SANSAD Public Forum

What’s at Stake in India’s Elections: Hypernationalism and its Victims

May 5: 2.00 pm – 4.00 pm

Room 7000 SFU Harbor Centre

515 Wes Hastings Street, Vancouver

Main Speaker: Navsharan Singh

Panelists: Harsh Trivedi and Lubna Moosa

Moderator: Dionne Bunsha

After five years of a hypernationalist government that spearheads the forces bent on transforming the India envisioned by the nationalist Gandhi and the Dalit leader Ambedkar and set on track by the constitution forged by Ambedkar, India is at a crossroads.

This forum will explore the developments in the past five years that have brought India to its current predicament, focusing on the threat of war, the military occupation in Kashmir, violence against Muslims and Dalits, political hijacking of state institutions, including police, judiciary, and education, arrests of human rights activists, attacks of journalists and journalism, and the use of media for repression.

Navsharan Singh is a women’s rights and human rights activist, who, works with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, in New Delhi. She has long been involved in the women’s movement in India and has written widely on women’s rights. She has been a core member of her father, Bhaji Gursharan Singh’s Amritsar School of Drama.She is the coeditor of Landscapes of Fear: Understanding Impunity. She has been travelling across India with the human-rights caravan, Karwan e Mohabbat to visit families of the victims of lynchings.

Dionne Bunsha is an award-winning author and journalist. She is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction book, Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat (Penguin India, 2006) about the aftermath of the communal violence in Gujarat. As a Senior Assistant Editor for Frontline magazine (www.frontline.in) in Mumbai, India, she travelled extensively to report on human rights, social justice and environmental issues.  Dionne writes for The Guardian, The Hindu newspaper, the New Internationalist, Guernica, Toronto Star and The Tyee. Dionne was a Knight International Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2008-09. Currently, Dionne coordinates a project mapping indigenous knowledge for Lower Fraser First Nations.

Lubna Yusuf Moosa teaches journalism at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She is the recipient of Navchetna Award for being the first Muslim woman to receive PhD in Communication and Journalism from the University of Mumbai. She worked for University of Mumbai as an Assistant Professor and served as a Reporter at All India Radio, before moving to Canada. As a reporter she reported for various beats and provided voice casts for national bulletins. She is actively involved in community service and volunteers for Options Community Services.

Harsh Trivedi is a student of political science and philosophy, recently graduated from the University of British Columbia. He writes a blog on international, Indian, Canadian, and US political affairs. He is a member of the board of SANSAD. He is concerned with issues of socialism, authoritarianism, and indigenous rights in India.

Contact/RSVP: Chin Banerjee, cbanerjee@telus.net

Together for Peace

Sunday, March 3, 4.00 pm – 6.00 pm
Holland Park (corner of King George Blvd and 100th Avenue), Surrey

Stop nationalist hysteria and warmongering in India and Pakistan. Stand up for solidarity and friendship across borders.

India and Pakistan are once again in the grip of nationalist frenzy with dangerous acts and rhetoric of mutual hostility. The sad killing of a large number of Indian soldiers in Kashmir by a suicide bomber has generated trans-border air strikes leading to the risk of military escalation. Kashmiri students and traders in India have come under attack. Media and political interests are stoking nationalist hysteria. Voices of reason are drowned by thugs and trolls. This has spread into the diaspora.

The people of Pakistan and India are one people with a shared history of millennia. There is no border in our cultures and religions. The political border created with the enormous bloodshed of partition has sadly been solidified into a wall with continuing mutual hostility, militarism, nationalist historiography, and demonization. These destructive and anti-people forces must be challenged. We must affirm the common interest of our peoples for peace, friendship, and freedom of movement and exchange.

We call for an immediate end to the acts and rhetoric of hostility between India and Pakistan. We commend the Pakistan government’s return of the captured Indian pilot as the opening of a move toward peace. We call for the resumption of the initiative toward peace embodied in the Kartarpur Corridor. We call on the governments of India and Pakistan to commit themselves to resolving all problems through dialogue. We call on the peoples of Pakistan and India and our people in diaspora to overcome the hostilities rooted in the violence of national division. We have a common interest in peace, social justice, and sustainable development that benefits all our people.

