South Asia Citizens Wire - 5 April 2017 - No. 2933 [via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]
Contents: 1. Human Rights Watch Report on Attacks on Students, Teachers, and Schools in Pakistan 2. India: Racism Against Africans in Greater Noida - Statement by African Envoys in India - On Incidents of Racism in Greater Noida - An appeal to citizens of India regarding growing menace of attacks on our brothers and sisters from Africa - Press Statement to the African Media by Concerned Citizens of India Regarding Racial Attack on African Students - Anti-Racism Cartoon on Indians in India and Indians Abroad 3. India: Stop Moral Policing, Disband Anti Romeo Squads in the State of UP - Joint Statement by Women Activists 4. India: Protect minority rights in Jammu and Kashmir - include all ethnic groups 5. CNDP Statement on India’s refusal to join UN negotiations to ban nuclear weapons 6. India: Statement by PADS on the Freedom of Irreligion and Against Religious Bigotry 7. India: Assault on Intellectuals and Students’ - Excerpt from Basharat Peer’s A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen 8. Recent on Communalism Watch: - India to deport 40,000 Rohingya Muslims - If Afghans Are Good Refugees in India, Why Not Rohingya Muslims? (Chandan Nandy) - India: BJP Advised TO Steer Clear Of All Anti-Fish Propaganda in West Bengal - India - West Bengal: All India Trinamool Congress to perform Hanuman Puja to take on Sangh Parivar - The Sangh Parivar’s brand of patriotism connotes a perverted concept of nationalism (A.G. Noorani) - Review of Book: Kandhamal - Whither Justice for Violence Victims (Ram Puniyani) - Hindi Article: Yogi as UP CM - India: Anti-Romeo vigilnates are going beserk in BJP run states of UP / Uttarakhand - video report by India Today - India: Meat under attack: Authorities must not encourage food bigotry or harass legitimate businesses | Editorial, The Times of India, - I was forced to change my religion - Kanon Sarker: Excerpt from 'Bangladesh 1971: Dreadful Experiences' - India: Saffron storm, hard cash | Jawed Naqvi - India: The ideal Hindu Rashtra will be no different from this demo version (Aakar Patel) - India: Paving the Way for Ram Lalla? - Editorial EPW, 1 April 2017 ::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: 9. With Karate And Wooden Guns A Rohingya Insurgency Is Born | Wa Lone, Simon Lewis and Krishna Das 10. Sri Lankan Muslim Clerics Say Women Are Not Equal To Men, Defend Marriage Before Puberty 11. I, Migrant | Kamila Shamsie 12. We have failed to protect ‘Idea of India’ - An open letter to all opposition parties | Manoj K Jha 13. India: ‘Recall heritage of love, tolerance’ - As new India rises, a father pens open letter to daughter | Samar Halarnkar 14. This is How it Happens | Ujjal Dosanjh 15. Indian journalist charged under Official Secrets Act | CPJ Alert 16. India: Centre exploring ways to deport 40,000 Rohingya Muslims 17. The break-up of India, and a home | Kiran Doshi 18. Bebber on Basu's For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front 19. Children’s Books and China’s Crackdown on Western Ideology | Hannah Beech 20. What’s Left? | Sheila Fitzpatrick ======================================== 1. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT ON ATTACKS ON STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND SCHOOLS IN PAKISTAN ======================================== London, March 27, 2017) – Attacks by the Taliban and other militant groups are having a devastating impact on education in Pakistan, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released a day before the Second International Conference on Safe Schools in Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://www.sacw.net/article13173.html ======================================== 2. INDIA: RACISM AGAINST AFRICANS IN GREATER NOIDA ======================================== STATEMENT BY AFRICAN ENVOYS IN INDIA - ON INCIDENTS OF RACISM IN GREATER NOIDA Expectation of condemnation at highest level of Indian govt and swift action against perpetrators http://www.sacw.net/article13195.html o o o AN APPEAL TO CITIZENS OF INDIA REGARDING GROWING MENACE OF ATTACKS ON OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS FROM AFRICA We, concerned citizens of India, appeal to all fellow citizens, including teachers, students, the university and school administrations, sportspersons, political leaders, trade unionists and organisers in social movements to respond effectively to the growing menace of attacks on our brothers and sisters from Africa. We believe our society needs to be sensitized to the problems faced by foreign students in India, more especially students who come to this country from Africa. http://www.sacw.net/article13178.html o o o PRESS STATEMENT TO THE AFRICAN MEDIA BY CONCERNED CITIZENS OF INDIA REGARDING RACIAL ATTACK ON AFRICAN STUDENTS We, representing concerned citizens of India, are extremely disturbed by the assault on 4 Nigerian students in Greater Noida in the state of Uttar Pradesh, adjoining Delhi. We condemn in the strongest possible terms these attacks carried out by a mob which chose to take law into its own hands on mere suspicion which has also since turned out, as confirmed by the local police, to have been without foundation. That these assaults were made on foreigners who have come to India in friendship and goodwill makes these even more reprehensible. http://www.sacw.net/article13177.html o o o ANTI-RACISM CARTOON ON INDIANS IN INDIA AND INDIANS ABROAD http://www.sacw.net/article13188.html ======================================== 3. INDIA: STOP MORAL POLICING, DISBAND ANTI ROMEO SQUADS IN THE STATE OF UP - JOINT STATEMENT BY WOMEN ACTIVISTS ======================================== "Anti-Romeo Squads" are policemen and women and vigilante groups, operating outside the purview of law, with the support of the Uttar Pradesh State, which threaten women’s freedoms. The serious issue of violence against women and routine sexual harassment of women in Uttar Pradesh cannot be addressed by setting up anti-Romeo squads. http://www.sacw.net/article13196.html ======================================== 4. INDIA: PROTECT MINORITY RIGHTS IN JAMMU AND KASHMIR - INCLUDE ALL ETHNIC GROUPS ======================================== It is good that the Supreme Court has asked why there is no mechanism to protect minority rights in Jammu and Kashmir. Minorities everywhere must be protected. That is the mark of a civilized society. http://www.sacw.net/article13186.html ======================================== 5. CNDP STATEMENT ON INDIA’S REFUSAL TO JOIN UN NEGOTIATIONS TO BAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS ======================================== This week at the UN Headquarters in New York, an unprecedented marks the commencement of negotiation is at the United Nations Headquarters in New York taking place wherein most member states of the UN General Assembly are discussing on a comprehensive legal prohibition on the use, possession, production, stockpiling and deployment of nuclear weapons. For all its avowed commitment to the pursuit of universal global nuclear disarmament, it is shocking that the Indian government, to our utter dismay, has stayed away abstained from these negotiations. http://www.sacw.net/article13181.html ======================================== 6. INDIA: STATEMENT BY PADS ON THE FREEDOM OF IRRELIGION AND AGAINST RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY ======================================== People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (PADS) is aghast at the news of the murder of a rationalist H. Farook in Coimbatore, Tamilnadu. After, Dr. Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and Prof. Kalburgi, Farook is the fourth rationalist who has been murdered by barbarous champions of religion. http://www.sacw.net/article13156.html ======================================== 7. INDIA: ASSAULT ON INTELLECTUALS AND STUDENTS’ - EXCERPT FROM BASHARAT PEER’S A QUESTION OF ORDER: INDIA, TURKEY, AND THE RETURN OF STRONGMEN ======================================== On an August 2015 morning, two young men on a motorcycle stopped outside the home of Malleshappa Kalburgi, a 78-year-old literature scholar in the town of Dharwad in the southern state of Karnataka. One rider stayed on the bike while the other walked up to Kalburgi’s door and introduced himself as a former student. Kalburgi had been the vice-chancellor of Kannada University, and he was famous for his critique of superstition and conservative practices, which angered Hindu extremists. http://www.sacw.net/article13197.html ======================================== 8. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ======================================== - India to deport 40,000 Rohingya Muslims - If Afghans Are Good Refugees in India, Why Not Rohingya Muslims? (Chandan Nandy) - India: BJP Advised TO Steer Clear Of All Anti-Fish Propaganda in West Bengal - India - West Bengal: All India Trinamool Congress to perform Hanuman Puja to take on Sangh Parivar [which is involved in organising Ram Navami] - The Sangh Parivar’s brand of patriotism connotes a perverted concept of nationalism (A.G. Noorani) - Review of Book: Kandhamal - Whither Justice for Violence Victims (Ram Puniyani) - Hindi Article: Yogi as UP CM - India: Anti-Romeo vigilnates are going beserk in BJP run states of UP / Uttarakhand - video report by India Today - India: Meat under attack: Authorities must not encourage food bigotry or harass legitimate businesses | Editorial, The Times of India, April 3, 2017 - I was forced to change my religion - Kanon Sarker: Excerpt from 'Bangladesh 1971: Dreadful Experiences' - India: Saffron storm, hard cash | Jawed Naqvi - India: The ideal Hindu Rashtra will be no different from this demo version (Aakar Patel) - India: Paving the Way for Ram Lalla? - Editorial EPW, 1 April 2017 - Facebook secularism - Frederick Noronha - India: Radhika Ramaseshan BJP’s 2017 UP Win - India: Taliban-like fanatics using strong-arm tactics are giving Hinduism a bad name says Jug Suraiya - The Hindutva project has succeeded in projecting itself as speaking to the deep diversities that crowd U.P. (Valerian Rodrigues) - Dear Non Racist India: Greater Noida attacks are unusual as the attacking mobs went after any African they came across (Amrapali Basumatary & Bonojit Hussain) -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/ ::: URLs & FULL TEXT ::: ======================================== 9. WITH KARATE AND WOODEN GUNS A ROHINGYA INSURGENCY IS BORN by Wa Lone, Simon Lewis and Krishna Das ======================================== http://epaper.indianexpress.com/1134787/Indian-Express/March-13,-2017#page/14/2 ======================================== 10. SRI LANKAN MUSLIM CLERICS SAY WOMEN ARE NOT EQUAL TO MEN, DEFEND MARRIAGE BEFORE PUBERTY ======================================== (Colombo Telegraph, March 22, 2017) In an alarming submission [1] made to several parliamentarians and other conservative groups with regard to proposed amendments