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India’s Reckless Road to Washington Through Tel Aviv

December 24, 2008

By VIJAY PRASHAD | Counterpunch, Dec 23, 2008

On Thursday, November 27, in the middle of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Imran Babar, one of the terrorists, called India TV from Nariman House. He used a cellphone that belonged to Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the co-director of the Chabad-Lubavitch Center. The following day, Babar and his associates killed Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka. The phone call he made was not long. Babar opened with a comment that made little sense to most people: “You call [Israel’s] army staff to visit Kashmir. Who are they to come to J &K [Jammu and Kashmir]? This is a matter between us and Hindus, the Hindu government. Why does Israel come here?”

Little is known of Babar’s babbles outside the confines of Hakirya, the “campus” of the Israeli high command, and of South Block, which houses the Indian External Affairs and Defense ministries. What he referred to are the growing military and security ties between India and Israel. As well, he might have referenced the now rather solid links between the Hindu Right and the Israeli Right, and how their view of the conflicts that run from Jerusalem to Srinagar mirror those of the jihadis like Babar. Imran Babar and his fellow terrorists come to their critique from the standard anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism that blinds many aggrieved jihadis. Rather than make a concrete assessment of their grievances, they take refuge in as mythical a world as sketched out by the Israeli Right-Hindu Right, where Jews, Hindus and America are arrayed against Muslims.

That the terrorists attacked the Chabad-Lubavitch Center has renewed the call to see the commonalities between the victims of terrorism, whether those in a Haifa restaurant or a Mumbai train, between 9/11 and 11/26. To do so flattens out a significant differences, and reduces the violence to their acts themselves rather than to the social context that leads people to acts of terror. Mumbai provokes the Right to seek recourse to the solutions of war and surveillance, methods that might create a moment’s sense of security before the wily adversary finds a new technological means to strike back. There is no common technical solution: better sniper rifles or iris scanners, better intelligence databases or cattle prods. The weapons used to deal the fatal blow to the terrorists are also incubators of a new generation of terrorists. This is an elementary lesson, lost to those who seek the silver bullet.

Why Does Israel Come Here?

On September 10, 2008, Israel’s top army official, General Avi Mizrahi landed in New Delhi. He met with India’s leading army, navy and air force officials before leaving for a short visit to Jammu and Kashmir. Mizrahi, a long-standing officer in the Israeli Defense Force, lectured senior Indian army officers at the Akhnur Military Base, near the Indo-Pakistan border, on the theme of counterterrorism. Later, in Srinagar, Mizrahi and his Indian counterpart, Army Chief Deepak Kapoor agreed to joint counterterrorism activities, notably for Israeli commandoes to train Indian soldiers in urban combat.

The Mizrahi visit in 2008 is not extraordinary. He had been to India in February 2007. In June 2007, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky brought a team of IDF officers to Jammu and Kashmir, where they met senior Indian officials at the 16 Corps headquarters at Nagrota in the Jammu region near the India-Pakistan border. Kaplinsky’s team discussed the problem of infiltration, how militants from the Pakistani side enter the India. The 720-kilometer barbed wire fence, an echo of Israel’s wall, has not prevented the transit of militants. Kaplinsky came to push other, high-tech means, such as night-vision devices, to help interdict militants. En route to Israel, Kaplinsky’s team went to the Mumbai-based Western Naval Command.

In January 2008, to continue these contacts, the IDF’s chief, Brigadier General Pinchas Buchris came to India and met the top civilians and the top brass. They discussed the procedures to share intelligence on terrorist activity. A week after Buchris returned to Israel, India’s Navy Chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta spent time in Jerusalem, meeting IDF heads Gabi Askhenazi and Buchris. Between 2007 and early 2008, all three Indian defense chiefs visited Israel. The framework for these meetings is the 2002 agreement to form an Indo-Israeli Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism, a long-standing attempt to create an entente between the armies of India and Israel, and to consolidate the immense arms trade between the two countries (India is now Israel’s largest arms buyer).

The impetus for the relations goes back to the 1990s, when the governing Congress Party began to dismantle the dirigiste Indian State and to withdraw from India’s long-standing non-aligned policy. The Congress government believed that it was time to reassess its relations with the United States, and that the best way to get to Washington was through Tel Aviv. Stronger ties with Israel might soften the reticence in Washington toward India, and lead it to loosen its bonds with Pakistan and China. India banked on Israel to play the broker with Washington. (This is the argument of my book, Namaste Sharon: Hindutva and Sharonism Under U. S. Hegemony, New Delhi: LeftWord, 2003).

In January 1992, the Indian government recognized the state of Israel. The next month, Defense Minister Sharad Pawar called for Indo-Israeli cooperation on counter-terrorism. Israel’s Director-General of Police Ya’acov Lapidot visited India for an international police convention, and returned to Israel with news that the Indian government wanted Israeli expertise on counter-terror operations. Government spokesperson Benjamin Netanyahu told India Abroad (29 February 1992) that Israel “developed expertise in dealing with terrorism at the field level and also internationally, at the political and legal level, and would be happy to share it with India.” In the Congress years, the main arena of cooperation came in arms deals, as India’s massive purchases provided stability to Israel’s previously volatile arms industry.

When the Hindu Right came to power in the late 1990s, it hastened both the economic “liberalization” policy (with a Minister for Privatization in office) and it shifted its attentions to Washington, DC and Tel Aviv: an axis of the three powers against what it called Islamic terrorism was to be the new foundation of India’s emergent foreign policy. The close relationship between Netanyahu (then Prime Minister) and L. K. Advani (the Home Minister of India, and a brigand of the Hard Right) smoothed the path to intensive collaboration. Advani admires Netanyahu’s personal history as a member of the Sayeret Matcal (special forces) unit of the IDF; Advani himself has no such on-the-ground experience. In 1995, when in Israel, Advani happily received Netanyahu’s new book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism.

Advani has since made it his practice to quote from the book, particularly the view that a “free society must know what they are fighting,” which is the “rising tide of Islamic terrorism.” This was all honey in Advani’s ear. He drew the central concepts of his counter-terrorism policy from his friends in the Israeli government: a wall at the border, threats of “hot pursuit” across it; demur against political negotiation, escalation of rhetoric; limits on civil liberties when it comes to suspects in terror cases. Netanyahu had purposely refused to distinguish between Iran and Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood. Advani too began to collapse the distinction between Kashmiri separatist groups and post-Afghan war terror outfits based in Pakistan, between aggrieved Indian Muslims and Pakistani proxy forces. As well, Netanyahu and Advani crafted a stage on which to enact an endless battle between Democracy and Terrorism, where the role of Democracy is played by the United States, Israel and India and where the role of Terrorism is played by Islam. It is all simple and dangerous.

During his June 2000 visit to Israel, Advani underscored his adoption of Netanyahu’s framework during a lecture at the Indian Embassy. “In recent years we have been facing a growing internal security problem,” he said. “We are concerned with cross-border terrorism launched by proxies of Pakistan. We share with Israel a common perception of terrorism as a menace, even more so when coupled with religious fundamentalism. Our mutual determination to combat terrorism is the basis for discussions with Israel, whose reputation in dealing with such problems is quite successful.” Advani invited a team of Israeli counter-terrorism experts to tour Jammu and Kashmir in September 2000. Led by Eli Katzir, an aide to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the team conducted a feasibility study of India’s military security needs and offered suggestions for Israeli assistance. Three years later, Israel and India signed a military-arms pact that included a specific training mission. Israeli forces would train four new Special Forces battalions of the Indian Army; other battalions would learn the practice of “irregular warfare” and work with the Northern Command in Kashmir.

