Let’s not talk about Kashmir, so how about Israel then?

By Jawed Naqvi

AMNESTY International had declared Morarji Desai a prisoner of conscience because he was thrown into prison by Indira Gandhi. One day Morarji Desai himself became prime minister. So lawyer activist A.G. Noorani very enthusiastically went to see him with Amnesty volunteers, to request Morarji Desai to let the group visit all parts of the country freely, including Kashmir.

Noorani was in for a surprise. “What is Amnesty International?” Morarji Desai queried, pouring buckets of cold water on everything the group had done for him. After it was patiently explained to him how Amnesty volunteers worked to defend human rights of prisoners across the world, among their other good deeds, the Indian prime minister shot back: “Only God can give protection or amnesty to anyone, no one else has that right.”

It was obvious that Desai would, by a quirk of his strange logic, find it acceptable for human beings to throw fellow humans into prison — he did too, sending former tormentor Indira Gandhi to Delhi’s Tihar Jail, albeit for one night — but he invoked God when it came to delivering justice against his mortal man’s common tendency to trammel the basic rights of other fellow humans. Even as A.G. Noorani recalled his shocking experience with Morarji Desai, at the release of Amnesty’s annual world report in Delhi last week, it became suddenly clear why Desai, prime minister in 1979, had refused to join the international community in seeking clemency for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from the hangman’s noose. For that singular ‘favour’, Gen Ziaul Haq, another great devotee of God, rewarded the Indian prime minister with Pakistan’s highest civilian honour. (And what fuss we made when Indian thespian Dilip Kumar was deservingly accorded the same honour by Pakistan, much later, for his acting talents!)

During the Cold War it was easy to target Amnesty as an intrusive western agency, but now that India has chosen to snuggle up to the West, whose diplomats visit Kashmir as often as they please, it does seem odd that Delhi continues to keep the widely respected group out of its troubled areas. The quandary for a country like India in this regard is not difficult to see. Amnesty comes across so even-handed in its approach to the protection of universal human rights that it becomes morally untenable to ignore its conclusions. Take the example of Mumbai. Amnesty strongly condemned the serial train blasts that killed over 200 commuters in July last year. That criticism suited India fine. But the group was equally forceful in its previous reports in pressing for justice for the victims of communal orgy that was let loose in the city by the Shiv Sena in January 1993. This didn’t seem to suit India at all. The Shiv Sena was indicted by the independent Justice Shri Krishna Commission, but that was that. There was no follow-up to bring the culprits to justice as is the case currently with the underworld-linked criminals in the 1993 bomb blasts who rocked Mumbai and killed hundreds.

Yet most countries that oppose groups like Amnesty, overtly or covertly, are quick to use its reports to target their opponents as is often the case with India and Pakistan. The Indian foreign office, which would not have the UN rapporteur on torture in the country, as lamented by Amnesty’s latest report, has often enough found itself quoting the group’s strong criticism of Pakistan’s human rights abuses to throw a well-aimed barb at Islamabad. Likewise with Pakistan. It doesn’t squander any opportunity to cite Amnesty or Human Rights Watch on the goings on in Kashmir, even though the groups are not allowed to visit there. In this year’s Amnesty report too killings and disappearances in Kashmir are listed as a cause for serious concern, grist to Pakistan’s propaganda mill. India would of course readily point to Irene Khan’s forward to the report where the Amnesty chief has named Pakistan among the states that are moving in the direction that would attract the classical description of failed states. Afghanistan, Iraq, occupied Palestine and Lebanon are among the others in this category.

The irony for country’s like India is that their political and moral anchor in the post-Soviet era, the United States of America, has been severely criticised for its “war on terror” that has done everything but fight terror — mostly of its own making. Israel’s daily excesses against the occupied Palestinian people too have been brought into sharp focus. It is said that you can be easily judged by the company you keep. The strategic alliances with Israel and the United States reflect a mindset within the Indian establishment that is not too different to the thought process that strives to keep Amnesty out of Kashmir. The policy would be far less duplicitous if India didn’t ever quote Amnesty reports to make its point. But let us for a moment heed the sensitivities of the Indian establishment in Kashmir, or of Pakistan in Balochistan. Let us hear of Irene Khan’s experiences in Palestine, and see if that won’t make the establishments in India and Pakistan take notice of the close resemblances there are between the world’s troubled regions.

On Dec 10, 2006, while the world celebrated International Human Rights Day, Ms Khan was in Jayyus on the West Bank. “The small village is now divided by the Wall — or more accurately a high iron fence. Built in defiance of international law, and ostensibly to make Israel more secure, the Wall’s main effect has been to cut off the local Palestinian population from their citrus groves and olive orchards. A once prosperous farming community is now impoverished.”

She spoke to an angry Palestinian farmer, who cried: “Every day I have to suffer the humiliation of checkpoints, petty obstructions and new restrictions that stop me from getting to my orchard on the other side. If I cannot cultivate my olives, how will I survive?”

As she listened to him, Ms Khan says she could see in the distance the neat red roofs and white walls of a large and prosperous Israeli settlement. She wondered if those who lived there believed that a Wall threatening the future of their neighbours could truly enhance their security.

Earlier that week, she had visited Sderot, a small town in the south of Israel, which had been subjected to rocket attacks from Palestinian groups in Gaza.

“We are frightened,” one young woman resident told Irene Khan. “But we know that there are women like us on the other side who are also suffering, who are also afraid, and who are in a worse situation than us. We feel empathy for them, we want to live in peace with them, but instead our leaders promote our differences and create more distrust. So we live in fear and insecurity.”

This brave Israeli woman understood what many world leaders fail to comprehend: “that fear destroys our shared understanding and our shared humanity. When we see others as a threat, and are ready to negotiate their human rights for our security, we are playing a zero-sum game.”

The Amnesty chief found the Israeli woman’s message sobering at a time when our world seems as polarised as it was at the height of the Cold War, and in many ways far more dangerous. “Human rights — those global values, universal principles and common standards that are meant to unite us — are being bartered away in the name of security today as they were then. Like the Cold War times, the agenda is being driven by fear — instigated, encouraged and sustained by unprincipled leaders,” says Ms Khan. The force of logic is clear and the message resounding, unless of course, you happen to share the self-defeating mythology of Morarji Desai.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

The disappearing act of a character called Sukhi Lala

By Jawed Naqvi

UNLIKE India, where it is difficult to tell these days when a Congress-led coalition has paved the way for a BJP-led alliance and vice versa, political groups in Pakistan seem to have a lacerating relationship. The army, the mullahs, the PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League are complemented in their hostile aloofness towards each other by a marked regional fervour of the Baloch, the Pashtuns, the Punjabis, and the Sindhis, with the MQM bringing up a vengeful tail.

Also, unlike India, where the media has allowed itself to follow a consensus on most key issues, both foreign and domestic, the absence of a common perspective on most key issues in Pakistan makes it difficult, perhaps even impossible, for the media to pursue a consensus simply because it is just not there at the political level.

