice and the material structures of
inequality. The language of caste democracy is now the main plank of the Janata
bloc.
Communism in Bihar has had old roots. Land struggles – led by the Communists –
disturbed the Right. In 1938, Sardar Patel – Gandhi’s adjutant and a hero to
the BJP – went to Bihar and said, “Comrade Lenin was not born in this country
and we do not want a Lenin here.” He did not get his way. A decade later, in
the early years of independent India, the local administrator in Munger, wrote
in a secret dispatch, “Congress workers and leaders come to us for their
personal work, while communist workers and leaders come with the problems of
the common man and regarding the problems of farmers and workers” (from the
research of Professor A. K. Mandal of Hazaribagh). The Left was in the hearts
of the people. But, a mechanical understanding of caste and questions of
dignity hampered the Left’s ability to be the natural leader of the people.
Such a mechanical attitude is now no longer in the Left’s framework.
For several election cycles over the past two decades, the various Communist
parties in Bihar joined with the Janata bloc as a way to defeat the Right. The
dividends from this unity have been limited. Out of its peasant and worker
struggles, the Left built up pockets of support in northern Bihar and in
southern Bihar, but this support had been divided amongst the many Communist
parties – the CPI, the CPIM and the CPIML (Liberation). In the early 1990s, the
Communists developed mass land struggles across the state that challenged not
only the BJP’s base (amongst the large landlords) but also the base of the
Janata bloc (amongst the small holders and local power brokers). The
governments of the Janata bloc have frequently used violence against the land
seizures led by the Communists. In 1998, a CPI-M leader and member of the State
Assembly, Ajit Sarkar, was killed on the orders of Pappu Yadav. Yadav had
warned the Left that violence would be the answer if there were “any attempt to
redistribute rural land.” These land struggles could not – for various reasons
– be converted into electoral gains (except the Nawada parliamentary
constituency, which the CPIM held in 1989 and 1991). Nonetheless, they brought
the various Left parties together in the fields and in the factories. In 2009,
for the first time, the United Left Bloc decided to contest the parliamentary
elections together. That unity has held, and this year, the Left Bloc fought in
this election against both the BJP and the Grand Alliance.
Certainly the Left Bloc knew that it would not win the election. On the other
hand, the Left Bloc won three seats (each won by the CPI-ML) and it came second
in a number of other seats. What this shows is that the Left has built spaces
of hope for the struggles that will doubtless come – after all the Grand
Alliance, which combines commitment to caste democracy and neoliberalism, will
not be able to address the challenges of the Bihari people. It will be left to
the Communists to raise these issues.
On the national stage, Nitish Kumar will put together a Grand Alliance to
confront the BJP. That is already on the cards. The Left, on the other hand,
will pursue its policy of Left Unity and build influence in its bases. Further
south, in Kerala (population: 35 million), the Left Democratic Front handily
won the local elections last week – beating both the Congress and the BJP
easily and setting up the stage for the assembly elections for next year. The
Indian Right thought that the dynamic of history had resolved the political
questions to its benefit. Seems that it will have to rethink its arrogance.
Vijay Prashad, director of International Studies at Trinity College, is the
editor of “Letters to Palestine” (Verso). He lives in Northampton.
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14. THE PRICE OF LIGHT: INDIA'S HUGE NEED FOR ELECTRICITY IS A PROBLEM FOR THE
PLANET
Annie Gowen, The Washington Post
=========================================
(ndtv.com, November 09, 2015)
CHOWKIPUR, INDIA: Dusk descends on a village in the eastern Indian state of
Bihar as residents start their evening chores. Women walk in a line, balancing
packets of animal fodder on their heads.
Others lead their water buffalo home before dinner.
Overhead loom bare utility poles - built but never wired for electricity -
casting long shadows across the landscape.
Of the world's 1.3 billion people who live without access to power, a quarter -
about 300 million - live in rural India in states such as Bihar. Nighttime
satellite images of the sprawling subcontinent show the story: Vast swaths of
the country still lie in darkness.