When the Hindu Right lost the election in 2004 to a Congress-led alliance, the pace of contacts lessened. With both Advani and Netanyahu in the shadows, the alliance lost its main champions. The Congress government recognized how toxic this alliance would be, unnecessarily inflaming an already difficult relationship with Pakistan. This was also recognized within Israel. Efraim Inbar, director of Israel’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, who is actively involved in the Indo-Israeli contacts, recognizes the political problem; “this kind of cooperation needs to be secret if it can be,” he told Newsweek. The military and arms deals between India and Israel continued, even if it was now treated as a sideshow. India remains a major importer of Israeli arms. What lingers in the shadows is the Israeli work in Kashmir. Little is officially revealed of it, even as leaks here and there hint at the extent of the contacts.

Technocrats of Terrorism.

Ami Pedazhur, a political scientist from the University of Austin-Texas, joins the chorus on the New York Times op-ed page with suggestions for the Indian government after Mumbai (“From Munich to Mumbai,” December 20). Rather than see anything new in the Mumbai attacks, Pedazhur conjoins it with an unbroken history that stretches back at least to the 1972 Munich attacks. What links Munich to Mumbai is neither the identity of those who kill nor those who are killed, but the means by which the killing occurs. Analysts of terrorism, like Pedazhur, are technocrats of counter-terrorist actions. They study how terrorists operate, and so what best security and military force can constrain them. The public policy that stems from this sort of technocratic view of terrorism has one end, to restrain the terrorist with more security checkpoints, more hot pursuit.

Why does the Indian government take advice from a government whose own security services have a dismal record of preventing terror attacks and whose own armed forces have failed to create stability on its borders? Israel’s weaponry works fine. But Israel’s counter-terror expertise is questionable. Pedazhur takes pride in Israel’s counterterrorism policy. What pride there can be in a regime that maintains its safety through a ruthless military strategy is questionable. The Israeli government, regardless of the party in charge, is conspicuous not only for its treatment of the Palestinians but also, significantly, for its failure to create a secure society for its own citizens. It is easy enough to make the Palestinians the author of the troubles, but this of course ignores the intransigence of Israel’s political leadership to produce a settlement. Because it cannot make a political peace, the Israeli authorities have perfected various technological means to minimize the consequences of its failures. This is what it wishes to export to India. For India, the imports signal the surrender of its leadership to the current imbroglio. Gated countries wallow in fear and hatred.

The costs of the Tel Aviv-New Delhi-Washington axis are too much to bear, at least for India. India cannot afford to mimic Israel’s failed neighborhood policy, nor can it follow the U. S. example that seeks to solve its problems by aerial bombardment. South Asia requires a regional solution to what is without doubt a regional problem, one with its roots in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s as much as the unresolved Kashmir question (with close to a million troops in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian government runs what is tantamount to an occupation – they provide the opposite of security for the residents of the state). When the Afghan civil wars came to a unjust quiet in the early 1990s, the various foreign fighters returned to their homelands, emboldened by their self-perception of their victorious struggle: they went to Chechnya, the Philippines, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and into the Kashmir struggle. Pakistan and India are equally victims of these veterans of the jihad, and both have a vested interest in their demobilization. But more than that, there is a danger that as the U. S. amps up its war in Afghanistan and treats Pakistan with contempt, the jihadis  will take out their wrath with the same kind of ferocity as they demonstrated in Mumbai. Rather than risk a failed military strategy against the jihadis, it is time for a regional conference on human security, one that includes better cooperation between the states and a program for the lives of those who are driven to the compounds of hatred through their many, many grievances.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

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RIGHTS-INDIA: New Anti-Terror Laws Draconian Say Activists

December 22, 2008

Analysis by Praful Bidwai | Inter Press Service

NEW DELHI, Dec 19 (IPS) – Following the late November terror attacks in Mumbai, India has passed two tough laws being seen by rights activists as potentially eroding the country’s federal structure and limiting fundamental liberties.

Parliament — meeting under the shadow of the November 26-29 attacks on India’s commercial hub resulting in close to 200 deaths — approved the legislations on Thursday with no considered debate and the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pushing them past amendments tabled by several parliamentarians.

One law, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) Act, seeks to establish a new police organisation to investigate acts of terrorism and other statutory offences.

The other, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment (UAPA) Act, radically changes procedures for trying those accused of terrorism, extends the periods of police custody and of detention without charges, denies bail to foreigners, and the reverses the burden of proof in many instances.

Civil liberties activists and public-spirited citizens are appalled at the new laws, which they describe as draconian and excessive in relation to the measures India really needs to take to fight terrorism.

“The UAPA Act is particularly vile, and will have the effect of turning India into a virtual police state,” says Colin Gonsalves, executive director of the Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network. “It basically brings back a discredited law, the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 (POTA), except for admitting confessions made to a police officer as legal evidence.”

POTA was an extremely unpopular law, which the UPA government abrogated upon coming to power in 2004 in response to innumerable complaints of its selective and discriminatory use against India’s Muslim minority, and its cavalier and irresponsible application to offences not even remotely connected with terrorism.

While rescinding POTA, the UPA kept in place all of India’s criminal laws, which are much stricter than those in many democracies.

In addition, it also enacted an amendment to the Unlawful Activities Act, 1967, which increased punishment for committing acts of terrorism and for harbouring terrorists or financing them, enhanced police powers of seizures, made communications intercepts admissible as evidence, and increased the period of detention without charges to 90 days from the existing 30 days.

However, this was not enough to please those who want a “strong” militarised state which will prevent and punish terrorism by violating the citizen’s fundamental rights, including the right to a fair trial, and not to be detained without charges.

India’s main right-wing political group, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has been stridently demanding that POTA be re-enacted. Until recently, the UPA, the Left and other centrist parties stood firm in rejecting the demand despite the numerous terrorist attacks that India has suffered over the past few years.

“But now, the UPA has suddenly, and shamefully, caved in to the BJP’s demand under the pressure of elite opinion,” says Jairus Banaji, a highly regarded Mumbai-based social scientist. “The capitulation seems to be based on the UPA’s anxiety to counter the BJP’s ridiculous charge that it lacks the will to fight terrorism, and on its political calculations about the next general election due by May.”

In its desperation to be seen to be taking a tough stand against terrorism, the Manmohan Singh government also tabled the NIA Bill earlier this week. The new agency will specifically investigate offences related to atomic energy, aviation and maritime transport, weapons of mass destruction, and Left-wing extremism, besides terrorism.

Significantly, it excludes Right-wing terrorism, which has become a greater menace in India.

Unlike the existing Central Bureau of Investigation, which needs the consent of a state before investigating crimes there, the NIA will not need a state’s concurrence. This is a serious infringement of the federal system, where law and order is a state subject.

Many state governments and regional political parties have sharply criticised the Act on this count. In India, Central agencies are politically vulnerable to manipulation by New Delhi and often used to settle scores with states ruled by opposition parties.

The NIA Act also provides for special courts to try various offences. This too has drawn criticism from eminent lawyers such as Rajeev Dhavan, who argues that the potential misuse of this anti-terror legislation will now “come from both the states and the union, which can hijack the case”.

The UAPA Act contains a number of draconian clauses, and is also applicable to the entire country — unlike the Unlawful Activities Act, which was originally not extended to the strife-torn state of Jammu and Kashmir. This too has drawn protests from Kashmir-based political parties and human rights groups.

The stringent clauses cover a broad range, including a redefinition of terrorism, harsh punishment extending from five years’ imprisonment to life sentence or death, long periods of detention, and presumption of guilt in case weapons are recovered from an accused person.

The new definition now includes acts done with the intent to threaten or “likely” to threaten the unity, integrity, security or sovereignty of India, and offences related to radioactive or nuclear substances, and even attempts to overawe, kidnap or abduct constitutional and other functionaries that may be listed by the government. Dhavan says: “The list is potentially endless.”

Under the Act, an accused can be held in police custody for 30 days, and further detained without charges for 180 days, although courts can restrict the period to 90 days.

