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Capitalism is Dead, Long Live Capitalism

April 6, 2009

What of Religion?

By Badri Raina | ZNet, April 5, 2009

One million Indian lives were consumed by the famine of 1771 in the Purnea district of the then undivided Bengal Province.

Warren Hastings, Governor General, proudly wrote back to the Board of Directors of the East India Company that, contrary to what might have been expected, he had collected more taxes that year than ever before!

This may have pleased the Company but did not please Edmund Burke.

His fulminations about how the Company had devastated flourishing cities like Dacca and Murshidabad and handed the region over to the tiger and the orangutan are of course legend.

So why was he so displeased, and why did he become the chief engine of the subsequent impeachment of Hastings?

Not because his heart bled for the Indians, but because he knew cannily enough that if such depredations were allowed to continue, the Company could not hope to survive for long.

Crucial to the continued exploitation of the colony and to the drain of its wealth was the preservation of the myth that the British were in India to do good to the Indians against their own primitive incompetence. The “white man” had to show himself a saviour.

Such was also the reason why Burke was to become an implacable enemy to the revolution in France.

It was important to show that the British dispensation at home, however oppressive, was anyway to be preferred to the egalitarian impulse of the French event, and to ensure that nothing of that kind brewed within the shores of Britannia.

Some fifty years on from there, Carlyle wrote perhaps the first three-volume account of the French Revolution (1836).

And the intent was no different. The purpose was to egg the new Whig parliament to effect “reforms” in good time lest Chartism took on the dimensions of the French happenings at home.

Something similar seems to have happened at the London, G-20 summit.

Recognizing the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon model of free-market Capitalism, its global votaries have put their heads together to salvage Capitalism from its ruins.

The air from London is thus thick with news of Capitalist institutions and practices up for pragmatic “reform.”

Interestingly, if “reform” since the Washington Consensus (1990) had meant a near-total deregulation of Capital flows, Banking practices, Market mechanisms, and a dissolution of the sovereignty of nation-states to enable the global privatization of wealth and profit-maximisation, “reform” at the 2009 London conclave seems to have come to mean something rather contrary to all that. Even if only as a change of garb.

We now hear of a global intent to reform the IMF, even as more liquidity is infused into its coffers ($500 billion, precisely), of regulation of banking and other investment practices, of sops to be doled out to those most innocent of the collapse but most affected by it, and of steering clear of “protectionism” so that the revival of global wealth multipliers are not thwarted by debilitating autarky.

In one word, the Captains of world Capitalism seem to have come to the view that if Capitalism is to be saved for the times to come, it will need to be given the garb of a world-wide Social Democracy for a while.

And, the Sinner of the first part, namely the United States of America, seems to have also come round to the view that it may not hope to lord it over the wealth of nations in quite the unfettered way it has been used to.

Cannily, if the survival of Capitalism requires that parties such as India, South Africa, Brazil, and China be incorporated fully into the world Capitalist system then so be it.

Better that than give them the breathing space to chalk out political economies of an alternate kind.

And, surely, all of them seem equally elated to be now sitting at the global high-table, with a stake in the pie. And the right to make impressive noises in the world’s regulatory committees.

However we may cavil at the subterfuges, the news of the death of the Washington Consensus and of its transmutation into the London Consensus must for now be greeted with some relief, even as the struggle for Socialism must continue to be engaged in with conviction and hard work.

III

The world could, however, also do with another concomitant relief—namely, from the devastating ravages that religion has been subjecting it to.

This writer has often pointed to the integral tie-up between Capital and organized Religion (www.zcommunications.org/zspace/badriraina.)

And a full enunciation of that thought is now available in a book called God Is Back, written by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge.

Indeed, these two gentlemen, one a Roman Catholic and another an Atheist, concur sentiently on how the adherence to faith and to science-driven capital meet most sweetly in the market-economies of the world. Precisely what we have been at pains to say.

It is another matter that the book shallowly endorses this marriage of convenience, without, as Troy Jollimore underscores in a fine review (Truthdig, April 2, 2009), being troubled by any chicaneries and inconsistencies of logic or principle. Including the reality that this unholy tie-up has tended to “encourage parochialism and hatred of the other, as well as superstition and scientific ignorance.”

As Jerry Coyne says it in The New Republic, to say that science and religion are compatible because many profit by the conjunction is “like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers.”

Here is a sampling of what some illustrious souls have had to say on the matter:

“Religions are all alike—founded upon fables and mythologies”

(Thomas Jefferson)

“The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.”

(Lincoln)

“Religion is based. . . mainly on fear. . .fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . .My own view on religion is that of Lucretious. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.”

(Bertrand Russel)

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

(Kurt Vonnegut)

“Faith means not wanting to know what is true.” (Nietzsche)

“I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. . . No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life—our desire to go on living—our dread of coming to an end.” (Edison)

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.” (Einstein)

and, succinctly for our consideration of contemporary international life:

“If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” (Voltaire).

Indeed, the thinker most congenial to the Capitalist way of perceptions, Freud, was to call religion an “extraordinarily useful illusion.”

The fact is that where organized religion before the advent of Capitalism presided unmitigatingly as the chief oppressor in league with privileged authority, Capitalism, from the Protestant Reformation onwards, has found in it a potent tool to neuter the secular concerns and mobilizations of vast billions of human beings, as well as to make of it yet another source of commercialized profit-making.

And when the need arose, to draft whole nations into war through a deadly mix of faith and jingoism. All for the enrichment of the possessing classes.

It is hardly a wonder that the conflict between a rampant imperialism thirsting to appropriate the oil wealth of Western Asia and the Middle East, and to secure land and sea routes for the purpose was until the other day to find it useful to pitch the contention as a “clash of civilizations.”

And we were invited to think that the “civilization” responsible for Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the slave trade, and innumerable other depredations through centuries of aggressive invasions was “superior” to Babylon and Mesopotamia. Think again.

That human frailty, compounded by immiseration and exploitation, looks heaven-ward is perhaps both understandable and excusable.

Yet, that “global” impulse has nowhere been given a more humane expression than in the saying of those drop-outs from organized “high-religions” whom the world knows as the Sufis, the Mystics, the Dervishes and so forth.

A tribe of empathy-riddled, non-coveting, and fearlessly loving human beings who placed the least always at the centre of their teachings and concerns.

Happily, such ones were to be found among all of the world’s major semitic and non-semitic faiths, and among all of the world’s poet-legislators.

They were, and remain, the uniters, not the vicious dividers.

I may conclude by citing just one couplet from the great Mirza Ghalib—a couplet that could bring light and wisdom both to the fraught world of contemporary Islam and their counterparts everywhere, including the right-wing Hindutva fascists in India:

“Hum Muvahid hein, hamara kesh hai tarque rasoom, Milatein sab mitt gayein, ajzaayei eemaan ho gayein.”

Instantly translated, this might read:

Ghalib, I hold all gods to be one god:

The highest faith can result only

When all discrete dogmas are shunned.

At a time now when Capitalism is somewhat on the back foot, when the drums of war seem more hesitant, when relations between nations and communities are sought to be “reset’, how lovely it would be if the world were also to be freed of the fatal stranglehold of dogmas, and returned to the noble instincts of common humanity.

After all, what use is it otherwise to say that Jesus, Mohammed, Ram, Budh were indeed the finest human beings—before they were anything else—known to the history of homo sapiens?

Can we expect that Capitalist and other warlords will now spare both the earth and the human race from the twin onslaughts of Capital and Religion?

badri.raina@gmail.com

Tags:dogmas, Edmund Burke, free-market capitalism, IMF, India, religion, science and religion
Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment »

Kashmir konflikt og kashmirernens politisk krav

March 31, 2009

Nasir Khan

Terrorangrepene i Mumbai i november 2008 ble fordømt av nærmest en hel verden. De minnet oss på, nok en gang, hvor viktig det er å bekjempe krefter som utfører politisk vold og etnisk/religiøst motivert terror på det indiske subkontinentet. Men de dype og underliggende årsakene til den elendigheten slike voldelige handlinger er et symptom på, blir ofte ignorert og underkjent. En av de viktigste årsakene er den uløste konﬂikten i Kashmir, som vekker sterke følelser av sinne hos millioner mennesker.

Problemene med vold og terror i denne delen av verden kan slett ikke løses slik Bush-administrasjonen har forsøkt å gjøre det: Å gjenta mantraet om «krig mot terror» og samtidig planlegge og sette i gang massiv aggresjonskrig hjelper ikke det spor. Tvert imot har Bushs kortsiktige propagandatriks bidratt til å dekke over aggresjonskrigføringen og lagt grunnlaget for mer vold, ﬂ ere massakrer. Hensikten er å fremme herredømme og imperialistiske interesser: Den såkalte «krigen mot terror» er i virkelig- heten en forlengelse av USAs imperialistiske strategi for å nå egne mål i Midtøsten, men også langt utenfor regionen. Det er innlysende at ethvert seriøst forsøk på å bekjempe terror må ta terrorens årsaker i betraktning og ikke nøye seg med å angripe symptomene som ligger opp i dagen.