India, the third-largest emitter of greenhouses gases after China and the
United States, has taken steps to address climate change in advance of the
global talks in Paris this year - pledging a steep increase in renewable energy
by 2030.
But India's leaders say that the huge challenge of extending electric service
to its citizens means a hard reality - that the country must continue to
increase its fossil fuel consumption, at least in the near term, on a path that
could mean a threefold increase in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, according
to some estimates.
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked climate change with President
Obama in September at the United Nations, he was careful to note that he and
Obama share "an uncompromising commitment on climate change without affecting
our ability to meet the development aspirations of humanity."
Here in this little village, a single solar light bulb gleams.
It belongs to the family of Satish Paswan, 35, a farmer who sold a bit of his
family's land to purchase a solar panel and light a few months back for about
$88. He wanted his five children to be able to do their homework.
"We feel very ashamed and bad that other neighboring villages are enjoying
power facility and we don't have it," Paswan said.
"Whenever a small leader or a big leader belonging to the ruling party comes
here, they promise their first priority is to provide electricity to the
villages. But they have never fulfilled that promise."
Fossil fuel generation of electricity is the largest single source of
greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. Yet demand for inexpensive power will rise
in a great tide in the decades to come, especially in South Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions of the globe with the least access to
electricity. All the countries of Africa, taken together, have twice as many
people without electricity as India does - 622 million. No country is content
with that.
"It's a matter of shame that 68 years after independence we have not been able
to provide a basic amenity like electricity," Piyush Goyal, India's minister of
state for power, coal and new and renewable energy, said recently.
The Indian government has launched an ambitious project to supply 24-hour power
to its towns and villages by 2022 - with plans for miles of new feeder lines,
infrastructure upgrades and solar microgrids for the remotest areas.
If India's carbon emissions continue to rise, by 2040 it will overtake the
United States as the world's second-highest emitter, behind only China,
according to estimates by the International Energy Agency.
Yet the Indian government has long argued that the United States and other
industrialized nations bear a greater responsibility for the cumulative damage
to the environment from carbon emissions than developing nations - with Modi
urging "climate justice" and chiding Western nations to change their wasteful
ways.
Total carbon dioxide emissions for India were 1.7 tons per capita in 2012, the
most recent complete data available, compared with 6.9 tons for China and 16.3
tons for the United States, according to the World Resources Institute.
Officials say they are keenly aware of India's vulnerability to the impacts of
climate change: rising sea levels, drought, flooding and food security.
Yet the government says it must depend on fossil fuels to bring an estimated 30
percent of the population out of extreme poverty.
"We cannot abandon coal," said Jairam Ramesh, the former environment minister
and climate negotiator, and author of the book "Green Signals: Ecology, Growth,
and Democracy in India." "It would be suicidal on our part to give up on coal
for the next 15 to 20 years, at least, given the need."
- - -
Although 300 million Indians have no access to power, millions more in the
country of 1.2 billion people live with spotty supplies of electricity from the
country's unreliable power grid. The grid failed spectacularly in 2012,
plunging more than 600 million people into total blackout.
In the country's high-tech capital of Bangalore, for example, residents have
recently had to endure hours of power outages each day after repairs and a bad
monsoon season prevented the state's hydroelectric and wind power plants from
generating enough electricity.
Many of the giant IT companies have their own generating systems - Infosys, for
example, is building its own solar park - but small businesses and residents in
rural and urban areas are suffering, said Harish Hande, the chairman of
Selco-India, a social enterprise that provides solar power in Karnataka.
"How do we manage our supply and make sure we put money aside for
infrastructure? If you look at the future, it's what we need," he said, "but
there's not a single thing that's moving ahead."
Estimates show that India's power woes cost the economy anywhere from 1 to 3
percent of gross domestic product - an impediment to Modi's hopes to expand the
economy and make the country more hospitable to manufacturing, according to
Rahul Tongia, a fellow with Brookings India. Electricity demand will increase
sevenfold by mid-century as the population continues to grow, experts say.
Energy access is worse in rural areas. Bihar, one of India's poorest states,
has a population of 103 million, nearly a third the size of the United States.