“This is a travesty of constitutional rights and the rule of law,” says Gonsalves. “Even worse is the presumption of guilt in case there is a recovery of arms, explosives and other substances, suspected to be involved, including fingerprints on them. The police in India routinely plants such arms and explosives, and creates a false record of recovery.”

“The very fact that offences such as organising terrorist training camps or recruiting or harbouring terrorists carry a punishment as broad as three or five years to life imprisonment shows that the government has not applied its mind to the issue,’’ Gonsalves added.

Under the Act, there is a general obligation to disclose any information that a police officer of a certain rank thinks is relevant to the investigation. Failure to disclose information can lead to imprisonment for three years. Journalists are not exempt from this.

Besides making telecommunications and e-mail intercepts admissible as evidence, the Act also denies bail to all foreign nationals, and mandates a refusal of bail to anyone if a prima facie case exists, which is decided on the basis of a First Information Report filed by the police.

POTA and its predecessor, Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), were extensively abused. They typically targeted the religious minorities, specifically Muslims, and allowed for their harassment and persecution.

The TADA story is especially horrifying. Some 67,000 people were arrested under it, but only 8,000 put on trial, and a mere 725 convicted.

Official TADA Review Committees themselves found the law’s application untenable in all but 5,000 cases. In 1993, Gujarat witnessed no terrorism, but more than 19,000 people were still arrested under TADA.

Religious minorities were selectively targeted under both Acts. For instance, in Rajasthan, of 115 TADA detainees, 112 were Muslims and three Sikhs.

Gujarat had a worse pattern under POTA, when all but one of the 200-plus detainees were Muslims, the remaining one a Sikh.

The passing of the two new laws is certain to increase the alienation of India’s Muslims from the state. They have been the principal victims of India’s anti-terrorism strategy and activities in recent years.

Muslims are first to be arrested and interrogated after any terrorist incident, even when the victims are Muslims, and although strong evidence has recently emerged of a well-ramified pro-Hindu terrorist network, in which serving and retired army officers were found to be key players.

Muslims also distressed at the alacrity and haste with which the new laws were passed, especially since it contrasts with the UPA government’s failure to enact a law it promised five years ago to punish communal violence and hate crimes targeting specific religious groups.

“This will pave the way for more disaffection amongst Muslims and make the social and political climate more conducive to terrorism,” argues Gonsalves. “Even worse, it will promote excesses of the kind associated with state terrorism. And that is no way to fight sub-state terrorism.”

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India’s Long But Sure Revolution

December 15, 2008

By Badri Raina | ZNet, Dec 14, 2008

I

Few things about contemporary India have been as consequential as the excruciating churning among Indian Muslims. Consequential, as I suggested in an earlier column, as well for Muslims worldwide (see my “Fatwa Against Terrorism,” ZNet, June 8, 2008).

Remarkably, where vested segments among Hindu organizations have sought to move the majority community towards undemocratic closures, it is the beleaguered Muslim counterparts that have been showing the way to greater democratic consolidations.

Transcending a clutch of grievance and hurt, Indian Muslims are today truly in the leadership of Indian democracy—a day I have been wishing for and writing about for over two decades and now live to see.

And this long revolution that is underway is no sham or tactical occurrence. There is stern substance to the Muslim resolve not merely to appeal to the Constitutional regime as supplicants but indeed to function as its foremost guarantors in close clasp with secular and democratic Indians across communities.

There is to me something heroic in the way in which India’s Muslim citizens have over the last two years especially sought to redefine themselves in relation to the worldwide ummah and the nation at home. All that despite the most irksome provocation.

It is the rigour of that introspection which today translates un-selfconsciously into a rejection of ungodly mayhem carried out ostensibly in defence of the faith, even as Indian Muslims along with millions of other Indians remain cognizant, as they ought to, of the oppressive forces that alternately both create and denigrate religious and cultural reaction—forces that reside both outside India and among comprador social interests at home.

II

If the discovery earlier of terrorist perpetrators with Hindu names had paradoxically helped to relieve the unmitigated odium vented on Muslims, obliging right-wing fascists, rather abjectly, to mirror a helpless Muslim discourse in their defence, the vanguard role played by Indian Muslims in condemning the attack on Mumbai on behalf not just of common humanity but of India has led to a still more far-reaching historical consequence.

This watershed secular assertion has had the effect of taking the stuffing out of what electoral expectations the right-wing Hindu BJP came to harbour in the wake of the Mumbai attack.

Its emphatic losses in the states that went to the polls after the terrorist strike scream a grassroot rejection of its communal politics. And of the ugly callousness that informs it.

However wedded to the BJP, India’s corporate media have had the sense to welcome this occurrence, as it now banners the slogan that terror must never be politicized. Better late than never.

It will not be long before the residual interests of India’s capitalist class and collaborative elites in retaining denominational politics, notwithstanding their often disingenuous noises against communalism, will also have to yield to propagating secular democracy in more convincing ways.

Always wary of class consolidations from “below”, India’s political class will, nonetheless, sooner than later, find it as expedient to be in the forefront of the fight against communalist politics as they are now against terrorism.

And, as these histories ripen and fructify, the credit in overwhelming measure will go to Indian Muslims and to the leadership they are now furnishing.

Prophesies can come good only as products of dedicated human labour. As India’s Muslims now come together with the great mass of other secular Indians, that labour is truly underway and destined to succeed.

III

In the aftermath of the Mumbai attack, this writer, like many others, has received agonizing notes from compatriots in Pakistan.

And they ask the question: can any Pakistanis truly have been involved? Is this again a “nationalist” outcry from India? Do we not realize how wistfully fragile the democratic experiment in Pakistan is, and how ambushed from all ends?

I say to them that Indian Muslims truly show the way as much to Pakistan now as they do to India.

If their leadership in India helps to render toothless and dysfunctional entrenched evils at home, it carries an equally important message to Muslims in Pakistan.

Do not simply jerk into unanalysed, Pavlonian “Muslim nationalist” reactions to what has happened.

Go rather back to the insight that Jinnah had voiced in his address to the very first session of the Assembly of the new nation of Pakistan.

In short, however the partition of India may have been brought about by vested interests on all sides, revisit the “two-nation” theory, revise the Constitution, and be reborn as a secular nation-state. In that future alone resides the well-being of the subcontinent and of much more.

Same must be the counsel for Bangladesh, indeed more especially. Given that the territory could not stay put as part of an “Islamic Pakistan,” it is an irony that upon that severance Bangladesh should still want to espouse a theocratic statehood.

If Nepal could do it why not others?

IV

Meanwhile, it is gratifying that the UPA regime in Delhi has thus far not succumbed to the brainless jingoism of the South Mumbai crowd and those in the establishment who view that jingoism with favour.

There is now a political elite in India that requires ATM-like solutions to historical conundrums. Push in that card and pull out the required political currency, as it were. Drop the bomb and warn them not to drop their’s etc., All very profoundly slick, no doubt, but eminently ignorable. As in money-making, the shortest of short cuts is recommended—and with educated bluster in the English language.

Nonetheless, it is that Dhoni from Jharkhand who may be trusted with bringing victory to India, because less slick and more astute. And more hard-working as well. As much in politics as in cricket.

Luckily, there does exist a constituency in the Indian establishment that truly realizes that every Indians’ best interest is served if India serves the best interests of most Pakistanis. No easy job that, but increasingly both desirable and possible, since answering constituencies also speak up from Pakistan as they did not before with quite the same conviction.

Such a praxis on either side, and conjointly, must seek to isolate from public sympathy, public space, and all kinds of state favour those that find democracy ill-suited to their purposes, but misuse it nonetheless. Or make opportunist disclaimers when it suits them, as Sonal Shah is doing this minute, fearing she may be shunted out of the Obama transition team were she not to do so in time.

And it must equally seek to distance democracy in the subcontinent from superpower interests that work their nefarious way by alternately feeding the cupidities of entrenched classes or threatening disastrous military reprisals.