Journalists are creatures of their politics and it is a bit of a myth that they pursue ‘objectivity’, if such a creature truly exists, beyond a reasonable flexibility around their given ideals. To the Indian eye, therefore, the relatively unbending Pakistani media is more akin to the regional media in India, say like Tamil Nadu, where the political contradictions are actually played out more nakedly, and viciously. In Uttar Pradesh, Sahara TV, aligned with Mulayam Singh Yadav, is unlikely to present his successor, Ms Mayawati in fair light. Such antagonisms are a fact in practically every state.

But at the federal level all this changes quite magically. The Left Front’s support for the Congress, despite their bitter feud in West Bengal, is a case in point.

Violent contradictions at the state level and a consensual political platform at the federal level define Indian politics and, in a sense, the media too. When a newspaper has switched sides, from supporting the BJP to brazenly idolising the Congress, or in rare cases when a newspaper or a TV channel has shifted from a left-liberal corner to the hard-line centre, or from the right to the centre and back again to its original posture, is difficult to tell. I asked a sagacious uncle how senior journalists who would swear by Atal Behari Vajpayee when he was prime minister had switched their loyalty to Manmohan Singh. A notable example, though not the only one, is Manmohan Singh’s media adviser who once had described Vajpayee as a latter day Nehru.

The uncle’s reply was in Urdu and it deserves to be recorded accurately. “Ye log badalte nahi hain beta, ye log hotey hi aise hain.” (These people do not change, son. They just happen to be made this way.)

This is not to say that politicians in Pakistan do not switch sides or that journalists do not change political corners. In fact, even sitting in far away Delhi one can make out that the present ruling party in Pakistan has generously poached people from different ideological corners. In this malleability there is hardly any difference between an Indian ruling coalition, be it led by the Congress or the BJP, and the current coalition of poached leaders that is ruling Pakistan. In fact, it seems easier for people to become a notable figure in a rival party before making a transition to the current one.

Take Shankar Singh Vaghela for example, who heads the Congress party’s strategy in Gujarat. He is a former leader of the RSS/BJP stock. He switched sides to spite the current state chief minister Narendra Modi. Well-known ideologue of the intellectual right Sudheendra Kulkarni came to the BJP from a communist corner. Devi Prasad Tripathi was in the RSS stable before he became a senior member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist. He even went to jail as a comrade during Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule. It is another matter that Tripathi later joined the same Congress that once threw him into prison. He is currently a leader of the breakaway National Congress Party. Likewise with the BJP. It has senior leaders, like Najma Heptullah, who once adorned the Congress.

So how has India, at least to the naked eye, evolved a seemingly consensual (some would say incestuous) politics as opposed to Pakistan, or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka — the list can be easily extended to virtually all the South Asian countries because political rivalries there are like a fight unto death?

The answer perhaps lies in India’s case in the consensus of Sukhi Lala. Let me explain this idiom. In the early days of the Indian cinema, in the 1940s, 50s and to an extent up to the 1960s, the arch villain in a movie was the avaricious moneylender who wreaked havoc on innocent village folks with his greed. In the classic Do Bigha Zameen and the magnum opus Mother India, the forced alienation of the peasant from his land by the moneylender was widely appreciated theme that reflected a political and economic reality of the newly independent nation. Similar themes were also the burden of the literature of that period, Prem Chand being the best recognised of the campaigners who highlighted rural distress and exploitation.

In Mother India, the nasty moneylender was called Sukhi Lala, who stole the land from an illiterate peasant family by fudging records of a loan he had once advanced to the peasant family’s head. Over a period of time the villain mutated from moneylender into a gambler who played ‘satta’, popular pejorative for the stock market. With time this money-lender-satta-player duo gave way to the gun-toting smuggler and the rise of the underworld don. More recently Indian cinema has created the ubiquitous ‘terrorist’ as the chief villain who sports a beard and speaks like a Pathan or a Kashmiri. At some point, with the rise of the non-resident Indians’ profile in the affairs of the home country, the remaining vestiges of Sukhi Lala disappeared. In fact in a popular genre of current cinema the villain himself has vanished. In fact, in the Guru, released some months ago, which is supposed to be a story based on the life of a powerful Indian tycoon, you would notice that the villain Sukhi Lala has mutated into a hero.

It is this Sukhi Lala who supports Narendra Modi in Gujarat as the model chief minister, then strikes a deal for various industrial projects with the communists in West Bengal. He controls the politics of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana that surround Delhi. He has his liaison officers masquerading as party apparatchiks in the Congress, BJP and most regional parties. Therefore, even though Sukhi Lala of Mother India is still going about his business, plundering economically vulnerable village folk, in his new avatar he is no longer regarded as a villain but the harbinger of a world order of which India would be an integral part.

As I read the news report about the proposed censorship by the Cable Operators Association of Pakistan (CAP) of politically unsavoury news telecasts, it reminded me of the delicate balancing act that Sukhi Lala everywhere has to perform before he is in any position to swamp the society.

“We have decided that we’ll not become part of any campaign which goes against the armed forces, judiciary and integrity of Pakistan and will virtually boycott the channels, which indulge in such acts,” said CAP chairman Khalid Shaikh at the Karachi Press Club. Now we all know that it would require daunting political calisthenics for anyone at this point in time to defend the judiciary in Pakistan without offending the army and vice versa. But once this consensus is achieved, as Mr Shaikh is striving hard to put together, Pakistan may go India’s way.

The once evocative slogan of Roti, Kapda Aur Makan would be muffled by its own former patrons. And Sukhi Lala, the quick change artist that he is, is waiting for precisely this moment.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

__________________
Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

A few good reasons to remember Pablo Neruda today

By Jawed Naqvi

Monday,JUNE 11,2007

THERE was a time when Indian poets and writers would be engaged with Indian issues as closely as they were involved with the rest of the world. The heart-rending cry against capitalism of Majaaz in his poem

“Sarmaayadaari” of the 1930s had a universality that Iqbal had earlier leaned on to berate imperialism. On the face of it, it may appear that Iqbal was hostile to the West. However, his concerns were really riveted to the exploitation of the weak and the poor. For example, he says:

“Europe’s hordes, with flame and fire

Desolate the world entire;

O architect of yonder realms,

To rebuild the world arise!

Out of leaden sleep

Out of slumber deep

Arise!

Out of slumber deep,

Arise!” Zabur-i-Ajam (Persian Psalms)

In the Urdu-Hindi tradition of poetry and prose writing, as with other Indian languages, there was concern for practically every raging issue of the time regardless of which corner of the world the subject belonged to. From the massacre of Vietnam (Sardar Jaafri, Niaz Haider) to the plight of the Palestinians (Faiz) to Apartheid and Fascism, every thing was up for scrutiny and comment. It may sound sadly absurd today, but there was a time when popular sentiment in the newly-freed colonies of South Asia was one of suspicion of the British Commonwealth. It was thus that Majrooh Sultanpuri declared Pandit Nehru an agent of imperialism, all because Nehru thought it was a good idea to take India into the Commonwealth. Majrooh’s poem became a popular refrain for many an Indian street-fighter. “Commonwealth ka daas hai Nehru; maar lo saathi, jaane na paaye!” the poet thundered.

