Category Archives: South Asia Bulletin

September 17, 2016South Asia BulletinSANSAD

Saturday, September 17, 2016

I Will NOT Remain Silent…

LALITA RAMDAS

I Will NOT Remain Silent…

LALITA RAMDAS

Thursday, September 15,2016

MUMBAI: I read Seema Mustafa’s evocative and heart wrenching piece with sadness and a deep deep sense of foreboding. And what follows is a stream of conscience set of thought and emotions which kept coming almost endlessly.

(http://www.thecitizen.in/To-Be-A-Muslim-In-India-This-Eid)

I have not had the heart to pick up the phone and wish any of our friends and family Eid Mubarak this Eid. And the few with whom I spoke have shared their own emotions about the joylessness of the festival this year. Found myself struggling with so many many emotions – outrage and anger, sadness and a terrible sense of loss, a set of unspoken fears and wondering for how long we will have to live with this almost daily assault on a faith, a people who follow that faith, pushing them into corners and ghettos where we should be celebrating the diversity that they add to the heritage of this ancient land.

Have been asking myself what am I saying mubarak about? For being allowed to live with fear and insecurity in this land which is every bit “theirs” as it is yours and mine?

Is this really the occasion for the RSS President to repeat, ad nauseum, the meaningless mantra, now sounding increasingly like a threat, :”Never forget you are all Hindus”!! My sense of outrage at this utter insensitivity is still palpable.

Frankly I don’t know and I really don’t care who we were at the dawn of history (or herstory). We were human beings – figuring out how to engage with our environment, our surroundings and our neighbours .

I prefer to believe like museum of African Heritage in San Francisco reminds us, that we all originally came from Africa! And the story of how human beings wandered onto all the present day five continents and adapted over millennia to climate and other ecological and environmental influences, is itself an exciting story.

I refuse to be labelled, to be forced into box called Hindu, or Muslim, or Brahmin or Dalit, or dark and fair, or any other categorisation for that matter.

And worse still, then be told what to say, what to wear, what to eat, what not to eat, how and to whom to pray, just because some one sitting in Nagpur or Saudi, or Rome for that matter has so decreed?

I had always felt proud of my heritage as an Indian, and also of the religion into which I was born – Hinduism, despite its deep contradictions and warts. This was because I believed that it gave me the freedom of choice as to how, when, if and why I chose to worship; the right to dissent; and the intellectual space to debate, disagree and decide what was best.

This was the idea of India so beautifully enshrined in my Constitution.

It is this idea of India that is being torn apart and disfigured into an unrecognisable monster, an idea from which I totally distance myself.

I am ashamed that my Dalit brothers and sisters are still abused, used and heaped with indignity upon indignity. All this continues despite the Magsaysay for Bezwada Wilson!

It continues because you and I and people like us chose to be silent when Wilson repeatedly asks WHO IS EXPECTED TO CLEAN THE LAKHS OF TOILETS THEY WILL BUILD UNDER THE SWACCH BHARAT ABHIYAAN.

I was ashamed in 1984 when the gentry of Lutyens Delhi slammed the door in our faces as we begged for medicines and clothes to help the survivors of the anti Sikh pogrom. “They deserved it” – they told us.

Yes my friends and concerned citizens 1984 has already become a distant dream and even people like myself and the many volunteers who defied the curfew and went out to bring the terrified women and children to some safety and security,no longer remember the details. And while some of us spoke up and testified before the Ranganatha Mishra Commission of Enquiry, most remained silent

Too many of us chose to remain silent ……

I watched with deep trepidation the wavering members of the ‘people like us’ group, who sat on the fence and began spreading stories about Muslims in our so called secular service community after the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992. Some of us spoke – challenged false facts and reached out to the minorities amidst us –

But too many of us chose to remain silent ………..

And I heard the horror stories of the massacres of Gujarat in 2002…from victims in the camps as much as from so many who have worked day and night to uncover the truth and defend hundreds who saw their families and neighbours lose their lives with our police as silent spectators. My husband, Ramu Ramdas, a former Navy Chief was among the multi faith team led by the intrepid peace worker and Gandhian, Nirmala Deshpande, who visited Godhra, Ahmedabad, and recall how they were hounded by mobs to hand over the Muslim members of the delegation – or else leave the place where they were staying. The memories and the fall out of that nightmarish time will not go away

And yet, too many of us chose to remain silent ……

MF Husain, the gentle genius, was a personal friend, who Anjolie Menon, the painter and I, as college girls, would drop by to share a cup of tea and watch him at work. How could we allow an icon of our times to die in exile? Just because a bunch of hooligans posing as defenders of my faith, manufactured canard after canard, destroyed his work, and terrorised the country and the government into shameful submission?