They ought to be referred back to the problems they have at home, dime a dozen, and indeed encouraged to change course.

In that context, President-elect Obama’s resolve to be sworn in not just as “Barack Obama” but as “Barack Hussein Obama” is a most worthy and visionary step in the right direction.

It is not that in so doing Obama will have become a Muslim; it is that he will be saying that religious denominations are simply the donnee of individual identity, and need have no bearing on our citizenship or entitlements thereof. As Colin Powell was to say honourably enough during the campaign.

The worry is, as John Pilger has pointed out in a recent ZNet article, that Obama’s appointments to the cabinet seem thus far to suggest a pattern of “continuity” rather than “change.” Surprised?

All the more reason therefore for us on the subcontinent to learn to consolidate our own lives and institutions along principles that bring the most benefit in terms of non-sectarian social and cultural cohesion, collective secular endeavour, and enlightened economic democracy spread amongst the widest commonality.

The more we embrace that sort of historical project together, India and Pakistan can begin to draw away from wasteful militarism that feeds the pockets only of those that retain a value for conflict and destruction, and learn to stand up to threats as two nation-states but one people.

And that includes the Kashmiris as well, who have just been demonstrating their allegiance to the principle of democracy in unprecedented ways.

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The Kashmir issue and the violence in the Indian subcontinent

December 10, 2008

Nasir Khan, December 8, 2008

Almost the whole world has condemned the Mumbai attacks of November 2008. Such terrorism has also, once again, reminded us how important it is to combat the forces of communalist terror and political violence in the Indian subcontinent. But what is often ignored or suppressed is the fact that there are deep underlying causes of the malaise that erupts in the shape of such violent actions; the unresolved Kashmir issue happens to be the one prime cause that inflames the passions and anger of millions of people.

However, to repeat the mantra of “war on terror” as the Bush Administration has done over the last eight years while planning and starting major wars of aggression does not bring us one inch closer to solving the problem of violence and terror in our region. On the contrary, such short-sighted propaganda gimmicks are meant to camouflage the wars of aggression and lay the ground for further violence and bloodshed. The basic motive is to advance imperial interests and domination. The so-called “war on terror” is no war against terror; on the contrary, it has been the continuation of the American imperial policy for its definite goals in the Middle East and beyond. Obviously any serious effort to combat terror will necessarily take into account the causes of terror, and not merely be content with the visible symptoms.

The unresolved issue of Kashmir has kept India and Pakistan on a dangerous course of confrontation since 1947, when the British raj came to an end and as a last act of charity to their subjects the imperial rulers agreed to divide India along communal lines that was to prove a Pandora’s box for the coming generations. We had witnessed their double-dealings in the process when they gave their blessings and patronage here and there and a lot of mischief wherever possible especially while they drew the boundaries between the two emerging countries. The recipients of favours reciprocated in kind: the last viceroy Lord Mountbatten was made the first Governor-General of Free India! This carefully crafted expedient arrangement served its purpose well for one country at the cost of the other.

At the time of partition, the princely State of Jammu and Kashmir was ruled by the Hindu Dogra ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh who was the great-grandson of Gulab Singh, to whom the British, under the terms of the Treaty of Amritsar (1846) had sold the entire valley of Kashmir. Because the overwhelming majority of Kashmir was Muslim, it was thought that Kashmir would  join the new state of Pakistan. When the Kashmiris from what came to be  known  as Azad Kashmir and the tribal fighters from the North Western Frontier Province of Pakistan started a guerilla offensive on the state to bring pressure on Hari Singh to join Pakistan, he asked Lord Mountbatten for help, who agreed to give military help if the ruler joined India. Thus started the first war between India and Pakistan that finally stopped in 1949 when the newly-formed United Nations Organization arranged a ceasefire. The Line of Control was established that has remained the de facto boundary between the Indian-controlled Kashmir and ‘Azad’ (Free) Jammu and Kashmir (but called Pakistan-occupied Kashmir by the Indians).

To affect a ceasefire, in 1948, India took the matter to the Security Council of the United Nations against Pakistan. As a result the Security Council passed three resolutions in 1948 and 1949 that also acknowledged the rights of the people of Kashmir about whose land the two countries were fighting . According to the resolutions, India and Pakistan were to hold plebiscite in Kashmir so that the people could decide their own future. The Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru promised that the people of Jammu and Kashmir would gain independence when the peace was restored. After the end of the hostilities, he did not keep his word; neither were the terms of the resolutions ever fulfilled. The Indian government granted a special status to Kashmir that allowed more internal autonomy. This was thought to pacify the people when Kashmir’s ruler joined India. But the promise to hold plebiscite was not kept and the successive Indian governments have adamantly held that Kashmir is an integral part of India, and all demands of the Kashmiri people for plebiscite or defying Indian occupation were presented as internal Indian matters. No third party was allowed to speak on behalf of the Kashmiri people or voice their legitimate demands under the UN Charter or the UN resolutions. Meanwhile India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir another war in 1965.

The grievances of Kashmiris had accumulated over the decades. Kashmiris challenged the legitimacy of the Indian occupation and in 1989 they started armed struggle to evict the occupiers. Mass arrests, disappearances and violence followed in the wake of the military crackdown. India deployed more than 500,000 soldiers to suppress the Kashmiri Muslims.

According to conservative accounts Indian forces killed about 78,000 people and  brutalized the whole population, but the Kashmiri sources put the number of those killed  around 100,000. In this militant struggle, Kashmiri Hindu minority, the Pandits, also became the victims insurgents; according to the state government over 200,000 fled the valley. They sought refuge in Jammu and some fled to India. The conditions under which the Pandits have lived since their displacement have been deplorable. But it is heartening to see that all sections of Kashmiri Muslims and their leadership are now pleading for the return of their Hindu brothers to their homeland.

After 18 years of brutal military occupation, the Indian government was faced with a new situation. The Kashmir Jehad Council called for an end to armed struggle and instead appealed to all militant freedom-fighters to use only non-violent and peaceful means to achieve liberation from India. The call for Azadi (freedom) is getting louder which the Indian machine guns and their marauding forces are not able to drown. But the Indian rulers have shown little willingness to listen to the people and have kept a tight military stranglehold over the Kashmir Valley.

The Kashmir conflict has caused untold misery and destruction in Kashmir, both in life and property. It has also been the key cause of tension between India and Pakistan as rivals. The tremendous drain of resources incurred by the two countries on military buildup and arms-race including the acquisition of nuclear bombs is a result of their confrontation over Kashmir. The official propaganda each government has directed against the other created enmity, distrust and hatred in the respective populations of these countries against their “mortal enemy”. This has gone on for over six decades and there is no end in sight. This has poisoned the minds of Indian and Pakistani people. As a result we see political polarization and perennial tensions amongst the people that stand in the way of settling the issues like Kashmir and the normalization of relations between the two neighbours. In addition, another ghastly development has been the rise of political and religious extremism in India and Pakistan.

The growth of religious and political extremism in India and Pakistan is not new. But what is new is the general acceptance of extremist tendencies in the social and political fabric of the two countries. The preachers and high priests of communalism and hatred influence the mainstream politics.

In India, some political parties have been closely allied with communalist militant political Hinduism or Hindutva. The Sangha Parivar is the umbrella organization for all Hindutva parties. The avowed aim of Hindutva has been to assert Hindu supremacy and Hindu communalism in India by identifying India with Hinduism and Hindu rule. Hindutva organizations are influenced by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which stands for a Hindu majoritarian rule. The Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) is the leading political party of India that stands for Hindutva doctrine and Hinduising the entire country. Jawaharlal Nehru had once warned that if fascism would arrive in India, it would arrive in the form of majoritarian (Hindu) communalism. His words and warning were almost prophetic.