Organized by Committee of Progressive Pakistani Canadians (CPPC) and South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD), www.sansad.org
Contact: Shahzad, 604-613-0375; Chin, 604-421-6752

Edward Said and Palestine
Book launch: “Culture and Resistance” by Edward Said and David Barsamian
Saturday, February 23
2.00 pm -4.00 pm
Room 7000 SFU Harbor Centre
515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

The late Edward Said left an indelible mark on post-colonial studies with his book, “Orientalism” and taught generations to recognize the West’s constructions of its “other,” particularly in the Middle East and the Islamic world. As a Palestinian intellectual Said brought his anti-colonial critique to bear on what he called “The Question of Palestine,” revealing Zionism as a colonial ideology and the Western liberal support of this as a part of its colonial heritage. He was one of the first to publicly criticize the Oslo Accords and said one month after the signing of Oslo in 1993 that it was “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”. This forum looks at Said’s legacy in the context of the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Moderator: Joanne Naiman
Main Speaker: David Barsamian
Panelists: Hanna Kawas, Adel Iskandar, Sana Janjua

David Barsamian is an investigative journalist, broadcaster and author. He is the founder and director of Alternative Radio, which is in its 33rd year. He has interviewed and written books with Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad, Howard Zinn, Tariq Ali, Richard Wolff, Arundhati Roy and Edward Said. His latest with Noam Chomsky is Global Discontents. His book with Edward Said, Culture & Resistance, which had been out of print is just reissued with a new introduction by David. He is a winner of the Media Education Award, the ACLU’s Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism, and the Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. The Institute for Alternative Journalism named him one of its Top Ten Media Heroes. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. He has collaborated with the world-renowned Kronos Quartet in events in New York, London, and Vienna. He was deported from India in 2011 because of his work on human rights abuses in Kashmir. He reports on people’s struggles across North America and the rest of the world.

David Barsamian will speak on Edward Said and the Middle East.

Adel Iskandar is an Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver/Burnaby, Canada. He is the author, co-author, and editor of several works including “Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution” (AUCP/OUP); “Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism” (Basic Books); “Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation” (University of California Press); “Mediating the Arab Uprisings” (Tadween Publishing); and “Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring” (Palgrave Macmillan). Iskandar’s work deals with media, identity and politics; and he has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. Iskandar’s engaged participatory research includes supporting knowledge production through scholarly digital publishing such as “Jadaliyya” and academic podcasting such as “Status.”

Adel Iskandar will speak on Said’s critique of Orientalism and Nativism and his positioning as a secular humanist in exile.

Hanna Kawas is a Palestinian born in Bethlehem, Palestine. He is a writer and activist and has spent all of his adult life working for Palestinian national and human rights, as well as supporting liberation movements all over the world. Hanna is the chairperson of Canada Palestine Association, which was established in 1980, and is also the co-host of Voice of Palestine. He is currently active with BDS Vancouver-Coast Salish that has launched multiple campaigns.

Hanna Kawas will speak on the current situation of the Palestinians.

Sana Janjua writes poems. She is going to read three poems: one from Neruda’s Isla Negra, one from Darwish, and one from Faiz. All three speak to the experience of exile, memory of violence, and the condition of the refugees drawing connection to the global crisis of internally displaced peoples, and forced migration(s) across borders.

Joanne Naiman is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has been involved over the years in a variety of activist organizations, including the anti-apartheid movement as well as support for public education in Ontario. Since moving to Vancouver in 2008 she has been an active member of Independent Jewish Voices.

Organized by South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD), Canada Palestine Association, Independent Jewish Voices, and Committee of Progressive Pakistani Canadians (CPPC) with support from Dr. Hari Sharma Foundation and the Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University.