The stories and the examples come flooding back – and do not allow me to sleep this night , nor to remain silent .

If earlier regimes were thinly disguised communalists, the gloves are off today and there is no question in my mind that everything we are seeing happen around us today is part of a well planned anti-national agenda to establish a Hindu Rashtra in India. This has always been an important part of the agenda of the RSS, the Sangh Pariar, and therefore by extension of the party in power today.

The state and its so called protectors and rulers are deliberately creating divisions and fissures between our communities and faiths and regions, it’s the British policy of divide and rule. Only it is now being applied to our people by our own elected rulers.

We have a choice, to cower in silence or have the guts to speak up and speak out.

What do we have to lose?

I say with pride that my legacy of free thinking, drawn from thousands of years of my civilizational heritage in this region, has today given me a personal heritage unparalleled for its diversity and texture and weave .

I believe my maternal ancestors were bangle sellers from Arcot. If I believed in caste, then that would make me either a BC or an OBC!

My paternal family were from a trader class (Naidus) who fought against the British in the then Madras Presidency and moved to Hyderabad in the service of the Nizam.

My only brother married a Muslim girl from Mumbai – and it was my ma-in- law, a Brahmin woman from Palghat, who reassured my mother that it was fine.

And this same Brahmin mother in law, always in her traditional nine yard silk sari, who cooked beef for the beloved family dog in her one and only pressure cooker in her Sait Colony kitchen in Chennai.!! I cannot recall any contradictions or problems about the cooking of beef. She never ate any form of meat – but never did she stop anyone else from eating what they wished.

Between her and my mother they unhesitatingly welcomed their first grand son in law – who turned out to be an American of Pakistani origin – from Karachi – and a Muslim

And our entire clan welcomed my other son in law, an African American deeply religious Baptist from Virginia,

And talking of diversity — earlier we had a Bihari son in law from Patna ….we still have a nephew in law Sri Lankan Tamil from Jaffna – now in Canada thanks to the mess in his own country ….another nephew in law is a brilliant physicist, anEnglishman from Oxford – now settled and teaching in Chennai…

North, south, east, west..

Black brown and white and somewhere in between

Hindu, Muslim, Christian, atheist….

This is my interpretation of the true meaning of Vasudhaiv Kutumbakkam, The world is one family.

But for this message to be brought home to our unscrupulous political class – as also the children of today who will be our future citizens …..we need to amend all school curriculum to build a strong component of secular studies, of tolerance, of openness of citizenship, of neighbourhood management and above all of inclusivity.

We need to speak up, to write, to educate, to challenge and debate the idea of India, to remind our future generations of the Constitution of India, continually and with the largest possible outreach in our homes, our schools, our work places and our social networks –

And remember the time for silence has gone by …..

[written on Eid ul Adha 2016 or what we know as Bakrid]

Belonging in India

September 4, 2016South Asia BulletinSANSAD

September 2, 2016

Belonging, at the margins

Relationship of proportionality: Whereas Mr. Hazare’s protest can be accommodated within Indian nationalism’s Gandhian conception, Ms. Sharmila’s seems to be a jarring presence in it.” File photo of Irom Sharmila.

Irom Sharmila’s failure to get an official acknowledgement speaks to the larger silences on the Northeast

Irom Sharmila’s extraordinary fast of 16 years, demanding the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act or AFSPA, has come to an end. Her struggle drew on the most sanctified mode of protest at the very heart of the formation of the Indian nation. Yet, despite its length and hardship, it failed to receive an acknowledgement from the Indian state, nor did it register in the consciousness of the nation. How are we to read this non-acknowledgement in the context of our polity?

In this regard, it is instructive to contrast Ms. Sharmila’s fast to that of Anna Hazare, whose anti-corruption movement in 2011 galvanised the nation and shook the political establishment. On the 12th day of his fast, concerned about his well-being, the government agreed to a dialogue with him. At the time, there was much optimism amongst civil society that, perhaps, Ms. Sharmila too would receive a similar acknowledgement. Many civil society groups got together to form the Save Sharmila Solidarity Campaign in September 2011. Activist Medha Patkar who was part of the campaign had, in fact, hopefully speculated that “when Anna’s 12-day fast could move the entire nation, why can’t Sharmila’s 10-year fast help remove the AFSPA?”