Of course, the main targets of Hindutva have been the Indian Muslims in the first place, followed by low-caste Hindus–formerly “Untouchables” (!) and now called Dalits–, and Christians. Over 150-million Indian Muslims are a religious minority in India. Since the unfortunate circumstances that led to the partition of India in 1947, Indian Muslims have come under enormous pressure. They have gradually found themselves at the mercy of Hindus, politically marginalized and socially alienated in their own country. Even their national status and loyalties became suspect. They are “Muslims first”, so how can they be “true Indians”? And, why are they in Hindu India anyway if they don’t like India or complain about their lot in India? They can just pack up and go away. They are ‘Pakistanis’ and should migrate to their own country!

Such views and political developments in India have left Indian Muslims in an extremely difficult situation. In 1992, Hindu militants destroyed sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya while the state authorities stood idle by. The then Indian prime minister promised to re-build the mosque. The promised was not kept. Instead a temple was raised on the site of the destroyed mosque that provoked religious frenzy and communal passions. Three thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the ensuing riots.

Two thousand Muslims were massacred in 12002 in Gujarat, which was a full blooded pogrom which took place under the state government run by the BJP. The New Delhi rulers did not intervene to stop the massacre of Muslims.

Attacks on Muslim holy places and people have increased in the recent years. In one recent attack by Hindutva activists on a mosque a Hindu lieutenant-colonel of the Indian army was arrested for his involvement in the attack.

In Pakistan, fundamentalist religious parties have felt duty-bound to monopolise Islam, but they have never at any time gained much support in the masses. Their poor electoral results in various elections have clearly demonstrated that. However, Pakistani Muslim clerics have gained much notoriety for their inter-religious invective. The Sunni preachers direct their anger at the “infidel” Shias and the Shia preachers reciprocate by calling the Sunnis “infidels”! This leads to an unending cycle of violence and acrimony in the name of Islam. But the danger posed by militant Islamist groups in stirring violence and hatred is beyond doubt. However, the Indian treatment of the Kashmiri Muslims and the unresolved Kashmir issue because of Indian intransigence is universally condemned by all Pakistanis; it also provides an opportunity to the militant groups like Lasher-e-Taiba and others who exhort their followers to avenge the grievances of their Indian co-religionists at the hands of Hindutva militants as well as to make a stand for the freedom of Kashmir by all means, including violence. This is exactly what happened last month in the Mumbai attacks.

For the last six decades India has maintained its occupation of the Kashmir Valley by political manipulation and brutal military force. The massacres of the Kashmiri Muslims by Indian forces amount to war crimes under international law; however, the ultimate responsibility for this genocidal policy lies with the New Delhi rulers. If Indian government wants to continue with the occupation of Kashmir and also expect that people of Kashmir will forego their demands for freedom because they face a great military and economic power like India, which has extended its cooperation with other imperialist powers like America and Zionist Israel, then one thing is certain: the situation will get worse; violence and terror will flourish.

The 10-million Muslims of the Kashmir Valley want independence from Indian colonial rule and oppression. The best course left for India is to make a break with its previous policy, and accede to the right to self-determination of the Kashmiris. This will not weaken India; instead, it will show the strength of Indian democracy as well of the humane aspects of Indian cultural tradition.

Whether the people of the Kashmir Valley decide to join India or Pakistan, or they opt for full independence should be for them to decide. No matter what decision they make to determine their future as stipulated by the UN resolutions should be their and their alone. However, it is far from certain that they will choose to join Pakistan, but if they do so that should not worry India. In such a case, Hindu Jammu and Buddhist Ladakh will certainly join India. Thus, by a wise and courageous step Indian leaders can create the political conditions under which a new era of good neighbourly relations between India and Pakistan can materalise if they allow the people of the Kashmir Valley to control their own destiny instead of the inhumane treatment and humiliation at the hands of the Indian state and its armed forces. Once the main bone of contention between India and Pakistan is removed then the two former rivals and “enemies” can become friends and concentrate on socio-economic problems of their people within a peaceful atmosphere. An independent and self-governing entity in the Kashmir Valley will bring hope and good-will to its neighbours. By removing the biggest unresolved problem of Kashmir that has fueled hostility and has caused immeasurable damage, the two countries will also be able to contain the forces of communalism and religious fanaticism that plague India and Pakistan.


Nasir Khan is a peace activist. He is the author of Development of the Concept and Theory of Alienation in Marx’s Writings 1843-44 (1995) and Perceptions of Islam in the Christendoms: A Historical Survey (2006). He has his own blogs at http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com and  https://sudhan.wordpress.com through which he can be contacted.

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Mumbai attackers were ‘non-state actors’: Ambassador Haqqani

December 1, 2008

By Khalid Hasan | Daily Times, December 1, 2008

WASHINGTON: Pakistan’s ambassador Husain Haqqani told ABC in an interview on Sunday that those who staged the Mumbai attacks were ‘non-state actors’ and this is no time for India and Pakistan to blame each other but to work together to fight terroism.

In answer to a question, Haqqani said if India moves its forces to the border with Pakistan, it will leave his country no option but to take steps to defend itself. Troops will have to be pulled back from the border with Afghanistan “and nobody wants that”. He said the democratic government in Pakistan led by President Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani had “gone the extra mile” in reassuring the Indians that both countries being victims of terrorism, this was the time to forget past history and get together. In answer to another question about the initial Pakistani offer of dispatching the ISI chief to India, the ambassador said that the ‘rhetoric’ right now is such that it would not be the right time for a high-level meeting of that sort, but Pakistan has offered high-level intelligence cooperation to India. He added, “We will cooperate with the Indians in every detail if there is evidence that there is any link to anybody.” He said everyone in the world had come round to the view that the government and state of Pakistan and the military and intelligence services of Pakistan “are not directly involved” and that is the good news. If there are individuals, then there are individuals in the United States too, but that does not mean the United States is at fault. Haqqani said his government has gone the extra mile to reassure the Indian government that “we feel their pain”. He said there was ‘intelligence failure’ and “I think people have to look closer to home for that”.

Haqqani said the Mumbai attacks must not be viewed through the prism of past bitter Islamabad-New Delhi relations. “As two democracies we need to strengthen each other rather than fall into the trap of the terrorists who want us to fight with each other so that they can get greater strength,” he added.

Giving background, he said, “Pakistan and Afghanistan became the focus of jihad central many many years ago when they were all fighting the Soviets. So these people have roots in some remote parts of our country. They have spread those roots. Some of the efforts in the war on terror have not been successful. Our dictator, General Musharraf did not do the right thing to eliminating the terrorists but the new government is making its effort and our intelligence services are far better prepared. Pakistan is a victim of terrorism. India is a victim of terrorism. The victims need to get together. Forget about our bitter history,” he said.
Asked whether a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s team would be welcome to broker a compromise on the disputed area of Kashmir, Haqqani said Sen Hillary Clinton, Obama’s likely pick for Secretary of State, or anyone else would be welcome. “I think it’s about time that people put those arguments behind us and if anyone can help us do that that would definitely be a good thing,” he added.

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Mumbai atrocities highlight need for solution in Kashmir

November 30, 2008

    Jihadi groups will exploit Muslim grievances unless peace can be brought to the troubled state

  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 30 2008 00.01 GMT
  • The Observer, Sunday November 30 2008

Three weeks ago, in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar, I met a young surgeon named Dr Iqbal Saleem. Iqbal described to me how on 11 August this year, Indian security forces entered the hospital where he was fighting to save the lives of unarmed civilian protesters who had been shot earlier that day by the Indian army. The operating theatre had been tear-gassed and the wards riddled with bullets, creating panic and injuring several of the nurses. Iqbal had trained at the Apollo hospital in Delhi and said he harboured no hatred against Hindus or Indians. But the incident had profoundly disgusted him and the unrepentant actions of the security forces, combined with the indifference of the Indian media, had convinced him that Kashmir needed its independence.