Majrooh was a leading member of the left-dominated Progressive Writers Association apart from being a popular song writer for movies. He also wrote a moving tribute to the people of Pakistan who were at that time locked in a grim battle with Ayub Khan’s martial law. In powerful words that echoed the 16th Century sufi poet Kabir, Majrooh enthused masses across the border thus:

“Jalaa ke mishal-i- jaa’n, hum junoo’n sifaat chaley!

Jo ghar ko aag lagaae hamaare saath chaley!!

Sutoon-i-daar par rakhte chalo saro’n ke chiraagh!

Jahaa’n talak ye sitam ki siyaah raat chale!!”

Somehow, today when a dozen or more citizens are killed in Karachi or elsewhere in Pakistan and thousands others are braving the scorching heat to battle dictatorial laws on the nation’s streets, there doesn’t seem to be a memorable line or verse from anybody in India that we have heard of, be it against Pakistan’s current military rule or about MQM’s self-destructive violence against fellow Pakistanis. Similarly, Iraq has been raped, and continues to bleed to a painful death. Let us know if there is a verse or a poem that was missed on this tragedy from a known writer or poet in South Asia. Therefore, clearly there was once an open fellowship between South Asians, more so between Indians and Pakistanis in their difficult times in the past. Ayub Khan’s reign of terror triggered a wave of solidarity in India for fellow Pakistanis who fought him. That empathy is somehow missing today.

There could be several reasons for this change, but one that comes to mind is the utter confusion in the opposition’s ranks in Pakistan about their aims and objectives. And given the nature of the dominant media in both countries, there is a tendency not to explain the rush for democracy in Pakistan and the apparent obsession, of practically everyone who is opposed to Gen Musharraf, with free and fair elections. A question that is seldom asked: Is there an anti-imperialist edge to the public outcry against Gen Musharraf’s regime or is there a critique of the neo-con economic policies being pursued by his government. There is a genuine fear that everyone in Pakistan, barring obviously the mullahs, ironically enough, is ready to do genuflection before the most powerful military power regardless of the fact that it is playing havoc in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is there a critique of America’s shadow over Pakistan from within the ranks of say the PPP or the Nawaz Sharif group? It doesn’t seem so. And it was certainly not the case when these groups were in power during their brief tenures. The picture in Pakistan was perhaps clearer in the battle against Ayub Khan, a factor in the more vocal support that came from ideologically driven corners around the world, and certainly so from India of that period, for those who fought him.

But India too has chosen to go down the tube. There was a time when this country’s word counted among the Third World nations. India was a major leader when it advocated non-alignment, not as a namby-pamby idea for passive aloofness but for an active opposition to big power exploits everywhere in the world. Sixteen years ago India abandoned all that and took a sharp turn to the right. It hasn’t worked to our advantage. Last week, the Indian prime minister returned empty-handed and apparently annoyed from a G-8 summit in Germany. And though Dr Manmohan Singh blamed the format of the summit for his ‘irritation’ which didn’t accord him a proper forum to discuss India’s perspectives, there was a hint in the Indian Express that he may not go to another G-8 meeting if things don’t improve.Well, the prime minister should have taken a stroll out of the secure precincts of the summit venue and met with the protestors who had different ideas on a variety of issues discussed or not discussed inside. They too were deprived of a platform to be heard by the super-rich nations. Dr Singh would have found an immediate affinity and perhaps even an audience among the angry Europeans, because despite India’s recent efforts to abandon the left-liberal corner, its soul remains in the grip of its old humane ideals. There was a time when Pablo Neruda came to Delhi to discuss with Pandit Nehru proposals for a World Peace Congress, euphemism for solidarity against American hegemony.

If Dr Singh looked around in the crowd he would find that Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez are their idols, not any current European leader. He would find that the war on terror which he supports with such sincerity, rings hollow with people across the world. As it did on another Sept 11, (not in 2001 but in 1973) when President Nixon ordered the CIA to overthrow Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. Neruda applauds himself as a terrorist bard in this pamphlet he wrote as a moving poem at that time. And it’s well worth noting for those, in India and Pakistan as elsewhere, who are locked in a major disagreement with the policies of George W. Bush or his protégés, that very little has changed in the world since Neruda wrote the following lines in a collection of poems called: “A call for the destruction of Nixon and praise for Chilean revolution.”

“Because I love my country

I claim you, essential brother,

Old Walt Whitman with your gray hands.

So that, with your special help

Line by line, we will tear out the roots

Aand destroy the bloodthirsty President Nixon.

There can be no happy man on earth,

No one can work well on this planet

While that nose continues to breathe in Washington

Asking the old bard to confer with me

I assume the duties of a poet

Armed with a terrorist’s sonnet

Because I must carry out with no regrets

This sentence, never before witnessed,

Of shooting a criminal under siege,

Who in spite of his trips to the moon

Has killed so many here on earth

That the paper flies up and the pen is unsheathed

To set down the name of this villain

Who practises genocide from the White House.”

How many poets or intellectuals or for that matter politicians in India or Pakistan are willing to arm themselves with the “terrorist’s sonnet”? Let’s look for them. Neruda’s 103rd birthday falls on July 12, a good time as any to redeem the old pledge.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com


http://www.dawn.com/weekly/jawed/jawed.htm

__________________
Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Looking for common remedies to a rabid malaise

By Jawed Naqvi

A COUPLE of weeks ago an Indian TV channel showed men, women and children somewhere in the country drinking water from an open gutter because they believed it was a foolproof prevention against rabies.

The gut wrenching sight of a father lovingly scooping up brown liquid into a glass, with everything floating in it, and offering it to his young ones revealed a sickening reality for a nation aspiring to become some kind of a superpower.

There could be two or three lessons to draw from this bizarre happening. First, the extremely notional health facilities that exist in most Indian towns and cities have forced people to fend for themselves and, naturally, quacks are having a field day. Second, there is official approval of and systematic apathy towards this absolutely deplorable state of affairs, which includes letting loose rabid dogs on the streets with no one really looking eager to set things right. Third, it was more important for the TV channel to show the disgusting pictures to improve its own TRP ratings rather than to intervene instantly to stop the foul ritual of humans drinking sewage water.