to the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act (MMDA), the All Ceylon Jamiyathul Ulama (ACJU) has said that they agree with the Hadith “No people will ever prosper who appoint a woman in charge of their affairs” and therefore a woman isn’t worthy of being appointed a Qazi (judge). The ACJU is the main body of theologians of Muslims in Sri Lanka. In a brief document dated March 2017 of which the Colombo Telegraph possesses a copy, the clerics have said that therefore they oppose the appointing of female judges (Qazis). The Hadiths, which was compiled at least 230 years after the death of the Prophet quotes Muhammad the Prophet of Islam as making the statement, the veracity of which has been questioned throughout the Islamic intellectual tradition. The submission also includes the fact of the marriage of the Prophet to Aisha, of which the contract of marriage was said to have taken place when she was 6 years of age. It uses the story as a justification for the marriage of girls who have not attained puberty. Again quoting a Hadith the document says “A father giving in marriage his daughter before attaining puberty is possible and this is the evidence that Abu Bakr (RA) gave Aisha (RA) on marriage to the Prophet (PBUH) when she was 6”. However, the narration is also a construct of later day scholars although documented in Bukhari, one of the most voluminous of the compilers and considered to be a Sahih (truthful) Hadith. There has been no other evidence to the effect that Aisha was in fact 6 and that the marriage was consummated when she was 9 except for Hadith, which according to academics was compilation though hearsay. Muhammad is said to have been 53 years at the time. The ACJU accordingly has made a sweeping conclusion saying they are against any female judge sitting in as a Qazi and that her edicts will be not binding as per the Sharia and will therefore be null and void. Instead the ACJU has sought to confine the female in a consultative capacity. Adding insult to injury, the ACJU has justified its view using the same justification of Saudi Arabia- saying “It is to protect the rights, honour and modesty of women”. The head cleric of the ACJU Rizwi Mufti was yesterday on record saying that the MMDA is “perfect in the present state”. Several organizations including Muslim led civil society groups and the media have highlighted and documented many issues of rural Muslim women suffering as a result of the MMDA, including many instances of child marriage. ======================================== 11. I, MIGRANT by Kamila Shamsie ======================================== (Dawn, April 02, 2017) One London night, a few weeks after Brexit, something happened as I was walking to a bus stop that had never happened in the 9 years since I’d moved to the UK: a man (white, young, Londoner by his accent) shouted abuse at me and followed up with ‘Go back where you came from’. He seemed more ridiculous than threatening but even so I wasn’t about to get into any kind of exchange with him, so I didn’t ask the question I wanted to ask: ‘And where do you think that is?’ In London, I’m almost never recognized as Pakistani. Spain or Italy or Greece are the countries I’m more often asked if I’m from. And so I couldn’t help wondering, as I walked away from the man, whether the racism I’d just had hurled at me was the old-fashioned ‘Paki-bashing’ that has so long been a part of UK life or if it were a more recent form of anti-European sentiment — that didn’t confine itself only to Eastern Europeans as it used to. More likely, I decided, it was both. The man didn’t know where exactly my origins lay, or even if I had ever lived anywhere other than the UK — but he knew I wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon. And that was enough to make me the unwanted outsider. Welcome to Brexit Britain. Brexit Britain isn’t, of course, an island unto itself. Rising anti-migrant feeling is part of Trump’s America and the many nations of Europe, such as France, Austria and the Netherlands, where far-right parties have recently seen a surge in popularity. There are many reasons for this wide-spread lurch towards xenophobic nationalism — Pankaj Mishra’s new book The Age of Anger is a particular fascinating analysis of how modernity/neo-liberalism has failed a large percentage of the people who expected to have their lives improved by it — but despite all the common factors, the malaise plays out differently in every nation. And living in Britain the last decade has meant watching the disease advance, bit by bit, and both seeing and not seeing where it could lead us. It’s the idea of ‘The Migrant’ that people hate and fear more than the reality of it I can’t say that I knew the Brexit vote would win — but in the weeks leading up to the referendum I thought the chances were 50/50. There’s nothing like being a recent migrant to be attuned to shifting attitudes towards migrants in your new nation. When I entered the UK in 2007 it was on a ‘writers, artists and composers’ visa — one of the many visa routes that could lead towards settlement and citizenship. Within a year of my arrival a new ‘points-based’ visa system was introduced by the Labour government — ostensibly to streamline the work of the Home Office. But from the start it seemed a way to make far fewer non-EU citizens eligible for settlement, and to allow the government a mechanism to make the rules even more stringent with relative ease. I was only able to stay on when my visa expired because that particular year I had earned enough from my writing to switch into another visa category. And within a couple of years the category I had switched to became impossible for someone with my income level to qualify for, and then it was erased entirely. July 15, 2016: Hundreds flock to the funeral of slain anti-Brexit MP Jo Cox to pay their last respects It was clear what was going on — first the Labour, then the Tory-Liberal government, was responding to the increased anti-migrant feeling (stoked by the right-wing press) by making it more difficult for non-EU citizens to migrate to the UK. In doing that, the parties accepted the cries of the far-right which said migration levels were too high and damaging the UK — migrants were taking jobs, committing crime, changing the cultural fabric of the UK. Where there should have been a space for reasoned conversation — which, for instance, stressed the contribution of migrants to the economy and to the cultural life of Britain while also looking at the costs of migration — there was instead a capitulation to hysteria. "I didn’t understand how much the UK had changed until the day the anti-Brexit MP Jo Cox was shot dead. ‘Stronger together’ had been her passionate plea for a UK that embraces migrants; against that was the ‘Britain First’ cry of the man who killed her. The day she died, rather than the day Brexit was voted in, was when I realised how dark the world around me had become. And so, incre-asingly, we saw the far-right dictate the terms of the conversation on migrants — the Tories were the most enthusiastic about falling in line, but Labour really didn’t do much better. Watching all of this, listening to all the campaign promises about reducing net migration, I often thought the politicians were painting themselves into a corner. They could make it near-impossible for non-EU migrants to enter the UK — going so far as linking to income levels the right to bring in a non-EU spouse to the UK, as though the well-off had a greater right than the poor to live with their spouses in their nation of citizenship — but since freedom of movement was enshrined in EU law there would come a point when the press, the politicians, and the electorate would simply have to face the reality of porous European borders. Perhaps then, I naively thought, the political parties would get round to talking about the benefits of being part of the EU rather than allowing ‘the Poles are coming and they’re taking our jobs’ to be just about the only kind of rhetoric you ever heard about the EU. I thought, that is, that the migrant hysteria was a cry of defeat that preceded adjusting to a new reality. And then David Cameron promised a referendum on Europe in order to placate his Euro-skeptic back-benchers, never imagining — if all the pundits and Westminster insiders are to be believed — that such a vote could be lost. At first, it was simply so bizarre that my brain failed to really register what was at stake. But once it became clear that the Brexit vote would be, at heart, a vote on freedom of movement in the EU I began to have a very bad feeling. February 4, 2017: Thousands gather in London to demand that PM Theresa May cancel an invitation extended to US President Donald Trump for an official state visit. Even so, I didn’t understand how much the UK had changed until the day the anti-Brexit MP Jo Cox was shot dead. ‘Stronger together’ had been her passionate plea for a UK that embraces migrants; against that was the ‘Britain First’ cry of the man who killed her. The day she died, rather than the day Brexit was voted in, was when I realised how dark the world around me had become. No more was it possible to think of the UK as a place where people could express unpopular views without the fear of being killed in the street for it. I watched news reports of Jo Cox’s death and I thought of Salman Taseer, Shahbaz Bhatti, Parween Rahman and my childhood friend, Sabeen Mahmud. ‘This is how it starts’ I remember thinking. But politicians and pundits gathered round and declared that to link Jo Cox’s death to the referendum would be ‘playing politics’ with a woman’s death. She should have been the face of the ‘Remain’ campaign, she should have been the warning of the road we were walking on. Instead, she faded away from the conversation as though ‘Stronger Together’ vs’ Britain First’ had no real relevance to the referendum. The bitterest part of the Brexit vote was learning that Jo Cox’s constituency had voted to leave the EU. The only word for it was ‘indecent’. So Brexit won. And while it would be unfair and wrong to imply that everyone who voted for it did so for racist reasons, it is also true that when Brexit won the racists won. But the morning after the referendum we woke up in a Britain where to suggest that an anti-EU vote had anything to do with racism meant you were part of a London elite. Brexit was re-configured as the triumph of the Overlooked, the democratic roar of the Ones Who Were Left Behind. Now the London liberal elite would be forced to hear the pain of the white working class. The key word there, of course, is ‘white’. The black and Asian working class have been removed from the analysis entirely because their far more pro-migrant political stance complicates that line that this is about those on the margins standing up to those at the centre of power. Now, people who a few years ago were rightly derided as peddling racist notions about the danger of migrants are being called ‘prescient’; rather than treating the lies and hysteria