Fewer have electricity as the primary source of lighting there than in any
other place in India, just over 16 percent, according to 2011 census data.
Families still light their homes with kerosene lamps and cook on clay stoves
with cow-dung patties or kindling.
In Bagwan village, students at the local middle school swelter in concrete
classrooms without fans. A diesel generator rattles and spews black smoke
outside the offices of the Union Bank of India.
"Electricity touches each and every sector of life," said Rajesh Kumar Singh, a
farmer who is the village sarpanch, akin to a mayor. "I can't see TV properly.
I can purchase an air conditioner, but I can't run an air conditioner. Every
piece of equipment that runs by electricity we can't have. So life is not good
for us. We are just surviving."
Singh, 44, lives with his large extended family in a spacious home around an
open-air courtyard where most of the cooking is done in a clay oven fueled by
cow dung. He shows off his small refrigerator, which cannot be used to store
food for any length of time because of the uneven electricity supply.
"I have a refrigerator, but it's just sitting there. It's just a showpiece," he
said, and sighed. "We are cursed to live in Bihar."
- - -
In Bihar, the average per-capita electricity consumption is 203 kilowatt hours
per person per year, compared with about 1,000 kilowatt hours for India as a
whole, about 4,000 for China and about 12,000 for the United States, according
to estimates from the World Bank and India's Central Electricity Authority.
Pratyaya Amrit, the secretary of the energy department for Bihar, said that the
state is about seven to 10 years behind the rest of the country, a fact that is
not lost on his constituents. His office is trying to link the last remaining
2,000 villages with power and improve conditions for 40 percent of the rest
that have bad infrastructure.
"They will ask you: 'My village. By when? Please get it done,' " Amrit said.
The state's power-generating capacity is expected to increase in the next few
years as work is completed on two new coal-fired power plants, among hundreds
of such plants planned throughout India.
Most of the country's power-generating capacity still comes from about 125
coal-fired power plants, but the government has mandated that plants
constructed after 2017 be built with more efficient "super critical"
technology. As many as 140 coal-fired plants are planned or in the pipeline,
according to Arunabha Ghosh, the chief executive of the Council on Energy,
Environment and Water (CEEW) in New Delhi.
Led by Modi, an early proponent of solar technology, India is in the midst of a
huge drive to expand its solar and wind capacity, with plans for dozens of
mega-parks that the government hopes will move the country closer to its goal
of 100 gigawatts of solar-generating capacity by 2022, plus 75 gigawatts of
other renewable energy, predominantly wind. The government wants to expand its
hydroelectric and nuclear power capacity, as well.
The ambitious goal - which some think is unrealistic - would essentially
require the country to double its installed solar-generating capacity every 18
months from its current capacity of four gigawatts, according to the CEEW
estimate.
India also wants to double its coal production in the next five years, to more
than 1 billion tons annually, with plans to open 60 more coal mines. India has
the world's fifth-largest coal reserves, and officials say cheap, plentiful
coal will make up the lion's share of the country's energy budget well beyond
2030.
"India could be consuming as much as 1.8 billion to 3 billion tons of coal
annually by 2050," Ghosh said, noting that this is a "business as usual"
calculation and does not factor in India's new push for renewable energy. "This
is still lower than the amount of coal that was burnt in China on an annual
basis in the last four to five years."
At the same time, the Indian government says it wants to develop its economy
using green technology, setting up 100 smart cities and touting its work with
energy efficiency in industrial buildings and making LED light bulbs affordable.
"Two-thirds of our buildings have yet to be built, and half of the roads and
infrastructure have yet to be created," said Samir Saran, a senior fellow and
vice president at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. "There's an
opportunity to build at least some of them right for the first time - if we can
create the right financial ecosystem."
- - -
In recent months, the Indian government has announced plans to modernize its
national grid and is preparing to address the financial woes of the country's
state-owned utility companies, some of which are mired in debt, to the tune of
$66 billion. The rescue plan is likely to include power tariff hikes - a
politically unpopular concept in a country where many residents are used to
heavily subsidized power.
In 2010, according to a World Bank estimate, 87 percent of all electricity
consumed by domestic customers was subsidized.