Den uløste konﬂikten i Kashmir har siden 1947 brakt India og Pakistan stadig videre på en farlig konfrontasjonskurs. Dette året endte britene sitt styre i regionen, og som en siste gest mot sine undersåtter besluttet imperieherskerne å dele India langs etnisk/religiøse linjer.

Britene førte under hele prosessen et dobbeltspill hvor de delte ut velsignelser og beskyttelse med den ene hånda og elendighet med den andre. Med sin grensedragning mellom de to framvoksende nasjonene i området åpnet britene en Pandoras eske for kommende generasjoner. De som hadde noe å takke for tjenesten, gjorde det til gagns: Britenes siste guvernør for India, Lord Mountbatten, ble utnevnt til det frie Indias første generalguvernør. Den nøye utarbeidete og målrettede inndelingen skulle vise seg å tjene ett lands interesse på det andres bekostning.

På den tida India ble delt, var prinsedømmet Jammu/Kashmir styrt av Maharaja Hari Singh. Han var hindu, fra den etniske gruppa Dogra, og oldebarn av Gulab Singh, som hadde kjøpt hele Kashmirdalen fra britene som følge av den såkalte Amritsar-avtalen av 1846. Ettersom det store ﬂertallet av innbyggerne i Kashmir var muslimer, var det ventet at Kashmir ville tilfalle det nye Pakistan etter delingen. Folk fra den delen av regionen som seinere ble kjent som Azad Kashmir («Fritt Kashmir») startet sammen med stammekrigere fra Nordvestlige grenseprovins (NWBP) i Pakistan en geriljaoffensiv mot staten for å presse Hari Singh til å la Kashmir inngå i Pakistan. Herskeren ba da Lord Mountbatten om hjelp, og ble lovet det – på betingelse av at han sluttet seg til India. Dermed startet den første indisk-pakistanske krigen. Den endte i 1949 med en våpenhvile nedsatt av FN, som da nylig var stiftet, etter at India i 1948 hadde brakt Pakistan inn for Sikkerhetsrådet. Våpenhvilen innebar også etableringen av en delelinje, som har forblitt de facto grense mellom det indisk-kontrollerte Kashmir og Azad Jammu/ Kashmir (kalt pakistanskokkupert Kashmir av inderne).

Sikkerhetsrådet vedtok tre resolusjoner i 1948/49 som også anerkjenner rettighetene til innbyggerne i Kashmir, hvis landområder de to nasjonene sloss om. Ifølge FN-resolusjonene skal India og Pakistan avholde folkeavstemning i Kashmir, slik at folk der kan få avgjøre sin egen framtid. Indias daværende statsminister Jawaharlal Nehru lovet folket i Jammu/Kashmir uavhengighet så snart det ble fred i området. Dette løftet brøt han da kamphandlingene tok slutt, og innholdet i resolusjonene ble aldri fulgt opp. Derimot ga indiske myndigheter Kashmir en særstatus som åpner for større grad av selvstyre i regionen.

Hensikten med dette var å pasiﬁsere befolkningen når herskeren seinere lot regionen inngå i India. Løftet om folkeavstemning er fortsatt ikke innfridd, og den ene indiske regjeringen etter den andre har hardnakket hevdet at Kashmir er en del av India. Ethvert krav fra folk i regionen om folkeavstemning og enhver protest mot den indiske okkupasjonen har blitt ansett som et internt indisk anliggende. Ingen tredjepart er gitt anledning til å uttale seg på vegne av kashmirerne eller fremme de rettighetene som ifølge FN-charteret og resolusjonene fra 1948/49 er legitime. I stedet brøt det i 1965 ut ny krig mellom India og Pakistan om Kashmir.

I tiårene som fulgte har kashmirernes lidelse økt i omfang. De har utfordret legitimiteten til den indiske okkupasjonen, og i 1989 startet de væpnet kamp for å kaste okkupantene på dør.
Det indiske militæret slo hardt tilbake, med massearestasjoner, vold og forsvinninger som konsekvens. India har sendt flere enn 500 000 soldater for å undertrykke muslimene i Kashmir. I følge forsiktige anslag har indiske styrker tatt livet av rundt 70 000 mennesker og brutalisert en hel befolkning. Kilder i Kashmir mener tallet på drepte er så høyt som 100.000. I den væpnete kampen har hinduminoriteten i området, panditene, blitt offer for opprørerne, og ifølge statlige myndigheter har ﬂere enn 200.000 av dem ﬂ yktet fra Kashmir. Noen har søkt tilﬂukt i Jammu, andre har dratt til India. Etter landﬂ yktigheten har panditene levd under sørgelige forhold. Men det er oppmuntrende å se at kashmirske muslimer og deres lederskap i sin helhet nå ber sine hindubrødre om å vende tilbake til hjemlandet.

Etter 18 års brutal militærokkupasjon sto den indiske regjeringen så overfor en ny situasjon: Jihad-rådet i Kashmir tok til orde for å avslutte den væpnete kampen og oppfordret alle militante til å bruke ikkevoldelige og fredelige metoder i kampen for frigjøring fra India. Ropet om frihet – azadi – har blitt høyere, og India kan ikke drukne det med sine maskingevær og plyndrende militærstyrker. Imidlertid har de indiske lederne vist liten vilje til å lytte til folket og har i stedet holdt Kashmirdalen under streng militær bevoktning.

Den pågående konﬂikten har ført til ufattelig stor nød og ødeleggelse i Kashmir. Samtidig er den en viktig årsak til spenningen India og Pakistan imellom. Rivaliseringen om regionen har ført de to landene inn i militær opptrapping og våpenkappløp – der anskaffelsen av atomvåpen er en del av bildet – som tapper begge for store ressurser. De to landenes myndigheter bruker et propagandaspråk mot hverandre som skaper ﬁ endtlighet, mistenksomhet og hat og gjør at befolkningen på begge sider anser motparten for å være sin «dødsﬁ ende». Konﬂ ikten har forgiftet sinnene til både indere og pakistanere; den har pågått i mer enn seks tiår, og det er ingen løsning i sikte. I kjølvannet av situasjonen følger økt politisk polarisering og vedvarende spenning mellom de to folkegruppene. Dette gjør det tilsvarende vanskelig å løse uenigheten om Kashmir og andre konﬂikter og derigjennom normalisere forholdet mellom landene.

En annen urovekkende tendens er den økende politiske og religiøse ekstremismen i India og Pakistan. Denne utviklingen har i og for seg pågått i lengre tid; det nye er at ekstreme tendenser er allment akseptert som en del av det sosiale og politiske landskapet i begge land. Mainstreampolitikken har blitt inﬂuert av gruppetenkningens og hatets predikanter og yppersteprester.

Flere indiske partier står i nær forbindelse med Hindutva, den militante politiske hindunasjonalismen, og organisasjonen Sangha Parivar fungerer som paraplyorganisasjon for partier som bekjenner seg til denne retningen. Hindutva-organisasjonene er inﬂuert av tanken om hinduistisk ﬂ ertallsstyre, eller Rashtriya Swayamseval Sangh (RSS). Gjennom å identiﬁ sere India med hinduisme og hindustyre forsøker denne retningen å etablere en etnisk/religiøs dominans i landet. Det ledende indiske partiet Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) har stått i spissen for Hindutva-doktrinen og hinduiseringen av landet som helhet. Jawaharlal Nehru advarte i sin tid om at dersom fascismen skulle gjøre seg gjeldende i India, ville det skje i form av majoritetens (hindu-)nasjonalisme. I dag har hans ord og advarsler vist seg nærmest profetiske.

I Pakistan har fundamentalistiske religiøse partier forsøkt å ta monopol på islam. De har ikke på noe tidspunkt oppnådd særlig folkelig støtte og har gjort det tilsvarende dårlig i valg. Flere pakistanske religiøse ledere har imidlertid gjort seg notorisk bemerket med ukvemsord mot andre muslimer. Sunnipredikanter har rettet sin vrede mot de «vantro» sjiamuslimene, og sjiapredikantene har svart med samme mynt. Dette har forårsaket en negativ sirkel av vold og hatefulle beskyldninger i islams navn. Det er ingen tvil om at militante islamistiske grupper bidrar til denne negative utviklingen og utgjør en betydelig fare. Men Indias behandling av muslimene i Kashmir, samt landets uforsonlige holdning til konﬂikten, er noe alle pakistanere ensidig fordømmer. Indias oppførsel provoserer også militante grupper som Lasher-e-Taiba; disse oppfordrer sine tilhengere til å hevne sine indiske religionsfellers lidelser, påført dem av militante hindunasjonalister – og til å slåss for Kashmirs frihet med alle midler, om nødvendig med vold. Angrepene i Mumbai i november i fjor var et uttrykk nettopp for denne dynamikken.