of the Brexit campaign and the assassination of Jo Cox as reason for standing up to the anti-migrant rhetoric, the pundits and politicians are telling us we must listen to the ‘genuine grievances’ of alienated Britons. Here’s the funny thing though. Research has shown — repeatedly — that the highest anti-migrant feeling exists in parts of Britain where there are the lowest rates of migration. It’s the idea of The Migrant that people hate and fear more than the reality of it. If there is any hope, it’s in that. And that’s why, through all of this, and despite the isolated incident of the ridiculous young man telling me to go home, I’ve never felt happier to be in London, with its Muslim mayor, its pro-EU sentiment, its ability to know how people should live together. This is not an elite bubble; it’s what hope looks like. I’ve been thinking a lot in the months since Brexit of a greengrocer I was talking to in Brent, which is London’s most racially-mixed borough. He grew up in a mostly white neighborhood; now his neighbors are Pakistani, Indian, Albanian, Caribbean. When I asked him about changing demographics he said, “There are really only two kinds of people from my point of view. Those who eat fresh produce and those who don’t. And if they do, I find out what kind of vegetables they need for their kitchen, and then I stock them, and they buy them.” That simple. The writer is a celebrated novelist. She tweets @KamilaShamsie ======================================== 12. WE HAVE FAILED TO PROTECT ‘IDEA OF INDIA’ - AN OPEN LETTER TO ALL OPPOSITION PARTIES by Manoj K Jha ======================================== (The Tribune - 31 March 2017) People have not failed us. We have failed the people. What have we done, individually or as a collective, to protect this beautiful idea of India against the onslaught of the right-wing? The opposition parties must take politics to the people. LET me convey at the outset that this letter was in the making irrespective of the outcome of the recent Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. It was in the offing because elections come and go every five years (or more frequently), but only at the cost of peril we can remain oblivious of everyday concerns of the social constituencies we are supposed to represent. Elections at any level — whether the Centre, state or for urban local bodies — shape the contours of democracy. But elections alone do not constitute the idea of democracy. There is much more to democracy and the associated ideas such as inclusion, representation and participation than simply making alliances, distributing tickets, campaigning, and contesting elections. We have reduced our party organisations simply to mere election-fighting machines. Our social and political engagement with the people begins with the announcement of elections and it ends with the declaration of results. Core ideas which constitute the idea of India — freedom, liberty, social and economic justice, and secularism — gain currency during the elections but only as hollow buzzwords. An observer on a visit to India during elections may pay glowing tributes to our political culture but may not realise that our passionate engagement with these ideals gets over with the end of elections. I hope not to sound like a cynic to your ears. All of you, including us, are used to living in a make-believe world. However, it is not pessimism which is driving me to share with you all what perturbs me — not only as the spokesperson of a political party which is committed to contest the might of right-wing authoritarianism but also as a citizen of this great country. While the rot is spreading in these dark and difficult times, we are busy looking at the changed context with the old soiled lens. We need to introspect and at least for once take the blame for being passive in the face of right-wing propaganda, aided by some “Leni Riefenstahls” of the media. It denigrated the entire social justice plank as an undesirable instrument which promotes "mediocrity" at the cost of "merit." In our slumber, we also failed to defend the vilification of secularism to such an extent that a sizeable number of our youth understands secular more as "sick-ular". We also need to reflect that when progressive intellectuals and academics were being presented as anti-national rowdies who wish to see India break into pieces, we did not communicate the issue better and take it to the people. Our engagements were confined and limited to a few public appearances at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jantar Mantar. So was the case with the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a bright Dalit student whose birth as well as death was a "fatal accident". What did we do apart from symbolic marches and candle-light protests at a few locations in Hyderabad and Delhi? Should we not have taken this case of "institutional murder" to every part of this country to highlight that a youth lost his life because of the oppressive and discriminatory structures? Politics is a serious vocation and progressive politics has to be all the more earnest. This entails that your engagement with people and the issues affecting their lives cannot be an episodic phenomenon waiting for the declaration of the date of elections by the Election Commission of India. In spite of our avowed commitment to representative democracy and secularism, we have silently watched the "disenfranchisement" of certain minority communities and have practically avoided speaking about it, leave aside making it a broad level issue. Do we seriously ponder over the fact that instead of providing a robust and inclusive alternative vis-à-vis our principal opponent, we tend to become a hazy photocopy of the regime we are supposed to contest? Can we deny that we have developed our own comfort zones of studied silence and prefer not taking positions even about issues such as human rights violations, particularly if these are in Naxal areas, parts of the North-East and the Kashmir Valley? Political parties are dynamic and living organisations of people. The people want us to be actively visible in their moments of despair, in their phases of distress. They seek us not always for solution but more often than not for solidarity. Have we done anything beyond hollow symbolism? I know it is very difficult to accept but please remember that people have not failed us rather we have failed the people. All of us, at least on the paper, are committed to the “Idea of India” but what have we done individually or as a collective to protect this beautiful idea against the onslaught of the rightwing? I know almost all of us are active on social media — particularly on twitter — which demands you to encapsulate everything in 140 characters. I do not grudge this but we do need to acknowledge that the obsession of visibility on these platforms with the handful of characters is taking us away from the real-life characters and real-life issues. Did we even utter a word when significant numbers of civil society organisations were subjected to unprecedented arm-twisting and repressive tactics by the state? Most of these were fighting along with Dalit and tribal communities for their rights against the corporate-state nexus. Our silence only weakened and made these constituencies vulnerable. We conveniently failed to notice that less than 10 per cent of people cannot make decisions about the resource distribution of more than 90 per cent of people. Nearly two years ago the government released "trailer" of Socio-Economic Caste Consensus (SECC) data. It informed us of a reality we already knew, whether it was about daily-wage earners or homeless people or landlessness. How would we explain not pressing for the complete release in the public domain of this data which speaks about the dark side of the much-touted "New India"? Ordinary citizens of this country are actually perplexed by this dangerous politics of tele-tubbies being played out every day in the news studios of the corporate media? We have allowed our "ideologies" to be museumised and have preferred to settle with the grand declaration of the end of ideology in politics. The list of our collective failure in reading peoples' mind and disappointing scale of our political impairment is growing longer by the day. My purpose was not to subject ourselves to superfluous self-humiliation but to sound an alarm as to the dangerous direction in which we are heading. These are indeed post-truth times, wherein a "manufactured belief" can assassinate truth and the celebrations that follow mock all notions of rationality. In these difficult times the least we can do is to acknowledge and understand the times we are in and do everything possible to take politics to people, because it belongs there only and nowhere else. The writer is the National Spokesperson of the Rashtriya Janata Dal ======================================== 13. INDIA: ‘RECALL HERITAGE OF LOVE, TOLERANCE’ - AS NEW INDIA RISES, A FATHER PENS OPEN LETTER TO DAUGHTER by Samar Halarnkar ======================================== (Hindustan Times - April 03, 2017) Much of what you heard when you were a child may now be myth. For instance, that great Ram temple at Ayodhya: There was once a mosque called the Babri Masjid there. (HT Photo) My dearest daughter, As I write this letter to you, a new India is rising. Some say an era of hope, nationalistic pride and development is at hand, where lost greatness will be regained. Others predict an era of hate and darkness, where our worst instincts will overwhelm the founding principles of your country. By the time you come of age in 2028, the path your nation took back in 2017 would be amply clear. Last week, I was wearing my optimistic hat, and I wrote that our Prime Minister, Narendra Modi--he may be yours as well--would not be able to convert India into a Hindu Pakistan because that would cripple his own ambitions of creating a “developed nation” by 2022: This does not mean you should expect neatness, order and prosperity around you. What you should expect is a Hindu India. The ascendance of a hate-spewing yogi with a criminal record was enough to shock my conditional optimism into pessimism. It is hard not to be pessimistic. A tide of righteous resentment is currently sweeping your country, targeted at its minorities and at a tiny, elite--yes, I among them--who call themselves liberal and secular. These are terms you may never hear, but you know them because you lived these ideals. When you were seven, you had two best friends. One was Muslim, the other was Christian. You shared in their lives, and they in yours. Along with the Sanskrit invocations you learned in school and those stories of the Mahabharata and Ramayana from your grandmother, you learned hymns at church, knew when maghrib prayers began and once suggested that we fast during Ramzan. We were fortunate to live in a neighbourhood of great diversity and togetherness. Did you know that your first Diwali was organised by Muslim friends in a completely Muslim