Another grim reality crying out from this apparently popular daily event is that a large number of helpless people are being forced to drink foul water, and they are often unaware of the fatal consequences of doing that. You could safely conclude that people in large parts of India are actually forgetting what clean potable water looks like. In fact, in one of the visits to the site of the Narmada anti-dam demonstrations led by Medha Patkar, a woman protester was carrying a bottle of water to beat the scorching heat. She was surprised when some of the young tribal boys there, evicted from their homes to pave the way for the dam, asked her to explain what she was carrying in the plastic bottle. The boys simply refused to believe that it was water and nothing else. Why would they not believe a friend and sympathiser who had travelled a thousand miles to express her solidarity with them? The explanation was hesitant. One of the tribal boys produced his own version of water, a bottle of brown liquid, and insisted that water was brown and not transparent.

Viewers who missed the India TV report from Lucknow, if I remember right, would be more familiar with the other, some would say uglier, reality of India. They would be more familiar with the images of India’s ageing but still charming film star Hema Malini and her daughter Esha exchanging notes in a TV ad on precisely what makes for clean drinking water. The star duo have been promoting a branded device that filters relatively clean water through a process called reverse osmosis or RO. A quick research about the contraption threw up startling facts about the system that is fast becoming a fad among the well-heeled in Indian cities. According to this research, RO units are not only expensive to procure and maintain but they use a lot of water too.

For one they recover only five to 15 per cent of the water entering the system. The remainder is criminally discharged as waste water. Because waste water carries with it the rejected contaminants, methods to recover this water are not considered practical for household systems.

Waste water is typically connected to the house drains and will add to the load on the household septic system apart from squandering away precious quantities of depleting ground water. An RO unit delivering five gallons of treated water per day may discharge 40 to 90 gallons of waste water per day to the septic system. This contraption goes well with the main thrust of India’s 15-year old economic reforms, but it doesn’t seem to spare a thought for the larger question of conservation. But who cares? Ms. Malini and her product manufacturer are laughing all the way to the bank.

When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh goes to another international summit, say of G8 leaders or some such, to express solidarity with some who claim to be looking for ways to create an agreeable environment from their industrial waste, he should also be able to explain why India has allowed his economic reforms to create monstrous consumers with even more monstrous contraptions, the water-guzzling washing machine being another such. Moreover, it is not uncommon in most of these RO-friendly households to find overhead tanks overflowing relentlessly after callously sucking away water from depleting ground reserves. Here is a selfish, self-obsessed class of Indians who applaud the so-called reforms at CII and FICCI meetings but are least interested in acknowledging the disaster they are collectively and mindlessly leading us to.

India’s water woes are not its internal ‘domestic’ matter alone. Disputes over the scant resource are a feature of its diplomatic engagements with Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and even China. In fact, John Kenneth Galbraith when he was US ambassador to India signalled the fear of a potential water dispute in the resolution of the Kashmir issue as early as 1960s.

In a significant resemblance to the state of play existing today, Galbraith had ruled out a plebiscite in Kashmir and held that “the only hope lies in having a full guarantee of the headwaters of the rivers. Each side should hold on to the mountain territory that it has and there should be some sort of shared responsibility for the valley. I really don’t think that a solution on these lines is impossible.”

Headwaters disputes are not a peculiarity of India’s border states alone. Bang in the heartland of the country, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are all engaged in bitter wrangling over water sharing. The Narmada river that straddles western parts of India across several states has been the focus of mass mobilisation by native people who live or were living along the banks before they were evicted by the mega dam project.

Bold signs of the looming bitter strife are writ large for every one to see. India’s burgeoning middle class is “reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed”, says Arundhati Roy. “The greed that is being generated and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable.”

Fidel Castro, on the other hand, recently calculated that more than three billion people in the world are being condemned to a premature death from hunger and thirst. He quoted Argentina’s official Telam news agency as issuing a stark warning: “Within hardly 18 years, nearly two billion people will inhabit countries and regions where water might seem a far away memory. Two thirds of the world population could live in places where the lack of water could bring about social and economic tensions that could lead peoples to go to war over the precious blue gold.”

In the course of the last 100 years, water consumption has grown at a pace which is more than twice the population growth rate. According to the World Water Council, the number of persons affected by this serious situation will increase to 3.5 billion by the year 2015. Telam says that many regions on this planet suffer from severe water shortage, where the annual rate of cubic meters per person is less than 500.

“An insufficient amount of the precious fluid necessary to produce foodstuffs, the impaired development of industry, urban areas and tourism, and the emergence of health problems are some of the consequences that derive from water shortage,” Castro warned.

He lives a stone’s throw away from the United States, where the head of the nation recently announced a mega plan to convert foodstuff into industrial fuel, thus adding the prospects of aggravated misery for an already starving multitude. It is already difficult to say if some of these novel ideas are not more rabid than the street dogs that have sent clusters of clueless Indians looking for desparate remedies.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/jawed/jawed.htm

__________________
Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

A hallowed institution that mirrors the split personality of a nation

By Jawed Naqvi

Tuesday,June 26,2007

FAR from having a ceremonial role as originally assigned by the country’s constitution, an Indian president in today’s coalition era has come to play a decisive role — that of inviting a candidate of his choice to become prime minister. The rules for a hung parliament, a feature of every Indian government since 1989, are generally open to wide interpretation. It was thus that President Shankar Dayal Sharma made a bizarre offer to Atal Behari Vajpayee, after the inconclusive general elections of 1996, to become prime minister for the first time.

He asked Mr Vajpayee to prove a majority which he knew he simply didn’t have, nor was he going to have, in that particular Lok Sabha. Naturally, the government fell after a mere 13 days in office. Mr Vajpayee decided that a trust vote would be too embarrassing for his isolated Bharatiya Janata Party to face. And so he resigned without probing his chances in parliament. It is said that those 13 days were used to pore over crucial files in some key ministries where the BJP had its first shy at truly federal power. Moreover, the last day of the 13-day government became an occasion to sign a controversial deal with Enron for a power unit in Maharahstra. The American project continues to be in a mess. Without presidential indulgence all this would not have been possible. By contrast, Rajiv Gandhi, who had many more seats in parliament following the hung verdict in 1989, had declined to take office when it was offered as, in his view, it was not his mandate to rule. Gandhi was assassinated during his next attempt to gain the elusive mandate in the 1991 elections.

But in 1991, P.V. Narasimha Rao, who succeeded him, ran clearly short of a majority. However, he was given a chance to form a government. When the moment for a trust vote came he was allowed to retain power by a momentary parliamentary consensus. Fair enough. But how did Mr Rao respond to the reprieve? Well his party literally bribed a group of MPs from the tribal state of Jharkhand. This enabled him to win not one but several confidence votes that followed, including the government’s budgets piloted by Manmohan Singh. This was essentially how India’s much touted economic reforms came about, by a parliamentary subterfuge rooted in bribery of MPs who were later convicted by a court and given prison sentences. A more scrupulous president would have pre-empted these charades at the outset. Also without a conniving president Indira Gandhi would not have succeeded in declaring a national emergency in 1975, when civil liberties were suspended and political opponents thrown into jail.