Contacts: Chin: cbanerjee@telus.net; Hanna: hkawas@msn.com

SANSAD Forum

Niranjan Takle: Journalist on the Fascist Trail

Niranjan Takle in conversation with Dionne Bunsha and Peter Klein

September 16, 2018

1.00 PM – 4.00 PM

Room 120, Surrey Centre Library

10350 University Drive, Surrey

“We should know by now that we are up against a regime that its own police call fascist. In the India of today, to belong to a minority is a crime. To be murdered is a crime. To be lynched is a crime. To be poor is a crime. To defend the poor is to plot to overthrow the government.” Arundhati Roy

There is a shift in the world toward right-wing populist authoritarianism. As the recent spate of arrests of human rights activists and lawyers shows India is well advanced on this path with its ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) moving rapidly to make India a Hinduva fascist state. Investigative journalist Niranjan Takle tells a story of historical significance in this development: the murder of a judge presiding over a case of extra-judicial killing in which the president of the ruling party and the most powerful man in India today, Amit Shah was the prime suspect.

In 2005 a Muslim man, Shohrabuddin Sheikh was murdered in custody by the Gujarat police and his wife, Kauser Bi was also raped and murdered. Senior officers of the Gujarat police were involved in this custodial murder, a practice legitimized by naming it “encounter” in India. The home minister of Gujarat at the time, Amit Shah, was the director of the operation.

The Supreme Court of India ordered an inquiry into these murders by the Central Bureau of Investigations and appointed a Special court of t he CBI to try Amit Shah and 11 police officers.

The presiding judge J. T. Utpat, became exasperated by the non-appearance of Amit Shah and ordered him to present himself on June 26, 2014. In answer he was transferred on June 25. Judge B. H. Loya who replaced him also became similarly exasperated and ordered Shah to appear in court on Dec 15. Instead, he was declared dead from natural causes on Dec 1 while attending a wedding in Nagpur. The next judge heard the case in two days and discharged Amit Shah on December 30. All other accused were also discharged.

Investigative journalist Niranjan Takle was approached by the niece of Judge Loya to report on the extremely suspicious death of her uncle and published the results of his investigation in The Caravan on November 20, 2017. He resigned from the Bombay paper he had worked for since 2011, The Week, after it refused to publish the story. Takle’s story has led to a delegation of politicians to the President of India and a (fruitless) hearing in the Supreme Court. But it has been conspicuously ignored in the mainstream media.

Judge Loya’s death is a milestone in the development of fascism in India, enveloped as it is in the silence of his fellow judges and the determined evasion of the mainstream media. With journalists and journalism under attack everywhere in the world today it is more than ever necessary to hear the voices of those who have the courage and tenacity to uncover what the powerful want covered up.

Niranjan Takle trained as an engineer. He turned to journalism with a strong sense of media being used for political manipulation and propaganda and a desire to counter it. He joined CNN-IBN in 2005 and began by breaking a story of the smuggling of placenta chords from government hospitals. Moving from Nasik to Bombay he worked with The Week from 2011 to 2017, when he resigned on being denied publication for his story, “The Mysterious Death of Judge Loya.” His story, “A Lamb, Lionized” on V. D. Savarkar, the icon of the Hindu nationalist RSS and BJP, exposing him as a collaborator with the British, was published in The Wire in January 2016.

Peter W. Klein is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and filmmaker. He has reported from around the globe for CBS News 60 Minutes, as well as other network programs. He writes for US publications and oversees independent productions out of his studio in Vancouver. He is also the director of the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, and runs the school’s International Reporting Program. In 2009-2010 he was the host of the national Canadian public affairs program The Standard

Dionne Bunsha is an award-winning author and journalist. She is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction book, Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat (Penguin India, 2006) about the aftermath of the communal violence in Gujarat. As a Senior Assistant Editor for Frontline magazine (www.frontline.in) in Mumbai, India, she travelled extensively to report on human rights, social justice and environmental issues.  Dionne writes for The Guardian, The Hindu newspaper, the New Internationalist, Guernica, Toronto Star and The Tyee. Dionne was a Knight International Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2008-09. Currently, Dionne coordinates a project mapping indigenous knowledge for Lower Fraser First Nations and teaches communications at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Organized by South Asian Network for secularism and Democracy (SANSAD), http://

www.sansad.org; co-sponsored by GRC https://globalreportingcentre.org/about/