neigbourhood? There are many things you may not remember because your memories might be overwhelmed by new India’s unending flood of discoveries: The rishis and munis who, we are already being told, invented flight, nuclear power and inter-species head transplants; the vedic mantras that may made possible India’s first mission to Jupiter; and how our national drink, cow urine, supposedly cures cancer. You probably know the cow as our national animal, but an aggressive, meat-eating creature once held that honour. Of course, the tiger must be extinct, its forests given over to development. Much of what you heard when you were a child may now be myth. For instance, that great Ram temple at Ayodhya: There was once a mosque called the Babri Masjid there. You have heard me say how wrong it is to strengthen your faith by destroying that of others, how wrong it is to be so insecure that you get pleasure by oppressing others, forcing on them your view of life and culture. Did you know that Karnavati was once Ahmedabad, Bhagyanagar once Hyderabad and Sambhaji Nagar once Aurangabad? Rana Pratap Marg in Delhi was, for decades, Akbar road, named after a great emperor who forged the best of Muslim and Hindu cultures but could not escape the tag of invader, because his forefather was one. Of course, the forefathers of your Prime Minister were also invaders from a time further back but are now Hindu, so that does not count. In my era, to not be a Hindu--or to be a secular Hindu--is to invite scorn and suspicion at best and hate and violence at worst. We, as secular Indians, lose friends every day, as India’s majority buys into a narrative that minorities--especially those invaders -- must live at our sufferance. We, as Hindus, are now infatuated with the passions our new leaders have excited in us, and history tells us that mass infatuations do not easily fade. Around you, the signs of repression will be evident. Some minorities may have accepted their place, others may be in conflict with the state. India is empowering--as one commentator put it this week --the worst of itself. But you, my dear, are a Hindu, however flawed a Hindu you may be if you have followed your parents’ path. To be Hindu is to be privileged--I fear for your friends who were not--and you can always cash in on that privilege. As I and your mother told you, you can be anything you choose. If you embrace another religion and select as your partner someone from another religion--unless such marriages have been banned--you know we will always approve. After all, growing up, some of your friends came from inter-religious marriages, where both mother and father retained their religions and imbibed your friends with the best of both worlds. If you choose to be a Hindu, do remember the forgotten tenets of your religion and the wisdom of its scholars. You will find it ironic that Swami Vivekananda--yes, the same one eulogised by our great leader--said that quarrels and disputes over religion indicate the absence of spirituality, that his faith preached “universal toleration” and all religions as being true. Remember what the Upanishads say: “Sarve bhavanthu sukhinah...maakaschit dukha bhaag bhavet. May all become happy. May no one suffer. Recall that heritage of love and tolerance, not the heritage of hate that infatuates your nation, and fight for and find your place in your India. There will be nowhere to run to because vast swathes of the world will be milder or more virulent versions of your country. The principles your family lives (or lived) by may fade, but they will never disappear. As a columnist, I do not claim to be able to affect the course of a nation on a path to repudiate its own scriptures and principles. But, as your father, I will try to influence your life. I hope I was successful. Samar Halarnkar is editor, Indiaspend.org, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit ======================================== 14. THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS by Ujjal Dosanjh ======================================== (The Wire - 16 March 2017) It is now considered harsh to call a spade a spade. One has less and less and sometimes no right to one’s truth. Ascendant is the truth of the strong, particularly the strong man This is how it happens. It happened in Europe in the last century. Democracy succumbs to the strong man, then to authoritarianism and then possibly to totalitarianism. No, not necessarily the totalitarianism of a government; in fact sometimes of the mob – under a government that may have a disciplined and deadly mob at its disposal. A strong man emerges. He gathers people with money around him. He mines the majority’s minority complex – the majority feeling oppressed by the minority or minorities. The vast majority is still in control but is told to feel persecuted like a minority. Circumstances and stars all align for him. He builds a base in one part of the country. Once a pariah, ignored and written off, he gains popularity and strength. He rises like a sun on the darkening national stage. He emerges as the strongest man on the scene. Ordinary people beaten, their dreams destroyed, defeated by the corrupt elites, place their faith in him. He becomes the bundle of their hopes, spinner of their dreams and the weaver of their heavens to come. The heavens are not there, at least not yet. But they are promised. The promise can now be believed because the man himself represents it, makes it and repeats it in its varied and mesmerising oratorical iterations. Truth and lies don’t matter. Hannah Arendt described the phenomenon well: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” This is how it happens. He wins election after election. He rides that sense of perceived oppression and persecution of the majority by the minorities. He plays the nationalist card; the new nationalism never seen or experienced before in the land; the nationalism that could exclude and include at the same time; like now you have it and now you don’t. He holds his audiences in the palm of his hand, can make them dance to any tune, put them to sleep, reawaken them – never losing his hold over them even when he shuts down their banks and prohibits them from using their own money. He argues he was dishing out pain but it was all for their good. Proof or no proof of what if any good all of it was doing, people believed in him, even worshipped him – in large enough numbers for him to win the elections again. He keeps winning elections, democratically. And he has a readymade army of volunteers. No, this army is not new. It has existed for a long time. It has never worked for a broader and inclusive nationalism. Its aim always has been the narrow nationalism of the majority. In another country, at another frightening time it was the nationalism of the race. In this case, it is the nationalism of the religion. Even against the alien rule of the white man this army didn’t rise because it perceived no threat to its religion at the time. It only existed for defending what it considered was an oppressed majority. The army is fully regimented. It now rules the streets, subdues the universities, suppresses dissent as sedition, and pursues to the end of the earth anyone that criticises their ‘God’ – the strong man and his word. He is hailed as the new saviour. The army of volunteers, the RSS, was his alma mater. He was once a part of it. Some media in the free country now self-censor ‘for the good of the country’, ‘for peace’ and ‘harmony’ – I suppose the peace of the dead. Otherwise the Rashtriya SS is there to ‘restore peace and order’. The new India being built under the new redeemer needs the silence of consent; the dissonance of dissent ‘threatens’ the ‘peace’ and ‘integrity’ of the country. The once strong country with a deep democratic ethos is suddenly proclaimed by the Sangh to be fragile – unable to withstand any harsh criticism. It is now considered harsh to call a spade a spade, to speak the truth as one sees it – in Mahatma Gandhi’s country. One has less and less and sometimes no right to one’s truth. Ascendant is the truth of the strong, particularly the strong man. His truth dominates all others, threatening many. Of course he has the Army of Truth working for him. That was how it once was in another country, in another era, not too long ago. It came to no good end. Some say the fear of a bad end is at best unreal and at worst exaggerated. Hope wrestles fear. Here is hoping that hope wins. And India wins. Ujjal Dosanjh is a former Canadian minister of health and a former premier of the Canadian province of British Columbia. He tweets at @ujjaldosanjh ======================================== 15. INDIAN JOURNALIST CHARGED UNDER OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT | CPJ ALERT ======================================== https://cpj.org/x/6bdf The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) 330 7th Avenue, 11th Floor New York, NY 10001 April 3, 2017 Indian Army recruits in ceremonial uniform graduate from a 49-week training program in Rangreth, Jammu and Kashmir, March 5, 2016. Journalist Poonam Argawal faces charges for an undercover investigative report alleging senior officers near Mumbai improperly ordered subordinates to carry out personal errands on their behalf. Indian Army recruits in ceremonial uniform graduate from a 49-week training program in Rangreth, Jammu and Kashmir, March 5, 2016. Journalist Poonam Argawal faces charges for an undercover investigative report alleging senior officers near Mumbai improperly ordered subordinates to carry out personal errands on their behalf. New Delhi, April 3, 2017--Authorities in India should immediately drop all charges against Poonam Agrawal, a journalist for the English-language news website The Quint, the Committee to Protect journalists said today. Police in Nashik, roughly 170 kilometers (105 miles) northeast of Mumbai, on March 28 opened a criminal case against Agrawal on charges of spying and criminal trespass under the Official Secrets Act, a 1923 anti-espionage law. They also charged her with criminal defamation and abetment of a suicide under the Penal Code, according to the journalist and media reports. If convicted of all charges, she faces a maximum sentence of 29 years in prison. The charges stem from Agrawal's reporting on senior army officers' alleged improper use of subordinate soldiers for personal work. In a video report The Quint published on February 24 but since removed from its website, Agrawal is seen entering an Army camp in the state of Maharashtra, where Nashik is located, allegedly without permission, filming the premises, and using a hidden camera to record conversations with soldiers, according to media reports. One of the soldiers she taped, Roy Matthews, was found dead on March 2, in what police have determined was a suicide, according to media reports. "Charging journalists with serious crimes for reporting on the military risks having a chilling effect on press freedom," CPJ Program Director Carlos Lauría said from New York. "We