De siste seksti årene har India opprettholdt sin okkupasjon av Kashmirdalen gjennom politisk manipulering og brutal militærmakt. Massakrene på kashmirske muslimer utført av indiske styrker vil under Folkeretten regnes som krigsforbrytelser. Men til sjuende og sist må lederne i New Delhi bære det endelige ansvaret for den folkemorderiske politikken. Indiske myndigheter kan ikke fortsette sin okkupasjon av Kashmir og tro at folk der – stilt overfor den militære og økonomiske stormakten India, med imperialist-stater som USA og det sionistiske Israel som stadig nærere forbundsfeller – skal gi opp sitt krav om frihet. Dersom okkupasjonen fortsetter, vil situasjonen garantert bare vil bli verre, og volden og terroren i området vil blomstre.

De ti millioner muslimene i Kashmirdalen vil ha uavhengighet fra indisk kolonistyre og undertrykking. Det mest fornuftige for India vil være å ta et oppgjør med fortidas politikk og erkjenne at folk i Kashmir har rett til sjølstyre. Dette vil ikke svekke India; tvert imot vil det demonstrere styrken i det indiske demokratiet og framheve den indiske kulturelle tradisjonens humane sider.

Hvorvidt befolkningen i Kashmirdalen velger å slutte seg til India eller Pakistan – eller tar sikte på full sjølstendighet – bør være opp til dem å avgjøre. Uansett hvilken avgjørelse de fatter om sin egen framtid, bør den være deres alene, og dette er noe FN-resolusjonene gir dem rett til. Det er langt fra sikkert at folket i området velger å slutte seg til Pakistan, men i så fall har India ingenting å frykte. Da vil nemlig det hinduistiske Jammu-området og det buddhistiske Ladakhområdet med all sannsynlighet bli en del av India. I stedet for å utsette dem for de militære styrkenes ydmykende og inhumane behandling, kan India gi folket i Kashmirdalen rett til å bestemme over sin egen skjebne. Med det kan de samtidig legge de politiske forholdene til rette for et godt naboskap mellom India og Pakistan. Dette vil imidlertid kreve både mot og klokskap fra indisk side.

Så fort det viktigste stridstemaet mellom de to landene legges dødt, kan de to tidligere rivalene og «ﬁendene» møtes som venner og konsentrere seg om å løse sine respektive sosiale og økonomiske problemer i en fredelig atmosfære. Nøkkelen til håp og godvilje i India og Pakistan ligger altså i opprettelsen av en uavhengig politisk enhet i Kashmirdalen. Ved å bilegge en konﬂikt som har skapt ﬁ endskap og påført skader i uoverskuelig omfang, kan de to landene også bli i stand til å tøyle kraften i den religiøse fanatismen og etnisk/ religiøse gruppetenkningen som hjemsøker dem.

Nasir Khan, dr. philos, er historiker og fredsaktivist.

Oversatt av Cato Fossum og publisert i Klassekampen 17. Februar 2009

__________________________________________________

Some pictures of Kashmiris under Indian occupation

Tags:500000 Indian troops in Kashmir, 500000 Indiske soldater, aggresjonskrigføringen, Amritsar-avtalen av 1846, Azad Kashmir, Britenes rolle, FN resolusjoner, FN-resolusjonene, Hari Singh, India, indiske okkupasjonen, Kashmir, Kashmir konflikt, Lasher-e-Taiba, Lord Mountbatten, militærokkupasjon, muslimene i Kashmirdalen, muslimer, Pakistan, Rashtriya Swayamseval Sangh, tallet på drepte, uavhengighet, vold og forsvinninger, vold og terror
Posted in Commentary, Human rights, imperialism, India, Kashmir, Muslims, Pakistan, War Criminals | 1 Comment »

India’s Democracy Challenged

March 29, 2009

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

By Badri Raina |ZNet, March 28, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

THE CONSTITUTION OF INDIA

Preamble

“WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens

JUSTICE, social, economic, political;

LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith, and worship;

EQUALITY of status and opportunity;

and to promote among them all

FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation,

IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.”

It is once again Hustings time.

The fifteenth Lok Sabha (House of the People) is due to be elected, and the 16^th of May, 2009—counting day—will tell us what it looks like.

Even as the Indian Republic as duly constituted justly takes some satisfaction at its continuance, transcending a plethora of adverse circumstance, some challenges there are that qualitatively spell more than an ordinary hiccup.

Let me allude to just three.

First, the good challenge:

This comes from none other than “we the people.”

And they make a simple but incontestable point: namely, that some sixty years to the good, it is clear that they have been at the receiving end of the bad old ruling class trick.

To wit, legitimize the Constitution in the name of “we the people” but ensure that the state thereof in truth serves the interests of the very few.

This is achieved by enshrining “Socialist” as the defining USP of the Constitution of India but merrily practicing Capitalism of the cronyist and crassest kind.

No wonder therefore that billionaires burgeon on one end, and paupers on the other; that the Republic breaks world records in the numbers of children who suffer malnutrition, preventable diseases, exploitation at home and in the labour market, and untold abuse everywhere; that women have next to no representation in the highest echelons of democratic policy and decision making, and remain unsafe both in the home, in the work place, and on the street; that unconscionable violence and humiliation is routinely meted out to India’s Dalits by social “superiors” and members of the state apparatus alike, and often in tandem; that just resistance to excesses of diverse description in vast parts of the Republic is put down by draconian laws, such as the Disturbed Areas Act and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which empower the least man with an authorized gun to shoot to kill without any questions asked.

No wonder that the requirements of Capitalism this day yield a culture of perceptions which enjoins on us to think that those whose assets on the stock market climb down some notches are greater sufferers than those who eat grass or leather or carrion for want of food. Or, failing that as well, kill their families and then commit suicide.

And that the “growth” of the economy is crucial so that some 77% of “we the people” can spend at least 45 cents a day!

As to redress of the legal kind, tell me about it. Try going to court against a fatso adversary and soon you will wish you had rather gone to the burial ground.

So much—and indeed the very much more that can and needs to be said—for “socialism,” “liberty,” and “justice”—social, economic, and political.

Yet, as Indians in their millions in one place or another remind the custodians of the state of these facts, theirs must be considered a salutary and good challenge.

After all, they only wish the Constitution to be made a universal reality, rather than to be abrogated. And they say: remember, we are “we the people.”

And many still believe, or wish to, that the ruling interests can be pressed to do so through democratic means.

Not for long, though.

The bad challenge:

This comes from very sophisticated quarters who fervently hold that auctioning cricket players to the full regalia of prime-time media,– a spectacle far more engaging than the wretched business of Gandhi’s spectacles and the hullaballoo thereof, or of camels and bullocks in the famous event at Pushkar in Rajasthan–and conducting the Indian Premier League (of Cricket, that is) is of far greater consequence to the Republic than holding elections to the House of the People.

And, no more significant fact here than that wide sections of the elite media, often called the fourth estate of the Republic and its chief watchdog and guarantor, concur with these sophiscates to the hilt. As does the right-wing, Hindu party, the BJP, believing that not holding the tournament along with the elections only shows how “weak” the UPA government is against the possibility of terror attacks.

Thus, the government of the day is pilloried for its old-fashioned preference of ensuring free and fair elections to the Lok Sabha over supplying troupes to the IPL so that billions can be made and “we the people” entertained as a corollary.

And, just to remind you, the IPL is a private enterprise solely!

They ask in consternation: what has the Republic come to that it should seriously consider elections to the House of the People more important than cricket and the moneys thereof. After all, if the state cannot furnish food to “we the people” let them at least eat cricket. And if the government cannot govern the country, let it at least help the IPL honchos govern cricket. After all, what matters more—cricket or the legitimacy of the state?

To wit, this challenge to the republic comes from a new set of Indians who, having thoroughly milked its offers, now feel chagrined that its continuance should so obstruct the hedonisms that they have so earned through smart practices and sharp dealings.

These are chosen ones who pooh pooh the primitive formulations of the Preamble, namely that “liberty,” “equality,” or “justice” either can be or indeed ought to be made available to “we the people.”

They hold that human beings are not differently able or differently circumstanced but, plainly and simply, unequal and undeserving of equal consideration by the state.

The IPL patrons, wherever they be, simply believe that democracy is a nuisance, the Preamble a joke, and the state their handmaiden. And the electoral process a massive redundance that merely disrupts the smooth flow of money-making and other collateral pursuits. Far more exciting to have the IPL gladiators fight to the kill while they watch and smooch on the grapes.