In Bihar, 30 percent of power is lost to transmission and distribution as well
as theft, Amrit said, although independent analysts say the number may be
higher.
Dark comes quickly in Chowkipur village, a small community about two hours from
Bihar's capital of Patna. Parents pull out kerosene lanterns as soon as the sun
goes down so their children can study. The young men gather in the grass to
play a board game called Ludo, lighting the board with their mobile phones,
which they charge for 5 rupees per hour - about 8 cents - in town.
At the home of Rada Krishna Paswan, a 26-year-old bricklayer, his wife and
other members of his extended family cooked pumpkin for dinner over a fire as
nephew Pran Kumar, 6, tried to read his Hindi homework under a dim,
battery-powered light.
The 100 or so families of the village took to the streets in August to protest
the lack of power, Paswan said. Villagers blocked the main road for hours,
chanting, "No power, no vote!" They were chiefly concerned about 70 students
from their village and a neighboring community who failed to pass their Class
10 exams - it is difficult for them to study without light, he said.
"You see with your own eyes how we are suffering," Paswan said. "There is a
sense of urgency now. We need power. This is the moment. This is the time."
Story First Published: November 09, 2015
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15. TOO WEAK, TOO STRONG
PATRICK COCKBURN ON THE STATE OF THE SYRIAN WAR
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(London Review of Books - Vol. 37 No. 21 · 5 November 2015)
The military balance of power in Syria and Iraq is changing. The Russian air
strikes that have been taking place since the end of September are
strengthening and raising the morale of the Syrian army, which earlier in the
year looked fought out and was on the retreat. With the support of Russian
airpower, the army is now on the offensive in and around Aleppo, Syria’s second
largest city, and is seeking to regain lost territory in Idlib province. Syrian
commanders on the ground are reportedly relaying the co-ordinates of between
400 and 800 targets to the Russian air force every day, though only a small
proportion of them come under immediate attack. The chances of Bashar
al-Assad’s government falling – though always more remote than many suggested –
are disappearing. Not that this means he is going to win.
The drama of Russian military action, while provoking a wave of Cold War
rhetoric from Western leaders and the media, has taken attention away from an
equally significant development in the war in Syria and Iraq. This has been the
failure over the last year of the US air campaign – which began in Iraq in
August 2014 before being extended to Syria – to weaken Islamic State and other
al-Qaida-type groups. By October the US-led coalition had carried out 7323 air
strikes, the great majority of them by the US air force, which made 3231
strikes in Iraq and 2487 in Syria. But the campaign has demonstrably failed to
contain IS, which in May captured Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. There
have been far fewer attacks against the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, Jabhat
al-Nusra, and the extreme Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham, which between them
dominate the insurgency in northern Syria. The US failure is political as much
as military: it needs partners on the ground who are fighting IS, but its
choice is limited because those actually engaged in combat with the Sunni
jihadis are largely Shia – Iran itself, the Syrian army, Hizbullah, the Shia
militias in Iraq – and the US can’t offer them full military co-operation
because that would alienate the Sunni states, the bedrock of America’s power in
the region. As a result the US can only use its air force in support of the
Kurds.
The US faces the same dilemma in Iraq and Syria today as it did after 9/11 when
George Bush declared the war on terror. It was known then that 15 of the 19
hijackers were Saudis, Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and the money for the
operation came from Saudi donors. But the US didn’t want to pursue al-Qaida at
the expense of its relations with the Sunni states, so it muted criticism of
Saudi Arabia and invaded Iraq; similarly, it never confronted Pakistan over its
support for the Taliban, ensuring that the movement was able to regroup after
losing power in 2001.
Washington tried to mitigate the failure of its air campaign, officially called
Operation Inherent Resolve, by making exaggerated claims of success. Maps were
issued to the press showing that IS had a weakening grip on between 25 and 30
per cent of its territory, but they conveniently left out the parts of Syria
where IS was advancing. Such was the suppression and manipulation of
intelligence by the administration that in July fifty analysts working for US
Central Command signed a protest against the official distortion of what was
happening on the battlefield. Russia has now taken advantage of the US failure
to suppress the jihadis.