call on Indian authorities to drop all charges against Poonam Agrawal and direct their attention to reforming outdated laws on espionage that are easily abused to intimidate critics." Col. Aman Anand, a public relations officer for the Indian Army, did not respond to CPJ's questions emailed to him on March 31. "This is nothing but an attempt by the Indian Army to shut up journalists from exposing wrongdoings in the institution," Agrawal told CPJ. "It will set a very bad precedent, because in future, an editor or reporter will think twice before raising their voices against the Army." India's Official Secrets Act has been used against journalists before. In 2002, CPJ wrote a letter to Lal Krishna Advani, then India's minister of home affairs, expressing concern about the use of the Official Secrets Act to justify the arrest of Kashmir Times journalist Iftikhar Gilani on charges of possessing classified information. ======================================== 16. INDIA: CENTRE EXPLORING WAYS TO DEPORT 40,000 ROHINGYA MUSLIMS ======================================== http://indiatoday.intoday.in/video/rohingya-muslims-jammu-and-kashmir-myanmar-indo-bangladesh-border-indo-myanmar-border/1/919848.html ======================================== 17. THE BREAK-UP OF INDIA, AND A HOME by Kiran Doshi ======================================== (The Hindu, April 01, 2017) Mr and Mrs Jinnah; Sheela Reddy, Penguin/Viking, ₹699 Built around a bundle of private letters, this is a welcome addition to the small storehouse of our knowledge of Jinnah ‘I will tell you who made Pakistan. Myself, my secretary and his typewriter,’ Jinnah is believed to have said. The boast was true. No other Muslim leader in India was strong enough to take the British policy of divide and rule to its logical conclusion: the break-up of India. Yet this man was once a staunch nationalist, a leading member of the Indian National Congress, and ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. Why did he change so drastically? Answers, anyone? No book on Jinnah has given an entirely satisfactory answer to this question. One reason for this is the great shortage of credible information on his personal life. An intensely private person, he never wrote any memoir, never kept a diary, and when he wrote a letter—he was a most reluctant letter-writer—kept it dry and impersonal. Worse, much of the little that we do know of the inner man is based on uncorroborated reminiscences written years after his death by people who clearly adored him. No serious biographer of Jinnah (including the author of Mr and Mrs Jinnah) can therefore avoid using qualifiers (‘perhaps’, ‘undoubtedly’, ‘quite possibly’, ‘would most likely have’, ‘would have surely’...) before saying anything significant about Jinnah’s personal life. That’s why Mr and Mrs Jinnah is such a welcome addition to the small storehouse of our knowledge of the man. For the book is built round a bundle of private letters preserved by Padmaja and Leilamani Naidu, daughters of that most remarkable woman and indefatigable letter-writer, Sarojini Naidu, and stumbled upon by the author in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. The bundle contains not only letters on the Jinnah couple written by the members of the Naidu family to each other, but also several letters written by Jinnah’s beautiful, precocious, highly romantic but finally doomed Parsi wife, Ruttie herself. She was close to the Naidu family. Sarojini Naidu also knew and greatly admired Jinnah. The letters are absorbing enough to have been published as a booklet. Happily, the author, Sheela Reddy, journalist and writer, has made a whole book out of them by blending them with two excellent ingredients: one, vignettes of those times, political as well as social, which, though known to history buffs, should nevertheless be of interest to the general reader; and two, the author’s interpretations of what the letters say—as well as some general observations and conclusions. The final product, even if some of it is old wine, is a heady cocktail that is difficult to put down till after the last drop of it is drunk. Of course in essence, as the title of the book suggests, Mr and Mrs Jinnah is a tragic love story. It has the right ingredients for one: a high-spirited, wealthy, young girl falling in love with a public hero (old enough to be her father); her break with everyone and everything from her past to marry the man; her hopes; her crushing disappointments; her increasingly desperate efforts to make a go of the marriage; her descent into darkness; her walking out of the marriage, leaving behind a deeply moving farewell letter; her lonely death at a young age (on her 29th birthday) perhaps from a deliberate overdose of morphine... And it is a deftly told story. Incomplete tale However, it is an incomplete story; for the Naidu bundles contain no letters from Jinnah himself. The author has tried bravely, using every straw in the wind, her own remarkable ability to put herself in her characters’ shoes, and, of course, her skill as a writer, to reconstruct Jinnah’s feelings at various stages of the disintegration of the marriage, but the fact remains: we have only Ruttie’s (mostly, only Sarojini Naidu’s) version of what went wrong in the marriage. That and the author’s interpretations. Do these solve the great riddle of why Jinnah, once ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, ripped apart that unity and created a country which—step by inevitable step—has become ‘the hub of (Islamic) terrorism’ and ‘the most dangerous place on earth?’ Perhaps they do, provided you link the revelations in the Naidu letters with the conclusion of Kanji Dwarkadas, as the author has done on the last page of the book: ‘It was Jinnah’s bitterness, born out of his personal loss and disappointment, which travelled into his political life.’ Interestingly, the author also mentions (albeit, without quite endorsing it) Chagla’s view that Jinnah’s unmarried sister Fatima (who re-entered Jinnah’s life the day Ruttie died, never to leave his side again) was also at least partly responsible for Jinnah’s transformation. This should do, at least till the day someone finds a bundle of personal letters written by Jinnah himself. They must exist somewhere. Mr and Mrs Jinnah; Sheela Reddy, Penguin/Viking, ₹699 ======================================== 18. BEBBER ON BASU'S FOR KING AND ANOTHER COUNTRY: INDIAN SOLDIERS ON THE WESTERN FRONT ======================================== Shrabani Basu. For King and Another Country: Indian Soldiers on the Western Front, 1914-18. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. 256 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-93-8405291-1. Reviewed by Brett Bebber (Old Dominion University) Published on H-War (March, 2017) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey Shrabani Basu’s recent addition to the emerging literature on the British Indian Army in the First World War is full of the sentimentalism that has long characterized popular histories of military engagement. The book weaves together several stories of individual soldiers in a mostly coherent narrative that begins with the German ship bombing of Madras in September 1914 and ends with the Amritsar Massacre of 1919. Basu’s central contribution is tracing the lives of twelve Indians across a wide range of social ranks—from a sweeper to a rifleman to a maharaja—throughout the war years. Throughout, Basu attempts to include the experiences of disappointment, disillusionment, and frustration Indian recruits suffered, but her emphasis on sacrifice and mutual appreciation between British and Indian participants often washes out these other threads. Especially in the early chapters, Basu endlessly praises Indian soldiers’ bravery in battle and loyalty to Britain. Indeed, her characters rarely display any emotions besides their despair of the war and their fealty to the empire’s cause. The frames of this story are well known: Indian soldiers enthusiastically signed up for war, suffered the poor weather and terrible conditions of the trenches, experienced massive death and destruction, and within weeks wanted to return home. The opening chapters cover her characters’ departure from Bombay and Karachi in August 1914 and their first action defending Ypres in October. She is keen to point out their valiant and indispensable contribution to defending the western front. “The Germans would have reached the ports, were it not for them,” she declares (p. xxi), and points out that the 1.5 million soldiers that British India sent to the front lines outnumbered the combined armies of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. In each descriptive chapter—of the trenches, of the long winters, of Indian aviators—she underscores the reciprocal feeling of admiration between Indian soldiers and British officers, and uses their words to highlight this profound respect. But one cannot help noticing that this dominant impression has been selected by an author keen to play on well-tested mechanisms that can inspire an audience, but render much of the struggles and desperation about war and identity in the margins. Basu’s most enlightening additions come from her finely detailed descriptions of the accommodations the British made for the Indians at the front and in Britain to allow soldiers to maintain their religious practices and diet. The third chapter on the Comfort Kameti, a group of high-society Britons with interests in India, discusses the construction of two hospitals for ailing Indian men. Despite providing respite and care for the wounded, the Kameti (Committee) established a network of gift-giving and provision specifically for Indian soldiers. It graciously distributed teas, spices, sweets, foods, board games, coconut oil, Indian tobaccos, and copies of religious texts across Britain and France. Basu acutely details how the Kameti acquired funds, took requests, and delivered specialized items to meet Indian entreaties. Basu suggests that the British volunteers “learnt the lessons from the Mutiny” and attempted to ensure good relations while Indians were far away from their homes (p. 40). Another series of interesting insights comes from the letters written by Indian soldiers collated by the War Office under new censorship guidelines that attempted to minimize the ability of sepoys to inadvertently reveal strategic operations and prevent them from proactively fomenting resistance to the war effort. The British clearly feared Indians in their midst, and constantly monitored their activities as they carried out their duties. Outside of the censored files, Basu does not discuss her other sources specifically. The notes and bibliography suggest that she pulled much of her information from early published histories of the war, diaries and journals of soldiers, and interviews with their descendants. The author has put in some time at the National Archives and the British Library as well to elicit British officers’ views of their Indian charges. This research has led to