Which is why they do not bother to dirty their finger nails with electoral ink: after all, when either tweedledum or tweedledee come to power, they only need to make that phone call to get the job done. Indeed, their idea of democracy is to have the same set of people in power, even if under differently-coloured fig leaves.

III

Now the ugly challenge:

This comes from a set of butchers who question the notion of “we the people” in the first place.

They hold that only some are “people” (namely, the Hindus) and the rest are “enemies” (chiefly the Muslims and Christians).

And they are everyday willing to kill for that belief.

A century and a half ago, an English poet wrote of the Lotus Land (where Odysseus’s mariners halted during their return home to Ithaca after the Trojan war) thus:

“in the afternoon they came unto a land

where it seemed always afternoon.”

And of the music there thus:

“music that gentlier on the spirit lies

than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.” (Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters).

Nothing so sleepy or gentle, though, about India’s Lotus valaas.

Here is what Varun Gandhi said of the matter the other day in Pilibhit:

“This is not the ‘hand’ (of the Congress party); this is the hand of the Lotus. It will cut the throat of Muslims after the elections.”

Ever knew the lotus to be so bloodthirsty?

And in saying that with crude directness, he only gave full voice to the teachings of the scions of the RSS.

Those teachings teach that Muslims are “incomplete, uncultured, demonic.” Further, they are scary like rakshasas (evil demons) and have no loyalty to India because they do not accept their kula dharma, (ancestral duty), towards Hinduism. They are outsiders who must be assimilated to the point where they no longer call themselves Ali, Hassan, John, or Thomas.

And if they will not, here is what needs to be done:

“Parshuram avenged his father’s humiliation by offering him libations of blood of those who had insulted him.” “Likewise, the only way to worship the motherland after she had been defiled” (that is to say by centuries of “Muslim” rule) would be “to wash it with the blood of those who dared commit such an act.”

(See Jyotirmaya Sharma, Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS, and India; see also Siddharth Varadarajan’s “A Stench That is All Too Familiar,” The Hindu, March 24, 2009.)

This, then, continues to constitute a challenge to the Republic of a very different sort, albeit one which often conveniently overlaps with the class preferences of the challengers mentioned in the second canto of this write-up.

Put succinctly, these are people who wish to overthrow all the Preambular postulates of the Constitution of the Republic of India: in their scheme of things, only those who are both born in India and have their chief icons of worship in India (rather than in Mecca or Jerusalem) can be considered “citizens’; Indian democracy and the nation cannot be “secular” but one based on Hindu-racial principles, and “Socialism” as much an excrescence to them as to the IPL fraternity of India’s social, political, and economic elites.

And the bad and the ugly together remain opposed to the challengers in the first part who take the egalitarian provisions of the Preamble so much to heart, or seek to cause ruckus on their behalf and behest.

All said and done, not a pretty picture.

But one thing seems for sure: neither the IPL nor “cultural nationalism” of the ugly holds any promise of redress.

For all that, “we the people” will need to intensify their humanist struggles, and maybe look to Chavez and the rest of Latin America for inspiration. Not to speak first of Gandhi, Nehru, and the struggles of the Communists and Socialists within India.

If indeed the rational alone can be the right, then those struggles cannot but bear desirable fruit.

“It is patience I need,” said Lear.

_______________________________________________________________

badri.raina@gmail.com

Tags:Badri Raina, BJP, democracy, Hindus, India, Muslims and Christains, Varun Gandhi
Posted in Commentary, Human rights, India, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Human Rights Situation In Kashmir

March 27, 2009

Kashmir Watch, March 27

Human rights situation in Kashmir is as bleak as it has been during the last two decades. The gross violation of basic human rights are continuing unabated, says Ghulam Nabi Khayal, who presented this paper at the National Seminar on Kashmir organised by Jamia Millia University, Delhi last week.

The track record of human rights situation in Jammu & Kashmir, particularly during the last two decades, does not merit any praise or appreciation. It is quite heart rending that the human rights charter adopted by the United Nations has been thrown to winds in this strife torn border state by all those who hold a gun in their hands.

The worst and most horrific period of gross violation of the human rights across Kashmir Valley has been during early nineties when only a few incidents of indiscriminate gunfire opened by the forces on unarmed civilians resulted in the killing of about three hundred people including old men, women and children. The excessive use of force was wantonly witnessed when the funeral procession of Mirwaiz Molvi Farooq, who had been gunned down on 21 May 1990 allegedly by the militants, was fired upon by the forces killing about 40 persons on spot. The forces did not spare even the coffin of the late Mirwaiz and several bullets were found having been pumped into his dead body.

This gory incident was so shocking that the former prime minister, Chander Shekhar said in the Parliament, “we must hang our heads in shame.” The required action followed quickly by shifting of Jagmohan, the most controversial Governor of the State, during whose tenure Kashmir was seen bathing only in blood.

According to a conservative survey conducted by a few local groups, there are as many as ten thousand widows spending their days of life in penury, misery and prolonged agony. Their husbands, whether militants or otherwise, are no more and this is not their fault that they have been left at the mercy of Allah.

Several so called organisations, NGOs, numbering about five thousand, claim to be the saviors of this miserable lot of the fair sex but they have failed to help out even a small number of them though these fake organisations have been receiving huge funds of money for this very purpose both from Delhi and Islamabad. This criminal negligence towards a suffering community has obviously given rise to social evils in the Valley where the hapless widows are naturally forced to be exploited in different immoral ways to earn their two square meals.

The irony of the fate is that the widows of slain militants are categorically denied permission to perform Hajj pilgrimage which they could do after managing the required money. Also, a valid passport is not issued to them under instructions from the Central government. Their fault, depriving them of a very pious religious performance, is yet to be defined. Why should they be punished for a sin they never committed?

The present scenario across Kashmir is a little brighter for, the militants are not seen indulging in anti social and objectionable activities, also due to the fact that a majority of them has been physically eliminated by the forces during the last two decades of unprecedented armed uprising.

At the same time, and unfortunately, a number of surrendered militants, locally nicknamed as Ikhwanis or renegades, are still at large to harass people by way of arson, kidnappings for ransom, molestation of women and even brutal killing of common people. These heinous crimes mostly take place in far off villages in the Valley and are hushed up as not reported due to the social taboos of the Kashmiri Muslim society. These renegades function directly under the Rashtriya Rifles of the army and the official patronage is available to them so acrimoniously that they are neither hauled up nor are they brought to justice for crimes they are committing unabated.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December1948, says among other things in its Article Number three that “every one has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” These basic guarantees offered to the human being by Almighty God and by the UNO are to a large extent, not available to a common man in Kashmir despite the horrifying fact that About 100,000 people in the State have already been done to untimely death in this turmoil.

As far as the conditions prevailing in various prisons, where Kashmiri suspects or hardcore militants re lodged, are concerned, they can be described as inhuman and nothing else. Even today, scores of detenues are languishing in jails all over the country, from Jammu up to Koimbatore, without being tried in a court of law for the crime they have allegedly committed. Some of these prisoners are there behind the bars for more than 15 years now and no legal procedure has been adopted to facilitate for them a fair trial in an impartial court of law.

My own newspaper Voice of Kashmir has been receiving letters full of pathos and miseries faced by these detained youths in different jails in the country wherein they narrate woefully hair raising tales of torture and inhuman treatment meted out to them by their interrogators. The UN human rights declaration clearly states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Probably, this charter does not apply to the forces operating in Jammu & Kashmir state.

It is rather imperative to point out here that while talking about the activities of the militants and the security forces, one cannot apply a similar yardstick to them. Militants took up gun but were never answerable to any one.

On the contrary, the armed forces and the paramilitary troops are supposed to be bound by unflinching discipline, moral, ethical and legal obligations. Their reported violations of basic rights are not therefore acceptable under any circumstances.

There are also complaints pouring in regularly that Kashmiri youths who are out in the Indian states to earn their livelihood are subjected to victimisation by the police. They are physically manhandled all over. Even hotels in different cities are instructed to avoid providing accommodation to the Kashmiri visitors.It was on 13th of this month that three Kashmiris were taken into custody in Maharashtra for no obvious reasons.

Several state regimes have publicly admitted that on occasions, forces in Kashmir overstep their brief and that the guilty shall be punished. One has yet to ascertain beyond doubt whether any erring soldier was ever awarded deserving punishment.

The present situation across the State is comparatively conducive to rub off black scars of this menace from the face of Kashmir.

Firstly, all detunes jailed for their involvement in militancy or on suspicion, must be tried properly in a legal court to affirm or nullify their alleged crime. Only then, can their fate be decided in a democratic way.