But great power rivalry is only one of the confrontations taking place in
Syria, and the fixation on Russian intervention has obscured other important
developments. The outside world hasn’t paid much attention, but the regional
struggle between Shia and Sunni has intensified in the last few weeks. Shia
states across the Middle East, notably Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, have never had
much doubt that they are in a fight to the finish with the Sunni states, led by
Saudi Arabia, and their local allies in Syria and Iraq. Shia leaders dismiss
the idea, much favoured in Washington, that a sizeable moderate, non-sectarian
Sunni opposition exists that would be willing to share power in Damascus and
Baghdad: this, they believe, is propaganda pumped out by Saudi and
Qatari-backed media. When it comes to keeping Assad in charge in Damascus, the
increased involvement of the Shia powers is as important as the Russian air
campaign. For the first time units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been
deployed in Syria, mostly around Aleppo, and there are reports that a thousand
fighters from Iran and Hizbullah are waiting to attack from the north. Several
senior Iranian commanders have recently been killed in the fighting. The
mobilisation of the Shia axis is significant because, although Sunni outnumber
Shia in the Muslim world at large, in the swathe of countries most directly
involved in the conflict – Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – there are more than
a hundred million Shia, who believe their own existence is threatened if Assad
goes down, compared to thirty million Sunnis, who are in a majority only in
Syria.
In addition to the Russian-American rivalry and the struggle between Shia and
Sunni, a third development of growing importance is shaping the war. This is
the struggle of the 2.2 million Kurds, 10 per cent of the Syrian population, to
create a Kurdish statelet in north-east Syria, which the Kurds call Rojava.
Since the withdrawal of the Syrian army from the three Kurdish enclaves in the
summer of 2012, the Kurds have been extraordinarily successful militarily and
now control an area that stretches for 250 miles between the Euphrates and the
Tigris along the southern frontier of Turkey. The Syrian Kurdish leader Salih
Muslim told me in September that the Kurdish forces intended to advance west of
the Euphrates, seizing the last IS-held border crossing with Turkey at
Jarabulus and linking up with the Syrian Kurdish enclave at Afrin. Such an
event would be viewed with horror by Turkey, which suddenly finds itself hemmed
in by Kurdish forces backed by US airpower along much of its southern frontier.
The Syrian Kurds say that their People’s Protection Units (YPG) number fifty
thousand men and women under arms (though in the Middle East it is wise to
divide by two all claims of military strength). They are the one force to have
repeatedly beaten Islamic State, including in the long battle for Kobani that
ended in January. The YPG is lightly armed, but highly effective when
co-ordinating its attacks with US aircraft. The Kurds may be exaggerating the
strength of their position: Rojava is the safest part of Syria aside from the
Mediterranean coast, but this is a measure of the chronic insecurity in the
rest of the country, where, even in government-held central Damascus, mortar
bombs fired from opposition enclaves explode daily. Front lines are very long
and porous, so IS can infiltrate and launch sudden raids. When in September I
drove from Kobani to Qamishli, another large Kurdish city, on what was meant to
be a safe road, I was stopped in an Arab village where YPG troops said they
were conducting a search for five or six IS fighters who had been seen in the
area. A few miles further on, in the town of Tal Abyad, which the YPG had
captured from IS in June, a woman ran out of her house to wave down the police
car I was following to say that she had just seen an IS fighter in black
clothes and a beard run through her courtyard. The police said there were still
IS men hiding in abandoned Arab houses in the town. Half an hour later, we were
passing though Ras al-Ayn, which the Kurds have held for two years, when there
was the sound of what I thought was shooting ahead of us, but it turned out to
be a suicide bomber in a car: he had blown himself up at the next checkpoint,
killing five people. At the same time, a man on a motorbike detonated a bomb at
a checkpoint we had just passed through, but killed only himself. The YPG may
have driven IS out of these areas, but they have not gone far.