I thought back to this conversation last week, when news came in that the murderous attackers of Mumbai had brutally assaulted the city’s hospitals in addition to the more obvious Islamist targets of five-star hotels, Jewish centres and cafes frequented by Americans and Brits. Since then, the links between the Mumbai attacks and the separatist struggle in Kashmir have become ever more explicit. There now seems to be a growing consensus that the operation is linked to the Pakistan-based jihadi outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, operates openly from his base at Muridhke outside Lahore.

This probable Pakistani origin of the Mumbai attacks, and the links to Kashmir-focused jihadi groups, means that the horrific events have to be seen in the context of the wider disaster of Western policy in the region since 9/11. The abject failure of the Bush administration to woo the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan away from the Islamists and, instead, managing to convince many of them of the hostility of the West towards all Muslim aspirations, has now led to a gathering catastrophe in Afghanistan where the once-hated Taliban are now again at the gates of Kabul.

Meanwhile, the blowback from that Afghan conflict in Pakistan has meant that Asif Ali Zardari’s government has now lost control of much of the North West Frontier Province, in addition to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, while religious and political extremism flourishes as never before.

Pakistan’s most intractable problem remains the relationship of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) over the last 25 years with myriad jihadi groups. Once, the ISI believed that they could use jihadis for their own ends, but the Islamists have increasingly followed their own agendas, to the extent that they now feel capable of launching well-equipped and well-trained armies into Indian territory, as happened so dramatically in Mumbai.

Visiting Pakistan last week, it was clear that much of the north of the country was slipping out of government control. While it is unlikely that Zardari’s government had any direct link to the Mumbai attacks, there is every reason to believe that its failure effectively to crack down on the country’s jihadi network, and its equivocation with figures such as Hafiz Muhammad Syed, means that atrocities of the kind we saw last week are likely to continue.

India meanwhile continues to make matters worse by its ill-treatment of the people of Kashmir, which has handed to the jihadis an entire generation of educated, angry middle-class Muslims. One of the clean-shaven boys who attacked CST railway station – now named by the Indian media as Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amin Kasab, from Faridkot in the Pakistani Punjab – was wearing a Versace T-shirt. The other boys in the operation wore jeans and Nikes and were described by eyewitnesses as chikna or well-off. These were not poor, madrasah-educated Pakistanis from the villages, brainwashed by mullahs, but angry and well-educated, middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively.

If Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is the most emotive issue for Muslims in the Middle East, then India’s treatment of the people of Kashmir plays a similar role among South-Asian Muslims. At the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the state should logically have gone to Pakistan. However, the pro-Indian sympathies of the state’s Hindu Maharajah, as well as the Kashmiri origins of the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, led to the state passing instead to India – on the condition that the Kashmiris retained a degree of autonomy.

Successive Indian governments, however, refused to honour their constitutional commitments to the state. The referendum, promised by Nehru at the UN, on whether the state would remain part of India, was never held. Following the shameless rigging of the 1987 local elections, Kashmiri leaders went underground. Soon after, bombings and assassination began, assisted by Pakistan’s ISI which ramped up the conflict by sending over the border thousands of heavily armed jihadis.

India, meanwhile, responded with great brutality to the insurgency. Half-a-million Indian soldiers and paramilitaries were dispatched to garrison the valley. There were mass arrests and much violence against ordinary civilians, little of which was ever investigated, either by the government or the Indian media. Two torture centres were set up – Papa 1 and Papa 2 – into which large numbers of local people would ‘disappear’. In all, some 70,000 people have now lost their lives in the conflict. India and Pakistan have fought three inconclusive wars over Kashmir, while a fourth mini-war came alarmingly close to igniting a nuclear exchange between the two countries in 1999. Now, after the Mumbai attacks, Kashmir looks likely to derail yet again the burgeoning peace process between India and Pakistan.

Kashmir continues to divide the establishment of Pakistan more than any other issue. Zardari might publicly announce that he doesn’t want to let Kashmir get in the way of improved relations between India and Pakistan, but Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is officially banned, continues to function under the name of Jama’at al-Dawa, and Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed continues openly to incite strikes against Indian and Western targets. At one recent meeting, he proclaimed that ‘Christians, Jews and Hindus are enemies of Islam’ and added that it was the aim of the Lashkar to ‘unfurl the green flag of Islam in Washington, Tel Aviv and New Delhi’.

Sayeed also proclaims that the former princely state of what he calls ‘Hyderabad Deccan’ is also a part of Pakistan, which may explain the claim of responsibility for the attacks by a previously unknown group named the Deccan Mujahideen. It is clear Sayeed appears to operate with a measure of patronage from the Pakistani establishment and the Zardari government recently cleared the purchase of a bulletproof Land Cruiser for him. When Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was yesterday asked on Indian TV whether Pakistan would now arrest Sayeed, he dodged the question answering: ‘We have to recognise that there are elements in every society that can act on their own.’

In the months ahead, we are likely to see a security crackdown in India and huge pressure applied to Pakistan to match its pro-Indian and pro-Western rhetoric with real action against the country’s jihadi groups. But there is unlikely to be peace in South Asia until the demands of the Kashmiris are in some measure addressed and the swamp of grievance in Srinagar somehow drained. Until then, the Mumbai massacres may be a harbinger of more violence to come.

• William Dalrymple’s Last Mughal won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Crossword Indian Book of the Year prize.

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Pakistan condemns Mumbai attack, offers cooperation

November 28, 2008

Zeeshan Haider

Reuters North American News Service

Nov 27, 2008 12:53 EST

ISLAMABAD, Nov 27 (Reuters) – Pakistan condemned on Thursday militant attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai that killed 107 people and promised full cooperation in fighting terrorism.

Relations between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan have warmed in recent years and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has made moves to improve ties further.

But big militant attacks in India always fan suspicion of Pakistani involvement, either by Pakistan-based militants or even its security agents.

Pakistan bemoans what it sees as knee-jerk blame.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed militant groups based in India’s neighbours, which usually means Pakistan, for the Mumbai attacks, raising fears of renewed tension.

Zardari and his prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, deplored the attacks in separate messages earlier on Thursday.

“President Zardari stressed the need for taking strict measures to eradicate terrorism and extremism from the region,” the state-run APP news agency said. Zardari, widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, came to power after February polls that restored civilian rule.

He wants to push forward a four-year peace process with India, launched after they nearly fought a fourth war in 2002.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who arrived in India on Wednesday for a four-day visit, said he was shocked and horrified by the “barbaric” attacks in Mumbai.

Noting a spate of attacks in Pakistan, including a suicide attack on one of Islamabad’s top hotels in September, Qureshi said all civilised societies had to work to fight with terrorism.

“Pakistan offers complete support and cooperation to deal with this menace,” he said.

KASHMIR DISPUTE

The use of heavily armed “fedayeen” or suicide attackers in Mumbai bears the hallmarks of Pakistan-based militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed, blamed for a 2001 attack on India’s parliament.

Both groups are banned in Pakistan. They made their name fighting Indian rule in disputed Kashmir and were closely linked in the past to the Pakistani military’s Inter Services Intelligence agency, the ISI.

Lashkar-e-Taiba denied any role in the attacks, and said it had no links with any Indian group. Instead, the little-known Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility.

A militant holed up at a Jewish centre in Mumbai phoned an Indian television channel and complained about abuses in Kashmir.

Pakistani Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar warned against a blame game with India.

“Nobody should blame anyone without any evidence and verification,” Mukhtar told Reuters. “We have nothing to do with these attacks. We condemn these attacks.”

The main dispute between Muslim Pakistan and mostly Hindu India is the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which both claim in full but rule in part.

Pakistan for years supported militants battling Indian forces in the disputed Kashmir region. It also backed the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, then military ruler Pervez Musharraf broke off support for the Taliban and reined in the Kashmiri militants.