Inequality of representation

Ms. Patkar’s hope, of course, did not materialise. But her question is instructive, for it suggests an inequality of representation between Ms. Sharmila and Mr. Hazare within the national imagination. Whereas Mr. Hazare’s protest can be accommodated within Indian nationalism’s Gandhian conception, Ms. Sharmila’s seems to be a jarring presence in it. We want to suggest that there is a relationship of proportionality at work here — Sharmila : Hazare = Northeast : India. Within the representational schemata of the nation-state, the first term on either side of the equality is of a lesser worth than the second. Therefore, understanding the lack that the category Northeast connotes in relation to India is productive ground for understanding Ms. Sharmila’s failed attempt at getting an acknowledgment from the Indian state. At the same time, we have to consider whether this very non-acknowledgment speaks to the political condition of marginality of India’s Northeast.

The fact that AFSPA and representative democracy have co-existed in many parts of India’s Northeast for almost 60 years itself suggests that there is something amiss about the way democratic institutions have functioned in the region. Consider for a moment how AFSPA found roots in post-Independence India. Its formulation in 1958 was a response to the demands of the Nagas for sovereignty based on the assertion that the Nagas are a nationality, distinct from the Indian nationality. This claim was something the Indian nation-state could neither ignore nor acknowledge. The institutional response in the form of the AFSPA precisely entailed considering the demands of the Nagas as neither that of an outsider nor an insider; in other words, as the demands of someone included within the nation-state, yet excluded from nationalism’s imagination of the national.

Inclusion-exclusion conundrum

In purely logical terms, there is, of course, nothing that can be both inside and outside (a set) at the same time. That is why, within these terms, when the presence of such an element shows up, we refer to it as a contradiction. India’s Northeast very much finds itself within such a theoretical and political impasse, caught up, as it is, within a non-space — inside the physical space of India, yet outside the political and epistemic space underlying its imagination. How does one stand and take a position on a space that is actually a non-space? That is the challenging question that intermediates the political articulation of marginality in the region, one that we must ask of Ms. Sharmila as well.

A pattern of exhibition of sovereign power has persisted for the last 16 years. Soon after Ms. Sharmila started her fast, the state arrested her, charging her with the crime of attempted suicide under Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code. Every 15 days she was produced before a magistrate and as she refused to eat or drink, her judicial remand was extended by another 15 days. As the maximum punishment for attempted suicide is one year’s imprisonment, every year she was released after completion of the one-year term and rearrested a few days later. In exercising this power, the state has tried to “protect” her as an Indian citizen. However, this gesture immediately opens up a paradox. Because she has been protesting against AFSPA, her supposed protection immediately points to the precariousness of everyday Northeastern citizens under the peculiar politico-juridical arrangement of representative democracy co-existing with martial laws. Therefore, the very moment of her inclusion also turns into an exclusion. That exclusion manifests itself in the form of an absolute non-acknowledgement by the state of her call for a political dialogue.

Being included and excluded at the same time, Ms. Sharmila too has been caught up in a non-space. She cannot be excluded from the legal category of Indian citizenship and yet cannot be included within the political imagination of the nation, which, in this postcolonial context, appears to be what this legal category draws on for its force. Her struggle personifies the very impasse of the Northeast, its non-space. In so doing, it has provided, arguably, the most powerful democratic expression of a political condition that, given the ways in which nationalism’s language has stripped the categories of citizenship and representative democracy of their emancipatory potential, has proven almost impossible to articulate. Indeed, her struggle takes us to and exposes the very limits of these categories at the margins of the postcolonial nation-state. That is the enduring political content of her struggle. It is a struggle that asks of those of us who abide by India’s Northeast to re-examine the very lexicon with which to articulate claims of political belonging at the margins of the postcolonial nation-state.

Papori Bora and Abhinash Borah are faculty, respectively, at the Centre for Women’s Studies of JNU and the Economics Department of Ashoka University. Some of the arguments made here draws on earlier published research of Ms. Bora.

What is Kashmiriyat?

August 28, 2016South Asia BulletinSANSAD

Or insaniyat? Or jamhooriyat? In Kashmir, so-called solutions are riddled with contradictions and divisions

Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Published:August 27, 2016 12:00 am

Kashmir unrest, Kashmir valley unrest, Kashmir violence, kashmir curfew, kashmir issue, Jammu and Kashmir, J&K, Kashmir protests, mehbooba mufti, Jammu and kashmir chief minister, Jammu and kashmir CM Mehbooba Mufti, Kashmiriyat, jamhooriyat, insaniyat, PDP, BJP, hizbul muzahiddin militant, kashmir news, india news The brutalisation produced by the war in Kashmir has also produced new internal logics of violence and conformity. (Source: PTI photo)

Kashmir has been under curfew for nearly 50 days. This curfew will, inevitably, risk a new cycle of alienation, brutalisation and deprivation. There is a desperate search for small consolations. It is a failure of our political imagination that it took an army commander to remind us of the banal truth that at least all parties need to be talking to each other. We may console ourselves, as Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti seems to claim, that only five per cent are responsible for this agitation. But we should not deny the fact that this agitation is geographically unprecedented. The state’s assumption that an informational clampdown will reduce the protestors’ ability to organise seems to have been deeply mistaken. The ability to perpetuate a cycle of violent provocation and counter provocation remains unabated. Fatigue may produce a fragile peace. But the suffocating logjam that has produced this crisis is not likely to abate in the absence of political boldness.