Lumiere, Durham. The Conference
Innumerable victories and defeats on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq have
been announced over the last four years, but most of them haven’t been
decisive. Between 2011 and 2013 it was conventional wisdom in the West and much
of the Middle East that Assad was going to be overthrown just as Gaddafi has
been. In late 2013 and throughout 2014, it was clear that Assad still
controlled most populated areas, but then the jihadi advances in northern and
eastern Syria in May revived talk of the regime’s crumbling. In reality,
neither the government nor its opponents are likely to collapse: all sides have
many supporters who will fight to the death. It is a genuine civil war: a
couple of years ago in Baghdad an Iraqi politician told me that ‘the problem in
Iraq is that all parties are both too strong and too weak: too strong to be
defeated, but too weak to win.’ The same applies today in Syria. Even if one
combatant suffers a temporary defeat, its foreign supporters will prop it up:
the ailing non-IS part of the Syrian opposition was rescued by Saudi Arabia,
Qatar and Turkey in 2014 and this year Assad is being saved by Russia, Iran and
Hizbullah. All have too much to lose: Russia needs success in Syria after
twenty years of retreat, while the Shia states dare not allow a Sunni triumph.
The military stalemate will be difficult to break. The battleground is vast,
with front lines stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean. Will the entrance
of the Russian air force result in a new balance of power in the region? Will
it be more effective than the Americans and their allies? For air power to
work, even when armed with precision weapons, it needs a well-organised
military partner on the ground identifying targets and relaying co-ordinates to
the planes overhead. This approach worked for the US when it was supporting the
Northern Alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraqi
peshmerga against Saddam’s army in northern Iraq in 2003. Russia will now hope
to have the same success through its co-operation with the Syrian army. There
are some signs that this may be happening; on 18 October what appeared to be
Russian planes were reported by independent observers to have wiped out a
16-vehicle IS convoy and killed forty fighters near Raqqa, Islamic State’s
Syrian capital.
But Russian air support won’t be enough to defeat IS and the other
al-Qaida-type groups, because years of fighting the US, Iraqi and Syrian armies
has given their fighters formidable military expertise. Tactics include
multiple co-ordinated attacks by suicide bombers, sometimes driving armoured
trucks that carry several tons of explosives, as well as the mass use of IEDs
and booby traps. IS puts emphasis on prolonged training as well as religious
teaching; its snipers are famous for remaining still for hours as they search
for a target. IS acts like a guerrilla force, relying on surprise and
diversionary attacks to keep its enemies guessing.
*
Over the last three years I have found that the best way of learning what is
really happening in the war is to visit military hospitals. Most wounded
soldiers, eyewitnesses to the fighting, are bored by their convalescence and
eager to talk about their experiences. In July, I was in the Hussein Teaching
Hospital in the Shia holy city of Karbala, where one ward was reserved for
injured fighters from the Shia militia known as the Hashid Shaabi. Many had
answered a call to arms by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani after IS captured
Mosul last year. Colonel Salah Rajab, the deputy commander of the Habib
battalion of the Ali Akbar brigade, who was lying in bed after having his lower
right leg amputated, had been fighting in Baiji City, a town on the Tigris
close to Iraq’s largest oil refinery, for 16 days when a mortar round landed
near him, leaving two of his men dead and four wounded. When I asked him what
the weaknesses of the Hashid were, he said that they were enthusiastic but
poorly trained. He could speak with some authority: he was a professional
soldier who resigned from the Iraqi army in 1999. He complained that his men
got a maximum of three months’ training when they needed six months, with the
result that they made costly mistakes such as talking too much on their mobile
phones and field radios. IS monitored these communications, and used
intercepted information to inflict heavy losses. The biggest problem for the
Hashid, which probably numbers about fifty thousand men, is the lack of
experienced commanders able to organise an attack and keep casualties low.