the book’s lasting achievement. The volume effectively makes the stories of twelve Indian men accessible to a wide audience in plain language. Basu’s book is sure to be devoured by those who would like to understand Indian participation from a personal perspective. It also allows the reader to see the war through multiple sets of Indian eyes, and Basu should be applauded for following the stories of a wide cast of characters. Chapter 6 on the first winter in Europe does this well, tracing how Indians of various backgrounds felt about the extension of the war beyond Christmas. Other sections of the book briefly explore more troublesome and conflictual narratives of Indian participation. Sections on topics like Indian desertion, and specifically on British fears of Indian defectors, become more frequent as the book progresses. But these accounts are truncated, and lack the analytical thrust to dislodge Basu’s insistence on the twin themes of loyalty and mutual respect with the British. Indian frustrations with British racisms and fears of miscegenation in Brighton in chapter 10, for example, are outlined well but eventually elided as the result of Indian soldiers—like all soldiers—wanting to return home. Interrogating the origins and importance of overt racisms and gendered medical discourses about Indian “hysteria” during the war must await further attention elsewhere. More focus on the strategic contributions of Indian regiments, as well as on the recruitment of soldiers in India, would also help satisfy military historians’ desire to understand their contribution beyond the perspective of the subjective individual. Nonetheless, in the end, the book hopefully stirs more interest in colonial troops, and especially Indian volunteers, to the British war effort. Basu demonstrates that seeing the war through Indian eyes can be both frightening and inspirational. ======================================== 19. CHILDREN’S BOOKS AND CHINA’S CRACKDOWN ON WESTERN IDEOLOGY by Hannah Beech ======================================== (The New Yorker, 16 March 2017) After Xi Jinping vowed to turn China’s schools into “strongholds of party leadership,” translations of Western classics are facing new restrictions.PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED DUFOUR / AFP / GETTY Earlier this month, my nine-year-old son came home from his bilingual school in Shanghai having vandalized his Mandarin textbook. Under the title of a lesson called “The Bountiful Xisha Islands,” he had scribbled, in pencil, “不好,” or “not good.” The Xisha, or “Western Sands,” are islands in the South China Sea that are known in English as the Paracels. The textbook described the islands, which are located in waters between China and Vietnam, as “cute,” with multicolored coral and plentiful turtles that could be hunted for their valuable shells. The lesson, however, neglected to mention that ownership of the Paracels, like that of many islands in the South China Sea, is in dispute. In 1974, China seized complete control of the Paracel island chain from an overextended South Vietnam. Since then, the Chinese have managed to effectively take control of other shoals and maritime features that are claimed by other countries, like the Philippines. In the past couple of years, Chinese dredgers have transformed contested rocks and reefs into military bases, complete with structures that can house surface-to-air-missile batteries. China’s ambitions in the South China Sea do not revolve around turtles. As the child of two American journalists living in China, my son has developed a certain kind of awareness. He knows that his parents assume their phones are tapped. At least once, when we were living in Beijing, he was interrogated in Mandarin by a state-security agent, who wanted to know where his mother was. (To my son’s credit, he obfuscated.) Last year, I spent months reporting a story on the South China Sea—travelling to Philippine-controlled islets in the Spratly Islands, another disputed cluster—so he understands something of the territorial disagreements in question. Perhaps because he is more slender than his brother, he also sympathizes with the little guy. China’s increasingly muscular claim to nearly all of the South China Sea, which conflicts with maritime boundaries drawn by Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Brunei, offends his sense of fair play. Every country’s textbooks reflect national myths while omitting disagreeable truths. But as China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has intensified a crackdown on dissent that human-rights groups describe as the most punitive in decades, these lessons are likely to become even more ideological. In a December speech, Xi vowed to turn schools into “strongholds of Party leadership,” which defend “the correct political direction.” China’s economy is slowing. Without the buoyant growth rates that burnished the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy for a quarter century, Xi seems to hope that flag-waving will unify the populace around its rulers. (In a country governed by a sole party for nearly seven decades, to love China is, in the government’s eyes, to love the Chinese Communist Party.) A similar tactic was used in the days after Army tanks crushed the Tiananmen democracy movement, in 1989. Worried about the ruling party’s image, China’s Education Ministry redoubled efforts in the early nineteen-nineties to infuse textbooks with a kind of defensive nationalism. Only the Chinese Communist Party, textbooks taught, had the fortitude to end a hundred and fifty years of humiliation by foreign invaders. These days, the message in school remains the same, even if the world in which China exists has changed. In 1989, China was largely closed, an impoverished nation of bicycles and socialist collectives. Today, more than three hundred thousand Chinese students have flocked to U.S. schools, most paying their own way. (Xi’s own daughter studied at Harvard.) At least a hundred and thirty million Chinese tourists ventured beyond mainland China last year. Such cultural cross-pollination made it all the more dissonant when, in December, China’s Education Minister, Chen Baosheng, warned that “schools are the main targets for infiltration by hostile forces.” A year earlier, his predecessor had ordered Chinese universities to “never let textbooks promoting Western values appear in our classes.” The ideological crusade heightened last week, when Chinese publishers told reporters, including one from Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, that they were being forced to slash the number of foreign children’s picture books in their catalogues. Taobao, China’s largest online commerce site, went further, announcing in a statement that, as of March 10th, it was halting resales of all books published overseas. If these latest restrictions are enforced, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Guess How Much I Love You,” two top-selling foreign children’s titles, could become samizdat reading in China. Patriotic education and embargoes on chocolate factories and hungry caterpillars may do less to create a compliant populace than it once did. It’s true that Chinese kids still wear red kerchiefs to school, and must sit through “political education” classes in college. (Sample topic: Modern applications of dialectical and historical materialism.) However, Alastair Iain Johnston, of Harvard University, who studied Beijing youth raised under the post-Tiananmen educational push, concluded that this cohort is nevertheless less patriotic than the older generation is. “The decline in unquestioning loyalty implies that the Chinese government may have a harder time relying on nationalism to rally the public without also delivering security and prosperity,” Jessica Chen Weiss, a China-focussed political scientist at Cornell University, wrote to me in an e-mail. Yet Weiss noted that another study, by Haifeng Huang of the University of California, Merced, found that “exposure to overseas information actually improves Chinese citizens’ views of China by correcting their rosy views of foreign countries.” The more that Chinese travel, the more they realize that their subways and airports are better than those in New York or Paris. And the view of the rest of the world from China is limited in ways that many Chinese don’t consider. In China, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google are all blocked by the state; I have to use a virtual private network to leap over the Great Firewall. Most Chinese can’t be bothered with such costly or time-consuming steps. Connecting to those Western services is irrelevant to their lives when domestic search engines and social-media platforms are available. Although these local alternatives offer user-friendly experiences, sometimes even better than those of Western tech companies, they also censor information deemed undesirable by the Chinese state. Exposure is narrowed, even as people feel that their options have expanded. “Chinese people don’t just memorize by rote what the Chinese Communist Party tells them to,” says James Carter, a historian at Saint Joseph’s University, who studies the roots of Chinese nationalism. “But what I worry about is that the Party has set the parameters of the debate and, therefore, the range of opinion is limited to what people have access to.” As for my son, he ended up crossing out his negative commentary on “The Bountiful Xisha Islands.” His Chinese teacher, he worried, would not be pleased. And I discovered that his school—which enjoys more autonomy than its local counterparts because of its legal status as an international school—had, in fact, already toned down the lesson by removing its concluding sentence. The original version, taught elsewhere in China, ends with a crescendo of patriotism. “The heroes of the island guarded the south gate of the motherland, day and night,” the lesson concludes. “With the development of the cause of socialist construction, the cute Xisha Islands will become more bountiful.” ======================================== 20. WHAT’S LEFT? Sheila Fitzpatrick ======================================== London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 7 · 30 March 2017 pages 13-15 | 3706 words BuyOctober: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville Verso, 358 pp, £18.99, May, ISBN 978 1 78478 280 1 BuyThe Russian Revolution 1905-1921 by Mark D. Steinberg Oxford, 388 pp, £19.99, February, ISBN 978 0 19 922762 4 BuyRussia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 by S.A. Smith Oxford, 455 pp, £25.00, January, ISBN 978 0 19 873482 6 BuyThe Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin Basic, 496 pp, $30.00, May, ISBN 978 0 465 03990 6 BuyHistorically Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution by Tony Brenton Profile, 364 pp, £25.00, June 2016, ISBN 978 1 78125 021 1 For Eric Hobsbawm, the Russian Revolution – which occurred, as it happens, in the year of his birth – was the central event of the 20th