Platitudes are all back in play. But these platitudes may mark a strategy of avoidance rather than heralding a new breakthrough. Take the oft cited trinity: Kashmiriyat, jamhooriyat, and insaaniyat. When Vajpayee invoked them, they were a good starting point. But now they sound more like metaphysical abstractions unmoored from actual politics. Invoking them seems more like begging the question. Kashmiriyat has now mutated in ways that its meaning is not clear. Who will it include and exclude, and on what terms? There is no question, as this column has argued, that the Indian state has unconscionably failed in Kashmir. Its legitimacy is tenuous at best, a legal artefact secured by brute force. But normatively speaking, the very thing that makes us suspicious of hyper Indian nationalism should also make us suspicious of sub-nationalisms.

As a resistance to human rights violations, or homogenising cultural impositions, sub-nationalisms are understandable. But the very pathologies that make nationalism suspect are often equally on display in sub-nationalisms. Just like the question, “who is an Indian”, can be a trap to benchmark identity into a logic of conformity, the question of Kashmiriyat does the same. How will a political movement based on Kashmiriyat negotiate differences over the very idea? Can aazadi or a future within the Indian Union both be manifestations of Kashmiriyat? If so, how does invoking the concept solve the problem? If those invoking aazadi look upon any good faith cooperation with the Indian state as an act of betrayal, if the language of collaborators and traitors and the violence and psychological pressures it produces becomes widespread, how is dialogue possible?

The brutalisation produced by the war in Kashmir has also produced new internal logics of violence and conformity. The extent of religious radicalisation of the Kashmir movement is a matter for some debate. But it only exacerbates the question of Kashmiriyat. Second, in diverse populations, territorial secession almost always comes with ethnic cleansing. The alignment of territory and ethnicity is a deep form of closure, and in Kashmir that has already happened with the expulsion of the Pandits. Third, most movements born out of violence, whether perpetrated by the state, militants, or even reckless provocateurs, find it hard to overcome the traces of violence; the forms of protest will also produce their own new brutalisation. In short, Kashmiriyat at this point, is already a deeply shattered mirror that will distort reality as much as it represents it.

In fact, so deeply is the mirror shattered that even the question, who represents Kashmir, is now at an impasse. If you recognise Kashmiriyat you are seen as occluding differences within Kashmir that now run deep. If you don’t invoke Kashmiriyat you are accused of harbouring some assimilationist design of the Indian state. This argument is not meant to settle any of the normative issues or deny the legitimacy of the Kashmir movement, though in our era of suspicion it will be understandably read that way. But because the Indian state is deeply wrong, it does not follow that the current articulation of Kashmiriyat is any less in danger of taking on a pathological form. In South Asia, more generally, identity and territory are less promising normative frames in which to solve our problems than accepting diversity born of individual freedom and human rights. But freedom and human rights are always casualties of competing nationalisms.

The same is true of jamhooriyat. What are the terms of democracy we are looking at? Given the Indian state’s track record, most Kashmiris will rightly read this as an invocation of the status quo. After all, democratic incorporation through free and fair elections has been the Indian state’s gambit. What is the deeper or newer meaning of jamhooriyat that is on offer? A more radically asymmetric federalism? A reversal to the pre-1953 constitution? More radical decentralisation? All of this should be a matter of discussion. But there is not an iota of evidence that Delhi is willing to move on a variety of institutional proposals that have been gathering dust for decades. In fact, in some respects, democracy can impede more radical proposals for democracy. Even in Kashmir, the PDP and NC have more of an investment in embarrassing each other than they have in finding a common solution. All the forces that participate in democratic politics, as Delhi defines it, stand discredited. The innate risk averseness and structure of competitive politics in Delhi is such that all parties can come together to preserve the status quo, rather than risk imagining democracy differently. In short, jamhooriyat is a noble idea. But its competitive version is also, curiously, part of the problem.