As a member of one working group constituted by the Honourable Prime Minister in 2007, I had strongly advocated that those frustrated Kashmiri boys who had crossed over to Pakistan administrated Kashmir to receive training in use of arms, are now quite eager to return home, join their separated families and spend rest of their lives peacefully.

Their comeback should be facilitated both by the Central and the State governments. Constant police surveillance can be there to check their routine activities. Gradually, they will themselves turn to a normal life.

There should be a strict ban imposed on the forces for their resorting to reckless use of force while dealing with the peaceful protesters. The declaration of zero tolerance assured by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh before the Kashmiri people should be adhered to in letter and spirit.

As was repeatedly demanded by the previous government headed by Mufti Mohammad Sayed, the Indian paramilitary forces, now largely the Central Reserve Police Force, be withdrawn from the cities and towns to be replaced by the State police. This will undoubtedly reduce instances of human rights violations being committed all over the State. This popular demand has not met with any positive response. Needless to mention here that the imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in force in the State since 1990 does not empower or authorise the State authorities to initiate any inquiry against the forces including the army, the BSF, the CRPF and other paramilitary troops.

The author can be reached at: gulkhayal@yahoo.co.uk

Tags:Human rights, India, Indian armed forces, militants, Mirwaiz Molvi Farooq, protesters
Posted in Human rights, India, Kashmir, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The Spectacular Return of Gandhi’s Spectacles

March 7, 2009

By Badri Raina | ZNet, March 7, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

I

Gandhi’s spectacles did go under the hammer in New York for money.

And money bought them back for India.

The Mahatma (great soul) wished the Capitalist class to perform as the “Trustees” of the nation’s interest.

As the premier Gandhian, Vinobha Bhave, was to write of Gandhi’s equation with Scientific Socialism: “Socialism wishes to advance by setting class against class, Gandhism by cutting across classes.”

Well, the whisky magnate, air-line and stud farm-owning industrialist, Vijay Mallya, may or may not be a trustee of the nation’s interest, but he surely has paid more than a million dollars to retrieve Gandhi’s spectacles etc.

India of our days may have only an archival interest in those spectacles, but Mallya surely will benefit. Frontline entrepreneur that he is, his vision is sharp.

He may even set up a huge enterprise cloning those spectacles for the global market. And global celebrities may pay for them more than handsomely as well. And then walk the ramp. Them spectacles could become the best business going.

The powers-that-be, after all the melt-downs, still devoted to neo-liberal economics, may claim during the forthcoming general elections that they did not let the Mahatma’s spectacles fall into foreign hands as mere commodity, even if it barely sees eye to eye with the eye that saw through those spectacles.

Asked once how any individual may assess and evaluate the rightness or wrongness of a course of action, the Mahatma responded with his famous talisman:

Ask yourself, he counseled, whether the thought you think or the action you contemplate has any benefit for the most wretched of faces you may ever have seen, and if the answer is “yes” know that you are in the right path.

As the number of Indian billionaires burgeons, and the gulf of inequity between the top and the bottom widens forever, it beggars the imagination to claim that the Indian state has been a devoted votary of that talisman.

But, on another front, what is a nation without heritage?

The word “memorabilia” is of course a dead give-away.

It connotes at once that he/she whose effects we gather and embellish is a memory, rather than something that impels our present thoughts and actions as a living force.

Yet, the more fallible we are, the more good memories and tough ideals we need.

Plagiarising the poet, Browning, a man’s memory must exceed his greed, or what is our striving for.

There are times when a twitch of memory may reclaim us from the excesses we are about to commit. It sort of lends a Kantian distance to our embroiled subjectivity.

And memory expanded manifold is after all what we call history-which is something quite distinct from a chronology of past events.

And it may even now be rather impossible to conceive of India’s modern history without reference to Gandhi, however we may work that hermeneutic. Indeed, the more he nags us, even if as an unpleasant toothache, the better our gastronomical functions might become.

III

To illustrate.

I was once asked by a perfectly well-intentioned bigot why I retained my commitment to socialist ideals, since socialism was now all a memory.

Naturally, this was several years before now, when Capitalism is fast on the way to becoming one as well,–a memory, I mean– and when Das Kapital is suddenly the highest selling work in Europe and Karl Marx on the cover of Time Magazine.

I sighed back in shamefaced agreement, but posed a question back to him as well.

You seem to me a very religious man, I said, and a good one at that. Of course, he shot back with glee, and some satisfaction at my percipience.

So, do you often go to the temple?

Ever since I was a child.

That would make it some fifty odd years. Yes.

Which means you must have seen god more than once?

Alas, that good fortune I haven’t had.

And yet, I said, you keep visiting the temple? I do, he answered with pride.

In other words, you continue your devotion to something you have never seen, but advise me to abandon that which I and the world have, and which continues to exist in one shape, colour, or form, here, there, and elsewhere?

That indeed was the end of that.

Which is to say, Gandhi did exist and walk the earth, even when, as Einstein had prognosticated, many find it hard to believe that such a one did so.

And not only did he walk the earth, he led a movement for freedom from colonial oppression in a way that seems today to have come to invalidate other ways of seeking freedom from oppression.

So that the more violence the world sees and perpetrates, without finding the ends that the violence is directed to achieve, the more Gandhi stands validated.

The more that the glaciers melt and the oceans rise, and the forests disappear, and draught and flood answer the sophistries of the profit-maximizers, the more all of that underscores the simple truth that Gandhi enunciated: “the earth has enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.”

The more that organized bigotry backed by big money takes mankind away from god, the more Gandhi’s pluralist pieties seem vindicated, warts and all.

I recall once asking a colleague at Madison, Wisconsin-a seventh-day Baptist he was– what he thought might be Gandhi’s fate on Judgment day, remembering that he was one man who carried the Sermon on the Mount everywhere he went, and sought to live Christ’s simplicities.

He took not a second to answer that he (Gandhi, that is) would be damned, not having been baptized.

Jesus, are you there, and listening?

Further, the more that technologies calculated to free us from necessity actually bind us into unfreedom, the more we may recall what Gandhi said of freedom:
ask not what you are free from, but free for.

So, what of the warts I spoke of-his insistence that politics without religious inspiration must be evil, that the varna ashram (caste system) has a point to it, barring the reprehensible practice of untouchability, that the cow be seen as a panacea for all kinds of economic and moral maladies, that the rich have a place just as the poor, assuming economic democracy to be neither achievable nor perhaps desirable, that the village system be preserved in perpetuity, and so forth?

Here is my simple suggestion: take a cue from the old man and mount a Gandhian movement against all those warts. And most others as well.

Indeed, what many Civil Society Movements in India and elsewhere in the world seek to do in resisting authoritarian pogroms against democracy and human rights, against the degradation of the earth, against social evils of one kind or another, against corruption in political systems, bureaucracies, and big business, against armaments, polluting agents, war, after all, owe not inconsiderably to the legacy that the Mahatma left the world.

It remains for us then only to extend the reach of that legacy to resist the irrational and uncritical impulse of idolatry, of the impulse to justify his work everywhere without warrant, and to use his methods to rid his legacy of those warts.

Something of course that must require us first to imbibe as much as we can the daring selflessness and freedom from distorting personal ambitions, the conviction to refuse sectarian purposes and self-righteous loathing of the “other”, or the belittling impulse always to claim credit that so informed his life and work.

Now that his spectacles are back with us, how about we recall what he said to the Nawab of Junagarh when he made a gift of those glasses to the fleeing Nawab: “these are the glasses through which I saw my way to the freedom of India.”

That seems far more miraculous than anything in Harry Potter.

The paradox is that while India strains to recover those spectacles, it is governments and leaders elsewhere who talk passionately of his vision.

Gandhi said to Louis Fischer that he regarded himself a Communist, and that Communists after Marx had greatly distorted the spiritual force of the latter’s work and vision.

Hey, as the meltdown deepens everywhere, how about we begin to see our way to marrying the two-Gandhi and Marx-and see where that takes us.

What is there to lose, more than we have lost?
________________________________________________________________
badri.raina@gmail.com

Tags:caste system, Das Kapital, India, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, spectacles, untouchability
Posted in Commentary, Human rights, India | Leave a Comment »

The High-Minded Illiteracy Of the Indian Elite

March 1, 2009

By Badri Raina | ZNet, Feb 29, 2009

“No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law”

(Article 21, Constitution of India)

The atavistic blood-lust of India’s corporate-media elite has again been to the fore.

Same “premier” English channel; same “top-billed” programme (viz., Face the Nation), same uninterruptibly high-pitched compere, shriekingly anguished about the State’s less-than-murderous response to terrorist crimes.

Question posed for the day: should the lone Pakistani terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, now in Indian custody and duly chargesheeted, be given a fair trial? To wit, does he deserve to be so given etc.,

Argument: since everyone saw the chap on video going about his terrorist business, do we not need only to find the most convenient lamp-post to hang him by?