century. Its practical impact on the world was ‘far more profound and global’ than that of the French Revolution a century earlier: for ‘a mere thirty to forty years after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes directly derived from the [revolution] … and Lenin’s organisational model, the Communist Party’. Before 1991, this was a fairly standard view, even among historians who, unlike Hobsbawm, were neither Marxists nor Communists. But finishing his book in the early 1990s, Hobsbawm added a caveat: the century whose history he was writing was the ‘short’ 20th century, running from 1914 to 1991, and the world the Russian Revolution had shaped was ‘the world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980s’ – a lost world, in short, that was now being replaced by a post-20th-century world whose outlines could not yet be discerned. What the place of the Russian Revolution would be in the new era was unclear to Hobsbawm twenty years ago, and largely remains so to historians today. That ‘one third of humanity’ living under Soviet-inspired systems before 1989-91 has dramatically dwindled. As of 2017, the centenary of the revolution, the number of Communist states in the world is down to a handful, with China’s status ambiguous and only North Korea still clinging to the old verities. Nothing fails like failure, and for historians approaching the revolution’s centenary the disappearance of the Soviet Union casts a pall. In the rash of new books on the revolution, few make strong claims for its persisting significance and most have an apologetic air. Representing the new consensus, Tony Brenton calls it probably one of ‘history’s great dead ends, like the Inca Empire’. On top of that, the revolution, stripped of the old Marxist grandeur of historical necessity, turns out to look more or less like an accident. Workers – remember when people used to argue passionately about whether it was a workers’ revolution? – have been pushed off stage by women and non-Russians from the imperial borderlands. Socialism is so much of a mirage that it seems kinder not to mention it. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the Russian Revolution, it is the depressing one that revolutions usually make things worse, all the more so in Russia, where it led to Stalinism. This is the kind of consensus that brings out the contrarian in me, even when I am to a large extent part of it. My own The Russian Revolution, first published in 1982 with a revised edition coming out this year, was always cool about workers’ revolution and historical necessity, and made a point of being above the political battle (mind you, I wrote the original version during the Cold War, when there was still a political battle to be above). So it’s not in my nature to come out as a revolutionary enthusiast. But shouldn’t someone do it? That person, as it turns out, is China Miéville, best known as a science fiction man of leftist sympathies whose fiction is self-described as ‘weird’. Miéville is not a historian, though he has done his homework, and his October is not at all weird, but elegantly constructed and unexpectedly moving. What he sets out to do, and admirably succeeds in doing, is to write an exciting story of 1917 for those who are sympathetically inclined to revolution in general and to the Bolsheviks’ revolution in particular. To be sure, Miéville, like everyone else, concedes that it all ended in tears because, given the failure of revolution elsewhere and the prematurity of Russia’s revolution, the historical outcome was ‘Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch’. But that hasn’t made him give up on revolutions, even if his hopes are expressed in extremely qualified form. The world’s first socialist revolution deserves celebration, he writes, because ‘things changed once, and they might do so again’ (how’s that for a really minimal claim?). ‘Liberty’s dim light’ shone briefly, even if ‘what might have been a sunrise [turned out to be] a sunset.’ But it could have been otherwise with the Russian Revolution, and ‘if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.’ Mark Steinberg is the only one of the professional historians writing on the revolution to confess to any lingering emotional attachment to it. Of course, revolutionary idealism and daring leaps into the unknown tend to result in hard landings, but, Steinberg writes, ‘I admit to finding this rather sad. Hence my admiration for those who try to leap anyway.’ But even Steinberg – whose study of the ‘lived experience’ of 1917, based largely on the contemporary popular press and first-person reports, is one of the freshest of the recent books – has largely abandoned his earlier interest in workers in favour of other social ‘spaces’: women, peasants, the empire and ‘the politics of the street’. Subscribe to the London Review of Books To understand the current scholarly consensus on the Russian Revolution, we need to look back at some of the old controversies, notably the one about inevitability. For Steinberg, this isn’t a problem, as his contemporary worm’s-eye view ensures that the story is full of surprises. But other writers are almost excessively eager to tell us that outcomes were never set in stone and things might always have gone differently. ‘There was nothing preordained about the collapse of the tsarist autocracy nor even of the Provisional Government,’ Stephen Smith writes, in his sober, well-researched and comprehensive history. Sean McMeekin seconds this, affirming that ‘the events of 1917 were filled with might-have-beens and missed chances’ while at the same time tipping his hat to show who the intellectual enemy is: these events were ‘far from an eschatological “class struggle” borne along irresistibly by the Marxist dialectic’. In other words, the Marxists, Western and Soviet, were all wrong. Historically Inevitable?, an edited collection, addresses the question of necessity directly by offering a series of ‘what if?’ studies of key moments of the revolution. In his introduction Tony Brenton asks: ‘Could things have gone differently? Were there moments when a single decision taken another way, a random accident, a shot going straight instead of crooked … could have altered the whole course of Russian, and so European, and world, history?’ But Dominic Lieven is surely speaking for the majority of the volume’s contributors when he writes that ‘nothing is more fatal than a belief that history’s course was inevitable.’ To be sure, those contributors see contingency as playing a greater part in the February and October revolutions than in the post-October path towards terror and dictatorship. Orlando Figes, author of a widely read study of the revolution, The People’s Tragedy (1996), devotes a lively essay to showing that, had a disguised Lenin not been admitted without a pass to the Congress of Soviets on 24 October, ‘history would have turned out differently.’ In play here are various politically charged arguments about Soviet history. First, there is the question of the inevitability of the collapse of the old regime and the Bolshevik triumph. This is an old Soviet article of faith, hotly disputed in the past by Western and, particularly, Russian émigré historians, who saw the tsarist regime on a course of modernisation and liberalisation that the First World War interrupted, plunging the country into disarray and making the previously unimaginable Bolshevik victory possible (Lieven, in one of the most sophisticated essays in the volume, characterises this interpretation of Russia’s situation in 1914 as ‘very wishful thinking’). In the context of past Sovietological debate on the revolution, raising the question of inevitability was interpreted not just as a Marxist claim but as a pro-Soviet one, since the implication was taken to be that the Soviet regime was ‘legitimate’. Contingency, conversely, was the anti-Marxist position in Cold War terms – except, confusingly, when the contingency in question applied to the revolution’s Stalinist outcome, as opposed to its onset, in which case conventional wisdom held that a totalitarian outcome was inevitable. Figes holds the same view: while contingency played a big role in 1917, ‘from the October insurrection and the establishment of a Bolshevik dictatorship to the Red Terror and the Civil War – with all its consequences for the evolution of the Soviet regime – there is a line of historical inevitability.’ In an attack on the whole ‘what if?’ genre of history, Richard J. Evans has suggested that ‘in practice … counterfactuals have been more or less a monopoly of the Right’ with Marxism as target. That’s not necessarily true of the Brenton volume, despite the inclusion of right-wing political historians like Richard Pipes and the absence of any of the major American social historians of 1917 who were Pipes’s opponents in the bitter historiographical controversies of the 1970s. Brenton himself is a former diplomat, and the last sentence of Historically Inevitable? – ‘We surely owe it to the many, many victims [of the revolution] to ask whether we could have found another way’ – rather endearingly suggests a diplomat’s propensity to try to solve problems in the real world, as opposed to the professional historian’s habit of analysing them. Pipes, who served as Reagan’s Soviet expert on the National Security Council in the early 1980s, was the author of a 1990 volume on the revolution that took a particularly strong line on the basic illegitimacy of the Bolshevik takeover. His argument was directed not only against the Soviets but also against revisionists closer to home, notably a group of young US scholars, mainly social historians with a special interest in labour history, who from the 1970s objected to the characterisation of the October Revolution as a ‘coup’ and argued that in the crucial months of 1917, from June to October, the Bolsheviks had increasing popular, notably working-class, support. The 1917 revisionists’ work was solidly researched, usually with information from Soviet archives which they had been able to access thanks to newly established official US and British student exchanges; and much of the field held it in high regard. But Pipes saw them as, in effect, Soviet stooges, and was so contemptuous of their work that, in defiance of scholarly convention, he refused even to acknowledge its existence in his bibliography. The Russian working class was an object of intense interest for historians in the 1970s. This wasn’t only because social history was in fashion in the profession at the time, with labour history a popular sub-field, but also because of the political implications: did the Bolshevik Party in fact have working-class support and take power, as it claimed, on behalf of the proletariat? Much of the revisionist Western work on Russian social and labour history despised by Pipes focused on workers’ class consciousness and whether it was revolutionary; and some but not all of its practitioners were Marxist. (In the non-Marxist wing, I annoyed other revisionists