On insaniyat, the plot was lost a long time ago. The brutal repression by the state, the ravages of militancy, the psychological effects of occupation, have made insaniyat hard to imagine in its institutional form. Decades of killings, disappearances, torture has now been replaced by the use of kids as fodder for violence. Insaniyat is, and has always been hostage to the demands of abstract passions like identity and territory. Insaniyat is already hemmed in: Territory before insaniyat, aazadi before insaniyat, borders before insaniyat, the lines of us and them before insaniyat.

Overcoming this logjam will take incredible political courage. All parties, including Pakistan, will have to be part of the dialogue, perhaps without preconditions. But it is a measure of our moral cul de sac that the very things that are supposed to be a part of the solution — Kashmiriyat, jamhooriyat and insaniyat — are the very things that reflect our contradictions and divisions. These are platitudes of avoidance.

The writer is president, CPR Delhi and contributing editor,‘Indian Express’

Critiquing neoliberal development

August 19, 2016South Asia BulletinSANSAD

From saving Narmada to critiquing development, NBA has come a long way

Launched this day 31 years ago, the movement has become the rallying point of everything anti-neoliberalism

GN Bureau | August 17, 2016

GN Photo

Medha Patkar and the movement led by her, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), evoke sharp responses. Many label them anti-development, anti-technology and in cahoots with those who do not want to see India racing ahead. On the other hand, many see them as the torchbearers of human rights and the first critics of the market-oriented economy.Opinions and prejudices apart, the fact remains that NBA, which completes 31 years today, has been a thoroughly non-violent Gandhian movement of our times. (It features alongside the Bhoodan movement and the Chipko andolan in David Hardiman’s ‘Gandhi in His Times and Ours’ as an example of Gandhian activism.)

READ AN INTERVIEW WITH MEDHA PATKAR: “Impoverishing so many people cannot be justified”

In 1985, it was just a social science scholar junking her dispassionate research and taking up the cause of her subjects, when Medha Patkar formed the Narmada Bachao Andolan to fight for the rights of the tribals and others whose land was going to be submerged because of the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP). SSP was one of the 30 mega dams on the river Narmada, and the biggest of its kind attempted in India.

The nascent agitation met its match in the late Gujarat chief minister Chimanbhai Patel who aggressively promoted the project in the state. He termed it the ‘lifeline of Gujarat’, and brought the whole political spectrum as well as civil society to support it. Yet, the NBA succeeded in bringing moral pressure on the World Bank to stop its funding for SSP in the early 1990s.

The NBA then took the legal recourse, challenging the project in the supreme court, which immediately banned further construction work in 1994. Though the supreme court gave a go-ahead to the project in 2000, albeit with conditions, the case went on to raise the awareness and launch a debate on the development and rights. It also helped that Arundhati Roy, then a new Booker prize winner, wrote one of her earliest long essays on the human costs of the project.

The October 2000 judgment could have brought curtains on the NBA, but the organisation has continued valiantly to fight for the affected people: a large number of them are yet to be rehabilitated though the dam has been constructed to the full height, and many are yet to be recognised as project-affected people in the first place.

Meanwhile, as the debate has gone beyond the dam and encompassed larger issues of development, the movement too has enlarged its mandate to also fight for orphans of growth-centric development, for example, slum dwellers in Mumbai.

In the process, NBA has emerged as the prime platform of raising the voice against economic reforms – the two originated largely around the same time – taking up the role the Left should have played. It has “led to a discourse and push for an alternate, least destructive development model which would bring prosperity to even the poorest Indian living in the remotest, least developed part of the country”, as its supporters put it in a press statement today.

“The three-decade-long movement began by questioning the development model created around the Sardar Sarovar Dam being constructed on the Narmada river. This mega project would result in the displacement of lakhs of self-sufficient tribals, farmers, fisher-folks, potters, artisans, etc.; submerge lakhs of hectares of fertile and irrigable farm land and rich forests plus permanently cause salinity and therefore create deserts in the presently fertile and productive areas in the Narmada valley. The project would drown one of the oldest civilisations in the world without even time to study it first,” they have noted.

NBA, via its struggle covering 31 years, has managed to get the promised land for land rehabilitation for approximately 14,000 adivasi, dalit farmers and their families – especially those from Gujarat and Maharashtra, the statement says.

“However, the status of rehabilitation is shockingly slow and shameful when you consider that submergence started in 1995 and in 2016, more than 40,000 families are still awaiting their rightful rehabilitation after they were forcefully made to sacrifice their homes, farms and forest resource base in the name of development and progress of the country.”

Ironically, after all the exploitation, the full benefits of the project are yet to accrue to farmers in Kutch and Saurashtra in Gujarat.

– See more at: http://www.governancenow.com/views/columns/-saving-narmada-critiquing-development-nba-has-come-a-long-way#sthash.GG4CGUQY.2N4ZN3xT.dpuf