Pakistan says it offers political support for what it sees as a freedom struggle by the Muslims of Indian-controlled Kashmir, where troops have been battling an insurgency since 1989. (Writing by Robert Birsel)

Source: Reuters North American News Service

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The Quest for Purity

November 25, 2008

Another Name for Fascism

By Badri Raina  |  ZNet, Nov 25, 2008


Epigraph:

I am not a fascist only when

I decimate all other kind;

I am a fascist when first I think

It is purity I have in mind.

(Badri Raina, Modest Proposal & Other Rhymes for the Times, Sahmat pub., Delhi, 2000)

I

These are confused times for India’s political Hinduism.

As the hours go by, the proverbial cunning of its leaderships across its many falanges experiences an exhaustion that surprises most of all the Sangh itself.

Having fooled millions over a century, it is astonished to find that it may at bottom have been the most fooled.

Adroit as it has been at double-speaking its way out of double-speak, the alleged involvement of its scions now in acts of terror renders it the mirror-image of those it never ceases to construct and condemn as its “other.”

Worse still, it is abjectly reduced to proffering in defence every single argument routinely proferred by its “opposite” number. And its self-righteous bluster that no Hindu can, by definition, ever be a terrorist rings hollow even among its loyal constituency, rebuke as such bluster does even the lowest form of common intelligence.

How much dent all that will or will not make in its electoral base must depend on some collateral factors, chiefly the further successes of investigative agencies, the fate of the cases in courts of law, and the quality of exertion on behalf of secular civil and political agencies to bring home the facts to the nation at large.

II

My ruminations here are occasioned by a statement made by the spokesperson of the All India Hindu Mahasabha (that most ontological of theoretical Hindutva over which Savarkar presided as the chief ideologue), Pravin Sharma to Times of India, online on 22nd Nov.,2008.

This statement characterizes the BJP as “an opportunist political party playing politics over terrorism”: clearly, neither the Congress nor the Left could have said more.

It then goes on to say: “Please ask the BJP, VHP, Bajrang Dal, RSS and Abhinav Bharat as to what contribution they have made for Hindus and Hindutva so far.” Fascinating stuff.

Taken together with media reports of confirmation of the truth of the allegation that the Sangh scions now in custody, alongwith an endocrinologist who works at a reputed private hospital in Delhi, were indeed plotting to murder two leaders of the RSS (see The Hindu, 23rd, Nov., p.10), the Congress seems well-placed in saying that there is currently a “civil war” under way within the Sangh Parivar.

But to return to the disillusionment expressed by the Hindu Mahasabha with all other falanges of the Hindutva brigade.

Just within a year of the framing of India’s secular-democratic Constitution, the RSS (Vatican of the Parivar) decided that it was not enough merely to engage Hindus in acts of “cultural” transformation towards hard-core Brahminical practices.

Such work needed to be done politically as well through the party-political system and electoral participation.

Thus was floated the Jana Sangh in 1951.

Sadly, the Hindu “purity” of its programmes (read anti-Muslim agenda) failed to yield any more than two seats to the Indian Parliament up until the end of the 1980s.

A declension from “purity” was thus indicated; and with that realization the BJP was born.

The BJP in turn was to discover that it did not have a constituency large enough even among India’s Hindus to reward it with an absolute ruling majority in the House of the People.

Indeed, it remains a significant pointer to the secular heart of India that this pro-Hindu party has never yet managed more than some 29% popular vote in any general election. And given that not more than some 3-5% non-Hindu voters are ever attracted to it, the conclusion is that some 65 or more percent of the Hindu electorate do not vote for the BJP.

Despite every species of public and ideological manoeuvre that the BJP and its individual leaders have attempted since the infamous Rath Yatra led by L.K.Advani, an aggressive Hindutva putsch that was to culminate in the watershed demolition of the four-hundred year old Babri mosque in 1992, the BJP has been unable to achieve state power in Delhi except in alliance with a plethora of other parties who hold no allegiance to the Hindutva telos.

Thus, if successful political intervention in transforming the Republic into a saffron hue has entailed a mitigation of its sectarian agenda, it has simultaneously found itself at the receiving end of purist injunctions from the RSS -Vatican in Nagpur, reminding it with frustrating insistence that its existence in the first place was to Hinduise the procedures and genius of the institutions of Indian democracy.

III

Imagine then the enormity of a situation where a still higher custodian, however self-assumed, of Hindutva “purity,” namely the Hindu Mahasabha, now feels impelled to find even the RSS fallen into impurity. And to a point where the alleged culprits now in custody felt warranted to do away with two of its leaders for doing little on behalf of Hindutva.

Another way of conceptualizing the dynamic of this narrative—the ruthless impulse to return to “purity”—is to say that it maps out vividly how democracies are sought to be shrunk from the expanded base of the political pyramid to its fascist point at the top.

And, European history of the last century teaches us how such impulses are sought to be validated by the “self-evident” and “transcedant” claims of some legend/myth of past glory, or some past wrong-doing, or, some self-assumed supremacy of race or religion, even biological purity, all peddled as unimpeachably pure “nationalism.” A whole package of “purity” that in turn warrants without proven mandate violent voluntary vigilantism, and triumphalist war once the state is captured.

What matters is that the illusory victimhood of the majority is first established, and then ascribed to the sinister scheming of the “other” who is seen to “pollute” the “purity” of the “real” nation’s life at every point.

That history also teaches us that these coercive shrinkages of democracy and the concomitant centralization of political power then go hand in hand with the centralization of Capital into a handful of monopolies.

And as the state and its economic arrangements defeat plurality and competition, the Dionysian “purity” of self-justifying authority is born.

In our time, this package of “purity” has been in evidence as the marriage between the pre-emptive claims of neocon imperialism and neo-liberal market fundamentalism, internationally. Christened “globalization,” its beneficiaries have been those at the top of the pyramid, and its victims spread over a base as wide as the world.

How much of that may change now remains to be seen. It is no small tribute to the American people that the consequences of that marriage should have disgusted them decisively enough to have joyfully elected as their President a talented young man from among the “other.”

IV

To return to India.

A remarkable dynamic counter to the re-centralizing, purity-oriented turmoil within the Sangh Parivar is currently at work among India’s Muslims. A dynamic that I venture bears the promise of defeating the renewed fascistic call of the Parivar more conclusively than anything else in view.

Ever since the Partition of India which still left this country with the world’s second largest population of Muslims (and yet a “minority”), India’s Muslims—with most of the elite gone over to the new country of Pakistan—bereft largely of secular leadership internally, have been at the receiving end of three sources of oppression: the animosity of the Sangh, the clout of Muslim clerical authorities, and the neglect by the state.

Invariably they have answered these oppressions in two principle ways: one, to band together qua Muslims, and to vote for political parties that could at the least ensure their physical safety.

With the coming to age of a new generation of Indian Muslims unburdened by personally experienced happenings of the Partition, the failure of the state to be wholly secular, especially in the wake of pogroms against them, and the rise of their aspirations as citizens to be equal partners in the productive processes of an improved national economy, the two habitual recourses noted above have come to be seen as wanting, even as the way ahead has seemed unclear and unconvincing.

It was with those contexts in mind that this writer had, as far back as 1990, made the following suggestion:

“Indian Muslims must. . .resist constructing their identities along a trans-Indian Islam. For one thing, it is only when this begins to happen that Hindutva can lose both its twisted rationale and its retrograde mass appeal. Muslims must, instead, join in with whatever democratic forces and movements are in operation in the regions in which they are located as parts of specific civil societies. Just as the critique of and opposition to majority communalist politics come increasingly from within the Hindu community itself, an invigorated Muslim democratic opinion must take on that role, not just in relation to Hindu communalists but Muslim as well.”