Indeed, does it matter what the Constitution of the Republic of India stipulates in matters of life, liberty, or death? And, in any case, should not an elite mob have the privilege to consider the Constitution amended through high-minded soundbyte? A self-evidently patriotic procedure that would save the state much money, and peremptorily assuage the damaged prestige of the wounded clan of celebrities who, after all, speak for the whole nation—slumdog and all; at the least those slumdogs who have now become celebrities.

Interestingly, we have not heard such lawless bloodthirstiness expressed in relation to the accused in the Malegaon terrorist blast case. Recall that those accused are also in custody, and have equally made admissible confessions with regard to their guilt. Indeed, in the latest of those confessions, Dayanand Pandey has averred that the money for the Malegaon terrorist act came from the ISI of Pakistan (no less), and through the agency of two senior leaders of the RSS, under the patronage and protection of the top man himself, namely, Shri Mohan Bhagwat.

A senior advocate on the programme clearly had a hard time balancing his soundbyte on the question posed about Ajmal Kasab, since he happens to be defending the accused in the Malegaon case.

Much as he would have liked to concur with the compere, he must have known how indefensible his defence of Sadhvi Pragya Thakur— allegedly, one of the chief perpetrators of the Malegaon blast—would have instantly become had he been tempted by the force of his cultural sympathies to argue that the Constitutional provisions of due process and fair trial need not apply to Kasab. After all, what is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander as well—at least for a practicing lawyer!

The instructive inference from all this is the following: India’s fattened, free-market elite never tire of singing praises of India’s democratic system, and of cocking a snook at the poor relations next door in Pakistan and Bangladesh where democracy never seems to take root.

But to this day, some sixty years after the Republic came into existence via the adoption of the Constitution, the further thought that its founding stipulations with regard to freedom and equality are compellingly grounded in the rule of laws and in their impartial and non-partisan application has not sunk in.

Or the fact that even when the rights of people are circumscribed, that too must happen through the enactment of legislative procedures. Something that Indira Gandhi did during the infamous Internal Emergency of the seventies.

And remember what howls that raised among precisely the sorts of people compering the programme I have talked about!

So that when our no-nonsense elite laud the no-nonsense confinement of “vicious” people in Guantanamo, they do not stop to think why the now thankfully bygone Bush had to find a place for them outside the juridical limits of them United States of America.

Because had they been confined within the territory of the State, they would have automatically, as per American law, become eligible to all the procedures and privileges that American laws furnish to its own citizens.

And that circumstance would have disallowed both torture and kangaroo justice of the kind that our own madam compere seemed to think warranted in the case of Kasab.

III

Indeed, a further compliment is due to American democracy.

Study any American election post the dismantling of racist discrimination and segregation, and you will find that it is never a matter of debate whether laws should apply differently to different people. What those laws should be invariably is the crux of the contentions, in relation either to domestic or foreign concerns.

Alas, we are not there yet.

Thus, in law, white-skinned Americans or Britons or others who have gone over to the Al Qaeda are as much terrorists as those whose skin colour is different, or who espouse a different faith. Those that did the Oklahoma killings found few voices that claimed that they could not be terrorists because they were white and Christian-born. Certainly, no TV channel spoke for them.

India is a different matter altogether: do we not hear from honourable right-wing leaders who aspire to lead the governance of the Republic that Hindus cannot be terrorists, because, being Hindus they must ipso facto be regarded as “nationalists”?

The sort of reason, after all, why no mention of the Malegaon accused—all Hindus—came up at all in the programme I have alluded to.

Or why the killers of the Bombay pogrom of 1992-93 or of Gujarat, 2002 are sought to be viewed through glasses of another make.

Imagine that even after the Special Investigation Team (SIT) mandated by the Supreme Court of India to reinvestigate some of the more unconscionably gruesome episodes of the Gujarat pogrom has reported on affidavit how the state machinery upto its eyebrows was complicit in the pogrom, how a senior minister of Modi’s cabinet, one thought especially close to him, was on the scene of the carnage, distributing swords to the mob and firing from her own pistol, how two of the most upright police officers swore to being asked by Modi personally to lay off the Hindu leaders of the pogrom, none of India’s premier channels has squeaked even to ask for the concerned minister to resign, not to speak of Modi to be indicted! Do recall that during the Gujarat pogrom, among the rapes and hackings, a woman’s womb was cut up and the foetus flung from the point of a sword.

To this day, no one, least of all Modi, has expressed regret, not to speak of owning up responsibility. Even as the chief perpetrators continue to roam free, the state has sought at every step to subvert the procedures and reach of the law—all that testified to by the SIT.

If anything, don’t you know, the same Modi is the cynosure today of some of India’s leading industrialists, and of TV channels busily projecting him as the most desirable candidate to be India’s Prime Minister.

Let it be said that even under the Bush regime, this would never have happened in America.

The Hindu-elite-Indian’s take on the regime of laws and jurisprudence is illustrated literally everyday, of course, in one circumstance or the other But here is another notable instance, also pertaining to Gujarat.

Some months ago, the POTA Review Committee examining the cases of some 135 Muslims who have been rotting in Gujarat’s jails for seven long years as persons allegedly culpable in the Godhra train-burning episode under provisions of that draconian Act (since repealed by the current Indian government), determined that the Act did not apply to these persons, since the train-burning event did not qualify as a “terrorist” Act in the first place! The Committee held that the violence ensued as a consequence of an altercation between the karsevaks (the goons who were returning home after demolishing the Babri mosque, and traveling ticketless as well), and the vendors on the railway station at Godhra.

A finding that has since been upheld first by the Gujarat High Court, and now by the Supreme Court.

Any Gujarat heads rolled for this perfidy? Not a one. Any TV channel ask for such a head or two to roll? Forget it. They are all Muslims, after all! And Modi is the engine of a projected Hindu Rashtra (Theocratic Hindu State), one that promises much to billionaire fat-cats out to make further killings in socially neutered conditions.

Futile to recount what screams go up among the channels here when some elite suspect is held by the police just overnight in confinement, provided of course he is not Muslim.

India thus, in truth, is a democracy-in-the-making. Thankfully, a vast enough civil society remains fully engaged in ensuring that in addition to voting every five years, this democracy learns to recognize and accept that unless Indian democracy is also to descend to the arbitrary cronyisms of those that it fatuously derides, it must learn to embrace without question the tenets of citizenship, of universal human rights, and the dispassionate and egalitarian principles of equality before the laws, regardless of caste, creed, gender, language, or class which the Constitution mandates.

All this while many well-to-do Indians who have milked Indian democracy to the hilt thus far seem hell-bent to make of it a handmaiden to hate-filled, sectarian agendas, in addition to the interests of the class they represent and speak for.

Consider that everyday some right-winger or other is heard to scream why Afzal Guru, sentenced to death in the Parliament attack case, is still alive; but never asks the same question about Murugan, sentenced to death for the Rajiv Gandhi murder several years prior to the Parliament attack!

Simple enough reason: the one raises the possibility of causing an electorally fruitful sectarian divide among the polity, the other does not. So much for justice. And so much also for the corporate channels who never mention Murugan, even as Afzal is pressed into the service of talk shows and such-like intended to favour the communalists.

That the NDA government, led by the Hindu right-wind BJP (1998-2004) never did anything to carry out the Afzal or the Murugan sentences is of course another matter that concerns the media but scantily.

The fact is that even some Rajas and Mughal Kings of old had a more non-partisan devotion to the dispensation of justice than many of those who fulminate on behalf of Indian democracy in our day. Who more memorable than Jehangir as a dispenser of impartial justice?

________________________________________________________________

badri.raina@gmail.com

Tags:Ajmal Kasab, Babri Mosque, Gujarat, India, lawlessness, Malegaon terrorist blast, Narendra Modi, Oklahoma killings
Posted in Human rights, India, Muslims, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Israel now India’s top defense supplier

February 16, 2009

By Yaakov Katz | The Jerusalem Pos t, Feb 15, 2009

Israel has overtaken Russia as the main defense supplier to India after breaking the $1 billion mark in new contracts signed annually over the past two years. According to news reports, Russia had averaged sales of $875 million annually to India for the past 40 years.

The Spyder air defense system at an exhibition.

In August, India’s defense ministry approved a $2.5b. joint IAI-Rafael deal to develop a new and advanced version of the Spyder surface-to-air missile system. In March, India is scheduled to receive the first of three new Phalcon Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS) developed for the Indian Air Force by Israel Aerospace Industries. The sides are in talks for the possible purchase of another three AWACS.

The Phalcon (phased array L-band conformal radar) was designed and manufactured by Elta. It includes radar, electronic intelligence systems, and communication equipment. It has already sold a similar system to the Chilean air force. IAI last week displayed at the Aero India defense expo its new third-generation AWACS based inside a small G550 Gulfstream business jet.