These are some of the possible reasons why the race for India’s presidency has become heated and even obnoxious. After all two years from now, if not earlier, there will be general elections with a reasonable chance of returning a messy coalition. It is possible that Congress mascot Rahul Gandhi would be a candidate for the top job against someone daunting, say a candidate of the BJP. The presidency would be absolutely vital in tipping the balance in a close race, or even in interpreting the verdict of a hung parliament. No one wants to take any chances and therefore rival dirty tricks departments are having a field day. India has to elect a new president on July 19. The process involves all MPs and state legislators. The result would be known on July 21.

As happens across much of the world that follows the antics of this grand office of the nation’s first citizen, there is a nationwide schizophrenia enveloping India too. It is triggered by the fact that we who heap calumny on a person one day in the name of democratic freedoms are mandated the next day to regard the same quarry as sacrosanct and inviolable because he or she has now become president of the country. You can insult a presidential candidate but not the president because that would be insulting the constitution, a serious offence. The same holds true for the coup leaders in India’s neighbourhood, both civil and military, who all are required to be addressed as Excellencies by their foreign interlocutors even though everyone knows they are mere usurpers. And how can we forget that His

Excellency the President of the United States continued to enjoy the sobriquet for years after he was found dallying with a young female intern at the White House, an act that nearly got him impeached but ended with a tame apology.

Coming to the elections in India, after President Abdul Kalam removed his name from the race, there are basically two serious candidates left in the fray. The opposition has put up Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, a former police constable (Matric pass), who made it good as a BJP politician. He is vacating his post as India’s vice-president to fight the elections as an independent candidate. Why or how a former BJP politician can be deemed an unattached candidate has much to do with the political filibustering that marks this coveted race. Shekhawat’s lobbyists include the BJP which says that he has a good chance of winning the office. Given the fact that the ruling coalition’s candidate, Mrs Pratibha Pa

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/jawed/jawed.htm

__________________
Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Why are India and Pakistan reluctant to honour their common hero?

By Jawed Naqvi

Monday,July 02, 2007

A FEW years ago I asked Zameer Akram, then Pakistan’s ambassador in Nepal, why his country was not doing anything to show some respect toBegum Hazrat Mahal’s memory, whose unmarked wayside grave in the heart of Kathmandu is open to abuse by humans and stray animals alike. He said there was in fact a joint agreement with India to build a grand mausoleum at the site. So what has happened to that plan, nobody knows.

On May 10 this year, when India was celebrating 150 years of the 1857 uprising against colonial rule, a revolt in which the Begum was a vital player, several readers asked me whether Pakistan too was marking the occasion with due fervour. I told them that as far as I could see Pakistan was too busy with its internecine bloodbath in Karachi and elsewhere to spare the time for a tryst with history. I am not sure if I was right, but there was nothing in the Pakistani media that I noticed to indicate any official celebration of the anti-British rebellion across the border, much less about Begum Hazrat Mahal’s unique, if largely unsung role in it.

I recently came across a fine tribute to the Begum, possibly one of a very few that throw light on the life of this tenacious fighter and an unrelenting rebel. Samarendra Nath Chanda wrote the article for The Sunday Statesman of Delhi on February 1, 1959, perhaps in the wake of the 100th anniversary celebrations of the revolt. Also, in Lucknow, the Publication Bureau of Uttar Pradesh has compiled rare articles on the freedom struggle in Oudh. They contain a must read proclamation by Hazrat Mahal even after her armies were defeated.

The document is today and was during her time known as a “counter-proclamation” because it was really a rejoinder to the proclamation by Queen Victoria about a new equation her government would have with India after 1857. Indians and Pakistanis need to read this piece of prose in Urdu which the British rulers translated into English. They would have been aghast at the extent of solidarity that existed between India’s Hindus and Muslims not so long ago against their common foe, the foreign occupiers.

After the capture of Lucknow the Begam was listed by the English as No.1 of the enemies still at large. From Lucknow she retired with a large following across the River Ghagra and posted herself in the fort of Baundi, in Bahraich district. She fortified the stronghold with heavy guns and armed men. A correspondent of the government reported: “….a force is encamped on all sides of the fort, numbering about 15,000 or 16,000 including followers. Among these there are 1,500 cavalry and 500 mutineer sepoys, the rest are ‘nujeebs’ and followers.”

Unlike Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi, the Begum, says Samarendra Nath, had a different beginning to her career. She was born at a time and brought up in a manner suitable only for a life of gay abandon. Her obvious place was in the royal harem of the extraordinary King Wajid Ali Shah, essentially a poet par excellence and a connoisseur of beauty. William Howard Russell in his ‘My Indian Mutiny Diary’ writes: “The Sepoys, during the siege of the Residency, never came on as boldly as the zamindari levies and nujeebs (irregulars). This Begum exhibits great energy and ability. She has excited all Oudh to take up the interests of her son, and the chiefs have sworn to be faithful to him. Will the Government treat these men as rebels or as honourable enemies? The Begum declares undying war against us. It appears, from the energetic character of these Ranis and Begums, that the zenanas and harems (wield) a considerable amount of actual mental power and, at all events, become able intriguantes. Their contests for ascendancy over the minds of the men give vigour and acuteness to their intellect.”

Tidbits of information available about the Begum’s career as a sovereign reveals the statesman in her. To fortify the city of Lucknow against advancing relief forces of the English she sanctioned five lakhs of rupees to “have a wall built round the city.” Then, when she was informed that the English had purchased the friendship of Rana Jang Bahadur of Nepal with the promise of Gorakhpur and a share of Oudh, she immediately made the Rana a counter-offer of “Gorakhpur, Azimgurh, Arrah, Chupra and the provinces of Benaras, if he would unite with her.” Her battle tactics too bear the stamp of an expert schemer, says Samarendra Nath. Through efficient agents, she contacted the officers of the Indian regiments serving the English at Cawnpore and settled with them that when they were to face the Begum’s forces “the regiments should fire blank ammunition” and afterwards “turn upon the Europeans”. She even personally appeared in the field (on February 25, 1858) on elephant back, along with other officers to supervise defence operations.

While the English were busy in re-establishing their authority in Lucknow, Begum Hazrat Mahal once again successfully fired up the rest of Oudh to rebellion. In fact, 1858 saw a series of sporadic outbursts in different areas of Oudh, and the English experienced some of the toughest encounters of the whole history of the rebellion. The heroes were mainly and obviously the taluqdars and zamindars of Oudh, and there is enough evidence on record to show their attachment to the Begum.

After the Queen’s Proclamation, the English wanted to win her over by offers of royal clemency and even of a pension. But Begum Hazrat Mahal replied with a counter-proclamation under the seal of her young son and heir to the Oudh crown, Birjis Qadar, warning the people of Oudh not to be misled by false promises. The Begum’s Proclamation, as it is called, stated: “At this time certain weak-minded, foolish people, have spread a report that the English have forgiven the faults and crimes of the people of Hindoostan. This appears very astonishing, for it is the unvarying custom of the English never to forgive a fault, be it great or small, so much so that if a small offence be committed through ignorance or negligence, they never forgive it….. therefore we, the ever-abiding government, parents of the people of Oude, with great consideration, put forth the present proclamation, in order that the real object of the chief points may be exposed, and our subjects placed on their guard.”