(”Pakistan, Kashmir, and the Democratic Agenda, “The Statesman, 6th May, 1990)

Recent trends have shown that this is increasingly becoming the praxis that Indian Muslims seek now to follow:

–Muslims now seek secular education up to the highest levels;

–Many young Muslim men and women are beginning to question social practices supposedly ordained by one clerical authority or the other;

–Muslims are increasingly and in great numbers part of civil rights activities that seek to deepen the values and stipulations enshrined in the Constitution, and to reinforce the non-discriminatory exercise of the rule of law;

–everyday, one influential Muslim social/cultural organization or the other, including clerical forums, publicly decry the resort to violence in any form, condemning the killing of innocents especially as “un-Islamic”;

–a joyful increase of Muslim faces is in evidence in the public arena, in the media, and in inter-community life generally;

–Indian Muslims, most of all, are beginning to recognize that it is in pluralist democracy rather than some loyalty to denominational “purity” that progressive prospects reside both for them and for the nation-state generally.

As should be obvious, all that subverts the fascist construction of Indian Muslims that has through the last six decades so suited the Sangh Parivar.

This particularly so because the new forward-looking, secular orientation among Muslims draws approval from large sections of ordinary Hindus who remain wedded to the principles on which the Indian state bases itself.

Just as the state as well feels impelled to look more honestly at the specific areas of neglect suffered by Muslims and formulates policies to redress them.

V

Sadly, the response of the Sangh Parivar to these developments seems to be to recede further into “purity” (emulating Muslim instincts up until now), rather than to say “how good that these changes are underway.”

And this is not hard to understand.

Whatever its rhetoric about Muslim exclusivity, the Sangh has never at bottom desired Indian Muslims to be incorporated into the full life of the nation-state.

Indeed such a prospect fills it with the apprehension that its pristine project of transforming India into a “pure” Hindu nation (much like the erstwhile Nepal, now so sadly fallen into secular republicanism) may indeed suffer conclusive rejection. If anything, its private anguish is caused by a sense of betrayal: despite the two-nation theory which led to the Partition of India, why should so many Muslims have chosen to stay back?

The BJP, however, to the extent that it is unlikely now to abandon its participation in Indian electoral democracy, wind up, and return to some cloistered Hindutva “purity,” has some far-reaching thinking to do.

Does it have the will to match the paradigmatic shift in Muslim attitudes and resolves?

Does it have the wisdom to finally own the foundational principles of the Indian Republic as much in conviction as it does in tactics, accepting or rejecting its operations only to the extent that these suit or do not suit its sectarian purposes?

In short, does the BJP have the courage to jettison the fascist “purity” enjoined upon it by its mentors, some among them now alleged to be terrorists, and rejoice in the tainted but humane, inventive, and inter-communitarian exertions of democratic creativity?

As things are, it may be idle of the BJP to think that the dynamics of an increasingly secular polity will forever keep a constituency of “purity” ready and available to it.

Consider that this is what was once stipulated in the Katha- Upanishad:

“Hope and expectation, good company and pleasant discourse, the fruits of sacrifices and good deeds, sons and cattle—all are taken away from that person of little understanding in whose home a Brahmin remains without food.”

(D.S.Sharma, The Upanishads: An Anthology, Bharti Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1975, p.43)

Today, many foodless Brahmins are happy to be alongside a Dalit Mayawati.

A History worth emulating in many ways.

________________________________________________________________

badri.raina@gmail.com

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Undeclared curfew imposed in occupied Kashmir

November 24, 2008
The News International, Nov 23, 2008
SRINAGAR: The authorities in occupied Kashmir have been continuing to keep the Chairman of All Parties Hurriyet Conference (APHC), Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and other Hurriyet leaders including Maulana Abbas Ansari, Agha Syed Hassan Al-Moosvi, Fazl Haq Qureshi and Bar President, Mian Abdul Qayoom under house arrest and resorting to strict measures to thwart the March towards Ganderbal.

According to Kashmir Media Service, the call for the March has been given by the Jammu and Kashmir Coordination Committee on the occasion of holding of 2nd phase of shame polls by the occupation authorities in six constituencies of Ganderbal and Rajouri districts.

Except these constituencies, undeclared curfew has been imposed in the entire Kashmir Valley and roads leading to Ganderbal have been sealed.

Heavy deployment has been made in Srinagar and other major towns of the Valley. All roads leading to Ganderbal have been sealed with barbed and razor wires and barricades.

The police and paramilitary personnel have been forcing people to remain indoor and patrolling the deserted streets to foil any attempt by Kashmiri people to assemble for the march.

In view of strict restrictions imposed by the authorities and a general strike called by the Coordination Committee, all shops and business establishments are closed.

The residents complained that security personnel are not allowing them to come out of their houses.

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Pakistanis fear U.S. collision with neighboring enemies

November 24, 2008

Kashmiri Muslims waiting to cast their votes in Ganderbal, Pakistan, in the outskirts of Srinagar, Sunday. (Tauseef Mustafa/Agence France-Presse)

MEMO FROM ISLAMABAD | International Herald Tribune, Nov 23, 2008

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.

That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.

“One of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan,” said a senior Pakistani government official involved in strategic planning, who insisted on anonymity as per diplomatic custom. “Some people feel the United States is colluding in this.”

That notion may strike Americans as strange coming from an ally of 50 years. But as the incoming Obama administration tries to coax greater cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against militancy, it can hardly be ignored.

This is a country where years of weak governance have left ample room for conspiracy theories of every kind. But like much such thinking anywhere, what is said frequently reveals the tender spots of a nation’s psyche. Educated Pakistanis sometimes say that they are paranoid, but add that they believe they have good reason.

Pakistan, a 61-year-old country marbled by ethnic fault lines, is a collection of just four provinces, which often seem to have little in common. Virtually every one of its borders, drawn almost arbitrarily in the last gasps of the British Empire, is disputed with its neighbors, not least Pakistan’s bitter and much larger rival, India.

These facts and the insecurities that flow from them inform many of Pakistan’s disagreements with the United States, including differences over the need to rein in militancy in the form of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The new democratically elected president, Asif Ali Zardari, has visited the United States twice since assuming power three months ago. He has been generous in his praise of the Bush administration. But that stance is criticized at home as fawning and wins him little popularity among a steadfastly anti-American public.

So how will the promise by President-elect Barack Obama for a new start between the United States and Pakistan be received here? How can it be begun?

One possibility could be some effort to ease Pakistani anxieties, even as the United States demands more from Pakistan. That will probably mean a regional approach to what, it is increasingly apparent, are regional problems. There, Pakistani and American interests may coincide.

American military commanders, including General David Petraeus, have started to argue forcefully that the solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, where the American war effort looks increasingly uncertain, must involve a wide array of neighbors.

Obama has said much the same. Several times in his campaign, he laid out the crux of his thinking. Reducing tensions between Pakistan and India would allow Pakistan to focus on the real threat — the Qaeda and Taliban militants who are tearing at the very fabric of the country.

“If Pakistan can look towards the east with confidence, it will be less likely to believe its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban,” Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last year.

But such an approach faces sizable obstacles, the biggest being the conflict over Kashmir. The Himalayan border area has been disputed since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and remains divided between them.

Pakistan’s army and intelligence agencies have long fought a proxy war with India by sponsoring militant groups to terrorize the Indian-administered part of the territory.

After the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan reined in those militants for a time, but this year the militants have renewed their incursions. Talks between the sides made some progress in recent years but have petered out.

Pakistanis warn that the United States should not appear too eager to mediate. First, they caution, India has always regarded Kashmir as a bilateral question. India, they note, also faces a general election early next year, an inappropriate moment to push such an explosive issue.

Second, some Pakistanis are concerned about the reliability of the United States as a fair mediator. “Given the United States’ record on the Palestinian issue, where the Palestinians had to move 10 times backwards and the Israelis moved the goal posts, the same could happen here,” said Zubair Khan, a former commerce minister who has watched Kashmir closely.

Continued  >>

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