“We have a very special defense relationship with India. It’s now moving toward joint development of equipment. There are several new projects in the pipeline,” Maj.-Gen. (res.) Udi Shani, head of the Defense Ministry’s SIBAT Defense Export and Cooperation Agency said in an interview with the Indian press last week.

Israeli defense officials said that in the past decade, the countries have signed deals reaching a whopping $9b. “There is close cooperation and the Indians respect Israeli systems and our experience in fighting terror,” one official said.

Another system India recently purchased from Israel is the aerostat radar to help defend the country against attacks like the ones in Mumbai in November in which the attackers infiltrated the city by sea. The radars will be deployed in strategic points to provide advance warning against incoming enemy aircraft and missiles. The deal is valued at $600m.

The EL/M-2083 Aerostat radars are a simpler version of the Green Pine radar, made by Israel Aerospace Industries, and used by the Arrow missile defense system. The phased-array radars are mounted on blimp-like balloons tethered to the ground and capable of detecting intrusions earlier than ground-based radar systems.

Following the Mumbai attacks, Israel and India also agreed upon the joint development of medium-range surface-to-air missiles (MRSAM) for the air force.

Tags:India, Israel, Israel Aerospace Industries, joint projects, Russia, Spyder surface-to-air missile system, Yaakov Katz
Posted in India, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

Germany, 1933 / Gujarat, 2009

January 23, 2009

the Triumph of Positivism

By Badri Raina, ZNet, January 23, 2009

Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page

Epigraph:

“what matters today is to preserve and disseminate freedom rather than to accelerate . . . the advance towards the administered world”

(Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment)

Just the other day, at the “Vibrant Gujarat” conclave in Ahmedabad, two of India’s leading industrialists, Anil Ambani and Mittal, speculated from public platform what a radiantly developed country India could become were Narendra Modi to be made the “next leader of India” (read Prime Minister).

At which memories of a similar conjuncture in the Germany of 1933 came rather rushingly to the fore.

Jackson J. Spielvogel tells us how Hitler “knew that to fulfill his foreign policy goals he needed the technological skills of the industrialists and capitalist industry itself.”

Thus he was to appoint Reichsbank Schacht as the new president of the Reischbank, “staunch defender of capitalism, which certainly reassured business and industrial leaders about Hitler’s economic direction. Fortunately for Hitler, Schacht was also an astute financier willing to use his many talents to benefit the Nazis” (Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History, Prentice Hall, 1988).

Sure enough, the Krupp family and a bevy of other industrialists were drafted to set Germany on the autobahn course, leading eventually within a year to a massive attention to rearming the Reich, and everything that followed, as Jews came to be seen to constitute the sinister fifth column of the Bolsheviks, threatening to capture the German economy and the state.

In our own Gujarat, it is not so much foreign policy that Modi has in mind as the domestic ascendance of a Fascist pattern of development that might in course of time yield him the position of the chief CEO of the country.

And, although such thinking has come to permeate the whole Indian state, what makes Gujarat stand out for the captains of industry is the social ground that Modi has prepared since the pogrom of 2002.

Briefly, a graveyard of peace where Modi’s administration faces no opposition from any quarter—other political parties, labour organizations, tribals, what-have-you; and where the least voice of dissent from within his own party, the BJP, is put down with no-nonsense repression. Add to that a totalitarian control over investigative agencies, state apparatus, and large sections of the judicial apparatus—the sort of objective conditions that have led the Supreme Court of India repeatedly to intervene in their maladroit operations and to refer both the investigation and juridical determination of cases related especially to the Muslim Gujaratis to agencies outside the state, or to special task forces directly under its own aegis.

As to the media, Gujarat is one place where the most puissant of them can be put into the doghouse: for example, when recently the Times of India did an expose on the Police Commissioner of Ahmedabad, charges of sedition—no less—were slapped on the those who ran the local edition of the newspaper.

State agencies like the Collectorate of Police, the Charity Commissioner, not to speak of party fascios, are used to terrorise individuals and groups who show the gumption to work on behalf of the poor, the minorities, or the other marginalized sections. Not to speak of the intimidation meted out with full state support to artists, film-makers, other cultural practitioners whose work is seen to transgress or question the preferences of a traditional, high-caste Hindu order of things.

Modi’s satraps routinely take recourse to the argument that having won elections, Modi has proved his legitimacy—an argument that is denied to the repeated and impressive victories scored by the Left in West Bengal, Lalu Prasad in Bihar, Shiela Dixit in Delhi, and so on, victories that have not had the underpinnings of a fascicised, majoritarian produce of hate to propel them. Yet the world knows that Modi’s electoral victories have resulted from a Hitlerite polarization of the majority Hindus against, not the Jews but the Muslims?

Nowhere in India, for these reasons, does the road to “development” and profit-maximisation seem as smooth to the industrialists as it does in Gujarat. As to the living indices of common Gujaratis, and of the relegated sections and victims of communal pogroms especially, how are they material to the story of “vibrant Gujarat”?

III

Adorno and Horkheimer, seeking in 1944 to understand what could explain the transmogrification of Europe from Enlightenment reason to Fascism, were to theorise how a “tireless self-destruction of enlightenment hypocritically celebrated by implacable fascists and implemented by pliable experts in humanity” had taken place—a process calculated to to turn “thought into commodity” and “language into a celebration of the commodity.”

Indeed, in a whole section devoted to the media. A&H were to show brilliantly, long before Marshall McLulan, how that decline of Enlightenment humanism into reified class interest was to turn the message into the substance, thus scoring a mythical and fraudulent triumph of “communicative reason” to which such votaries of that reason as Habermas have remained cruelly oblivious.

Given that the Indian bourgeoisie that supported the anti-colonial freedom movement, far from producing any European-Enlightenment moment of opposition, not to speak of sustained opposition, to the social/mythical weltanshuuang of the old feudal classes, simply incorporated the past into both their own lives and into the political manipulations of the anti-colonial movement, the Gujarat variety of fascism could the more easily marry instrumentalist positivism with social stasis and rootedness.

A structure of inherited prejudices and organized corporate religion have, thus, been brought to buttress commodified reason rather than thwart its virulently benumbing operations.

A & H were to point out that “if enlightenment does not assimilate reflection in this repressive moment, it seals its own fate,” as “motorized history” furthers the “oblivious instrumentalization of science.”

And, with uncanny pertinence to the contemporary Indian situation: “in the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the spell of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia. . . the weakness of contemporary theoretical understanding is evident.”

This decline of the Enlightenment into an unreflective and despotic positivism ensures that “the flood of precise information and brand new amusements make people smarter and more stupid atonce.” Brilliant formulation if ever there was one.

Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944,1947,1969,2002, the last in Edmund Jephcott’s excellent translation) was thus intended as a “critique of enlightenment…to prepare a positive (rather than “positivist”) concept of enlightenment which liberates it from entanglement in blind domination.”

Put another way, this project was to liberate the enlightenment from the extensions it was to find in the work of Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche—all of that leading to Fascism and Nazism.

In our own case, the event in Gujarat suggests the long road still to be taken first to arrive at the Enlightenment moment, and then to disabuse that moment of its instrumentalist, anti-democratic hegemony, both tasks ominously coterminous rather than sequential. And all that almost exclusively the onus of a weak organized Left and civil society organizations that often find both the state and the classes that kow-tow to it in concerted antagonism.

Imagine that even as India’s leading industrialists think it mouth=wateringly desirable that Modi be set-up as the Prime Minister (by which term they intend really the CEO of the state reconceived as a Corporation), here are some facts about common life in Gujarat:

–one of the lowest gender ratios in demography in terms of females to males;

–one of the highest rates of female infanticide;

–girls raped by teachers for better grades, and in govt., hostels;

–boys mysteriously murdered in religious ashrams;

–vigilante violence against young people wishing to cohabit or marry across communities or castes, all duly ignored by state agencies;

–a “freedom of religion” law that infact punishes change of religion;

–denial of ordinary civic rights to Muslims who are denied both trade rights and housing in up-market areas dominated by Hindus;

–organised lying about developmental indices: e.g concealment of the fact that it is one of the most indebted states in the country; that industrialists are attracted by government subsidies given to them; that no more than some 23% of MOUs signed with them since 2003 are actually in the pipeline; that the waters of the Narmada still do not reach the most needy regions of the state; that thousands have been displaced from the banks of the Sabarmati river to make way for the Sabarmati River Front Development Project; that fisher folk find themselves ruthlessly dispossessed without alternative recourse;

–that Dalits continue to live in inhuman conditions;

–that massive numbers of children remain enslaved in the labour force;

–that official school text books continue to be full of distortions of history and other myths and inaccuracies;

–that in contrast to a national average of 66%, only some 59% of rural children can read;

–that right-wing Hindutva groups may put up bill-boards anywhere proclaiming “Hindu Rashtra”;

And so on.