In the counter-proclamation, Begum Hazrat Mahal comes across as a secular person who was greatly troubled by the domination of any one religion over others. Her exiled husband Wajid Ali Shah was enriched as much by Hindu lore as by his own Shia creed to fortify Oudh with an enviably syncretic worldview. She rebuts Queen Victoria’s assertions point by point, but the following one surpasses all. “In the proclamation it is written, that the Christian religion is true, but that no other creed will suffer oppression, and that the laws will be observed towards all. What has the administration of justice to do with the truth or falsehood of religion? That religion is true which acknowledges one God, and knows no other. Where there are three gods in a religion, neither Mussulman nor Hindoo- nay, not even Jews, Sun-worshippers, or Fire-worshippers can believe it true. To eat pigs and drink- to bite greased cartridges, and to mix pig’s fat with flour and sweetmeats — to destroy Hindoo and Mussalman temples on pretence of making roads to build churches — to send clergymen into streets and alleys to preach the Christian religion — to institute English schools , and to pay a monthly stipend for learning the English sciences, while the places of worship of Hindoos and Mussalmans are to this day entirely neglected; with all this, how can the people believe that religion will not be interfered with? The rebellion began with religion, and, for it, millions of men have been killed. Let not our subjects be deceived; thousands were deprived of their religion in the North-West, and thousands were hanged rather than abandoned their religion.” Any taker for the Begum’s grave in Kathmandu — Indian, Pakistani, or, preferably, both?

jawednaqvi@gmail.com


http://www.dawn.com/weekly/jawed/jawed.htm

__________________
Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

A notch below the white man, a touch above the black

By Jawed Naqvi
I AM not surprised at all by the revelations in The Guardian last week that British military scientists sent hundreds of Indian soldiers, their colonial cannon fodder of many a foreign campaign, into gas chambers and exposed them to mustard gas during World War II.

For the record we are talking of a chemical warfare agent first used by the German army during World War I. It causes skin disorders, blindness, cancer and finally death. President Saddam Hussein, who used it, was hanged under the watch of Iraq’s Anglo-Saxon victors. Saddam’s cousin was nicknamed Chemical Ali for using it in the 1988 Anfar campaign, killing thousands of Kurds. He got death for “genocide” this year. (Did we hear of anyone getting punished, much less executed, for using Agent Orange in Vietnam?)

Documents uncovered by The Guardian indicate that the British military did not check up on the Indian soldiers after the experiments to see if they developed any illnesses. Many of the soldiers suffered severe burns on their skin, including their genitals. Some had to be treated in hospital.

According to the report, the controversial trials were thrown into the spotlight by newly discovered documents at the British National Archives, which have shown for the first time the full scale of the experiments. The Indian troops were serving under the command of the British military at a time when India was under colonial rule. The experiments took place over more than 10 years before and during World War II in a military installation at Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan.

Scientists from the Porton Down chemical warfare establishment in Wiltshire who had been posted to the subcontinent to develop poison gases to use against the Japanese had carried out the tests. The experiments are a little-known part of Porton’s huge programme of chemical warfare testing on humans. More than 20,000 British soldiers were subjected to chemical warfare trials involving poison gases, such as nerve gas and mustard gas, at Porton between 1916 and 1989.

Many of these British soldiers have alleged that they were swindled into taking part in the tests, which damaged their health for years to come after the trials. The reports record that in some cases Indian soldiers were exposed to mustard gas protected only by a respirator. On one occasion the gas mask of an Indian sepoy slipped, leaving him with severe burns on his eyes and face. The tests were used to determine how much gas was needed to produce a casualty on the battlefield. In 1942, the Porton scientists reported that there had been a “large number” of burns from the gas among Indian and British test subjects.

The Guardian report doesn’t surprise because we have always known that there was no major difference in the worldview, or the methods of sustaining it, between 15 years of Nazi rule in Europe and over 200 years of British colonialism across the world. Lest we forget, their common approaches included entrenched anti-Semitism which both practised in different forms throughout their respective histories. But I am not sure that India’s current ruling elite would share the comparison. Britain gave us vital civil values after all and good governance to boot, proclaimed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at Oxford University a couple of years back. The comments of course reflected the arrival of the neo-con NRI-dominated middle class at the helms of affairs in India.

There are cultural accoutrements to go with this nouveau riche worldview. Here, the anti-colonial saga is easily mixed up with the country’s communal fault lines. One school believes that fighting British rule was a heroic feat. The other takes its history further back to the resistance against India’s Turko-Afghan rulers, followed by the uprisings against the Mughals. Thus rightwing zealots deride fellow Muslims as offspring of Mughal emperor Babar. The Dravid movement in the south and the Dalit movement in Maharashtra pushed the history of their “occupation” to the Vedic period. To the rational middle ground all three strands have their validity. Why should anyone defend megalomaniac rulers, be they Hindu, Muslim or of any other faith? But the current flavour, going by the recent unveiling of the statue at India’s parliament house of the mediaeval warrior Rana Pratap, is as much part of an officially patronised Hindu-Muslim paradigm as it is a scrupulously calculated shift away from critiquing the former colonial masters, who happen to be today’s neo-con allies.

Sometimes inconvenient facts are masked; sometimes they are refurbished with a new spin on history. When New Delhi’s India Gate was designed and built by Edward Lutyens, it was originally called the All India War Memorial in memory of the 90,000 Indian soldiers who died in the campaigns of World War I, the northwest frontier operations of the period, including the 1919 Afghan fiasco. On the walls of the structure are inscribed the names of all the Indian soldiers in the British army who perished. In other words, the memorial stands as a towering reminder of our erstwhile slavery. And though it got converted into a more contemporary version of war memorial, honouring the Indian soldiers who fought in the Bangladesh war, the walls of the India Gate memorial still bear the names of the fallen victims of colonial wars, not those who fell in 1971.

When we refer to the NRI-dominated middle class being today’s dominant ideological force the allusion really is to those non-resident Indians (as well as the ones who stayed home) who have traditionally connived with colonialism for the crumbs they were rewarded with. The old-fashioned school of sociologists called them the comprador class. This lot shares the cultural manifestations, including racism, of their masters. In the opposition were those Indian expatriates who fought colonialism and its racist features wherever there was on occasion to stand their ground.

History has shown that for India’s ruling elite, the most comfortable place on earth has been a notch below the white man and a touch above the black, so to speak. I always cite the example of South Africa’s notorious tricameral parliament, which was specially created during the Botha regime to accommodate Indian immigrants as a buffer between the white rulers and the majority Africans. Therefore, when many of the Indian migrants in South Africa were fighting shoulder to shoulder with Nelson Mandela’s ANC, the other half chose to join the Apartheid rulers in a system in which the Black majority remained disenfranchised.