Omar Abdullah, an 18-year-old militia volunteer, was in another bed in the same
ward. He had been trained for just 25 days before going to fight in Baiji,
where his arm and leg were broken in a bomb blast. His story confirmed Colonel
Rajab’s account of enthusiastic but inexperienced militiamen suffering heavy
losses as they fell into traps set by IS. On arriving in Baiji, Abdullah said,
‘we were shot at by snipers and we ran into a house to seek cover. There were
13 of us and we didn’t realise that the house was full of explosives.’ These
were detonated by an IS fighter keeping a watch on the house; the blast killed
nine of the militiamen and wounded the remaining four. Experienced soldiers,
too, have been falling victim to traps like this. A bomb disposal expert in the
ward told me he had been examining a suspicious-looking wooden bridge over a
canal when one of his men stepped onto it and detonated a bomb that killed four
and wounded three of the bomb disposal team.
The types of injury reflect the kind of combat that predominates. Most of it
takes place in cities or built-up areas and involves house-to-house fighting in
which losses are high. Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers described being hit
by snipers as they manned checkpoints or being injured by mines or booby traps.
In May, I talked to an 18-year-old Kurdish YPG fighter called Javad Judy in the
Shahid Khavat hospital in the city of Qamishli in north-east Syria. He had been
shot through the spine as his squad was clearing a Christian village near
Hasaka of IS fighters. ‘We had divided into three groups that were trying to
attack the village,’ he said, ‘when we were hit by intense fire from behind and
from the trees on each side of us.’ He was still traumatised by finding out
that his lower body was permanently paralysed.
For some soldiers, injuries aren’t the only threat to their survival. In 2012,
in the Mezze military hospital in Damascus, I met Mohammed Diab, a 21-year-old
Syrian army soldier who a year earlier in Aleppo had been hit by a bullet that
shattered his lower left leg. After making an initial recovery he had gone back
to his home village of Rahiya in Idlib province, which was a dangerous move
since it was under the control of the opposition. Hearing that there was a
wounded government soldier in the village, they took Diab hostage and held him
for five months; they even sold his metal splint and gave him a piece of wood
to strap to his leg instead. Finally, his family ransomed him for the
equivalent of $1000 but his leg had become infected and so he was back in
hospital.
In one sense, the soldiers and fighters I spoke to were the lucky ones: at
least they had a hospital to go to. Thousands of IS fighters must have been
wounded at Kobani, where 70 per cent of the buildings were destroyed by seven
hundred American airstrikes. In Damascus, whole districts held by the
opposition have been pounded into rubble by government artillery and barrel
bombs. Since March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,
250,124 Syrians have been killed and an estimated two million injured out of a
population of 22 million. The country is saturated by violence. In September I
went to the town of Tal Tamir outside Hasaka City, near where Javad Judy was
shot. Islamic State had retreated, but people were still too terrified to
return to their houses – or those houses that were still standing. A local
official said he was trying to persuade refugees to come back. Their reluctance
wasn’t surprising: the previous week an apparently pregnant Arab woman had been
arrested in Tal Tamir market. She turned out to be a suicide bomber who had
failed to detonate the explosives strapped to her stomach under her black robes.
The Russian intervention in Syria, the greater involvement of Iran and the Shia
powers, and the rise of the Syrian Kurds has not yet changed the status quo in
Iraq and Syria, though it has the potential to do so. The Russian presence
makes Turkish military intervention against the Kurds and the government in
Damascus less likely. But the Russians, the Syrian army and their allies need
to win a serious victory – such as capturing the rebel-held half of Aleppo – if
they are to transform the civil war. Assad won’t want his experienced combat
units to be caught up in the sort of street-by-street fighting described by the
wounded soldiers in the hospitals. On the other hand, the Russian air campaign
has an advantage over that of the Americans in that it has been launched in
support of an effective regular army. The US never dared to attack IS when it
was fighting the Syrian army because Washington didn’t want to be accused of
keeping Assad in power. The US approach has left it without real allies on the
ground, aside from the Kurds, whose effectiveness is limited outside Kurdish
majority areas. The crippling weakness of US strategy in both Iraq and Syria
has been to pretend that a ‘moderate Sunni opposition’ either exists or can be
created. For all America’s fierce denunciations of Russian intervention, some
in Washington can see the advantage of Russia doing what the US can’t do
itself. Meanwhile, Britain is wrestling with the prospect of joining the US-led
air campaign, without noticing that it has already failed in its main purpose.
23 October
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web:
www.sacw.net/
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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
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