by ignoring class consciousness and writing about upward mobility.) The authors of the centenary books all have their own histories that are relevant here. Smith’s first work, Red Petrograd (1983), fitted the labour history rubric, although as a British scholar he was somewhat removed from American fights, and his work was always too careful and judicious to allow for any suggestion of political bias; he went on to write a fine and underappreciated study, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (2008), in which the workers and labour movements continued to play a central role. Steinberg, a US scholar of the next generation, published his first book on working-class consciousness, Proletarian Imagination, in 2002, when social history had already taken the ‘cultural turn’, bringing a new emphasis on subjectivity with less interest in ‘hard’ socio-economic data. But this was more or less a last hurrah for the working class in writing on the Russian Revolution. Pipes had rejected it outright, holding that the revolution could be explained only in political terms. Figes in his influential People’s Tragedy focused on society rather than politics, but minimised the role of the ‘conscious’ workers, emphasising instead a lumpen proletariat raging in the streets and destroying things. In their new works, Smith and Steinberg are both uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of workers, though street crime has entered their field of vision. McMeekin, the youngest of the authors here, set out to write a ‘new history’, by which he means an anti-Marxist one. Following Pipes, but with his own twist, he includes an extensive bibliography of works ‘cited or profitably consulted’ that omits all social histories except Figes. This includes Smith’s and Steinberg’s earlier books, as well as my own Russian Revolution (though it is cited on p.xii as an example of Marxist, Soviet-influenced work). It could be argued that McMeekin doesn’t need to read the social histories since his focus in The Russian Revolution, as in his earlier work, is on the political, diplomatic, military and international economic aspects. He draws on a multinational archival source base, and the book is quite interesting in detail, particularly the economic parts. But there’s a whiff of right-wing nuttiness in his idea that ‘Marxist-style maximalist socialism’ is a real current threat in Western capitalist countries. He doesn’t quite call the whole revolution, from Lenin’s sealed train in April 1917 to the Rapallo Treaty in 1922, a German conspiracy, but that’s more or less what his narrative suggests. The end points people choose for their histories of revolution reveal a lot about their assumptions of what it was ‘really about’. Rapallo is, appropriately, the end point for McMeekin. For Miéville it’s October 1917 (revolution triumphant), for Steinberg 1921 (not so much victory in the Civil War, as you might expect, as an open end with revolutionary business unfinished), and for Smith 1928. The last is an awkward choice in terms of narrative drama, as it means that Smith’s book ends with two whole chapters on the 1920s, when revolution was on hold under the New Economic Policy, a retreat from the maximalist aims of the Civil War period made necessary by economic collapse. It’s true, something like NEP might have been the outcome of the Russian Revolution, but it actually wasn’t, because Stalin came along. While the two chapters on NEP, like the rest of the book, are thoughtful and well-researched, as a finale it’s more of a whimper than a bang. This brings us to another highly contentious issue in Soviet history: whether there was essential continuity from the Russian/Lenin Revolution to Stalin, or a basic disruption between them occurring around 1928. My Russian Revolution includes Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ of the early 1930s, as well as his Great Purges at the end of the decade, but that is unacceptable to many anti-Stalinist Marxists. (Not surprisingly, Miéville’s annotated bibliography finds it ‘useful … though unconvincingly wedded to an “inevitabilist” Lenin-leads-to-Stalin perspective’.) Smith’s cohort of 1917 social historians generally felt much like Miéville, partly because they were intent on defending the revolution from the taint of Stalinism; but in this book, as on many issues, Smith declines to take a categorical position. Stalin certainly thought of himself as a Leninist, he points out, but on the other hand Lenin, had he lived, would probably not have been so crudely violent. Stalin’s ‘Great Break’ of 1928-31 ‘fully merits the term “revolution”, since it changed the economy, social relations and cultural patterns more profoundly than the October Revolution had done’ and moreover demonstrated that ‘revolutionary energies’ were not yet exhausted. Still, from Smith’s standpoint it’s an epilogue, not an intrinsic part of the Russian Revolution. Even-handedness is the hallmark of Smith’s solid and authoritative book, and I’m uneasily conscious of not having done justice to its many virtues. Really the only trouble with it – and with many of the works being published in this centenary year – is that it’s not clear what impelled him to write it, other than perhaps a publisher’s commission. He identified this problem himself in a recent symposium on the Russian Revolution. ‘Our times are not especially friendly to the idea of revolution … I suggest that while our knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War has increased significantly, in key respects our ability to understand – certainly to empathise with – the aspirations of 1917 has diminished.’ Other contributors to the symposium were similarly downbeat, the Russian historian Boris Kolonitsky noting that, while finding out the truth about the Russian Revolution had seemed enormously important to him back in Leningrad in the 1970s, interest in the topic is now ‘falling drastically’. ‘I sometimes wonder: who cares now about the Russian Revolution?’ Steinberg asks sadly, while Smith writes on the first page of his Russia in Revolution that ‘the challenge that the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 posed to global capitalism still reverberates (albeit faintly).’ * In purely scholarly terms, the 1917 revolution has been on the back burner for some decades now, after the excitement of the Cold War-fuelled arguments of the 1970s. The days are long gone when the late imperial era could be labelled ‘pre-revolutionary’ – that is, interesting only in so far as it led to the revolutionary outcome. That started to change in the 1980s and 1990s, with social and cultural historians of Russia starting to explore all the interesting things that didn’t necessarily lead to revolution, from crime and popular literature to the church. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the revolution shrivelled as a historical subject, revealing behind it the First World War, whose significance for Russia (as opposed to all the other belligerents) had previously been remarkably under-researched. That same collapse, by stripping away the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union, brought questions of empire and borderlands to the fore (hence Smith’s subtitle, ‘An Empire in Crisis’, and Steinberg’s chapter on ‘Overcoming Empire’). In the 1960s, it was self-evident to E.H. Carr, as well as to his opponents like Leonard Schapiro, that the Russian Revolution mattered. It mattered to Schapiro because it had imposed a new political tyranny on Russia that threatened the free world, and to Carr because it had pioneered the centralised state-planned economy that he saw as a portent of the future. Coming to the subject in the 1970s, I concluded that, along with the many ‘betrayals’ of socialist revolution pointed out by Trotsky and a host of others, there were also many achievements in the realm of economic and cultural modernisation, notably state-sponsored rapid industrialisation in the 1930s. Hobsbawm made a similar point on a wider canvas when he noted that ‘Soviet-based communism … became primarily a programme for transforming backward countries into advanced ones.’ The modernisation point still seems right to me, but it has been tarnished by the fact that, on the economic side, it is a kind of modernisation that no longer looks modern. Who cares now about building smoke-stack industries, except in a context of polluting the environment? Brenton’s confident summation has a free-market triumphalism that, like Fukuyama’s End of History, may not stand the test of time, but it reflects the negative verdict of much current writing on the Russian Revolution: It has taught us what does not work. It is hard to see Marxism making any sort of comeback. As a theory of history the revolution tested it, and it failed. The dictatorship of the proletariat did not lead to the communist utopia, but merely to more dictatorship. It also failed as a prescription for economic governance. No serious economist today is advocating total state ownership as the route to prosperity … not the least of the lessons of the Russian Revolution is that for most economic purposes the market works much better than the state. The rush away from socialism since 1991 has been Gadarene. If the Russian Revolution had any lasting achievement, he adds, it is probably China. Smith, in more cautious terms, makes a similar assessment: The Soviet Union proved capable of generating extensive growth in industrial production and of building up a defence sector, but much less capable of competing with capitalism once the latter shifted towards more intensive forms of production and towards ‘consumer capitalism’. In this respect the record of the Chinese Communists in promoting their country to the rank of a leading economic and political world power was far more impressive than that of the regime on which it broadly modelled itself. Indeed, as the 21st century advances, it may come to seem that the Chinese Revolution was the great revolution of the 20th century. Now that’s a conclusion that Putin’s Russia – still uncertain what it thinks of the revolution, and therefore how to celebrate it – needs to ponder: the ‘Russian Revolution’ brand is in danger. Perhaps by the time of the bicentenary Russia will have worked out a way to salvage it, as the risk of losing a chapter in the world history of the 20th century is surely one that no patriotic regime should ignore. For the West (assuming that the extraordinarily resilient dichotomy of ‘Russia’ and ‘the West’ survives into the next century), it is bound to look different as well. Historians’ judgments, however much we hope the opposite, reflect the present; and much of this apologetic and deprecatory downgrading of the Russian Revolution simply reflects the – short term? – impact of the Soviet collapse on its status. By 2117, who knows what people will think? _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ 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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