This is of a piece with India’s current stance on the nuclear issue. The argument is not too different. India can have the bomb but no other third world country is fit enough to deserve one.

This coming form a nation that spoke out against nuclear apartheid is nothing if not hypocritical. The same desperation is reflected in our vain quest for seat at the UN Security Council as a permanent member, no less, of the elite club, never mind that we were ready to be assigned a humiliating non-veto status in it. A little below the global ruling elite, and a little above fellow third world nations, an NRI-inspired worldview, always looking for that awkwardly added seat at the table, as those who have seen Peter Sellers in The Party would understand.

That’s precisely why there will not be a statue of Bhagat Singh in the Indian parliament, the very place from where the rebel signalled his revolt against British rule. For that’s where he dropped a small bomb from the visitors’ gallery at the colonial assembly. That’s why there will not be a statue of Bahadur Shah Zafar in the parliament, the last Mughal emperor who fought the British. That’s why India, the self-proclaimed champion of human rights will not add its powerful voice against the daily outrages in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. That’s why there will be more conspiratorial silence than outrage over The Guardian story.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/jawed/20070309.htm

__________________
Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Taming the nature of the beast

By Jawed Naqvi
IT WAS way back in 1985 that the BBC commissioned Tariq Ali to write a TV play — The Leopard and the Fox, A Pakistani Tragedy. As rehearsals were about to begin, it was agreed that Zia Mohyeddin would play General Zia, and India’s Naseeruddin Shah would play Z.A. Bhutto. Then suddenly, under pressure from the British Foreign Office, the BBC decided to cancel the project.

I got my hands on it recently when Seagull Books in UK finally published what comes across as a fairly credible dramatisation of Zia’s coup and Bhutto’s dubious trial and execution.

The play runs into 106 short scenes. But in today’s context, with one former prime minister dispatched to a second exile in Saudi Arabia (an old Muslim habit, considering what Emperor Akbar did with Bairam Khan, his once trusted aide) and another bracing to wade into Pakistan’s political quagmire, perhaps the most important scene to ponder in the play is Scene 20.

It opens in Gen Zia’s office at the military HQ. It shows Zia involved in a serious discussion with General Azad, evidently an officer whose name the author has changed because of the BBC’s libel policy. The men are sipping cold drinks, just to give a flavour of the times, with Zia exuding a friendly demeanour.

Azad: In 1971 the army was finished. Finished! If Bhutto had hanged 20 generals in public, the people would have applauded.

Zia: You think I don’t know what Bhutto did for us? But it is no longer a private matter. Americans are very angry because of nuclear programme.

Azad: We pressured Bhutto to start our nuclear plans. Zaman (another changed name) said, ‘Sir, we cannot sit back, while India tests nuclear devices.’ So Bhutto told the world.

Zia: Correct. But what worries Pentagon very much is civilians controlling nuclear weapons. Unstable. Unstable. In Fort Bragg they made it very clear that even their president in the White House was not completely independent. He is always flanked by military advisors. General Barnes laughed and said to us: ‘You see, we have a permanent semi-martial law in our country. No one objects.’

(And so the scene continues with Zia trying to entice Azad as an accomplice in the arriving coup).

The most notable thing about the above scene is that it frontally tackles the crucial nuclear issue, which seemed to be missing from the discourse in Pakistan during the last several weeks when many hopes were raised and fears triggered by the brief return of pro-democracy street fighters.

Is there perhaps a clue in Tariq Ali’s TV play, which was written more than 20 years ago, as to why there may not be a truly desirable democracy in the country in the foreseeable future, one that is bereft of a covert or overt role for the army? Civilian and democratically elected governments endorsed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, but their safety and security has been a headache for the Americans. Can the Americans trust Nawaz Sharif with nuclear weapons? Has he not changed dramatically since his assault on Jamaat-i-Islami activists during the Lahore summit of February 1999 to his newfound bonhomie with his former detractors, the Jamaat?

Or can the West trust Benazir Bhutto, who goaded and cajoled Nawaz Sharif to carry out the 1998 tests, before she began prescribing ways for nuclear prudence? Was the move to set up a National Security Council a ruse to keep the army involved in Pakistan’s quasi-democratic governance partly because of nuclear worries?

Did Nawaz Sharif lose brownie points with the Americans because he shot down the project? If so, what new mechanism is required to keep the army, perceived as America’s trusted conduit in Pakistan, happy in any new civilian administration, if one does fructify?

And finally, how broadly would the new arrangement be different from the existing one in Bangladesh, where military dictatorship has acquired a civilian face? These are some of the worrying questions that form a logical corollary to Ali’s Scene 20.Tariq Ali is not a soothsayer but the depth of his political analysis gives him insights that border on prescience. Take for example Scene 74 where he unwittingly constructs a seamless transition between something that happened 20 years ago to, say, the events of Sept 10. The play was written in 1985. But just see how he makes it relevant for today.

In this scene, General Azad, who comes across as a pro-democracy officer, is telling Bhutto to leave the country that very night if possible. Benazir, Nusrat Bhutto and a foreign correspondent close to the Bhuttos, called Cherry, are listening on.

Bhutto: But why?

Azad: Zaman wants you polished off. He wanted it before the coup. I stopped it then. Now there are no barriers. Trial’s a complete farce. Everything is planned.

Bhutto: How can everything be planned? The people have the capacity to upset many plans.

Azad: I agree, so do Zia and Zaman. But they noticed something. When martial law was declared nothing happened. Not a bird twittered. They laughed about it.

Bhutto: Not a bird twittered? What about the textile workers in Multan? They went on strike. Zia’s machine guns ended that. Sixty workers were killed. Hundreds wounded.

Azad: That’s small beer, my friend. The army was preparing to deal with a general strike. It never happened. Don’t resist now. Save yourself.

Bhutto: More important to save Pakistan.

Cherry: Are the two not connected?

Bhutto: Of course they are. That’s why I won’t run. Let them do their worst. Finally they will run.

Just who will “run” eventually from the field is not easy to discern sitting here in Delhi, for the ground reality in Pakistan is surely far more complex to hazard a guess. All one can say is that there is a pattern in Pakistan’s current turmoil to the day in 1979, when the Indian government had tacitly approved of Bhutto’s hanging.

There is no other explanation about why then Prime Minister Morarji Desai refused to intervene to try to save him. And why else would Gen Zia find it prudent to decorate Desai with Pakistan’s highest civilian award? This was not a stand-alone feature of the times; rather it was part of a series of political earthquakes that resulted from a huge backlash triggered by America’s defeat in Vietnam.

In the play itself, Bhutto is heard recalling in a speech to the National Assembly, the tragedy of Salvador Allende in Chile. The Cold War’s chess game in Iran, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh too had begun around the same period.After the United States won that war with unexpected ease, the consolidation seen by Ali in 1985 should only be more complete than before. This is perhaps why India, one of America’s most important assets after the Cold War, and which is supposedly spearheading a global democracy project with Washington, has not said a word on the second exile of Nawaz Sharif. But equally true, that the tussle between the leopard and the fox will continue to move towards the evasive denouement. For that’s the nature of the beast.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/jawed/20070920.htm

__________________
Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

Can we resist fascism with indignation alone?