(see “Vibrant” Gujarat: Lies, Half-Truths and Illusions, The Gujarat Reality Today,” by Fr.Cedric Prakash, Director of Prashant, Ahmedabad based Jesuit Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace.)

Yet none of this figures in the calculations of the big-wigs who celebrate “vibrant” Gujarat.

True to this pattern of cutting-edge technological development nestling next to areas of abysmal social darkeness are neighbourhoods like Noida and Gurgaon in the National Capital Region.

These are areas that have some of the highest crime rates in the country, such as include daylight abductions, rapes, robberies, road-rage killings, honour killings of young women—and men—who dare defy the traditions laid down by caste groups and panchayats, and other forms of violence engendered by a culture of new affluence married to the prejudices of a feudal world-order.

A pattern entirely to the convenience of investors and industrialists who wish for great leaps in technological development but think any application of the scientific ways of thinking about social and cultural issues first a nuisance and then a potential threat to the flow of their operations.

As Marx had foreseen, the bourgeoisie may have, in Europe especially, made ruthless use of science in dethroning the regressive weltanshuuang of the feudal classes, but once in power, the last thing they desired was to see science carried further forward to scrutinize the weltanshuuang of their own class.

From about the end of the eighteenth century, science had to have but one use: the exploitation and mastering of natural resources for the ploughing of surpluses at whatever social cost. And the chief source of surplus being wage labour.

Gujarat under the Narendra Modi dispensation offers just about the most perfect scenario for so doing. It also boasts one of the lowest rates of wage labour!

What fitter candidate for India’s Prime Ministership?

________________________________________________________________

badri.raina@gmail.com

Tags:Badri Raina, Dalits, Gujarat, Hindu Rashtra, India, Muslim Gujaratis, Narendra Modi, Nazi Germany, the Krupp family
Posted in Commentary, imperialism, India, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

David Miliband comes under fire over Kashmir

January 22, 2009

From The Times, January 22, 2009

Philip Webster and Jeremy Page

David Miliband was at the centre of a diplomatic row with India last night after officials and ministers protested about the Foreign Secretary’s words and body language on a visit to Delhi.

Indian officials told The Times that they were upset by his suggestion, made in a newspaper article and in private discussions, that the disputed region of Kashmir was the root cause of terrorist attacks such as that in Mumbai. In the article on Thursday last week, Mr Miliband wrote: “Resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms.”

One senior Indian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “The long and short of it is that he did manage to ruffle a few feathers. It was both the content of the message and the way it was delivered — the body language.”

India has long rejected international involvement in Kashmir, over which it has fought two of its three wars with Pakistan since independence from Britain in 1947. Indian officials were also angered by Mr Miliband’s assertion at a press conference in Delhi, and in private conversations, last week that there was no evidence that the Pakistani state directed the Mumbai terror attacks.

The dispute threatens to overshadow the current visit by Lord Mandelson, with one senior Indian official publicly voicing his reluctance to appear at an event attended by the Business Secretary.

One Indian newspaper reported yesterday that Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, had written to Gordon Brown to complain about Mr Miliband, though officials denied that.

Vishnu Prakash, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: “We do not need unsolicited advice on internal issues in India like Kashmir.”

Jairam Ramesh, the Minister of State for Commerce, said that he almost stood up Lord Mandelson at an event on Monday.

“I didn’t feel like going,” he said, adding that he had called Pranab Mukherjee, the Indian Foreign Minister, on Sunday to ask whether he should attend and was told that he should go, but should make his point.

Mr Mukherjee, who met Mr Miliband last week, tried to play down the row yesterday when he spoke to reporters at a security conference.

“When the Foreign Secretary of the UK visited us he shared his perceptions about the situations, and I equally told him and all the interlocutors that this is your perception,” he said. “We do not share this perception.”

A senior British diplomat said that Mr Miliband had not spoken out of line or diverged from British policy. He added however that India, along with Israel, was a country where whatever a Foreign Secretary said, there was always a risk that it could upset domestic political sensitivities.

Tags:David Miliband, India, Indian officials, Kashmir issue, Mumbai attacks and kashmir
Posted in Commentary, India, Kashmir | Leave a Comment »

INDIA/PAKISTAN: Kashmir Jittery Over Prospect of War

January 20, 2009

By Athar Parvaiz | Inter Press Service

Anti-war protests in Srinagar.

Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

SRINAGAR, Jan 19 (IPS) – As war clouds hover over India and Pakistan, anxiety levels have risen in Kashmir, often described as the bone of contention between the South Asian neighbours

Bellicose posturing by the two countries, following the Nov. 26-29 terror strikes in Mumbai, has, according to analysts here, the potential of spiralling into yet another one of a series of wars fought over the territory by the two countries, created in 1947 following the decolonisation of the sub-continent.

”War between India and Pakistan appears to be a possibility given the course the two countries have taken,” Mohammad Sayeed Malik, a well-known, Srinagar-based political commentator told IPS. “If not checked, it may reach a point of no return and actual war would be impossible to avoid.”

The Mumbai attacks, which left 180 people dead, rudely interrupted the ‘composite dialogue,’ begun in February 2004 after the nuclear-armed neighbours restored diplomatic ties – downgraded in reaction to a similar armed attack on India’s parliament in December 2001.

Accusing Pakistan-based militant groups, Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), for staging the attack on Indian parliament, India massed troops along the border in the largest military mobilisation since the two countries went to war in 1971.

The LeT, set up to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, has now been implicated in the Mumbai attacks as well by India and by United States officials and analysts who have also linked it to Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence.

In the aftermath of the 2001 attack, war between the neighbours was avoided by intense diplomatic activity led by the United States. But it took until February 2004 before the composite dialogue process – a serious effort aimed at confidence building, normalisation of bilateral relations and dispute resolution – could be put into place.

The peace process brought better diplomatic, trade and people-to-people contact across the 298-km, fenced and fortified Line of Control (LoC) that divides Indian Kashmir from the Pakistan-administered part of the territory and has served for decades as the de facto international border.

Most significantly, for people living along the LoC, the peace talks brought about a cessation of the constant exchange of artillery fire by the Indian and Pakistani armies across the border. Scores of civilians have been reported killed, maimed or displaced by the destructive exchanges.

“After the ceasefire, we had been living in a comfortable manner without any fear, but now we might again have go through the traumatic times before the ceasefire,” Rustum Gelani, a resident of the border town of Tangdar, told IPS over telephone.

Reports from the other towns near the LoC such as Uri and Poonch suggested that people were close to panic. “We would appeal the two countries to maintain the ceasefire,” said Abdul Gafoor, a resident of Poonch.

People living along the road leading to LoC in Tangdar, Uri and Poonch have reported seeing deployment of troops and equipment for several days now. “More military and machines are being stockpiled on the LoC… it looks like war is brewing up,” said Neik Mohammed, a resident.

Army officials have downplayed the activity as part of routine exercises, normally conducted at this time of the year. But one defence source said the moves were ”precautionary measures as our neighbour Pakistan is mobilising troops on its side of the border”.

Malik said that should war break out between India and Pakistan, Kashmiris would be the worst sufferers; socially, economically and politically. “It would wash away all the gains of the five-year-old peace process. The positive mood in the aftermath of the peaceful elections in Kashmir may vanish into thin air,” he said.

“During and after Gen. [Pervez] Musharraf’s rule, Pakistan had made quite a lot of progress in disengaging itself from active involvement in Kashmir… a war could reverse it,” Malik added.

Civil society and NGOs have been busy urging India and Pakistan to work towards de-escalating tension and peace-building. “We call upon India and Pakistan to sign the convention and treaty to ban production, stockpiling and use of cluster munitions and landmines,” said ActionAid’s Arjimand Talib, a peace activist.

”A war would seriously dent efforts at poverty eradication in the region and shift focus from development to further militarisation,” Talib added.

“After India felt that international pressure had started working on Pakistan, it has helped bring down tension levels. This should have been enough, but since India’s elections are just round the corner, one can’t be sure that the war hysteria will come down,” said Malik.

Tapan Bose, secretary general of the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD), told IPS that public anger projected in the media carried the danger of precipitating war, forgetting that ordinary people would suffer the consequences most.

“We have been so overwhelmed by the war jingoism of the media and sections of the state and upper middle class [because they were hit by the Mumbai attacks] that we forget what the peace process means for thousands of ordinary people,” Bose said. ”Who speaks for them?”

Tags:danger of war, India, Kashmir, Mumbai terror, Pakistan
Posted in Commentary, imperialism, India, Kashmir, Pakistan, Peace Movement, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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