SUPPOSE Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, is called a fascist, which he is, and it translates into more votes for him in the coming state elections. How does one respond to this possibility, which, as many have concluded, is in fact the bitter truth? This is the backdrop we have to keep in mind about Tehelka’s otherwise skillful and daring expose with concealed cameras of the manic Hindutva hordes that raped and killed at will in Gujarat in 2002, and their cheerleader, the chief minister himself.

Suppose all the gory revelations captured on the camera by the grittyjournalist Ashish Khetan are turned into a vaudeville, which can happen to any burning issue in India today with generous help from the corporate media. What happens next? Remember the lines of the woman inmate in a Chicago prison in the movie of that name? The woman, June, was one of several female prisoners serving sentences for killing their boyfriends, husbands, lovers and so on. June’s lines in a song drenched in black humour went thus: “ I’m standin’ in the kitchen, carving up a chicken for dinner, minding my own business, when in storms my husband, Wilbur, in a jealous rage. ‘You’ve been screwing the milkman,’ he said. He was crazy, and he kept on screaming, ‘You’ve been screwing the milkman.’ And then he ran into my knife... he ran into my knife ten times.”

June’s lines were relived the other day by a key character caught in the Tehelka expose. Gujarat government counsel Arvind Pandya resigned from his post and has filed an FIR against the reporter who conducted the sting. But he needs to be heard to be believed. “They came to me and said they were making a serial. And to give a touch of reality, they wanted me to play a role. I would initially be portraying a negative role and later a positive one. I was given a script with all dialogues and I just had to read them. They also made me practise my lines,’’ he complained.

What did Pandya’s ‘rehearsed’ lines say in the role he says was assigned to him by Tehelka? Remember he is the man representing the state government in the commission of inquiry headed by Justices Nanavati and Shah. In fact Pandya is Gujarat’s Advocate General.

Tehelka: Who was at the forefront during the riots?

Pandya: It will be wrong to say some were there and some were not…

Practically everybody who went to the field was from the Bajrang Daland the VHP…

Tehelka: Did Jaideepbhai (VHP vice-president Jaidee Patel) go to the field?

Pandya: Jaideepbhai had also gone… Which leaders went where, who had a role, who had a suspected role — we have before the Commission all these details, all the mobile numbers, who went where… We have the locations…

Tehelka: Yes, some controversy also took place…

Pandya: It’s still on… And I know whose mobile numbers were there… who talked to whom, from which location… I have the papers…

Tehelka: So can there be some problem for the Hindus because of that… for Jaideepbhai etc…

Pandya: Arrey bhai, (Hey fellow) I am the one who has to fight the case… don’t worry… don’t worry about this, there will be no problem here. If there will be a problem I’ll solve it… I have spent all these years for whom… for my own blood.

Tehelka: Can the commission’s report go against the Hindus?

Pandya: Nahi, nahi (no no)… it can create some problems for the police… it can go against them… see, the judges who have been selected are from the Congress…

Tehelka: Yes, Nanavati… and Shah

Pandya: That’s the only problem… our leaders at the time got into a controversy in a hurry… what they thought was that since Nanavati was involved in the Sikh riots... that if they use a Congress judge there will be no controversy…

Tehelka: So is Nanavati absolutely against you people?

Pandya: Nanavati is a clever man…He wants money... Of the two judges, KG Shah is intelligent… woh apne wala hai [he is our man]… he is sympathetic to us… Nanavati is after money…

Pandya: I have been the government’s special AG (Advocate General) in these riots… I kept note of just two things… I told the VHP that none of you have to come to the Commission ever… you keep in touch with me, that’s all… I told the BJP too to keep in touch with me, that’s all… I have also told the Sangh that whenever I hold camps at various places don’t come there with a big strength and don’t bring a known face. You keep in touch with me on phone… If I’ll need anything, you’ll just receive a call, not more… I also went to all the places where the camps were held. I also held my own camps. I went to the camps to win the local people’s favour… how it should be done, what is to be done.

Pandya’s comments captured on camera are of course not greatly revealing beyond a point. If anything they are a reaffirmation of what we mostly know about the way judiciary works in cahoots with the state, including a rogue state or a fascist one for that matter. What is significant is that fascism stays and flourishes in Gujarat, regardless of any expose and the moral indignation it brings about.

Why it has struck roots in Gujarat and not in other BJP-ruled states like Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh is a valid question. The answer perhaps lies in the corporate support fascism enjoys in one of India’s most prosperous regions, not too different from the role assigned to the Shiv Sena in Mumbai, India’s financial capital. Like Bombay of yore, Gujarat was the hub of leftist labour unions. They have been smashed and decimated. Instead we now have politically influential corporate clubs whose roots go right up to the Indian expatriates in the United States. The India-US business partnership launched by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh features tycoons like Ratna Tata and Mukesh Ambani, both viceforous public supporters of Modi, their model chief minister.

But the Tehelka expose never aimed to tackle the corporate support for insidious fascism inherent in Gujarat’s economic progress. At the same time it is equally true that the nation’s ruling party, the Congress, which had the potential to challenge Modi’s sway has a problem of its own to tackle – its own economic planners have themselves declared unalloyed affection for Modi’s growth model for the state.

Moreover, the strategy to fight religious fascism in the framework of a still breathing (or gasping) democracy is to go to the people with a secular agenda. The Congress has done just the opposite. It has gone about poaching BJP’s leaders, wooing them to swell its own ranks, including people who are known to have led the wild mobs against Muslim women and children. This method is expected to deplete the electoral resources of Modi. Can you imagine Churchill planning to undercut Hitler by wooing Goering, Himmler etc to his side?

Be that as it may. The Tehelka expose, available in detail on the website , deserves to be seen and read and discussed widely, not because it will bring down Modi’s fascist rule in Gujarat. Nor is the expose important for bringing out all the gory details of the rape and macabre murder of many innocent victims, the way Ehsan Jaffrey was cut to pieces, or a woman disembowelled and her foetus smashed in the womb. It is also not a revelation that Hindutva activists are imbued with the same sense of missionary zeal as any suicide squad among Muslims or any other faith.

The expose is important because the rape of Gujarat failed to budge the conscience of the great patron of democracy, the United States. We had to pointedly ask Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to comment on the violence before she gave a grudging lukewarm disapproval of the mayhem there. Later Ms Rocca told the US Congress that Gujarat’s legal authority was robust and was pursuing the criminals of the violence.

That was before Pandya slipped up before the hidden cameras of the Tehelka reporter. Ms Rocca, are you there?

jawednaqvi@gmail.com



http://www.dawn.com/weekly/jawed/jawed.htm

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Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.